Suggestions for Improving SEO

Search Engine Optimization

The nature of the website is that most visitors will first come to your website through search engines, primarily Google.

Search Engine Optimization is looking at ways to improve your site to get more traffic and higher rankings for certain keywords

 

Search Engines like Google have become increasingly sophisticated making “SE tricks” less successful.
For example these include: keyword stuffing gateway pages, buying PR, e.t.c At best things like this will have little benefit. At worst your site could be penalised.

 

Firstly SEO is not really about short term quick fixes.

The most important thing is to design a site that is useful and well presented. If you have a good site then it will encourage people to link to the site and overtime the site will generate more links and higher rankings.

 

Advice for improving your rankings.

 

1. Unique Content
   Create unique content rich material. You can grow a site quickly by copying material from sources that allow it like Wikipedia and Ezines. However this content will not help much if it is on other sites. Visitors and search engines are looking to see whether you have anything new to offer. Unfortunately this process is not quick and it helps if you have experience writing. However if you add 1 good article per week then it soon adds up.
1. - Duplicating content does not necessarily harm your site, there is after all much duplication throughout the internet,  you shouldn’t just rely on duplicated content too much.
2.  Also if you have several sites on the same IP address it is particularly important not to duplicate too much content and then link these sites. Search Engines don’t like that.
2. External Links
1. The best type of external link is what we term a natural link. This is a site that links without you linking back. This suggest the other site likes the content you have on offer. To get these types of links goes back to the first point of creating attractive useful information. See also: Tips for getting more links"
1. Recipricol Links. Recipricol links used to be very popular, but have gone out of fashion as Search Engines reduce the value of these “artificial links”. The idea is you link to mine and I’ll link to you. You can see some sites with ridiculously long lists of links on their links page. Generally links from these pages are not worth much.
1. However there is still a place for recipricol links if it is from sites who are in the same subject area. For example if you are a site offering yoga classes. It is helpful to get reciprocal links from other Yoga sites, especially those sites who are well established with good Page Rank.
1. Quality of Links. As well as the number of links it is also important to consider the quality of links. Links from link farms and link pages with many other links on the same page are not worth much. The best is to get links in the middle of a page surrounded by your keyword text.
1. Also Google gives rankings to websites and pages, therefore links from high PR pages are worth more than from blogs.
3. Anchor Text link.
   This is the word or text that is made into a link. This is quite important. If people link the word Meditation Music this is descriptive of the page. If they link Click here. This is not descriptive. Anchor text link is given a lot of weighting by the search engines because it is said to be a good description of what is in the page.
   
1. Therefore it is important where possible to take care of the anchor text links that you use and also the text around the link. For example the link on meditation music above would be much better in an article about meditative music.
4. Internal Links
   . You can use internal links to give a higher weighting to pages that you wish to promote. For example if you link Our Plone Sites this gives a higher weighting to this page. This is particularly effective for links from the home page.
5.  Be Patient
   If you are a new site it will take time to get established. Google tends to give sites a sandbox of 6 months before it gets any good rankings.