Some SEO Considerations

[seymourjames +]

Here is some practical advice about Search engine optimization (SEO) and why it is important to spend as much as you can afford to host your classifieds site. Skimping on hosting if you want good search engine rankings is not the thing to do.

It is well known that the search engines are becoming evermore sophisticated in terms of ranking web sites in their results. Many factors decide on placement of a result from the age of the domain, to who is linking at it, to its internal linking structure, the content on the page relative to the search terms, the freshness of content, etc. Hundreds of factors go into the ranking decision and the art of SEO is to find out which ones play the biggest part.

Some areas which have become of more concern to search engines according to the SEO press are the following:

1. How long is your domain name registered for - clearly a 10 year registration plan shows more commitment than if you only register for a year. In the former case you can be trusted more and you are clearly more serious about your site.

2. If your target market is in the U.K. then hosting in the U.S is fine but equally so, it may give you a point or two extra if you host in the U.K. where your visitors come from. This will also help to improve the speed of the site for your visitors which is another important factor. Much has been said recently about the importance of page loading times. A whole topic in itself. Likewise you can use meta tags on your site to inform the search engine of your target geographical market and in the case of Google, you can use their webmaster tools to tell them directly. As an aside this is why it is important to get links from other sites to your site from the same geographical location where possible. A few hundred basic links from China if you are a U.S site are unlikely to be considered very important or trustworthy.

3. How many other websites do you share the IP address with of your server. Again if you are on a shared server plan with thousands of domains on it, it may imply that you are less serious in terms of your investment than if you have a VPS system with a dedicated IP address for your site.

4. If you have several sites which link to each other, it may well be worth registering them in different names/addresses. It is then not so obvious to the search engines that use the whois lookup information that in fact the links may be considered as contrived as the owner for all of those sites is the same person.

I can give you a good example. I have a site which jumped one whole page in the search results simply because I paid $3 each month for a unique IP address on a server which is also based in my target market and which happened to be the U.K. The ranking improved in less than 3 days. I can't be 100% certain that this was the only reason as search engines change their algorithms regularly but it seems highly coincidental. It is however common sense if you thick that Google wish to improve the relevancy of their results. It is even more important to have different IP addresses if you have several sites on the same server and they link to each other.

To read more about SEO you can search the forum where I have tried to offer simple and practical advice on a range of topics. Also the services offered here - SEO - get better rankings