Our Origins

The team at UK Tights has been concentrating on SEO since the first day we launched our site. Since then, we’ve run into obstacles and plenty of road blocks, but we’ve learned how to navigate these and make a success out of our website.

SEO is always going to be a difficult thing to get right. Search engines like Google make sure that not all of the requirements for a strong website are published so that people don’t engineer their sites just to get to the top of certain SERPs.

UK Tights decided that the only way to go about making a healthy website was to make small changes and wait until we saw a change in our SEO profile, measuring this using Google Analytics to see if our visitors increased and one what search terms. That way, we could effectively experiment with changes to our website and see what worked and what didn’t.

The Human Element

But really, the best indicator for finding out how a website might climb the SERPs is to look at how people react to your site when you make a change. Search engines try and make their search results as humanistic as possible, so when you make a change that people respond to positively, Google and other engines love it too. One example is bread crumbs. We added bread crumbs to UK Tights, which is a string of links that run across the top of the page so you can find your way back to larger sections when you need to.

Bread crumbs are a common feature of websites and people use them regularly to get back to where they need to go. As soon as we installed this feature, Google picked up on our change and we saw our rankings increase for those terms that were included in the bread crumbs, such as brand names that we sell.

Thinking How The Search Engine Thinks

Google have stated that they want their search engine to think as close to the way a human brain thinks as possible, so they make sure it values the same things a person would value. Write many of one keyword and Google will think you are generating spam, the same way that a person will think your article is not very enjoyable to read.

We at UK Tights found the best way to do SEO was to look at making changes that benefit our customers, especially when it comes to written content. Creating a page for a brand of items that we sold allowed people to look only at their favourite designer and the few hundred words of text at the top we used to talk about their history was something our customers loved. Search engines did too; they saw the brand page and knew we specialized in that brand and they saw that we had written about the history of the designer, so we must be an authority on the topic. This view point helped us immensely and it continues to guide the way we think. Make it easy for the customer or the reader to find what they need and you’ll be rewarded.

SEO Copywriting – Why Content is King (and what you can do about it)

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

Devious Webmasters, would-be marketers and sloppy content writers are blighting the World Wide Web with spammy content, underhand tactics and dubious links…

There was a time when the world of website content was a wild frontier, plagued with mean tricks that would get your site up the rankings quickly and easily, and while it might seem that online copy is leading a clean-cut existence nowadays, the dreaded Black Hatters and lazy content writers (think Darth Vader and Boba Fett) are still at it. So just how do you stay clear of the penalties handed out by the likes of algorithm update, Google Panda, and keep your site ranking well?

The web is made up of content – that’s what it is; a behemoth Smörgåsbord of files and folders full of documents, images, videos and so much more. So it stands to reason that in order to have a well-ranking website your content should be wholesome, good and honest (think Princess Leia and R2D2).

Google (and those other search engines we occasionally hear about) is becoming increasingly more attuned to the way in which content is written and, more importantly, how it is understood by the most technically advanced element of the internet, the humans. Content is still very much king (or, er, emperor?) and with the recent release of Google’s Hummingbird update ushering in the dawn of semantic search, that mantra isn’t looking like it will go away anytime soon. In fact it’s going to get increasingly harder for the bad guys to ‘outsmart’ the search engines as they dynamically learn the values and trademarks of well-written content.

Definitely Black Hat

A clean-living White Hatter

Images courtesy of LucasFilm and The Walt Disney Company

The Top 10 Steps to Better Content

Making significant gains in Google’s organic search listings needn’t be cloak and light-sabre (‘black hat’).  Follow these 10 steps to becoming a Content Jedi:

1. Write for people first and worry about ‘bots’ later.
2. Choose your keywords carefully and use them wisely.
3. Don’t get SPAM-tastic – No-one likes a thorough keyword stuffing and Google seriously hates it!
4. Mark up your page with a relevant structure (headings, sub-headings, bold text etc.)
5. Better Meta – Help search engines to understand what’s going on with good meta data.
6. Keep it interesting – Include some dynamic content such as images, videos, polls etc.
7. Keep it relevant – Writing about red widgets? Then don’t try and sell me casinos and ladies of the night.
8. Build some trust – Create links to and from relevant, genuine, trustworthy sites.
9. Share it – Don’t wait around for people to accidentally trip over your shiny new content, tell the world.
10. Tell Google – That’s right, you can let the boffins know too! Google Webmaster Tools is a great place to start.

For more tips or help with content writing, web design and online marketing please visit Outsrc Web Design and drop me a line.

Remember, the force is with you, mostly.