International SEO has become a lot easier since Google Webmaster Central hit the streets. Specifically, and regardless of where the site is hosted, we can direct relevant country specific traffic to the relevant part of our website. More on this later.
Of course if you have a country specific domain – eg – www.yoursite.de, www.yoursite.co.uk etc [...]

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Local Search is important – some recent research from Yahoo indicated that over 40% of all searches are for local services – ‘dentist kent’, ’solicitor northwest’, ‘manchester air conditioning’ etc, etc.
One point to be aware of in this is that even if your services are national or international – you still want to capture individuals [...]

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We’ve discussed the importance of ‘link building’, or off page SEO, previoulsy and in this post I’m going to give you the definitive list of approaches to finding as many link targets as you need.
Remember, the on-page SEO will only take you so far, but its the systematic link building which will drive you up [...]

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An essential part of any online marketing activity is to monitor your progress and be prepared to change things to improve.
In order to monitor your SEO improvements and performance you need a couple of important tools:-
1. An analytics tool
2. A ranking checker
Web Site Analytics
We have already discussed using Google Analytics and you may already have [...]

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So by now you should have a completely optimised homepage, and, if you followed the last lesson, a target list of links to build in the future to help improve your ranking.
In this lesson we’ll learn how to otimise our inner pages.
Using your whole site to capture many keyphrases
Good optimisation means that your whole site [...]

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There are two broad categories of factors Google (and other engines) are looking at when ranking a site. One category – ‘on-page factors’ is what we have focused on already (changing text, metadata etc). The other category is ‘off page factors’ and this is mainly to do with links coming into your site from external [...]

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In addition to the ‘title’ tag we optimised last time, there are a few other important tags which need our attention.
What follows is instruction on how to structure the rest of the tags for your homepage – although these same instructions will be applied to the rest of our website as we move forwards.
So, [...]

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Hopefully you have now got some keyphrase rich copy produced for your homepage.
Good SEO is about aligning the keyphrases people search for to both your on-page copy and the associated metadata. (Metadata being the behind-the-scenes code the search engines see, but human viewers typically dont).
The most important piece of metadata as far as search engines [...]

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We’re now ready to start the optimisation process. We’ll start with your homepage.
Of course its necessary to optimise all pages you want rankings for and we’ll come to that later. The homepage is a bit of a special case though, for two reasons – one, it should reflect the more general nature of your [...]

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The first point to accept here is that this part of the process needs to be kept separate from other parts. Don’t be concerned at this stage where these keyphrases will go on your website – we’ll address this later. The important point is to find and record them. You’ll find the best way [...]

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Google Webmaster Central will enable you to kick start the SEO process and will also enable you to satisfy many of the basic requirements of SEO.
Incidentally, if you are beginning to think everything is a bit Google centric, its because in the UK (and most of Europe) Google is dominant. Also by optimising for Google [...]

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So, where to start your SEO activities. (I’ll refer to the practice as SEO – you probably know that it stands for Search Engine Optimisation). There are some essential prerequisites:-
-You will need to be able to change your site’s textual content and ‘metadata’. (This is the ‘behind the scenes’ information the search engine spiders see). [...]

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