Pay-As-You-Go SEO Testimonials Affordable SEO Reports Benefits of SEO Site Map
Do you want potential clients to find your site as easily as you've found mine?
Call 0208 224 5976 for details.
Ask yourself, have you seen a desktop, anywhere, ever, that didn't already have that? You should be using that space on the screen to promote your site.
If you're optimising for the wrong terms, all your best efforts may well be in vain.
It's generally helpful to make a graphic into a relevant graphic link and put keywords or key phrases into the alt tags. This should not be abused, though. If your site is about SEO, for example, you wouldn't want to be putting, say, in the alt tag of a photograph of convention goers at an SEO convention alt="seo seo seo seo seo". That's definitely the wrong way to do it. Something along the lines of alt="Jill Whalen and Mike Grehan at the San Dimas SEO con" both fulfills the original function of the tag and serves our optimisation purposes. It actually does this in a way that may not be immediately obvious - both Jill Whalen and Mike Grehan are well-known figures in the world of search engine optimisation, so the inclusion of their names (hey look; I just popped them in again there, y'see?) means that the page now has a greater association with the subject of SEO in general.
You know, those little images saying "W3C" and when you click on them they go to one of the W3C validation pages... I mean, really, who cares? If you make shoes, or ball bearings, or you sell fireworks, or groceries, what is the actual point in having validation graphics on any of your pages, let alone the home page where they're usually proudly displayed? They are bad, bad, bad for the following reasons;
If you aren't using your title and description tags to sell, that'll be why you have no click-throughs. You have in the title tag perhaps six or seven words which will be displayed in bold in Google's SERPS. You must use these to grab attention. Then you use the text in the description tag, a line or two of which will hopefully be displayed immediately underneath the title in what's called the Google Snippet, to convince searchers that, out of the displayed options, yours is the site they should be clicking through to. The text displayed in the title section in Google's SERPS will be the actual text you've written in the >title< >/title< tag on your page, or at least the first few words of it. There's no point making it a thousand words long, they won't be displayed anyway. You have to make that first half-dozen or so really count.
Similarly with the meta description tag. If you want what you actually write in that tag to be the text that's displayed in the Google Snippet, I find it's best to use the actual search term you want to be found for at the beginning of the description. Thus, if your search term is "Bigger widgets", your description tag should read something like "Bigger widgets - get the absolute biggest from Bloggs and Co. of Yadaland - discounts for quantity, home delivery". Or similar. You get the idea. You'll be amazed if you begin to do this by the difference in your click-throughs it will make. Go back to the SERPS page, though, and see how many of your competition simply have lists of keywords and phrases in their title and snippets. That will explain why. You've made the effort, gone the extra mile, and they haven't. That's the difference.
The site doesn't use H tags to any degree. The use of H1 tags (one and one only per page please) can greatly assist the engines to determine the nature of the information on a page and thus return it as relevant to a specific search, which is of course what we want to be happening. So, I'd recommend use of the key term for each page in the title tag, strong mention of it early in the meta description tag, and again in an H1 tag and perhaps, according to each page's template, in an H2 and h3 or 4 tag too. On some pages using a similar but related term might be more appropriate for use in the lesser H tags.
If you have a large number of broken links on the site, that's unacceptable. Obviously these need to be individually attended to. It suggests further that insufficient time has been spent in maintaining this site. If you want people to come to this site, and obviously you do, then you need to make very sure indeed that the site's worth coming to and doesn't have far more than its fair share of links that lead to nowhere on it. This damages you in all kinds of ways. It means that when people do arrive there they'll soon get fed up with the site and this will stop them from recommending it, linking to it themselves for instance, from their work site, from their home pages, by viral marketing, whatever... it isn't merely broken links in themselves that are important, it indicates that the basic functionality of the site has to be called in question. It might not immediately appear to be, but it is a big problem.
It's bad news when the majority of a site's urls are formed similar to http://www.yadadoohickey.com/catalogue_f.php?idPrice=8&idhallomumDesign=30Icanseethepubfromhere&idStyle=47 as it tells the engines nothing about the site's content. yadadoohickey isn't perceived by the engines as being the same or having any relation to either yada or doohickey. I know the terms will be highlighted in search results but highlighting terms and parsing them are two different things.
You need to use mod-rewrite on Apache servers or ISAPI rewrite (Windows) to create urls that have keywords in them and those keywords should be separated by hyphens or, from now on apparently (I write this 26/07/07), by underscores. Here's a typical example of a bad url; http://www.yadadoohickey.com/keywordkeywordkeyphrase.htm. That needs to be re-written as http://www.yadadoohickey.com/keyword-keyword-keyphrase.htm or http://www.yadadoohickey.com/keyword_keyword_keyphrase.htm so the engines can better interpret it and therefore increase the relevance of the page in returned search results. Remember, this-phrase-can-make-sense-to-a-search-engine, as_can_this_one_now_or_very_soon_anyway_because_it's_joined_by_underscores while thisonecan'tbecauseit'sallruntogether.
Give me 450+ words of highly original text on each of your key phrases, ideally, and let me run with it. If you look at my site where I have pages on Internet marketing expert, Internet marketing professional, Internet marketing whatever,and they're all basically the same, what I do is, I Google for each term, mash together content taken from the first few results, then combine it to make a very crude web page. Wholly ungrammatical, full of spurious code and to the visitor's eye (not that a visitor will ever see it at this stage) unintelligible. But it puts something on the page. Then I go through it and start correcting it, taking out bits where it has the other company's name, removing the coding, changing prices etc., and doing that I'll get ideas and that starts me off. I do several drafts, and that'll eventually give me a page that's largely original me, so I can't get done for plagiarism.
Research shows that people don't actually read web pages, they skim them and look at the headers and a few lines here and there. So it doesn't matter that I'm not writing Shakespeare. But I'm writing intelligible original material about a specific subject and the engines can pick up on that. That's what we need the text content for.
To actually get work from this, we need calls to action. I have a paragraph at the beginning of most pages that I adapt to the individual page which has a call to action on it. Writing this here now, I'm reminded I have to go back over all of them and make the phone numbers bigger, research shows people are more likely to do what you want if you push them harder. Don't have a small phone number, have a big one! So, I have to go through the site doing that now - it never ends! Anyhoo, you need to think of a call to action that will appeal to your clientele and incorporate that into your pages too.
When we've got the pages assembled, we have to look at the page titles and description tags very carefully. These are what will be displayed in the SERPS, so basically, they have to make you stand out from the others. People have to choose to clickthrough to your site over the others on the page.
