How many SEO consultants does it take to change a light bulb?

Two. One to change the light bulb and another to explain that there are over 100 factors that go into determining the state of the light bulb and it could take 3 to 6 months to know for sure that the light bulb has indeed changed.

What exactly is search engine optimization? It’s simply the process of getting your website listed as high in the search engine results as possible.

The benefits of appearing high in the results pages are fairly obvious – more people will find your website, which increases the amount of traffic you get, which in turn should increase your sales.

The process is fairly simple, but because the search engines are reluctant to share the exact methods they use to rank web pages, no-one is really sure exactly what works and what doesn’t.

There are some ground rules which we can be fairly sure about.
Firstly, the search engines are looking for quality content which is relevant to the search term their user types in.

All the search engines use the text on a page to work out what that page is about. If you want your web page to appear for a certain search term, that search term (or ‘keyword phrase’) had better appear somewhere on the page. If the keyword phrase is really important, then it should appear in the page title and in the headline on the page.

At the same time, the search engines are clever enough to spot deliberate attempts to manipulate them. Repeating a keyword phrase too often can result in the page dropping in the rankings.

‘Latent Semantic Indexing’ is one of those catchy buzz-phrases beloved by the SEO crowd. It simply means that once the search engines know what the primary keywords are for a page, they look out for similar, related keywords one would expect to find on a page about that topic. For example, although this post is about ’search engine optimization’, I’m not repeating that phrase over and over – I’m using related terms like ’search engine’, ‘SEO’ and so on.

Search Engine Optimization Services is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za

Getting your website to rank in Google is not as difficult as you may have been told. There are thousands of articles about search engine optimization on the Internet, 99.9% of which are complete rubbish.

The first step in the process is ensuring that your site is indexed – that is, included in Google’s index of websites. If it’s not in the index, it won’t appear in the search engine results pages.

You can check if your site is included in the index by typing this expression into Google (or most of the other search engines):

site:yourdomain.com

If the search engine can’t find any results, your site is not in the index.

Getting your website indexed can be as simple as getting a backlink from a popular website, such as Digg.com.

There are two four factors used by the major search engines to decide on the ranking for a given web page:

On-page
The search engines analyze the text content on a web page to determine what the page is about. If your web page doesn’t include a keyword, it’s very unlikely that the page will rank for that keyword.

The most important place for your keyword (or keyword phrase) to appear is in the HTML ‘title’ tag. That’s the line of text that shows up at tthe very top of the browser window, usually in a blue bar. The search engines will usually show the title as the first, bold line of text in the search engine results.

If the title is too long, it will be truncated. 60 characters is safe.

The other important element is the ‘description’ tag. Most of the search engines display the description as the second and third lines of text on their results pages. If it doesn’t exist, they will usually use the first 20 or so words from the page. It’s important to remember that the description should be written in such a way that it encourages people to click through to the web site – in other words, it’s really ad copy.

As I mentioned, your keywords should appear in the page text. The best way to do this is to write about the topic naturally. ‘Keyword stuffing’, where you repeat your keywords in virtually every sentence, is not effective. It alienates human readers, and the search engines detect it and give the page a poor score.

Original content, written for human readers, is the best approach.

Off-page
Google pretty much revolutionized the search engine business when they introduced their algorithm which determined the authority of a web page by the number of incoming links to the page. Effectively every incoming link (or ‘backlink’) is a vote for the quality of the content on the page.

All the major search engines now use incoming links as a factor in their rankings.

There are hundreds of ways to get incoming links. A few years ago, ‘reciprocal linking’ was popular – ‘You link to my site, and I’ll link to yours’. The search engines quickly realized what was going on, and started discounting these links – in otherr words, giving them less value.

The key strategy these days is to get backlinks from sites which already have a large amount of traffic. Many of these sites depend on user-generated content, and a backlink to your website is your reward for providing your content for free.

These sites include article directories, like EzineArticles.com, social news sites like Digg.com and free webpage sites like Squidoo.com.

Unique, original content – especially controversial content, or ‘linkbait’, can result in thousands of people arriving at your website.

Domain Name and URL
The next factor which affects your search engine ranking is your domain name. The search engines look at the age of your domain, the theory being that if your domain has been around fro some time, it’s less likely to be a spam site. The length of time that your domain is registered for is also a factor.

Having your keywords in your domain name also plays a part in the ranking formula.

Carefully-chosen URLs for each page of your site also have an effect on ranking. If the URL contains a keyword phrase which matches the page title, it’s likely to rank well.

Human review
The major search engines employ people to monitor the quality of the websites in their indices. Nobody knows what effect human reviewers have on search engine rankings, but it can be assumed that they look out for spam sites and reduce their rank or remove them from the indices altogether.

If you want to find out more about how to rank in Google, you can read Google’s own excellent Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

How To Rank In Google is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za

If you’ve been wondering about the value of having a blog for your business, you should find this interesting.

There are 170 Google searches a month for the search term ‘johannesburg hardware’. In other words, around 6 people are typing the search phrase ‘johannesburg hardware’ into Google every day.

Not one hardware store’s website appears on the first page of Google’s results.

There are listings for a number of directories,forums and classified ad sites – gumtree.co.za, yellowpages.co.za – but not a single hardware store’s site has made it to the front page for that search term.

There are a couple of computer hardware sites, but that’s all.

If I were the owner of a hardware store in Johannesburg, I’d be all over this.

Other terms people might be searching for might include

hardware stores johannesburg 28
linden hardware 210
morningside hardware 91

Now…getting back to the value of having a blog. Google likes blogs. Once a blog is indexed, it is generally spidered by Google on a regular basis.

As a little experiment, I’m going to see how long it takes to get this blog post to the first page of the Google results for the term ‘johannesburg hardware’. There are 275,000 competing pages, which is not too scary – those pages all have the keywords ‘johannesburg’ and ‘hardware’ somewhere in the page.

I’ll report back on this later….

Johannesburg Hardware is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za

Google recently released their Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, which I recommend you download and read if you have any interest in getting your website to rank well in the search engines.

There’s nothing really new in the guide – many of the topics are already ‘best practice’ for web page optimization – but it’s important that Google has put its stamp of approval on these techniques.
The guide is brief at 22 pages, well laid out, and spells out specific “good practices” for each method.

There’s no index, so here’s a list of the methods they discuss:

• Create unique, accurate page titles
• Make use of the “description” meta tag
• Improve the structure of your URLs
• Make your site easier to navigate
• Offer quality content and services
• Write better anchor text
• Use heading tags appropriately
• Optimize your use of images
• Make effective use of robots.txt
• Be aware of rel=”nofollow” for links
• Promote your website in the right ways
• Make use of free webmaster tools
• Take advantage of web analytics services

“Promote your website in the right ways” mentions using a blog on your website to let visitors know when you’ve added something new. If you’re a business owner, and your website doesn’t have a (regularly updated) blog, you need to add one quick-sticks. Blogs are one of the best ways to get visitors to your site.

Google Spells It Out For Webmasters is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za

One of the first steps towards getting traffic to your website is to get it indexed by the major search engines – Google, Yahoo and MSN. Being indexed means that your domain name, or your home page, appears in the  list of websites that the search engine knows about. It doesn’t mean that your site will appear on the first page of the search results for any search term other than, perhaps, your domain name.

How do you know if your site has been indexed? Go to Google.com and type in “site:mywebsite.co.za” – without the quote marks, and obviously replacing “mywebsite.co.za” with whatever your website domain name is. Make sure you don’t put a space between “site:” and the domain name. Getting your website indexed by Google isn’t particularly difficult. Here are some effective ways to do it:

1. Get backlinks from highly trafficked sites. There are a number of popular web sites which are spidered multiple times per day. Many of these will allow you to create your own profile, blog or page. If you have a link back to your website, you can expect that it will be followed by Google’s spider within a short period of time.

Here are some sites which let you create your own pages with backlinks – there are many others as well: WordPress.com
Blogger.com
Tumblr.com
Zimbio.com
Squidoo.com

Set up a free account with any or all of these, create a short, unique article about your company, your product or your service, with a link back to your website and there you go. Each of these sites has its own quirks – for example Squidoo wants you to put up a bit more than one short article.

2. Set up an RSS Feed. Google owns one of the top RSS feed management services, FeedBurner.com. In my experience, if you set up a FeedBurner feed for your blog, you can get it indexed in under 24 hours.

3. Add it to Blog Directories Blog directories like Technorati and IceRocket keep tabs on the RSS feeds from millions of blogs. Whenever a new post is made to any of these blogs, it gets listed by the directory. Since Google crawls Technorati’s directory regularly, a new post can be indexed in a matter of hours. Create free accounts at Techorati and IceRocket and submit (or ‘claim’) your blog.

Technorati
IceRocket

You can do all of the techniques I’ve mentioned. Not only will your site be indexed quickly, but once the search engines know about your site, they will crawl it regularly as well. This means that updates such as blog posts will be noticed and indexed as they happen.

You’ll notice that I’ve assumed that you have a blog. Blogs have a number of advantages over conventional ’static’ websites. Blogging software has a number of built-in features which help to improve the search engine exposure of your web site – like automatically pinging the blog directories, built-in RSS feeds and so on.

How To Get Your Site Indexed By Google is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za

Some of the top web marketing companies in South Africa offer to submit your website to a huge number of search engines – like 2,000 or more. Does this actually work?

There are actually only 3 search engines which are of any importance – Google, Yahoo and MSN. Together, these 3 get around 95% of all search traffic. The other 1,997 share the remaining 5%, and submitting to them is basically a waste of time. Most of them get their search results from one of the big three anyway.

What’s more, the search engines are all set up to search the net for new sites. They find them by following links from existing sites which have already been indexed. The more incoming links there are to your site, the better.

If you really want to, you can submit your site manually to the top three – but many search engine optimization experts believe that it’s better to simply let the search engines find your website naturally.

There’s also no advantage in submitting your site to the same search engine multiple times – you stand a good chance of being banned if you do this (or if someone does it for you).

There are more effective ways to get indexed by the search engines, and I’ll look at some of them over the coming days.

Search Engine Submission is a post from: IdealMedia.co.za