You are welcome to submit your website for free or a paid subscription, there are many options for advertising on various categories.

The site will be updated regularly not only with content but also from a design perspective.

Please note that this Directory is only for Perth based businesses, so you have to have a Perth address to submit in.

The URL is:  http://www.perthlisting.com.au

Here is a short list of some of the items to look at when your website is being developed to ensure it has a chance in Search Engines to rank for any of your desired key phrases.  Naturally, these are items to consider and a professional Web Consultant with SEO experience will be able to reply and implement them accordingly.

• XML Sitemaps
• Friendly URLs
• Simple Design
• Social Media
• Crawleable Menu
• Meta Data
• Good Heading tags
• Content
• Fast Loading

XML Sitemaps

There is no reason not to have a sitemap on your website these days, most CMS’ have auto generated sitemap tools. A Sitemap is a way of telling the search engine bot where your pages are and what you’d like looked at. Naturally a search bot will troll through your website but it may hot some snags along the way, this simple tool will exactly show the search bot where to go and what to follow.

Friendly URLs

Friendly URLs are URLs are ones that have key words and meaningful text in them, some CMS’ don’t rewrite the URLS, and you can have something that looks like this:

http://www.yourwebsite.com.au/8301-13579_3-20010840-37.html?tag=topStories3

as you can see this URL isn’t very meaningful, but it it looked something with key words or page title, then it would be uselful and re-enforce the page’s meaning.

Simple Design

Why complicate your design, your users will be confused and more than likely leave your website rather than wasting time trying to search for their desired item on your website. Having a great layout that works and has a great flow will result in a positive response from your users and also Search Engines.

Social Media

Linking to social media is important these days, people, with just about everyone on Facebook and/or Twitter, and Twitter being the 2nd biggest search tool (after Google, and yes it beats Bing and Yahoo), providing an easy way to link and share is a normal part of any SEO campaign.

Crawleable Menu

A great looking menu will make your website shine, but if a search engine can’t crawl through it, your pages won’t be catalogued.  It’s not good practice to have flash driven menus any more.

Meta Data

Meta Data is the data about data, so we’re telling Search Engines what they are about about to read. Although Google doesn’t use Key Words for search results, other search engines do, and your other meta as in Title and Description are still critical.  As for Sitemaps there are tools that will generate descriptions and titles for you based on your content, it’s not ideal, but better than having nothing.

Good Heading tags

Using <H> tags properly to categorise your content will make a difference in your pages searched. Once again search engine bots aren’t intelligent to work out what is what, so telling them is critical.  It’s important that images aren’t used for headings.

Content

Content is king.  Without content yo have no website. Content includes text, images, videos and audio.  Having great original content on your website will yield in great results.  It’s worth having proper naming conventions for your images i.e. black-pearl-from-broome.jpg rather than img-009.jpg, you’re telling the search engine what it’s got to deal with, search engine bots don’t have eyes. In addition each media should be using it’s correct tags and utilising TITLE and/or ALT.

Fast Loading

Who wants to wait for websites these days? Most CMS’ do have caching tools that will make the experience easier for the user.  It’s well known that Google uses website speed as a way to measure it’s results too. So if there are 2 websites of the same value, one loads faster than the other, then the faster one will be ranked higher each time.

Overall, all link building activities need to be monitored and measured to ensure you get high quality links back to your website. You can use internal links to help navigate the user to targeted content, and show search engines what content is where based on key words.

Below are three types of links that you can use on your website and others to target key phrases and importance.

Internal Links

Internal links are links within your website to other pages. This is a way of telling both the user and search engines what is where. it’s a convenient way of showing the website user what is where. If you have a website that has lots of pages, you may find that they can be accessed by you clients easier if you put some internal links. So when we talk about website hosting in Perth, I can link you straight there with my link mentioned before, or if I want to draw attention to you to our SEO Services would be another.

One Way Links

These are great, and I’d say the best for you, as once people link to you one way, they are giving you a big recommendation that you are important about the particular topic that they are linking on. You want lots of “one way links” to your website. In an ideal world, you’d want them to link to you with your key words in the link, so if your business name is “John Smith Plumbing” and you are trying to optimise for “plumber perth” then “plumber perth” would be more important than “John Smith Plumbing“, as you are telling the search engine that go to this particular website for “plumber perth”

Reciprocal Links

This is when you link up with another website, and you swap links. This is a great way to get links. This isn’t as powerful as “One way links”, but still very good. It’s the form where your website will have a link on it’s site back to the one that’s linking to you.

That’s not to say that other search engines don’t use the “Key words” Meta Tag – Google doesn’t.

So what are some of Google’s items it looks at:

• Good original content
• Good well structured title meta tag relative to the content
• Good Description meta tag content
• Did I mention good original content?
• Proper image naming

There are around 200 items that Google looks at when caching your website to determine where it will be in the results (SERPs), we as SEO Consultants are aware of a number of them, but Google doesn’t release this magic list nor how it uses them.  We have proven tests that allow us to see what is important and apply them for our clients.

Website: On Track Hiking Hire – http://www.ontrackhiking.com.au

CMS: Joomla

SEO: We’ve optimised the On Track Hiking website for various hiking and  hiking hire in perth key phrases.  The site generates great organic traffic turning into sales for the owner.

Key words optimised:

• bibbulmun track hire (#3)
• hiking hire perth (#1)
• hiking hire
• hiking equipment hire perth (#1)
• hiking perth (Local Listing #1 + #12)
• camping gear hire perth (Local Listing #3 + #7)

There are other key words that generate traffic as well, but this is the main list.  Over time this list will extend, which also include some of the tracks that David walks.

About the On Track Hiking website:

On Track Hiking which is operated by David offers 2 things, one being hire of equipment when you go hiking in Perth, and the other is his services as a guide on a track on some of the many that you can do in and around Perth.

In short, if you have your complete website in Flash, Google won’t see it. They have some technology that can read parts of it, but it depends on how it was developed.

If you use Flash on your website in small parts, to show some graphics, pictures or anything else, this isn’t going to hurt your website from and SEO angle that much. Having an image there rather than Flash will mean that Google and other search engines can read the graphic if it has good meta, geo, file name.

Google and other search engines (Bing, Yahoo etc), all use your website content as one of the strongest aspects of working out what your website is about.

One thing to consider is speed of your website, so if you have a massive Flash file on your site, you may find that with the new way that Google ranks your site, it may not like it too much, and not rank it highly.  Google’s new algorithm requires you to have a fast working site with great content.

As a conclusion, having some flash on your website won’t effect your SEO results providing you have all the other elements covered correctly.  If you have a website that is all or mostly Flash, you have no or very little chance in getting results.

Flash on Websites for SEO: NOT GoodGood

Google website submission: http://www.google.com/addurl/

Bing website submission: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx

Before submitting your website, you’ll need to ensure that it’s set up and has content.

You may also find that both search engines will find your website anyway, and this in most cases is better than you telling them that you exists. So next time you have a website launched, get a link from another popular website back to yours and both search engines will look at it.

Don’t forget to have:

• sitemap.xml
• robots.txt (if you want the search bot not to catalogue certain pages)
• meta data (title, description, key words)
• google analytics
• some good content and relevant to meta
• all your ALT tags are in place
• all your images are named correctly
• H1 – H6 tags correctly
• don’t have loads of flash
• don’t have loads of large sized images/graphics

Hope this helps.

Ticklespot Finder

Judd invented the Ticklespot Finder as a by product of a conversation that we had on the Port 8o Forms.

Well done on your new invention, hope you sell lots of them.

Pictures and more details about the Ticklespot Finder coming soon.

If you do need assistance in finding a ticklespot on anyone, you can call Judd for his “Ticklespot Finder“

So how do you show a search engine what its looking at?

1. Use a proper file name that describes the image – i.e. “green-car-01.jpg”.  I used a numeral at the end of the image name, as I may have another green-car in my list of cars on my website.  Putting a number at the end is the easiest way to split them up.
2. Use hyphens to separate words in the image name as listed above. The Hyphen will tell the search engine that its has another word to deal with.  Using spaces in your website for file names is not within web standards.
3. Use a proper ALT tag to describe the image, keeping this short and down to around 4 words is best.  Keep the ALT tag short and sweet. Also, if you have multipe images on the same page, try to give them different ALT tag values.
4. Use a proper descriptive TITLE tag ie. TITLE=”green car on our lawn at home”.  Titles are used by some image display tools, these can be longer than the ALT tag.  Not a necessary attribute but recommended.

Having your images/photos/graphics named correctly will also have you included in search engine image libraries.  This is great as people search images for specific items.

You will also find that having listings in Google Images will help with your rankings.  Search Engines can’t read images, they read text, so you need to tell them what you have on your web page.

An incorrect way of naming your image of a horse on a farm is “image001.jpg” what it should be “horse-farm.jpg”. If you also include an ALT tag with the correct words in it “Our horse on the farm” this will also reinforce what the search engine has found.  It’s also web standards to include an ALT tag with each image.

One other aspect of using a proper image name and ALT tag, is that some browsers or people with disabilities who can’t see pictures, their computers will read out what the ALT tag is for an image, informing them that it is a “Our horse on the farm”.

As an exercise go to Google Images or Yahoo Image Search and type in the service or product that you sell and see if you have any results there.

Correct usage of images for links is allowed for SEO.