Monday is expected to be the busiest online shopping day of the year, as consumers get ready for Christmas.

Tens of thousands of pounds are expected to be spent online every minute throughout the day, on what has been termed ‘Mega Monday’. Video games, gadgets and DVDs are amongst the most popular purchases.

BBC article

If you’re interested in how to boost your sales over the holiday period, feel free to contact us in regards to optimising your existing website for search engines.

Alternatively, if you want to discuss e-commerce web design in general, please take a look at some of the articles we have on the topic!

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SERPs are the pages you land on, as an Internet user, when you enter search terms into an online search engine. They present a list of web page results which are linked is order of relevance, from most relevant to least relevant, in accordance to the keywords you have entered. Obviously, having a having ranking in these results pages will increase your website’s overall web visibility, whilst a lower ranking will decrease its visibility.

If you want to increase your web visibility in SERPs, you need search engine optimisation. For more information about search engine optimisation, take a look at some of the following blog posts.

• SEO Tips
• Ideal Keyword Density
• Social Networking and SEO

Alternatively, you can view all our search engine optimisation articles, read about the SEO services we provide, or simply contact us directly.

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In the context of search engine optimisation, keyword density refers to amount of times a certain keyword or phrase appears in web page content relative to the total number of words present within the content being analysed. The keyword density is usually shown as a percentage indicating the number of times the keyword or phrase, in comparison to the total number of words, but can also be expressed as a ratio of the same data.

Significance of Keywords for SEO Purposes

Keyword density was first introduced as a search engine optimisation tool in the early 1990s when, at the time, keyword density was one of the major, and in some cases, only factor contributing to the way search engines ranked their results. Currently keyword density is still of great importance to search engine optimisation, but is no longer the sole factor in increasing ranking. Other important factors include good site structure, unique, high-quality and regular content updates and strong, numerous and consistent back links.

The Ideal Keyword Density

Most search engine optimisation experts recommend a value of between 1 and 3 percent keyword density for any particular targeted keyword or key phrase. This value can vary dependant on the nature or format of the content, and also can depend highly upon the subject matter of the content itself.However, it is important not to over use the technique of putting keywords into content, as this results in a very high keyword density and is known as ‘keyword stuffing’.

Although keyword stuffing may produce high rankings for a brief time on highly unique content, it is likely to be diminished very quickly, and is not a recommended strategy for search engine optimisation. Due to keyword stuffing being a technique for writing for search engines, rather than for humans, this breaches Google’s web master guidelines and thus could, in a worse case scenario, result in a indexing ban from Google and/or other search engine.

Keyword Density Advice

If you want advice on keyword density or any other aspect of search engine optimisation, feel free to contact us. Also, please ask us about how we can search engine optimise your website and what the best strategy for your unique niche might be.

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1. Content - ‘Content is king’ – ensuring your content has regular, up-to-date and unique quality content is vital for high search engine rankings.
2. Links - Links, both internal and external help map out the importance of various pages on your sites and increases its reputation in the eyes of search engine spiders.
   1. External link popularity – External link to your pages help boost recognition of your website and helps define the keywords which are associated with your site and each individual page.
   2. Internal link structure – The internal page links are very important to defining the overall structure of your site and the site wide important of the pages.
3. Code optimisation – The optimisations of website code can increase the rate and reliability at which search engines spider your website and can assist in emphasising the most important content on your web-pages.

Content

The common and highly cliché phrase relating to web-page and media content is ‘Content is king’ and that is certainly true in terms of search engine optimisation. Quantity and quality are both highly important in terms of SEO, along with the originality of articles also being highly important. In many cases, non-original or copied articles can be penalised in the search engine rankings due to duplicate content penalties.

Links

Linking is very important for search engine optimisation, with external inbound links being one of the most important and fundamentally measurements search engines use to verify and represent the overall importance of any individual web-page and website.

External Link Popularity

In the main categories list above, both the external link popularity and internal link structure are mentioned. In relation to external link popularity, each search engine utilises its own measures. The most noticeable and well known of these is Google’s Page Rank features. Page Rank indicates the importance of a page according to the Google Search engine, it uses number/popularity of inbound links, global rankings and other measures to determine this value via a proprietary algorithm held secret by Google themselves.

Internal Link Structure

In addition to the highly important external back link popularity, the internal link structure of your website is very important. The most important pages on your websites should be linked to from all other pages. Typically, this is done via a header, sidebar or navigation in the footer. If  you are relying on Flash or JavaScript buttons in many parts of your site, ensure that text links (that search engines can easily spider) are also included to compliment these, either within a navigation bar or the page footers. In the same way that you should utilise important content-related keywords in external back link link text, these keywords should also be present in internal links as well to ensure search engines know the subjects and topics each of you web-pages relate to.

Code Optimisation

Code optimisation, in the context of search engine optimisation, refers to many improvements that developers can make to the HTML structure of a website. One of the most important changes that can be made is making code compliant with W3C standards, ensuring search engine spiders can easily navigate through and extract contents from web-pages. Additionally, web-page content can be rearranged to put main keyword rich page content towards the top of the page code, ensuring it is the first part of the page which is seen when search engines spider the pages. Reducing the code to content ratio can also be quite important in making sites easier  to read by search engine spiders.

Another optimisation, which is in dispute regarding its importance now is the use of META tags. Dependant on the search engine spider itself, META tags containing keywords and description information, are used to varying degrees. It is commonly believed that Google utilises META tag content to a very small degree in determining the search engine results rankings, whilst other search engines such as Yahoo Search and Microsoft Bing have relied on these tags very heavily in the past.

More Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Tips

If you’re after some more, high quality, search engine optimisation tips or advice, for your websites, or in general, please feel free to contact us or read about some of our search engine optimisation services.

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So, what are all of these social web elements? Let me explain.

• Blog – A blog, also called a ‘web log’ is a series of articles called posts, which are written and published over a period of time to the web. Most blogs are provided in the format of many pages in which the posts are displayed in reverse chronological order, and are categorised and tagging by the topic or topics of the individual posts. Blogs can be informative, such as tips and ‘how-to’ guides, personal, in the format of a journal/diary, or corporate, giving information and news around a specific topic or range of topics. What you are reading now is an example of informational, corporate blog post.
• Social Networking – You may already be using a social networking website already without realising it. Examples of very popular social networking websites are Facebook, MySpace and Orkut. Social networking websites allow you to keep it contact with your friends, family, acquittance and colleagues. Many are open to various advertising and marketing campaigns, commonly targeted to users via their age range, gender, location or interests.
• Social Bookmarking – Social bookmarking websites, or social news websites, allow users to post links to other web content and share it with other users of the website. Examples of social bookmarking websites include Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon. These social bookmarking websites are the perfect opportunity to promote engaging and viral content includes articles, images and videos to a large number of users at once.
• Micro Blogging – Just like social networking, you may already be using a micro blogging website but not have heard of the social media terminology. Examples of micro blogging websites include Twitter, FriendFeed and identi.ca. Micro blogging is the same general idea as a blog, a reverse chronological listing of posts. The difference with micro blogging is in the name – the posts are deliberately small in size, generally under 140 characters. Micro blogging sites are used frequently, like social bookmarking websites, to share content via links to webpages or video clips, so are, again, a great social media website promotion tool.

If you want some help promoting your website via search engine optimisation techniques or social media, we offer quite a few great services to promote your website. Feel free to contact us about them!

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Islam is getting a little help from Britain’s Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism, which says it plans to train government-approved groups to “flood the Internet” with “positive” interpretations of that religion in an online fight against radicalization.

The OSCT plans to coach moderate Islamic groups on how to manipulate the Google rankings of their Web sites in order to boost the online profile of moderate voices in the Muslim community, reports The Register, a British online investigative newspaper.

(Credit: International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation )

It is widely understood that terrorists use the Web to radicalize and recruit the vulnerable and disaffected; search engine optimization, or SEO, training is part of the campaign to counter this, a Home Office representative confirmed to The Register. “In order to support mainstream voices, we work with local partners to help develop their communication, representational, and leadership skills.”

Source: cnet news article

This is a rather unusual and political use for search engine optimisation. It seems that the British govnernment is employers content writers and SEO experts to promote the positive elements of Islam, in an attempt to reduce the negative interpretation commonly associated with the Islam religion.

Search engine optimisation is generally only utilised for commercial purposes to promote e-commerce websites and other types of websites. If you’re interested in SEO strategies for your own website or websites, please feel free to contact us here at Rapid Web.

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With all hope, business will be booming as you stock many relevant red and pink Valentine’s day gifts. The problem is, in e-commerce, it is fine to stock plenty of unique and holiday specific gifts, but if you’re not getting any hits to your website, you’ll be low on leads and even lower on conversions. You need to get seasonal visitors to your e-commerce website, and that means doing seasonal e-commerce related keyword research.

Unfortunately, people have already been all over the standard keywords and phrases you expect for these holiday. So ‘Valentine’s Day’, ‘Valentine’s Day gifts’ and ‘Valentine’s Day presents’ are all highly competitive  keywords, so you’ll need to try alternatives. A good idea here is localised keywords and phrases. If you are running both a retail store and an e-commerce website, you may wish to target localised keywords such as:

• ‘Valentine’s Day gifts Stafford’
• ‘Valentine’s Day presents Stafford’
• ‘Valentine’s Day Stafford’

Seasonal holidays are also a good time for some highly relevant link building. There are many seasonal holiday specific product listing and directory websites, that are designed to help people find gifts and presents for Valentine’s day and other holidays from a variety of different merchants. If you’re lucky, and the directory website is set-up appropriately, you may be able to set up a merchant account with the website and promote your products and gifts in-line on the website.

Whether it is Valentine’s day and love is in the air, or Christmas time with high festive spirits, your e-commerce site can always benefit, especially through link building and natural search engine traffic and rankings though search engine optimisation. Here at Rapid Web, we specialise in getting natural traffic to your websites via advanced search engine optimisation techniques.

Interested in how this holiday can help your e-commerce website? Feel free to contact us and have a chat. If you want, we have collated some consumer statistics for Valentine’s Day 2010 we’re happy to share.

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Earlier this week, Google let slip the development of the ‘Caffeine’ algorithms. The new algorithms are designed to ensure new and fresh content (in terms of time-sensitive news and articles) appear at the top of search engines meaning it will soon become even more important that websites keep their content up-to-date where appropriate. Although these changes will have a significant issue for search engine optimisers, many end-users of Google may not notice the difference as Google’s current web interface is not going anywhere, and thus for many, these changes will go unnoticed apart from perhaps the odd more relevant search result.

Bing – Microsoft’s search engine – is soon to become the search engine which powers Yahoo search, and will likely become Google’s only major competitor in both the UK and US search markets. This will make for some ne and interesting challenges for SEO optimising for the new Google and Bing algorithms. However, removing the Yahoo algorithms from the search engine optimisation equation entirely will certainly benefit many websites that already rank well in Google and Bing, or indeed Live Search from which Bing inherited its index and many of its initial search algorithms.

For more information on search engine optimisation in general please see our dedicated SEO services page, or to see how we are doing in ever advanced optimisations see our Live SEO Rankings page which automatically updates to show the latest results for a small selection of our clients’ targeted keywords and their positions in Google, Bing/Live and Yahoo.

Any other questions? Feel free to comment just below or contact us directly.

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