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.

That’s why we now have a Guaranteed SEO service to take the risk away from the client.  Our pricing has been tweaked a bit and what you now get is a guarantee that if we don’t get your agreed keywords onto page 1 of Google within the agreed time period, we’ll refund your money in full.

We’re one of the only companies in the world able to offer such as cast iron SEO guarantee and to top it off, our prices are better value than most other SEO agencies who don’t offer a guarantee.  You can’t lose - so check it now!

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!

We’ve recently had the pleasure of working with Evasion Travel, a small but fast growing activity holiday company based in France.  Evasion Travel began their journey to build their holiday business in 2006 when Adam and Annabel Breen began running holidays in the Ardeche region of France. They now offer guests the choice of several beautiful gites in the Ardeche alongside the activity holidays, and offer their same personal service in winter to visitors in the ski resort of Courchevel, France.

Putting Evasion Travel on the map as a leading provider of France activity holidays, Scamper have completely redesigned their previous network of websites into one by employing a very friendly and navigable WordPress design for their website. Our objective was to not only communicate the huge amount of information that Evasion needs to present about summer holidays, winter holidays, activities, accommodation etc in a simple and easy to navigate design, but also to give the business a professional web presence that doesn’t lose the essence of their business of being personal, flexible and fun.

The site showcases two separately themed areas for summer and winter holidays, with many advanced features such as featured image galleries, multi-layered navigation, availability calendars, scrolling testimonials and more. And with its multi-lingual feature, you can browse it seamlessly in Dutch, German and French aswell as the default language of English.

The new Evasion Travel website is SEO-friendly and we’d like to think that we’ve managed to do justice to the great team at Evasion by giving them a really great travel website design.

Visit the Evasion Travel website and have a nosey around, and if you fancy a bit of adventure or relaxation then why not book in and enjoy their hospitality.  http://evasiontravel.co.uk/

The recently launched Luxe Wedding Photography Website serves as a portfolio and brochure where clients can take a sneak peak at the hospitality offered by senior consultant Campion and the masterful shots made by Wood and his team of expert wedding photographers.

Expertly captured moments and emotions are just among the promises Wood and his team can deliver on the day you tie the knot. You can also be sure that behind the scenes every last detail is taken care of to ensure that everything from the style of your shots to the album design is always perfect.

Scamper have built a website that shows off what Luxe have to offer using yet another a great WordPress Design. Wood and Campion wanted a very friendly website that exudes class and elegance while also communicating their key sales messages and allow them to easily manage advanced features such as a photo portfolio and private galleries where each couple can log in and view their photos after the event.

The new Luxe Wedding Photography website boasts an SEO friendly design that is the perfect platform on which to grow their business.

Check out the new Luxe website now at http://luxeweddings.com.au/