Sales & Marketing Authority, Bestselling Author & Business Motivational Speaker

SEO SOS – Top Tips for High Rankings

SEO, otherwise known as Search Engine Optimisation, has recently become an incredibly hot topic amongst internet entrepreneurs. Effective search engine optimisation means higher ranking amongst websites in similar niches, making your page more visible during everyday web searches. The higher your page ranking, the more likely it is you’ll experience an increase in search engine traffic to your website or page.

There are a number of things you can do to optimise your pages for the search engines. Here are a few of my personal favorites.

Start with an effective domain name and heading. Including niche keywords within your actual domain name will increase your likelihood of being indexed within the search engines for that particular keyword. If you like bird watching, for example, you might want to purchase a domain name such as www.birdwatching.com or a variation, such as www.birdwatching-experts.com. The keyword “bird watching” is in both names and increases your chances of being seen.

Use headings and subheadings within the text of your web page. The headings and subheadings should include keywords and phrases relating to your niche. You should also use a H1 or H2 heading tag (or any H# tag up to 6) to make your headlines stand out. Search engines look for headline tags with strong keywords, so finding a way to include a headline tag within your content is essential.

Add descriptions to the images you use on your website. It’s one thing to place a breathtaking image on your website or sales page, but you have to make sure they are SEO compatible as well. When you add an image you’ll have the opportunity to add what is known as an ALT tag. The ALT tag is simply a description of the image, but when you write this description you’ll want to be descriptive and use at least one variation on your niche keyword.

Every website needs a sitemap page. A sitemap page is a website page that lists links to all of the different pages contained within your website. Sitemap pages make it easy for Google and other search engines to find and index all of your pages because you’ve linked them in one convenient place.

Create internal links. Each page on your website should have links to some of the other pages contained within your site. One or two should do the trick, but will help increase clicks to other pages, which will in turn increase your search engine popularity.

Search Engine Optimisation can be tricky at first, but once you get the hang of writing content that is SEO optimised, you’ll have a difficult time reverting back to your old style of content creation. I find that SEO optimisation is absolutely paramount if you’re hoping to use the search engines to gain traffic for your website. The above list is not complete, but provides a great starting foundation.

What are some of your favourite SEO optimisation tips?

Happy Marketing!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Marketing Consultant - Internet Marketing Consultant - Sales Expert

Search Engine Optimisation Tips

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is commonly referred to as an art in, and of itself. It’s simply not possible to create a website, submit it to a series of search engines, and then sit back and wait for the traffic to come rolling in. A good webmaster will form a clear plan of action for making sure that his website earns the highest page rankings possible which, combined with a few other marketing strategies, will ensure him as much web traffic as possible.

We’ve already discussed a few of the things you can do to help with the search engine optimisation of your site. Today I’d like to share a few more tips that, when incorporated, should help a great deal when it comes to increasing your page ranking.

Don’t neglect your website’s TITLE tag. The TITLE tag is something that not many of us think of when creating a website or blog. The little blue box at the top of the screen appears to be more a part of the search engine browser than as a part of our website, but it is incredibly important to have a title in the box that draws the attention of the search engines. Try to be creative and devise a different title for every page of your website – and don’t forget to incorporate your keywords into the titles, too!

Avoid flash images and frames. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s ok. If you do know how to add flash images and frames to your website, I highly recommend avoiding this. These types of coding are new and most search engines do not know how to read them. The search engines won’t understand the tags they find and this can ultimately end up with your page not being indexed at all.

Find a good website submission program. Some search engines will automatically seek out and index your website pages while others will take longer because they require actual human review. In some cases, your website will be declined the first time around, but it is more likely than not that it will be accepted and indexed the second time around. Some search engines require waiting periods for new sites to become indexed, so be sure to plan ahead if you’re working on a project that needs to be successfully optimised by a certain time of year.

Regularly maintain your website. If you have HTML errors on your pages, and a search engine should happen to come across one while indexing, it is possible for your website to be removed from the search engine index. If that happens, you’ll have to wait for their next web crawl to be re-indexed and there is no way of knowing when that will be. Regularly check your website for errors within the pages to avoid problems with the search engines.

While some of these tips may sound complicated, it really only takes a little bit of experimentation, trial, and error to get a firm grasp on what needs to be done. I regularly incorporate each of these into my projects and find that they do quite a bit to increase traffic. Good luck!

Happy Marketing!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Marketing Consultant - Internet Marketing Consultant - Sales Expert

SEO Marketing Tools You NEED to Have

We’ve already gone over some tools you can use to market your website, but we haven’t really focused on tools that will help you specifically with Search Engine Optimisation. Effective SEO is crucial to the success of your website, so it is incredibly important for you to experiment with a few tools specific to SEO marketing as well.

One tool I find incredibly important to have is a good backlink anchor text analyzer. Backlinks are wonderful, and search engines love looking to see them, but if the anchor text used to create the link is terrible no one is ever going to see your website. You don’t have to use the name of your website when you create anchor text. Your website may be “XYZ Blog Network” but the anchor text used with your backlinks might be “Get Paid to Blog.” The idea of getting paid to blog will attract more visitors than the name of your network alone.

Another incredible tool is a domain stats tool. There are quite a few available and you will use this tool to track the statistics of other websites within your niche. The best way to become as successful, or more successful, than the competition is to know everything you can about the sites you are competing with. A good domain stats tool will tell you a website’s web ranking on certain search engines, the number of backlinks the page has, and the age of the domain, amongst other things. These are all useful statistics that you can use when planning your marketing strategy.

The online broken link checker found at www.dead-links.com will search your website for bad or invalid links. It’s great to exchange links with other websites, and even more important to include internal links within your website, but if those links end up broken your page rank may suffer. This service, and others similar to it, will enable you to catch and remove broken links before the search engines find them.

Another great tool you absolutely need to have is Copyscape. Copyscape is an online service that allows you to check for duplicate copies of your web content on other websites. If someone steals your web content, you’ll need to know. Duplicate content is frowned upon by most search engines. Copyscape has both a limited free service and a paid premium account. You can either enter your website address to search for duplications or cut and paste specific text to check for plagiarism and duplication.

The tools I’ve shared today are great for making sure your hard SEO work and marketing efforts are not wasted. Simply checking your website for errors, avoiding plagiarism, and knowing more about your competition will help you to boost your page rank and search engine results in no time.

What other SEO marketing tools can you simply not live without?

Happy Marketing!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Marketing Consultant - Internet Marketing Consultant - Sales Expert