Archive for the ‘SEO Rankings’ Category

Are You Focusing Your SEO Efforts On Rankings?

If you are running an online business, you are aware of the great importance of good rankings in the search results. Being ranked highly in the search results provided by a search engine such as Google can be hugely beneficial in many ways.

If your website is ranked in a top spot for relevant keywords and search terms you will enjoy a massive amount of exposure and a great deal of relevant traffic visiting your web pages. The more internet users aware of your business and being directed to your website, the greater the potential for an increase in sales and this is a primary objective for all online businesses.

It is undeniable that rankings play a significant role in online business and therefore are of significance when running a search engine optimisation campaign. There are numerous SEO techniques which can benefit a company in terms of their rankings in the search results. The writing of high quality content, the building of relevant links and optimising websites appropriately are just some of the methods which prove effective.

However, a common problem is business owners focus on rankings only and do not consider other areas of search engine optimisation as worthy of their time and effort. This is a mistake. Obtaining high rankings can be hugely advantageous but brand development is also of extreme importance in search engine optimisation and is becoming increasingly significant in the SEO campaigns of many. Businesses are achieving better results by taking into consideration brand development as well as gaining the respect of the search engines.

Rankings can get your business noticed and can get traffic visiting your website but with such competitive online business markets, it often takes more than this when trying to increase sales. It is now necessary for business owners to make their companies stand out in other ways. They have to get others interested in what they do, make them trust and respect them and make their companies memorable too.

All of these can be achieved through effective brand development as part of a search engine optimisation campaign. Just consider how much more productive it could be directing visitors to your site which are already aware of what you do and have developed a bond of some sort with your company through your brand development efforts.

Social networking websites, blogs, articles and forums can all be useful SEO techniques when trying to develop your brand. This is because you can provide those you are interacting with online with valuable and useful information, display your expertise on your business subject and show them your company can be trusted. This makes it increasingly likely that they will develop a further interest in your website and will potentially become a customer of your business.

At SEO Consult, we know attention to rankings and brand development is the most effective combination when running a search engine optimisation campaign. Let us identify and use the most suitable SEO techniques to help you to achieve success.

Make Your Site Unique

Unique content is a must for any website whose owner wishes to improve its rankings. Without it, your site is not seen as important as a site with unique content. Google doesn’t know which site wrote the content originally, so it penalises both sites instead, so it’s your job to continually check your sites for content that may have been copied by another website.

Along with content from other websites, you should also check for duplicate content within your own website too. One of the areas to check is the Meta descriptions. Each page in your site should have a unique description so Google can understand what that page is based upon. If you have duplicate Meta descriptions then Google can’t determine which of the pages that has duplicate content is more important, so the ranking of both pages falls.

You should also keep an eye on your page titles, especially if the pages are dynamically generated, and/or you have a lot of pages. Your page title is part of the text search engine users will see when they do a search. If your site comes up, the first bit of text they are likely to look at is the title. If your title doesn’t contain the information they’re looking for, chances are they’ll move on to the next result. This applies especially if your titles simply contain the name of your site and nothing else. You should ensure the page title is relevant to the content on the page, and it is unique to every other page on the site.

You may have duplicate content on your site without realising, because of an issue known as “canonicalisation”. This occurs when a single page on your site is accessible from several variations of your URL. Normally this happens when you access the pages with www. in the URL and without www. in the URL, or when your index page doesn’t redirect to your full domain name, leaving the filename in the URL.

Example:

  • http://www.domain.com
  • http://www.domain.com/index.html
  • http://domain.com/index.html
  • http://domain.com

All of these URL’s redirect to the same page, so there are 4 versions of the same URL visible to the search engines. You can often fix this by using a .htaccess file and a re-write rule.