S = Site + Search
E = Evaluation + Monitoring
O = Optimisation + Conversion
I run a number of sites that have first page rankings in the ringtone, mp3 download and lyrics marketplaces. All highly competitive sectors with millions of searches a month and millions sites returned in the results.
I suppose you could say I'm a bit of a 'ranker'..... I admit, it's true! I've put this site together to share the knowledge I've picked up over the years and pimp by search optimisation knowledge for financial gain!
I'm available to spend a few hours investigating your website. I mean really investigate. I'll dig deep, check, test, review, audit, assess and perform a totally unique, thorough document guiding you closer towards the search success you seek!
For just $150 I will write you a thorough guide taillored specifically towards to your website to help you acheive better rankings. I'm a techie, I like detail but more than that I like common sense.
I guarantee a 100% BS free, common sense and easy to adopt review to thoroughly audit your websites performance on many vital aspects.
If you're starting out you need to define just what you want from your website. Is it to generate sales, create leads, interact with an audience or a simple brochure site with contact form?
I've seen clients who 'want a website' but have no idea of what it should do. Why? What's the point? Some direction from the outset please. If you don't know where you want to go how can you get there?
How many sales do you need to generate, how many business leads a month, how many Twitter followers and FaceBook fans do you want, what percentage of people who visit your site do one of the things you want?
Yes, it is possible to publish something and have it ranked at number one at Google; however, real rankings take a long time, a lot of effort and there's a cost, if you do it yourself there's the hours and hours learning and testing, if you use an SEO firm they're going to invoice you.
There is no overnight solution; time is money.
Too many people are still stuck in the mindset where they think if you upload your website that's it. Sorry to say it never was, isn't and never will be that way. I've seen really good people spend thousands on a site to look so saddened when it hadn't generated any sales within hours of launch. If you want visitors and you want them today, pay for them and the best way to do that is Google's AdWords.
Whilst there are sneaky tricks you can pull to rank better they're not worth the effort. Try pulling a fast one on the search engines and you'll be dumped from the results, your time and effort is best spent playing by the rules.
There are rules. Break them at thy peril, know them well to play thy best.
For this example I'm using the most relevant term I can for this site: 'seo checklist' - right away Google has told me that people are looking for this list of terms by volume:
So, here we have a nice list of relevant terms we can utilise. Knowing which keywords are highly competitive and understanding how Google relates one set of words to another is paramount and will give you additional insights. A search term with very few searches a month, such as 'SEO performance' might not bring in a stack of visitors but the aim of this website to increase the performance of your SEO.
Keywords are either short tailed or long tailed. 'SEO' would be a short tailed search whearas 'Google keyword tool SEO tips' is a long tail search, as is 'search engine optimisation hints and tips'.
Long tail searches bring less visitors and tend to be easier to get better rankings for in the short term, plus long tailed search terms have an aggregated effect on your short tails. In other words, the relevancy your long tail terms all carry weight on the short tailed terms, given they're all relevant of course!
It's a stunning tool to stalk and monitor keywords. Each time Google finds a new reference to the entered term it will send you an email.
It helps you keep up with all that's fresh on that term.
To verifiy your site with Google you either need to upload a small file to your site or add a line of code to your website.
This is by far the best tool offered by any search engine. It is far too comprehensive an SEO tool to justify it with here.
When you add a site to Bing you can also give it your sitemap address. You will then need to upload a small XML file to your website or like Google you can also validate your site by adding a line of code.
Bing will tell you how many pages on your site appear in their index plus give you their 'Page score' plus details of when they last accessed the page. You can specify where your sitemap lives and they report back any errors they find when crawling your site.
It's okay as a tool but nowhere near as powerful as Google's Webmaster Tools, that said Bing is likely as it is today to deliver you a lot less traffic than Google will.
Like Google and Bing, Yahoo have followed with the meta tag and file upload methods.
This tool is very handing for finding our more about who's linking to you as it allows you to explore your site their Yahoo's eyes in a sense.
Who are you? I know you're here looking for help with SEO, you want your website to rank better in the search engines! It's simple but so understanded; know your audience!
In this example you're either looking for an SEO consultant or maintaining your search marketing in-house who's in search of the holy grail of SEO knowledge!
So now we know you fall into the possibilities above what do we want you to do?
In my example using this site I need you to know where to click, you either need to click throught to the fictional page about hiring a search consultant or you click through to the fictional set of SEO self help tools
I don't want to give a class or sucking eggs but it is simplicity that will work best. We know who you are, we know what we want you to do so the next logical step is to make is so mindblowing easy for the visitor to do what you want.
This is funnelling, knowing who your visitors are, knowing what call to action you want them to execute and pushing them in the right direction to do it is core to making money or generating sales leads and fulfilling visitor expectations.
Google give us great tools that tell us how many visitors a site gets, how many pageviews and many more advanced tracking and analytical tools that I can give due respect to here.
Now you know the goals you want your visitors to perform and have Google analytics installed on your website you will be able to track how many visitors perform your given 'call to action' by defining 'goals'.
Installing Google Analytics is easy, you just cut and paste a little JavaScript into your page, re-upload it and you're pretty much done.
Does the blue image generate more buyers than the green one? Do the words 'Contact us' get more people filling in your form than 'Get in touch' - Google's website optimiser gives you tools to find out these answers and optimize your conversion rate to make your website more effective!
This lets you make decisions and take action based on real data not speculation. If you 'think' the blue buy now image might get you most customers than a yellow buy now button don't speculate, test instead and know for sure.
It shows you intend to hang around longer and are less likely to be a fly by night website that's here today and gone tomorrow.
This is for your users as much as the search engines. Make sure your website is fast, to do this your host needs to be up to speed. Google has said that speed is something of consideration and rightly so, if you make me wait I might get bored and click the back button. If that happens it's an opportunity to convert lost.
Make sure your site is up and online. Get instant notifications of any downtime, if you get too many of them move host. If you're site is down it's not worth a carrot.
Many years ago a lovely company (scum) we dealt with had a .co.uk for us and hosted our website. One Friday afternoon we get a call demanding we pay £2,000 in charges for bandwidth we'd used, couldn't prove we'd used hadn't told us we'd used. I was furious, it was bad juju for them to try sting us the way they did and they held us to ransom.
We then wanted to get away from that hosting company as quickly as we could, all hell broke loose. The MD of the hosting company pulled the plug on our box, we lost 2,000 uniques a day at that point and were down for days. Worse than that they wouldn't update our DNS, we couldn't just upload the site elsewhere, update the name and forget a bad episode.
In the end, we went to Nominet and now have that name direct with them, on a seperate note we're also a Nominet tag holder.
The morale of the story is...... Hosts do hosting. Registrars do names. Don't mix the two. It rules out a potential weak spot.
DO NOT MAKE ME WAIT - damn I'm an impatient visitor, the internet is my oyster and if you're too slow I'm outahere thanks to the back button.
There are a number of amazing tools to help you get your website lightening fast! Pages should load within two second for most users, anything more than that is sluggish, anything beyond that is utterly fatal towards your conversions.
I know, I know, some say it doesn't matter at all. In fact, if your website is getting traffic, converting and reaching it's goals with markup that's broken and looks like 'tag soup' don't worry. If it works it works. However, if you're paying for a developer and designer to work on your site they should be skilled in the craft they've sold you and should be able to output clean, valid code.
It takes your browser longer to understand crappy markup. I've not seen an jot of scientific proof that valid code helps a website but HTML is the language of the web so it makes sense to speak it fluently. Valid code is easier to manage and makes development easier as less time is spent decyphering tag soup.
What kind of user experience would a disabled person have on your site? Whilst the huge flash movie on the index page looks amazing and plays that really funky tune if a user viewing your site on a screen reader comes along it's a chocolate fireguard and brings no value.
Search engine spiders, those robots who come and read our sites are pretty disabled, they've no eyes, no ears, no arms, no fingers and no legs. If your site is accessible to all humans regardless of their physicial ability the search engine crawlers will have no issues reading your pages.
Every single page on your site should have a unique title tag. This by far is the most important on-page element so take your time and make sure the title is relevant to the page and easy to understand. If there were a page here with a title of 'Search engine secrets' and another page with the same title how would Google or any other search engine know which one to show people?
Making your title tags unique is paramount.
Making your page title relevant to the page is an essential too.
Thanks for popping by my website.
Andy Moore
www.andymoore.info