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Your website address is an indication of the geographic market place you target. A “.com” is generic and as such it is harder to position the website for a specific geography. A “.co.uk” is specific and Google will understand that the website is specifically targeted at the UK. In the same way a “.eu” would work for Europe.
The other consideration is where your website is hosted. If it is hosted in the USA, for example, Google will assume that is targeted at the US market.
Using Google webmaster tools you can specify the “geo target” but selecting an appropriate URL and hosting your website in the appropriate country helps.
Of course we take care all of this as part of the Winning Inch SEO service.
Adding a robots.txt file to your server is a way of telling search engines who to index and what not to index. It is a also a great idea to add your sitemap location as well.
To create a sitemap there are many freely available you can find them by searching for “sitemap generator” but a nice simple one can be found here enter your website address and download the XML version. You will then need to load it to the server using FTP software. We use filezilla which is free and easy to use.
If you want to invite a search bot to index your entire website here is the code:
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# robots.txt courtesy of http://www.cirencester-website-design.co.uk/index.html
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Disallow: /add the forward slash followed by the directory names you want to exclude (one per line) i.e. /customer_data
Sitemap: http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk/sitemap.xml
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This simple code tells all search engine bots that nothing is disallowed and the location of our site map. Using a text editor (see resources) copy and paste the above and change our address to your own website
Duplicate data will result in diluted page rank and search results positions. Google is very good at identifying duplicate data. Do do not do it. The rules are clear, every web page must be unique and original, there is nowhere to hide so avoid it.
However, there are inadvertent ways to create the problem and this relates to URL duplication known as canonicalization.
This is where you can access your website by typing in http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk and by just by typing http://yourwebsite.co.uk.
Essentially search engines see these two methods of access as two independent website with duplicated content. This was declared an issue by Google in February 2009 but is common amongst most search engines.
The way to resolve this is to adopt one method of addressing i.e. always http://www…. or http://….. But this is not really practical.
The easiest way to overcome the problem is to use a .htaccess file (which works with most unix based servers). This redirects all access to your website to a one standard.
Use a simple text editor (not word processor) i.e. editpad lite which is a free download.
Here is the code:
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#htaccess courtesy of http://cirencester-website-design.co.uk/
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^yourwebsite\.co.uk$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]
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Replace yourwebsite\.co.uk and http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk with your own website details.
You will then need to load the .htaccess file to your server using an FTP product. We recommend Filezilla which is free and very good.
See the Matt Cutts, of Google, video for a detailed canonical explanation and options
Google, amongst others, use meta descriptions. The meta tag is created in the <head> section of your website. Normally it goes under your page title
To create a meta tag is fairly simple. Just copy the code below, change the wording between the speech marks and paste it underneath your page title in your html. The meta description helps to reinforce your page title and associated content.
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<!– meta description courtesy of http://www.cirencester-website-design.co.uk/index.html –>
<meta name=”description” content=”Your meta description goes here” />
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Your meta description should include your keywords for each page and give a brief summary of the content of the page.
That is all you need do. This summary usually appears in search results under the page title.
There are other meta tags but mostly these are ignored by search engines with one or two exceptions but these are, or will be, discussed in other posts.
Gaining good quality links to your website is like receiving a vote for your website. This is why search engines use links to determine your page rank.
Links take a long time to as it can take quite a while for people to discover your website and find it compelling enough to want to link to it. So it is important to have great & compelling content that is well presented and easy to link to.
Avoid paid links and reciprocal links. These have little value and can do more harm than good. The best way forward is to participate or to invite participation. Contributing to an open forum that is relevant to your business / website is great. Overtime you build a reputation and other people using the forum will begin to notice you and see you as an authority on the subject matter. As well as that you can add a blog to your own website. Having a blog within your domain will contribute to your overall ranking.
But having said all that and you should still be concerned with your page rank. Page rank now has less to do with your positions in search engine results. There is a shift to relevancy to a search keywords. This will become clearer as Google Caffeine is rolled out in the first quarter of 2010.
What we know about Caffeine is sketchy but we do know it is to increase relevancy and load speeds. See SEO in 2010 article
Is validation important or even a consideration to Google? No it is not. In fact Google itself does not validate. Google is only concerned with content.
So is validation important? Yes it means that your website will work and look the same regardless technology. It does not matter whether someone is using the latest PC running the latest browsers or someone using the oldest. Both will get exactly same user experience.
It also means that those who need to customise their browsers, i.e. use large fonts for easier reading, can and your website will maintain appearance.
Another major consideration is mobile devices. More and more people use mobile devices to access the Internet. To look good on theses devices your code needs to validate. If your website does not look good or is difficult to navigate visitors will just move on. This will increase your bounce rate and therefore lower your chances of being found in search results.
You can check your website pages at http://validator.w3.org/
If your page fails you will be given details on how to fix your code. If you need help we do this as part of our “optimisation service“.
Good page title tags are essential. We often find that title tags are neglected creating an “untitled page” or that the same page title is used for all pages.
Search engines use title tags to display page info in search results.
As such title tags are essential and must reflect the content of each page and use appropriate keywords.
Title tags go into your <head> section of the web page between <title></title>. i.e. <title>your page title goes here</title>
Title tags should be a short summary of the pages content and include your keyword. When you see a list of results from a search engine the first line on each result is based on the title tag.
Title tag length should be limited to around 65 characters, including spaces, this is not a definite number but is the maximum that will be displayed so to get your message across concisely do it in 65 characters.
See also meta descripton
Keywords drive the Internet. These are words / phrases that are entered into a search engine to find answers, goods and services. The key is to match the keyword your goods and / or services that those searching the Internet will find your website.
There are two primary sources to help you to discover what people actually search for when looking for the things that you supply.
Google adwords external tool. This free tool from Google will give you some useful data. But it is limited because it is “Adwords” focused. You can try it here
The industry standard is Wordtracker. This provides specific data about keywords including how competitive they are. You can get a free 7 day trial of Wordtracker here
Winning Inch provides a managed service for Keywords where we estimate both traffic and potential revenue by keyword. This helps to target the keywords that will provide the greatest return on investment potential.
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