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.
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. Butdo 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.
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.
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.
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!
Twitter is an extremely effective tool for promoting and managing events. If you hold any kind of events, be it seminars, webinars, exhibitions or training workshops, you can use Twitter to help ensure it is a success.
Some Twitter statistics (from April 2010)
Twitter now has 105,779,710 registered users
New users are signing up at the rate of 300,000 per day
180 million unique visitors come to the site every month
Twitter users are, in total, tweeting an average of 55 million tweets a day
Twitter’s search engine receives around 600 million search queries per day
So how can you use Twitter to promote your event?
Depending on the type of event you are holding, choose to either use your main corporate Twitter account, or create a new account – purely focused on just this event (which might be the best choice if you have an event which is reoccuring)
Create a Twitter hashtag unique to each event and use this in each tweet
Encourage delegates to update their own Twitter feeds with tweets about the event using this hashtag
This hashtag measn that anybody at your event, or interested in your event can instantaneously see what you, your delegates and other interested parties are doing and saying
Twitter can also be used to provide mini-updates for one-on-one delegates
Use Twitter as a way to inform event participants of the latest event updates/changes
Include tweets containing links to new information, advice, tools and resources on your website
Use Twitter to instantly communicate important messages and ‘calls to action’ to their delegate/customer base
Delegates can subscribe to your Twitter feed or your hashtag search result via mobile or RSS for instant notification
Twitter’s social nature, combined with the ability to create instant updates and announcements makes it a perfect took to keep delegates up to date with the latest event news. Used wisely it can have a real impact on the success of your events.
Online promotion is a key marketing method for small businesses. If you’re promoting a new offer, product or service, how can you market it online? One of the key benefits of the Internet is that it creates an even platform – allowing smaller businesses to promote themselves at a relatively low cost. But you still need to understand what is available, and how to best promote yourself using these online tools.
So imagine you have a new offer – promoting 50% of a particular product – what can you do to push this promotion online?
Create special offer page
Explain what the offer is
What are the benefits?
What are exactly are you offering – what can your customers expect to receive?
What is the cost? (free, percentage off, pounds off etc)
How to order?
Include form on the page to register
Then promote this page using various online platforms:
If you are using Google AdWords or any other form of pay per click advertising, create a special campaign with dedicated adverts pointing to your promotion web page.
Create a press release about your offer
Upload it to online newswires
Might be worth paying £45 or so to put it on a paid newswire
Email it to industry journalists and publications (both online and physical)
Promote on all social media sites
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Create a blog post about it
Link to the main landing page
Create an article about it
The benefits of your offer and how it can help your customers
Create an email about it and blast it out to your email marketing list
For previous prospects that maybe didn’t convert in the past, try writing a personalised sales letter to the contact and posting it (old school, but still a good-un!). Explain what the offer is and include a link to the page for people to register for it, and a paper form which they can fax/scan/email back.
Add it to your email signature
Maybe consider buying some banner ads on relevant event marketing websites
When you sell one, try and get a customer testimonial which you can add to the promotional page (and other marketing materials)
See if you can get existing customers to spread the word to their customers/partners etc
So you see, that with a bit of time and effort there really are very effective methods you can use to promote your latest offer.
In our final post about Google Webmaster Tools, we explain what all the reports mean and how you can use some of them to help improve the performance of your website.
Dashboard
Tells you a summary of your key reports – search queries, crawl rate, keywords, sitemaps and links to your page
Site configuration
Sitemaps– this page will show you what sitemaps you’ve uploaded, how many indexed URLs it contains and if there are any issues with it.
Crawler access– if you’ve added a robots.txt file, this is where it’ll be. If you haven’t, this is where you can generate one. A robots.txt file is a list of URLs that you don’t want Google to index. This would be useful for private, out of data or duplicate content.
Sitelinks– sitelinks are links to a site’s interior pages. If you have any, you’ll be shown them here.Change of address – this page tells you what to do if your website is going to move to a new domain.
Settings – this is an important page. Here you can tell Google what country you are targeting which is important if you only work with customers in one country. You can also set what your preferred domain is: either http://www.SMEketing.com or http://SMEketing.com.
Your site on the web
Search queries- here you’ll see a similar graph to those within Google Analytics. You’ll see how many impressions your site had and how many clicks. You’ll also be able to see what keywords people used to find your site – how many impressions those keywords created and how many clicks resulted. You can also see your average position for these terms. It’s important to remember that this tells you how people are finding your site at the moment – if you are optimising your site for a particular keyterm, but are not yet ranking well for it, it’s unlikely to show up in this report. This report is useful in telling you where you can direct a little bit of effort to get improved results – if you are ranking 4 or 5 for a keyword you know converts well, with a bit of extra effort you could improve his rank and massively improve click throughs.
Links to your site – Here Google will tell you the number of links pointing to your site. It’ll also tell who what pages those links point to. Like most websites, the homepage will normally have the most links. Not all of these links will be great quality – link building is all about quality over quantity (although having a huge quantity of great quality links is the ideal!). This report will help you see if you have important pages with a low volume of links pointing to it – so you know where to direct your link building activity.
Keywords- If you’ve done your keyword research you should have a good understanding of what your website should be optimised for. This Keyword report tells you the most common keywords Google found when crawling your site. The terms at the top are those which are mentioned most often. These should match the terms you’ve optimised your site for. If there’s an important keyterm that’s not reflected in this list, you need to go back and amend your copy (although remember, no keyword stuffing!! Keep keywords to within 3-5%). If you click on one of these keywords, it’ll show you what pages of your website this term appears on.
Internal links – This report tells you the internal links you have to each page. Internal linking is an important part of SEO. Your most important pages should have the highest number of links pointing to them. The volume of links should go down for less important pages.
Subscriber stats – If you have an RSS feed associated with a blog, news page or any other page, this report will show you how many people are subscribed to them.
Diagnostics
Malware - Malware is a piece of software, such as a virus or spyware that can attach itself to your site. You should see the message “Google has not detected any malware on this site.” Call your IT guys if you’re not getting this message!
Crawl errors- This report tells you if Google has found any problems whilst crawling your site. The most common issues would be 404 pages not found and broken links. However, this report can often show pages/links that dont’ exist anymore. It’s not a great report in terms of accuracy. If you want to find broken links on your site, visit Xenu at http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
Crawl stats- This graph shows you your site’s crawl histroy over the last 90 days. It shows you the pages crawled, kb’s downloaded and the time spent downloading on a daily basis.
HTML suggestions – This is a useful area. It’ll tell you if Google has found any issues with the content of your site or with the title tags or meta descriptions (notice it doesn’t mention meta keywords here… that’ because Google doesn’t pay attention to them anymore!).
Labs
Fetch as Googlebot- You can request to see pages as Google bots sees them – without any snazzy design, pictures of any of that bumf! You can use this to check that Google is seeing your site in the way you want it to.
Site performance - Google is beginning to place more importance on the load speed of your site. People don’t to wait ages for a webpage to load, so Google is starting to place preference on faster loading sites. This report gives you a nice looking graph showing how your page download speeds have averaged over the last few months.
So that’s Google Webmaster Tools explained. It’s best if you spend some time clicking about and exploring the reports. It’s pretty easy to use and can give you some excellent information to help improve your site’s performance. Even though this is Google Webmaster Tools, making changes to improve your site will also help its rankings in the other major search engines.
If you have read our other posts on registering your site with Google Webmaster Tools, you should both understand the importance of this to your website SEO, and also now have an account and your website should be verified. If you still need to undertake these steps, read these last two blog posts:
There is a huge amount of valuable information that you can get from Google Webmaster, but you need to know where it is, and what to do with it.
Firstly, you should submit an xml Sitemap. This is basically a list of all the URLs in your website. It helps to tell Google about all your pages; including pages which for some reason or another they may not be aware of.
There are many reasons Google may not crawl every page on your site naturally, so this is why Sitemaps are helpful. Google states, that Sitemap’s are useful if:
Your site has dynamic content.
Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process—for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or images.
Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn’t well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.
To create an xml Sitemap:
Visit http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ add your site URL to the box (ignore the other boxes and options) and click on ‘Start’.
You will then need to save this and upload the file to your website.
Click on ‘Site Configuration’ and then ‘Sitemaps’
Click on ‘Add a Sitemap’
You will be presented with a box with your domain name with a field at the end of it – type in sitemap.xml and then click on submit.
And that’s it. Google will tell you if there is a problem with your Sitemap, but if you have followed these instructions you should have submitted it successfully.
Our next post is the long overdue explanation of what information Google Webmaster Tools can give you and how to interpret the data to improve your website.
If you found this information useful, but feel like you don’t have time to manage your online marketing, please get in touch. We’re online marketing experts and love nothing more than getting stuck into websites, helping our customers get more business from their online endeavours! Email us today on info@SMEketing.com.
Our previous post introduced Google Webmaster – what it was and how it can benefit your website in terms of its performance and how it can aid you with any search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts.
In order to get the benefits of Google Webmaster, you first need to register and verify your site with Google Webmaster. It’s a very quick and easy process. To find out how to do it, watch the video below:
The next blog post will outline what information you can get from Google Webmaster and how to use it to make your site perform better in Google.
Google Webmaster Tools is a free service from Google that lets you gain information about your website and how Google sees it. It is an important part of any search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign.
It’s extremely easy to use and is a vital tool in ensuring your website is performing as well as it should be. It also informs you of any issues that Google has with your site – giving you the opportunity to fix them, ensuring your site stays in Google’s good books!
So what can Google Webmaster do?
It lets you check and set the crawl rate
It lists internal and external links
It gives you statistics about how Google indexes your site
It allows you to submit an xml sitemap
You can generate and submit a robot.txt file
You can set a preferred domain – telling Google what you would like your site to be listed as
See what popular keywords are being used to access your site and where your pages rank for those terms
See any errors Google has come across while crawling your site
We will be giving more information on what these mean and how you can interpret the results to help improve your site in a future blog post.
You’ll firstly need to log into Google Webmaster with your Google account (if you don’t have a Google account you can easily create one here). You’ll then have to add your site to Google Webmaster and verify it – if you’re unsure how to do this, don’t worry…
…our next blog post will outline how to add and verify your site within Google Webmaster.
Twitter is an extremely effective tool for promoting and managing events. If you hold any kind of events, be it seminars, webinars, exhibitions or training workshops, you can use Twitter to help ensure it is a success.
Online promotion is a key marketing method for small businesses. If you’re promoting a new offer, product or service, how can you market it online? One of the key benefits of the Internet is that it creates an even platform – allowing smaller businesses to promote themselves at a relatively low cost. But you still need to understand what is available, and how to best promote yourself using these online tools.
Visit 
