Tasha Harrison

2011 saw one of the most important changes in the way Google ranks websites. Google’s Panda Update was designed to increase the quality of search results and start to punish ‘link-farms’ (sites with hundreds of links which are designed for purely SEO purposes). This basically means that Google stopped putting so much emphasis on the quality of links and put more emphasis on the quality of the website as a whole. The idea is to stop people from simply creating hundreds of meaningless links and reward sites with great content which is worth linking to.

The two most important criteria for judging the quality of your site are:

1. The quality of your website – how often content is changed and updated, loading speed, repeated pages.
2. Social bookmarking – ie how many people have linked to and shared link to your website on social media sites.

Of course this is a great victory for blogs and news sites, since they have constantly updating content which lends itself naturally to being successful on social media. However, it does make it increasingly difficult for ecommerce sites and smaller businesses who maybe don’t have the time to create new and exciting content all of the time.

Sadly, there is no easy way around this. Gone are the days when an SEO person would simply spend time building links through directories and meaningless article sites. Now SEO needs to be fully integrated into your overall marketing strategy.

Top Tips for SEO in 2012

1. Ensure your website is properly optimised for search engines from the start
   A good website designer should structure your site properly – it is much more difficult to go in after your website is built to make the necessary structural changes.
2. Create a section of the site which you update on a regular basis
   This could be a latest news section or a blog, but this is becoming increasingly important. A regularly updated blog will give you a huge advantage over your competitors and enable your site to rank for a greater number of search terms.
3. Create a Facebook Fanpage and get a Twitter account
   These two social networks are still extremely important in terms of sharing your content and making connections with people. The success of these should not just be measured in terms of sales, but in terms of how many links and connections you have. Remember that links from social media will help your ranking on Google.
4. Use your offline marketing channels to drive traffic to your social media as well as your website
   Gathering as many fans and followers online is the same principle as building a list of email addresses. It enables you to communicate with your customers and potential customers, reminding them you are there for when they are ready to buy.

It’s all very well building the links, but how does this fit in with your keywords and phrases?

Google uses links to find out how relevant your site is. Each link is like a thumbs up, which it then takes into account when ranking your site for each search. It judges each link based upon how relevant and important the linking site is.

The links also show Google what your site is about. It does this through the linking text:

The link text, ‘social media for theatre’, describes what the page that it links to is about. In this case it links to the play’s website, http://suchtweetsorrow.com.

For your own website, you want the link text to be either your chosen keywords or words that describe what your site is about. You can’t always control the link text and most often people link with simply the name of your company or site. However, if you have information on your site that people think is worth mentioning they are more likely to use descriptive text.

See ‘The Basics of SEO – Link Building‘ for more on link building.

Just like with Titles, search engines use your URL to identify what your site is about. It is, therefore, extremely important that your keywords are included in the URL.

Using the example keyphrase ‘memory stick’, below is an example of how a site is listed on the first page on Google. Note the repetition of keywords and how Google highlights them in the URL.

This is how the page is optimised:

Note how the keyphrase ‘Memory Stick’ is repeated not only in Title and URL, but also in the main page title, called the H1 tag.

The saying goes that links are the currency of the internet. As social media has expanded, your followers and fans have become the most important currency, but as far as SEO (search engine optimisation) goes links are still very important.

Making your links relevant

Link building is by far the hardest part of SEO, creating relevant links that the search engines will deem valuable. There are a few rules that are worth noting:

1. Build links on sites that have relevant content ie the site’s content is connected to yours.
   For example, your site sells swimming pool accessories, so an ideal link would be a site selling swimming pools.
2. Include your keywords and phrases in the linking words.
   For example, your keyword is ‘swimming pool filter’, so in an ideal world your link would be – swimming pool filter

Building Links

Getting sites to link to you is a time consuming process, so don’t expect to suddenly have hundreds of links. There are no hard and fast rules for how to do this, but here are a few tips:

1. Directory submissions – there are hundreds of free directories that you can submit your site to. These aren’t as valuable as a link from a blog or news site, but it is the easiest way to start out.
2. Contact other site owners – if you find a site that is relevant, drop the site’s webmaster an email asking if they will link to your site.
3. Product reviews – contact bloggers that you think might be interested in your products and ask if they’d be interested in writing a review. Remember to always treat bloggers with respect, many of the popular one’s are inundated with these kind of requests.
4. Create content worth linking to – the most effective and most difficult way to build links. If your content is interesting and/or useful then people will link to it.

Good Luck

Having done link building campaigns for a variety of different businesses there really is no easy way to go about it. It takes imagination and determination! Remember to always think, ‘Why would someone link to my site?’

Meta data is information that sits in the code of your site. You don’t actually see it on your page, but it is how search engines display your pages in their results and how they judge what your site is about.

There are two important parts of meta data:

1. Page Title
2. Meta Description

There are also meta keywords, but these are no longer regarded by Google since it became too easy to cheat. See Google’s reasons for why on the Google Webmaster blog.

Below is an example of how the information is displayed on Google.

Note how the meta description ends with ‘…’. This is because the meta description is too long, it is 37 words or 228 characters, but should actually be nearer 150 characters.

The description is an opportunity for you to sell your site and increase your click through rate from Google. If it is appealing to your audience then they will be more likely to click through to your site than to your competitors.

The page title also appears on the browser.

The page title is a good indicator for Google to tell what your site is about, so make sure you include your main keywords in it. The ideal length is between 60 – 65 characters.

And remember that it is used by real humans as well as the bots, so make it people friendly.