By now our regular readers will have a fairly broad knowledge of what goes on in search engine optimization and of the terminology used. There’s always more to learn though! Just a few terms today, because as they get more complex we like to give concepts more space.

Code swapping is a bit of a dirty trick played by people looking for very short term returns. The idea is to build up SEO for a site with one set of content, and then change it as soon as a certain level of performance in the SERPs is reached. For example, a site could offer something for free to build up authority and inbound links, then start charging once it has taken advantage of the SEO benefits of providing free value. The technique is also known rather neatly as ‘Bait and Switch’. There is an upcoming blog post on code swapping tomorrow, discussing the topic in detail if you want to know more about how (and if) it works.

Splash pages are all about graphics and grabbing user attention. They rarely provide much value, and although they can attract attention the first time, they can get annoying if going through the splash page is a requirement rather than a choice. See our information on using Flash and why it’s less than ideal for SEO.

Breadcrumb navigation is an excellent device and highly recommended SEO practice. The breadcrumbs are the line of links at the top of the page that look like this: main page>next level>this page. The can be arranged to show a user’s path through your site (landing page>up one level>another page at the same level>this page, for example) or simply reflect the layered structure of the site. They are an easy to use text based navigation tool.

A Walled Garden is a set of web pages that link to each other but not to anyone else. An example might be a group of friends who have specialist pages, say about a particular variety of orchid. If they link to each other (the most directly relevant sites) and there are no links with orchids.com or any greater hubs, the walled garden is isolated. Sites in the garden may still show up in SERPs, but they’ll rank badly- their Pagerank is extremely poor. Sometimes walled gardens appear inside sites with very badly set out navigation.

Canonical issues relate to duplicated content. Particularly if your website uses product descriptions or other text provided by manufacturers or something similar, there will probably be duplicate content on your website somewhere. That brings up a host of complications with search engine algorithms, because they don’t like duplicate content. We have a dedicated post on how to handle canonical issues, so have a read if you think they might be causing problems for you.

User Generated Content is anything you can get site users to provide for you. Comments, product reviews, anything like that. The best example of user generated content is Wikipedia, which is almost entirely user generated and immensely successful. For most small commercial sites it can be useful but it would be a mistake to think of it as SEO gold, because it may not be.

Duplicated content is bad. That’s a simple but fairly fundamental tenet of search engine optimization. By ‘canonical issues’ we mean those that relate to having more than one copy of a particular piece of text, either between two pages on your site or on two entirely different websites. Note that we don’t mean short phrases or titles – think paragraphs of text or more. The ‘canon’ or ‘canonical copy’ is the original, from which the others were taken.

How search engine algorithms decide which copy is the canonical one is an open question but in most cases it is probably decided by a few simple factors. If one version is older, that will be the canon. If one appears higher in the navigation structure it may be more likely to be the canonical copy, and the site that has the greater authority it will probably be given the benefit of the doubt about owning the original if two versions appear on different sites simultaneously.

The first point to note is pretty obvious- don’t copy content from other websites and post them on your own. Even if you’re honest about where it came from, it’s not good SEO. If you want to, provide a discussion in your own words and a link to someone else’s information. Better yet, do some extra research and write your own article on the same topic. All content on your site should be original. If you don’t have the time or the inclination to write plenty of fresh and optimised content, a search engine optimisation company like us can do it for you. Our SEO services include expert copywriting.

The 310 redirect is a useful tool for avoiding duplicate content between sites you own. Having one copy of some text at mysite.com and one at mysite.co.uk will not help you and isn’t a great strategy either for easy updating or search engine optimisation. Canonical issues will result in one copy ranking poorly, so use a 301 redirect to transfer users from one site to content on the other rather than maintain separate copies. It’s discussed in a blog post of its own if you want to learn more about it.

It’s sometimes difficult to avoid canonical issues within your own site. Say you take product descriptions direct from manufacturers, and some products appear more than once on the site in different categories. Short of writing two or more different descriptions for each product, which is time consuming for retailers with a lot of products or frequently updated stock lines, what can you do to avoid canonical complications?

Redirection can be tricky in that sort of environment. In 2009, Google, Yahoo and some other search engines introduced support for the canonical link tag. This is very simple to use, and just tells crawlers that what’s behind a link is a copy of a canonical original that appears elsewhere on the site. It doesn’t work across domains, so you will still need to use a 301 redirect for that, but within a single site the canonical link tag is very useful.

Toolbar pagerank shouldn’t be confused with the plain PageRank metric. PageRank is an important concept in search engine optimization, and we’ve discussed the basic measure in greater detail elsewhere, so many of our readers will know that it’s a metric of the quality and number of inbound links any site has. It can be though of as describing how likely a randomly wandering user is to land on a particular site within a network. Unlike Alexa Rank and some others, a high PageRank is good and a low one poor.

Google toolbar users will see a little PageRank box for every site they visit. This Toolbar PageRank doesn’t return the standard PageRank value. It is normalised so the relative PageRank levels of any two sites can be easily compared. The toolbar version is a number between zero and ten, ten being the return for the best ranked sites.  It’s not so much a factor in SEO as guidance for Google users, to help them understand the good standing of any site they might look at.

So Toolbar PageRank is obviously a simplification. It’s also not updated nearly as frequently as standard PageRank- possibly only once every month or two. Toolbar PageRank is easy to check, but as an SEO tool it’s very limited because the values returned are often out of date.

Google Directory PageRank is another version and displayed differently again. Go to any category in the directory (Google directory only- PageRank is a term owned exclusively by the Goog) and you will see sites ranked not alphabetically but in PageRank order. There is a little green bar beside each one that graphically displays that site’s Directory PageRank. If you are listed in Google Directory- and if not, why not?- this is an interesting search engine optimisation metric for you to look at, and is directly relevant to the amount of traffic you can expect from the directory listing.

And now a note of caution. PageRanks of all kinds are some of the best known SEO metrics, and there are plenty of black hat operators waiting to exploit anyone looking for a quick way to boost any of their PageRank returns. One of the most effective methods used to be Google Jacking- using redirects to grab PageRank from any other page, but usually Google, which has an outstanding PageRank as you would expect. This does not work any more, and like any black hat SEO, trying it can get you banned from the SERPs.

Be aware of anyone offering a ranking checker and then asking for money to improve it. You may end up paying for a guaranteed improvement in a black hat SEO company’s own proprietary metric and not for any real change in Google’s PageRank or any measure that counts. Not all metrics are useful or meaningful.

By all means use our free SEO tools and other people’s rank checking tools to investigate how you and your competitors come up, but stick to established metrics- PageRank, TrustRank, Alexa Rank, and other well known measures

Using long tail key phrases as part of your search engine optimization strategy is something that can bring great results even in really competitive industries. There are usually a few really common searches that are performed all the time, a handful of fairly common ones, and a huge number of less frequently searched upon combinations. Picking up the frog example, the common searches would be something like ‘frogs’, ‘British frogs’, and ‘tree frogs’. Then there would be some directly related to commerce, like ‘buy frogs in London’ and ‘live frog food’.

After the obvious search terms, there are a huge number of rarely searched upon terms forming the long tail. These rare searches could be specific species like ‘Painted belly monkey frog’ or ‘horned toad’, or they could be location specific, like ‘buy frog food in Llandudno’, or something entirely different. The long tail is growing all the time. SEO experts estimate that up to 25% of all searches performed today will be new and unique, and belonging to the long tail of some topic.

When choosing which keywords are best for your site and your SEO strategy, it’s very tempting to go for the terms that are most commonly searched on. However, the most common terms are also what the most other websites will be targeting. Particularly if yours is a high competitive industry, the long tail can be an excellent resource.

While keywords which are long tail are less commonly searched for, traffic levels may still be quite significant. Because they are more specific, they are also more monetisable. Conversion is the ultimate goal of SEO, after all. If a user searches for ‘buy live frog food in Llandudno’ and your North Wales pet shop can rank well, the chances it will result in a sale are very high. If you can provide an information page on horned toads, that will get you a higher percentage of the traffic for that search than a page on general frogs, because there are thousands of those and most search traffic will go to the top few. There is less competition and the user goes straight to relevant content. If you can find the right long tail keywords, they can make a huge difference to your SEO.

The same theory also works when buying advertising space or running a PPC campaign from search providers like Google. Long tail keywords are often cheaper because they are less commonly used and competition for them is low. Opportunities to leverage the long tail of search distribution do exist, so it is well worth including some long tail terms in your keyword plan and create excellent content on your landing pages.

Google and the other search engines evaluate websites using web crawlers, also called spiders or bots. These are fully automated critters that follow links across the internet independent of their owners, and report on what they find. That information is used to measure relevancy to particular searches and also to rank websites and decide which are the best. There are a slew of other factors at work, of course- SEO is a complex business- but the data gathered by crawlers is extremely important.

Sites with high authority, those that the search engines think are good, are crawled (or ‘indexed’) frequently. If they are known to update content frequently, that could mean a few times a day. New and unknown sites, or those with low authority for whatever reason, won’t be crawled so often. Poorer quality sites may only be indexed once a month or less.

Collecting and storing data with bots is cheap, but when that data runs into terabytes upon terabytes, using it effectively does become more problematic. Of course, there is incredibly valuable information in Google’s data warehouses, but nobody can deal with an infinite amount of data. There are millions and millions of sites on the web, some with a lot of content and many different subpages, and search engines need to prioritise the ones they gather data from.

For the same reasons, crawlers limit the information they gather from each site. And like the frequency of crawl, the amount of information gathered varies according to the good standing of the site, or otherwise. The higher a site’s authority, the more the crawler will look at.

For most sites, the bots restrict themselves to the top four levels of the url. That means thissite.com/level2/level3/level4/apage.html won’t be considered. Any keywords or content on it won’t contribute relevancy information. Users don’t like clicking through a lot of levels either, so keeping your site structure at four levels or less is a sound idea for more than one search engine optimization reason.

They also don’t index more than about 150kB of content from any page or subpage. Images don’t count towards the total, so you do get quite a lot of text within the limit, and all of that will contribute towards your overall SEO efforts. Again, most users won’t read through nearly that much content on any one page either, so there is a second reason to keep each one at a reasonable size. You have to consider your search engine reputation management with every aspect of your site.

Titles should be no more than 70 characters in length or there abouts. That’s not far off the length of the last sentence, so as you can see, it’s a fairly generous allowance. Anything longer than that will look a little odd anyway.

There are other factors that limit where bots will look- Flash objects and poor or image based navigation, for example- but as a rule of thumb, create content for easy reading by people and you probably won’t have to worry much about indexation limits. It is a good policy that will serve your SEO well in a lot of areas.

The way we all access and use the web is changing. More people are using the internet from mobile devices. Some of those devices will be iPhones, Android phones and Blackberries, which are designed with larger screens and internet usability firmly in mind, but many aren’t. Even normal phones can be used to access the internet, but the screens are much smaller and the keyboards only those found on standard phones rather than the full qwerty style you get on handheld computers. There is no doubt that internet use on both kinds of device is a growing trend, so search engine optimization professionals will need to consider it.

The technology phones use to parse websites is generally excellent and very effective. Even if you own an old website built well before the rise of the mobile internet, the chances are that you’ll be able to browse through it on any internet enabled phone. You would probably be surprised just how well most sites appear.

However, there are some things that just don’t work well on a small screen. Long lists are one. Most phone internet software will automatically remove images and flash, so don’t worry about them cluttering up precious space. That is another SEO reason not to use image based navigation, though!

While we don’t recommend focusing your SEO strategy on optimising your site for phones, how your site looks on one is worth considering. The vast majority of your traffic will come from laptop and desktop computers, but internet phone use will increase significantly in the next few years. There may be a few small factors you can tweak to make phone browsing easier on your site. Social media on phones is a strong growth area and is worth keeping in mind when building your SMM strategy, too.

Get an internet enabled phone and check out your site. How easy is it to navigate from page to page? Can you enter text in search boxes without problems? How do the titles look? The iPhone, for example, allows users to zoom into content, but a lot of mobile internet devices don’t and it is better if nobody has to. If you’re starting a new site, internet phone use is another good reason to choose the right domain. Because browsing with a phone usually costs money and takes more time than usual, more users type addresses into their address bar on mobile devices than standard computers, rather than going through search engines. A memorable domain name is good search engine optimisation practice any time, but that is especially so for mobile phones.

Another thing to consider is loading speed. In these days of near total broadband coverage, loading speeds are no longer really a consideration for regular user friendliness (and hence SEO). For phones, be careful of anything on your page that might cause a user to reload the page or refresh content unintentionally. Talk to a friendly web developer about the html on your site, and the Java if there is any. The way Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are implemented can also have an impact on refreshing and loading speeds.

So what is cloaking and what does it have to do with SEO?

Cloaking is the term for deceptive programming in which you show search engine spiders website content that is completely different to that which human visitors see. It is considered unethical when it is deliberately used to deceive the search engine spiders in order to attain a higher search engine result ranking. One of the reasons for search engines’ dislike of cloaking is that it can lead to human browsers clicking on a seemingly relevant link for their entered keyword from a results page only to encounter an irrelevant site, which given some of the industries with which cloaking is popular, can often be offensive or pornographic. This isn’t a techniques which any reputable SEO Company will employ on their own or any client websites.

Cloaking runs side scripts to websites and delivers information to the search engines that is different to that it shows to the user. The website that search engine spiders come across is often in the format of HTML, with the human user encountering images or Flash. Cloaking can also involve inserting irrelevant information into a website’s Meta tags to give it a high ranking in a particular keyword’s search engine results even though the visible content of the website is not relevant.

Websites that use cloaking alternate what they show depending on whether they are accessed by a human user or a search engine. While a user will normally access the page via a search engine and end up on the deceptive page, search engines tend to access the page through a directory page before then being confronted with the fake page. These measures help to ‘fool’ the systems that search engines have in place to detect cloaking and therefore this and other manipulative methods are known black hat search engine optimization.

Websites can desire to make use of cloaking for such well-meaning purposes as to make a webpage more visually appealing to a human user than the content that is desired to be shown to a search engine’s spiders. Even so, cloaking remains very much unethical SEO activity. It is not ideal for your company’s online reputation management due to the risk of search engine penalties, and even if it allows your website to achieve a high search engine result ranking, if a human user ends up on a different page from the one that they were expecting and it therefore becomes irrelevant to them, then they will probably leave. As cloaking is therefore unlikely in many cases to lead to a high conversion rate of visits to sales, it is best to consult a professional SEO company for advice on how to improve your appropriate website traffic and get a higher conversion rate by using ethical methods instead.

Don’t be tempted by a search engine optimisation company offering cloaking services even with promises of traffic. Cloaking is one of those techniques that less respectable companies may use to persuade you to invest in their SEO services, by using it to generate high traffic figures that they can then advertise. For this reason, it is best to ask for information on conversions of hits to sales when looking for a good search engine optimization company.

On its own, pay per click advertising, or PPC, is limited in its effectiveness. By combining PPC with a well thought out search engine optimization strategy, however, your online business can fare much better. This is because both PPC and SEO have various strengths, which means that, taken together, they can complement each other very well.

PPC, for example, can be both controlled and predicted fairly easily. It can be deliberately targeted to specific users at specific times, such as on specific days and in particular parts of the world. It is also, however, increasingly expensive. SEO, on the other hand, while often cheaper, is the more difficult to control. PPC is instantaneous in both its implementation and effect, going live within minutes and immediately drawing visitors directly to a target webpage. Search engine optimisation, meanwhile, is more organic. Its forte is in gradually attracting more visitors over time through a variety of different entry points – in fact, onto any page of yours that has been indexed by the search engines. This means that it is the user who has a bit more control of the experience.

Many companies will tend to choose between PPC and SEO, rather than making use of both simultaneously. Money will get spent on PPC campaigns that just don’t generate the visits and above all, the sales, to justify the outlay. Businesses mostly using search engine optimisation services, meanwhile, will often lament what they feel to be the lost time between when it is implemented and the point at which an appreciable increase in site visitors and resulting sales occurs. This lack of an instant impact is not ideal when you have a specially timed campaign that you wish to promote, for example if you are an online shop that wishes to market a particular range at popular times of the year such as Christmas or Halloween.

What you may wish to do instead is combine the two methods strategically. You can choose keywords to ensure a good longer term flow of visitors, but also place a PPC advertisement at the aforementioned times of the year to heighten your shorter term impact. This is particularly handy when you have a one-time-only sales event where SEO on its own just can’t make its impact quickly enough.

You can also use PPC as part of your internet reputation management to divert attention from the bad news or reviews that can so easily populate the first page of the search results when a user searches for your brand or related keywords. Another benefit is that with Google Adwords, you can even get your PPC advertisement to appear on the search engine results page when a user searches for your rival’s brand. So you may not even need them to search for your own keywords to be able to produce results!

For more information on how to make the most of SEO, just get in touch with us today, here at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk.

Publishing articles is a great way to keep your search engine optimization campaign fresh, and while, in our opinion at least, everyone should use them, unfortunately too many people abuse them, which only results in devaluing their worth in the eyes of the reader and the search engines. But, written and handled properly, article submissions can be fantastic SEO tools in terms of increasing traffic to your site and optimising your Internet reputation management.

Here are a few top tips to make sure your articles hit the mark with everyone.

Use your expertise
You don’t have to be the next Albert Einstein or William Shakespeare to do this. For example, if you are a beauty therapist or a mechanic then you are qualified and know a great deal more than your reader, so use your knowledge to inform them.

Find your USP
Spend some time researching your field and write about topics that aren’t being covered well as this way readers are far more likely to land on your article rather than having to trawl through dozens of other articles on the same subject to maybe find yours.

Watch your language
Don’t be too informal when writing articles as this can make you sound less authoritative. Remember that the people you are addressing are potential clients. If you sound professional then people will trust what you’re saying and this will do wonders in terms of your online reputation management, as you’ll be viewed as a trustworthy source.

Don’t over-expose yourself
You may be very proud of your prose, but make sure that you don’t list your SEO articles on too many sites and article directories as this can often have a negative effect on how readers and sites view you. Choose where to publish carefully as it’s better to be listed in a few select places where you’ll attract the right type of traffic rather than being seen on any old site.

Only pay for quality
There’s no getting away from the fact that if writing is not your thing then it can be difficult and time consuming putting together new articles on a regular basis. But, before you pay someone to write them for you make sure you see other examples of their work.

There are literally thousands of people offering to write SEO articles on your behalf, but many of them are low quality and will do little for your long-term rankings or online reputation. Make sure you choose a good SEO company that employs professional copywriters that will take the time to research your subject before you jump into paying for articles.

Content before keywords
As with any search engine optimisation, content is, and always will be, king. We’ve all come across articles that are nothing but fluff crammed to the hilt with keywords that have little or nothing to do with what you were searching for. While keywords are important, make sure that the content is actually informative and makes readers feel that they have actually learnt something from it.

Links are a really important part of any effective search engine optimization strategy, but if you’re not an expert in SEO link building and the intricacies of using links as SEO tools, then it can be a daunting task knowing what to do and equally importantly what not to do when it comes to building SEO links that work.

Unfortunately, there is no getting away from the fact that links are complicated beings and can be a double-edged sword, working both for you and against you, but if you decide to go it alone without the help of a professional SEO company and handle your own link building strategies, here are a few tips.

Quality wins out
A basic misconception is that any exposure on the Internet is good, but this is not true. When creating links with external sites, be choosy, as the people you’re connected to can have a significant impact in terms of your search engine reputation management. Yes, link building is time consuming, but it’s imperative that you take the time to make sure that the sites you’re linked to are relevant. Link building schemes may seem like an easy solution, but they are pointless if they don’t generate traffic for you.

Aim high
If you are a genuine and reputable website then other genuine and reputable websites and organisations will usually be happy to link to you, so don’t go for the easy option and accept the first people that come knocking at your door. The key to effective SEO link building is to be pro-active and seek out the people that you want to link to rather than vice versa. Therefore, spend the time finding the right places and the right people to approach to create the best and most effective links.

Get personal
When approaching webmasters to request links, remember that there is a person reading your email and appeal to them on a personal level. Don’t just send out a generic begging request, if possible find out the name of the person in question and address them directly.

Yes, we know that this takes more time, but it also bears more fruit in terms of the calibre of links you can achieve this way. Just because you’re approaching someone online don’t forget the basics of good business. Would you send a letter to a large potential client addressed to “To whom it may concern’? No, so when you’re looking to implement effective link building strategies with high calibre sites, take the time to do your research and it will reap far better results.

Keep on connecting
While you should never compromise on quality, it’s also vital to stay on the ball and keep your link building strategies up-to-date. There is no magic number in terms of how many links you should be creating and how often you should try to add or establish new links as it all depends on the field you’re active in and the good SEO link building opportunities available at any time. But, it’s vital to continue to build new links constantly to ensue that your search engine optimisation doesn’t go stale.