Based on comments from a number of website owners and people who were unfortunate enough to have had bad experiences with SEO consultants, I believe that many potential clients are doubtful of the value of SEO to their businesses.

No doubt this stigma attached to SEO has arisen from consultants who:

1. Sell themselves as SEO experts but have little knowledge or understanding or
2. Use 'black hat' or dubious techniques to increase their clients ranking or
3. Promise more than they can deliver or
4. Hide behind SEO being a 'black art' rather than a process or
5. Claim for more hours than they spend.

This bad perception of SEO does little to help the SEO professionals who do not fit into any of the categories above.

How then can we change this perception?  Is there some way of exposing the fraudulent SEO practitioners? Do we need to create a new name for SEO? or is it all about educating the client base?

Everyone who has an insight into SEO has an opinion as to what are the best 5 things you can do to improve your Search Engine ranking.  I believe that any top 5 must not be absolute and should be defined in relation to the family of sites that are under consideration. For example, the top 5 SEO techniques for newly launched private web sites will be very different from the top 5 for well established sites in a very competitive business market.

Why the top 5 and not top 10, 20 or more? I believe that optimisation should be done in bite sized chunks and 5 is my 'bite size'. So, these are my top 5 techniques for newly launched sites (Part 1). In subsequent articles, I will provide part 2 for new sites and will deal with other families of web site.

Before you start...

Before you can optimise any page on a site, you need to spend some time deciding which words or phrases you want the to achieve a high ranking on. Don't only think about single words, think about search phrases because people search on phrases and it is easier to rank on phrases than individual words. Try to find 3 or 4 phrases for each page.

Top 5 techniques (New Web Sites - Part 1)

Use the title tag

While tags are not directly visible and there is a lot of debate over the use of keyword tags, the title tag is one of the most important components on the web page. The title tag is visible as the heading on the browser tag and the title tag is used by search engines to determine the topic of the page. Make sure that the title tag is distinct for each page on the site and ensure that the title tag is pertinent to the content on the page. Also, make sure that your most important keyword is included in the title tag.

Optimise your page content

The content on the page contains the words that search engines will use to index the site and to determine a ranking for the page in terms of these words. Consequently the relevance of the words, the word frequency, the proximity of different words to each other and msot important the position of the words on the page are factors that need to be considered when developing content for the page.  While it is important to develop your content with these factors in mind, you should not optimise your pages for search engines, they must be optimised for your target audience.

Don't put too much information on the page

If your page gets too long, split it. Think of the page as a container. If you keep the contents of each container clearly defined, it will be much easier to find what you want in all your containers. The same applies for search engines.  If you find that it is difficult to restrict yourselt to only 4 key phrases, and you feel that you need more key terms or phrases then it is likely that you have too much on the page.  Too much information is likely to dilute your key messages which then may lead to a lower ranking for all your key terms.

Include links to and from your site

Include links to authorative sites from your page where this is pertinent. Also try to get yous site referenced from other sites.  However be careful not to use link farms of dubious sites that are prepared to link to you. You could even be penalised if you have too many 'bad sites' that link to your page. The value of the incoming link is only as good as the site that the link is coming from, so try to get authorative links. One approach to getting good links is to write articles or blogs on other unrelated sites and to reference (link back) your page from these articles or blogs. Bear in mind, when you link out from your page, you sould set the target to a new page so that you do not take your reader away from your page.

Avoid any black-hat techniques

Developing page content primarily for search engines is likely to lead to black hat techniques. Black hat techniques include repeating words too often (keyword stuffing or keyword spamming); invisible text on the page containing keywords; fake pages that transfer the user to some unintended location. Don't be tempted by black hat techniques because these can penalise of disqualify a site from the major search engines.

Every company, society, club or even individual now wants to have a web presence. Setting up a basic site can be quick, easy and cheap (if you want a static site). All this is fine until you want to be found on the web. This is where Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) comes into the frame.
 

There are some basics of SEO that can be achived as a DIY job and there are various tools on the web that can help to achieve this. This initial SEO can be cheap costing the webmaster only his time and effort and the initial rewards can be quite good.

...but herein lies the problem... If everyone is trying to improve their ranking and if this is cheap and easy then most site owners will put in the time and the effort to do the initial optimisation. Basic SEO then becomes the norm and you have to at least meet the these basics before you can improve your ranking.

So, if you want to improve further, you have to use more advanced tools and techniques to climb the search engine ranking ladder but other people will also be competing for these rankings and will be doing the same thing and as soon as they see their ranking dropping, they will do something to further optimise their site. I think you can see where I am going...

Search Engine Optimisation is a competition, you have to understand your competitors, you have the best tools available to you at the time, you have to spend the time to improve, you need to monitor your performance and most important you have to see this as a competition and you have to have the will to win!

This is what the group "More than SEO" on LinkedIn is all about. The group doesn't preclude basic SEO, but it builds on the basics to advise those that WANT TO SURVIVE ON THE WEB.

All too often businesses choose a static web site because it is easy to find a designer to create the site; static sites are generally quite cheap; and turn around time for creating a static site is usually quite short. Often the new start-up company doesn't even need to pay much for a tailored design because the standard designs offered by the static site developers are usually quite good. So you add a logo, choose some colours and away you go.

So why are static sites cheap and why are there so many vendors out there? On of the primary factors is the software available to people for creating static sites. Most of the available software packages are extremely powerful and are easy to use. The user can quickly learn to create a site with little or now knowledge of programming or of the web building blocks like HTML and CSS not to mention programming languages like PHP or JavaScript etc. So to become a static site designer, the person only has to purchase the software or find some free software (like Netobjects Fusion 10) and go on a short 1-2 day course. Then a bit of trial and error and yet another static site developer can offer their services at a very good rate.

As a customer, this has to sound great, cheap, quick off the mark and a site looks good. So everyone is happy, what could be the problem?

To answer this, first you need to consider what the purpose of a web site is. There are many answers to this, but some of the main reasons must be: to advertise your business on the internet; to be found on search engines; and to communicate product information, company news etc. to customers or prospective customers. So far so good, the static site looks great on day 1 and meets all these criteria. However, 'static' means you can't change the content on the site without going back to the developer. So every time you want to make a change you need to pay the developer. Usually this is the same developer who created the site because the developer wants to hold onto your business and ties you in by keeping the code, so you can't get someone else to update the site for you. The developer effectively owns your site, you are stuck with your developer and you have to pay for any changes.

Next you discover that you aren't featuring very well in searches (i.e. your site does not appear on the first page of the main search engines). When you explore this further you discover the art of SEO (search engine optimisation) and the importance of relevant content, good keywords and appropriate meta data. You discover that content needs to be up to date and that you need to continually make small changes the information on your pages. You will no doubt come across software like CreatorSEO (http://www.creatorseo.com) that point you in the right SEO direction and identify changes to the meta data and to the keywords. Also, this software analyse your competitors to find out why they rank better on the search engines and the changes you need to make to your content to compete better. So you have to go to the developer again. You then find that the changes will be delayed because the developer has to maintain hundreds of these cheap sites to break even. So your changes are in a queue and you are at the mercy of the developer. Of course you may be able to pay to get a quicker turn-around on any changes or to jump the queue.

I think that you may be getting the picture now... the cheap static site is not so cheap anymore and more importantly, it does not serve your needs as well as it should unless of course you want a site that is no more than a static advertising board for your business.

A solution presents itself in the form of a dynamic site, also known as a content management systems (or CMS). In it's simplest form, a content management system allows you easily and quickly to manage the content of your web pages. The developer is needed only in the initial implementation of the site to create the overall structure, layout and style. Thereafter you are in control. You can make changes directly by logging in to the site mad making changes that will be immediately visible to anyone visiting the site. There are a large number of content management systems available like Joomla, Drupel and CreatorWWW (http://www.creatorwww.com) that can be configured to meet any site design.

The creation and implementation of the site will be relatively more expensive than a static site because the developer has to do more work. There are database tables to set up on the host computer and the developer needs to have a good understanding of the building block of the web, like HTML, style Sheets (CSS). The developer also needs to have a knowledge of the programming language used to drive the content management system if he or she is to be able to configure the site to meet your needs. However, the good news is that once the site is in place, you can take ownership of the site and the content and can influence the effectiveness of your web for reaching your customers.

In short, my advice to you is that think twice before paying for a static site. It is always better to pay a little more initially for a dynamic site and then take control of your site.

Cost of ownership is not always what it seems at first sight - is it?

Does submitting to Google effect your rankings negatively?

If it does why is it not used to gain a competitive advantage: submit your  competitors?


JR