If you are moving your website to a new host, but wondering about your SEO, then this video will give you an answer.

So it seems that there is nothing to worry about. As long as you are moving to a good host then the fact that you are changing your IP address should not make much difference for your ranking in search engines. If you are moving to a slower host however then that could make a difference.

The way to move hosts is the leave the old host up, while you change the dns to the new host that way the is limited interuption to the users.

The guys over at Fresh Egg have done put out a great video on how to get links for your website.

An overview of the video content is below:

Link Building
People are turning to internet marketing in the recession because:

• It’s targeted
• It’s measurable
• Great ROI (return on investment)

How?

• Google algorithm
• Relevance and importance

Relevance

• Matching pages to keywords

Importance

• Query dependant
• Links are used as votes, ones with the most links are the most important ones
• The combined authority of links that are coming to your site, how much influence and authority are those links giving your site?
• Not just links but authority links!
• Linkerati: the section of your audience that have the power and authority to link to your site, bloggers, online journalists, social media, bookmarking, tagging. Every niche has a linkerati: who are they? Why do they link? Give them something to link to?
• Power of giving away value for free. If you don’t’ share your expertise you’ll never get any links, and you’ll be invisible on the web

3 DAY PLAN – to get authority links

Day one

• Find your linkerati
• 10 sites to link to
• Google it – top blogs for your area
• Blog search – Google blog search, technerati – pick a topic relevant to your area that is time relevant
• Link diagnosis – allows you to see your site and your competitors links

Day two

• Don’t rush
• Reading, listening, understanding, absorbing
• Language they use, why they link when they link, learn from that
• Comment on the posts
• Gets you in the mind of your targets

Day 3

• Create one piece of content on your site that you are going to give away to the linkerati for free
• How to or beginners guide, something that hasn’t been done before
• Money saving tip or do it yourself guide
• To collate information that’s already out there and put it together as a resource – an authoritative resource
• If your willing to dedicate time and energy to your site you will be able to start getting your authority links

Will become more and more necessary to get these links as the market becomes more saturated

Six Revisions have posted an artile looking at how to optimise your wordpress website to get more traffic from Google. If you have a wordpress website or want to know more about SEO and what is involved then the article is worth a read.

Here are the main points that the article makes.

1) Make sure that the titles are optimised. If your wordpress is putting the title of the site before the article title then you need to change that round. So that mysite – the article title, becomes, the article title – mysite.

2) Using meta descriptions. For this you need a plugin that allows you to wrtie your own meta descriptions.

3) Make sure your site uses permalinks. This means that the website is not using mysite.com/p=123 but something like, mysite.com/the-article-title. This can be done in the permalink section of wordpress.

4) Using breadcrumbs. This is not only for seo but also helpful for the readers as well. So an exmple maybe, mysite.com >category >pagetitle. Using this will allow users and search engines to find their way round your website easier.

5) Use sitemaps. You can submit your sitemaps to Google using the webmaster tools. If you use a plugin, then this can also help Google know when the latest post has been submited.

6) Describe your images. Using proper names for your image names and also good alt tags that describe the image.

7) Link to related posts. This not only helps with your seo but also helps readers see other posts that may interest them.

8 ) Use good keywords in the post headings. If you research your keywords and use them in the headings of your posts then that is a sure fire way to get them ranked better.

9) Avoid duplicate content. Using the correct htaccess file setup and also not adding duplicate content onto your wordpress site will avoid problems with the search robots.

To read more detail about these steps the full article is here: http://sixrevisions.com/wordpress/optimizing-wordpress-for-search-engines/

Google has started offering real time search results for searches. If you try searching for “Copenhagen”, then you will find a search box like the image below that updates with the latest web results, comments and posts about the Copenhagen summit.

The results box is updated every couple of seconds with new results from Twitter or from blogs. It is worth keeping an eye on this change from Google. They said it is the beginning of the real time web.

A good article on what are the primary ranking factors for websites is here http://www.davechaffey.com/blog/seo/update-to-seomoz-seo-ranking-factors/ The sumary was that the following percentages were what was though the search engines placed most weight on:

24% Trust / Authority of domain name
22% Link popularity of specific page
20% Anchor text of external links
15% On page keyword use
7% Traffic and click through data
6% Social
5% Hosting and registration data

Also out of the on page factors title tags carry the most importance, followed by keyword frequency then headings like h1 and h2. The bottom of the list of on page factors was the meta name and keyword tags which are not used that much anymore. Plenty more information in the article.

I am working on the SEO for a site about Irish fine art prints called perquisites. We have changed the website to have a faster loading front page and changed the title and meta tags to reflect what the website is about. Working with different projects is always interesting and it will be interesting to see if we can get this website to rank higher on Google.

An article about how the Google algorithm works. A useful post on SEOmoz explains some of the way Google works using charts to explain the link between links and rankings.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-algorithm-pretty-charts-math-stuff

An article on imediaconnect about how to improve your seo on youtube. The article points out that youtube is now the second biggest search engine in use after google.

Being a video sharing website, there are some other things to consider different than thinking about a website or even a corporate video. For instance, Drew (the author) says:

“For example, if you sell construction equipment, you could produce videos of stunt drivers doing freestyle tricks in a Bobcat. Or perhaps a clothing company could create video fashion shows of embarrassing styles that were once popular. You don’t have to create traditional TV commercials to get people talking about your brand.”

When optimizing your youtube upload it is not the video itself but the text for the video that matters. Youtube builds the metatags for the page based on:

Name on video -> becomes title tag
Description (more info) -> becomes description tag
Youtube tags -> become keywords tag

Drew mentions CocaCola as a good example of video optimization http://www.youtube.com/user/cocacola

To read the full article click below

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/24745.asp

A useful article has been written by Grant Simmons on imediaconnection.com, that is worth a read if you are interested in getting your website higher in search engines.

It includes how to measure a search campaign and clicks, and gives a quick guide to what things like bounce rate and pageviews mean in analytics.

If you are new to SEO and search engine analytics then its well worth a read.

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/24535.asp

A client was asking questions today about ranking for various keywords and should they try and get their website on the search engines for specific words. I get asked this somethimes and so thought I would do a quick blog post about it, to explain my point of view.

First what are keywords and keyphrases?
Well a keyword when talked about in SEO terms means a word that you would like google or a search engine to pick up and show your website in the results for that word. For example a keyword might be website or design or web.

A keyphrase is the combination of a couple of keywords. So it may be website design or web developer. It can also be a few words long such as web designer worcester.

The main thing that any website owner should be primarily concerned with when it comes to search engines is what is your target audience going to type into the search box. It does not matter if you are number 1 in google for a never searched for phrase. Also I would say that it does not really matter to get loads of traffic to a page that visitors instantly leave or that you are not interested in.

Thinking about the search user

If for example I wanted to be found in google for any keyphrase or keyword it would not be very useful to rank highly for design, really. Someone who types that into a search engine is proberly not looking for my services, and it also puts me up against a load of other websites.

For me my ideal client would be a business searching for a web design company or web designer, and also maybe restricted by area as well. So my idea customer would be searching for web design +Worcester maybe.