Here are three easy and quick ways to improve your search rankings.

Title Tags

This is very easy to fix and it has a powerful and quick effect on the ranking of your website and each individual page.  Every page should have a great descriptive title that contains your keywords or phrases - this is the first way to tell the search engines what your site is about.

Description Tag

This is the small amount of text that is shown in the search results under the title.  I use this in two ways.  Firstly if there are secondary keywords or phrases that could not be fitted into the title use them in the text here.  the description should be written as your sales text, inviting users to visit your website.

Directory Submissions

Every website will fit into a category and there are many directories that are niche specific, go and enter your site details to these directories.  Use your keywords as much as possible for the anchor text in these submission.  Additionally there are web directories that are country specific, this is a list of Irish Web Directories - so if your website targets the Irish market go and add it to these directories.

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I was having a discussion with a colleague during the week about a long term site that we are working on which will need about 7,000 links. We know it will take a few years, it is not at the top of our priority we are working through it in spare time. However he was commenting that we must run out of places to have our link placed at some point. And of course I disagreed.

I believe that we will run out of places to get links from when we think like that, when we think that the competition is too much for us. As long as we keep doing what we do every day it will all be good. I also think this is another good reason to be working in teams; link building is hard and sometimes people need a pep talk to see the bigger picture and start to use their imagination again.

Just think - I said to him - in Ireland alone their are more than 100,000 .ie domain names. Pushing people to wrap their heads around the huge numbers can sometimes be challenging, but I carried on - how many .com or .co.uk domain there are?

The biggest problem with web workers is doing the work, this is well known in the industry. Just sitting down day after day and staying focused can be tough - but in reality we have it a dam site easier than most of the world.

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And now Google have made it even better by letting you compare the traffic on websites - but more of that later.

This image shows the data for four different search terms. The data is worldwide and gives very little information, the only interesting fact is there are less searches for “web design” over the time scale of the graph, and increasing numbers for SEO. The reason for this decline I guess is that searchers will search more for web design + location.

Target a Region

The second graph adds information that allows me to target a region. I have used “Ring of Kerry” at the start to force Google trends to give me results based on Ireland - this is where I live. I don’t own the number one site for “Ring of Kerry” - though I do own a site that ranks at number 10 for one of the pages for this search term. Therefore doing the maths I can work backwards to a rough estimate of the number of visitors for the other search terms.

However I do own various sites that list at number 1 for various search terms and I can check inside analytics how many visitors I get for those search terms, therefore I can then see an estimate of how many visitors “ring of Kerry” is worth at the number 1 spot on Google by comparing those two key phrases. Having that information allows me to know what “web design” or “seo” is worth in visitor numbers. I find the results surprisingly accurate.

Double Check

However having made mistakes before in targeting particular phrases then to finally get to number 1 and find that I had lost money and was never likely to get it back, I double check the figures with Wordtracker even though it is less accurate than Trends. I also check with Google Adwords traffic estimator which is a bit more accurate than Wordtracker. Lastly the second best way to check the stats is to run an Adwords campaign for a while; the best way to know the traffic stats is by being at number one for that search term.

Running an Adwords campaign for a while can be costly depending on your search words, however if you are sinking a lot of capital or time into a project and you are depending on search traffic for your visitors it is worthwhile.

You can play around with Google trends and reduce the region to Ireland only, or to Dublin only - however once you do this the numbers are less reliable. A larger region and bigger numbers provide better stats I have found.

Google Trends for Websites

This is a brand new part of Google Trends and so far I have been only able to check it using my own and client sites. It does seem to be accurate on the bar graphs at the bottom, though the main graph doesn’t appear to populate well for smaller sites - but it is new.

I searched for “Irish Jobs” and I have taken the top five from the search results to compare them in Google trends for Websites. (irishjobs.ie, jobs.ie, loadzajobs.ie, eirjobs.com, recruitireland.com) What the graph shows is who has the most visitors and peaks when people look for jobs; it is easy to see that visitors numbers are down in December and jump again in January - to be expected in this market.

What use is this information?

Once again I can drop a website into the search bar and see a comparison, great if I know numbers from a website. I trust this information less so far and it has less functionality than Google Trends for search terms.

Watch the Competition

However I can compare a website with the competing sites in the same niche and see who has the most traffic. Then I can query their site using the likes of SEO Digger and get a list of their keywords and where they rank for them - that has quite a few uses. I can then take the keywords and run them through the above and see if I can compete for them.

Essentially though Google is letting more and more commercially sensitive information be publicly available. They also list where they collect the information that they use in Trends. Google Trends for terms have come a long way and hopefully the same will happen with Trends for Websites. One disclaimer that Google adds to the information is that these products come from Google Labs; my disclaimer - don’t use it as your only source of information.

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On the bottom right hand corner of your browser there will now be a SEO logo – it is greyed out when off, toggle with the mouse and it will become coloured and on. Do not do all your searches with this on, if you have a fast internet connection Google will treat it like automatic queries after a while and ban your IP address from Google for somewhere between 30 minutes and four hours – therefore if you are using this on a server at work the whole system could be kicked out of Google search for a while.

The default for SEO for FireFox is off, therefore without editing the settings it will not work. Follow the instruction on Aaron’s page and or the tool itself.

Once setup, run a search query; you will now see below each result more information. There are only a few pieces of the huge amount of information that I want to know immediately about a website. The age is right at the start, this is important for getting links from and if I want to get in front of them in the search results, generally the older the site the harder it is to beat and the better it is to get a link from.
The first Yahoo! links number is the inbound links to the whole site and the second Yahoo! Number is the inbound links to that page. The .edu is the education links. Switch off FireFox before opening any of these to see the actual links. You have to open the Yahoo! Page to see the links as the figures given are the total number of links and it often falls dramatically when you open Yahoo! and see that many of the links are coming from the one website – good for Page Rank flow and indexing, but it makes little difference for search results.

The last item on this menu is the whois link. I use this when I cannot find contact details on the website; more often the whois details will have contact information. If there is no whois contact and no contact on the site then it is time to move on quickly.

By no means does this tool give an in-depth guide to the search results, but it can give a very quick feel for the area, and often helps to make my mind up quickly on whether to compete in the area.

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Everyone who works in online marketing or is developing their own web site will have various SEO and FireFox add on’s and software tools that they use. For the next while I am going to list some of my favorite and sometimes not so favorite tools.

RedFly Marketing are one of the few Irish companies that have developed a FireFox plugin. I use it simply because it is easier to use than entering the text details myself. (&gl=country code - at the end of the search string)

Their FireFox plugin allows you to easily see the search results in other geographic locations. If you are in Ireland and search using Google, as most people do, then you will be getting results that are influenced by the Irish index. If you can think of Google as huge databases it will help. They have a database for just Irish results so you can click on “pages from Ireland” and this will give you only pages from Ireland.

If you use Google.com in Ireland the results are influenced by your geographic location, therefore the website at the top in Google.com in Ireland is often not the same website that is at the top if the same search is done in the UK or the US for example.

If you are only competing in Ireland and have no care what happens to your website outside of Ireland this may be of no interest to you, however if you sell online this is unlikely to be the case. For example if you search for “B&B Kerry” the same website is at no1 in the US, UK, and Ireland - however the no 2 and beyond change - this information I am sure is very important to the website that is no1, and for the rest who are trying to get that spot.

This plugin is easy to use, just go to the RedFly site and download and install using FireFox. You will be prompted to restart FireFox, do so. Once installed you only have to right click on the screen and go to “Search Google Global” and chose the geographical location to see the different search results.

So the next time your search engine optimisation team tell you just to do a search on Google.com - well they might just have a surprise.

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Your title tag is the strongest individual page element - once you get it right leave it alone. Changing the title tag can cause the page to be indexed for something different every time, if you are not competing in a very competitive market. If you are competing in a very competitive market it can mean that you are not getting listed in Google’s index for anything.

Example:

Using the phrase “SEO” in your title will help you get listed for SEO, after a while as it is a very competitive search term, assuming other parts are in place. However if you keep changing this to “Search Engine Marketing” or Web Marketing” - you run the risk of not being listed in Google index for any of the terms. Google loves age: age of pages and age of domains.

By all means play around with your title tag until you get it right but once you do leave it alone. The title for this post will never change completely; it is unlikely to even get tweaked.

How do I know if I have the title tag right?

Look at your statistics and see what search phrases people are using to find the page. This should be congruent with the page. Check Google webmaster tools or some other tool and find out if you are being listed for the search terms that are part of your title tags. And most importantly is your title tag the phrase you want to be found for? This last part should have been part of your keyword research and competitive analysis.

The last point on the title tag is length. I come across many sites that have titles that go across the top of my browser. This is far too long - the title should be no more than 12 words, if those twelve words are so long that Google is cutting off the title in the search results reduce again until the full title shows in the page results - the reason for this is spam, your title looks too much like spam to Google and that will reduce the possibilities for that page.

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It is that simple, there is no such thing as a free link. It is going to cost you time or money, and time is money. So what is best for you - spending your time or money?

I do both. For myself and clients most SEO work is finding good links, it is the hardest part of SEO for business sites. Most business sites don’t get links naturally, even when they have a good history - everyone writing on the internet today knows their link has a value and generally they want something in return for it.

Ezilon, Yahoo Directory, and Business.com are some of the strongest links on the internet from directories, they cost $69, $299, and $299 respectively. These are three good places to spend your money if you are promoting business site.

There are thousands of “free” directories out there - most of them are not worth the time taken to enter your details and if you are going to do this get someone from a low wage environment to do it for you. What these low quality links can do is help to shape your anchor linking profile - so they have a value for that. If you are competing in a niche with little competition they may also help.

The best strategy for link building is to know how many links you need, what anchor text, what quality - then work out the price and buy them over time.

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W3 Sites is a directory of web designers, I would expect your web designer to have a page there. This page is a portfolio is the websites he/she has designed - of course they should take the time to add your site to their portfolio. If they don’t you can go along there and create your own account, just follow the link, the whole exercise will take less than ten minutes.

Next free and easy link I would expect would be a clean link from your web designer. I would expect any web designer to link to their clients sites as part of his portfolio from his own site. Unfortunately this happens more often the other way around…

And last for today I need to mention aboutus.org again. As I stated previously you should have your own site listed here and I do have mine listed there, but whatever happened that day I wrote almost nothing when entering my site. After my last post on about us I received an email from one of their staff reminding me that I could have done so much more on my own page there, adding contact details, adding images, address, you get the idea.

It all helps one little bit at a time. The problem with search engine marketing is that no one move gets the job done, it is a combination of many hundreds of little ones together. Therefore if you are doing this for your own company site do some work on it every day or at least once a week, and don’t expect to see the results quickly, SEO takes time.

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I stated previously that search engines see links and follow them to the page they are pointing at, and take note of the anchor text - well here is the caveat.

Google will not follow or take note of anchor text on a link that has an additional little bit of htm code telling the search engine “nofollow” - this code is commonly found on blog comments.

The idea behind no follow was to tell the search engines that you did not review or endorse this page the link is pointing at.

So you may wonder is there any point in getting no follow links? Yes there is. Having a whole range of links pointing at your web site is good for the link spread, and I believe that to include no follows, though this point cannot be definitively provided either way at present and there is a large intense debate surrounding this in webmaster forums.

There is also an additional bonus from the follow links. As these links are normally from blogs you will get some traffic from the comments you leave - if the comments are relevant and interesting, you may even find that someone will write a blog post and cite you - and that is a follow.

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Okay, my mind raced, how would I get back to there - there being the beginning of the internet.

What is a link? This is a link http://www.deadflyseo.com when you click on this it takes you to another web page. The last part is important, a link takes you to another web page - now that web page may be on another web site, however the link always points at a web page, not a whole web site.

The word link, in this usage, is the shortened version of hyperlink. A link uses HTML code and is essentually made up of two parts.

Firstly there is the web address where the link is pointing to - this is the http://www.mysite.com - this tell the broswer the adress to bring up on the screen when this link is clicked.

The second part of the link is the text. For example here is another link Glendalough - here the text is Glendalough, this text can say anything that you want. This text is called the anchor text - it is very important, very.

When you have put both these parts together inside the html on a page you have now given direction to the broswer to go to that page when it is clicked. Simple?

Search engines, like Google, read these links and take note of what the anchor text is. By placing the anchor text on a web page you are telling the search engine what you think this web page is about. Therein lies the simplicity of SEO. Everytime a web page has a link pointing towards it, generally the search engines take this as a vote of confidence in this web page - generally. But of course there are a few other variable - the current guess is about 200 or so…