New Zealand Search Engine Marketing - Optimisation Basics

Where to host the domain

• If most of your market is in New Zealand, the ping times/how fast the website is, is around 60 milli seconds. For a USA hosted website, the ping time is 200ms, so it can be better to host in the country that your traffic is coming from.
• To be found on Google for "Country websites only", you need to either be hosted in that country, or have a domain name of that country, or have a non country domain, and set the Geographic Target via Google webmaster tools. "Domain.com/country" can also be added to Google webmaster tools, and that subdirectory set to a specific country.
• What % of the time is the host/webserver live. I have had websites hosted where I have been on the phone promoting the website, and the website has gone down! I soon moved. If your website is down while Google is visiting, Google may drop all your pages from its listings. It may take a month or more to get your rankings back to where they were. So, very important to get a "professional" website hosting service, that guarantees and has in practice 99.99% uptime, and has policies that you quiz them about, that tell you they have sufficient backup plans should problems occur.

On page optimisation

• Use search phrase in:
  • Title - use the phrase at the start of the title, then branding - 70 characters allowed for Google and MSN
  • Twice in meta description - 155 characters. Use a full stop as the 155th character, then you can continue on to around 181 for Bing (MSN). Yahoo will be using Bings results, so no need to think of Yahoo.
  • Don't use meta keywords. They are ignored by both Google and Bing
  • In the h1 tag - a dumbed down/simplified meta title
  • The exact search phrase in the opening paragraph
  • A number of other times in the text on the page - no more than say three times, and preferably with plurals and other senses and orientations of the phrase
  • Have the phrase possibly in bold, italics, and underline a number of times through the page - I have in bold once, then in italics once when I want to use this method
  • If you are going to link to other pages from the text of your page, mention the search phrase firstly with no link from it, then link from a second mention. If your page is truely about that phrase, then to link to another page is confusing the matter.
  • Use the phrase in the url - lowercase with words separated by "-" ie search-engine-optimisation-basics.html
  • Use the phrase in file names of relevant images, along with alt text for those images
• Don't exactly copy the same text as other websites (sentences/paragraphs/whole pages) - especially if you are wanting to be found by the search words in that text.
• Validate the HTML of each page with the W3C validator
• Put all your javascript and CSS into their own external file - means your all important text is as prominant as possible on the page and page download time is fast.

On site optimisation

• Use the phrase in text links from other pages in the site back to that page
• Decide on two pages per search term and have one page slightly less optimised than the other. Make sure there is a link from the main page to the second page, but not necessarily any other links to that second page - gives 2nd indented result on Google.
• If your site is large enough that not all pages are shown on every page, use a site map - link on the search phrase describing each page
• Place a link from every page on the site, to the site map page
• If you use flash, use it for only parts of the page, and make sure that you also have plenty of text on the page, or as a last resort, use a div substitution method for showing flash, and include the words showing in the flash, in that div.
• Don't use frames on your pages - Google finds it very hard to navigate - there are ways around this, but better to not use frames in the first place.
• Don't use session id's for pages that you want the search engines to find - or use session ID's only for human visitors. Session id's can be excluded from Google via Google webmaster tools.
• Have only one URL to describe each page
• When referring to the index page, don't use index.html (or .php ...), refer to it as the root ie www.marketitonline.co.nz not www.marketitonline.co.nz/index.php. Otherwise you are creating two url's for the index page. While Google tries to resolve the page back to the root, its best not to confuse Google.
• Use 301 permanent redirects rather than 302 temporary redirects if any have to be used around the website. There is a slight loss of PR through 301 redirects.
• Have a consistent navigation structure on each page using search phrases as text links where possible, or alt text on image links.
• Have an xml sitemap that you reference in your robots.txt, and also submit to Google webmaster tools.

Whole of web optimisation

• Links, links and more links.
• The higher the Google PR of the pages linking to you the better.
• The closer your links are to pages with many external and internal links, the better.
• Use only the link text that you want to be found for - your search phrase/keyword phrase.
• Use a variety of link text. If you only use 1 phrase, the links are likely to be considered spam, and disregarded, or the page lowered on Google rankings.
• Google takes a snippet of approx 155 characters. Therefore have a description with every link that is optimised for your search phrase. This means the sites with your links and descriptions on them have a chance at being ranked on Google for that phrase.
• Get links from pages that have been cached by Google - unless you know that the pages are less than a week old and have not been cached by Google yet.
• Be wary of links pages that are duplicates of other links pages on the webmasters other websites - Google may not cache any of them, or may cache only one of them.
• If you have a new website - be prepared to wait 6+ months to be properly ranked on Google Googles aging delay for new sites.

If it's worth doing, it's worth measuring

• Use a Google Analytics to track traffic through the website, and to find what search phrases are being used to find the site
• What words are being used to find your site? Where do you rank for those terms. If you are not listed first, how about creating a separate page specifically optimised for that term so you can rank higher.
• Track yours and your competitors ranking on Google for the search terms you are targeting. Are your rankings increasing at the same rate of your competitors for the phrases.
• Free SEO Tools

RSS Feeds on your site - why have them, how to add them

I don't consider that RSS feeds are any help for SEO, rather they are good for getting people to return to your website for the news that they show. Generally, RSS feeds will be duplicate content with all the other websites around the web that use them. However, if you are smart, you can add unique content around them to make them content able to be found on Google specific for that content.

• RSS Feeds - an outline about what they are, why use them
• PHP RSS Feeds - a nice free program for adding RSS into your website.
• RSS Feeds - A rather nice program for automating RSS feeds along with some ideas about why they could be good for SEO.