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It’s not exactly the sort of thing you’d expect to read in the red tops but the subject of SEO (dressed up admittedly in more reader friendly terminology such as ‘online profiling’) snuck its way into the Sunday Mirror at the weekend. More…

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Anyone who’s ever dabbled in SEO will either be already aware or very interested in the news that Google has recently updated its search ‘algorithms’. For those whose job it is to keep their website in the top page rankings for particular search terms, the rules that the search giant uses to determine ‘relevance’ are of key import.

Techcrunch implies that recent content is now given more preference but I think that this has been the case for some time now; it may be that it’s been turned up a notch. For anyone searching for archive information, preference given over to blogging or ‘almost realtime’ content isn’t necessarily ideal - but then, that is what the Advanced Search is for. More importantly, SEO gurus who are using ‘links’ strategically to influence page rankings may be feeling a bit sick today.

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I’ve just come back from Internet World in London.  One of the things that struck me about Internet World is that businesses are now starting to think about the Internet as a main distribution channel and not just an add on. ie. Throw a web page together and be done with it.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) was HUGE at Internet World. Businesses were willing to charge you and arm and a leg for the privilege of being on the first page from a search on Google.  Theses SEO experts were all saying the same stuff.  In fact if you went to the Google University at 9am you could learn everything you needed for Free!  So why are businesses prepared to spend a small fortune instead of doing it themselves?

Time, Patience, Knowledge? All of them?

The basic premise of getting a decent SEO campaign off the ground is:-

[1] Context is King. So make sure your content is relevant, accurate and up to date

[2] 3 Links is deep enough. So make sure your content is easy to find and no more than 3 links from the main entry point into your site

[3]  Search Engines can only read text. So don’t go all Flash & Video.  Make sure you actually have text and not just graphics.

[4] DIY is just as good unless your a BIG business.  You KNOW your business better than anyone. You KNOW what your customers are going to be searching for - so make your site suitable / relevant and you will get a decent ranking.

[5] Patience is a virtue.  Unless you have a tier 1 site like the BBC or CNN, its going to take a while for your site to become “known”

I would recommend any small business out there to do a little research into SEO and learn the basics before they go off and spend a small fortune with an “SEO expert”. Even if you decide not to do it yourself you’ll be better informed and be able to steer the “expert” in what your customers are likely to search for.

regards

dean

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A current work in progress at PlusNet, Force9 and Free Online is to update our meta content on the pages, from an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) point of view.

You’ll find that pretty much any site explaining or teaching SEO will mention page titles. Optimising your document title one of the simplest changes you can make to help your site achieve a better rank. It’s also one the most important factors in SEO, partly because it becomes the text that your searcher clicks on. This means a good title can increase click-through rate. It is also used to indicate whether your document content is relevant to the search performed by the user. More…

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Hello folks. My name is Wojtek and I work as Web Designer in our PlusNet Production Team. I’d like to tell you a bit about one of our main targets for the upcoming months – SEO, which is nothing else but Search Engine Optimization.

New technologies and strategies – you’ve seen Broadband Your Way coming, and you are also experiencing simplified sign up journey for all our main products. But that’s not the end of the story; we’re experimenting with SEO now. Good search engine positioning is essential now; our Referral Model has proven itself to be very efficient, but today if you don’t exist in Google – you don’t exist at all. Simple as that. Type “broadband” into google.co.uk – and where will you find PlusNet? Well, let’s close our eyes and imagine that we’re somewhere on the top… Because we’re not. We want to change it and we will do it. There are some steps to achieve this.

First of all, our content needs to be optimized. And we’re working on that; there is a special group of people here – we call them Content Writers or “The Portal Pirates” (don’t ask why, as we don’t really know either The job of these folks is to sit and to write good, user-friendly and SEO optimized text. And they do their job pretty well, which you can see for yourself more and more with every single project delivery. Keywords, hypertext links connecting pages all together; pure, semantical structure and minor navigational tricks - this is a major improvement and it will be progressing even further. Our Support System, which is a core of our knowledge base looks even clearer and better with every day.

Secondly, our codebase is heading towards what I would call “half-way decent XHTML code”. XHTML and CSS are the technologies used for separating the visual layout from the content description level, and are replacements for old-fashioned table HTML. The major advantages of migration to these powerful hypertext solutions are better accessibility, faster rendering time for the webpages and – what is probably the most important – much better cross-browser availability. It is also affecting SEO a lot due to delivering simpler, semantically oriented data structure for the engines. Stuffing Google and friends with nested tables and image maps is not really what hardcore web coders and marketing gurus do We’re still far from the ideal, so forget W3C validation for example – but give us some time and somehow this monstrous codebase of our three portals will get optimized to deliver you much better user experience. Navigational structure is also being improved on the fly, so each move requires less clicks now, and our aim is to lower this number much further.

So, my dear friends, wait and you’ll see PlusNet raising from the depths of unknowing Our main target is clear: our name and products needs to be better known amongst the crowd. And they will. It’s just a matter of time!

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