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.

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!

So what is Panda and how will it affect the search results? Well in a nutshell, Panda was designed to try and eliminate low quality pages and sites from the search results. These sites include those that scrape content from other websites, farm links and generally provide a low quality service to visitors.

If you notice a sudden drop in traffic levels to your site, it could be that you’ve been affected by this update. If you work hard to create useful, unique, valuable content then you should be okay. However, if you feel you’ve been negatively affected and aren’t deserving of it, you can add a post with your details to this Google Webmaster Forum thread.

In the meantime have a look through your website:

• Is all your content original?
• Can visitors navigate their way around your site easily?
• Have you updated your site recently?
• Are all your pages useful and engaging?

If you think you’ve been affected by Panda, get in touch. We can have a quick look through your site and give you some pointers to help improve it.

Wikipedia gives a good description of a bounce rate:

Bounce rate (sometimes confused with exit rate) is an Internet marketing term used in web traffic analysis. It represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and “bounce” (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site.

The formula used to calculate bounce rate is:

Bounce rate = total number of visits viewing only one page / total number of visits

The bounce rate is really the easiest web stat to understand, and can be the best starting place when looking to improve the performance of your website.

First, list all your landing pages (the pages people land on when they arrive at your site) with the highest bounce and look at the keywords people use to arrive at these pages. Do these correspond with the content on the page? Where do you think you should be putting these keywords? In the header, the title tag, the copy. By doing this, people will feel reassured that they are on a relevant page and are more likely to stay put. Sometimes just making some minor changes like this can have a big affect on your bounce rate.

Other factors that may cause a high bounce rate are:

• Slow loading pages: Who wants to hang around for a page to load?
• Cluttered pages: We like to see well designed, clean web pages
• High number of adverts: If you include adverts on your website, make sure they’re relevant, well designed and kept to a minimum. You don’t want to run the risk of looking like a spam site
• Poor navigation: Is this a standalone page? Many landing pages for PPC (such as Google AdWords) have their navigation removed as part of the landing page strategy (to help boost conversions). However, this might not work for your industry or service/product and is something you should test

So what else can you do to improve your bounce rate?

• Test everything! Test your copy, your headers, your images. Test anything that you think will have an impact on your bounce rate
• Do you have a video or music that plays automatically? This can really put people off so think about removing it. Not everyone will be in an environment that can accommodate sound (i.e. public transport, a busy office, a sleeping baby next-door!)
• Think about the images you use. Are they relevant to that particular page? Are they high quality images or cheap looking ones taken from ClipArt?
• Test your website and key landing pages in a variety of browsers and versions of browsers. If you look at what browsers people actually use to visit your website you’d probably be surprised at how many people are still using really old, dated versions
• Stay above the fold. The ‘fold’ is the area of the website that you can see in your monitor without scrolling. Taken from the times when people used to buy newspapers (which they still do, but not so much!), the fold was the section of newspaper that people could see when it was sat on the newspaper stand. It was important that headlines and images grabbed people and convinced them to buy. The same theory goes for your website – what can people see without scrolling? Is it relevant and pleasing on the eye?
• Are you in an industry that uses specific language or jargon? Slipping in some relevant terminology from the start will show your visitors you know what you’re talking about
• How is your content laid out? Are you using nice small, bite-sized paragraphs, headers and bullets? People get put off by large chunks of text
• Either keep your content up to date or remove dates from your site. It can put people off if they land on a page that’s dated three years ago

If you want any help improving the performance of your website, please get in touch. We love working on websites and seeing their sales and leads increase as a result of our advice and work. Give us a call on 023 8083 7271 or email us on info@SMEketing.com. Alternatively, leave us some questions in the comments below and we’ll answer them straight away!

However, this wasn’t just some minor tweak. Taken from the official Google Blog:

Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking–a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries–and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites–sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites–sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

So basically, Google are saying that they want to reward websites with high quality, unique content which offers value to site visitors. This is what we’ve been preaching at SMEketing since we started – content is king!

For now, Google are only launching this new change in the US, but you can be sure it will soon roll out over their other Google sites – including the UK soon. Fingers crossed high quality sites will see their position boosted whilst we’ll see a reduction in the number of spam sites, such as content farms, in the search results.

If you need help with SEO, be it creating high quality content, optimising your website or building high quality links, please get in touch today for a free consultation or written proposal.

You might think that it’s easy to select a few, well targeted keywords, but in reality you need to make sure you target keywords that are not only relevant and achievable, but will also bring in high quality traffic.

So think about:

• Relevant keywords: The keywords you target should always be relevant to your business, your products/services and your website
• Use phrases: The term ‘keyword’ can be misleading. It’s unlikely that you’ll have any success targeting a single word. Instead, think about phrases. For example, the word ‘marketing’ is not only too generic for SMEketing to target, but it’s so competitive we’d never get good enough rankings. And if we did, the traffic it would provide would be low quality, low converting visits. Instead something like ‘marketing in Hampshire’ would be better – more focused, less competitive and more likely to drive quality visits
• What would you/your customers/your prospects search: Think about what you would actually type into the search engine if you were looking for your business/service. Ask your current customers what they would search for too
• Local keywords: As in the example above, if geography is important to you, remember to add this into your keywords. But don’t be too specfic
• Number of keywords: Generally, you should optimise each page for one primary keyword, and maybe two or three secondary keywords

Once you’ve put together a list of potential keywords, go to the Google Keyword Tool and enter them in the box provided. The results will tell you how popular a particular keyword is as well as how competitive it is (this is based on Google AdWords rather than organic searches, but you can bet that if companies are bidding on these keywords within AdWords, they’ll be optimising their site for them too). You can also see the number of searches within the UK – just set the ‘Local Results’ to google.co.uk.

As well as giving you information regarding the keywords you’ve entered, it will also give you some additional suggestions that you may have not thought of.

Hopefully, this information will help you narrow down your keyword list to a manageable size. Next you have to select the ones you want to work with. You will need to consider:

• Conversion Rate: The percent of users searching with the term/phrase that you know converts (a conversion would be to make a purchase, an enquiry, download a brochure, sign up to your newsletter, etc.)
• Predicted Traffic: An estimate of how many users will be searching for the given term/phrase each month
• Value per Customer: An average amount of revenue earned per customer using the term or phrase to search – comparing big-ticket search terms vs. smaller ones.
• Keyword Competition: A rough measurement of the competitive environment and the level of difficulty for the given term/phrase.

There’s little point optimising pages for terms that have a low level of competition (so a high chance you’ll achieve a good position), but which are unlikely to convert into sales or leads. You want to have a good balance between the above points – keywords which aren’t so competitive you don’t stand a chance, with a high level of traffic and with a good chance of converting into a high value sale.

Obviously you can’t always strike the perfect balance. But undertaking keyword research will put you in a better position to target keywords that will work for your website. It can be a fine balancing act and you may have to sacrifice traffic volume for quality – but that’s so often the case. Quality and quantity is the goal, but for now, quality over quantity is what will help your website succeed.

Have you got any other keyword research tips? Let us know and leave them in the comments below.

You can check the loading time of your website in your Google Webmaster Tools account (which will also tell you whether its performing well compared to other sites), or you can use free online tools like http://tools.pingdom.com/.

So what steps can you take to ensure your site loads as fast as possible?

• Reduce the size of your images: Having lots of large images on your site will slow it down. Make sure you’re using small file-types such as .gif’s and keep the size to a minimum. There are free services such as http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/imageoptimizer/ which will reduce the size of your images for you
• Keep images to a minimum: Don’t use images to display text – this is bad in terms of load speed, but also SEO. Search engines can’t crawl text built into images, so you may be harming your site by adding text this way. Using CSS you can pretty much make text look anyway you want to anyway, so there’s no need to use images to present text
• Avoid tables: Use DIVs for layout if possible
• Keep your CSS and Script files externally: Try not to include your Javascript or CSS code in your HTML documents. Create separate files and then call out to them when you need to
• Clean up your code: You can use free tools like CSS Tidy and Clean CC to help clean up your code. Remember to take a backup of your files before you start optimising though – you don’t want to accidentally ‘tidy away’ some key bits of code!
• Use trailing slashes: This is just a small one but it helps. If you have a folder called ‘blog’, link to http://www.SMEketing.com/blog/ instead of http://www.SMEketing.com/blog
• Avoid excessive use of flash: Flash isn’t the demon it used to be, but try not to go OTT. Heavy usage will seriously slow your site down
• Invest in a good quality hosting provider: Sometimes the cheapest isn’t always the best.

Have you ever had any issues with load speeds? Have you got any other suggestions? Let us know in the comments below.

Anyone can easily set up their own blog nowadays – free blogging sites like Blogger and WordPress make it easy to create good looking, functional blogs. The introduction of AdSense from Google in 2003 provided bloggers with a form on income but have also made it far more competitive.

So, what does it take to become a successful blogger?

Setting Your Objectives
You must understand why you are blogging in the first place – what are you going to write about and who is your target audience. Some of the most successful blogger (such as Darren Rowse from Digital Photography School and Perez Hilton) have a very particular audience that they write for. People looking for fantastic photography tips will know to go to Darren’s blog, whereas someone looking for the latest gossip on Brad Pitt would go to Perez.

Know Who Your Readers Are
What are your readers expecting? And are you giving it to them? Readers want more than just an essay on a topic – they want personal opinions, humour, good writing, something unique and useful. A good way of finding out what your readers want is to monitor and reply to any comment that you get.

Effective Blog Design
The design of your blog is an extremely important part of blogging. A professional looking design is necessary if you want to instil a sense of trust to your readers and convince them that your blog is a quality blog that they should spend time reading. Your choice of template/design should reflect the content of your blog – if you’re blogging about photographs, you shouldn’t have a blog template covered in images of lipsticks and pretty pink things (which would be suitable for a blog on beauty products).

Use Of Appropriate Images
Images are vital in blogs, as they say ’a picture is worth a thousand words’, You need to ensure that you select appropriate images that match your blog post – these can be pictures, graphs, illustrations or screenshots.

Writing Style
You might find that you end up typing blog posts very quickly – if it’s a subject you’re passionate about you’ll find that your fingers might not be able to type quick enough! This is great, but it’s important to go back and check your posts before you publish. Blogs can often be more relaxed in their tone, but readers still expect a piece of well structured writing with good spelling and grammar.

Functionality and Optimisation
Optimising your blog so that it can perform well in the search engines is important if you want to pick up traffic from this medium. Make sure your blog can be indexed by the major search engines and that it has good architecture and navigation. However, a well designed blog, with unique, useful content will more than likely do well in the search engines naturally. Content is king, and blogs are an excellent way of hosting a large amount of high quality content. Keeping the optimisation of your blog in the back of your mind can’t hurt though – ensuring you’ve got good internal linking, title tags other on-page optimisation ticked off can only help you do even better in the search engines.

If you’d like any help blogging in 2011, get in touch with us today – call 023 8083 7271 or email info@SMEketing.com

Quantity
All things being equal, the more links the better. However, things are rarely (if ever) equal. So the advice is to build as many links as possible, however some links are pretty worthless (such as those found on link farms, mass directories etc), so it’s best to make the best use of your time by focusing on those that will give you the most benefit.

Quality
What makes a quality link? This is a pretty broad area, but basically you want to get a link from a high quality site (i.e. an established site, not some spammy directory), and one that is relevant to your industry. A link on a very focused page from a high quality website is worth a lot. Just think ‘focus’ – you want a link from a relevant industry website, on a page focused on your particular service/product, within a paragraph that’s talking about what you do.

Position
Where are all the other links of the page situated? Are they right next to yours? Where is your link? Closer to the top and sitting on its own it the best.

Keywords
Do you have keywords in the anchor text of your link? Having your URL or a simple ‘Click here’ isn’t great since it doesn’t tell Google any additional information about your website. A link like ‘Southampton Marketing Agency‘ is worth far more to SMEketing than just our URL listed somewhere.

Dilution
The more links on a page, the less yours is worth. Links pass ‘link juice’ to the pages they link to… so the more links, the less ‘juice’ you get. So try and get a link on a page that only has a few links (internal links are included in this too).

Nofollow
This is an attribute that many websites use to stop the flow of the above mentioned ‘link juice’. Many social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and comments within blogs and forums use this attribute within their link tag. It looks like: rel=nofollow. It stops people from spamming sites and means that you don’t get any SEO benefit from that link.

Link building is something that you must be continually working on – it’s not enough to build 1000 quality links and then sit back and relax… because it’s likely your competitors are still link building. The Internet is constantly changing and you must keep up in order to build and maintain a strong position with the major search engines.

There’s a lot to learn with SEO, if you want more information, or are interested in registering for an SEO workshop, please get in touch – info@SMEketing.com.

However, what pretty much all our customer have in common is the desire to increase their keyword ranks in the major search engines. A lot of people think this is the be all and end all of SEO – and don’t get us wrong, it’s important to rank well for your valuable terms. However, here at SMEketing, we like to also focus on conversions. There is no point getting visitors to your website if they don’t take the desired action.

Creating onsite conversions is a massively important part of SEO, and it’s a part that a lot of SEO providers forget about (or just don’t bother with). But we feel we’d be doing an injustice to our clients if we helped them get more relevant traffic, only to let them fall at the last hurdle.

One of the key parts of getting visitors to convert is to create effective call to actions. You need to sit down and think about your website visitors:

• Who are they?
• Where did they come from?
• What do they want from your website?
• What do they want from you?
• What stage of the sales cycle will they be at?
• What information do they need in order to reach the next stage of the sales cycle?

Not all your visitors will want the same thing – therefore you have to create call to actions that target as many different visitor types as possible. Some may be at the buying stage, so a ‘Buy now’ action might work for them, however others may still be researching, so a ’Download the brochure’ button will be more appropriate.

Understanding who your website visitors are is part one of the conversion process. Part two is deciding what actions you want them to take. So many websites have a simple ‘Contact Us’ as their main call to action. But this is known to be one of the lowest converting actions. So you need to think about what you actually need from your website visitors – is it literally just their contact details so you can call them up for a chat? Or do you need more information so to qualify them before you make contact. Or do you want them to make a purchase there and then?

Knowing what you need from your visitors as well as understanding what your vistors want, can help you craft effective call to actions.

So what are some popular call to actions you can use? In no order of preference, here are some ideas for you:

• Contact us
• Request a quote
• Sign up for a free trial
• Download a … (could be a brochure, white paper, factsheet etc)
• Buy now
• Order now and receive…
• Download now
• View demo
• Request a call back
• Call us
• Offer expires 31st January
• Take a Tour
• Register for our webinar
• Request a call back

The list is endless, but the goal is to create a call to action that is:

• Easy to understand: Visitors need to understand exactly what they’re getting, where they’ll be taken and what they have to do when they click on your call to action link
• Action orientated: You need to tell people what to do. Don’t pussy foot around the subject – be direct!
• Compelling:If the offer isn’t interesting or desirable, your call to action will not work. This is why the ‘Contact Us’ is such a poorly converting request. It’s not compelling in the slightest!

Once you’ve crafted your call to actions, you then need to think about how and where you’ll place them. It’s always best to have them as a link within the text of your copy and as a nice shiny, bold button.

The art of creating effective looking call to action buttons is something that takes a lot of trial and testing. It’s a huge subject – if you’re interested in finding out more about the design side of things visit: Call to Action Buttons: Examples and Best Practices by Smashing Mag – they are a fantastic resource and you may well end up spending hours on their site!!

Have you experimented and tested the call to actions on your website? What results have you seen – let us know in the comments!