If you're still wondering how a lot of this SEO malarky works, then you're not alone. Despite the fact that search is now a well-entrenched aspect of our daily lives, a great many business owners are still to become educated in this seemingly dark art. In our opinion, that's fine - after all, you've got your own business to run - do you really want to have a hand in every aspect of your marketing operations?
In this month's DIY SEO Tip, we wanted to bring your attention to the importance of building links to your site. Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, to name but a few search engines, all hold importance in the number of links that a site acquires from other sites. Each time a webmaster sees fit to link to your site from theirs, you can consider it a vote of your importance and authority on a given topic (typically indicated by the keywords resident on the page that links to you). Companies can pay a great deal to have an agency build links for them, but what options and quick wins are available to the frugal business owner. Well, you could start with one very simple and easy to implement strategy... ... Ask your friends! How many people do you know, who have their own website, Blog or social media profile? Whilst they may not write a huge amount of content on the subject of animal hypnotherapy (if that's your business), you can usually illicit some value from their site, and a link thereon.
Here are some important factors to consider:
Choose a page which uses related keywords and phrases associated with the topic you wish to be found for. relevance between the linking page, and the destination page on your site, is of utmost importance to the engines.
Choose your most popular friends first! If they have a healthy following, and a healthy link popularity themselves, they'll add more benefit to you.
Use anchor text on the link, to tell search engines exactly which keyword(s) are associated with the link. Never use link text like "Click here" or "Read more", as they're simply not relevant, and hence will not add as much value.
Look out for Spam. Many search engines apply a Trustrank score to sites, based on their own link popularity and the quality of the links they possess. There are a number of websites that will help you assess the Trustrank of sites you're thinking about linking from.
In short, not all links are built the same. Choose your friends carefully, and set yourself on the right link-building path today!
With the recent rollout of Google's Panda/Farmer algorithm changes, Your SEO Consultant decided to look into the most important factors for business owners and webmasters, to put into plain English the implications of these sweeping changes to the ranking system. Summarised below is what we've gleaned from our tests:
Domain names are now considered even more important in terms of keyword placement. If your domain contains keywords relevant to your business, products and services, you'll be in good shape. If not, perhaps it's time to consider some mirror sites, that make use of keyword targeted names; and which can drive more referral traffic to your main site.
.com extensions have seemingly been given higher priority in the United States, making it even more important to use localised domain extensions. Since the advent of Google Places, it has been even more imperative to have a .co.uk extansion for a UK business, for example, and Panda provides another reason to do so. For globalised or "glocal" companies, you may find that your chances of attracting traffic and business from the US has increased. Happy days!
There has been a perhaps-overstated crackdown on "Content Farms" and “Scraper” sites; those widely defined as not having original content but instead pulling content in from other sources. Some do this through legitimate means, such as using RSS files with permission. If you have used an SEO company or outsourced organisation to build backlinks for your site, you may have seen a drop in the number of backlinks credited to you. This is an indicator that your chosen resource has used a scraper site or content/link farm.
The real impact is still being assessed, and the sweeping and widespread changes in ranking have yet to be reported. One thing's for sure; every business should be aware of the methods by which their chosen SEO partners are creating links and promotional content, so as to ensure the greatest possible benefit for their efforts, and your money!
You wouldn't embark on any marketing campaign without first conducting some basic market research; and SEO should be no different. The tools are out there, to assist you in proving the demand for your products and services, before you need to invest any time or money.
When it comes to market share in the search engines stakes, Google still reigns supreme, and they happily share details of keyword demand with any and all their potential customers. Check out the Google Keyword Research Tool, and do some basic searches, for terms which loosely describe what you're offering. The tool will suggest some in-demand search terms, for you to optimise your content for. Here's what to look for:
Relevance - First things first; make sure that the terms you're considering are highly-relevant to your offering. Also consider the likely proximity to a purchase decision the prospect might be, based on their terminology.
Demand - Ensure there are a good, healthy number of daily searches for your chosen terms. Balance this with relevance, as more-generic terms will often receive a relatively large number of searches in comparison to more-targeted keywords.
Competition - Ensure that the number of competing pages (those which are optimised towards the chosen term) is kept as low as possible. Your chances of ranking for highly-competitive terms could well make for a lengthy and expensive campaign, resulting in poor ROI in the short-to-medium term.
Whatever your line of business, there are usually a good many high-value keywords still being overlooked by the competition. Invest some time in getting this first, basic step right, and you could reap the rewards in next to no time.
We've all, it would seem, had some exposure to the varying messages about what makes for a successful SEO campaign. The less-informed would cite traffic as the goal. The slightly more savvy would look at "stickiness" metrics, such as bounce rate, average page views per visit, and overall time on site. But let's face it; there's only one reason why anyone embarks on any marketing journey ... conversions.
For many; especially those with an ecommerce site, this is a very simple process. Search traffic that results in a sale means success for your search efforts. The next step would be to repeat, and expand the search terms for which you're attracting traffic (that then converts, too).
But if you already enjoy a healthy number of visitors to your site, coming from search engines, how can you improve the proportion that make a purchase. The answer is "Conversion Rate Optimisation".
The practice is simple; offer your visitors a number of differing versions of your pages, and test them to see which converts best. You'll need some web design and development help, but the results have the potential to transform your bottom line, and make your website a far-more effective marketing tool. Here are some things you can work on, to improve your chances of converting visitors into customers:
Headlines and sub-headers (content and placement)
Page layout and design
Placement, colour and content of Calls to Action
Contact details
Testimonials and Case Studies
Special Offers
Form design and layout
Google offers its Conversion Optimizer to Adwords customers, and acts as a good guide on how to improve your end-to-end offering. The important thing is to continually improve your chances of making a sale. Review the tips above, and see the effects it can make to your online success.
When performing a full SEO audit of your small business website, you'll want to ensure that you give the search engines as much chance as possible, of finding and indexing all of the pages on your site. There are 2 files that you should think about histing, on your site, in order to "tell" the search engines where your pages are located.
In the fifth and final video in our series "DIY SEO for Small Business", we look out how you can quickly and easily create a robots.txt file, and a simple sitemap, to do just this.
OK, so there was a bit of a gap between videos 3 and 4, but here it is! The fourth in our series of videos, helping Small Business Owners to do their own SEO, focuses on Google Webmaster Tools, and how you can use this free tool to assess your website's chances of ranking in Google, as well as the other crawler-based search engines.
I promise not to leave it so long next time. Enjoy!
This is the Slideshow presentation of our first DIY SEO Guide for Small Businesses. We'll be providing more information about this at the Ricmond Expo, where we'll be exhibiting on this coming Tuesday, 2nd March. Come and see us at Stand 17, for some fun and games, and the chance to win some great prizes and discounts off your next SEO campaign.
I recently involved myself on a discussion with some like-minded (and not-so-like-minded) Online Marketing exponents on Linkedin, when the question was raised "Is there a need for SEO, now that Social Media has arrived". I took the stance that Social Media allows the potential to create an online presence, without the need for your own business website, and in that respect, SEO is less important than it once was (shooting oneself in the foot?).
It got me thinking, though, about how I utilise Social Media for my own business gains. A look at my Analytics shows that traffic from referring sites; mostly Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Ecademy and The Best of Richmond, comprises more than 50% of non-direct traffic. That's great in itself, but there's more to consider.
It's fair to assume that only a fraction of people who view your Social Profiles and Pages will click through to your website. Therefore, in the case of my own online presence, there are a great deal more people finding out about me from the Social Networks than my own Website! You could argue that this behaviour comes from the position of my being an SEO Consultant, residing in a super-competitive Search environment. Whilst that's a factor, I'm sure, there is evidently a great deal of promise in Social Media as a Business generation toolset.
Social networks allow you to be more targeted about who you connect with; your ideal clients and partners can be found with relative ease, and providing you're willing to nurture the relationship, your efforts should be rewarded with paid work. Treat your online networking in the same way as you do your real-world networking, and you can't go far wrong, whatever your chosen industry.
What have been your own experiences of Social Media for generating new business?
We've been toying around with Animoto for a few days now, and finally got around to pulling together a short promotional video for our work in harnessing Social Media for our Clients. The results for less than 15 minutes work are really very impressive.
For those who haven't crossed paths with Animoto, the benefits are in the technology. You simply upload a number of images or short video clips, intersperse with some textual snippets, and let their rendering engine do the rest!
With web video helping to raise conversion rates for online businesses, this service could be an invaluable tool. The devil is in the detail, and you'll want to get some good stock photo's or personalised shots first. Talk to our friend, John Frye for some really professional-looking portraits, then get your Animoto account and start making professional-looking videos in minutes.
With the new year comes another new addition to the Google Search Engine Ranking Pages. Freshness has been a focus of Google's for some time now, with results deserving freshness being given a certain level of prominence, some times in preference to long-established, but less recent pages.
After partnering with a number of Social Media and newsfeed sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, MySpace, Friendfeed and Identi.ca, Google has added a scrollable box, part way down the first page, showing related "real time" posts and content. Here's how it looks, headed "Latest results for snow day" with keyword shown bold:
Our opinion is that the ramifications are 2-fold. Firstly, the organic results in positions 4+ are likely to get pushed further from the searcher's eye. We already knew that position #1 was important; now even more so!
Secondly, it re-emphasises the importance that is being placed on Social Media for the most up-to-date and still-relevant content on the web. Businesses that want to improve their brand exposure, whilst expanding their reach at the same time, are increasingly turning to Facebook, Twitter, and the Social Network sites, such as Linkedin, Plaxo and Ecademy.
Perhaps the day is not far away, when owning your own domain and website is nothing more than a needless expense.
Yesterday, Hitwise tweeted the news that Facebook took Number 1 spot as the US's top-visited site for 2 days over Christmas. This is the first time Facebook has ever been the #1 visited site in the US, and it overtook Google.com (web search only) on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, taking more than a 7.5% market share on both occasions.
The news comes just days after Facebook hit the headlines in the UK, for helping the mosh-pit favourite "Killing in the name" by Rage Against the Machine, to hold off this year's X-Factor winner, for the #1 spot in the UK Singles Chart. A campaign, centering around a Group set up on Facebook that became viral to an unexpected and unprecedented scale, was set up in an effort to upset the formbook for the first time in 4 years of X-Factor Dominance.
The success that followed allegedly resulted in a job offer for the Group Organisers by none other than Simon Cowell himself, and it should be noted, also raised in the region of £100k for homeless charity "Shelter".
Facebook and Twitter are now surely battling it out to be the outright King of Social Media sites, and more so a tool for business to showcase their talents. Through the use of Fan Pages, Events promotion and one of the most-targeted advertising systems on the web, can any business afford to ignore Facebook when it comes to Social Media Marketing?
A couple of weeks back, yours truly and the rest of Richmond's greatest BNI Chapter brought panto to breakfast networking, and made the baffling decision to capture it all on video. What follows is the first draft of our entry into the BNI "YouTweet" Challenge:
Please give our entry your honest rating (or if it's below 5 stars, then feel free to be as dishonest as you like!). If you're mad enough to want to join us for breakfast, and grab a share of the business referrals we pass to each other every Tuesday morning, then please get in touch.
From Your SEO Consultant, have a very Merry Christmas!
Much has been made, in recent days, of Google's personlized search, and what it means for SEO experts and their Business Owner clients alike. Firstly, for those to whom this is new information, Google has recently rolled out functionality to allow users more relevance and accuracy between the searches they make and the listings they see in the SERP's (Search Engine Results/Rankings Pages). Here's a short video on how it works:
Not only has Google enabled this for used who are "logged in" to their Google account, but also to those not logged in, via cookie storage and web history logs that can go back as far as 9 months. Some see this as a massive invasion of privacy, whereas Google insist it is a measure meant to improve their offering, and the experience of its myryad users.
Regardless of your opinion on the methods, Personalized Search is seemingly here to stay. So with so many users getting personalized results, how, as an SEO, do you target the top positions for your clients? The top positions, after all, could be different for everyone!
The general concensus is that there's little to be concerned about. Relevance in search, along with well-formed page content and descriptions, will encourage clickthroughs from the SERP's, and ensure top positioning DUE TO personalized search! What seemed like a challenge just moments ago now seems like one to be relished. Regardless of what Google does to enhance/degrade their products, a good SEO will move with the times, and make the best of the opportunities that present themselves for their clients.
Many Business Owners come to me with aspirations of higher traffic levels for their website. It seems to be that the importance of high search engine placement, and enjoying improved numbers of daily visitors, is finally hitting home with those wishing to grow their business beyond their current position.
But does more traffic equal more sales? Well, the simple answer is ... Sometimes! The fact is that there are a number of other, often overlooked factors, driving the success of your online targets and goals
Tags: seo,link building