How long does it take for my website to get indexed?
Creating a great website nowadays is child’s play. Getting it indexed by most search engines is where it gets tough. I have a website, now what? Having your website online is not enough. Search engines can take a while to crawl and index your website. You must submit it to their index manually. This way you attract the search engines’ attention to your newly created website. I’ve submitted my website. Nothing happened. If you take into consideration just how many websites are submitted on a daily basis it is understandable why days may have passed without your website featuring in search engine results pages. How can I make the indexing process faster? There are some things you can check/fix in order to make sure your website can be crawled and indexed: Your pages must have a 200/OK server response Make sure you have actual content – although pictures and videos might be perceived as content for your users you also need to have text on your pages. Crawlers can’t see inside videos but they can definitely see the text. Don’t complicate your links – use simple HTML for the links on your pages. Don’t overcomplicate things by using JavaScript based events. Manually submit your website – if you think your website is ready then you can start submitting it to various search engines. Help your website get discovered – try talking about your website on other sites. Keep in mind these need to be relevant to your own website’s topic. Try finding only the quality websites that are both popular and reliable. With just one link placed on such a website you can ensure a faster indexation. My homepage is indexed but my other pages are not You can finally see your homepage listed in a search engine but where are the rest of your pages? There are several possibilities why your website hasn’t been completely indexed: You haven’t properly interlinked your pages – the crawler can’t get to every page of your website. In this case you should change the way your pages are linked to each other. Until you do that you should create a sitemap file that contains all your pages. When the crawler visits your site it will be looking for this file before crawling your website. You accidentally blocked the crawler’s access – you’ve disallowed the access to certain sub-directories from your robots.txt file or added the noindex tag on some of your pages. Check your robots file and see if you added any extra lines. Also check the pages you can’t find in search engines and see if these have the right server response or if they have a noindex tag in their source code. Robots.txt, sitemaps and server responses. I don’t know what does those are! Do not panic if you feel it is getting too technical for you. If none of the above makes any sense then you can simply use a service that will submit your website to search engines. 123-reg has its very own SEO software called Search Engine Optimiser which can help you get indexed. The best part? You don’t need any technical knowledge to use it. What will your software do for my website? Automatic submission It will save you some time by automatically submitting your website to hundreds of search engines – imagine doing that manually, it would take forever. By having your website indexed by so many search engines you will get worldwide exposure. Website improvement You don’t need to know SEO to understand what problems your website might have. The detailed SEO analysis of your website is clear, concise and easy to understand. By fixing your website’s issues you can get better ranks and more traffic. Competitor research See how well your website is doing in search engine results pages compared to your competitors. Personal control panel You don’t need to download or install anything. Your control panel is online which means you can access it from any device and any place. See the full list of Search Engine Optimiser features for more details and please come back and tell us how you think our SEO software can help improve your website’s visibility.
The majority don’t understand search
Search Engine Optimisation is probably the biggest investment you can make in tweaking your website but if you needed proof that it isn’t a magic wand, take a look at the top search terms using Google Insights for Search. These are the top 10 searches via Google UK in the last 12 months: It’s a trend that will take some time to change too, as the search for the top 10 in the last 7 days also shows. Hardly rocket science searches! The same top 10 searches, pretty consistent for the last 12 months, just in a slightly different order. In each and every case you would have expected those searching for these terms to already have them bookmarked, but what we ‘tech-heads’ need to acknowledge is that the widespread use of the internet now means the majority of those using the tools we take for granted, don’t actually know how to properly use them. People use Google literally as their window on the world. The majority of those using the web don’t actually know how to use even the basic of browser tools, let alone advanced searching. So what does that mean? Well, interestingly the popularity of ‘How To’ articles on YouTube coupled with its own web popularity means people are filling their knowledge gaps quicker than ever. That also means there is strong SEO value in investing in maybe creating your own How To articles, be they for YouTube, your blog or website. It’s a great way of capturing new traffic and what’s more if they like what they find, psychologically they will be more led to trust you and come to you in the future too. It also suggests that over complicating your SEO strategy probably won’t help too much either. Certainly if you are looking for a high level of internet understanding or a certain amount of ‘expert’ traffic to come to your site, then specific keywords aimed at that may help, but trying to be clever with too many long-tail keywords to attract general traffic is only likely to waste your time.
Use transcriptions so the world can see your videos
We’ve highlighted the SEO value in YouTube before, as the second largest search engine in the world, you are fool not to be featuring your brand, but it appears few people know about a YouTube feature that not only expands your reach but can also improve your SEO. For every video uploaded you have probably optimised the description and Keywords fields but have you used every tool available? YouTube has a helpful transcription facility designed to help you reach out to the hearing-impaired audience but which also acts a great SEO tool too. YouTube’s closed captioning service can literally put words to the pictures as they appear in the video. The machine transcription system effectively works via voice recognition and actually is not one of the most accurate of its ilk but even the experts appear to have been stumped at creating total accuracy in this field. However, the automated processing can be easily overridden and edited, so spending a few extra minutes can make your transcription word perfect and the effort will bring a big boost to your organic search. Here’s how to use the tool: 1. Upload and save your video to your YouTube channel Remember to include an engaging headline, relevant keywords and a full description of what your video is about 2. Use YouTube’s Machine Transcription Once your video uploads select it from your list of videos and click click the edit link. Next click on the Captions and Subtitles tab. You should now be presented with “Available Caption Tracks” with a checkbox beside “English: Machine Transcription”. Click the download button and let the system work it’s magic. You may be presented with the following message “Machine Transcription is available for the videos in this Channel. To enable Machine Transcription for this video, please ‘Request Processing’. We will try our best to get some results in a few days.”. In which case click the “Request processing” button and allow the system time to try to carry out the transcription. 3. Edit your transcription Once you have transcription you can download the same and edit it in any text editor. You can amend any errors and typos and event arrange the correct words with the correct video sections. Be careful to ensure the time coding is kept intact and is accurate to the location of that text in the video. You will see the formatting is fairly logical but this is usually the part that creates problems for people. 4. Upload your captions Once you are happy with the transcript simply upload it to the video under “Add a Caption Track”. Before you set the video live check the captions are in sync and correct by watching the video through. Click the cc symbol on the bottom right of the video screen to kick the captions in. If there are any errors you can easily correct any errors by repeating the process above. If it works send the video along with the captions live. Now sit back and watch the traffic roll in. As well as providing vital subtitles to the hard of hearing your captions will now provide a transcript for search engines to trawl. It effectviely provides them with a complete catalogue of every word used in the video including any vital keywords. To add extra value download the completed transciption file and save it to your computer. On this version strip out the timecoding references and then use the text to create a blog article to support a page you might embed the video on. Have you used YouTube captions to good effect?
8 WordPress Plugins you have to Install
WordPress is one of the most well known blogging platforms. In recent years it has evolved so much that people like myself use it as the CMS of choice for all their websites. As well as this you can install a wide range of plugins, acting like extensions/add-ons to the WordPress platform, that can really help your site or blog in many ways. Here are 8 plugins I make sure I have on all WordPress sites: 1. WordPress SEO by Yoast Joost de Valk is a genius when it comes to WordPress, and this plugin illustrates that. The WordPress SEO plugin helps you with many aspects of optimising your site including editing META data (page titles and descriptions), inserting breadcrumbs, enabling an XML sitemap to help search engines find all the pages you want indexed for people to find, and lets you add information within your RSS feed so that other sites don’t just steal your content and put it on their own site. 2. Google Analytics Another plugin by Joost de Valk, which helps you connect your WordPress site to a Google Analytics account. If you are interested in analytical data this is a great plugin as it lets you segment data directly from the plugin settings page so you don’t have to learn code yourself! 3. W3 Total Cache Google doesn’t like websites that take a long time to load. In fact, they actually use page load time as a factor on where to rank your site in their search results. This plugin helps this by using a number of methods to reduce page load time. 4. WP Smush.it smush.it is a service owned by Yahoo! that lets you compress your images to the lowest filesize without reducing any quality whatsoever. Simple really! If you already have a bunch of images on your site that’s fine – there is an option to “bulk smush.it” which will go through each image already uploaded and compress them for you. 5. Facebook Comments I developed this one 🙂 This plugin inserts the Facebook Comments system into your site and places it above the native WordPress comments form. Once installed and configured you can then manage all comments within your Facebook account. I use this for a few reasons: There is less spam activity as you need to be logged into your Facebook, Yahoo!, AOL or Hotmail account. The comments are now indexed by Google, which means they are more SEO friendly than they were a month ago When someone comments on a post or page, the comment can be posted to their Facebook profile. This adds a social aspect to your site as the comment will appear on their friends’ news feed with links back to your site 6. Twitter Feed Another one I developed. This feed is a more SEO friendly way to output your latest tweets, search results, hashtags, mentions and favourites into your site. Using a simple shortcode is all you need to do to insert the feed and is highly configurable. 7. Gravity Forms This last one isn’t free but I use it all the time and is, in my opinion, well worth the money. This plugin takes contact forms to a whole new level! This highly versatile plugin helps you insert forms of any kind into your site from a simple contact form and questionnaire to a fully fledged entry form to create new posts within your own site. Everything can be configured from what is asked, whether new questions should be asked based on what has been entered already, and your thank you message once the form has been completed. 8. Simple URLs This plugin lets you manage outbound links and track them by clicks. So, for example, your blog site is at myblogname.com. Your link to somewhere you want to track outside of the site is abc.com. Instead of directly linking to abc.com you can make a Simple URL like myblogname.com/go/abc. This is good for a number of reasons. The main reason I use, is to use them for affiliate links. This way they are easier to give out to people, they’ll be tracked and you can keep them within your own domain and change where they link to at any time. This article was written by Alex Moss, partner at Manchester SEO agency FireCask. He provides freelance SEO for all kinds of businesses as well as developing WordPress Plugins. You can find him on Linkedin or follow him on Twitter. Follow @alexmoss
9 tips for setting up your first YouTube campaign.
YouTube is massive. As a stand alone search engine it’s the second largest. It is the third biggest online destination behind Facebook and Google. Those facts alone mean that is has to be a part of your online media mix. But when consider how engaging video is, YouTube becomes even more important. Consumers like watching video online. YouTube offers a fantastic environment for it. As a marketeer YouTube also gives you lots of tools. It’s possible to target people by groups, video, and by channel. YouTube makes it easy to forward and share your video content to others or on their own website. As YouTube is a search engine you can use your video content to answer users search queries, putting brand in front of others people looking for your services. YouTube also makes it easy to link other content, closing the loop between YouTube and your website tools. And currently YouTube is currently very cost effective. Apart from the effort, a user or enhance channel is free to set up. You buy ads on a CPC or CPM basis. And at the moment there are more eyeballs than advertisers. So here’s a 9 tips to make sure your YouTube campaign gets off to a good start. 1. Choose the right name Your channel name should be keyword rich, to improving its chances of ranking in relevant search queries. If you have a well known brand then include that, so your video content shows up for brand searches, highlighting your great content to new and current customers. 2. Think about SEO Make sure you use titles, descriptions and video tags that are keyword rich, and include links to your website. YouTube search results are based on these, assessing their relevancy and popularity. Just 1,000 characters show up in the initial search, so keep is short and sweet. Although you get 426 characters for tags, stick to 150 or less. 3. Customise your Channel Brand channels used to cost £25,000, but in the last couple of months Google has allowed many advertisers to create ‘enhanced channels’ for no cost at all. These give you almost all the cool design elements of a brand channel, minus a bit of functionality. It’s a great opportunity to create a customised environment for your video content. See our Social Media Guides for how to do that. Check out the British Gas YouTube channel for a great customised background: 4. Think about disabling comment options Negative comments can harm a brand. Consider your Social Networking Policy and work out how you are going to respond to poor feedback. If you don’t have the time – or want to retain the control – consider disabling the comment option. 5. Keep it short Before you start adding content, decide on some basic rules such as the length of each video, and the number of points you want to make. Although YouTube lets you add up to 15 minutes of video, users don’t often watch more than 1 or 2. And don’t forget your call to action too – give people something to do next. 6. Add plenty of video Make sure you have at least 3 videos at the launch of your channel, to make it look at bit busier. It keeps users satisfied, and helps it gain popularity and visibility in the Youtube search results. And if you’ve paid for someone to click through to your channel, then it makes to give them plenty to watch once they get there. 7. Consider watermarking Users love to share video content. Make sure you get the benefit of this share by watermarking your video, or including a call to action to your website. 8. Use Promoted Videos to drive traffic One of the most effective PPC areas of YouTube is promoted Videos. These serve your videos at the top of the search results. Ads appear as a video thumbnail and several lines of text. Users just click to video. You can then use text overlays to push users onto your website. The concept of promoted videos – giving users something they’re looking for – is broadly similar to regular paid search, and as such they can deliver an ROI in line with those. 9. Make us of Insights and Analytics As a channel owner to you can use YouTube insights to find out lots of interesting stuff about viewers of your content. You can identify their demographic, and how they found your videos – through search, sharing or direct links. And you can also see which parts of your video they liked (hot spots) and what turned them off. Use this information to improve your campaign targeting and video content. That’s it When it comes to audience and engagement, YouTube is huge; but as a marketing channel it’s underused and undervalued. Don’t forget to check out the new 123-reg YouTube channel. Nick Leech runs Digital Marketing Agency Euston Digital
SEO direct tips from Bing
However good your SEO, the key aim is always to get a higher listing in search engine directories. So when one of those search engines shares tips on optimising your site for SEO, it’s worth taking notice, after all they should know what works and what doesn’t. On the Bing Webmaster Centre Blog last month Duane Forester who runs the public outreach side of the Webmaster program for Bing gave 18 tips on how to best optimise your website. The 18 points are not comprehensive apparently, but designed to cover “the important aspects you should look at addressing”. Certainly worth a look and if you are designing a new site from scratch, well worth using as part of your template. We suggest you read the full blog but if time is short make sure you memorise these 8 definite no-nos: cloaking link buying like farms link farms three-way linking duplicating content auto-follows in social media the thin content approach Have you seen any other SEO tips direct from search engines?
Top six killer SEO tips for your website
Over the years we’ve covered the art of search engine optimisation (SEO) here in some detail. From understanding what search engine optimisation is to creating content which attracts lots of links, we have advice that can help. The thing is, we have so many blog posts now that it’s not that easy to find the key bits of SEO advice you need. That’s why we’ve decided to bring together six of the best SEO articles we’ve written – so you can find out everything you need to know about getting your website to rank highly on search engines like Google. Why you should bookmark Google’s keyword tool Google’s keyword tool has been around for years now, and it’s one of the most valuable tools you can use when you’re trying to improve your site’s rankings. Why? Because it can tell you what people actually search for online, helping to make sure you optimise your website for the right phrases. Learn about Google’s keyword tool > Top six examples of link bait Link bait is anything on your website that attracts lots of visitors and encourages other people to link back to your website. Because the number of links that point at your site have a huge influence on its rankings, link bait is a great way to climb the rankings. See how to write your own link bait > Big mistakes in SEO writing Writing optimised content isn’t rocket science, but there are some basic rules you should stick to – and some key mistakes to avoid. For a start, content is king, not your keywords – so always keep the people who’ll be reading what you write in mind. What not to do when you write for your website > Six questions to ask an SEO consultant It can be a good idea to bring in an expert to help improve your website’s search rankings. But there are lots of people out there who call themselves SEO experts – the trick is spotting the good ones. It’s vital to ask the right questions. What to ask an SEO consultant > What on earth is Google PageRank? There’s a lot of confusion about what Google’s PageRank actually is. Some people reckon it shows you how your site ranks in Google. Others reckon it’s meaningless. But actually, the truth lies somewhere in between. Find out what PageRange means > How to label your images Every element on your website matters, and images are no exception. Labelling them accurately makes your images more likely to show up in image search tools like Google Images – and that means you’ll get more visitors to your website. Read about labelling images for SEO > What are the key tips you’ve learnt about SEO? Share them with us in the comments.
Why SEO words also means pictures
The importance of labelling your images correctly for SEO purposes We publish articles on blogs to build authority and find search engine delight. We spend lots of time researching to come up with fresh content and we try to make the most out of every piece we publish. But being a writer nowadays doesn’t refer to just writing a piece and hitting the publish button. If you want your post to be found, you need to optimise it before it goes on the web. And when I say optimisation I don’t mean just content. I mean titles, URLs, tags and, yes (!), images. You have no idea how many images there are on the web labeled as IMG. It’s such a shame, especially since most blogging platforms make it so easy to label photos. There are millions of beautiful photos out there that no one’s going to see just because they weren’t labeled properly. Who do you think is searching for doimg14576.jgp on Google images? No one, you can be sure of that. Google can’t see your images but it can most definitely read their descriptions. If you have no description, it’s like your image doesn’t exist. Think about it. Images take valuable space on your site, in your posts, and you’re wasting it, when you should be taking advantage. It’s so easy to optimise images that you just have no reason not to do it. Set a unique title, an ALT text and a description with relevant keywords for every image you include in your article so that search engines know what they’re “looking” at. This will help you get some extra traffic when people are searching for images using certain keywords. We are extremely visual. When a user is searching for restaurants, hotels or any service or product for that matter, he’s interested in a written review, but he’s even more interested in seeing pictures because seeing is believing. Don’t lose a great opportunity to get some more traffic on your site when it’s so easy to optimise your images. Make this a priority, not an afterthought. Do you optimise your images? Let us know via your comment below.