laptopmanpaul.co.uk

SEO top tips that I’ve learnt on the bus

Back to school means back on the bus

With the kids back to school this week, it’s meant that the car has been requisitioned once again and I’m back on the bus.

That’s actually not so bad, because I get a lot of my reading done on the bus.

Most of what I pass on in this blog is gleaned whilst eating my morning bowl of porridge or during my short ride to and from work.

I’m currently reading Search Engine Optimization for Dummies by Peter Kent which is proving to be a very worthwhile purchase.

I’ve already warned that it’s serious SEO time, and I’ll be passing on the tips I’ve learned step-by-step as I work through this book.

So let’s get started with what I’ve found out so far.

My ‘back of a bus’ top ten SEO tips

Tip 1: Ditch the fancy flash intro on you website.

They’re an irritation to visitors, and usually just an excuse for designers to pose.

They’re rubbish for SEO though because search engines like things to read, like text.

Any text in a flash animation can’t be read … so don’t do it!

For the same reason use embedded video sparingly.

Tip 2: Don’t use .gifs, .jpgs or .pngs for that matter as part of your site navigation.

Use text where you can, not images.

In fact, don’t replace text for text embedded within images at all.

Once again, the search engines like stuff to read and if you do this, they can’t read your stuff.

So click here for my blog is better than a button like the one below:

The rule of thumb is to avoid embedding text into images, create lots of readable text instead.

Tip 3: Don’t use frames.

Browsers struggle to read frames, which means you’re going to miss out on SEO opportunities.

And they’re just plain nasty too.

Browsers need to read a website’s source code.

Find a website made with frames, then using the toolbar at the top of your browser select ‘View’ then ‘Source’ … see what I mean?

Internet Explorer shows you the frame-definition document, the pages within the internal frames tend to become orphaned.

Tip 4: Add a sitemap to your website.

Let the search engines know where they should be looking.

You should also produce a visual sitemap that your web users can read, also known as a table of contents.

See more on sitemaps elsewhere in this blog.

Tip 5: When you create links on your pages, make them descriptive as you can.

Apparently, usability testing indicates that people like long link text ie links which describe what they’re taking you to.

So rather than me writing click here or more, it would appear that website users would prefer something like find out more about my IT blog and in addition, the search engines like it too!

Tip 6: Create error pages with links to other areas of your website, perhaps even a sitemap or table of contents.

You can read about creating error pages elsewhere on this site, but the key concept with this SEO tip is that your web users, and the searchbots, won’t reach a dead end on your website, even if they end up somewhere they shouldn’t really be,

Tip 7: Search engines like simple.

At it’s most basic interpretation, that means black text on a white background.

The fancier and more complicated your webpages are, the harder it is for the search engines to work out what they’re about.

Think ‘words’ whenever you’re working on your website … words are clues for search engines and help them to index your site correctly.

Tip 8: Much has been written about the Google sandbox, but what is certain is that the longer a domain has been registered, and the longer a site has been active, the better.

Register domains as soon as possible, get a few pages and some links pointing to you as quickly as you can and you’ll start that long, slow haul to the top straight away.

Tip 9: When selecting keywords, make sure you remember ‘the search tail’.

These are the phrases which are not right at the the top of a search list, but which go on to represent a very high percentage of the total searched-for keywords.

Peter Kent recommends that you don’t aim for the top, where it’s overcrowded, but for the search tail.

He says if you only focus on a primary term, you’re missing most of the action.

Tip 10: Use your text carefully

Without overdoing it, here are some text-based tips for making your pages more easily readable by search engines:

- Use particularly important words -the sorts of things people will be searching for in your particular field - at the top of the page

- Use bold and italic keywords

- Put keywords in bulleted lists

- Use keywords multiple times on a page … but not too often!

Next bus stop?

I’m only up to chapter 5, and you can see how much useful information I’m extracting from Search Engine Optimization for Dummies by Peter Kent already.

There’s more to come in future posts, and please pass on your own tips via the comments form at the bottom of this page.

Something completely different - and much more useful - for resellers

Reselling with a difference

I keep dithering about whether to offer reseller hosting packages.

I fear that offering reseller packages would have me constantly bogged down with customer queries about how this works and why that’s broken.

However, I’ve discovered an alternative … and I like it a lot!

Enter stage right ResellerClub.com

I can’t even remember how or why I found this website now, but it immediately caught my interest.

ResellerClub.com is a reseller package with some very key differences to what’s normally on offer.

The blurb says: We offer an exciting range of fast moving, high margin products, ready for you to sell.. start now!

What this amounts to is that you can re-sell the following services:

- Domain names

- Website builders, including with ecommerce

- Digital certificates

- Domain/mail forwarding

- Live chat services

- Mail and web hosting

- Sub-reseller packages

In addition, customers get a 30 day money back guarantee with many products.

What I really like about this service is a) the automation … once set up, I don’t have to lift a finger, all sales, refunds and set-ups happen instantly and automatically b) my reseller account is set up with price suggestions clearly indicating my ‘mark up’ on products, but I can easily change prices to suit myself.

When you sign up with ResellerClub.com you’re given your own customisable area - here’s mine.

If you want to you can integrate your ResellerClub.com account into your existing website using their APIs … I intend to play with this function, but haven’t worked out how to do it yet.

This really is the simplest, most sensible type of reseller account I’ve seen, and as you can see I’ve signed up and intend to give it a try.

One thing to flag up … money.

Once again, I like this system because it doesn’t cost you anything to set up.

However, you do have to credit your account with $200 when you open it.

This amount is refundable, but it’s a float you have to maintain … and the bigger the ‘float’ you keep, the better rates you get on the services that you sell.

As far as I can see, if someone buys from your website, you pay ResellerClub.com at cost price from your account, and your customer’s money goes into your account at purchase price … seems fair enough to enable instant and hassle free purchases.

It’s well worth a look if you’re considering becoming a reseller, it’s the most interesting and diverse package that I’ve come across so far.

If you’d like to find out more about becoming a reseller, you can do so here.

I intend to use this with some work I intend to do in the network marketing area, as you can see from the new grid-based website I’ve set up below.

Once I’ve worked out the APIs I should be able to integrate it much better.

A word of warning over submitting to search engines

Short and sweet

This post is short and sweet, but could save you tens of pounds when making and launching websites.

When I started my website projects I received some basic start-up funding as part of the short business course that I’d been studying.

As it was someone else’s money I decided to try the hypersubmit service with namesco because I was building a website for someone at the time hosted by namesco and their service looked cheap, well-organised and easy to use.

I went for the £19.95 basic option which offers:

- Submission to over 100 search engines

- Monthly re-submissions to search engines

- Monthly reporting by email

- Personal control panel

- Meta tags generator

All my websites, with the exception of this blog, were added this hypersubmit service … and the interesting thing is that the most looked at website in my portfolio is … you guessed it, this blog.

Yet this blog has only been manually submitted to Google, Windows Live Search and Yahoo as well as various blog directories.

The other websites do fairly low levels of business, but in theory they’re available in over 100 search engine, so how can that be?

Well, here’s a basic SEO tip that everybody - and I mean everybody - that I’ve read so far suggests.

They all recommend submitting only to the following search engines because a) they represent a huge percentage of all internet searches b) they feed many of the other search engines anyway:

1) Google

2) Windows Live Search

3) Yahoo

4) Open Directory Project (or dmoz.org as it’s known)

5) Ask (just for good measure really, but not essential!)

I have the data from my Google adsense account - and my Awstats info - to confirm that the one website that I didn’t hypersubmit to gets the most business and the most traffic.

So, if it’s just submitting to search engines that you’re after, do it manually and make sure you submit to those key sites.

Incidentally, I do get some useful info from the hypersubmit service but in general it’s nothing I wouldn’t be able to obtain via Alexa.com, Google or Awstats.

The most useful and handy functions are:

- Google Page Rank indicator (though you can do it just as easily with a free online tool like this.)

- Meta tags generator (I don’t use this, but it would be very useful for the novice web designer)

So, take a tip from the SEO experts, and now from me, over £100 worse off for having submitted to these services … do it for free first and see how you get on before you part with any cash.

Feedback for this blog - more useful tips and notes

I’ve just had my first blog review published on untwistedvortex.com and it’s proved really useful for advice and tips.

I stumbled across the website by accident but found the reviews really interesting and rooted in giving practical indicators as to how sites can be improved.

As I’ve said before in my posts, it’s a real uphill struggle to get blogs seen when they’re new, so any kind of advice is helpful.

I’ll list the points made and outline what steps I’ve taken to remedy to the problems, as this may save you falling into the same traps.

1) Reviewer writes: This blog is using one of those themes that doesn’t use quite all of the available screen real estate the 1024×768 resolution (still the most widely-used resolution) has to offer. Most people don’t realize how much more scrolling is required when the theme is just an inch narrower than it could be.

My actions: None yet, as this one involves a lot of work searching out a new template.

It’s effectively a re-brand, but it’ll mean changing the entire look of the blog.

I hadn’t thought about the 1024×768 resolution issue but it’s a very fair point.

Over the next few months I’m intending to integrate this blog with some reseller functions, and I’ll also probably call it something more descriptive than laptopmanpaul.co.uk.

So this one goes on a very full pending tray!

2) Reviewer writes: I couldn’t find his list of categories anywhere. Besides being an almost a standard on blogs, categories count as additional pages.

My actions:Again, another good point. I’d left the categories off when I started the blog, because I had no content, but now I have I need to get those categories out there.

This one was easy to achieve, so you’ll now see on the RHS of this page my list of categories.

3) Reviewer writes: I found it odd that there’s only one article displayed on the front page. This is the first time I’ve seen that and I’m not sure what to make of it. Each of the archives pages only displays one article at time also. This makes looking for past articles very cumbersome.

My actions: I’m new to blogging and hadn’t realised this was standard convention.

I didn’t want my pages to look too cluttered at first, but now I know better you’ll see that you now get more posts to your page.

Now I’ve made the change I prefer it that way too!

4) Reviewer writes: I found most of the articles easy to read, except for one small detail: The justified text. On some lines it’s just excruciating to try and read the complete sentence naturally.

My actions: What a perceptive reviewer!

This same issue had been annoying me for some time, but having it pointed out in the review made me apply myself to sorting it out.

The problem?

It was in the style sheet of course, and all post text is now left-aligned.

5) Reviewer writes: Due to the low publishing frequency, this blog should have feeds by email enabled (but doesn’t as far as I can tell).

My actions: And there’s me thinking I was doing alright and posting fairly regularly!

I’ve taken the point on board however, and now I’ve added a ’subscribe by email’ option on the Subscribe in a reader link on the top RHS of the page.

I’m pleased I’ve got that function actually, as ‘the more the merrier’ as far as I’m concerned.

6) Comment writer: Just had a quick look at the site; the justified text is a real eye killer! That right sidebar is overloaded as well.

My actions: I’ve sorted the justified text already and also pruned the right hand sidebar.

I think on reflection, I’d recommend a three column blog template in future, it gives you more scope for arranging your links, tag clouds, adverts and so on.

Take a look at my friend’s template at http://oldvarieties.com, that’s a really nice layout and uses more of the available screen area as suggested in my site feedback

And finally …

Brave enough to get your own blog reviewed?

Add yourself to the untwistedvortex.com list and see how you get on.

Being reviewed also gave me an additional Technorati ‘authority’.

And guess what?

We found out this week that every time I mention my mate’s blogs, he gets an additional Technorati authority of 1.

He’s got 3 blogs of his own and he’s managed to get a Technorati authority of 5 or 6 simply with his own links to his own sites and the mentions I make in my blog.

He’s managed to move up to 900,000 or so in the rankings.

There’s a lesson to be learned there for all Technorati authority obsessives … like me.

And my friend’s just got himself another Technorati authority!

Getting your new blog seen … change the rules!

Is there anybody there?

I agree with Hans de Ruiter in his blog The Technorati Visibility Game when he discusses how difficult it is to get a new blog seen.

As you can see from the right hand side of this blog, I’ve made lots of effort to get my posts seen, but it’s a bit of an uphill struggle.

For instance I now have an authority of two on Technorati, thanks to this review of my blog on untwistedvortex.com.

It was Hans who gave me my first authority, which moved my blog up from something like 4.5 million down in the rankings to 3.5 million down.

With this new authority from untwistedvortex.com I’ve now moved up to 1.9 million down the rankings.

As I said, it’s a slow process!

milliondollarhomepage.com revisted

I was looking at the code used by Alex Tew in his milliondollarhomepage.com website the other day, and decided to try it out for a project or two of my own.

It’s a really nice bit of code, and although I’m not going to attempt to replicate Alex’s success or strategy, it’s a very useful way of presenting paid-for or free ads on single themes.

Instead of getting out in the garden today, I’ve put together this website as a pro-active move for new bloggers … it’s called brand-new-blogs.com.

It works on a low cost ad basis, but gives your blog access to a dedicated homepage for as long as it takes to fill the grid, and then it sits in the archive for 12 months.

You’ll notice I’ve added my blog to the grid already to get things started.

So if you’re getting desperate for some blog visibility, give it a try, who knows if it catches on it might become a sort of ‘X-Factor’ for the blogging community!

You can get HTML links for your own site from this page.

brand-new-blogs.com … get your new blog noticed straight away!