You see in order for a search engine to rank your site it has to be able to read your content. Imagine giving a CD to a book reviewer and asking him to read it. If he did not have a cd player what could he do? This is the same for websites. If you have a very fancy flash only website search engines can not read the flash content. Sure the site looks great but the search engines will usually say fine and move on.

So you need content on your site. It needs to be relevent for the market you are targetting. This makes sense if you think about it. Imagine selling a book with no relevent content in it. You go looking for a bookshop that specilises in Spanish Language books but you find it is in fact a general bookshop. You’re going to be disappointed, feel you’ve wasted time and be annoyed. Will you recommend this bookstore? No because you were for want of a better word lied to in it’s relevence and content. The same goes for your website. If a user finds or a search engine finds that it is not relevent to what they were looking for you soon get a bad name and won’t get good rankings.

The idea with your site is to find a niche and build your content for those people. Search engines like nice targetted sites. For example a site about renting or selling property works better if it focuses on just that rather than selling cars and caravans and boats. This is often refered to as a Silo.

The more focused your site is the better.

Remember it’s better to get 20 focused visitors to your website a day then 200 tyre kickers

With regard to the SEO element you need to provide relevent keywords and content. If you’re selling houses in Dublin, name your main pages houses-for-sale-dublin.html – this ensures that the viewer of the page can see what the page is about and can help on search engine ranking. Compare this to newpage3.htm – what’s that about?

Use your meta keywords and description and make them relevent – don’t put in keywords about selling boats selling cars etc.

Remember it’s all about content and relevance.

Take care and more later

I built a new site about a month ago. I added loads of content to it, over 100 pages and also bought a load of links back to my site but Google still has not indexed it. Why is this!

Ok let’s take this one step at a time. Firstly age does matter with Google. Domains that are older or have a history with Google will rank better. Why? Because Google can see the progression of them. It’s like older and wiser. So if you register a new domain name it will in most cases take longer to rank than a domain that is older. Google wants to make sure that you’re here to stay and will take the age of the domain into consideration.

Secondly when you have content it wants to see the content grow organically.  “dumping” 100 pages into a website overnight will set off alarm bells with Google. It’s just not natural. Google will know you are just trying to increase your rankings. Compare this to a site that publishes about 5 pages a week, over the course of 20 weeks. It again seems more of a natural growth than 100 pages over night.

Thirdly buying links or backlinks is never a great idea. Google will know that you have bought the links and will not always see them as valuable compared to backlinks that were organically gotten.  How does Google know? Well Google knows everything right! Seriously it has algorithms, and ways of knowing these things.

Here’s my tip. Automate your business. Get a system in place that you can drip feed content. Sure you might have a writing spurt, but automate the content so that you can say load up your 100 articles or posts and then allow them to publish over a period of time. This means that by the time your website has 100 pages in it, it has grown over time and is probably starting to rank well.  However you did not manually have to add each and every page every couple of days.

They key to good website management is automation. Check out my post on using wordpress as a content management system for your website.

WordPress for those who are not familiar with it is a tool used for blogging however it can be used for website creation. It is very easy to use and means that you can update your site very very easily form anywhere in the world. There’s no need to worry about html code, or packages such as DreamWeaver etc.

If you search online you’ll see a lot of people say that Google loves blogs. Blogs get ranked quickly and highly by the search engines. There’s a number of reasons for this:

• By their very nature blogs are updated more frequently than websites. Therefore the content is more up to date meaning Google will index and return more often.
• Within wordpress there is a tool that automatically “pings” (sends out a notification) to search engines and blog search engines to tell them that you’ve updated your site.
• WordPress creates clean code when it builds your pages or posts for you.
• WordPress allows you to tag all your posts and set them into categories which helps with your seo ranking

Now can you see where this is going? Easy to use, loved by search engines – why would you not use wordpress for your site layout?

For many it’s simply either not knowing about the possibilities of wordpress or being afraid to use the platform. Take it from me it’s the easiest tool to install and really easy to manage. Many companies will charge you for a content management system (CMS) when you don’t need to pay you can get it for free!

There are also many designers out there that will design sites for wordpress and you can also find templates, so your wordpress site will not look like a blog!  If you’d like more info about wordpress and what it can do why not give me a call on 087 6361907 and let’s get you rocking up the search engines!

a) you have an atractive and informative site

b) to rank well in the search engines

Before engaging a web marketer or seo firm, make sure to get an accurate baseline report from them to see what your current rankings are if any. This then allows you to have a benchmark or baseline to compare their work. I do this with all my clients as it saves hassle in the long run. We both know how good a job I did since they can see where they were and where they are now.

The second thing you need to be very aware of is google may report your search engine rankings “incorrectly”

This is not a flaw in google rather what they term a feature.  If you have a gmail account or any other account with google your search results may often be shown based on your previous searches or web history. What this means is that although your site may appear in the top ten, this could be based on your surfing history not actually on where it is placed. Can you see the danger here? An seo company shows you your listings in google and within a week they have improved your rankings! Unbeknown to you they are showing you a “personalised” result based on your or their search history!

One way of ensuring you see correct results is to make sure you or they are logged out of their gmail accounts.

The second way is to use a third party piece of software such as Internet Business Promoter which will give you results independent of your search history.

Now a proviso on this. I have found that sometimes reports generated by this software may say I am ranked number 2 for a keyword in google.ie or google.com but when I do a normal google search I don’t find my ranking. Why is this? Since google is running its services over a huge array of servers, it may take time for each server to have the most up to date search rankings. Perhaps each server is updated every 30 minutes. This means that when you go to google.ie you may connect to server 57 the next time you run the same search it may connect to server 557 – which might not have the exact same information.  Note these are my observations over the last number of years.

Bottoms line – always make sure you get fully documented results with screenshots to prove your ranking!

It’s something very few business owners I have talked to actually know and understand. You see as a business owner you might think that people find your site by your company name, however they might be typing in product names, service names or none of the above!

The first thing you should do is check your website log files. If you’re unsure how to do this either contact the person who set up your website or the hosting company you deal with. This is essential as your log files will tell you no end of information including:

• how many people visited your site?
• where they came from ie what sites or search engines
• what keywords they used to find your site
• what countries they are coming from

The important thing I want to focus on here in this post is the keywords. Let’s say for my business I see people are finding my site by typing in “what is seo” I could use this information to begin to write articles about the seo, explaining what it is and how it can be used.

I use the keywords they give me as the title of my article or page of content. This is basically feeding the search engines with relevent content to help you rank higher in the search engines.

Remember that the major search engines want relevent content, with your keywords mentioned but they want information that is natural and human like. If you “stuff” keywords all over the place within your content, the search engines will know that you are doing this and will not rank you or they may even penalise you.

A great tool I use is the Google Keyword Tool – (just google that phrase). This tool will allow you to see the monthly searches locally and globally for any keyword.  Using this information you can see if there is a market for your product.

For example if you want to sell red left handed widgets and there are 1000 searches in your country for this and 10,000 globally a month then this might be a product or service you should provide. However if there are only 2 searches a month, perhaps you might thinkg again…

Now go start your keyword research!