Blog @ TidyHosts

Complete Your LinkedIn Profile – Ensure everything is filled out and up to date, we can then start work on optimising your LinkedIn profile for search engines.

Specialities – Great for including keywords and Google index’s this section.

Custom URL – Rather than having the random numbers in your LinkedIn in URL set it to be your name.

Question Time – Answering questions may not have any ranking strength but it is important to get involved in the community and raise your profile.

Keyword Rich Website Links – You can have up to 3 links in your “Websites” section on your profile. You can also set the keywords used in the link. So make use of it and deep-link to your website with relevant keywords.

Groups – Joining a group helps your SEO as your name becomes associated with the name of the group and group names often include relevant keywords.

WordPress Integration – If you’ve a WordPress site then be sure to include the WordPress application. Your profile will then automatically update with new blog posts.

Twitter Integration – If you’ve a WordPress site then also include the Tweets application. Your profile will then automatically update with new Tweets.

Connect, connect, connect – It’s why you are on LinkedIn and it’s your best chance of getting inbound links to your website. Connect with friends, family, colleagues and anyone else you may have met at a conference or college etc.

Choose a Great Username – Pick a username/handle that is relevant to your brand or project as it becomes part of your Twitter URL – Twitter.com/tidyhosts – This will also be what search engines index as your Twitter link. Our Twitter account is listed on page 1 of Google for the term “Fasthosts” so you can see how important it is to have a relevant username.

Choose your Account Name Carefully – This will appear next to your profile on the right hand side panel. This can be different to your username but again make sure it is relevant. Possibly choose a variation of the term your most found under. For example instead of “YourSite” you use “”YourSite Hosting”.

Include your Keywords in your Bio – You have just 160 characters to get this write. Your bio is frequently crawled by search engines and should reflect what your Twitter page is about. Check out our Tidyhosts Twitter Bio for some ideas.

Get the Start Right – When a tweet shows up in Google you will only see about the first 40 characters. This includes your username so keep in mind that if you’re tweeting a message that you want to show effectively in Google then get the important info within the first 40 characters, minus your @username.

The ReTweet Factor – Make sure that any tweets that you would like to be retweeted are short enough for someone else to add “RT @username” in front of the message. You have 140 characters in any Twitter message to remember to leave enough characters for others to RT. Although Twitter now incorporates a RT feature that does not need you to use less than 140 characters it is still good practise as there are pros and cons to both RT methods.

Keyword Rich Tweets – Make sure that you include a few of the keywords that you want people to find your tweet with. If you are tweeting a link to a Great SEO Tips article (hint…hint) then ensure you include words like SEO or use hashtags like #seotips so that people can find the tweet in their Twitter searches.

SEO your Twitter Avatar – Rename your profile picture (leave no spaces between words), before uploading, with your keywords. It will then show up in the pictures URL.

ReTweet Others – Make sure it is not all about you, retweet other tweets that will be helpful to your followers and tweet other peoples articles. You will quickly build a happy group of followers if you RT great content.

List Tagging – Although we cannot confirm that getting tagged in Twitter lists it is likely to boost your credibility to search engines. Build relationships with Twitter users that have large followings, are related to your industry and are on a list with similar “Big Players” and then you will improve your chances for being added to such a list.

Follow Similar Twitterers – Again this is not a confirmed algorithm of Google’s but with the growing importance of Real-Time search engine results it is another important aspect to consider. Follow Twitters that are like-minded, not only are they going to be interested in what you’re saying, they may even RT it to more like-minded people.

Allow Your Site to Be Crawled – By default many WordPress installations block search engines from crawling them which will make your SEO efforts pointless. Just simply go into the WordPress Admin Panel – Settings – Privacy – “I would like my site to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati) and archivers”

Enable Comments – Comments keep your site fresh which search engines love. Make sure you enable comments so that search engine spiders keep coming back frequently and it enhances the discussions within your blog.

Pretty Permalinks – By default WordPress uses “ugly” permalinks (ie. Yoursite.co.uk/?page_id=2) This doesn’t give search engines any info on what your page is about. Instead use “Pretty Permalinks” which will include those all-important keywords from your page titles. To change this setting go to WordPress Admin Panel – Settings – Permalinks

Image Alt Attribute – Whenever you use an image in a blog post make sure you give it a title and alt text that is a relevant keyword.

Install an SEO Plugin – Make life easier by installing a WordPress SEO Plugin. We use HeadSpace 2 SEO, which has met our needs so far. If you’ve found a better one then let us know in a comment below.

Start Pinging – By default WordPress will ping Ping-o-matic which basically sends a “new content” message that invites bots to visit your blog.

Use the Slug – I recommend installing the SEO Slugs plugin that will automatically remove unnecessary words from your posts URL and just leave the important keywords. For example when your post title is “This is what you can do to Effectively Boost your Website Ranking” it will change the URL to “/effectively-boost-website-ranking”.

Social Media Sharing – As previously stated you need to make it easy for people to share your content. Social Media buttons are great ways of letting visitors share your great articles; there are a number of Social Media plugins that do this for you.

Get More Inbound Links From Your RSS Feed – There are a number of sites out there that will scrape your RSS feed and republish a portion of your content. You can make the most of this by ensuring the RSS feed that the scrape uses not only has a link to the main article they republish, but also 5 more of your related posts. Here is a full explanation from EarnersBlog

Be Part of the Community – Once you’ve selected some keywords you want to rank for go and visit Google’s Blogsearch and find which blogs rank highly for your keywords. Read those blogs, make comments and respond to their post by writing a follow up post on your own blog with a hyperlink back to them. Then post another comment stating you’ve done a follow-up post and you will start to see the community filter through to your site as well.

Use Your Older Pages – It can be easy to overlook the importance of your own website for ranking factor. If you’ve just posted a new page you need to link to it internally and doing this from older, well established pages, is the best approach. Here is a fantastic article that explains internal link building in more detail.

Increase Indexation – Ensure that you submit your sitemap(s) to Google using their Webmaster Tools. You can then begin to see how often your site is crawled and indexed. Most websites have a Homepage that is crawled relatively frequently but other internal pages are ignored. This is largely due to a lack of inbound links to those internal pages, to combat this it is a good idea to implement a sitemap within each folder, listing the pages in that particular folder. Then create a master sitemap that that links to all the smaller sitemaps. Remember to add a link in your footer to the master sitemap.

Avoid Over Using Sub-Folders – You want to make sure that the keywords in your pages URL are as close to the root domain as possible as it helps Google recognise what that page is for and increases the strength of your ranking factor. So instead of “yoursite.co.uk/folder/folder/foler/page3.html” use “yoursite.co.uk/top-seo-tips-2011.html”

Start Building Deep Links – Inbound link building is one of the most important factors to getting more website visitors from Google. However, make sure that all your link building efforts are not just to your websites homepage. Search engines give more ranking strength to websites that have popular internal pages, and by popular I mean pages that have inbound links. So for example if you are guest writing an article for another site who has agreed to link back to you then why not get them to link to an internal page rather than your homepage.

Properly Formatted Meta Titles and Descriptions – The structure and wording of your meta titles and descriptions is something that you can easily change on all of your current and future web pages. This is an in-depth post on the correct keyword hierarchy.

Keyword Stemming – This is a masterful technique that will help you really improve your ranking strength for a specified page. SEODesignSolutions have created this in-depth post to explain SEO Rankings and How to Create Them.

RSS Feeds – Sharing content is the main aim of any website/blog and RSS feeds really help to syndicate your articles and posts to other sites. It helps attract natural backlinks from news sites and anyone else who thinks your content is interesting. It is worth setting up a RSS feed for each particular topic, especially if you have a large amount of article for those topics.

Virtual Theming – Wikipedia is one example of a website that uses virtual theming (which means creating a secondary navigation contextually through keyword co-occurrence) and as a result reaps the rewards in search engine ranking. You will notice when you visit a Wikipedia page that many keywords link to another Wikipedia page. Wikipedia does this automatically, when creating a post. For example if you type SEO and then want to hyperlink that somewhere, Wikipedia will automatically choose its own SEO article as the default target URL for that word, making it very easy for people to link internally.

Broken Links – Regularly check your website for broken links, search engine spiders hate not being able to flow through your website and so make sure you remove any hyperlinks that are going to an error page/incorrect page.
Image Alt Attribute – This is a tip that many of you will have come across before but it is a really useful one. It helps reinforce the relevance of the text on the page if your alt attribute is a keyword and links to another internal page.

Bing, the Microsoft search engine, now accounts for around 30% of all US searches and that is rapidly becoming the case for UK searches as well. It is important to begin optimising your website for Bing and in Part 1 of our “Optimising for Bing” series we’ll be focussing on content.

Choose your topic – Ensure that each page on your website has a strong theme by covering one topic. For example, this page is focussing on optimising for Bing, if we also tried to cover Facebook news on this page then it would have a negative impact when trying to rank in Bing.

Pack in your content – Small sites don’t do as well in Bing as sites that have lots of pages. If you are struggling to add more pages then why not set up a blog.

300 words – The search engine appears to place more value on pages that have 300+ words.

Focus on phrases – When adding keywords to your content always try to insert the phrases into your content exactly how people would search for them.

NO hidden text – Ensure that your pages don’t have any hidden text. By that we mean white text on a white background.

Keep it unique – Bing will remove pages from its search engine results if it finds duplicate content. Keep your content unique.

Link to others – Bing increases the page rank of your site when you have lots of outgoing links to quality sites. Ensure the title tag of the webpage you’ve linked out to is relevant to your page.

Facebook Pages provide businesses with a fantastic opportunity to reach their target audience through a highly engaged and effective channel. You can now sell products directly from your businesses Facebook Page and communicate quickly and easily with current and future customers.

Below are our top SEO tips that all Facebook Page owners should implement.

Choosing the Best Name and URL

When creating your page it is important to use your business’s real name as your page name and do not change it. Don’t be tempted to stuff your page name with keywords, the Facebook community can spot a spammy page title a mile off. Not changing your page name also helps keep any SEO strength you build up over time.

You can now choose a custom username for your Facebook Page. Whilst this does present an opportunity to add extra keywords it is important to keep in mind that Facebook may block your page if you appear to have a URL that does not accurately represent your page. I would advise just using your company name as the URL username. Please note you need to have 25 fans before you can create a customer username for the URL.

Take Advantage of the About Box

The About box is the most valuable area that you can add your keywords to. Of all the areas to add custom text, the About box is placed highest within the CSS structure. So choose your 250 characters carefully, remember that first and foremost it needs to be optimised for your human visitors but after that think about how to add your specific keywords for search engine spiders to crawl.

Create Custom Tabs

The FBML provides the best opportunity to design your own static html pages within your Facebook Page. If you check out the Fasthosts Facebook Page you can see that the Welcome and Win sections are our own custom design.

The FBML allow Page owners to add fully optimised pages on Facebook and help towards your search engine ranking.

Share Great Content

Facebook users want interesting and regular content. Share your photos, videos and news with your Facebook fans. Ensure that all descriptive fields are filled out with keyword optimise text. All this content is indexable by search engines.

Keep your wall regularly updated and if you are on Twitter then you may want to include selected tweets. Selective Tweets is a Facebook app that you can install for your page that will include any tweets that have the #fb hashtag. For example on the TidyHosts wall we display any tweets that we want to share on Facebook using the #fb tag:

With your Facebook Page you may have noticed that there is an Info tab. Complete this section with your keyword optimised text and add your website links. Complete the address section and company overview/products sections to gain traffic from local searches and product searches.

So if you have not yet set-up a Facebook Page then I advise creating one asap and remember to incorporate these valuable SEO tips.

The Ultimate SEO Tips guide. This article provides you with SEO tips for your website, blog, Twitter, Facebook, Linked and YouTube content.

We are still incorporating many of the tips ourselves and if you have come across any others then please leave them in a comment below.

It is fairly lengthy so remember to bookmark this article for later reference.

Top 10 SEO Tips for your Website

(Difficulty – Medium/Advanced)

Use Your Older Pages – It can be easy to overlook the importance of your own website for ranking factor. If you’ve just posted a new page you need to link to it internally and doing this from older, well established pages, is the best approach. Here is a fantastic article that explains internal link building in more detail.

Increase Indexation – Ensure that you submit your sitemap(s) to Google using their Webmaster Tools. You can then begin to see how often your site is crawled and indexed. Most websites have a Homepage that is crawled relatively frequently but other internal pages are ignored. This is largely due to a lack of inbound links to those internal pages, to combat this it is a good idea to implement a sitemap within each folder, listing the pages in that particular folder. Then create a master sitemap that that links to all the smaller sitemaps. Remember to add a link in your footer to the master sitemap.

Avoid Over Using Sub-Folders – You want to make sure that the keywords in your pages URL are as close to the root domain as possible as it helps Google recognise what that page is for and increases the strength of your ranking factor. So instead of “yoursite.co.uk/folder/folder/foler/page3.html” use “yoursite.co.uk/top-seo-tips-2011.html”

Start Building Deep Links – Inbound link building is one of the most important factors to getting more website visitors from Google. However, make sure that all your link building efforts are not just to your websites homepage. Search engines give more ranking strength to websites that have popular internal pages, and by popular I mean pages that have inbound links. So for example if you are guest writing an article for another site who has agreed to link back to you then why not get them to link to an internal page rather than your homepage.

Properly Formatted Meta Titles and Descriptions – The structure and wording of your meta titles and descriptions is something that you can easily change on all of your current and future web pages. This is an in-depth post on the correct keyword hierarchy.

Keyword Stemming – This is a masterful technique that will help you really improve your ranking strength for a specified page. SEODesignSolutions have created this in-depth post to explain SEO Rankings and How to Create Them.

RSS Feeds – Sharing content is the main aim of any website/blog and RSS feeds really help to syndicate your articles and posts to other sites. It helps attract natural backlinks from news sites and anyone else who thinks your content is interesting. It is worth setting up a RSS feed for each particular topic, especially if you have a large amount of article for those topics.

Virtual Theming – Wikipedia is one example of a website that uses virtual theming (which means creating a secondary navigation contextually through keyword co-occurrence) and as a result reaps the rewards in search engine ranking. You will notice when you visit a Wikipedia page that many keywords link to another Wikipedia page. Wikipedia does this automatically, when creating a post. For example if you type SEO and then want to hyperlink that somewhere, Wikipedia will automatically choose its own SEO article as the default target URL for that word, making it very easy for people to link internally.

Broken Links – Regularly check your website for broken links, search engine spiders hate not being able to flow through your website and so make sure you remove any hyperlinks that are going to an error page/incorrect page.

Image Alt Attribute – This is a tip that many of you will have come across before but it is a really useful one. It helps reinforce the relevance of the text on the page if your alt attribute is a keyword and links to another internal page.

Top 10 SEO Tips specifically for WordPress Blogs

(Difficulty – Easy/Medium)

Allow Your Site to Be Crawled – By default many WordPress installations block search engines from crawling them which will make your SEO efforts pointless. Just simply go into the WordPress Admin Panel – Settings – Privacy – “I would like my site to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati) and archivers”

Enable Comments – Comments keep your site fresh which search engines love. Make sure you enable comments so that search engine spiders keep coming back frequently and it enhances the discussions within your blog.

Pretty Permalinks – By default WordPress uses “ugly” permalinks (ie. Yoursite.co.uk/?page_id=2) This doesn’t give search engines any info on what your page is about. Instead use “Pretty Permalinks” which will include those all-important keywords from your page titles. To change this setting go to WordPress Admin Panel – Settings – Permalinks

Image Alt Attribute – Whenever you use an image in a blog post make sure you give it a title and alt text that is a relevant keyword.

Install an SEO Plugin – Make life easier by installing a WordPress SEO Plugin. We use HeadSpace 2 SEO, which has met our needs so far. If you’ve found a better one then let us know in a comment below.

Start Pinging – By default WordPress will ping Ping-o-matic which basically sends a “new content” message that invites bots to visit your blog.

Use the Slug – I recommend installing the SEO Slugs plugin that will automatically remove unnecessary words from your posts URL and just leave the important keywords. For example when your post title is “This is what you can do to Effectively Boost your Website Ranking” it will change the URL to “/effectively-boost-website-ranking”.

Social Media Sharing – As previously stated you need to make it easy for people to share your content. Social Media buttons are great ways of letting visitors share your great articles; there are a number of Social Media plugins that do this for you.

Get More Inbound Links From Your RSS Feed – There are a number of sites out there that will scrape your RSS feed and republish a portion of your content. You can make the most of this by ensuring the RSS feed that the scrape uses not only has a link to the main article they republish, but also 5 more of your related posts. Here is a full explanation from EarnersBlog

Be Part of the Community – Once you’ve selected some keywords you want to rank for go and visit Google’s Blogsearch and find which blogs rank highly for your keywords. Read those blogs, make comments and respond to their post by writing a follow up post on your own blog with a hyperlink back to them. Then post another comment stating you’ve done a follow-up post and you will start to see the community filter through to your site as well.

Top 10 SEO Tips for your Twitter account

(Difficulty – Easy/Medium)

Choose a Great Username – Pick a username/handle that is relevant to your brand or project as it becomes part of your Twitter URL – Twitter.com/Fasthosts – This will also be what search engines index as your Twitter link. Our Twitter account is listed on page 1 of Google for the term “Fasthosts” so you can see how important it is to have a relevant username.

Choose your Account Name Carefully – This will appear next to your profile on the right hand side panel. This can be different to your username but again make sure it is relevant. Possibly choose a variation of the term your most found under. For example instead of “YourSite” you use “”YourSite Hosting”.

Include your Keywords in your Bio – You have just 160 characters to get this write. Your bio is frequently crawled by search engines and should reflect what your Twitter page is about. Check out our Fasthosts Twitter Bio for some ideas.

Get the Start Right – When a tweet shows up in Google you will only see about the first 40 characters. This includes your username so keep in mind that if you’re tweeting a message that you want to show effectively in Google then get the important info within the first 40 characters, minus your @username.

The ReTweet Factor – Make sure that any tweets that you would like to be retweeted are short enough for someone else to add “RT @username” in front of the message. You have 140 characters in any Twitter message to remember to leave enough characters for others to RT. Although Twitter now incorporates a RT feature that does not need you to use less than 140 characters it is still good practise as there are pros and cons to both RT methods.

Keyword Rich Tweets – Make sure that you include a few of the keywords that you want people to find your tweet with. If you are tweeting a link to a Great SEO Tips article (hint…hint) then ensure you include words like SEO or use hashtags like #seotips so that people can find the tweet in their Twitter searches.

SEO your Twitter Avatar – Rename your profile picture (leave no spaces between words), before uploading, with your keywords. It will then show up in the pictures URL.

ReTweet Others – Make sure it is not all about you, retweet other tweets that will be helpful to your followers and tweet other peoples articles. You will quickly build a happy group of followers if you RT great content.

List Tagging – Although we cannot confirm that getting tagged in Twitter lists it is likely to boost your credibility to search engines. Build relationships with Twitter users that have large followings, are related to your industry and are on a list with similar “Big Players” and then you will improve your chances for being added to such a list.

Follow Similar Twitterers – Again this is not a confirmed algorithm of Google’s but with the growing importance of Real-Time search engine results it is another important aspect to consider. Follow Twitters that are like-minded, not only are they going to be interested in what you’re saying, they may even RT it to more like-minded people.

Top 10 SEO Tips for your Facebook Fan Page

(Difficulty – Easy/Medium)

Custom Fan Page URL – Once you have over 25 fans for your Facebook Fan Page you can have a custom URL (www.facebook.com/fasthostsinternet). Here is a simple guide on how to set a custom Facebook URL. This is what will show in your Google indexing for your Facebook page so ensure the URL reflects your brand.

FBML – Facebook provides you with some default, limited, tabs for your fan page. I recommend installing the static FBML application to create additional tabs and more engaging content. I used this guide when creating the FBML for our Facebook Fan Page.

Optimise the About box – The About box sits just below the profile picture on the left hand side. You have 250 characters to play with so make sure you choose descriptive keywords for the search engine spiders to crawl.

Photo Captions – Make sure that any photos you post have keyword-rich descriptions. Facebook users love photos and videos so try to get lots on your Fan Page (we’re currently working on that, hopefully have more on our page soon!).

Event Descriptions – Again make sure your events have keyword-rich descriptions for Google and other search engines to crawl.

Link to you Page – We make sure that not only do we include lots of links from our Facebook Page to our Blog that we include links from our blog, Twitter, newsletters and support emails to our Facebook page.

Default Facebook Landing Page – Ensure that your more interesting Fan Page tab is the default landing tab. We use a Welcome tab that we regularly update with blog posts. Do change this setting go to Edit Page – Manage Permissions – Default Landing Tab

Keep Updated – Keep up to speed with any changes Facebook make. They regularly alter their FBML limitations etc. Just check out the Facebook Blog for updates. They sometimes include clues on their ranking factor algorithm as well.

Update Your Wall – Keep your wall fresh with content. If you’re also on Twitter then get the Twitter application so that if you want a tweet to appear on your wall you can use a specific hashtag. We use #fb as you can see on the Fasthosts Facebook Wall.

Make it Public – Make sure you check your privacy settings to ensure the right group of people can view your content. Again this is in the Edit Page – Manage Permissions – Page Visibility, Country Restrictions and Age Restrictions.

Top 10 SEO Tips for your LinkedIn Profile

(Difficulty – Easy)

Complete Your LinkedIn Profile – Ensure everything is filled out and up to date, we can then start work on optimising your LinkedIn profile for search engines.

Full Job History – Many people who search for others on LinkedIn will be looking for them under a previous company that they’ve worked for. Make sure you include all previous jobs (you want to be found for) in your profile.

Specialities – Great for including keywords and Google index’s this section.

Custom URL – Rather than having the random numbers in your LinkedIn in URL set it to be your name. Here’s how to customise your LinkedIn URL.

Question Time – Answering questions may not have any ranking strength but it is important to get involved in the community and raise your profile.

Keyword Rich Website Links – You can have up to 3 links in your “Websites” section on your profile. You can also set the keywords used in the link. So make use of it and deep-link to your website with relevant keywords.

Groups – Joining a group helps your SEO as your name becomes associated with the name of the group and group names often include relevant keywords.

WordPress Integration – If you’ve a WordPress site then be sure to include the WordPress application. Your profile will then automatically update with new blog posts.

Twitter Integration – If you’ve a WordPress site then also include the Tweets application. Your profile will then automatically update with new Tweets.

Connect, connect, connect – It’s why you are on LinkedIn and it’s your best chance of getting inbound links to your website. Connect with friends, family, colleagues and anyone else you may have met at a conference or college etc.

Top 10 SEO Tips for your YouTube videos

(Difficulty – Medium)

Related Videos – If you’ve a series of video then use a video title that relates to the series such as “The SEO Series: Inbound Link Building” and “The SEO Series: Optimising Blog Posts”.

YouTube Thumbnails – Youtube pulls thumbnail images from the one quarter, half, and three quarters marks of every video. Try to ensure you’ve a brilliant image at those points in the video as it highly influences whether a viewer chooses to watch your video from YouTube search results.

Translucent Logo – Add your logo to your video in the top right or left corner, ensure it slightly translucent so it doesn’t frustrate the viewer. It helps copyright the video and provides additional advertising.

YouTube Title – Include relevant keywords in your video title as it is the most important that Google and other search engines have about your video. **Bonus Tip** Include the word video in the Title as many Google searchers will include that word.

Description – This is the best chance you have to write a keyword rich description of the video and make sure you include a URL to your website. Keep the URL at the start of the description to ensure it is seen when the “more info” option is clicked.

Tags – Tag your videos with your chosen keywords. Tags help the search engines identify the Video’s content.

Share your Video – As previously mentioned in the Top 10 SEO Blog Tips section, make sure you share your video on Twitter, Facebook, social bookmarking sites etc.

Broadcasting and Sharing – It is always good to open commenting and embedding to help nurture discussions and embedding of your videos. Keep an eye on it though to make sure you don’t start getting spammed.

Annotation Technology – YouTube now supports annotation technology which allows you to put note, subtitle and links over the top of a video.

YouTube Insights – With YouTube Insights are now provided with a great number of analytics and stats about your videos including viewer’s age, gender and geographical data. With this data you can look at improving your videos for the future.