Introduction

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of increasing the organic visibility of a particular web page, video, image or place on any given search engine’s search results pages. Unlike other areas of search engine marketing (SEM) such as ‘paid search’, well executed SEO results in a ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ listing that is positioned in a ranked order depending on how well the thousands of variables within a search engine’s algorithm are satisfied.

Search engine algorithms consist of thousands of variables, many of which are completely unknown. Secrecy within a search engine’s algorithm plays a large role in limiting a person’s ability to exploit said algorithm to manipulate their own rankings. However a large portion of what is known can be broken down into two sections known as ‘on-page’ SEO and ‘off-page’ SEO.

On Page SEO Training

Introduction

On-page SEO encompasses a number of different areas that are all related to changes that you can make to your website. Adopting the appropriate on-page SEO techniques tells search engines exactly what your content is about and allows them to rank your website accordingly. Clear and well structured websites will rank higher in the ‘search engine results pages’ (SERP)s.

Think of on-page SEO as the building blocks for any SEO campaign. The first place search engines look is the website. They crawl every webpage (provided the internal link structure is correct) and look at a number of key areas – key areas that need to be optimised to tell the search engines exactly what you should be telling them.

Keyword Research

Conducting keyword research is the first step for any SEO campaign. Keyword research includes:

• Identifying traffic levels
• Examining the conversion rates
• Analysing SEO competition

Identifying Traffic Levels

There is a very simple way to see how much traffic a keyword term gets. Go to the Google Keyword Tool, type in the key phrase you are considering and filter for ‘exact matches’. This will give you a clear indication of monthly search levels. The tool will also give you suggestions which you can look into further, however for more indepth analysis, keyword research software must be used.

Examining the Conversion Rates

Traffic levels are not a be-all-and-end-all for deciding on what keywords to use in an SEO campaign. It is necessary to examine the possible conversion rates of the people that arrive at your site from the keyword you have looked at. For example, ranking #1 for ‘Internet Marketing’ will result in a huge influx of traffic; however the conversion rates will be significantly lower than if the keyword targeted was more specific. Finding a balance is important.

Analysing SEO Competition

Analysing potential competition requires a high level of understanding about SEO. It begins by taking a look at the broad competition very early on to ensure that the rest of the research isn’t going to result in time wasted because the keywords are too competitive. Again, professional software is used to make this process far more accurate, but generally speaking you can roughly identify competition levels by looking at the front SERP for the keyword in question. If you want to conduct an in-depth analysis without all of the technical know-how, I wrote this blog post on keyword competition analysis. For a more general overview, stick around on this page.

Obvious signals of competition levels:

1. PageRank

PageRank is a general measurement of a website’s authority and is rated on a scale of N/A to 10. N/A means that the website is not ranked which can be due to being banned from Google or much more commonly – from being a new website. The scale then runs up starting from 0. In general, a website with PageRank 4 and above is considered a strong authority. You can use this PageRank Checker to find out any webpage’s PageRank for free.

2. Content

At the moment, search engines can only read text. If a website uses a lot of flash, video or images then this content effectively appears blank to a search engine. If a website has a lot of text content and a lot of pages indexed and is also ranking at the top for a highly searched term – you can bet that it’s going to create some stiff competition. Not sure how many pages are indexed? Download an SEO tool bar plugin like this Chrome Extension. Of course this is a very basic analysis but will give you a rough idea of how competitive a market is.

Fun fact: PageRank was a term coined by Google and inspired by the founder, Larry Page. It does not technically refer to ‘page’ as in ‘webpage’!

Keyword Density

Keyword density is a myth that has somehow managed to survive for several years. It goes something like this:

KDi = TDi/WC x 100

Where:

KDi = Keyword density of term ‘i’
TDi = Total number of times keyword ‘i’ appears in document
WC = Word count of document

Webmasters would perfect their KDi to the 4% mark or some other magical number that a blogger decided was optimal. The idea behind this was that at a certain level, your document became as relevant as possible without raising ‘spam’ alarms.

This isn’t how it works

The above metric is an insult to any search engine! It suggests that Google or Bing’s algorithm for determining relevance looks only at KDi. If only it was that simple. KDi does not take into account the position or distribution of keyword terms; i.e. are the keywords positioned in context and are the keywords distributed naturally?

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More on this:

Semantics have replaced the KDi metric.

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Link Baiting

The term ‘link baiting’ literally means baiting people into linking to your content. Link baiting is most common amongst bloggers where they are able to write topical, informative, funny or controversial content that ‘baits’ others into linking to that content. Whilst link baiting works particularly well with dynamic pages such as blogs, it can also be used when writing very informative static pages. In many cases, attempting to create content that will work as link bait can be inappropriate and so the more casual use of a blog on your website can potentially lift this barrier.

Semantic Web & Synonyms

Semantic web makes up a component of the concept, Web 3.0. It involves the web understanding our behaviour and in this case, our search behaviour. For example, when you search for ‘Apple’, there is absolutely no way of search engines understanding if you mean the technology giant or the fairly innocuous fruit. This is where the context of search terms play a huge role in a search engine’s ability to understand what you are looking for. By simply searching ‘Apple computers’ instead of ‘Apple’, a search engine is able to understand, with almost 100% certainty, that you are searching for the Apple brand.

This certainty mentioned above is directly applicable for synonyms. Use synonyms when writing content because it gives search engines a clearer understanding of what the content is relevant to. If you use the same keyword over and over again, it’s always possible that the search engine has misunderstood the keyword. That slight risk makes it more difficult for a search engine to rank the webpage in the top spot as it potentially cannot say with statistical certainty that your webpage should be there.

Don’t just pick up a thesaurus. You want to find out what Google perceives as a synonym and it’s simple. Search in Google for the keyword but with the prefix of ‘~’. For example, if you keyword contains ‘business’, search for ‘~business’ and Google will bring back all the synonyms (highlighted in bold) of that keyword. This is what Google sees as synonyms and so should you! Take a look for yourself.

HTML Tags

There are certain technical aspects of on-page SEO that need to be understood if you want to optimise effectively. HTML tags include header tags (<h1>, <h2>, <h3> etc) and <title> tags as well as ‘alt’ tags and ‘title’ tags for images and links. In order of importance:

1. <title>

The <title> tag is the first thing a search engine looks at when identifying the content of a webpage. Each webpage should have a <title> tag that reflects what the content is about and should include keywords. A good <title> tag should feature the keywords first and include descriptive text – the keywords for SEO and the description for click-through rates (CTRs).

2. <h1>, <h2>, <h3> … <h_n>

Header tags separate the content of your webpage into different sections. The main header of your page should be wrapped in a <h1>header</h1> tag and the content written below this should then be relevant to the header. The <h2> and <h3> tags then follow; a good on-page structure is to use one <h1> tag and multiple <h2> tags within that content.

3. ‘alt’ tags and ‘title’ tags for images and links

Very useful in content to give images an ‘alt(ernative)’ text when the image cannot be loaded and also gives the picture some meaning in the eyes of a search engine. Adding ‘alt’ tags to all images can increase the relevance of the content of a webpage.

Can you use more than one h1/h2/h3 tag on a webpage?

A very common question asked is whether search engines (Google in particular) penalise or reward multiple <h1> tags. The answer is that yes, you can use more than one <h1> tag on a webpage and in many cases it is entirely appropriate. However Matt Cutts, a senior engineer at Google, advises that using <h1> for every heading won’t get you anywhere (see video below) – it’s better to use a proper heading structure like mentioned above.

How do you add an ‘alt’ and title tag?

When coding in HTML, you will want to add the ‘alt’ and title tags to the image code.

A very basic line of image code in HTML looks like this:

<img src=”http://www.image.com”>.

A line of image code with appropriate tags is:

<img src=”http://www.image.com” title=”image keyword” alt=”descriptive text of image with keyword”>.

The same can be applied to links:

<a href=”http://www.yourlink.com”>anchor text</a>

<a href=”http://www.yourlink.com” title=”link keyword”>anchor text</a>

Other than the SEO benefits, a title tag can explain a bit more about a link – put your mouse over me! (the same goes for images).

Note: ‘alt’ tags cannot be applied to link code.

URL Structure

There are many different ways of structuring URLs but there are only a few ways of optimising them. Having consistent relevance between <title> tags, header tags (<h1> etc) and URLs is very important for optimising any given page. If these are all very different from each other then it will send mixed signals to a search engine.

Examples of URL Structure

Don’t use URLs like:

http://www.yourdomain.com/35135&631

Do use URLs like:

http://www.yourdomain.com/your-clearly-spaced-keyphrase

Does it matter how deep the page URLs are?

http://www.yourdomain.com/first-level/second-level/your-clearly-spaced-keyphrase

Simply put the answer is no. If there is any negative impact it is practically negligible. When structuring URLs for ‘deep pages’ make sure that the pages (such as categories) in between the domain name and the page URL have relevant keywords.

Internal Link Structure

Creating links on your website that point to different pages is known as internal linking. It is essential to then structure this internal linking into something that:

• Allows search engine bots to efficiently crawl your entire website

Search engines can only index pages (place them in the SERPs) that get ‘crawled’ by the bots. Bots can only travel around webpages and discover new pages through links; therefore making sure every page is easily accessible is important. Top navigation and footer navigation is a good way of avoiding any difficulties with crawling.

• Allows users to efficient navigate your entire website
• Passes PageRank from one page to another

When link building with off-page SEO, a large proportion of links will end up pointing to http://www.yourdomain.com (as opposed to http://www.yourdomain.com/some-other-page). Because of this, a lot of PageRank is then directed towards your homepage. From here you want to make sure that this PageRank is distributed to other important pages such as sales and resource pages which will then help those small pages to rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). This requires an internal linking structure that focuses on the important pages of your website first (i.e. pages linked to from the homepage) and lesser pages second and third (i.e. pages linked to from deeper pages). It’s important, as an SEO best practice, to note that your site structure should be flat, with users being able to reach any part of your site through 3 or 4 clicks.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps are an essential part of any website’s internal link structure. By using the XML Sitemap Generator, you can easily create a free sitemap.xml file by simply entering your website’s URL. Once this has been created, you just need to upload the file to the root directory of your FTP i.e. http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml and then place a link to this in the footer of your website (it helps if your footer content is sitewide – it normally is). The sitemap will contain a simple structure of your website that is simple for a search engine bot to read and crawl – don’t forget to submit your sitemap.xml to Google Webmaster Tools (sign up if you haven’t already!).

How NOT to on-page SEO

• Duplicate content

Duplicate content won’t get indexed. If you copy content it will be moved to Google’s supplementary index where it will be held until it is deemed useful. The supplementary index is not accessible to you and I.

• Canonical URLs

http://smemarketing.com, http://www.smemarketing.com and http://www.smemarketing.com/index.php are all technically different pages. Make sure you have all of your links pointing to one page (keep it consistent!) and if possible, 301 redirect all of the other pages to the one page you want as your homepage. Notice how all of those links above redirect to http://www.smemarketing.com. Canonicalization is Google’s term for finding the most appropriate URL for a webpage – make it easy for them.

• Outbound Links

Be careful with outbound links. You’ll lose PageRank through them! When adding links that you don’t want to pass PageRank, add the rel=”nofollow” tag to them:

<a href=”http://www.outboundlink.com” rel=”nofollow”>anchor text</a>

• <title> Tag Repetition

Specify your <title> tags. Don’t use the same one throughout your website, by all means finish each <title> tag with your brand name or slogan, but make sure the first part of all webpage’s <title> tags are unique to that page’s content.

• Hidden text/links

Hiding links and text (i.e. making the font the same colour as the background) will get your website banned from Google. Don’t do it!

• Keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing on your own webpage isn’t going to get you anywhere. Follow the keyword density guidelines above to make sure you avoid wasting valuable SEO time!

Off-page SEO Training

Introduction

Unlike on page SEO, off page SEO requires continual maintenance and can be very time consuming. It involves many different strategies but the ultimate aim of any off page SEO is to get links pointing to your website. Think of off page SEO as a popularity contest – the more links that point to your webpages, the more ‘popular’ your webpages become. Google and other search engines like to rank content that is popular as popularity is positively correlated with usefulness and relevance; this results in a growth in ‘authority’. Search engines want to rank high authority websites above low authority websites because, if their algorithm is working correctly, high authority is a better signal of quality.

Of course gaining links off page is not always easy but there are many different ways of going about getting them. Here’s what you need to know:

Anchor text

You may have heard of the phrase ‘anchor text’. If you’ve ever seen a link that says click here then the anchor text of that link is ‘click here’. Anchor text is the crux of all off page SEO work that ever happens. The most important part of a link is the anchor text as this tells the search engines exactly what the link is about. Using keywords as a link’s anchor text is absolutely crucial when link building. As a general rule, the more links you have that are anchored with ‘your keyword’, the higher you will rank for that keyword.

How do you add anchor text to a link?

If you’re using a content management system (CMS) then there’s usually a hyper-link button. Simply select your keyword/keyphrase and click on the hyper-link button and fill out the URL.

If you’re working with HTML, the link will be coded like this:

<a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com”>anchor text</a>

oh, and don’t forget those title tags!

<a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com” title=”your keyword”>anchor text</a>.

Anchor Text Context

Using anchor text for your links is very important but that on its own won’t necessarily help much in terms of off page SEO. Search engines do not look at every word individually, they bring entire web pages together and attempt to understand the overall context of the content that is on there. If you were building links to a bakery, having your link surrounded by completely irrelevant context on a website that has nothing to do with bakery will do very little for your campaign. Where possible, surround your links with appropriate content that is relevant to the website you are linking to. In some cases you may only be able to have a short description following your link – in this case, make sure the description is concise and contains keywords, synonyms and relevant content to the link.

Article Submission

EzineArticles and GoArticles are a great place to start when it comes to article submission and building backlinks. By writing articles you have control over the content and therefore relevance of the webpage that your article is displayed on.

Article Submission Tips

• Include the keyword or parts of the keyphrase in the title of your article (make sure it makes sense or your article won’t be accepted).
• Feature your keyword along with synonyms of the keyword as much as possible without damaging readability. Don’t force synonyms or keywords, just make sure you think about them when writing your content and put them in naturally.
• Link your keyword/keyphrase to the website you are optimising at some point in the article.
• Articles can gain thousands of views from ranking well and can be a great source of traffic as well as a tool for SEO. Think about titling your articles with keywords that people might be searching for.

Directory Submission

Directories have existed since the dawn of the internet. They range from simple website directories to business directories and niche directories. Find directories that have categories relevant to your website and submit your URL to them. Finding directories is simple – either download a list or type this search term into Google:

KEYWORD directory “add url”

or

KEYWORD directory “suggest url”

i.e. business directory “add url”

Individual directories have limited value from an SEO point of view. If you are going to adopt a directory submission strategy, submitting to large quantities of directories is important. This can be time consuming and may require a directory submission service.

An exception to this rule is the Open Directory Project, also known as dmoz.org. The largest and most influential (free) directory on the internet (in terms of SEO), getting listed in dmoz.org can give your website a powerful boost to your campaign. Being ranked in dmoz.org takes time and you will need to make sure your website provides value and is submitted to the precise category. Not all links from dmoz.org carry authority and some very deep pages haven’t even been indexed in Google!

Satellite Sites

Creating websites is now easier than ever and adding content is a doddle. Buying up domains and hosting a simple website CMS such as WordPress on them takes no time at all. You can also create free websites from places such as Blogger.com that work just as well but aren’t as customisable. Now all you need to do is add relevant content to each website, link all of these ‘satellite sites’ together and then point them all to the appropriate pages via links. It’s a fairly abstract concept to understand – the diagram on the right shows a visualisation of a section of a very basic ‘link wheel’ strategy that incorporates at least 6 ‘satellite sites’. The impact of a basic link wheel like this can be almost negligible – make sure you populate the sites with useful, unique and quality content.

Social Bookmarking

A social bookmarking site is one where users submit URLs that are worthy of bookmarking. In many cases, a webpage that has been social bookmarked will have a link included. You can social bookmark any webpage that you like but many social bookmarking sites will reject content if it is not useful or appears spammy. Be selective with the webpages you bookmark, find ones that are interesting/funny/informative/topical/controversial as these tend to ‘stick’ the best and may also create some discussion. If you are adopting an article submission approach – remember to social bookmark these articles – it won’t directly give your website any PageRank, but it will pass some PageRank to your article which in-turn will be passed onto the webpage linked to from that article (albeit slightly diluted).

A free semi-automated browser-based tool for social bookmarking can be found at SocialMarker.com.

Deep Linking

By creating links that point to deeper pages on a website you are deep linking. For example if you created a link to http://www.yourdomain.com/this/is/a/very/deep/page then that would be classed as a deep link. Creating links that simply point to your home page can be extremely costly from a conversion point of view. Let’s take this example:

You search for a keyphrase like ‘web design’ and the first result you find takes you to a home page of an internet marketing company that has many different services (web design being one of them). This isn’t the content you were looking for. The ideal situation for user and for a website (from a conversion point of view) is to have that user taken straight to the web design page, i.e. http://www.yourdomain.com/services/web-design. Ranking deeper pages is absolutely necessary.

How do you rank deep pages?

Well simply by linking to them! Links can be both internal (on page) and external (off page) links that point to deeper pages within your website. This strategy is very important to adopt from an early stage; because if you spend the next 6 months link building purely for your home page then it’ll become more and more difficult to change what pages are found in the SERPs. It’s also a lot easier as you can target each deep page on your website to rank for a particular keyword and have all the relevant content, URL structure, <title> tags and header tags on that page – it’s a far better solution than trying to fit all of the keyword relevant content on just your home page!

Link Portfolio

Search engines want to rank websites at the top of the SERPs naturally. They don’t want to rank a website at the top of the SERPs simply because it has 5,000 inbound links all with the same keyword and all of them coming from the same place! Make sure you use all the different platforms available for building links and target many different keywords for many different deep pages (and also your home page). This will make your SEO campaign look far more natural and after all, natural rankings are exactly what the search engines are looking for!

How NOT to Off Page SEO

There are a lot of aspects of off page SEO that will be a complete waste of time. Certain changes and link building strategies can have absolutely no impact on your SEO campaign whatsoever and so they are absolutely worth avoiding:

Using Link Farms (100+ outbound links)

Web pages with hundreds of outbound links will be completely stripped of PageRank. Placing a link on a webpage like this will have absolutely no impact on your SEO campaign and neither will you get any direct traffic. Link farms were great about 10 years ago but not anymore.

Using ‘nofollow’

The rel=”nofollow” tag contained within a link means that the link will not be followed by a search engine bot. This means that you won’t pass (i.e. lose) any PageRank if you use a link like this on your own website but it also means you won’t gain any if you build a link that is ‘nofollow’.

A way to find out if a link is nofollow is by checking out the source code by either right clicking the link > inspect element; or pressing ctrl+u and then ctrl+f to find the link you’re after.

If you can see a link structured like this:

<a href=”http://www.alink.com” rel=”nofollow”>anchor text</a>

then, from an SEO point of view, steer clear.

Irrelevant Keyword Anchor Text

Ok, so irrelevant keyword anchor text will still pass on some PageRank but it won’t help a lot when it comes to ranking for particular keywords. Use the keywords that you’re targeting in your campaign as the anchor text of almost every link you build. Of course it may be that the words ‘click here’ or ‘buy now’ are used for links, but what’s important is that you don’t anchor a link to your Leicester dog training website as “London Fish Mongers”.

Google Places SEO

In Autumn 2010, Google made some drastic changes to the way Google places was presented in their SERPs. While before, Google Places had to be searched for separately from normal search, they now appear alongside the standard web results and at the very top! It’s now absolutely necessary for every company to have a Google Places account following the changes.

Why do Google Places results appear sometimes and sometimes not?

Google has a rough understanding of what search terms should display Google Places results. It still needs some ironing out but in general Google will understand that ‘flowers leicester’ is only going to be searched by people looking for a physical location. Other search terms are slightly more ambiguous – i.e. ‘SEO Leicester’ doesn’t currently have any places results, however the more specific term ‘SEO in Leicester’ does. The semantics of it aren’t quite there yet. For example a simple Google search for the keyword ‘Carols’ brought back a whole host of Google places results for restaurants and bars owned by someone called Carol. Needless to say the actual search query was in regards to a certain type of Christmas related singing and not for a local bar.

How do you optimise for Google Places?

A high ranking places page has a direct and positively correlated relationship with a high ranking website. Focusing your SEO work on your website will positively impact your Google Places optimisation. There are on page techniques for Google Places which includes filling out all of your categories correctly and accurately (with priority categories featuring first) and completely all the information to its fullest. Matt Cutts has also stated that positive reviews help ranking. And it’s not just Google Places reviews that reflect that; Google aggregates reviews from all across the Internet to get a more accurate picture whilst also dampening the impact of spiteful negative reviews from competitors. Find out how to leave a Google Places review.

Google has set up a separate section of Quality Guidelines that will help you to optimise your Places page.

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