Free Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) help & Tips


Search Engine Optimisation has been around for a while and it's particularly important for any business who wishes to trade successfully online. Below is a guide to help you understand Search Engine Optimisation, it provides tips and help on how to SEO your website.

We provide SEO Services for our clients in Swansea, Carmarthen, Cardiff and throughout South Wales. We only use organic natural SEO methods, these methods utilise you're websites own content to produce high search engine rankings. To find out how we can help you with your SEO please visit our Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) page for more information		 Search engine optimisation swansea, cardiff and wales
 
Also check out our Pay Per Click Solutions page and our Pay Per Click Guide on our free website resources page for more information.
 

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Quick links
> 5 Free Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Tips
> The most important SEO techniques to use
> What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?
> How do search engines work?
> Crawler based engines
> Search engine ranking
> Frequency and location
> That little bit extra
> Off the page
> Crawlers, Meta tags,keywords and descriptions
> Example tags
> Black Hat SEO methods to avoid
 
For Search Engine Optimisation management please click the SEO button. SEO Management
 
Contact us now on 0845 0034265 for an informal discussion regarding SEO.
       

5 Free SEO tips for SEO newbies

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1) Anyone can submit a website to google http://www.google.com/addurl.html
2) Don't use images as text for important information, web crawlers can't read images. If you have to, make sure you use the alt text function. This is text which appears over an image in some browsers, when you place your mouse over it, it is also indexable by search engines.
3) Give every page a relevant title using your best keywords, crawlers use this to index pages. The title appears in the very top left corner of your web browser above your menu bar.
4) These are the top search engines you'll need to submit your website to:
Yahoo
MSN
Google
Go
AOL
5) Don't use frames most search engines can't follow them.
 

The most important SEO techniques to use

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SEOMOZ have managed to get the most renowned experts in the SEO field to answer a few questions on SEO. Below are a few of the most important factors in SEO they discussed. For the full article visit SEOMOZ.
 
1) Use your keywords in your title tag. Your most important keywords should appear in an informative and readable way in your title tag.
2) Use your keywords in the body text of your page. Try to write text that people will want to read and will understand.
3) Don't stuff the page with text that does not read well and only lists your keywords over and over again.
4) Use related words and phrases that mean the same as your keywords, e.g. if your keyword is ecommerce you could also use the fraise online trading or electrical commerce. Try to use media popular issues and themes and relate them to your keywords and phrases. For example, if you sell electronic gadgets, keep up to date with the latest scientific inventions and run any popular news articles on your website linking them to other gadgets you sell.
5) Your heading 1 tag should contain your most important keywords and phrases.
6) If your domain name contains your keyword your 25% of the way to the top.
 

What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) or Search Engine marketing (SEM) is the process of improving the amount and quality of traffic sent to your website from search engines. It's a tremendously complicated and fluid area of marketing and as such attracts the SEO con men, please see below for disreputable black hat SEO methods to avoid.
 

How do search engines work?

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There are two different types of search engines, crawler based engines and human directory based engines. Crawlers periodically search the internet and index the results, website content or product changes will be noted and indexed.  Directories rely on people actually submitting their site to the directory along with site descriptions, any website changes are not noted or marked on the directory. Some engines use a mixture of both methods to index results. Search Engine Optimisation
   

Crawler based engines

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These engines send crawlers or spiders periodically to read your website and follow any links they find. What the spider finds is then added to the search engines index, which is like a massive book full of website pages holding information. This information is only updated after it has been indexed and only then will changes be available to everyone on the net. Then the most important thing happens, the search engine has a software program that combs through the indexed pages and using a search term finds the most relevant data and ranks it according to its relevance.
 

Search engine ranking

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If you search google for anything you'll get a page that looks like the one below. The search engine sifts through the millions of pages of information and presents you with a list of the most relevant matches for your search.
 
 
So the most important question is how do they do it? Well that's a secret guarded very well by the search engine companies. What I can say is that search engines use ranking algorithms which follow certain rules.
 

Frequency and location

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One of the main algorithm rules is frequency and location of keywords. If you search for the word 'bus timetable, Cardiff' on a search engine. The search algorithm will check the following in order to determine relevancy:
> The keywords listed are present on a website, keywords being, 'bus timetable' and 'Cardiff'. Sites with these words will be more relevant.
> The keywords appear in the TITLE tag (see below for more info) if they do further relevancy will be attached to the site.
> The keywords appear at the top of the page in the first paragraph or in the headlines at the top of the page. If they appear here any articles will be deemed more relevant.
> The number of times the keywords appears on the page in relation to other words. The more they appear the more relevant.
 

That little bit extra

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Different search engines tweak this method in different ways, they all add that little bit extra to their algorithm which makes each search engine produce different results. The frequency with which search engines trawl the net is another factor which can make results different.
 

Off the page

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Webmasters have become more and more adept at re-writing content to produce high ranking websites, so much so that search engines now take into account 'off the page' factors as well. One of which is internal site linking, by analysing this they can discover what a page is all about and whether its important and deserving of a higher ranking. Another method is the 'click through rate'. If a link displayed on a search engine receives less clicks by users its relevancy drops and so does its ranking.
 
So your best bet with SEO is to be honest and try and give your readers as much information as possible.
 
 
Search Google for more SEO tips now
 
 

Crawlers, Meta tags, keywords and descriptions

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Some crawlers look for certain pieces of code on your website called meta tags.
 

Here is an example tag for a carp fishing website

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<HEAD>
<TITLE>Carp fishing made easy</TITLE>
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Carp UK is the only online resource for corporate carp fishing.">
<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="Corporate carp fishing, Carp, online resource, free carp magazine, Carp fishing tackle sale,">
<HEAD/>

You need to insert these meta tags into the code yourself. The TITLE tag is the title that appears on the page and the CONTENUT tag comes from the descriptive content you have on your website.  

 seo
The KEYWORD tag is made up of words listed on your site which describe what you do or sell and are likely to be used as search criteria by people when they search the net for specific products.I should point out that adding keywords to your site is not a magic panacea for top rankings. Not all search engines use meta keywords as a method of indexing websites. For example, google one of the biggest search engines does not.
 
A crawler searches your website and indexes and gathers many pages from your site even if they have not been submitted to any engines. The meta robots tag is a piece of code which tells crawlers where they can go and where they can not go on your website. Most engines look at the full written text and index it, but be wary of over long pages they will not index it all.
   
A word of caution be wary of SEO consultants who are vague about what methods they use, they may be bogus and use the following Black Hat SEO methods:
 

Black Hat methods to avoid

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Any type of spamdexing.
The use of hidden text on a website.
Sending users to pages that are different to those listed and ranked on search engines, this is known as cloaking.
Adding hidden links on your site to other sites.
 
For Search Engine Optimisation management please click the SEO button. SEO Management
 
Contact us now on 0845 0034265 for an informal discussion regarding SEO.

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Website Disclaimer 23/02/2010: The use of data-mining, extraction software or bots by any company that is not collecting data for a search engine is strictly forbidden on this website. The use of any data collected from the website by any data-mining, extraction software or bots is also strictly forbidden. This does not include search engine bots collecting data for search engines. The use of Picscout in particular will be treated as 'hacking' and will be prosecuted.