Now we don’t want to launch into a crash course about html or meta tags — the thing is, the power and force of search engine optimization can absolutely bring in power and force to your website, and eventually to your sales as well. We can say that SEO effort is successful through the sales and dollars — that’s why many will agree that SEO programs are the driving force that makes a website a website. By making changes every once in a while to your SEO (words, phrases, meta tags, html) the better results you will going to get. This simply shows that yes, SEO is magical. Literally.

Search engines such as Google and Yahoo have come into terms of getting rid of spam and will probably get rid of your site when they see it as just trash or a scheme to lure people to check it out — that means your online business should have the meat and spice to make you reach the top ranks into their list — and then everything else will just follow. You’ll feel its power and force in no time.

Goojje is a play on words, sounding like sister while  ‘Google’ in maderin sounds very much like big brother. The creators of Goojje even left a message on their front page roughly translated as “Sister was very happy when brother gave up the thought of leaving and stayed for sister”. Many are interpiting this as a mockery of Google potentially pulling out of China while others believe it is a plea for Google to stay.

Goojje Home- page suspiciously similar to Google

It is very clear that the site has modeled itself off the searching giant from the style of layout to the Google font and colours. There is even a small nod to Baidu with the paw print in its logo.  The search engine returns many of the same results of Google but only ‘clean’ government approved websites. It is well known that the Chinese government has implemented filters on the country’s internet access dubbed as The Great Firewall of China, with any content that is deemed ‘undesirable’ blocked out. This includes many foreign sites such as the BBC news site.

The Google owned Youtube was also reproducted with a Chinese makeover. A variation of Youtube called Youtubecn popped up not long after Goojje showing videos that are usually blocked on the Youtube’s site. Although its slow and often described as glichy, Youtbecn is gaining alot of momentum.

Google refused to make any comment on Goojje or other copycat sites.

Google is still the strongest owning 66% of all the online search market. Although Google still is the most predominantly used search engine, competition is now emerging from Chinese search site Baidu ranking third, while Microsoft is showing amazing growth being up 70%. This could be suggesting that many users are wanting to optimise their search results by going to alternatives.

With internet searches diversifying over the course of 2009, any number of new searching sites could find their way onto comScore’s list for 2010.

*images sourced from www.comscore.com

Search engine optimisation is a way of getting your site to rank highly on search engines by choosing words and phrases that best relate to your website. As users search these terms it is a sure fire way to display your website at the top. By making changes to your meta tags and HTML, the quality of searches can be improved greatly. Its widely known that the top search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves like to keep their search algorithms and strategies a secret to stop spam sites from clogging up their searches and still claim credit for the highest search results.

SEO algorithms are very complex, meaning, for example that a website could be ranked 600th on Google and 1st on AOL. There’s often no need to submit a new site to a search engine as a cleverly placed link to an existing site will do the trick, connecting all the content together on the search engine. From then it takes a few days for all the new sites to be indexed. Now it is imperative that research is carried out to find the best search phrases and keywords to improve your search engine ranking. This is usually time consuming for business’, who are now choosing to seek additional help for this kind of promotion and marketing. A kind of a consultation service to help improve the design and traffic of their site

123 Ranking is one of those that business’ are turning to guarantee their top ten position in search engines. SEO with a difference they are defiantly one to be looked up.

www.123ranking.co.uk

What Are Testimonials?

In the online world, testimonials are positive comments posted on a website to demonstrate how happy previous/existing customers are. Testimonials are from people who are willing to recommend the service and put their name, even their face or company name, against their comment to vouch for what they’ve said. It is a known fact that they can increase conversion for many sites.

How Can You Use Them to Build Links?

Well, when a testimonial is displayed on the website is often links to the site of the person commenting. This is a valid link and, if you have an exact match domain, can be a great link to have – particularly if the comments are displayed on a websites home page and they are an established website with some level authority and trust.

If you are happy to submit positive comments to a company or website they should be more than happy to publish them – particularly if you are also an authoritative source or well known name or brand.

Have you tried this method of link building? Did you find it effective or difficult to implement? Would you include this as part of your link building campaign? Comment below.

Here are 6 SEO site redesign tips to keep your new site search engine friendly:-

1. Creating Your SEO’d Site Architecture

Search engine spiders pay a lot of attention to how your pages are linked together, pages that have inbound links from every other page on your site will be given more weight than those that are only linked from a couple of others.

Don’t bury content that was previously bringing targeted search engine traffic too deep within the new sites structure. Ensure that content focused around the more competitive key terms are placed fairly high in your sites hierarchy.

2. Categorization and Avoiding Duplicate Content

People seeking information from a search engine tend to have a question,  problem, or a need for specific information. The search terms they type into the search engines reflect this. The more ways you can categorize your content for different target markets you serve, the better.

Try to make sure that all of your top-level pages answer the visitors potential questions, and make it clear that your products and services can solve their problem. To avoid any duplicate content issues you should also ensure that regardless of how someone found any piece of content on your site, they always end up at the same URL.  For example, if a specific product can be classified as both a product and a service, it makes sense that it might be listed under both categories. However, the page (URL) that the potential customer eventually lands on, regardless of which category they started in, should always be the same.

3. New Content Management System and Changing URLS

Search engines take time to index new URL’s  and give them any kind of weight. During your redesign if URL’s have to be updated for any reason, whether it be due to a new content management system or back-end coding, it’s vital to 301-redirect all old URLs to their relevant counterparts on the redesigned site. This will ensure that the link popularity of the old URL’s are swiftly passed onto the new ones, this will also ensure site visitors don’t receive 404-not-found errors if trying to access old URL’s.

4. Coding of Navigation Menus

Any links that are contained within the navigation menu of your site should be coded in a search engine– friendly manner. Some DHTML and flash menus are invisible to search engines, so can’t be crawled which consequently causes the pages linked within them to not receive the link popularity they should and possibly even not get indexed at all.

Ensure all navigational menus are coded with CSS, this will make them visible and therefore crawlable to the search engine spiders. It’s also best to make sure your content can be reached by hard-coded links, –don’t force visitors to go through any kind of search box menu as they are generally not very search engine friendly.

5. Custom HTML Elements

Some level of automation for metas, headers, URLs, and alt attributes for images can be helpful but it’s vital for an effective optimisation that your new websites content management system (CMS) allows you to manually input custom descriptions for these as well.

Make sure your CMS has fields available to enter data for meta tags, heading tags, etc. Some systems only allow one set of global tags but it is far more effective to optimise individual pages so try to use a system which has this function.

6. Session IDs and Other Tracking Links

Generally it’s best not to use session IDs to track your sites visitors,  however if your system has to use them you’ll only need to feed the “clean” URLs to the search engine spiders ,– otherwise they may get caught in an infinite loop, indexing the same content under multiple URLs which will result in duplicate content issues.

There will probably always be a few unexpected bugs to work out when your new site goes live but by following the above at least you won’t have to be afraid of losing your search engine visitors.  There’s nothing like the feeling of having your beautiful new website launched, but even better is knowing that the people looking for what you offer will continue to be able to easily find you in the search engines.

One report I saw recently showed that in some niches it is important to be listed in Google UK better than in Google.com. They have various sites, one of them listed at #1 in Google.com and #10 in Google UK. They get much more traffic from Google UK than Google.com – yet the AdWords Keyword Tool suggests that search volume is higher in the USA than in the UK.

Another report (based on a small scale of businesses) shows that websites that sell to a UK market generally get around 20-30% more referrals from Google.co.uk than Google.com, even though they rank at #1 in both search engines.

According to some, a lot of this comes down to your TLD – (domain extension). A .uk domain name is likely to rank better in Google UK, a .fr domain is likely to rank better in Google France and so on.

Some say that it also comes down to the TLDs that link to your site. A site with plenty of .gr links pointing to it is likely to be a Greek website.

IP address also comes into play according to various webmasters. People have reported that they have seen ranking fall slightly in Google UK when moving from a UK-based IP to a US one. It wasn’t founded that their positions in Google.com increased.

In Google Webmaster Tools you can specify the location of your website which will be where your website’s exposure will be focused. The last time I checked this could only be done with non-geographic domain names (as a .fr domain already says you are running a website in French) to help target your website to a particular community.

So it seems that where you rank better can be manipulated somewhat. In the ideal world you’d want to rank better in the search engine that refers visitors that convert the best. But can you really determine where this is without painful trial and error? And does all of it it really matter? Some say it does – other’s don’t. What do you think? And where would you rather rank?

Unique product descriptions

Avoid simply using the manufacturer’s generic product description as it’s highly likely that  many other sites selling the same products as you will  be using it already. It may be an easier option in the short term to do this but will not do your website any good in the search engines as they will penalise your site for containing duplicate content.

A unique product description will not only help you to attract more search engine traffic but should also help to increase your conversion rate. A slightly lengthier product page will also enable you to include more of your main key terms which again should improve your positions within the search engines.

Use keywords in URLs

Many online retailers tend to use dynamic databases which can produce some ugly, lengthy URLs which bear no significance to the product.

Adding related keywords to your product page URLs will help them rank higher in search engines, as well as making the pages more understandable to your visitors.

Use customer product reviews

Customer reviews are not only a great way of persuading shoppers to purchase your products, they can also be very useful in terms of SEO.

Adding reviews is a great way to ensure your product pages are filled with plenty of unique content – which is something the search engines love.

Make sure product pages are just a couple of clicks away

This is great practice anyway as it will allow customers to find your products  quickly and easily,  it also makes it easier for the search engine spiders to access,crawl and therefore index these pages.

Optimise your images for SEO

With the introduction of universal search more and more images will be popping up in the search results, therefore every image on your product pages should be well optimised.

Optimise your product photos with  keyword-rich, descriptive  ALT tags and file names.  Also adding descriptions to your images will help the visually impaired use your site.

The  proposal was unveiled by Google’s Matt Cutts last week, during which page loading time was included in a list of ‘things to expect in 2010.’ Matt explained that the loading time of a site  is already a factor in Google Adwords  advertising  and that there is a strong desire to incorporate the speed of a site  in Google’s organic search ranking algorithm and making it a quality factor.

Seeing as Google have over 200 other organic ranking algorithms being taken into consideration, which are changing all of the time,  page loading time may not ultimately prove to carry a significant weight, and will probably only impact those sites that take an excessive amount of time to load. Nevertheless, loading time is a factor that site owners have some degree of control over and this decision may see users taking measures to ensure their pages are loading as quickly as possible.

This decision may provide a justification for webmasters to spend more money on larger hosting packages with hosting providers with high connectivity, or even move to a dedicated server . Although this would seemingly provide a “quick fix” site owners are being encouraged to put more of a focus on the quality of their dynamic pages and work to employ the best coding and SEO practices to produce fast loading, high-performance sites.

So with such a flexible and powerful platform (one that doesn’t even need to be used for a blog!) it makes sense to make the most of it’s usefulness and ease of use as a business tool and take advantage of every opportunity to optimise your WordPress blog for the search engines.

To get you started WordPress Codex includes a page dedicated to SEO topics and this page is a must-read for anyone running a WordPress blog or website.

There are a also number of great plug-ins that make it easy to implement SEO techniques with WordPress:

• All in One SEO Pack, a very popular plugin that performs a number of functions, including optimizing your page titles, adding META tags automatically and removing common duplicate content.
• Google XML Sitemaps which is another popular plug-in, Google XML Sitemaps creates a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap for your blog.
• KB Robots.txt enabling you to create and edit Robots.txt files from within the WordPress admin.
• Redirection helps you monitor 404 errors, automatically manage 301 redirections when a post URL changes and has a powerful set of features that helps you redirect users to different pages based on various conditions.
• Breadcrumb NavXT adds breadcrumb navigation to your WordPress blog with this plug-in.
• WordPress Related Posts allows your blog to feature related posts.
• SEO Friendly Images automatically adds the ALT and TITLE attributes to images.
• Nofollow Case by Case enables you to decide which comments should have or nofollow attribute which is otherwise automatically added by WordPress.

Have you used any other plugins that you found useful or prefer to use regularly? Please comment below.