One of the problems is that SEO, done properly, can be a long term investment. Many websites that I have done optimisation work on for in the past still hold their elevated postions a year or two after the work was completed. However, this does not always hold true.

If you have used good practices then you should expect the position to be held for a long term, but use dirty SEO tricks and you might find that your positions are gone within months or even weeks.

And with a quality campaign, a lot of the benefits could be seen on other similar keywords, not just the obvious ones that you have worked for.

It might seem that it could be as simple as watching your traffic graphs, however, life is not that simple.

Yes, your search engine ranking might have improved, but has the traffic level on your search terms been affected by seasonal trends? If the season has destroyed the traffic, you could still be getting more traffic than you would have done without the SEO work, but seeing less daily visitors.

The only real way of measuring the effect is to start off with two similar websites. Fine for small businesses, affiliates, work at home mums and so on, but for big business with a lot of branding totally impossible.

                          

Actually, it is a very difficult thing to do, if not impossible. With a lot of marketing practices there is an immediate effect along with possibly a long term effect, that can be difficult to measure, but Search Engine Optimisation is all about investing in the long term.

Generally, if you invest some of your valuable marketing budget on SEO today, then it could be many weeks before you start to see your site creeping up through the search engines. And it is only once your site gets into the top few places that you will see any return on that investment.

However, there are also likely to be knock on effects. You might optimise for one term and this helps your position on longer tail keywords. How would you know when the orders arrive if they are because of the search engine work?

In short, SEO is all about faith. Faith that if you get to the top then you should see results. However, if you are sensible that is not enough! You need to make sure that you do your homework first to make sure that you are selecting the keywords that will generate you some income.

But, unless you are a new business, then it really is difficult to work out just what your return has been. However, we can also look at getting the best from your SEO. I’ll come to that another time!

                          

I was contacted yesterday by a local customer who wanted to rank well for a local search term. Now, this is something that I highly recommend. His question was simple “How much would you charge to optimise my website?”.

Do the terms send traffic?
But, I had been running research last week on loads of local terms and I guessed from that that his marketing consultant terms would yield little results. So, off to Google I went and yes, 0 monthly searches.

My next step was to look and see if he was close to the top anyway and I’d just have done a few free articles for him. I typed in the search terms and actually the main part of this website was 2nd on Google. His was nowhere to be found and a couple of other customers of mine were on page 2.

An expensive pink elephant
Conclusion – it would take a bit of effort to get him to the top of a useless search term. I explained all of this and even checked my own traffic logs. I was 2nd on Google and no hits from that term in the 13 / 14 months I looked back.

The relief!
His response – well obviously he had thought it was his chance to push his brand new business, so I expect he was a bit upset. But he thanked me and told me the full story. He had been approached by some self confessed SEO experts who had offered to do the job for him using that search term, for £1,500.

Don’t blindly trust those you don’t know
He didn’t mention which bandits made this offer, so I can’t name them. But, for a brand new business, that would have been a lot of money straight down the drain that he probably couldn’t afford.

Shame on them!

                          

There are several crucial things that you really do need to know when you are designing a website and you want it to be pulling in the search engine visitors. Some people take this to the extreme and create code that is just basically a load of spam, which I cannot recommend, but there are a few consideration that will keep it on track and potentially make it a better site.

Selecting keywords – Do not get carried away by attempting to optimise a single page for loads of search engine terms. Just concentrate on one or two phrases per page.

Meta Data – You have the title, description and keywords meta tags and some people go overboard by stuffing every conceivable keyword into these lists. Don’t! The title and description are probably what search engine visitors will see first about your site so instead concentrate more on writing them meaningfully and naturally and including your key phrases once within each. But make it read well!

Emphasis – Read around and people will tell you to use plenty of bold, underlined and italic text plus h1, h2 and h3 to display your keywords. Don’t! Again, make it natural and it will read better for the visitor. Use bold, headings etc to highlight for your readers, not the search engines.

The page content – If you haven’t guessed already, the best page content for the search engines is actually whatever is the best page content for your readers. Google near enough ignores your page content although Yahoo and Bing do put some weight on Titles and Descriptions.

Navigation – Now we are talking! You want the search engines to be able to crawl your website and find all of your pages, so make sure that your navigation is not hidden behind clever flash animations or javascript routines. If you want to use image links do so as search engines should follow them (this is the only time the image’s alt attribute is actually read), but it is also a good idea to repeat the links in the page footer as text links. This is not only good to make sure that search engines can follow the links, but also it increases your website accessibility.

Use CSS style sheets – Avoid laying your page out using tables! A table should be used to layout data and nested tables should be avoided at all costs. Instead, code your website in CSS, which is a lot lighter in code and actually easier to maintain. If you then move the CSS out of the page into a stylesheet this also reduces the amount of code on the page, increasing the text to content ratio. It is also better (again) for your website accessibility.

In short, to make your website the best it can be for the search engines, then avoid the spammy techniques such as alt attributes that went out a couple of years ago and design a website for maximum accessibility. Keep the content clean and the best for your readers and you should be onto a winner with the search engines.

                          

Take this email that I have received today (click the picture to enlarge it). It is obviously driven from some spam crawler that reservationhotels.org are using to trawl through websites and pick up email addresses.

It then adds a link to the website, along with the title taken from the home page, to a links page. Wow, so I am on links page 3005. I don’t know why but I did actually look at this page (for once). It is full of junk!

Even on just this page there are 301 redirects, Japanese character websites, German aquarist, French baby, fertility, hairdressing opportunities and loads more totally unrelated websites. Further down the page is full of other websites that can’t be found, but the crawler has still added them to the page.

But, the owners of this PR3 website are quite safe in making these junk lists of what amount to Free For All directories. Why? Well looking at the site, there is nowhere that lists to any of these links pages, so search engines will never find them. Even if they do discover 1 links page that only links to the main site, not to any of the other junk pages.

So exchanging links with these guys would be a waste of time. You would get no benefit back. What though, if they did run their link exchanging honestly and gave a link back?

Well, this page and some other randomly guessed pages all display 20 links. So the traditional Google Page Rank algorithm (as first registered, we expect it has since changed), implies that this would donate to us ((PR * 0.85) / 20). In other words, 1 20th of 85% of that page’s page rank. And that is for on topic pages.

Ignoring the spammy nature of the page, that means that we would need about 24 links like this just to get the equivalent page rank for our site. Given that it is 1 of thousands of such pages, it is never likely to rise even to PR0, so that isn’t much good.

So how many would be needed to get to PR0? It is usually a factor of about 6 per level you jump up. So around 150 links off such links pages might provide a PR0, 900 links to get a PR1 and 5,500 to get a PR2.

But, in the words of the quiz show, we don’t want to give you that much! These are off topic links from an irrelevant site. The page is not a categorised directory, merely a random assortment of Free For All links. So that effect is watered down, by how much we do not know! It could be a whole PR penalty, meaning 5,500 such rubbish links give you a PR1, or even a PR0.

So don’t waste the time it takes me to hit the delete button. I don’t bother with these links. If you want links then use a proper method of earning them on pages that have a Page Rank and are accessible to search engines.

And as for the last paragraph of the email: “If your didn’t [sic] send mail to us with your site link where placed our link in 7 days,we will remove your link!” – please do so. I have no wish to be associated with such junk methods.

                          

I have recently been carrying out several experiments with link building to see what the results are. I am part way through the entire trial, which aims to find out if too loads of links might equally destroy the good work. But I am noticing several interesting results.

For my testing I picked on a new website of my own that included a claim phrase from a paid to post system. This claim sentence is a random group of words that is just found on web-sites trying to become members of the system, so it is highly unlikely that anyone else on the internet is running any SEO on it.

My website, at the outset of the test, was 35th in the Google search results for this claim sentence and nowhere to be found on Bing or Yahoo. I used the sentence as the anchor text for a link to the post page from a PR3 website that I also control.

Give it a week and Google has been all more than the PR3 website. Funnily, this website is suddenly 12th on the results. At first, the site moved up from 35th to 15th and then 10th, finally stepping above my PR3 website.

So through a single link on a PR3 page, my site jumped 2 full pages for this totally uncontested phrase on Google. It hadn’t moved a single place until the day I saw that the PR3 website had been revisited by Google. So, the just explanation for the jump of 25 positions is this new found link to it.

But, it is also interesting to note Bing and Yahoo. Neither had the post page listed in the search results prior to the link going live. Yahoo did quite quickly list the PR3 web site with the list on it for the search terms, which was quite promising, but it took a few more days until it also listed the post, down on the bottom of page 4.

The interesting difference between Google, Bing and Yahoo is the number of results each return. Bing and Yahoo return 30 – 40 results on this search yet exactly the same search on Google returns nigh on 800 current results.

It appears that Google is being less fussy around what pages it caches and lists in the search engines. And when looking at how numerous pages of the site that Yahoo has indexed, they are almost all category and archive pages. There is only one post page listed in the archives – the one in this trial.

So, it looks as even if because of one PR3 page pointing to the post, Google has promoted the site from 35th to 10th and Yahoo has taken an interest in the page and also cached it and listed it well. Bing even though, is merely being slow (it hasn’t visited the PR3 page for some time).

Therefore, incoming links are undeniably the lifeblood of a website. They do move you up the results and make search engines take notice of the pages. Next, I’ll test whether a site wide link destroys the position or aids it!

                          

Are You There?
You can ‘ping’ plenty of things, not just a blog. Loads of years ago, before blogs took off, we would ping computers remotely and if we got an answer back, then we believed they were up and running. You can even do this yourself from your machine, perhaps across your network to other computers.

And that is principally what a ping is – one machine seeing if another computer is responding.

How Does This Help?
But this does not exactly help our websites. The ping service evolves a bit from merely a basic communication saying “I’m here, are you there?”. If you ping a site service, rather than merely them answering that they are there, it is taken as an sign from the site sending the ping that they want some attention.

The website receiving the message will reply back that it has received your communication, typically with a “success” communication. Of course, to respond they need to now what website sent the request, so as well as “Are you there?”, your message has included your web site address as the sender.

Getting Clever With The Process
This is the clever part. The recipient strips the communication apart and stores your web site address for processing. It takes the ping as an indication that you want them to visit you, typically because you have generated new content that you want them to take a look at.

Identify new content, Quickly
So, at a later point in time, maybe instantly, probably later that day – it is entirely up to the service what they do – their robot is sent to visit your homepage to see what is fresh. It is a flag to various systems that you have updated your web site.

And this is why we use pings. It enables us to tell a variety of other web-sites that we have new matter and that they should come over and see it. On a good day, I’ve seen Google come calling quite quickly after the post has been published, thanks to the ping, and then the post listed and the new page cached on Google within a couple of hours.

The Future Is Pinging
This is the way that search engines like Google are moving. They want to be able to grab fresh matter as soon as it is made public and by pinging them they are able to do that. So it helps them to do what they want – get new matter and quick – and helps us do what we want – get our new content onto the search engines.

A Little communication Goes A Long Way
So, pinging just basically shouts over to various vital web-sites that we now have an update on our own site and we want them to come and visit it. And by sending this little message, we are hoping to increase our search engine exposure.

                          

If you want to leave a comment, please do so. All comments are still checked manually, but as long as what you say is reasonably going with the flow, then it will be accepted.

A few pointers though:

Comments should fit in with the topic. Sorry, but ‘”Nice site, you’re 34th on my daily must read list” is still spam as is “Great views on the topic.” If you have read the post, at least refer to what you like about it or how you found it so I can write more on those themes!

No in comment links. Isn’t the fact that the comment links back enough? If the link you add adds value to the comment then that is fine, but self serving links for the sake of it are a sign of spam.

Give your name. Your name isn’t really ‘Best Online Casino’, give your name so we know who is talking to us. I’m not saying I will never approve a comment without a name, it just adds to the crosses in the checklist to get the comment deleted.

Use an Avatar! Not essential, it is just that I am interested in who is commenting!

I’m not saying that you have to do all of the above, just that these are the sort of warning flags I am looking for with comments. If your comment is interesting and fails the rest, I’ll accept it.

And if your blog is not nofollow, let me know!

                          

Much is talked around seo approaches and what is required to get to the top of any particular search engine. But, most of these discussions centre around what is required for Google optimisation. This is fine, considering they currently carry most of the search traffic, but what around Yahoo and Bing, both of which have lots of visitors?

A while ago I started to optimise two of my own different sites for the same keyword phrase, and in excess of the 15 months since I started this I have watched them move around and finally one of them take top spot on Google. At the same time, the other site takes 2nd spot on Yahoo and Bing and 4th on Google.

This is fabulous, but the web site that is 1st on Google is not on the top page of Yahoo nor MSN, which tells me masses about the different methods used to optimise for these search engines.

Now I have to point out that I have done stacks more work for the website that is top of Google and that is why it, rather than the other site, takes top spot there. But, that indicates clearly what is required to reach the dizzy heights of first place on Google – heaps of article writing and guest posting. I have lost count of how lots of articles and guest posts I have submitted to a whole arrange of sites and blogs, but it has been done on the side of other activities, so it is achievable by anyone.

The vital factor is that the web site does not feature top 10 in Yahoo and Bing, even though the other site is second, with less articles and guest posts. For these search engines other factors are crucial.

With these search engines, the inbound links have been important. That web site would not have risen the way it has without them, but Yahoo and Bing do not put so much total faith in the inbound links. For the site that does well on these two search engines is also the web site that I did a little bit (but not too much!) work on the code.

Both websites have the keyword phrase in the title meta, but it is merely the one that does well in Bing and Yahoo that then goes on with supplementary mentions of the phrase. This web site also has the search terms in the meta description, the search terms and twice in the body (once being in emphasised text). They also occur in a h1, but as part of a longer phrase.

So to reach top spot in Google, one mention on the page is enough (and even that is not required), but to rank well for Bing & Yahoo, make sure that you do at least reference the keywords a couple of times, but do not go excessive.

                          

I have already written about how I believe that outbound links on a page can boost its influence on the search engines. I noticed the effects that outbound links had on a low ranking website compared to another that I run, without the outbound links, but with huge amounts of SEO work and a respectable page rank, not just on the home page but also on the inner pages.

So, what reason might there be for the search engines to boost your position just because you point to another page, maybe on your own website, with the search terms in the anchor text?

It sounds crazy, but it is a conclusion that I have come back to a few times looking at several websites covering different niches over a couple of years. It does seem to work.

Looking at search engines, they exist by providing their visitors quality results. You find the results you want on a search engine and so use it again and again. They have to provide quality answer.

Say then, you are searching for Acme Widgets. You want to find out how to make one and search ‘how to make an Acme widget’. What results should the search engines show you?

What the search engine does not know is what level you are interested in the information at. Are you wanting to make one for yourself, or do you want to discover how they are made because you are interested in the process. The results have to cover this answer for all people.

It is the same with many searches. If you search for ‘search engine optimise a website‘, do you want a step by step set of results, or someone that can tell you what is needed and do it for you?

In both of these situations, if you are sent to a page that gives you the high level overview, maybe a video of the manufacture or an SEO experts page, then the basic level query is answered. If that website then links to the full details, say the step by step instructions, then you can dig deeper to find a fuller answer.

It has been accepted before that search engines like to send visitors to a page with the high level answer from where they can then dig deeper to a more complete answer. So, how do the search engines know that your page can provide the further details?

Well, the page itself must have an overview of the search terms and there must be a link to more information. If this link contains the search terms on a page about those search terms, then it is likely that the target page provides further details about the subject.

And that is what makes me think that an outbound link on a website page might hold some weight at least with the search engines. Maybe not a lot, but enough to tip the balance. Whether the link need to be on another site or whether it can safely be the same site, I am still working out!

                          

Now, I do not know if this applies to just when the link points to pages on your own site or any outbound links, but time and time again I see before me the evidence that this could just be the case.

Last night I was comparing 2 of my own websites. The first, with Page Rank 3 and lots of SEO work against the second, Page Rank 0 and ignored. They are both directories, feeding from the same cottages database, listing the same cottages in the same towns etc. The differences to the title and description tags are tiny, and anyway, I doubt these elements hold much weight. Not enough that rent [town name] against [town name] rent is going to explain the differences I am seeing.

But the fact of the matter is that the lower page rank site gets 4 times the traffic of the other site. When we are submitting articles for the higher ranking site, its traffic increases. But, as soon as we stop, it drops back to the 25% mark.

Each page is ever so slightly different with a small thesaurus applied to the text, but not that much different. In essence, the sites are the same.

So why does the newer, lower Page Rank, totally ignored site get 4 times the traffic of the site that I have lavished many hours on trying to increase its traffic.

At this point I looked at the traffic stats just to see where visitors were finding the sites. The lower traffic site had a few searches for odd terms. The search engines obviously picking up cottage names and descriptions from deep within the site. So they are trawling the site well (some inner pages have Page Ranks of 2).

For the poorer cousin with a lot of traffic, the main search results were [town name] rent and so on. The sort of searches that are more abundant, produce more traffic and are more competitive.

So, although there is a lack of search engine optimisation and Page Ranking, it is doing better in the search results. For this reason I started to look at the town pages of both site to see where and how often the word rent was mentioned and also the same for the particular town.

Basically, looking at the town name, the sites were near enough the same. OK, one site has “rent” before the town name and the other after it, but the search engine results showed both versions anyway – if anything, more favoured the way they were shown in the lower ranking site.

There was only one instance of the words rent and the town name on the higher traffic site that the lower traffic site did not use. And that was in the breadcrumbs!

The higher traffic site offers links to the higher level pages and the current page through the breadcrumbs, the lower traffic site just relied on the main navigation to cover it.

So, there is an obvious change and an equally obvious conclusion. The difference in traffic is because one site has an outbound link containing the search terms. Why would this be? That is for another time?

                          

That article was actually part one of a series. And as though Google was trying to prove a point, a point which was in agreement with what I was writing, within 15 minutes of hitting the publish button in WordPress the Google bot had visited the brand new post and cached the site.

That, I believe, is thanks to a little plugin that is embedded in my blog. I found a fantastic plugin that automatically sends an update to my Twitter account whenever I publish a post to my blog.  A fantastic find! It is one of many similar plugins available, but it did exactly what I wanted. Nothing more, nothing less.

It was amazing that this new blog, which previously I had struggled to get posts listed on Google, was suddenly having its posts listed in no time. And it is not the only one. A second blog is also reacting equally quickly using the same technique.

This does not mean that this little pluggin is the super golden bullet that will get every post listed on Google in 15 minutes. Far from it. I also installed it into a third blog, without the same success. But this is not a sign of failure. In fact, it is a sign that the system is working in a way that I expect it to and hopefully I am following how they are working.

How to best use Twitter for publicising blogs is probably far more than the space remaining here. In fact that subject in itself is probably a couple of sessions and I’ll work through it over a couple of days in my own blog, if you are interested to follow it.

But the results of the speedy way that the blog posts have suddenly started appearing on these two blogs shows that there are benefits to be had by using Twitter in conjunction with a blog. It’s not just a matter of setting up a blog and a Twitter account and having done with it, there is a little bit of work to be done on both. But it is easy.

The thing is, if you are a website owner and want to generate more traffic to your website, then these are techniques you can use without any technical knowledge. Whether you control the design of your website or whether you have paid someone like me to design and run it for you, using these techniques you can generate more interest in your products or posts and hopefully more sales through this added traffic.

This is what these social networking techniques are about, in my opinion. They are not about paying a fortune to get traffic. They are about generating an interest in you that will arrive at your website ready to buy from you. It is something anyone can do!

                          

We are an expert link building firm which provides outsourcing services to a wide variety of agencies and clients globally.

We offer One-way thematic/contextual link development and have generated more than 2800 links in last 3 months. We presently service the expansive link requirements of 18 US and 7 UK based Online Marketing and Web Designing agencies.

I am writing to offer you our contextual link building service at an affordable price of USD5 per link (subject to a minimum order of 50 links).

We are so confident of our service quality that we offer 100% Service and Satisfaction Guarantee. We would deliver on what we commit (thematic one-way, no FFAs, unique IPs, no ‘no follow’, etc) – in short we would develop links that would pass maximum link juice.

Not only is our quality a notch above the rest, our client servicing is impeccable. We would send you periodic link reports and maintain the anonymity of our alliance. So, you can be absolutely sure that you have chosen the right outsourcing partner – that’s us. We will never give you a chance to rethink your decision!

To begin with, you can choose to test our service quality by ordering our Trial Pack Now (8 links for USD 50 only).

We are ready to start servicing your requirements and will look forward to become your trusted link building partner.

It sounds a good offer. Links from $5 a time from ‘maximum link juice‘ sites. But to me, it can not be all that it is made out to be. The cost of $5 per link is too cheap. Even a trial pack is offered of 8 links for $50. I can only assume they hope people buy that trial pack.

Why do I think it is so cheap? Well I often receive offers from people to include on my own websites links to their clients, in return for a payment. Exactly what the above is offering. But, for links on a basic PR2 / PR3 website, I can be offered £150 – 200 per link, if it is a whole page or a paragraph on the home page. Even just writing a page on a blog and linking once to a company earned me £30 per link earlier this week.

And I would not exactly call my pages ‘maximum link juice‘ pages. OK, there are not any ‘no follow’ tags etc. But they are not pages with huge page ranks. So if I can get £30 for a basic link off a blog, with the company sourcing the links also taking a fee, that must be costing the buying company far more than £50 per link. So what exactly does $5 get you a link from? I won’t be finding out. But thanks for the offer.

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