It’s generally accepted that your website should be hosted in the country most of your customers or visitors come from – indeed, widely respected SEO experts, SEOmoz, rate the geographic location of the host IP address of the domain name as of high importance in their breakdown of ranking factors. What this boils down to is that search engines are able to tell where your website is hosted and will use that as an influencing factor in how your website ranks in search results.

Google has been placing increasing emphasis on location as it relates to the relevance of search results in recent years, and at the country level most people in the UK use www.google.co.uk rather thanwww.google.com. That being the case, your website is more likely to be returned in UK search results if it’s hosted in the UK as the search engine will more readily recognise it as relevant to the UK local audience.

This is of particular importance if you’re not using a .uk domain name – a .co.uk will generally be taken as evidence that your site is of interest to a UK audience and should be displayed when people in the UK search for relevant topics. If you’re using a .com that’s hosted in, say, the US there’s nothing to tell Google that it’s actually people in the United Kingdom who will find your website relevant – so you risk not appearing in relevant search engine results for the UK audience.

So, if you want to rank well in search results for a UK audience, you’ll boost your SEO efforts if you use a web host (Like us! We’re a UK web host, and we’re proud to host your websites in the UK and provide technical support that’s based in the UK to support them.) that hosts their sites within the uk, and if you use a .co.uk domain name.

If you have Google Analytics (and if you’re serious about measuring the effectiveness of your website and marketing activities, you really should!) and Google AdWords, you can access the search term-based Keyword Tool from within. Head to the Traffic Sources section, click on Keywords and you should see something like this under your results table:

Click on ‘learn more’, and you’ll find that Analytics generates a set of keyword ideas based on your common search terms.

The search returns possible keywords and phrases which aren’t already in your Google account, gives you an idea of the monthly search volume, and tells you what the ad/search share % is for each suggestion.

You’ll also see that they tell you from which page of your website they’ve extracted the suggestion and provide a suggested bid level for each option.

Obviously, you shouldn’t take what Google suggests as gospel – you still need to make sure that any new activity fits your budget and your business goals. But using their keyword suggestion tool can really help you quickly identify likely candidates if you’re looking to expand your PPC activity or are keen to hone the phrases for which you’re optimising.

One thing to bear in mind, for both SEO and PPC targeting:

Don’t just focus on words – use phrases

It’s likely that your results will include several phrases rather than just a list of single words. Take advantage of that – you’re likely to get more relevant traffic by using phrases – if you only sell children’s shoes, people looking for ‘shoes’ may only want adult-sized shoes and so will not buy, but people arriving on your site after actively searching for children’s shoes are much more likely to convert.

You’re aiming for specific, but not too specific. For example, ‘UK web hosting‘ accurately describes Daily and is something for which interested customers might well be searching. ‘UK web hosting based in NG9′ is probably too specific – we are, but so few people will search for that specifically that our efforts are likely to be better spent elsewhere.

You need to be logged in to a Google account to see it, but if you are, you’ll see that results now start to complete before you’ve even finished typing your query. Google uses what you’ve typed so far, combined with where you are and what you’ve searched for previously, to predict what query you’re trying to make and returns search results accordingly. These results will likely change as you finish typing your search term. The aim is to make it much faster to find the information you’re after by delivering the answer Google thinks you need before you’ve even finished asking the question – Google predicts that Instant will shave between two and five seconds off the average search query.

If search results – both paid and natural – are being returned before a query is even completed, though, what impact will that have on your pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts?

For PPC, let’s take it straight from the horse’s mouth. Google says that ad impressions will be counted in these circumstances:

• The user begins to type a query on Google and clicks anywhere on the page (a search result, an ad, a spell correction, a related search).
• The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing Enter, or selecting one of the predicted queries.
• The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of three seconds.

So, their thinking seems to be that impressions will still only be counted if there’s a reasonable chance that the person performing the search could be interested in your ad. Great!

At this stage, it’s too early to predict exactly what sort of effect the new system will have on your PPC campaign as a whole. Google’s expressed hope is that things will improve for you as Google Instant “helps people search using terms that more directly connect them with the answers they need”, but the best course of action is to continue to monitor your pay-per-click advertising campaign closely and adjust if necessary.

SEO can be a trickier beast to predict. Google Instant may make it more challenging for SEO experts to use search engine results pages (SERPs) to inform their activities, but at the moment, it’s not thought within the industry that Instant will have a tremendous impact on what you should actually do from the point of view of optimising your website. If you need a refresher course on SEO best practice, take a look at our Bibliography of SEO Resources and our  SEO Tips blog series.

So, for now, it’s carry on as you were but keep a close eye on your campaigns (we hope you do that anyway, of course!). We’ll keep you updated if we find Google Instant has really changed the landscape.

We’ll continue to publish occasional blog articles on the subject (in fact, if there’s something specific you’d like to know leave us a comment and we’ll get on the case!), but we thought it might be helpful to provide a ‘further reading’ list of a few places you can go for expert advice and discussion. It’s well worth browsing the archives of these sites:

1) http://www.seobook.com/blog

Another excellent blog with some really useful tools, like the SEObook toolbar, and a ’7 Days to SEO Success’ free email course that contains some helpful information to start with.

2) http://www.seomoz.org/blog

Phenomenally informative blog from some serious experts in the industry. You’ll see that as well as an incredibly useful blog, SEOmoz also has a tools section with a few freebies which might help you finetune your SEO habits, plus some useful guides. If you’re willing to splash a bit of cash, there are member advantages.

3) http://www.seo-chicks.com

A relatively new and very accessible blog with a mixture of technical SEO articles and wider industry-relevant features.

4) http://searchengineland.com

A plethora of information on all aspects of online marketing. Well worth trawling through the features and columns sections.

There’s a wealth of information across these sites, but they really are well worth a rummage through the archives. Most of them also have newsletters and Twitter accounts that you can follow if you’d like to be kept up to date – why not sign up to a few and see what you learn?

And it’s not like the Description tag, either: while your description doesn’t influence your ranking, Google will quite often display it within the listings, so it’s absolutely worth making sure your descriptions are as honed and inviting as possible because they’re going to play a huge part in influencing potential visitors to click. Keywords? Nope, they’re not even seen.

So, you don’t really need to bother with the keywords tag at all, then, do you?

Well… this is where I don my ‘Google Is Not The Internet’ t-shirt. It’s a phenomenally successful and innovative enterprise, and there’s no denying that it’s the most commonly used search engine out there (let’s face it, when a product name finds itself being used as a verb you know it’s a winner), but it’s not the only one in the world. There’s Ask, Yahoo!, Bing… well, you get the idea.

So, while you shouldn’t expect carefully crafted keyword tags to send floods of eager customers to your website by placing you right at the top of the rankings in Google, the best advice we have at the moment is that it’s still likely to be worth putting in the effort for the benefit of the share of the search market that’s not Google’s.  Which means that the advice we gave in our SEO Tips article on Maximising Meta Tags still applies: keep the contents of your keywords meta tag short, sweet, and relevant.

Keyword Research
A good place to start is to conduct a little keyword research. Think of this as an extended exercise in working out what terms people who are interested in the types of things your website provides will search on. Once you’ve worked that out, you can include the terms in your copy so that your site is right there when they search. So, the first thing to do is make a list. What words and phrases would you Google for if you were after the type of product on your website?

That list is your starting point. From here, it’s really helpful to use a keyword suggestion tool to try to expand on your suggestions. If you have one of our higher end Hypersubmit SEO products you’ll have one included in that, but there are also great tools available from Google and SEOBook. Just type in the words and phrases you’ve come up with and see what suggestions you get.

By way of an example, if I type ‘web hosting’ into Google’s tool it comes up with a list of related keywords. More importantly, though, it also gives an idea of the volume of searches for each term and gives an idea of the level of competition for that term, so I can now run through that list and rank it in order of desirability for inclusion on our website. This is always something of a balancing act – if you sell a popular product or service, the single word that best describes it will be extremely widely used, so while you do want it in your copy you might like to think about using it in a phrase which is still widely searched for but for which there is a bit less competition. In other words, if you’re running the website for a firm of solicitors don’t just put all your energy into trying to rank high in the search engines for ‘solicitor’ – try including phrases which include the name of your town and the type of law in which your firm specialises. There will be less competition for this more specific phrase, so when someone local needs your services they’ll be much more likely to find you.

You’ll also need to consider whether different keywords will be appropriate for different areas of your website – if you offer various products and services, then your descriptions of them should be aimed at describing each item as enticingly as possible – with the most relevant keywords for that particular product.

Keyword Placement
Once you’ve established which keywords you’d like to target for which general areas of your website, you need to work out how to use them to best effect.

We’ve talked before about keywords and the Title tag, so here’s a few other things to consider.

1. Keep it natural
Remember that if your copy is going to impress your human visitors it needs to be clear, informative, and concise. While it’s important to make the most of your chosen keyword phrases, if your site starts to read like a bunch of similar phrases strung together by a few ‘ifs’ ‘ands’ and ‘buts’ you’re going to lose visitors. With a little creativity, you can include keywords and important phrases in copy that flows beautifully, so please – while you’re following the below advice, no torturing of the English language in order to shoehorn an errant word into place!

2. The F principle
People have been shown to read web content in something approximating the shape of a capital F. We scan the title, drop down to scan the subtitle, and then zip down the site with the emphasis on the left-hand side (here’s the science). Broadly speaking, the same holds true of search engines. So, to simplify it, for every single page on your website you need to determine which is the keyword or phrase you most want to rank for and get that as close to the top and the left as you can – without compromising readability. Rate your list of keywords in order of priority and work from this ordered list.

3. Headers
It goes without saying that you’ll use your chosen keyword term as the heading for your page. There’s a little more to it than that, however.

Firstly, you need to make sure that your heading is in text – since search engines can’t ‘read’ images then plonking a graphic, however beautifully crafted and highly relevant, in the most important real estate on the page will do you no favours whatsoever. If you want to include the pretties, use them for background only and make sure any text is overlaid html that’s legible to search engines.

Secondly, try to use the html that search engines expect to see for headings. This is where the <H1> tag comes in – if you put your page header within that tag, it will be recognised as such and should be granted greater importance by the search engines. So, drop in that most important keyword on which you’ve decided and you increase your chances of a search engine realising, when someone searches using that term, that your page is highly relevant. Don’t try to fool them with more than one <H1> tag, though – they’re wise to that sort of sneaky behaviour! You can always use <H2> for subtitles and <H3> for sub headings or paragraph headings if necessary to split out your copy.

4. Follow that F!
Once you’ve got the header and subtitle out of the way, write the rest of your text in such a way that the keywords which you consider to be next in importance to your header and subtitle are closer to the top, preferably over towards the left hand side of the copy. Just work down your list and try to keep your copy as natural and succinct as possible. You can still try dropping in what look like more outside keyword possibilities further down the page, of course.

5. Be bold
If you use bolding sparingly, to highlight important items (like the start of each new point in this list), it will be easier for readers to skim your page and determine that it’s relevant to them. There’s also a school of thought that suggests search engines give greater importance to bolded words and phrases, so a little bolding of your keywords is worth a try. Emphasis on ‘a little’, though – no-one likes to feel they’re being clouted with the bolding hammer every other sentence!

Earlier articles in our Search Engine Optimisation series
Search Engine Optimisation – An Introduction
SEO Tips: Maximising Meta Tags

What’s meta data?
First things first, for those of you that haven’t fiddled too much with your websites – what is meta data? Also known as meta tags or meta elements, meta data is website code that explains what your website is all about – particularly to search engines and people accessing your site from them.

Let’s take a look at the result you get if you search Google for Daily.co.uk:

Google returns, in response to any query, information drawn from two key meta elements for the websites it returns. “Daily Domain name registration and web hosting from Daily.co.uk” is what we have in our Title tag, and “Reliable and fast domain name registration with free website builder including .com and .co.uk domain names. Register your domain names today with Daily.” forms the contents of our meta Description.

How meta Title and Description tags are relevant to potential visitors
When you look at it that way, it’s pretty obvious that you should make sure that your Title and Description tags contain a succinct, relevant, and enticing summary of what your website is all about. You want people who see your site on their Google search to understand immediately who you are and what you do, and to feel encouraged to click the link and visit your site.

Secondly, do you have more than one page on your website? Well, then, you’ll need to make sure that each one has individual Title and Description tags that best reflect the content of the page. Remember that all the time, search engines like Google, Yahoo! or MSN are sifting through millions of web pages to find the most relevant matches for any search – if there’s useful information on your website, the chances are that they will direct searchers directly to the page containing that information, not to your homepage.

Here’s what happens if Google decides that a what a searcher really wants is somewhere they can find a decent reseller web hosting package:

Totally different from our general results, you’ll notice. If someone specifically searches for reseller web hosting, we want to tell them how great our reseller accounts are, give them an idea of what they include, and tell ‘em where to find these great accounts. These potential customers are after specifics about reseller hosting, not generalisations about our company, so we make it easy for them to see that we’ve got the information they’re after. Do the same across every page on your website and you’ll increase the chances of people who search on terms which are relevant to your website actually clicking the link and becoming visitors.

How Title and Description tags are important for SEO
That takes care of the humans who might come across your Title and Description tags. But SEO is about search engine bots, so there’s a few other angles to consider to make sure that search engines return your site in response to relevant searches.

Firstly, everything above works brilliantly for bots as well as humans – search engines aren’t particularly fond of repeated content in general and prefer to see that meta elements relate well to the actual page content. But there are few more technical things you need to consider in order to truly optimise your meta tags for search engines.

1. Be honest about page content
Just as you won’t impress a human visitor with overly grand claims, you’re not going to convince a search engine that your site is a useful, relevant and easy-to-use resource for potential visitors if your Title and Description bear only a passing relevance to your page content. Keep it short, snappy, and accurate.

2. Include relevant keywords – and use them wisely
You’ll see that in the above examples, the keywords I searched on were bolded in the results, drawing the human eye to the fact that this result fits perfectly with the search. At the background level, the same thing happened with the search engine – it looked at millions of possible web pages and found that this one had relevant information.

To make this work in your favour, you need to decide what the most important keywords are for each page of your website (we’ll cover keyword research in more depth in a future article) and make sure that they are in both your page content and your Title and Description tags. Choose just one or two keywords or phrases per page, and put them as close to the front of the tag as you can without sacrificing readability. Search engines consider the top of the page and the left-most area of a title or heading to be the most important and so attach more weight to it when deciding what pages to return in response to search queries.

3. Keep it consistent
Develop a style for your title tags and stick to it. One good trick is to start with your brand name before discussing the specifics of that particular web page. You’ll get the benefit of a consistent format plus you’ll increase brand awareness – and the more people see your brand name, the more relevant and trusted it will appear.

4. Keep it short and sweet
Search engines will only display a certain number of characters, so if you try to make the contents of your Title and Description tags too lengthy you’ll just be wasting your time as your carefully crafted content will be replaced by a … after a certain length. Much better to write something that presents the honest facts as briefly and enticingly as possible. If you offer a free trial of a product, for example, use your description to encourage your visitors to give it a whirl.

The Keywords Meta Tag
The Keywords tag is a widely discussed topic in the SEO community, since it’s the one that in the past has been most open to abuse by unscrupulous website owners stuffing common-but-not-necessarily-relevant search terms in just to try to show up on as many search results as possible. As a result, the major search engines have put in a lot of work to make sure that a) this practice does not benefit those who try it and b) the Keywords tag carries less weight than other meta data in terms of search engine ranking.

It’s still open to discussion how far the keywords you add to this tag influence search engines, though it’s generally agreed that some search engines place more importance on them than others. However you look at it, there’s really only one guideline to follow:

Keep it relevant
For effective SEO, this should be your battle cry with every aspect of website design and copywriting, and the Keywords tag is no different. You don’t need hundreds of keywords, just a few well-chosen, targeted words and phrases which accurately reflect both page content and likely search terms. Don’t repeat every possible relevant keyword across every possible webpage – split them out and use them where they most reflect the page content. And don’t, for the love of sanity, indulge in the decidedly suspect tactic of adding keywords which you think will be commonly searched for but which have no relevance to your website – you won’t fool the search engines any more than you’d impress a human visitor with such tactics.

First, a few things it isn’t. SEO is not a fixed set of actions that if taken will propel you to the top of Google for all eternity. It is not a one-time only project. It’s not about forking over hundreds (or even thousands) of pounds of your hard-earned to someone who guarantees the top spot in Google (more about that here). Fortunately, it’s also not the mystery it might appear.

SEO, practised properly, is a permanent factor in your web design, your copywriting, and your online business strategy as a whole. In other words, it’s more of a mindset than a project. It’s all about making your website as accessible and easy to find as possible.

Why SEO is important for your website
Basic rule of SEO: largely, what makes a site accessible for your human visitors will work for search engines, and vice versa. If your site is laid out so that people and bots can find good quality, relevant information quickly and easily, you’ll perform well whenever someone searches using an appropriate term.

So, the chances are you’ll bring in more visitors the more relevant, useful and well-structured your site is. And the more relevant, useful and well-structured your website is the easier visitors will find it to track down what they’re interested in and the more likely they’ll be to hang around. More visitors means more potential sales, higher ad revenue, and ultimately a fatter bank balance.

What does SEO involve?
We’ll go into all of this in more depth in future articles, but you can probably divide site optimisation into three broad categories: what to do with your website code, what to do with your copy, and building links.

What to do with your website code is a series of articles in itself, but here’s a couple of hints.

First and foremost – keep it clean! There’s a code validator at W3C that you can use to check that there’s no errors or broken links within your website – the fewer there are, the easier the search engines will find it to navigate around your site.

Secondly, be careful about your use of Flash and images. Both are great tools for making your website more engaging for your human visitors with good eyesight, but while they can cope with images and Flash (although I know a few people who might argue that point when it comes to Flash!), search engines (and visually-impaired visitors accessing the site through a special screen reader) can’t – so any text you put within an image or a Flash banner is going to be largely invisible to Google, Yahoo! and the like. Make sure you keep images for illustration rather than explanation, and give them an appropriate alt attribute (often called ‘alt tags’) to help search engines and screen readers work out what they’re missing.

When it comes to copy, keep it relevant, engaging, and as brief as possible to make it easier for visitors and search engines to find what they need. If you’re selling products or services, make it immediately clear what you’re selling and why it’s great. If you’re an organisation, tell people straight away what you do, where you are and how that’s relevant to them.

Use keyword research to find out what words and phrases you need to focus your website around in order to attract searchers. Tools like HyperSubmit SEO can help, but it’s also worth keeping an eye on the search terms people use to reach you and what competitors are doing. Consider what you might search for if you were after information on your subject of choice. Those are the terms you need to make sure are in your copy. Once you’ve got your keywords identified, you can work on structuring your web copy, keyword density and tackling the long tail – we’ll talk about that later!

And finally, link building. Search engines tend to consider a link to a website as something like a vote for that site. So, theoretically, more links = more votes = higher position, right? Well, not quite. Links from a website on a topic that’s appropriate to your own will be thought more relevant, and a link from a popular site like the BBC carries more weight than a link from a newly-created blog. Bought links are prevalent, but frowned upon. We’ll talk more about how to develop a strong link building strategy in future articles.

Any questions or comments?
We’ll be delving into all of these topics in more depth in future features on this blog, but as always we welcome your thoughts.

If there’s something specific you’d like us to blog about, leave a comment and we’ll see what we can do. If you have an SEO success story and fancy having it blogged here, why not drop us a line?

We know there are changes we can make to improve the Daily.co.uk website, incidentally – don’t worry, we’re on the case!