Create an Awesome Home Business » SEO

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.

Page Rank or Visitors?

Martin — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:17:02 +0000

Here’s a question I saw in a forum this week: is it better to have a good page rank or lots of visitors to your site.

The person in question had a site which was focused on design and design services, so my opening response was that what they really wanted was lots of visitors who were looking to buy design services.

A statement of the obvious, I know, but it opens up another thought which I think is worth reiterating: how much attention should you focus on all the SEO type stuff (of which page rank is a bit)?

If you’ve seen my other articles on this you’ll know that I do believe in getting the basics right. That means getting your on-site SEO sorted out and getting some links to your site. There are several articles on that here.

But once you’ve got the basics done then you should focus on providing a valuable resource to your visitors. If you don’t they’ll not only leave (quickly), but the search engines will work it out too and they’ll stop sending you any visitors at all.

So how do you provide a valuable resource?

Well, for a start, stop thinking of yourself as a blogger, or a webmaster. Think of yourself as a publisher.

Which is, after all, what you are: an online publisher.

A publisher is not going to publish stuff that’s not going to make him any money. So when he’s looking for stuff to publish he needs to know there’s a market for it, and that what he’s thinking of publishing provides value to that market.

It’s no different if you’re publishing a website – unless you’re purely writing for your own gratification or a few specific friends.

You need to know there’s a market for what you’re publishing and you need to provide value to that market. If you do, they’ll visit your site, tell their friends, who’ll also visit your site and tell their friends.

Before you know it you’ve got yourself a following.

The good thing about that is this: the search engines will notice that people are staying on your site longer and returning more often. So they’ll send more people your way.

Some of those people may link to your site, if they have sites of their own. And before you know it your page rank will start to rise.

So, once you’ve done the basics forget about all the SEO stuff.

Just produce high quality, good value information, which is regularly updated and meets the needs of your market, and the SEO stuff will take care of itself.

10 SEO Steps For a New Website

Martin — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 01:37:09 +0000

Here’s a list of the top 10 SEO activities I do for a new site. I…:

Complete my META tags for each page of my site. I complete all available META tags and I complete them individually for each page.
Make sure that all my images have ‘alt’ tags defined
Make sure my navigation is simple, clear and easy to follow. I make sure there are no orphan pages or dead ends.
Make sure I correctly use my h1 and h2 tags on each page and that these are sync’d with my META tags for that page.
Minimise the use of scripts
Create a sitemap and submit it to Google. I create a new sitemap and re-submit it each time I add or remove a page.
Register my new site on my Google Webmaster Tools account to submit my sitemap and check it each week for any problems showing up on my site.
Create as many inbound links to my site as I can. I do this through writing and posting articles, putting the url in my signature link on forums. I’ve even created a small community using Google Friend Connect on my most recent site.
Set up a blog on my site and post regularly (I’ve only done this on one site – I should do it on others).
Set up satellite sites like Squidoo and HubPages, and satellite blogs on sites like blogger.com and wordpress.com with links pointing to my site.

If you need some more information on how to do any of these steps you can find it here.

SEO vs Social Marketing

Martin — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 13:40:01 +0000

Here’s another question I saw in a forum this week: what’s the difference between Search Engine Optimisation and Social Marketing, or are they the same thing. Here’s the reply I offered:

They are different things but Social Marketing will help your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) efforts, if you do it properly.

Firstly, SEO:

This stands for Search Engine Optimisation and it’s the process of making your site as easy as possible for the search engines to find, to find out what it’s about and to find their way around it. I’ve written some posts explaining in more detail how to do that – see them here

Once they’ve done that and indexed your site, it will then appear in the search results when people type in search terms that the search engines think your site can provide the answer for.

Secondly, Social Marketing:

Social Marketing is the process of raising awareness of your site through the many Web 2.0 (social networking) sites that exist. These include sites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Mashable and a gazillion others.

The idea is that raising awareness of your web site through the Web 2.0 sites will expose your site to people who might not otherwise have seen it. If they then visit your site and like what they see they may link to it.

If they do link to it, this will benefit the SEO effectiveness of your site because the search engines will see it as an inbound link. And inbound links to your site is one of the criteria that search engines like, because they see inbound links as an indication that the site has valuable information.

That is an extremely high level answer, but I hope it helps a bit!

More Ways To Get Traffic To Your Website

Martin — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 12:39:57 +0000

I wrote an article a couple of days ago on the 10 steps I follow when setting up a new website so that it will bring me consistent numbers of visitors. Today I went looking for what other people are doing to build up the number of visitors to their sites.

Here are 3 articles. This first one looks at how to get links from the Social Media Sites:

How To Get Social Media Sites To Link To You

These techniques are good ways to get rankings in the search engines. Obviously there are some things that make getting ranked in the search engines very valuable and if you can not only get your main website ranked, but get several of …

This next article looks at 5 different ways to promote your site. You’ll need to scroll down a bit after clicking through because the article starts beneath some definitions and an ad space that are at the top of the page:

Traffic to Blog – 5 Fun and Fast Ways to Drive Traffic to a New …

It is these tags that will help drive traffic to y our website. The best tags to use are the ones that are you targeting your site about — plus what you believe your search engine visitors will put in the search box in order to find …

And this final article looks at 5 free ways of promoting your site. Note that one of the ‘free’ ways she mentions is email marketing. While email marketing itself is free you still need to build up a subscriber list to email to, and that may not be free!

In fact, if you’ve managed to build up a good subscriber list you probably already know enough about driving traffic to your site to be able write an authoritative article yourself! Anyway, here’s the article:

5 Free Ways to Promote your Website

Here are 5 free ways to promote your website that will take you a little bit of time on a consistent basis. 1. Article marketing continues to be a very strong way to get traffic to a website. There is a skill to writing a quality …

What are your thoughts?

10 Easy Steps to Consistent Website Traffic

Martin — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 03:03:03 +0000

I read a post today from someone who’s experienced the frustration of focusing on the Search Engines for their website traffic.

The problem is – the search engines keep changing their algorithms in order to improve the relevance of their results and to block loopholes the black-hatters find. And this can really blow your search engine rankings.

I had the same experience 18 months ago when I was depending on PPC via Adwords for my traffic: the Adwords algorithms were changed every couple of months (or more often) which often completely screwed up my campaigns. Extremely frustrating.

So I stopped relying on Adwords and looked for other ways of getting traffic. And gradually my traffic is building up and remaining consistent – meaning that it’s resistant to changes in the search engine algorithms.

Although I’m by no means an SEO wizard, I now follow 10 basic rules for every site I put up. And they seem to work – for me, at any rate! Here they are:

Complete all your META tags – individually for each page
Create a sitemap and submit it to Google. Remember to create and submit a new one each time you add or remove a page
Use your H1 and H2’s properly and include your keywords or closely related words in each.
Avoid flash and scripts as far as possible
Use CSS with an external stylesheet
Run a PHP based RSS feed on an ‘articles’ or ‘news’ page – making sure the content it pulls in is totally relevant. (PHP based because the SE’s can read it – they can’t read java based ones)
For every image link also include a text link with good anchor text
Complete all ‘alt’ tags for all images.
Link to it from wherever possible (Squidoo, Hubpages, your blogs, profiles on the Social sites, etc)
That’s it.

For a new site I sometimes set up a small PPC campaign to get things going but once I’m getting the same amount of traffic from the natural search results as from the PPC I can the PPC campaign.

Cheers,

How To Use META Tags

Martin — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 04:16:00 +0000

I saw another question on how to use META tags today, specifically on the use of Title, Description, Keywords and Footer. Here’s a copy of my response:

The Title tag is what appears in the blue bar at the very top of your browser window.

Google currently appears to place a lot of emphasis on this in search results. This title is also what appears as the blue heading of each item in the natural search results – the equivalent of the headline in an Adwords ad. So it’s worth thinking carefully about what you put there.

Keep titles to 80 characters or less and make them unique to each page

The Description is what appears under the title in the search results, and describes what your page is about. Think of this as an Adwords ad – a way of enticing people to click through to your page.

Keep descriptions to 150 characters or less and make them unique to each page.

The META Keywords are the primary keywords for the page. Don’t use too many – I use no more than 10 – 12, often less. Keywords should be unique to each page.

Think of these keywords in the same way you think about keywords for an Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing ad.

The ‘footer’ is not a META tag, but you can use the footer area of your page to place the code for Google Analytics or any stats tracking software.

Place this code after the tag and before the tag, which you’ll find near the bottom of your page in the source code view.

Apart from the Title, Description and Keywords, there are plenty more META tags available. Because the search engines are continually changing their algorithms, I use most of them on all my pages, even though many will tell you they’re no longer relevant.

The reason I do that is because Google may appear to be placing emphasis on page titles now, but who knows what they’ll be doing in 6 months time.

Apart from that, it’s simply good practice to set your page up properly – it makes it more resilient to the changing whims of the search engines.

The best and easiest way to get on top of this quickly is to go to one of the many sites that will generate your META tags for you – free.

They will ask you simple questions that you respond to in a web form and then they create a full set of META tags from your answers. You simply copy the code they give you into the source code view of your page between the and tags, and you’re done.

The site I use for this is here.