Why SEO?

One of the issues which is greatly overlooked is SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. Think of when it comes to releasing a product, you have your research, your production and your marketing. Think of SEO as the marketing side of your service /  product.

So how do you optimise your already built product in this case your website? WordPress / 3rd parties offering tools / plug-ins which allows you to configure your website to allow optimisation on your website. This blog uses plug ins that allow pages to become SEO friendly to help boost SEO ranking performance.

It is important you also have a google webmasters account and any sort of analytics program, for this website I use google analytics to monitor my traffic. I also use it for a lot of sites I build. It is slightly more advanced than the typical stats type package but once you used it a few weeks you can get the hang of it.
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Google Speed Ranking

Alot is going around now that Google are now taking into consideration the speed of the website. While this has come to no surprise. While I agree that the speed of the website is important I do disagree that blaming the website is not always the case.

Looking into considerations I have made a list what could cause slowdown on the site.

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Schematically correct Markup and SEO

Website structure is important for SEO. I find out a lot of people including myself is guily for not correctly structuring websites schematically. For SEO websites should contain h1, h2, p , strong and other elements to scructure a document. I am sure alot of people are guilty for this, including me applying h* tags to make text bigger.

I noticed an issue about one of our website rankings were dropping, we included lots of key text phrases, everything we thought had been done right and could not think of a way why our ranking were doing below average.

I looked at the structure, what was behind the scenes within the HTML language. As I found that the admin was using his updatable website to present all his text in h1 format. Thus givng priority over h2. So when google comes to check for keywords within the title tags it was seeing paragraphs of text with random works instead of just a few words which tells google the purpose of page.

While our site was great from a user point of view, schematically, it was very bad.  I have found alot of people having this problem but it is easy to get sidetracked. Another issue is using strong tags on text for styling rather than emphasising.  font-weight: bold and <strong> are very different regarding to structure.

I have just realised my flash twitter banner on the right is not compatable with Opera.
Alot of people now will do anything to manipulate people with jargon they do not even know themselves. About the google man ringing he can claim he can get anyone at the top of the natural listings now people are ringing up site owners claiming that everything is wrong with their website when it comes to SEO.

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Improving SEO and bringing traffic to your website is a tough task. As google does not deal much with classic SEO such as keyword, name titles, it is all about kink exchange, content and friendly URLs. So when starting out how do you drive this traffic?

In comes google adwords. While used to sell a service or product it can help improve ranking to give your site that extra boost. It is almost like paid advertising but with a twist. This can be done short term and long term.

if you do consider using adwords for SEO remember these key rules.

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When working with websites I have noticed alot of people phoning up saying that they can get my websites at the top of Google. Normally in this situation the phone goes down on the reciever. But a few days ago someone who said they worked at Google claiming they I could be at the top of the search engine natual listings.

For most of us we take this as a pinch of salt but if we are charging a cost to do SEO work for clients and these people ring up manipulating clients I work with claiming that the work we do is bad and they can deliver solid results to end up at the top of Google natural listings especially when they claim they work for Google or part of the Google team.

We do tend to get a few phone calls from the clients questioning this issue. They tend to be hoax calls that basically want to steal money without even touching any websites.

Trying to improve on SEO is tough. At work we are improving on ways to improve SEO. We all know SEO is the marketing of a website, the website is the product. There are many articles that help improve SEO such as content, external linking and title tags but with many black hat and white hat techniques there is never any proper answers to get your website to number 1.

I tend to get a few clients wondering why they google there name or product they sell and say why they are not at the top. I find it one of the most fustrating things. Because there is never an accurate answer. We at work, are testing new tools now to help improve SEO rankings but it’s touch and go and only time will tell. Maybe these SEO dedicated companies know something we don’t? maybe there is not a quick answer and with Google’s algorithm  changing all the time byt the time we figured out the anwer it is already to late?

My co-worker said to me today that SEO is a dark art and I have to agree.