Getting your website noticed online can be a difficult proposition. Beyond choosing a catchy domain name, what tools are at your disposal to increase your online exposure?
One of the best tools available for this purpose is SEO — search engine optimization. This process works by creating web content that contains a certain number of keywords. When you’re content is properly saturated with these keywords, the chances of your website popping up in relevant search results is greatly increased.
Here are eight SEO tips that will boost your websites online exposure:
1. Keyword Selection
Keyword selection is the most important aspect to increasing your websites SEO. Make a bullet point list of 5-10 words that best describe your site. Then pick the three most relevant. These are your keywords and you should include them in your content, headers, titles and meta tags.
Ever wonder how some businesses get their listing along with a Google map at the top of search results?
If you search for the term “Sydney massage” in Google, you will come to a page displaying the local business results first. This is obviously prime real estate when it comes to performing Web searches, pretty much giving businesses another method to making it to the top of page one without needing to focus so much on the SEO of their Web pages. To get your business and website listed (note: you do not need a website), then you need to learn more about Google Places and Google Maps.
Google Places offers businesses a free way to list their name, location, hours, products, services and pictures, and it then integrates that listing with Google Maps. Google Maps makes it easy for customers to find where businesses are located in relation to them or other businesses by displaying each on navigable maps with clear indication markers. The maps even let users quickly find driving or walking directions to their business of choice.
So, by adding yourself to Google Places, you are actually opening your business up to acquiring some of those millions of Google Maps searches every day. In addition, you are also making yourself accessible to search results on the standard search pages.
The Difference Between Google Maps & Standard Search
Google Maps is another branch of search provided by Google. It is a sector that is specifically for mapping out street addresses, or for locating businesses. The standard Google search pages will look for everything involving a search term, and coincidentally also pull in any valid Google Maps results. However, your business must first be listed in Google Places for this to occur.
How to Add Your Business to Google Places
Adding your business is easy and free; just follow these simple steps:
1. Access Google Places and enter your business information, photos and videos. You will need a Google account to do this, but you can create a new one if necessary. While adding your new listing, make sure you choose up to 5 appropriate categories for your business as these will help customers find you better.
2. Verify the account. At the end of creating a new listing, you have the option of choosing your verification method. The options available are by phone or by postcard.
3. Check that the account becomes active on Google. Normally, these accounts become active within a day.
Individuals can enter up to 100 businesses for free, but more than 10 at one time requires a special bulk upload.
For further assistance, refer to the Google Places User Guide. You should soon enough find your business getting discovered in even more ways online.
Please note: No guarantees can be made for you business showing up for certain terms on Google Maps. Google maps like Google’s Organic search results pages are ranked by mathematical algorithms and are constantly changing.
Google seems to be putting out one surprise after another lately. First, they get us with with the personalised search, and now it’s a fresh new look with added features. If you haven’t taken the time to read more about the new changes, and why Google made them, here’s a video to help you along:
Basically, the team at Google took some of the features (the search options across the top of the page), expanded them and made them better. The search options are now available on the left-hand side of the page, with the Universal Search options being the default view. This option shows all results for a search item like you normally would. The options under, however, let you receive more specific results.
For example, you can now limit your searches to just books or blog posts, or even blog posts in the past 24 hours. It is quite handy to those wanting to get only the most recent news and results, or even for those trying to compare changes between certain periods of time.
But, for people interested in seeing changes over time, there is also the additional feature of the “Timeline”. This gives the user a visual graph of the search results over time, also with a play by play (year to year) breakdown of what was popular. This new feature can quickly and easily show the popularity of that keyword or phrase over time, which is helpful for individuals conducting market research, or even for SEO purposes.
The “wonder wheel” is another interesting addition to the new Google. By clicking on this option, the user is brought to an image laying out the related searches spawning from this first search term. Click on a related search from the image, and the user is brought to yet another wheel (off the first wheel) with its own related searches. Being only a visual representation of Google’s standard related search ideas, it is noteworthy to be able to see on one screen the interlinking web of terms.
Cosmetically, Google has also updated the look of the site and the logo in order to appear more modern.
In terms of SEO, will this affect me?
It’s hard to say at this point.
With the removal of the radio buttons that previously allowed the selection of “the web” OR “pages from Australia” from the google.com.au homepage, search results now appear to be defaulting to “the web” results.
Google’s Old Look
Google’s New Look
After a search has been conducted a user can then select the “pages from Australia” option from the left hand side menu and then toggle between “The Web” and “Pages from Australia” as required using these links.
There seems to be mixed emotions on many Australian websites about Google’s new changes.
How do you feel about it? and more importantly, have you experienced any changes in website traffic?
A big change happened to web search two weeks ago, but you may not have even heard about it.
Google unleashed its Personalised Search onto the world, and it is more than likely affecting your search results at this very moment. Take a quick look at this video to see what personalised search is all about.
What this means is simply that standard search results are a thing of the past. Personalised search is now automatically turned on for all Google browsers, even if the user is not logged into a Google account. In order to make this possible, Google puts a tracking cookie onto the computer that monitors data and uses that information from the past six months to provide “customised” search engine results.
For example: Let’s say that you visit your own website twice a day. If the next day you attempt to search for your website in Google by typing in your most competitive keywords, you may just find your website ranking much higher, even first position in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Please be advised – this is what personalised search will do – and this is not necessarily the result that everybody else is receiving. Google recognises that you have been to that website before based on your “web history” and serves your website first in the hope that this is the best result for you.
So, in the same sense, if you have been tracking your own website’s activity in the SERPs for the past week, you could very well be fooled into believing your ranking is much higher than it actually is.
Many people in the web industry are upset because they feel it takes away from the reliability of standard search results, while also affecting methods of search engine marketing. How is any website supposed to effectively compete for search engine traffic when a web surfer is being given previously customised results?
For those concerned, there is the option of always turning off the personalised search results. A big problem, however, is that many people simply do not know about the new feature as it was only announced on the Google blog, and on a Friday nonetheless. Another issue, being that it is an opt-out feature, is that very few people will probably take the time to turn it off.
If you would like turn off the personalised search, do the following:
Click on “Web History” in the upper right corner of a search results page.
Then, click on “Disable customizations based on search activity”.
How do you feel about Google’s roll-out of the new personalised search? Now that you know about it, are you planning to keep it active, or disable it?
