Posts Tagged ‘UK SEO’

In the current day and age, when we are searching for a product or service we tend to do so online. Long gone are the days of picking up the local phone book, businesses are going online advertising their products or services and it is becoming hugely competitive. If you are a business owner and want to improve your online presence so that you appear higher on the major search engines than your competitors, you have to consider SEO.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is the process and method of improving the quality and volume of traffic to a website from search engines. The theory is that the higher your website ranks on the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing with SEO, the more traffic and visitors your site will receive from the search engines.

SEO Tactics

SEO is all about researching how the search engines work and what your potential customers are searching for. In order for your website to rank high on the search engines, it needs to be optimised by editing its content, HTML and coding, to increase its relevance to the specific keywords that your potential customers are searching for.

Improve Your Online Presence, Choose SEO Services

For more information on how SEO can help you, get in touch with an SEO expert today by calling 0161 928 8799 and we’ll be happy to help you reach the top of Google!

Link Building is an essential part of internet market, as links are what draws traffic to your website, from the website that is advertising you, although you should be aware that this will not necessarily draw in a large amount of traffic.

The best amount of traffic will be brought through from Search Engines, because having links towards your website makes you more visible so-to-speak to the search engines.

SEO Link Building Theory

The theory is that the more times a search engine “finds” your website, it comes to the conclusion that you are valuable and the higher you will be ranked.

Despite this, It is important to remember that the key to successful Link Building is not based around placing your link on every website that you can possibly think of.

For example, there is absolutely no point in asking for your link to be placed on a website that already has links to hundreds of other websites. This is because that means that your link is needlessly competing against every one of those other links, which is completely redundant, especially if the other links aren’t even directed to websites similar to yours.

Relevant Links, Tags and Categories

Also, placing links on websites that have nothing to do with what you do, or even the kind of traffic that you want to gain is a complete waste of time. You don’t just want to draw people to your website, you want them to actually stick around and see exactly what you have to offer them.

Having lots of traffic, does not necessarily mean that people are going to stick around. If your content does not match the needs of the incoming traffic, then they’ll leave. However, if you place links on relevant websites, you stand the chance of drawing in an audience with a higher possibility of sticking around, and clicking on other stuff. Remember, a page view has a lot greater credibility than site hits.

For this reason, you need to make sure that the Search Engines put you as high as possible in searches that are completely relevant to what you offer or do.

Monitoring the Competition’s SEO Link Building

If you really do not have a clue where to start attempting to place links, it is well worth scoping out the competition and finding out what kind of websites they have links on.

To find this out, try typing your competitors’ website into Yahoo’s search engine (like this: link:competitorwebsite.co.uk) and see what you find. It helps if the competitor that you check out is obviously doing well, because this means that their Link Building is probably working for them.

Use your judgement and decide for yourself if you should be building links on the same websites, but don’t feel that you have to completely copy their choices. You might find that it gives you ideas of other websites that you could approach, that would be more effective towards your website and its individual needs.

Remember, your competitors don’t necessarily have the same needs as you and every website’s SEO Link building requirements will be different.

For any online business, getting regular traffic is incredibly vital to their survival, because without traffic, there are no customers, and without customers there are no purchases, and without purchases there is no profit. And, well, you get the picture!

SEO Link Building

SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation) is vital for drawing in traffic; however building effective links, is proving to be an even more valuable tool. The reason this is so valuable to your business, is down to the way that Search Engines such as Google work. Search Engines “crawl” or search websites, extracting links to other websites. The idea is, that the more websites link to your website, the more times it will be “found” by the Search Engine “crawlers” and the higher the ranking of your website.

Ranking, is also crucial to the success of your website, because the higher a Search Engine ranks your website, the higher it will be placed when an individual uses a Search Engine.
Predominantly, the aim should be to get as high a rank as physically possible, with the main intention to find yourself on that all important first page.

The importance of a top 10 Google Ranking

Being on the first page might not seem important, but according to research, almost half of Search Engine users never get past the first page. This is commonly because, they either find what they are looking for (or something close at least), or they change the Search Engine terms in order to find something more relevant to what they are looking for.
Therefore, if you’re not on the first page, then it is quite likely that potential traffic just isn’t coming close enough to finding you and what you have to offer.

However, don’t think that you can just plant your links on every forum, blog and website that you can find, because it really isn’t that simple, or easy.

The Importance of Link Building for SEO

First of all, placing links on irrelevant forums and blogs will almost certainly see your hard work going to waste, as the links will most likely be deleted by moderators or site owners, mainly because it has no relevance to them or their sites visitors, therefore why would they want to help promote you? And also, most moderators and site owners are completely aware of Link Building, and they will know exactly what you are doing.

If, however, you really do your homework, and work together with websites that are relevant to your business, they may be more willing to turn a blind eye. Site owners will be even happier to help your business if you have something to offer them in return. This would usually incur placing a link for their website on yours, in a case of “you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours”.

The key issue to learn here is to think about what your business is and does, and what kind of customers you want to attract. Think about what other websites potential customers may be visiting, and try to build up relationships with those websites in order to build valuable links, that will build you success with Search Engines.
And remember, no links means no rankings, and no rankings means no traffic.

SEO Manchester

If you have an website and are looking to sell more of your products or services by driving targeted traffic, feel free to contact this Manchester SEO today via email or by calling 0161 928 8799

What is Ecommerce?

Ecommerce, quite simply, is the sale of goods (or services) through the internet, typically, although most certainly not exclusive to, the form of an online, or virtual, shop.

ECommerce is practically essential for a vast majority of businesses in the 21st Century, especially with the rise of the internet, and subsequently internet shopping. There has been an immense rise in online sales over the past ten years, as more and more consumers prefer the comfort and stress-free environment of their own over a busy Saturday morning shopping centre.

However, Ecommerce does not necessarily have to be clothes, books, CDs and the typical things that are commonly perceived as popular online. Almost anything can be sold online, from a professional service to banking, and cinema and gig tickets to holidays.

Whilst there are obvious benefits to the customer, it can be hard to see the benefits to you, as the business owner. The first, and most obvious benefit, is that there is great potential to draw in a much wider-based clientele, rather than simply a local one.

The benefits of Ecommerce

A more important benefit, however, is one that is sometimes not thought of, and that is that fact that your website or online shop acts as your shopfront, theoretically speaking. This means that you do need necessarily require physical premises, which could potentially save you a great deal of money, in both the short and long term on overheads that would have been needed. Subsequently, running an online shop is a great dealer cheaper than an actual shop.

What is SEO, and why is it a Dream Partnership with Ecommerce?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and is absolutely essential for anyone intending to get in on the Ecommerce action. This is mainly because it is SEO that will vastly improve the amount of visitors and will draw in the majority of new customers to your website, and shop. SEO allows Search Engines, such as Google, Yahoo etc to be able to find your website through the keywords that litter your site’s text. This is important, because whether we like it or not, Search Engines are the best and most successful way of bringing people in.

The keywords, of course, need to be relevant, in order to make sure that the crowd the search engines bring in for you are the right crowd that you are aiming at, and that is why planning is key. This is because, if your keywords, collectively, don’t seriously promote your products and/or, the Search Engine will bring you customers that aren’t really interested. This means that whilst your traffic might be sky high, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the traffic is willing, or wanting to purchase anything that you are offering them.

Using Ecommerce and SEO together

Used effectively together, Ecommerce and SEO can make your business the success that it deserves to be. SEO will draw the customers in, and Ecommerce will allow them to buy safely, and conveniently, at their own leisure, whilst being incredibly cost-effective to you.

SEO Manchester

If you have an Ecommerce site and are looking to sell more of your products or services, feel free to contact this Manchester SEO today via email or by calling 0161 928 8799

All of us as website owners and search engine marketers have always wanted to know “How exactly Google sees our website”.

This information can be found in Google support tries to help webmasters diagnose errors and enhance their website’s search engine visibility.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google webmaster tools lists the preferences on how website listings are handled.

Before you can start with any of these you will to sign up for your Google account. After signing up log into the following page https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools

Verification of Ownership

You will have to verify your ownership of your website that you would like to control using Google webmaster tools. You will have to enter the URL of your website and follow the instructions provided to verify the ownership of your website.

This can be done in two ways, one is by uploading a blank HTML file with a specified name and the second method is by pasting a Meta tag provided by Google webmaster tools in the Header part of your homepage. Once you upload your blank HTML page or add the Meta tag, click verify.

This will allow Google to verify quickly that you are the authentic owner of the website that you are trying to control using Google webmaster tools.

The Overview

Once verified, you will be able to see your website’s profile in the Google webmaster tools control panel. You just need to click on the URL of your website whose profile you would like to view under the Manage section.

This will take you to the overview page. You will find highly crucial information on your website that will give you great insights into the nature of your website’s traffic. You will also find links to specific webmaster tools in this section.

Diagnostics Tools

The function of these tools is to tell you whether there are any errors in your website as seen by Google when it crawled your website. You will normally find errors such as 404 errors, pages not indexed by Google robots.txt and other indexing issues.

Some of the common types of errors can be listed under the headings such as HTTP errors, URLs not followed, URLs disallowed by robots.txt, not found, URLs timed out, and Unreachable URLs. To ensure that your website is without any error, you must regularly check your diagnostics reports.

Statistical Tools

Google has amazing statistical tools that you can use to improve your marketing efforts. Google webmaster statistical tools include the following:

Top Search Queries

Every webmaster would like to know the top search query through which visitors get in to their website using Google Search. You will be able to see list of keywords for which the highest number of visitors came to your website.

One of the most important pieces of information that you will find here is that your position in the SERPs for a particular keyword. There may be minor variation in the indicated number and actual position however, this will get better with time.

What Googlebot sees

This is one of the best ways of learning how other websites link to your website . You can find three sections here.

• Phrases used in external links to your website
• Keywords in your site’s content
• The actual content on your website in terms of keyword density

Crawl Stats

Here you will be able to learn about your website’s pagerank strength. You can see your pages categorized in terms of low, medium, high and not yet assigned. Most often you will find your pages categorized under low but do not get discouraged.

Another useful piece of information here is pagerank information of specific pages, which is updated on monthly basis. This is one of the best ways of measuring the effectiveness of your specific Link Building efforts.

Index Stats

Here you can find advanced Google queries on your website that used some search operators. This includes the following operators site:, link:, cache:, info:, related:, etc.

Subscriber Stats

This particular tool will help you find the status on your RSS feed subscribers. This is one of the new additions to the toolbox and is certainly useful when you are using feed management systems.

Links

This is where you can learn about your website’s internal and external link popularity status. Though this tool is a very limited in terms of the information provided, it will certainly be helpful information when you are trying to work on your website’s online exposure.

Google Sitemaps

This is one of the basic and oldest Google webmaster tools. In fact all the Google webmaster tools were built around Google sitemaps tool.

This will help you to manage your sitemap files that are Google specific. You will be able to upload XML files, which will help Google to crawl your website completely.

Tools

The tools area in Google Webmaster Tools is the most resourceful sections. You can find the following tools under this section:

Analyse robots.txt

Robots.txt is a protocol meant for googlebot, which will tell Google how they should go about crawling your website. You can give instructions to googlebot in this file. You can control the crawling of Googlebot to the desired parts of your website as well as block the search engines from crawling certain parts of your website.

Analyse robots.txt tool will help you check the validity of your robots.txt file. Even a small mistake in this file can cost your website’s ranking dearly. So better take advantage of this tool to ensure that everything is in place.

Site Verification Management

This section will help you change the options on your site verification. You will also be able to secure your website. This is highly helpful when you are using a SEO company to handle your webmaster tools. Once you terminate their services with them, your information will still be available to them. Using this site verification area, you can block unauthorised entries to your website.

Crawl Rate

Here you will be able to get Google’s activity on your website and their indexing frequency. If you really want to benefit from this section, you will have to select adjust crawling speed feature. Here are few useful tips on how you can benefit from the activity graphs.

You will have to remember here that info will be limited to a 90 day span. You can see variations in the graph based on your website update frequency. Check the graphs closely and compare it with your website activity. You will also be able to measure the effectiveness of your Link Building efforts. You can see spikes in the graph if your Link Building efforts have really been effective. The aim here is to make sure that Google is visiting your website frequently and interacting with your website actively. This is important to get new content in your website indexed fast.

Set Preferred Domain

If you do not want your page rank and the effectiveness of your Link Building efforts diluted between www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com, you need to tell Google which will be your canonical URL or which will be your preferred URL.

This will have definitive impact on your website’s ranking. Google will display the right URLs based on what you have instructed it in this section. Never ignore this section; not many people realize the importance of this section.

Enhanced Image Search

One of the ways of enhancing your website’s online presence is by getting yourself included in the image search. When you select enhanced image search you will be able to gain control on labeling images in your website. You can also make use of Google image labeler to help improve image relevancy.

You can find Google image labeler at http://images.google.com/imagelabeler.

Remove URLs

If there are pages removed in your website in your latest update, you should remove those pages from Google indexing. You will be able to do this easily using the remove URLs tool.

To conclude

When you invest enough time understanding each of the tools available in Google webmaster tools, you will certainly be able to benefit a great deal. All these tools after all are FREE for use.

Google even allows users to download important information regarding their website. You can set automatic download schedules to have your statistics downloaded. The best download schedule suggested is once in 60 days as Google provides information once in 90 days. When you set 60 days download, you will have overlapping data to interpret the information better.

The data gathered here can be used in multiple ways to gain valuable insights regarding your website’s online performance.

If you need any further advice on Google webmaster tools and the way it can help you interpret your site data please do not hesitiate to contact us via email or call on 0161 928 8799. We are Manchester SEO and Manchester Web Design specialists

Many people start off trying to do their own SEO but often no matter how hard they try, their sites do not rank well or the sites rank well but SEO takes all their time and all their other jobs are neglected

If this is the case with you, maybe it is better to consider employing a SEO company to do the work for you. With so many SEO companies out there, you can’t complain that you have no choice. Or is it the opposite – so many companies but very few reliable and transparent?

It is wrong to say there are no reliable SEO companies. Yes, there might be many scam SEO companies but if you know what to look for when selecting a SEO company, the risk of employing scam companies is reduced.

here is a list with some points to watch for when choosing a good SEO company:

Do they promise to guarantee a number 1 ranking?

If they do, you have a serious reason to doubt their abilities. It is a well known fact that no one can guarantee a #1 ranking in Google, all we can do is follow the principles of SEO and use our experience of working within your industry.

Get recommendation from friends, business partners, etc. Word of mouth is very important for the credibility of a company.

Google the company name.

If the company is a known scammer, chances are that you will find a lot of information about it on the web. However, lack of negative publicity does not mean that the company is great, nor do some subjective negative opinions mean that the company is a scam

Ask for examples of sites they have optimised.

Happy customers are the best form of promotion, so feel free to ask your potential SEO company about sites they have optimised and references from clients. If you get a rejection because of confidentiality reasons, this must ring a bell about the credibility of the SEO company – former customers are not supposed to be a secret.

Check the PageRank of their own site.

If they can’t optimise their site well enough to get a good PR (over 3+), they are not worth hiring.

Ask them what keywords their site ranks for.

Similarly to the page rank factor, if they don’t rank well for the keywords of their choice, they are hardly as professional as they are pretending to be.

Do they use automated submissions?

If they do, stay away from them. Automated submissions can get you banned from search engines.

Do they use any black hat SEO tricks?

You need to know in advance what black hat SEO is in order to judge them, so getting familiar with the most important black hat SEO tricks is worth before you go and start cross-examining them.

Where do they collect back links from?

Back links are very, very important for SEO success but if they come from link farms and other similar sites, this can cause a lot of trouble. So, make sure the SEO firm collects links from reputable sites only.

High price does not guarantee high quality.

If you are eager to pay more, this does not mean that you will get more. Just because a firm costs more DOES NOT make them better SEO’s. There are many reasons for high prices and high quality is only one of them. For instance, the company might work inefficiently and this is the reason for their ridiculously high costs, not the quality of their work.

Cheap is more expensive.

This is also true. If you think you can pay peanuts for a professional SEO campaign, then you need to think again. Professional SEO companies offer realistic prices.

Do they offer subscription services?

SEO is a constant process and if you want to rank well and keep on like that, efforts are necessary all the time. Because of this, it is better to select a company that includes post-optimization maintenance, than get a company that pushes your site towards the top and then leaves you in the wild on your own.

We have tried to mention some of the most important issues in selecting a SEO company. Of course, there are many other factors to consider and each case is different, so give it some thought, before you sign the contract for employing a SEO company.

Our UK SEO Company offer full transparency on all elements of SEO and we also do not tie you into a minimum term contract

You cannot say fairer than that – Our results do the talking – not our sales people

HTML 5 is still being finalised at time of writing but any SEO company worth their salt (or your money) will be looking ahead at how HTML 5 will impact SEO.

We have been monitoring the progress and development closely and feel comfortable enough to publish some interesting points we have found.

HTML5 and the implications for SEO

Whilst it is true that the changes and the new features in HTML 5 will impact our web developers and designers more than the SEO, HTML 5 will still mean changes in the SEO techniques and strategies we use.

What’s New in HTML 5?

HTML 5 follows the way the WWW has evolved in the last 5-10 years and includes many useful tags and elements. At first glance, it might look as if HTML 5 is going in the direction of a programming language but actually it isnt – it is still an XML-based presentation language.

HTML 5 is not very different from HTML 4. One of the basic ideas in the development of HTML 5 was to ensure backward compatibility and because of this, HTML 5 is not a complete revamp of the HTML specification. Fear not – you will not need to start learning a new language from scratch, merely expand the scope of your current skills.

How the Changes in HTML 5 Will Affect SEO?

As SEO geeks, we are interested mainly in the changes in the HTML 5 specification, which will affect our work directly. Here are some of them:

• Improved page segmentation.

Search engines are getting smarter and there are many reasons to believe that even now they are applying page segmentation. Basically, page segmentation means that a page is divided into several separate parts (i.e. main content, menus, headers, footers, links sections, etc.) and these parts are treated as separate entries.

At present, there is no way for a webmaster to tell search engines how to segment a page but this is bound to change in HTML 5.

• A new <article> tag.

The new <article> tag is probably the best addition from a SEO point of view. The <article> tag allows to mark separate entries in an online publication, such as a blog or a magazine. It is expected that when articles are marked with the <article> tag, this will make the HTML code cleaner because it will reduce the need to use <div> tags. Also, probably search engines will put more weight on the text inside the <article> tag as compared to the contents on the other parts of the page.

• A new <section> tag.

The new <section> tag can be used to identify separate sections on a page, chapter, book. The advantage is that each section can have its separate HTML heading. As with the <article> tag, it can be presumed that search engines will pay more attention to the contents of separate sections. For instance, if the words of a search string are found in one section, this implies higher relevance as compared to when these words are found all across the page or in separate sections.

• A new <header> tag.

The new <header> tag (which is different from the head element) is a blessing for SEO experts because it gives a lot of flexibility. The <header> tag is very similar to the <H1> tag but the difference is that it can contain a lot of stuff, such as H1, H2, H3 elements, whole paragraphs of text, hard-coded links (and this is really precious for SEO), and any other kind of info you feel relevant to include.

• A new <footer> tag.

The <footer> tag might not be as useful as the <header> one but still it allows to include important information there and it can be used for SEO purposes as well. The <header> and <footer> tags can be used many times on one page – i.e. you can have a separate header/footer for each section and this gives really a lot of flexibility.

• A new <nav> tag.

Navigation is one of the important factors for SEO and everything that eases navigation is welcome. The new <nav> tag can be used to identify a collection of links to other pages.

As you see, the new tags follow the common structure of a standard page and each of the parts (i.e. header, footer, main section) has a separate tag. The tags we described here, are just some (but certainly not all) of the new tags in HTML 5, which will affect SEO in some way.

For instance, <audio>, <video> or <dialogue> tags are also part of the HTML 5 standard and they will allow to further separate the content into the adequate categories. There are many other tags but they are of lower importance from an SEO point of view and that is why they are not discussed here.

Currently HTML 5 is still an emerging technology. When more pages become HTML 5-compliant, search engines will pay more attention to HTML 5. Only then it will be possible to know how exactly search engines will treat HTML 5 pages.

The mass adoption of HTML 5 won’t happen soon and it is a safe bet to say that for now you can keep to HTML 4 and have no concerns. Additionally, it will take some time for browsers to adjust to HTML 5, which further delays the moment when HTML 5 will be everywhere.

Once HTML 5 is accepted and put to use, it will be the dominating standard for many years to come and that is why you might want to keep an eye on what other webmasters are doing, just to make sure that you will not miss the boat when HTML 5 becomes the de-facto standard for HTML and SEO web design.

I’m sure you are already know about SEO!

There is nothing more thrilling than outdoing your competitors but you must be careful in doing so. If you have been left scratching your head as to why your opposition might be slipping ahead, it could be down to the number of backlinks your site has.

Quality Links

Traditionally, it was believed that the more links you have to your site, the higher your rankings on the major search engines. To a certain degree this is still the case but you mustn’t do a job half-heartedly! It is often the case that websites with 10 backlinks are appearing higher on the search engines than those with 1000 links. The reason being is it’s all about the quality of the links you use.

If you take time to study sites that rank on the first page, you will soon realise that the links they use are relevant or more trusted, and seem to be directed from the right place meaning industry related sites. Like a Cheetah, you will start the race by quickly accelerating but will soon burn out. It is important that you don’t get hooked on a “number game” and get caught in a trap.

Business owners who strive for a high volume traffic site think that by buying bulk volumes of links that they are magically going to rocket up the search engines. This is simply not the case! They are often getting links for non-trusted sites that are not doing them any favours. Use real sites where you can get your links on real pages not SEO’d sites.

Manuallinkbuilding.co.uk have been working with clients in the UK and internationally for the last 4 years on successful link building campaigns. We have the experience of working with many Link Building partners across the world, allowing us to distinguish between the good ones and bad ones, saving you the nightmare. we are now the Link Building partner of choice for many of the UK’s largest SEO companies.

So if you are looking for assistance with your Link Building campaign and need someone who can give you sound advice, try using manuallinkbuilding.co.uk where you can choose from the range of packages and services we offer to suit your business needs!

The key to the success of your website and business is getting your site to rank high in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Google now accounts for 70% of online searches so it is important to consider how search engine optimisation and Link Building can help your website rank highly.

Google doesn’t rank whole websites; it ranks the pages that it knows. Many business people put a huge amount of effort into promoting their homepage and this is the reason why so many homepages are ranked highly. The two most important factors to consider when raising the profile of your website are:

• 1. The content of the webpage and how relevant it is to what the individual is searching for

• 2. The inbound links that are being used to direct traffic to your website from other places on the Internet and how relevant they are.

Relevant search results

Google’s object is to provide search results that relevant to what the individual is searching for. It is therefore vital that you make it clear what your website is selling and who your target audience is for Google to understand this. In order to do this, you need to carefully design the web pages of your site to include the search terms that people would use when looking for a business like yours.

Once you have completed the content of your site, the next step is to promote it. Many business fail when it comes to promoting their websites, after putting in a lot of hard work and effort into the content and design work, therefore it ranks poorly. As with many entrepreneurs, they think that once they start a business, hundreds of people will come flocking and will buy what they are selling.

In reality this does not happen. Promoting and marketing the business, play a vital role in how successful the business will be.

A website can be seen as a shop front, and shop owners do their best to attract passing trade. View your website as a shop front and do your best to promote your services so you will rank high on the search engines for search terms related to your business. This will be the difference between gained a steady stream of customers and wondering why you have received no interest at all!

SEO Link Building

Another key to the success of your website is Link Building for search engine optimisation. As previously mentioned, the inbound links that are being used to direct traffic to your website can dictate the volume of the traffic that visits. These links need to be of high quality and be relevant to the nature of your business. The more links that you have to your site, the more traffic you will receive and a really simple way of building links is to get friends, family or colleagues to add a link for your website to their site or blog. In addition, you can also use social bookmarking, and produce articles and press releases to be submitted to online directories to boost numbers.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the method used to rank a website highly on the major Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Considering the size of the World Wide Web (WWW), it may seem an impossible task to have your website ranked above those of your competitors.

SEO is a time consuming strategy however, with a lot of work and commitment, your website can be ranked highly on the Search Engines. The higher that your site is ranked, the more traffic that will be routed to it, therefore increasing the number of potential customers you will have.

SEO is a complex strategy and there are many different factors that are crucial in raising the profile of your website. Broken down simply, there are two main processes to SEO:

• 1. On Page Optimisation

The first is on-page optimisation which is the process used to optimise the website itself, and secondly off-page optimisation.

• 2. Off Page Optimisation

The second is the strategy concerned with the external environment of the website such as building links through manual Directory Submission.

Manual Directory Submission is vitally important if you want the ‘Crawlers’ or ‘Spiders’ of the major Search Engines to find your website and rank it highly above your competitors. These are sent out on a daily basis to find new websites or websites with fresh content, and work by finding the inbound links to your website.

Web directories are free to submit your website on so the more that you submit to, the more chance your website has of being highly visible for your chosen keywords of phrases related to the nature of your business.

If you’re interested in dramatically increasing the visibility and online presence of your company, get in touch with us today and ask about our SEO services.

If you want a cost effective solution to raise the rankings of your website on the major Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing, it is vital that you submit your website to as many web directories as possible.

Search Engines such as Google and Yahoo! send out “Crawlers” or “Spiders” on a daily basis to search the Internet for new website content. If you have a new website and want it to be found by the Search Engines, it is important that its links are being found through SEO friendly directory sites.

The majority of web directories provide one-way links that help with the SEO aspects of your website. How well your site is ranked on the Search Engines depends on the number of inbound links it has. Unlike two-way links that are exchanged with other sites, one-way links are more valued by the Search Engines when ranking it for a given position.

Web directories can help majorly when it comes to using specific keywords or phrases for your website to be found. This is not an easy task but directories allow you to provide these keywords to help Search Engines favour your site over others with similar search terms.

The common misconception is that people believe by submitting their website to many directories they will receive plenty of traffic to their site. There are some directories that are able to provide traffic; however, it is for certain categories.

Important Factors with Web Directory Submissions

The most important factor of submitting your website to web directories is that it is a cost effective solution. As it is free to submit your site, it makes sense to submit to as many directories as possible, therefore increasing your chances of being ranked highly on the Search Engines.

The problem is; it’s a time-consuming process! This is why it’s worth considering the outstanding manual submission services that we have to offer, saving you the time and trouble. We employ a team of dedicated and experienced professionals to ensure that your website is submitted to all the top quality SEO friendly directories.

Do you know how many people visit your website each day? Is it tens, hundreds, or even thousands?

Whatever the number, there are many different methods you can use to increase it.

Advertising is probably the most important thing you can do for your website, but…

What are the best advertising methods and how do you go about using them?

Well, imagine a TV advert. The advert has cost thousands of pounds to create, but there isn’t a spare TV slot in which to present it. How do people get to hear about the product? The chances are that they won’t. And this is the same for your website. You have put in all the effort of creating an eye-catching and engaging site, but if people don’t know about it they will never visit.

The importance of SEO to your website

SEO is a big thing right now and looks set to stay. With so many websites struggling to rank highly on the search engines, search engine optimisation is key for making sure you stay ahead of the crowd.

There are numerous methods you can use to keep your website ranking high on Google and other search engines, but you do need to work hard and keep your content and SEO methods up to date and fresh. As a website owner you are responsible for making sure that web traffic continues to flow and at an increased rate. The only way you can do this is by employing several clever SEO methods.

For example, you could promote your site by writing articles that focus on your particular niche. By imparting invaluable and informative information to your readers you will have more chance of them wanting to know more by visiting your site. All you need to do is supply a link to your site within the article and you have your audience right there.

Other SEO Techniques

Other methods of SEO include link building and social networking. Link Building involves the link to your site being added to other like-minded websites. This usually works in a mutually beneficial way by you also placing the other party’s link on your site. After a while you can build up many hundreds of websites that contain your link. However, you need to be selective and only choose high quality sites that are relevant to your site’s content.

Implementing SEO on your website

SEO doesn’t need to be taxing and you can even choose to employ SEO experts to assist you in this area. This is sometimes a good idea if you like to focus on the business whilst somebody else handles the administration and advertising.

The most important thing is that you do something and with so much competition out there, you need to do it well. Keep ahead of the latest SEO Manchester trends and employ some of them for your website and you are doing something positive that will help to generate that extra traffic.

SEO is essential to your success on the Internet. After all, if visitors don’t know the name of your site or how to get to it then they will bypass your products or services completely. SEO stands of search engine optimisation and is one of the most important tools you will use in your quest to rank high on the search engines and gain more web traffic.

SEO and eCommerce shopping sites

Shopping sites are used more and more in today’s modern world and offer a great service for consumers looking to save money. Marketing a shopping site is important in order to stay ahead of the competitive and make sure that shoppers land on your page first. Once they are there they will stick around for a while and you need to make sure you make your pages and content interesting and informative to encourage them to save your site and visit again.

You can market your site in a number of different ways. Traditional advertising methods work as does word of mouth. However, these methods are becoming pushed aside for more modern methods such as article marketing, Link Building and social networking. The Internet is saturated with websites all vying for attention at the top of a search engine listing. You need to constantly update your methods of SEO in order to keep your site fresh and interesting. Writing articles is a great way of promoting your site whilst imparting information that is of use to the consumer and encourages to click on the link to your site.

Link Building and SEO

Link Building is another great tool, but this needs to be used wisely. Only choose to put your links onto sites that contain relevant content and that are of high quality. You are more likely to get hits on your site from genuine consumers looking to make a purchase.

Social networks and shopping sites

Social networking is another great way of marketing your shopping site. Facebook and Twitter for example are now major contenders in the world of SEO and with millions of people using these networks each day you open up your site to so many more potential visitors. There has never been a better time to market your site as there are so many SEO tools available and just searching online for tools results in hundreds of different methods and resources at your disposal.

Marketing your site is the most important thing you can do. Make sure your content is fresh and interesting, stay focused on high quality marketing techniques, and review the methods you use in order to stay ahead of the crowd and ahead on the search engine results. Once you employ several successful methods you can continue to use these tactics each day to improve your web traffic and your sales.

For more details about how our SEO Link Building techniques can help you achieve success through search marketing, please contact us today on 0161 928 8799 or email us

Today we have completed our research and released a new product to our portfolio of SEO Link Building services.

We are now offering 250 .co.uk manual Directory Submissions for just £59.99 + VAT

View the full offer and buy online here – UK Directory Submissions

Google is a highly secretive search engine. If you are trying to optimise your site to obtain high rankings, Google will provide you with little or no information. It even fails to show all of the links it is counting to your site, a negative step that no other search engine takes. What Google does provide, however, is the Google pagerank for sites.

In our opinion, Google pagerank is a bit of red herring. We don’t believe it tells you much about how Google views your site. Instead, it is a bit of bait designed to get you to download the Google Toolbar.

Yes, you can only see your true pagerank if you download a Google program on to your computer. And you thought Microsoft was bad!

If you are looking for SEO in Manchester then Pagerank will matter to you

Assuming you have downloaded the toolbar, the pagerank is the little bar in the middle that should be partially covered in green.

The green represents your pagerank and is out of ten. You can run your cursor across it and the actual pagerank number will appear. Most sites have a pagerank of 3 unless new. If your bar is grey, it means you have been banned by Google for doing something they don’t like in your optimisation efforts.

If the bar is blank, it either means your site has not been indexed yet or Google is updating its rankings.

So, what does the Google pagerank mean when it comes to search engines?

Not much. Originally, it was thought to be a measure of value compared to other sites. Google still touts the tool as this, but it is a crock. In reality, the pagerank tool doesn’t mean much of anything.

You can see the truth of this statement by doing a search and then looking at the pagerank of the sites in the top 10. You will see pagerank of three or four with much higher placement in the search results than a site with a pagerank of six or seven.

This, of course, renders the tool useless since it is not indicative of anything other than some amorphous value Google is assigning to your site.

Google pagerank for search engines is an interesting tool in a very general sense. Just keep in mind that it does not actually mean much of anything when it comes to search engine rankings.

If you are looking for assistance in improving your Google rankings – please contact this SEO Manchester for details

SEO is not an easy job

First of all, search engine optimisation is vitally important if webmasters want to get to the top of the SERP’s. Appearing in the top 6 positions on the SERP will make sure you get all the traffic from the search engines!

Difficulty of SEO

SEO, or search engine optimisation, is an extremely time-consuming process involving a lot of ‘leg work’ and research. The most difficult part of SEO is finding keywords with very little competitiveness, but high search volume. When we decide to use a keyword on our website or in our blog posts, we always use keyword research tools like Google Trends and Google AdWords to find the specific search volume and competitiveness for the keyword we want to use. As with any good SEO, we consider keywords on a daily basis and make a list of any promising ones we think of.

Having enough time to SEO your own website is very rare, but even if you do, there’s a good chance that won’t be enough to get to the top of Google. You may be able to rank yourself but to get to the very top of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo & Bing), you need to consider working with a professional SEO company.

The SEO solution

If you really want to appear on the top of the major search engines as soon as possible, then you need to consider hiring a professional SEO company to take control of your SEO campaign. Not only will they have the experience of running link building campaigns to do this, they have the time and resources to really do your site justice.

If you haven’t heard about ‘Personalized Search for everyone‘ then read on, if you have then perhaps you would like to read on and discuss the change in the comments section.

Many of you, however, will have seen Google personalised search, which was created to give a more personalised results page. Since December 2009, Google has made personalisation standard, whether you’re signed in or not. If you wish to disable it, you can by clicking the “Web History” tab at the top of Google.

But what about SEO?

There are not as many actual changes as people imagine, but there are some changes that will affect SEO – below are a few ‘facts’ to consider:

* Only queries that a user has made before will be affected, resulting in a lot of possible queries being unaffected
* Positions 1-4 in Google have seen little change
* Positions 5-10 do change a little bit more than usual, but the first page is mostly unchanged.

What has changed with personalised search?

From the point of view of an SEO company, there are several new factors to adjust to, such as the fact ranking placements are not as ‘reliable’ as we thought they once were. With personalised search SEO companies now need to put even more effort in to get as many users to visit the site as possible because one ‘click’ can result in pushing the site to the top of the rankings!

Personalised search may not be the devil that a lot of people in the SEO industry seem to believe, but it will require a little bit of change, and the best SEO companies will take notice rather than ignore the personalisation of Google Results.

And remember – Personalised search or no personalised search – link building is still very important for a successful SEO campaign

At Manual Link Building we know how important Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is for a business in the 21st Century. We also know that plenty of business owners not only don’t know why it’s important, they don’t even know what it is! This is a major problem…

Why is an SEO campaign a necessity to all webmasters?

An SEO campaign has one main goal; to increase the awareness of your business online.

How does an SEO Campaign work?

The most effective way is to optimise your website for the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing), this includes the on page content, the links to your site and many more factors that the search engines require and look out for.

If your website appears on the first page (or one of the top 5) of Google for a keyword phrase that relates to the products or services you offer on your website, then there’s a good chance of increased traffic and hopefully sales for your business!

Think about it; when you search for a product or service (e.g. Plumber in London), how often do you go past the first few pages in the search engine you use? I bet your answer is either not many or never!

To be seen at the top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)…

…is vital in today’s web-savvy world. If your business can be found organically on Google then you’re opening your company up to a whole new world of potential customers – if you’re nowhere to be seen, then you’re missing out on a lot of money!

Whether you’re setting up a new business or you’re trying to turn around the fortunes of your current company, an SEO campaign by a respectable SEO company can work wonders.

If you’re interested in getting your website ranked, throw us an email and we’ll be glad to help.

A sitemap will enable search engines like Google and Yahoo to better crawl and index your site.

The more search engines know about your web site structure, the greater chance there is of increased traffic being driven to your site. A good place to start for an overview is sitemaps.org. They provide the following definition of a sitemap:

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

If you want to go into more detail regarding the structure of these sitemaps then I suggest you read their protocol page.

This will give you an example of a basic XML sitemap together with an explanation of each of the tags that make up the XML sitemap file.

Submitting XML Sitemaps to the Major Search Engines

So how do you go about creating one of these XML sitemaps and submitting it to the search engines?

If you’re using WordPress then I recommend you take a look at the Google Sitemap Generator plugin.

This plug in generates an XML Sitemap of your WordPress blog. Whenever you change, edit, create or publish a post, the plug in will automatically update your sitemap and ping the new sitemap to Google.

It’s a great solution for people who want to simply install a plug in and then forget about it.

If you’re not using WordPress, or you run into problems using the plug in, then there a host of web sites which offer a free online service which will generate a sitemap for you.

The one we use can be found at XML-Sitemaps.com.

This site provides a free online sitemap generator. You simply enter your website address and then press the start button. You then wait a few minutes for it to crawl your site.

The end result is an XML file which you can then save to your computer. You then submit this XML file to Google and other search engines.

This is a perfect XML sitemap solution if your website has less than 500 pages.

They do offer a paid version for over 500 pages – $10 – so well worth it

Pinging your Sitemap to the Search Engines

Once you have your XML sitemap saved on your computer, the next step is to submit the sitemap to the major search engines. There are three main options available.

• 1. If you use Google Webmaster Tools then you can login to your Google Webmaster Tools account and add the sitemap.

• 2. You can modify your robots.txt file to include a line which specifies the location of your sitemap. This will enable crawlers to automatically find your sitemap the next time they crawl your site. More details on this procedure can be found on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.

• 3. Our preferred choice is to Submit your sitemap using an HTTP request.

Here are the links for the major search engines

• http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=

• http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.website.com/sitemap.xml

• http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&url=http://www.website.com/sitemap.xml

Simply replace http://www.website.com.sitemap.xml with your details, place in your web browser, click enter and you are done – You will be redirected to a success page once done.

XML Sitemaps and Pinging the Search Engines Summary

Sitemaps are easy to setup and maintain and we recommend you invest the time to get a sitemap setup on your web site.

If you use sitemaps in conjunction with other SEO tips then you increase the likelihood of traffic coming to your site.

There are many Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) methods, and one of the most important is link building

What is ‘Link Building’?

Link Building in basic terms is building links back to your website – whether you post them on websites or forums, write articles with links back to your site and submit them to directories or many of the other ways in which you can gain links to your site (see below), it’s all done with one aim; to improve the ranking of your site in the search engines!

Why do we use Link Building?

Why would you want to increase the ranking of your website in the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing)? The higher your site appears for keyword phrases relating to your website, the more visitors your site will receive! No longer will you need to spend heavily on advertising or marketing projects, if you can appear on the first few pages of Google, Yahoo and Bing for a competitive keyword phrase that describes exactly what you’re offering on your site then your traffic will increase instantly!

Quality Back Links

Back links are known by many different names; inbound links, inward links, in-links and incoming links – but they all mean the same thing – a link to your site that a search engine like Google can use to find your site. Receiving quality back links from popular and highly ranked sites can directly help your own websites ranking – with different types of back links such as reciprocal links, theme-based links, three-way links, Directory Submission links and many more, it’s well worth your time and money contacting a professional SEO company in Manchester like Gareth Hoyle to take care of your SEO campaign.

Beware…

…sites that can get you banned. If you decide to choose a ridiculously cheap SEO company to work with, there’s a good chance they will use SEO methods that could get you banned from the major search engines! Through using a world-renowned SEO company like Gareth Hoyle you can rest in the knowledge that your site is in safe and experienced hands.

Search Engine Optimisation is now a necessity for all new online business and has seen a rapid growth over the last few years.

Finding the best UK SEO company to take you forward is vital – but what signs of quality should you be looking for?

UK SEO Expertise

Every SEO company claims to have a fair amount of ‘expertise’ in SEO – whether they actually have it or not, is another matter. The problem people looking for a UK SEO company face is that they need to find out who actually has the experience and knowledge required, and who the cowboys are.

Top UK SEO should possess certain characteristics –

• They should have a long list of past and current clients, and they should be happy to show you the results of the campaigns.
• The majority of the best UK SEO companies don’t do much self-promotion, they can be found through recommendations on SEO forums and through checking out the websites that appear on the first page of Google for competitive keywords such as SEO “their city” (SEO Manchester as an example).

Remember…

…check the history of any UK SEO company you are thinking about working with. You don’t want to be stuck with a guy who has no idea about SEO but thought it would be nice to get paid for 3-6 months for nothing.

We recommend Gareth Hoyle – A Manchester SEO who has a vast amount of experience when it comes to both SEO strategy and also SEO Link Building.