Well, very soon we are going to be giving you access to a FREE mini course with a series of online videos to get you started in SEO.  In the meantime, here are 6 top tips to help you on your way up the search engine rankings:

Tip 1: Pick your keywords carefully

You want to be on page 1 of Google.  But what do you want to be on page 1 for?  It’s easy to rank for obscure pointless terms that no one ever searches for.  You need to rank for the terms that your own potential customers are searching for.

Use a tool such as Google’s own keyword tool to find out what people are really looking for, and then focus your site around those terms.

Tip 2: Tell us what it’s about!

The title of every page of your website is important for 2 reasons.  Firstly, search engines place a lot of importance on what you write in your page titles – after all, the title tells you what it is about, right?  Secondly, the title is displayed in search result listings, so that’s what people will see when searching and use to decide if they should visit your site. Write unique, enticing, keyword rich titles for each page of your website and you’ll be off to a good start.

Tip 3: Content is king

This is a pretty common tip, but just as relevant as ever.  Search engines can’t read pictures, or videos, or animations (at least not yet), so the only way they can judge what your website is about is by what you write.  Other than your page titles, you should have original, informative content on every page.  Don’t stuff your keywords like crazy, but make sure they’re included wherever appropriate and aim for at least 300 words per page.

What’s more, interesting well written content will keep your visitors engaged, help drive sales and encourage people to come back time and time again.

Tip 4: Get some link love

Unless you’re in a really uncompetitive niche, you can’t just put your website online, add some content and achieve top search engine rankings.  What you need are votes from other people saying that your website is worth visiting for a particular topic.  How do they give you these votes?  With links!

Every link to your website tells the search engines that someone values your page, and the words that they have hyperlinked give an indication of what they think your page is about.  So the more people that link words related to your business to your website, the higher your website will be ranked in your niche.

Links can vary a lot in quality but as a general rule, links are good news for your website and you should collect as many as possible. Ask friends, customers, partners, suppliers and everyone you know with a website to help get you started in building some links.  Even link between pages within your own website.

Tip 5: Write a blog

A blog is possible the single best thing you can do on your website to improve its SEO.  But why do you need a blog and what should you write about?

Simple.  You need a blog because it shows the search engines that your website is fresh and up to date, it creates large volumes of content that increase your chances of being found and every extra page gives you another chance to link within you own website, and every link is a good thing, remember!  What’s more, your blog gives you a chance to engage potential customers and partners, build awareness of your brand and earn trust and authority by talking about your field of expertise.

Give advice, comment on your industry, tell people what’s happening with your business and products.  If you think someone might find it interesting, useful or entertaining and it’s relevant to your business, stick it on the blog.

Tip 6: Leverage

It can seem as though getting top search engine rankings is a huge amount of work and if you’re not careful it can end up being a full time job.  You’re an expert in your business, not necessarily an expert in SEO, so look for online tools, software and people that can make your SEO easier, more efficient and more effective.  Every hour you save working on your website is an hour you can spend doing what you do best.

Hope that helps

This is just a really quick introduction to some key concepts of SEO.  If you want more detail on how to improve your search engine rankings then look out for our forthcoming emails about our FREE online mini course.

Of course, if you need help in the meantime, feel free to ask.

We’ve had a lot of conversations with clients, partners and colleagues over the last few years about web marketing techniques and one that comes up time and time again is blog commenting, and whether it can really help your search engine rankings.

What is comment linking?

Just to clarify, if you’re not familiar with blog commenting as an SEO technique, the theory is that by leaving comments on other peoples blog posts, you get free links back to your website from within the comment.  Sounds great, right?  The problem with this technique from a pure SEO perspective (ignoring any ethical issues – that’s another discussion!) is that bloggers are fed up with people spamming their comments trying to get free backlinks, and so have set the links in their comments to automatically include the nofollow tag.  In fact, many leading blogging platforms including our favourite WordPress automatically set comment links as nofollow.

What is a nofollow tag?

Put simply, a nofollow tag is a tag placed on a hyperlink telling search engines to ignore the link.  Like a sign saying “No Entry”.  The door may be open for humans to click the link and visit the other website, but search engines are kindly told to keep out.

So what about SEO?

So how does this work in terms of SEO?  In theory search engines should not follow nofollow links, but in practice it is up to them whether they obey your instruction or not.  Google has stated quite clearly that it does not follow no follow links, which if true makes the whole exercise of commenting for SEO largely pointless unless you spend hours hunting down the small number of blogs still not using the nofollow tag.

However, people have experienced strange things and this has led to conspiracy theories evolving suggesting that Google is in fact lying and does follow these links.   After all, nearly all the links on Twitter and Facebook are nofollow, and surely they’re significant to what’s happening on the web these days. Right?

Our curiosity got awakened when a bunch of links from comments that we’d left on blogs appeared in our Google Webmaster Tools account as backlinks.  On inspection, these comments did infact posses the nofollow tag.  Very strange if Google doesn’t follow these links.

So we set up a small experiment, and here’s what we found.

The Test

We setup a secret webpage on the back of a new domain.  This page contained entirely unique content and was not accessible from anywhere on the web.  No internal navigation, no sitemap, no backlinks.  Nothing.

We then picked a keyword that we wanted to rank for.  To make it easy, we picked one that was totally unique and had no current results in Google.

Then we left a bunch of comments on blogs (only those with nofollow links), using this unique keyword as our name (and therefore link anchor text), with our URL set as our secret page.

The Results

Its been a few weeks since we started this experiment.  This is what we observed.

After a few days we could not find our secret page in Google when searching for any of the content it contained.  When we searched for the keyword in our anchor text, we found many of the blogs where we had left our comments, showing that Google had been round and read the comments.

After about 1 week, we saw that our secret page had been indexed in Google, but not for the keyword in our anchor text – just for terms within the actual page content.  Woohoo!!  We initially thought this meant Google had followed the comment links to find our page, but as Jez at Make Hay pointed out, Google could have found the page through our Google toolbar when we visited the page, so it was still inconclusive.

However, a few days later our page showed up for the keyword in our comment anchor text.  It was the last result after all of the pages with the comments on, but still, it showed that Google had indexed the page based on the anchor text of our nofollow links.  Woohoo!?

We were the last result though, so it only showed that the links helped indexing not ranking.  We left a bunch more nofollow comments with the same keyword to see if we could nudge it up the rankings, and a week later…

…

…our page had disappeared off Google for our keyword altogether, as opposed to the upward movement we were hoping for. Doh!

Conclusion – Do nofollow blog comments help SEO?

It’s still not entirely clear what Google is playing at here, but it seems as though it does follow nofollow blog comments (at least some of them) and that it uses them for indexing on some level, but that it doesn’t pass any pagerank that could help rankings, and that whatever value it gives in terms of indexing is very very minor indeed.

Basically, it sounds like a nice idea but it’s probably still a waste of time if you’re serious about building valuable backlinks to help your search engine rankings.  Dofollow links are a different issue of course, if you know where to find them!

Have you had any experiences that confirm or contradict our findings?  Have any interesting theories? Please leave a comment below.

Update!!

I thought for the sake of completeness we should check how things are going on Yahoo.  Seems Yahoo does value nofollow links, as our secret page not only ranks but it ranks 2nd out of 7 results on Yahoo search for our anchor text keyword (which is nowhere on the page).

Bing.com hasn’t found the page at all, but no great surprises there!

Here’s how to do it.

In Gmail, click on settings in the top right corner of the screen. Now, click on the accounts tab,

You then need to go to the section called “get mail from other accounts”.  Click “add another e-mail address”.  Again, follow the instructions in a pop-up window.  You will need to enter the username and password for your alternative e-mail account, but you should leave the POP details as default, unless your domain provider has giving you other information.

If you are the kind who doesn’t like to read guides, then just click on the link and start using  and learning as you go – http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html

To complement our SEO Web Design services we wanted to create a really easy to use and practical guide to SEO that can be used by beginners and individuals wanting to optimise their own website for better search engine rankings.

This guide will take you through the main aspects of search engine optimisation step by step so that you can easily apply what you learn.

The guide is split into two main parts. In this part, we will be covering on-site SEO, involving all of the main things that you need to do to set up your own website, and it passed to we will be covering external SEO to outline the things that you can do away from your own website to improve the ranking of your site.

Part 1 – On-site SEO

1. SEO Strategy

• Before you start anything, identify the key terms for your website. These are the terms that when searched for, you would like your website to appear high up in the listings on Google, Yahoo etc

• Identify terms that people are actually searching for in your target country. User tools such as Google keywords tool to identify these terms.

• Think carefully about the relevance of particular search terms. Some terms such as “shoes” are very general, and while they may have a high volume of searches, there are likely to lead to sales. More specific terms such as “Salomon AX90 Pro Running Shoe” may have much lower such volumes, but suggested that the customer is specifically looking to buy a product, making it much more valuable if you are a retailer of that product. Strike a balance between terms of a specific and also have a reasonable number of people looking for them.

• Use exactly terms, not individual keywords e.g. “Running Shoe” is a single key term, not to separate keywords “running” and “shoe ”.

• Don’t spread your efforts too thin. Start off by focusing on one keyword to optimise your homepage and one additional keyword for each page of your website.

• Make sure that no two pages on your website targeting the same key term as this will create a conflict between the two pages

2. SEO URLs

• Choose a domain name that includes all part of your primary key to, and if possible emphasise that by putting as the first part of your URL and separating words with hyphens. For example, if I ran a SEO company called monkey, I could use the URL www.SEO-monkey.com, rather than www.monkey.com or www.monkeySEO.com.

• If you have a very large website, then you can use subdomains to include unique variations of your keywords in your web domain for specific areas of your website. The example, if I had a specific service aimed at SEO for charities. Then I could create a sub-domain with content about this service at www.charity.SEO-monkey.com, thus including the key term “charity SEO” in the URL.

• Set up your site to either use www or to not use www. This will help to avoid the search engines seeing http://www.SEO-monkey.com and http://SEO-monkey.com as two separate websites with duplicate content. Decide which one you want to use and redirect the other.

• Use your key terms as the page slugs throughout your website, separating words with hyphens. For example, if I have a page targeted at “Trail Running” then the page link should be www.example.com/trail-running

3. Meta Data

• Every page of your website meets correctly set up Meta data and tags

• Title – make your main key term for each page the first part of your page title. For example, if I have a company called Intertel and my page keyword is “IP phones”, then my page title should be something like “IP phones by Intertel” instead of “Intertel IP phones”

• Description – the description isn’t too important search rankings, but is displayed in the search listings and so has a huge effect on click through rates. Keep it short, relevant and include a call to action. Limit to 160 characters.

• Keywords – these don’t really count for much in terms of search engine rankings. But you might want to include mis-spellings of your main keywords to increase your chance of appearing when someone typed the keyword wrong in the search engine

• Ensure that all pages on your website marked with follow and index tags, and that any pages that you do not want to be indexed (e.g. your terms and conditions) are marked with no follow and no index tags.

4. SEO Content

• Your content tells both readers and searching is what each page of your website is all about. It is therefore the single most important aspect of your SEO.

• Each page should have at least one full paragraph of text (at least 200 words). Basically, is much relevant text as you can include without waffling or making your website look like a mess.

• Feature in your page specific key terms within the text frequently. Don’t overdo it though because it will look like spam to both visitors and search engines. No more than 5% of your contents should be a particular keyword

• Use headings. Divide the page up into sections, using your page specific keywords within the paragraph headings. Each page should have at least one H1 Heading and at least one H2 Heading

• Try to include other keywords from around your website in each page and hyperlink those keywords back to the relevant page on your website.

• Highlight your keywords within the text occasionally in bold or italics

• Include some images in each page relating to your subject matter. Use keywords in the file names and give the images titles and alt tags containing the relevant key terms

• Include an inventory of your products and services on a prominent page (probably your homepage) using exact keywords to represent your products

• Writes lots of pages. They don’t all have to be in your top navigation menu, but if your web site has lots of content folks round your main keywords and linking back to your main pages, then it will make the website as a whole seem more credible and more relevant, and increase the number of internal links. The blog is a great way of achieving this

• Regularly update your content and add new content, indicating such tensions that your website is well maintained and up-to-date.

5. Readability

• Use a web technology that is fast to load content and can be read by search engine spiders. Most are fine, but some such as Flash can be difficult or impossible to search engines to read.

• Use real text links wherever possible, especially in your main navigation menu. Try to avoid image links.

• Install an XML site map to help search engines index or areas of your website. Make sure that it is set up to automatically ping, Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask whenever the sitemap is updated. Also set it to instruct, search engines to crawl your website regularly. Exclude any relevant pages from the sitemap.

• Make sure that your pages are fast to load. If people have to wait too long, they’ll get bored and click away. Anything more than six seconds and you need to speed it up. Also, Google has recently announced that it is looking into using loading times in its search metrics.

6. Monitoring

• Install website analytics software such as Google Analytics or Mint

• For each keyword in your website, record your search engine position and the number of website visitors from that search term. Do this every month and compare with notes on what aspects of the website you have changed.

If you need help check out our Guaranteed – SEO Services or SEO Web Design Service to get your website thriving in the search engines.

Also visit our latest post 6 Top Tips for Google Page 1 ranking…