SearchEngineOptimisation.com, only one way up

Any your search engine optimization company will advise that good content is a way to get ahead in today’s internet. The search engines have been pushing for better and better content over the years, as have internet users. In order to impress the search engines – and your site’s users – you need to find ways to make your content shine out from the rest.

It’s not easy to be witty and original all the time. For those days you can’t dredge up some sparkling commentary, here are some easier ways to make your content stand out:

*Subheadings, bullet points, numbers and other block-busters. Every SEO company uses these in content to create flow and catch the user’s eye. They’re worth a mention here, though, because they really do work. Just be sure to vary your use of them to avoid monotony.

*Images. Images are underrated by site owners and even by many SEOs. It’s amazing how an image can make a relatively ordinary piece of text stand out. You can make further use of your images by optimising them for Google [...] Continue Reading…

There was a time when Wikipedia pages were seen as a useful tool for SEO. They fit in nicely with link building strategies, and they were great for search engine reputation management as well. While there is still a search engine optimization company or two that will include Wikipedia in their clients’ online plan, the general consensus is that Wikipedia’s usefulness is a thing of the past.

The reason for this is wrapped up in practicalities. In years gone by, it was thought that Wikipedia helped boost a site’s profile with links and attention, and you can find out more about the implications of this with us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk. When it became clear that was no link joy in SEO terms, those that favoured the Wiki route concentrated on the reputation benefits.

These days, the scales are tipped even further against using Wikipedia as an SEO tactic. Some SEOs feel that there’s too much risk involved, reputation-wise. Wikipedia entries tend to zoom to the top of the rankings for brand keywords, but the open-source editing system of the site means such [...] Continue Reading…

Many SEO experts sing the praises of .edu links. These links, coming from academic institutions, tend to carry a fair amount of weight with the search engines because, presumably, they can’t be bought. If you’re engaging in a high quality link building campaign, it’s likely your SEO agency has advised you to pursue these links if you can. The trouble is, they’re incredibly hard to get.

Being links from educational organisations, .edu links are different from other forms of links. It’s difficult to organise some sort of exchange with the sites involved, because generally you don’t have anything that they want. ‘Generally’ is the word here. The trick is to find something that they do want. There are two common ways to get in:

*Fundraising. Every educational institution is interested in fundraising, or has student organisations that are. Offering up products and services for a fundraising effort can usually get you a link. Just investigate the causes your targets have going.

*Students. The student body of any school or university is a wide-open gateway for link building. Universities, in particular, usually allow [...] Continue Reading…

It takes more than technical SEO these days to get to top spots in the SERPs. Particularly if you’re in a high-competition industry, you need to work every angle you can get. Luckily, with social media hotting up like never before, there are plenty of angles to work. If you want an effective campaign, you need to know how to engage with the social media to build up your site’s authority.

Social media services are a common addition to organic search engine optimization as they can build links and make contacts. The most important thing that social media brings to the table, however, is the building of a site’s authority. As any search engine optimization company will tell you, it’s not as simple as joining a social media network. You have to fully engage:

*Create. This is likely to be a part of social media you’re already engaged with. Content creation is a major part of any SEO campaign, and you can discuss this with our team at SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk.

*Chat. Just as important is the contribution of chatter. Social media users love [...] Continue Reading…

If you’ve been working on your SEO for a while, you’re likely to have accumulated quite a bit of content. Even an update schedule of a couple of times a week results in the swift accumulation of old pages. So what do you do with them as they age? Refresh them.

Old pages can weigh your site down, particularly if they don’t contain valuable content. While they make your site a weighty one, they do have the potential to draw negative attention from Google after the Panda update.

How to refresh

You and your search engine optimisation company have a few options when refreshing pages:
*Completely rewriting content
*Taking down old content and redirecting to a new page
*Slightly altering content, or adding an update note to bring information up to date
*Adding new page elements
*Opening up comments to generate fresh content

Refreshing doesn’t have to be hard work. All it may take is a little polishing up of the introduction to the content, or even just the addition of new elements to the page. In this way, a page refresh can bring more than one type [...] Continue Reading…

If you’ve been worried about having your content scraped, some news from Google will come as a big relief. The search engine has gone a step further in its crackdown on low-quality content with a recent announcement that the algorithm’s ability to recognise original content has been improved. This means that scraper sites are likely to experience a drop in rankings, while sites pushing quality content as part of their organic search engine optimisation are likely to feel a benefit.

This new tweak is good news if you’ve been concentrating on your content plan this year. One of the annoyances of recent years has been scraping, which undermines the efforts of site owners to build up their site quality. If you’ve been working on your search engine optimisation blog, only to have its content scraped by twenty other sites, you’ve essentially wasted your time and money.

If the algorithm change does what Google promises, however, site owners can breathe a little easier. Having the algorithm pick out which site originally hosted the content will save a lot of time previously devoted [...] Continue Reading…

It should not come as a shock to hear that fresh content is vital for your site’s rankings. The search engines have been putting more and more weight on fresh content over the last three or four years, focusing on producing time-relevant results for internet users. The freshness of content has become a standard SEO factor. Now, with a recent announcement of algorithm updates, Google has set the bar even higher.

Google announced in November that results for searches with a time relevance will be changing. Things like news and trending information have had time as an important factor for a while now, but Google has announced that time is now very important for pages that relate to:
*Recent events
*Regular events, such as annual holidays or recurring sporting events
*Information that has a ‘high decay’, such as new technologies, volatile politics and other changeable topics.

The search engine giant added that the time-tweak to the algorithm was expected to make a major impact on six to ten percent of searches.

What does this mean for you? A lot, if you’re a retailer, services provider [...] Continue Reading…

Multilingual sites can be a real hassle for SEO. When you’re dealing with content in two or more languages, you have to worry about how the site will read for not one, but many versions of Google and Bing. The main question is whether to separate out your languages into different sites, or to keep it all together.

Separate: Once upon a time, the average SEO company would recommend that you separate out the languages on your sites, creating new sites for each language. This meant complications for SEO link building and other factors, but it worked out better in the end. This is no longer your only option.

The original reason for separating pages was the difficulty search engines had when dealing with languages. It was simpler and more efficient to keep sites all in one language when possible, avoiding possible confusion. Google has been adding some improvements to the algorithm to provide automatic translation. While it’s not certain that this will take care of all the issues involved when working with a multilingual site, it’s likely to help such [...] Continue Reading…

One of the big ranking influences is site architecture. It’s hidden within your site, lurking, waiting to trip up the little search robots. Usually, reorganisation of site structure is a big part of the early work of any SEO agency on a new client site. For this to be effective, however, the client needs to know what style of architecture they favour.

When resolving the issue of site architecture, the following questions need to be considered:

*What is the current structure? Is it appropriate? These two questions are related. Site owners often cling to existing architecture when a different structure would be more useful from a business point of view. Review the existing structure and analyse its effectiveness from a user point of view.

*What do users favour? The structures of the top-ranking sites for your major keywords should be considered. They can provide some good guidelines.

*What are the sales paths? This is a vital question, but one that can be pushed aside. Conversion paths are often SEO-friendly because they set out a path of information users are looking for. Talk to [...] Continue Reading…

The festive season is a major event for online retailers, but with so much competition it can be difficult to secure that boost in sales you may have counted on. Just a few minor touches can increase your sales at any time of year, and they can assist with your SEO, too.

*Use your front page. A bad habit many businesses get into is treating their home page like a general advertisement, rather than the prime internet real estate it is. Linking to your most popular products from the home page helps with your internal SEO link building, allows easy access for customers, and can help promote other products via deeper links.

*Create connections. A great way to further boost sales is to create links to less-popular products at the secondary level. This is a fairly standard tactic for retail sites. However, a lot of retail sites fall down with this method because they don’t provide relevant product links that will interest customers. Use your related keyword research to put forward products that are truly related. Talk to us at SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk [...] Continue Reading…