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Monday, March 16, 2009
search engine rankings
Not checking your Search Engine Rankings is like entering a competition and not knowing if you won it or not. You can’t know how well you’ve done if you don’t check this. And if you don’t know where you came in the competition you won’t know what to do to improve you performance for the next competition you enter. get the rest here...
Monday, March 9, 2009
Sunday, March 8, 2009
twitter and consultancy
twitter is a great place to build links to your consultancy business. Try it
Friday, March 6, 2009
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Why should I optimise my website?
Most people who market their products and services on the internet know that you need to optimise your content. Although few people really understand the process of how to do this.
There is a lot talk about the ‘mysteries’ of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Sadly, many SEO companies exploit the ignorance of those who don’t know any better. The simple truth is that the search engines (like Google and Yahoo) have never published how their engines work so no one, really knows exactly what they use to ‘rate’ your site. Although through research we can make (and many have made) accurate estimations.
It is important to point out that your website itself is not ‘rated’. Websites themselves are not searched by search engines. It is relevant content that the engines search for. If you look at when Google last crawled your website you will see that each page was visited at a different time. This suggests that it was not your site that was searched as a whole but relevant content.
Much of what is known about SEO has been learned by testing and experimenting. There is relatively little authoritative knowledge published on it. You can develop your own learning on it without spending lots of money on consultants to teach you.
Bear in mind that most SEO experts will not be writing your salescopy or web content for you. Nor will they be able to do many of the other things you can do yourself or get a knowledgeable friend to help you with.
The founders of Google were meticulous in the way that they set the systems they use to work with respect for content and relevance for what searchers are looking for. So they expect your pages to have quality content which includes a meaningful title and description that they can index to help the searchers.
Meaningful page titles, descriptors and keywords in the Meta tag areas of all pages is really important. There is also a citation aspect is also relevant since the more sites that link to your site the better. This is premised on the on the idea that if other content on the internet links to your content it is likely to be because your content is valued by the linking content.
However it’s also worth considering that the value of the site that links to your content is ‘weighted’. That is, links from highly reputable sites such as universities or highly respected authors and publishers are valued more highly than those of lesser repute. Content with high volumes of visiting ‘traffic’ are also considered of higher value (by virtue of their popularity with searchers) than those with low levels of traffic.
You need to put your keywords in the meta tags fields of you page. If you do this and you include them in your page then this will be found by the search engines. However, if you use them in you meta tags but then fail to use them in the content of your page then a search engine will be confused and may will and may not index it at all. This means that it is counter-productive to try to ‘con’ the search engines by pretending that your content is about one thing when it is really about something else. In other words you cannot cheat by using one set of words in the Meta tags and then write about something entirely different.
For example, if you think that planting lots of keywords on a page at random will make Google like you then you’ve got it wrong – it won’t. In the early days of the internet people used to try and trick the search engines by hiding keywords in their pages so that only the search engine could see them (like making them the same colour as the background and therefore invisible to the human eye but visible to the search engines) and thereby trick visitors into coming to their site. Another trick was to keep repeating the same keywords over and over. Today search engines are a lot smarter and will disqualify your page and/or site if you try this. Don’t get disqualified as it is hard to get re-qualified again.
Write good content that stays within the rules and you’ll be rewarded. Linking this to a few simple rules such as Keyword placement and proximity is the heart of SEO. You don't really need a highly paid SEO expert to do this; it just needs to be part of your regular writing of web copy.
Tip: a great system that helps you optimise your site whicle you actually build it is the Bebiz Business Builder. Go here to find out about it
If you are interested in getting more marketing ideas like this then take a look at the ones here … at http://www.startaconsultancy.com/articles.html
There is a lot talk about the ‘mysteries’ of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Sadly, many SEO companies exploit the ignorance of those who don’t know any better. The simple truth is that the search engines (like Google and Yahoo) have never published how their engines work so no one, really knows exactly what they use to ‘rate’ your site. Although through research we can make (and many have made) accurate estimations.
It is important to point out that your website itself is not ‘rated’. Websites themselves are not searched by search engines. It is relevant content that the engines search for. If you look at when Google last crawled your website you will see that each page was visited at a different time. This suggests that it was not your site that was searched as a whole but relevant content.
Much of what is known about SEO has been learned by testing and experimenting. There is relatively little authoritative knowledge published on it. You can develop your own learning on it without spending lots of money on consultants to teach you.
Bear in mind that most SEO experts will not be writing your salescopy or web content for you. Nor will they be able to do many of the other things you can do yourself or get a knowledgeable friend to help you with.
The founders of Google were meticulous in the way that they set the systems they use to work with respect for content and relevance for what searchers are looking for. So they expect your pages to have quality content which includes a meaningful title and description that they can index to help the searchers.
Meaningful page titles, descriptors and keywords in the Meta tag areas of all pages is really important. There is also a citation aspect is also relevant since the more sites that link to your site the better. This is premised on the on the idea that if other content on the internet links to your content it is likely to be because your content is valued by the linking content.
However it’s also worth considering that the value of the site that links to your content is ‘weighted’. That is, links from highly reputable sites such as universities or highly respected authors and publishers are valued more highly than those of lesser repute. Content with high volumes of visiting ‘traffic’ are also considered of higher value (by virtue of their popularity with searchers) than those with low levels of traffic.
You need to put your keywords in the meta tags fields of you page. If you do this and you include them in your page then this will be found by the search engines. However, if you use them in you meta tags but then fail to use them in the content of your page then a search engine will be confused and may will and may not index it at all. This means that it is counter-productive to try to ‘con’ the search engines by pretending that your content is about one thing when it is really about something else. In other words you cannot cheat by using one set of words in the Meta tags and then write about something entirely different.
For example, if you think that planting lots of keywords on a page at random will make Google like you then you’ve got it wrong – it won’t. In the early days of the internet people used to try and trick the search engines by hiding keywords in their pages so that only the search engine could see them (like making them the same colour as the background and therefore invisible to the human eye but visible to the search engines) and thereby trick visitors into coming to their site. Another trick was to keep repeating the same keywords over and over. Today search engines are a lot smarter and will disqualify your page and/or site if you try this. Don’t get disqualified as it is hard to get re-qualified again.
Write good content that stays within the rules and you’ll be rewarded. Linking this to a few simple rules such as Keyword placement and proximity is the heart of SEO. You don't really need a highly paid SEO expert to do this; it just needs to be part of your regular writing of web copy.
Tip: a great system that helps you optimise your site whicle you actually build it is the Bebiz Business Builder. Go here to find out about it
If you are interested in getting more marketing ideas like this then take a look at the ones here … at http://www.startaconsultancy.com/articles.html
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