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Archive for the ‘Simple SEO’

How to Write Effective Website Content

Tuesday, May 15th, 2012

In the words of the Beegees – “It’s only words, and words are all I have to take your heart away…” and this statement is just as relevant to online content as it is to love poems penned under blossoming apple trees.

But why should you take the time to write your website content?

Writing Effective Website Content

Ask yourself what you, as a consumer, would want to read on a website. 

Then ask yourself, as a business owner, what information, tone and vibe you want to give to your customers.

Thinking from a different perspective helps when it comes to writing effective website content; aim to answer these key questions:

  • How should your content read? Is the tone of your company formal, informal? How do you as a brand interact with your consumers?
  • Do you have all the relevant information for that page or is there key content that has been missed off?
  • Where are your calls to action and what do they say? A call to action (such as ‘Call us today to get your quote’ or ‘Check out the brand we’ve worked with’) feeds consumers through your website … meaning they will see more of your site and, hopefully, get in contact or purchase your goods.
  • Is your content optimised for search engines? Read back through your content and highlight any keywords and phrases that appear in it (see below for more on this) – does your website content include enough mentions of keywords and phrases? Are there too many, so much so that the content doesn’t flow for a human reader?

Writing Website Content That Search Engines Can Read

You may ask what we mean by making your content ‘readable’ by search engine? 
The art of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) refers to how your website ranks within search engines.

Your position, that is whether you are positioned first on page one or eighth on page two, is affected by the content on your website.

 This is not to say that search engines just look at your content; in fact there are many complicated algorithms in place that define your ranking, but having website content that is filled with keywords and phrases will help.

Choosing Effective Keywords and Phrases

Any keywords and phrases you use should be relevant to your industry and line of work as these are the terms people will be looking for when they wish to find your services.

Moreover, these are also the same terms search engines will rank you for – the more the content on your website refers to what you do, the more trusted your site will be by search engines. 

After all the primary goal of a search engine is to get people the information they are looking for.

How do you choose keywords and phrases though?

The easiest way to explain is to give you an example: Skills On Toast. 

As you’re probably aware, we provide web design and development services in Bristol and the surrounding areas.

Therefore we want to be ranking for the following terms:

  • Bristol web design
  • Bristol web development
  • Web design and development in Bristol
  • Web design agency Bristol
  • Web developer in Bristol

The above is just an example of the terms we would go for; you can also target more in-depth terms relevant to your industry; examples for us being:

  • Designing a website for a company
  • Adding videos and images to a company website
  • How to manage a company website
  • How to freshen up a company website
  • Content management help

Attempt to sum up your business in a couple of lines. Then sit down and think about what phrases from these sentences you would search for. You can also use tools such as Google’s Keyword Tool to aid your search for the most effective keywords and phrases.

Three Tips:

  1. Remember that search engine spiders (the technology that crawls your website) are clever creatures: do not try to cram your website with keywords and phrases just for the sake of it. Also, including a paragraph of keywords and phrases at the bottom of every page is known as Black Hat SEO and is ‘frowned upon’ by search engines.
  2. Each page has a different subject matter, this means each page will have different keywords and phrases, so make sure your content addresses this.
  3. Writing content for websites should not just be aimed at search engines: your customers are human so make sure any content that appears on your website is well written, grammatically correct and makes sense.

Oh, and if you happen to like the BeeGees song we referenced earlier, here’s a video … enjoy!

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Posted in SEO, Simple SEO, Web | No Comments »

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SEO FAQ – A Beginners’ Guide to Search Engine Optimisation

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

We have put together this list of frequently asked questions to try and help our readers understand a bit more about SEO. If you don’t find the answer to your question, please contact us and we’ll do our best to help. Your question might even end up on this page!

What is SEO?

SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimisation, encompasses all the things you can do to increase traffic to your website, by making it more attractive to search engines.

Are there different types of SEO?

In a word, yes! The two basic groups are on-page and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO, as you may have guessed, includes the things you can do to the website itself, such as optimising the layout, code and content for search engines, use of titles, keywords and descriptions and a whole host of other things.

Off-page SEO includes all the things you can do away from your website, such as search engine and directory submissions, link building, social media and a whole lot more.

Can I get to the first page of search results?

That is a very difficult question to answer, because of course you can get to the first page of search engine results, if the user enters the right keywords. Type ‘Skills on Toast’ into Google and you will find us on the first page – getting the site onto the first page for other keywords is a bit more tricky.

There are a lot of factors to consider, such as how many other people are competing for the same keywords, how well established your website is, and so on. Although the aim of any search engine optimisation is to get your page high up in the rankings, I am very wary of any company that guarantees to get you on the first page, and Skills on Toast is not in the business of misleading our clients! For second opinion, please see this great article on SEO scams.

As a guide, in the last 6 months we have achieved first page rankings for all our clients within 1-3 months of SEO work for their chosen keyword phrases.

How long will it take to see results?

SEO is not something that happens over night – it takes time to slowly build a place for yourself on the web, as well as a lot of tweaking of all the right elements. You will be able to see some improvements very quickly, others will take a while to filter through, which is why, in my opinion, long term investment in SEO, rather than a one-off push, is much better value for money.

What is Pay Per Click (PPC)?

Pay Per Click (PPC) adverts can be set up for different search engines, and they work on the basis that if the right keywords are entered, your advert displays either at the top, or the side of the search engine listings – they are called ‘Sponsored links’ on Google. Every time someone clicks on your link, you pay a fee to the search engine, ranging from a few pence to a few pounds, depending on the competitiveness of your keywords.

Should I use pay per click (ppc)?

Pay Per Click adverts can be a wonderful tool to boost traffic to your website, but I tend to see them as a last resort. I hear from a lot of clients that they totally ignore the sponsored links in Google and go straight to the ‘Organic’ listings, which are the free ones. I tend to focus more on improving organic rankings, but in some cases PPC is the best option.

How do I see results from SEO?

One of the first things I do when taking on any SEO client, is to set them up with website traffic reports so that they can see which efforts are working the best. These reports show where people came from to get to your site, which keywords they put into the search engine, how long they stayed, where they went and a lot more besides.

If you’re going to invest in search engine optimisation, you need to be able to see measureable results – otherwise how do you know whether it’s worth the effort?

What else can I do to drive traffic to my website?

Never underestimate the power of good old word-of-mouth – tell everyone you meet about your site, hand out business cards and shout about it from the rooftops!

Should I buy lots of domain names?

Having a really good, keyword-rich domain name is a great way to get traffic to your website. One of the reasons this site comes up when you search for ‘Skills on Toast’ is that it’s in the domain name.

In my opinion, buying some good domain names and pointing them all to one website can be very effective, but you have to use a permanent 301-redirect, otherwise search engines may see you as ‘deceptive’.

I’m a bit new to all this – what things can I do to boost rankings myself?

If you’re a bit website savvy, there are lots of things that you can do yourself, without the help of a professional. Check out our ‘Simple SEO’ series for lots of tips, and if you get stuck, contact us for help!

Is SEO expensive?

Not at all! One of the major benefits of SEO is that your traffic is more targeted – you get relevant visitors that are actually interested in what you have to offer, so the resulting enquiries should more than cover the cost of ongoing SEO.

We agree targets with our clients before we start to ensure that they know what they can expect to see, and we can tailor how much we do for you to suit your needs and budget.

How can Skills on Toast help?

We tailor all our ongoing SEO plans in order to meet our clients’ expectations. If your budget is small you can still see great results, it just might take a little longer.

We are always happy to hear from our blog followers, so if you would like help or advice, contact us for a no-obligation consultation.

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Posted in FAQs, Online marketing, SEO, Simple SEO | 16 Comments »

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Simple SEO – part 4 – Content

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

Content is king! Valid markup and quality content

The most important factor when writing for the web is to ensure your audience can find the information they’re looking for without having to read everything. Web users very rarely read everything on a page and if they can’t find what they’re looking for within the first few seconds, they’ll try somewhere else.

The good news is that many of the style related things you can do to make your website more user friendly for people, also make it more user friendly for search engine crawlers.

Structure your content

Use clear titles and subtitles in your content. You should make it painfully obvious what your page is about and what can be found there. Split your content into small sections with titles and use HTML headings, e.g. h1, h3, h3, etc. This will make the layout easier to scan-read for your users, and highlight the important topics on your page for search engines.

Keep it concise

Try to use short sentences, paragraphs and bullet points so that the text can be easily scanned. Again, the HTML markup that you use for this will be used by search engines to determine exactly what is on your page.

Highlight key terms

If you already have your sections marked out with headings, you can further assist your scan-reading users by highlighting the really important terms. Make them bold, use a different colour or make them italic – anything to make them stand out. This process will also help you to pick out keywords and descriptions for your site. For more information on keywords, see Simple SEO Part 2 – Metadata.

Make sure it’s valid

It’s easy to say that if your website looks OK in your browser, then it doesn’t really matter, and even if most of your users can’t tell, a valid website is always favoured by search engines.

You can check your website using the W3C Markup Validation Service. It will tell you how many errors you have and where they are in your code. Don’t be discouraged if you have a lot of errors – it is often the case that one error at the top of the page causes several others further down, but fixing that one error can fix many more.

Link to relevant content

The web is a place to share – get into the spirit by linking to other sites that you have found useful. If you used another website to research your content, link to them. You could even get in touch and let them know – they might link back to you – you never know!

Use helpful link text

Don’t ever, ever, EVER use the words ‘click here’ as the text for one of your links. People started using that back in the day when the internet was a new a scary place, and we didn’t know what links looked like. You’re safe now – if you’re using consistent styles throughout your website, they will be pretty obvious. Using useful, descriptive link text is better for your users and search engines.

Example

To read more on e-mail campaigns, click here.

Our e-mail campaign service includes template design, mailing list automation, distribution and more.

Hopefully you’ll agree that the second example stands out much more. If scanning this page, your eye would be drawn to the link text, and you would be powerless to resist our e-mail campaign service!

This linking technique is not only useful for your users but also… you guessed it… search engines. They recognise and crawl links – so make sure the ones on your site use relevant link text, and if people link to you, try to make sure they use it too! A link that says ‘Web design and online marketing‘ is much better than one that just says ‘Skills on Toast’.

You can help futher by using helpful link titles – for more information on this, see Simple SEO – Part 2 – Metadata.

Summary

Hopefully this article has given you some food for thought. The golden rule here, and actually for most things on the web – if it’s good for your user, it’s good for search engines, and the more you help one, the more the other will take notice!

We are always happy to assist faithful followers of Butter Side Up, so if you need advice on using these methods or want to improve your website ranking, don’t hesitate to contact Skills on Toast!

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Posted in Articles, SEO, Simple SEO | 1 Comment »

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Simple SEO – part 3 – Site Maps

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

Site Maps – give the search engines a helping hand!

Welcome to part 3 of the Butter Side Up Simple SEO Series. In this part we’re going to tell you everything you need to know about site maps – what they are, why search engines love them, and how you can create them yourself.

What is a site map?

Site maps come in a number of formats and can be used by both users and search engine crawlers to see exactly what is on your site. They can be a very effective tool in controlling which of the pages on your site show up in search engine results.

The most popular type is a web page that lists and links to all the content of a website, often in a hierarchical format, like the Skills on Toast site map. These are great for your users – if there’s something they can’t find through your navigation, they should find it there, and when your site gets crawled by search engines, they’ll pick up on the content too.

Then there are XML site maps – often called ‘google site maps’, which are XML documents that you include in your site. You won’t see it, and the chances are your visitors won’t either, but the search engines and their crawlers certainly will!

There are also ROR (Resource On a Resource) site maps, which describe all the items on your site using an RSS feed XML document. Including an ROR XML file in your site allows search engines to crawl your content and index it much more efficiently. Some people argue that these are obsolete, but they certainly won’t do your website rankings any harm, so why not include one?

Why do search engines love site maps?

This one is short and sweet – site maps make the job of search engine crawlers much, much easier. Instead of having to crawl your site for content, they can go straight to the site map and see what’s there instantly. The more quickly the crawlers get the information they need, the more quickly your site will get indexed and start showing up on searches.

Who should have a site map?

Broadly speaking, everyone should have one, in one form or another. Having a web page site map helps your users to find information more easily, and a happy, satisfied user is more likely to revisit your site. XML and ROR site maps can only help to get your content noticed by search engines.

In particular, Flash sites will get an added benefit from site maps because their content is often hidden in a non-textual format, meaning that it’s not always possible for search engines to crawl.

How can I create a site map?

Website site maps
There are lots of tools out there to help you create a site map for your site. Our website is powered by WordPress and we used the PS Auto Site Map plugin to create ours. This is a great solution, as it generates the content dynamically, so if we add a new section to the site, it is automatically added. There are similar tools for most content management systems, and if your site is not dynamic and made up of html pages, you can create a simple site map page and update it manually.

XML/Google site maps
You can generate XML site maps automatically and there are lots of tools out there that will do it for you. To get you started, visit www.XML-Sitemaps.com and follow the instructions.

ROR site maps
You can easily generate ROR XML files using the online tool at www.rorweb.com/rormap.htm – just follow the instructions.

I’ve made my site maps – now what?

If you’ve made a web page site map, upload it to your web space and make sure you link to it from all the pages on your site, so that your users can find it easily.

If you’ve made XML or ROR site maps, make sure they are uploaded to the root directory on your web space. If you have a google webmaster account, go to the ‘site configuration’ option and submit your XML site map.

Summary

We believe in making the web a better place for everyone, so our number one tip would be to include a web page site map – it helps you, it helps your users and it helps your website get noticed. XML and ROR site maps are fantastic tools and they’re simple and free to set up – so you’ve got no excuse!

We are always happy to assist faithful followers of Butter Side Up, so if you need advice on using these methods or want to improve your website ranking, don’t hesitate to contact Skills on Toast!

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Posted in Articles, SEO, Simple SEO | 1 Comment »

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Simple SEO – part 2 – Metadata

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Metadata –the bits of your website that you can’t see, but search engines love

Different search engines use different parts of your website when they choose where to rank you. Traditionally they use the metadata in your site – one piece or another or a combination. Some like keywords, others like descriptions, some like titles but most like some combination of these.

Metadata sits inside the <head> </head> area of your web page and comes in a number of different forms. We will discuss a few of the favourites here, but there are others out there!

Example:

<head>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword phrases, my keywords, keywords” /> <meta name=”description” content=”description of the page” />
<title>Title of the page</title>
</head>

<head>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword phrases, my keywords, keywords” />
<meta name=”description” content=”description of the page” />
</head>

Keywords

While not as important as they used to be, keywords still play a vital role in optimising your site for search engines because they are used in conjunction with your content. The aim is to have a different set of keywords or keyword phrases that are relevant to your content, on every page of your site. If you have the term ‘Nirvana’ in your keywords, but your content has no relation to either the Buddhist state of enlightenment or the 1990s grunge band fronted by the late, great Kurt Cobain, search engines will judge your keywords to be irrelevant and mark you down.

Example: <meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword phrases, my keywords, keywords” />

A good place to start is to imagine you’re reading the content for the first time and want to memorise it – which words would you highlight? This is also a good way to check whether your content has all the terms in it that it should. For more about content check out Simple SEO – Part 4 – Content.

Keywords must be relevant to the content on the page – to help you choose them, imagine the search terms someone might enter to try and find your site. Anything that you consider to be a relevant keyword should also appear in the page content – this reinforces your use of relevant keywords. For example, if you pick out the following phrases as keywords: ‘doughnuts’, ‘baking’, ‘recipes’ – you need to make sure that those phrases appear in the content on the page as well. This won’t be possible in every case, but you need to be as thorough as you can.

Don’t use too many – search engines will actually penalise you for using too many keywords, so try to keep the list short (around 20-30), but have a mixture of short phrases and single words. You should produce a comma separated list of terms and each separation counts as one ‘keyword’.

Research your keywords – there is no point in having a lot of keywords that no-one ever searches for, and equally it will be difficult to get to the top of the search engines if you only use highly-competitive words. Run your list through the google keyword tool – this will show you how many people searched for those terms in the last month and give you suggestions to add to your list.

Descriptions

The description metatag is actually used more than keywords by a lot of search engines. It is often used as the text that appears under your link in search engines.

Example: <meta name=”description” content=”description of the page” />

If your page has no description, the listing will have a default piece of text from your site, but it is undoubtedly better to control what is displayed by using the description metatag. The description should be a synopsis of what the page contains, and as the content changes, it should be updated. Again, it is important to ensure that you have accurate, relevant and different descriptions on every page of your site – don’t describe your page as containing the secret to eternal youth if it’s actually your small business website.

Top tip: If you already have a list of keywords, try and use as many of them as possible in a short, descriptive sentence – but keep it down to 160 characters as most search engines use that as a limit.

Titles

While the title tag isn’t strictly speaking a piece of metadata, it is used by search engines and resides in the header with the metatags.

Example: <title> My page title </title>

The text you use in the title tag is one of the most important factors in how a search engine chooses to rank your site, and is more often than not used as the link text on search engine listings.
It also, very helpfully, appears in the top bar or tab of the user’s browser when they are on your site, and if they add a page as a ‘favourite’ is used as the link text.

Again, search engines like to see a different title on every single page of a website.

Alt text

Again, this is not strictly metadata as it appears throughout a site, but it warrants a mention. Some search engines pick up on the alt text that you use for images on your site.

Example: <img src=”dog.jpg” alt=”picture of a dog”/>

As both an SEO exercise and good practise for accessibility, you should always include some alternative text with your images. If the page doesn’t load properly for some reason, this is the text the user will see in place of the image.

Title text

OK, this isn’t metadata either, but it’s really helpful…! Use title text in your links – it’s like a tool-tip that displays when you hover over a link, and again, search engines pick up on it. It’s a great way to describe exactly where a link goes.

Example: <a href =”www.skillsontoast.co.uk” title=”Skills on Toast – Web design and online marketing, Bristol”>Skills on Toast</a> displays like this: Skills on Toast – hover over it to check we’re not lying!

Summary

Which of these things each search engine uses to index and rank websites changes all the time. We think the best strategy is to cover yourself from all angles. The number one rule for all these things is to make what you include relevant to your site. Using false, high-traffic search terms for keywords, descriptions and alt text, that appear nowhere else on your site will only encourage search engines to class your site as spam. So, be honest, be thorough and invest some time in doing it properly.

We are always happy to assist faithful followers of Butter Side Up, so if you need advice on using these methods or want to improve your website ranking, don’t hesitate to contact Skills on Toast!

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Posted in Articles, SEO, Simple SEO | 9 Comments »

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Simple SEO – part 1 – SEO Tools

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

SEO Tools – tools you can use to help you improve your website rankings

This article is the first in the Butter Side Up Simple SEO Series, which will be published every fortnight.

If you want to improve your website traffic, you’ll need to know where you stand. This article outlines a few of the many freely available tools you can use to check your progress, and make improvements.

Google Analytics – www.google.com/analytics

If you have a website and you don’t already have google analytics, now’s the time to register! Google analytics gives you information on the sites that people came from to get to yours, how they navigated through it and even which key words they typed into google to find you. It even shows you where in the world your traffic comes from on a map. Using all this information you can set goals and create reports. With the benchmarking tool you can even compare traffic figures for similar websites.

If you’re trying to optimise your website for search engines, signing up for analytics is the first step you should take so that you can track your progress and see which methods are working best for you. For example if you link share with another website, you’ll be able to see how much of your website traffic comes from their site.

Google Webmaster Central – www.google.com/webmaster

Google webmaster central allows you to see the top search queries used to find your site, links to your site, page errors and much, much more. It’s a great tool for identifying problems such as broken links and crawl errors, and the diagnostic section often offers solutions.

You can also upload sitemaps and robot text, which help to index your site for google and other search engines. For more information on site maps, go to Simple SEO – Part 3 – Site Maps

Ranking Today Site Checkup – http://www.rankingtoday.com/seo/site-checkup.php?SID=GADW

Amongst the multitude of tools offered by Ranking Today, is the site checkup tool, which rates your website in terms of how appealing it is to search engines, giving you a mark out of 5. The score is based on a number of factors, including keyword density and page load times, and the site provides really simple explanations of what the reports mean and how your score can be improved.

SEO Chat Search Engine Keyword Position Tool – http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/search-engine-keyword-position/

This is another great tool that is available from a number of different sites. The idea is that you enter the URL of your website and a keyword phrase and the report shows you your ranking for that query on a number of search engines. This is a great way to see whether the changes you’re making are working.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool – https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal

Again, there are many tools out there that help you to research your keywords effectively. The Google Keyword Tool allows you to either enter the URL of your site so it can scan your content for appropriate keywords, or enter keyword phrases to compare their relevance and popularity.

Researching keywords is really important for search engine optimisation – we look at keywords in more detail in Simple SEO – Part 2 – Metadata.

So there are a few of our favourite SEO tools – there are thousands out there on the web, and many of them are free – so go for it – see how you’re doing – it’s the first step in trying to make improvements.

We are always happy to assist faithful followers of Butter Side Up, so if you need help using the tools, interpreting the results, or want to improve your website ranking, don’t hesitate to contact Skills on Toast!

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Posted in Articles, SEO, Simple SEO | 7 Comments »

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