Firstly a brief definition on what an SEO lemming is;

“An SEO lemming is a human being whose nature it is to believe another human being because they sound like they know what they are talking about. In doing this you will be influenced in to doing anything without realising it. You may find yourself digging a hole with your bare hands for no apparent reason, building a bridge, parting with huge sums of cash to appear on the first page of Google – or if you’re really unlucky you will notice a number appear above your head and proceed counting down.”

How to avoid becoming an SEO lemming?

1. If you receive an email from an “SEO Company” with their “analysis” of your website, right click and mark as spam – exposure to such material can lead to SEO lemming symptoms.
2. If you are approached by anyone in regards to SEO without asking to be, just mention you know what an SEO lemming is and don’t want to become one!
3. You want to invest in SEO, that’s excellent news – read some trusted SEO blogs on the basics so you know what to avoid. Simply type “seo blog” in Google and choose the websites on the left of the page with a white background.
4. Understand this – SEO is a long term strategy that requires investment. If you are after a “quick fix” then unfortunately you are already under the influence and you’re an SEO lemming – watch out if you find your hair turning green.
5. If you submit a tender and you are approached by SEO companies, check their websites out. If you see any of the following phrases, please avoid;

a. Top 10 or your money back
b. Guaranteed first page
c. Only $xxx to get on Google
d. We have been around since time began
e. SEO lemmings are cool

I am already an SEO lemming – what can I do?

1. The first stage of recovery is to acknowledge you are an SEO lemming – well done!
2. If you are showing symptoms at an early stage, there is still time for you – please revert to point 3 in the section above for a minimum of 2 weeks with lots of rest.
3. If you are going to part with cash make sure you talk to the guys and question them about their SEO methods. It’s advisable that you have a sit down with the companies – this will combat most SEO lemming judgements.
4. Use your common sense, if you can remember what that is. If it sounds quick and easy it’s expensive and useless.
5. You can try denying the fact that you are an SEO lemming, this might make you feel better temporarily but this is not a long term solution.

On a side note - if you would like to play the original game:
http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/

If you have just setup a new website or your small business has just gone “live” for the first time then I hope I can help you save money.

Once your website is live you may of course wonder why you are not receiving tens of thousands of visitors. Surely everyone needs or wants your product or service? A little rule, even if you were giving out free gold bars very few people would know about it – although I imagine your website would become popular by word of mouth - that’s a whole other story!

How do I get traffic to my awesome website?

1. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
2. PPC (Pay Per Click)
3. Affiliate Marketing
4. Social Marketing
5. DM (Direct Mail)
6. Email
7. Word of mouth

The bad news is that most of these options will cost you money, and to achieve large numbers of targeted traffic it will cost a lot! I will attempt to give you new websites some very basic tips to follow and implement that a lot of “SEO companies” would charge well over £1000 for.

Some basic tips

You will of course need some basic HTML knowledge for this, although some points require no prior experience.

1. Make each page Title unique to the page; keep the length to 60 characters or under. Any more and the search engines will not list the words in the results but you will see little dots…

Example:

<title>Important Keyword | Relevance Word | Company Name</title>

2. Create a Meta description that describes your page in a readable format; consider it a window to your larger shop.

Example:

<meta name=”description” content=”Important Keyword is a service or product in the keyword industry by company name.”>

3. Create a Meta Keywords tag, and include words that might not appear in your copy and misspellings of your keywords.

Example:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”related keyword, 2nd related keyword, related industry, misspelled keyword 1, misspelled keyword 2 “>

4. Make your <h1> tags contain the most important keywords on each page – only one <h1> tag per page.

<h1>Keyword</h1>

5. Make your <h2> tags contain your less targeted keywords

<h2>Less important keyword</h2>

6. Give all your images “Alt” descriptions, these should describe the images perfectly

<img src=”imagelocation.com” alt=”Keyword in a situation” />

7. Create an XML sitemap

Visit: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ - to have one generated for you

8. Submit your XML sitemap to each webmaster console

Google - http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
Yahoo - http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
MSN - http://webmaster.live.com/webmaster

9. Submit your website to a list of trusted directories. A good list can be found here:

http://www.avivadirectory.com/strongest-directories/

10. Make any links on your site include keywords rather than “click here” or “read more”

<a href =”URLdestination.com”>Keyword</a>

The list above is just some basic standards to follow. Of course if you have a good website built for you then some of these will not be an issue, you will be surprised though.

Find some free backlinks

It amazes me how lazy some people are, I see many “SEO companies” charge anything between £50.00 - £1000 just for 250 backlinks – these often tend to be non-relevant so actually do very little for your search rankings.

This is how I find relevant backlinks, granted it may be time consuming but it’s cheaper or often free and the results actually work.

1. Go to http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/
2. Enter a competitors website
3. Look at the results

You will often find free resource sites and directories that carry some weight using this tool. If not you will see where “the enemy” are getting their links from – which you can follow.

You can also use another tactic whereby you write comments on blogs that count as backlinks:

http://www.dofollowblogs.com/
http://www.digeratimarketing.co.uk/2007/07/20/over-160-relevant-link-following-blogs/

To finish this post off I will just add a few more tips, more server side that are always recommended. I would guess for sure that if you implemented all I have listed here, a new, un-optimised website would benefit from it (I guarantee that some SEO companies will charge well over £1000 for this sort of work)

Final Tips

• Implement a 301 redirect on your domain, if you do not know how, visit the link below:

http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php

• Make sure your URL structures contain keywords:

Example: http://www.yourdomainwithkeyword.com/productnamewithkeyword

SeoUnique has reached a point where I am looking to expand it’s horizons by looking for additional bloggers to join the team. SeoUnique has been live for nearly 12 months and has its foundations in place to provide Internet Marketing insights for its readers.

Potential Candidates:

1. You must list some previous SEO posts you have written or contributed to

2. Blog posts must be on the subject of SEO, SEM and Internet marketing

3. You will be asked to post at least once a month, this will give you an opportunity to generate your own reputation

4. You can be of any age, as long as you show maturity in your writing style, of course it can be fun!

5. You must know how to work with Wordpress

Apply Here 

Bloggers will be announced as soon as they are chosen

Thanks

As you will all know by now yesterday saw the third PR update in 2008 and we are only in April. The majority of webmasters will care more about SERPS more than PR but if you monitor your site enough you will see some correlation involved.

A few months ago I entered the “Yicrosoft Directory” competition at SEO Noobs dot com, although I didn’t win I implemented a some standard SEO practices on a standard Wordpress theme and built up under 100 backlinks with 3-4 variations of anchor texts.

Now what is strange is that on reflection on the new update I looked at my site which I hadn’t touched in months or even accessed. To my surprise the little green bar was displaying a PR4, I then proceeded to look at the PR for the top 4 sites under “Yicrosoft directory” and their page ranks were all 4-6. Quite high I’m sure you will agree for websites that are only a few months old about a subject that was made up. This is also not the first time blogs and websites have received high PR updates on young domains.

Now what I believe Google to be doing here is ranking based on an industry level. Say for example you want to rank for a competitive term such as “bank loans” – you may have a 3 year old domain, 50k backlinks and an SEO friendly website, however you still only have a PR of 3 or 4.

Matt…what are you talking about – explain yourself immediately?

Ok, stay with me here – If you have a new keyword phrase, as we all played for (Yicrosoft directory) then out of all websites competing for the term the distribution is shared.

For example:

“mortgages”
• Position 1 - PR 6
o Backlinks: 3 Million
o Domain Age: 2001
• Position 50 – PR 4
o Backlinks: 6,000
o Domain Age: 1996

“Yicrosoft Directory”
• Position 1 – PR 6
o Backlinks: 2,000
o Domain Age: Feb 2008
• Position 50 – PR 2
o Backlinks: 273
o Domain Age: Feb 2008

I know I have only used 4 examples here but you can see the PR’s match but what doesn’t match are the backlinks and domain ages.

So I guess what I’m trying to explain here is that for your website to rank well in the SERPS and achieve a high PR in competitive industries is a lot harder than on less searched terms. Although this conclusion is far from revolutionary, it does explain why new websites and blogs are ranking highly in Page Rank. To me this indicates the up most relevancy and value of a link to your industry or service, random PR links may not be as valuable to you if they are not directly related.

1. Research your keywords – use online tools to check search volumes and competition. The higher the search volumes the harder it will be to rank well, but the more traffic you will get if you rank well!

2. Make sure your page content matches your Title descriptions and Meta data. The titles and Meta data should be as accurate as possible to describe the content.

3. Ensure your H1 tag contain your most desired keyword.

4. Make your H2 and H3 tags contain other important keywords that perhaps you could receive long tailed traffic from (must be relevant to industry).

5. Highlight occasional keywords and phrases in bold to add emphasis for visitors.

6. Look at your source code, see what content the spiders will see first and add value to this content, for example; if it’s a link – add a keyword / phrase, if its copy – add keyword or phrase to sentence.

7. Add keywords to your link descriptions within text copy, avoid “click here” and “read more” descriptions, but again make it relevant to the destination.

8. If you use any references to external websites also provide a link pointing to the source, this adds credibility to the content.

9. A sales page will not help you rank for a keyword, be informative and provide good detail on a page, include a click to action to your sales page if necessary.

10. Do not over use keywords in your individual page content. I have seen pages include a 3 keyword phrase more than 30 times on a single page and be placed 3 pages behind websites with 10-15 keywords on.

11. Make your content readable for your users not just the spiders, after all it’s the users you want to impress.

12. Include your targeted keyword and phrase in the first sentence – although there is no real proof this helps I personally believe it does.

13. When writing around images or using images to backup your copy, give an accurate description of what the image is for or what it refers to.

14. Be sure to add your companies address on the site, either on the contact page or elsewhere.

15. Don’t use text under 8pts to write your main copy - no one enjoys squinting (yes I know my text is quite small).

16. Use recognisable fonts – not everyone has the same font’s as you!

17. Make sure you don’t duplicate content throughout the website; each page should be unique, excluding the navigation etc.

18. Include keywords in Alt descriptions of images but don’t stuff them silly people!

19. Use http://validator.w3.org to check your website once the copy is added.

20. The best way to write good SEO friendly copy is to use your common sense more than anything. Be your own judge on what you think visitors will want to see, at the same time remember that spiders and bots do need to see your target keywords to make you visible in the searches!