When it comes to creating websites, Drupal is a really popular option for many developers. This is largely because it uses open source software and is free for anyone to download and use, which naturally makes it very appealing. Also, a team of volunteers work on the software, updating it and improving it all the time so there are lots of benefits to take advantage of when it comes to Drupal. Of course, SEO is something that all websites need to take into consideration, so read on for more information about the basics of SEO for Drupal sites.

If you want to get good results with your Drupal SEO then it certainly helps to have some knowledge of both SEO and the Drupal software before you start. This will give you a good head start when it comes to getting good search results and making your website more profitable. There is a good Drupal SEO module available on the website that is definitely worth downloading and investigating as this will give you good advice and take you through the best practices you should definitely know about.

One tip for Drupal SEO is to make sure you have enabled clean URLs. These should be automatically enabled on newer versions of the software, but it certainly pays to check as clean URLs are preferred by search engines – and if you want to get good search rankings then you need to do everything you can to boost your website’s performance.

There are also lots of smaller modules that you can install in order to boost your Drupal SEO. One of these is called the Pathauto module, which is available to download and install. This is especially good for new Drupal sites that want to create good URLs based on information such as your title, username and content type.  This helps to make the process of creating good URLs easier and quicker, which is particularly useful if you are new to the software.

Another good thing to download is the Meta Tags module. This is a module that you can configure to output meta information on every page. This basically means that if web users search for a particular webpage, they’ll see meta information specific to that page, which will hopefully make it more relevant to what they are looking for rather than just getting general information. You can also set custom titles for all of your Drupal pages with the Page Title module, which is definitely something worth doing.

Also, when you are building a Drupal site, a good tip for your SEO is to use a custom front page. This is because the homepage of the site is almost identical to the site you’ll find at the /node extension, which is the one that search engines crawl and index. Creating a custom page helps to fix this and makes sure the right information gets indexed for SEO purposes.

Overall, it’s definitely worth downloading the Drupal SEO module and there are some good tutorials on the web that can take you through the key points and offer tips for SEO success. If you’re hoping to build your website to compete, you should certainly check them out.

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Google Analytics is a tool that is used by many businesses, both large and small. It can help you understand more about your website and the people who use it, which can in turn be built into your business plan so you can work out how to turn the information you’ve been given into revenue for your business. Read on to find out about 5 reasons to be using Google Analytics.

Learn about your traffic stats

One important reason to use Google Analytics is to find out about your traffic statistics. This essentially refers to how many people are using your website. For instance, you can look at how many people visited your website on any given day, as well as other information such as how long they stayed on your site. The ‘bounce rate’ is another important element of your traffic statistics; this is what tells you how many people left your site almost as soon as they found it. It will give you a good indication of how much more work you need to do in order to grab web users’ attention.

Find out about search information

Another reason to use Google Analytics is because it can give you important search information. For example, it can tell you the search terms that your customers used to find your site; this is useful when you are determining which keywords and phrases to target. If you have an internal search engine on your website, it can also tell you what your readers searched for on there, which can be a good way of determining popular topics on your site.

Integrate it with AdWords

You can also integrate Analytics with Google AdWords. Adwords is Google’s tool that helps you to identify keywords to target on your site. Once you are armed with the relevant search data provided by Analytics, you can then also make use of AdWords to get valuable information that can be translated to your website. For instance, users might have been searching for key terms you had never previously considered; this could be beneficial for both your SEO and in translating site visitors into business.

Track progress and plan ahead

Google Analytics also allows you to track the progress of your website over time. For instance, you can look at data from a few months ago and see how it has performed since then. This can be a good way of tracking your online achievements and it can also highlight areas where you might need to spend a bit more time in order to ensure your website is a success.

You can also use Google Analytics to set goals for yourself, so you have something to work towards when you are improving your website. You’ll then be able to see if and when you meet those goals, and then set new challenges once you’ve done it.

The cost

One of the best reasons to use Google Analytics is the cost: it’s free. This means that anyone can use it, making it great for small businesses in particular, and you can use the results to improve the performance of your website. It can help you identify untapped areas of potential in your site and make the most of them – something that’s very important if you want to become a success on the web.

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Everyone knows links are important but which kind of links should you be looking to get?  Some people will spend hour just trying to get 1 really good links while other people spend a bit of money buying 100′s of quick links.

Are either of these the right or wrong way? Should you have a balance of both of these types of link building or look to have a more balanced link building strategy?

Here are a few ways to build links that will either increase or decrease your rankings.

Outbound Links

Google seems to like you linking out to authority sites. Referencing sites such as the BBC or Wikipedia in your content shows the search engines that you are showing your visitors that there is further information available, or that you reference your sources. This can make your site seem more informative, therefore, more useful to your visitors and you can be rewarded with higher rankings.

Tip: Add target=”_blank” to your outbound link so your site is easily returned to.

Social Links

Social links from real accounts such as twitter, Facebook and Google+ have a huge effect on your rankings.  Receiving a +1 can bump you up the rankings. Using fake profiles is not advised as Google will most certainly be able to discover these in the future.

Tip: A good piece of content can attract 100′s of social links

Internal Links

Linking to your own content counts as a link. It helps visitors navigate your website as well as allowing the search engine bots to crawl your site easier.

Tip: WordPress is very good and automatically linking to its own content

Link Speed

Gaining too many links too quickly will alert Google.  This pretty much always end up in a penalty nowadays.

Tip: Keep your link profile natural and balanced

Number of Backlinks

Due to many sites filling their footers with links and having them all linking to each other a huge amount of times and those that buy large amounts of links, the pure number of links is counting for less and less.

Tip: Don’t just spam the same sites as everyone else, look for new opportunity’s to build links.

Backlink Diversity

Gaining all your links from one source is not natural.  vary the sources you gain links form and try to make them come from different IP ranges.

Tip: Stay away from link farms and check the whois information for their IP if you need to.

Anchor Text

Vary your anchor text. Having all your links with the same anchor text is unnatural.

Tip: Vary the anchor text as much as you can

Link Position

The position of the link on a page is important. Try to get a link in the main content of a page as these links are harder to obtain, therefore, worth more.

Tip: Guest posts are a great way to get these

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There is a big difference between picking a target market and promoting products or campaigns to the wider market. If you promote something to the wider market, this involves selling the same product or service to everybody, regardless of who they are. Marketing to a target market, however, is more nuanced and requires a different approach that is tailored to the needs and wishes of your individual market.

If you get it right, then a target market can prove to be a very good source of business and potentially very lucrative. This means it is extremely important to make sure you pick the right regional target market. Here are a few tips you should consider:

Think about the market segment

You need to think carefully about the target market you are looking to engage. Ask yourself key questions about them to gain a deeper understanding of what might work with them. For instance, where are they based? Are you hoping to target a specific age range, gender, geographical location or type of person?

As well as building up a profile of your regional target market, you also need to consider projections for that market so you can work out how good a business opportunity they will prove to be. For instance, is the target market predicted to grow in the coming months and years? How big is the market at the moment? It is likely that your market will be more profitable in the long term if it is predicted to grow either in terms of numbers or spending power.

Think about your competitors

Another important thing to consider when choosing a regional target market is who else is operating within that market. It’s important that you do some market research to identify your competitors. Find out how loyal your target market is to competitors and how much of a market share each of your competitors has. Then work out your likely market share based on what your competitors spend and the budget you available to engage your proposed target market. This will go a long way to helping you work out whether what you want to do is viable or whether you might need to expand your horizons.

It can be a good idea to target smaller or niche markets, depending on your business, as larger sections of the demographic are likely to already be clogged with competition. Try and look for gaps of service coverage and find an under-represented regional market that you can engage and grow over time.

Think about your business

When picking a regional target market, you also need to be certain that they fit your business. After all, there is only a certain market that will have any need of baby products, for instance. Think carefully about what it is you are trying to market, what you are hoping to achieve from it then research to find your key market as well as any periphery markets that might be able to fit into your business model. You need to think about the impact on your operations as well as the image of your business: in other words, your chosen regional target market needs to be beneficial for both them and your business.

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Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a key part  of the process of designing or redesigning a website, an expert has said.

Reliance on SEO is increasing in recent years but an SEO strategy is usually added after a website has been developed and search engine rankings become a factor.
Senior natural search analyst at iCrossing, Dave Peiris, says SEO should be a factor from step 1 in the design process in order to fully maximise the SEO potential of the site.

He points out that content management systems can run into unexpected problems further down the line if SEO was taken into consideration early

Mr Pieris goes on to say that the investment in time early in the stage can lead to a saving in time after a site is completed.

He added, “If you’re just thinking about SEO after your site is live, then your site structure can be one of the hardest things to change”.

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Choosing a good domain name is important for your business or affiliate site.  It needs to give a good idea of your company name or, if you’re an affiliate it will need to state what your site is about or it will need to be a domain based on a targeted keyword.

Assuming you don’t need to have a brand name for your site we will look at the ways to choosing a good domain name.
After doing your keyword research for your new project you will already have a good list of keyword domains.  These keywords will also help you with content ideas for your site.  If you find your chosen keyword and decide to go ahead with it on your site you then have to make sure firstly that its available and secondly what type of domain do you want.  If you want worldwide traffic a .com domain is best but maybe you only need .co.uk for your UK customers.  Each have their strengths but the agreed upon rank seems to follow like this..

1 – Exact Match Domain (Strongest)

exactmatchdomain.com

2 – Exact Match Hypenated Domain
exact-match-domain.com

3 – Contains All Words
almostexactmatchdomain.com

So what we are saying is that if “mychosenurl.com” is not available the “my-chosen-url.com” is the next best choice.  One tip is to avoid using numbers, 10, ten and X all mean the same so it only works written down.

Of course there are other factors other than SEO related ones.

Be aware of infringing copyright on your URL.  Using a known brand or a variation on it could lead to that brand owner shutting you down.  In recent years there has been a stronger approach to people doing this so be aware that although you might have a cool URL that looks similar to or mentions a recognised brand or person, it could easily be taken away from you.

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Most of the time, we are too busy concentrating on link-building and nailing the off-site aspects of SEO in order to please Google and tend to neglect the on-page aspects. If you want long-term, long-lasting SEO success, you’ll need to pay close attention to your on-page SEO, too. We’ve put together our top 5 on-page SEO tips to help you along the way.

1. Optimise your title tag

Your title tag is vitally important in terms of SEO. Don’t simply include your company’s name and leave it at that. Prioritise your main keyword at the start of the title tag and ensure that it reads naturally and doesn’t take up any more than 64-70 characters. Any longer than this, and Google will simply chop the end off.

2. Utilise your link text properly

The text that makes up a hyperlink is what tells Google what the target page is about. Want Google to associate a page with a specific term? Use that term in the anchor text of your hyperlinks and you’re half-way there. However, you need to make sure that the text reads naturally and won’t put off humans in favour of search engines. Remember your audience.

3. Remember the alt attributes!

Many people neglect alt attributes on images. Essentially, this text tells browsers what the picture is about, seeing as most are unable to read and decipher images. This is vital for W3C validity, but the real bonus is an SEO one. If your image is linked to another page, the alt text will act as the equivalent of anchor text in a text-based hyperlink. By utilising your keywords in the alt text, you can squeeze a little bit more SEO benefit out of your pages.

4. Keep your code clean and valid

Having code which is clean and structured and conforms to W3C standards will ensure that search engine spiders and browsers are able to read and navigate your site effectively, as well as being able to extract the relevant content from your site and discover its focus and meaning. Making life easier for Google will make life much easier for you, and you’ll see the benefit in your search engine rankings in no time.

5. Above all, keep the quality high

The temptation is always there to spam your pages in order to get the search engine benefit but make your site completely useless and unintelligible for human visitors. Think about it – what use is it being at the top of the search engines if your users can’t find their way around your site or work out what you’re trying to say from your jumble of heavily-SEO’d text? Keep your users at the front of your mind at all times, and search engines will follow.

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When trying to make the most out of search engine traffic in order to generate traffic to and business from your website, there are two aspects to take into consideration: paid traffic and organic traffic. Essentially, the differences are quite obvious: one is free and one requires payment, but the differences go a lot further than that.

Paid traffic, often generated through Google’s Adwords platform consists of paying for each click that a user makes on one of your adverts, thereby generating traffic to your website and, hopefully, enquiries and sales for your business. Paid search allows you to set your own budget and stick to that, but it does tend to be quite expensive when compared to organic search engine optimisation.

Organic traffic accounts for more than 85% of all search engine traffic, so you can see where the big money lies. To have real search engine success, you need to be on the first page of Google for your chosen keywords. Of course, some financial input is likely to be necessary, especially if you decide to hire a search engine optimisation company to optimise your website for you. Organic search engine optimisation gives long-term, long-lasting benefits which target the bulk of the traffic, but the results do take time to build up and bear fruit, meaning that you need to be committed in the long term.

Generally, the best practice (if your budget allows it) is to start off using paid search and organic search engine optimisation in tandem, allowing paid search to bring in the traffic and sales whilst the organic search engine optimisation takes time to come into full effect. As your business from organic search engine optimisation begins to build, you can level off your paid search spend and concentrate on the bulk of the traffic from organic search. Although paid traffic is still successful, it is declining in terms of the likely return on investment that advertisers are seeing, as well as becoming more expensive as a form of advertising and marketing. Through embracing organic search engine optimisation in the long term, your results will be positive and long-lasting.

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The SEO industry has exploded in recent years, with more and more people jumping on the bandwagon to try and promote their products and services through search engines. If you’re new to the SEO industry and trying to do things yourself, it can be a little bit daunting at first. Fortunately, we’ve put together our top 5 basic SEO tips.

1. Title tags

Perhaps the most important on-page SEO aspect is what sits between your <title></title> tags. You should be careful to limit this to 64-70 characters at the most (any more and Google will ignore it or cut it off) and be sure to prioritise your main keywords at the start of your title tag.

2. Create a sitemap

A sitemap will help Google create an index of all the pages on your site and crawl them effectively, rather than having to follow links. You should create an HTML and an XML sitemap. If you don’t feel confident using XML, a simple text file sitemap will work fine. You should register these with Google’s Webmaster Console and keep an eye on the indexing.

3. Keyword-rich linking

When creating links to other pages on your website, ensure they are keyword-rich. Whatever the anchor text of your link is, that’s what Google will associate the target page with. Use this to your advantage and create natural, keyword-rich anchor text to use when linking within your website.

4. Backlinks

Google’s algorithm is heavily weighted towards backlinks. Every link that points in to your site is a vote of confidence, with on-topic and high-authority links counting for far more than minor, off-topic links. You should spend a great deal of your time on your linkbuilding strategy to ensure long-term Google success.

5. Content is King.

Ensure your site is kept up to date with relevant, interesting content which enables Google to see that your website is alive and growing all the time. Keep the content on-focus in terms of SEO and ensure it is relevant and interesting for users so that they feel compelled to link to it and give you even more SEO benefit.

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When you start a new business or set up a new website, one of your first decisions will be to decide which domain name to use for your website. With far more to consider than many people realise, this is not a decision to be taken lightly.

First of all, you should think about your SEO considerations. When launching a new website, your domain name could be vitally important in your SEO campaign. A domain name which contains your main keywords could give you a big SEO boost – especially in the early days of your website’s life. If your company name contains your main keyword, too, you will have a memorable, SEO-friendly domain name.

You should, however, be careful not to focus solely on your SEO considerations when choosing a new domain name. More than anything, your domain name needs to be memorable and last in the memory of your potential customers.

If customers cannot remember the name of your website, they’re unlikely to come back and will find it difficult to recommend your website or business to their friends. Keep it short, snappy and relevant. Long winded domain names will do nothing to help your branding or your SEO campaign.

Users and search engines can easily be satisfied at the same time. If you sell power tools, for example, BobsPowerTools.com does everything it should – it satisfies search engines and is easily memorable for users. Likewise, SpeedyCarInsurance.com is catchy, memorable, and contains your main SEO keywords.

Choosing a domain name doesn’t have to be an impossible decision, but it should certainly take more deliberation and thought than you may have initially realised. With a well thought out domain name, however, you’ll be well on the path to search engine success.

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