Abubilla Music

How To Guide: Search Engine Optimisation Tactics (Internet Strategy)

Written by Steph

 So having had a delve into a world of which I know absolutely nothing, the World Wide Web and the way it works, I thought I’d pop it up on here to help others who are similarly clueless about it all. According to what I learnt, there are ways that you can make your webiste more visible in the Google rankings by controlling and optimising the content. Here’s the best of what I discovered! Hope it helps.

On keyword occurence pushing your website up in the Google rankings:
 

• The number of times the keyphrase is repeated in the text of the web page (frequency) is a key factor in determining the position for a key phrase in Google rankings. This did lead to spamming and search engines make checks for spamming, i.e. that a phrase is not repeated too many times such as “cheap flights.. cheap flights.. cheap flights.. cheap flights.. cheap flights.. cheap flights.. cheap flights.. cheap flights..‟. The search engine algorithms then turned to favouring keyword density, but this also resulted in some websites being penalised for trying too hard to work phrases into the page.
• The page length is clearly closely related to keyword density since increasing page length typically decreases keyword density. This has led to an approach of optimizers using relatively short pages of 200 to 400 words for pages specifically created for optimization – you should try to stick to blog lengths, if you can, of 400 words or fewer.
• Position on the page of the keyphrase also has an impact – it’s another indication to search engines of relevance, and will boost you up further.
• Some search engines conduct a semantic analysis of a website, so you need to fit in as many related words and synoyms onto each page as possible. Things like, “musician”, “performer”, “artist”, “creator”, even the awful, “artiste”. I really hate that word. But apparently it works. They should appear naturally in a text or document anyway, so it’s not too big a bother, but useful to be aware of.

 
On optimising link-building:
 

• Not all links are of equal value. They vary in link quality. Links from pages that themselves have a high popularity as indicated by PageRank are rated as being more important, such as a homepage, for example. You need to consider this the most important page to link to.
• Media sites which tend to have a high PageRank and volume of unique visitors are considered to be more valuable. You ought to check the pagerank of the sites you’re linking with before you request a link with them.
• You need to work out how to get the summary that comes up for our site when you find it in Google to be a “call-to-action” summary, something that if read, will prompt the read to click through. Something like…”click through to listen to some brilliant music from talented up-and-coming musicians, and find out how to help us with our Africa project”. Something that might grab them.
• Here are some things you need to be aware of when exchanging and requesting links. Required features of a link are:

1. Anchor text – this means getting sites to link up with your homepage, stating your name as the link, rather than linking us up as something like, “here’s a good music website”…
2. Adjacent text – all this means is that it’s useful to have text next to it, explaining who you are, but not providing the link itself.
3. Domain or pagerank popularity – the site you link to should have a large number of incoming or outgoing links itself, ideally more than 50. I’m not sure if you know how to check this, I wasn’t sure until recently, but you can go to http://http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com to test a number of links to a site. To check PageRank you can use SearchStatus. Sites with homepage rankings of 4 or over are the most valuable.