But what is page ranking? And why does it consider link? Every SEO company and SEO consultant knows that every website has to establish their presence or visibility and importance, establishing the latter through page ranking therefore requires your website to have a considerable amount of websites linking to your website. This means that every website outside your website should will have to create a link pointing to your website or part of it, this is because websites linking to your website is being viewed by Google as a vote to your website. But it will have to take hundreds if not thousands of websites to link back to you before you gain such importance. So how do you get that page ranking fast? Well this has been one of the endeavors that SEO companies and SEO consultants have been continuously focusing on.

Well you have to first research and look for a website that has a high page rank, one with a page rank of six (6) will do better than with a page rank of three, once you have located a site that has a considerable page rank the hard part is on how you should ask for the website owner to create a link pointing towards your site. This can happen automatically if your website content is reliable and if your site has relevant contents with that of the website that you want to link with you. It is harder to ask for a link from a website with a pagerank of six because you have everything to gain but none for the linking website. So why not ask websites with page rank of 2, 3 , 4 or 5?  Well it is believed that page ranking increases in logarithmic behavior therefore a website with a page rank of three will have a difference of more than one hundred links with that of a website with a page rank of five, so if you want to get a high page rank fast then do your best to link to a website with a page rank of six.

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You will also have to create external links for your website therefore the next step in your to do list is to submit your website search directories. You can also build your external links by submitting blog posts and articles to different websites. This includes already the setting up of a link exchange and link building campaign.

Finally, if everything in your SEO strategies has been set-up you have to create a monitoring system that will allow you to monitor your websites’ progress. Such SEO strategy will allow you to identify flaws in you SEO campaign and which could then help you fix or patch up such flaw.

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Last time we set up the initial page, meta content, and added some images and adsense in for good measure. Today, we’ll review the site’s progress so far and add some changes and tweaks to improve its rankings!

Current Rankings

So I suppose we should start where we usually do, and that’s an update of how our 10 selected keyphrases are ranking now, and compared to how they were previously!

* Keyphrase – Current rank (previous rank) +/- change from previous rank
** N/A = Nothing At-all in the top 300

• Staffordshire Bull Terrier – 104 (N/A) +196
• Stafforshire Bull Terriers – 85 (N/A) +215
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies – N/A (N/A) +/- 0
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier – 76 (119) +43
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppy – N/A (N/A) +/- 0
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Dogs – N/A (N/A) +/- 0
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Pictures – 77 (N/A) +223
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies – 15 (N/A) +285
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers – 60 (116) +56
• Solid Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers – N/A (N/A) +/- 0

So a total of 1,018 ranks higher up than last time overall.. which is good, but none of the keyphrases are on the 1st page of Google yet, which is all that really matters – so there’s definitely still a lot of work to do.

Additional Rankings

Interestingly though, the site has pulled in a whole load of other keyphrases that we weren’t actually targetting, and is ranking pretty well for them. I’ve listed the top 5 below, their current rank, and how many searches (approx) those phrases get per month.

* Keyphrase – Current rank – Approx number of searches per month (keyworddiscovery)

• Staffies – 11 – 390
• Blue Staffies – 4 – 31
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier – 17 – 106
• Blue Staffie – 8 – 18
• Blue Staffordshire Terriers – 11 – 12

Now if you compare that to the search volume of our initial keyphrases covered in part 1, that’s not bad at all. I also cross checked this list and ran it through the Google Adwords keyword tool, which seems to think that these keyphrases receive significantly (about 4 times) more searches per month.

Adapting Our Goals and Targets

Now the sign of a good SEO campaign is one that adapts to its environment, so that’s exactly what we’re going to do. I’m going to swap out some of the keyphrases that are clearly going absolutely nowhere from our original list, and swap in these new phrase which we’re already doing well with, and could be seriously improved with a bit more of a push.

So here’s our new list below, the four which I’ve removed are all the ones which have been consistantly N/A since we’ve been tracking them, and I’ve added the top four new keyphrases from the above list.

* Keyphrase – Current Rank

• Staffordshire Bull Terrier – 104
• Stafforshire Bull Terriers – 85
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier – 76
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Pictures – 77
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies – 15
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers – 60
• Staffies – 11
• Blue Staffies – 4
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier – 17
• Blue Staffie – 8

Changing and Tweaking The Site

At the moment, the site is actually performing ridiculously well in terms of Adsense revenue, since I launched it in October it’s made me about $100 with a clickthrough rate of 5%! (very high for adsense, average on my other sites is 1-2%).

The only problem with it is that I have a bit of a moral issue with it, I put Adsense to ‘help rankings’ not really to make money at all – and I personally hate sites like this one that are basically spam+adsense… so I fell bad poluting the internet even further. So to rectify this, I’m going to add more pages in an effort to give at least SOME value to users. In addition this should increase internal linking, which will help all pages, and increase how many pages we can have indexed.

The final thing which I’m going to do (have now done) is to convert the site to Wordpress. The reason for this is that Wordpress and Google are secret lovers, and a lot of my best ever SEO results have been from wordpress driven sites.

So here’s what it looks like now:

Notes On Wordpress

I used a free theme, no work required, and I’m only using two plugins: the all in one seo pack, and the google sitemap generator. It’s not pretty, but it doesn’t need to be. The most important part is that I kept the homepage content the same, and the meta content the same. We really don’t want any adverse effects from switching the site into wordress.

I should also note that using the google sitemap generator plugin I installed Google webmaster tools, and added the sitemap URL to it.

What’s Next

Well I’ve spent far too much time on this today already so I haven’t actually added any new pages yet, but I will be getting Nikki onto some more copywriting for the site over the next few days and then we’ll check back soon(ish) to see what happens!

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Last time we looked at an introduction to this case study and did our keyphrase research to start optimising our brand new site: BlueStaffordshireBullTerriers.co.uk. Today, we’ll go through the initial page construction and start putting together a stategy for improving the site’s ranking.

Since last time, I actually already put together the index page of the site, and have had it live for about two weeks. Because of this, it’s already been indexed! Here’s an update of how it’s ranking so far for our selected key phrases, nothing to spectacular so far but then nothing has been done yet so it’s actually a pretty good starting point.

• Staffordshire Bull Terrier (N/A)
• Stafforshire Bull Terriers (N/A)
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies (N/A)
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier (119)
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppy (N/A)
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Dogs (N/A)
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Pictures (N/A)
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies (N/A)
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers (116)
• Solid Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers (N/A)

Coding Up The Header of Index Page

As I mentioned last time, we’re going to keep this very simple and not focus on the design of the page at all.

The first thing which I sat down to define was the meta content, I wanted to include as many of my keyphrases (and variations/combinations there of) as possible, without coming across too spammy.

Here’s the meta content used:

• Title: Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers, Staffordshire Bull Terrier Pictures
• Description: Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier pictures, stories and information! Loads of great blue staffordshire bull terrier help and information.
• Keywords: blue staffordshire bull terriers, staffordshire bull terriers, staffies, staffy bull terriers, staffordshire bull terrier, blue staffordshire bull terrier, staffordshire, bull terrier

The title is 69 characters long, which is actually 4 characters over the recommended limit but as you can see in the screenshot above Google has indexed and does display the full title.

The description is 135 characters, which is about 15 characters below the recommended limit, I might add a little more to this later but for now it’s a good starting point.

There are on 8 keywords. So few places care about or even bother to look at meta keywords that if you want the ones who do pay attention to take any notice then you’d better be as un-spammy as possible.

The Rest of The Page

The rest of the page is quite simple, I got my partner Nikki to write up around 800 words on staffordshire bull terriers and I put all the paraphraphs in <p> tags, using appropriate headings and subheadings going down the page, starting with <h1> all they way down to <h6>. Thats it, litererally, and that got the site indexed though granted not highly – let’s move on to the changes for today.

Here’s the page as of the initial coding 2 weeks ago:

What’s Next?

Well my good friend Tony has had a lot of success putting Google Adsense on pages which he wants to be indexed quickly. This isn’t something that I’ve tried before but it makes sense if you think about it; Google want to give their advertisers exposure so it would only make sense to look on them more favourably. Either way, we’re going to give this a try so I’ve just inserted a couple of bits of adsense on the page.

Emphasising Words

You can use <em></em> and <strong></strong> tags to indicate which part of a page is important, or which part of it should be ‘emphasised’ to search engines. A lot of people go overboard with this and there’s more bold text than there is normal text! So don’t do that!

I’ve picked a couple of key phrases out of the page and put <strong></strong> tags on them.

Images

Google is pretty clever, and while it can’t SEE images, it does value their alt attributes and it’s fair to say that Google probably knows that a page which has image is of more use to searchers than a similar page without images.

I’ve added a couple of pictures of Herbie (my staffy) with appropriate alt attributes again relating to the subject of the page and the subject of the image. More on opimising alt attributes here.

The two images (as you can see) are the same, but they have different file names and alt attributes, so it doesn’t matter, they are different enough. They are different sizes for a reason, consider Google Image Search, where google takes images size into account; I’m providing a little diversity.

Outbound Linking

This is a hot topic of debate amongst some but I am a firm and strong believer that linking out to high quality websites (with high PR) strengthens your own. So I’m going to drop some links in to places like Wikipedia and the BBC.

Installing Stats

This again is questionable, but some believe that using Google Analytics again makes Google look more favourably on your site because you’re sending them free information. Whether or not this is true I don’t know, but I’ve installed it anyway (alon with Webmaster Tools) so that we’ll be able to track the site’s stats, keyphrase related and otherwise.

And finally..

Inbound Linking

Over the next few days I’m going to start grabbing a couple of decent-PR links in to the site to hopefully pass over some pagerank and additional “juice” to the site.

And here’s the page now that we’re done with it for the day:

What Do You Think?

What else do you do personally when optimising the code on a brand new site, are there any things that I’ve forgotten or that you would have done different? Let me know in the comments below!

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So I’ve decided to do a multi-part case study, I’m going to start a new (very simple and un-pretty) website, and I’m going to document every change and piece of work that I carry out on it. Along with each post, I’m going to document benchmarks of where 10 keyphrases rank, and their movement, along with traffic statistics based on organic traffic. I think this will (maybe) be both fun and educational.

Let’s Get Started

The first thing to decide is what the site is going to be about, this was relatively simple (for once) as I didn’t need to think of something particularly catchy or memorable – it’s purely meant to appeal to search engines. So, I have a very sweet Staffordshire Bull Terrier who is what’s known as a ‘blue’ variety of the breed (basically grey, the Kennel Club just make up fancy names). Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers are generally quite rare and highly sought after, so at least it’s something that I can write some interesting content about.

Step 1 – Register a Domain Name

As mentioned, I have no interest in having a short and catchy domain, and I don’t need any company branding. So I’ve gone for a nice keyphrase-full domain, and picked up: http://www.BlueStaffordshireBullTerriers.co.uk

Step 2 – Do Keyphrase Research

I usually use KeywordDiscovery for my keyphrase research, but recently I’ve also found that the Google Adwords keyphrase tool has actually also proven to be quite useful. I’m going to keep it simple and only collect keyphrase data for ’staffordshire bull terrier’ and ‘blue staffordshire bull terrier’ and their derivatives. So I’ll be working from a list of about 40 and narrowing it down to 10. (Usually I’m working from a final list of 10,000 to be narrowed down to about 400, true story).

Here are the KeywordDiscovery results for “staffordshire bull terriers”

and again for “staffordshire bull terrier”

Interestingly, VERY skewed numbers in favour of the singular form rather than the plural. Also higher search volumes than I anticipated, this could be harder than I first imagined (oops).

Step 3 – Produce a Final List of Key Phrases

So, based on the above lists, here are the 10 which I’m going to go for.

• Staffordshire Bull Terrier
• Stafforshire Bull Terriers
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppy
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Dogs
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Pictures
• Staffordshire Bull Terrier Puppies
• Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers
• Solid Blue Staffordshire Bull Terriers

I’ve ordered them (as I always do) with the most searched key phrase at the top, and the least searched at the bottom. This works under the assumption that a key phrase which is searched for most in a month, will have the most competition for the top spot, and as such will be most difficult to rank for. The goal is to work your way up from the bottom of the list to the top.

Step 4 – Research The Competition

Obviously if I’m going to rank for any of these phrases then I need to know who I’m up against, so it’s time to google each one of the above key phrases and see what comes up.

Here are the results of the most common sites that appeared in the top 3

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staffordshire_Bull_Terrier
• www.staffords.co.uk/
• www.staffybullterriers.com/
• www.sbtfun.com/
• www.k9puppy.co.uk/Puppies/StaffordshireBullTerrierforsale.aspx
• www.epupz.co.uk/search/puppies_for_sale.asp?area=all&st=1&breed=Staffordshire%20Bull%20Terrier
• www.bluestaffy.co.uk/

K9Puppy and ePupz (as you might expect) are puppy classified sites, they rank well for pretty much every dog breed name under the sun because they have high Page Rank, and frequently updating content.

Wikipedia is going to be a tough one to beat, but luckily it only showed up on one of the 10 key phrases’ search results, but there also several positive things that we can use this page for. (more to follow)

As for the rest, they’re staffy-fansites. They aren’t well designed, they don’t have any remarkable features (or PR) and the only thing that they really have going for them is domain-name age.

I’m confident that these competitors aren’t a major concern, the ones that I’m most worried about are the money-laundering god-foresaken puppy selling websites.

Step 5 – Play The Waiting Game

The most boring part of all. Wait for your domain registration to go through, then point the domain to the right nameservers, and wait again for it to propagate. If you’re like me and you get bored and frustrated then you might like to check out this tool, which tracks your domain’s progress and sends you an email once it’s finished propagating. (Which I think is rather cool)

Stay tuned for next time, when I’ll be putting together the index page and coding the html for it. Make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed so you don’t miss the rest of the series!

So, do you think this is going to be a success? Or a dramatic failure? Let me know in the comments!

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So this is going to a be a semi-informational and semi-rant type post for today I’m afraid, I’m sure you’ll learn something about SEO but most of all you’ll learn something about business ethics.

SEO is a coveted industry, it’s a bit like Formula 1 in a way… everyone is trying to achieve the same thing but no one wants to tell eachother what works and what doesn’t because everyone else is the competition. As a result (and as I’ve said many times before) the SEO industry is secretive and very often dishonest, which is what I’m going to touch on today.

This blog isn’t specifically geared to teaching SEO techiniques, it’s meant to cover all the bases whether you’re providing SEO yourself, or whether you’re a small company considering taking on a company to perform SEO work on your site – as such this is really an article for everyone to take note of, not just the techies.

SEO has a nice little foothold compared to other web-services, there are no REAL measurable results, there is no definition of what it is, and almost no one understands it. How brilliant is that? Companies are charging thousands and thousands of pounds (a MONTH) for an invisible service! Which reminds me a little too much of a certain emperor with new clothes.

The problem with this is that it makes it incredibly easy for SEO companies to rip off their clients, after all, how can a client question the quality of the service which they receive when they neither understand nor know what it is? – I for one really hate this mentality, I’m not in business to make money by ripping people off, and the proof is in the pudding – 90% of the enquiries that I get to my web design and internet marketing business are based on word of mouth recommendation.

So enough preamble, how are SEO companies ripping people off?

Well talk to any SEO company and they’ll likely tell you that the work they carry out consists of an ‘initial’ SEO evaluation of the site, followed by a monthly ‘maintenance’ fee for ongoing specialist work. The truth however, is a little further from this pretty picture that they paint for you.

The initial fee, regardless of the sometimes astoundingly high price, is almost always justified – the evaluation of a site down to the last detail takes a LOT of work and all of the work carried out and the documentation provided takes specialist knowledge and skill. The biggest benefit that any site will get is in it’s initial SEO work, which really is an all-encompasing list of changes that need to be made in order to improve the site.

The monthly maintenance crap on the other hand, is exactly that, crap. You are generally charged £250-£25,000 per month (depending on how many hours work you want done), and the companies will happily tell you that this is necassary to ‘maintain’ your high rankings in the search engines.

Well I’m going to tell you exactly how YOU can do that, without paying them!

All that ‘monthly maintenance’ work consists of is link building, and quite often in the form of spam which is more likely to hurt you in the long run than help you. For those not familiar, link building is the process of acquiring as many links as possible all over the internet coming back to your site; this is done by posting comments on blogs, posting on forums, starting additional spam blogs which only exist for the purpose of link building, and using YOUR money to pay other sites to link to you.

This is NOT specialist work, anybody can do this and you could pay a 16yr old schoolkid less than minimum wage and he would probably do a better job than most SEO companies (who do it so much that they are bored to tears and only put in a half-hearted effort anyway).

The only monthly fee that can be justified is a consultation, a small review of the site each month to track it’s progress and offer further advice to the site owner about what THEY can do to keep improving it.

The second you hear anything about a 12-month contract or fees based on rankings achieved – run for your life from the scammers!

Here’s what YOU should be doing on a monthly basis

• Update your site – as often as possible, daily is best.
• Start a blog, and USE it, this contributes mostly to the above point, and also to the next one.
• Add content, add user reviews, add articles, add detailed hand written product descriptions.
• Actively seek to get reviews of your products from other sites, send out freebies if you have to.

Doesn’t look like much does it? That’s cause there’s not much too it! It’s really a case of time rather than effort, you just need someone who will actively do all these things for you.
Bare in mind that starting a blog and NOT using it is generally worse than not starting one at all, so think long and hard before you do, and assess whether or not it’s something that you will have the time and resources for, but know that if you do, the rewards are plentiful.

And finally

Reputation management is something that is becoming more and more popular (and important) these days on the web, you should regularly scan for sites linking to you.

Go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ and type in your url, this will give you a full list of all the sites linking to you.

You don’t want contentious or sites with a bad reputation linking to you, both for branding reasons and for SEO reasons, as in the long run all the people who try to cheat the search engines get found out, and penalised.

So

I hope you’ve learned something, remember the true form of SEO is honest and consists of improving a site to make it rank better, not gaming search engines or trying to rip off clients for services that don’t do anything.

Don’t agree? Or feel you’re being ripped off right now? Drop me a line in the comments and tell me what you think!

If you liked this article then please help out this site and Vote for us as at Favelets

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You may be confused by this one, possibly even a little surprised and angry that the world has been lying to you for so long telling you that you need to ‘optimise for search engines’ when you don’t need to at all. The underlying aspect of search engines that we always forget is that, not only are they programmed to act like users, but they were also created, and are controlled, by users.

The similarities between elements that are important to search engines and elements that are important to users, are strikingly obvious.

Let’s take a look

• Titles and Meta Content
  • Search engines: Use this to pick up on what the page is about, and rank it accordingly.
  • Users: Use this to pick up on what the page is about, and decide whether or not to use it.
• Header Tags
  • Search engines: Use them to assess what the main bodies of text are about, and rank the page accordingly.
  • Users: Use them to quickly see what the main bodies of text are about.
• Anchor Text
  • Search engines: Use is to understand what the page that is being linked to is about, and rank that page according to its relevance to the anchor text, and the quality of the inbound links.
  • Users: Use it to understand what the page that is being linked to is about.
• Alt Attributes
  • Search engines: Use this to understand what the image is of, or what it is representing.
  • Users: Use this to understand what the image is of, or what it is representing. Particularly disabled users, and people who browse with images turned off.
• Page Copy
  • Search engines: Use this to establish which search queries this content is relevant to.
  • Users: Use this to establish if the content is relevant to what they are looking for.
• Strong Tags
  • Search engines: Use this to pick out important key phrases within the copy.
  • Users: Use this to scan the copy and pick out the most important words.

  I could go on all afternoon, but I won’t because I’m sure you get the general idea by now.

  So many people go crazy when trying to ‘SEO’ their sites, they think ‘right, here are some techniques to use, lets apply them to absolutely everything’. Which unsurprisingly, doesn’t work.

  Real SEO is User Optimisation because…

  Think about the techniques you’re using to rank higher, and now ask yourself this: Would a user appreciate it? If the answer is yes, then the chances are that a search engine will too.

  Here are a couple of examples

  You add 35 key phrases to your page copy, and but them all in strong tags.

  • Users say: I can’t read it, it looks terrible.
  • Search engines say: Its spam

  You use clear anchor text throughout your site that is relevant to the page which is being linked to.

  • Users say: This is really easy to navigate, I like it.
  • Search engines say: The anchor text is relevant to the page content.

  Again, I could go on, but I won’t. The jist of it is that if you’re pissing off your users with your ‘optimisation’ attempts, then you’re probably annoying the hell out of search engines too.

  Write your site, your code, and your content for your users. It doesn’t MATTER how many people find you in Google if your content is worthless to the visitors. Create your code and your content for users and you’ll see a nice correlation to your rankings too.

  SEO does not mean tricking search engines for ranks.

  Search engines work by looking for the best sites to rank.

  SEO means IMPROVING your site until it’s good enough to rank.

  More from the ‘Real SEO:’ series to follow…

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I’ve already talked previously about how Google page rank works and yes, this is based on linking. What I also said, (but probably not clearly enough) is that links do NOT equal positions. So many people think that in order to optimise their sites, they need to go out there an sign up to every social network imaginable and spam them to hell with links back to their site. Not only does this not help with search engines, but it hinders you with traffic, as you will become known for being ‘yet another spammer’ – causing people to ignore/block you altogether.

Having links will NOT get you positions, if you are already ranking for a key phrase based on other SEO elements, then yes PR may help you that extra little bit from Google’s point of view because you are considered to be an ‘important’ site, but again this cannot be achieved through spam links.

Where’s The Pitfall?

If you are doing the SEO, then the pitfall is that it will get you nowhere, you won’t see much benefit from it in the short run, and in the long run it may get you banned from certain sites, blacklisted, or even penalised by Google themselves depending on how extreme you get. If you are paying for the SEO, then the pitfall is that you are paying for a service that a 14yr old could accomplish, dropping links into random sites, and it still isn’t helping! Link building is NOT SEO.

What is Linkbuilding Then?

Linkbuilding is just that, building links. It should be named as no more or less than acquiring links from other sites, you should not charge or pay a premium for this service as there is no skill, knowledge, or qualification required!

But Then… What is SEO?

SEO is clean code, SEO is using the correct code, SEO is key phrase research, SEO is targeting your online marketing demographics through specific pages on your site, SEO is usability for both users AND search engines, SEO is coding and designing your website how it should have always been in the first place.

SEO does not mean tricking search engines having you rank highly.

Search engines work by looking for the best sites to rank highly.

SEO means IMPROVING your site until it’s good enough to rank highly.

More from the ‘Real SEO:’ series to follow… here

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