While many website owners focus on obtaining external links, it’s easy to miss internal link building, which is still an effective way to boost rankings for other pages within your website and the the best part of Internal Linking is that you have complete control over the implementation!

To get the highest possible return for your SEO, follow these simple guidelines to ensure internal links are working to improve your rankings.

1. Optimise the anchor text
You should ensure your anchor text targets your core keyword for the page. This is a good tactic to use in site-wide footer links, or even in the navigation, provided what you put there still makes sense for your visitors.

2. Ensure all links are do-follow
Google ignores link value from any links marked as “nofollow”, so make sure that you haven’t marked internal links with the “nofollow” attribute.

3. Use content based links where appropriate
Aside from the main navigation and footer links, linking to the main pages within the body text of your web page is another way to help rankings. Remember that it’s important to use your target keywords as anchor text, but make sure the actual text fits within the context of the sentence, so that the link doesn’t look out of place or seem irrelevant

4. Keep the total link numbers low
Make a note of the total number of links on any given page and try and keep this number as low as possible. This is because individual link “juice” is divided amongst ALL the links (external and internal) on the page, so the less links you have, the more value each link is going to pass on. Having hundreds of links on a page will dilute the effect of each link to almost nothing!

If you follow these simple guidelines, you should start to see some positive effect on the rankings for your keywords.

Google have given webmasters a strong indication that the speed of a website may become an organic ranking factor in 2010!

Here’s what Google’s Matt Cutts has to say on the issue:

“Historically we haven’t used it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast, it should be a good experience and so it’s fair to say if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus, or if you have an awfully slow site, maybe users don’t want that as much.”

Google already considers page load times as part of the AdWords quality score, so it’s a logical step for this to be included in organic listings too.

While it’s unlikely to have a huge impact on rankings (there are over 200 other factors) it would be worth preparing for its introduction ahead of time and get your site loading as fast as possible. Here are a couple of tools which can help you get started:

• Google’s Page Speed Tool – This is a firefox plugin from Google that enables you to see which areas of your site need improvement.
• WebPageTest.org – Another speed tool which provides optimization recommendations and other interesting stats.

I recently built the Cheap Event Tickets website & went through loads of free & paid for themes, which I could use on the site, but all of them had formatting problems and just didn’t look professional enough.

I then came across StudioPress ® Premium WordPress Themes which are professionally designed premium WordPress themes and look absolutely superb, but are also optimised for search engines by Joost de Valk, an SEO Specialist whom I’ve mentioned previously on my blog. He has also released 20+ WordPress plugins with close to 1 million downloads in total & lots of nice WordPress tutorials on his blog yoast.com.

The fact that the StudioPress themes are already Search Engine optimised, means half the job is done for you! With installation of the recommended plugins, provided your content is up to scratch, the site will work really well, as well as looking fantastic.

I’m so pleased with how Cheap Event Tickets has turned out & how easy the theme is to use, that I’m going to upgrade to the Pro Plus All-Theme Package, which allows me to use ALL of the themes, on as many sites as I want and also gives me access to any future themes that are released! I’m planning to use the themes to redesign Love Your Pets, to possibly re-develop the My Travel Extras blog & to finally get Web Travel Offers off the ground!! However, I could also use these themes to build sites for clients, so they’re real value for money too!

Some of the benefits of using the StudioPress ® Premium WordPress Themes are:

Search Engine Optimized

Google loves WordPress and most blogs do well in the search engines, but our Themes have been fully SEO’d by one of the leading SEO specialists, Joost de Valk. Our Themes will help your blog rank higher in the search engines and by following our Tutorials and recommendations you can achieve even greater search engine placement results.

Widget-Ready

If you are looking for ease-of-use, WordPress widgets are the way to go. Without having to know how to code, you can simply drag-n-drop to create the look you desire for your blog.

Theme Options Page

Our WordPress themes use a theme options page that allows you to easily customize the way your blog looks. Simply select from drop-down choices what categories you want to display or the number of posts to show and even what size you want your thumbnail images. You can also simply toggle between using a custom image or dynamic text for your header logo area.

Auto-sized Thumbnail Management

There are thousands of blogs and if you want yours to stand out, you must draw attention to your blog and articles. Nothing creates interest better than using images to draw attention where you want it, but image management can be a hassle. Not so in our Themes as we have integrated the use of the TimThumb PHP scrpit that dynamically resizes your images.

Ready for Advertising

Most of our themes are ready for advertising. All you need to do is insert your advertising code, like Google Adsense, Azoogle Ads, Clicksor, or any others, into the advertising widgets and start collecting your advertising revenue.

Comment Functionality

One method of holding your website visitor’s attention is through discussion of your articles. WordPress achieves this through the use of Comments and our themes use the latest features of WordPress including threaded comments and Gravatar integration.

Developed for Localization

A new feature for StudioPress themes is that they are being developed for localization. This means that you can now translate these themes into your own native language! Currently the Agent, Church, Education, Lifestyle and Streamline themes have this feature, but we will be updating all themes to include this as quickly as we can.

PSD Files Included

Another way to attract visitors to your blog is through the use of great-looking graphics, which the StudioPress themes have. Many members have a design-look in mind and to make it easier to change the graphics we provide the Photoshop Document (PSD) files of the graphic files we use.

Lifetime Support

Need help fixing a problem or making a minor modification to your theme? Let’s face it; technology doesn’t always work as smoothly as we all want. So, if you need help, our support is world-class and our team consists of over 20 moderators from all over the world, who provide solutions and help to our 12,000+ members, many of which help other members.

WordPress & Theme Tutorials

Whether you are looking to get up to speed with your WordPress knowledge or ready to get your brand new StudioPress theme working, our tutorials will teach you what you need to know.

Approved Designers

Maybe you are a busy businessperson or don’t want to spend the time creating your website blog. We provide a list of talented, freelance WordPress designers/customizers that you can hire to provide you with the look you want. Many of the blogs in our Showcase were created by these creative people.

Well, it’s happened again! After having put in hours of work on a site, the client has changed their mind & sneakily built themselves a “do it yourself” site, using elements of my design in their “creation”.

This happened to me a while ago when I was building a HIPS site & has now happened with the escort agency I was building a site for. Despite putting in hours of work & even having the client visit me to discuss how to progress with the site, all of a sudden they had gone very quiet! Upon checking the domain that I was supposed to be working on, I found a very cheap and tacky looking site, developed using doyourownsite.co.uk, which costs £5.88 per month to use & the resulting site certainly looks worth no more than that!

The client did explain that she wasn’t educated & this would explain the spelling mistakes that proliferate the site. However, I suppose the sort of people who will be using the service won’t care too much about that, but the client was saying that she wanted the site to look professional, along the lines of www.vogueescorts.co.uk. However, the one she’s come up with looks total rubbish – I won’t put their domain here as I don’t want to give them any publicity!

I think I’ll have to start assuming that everyone will try to rip me off by default & charge people a deposit up front from now on, as I can’t afford this to keep happening…..I’ve spent the last month working on 4 sites & have not yet been paid by any of the clients – I know I will get paid by one of them, it looks like I won’t get paid anything by 1 and the other 2 are an unknown quantity. The only solution seems to be taking part payment up front to prevent this happening again. Interestingly enough, the two people that have done this have both been self-employed business women! Contentious I know, but is this because women tend to change their moinds more often?!!!

The escort agency client did mention to me that she pays no tax on her business, yet makes a shed load of money (the girls get £110 per hour, before any “extras” are negotiated), so I contacted the HMRC Tax Evasion hotline, with as many details as I could supply, as she’s made it quite clear I won’t be getting any money out of her for the work already done!

First rule of business these days seems to be “don’t trust anyone”!

It’s nearly been a month since I blogged on here, mainly due to the amount of web design work I am doing.

One project is for a home security company, www.guardedhomes.co.uk, offering ipCCTV, gates, railings, shutters, safe rooms & the like, another new(ish) recruitment firm, as well as 3 home page mock-ups for another well-established recruitment company, not to mention a local escort agency!!!! On top of that, I’ve had a few other enquiries & just never seem to have the time for blogging at the moment. When I actually get paid for some of this work will be interesting though O

I’ve not been able to do much work on Cashback Shopper, or My Travel Extras recently & absolutely NONE on Love Your Pets or UK Shopping Spree & really want to redesign My Travel Extras to be less cluttered & more Web 2.0, but will have to wait for a quiet spell I guess. Once I get paid, I want to promote my dating sites a bit more I recently bought a number of new domains, but guess they will also have to go on the back burner for now: cheapcarhirealicante.com, webtraveloffers.com, travelcheapinfo.com, cheapsmallbusinessbroadband.co.uk, scifigoodies.co.uk, findmegaydates.co.uk, findmelesbiandates.co.uk, plus I wanted to try to resurrect easylolly.com for some sort of financial site.

On top of this Ei42 have just launched in the US, so I’ve been link building for www.cashbackshoppers.biz, in the hope that I can get some more interest in this, but think this is going to need some articles and forum postings to get anywhere…..I did start writing to schools asking them to consider joining as a way to raise funds for their school, but haven’t had the time to carry on.

Maybe I have my fingers in too many pies & am spreading myself a bit too thin, but we’ll see.

I recently completed another affordable website design for a client, which you can see at www.tideservices.co.uk.

This was quite a straightforward job; although the original company role was the installation of roller shutters to shops & bakeries, they have branched out into many more fields over the last few years, but wanted all of this covered by a 5 page site!!

This was the only issue as far as designing the site was concerned…..the company performs about a dozen different functions – how to get that into a 5 page site. Luckily, I was able to separate the navigation into 2 sections on the homepage – Industrial doors & building maintenance down the side as the 2 main functions of the company & some sub headings horizontally across the page too, highlighting particular products!

Once all the information was collated from the client, the site made good headway & the client is very pleased….I can say this because he wants me to work on another site for him & has referred me to a relative who runs a wedding planning business!!

Always nice to be appreciated )

There’s been a lot going on recently including a new blog for My Travel Extras, transferring the travel related posts from this blog; a change of web host (followed by changing straight back again!) & trying to get some more web design business.

First of all the change of web host! I decided that I should move my sites to a hosting company with its servers based in the UK as Get to the Top on Google: Tips and Techniques to Get Your Site to the Top of Google and Stay There suggests that Google.co.uk gives higher importance in the UK rankings to websites where the server is based in the UK. As I use 1and1 & their servers appear as being in Germany, this may be harming my .co.uk domains.

I chose Heart Internet as they offered web hosting at the same price, but with 100 mySQL databases as opposed to the 2 I have with 1and1. I transferred all my domains over to Heart, the .co.uk being free & the .com costing £5 each. Unfortunately, it was only when I had a number of the .co.uk domains transferred, that I realised that I was unable to apply more than one domain to the hosting account unless I paid a “domain mapping” charge of £20pa for each other domain!

With around 30 domains, there was no way it was worth doing that, so the only alternative was a reseller account, whereby I would also be selling web hosting! As this cost a minimum of £25 per month, with no guarantee of selling any hosting, I couldn’t consider doing this & was gutted that I’d spent loads transferring the domains over & now would end up paying through the nose for something I didn’t really need.

I have to say that this domain mapping was not something mentioned anywhere on the hosting section of the Heart site & now I will be very cautious about it if I ever consider changing my hosting again!!! It was only by going through the support database, that I found any reference to it!

I decided to bite the bullet, take the loss & transfer my domains back to 1and1 /  Luckily however, the .com transfers had not been completed and so they could be cancelled & the charges refunded. Because Heart also offers a 30 day money back guarantee, I got my hosting costs back too <phew>. I would like to say thanks to the support team at Heart Internet though, who responded to my enquiries within minutes & were very helpful in sorting this problem out, even though they were losing a customer. Excellent customer service – if only Tiscali could be like this, but that’s another story!

I decided to also set up a separate blog for My Travel Extras, removing all the travel related posts from this one. Whether it makes a difference or not I’m not sure, but I presume that travel related content on the travel site would be viewed better by Google, than travel related posts on a web design domain. Fingers crossed this may help bring some visitors to My Travel Extras which has not been setting the world on fire recently and may even benefit the Freshwebz rankings too!

Well, I did say I would blog about the downs of affiliate marketing too, so here goes!

What happened to all the Christmas sales?!!! I don’t mean sales in shops, desperate to attract people to them before they all go bust (goodbye Woolies & MFI), but the online sales I was expecting through Cashback Shopper. Transactions had been steadily rising as the membership grew, so I put extra effort (& money) into PPC to try & attract as many new members as possible for the Christmas rush.

But new memberships have dropped to a trickle & the amounts spent have also fallen as we get closer & closer to Christmas! I can only imagine that people have decided that because of the discounts offered in stores, it’s better to go & buy direct than online!! Perhaps this is affecting everyone, or is it just on my site that transactions have been disappointing?!

At the moment, all I can do is get through Christmas & hope things pick up again in the new year. But now there are bigger (national) companies starting up their own cashback sites & I’ve spent everything I can on getting my site where it is & can’t afford to spend any more.

January is a peak time for travel, but I don’t have the budget to push my travel extras site any more & to be honest, I may even have to consider getting a day job again   (   Or, at the very least put the affiliate marketing on the back foot & try to get more small business web design work……

It’s been sometime since I blogged about web design work that I’ve been doing – is there any time inbetween affiliate marketing for other things?!!! O  Well, I suppose I have to earn some money to pay for the advertising, which sometimes seems like a bottomless pit! In fact, I don’t know why we don’t all give up affiliate marketing & just become advertising agencies instead – that seems to be where the real money is!!

A few months ago, I was asked to build a website for Change Social Care – a London based recruitment agency, with over 20 years experience specialising in the recruitment of quality Social Care Professionals & Administration and Secretarial Staff for Public and Private Sectors.

The budget for the job was around £300, even though the site took some time to complete, due to the regular re-writing of the content /  But, the site was finally completed to the satisfaction of the client & has been up & running now for some months.

I was contacted recently by an advertising agency, to build a 3 page website within a couple of days! They supplied all the copy & the site was built & uploaded on schedule, at a cost of just £100! The site www.mediatalent.co.uk is pretty basic, but looks fine & what do you expect for £100?!!!!

The major project I’ve been working on for some time has been for Roberts Roofing, a London roofing contractor working on projects worth £4 million last year! So, the pressure was on with this site!! They already had a website, built by the company itself, but wanted it brought up to date & modernised.

The new site was designed with a great deal of CSS and was constructed to emphasise the projects they have worked on, showing decent quality images of them. They wanted clean, simple lines & all relevant infomation to be available within a few clicks of each other, whilst removing a lot of the personalisation that had existed on the original site.

The site has finally been finished & the client is VERY pleased with it – so am I )

New website built for Roberts Roofing

If you’re selling products and services that are related to a special area, it is crucial that your website gets found by people that are looking for it. One of the easiest ways to get found by people that live in your area is to optimise your web page titles for your product & location.

What is the web page title?

The title of a web page is the text that is written between the tags in the HTML head code of a web page, is displayed in the web browser window when someone visits your website and it is usually used as the linked text when your website appears in the search results.

Why should you use optimised web page titles?

The web page title is one of the main factors that Google, Yahoo and other search engines use to rank web pages. A good, relevant, informative web page title greatly improves the chances of getting high search engine rankings for your product/service.

The web page title is used by the search engines as the bold linked text on search result pages. That means that it should be clear, relevant, concise and appealing, so that web surfers will be drawn to click on it.

How to write your web page title so that it gets better local rankings

If you optimise your web page titles correctly, they will both increase your search engine rankings and attract people from the local area & those looking for your products/services, to your website.

You’ll benefit from targeted traffic and targeted traffic leads to more conversions i.e. sales. Here are some things that you can do to improve your web page titles:

Include the name of your business, important keywords and your city in the title of your homepage:

FreshWebz – Affordable web design in London and Essex

Depending on your business size, change the order of these items. Well known businesses should list their company name first. If your business is new then it’s usually better to list the keyword first:

Affordable web design for small businesses: Freshwebz in London

People are probably looking for a solution to their problem (web design) instead of your actual company name. Instead of your town, you can also use the name of the greater area if your service is available in that area.

Use a different title tag for every page. This is important! The title should reflect the content that can be found on the page, so it’s less effective just copying the homepage title to every page. For branding purposes, the titles should contain your company name and a popular keyword for which you want to be found on search engines:

FreshWebz: Search engine optimisation & SEO services in London and Essex
FreshWebz: Web design Portfolio – websites designed for recent clients
FreshWebz: Contact us for an affordable quote for your new website design

Use short web page titles. Short titles are much easier to read for web surfers. Do not try to stuff your title with keywords in the same way that you wouldn’t stuff your page content with keywords. It is much better if your web page title is highly relevant to one keyword, than somewhat relevant to many keywords. If you want to optimise your website for different keywords, optimise different pages for different keywords.

Do not use special characters in your titles. Avoid symbols and other special characters wherever possible. They might not be displayed properly on all computers and your website listing might look strange in the search results.

If you change your web page titles as described, your website will get better rankings on search engines and it will be found by people looking for your products/services & who live in the right area. By getting more visitors for one topic, you will improve the overall ranking of your site & so improve your position for other search terms.

Unfortunately, the web page title is not the only element that influences the position of your website in the search results of Google and other search engines. If you want to make sure that your site appears in the top 10 results, you should optimise all factors that are needed to get top rankings. FreshWebz can offer your website guaranteed Top 10 Google rankings for your desired keywords in the natural listings.