The image above clearly shows that Google.co.uk is the primary search engine with the greatest amount of searches over the other search engines combined (Yahoo, Live, Ask and MSN).  Therefore, if you’re using this data for your SEO actives, it is wise to put your attention on getting the best results on Google UK. Now very often, as a by-product of doing this, what works best for Google can also lead to success on the other engines to. Also, now if you hear about someone who claims they have a number 1 ranking in Yahoo or MSN or in fact are showing off their successes, it is not nearly as impressive as being in the same position in Google.

There are many things here we can drill into and analyse such as focusing our efforts using country code top level domains (CCTLD) such as “.co.uk” rather than a top level domain (TLD) such as “.com” as these tend to rank better in UK searches (“.com” domains can have their preferences set in Webmaster tools to target the UK though) but this will be explored in a future post.

1) Title Tags – Ensure each title tag is unique on every page of your website. Ideally name the title tag according to the top two or three main keywords you want each page to be found for on the search engines. Many websites on the internet have still not even changed it from “Untitled”. Arguably just as bad are websites who only use the keyword “Home” for their homepage title tag instead of a targeted keyword/phrase.

The image below quickly shows us there are over 64,000,000 pages on Google UK that have not optimised their title tag properly and miss out on them ranking.

2) Link Reputation – Look over all your website navigational and content links. If they point to other pages on your website, make sure they mention where possible the actual keywords you would like the page it is linking to, to be found for. Typical things to look out for are links which say “click here” or linking back to your homepage with the word “home” instead of a relevant keyword.

3) Unique Content – Many websites suffer from duplicate content. This is simply website content that Google and the other search engines feel have already been found on the web and you are purely adding to the congestion on a search engine results page (SERP). If the same content is already out there then you are not offering anything of value to warrant your content being shown instead.

In summary, there are two types of duplicate content:

• First is having the same content as other websites. This can easily be overcome by ensuring you only write unique content and change what you currently have on your website.
• Second is having duplicate content within your own website. This typically occurs when you have little content on a given page but lots of navigational links, text heavy footer and basically the page has at least 50% content the same as your other pages. By simply removing the duplicate content (for example, by putting text heavy footer content into an image, and making sure you have more unique content per page so that over 60% of your page content is unique), you should notice a big difference.

4) URL’s indexed – Lots websites are still having a very hard time being index by Google because they use unfriendly dynamic URL’s that continuously change making it near impossible for any search engine to index the same page. Many content management systems also suffer from this so by simply ensuring your URLs are friendly can make the world of difference in getting you natural traffic. If you are having problems with dynamic urls, consider using some type of URL re-write like mod rewrite form example which the search engines can work with.

To check if your pages are indexed:

• You can check to see if a specific page is indexed by Google by using the following search command: info:domain.com. If you get the following response: “Sorry, no information is available for the URL” then that means the page URL you were entering is not currently indexed.
• To know in a quick glance which pages you have on your domain that are indexed simply put the following search command into Google: site:domain.com

5) Two links to each page – Typically e-commerce websites with product pages have a hard time being indexed or rank well at all because the item page only has a link from the parent category page linking to it. As a good rule of thumb, try and make sure each page on your website has at least two incoming links (excluding the sitemap link). Some suggestions could be to introduce a field somewhere on the same page which offers a suggestion to the user for other related products on the website and cross link to them.

There are many other elements to modify but they will be covered in following posts.

1) Your Meta Description
Your meta description is a fantastic tool for increasing your page clicking through rate. Look for this in your source code:

You can customise exactly what appears in this snippet by applying some of the following suggestions:

• Include your keyword/phrases – These will become highlighted and attract more attention and visibility.

• Your message - Describe the content of your web page as accurately and succinctly as possible while adding in your target keyword/phrases. Make it unique to the page and keywords you are targeting. Many websites have the same content displayed in the meta description throughout all their pages which can often be totally useless. Think of each snippet as an advertisement for people to click on in the search results so it needs to be as compelling as possible. This can be tricky but it can be very much worth your time.

• Beware the character limit - Even though Yahoo and MSN allow for more text, try to keep it within 155 characters (including spaces) for Google otherwise your message will get cut off.

• Uniqueness - Differentiate the descriptions for different pages so it is an unique and relevant as possible.

• Analysis - Look at your traffic logs or sources to determine your typical keywords. If you feel you are mainly attracting long tail search terms (your keyword/phrase plus modifiers), consider letting Google decide what description they feel is relevant instead of focusing one instead.

• Testing - If you have a page which generates worthwhile traffic and is worth the time testing, one of the very best ways of testing which meta description snippet will work best for you without potentially weeks or even months of testing depending upon how long your page takes to get indexed, is running a targeted paid ad. Now granted this is an expense however, it could pay off big time. With Adwords you can set it up that you display different messages in your ad description. Simply see which wording yields the highest click through and rinse repeat with all your pages. This is not always relevant as some people who click on paid listings may have different motives than clicking on natural results but it might be worthwhile to test.

Some meta tag information to know about:

• “NOODP” – If your homepage is by default displaying the same meta description and title tag your website has in DMOZ (open directory project) and can’t get your new one to show then you can use “NOODP” to stop it being used on Google, Yahoo and MSN.
• For all search engines that support the meta tag: <meta name=”robots” content=”NOODP”>
• For specifically Google: <meta name=”googlebot” content=”NOODP”>
• “NOYDIR” – This only works on Yahoo and has the same effect as “noodp” above has on DMOZ, except this works to prevent the Yahoo directory being used instead and overwriting your meta description and title tag.
• “NOSNIPPET” – This can be used if you do not want Google to generate a description based on on page text found.
• There are also other meta tags which can be used to tell Google what information to show such as using “NOARCHIVE” and “NOINDEX”.

2) Your Page Title Tag
Ensure your title tag is optimised correctly and conveys a message which is welcoming. This is double edged sword however, as if you mess around too much for your title tag, you may find it alters your search position (positively or negatively depending upon what you do) and rank for completely different terms than you intend to so be very gentle especially if you are in the top fold of the first page. Try to keep your title tag within 65 characters for Google so your entire message appears and does not get cut off with the typical ”…”.

3) Your URL
Another double edged sword as its usually too late unless you have a brand new website and don’t mind risking temporary loss of rankings is make your URL contain the keyword/phrase you are targeting. Apart from other benefits this will bring, Google will highlight the word/s and it will attract more attention than websites not doing it.

If you would like to discuss anything above with us in greater detail, we would very much like to hear from you.