Over the years I have found that some clients will only take some of my advice but not all.  Sometimes people think they know best even when they have come to me for help.   Because Ancoris  listened to my advice, did what I suggested, by May their site was 8th position on the first page of Google for their top keyword and by June up to 5th position.  They now have 7 of their keywords coming up on the front page of Google and many others not that far behind.  To be fair to Ancoris, they had done a good job of their website in the first place, it just needed optimising and some ongoing promotion.

Recently thanks to my efforts and the efforts of their PR company, the Managing Director of Ancoris, David McLeman was asked to be interviewed on Bloomberg TV.  This is proof that if you promote your website ethically you will be found by all the right people.  I am looking forward to driving more traffic to the site and helping them to grow online naturally.  I am also now a fan of cloud computing and use it for my business.

SEO Portfolio

Here are some guidelines that a CMS must adhere too, to be classed as SEO friendly.

Meta
You need the ability to add/edit a unique title and meta description to each page. Also helpful but not essential is the ability to add additional meta tags. What is bad in SEO is if each page is titled with your business name.

URLs
You  need static customisable URLS.  No dynamics if possible.

Images
You need the ability to add your own Alt Tags (alternative text) to an image and add an appropriate description of the image.

Unique Headers
You want to be able to add and edit page headers (H1, H2 tags).  Each page should have a unique H1 tag.  You want to be able to edit the header without it changing another field e.g. title.

Body Text
You need to be able to add bold/italics, bulleted lists, just all the basic word processing functions.   You also want to be able to add hyperlinks to link to other pages.  Flexibility is key.

Navigation
You should be able to easily update your site navigation so you can ensure all pages are crawlable.

Redirects
The ability to redirect pages is beneficial.

RSS facility
The ability to show your content via rss.

Sitemaps
You need the ability to create and update sitemaps.  Ideally one for the site to help people navigate , but also an XML one to help with indexing.

Link popularity is what you need to come up top in Google.  It is like being popular at school.  The more friends you have the more popular you are, so the more credibility you have.  The more links you have the more popular you are.  But if you had say 80 links and your competitors only have 40 it could be that some of their links are strong than yours.  It would be similar to someone having 80 friends, but the person with 40 had half a dozen famous friends like Posh and Becks or Madonna.  So it is not always about numbers but quality links.  Some of your best links could be from your competitors sites.     Finding the links is the tricky part.  Some webmasters have a fairly high standard for linking.  If your entire website looks like an advertisement you will struggle to get strong links.  There is nothing worse on a website than flashing banner ads.  And even more annoying than the actual look of them is that many site owners use adverts which are not even relevant to that market.  So as well as having an annoying banner that is putting you off reading the web page, the actual banner is totally irrelevant to you.  If you must have ads go for text ads as they blend better into the content of the site which creates ad blindness.

Website owners need to look more at their competition.  If your competitors are coming up top in Google there is a reason for it, it’s down to thier good content which gives them good inbound linking.  But you can’t get the inbound linking without good content.  This is why content is king and always will be.

Some of the reasons why a website has dropped in rankings are:

1) It could be some of the links pointing to your site which previously had been providing a significant amount of PageRank could have been removed or deleted, or the PageRank of the originating site has dropped possible for similar reasons.

2) Search engines are always changing the methods they use to rank websites so they can improve the general quality of their search results.  So there could have been a recent algorithm change. Google is constantly changing its algorithm.

3) Several new web pages that also target your keywords could have been recently created and indexed making that keyword/phrase more competitive.

Well it is simple. Just go to your twitter account and click on settings.  In there you will see your user name.  You simple just change it to what you want,   you wont loose any followers and when they log in they will see you have changed your name.  Then if you want you can create a new account with your old Twitter name, and then just add the new URL and post a single tweet notifying people that your name has changed:  Follow my new account:- @EthicalSEOuk.

Sorted!  So if anyone used to follow @cazamic, I am now @EthicalSEOuk

To rank high in google you need strong inbound links.  It is one of the most important parts to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

“Link Juice”  is the name given to the PageRank that is passed from one site to another, via the means of a text link.  You could say a site with strong inbound links has some “link juice”.

The API (Application Programming Interface) key is just a set of rules and specifications that a software program can follow to talk to another software program. For example I just added the Twitter Tools plug-in which allows my blog posts automatically update my twitter account. I needed an API key so the twitter program can talk to my wordpress program.