Underrated.co.uk – Search Engine Optimisation

Before any successful web venture can begin you will need a home for it. It’s worth giving serious thought to your choice of domain name because in both branding and SEO terms this choice does have very real implications. Whilst your concern may not be picking an “unfortunate sounding” domain name ( www.ViagraFix.com - ViaGraphics, www.OddSexTractor.com – OddsExtractor,  www.WeBone.com -WebOne), you should take the following suggestions on board:

1) Do not use numbers or hyphens in your domain name. It’s a no brainer on the number front, and as for hyphens, they make it difficult to verbally convey to people what your domain is, and they may forget the hyphen at a later date and not be able to navigate back to your site. It just doesn’t sound or look professional either, and since first impressions are important, it’s a  bad idea. A hyphen is a word separator in search engine optimisation terms, so does offer a very slight SEO boost, but it’s not worth the trade off in my view.

2) Keep the domain name short and snappy. Nobody wants to remember a four word domain and again it just doesn’t look professional. In any case, for SEO purposes cramming your domain name full of keywords is pointless (unless you add hyphens between the words, but then it looks even less appealing). What’s an easier to remember and more attractive domain name for a daily update funny video site dailyhaha.com or something like the-very-best-funnyvideos.com ? If you struggle to find an appropriate name, try BustAName . It’s a useful word combiner tool.

3) Use a keyword in the domain name. This isn’t a must, but it’s far from being  a bad idea. If you offer a pet grooming service words like grooming, animal, cat, dog and pet will both describe your service and help you choose a domain name. It may help to have a two word domain name, one of which descibes the service on offer  and another fairly expressive word. If your URL is too stuffy and boring it can put people off your service. Though of course you have to match the expectations of your audience. If you run a funeral home, calling it groovygraves might not earn you many customers.

4) Go for the .com if available. Assuming that you wish to offer a service worldwide, choosing a .com domain extension is the best option for you. It may be worth going the .net route should you really, really want the domain name in question but it’s still second best. There are excetpions though, if you run a local service you may wish to choose the domain name relating to that country (.co.uk for the UK for instance). This will gain you a placement in the search engines local listings for that country – ‘pages in the UK’ in google for instance*.

5) Register multiple domains. If your company name is unique and currently not registered then consider buying the .com, .net and regional (if applicable) variation of your domain name. There would be nothing worse that building up a brand, only for someone else to try to monopolise on your success by purchasing a name that you could’ve grabbed for an insignificant amount. 

*Regardless of your domain name extension, hosting your website in a territory will also result in you achieving local placement in that country.

If you’ve gone to the trouble of creating a wealth of useful content, but nobody actually knows about it, the website isn’t reaching its full potential. Offpage tips have been stated elsewhere in the blog but it you fail to optimise ompage elements too, then you on’t receive the full benefit of your promotional efforts.

Here’s a quick run through of the most basic elements that need to be in place:  

H1 tags – The index page and preferably every page should have a H1 Tag. This, along with the page title <title></title> and URL helps google to asscertain the meaning of the document. Of course it must relate to the main text of the document. Having the title “James Bond” on a page about industrial drills, probably won’t do you any favours.

Keywords Density – If you’re looking to rank for a specific keyword or key phrase in google, you will need to include the key phrase within the document a number of times. Also words related to the keyword topic should feature too. This will hopefully demonstrate to google that your article is very much on topic and not ambiguous in nature. Overkill can be a problem though. If your document lacks meaning and is stuffed with keywords and lacks depth, this may count against you. It will also be less likely to be linked to by others too if it’s gibberish.

URL – If your document about popular horror movies is at  the document is at http:///www.yourdomain.com/?p=258  you’ll receive less credit from the search engines than if the document is titled http:///www.yourdomain.com/top_horror_movies.html . Basically it’s just another indicator to google that the document relates to the topic in question. It’d be silly not to take advantage of this. Again though, overkill is to be avoided. If your URL is “top ten horror movies” , the H1 title is “top ten horror movies” and the document includes that term numerous times, beyond a point you may be penalised.  Mix it up a bit and use slight variations on these phrases and keywords.

Meta Tags – All pages should feature a title tag, meta description tag, and meta content tag. Not only do these tags once again help google to categorise your content, but in the case of the meta title and description tags, they are used by google/yahoo etc within the search listings so are the first thing that a potential visitor will see in relation to your site. Keep it on topic, short, snappy and descriptive, else users may pass by your site and visit a rival instead.

Image Tags – Adding ALT tags on images is quick, easy and good practice. It allows your site to be more accessible to the visually impaired and can be used to reinforce keywords within the content. It terms of SEO iimportance, it’s not very high up on the list, but for the time it takes to do it’s well worth the effort.

Should you run a static html site, all of these changes can be hand coded. If you run a blog there are various plugins to help you feel with these issues. It’s best to start as you mean to go on, rather than try to correct sloppy habits at a later date, so don’t delay.

Without a shadow of a doubt backlinks are the primary factor in how your site ranks in search engine listings. If you don’t have authority websites and/or a mass of lesser quality inbound links pointing towards your site, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to achieve a high ranking for any keyword that is in the least bit competitive.

How do search engines rank sites?

Think about it like this. Search engines like google are designed in such a way that they aim to provide the surfer with links that are most relevant to them. If you throw up a website in ten minutes and nobody links to you, it’s unlikely that you’re offering anything of value to the masses, hence you will likely not rank well. Should you have great quality content and optimise keywords/title tags and so on, , this is helpful in terms of on site claity, but again if this content is not being linked to, it won’t rank well. Onsite optimisation is very important, but it’s only part of the puzzle.

Offsite elements form a core role in any marketting strategy. Google, and search engines like them are very friendly towards pages that are linked to from authority sources. By authority sources I mean sites that  are effectively the “go to” website for that particular subject. If you cannot snare authority links or agree upon a link exchange, all is not lost. Sites such as digg.com are a great way to introduce people to your content and gain backlinks as are directory submissions. I’ll go into these areas much more at a later date. Remember: if your content does not draw attention, then nobody is going to want to link to it, or plug it.

Backlink Factors

So you think you have quality content and the potential to gain quality backlinks. Well in this case, you’ll want to make the most of that situation and gain maximum benefit from the inbound links. Of course many people will organically link to your site. As such you have little control over optimisation in these cases, but in other cases you do. These elements all factor in:

Anchor Text

This refer to the text of the link to you site. If you wish to rank well for the term “SEO backlink Strategy” you’d need to be linked to as something resembling that keyword phrase. Should you wish to be be searchable via your company name. You may wan tot be linked to as this. Consider what will result in the most relevant and quality traffic heading your way. I would advise you not to use the exact same anchor text all of the time, as google and co, may frown upon this.

Text surrounding Link

Search engines are designed to give prefered treatment to websites that have grown popular by organic methods. For this reason links to your site that are embedded within documents/articles are deemed to be more natural (than link exchanges for example) and as such are a sought after commodity. It’s important to have a diverse SEO strategy and you won’t go far wrong if this forms a part of it.

Age of Link / Site (sitewide not important)

If a five year old authority site links to a page on your website, google, yahoo and co and going to pass on some of that authroity to your site. If a five day old site links to yours it probably won’t have any positive impact at all. The longer your link remains on a site the better as it gains more trust. Of course its also important if you are in a niche, for the in bound links to be in topics relating to your site. If you run an acne site, it’ll benefit you to appear on a medical site, but not so much if the link is on a site unrelated to the subject matter. 

Number of Links

If a hundred sites link to your site with anchor text “construction companies in wales”, then it is likely that your site actually relates to that subject matter, hence you should rank reasonably well. It’s not simply a numbers game though. It would benefit you just as much to be linked to via a few popular sites in your niche, as it would be be linked to from a multitude of unpopular websites. It’s not simply a matter of choosing where you are linked to though. You need to devise strategies to get your website recognised. We’ll save that topic for another day.