Shoe String SEO

There are many factors to consider when reviewing a site for SEO. On-site, off-site, target market, useability to name but a few. Today i will be talking about on-site factors.

On-Site SEO

This kind of budget seo is often overlooked recently in favour of massive/bulk link building campaigns.

No matter how much off-site seo you do (link building, cost-per-click advertising, banner adverts etc) if your site isn't readable by search engines and people then it's just not going to work.

So what can i do?

First: You should make some catchy (but relevant) phrases and put them in a fairly central location on your website in a bulleted list. Take a look at Debt Help Quick (one of our recent clients) and you will see a great example of this. This grabs the attention of the visitor and immediately, at-a-glance, tells them what your site is about and what it does. In budget seo terms the search engine spider will easily be able to see what kind of internal category it should put your site in and what is relevant to it.

Great, ok what else?

Header tages (h1-h5) and bold tags in the html to emphasize important words in your content doesn't just make them stand out to your users, it also tells the search engines that these are important phrases and really say what your site is about. Remember: A search engine isn't as intelligent as a human (yet!) so it still has to follow some rules to work out what your site is supposed to be about and what it isn't

Feel free to include some nice flashy images or in fact flash animations but you must remember to include 'alt' tag text that tells the search engine what this image is supposed to be.

That's enough to get you started.. more to follow soon.

What are Metatags?

Ok first off i should explain what metatags even are if you haven't heard the term before.

Metatags are information about the web page you're looking at. If you 'view source' on a web page sometimes you will see a section at the top withing the HEAD tags that has a tag called META in it. This will then have a name attribute which will usually be keywords, description or title. This is then followed by another attribule called content.

All this stuff is designed for non-humans to be able to tell what the page is about and was originally what search engines used to determine the topic and content of your page. Unfortunately these tags (especially meta name='keywords') was abused so spammers would fill this information with completely irrelevant data just to get them to show up in search engines for anything.

So i shouldn't use them then?

Since then most search engines have stopped placing much weight (in terms of how they effect a page's ranking) on metatags. But that doesn't mean they're completely useless.

Google still uses the title tag and often takes exerts from the description tag. MSN (Bing) and Yahoo still use the data to an extent too.

So you're saying i should use them then

The simplest answer is: Yes you should but keep them relevant. You don't actually NEED to have the keywords metatag at all and it certainly won't hurt your low cost seo campaign. As with any seo the rule is: Keep it relevant and don't be tempted to spam. Make your title tags relevant and you meta name='title' as explained in my last article. You're only risking ranking penalties by making irrelevant or spammy metatag.

Also try and keep them unique per page. Each page should be about something different to reflect that in the metatags and title

Ok thats all for now

What is a keyword?

Keywords are what customers search for in search engines to (ideally) find your site in the budget seo. Keywords are usually one to four words in length.

Why are keywords important

Choosing the right keywords isn't just important to getting relevant traffic and sales from your site its EVERYTHING. If you don't appear at a reasonable position for a relevant search phrase you will get very little worthwhile traffic.

This article will teach you basic keyword research strategies and introduce you to more advanced local tactics.

How do i choose my keywords?

Think about what you site is about and what YOU would search for if you wanted to find it. For example: If you're selling sports equipment then its probably not such a great idea to go for 'sports equipment' because it's too generic and people wouldn't generally search for it to find a tennis racket or a set of golf clubs. You need to be as specific as possible to get relevant traffic without being so specific that you choose a keyword that very few people search for.

This is where keyword tools come in handy. These tool will show you an estimate of how much traffic a term receieves for a given term in a month. They will show you various variations of the keyword you enter. Put in something generic and it will show you many variations.

Free Keyword Research Tools

Google Keyword Tool - Search for keywords in over 50 languages. It features a very high quality, clean and frequently updated keyword database, with estimated search volume. This is my personal favourite and the i personally would alway use.

You could also try Wordtracker or Yahoo Search Marketing's keyword tool.

In summary: Make sure to spend a bit of time researching before you go ahead with a seo compaign. Speak to us if you need help choosing your keywords and we will happily take a look at your site and make some suggestiongs

What is the Title tag?

As the name suggests, the title tag is an HTML tag that is used to give a title to the page. This is very important in seo since it is the first thing the search engine (and the user) will see.

How do i see my Title Tag?

You can see the title tag in the source code of a web page or at the top of your browser window. Simply click on view from the menu at the top of your browser and then click on view source. You will find the title tag in the head section of the source code along with your Meta description tag and Meta keyword Tag.

What should your Title Tag contain?

In general the title should contain the name of your site or company along with any keyword you are interested in being discovered in search engines for.

How long should your Title Tag be?

This is open to debate but in our opinion title tags should span no less than six words and no more than twelve which result in about a range of fifty to eighty characters, this includes spaces, hyphens, commas, etc. This will allow the search engine to utilize this information effectively. You do not want to over kill the keyword density by cramming in to much information that a search engine may look over. It is not recommended to use the same word more than 3 times.

Making a title tag long is not necessarily a bad budget seo but if you offer multiple products or services do not feel you have to cram all the keywords in one tag because you are in fear of something being missed by a search engine. Remember that each page can have a title tag so you have be more specific for a given product on sub pages of your site.

Try one of our free site reviews to get some recommendations

1. Use consistent and intuitive navigation. Users are impatient. They hate having to learn new site navigation. Make your navigation obvious and consistent throughout your site. Don't try and come up with some new and unusual flashy menu. People aren't usually interested in watching animated menus and links.

2. Consistent navigation and search feature present on each page are among the most important usability tools we can offer to a website visitor.

Combining navigation and search results can be even more powerful - this provides context and eliminates guesswork.

If you have a site search you might want to consider putting together search results and navigation (i.e. bread crumbs or cookie crumbs, depending on your culinary preference). If impossible to add the crumbs navigation to each link in the search results, consider adding the URL. Provided your site's information architecture is decent, seeing what directory the page belongs to, might provide an additional clue as to whether the result is indeed relevant.

3. Don't disable the "Back" button or keep forcing the user back to a certain page. Many people will simply close the browser

4. Cookie crumbs are good to help visitors know what page/section of your site they are on. For example a trail like this:

You are currently browsing this page: Home > Our Services > budget seo > Pricing

5. Home page link: Always have a consistent link to the home page of your site in the same location on every page. Make the logo link to the homepage.

6. Back up fancy navigation such as java applet, flash DHTML & javascript with appropriate text links & sitemap. Always provide standard html links as a backup for users with high security settings or primitive browsers.

7. Build a Site Map

People do use them and more importantly search engines do too which helps with seo

8. Remember that the homepage is not the only entry page to the site and make it clear to users which page they're landed on at all times.

9. Redundancy in Navigation. Navigation is fundamental to website development so redundancy assures users will find what they are looking for. Provide side menu and top menu for example.

Following these tips will not only improve your site's usability but will also improve cheap seo

Step 1 - Keywords
Choose your keywords. Perhaps the most important step of the process of budget seo as incorrectly targeting phrases can result in traffic that is not interested in your product. Here are 3 useful tools for this:

1. Google AdWords Keyword Tool
2. WordTracker Keyword Tool
3. SemRush Keyword Tool


Step 2 - Site Content
Before you optimize a websites it's to get some new content created so that you know exactly what you need. Creating some of new content before starting the budget seo process can be doubly helpful in that it can reveal potential additions to your website that you may not have considered (a forum or blog for example). If you already have a site, perhaps simply sit back and imagine what you would do if your whole site was lost and you had to start again.

Step 3 - Site Structure
A solid structure is very important. Creating a site that is easily spidered by the search engines yet attractive to visitors can be a daunting and yet entirely rewarding endeavor. A search engine spider reads your web page like you would read a book. It starts at the top left, reads across, and then moves down. Priority must be given then, to what you place near the top of your page.

Step 4 - Optimization
Once you have your keyword targets, your content created and your site structure established you must now move on to the most obvious step, the optimization of your content.

As above, a spider places importance on what it reads highest on the page and so beginning with a sentence that includes your targeted phrase only makes sense. That said, stuffing in keywords in hopes that it will add weight to your page generally doesn't work. The term "keyword density" refers to the percentage of your content that is made up of your targeted keywords. There are optimum densities according to many reputable cheap seo's though exactly what they are is debata ble. Estimates seem to range anywhere from 4 or 5% to 10 to 12% (quite a gap isn't it).

Step 5 - Internal Linking
To insure that your website gets fully indexed you have to make sure that the spiders have an easy path through your website. Text links make the best choice as the anchor text (the actual words used to link to a specific page) add relevancy to that page for the words used to link to it. For example, if I ran a website on acne and had a treatments page I could link to it with an image, with text reading "Click for more information on how to treat this skin condition" or simply "Acne Treatments". When a search engine spider hits an image it has no idea what the image is and, while it will follow the link, it will not give any weight to the page it hits. If you use text that does not contain the keywords you are targeting you are essentially supplying the engine with the same lack of relevancy as with an image, but if you use the phrase "Acne Treatments" to link to your acne treatments page you are attaching relevancy to that page for those keywords.