This post was inspired by a request I received when doing some work for a marketing company.

The request showed that there are people moving into online marketing who do not understand what keywords are or how they are used in the optimisation process

I was presented with a list of 5 key phrases and asked to add them to the current list. I discovered by the current list they meant the list in the meta keywords tag and the list in the ranking software. That was it, that was how they saw optimisation – the adding of as many keywords they could think of to the ranking software and meta keywords tag. There were already 38 key phrases in the list and the new ones took it to 43. This was, however, small compared to some of the lists that had been created, one of which was 85 phrases in length.

So why were so many keywords being identified and placed in the meta keywords tag? Because it was felt that is was important to identify as many keywords as possible to cover all the angles.

So what should they have been doing?

Well to start with, there is nothing wrong with how they started. Identifying as many keywords related to the subject matter as possible is fine but these then need to be refined through a process of analysis.

Let us remind ourselves of what keywords are. They are what we use to find what we want on the web through the use of search engines. These search engines, such as Google, crawl the internet indexing the content of websites and, using algorithms, return those sites in its search engine results page (SERP) that are relevant to those keywords. SEO is not about tricking the search engines into listing your site high in the results pages, it is about showing the engines what it is your site is about and what makes it relevant when a particular phrase is searched for – relevant enough for the search engine to place it, ideally, in the #1 position.

So lets take that list we have identified and look at it again but this time lets really look at it. Which of those keywords can we drop. Lets start with anything that is so broad that it will be frequently used by people searching for things that have nothing to do with our site. These maybe single word keywords for example.

Use the concepts of relevance, search popularity and competition level to further refine your list. Don’t worry, I’ll be posting more about these later. Meanwhile basic information on search popularity and competition level can be obtained from Google’s Keyword Tool. It’s free and a good place to start. Subscription tools that offer more options include WordTracker and Keyword Discovery. Once again, I will be posting more information about both of these soon.

Once you have done this whittling down you should be left with around 10 key phrases. There is no precise number it depends very much on how competitive the subject of your site is and the chosen keywords. If your keywords have a very high competition level you should be looking at one to two keywords per landing page. The number could be increased where the competition is lower but try and keep to a maximum of 4-5 key phrases per landing page even for the most unique subject area. With around the same number of landing pages we are still looking at a maximum of 20 key phrases.

All in all using this approach will help us focus on what it is that is important about our site and what the critical keywords are which in turn will help drive qualified traffic, increasing goal conversions. Something we are never going to achieve by placing 85 keywords in the meta keyword tag and calling it SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is soooo essential for your website, without it your website is like a banner in the desert, nobody will know its there and nobody will see it.

I came accross this video and thought I would share it with you

Today we’ve  completed another Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign for one of our clients, namely Easy Step Flooring.

Who Is Easy Step Flooring?

Easy Step Flooring is a privately owned company based in Heathrow specialising in solid oak wood flooring.

What was the purpose of SEO?

Client wanted his website to be a search engine friendly so that potential customers could find them easily on the Internet.

What Keywords?

We have been asked to optimise their website with the following keywords: Solid Oak Wood Flooring.

What Did We Do?

• Keeping in mind that having keywords in your domain name boosts your search ranking, as a part of SEO project, we have registered a domain name that contained those keywords: www.solidoakwoodflooring.com.
• Replicated the current official website www.easystepflooring.co.uk , optmised it with “Solid Oak Wood Flooring” keywords and upload them into the www.solidoakwoodflooring.com (By the way, we have also e-commerce enabled the website. No more EBay fees anymore!!!).
• Submitted to 60+ Search Engines including the Google.
• Added some links in some websites pointing to www.solidoakwoodflooring.com to boost the link popularity rating of the website.

What’s Next?

The next is to keep on increasing inbound links and patiently waiting for crawlers to start crawling the website and and ranking it accordingly, inshallah.

In January 2009, Sweetsunnah-uk.com – (an online retailer of very good quality black seed products) engaged with the Ummah-Design.com Team on a consultancy basis to improve its presence within the organic, natural search engine listings.

The key objectives for Ummah-Design.com Team were:

• to drive more natural, organic, unpaid traffic to its website;
• to improve its search engine friendliness;
• to increase the number of site pages being indexed by major search engines;
• and with all of these three objectives to achieve the ultimate objective i.e. to attract more buyers

Ummah-Design.com Team began the project with full SEO (Search Engine Optimization) audit of the website which uncovered all of the technical aspects of the site that were preventing search engine access.

As a result of this SEO process and appropriate recommendations, between January 2009 and March 2009, Sweetsunnah-uk.com’s traffic from search engines increased by 140-150% across the major search engines.

We wish SweetSunnah-uk.com all the best with their continuing SEO success, inshallah.

Some of us may have heard the term “Organic Listing”. The Organic Listing is to appear on the search results of the search engine natuarally i.e. by not paying a single penny. To illustrate, if someone types in and searches “Muslim Web Design Company” keyword on the Google, the Google will bring up all the relevant websites as a list.  For example:

The more your website is optimised for the search engines and the more you have links to your website – the higher is the chance that your website will appear on the first pages of the search results. And you don’t have to pay a penny to the Google. This is called an Organic Listing.

With Pay Per Click (PPC) however, your website doesn’t have to be search engine optimised and you have to pay everytime an Internet user clicks on your advert. The best example is Google AdWords.

If you ever noticed, every time you search something in Google, it brings up a list of advert boxes under the Sponsored Links on the right hand side or sometimes on the top, just before your search results.
Here is an example (click on image to enlarge):

This is a clear example of PPC. You don’t pay anything to advertise on that section. You only pay for a click starting from £0.01! (I will try cover the Google AdWords in more details very soon inshallah. )

A well thought and clever Google AdWords campaign can bring lots of potential customers into you website.  However before you opt for AdWords campaign you need to do everything you can to make sure that your website is search engine friendly anyway! Run your campaign, but make sure that you are maximising your site’s performance in the organic listing too.

Ideally, your main target should be to come up high in search engine results (organic listing) and be listed in the AdWords listings – because two listings on page 1 of Google is always goingto look stronger than just a single one!

There are many tools on the Internet that you can use to check your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) performance. I would like to touch upon some of them, inshallah.

www.marketleap.com

Marketleap.com offers lots of advice on SEO and online search marketing and I would advise everyone to take some time to explore the site and read the information given there. It’s really worthwhile. They also provide free yet powerful and useful tools that you can use to check your search engine performance. One of them is the Link Popularity tool.

In one of my posts, I explained the importance of the Link Popularity and its effect on your search engine ranking.  I also advised that you increase your inbound links (links to your website from other websites).  So imagine you have requested the inbound links and the website owners agreed to add them or probably told you that they did so.  How do you check whether they added you or not?  It’s time to use the Link Popularity tool!  Just follow this simple steps:

1. Click on the  Link Poplularity link on Marketplace.com (you can find it on the bottom of the page) or here is the direct link to that tool: http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/ .
2. Enter your URL and if  you like three other websites to compare (maybe your competitors’ websites?) and click on Generate Report button.
3. Be a little bit patient and enjoy the results.

What’s good about this tool is that not only can you see how many websites link to you but also what those websites are.

www.linkpopularity.com

This is another but quite straightforward tool to use. Just enter your website URL and it will show the results for three major search engines: Google, MSN and Yahoo.  Please note that the results vary from one search engine to another.

I hope you found this article useful and if you have any comments, please share them with us, inshallah.

Jazakallakhu khairan.

Have you ever wondered how many websites are linked to your website? Do you know how to check this out? Well, in that case you would need to watch this 2 minutes long video and quickly find out how, inshallah.

Assalamu alaykum.

I hope everyone has had or still having a nice holiday and not too tired of standing around in queues making the most of High Street bargains from shops like PC World

As promised, I would like to elaborate on Google’s next way of ranking a website, namely Link Reputation.

So what is a Link Reputation then?

We learn that Link Reputation is just as important as Link Popularity and Page Rank that we discussed earlier. Link Reputation is what  is written in the text that links to your web page (inbound links) and from your website to other websites (outbound links) .

An example of an inbound link is, let’s say 10 websites are linked to my website and the text of the links on those websites are Web Design Company. This will tell Google that my website is about Web Design and will rank me under the web design search terms accordingly.

An example of an outbound link is, let’s say my website is competing for the keyword “web design” and I want to have a link to a web design blog. So instead of saying “Click here to go to my favourite web design blog”, I would say “Please check out my favourite web design blog”.  So the link “web design” is regarded as an optimised link that is passing on a reputation and telling Google that this site is about Web Design. Whereas “Click here” is telling Google that that site is about Click Here .  So the text used to anchor the link (the anchor text) which in this case is “Web Design” passes on link reputation that helps with keyword ranking.

Therefore I would advise you to be mindful when it comes to naming your links and making sure to use the appropriate keywords that would give your website the right reputation.

It’s as simple as that.

I hope my recent posts have helped improve your knowledge  about Link Popularity, Page Ranking and Link Reputation. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them here.

Assalamu alaykum,

This is the continuation of my previous post where I discussed Link Popularity as one of the new ways of  ranking websites that Google introduced a few years ago.

Google also introduced another idea which was called Page Rank where not all links were treated equal. For example, if I had 1 link from BBC’s website whose page rank is 8 and your site had 1 link from a blog whose page rank is 3, my website would have had a higher ranking because it had a link from a more reputable website which had a higher Page Rank on the Internet.  The website with a Page Rank of 2 is 8 times more powerful than a website with a Page Rank of 1. Therefore it is very important  to have popular and high Page Ranked websites linked to your website.

You can download the Google Toolbar that shows the Page Rank of any website you visit or alternatively, there are many online tools that can do it for you, for example, try this Google Page Rank Checker.

That’s that for today.  In Part III inshallah, I will touch upon Link Reputation, so please visit us again.

Assalamu alaykum,

Today inshallah, I would like to talk about how search engines like Google and others decide how to rank sites. In other words, what happens inside the search engines that decide to rank one website higher than another.

In early days, the main search engines such as Infoseek, Lycos, Excite etc. used to judge the website rankings based purely on content algorithm.  To give a primitive example for this, let’s say my site and your site is competing for the keyword “web design” and the search engine encounters this keyword 100 times in your website and 101 times in my website.  I will outrank your website by just one keyword. So the decision was based on content only.

This has changed since Google introduced new ways of ranking websites and one of them is Link Popularity.

The Link Popularity is based on the number of links that your website is linked to. To illustrate this, let’s say my website has  links  from 10 websites and yours has only 5. I will outrank you because I have more websites linking to my website.  The more links you have from other websites the higher your ranking is.

Therefore you should make sure you have more links from other websites than your competitor.  There are many ways to achieve this.  For example:

• exchange links or banners with other websites. Ask other websites to put a link to your website in exchange for theirs.
• Participate in forums or discussion boards and leave your website address there.
• Subscribe to social networking websites and list your website there too (E.g. digg,  facebook, Stumble Upon etc)
• Publish useful information on your website which will cause users to want to link to your website without even asking.
• Submit your website to different web directories under the  relevant sub-categories
• Ask your friends, business partners, customers, vendors or even family members to link to your website!

I hope this helps inshallah. Happy linking