Create an Awesome Home Business » SEO

Do Better on Google: Speed Up Your Site Load Time

Martin — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 23:30:09 +0000

With Google now including site load times in the factors it uses to rank sites for the natural search results, a recent article on the SEOmoz blog giving 7 ways to speed things up caught my attention.

Some of them I was already using but one that I wasn’t was Gzip compression, so I dived right in.

Compressing your site files before they’re sent from your server to the browser that’s viewing them reduces the amount of data that has to be transferred. And that speeds up site load times – a lot.

It’s like using Winzip to compress Word or PowerPoint files before you email them.

As long as your server is running Apache you can follow these steps to activate compression and speed up your site load times:

Step 1:

In your WordPress root folder (the folder where your WordPress files sit) find and open the .htaccess file.

You may need to do this with your FTP client because some hosting provider file managers hide this file.

Here’s what it looks like using FileZilla:

Right click on the .htaccess file and the third option down is ‘view/edit’.

Step 2:

Select ‘view/edit’ and FileZilla will download and open the file with Notepad.

Step 3:

When the file is opened paste this entire block of code into it:

Click here for a copy of the Notepad file contents to make it easier to copy and paste.

Step 4:

Once you’ve pasted that code into the file save and close it.

When you’ve closed it, FileZilla will ask if you want to upload the changed file back to the server:

Step 5:

Click ‘Yes’ to upload it back to the server.

Step 6:

Once the file has been returned to the server you can click View>Refresh to see that the new file has been successfully uploaded.

Make a note of the file size before refreshing. After refreshing it will be around 500 bytes larger.

Step 7:

Disconnect from the server and close FileZilla. You’ll see a message that claims an edited file is still open and warning that if you close FileZilla your changes will not be saved.

As long as you verified that your updated .htaccess file has been updated (step 6) you can ignore this warning.

That’s it – you’re all done and your site visitors (and Google) will have a big smile on their faces.

Cheers,

An Interesting SEO Experience

Martin — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 23:30:49 +0000

A while ago I wrote about hitting Google page 1 out of 192,000,000 results for the search term ‘online home business tips’.

Having hit that target I confidently waited for my traffic to start kicking up. But it remained pretty much unchanged.

Digging a bit further revealed that although there were around 200,000,000 results for the search term ‘online home business tips’, there were relatively few searches.

The term ‘Internet marketing tips’ has a much better supply/demand ratio, with more searches but only 60,000,000 results.

So about a month ago I decided to re-optimise this site for the term ‘Internet Marketing tips’, fully expecting to lose my first page position for ‘online home business tips’ in the process.

Since the term ‘online home business tips’ was not bringing in the visitors, I figured dropping off the front page wasn’t going to have any impact anyway.

So I set about re-optimising everything, expecting to drop off the first page for ‘online home business tips’ and start climbing up the order for ‘Internet Marketing tips’.

And the opposite has happened.

I’m still on the first page for ‘online home business tips’ (number 4 out of 203,000,000 today) and I’m still way down (unchanged) for ‘Internet Marketing tips’.

And my traffic has been completely unaffected. (More than 38% of my traffic comes from Google search results – all of it direct to individual articles).

I have to say I’m surprised and puzzled.

I’ve been in this business long enough to know how to optimize sites and pages – the amount of traffic I get from the natural search results to individual articles is testament to that.

But it’s clear that the process of re-optimising a site is a lot less sensitive than re-optimising an individual article. Something I’d not appreciated before.

Anyway, since the changes I made have had no impact on my traffic I’m going to leave them in place.

The supply/demand ratio on the term ‘Internet marketing tips’ is so much better than it is on ‘online home business tips’ that I will eventually get a benefit when the re-optimisation of the site starts to take effect.

If not, it’s back to the drawing board again!

Cheers,

Choosing Keywords and META Tags

Martin — Wed, 19 May 2010 23:30:36 +0000

Last week I wrote about some key points that came out of a website review I completed recently (see it here)

One of the things I delivered as part of that review was a set of META tags for each page on the site, so I figured I’d explain how I went about that.

A heck of a lot of META tags have been defined and you certainly don’t need to use all of them. Probably the three most important ones are: Title, Description and Keywords.

There are also tags that tell the search engines whether or not to index your page, whether or not to follow links on the page, whether or not to keep a copy of your page in their archives, how soon they should re-crawl the page and a whole lot more.

You can use these tags if you specifically want the search engines to do something other than the default.

So there’s no need, for example, to specify that a page should be indexed. It will be indexed by default. Only if you do not want it to be indexed do you need to specify this.

Turning, then, to the three I referred to earlier: these are all based on the keywords your page is focused around.

So before we get into them in more detail let’s look at generating keywords.

Generating Keywords

There’s an ongoing argument about whether or not the search engines rely on keywords – meaning the META keywords – but the fact still remains you need to think in terms of them.

Or, more specifically, what someone searching for what your page is about might type into the search engines – the search term they might use.

When you type in a search term and look at the results you’ll see that whenever a word you typed in appears in the results it’s made bold.

And, since your eyes are naturally drawn to the bolded words, you’re more likely to click on those links first.

Therefore, you want to come up with a title tag that contains the words that people searching for your page have typed in.

Many people will tell you that you need to do your keyword research first (and exhaustively) and then write your article around whatever you came up with.

I have to admit that I do the exact opposite

I work out what message I want to give and then write the article to give it.

Having got the article to the point where my message is clear I then turn to keywords.

Most times the keywords just jump out at me but, where they don’t, and if I’m really stuck, I copy the article into a static web page on my admin site and open up Google Adwords.

In Adwords I go to the keyword tool, type in the URL of the page I’ve just uploaded and search for keyword suggestions.

The Adwords tool analyses the page and produces a list of keywords that people searching for the kind of information on the page have typed in.

I can then pick terms from the list to use in my Title, Keywords and Description tags.

Let me pause here and clarify what these tags are:

The Title and Description tags are best illustrated in this picture:

The keywords are simply the search terms that people may type in to find what you’re writing about. You should only use a few of these and keep them focused. 8 – 10 is plenty.

Using Your Keywords

OK, so having got my keywords I then go back to the article and review what I’ve written in order to get them into the headers (H tags) and my opening paragraphs in the article itself.

Be careful here not to alter the way your article reads – make sure it still reads well to humans! Using this approach means you should only need to make minor modifications – if any.

I also come up with a META title that contains the most appropriate search term from the list.

The META title doesn’t need to be perfectly grammatical, so keep it short (less that 60 characters) and get your keywords (search term) as close to the beginning as possible.

I then write a META description that contains at least one of the keywords, but also entices people to click through to the article. Think of it as an Adwords ad.

And finally I select four or five of the keywords from the list to insert in my META keywords tag. Yes – I do use META keywords, despite all the claims that they’re a waste of space.

I then paste these three META tags (plus any others I’m using) into the source code of my web page between the HEAD and /HEAD tags.

And that’s it.

To make it even easier you can use one of the many online META tag generator services to generate the code for you. The one I use is here.

Alternatively, if you’re using WordPress you can insert them via the All-in-one-SEO pack plugin or in the custom SEO fields (if you’re using Thesis).

As I mentioned in last week’s article: getting your META tags properly set up and in sync with the content on your page is an important part of on-page SEO, but the overall coding of your site is becoming increasingly important too.

So make sure you’ve got both well set up.

Cheers,

Why Your Website Code is Important for SEO

Martin — Mon, 10 May 2010 23:30:42 +0000

I’m just completing an SEO review on the website of a local business, and I thought it may be helpful to talk generally about some of the major points that came out.

Don’t fret – total confidentiality is guaranteed!

First thing to keep in mind: Search Engine Optimisation is a dynamic environment.

The search engines constantly update their algorithms to provide more relevant results and stay ahead of the black-hatters.

Plus, developments in technology enable them to continually use new and more effective methods of discovering what your site is about.

None-the-less, some core principles hold true:

Web users want sites that load quickly, are easy to navigate, provide good information and are clearly laid out.

So do the search engines.

Consider that for a moment, and you’ll realize that this means more than just good content and good META tags.

It means your entire site construction must be efficient and clean. Here’s why:

Use of images

Among the things that slow down site load times are, of course, too many images that are too large.

I’ve seen sites that use images to portray information that should be in H1 or H2 headers.

Not only does this slow down the site load time but, unless you provide informative descriptions in your ‘alt’ tags, the search engines won’t know what information you’re putting across – because they can’t read images.

Not good for SEO.

Wherever you use images be sure to complete informative ‘alt’ and ‘title’ tags. And use images to support your message, not to give it.

Multiple versions and types of code

HTML versus XHTML

HTML has evolved through a number of versions to XHTML. Because of this there’s a doc type declaration at the top of each page that tells the browser which version of HTML or XHTML you’re using.

This enables the browser to render your site quickly and accurately.

I’ve seen sites that declare XHTML in the doc type but then use earlier versions of HTML (as well as XHTML) in the body content.

This will slow down site load times as the browser will take longer to figure out what you’re trying to display. On some browsers it may well create errors.

It will also reduce your cross-browser compatibility, meaning that your site will render completely differently in some browsers – potentially destroying your carefully designed layout.

Ensure that your site is consistently built, using the version of HTML (or XHTML) that you define in your doc type declaration. This will speed up site load times and improve cross-browser compatibility.

Good for SEO

Tables versus CSS

I’ve seen new sites (developed as recently as last year) built using tables, but with blocks of CSS definitions and JavaScripts in the HEAD section.

This, again, will slow down site load times and reduce cross-browser compatibility.

No new site should use tables in its construction.

CSS was developed to separate the design from the content. The styling of your site should be done in a stylesheet and kept in a separate file.

This will speed up site load times because all the style rules need only be downloaded once, instead of each time a page is downloaded. The external stylesheet will ensure styling is displaid consistently throughout your site.

It also improves cross-browser compatibility by reducing the amount of code on the web page and defining the styling in accordance with the agreed CSS standards.

Reducing the amount of code on a page (thereby improving the ratio of content to code) will help the search engines to read your site and understand what it’s about.

Good for SEO

Summary

We’ve all known for a long time that the search engines’ aim is to provide the most relevant results possible. Therefore, good content was important if you wanted to do well in the search results.

But other factors are coming into play all the time, and site load-time is a recent one.

So, in addition to all the things I’ve written about before (good content, correct META tags, proper use of H tags, alt tags and title tags, etc), you need to pay close attention to things that will affect site load times and consistent rendering.

Which means making sure your code is up to scratch.

Cheers,

Don’t Ignore the SEO

Martin — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 04:29:29 +0000

Interesting thread in the Third Tribe forum today: don’t ignore the SEO.

It was started by someone who’d taken the ‘write for people, don’t write for the search engines’ mantra literally – and not done any SEO work on their site.

Now, I’ve repeated the ‘write for people …’ theme many times on this site and I hope I didn’t give the impression in doing so that the SEO will take care of itself.

Because it doesn’t.

SEO breaks down into two parts:

On-page (or site) SEO
Off-page SEO

Broadly speaking, as a webmaster or blogger you have direct control over the On-page SEO. Your control over the Off-page SEO is way more tenuous.

On-page SEO

You need to get your On-page SEO right, because that’s what tells the search engines what your site (or page) is about.

Remember: the mission of the search engines is to provide the most relevant results possible to searchers. To do that they need to know in as much detail as possible what information your page contains.

So the easier you can make it for them to do so, the better the SEO platform you’re building.

Here, then, is what you need to get done for your On-page SEO:

Effective META page titles
Effective post titles (not the same thing, if you’re blogging on WordPress)
Effective use of H tags (heading tags)
Effective META description
Effective META keywords
Effective use of Tags and Categories (if you’re on WordPress)
Effective permalinks (or page urls)

If you get those things right for your site as a whole and for each post (if you’re blogging) or page (if you’re doing a static site) you’ll have created a good SEO platform.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is where the principle of writing for people, not the search engines, comes into its own.

The principle driver of Off-page SEO is the number and quality of incoming links.

This is because the search engines see each incoming link as a vote of confidence by a third party in the quality of your site.

And the incoming links that the search engines are interested in are the ones created by humans.

So you want to write sufficiently well, and provide sufficiently useful information, that humans will link to your article (or site) or refer your page on to others.

And you definitely won’t achieve that by writing for the search engines.

Summary

So yes – write for people, not the search engines. But make sure you get your On-page SEO set up first.

Cheers,

SEO Guidelines and How to Avoid Getting Ripped Off

Martin — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 04:28:56 +0000

I’ve had two occasions recently to be shocked at what Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) consultants charge versus what they actually deliver.

And angry, because (in one case) it was daylight robbery.

So here’s a tip if you’re struggling with optimizing your site for the search engines:

Get your self a free Google account (if you don’t already have one) and add Google Webmasters’ Tools and Google Adwords to it.

With Adwords you’ll need to give them details of a valid credit card, but you don’t need to spend anything unless you set up a campaign.

Google Webmasters’ Tools

Then dig into Google Webmasters’ Tools and read their guidelines on setting up an effective site – Webmasters’ Guidelines.

There’s a lot of valuable information there and it’s a great starting point for making sure your site is properly structured and meets Google’s quality guidelines. Especially as it comes from Google itself.

For more information specifically about optimizing your site for the search engines there’s a PDF document on the Google Webmasters’ Tools site.

It’s Google’s Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide, and you can find it here.

This one goes into some detail on each of the on-page elements you need to pay attention to, what they do and how you should configure them for the best results.

I urge you to read both those documents to educate yourself on the principles of site construction and search engine optimization.

You may still decide to hire an SEO consultant if you do not have the time, the skills or the inclination to do it yourself.

That’s fine (and a good move unless you’re confident of doing it yourself), but please educate yourself on the basics first, so you know whether or not your chosen consultant is giving you good value.

Unfortunately, because SEO has this aura of being a black art, it’s an area that’s spawned a bunch of people who claim to be able to do wonderful things, for which you’ll pay a fortune and get little in return.

Here are some questions to ask and things to look out for when looking for an SEO consultant.

Google Adwords

I also mentioned adding Adwords to your Google account. This is because Adwords contains a very powerful keyword tool that you can use to find good keywords for your site.

You’ll have noticed that those articles by Google on SEO don’t mention keywords. That’s because Google is able to access your site and read the content of your pages, so it doesn’t need keywords to tell it what your site’s about.

However, other search engines (Yahoo and Ask among the major ones) do make use of keywords, so it’s as well to include properly focused keywords in your META tags.

Quite apart from that, the META keywords tag is part of the W3C standards for web page construction, so having them there helps to ensure your page is standards-compliant.

The Keywords Tool in Google Adwords offers you two ways of developing a set of META keywords for your page:

You can type in the URL of your page and ask the tool to list keywords it recommends based on the page content
You can type in the primary keyword (or search term) you have come up with for the page and ask the tool to list related keywords.

In both cases the tool will look at the keywords (or search terms) that people have used to find the same type of information that your page contains, and list those terms for you.

Some of the terms will be irrelevant. So select between 3 and 10 relevant ones and use those in the keyword META tag content for your page.

Search Engine Optimisation is a necessary and important part of making your website successful, but it’s not a black art.

So don’t let someone persuade you it is and charge you a fortune for doing little in return.

Cheers,

Google Page 1 Out Of 192 Million Results

Martin — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 08:50:52 +0000

It may not be a big deal to you but it is to me.

After 2 years of work this site is finally on the first page of Google, out of 192,000,000 results, for the search term Online Home Business Tips.

And here’s the picture to prove it.

OK, I’m only at number 10, but hey – who’s counting?

So why the excitement?

I’ve held higher spots (including number 1 for some search terms) but they were not competitive terms.

I’m at number 5 (and I’ve hung around at somewhere between 4 and 9 for a long time) for the term Global Abundance Program, but that’s out of only 1,240,000 results.

And I’m at number 1 out of 43,400,000 results for the term Create an Awesome Home Business – but that’s the title of the site, so I should be up there somewhere.

But number 10 out 192,000,000 results for a term like Online Home Business Tips – well that, to me, is an achievement.

And I’m enjoying it.

My secret strategy? Sorry – no secret strategies. I’ve only done exactly what I’ve written about throughout this site.

Nothing even remotely approaching black hat. Not even a trace of grey. No tricks, no secret systems and no expensive SEO consultants.

It’s all here on the site, all the SEO techniques I’ve used, so browse the SEO category (under ‘See Articles On:’ in the sidebar to the right) and enjoy.

And if you have any questions by all means drop me a line – I’d love to hear from you.

Update: 4th March, 2010:

This morning out of curiosity I re-checked this site in Google, fully expecting it to have dropped back to the second page of results.

What I saw blew me away: it’s at number 1 out of 193,000,000 results – and here’s the picture to prove it.

I was utterly gob-smacked – but delighted .

How to Create a Search Engine Effective Web Page

Martin — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 04:04:58 +0000

I’m often amazed when I look at the source code of web pages, because creating a page that’s optimised for the search engines is so straightforward – yet so seldom done.

I’ve said repeatedly: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is not a black art, so don’t let anyone tell you it is.

All you need to know about SEO is readily available on-line – and Google Webmaster’s Tools is a great place to start.

A quick recap:

On-page SEO, the way you construct your web pages, is more of a one-time exercise than off-page SEO – although it does require some maintenance, particularly if you change the content or focus of your site.

Off-page SEO is not complicated, but it does require a continuous effort.

This article looks at how to structure a web page effectively – on-page SEO.

There are 3 areas to focus on:

Your META tags. This is data that sits in the header area of your page and is specifically designed to tell the search engines about your page: how often they should visit it, whether or not they can index it and so on. The search engines will naturally look for META data whenever they visit your page.
Tags within your content. This is information that’s contained within HTML tags in the content you write. It’s designed to give the search engines information about things they can’t read (images, for example) and let them know about information you consider to be important – headers, sub headers, bolded text and so on.
Your content itself. The search engines can and do read this. As I mentioned elsewhere, it won’t be long before the search engines can assess the quality of spelling and grammar on a web page, and they may well start prioritising pages accordingly.

So let’s take each of these in turn.

META tags.

This is an image of the page source of the header section of one of my sites. The META tags go in the header area – the bit between the HEAD and /HEAD tags (circled above) which, themselves, sit between the HTML and BODY tags, (1 above).

These tags give information to the search engines about your page, what it contains, who wrote and designed it, how often they should visit and so on.

The easiest way to understand what it’s telling them is to look at the input form of the on-line META tag generator that I used to create them. Here’s a screenshot:

All I did to create the META tags in the first picture was to fill the answers to the questions into the fields on the right of the second picture.

I then clicked the ‘Create Meta Tags’ link at the bottom and pasted the resulting code into the page between the HEAD and /HEAD tags.

You can find this META tag generator here.

That entire process will probably take you around 10 minutes, depending on how long you take to fill in the answers to the questions.

Tags within your content.

The tags within your content give the search engines information about content you consider to be important or content they cannot read – such as images.

The content you consider important is defined by the H tags, and these are no different to the ‘header 1′, ‘header 2′ and ‘header 3′ paragraph definitions in Word.

Usually your main headline for the page would be your ‘header 1′ paragraph in Word or, in a web page, would be the words between your H1 and /H1 tags.

Sub paragraphs (header 2 and header 3 paragraphs in Word) would be the words between H2 and /H2, and H3 and /H3 tags on a web page.

You should use these tags to define headers and sub-headers within your content. Not only will this make it easier for readers to understand what your page is about, it will make it easier for the search engines too.

The other principle tags to use within your content are tags to tell the search engines what your pictures are about.

These are the alt tag, which defines the text that will be displaid if, for any reason, the image cannot be, and the title tag, which tells the viewer what your picture is about when they mouse over it.

Both of these tags are readable by the search engines, whereas the images are not. These tags give the search engines what may be important information, especially if you’re using an image to make an important point within your content.

Your content itself

As long as your page is focused on one subject (which, generally, it should be) your content will naturally contain relevant keywords.

An important message here is to write for people.

Don’t stuff keywords into your text in order to attract the search engines or achieve some keyword density target. It will read unnaturally, with the result that it won’t impress people. And it won’t impress the search engines either.

However, it is worth finding a way to incorporate your main keywords into the H1, H2 and H3 content. Remember, these tags tell the search engines (and readers) what you consider to be important. So getting your main keywords into these tags is a good way of letting the search engines know what your page is about.

Summary:

So, in order to create a web page that is effective in the search results you need to focus on 3 things:

Your META tags
Your tags within content
Your content

It goes without saying that these should all be tightly focused. In other words, keywords that you define in your META tags should be completely in sync with the words you use in your H tags and the content of your page.

As such, you should be writing your page content first and refining that. Once you’re happy with the content you can define your META tags and H tags.

For other articles that I’ve written on SEO, click here.

META Tags Are A Waste of Time

Martin — Wed, 27 May 2009 04:35:54 +0000

I read a post recently in a forum that argued quite strongly that META tags are a waste of time.

The argument was that they don’t serve a useful purpose any more, with the exception of the Title and Description tags.

I disagreed quite strongly with that position.

Here’s why:

META tags are part of the agreed standards for building web pages and sites.

They’re clearly defined and used for managing the way the search engines view and treat your site.

For example, the ‘robots’ META tag gives the spiders instructions on whether to index a page or not, and whether or not to follow outgoing links.

If there is no instruction the robots will index the page and follow links. But if you don’t want people to find a page via the search engines – for example, if it’s a download page – telling the robots they cannot index it is one of the ways of protecting it.

One of the arguments against using them (in that forum post) was that people have started spamming the META tags, as a result of which the search engines now ignore them.

Of course you can spam keywords into META tags – but of course the Search Engines recognise these and ignore them. The spammy keywords, that is, not the META tags.

I do agree that the Title and Description tags are ones you should always use – they’re currently used in the natural search results and displaid to searchers. So a good title and description can grab attention and entice people to click through to your site.

But all the META tags are there for a reason, so it’s both sensible and in keeping with agreed standards to use them.

Different Search Engines do place different emphasis on different META tags now than they did a couple of years ago. But, as we know, search engines are forever changing their algorithms and that also applies to how they view and use META tags.

So who knows how they’ll use them in 2 years time? I suspect not even the search engines do (yet).

There are a lot of META tag generators available online. You simply fill in the answers to the questions they ask and they will generate the code for you to paste into the HEAD section of your page.

So there’s no reason at all not to use META tags – and every reason to do so.

They are part of the agreed standards for building pages and sites, and it’s so easy to generate them that they should always be included in any and all pages.

After all – if they’re all included it won’t matter how much or how often the search engines change the way they view and use them in the future.

Whatever they do, your META tags will be in place, which will increase your site’s resilience to any changes they make.

Backlinks, No Follow and Page Rank

Martin — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:54:47 +0000

I received a question through my Dear Martin page the other day from someone who was asking how backlinks affected page rank, and how the ‘nofollow’ tag affected backlinks, therefore affecting page rank.

Here’s the response I offered:

The first thing I’d say is don’t get hung up on Page Rank and all that other SEO-type stuff. You’re focusing on the wrong thing.

You need to focus on what your visitors want and give it to them. That’s it.

Having said that, the ‘nofollow’ tag on a site does not have any impact on links coming into it. That is – where others are linking to you – backlinks.

Nofollow on your site only affects outgoing links from your site. It tells the Search Engines not to follow any outgoing links.

The blogging community got super hung up over this last year and people started refusing to comment on blogs that had the nofollow tag set. This was because they wouldn’t get credited by Google for links back to their sites from the blog they commented on.

That was an absolutely prime example of focusing on SEO-type stuff instead of giving good value to their visitors. And in many cases it probably cost them traffic.

The thing to remember is this: the search engines are not the ones that will buy from you. People are.

So write your blog or site for the benefit of people.

You should definitely set up your site properly – i.e. use the correct META tags, H tags, alt tags, and title tags, provide clear navigation, create a site map and so on. Make sure you get all the on-site SEO stuff sorted out.

But then forget about SEO and write for people. Use places like Twitter, forums, chat boards and wherever else your target market hangs out, to learn what people are asking about.

Then answer those questions on your blog.