SEO Guidelines from Google

Dont just take our word for it. Below are Googles SEO top tips:

Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue.
Amazingly, Google get these spam emails too:

"Dear google.com,I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories..."

Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for "burn fat at night" diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.

No one can guarantee a ranking on Google.

Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google, or advertise a "priority submit" to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or through the Webmaster Tools and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.

Be careful if a company is secretive or won't clearly explain what they intend to do.

Ask for explanations if something is unclear. If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or "throwaway" domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google's index. Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it's best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to "help" you.

You should never have to link to an SEO.
Avoid SEOs that talk about the power of "free-for-all" links, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines. These are typically useless exercises that don't affect your ranking in the results of the major search engines -- at least, not in a way you would likely consider to be positive.

Some SEOs may try to sell you the ability to type keywords directly into the browser address bar.

Most such proposals require users to install extra software, and very few users do so. Evaluate such proposals with extreme care and be skeptical about the self-reported number of users who have downloaded the required applications.
Choose wisely.

While you consider whether to go with an SEO, you may want to do some research on the industry. Google is one way to do that, of course. You might also seek out a few of the cautionary tales that have appeared in the press, including this article on one particularly aggressive SEO: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002002970_nwbizbriefs12.html.

While Google doesn't comment on specific companies, we've encountered firms calling themselves SEOs who follow practices that are clearly beyond the pale of accepted business behavior. Be careful.

Be sure to understand where the money goes.
While Google never sells better ranking in our search results, several other search engines combine pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular web search results. Some SEOs will promise to rank you highly in search engines, but place you in the advertising section rather than in the search results. A few SEOs will even change their bid prices in real time to create the illusion that they "control" other search engines and can place themselves in the slot of their choice. This scam doesn't work with Google because our advertising is clearly labeled and separated from our search results, but be sure to ask any SEO you're considering which fees go toward permanent inclusion and which apply toward temporary advertising.

Talk to many SEOs, and ask other SEOs if they'd recommend the firm you're considering.
References are a good start, but they don't tell the whole story. You should ask how long a company has been in business and how many full time individuals it employs. If you feel pressured or uneasy, go with your gut feeling and play it safe: hold off until you find a firm that you can trust.

Does W3C compliance impact on your SEO?

Can W3C compliance and accessibility impact your Search Engine Optimisation? It's a common question and the answer is "definitely maybe".

From experience having a site that is 100% code compliant doesn’t give you any direct SEO benefit. That said throwing up a page with complete disregard for valid code is looking for trouble. If you put your page into a validator and it comes back with hundreds of errors you may be looking for trouble. Depending on what your errors are you may have made it harder for a search engine bot to crawl your website. However if you can get it down to handful of errors (such as images or search boxes), it might not be worth the time obsessing over those last few details.

A site designed with XHTML is a different kettle of fish altogether. With strict compliance you really should be 100% valid. If you site is likely to end up on a mobile device such as a phone or iPaq then it has a better chance of not "breaking". Until mobile browsers become more advanced, forgiving and standardized it’s going to be rough going and 100% W3C compliance is a really good idea.

Links, Links, Links

Ok, so I've taken this post from another blog but I thought it might be interesting!

Have you ever wondered how some sites get so many links? Clearly sites such as Google deserve to have millions of links but I decided to see which sites and sub pages were building links into the millions.

• 150 million links to http://www.statcounter.com/
• 24.8 million links to http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
• 24 million links to http://wordpress.com
• 22 million links to http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
• 14 million links links to http://www.technorati.com
• 13.7 million links to http://www.moneyexpert.com/Compare-Loans.aspx
• 7.5 million links to http://www.moneyweb.co.uk/products/mortgages/mcapital.html
• 5.5 million links to http://threestore.three.co.uk/
• 5.5 million links to http://www.microsoft.com/
• 4.8 million links to http://www.apple.com/
• 4 million links links to http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/geovisitors/
• 3 million links links to http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/
• 2 million links to http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress/popularity-contest
• 1.3 million links to http://photomatt.net

We think this is quite a strange list apart from a few. Where are the media web sites such as CNN or BBC? I think that this goes to show that there are non-ethical techniques at large in creating links from "spammy" web sites.

I wonder how long it would take for the search engines to suss this out - that is if it is possible of course!

Give your new web site a kick start....

Judging from forum posts and other sources, getting indexed in Google – let alone on the first few pages – presents a major challenge for a new web site. Some SEO consultants wont even even touch new web sites.

If you have a new web site, chin up; its not all doom and gloom!

When building a brand-new web site, SEO should not be an afterthought; you need to think about it right from the beginning, along with your site’s content. It starts with keyword research.
You know what your business offers but do you know how your target audience refer to or think about it? Do your customers refer to your products using the same phrases as you do? Put yourself in there shoes when thinking about your keywords.

You shouldn't think about putting an "Under Construction" page up when your site is being built. Do you really want Google to index a blank page? If you need to get something online quickly then think about building a mini site with some basic product and contact details on it.

When building your web site you will need to think about your directory and navigation structure. Make it so that Google can follow all your links and find all the necessary pages on your site.

Then start to think about your external links. Good external links can build up a sold reputation for your site - otherwise known by Google as Page Rank. Page ranking is the first port of call that Google uses when positioning a web site on its search index. The higher the page rank, the higher up the results you will appear.

SEO Techniques to Avoid

There are several things that you can do to try to get your page listed higher on a search engine results page. As a rule of thumb, you should never try to trick or deceive a search engine in any way, or you risk being blacklisted by them and all your efforts will be wasted. Since the majority of your traffic will come from search engines the risk far outweighs the benefits in the long run.

Search engine operators spend a lot of time trying to create a useful tool for finding related content on the web, and we have the utmost respect for these efforts. Below is a list of some things we recommend that you never do when trying to achieve better listings.

Do not

Do anything to try to trick the search engines into listing your site better. If what you are doing is not listed as one of our search engine tips the search engines will likely view it as spam and penalise you.

Use the same color text on your page as the page's background color. This has often been used to keyword stuff a web page. Search engines can detect this and view it as spam.

Use multiple instances of the same tag. For example, using more than one title tag. Search engines can detect this and view it as spam.

Submit identical pages. For example, do not duplicate a page of your site, give the copies different file names, and submit each one. Search engines can detect this and view it as spam.

Submit the same page to any engine more than once within 24hrs (in fact you should only ever need to submit to any search engine once. Once a Search Engine knows your website exists it will crawl it at regular intervals anyway)

Use a search engine optimization or submit service that promises you a top ranking by optimising your page and submitting and resubmitting your site to thousands of search engines. We have yet to find a service like this that really works, and many will use some or many of the techniques listed above, which can actually hurt, rather than help your site to rank well.

Blowing our own trumpet!

A little off the beaten track with todays blog entry as we'd like to blow our own trumpet a little.

Before Christmas 2007 The Communications Company web site wasn't really fairing too well in the search engines so we have been working hard since the new year to do what we can.

It was agreed that we would focus on three key words for now : Radio Hire, Walkie Talkie Hire and Motorola Radio.

7th March is now a monumental day for the Radio Hire phrase as the site has just broken onto the first page of Google in 6th position. Thats up 12 positions from the last check in.

We are really excited about this and we know that Paul from The Communications Company will be very happy with this result!

Now, about that No.1 spot................................

Pay-Per-Click Tips

Pay-per-click advertising is a tough business and there a few signs to say that its going to get easier in the near future. Bids are continuing to rise at a rate I would rather not think about.

A few years back I wouldn't have paid more than £0.50p per click and most clicks literally cost pennies. I can see that now, even upping my bidding to £2.00 per click that a decent listing is still hard to come by.

Large corporate businesses can afford to spend ridiculous amounts of money on advertising just for the sake of their brand, but smaller businesses, with much smaller budgets have to take a more cautious approach and this is why I don't think that PPC is right for them unless specific guidelines are adhered to.

The primary guideline is the choice of your keywords. Make them specific. In 2007 Google introduced a new keyword tool which helped to show you how competitive search words were in your field. If you want to sell Digital Camera's for example, then utilise the keyword Digital Camera's instead of just cameras's. Also think about the use of manufacturer names such as Nikon Digital Camera. You should "mine" your product range for more specific keywords that may just bring in those extra few clicks that you need.

Search Engine Wars

When people search for something they only care about two things, the response time and the relevancy of the result. Looks like Google or Yahoo is superior to Microsofts Live.com in terms of search technology.

I would believe to some extend it explains why Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo to battle with Google in the search market.

The different technologies used by the search engines can sometimes cause SEO professionals a bit of a headache, as they have to use different techniques for the the different listings. What you find these days is that most people optimise their sites for Google, because it holds the market share for search.

In short, lets take a look at just how the Search Engines take an interest in your site:

Yahoo!

• been in the search game for many years.
• is better than MSN but nowhere near as good as Google at determining if a link is a natural citation or not.
• has a ton of internal content and a paid inclusion program. both of which give them incentive to bias search results toward commercial results
• things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links still work great in Yahoo!

MSN Search

• new to the search game
• is bad at determining if a link is natural or artificial in nature
• due to sucking at link analysis they place too much weight on the page content
• their poor relevancy algorithms cause a heavy bias toward commercial results
  likes bursty recent links
• new sites that are generally untrusted in other systems can rank quickly in MSN Search
• things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links still work great in MSN Search

Google (take a deep breath!)

• has been in the search game a long time
• is much better than the other engines at determining if a link is a true editorial citation or an artificial link
• looks for natural link growth over time
• heavily biases search results toward informational resources
• trusts old sites way too much
• a page on a site or subdomain of a site with significant age or link related trust can rank much better than it should, even with no external citations
• they have aggressive duplicate content filters that filter out many pages with similar content
• if a page is obviously focused on a term they may filter the document out for that term. on page variation and link anchor text variation are important. a page with a single reference or a few references of a modifier will frequently outrank pages that are heavily focused on a search phrase containing that modifier
• crawl depth determined not only by link quantity, but also link quality. Excessive low quality links may make your site less likely to be crawled deep or even included in the index.
• things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links are generally ineffective in Google when you consider the associated opportunity cost

Ask (Jeeves, remember him?)

• looks at topical communities
• due to their heavy emphasis on topical communities they are slow to rank sites until they are heavily cited from within their topical community
• due to their limited market share they probably are not worth paying much attention to unless you are in a vertical where they have a strong brand that drives significant search traffic

Basically, content is king - no let me rephrase that - Quality content is king. There is very little doubt about that. The relevance of the content on your site plays a big part in how all the search engines rank it, especially Google. And lets face it, with Google hogging the majority share of the search engine market, its Google where we want our listings to appear - right?

Googlebombs!

Today's blog note takes a slightly comical, but very real phrase, and looks into what it actually means.

A Google bomb (also referred to as a 'link bomb') is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions.

Because of the way that Google's algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb is created if a large number of sites link to the page in this manner. Google bomb is used both as a verb and a noun. The phrase "Google bombing" was introduced to the New Oxford American Dictionary in May 2005, so it's not a new phrase. Google bombing is closely related to spamdexing, the practice of deliberately modifying HTML pages to increase the chance of their being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned in a misleading or dishonest manner.

The term Googlewashing was coined in 2003 to describe the use of media manipulation to change the perception of a term, or push out competition from search engine results pages (SERPs).

A recent Google bomb example was the word "failure" being linked back to the White House and George Bush. I'll let you keep your thoughts on that to yourself, but it is a perfect example of how link building and anchor text plays a huge part in the relevance of your links and your sites ranking on Google.

Until tomorrow.......

SEO guarantees?

As a web design agency we get plenty of emails from SEO companies promising us that No.1 spot on Google. Having performed SEO on a number of sites we are fully aware that there are NO guarantees when it comes to SEO.

Many of these companies use techniques that are frowned upon by the major players in Search Engines but lets look at what a guarantee actually is:

Guarantee: a promise or assurance, esp. one in writing, that something is of specified quality, content, benefit, etc., or that it will perform satisfactorily for a given length of time.

Excellent - just what we wanted to hear. How can an SEO company make a guarantee for something that they don't have control over? OK, based on current SEO practices they can probably "guarantee" to get some of your search keywords into the top positions of a major search engine, but is that good enough for what they are charging?

Take electrical goods for example. A T.V. might come with a manufacturers 12 month guarantee - but that doesn't mean that it won't go faulty within 12 months. However, the manufacturer does have full control over fixing your unit or providing you with a replacement.

Any guaranteed positioning should be taken with a pinch of salt. The search engines control the algorithms and no one else. In fact, Googles algorithms are one of the best kept secrets on the planet! An SEO guarantee should be an measurable, achievable goal that will contribute towards helping the ranking of your website.

A good SEO company should offer complete transparency and help you learn along the way. SEO should not be treated as top secret.