SEO PowerSuite
Just a very quick blog post this time.
If you’re looking for some decent SEO tools then you would do much worse than to check out SEO Power Suite. It has 4 distinct elements but by far the most useful tool for me is the SEO SpyGlass tool which allows you to check the backlinks of your competitors. Yes, I know you can do it in Yahoo (and SpyGlass uses Yahoo data) but it also picks out some useful metrics that are pretty useful. Check it out.
By the way, people tell you that you should bother checking the backlinks of your competitors because the best you’ll ever manage to do is equal them and never overtake them because you’ll have the same the links. Seems like a sensible argument until you decide to look at 10 of your competitors and get the best backlinks from them all.
All of a sudden you’ve overtaken the lot of them. SEO SpyGlass helps you do that.
Check it out here: http://www.link-assistant.com/
Avoid Flash if you want search engine rankings
Flash is really popular for website design because it allows you to do loads of pretty things that you just can’t do with standard HTML. EConsultancy have a list of top 10 cool flash websites that’s worth checking out if you want to see what they can do.
They really catch the eye and this shows that they can even be viral since people are discussing them based on how cool they are. But where Flash absolutely kills your website is when Google comes to ranking you.
Last year, Google announced that they can read Flash and just this week they’ve announced that they can now read external files loaded by Flash. What that says to me is that while they CAN read Flash, they don’t do a great job of it. If they announce that they can read Flash but then have to follow up with announcements that they can read flash a bit more than they used to, then common sense dictates that there’s plenty of stuff in Flash that they still CAN’T read.
This means that you’re still more likely to have better search engine success if you just stick to HTML.
I would suggest a compromise – keep all of the SEO special bits in HTML, so that includes your titles, headings, important body text and navigation. When you want to do the pretty stuff, use Flash, but keep all of the important bits out of the Flash file. That way, Google will find what it needs to find by reading the HTML (something that it’s super-good at) and your visitors will still be blown away by the great animations and graphics capabilities of Flash.
Sharing knowledge helps your website rankings
One of the hardest things to do to move your website up the rankings is to get people to link to your website. It can take many, many hours of effort each week just to get a couple of useful links.
However, one of the easiest ways to get links to your website is to share some of that great knowledge that you’re hiding up there in your brain!
I constantly bang on about how useful it is to keep a blog and to update it with useful information. But as well as writing information on your own website, you can also write for other websites and generate a few links back to your own site.
There are a couple of ways to do this. One way is to offer to write a guest blog post on an established blog. The best way to do this is to know in advance what you’re going to write about and then approach the owner of the blog that you’d like to write for and make a pitch to them.
It would be helpful if you’ve followed that blog for a while and know a bit about it so that you know what they like to write about and what sort of readership they have. Then when you approach them, make sure that you sell them the idea and make it clear what they’re going to get out of it and what their readers are going to get out of it. If you can show them that you can give their readers something that they can’t then they’ll bite your hand off!
Another alternative is to write an article and then submit it to a few article websites. This is much easier but it isn’t quite so effective because article websites are usually fairly generic and have a habit of being spammed by other SEOs. However, it’s still an easy way to get a few nice anchor text rich links pointing to your own website.
When it comes to writing the article, try to take some pride in what you’re writing! Don’t just crank something out and liberally sprinkle links all over the place because that will look incredibly spammy!
One less spammy option would be to write the article as if you were writing it for your own website, and then include a paragraph about yourself as the author at the bottom, with relevant links back to your website.
Alternatively, you can write the article and where appropriate, link back to relevant pages on your website.
So if you want to create a few links to a sub-page about mobile air conditioning units, then your article would perhaps be about the practicalities of using a mobile air conditioning unit and the benefits of using one over a static unit. Then, where appropriate you can link on the words mobile air conditioning units back to your website.
However, don’t forget to add content to your own website as well! Getting links to your website is great but don’t overlook the importance of making your own website a useful resource – continue to add useful articles and blog posts to your own website.
Don’t worry about website rankings
Are you one of the people that checks their keywords and their rankings every day? Do you panic and break out in a cold sweat when your site drops a place and then go crazy trying find more links and start writing more content (or call up your SEO guy and go nuts at him)?
I was once told that if you look at your rankings every day then you’ll go crazy. I found that to be pretty good advice.
The problem is that rankings tend to jump up and down naturally. It can be for any number of reasons and often the fact that you’ve dropped a position is just a by-product of a different change. It’s often just a temporary change as well.
I continually see rankings start the day in one position, drop down an hour or so later, spend the day bouncing up and down a few spots and finish the day back where it started so that the fun can all begin again today.
Remember, SEO is at the very least a medium term exercise. What you want to see is a general upward trend of your website moving up the search results over a period of a few months. If the trend is going up then things are good. If it’s going down then you need to try harder.
What I would recommend is that you check your rankings two or three times a month. That way you’ll free up a stack of time to do some proper optimisation and you won’t go crazy when you site drops a position due to Google trying a tweak to its algorithm!
