Online Marketing 6 - Some Changes

The world of Search Engine Optimisation and online marketing in general is constantly changing, although our Bury St Edmunds online customers needn't worry - that's what we're here for...

But if you're following SEO advice from even six months ago you might be doing a few things you needn't bother with and damaging your website's ranking by ignoring some important issues.

For example, metatags. If you're not familiar with these, they're a kind of labelling system that website designers use in the coding of a site. Human readers don't see them but search engine spiders do, and they use them to assess a website's 'relevancy'. One of the most obvious ways to start optimising a site, apart from the web copy itself, is by inserting as many keywords as possible in the 'keyword tags'.

But, back in November 2009, Google confirmed they no longer took any notice of keyword tags in assessing a website's relevance and ranking. They don't count at all any more. That's a pretty big change and one that not all SEO 'experts' have spotted yet.

It won't hurt to add keywords to the keyword tags, and it's not yet clear if Bing and Yahoo spiders still use them, or if Google will start attaching some weight to them in the future, but for now, Google ignores them.

A second example is speed of loading. Google is committed to giving users the best possible experience, and that includes not having to wait too long while a page loads. Now, it's always been a bad idea to keep your prospects waiting and we all know by now that people have even shorter attention spans online than they do with their TV remote, but now Google is taking action , too.

So now, if your web pages are slow to load, Google will punish you by reducing your site's PageRank accordingly. That will mean a lower position in the results if your competitors' sites load more quickly than yours.

This means you won't just lose customers through boredom, you could miss out on them visiting your site at all.

So if your website designer wants to include loads of slow to load features like flash and huge image files, because they 'look good', just say 'No!'

It's important that you keep up to date with SEO and remember to keep building those links - there's some vitally important information now emerging about linking strategies that I'll bring you next time.

Roy