Scotland SEO Blog

There are two ways to handle reputation management. There is the hard way, where you do nothing and wait for the proverbial to hit the fan, which for many businesses may well suffice, until someone switches that fan on; or there is the easy way.

The easy way is a two step process. Step one: monitoring the air waves. There are several ways to monitor what is being said. You can use something as simple as Google Alerts, or you can use a proprietary program such as Trackur from Marketing Pilgrim.

The second step, while not difficult, involves a little work. Being proactive can often go along way towards preventing malicious attacks. This can be done either by being involved in social networking through the various social networking channels, or by incorporating a blog and writing to it regularly.

Social network takes a lot of effort if done on its own. Being active on one site is generally not enough. You need to be engaged on two or three sites to cover all demographics.

A blog can decrease the work load. Writing regularly and fostering communication through comments is a good start. Follow up with the occasional trip the social networking sites slowly develop your reputation.

Together with a good reputation monitoring program, you can be in a position to counter any negatives before they get too far out of hand.

Google have recently made some minor changes to their SEO recommendations. In the past they have recommended submitting your site to DMOZ and Yahoo! Many webmasters where quick to point out that Google had removed this recommendation.

This change of heart raises the question as whether or not it is worth submitting your sites to directories

I think one of the points that has been lost in this debate is that while Google have removed this recommendation, they have not publicly stated that directory listing are worthless nor have they said you will get penalized for having sites listed in directories.

What they have said is that sites that develop links to quickly may come under closer scrutiny to determine why. But then, this is true of any links, not just directories. Build your links too quickly and your likely to get ejected for spaming.

Directories have benefits in many other ways. First, whilst it may be slow, directories deliver traffic. Not heaps of traffic, but a steady stream. Gaining a back link is certainly a bonus.

Is the description meta tag important and what role does it play in search engine marketing? A short answer? Yes and heaps. The long answer - read on.

The description meta tag is important - however it is important for search engine marketing, not search engine optimization as many people think. The descriptions meta tag is used by the search engines when they display your page in the search results for a particular search.

This little snippet is the only way you can market your pages to the searcher. If what you have placed in that snippet attracts the searcher, they will click through to your site. Keywords are not the main issue - marketing your site is.

Your search engine marketing through the description meta tag needs to be an accurate description. Use a poor or irrelevant description and the search engine is just as likely to ignore it and use the first paragraph of the content instead.

Write you description meta tag clearly being sure to target the searcher, not the search engine. After all, the search engines never buy a thing from any site.

Google Webmaster have decided to run a series of posts this week, having dubbed this week, ‘links week’.

A series of posts over four days, well three days really since day one is a preview of the rest of the week. The three topics covered are:

• Internal links (links within your site)
• Outbound links (sites you link to)
• Inbound links (sites linking to you)

With days one and two already published, I have to say I haven’t learned anything new. In fact, they are espousing what every one else has been saying for many years. If there is a benefit to these posts, it is at least a confirmation by Google that this is the way they prefer to see links.

If there is one message from these posts that I think should be reinforced, it is the value of using good descriptive anchor text in links. Google of course wont say use keywords, but they come close.

For novices to linking, the Google posts are well worth a read.

For many years webmasters and SEO experts have concentrated on finding keywords that a site can be competitive with. There have always been two key indicators - the number of searches for that keyword and the number of results. What you would look for in your keyword research is a high search number with a low number of results.

The problem with that scenario is that we are running out of keywords that fit that scenario. The answer, long tail keywords. Find long tails that have a high search number, again you are looking for a low number in the results.

There is one other approach and that is to look for keyword patterns. Keyword patterns are where you take a number of individual keywords and let them flow together. Finding a keyword pattern for your site can be difficult and should be done with care. There can be a fine line between keyword spamming and effective use of keywords.

A simple example could be in the popular loans area. If you target ‘home loans’ and ‘loan consolidation’ and ‘debt consolidation’ then, with a little rearrangement, you could target a long tail of ‘home loans consolidation of debt’.

Use that phrase in a title and once or twice within your content. You can also then use ‘home loans’, ‘loan(s) consolidation’ and ‘consolidation of debt’ several times within your content. This one long tail will then target all three smaller keywords at once. Effective linking strategies can then reinforce those keywords.

One mistake that many people make is to approach social marketing as a business. Whilst you may represent your business, you are a person and it is the human that others want to socialize with, not the business.

You can add a personal touch in a number of ways. The most obvious is with a photo of yourself in your profile. Your photo should be a pleasant shot that show you at your best - a smile even helps a little.

Other touches can include revealing a little about yourself. Personal interests, education level, children. Anything you are comfortable revealing online.

With these personal touches, you are letting the world know you are human. I am sure you have seen profiles before that are empty when it comes to personal touches. You know immediately that these individuals are not interested in socializing, they are there to push their products or services.

By adding a human touch, you are differentiating yourself from those individuals and removing the tarnish of social abuser.

There are so many different browsers around these days and they all read and render web code in slightly different ways. The two most notable browsers, Firefox and Internet Explorer use different methods to render a web page.

Firefox reads and renders pages that are W3W compliant with little problem. Internet Explorer has been considered a bit of a renegade over the years, not rendering pages correctly even though they are W3W compliant. They are not the only two browsers in use. Other browsers include:

• Safari
• Opera
• Flock
• Chrome

Chrome is the new browser from Google and seems to be compatible with all W3W compatible web sites.

There are several free utilities on the net that you can use to check on browser compatibility. A simple search will find most of them. You should do a regular check on website to ensure that your web design is still compatible with the most recent browsers.

When search engines such as Google use an algorithm to determine where your pages are going to be placed in the search results, they take into account a wide variety of factors. Some factors may only affect your rankings marginally, however, optimize for enough of them and the effect becomes significant. Your domain name is one factor that is used to assess a sites authority.

If your site has been registered for less than a year and it started with a one year payment, search engines are going to use a wait and see approach. That is, we wont give it domain value until we can be sure it is going to be there in future.

Compare this to a site that has been registered for five years and has just been reregistered for the next 10 years. The search engines can see that the site has intentions of being around for a long time therefore they will place a high value on the domain name and any of its pages.

Any domain name that is due for registration, think about your intentions. If you plan to be there in ten years time then try to get a ten year registration. If you cannot get ten then go for the five years. If nothing else, you may find you are saving in the long run as prices creep up each year.

Domain name registration, sometimes called domain age, is an important SEO factor: one that can be fixed with a simple single payment.

You often hear that content is king and that you should provide fresh content on a regular basis as part of your SEO strategy. You may wonder why?

Surely a site that has good content doesn’t need to keep adding to it so why should I be adding fresh content? Sites with good content do rate well. However, by adding fresh content on a regular basis you are, in effect, training the search engine spiders to visit your site on a regular basis to check for any changes and for any fresh content.

When the spiders visit they send back copies of the pages traveled. These are stored in the search engines and are available to those to undertake a search. You will see them referred to as cached pages. The more often the spider visits, the more up-to-date your cached pages will be.

Of course, new content is found when the spider visits and this content is indexed and added to the search database.

If you did not provide fresh content then your site and your pages could go weeks between visits and although your content may not have changed, it always looks better to have a cached page with today’s date rather than a page with a date two weeks old.

Fresh content equals more regular visit from the search engines. This benefits your web site over time as every page becomes indexed.

Do you understand the jargon used within the search engine optimization industry particularly when it comes to the search engines themselves. For example, do you understand what a ‘bot’ is and what it does?

Some of the language is fairly straight forward although it is often used in the wrong context. The search engine spider (aka bot) is one example. People will often talk about about a spider coming and indexing you web page. That is not really the correct context. Some of the more common terms include:

Search Engine Crawler - search engine spider - search engine bot:
These are one and the same. The search engine crawler is a piece of software that is sent pit by the search engine to follow links. If it suits the search engine, it may send a crawler to your search specifically to see what is there.

At other times it may arrive on your site because it has followed a link from elsewhere. It reads your websites to see in there are any changes. If there is new or updated content it sends a copy of that page back to a central storage location.

Search Engine Index:
If the search engine crawler has found new content and sent it back for evaluation, there is a special software used to analyze it for further action. If the content is unique it will store it and make it available to searchers - this is known as indexing.

When a search term is entered it is compared to all the data in the index and the most appropriate pages are listed for the searcher to select from. Part of the indexing process is ranking the page. The ranking determines the order the results are displayed.

Search Engine Algorithm:
The search engine algorithm is the mathematical formula used to rank pages. There are a lot of variables used in this formula and the formula itself is known only to the search engines.

They are constantly updating the formula in an attempt to deliver the best possible result to any searches. Your pages will have different rankings for different keywords.

The aim of every website owner is to publish their content; have the search engine crawler visit and send the new content back for indexing. During the indexing process it is every website owners desire to be ranked number one for their search terms.

We cannot all be ranked number one so we look for at least a top placement within the search engines results. The jargon is not that difficult to understand once you get the hang of it.