The success of Google in the Search Engine arena is down to its highly accurate search results.

These are due to its primary ranking system – PageRank. Now, while there is much debate as to how important PageRank actually is these days, there’s no escaping that it’s still one of the major factors in generating Google’s SERPs.

The idea of PageRank is a simple and thoroughly democratic one. The theory goes that in a network of interlinked documents, such as the World Wide Web, the pages with the most inbound links to them are going to be the most important, and most authoritative pages.

In simple terms a link from another web page to yours is considered a vote, a vote approving your content and recommending it to others. It is this “voting” system that is the key to Google’s results generation.

Essentially, the more votes you get, the higher your PageRank, and the higher your PageRank, the higher you will appear in the search results for keywords relating to your content.

There are other factors involved, such as the authority of the page that has the link on it, but for the purposes of this article we’ll be looking at the basic principle of a link equals a vote.

Firstly, let’s have a look at what the anatomy of a perfect inbound link would be:

• Keyword/phrases in link Anchor Text
• The link is on a page with good PageRank
• The link is on a page with relevant content
• There are few other links on the page
• The link is nestled within some relevant content

Now going back to our Rattan Furniture example, an ideal link for that site would come from a page about Rattan Furniture, or at least furniture of some description, the anchor text will be something like: Rattan Furniture Suppliers and will be one of few outbound links on that particular page and the page would have a high PR.

Realistically, a link that ticks all of these boxes will be difficult to attain at first. We’re going to start with a realistic link building campaign that will get us started, and get Google noticing our site.

We’re going to start building up a good amount of links that whilst not being great scoring links, will increase our PR slowly.

We are also going to bear in mind that getting links aren’t just useful for SEO purposes, but they are also promotional tools. Links bring people to your site, and hopefully a percentage of them will spend money with you.

So where should we start our campaign? We are going to start by building a good foundation of easily attainable links. So for this we’ll start with forums.

There are web forums for pretty much every topic and niche you could imagine. What we need to think about is the kind of forums where our potential customers might be using.

This would help promoting the site to future customers as well as bringing some backlinks from pages with relevant content.

For our Rattan Furniture example, we could target forums for realtors, interior designers, house wives and so forth.

Once we’ve searched in Google and found some relevant forums, we join them and make a signature for ourselves.

This will appear at the bottom of every post we make and can contain a link to our site.

We want this link to contain our keywords, and have some related text around it, and we also want to use slightly different variations for all the forums we post it.

For a start, we’ll aim for 5 or so forums, and our signatures could be as follows:

• Order Quality Rattan Furniture Online
• The Best Rattan Patio Furniture available online
• We supply Rattan Furniture at Trade prices
• Enjoy the outdoors in comfort with our Rattan Garden Furniture
• Rattan Furniture Suppliers

The anchor text in these links gives Google a good idea what content the landing page is going to contain and is also punchy enough to catch people’s eye in the hopes they visit our site and become a customer.

Now if you think back to our anatomy of a perfect inbound link, these signature links tick 2 of our criteria: our keywords are in the anchor text and it’s on a page with relevant content.

To get the most benefit from the forums it’s important to remember to join in the discussions and post frequently.

Don’t simply post advertising SPAM, this will get you banned very quickly. Join in debates, answer people’s questions and enjoy it – forums are social places and can be a lot of fun, and they can be a good way to get direct to your customers.

Don’t pressure-sell or just post a promotional link. Always remember to make all of your posts meaningful and helpful, and always respect the rules of each forum.

If you get involved it’s reasonable to expect to that a daily visit between your forums could bring in 2000 inbound links within a few months. 2000 low-grade links, from my experience, should be enough to get you a PR of 2.

This isn’t set in stone of course, but its good target to aim for. These links, provided they’re placed in relevant forums, should also bring in some traffic, and help promote your product or service to the right people.

Next time we’ll continue looking into building a good foundation of inbound links through blogs, directories and portals. Until then, get into those forums and get link building!

Editor Note: Ed Gray comes from a graphic design background, having started out in the UK Newspaper industry before moving to magazines and advertising before finally moving onto the web.

He has been designing websites for several years now and has been closely following trends in Web Standards, Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization.

He currently works as an SEO & SEM consultant for a variety of companies, including the Personal Travel Group.

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Related Articles at E-MoneyMarketing:

Getting to Grips with Google
Getting to Grips with Google – Part II – Keyword Analysis
Getting to Grips with Google Part III continued – OnPage SEO
Getting to Grips with Google Part III – OnPage SEO

Going back to our Rattan Furniture shop example, we’ve already optimised our home page, so what can we do to optimize our inner pages? The OnPage SEO techniques we covered last time still apply and should be used on every page on the website. But, do we want our inner pages to be targeting the same keywords in the same manner?

In a word, the answer is no. There’s no point for us to target the same keywords. Each page of our site is going to have specific and hopefully unique content which we will be optimizing in exactly the same manner as we did last time.

This time, however, there is a little more that we can do. We can build more SEO factors into our sub pages through navigation, file structure and file naming.

Let’s imagine that our Rattan Furniture site consists of the homepage, and about page, a contact page, and three pages each consisting of one particular piece of rattan furniture. The first thing to remember is that we want the content of all of our sub pages to relate nicely to our homepage, as well as the content on those pages themselves.

Firstly, let’s look at our navigation. Ideally, our links will be text rather than images, and the “anchor” text of them will relate nicely to what’s on the destination page. It is also beneficial for our page to be named with our keywords for that page in the filename.

Our navigation and filenames, including our 3 products, could be something like:

• Home (index.html)
• About Shop Name (about-shop-name.html)
• Rattan Garden Chair (rattan-furniture/rattan-garden-chair.html)
• Rattan Conservatory Table (rattan-furniture/rattan-conservatory-table.html)
• Rattan Patio Set (rattan-furniture/rattan-patio-set.html)
• Contact Us (contact-us.html)

As you can see, I’ve filed our products in their own folder called “rattan-furniture”. This nicely ties our products, such as patio-set.html together with the overall theme of our site. With this in mind, let’s look at the optimisation of one of our pages.

As before, our page title can take something like the following format:

Company Name | Keyword 1, Keyword 2

But this time we can just focus on the content of that particular page, rather than the general keywords. So, let’s look at our Garden Chair page. Our TITLE will be:

Shop Name | Rattan Garden Chair

We’ll keep it nice and specific here, there’s no need for us to put anymore in here. What we’ve done here is cover a nice variation to one of our original keyphrases. By creating variations such as these we increase the chances of us capturing traffic, which is what this whole process is really about.

The rest of the page will be optimised as before: our H1 tag will match our TITLE tag, our page description will contain the keywords in the TITLE, our images will have an ALT attribute with our keywords inside and the image filename will also include our keywords and we’ll have a few instances of our keywords in our body text, with one instance enclosed in <STRONG> tags.

This we can apply to all of our remaining pages. Remember not to just pepper the pages with too many keywords, keep it relevant to humans and Google will understand.

The Final Touches

Before we move onto promoting our website we’re going to make sure we’ve added an XML sitemap to our site. You can generate Google-friendly sitemaps here. An XML sitemap will just help Google that little bit more to trawl ALL of your pages, and if your site includes dynamically generated pages, this will be incredibly helpful to GoogleBot.

We’re also going to install Google’s Webmaster Tools on our pages and submit our XML sitemap to it. We should also install Google Analytics too. These tools are going to be very helpful when we start our impending link building campaign, as they’ll help us monitor our progress and see what’s working and what isn’t.

Editor Note: Ed Gray comes from a graphic design background, having started out in the UK Newspaper industry before moving to magazines and advertising before finally moving onto the web.

He has been designing websites for several years now and has been closely following trends in Web Standards, Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization.

He currently works as an SEO & SEM consultant for a variety of companies, including the Personal Travel Group.

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Related Articles at E-MoneyMarketing:

Getting to Grips with Google
Getting to Grips with Google Part III – OnPage SEO
Getting to Grips with Google – Part II – Keyword Analysis
Getting to Grips with Google Part IV – Link Building & Promotion

Once Google understands completely what your pages are about, it can then start coupling this with your backlinks to decide where to put you in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

So how do we do this? When search engines were in their infancy, SE’s tried to understand the contents of pages by calculating things such as keyword density.

Techniques such as keyword stuffing could then be used to fill the page with the desired keywords and thereby raising the density for that term, and in turn ranking better for it.

Nowadays SEs, and in particular Google, are a lot smarter. They no longer look at your keyword density, and instead use other markers to understand a page.

These markers are semantic markers already built into HTML. HTML was originally conceived with the idea that the way a page was constructed would format the information, tag it, in a way that made it understandable.

The use of <h1> tags, for example, aren’t just there for styling purposes.

Semantics in HTML

These tags give you the chance of not only greater control over the styling of your pages, but also they provide good explanations of your pages. By placing our keywords in these semantic tags, we can put more emphasis on the words we want, and make Google’s job a lot easier by spoon feeding it the content of our pages.

These semantic markers include:

TITLE

META Description

H1 – H6

STRONG

Before we get placing our keywords within these tags, it’s important to remember that Google tries it’s damndest to be human. GoogleBot wishes it was human. And with this in mind, it likes pages to be relevant to humans, and readable by humans, so we’re not going to go overboard here – keyword stuffing is not acceptable simply because it’s not useful to humans.

Using our Rattan Furniture as an example, keyword stuffing in a title might look like the following:

<title>Rattan Furniture, Furniture Rattan, Rattan, Rattan Garden Furniture, Rattan</title>

This just isn’t necessary. Simply saying something many times is not going to make GoogleBot rank you better. GoogleBot isn’t in charge of rankings, it just parses and indexes pages. Remember, OnPage SEO generally isn’t going to shoot you up the rankings by itself, so there’s little point wasting your time doing this kind of activity.

Something more appropriate, something more human-friendly might take this format:

Company Name | Keyword 1, Keyword 2

So in our Rattan Furniture example:

Shop Name | Rattan Garden, Patio & Conservatory Furniture

This would be effective for our homepage – it’s nice and general about the content of our site, contains all of our keywords and isn’t unnatural looking.

The next place for our keywords is out META description tag. This text is often displayed in SERPs, so again, we need to make this human friendly, descriptive, and punchy too; this is our hook to get people to click on our site so it really needs to include a call to action. Keep it reasonably short, under 25 words if possible. Obviously we’ll include our keywords and phrases in here too, again, remembering not to keyword stuff.

As for the META Keywords tag, Google does not read or index this. But, Yahoo and MSN do so it’s worth including them. Keep it to one instance per word.

Next up we’ll be using our <h1> tag. This is our main heading for the page. I’ve seen many designers who are being far too clever for their own good using this tag to display the corporate logo.

Whilst semantically I suppose this would be correct, it’s a wasted opportunity if you ask me. We’ll use the <h1> tag here to re-affirm to Google the contents of this page by slightly reworking our TITLE:

<h1>Rattan Garden, Patio & Conservatory Furniture from Shop Name</h1>

After that we’ll try and include a few instances of our keywords and keyphrases throughout the body copy of our homepage. Remember that our keyphrases overlap nicely so if we just include 1 instance of each, we’ll have 3 instances of “rattan” and 5 instances of “furniture” without doing any stuffing.

We don’t want “furniture” to overtake “rattan” by too much, so we’ll try to add a couple of extra “rattan”s to even them out. It may be prudent to split the text up into a section for each of our keyphrases and use the <h2> – <h6> tags to emphasize each particular keyphrase.

We’ll also place the first instance of our keyphrase in the body inside a <strong> tag to emphasize it.

We must also remember to apply an “alt” description to any images placed on the page. The same applies to everything that went before – no keyword stuffing – a short description of the image is best, including 1 instance of our main keyphrase:

<img src=”images/rattan-furniture.jpg” alt=”rattan patio, garden and conservatory furniture” />

We can put variations of our keyphrases on other images, but remember to not keyword stuff, make it a good description of the image and keyword rich.

Apply all of the above and you’re on your way to having a nicely optimised page. Next time we’ll be continuing with OnPage SEO, and looking at optimizing the sub pages of your site, and what kind of navigation structures your site should have along with page titles and other naming conventions.

Editor Note: Ed Gray comes from a graphic design background, having started out in the UK Newspaper industry before moving to magazines and advertising before finally moving onto the web.

He has been designing websites for several years now and has been closely following trends in Web Standards, Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization.

He currently works as an SEO & SEM consultant for a variety of companies, including the Personal Travel Group.

Ed lives in southern Spain with his two cats, his iMac and his beloved Martin guitar.

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Related Articles at E-MoneyMarketing:

Getting to Grips with Google Part III continued – OnPage SEO
Getting to Grips with Google
Getting to Grips with Google – Part II – Keyword Analysis
Getting to Grips with Google Part IV – Link Building & Promotion

It’s all well and good ranking number 1 for phrases such as “new and used vintage wine racks” but if no one is searching for that term, then your efforts will be fruitless.

By doing a keyword analysis, we can look at what keywords & keyphrases are being searched for the most, and also then we can check to see what the competition is like for those terms, and if we think we can stand a chance for ranking well for them.

First off, let’s suppose your online business is one that sells rattan garden furniture. Obviously we’ll be optimizing for the term “rattan furniture,” but should this be our only target? Let’s have a look.

Head on over to the Google Keyword Tool and let’s type “rattan furniture” into the box. Give it a few seconds and a long list of search terms will appear in order of relevance.

I would suggest scrolling down the list and clicking the link to download the file as a .csv file. This way we can open in Excel or any other spreadsheet program and sort our columns in descending order and remove any information we don’t need.

Further down the list we can see that there is a section headed “Additional keywords to be considered”, so let’s download this .csv file too.

When we open the file, we’ll sort these in order of Local Search Volume, because if you’re selling rattan furniture, chances are you’re selling to a local market in your chosen country.

We see our chosen term of “rattan furniture” as the top of the list, shortly followed by “rattan outdoor furniture” and “rattan garden furniture”. As you can see, these terms are really the only ones with significant search volumes.

We can do the same with the second spreadsheet we downloaded, which contains additional related searches.

By repeating the process we see “furniture”, “garden furniture” and “living room furniture” as our top searches. The top two are relevant to us, but the third isn’t quite in our niche.

But if we look down further we can see the phrases “patio furniture” and “conservatory furniture” that have very good local search volumes and relate nicely to what we’re selling.

Now we can search for these terms in Google and assess our competition.

Before we do this, we are going to install the SEOQuake toolbar into our browser. This will give us some crucial information about the sites we’re up against.

Once installed, now when we do a search for “rattan furniture,” and open the first few links, we will see the SEO information in the SEOQuake toolbar at the top of the page.

Our top hit in this particular instance is a company called Cane Direct. SEOQuake tells us it only has a page rank of 2, which is easily achievable in as little as a month so.

For a term with such high volume, this is not that competitive so it won’t be too difficult to get us on the first page for this and related searches.

Repeat this process for the other search terms in our list. If you see sites at the top of the results with very high PR (5 or above), or the first page being littered with high PR sites it might be prudent to avoid that particular term.

In that case, head back to our list of keyword suggestions and pick another, relevant phrase, and start the process again.

What we’re aiming for is a list of 3 to 5 keywords/phrases that we can then start to build into our site and finally use to promote our site through links.

In this case we’ve picked 5 keyphrases and a total of 6 words.

Our list might look something like this:

• rattan furniture
• rattan outdoor furniture
• rattan garden furniture
• patio furniture
• conservatory furniture

The thing to think of when picking keyphrases is that it helps if the words overlap – in our list we have furniture and rattan repeated across several phrases.

This helps because they’re going to be easy keywords and phrases to place around our pages without them looking unnatural or “stuffed”.

Next time we’re going to look at how to optimize your pages to target these phrases, and most importantly, help Google understand exactly what your page is about.

Editor Note: Ed Gray comes from a graphic design background, having started out in the UK Newspaper industry before moving to magazines and advertising before finally moving onto the web.

He has been designing websites for several years now and has been closely following trends in Web Standards, Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization.

He currently works as an SEO & SEM consultant for a variety of companies, including the Personal Travel Group.

Ed lives in southern Spain with his two cats, his iMac and his beloved Martin guitar.

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Related Articles at E-MoneyMarketing:

Getting to Grips with Google
Getting to Grips with Google Part III – OnPage SEO
Getting to Grips with Google Part III continued – OnPage SEO
A visitor from Google I never expected!

Anyway… Guys, meet Ed Gray. Our new guest blogger. I’m very glad to have him onboard. And I present to you his first article in a article series on SEO. Ed…take it away. Enjoy the article folks.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has long been a buzzword in the internet marketing industry. And in spite of that attention, it’s an often misunderstood practice.

Trawl the web for SEO techniques and you’ll be bamboozled by a myriad of conflicting opinions and contradictory advice.

In this series, I’m going to ignore all the waffle and give you a guide on how you can increase your traffic with some practical tips on how to get search results from Google.

I won’t even bother claiming to get you to the top position. Such claims are always nonsense and should be regarded with heavy skepticism.

The aim of this guide is to simply set you off in the right direction, increase your traffic and ultimately increase your revenues. Over the coming weeks we will be going through the following steps:

1. Understanding Google
2. Keyword Analysis
3. OnPage SEO
4. Link Building & Promotion

Follow the instructions and you’ll be well on your way to getting to grips with Google.

It is important to view SEO as an ongoing exercise – SEO practices should vary depending on results, if something is working for you, focus on that.

SEO is very much a trial and error process and should never be considered to be completed.

Understanding Google

Before we get started, it is important to understand how Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are generated, and what factors are important in having a well optimised page. No one but Google can fully understand exactly how it ranks web pages, but we do have a pretty good idea of the main factors involved. These include:

1. Domain/website Age
2. Keyword Usage
3. Host Domain Authority
4. Page Rank

The first here is obvious. Google prefers websites that have been around for a while. That doesn’t mean new sites cannot rank well, it is possible to do well without having this factor on your side.

But there’s no doubt having a site around for a few years certainly helps. This is why it often pays to use previously used expired domains.

The second here is the most misunderstood part of SEO going. I’m sure you’ll have heard people talk about the importance of keyword density, META keywords and the like.

This is all nonsense. Google simply doesn’t care what your keyword density is, and it doesn’t bother to read your META keywords. What number 2 refers to is more about keyword placement than anything else.

This will be covered in the OnPage SEO section and continued into Link Building as it involves how your web pages are constructed and how your inbound links are formed. Host Domain Authority refers to how important Google views the domain.

Good examples of this are sites like Wikipedia, The BBC, Ebay and Amazon. Pages within these sites rank well partly because of how authoritative Google views their domains.

These are important websites and so it follows that the pages within them will contain important information. The final factor, PageRank, is best thought of as a count of votes for a particular page.

As a page receives inbound links, these are considered as “votes” by Google. The more votes, from more authoritative sites, the higher the PageRank.

It was this factor upon which Google originally built their search concept and remains a pretty important factor to this day.

With these in mind, next time we’ll start looking at choosing and targeting the right keywords and keyphrases for your web pages.

Editor Note:  Ed Gray comes from a graphic design background, having started out in the UK Newspaper industry before moving to magazines and advertising before finally moving onto the web.

He has been designing websites for several years now and has been closely following trends in Web Standards, Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization.

He currently works as an SEO & SEM consultant for a variety of companies, including the Personal Travel Group.

Ed lives in southern Spain with his two cats, his iMac and his beloved Martin guitar.

[tags]EMoneyMarketing, Search engine optimization, SEO, online marketing, page rank, keyword density[/tags]

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Related Articles at E-MoneyMarketing:

Getting to Grips with Google Part III continued – OnPage SEO
Getting to Grips with Google – Part II – Keyword Analysis
Getting to Grips with Google Part III – OnPage SEO
So you think you know Google well enough?