Archives – January, 2010
Our January offer of a Twitter & Facebook Business Page for just £120 is nearly up, and we have two left!
If you would like to take advantage of this offer, then get in touch straight away! This offer expires on Friday and once gone, the price will go back up!
If you’re interested in getting stuck in with social media, but aren’t sure how to go about doing it, then this is the offer for you. We’ll not only set you up with a Facebook Business Page and a Twitter account, but we’ll tell you exactly how to manage them and how to use them to boost your business.
So what does the offer include?
What your Facebook Business Page will contain:
- We will create your page for you
- Add all relevant information – logo, website, email, telephone, about us etc..
- We will populate your wall with up to twenty posts
- We will add up to five events that you may be hosting/attending
- We will add up to five photo albums, populated with your photos/images (limit to 10 photos per album, or 50 photos overall)
- We will provide you with a ‘How To’ guide, explaining how to manage your Facebook Business Page, and what kind of information you should be adding
What your Twitter account will include:
- A Twitter logo created based on your existing corporate logo
- Bespoke background created (to include contact details and about us summary)
- A Twitter ‘bio’ created with the aim of a) getting people to follow you and b) luring people to your main site
- Follow 100 relevant people based on a criteria you set
- Create up to five Twitter lists for you
- A ‘How To Guide’ informing you how to use Twitter to boost your business effectively
We will then link your Facebook page to your Twitter account – so any new Facebook updates will automatically be posted on your Twitter account, with a link back to your new Facebook page.
You can order now – we require payment before any work is undertaken. You can contact us and pay via BACS or alternatively, pay via PayPal now!
January 28, 2010
A fantastic way of keeping your blog fresh, up to date and interesting is to use guest bloggers.
Guest blogging is where you invite someone to create a blog post for your blog. There are many benefits to both blog owner and guest blogger:
Benefits of Guest Blogging for the Guest Blogger:
- Free publicity for your business
- High quality link back to your website
- Benefit of reaching a new audience
- Improves your reputation
- Future recipriocation
Benefits of Guest Blogging for the Blog Owner:
- Enables a fresh point of view and style of writing to your blog
- New opinion from a respected industry member
- A day off from writing blog posts yourself!
So SMEketing are kick starting the guest blogging here and now with this offer: if you are a small business that has experienced success with online marketing such as social media, SEO, online advertising, or success in more traditional marketing, such as events and print advertising, get in touch. We would love to hear from you and print your story on our blog.
If you’re interested, send us an email at info@SMEketing.com.
We look forward to hearing from you soon!
January 27, 2010
This final post in the six part series looks at how you can measure your SEO campaign. Like any marketing activity, you must measure and track progress if you are to ascertain the level of success. Using a tool such as Google Analytics, will give you the statistics required to measure the changes, improvement and success of your website.
What should you track?
- Search engine referrals: What search engines are sending visitor to your site and what keywords are being used to find your site?
- Other referrals: What other sites are directing visitors to your site? This will show you where your valuable links are coming from. For example, seeing that 10% of your traffic came via your articles on eZine may prompt you to boost your article marketing campaign
- Returning Vs Unique Visitors: Are most of your new, unique visits, or are they returning visitors? This metric will show you how often people are coming back to your site – if you have a site that consistently produces regular content, you will want to see a high number of people returning to your site to read it
- Entry and exit pages: What pages do most people land on when they arrive at your site, and what are the pages that people are leaving from. If a lot of visitors leave from a key page, you may want to think about amending that page to try and reduce that figure
- Pathways: What path do visitors take when they’re on your site? Ideally you should create a ‘funnel’ where people land on a specific page and are guided through your site to the desired action page (such as a checkout or the Contact Us form). Understanding the path people take will help you improve the usability and conversion rate of your site
- Popular Pages: What pages are viewed most on your site? You can use this information to improve other pages that aren’t so well visited.
Of course the main thing you need to track are your conversions, and the route leading up to those conversions – what keyword was used, what search engine, what entry path did they take, what pages did they visit, how long did they stay on your site, were they a new or a returning visitor? Tracking your success will help you build a stronger, more focused campaign.
However, it’s equally important to measure failure – what isn’t working, what pages have a high bounce rate, what keywords have a high bounce rate, what article got no views at all etc… These are all important metrics that can be used to enhance your campaign plan.
So that’s it – the six part series explaining the basics of SEO is over. If you have any questions, please get in touch or leave us a comment. At SMEketing we’re passionate about search engine optimisation; if you feel we could help you and your site, please get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.
January 22, 2010
Part five part of this six part blog series on SEO explains how you can build up the number of links pointing to your site.
This is a common problem businesses have – how can you increase the number of links pointing to your site. We’ve already established that link farms and reciprocal linking is a big no no. So what other options do you have available?
Here are a list of link building ideas:
- Blogging: Good quality blog posts help to build links, as other bloggers may link to them. You can also register your blog with RSS feed directories and submit each blog post to social bookmarking sites (such as Digg, StumbleUpon etc)
- Social Media: Social media is becoming more prevalent in marketing than ever. It’s not clear yet exactly how much weigh the search engines will place on the links resulting from sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn etc, but it’s still a very worthwhile area to invest some time in. There are many more benefits to social media than just link building
- Press Releases: Creating optimised press releases and submitting them to online newswires are an excellent way of generating a high volume of good quality links
- Article Marketing: Creating well written and well optimised articles and submitting them to sites like eZine and GoArticle will help generate not only good quality links, but click throughs from reputable sources
- Link Building Through Competitor Analysis: This is as simple as looking at the links your competitors have, and copying them! See here to find how to How to Increase the Number of Links to Your Small Business Website using the Yahoo! LinkDomain search query
The final part of this six part series will focus on how you can measure and track your SEO campaign.
Call us on 023 8083 7271 if you want more information on SMEketing’s SEO services.
January 20, 2010
Carrying on with this seven part series, this post looks at the elements you can utilise to optimise your site. There are many critical components involved in optimising a website – your goal is to ensure your site has the best chance of being crawled, indexed and ranked by search engines spiders. It’s important to build a good quality, well optimised site to help it get ranked for your chosen keywords.
Below are the main areas that are involved in optimising a site:
- Design: Ensuring that the graphical elements and layout combine to create a user friendly and search engine friendly website
- Information Architecture: Creating a search engine friendly organisational hierarchy
- URLs and Meta Details: Creating descriptive URLs and unique, keyword rich meta details
- Navigation: Creating a navigation system that guides users easily through both top level and deep pages. This also includes the use of breadcrumbs, alt tags for images and well written anchor text
- Functionality: Ensure that all tools, scripts, images and links function as intended
- Accessibility: Focusing on removing broken links and ensuring that content is visible and accessible in all browsers and without special actions
- Content/Copy: Ensuring content is optimised with 3-5% keywords, keyphrases and synonyms, uses keyterms in relevant placing within the copy and has correct use of H1 and H2 headers
Creating Quality Content
The phrase ‘Content is King’ could not be truer for SEO. At the end of the day, search engines want to produce a list of high quality, relevant pages to their searchers. What makes a good quality site – one with hardly any content that is never updated, or a huge site with loads of fresh, new, unique content? What would you rather spend time on?
Users will probably enjoy spending time on a site if it is full of good content. Likewise, good quality content also helps to generate links – helping the popularity of your site even further.
For more information on why quality content is important, read these blog posts (they are based around how blogs can help you create content, but also include details of why and how fresh content helps your site in terms of SEO):
Part five will be published on Wednesday and will discuss how you can build links for your site. Make sure to come back and read it! As always, any comments are apprecitated!
January 18, 2010
Part three of this six part SEO series talks about what is involved when creating a plan for your search engine optimisation.
Keyword Research
Targeting the right term is a vitally important part of SEO. This is more than just measuring the level of searches a keyword gets and going for the one with the most. Proper keyword analysis will look at the keywords and phrases that are likely to convert (whatever your conversion is – be it a sale or the completion of a Contact Us form), the predicted traffic levels for various relevant terms, how much value the conversion on one keyword is worth compared to the conversion of other keywords (i.e a term such as ‘dining room table’ maybe convert into a higher value sale than ‘coffee table’). Finally, the analysis should look at the competition levels of each term – is it worth competing on a term that is extremely popular, or is it better to compete on a term that has a lower volume of searches, but is less competitive?
It’s important to take into consideration all the above elements. Unless you know the information surrounding a chosen keyword, how can you tell if it’s likely to be profitable for you? A big mistake in SEO is to go straight in, optimising your site and your link building strategy for a keyword that either won’t convert or is so competitive you don’t have a chance of doing well in the search engine result pages. A small independent bookshop shouldn’t try competing on a term like ‘books’ because Amazon and Waterstones and WH Smith have that market pretty closed!
What is a Long Tail Keyphrase?
The ‘long tail’ was a concept developed by Chris Anderson in his book and blog (The Long Tail). He explains it very well here:
“The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.”
So taking the example of ‘books’ again. The term ‘books’ is at the head of the keyword search, and will produce a great number of searches. However, there is a large amount of value within the other longer, unique searches, known as the ‘tail’. These would be terms such as ‘books on the history of Hampshire’ – the value of these searches lie in the fact that they will be less competitive, and more likely to convert. The person searching for history books in Hampshire is more likely to buy from you if you present him with a page on your Hampshire history books. Whereas if the same searcher searched for ‘books’, he’d probably have to crawl through a few different sites before he came across what he was looking for.
Stay tuned for the next installment in this series. Part four will be posted on Monday morning and will dicuss how you can optimise your site. If you want to find out more about SMEketing and our SEO work, you can get in touch with us in a variety of ways:
January 15, 2010
Point number four on the previous post (What is SEO (search engine optimisation)?) explained that search engines decide how to rank pages based on how relevant it feels it is for the searcher. So this blog post (second of six in the series) explains what is involved when search engines classify a page as ‘relevant’.
When looking at a particular page, the search engines will look for key areas where they would expect the search query to be located – the title tag, meta description, heading tags and body copy. If a page is relevant to the query, it will most likely have that keyword or phrase featured in the above areas.
Search engines also base relevancy on how popular they feel your page is (yes, it’s like going back to school again – the popularity contest never ends!!). This is why links – and good quality links, are important. Search engines will look at the links pointing to a page and analyse the type of link (whether or not the anchor text is relevant to the search query), what else is said on that page (is there information and copy near the link that contains the query term? This is why lists and directories aren’t generally classed as high quality links). They also look at whether or not the page in question links back to the linking site (is it reciprocal?) and how trustworthy the linking site is (for example a public sector domain such as .gov is more trustworthy than a .net, and Wikipedia is more trustworthy than wikidirectory.biz etc…).
The search engines combine the outcome of these two factors with many other smaller aspects and filter the total results through their algorithm. The algorithm then decides the score for each page, and will then present the list of results in order of most to least importance.
So you why link building is such an important part of SEO. If you have thousands of other websites all linking to your site, then the search engines will assume that your site is extremely popular and must have a certain level of value. If all your links come from well respected and trustworthy sites, then the power of the link is even greater. However, if you have a thousand links all coming from low quality sites or link farms, the search engines are likely to recognise this and eliminate the value of those links (or they even penalise you for trying to cheat the system).
What makes a good quality link?
- The anchor text: Anchor text is the text the link is made from. For example: ‘SMEketing: Marketing agency working with businesses in the South’ has the word ‘SMEketing as the anchor text – this tells the search engine that the word ‘SMEketing’ is relevant to www.SMEketing.com. A better anchor text would be : ‘SMEketing: Marketing agency working with businesses in the South’ – this tells the search engines that www.SMEketing.com is relevant to SMEketing marketing agency, which is much better.
- Popularity of the site: As mentioned before, it’s all about popularity! A popular site has a high volume of quality more links pointing to them.
- Text around the link: If the link has text surrounding it that is on topic, that link will be deemed better than a link surrounded by other links, or text that is not relevant
The next post (3 of 6) will focus on keyword research and will be posted on Friday. In the meantime, you can view the first post here: What is SEO (search engine optimisation)?, or get in touch to find out how we can help boost relevant traffic numbers to your site – call us on 023 8083 7271.
January 13, 2010
We all hate January – it’s cold (especially this January! Brrr!!), the festive season is all over and the fun and frolics of Christmas and New Year are now firmly set as a few extra inches round our waistlines. So for this reason, SMEketing have decided to launch a new offer – limited to just January 2010, and the first 10 people that apply!
We are offering to create a Twitter and Facebook Business Page for you, for the reduced price of £120 – all in!
What your Twitter account will include:
- A Twitter logo created based on your existing corporate logo
- Bespoke background created (to include contact details and about us summary)
- A Twitter ‘bio’ created with the aim of a) getting people to follow you and b) luring people to your main site
- Follow 100 relevant people based on a criteria you set
- Create up to five Twitter lists for you
- A ‘How To Guide’ informing you how to use Twitter to boost your business effectively
What your Facebook Business Page will contain:
- We will create your page for you
- Add all relevant information – logo, website, email, telephone, about us etc..
- We will populate your wall with up to twenty posts
- We will add up to five events that you may be hosting/attending
- We will add up to five photo albums, populated with your photos/images (limit to 10 photos per album, or 50 photos overall)
- We will provide you with a ‘How To’ guide, explaining how to manage your Facebook Business Page, and what kind of information you should be adding
We will then link your Facebook page to your Twitter account – so any new Facebook updates will automatically be posted on your Twitter account, with a link back to your new Facebook page.
All the above is based on the information you provide us. We have a limit of only ten and this offer is only valid in January 2010. If you’ve missed out on this offer, please get in touch anyway and we can arrange to create a Facebook Business page or Twitter account for you at our usual rate.
You can order now – we require payment before any work is undertaken. You can contact us and pay via BACS or alternatively, pay via PayPal now!
For more information on Facebook and Twitter, read these posts:
January 12, 2010
Many of the SMEketing blog posts focus on search engine optimisation (SEO), but we realised the other day that we’ve not actually formally introduced what search engine optimisation is. If you’re not familiar with the topic, it can appear to be a very complex and confusing subject. Hopefully this series of six concise posts will help make it clear to you what SEO is, why it’s important and how it can be carried out. We’ll be posting these every other day over the course of the next two weeks, so make sure you come back from the next instalment!
What Is SEO?
Search engine optimisation is the process of optimising a website by improving internal and external parts in order to increase the volume of relevant traffic to your site from search engines. It is important to note that it is the increase in ‘relevant’ traffic to your site – there is no point gaining 100% more visitors if they are not the type of visitor that will convert for you (whether your conversion is a sale, request for more information etc…).
Search engines are very clever, and they will be able to find your site without you manually submitting it to them. However, SEO is all about helping you to boost your website rank for the specific keywords or phrases that you feel will convert into good traffic for your site. The online environment has never been more competitive, and this is why SEO is used; optimised sites will have a large advantage over their competitors in terms of visitors and customers.
How do Search Engines Work?
Remember that search engines do not display websites in their search results – they display web pages. This is an important thing to remember when optimising your site.
So how do they work and how do they decide what pages to list and in what order? I’ll try and keep this simple
- They have ‘bots’ or ‘spiders’ that crawl the web, using the hyperlink structure to ‘crawl’ the pages and document that make up a website
- The index those pages and documents – basically they store it all in a huge database which they call their ‘index’
- When someone types a search into the search engine box, the search engine retrieves from its index all the documents and pages that match that query. A match is made in a variety of ways, but mostly it’s determined by whether or not the search term is found in the webpage or document (and in what format – if the searcher put quotes around their search, the search engines would only list pages that contained the query in the exact same format)
- The search engine will then use its algorithm to work out what order (or rank) to place each result. This is based on what it feels is most relevant to the searcher.
The next instalment (2 of 6), will focus on how search engines decide what a ‘relevant’ site is. Make sure you come back on Wednesday to read all about it! In the meantime, give us an email if you want to find out how we can help improve your website: info@SMEketing.com
January 11, 2010
