Yellow Jersey Web Design » Search Engine Optimization Tips

SEO Tip

admin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:22:44 +0000

Think local.

It’s very hard to compete with the millions of websites on the world wide web but how about just competing with businesses in your town.

Including your town as one of your optimized keywords and entering your business’s info on local directories can go a long way to helping you be found by your local customers.

Conversions are key in website optimisation

admin — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 10:37:14 +0000

When you enter the world of search engine optimization there are so many stats that suddenly become important to you:

Unique visits to your website
Page Rank
Page Views

It can all become overwhelming and essentially distracting.

The most important thing to keep in mind as you plan and implement your seo plans is:

What am I trying to achieve, what constitutes a conversion to me?

This should be both the starting point and the goal of your campaign. For some a telephone call or the completion of the contact form would be considered a successful conversion. For others, signing up for their monthly newsletter or registering for a course. Those with ecommerce sites would be aiming for a sale.

Once you know your goal, everything shifts into a different focus.

Your keyword choice should be based on drawing those potential conversions in.

Your site should include “calls to action” that drive visitors towards that conversion

Your success rate should be based on how many conversions have been achieved.

The importance of links for proving and improving your website popularity.

admin — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 10:27:57 +0000

Why are links important for search engine optimization?

Links are very hard for webmasters to manufacture artificially and so search engines, and particularly Google, rank them very highly as evidence of your websites’s popularity.

Links are essentially the highway around the world wide web. Google and other search engines send their spiders along this highway indexing sites and assessing their popularity.

Links and Page Rank

Page Rank is a score awarded by Google to a site based on the sites popularity. If websites linking to yours are quality, relevant sites they will add greatly to your Page Rank. Page Rank is one of the measurements Google count as they assess the relevance and value of your site. Page Rank is only one of many factors in determining where you list in Google results but it is an important one.

There are many free tools on the internet that you can use to check your page rank. Here is a link to one of them.

Page Rank Tool

You are scored out of 10, the higher the number the better your ranking

Which websites should I link to?

The answer to this question is very simple.

Relevant ones. Quality ones.

When choosing sites to link to you need to seek out sites that are relevant to your business and your customers and sites that would add value to what you are offering your clients.

Using those criteria it very easy to weed out spam sites and it makes sense to avoid link farms where reams of irrelevant and spammy links are sold. Avoid these like the plague!

Tips to make the most of your links.

Make sure links to your site include searchable keywords. For example, instead “click here” being the link, your company name or a pertinent keyword the link. The clickable words are given weight by search engines.

Direct your links to different pages on your site, not just the homepage. Make sure that your link text is relevant to the page it is pointing to

Google your keywords and see what other sites pop up. Either write to their webmasters and request a link and/or see who they are linking to.
Submit articles about topics of interest in your industry to relevant sites. Always include a link back to your site.
Create articles that people will want to link to – this is referred to as link bait or link magnets. Use social networking sites to promote your article
Paid links will not help your link rating

Using Content for Search Engine Optimization

Linda — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:37:36 +0000

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a hot topic. You have spent the time and money on getting a good website, now you want it to be found.

The first thing to understand about SEO is in order to get a good search ranking you need to give Google, and the other search engines, what they want. So what is Google looking for? Well it’s very simple, really, what they want is good, relevant sites, sites that provide their customers – your customers! – what they want.

So at the end of the day it all comes down to something you, as a small business owner, are very familiar with – providing your customers what they are looking for. When potential customers are searching online they are looking for information. The type of information they want, is something you should be very aware of.

Studies show that the majority of web surfers are doing research and that is why the search engines tend to favor sites that look informative and trustworthy.

Informative content is fairly simple to achieve. To be considered an informative site, you need content. Lots of good, solid, relevant content.

When planning content you need to keep relevancy and quality in the forefront of your mind. Relevancy because you want it to be very clear to search engines what your site is about, and what your area of expertise is. Quality because you want to keep customers coming back and, of course, when they are there, you want to impress them. That, after all, is the point of driving them to your site – to convert them into your customers.

The second thing to think about when planning content is keywords. The right keywords are absolutely vital to a good search engine optimization campaign. You want the keywords customers are using to searching for your type of services. These keywords need to be sprinkled throughout your content.

SEO experts all agree that keywords contained in the content of your site are the most enticing way to capture a search engine’s attention.

That said, do not be tempted to stuff your content with keywords.

You need to remember Google wants what the customer wants, and the customer does not want to land on a page that is essentially a list of keywords. So Google has taught their little spiders that crawl the web in search of good sites to disregard sites trying to trick them. Search engines have a very low tolerance for trickery and they have become more and more refined at spotting it.

So write content that is logical, and interesting and you will be rewarded with a better ranking. Of course, you want your subject matter to be very clear to spiders, so make sure to include keywords and use headings, lists and links to emphasize your point. By doing this, your website is given greater weight by search engines. So take time to plan carefully.

To write good SEO content follow these steps:

Plan a topic that is relevant.
Write a first draft without thinking about search engine optimization.
Read through your work and decide which keywords describe well what it is about – these keywords should also be relevant to your site as a whole.
Plan your headings and sub headings to include them.
Insert the keywords in logical places.

Once your site has a good quantity of quality, optimized content you are well on your way to being found.

Improve your search rankings and drive customers to your site

admin — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 19:37:03 +0000

Here at Yellow Jersey we believe your website is never “done”. It is an organic thing that should grow and develop. This means a constant process of refreshing and adding content. This requires an investment of time, something small business owners are notoriously short of, but it is well worth it if done correctly.

Keeping your site current is important for a number of reasons:

Your website is often the first impression a customer will get of your business and we all know how important first impressions are! You want to create energy and vitality. A fresh, current site portrays a vibrant, thriving business.
Most businesses start off with 3-10 pages on their site. This is a good start but should definitely not be the end. The more relevant pages you have the better your chances of a good search ranking.
Keep people coming back for more. If your site is interesting enough and updated frequently you will get repeat visitors to your site or even subscribers to your rss feed or your newsletter

A newsletter is a great way of combining your marketing efforts. The content you create for your newsletter becomes the content for your site. And if you host the content on your site, readers of your newsletter will click through and so be driven onto your site.

If you have a content managed site or a knowledge of html this is easy to do. Write the text, put it on your site and create the links in your newsletter. (If you have an email marketing service like Constant Contact this is a simple process). And voila you have a double edged marketing tool.

If you don’t have either we can help. We can either create you a content managed site or we can upload your newsletter content to your site for a very affordable monthly charge.

Either way we can empower you to cost effectively grow your business.