In support of a new client The EHR Group and MyTechDeal.com we’re providing consultancy and development for a new web blog and community & client area. Our brief also includes helping grow their internet presence – helping them market their niche consultancy services.

We certainly don’t claim any special hidden dark secrets for improving web presence; we just ensure that all the free tools and techniques are properly employed.

Search Engine Optimization companies will promise you page #1 Google ranking, through competitive linking tricks, ‘managing’ your meteoric search engine placement, oh, and also untold wealth, a stunning wife, intelligent kids… Too good to be true?

Google, Microsoft, all of the Search Engines, are expert in spotting SEO tricks that artificially promote your ranking. In reality your Google ranking is not improved by appearing upon sites that are simply link-exchange or link-only web-sites. I would not be surprised if using them actually downgrades your search engine ranking where suspect site promotion tricks are employed.

The raison d'être of any Search Engine is to deliver rapid relevant appropriate weighted content in response to a search phrase. They will link to a blog or forum post discussing your subject over a link-only web-site. The more intelligent the references back to your blog, the better the weighting given to the content indexed upon your site.

The following SEO strategies are free and worth the effort:

1. Sitemap

We specialise in providing blog and web-applications that inherently provide dynamic updating compliant sitemaps. Therefore as new content is added to your site the sitemap is automatically updated, and search engines know you have new content to index. If you don’t have that automatic sitemap facility on your web-site you can at least create a sitemap and update it occasionally.

XML Sitemaps is just one that we’ve used, but a Google search should find plenty. This will generate an XML compliant sitemap which you upload to the root of your web-site. You should also update this sitemap in sync with new content uploaded to your site.

2. Update Robots.txt with sitemap

This is not just about Google. Your sitemap is read by all search engine provided that you correctly advertise that you have one. You should include the following ‘sitemap’ reference in your robots.txt which is placed at the root of your site. (of course, change the following to the name of your sitemap)

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
User-Agent: *
Disallow:

This is a sample Robots.txt allowing all search engines to index your site and listing the URL location of the valid sitemap.

3. Tell Google you have a sitemap

This is the only Google-specific note. Google Webmaster Tools allow you to advertise your sitemap to Google and for them to verify that its a good one.

4. Update your signature

You may be authoring content upon forums, blogs, news articles and leaving comments upon other people’s blogs. You should try to provide a consistent signature (wherever you post) that links back to your blog or site. This is excellent search engine relevance. Remember that forum threads and blog comments are also indexed by search engines.

5. Give attribution – always

If you read an article from which you draw some inspiration or ideas, or even if you ‘borrow’ some graphics, you should provide a HatTip or reference to that source. Of course that is good manners, but more importantly this is a link between two relevant subjects and their authors. By giving attribution you’re far more likely to become a buddy with that author. They are far more likely to start checking your blog because they discovered that you had linked to them. This is how your site is genuinely placed as a link, therefore improving SE ranking. The DrudgeReport is an excellent proponent of outbound links. Of course, this blog post does a fair job of referencing useful resources and tools!

6. Title your content for Search Engines

If this weeks news (for your speciality) is subject you want to write about, use a good relevant blog or forum subject title. Instead of titling an article “Recession”, using “How to cope with the Recession” would match more search expressions. Just think what you would type to find a subject (about which you’re writing).

7. Watch yourself

Install Google Analytics upon your site. This will provide comprehensive information about who links to your content and what search terms bring people to you. Configure a number of Google Alerts for search terms including your name and organization or blog. Have these Google Alerts delivered directly to …

8. RSS

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows you to capture feeds from web-sites that you frequently visit drastically increasing the efficiency with which you do your daily research. RSS will help you react quickly to a new story or event drawing upon multiple sources of information fast. Even if you’re only alerting, commenting and linking to a story, your readers know that you’re a good source of information – and you do your site no harm with the search engines for that news event. There are many, many RSS readers; I just use Google’s RSS Reader.

9. Plan ahead & Platforms

When your Blog content is delivered from a certain web-application folder (e.g. /blog/) your sitemap and search engine indexes will cache links to that location. If feasible try to keep that location static so that even very old links are respected and hit a page with content.

Don’t get too worried about uber-cool web-site names. It is your site content that is being indexed, not your site URL. Blog posts under a .blogspot.com or .wordpress.org site are at no disadvantage compared with www.trendysitename.com.

Unless you want to invest in a dedicated server hosting you never know if your site is going to handle a “Digg” or New York Times event – when you suddenly have 200,000 visitors. Wow. Where did they come from. If you host your site or blog with Google, they will manage that traffic event – I can’t say the same for PHP based Wordpress.

10. Get noticed

If you are authoring a Blog, we talked above about developing relationships with other bloggers. This introduces readers of other blogs to your blog.

But you can also offer your Blog for syndication upon blog services that aggregate blog content from thousands of other blogs by subject or category. ProBlogger provide three suggested tactics for getting noticed – and hopefully getting some New York Times and CNN visits.

link update: I stopped by Robert Scoble who asked the same question. He pulled a heap of resources and links worth investigation here.

Growth, SEO Growth, SEO