Jason Roe / Blog, Jason Roe - Web design, Development, SEO Advice

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Keep It Local

The one major problem that I have seen with a lot of Irish companies and websites is that they are hosting their website outside of Ireland. Why would this be a problem? Most of the modern search engines over the last few years have implemented geo targeted results. Geo targeted means that the search engine find pages that a most relevant to you by showing you local results first.

The long and the short of this is, If you’re an Irish based company looking for Irish traffic it is better to host in Ireland. In the same respect if you are a UK based company looking to target UK customers then host in the UK or on UK IP space within Ireland (Ask your hosting providers!). Hosting in Ireland won’t guarantee that you will shoot up the SERP’s on the major search engines, however it can help you along the way.

Avoid Duplicate Content

It is well known that the best way to help your rankings is to always have a fresh supply of content. This is why blogs and the like have sky rocketed in the last few years, the search engines love them. However with the adoption of RSS by webmaster has come a plague of duplicate content issues. Duplicate content is an exact copy or a close copy of content from other websites. Search engines frown upon too much duplicate content on a page.

A prime example of duplicate content is news feeds on pages, if your “news section� is made up entirely of this kind of duplicated or aggregated content it won’t help you one bit on your rankings. Most of the major search engines can easily identify duplicated content and if your page is found to have too much it, the page just won’t rank at all or get dropped into the supplemental results. Many webmasters now re-write content feeds by replacing words, terms and by using LSI (latent semantic indexing) theories.

There are some rare cases where this may not be the case. We have all heard stories of 100% duplicated content ranking well, however in many cases these sites have used other methods to help their cause.

Help Spiders do their job

Spiders are automated bots design by search engines to crawl your website. Over time a spider will index your pages many times. The bots are designed to help identify and classify sites so that the search engine can return these results in the SERP’S. There are many theories about how to help these bots along the way.

1. I always suggest that a site should always have text based navigation somewhere on the page. This text based navigation can be placed anywhere on the page, the header, the footer or in the body. A text based navigation is beneficial because the search engines can obtain extra information from the link text. Image based navigation can also use this theory by using image descriptions, however many seem to believe that this kind of navigation is not as effective as a traditional text based link. In many cases a text based navigation can also be used in conjunction with a image based Nav.
2. Don’t use the same title on every page, your title shout be customised to the content on a specific page and should relate to your keyword density. In many cases your page titles should look something like this“Page Name, Company Name – Keyword1, Keyword2, Keyword3, Keyword4, Keyword5�
3. Place your content as high as possible within your pages. Try to place your content above your navigation, the spiders will read this information first and will not get cluttered up with other possibly irrelevant information. In many cases this can be achieved by using a right hand side navigation or by positioning the navigation with CSS.
4. NoFollow all un-trusted links or external links that you are not in control of. You can’t control what a webmaster on an external site may or may not do with their site. If they happen to “Break the rulesâ€? in a search engines eyes you may be left in a situation where you are now unknowingly linking to a “Bad Neighbourhood â€?. So why risk it? Give the link love to sites that you think deserve it. A NoFollow link is a standard link with the attribute rel=”nofollow” added to it . This attribute signifies to search engines that you would not like to take the responsibility of being associated with a site.