The biggest pay per click platform is that run by Google on its search pages, called adwords. Ads can also be placed on it’s content network ie on normal websites. The owners of the website then get a cut for every advert clicked on their site. More recently facebook has sought to gain a foothold in this market by placing ads on Facebook pages. These ads tend to get a very low click through rate but can prove very effective.

Search engine optimisation generally can be considered to have two aspects: things that you put on your site to make it rank well and links you get to your site. As Google changes its algorithm or programme, different of these factors may become more or less relevant. There is a feeling that backlinks are no longer as important as they used to be. However, on the whole, getting more backlinks to your site is likely to be worthwhile, particularly if they are links from other sites that rank well. It is unlikely however that entries on general directories that contain thousands of sites are of much value.

Factors to do with your website itself that can make a difference are use of meta tags (particularly title and description tags and keyword density – how many times a particular keyword or phrase appears in the content of your site.

tech4on.com – PR2
atlantisweb.net – PR0
lifespot.org – PR0
ukeverything.co.uk – PR3

Here’s a list of directories that I have found fairly consistemntly show up in backlink profiles:

wondex.com – PR1 – General
askpeter.info – PR3 – General
viva-almeria.com – PR5 – Spain Travel (recip)
flesko.co.uk – PR4 – General (recip)
splut.co.uk – PR5 – General
passion-4.net – PR4 – General
donsautopages.co.nz – PR4 – Motoring
londinium.com – PR5 – London
crazyleafdesign.com – PR4 – General
urlshack.com – PR3 – General
slackalice.com – PR4 – General
diroo.org – PR4 – General
caven.org.uk – PR3 – General (recip)
abigdir.com – PR3 – General
littlewebdirectory.com – PR3 – General
bizseo.com – PR5 – General (recip)
londovor.com – PR3 – General

Despite what some people say, it seems that having links to your site is a good thing. I’ve recently done some research with a couple of sites. They had had little work done on them for quite a few months when I checked the serps position for keywords contained in the domain name. I then set about getting a few links and then reviewed the search position… and yes, getting links did seem to improve their ranking.

But what about LINK DIRECTORIES – is it worth submitting to them. Well it seems from my research that it can be a lot of work for little return. One site I submittted manually to 16 different free directories. On using a backlink checker two months later, not one of those sites showed up.

I have two link directories of my own: Lifespot and Imango and I know how much spam you get when running a directory. But I do also know that links submitted to my directories to show up in backlink profiles.

I’ve also found other directories in the past that do give useful links – but that’s for another post

There’s no point in spending a fortune on link building to boost your search ranking if you haven’t got the basics right in terms of onsite optimization. On site optimization can be described as ensuring that your site is really at it’s best to help the search engines. Although some aspects have a bigger influence on your ranking than others, why not make sure you have everything in place that you can.

If you are using a programme such as Dreamweaver this will generate some of the tags for you to tell the search engines which language you are using.

SITEMAP
It is also worthwhile getting a sitemap generated for search engines. You can get a sitemap generated for you at www.sitemapdoc.com. However don’t use the sitemap as an excuse to not have a good internal linking structure.

INTERNAL LINKING STRUCTURE
Usually, unless your site is very large, it is best to ensure that every page is within one or two clicks of the homepage. Ideally use text links rather than image links for your navigation. If you do use image links, you might want to ensure that their are text links available too.

Some software automatically generates site relative links, others such as blog software often produce www – relative links.
If your site has a keyword rich domain name, this latter approach means your domain name will appear more times on your web page. Some web designers use this as a form of keyword stuffing for search engines.

For more information about costs and how else we can help you with your metatagging requirements browse the rest of the site.

A Windows web hosting plan will typically be more expensive than a Linux web hosting plan, so it is important to take this into consideration when cultivating the overall expense of the web hosting plan. Windows web hosting is often offered in dedicated servers, which are much more powerful than VPS and shared servers because they are devoted to a single webmaster rather than being shared by dozens or even hundreds of websites simultaneously.

Use all the correct tags in your webpage.

If there are pages on your site that you do not want search engines to visit you will need to use a robots.txt meta tag on those pages. If there are links that you do not want search engine’s to count for ranking purposes you can use a no-follow tag .

Also include

tags for the main heading on your page, and if relevant and possible, use

tags.

tags for images – there are a number of benefits in using the tag. As well as being good for your visually impaired visitors and those who have images turned off, it tells the search engines what’s in your pictures. This helps give more clues as to what your site is about and also means your images may get into Google images search, which can be an extra source of traffic.

]]> http://www.compass-search-engine-optimisation.co.uk/a-few-seo-pointers/feed/ 0 http://www.compass-search-engine-optimisation.co.uk/40-of-firms-do-no-seo/ http://www.compass-search-engine-optimisation.co.uk/40-of-firms-do-no-seo/#comments Wed, 12 Jan 2011 16:53:14 +0000 admin http://www.compass-search-engine-optimisation.co.uk/?p=29 Continue reading →]]> A recent survey by Fasthosts reveals that more than 40% of busineeses do not do any website optimisation to improve their Search engine rankings.

Research by the web hosting firm revealed that 25% consider that paying to optimise their positions would be too costly and 11% felt that  past attempts to optimise their online visibility had not been effective.

]]> http://www.compass-search-engine-optimisation.co.uk/40-of-firms-do-no-seo/feed/ 0 http://www.compass-search-engine-optimisation.co.uk/why-engage-a-professional-seo/ http://www.compass-search-engine-optimisation.co.uk/why-engage-a-professional-seo/#comments Wed, 29 Dec 2010 11:50:53 +0000 admin http://www.compass-search-engine-optimisation.co.uk/?p=24 Continue reading →]]> There are plenty of things that the amateur website owner can do to help his website to rank well, and there’s lots of information available at various different forums and blogs on the internet. However, for anyone wanting to make a real break through in the Search Engines, particulalry, those in very competitive areas, engaging an SEO professional is the sensible approach.

Two of the main benefits are experience and economies of scale. An SEO professional will have learnt what works and what doesn’t through experience. He will know websites that are worth getting links from and those that are not. He will also be working on a number of projects at the same time, thus cutting down on a lot of the research time that the amateur website owner would need to do.

If you’re engaging someone to do SEO, make sure you speak to the person who is going to do the work. beware their are SEO resellers out their who sell you a package and then sub-contract it to someone else. This may not give you the best experience.

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