Search Engine Submitter » admin

How important is web hosting?

admin — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 18:35:53 +0000

There has been a lot of talk recently on the importance of where your website is hosted in relation to your rankings in the search engines. It is well documented that having your website hosted in the country of the search engine you’re trying to get listed on works wonders. For example, hosting in the UK and targeting search positions on Google.co.uk. By having your website hosted in the specific country, you can increase your weighting by some 20%, some claim it’s even higher. One thing is for certain, if you’re competitors are hosting in a different country other than the one you’re targeting, it’s time to switch. Putting your website on a host or IP address that is located in the specific country will indeed give you the boost you desire.

There is also talk of whois contact information and the location of the nameservers being factored into the ranking fo your site, but at this time, there is no evidence to support this.

Looking at the google.co.uk for some highly competitive search terms, 9 out of the top 10 appear to be on .co.uk domain names and hosted in the UK. I guess having country specific domains and web hosting combined is the way to go for ranking in the search engine of your country or in your Google locality.

The need for good content!

admin — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:18:55 +0000

When it comes to your website, the single most important on site factor is definitely not how optimised your website title or meta tags are, it’s the content itself. The content on your website should be primarily unique and secondly, interesting. By having unique content, in the first instance, your website is going to be highly weighted and your specific content has a chance of ranking for the contained keywords. This wouldn’t happen if your content had been copied from somewhere else as the website you copied it from would simply rank higher than you (as it’s more established / on a more established website).

The other good thing about having interesting content is that it will attract links from third party sources who like your content. As we all know, the single most important thing when it comes to search engine optimisation is links. By having good content, you will gain a variety of different backlinks which in turn will boost your overall profile / weighting of your website and make it rank for a wide range of long tail keywords as opposed to a single search term.

In SEO content rules, don’t think you will get any traffic by duplicating other peoples work, you won’t.

Single term or long tail keywords?

admin — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:23:22 +0000

One of the questions I get asked a lot these days is whether to go after a single high traffic keyword or to target a bunch of what are known as long tail keywords. There are numerous advantages to each. Obviously by targeting a single keyword, you can allocate 100% of your link spend budget at that particular word. You can also highly optimise your page content for that specific keyword. The danger however of going after single search terms is that primarily, you risk what is known as an over optimisation penalty and secondly, with high traffic keywords comes high competition and if your website is relatively new, you may be waiting several months, perhaps even years before you’re ranking in your desired position for your term.

In contrast, long tail keywords offer a lot less in terms of raw traffic figures, but they are a lot easier to obtain than their single, high traffic keyword counterparts. The advantage of targeting long tail keywords is you can target thousands of different phrases with a single website and will often rank for these long tail phrases based on the optimisation of your page and content alone instead of the links you’ve purchased.

Do we need to submit our site?

admin — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 18:12:41 +0000

The main mistake people make when it comes to getting their website initially crawled or spidered is to use one of the many third party website to search engine submission services. Some people even pay money for this service when in fact it is completely pointless and in some extreme cases can do more harm than good.

The best way and usually the quickest way to get your website crawled or spidered is to link build for it. You can do this a number of ways as mentioned in previous posts. Once the Google spider or robot sees a link to your site, it will follow it and in turn learn about your websites existence. Once this happens, your website is cached by Google and will start appearing for given search terms and phrases.

If you use certain pieces of software on your new website such as Wordpress, you may not even need to link build in order to get your website crawled as Wordpress comes with a pinging application which alerts Google when a new post is added to your website.

If you’re looking for your site to appear / rank for certain keywords, I would strongly advise link building using specific anchor text strings.

How important is link building?

admin — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:07:04 +0000

When it comes to search engine optimisation, the single and most important thing you can do in order to first get your site listed and then to get it to rank for the keywords you desire is to build links. I mean sure, there are all sorts of optimisation techniques out there for your site itself, but no matter what you do to your website copy, links will always be the deciding factor in how highly your site is weighted, ranked and ultimately where it ends up in the search engine results pages.

There are several different types of links to consider when it comes to SEO. The link option that most people opt for is the typical reciprocal link. This involves a simple link swap or exchange between your site and a third party. These links do count but because the link swap is mutual, they don’t do a great deal for your overall weighting.

The most popular type of link when it comes to SEO is the one way link. A single link from a website to yours, without a reciprocal link can work wonders with your websites weighting and with the right anchor text this sort of link can make you appear in the listing for a certain search term.