Fitzroy Social Club – http://www.fitzroysocialclub.co.uk

Where do you put your keywords on your website?

Search Engines read text therefore keywords are very important when optimising your website and you need to make sure that you page is relevant and relates to your chosen terms. Click on the following link for advice on choosing the right keywords.

Where to put your keywords on your website?

Once you have your basis keyword research completed, you then need to work out where to put your keywords on the website.

Within your META information – this includes your meta title, descriptions and keywords. See for example the meta information on my sam-seo.co.uk website:

Sam’s SEO Tips & Advice | SEO | Search Engine Optimisation | Internet Marketing

My main keyword is SEO and I have used this throughout my meta information, you add the keywords into the keyword section and separate them with a comma.

You should use your keywords in the H1 tag on your page or use it in the headline on your website. By adding it to the headline on your page people can easily know that they have come to a website that is relevant to what they are searching for.

Ensure your keywords are mentioned in your website content. By optimising your content you should do so in a way that is good for the search engines but also remember your human visitors – it needs to sound natural otherwise people will stop reading.

The content on your page should be a minimum of 250 words, you should mention your keyword within the content around 4 times, and use the keyword as anchor text to link to a relevant inner page.

Be careful not to stuff your keywords on the page too many times as this will be seen by the search engines as spamming and your site could get penalised!

A branded domain is one which is based on the company name, this is what people recognise and would increase your brand awareness. There are many advantages of using your brand name for your business domain name; it is often easy to remember, it maintains your brand consistency, it is more professional and tends to attract more loyal visitors.

From a search engine optimisation point of view I would say always choose a domain name that includes your keywords as this will give you a boost in the rankings as it makes your site more relevant.

For example, if I wanted to go for brand / individual awareness with my site I could have chosen the following domain name: www.samantha-woolstencroft.co.uk. However I have chosen to go for www.sams-seo.co.uk this includes a little bit of self-promotion as well as the keyword for SEO.

There are many SEO people out there who recommend brand based URLs, however I recommend keyword specific domain names because search engines place emphasis on having keywords in the domain.

I have included a list below of useful SEO Plugins which I use every day. Feel free to contact me or comment below if you use any plugins which I have missed but you find useful!

SeoQuake
This plugin lets you view a variety of information regarding websites such as Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Yahoo Site Explorer links and cached pages, SeoQuake is a useful tool to employ when carrying out a competitor analysis.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3036

SEO for Firefox
SEO for Firefox shows useful information to Google and Yahoo’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). This involves domain age, .edu links, DMOZ, bloglines and Whois info.

http://www.seobook.com/free-account/

Fire Shot
This plugin is very useful and much more practical that using Print Screen and Paint on your key board to take a screenshot. Fireshot allows you to create screenshots of web pages and also allows you to add notes, crop and annotate the image.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/5648/platform:5/addon-5648-latest.xpi

Web Developer
This allows you to carry out developer tasks such as disabling Javascript, disabling cookies, disabling CSS to check for hidden content, and using W3C to validate HTML.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/60/addon-60-latest.xpi

GA?
Tells you really quickly and easily if a website has Google Analytics installed

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/5631/addon-5631-latest.xpi

Firebug
Firebug allows you to debug websites and make changes to HTML, CSS and JavaScript in real time.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/1843/addon-1843-latest.xpi

SearchStatus
Allows easy checking of keyword density. Google PR, nofollow links, internal and backlinks and more.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/321/addon-321-latest.xpi

Site Information Tool
Gives information including whois, Google PR, Alexa rank, link details, IP address, response headers and more.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5607

IE Tab Options
By the click of a button you can easily see how a site looks in IE then click again to go back to Firefox view.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/1419/platform:5/addon-1419-latest.xpi

Let me know how you get on with the above and definitely get in touch if you know of any more good SEO Plugins.

Mozilla Firefox 4 Beta Update

This I am very pleased about because I use Mozilla Firefox every day, in my opinion Firefox is a stable web browsing experience and I enjoy using it much more than Internet Explorer.

The Mozilla Firefox 4 beta update means people using Windows 7 machines and who have touch screen monitors can now use this feature when using Firefox as their browser. Basically Firefox is now letting you interact with websites by touching them. In addition to this, the new version of Firefox also enhances the performance of animations – making them quicker.

The powers that be, inform us that Firefox 4 will not be officially released until October or November, but you can still try it out and let me know what you think.

What is Internet Marketing?

If you have a website which sells products and services then you should definitely be thinking about your internet marketing strategy.

When you compare internet marketing to the amount of people you can reach online it is fairly inexpensive, the reason being you can reach your target audience and your potential customers can then research and purchase your offering in their own time and at their own convenience.

With internet marketing you can easily track and measure statistics. A variety of methods can be employed including pay per impression, pay per click or Google Analytics. This allows website owners to measure and track results almost immediately meaning the most successful adverts or offerings can be employed rather than the less appealing adverts.

Why is effective keyword research important for SEO

If you choose the wrong keywords for your website SEO campaign, then the search engines will struggle to rank you and your customers will be unable to find you. You’ll be wasting money trying to rank for ineffective keywords.

Therefore the first step of a successful SEO campaign is effective keyword research. I have put together some information below on how to choose the right keywords for your website.

Steps for effective keyword research:

1. Put yourself in your customers shoes – what would they search for to find your website? Rather than industry jargon, move away from the industry speak and come up with viable keywords related to your product / service.
2. Choose keywords that are relevant to your site. If you are a clothes company, there is no point trying to rank for the term ‘Google’ because you may see lots of traffic but your visitors would not stay on your site as it is not relevant. Potential visitors would be searching for Google not for a clothes company.
3. Create a list of potential keywords and ask your staff, colleagues, friends and family to see what they would search for to find your site.
4. Carry out competitor analysis to see which keywords they are targeting
5. Use a keyword research tool to see how popular your chosen keywords are. There are many tools out there which aim to help you choose the right keywords. However in my opinion Google Adwords Keyword tool is the most effective; you can use the keyword tool here:

   https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

6. Understand how competitive a term is, you need to determine how many other sites are also ranking for that keyword and how strong the sites are, for example check the number of Pages Google has indexed and check the number of links. If it is too competitive choose a different keyword.
7. Ensure you have content on the site that reflects the keywords you are wanting to target, if you don’t have the content you will need to create new pages which support your keywords.
8. Add your keywords into the most effective places on your site such as title, meta information, headings, alt text and anchor text.

OK so that is your keyword research completed. However that is not the end! Your industry, your competitors, your customers and your website will change over time, people will search for different things and your focus may change. Therefore it is important to monitor and amend your keywords in line with the changes in the industry.

Choosing the right keywords ultimately gives you a competitive advantage so make sure you get it right!

You can find more advice on how to improve your rankings by clicking on the following link: Improve Ranking

DIY SEO - How do you do SEO?

Search engine optimisation is not the dark arts, or rocket science, all it takes to ensure your website is optimised correctly is a bit of hard work, perseverance and patience.

SEO is not a secret – if you carry out some research online you will be able to find all the information you need on how to do SEO – some of it may be accurate and reliable and some may not, so be careful which SEO tips you implement.

The one draw back to doing SEO yourself is that the search engines change their search algorithms all the time. You need to stay informed with search engine optimisation updates in order to increase your chances of your website ranking well in the SERP.

I will cover each of the DIY SEO tips briefly below and over the coming days I will post more in-depth and detailed advice of how to do SEO yourself to get better rankings and ultimately more traffic and leads!

1. DIY SEO – Carry out keyword research to determine what people are searching for
2. DIY SEO – Choose a keyword rich domain name
3. DIY SEO – Put your keywords in page titles
4. DIY SEO – Put your keywords in your website navigation
5. DIY SEO – Content is king – repeat your keywords in your content to make the page relevant
6. DIY SEO – Use your keywords in your META information
7. DIY SEO – Use your keywords in your anchor text – don’t use ‘click here’
8. DIY SEO – Implement both an HTML sitemap and an XML sitemap
9. DIY SEO – Generate some high quality inbound links from external websites
10. DIY SEO – Install Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools to monitor statistics

As I mentioned above SEO takes time so you need to be patient – do not expect to see results over night because this is just not realistic!

What is the definition of SEO?

SEO is an acronym for “Search Engine optimisation.” SEO means wanting to achieve better visibility in the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing in order for business or people with websites wanting to build their success online. There are many different definitions of SEO so I have decided to pull together a few of the SEO definitions and list them here for you to choose which one best suits your needs:

• Search Engine Optimisation – are strategies and tactics undertaken to influence the rankings of web pages in the search engines.
• Search Engine Optimisation involves the 3 steps of SEO including technical optimisation, content optimisation and link building.
• Wikipedia states: Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a web site or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.
• SEO – Search Engine Optimization – The art and science of improving a web site’s rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)

PageRank - Google's Search Algorithm

So when applying this to Google’s Algorithm – Google uses a tool called PageRank which is a link analysis algorithm. The PageRank Google Algorithm gives a numerical weighting to each page on the internet in order to measure the importance within the group of pages.

Basically, PageRank is determined by how popular your website is, so the more incoming links you have to your site from external sites the more votes you have. If you have lots of pages linking to you and these pages have high PageRank, then this PageRank will pass through to your site.

PageRank ranges from between 0 to 10, there are only a very few websites that actually have a PageRank of 10 – the best example of this is the World Wide Web Consortium website: www.w3.org.

Ultimately Google’s search algorithm uses PageRank to determine where to list your site in the search engine results pages (SERPs), however there are many other factors which affect PageRank and Google unfortunately doesn’t give any specific information on these.