Search Engine Optimisation Guide

A very brief and basic guide to search engines, websites and generally helping the two to get along nicely.

Search engines such as Google will always try to serve up what is the most relevant website or page to a particular search term. So, for example, somebody searching online for ‘Rugby Union Fixtures’ it’s not surprising that the following sites rank highly:

• http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_union/default.stm
• http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_union/fixtures/default.stm
• http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/rugbyunion/fixtures/6501865/Rugby-Union-Fixtures.html

There are a number of factors that contribute to getting a website or particular web page to perform well in the search engines, to name a few:

Accessibility

How easily or quickly a site be easily scanned and read by the search engines?

To help illustrate this, click here to see how a search engine, such as Google sees a well optimised website. You’ll notice that all the frills and images are completely stripped out, leaving only the text. However, it is still easy to see that this web page is specifically about Gardening.

Flash based websites = Bad SEO

Compare this to a site built using Flash, such as ‘Get the Glass’.

Sites built in Flash are very difficult for search engines to read and decipher what information they hold, and more importantly, when to show these pages to someone searching for a particular word or phrase.

Support for Flash based sites is (thankfully) on the decline, helped in no small part by the popularity of Apple’s iPhone and iPad, neither of which support Flash.

In short – the easier you make it for search engines to access the content of your website, the greater the chances are of it being found by the right people.

Relevance

How relevant is a particular web page to the theme or topic it is trying to be found for? Using the Rugby example above, part of the reason that Google decides to show those particular sites to people searching for ‘Rugby Union Fixtures’ is because they’re all very relevant to that particular term.

Links

Inbound links coming in from other sites to your site all count as votes and help push it up the rankings. Generally speaking, the more votes (links) a site has the more trusted and correct it’s content is seen to be by the search engines. In turn, a vote (or link) from a strong, trusted site counts for more than that from a small, unknown site.

The better quality the site that links to you, the more valuable the link.

How to Remove a Page From Google’s Index

Most sites will have pages that their owners would rather were kept out of the public domain, e.g. expired or seasonal offers, obsolete products, pages under construction etc.

So, what do you do if you discover just such a page showing up in Google, that you’d really rather wasn’t there?  Fortunately, the answer’s easy – but it requires a Google Webmaster Tools account.

Log into your Google Webmaster Tools account and navigate to:

Site Configuration >> Crawler Access >> Remove URL

Now click the grey ‘new removal request’ button, and enter the exact URL of the page you want to remove from Google’s index, then click ‘continue’.

Now you will have a drop-down with 3 options:

• Remove page from search results and cache
• Remove page from cache only
• Remove directory

My Site’s Vanished from Google!?

After launching an all new, redesigned eCommerce site for JBA Seed Potatoes at the end of last week I received the call that every SEO dreads…

“My site’s disappeared from Google?!”

More specifically, it was only the homepage that had vanished since the relaunch.  Cue a Friday night, 8pm panic Skype meeting between Client (JBA), SEO (me), Lead Designer (Kit @ Kit Allen) and Lead Developer (Nick @ LinkCentre).  After sifting through all the code we spotted a load of notes left by Paul (aka Yabba), the previous, twisted genius of a programmer who tragically and very sadly passed away half-way through the development.

Within his notes we found a load of ranting and swearing (all at himself whilst he was working his way through building the site!) and made the assumption that Google must have crawled the page, found all this, assumed the page had been hacked and dropped it from the search results.

After tidying up the source code and resubmitting the page to Google (along with a very grovelling re-submission request) we all left it at that.

Roll forward a couple of days and we all decided to take a fresh look at it – just in case there was anything else it might possibly be, and BANG – there it was.

Eight lines into the source and as clear as day:

<meta name=”robots” content=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” />

Or, to put it another way – that’s a message to Google/Yahoo/Bing (and all the other search engines out there) along the lines of:
“Go away, don’t read me, don’t index me and don’t bother checking out any of the links I’ve got either.  Go on, off you trot!”

30 seconds later and we’re now just waiting for Google to re-crawl the site, re-index the home page and (with any luck) sit it back on top of the results for ‘Seed Potatoes’ again.

If ever there was a stern reminder of just how powerful Robots.txt can be (and why it should be treated with extreme caution!), this is it.

Checklist for New Website Owners

Setting up a new website?  Here’s an ever growing list of essential online tools that will make your life much, much easier:

Google Analytics

Who are your users?  How did they find your website?  What pages did they visit?  Did they buy from you?  The answers are all available in Google Analytics, and better yet… it’s completely free!

Google Webmaster Tools

Seeing your website from Google’s perspective helps you to quickly identify any errors, broken links, missing Meta tags and more, and yet again… it’s free!

Google Places

Do you offer a local service?  If so, make sure your company and site is listed with Google Places.

Shoot The Hippo

Is Your Company’s Hippo Holding You Back?

Whilst tidying up the website analytics page today I was reminded of something I heard a couple of years ago at an Online Xcellence event in Glasgow, and it went along the lines of this:

Unlike almost any other form of advertising media, internet marketing provides the evidence of what’s working, and what’s not – everything that happens is backed up with facts.  There is no more guessing required about how many people saw, or clicked onto your ad, or what percentage of people that clicked, your ad, then went on to convert / buy from you.  Yet, it still appears to be the case that, all-too-often, fact is over-ruled by the opinion of the highest paid person that’s involved with the website project.  Whilst most director or senior manager will (usually) have a wealth of knowledge and experience regarding their products, markets, customers and trends, when dealing with data, analytics and decision making – these otherwise vital traits, count for nothing.

In most cases, these ‘Highest Paid Person’s Opinions‘ (lovingly dubbed ‘HIPPO’s‘ for short), are costing their company a fortune, every week/month/year in both wasted advertising spend and missed opportunity – purely because they make strategic changes and decisions about their website based on nothing other than their own thoughts or ideas.

These decisions are often backed up with words like “gut feeling”, “seat of the pants”, “I think” and “I just feel…”.  In many cases, research is either not carried out, or in the worst cases, ignored completely.

Anyone that bases a strategic decision regarding their website on the basis of “I just feel…” will hold back the progress of that site’s success for as long as they ignore what is right under their nose.  Data, and facts.

Spend time testing, not guessing

Your website’s analytics data will tell you ‘exactly’ what pages, products or services are performing well, or not, on your site.  Once you’ve identified a need for change (poorly performing pages or keywords being a good place to start looking for changes), the next stage is to test different things, until you find the one that works best.

You can test almost anything using a standard A/B split test – different prices, colours, offers, messages and calls to action, shapes sizes, fonts, you name it.

The most important thing isn’t so much ‘what’ you test, but ‘that’ you test.

Making decisions based on guesswork, gut instinct or “I just feel…” (you may have noticed I suffer from a fairly substantial phobia of that particular phrase,  “I just feel…”), is as effective as pulling the name of a racehorse out of a hat and then betting your monthly advertising budget on it.  It’s a complete stab in the dark, which more times than not will end up in failure.

Learning how to get the best out of your web analytics will empower you to make strong, informed decisions based on data, facts and evidence – surely that’s the way forward?

Are your keywords even worth ranking for?

A new client that I’ve recently begun working with happened to show me their latest SEO report that’d just arrived from the web design/developers that have been looking after their online marketing for the past 18 months or so (since their site was launched).

The report was a typical ‘here’s a list of 10 keywords that we’re getting you to rank for, and here’s where they’re ranking amongst all these other gazillions of competing pages’.

Great, nothing out of the ordinary so far.

However, a quick bit of digging showed that from this list of 10 keywords, there was a total of 91 estimated UK monthly searches *.  A situation made even worse by the fact that of those 91 est. searches – all of them were for a single term – the company’s own brand name.

“Why would you effectively pay good money, on a regular basis, to advertise your brand in a magazine with zero readers..?“

This is one of those unfortunate scenarios that comes up time and time again when a website is investigated.

Make sure that your website is targeting the right keywords – contact us at the Avalanche for a free consultation and get on board.

* Keyword Research results c/o Google & Wordtracker