Size really does matter

We've all heard the expression "size doesn't matter" well in relation to SEO it does.

Amongst other things the size of your website - the amount of pages it consists of - determines how important Google considers it to be. The more importance Google places on your website the higher up the search results your website will appear.

A good example of this is the encyclopedia website www.wikipedia.org
The Wikipedia website consists of over 15 million pages.
These are just the number of pages that Google has indexed at this moment in time.

Quite often when you search on Google the Wikipedia website appears at #1, try it, search on the keyword SEO, you will see that the #1 result is a page from www.wikipedia.org

The same goes for a lot of the most popular keywords, try sex, you will see that the Wikipedia website is on the first page for this keyword, and this is from over 600 million competing websites.

Now this is not necessarily because these pages from the Wikipedia website have been optimised for these keywords.
It's because Google places such importance on the Wikipedia website.

So, there you have it, in SEO terms, size really does matter.

Myles.

Choosing an SEO Company

With so many dodgy SEO Companies out there I can appreciate that it must be very difficult to decide on which SEO Company to trust the success of your website to.

How to decide which SEO to use:
A good start is to ask yourself, how did you find the seo company you are contemplating ?

Who made first contact ?
Did they contact you, either by cold calling or sending you e-mail spam ?

Or did you contact them ?
If they contacted you then I would suggest avoiding them.
I'm not suggesting that every seo company that cold calls are dodgy, it's just that it is a good indicator that they are not receiving enough clients from their website via Google's organic results.

If you contacted them because you found their website top of Google's results, then there's a good chance that they will be able to do the same for your website, get it top of Google for your relevant keywords.

Myles.

dmoz who ?

I quite often get asked by clients about getting listed on DMOZ.
For those of you that do not know what DMOZ is, which is probably quite a lot of you, DMOZ the Open Directory Project says this:
"The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors."

The clients that ask me about DMOZ have usually done a little research and found out that DMOZ directory data is supposedly now used by the majority of major search engines and Google supposedly gives a large boost to sites that appear in DMOZ.
This may well be true but I would not get too obsessed about getting a listing on DMOZ.

It is possible to achieve prominent top positions on Google for websites that are not listed on DMOZ, in fact listing clients websites on DMOZ is not something that I have ever found a need to do..

For those of you worried about not being listed on DMOZ, I would say - stop worrying.

Providing that you have top positions on Google, Yahoo or MSN for most of your websites relevant keywords why worry about DMOZ ?

Only worry about DMOZ if you feel that not being listed is preventing your website from achieving top positions on Google, which is probably not the reason why anyway.

DMOZ - don't worry.

one way links, backlinks and your website

Inbound Links
The more links you have going to your website from other websites the more important Google considers your website to be.

One way inbound links are now considered more important by Google.

The good news is these are a lot easier to set up than reciprocal links.

Orgainising reciprocal links is a very long drawn out time consuming process that goes something like this: you search Google for websites similar to yours that appear top of the results, you then visit the website to see if they have a reciprocal links page, if they do you send them an e-mail saying something like "I came across your website and I think that we would benefit from exchanging links, blah blah blah."

Most of the time you hear nothing back, and why should you, the website you have contacted has nothing to gain from linking to your website, they are already at the top of the results, the only one to benefit from a reciprocal link is you !

So the fact that Google now places more importance on one way inbound links to a website is good news.

But did you know that Google does not recognise all links going to a website. For instance you could have 1,000 websites linking to your website but Google may only see 50 of them.

Google does not see all links that go to a website, this is why you should NEVER EVER pay say £200 for one link on a website with a high page rank as there's no guarantee that Google will ever find it.
I have known people to pay that much for one link.

I always recommend you get as many inbound links set up as possible this way increasing the chances that Google will find some.

Check out my one way inbound link building service.

Myles

Things to consider when deciding on a new website.

Search Engines
If you are going to invest in a new website you need to make sure that it has every possible chance of being found top in the search engine results.

To do this your new website needs to be created as search engine friendly as possible.

Below are some things to avoid when considering a new website.

Flash:
For search engine friendliness a completely Flash based website is a definate NO.

As far as the search engines are concerned a Flash website is basically just a movie.
It does not contain any text for the search engines to read which could contain keywords.

Although not impossible, achieving top positions in the search engines results for a Flash website entails a lot more work for the SEO Company and a lot more expense for you.

Frames:
A website created using Frames causes similar problems to a Flash based website.
The Frame within the HTML code prevents any text contained within the pages being read by the search engines.
Once again it is not impossible to achieve top positions for a website created using Frames but this again entails a lot more work for the SEO Company.

CMS - Content Management Systems:
The great thing about CMS websites is that they are easy to update and maintain for the website owner as they do not have to pay the web designer each time they need some changes made.
For the SEO Company they are not such great news.
Optimising a CMS website is made more difficult, sometimes impossible, as the SEO Company is limited to the options available via the content management system.

SiteBuilder websites:
The same goes for any Sitebuilder type websites, as with CMS websites the SEO Company is limited to the options available via the control panel options.

Dynamically Generated Pages:
These type of web pages also cause problems for the SEO Company as in reality the page does not exist until it is generated by a request from the website visitor.
If you had a website that consisted of 1 static HTML home page and 1,000 dynamically generated pages in reality the website only has 1 page.
The more static pages that a website has the more chances it has of achieving top positions in the search engines results.

Blog Websites:
A lot of companies now have Business Blogs.
Business Blogging is a great way of promoting and developing your business as your company can come across as an expert in its field.
Where some businesses go wrong is that they integrate their business website within their business blog. What this means is that as with Content Management websites you are restricted once again to the SEO options available via the blogging software management system.
If you do have a business blog keep it seperate (stand alone) from your business website.


Password Protected - Members only pages:
You will see a lot of websites that have password protected members only areas.
These are fine for the people that have access to the website pages but for the search engines the password protection prevents the search engines from entering the pages.
Therefore the members only pages will never appear in the search engines results.
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The above are most of the things that you need to consider when deciding on your new website, especially if you want your website to be found top of the search results.

Also avoiding the above when ever possible will make your chosen SEO Companies job a little easier and less expensive for you.

Myles
Affordable Internet Marketing

about Affordable Internet Marketing - SEO

Welcome to affordable internet marketing and SEO.

I have set up this Blog to simplify what a lot of SEO companies will have you believe is an extremely difficult process. They use ridiculous terminology to mystify the whole process and to somehow give them the justification to charge crazy prices for their services.

If you have trawled the internet looking for affordable internet marketing you have probably seen the kind of thing I'm referring to. First an initial consultation fee of £750 followed by a monthly fee of £500 for a minimum period of 12 months - come on, you are joking aren't you ? do people actually pay this kind of money ? Do the SEO companies that charge these prices actually get any clients ?
Anyway, with the help of my affordable internet marketing blog we can cut through all the bull.