“The idea is to try and level the playing ground a little bit. So all the people who have been over-doing SEO, compared to people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to address that.”
What is actually classed as “over optimisation” which will subsequently trigger a penalty (ranging from downgrading your ranking to even de-indexation) wasn’t revealed.

In conversation a few days ago I was asked if I thought a website could be considered to be “over optimised”. I won’t reveal the website in question, but after some consideration the answer was swaying rapidly towards yes!
Based on the website in question, I would suggest that these on-site factors (without considering any external links) could be enough off a giveaway that you have attempted to get an unfair advantage over your competitors, based on what you have published on your website.

What Could Be Classed As Over-Optimization?

Excessive keyword usage

The old school attempt of getting your website to rank by cramming in as many instances of your targeted words is still as rife as ever, this is likely to be an obvious signal for this penalty. Read your content – if it reads unnaturally, or you think you are repeating words too often, then you probably are.
Another thing to look out for is placing lists of keywords (listing locations that you supposedly operate in is common) . This should be an obvious give away and could put your website on bad terms with Google.

Keyword Based Internal Linking

Linking to your homepage with a keyword orientated anchor text such as “SEO Cardiff” was thought to have been somewhat clever, however this could be a signal now as a cheap attempt of keyword linkage. Also only linking to your other pages with long keyword orientated anchor text is also likely to be a giveaway.

In addition to this, excessive linking to your pages may also be seen as an attempt at over optimisation. For example, if you are linking to a page in your main navigation, a footer, a sidebar and then multiple times within the body of the content – ask yourself, is all that linking really necessary?

Many Pages With Similar Content

In my days of dabbling with Adsense, I would create many pages with similar content to target variants of keywords, it worked for me and probably has been working for many other website owners. Look through your website content and ask yourself: do I really need 8 pages of content essentially saying the same thing? If you have done this, I’d recommend that you combine the content onto one existing url (and 301 redirect the others).

Excessive Duplicate Content

If you have a load of content copied and pasted from other websites without much in the way of your own, original content, then I think this would be a signal that your website offers little value.

Content Primarily For Search Engines

Many SEO “experts” will encourage their clients to have a load of text beneath their website’s footer, many of the visitors will assume the content isn’t there, but the search engines will see it. It looks ridiculous and in reality should be easy enough for Google to pick up on algorithmically. If you have been doing this, delete that content , If it is good enough for your visitors to read, place it where it can be!

Doorway Pages & Redirects

Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimised for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination.
If you are using any on-page redirection, stop it! Use 301 permanent redirects if you have any expired content.

Your Domain Name

If your website’s domain name is something like “the-bestest-website-design-cardiff” (let’s assume the word “bestest” is used in everyday society!), then realistically you would struggle to give reasons why you purchased that domain name for reasons other than it may give you a boost over your competitors for that particular keyword. If you have a keyword orientated domain name that has multiple hyphens and looks excessive, I’d consider purchasing a nice, shiny, brandable domain name.

How Do I Know If I Have Been Penalised?

First of all, if your website rankings have dropped, even significantly, it may not be a penalty, it may be that the links that were impacting your rankings have been devalued significantly.
For an over-optimisation penalty, I would look at the number of pages included in Google’s index, compared to previous indexed amounts.
To do so, use the command site:yourdomainname.co.uk in Google’s search bar. If you don’t see any results, try link:yourdomanname.co.uk
If you still get nothing, then there’s a high probability that Google has targeted your site and an over-optimisation has been applied.

What Can I Do if I’ve Been Penalized?

Go through your website and resolve any of the issues mentoined above and clean up any other dubious aspects of your website and then request that Google reconsider your site.

+Jonathan Walker

Here’s a summary of some of the more useful snippets of information from the event:

2012 Discussion Panel – Ask the Search Engines

This Q&A session was with a panel including Pierre Far (Google) and Dave Coplin (Bing). I’ve condensed the responses and subsequent debate into easy to absorb take aways.

Will SEO Die?

‘SEO will never die. It will evolve but will never die.’ – Google’s Pierre Far.

How do you optimise your content?

Pierre: Ask yourself two questions: what are you offering the customer and did they get it? It’s not just about content, it’s about videos, reviews and a good user experience. Also think about how people will share your content.

Does this mean the media is a ranking factor?

Pierre wouldn’t be drawn in and urged people not to use SEO as a check list. If you create good content then you will naturally tick the boxes

What is a bad link?

Site owners should ask themselves before attempting to, or creating a link: is the link genuinely there to link to good content or is it there simply to gain a link.

What Should You Do If You Are Manually Penalised for Bad Links?

If your site is manually punished for bad links then the advice is to do your best to fix those bad links:
Contact Webmasters who are linking to your site and ask them to remove the links, if you don’t get a response, keep a record of your attempts so that Google knows you are genuinely trying to fix your bad links.

What Is Replacing Link Factors?

The unanimous response was social.
When asked what he meant by social, Dave said ‘Twitter and Facebook’. However Google+ is likely to become an important factor for Google still.

What is a Good Social Signal and What is a Bad Social Signal?

Pierre and Dave stated that the number of followers is just one of many factors that also include speed of sharing and reach of sharing.

There is more value in sharing good content to a strong follower base (who will then share your content to their followers who in turn will share it themselves) than simply buying large numbers of followers who you don’t engage with.

Microformats

To view the slides from Glenn Jones’ presentation on Microformats, go here:
http://www.slideshare.net/glennjones/microformats-and-seo-12527640

Afternoon Session

The afternoon featured a variety of presentations, here are some of the more interesting tips

How you can get BIG links from BIG media sites

You don’t need to have relationships with people to get links, for example you could follow them on Twitter or connect with them on LinkedIn.

Before you make contact, try and find their outward linking policy.

A few tips for asking for links from big media websites:

• Pick up the phone!!
• Be up front about wanting a followed links.
• Ask could you credit us with a link?
• Ask for branded, not anchor links

Tips For Using PR Wires

• When you syndicate a press release avoid using symbols.
• Have a variety of natural links, 3 links to different sections of your site.
• Use notes to editors for extra links.

Google Panda

You could argue that Google Panda (originally referred to as Farmer) was the first step of the attempt to clean up the search results (that is still continuing with yet another update being rolled out at the end of March 2012). This algorithmic update was officially launched in February 2011 with the aime to lower the rank of “low-quality sites” – such as websites with heavily duplicated, similar or even “worthless” content.
This update made website owners take note of what they are actually publishing on their website and have asked these questions:

• •Is this content adding any value to my website’s visitors?
• •Are visitors likely to share this content?
• •If I gain a link from this website, would it (or should it?) realistically be of any benefit to me?

As somebody who has built links for many clients of all sizes over the years, the last question is one that I had been asking for quite some time. In the past I’ve used article directories & link directories as key components of a link building campaign. This particular update appeared to put a large nail in the coffin of this type of link building (as is likely to continue to do so!).

So if you are adding content to your website – ask yourself if it will be of use to your visitors, if it’s not, then rethink it. If you have similar content across your website, I’d recommend that you look to consolidate pieces where possible (and 301 redirect the newly 404’ing pages).

Link Value

Typically what I consider to be “low quality links” appear on “low quality websites”, i.e those that are either built specifically for linking to other websites, or ones that simply don’t offer the visitor anything unique.

Although not in every case, you can categorise many “article directory”, “link directory” and “press release” website into the “low quality” category. Any value that would have been passed to your website(in terms of improving your position in the search results) from gaining a link from these websites has decreased and will continue to do so.

Moving away from these types of websites, Google has also been de-indexing large link networks, such as BuildMyRank.com
Link networks are essentially a group of websites built with the intent to sell links to those willing to pay. These websites have been running and as a tactic have been working for years, but it appears to be coming to an end.

Webmaster Tools Warning

If you have been dabbling with paid link networks, you may have (or may soon) see this message waiting for you in your Webmaster Tools account.

If you have received this message ask yourself:

• >Have you ever been involved in any artificial link networks?
•  Do you submit spun content to low quality Blogs, article directories or press hubs?
•  Have you paid for links on large networks?
•  Do you have a large amount of site wide links, all with keyword orientated anchor text?

If you can answer yes to some or all of these questions, then it’s likely that you will need to take some action. The main thing to point out here is that it is extremely unlikely that if you have done a lot of “low quality link building” that all of these links are actually contributing to your rankings. Personally I think the value passed from PR and article directories was devalued greatly years ago.

If you were using a service such as BuildMyRank (or similar), then in my opinion these links are more likely to be having an impact on your rankings. If you are able to have these links removed, then I would do so. If these links were indeed responsible for your website’s ranking, then yes you should see your website move down in the rankings. This isn’t a penalty and therefore instead of submitting a reconsideration request, personally I would spend the time trying to gain some “quality links”.
To gain quality links you’ll need to invest time (and potentially money) in to building quality content & tools that people will want to share with their friends, or website visitors. This is time consuming, but the end result (especially if low quality links continue to be devalued) will be worth it.

It’s important to remember that “Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index” (source: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34449) so unless you really have been involved with link networks & other schemes as a sole tactic, having your website de-indexed is unlikely.
If you aren’t sure what kind of link building has been done on your behalf, or by somebody in the past, then I’d recommend that you use OpenSiteExplorer.org to see what websites are linking to you and the anchor text that is used.

Conclusion

I’m sure some of you that have read the above will fall into a state of panic but SEO is not dead and neither is Link Building. However the days of getting your low quality website by gaining links from equally poor websites, or schemes are rapidly (finally!). I’d recommend that you change your strategy now, otherwise you may find your website falling drastically out of favour with Google’s search results!

The initiative offers business’ without a website to get a free one (via the Yola web builder tool) and will look to get them starting with website promotion such as via Google Adwords & via Social Media.

Currently there are two types of session available to business owners, freelancers, sole traders (or those considering starting a business and the curious!), the first being a “Juice Bar”.

The Juice Bar sessions are essentially 40 minute 1-2-1 sessions with somebody in the know who can help you set up a free website, introduce you to AdWords, or can answer your questions, even if they are of a more advanced level.

There are also Workshops scheduled, which are of a more group based format, with presentations (as well as Q&A) about different topics relating to Online Marketing.

The Juice Bars & Workshops are currently scheduled in Cardiff, Newport, Merthyr, Swansea & Bridgend, but are likely to also take place elsewhere.

These sessions are free! So if you have any questions and don’t want any associated sales pitch, get yourself along to one of these!!
For more information and to book your place on one of these sessions, have a look here:

http://www.gbbo.co.uk/live

Google’s webspam team send out a lot of good signals about how they are tackling the problem of people “gaming” the results, however the sad truth is that there are so so many websites ranking highly in ultra competative sectors by using tactics that looked shady even way back in 2007!

I believe that Google is clamping down hard on websites relying on spammy on site practices or link building tactics for their rankings, so if you are new to SEO and you have been approached, have a look out for some of these tell tale signs of dubious, or out dated SEO tactics that are being implemented.

Keyword Stuffing

Everybody loves a bit of keyword stuffing! Adding a desired keyword multiple times throughout the page is a good way of “optimising” your content (realistically this should occur naturally), however there are times when people take things a little bit too far

Keyword Stuffed Footer Menus

Internal anchor text does have an impact on your websites rankings, having grasped this, shady SEO types would then look to fill their websites with additional keyword orientated anchor text menu’s where possible. The Page footer became a prime spot for this.

Text Way Below The Fold

If a company wants an incredibly clean, text light design, but also want to rank for ultra competitive terms, many SEO’s don’t know how to approach this. One of the frequently used methods of doing this was to have plenty of text beneath what appears to be the end of the website design (footer). Look out for an unnecessary looking scroll bar beneath a page footer and you may be in for a pleasant surprise.

Link Building

As an experienced SEO I find it pretty easy by looking at a competitors, or potential clients back link profile to assess any previous link building activity that may have taken place. In the past I (like many SEOs) have indulged in many of the below, and in moderation some of the below factors can have a place as part of a strategy – however if the below activities could be visualised as a basket, I wouldn’t suggest that you put all of your precious eggs in it!

Low quality directory submissions

Back in 2005 submitting your website to as many directories that time would allow would more often that not result in great rankings for your website. Directories with higher page rank would begin to charge fees for your link to be included and eventually “Bidding directories” (an odd hybrid of a regular directory and an auction) appeared.

The value of the majority of these directories (ones that offer little to no editorial value and are made specifically for SEO purposes) is long gone, however many people are still promoting their perceived value of submitting the website to these directories.

Link exchanges / resource pages

Back when websites were referred to as “homepages”, swapping links with websites that you liked, or were remotely related to yours was fun, it even gave you an opportunity to send and receive an e-mail that didn’t involve an animated gif of a monkey playing with itself! Swapping links on dedicated “links pages” would have a positive impact on your websites rankings. Overtime “links pages” became known as “resource pages” – exchanging links no longer has the impact it used to on a websites rankings (but still can of course result in great traffic).

Article submissions

Back in the day submitting content to dedicated article websites was a feasible way of gaining traffic to your website and improving your website’s ranking. The strategy of submitting articles to these types of websites would soon evolve into submitting as many shoddily written articles (by hand or by using automated software) on mass. These days the value in terms of ranking improvement is and traffic is extremely minimal – there are better ways to spend your time.

Lots of sitewide links

There was a time when site wide links were all the rage when it comes to link building. If you don’t know what a site wide link is, essentially its a link on a website that appears on every page, typically these will be found within a sidebar or footer area of the website. These links were often sold on the basis that your website could instantly gain thousands of backlinks from a website (due to a link to your website appearing on every page on a rather large website).

Typically these sitewide links would also be linking to websites with very keyword orientated anchor text, they are also sometimes placed beneath headers such as “sponsors”, “partners” or “our friends”.

Sidebar & Footer Links On Mass

Similar to the sitewide links, many webmasters would sell links to individual pages of their website, again primarily within the sidebar or footer area. Once more, these kind of links tend to be easily spotted by the keyword orientated anchor text used.

Links From Unrelated Websites

Websites that have lots of links from blatantly unrelated websites (again most probably found in sidebars or footer areas) is a typical sign of paid link activity. Even if the website that is linking to yours in question is semi related, have a look at the other websites that it is linking to – tell tale signs of bad linking (probably selling) policies often include links to “pharmacy” websites!

Links from expired domains

Expired domain auctions such as ones hosted on GoDaddy led to SEOs purchasing expired domain names that still had visible pagerank and building small websites for the sole purpose of linking to their clients websites. More often that not these domain names wouldn’t exactly appear related to the (shallow) content produced and placed throughout the website.

Blog comments

Before the “no follow” initiative, posting comments on blogs under the guise of a keyword orientated name and link to a website was quite common. Many websites now moderate blog comments and almost all will “no follow” external links that have not been included by their choice.

Forum signatures

Adding a link to a website in your signature on your favourite forum is very common. However contributing nothing of value on multiple forums, but including your link to an unrelated website is not. This kind of link building activity sticks out like a sore thumb in a backlink profile.

Profile links

An extension to forum signature spam, creating profiles on unrelated websites with the sole intention of including a link to your website also had its time as a “groundbreaking SEO tactic”. In fact there are two pretty well known systems dedicated to this, their value these days though is extremely questionable.

Unworthy press releases

Submitting “news” to press release websites was pretty popular back in 2007, these un news worthy press releases would then appear on multiple dedicated press release websites that would be read by nobody and the majority wouldn’t be valued by Google – despite what those who were pushing this service would claim!

Unrelated .edu & .gov

.Edu and .Gov links were and in some online areas still seen as the place to get links from, despite Google representatives saying the opposite. So if you find a neglected page buried deep within a .edu website (such as an old news page or guestbook) and your able to add a link, don’t expect it to change your website’s ranking fortunes!

Un-inspiring social media links

Submitting relevant news stories or articles to relevant social media websites could (and still can) result in good amounts of traffic to website and links to go with it. However when done incorrectly, social media activity sticks out like a sore thumb. Typical signs of trying to use social media, or social news websites (such as Digg) are when there are lots of unworthy articles submitted to the website, with little to no interaction from the community.

So what should be done?

As I’ve written about things that you shouldn’t be looking to do, it only makes sense that I write about what you could and should focus your SEO attention on. That will be coming next week!

If you’re reading this and wondering what’s wrong with buying links to benefit your search ranking, go here:

What Google Says About paid Links

In an ideal world those that bought links wouldn’t see the direct benefit of doing so based on their position in Google’s results, but unfortunately that simply isn’t the case.

There are countless websites ranking extremely highly in Google for insanely competitive keywords either based entirely on aggressive link buying or certainly mainly on the back of doing so. Depending on your competitors (and potentially limitations of your website, or the amount of time you can devote to it) you may have little option other than to buy links to increase your Google rankings.

If you are going to indulge in this though, in order to “go under the radar”, I’d suggest that you be somewhat smart and tactical in your approach.

Avoid The Obvious

Buying links to improve your rankings is against the rules of the game, so be discreet about it! I would suggest avoiding purchasing links from websites that actively promote the fact that they sell links to website owners. Phrases such as “sponsored”, “advertisers” or even “our favourites” (or similar) should be easy for Google to classify as paid links.

Also websites that promote that they allow paid reviews or paid posts are also best avoided, as these should also get classified as paid by Google and in theory shouldn’t pass any value to your websites ranking.

I would also avoid buying links on websites that simply “look like” they are, or may be selling links. A good tell tale sign would be if there are a lot of links either in the sidebar or footer, with very keyword orientated anchor text. Often some of these links will be irrelevant and will stick out like a sore thumb!

Keep It Relevant

If you are going to buy links, only do so from highly relevant websites. You should avoid all temptation to purchase links from irrelevant websites, despite how tempting the price is, or how the Googlepage Rank amount is.

In terms of relevancy, if your website is about Cats, you should be looking for websites also about cats, but you can also spread your search to other animal (or pet) websites providing that some of the content is relevant to yours.

There will be many SEOs who will claim that relevancy isn’t a factor, but unlike many I like to think logically, as an example in theory, why should (and would) a website about wrestling linking to a website about cats help to improve its rankings in the Search Engines?!

I’d also suggest that websites with lots of links to irrelevant websites could be easily be considered as one that is selling links due to the irrelevancy and not pass any value to any of the websites its linking to.

Keep It Real!

Although this may be a little strange, but you should look to create an as natural looking link profile for your website as possible if you are going to be purchasing links.

If your website is gaining links from others naturally (without you paying for them), they would most likely be placed on different areas of the website (such as a sidebar, within the content or on a dedicated resource page as examples) and be doing so via a variety of anchor texts (such as your website address, company name or something a little more keyword orientated).

Many people fall into the trap of solely buying keyword orientated site wide links located in sidebar or footer area of websites. This will result in a completely unnatural link profile and will scream of “link buying” to Google, so again you could see all of the value of those links removed.

So look to mix it up, generally when you purchase a link, you should be able to specify the anchor text that will be used to link to your website, so purchase a variety of “natural looking” links and some more keyword orientated anchor text links.

I would also suggest you don’t rush in and purchase a load of links in one go, instead you should look to build the links slowly over time – especially if your website is relatively new.

Keep Cool

If you have found a great looking website that you would like to purchase a link from (if you can’t see a reason why they would link to you otherwise), simply asking if you can buy a link may not be the best of approaches to take.

Sometimes webmasters will be a little insulted if you do this (for example the person in charge of an area of a University website that simply wants to provide users with quality links) or will simply refuse your request.

Other website owners won’t like the fact that you’re not keen on reciprocating the link, so you may need to do some creative convincing.

If the website appears to be by a hobbyist or enthusiast, you may be able to tempt them by creating a new image for the website, such as a header graphic. Others may be open to you donating to their chosen charity, or buying them a gift from their Amazon wish list.

Potentially for the more difficult to achieve (such as University websites), you could offer to sponsor an event they are having in an exchange for a “clickable mention” on their website. Clever ay?!

My Experiment:

In the interest of research I purchased a small amount of links for two separate websites (in completely different industries) using an extremely stringent criteria to ensure that my money was not wasted and so it would be extremely, if not impossible for these links to be 100% classifiable of being paid for.

The results were pretty impressive!

*Please note for confidentially and other obvious reasons, all of the information, such as the website and targeted keywords have been removed!*

Conclusion: Paid Links Work

It’s true…It’s damn true! Buying high quality links can give your website a significant boost in Google for your targeted key phrases. This practise is against the Google webmaster guidelines though, so if you are going to head down this path, I would suggest you do so with great caution.

Important Image Ranking Factors

Image filename

The Image filename should be focused to the keywords that you are targeting. For example if your image is a picture is of a Michael Myers Halloween costume, then save your image as MichaelMyersHalloweenCostume

Image alt text

Alt text is used by Search Engines to understand what the image is about, as they can’t “see” them. In an ideal world your alt text will be descriptive (keyword focused) and match the image filename. Be careful with your ALT text though, as visitors using alternative technology (such as screen reading software) to access your content will be presented with your ALT text – so don’t make it spammy or confusing!

Image title text

The title text on images is often neglected and from testing, it doesn’t appear to be particularly important in terms of getting your images ranking. However, it will only take a few moments to copy and paste your Image ALT text to your Image Title text, so go ahead!

Image caption

Image captions are often overlooked, but using them can certainly increase the chances of the image ranking well. Again keep the theme of your Image’s filename and description, but be aware that the caption will be on the screen and read by your visitors. This can allow you to be more descriptive of your image.

Surrounding text

The overall surrounding text on the page that the image is placed plays a big part. If an image ranking in the search results is a big part of your strategy, I’d suggest keeping your images on relevant pages only – and limit the amount of them on a page. The page itself should be optimised as per my suggestions here, such as your Page Titles, Descriptions and Heading text.

Filesize & load speed

Google has revealed that its incorporating the load speed of WebPages into its ranking factors and images are no different. You should look to optimise your images’ file size which will help reduce its load speed. If your server is slow then it’s worth you considering to move your website elsewhere.

Preference for JPG images

Google seems to have a preference of .jpg images in its results, so where you can use the jpg file format, do so over .png and .gifs as examples.

Dimensions

Google looks to include the full images in its results and not a thumbnail, with the theory being that searchers only have to click once to view the image, which will be of a substantial quality. Not every image online is of a high quality, but having dimensions of at least 250×300px does appear to be what Google is looking for.

No links within the Images

As mentioned above, the theory of searchers not having to click more than once to view the full size image suggests that thumb nailed images aren’t going to do you any favours when it comes to getting your images ranked. So include the full sized image on your webpage if you want it to be included in the Search Results. If you need to have a much larger version of the image linked on your webpage, then perhaps you could include a text link to it elsewhere on the page?

So if you want your images to stand the best chance of ranking for your targeted keywords, try to implement all of, or as many of the above as possible!

1: Claim Your Listing

If you have never considered registering a local business listing with Google, the chances are that your business is not listed – especially if your business is somewhat new. However there will be occasions when businesses are already included in the listings, just waiting to be claimed.

If this applies to you, claim your listing immediately, the benefits are obvious – Once you have claimed your listing you can add photos, edit your information and select categories. All of which has a huge effect on the rankings. Also, if you don’t claim it, you’re vulnerable to another person doing so!

2: Have A Physical Address In Your Targeted City

When submitting your listing, you are required to enter your physical address. As Google wants to supply its users with relevant results, it makes sense to return results within a specific area. If you’re based just outside of the city you are targeting, consider investing in a virtual office, as you will be able to get an official address, usually in the centre of the city.

3: Include Keywords In The Title

Although this does by all accounts go against the guidelines set by Google, it is far from well policed. Adding your keywords into your business name can have a great impact on your listings placement – just don’t over do it.

4: Include Your Location In The Title

This may not be possible for everybody, but if you can include your location within the title of your listing, you are likely to see your listing appear above those who do not.

Ideal format:

Company Name – Service Keywords – Location

5: Include Keywords In Your Custom Categories

Although when submitting your listing you will need to select one of the pre-determined categories (at least one category that matches suggestions as you type), you are then able to add your own.

Make sure these categories are keyword orientated

e.g: Category: personal trainer
additional categories: personal training
one to one personal training

6: Include Your Keywords In The Description

Much like is suggested with your web pages, including your keywords into your description can also have a positive impact. Once again though, don’t over do it. Your text needs to make sense and your keyword inclusion not appear to be forced in any way.

7: Include Your Location In The Description

Adding your location into your description is pretty easy to do, but is often something which is overlooked by many when creating listings.

Many will say that adding your location into your title is far more beneficial, including it here as well is something that should be done.

8: Include Your Product/Services In The Additional Details Field

Although if done incorrectly this can appear somewhat spammy, carefully including one or two of your keywords in your additional services can also help to boost your listing.

Examples
One To One Training: Yes
Home Personal Training: Yes

9: Include A Local Phone Number (not a free phone, or mobile phone number)

Your phone number can confirm that you are indeed based where you claim to be – and more specifically within the city that you are targeting. Many companies will opt to include a free phone number in their listing, you should resist this and include your local phone number, complete with your specific area code.

10: Include Your Physical Address On Your Website

Although you submit your physical address when creating your listing, having your physical address on your website is also advantageous.

Be careful not to include more than one address though (if you have separate offices for example) as this can have detrimental effects on your local business centre result.

11: Upload Photos

Google appears to be pushing for users to complete their listings as much as possible and as images certainly help improve the users experience, it makes perfect sense for the listings that have images to list highly.

It may also have a positive impact on the amount of users that click through your advert over those that do not.

Add photos occasionally as it will show that you are keeping on top of your listing and keeping it updated – something which Google likes.

12: Link To Videos

If your company has some videos that can be uploaded, the smart thing to do is to create a YouTube account and upload them there. Link to your YouTube account via your listing to instantly create another web reference for yourself.

13: Create Coupons

Coupons are not believed to have much of an impact on the positioning of your listing, but can work wonders for increasing the amount of people that click on your listing due to the enhanced appearance when compared to listings without coupons.

14: Include Your Business Hours

Completing this area won’t give you any opportunity to include your keywords, but will help those who are viewing your advert know when you operate, which may lead to a follow up phone call. It also ticks another completed section box, so its worth spending the two minutes that it will take doing so.

15: Get Reviews!

Reviews are heavily weighted within the Local Listings, so spend some time acquiring them from your customers. Once your listing can be found, those with Google accounts can simply write a review about your business, but it is also beneficial to gain reviews about your business from other websites.

In the UK these are the most frequently used review websites are:
Yell
Scoot
Thomson Local
UK Business Directory
Free Index
Touch Local
UK Small Business Directory
City Visitor
Wahanda

Canonicalization basically occurs when the same content is available via different URLs, for example, visitors could find your website via http://www.example.co.uk and http://example.co.uk.

Resolving Canonicalization issues is important for your website, but why?

How to resolve Canonicalization issues

There are essentially two methods available to you to resolve these issues, these are via 301 redirects, or by using the link rel=”canonical” tag within pages.

301 Redirects

A 301 redirect essentially tells search engine spiders and your visitors that a page has been permanantley moved to a new location. Users will automatically be re-directed to the new page (or domain name), while search engines will also be able to update their index and pass *almost* all of the link juice/equity given to the former location.

Resolving Non www Vs www version of a website

A common issue with websites is that both the non www. and www. version of websites are active, meaning that any inbound links to these are going to be seen as going to seperate pages! If you have an Apache server, add this code into your .htaccess file

Resolving the trailing slash Vs the index file URL

Another common issue is the trailing slash versus the index file URL versions of the page,which again are going to be seen as seperate pages, as shown here:

http://www.example.co.uk/directory/

http://www.example.co.uk/directory/index.html

This issue can be fixed with one line in your .htaccess file using a redirectmatch command, which will match any instance where the redirect is supposed to occur sitewide!

While we’re speaking about 301 redirects, here are some other common 301 examples you may find useful:

Redirecting Old Pages To New Ones

If for any reason your pages’ url’s have changed (such as if you have had a new CMS for your website) you can tell your visitors and search engines the new address of the page they were looking for.

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.example.co.uk/newpage.html

If you would like to simply Redirect an entire website to a new single address:

redirect 301 / http://www.example.co.uk/

*Make sure that you include the full URL of the new location as above*

Redirecting Dynamic Pages:

A dynamic page is one generated by a database driven application, such as blog. A file name is appended by a query string, looking something like this:

http://www.example.co.uk/page.php?id=7

When a query string is used, the 301 redirect solution for static pages as above will not work and you’ll need to use a rewrite solution. Using the page.php?id=7 example, you’ll need to use in your htaccess file:

Rel Canonical Link Tag

In February 2009, Google announced that they were accepting a new form of the link tag that would help website owners with canonicalization issues.

The element is rel=canonical.

For example, if you have two pages of content that are now out dated or very similar and you want to specify the version of the page you prefer, you could add this tag to the of the pages that you dont want to be the canonical URL of your content

such as

http://www.example.co.uk/outdated-page-1

http://www.example.co.uk/outdated-page-2

This tells the search engines (Google & Yahoo!, Bing doesn’t appear to follow it) that these URLs all refer to the canonical page at

http://www.example.co.uk/updated-page-address

It’s also worth mentioning that Google also accepts canonical links between domains as well. Which is very important for websites that sell content to other companies (such as classifieds portals displaying their content on local websites).

Further Reading:

Google’s help page on Canonicalization

More information on Apache .htaccess files

A Domain Farm is generally considered to be a series of websites owned by a company which offer the search engines or users very little in terms of quality.

In many cases companies will invest in building multiple websites where one would be adequate, in order to try and gain higher listings in the organic searches, or to appear for a wider breadth of key phrases.

If you don’t think that there’s anything wrong with this, check out what Google says on this:

“Don’t create multiple pages, sub domains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.”

Not to put everybody under the same brush, there are plenty of companies that will create multiple sites and make them unique and valuable to users, there are all too many that will simply create variants and try to “trick” the search engines to a certain degree.

Unfortunately those who do this aren’t particularly smart about what they do! More often that not they give the game away by including standard information on their websites such as their address and telephone numbers!

As well as that these websites are often hosted at the same location, with many sharing the same i.p address, all registered within the same Google webmaster account and not to mention the fact that the domain names are all registered in the same way!

Without trying to scare monger, if your company does have a variety of websites for a valid reason, take care to ensure that they are all different and their existence can be justified. Don’t try and flood a particular phrase with multiple sites, or create sites which are too similar – be careful not to cross over your targeted key phrases in any way.

You also need to avoid interlinking these websites, in order to avoid being seen as an attempt to manipulate the search results.