SearchEngineOptimisation.com, only one way up

Many social media sites have a search component. This makes them a viable avenue to pursue during website optimisation. When it comes to social media, Facebook is a big player – but do you need to worry about being found on Facebook search?

The Facebook search bar is far more unassuming than Google’s various search options, but many users turn to it in their time of need. Facebook search has improved over the years, allowing users to track down long-lost friends, favourite pages, events and much more. These changes mean that it’s easier for Internet users to find your pages on Facebook.

Just this fact alone should make any site owner sit up and pay attention. The main difficulty with Facebook for business users has always been the structure. It’s hard to reach users who haven’t heard of you. By using the right keywords however, you can get your pages listed when users make use of Facebook’s search bar. You can talk to us at www.searchengineoptimisation.co.uk about using SEO tactics in social media marketing.

It’s unlikely Facebook will ever be able to compete with Google in terms of search. While YouTube has become the first choice for many video searches, Facebook won’t be able to operate as a search engine without big changes. However, there is a lot of value in making yourself easier to find on Facebook. Talk to your search engine optimisation company about improving your presence on Facebook and start broadening your SEO to include social sites.

When those in SEO services talk about blogs with clients, it’s usually about content. Blogs provide a great source of fresh content. Link building and social media optimisation are minor considerations in comparison. But what if they weren’t?

A good blog can be a link-building gold mine. It only builds links, though, if you work link building and social media into your blog’s foundations. To do this, you may need to change some of your priorities.

Choose the right audience

If you’re running a blog, no doubt you’ve spent some time thinking about what your target market wants to read. Any good SEO agency will hunt out the audience for an SEO blog, as we do when providing SEO services at SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk. Time is spent sorting out the style, length, content and even look of articles the target market reads. There’s a lot of concentration on what readers want.

But what about what you want? Your blog doesn’t just need to be read. It needs to be talked about, shared, linked to and generally seen all around the net.

Finding that audience

The audience you want, then, is far more specific than your site’s general audience. This will have an effect on the posts you write, and the way you promote them.

Planning for this more specific audience involves the same steps as preparing content for any audience. The difference is in planning for an audience that will link and share, rather than passively read.

Blogs are terrific for organic search engine optimization. Don’t waste this natural resource by ignoring its potential.

Ever wonder why other blogs are succeeding when yours isn’t? There’s no magic to it. If your SEO blog isn’t pulling in traffic, regular followers and links, it could be because of something you’re not doing. More likely, it’s because of something you are doing.

*You ignore the rest of the world. It has been said that ‘no man is an island’. These days, there are plenty of people who live in complete isolation undermining the phrase ‘but no blog can survive as an island’. Truly successful blogs are written by people who are active in the blogging community

*You throw away old work. A blog isn’t a single item. It’s a series of pieces which build up over time. Promote your hard work by posting links to older posts

*You forget to SEO. If you’re running a blog because you want to boost your rankings, you need to keep returning to SEO principles. This means using keywords, writing compelling headlines and using blogging software that is search engine friendly. Don’t forget to create URLs that are easy for search engines to analyse. You can talk to us at Searchengineoptimisation.co.uk about any of this

*You ignore the rest of the world… again. As any SEO agency will tell you, much of Internet marketing centres on social media. This is particularly true for blogging. Internet users are getting used to being notified of exciting new things. If you’re not tweeting your posts, promoting via Facebook or tapping into other social streams, you’re effectively crippling your blog

Search engine optimisation services have to perform a diversity of tasks. A lot depends on the nature of the site concerned, but despite this caveat there are some common tasks which are done on a regular basis. Regardless of the continuing changes in the world of search, many of these basics will be done by SEO experts for some time to come. A simple way of looking at these tasks is as SEO basics. Some of these basic activities are concerned with luring more traffic to a site by off-page means, while others are actions which are done to the pages of a site. This piece will focus on the latter.

At SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk we understand the complexities of contemporary SEO, but we never take our eye off the basics. This means that our multifaceted campaigns have the best possible chance of pleasing users and search engines alike. Although we always adapt our tactics to the individual requirements of specific sites, there are five things our efforts often touch upon:

• Title tags are crucial and require more attention than you might think. Quite a few individuals who perform SEO independently go astray when dealing with the title tags on the pages of their sites. Even the basics of SEO often need the skills of a specialist.

• The content is pivotal. In the first place, this means looking at the text to be added to the pages. This is because search engines and users usually want a site to have interesting and informative content in text format. It also involves looking at the amount of space on the page to facilitate easy reading. Furthermore, it includes considering what should be added in terms of the subject. Industry news and comment can often work well, but not in every case.

• A site’s structure must be arranged so that users and web crawlers find it easy to get around. If either group have difficulty in finding what they want, the site will not perform as well as it should. Users have to be pointed in the right direction so that they can get the information and hopefully the products or services that they wish for.

• The careful use of keywords is essential. If the site has a blog or articles, keywords should be seeded throughout the text. However, this should be done sparingly so as to avoid the charge of keyword stuffing. Too high a keyword density and a site may incur a search engine penalty, too low a density and the site may perform in a suboptimal fashion. Therefore it makes good sense to use SEO Content Management Systems.

• The final thing which must always be done with regard to on-page SEO is to think outside the box. Users often love things which break up the monotony. The use of video can be a good idea in some contexts. If the video would have too negative an impact on the site’s load time, linking to YouTube is one option worthy of some consideration. It is not so much what you put on the site, as having the correct attitude, while avoiding errors like too much Flash.

Most websites have a navigation menu system that is applied to every page of the site (you could have hundreds of thousands of pages with the same navigation menu). 8/10 times, the navigation menu has a link back to the homepage and it is the first link with the anchor text “Home”.

Since there’s not many cases were having the keyword “Home” is applicable, having the anchor text as home gives no benefit to the site.

Although I haven’t done any conclusive tests to prove that this works, I believe that inbound links play a part in building up the page theme so when you’re using the word “Home” as the anchor text you are essentially telling Google that your page is about “Home”. There have also been tests to suggest that Google only counts the first link when it comes to ranking the targeted page.

For this reason, I belive that the first link in the navigation should contain the main target keyword. Agreed, having the link anchor text as “Home”  allows users to navigate around the site easily as every visitor knows that a link saying “Home” will take you back to the homepage.

I think that we need to compromise between using the anchor text “Home” and the targeted keywords while still making sense to the user for example;

If I have as site that is to do with kitchens and I wanted to target the key-phrase “Kitchen Units”, I’d look at changing the “Home” link in the navigation menu system to being “Kitchen Units Home”.

I’m currently doing my own tests and you shouldn’t take the word for any SEO technique until you learnt and tested the technique yourself.