With the dawn of a new year, businesses are reevaluating their marketing priorities in an attempt to put themselves on track for a profitable year. With our knowledge and experience, we at SMEketing can help you develop an online digital marketing plan to help your company thrive in 2012.

Unlike in the past, online marketing has become one of the primary ways in which companies reach potential customers. In a recent study published by the Pew Foundation, it was found that 96 percent of young adults and 87 percent of older adults use search engines to find out information about products and services. Additionally, search engine use behaviour indicates that users tend to only follow links to sites listed on the first page of search results. Social media has also taken on a whole life of its own, with 78 to 84 percent of users depending on social media to research products, according to Digby. Both of these trends point to the importance of using digital marketing services as a means to attract and interact with potential customers to increase sales.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search engine optimisation, or SEO, has long been one of the primary methods used to improve search engine ranking to increase website traffic. Our view at SMEketing is that ultimately, high levels of website traffic translate into increased opportunities for sales. SEO efforts can include the use of keywords in website structure, high quality content that naturally integrates targeted and long string keyword phrases and article marketing, just to name a few methods used.

Often, website structure is overlooked by business owners as a method to improve search engine ranking. However, if keywords are integrated into page titles and in website names, it increases the opportunities for users to find the website.

There is a saying among internet marketers – “Content is King” – and it is definitely true. Quality content includes blogs, product descriptions and overall content that is keyword rich and delivers valuable information to readers. It is recommended that almost all businesses have a blog as part of their website. Blog content can include helpful information about products, background information and profiles of key employees, industry information and general information that customers might find interesting.

Article marketing can also be an especially helpful and effective method of search engine optimisation. Quality articles are written that contain targeted and long string keyword phrases and links to your website. Additionally, when they are submitted to high quality article directories, company information is included with the article. The value of article marketing is multilayered. High quality content articles establish you as an authority and expert in your field and industry. They also provide high quality backlinks to your website. Finally, they provide a means for interested readers to go to your website, increasing website traffic and sales.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is an amazing phenomenon that has grown by leaps and bounds just in the past several years. With such high numbers of people using social media as a resource for product information, it is smart business to concentrate marketing efforts using this medium.

Social media can be used for many different goals. It is a wonderful way to increase quality backlinks and website traffic with a minimum amount of effort. With a single posting, you can literally create hundreds, if not thousands, of backlinks when the message goes out to your followers. If those followers find the message valuable, they will re-post it to their own network of followers, creating yet another wave of backlinks and website traffic.

Social media posts can be used to announce sales, introduce new products and create a positive reputation online for you and your company. In recent reports, users have indicated that they often turn to online recommendations or recommendations from friends when making purchase decisions. As a result, conducting a positive online PR campaign can reap tremendous benefits.

The value and importance of online marketing cannot be underscored enough in today’s digital atmosphere. If you are looking for experience and knowledge for digital marketing services for your company, please contact us at SMEketing. Offering premier internet marketing in Hampshire, we will provide you with an honest analysis of your current online marketing efforts and make recommendations to improve your online presence and search engine ranking.

So in no official order, below are the top ten most read blog posts of 2011:

Top Email Marketing Checks To Do Before You Hit Send

Email marketing is a very effective way to communicate with your current and prospect customers. It’s quick, inexpensive and can give you instant results. But it’s important that it’s done right. Make sure you make the most of each eblast by making the following email marketing checks: From Name Is your ‘From’ name recognisable? Will [...]

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Google+ For Business

If you’ve been in a coma recently, you might not have heard about Google’s new social media platform, Google+! Even though it’s been around now for a few weeks, there’s still some confusion over how to use it and what it could mean to you both personally and as a business. The service is Google’s [...]

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Building Your Email Marketing List : Research Results

A couple of months ago, MarketingSherpa released the results of a study they had undertaken, into the most effective methods of growing an email marketing list. The researchers asked more than 1100 marketers to indicate the effectiveness of various methods used within their organisation. This is what they found: Although these results are based on [...]

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Top Black Hat SEO Techniques You Must Avoid

Wikipedia describes black hat SEO as “SEO tactics such as spamdexing, attempt to redirect search results to particular target pages in a fashion that is against the search engines’ terms of service and is often considered unethical SEO.” The alternative is white hat SEO, which are the techniques that are approved by the search engines [...]

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Reciprocal Linking – Good or Bad SEO?

If you’ve got a new website and you’re trying to optimise it and improve it’s position in the search engine results for your desired key terms, you may be aware that link building is an important area of SEO that you need to focus on. So it could be tempting to respond positively to an [...]

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Secrets of Successful Blogging

The term “weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, “blog,” was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase “we blog” in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999. Ever since then, people have been blogging for business and for [...]

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Top Ten Google AdWord Mistakes – Part Two

Following from our previous post last Thursday, here are the additional five mistakes that we see people make in their Google AdWord Campaigns: 6. Not targetting the right group of searchers: Is your product or services aimed towards a particular demographic or geographical location? Did you know that you can set your AdWord campaigns to target those [...]

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MegaBus Robots.txt File Fail

I am organising a trip up to London with some friends in September. We’ve decided to save some money and use the MegaBus to travel from Southampton. Due to my love of all thing organising, I was put in charge of sorting out the costs etc. So first thing I did was to Google MegaBus. [...]

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Online Promotion: How to promote a new offer, product or service online

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 [...]

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Small Business Branding, Logo and Corporate Identity – What’s the Difference?

Okay small business owners, I have some questions for you here: How many of you reading this, know what your logo is? (I’m really hoping you’re nodding along, safe in the knowledge that you know what your logo is! I’ll be scared if  you don’t, unless you’re just starting a new business and haven’t had a [...]

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If you want to start 2012 with a bang, get in touch. We love helping businesses grow through using effective online marketing. So if you want more leads, more sales and more growth in 2012 drop us an email or complete our contact form.

1. Go to Google Analytics and review your traffic levels – are you seeing a sudden drop or any other worrying trends?
2. Log into Google Webmaster and see if there are any problems with your site – are there any crawl errors, messages from Google etc?
3. Go to Google and do this search: [site:yoursite.com] – review how many URLs are listed. Is this what you would expect or are you missing quite a few?
4. See what position your site comes up when you make this search: “domain-name” search (without the TLD). If you’re in position 50 or below it’s pretty likely that you’ve got some kind of penalty
5. Has your Google PageRank dropped suddenly? This isn’t always obvious since Google only updates this every 3-4 months, but it’s worth a look just in case
6. Check that your site hadn’t been blacklisted as unsafe for browsing. Type http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=mysite.com (with your domain at the end)
7. Check your inbound links – has there been a sudden rise in poor quality links?
8. Check your outbound links – make sure you’re not linking to any questionable sites. Use http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm
9. Do you have more than one website? If so check thse. Sometimes Google has seemed to devalue the WHOIS domain owner which results in the dropped ranks of all the sites under the same domain account.
10. Take a sentence from one of your website pages – cut and paste this exactly into Google with quote marks surrounding it (exact match). Check to see if the page you took it from ranks at the top
11. Add this bit of code to the search URL : &filter=0 (or click on the “show omitted results” link). If your site shows under this search it means that you’ve been hit with a duplicate content penalty

If you have been penalised then you need to make sure that you identify what it is that you’ve done to cause the penalty. Read the Google Webmaster Guidelines to ensure you comply.

Here’s a video from Google’s SEO spokesperson, Matt Cutts, where he talks about sites that have been penalised and how long these generally last for:

Link building, done correctly, should be a steady process – with a wide variety of links being generated, with a variety of anchor text pointing to a variety of pages.

What kind of activities should you be careful about?

Building too many links at one time: If your website has been ticking along for the last few years, without much work or SEO done to it, you might not have generated many inbound links. If you suddenly start on an Internet marketing campaign with the goal to boost your website, even if you’re doing things the right way, Google may be wary of you if you suddenly go from 5 links to 500 within a week. This is known as ‘link velocity’, and as Tad Chef from the SEOptimize blog says:

“Google is checking the link velocity – aka the rate in which you earn links – and if you get more links than you deserve, you risk a penalty even if the links are perfectly legit.”

Using identical anchor text in links: Anchor text is the clickable part of a link. Having your keywords in this anchor text is a good thing – it tells the search engines exactly what that particular link is about. However, when people naturally link to you, they wouldn’t always use the same anchor text – one person will use a different phrase to describe your business or a web page than another. So having all your inbound links with the same anchor text looks unnatural, and therefore will raise flags.

Getting links from the same sources: Variety is not only the spice of life, it’s the spice of link building too! You need to ensure you’re getting links from a wide range of websites. Getting a high number of links from the same site can look unnatural.

What are the common Google penalties?

Common penalties include:

• Any position 1 or 2′s being dropped to 6 and being stuck there (which was noted for the first time back in 2007, and is called  Google #6)
• All rankings being dropped by 30 places (named the 30 penalty)
• Particular rankings being pushed to the last position (known as the 950 penalty, as it’s an average of a drop of 950 places!)
• Complete ban

Take this case study from from SEOptimize. They wanted to test whether or not generating a high number of low quality links at once would result in any penalties. Author Marcus Taylor went about generating 10,000 spammy links to a new website he created specifically for the experiment. You can see the traffic volume the site was getting below:

Although the test site reached the number 1 position for its target keyword within a few weeks, eventually it was kicked out completely from these rankings. According to Taylor:

“Just as I was beginning to lack faith in Google’s ability to detect the most unnatural of link patterns, the site suddenly dropped out of search results for everything including brand searches, and what’s more it’s never bounced back.”

So what can you take away from this? Besides the obvious, “It’s not a great idea to build 10,000 low quality inbound links at once,” this case study also illustrates why it’s so important to develop a range of different link types over time. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket – instead of relying on just one method to generate inbound inks, use a range of activities that will help to generate a natural link profile.

Avoiding Penalties

Make sure that your link building is done naturally and at a steady pace. Focus on generating and promoting high quality content. Avoid any black hat SEO activities, such as keywords stuffing, using link farms and other dubious link building activities. The goal is to build up a natural looking link profile – full of nice, high quality links.

If you’re looking for some link building help, please get in touch with us today! Email info@SMEketing.com or complete our contact form.

Extra content for the search engine robots

The backbone of SEO is content. The more content the search engines can find and index the better. If you’ve got a well rounded blog, covering a range of different topics, you’ll have more chance of being found for a wide range of terms (and your long tail terms will get a boost too). If you’re having trouble creating regular content for your blog a guest author could help out by giving you a post on a regular basis to add. You can schedule these in whenever you need a break (or during busy times when your efforts may be taken elsewhere in the business).

Variety for your readers

Guest blog posts help to keep you blog fresh, but also gives an additional viewpoint and tone of voice. As they say, variety is the spice of life! Having a good range of blog posts with a variety of content and views makes your blog more rounded and helps to keep visitors engaged, as well as giving them a reason to come back on a regular basis.

A different range of keywords

Because everyone has a different tone of voice and a different writing style, you’ll find that by using guest bloggers you’ll get a different way of promoting the topics that you want to focus on. A lot of the time guest bloggers may approach you, in which case you can tell them the topic you want written about and the keywords you want targeted. But how they go about writing those keywords into their copy, and the different synonyms and ways of saying these terms is up to them. You have the right to edit or amend your guest posts, but you might find it beneficial to keep them as they are (apart from spelling and grammar fixes), as they may have a fresh or different approach to your own posts.

More content to support your social media marketing

If you’re active on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+, you’ll know that they live off fresh content. You need to constantly promote new content – be it your own or others (which is always a good way of doing it, please don’t constantly promote your own content alone!). The more blog posts you upload, the more content you have to tweet about and the more posts you can add to your Google+ and Facebook page. You need to keep a steady stream of communication going in these mediums, and guest blogging gives you this.

Additionally, you can bet that if your guest author is an active blogger, they’ll also be active on the major social networking sites. And they want to promote their content just as a much as you do. So you’ll also benefit from them tweeting the blog post to their network of followers. Although it’s their content, it’s on your blog, so you’ll be opening up your site to a whole new range of people/contacts that you previously didn’t have access to.

Plus, we’re seeing that Google and the other search engines are starting to place more emphasis on social signals – so each tweet, mention, Facebook like or Google+ share is an additional signal, all pointing in your direction!

Generate more high quality inbound links

If your guest author promotes their post on their own blog or website, then you’ll get a good quality inbound link from that promotion. Even if you only get one link from them, it’ll be a high quality link (good anchor text, from an authoritative site, on a relevant page with relevant content surrounding it), so it’s worth it. Lots of these individual links soon grows to a wide and diverse link portfolio for your blog.

Attract a new wave of visitors to your blog

In an ideal world, your guest blogger will be well known in their industry, and have a loyal base of regular readers already. This is a great way of adding value to your blog, so when they promote their guest post to their readers, you’re essentially driving traffic from their site to yours. Even if you only get a few of those readers to come back to your blog again, you’ve managed to successfully increase your readership.
If you’re struggling with generating enough content for your blog, or you just want someone to manage the proces for you, please get in touch, or read about our Content Marketing services. Alternatively, if you’re an active blogger and fancy writing a guest post for SMEketing, get in touch!

We’ve learnt that the slow and steady way of doing things brings better results and these results tend to be more long standing. Anything that resembles grey or black hat SEO is something that we avoid like the plague, and we tend to feel that SEO tools fall into the area of grey/black hat SEO.

Panda

In the last 6 months, since the Google Panda algorithm update, these old school SEO ways have really been proved to be the way to do things if you want to comply with Google and the direction they’re taking search. The methods of taking an article, using software to sphinn it into many different (badly written) versions, then uploading it en-mass to hundreds of different article marketing sites used to work quite effectively, but these article sites are slowly but surely being wiped out as a result of the Panda update. The links that these sites provided are now longer not worth very much at all, and in some cases can damage the websites they’re linking to, purely from association.

The Panda update works to ignore or discount any content that has been written with the sole purpose of generating inbound links. Rubbish content that made little sense and that had little value has now been assigned to the Google spam bin and the sites that used extensive article marketing tactics to falsely boost their search engine rankings have also met sharp, swift drop in ranks. In addition, smaller websites with little or no content have also had drops in their rankings.

While there are many SEO agencies that have had big problems as a result of the Panda update, it is clear to those who always subscribed to white hat tactics that these questionable methods of promoting your website and building links will always be spotted, highlighted and punished by all the major search engines (it’s not just Google that hates spam).

The Panda update was one of the largest algorithm updates Google have made to date, and since that update six months ago, they’ve gone on to make further, additional changes and updates again. This is a clear indication of the path Google are on – they’re taking black and grey hat SEO seriously, and are on a mission to punish those that use them. Users of automated SEO software should be wary.

Why risk it?

If you value your website, and the impact it has on your business, you should think carefully about the methods you use to market it. A lot of automated SEO tools offer short, sharp results, which might initially seem great, but will in the long term will become worthless at best, damaging at worst. Why waste your time carrying out tactics that will have no (or a negative) impact in the long term. Take your time to carry out effective, SEO that will help bolster your site from now until forever.

So in no particular order, here are the things we like to do on a daily/every other day or at least once a week…

• Check Google Analytics: Ensure there’s no unusual activity (which can be a good or bad thing!)
• Log into Google and Bing Webmaster Tools: Quick check to ensure there are no crawling errors, jumps in page load speeds, broken links etc
• Check any paid advertising campaigns (such as Google AdWords, Facebook/LinkedIn ads): Review the click through rates (CTR) of keywords and adverts (particularly any new adverts you may be testing), adjust any bids or budgets, add any new negative keywords you may have recently thought of
• Check your presence on social media sites – Twitter, Facebook, Linked, blogs: Review and reply to any mentions, comments etc, engage with other users, make a useful contribution
• Read through any new articles you have loaded in Google Reader: This is a great way to keep up to date on a range of blogs – just add any RSS feeds to Reader and go through it on a daily basis
• Browse through your competitor sites: Are they up to anything new/interesting. A good way to monitor this is to set up Google Alerts with their name, then any new activity from them can either be emailed to you, or added to your Google Reader account
• Have a quick check of the rankings of your major keywords you may be working on: Although rankings do fluctuate on a regular basis and you shouldn’t rely on a small number of keywords, but giving these a quick check can alert you to any issues early on (remember to turn off personalised search!)
• Have a bit of an explore around your website: Check that everything is working as it should, forms are working, links are working etc

Are there any other checks you do on a daily basis? Share your ideas in the comments below.

If you need any advice on what these check are and how to do them, please have a browse through our blog or get in touch; email info@SMEketing.com.

However, the world of SEO can be a confusing, complicated and complex place for even the most seasoned SEO’ers. This is mainly because there’s a lot of good and bad information out there. Since there’s no official ‘Google Approved Indepth SEO Best Practice Guide’ that covers everything, it’s left up to people who work in the field to promote what they think works, what doesn’t and what you should and shouldn’t do. The problem is there’s a lot of ‘experts’ out there who just want your money and are peddling a load of old tosh.

So we wanted to list the top 5 SEO myths that we still get asked about today, hopefully these should help give SEO beginners a slightly better head start:

Myth 1: Google PageRank is an effective way to measure SEO results

Google PageRank is an old measure that Google used to use to rank webpages on a scale of 1-10. Whilst it’s accurate to say that Google uses PageRank to rank webpages, it’s not true to say that it’s an accurate way to measure your SEO results. PageRank is just one of hundreds of indicators Google uses to rank pages. In fact it’s such a small measure that they’ve even taken it out of the Google Webmaster Tools. Also, the PageRank that you see in your toolbar is most likely not the actual PageRank Google are using – they only update these 2-3 times a year, so you’ll see an old rank as opposed to what they use in their algorithm

Myth 2: SEO is a one off job

Search engine optimisation can be split into two parts – on page optimisation and off page optimisation. On page may or may not be a one time activity, depending on the size of your website and how often you update it. However, the off page part of SEO is a long and ongoing process. This generally refers to the link building aspect of SEO – getting high quality links pointing to your site. This is a job that requires constant attention. Even if you are ranked number 1 for your desired keywords, who knows what your competitors are up to – all it takes is a bit of effort on their side to knock you off. Or what happens if your industry changes and your main keyword isn’t such a strong industry term anymore? You should never rely on just one or two main keywords. Try to optimise your site and your inbound links around a variety of similar terms.

Myth 3: You need to manually submit your site to the major search engines (and pay an SEO to do it!)

Think about what a search engine is …. it ‘searches’ for websites. So you really think you need to tell them that you’ve got a new site? Search engine robots constantly crawl the Internet looking for new pages and websites. They use the network of links to go from page to page, site to site. So if your new page or site has a link to it, the chances are the search engines will find it.

However, you can help the process along – register with Google Webmaster Tools and submit an xml sitemap – that’s effectively telling Google what pages you have on your website. If you’re going to do anything – do that. Don’t pay someone to ‘submit your website to all the top search engines’ – it’s a scam.

Myth 4: Optimising your meta keyword tags will give you amazing rankings

You may have heard about the wonderful meta keyword tag – where you insert a load of keyword relevant to your site and Google will instantly rank you for those terms. We wish. Google have been quite outspoken about how they do not use the meta keyword tag in their algorithm any more. Even the meta description won’t affect your rankings (although it may affect your click through rate as this is what’s shown in the search results as the description of your page – and the higher your click through rate, the better your page is in terms of Google’s eyes, so that’ll help your rankings)

Myth 5: You need to have a certain number of keyword in your copy

Search engines have hundreds of ways of understanding what a page is about and how relevant it is to a particular search query. Obviously having the relevant keyword on the page is going to help, but taking time and effort to make sure you have exactly and 8% ratio is a waste of time. It’s much better to write a high quality page, with useful information that will help the reader. If you’re worried about keywords on your page, make sure you’ve got them in your main headers and in the title tag.

What other myths have you heard? Let us know in the comments below!

The alternative is white hat SEO, which are the techniques that are approved by the search engines – and although these may take longer to produce results, these results are usually longer lasting and higher quality.

There’s no definitive list of black hat SEO techniques, but basically it’s anything that makes you feel uncomfortable, anything that leads to a poor user experience, and anything that is done with the sole purpose of manipulating the search results. At SMEketing, we always tell our clients that if it feels like you’re trying to cheat your way to higher search results, then it’s probably black hat SEO and should be avoided.

So what are the most common black hat techniques you should avoid?

1. Hiding Text or Links
   This can be done by making the text the same colour as the background (i.e. white text on a white background), making the font size 0, or by using code to hide it (such as hiding the text under a layer and by using “no frame” or by placing content in “no script” sections).
2. Duplicate Content
   This was something that the recent Google Panda algorithm update tried to eliminate – removing sites from the search results that copied and scraped content from other sites. So make sure you don’t copy content from other websites. If Google has crawled the site with the original content already, they’ll know that your version isn’t the original and could penalise you for it. If you’re using a Content Management System (CMS) for your website, make sure you add duplicate content to your robots.txt file (i.e. blog posts that could be found via a date search/category search etc).
3. Meta Description and Title Tag Stuffing
   Find out how to correctly create effective meta titles and descriptions here: Website Meta Descriptions and Website Title Tags. Generally the rule is that stuffing these with keywords and variations of keywords is black hat. It looks spammy and doesn’t add anything to the user experience. The meta keyword tag can also be open to abuse, but this is something that the major search engines don’t take into account when ranking web pages (spamming or no spamming) – but it’s best to avoid keyword stuffing it anyway.
4. Cloaking
   This is something that you’ve likely come across when searching yourself. When you click on a search results, the page/content you see will be different to what the search engine crawled. This is done using a technique called service side scripting.  It’s black hat because it’s deceiving the search engines and providing a poor quality experience for the visitor. How many times have you clicked on a search result that looks spot on, only to find that the page you go to is completely different and irrelevant? And what do you do? Hit the back button – so it’s not even a technique that results in high quality visits anyway.
5. Article Spinning
   This refers to the technique of taking an article (or other content) from someone else’s website, then changing it slightly so that it’s not a duplicate copy. This is normally done using software and the results are usually very poor.
6. Link Farming
   This is when you create lots of different websites across different domains, then link out to each other to give each site extra links and link juice. Link farms also refer to directory style sites that consist of nothing more than a list of (often paid) links. These should have no place in your link building strategy since they are such poor quality links and Google may even penalise you for having them (especially paid links).
7. Spam in Comments
   This is usually done in blog posts – people seem to think that writing a spammy comment and leaving a link will give them some kind of SEO boost. In reality most blogs use the nofollow attribute in their comments and many blogs will automatically remove spam comments. Either way, they’re not a good advert for your company.

So there they are, our top 7 (yes, we know 7 is a random number for a list but that’s just how we roll!).

Have you seen any other black hat SEO techniques being used? Help us boost this list to 10 – leave your observations in the comments below!