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Tom Fotheringham from Orange Bus deciphers SEO for Bdaily

Tom Fotheringham, director at Northern digital agency Orange Bus is one of the industry’s leading online conversion experts. Orange Bus is well established as one of the leaders in its field, working with scores of global names including Sage, international publishing company, Pearson and Sarah Beeney’s mysinglefriend.com dating site.

The subject of SEO is often made over complicated by some unscrupulous outfits that seek to profit by blinding with science. Tom simplifies the matter for the Bdaily.

What does Google Page Rank gauge?
PageRank measures a web page’s importance.

What is a bounce rate and how does it affect your rankings?
Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Search engines use this data to gauge your site quality. A higher bounce rate will have a negative impact on rankings.

What is the most common SEO mistake?
Chasing rankings – Sounds a little strange but you will never get to the top this way. Instead build a great website which others will want to share. Search engines recognise this.

What is the best way to get links?
Create link bait by producing white papers, top 10, survey results, interesting video and infographics. Give other websites and blogs a reason to link to you.

What is the most common SEO mistake when creating a website?
Creating a well-structured website is critical to ranking well. This allows users and search engines to navigate with ease.

My competitor is ranking above me, why is this?
Carry out competitor analysis using tools such as Open Site Explorer to evaluate who is linking to your competitor. This is also useful to see if they are doing something which you aren’t.

My website has dropped 40 places, what has caused this?
This could be a number of reasons however in most cases this would be a penalty. This could be for too many inbound links with the same anchor text, spammy looking pages, spammy inbound links. Anything which doesn’t look natural to a search engine can have a negative effect.

How aggressive can my SEO campaign be when launching a website?
The key is to ensure your backlink profile looks natural to search engines. If a site goes live, a search engine wouldn’t expect it to gain 10,000 inbound domain links within a week. This is a clear indication of spam. Gradually build the link profile over time.

I’m about to start a new business. What does the best SEO domain look like?
Two years ago having a keyword rich domain would be critical to good rankings. Now you should focus on building a brand.

Which domain extension is best, .com or .co.uk?
If you are targeting the UK market then you will want a .co.uk domain. Also purchase the .com domain if you can see yourself breaking into foreign markets.

Does my server location affect my rankings?
Yes. A good indication to a search engine as to which country you are targeting is your server location. Keep it in the same country where possible.

What are the important search engines?
Google still has 82% market share although this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t target the others.

What is the Google Algorithm?
The Google algorithm changes many times per year. We have strong indicators as to what works and what doesn’t however, unless you are a Google engineer, nobody knows for sure!

Which are the best SEO tools?
SEOmoz is the leading tool for overall SEO campaigns. Specialist tools such as SEM rush are available, which specialise in competitor research.

Which are the best SEO Blogs?
If you are looking for all round SEO blogs then again SEOmoz is up there. Other reputable ones include Search Engine Land, SEOBook, Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Journal.

How important is page load speed?
Page load speed is increasingly becoming a factor in ranking higher. To check your page load speed visit https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/

My website is banned from Google, how do I get it back into the listings?
Firstly, find out why you have been banned. This will involve some digging around. Then log into your webmaster tools account and view your sitemap. At the bottom you will see an inclusion link. You can go through this form to try and get your site re-indexed. You will need substantial evidence to back up your claim.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Fotheringham .