hal9000.ie

Having other websites linking to your website has long been established as a ranking factor with search engines. It’s also clear that no two websites offer the same value in the links.

The ideal scenario is to obtain these links naturally, or organically. What Google likes to see are websites with great content that other sites want to link to. For many businesses the process of creating compelling and fresh content in order to obtain a link profile in this way is challenging (to say the least!).

So, one other way to add to your link profile with the aim of improving your search engine optimization (SEO) is to add your site to Local Directories.  This has the two-fold advantage of raising your online profile with users of the directory and driving traffic to your site, while at the same time enhancing your SEO.

Many of these are free directories, but some offer paid inclusion or premium listings. A key SEO factor is the type of link offered. Ideally use directories that offer ‘followed’ links. This is a technical specification in the creation of the link and a ‘followed’ link means that the search engine ‘follows’ the link and transfers link value. One of my favourite Irish business directories is:

Ireland-free-directory.eu

Local Directories

Finding directories that have listings for your area or perhaps county are another source of links and of traffic. These local directories have more relevance for your site geographically from an SEO perspective and for visitors also. The BRAND project is a fabulous initiative which has seen the creation of a Dun Laoghaire Town website. This is to meet the needs of residents, local businesses aswell as visitors and is a great resource. Businesses based in Dun Laoghaire can list on the site also:

http://www.dunlaoghaire.ie/local-businesses/list-your-business/

Niche Directories

It’s also a good idea to list with industry-specific or niche directories that will have greater relevancy for your particular audience or keywords that relate to your product or service. OOYO Sports is a recently launched online sports directory which is currently running a promotion offering 12 months FREE listings in Ireland (see details on their blog). So for those in the sports events, classes or therapies area, this is a great opportunity. For example, if you are running Dublin Yoga classes but don’t have a marketing budget this is the place for you. There is also a blog on the site which the owner is committed to developing and aims to create a go-to place for Irish sports enthusiasts.

Examples of niche directories are:

Ooyosports.com                                – sports classes events & therapies

Iloveshopping. Ie                              –  retail (run by AnPost)

Irishengineeringdirectory.ie        – engineering related

Mediastreet.ie                                     – media & marketing

Local SEO

A Google Places listing is crucial for the local SEO for businesses with a local target audience. Again, this is a free service from Google. It’s becoming even more important with the increase in smartphone usage where the location data is used in mobile delivery of Google Places results.

User-generated reviews on these local ratings directories are important in influencing these results. Google has had to remove review content on its Google Places listings that was taken from external directories such as Yelp, and it now just links to the reviews. But these reviews still have influence. Reviews from other Google Users are now displayed.

Some local review sites include:

Dublin.ratemyarea.com

Yelp.ie

Qype.ie

Whoseview.ie

List also on directories for your specific local area.

Anchor Text

Directories vary in what content they allow, but where you can it’s beneficial to use anchor text on your keywords in the link back to your site. Also add descriptive content with targeted keywords about your business where possible.

SEO Tip

As always in SEO, a great way to find relevant directories to list with is to do some competitor analysis. Do this by selecting 2 or 3 of your competitors that are ranking well online and take a look at their link profile and use Google to see which directories they are listed with.

Want to see some other SEO tips?

Here’s a fantastic presentation showing how the focus in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has shifted over the years. It’s from Rand Fishkin over at SEOMoz and shows how the various Google algorithm changes have impacted on the approach to SEO.

The slides look at the emphasis in the early days on on-site optimization, and then the focus on linkbuilding. Now, there is increasing attention to social factors with content shared on Twitter providing ranking signals for Google and Bing.

It has some interesting research on rankings post-Panda update.

Google launched their latest iteration in search recently with the +1 button.

You’ll start to see this appear across the web in search results, and on websites. It’s the Google equivalent of a Facebook ‘Like’ button and it’s Google’s attempt to get some of the social data that Facebook has in spadefuls.

It’s a social layer that is being built in to search and your results will be influenced by those in your social network and the items that they have ‘plus oned’. Having said that, your social network are contacts you have in Google (in Gmail and Google profiles), which is not the social beast that Facebook is.

Since its founding in 2004, Facebook has focused on enabling social connections, not on search. And yet, in the process, Facebook has created a platform that knows more than 600 million people, complete with identity, interests, and activities online.   TechCrunch

So how does this affect search engine optimisation (SEO)? Well the number of people who have plus-oned a web page may become a ranking signal for Google. If  people are recommending it, then it’s a strong case for the quality of a page.

Personally, I wouldn’t be too crazy about the ‘+1′ naming of the concept, but let’s see how well it takes off.

You can take a look at the top right of this post to see it in action (feel free to ‘plus one’ it).

You can get one to add to your WordPress site by using this plugin. Others are available for different platforms.

Here is a cool SEO (search engine optimization) tool to visualize competitors with websites in your space that are ranking with Google. You can easily see the terms that they’re ranking for and it also shows the relationship between them.

You can create an SEO Visualization Graph for one term and then layer other terms on top. The graph will show how the various websites are related in targeting these terms.

The tool uses Google’s search results to show the top results for the given terms. The graph then displays the results in a great visual way to provide clarity.

Take a look at the following graph created for the search term ‘SEO Dun Laoghaire‘ with the term ‘Digital Marketing Dun Laoghaire‘:

You do see some spurious results however. For example, one of the results for the term ‘SEO Dun Laoghaire‘ is for a wedding photographer presumably because he has a footer link on his website with anchor text to an SEO company.

If you add in another term, ‘online marketing Dun Laoghaire‘, this is what the picture looks like:

They also have a similar tool for personal use with Facebook which shows how your friends are connected to one another (but you probably know that already).

Create your own at TouchGraph.

All Class Kitchens in Naas, Co. Kildare are a typical local business trying to get more visibility online. Having redesigned their website (and a lovely job done too – thanks to Amosh Designs ), the next challenge is how to reach their prospective customers.

Local business search marketing is key to providing a return on the investment in a website and here we’re going to look at the things they could/should be doing to market themselves. A similar strategy applies to other local businesses.

Online is a big place, so it’s all about relevancy and targetting.

Geo-target with Google

In this example, the website allclasskitchens.ie is already relevant for Ireland because it has a .ie domain. But it could also be set to target Ireland in the Google Webmaster Tools facility.

Localise with Maps

A great way to localise a business is to place a map on the website. You can use Google Maps to pinpoint your business and make it easy for Google and customers to find. Our case study could add a map to their ‘Contact’ page.

Address and Phone No.

Also have the business address prominent, so that search engines can tell where the business is located. Ensure consistency of the address across all places it appears online. A local landline phone no. will create trust with your local visitors. All Class Kitchens have this clearly laid out on their Contact page, but it could also be added to the footer of each page to emphasise

Google Places

Formerly known as Google Local Business, a Google Places listing is a must for every local business. This is even more important with the increase in smart phones. The Google Places app for iPhone and Android is being used more and more to tell people where the nearest coffee shop or kitchen supplier is. The business in our case study, All Class Kitchens, already have a listing but this could be enhanced in a number of ways:

• Tag with all the keywords relevant for the business.
• Place the business in all the relevant categories
• Add pictures. This enhances the result for visitors and search engines like to return quality results to searchers.
• Get reviews from your existing customers. This is an important one. In search engines eyes, the more reviews you have the more relevant you are.

If your business doesn’t already have a listing, you can add a Google Places listing. It’s free.

While Yahoo and Bing are not widely used in Ireland (less than 5% of search engine market share), and you can’t add local Irish listings at the moment.

However, if you have a UK presence then you can add local listings to Yahoo Local Listings and Bing Local Listings.

Also, take a look at Facebook Places and adding your place here. For more info see  Facebook Places Business.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Search Engine Market Share

Local Directories

A number of local online directories are available to place listings, mostly free. Some of these also have review features and therefore get more attention from Google. The business can place listings with these. It’s important to keep the details, in particular the website URL consistent across these entries.

A good tip on choosing directories is to do a Google search for a similar product or service and see which ones  Google is returning. Also, you could check to see which ones your competitors are listed with.

Some of these directories include:

• hotfrog.ie
• whoseview.ie
• yourlocal.ie
• browseireland.ie
• yelp.ie
• qype.ie
• niceone.ie

There are many more. See also whether there are sector specific ones. For example the An Post managed site Iloveshopping.ie is for ecommerce sites or childcare.ie for children-related businesses.

Of course, the site itself needs to be optimised for the key terms of the business. For example, the business  in our case study also designs and builds bedroom and home office furniture. So the relevant pages should be optimised.

And there’s more. But that’s for another day.

With a title owing more to alliteration than optimisation (I didn’t check to see what the search volumes were for this blog post title!), we’re going to look at one of the most important aspects of on-page search engine optimisation (SEO), Title Meta Tags. Using a site to illustrate and (make an example of) can be useful and in the hot seat is handcrafted jewellery shop Dink Design!

First of all, a Title Tag is one of the pieces of meta data that search engines read in order to determine what a web page is about. It can be seen on the top bar of your browser when you’re on a website and it’s also often used by search engines as the title of the snippet they show for a site on a search engine results page (SERP).

So, as it’s visible, it’s very important for humans, and as it’s read by search engines, it’s important for optimising your site. When a page is returned in the SERPS for a given search term or terms, the term is presented in bold on the SERP, the more keywords matching the search term you have in bold, the more likely a searcher is to click on your site.

1. Unique Title Tag

Have a unique Title Tag for each page on your site. It should have the keywords and terms that are relevant for that page, and that you want that page to rank for. If you use Google Webmaster Tools they will show you if you have duplicate title tags and where they are.

With Dink Design the home page title tag looks like:

The Title Tag looks like:

and includes the following key terms:

1. Handcrafted Jewellery
2. Unique Jewellery
3. Fashion Jewellery
4. Dink Design
5. Dublin
6. Ireland

But the title tag on the Bracelets page for example is exactly the same. This would be better if it targeted ‘bracelets’ and relevant terms for that page.

2. Length of Title Tag

Ideally keep it under 70 characters. This is the length shown in SERP snippets. Some sites stuff keywords into the title tag, but it’s not recommended because:

• it can appear a bit spammy and unprofessional for visitors when they see it on the browser title bar
• it can look untidy when  it’s presented as the title on a snippet on a SERP

The Dink Design title tag is 114 chars (including spaces) and will appear shortened on a SERP like:

3. Keyword Placement

Put the most important terms or keywords towards the beginning. You should be already ranking for your site name or brand name (assuming it’s not a common word) and so this can be placed at the end. If you are a big brand that users are likely to prefer and click on, then you might want to put the brand name at the beginning.

For Dink Design, a Google search on “handcrafted jewellery” Ireland shows them in 3rd place (below ads). Not bad. Theres an entry from BrowseIreland.com in 2nd place. Dink Design could also put an entry here with keywords to be targeted in the description.

4. Match Keywords in Content

Keywords in the title tag are not so effective if the keywords do not appear in the content of the page. Even though you’re telling a search engine that this is what your page is about, if it doesn’t find any evidence, it may not rate it much.

Content can be a challenge on ecommerce sites which typically have lists and images of products with little text around them.

On the Dink Design site, the keywords from the Title Tag are not used in the content of the page, except for a repeat of the title tag at the bottom of the page.

5. Keyword Research

Before writing the title tag, do your keyword research to check which are the terms that your target market is actually searching on and target these terms. Also, check the terms that your competitors are targeting and see if there are any others that they’ve left out and that you could target and scoop up the traffic on.

6. Write for Searchers

Think user experience (UX). If search engine traffic is an important channel for you, try to write title tags that users will want to click on – attractive, snappy, compelling, positive.

7.  Dividers

I think it looks better if you use a divider like a pipe (eg. Necklaces | Dink Design ) to separate the keywords from your brandname. This doesn’t make a difference to SEO.

8.  Test

If your traffic is relatively stable, then you can make changes to your title tags and see if the traffic improves and, more importantly, if the traffic is better targeted and conversion increases.

9.  Geo-target terms

If you target different geographical markets, then you may need different spellings in your keywords. For example, it’s jewellery in Ireland, but it might be jewelry in the US. Make sure your terms are relevant for your audience.

10. Use Plugins

For WordPress users there are a variety of plugins you can use to help in the process of filling in a title tag. All-in-one-SEO for example (and there are others) allows you customise the title (and description) tags easily when you make changes on a page. If you don’t manually fill them in, it will automatically populate based on content. This may be fine if you have something like a blog post and have already keyword targeted the heading.

Now to get me some bling…

Google have a relevancy algorithm which decides where your website will be placed on a search results page (SERP). If you want to be no. 1 on Google then it’s this highly complex, constantly changing and secret algorithm (or computer program) that decides.

The perfect search engine:

“understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”       Larry Page

There’s no denying that Google doesn’t quite do that and there is a constant battle to remove spam results from the listings. Also, with Google Instant you could add fast to the criteria of the perfect search experience. The attention span of the searcher is getting shorter and searchers are expecting relevancy and they want it smartish. If you’re trying to be found on the web, then it’s up to  you (or your SEO) to help them along.

PageRank

The PageRank of a page on your site will be a factor in how high it appears in search results for the search term. One of the factors in this is the PageRank of those other website pages that are linking to your page, the one you want to rank for. These links are considered by Google to rate your importance on the web and this is why those site owners with an SEO strategy are always in keen pursuit of quality links to their sites.

PageRank itself is a rating from 1 to 10, with the highest being the best. Each time a website links to you, assuming it’s not a nofollow link, then in Google’s eyes it transfers a little of it’s authority on to your site. It’s often explained as being like a vote for your site.

Of course it’s only one factor, there are many others (over 200) that come into play in Google’s goal of providing comprehensive, relevant, quality results for searchers.

This infographic from Zippycart gives quick and useful overview of Google’s PageRank.

[Via: ZippyCart Shopping Cart Reviews]

Kinds of Links

PageRank is not the only measure of a link in to your site. Other things that Google look at are the ‘anchor text’ of the link (are there keywords in the link to the URL), the content around the link, the amount of links on the page and whether the link has a ‘nofollow’ tag – in which case no pagerank is passed on.

Site Crawl

In terms of your own site, your PageRank may be a factor in how deeply your site is crawled by Google. Sites that are many levels deep ie. where the user needs to click more than 5 or 6 times to get back to the home page are not crawled as often or as deeply if they are not perceived as relevant.

Duplicate Content

In the case of duplicate content, maybe someone has scraped your content from your site or you have the same content in more than one place, your PageRank may also be a factor in how Google decides which is the correct one to rank.

How to check PageRank

You can check the PageRank of any page using PRChecker. Or, if you’re a Firefox user, you can download the Live PageRank Add-on to display it. Alternatively, you can download the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer or Firefox. This gives you PageRank, Google Search box, Translation facillities and Bookmark options also.

Bear in mind though that the Google Toolbar PageRank is not updated frequently.

Irish Election by PageRank

For those you can’t bear to hear any more from our illustrious leaders, let’s do a popularity poll on the candidates based on PageRank. In alphabetical order:

• • Gerry Adams         :   4
  • Richard Bruton     :   4
  • Joan Burton           :   4
  • Eamonn Gilmore  :   4
  • John Gormley       :   3
  • Enda Kenny            :   ?  the Fine Gael candidate page may not be ranked  the Bebo page (www.endakenny.com) is a little unfortunate – more Simon Cowell than Vincent Browne..)
  • Brian Lenihan        :  4
  • Micheal Martin     :  3
  • Shane Ross             :  5

We appear to have a clear winner with Independent Shane Ross. Congratulations!

{Note, I’m not linking to any of them…]