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The following are some of the most commonly asked questions from our SEO customers. Chances are you'll find what you're looking for in the list below, but if not, contact Salsa on our 1300 number at the top of the website, and we'd be pleased to answer any other questions you might have.
1. How do I get my website to rank well on Google?
If there was a single recommendation we could make to ensure you rank well on Google it would be to fill your website with lots of pages, of high quality, useful, informational, editorially independant content, stories, articles, & information. That doesn't mean contrived press releases about your latest money making venture.....we're talking about informational content that has independant, useful value regardless of who it comes from. That is one of the most highly valued aspects of a website by the search engines. It's also very hard, time consuming & costly to create.....so here's a few other things you can do to get good rankings quickly given that for most people / companies, the aforementioned factors are tricky to generate quickly:
There are at least 150 different aspects of a website's technical construction, and its profile on the internet that affect how well you rank in the "free listings" on Google. The short answer to this question however, is that mostly - the following things affect how you rank on the internet. There are on-site" factors which are things about the HTML construction of your website, how your meta tags are constructed, and how both the link structure and the content on your site is arranged that affect this. There are also "off-site" factors including which 3rd party websites have links pointing to your site, what text is used in those links and other issues. In summary, these are the some of the most important issues to consider:
On-site factors:
- a) HTML <title> tags - must be unique on each page, relevant to that page, and containing words that people search on often on google (keep in mind that <title> tags appear as the blue links in the search engine results page, so write these with a balance of keyword optimisation and trying to convey a message that encourages users to click on your listing).
- b) HTML <H1> tags - these are "Heading 1" tags, and must follow the same principles, unique, containing keywords relevant to the content of that page, and matching the terms that people search for on the search engine.
- c) Page Content - you should aim for a minimum of 20 - 30 pages on your website of keyword rich content of 300 - 500 words at least. You should include 5 - 6 occurences of the important "two word" keyword phrases that you want to rank for, and that people search for on google. You should ensure a range of synonyms relating to the "theme" of that page are included in the page to clearly convey the purpose & meaning of that page to the search engines.
- d) Meta description tags - these appear as the description under your main website link on the search engine results page, so while they are not critical for ranking, they are very important to convey a selling proposition or message that encourages users to click on your listing.
- e) Link structure - ensuring that the links on the pages within your website (from menu's, headings, sitemaps etc) that link to other pages on your site, are setup in a way which ensures that any ranking or weighting which google gives these web pages, is passed through into other pages within your website to maximise each page's changes of ranking well for various keyword terms.
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Off-site factors:
- a) You should aim to have as many one way, inbound links pointing to your website from 3rd party websites.
- b) If possible, these links should be from websites which themselves are important or highly ranking, or educational or government institutions
- c) Avoid "reciprocal linking" schemes where you exchange links with other websites, unless they are highly relevant to your website's target audience.
- d) Ensure the link text in the link itself contains two keyword terms which you want to rank for.
- e) Try to get links from websites that are related to the subject of the page which they are linking to.
- f) Try to get links from pages which do not have hundreds of links pointing out to other websites ie pure "links" pages.
If you take care of these factors alone, your ranking will increase significantly over previous results.
1a. So my website is now optimised but the (insert one of: H1 tags / volume of content / title tags / inbound links) aren't yet sorted out to at the level that you're recommending - is this REALLY going to make a difference? Shouldn't my site already be ranking well given the work done so far?
No - these elements (well written title tags containing your keywords, properly formatted H1 tags, a strong volume of content on your website (ie lots of pages of keyword rich content), and a strong volume of inbound links containing the right link text) are all the fundamental foundation stones of SEO. If one of these issues has been ignored or not addressed thoroughly, then it could potentially be dragging down all the other elements of your on-site SEO and causing your site not to rank where it needs to.
2. What is Google "PageRank" ?
This is a rating which Google publish approximately ~quarterly showing how your site is performing relative to other websites in the search engine rankings.
3. My competitor has a pagerank score of 3, and I have a 5 - why do they rank higher than me?
PageRank is a general indicator only, and should not be relied upon as the sole indicator of how a website is ranked in the search results. Google factor in other issues such as keyword matching within the website content, link structure of the website, matching against page titles and a host of other issues.
PageRank is calculated based on a range of factors, but mostly it's a rating based on how many links you have to your website, and the quality of those links (whether they originate from high ranking websites). PageRank is widely believed to follow an exponential scale, with a factor of ~5 (other figures are quoted from time to time). So a PageRank score of 6 is 5 times better than a 5, which is 5 times better than a 4 etc. In other words, while it's not overly hard to get a 2 or 3, beyond this you need to have established a range of quality links pointing to your website from other websites. Google also discount PageRank scores given to websites where there is a reciprocal link back to the originating website. Google recognised this a few years ago as a trick that SEO companies were playing, and tend to only value one way inbound links these days, although this continues to be a subject of debate within the industry.
4. How often to google visit my site to index it?
For an average corporate website, the typical timeframe for google to come visiting is every 10 - 14 days for the home page of a website, and interior pages may be less frequent. Each time google visits however, they review whether your website has been updated, and if it has, chances are in future they will come back more often. This can increase to the point where for frequently updated websites like directories, or classified advertising sites or other sites which change regularly - google can be visiting the site many hundreds (or even thousands) of times each day.
4a. How do I know when google last visited my site / page?
If you search for site:yourcompany.com on Google, in the search engine results - just below the blue link to your website home page, there is a "cached" link. If you click on this cached link you will be taken to the Google cached version of that page. At the top of this cached page you will see the date when Google last took a cached snapshot of that page. This is the same date that Google last crawled that page. You can do this for any page on your website in order to see the date it was last visited / indexed by Google.
5. I type in "blue widgets" into Google but I don't see my site in the search results, but my competitors site is there - why?
Chances are you haven't taken care of the factors mentioned in (1) above. You many not have your html <title> tags containing the term "blue widgets". The page content on your home page may not contain much text, and the text may not include "blue widgets" very often or at all. You may not have links pointing to your website from other highly ranked websites where the link text is "blue widgets". If you have all of this, and you still don't rank well - then you may need to seek the assistance of an expert to find out what's going wrong.
6. Should I fill my meta keywords and pages with the keyword I want to rank well for?
No!! This is a big trap that people fall into, thinking they can employ a simplistic flooding of their content with the keywords they want to rank for, and that google will send them to the top of the search results. Google and the other search engines employ "filters" which can often detect when someone is artificially filling their content with meaningless keywords in an attempt to game the search results. Not only will this usually not get you ranked well, but it may see your site penalised by these search engine filters which deprioritise your website in the search results on the basis of this approach. Similarly playing tricks like hiding content on pages by using white text on a white background, or inserting scripts which send search engine crawlers to one version of your website, while normal users see another version - are all things which may cause you big problems in future, even if you achieve a short term gain. In other words, unless your an SEO expert, employ a straightforward, sensible approach which adds value to the visitors of your website and focuses on delivering quality content - period. Anything else, is taking big risks with an important source of sales inquiries and leads.
7. I'm creating a new page on my website about Blue Widgets. Should I change the links in this new page which say "Contact Us" to "Contact Us about Blue Widgets"?
"In page" links within your site have 2 benefits.
1. They are another opportunity to include "blue widgets" on the page and hence increase it's keyword density (minor issue only if the page in question already has plenty of occurences of that keyword on the page)
2. They add strength to the destination page (being linked to) for that keyword.
If the link is linking to the contact-us page - then (2) above really has little applicability as you don't really want your contact us page to rank for lots and lots of different product specific keywords. What WOULD be valuable would be to have any other references to the word "blue widgets" on your website - to be set to be an active link to your "blue widgets" information / product page.
8. Will it help my rankings if I link to other important / authoritative websites in my industry?
This is generally recognised as being a positive thing. I wouldn't go over board here, but having 2 or 3 links in the body of your page content may help the ranking of that page. Try to keep it natural - so only link out to authority sites where it makes sense to the copy / purpose of that page.
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