When considering SEO, a link building strategy is one of the many options that should be considered.

When deciding on the ranking of a website, the amount of links coming into a site is a major factor that influences the decision that Google makes.
So, how does this work in practice? When Google uses its robots to check through the websites on the internet, it recognises links on the sites pointing to other web pages. As an example, say you put a link on your website to www.seo-creare.co.uk .

When Google checks the sites it would notice this link and would see this link as a “vote” for this site. Simply put, the more “votes” a site has, the more relevant it is seen as, and the higher the page ranking. This is a fairly simplistic view, as there are other factors to consider, but it still holds true.
So, are all these “votes” given the same weight by Google? The simple answer is no. Links from sites that have a high ranking are deemed to have more influence. A link from www.e-commercewebdesign.co.uk (a page rank of 4) to www.seo-creare.co.uk  would not be given as much weight as a link from www.bbc.co.uk (a page rank of 9) for example.

From this you can see that the link system does have to take vote strength into account. The number of links coming into a site can still be a good indicator of the relevance of a particular page, but its important to consider that one hundred low quality links to a site may not have the same influence as one or two very high quality ones.

So, when embarking upon a programme of search engine optimisation, take these factors into account if you wish to give your site the best start possible.

Google have released new search facilities that are a follow up to Google’s ‘Universal Search’, The universal search meant that videos, images, books, blogs and articles would be included in the organic listing for a users search query. It is important that Google evolves as their users intelligence increases, they can’t afford to lose market share and they would be surely gutted if they lost their monopoly.

The new features are designed to allow users to refine their search query, it is displayed in a ‘tool belt’ fashion down the left hand side of the search results. You can find this by clicking the ‘show options’ link underneath the search box (shown Below).

Once you have clicked the ‘show options’ link you get this array of options.

Lets break down each search refinement and look how the search results change according to the selection. We will use the example ‘web design’ to be consistent with query above, also we at Creare are quite familiar with the results for this search query, so it should give us a good indication to what the new options achieve for a user.

1.) Video Options

You can see that once you have selected the videos option you are then faced with 2 additional sections, ‘All durations’ and ‘Any Time’ these are designed to further refine your search and are pretty much self explanatory. As you can see the search results now only displays videos, on the first page the results include: youtube.com, Google.com, viddler.com and 5min.com.

2.) Forum Results

The forum results display communities and forums discussing web design, this is excellent for users. For example if you query ‘web design’ 75 % of the results on page 1 are companies selling web design services, Not everyone that searches for ‘web design’ actually wants to buy a website. This forum feature helps refine a users search.

3.) Reviews

I have used this feature already with a reasonable amount of success and will be used to find products, maybe not as relevant for services such as ‘web design’ but I am sure this will be one of the most used features. The search also allows you to refine your search via a time scale, this is great as you will want the most up to date review about a service or product.

4.) Images Only

I personally like this function, to allow you to see images pulled from a website. As you can see on the search results, it shows examples of the work for the web design companies.

5.) More Text

This again is pretty self explanatory and as well as taking your meta description tag, it also recalls various sections of your website to show to the user what your site is all about. Is this a chance to add that little marketing spiel that could make a user click your search result.

6.) Related Search

When you click the related searches link you get a variety of links appear at the top, these are the search queries that Google thinks are related to the initial search query. Could this be a clue for key word selection?

7.) Wonder Wheel

Similar to the related searches option, it allows a user to see their query and how it is related to other search queries and as you start to click the results the results change, displaying on the right hand side of what is now a 3 column display. The wheel relocates as you click through various search queries, this allows you to see where you have come from and return easily to previous queries.

8.) Timeline

The timeline feature allows users to see the search traffic from various sections of time, this can be refined into the past 24 hours, weeks, months and years. As you can see the demand for ‘web design’ has increased in recent years in comparison to the 90′s. This excellent tools gives a range of information that can be applied to the search industry, it shows the pattern of a phrase over a period time and then lets you refine your search down to a year, month or even week, meaning you can find press from a specific time period.

Conclusion

I was trying to imagine the implications this may have on the search engine optimisation industry, I think from a user point of view the new features are great and obviously Google doesn’t particularly like SEO. I predict a reduction in traffic for general phrases, but potentially a better conversion rate as the visitors will be interested in the product or service you office.

References:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/more-search-options-and-other-updates.html

1.) Preparing your website.

The first thing that you should do is ensure Google is aware that your site exists, you can do this by submitting your URL http://www.google.com/addurl.html, Then you need to help Google find all your content, Submitting your sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools is quick and easy and helps towards all of your pages being indexed. You can generate a sitemap by using http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

2.)Design and Content

You should ensure you site can be found from internal linking, Google states that every page must be reachable from a static text link, This can be done via a sitemap in the footer of your template. Offer a sitemap page which links to every page within your site, Google will also look for something named sitemap.html or similar.

Create quality content that reflects what you are trying to optimise for, you cannot perform well in any search engine if you key phrases are not mentioned within the site. Use HTML formats to emphasis your key words.

Check for broken links and make the usability as easy as possible. Domain URL’s should be as search engine friendly as possible and DB queries do not perform as well as static html extensions. i.e. services.html.

Keep links to a minimum, Google states that less than a 100 is reasonable.

3.) Technical Guidelines

Make sure your site is as readable for the search engine spider as possible, you can use Lynx to see what your site looks like to a search engine. This is worth doing if you have frames, cookies, fancy functionality such as flash and javascript.

Make use of the robots.txt to tell Google’s spider which pages, directories and content it should or should not index. You can find more information about this here: http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html.

Test your site in multiple browsers so that your site is accessible to wide range of users.

4.) Quality Control

Do’s:

Make pages for users and not search engines, write copy naturally, not for search engine optimisation and do not cloak any information. Avoid link building schemes to increase your PR, build links honestly through link baiting and social networks.

Don’ts:

Avoid hiding text or links, do not cloak or use re-directs. Don’t use software to query Google and don’t create pages that are irrelevant to your main content. Avoid duplicate content, meaning don not create multiple sites or sub domains with the same content on.

Just as in the written language, there is a right way and a wrong way to write the code that makes a website. Correctly written and valid HTML allows search engines to read the code of a site faster and easier, but with regards to SEO, it can have an even larger impact. Badly coded sites with mistakes in, can be penalized by the programs that check the sites content. Coding mistakes can also lead to your site looking different to different users on different computers. It might look fantastic on your Imac, but it may not work at all on a PC!

So, how do you check that your site is compliant with the standards? We use a tool provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3), an international group that works to ensure the long term standards of sites on the web.

http://validator.w3.org/

This page offers some simple to use instructions on how to use the tool. By typing in the website address, the tool will automatically check the site to see if its coding is up to standard.  If there are problems, the tool helpfully shows you where the problem is in the code, and also gives some brief information on how to fix it. After you have altered the code, simply re run the checker to see if the site is now up to standard.
Once the site has been checked and approved, you can add the following icon to the bottom of the web page:-

to let people that visit your site, know that you have taken the time and the trouble to provide a site that fits all the requirements for now, and tomorrow, on the World Wide Web.

If you are involved in search engine optimisation, the chances are that you are aware of an application called google analytics, if you have no idea what it is however, read on.

Google Analytics is a free service that is offered by Google that gives detailed and comprehensive statistics on the visitors to a given website. It is able to track visitors from all the different types of referrers such as search engines and links from other sites. Users are able to track where in the world the people who visit the site are from, what phrase they used to find the site etc. Google Analytics is also able to give users a fast insight into pages of the site that are not performing, allowing them to rectify the situation at an earlier stage rather than letting the issue become worse.

Google analytics is inserted into a website by using javascript code that is supplied by Google. This relatively simple process involves the placing of the information just before the last body tag on each page that you wish information to be gathered from. By using a separate line of code, it is also possible to see how many times a PDF file has been downloaded from a site. This can be useful for checking on the relevancy of information that is being provided to the public from a site.

While Google Analytics can be said to be highly accurate most of the time, there are some issues that highlight gaps in its abilities. Some programs, such as Firefox’s NoScript addon can block the tracking code. This can lead to inaccurate results, where more people may have visited a site than is being displayed. Users deleting or blocking cookies on their systems can also have a deleterious effect.