Questions from a Journalist

I am occasionally asked to respond to Journalists questions, and it is a pleasure to give my input, I’m not to worried about getting published, but often I like the questions as they are quite insightful. Here is a recent questionnaire I was asked to respond to for Sports Insights (I mean what do I know about sports):

1) Many small business owners are looking for fast and easy ways to improve the ranking of their websites on Google. Are there any easy tips and tricks they can use? Or is improving their ranking down to just hard work improving their websites generally?

Content remains King – provide content people want and can use. It should be text based and NOT just press releases, Search Engine read text and like fresh content. An industry wide Blog that is updated 3 or 4 times a month is probably best for a small business at the moment.

2) What do you think is the most important aspect of a website’s design when it comes to search engine optimisation?

Construction, it’s more than just keywords and meta tags – you need to separate design from content and that means making full use of CSS. You need the content to be human readable and in the right order, try viewing a website with the Style switched off (in Firefox; View -> Page Style -> No Style) and see what happens… if it looks good a search engine will like it.

3) Meta tags and keywords are not the only things that the search engines spiders look at when they crawl a website. Can you talk about other aspects of a website that need to be optimised to ensure maximum exposure on Google and other search engines?

If possible use CSS menus and Bullet lists, use Alt tags on images, provide text based links… don’t just say ‘click here’ and link it, say ‘Manchester United Shirts’, make the link relevant and understandable to search engines, then organise the website, make sure images are given proper names, not just ‘image01.jpg’, ‘image02.jpg’ and so on, also give your pages proper names ‘about0us.html’ does not say a lot, so call it ‘about-companyname.html’ and so on. Make everything relevant and remember that to get to the top of Google is all the little things added up that make it greater than the whole.

4) There are thousands of companies that purport of offer search engine optimisation services. Can you offer any advice on what someone should look for when they are buying these services for the first time?

It’s a cowboy business right now… if it costs £1000 or less it probably is not worth it… Also stick to someone recommended and small. The more important your business is to the company the better you will do, SEO requires expertise and in depth knowledge, be prepared and if you do sign up to a telesales call, really chase them to get your monies worth.

5) Which popular myths for achieving search success can be exploded?

Reciprocal Linking, but that it quite old now, it’s better to have relevant incoming links (quality not quantity), but it is also still good to have relevant out going links, but they are unlikely to match. Also Domain Name protection, buying .eu, .fr, .ie, .cn and so on, waste of time, concentrate on a single domain worldwide.

6) Have you found that more websites are turning to paid rankings to ensure that they get a good ranking in their categories search pages?

Not really – money is too tight, people use Google Adwords for many different reasons, brand awareness to ecommerce, but strangely few join the concept of SEO and PPC together. Most people know a bit of both is healthy. My advice to clients is ALWAYS – test the website on PPC, if you get conversions then you know your website can work… You can then invest in SEO which tends to have a much higher entry cost.

7) What do you think the future of search engines looks like? Many pundits are talking about localised searches being the next big thing as people increasingly use the web to find goods and services in their geographical area?

Analysis and SEO people get very angry when Google undermine them, for example the recent introduction of https://www.google.com/ which prevents disclosing referring websites and other important data to a marketeer. Personal I think this is great, bring it on Google. But website owners need to think Target Audience – very little else matters, there’s no point in offering pizza delivery in Scotland if your shop is based in Brighton, let Google do that work for you.

Thanks to Carina Birt of Sarum Consultancy Services and to Dave Howell who asked for responses to these questions (I’m sure I was not the only one who responded)

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