Website Optimisation

In order to attain a higher listing within search engine results, it is immensely important to optimise your website for search engines.

Search Engine Optimisation SEO consists of a keyword analysis which identifies a range of important keywords based on your business, these keywords are incorporated into your website, along with the underlying code being optimised for search engines. This process helps search engines better index your website, hopefully improving your positioning. This service is a must for anyone requiring more traffic!
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Here's an excerpt from my seminars notes...For the full seminar - please visit www.mklink.com/training/

This subject alone could keep me in work on a full time basis because it’s what I get asked about most often. Being at the top of the search engines is what almost everybody asks me more information about all the time.

Well, hopefully, you can see why I’ve structured my seminars the way I have.

If I’d have put the search engine optimisation seminars right at the beginning of the course, most people would have just ambled off and tried a few of the things that I’ll be mentioning just now and because there’d would be no structure in place, they wouldn’t really know what they were doing or indeed if there was any improvement.

To recap, at this point you should know how to plan your website and your internet marketing. You should have a diary with all your key performance indicators on it such as visits and leads and sales so you know your conversion rate.

You should know where your website is in the search engines anyway for some arbitrary key phrases because we’ve been giving you information about this on a month by month basis.

And because we’ve spent a lot of time doing the homework with keyword selection, we’re well equipped to know what we want to be found for both with pay per click marketing and also natural search.

Search engine optimisation isn’t always quick.

In fact it can take months or even years to get a website to where you want it to be – sometimes never!

That’s why I covered pay per click first – so that you can be getting traffic directly and consequently have more sales and therefore profits whilst your search engine optimisation is being done in the background.

So I hope that’s explained why I’ve kept this until now.

Not that SEO is the be all and end all because there are other ways of getting traffic to your website which are just as valid which we’ll see soon.

But let’s assume that you want to be at the top of Google for your given choice of key phrases.
Here’s where the fun begins. Especially as SEO is enshrouded in so much mystery.

Well, for my money, for every ounce of mystery there’s a pound of garbage, so don’t worry about it too much! If I were you, I’d stick to the basics and do it well, rather than messing around with lots of stuff that doesn’t necessarily make any difference

As an aside, when I say search engine optimisation, I basically mean Google because at the end of the day, that’s pretty much what everyone wants.

In fairness, if you go deep into search engine optimisation or SEO then some people actually look at optimising different websites for different specific search engines. Frankly I can’t be bothered and don’t really see the point.
I know I could be missing out on a trick and it’s probably not really the right attitude but the way I see it, everyone goes on about Google and the vast majority of people I know use it so that’s what I’ll be concentrating on for now anyway.

Not only that, all the other search engines seem to be trying to copy Google anyway.
Search engine optimisation is a very large part of internet marketing and there’s so much information out there that you can spend the rest of your life reading all about it so once again I suggest you just do the simple stuff and learn to do it well and systematically and it will serve you in good stead.
Additionally, you’ll know more about it than most web designers anyway because most web designers aren’t interested in this stuff because it doesn’t look pretty and by now you’ll already know my thoughts on pretty websites.
Seeing as we want to be at the top of Google, it makes sense that we know a little about Google so that we can give it what it wants.
Very briefly, Google was setup in 1998 by a couple of college students called Larry page and Sergey Brin and it revolutionised the search engine world. In fact 1998 was the same year the same year I setup MKLINK.

It very quickly stole the show with its brilliant simplicity and its excellent search results. The search results, in comparison to other search engines at the time like HotBot and Lycos and things like that was simply light years ahead.

It was even better than Yahoo – which most people at the time considered to be the superior search engine around.
What made it have such a quantum leap was the way it ranked websites and the fact that it was brilliantly simple to use without clutter. You already know my thoughts on keeping websites simple.

Anyway, it stemmed from a concept of popularity that the students used in that with college papers, in that the more citations a document has, the more value that document must have.
So if you have a research paper all about quantum “nano-structures” and lots of other people are mentioning this groundbreaking work in their research as well, it stands to reason that your research paper will be well read and hopefully well respected.
If you think about it, this concept whilst certainly not flawless is brilliantly simple and self policing.

For example, if there’s a really good film on at the cinema and everyone’s raving about it then odds are it’s worth watching.
In much the same way if loads of websites are linking to a particular website, then the website in question must have something worth linking for.
So the thing to understand about Google that is fundamental to how it works is the concept of Page rank.

Page Rank, Named after Larry Page. Not as in web PAGE – which many people mistake it for.

So when I talk about page rank in future seminars please don’t confuse the term page rank with the ranking of your website in the pages of the search engines. The other kind of page rank is called a search engine ranking position – or SERP for short.
The page rank of a website is calculated by Google and is a number between 0 to 10.
Cutting out all the maths, it’s basically reflects a recursive function of how many web sources(i.e websites, blogs, noticeboards and suchlike) are linking to a web page and also the respective value of those inbound links.
So, get lots of links! Inbound links. I can’t stress this enough.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last few years, you’ll know that it’s a good idea to have lots of website links.
In fact if you take nothing else away from this seminar then at least do two things.
Firstly, be aware that 50% or more of your search engine ranking success depends upon your inbound links.

Secondly, resolve to spend a set amount of time either every week or every month getting more links to your website.

Now this will be much the same as doing the spade work for search phrase analysis in that you can do a lot of work and just because you might not see immediate results, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not worth doing.
And as an aside this is half the problem with business in general, let alone internet marketing. And I’m just as guilty of this as anyone else. The fact of the matter is that some of our most valuable work that produces the most results doesn’t produce the most IMMEDIATE results.
Because of the way humans work, we tend to do work and then expect to see a reward. So if you sell something, you see your sales figures go up – or your cashflow.
If you setup a pay per click campaign, you at least get to see the traffic coming in straight away.

Unfortunately, if you spend half a day establishing some really good links to your website, you might well not see the benefit of it straight away.
The fact that getting those inbound links will put hundreds or even thousands of pounds directly in your hands over the weeks and months and years ahead doesn’t register with us on cerebral basis and consequently we spend more time doing stuff which gives more superficial results.
Like I said, I’m guilty of this as well. If it’s Friday afternoon and it’s summertime and the weather is nice and I have a choice of either sneaking off mid afternoon and going fishing for a few hours or having a couple of pints or saying right – well I’m going to stay here until 7 pm and spend 4 hours solid getting some back links to my website, then guess what – I’d probably be as guilty as anyone else.
If you can work that way then great go for it. If you don’t then my suggestion is that because this is so important, you do it but you do it in a slightly different format.
Little and often. 15 minutes a day or something like that. I can’t make any more suggestions than this because you will have a unique way of working that works best for you.

But please be advised, you really, really do want to do this and until you’ve got a reasonable amount of backlinks, you should really do this yourself – don’t outsource it. At least not yet.

The reason being because you want to see how the process works and get a feel for the kind of sites that you want to be linked with and you can appreciate what’s involved with it all.

Otherwise, if you do outsource it all – which you certainly can do, you’ll be very detached from this whole area and because it’s such an important issue as I say, that wouldn’t necessarily be a good idea.
So, in a nutshell, you want loads of inbound links from other, relevant websites.

There’s 3 adjectives in that last sentence and they’re all important – so I shall spell them out one by one.

Firstly you want loads. I.e. the quantity of inbound links is a direct function of your page rank.
So for 2 websites with virtually the same content, the one that will be higher up the search engines is
the one that has the most inbound links.

And that leads me to highlight the second keyword here and that’s ”inbound”.

The WHOLE POINT of the page rank system is to gauge a website on how many other people are linking their websites and blogs to that site. The reason being that like I say, if everyone is linking to it then it must have value. So it’s important to realise that we’re talking about inbound links.

Interestingly, it’s been shown that inbound links are also included from your own website, which I have to say I found quite surprising.

Given that you have full control over your website and you don’t necessarily have full control over someone else’s website, then of course it makes sense to ensure that the links within your own website are well formed, because it’s a no brainer and carries almost no overhead.

For example, I have a blog and on the footer of each article that I update, I add a link to my website’s homepage. Going back to our example of someone selling sports equipment, if they have a news page for example and there’s an article on there about a new type of Golf club, then that article should logically contain a text based hyperlink to the section about golf clubs.

As a spin off to this, you’ll remember that because you have control over your own website, you can of course extend this further to all the other sites that you own.

This is one of the beauties of owning and updating a plethora of microsites as well. If you think about it, they represent a fantastic opportunity to create text based inbound links from other relevant websites. As an aside, it’s worth remembering to have them on different IP addresses if possible, although it’s not the be all and end all.
And that neatly brings me onto my third adjective about links which is relevancy. Now I have to admit that there is some controversy about this point.

I’ve always worked on the principle that you really should be aiming for links from websites and web sources that are relevant.

Which means to say that if you’re selling sports equipment and you’re getting links from other websites such as industrial bleaching agents then you might not benefit from the link.

However, there are two schools of thought about this. Some people say that the relevancy of the inbound links isn’t important and they get great results anyway.
The reason I’m mentioning this is because Google is aware that people know about the importance of links and consequently doesn’t want to have its system abused.
As in all these things it has developed into yet another arms race.

You may or may not have heard the work link farm. This is essentially the practice of putting loads of links onto a website and charging people for the links. In most cases the link farms have no significant value and so the website owner would simply be wasting his or her time or money – especially if they are paying to have a link.
But it’s worse than that. Google can actually penalise you if it thinks you are trying to artificially boost your page rank by subscribing to link farms and can drop you from the listing altogether – so be warned.

Even if you have no intention of using a link farm you need to be aware of them for this reason. In much the same way if you have a certain number of links coming to your website and then next month you have a ridiculous number more coming to your website then of course this is another signal to Google that you might be employing what’s known as black hat search engine optimisation techniques.
So whether you want to outsource getting links to your website or do it yourself, you’ll want to be aware of these two issues for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, you’ll want to make sure that you are very careful not to jeopardise all your hard work and your Google ranking by linking to the wrong people or having too many links too quickly.
Secondly, you want to be aware that other people might actively be trying to do this to your website without your knowledge.

Like I said, search engine optimisation is an arms race and not everyone is straight so some people will try and link their competitor’s websites to known link farms or known blacklisted websites and things like that just to try and improve their own website ranking.

It’s called Google Bowling and it involves a lot of work and hassle and I shouldn’t worry about it, unless you’re in a hugely competitive industry and you’re already at the top. As in all these things, you’ve got more important things to think about.
So, the upshot of what I’ve just said is that you need to get decent quality links from other websites. Personally, I would advise you to make the sites that link to you wherever relevant and simply swapping links won’t really cut it – especially not anymore – it’s just inbound links that are what count.
So if you get people asking to swap links with you, then unless there’s another compelling reason to do it, I shouldn’t bother. It will simply mean that the ratio of links that you have coming to you over the links you have going out will be lowered.
The ratio of inbound links to outbound links on a website can be a quick gauge of how search engine friendly the web page is.

For the same reason, just having a links page probably doesn’t have a lot of merit. Most people if they have a links page have it as an afterthought anyway, so it doesn’t really add much to the value of the website.

What IS hugely important is the page rank of the inbound link.

The Google page rank system isn’t linear, it’s logarithmic. So a page rank of 4 isn’t double a page rank of 2 - it’s a lot, lot more than that.
If you can manage to get yourself a link from a high ranking web page then you will really turbo charge your listing for the page that it’s listed with.
One of the areas that we’ll be covering when we go into more detail with this is called Google sandboxing.
You can sandbox something on your own computer if you want. If you have downloaded some software and you don’t really know if it is malicious or not, then you can install it to some temporary memory to check it out because it’ll be a lot easier to delete from temporary if there is an issue.
It also means that when you turn your machine off everything will be lost – but that’s rather the point of temporary memory.
Anyway, Google typically sandboxes new websites. In English, this means that one of the criteria that Google looks for in a website is the age of the domain name.

The reason for this is because there are so many websites that spring up and are never used and so many sites that were used as gateway pages that Google needed a way of separating the wheat from the chaff.
Once again, there’s 2 schools of thought about this. One is that Google really does have a sandbox and it essentially quarantines new websites. The other is that it is simply a function of the page rank of a website taking time to apply.
It doesn’t really matter what you believe. What matters is that if you want to drive your website out of a sandbox then by linking to a website with a half sensible Google ranking, you’ll blast your website out of the sandbox straight away.
A decent page rank is about 4 and above. You’ll be doing really well to have 5 or 6 and seven and above and you probably will know more about this than I do if that’s the case.

An average page rank is about 1 or 2 or three but obviously you should aim higher than this if you can.
How you actually get a link on a high page rank site is down to you – depending on what industry you’re in and what you’re doing.
But let’s start with the obvious stuff first. It’s so it’s obviously going to be a lot easier to get people to link to you if you have something worth linking to.

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