All websites are awarded a PageRank score by Google. What’s PageRank? It’s a score between 0 and 10 that Google uses to indicate its view of how that site compares with others in its category. More info here.

If your site is more more than 6 months old, and is either unranked or has a PageRank of zero – something is wrong. Check your site’s PageRank here.

Does your site have a low PageRank score? Then there are things about the site Google doesn’t like. Here’s a list of possible issues…

• Duplicate content (multiple URLs access the same web page)
• Duplicate site (2 or more URLs point to the exact same website)
• Too many ads on the page
• Low-quality content
• Repetitive content
• Too much content copied from other sites
• Too many keywords on the page (keyword stuffing)
• Attempts to display different content to Google than is seen by a site’s visitors
• Very low quality content throughout the site
• Too little content on each page and/or too few pages on the site
• Site is built using Adobe Flash with no attempt to display alternative content for non-Flash visitors
• No external inbound links to the site
• Too many very low quality external inbound links

The fastest way to fix issues like these is to hire an SEO Professional and have him/her rework the site from scratch. If you have the skills to do the donkey work yourself, it’s probably cheaper to hire a Professional as a consult and have him/her explain what needs to be done.

Either way, I suggest you get 3 quotes and average them. Then try to work out whether the average amount being asked is likely to return a profit through increased exposure on Google. An SEO Professional can help you with this too (e.g. you employ him/her to help you vet SEO proposals submitted by other SEO companies).

search engine optimization, seo help

Link bait is an SEO (search engine optimisation) technique that provides something so incredibly useful, other people link to it of their own accord.

It’s a fantastic idea, in theory, because it promises to help a site go from SEO zero to hero with relatively little effort. Simply create the link bait itself, and then sit back and wait for world domination.

Of course it’s not that simple. Here’s what they don’t tell you about link bait…

• It won’t work if the ‘bait’ isn’t truly amazing
• Coming up with something truly amazing (not to mention original) is hard work. It requires a combination of creativity and effort that most people aren’t prepared to invest
• On creation the link bait requires promotion. On average, 1 in 10 people will link to something that’s very good
• If 1 in 10 people are needed to secure 10 links, you’ll need 100 people to visit the ‘bait’ just to get 10 more links. Those links will result in another link. That’s 11 links. Of those 11, an average of one will deliver SEO value (link juice) to your site
• To realise significant benefit in Google, you’ll need to invest time and effort in sending at least 10,000 people to your site to get 1,111 links – 100 of which will deliver useful amounts of SEO value

Of course, once you have those 1,111 links they’ll start sending visitors to your link bait. This will generate more links, and 9% of them will produce SEO value.

This SEO value will benefit your entire site, including the ‘bait’ itself. Which will deliver even more visitors to the ‘bait’. Which will generate even more links, delivering more SEO value, further increasing the visitors you’re getting.

This is a virtuous circle, and is the very thing that is great about link bait. To summarise, SEO link bait…

• Is difficult to create
• Is hard to replicate
  If you manage it you’ll own the value that ‘bait’ produces
• Requires promotion in and of itself
  This makes success even more elusive
• Eventually reaches critical mass
  The bait becomes a self-running virtuous circle that produces visitors and SEO benefit

It’s not easy to create successful link bait. If you manage to do so the rewards are spectacular, and difficult for others to replicate.

If you’re willing to put in the effort I urge you to do so. You won’t regret it.

link bait, search engine optimisation

I like my web traffic to be regular, frequent and free. The simple plan outlined in this article will send you a lot of free traffic. And you can get it all in just 2 minutes a day. Here’s how…

• Schedule a 2 minutes appointment in your calendar – every day for the next 101 days
• Bookmark this website: 101 free directories for SEO link building
• Visit every single site at a rate of one per day over the next 101 days
• I recommend you do this first thing in the morning before you do anything else

In 101 days time you’ll have put your site in 101 different web directories. This helps you get traffic in multiple ways…

• You get 101 links to your site
• Some of your visitors will find you via the various directories
• Each link conveys some SEO value that improves the importance of your site in the eyes of search engines
• Each link is from a different domain. This domain diversity is also helpful
• The better you do in search engines, the more traffic you’ll get

The key to making this work is to do the following…

1. Have answers for all the fields asked by directories in a notepad file ready to cut and paste (speeds up submission)
    
2. Write a proper headline and description. Don’t simply submit a list of keywords. The better your description, the more likely it is to be accepted. Here’s an example….
    
   

   Pain-free Root Canal Specialist in Battersea London
   The pain of a root canal treatment is something many people still fear. You don’t need to worry thanks to the pain free root canal treatment offered by SW Smiles, the root canal specialist. We offer fast, convenient and friendly dental treatment in our modern London surgery. Visit our site and arrange your appointment today.
   http://swsmiles.co.uk/root-canal-treatment.php
   Health : Dentist

3. Get to know the short-cut keys for copy and paste on your computer (speeds up submission)
    
4. Memorise the best category for your site so you can find it quickly (most directories have identical category definitions)
    
5. Keep doing this for 101 days. Don’t quit half-way through. 100 sites will deliver more than twice the traffic that 50 sites will (i.e. there is a cumulative result that comes into play with link building)

link building

The trouble with Google is that you can never find anything. That is to say, it tends to spit out the same tired old sites over and over and over and over again.

This is especially frustrating when it comes to finding new and exciting information. And it’s why I’ve decided to compile this list of useful SEO resources. Enjoy!

• Google Webmaster Guidelines – the place to start any SEO journey
• The DIY SEO Seminar – the best SEO course aimed at non-technical people
• The DIY SEO Guide – a free downloadable ebook
• 66 ways to get links to your site – a superb collection of link building ideas that continues to be updated
• 101 free link directories – all offering free one-way links to your sites. Link building is still the backbone of professional SEO link building
• SEO Quake – the brilliant Firefox (and now Chrome) add-on that does most of SEO’s heavy lifting for you (keyword density, meta tags, PageRank and more)
• Search Status – an add on for Firefox that does many useful things (e.g. highlighting all the no-follow links on a web page)
• SEO Books Free SEO Tools
• SEO Moz’s SEO Tools – some of which are free to use
• 32 article sites – useful for building contextual links
• Contextual links explained – put the power of contextual links to work for you
• More on contextual links
• Google PageRank explained – what do those mysterious numbers mean, and do you need high PageRank to top the search results?
• What is link juice – and how it can it be used to understand the flow of SEO value?
• Deep linking techniques – what are they and how can you take advantage?
• How to make Google understand – a discussion of a Google problem and its solution
• Yahoo Site Explorer – find out how many people link to your site
• What do you do when SEO gets in the way of the sales copy?
• Comprehensive introduction to SEO for beginners

seo resources

Search engines can’t index video content they way they do plain text. From an SEO perspective, it can seem that video content can’t help with search engine optimization (SEO).

As it happens, there are several ways you can use video to improve your ranking in search engines…

• Get your video ranked in Google through back links
• Upload your video to a third party site with high credibility (e.g. You Tube) and work on getting it ranked
• Transcribe your video to improve indexing

Of these 3 strategies, the last is the most useful in the long term with respect to your own site. Over time, you’ll post more video content. Some of these will prove to be very useful. People will find them, and link to them from their own sites (i.e. they’ll become link bait).

The end result is increased PageRank and credibility with Google and other search engines. That benefits your whole site, not just the pages that contain your most popular videos.

The challenge is to make sure Google correctly indexes each of your videos. An excellent way to achieve that is to transcribe it and post the resulting text on the page that contains the video.

You can see an example of this technique on the following UK Pension Cash site.

As you’ll see if you visit the above site, the full content of the video is not transcribed. Instead the content has been summarised, giving a visitor enough information to get the jist of the video. And provide Google with enough words and phrases to correctly index the page.

seo video

A deep link is a URL that links to a page within a website. That is, a page that isn’t the site’s homepage. For example…

Abicord wants to improve the rank of the smoking cessation page on its website. This page isn’t on the homepage, though it is linked from it. The smoking cessation page is specifically focussed on a stop smoking product.

Abicord wasn’t interested in keyword research and is happy with the keyword density of the current content. All it wanted was additional backlinks to help boost its deep linking.

In particular, it’s interested in having this page show up in sub-listings when people search for Abicord in Google. And deep linking is the key to encouraging Google to incorporate extra pages in its sub-listing.

deep linking

Take your pick
Pick a piece of online copywriting you like. Even some of mine! Cut and paste it into a new document. Then print and read it. Odds are you’ll find it doesn’t work as well in print as it does in pixels.

Is this harder to read?
Writing for the web is different, because reading a screen is different. It’s harder than reading paper, so work to make web copy less difficult to read. Tempt the visitor to keep going.

Yours sincerely
The web is informal – when did you last see a webpage beginning “To whom it may concern”? Use the first person and active constructions. Take liberties with grammar and construction, as long as you know what you can get away with.

Byte sized*
Break a chunk of copy into short paragraphs – it looks less daunting.

Ask a designer
Any designer will tell you about the advantages of white space. That works on-screen too.

Love spiders
Pepper web content with headlines and sub-heads. It leads the visitor on. And it’s an SEO technique for grabbing spiders.

Key words and phrases
Only humans read print. But web pages are read by stupid software. It doesn’t understand what you’re saying, it just indexes words and phrases. So, repeat key words and phrases more frequently than you’d do for a human reader. However, spiders aren’t going to spend money with you so, for the sake of the humans out there, learn to repeat key words and key phrases unobtrusively.

Pixels, not print
Always proof check for typos and grammaticals by reading your copy as a print out. You’ll see more mistakes that way. Then proof read for sense and readability on screen, because that’s where everybody else will read it.

Keep it short
Bored yet?

*deliberate mispelling. But you knew that anyway.

content, copy, Copywriting, grammar, grammatical errors, search engine optimisation, SEO, webcopy, writing

The best keywords in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) pose a great challenge to ordinary mortals with regular websites. How can you or I possibly complete for a keyword phrase that gets 100,000 searches per month in Google?

The plain fact is, we can’t. To compete for a top keyword you’ll need…

1. A well-established website with thousands of web pages
2. New unique and original content added daily
3. Content of sufficient quality to pass Google’s human inspectors
4. Thousands of links into your site
5. Links to a variety of pages in your site
6. Links from sites with high PageRank and Trust

Most websites have none of these things, and never will. To make matters worse, most of the “how to do SEO” articles do nothing more than tell you to get all 6 of the above.

So what is a small business owner to do, if s/he wants to get to the top of Google?

I suggest you focus on getting quick wins. There are a number of good reasons to do this, but the main one is that you’ll experience SEO success within 10-20 days. This is especially useful for beginners.

For a start, give up the idea that you’re going to get to page one for a heavily contested search term. Instead, refocus your efforts on keywords that…

• Have a lot less competition (e.g. 1,000 searches/mo)
• Are highly targeted (e.g. battersea dentist versus dentist london versus dentist)

You can probably get to page one for such a term in 1-2 weeks. Once you’ve achieved it, find another keyword and focus on that.

Doing SEO Keyword Research is one of those things that sounds difficult, but is actually very easy. Click the link for a one-page quick-start guide that explains everything you need to know.

Once you’ve settled on a particular keyword, it’s time to optimise for it. The easiest page to get to the top of Google is your site’s homepage. However, if your keyword naturally sits inside another page on your site, optimise that instead.

Content Optimisation is something anybody can do. You can find a brilliant beginner’s guide to SEO on the site I’ve just linked to. It includes links to many excellent guides, tools and SEO resources.

So there it is in a nutshell. Pick an achievable keyword phrase, and focus on getting to page one for that. Then pick another achievable phrase, and apply it to another page on your site. In 6 months time you could rank in the top 3 for 25 keyword phrases that collectively attract 25,000 searches per month.

This is almost certainly more useful than getting into the top 3 for a single keyword phrase that attracts 25,000 searches per month. Why? Because each of your terms will be highly focussed, and take people to a well targeted page designed to receive its own term. This greatly increases your chance of converting a visitor into a lead.

search engine optimisation, seo keyword research

My usual advice on writing for websites is keep it short, keep it relevant, avoid repetition, and make sure key search terms are included in the page copy (as well as the page title, headers, tags, etc). There’s an exception; the FAQs page. That’s where you can relax a little and expand.

Frequently Asked Questions WILL be read by those with real interest in doing business with you (they’ll be read by your competitors too!) Because potential customers come to FAQs seeking answers, you don’t need to worry about crafting words to grab their attention in the first couple of seconds, and convincing them to buy in the next two. You can use more words without boring the reader. You can insert some jargon. You can build in plenty of internal links. You can include a raft of H2 and H3 headers, much loved by search engines. You can cover a single topic from several angles by varying the question. You can include lists – which you’d normally avoid doing. And you can pack in key words and phrases.

Effectively, there’s no limit to the number of FAQs you can pose but, for readability, once you get beyond about ten or twelve, start breaking them into topic groups, to tidy the page visually. Unless an FAQ is deep down technical, limit answers to no more than 50 words or so. If you need many more, consider linking from a summary answer to a sub-page with the full answer in glorious Technicolor.

Many web copywriters regard FAQ’s as a chore. They’re actually a powerful SEO weapon. That’s why, at writeltd.com, we love them.

web copy copywriting FAQ SEO

When it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO), content matters a lot. And not just what content you have, but how much. For example, I created this mini-site for 1st Financial Foundations. It’s purpose is to help people thinking about withdrawing tax free cash from their pension.

Initially, the site had 3 pages…

1. Homepage
2. About us
3. Contact us

The content is optimised for the keyword ‘pension cash’. I created a sitemap, registered the site with my Google Webmaster Account, and waited to see where it would end up in Google’s SERPs (search engine results pages).

It ended up nowhere. It appears the competition for that keyword phrase is more organised than I realised. I started working on contextual and non-contextual backlinks, in an effort to get it somewhere in the first 10 pages. No joy.

It seems clear to me the problem is one of content. The site had only 3 pages, and one of those was a contact page. I’m now adding more pages in conjunction with the client. These additional pages focus on particular aspects of pensions (e.g. pension audit, types of pension, pension news).

Over time, I plan to build the site up to 12 pages.

Why over time? I want the pages to appear naturally, rather than all at once. I’ll also continue to build links back to the site. Based on results to date, I think it will be several weeks before the site appears on page one.

It just goes to show, it’s not only about quality. In search engine optimization quantity counts too.

This wedding site also has a content problem. It’s supposed to generate leads, and is highly focussed on wedding reception entertainment. The problem is two-fold…

1. There’s no offer (lead generation requires an offer)
2. The copy is client-centric

When writing copy designed to generate leads, the copy must be about the offer. Not about the company. It’s such a simple concept, yet it’s totally overlooked by almost every website out there.

content, SEO