Thoughts on SEO

[sn00p]

I've just done a small website to promote some of our products, I'm not a web designer (I'm a software engineer) so don't really know the tricks of how to optimise the content for search engines.

Has anybody got any recommendations on methods of SEO? Do these companies that offer SEO (probably in-links) work? Anybody have any experience of them or recommendations?

Cheers.

 

[chriscummins7]

I don't have any personal experience but companies I have worked with spend big money on it.

My sister is currently running the website for a boot camp running from Leeds met and deals with all the SEO herself, could happily ask her for you when I see her tomorrow? Although I'm sure some of the more tech guys will be along soon!

 

[C.J]

Don't pay for links. On page SEO, blogs, articles, newsletters. PPC is also a great way to increase traffic to begin with, as it'll take months for organic traffic to begin.

Most companies will simply post hundreds of links from unrelated sites, which means nothing. Quality > quality.

If you want to do it yourself, read, read, read.

 

[mas]

Its not exactly a dark art, its just very time consuming. Its taken my companies website about 18 months to get to Page Rank 3.... does well with my targeted search terms.

Best thing to do from my experience, is:

1- to research keyword popularity and competition https://adwords.google.com/o/Target...&__u=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS

2- Find keywords/terms which are not to heavily used but searched often by users

3- Ensure you have this term in your url... i.e www.mywebsite.co.uk/big-guns-rule

4- Make sure you content is fresh with regular use of your targeted keywords. I generally try to use a different term focus on the different pages. Some people think that using bold on your keywords, H1, H2 tags etc... make a difference, I'm not to convinced by its best to try different things to see your results.

5- Then the hard/PITA part, get as many quality inbound links as you can. Relevant to your content, and with the highest PR possible. Use directory submissions, blogs etc etc...

Takes a lot of time, but I haven't touched my site for around 12 months since the initial SEO push and it has gradually gotten a higher PR over the period.

Oh, a great tool to see check out your sites performance, and the competitions is... http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ - also use Yahoo/Bing tool - http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster & Google Webmaster

Hope that helps.

 

[Danny Lee]

Its taken my companies website about 18 months to get to Page Rank 3

It can be done faster if done well - iv built, host and 100% run a load of sites and although im not educated in any level of IT (self taught everything as i basically LOVE doing it!) i think I know what im doing

an example of my work to show about page rank would be www.digitallifestylegadgets.com - been up about 6 months and already page rank 3 - if you have a look you will see I didnt even update its content for 3 months as i wanted see what I can achieve with a fairly static site

how did you create the site? im happy to help but its useful to know how the site is put together as its easier to show you exactly where and how to implement to powerful seo basics

 

[sn00p]

Thanks for the replies guys, food for thought.

Danny, I did the site in TextMate on the mac by hand.

I'm not a designer and certaintely not a graphics artist but we're visiting a show next week and thought we'd better get something up so that we can refer people to it so that they can get a brief idea of what it is that we do and can supply. It's not meant to be an in depth site, just to get the basics across.

Site is http://www.kestrelradarsensors.com

Like I said, bear in mind I'm not a graphics artist or designer!

 

[mas]

Something like Danny has posted, is great... because it is something which people are interested in and generally search for on a regular basis.

Unfortunatley, with your type of site sn00p and mine http://www.greenhouseepc.co.uk - they are pretty dull and only appeal to a small portion of people, organic growth will be much slower.

 

[C.J]

Mas, you've got a lovely looking site. Good work.

 

[sn00p]

Yeah, that looks beautiful, but like you say it's a very specific type of content that is unlikely to generate a lot of organic link-ins and such like.

Next week will be interesting as we'll get to see what people are up to in our particular market.

 

[The Fatty]

I offer this service to a lot of my clients. A lot of in-links from sites with a poor reputation or with 100s of links on it is not good. Same goes for having a bunch of keywords in your meta that doesnt appear in your content. Also the in-linking pages should contain some of the words in your meta data to help validate the link and your page. Remeber to use the right tags, dont hide text or try and make it invisable and remember to only have 1 domain name pointing at your site, all other variants should be setup on a perminantly redirect (else you site wil be seen as a spam type site). Make sure you site has a sitemap and submit it to the search engines, it will help the spiders.

 

[mas]

Cheers sn00p, C.J

 

[Chapster5]

As the above have said really I've only been doing websites for 3 years and just started dabbling with SEO

Here's a site I built

Www.belfastcarscene.co.uk

Now if you search

Belfast car scene

In google it appears top rank with spidered links underneath I think the major reason being

1. The keyword is in the website address

2. Active members

3. Content is updated usually daily

4. The members are posting links in other forums to either the blog or forum

5. There is a Facebook like page with over 5000 likes and that pushes most of the traffic to the site (Facebook being massive is a very invaluable source for in bound links)

And last but not least

6. It is known throughout the local Belfast area to te guy who owns it so it gets hundreds of natural organic searches and click throughs on google searches for Belfast car scene

All I did was submit a site map to google and that was it

Word of mouth and organic clicks REALLY help also the older your domain the better and if you pay for a .com domain for say 5 years you will apparently (don't quote me) get a better rank as google looks at it and thinks you will more than likely update your site and keep it running for longer

Last bit of info the site has been up 1 and a half months but the domain is 2 years old as the site has been changed many times but the current design is new. It's also built with joomla!

Hope that helps I am no SEO guru I have another site to get to top rank aswell but that's another story

Nick

 

[Addicted]

I won't go much into it as I've gotta go out now, but don't focus too heavily on SEO, Google have just announced they are making some changes and will actually punish sites that are to SEO'd as a way of allowing other sites to keep up!

(The view is that people with less SEO may often have better/more unique content and focus on this rather than SEO, and likewise with SEO).

 

[C.J]

I won't go much into it as I've gotta go out now, but don't focus too heavily on SEO, Google have just announced they are making some changes and will actually punish sites that are to SEO'd as a way of allowing other sites to keep up!

(The view is that people with less SEO may often have better/more unique content and focus on this rather than SEO, and likewise with SEO).

This isn't strictly true. They are only penalising sites using 'black hat' SEO, not genuine content / density / keywords etc.

If you're 100% above board, and are in it for the long haul (like me), you've nothing to worry about.

 

[The Fatty]

This isn't strictly true. They are only penalising sites using 'black hat' SEO, not genuine content / density / keywords etc.

If you're 100% above board, and are in it for the long haul (like me), you've nothing to worry about.

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