The Future Of SEO

Archive for May, 2006

The Future Of SEO

With each update Google rolls out they are attempting to sift out the spam and return the most relevant and authoratative results possible. Therefore many techniques just don’t work anymore.

For instance bought links are very easy to pick up and having a significant amount of unrelated reciprocal links are now detrimental to your site. This is because the Googlebot has different crawl priorities and site with irrelevant links are just not getting crawled as they used to.

What is the best way to get your site ranking in Google? Remember Google wants a site and the links pointing to it to develop naturally. It wants people to find a site and because of its quality content, link to it. So make sure your site has good quality useful content and then maybe contact webmasters of authority sites and ask them for a link. If your site offers something useful to their readers they will be more likely to link to your site as it enhances the experience for their visitors. Also don’t forget about RSS feeds. By having an RSS feed you will open new avenues for people to link to your site and for Google to find its way to spider your site.

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Googlebot Crawling

With Google Bigdaddy update many web
masters have been complaining that google is returning old pages from
their sites or has dropped a significant amount of pages from its
cache. In a recent post Matt Cutts shed some light on why this may
be?

Most of the sites effected seem to be those that have
engaged in dubious link exchanges with non relevant outbound links
i.e. A website about surfing having a link to a site about Linux. He
states:

“As these indexing changes have
rolled out, we’ve improving how we handle reciprocal link exchanges
and link buying/selling. ”

“think this is covered by the same
guidance as above; if you were getting crawled more before and you’re
trading a bunch of reciprocal links, don’t be surprised if the new
crawler has different crawl priorities and doesn’t crawl as much. ”

“Some folks that were doing a lot of
reciprocal links might see less crawling ”

Therefore the conclusions we can draw
from this is that Google places more and more importance on the
quality and relevance of linking. Reciprocal links are not a good
idea! Especially if they are to and from completely irrelevant
sites.

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Google Sitemaps

Any webmaster that has not created and submitted a google XML sitemap should do so ASAP. Not only is it a stage where Google can contact any potential unwitting spammers it also provides an abundance of information of how Google perceives your website.

To create a sitemap either do it in notepad or search a XML sitemap creater that automates the process for you.

head on over to http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login
and get started.

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performancing plugin

First post with the performancing plugin. Pretty easy to use and makes you love Firefox even more than you allready did.  What about a spell checker cause my spelling needs automated correction.

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adwords mistakes

Adwords can be one of the easiest online methods of marketing but it can also be one of the most costly. Many accounts are set up, a few general keywords are added and then they are left to do there own thing. This method of account management is not at all effective and can lead to a very high cost per conversion.

You should be trying to achieve a maximum return on investment (ROI) for the keywords or phrases that are most relevant to your business and are most likely to provide you with targeted traffic to your website.

The mistakes to avoid.

Having a long list of general keywords

Creating long lists of irrelevant and generic keywords will mean higher CPC and you will be competing with the biggest playes in you industry. Rather focus on more specific keywords that desribe products or services that you offer.

Your ad text does not contain the keyword

Bu using DKI(Dynamic Keyword Insertion) you can ensire that you ads are highly relvant. This means people are more likely to click on you ad meaning a boost for your qulity score and lower cpc’s.

Not having specific landing pages

Targeted landing pages are essential. If the user click through and does not find what they serach for they will very likely hit the back button and choose one of you competitors. This costs you a click and directs users to your competitors.

Not turning on optimized Ad Serving

Adwords allows you to create multiple ads and will serve these randomly at first to see which one user prefer. After a favourite is established you can deleted the under performing ad and try another ad

Not tracking results

It is essential to track how your campaigns are performing. Google offers tracking code that you place on you thanks page that will tell you your conversion rate. Google analytics is free service that gives highly data about campaign and website statistics.

Using the same bids for search and content network

The content network can be a very effective way of showing your add to a lot of users. This can mean many more clicks than on the search network. Therefore you would want to lower you bids drastically. If you bid £1 on the search network you could get away with bidding £0.10 on the content network. Otherwise you could drain you budget very quickly on clicks that are less likely to convert.

By avoiding these mistakes you can make sure you are getting the most out of your advertising campaign. Your CPA should decrease and as your quality score increases your CPC should drop. Adwords is easy to use but to get the most from Adwords, it needs to be used cleverly.

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