Make Money Online

What is SEO and do I need it
SEO is the process of driving more quality traffic (“visitors”) to your web site from a search engine via the organic (“natural”) listings.
Organic search results are returned free of charge by a search engine and as such you are not charged every time someone clicks on a link to your website.
The process of SEO has to consider how search engine algorithms work, how “bots” crawl your website and what keywords people would key in to find your site or what products or services you sell.

How does SEO work
We have just demonstrated the process of SEO to you, How? We hear you ask, well you are probably reading this page or came to this website because you found us listed on a search engine like Google, Windows Live, or Yahoo, there you go that’s what SEO is all about, you type in a search phrase or keyword, a list of website are shown in the results, you click on a website you think can answer your question or provide you with a product or service your looking for, you visit the website and bang job done, that’s what SEO is all about.
Now if your in business can you afford not to have your website listed on the first page of the major search engines, well probably not because the chances are your competitors are already there and are no doubt “raking it in” with all those visitors that come to their website, after all if your not listed then how would these people find you.

Google SEO tips
There are over 200 factors (some listed below if you fancy a bit of DIY SEO) which Google can use to determine where your page should list in the search engine results (SERPs).
How may of these factors are used when scoring your website or web page is based on your competition and your website theme along with how complex your website is.
Here is a list of some of those factors based on our research and knowledge within the industry and we would like to stress that this is from our knowledge.
The SEO rules listed below are not listed by any relevance as at the end of the day that exercise is down to you along with your type of website and competition.
Please note that when we refer to the word keyword it can mean either one word or multiple words that are always together when users search the internet for a particular product or service, i.e. “SEO” is a keyword as is “SEO Company”.

Domain name factors

Main keyword in domain name
This helps and can add points but it’s not as important as it used to be.

Top level domain name extensions
(TLD)What sort of domain extension you have can get you points without doing anything.

.gov gets very high status
.info can get high status depending on topic
.edu gets very high status
.org can get high status.

What you need to do is have a TLD that is based in your country or the country you are aiming at, i.e. co.uk for UK companies or for people searching in the UK.

Internet users also look at the extensions of a domain in the search results and many will click on links that they think are in their own country.
Try to avoid domains like .uk.com, as these are hard for your customers to remember and seem not to rank well for searches based on the country your aiming for.

Age of domain
Old websites do well, older websites are more trusted if they stay within the same topics or themes.
New websites are not so trusted and can end up in the Google sandbox, it can take up to 6 months to get out of the sandbox if you have a good website.
In some cases we have seen it take up to 1 year to get out of the sandbox, this can depend on your type of website and theme.

URL factors

Main keyword in URL
This is a must and scores big points, use hyphens or underscores to separate words.

However Google can see the separate words even if they are all joined up.
Not to many words as that can be classed as spam, (max 5) with a max of 3 hyphens or underscores and use one or the other, not both.

URL length
Keep this to a minimal but try to use your main keyword or even what someone might key in as a search term, i.e. “Google_SEO.asp”.
Caution should be used as if it’s to long you could raise a flag for spam.
Less than 50 characters is a better idea.

Meta tag factors

Description Meta tag
Still in use and is often displayed as the search result text.

Must show theme with a max of 200 characters and no special characters.

The description must be unique to each page.

Keywords Meta tag
Apparently not used by Google, but we still use it as “G” are not the only search engine out there, could be used if the bot has problems working out what your real keyword are, Max 10 keywords words and every world must be on your page.

Robots Meta tag
Only needed if you want to stop your page being indexed

OR

If you don’t want the description from the open directory project to be used then use the robots tag with NOODP

Author Meta tag
Have seen this used by other search engines, so pop it in with the name of the author of the web page.

Copyright Meta tag
Have seen it used by other search engines, use it for any copyright info and normally you just put the company name or domain name in.

Web page content factorS

Main keyword in the title tag
This is a must and scores massive points, use | to separate keywords
First or second word using the main keyword is best
Title tag 5 to 60 characters max, also max 3 special characters, unique for each page.

Latent Semantic Indexing
This is one of the biggest factors when writing content for your web page.
Latent Semantic Indexing is really synonyms, but based on user browsing habits rather then synonyms from a dictionary.
A lot of time can be taken up writing content that includes other related words to the main keywords of your web page.
i.e. people who search for “labels” also looked at sites that provide “stickers”
Therefore Google will relate the word stickers to labels meaning that if you have a web page with both words on then you are more related than a page with only one of the words.
Extra caution should be used with this, it’s easy to over do and end up being marked down for spamming.

Keyword density in body text
Aim between 10% to 30% of total words in you total content.
Some keywords are sensitive to the total amount, other keywords are sensitive based on topic or theme so % threshold varies.
Individual keyword density in body
2% to 10% Max depending on the total amount of text or content on your page

Keywords inside H1, H2, H3 tags
These must be used correctly, Not to many, but does depend on theme and topic.
H1 at the top of page using main keyword followed by H2 but only if needed then H3 if required.

Keyword font size
This must be used correctly based on your page layout as putting in large text inside normal size text can make the website look messy and put your visitors off.
Idea is to use in headings where you have already used H1, H2 and H3 tags.

Keyword font weight
This is a must and is a good idea around the beginning of a sentence where you keywords are highlighted by using bold or strong, Google treats bold and strong as almost the same thing so you should use either based on what looks best for your web page.
Italic can also be used and scores points if used in the correct way, normally used when quoting what someone has said or a slogan of some sort.

Keyword proximity
It’s best to place your main keywords at or around the beginning of a page, usually best when within the first 20 words.

Keyword prominence
This would be a mixture of keyword proximity, keyword font weight and keyword font size.

Keyword stemming
Used to try and match words that might be keyed in during a search.
i.e. Google, Google’s, Googled etc

Page freshness
Google loves fresh pages, ones that are updated over time, have new content added.
This must be done very carefully as some pages should never really change and some pages should only have small changes done every now and then.
Home page should not really change unless you have a new service to offer, have a small news section on it, or have things like special offers displayed, otherwise this could cost you in your listing or a loss of some of your main keywords.
Other pages like About Us, Contact Us, Terms and conditions should also only be updated for good reason.
Info pages, product pages, news pages, special offer pages etc, should always be updated on a regular basis.
Depending on the page in question, updates should be once a week or once a month otherwise Google may have trouble keeping up with you and will cause visitors to “bounce” which is a bad thing.
Frequent updates will lead to frequent spidering which in turn leads to a newer search engine cache.

Content changes
As above but there should be a ratio between new pages and old pages.
The same can be said for updated pages, how much new content to old content.
The % ratio varies depending on page size and website size along with the theme of the website or sub directory.
Between 10% to 30% a month is a good idea but again it’s based on what the page does.
Content changesAs above but there should be a ratio between new pages and old pages.
The same can be said for updated pages, how much new content to old content.
The % ratio varies depending on page size and website size along with the theme of the website or sub directory.
Between 10% to 30% a month is a good idea but again it’s based on what the page does.