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.

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!!

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?

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.

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).

These forums really are a bad place for newbie SEO’s or website owners who are looking for some DIY material, to hang out.

There is only one way to do SEO:-

1. Build a good site with lots of rich unique content that shows that YOU are an authority in YOUR business.
2. Perform good keyword research with a mix of broad and long tail keywords
3. Optimise your site really well using the most important elements such as titles, H tags, on page copy, internal linking, alt tags and keyword rich urls.
4. Build solid, non spammy links. Best paid directories, niche directories, article writing, press releases, reciprocal linking(yes it still has value) social media and any other site that is related to yours in some way.
5. Look at where you competitors are getting links from.
6. keep a track of changes you make, on site and off site
7. Monitor ranking movements
8. Repeat

So on to the main point of this post. Your linking profile is very important. It must look natural otherwise you may set of some flags with google and may find that you may get a human from google to look at your site for a bit of closer inspection.

The more natural your linking profile is, the less likely you will get penalized in some way.

Link building must be done slowly with a mix of good high PR and low PR links from mostly relevant sites to your own. Your links should be built consistently and over time as anything less than this will ring an alarm bell with the search eninges. Search engine algorithms are becoming so advanced that they can now take an historical look into your link profile. When they see a large amount of links come in one month and nothing the next this can look suscpicious(although not a complete indication that a site is link spamming) and may lead to a human review of your site.

With SEO slow and steady wins the race. Quality and consistency, not quantity and speed.

Building good content is another great way to improve your rankings. Fresh content always gives a good boost to a site not just for search engines but for users too.

Stop focusing on building crappy worthless spammy links and start putting more time into building a kick ass site that is “link worthy” and you may find that people will link to you naturally. You think Amazon seek out recipricol link exchanges? Of course not, people link to them naturally as they have great content.

Think of it this way. Where do we look to get good links or rather where SHOULD we be looking to get good links from??? How about sites that are authoritive or sites themselves that have good backlinks from .gov, .edu and other high ranking sites? Why are these sites you want to get a link from so authoritive? Because of the great informative, interesting content they have.

There is no doubt about it. Build a site that is authoritive with great content and you will attract thousands of links for free, not to mention thousands of new customers. But this takes time and can’t be done overnight.

One last thought, especially if you are an SEO yourself. You should always be asking WHY. Why am I doing this? Everytime you want to get a link from a site or optimise a certain page element etc etc, ask WHY am I doing this. Is this going to add value to my clients site in some way??

Have a good weekend.

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.

The nofollow tag was introduced in 2005 and was agreed upon by the top 3 search engines as a method that could be used by webmasters in order to prevent comment spam on the web. The nofollow tag is not visible when looking at a site and its links, but looks something like this in html code:-

<a href=”www.mysite.com” rel=”nofollow”>Link to mysite</a>

So there you can see the attribute rel=”nofollow”. What this actually says to the major search engines in most cases is, do not pass any link value to the linked to page. So if I place a link from a page on site A to a page on site B and place the nofollow attribute within my linking code, site A will not pass any link weight or page rank to site B.

Like I said previously, this was originally done(and still is) to prevent spammers from placing spammy comments within blogs just in order to gain a link back to their website and hence manipulating the search engine results.

But there are other important aspects to nofollow that need to be pointed out.

With Google, nofollowed links are not followed at all and no link weight or page rank is passed. The page that is linked to can still be indexed via some other link somewhere but NOT from the nofollowed link.

With Yahoo, the link IS followed but no link juice is passed via the link although the page will still be indexed.

The yahoo approach to nofollow is the same with MSN/Live and that it is followed and pages are indexed but no link weight is passed to the linked to page.

“So what”, you might say. What does that mean to me and the performance of my site? Do I need to use it?

My answer is a resounding YES you do!

Nofollow is a great way of doing a number of things including sculpting page rank. By placing a nofollow tag on the least important pages on your site, ie about us, contact us, terms and conditions etc you enable your site to pass and distribute page rank to the more important pages. If you do not add nofollow to these links, pages like terms and conditions could end up with good page rank. What a waste of PR!

By placing nofollows on these links, your more important pages will inherit more page rank which will signal them with Google as being more important. The higher the pagerank, the important that page is too Google, the better ranked that page and more frequently it will be crawled by the search engines.

So you see, although nofollow was invented to prevent comment spam, it does have other great uses which are also encouraged by the search engines. Make intelligent use of nofollow and you will eventually be rewarded with more page rank to your most important pages, better rankings and generally a deeper crawling of your site.

Firstly, Search Engine Optimisation is really about driving as much traffic to a website as possible to assist a company in converting as many visitors as possible, whether it be to purchase a product or to sign up to some service.

SEO alone cannot make people purchase a clients product. Once an SEO has driven visitors to a site, his job is pretty much done. You can get to #1 for some popular search term, but if you don’t have anything to offer your visitor when they arrive, its like opening a restaurant but having nothing on the menu for them to eat!

If you want to turn more of your visitors into buyers, there a many other aspects of a site that needs to be looked at first and this should come prior to any SEO contracts or agreements taking place.

Web Design

This is the first on the list as it’s the first thing that visitors will see. Your website design is a critical part of your branding. If you get this wrong, it could be a major cause of failure when it comes to generating visitors and revenue at your site.

Know Your Visitor

How many companies have websites yet fail to really grasp a full understanding of exactly who their visitors are? Many is the answer to that one.

Any salesman will tell you that if you want to sell to a customer, you need to know what the customer wants and what it is that motivates them to buy. If you can get inside the mind of your prospective customer, you are are already half way there to actually selling them something as you will know what drives them to buy the kind of products or services you have on offer.

Killer Copy That Sells

In the real world or should we say the “off-line world” you have spoken words that you can use to pitch to your prospects. This is not the case with a website(unless you use some kind of promotional video) as it is dependant on the written text or “copy” that you have on your pages to sell to your customer.

Writing effective call to action web copy, is a skill that many sites fail to implement due to either ignorance or due to laziness. There can be no doubt that great web copy that gets into the mind of your visitors, has the potential to increase your sites conversions ten fold.

When people visit your site and see what you have to offer, they have many questions that need answering. As an example lets take real estate. So you are looking for a new home in Spain and you do a search on Google using your search term and you get 10,000,000 results. You then plump for one of the results in the top 10 that seems to have a descriptive title and snippet and you decide to click it and pay them a visit.

In this case it may be that the site is nicely designed, looks professional and feels like these are the guys you would like to find you a new home. But wait, you have a number of questions as buying a new home or investment is very expensive and is not the kind of thing you take lightly. You may have many questions that you need answering such as “How long have these guys been around and can I trust them?”, “Is it a good time to buy in Spain”, “Will these guys really sell me the right property for me or spend more time on worrying about their inflated commissions?”, “Are the fee’s they indicate really all I will be paying?”.

All these and manymore are the kinds of questions this theoretical customer would most likely have. All of these questions must be answered within your sites web copy otherwise you risk no answering your potential customers most trouble concerns.

Be Transparent

For me when purchasing something online, its great to be able to see the folks who are behind the site who I may be in correspondence with. This gives you as the owner, a sense of transparency and can help to install confidence in your visitors. It says “hey look, here I am. Im proud of my site, services and what I have to offer and am not afraid to put my face to it”.

Another thing to do is to make sure you have lots of options for your customers to contact either you as an individual, or as a company. So using phone numbers and emails for different departments is great, as are skype and msn contact id’s if you provide online support in that way.

Make yourself available and transparent and your customers will feel that they are buying from a human being and not from a virtual shop assistant.

So remember the above points the next time you want to blame your SEO for a lack of sales. There are many things that lead to a conversion and optimisation is just a small part of it. Implement some the above and you could be on your way to getting a higher conversion rate!

]]> http://www.seoservicesspain.com/wp/seo-just-isnt-enough/feed/ http://www.seoservicesspain.com/wp/optimising-for-the-long-tail/ http://www.seoservicesspain.com/wp/optimising-for-the-long-tail/#comments Mon, 05 May 2008 14:01:32 +0000 admin http://www.seoservicesspain.com/wp/optimising-for-the-long-tail/ What is the Long Tail?

The “long tail” is a buzz word that has been thrown about for some time now in forums and other places across the web, but many people are still unsure on many aspects of the long tail inlcuding what it is and how it can help with your SEO campaign.

When performing search engine optimisation on a site one of the first things to do is to examine your niche, your competitors and the market place in general. Another thing you do is to ascertain the most lucrative search terms to target in order to drive the maximum amount of traffic to your site.

Normally you will come up with a selection of keywords that are the ones that you are going to go with and after a few months or whatever length of time, you check your stats and what do you find?

You find that around 20% of the visitors that came to your site via organic searches found your site using your top optimised for keywords. The other 80% will have found you using whats called the long tail or those phrases that were made up using words and phrases found in your websites copy(or text).

Below is a graphical chart depicting what the long tail would look like like if you were to create a graph using your google analytics or other website stats.

The X-Axis shows us that each tower represents a specific keyword and that the Y-Axis represents the keyword popularity or put another way, the amount of times the keyword was searched during a certain period of time.

The graph shows us that most of our main keywords provided us with around 20% of our visitors whereby the “long tail”(the remaining keywords) represent around 80% of search terms that we were found with.

So logic tells us, that we should not only target the more popular search terms, but also go after the long tail terms which can provide us with significant traffic.

The advantages of targeting the long tail are:-

1. They are not as popular as the higher traffic terms so are easier to rank for
2. Easy to optimise as you will not have to build links for these terms
3. Long tail terms are much more specific hence are easier to convert to sales

An example of the long tail might be:-

Real estate spain

Real estate lawyers spain

Real estate in valencia spain

Commercial real estate in spain

Real estate spain investment fund

Real estate agents in spain

Best real estate agents in spain

Buying real estate in spain

Real estate market situation in spain

Off plan real estate offers in Spain

As you can see by the above example. The top term “real estate spain” is more generic and not very specific and targeted. With terms like these a searcher could really be searching for any one of the terms below which are much more specific.

This means that the more long tail visitors we can get the more likely we are to convert those visitors into sales or customers.

How to target the long tail

Another bonus of optimising and targeting the long tail keywords is that they are not so popular which means there is less competition and there are fewer sites actively targeting these terms.

Optimising your sites pages for the long tail terms is pretty straight forward and generally means placing your long tail keywords within the pages copy/text so that the search engine crawlers can index them for searching.

Below is an example of a paragraph used on a real estate site before the long tail keywords have been inserted.

XYZ Real Estate Spain is your leading real estate company in spain. We have a number of really luxurious off plan and resale properties on offer in the Costa del Sol and the Costa Blanca. We are also able to provide you with finance for your purchase via our trusted and experienced mortgage advisor.

And now the paragraph after the long tails have been inserted.

XYZ Real Estate Spain is your leading real estate company in spain. We are one of the leading real estate agents in Spain and have a number of really luxurious off plan and resale properties on offer in the Costa del Sol and the Costa Blanca. If you are buying real estate property in Spain, we are also able to provide you with finance for your purchase via our trusted and experienced mortgage advisor.

The real estate market situation in Spain has been somewhat unstable recently, but market is now as bouyant as ever and we are now starting to see more demand for certains regions especially real estate in Valencia.

We are now able to offer some really amazing off plan real estate offers in Spain which include cash back and no money down deals.

As you can see, with a bit of wizardry we are able to insert our long tail terms into our copy so that we can target them.

So there you have it. If you do some solid keyword research I’m sure you can come up with a number of long tails that just may bring you more targeted traffic.

I recieve many link exchange requests every day which are pretty pathetic really. You know the ones “Hi, I saw your site and wanted to know if you would link to me? blah blah”.

For me, reciprocals are now pretty pointless. Don’t get me wrong, one or two reciprical links from relevant authority sites is not a bad thing, but links from pages that have hundreds of other links(including those to Viagra and online gaming sites) are pretty much worthless in my eyes and no doubt in the eyes of the search engines.

SEO’s and webmasters need to adopt a different approach to link building if they want to rank well. The search engine algorithms are becoming more and more sophisticated and have the ability to sniff out crappy, worthless links.

So how does one go about obtaining good quality links then?

Well in my opinion SEO’s need to start networking more. What I mean by this is that link building is very similar to building links and business associates in the offline world. In order to for you to do well in regular business, you need to network and build relationships in order to help each other to achieve your goals.

The same applies to SEO and link building. If you have something of interest, for example good articles, how to’s, free software or advice for example, why not approach another webmaster and ask to have your content placed on their site with a link back to you or a link to your content from their site?

If what you are offering is of any real value, most webmasters are sure to give you a link back and no doubt the link will be of much more use in terms of link juice(coming from a quality relevant site) and in terms of click throughs.

Most savvy webmasters are only to happy to place good content or information on their sites and are not afraid of “losing page rank”. Its all about offering your visitors more and sometimes this means linking out to other relevant authority sites.

For me, its better to spend a number of hours writing good content and then contacting others sites and getting them to link to you, than it is to build 100 crappy recip links that have no value. The return on investment(your time) is far greater.

Another good thing about writing or offering something of value is that your site also becomes an authority site in your niche and becomes a bit more trusted when linked to from other quality sites.

So go on, start networking with other sites and see if you can offer each other some quality content as opposed to some worthless reciprocal links.