1. Page titles

A vital key to search engine ranking are well written page title tags. The tags must contain a good keyword density for targeted phrases and accurately represent what is to be found on that page. Page titles should be unique for each page.

2. Navigation

There must be clear navigational paths for spiders to follow through the whole site. These paths must use plain, well written HTML as opposed to javascript or flash (which is invisible to spiders). This is achieved with footer navigation link blocks and other similar methods.

3. On page Optimisation

Every page needs to have a good amount of targeted keywords on it. HTML images need to have well written alt tags. HTML formatting needs to be made as clean as possible. And most importantly, the page’s content must be analyzed for correct keyword density and other factors.

4. New content creation

An important factor in good SEO is well written copy, ideally with fresh content being added all the time so that when search engines crawl the website it appears fresh, updated and vibrant. Depending on the existing site content we would consider such additions as blogs, auto-updating news feed content and language translation to increase the website’s visibility. Some of these additions may incur extra costs to the client, so at this stage, we are only recommending these options.

Some changes are going to be needed to any website starting the SEO process. Websites are crawled by search engines on a regular basis once they are included in the engine’s index and there are many basic ways to make a website as attractive as possible.

To do this we have to consider how a website looks to the spider robots used by the search engines and adapt the website to help it as much as possible. There follows a short, but not exhaustive list of the things we will look for and change on a website as part of this step.

Ceros. Being a part of the original development team of the Ceros product has certainly been one of the high points of my career. Even though I’m only loosely involved with it these days, it still gives me a great feeling to see it go from strength to strength.

A recent article on mequoda.com

talks about ceros’s leading position in the market and outlines a vision of the future for digital magazines in general. Here’s an excerpt

How Ceros Media is creating digital editions that “draw upon the best qualities of the Web”.

Digital editions are quickly creeping up on the magazine industry. If you are a magazine publisher and haven’t looked down this avenue, you might have another thing coming. You might think that users prefer paper, but you’d be surprised to know that users now prefer to have both, and you don’t really have a choice unless you’re prepared to be the underdog.

The 2007 BPA-Certified Digital Magazine Reader Survey found that:

* Digital magazine reader satisfaction rates remain high, 88% of readers are “very satisfied” or “satisfied” with their digital edition, an increase of 3% from 2006.
* Digital magazine readers are highly engaged with the digital edition; 89% read the digital edition the same week and 42% read it immediately or the same day.
* Digital magazine readers are reducing their use of print, making digital magazines critical for reaching these readers. Over 44% of respondents have decreased their use of print in the last twelve months. This is an 11% rise from the 2006 survey in which 33% of respondents had decreased their use of print.

Today we’d like to introduce you to one of the larger digital magazine providers, Ceros Media. They publish the digital editions for clients such as Marie Claire, BBC, and National Magazine Company. To see specific examples, read the interview.

With their platform, all individual pages of each magazine are optimized for search. If you google “miss gobbledegook”, you’ll find that the number one result is page five in Monkey Magazine. According to New Media Age, Monkey Magazine has recorded an increase in its ABCe figures to a new high of 271,667, up 10.7% month on month. It is the third successive month Monkey’s ABCe has climbed.

Something else we’ve noticed about the Ceros platform, in comparison to other digital magazine providers, is that their look is extremely clean and their interface is intuitive. Not only is it search engine optimized, easy to browse and delivered digitally, it is as classy and elegant as the brand it is representing.

We had a chance to talk to Dominic Duffy, co-founder of Ceros Media to ask him about Ceros and the future of digital magazines…..

read more here >>

If you’d like to distinguish between your subdomains, you can create an Advanced filter for your profile with the following settings:

Filter Type: Custom filter > Advanced
Field A: Hostname
Extract A: (.*)
Field B: Request URI
Extract B: (.*)
Output To: Request URI
Constructor: /$A1$B1

With this filter in place, the previous examples would appear with the subdomain attached:

www.example.com/index.html
help.example.com/more.html

Once a website’s goals are established the next step is to research the current search engine rankings for the chosen phrases and refine our goals to create a final list of phrases to target.

E.g. During this stage, it might be found that the phrase ‘video production’ is highly competitive, with many heavyweight companies with big advertising budgets competing for the traffic. This makes it unlikely for our basic SEO service to be effective for that phrase. The research might also find that the slight misspelling ‘vidieo production’ has a good amount of search traffic which is not nearly as competitive. Targeting this misspelled phrase could yield much better results.

Working together with the client we refine our list of phrases to get the best result from our SEO effort.

We then analyze the existing website to see how well it is suited to achieve those goals. If we are trying to rank a site for a particular phrase, the phrase must be present at the correct density compared to the rest of the content in order to make it attractive to the search engines.

The start of video content to the blog. I have always enjoyed the extra impact a video can have as a blog post, and like the fact that google open up the API to their youtube offering.

Here’s the new Listings Lab YouTube Channel. Blog digest version 1.0