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Making Your Blog Post User Friendly

Published on January 30th, 2012 by in SEO UK

When publishing content in your site you need to make sure the page if clean and fresh for users to read. Try and remove all unnecessary clutter on your blog such as adverts, extra links but at the same time keeping the page looking fun so users will want to read your post.

People are viewing your post because it is something they want to read about so why put them off by showing them adverts and images that are not relevant to the post? Keep your posts clean and straight to the point on the subject you are writing about. This will make people read your post and hopefully view other posts you have written in the past. Using a design for your blog that makes your post printable and can be easily shared is a great way for your content to be read by others. A good percentage of users who read up on blogs use Safari which has the ‘Reader’ button next to the address bar which allows you just to read the main content of your post and remove all the clutter.

safari reader button

Always make sure you are using quality images or graphs in your post to make it more visually appealing. Not only does this bring your post to life, it is also perfect for sharing, eg Facebook and Google+. If you post a link in either of these social sites an image is automatically pulled into your post making your link more interesting for users to read and share.

google+ image post

The main reason you are posting content is for people to read, the more people the better. If your post is easy to read, of interest and quality, well structured and visually appealing, the more chance you will have of people sharing on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. They will share your post, one of their followers will view and share, then another person does the same and before you know it your post is receiving high volumes of visits.

Obviously, if your post is of no interest to anyone or if the points you are making are completely incorrect then you’re have no chance of anyone viewing or sharing your content. Google insights is the best way to monitor what if being talked about in your industry. If people are searching for it on Google, then get writing about it. Make sure you are not just repeating what others have wrote but get your own views and ideas across that nobody has even mentioned. The best way to get the traffic is writing about a post that is on the up (below) rather than in decline.

google insights

It will take a while for users to share your posts around their circles but once you have become established as supplying quality content on up to date subjects then people will view and share your post more frequently so don’t get upset if nothing happens overnight, just stick at it.

 

SEO UK

 
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Where To Link From

Published on January 23rd, 2012 by in SEO UK

The most important thing to keep in mind whilst performing SEO, or Inbound Marketing is, you need to put the time in to get the results. The days of trying to trick Google into ranking your site by high keyword density have long past. Today, content is king and has been for some time.

There is no way you can write poor content or even worse duplicate content, then just spam your content by repeating your keywords over and over again. Keyword Density is dead and has been, if it ever was effective, for years. The only way you can put trust in your website with Google is through high quality, unique content throughout your website. This also applies to your Link Building strategy or Inbound Marketing as we are calling it now!

Google wants to show quality content that is unique in their results. Google makes money by supplying the user with the best possible set of results for the selected keywords. If you were searching for a service and 5 out of the 10 results were all from the same company, with the same prices and all this company was doing is creating extra pages within their site with duplicate content and spamming their page with keywords, or even worse, microsites which all the links point back to their main site, you will be annoyed. This is exactly how Google sees this as well. They are not stupid and will only show you the highest quality set of results in their listings because they have removed all the duplicate set of results for you. So, if Google removes all sites and pages that contain duplicate content because it is not relevant, what good is your link on that page?

What Type Of Sites Should I Avoid?

The main sites to avoid are link directories as they have no original, unique content. How many times have you searched on Google for anything and found a link directory on the first page of results? Why? No relevant content. There are a few directories out there that are worth linking to. SEOMoz has created a list of directories worth submitting to.

What Sites Should I Link From?

If you keep in mind, content is king in SEO so the best links will be from relevant websites that contain your link, surrounded by relevant text regarding your keyword or industry. As mentioned earlier, you need to put the time into your Inbound Marketing. Only put your backlinks in quality websites. The best way of doing this, and the only real way of ranking your website today, is by getting in with quality bloogers to write about your services, add your link and then get them to market that page through Social Media such as Twitter and Google+. This will drive visitors to the bloggers page, read about your services and/or click through to your website or even republish your page within their circles allowing even more views.

Remember, QUALITY and UNIQUE RELEVANT content is the only method for obtaining backlinks to improve rankings. Please please do not waste your time with link directories, artilce directories etc. Put the time in and get people talking about your services.

SEO UK

 
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Google+ Forcing Our Hand?

Published on January 19th, 2012 by in SEO UK

Google+ is the latest social entity to hit small businesses to share their content on the web. This is a more developed social media platform then Facebook and Twitter which are more focused on the personal side of social media.

Google+ works by attracting users into your circles allowing them to view the content you share, very much the same as ‘likes’ and ‘friends’ on Facebook and the same as having followers on Twitter. The more users you have in your circles, the more people you will reach with your content which will increase the chances of your users sharing your content within their circles and so on.

Why Is Google+ Different from Facebook and Twitter?

Simple, Google controls what we search for! They are really forcing our hands in getting onboard with Google+ as they are favouring Google+ pages more than actual natural results. You can see this when you are logged into your Google account, not so much here in the UK yet but definitely in America, which means eventually it will get bigger across the globe.

When you search for a product or service you will see a new set of results with Google+ dominating the rankings above the natural listings and also the PPC listings. Google are really pushing this and forcing people to use their new social media platform as it gives priority rankings over all other types of listings.

Google+ Listings

You may have noticed the small ‘Plus’ box next to all the websites in your results pages. Again this is for promoting websites within your circles, telling Google what websites you think are important. The more +1′s added on each site, the higher the rankings will be, well for the time being anyway. At the moment, Google are bias about promoting their Google+ and providing top listing results for Google+ users and not always giving the best set of results as they usually do within their natural searches. Again this is going back to Google forcing our hand to create a Google+ account and share our content through their social media more than Twitter or Facebook as they will give your higher rankings. As this is all brand new and not a lot of users are using Google+, the results will not be as great but if Google keep with it and grow Google+ I’m sure they will be able to deliver more accurate results for searches, at the minute they are limited with the resources of users on Google+.

What Should I Do?

If you are sharing blog posts or content through Twitter or Facebook i would strongly recommend setting up a Google+ account straight away. Google really want to push this and are bias in the results toward Google+, so what Google wants – Google gets! Start sharing all your content and links through Google+ as well as Twitter and Facebook and let’s see if this takes off.

SEO UK

 
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SEO Spam Blog Comments

Published on January 16th, 2012 by in SEO UK

There are still “SEO Companies” creating links through blogs thinking this is still the way to perform a successful Link Building campaign. What they still do not understand is nearly every single blog, mainly WordPress, has ‘No Follow’ links meaning Google will not pick their links up.

The companies that carry on these out of date Link Building techniques are usually from India. The chances are you have received an email from one or several of these companies offering you high quality relevant backlinks for something like $5. This sounds very tempting as what have you got to lose for $5? Fair enough it is only $5 but you are gaining absolutely nothing from it as all they will do is spam peoples blogs with comments with a link back to your website. What they still do not understand is THEY ARE NO FOLLOW LINKS meaning Googles spiders will not follow that link and register it as a link back to your website.

Unfortunately it’s not just companies in India that are doing this type of SEO Link Building, many companies in the UK still think they can rank websites by posting blog comments.

So, How Do They Try To Create A Link?

What they do is name themselves as your keyword you require a link for instead of their name. Most people use their name or nick name as an author when posting comments, these are usually genuine people writing a genuine comment about your blog. You can tell when there is a spam comment on your blog when the authors name appears something like ‘UK Pharmacy Supplies’. This is how these companies in India and the UK think they can get a backlink from your blog.

Instead of them writing their own content, spending time researching or writing about knowledge you have built up for years, they try and jump on your content and create a backlink on your blog. There is no difference from a newspaper reporter researching a story for weeks, submitting it to the editor for publishing, and the editor puts his/her name on the article trying to take all the credit!

Usually the comment they post is just something generic as they have not even spent time to read the article and write something constructive to even be considered having their comment accepted, something like “This is excalty what I was looking for. Thanks for writing!” or “It’s like you’re on a msisoin to save me time and money!” and no i have not made any spelling mistakes, these comments were copied and pasted from real comments submitted to our blog where they cannot even be bothered to check the spelling!

How Do I Know If A Link Is No Follow?

If you use Firefox there is a free plugin you can download to show No Follow links. This Add On will put a strike through all the links that are no follow every time the page loads, for example ‘UK Pharmacy Supplies‘. If you do not use Firefox you can check the source code on a link and it will say:

rel=’external nofollow’ class=’url’>UK Pharmacy Supplies</a>

We are going to allow these spam comments to come through on this post so you can see exactly what we have been writing about today. They will not even read the post before commenting!

SEO UK

 
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Keeping Old Web Pages Fresh

Published on January 13th, 2012 by in SEO UK

Google wants to see pages in their results fresh and up to date so it is important to keep your web pages up to date as possible with new content. If you only make a few changes to your pages like adding a new sentence, Google will not see this as a big enough change to take any notice.

How Often Should I Update my Pages?

You should be adding or changing your content throughout your site every 3-6 months. By doing this Google will see your website is constantly being updated and will crawl all of your pages more often. As mentioned, just adding a short sentence is not regarded significant enough as a change. A couple of paragraphs will be considered as a change. It is worth adding new content to your pages and also replacing old content as well. Also remember to change your meta tags and keep them updated. Again Google will see this as keeping your page fresh and up to date.

How Can I Keep Updating My Content?

One way if your site is popular enough is by having people commenting on your page. If you are receiving high volumes of traffic to your pages its worth allowing people to comment. This will add new content every time a user makes a comment on your page.

But what if you are not getting a large amount of traffic to your site? It is still worth keeping the comment option open to users as when your site does see an increase in visitors, they can start keeping your pages fresh with content. I would suggest if you are writing a daily blog on your site, using your previous 3 blog posts on every page throughout your site. As you are constantly writing a blog, your content is always changing. If you use snippets from each blog and place them at the bottom of your pages then every time you write a new post, the content will change and be updated.

Will Google see this as duplicate content? No not really as the 3 snippet posts you add to your pages will be constantly updating and link internally. Google will not reindex every single page within your site every time they crawl. Depending on the size of your site they might index only 10% one day, 20% the next an so on. But by then there will be another post added to your page by the next day so your content has changed once again.

Remember, update all you pages every 3-6 months with a couple of paragraphs of new content and update your meta tags.

 
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