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.
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.
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.
Continuing with our blog series on meta tags, this post looks at the meta description. The meta description tag plays an important part in optimising your site (SEO) and a crucial role in gaining click throughs from the search results.
The meta description tag is a piece of hidden HTML coding (known as a tag) that allows some search engines to display a description of your site in search results.
You will normally find the meta description within the < head > tags, just below the title tag. The code will look like this:
<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”The description of your web page will go here”>
Your meta description will most often be shown in the search results:
Google will normally show the meta description if it feels it is relevant to the searchers query (which if your page is relevant to the search query and is being shown in the search results, hopefully your meta description is an accurate account of what can be found on that page, so Google will most likely always show your meta description). If you don’t have a meta description, Google will extract a piece of text from your page and display that.
The meta description can play an important part in getting searchers to click on your page within the results. Just because you’re on the first page of search results, it doesn’t guarantee you any clicks. You have to compel people to click on your page and not the other 9 (or other 10 or so paid listings). This is where the meta description comes in handy. You should try and craft a description with a strong call to action. Linking the content to the title tag content is also a good way to reinforce your message. Have these two tags working together to persuade people to click. If you can get some keywords in here, that’s great. You’ll notice in the search engine results that the terms you’ve searched will be highlighted in bold in the search results. So if you have some keywords in your meta description (and title tag), then these will be made bold if they match the search query.
It’s a good idea to try and keep the meta description to within 150 characters. Different search engines display different amount of text in their results, but if you keep it to within 150, then you’ll generally be covered in all.
If you need any help crafting some effective meta tags, please get in touch with a member of the SMEketing team.
One of the most basic, but important things you can do for your website (in terms of search engine optimisation – SEO), is to ensure that each and every page has its own unique, keyword rich title tag .
The title tag can be found at the top of your source code within the < title > and < /title > tags (on a web page, click on View > Source Code to view the page code).
Where will I see my title tag?
The page title will be shown within your site in the web browser here:
It is also shown within the search results here:
Because the title tag is shown in the search result pages, creating a well crafted title could also lead to an increased click through rate.
What should I include in my title tag?
We’d recommend a mixture of your company name and keywords. If you’re targeting a specific geographical area, include this as well. It’s important to remember that search engines only display a certain number of characters within your title. It varies between search engines, but if you aim to keep your title under 70 characters you’ll be fine.
For example, if you were an accounting firm in Fareham in Hampshire called Bill & Ben, you would may want to include your company name, your target area of Hampshire, as well as some keywords (which you would have hopefully researched already!). If you’re aware that the term ‘book-keeping’ and ‘tax returns’ are two of your major keywords, you could craft a title that looks like:
Bill & Ben Tax Accountants Hampshire
or you could have
Bill & Ben Book-Keeping Accountants Hampshire
However, you could try and fit it all in:
Bill & Ben Accountants – Tax Returns & Book-Keeping Hampshire
or
Tax Returns & Book-Keeping Hampshire > Bill & Ben Accounting Fareham
You can seperate or split the title using various characters. The common ones are: – > and |. There’s no “correct” one to use. Sometimes a ‘|’ might be better to split up different subjects such as ‘Tax Accountants | Book-Keeping’. Whereas a ‘>’ can be better when the next section follows on from the first, i.e. ‘Hampshire Accountants > Bill & Ben’.
You can use proper sentences if you like ‘Bill & Ben are Hampshire based accountants’ would also work well.
Try not to get into the trap of spending hours fiddling and obsessing over your title tags. Just make sure they make sense, conveys the content on the page well, and include your desired keywords.
If you’re ranking well for a particular search term, but you’re not getting a lot of clicks, it could be that your title tag isn’t compelling enough. Sometimes it can take a bit of testing and tweaking to get it right.
Our next post will be focusing on another important website tag – the meta description!
Until then, cheerio. If you have any questions or comments regarding your title tags, or if you’ve seen a vast improvement in your rankings because of changes you made to your title tags – let us know in the comments below, or email us on info@SMEketing.com.
This final post in the six part series looks at how you can measure your SEO campaign. Like any marketing activity, you must measure and track progress if you are to ascertain the level of success. Using a tool such as Google Analytics, will give you the statistics required to measure the changes, improvement and success of your website.
What should you track?
Search engine referrals: What search engines are sending visitor to your site and what keywords are being used to find your site?
Other referrals: What other sites are directing visitors to your site? This will show you where your valuable links are coming from. For example, seeing that 10% of your traffic came via your articles on eZine may prompt you to boost your article marketing campaign
Returning Vs Unique Visitors: Are most of your new, unique visits, or are they returning visitors? This metric will show you how often people are coming back to your site – if you have a site that consistently produces regular content, you will want to see a high number of people returning to your site to read it
Entry and exit pages: What pages do most people land on when they arrive at your site, and what are the pages that people are leaving from. If a lot of visitors leave from a key page, you may want to think about amending that page to try and reduce that figure
Pathways: What path do visitors take when they’re on your site? Ideally you should create a ‘funnel’ where people land on a specific page and are guided through your site to the desired action page (such as a checkout or the Contact Us form). Understanding the path people take will help you improve the usability and conversion rate of your site
Popular Pages: What pages are viewed most on your site? You can use this information to improve other pages that aren’t so well visited.
Of course the main thing you need to track are your conversions, and the route leading up to those conversions – what keyword was used, what search engine, what entry path did they take, what pages did they visit, how long did they stay on your site, were they a new or a returning visitor? Tracking your success will help you build a stronger, more focused campaign.
However, it’s equally important to measure failure – what isn’t working, what pages have a high bounce rate, what keywords have a high bounce rate, what article got no views at all etc… These are all important metrics that can be used to enhance your campaign plan.
So that’s it – the six part series explaining the basics of SEO is over. If you have any questions, please get in touch or leave us a comment. At SMEketing we’re passionate about search engine optimisation; if you feel we could help you and your site, please get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.
Part five part of this six part blog series on SEO explains how you can build up the number of links pointing to your site.
This is a common problem businesses have – how can you increase the number of links pointing to your site. We’ve already established that link farms and reciprocal linking is a big no no. So what other options do you have available?
Here are a list of link building ideas:
Blogging: Good quality blog posts help to build links, as other bloggers may link to them. You can also register your blog with RSS feed directories and submit each blog post to social bookmarking sites (such as Digg, StumbleUpon etc)
Social Media: Social media is becoming more prevalent in marketing than ever. It’s not clear yet exactly how much weigh the search engines will place on the links resulting from sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn etc, but it’s still a very worthwhile area to invest some time in. There are many more benefits to social media than just link building
Press Releases: Creating optimised press releases and submitting them to online newswires are an excellent way of generating a high volume of good quality links
Article Marketing: Creating well written and well optimised articles and submitting them to sites like eZine and GoArticle will help generate not only good quality links, but click throughs from reputable sources
Carrying on with this seven part series, this post looks at the elements you can utilise to optimise your site. There are many critical components involved in optimising a website – your goal is to ensure your site has the best chance of being crawled, indexed and ranked by search engines spiders. It’s important to build a good quality, well optimised site to help it get ranked for your chosen keywords.
Below are the main areas that are involved in optimising a site:
Design: Ensuring that the graphical elements and layout combine to create a user friendly and search engine friendly website
Information Architecture: Creating a search engine friendly organisational hierarchy
URLs and Meta Details: Creating descriptive URLs and unique, keyword rich meta details
Navigation: Creating a navigation system that guides users easily through both top level and deep pages. This also includes the use of breadcrumbs, alt tags for images and well written anchor text
Functionality: Ensure that all tools, scripts, images and links function as intended
Accessibility: Focusing on removing broken links and ensuring that content is visible and accessible in all browsers and without special actions
Content/Copy: Ensuring content is optimised with 3-5% keywords, keyphrases and synonyms, uses keyterms in relevant placing within the copy and has correct use of H1 and H2 headers
Creating Quality Content
The phrase ‘Content is King’ could not be truer for SEO. At the end of the day, search engines want to produce a list of high quality, relevant pages to their searchers. What makes a good quality site – one with hardly any content that is never updated, or a huge site with loads of fresh, new, unique content? What would you rather spend time on?
Users will probably enjoy spending time on a site if it is full of good content. Likewise, good quality content also helps to generate links – helping the popularity of your site even further.
For more information on why quality content is important, read these blog posts (they are based around how blogs can help you create content, but also include details of why and how fresh content helps your site in terms of SEO):
Part five will be published on Wednesday and will discuss how you can build links for your site. Make sure to come back and read it! As always, any comments are apprecitated!
Visit 
This final post in the six part series looks at how you can measure your SEO campaign. Like any marketing activity, you must measure and track progress if you are to ascertain the level of success. Using a tool such as Google Analytics, will give you the statistics required to measure the changes, improvement and success of your website.
Part five part of this six part blog series on SEO explains how you can build up the number of links pointing to your site.
Carrying on with this seven part series, this post looks at the elements you can utilise to optimise your site. There are many critical components involved in optimising a website – your goal is to ensure your site has the best chance of being crawled, indexed and ranked by search engines spiders. It’s important to build a good quality, well optimised site to help it get ranked for your chosen keywords.
