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.

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!

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!

There are two sides to this new little button – the search result side and the content side.

Search Results

Currently this only works if you have activated the +1 in your Google Account (click here to go to the Google Experiment page). Once this is activated, you’ll see little faded +1 buttons next to the search results (and paid results) when you search in Google.com. If you see a result you like you can click the faded button and +1 it.

When you’ve +1?d something, it’ll be shown to people in your Google Network. If your friend Jane is searching for marketing, and they see that you’ve +1?d the Wikipedia result, that’ll be shown to Jane under the result.

Content +1?s

This works in much the same way as the Facebook Like button that you may have seen at the bottom of blog posts. Website owners can add a Google +1 button (get the code here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/) to their content and hope that readers will +1 it (see the +1 we have at the bottom of this post – feel free to click it and +1 us!).

Who is in Your Google Network?

• People in your Gmail & Google Talk chat list
• People in your “My Contacts” group in Google Contacts
• People you follow in Google Reader or Google Buzz

You can manually extend your connections, by linking your Google Profile with other accounts you have online. If you open your Google profile and go to Account Settings. You’ll see an option which says “Connected accounts : View and manage your accounts from other services”. From here you can connect Facebook, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Quora etc to your Google Profile – I  believe there are plans to use this to extend your Google Network now that they have rolled out this +1 feature.

What is the point of Google +1

This is a move for Google towards more social search – personalising and improving the results you see based on what people in your network have stated they like. Many say it’s Google trying to make the foundations for their own social network. Many also say they’re trying to copy Facebook and create something similar to Facebook’s Like feature. It’s an interesting development and is something that has a lot of people talking.

This article, Meet +1: Google’s Answer To The Facebook Like Button, by SearchEngineLand was written back in March, but really does cover all angles of this new +1 button. It’s long, but well worth reading if you want to find out more.

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!

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.

We’ll submit your website to 500 social bookmarking sites for just £50. Imagine getting 500 valuable links on high PR websites pointing to your domain… for just £50! That’s just 10p per link!

We’ve probably all had an email like this at some point, but unfortunately sometimes people get lured into the idea of all those wonderful, high quality links and actually follow these spammer up with their offer.

There’s so many things wrong with this offer, it’s hard to know where to start, but I’ll give it a go:

• Firstly, you don’t submit websites to social bookmarking sites, you submit a URL that contains a particular piece of content – so if this company is just submitting your homepage URL, there’s a good chance it will be rejected.
• Most social bookmarking sites use the NoFollow attribute on their links – this means that you don’t get any link juice from the linking site. Some social sites remove this attribute if your content becomes very popular and makes it only the first page, but this takes effort and it’s unlikely that this company will be putting in any extra effort for you.
• It’s unlikely that all 500 social bookmarking sites will relate to you, your product/services or industry. Many of these will be niche sites which won’t even accept your content.
• At the same time as submitting your site to the social bookmarking website, they’ll also be submitting the links of the other poor buggers who fell for this scam – owners and administrators of these sites don’t take too kindly to this kind of activity.
• Many social bookmarking sites don’t offer permanent links – the links stay on the site for as long as the submitting account stays open and active – spammer accounts often open and close quickly, which means your links get deleted too.
• Some of the more popular, influential social bookmarking sites (such as Stumbleupon and Digg) could also ban your domain indefinitely, meaning that when you want to manually submit high quality content on your own time, you’re out of luck!

Social bookmarking isn’t about generating as many links as possible – it’s about sharing high quality content to people who will find it interesting. It’s a social thing and something that takes time. But if done correctly it can have fantastic repercussions for businesses.

So next time an email with an offer like this comes into your Inbox, mark it as spam and forget about it!

If you’re interested in the benefits of creating and promoting high quality content online, get in touch with SMEketing. We love writing copy for the web – blog posts, articles, website copy and more! Call us on 023 8083 7271 or email info@SMEketing.com.