Search Engine Optimisation
SEO Guide To Launching A New Website
With all the time, effort and money that goes into getting top SEO rankings and building a stream of consistent organic traffic, great care must be taken when developing and launching a new website that replaces an existing one.
It can take months or even years to get top SEO rankings but you can lose these rankings in a matter of hours. With this in mind, here are a set of guidelines to help maintain your website’s SEO value and minimise any negative impact on your rankings.
Maintaining URLs and Linking Structure
If your website has been online for a while then you have likely built some value for your current website through internal and inbound links. Before you develop your new website it’s important to keep in mind that any changes to the URL of any existing pages will diminish the value of those pages. With this in mind, and wherever possible, you should maintain the same URLs and linking structure in your new website.
If your website has a large number of pages indexed by Google or if internal pages on your current website are already ranking you should use the same URL structure for those pages so that all previous links do not need to be redirected. If your current website uses a search-engine-friendly link structure it would be best for SEO purposes if that structure was carried across to your new website.
How Domain Names Affect SEO
One of the most common types of question we receive is about domain names and how they affect SEO. While your domain name is, in most cases, the least important part of a top SEO ranking here are answers to the most common questions about domain names:
Should I buy a domain name that includes a keyword in it?
Having keywords in your domain name only makes a difference to your SEO when your domain name is the exact-match keyword that you want to rank for AND is the .com or local .com version (eg .com.au) of the keyword. Two examples of this are homeloans.com.au and travelinsurance.com.au, which both rank at the top of Google for those exact keyword phrases, which are highly searched for.
It’s important to note that using any other keywords in the domain name will negate the ranking benefit of having the keyword in the domain name. For example, mytravelinsurance.com.au will not have the same ranking effect for ‘travel insurance’ as travelinsurance.com.au but it will rank for ‘my travel insurance’.
Additionally, having a .net, .biz or any other extension apart from the .com version will not assist with your SEO rankings – you must have the .com or localised .com version (eg .com.au) of the domain name to rank highly for that keyword.
How to Write Effective SEO Articles for Your Blog
With the recent release of Google Caffeine, frequently updating informative, quality content to your website has never been more important. Regularly adding fresh content effectively increases not only the visibility of your website, but also assists with boosting your natural search engine rankings.
A perfect way to take advantage of this is to utilise a blog on your website and upload articles on a regular basis. This enhances the authority of your website and plays a major role in achieving top rankings for competitive keyword phrases. However, sometimes the hardest part of initiating the article writing process is gaining the inspiration or the article idea to start the ball rolling. Here are some article development and writing tips to make the process easier.
Creating Your Article Topic
The first task when writing an SEO article for your blog is to identify a high impact article topic. It is best to make your article topic short, snappy and appealing. Here are some ideas for topics ideal for your blog:
10 SEO Strategies for Google Caffeine
In my last article I spoke about how Google Caffeine will affect SEO. In this article I share 10 SEO strategies that align with Google Caffeine to increase your SEO rankings.
1. Make Your Site Larger
Google Caffeine places a greater importance on the authority of your domain. The easiest way to increase the authority of your domain is to make your site larger. The larger your site, the more PageRank you will control and the more authority your domain will have.
2. Post Articles To A Blog On Your Site
Adding articles to a blog on your site is not only a great way of increasing the size of your site, it’s also one of the best ways to keep your site fresh in the eyes of Google. Caffeine is all about finding the freshest and most relevant content on the web and presenting it to its users, and posting articles to your blog aligns perfectly with this.
How Will Google Caffeine Affect SEO?
There has been a lot of buzz in the SEO industry with the formal launch of Google’s new indexing system Google Caffeine. Many of our clients are interested in how Google Caffeine will potentially affect their SEO. Here are some insights…
An Overview of Google Caffeine
Google Caffeine is not a change in how Google ranks websites – it is a change in how it indexes and then presents new information online. Rather than taking a few weeks to browse the web and then update its index (ie what you see when you conduct a search) it can update its index as soon as it finds a new piece of information. Caffeine was developed to improve the speed, relevancy, size and comprehensiveness of Google’s search.
SEO Will Be Picked Up Faster
As Google is able to index content faster, any SEO activities being implemented will have a faster impact on SEO rankings. So rather than waiting for weeks for SEO activities to be seen by Google you can expect them to be picked up almost straight away.
It’s important to note that the current ranking factors still exist but the work done to improve SEO rankings will take effect faster.
7 Website Optimization Tips For Top SEO Rankings
Achieving top SEO rankings for a profitable keyword phrase requires a link building strategy designed to get other websites to link to you with the keywords you want to rank for within the links. While on-site SEO only plays a small part in your overall SEO ranking success, a well optimized website can significantly reduce the amount of link building you need to implement to achieve top SEO rankings.
Here are 7 website optimization tips for top SEO rankings on Google…
1. Optimize Your Title Tags – your title tags are the words that appear as the first line (ie your headline) in your Google search results. Title tags are one of the elements used by Google to determine what a particular web page is about so you must ensure that the keywords you want to rank for are located within the title tags. Keep in mind that people read your title tags and make a decision on whether to click through to your website or not, so make sure it reads well for humans. Limiting your title tags to 60 characters will ensure that all of the words you use are visible in the search results pages.
7 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Wait To Invest In SEO
The growth of the Internet (and Google) has provided one of the most powerful and cost-effective methods of marketing and growing a business this decade. The businesses that take advantage of the Internet are seeing massive growth year after year. And while there are many online marketing strategies that businesses can use to drive sales and business growth, one stands out from the crowd… SEO.
SEO is one of the most powerful methods any business can use to drive sales and growth on a limited budget. Whether you are investing in SEO or not, you can be fairly certain that your competition already is. Here are 7 reasons why you shouldn’t wait to invest in SEO…
Are You Targeting The Wrong Keywords For Your SEO Campaign?
“Keyword research” is a term thrown around by many search engine marketers but there is more to this than simply looking at a keyword tool and picking some related keywords. Keyword research is often the most important factor in a successful search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign. Why? Primarily because SEO is a long-term strategy; picking the wrong keywords can result in wasting upwards of 6-12 months and thousands of dollars optimising for keywords that you may never rank for or that will provide very little return on your investment. The right keywords, however, coupled with effective optimisation can mean massive growth for your business!
One of the biggest reasons SEO campaigns fail is because people are targeting the wrong keywords. It is essential for any campaign that the keywords targeted are both achievable and produce results. With this in mind, there are a few things that you must always consider when researching keywords for your SEO campaign.
17 of the Most Common SEO Myths
Some people refer to the SEO industry as the ‘wild west’ because there are no rules or regulations outlining who can provide SEO advice or services… and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people who take advantage of this.
There are many self-proclaimed ‘SEO experts’ who, armed with a limited knowledge of SEO and some industry jargon, give businesses incorrect advice or (even worse) charge for services.
The main problem with the SEO industry is that it can take 6, 12 or even 18 months to achieve results for competitive keyword phrases which means an incorrect decision of who to listen to or which company to work with can be disastrous.
Here is a list of the most common SEO myths which you can use for your own SEO or when deciding which SEO company to work with. Of note, these myths are related to Google, which controls the majority of the search market in Australia and the USA.
What is the Future of PageRank?
Before we discuss the future of PageRank it is important to understand what it is.
PageRank is a numeric value assigned by Google of the importance of a web page. PageRank is scaled between 0 and 10 with 10 being the highest rank.
Your PageRank is based on the number of websites linking to your website and the number of websites linking to them, and so on. The more links you have pointing to your website the higher your PageRank will be.
How To Avoid Google’s Duplicate Content Penalty
Achieving top SEO rankings for competitive keyword phrases is one of the most valuable and most difficult marketing goals to achieve. While there are many SEO strategies you need to implement to achieve top rankings, there are also many pitfalls you need to avoid at the same time. One of those pitfalls is duplicate content.
Duplicate content is a phrase coined by Google that refers to the same content (ie wording) being used across multiple websites and / or pages on the Internet. The content may be exactly the same or it may be slightly different (ie 10%) but is seen as the same by Google.
Over the years the response by Google to websites or web pages it deems to have duplicate content is referred to as ‘duplicate content penalties’. Duplicate content can be intentional or unintentional in nature, but the effects are usually the same:
Keyword Research – How To Select The Best Keywords for SEO
Successful SEO campaigns all have one thing in common… the selection of the right keywords to focus efforts upon.
Keyword selection can make or break your SEO campaign because all of the work done after this stage is based upon the keywords that have been selected: select the wrong keywords to focus on and the next 12 months of SEO will return less than 100 visitors per month; select the right keywords and your business will grow in leaps and bounds.
Before expanding further on how to find the right keywords for your SEO campaign it is important to define what a keyword is and the different types of keywords available.
How To Get Top Google Rankings?
Ranking at the top of Google for the right keyword phrase can help your business grow at a rate faster than nearly any other form of advertising. Because of this very reason the race to achieve top rankings for high value keywords is becoming faster and more difficult every single day.
SEO experts are continually trying to figure out the various factors that Google uses to rank websites (the Google Algorithm) while Google is constantly working at improving and changing its algorithm to make it difficult to figure out.
While nobody knows all the factors that make up the Google Algorithm (and there are hundreds) there are certain ranking factors which most SEO experts know and use to achieve top Google with great success.
The following ranking factors have been proven to assist with ranking your website at the top of Google. The list has been broken down into on-page SEO factors, which are optimisations you can make on your website, off-page SEO factors, which are mostly concerned with link building, and negative ranking factors, which should be avoided to ensure solid rankings.
How Much Should SEO Cost?
How much you should spend on SEO is a difficult decision to make, especially as the investment made today is not returned for 3, 6 or even 12 months in the future. At some stage this is a decision any business person seriously looking to grow their business online will have to make.
There are many important factors that need to be considered when deciding how much to invest in SEO with the most important factor being how competitive the market is. For example, if you are looking to move into a highly competitive area, such as ‘home loans’, expect to pay a lot more than you would for a less competitive niche like ‘goldfish food’. You won’t get rankings for ‘home loans’ with a $150 a month spend when banks and other financial institutions are spending +$10,000 per month for the same keywords.
The cheapest solution is never the best and is, in most cases, a much more expensive option in the long term when you factor in the opportunity cost of not achieving results. Achieving results in any competitive market is difficult at the best of times and requires a powerful off-page SEO strategy utilising a number of content-based strategies.
How To Choose An SEO Company
Narrowing down the best SEO Company may be easier once you know which ones to avoid. Once you take those companies out of the equation, some simple research and the right questions will make it clear who the best providers are. Final selection is then all about your individual business needs and your budget projections.
The path is, however, fraught with many pitfalls. You must not be persuaded out of your money by less than scrupulous providers looking to make a quick buck and wooing you with technical jargon.
If you have limited or no knowledge of SEO then I’d suggest that your starting point is some general research to grasp the basic implications of good SEO practices.
For those with a good grasp of SEO, you may at one time even have wondered why you’d need a specialist provider if you already have a good understanding SEO yourself. Actually, knowing how it works and why it works are vastly different. To say nothing of the dynamic nature of SEO, so read on.
