May 07
19
SEO advice good or bad
We all know that if we want to get lots of visitors and expect to get them from search engines then unless we apply a little SEO knowledge, we’ll never get past page 25 for our target keywords.
But is there a quick way to get off the ground? Especially if we don’t know where to start and can’t be fussed with what seems to be a torturous process of trying to work out who to employ or what to apply and in what way.
There’s a lot of stuff out there on SEO. Lots of it, page after page after page of opinion, speculation and hogwash.
When SEO is discussed for example what do they mean when they say
You need a few meta tags here and there?
Your title tags need to be looked at and changed?
Your copy needs to be rewritten?
Do they mean that you need to restructure everything and throw in lots of bold tags, links, H tags, blockquotes, off site links, nofollow links, url rewrites, increase keyword densities?
What do they mean when they begin to talk in terms of your pagerank or alexa score or external link building campaigns that-will-use-a-combination-of -social-and-historical-methods and yeah… wtf exactly does that mean even.!
Most would be forgiven for taking the conclusion of, this SEO stuff is a little confusing to say the least!
Just hire a professional SEO
I’d advise anyone who is serious about their website and clueless on SEO to go and hire an individual or firm who know what they are doing. Ask them for references, don’t buy any BS about monthly submission fees or ‘get you on 1st page of google in a week’ promises as you may as well just send it to my beer benevolent fund and let me drink it for you, I can promise you the same you know 
I’m a tightwad, I’m smart I can do it myself thanks, just gimmee a tip!
Ok, so you wish to persist on your own and want to have a little play around yourself . Ok, without further ad0 here are 3 little tips that you wouldn’t go too far wrong applying..
- Create something that is good – Kick arse with your content, do it better than everyone else.Have an idea or product that is good!If your website is crap, then improve it, add value now, before it goes down the tubes.
Add a blog, use social mediums to drive it forward, ask yourself lots of questions and be honest with your answers. Would you want to buy your product from your website? Is your site the best at what it does? If the answer is no, then it’ll pay to think that the search engines might think the same too. If thats the case, then you could be stuffed pretty quickly. Can you afford to be so?
The web is powered by links and in lots of ways, the words contained within those links. You need to get people to link to you in all manner of themed ways, to different areas of your site from as many different sites as possible. This is the juice that will power you up the ranks. If you don’t have it, then it will be very difficult to rank without it.
Link juice will be very difficult to obtain if what you are selling or saying is nothing but a lot of old rubbish or same old same old. It takes hours of effort to manufacture artificial link popularity. Your time could be better utilised on improving your product. By creating something that is useful or buzz creating, you will get people talking about you and what you do.
Use your blog to communicate with your visitors. Discuss your latest innovations or deals. Feedback to people who are enquiring of what you do. Show them a human side to your organisation/business/personality. Give them what they need.
Ping the various social connecters out there – get active in your sphere, create excitement in your marketplace, stimulate your visitors, give them a reason to return. Give them the tools to talk about you in earnest.
- Use established site structuring techniques and good effective copyYou’d be amazed at the number of pages that fail at the very first hurdle of production.Go and read up about basic good page structureUse the title tag effectively.
If your site has pages that say “Company name: about us section” or “Company name: our product section” then you really need to think about that and ask yourself what the value in that is. The short answer is there is very little.
Everypage of a website should be different. Everypage should have a unique title tag that suitably heads up that page. If a page is about a Sony Vaio Ar21 then those words should come first within the tag.
It sounds elementary and obvious but you’d be amazed at the amount of people out there who miss this singley important factor. Trust me <title>Sony Vaio Ar21 Laptop – Buy your Sony Vaio Ar21 Laptops here – read Sony Laptop reviews and more</title> works infinitely better than <title>Company name: Our Laptop products</title>.
Use headings to head up your content and apply logic to what it is you are discussing.
If a page is about the Sony Vaio AR21, then put those words in your H1 tag. Do not expect to just stick an image or a flash movie in there and expect it to do well. You have to tell both your visitors, and the search engine spiders that you would like to index your pages, what it is that your pages are about. Spiders cannot deduce meaning and context from that which they cannot see. Images and Flash movies and videos are more or less useless as they offer little means for either.
Use words, and emphasise important words such as your product name – use related language to describe what you are selling or trying to promote. If you don’t want to take the time to look at your SERPs for examples of how this works, then go hire an SEO copywriter, ask to see examples of their work and look to see how these people are ranking.
Use good link navigation throughout your site. Consider using breadcrumb trails throughout. Page > Subpage> Product name
Clean your urls so they read nice. Read up on modrewrite and get rid of those session id’s and variable parameters.
- Discuss one topic or product per page. If you are selling products on your site then you need to have individual pages for individual products. Unless you are a craigslist or an Amazon or a dealtime or an ebay perhaps, you just will not rank for a product on a page that contains 20 other items.If you want to have any chance of ranking for individual keyword items, then you must seriously consider creating a separate page for each.
If you have 100’s or 1000’s of products then invest in a database or spreadsheet and read up on dynamic page creation. It really isn’t too difficult, and will save you hours of editing and fannying about opening up separate files to do this that and what have you. Template design is where its at.
What you expected more? Sorry, maybe some other day
