The number of links from social media sites is already a factor in search engine rankings so build up your network of friends, family and colleagues on sites such as Delicious, Reddit and StumbleUpon. Get into the habit of sharing your bookmarks with your network every time you bookmark a new page for your business website and inviting people to bookmark it. This will quickly build up a good number of bookmarks for each page on your website as it grows in a natural way.

Directory listing have a key part in any SEO strategy. They are less important than they were in the past but they still represent a good way of building high quality links as part of an overall strategy. We have been doing research on which UK directory sites give value for money and we would recommend the following. They have good page ranks and high traffic.

Website Name	Page Rank (PR)	Alexa Traffic Rank	Cost of a one-way back link listing	Notes
http://www.freeindex.co.uk/	6	5,916	Free	Also offers lead generation
http://www.uksmallbusinessdirectory.co.uk/ which is ideal for UK small business	5	26,788	£50 per year
UK Business Directory – UK directory of Internet services and Internet providers	5	38,113	£24 per year	No Follow Links

Page rank is the importance assigned to a page by Goggle. On a scale of 0 to 10 it measures how important a site is based on the number of other people who link to it. The higher the number the better for example the BBC is page rank 9. Alexa Traffic Rank Measures high a site ranks based on the number of visitors to a site, the lower the number the better.  

The web can seem like a international anonymous place but location matters. Goggle and other search engines use location information on your website to place you site in a specific location. This can both drive local traffic and also improve the trust associated with your web site. Trust is a key measure based on stability of the IP address, length of time a site has been live and availability of the site. So make sure to include a address and phone number on your site.

If you were an SEO of a large company, what would you include in your 2011 strategy? Matt Cutts gives us his top three tips: Optimise for page speed Decrease the speed that pages are returned, and website visitors may do more things on your site e.g. purchasing your products. Decrease page speed = increase your ROI. Internal linking & CMS Make sure you have full control of the Content Management System and make sure that your internal linking is consistant and you don’t have a load of 404 errors. Social media marketing Spread your content on Twitter, Digg & Stumbleupon etc. The more links you have out there, the more chance you have of someone visiting your website. These links could ultimatley influence your page rank too.

Not all backlinks are equal, most blog, forums and some directories attached a “no follow” tag to back links to your site. This is very important because this tells the search engine to ignore the value of this backlink when deciding upon the ranking of your site. No follow links were invented to prevent Spamers from attacking sites like Wikipedia and YouTube and filling them full of spam. Building links to these sites will add no value to your link building activities. On the other hand some site still offer “do follow” links, how can you tell the difference?

1. All the large social networking sites Linked-In, Wikipedia, Flicker, Twitter are no-follow so these are a waste of time for link building. Although viral marketing via a promotional video may be another source of traffic.
2. Some article sites offer do-follow links and you can find a list here http://dofollow.info/dofollow-article-directories/
3. Most blogs comments are “no-follow” but if you offer to write a guest post then often bloggers will include a do-follow link at the bottom of the text.
4. Some social bookmark sites offer do-follow links including Digg.
5. Some directories offer do-follow links, but it’s worth checking first.

So How can I check if a site offers “do-follow” links

The easiest way is to use Google Chrome as a browser. This will overlay a box over those links which are no follow, this way you can make sure that you only spend your time on sites that offer do-follow links. See the screen shot below from Wikipedia showing the no-follow links highlighted in a box.

Search Engine Optimisation by DIY is it possible for small businesses?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) companies can charge tens of thousands of pounds to help get you web site optimised and help you get that all important first page ranking. This is far beyond the reach on many start up or small businesses. They keep the tricks of the trade very secret. In fact the steps to good SEO are very simple. At Parallel Project Training we have been doing our own SEO since launching in October 2009, and in a very short time we get good first page results for some of our specific key words such as “APMP Distance Learning” “APMP Study Guide” and “APM Project Management Training” ranking with companies with multi-million pound turnovers and major SEO budget. Without spending a fortune, just by creating an interactive and interesting site and some simple SEO tips.

Step by Step Guide to Small Business Search Engine Optimisation?

The six steps to successful small business SEO:

1. Select your keywords with care.
2. Design you website to clearly align with your keywords. (Other way around? “Design your keywords to clearly align with your website/business.”)
3. Create good, dynamic content and keep it fresh. Perhaps consider adding a blog.
4. Create back links by writing relevant articles, publishing press releases, joining relevant forums, commenting on blogs in relevant areas, publishing videos on YouTube and podcasts on iTunes. Pay to join some of the key directories.
5. Build community customers who interact with your website using social media tools and use e-mail to keep them engaged.

Finally check out some of the high ranking back links your larger competitors are using. You won’t beat them this way but you may get some good hints and tips. Much of this work can be done by hand or by using free web tools. However I have found Web CEO is ideal for the small business. It takes you through each step and can keep records of you ranking and back link trends. The basic version as used by SEO companies if free version is ideal for a small business, http://www.webceo.com/

Tip number 1) Select your keywords to find you niche.

On one hand there is no point spending lots of time building a website if no-one visits it to see your work. On the other hand there is no point trying to get to the top of Google for really common search terms such as “holidays” if for example you are a small travel agency. So you are trying to find a niche that balance two things:

1. Number of searches for your keyword(s) in a month (the more searches the better).
2. Number of competing web sites (the less sites the better).

Many tools combine these to give a Key Word Effectiveness Index by dividing the number of searches by the competing sites. One of the best comes from Google Key Word Research Tool The higher KWE the easier it will be to get a good ranking and good traffic. e.g   This means it will be much easier to build a site which gets good traffic and has less competition if you focus on “Tenerife holidays” first, always assuming you sell Tenerife holidays. Even so you will have to compete with another 2 million sites, so it is well worth while spending some time finding the key words that relate to you business and have a reasonable amount of traffic but are not too competitive maybe “Tenerife walking holidays” for example. If you are a local business, then make sure you include your geographic location in the key words.

Tip 2: Design your site to communicate clearly to the search engines and your visitors what your site is about.

A number of key elements help the search engines understand what your web page is all about and your key words need to be included in these sections. Important elements are: Domain Name has a really important factor on search ranking. Consider setting up a site with the key words in the domain name e.g. www.tenerife-walking-holidays.com Meta Tags are descriptions in the header of the page which are not shown on the page but help the search engines to understand the pages contents. To see them in Internet Explorer, simply “right click” on the page and click “view source”. Most content management systems have fields where you can set the title for each page. These include:

1. The page title
   This is the text that appears in the title tab for your page. It is also the title that Google will pick up so make it meaning full and ensure it contains your key words e.g. The key words have more importance if they come first but make it sensible and standalone summary of your page theme.
2. Meta Descriptions
   These are labels that Google uses to understand you pages. They include the title, description and meta key words. The title and meta description are the most important and you key words should appear early and possibly several times in the description.
3. Header
   Like headers in a word document then the headers on a web page tell Google and visitors what the site is all about. So you should make sure you key works are well represented in the headings (H1) and subheading used on you web page.
4. Image Labels
   Images that you used on the web page have labels which are buried in the code. You can see these if you point at the image before you click on them. Again, your keywords should be shown in these image descriptions.

Tip 3 Create good content and keep it dynamic (add a blog to your site an keep it fresh)

Goggle loves websites which are frequently updated and have fresh engaging content. One way the achieve this is to set up a blog to post news and updated information about your company. A discussion forum can also generate lots of live content. Blogs are easy to establish and generating one post a week will significantly improve the quality of your site. It is easy to integrate a blog with you twitter account so that you can alert a community of new posts.

Tip 4 Create back links by writing relevant article, publishing press releases, joining relevant forums, commenting on blogs in relevant areas, and pay to join some of the key directories.

 

Generate real news press releases and publish then on some of the better PR sites such as www.i-newswire.com and www.1888pressrelease.com. It can be worth paying the $49 for premium release.

Avoid the cheap link sites all over the web, you will get a bad name.

Register you company on Google maps.

Advertise and swap back links with people in your local business network.

Write and publish articles which contain your key words on the main article sites

http://www.buzzle.com/

http://ezinearticles.com/

Search for relevant blogs and comment on articles including a back link to your site.

Tip 5 Build community customers who interact with your website using social media tools and use e-mail to keep them engaged.

Building you own online community can be a very powerful way of engaging with customers. Today it is easy to build Facebook like functionally into you website so that you customers and share the areas of interest. This can be as simple as a newsletter, user forum of a fully interactive community.

The generation and publishing of website sitemaps is quite often underestimated, yet it one of the most important things a website owner should do in order to help the navigation of both it’s users and the search engines. A sitemap is quite simply a map showing the structure of your website. There are basically two types of sitemap, one is a HTML sitemap which is readable to human visitors and helps them navigate through your website, the other is a XML Sitemap which helps the search engines navigate through the site. There are many advantages to using sitemaps, for example:

• they help simplify website navigation for both visitors and search engines
• they help the search engines accurately index your site content
• they help advise the search engines how frequently your content changes and when it was last modified

Generating a sitemap is relatively straight forward, but absolutely essential for effective search engine optimisation.  One on the best tools is at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com. Here you can use their free online sitemap generator to build your sitemap by simply entering your website address and hitting the “Start” button. For larger websites with more than 500 pages, they also have an unlimited sitemap generator script available for just: $19.99. Whether you use the free or unlimited generator, this is a fantastic tool for simplifying the process of generating a high quality sitemap of your website for the search engines. The unlimited version contains may extra features well worth the small extra cost. It gives you much more control over the pages that are added to (or excluded from) your site map, automatically updates your site map for you every week, pings Google when you have a new site map and finally it will help you find and fix broken links can be a bit of a nightmare, but this tool makes it a simple task by presenting you with a link to the page that the broken link is on. Since sorting out our site maps our site has jumped three places in Google and that’s a bargain for only $19.99.