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How do I make sure that my SEO is effective?

There are many different factors to work on in order to ensure that SEO[1] is effective. It is a difficult process; one minor error affects the entire website’s search performance. However by following a few simple rules, this situation is easily avoidable:

Hidden errors

A website often contains unnecessary errors that prevent the search engine spiders[2] from crawling it.

- The web server should return a ‘200 OK’ code when visited by the spiders; if an error code is returned it will not be indexed.

- The HTML code must be error free; some HTML errors can prevent your site from being indexed.

Images and Flash animation

The main content of a website should be shown through text. Although images and flash animation improve the website’s appearance, search engine spiders do not understand them. Additionally, flash does not work on the new Apple software (Ipads and Iphones).

Content

Avoid including articles or affiliate links that can be found on other websites. A website’s content should be distinctive and trustworthy; if you know a lot about a particular topic, write detailed facts about it. This will make the spiders believe that your website is the best place to visit for information on that topic.

Site planning

The site’s architecture should be carefully planned. If there are a group of web pages that are all related, it shows the search engines that the website is more than just a random collection of web pages.

Keywords[3]

Top listings in Google are achieved by using specific and effective keywords.

- Longer keywords are more search engine friendly. Specificity is crucial; specific keywords direct more potential customers to your website.

- Shorter keywords are less likely to direct a potential customer, and are far more competitive.

Link building

Back links[4] guarantee a high search engine rank. Links have a great deal of impact, and the more targeted the link, the better.

[2] Search Engine Spider:  A computer program deployed by the search engines to collect data from the internet.

[3] Keyword: A word or phrase associated with your company that web users type into the search engines.

[4] Back links: Links that web users make to your website from other websites.

It takes time to optimise your Search performance

SEO[1] takes time and commitment to achieve top listings on the major search engines. Many webmasters still believe that they will be on Page one immediately after submitting their website to Google. It may have worked in the past, but it does not work anymore. The search engines spend time updating their index by discovering the website and its links.

Website content must be updated on a regular basis. Regular updates show that the website is important. If the content is interesting to the targeted audience, then users will build links to the website. This is the only real way to help search engine performance with links. The fundamental rule is: the easier it is to get the link, the less it influences the website’s ranking.

Website content must contain relevant and specific keywords[2]. These particular keywords can be discovered by running short term PPC[3] ad campaigns. These campaigns track conversions and find out which keywords are searched for the most. The most effective keywords help the website appear higher in the listings which attracts more customers. It is better for the website to use less competitive keywords before incorporating more competitive keywords. During this process, Google will deem the website trustworthy. This is essential; without the search engines’ trust the website will not do well in the rankings.

[2] Keyword: A word or phrase associated with your company that web users type into the search engines.

[3] PPC: Pay Per Click

Will web page speed become a more important ranking factor?

Google’s Matt Cutts recently suggested that Google may soon pay more attention to the speed of a web page in their ranking algorithm; Google seems to believe that faster websites in the search results make the searching experience better.

What can you do to make your web pages faster?

Choose a reliable web hosting company that has fast connections to the Internet. Your web site should be hosted on a web server that is be easy to reach and has a good level of availability (up time).

In addition to choosing a fast web host, the following will make your web pages faster:

• Combine external JavaScript code files into one file; the fewer files the web server has to serve, the faster your web pages will load.
• Compress your JavaScript code to make the JavaScript file smaller.
• Combine external CSS files into one file and compress your CSS files to make the CSS file smaller.
• Enable gZip compression if your web server supports it; your web hosting compaqny may have yo do this for you.
• Try to keep the number of images on your website to a minimum and compress your images. Most image tools allow you to choose the compression rate when saving an image for the web.
• Put tracking codes and other JavaScript snippets at the end of your web pages.
• Analyse your web pages to get an idea of the speed of your website and compare your website to the websites of your competitors.

Is it a good idea to use the loading time in the ranking algorithm?

Fast loading web pages are good for search users, but using the web page loading time in the search results ranking algorithm could cause problems for smaller businesses:

• Businesses will be forced to choose faster and perhaps more expensive web hosting providers if they want to be found high up in the search results.
• Businesses with a low income or from a country with slow Internet connections won’t be able to compete.
• The big websites will get bigger and the small websites will get smaller.

Health Warning: the role of the page loading time in Google’s ranking algorithm isn’t clear yet so the above points are speculative.

It is always a good idea to optimise the loading time of your web pages, regardless of the effect of loading time on your search results rankings. The faster your web pages load, the more visitors to your website are likely to see the contents of your pages.

Web surfers are impatient people; the average web surfer expects immediate results. That is enough reason for your website to be fast loading.

Don’t overlook making sure your web pages also contain clearly arranged content that is easy to read. You should assess the readability of your web pages; you can even calculate a Flesch/Kincaid readability score, the higher the score, the more difficult your web pages are to read.

Google’s duplicate content patent

Google has been granted a patent named Duplicate document detection in a web crawler system. The patent explains how a content filter from the search engine can work with a duplicate content server.

What is duplicate content?

The patent’s definition of duplicate content is:
“Duplicate documents are documents that have substantially identical content, and in some embodiments wholly identical content, but different document addresses.”
The patent describes three scenarios in which duplicate documents are encountered by a web crawler:

1. Two pages, comprising any combination of regular web page(s) and temporary redirect page(s), are duplicate documents if they share the same page content, but have different URLs.
2. Two temporary redirect pages are duplicate documents if they share the same target URL, but have different source URLs.
3. A regular web page and a temporary redirect page are duplicate documents if the URL of the regular web page is the target URL of the temporary redirect page or the content of the regular web page is the same as that of the temporary redirect page.

A permanent redirect page is not directly involved in duplicate document detection because the crawlers are configured not to download the content of the redirecting page.

How does Google detect duplicate content?

According to the patent description, Google’s web crawler consults the duplicate content server to check if a found page is a copy of another document. The algorithm then determines which version is the most important version.

Google can use different methods to detect duplicate content. For example, Google might take “content fingerprints” and compare them when a new web page is found.

Interestingly, it’s not always the page with the highest PageRank that is chosen as the most important URL for the content:
“In some embodiments, a canonical page of an equivalence class is not necessarily the document that has the highest score (e.g., the highest page rank or other query-independent metric).”

How does this affect your website?

If you want to get high rankings, it is easier to do so with unique content. Try to use as much original content as possible on your web pages.

If your website must use the same content as another website, make sure that your website has better inbound links than the other websites that carry the same content. It’s likely that your website will be chosen as the most important URL for the content then.

If your web site has unique content, you don’t have to worry about potential duplicate content penalties. Optimise that content for search engines and make sure that your web site has good inbound links.

It’s hard to outrank a website with good optimised content and many good inbound links.

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