If you’re not aware of Google Instant, here’s a summary:

Google Instant is being rolled out in the US this week and will come to the rest of the world in the coming months. This new way of searching is causing rather a lot of stir at the moment. Many people are saying that this is the closest any search engine has come to reading searcher’s minds! It’s goal it to provide you with the results the moment you begin typing!

“I think it’s a little bit of a new dawn in computing,”Google co-founder Sergey Brin stated during a press conference on Wednesday.

So what does it mean to you and your business website? Well, you will soon start to see evolving search results that can change -potentially even as often as you type each additional character, into the search box.

Google will (try to) guess exactly what you’re searching for by filling out the predicted search term in grey. Underneath that that there will be a dropdown box where Google will supply you with some additional suggested queries.

By speeding up the delivery of search results, Google believes it will keep its users happier and if they are happier, they hope they are more likely to search even more (which is good for Google because they get to serve ads on each query, which means potential for them to increase their revenue)

During the release, they announced that they expect to reduce the time that people collectively spend on its search engine by about 350 million hours annually – all due to Google Instant!

Google outlined what they felt the benefits to Google Instant would be to a searcher:

Faster Searches: By predicting your search and showing results before you finish typing, Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search.

Smarter Predictions: Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, predictions help guide your search. The top prediction is shown in grey text directly in the search box, so you can stop typing as soon as you see what you need.

Instant Results: Start typing and results appear right before your eyes. Until now, you had to type a full search term, hit return, and hope for the right results. Now results appear instantly as you type, helping you see where you’re headed, every step of the way.”

You can find out more about Google Instant here: www.google.com/instant/.

So a lot of people in the world of search engine optimisation are worried by this new development. Any changes Google makes to its search function can cause issues to those marketing websites, but these are unlikely to ever kill off SEO for good!

No matter what Google does with the way it delivers search results, a good website needs to be optimised in order to be one of the sites it presents. You need to have a search engine friendly site – that’s the bottom line. It’s that simple.

Google associate Matt Cutts has commented on these new changes and the impact this will have for website owners: “The search results will remain the same for a query, but it’s possible that people will learn to search differently over time, For example, I was recently researching a congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson’s blog that had been on page 2 of the search results.”

So Google have clearly stated that rankings will stay the same with Google Instant.

We should also remember that Google Instant is not going to be mandatory; this is going to be something that people will be able to switch off. In doing so, they will leave themselves open to Google’s standard results.

If you want to learn more about Google Instant, you can view this official video:

We’re interested to see how popular Google Instant will be. We often say that online marketing is all about making sure you make it as easy and simple for your website visitors as possible. We often refer to searchers (ourselves included) as ‘lazy’.

People don’t want to have to work hard when they’re surfing – they want to:

• Type a search query that takes them straight to a relevant result,
• Once they click on that result they want to see instantly that yes, this is what they’re looking for
• They then want to have the information presented to them in a clear and obvious way
• Finally they then want to be told what action to take next

So people are lazy (or just very spoilt nowadays when it comes to the rich resource of information we have via the Internet). At SMEketing, we feel that Google Instant is just another way to make it a bit easier for us lazy searchers! So things could be getting faster and easier for us Googlers.

However, another bonus of Google Instant is that it’ll open us up to new ideas for search queries relating to our search. What this means for businesses is that you’ll need to have regular, unique content on your site, full of up-to-date information and jam packed full of long and short tail keywords.

If you are considering employing some SEO for your site, now is actually the perfect time. Whenever Google makes a change businesses often scramble to update and optimise their website; this bout of activity could either be an opportunity for you to join in and get some optimisation done or it could be what causes your rankings to potentially drop. Please note Google Instant won’t cause your rankings to drop on its own – it’s the flurry of optimisation by others whenever Google makes a change. Don’t let your competitors out-rank you on Google!

Not sure if SEO is for you? Request an SEO consultation to find out!

Happy Googling!

A conversion is an action you want someone to take on your site. There are a range of conversions that you might want to track – such as when a visitor downloads an ebook, registers for an event, signs up to your newsletter or makes a purchase.

When you create a goal in Google Analytics, you are effectively telling it what your desired conversions are. When you get down to the nitty gritty; goal conversion are really the primary metric for measuring how well your site fulfils business objectives. 

Setting up goals is easy. We’ll take you on a step by step walk through of setting up a goal – this example goal will be tracking when people complete a Contact Us form. All we need to know is the URL of the page people are taken to once they have completed the form. For this example we’ll use www.SMEketing.com/thank-you.html. Most goal pages should be pages people only get access to once they have completed an action. So they’re most often thank you pages – thank you for signing up to our newsletter/thank you for contacting us, we’ll be in touch shortly/thank you for buying our product… etc. It’s important that you know the page/URL you want to measure and that visitors can only access this page by completing the desired action.

So…

1. Log into your Analytics account – on the Overview page, select ‘Edit’ on the right hand side:

2. Scroll halfway down and click on ‘+ Add Goal’ (your goals can be split into four sets, each with 5 goals = 25 goals in total overall. The image below is selecting to create the first goal in set 2):

You will then be presented with the following page: 

Give your goal a name. For this example we can call it ‘Contact Form Completion’. Then select ‘URL Destination’.

You’ll be given some new fields to complete (below). In the Match Type field you can select either Head Match, Exact Match, or Regular Expression Match. You can find out more about the different type of matches here: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en_GB&answer=72286&utm_id=ad

Then enter in your goal URL, select if it is case sensitive or not, and then enter in a value for the goal. This is optional, but if you know that the conversion you’re tracking is worth a certain amount, it can help you get a better idea of the ROI you’re getting from your website.

If you have a specific sales funnel that you have created, you can set this up to be tracked also. For example, you may be directing people to a landing page (via Google AdWords or some other form of online advertising), they then click on a call to action button which takes them to a page with a form, they then complete the form and are taken to the thank you page. So your funnel looks like:

1. www.SMEketing.com/landing-page.html
2. www.SMEketing.com/landing-page-contact.html
3. www.SMEketing.com/thank-you.html

The funnel section is optional. Once you’re happy, you can click on ‘Save Goal’ and you’re done!

Tracking Goal Conversions

You’ll be able to track your goal conversions throughout Analytics. You’ll see a special ‘Goals’ section in the menu where you can see all the information and statistics.

You’ll also be able to track the goals on various other pages. For example

• If you look at the Referring Sites report, you’ll be able to see how many goals were completed from traffic arriving from various sources.
  • Did Twitter send 100 people with 68 conversions? Then you know that you’re getting a good ROI from your social media. 
• Looking at the Browser report you’ll be able to see how many goals were completed by people using various browsers
  • Did more people using Firefox convert than Internet Explorer users? Maybe there’s an issue with your site in Internet Explorer?

Tracking conversions is an extremely important part of online marketing – if you can track what works and what doesn’t, how can you improve your marketing efforts?

As always with Google Analytics, this is a huge subject. If you have any questions about creating and monitoring goals, please leave a comment or email us on info@SMEketing.com.

1. Do not respond to any SEO offers you might receive over email: Now I’m talking specifically about the emails you get asking you to swap links or from companies telling you they can get your site 1000 new links for just £100. These are SPAM EMAILS!! They might sound like good ideas, but they’re not. Mass reciprocal link building is a waste of time and any company that will give you 1000 links for £100 is going to be giving you poor quality links that may harm your site. Also any company that promises to get you the number one spot on Google is lying. Don’t trust them!

2. Don’t wait too long to start your SEO campaign: SEO should be something that should be done before your site is even built! You need to think about navigation and site architecture when building your site – so SEO should be something you do from day one.

3. Don’t waste time submitting your site to search engines manually (or worse - pay someone to do it for you): Search engines work by sending out spiders (or bots) that crawl web pages using the hyperlink structure of the web. So as soon as your website gets a link from somewhere else, the spiders will follow that link to your site and as long as your site has been built well, they’ll crawl your pages and add them to their index. Manual search engine submission went out a long time ago! 

4. Don’t make your website uncrawlable: Following on from the above point, you need to ensure the search engine spiders can find and crawl all the pages on your website. So avoid having session IDs, huge dynamic URLs, using a complicated, messy navigation menu that spiders can’t (or won’t) follow, or developing an all-Flash, all-graphic, or all-AJAX site. If you are using a robot.txt file, make sure it has been created correctly.

5. Don’t focus on hugely generic search terms: If you’re a bakers in Southampton, don’t focus your efforts on trying to rank well for the term ‘baker’. It’s too generic. Optimise for relevant, targeted keywords and you’ll have more success.

6. Don’t keyword stuff: This is so last decade!! Keyword stuffing used to work back in the mid 1990’s when search engines were naive to the cheating/scamming nature of human beings. People stuffed their sites with keywords and came out tops. But search engines aren’t that stupid anymore! If you keywords stuff, hide text (by making it size 0, making it the same colour as your background etc) you’ll likely get penalised by the major search engines.

7. Don’t have the same title tag on every page: We’ve covered this before in this post: Top 10 SEO Mistakes Your Small Business Should Avoid  but it’s an important issue so it’s worth mentioning again. Each page should have its own keyword rich, relevant title – keep it to within 70 characters. Find out more about title tags in this post: Website Title Tags

8. Don’t think that your visitors don’t want fresh new content: Just because you might not get constant feedback, or because you think you’re in a boring industry, don’t make the mistake of thinking that fresh, new, useful content isn’t important. There are always things you can write about - it helps improve the quality of your site, improves the perception of your company and is a great way of boosting your search engine position.

9. Don’t use the same anchor text in all your inbound links: The anchor text of a link is the (commonly) blue text you click on. When requesting and building links, make sure that you mix this up a bit. Use keywords rather than just your URL or company name and make sure that you vary it a bit.

10. Don’t focus on Google PageRank: This used to be a metric people used to access the quality (in Google’s view) of a web page. However, Google have stated that this is no longer something that they place relevance on. The PageRank you now see in your tool bar is often months out of date and doesn’t affect your rankings like it used to. Google have even taken it out of their Webmaster Tools.

This list could go on and on! Your additions are welcome in the comments – what mistakes have you made/seen in the past?

Fixed Costs: The cost of search engine optimisation will stay the same, irrelevant of how many clicks and visits your website gets. Compared to pay per click (PPC) advertising (such as Google AdWords), where the more clicks you get the higher the cost

Cost-effective Customer Acquisition: There are no fees required to have your website included in the natural search engine results. This makes it especially cost effective if you can rank well for quite competitive terms that would have cost a lot to bid on in PPC advertising. If you’re currently paying a lot for certain keywords in your PPC advertising, think how much you could save if you could get these clicks for free in the natural search!

Repeat Business: Studies have shown that customers gained from natural search results tend to be higher quality than those from other paid sources. These visitors stay on your site longer, have a higher chance of converting and are more likely to return to you again for further purchases.

Emphasis on Unique Content: Most search engine strategies will include a content strategy – a plan to create and add unique content to your site on a regular basis. Not only do search engines like this, but visitors do too. Fresh new content will provide a feeling of trust and authority to your visitors and will encourage them to buy. Blogs (like this one!) are a great way of providing new information in a format that helps your SEO efforts.

Credibility: If you’re well known in your industry, yet aren’t showing on the first page of Google for your main keywords, won’t that create an air of suspicion? To keep your brand perception at the required level you need to ensure you come top of the search engine results.

Improved Website Standards: Focusing on SEO will also force you to focus on the architecture and navigation of your site. Your site must comply with best practices in order to gain high rankings. This in turn also improves the usability of your website, giving your vistors a better user experience, making them more likely to turn in to customers.

To find out more about SMEketing’s SEO services - click here, or contact us for more information. Call 023 8083 7271 or email info@SMEketing.com.

Remember to follow us on Twitter  – @SMEketing!

Hi!

Fantastic video, sooooo helpful!!!

It would be fantastic to see a video on how to create inbound links…..

I went to university in Southampton, and now I am within my first year of a new job and been asked to build 700 links in the next MONTH which is impossible and I dont want to? get my company blacklisted from google how can I do this?

Can you help me with creating quick inbound links to my website?

Thanks

This was our response:

Glad you found the video helpful.

So link building… being asked to produce so many new links in such a short time is not only a bit unrealistic, but it’s not really a good idea. If your site goes from having about 100 links to about 800 in the space of a month, that’s going to look a bit dodgy/spammy to Google.

Link building is all about building up quality links of a sustained period of time. Google wants to see a site that is growing in size and popularity – and getting a steady stream of good quality links is an indicator of a good quality site.

Link building is both about quality and quantity – it’s not an even/or thing (although if you had to pick, going for quality over quantity would be the way to go). You want to have a lot of good quality links.

There are loads of factors that make up a good or bad link. In a nutshell, a good quality link is one that comes from a reputable website, has good anchor text (the blue bit you click on), is on a good quality relevant page (i.e. relevant to your industry) and does not have the ‘nofollow’ attribute (which a lot of social media channels/blogs/forums have – basically the ‘nofollow’ attribute stops the linking site from passing any link juice to you through the link).

So the best way to build links is to create really good content that people want to link to. There’s a thing called ‘link bait’ which is basically defined as any kind of content that people want to link to. Imagine yourself as an industry blogger, seeking to cover the most exciting, unique trends and pages in the sector. If this individual stumbled across your content, would they be likely to write about it? If the answer is yes, it qualifies as link-bait.

So you can create content such as:

- Free Tools
- Web 2.0 Applications
- Top 10 Lists
- Industry-Related Humor
- Reviews of Events
- Interviews with Well-Known Insiders
- Surveys or Collections of Data
- Film or Animation
- Charts, Graphs or Spreadsheets
- Contests, Giveaways and Competitions
- Trend-Spotting
- Advice from Multiple Experts

Also things like press releases that you can upload to free newswires and articles that you can upload to sites like Ezine are a great way of generating links.

So I hope this helps! If you need any additional marketing assistance, let me know. We offer a range of outsourced marketing services at SMEketing and can do as little as an hours work, right up to a certain amount of days a month. You can email us at info@SMEketing.com.

Also follow us on Twitter – http://twitter.com/SMEketing and follow our blog – we normally blog a lot about SEO – http://www.SMEketing.com/blog/

Link building is something that should be taken on as part of an on-going marketing strategy; it’s not something that should be done in short, sharp bursts. Think about what content your prospects and customer want to use and read. High quality content will always create high quality links – it just takes time and effort.

• What is Google Webmaster
• Adding Your Website To Google Webmaster

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.

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.

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 can find Google Webmaster here: www.google.com/webmasters/tools.

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.