Rural Housing Association is a registered Housing Association in Northern Ireland and they build and manage housing in the social housing sector for people in housing need. The site provides information for their tenants, the general public and others interested in Social Housing in Northern Ireland.

This new site features a full Content Management system to allow the Staff to update all aspects of the website. The site also features a customised Google map, showing all the locations of their properties throughout Northern Ireland.

Visit the new Rural Housing website.

Keyword Targeting
Targeting your website to the correct keywords should be the first stage of any SEO. If you target your website to the correct words you can increase your Return on Investment (ROI) by getting your audience to the most appropriate pages and making their buying journey as smooth and simple as possible. This means that your content must target the phrases users are searching upon.

Title Information
The title of your webpage is the single most important piece of ‘on page’ information. Your title tag will define to users, and search engines, what the page will talk about. It will provide the link within the search engines to pages. As such it must relate to the appropriate keywords and also help to inform consumers of what the page contains. All keyword targeting flows from the Title tag and repetition of the appropriate sections of your title tag will help to maximise the positions achieved by your website.

It is important to remember that the primary function of the title information is to let users know what a page is about and have effective targeting for users is as important as the needs of search engines. Search engines will normally display the first 64 characters of your title tag in their results and will, generally, be the text of the link in the search engine results. So having an effective focus in this tag helps improve not only your search engine positions but can help maximise your potential click through for the results.

Meta Information
The Meta information is data within the code of a webpage that is not displayed to a user. It is used to convey information to search engines. Meta data consists of two main types of data: description information and keyword information. The description is often placed below the link to a webpage and is used to help consumers understand the core focus of the webpage within the results. The keywords tag contains a list of terms that the page is targeted towards and is used by some search engines as a way of determining the focus of the webpage.

Google has recently publicised the fact that they no longer use the meta keywords tag for any ranking purposes – it is still however relevant when optimising for the Bing and Yahoo! search engines.

Body Content Optimisation
Body content is highly important for your website. It is the content that sells your product/service to prospective customer and at the same time affects your search engine positions. For content to be search engine targeted it is important to include the following:

Keyword Density
It is important that the pages targeted for keywords talk about those keywords within the copy. The level of your keywords within your content is known as the ‘keyword density’. It is important to have a keyword density that is higher than average for a page of copy but is not so high as to make the web content unintelligible or unreadable.

Semantic Concepts and Keyword Co-occurrence theory
Search engines read web pages to determine their keyword relevance. One way this is done is by analysing the use of inter-related keywords within a document. The related keywords are often referred to as semantic keywords. By using these interrelated concepts within your website it is possible to develop website content that is more attractive and enjoyable for users whilst delivering keyword relevance to the search engines.

These semantic relationships are determined by:
• words that often appear in similar themed content
• words that often appear close to each other within pages of content

Please note that all relationships are unidirectional: the example Google gives is that “all elephants are grey” (semantic relationships accrues as pages talking about elephants are likely to mention their colour) where are not all things that are grey are elephants (as grey can be used in far more contexts than simply those involving elephants).

Related keyword lists in Google can be found by querying your chosen search term preceded by a tilde (~). The words appearing in bold within the result set are those which are ‘semantically linked’ to your chosen search word. For example ‘phone’ will show keywords including ‘nokia’ (as nokia is a type of phone).

Content Formatting
As search engines read the code of your web pages it is important to present the website content in the way that will deliver the maximum relevancy. Content performance can be improved by adapting the code to direct the search engines to the sections of code that are most important.

Header Tags
Header tags are the most important content tags. Header tags determine the focus of the content to follow the tag. The most important of the header tags is the H1 header tag. This tag defines the core focus of all the content within the document.

Talk about value for money, the sheer energy and commitment of their show was second to none. The band played for over a mammoth two and a half hours, which consisted of over 30 songs from their 20 year back catalog featuring tracks and hits from seven of their eight albums. I was exhausted by the end and I had just been watching them! Green Day have been in our lives for over 20 years now and this really shows with how they work the stage and audience.

Green Day opened with “Song of the Century”, the first track from their 2009 album 21st Century Breakdown, and then proceeded into track 2 “21st Century Breakdown”. The pyrotechnics and shooting flames were spectacular as well. Audience participation is a huge part of their show and throughout the 3 hours the charismatic front man Billie Joe Armstrong, brought several fans onstage to help out on vocals and on one occasion in particular one fan sang the whole of ‘Longview’ while the rest of the band played on.

Billie Joe likes his on stage props as he proceeded to launch Green Day t-shirts and toilet roll from some kind of air launcher gun. Have a look below at something similar from another concert:

The show closed with Green Day playing two encores, with the particular highlights being ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends’ and ‘Good Riddance (Time of Your Life).’

If you have the chance to go see them live do not turn it down as you will not be disappointed.

Navigation was an important aspect for this new redesign, therefore a dynamic fading drop down system has been implemented to allow the user to navigate the site as easy as possible. We have given the “Contracts” section of the website more prominence, as research showed it was a key reason for people to visit the site. Additional features include a Homepage “News” rotation created using “jQuery” and “PHP”.

Visit the new Rural Housing website.

This was an unusual match between Barbados and Grenada.

History behind the video
Grenada went into the match with a superior goal difference, meaning that Barbados needed to win by two goals to progress to the finals. The trouble was caused by two things. First, unlike most group stages in football competitions, the organizers had deemed that all games must have a winner. All games drawn over 90 minutes would go to sudden death extra time. Secondly and most importantly, there was an unusual rule which stated that in the event of a game going to sudden death extra time the goal would count double, meaning that the winner would be awarded a two goal victory.

Barbados was leading 2-0 until the 83rd minute, when Grenada scored, making it 2-1. Approaching the dying moments, the Barbadians realized they had no chance of scoring past Grenada’s mass defense, so they deliberately scored an own goal to tie the game at 2-2. This would send the game into extra time and give them another half hour to break down the defense. The Grenadians realized what was happening and attempted to score an own goal as well, which would put Barbados back in front by one goal and would eliminate Barbados from the competition.

However, the Barbados players started defending their opposition’s goal to prevent them from doing this, and during the game’s last five minutes, the fans were treated to the incredible sight of Grenada trying to score in either goal. Barbados also defended both ends of the pitch, and held off Grenada for the final five minutes, sending the game into extra time. In extra time, Barbados notched the game-winner, and, according to the rules, was awarded a 4-2 victory, which put them through to the next round.

The first stage of any SEO  is to ensure that the server and website are returning appropriate information to the search engines in the best ways possible. This will allow us to have a strong technological foundation upon which to develop an effective SEO campaign.

On the whole having a sound and search engine friendly technological set up will not positively affect your search engine performance. Rather, having a technological set up that is not developed with search engines as a primary concern can significantly reduce your ranking potential.

HTTP Headers
HTTP headers are sent by your server to anything that requests the page before the page of HTML code is returned. Google looks specifically at two main groups or HTTP header; those that describe the status of the page and those that give information on when the page/site was last updated.

Having an incorrect response returned for web pages can lead to devaluing of your website and may lead to ineffective indexing by the major search engines.

200 OK
This header is sent out by web pages that have been requested and will be returned by the server effectively to the user. All pages, except error pages, should deliver this header. It lets the search engines, and browsers, know that the content will be delivered as requested without any problems.

404 Not Found
When a server cannot find a webpage, such as when a user has typed in a URL incorrectly, it will return a 404 error header response. This will tell the browser to display the correct error code to say that the page could not be found. Google will inspect your website to ensure that error pages return this code. If your error pages do not return this header response for missing pages Google will not allow access to information within Webmaster Tools.

302 Temporarily Redirected
This header lets browsers, and search engines know that a page has moved from the requested location. This HTTP header indicates that the page will be returning to the original location shortly. The browsers and search engine are then moved to the temporary location of the page.

Search Engines do not effectively spider these redirects. Unfortunately, the default setting for page redirects on Microsoft Servers is for 302 redirects to be used. This can lead to your website losing pages in the search engine indices following redevelopment.

301 Permanently Redirected
301 header redirects indicate that the requested page has been moved permanently to a new location. Search engines will transfer all the attributes from the previous page location, such as links, to the new location. The redirect sends a web user from the old location of the page to the new location.

Robots.txt
This file is used to inform search engines which parts of the website we do not want them to index. This file is requested by default by all the major search engines. It should be located at http://yourwebsiteurl/robots.txt.

Favicon.ico
This image appears within Mozilla-based browsers in the address bar and is an image for the website that will also appear when the page is bookmarked. Google currently uses a web spider based on the Mozilla browser and requests this file from every page it visits. The Favicon.ico will also appear on user’s web browser if they bookmark your website.

Stay tuned for part 2.

The penalties for breaching the terms and conditions of the search engines can range from reductions in website positions to complete expulsion from the search engine rankings. Ethical SEO is improving the position of webpages to improve not only the quality of visitors to a website, but ensuring that the users receive appropriate and relevant content once they arrive at the site.

I only recommend ethical SEO techniques to my clients to prevent damage to the long term health and stability of their website.

1. Technological Aspect – Ensuring that the website can be indexed efficiently, correctly and easily
2. Content Aspect – Making content relevant to search engines
3. Linking Aspect – Ensuring that links point to documents to increase their relevancy

I am by no means an expert on SEO but unless a website effectively tackles these three aspects it is unlikely that they will be able to compete in the natural search engine results.

Basically in simple terms what this means is that the content provided on your website should be relevant to the search query entered by the user and if there are links pointing to your website this also indicates that you are relevant for the search query entered.

The reason I bring custom fields up is that I have came across a good article on Smashing Magazine that goes into detail on how to use them and examples of what they can be used for.

View Smashing Magazine Article