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.

It’s got to be something to celebrate, even if Yahoo only makes up a tiny fraction of the search market nowadays – something like 4% in the UK according to an article in Web User magazine. But what the hell, Top Spot is still Top Spot )

Cashback Shopper has just achieved the number 1 position for all the following keyphrases on Yahoo:

• shop cashback
• shopping cashback shopping
• shopper cashback
• shops cashback
• uk cash back
• cash rewards site
• extra cashback
• free cashback
• cash-back directory
• get cashback
• uk shopping cashback
• uk cashback shopping pays cash
• cashbackshopper
• cashback shopper
• earn cash back rewards
• cash back uk
• cash back shop
• cash back directory

and is in the top 10 results for 19 other keyphrases!!!!

It’s taken 9 months of constant promotion, blogging, marketing, seo etc. but it’s a nice feeling when the results are so visible. Will keep working at phrases that aren’t doing so well & the key objective is to start making a bigger dent in the Google SERPS!

The best Google positions currently achieved are:

cash rewards site 7
cashback shopper 1
cashback shopping 3
cashback shopping site 7
cashback site 3
cashback uk 9
earn cashback 5
extra cashback 4
shopper cashback 1
site cashback 4
uk cashback 2
uk cashback shopping 2

with 17 other phrases appearing in the next 2 pages of results.

MSN is a strange creature; I have about 13 top ten positions, but only 2 other phrases in the next 2 pages and a dozen or so ways down in the top 100! But with a only 3% of the search market, it doesn’t really matter anyway.

So, the aim now is to find the most searched phrases (& those with the highest KEI) from all these on Google & give them a real push to try & get them to the top!! With lots of FREE traffic up for grabs, this is the most important task for any affiliate marketer!

Link building is one of the most important search engine optimisation steps. Without good inbound links, your website cannot get high rankings. Although it is very important that your website has optimised content, without the links to your website, search engines won’t consider that content to be relevant.

It’s important to get the right links to your website. Link spamming doesn’t work. You must make sure that you get high quality links that Google and other search engines like.

Make your website linkworthy

You must make your website linkworthy. You cannot expect that other websites will link to your website if your site is basically a collection of affiliate links, or an online shop that looks like a thousand other online shops.

Your website must be different & unique in some way. Try the following:

* Add articles about your products or services to your website.
* Add tutorials and how-to articles about the topic of your website.
* If you have a lot to say, add a blog to your website & update it regularly.
* Add a directory with links to valuable resources on your website.

Check your competitors

The best way to start link building is to duplicate the links that your competitors have. Find all websites that link to your competitors and then try to convince them to link to your website. I use a couple of tools to find links to competitor sites, IBP & SEO Elite. The good thing about SEO Elite is that you can select to include the Page Rank of sites as a parameter, so that you can choose to apply for links only on sites with a higher Page Rank than your own. IBP shows the Page Rank of sites, but there is no setting not to include low Page Rank sites in the results. However, it is worth using as many tools as possible & IBP is very easy to use!

Get links from blogs

There are millions of blogs on the Internet and they all need something to write about.
Bloggers give out millions of free links each month & getting links from blogs is a good way to get links from related websites. For example, you could enter “real estate blog” or “music blog”, depending on what you sell on your website.

Using IBP to find these blogs also allows you to contact the blog owners quickly and easily and it automatically keeps track of the websites that you’ve already contacted so that you don’t contact the same person twice.

Get links from Internet directories

Submitting your website to Internet directories can be a good way to show Google that you have a reputable website. Low quality & fly by night websites usually don’t invest the time and money that is needed to be listed in Internet directories.

Inbound links are very important if you want to get high rankings on search engines. You should optimise your web page content first to make sure that search engines find your website relevant to your targeted keywords & then submit to directories & blogs.

If more than one website has been optimised for the same keywords (and that’s usually the case) then the website with the best links will get the best rankings.

If you want permanent backlinks for your website, then consider using the FreshBidz Bidding Directory! Newly launched, you can buy links in your chosen category and then bid your way to the top of the list from just £1. Increase your bid to take a top position, & get listed higher on the directory homepage.

The rankings of your website on Google have dropped and you don’t know why this happened. Most webmasters face this problem at some time. Indeed, I experienced it myself with Cashback Shopper only last month! There are many reasons why rankings can rise or fall but here are the 4 main ones why they might drop:

Reason 1: Your website has been penalised or banned from Google

Search for “site:yoursite.com” on Google (replace yoursite.com with your actual domain name). If Google returns one or more pages from your website then your website has not been fully banned. Your site has NOT been banned completely, but HAS dropped for keyword searches for some reason.

What you can do to solve that problem:

Find out what you have done wrong on your website! Google doesn’t like spamming, cloaking, link building and similar shady tactics known as black hat SEO. Clean up your website, ensure that you are not using any of these methods and ask for reconsideration.

Reason 2: Your server rejects Google’s spider

Have you installed a new robots.txt file lately? Does your robots.txt file allow Google to index your website? Have you changed your htaccess file? Have you recently installed a spam bot blocker?

Are you 100% sure that the spam bot blocker lets Google through to your website? Google uses different IP addresses for its different spiders and some spam blockers might accidentally block one of the spiders. This might also look like cloaking to Google.

What you can do to solve that problem:

Double check the settings in your robots.txt file, your htaccess file and your spam bot blockers. If possible, avoid bot blockers because they might send the wrong bots away. I had an incorrectly configured robots file on one of my sites without realising it & only picked it up by using Google’s Webmaster Tools which reports errors found by the Google spiderbot.

Reason 3: Google has changed its algorithm

Google is continually tweaking its algorithm. It might be that one of the latest changes affected your website. Last year, Google released more than 450 changes of the ranking algorithm. That’s more than 37 per month. Google’s rankings have been very fluid of late, which indicates that the algorithm is changing more often than ever before.

What you can do to solve that problem:

Check your website with IBP’s Top 10 Optimiser and follow its advice so that your website is compliant to Google’s latest algorithm. By using the Top 10 Optimiser you make sure that your web pages are perfectly optimised for Google’s latest ranking algorithm.

Reason 4: Your competitors increased their SEO efforts

You’re not the only one who wants to get high rankings for your keywords. Search engine optimisation is a constant competition & rankings are affected by a number of different factors both on & off page! Your competitors might have done something, even just one thing, better than you.

What you can do to solve that problem:

Analyse your competitors with IBP’s Top 10 Optimiser to find out what they’ve done to get the top rankings. Get better inbound links than your competitors and optimise your web pages.

Things that brought your website to the top of Google’s search results yesterday might not work today. If you want to get on Google’s first result page and stay there, you have to continually check if your website complies with Google’s latest changes & updates.

I posted the cashback shopper rankings about a month ago & then revealed that all my rankings had taken a big hit on Google & Yahoo, which I now suspect to have been because the site had reached 6 months old & had lost the “new site bonus” that Google (& possibly the other search engines) awards to new sites.

Continuing with normal SEO efforts seems to be moving the site slowly back up the SERPS & it has even improved on some phrases (albeit disappearing on a few others!), so I’m hopeful that continued efforts will get the site back onto the top 3 pages for more keywords. The current positions are:

Google

cash back shopping 33
cash rewards online 1
cash rewards online shopping 5
cash rewards site 8
cashback deals 47
cash-back directory 13
cashback from shopping 13
cashback online 21
cashback shopper 1
cashback shopper site 1
cashback shopping 44
cashback shopping site 18
cashback site 3
cashback sites 18
cashback uk 54
deals cashback 44
earn cashback 6
extra cashback 2
get cashback 45
online cashback 35
pay cashback 36
paying cashback 24
rewards cashback 33
rewards online 5
rewards online shopping 8
rewards online shopping site 6
shopping cash back 11
shopping cashback 10
uk cash back 31
uk cashback 17
UK cashback shopping 14
UK cashback shopping site 32
UK shopping cashback 26

Yahoo

cash back shopping 1
cash rewards online shopping 10
cash-back directory 24
cashback from shopping 14
cashback online 10
cashback shopper 1
cashback shopper site 1
cashback shopping 19
cashback shopping site 9
cashback site 21
cashback uk 48
earn cashback 33
free cashback 5
get cashback 6
online cashback 2
online retailers 35
online shopping site cashback 2
pay cashback 14
paying cashback 16
rewards cashback 29
rewards online shopping 21
rewards online shopping site 11
shopping cash back 23
shopping cash rewards 18
shopping cash rewards online 7
shopping cashback 2
shopping rewards 18
shopping site 35
shopping site cashback 3
uk cash back 25
uk cashback 4
UK cashback shopping 6
UK cashback shopping site 5

It appears that simple inbound links are no longer good enough to improve your search engine ranking by themselves. As web masters buy up thousands of paid directory links, the value of those links diminish, simply because the links are on websites that are largely irrelevant to the content of your site.

More emphasis is now being placed on articles which should contain information about your websites topic. The content contains links to your site & the idea behind this is that the links show the search engines that your site is relevant to the links pointing to it.

I have already written an article myself for ezinearticles.com, but it can be a time consuming effort (when you’re blogging as well!!), so I decided to look at some Article Writing Services.

I found a UK company that claims to have been researching and writing content for various websites in the US and United Kingdom for more than three years, writing web content for travel and tourism web sites, research websites dealing with history, place information, hotels, hospitals and other articles too.

The effective team of the company consists of 35 well trained Writers, 4 Supervisors and 6 highly qualified editors, and 3 System Administrators & they claim to carry out the following steps when writing articles:

» Conducting research on the key words
» Keyword optimised fresh 400 words per article.
» Writing optimised meta title
» Writing optimised meta descriptions
» Writing meta Keywords
» Unlimited changes on each article

The cost for their service is £5 per article & so I’ve signed up to have 10 articles written for My Travel Extras & Cashback Shopper. Once I get the articles, I will be able to give more information as to their quality & the company details.

A new report suggests internet searchers are getting more impatient and now 68% of users make their choice from the top 10 search engine results!

The report was conducted over December 2007 & January 2008 & tried to develop an understanding of how search engine users behaved in their searches on the three largest search engines: Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

The study revealed that 68% of search engine users click a search result within the first page of results and 92% click a result within the first three pages of search results! The importance of appearing high in the search results has always been emphasised by SEO companies & it seems this importance is steadily growing! There is a clear pattern developing between the data from 2002 to 2008 which indicates that more search engine users click the first page in 2008 (68%) as compared to 2002 (48%). Inversely, fewer search engine users are willing to click results past the third page in 2008 (8%) as compared 2002 (19%). In both these cases, there is a year on year rise & fall respectively.

So more than ever, it is vital for search marketers to ensure that their sites appear within the first three pages of search results and especially on page one.

In a second related finding, the study revealed that 49% of search engine users who continue their search process when not initially finding what they seek, change their search term and/or search engine after reviewing just the first page of search results, rather than search further down the SERPS & 91% do so if they do not find what they seek in the first three pages. Again from 2002 to 2008, it seems that more users are abandoning their query after reviewing the first page in 2008 (49%) as compared 2002 (28%) & fewer users are willing to continue their review of results past the third page in 2008 (9%) as compared to 2002 (22%).

Again, the need to obtain top placements on search results pages has progressively increased in importance for search engine marketers.

Finally, the study reveals that brand equity is conveyed upon companies whose websites appear among the top search results by roughly a third of the search engine users. In 2008, 39% of search engine users believe that the companies whose websites are returned among the top search results are the leaders in their field. This figure has grown from 33% in 2002. Another 42% feel neutral on this question, with only 19% believing that top search engine rankings do not automatically denote an industry leader.

Initiatives that produce top search engine rankings can clearly help companies achieve their branding goals.

The study, tabled by Yahoo!, iProspect and JupiterResearch, paints a dark picture for website owners who are sitting below the top 10 results! Theoretically, they are only exposing their sites to 32% of searchers by sitting off the first page.

Freshwebz have partnered with one of the UK’s leading Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) companies to offer your website guaranteed Top 10 Google rankings for your desired keywords in the natural listings.

High Google natural rankings will provide high levels of ‘ready to spend’ traffic to your website and unlike the Adwords/sponsored listings each click is free, meaning a greater level of return.

You will receive your own dedicated Account Manager that will guide you through the process and the results are guaranteed!

Guaranteed results or your investment back..it’s that simple

Hot on the heels of all the recent (& ongoing?) Google upheaval, Yahoo! have just applied another update to their search ranking algorithm which will see changes in the Yahoo SERPS (search engine results pages). This update is the latest in a string of recent ranking algorithm tweaks with the previous update just over a month ago.

The process of crawling applying the algorithm to all the sites in the Yahoo index will take some time, which will shuffle around some of the pages in the Yahoo! index. Quote from the Yahoo blog:

“We’ll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days, but expect the update will be completed soon. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.”

Algorithm updates are especially important for webmasters because it gives a chance for any SEO efforts to be picked up and translated into ranking improvements. Some comments in the Yahoo post indicate that the update may have reduced the reliance on social sites and increased the “keywords in the URL” importance

Lets see what this change does to my rankings over the next few days/weeks! Fingers crossed the use of keywords in all my sites URL’s will make a difference!!

I did say I would be writing about the ups AND downs of affiliate marketing & today is the turn of a considerable down followed by a slight up!

I wrote previously about how well Cashback Shopper was doing in the rankings, but within days of that post, my rankings took a big hit from both Google & Yahoo ( With drops of up to 60 places on Google, I was astounded & quite disappointed.

I have read a recent rumour that there is a new -60 penalty that Google applies to websites in which it has lost trust; defined as sites that are guilty of spamming! However, the definition of spamming in this case seems to be that many of the websites that seem to have been penalised, had many inbound links from websites that linked to them from every single page of their website (so-called site-wide links). Sitewide links are an indicator of paid links, which Google sees as an unwanted way to artificially inflate search engine rankings.

Although I have not carried out such a campaign, I recently had Cashback Shopper added to a large number of directories and although all of these were free directories & spread over a few months, I believe it is possible that the number of new links may have grown too fast & Google has become suspicious. But, although I have taken a big hit, now is a time not to panic & give the rankings time to recover.

It is interesting how the different search engines look at websites….for example, for the phrase “cash back shopping”, on Google my ranking has plummeted from 14th to 65th, but on Yahoo it has risen back to 1st! In general, my rankings have improved in Yahoo, but deteriorated in Google. I’m sure that this is because Google looks at the relevancy of the inbound links & the directory entries, while valued by Yahoo, are deemed irrelevant & possibly even negatively by Google.

So, the idea now is to find linking partners that are relevant to cashback & work on recovering my Google rankings, which seem to have stabilised now.

I have also been adding linked key phrases from the Cashback Shopper blog, which may also be classed as site-wide links, so I will remove some of these & see if this makes any difference over the next few weeks.

But, if this penalty for paid links really exists then even websites that follow Google’s rules can get in trouble. Your competitors could harm your website simply by buying links or by creating mini-net websites with site wide links to your website. Instead of penalising seemingly “bad” links, Google should simply ignore them. That way, people could not harm competitor websites.

People not involved in website optimisation often have difficulty understanding search engine optimisation and the different methods that are involved. Some of the following basic SEO concepts may help you:

1. Link building is important

Links are like votes for a website. The more votes a website has, the better the rankings.

2. There are different link types

Search engines consider the relevance of the links. Links from unrelated websites don’t help as much as links from relevant websites. A link from a website that has many inbound links for itself counts more than a link from an unpopular website.

3. It’s important to keep on link building

It does not help to get more links than your competing web pages. At least one of your competitors will continue to build links and pass your website. For that reason, it’s important to know that link building is an ongoing activity.

4. Buying links can get you in trouble

Search engines don’t like paid links because they consider the links to your website as editorial votes. Google has officially stated that it considers paid links as an attempt to game the system.

Google penalises websites that buy links. Even if Google cannot automatically find all paid links to your website, your competitors might report your website.

Try to get high quality organic links if possible.

5. Redirects can cause problems

Redirects have been used by spammers in the past and some search engines still have difficulties with that. If you have to use redirections on your website, only use 301 redirects.

A 301 redirect is the only server side redirect that is defined as a permanent redirect. That means that search engines will follow the links and pass the links from the old URL to the new URL.

6. Duplicate content can cause problems

Search engines want to return as many different results as possible in their results. That is why search engines only list one copy of a document in their search results.

For that reason, you shouldn’t promote more than one domain for the same website and you should have unique content on your web pages.

Near copies are also considered duplicate content, for example, when the same article is listed on more than one website.

7. Why your web pages must be optimised

Search engines use simple software programs to index web pages. These web pages analyse the text on a web page to determine what it is all about.

If a keyword is mentioned in the right places and in the right frequency, search engines will consider the web page relevant to that keyword. If a keyword is mentioned too often, search engines might penalise a website because it looks like a spamming attempt.

8. Keywords are the key to your success

It’s important to choose the right keywords for search engine optimisation. Single word keywords can be very popular but they seldom lead to sales. Industry specific keywords can be so special that no one searches for them. The perfect keyword is targeted, has a high search volume and leads to sales.

Search engine optimisation is not rocket science but it requires some work and ongoing efforts. If you understand the basic SEO concepts, it’s easier to get top 10 rankings on Google and other major search engines.

If you want guaranteed top 10 Google Rankings, then contact us to discuss our search engine optimisation plans, if you want to try SEO yourself, then we recommend Internet Business Promoter, an award-winning web site promotion suite that helps you to get top 10 rankings in Google, Yahoo and all other major search engines.

IBP is the only SEO software tool that guarantees top 10 rankings for your keywords. IBP offers all the tools you need to get top rankings, including tools for website optimization, link building, search engine submission and more.