A key aspect of proper SEO is keyword placement. It is important to remember it isn’t just about the quantity of keywords. In fact, you can get penalised if you over-do the keywords. It can also look unnatural for the reader, and you must make your reader feel as though they are in the right place at all times to ensure your site actually does what you want it to do: get sales, enquiries etc.

Many people believe that if they fill their web pages with keywords then they will ‘get to the top of Google’ – this simply isn’t true. You should ensure your keywords are placed in the correct HTML tags.

Use these guidelines to optimise your page:

• Place your keywords in the Title tag, Meta Description tag, Meta Keyword tag, and if applicable in the Alt tags.
• Place your keywords inside one h1 tag,  h2 tag and h3 tag.
• Ensure your keywords are in the first paragraph of the page – ideally this should be in the first 25 words.
• Place your keywords at the end of the page – ideally in the last 25 words.
• Make sure your keywords are in strong (bold) tags at least once on the page.
• Italicise your keywords at least once on the page.
• Put your keywords in lists.

By following these simple guidelines your site should not only read better than a page stuffed with keywords (and therefore be better at converting a browser into a customer) you are far more likely to get high rankings.

I often come across sites where it is obvious they are trying to optimise for certain keywords but end up reading really badly, which isn’t the way to get sales. So, if you don’t think your own writing skills are up to scratch then employ an experienced content writer. But, assuming you feel you are up to the job, then read on and learn some of the tools to ensure your site has the very best content you can get.

Content is, in my opinion, the most important part of Search Engine Optimisation. It is what your web visitors are looking for when they search for your site and it is what the search engines evaluate in order to rank your web site.  It is extremely important that you have excellent, compelling content on your web site. The quality of your content is directionally proportional to the likelihood of your site listing well, and more importantly, whether your potential customers are going to buy from you or employ your services.

•    Write for people NOT search engines

Search engines are machines, but they do know the difference between well written, naturally flowing text and awkward over-optimised drivel. More importantly, so do people, and people can choose to spend their money wherever they like, and if they don’t like the sound of your site they will certainly click elsewhere, and consequently end up buying from your competitors.

All the traffic in the world isn’t going to mean a thing if you’re site doesn’t make the conversion from traffic to sales, so if you have high traffic but low sales then the very best thing you can do is take a look at you’re text. Does it read well, do you make it clear what you want the consumer to do?

Make sure your content is structured with the reader in mind. Think of your site as a salesperson – albeit one that works incredibly hard – 24/7! But would you want your salesperson talking drivel to sell your products? Probably not, especially if it was all day every day. You need to answer any questions the potential customer may have regarding your product. List the benefits of your product, don’t get too slogany, give them facts and be reasonable. Ask yourself what concerns you may have if you were a consumer, and answer those questions. What is great about your product? How will it make a difference to people’s lives? By answering these types of questions you will be able to alleviate some of the concerns a potential customer may have regarding your product or service, this is guaranteed to increase your sales.

•    Keep the content current

Search engines like fresh content, so do returning visitors. Nobody likes visiting a ‘news’ page to find the last bit of ‘news’ was written in 2007. Current content is the key to maintaining listings and achieving high search engine rankings. There are many ways to achieve this, use RSS, write new content regularly, set up a forum on your site, and give your users a chance to interact with your site. It’ll pay off in the long run.

•    Avoid Duplicate content

Duplicate content is penalised by the search engines. More importantly, they don’t have the capabilities of determining who wrote the content first. To check if your site has duplicate content you can use this nifty tool copyscape to discover if your site has been copied. Copyscape give you advice on how to deal with duplicate content if you have become a victim of this.

Content written for the purposes of search engine optimisation, or SEO, is written to achieve organic rankings. Web sites with keyword-rich, naturally flowing, original content are judged by the search engines to be better web sites. By taking your content seriously (and I have had many a client who seem to think it just appears out of nowhere) you are taking your customers seriously. This could be the difference between getting sales and not getting sales, simple as that.

A final note: Check your spellings.

Online spell checker : http://www.netmechanic.com/cobrands/FutureQuest/spell_check.htm

Traditionally site links appeared underneath the search results which linked to specific pages within the site. The idea of site links was to lead the user directly to the page that they may have been interested in. These were designed for large complex websites, allowing an overview of the content inside the website.

Until very recently sitelinks were only visible on the first listings in the search page, meaning one set of links per query. This can be seen with our sister company;

Google has now introduced in-line sitelinks, meaning more than one result can have sitelinks, the sitelinks are limited up to 4 links.

The one site links have the same benefits as the original two column site links (but obviously on a smaller scale). Google uses an algorithm to determine the which links are show from the sites content / pages. It has been designed to increase the visablilty and traffic for webmasters while also improving the experience of the users. If you are a webmaster then you can restrict the a page appearing in Google’s sitelinks for up to 90 days via Google’s webmaster tools.

Most of us use some kind of blogging software on our websites, these create a lovely RSS feed which users can subscribe too. I have had problems in aggregating  my feeds from my blog onto my homepage or other pages and found that some feeders don’t work on various versions of PHP.

The use of an RSS aggregator will essencially pull your news / blog feed onto your PHP page and display the headings, dates, content, author, what ever you like really. Aggregators also have a very positive effect in terms of SEO. They will show the major search engines that your are adding fresh dynamic content to your site, providing the user with a better and more unique experience. It also means that search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN can index any new content more quickly.

My top 3 PHP RSS aggregators

1.) Simple Pie – www.simplepie.org
“SimplePie is a very fast and easy-to-use class, written in PHP, that puts the ‘simple’ back into ‘really simple syndication’.” – Quote from simplepie.org

Simple pie is an excellent aggregator that includes just a single .inc file, this means it is pretty straight forward. It aggregates all variables within your RSS feed and is relativly easy to manipulate the way it looks on your page. I would say that using the online documentation is a must if you are a novice, as the zipped versions readme file isn’t great.

2.) Magpie RSS – http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/
“MagpieRSS is compatible with RSS 0.9 through RSS 1.0. Also parses RSS 1.0′s modules, RSS 2.0, and Atom. (with a few exceptions)” – Quote from magpierss.sourceforge.net/

This is the first aggregator that i came across after installing the blog, it requires a few more files, i tend to stick them in a folder called ‘rss’ of whatever really. The feed works well, there is a delay with the updating the news, but only by an hour or so. Supports pretty good online.

3.) RSS Aggregator – www.rss-aggregator.com
“RSS-aggregator is a tool, for Webmaster, allowing to display several feeds RSS on a single page.” – Quote from rss-aggregator.com

The RSS aggregator uses magpie software, buy does so in a much more friendly way. If you are having trouble with simplepie or magipie then use RSS aggregator. It also makes aggregating multiple feeds easier.

If you have a blog attached to the back of a website i would recommend to source the feed on the homepage both for your users and search engines.

What are meta tags? You may have heard people mention them before, but you don’t really know what they are or what they do. This article will attempt to help you to understand the importance of meta tags, and their uses in search engine optimisation.

Lets start with a definition of what a basic meta tag is. A meta tag is a line of code on a website that shows certain information to the people who are looking at the page, and also to search engines that are trying to put the page in the correct place.

When looking at Search Engine Optimisation, the most important meta tag is :-

<meta name=”description” content=”A blurb to describe the content of the page appears here” />

An example of this that you might find on a website would be

<meta name=”description” content=” A Blogs plumbing offer a range of plumbing solutions in London and surrounding areas”/>

This information here would be visible when you search for a site in the SERP (search engine result positions).

If you typed “Air conditioning” into a search engine. Here’s an example of what you would see

The middle part here is the meta description. This short description shows what the company does, and what products they offer. Information like this makes it easy for search engine users to decide if they have found the site that they are looking for, as well as indicating to the search engine what the contents of the site are.

Other meta tags are also often incorporated into websites, giving the search engine different information. Examples of this can be :-

<meta name=”distribution” content=”Global” />
Shows the search engine that the site is to be available to anyone in the world to view.

<meta name=”rating” content=”Safe For Kids” />
The content in this site does not contain adult information.

<meta name=”author” content=”Creare Communications ” />
The author of the page is the company mentioned.

If you want any more information regarding meta tags, simply drop us a comment.