Latest Google Update

Google update the visable PR a few days back and i have to say for my established sites there was no real changes in PR value.  My new websites have gained PR with http://www.standrewshotels.org going straight to a pr3 but really i have to say its not a major priorty of mine to get pr.  After all you dont rank in Google with high pr, you rank with a well optimised website with good incoming links.  The real value for getting links is not in getting high pr links but getting trusted links from relevant or trusted websites.  Places such as business.com and yahoo directory offer quality links, while relavant links can be found by typeing your keyword into google and adding either “links.htm” or “add url” into the search.

Content Writing

Well its been a while since i posted but it has just been a crazy busy time as i am admist the process of Link Building for all of my affiliate websites, mostly Rooms in Scotland and Rooms in Edinburgh. The main focus has been on content writing and atricle submissions which i feel are the two most effective ways of obtaining backlinks.

I have writtent several travek related articles and submitted them to five article websites such as Go Articles and Article Factory. The idea is that people will read them and then use them on their website and since i have a link in my author section i would get a link back to my website for every atricle used. Now its not just about links, it also about getting relevant links as since the articles are travel related then it would stand to reason that travel related website would probably use them. This is a fantastic way for getting one way relevant links back to your site.

I have also been doing some content writing, basically increasing the amount of useful information on my websites. After all we all know that Google loves unique and useful content, so the more you have the better quality your site will be. I created some pages about castles (like stirling castle) and walks (speyside way) in scotland and then submitted them to wikipedia as to get a link back from a quality source. Even although these links dont pass link juice(they a nofollow links) they still pass as a quality link so they are still useful.

Well any way its time to get back to work, more articles to write and content to create, it is a busy life!

Success with Fresh Content

I have been doing an experiment latley in regards to fresh content and the effect this has on SERPS and crawl rate by bothe Google and Yahoo.  Basically i have added a latest news section to my homepage and it gets updated about every 3-4 days with company news.

I will be checking the results of the crawl rate of the google spiders on my site via the webmaster tools on Google and the idea is that by keeping fresh data on the page it should make for more frequent visits from google!

 

How to make Google Love You

Link building as we all know is the key concept in the battle to achieve high search engine rankings in Google, but it is also one of the hardest things to do.  when it comes to building links i often find that its not as much about quantity as it is quality.  At the end of the day getting 100 pr0 links will be alot of work but probably not as effective as 10 pr4 links, the same can apply to relevance.  Its better to get travel links for a hotels website than getting links relating to tanks or gardening.

 So really what you want is relevant links with a high PR and try and get some anchor text (the text that is in the link) with good keywords in it.  Sound simple enough?  Well at the end of the day it is a lot of hard work, but one of the ways to take some of the strain out of the work is to use your competirors.  You see the chance are they have already done this hard work, after all they are ranking at the top of the search engine results!  You can actually get tools that allow you to see what sites are linking to them.  The best one i use is IBP, now it does cost £200 but you dont have to pay that to use the link checker tool.  The demo version allows you to type in a URL and it will display the first 100 sites that link to it, but whats even better is that it displays the anchor text used, PR of the page and exact URL!

 Now once you have this information it is time to visit these sites and get them to link to you aswell, some will have an add url button but for others just use the contact us area.   Now if you do this for all the sites in the top 10 of the search rankings for your chosen keyword then you will be well on your way to acheiving success.

But there are more ways to building links, try starting a blog, search engines love blogs due to the fact that there is constatnly new information to find.  So pick a topic and get writing, another thing to do is type into google your keyword and the word forum.  This should find a forum on the topic area and you can usually put signature links into your posts on forums.  So if you have a good knowledge of your topic area you can share this with people and get links to your website in return.

Ok one last tip for link building, try and get one way links when possible and also vary your link (anchor) text so that search engines dont penalise you for unatural linking.  Also dont just think about your homepage when linking try and get some internal pages linked as it will help those pages rank higher in the search engines.

 Enjoy!

Basic Seo Guide part2

Once you have done some onpage optimisation it is important to follow that by doing offpage optimisation.  This is all about links and if done correctly you will get Google to love your site!  This is also a great way for new sites to get into the google, msn or yahoo indexes assuming you get some quality links.  So what do you want from a link?  here is three things you want to make sure you get:

1. Relevant Website (if you website is a travel site then try and get other travel realated sites to link to you)
2. Anchor Text – this is the link text that is clicked on to go to your site, make sure you have keywords in this text and also make sure you vary which keywords you use.  This is a powerful tool, it is possible rank for a keyword by purley having lots of high pr anchor text links.
3. Quality Links – There is some debate on this topic, generally you are looking for sites with a high PR and a small amount of outbound links.  Remember the more links on the page the less valuable that page becomes as the PR Vote gets split between all the site on the page. 

Things you should watch out for are paid links, Google hates these and it is more likley these sites will get found out and penalised by google (ie reduced to PR0).  Directorys can be a good place to get links but even these are now getting penalised by Google so only real quality ones are of use (DMOZ and Yahoo are 2 examples).

If you are looking for where to get links try search google or yahoo using “add url” and your chosen keyword or “add website” and you will find a few places.  When you do find a suitable link page make sure of 2 things

1. They do not have a “nofollow” attribute or a javascript redirect (use view source to do this)
2. check the page is cached in Google (type cache:website.com, replacing website with whatever the url of the page you have found is)

This is a long a difficult process so be patient and keep the faith!

The total SEO Guide

Search engine optimisation is a real buzz topic right now, wikipedia describes it as

“the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic“) search results for targeted keywords.”

Basicially it is all about getting your site to rank high in the search engines such as Google and Yahoo for certain keywords, so for example say you have travel website which has scottish accommodation and you want to rank for the keyword “hotels scotland” well thats where SEO comes in.

 So what do you do first, just pick a keyword and place it all over your webpage?  erm no!  The first thing you must do is find the RIGHT keyword and this is where keyword research comes in, there are a couple of free tools for this Keyword Discovery and Google Keyword Tool are a good place to start.  Now make sure you spend some time on this becuase if you go and optimise your site for the wrong keywords then you are not going to get the full benifit from your SEO.

So now you have that right keywords its time to get your page optimised, now there are onpage and offpage factors that effect your ranking.  The onpage factors are things that you can change on your webpage (text,meta tags etc..) and the offpage are things like Links (anchor text, PR, relevancy).

So lets start with some onpage things, here are the top three:

1. First has to be the Title tag (what you see when your site appears on the search engine page).  This is given a lot of weight so make sure you have at least 2 keywords in there, even three at a push. 
2. The next part is text, make sure you have some text on your page, probably around a 200 words.  Then ensure your keywords are somewhere in the text (possibly in an h1 tag) but make sure you dont overdo it, you only want the density of the keywords to be around 2-5% (so one keyword per 100 words appx).
3. Images- Search Engines cant read images but they can do two things with them, one they can read the image name ie pic.jpg so change the file names to be more descriptive such as hotel-pic1.jpg or burns-hotel.jpg.  Next make sure you have added an alt tag and try and include one of you keywords in an alt tag on the page where possible

Thats all for now, i will do a section on offpage optimisation soon.