For this reason I have decided to take a better look at titles and try to explain it. Titles are not the only the most important factor in your On Page SEO it is also what (most likely) will be in the search results. The title is for this reason extremely important not only for the SEO itself but  for your conversion rate and the amount of clicks you get in the search result. By having the right title you can increase your revenue a lot.

A good title should of course contain the keyword that you dedicated the page for. This is one of the reasons that you shouldn’t target to many keywords to each page as a spammy looking title is a bad title.

Make sure your title is click friendly, it should be a proper sentence, not just a series of keywords.

By encouraging the visitor to convert you will increase conversion rate, a title saying Buy whatever will do this more than a title saying just Whatever.

If you generate titles automaticly think about it twice before putting the system live, you really do want to create proper titles and they desperately have to be unique.

First of all I want to tell you how I came upon this knowledge. I was looking at one of the first sites I built and realized that the Webalizer stat pages could actually be viewed by anyone. If a site has Webalizer (or I learned Awstats) there is a big chance that you can just add /webalizer/ and take a peek at their visitor statistics. This is of course a big flaw in it self but there is an even bigger flaw hidden in this information. Some versions of Webalizer (2.01 I learned is the one being targeted) present referrers as links, proper good old fashion, search engine friendly, links.

This means that if you refer people to the site and make sure their Webalizer stat page is indexed, you will get a link. Combining this with referrer spam, just sending visits by proxy claiming to come from your site will get you on the Top 30 referrers in no time. I started wondering if anyone had actually found this bug before so I started doing some Googling and did actually find a lot of sites with indexed Webalizer pages. The key phrase here is the strict “Generated by Webalizer Version 2.01″, try it and you will find a lot of them. At the time I didn’t realize this was the term to use so I tried a number of them until I actually ran in to my old University. They happened to have this page indexed. I have pointed out this flaw to the Uni so they might fix it but I got a screenshot of what you can find under Top Referrers.

I later learned that most of this referrer spam is created by using a tool called PRstorm, which does exactly this. Now to the important part, I would suggest you don’t try this, it’s both rude and risky. Getting inbound links like this makes the risk of getting excluded from Googles index very high and you are being a nasty guy by spamming the sites.

This article was translated from my Swedish Blog.

1. Titles, change the titles on important pages so that they contain the important keywords. Make sure the titles are unique on all pages, they should present the page not the site.
2. H1 headlines, make sure the keywords are present in the H1 headlines on the pages. Headlines should be unique for the page in the same way as titles.
3. Text, make sure the text on important pages are unique and contains at least 400 words. The text is the base of all SEO and you can actually spend endless of hours making your text optimal, if you don’t have a lot of time, just make sure it’s all right.
4. Navigation, the navigation needs to be simple enough for Google to follow. Check so that you don’t have Java or Flash-navigation on your site, if you do and can’t change it, add links to the pages in the sidebar or somewhere else where it fits.
5. Pages, content is king, make sure you have at least 7-8 pages on your site. It’s actually the more the merrier when it comes to pages but a minimum is around 5 and for the SEO that needs to keep a deadline, 7-8 can work (decently).
6. Sitemap, make sure there is a proper HTML Sitemap. As we aren’t spending to much time giving the site a good hierarchy a sitemap can rescue a lot of the flaws that might be there. By adding an HTML sitemap you make sure Google can find your content. Link the site from the front page (preferably all pages) and link to all subpages in the sitemap. If you have lots of pages you can choose to link to the important ones or split the sitemap in several, don’t have more than 100 links per page. Don’t care about XML-sitemap, that’s for nerds.
7. Add your site to a select few link directories. Don’t spend a week adding your site to every single directory, it doesn’t do you that much good ant it takes for ever (and can actually kill you with sheer boredom). Take the good ones and submit the link, I usually even skip DMOZ because it takes forever to get a link approved (usually it’s never approved, or reviewed for that matter, DMOZ is strictly for nerds).
8. Exchange, do a quick link exchange with bloggers on your topic. It’s easy and fast, just send them a mail and tell them how much you loved the post about Paris Hilton and that you really would like to do a link exchange. You should get at least 10 links like this.
9. Start a blog. Just set up a blog and write about what you just did, add your site in the blogroll and ping the blog in some pingomatic-like service (pingomatic for example).
10. Call your friends. give your long lost friends a call and tell them to link to your site. If they don’t I can’t see any reason to call them friends.

Hope you use this “Quick and Dirty” guide to SEO and if you do please tell me and I’ll write about you. That is in itself a sort of SEO.

There are a lot of things to look at here, first of all, how do you value your time (or the time of your employees) and how do you value your own links. If you agree with me then you agree that these things have a value, at least you pay a salary to most employees I guess and your own time could also be measured as a cost. This is basic business finance and nothing new to most of us.

Targeting keywords such as SEO takes work and links there is not doubt about it, it’s one of the really competitive markets in SEO, for obvious reasons, the first being that every site you compete with has at least some basic SEO in the backpack. The guys on the front page of Googles result page have one thing in common they have invested a lot in getting there. If it is time, money or something else doesn’t really matter.

For this investment to be worth it you need to make more money from your clients than you actually spent getting there, this is obvious. The thing is I would claim even taht is not enough. If you spenf 1000 hours on your team or 50k dollars to get there and you make 500k dollars profit it looks like a no brainer but it doesn’t have to be true. What if you would spend the same resources to reach front page for another competitive keyword, let’s call it Poker. Ok, SEO has less competition than poker but the comparison is valid. How much money would you make from that? You would make a hell of a lot more profit, that’s the truth. My point is if you spend a lot of effort on ranking on SEO you are wasting your time and expensive skill, there is no doubt that you are a very capable SEO if you can get a top 5 on SEO but I would claim that you are not very smart.

To be honest, I do rank on SEO, not with this blog though and not in Google.com but in Google.se (Sweden) with my site that is in Swedish. I did it mostly to get bragging rights and it is, as I said before, stupid. The profit from it compared to the time spent getting there gives a bad, bad, bad ROI (Return of Investment). It gets even worse because I did it the old fashion way, trying to write as good content as possble, hoping for organic links. I really spent a lot of time on it. I made our designer spend at least 300 hours on the design, that has been updated 3 times. I made one of the devlopers build the best SEO-tool you can find and all of this for 50-100 visitors a day. Most of the visitors aren’t even potential clients as they are looking for tools to use when they do their own SEO (for their own clients).

If you want to take a look at it: Sokmotorkonsult. Sorry that it’s in Swedish but that is sort of necessary to get any positions in Google.se.

How to do SEO

To understand how to optimize your site, you need to understand some basic things about Google’s algorithm. We choose to only study Google in this article because it is the search engine that dominates the market overall. You can get some traffic from the other but it is when you learn how to get good positions in Google’s SERP (Search Engine Result Page) that you will get a lot of visitors.

Understanding how Google organizes sites

Google wants to show the most relevant pages for each keyword and sort them with their algorithm to make it so. The algorithm measures a number of things, and the single most important factor is the inbound link. This is a major simplification and there are numerous other factors, but we are going to get a little more understanding of inbound links to start with.

One of the pillars when Google was founded was the invention of PageRank named after Larry Page, who had developed the method and who also became one of the two founders of Google. Nowadays PageRank is somewhat outdated but the principle is similar. PageRank put a value on all pages on the Internet (that are indexed by Google) based on how many inbound links they have. The more links the higher PageRank. It does not stop there, however, the links are more valuable if they come from pages with high PageRank. The algorithm iterates the entire index and evaluate all sites and pages based on the value found on pages that link to them.

Lately, a lot of factors has been added to value the links worth. One of them is relevance, if you have links from pages that are of the same topic that your page the link gets a higher value. Another measurement today is Trust, this is the amount of trust Google has in a page / site and it is calculated from a variety of factors such as how old the site is, how big it is and what pages with high trust link to it.

Unfortunately just ordering the pages in order of importance doesn’t really help to tell what keywords to show the site on. PageRank (in the minimized version) would be excellent if there was only one keyword in the whole world, which would only show the page with the highest PR first and then in descending order.

To determine what pages should be displayed on the keywords, Google must succeed in determining the content of the page and then use their evaluation algorithm to sort them. When the content of the page is determined Google uses more than one hundred parameters, but we will discuss some that are a bit more important. The first step is to actually try and see what words the page contains. If there clearly is Vipera Berus in titles, headlines and the text it is a pretty clear signal to Google that it actually is about Vipera Berus. Unfortunately, the language works in such a way that it is not always clear to a search engine what a page is about. Just because a page is relevant to the keyword Vipera Berus it does not mean that it is all over the page. The title might be the only Swedish poisonous snake and it is easy for us to understand that this is vipers in one way or another, but it’s a little tricky for an algorithm.
For this reason (and a few others such as that there has been a lot of cheating, before Google days), Google needs help from the anchor text in the link to decipher the content. The text that represents the link is called Anchor Text and it is extremely important in terms of how to arrange pages in the result. The idea is pretty simple, if I blog about your site and I chose to have the text Martins Website as the anchor text, then it is quite reasonable that if you are searching for Martins Website, your site is probably relevant. If I link to your blog with the anchor text Viper, it is probably because I believe it is about Vipers and then Google trusts me in this and shows your page when someone searches for that.

It is of course more complicated, a little like a democracy, there are obviously a lot of pages that are all about Vipers and they all have inbound links with the text viper. Luckily we have the ranking algorithm we talked about earlier. It measures how important pages that link with the text (and how many) and sorts accordingly. All other factors that we have discussed are also included in the match, on a large site on topic the links will mean more than if a brand new site without that many inbound links of its own.

As we now have a little better knowledge of how Google thinks it’s time for us to try to tell Google that our page is actually the most relevant to the chosen keyword.

Ways to work with SEO

To even be able to start with search engine optimization, we must be sure that Google can find everything on the site. It is difficult to achieve results on Google if the search spiders can’t even find the page. There are many ways to solve this, but the basic principle is that all the pages on the site that we want to be indexed by Google must have a link to themselves. If you have a standard HTML navigation where all pages are listed, it is already solved as long as Google found the site at all. In order to get your site indexed by Google the best way is to get a link from a page that Google visits often. Google will then follow the link and find your site.

There are some things you should look out for and some things you should think about. There are many ways you can make it difficult for the Googlebot to index and the first thing that needs to be mentioned is the Frames. If we use the frames to build a site, it is almost impossible for Google to read it properly (there are ways around this but it is not a beginners job). Pages when you use the frames does not get unique URLs. That means that Google can’t read them properly and the site looks extremely fragmented, or simply as just a single half-page in the eyes of Googlebot.

Other things you need to watch out for is if you have any kind of special navigation on the site, such as a Flash navigation, Google is better at reading Flash than before, but it is definitely not a good feature to have links to the pages in Flash. The same applies to Javascript because Google actually choose not to click on things in Javascript (that would result in that they ordered things and wrote forum posts and a lot of other weird things). If you suffer from a tricky navigation, you have to give Google other opportunities to find the pages. Noscript works of course, but you can solve it in other ways, such as having regular links elsewhere on the page, both for Google and for those who do not show scripts. It may also be in place to use an HTML sitemap which can facilitate indexing.

The next step, be sure to tell Google what the page is about

It is of course not very far along to just get indexed. You must also make clear to Google what the page is about (we are talking about every single page on the site). To do so, bring unique and correct titles, headings, Meta tags and the like on the page. An example: on a page about “SEO for Google” the title should contain this and should not be “to improve search results in the world’s largest search engine,” even though it means the same thing.

One thing that a lot of people don’t think about is the internal linking on the site. If there is Rocket on the link, it is clear that you believe the page as it goes to about Rocket and you think it is a good way to tell your visitors what the page contains. Google is confident that you say the right things, so then they also believe that the page is about Rocket.

Many confine ourselves to build a search engine-friendly site with good unique titles and so on. In less competitive keywords this might work but when the competition starts to harden it is necessary that you have a strategy to get inbound links to the site.

Getting links

How to get links to a site is something that is much debated. There are many ways and they are more or less neat. Many argue that we live in a kind of ideal world, and that if you build a good site, the links automatically come, but the truth is, I find it hard to see that it suddenly will show up a lot of bloggers who are interested in the Well Drilling and link to your site where you sell the service. We would need to have a strategy to get inbound links and it is on these strategies, opinions differ.

The simplest way to get the first links to a site is to submit it to the Internet directories. There are quite a few, and most are not particularly highly trusted by Google. Two directories that are valued relatively highly are DMOZ (ODP – The Open Directory Project) and the Yahoo Directory. It is easily worthwhile to register in the others that are also available.

Another very simple way is to link to it from your own sites. If you have no sites that is of course a bit difficult, it may be worth thinking about if you should have a blog related to the page. Many choose to have a developer blog or a blog for news and press releases. It may then provide the first link because it is a little easier to get links to a blog, an exampel is if you use any of the blogghosts that have global-tag system that provides links to the blog automatically (WordPress.com, Bloggproffs.se).

Another relatively simple method is to publish news on social networks. By having news on your site on the topic and publishing them you can get a few quick links from the networks.

A little more time consuming method is to exchange, buy or get links from relevant sites. There are various methods for this and some argued that the only “ethical” way is to build so-called link bait. A link bait is a service, news or anything else that has an inherent ability to attract links.
With this in the back, you should have the basics to become a SEOs. What is needed is a little more specific advice on technology and the actual practices and we will return with it in a later post.

Translated from Swedish with the consent of the author, Original Post SEO Tips. 

Well there is an article on SEO though so maybe they’ll read it and learn.

I have no idea how hard the competition might be but I intend to find out. The prize money isn’t that big so perhaps people won’t spend to much effort on it. I know for one that the Busby SEO challenge won’t make me jump through any hoops but I’ll give it a halfharted try.

The Malta site we built managed to get the catchy domain seo.com.mt. I’ve just finished building it and now it is off to the bar for me. If you ever happen to be in Malta, make sure to contact me even though I might be a bit busy since I’m the one setting up the whole office.

We are facing an equally dramatic change today even though it might not come as fast as the introduction of Google. Almost everyone working with SEO is focused on Google today, for good reason. The number of SEO companies increases daily and the competition in the SERP is harder than it has ever been. The engineers at Google are constantly tweaking the algorithm to make the organic results as clean and good as possible. Compared to just 4 or 5 years ago, SEO is much, much harder now.

This needs to be handled in some way by the SEO:s and it is not a simple task. There has already been a a wave of merges in the world of SEO companies and that is of course one way of doing it. It will not be enough to be able to keep delivering results though. The dirty tricks are getting less and less effective, PageRank is more or less useless for SEO purposes and the number of manual filterings have increased dramaticly.

There is no doubt about it, SEO is changing and the companies that can handle this change are the ones who will win the market for thenext 5-10 years.

The national searches have been neglected for quite a time and even though there’s been talk about improving the results for quite a time the results are still waiting. Even on highly competitive keywords such as the Swedish translation of SEO there are lots of black sheep. You can find sites where almost all of the inbound links are from parked domains for example. Is this really reasonable? I know this keyword is such that it will attract the trickiest tricksters but wouldn’t it feel good to take a look at it at least? Try the search for yourself to see here.

I wouldn’t say there are more black hats in Sweden or other countries outside the US, my point is that the benefits of being one are better.  So please, Stina Honkamaa*, start doing what should have been done a long time ago, we need clean search results and so does Google.

*Stina Honkamaa is the head of Google Sweden (read about it).