Search Engine Optimisation

[Philby]

Is anyone here in East Dulwich prepared to sit down with me to help me otpimise my site and blog. Im prepared to pay something for someone who knows their way around SEO. Please get in touch. Thanks.

[Narnia]

I'm afraid I can't help but may I ask if you set up a website by yourself and if so do you have any tips? I want to do one for my other half but I'm learning from the start.

[Loz]

Yep. One very good tip - keep it simple. There are so many whizzy bangie things available, but most of the just hurt the retina. A really good example of what not to do.. A nice clean website design will make things easy.

Look at the best example of this - Google (even though they occasionally try to wreck it).

[binary_star]

Search engine optimisation really means Google optimisation for most websites these days. It will take more than a 'sit down' but if you have a limited budget you can learn a lot of the basics yourself. There's a lot of jargon in the industry that might seem baffling at first and although SEO can be greatly effected by things such as canonical urls, 301 redirects, .htaccess configuration, the robots.txt file, XML sitemaps, the main thing is to ensure you have relevant, accessible and well structured content. Remember that search engine robots will read your site as plain text - even images will be indexed using their file names, titles, alt tags, and descriptions so think carefully about what keywords people will be using to search for your site and write relevant content around those.

Google also places a lot of importance on page titles and the structure of html too, so make sure your web designer knows how to write standards-compliant (x)html. It's a bit cliche but user friendly is Google friendly so having readable urls, good html titles, consistent navigation and accessible content will help lots.

Get a Google account, install Google Analytics, submit your site to the major search engines and verify it in Google's Webmaster tools (or get your web designer/developer to do this for you). Sit back and review your analytics statistics to make sure you're meeting your goals or to see whether you need to make any changes.

Ultimately, be wary of anyone who promises to get your site to the top of Google (no-one can guarantee that) or anyone who advocates bad practices such as keyword stuffing, deceptive redirects, link schemes etc - this could lead to your site being blacklisted and you will be removed from Google's results altogether. Not irreversible, but a pain in the ass no less.

A good place to start is this from the horses mouth:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291

http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

Good luck!

EDIT: I forgot to say that if you can get your keywords in your domain name, then that is a mega bonus (www.eastdulwichforum.co.uk is actually a really good example of this).

[ironside]

Hi - I do this on Google for a living so can offer some insight:

1) Get some links to your site from other sites. Don't just spam forums with your link - offer to write guest articles for other blogs but request they credit your site [this has the additional benefit of driving traffic to your site. In Google's eyes this is means your site has quality content if you are being put on other 'high ranking' blogs

2) Put your blog on social media - make a facebook page for your blog, have a twitter account that links new articles make a tumblr account etc. Again this links back to point 1 regarding additional links from external sites. My hot tip for the moment is make a Youtube video that describes your site - Google owns youtube but is loosing money on it so they are trying to drive more traffic to the site by putting videos into search results (typically near the top). Takes about 20minutes to make a 30 second video and edit it but you really do see results!

3) Do NOT copy content from other site in large amounts - Google has a good algorithm for recognizing original content and if something is copied in large quantities you are pushed back down the rankings.

4) Make sure the coding of your site is up to scratch - no loose HTML tags, the "alt" tags on images are filled in etc etc. Again this is fairly standard stuff but the Google algorithm only 'sees' your site as raw code so make sure it is perfect

The main thing is just to make sure you have good, original content that people share around (it helps having twitter/facebook buttons on your page to help share the links). The more popular your website becomes the higher it goes in the rankings.

Much of the above is fairly standard - what is the area/subject topic your blog is in? If the topic is fairly competitive it is hard to break the "top 5" in Google.

Good luck!

[MrTwirly]

SEO is a bit of an odd beast at the moment. One thing to bear in mind about linking from blogs, flickr , youtube etc etc is a lot of these sites now prefix all links with NoFollow tags, meaning "well behaved" spiders shouldn't index them. of course, that doesn't always apply. I have links on my sites that are deliberately marked nofollow and still I see instances of spiders visiting them in the logs.

Ironside has it right though. link, cross reference , rinse and repeat. And content is king ! The better the content the better the links

good luck

(btw.. for what it's worth.. none of my sites ever made it to the top 5 PAGES let alone the top 5 links ;-) .. so perhaps I'm not the best person to listen to ;-)

[huncamunca]

Sadly, mine do, but then again, the content is rather "specialised"

Ironside sounds correct - maybe worth contacting him/her/them for proper SEO stuff innit