by Shane McDonald | Aug 14, 2012 | Personal, Search Engine Optimisation
The traffic to the site is now 1,000 visitors up PER DAY, over the same daily periods in the first 6 months of the year. In the months Jan to June I was getting about 1,800 visitors per day to the site and I put this down to my lapse in frequent blogging and a reduction in updates to the site. This follows on from the Panda and other updates from Google in recent months and I was sure I was affected.
In July I decided to start blogging more and updating the site more frequently. I uploaded a few blog posts in July. This seemed to work very quickly and early August traffic seemed to indicate very high spike in traffic and no apparent reason. Could this be down to the updates and more frequent blog posts?
I will wait and see – but for now I will not be resting on laurels and will be updating the blog on an ongoing basis to ensure this new gain of traffic is not lost !
by Shane McDonald | Aug 13, 2009 | Internet & Technology
This is the second post regarding tips and tricks you can use to improve your search engine optimization.
1 – Creating a Useful Web Presence
If you can create a useful web presence then you will be default get some good traffic. More and More, Google is moving towards natural searching patterns, so if an article is written for the audience (people) rather thank being stuffed with keywords aimed at search engines, keeping visitors in mind, then it should do well.
2 – Update your site often
Keep the site well updated, don’t let any content go out of date – this will ensure that your site will not be ignored by the search engines. One trick is to update your site with relevant breaking news or related topics as soon as possible – for example, one email company used Google alerts and on a day when GMail went down, their site was updated within minutes saying “Fed up with GMail Outages – Buy our Email Solution” – this was reflected in their Google AdWords campaigns and showed how an opportunity in their business field was taken advantage of.
3 – The Right Content
Wherever possible try to create sticky content. Sticky Content, or having a sticky site, refers to how longe people will stay on your site. If you can write articles greater than 250 words (some people say 600 words), but which are relevant, well written and “solve the search” for the visitor, then you have ticked off another box for your SEO.
For Example, if you have a Spa website and you are trying to sell Facials, you could list all the facials you currently provide, on your products page. However you could write some articles on why facials are good for the skin, what facials suit certain skin types and perhaps even how to make a homemade facial scrub with oatmeal …. none of this will earn you money though. What you are trying to do is to bring in visitors, this leads to brand awareness and ultimately conversions.
Articles are a great way to supplement your website and enhance what people know about your business.
4 – Making the Site Social
Social Media is a buzzword we now all know. One way to get your website out there is to provide a widget (or button) on your site, which allows people to share your websites link or content. This means your website address, blog post or a snippet of your content, can be sent by email, posted on Facebook or Tweeted on Twitter all for free … and you don’t have to do anything. Just place a button on each page of your site and this can all happen. There are a few major providers, but I found that Add This (www.addthis.com) is best. Visit the site for more information.
5 – Most Important – Don’t try anything stupid
People often try stupid tricks – these are called Black Hat SEO Tricks. These include;
– Keyword stuffing : placing lots of keywords in the text and meta data
– Cloaking : a script which trys to trick the search engines
– Invisible Text : Making the text the same as the background color
– Doorway pages : Invisible pages which try to get the site indexed
SEO requires patience, planning, and monitoring. If you use some SEO keywords and descriptions which bring you a large increase in traffic, you may try to improve on this but changing them further, but a good tip is to retain the old files incase the SEO changes backfire, you can always revert to the last most successful campaign. Try to record your visitor levels and your levels of sales (if you are a business site), in that way you can choose the best SEO combination which produces the best sales from your website.
by Shane McDonald | Jul 17, 2009 | Internet & Technology, Search Engine Optimisation
Everyone wants to be #1 on Google, #1 on Yahoo and #1 on MSN. Years ago when the internet started to become popular and search engines were not as clever as they are now, getting to No. 1 for lets say the search term SEO on a search engine was easy. You did this…
<meta name="keywords" content="SEO, SEO, SEO, SEO Optimisation, SEO Tips, SEO Advice, SEO tricks, SEO, SEO" />
… basically you crammed the keywords into your website and you got good listings on search engines. Sometimes the keywords might go on for 1,000 characters or more – This is Keyword Stuffing!
These days, if you spam keywords (also called keyword stuffing), you can expect a backlash – your site will either be banned or be penalised.
Here are 5 primary tips on how you can improve your websites search engine positioning;
- Update your website regularly – regular website updates ensure that your content is always fresh and also shows the search engines that this content is being maintained. You will find that sites which are updated more regularly get visited more by the spiders.
- Write Original Content – NEVER, copy content from another website. Always write your own content as Google does not like duplicated content. Write the content with the customer or website visitor in mind. Also when naming your website files, don’t call the pages page1.html, page2.html – if it is a page for SEO Tips and Advice, then call the page good-SEO-tips.html so if your website is www.shanes-seo-tips.com your page will be at www.shanes-seo-tips.com/good-SEO-tips.html and not www.shanes-seo-tips.com/page2.html – as this can hel your SEO also.
- Include Good Meta data – On each page have a unique TITLE, DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDS. The content of these meta tags should identify the content on your website. Choose good Title and Description tags. If you are stuck, try use the first few lines of the pages content as a guide and reduce it to about 200-230 characters. Keep the Title at a length of 50 – 80 characters.
3(b). Include ALT Text – for each image used on your website, include ALT Text, which means when a user hovers over an image or indeed if an image does not load, descriptive text will appear, describing the contents of the image which did not load. Include a keyword or two in your ALT text where possible. - Generate a SiteMap – Include a text based site map on your site, which means the search engine robots can navigate your website and index all your pages. Site maps can be in XML format or in HTML – avan better if you can include both.
- Check your site – This is a simple thing but often overlooked. Check your website for spelling errors, HTML Errors, Broken Links, Server Side Includes (SSI) which are not loading, Images which are not loading.
Before you implement these on your site…
(1) make a backup of your site – if you mess up the meta data, better going back to something which works rather than starting from scratch.
and
(2) record your current positions in search engines – that way you can measure your success rates, e.g. we were in position 56 last week and now we are at position #11 for the keyword “SEO Advice”. Keep monitoring your progress. Eventually this progress will slow down and you may need to implement some more advanced SEO techniques.
The tips above are all suited to those who have a basic knowledge of HTML syntax and are aimed at websites which have little or no SEO work done on them.
If you require a basic HTML introduction, leave a post with your comments and I will upload one.
Tips for Organic SEO #2 will appear on the blog soon – bookmark the tab “Search Engine Optimization” on this site.
The tips above have been used on many sites before and are known to work – however I accept no responsibility for anyones individual implementation or incorrect implemetation of these tips – I know they work and I would be very surprised if they did not work on any website which has decent textual content and which has not been optimised previously.
