If you sell products to teenagers, or have a website that is aimed at 12-15 year olds, then a new report from Ofcom indicates that its success depends on getting to the top of the search engines.

According to the report, 37% of 12 to 15 year olds believe that search engines rank results according to relevance. Another 32% think that the Search Engine Results Page is ‘truthful’. They believe that those websites ranking highly are truly the most relevant appropriate for the search query.

Just 14% think that companies pay money to get to the top.

Here’s the full graph.

It’s nice to think that at that age kids have not yet grown cynical about how the search engine results are ranked. It’s a shame there’s no corresponding research for an older age bracket, which I feel sure would be more aware of the manipulation of the SERPs by companies vying to get to number 1.

Of course, just because you want to boost your website up the search engine results page, and carry out a program of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to do so, doesn’t mean you are doing anything wrong or ‘manipulative’.

At the end of the day, Google wants to deliver the most relevant results for search queries, so if your SEO efforts prove to them that your website deserves to rank highly, then there’s no harm done.

Have you had any success or otherwise with SEO? Can you share your experience? Leave us a comment below.

Anyone who has been following our Search Engine Optimisation guide (SEO) will know that one of the most important things to decide before you start building a website is which keywords you’re going to focus on. Choosing keywords that are both relevant to your website, and that are also being used frequently on search engines, will decide how much potential traffic those search engines are going to send to your website.

So if choosing certain keywords plays a roll in how much traffic your website gets, do some website builders and publishers only choose those keywords that can in fact bring lots of traffic? Undoubtedly so, and there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as the keywords are highly relevant to what the web page is all about. But what if you’re a news organisation? Do you choose stories - and keywords - to write about simply because they will get visitors onto your site, rather than them being genuinely in the news?

This was the charge levied at thetelegraph.co.uk in a recent article in satirical news magazine Private eye. It was claimed that stories on the telegraph website were being chosen simply for keyword popularity, in order to drive more traffic onto the website. Moreover, the article suggested that reporters were required to stuff as many keywords as possible into the opening paragraph, to improve the chances of that article ranking more highly, and therefore getting more traffic. The text from Private Eye reads: “Telegraph news hacks are sent a memo three or four times a day listing the top subjects being searched in the last few hours on Google. They are then expected to write stories accordingly and/or get as many of those keywords as possible into the first part of their story”.

We recently discussed how theguardian.co.uk tried keyword stuffing - with a particularly ‘fruity’ theme – to whether it is possible to trick Google into boosting some football pages onto the first page for less seemly search terms. And it worked. But surely a large and respected news organisation such as the telegraph must report the actual news, as objectively as possible, rather than allow user searches to define what makes it into the news, mustn’t they?

Shane Richmond, the communities editor attempted to dismiss the story by responding: “Normally I’d chuckle and move on, but the Private Eye item seems to have caused a little confusion, which I want to dispel”.

The Telegraph, apparently, does push their reporters towards using certain keywords, but this is to help readers to find stories, rather than the other way around, whereby stories are written so that they fall into the path of the searching public.

“So yes, of course, that’s what we do and our staff are regularly updated on the performance of our stories in search engines and told when a vital key word is missing”, continued Richmond.

But he also strongly contested that specific keywords were compulsory, and nor were keywords playing a role in what made it into the news.

It all sounds like quite a fine line, and illustrates how ‘the news’ is a two way dialogue between broadcasters and consumers. Anyone relaying the news must always shape their stories to their audience. That, for example, is why a huge event in a distant land appears as the fourth item on the news whilst a UK celebrity choosing to adopt a baby can make it into top spot. There is most clearly describes the symbiotic relationship between reader and writer, between news giver and news receiver.

Of course bloggers have always known that if they have any hope of attracting new readers from the search engines then they have to lay down stories that have a chance of appearing highly on some high traffic keywords.

So, news receiver, lets swap roles. What do you think? Your feedback is always appreciated – show me how symbiotic we are by leaving a comment below!

Search queries – the words that we type into the search box on Google (or Yahoo, or MSN) - are getting longer, according to research from Hitwise.

Whilst this data is US specific, the same factors apply here in the UK.

In previous years the vast majority of searches were single, two or sometimes three word combinations. These days searches of four words and up are on the rise. In fact, more than 50% of searches are now at least three words long. And a third are four words or longer.

Here’s the table:

From this, you can see that 1 and 2 word queries are actually becoming less common.

Hitwise say the trend for longer search queries is ever increasing. These longer search queries are often referred to as the ‘long tail’ of search terms.

What does this mean if you’re building a website? At the most basic level, people using search engines are getting a lot more specific about what they’re looking for. This is possibly because Google is getting better at delivering results that are more relevant to them.

This has a significant impact in terms of both your Search Engine Optimisation efforts and also your Pay Per Click activities. (We’ll be producing a Pay Per Click guide soon – so keep reading).

The main action you need to take is to make sure your website is optimised for keywords that are very specific to your business. People who are using very specific (and therefore longer) search queries are more likely to carry out an action when they arrive on your site. They have a clearer idea of what they want, have moved along from the ‘research’ phase of their searching, and are ready to take the next step. If they find what they want on your website then they will buy / leave their details / make an enquiry.

For example, a few years ago if you ran a bed and breakfast in Somerset you might have wanted to focus your efforts on keywords such as ‘b&b’, bed and breakfast’, ‘West country.’. When your website popped up in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) you would have had to rely on those people who were looking for a B&B in the West Country to pick out your website.  These days it might make more sense to look at longer tail keywords such as ‘b&b exmoor’, ‘cheap b&b somerset’, or even (and of course only if its relevant), ‘award winning bed and breakfast near horse riding’.

Whilst the number of visitors won’t be huge, those that do arrive your website will be highly relevant to your site, and therefore more likely to carry out an action when they get there.

Have you had any direct experience of changing your keywords that you can feedback to other readers? Leave us a comment below.

More research from HitWise this week reveals the subjects that we, as a nation, are most interested in.

Hitwise analysed the top 1,500 search terms from Google, Yahoo and MSN for the last three months of 2008. They then placed each search term in a category. For example, the search term ‘the apprentice’ was placed in the category ‘TV’; and ‘Coldplay’ was in ‘Music’.

And the result? It seems that as a nation we’re obsessed with TV and online gaming. If you take out non-brand searches, over 14% of searches are related to TV, and just under 14% are related to Online Gaming (such as World of Warcraft). The next three categories are Travel, Sport and Finance.

Breaking it down further, the most popular search terms in the TV category were ’strictly come dancing’, ‘eastenders’, ‘x factor’ and TV listings. So as we mentioned in our blog post about the UK’s most searched for celebrity, we haven’t completely lost our interest in pop, soaps and that sort of thing.

Delving further into the other top categories, here’s the top search terms for each sector:

Online gaming:
games
free online games
car games
free games
cooking games (really!)

Travel:
train times
cheap flights
cheap holidays

9 out of the top 10 sport related terms were football related, with ‘arsenal’ topping the list. ‘F1′ was the only one from any other sport.

And when it comes to finance, the list was headed by ‘currency converter’. The words ‘exchange rate’ were right up there too. So it seems the weakness of the pound is on lots of people’s minds.

What does this mean if you’re a website builder? Well one thing to take from it is that if your business or hobby falls into one of the popular search areas, you have the potential to get lots of visitors to your website. Follow our search engine optimisation guide (SEO) to maximise your chances. Of course what also might be true is that since these are the most popular search terms, they might be the most competitive too. Therefore work out which niche you are best catering for, and concentrate your SEO in that area. For example, if you run a B&B in Somerset, near Exmoor and you specialise in horse riding too, then make sure you’re optimising not just for ‘B&B’ and ‘Somerset’, but also ‘Exmoor’, the local town, and possibly horse riding in Somerset, Exmoor, and the local town.

What are you searching for right now? Leave a comment below.

How do you get your website to the top of the search engine results page (SERPS)? If you are diligently following our search engine optimisation guide (SEO) then you might want to turn away now.

The techniques of SEO – boosting your website to the top of the SERPs - can be broken down into two types, called ‘white hat’ and ‘black hat’. ‘White hat’ techniques are all the best practice methods we talk about in the guide. These include making sure you include your keywords in the title text and visible copy of your website; linking your pages together clearly; and then generating inbound links.

The ‘Black hat’ techniques - referred to as such since they are suspected to include elements of sorcery! – involve ‘tricking’ the search engines into placing your website at the top of the SERPs.

Black hat techniques include building thousands of keyword rich ‘cloaking’ pages that the search engine spiders will see but that users never will, so that the search engine thinks you’re writing about a particular subject in great detail whereas your website might be about something else entirely.

It should be noted here that if Google finds your web page using any black hat technique they will surely boot your web page out of their directory, so it won’t be found at all. However, since it’s not always easy to discover that a website is using black hat – in fact it’s often only found out when the website in question is reviewed manually – websites get away doing black hat SEO for months, and sometimes years at a time. These websites are normally those in markets that some might consider slightly shady themselves, such as gambling or pornography.

There have been lots written about ‘black hat’ SEO, and how the search engines are trying to clean out their directories of websites guilty of it. So The Guardian website decided to try their hand at these techniques as an experiment to see what happens.

The Guardian stuffed a load of irrelevant keywords into the header of one of their football news pages. These were keywords that generate lots of search volume, but are from the more tabloid end of the keyword spectrum. They included ‘Paris Hilton’, ‘how to make money without working’, and some other words that we’re not going to mention on this blog… if you get my meaning.

And did it work? Not in all cases: Yahoo! and MSN weren’t fooled, but the mighty Google and Ask started to rank the website in the top tens search results for some of the saucier keywords. It remains to be seen how long they will stay there, but since this is now a news story someone at Google might be adding that page to their banned list.

So is black hat SEO worth trying? Well it probably depends what market you operate in – if you’re building a website all about poker then it may be your only choice. But if Search Engines are your main source of traffic, and you’re using black hat SEO, you had better find an alternative source of visitors for when Google do finally kick you out of the SERPs.

Have you had any experience of Black Hat SEO? Do you suspect a competitor of doing so? Leave us a comment below.

You might think that here at WebEden we bang on too much about search engines. But as the recent Hitwise data shows, if you’re building a website then you need to know about search engines too. Search engines will probably be the biggest single source of traffic to your website. So they are a fundamental part of any website project.

We’ve previously talked about the Google keyword tool, where you can enter a keyword and find all the other words that are similar to that keyword. It will also give you a rough idea of how many searches per month there are for that keyword. This is a really useful tool to use when deciding what keywords you want to use for your Search Engine Optimisation programme.

A few months ago Google released another tool which has been seen as an enhancement of the keyword tool above. Google Insights for Search is designed to help website owners understand even more about which keywords are right for their website.

It calculates total searches for keywords, looks at the data historically, and produces graphs to show how a particular search term has trended over the last few years.

It then allows you to categorise the search trend by industry sector (called ‘verticals’) and geographical region.

Here’s a good illustration of how useful that can be, by looking at the search term ‘apple’. The vast majority of searches using the word ‘apple’ will be related to the computing brand ‘Apple’, as in ‘apple mac’. Lets say you’re a fruit seller, you obviously don’t want your website to appear high up for searches related to ‘apple mac’, but you still want a clear idea of the number of searches that are relevant to apples the fruit. You can use Google insights allows you to filter the results to just those that fall within the Food & Drink category. The result is the search trends, and related search terms, for just those searches about apple the fruit.

Lets say too that you’re hoping to sell apples online, but just to your local area or region. You can filter by geography to get just those apple related searches that are specifically about apples the fruit, in your area.

Seeing search volume trends can be really useful if you sell a seasonal product. If you sell valentines cards, then type ‘valentines cards’ into Google Insights and you can get a historical guide to the peaks and troughs of that search term. As you can see from the screen grab below, searches for valentines cards actually peak on the 11th February, so anyone looking to maximise sales of valentines cards need to make sure they’re maximising their marketing efforts before this time, and holding plenty of stock on this day.

Google Insights is also really useful if you’re thinking about stocking a new product on your website, or choosing to no longer sell another. Before you make any decisions, type the product name into Google Insights and see whether searches for it are going up or down. Anything that is climbing fast is clearly rising in demand, so its probably a good idea to sell it. If the trend is downward, then you might not want to restock that item when your current stock runs down.

The draw back of this product is that Google won’t actually put a figure on the number of searches for each term, but rather expresses the trend line as a percentage of the total number of searches. And bear in mind, search volumes are gong ever upwards, so if the number of searches for a using a particular keyword is remaining static, this is actually represented as a decreasing trend line.

Despite this, Google Insights will still show you a clear and accurate guide to the level of interest in your products, and the related search terms. You get all this data historically, and it’s all free.

Have a go at using the tool, and then leave your feedback below.

On average, almost half of all traffic that arrives on a website comes through search engines. This is according to recent research published by Internet traffic measurement company Hitwise UK.

Whilst in January 2008 search engines contributed 37.1% of total traffic to websites, by January 2009 this had climbed to a whopping 40.5%.

Here’s a graph from HitWise:

Apart from anything, this shows that if you want more visitors to your website, you need to make sure that your website appears high up in the search engine results page (SERPs). Read our guide to search engine optimisation to boost your website up the SERPs.

The dominance of search engines in website traffic is a huge opportunity for small businesses. Big brands used to be able to dominate the media landscape. What small company has the money to buy advertising on television, in national newspapers or in glossy magazines? But when it comes to search engines the game has changed. You don’t need big  budgets to reach out to potential customers, just an understanding of how search works, and a product or service that people want.

The flip side is that search has made it harder for large companies to ‘own’ consumer interest. Just because you’re a big brand it doesn’t mean you’re going to appear high in the search results. And spending lots of money on search doesn’t necessarily mean lots of traffic. A well optimised website of a small business or an individual will beat a poorly optimised big company website every time.

Just search for a common household product and you’ll see that the results page is full of unknown websites and unknown brands. None of these could afford to buy airtime of on TV. Before search engines, how would these brands have been able to reach potential customers?

The other interesting information arising from this research is the way in which we are now using search engines. 90% of the top 1,500 terms were brand specific. This means that people are using search engines to navigate the web, rather than typing a website’s address directly into the address bar. That’s the same sort of user behviour as seen in Japan, where people almost always use search engines rather than type in a domain name.

Do you a have a big budget competitor that you’ve managed to beat in the SERPs, using the WebEden website making tool? Leave us a comment below.

Lots of the stuff we’ve been writing about on this blog has been about how to improve your website’s position in the search engine results page. We’ve tried to make it as easy to follow as possible. But not everyone is at the same level, so if there’s one thing that you must do when setting up a website, it is to add your website to Google. Here’s how:

Good luck, and let us know if you have any problems

And that, as they say, is that!

How have you found the process? Did it work for you? Are you now an experienced SEO expert as well a website making pro?

Like we said at the beginning, this is not meant to be the ‘be all and end all’ of SEO guides, but it does provide some useful, practical tips in a confusing world. Please (please!) remember, that this is not an instant process. It will take some time before your new site starts appearing in the search results. But follow the steps above, be patient and you can bet that your site will eventually turn up, and a hell of a lot quicker than if you did nothing.

So, all that is left to say is, good luck with optimising your site.

But did it work?

We’ve checked our results a few times. The first time was July 31st 2008, with results unchanged from December 12th 2007. The rankings were:

“West London Taxi” - number 1, “Joes London Taxis” - number 1 (Google.com)
“West London Taxi” - number 1, “Joes London Taxis” - number 1 (Yahoo.com)
“West London Taxi” - number 6, “Joes London Taxis” - number 1 (msn.com)

Then we tried again on December 12th 2008. How was Joe’s West London Taxis doing in the Search Engine rankings now?

December 12
•    “West London Taxi” - number 1, “Joes London Taxis” - number 1 (Google.com)
•    “West London Taxi” - number 1, “Joes London Taxis” - number 1 (Yahoo.com)
•    “West London Taxi” - number 6, “Joes London Taxis” - number 1 (msn.com)

What further work did we do on the SEO? Absolutely nothing! It shows that if you lay the groundwork, you can boost your website very high in the SERPs, very early on. To bolster that, it’s important to resubmit your domain name, keep updating your content to keep it fresh, and of course there’s the all important incoming links from popular sites. By doing this you can ensure your site has a much better chance of achieving and maintaining a top ranking.

A reminder

Lets recap on all the steps taken to SEO the site. You must remember: search engines look for consistency and relevancy in a number of different areas of your on-page content and referral links.

These include:
1.    The URL (or address) of your site (or specific pages on your site), e.g. www.joeslondontaxis.com, or www.joeslondontaxis.com/taxibooking, etc.
2.    Your site name or title (and page titles) being published in the HTML, e.g. “London taxi company”, or “London taxi bookings page”
3.    Your site and page keywords meta data published in the HTML, e.g. “London taxis, London taxi, Joes taxis, West London taxi, etc.”
4.    Your site and page description meta data published in the HTML, e.g. “London taxi company provides taxi services…”
5.    Your page content, e.g. the text that is on your page and relevant to your site name, keywords and description
6.    Links on your page, including the anchor text, e.g. the text on which the link is set, e.g. “Book a west London taxi” links to http://www.joeslondontaxis.com/taxibooking
7.    Images on your page, including the name of the image file (or Alt text)
8.    Referral links to your site or specific pages on your site, e.g. a link on another site (incoming links) referring to your site

You, of course, can easily control all points from 1 to 7, since they’re all related to whats on your website, and can all be managed from your SiteMaker control panel. Point 8 is all about other websites linking to your own: its harder, requires a bit of luck and a bit of elbow grease, although there are quite a few ways of doing this.

Come on now SEO pros! How high have you got your site? Leave us a comment below.

OK Website Builders! Here’s the challenging part! These are the best ways to generate inbound links to your website. Many of these involve a bit of thought and guile, and the others need a bit of elbow grease too.

Get listed in directories

You need to make sure your website is listed in as many website directories as possible, and make sure you go in the section that is relevant to your industry, if they have one.

For every directory you find, you need to find the link called ‘add my site’. Input the information that is relevant to you and your website, and press submit.

The best known directory is Yahoo. In addition, you should try to get listed on dmoz.org. It’s a well respected and used authority. Next, try going to Google and search for ‘website directory’ and you’ll get literally thousands to choose from. Do as many free ones as you have time for, and if you identify a good one it’s worth paying a pound or two to get listed.

Make posts in forums

A good way to get inbound links is to use websites where you yourself can post your link. Forums are an obvious choice. First, find out which forums are in your market. To do this, go to Google and search for ‘[my market] forum’. (Obviously replace [my market] with your actual market, eg ‘carpentry’). Register with these forums, and put a link to your website - using your important anchor text - in your signature. And then get active in the forum! Ask questions and answer other peoples’ queries. Refer people through to your website if it’s helpful (don’t forget to use your anchor text!), but don’t shameless plug your site, you may well get discredited or at worst kicked off the forum. In short, become an authority in that forum, and link to your website where possible.

Make posts on blogs

This follows the same principle as the forum posting. Find out (using Google again) who is blogging about stuff in your market, and make comments on their blog entries. Your comments won’t automatically get published (the blog owner gets to choose whether or not to include your comments), but my experience is that they appreciate the fact that someone is reading their blog and wanting to get involved. Once again, put a link to your site in your signature, and don’t plug yourself without offering other advice and info at the same time.

Convince bloggers and other editorial websites to write about you

This is the most long winded way to get links, but one which might well deliver you the most valuable ones. Contact all the important bloggers and journalists in your market. By contact, I mean send them a personal email, or even better give them a phone call. Try to convince them of the value in writing about your website. Only you know why they might want to do this for you, but if your website is genuinely useful to people in your market, then journalists and bloggers will be only too happy to write about it, as they want to give quality information and advice to their readers.

Buy links

This is the short cut to getting links to your site, but is of course the most costly one too. There are quite a few services out there (the best known is text-link-ads.com) who aggregate publishers (website owners) together, who all want to sell links on their websites in order to generate a few pounds. They then invite people to buy links on these sites. You, the buyer, can choose the type of website you want using criteria such as subject area, Alexa rank (traffic), page rank (Google’s indicator of importance), and the number of other links sold on that site. The most important sites to buy links on are those that are in a subject relevant to your own. But it’s also important to look at page rank too. A ‘link’ or ‘vote’ from a website with a high page rank is worth a lot more than a vote from one with a low one. As a buyer you also get to choose the anchor text of your link.
Try signing up with text-link-ads and search for sites that are both relevant to you and are important. The links themselves can cost anywhere from $10 to $1000 per month per site.
Again on the subject of getting links on relevant blog sites or editorial sites: if all your efforts at convincing the site owner come to nothing, your last resort may be to offer to pay them to put a link to your site from their own. It’s a bit mercenary, I know, but at the end of the day they all need to make a living.

Send out Press Releases

This is one of the easiest ways to generate inbound links. Write a press release about your website. Include links to your website within the release (use your anchor text), or as a source of further information. And then distribute or ‘post’ your press release to as many press release directories as possible. Well known press release sites include Prweb.com and pressbox.co.uk, but there are literally hundreds of them out there.  You need to create a (free) account with each, and then paste your press release onto the site.
Of course, if you’re writing press releases, you should also be sending them out to magazines, newspapers and websites that are in your market too.

Write articles and post them in article directories

This is another easy way to create inbound links, but which again takes lots of effort. Write an article about an issue in your market. Place links to your website within each article, using your anchor text. Then create (free) ‘author accounts’ with article directories, such as ezinearticles.com, submityourarticle.com or Google Knol. When you create an author account, you need to write a short (40 words) author biog that talks about who you are. Place links to your website within this biog, once again using your anchor text. Then paste your article into each directory. When those articles are approved (usually within 24 hours) you will generate 10s if not 100s of inbound links to your site, from editorial pages that are relevant to your site, with relevant anchor text.
What should you write about? It needs to be about an issue that gets debated in your market. For example, if you have a computer repair shop then maybe you want to discuss PCs vs Macs, or Windows vs Linux: something that you probably hear people discussing in that industry.

Ask your customers and visitors to link to your site

In the ‘real world’, many people are only too happy to refer friends and acquaintances onto a person or company they trust, and the same principle exists on the Internet. This comes down to asking a simple question of your current site visitors. If they like your website, and think its relevant, then can they link to you website? Only a few may bother, but if even 10% of the visitors to a low traffic website would in fact link to that site from another one, then that in itself will over time create hundreds of inbound links. Of course, many people do not have their own website from which to link, but thanks to Social Networking websites many people have their own ‘profile’ page. A link from a Facebook, Myspace, Bebo or Twitter  page is worth as much as a link from any ‘normal’ website, as long as that page is publicly viewable (which of course with Facebook it might not be).

And that’s it!

If you carry out the link building activities above in the way we’ve suggested, and use the right anchor text, you will surely rise up the SERPs for that search term. This proves that you don’t need to have a big budget to drive lots of traffic to your site.

How are you getting on? Leave us a comment below (it will give you an inbound link!).

Here’s a link to the final part of our Search Engine Optimisation guide.