Matt Taylor
SEO, Internet Marketing, and other things I don't know much about…
Best SEO Tools
Oct 12th
Now that we have addressed What is SEO? and Basic SEO Tips, I thought I’d share some of my favourite SEO tools. These can be used to properly focus your SEO strategy, or just to get an idea of what your competitors are doing. No doubt I will miss some great tools, so if you see anything you think is worth adding then let me know…
Google Keyword Tool
Absolutely invaluable to identify the niche’s you are targeting. Work out the competitiveness of a certain keyword, the number of searches per month, and other keywords worth focusing on. Be sure to set the search to Australia only, and when working out how many searches a certain keyword get’s, select “Exact” from “Match Type”.
Search Status for Firefox
Search Status is a great little add-on for Firefox (don’t use Internet Explorer) which aggregates a few useful SEO tools. Most notable is the Google PageRank (PR) feature which clearly shows a certain website’s clearly. This is a great way of quickly seeing how reputable Google see’s the site as being. If you right click on parts of the toolbar you will see you can easily find a website’s backlinks, Google cache and indexed pages plus much more.
Yahoo Site Explorer
This tool shows every backlink your website has that has been cached by Yahoo. It generally rates links in order of importance, so this is the perfect tool to find out exactly how many link you have, how many you need to be up with your competitors, and where your important links are.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is unbelievably valuable for any webmaster. It tracks every visitor to your site, where they came from, what keywords they used to search, which pages get visited the most, each pages bounce rate, where they are located and much, much more. If you can become an Analytics expert, and then optimise your website based on that information, you need know no more.
These are all you need to get started. Give some of them a go and let me know what you think. These are simply the basic (yet most useful tools) I use. Drop me a comment if you think I’ve left out something worthwhile…
Basic SEO Tips
Oct 9th
So in my last blog post I addressed the question, What is SEO? In this post I will be running over a few basic SEO hints and tips that you can do for any website, even with limited internet or dev knowledge.
1. Gather Links
Ever wondered how Google came to be so dominant in the search engine world? Do you regularly use anything other than Google? When Google came along way back in 1996, they shook up the search engine landscape by ranking pages on their implied “reputation”, and they did this by seeing how many other websites were linking to your site for example. So even if you had the website www.news.com with the keyword “news” used repeatedly, it knew that CNN.com (for example) was much more relevant as many people linked to CNN.com when talking about “news” on their website.
This would be one of the most important things you can do for SEO, gather links which point to your site (preferably using keywords you want to target, i.e. News which shows Google that I am linking to CNN.com and it is about news).
2. Fix Your Page Titles
Be sure to include the keyword/keyphrase you are targeting in the page title. Google also seems to provide more weight, the earlier you place the keyword in the title. So say I’m targeting ”basic SEO tips” in this post, I would make the title “Basic SEO Tips | Matt Taylor”, as this is good for SEO but still good for the user.
Take a look at Mobile Phones, and you will see the title is “Mobile Phones @ Mobiles Australia”, so it gets the keyword in there right away (“mobile phones”).
3. Make Your Site Easy to Naviagte
Make sure your site layout is easy to get around, and try to make it so no page is ever more than two clicks away. This will help both users and search engines. One way this can be achieved is through an HTML sitemap which helps search engines find every page on your site.
Avoid using ridiculous javascript on your website as well. It may look pretty but is totally unreadable by the search engines.
4. Keep Your URL’s Short and To the Point
Check the URL of this page. I have kept it as simple as I could while ensuring it includes the title of the page. This is the best URL structure for search engines. Avoid things like domain.com/09-10-2009/index.php?styleid=4 as this can just confuse the search engines. If you can’t avoid this, try using canonical tags (which I won’t delve into here).
5. Content
Seemingly obvious, but I know I have overlooked it in the past. Be sure to have compelling, interesting andunique content. DO. NOT. PUBLISH. DUPLICATE. CONTENT. I implore you! DON’T DO IT! Google is smarter than you and will find out then will ban you, which may result in you dying a bit on the inside.
This is the best SEO tip I can give. Write good content and your site should rank well naturally. It should also attract natural links as people are always interested in linking to sites which genuinely offer great content for it’s users.
That’s what I’ve got for the moment, but I will more than likely come back and update this page in the future. Feel free to throw me any questions you have, and I might go ahead and post a more advanced SEO post in the future. Here is a great overview of basic SEO from someone much smarter than me!
What is SEO?
Oct 8th
For my first post, I thought I would address the first question I receive from anybody when asked, “what do you do, Matt?” As far as I can remember, two people have actually known what SEO is (outside of people in the internet marketing industry)… SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation.
Wikipedia says SEO “is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion.”
So if you’re a cynic, SEO is providing unnatural search results in search engines (specifically Google since they have 87.81% market share as of last year). However, nowadays most webmasters know at least basic SEO, thus if you SEO your website it is simply giving it a polish so it is as presentable as it can be when the search engine comes and finds your site (which it does by sending “crawlers” across the world wide web, analysing each site individually). You could acheive this by doing some of the following:
- Frequently adding new, interesting content
- Ensuring your site is well laid out and easy to navigate
- Changing page titles to something related to the page you are on
- Much more which I will touch on more in my next post
Of course, people abuse SEO with what is called “black-hat” techniques. What is constituted as black-hat SEO is a highly contentious subject with debates raging across the Net. Unfortunately, many of these debates will most likely never be resolved, with Google and other search engine’s so hesitant to reveal how they rank websites and what is monitored. I have tried my share of black-hat (I would argue grey-hat) SEO with mixed results… A few definite black-hat SEO techniques include:
- Keyword Stuffing – filling your site full of keywords but nothing else. Likely to work in 1992…
- Cloaked Text – “hiding” text on your page by putting white text on a white background. Search engines have evolved, don’t do this.
- Doorway Pages – showing the search engine “spider” a different page to what the user see’s. Depends how sneaky you can be…
In my next post I will explain a few basic SEO hints, tips and techniques.
Any questions?
