8 tips on SEO
xml sitemap
What is it? An xml sitemap is a single computer file that helps search engines understand the page structure and loaction of the pages that make up your website. To view an xml sitemap is like seeing a long list of the page locations which make up your website. In reality, it is only required for search engines & will not be seen by visitors to your site.
Why is it needed? The reason why an xml sitemap is an important part of your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy is that they are important to search engines such as Google as they will “look” at them when trying to understand your website & its content. It’s like a basic listing & route map of your site, which Google can refer to in order to understand how to promote your site when people search.
Every time you add a page to your site you should update the xml sitemap to make Google aware a new page has been added, so any potential visitors who may be looking for the kind of things you offer can find your website. In short it helps your website be found & keeps Google up-to-date & if you are adding pages & content regularly this help you climb the search engines to receive more visitors.
How Real Web SEO Nottingham can help. SEO Notts can set up an xml site map for & provide you with a program to help you to maintain this yourself in the future supporting your good SEO services work.
Social Bookmarks
Today, social bookmarking & Search Engine Optimisation are being increasingly mentioned in the same breath.
When Google & the major search engines first started, the way in which they determined how popular a site was & therefore where it should be positioned when people search for a site of its kind was by how many people linked to the site. The idea is that links mean people like your site & think it’s worth telling people about by creating a link on their site. As a result Google will recommend your site & the more links you have the more highly it rates your website.
Nowadays the way they rank how popular a site is, is far more complex, however links are still a huge aspect to how high Google will feature you on search results & in turn this will have a huge impact on how many visits you receive.
Why is it needed? In more recent time Social Bookmarking sites have come to the fore & having links in these sites goes down well with Google, showing people like to recommend and talk about your site in a social environment online. Social bookmarking is now recognised as a key ingridient in any SEO services campaign.
How Real Web SEO can help. Real Web SEO Nottingham can create links to your website on over 160 of the biggest Social Bookmarking sites. This will have a big impact on the positioning of your site & our methods of doing this are efficient so the cost vs. benefits are very good. In order to work out how many links you need we look at what you want to achieve in relation to positioning & analyse the strength of your competition.
Meta Data
Well stuctured meta information is an important part of any SEO strategy. Meta Descriptions are seen on search listings on the major search engines, so they need to work for the search engines and importantly for any customers who read them. Meta Keywords are for the search engines reference only, to aid its understanding of what your site is about and should mirror the search terms your customers use.
Why is it needed? The right Meta Data will ensure Google knows who to promote your site to & when it is constructed correctly through knowledge of how to best employ Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). With a knowledge on your business & how Google reads this information it is incredibly effective in bringing more customers. Ensuring your site has good Meta Data is one of the most effective ways to bring more visitors to your site & increase the quality of those visitors.
How Real Web SEO can help. Real Web SEO Nottingham can ensure this information is constructed correctly for your website in order to draw the right customers to the right pages on your site & by making you far more effective on search engines, increasing your level of visits. We do this through gaining an insight into your business from you & by researching the most appropriate phrases based on how people may typically search for a site like yours. We also know how Google likes this information to be presented to ensure you’re ahead of the competition, including using the right number of characters in the right place & in the right order.
Use Social Network to get your website indexed on Google - SEO Tip
First of all never use Google's add site link to submit your web site to Google. It will take ages to work.
It is best to place a backlink on an exitisting web site for Google to spider naturally. If the site is spidered regularly then all the better.
However, for fast results submit the site to DIgg, StumbleUpon etc and tweet about the site adding the full URL. You could be indexed on Google within hours...
Then, your new web design can be found by millions!!!
Record your SEO Changes on Google Analytics
If you are running an SEO campaign of any description or size it's vital to record your amendments, changes and link building activity. I find it's quite handy to add my SEO activity on Google Analytics using the annotate function.
All you need to do is open up Google Analytics, go to the dashboard of the site you are monitoring, click on a datapoint and hay presto, 'create new annotation' appears under the datapoint data. Just click on that link and type in your SEO note!
What makes this a top idea in my opinion is that the annotation is placed directly on the Analytics timeline so you can see when you made the change on your website / web design and how that change affected your results!
Web Design - Image Optimisation
Now that Google is looking at download and rendering speeds to rank pages, it’s worth thinking about what you can do to improve your website's rendering speed. SEO now seems to cover every aspect of a web design!
There's a plethora of things you can do to address this issue but the primary and probably the easiest thing you can do is optimise your images. Photoshop has got to be the worst program to use, especially as it always seems to add extra metadata that is totally unnecessary.
One program I have found that does a fantastic job or reducing the file size and remove metadata too is JPEG & PNG Stripper - http://www.steelbytes.com/?mid=30
It's free and fast and all you have to do is drag and drop your images into its window and hay presto it’s done!
You can reduce your image file sizes by 75% by using this neat little program.
One final tip. No matter what program you use to optimise your images, BACK THEM UP FIRST! Just to be on the safe side.
SEO Rank Tracking
For some time now I have been using Rank Tracker which is part of SEO Powersuite created by Link-Assistant.com : http://www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker/. All my web design clients here in North Wales have benefited from the use of this software as I can see exactly what search engine optimisation is and isn't working.
It allows you to track your keyword positions over time across all the main search engines for your websites/web designs. You can select your local national versions of the main search engines too. Rank Tracker keeps a record your positions and shows a graph of each keyword you are tracking. All the data can be exported to spreadsheets and you can copy and paste the graphs directly into Powerpoint.
For me, this is an invaluable piece of software and no SEO expert should be without. Take a test drive with the 30 day trial version, I am pretty sure you will end up buying it!
SEO - Using GZip
Now that Google is looking at page rendering speeds, it's a very good idea to ensure GZip is enabled on your server to get that extra SEO tick in the box for your web design!
In a nutshell, GZip will compress the webpage server side, transmit it across the internet and then your web browser will 'unzip' it and render the page. Significant improvements in page rendering times can be achieved using GZip.
However, despite this being a great idea, many hosting services don't have GZip running natively which is a pity. If you are hosting using Apache, then you are in luck. GZip can be instigated by coding up .htaccess using the following:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
IIS7 should have GZip running by default and if not you can set up GZip programatically using microsoft.web.administrator. However, with IIS6 things are a little trickier. So long as you have direct access to IIS on the server then it is just a matter of checking a couple of property boxes and your done. But unless you have a dedicated server, this option is pretty much unavailable to you.
If you are having trouble getting GZip to work contact your hosting provider.
