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Search engine optimisation 101
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- Category: Tutorials
- Published on Sunday, 09 June 2013 11:40
- Written by Super User
- Hits: 3584
Getting a website to the top of any search engine is a daunting task. It’s a paradox since search engines expect you to have a reputation before they will honour you with top ten search results, but to have a reputation you appear to be faced with only two options: ether spend thousands of pounds (or dollars) a month on services such as adwords, Facebook ads or SEO services. Or the second is tell a few friends and hope it gets there. There is, however, a third option which many people are becoming aware of and that’s attempting to manage your own SEO and marketing. Now firstly we need to look at the factors you need to achieve to get yourself a top ten result on any search engine. Many of the tools needed can be found for free on our website: http://www.autosurf-uk.com
1. Focus on keywords – For every page you add to your website think about two or three keywords you would like to get to the top of Google. Attempting to achieve too many keywords with any single page is not a good idea, as it looks like keyword spamming and Google will rank you down for it. Just remember to repeat the keywords you are aiming for as often as possible without breaking a ratio of 10%. So, for example, if I was aiming for the keyword ‘Autosurf’ a typical sentence would look like this:
“Autosurf-uk is a leading traffic exchange, as ranked my MadTEtopsites.” – Basically a maximum of one in ten words should be your keyword, if you can aim for one in twenty that is even better.
2. Images are worth there weigh in JPEG – Firstly don’t overuse images, every image has latency and load time, so use a few a page but name them so they are relevant to your search term and give them a meaningful alt tag, Google loves a well labelled images. e.g.
“<IMG SRC=”no1autosurf.jpg” ALT= “Autosurf UK is a number 1 rated traffic exchange site”
3. Size Matters – Search engines rank you based on the load time, size and number of requests on a page. So you can use images but you need to make sure they add something. It is not a good idea to just cover a page in clipart because you think it looks good; it still needs to achieve something. Make sure you optimise every image you upload to the minimum size you can without making it look bad. Use CSS where possible. Compress your HTML and JavaScript (if it’s an option some Java simply stops working when compressed. A HTML compressor tool is now available at http://autosurf-uk.com). This also means you should avoid unneeded request as much as possible. There is no sense in having Facebook connect, share to Twitter and several different banner exchanges on one page. Your ads are not making you money if you lose users, 3 – 5 ads a page should be your maximum and will keep your load times down.
4. English is Important – The Flesch website score is used by search engines to determine the overall readability of your website. So well written, spell checked text, with proper and appropriate grammar will earn you tons of points. It is obviously important to have text that reads well on any website so it is user friendly in the most basic way. However, if you can remember to check all this when the time comes to publish a page, your website will in turn rank better, especially in the eyes of Google. There is a readability checker available for free at www.autosurf-uk.com.
5. Alexa Means More Than People Think! - Search engines take your Alexa rank as a measurement of how popular your website is; therefore having a good Alexa rank is key. You never want to be below the top million for your target country but ideally you want to be in the top 100,000. So how do you get yourself up in the Alexa ranks? Well you install an Alexa widget on every page. That way every hit from every visitor is measured by Alexa, you can get them here: http://www.alexa.com/siteowners/widgets. It is advisable to use a widget that measures both links and ranks.
6. Get Yourself Quantified – Although most search engines use Alexa some use Quantcast instead, so it might be a good idea to get yourself over to https://www.quantcast.com/ and sign up. Then you can install their tracking code, this way you can make sure you are being checked by both. Sadly some traffic exchanges do not allow the use of the Quantcast code as they believe it causes pop-ups, we have seen no evidence of this in action and until we do, Autosurf-uk, will continue to recommend its usage.
7. WOT – Search engines often look for the trustworthiness of a website, as do browsers such as Firefox and Chrome, give yourself a foot-up and submit your site to Web of Trust at http://www.mywot.com/. Then ask any of your valued users to write you a review, you can do things like this in your confirmation emails and newsletters by putting a note and a link in saying “if you like our service, tell the world via the independent site WOT”. http://Autosurf-uk.com actually uses WOT to see whether or not a site can be trusted in our surf rotation so it is highly recommended.
8. Meta Tags Still Mean Something – It’s amazing how many people forget that Meta tags are actually still important! You need to make sure every page on your site has a title tag (there is a FREE title tag generator available on our website at http://www.autosurf-uk.com). Meta description is just important as everything else. It tells search engines what to show to your potential users on the search page. Meta Keywords are another biggie, if you don’t have them, won’t have traffic either. So you need to pick no more than 5 – 10 key phrases and pop them in a Meta keyword generator ( you can also get one of these for free at http://www.autosurf-uk.com) and then put it on your site.
Our last 3 Meta tags are often forgotten, these are Meta contact, Meta copyright and Meta author, and they are obviously forgotten due to the fact that they are less important. It works something like this: some search engines want them and some don’t. But NONE of them will punish you for having them so it’s better to rank higher in certain engines than just the few big ones, (and yes, you guessed it, you can get generators for these tags at http://autosurf-uk.com.)
Meta copyright marks the website as your intellectual property, Meta author is used to tell the world who made it and Meta contact is used to tell people how to contact you – so it’s advisable to decide your contact in a certain form, such as: “admin | at | autosurf-uk.com” making it easy for a human to interpret the “at” but not for a bot, though the characters you choose to use is your choice.
9. Link Building: Doing it Right – People think the more links to your site the better, correct? No, this is in fact not the case! An over use of FFA directories can do more harm than good and will get you blacklisted on Google. Anywhere that lets you submit your site to 10,000 or 25,000 directories instantly, whether it’s free or costs you $99.00, is a bad idea. This cannot be stressed enough. By simply spamming your link on random sites that are full of spam links, Google will consider your site to live in a bad neighbourhood; all links to your site should fall into 1 of 3 categories:
1. Manual Directories – Where people have had to sit there putting the links in one by one in sites that vet submissions, (http://autosurf-uk.com offers manual link submission packages from $4.00, making us cheaper than the very popular fiverr.)
2. Reciprocal Links – These can account for up to 75% of all links to your website and are healthy to use as long as you follow a few rules. Never have more than ten links on a page, always check the reputation of the site you are exchanging with and lastly make sure there is at least some kind of connection between what your site does and what their site does.
3. One Way Organic Links – This can be from users linking to their down-lines or simply material being referenced on your site from others. Search engines love this, so it is a good idea to encourage people to link to your site.
10. Submit to A Wide Range of Search Engines – I have seen many SEO gurus telling people they should “focus on Google”. To blunt this idea is idiotic. I suggest you do very much the opposite; you should aim for as many as possible. Google is undeniably the biggest search engine, but it’s not the only one, there are over 100 search engines in Alexas top one million sites. This means a good number of people have to using all of them, for them to have made it into the top million, and since so many people are missing them you have less competition. You can submit your site to 126 separate search engines at http://www.autosurf-uk.com for free; we are also planning to add new engines very soon.
Well that’s the end of http://autosurf-uk.com SEO 101. This is a very basic insight into what’s involved in search engine optimisation and you should remember that the things you have read in this article are the bare minimum requirements to even getting noticed by search engines. Stick with us and in our next segment, SEO 102 we will be covering some of the things you can do to increase the popularity of your site for free using tools on our site. Here at Autosurf-uk we are proud of the work we are doing and it is our aim to continue to give guidance and help to anyone that wants it, but hey guys, just don’t forget us when your site gets to the top and remember to tell people that http://autosurf-uk.com helped guide you there and we did it all for free!
Well that’s it guys!
Stephen Driver
Autosurf-uk.com Admin