Building Websites & SEO

Saaf_laandon_mo · 15-08-2011, 13:48

I am building a website and was wondering if anyone would have some tips/tricks or even a guide to make it search engine friendly and get up the rankings in Google. Is there anything I should be doing. Is it worth paying a 3rd party money to do handle teh SEO side of things? What are the sorts of thimgs I can do to the site to improve this?

Any help will be much appreciated.

**Kymmy** · 15-08-2011, 14:36

Is it a php website? If yes then most php have SEF modules.. Also your google rankings depend a lot on links coming into the site.. It doesn't matter a great deal how SEF your site is if it's got no incoming links.

Saaf_laandon_mo · 15-08-2011, 14:50

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kymmy

Is it a php website? If yes then most php have SEF modules.. Also your google rankings depend a lot on links coming into the site.. It doesn't matter a great deal how SEF your site is if it's got no incoming links.

As in links to the site on other sites? for example a facebook page?

**Kymmy** · 15-08-2011, 14:55

As in anything that google can find that has a link to your site. Remember though it may take thousands of links for google to up your ratings by a small fraction

**Damien** · 15-08-2011, 15:34

Do not pay money to anyone to increase your SEO. The 'industry' is full of scam artists. Some maintain the whole concept is a scam.

SEO is more about good practices and content than anything else. Search engines want to reward good content and not good technical manipulation of their technology, any technique which does the latter will be phased out by search engines eventually. Google recently released the panda update which drastically reduced the ranking of alleged 'content farms' - sites which had been set up to feature high in Google with low quality, mass produced, pages that were key word heavy and quality light.

The best way to feature high is have good content. Sites with good content attract links from other sites which equally have good content and your site will rise up accordingly. This by far outweighs any other technique.

The rest is about good practise:

Having valid html mark up. <h1> tags, paragraph tags <p>, makes it easier for the site to be read by a spider.
Google are probably using page speed as a measurement. Ensure the site doesn't take an age to load.
Have a relevant title for your page.
You should find out what the common terms for topics you are referring to are and use those in your text. No point people searching for something but they don't find your page because you used different terms.
Ensure links between your own pages, consider the text you use for the link to make it relevant to the content of that link.
Clean URLs help. I.e Mysite.com/Products/Cake is better than Mysite.com/viewProduct?=cake2392137294

**Chris** · 15-08-2011, 16:30

To all the above I would add the observation that a few - a very few - good-quality incoming links are worth a thousand poor ones. We have no more than half a dozen incoming links but we are on page 1 of the organic results (and result number one on map results) for our chosen keywords.

Also, Google loves an active site that is refreshed regularly. In our business (b&b), the only time of year we see significant shifts in the ranking of our competitors is just before Easter ... This also happens to be the time of year when everyone updates their sites with the new season prices. Sites shuffle up and down a lot over the following weeks, but afterwards the only ones that move much are those that actively maintain their sites.

We keep a blog, and homepage Twitter and Facebook feeds, to help ensure our site is always changing, even though our product is by its nature fairly static.

Saaf_laandon_mo · 15-08-2011, 16:42

Thanks for all the above Chris Damien & Kimmy.

I like the idea of the blog and twitter/facebook feeds on the Home page too. My home page will be constantly changing so that should help.

The panda update was useful to know about so thanks again Damien.

Please don't stop the tips coming though.

---------- Post added at 16:42 ---------- Previous post was at 16:39 ----------

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chris

To all the above I would add the observation that a few - a very few - good-quality incoming links are worth a thousand poor ones. We have no more than half a dozen incoming links but we are on page 1 of the organic results (and result number one on map results) for our chosen keywords.
.
.
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Chris, I am guessing a good quality link would be something like a link from Facebook? Would I be on the right track?

**Kymmy** · 15-08-2011, 16:45

Probably a link from BBC would be like 10,000 from facebook unless of course it's a celebrity page..

**Damien** · 15-08-2011, 16:50

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chris

To all the above I would add the observation that a few - a very few - good-quality incoming links are worth a thousand poor ones. We have no more than half a dozen incoming links but we are on page 1 of the organic results (and result number one on map results) for our chosen keywords.

Excellent point. The weight of the incoming link is far more important than the amount of links. If you had one link from, say, BBC vs thousand of links from a link farm then the BBC one would likely win.

Quote:

We keep a blog, and homepage Twitter and Facebook feeds, to help ensure our site is always changing, even though our product is by its nature fairly static.

Expanding on that finding ways to drive traffic to your site via social media will be important as increasingly sites are finding that social media can be a powerful driver of traffic. It depends what your doing though, this is more for sites that have content than can trend. I.E news, articles, stuff that lots of people will want to read.

If you selling a IT website firm there is little that people would want to retweet/share on facebook.

---------- Post added at 16:50 ---------- Previous post was at 16:49 ----------

Quote:

Originally Posted by Saaf_laandon_mo

Chris, I am guessing a good quality link would be something like a link from Facebook? Would I be on the right track?

Unlikely. Google would know the difference between Facebook.com and the profile of a user.

If you show us your site we might be able to give more concrete suggestions...

**Chris** · 15-08-2011, 17:30

Quote:

Originally Posted by Saaf_laandon_mo

Thanks for all the above Chris Damien & Kimmy.

I like the idea of the blog and twitter/facebook feeds on the Home page too. My home page will be constantly changing so that should help.

The panda update was useful to know about so thanks again Damien.

Please don't stop the tips coming though.

---------- Post added at 16:42 ---------- Previous post was at 16:39 ----------

Chris, I am guessing a good quality link would be something like a link from Facebook? Would I be on the right track?

I would say not, partly because I suspect a great many Facebook pages aren't indexed by Google (probably cannot be, if they are locked behind privacy settings).

Furthermore, social media can very easily be posted to by anyone, any time ... I would be surprised if any of it has much currency when it comes to rankings.

A site that ranks highly, or better still a site that ranks highly for the same keywords as you, will constitute a good-quality link for you. In our case, we are members of our local tourist association and have a listing on their site. Their site is top hit on our keywords (and several other combinations as well for that matter). It costs us about £90 per year to be a member, but that's not purely an SEO cost. We get booking enquiries direct from their site and also industry networking opportunities and cross-selling in promotions with other non-accommodation member businesses. But the SEO value to us is I suspect huge - it may be what gave us the final push from the middle of page 2 to the bottom of page 1 of the organic results.