Seo Services Spain Blog

I thought I would take a moment to discuss “What makes a good website?”.

I get quite a few enquiries from clients looking for a new website, either they do not have one or their previous “designer” screwed up in some way and are now looking for a revamp or a new site all together.

One thing that is common though, is that clients have this vision of an all singing and all dancing website design with flash, rockets, animated graphics and all sorts of other “distractive” features!

People, get real! Your visitors do not want this, YOU DO! Are you trying to sell or entertain? Let me give you an example of a simple but effective website design. The google homepage. Do you think they will put lots of flashy images, movies and banners ads all over their homepage? Of course not.

Continue reading “What Makes A Good Website?”

Ok, well this is a question that I am asked from time to time and read a lot on the web. “How can I compete with the big boys online with a small budget?”

In terms of business size, bigger isn’t always better. There are some definite advantages to staying small in the business world that in my mind far outway some of the advantages of going BIG. Some of the advantages of remaining small include:

Continue reading “How YOU can stay small and COMPETE with the big boys”

I was recently reading a great post on the SEO Book blog titled “8 reasons why now may be the right time to invest in your website” and thought it would be a good time for me to follow up on this with a post of my own.

Well, unless you have been living on the moon for the past few months, you will have realised that the world is pretty much experiencing a global economic recession. The purse strings have tightened and most individuals and businesses are starting to feel the pinch with lots of major companies reporting much lower profits.

So where does that leave you as a small to medium size company with an online presence? How does it affect you? and should you reduce your marketing spend?

Continue reading “The Right Time To Invest In Your Website?”

It was announced yesterday on the Google blog that the search engine giant is now able to crawl and index scanned documents that are saved in the Adobe PDF(portable document format) format.

Wow, the mind boggles at the power that Google has in its quest to make the worlds information available to all.

So if you have any sensitive scanned docs in pdf format somewhere on your site that you would rather Google didn’t show the world, beware, as they are just a crawl away from being available to all.

OK, on to part 3 of my 6 on site SEO tips.

Internal Contextual Linking

Internal linking is not thought about by a lot of webmasters and SEO’s. If you want to see how linking internally should be done, take a look at wikipedia.org.

This is a top example of contextual internal linking. This kind of linking has the most value in terms of SEO benefits. Unlike site wide navigation or footer links these are treated differently by search engines as they are wrapped by relevant contextual text rather than just sitting as a single link next to a whole bunch of other links on a page.

Linking this way looks most natural to a search engine and is why they just love blogs, as these kind of links look more like a natural citation to another site. The search engines can also get a better idea of the links topic, by looking at the text surrounding the link.

This obviously will only work if you have content on your site. The more content you have, the more opportunities you will have to link internally more effectively. Having more content also gives you more options when targeting the long tail, but thats for another post.

So there you go. Start thinking more about interlinking as many of your pages as possible. This will give you better rankings and also make it clear to the search engines exactly which pages are targeting which search terms.

Good morning to all you budding SEO’s, prospective clients and general browsers alike. Where I am, the sun is shining and its a beautiful day!! So I am feeling good and wanted to share some more SEO tips with you.

Anyway, on to part 2 of my “6 On Site SEO Tips To Rank Better On Google”.

In my previous posting I mentioned the importance of using your title tags effectively in order to rank better and to get more user click throughs.

Today I wanted to touch on URL’s and how important they are for many reasons.

A url can take the form of www.seoservicesspain.com or something like http://www.seoservicesspain.com/wp/6-on-site-seo-tips-to-rank-better-on-google/. They can also sadly take the form of www.mysite.com/directory/index.php?type=45&value=5674&proparea=iraq&propid=2345. You get the picture.

Now, all of these are valid urls. They will ALL be crawled by google and other search engines despite the crap you may here from people in forums saying search engines do not like long url strings. Bull!! A few years ago maybe, today, not a problem. Trust me, I check pages that are indexed on Google and other search engnines every day and some of the urls are incredibly long with many many parameters which kind of lays this theory to rest.

Anyways, with some sites that have CMS(content management systems) or pull page content from a database, you can quite often see these long complex urls with multiple parameters. Like I say, these are crawlable by search engines but are not practical for users.

A url should be descriptive. As an example take the following url

www.myrealestatesite.com/directory/index.php?type=45&value=5674&proparea=iraq&propid=2345

1. This is hard for a user to remember

2. Its not very descriptive and doesn’t tell us much about the linked to page

3. Is just to damn long winded

The ideal url would be

www.myrealestatesite.com/property/villas/iraq/2345/

Now doesn’t that look better?

1. Easier to remember

2. Easier to type in

3. Is more descriptive(users get an idea of what this url is about)

4. Easier to link to

5. Less open to someone linking to the wrong url by getting a & or ? out of place.

If you have a CMS system which uses a lot of dynamic urls you may want to learn about mod_rewrite for apache. By editing your .htaccess file on your web server you can rewrite these horrid urls into nice clean urls. Take a look at this mod_rewrite tutorial.

URL’s are also valued by search engines so it makes sense to place your keywords in the urls. Just search on google for something and notice how those words are highlighted in the SERP’s(search engine results pages). You will notice that the keywords that are found in the urls are also highlighted which is showing that the search engines generally value this more.

So if you have a gardening website and the sub page is targeting landscaping services in kent an ideal url would be

www.mygardeningsite.com/landscaping-services-kent.html

Clean, descriptive and keyword rich.

Another thing to remember is to keep your most important pages closer to the top of your sites structure or close to the root directory/domain as possible. So try not to have an important page at

www.mygardeningsite.com/services/kent/foo/landscaping-service-kent.html

Search engines don’t crawl new sites deeply to start with. This only comes with time, trust and links.  So make sure that your most important pages sit at the top of the hierarchy and not at the bottom.

Thats it for today’s rant. Join me soon for Part 3.

Back to work for me!!

Being an SEO, I am constantly optimising websites for clients in order to get them ranked better. Quite often, I see that the basic foundations of SEO have been neglected in favour of something else. It seems that so many webmasters and SEO’s have become almost obsessed with building links to their sites as this is what Google uses to rank sites, but many have forgotten that this is not the only element to good SEO.

As I have to optimise many sites on a regular basis, its easy for me to get into a process which enables me to instantly optimise a site and achieve 100% better rankings without building a single backlink.

If you have a site that isn’t ultra competitive, you can achieve better rankings in just a few days by applying my 6 SEO tips to rank better. SEO isn’t a secret art form. It’s a proven process that if done correctly, can help you to obtain greater rankings for your site and help you to captcher your niche. Its like business. If you do what successful business men do, you to can see the same results.

So today I start my 6 part blog postings. Today we will start with page titles.

Part 1 - Use Your Page Titles To Maximum Effect

A web page title is one of the most important elements of a web page. It is valued highly by search engines as it outlines the subject and topic of a page instantly. It can be thought of like a books title. If you had a book title of “Think and Grow Rich” (one of my fav’s) you have a good idea of what is contained within that book.

The same applies to a pages title, so make sure that you use a good descriptive title for your page not only for the search engines but also for the users.

So for example if you live in kent and provide gardening an landscaping services your main homepage title may be something like “Gardening and Landscaping Services In Kent by Joe Bloggs Gardening”

So when an end users searches in Google for your services and you are in there among other sites listed in the search results, your title gives the user a good idea of exactly what your site provides.

The title needs to be catchy, informative and descriptive but also needs to contain a good mix of your targeted keywords.

Having a good page title, can help with click throughs by enticing your users to click and can also help you rank well within the search engines.

Another thing I want to mention about titles is to avoid keyword canabalisation. Keyword canabalisation means placing the same words within different pages titles. So having one title of “Gardening and Landscaping Services In Kent by Joe Bloggs Gardening” and another page with a title of “Gardening and Landscaping Services” can cause confusion with users and search engines. It can mean that a sub page outranks or is listed above the page that you actually want to rank 1st. So be careful of how you word your titles.

That’s if for part 1. Join me soon and check out part 2. Why not subscribe to my RSS feed so that you do not miss a trick?

Due to some great sucess with some of my existing real estate companies, I thought I would take a moment to mention my real estate seo Spain services.

If you have a real estate business here in Spain and are not currently using the search engine traffic in order to leverage more leads and conversions, you could be missing out on leads that your competitors are only too pleased to deal with.

There are thousands of real estate related searches performed on the major search engines every day and if you are not taking advantage of this by having regular search engine optimisation performed, you are potentially losing out on business that could mean the difference between success and failure for your real estate company.

So if you are finding things a little slow and are more reliable on more conventional forms of marketing, take a step back and think about how with some good solid real estate seo, you too like many of your competitors can start to build an online presence that can produce so much more business than you are currently enjoying.

Well, I’ve been into some of the SEO forums online, not that I do this often as I don’t have time(most real SEO’s don’t as they are too busy working) and its hard to believe some of the advice and information that is being thrown about willy nilly.

A bit of free advice. Do NOT believe all that you read in forums, as most is non confirmed and is pure assumption mostly by hobbiest SEO’s. Advice is the cheapest commodity on earth which comes from mostly unknowledgable people.

It actually p***** me off when I read some of the link building tips(most of which are spammy and cheap) that wanna be SEO’s are giving out. Find blogs that have followed comments, use this worthless list of crappy directories and why not use this list of 100 social media bookmarking sites(most of which are nofollowed anyway).

Continue reading “Better Quality Link Building For Long Term Results”

I have been doing SEO for quite some time now and recently have decided to offer a more “low cost” approach for small to medium sized business who are on a tight budget. I am forever hearing from potential customers that “things are tight at the moment”.

Things maybe tight but SEO is still time consuming and takes a lot of time and effort in order to rank websites on the top search engines and to drive good quality traffic to a site.

This being said, these customers can still be accommodated in terms of quality SEO where there is good ROI(return on investment). By chasing the long tail,building some great content and concentrating on the sites web copy for conversion purposes as opposed to shedding out loads of money on paid directories/links and targeting the short tail competitive terms, both SEO and client can still compete with the big boys even if on a smaller budget.

So from now on I will be focusing on these and other overlooked aspects of SEO and site design in order to offer more affordable seo services.

A sites true value in terms of SEO is its ability to draw in quality traffic as opposed to raw traffic. In many respects, its much more beneficial for a small business to get 50 great visitors a day that are highly convertible as they have found the site either by searching using highly targeted long tails or they have clicked through from quality relevant sites.

So there you have it. If you want targeted, convertible traffic then my affordable low cost seo services could be for you. Prices start at just 100 euro’s per month. Give me a call or drop me an email if you have any questions.