1)  ‘Do It yourself’ kits won’t work

The sites that are developed using such ‘Do-It-Yourself’ kits make use of templates which are of a very general nature. What’s more, the template you buy may also be used by some other site, so your site may end up looking much like any other site. It won’t have a distinct identity of its own. A web site design professional knows exactly what you want and can custom make a web site to suit your needs. A professional is also aware of the latest web designing tools and tricks and can design a site keeping the objectives of your enterprise in mind.

2) No need for a Lavish Budget

It may seem strange, but you don’t really need to have a big budget to hire a website designing professional. You need not have tons of content on your website just to add to the bulk. All you need is valuable and related content on your web pages. A good professional can do this for you. In today’s fast paced world, you and your business need to be visible all the time and this can be achieved by a professional company.

3) Leave an expert job for the experts

A professional company who is full time into web site design knows his job well and has more tools and resources at his disposal. They usually have a team working for tasks like designing, writing and SEO are handled separately. This benefit of individual specialization is available to you at no extra cost. It will also ensure that the job is done with finesse.

You may also achieve the same by a trial and error method, but it will take considerably longer time and you would agree that committing mistakes could prove costly for your business. So, its better to let a professional handle your web design needs.

Why SEO is important?

SEO can conjure great sales your business. Getting ranked in SERP can help you in various
ways, the most obvious of which is higher traffic.
1. Increased traffic will help in increased sales and services.
2. Increased traffic and rank in SERPs will help you establish a brand name in market
3. With the increased organic traffic you will feel greater satisfaction.
4. SEO will convert your Ordinary site into an Extraordinary site.

Excess OF SEO:-

Excessive linking may harm your site’s SERP and authority. When you generate links
excessively the Search Engines will not count them while evaluating your authority.
As per Google’s guidelines on Link Scheme, violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines will
negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results.
•  Links intended to manipulate Page Rank
•  Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
•  Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to  you.”)
•  Buying or selling links that pass Page Rank

Cloaking

Cloaking is case when the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that viewed by the user. When search engine spider is identified as a user, the server-side script renders a different version of the web page, which is somewhat different to what’s presented to the user.

Content Hiding

Content Hiding is a widely adopted SEO malpractice which is largely done for keyword spamming. Content can be hidden by adding keywords on page in a font colour same as the background colour. What happens is that the text exists on page but visitors are not able to see the same. However, search engine spiders read this hidden text and index the page accordingly.

Links To spam sites

A webmaster has no control over incoming links. However, a webmaster always has full control over link on his own site, otherwise known as outgoing links. Google knows that all links on your site have been placed by yourself. So, if a spammed site was giving links to your site, it would simply be disregarded by Google. However, when your site provides links to a spam site, it is instantly reprimanded by Google.

Hence, stay away from Spammed site or else your website may be penalised by Google.

It pretty much must be everything!

Here we will talk about the website’s age.

Why is it important how old your website is?

Why is it that web sites older domains feature higher on the search pages and have more value than sites which are newly launched? This is because older websites generally are more developed, maintained and secured against spam than comparatively newer websites. This could be a strong reason for Search Engines to award high ranking to older websites in their listings in the first page.

This way we can say that the age of incoming links is also very important to the indexing of your website in major Search Engines. If your incoming links are from older and trustworthy websites, then there is a high chance for your website to get featured in high rankings of all major search engines.

According to Search engines algorithms, a website’s name that is registered for a long period are give higher value. So, if you’re looking for quick indexing from search engines, especially for Google, a domain registered for at least 3-4 years is sure to get indexed quickly by search engine crawlers. But if your blog is hosted on WordPress or Blogspot, Google will consider their URLs with domain name as WordPress.com and Blogspot.com. It is hence advisable that, in case of blogs, you use external hosting unless it has been indexed.

Is website’s age the ONLY factor that promises High search engine ranking?

Of course NOT,  because there are so many other factors like incoming links, site content, keyword density etc. But the age of a website does play a valuable part.

1) What exactly are Directory Submissions?

For the uninitiated, it is the technique of writing relevant content and later submitting the same at websites known as article directories, which also list articles from other writers. Although some directories might be absolutely low on quality, you may also come across quite decent publications.  Some directories allow links, while others do not even get indexed.

2) How do you decide which directories should you submit your work at?

The first thing you can do is check out the Page Rank of the directory. See if it is indexed. Make sure they allow you to submit your links. Also, check if they are being no-followed.

Let’s just say you might have found a suitable Article Submissions Directory. Write a keyword-rich article based on your particular niche and post the same on it. Since it enjoys a pretty decent page rank, it is only obvious that it would attract a lot of traffic and, hence, your article is sure to be indexed. And what do you get? You get link votes, the value of which depends on the ranking and integrity of the article directory.

In case yours is a new website it would probably have a pretty weak backlink strucutre. Article Directories such as Ezine, ArticlesBase, Suite101, Buzzle, Helium and GoArticles help you get useful backlinks that further help you get your site indexed and feature on search pages in no time.

Directory submission is, indeed, a great way to attain quick popularity among search engines for your site. Generally, people use these directories to get easy access (read backlinks) through a number of popular sites which webmasters may use to enhance their websites from the point of view of search engines.

On-page factors are dictated by the web pages’ content and are critical to a marketing campaign. Besides the fact that they are easy to manipulate and that search engine masters have started taking into account, other factors as well, on-page factors still hold a lot of importance.

These factors can be broadly categorised into Visible as well as Invisible. In this write-up, I’ll only highlight the Visible factors.

The Importance of Visible Content

Search engines give a lot more importance to visible content as this is the content that users are going to see.

Some important Visible On-Page Factors are Page Title, Page Headings, Page Copy, Outbound links, Keywords in URLs and domain names, internal link structures and anchors and over all structuring of the Site.

Title

It is the text that is defined by the subject of the <title> element present in the <head> section of an HTML doc. This title can be clearly sited in the browser windows’ title bar and can also be seen in the headline of a SE result. This is clearly the most important factor from the SEO point of view. The quality of SE ranking for your site will depend a lot on your Page Title.

Google advises webmasters to have descriptive Title Tags and headings. Using the same generic text for making titles for all pages of a website should be strictly avoided. This practise may get your site a poor ranking, or worse, it may get you penalised for posting duplicate content. Ensure unique and relevant titles for all pages!

Headings

Page headings may be used to indicate the collective context and meaning. They are usually larger in size than the rest of the content and are created with the help of <Hx> tags in HTML. “X” can be any digit between 1 and 6. They have been readily abused to manipulate SE rankings but are still a relevant on-page factor.

Page Copy

It’s important for a website to post pages that are relevant to a users’ query. SE algorithms put a lot of emphasis on this. Excessive keyword insertion should be avoided. Key words may be used in a variety of legitimate ways such as varying the tenses or mentioning a singular keyword in its plural form. Keyword stuffing should be avoided at all times!

It should be noted that SE algorithms are unknown and constantly updated. This has added a lot of ambiguity to the subject of “Keyword stuffing”.

SEO copywriting is an art, which if mastered, will enable you to use such ambiguous factors to your advantage. As a webmaster, all you need to do is to make a site which is useful for the surfer and at the same time, SE friendly. Key words may be exceeded to a certain extent but should not compromise with the content and its relevance. They should not look contrived!

Outbound Links

A web page should only contain links that will lead the visitor to relevant content. Your sites’ ranking can get serious downward jolts if you include links that lead to irrelevant web pages.

Using Relevant Keywords in Page URL

This practice should be adopted by all! Using keywords in the URL can dramatically improve rankings and CTR (click-through ratio). The URL may also be mentioned on a webpage in the form of anchor text.

The Importance of Link Structuring

Search Engines do not give much importance to pages hidden inside a sites’ internal link structure. Webmasters need to design websites in such a way that pages with relevant content are linked well to the home page. Direct linking can do wonders to a websites’ ranking in SE results.

Here is an example of the things you should do and the ones you should avoid:

The Wrong Way:

This is something all webmasters should avoid. The pages between and aren’t directly linked to the home page. This practice will push relevant pages down the hierarchy.

The Right Way:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

In this case, it can be clearly seen that all the 9 pages between and are directly linked to the main page. Using this link structure will create a much better scheme of navigation to all the pages.

You can break SEO into three main areas: Content, Architecture and Links. These are the fundamentals of SEO that need to be understood and get right first.

Architecture – Can your site be crawled?
When commencing on the road of having your website created you need to look at whether or not your site can be crawled by the search engine spiders.  You could be spending hours producing the best content , but if the spiders cannot crawl through then your hard work will be in vain.  Below I will list a few things to which will help make your site more crawl-able:

1.    Try to avoid things like flash or javascript navigation. To date search engines struggle crawling these types of navigation, but who knows in time this may change?

2.    Make your site’s architecture as flat as possible. Keeping your pages as close to the root as possible will help the spiders see your content. In other words, yourwebsite.com/folder/product is much better than yourwebsite.com/category/subcategory/product/product-description.

3.    Distance your site from parameter strings in URLs. Having parameter strings in URLs could have multiple versions of the same content and you will have to learn how to properly use the canonical element. Avoid this by not using parameters. having a static URL for each page whenever possible is the way forward. For example: yourwebsite.com/product-name.htm is much better than mysite.com/?prod-id=432hju&cat-id=abc765.

4.    Internal linking should be used appropriately If it makes sense to link to other pages within the content then do so. Make sure you do no just rely on your sites navigation to get people and the search engines to where you want them to be on your site

5.    Sitemaps. Make sure your site has both an HTML and XML sitemap

I will write next week on tips on content and the good and the bad ways of linking.

1. Promise you the world

2. Sign you into a 12 month contract you cannot get out of

3. Not be too fussed about achieving results for you and making your phone line ring!

Have you found the same thing?  Many of the larger SEO companies in the UK have a single business purpose…that is to hit their own sales targets and not be bothered about achieveing for their clients.  Many of the SEO companies on page 1 for the keyword SEO operate in this way and simply live off the fact that they are number 1 on google for the keyterm SEO.  Sure…this is great and shows they can achieve good rankings and it is a real good sales tool when selling into clients, however…how do you know they havnt paid a company like us to get them there?  Dont get me wrong…over the next 12 months we will be aiming to get www.seonext.co.uk to page one for several keyterms relevant to our services but it is not something we will be shouting about.  When selling SEO to someone I prefer to display quantifiable results to my customers, showing them “hey, we did this for X company, and they achieved X sales from it making a ROI of X”.  I personallly think this is a much better way of displaying to clients the reasons for signing up with SEO Next.

Furthermore, the industry is changing rapidly.  There are several companies that have salesmen of SEO working for them that have never ran an online business of their own…therefore, if you think about it…how can they sell SEO?  Marketing is all about return on investment and therefore, how do these sales guys know how much a phone can ring by ranking a company for certain keyterms, or generate X sales from what they do!  Our mission at SEO Next is to ensure everyone who sells SEO here knows more than the SEO tactics that get a site to page 1, they must have ran an online business or been involved in the marketing for one and therefore know the FACTS! 

Enough of the rant!  My only questions I would ask anyone to ask a SEO company when they employ them to do their SEO is ask the guy who is selling the SEO, whats your background and have you been under pressure to make a phone ring from the results of a SEO program.  If you get a wooly answer to that, its time to move and look for someone who can tick all the boxes for you.