It’s been a little while
Posted on | November 8, 2011 | No Comments
Since the last post…..so thought I had better get the blogging head on again! Been doing a bit of work on some adwords campaigns recently and thought it was just worth highlighting to people how easy it is to waste money on them. You need to take time to understand the system and understand how you target your adverts effectively.
Get a good understanding of how to set it up, and then get everything in place….the next stage is vital. Monitor the results and understand them. Work out which adverts / keywords are working for you, and when you find one that isn’t (i.e. high bounce rates) then make the necessary changes. Ensure you use negative words as well, and this will help target the ads more effectively.
Adwords needs constant attention….if you get it right, then it’s extremely powerful, if you get it wrong then it can waste a lot of money on unwanted clicks.
For more information on the services we offer check out SEO Sussex and SEO Brighton!
Page Rank Update
Posted on | July 7, 2011 | No Comments
Most people familiar with SEO will know about page rank. For those of you who don’t, page rank is a value assigned to each website and is in theory a measure of the pages relevance to search engines. Personal experience has lead me to believe it is a useful indicator when looked at as part of a broad range of things that dictate a sites power…..but on it’s on people shouldn’t pay too much attention.
Page rank has finally been upadted and it is nice to see how all the different sites have been effected. Our clients have generally seen their PR go up, some by 1 and some by 2. It gives some credence to the work we are doing, and is nice to see the websites gaining in strength.
If you want to check your own sites PR then just do a search for ‘page rank checker’ and put in your sites URL.
For more information on the services we offer please check out our site SEO Services UK
Using Social Media….
Posted on | May 5, 2011 | No Comments
Social media is quickly becoming an ever more important part of SEO Work. As search engines evolve they are trying to make results more relevant and personal; to do this they need access to new data and that is where social media marketing is coming in. As we put more and more information about ourselves online, search engines are looking at how they use this to enhance search results.
Bing have tied up with Facebook for a while now and the intention was fairly clear from the outset. Bing have been trying to break the dominance of google in the world of search, and the tie up with Facebook gives them a huge advantage. Facebook holds a huge amount of data about people, including their likes and dislikes. Combining this data with their search algorithms allows Bing to personal search results, which is the way all search engines are looking to progress. Google is now trying to play catch up in the social space and is likely to be bringing in some significant updates shortly.
To cut to the chase, this has big impacts for SEO. As the search engines alter their algorithms, SEO work also has to evolve. Social bookmarking is now increasingly important in terms of offsite optimisation. Having a presence on the main social media sites is important, but also tying these up with the main website and blogs is also important. Companies need to ensure they are up to date with the new functionality becoming available on the social sites; things such as the ‘like’ functionality within Facebook. Add a like button to your website and this will help build your popularity within those sites, and might be particularly useful as future developments come along.
Make sure you keep up to date with the developments in social media and there is no doubt that it will pay dividends for your website and business in the future. Check out our main site for SEO Services UK.
Links
Posted on | February 10, 2011 | No Comments
Free SEO Tips – Links are an extremely important part of any SEO campaign, and getting links generally takes up most of the time, and budget of any SEO campaign. Onsite optimisation is something that can be done relatively quickly, but link building takes time, can be costly and is hard work.
Earlier posts have covered the different sources of links, this post is more about the type and quality of links. Link building is common sense….the most powerful and worthwhile links for you will come from very relevant and well established sites….and these tend to be the hardest to get! One thing to bear in mind with this is ‘follow’ and ‘no-follow’ links. ‘No-follow’ links were brought in by google as a way of letting people link to other sites without passing page rank (PR). To give a basic understanding – PR is a value google assigns to each web page, and this PR is passed to other web pages if there is a link off the page. In theory this means that from an SEO point of view, no follow links offer zero value…..however this does not mean you should avoid no follow links. Google likes to see ‘natural’ link building, and this would most definitely incorporate no-follow links, as such it is important to make sure you have mixture of no-follow, and follow links. Focus on the follow links, but make sure you are getting no follow links as well.
With link building make sure you bear in mind that search engines want to see natural link building. This however is hard to really define, would natural link building happen slowly over time? Or would it be more natural to see a lot of links appearing at one time due to a viral campaign? Either could occur in a natural way….so don’t worry too much. One thing that would seem obvious, is that if there are a lot of links appearing from non-relevant sites (and those sites also contain a high number of links to other sites that are non-related), it is clearly someone buying up links.
The fact is that nobody but the google engineers know exactly how they quantify and measure the value of links. Use your common sense, and generally avoid the quick fix, it will be a waste of time.
Offsite Optimisation
Posted on | February 8, 2011 | No Comments
Free SEO tips….this post looks at offsite optimisation and offers some tips and tricks…
Offsite optimisation combines link building and social media marketing….both of these are a form of marketing, in terms of bringing traffic to your site, but they are also both forms of purely link building for the purposes of moving up the search engines.
Let’ start with standard link building. The thing to always keep in your head is pretty much common sense…..links all have different values in terms of SEO, with the most powerful links come from the most relevant and established websites. If you are selling shoes, then a link from a popular blog about shoes, is going to be worth a lot more than a link from an irrelevant blog that gets no traffic. You can judge the relevance yourself, it’s simply a case of making sure the content on the page, and preferably the whole site, is related to your site/product/service. The other thing to consider is the authority of the site; one way to judge this is the page rank (PR)….the higher the PR the more value the link has. PR is a useful tool, but it shouldn’t be relied on too heavily. Consider downloading the SEO Moz toolbar which gives you an alternative to the page rank.
It’s worth bearing in mind that google would rather people link to naturally, rather than you going out and building links yourself. The argument being that if you write good content then people will naturally link to it. This is an important thing to remember, make sure your content and site are worth linking to…..but it seems a bit naive, given the millions of sites, to presume that all good content will get naturally linked to.
….but where to I get these links from??? That’s the bit that takes hard work, there is no magic solution. Generally, the more valuable a link, the harder it will be to obtain. Directories are a good place to start, there are lists of free and paid directories that can be found by doing a simple search on google….remember the point above, choose the directories that are more relevant to your business. In terms of paying for listings in directories, it really depends on your business. Sites such as business.com and yahoo.com have well established directories that offer very powerful links, and if you have free budget then I would say go for it. There are plenty of other sites that will try and get you to pay for a submission, you just need to choose carefully, most of them are likely to be a waste of money.
Forums are another good source of links. Find relevant forums and start posting on there. Don’t trying whacking links in straightaway, make a few friends and then ask if people mind the odd link. If you are courteous most of the time people won’t mind.
Blogs…these offer multiple sources of links, guest blogging, blog rolls, permanent ads, blog comments. Again it takes time to find relevant blogs, and get in touch with these people. With persistence blogs offer a great source of relevant links.
Social media….like blogs these offer a variety of places for links. If you set up profiles then generally you put a link to your website. Social bookmarking is now very popular and again creates links back to your site.
All of the above takes hard work and a fair amount of time. If someone tries to sell you link building done on the ‘cheap’, then beware. The likely outcome of that is that you will get a load of links from crap, non-related sites…..and these will do very little for you.
The final tip to think about is to do some analysis on your competitor’s websites….see where they get links from, and copy them.
One thing i am yet to cover is ‘no follow’ links – google set these up so that no PR would be passed. In theory this makes the link less useful to you, however don’t avoid these links completely. It is good to have a mixture of follow and nofollow links…..focus more on the follow links but don’t worry too much about this, focus more the relevance and authority of the site.
Happy link building!!
Tags: Google page Rank > Link Building > Social Bookmarking > Social Media Marketing
Using Social Media
Posted on | February 8, 2011 | No Comments
Free SEO Tips…Social media has now become one of the main areas for online marketing campaigns. As more and more people use the internet to interact with their friends and family, social media marketing has become more and more important.
The first step is to make sure your company has a presence on all of the major social network sites;
- Linked in
- Flickr
- YouTube
- Blogs
- Article writing
Marketing through social media helps raise brand awareness, drive traffic to your site and has huge potential to help expand your business. It can be as simple as having a blog for your company or having a full social network campaign.
Get your company set up on the main sites. Later posts will go into how you can use these sites to help with your internet marketing.
Tags: Blogs > Facebook > Flikr > Linkedin > Social Bookmarking > Social Media Marketing > Twitter
Managing PPC Campaigns
Posted on | February 8, 2011 | No Comments
Free SEO Tips…SEM (search engine marketing) incorporates a number of areas but one of the most important is pay per click campaign management (PPC). PPC can involve a number of different advertising methods, but the two most prominent services are adwords and facebook advertising.
Generally speaking PPC Campaigns should be done in conjunction with an SEO campaign. They offer a virtually instant way of bringing targeted traffic to your website, albeit at a cost. In terms of general setup, most PPC campaigns are straightforward, but to run them properly and effectively does require ongoing analysis and constant monitoring.
If we consider adwords, get your account setup. Then you need to consider which keywords you want to target….this is can make or break a campaign. It is worth reading an early post done on keyword analysis and selection. Once you have your target words, you then need to start to think about how you want to display your ads ( search network and or display network), and what you want to put in your ads. The content of any ad should be as targeted and relevant as possible, this will help your click through rates (CTR). Don’t just do one ad, make sure you split your campaign into separate ads, this means you can have very specific ads for each group of related keywords.
Time to get started….and time to start monitoring. The key to running a good PPC campaign is to ensure that you always monitor it and make changes as required. As your competitors make changes to their campaigns, this can affect you, so you always need to be looking at what is working and what is not working. You also need to consider your ROI and your conversion rates…..is the amount it is costing you, worth paying given the amount of sales you receive? Monitoring this is vital to ensuring the campaign is worthwhile and effective.
Take your time setting up the campaign, ensure you have thought about the keywords you are targeting, you have set up specific ads for each group of keywords, and you have written the ads with CTRs in mind. Then monitor the effectiveness and start to fine tune your campaign, you won’t get it all right initially so you need to make changes as you go.
Link Building A to Z…
Posted on | February 8, 2011 | No Comments
Free SEO Tips…When considering a Small Business SEO strategy, link building is currently considered a vital element in achieving a good position in the search engines. Many people have different opinions on link building and what works best….the fact is that the only people who really know are the people who write the search engine algorithms. Having said that we do know some things:
- Search engines prefer links that are ‘natural’. This means people who organically link to your site because they like the products/services/content etc.
- Search engines frown upon people ‘buying links’.
- Search engines give more weight to links from good quality, relevant sites.
Bearing all of the above in mind, your strategy for link building should start off from the point of trying to get people to organically link to your site. You need to think about offering something (products, services or content) that people will want to share with their friends. You also want to think about using social media to facilitate this process.
As with many things in life, quality is better than quantity. Search engines will give much more weight to a link coming from a highly relevant site i.e. if you sell IT software and you have a link coming from a relevant article in Computer Weekly. The more ‘powerful’ and relevant the site is seen as, the more ‘power’ it will pass to your site. It is not easy to get these types of links, and the search engines are aware of that and so award you accordingly.
Blogs, Social Media, Forums, and Directories all offer a good source of links – but just bear in mind the points above. I will do some follow up posts that go into more details on each of these areas.
Tags: Blogs > Link Building > SEO > Social Media Marketing > Web Directories > Web Forums
Website Optimisation…..what to consider
Posted on | February 8, 2011 | No Comments
Free SEO Tips…Once you have chosen your keywords (see earlier post), the next step is optimising your website. There are a number of key areas to consider:
- Target Pages – choosing a target page for each keyword (some pages will have multiple keywords on them) is your first step. Generally speaking the home page of any site will be the most powerful page and so the easiest page to push up the search engines. However you don’t want to focus everything on your home page so you need to choose the most appropriate target page for each of your keywords.
- Keyword density and placement in text – once you have decided on the appropriate page, you need to look at the text on this page. Primarily the text needs to read well from a sales perspective, but you also want to mention your keyword sufficiently (although not too much!) for search engines to realise the focus of the page.
- Domain Name – if you are in the position of not yet having a domain name, then including your main keyword in your domain is a very useful start from an optimisation point of view. If you were optimising for BMW cars then a domain such as www.bmwcars.co.uk would be a great start (although you might find that domain is already taken!!!).
- H1 Tags – H1, H2 Tags, are a way of defining the text on a websites page. H1 tag tells the search engines that this is the title text on the page and therefore gives this text more weight in the search engines eyes. As long as it makes sense from a user point of view, make sure your keyword is tagged as H1, and use H2 or bold on other areas to give them more prominence to the search engine.
- Image alt tags – place an alt tag on all images – search engines can’t scan images but they can read the alt tags.
- Meta Keyword Tags – on each page make sure you have your keywords are mentioned on the meta keyword tags, bear in mind that this also appears on the search engine results.
- Meta Descriptions – on each page make sure you have your keywords are mentioned in the meta descriptions, bear in mind that this also appears on the search engine results…..make sure you right it to maximise the click throughs from the search engine results.
- Proof Read – get someone else to proof read your work before you publish to the web, it’s easy to miss mistakes when you are re-reading material yourself.
Tags: Alt Tags > Meta Description > Meta Tags > Search Engine Optimisation > Website Optimisation
Keyword Analysis – how to decide which keywords to target….
Posted on | February 8, 2011 | No Comments
Free SEO Tips…Keyword analysis or keyword research is the first step in an SEO campaign. You need to decide which keywords or phrases to target with your SEO campaign. To do this you need to consider a number of factors.
- Relevance – think about what your customers will search for, speak to your customers and find out the different words or phrases they may use. If you have the time then sit down with some of your clients and ask them to go through the process they would work through to find your products or services. This will enable you to focus on the right keywords that are going to give you the best conversion rates.
- Search Engine Traffic – there is no point in choosing a keyword or phrase that is rarely or ever searched. Equally speaking, if you go for a word or phrase that is very heavily searched then in most cases this will be very competitive. This means you will need to allocate more time, money and resource in order to get onto the first page of the search engines. It is no bad thing to go for a competitive word or phrase, just be sure that you have the ability to get onto the front page; otherwise it may be more productive focusing on more niche words and phrases.
- What’s your budget? The more traffic a keyword generates, the more competitive it is likely to be…..the more competitive it is, the more it will cost to optimise for it. You need to decide how much money and time you would like to spend on promoting the chosen keyword. If you have very little time and maybe want to spend £100 a month, then trying to optimise for a phrase such as ‘car insurance’ is clearly not going to happen. Try and base your keyword choices around the amount of time and money you have to spend on them.
- Check out the competition – when you have come up with some keywords, go onto google, bing and yahoo, and type in the search terms. See who comes up in the top few results, have a look at their sites and see how well optimised they are. Analysing your competition like this will give you an idea of how hard it is going to be to get your website to the top of the rankings. If it appears that the keyword maybe more difficult than you thought, then try changing the phrase or keyword around a little (but also bearing in mind the first few points mentioned in this post).
Unfortunately this is not an exact science so there is going to be a bit of trial and error….but if you follow the advice above you will certainly be on the right track.
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