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.
• An ever increasing number of people are searching Google.co.nz and selecting "New Zealand sites only".
  On www.Time2Dine.co.nz on average:
  • September 2002 - December 2004 22%
  • January 2004 - December 2004 28%
  • June 2004 - December 2004 36%
  • On my Australian website, 63% are looking via Google "Australian websites only"
• 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.
• 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 gaurantees 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 - 156 characters (Use a full stop as the 156th character, then you can continue on to around 207 for MSN and 406 characters for Yahoo)
  • In the meta key words - along with say 5 other important words/phrases on that page
  • In the h1 tag
  • Twice in first words on page - within 156 characters
  • A number of other times in the text on the page
  • Have the phrase possibly in bold, italics, and underline a number of times through the page
  • Use the phrase in the url - lowercase with words separated by "-" ie search-engine-optimisation-basics.html
  • Use the phrase in file names of relavant 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.
• Good to link out to 1 or more relevant websites on every page
• 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.

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 the "noframes" for descriptive text about the page.
• 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
• 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
• Have a consistent navigation structure on each page using search phrases as text links where possible, or alt text on image links.

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
• Google takes a snippet of approx 156 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.
• Join the Link Vault Free Online Advertising - free links on multiple sites - an outstanding program (I was previously with the Digitalpoint Co-op)
• Get a reciprocal links manager program to help automate adding links to your website - the linked program comes with my absolute recommendations, especially after my hacks have been applied to the program. Please purchase the reciprocalmanager program, then request the hacks from me.
• 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 visitor package that tracks the search phrases used to find the site, and number of visitors of course
• 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 using the Digitalpoint keyword tracker. This free tool graphs and tables historical rankings for each of up to 1000 keywords using the Google API tool. Are your rankings increasing at the same rate of your competitors for the phrases.
• Ip addresses of known Search Engines
• Free SEO Tools
• Search Term Difficulty tool - how difficult to get to the first page on Google for a search term

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.