Category: SEO Guide

If you’ve dipped your toe into Search Engine Optimisation (the process of boosting your website up the results page on Google), or have read our SEO Guide, you might have heard about something called a ‘canonical’ issue.

This is where there is more than 1 version of your homepage.

What do you mean more than 1 version?

This means that your website exists on two slightly different URLs. These would be:

http://www.yourdomainname.co.uk

and

http://yourdomainname.co.uk (without the ‘www’)

This is called a ‘canonical issue’, and creates a problem for search engines. And if search engines have a problem with you then they’re less likely to rank your website highly.

The problem is this.

Because your homepage exists on two different URLs, Google isn’t sure which is your ‘main’ homepage. Therefore, when deciding where to rank your website in the Search Engine Results Page, it dithers between the two, and ranks both – but very low down.

The links on your website serve as pointers to direct search engines around your website. The page with the most links pointing to it is usually the homepage. But if your homepage is basically split into two different places, half the links will probably point to one, and the rest to the other. This means that ‘power’ of those links is split in two – effectively halved.

There is a solution to this problem (that you didn’t know you had!)

What you need to to is to designate 1 version of your homepage as the ‘main’ one, and automatically point all the link power from the other to the main one.

In order to do this you need to buy a domain name, or use the domain you’ve already registered. When setting up your domain name to be your main website address (IE getting rid of the ‘webeden.co.uk’ bit) you go to:

Admin –> Site addresses –>Add site address

The dialogue box looks like this:

Enter your domain name here as your site address. BUT make sure you enter it both WITH and WITHOUT the ‘www’ on two separate lines. Then all you need to do is designate one version – the WWW one – as your main ‘preferred’ site address.

Once this is done, anyone and any search engine trying to get on your website by typing your domain name with the ‘WWW’ will automatically be forwarded to the version with the ‘WWW’

And thats it.

Solve the canonical issue with your website by following these steps. Its one of the basic things you need to do to help your SEO program.

Any canonical questions? Leave us a comment below.

 Here’s a Video Tutorial for all you website builders who want to boost your website up the Search Engine Results page (SERPs). As covered in part 5 of our Search Engine Optimisation guide, ‘alt’ tags or ‘alternative text’ tags are the labels you place on images. These tell Google what that image is all about.

You need to use alt tags that describe what’s in the picture, and use keywords that you want to boost your ranking for in the SERPs. Watch the tutorial and let us know how you get on.

And that, as they say, is that!

How have you found the process? Did it work for you? Are you now an experienced SEO expert as well a website making pro?

Like we said at the beginning, this is not meant to be the ‘be all and end all’ of SEO guides, but it does provide some useful, practical tips in a confusing world. Please (please!) remember, that this is not an instant process. It will take some time before your new site starts appearing in the search results. But follow the steps above, be patient and you can bet that your site will eventually turn up, and a hell of a lot quicker than if you did nothing.

So, all that is left to say is, good luck with optimising your site.

But did it work?

We’ve checked our results a few times. The first time was July 31st 2008, with results unchanged from December 12th 2007. The rankings were:

“West London Taxi” – number 1, “Joes London Taxis” – number 1 (Google.com)
“West London Taxi” – number 1, “Joes London Taxis” – number 1 (Yahoo.com)
“West London Taxi” – number 6, “Joes London Taxis” – number 1 (msn.com)

Then we tried again on December 12th 2008. How was Joe’s West London Taxis doing in the Search Engine rankings now?

December 12
•    “West London Taxi” – number 1, “Joes London Taxis” – number 1 (Google.com)
•    “West London Taxi” – number 1, “Joes London Taxis” – number 1 (Yahoo.com)
•    “West London Taxi” – number 6, “Joes London Taxis” – number 1 (msn.com)

What further work did we do on the SEO? Absolutely nothing! It shows that if you lay the groundwork, you can boost your website very high in the SERPs, very early on. To bolster that, it’s important to resubmit your domain name, keep updating your content to keep it fresh, and of course there’s the all important incoming links from popular sites. By doing this you can ensure your site has a much better chance of achieving and maintaining a top ranking.

A reminder

Lets recap on all the steps taken to SEO the site. You must remember: search engines look for consistency and relevancy in a number of different areas of your on-page content and referral links.

These include:
1.    The URL (or address) of your site (or specific pages on your site), e.g. www.joeslondontaxis.com, or www.joeslondontaxis.com/taxibooking, etc.
2.    Your site name or title (and page titles) being published in the HTML, e.g. “London taxi company”, or “London taxi bookings page”
3.    Your site and page keywords meta data published in the HTML, e.g. “London taxis, London taxi, Joes taxis, West London taxi, etc.”
4.    Your site and page description meta data published in the HTML, e.g. “London taxi company provides taxi services…”
5.    Your page content, e.g. the text that is on your page and relevant to your site name, keywords and description
6.    Links on your page, including the anchor text, e.g. the text on which the link is set, e.g. “Book a west London taxi” links to http://www.joeslondontaxis.com/taxibooking
7.    Images on your page, including the name of the image file (or Alt text)
8.    Referral links to your site or specific pages on your site, e.g. a link on another site (incoming links) referring to your site

You, of course, can easily control all points from 1 to 7, since they’re all related to whats on your website, and can all be managed from your SiteMaker control panel. Point 8 is all about other websites linking to your own: its harder, requires a bit of luck and a bit of elbow grease, although there are quite a few ways of doing this.

Come on now SEO pros! How high have you got your site? Leave us a comment below.

OK Website Builders! Here’s the challenging part! These are the best ways to generate inbound links to your website. Many of these involve a bit of thought and guile, and the others need a bit of elbow grease too.

Get listed in directories

You need to make sure your website is listed in as many website directories as possible, and make sure you go in the section that is relevant to your industry, if they have one.

For every directory you find, you need to find the link called ‘add my site’. Input the information that is relevant to you and your website, and press submit.

The best known directory is Yahoo. In addition, you should try to get listed on dmoz.org. It’s a well respected and used authority. Next, try going to Google and search for ‘website directory’ and you’ll get literally thousands to choose from. Do as many free ones as you have time for, and if you identify a good one it’s worth paying a pound or two to get listed.

Make posts in forums

A good way to get inbound links is to use websites where you yourself can post your link. Forums are an obvious choice. First, find out which forums are in your market. To do this, go to Google and search for ‘[my market] forum’. (Obviously replace [my market] with your actual market, eg ‘carpentry’). Register with these forums, and put a link to your website – using your important anchor text – in your signature. And then get active in the forum! Ask questions and answer other peoples’ queries. Refer people through to your website if it’s helpful (don’t forget to use your anchor text!), but don’t shameless plug your site, you may well get discredited or at worst kicked off the forum. In short, become an authority in that forum, and link to your website where possible.

Make posts on blogs

This follows the same principle as the forum posting. Find out (using Google again) who is blogging about stuff in your market, and make comments on their blog entries. Your comments won’t automatically get published (the blog owner gets to choose whether or not to include your comments), but my experience is that they appreciate the fact that someone is reading their blog and wanting to get involved. Once again, put a link to your site in your signature, and don’t plug yourself without offering other advice and info at the same time.

Convince bloggers and other editorial websites to write about you

This is the most long winded way to get links, but one which might well deliver you the most valuable ones. Contact all the important bloggers and journalists in your market. By contact, I mean send them a personal email, or even better give them a phone call. Try to convince them of the value in writing about your website. Only you know why they might want to do this for you, but if your website is genuinely useful to people in your market, then journalists and bloggers will be only too happy to write about it, as they want to give quality information and advice to their readers.

Buy links

This is the short cut to getting links to your site, but is of course the most costly one too. There are quite a few services out there (the best known is text-link-ads.com) who aggregate publishers (website owners) together, who all want to sell links on their websites in order to generate a few pounds. They then invite people to buy links on these sites. You, the buyer, can choose the type of website you want using criteria such as subject area, Alexa rank (traffic), page rank (Google’s indicator of importance), and the number of other links sold on that site. The most important sites to buy links on are those that are in a subject relevant to your own. But it’s also important to look at page rank too. A ‘link’ or ‘vote’ from a website with a high page rank is worth a lot more than a vote from one with a low one. As a buyer you also get to choose the anchor text of your link.
Try signing up with text-link-ads and search for sites that are both relevant to you and are important. The links themselves can cost anywhere from $10 to $1000 per month per site.
Again on the subject of getting links on relevant blog sites or editorial sites: if all your efforts at convincing the site owner come to nothing, your last resort may be to offer to pay them to put a link to your site from their own. It’s a bit mercenary, I know, but at the end of the day they all need to make a living.

Send out Press Releases

This is one of the easiest ways to generate inbound links. Write a press release about your website. Include links to your website within the release (use your anchor text), or as a source of further information. And then distribute or ‘post’ your press release to as many press release directories as possible. Well known press release sites include Prweb.com and pressbox.co.uk, but there are literally hundreds of them out there.  You need to create a (free) account with each, and then paste your press release onto the site.
Of course, if you’re writing press releases, you should also be sending them out to magazines, newspapers and websites that are in your market too.

Write articles and post them in article directories

This is another easy way to create inbound links, but which again takes lots of effort. Write an article about an issue in your market. Place links to your website within each article, using your anchor text. Then create (free) ‘author accounts’ with article directories, such as ezinearticles.com, submityourarticle.com or Google Knol. When you create an author account, you need to write a short (40 words) author biog that talks about who you are. Place links to your website within this biog, once again using your anchor text. Then paste your article into each directory. When those articles are approved (usually within 24 hours) you will generate 10s if not 100s of inbound links to your site, from editorial pages that are relevant to your site, with relevant anchor text.
What should you write about? It needs to be about an issue that gets debated in your market. For example, if you have a computer repair shop then maybe you want to discuss PCs vs Macs, or Windows vs Linux: something that you probably hear people discussing in that industry.

Ask your customers and visitors to link to your site

In the ‘real world’, many people are only too happy to refer friends and acquaintances onto a person or company they trust, and the same principle exists on the Internet. This comes down to asking a simple question of your current site visitors. If they like your website, and think its relevant, then can they link to you website? Only a few may bother, but if even 10% of the visitors to a low traffic website would in fact link to that site from another one, then that in itself will over time create hundreds of inbound links. Of course, many people do not have their own website from which to link, but thanks to Social Networking websites many people have their own ‘profile’ page. A link from a Facebook, Myspace, Bebo or Twitter  page is worth as much as a link from any ‘normal’ website, as long as that page is publicly viewable (which of course with Facebook it might not be).

And that’s it!

If you carry out the link building activities above in the way we’ve suggested, and use the right anchor text, you will surely rise up the SERPs for that search term. This proves that you don’t need to have a big budget to drive lots of traffic to your site.

How are you getting on? Leave us a comment below (it will give you an inbound link!).

Here’s a link to the final part of our Search Engine Optimisation guide.

Now we’re going to look at inbound links. We’ve broken this into two parts because its very important. In this first part we’re going to look at the theory behind inbound links. Part 2 will cover how to go about actually getting inbound links.

The inbound link theory

What Google will never tell you is that for all the ‘best practice’ and ‘SEO guidelines’ that you follow when building your website, inbound links are where high rankings are won and lost. Inbound links – from other websites to yours – are the single most important factor that determines your website’s position in the Search Engine Results page (SERP).

More accurately, inbound links make up about 70% of the ‘importance’ of your website in the eyes of the search engine.

Why won’t Google tell you this? It’s because they want you to build a website for their spiders that’s as easy to read as possible. They don’t want you to hijack the system using this simple method.

Why are inbound links important? It’s all about how Google sees the Internet. For them, the web is like a topographical landscape with hills and valleys, dips and bumps. Within every subject area, there are hills or ‘authority websites’ that people look towards for new information. They have lots of new and relevant content, so many other websites link to them, as we all want to be referred to a good source of information.

Well known authority sites are the BBC.co.uk, Adobe.com, CNN.com etc. In your market an authority website might well be the website that is associated with your industry magazine, or a well used forum.

A link from one website to another is like a vote from one to the other. It’s like the website saying ‘I trust this website I am linking to’. So when lots of websites link to a single website, lots of websites are voting for that website. Google thinks ‘this website is obviously a trusted source of information; I therefore want it to appear in the SERPS, since I also want to give people trusted information’.

The next question Google faces is, ‘OK, I want it to appear in the SERPs, but for which search query?’ To find the answer to that Google looks at the words used as the link from the first website to the second. This is called the anchor text.

Just to illustrate what I mean, the words ‘build a website‘ are a link to the home page of webeden.co.uk, using the anchor text ‘build a website’.

Google will make that website (the one that is linked to) appear high up in the SERPs for the keywords used in the anchor text of the link.

If you think about it, this is very logical. For example, if I was writing here about ‘blueberry muffins’ and I wanted to link to a great recipe for blueberry muffins, it would make sense for me to link using the anchor text ‘blueberry muffin recipe’. This not only tells you, the reader, where to find the information, but it also describes what that information is.

By creating this link, I will be boosting that blueberry muffin recipe website (the one that I am linking to) up the SERPs for the search query ‘blueberry muffin recipe’.

It’s important that these links are one way, and not reciprocal. If website ‘A’ and website ‘B’ link to each other, it’s like both saying ‘I vote for the other one’, which is the same as a vote for yourself. And a vote for yourself doesn’t really count for anything!

That’s it for the theory. In the next part of the SEO guide we’ll show you how to get inbound links!