• marketing and achieving sales for the client, without being ‘tacky’ or ‘blatant’
• make sure that the users are navigated around the site in a pragmatic way, that leads to a sale, but is also interesting for the user
• primarily focus upon what some US pundits refer to as the ‘user experience’
• reduce the Bounce Rate, increase the crawl depth and time and increase return visitors
• if the website can, with the aid of the Search Marketing Group, become authoritative – people will bookmark the site and this will only help to increase trust factor

Informative content and news articles are needed, so that the client’s site enthuses people to link to it naturally, but also to represent the valid interests of the site.

Having personally trained many people in SEO over the years, there is one fundamental truth to search marketing and that is, in Google’s own words, websites should be written for the user, not for search engines themselves as most SEO companies do.

One other factor to consider, is that whilst outbound links can haemorrhage Page Rank, it is important to have outbound links and to be engaged in a constructive link building community. To this end, other sites will link to you if you have a good level of high quality content. We would always recommend that anyone selling jewellery for example, should have an outbound link to the British Jewellery Association or similar body for the purposes of SEO.

1. Splash Page

I’ve seen this mistake many times where people put up just a big banner image and a link “Click here to enter” on their homepage. The worst case — the “enter” link is embedded in the Flash object, which makes it impossible for the spiders to follow the link.

This is fine if you don’t care about what a search engine knows about your site; otherwise, you’re making a BIG mistake. Your homepage is probably your website’s highest ranking page and gets crawled frequently by web spiders. Your internal pages will not appear in the search engine index without the proper linking structure to internal pages for the spider to follow.

Your homepage should include (at minimum) target keywords and links to important pages.

2. Non-spiderable Flash Menus

Many designers make this mistake by using Flash menus such as those fade-in and animated menus. They might look cool to you but they can’t be seen by the search engines; and thus the links in the Flash menu will not be followed.

3. SEO Image and Flash Content

Web spiders are like a text-based browser, they can’t read the text embedded in the graphic image or Flash. Most designers make this mistake by embedding the important content (such as target keywords) in Flash and image.

4. Overuse of Ajax

A lot of developers are trying to impress their visitor by implementing massive Ajax features (particularly for navigation purposes), but did you know that it is a big SEO mistake? Because Ajax content is loaded dynamically, so it is not spiderable or indexable by search engines.

Another disadvantage of Ajax — since the address URL doesn’t reload, your visitor can not send the current page to their friends.

5. Versioning of Theme Design

For some reason, some designers love to version their theme design into sub level folders (ie. domain.com/v2, v3, v4) and redirect to the new folder. Constantly changing the main root location may cause you to lose backlink counts and ranking.

6. “Click Here” Link Anchor Text

You probably see this a lot where people use “Click here” or “Learn more” as the linking text. This is great if you want to be ranked high for “Click Here”. But if you want to tell the search engine that your page is important for a topic, than use that topic/keyword in your link anchor text. It’s much more descriptive (and relevant) to say “learn more about {keyword topic}”

Warning: Don’t use the EXACT same anchor text everywhere on your website. This can sometimes be seen as search engine spam too.

7. Common SEO Title Tag Mistakes

Same or similar title text:

Every page on your site should have a unique <title> tag with the target keywords in it. Many developers make the mistake of having the same or similar title tags throughout the entire site. That’s like telling the search engine that EVERY page on your site refers to the same topic and one isn’t any more unique than the other.

One good example of bad Title Tag use would be the default WordPress theme. In case you didn’t know, the title tag of the default WordPress theme isn’t

that useful: Site Name > Blog Archive > Post Title. Why isn’t this search engine friendly? Because every single blog post will have the same text “Site Name > Blog Archive >” at the beginning of the title tag. If you really want to include the site name in the title tag, it

should be at the end: Post Title | Site Name.

Exceeding the 65 character limit:

Many bloggers write very long post titles. So what? In search engine result pages, your title tag is used as the link heading. You have about 65 characters (including

spaces) to get your message across or risk it getting cutoff.

Keyword stuffing the title:

Another common mistake people tend to make is overfilling the title tag with keywords. Saying the same thing 3 times doesn’t make you more relevant. Keyword stuffing in the Title Tag is looked at as search engine spam (not good). But it might be smart to repeat the same word in different ways:

“Photo Tips & Photography Techniques for Great Pictures”

“Photo” and “Photography” are the same word repeated twice but in different ways because your audience might use either one when performing a search query.

8. Empty Image Alt Attribute

You should always describe your image in the alt attribute. The alt attribute is what describes your image to a blind web user. Guess what? Search engines can’t see images so your alt attribute is a factor in illustrating what your page is relevant for.

Hint: Properly describing your images can help your ranking in the image search results. For example, Google image search brings me hundreds of referrals everyday for the search terms “abstract” and “dj“.

9. SEO Unfriendly URLs

Most blog or CMS platforms have a friendly URL feature built-in, however, not every blogger is taking advantage of this. Friendly URL’s are good for both your human audience and the search engines. The URL is also an important spot where your keywords should appear.

Example of Friendly URL: domain.com/page-title

Example of Dynamic URL: domain.com/?p=12356

General SEO Do’s and Don’ts

Let me tell you WHAT TO DO by telling you WHAT NOT TO DO:

Don’t Ignore Your Audience

Write about topics your audience cares about. Like what? Find out, by conducting a poll (like I did), scan some relevant bulletin boards or forums, look for common topics in customer emails, or do some keyword research. There are great free keyword tools like the Google Keyword Tool or SEO Book’s Keyword Tool and loads more. The plan is not to spend your life doing keyword research but just to get a general idea of what your visitors are interested in.

Don’t Be Dense About Keyword Density

Once you have a topic for readers; help search engines find it. Keyword Density is the number of times a keyword appears in a page compared to the total number of words. You want to make sure your keywords are included in the crucial areas:

• the Title Tag
• the Page URL (friendly URL)
• the Main Heading (H1 or H2)
• the first paragraph of content.
• at least 3 times in the body content (more or less depending on amount of content and if and only if it makes sense).

Most people aim for a keyword density of 2% (i.e. use the keyword 2 times for every 100 words). But what if your keyword phrase is “SEO for Web Designers and Web Developers” how many times can you repeat that before it sounds just plain unnatural? Write for your readers not for search engines. If you follow the tips

in this article you’ll be writing naturally for your readers; which works for the search engines too.

Warning: Do not over fill your page with the same keywords or you might be penalized by search engines for keyword stuffing.

Don’t Ignore Relatives

In this article, it makes sense to mention topics like “keyword research”, “search engine crawlers” and “title tag use”, but what if I mentioned a highly trafficked term like “cell phone plans”… kind of out of context right? So use other keywords and topics that make sense to your audience, the search engine measures keyword relations to determine relevancy too.

• Cars and Tires (yes)
• Web Design and Flying Monkeys (no…well sometimes)

Don’t Be Afraid of Internal SEO Linking

Do you want the search engine to see every page on your website? Help the search engine spider do its job. There should be a page (like a sitemap or

blog archives) that links to all the pages on your site.

Tip: You can promote the more important pages by inserting text links within body content. Make sure you use relevant linking text and avoid using “click here” (as mentioned earlier).

Don’t Ignore Broken Links

You should always search for and fix the broken links on your site. If you’ve removed a page or section, you can use the robot.txt to prevent the spiders crawling and indexing the broken links. If you have moved a page or your entire website, you can use the 301 .htaccess to redirect to a new URL.

Tips: You can use the Google Webmaster Tool to find broken links and your 404 Not Found errors.

Don’t Be Inconsistent With Your Domain URL

To search engines, a www and a non-www URL are considered two different URLs. You should always keep your domain and URL structure consistent. If you start promoting your site without the “www”, stick with it.

Don’t Be Scared of Semantic Coding

Semantic and standard coding not only can make your site cleaner, but it also allows the search engines to read your page better.

Search Result Position

Coding and setting up your site to be SEO friendly can improve how well a search engine can access your website, it doesn’t guarantee you’ll end up at the top of the search engine result page (SERP). There are many factors in determining the search result position, but here are the basics:

SEO PageRank

Some professional SEO’s pay attention to Google’s PageRank and some don’t. In my experience it doesn’t hurt to have a high Google PageRank. It’s a nice little benchmark to let you know how important Google sees your web page as. You can improve your PageRank by following the tips above and building-up quality backlinks. If you want to learn how PageRank works, Smashing Magazine has a very good article.

Domain Age Before Beauty

You might be surprised to learn that domain age is also a factor in the search engine algorithm. Older domains have a history, and their content is looked at as more credible than the website that got started last week. Older domains sometimes get the edge in search results.

Be Patient

You may have done every single thing right., but your site is still not showing up in the search engines for your target keywords. Why? Because everything takes time. It takes time for the search engines to index and rank your site (especially for new domains). So, be patient.

Another reason — it could be the keywords that you’re trying to target are very competitive. Try altering the keywords on the page and you may have different results. Remember, you are competing with millions of web pages on the internet.

SEO Resources to Help You Go Farther

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools allow you check the crawl statistics of your site. If you haven’t been using this great tool yet, login to the Google Webmaster Tools, then add and verify your site.

After you’ve verified your site, you can find out:

• When was the last time Googlebot crawled your site
• HTTP errors
• 404 Not Found errors
• External link counts
• What keywords people are using to link to your site
• What are the top search queries to your site
• And more.

Free SEO Tools

Here are some online SEO tools that you can use to check your PageRank, Link Popularity, Search Engine Position, Keyword Density, etc.

• www.pagerank.net
• www.iwebtool.com
• www.seochat.com/seo-tools
• www.webconfs.com
• tools.seobook.com

SEO Resources

Here are some external links where you can learn more about SEO:

• www.seomoz.org
• www.seochat.com
• searchenginewatch.com
• www.searchengineworld.com
• www.mattcutts.com

Final Remarks

Please note the tips I share in this SEO guide are based on self-taught knowledge and years of web design experience.

Page Rank Advice NUMBER 1

Use lots of meta keyword tags. Use it WITH Commas. Make sure you don’t repeat the same word more than 3 times in a row. Google only indexes the first 101K of the document – so don’t use TOO many.

Page Rank Advice NUMBER 2

Make sure you include at least one link to Google. They need quality traffic as well. Don’t be greedy and hog it all to yourself. This can do wonders for your pages. Remember – Google may be going public soon – so the more traffic you send them the better.

Page Rank Advice NUMBER 3

Page Rabk Advicee NUMBER 4

Dots, Dots, and More Dots. Put them at the bottom of your document like this:
………….
Then link each one to your pages – make sure you link one to Google and for good measure another to Yahoo. Don’t link to other sites (other than your own) that aren’t search engines. Don’t even link to sites that used to be search engines – like AltaVista.

Page Rank Advice NUMBER 5

This tip is probably the most powerful one on here. Make at least three pages on your site and link them as follows:
Page 1 >>>>>> Page 2
Page 2 >>>>>> Page 3
And this is the kicker
Page 3 >>>>>> Page 1

Google will give points to page 2 from page 1, then to page 3 from page 2, and then – if you link it back to page 1 – it starts all over again. I can’t even count how many points this will end up giving you. Just don’t abuse it too much – or the big sites will complain you are taking too much PR from them.

Page Rank Advice NUMBER 6

Use H1 Tags for your entire page (except the title and other header information). You can use CSS Style sheets to make them look smaller and Google will give you bookoo points for having everything so big on the page (even though it doesn’t look big to the user).

Page Rank Advice NUMBER 7

Submit early and submit often. I prefer to submit on a Sunday. That way – on Monday morning – the Googleplex page rank will be swamped with so much to do – my submits will slip by.

Page Rank Advice NUMBER 8

Link back too other people linking to your page using link:www.example.org.
This is similar to the technique in page rank #5, but not as powerful.

Page Rank Advice NUMBER 9

Be careful spelling. Words like “PENS” and “ANGINA” can easily be mispelled to be words of the male and female anatomy respectively. This will cause Google to mistake your site for an ADUL† Site – and get it banned. Noticed how I used a special character to look like the letter “T” in the word before site. Use clever tricks like this throughout your documents.

Page ank Advice NUMBER 10

If all else fails – mail a 10 spot wrapped inside a number 10 envelope (make sure you wrap one layer of aluminum foil around it). Write your URL above the serial number on the front. If it won’t fit, then that’s THE problem – as Google Page Rank hates long URLs.

One day you will have a business website up and running that you’re proud of and you know is an asset to your business. But, how are you going to drive people to it?

There are two ways to get traffic to your website: promote it (which we’ll cover later) or get it to show up in search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! or Bing.

Ahhhh, the world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). There are many books on the subject, there are hundreds of websites dedicated to it, and there are many highly skilled professionals out there that make their living from it. It’s all about getting that search engine “Google Juice!” to your business website.

Here’s the good news. For a small business owner looking to get people to find your website by searching on Google, the process of getting your business on the first page of local search results is a relatively easy process. The hard part about SEO is if you are trying to compete nationally. That’s because when you’re searching for a generic product or website, you don’t add a location into your search terms. When you’re looking for something locally, you naturally add your location (town/city/region/neighborhood) to your search. If you owned a dry cleaning business, getting it on to the first page of Google (or any of the search engines) is hard to do under the search term, “dry cleaner.” But, getting that same business to show up under “dry cleaner in downtown Poughkeepsie” is much less difficult.

By understanding the right words to add into your business website pages, page titles, and meta-description, you should be able to rank high locally in Google and the other search engines in a short amount of time (a few weeks). The key for the local business owner is to know what keywords to utilize and where they should be placed. What should your “keywords” be? Ask a few friends and family members what phrase they would use if they were searching for the product/service you sell. If I were looking for a dry cleaner in downtown Poughkeepsie, I would type in the obvious phrase, “dry cleaner in downtown Poughkeepsie.”

1. Be sure that the phrase “dry cleaner downtown Poughkeepsie” is located multiple times on your home page and throughout your business website.
2. Be sure the phrase “dry cleaner downtown Poughkeepsie” is located in your business website page titles.
3. Be sure the phrase “dry cleaner downtown Poughkeepsie” is located in your page description.

If you only do those three things, you’re going to have done more than many of your competitors and put yourself at a big advantage when it comes to appearing on the first page of Google and the other search engines. There are obviously many other techniques that can be done that are beyond the scope of this guide, but by just doing the three steps mentioned above, you’ll have given your business website it’s first big boost for appearing on the first page of the search engines.

This is Part 4 of Creating a Business Website.

Part 1 | Keep it Simple
Part 2 | Don’t Go Alone
Part 3 | Think Like Them
Part 4 | Get Clicks!

In a struggling economy, it seems obvious that the best course of action for any business that wants to expand, or indeed survive, is to look at markets outside of their local website area. Not only does export open up your product to a larger number of consumers, but it also protects you from the whim of a single currency’s fluctuations.

So if we take it for granted that exporting is a sensible business strategy, and that the Internet is by far the most cost-effective method of international website marketing and trade, then all that remains is to decide how exactly to target foreign language markets online through your website.

It may seem like a sensible option prima facie to create website targeted by language, rather than individual localized sites for each country; after all, English is the official or primary language of more than 50 countries, Spanish is the official language in 15 countries, and 29 countries are Francophone — surely it makes a lot more sense to simply create one website for each language and be done with it?

Unfortunately, this isn’t the case.

Optimizing Your Website Search Engine Results

For starters, it will be a considerable boost to your website search engine rankings if your localized sites have a local top-level domain (TLD) — such as .de or .fr — and are hosted on service providers in the target country. So if a French web surfer searches for [librairie Paris] and you’re running a online bookshop with a .fr TLD hosted in France, then you’ll be much more likely to turn up in the French search results.

This isn’t always possible or financially feasible, though, so Google also provides a website geotargeting tool that allows you to set the location of your website in line with the relevance of its content. If your French online bookshop is hosted in China, you can now set your geolocation in Google Webmaster Tools as France, and your website will be more likely to appear in specifically French web searches (but not searches conducted in French-speaking Africa or Canada). This also works if you have country or language specific subdomains off your main site, as you can geotarget individual subdomains to specific countries.

Website Differences in Dialects

Perhaps more important than the domain names, though, is the fact that not all languages are the same across countries. For instance, think of the list of differences between U.K. and U.S. English — everything from whether to use an “s” or a “z,” or if there’s a “u” in color, to whether pants are worn on the outside, and whether “tabling a motion” means you’re proposing it for, or removing it from, consideration.

It’s not only English that can change dramatically between countries.

The Spanish spoken in Spain is vastly different from Latin American Spanish, and then there are the differences in dialects of Latin American Spanish between, say, Mexico, Peru, and the Dominican Republic. Not to mention that in Spain you can choose between four recognized regional languages (Aranese, Basque, Catalan/Valencian, and Galician) depending on which region of the country you’re focusing on.

And that’s not even bringing in the regional differences between Chinese dialects, or the French spoken in France and that spoken in Quebec, or in Francophone African nations.

Cultural Website Differences

Besides the differences between regional dialects of international languages, there are also the cultural differences between countries to consider, in both your manner of writing marketing copy and also your way of approaching the sales process (do your customers prefer buying items on a individual basis, or do they like value bundle packs?).

For instance, making reference to chat show philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy in your website for French Canada will likely draw a blank with your target audience. That’s still better than referencing “poutine” on your French website, though — people will likely think you’ve misspelled a curse word, which is embarrassing on more than one level.

Getting the right mix of appropriate tone and cultural reference is essential for creating a bond of trust with customers. You can’t achieve that level of specificity with a website if you’re trying to appeal to the inhabitants of more than 10 countries at once.

Therefore, your best option is to create a localized website for every country you wish to sell in. The next step after that is to optimize you website for the most popular search engine in each country, but that’s a topic for discussion next month.

This free tutorial covers everything you need to know to get started improving your search engine rankings in the major search engines. Put simply, this is the resource I would have kicked a fool in order to get my hands on when I was first diving into the wild world of Search Engine Optimization.

The New Beginner’s Guide to SEO

Free

The Beginner’s Guide won’t cost you a dime. It is free to read, download and otherwise devour. (Be careful about paper cuts! E-paper cuts are the worst kind of paper cuts.) Think SEO