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.