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Advanced SEO tips to get your site to the top

Simple ideas to help your site race up the search rankings

Being the first listing on Google can get as many as 55 per cent of all people who search for that term clicking on your link.

Put simply, SEO works. It's simple, cost effective and delivers long-term efficiencies. You just need to make sure it works for you.

The world of SEO is becoming more and more sophisticated. In a game of cat and mouse, the engines strive to limit spam and deliver relevant results in return for a few keywords, while so-called black hat SEO consultants, those who use unethical practices to gain top results, look to exploit the system.

A simple, professional approach to SEO can bring thousands of qualified visitors to your site, boost your income and make a real impact on your bottom line. So where do you start?

Work smart

The first thing you need to do is think about the journey your users take, from start to finish. At every stage of their journey, users enter different kinds of search query. These can be divided into three basic types.

The first is the navigational search: a query that includes your brand name, domain name or company name (for example: 'Sony Erikkson'). The second is the informational search, where the user enters highly generic phrases ('holiday in Spain'). Finally, the third type of search query is the transactional search: usually three-, four- or five-word phrases that exactly identify what a user wants.

Each type of search query is relevant at different parts of the user's journey, from initial research to shopping around and finally to selection and purchasing. The key to SEO success is to ensure you have visibility at each point of the user's journey, so understanding the sections of the journey is essential. Blindly optimising for a set of keywords you think is appropriate is a quick way to waste time and money. You really need to work smart to get the best from your efforts.

Think about the user journey for your site and select keywords that ensure you have a presence at every stage. Just because users who buy from you do a navigational search right before they purchase doesn't mean you should undervalue the influence other keywords have in the journey.

For example, let's say you sell handbags and you see everyone who buys arrives at point of purchase using your company name. However, the journey may have started weeks earlier, probably with an informational search.

Get indexed

Once you're happy with your keywords and overall content in the light of a user's journey, you need to start thinking about getting your site indexed by the big search engines. The chances are you won't have as many pages indexed as you think, but thankfully the rules are fairly simple.

First, you need to make sure they're able to crawl your pages. Search engine spiders favour a few simple things:
• Clean XHTML or HTML code
• A lack of on-page JavaScript (put it in an external file and use an include call)
• An absence of inline CSS styles: put them in an external CSS file instead
• Non-dynamic URL paths

The most troublesome of these four is the dynamic URL paths. Many shopping carts and content management systems use dynamic URL paths such as domain.com/=3888&colour=56.

All the current search spiders prefer URL paths that are static, so this could be changed to domain.com/ product-3888/colour-56. If you want to be extra SEO-friendly you could use URL paths such as domain.com/go-karts/red (see .net magazine's mod.rewrite tutorial atwww.netmag.co.uk/files/mod.pdf).

Submit a site map

So, you've cleaned up your code, removed the JavaScript and inline CSS styles and made your URL paths SEO friendly. What next?

In the early history of the web, you had to wait for the search engines to visit your site and index it for you. Happily, those days are gone. You can now post a special XML site map file, which contains details of your site, so the engines know exactly what they have to crawl. Head over togsitecrawler.com to create a free XML map of your whole site.

Once you have a complete site map available, you'll need to upload it to the top-level folder on your domain (domain.com/sitemap.xml) and inform the search engines where it resides.

There are three ways to do this. The first is to upload a 'robots.txt' file to your top-level folder on your domain and add a line of code that alerts the spiders to the location of your site map. This code should look similar to: sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml. Now all the major search engines will be able to find your site map.

If you can't get a 'robots.txt' file, or don't want to take that approach, you can inform the engines by sending them a 'ping' letting them know you have a site map and where it is. Each engine has a special URL to send these pings to: just change the URL to suit your domain and then browse to it. For Google you need www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http:%3A//www.domain.com/sitemap.xml while for Yahoo you needsearch.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&url=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml.

Finally you can use each of the engine's webmaster portals to add a site map manually. The URLs for each service are:www.google.com/webmasters/tools/,https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ and webmaster.live.com/. Signing up for an account with all three is a really good idea as it will enable you to track and monitor both indexed pages and any problems with your site.

Once you've started to get your pages indexed, you're well on the way to getting your SEO on track. The next step is to ensure you start to get high rankings in the search results pages for the keywords that will drive traffic to your site. This means making your site relevant.

Be relevant

Just because a human can work out what your website is about doesn't mean a search engine can. Creating a page that pushes every algorithm button may get you some good rankings, but humans would probably find it a fairly awful experience to browse.

This presents us with a real dilemma when optimising our content and a good rule of thumb for this situation is put humans first. After all, having tons of traffic from high-ranking keywords to an awful site equals disaster.

At the start we outlined how we need to work smart by finding a set of keywords and phrases that will drive qualified traffic to our site at all the stages of the user journey. Now we need to take those keywords and match them to the pages on our website.

If we have keywords and no content then we need to create it. It's a good rule of thumb to optimise each page with one main keyword, maybe a generic phrase like 'digital camera', and also for some niche or longtail keywords such as 'best value digital camera'.

How do we make the page relevant for these keywords? The first step is to dive into the code of the page, or meta title to be precise. This is the piece of code that lets the search engine know what the main subject of the page is (it's shown to humans in the very top of the browser).

Sometimes you'll see titles that have keywords repeated. This is because many people get fixated on three key elements of optimisation, namely proximity, density and prominence.

Placing keywords close together and excluding common language makes keyword proximity better – for example 'Holidays Spain' instead of 'Holidays in Spain'. Next on the over-the-top hit list is density. You may hear all kinds of 'rules' about this, from 10 per cent density of keywords to 20 per cent density, but trying to place keywords unnaturally into a page makes it a really bad experience for humans and risks search engines thinking the page is just spam.

Finally, you'll see pages where the meta title, page heading and initial text are stuffed full of keywords to try and make them more prominent on the page. The truth is, it's rare that you'll ever need to go this far.

It's better to write naturally. In the head section of your HTML you'll find this code: <title>Home - .net magazine</ title>. This meta title is probably the most important change you can make.

The first thing you need to do is make sure every page has a unique meta title. Then make sure the meta title follows a simple principle: <title>Primary Page Keyword | call to action | brand</title>. This makes the title relevant to search engines while still providing a good user experience.

Next, consider content. It's essential to structure your content using HTML heading tags H1, H2 and H3 as well as having 100-400 words of content. Add your primary keyword to your H1 heading somewhere in the first sentence on the page. Then write the rest of the headings and content naturally while considering how you can work in the other, niche/longtail keywords.

Finally, think holistically. Internal linking using the correct anchor text is a simple way of both passing users to relevant pages and letting the search engines know what the pages are about. Search engines put a great deal of significance on the text used to link to other pages; it's like telling the engines exactly what the page is about. So avoid links like 'read more' and start using keywords in these links.

Go through every page on your site and make sure that it's relevant to the keywords that will drive traffic. This will increase the user's experience and be a huge step towards letting search engines know what the page is all about. Avoid going over the top: always put your users first.

So, you've got your pages indexed, and made the engines aware of what you're relevant to. Job done? Not quite. The most important (and controversial topic) for SEO is building authority.

Build authority

With the launch of Google in 1998, a new element was factored into search algorithms: authority. This is measured by the number and quality of inbound links from websites to yours.

Google was the first search engine to take into account how a website is linked: for example, the more inbound links to a site from similar sites known to the engine using keywords in the anchor text, the more authority is given to that receiving site.

This isn't a perfect system. For instance, if you do a search for 'click here', you'll see Adobe is the number one result. This isn't because its site is relevant for the phrase 'click here'. It's because so many other sites have linked to it using the anchor text 'click here', mainly to the download page for Adobe Acrobat Reader.

This means that your website not only needs inbound links but it also has to have the correct keywords in the anchor text of that link to improve rankings for the keyword.

Google gives a measurement of the authority a web page has using PageRank. This is measured on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best. Webmasters soon discovered that getting links from pages with a high PageRank improved their PageRank, because some of the value of the linking page was passed along.

This led to many sculpting PageRank to artificially gain value and buying links from pages with high PageRank.

As soon as Google found people were gaming the system, it introduced changes to its algorithm to try to spot paid links. It also added a form to Webmaster Tools so people could report paid links and in some cases banned sites from the index. The most high profile recent case was GoCompare, which was banned from the index in early 2008 for what seems like buying links.

Google now actively seeks paid link reports and has a console in Webmaster Tools to simplify the process. This means certain link building activity has become impossible to carry out without alerting Google to the fact that it's not natural.

To keep your site safe, you're best off avoiding certain types of link building, such as buying links, reciprocal linking and site wide links.

Reciprocal links (also known as link exchanging) are where you swap links with other webmasters. Site wide links are those that appear on every page of a website, usually the sidebar or footer, and these can be seen as paid links by Google.

Ethical link building can be time consuming, but it's worthwhile in the long run. To start with, make sure you have your website listed in SEO-friendly directories, ie. a directory that's in Google's index. A list of these can be found at info.vilesilencer.com.

A next step could be to write, optimise and submit press releases to online press release distribution sites. Some are free and some require a fee. We've compiled an extensive list for you: go to delicious.com/netmag/pressrelease and click on the links.

You can also build ethical links by writing distributed content. This is basically an article that one site provides for others to publish rather than publishing it on their own site.

The advantage of this method is that good quality content is always in demand and your links will appear everywhere the article does. Once an article is put online, it's rarely taken down, so the initial cost is just the time you've spent to create and submit it.

Even better, your link will appear on a page surrounded by content relevant to your site and you'll be able to 'deep link' back to related articles within your own site. It's even possible to generate a creative commons licence, which allows anyone else to reproduce your content on their own site, on conditions that they link to your site.

But of course the simplest and most effective way to build links is to create content people want to link to. Whether it be a how-to guide, a Q&A or an interview with a prominent person, be the first to write the latest news in your niche and give away something valuable for free.

Finally, remember that the quality of a link is much more important than the quantity. Building authority is essential and one way you can naturally build links is to 'join the conversation' by getting involved in the explosion of social media sites currently being used by millions of people.

Join the conversation

Social media, social networking, blogging and social bookmarking have turned the web into one big conversation. Sites such as Twitter enable people to post comments on what they're doing directly to the web from their mobile phones.

This has created untold opportunities from an SEO standpoint, but some have been exploited. Sites such as www.digg.com andwww.stumbleupon.com have been abused by those trying to exploit their SEO potential, making it very difficult to ethically use either.

But there are fantastic new ways to build links naturally. By creating profiles on social media sites and participating on a personal level rather than as a commercial entity, you can build awareness of your website and services. If you have an authentic story to tell then people will naturally link to you, write about you and send traffic your way.

The simplest approach to social media is to optimise your site so that it's easy for people to share your content and link to your site. This includes adding links to bookmark pages at social media sites: you can do this using a service such as the one provided by Add This. Add links to your Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other social media profiles to your 'About us' page. Make sure you embed a Google Map of your location.

To get ready for the semantic web, you can start to use Microformats. This is a way of marking up the code of your page so that it's human- and machine-readable.

To see Microformats that appear on a page and what you can do with them, start using the Firefox web browser with the Operator plug-in, available athttps://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4106. Eventually search engines will start to read semantically marked web pages and this will enhance user experience and give you the opportunity to be ahead of the curve.

More than anything, just join in. Get a profile on LinkedIn, start commenting on blogs, start using Twitter and Facebook and if you have the time, start a blog yourself. It's the easiest way to build authority and links back to your site.

SEO is a vital part of your online presence, and the benefits you can gain are well within reach if you work smart, get indexed, be relevant, build authority and join the conversation. Get it right and it can provide thousands of qualified visitors, build your brand and maintain your competitive edge.

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First published in .net magazine, Issue 184

Now read 10 free online tools every web designer needs

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