When we talk to people about putting content on their website we always tell them that the content need to be unique content, that can be updated daily. But why is this important?

When we say that you should update content on your website on a regular basis, we dont mean once a month, twice a month, or even once a week, we mean once a day if possible. But why should you update your content on such a regular basis? Isn’t this taking it too far?

Well the first reason is that the Google spiders will visit your site more often if you keep updating your website, as they are programmed to go and find new updates. Now if your website is forever changing, then they will remember that every time they come to your site, there has been updates, so then they will come to visit mroe often, then more often than that to keep up with the updates that are happening on your website.

If you make a small change here and there won’t be enough to ensure that they come back again, and again. You need to either add pages to your website, or you need to keep adding more unique content to your website. A very easy, and quick way of doing this is to add a blog to your website. However if you do add a blog to your site, you do need to be strict with yourself and update it often, as a blog that is out of date, just looks bad.

Another reason why you should keep adding content to your website is for your visitors. If someone visits your site, and finds it interesting, then 3 weeks later they visit your website again, if nothing has changed, what is going to make them want to come back for a 3rd time? If you keep your website updated with a blog, or a forum, or live updates, they may want to come back again, and even add you in to their favourites for easy access to useful information.

When adding content to your site there are many things within the content of the text that will help you optimise your site for SEO purposes, however that is for another post…

Keyword research is a crucial factor when looking to optimise your site through natural search engine optimisation, however it is often not taken seriously enough, nor do most people put enough focus into it when starting a search engine optimisation campaign. The main purpose of SEO is to generate as many visits to your site as possible from relevant searches, however if you have not done your research into what enquiries will bring the most relevant traffic then you are fighting a losing battle from the start.

It is comon knowledge that you should optimise your keywords to the main page (homepage) of your website as that is the most powerful page, and that is where most people like to go on a site. The homepage should be seen as the hub of the website. When analysing your keywords you need to choose words that will bring in traffic that is going to be relevant to your website, however you also need to be realistic when optimising your website for your chosen keywords. It is better to be on page 1 of the major search engines for a key term that receives 500 searches a month, than to be on page 3 or 4 for a key term that get 7000 searches per month as most people do not go past page 1 or page 2.

Even though finding the correct keywords for your site may seem very boring and it is a job that you just want over and done with so you can just get on with the link building and optimisation, it is a very important step in the optimisation process and should not be taken lightly.

Lets first look at what a search engine is, and its purpose to the end user.

A search engine like Google and Yahoo are huge databases that bring relevant information to an end user when a keyword or keyphrase is types in to their browser. For Example: type “screen repairs” into a search engine like Google and it will bring up a list of thousands, if not millions of websites that it has in its database that have content that is relevant to “screen repairs” in it. The search engine will then rank the results in order of most relevant first so that it should bring the end user the information that they require without having to search through millions of listings, thus saving time.

Trust is a major factor to any search engine when they are sorting results in a relevancy order. Search engines need to trust that your website is relevant, and is not just built up around a certain keyword “screen repairs”, but then when you visit the website is shows information on mobile phones. One of the factors that search engines take into account when looking at authority and trust is the age of a domain, or a site. Sites that have been around for a long time usually are trusted more than a new site (so long as it has not had any penalties against it in its time). The reason that a site will be more trusted the longer it has been around is because sites that are made of “spam” usually do not last too long, 3 months, 6 months, usually a year at the most before they are taken down, or penalised by the search engines. Another key component to ensuring that oyur domain or website is authorative is how long is left on the hosting. This again is because sites with only 1 year or less left on the hosting says to the search engines that they don’t plan on being round for long, therefore the search engines will not pass them over as authorative.

Content is a very powerful way of helping your website rank well and become an authority in the major search engines, although time consuming, content is king. A good way to quickly update your website with relevant content that is informative, and useful to your visitors is through a news feed or a blog. If you do decide to start a newsfeed or a blog it is important to keep them up to date as an out of date blog does not look good on anyones site.

Another key way to build up trust to your website is through links pointing to your website from other websites that are relevant to yours. Link building is used by nearly all search engine optimisation (SEO) companies. Remember that if a site links to your it is telling the search engines that it trusts your site enough to send its own users to your website, thus trusting that your website is of good quality. If you can find websites that are seen as an authority themselves to link to yours then that will also help in building trust.

With the emerging technology of today, the world of the internet has evolved into a new generation in which people get more involved in online websites, and online shopping. The internet has become one huge supermarket. E-commerce websites have become a popular thing on the internet with many retail outlets starting up an e-commerce website to sell their products through, especially with a big credit crunch hitting many parts of the world, an e-commerce store is far cheap to optimise and run than paying out for a retail outlet.

In an ecommerce website design there are important parameters than need to be met some of which are to ensure that you have a clear and professional layout of products and services that are offered to your customers. Another one is to ensure that you have a good navigation system so that your customers are able to find what they need to find with ease.

Having a good looking and well navigated ecommerce website is only half of the hurdle to being successful on the internet, and selling your products to make a comfortable living. The other thing that you need to ensure when starting up an ecommerce website is to ensure that it is seen by those people that are going to buy your services or products off of it, as it is useless if it is not seen by your target market. Now how are you going to ensure that your website is seen by potential clients?

There are two major ways to get your website seen by your target audience. The first, and most popular due to being more cost effective is search engine optimisation (SEO). Search engine optimisation is a form of online marketing that will help your website be promoted in the major search engines that people usually search from, for example Google, Yahoo, MSN. The other way to promote your website to attract more vistors would be by Pay Per Click marketing, this is a much quicker way of getting your site seen, however it is also much more expensive, and usually only a short term solution to market a website while search engine optimisation is underway.

The main key points to remember when deciding that you want to start an ecommerce website would be:

Get the design, layout and navigation on the website right.

Ensure you know how your going to promote your website once it is build.

Once you have these two points worked out, you should have a great ecommerce website in the making.

Every web designer’s goal is to make a good website design; this is actually one of the most important among their several goals. So the question is how to make a good website design. There are actually many things to consider. In this post we will be enumerating some tips and things to consider in making a good website design. 

Know what you want – this actually pertains to the topic or genre of your website. It is important that from the very start you know the topic of the website that you want. In making a good website everything starts with what the topic is or what your website is all about. It is important that you correctly connect the message of your website to people visiting your site. 

Do a website design of your passion – when you love something you will definitely succeed in doing it. The secret of a good website is doing the kind of website design which is your passion. A topic that you really love and so you can put that into design. 

Choose the best colours to make things catchy. – Colours can really attract people. When they see that your website is really attractive then you can convince people to stay longer, to recommend your site and to re visit your website. 

A good lay out is important – having a user friendly site is important. If visitors have a hard time on navigating your website they might feel tired and lazy visiting your site. The lay out of your site must be organized and definitely user friendly. 

Think of what the people want – it is essential that you always think of what the people who will visit your site want to see and what they want to read from your site. Just like in search engine optimisation, when you optimise think of the people who will visit your site. Same with design, the people who will visit your site need to get the information they want. They visited your site because they believe that they can get the details and information they want, so provide them with that. 

Good information – in making a good website it does not only focus on a literal website design but also the information that your website contains. If your website contains the best and most informative updates and literature then people will definitely love your site, revisit your site, link to your site and even recommend your site. There are a lot of benefits that an informative site can give you. 

There are still a lot of ways and tips to consider in making a good website. Just keep in mind that in anything you do put passion on it, think of your goals and what you really want in your website. Think of the people who will visit your site, what they want to see, what information can help them and how you can make your website stand out among other sites. This also needs to be taken into account when you SEO your website too.

Viral Marketing, first of all, viral marketing doesn’t sound like a good thing does it? Viral marketing is a type of advertisement campaign that is designed to pass on a message just the the common cold. So once you get it, you want to just pass it on to someone else, and once they get it they pass it to someone else, or more.

Viral marketing was first used by Hotmail.com to to let everybody on the internet know that they can open up a hotmail.com email account for free. How did they do it? Well with a very good, but almost free advertising innovation “viral marketing”. First of all hotmail.com wanted everyone who used the internet to know about their free service. They knew that it would cost alot to get their message across to billions of people in such a short space of time. No, infact after initial setup costs, and a huge marketing departments wages, it was almost free to get their name all over the internet.

It was very simple really. When you signed up for hotmail.com’s free email account and you sent an email to someone, at the bottom on every email that went out from a hotmail account had a small advert advertising their free email services with a link to their sign up page, so that anyone could apply for a hotmail account.

Did this bug get you? It got me, in this exact way too. I had an email sent to me that was free to register, and also hosted my emails for free too. I signed up, and I sent emails from it, so I was an advertiser for hotmail.com.

There are many other types of viral marketing concepts on the internet. Although this was a cheap process for hotmail after they got set up, Viral marketing is normally a very costly way, but successfull way of advertising your business or service to hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Other than that, viral marketing, if done right, usually takes care of itself, and can help with your SEO campaign and is a great technique to add to your link building campaigns too.

Just like any other SEO related debate, many people are asking if directory submissions are still worth doing? Or just a waste of time? Or should I only submit my site to paid directories? Some people say that directory submissions are valuable, others say that directory submissions are wasted links, and you time could be better spent somewhere else.

In this post I will be discussing my viewa on directory submissions. Before I start I would like to make one thing clear. Each SEO has their own unique way of optimising a website, as there is not only one way to optimise a site, there are many different techniques to optimisation, and many different ways to build links.

My opinion of directory submissions is that they are still worth doing, however you must be carefull of the directories that you submit your site to, and the category that you place your submission under. Ensure that you always place your website under a category that is relevant to your website for it to make any effect on your positions in the major search engines. One of the golden rules in any part of search engine optimisation and link building is “quality outweighs quantity”.

There are several websites that have high pagerank and traffic too. DMOZ is proberbly the most important website to rank your own site in, however because of this, it is very hard to get your website submitted into DMOZ especially if you are targeting a competative category on the internet, as everyone who knows anything about quality directories tries to submit their sites to DMOZ. DMOZ is a free directory that is run, and updated by volunteers who apply to be editors of the directory, and they normally do this in their spare time, so with hundreds of thousands of submissions to the sites every weeks, the editors just can’t keep up with the demands of their advertisers. It can take months or even years to get your website listed into the DMOZ directory, however my thoughts are that it is well worth the wait for a high quality one way text link.

Im my own experience, when I check the backlinks of websites that I work for, I can always see a large number of links comming to the site from directories that I have submitted it too. I follow the link back to look at the quality of the link, and quite often the directory links seem to be better links than others that I have gained from other sources. Another good thing about directory links is that they are usually permanent links to your site for a one off cost.

Once again I would just like to make it clear to other SEO’s that are reading this post, that directories whether they are free or paid for directories may not work everyone with their techniques that that have in place, however they work for the sites that I optimise along with the other link building stratergies that I put in place too. I would also like to make it clear that I would not recommend anyone to only use directories as a form of building links to a website. You should always ensure that links are built from various sources for a natural success of a website optimisation campaign.

Before anything else, first of all let me calrify that not all forums allow “dofollow” links. “Dofollow” means that each link creted can be counted as a valid backlink to your site from the major search engines (Google & Yahoo etc). There are many benefits of posting on any type of forum, whether it be “dofollow” or “nofollow”.

First of all a forum can help make your site well known in your industry if you participate to forums that are related to your product or service. If you post a link of your site in a forum, or simply add your site as a signature link and make posts in forums, then there is the potential that people will see your link and be familiar with your website (especially if you are a regular poster to a few different forums). Forum posting is an added publicity technique that you can add to your other link building techniques that you currently use. It is like advertising your website for free to other people who are interested in your industry, as most forums are free to join.

The second benefit is gaining traffic to your site. Yes… since people will see your website link or your forum signatures, once they click on your link, then, hey presto, its a new visitor to your website that you would not have gained otherwise. If they like your website, and the content is attractive to them, they may visit again, or buy your product or service if it is of interest to them (hense the importance of keeping all links, including forum links relevant to your website theme.

Backlinks, if the forum where you placed the link is a “dofollow” forum then grat, easch post that contains your link i counted as a backlink in your link building campaign. Now if know it is hard to find a relevant forum which allow “dofollow” backlinks, ut, its not impossible, there are thousands, and thousands of forums on the internet, and in most, if not all industries and categories that you can think of. Gaining a “dofollow” link from a forum that allows PageRank to be passed on to your site through a “dofollow” link will certainly help increase your PageRank, and will also help with your search rankings too. Many forum owners leave the “dofollow” tags on links when the forum is new to entice new people to join in and use the forum, in many cases this tactic has worked very well, and forums have found themselves overloaded with visitors taking advantage of their PageRank to help promote their sites.

Forum posting is part of an SEO’s daily life. Its not just as simple as posting a comment and getting a backlink. Moreover, forums can definatly help you learn and make you discover a lot of new things in the field of search engine optimisation, or whatever your industry is. Keeping on the subject of SEO, there are many forums that study, and help people increase their knowledge of SEO, some of the biggest, and best forums include Digitalpoint, v7n forum, Google community forum, dnlodge forum, and Webmastertalk forum.

When looking for a good forum in your industry to help gain backlinks from, all you ahve to do it type the following into Google “forum” “your keyword“.

Its now 2009 and time to make your new years resolutions. But if you do make one, or have already thought of one, the question you need to ask yourself is “Will I stick to it”?

Well with Google getting tougher on blackhat SEO, many blackhat SEO companies are using their new years resolution up on their search engine optimisation techniques, turning from blackhat to whitehat. Now that Google is closing all the algorithmic loopholes for blackhat techniques to help the position of certain sites getting promoted in a false way SEO’s and their clients will have to be sure to optimise their sites in an ethical manner. It has been reported that over the last few weeks many sites have been pushed down the rankings with recent penalisations by Google for blackhat SEO being used.

Luckily for us, and our clients SEO Positive only use whitehat optimisation techniques, including link building. We have seen that Google is moving more towards “content is king“, and down grading sites that have very little content, and more links.

If you have a site with only a few pages, then there are steps that you need to take to ensure that your site is not penalised if you are link building for optimisation purposes:

1. Build more pages that are relevant to your products and services that will serve as information that is useful to your clients, and others alike.
2. Upload a blog to your site that keeps visitors updated with related information to your website.

Building pages to your site can become expensive over a period of time, and with content making up a large factor of SEO going forward it would work out cheaper to install a blog to your site, its cheap, its quick, and its very easy to manage and update on an ongoing basis.

I get this question a lot from our customers! Gaining new business on the internet does not stop when you get top results for your website with your chosen keywords. There are plenty of things that you can do once your chosen keywords are on the first page of the major search engines via natural search engine optimisation. Here is a list of things that you could do next:

• Increase the size of your site, and optimise it for more keywords / keyphrases to get even more people visiting your website.
• Gain a larger chunk of the pie by incorporating Pay Per Click (PPC) in with your natural SEO campaign.
• Build another site to optimise, you would proberbly be best to buy an old domain name and have that optimised rather than start from new due to the sandbox.
• Look into how you can get better conversions from your existing visitors to your website, and increase your sales if you have an online store or sell products and services.
• Build another site and use Pay Per Click (PPC) to decrease the amount of competition on the first page.

We have customers with at least 2 to 4 websites on the first page of Google for for their keywords in the natural listings, and 1 or 2 different websites in the Pay Per Click results just to knock out the competition of their competitors.

To find out how you can increase your traffic, sales, and conversion once your website is top for all its key terms, contact us and speak to an account manager.