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 Image Search. Talk to our experts at SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk about this aspect of search engine optimization. As with subheadings and bullet points, though, overuse makes for boring pages.

*Socialisation. Linking your new post in with your social media plan is a fantastic way to grab some more attention and to make the post itself look better. How? By embedding your social media widgets in the page. These widgets can be great SEO tools, creating buzz both ways.

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 pages are open to sabotage. Couple this with lack of link value, and it seems like too much effort.

If you operate a high-profile business, chances are you’re going to need to address the Wikipedia issue for online reputation management. If your company is large enough to attract unsolicited press, you may already have your own page there, and will need to keep track of it. However, if you’re small fry, it’s possibly an avenue that’s best left alone.

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 a certain amount of student space on their websites. Contact the various studient bodies, student bloggers and student publications when you’re link building. Links are easily obtained via the usual methods this way, and you can discuss methods with us at SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk.

Links with the magic .edu are difficult to get your hands on, but by no means impossible. Just employ a little creativity, and you could land some valuable additions to your profile.

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 to be commented upon, and this is a sure way to make friends.

*Lurk. Not everything is about activity. Watching others can give you some valuable insight into how to succeed.

*Critique. Offering criticism is a great way to spark interest when you feel your campaign is low on energy.

*Collect and review. To make your social media campaign pay off, analyse what you see and use your insights in other areas of your campaign.

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 of benefit. For example, if you’ve only recently added social media to your campaign, the addition of things like ‘Like’ buttons can get more of your website assets on board.

It doesn’t take much to refresh an old page, and there are quite a few benefits to be gained from doing so. Talk to our experts at SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk about a refresh for your SEO blog or other pages.

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 to disputes. It does mean, however, that the days of syndicating content are in the past.

This change is a part of Google’s pursuit of content quality, which has been behind a large number of major changes this year, including the infamous Panda algorithm update. Sites which feature duplicated or syndicated content have suffered this year, with content sites such as Associated Content taking a big hit in the rankings. Talk to us at SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk about your content plan.

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 or anyone whose business responds to events. Retailers are going to have a tougher time every holiday season if their content plan isn’t up to scratch. On the bright side, savvy site owners can make use of the algorithm change by tapping into recent events as part of their search engine optimisation services plan. Talk to us at www.SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk about how this change affects your site.

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 sites’ communication with the search engines.

Consolidate: If you do consolidate the various languages on your site, you still need to be careful, and you can discuss this with our experts at www.SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk. Mixing languages on pages is still problematic. Tactics for different search engines need to be considered, and different markets must still be kept in mind.

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 our experts at SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk about this.

The issue of site architecture can be a much bigger question than it seems at first. Most site owners are already pretty attached to the way their site’s organised before professional SEO services come into play. Arguments over architecture won’t help your search engine optimisation agency conduct a speedy campaign. Remember that good SEO is as much about usability as it is about search engines.

*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 about this.

*Don’t skimp on descriptions. Internet shoppers have very little to go on when making their decision to purchase. If you want to sell products beyond those your site users are specifically searching for, you need to use your product descriptions, product photos and product information to best advantage. Product descriptions are also a good way to assist your organic search engine optimization by linking related keywords together.