Updating Content

As of last Friday I am not a website developer! I expect to begin my new job in the next few weeks. As of yet I am not sure whether it will be more or less relevant to Search Engine Optimisation than my previous job. Anyway, enough about me, let's get back to SEO! In order to maintain a high ranking on Search Engine Results Pages, it is a good idea to update your content fairly regularly. Search Engines want to show their users relevant content. Suppose I search for 'information technology in Ireland' and the search engine has two relevant articles in its index. If one of the articles was last updated in 1999 and the other was last updated in 2006, then one would expect that the article from 2006 is more likely to interest me. You can expect a good search engine to follow this principle. Therefore it is important to keep your website updated with new and relevant information. From a non-SEO point of view, another benefit of always having fresh content is that you can entice visitors to return to your website frequently. Almost all good SEO techniques are of benefit to the user of the website as well as the search engines, and most of the optimisation techniques currently promoted by Google will help improve the user-friendliness of a website and make it more searchable.

Google Toolbar - Page Rank

I'd like to begin by apologising for not posting to this blog last week. I was in Morocco and decided to wait until I returned to Ireland to post again. I'm also in the process of switching jobs so everything is very busy here at the moment. Anyway, since I got back, I noticed an update of the Google Toolbar's Page Rank on some sites that I've been keeping an eye on. It's very difficult to say exactly how these features work, but, for what it's worth, I'll let you know the approach that I take to the Page Rank feature on the Google Toolbar. First of all, the feature is not search-specific, so, in some cases, it's possible you are getting some valuable hits through Google for a niche term without having a high page rank. Secondly, from what I can see, the feature is not updated very often - I do not think a change in the Page Rank on your Google Toolbar will be seen in your position for specific searches on Google. It is more likely that Google will have adjusted any rankings/scorings for your page each time it was crawled by Googlebot and the feature on the Toolbar is only updated occasionally to reflect the changes of the past few weeks/months. It is also possible that there is a time latency between when Page Rank is calculated and when it actually appears on the Toolbar on your browser. If this is the case, then the Page Rank on the toolbar may never actually accurately represent how well Google rates your page. I also believe that the feature on the Toolbar may not be as stringent as the actual algorithms used by Google. Sometimes pages that do not look like they are very Search Engine Friendly appear with relatively high Page Rank values, I think that this may be because the Page Rank feature does not carry out some checks that are normally carried out by Google's 'real' algorithms. Having said all that, if we are aware of the possible limitations of the feature, we may be able to use it as a rough guide. As I said earlier in the article, it is difficult to say exactly how these things work, I have just given my educated opinion. There are more articles that can be easily found on the internet regarding this topic including some that include references to correspondence with Google themselves on the matter.

Heading Tags, Internal Linking, and Bold Text

There are a number of simple things you can bear in mind when creating your page content and layout. First of all, Heading Tags - use these for the headings in your content. Use them properly, use 'h1' tags for your main heading, use 'h2' tags for headings that are one level below your main heading, and use 'h3' tags for sub-headings that are one level below your 'h2' headings. As well as being search engine friendly, this will also make your source code neater and easier to read. Google appears to treat anchor text a bit differently than standard text on your website. You should have text links to any other relevant pages within your website. The text that is linked should be an accurate signpost to the page that it points to. Where your links are somewhat relevant to the current page this should mean a benefit to your SERP (Search Engine Ranking Page) position. For example, if your homepage is aimed at people looking to buy a car and you have links to other pages on your site such as 'Car Buying Tips', 'Advanced Car Search', and 'Featured Cars' - then Google will make use of the keywords in the link text when ranking your homepage. (This principle would apply to pages other than your homepage also.) Bold Text is another thing search engines may put some weight in when rating your page, I would recommend using Bold Text sensibly - just as you would in a document for printing.

The 'site:' tool on Google and Yahoo

When optimising your website it is important to keep track of the changes that you have made and when the search engines first noticed these changes. Both Google and Yahoo support the 'site:' function. Simply type 'site:www.mysite.ie' and click 'Search'. Google/Yahoo will then return all the pages it has indexed for that domain. (Be aware that some search engines use more than one 'database' so the results may vary somewhat depending on which 'database' is being queried when you run the search.) Along with every result returned you will usually see a link called 'cached'. If you click on this link you will see what version of your page the search engine is currently using to decide where you will rank for searches. On Google you will also see what date the page was indexed. If you are keeping a close eye on the position of your pages for important search terms, this tool allows you to see which changes resulted in the improvement that you see. This is important if you want to learn and improve your SEO skills.

The Alt attribute and Metatags

Search engine spiders don't process the images on your website and decide what keywords they will convey to the visitor! But you can use the Alt attribute on your images and the search engine spiders will read these. (You should also be using the Alt attribute so that browsers that do not display images can tell their users what image would ideally appear.) So use the Alt attribute on every image and use it accurately - describe your image precisely and concisely with as few words as possible. Metatags may be less important now than they were in the past but they are still used by major search engines. The Metatag Description should be a short description of the content on the page that is being optimised. Metatag Keywords may be more important - only use a few keywords; separate key words and phrases with commas; make sure that all your key words and phrases appear, word-for-word, within the content of the page. So, in an ideal situation, your most important keywords for the page would appear in the Metatag Keywords, the image Alt attributes, the Page Title, the content of the page, and the URL of the page.

Domain Names, Page Titles and URLs

Google seems to see your domain name as being very important. If you sell boats and your website is 'www.buyaboat.ie', then you shouldn't find it too difficult to appear highly in a Google search for 'buy a boat'. When reading a domain Google is able to parse the words in the domain name without hyphens. When naming URLs it is best to separate words with hyphens. Page Titles (in the Head part of your html code) are also quite important to Google . You should title each page appropriately to the content of that page. Keep it short and rich in Keywords. Keep the more important keywords near the beginning of the title. Page URLs are also important to Google. I find trying to match your URL with your Title to some extent is a good way of focusing on the correct keywords. As with the page titles, important words in your URL should be closest to the beginning. Do not make your URLs too long - keeping them as short as possible is probably the best principle.

Duplication issues and 301 Redirects

Before we get into the nitty gritty of optimising your website page by page I would like to talk about duplication. Google isn't very fond of duplicate content. If it finds the same content on more than one of your pages it might not rank them very highly. There are a few cases where it is possible that Google may see something as duplicate content that might not be obvious to you. If your website shows up at http://yoursite.ie and http://www.yoursite.ie, then Google may regard all of your pages as having a duplicate page - http://yoursite.ie/page1.html and http://www.yoursite.ie/page1.html. Using 301 Redirects can prevent this issue. The normal method is to use a 301 redirect on the http://yoursite.ie/ pages that will redirect to the equivalent http://www.yoursite.ie/ pages. This also applies if you have both .com and .ie addresses - you should use 301 redirects from http://yoursite.com/ and http://www.yoursite.com/ pages to http://www.yoursite.ie/ pages (assuming you have chosen http://www.yoursite.ie/ as your favoured address). Also, Google may see http://www.yoursite.ie/ and http://www.yoursite.ie/index.html as two different pages with the same content. Making sure that all internal homepage links point to http://www.yoursite.ie/ rather than http://www.yoursite.ie/index.html can help to prevent this issue. If you find any backlinks (external links) that point to index.html, you could ask the webmaster to update the link to point to http://www.yoursite.ie/. This issue would also apply to index.asp or index.php etc. as well as index.html.

Keywords and Focus

Keywords are a big thing in Search Engine Optimisation. The words that appear on your website need to include the words that people type into the search engines (when looking for information that may be found on your website). People search for keywords more so than full sentences. Even if they did search using full sentences, you would still need to focus on matching the keywords. Important keywords should feature in your website naturally. It is important to ensure that the content of your website includes the keywords that you think are relevant to your business or interest but the content should not be contrived - the website must still be pleasant for a real visitor, and also, search engines may penalise you for overuse of keywords. Search engines may check the percentage of your page content taken up by one particular word, if it is too high they may stop indexing your webpages. You should pick keywords for each page on your website and make sure that you focus on optimising each page for the content on that particular page. Focusing on a number of areas will reduce the quality for individual keywords - it is wasteful, from an SEO point of view you may as well just have a one page website! If you can keep your focus you should be able to bring in plenty of visitors through the more minor pages of your website.

Yahoo and the importance of tracking visitors

In my experience, improving your Search Engine Results Page position is more difficult and takes longer on Google than it does on Yahoo. Google is important, much more important than Yahoo, but it can be nice to see some early results on Yahoo so that you know you're doing something right! I think this is a good time to stress the importance of tracking visits to your website. If you have functionality on your website that will track the page that a visitor came from before they arrived on your website then you can guage the success of your optimisation much more effectively. Tracking the amount of pages a visitor viewed and whether or not they filled out a form, made a purchase etc. gives you the opportunity to draw even more conclusions.

Search Engine Optimisation in Ireland

Ok, well I suppose I should start at the beginning to keep some sort of structure to this page. Most of my examples in my blog will probably be geared towards Irish readers. There are plenty of SEO blogs out there, so I'm going to post my thoughts without trying to cloak my Irish perspective. Search Engine Optimisation is possibly a lot easier when you are aiming a website at an Irish market in comparison to aiming it at the UK or US markets. The small area and population must make almost any kind of online marketing more straight forward and more affordable. In my experience, the 'search for pages in Ireland' option is very popular. Aiming to get a website ranking highly in searches for 'pages within Ireland' can be a good stepping stone towards bigger things. It means you can see results quickly - it shouldn't take long to get a few relevant search terms bringing up your website in at least the top thirty results (though obviously it depends on the kind of website you're optimising). One important thing to note, is that, for Google to rank your pages for searches within Ireland, your website must either be a '.ie' address or else it must be hosted on a server in Ireland.

Cormac's SEO Page!

Hi, my name is Cormac Fitzpatrick. I work as a developer in a Web Design company. I have recently begun to delve into the world of Search Engine Optimisation and find it very interesting. I hope that people will read this blog and post comments so that we can all learn from each other. Hopefully this page will help me to put some of what I've learned on paper, so to speak, and I will end up with a large collection of useful information. If you've any questions about SEO or SEO techniques please post a comment.