Archives – July, 2010
One of our most popular posts in this blog has been our “Top 10 SEO Mistakes Your Small Business Should Avoid“. This was based around the activities and actions you might implement when trying to optimise your own business website. So we thought it was time we created another similar post, however this will be more generic – looking at SEO activities you should be avoiding across the board.
1. Do not respond to any SEO offers you might receive over email: Now I’m talking specifically about the emails you get asking you to swap links or from companies telling you they can get your site 1000 new links for just £100. These are SPAM EMAILS!! They might sound like good ideas, but they’re not. Mass reciprocal link building is a waste of time and any company that will give you 1000 links for £100 is going to be giving you poor quality links that may harm your site. Also any company that promises to get you the number one spot on Google is lying. Don’t trust them!
2. Don’t wait too long to start your SEO campaign: SEO should be something that should be done before your site is even built! You need to think about navigation and site architecture when building your site – so SEO should be something you do from day one.
3. Don’t waste time submitting your site to search engines manually (or worse - pay someone to do it for you): Search engines work by sending out spiders (or bots) that crawl web pages using the hyperlink structure of the web. So as soon as your website gets a link from somewhere else, the spiders will follow that link to your site and as long as your site has been built well, they’ll crawl your pages and add them to their index. Manual search engine submission went out a long time ago!
4. Don’t make your website uncrawlable: Following on from the above point, you need to ensure the search engine spiders can find and crawl all the pages on your website. So avoid having session IDs, huge dynamic URLs, using a complicated, messy navigation menu that spiders can’t (or won’t) follow, or developing an all-Flash, all-graphic, or all-AJAX site. If you are using a robot.txt file, make sure it has been created correctly.
5. Don’t focus on hugely generic search terms: If you’re a bakers in Southampton, don’t focus your efforts on trying to rank well for the term ‘baker’. It’s too generic. Optimise for relevant, targeted keywords and you’ll have more success.
6. Don’t keyword stuff: This is so last decade!! Keyword stuffing used to work back in the mid 1990’s when search engines were naive to the cheating/scamming nature of human beings. People stuffed their sites with keywords and came out tops. But search engines aren’t that stupid anymore! If you keywords stuff, hide text (by making it size 0, making it the same colour as your background etc) you’ll likely get penalised by the major search engines.
7. Don’t have the same title tag on every page: We’ve covered this before in this post: Top 10 SEO Mistakes Your Small Business Should Avoid but it’s an important issue so it’s worth mentioning again. Each page should have its own keyword rich, relevant title – keep it to within 70 characters. Find out more about title tags in this post: Website Title Tags
8. Don’t think that your visitors don’t want fresh new content: Just because you might not get constant feedback, or because you think you’re in a boring industry, don’t make the mistake of thinking that fresh, new, useful content isn’t important. There are always things you can write about - it helps improve the quality of your site, improves the perception of your company and is a great way of boosting your search engine position.
9. Don’t use the same anchor text in all your inbound links: The anchor text of a link is the (commonly) blue text you click on. When requesting and building links, make sure that you mix this up a bit. Use keywords rather than just your URL or company name and make sure that you vary it a bit.
10. Don’t focus on Google PageRank: This used to be a metric people used to access the quality (in Google’s view) of a web page. However, Google have stated that this is no longer something that they place relevance on. The PageRank you now see in your tool bar is often months out of date and doesn’t affect your rankings like it used to. Google have even taken it out of their Webmaster Tools.
This list could go on and on! Your additions are welcome in the comments – what mistakes have you made/seen in the past?
July 30, 2010
We all know that every business requires an effective website in order to succeed online (and quite often offline too). If you want to perform well online, you must put effort into ensuring your website performs well in the search engines. However, as well as improved search rankings, there are a host of other business benefits from performing search engine optimisation. This blog post takes a look at a few…
Fixed Costs: The cost of search engine optimisation will stay the same, irrelevant of how many clicks and visits your website gets. Compared to pay per click (PPC) advertising (such as Google AdWords), where the more clicks you get the higher the cost
Cost-effective Customer Acquisition: There are no fees required to have your website included in the natural search engine results. This makes it especially cost effective if you can rank well for quite competitive terms that would have cost a lot to bid on in PPC advertising. If you’re currently paying a lot for certain keywords in your PPC advertising, think how much you could save if you could get these clicks for free in the natural search!
Repeat Business: Studies have shown that customers gained from natural search results tend to be higher quality than those from other paid sources. These visitors stay on your site longer, have a higher chance of converting and are more likely to return to you again for further purchases.
Emphasis on Unique Content: Most search engine strategies will include a content strategy – a plan to create and add unique content to your site on a regular basis. Not only do search engines like this, but visitors do too. Fresh new content will provide a feeling of trust and authority to your visitors and will encourage them to buy. Blogs (like this one!) are a great way of providing new information in a format that helps your SEO efforts.
Credibility: If you’re well known in your industry, yet aren’t showing on the first page of Google for your main keywords, won’t that create an air of suspicion? To keep your brand perception at the required level you need to ensure you come top of the search engine results.
Improved Website Standards: Focusing on SEO will also force you to focus on the architecture and navigation of your site. Your site must comply with best practices in order to gain high rankings. This in turn also improves the usability of your website, giving your vistors a better user experience, making them more likely to turn in to customers.
To find out more about SMEketing’s SEO services - click here, or contact us for more information. Call 023 8083 7271 or email info@SMEketing.com.
Remember to follow us on Twitter – @SMEketing!
July 27, 2010
Do you use email marketing as part of your marketing communications? So many companies are now using it to communicate with existing customers and prospects. There are so many benefits to email marketing, the main ones being:.
- Super low cost
- Super fast
- Super flexible
- Super instant reporting and analysis
So email marketing really is super. But do you know what isn’t so super? Being given a £1000 fine for not complying with the Companies Act 1985. Now I bet you’re thinking “1985?! Email wasn’t even around in 1985, how can there be legislation made up about something that didn’t even (commercially) exist!?”. Well the Companies Act 1985 has been updated on a regular basis I’m afraid, and was last updated in June 2010.
Companies Act 1985 and Email Marketing:
If your business is a private or public limited company or a Limited Liability Partnership, the Companies Act 1985 requires all of your business emails to include the following details in legible characters:
- Your company’s registered name (e.g. XYZ Ltd)
- Your company registration number;
- Your place of registration (e.g. Scotland or England & Wales); and
- Your registered office address
This information should also appear on letterheads, forms and your website.
It is not enough to just have this as a link in your email, pointing to the relevant page on your website. You must include something like:
Super Organisation Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales. Registered number: 1234567. Registered office: Super House, 21 Super Street, London, SE1 1AA.
The fine is enforced by Trading Standards and can also come with a £300 a day fine for each day you do not rectify the situation.
If you aren’t email marketing at the moment, but want to find out more about it, get in touch with us – call 023 8083 7271 or email info@SMEketing.com. We have a fully comprehensive email marketing tool – read this blog post for more details, or visit our Email Marketing services page.
July 20, 2010
We recently had a comment via our SMEketing Marketing YouTube channel from a marketer in need of some link building advice:
Hi!
Fantastic video, sooooo helpful!!!
It would be fantastic to see a video on how to create inbound links…..
I went to university in Southampton, and now I am within my first year of a new job and been asked to build 700 links in the next MONTH which is impossible and I dont want to? get my company blacklisted from google how can I do this?
Can you help me with creating quick inbound links to my website?
Thanks
This was our response:
Glad you found the video helpful.
So link building… being asked to produce so many new links in such a short time is not only a bit unrealistic, but it’s not really a good idea. If your site goes from having about 100 links to about 800 in the space of a month, that’s going to look a bit dodgy/spammy to Google.
Link building is all about building up quality links of a sustained period of time. Google wants to see a site that is growing in size and popularity – and getting a steady stream of good quality links is an indicator of a good quality site.
Link building is both about quality and quantity – it’s not an even/or thing (although if you had to pick, going for quality over quantity would be the way to go). You want to have a lot of good quality links.
There are loads of factors that make up a good or bad link. In a nutshell, a good quality link is one that comes from a reputable website, has good anchor text (the blue bit you click on), is on a good quality relevant page (i.e. relevant to your industry) and does not have the ‘nofollow’ attribute (which a lot of social media channels/blogs/forums have – basically the ‘nofollow’ attribute stops the linking site from passing any link juice to you through the link).
So the best way to build links is to create really good content that people want to link to. There’s a thing called ‘link bait’ which is basically defined as any kind of content that people want to link to. Imagine yourself as an industry blogger, seeking to cover the most exciting, unique trends and pages in the sector. If this individual stumbled across your content, would they be likely to write about it? If the answer is yes, it qualifies as link-bait.
So you can create content such as:
- Free Tools
- Web 2.0 Applications
- Top 10 Lists
- Industry-Related Humor
- Reviews of Events
- Interviews with Well-Known Insiders
- Surveys or Collections of Data
- Film or Animation
- Charts, Graphs or Spreadsheets
- Contests, Giveaways and Competitions
- Trend-Spotting
- Advice from Multiple Experts
Also things like press releases that you can upload to free newswires and articles that you can upload to sites like Ezine are a great way of generating links.
So I hope this helps! If you need any additional marketing assistance, let me know. We offer a range of outsourced marketing services at SMEketing and can do as little as an hours work, right up to a certain amount of days a month. You can email us at info@SMEketing.com.
Also follow us on Twitter – http://twitter.com/SMEketing and follow our blog – we normally blog a lot about SEO – http://www.SMEketing.com/blog/
Link building is something that should be taken on as part of an on-going marketing strategy; it’s not something that should be done in short, sharp bursts. Think about what content your prospects and customer want to use and read. High quality content will always create high quality links – it just takes time and effort.
July 15, 2010
Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking
Some LinkedIn statistics (as of April 2010):
- More than 65 million registered users
- Covers more than 200 countries and territories worldwide
- On average 36.5M people visit LinkedIn.com every month
- 51% male, 49% female
- Average age – 35-49
- 47% college educated, 27% university and above
So how can you use the tools LinkedIn offer to promote your business, your products and services and any offers or events?
- Members only groups can be created to provide your customers with a exclusive opportunity to network with other customers
- For customers with a particular product or service interest, focused sub-groups can be set-up
- You and your customers can upload photos, videos, create online polls, take part in forums, and receive email updates
- Groups can be used to communicate news and start online discussion and debate
- LinkedIn can also be used to promote events very effectively
Like most free social networking sites, you will get out what you put in. It can be resource intensive in terms of time, but for small businesses on a budget it can be an effective way of promotion.
If you’re interested in using LinkedIn or any other type of social media to promote your business, get in touch. We can help set you up with social media accounts, and can give you training and guidance on making the most of them. Alternatively we can completely manage all your social accounts for you!
Call us on 023 8083 7271 or email us on info@SMEketing.com.
July 1, 2010
