I’ve worked on so many sites now in relation to SEO, page ranking, website analytics and converison rate optimization and I’ve come to the following conclusion:

SEO doesn’t actually exist.

This is the following process you use (is this really SEO) ???

1. Ensure your website is technically correct;
   1. Title Tags
   2. Meta Tags
   3. Page structure + copy
   4. Site hierarchy
2. Clever link building with appropriate keyword research

I mean seriously - this isn’t search engine optimisation.

Its basic webmaster techniques (technicalities) and simple marketing (what will potential customers be looking for?).

photo credit: San Sharma

Really quick post this one, but one to the point. Approximately 99% of the sites designed on the web are to make money. Google makes this easy.

1. Google Adwords - Drive targetted traffic to your website. If you’re an ecommerce website, advertise your products.

   Link: http://adwords.google.com
   Blog: http://adwords.blogspot.com/

2. Google Analytics - Monitor the traffic on your website using enterprise website analytics.  Identify improvement areas and increase profits by looking at what traffic converts and what doesn’t.

   Link: http://analytics.google.com
   Blog: http://analytics.blogspot.com

3. Google Adsense - Monetize your website by publishing contextually relavent text and image ads.  Get revenue for every click from your ads on your site!

   Link: http://adsense.google.com
   Blog: http://adsense.blogspot.com

4. Google Website Optimizer - Find out which design, headline, images, promotional text and calls to action work best for your website traffic and which page versions ultimately leads to making your more money on the internet.

   Link: http://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt
   Blog: http://websiteoptimizer.blogspot.com/

The blogs have been included for reference as they often contain many tips, tricks and success stories that may inspire.

Good luck!

This is going to be a short post - but on a topic that is quite often overlooked. I have a website and I have great rankings in the search engines! Job done. My site is now collecting a decent amount of traffic that is of relavence. I’m doing great. Well, too be honest - traffic is stage one. After SEO- you’re no way done.  You’ve not even started.

photo credit: eduardoizquierdo

Ask yourself: What is your website conversion? The answer should be something that impacts your bottom line.

Well, OK….what is my bottom line? An event on your website that produces revenue or contributes to the success of your website.

For some websites a conversion is much more tangible than others.  For example; a conversion for an e commerce site is quite simple; a sale.  A conversion of my blog could perhaps be a blog registration, time spent on site or somebody to comment on my blog post.

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I’m sure you have heard of Google Analytics which enables you to track the behaviour of a site.  The key to success with Analytics is using website goals.  This allows you to conveniently measure the success of your website to criteria you dictate.  For a blog (for me), 2 goals would be a user registration - and a user posting a comment on a page or post.  For this, we need to ensure tracking is on all appropriate pages and that the goals are correctly configured.

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photo credit: cote

The rel=”nofollow” attribute on links is very usefull.  Additionally nofollow in robots can be usefull.  They should not be confused with eachother.

The rel=”nofollow” description below is courtesy of robotstxt.org

The rel=”nofollow” is an attribute you can set on an HTML <a> link tag, invented by Google, and adopted by others. Those links won’t get any credit when Google ranks websites in the search results, thus removing the main incentive behind blog comment spammers robots.

See Preventing comment spam on the Official Google Blog.

From that description it sounds like it only affects the ranking, and the Google robot may still follow the links and index them. If so, it is different from the robots meta tag NOFOLLOW semantics.

Additionally, the below is courtesy of robotstxt.org too

<html>
<head>
<title>...</title>
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
</head>

There are two important considerations when using the robots <META> tag:

• robots can ignore your <META> tag. Especially malware robots that scan the web for security vulnerabilities, and email address harvesters used by spammers will pay no attention.
• the NOFOLLOW directive only applies to links on this page. It’s entirely likely that a robot might find the same links on some other page without a NOFOLLOW (perhaps on some other site), and so still arrives at your undesired page.

Now, get using nofollow links!