If you’ve not heard about Google Instant yet – where have you been?! In the last day or two, the online community has been awash with discussions and debates surrounding this new Google update.
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.”
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!
Google Analytics is a fantastic free service that lets you monitor your website performance and the activities visitors take on your site. Tracking your website performance is a vital part of search engine optimisation (SEO), but it can become even more valuable when you start to track your online conversions.
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’.
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:
www.SMEketing.com/landing-page.html
www.SMEketing.com/landing-page-contact.html
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.
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. Now I was in a rush and my typing went awry and I accidentally typed ‘Meaga bus’. Without even really looking at the list of results, I clicked on the first link:
And this is what I was presented with:
So I had the quite reasonable impression that their site was down for maintenance. As an alternative I logged onto the National Express website to see how much their coaches were.
Once I had my information from the National Express I emailed my friends to tell them that I couldn’t get any information from MegaBus, but that the National Express seemed pretty reasonable and that we should just book with them. It was only then that my friend said she’d also tried the MegaBus site and was able to access it without any problems. So I went back to check and realised the error I’d made.
Even if you type ‘MegaBus’ correctly into Google, the maintenance page is still the third result. It would be interesting to look at their analytics to see how many visits this page gets; I bet it’s shockingly high.
A robots.txt is a file you can create in which you can list all the pages (URLs) of your website that you don’t want the search engines to index. There are many reasons why you wouldn’t want certain pages to show in the search results. This MegaBus maintenance page is just one such example. Other examples include:
Random pages such as your thank you or error pages
If you are in the process of building your website or new pages and don’t want your unfinished work to appear in the search results
If your website includes information that you don’t want people to find whilst searching online (such as member only information that isn’t hidden behind a password)
Any duplicate content you may have. For example if you had content in both a web page and in PDF format you would want to add one of those to your robot.txt file to avoid being penalised
The file itself is a simple text file, which can be created in Notepad. It must be saved to the root directory of your site – which is the directory where your home page or index page is.
You can find out more about robots.txt files and how to create them here http://www.robotstxt.org
Have you ever found any pages in the search engine results that you shouldn’t have? Let us know in the comments!
The first thing I ever tell my small business clients, no matter what marketing service they are using from SMEketing is “Get yourself a blog!”. Blogs are probably one of the easiest, cheapest and most effective marketing tools out there for small businesses today.
They have so many benefits, especially in terms of search engine optimisation (SEO). This weeks post will focus on just one of the benefits (come back next week for the next benefit):
Benefit Number 1: Google LOVES Fresh Content
Google, and the other search engines love fresh content; same as humans, we don’t want to read out of date content, and neither do the search engines (not that they actually ‘read’ the content, but they don’t want to present old content to searchers). Because of this, Google will prioritise fresh content over old content in their results. So imagine you have recently created a blog post all about the benefits of your product – such as your particular brand of easy clean paint brushes. When someone searches for ‘easy to clean paint brushes’ in Google, there’s a good chance that your blog post on your super easy to clean paint brushes will show up high in the search results. Your result is likely to be higher than some of your competitors who just have a product page featuring their brushes, that they’ve not updated in six or more months. In terms of search engine optimisation, you must remember that search engines don’t rank websites, they rank pages – and they love brand spanking new pages! Having a site with regularly updated content and regular new pages also means that overall your site gets more ‘trust’ from the search engines. So some of the benefit from the new content will roll over to other pages as well, even if they haven’t been updated in a while.
Another benefit of adding fresh content to your site on a regular basis is that the search engine bots will crawl your site on a more regular basis – meaning that any crucial updates you’ve made to your site/content will be refreshed in the search engine results a lot quicker. Have you ever wondered what the ‘cached’ link means when you look at search results in Google? Clicking on this will show you the last time Google crawled that web page – so you can see exactly what Google is seeing. If you have updated your website with some new product pages, Google will not know about it until the next time it comes to crawl your site. So if you hardly ever update your site, Google will be in the habbit of only crawling your site on a monthly (or so) basis. This means that none of your new product pages will appear in the search engines results during this month – not until Google crawls your site again. However, if you constantly add new content to your site, Google will get into the habbit of crawling your site a lot more often – the ideal crawl amount is daily, but realistically, weekly will do. Having your site crawled on a regular basis, means your brand new product pages will show up in the search engine results a lot quicker.
So we’ve established that the search engines love fresh new content. However, it can be difficult to continually add new content to your site - you don’t to be adding pointless pages to your site just for the sake of it – this is where blogs come in. Each time you add a new blog post, that creates new content and a new page on your site. Ensuring that you update your blog at least once a week means that the search engines will start to crawl your site on a regular basis and will start to prioritise your new pages (and pages in your site in general) in their results.
Come back next week for ‘Benefit Number 2′.
In the meantime, if you want any assistance creating a blog for your small business, please come and talk to us here at SMEketing. Not only can we create blogs for you, we can also write and optimise your blog posts! Click here to contact us.
Link building is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO). Building the number of high quality inbound links is something that all small businessess should be doing as it has a huge impact on the ranking of your web pages in the search engine result pages (SERPs).
The reason why links are so important, is because it helps to build up the ‘trust’ value of your website. In order to be ranked high, the search engines need to have trust in your site. Many factors affect this trust issue, such as domain age, site size, freshness of content, but most of all it is the number of good quality links pointing to it. Each of these links are like a vote – a vote from one website saying that they trust and value your site enough to mention it on their site.
So how can you increase the number of inbound links? Well like most things, there are many ways – here are a few summarised within three areas:
Link baiting: Generating such great content, that people can’t help but link to it
PR: Creating press releases that link to your site
Manual Link Building: Finding sites that are relevant to yours where you can submit your link to – such as directories, community organisations, as well as bloggers and industry sites.
Yahoo LinkDomain Search
To find out more about generating some links to your site, view the video below. This will show you a way in which you can not only generate some links to your site, but also keep an eye on what your competitors are doing using the Yahoo LinkDomain search query. It is also a good way of keeping track of who is linking to your small business website.
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If you want to know more about link building strategies, or about other ways in which you can increase your online presence, please get in touch with us at SMEketing. Call us, email us or complete our Contact Us form!
With the majority of people (approx 80%) searching the internet before they purchase a product or before they get in touch with a company they want to work with, it’s vital that all small business have an online presence that conveys a feeling of trust and creditability.
Everyone has had the experience of clicking onto a website, only to get the feeling that it hasn’t been updated since the mid 1990’s! What do you do when you get to a site like that? Click the back button and go to the next search result that Google gave you, that’s what! Have a think about your small business website – what do you think people feel when they first arrive? Do they immediately trust your company? Trust that you can deliver a good product or service? Do they feel it’s worth the investment of their time to spend ten minutes browsing through your site? Or do they get a worried feeling and decide to leave without even reading what you’ve got written on your homepage?
However, ensuring your website has a feeling of credibility isn’t just about good design. Granted, that does make up a lot of it. In the same way that we all judge books by their cover (even though we know we shouldn’t), we all judge websites on that initial split second view.
I’ve been reading a report by BJ Fogg from Stanford University. He carried out a huge research study into exactly what makes a website trustworthy. You can view the report here, or browse through a presentation on the subject on SlideShare.
However, if you’re short on time (which to be honest, most small business owners are), you can just read the main points below:
Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site
You can build web site credibility by providing third-party support (citations, references, source material) for information you present, especially if you link to this evidence. Even if people don’t follow these links, you’ve shown confidence in your material
Show that there’s a real organisation behind your site
Showing that your web site is for a legitimate organisation will boost the site’s credibility. The easiest way to do this is by listing a physical address. Other features can also help, such as posting a photo of your offices or listing a membership with the chamber of commerce
Highlight the expertise in your organisation and in the content and services you provide Do you have experts on your team? Are your contributors or service providers authorities? Be sure to give their credentials. Are you affiliated with a respected organisation? Make that clear. Conversely, don’t link to outside sites that are not credible. Your site becomes less credible by association
Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site
The first part of this guideline is to show there are real people behind the site and in the organisation. Next, find a way to convey their trustworthiness through images or text. For example, some sites post employee bios that tell about family or hobbies
Make it easy to contact you
A simple way to boost your site’s credibility is by making your contact information clear: phone number, physical address, and email address
Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose)
We find that people quickly evaluate a site by visual design alone. When designing your site, pay attention to layout, typography, images, consistency issues, and more. Of course, not all sites gain credibility by looking like IBM.com. The visual design should match the site’s purpose
Make your site easy to use – and useful
We’re squeezing two guidelines into one here. Our research shows that sites win credibility points by being both easy to use and useful. Some site operators forget about users when they cater to their own company’s ego or try to show the dazzling things they can do with web technology
Update your site’s content often (at least show it’s been reviewed recently)
People assign more credibility to sites that show they have been recently updated or reviewed
Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g., ads, offers)
If possible, avoid having ads on your site. If you must have ads, clearly distinguish the sponsored content from your own. Avoid pop-up ads, unless you don’t mind annoying users and losing credibility. As for writing style, try to be clear, direct, and sincere
Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem
Typographical errors and broken links hurt a site’s credibility more than most people imagine. It’s also important to keep your site up and running.
If you want more information on creating a credible website, or if you want some help getting your website ranked well in the major search engines, come and talk to us. We’re a very friendly bunch and are passionate about helping small businesses succeed.
Squidoo is a free site in which users can create single web pages on particular subjects. These web pages are called lenses. In February this year there were over 900,000 hand built lenses on a variety of different subjects – so no matter what your small business is, there is space for you to create your lens and to promote the knowledge you have of your product and/or services.
The joy of Squidoo is that it’s so easy to build a lens; however, this blog post isn’t about the technicalities of how to build a lens – it’s so very simple to do that and Squidoo provides more than enough information on this itself. This blog post is about why, as a small business, you should build lenses on Squidoo and how to use your Squidoo lenses as part of your small business SEO (search engine optimisation) strategy.
Squidoo lenses are a fantastic way of boosting your own sites ranking in the search engines. Why? Because they are owned and managed by you. You provide the content, and decide how the lens is managed. And it’s you that provides the links from that lens to your site. Squidoo lenses are a great way of generating good quality, deep inbound links to your sites. With SEO, the more inbound links you have, the higher Google will rank your website for your determined keywords. However, as with most things, quality rules over quality, and this is where Squidoo fits nicely. By building a high quality lens (with lots of fresh, unique content, well optimised – see tips below), you will be able to build up its PageRank. You also have full control over the links that point from your lens to your site, and the anchor text that is used in each link. These are all important factors when it comes to determining link quality. A link, with good anchor text, from a reputable site, is worth far more than a link from a simple directory.
So how do you go about building and optimising a high quality Squidoo lens? Here, in no particular order, are my tips:
Make sure the URL is relative to your lens subject – such as Squidoo.com/building-squidoo-len-for-SEO.html (hyphens are better).
Ensure that the module title and subtitles contain keywords – these are the Squidoo version of h1 and h2 headers.
Ensure any images have keywords in their names and in their alt tags.
Make sure there is a 3-5% keyword density in the body copy (but no more than 5% as this will start to look spammy).
If applicable, install the Google Blog Search module into the lens – this is a really SEO friendly module as it contains live links that search engines can read. When installing, I’d normally put it at the bottom of your lens and make sure you use the keywords you are targeting in the box provided.
Ensure that the body copy has links to many different pages within your site. So not only the homepage, but other pages (known as deep links). Do this by typing: <a href=”www.URL.com”> text </a> , into the body copy.
But no more than nine links to each domain, i.e only nine links to www.yoursite.com. This doesn’t mean you can only have nine links full stop, but only nine to each domain. If you use more than nine, there is a very good chance that Squidoo will ban your lens.
If you have more than one lens, you can link to each of your other lenses too.
You can make many different lenses then have a directory lens that links to all of them.
Large lenses are better. However it’s not a good idea to just cut and paste material from your website. You can take copy from the site, but I recommend that you spend a bit of time amending it – otherwise Google will view it as duplicate.
The larger the lens and the better content, the higher PageRank you’ll get. Which means that the quality of the inbound links you get from it are better. Which will help the ranking of your main site.
Make sure you tag your lens with the appropriate keywords.
In the Lens Settings, ensure you opt out of text link ads (doesn’t include Google ads) and the banner ads. You don’t want other companies (possibly competitors) advertising on your business lens.
Also make sure you Digg, Stumble, Delicious etc all your lens when you make them (you’ll find on the the left side bar buttons to make this simple).
Also promote your lenses via Twitter – you want to get people to visit the lens – this will help boost its popularity.
Make sure you go back regularly and update your lenses. Squidoo (like search engines) favours lenses that are fresh and up to date (as opposed to ones that have been built, then left untouched). So even if it’s to remove or add a sentence or two, make sure you do something to your lenses on a regular basis to keep it fresh.
Once you’ve built your lenses, keep an eye on them, the page rank they have, and their rating in Squidoo. Promote them when you can via the social media outlets you use and you may soon find that you’ll be getting referrals to your small business website from Squidoo, as well as improved rankings in the search engines.
You can’t miss the doom and gloom of the current economic climate. All businesses, large and small, must carefully spend their marketing budget. Gone are the days of frivolous spending. So I wanted to outline five cost effective ways of spending your small business marketing budget. With online marketing become more and more vital as part of a small business marketing plan, there are many ways which small businesses can promote their business and help drive leads.
1. Blogging: Setting up a blog can be completely free! Yes, we love anything free. But like most freebies, in order for it to be effective you need to plan it well and invest your time into it. Using free blog providers like Wordpress and Google Blogger are great ways of getting involved in the blogging world, without costing you a penny. There are so many different benefits of blogging, one of the biggest benefits is to your websites ranking in the search engines (aka Search Engine Optimisation - SEO): Google loves new and unique content. Blogging is a great way to constantly add new content to your site. Plus your posts will be tagged and full of relevant keyword. Blog well and others in your industry may link to you, increasing the number of valuable inbound links. For more on the benefits of blogging, read this post: Blogging – just for teenagers, or good for your small business?
2. Twitter: Again, another freebie! Twitter is great for promoting what you do and learning about latest industry trends. By joining the conversation and providing useful information, you will soon generate a loyal base of followers. Use Twitter to answer questions relevant to your industry, learn about new goings on, promote your product, events and news (but don’t be pushy). For more information on using Twitter to promote your small business, read these blog posts: Twitter: Small Business Success Stories – Will yours be one of them? and Guide to Getting Your Small Business Started on Twitter
3. Email Marketing: Email marketing can cost as little as 1p per recipient and £5 per mailshot (well, those are the rates for using a self managed SMEketing Email Marketing solution, but we like to think these are pretty competitive!). If you don’t have time to maintain a close working relationship with your customer base, email marketing is a great, cost effective way of keeping them updated with your latest news, products and offers. Email marketing can also be used as a lead generation tool. Send out well targeted mailshots to relevant recipients and you will find visits to your web site go up, and conversion rates increase. For more information on the benefits of email marketing read this blog post: Email Marketing for Small Businesses
4. Google AdWords: These unfortunately are not free (we wish!), but you completely control your budget. If you only have £10 a day to spend, that’s fine! Make sure you get the most from your budget by using relevant keywords, focused adverts with a strong call to action, and a well thought-through landing page. Google AdWords can be a great way of driving relevant traffic to your site, and the results are completely measurable. If something isn’t working, you know straight away. This is why AdWords are one of the most cost effective advertising mediums out there. Add Conversion Tracking to your adverts and you’ll be able to see exactly what ad’s are providing the highest conversion rate once visitors are on your site. Once you know that, you can direct your budget to keywords and adverts that are giving you the highest Return on Investment (ROI).
5. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO):You know I said Google AdWords weren’t free, well there is a way that you can get Google to promote your site FOR FREE! How? Improve your website’s ranking for relevant keywords, and Google will display your site in their search results – free of charge! But again, this is something that will take an investment in your time. Make sure your website is well designed – good navigation, lots of keyword rich content, no broken links, good use of anchor text in your links, etc… Once that is done, you need to boost the number of high quality inbound links. Go to Yahoo and type “linkdomain:yourcompany.com -site:yourcompany.com” to see the number of your inbound links. Do the same for your competitors and see how you compare. Next create a plan to increase the number of incoming links – sign up to relevant directories, promote your blog, create great content on your site that people want to link to. Links should be from high quality sites – link farms are NOT GOOD! The page giving you a link should have few other outgoing links on the same page, and the anchor text should be optimised to promote what you do, not necessarily your business name. An example of a good link to SMEketing would be: “SMEketing is a fantastic source for small business marketing advice and services.” The anchor text here tells Google that the link (www.SMEketing.com) is relevant to “small business marketing”. If the anchor text fell on the business name, it would just tell Google that “SMEketing” is relevant to www.SMEketing.com – which to be fair, it probably had figured out anyway!
Read here for more SEO tips: Top 10 SEO Mistakes Your Small Business Should Avoid
If you want to learn more about any of the above marketing strategies, please get in touch. At SMEketing we’re experienced in all these marketing mediums and have seen first hand the benefits when small businesses employ such tactics.
I’ve been very busy this week – visiting clients and prospects throught the South of England. I’ve been to Guildford, Portsmouth, Southampton and Eastleigh! So I’ve not had a chance to write a proper blog post. The aim of this blog is to provide educational content, to help small businesses understand the various marketing strategies they can use to help make their small business a success.
During my visits to clients and prospects this week, the importance of educating oneself has being hugely reinforced. Unfortunately, more than one person I’ve spoken to this week has told me about an unfortunate experience when outsourcing a marketing function to an marketing agency or consultant (not SMEketing though!!!). This is why it’s so important to educate yourself in the basics of what you want to outsource. If you want to employ a marketing agency or a marketing consultant to manage your search engine optimisation (SEO), Google Adword (PPC), or design a website, you must educate yourself on the foundation prinicples of these marketing activities. Only then are you in a position where you can question the marketing agency; for example, if you don’t know what is involved in creating and managing a small business website, how do you know if you’re being spun a yarn?
Another example is SEO; just type “SEO basics” into Google and millions of entries come up. Even 30 minutes spent browsing these articles is time well spent. That way, when you talk to your marketing agency, you will understand the jargon (although a good agency will not try to confuse you by using terms and jargon that you won’t understand). You’ll also know if the agency or marketing consultant is implementing unethical tactics – something which is vitally important, especially when dealing with SEO.
So this is the lesson for the week – educate, educate, educate. I’m not suggesting you go out and buy loads of books on various marketing strategies or spend hours crawling the internet for information. But by arming yourself with a basic level of knowledge, when you’re talking to an ‘expert’, you’ll be in a better position to decide if they are really an ‘expert’ at all. Outsourcing marketing activies can can be a vital part of your small business strategy, but it can become very expensive if you’re dealing with an agency or consultant who is willing to take your money and run because you don’t know better!
SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation) is defined by Wikipedia as: “the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results”.
SEO is something that can be done by yourself – up to a point. The major search engines are constantly changing and updating, and as a result the methods employed to boost website rank in those search engines also change and update. At SMEketing we can offer the majority of small business owners the SEO service they need to boost their website rankings.
However, if SEO is something you choose to manage in-house, here are a few of the most common mistakes that are made which can be easily fixed or avoided altogether.
Making your site uncrawalable – The most common mistake is developing a website that is completelyFlash based. Search engines need to be able to read text on your site to know what it is you do. Other ways to make it difficult for the engines to index your site’s pages include building an all-AJAX site, having an incorrect robots.txt file or having session IDs.
Poor design & usability – This can make it much more difficult to get inbound links from other sites. It may also reduce your conversion rates and if your site architecture is full of broken links it makes it very difficult for users and search engines to read.
Poor URL structure – Dynamic URLs in a database driven site are not very search-engine friendly and are confusing for users. By manually changing your URL structure you make it easier for the search engines to index deep pages and you may get more quality long tail traffic from searchers.
Submitting your site’s URL to the search engines – This is a waste of time. Do not ever pay anyone for a search engine submission service. The search engines will find your site, either without assistance.
302 redirect rather than 301 – A 302 tells the search engine robot that the page has been moved temporarilyto a new location, while a 301 redirect indicates a permanent move. With a 302 redirect, you will lose all the value from the links directed to the old page.
Duplicate content – Only post original content on your site! Rewrite pages if they sound too similar. It does not pay to be lazy on this point!!!
Same meta description on each page – If you are using the same words to describe each page, you are both misrepresenting your web pages and duplicating content on your site. Each meta description should be unique and relevant to the content on that page.
Overstuffing keywords into content / meta tags / image alt tags – Do not spam your own website by overstuffing keywords, especially into your web copy as it becomes unreadable and it is not user friendly. This is a very ‘black hat’ SEO technique, and you may find your site banned from Google if you employ this strategy.
Mismanaging links – Ensure that keywords are allocated in a logical manner across your site when developing your link building strategy.
Do not target overambitious general keywords – ‘finance’, ‘lawyer’ etc – these types of phrases are too general for most websites to ever rank for on the first page of the search engines. There are only 10 positions; please be realistic! There are a lot of big players in the marketplace – don’t try to compete with B&Q for the search term DIY – you will waste a lot of time and money, and you will never win! Instead focus on the long tail searches.
So I hope this has given you an indication of some of the strategies and techniques you should avoid. Google and the other search engines are very clever beasts – don’t try to outsmart them. If you think that the SEO strategy you’ve been advised to employ sounds a little bit like cheating, then it’s probably something you should avoid!
If you have any questions regarding SEO - leave a comment, or send us an email at info@SMEketing.com, one of our SMEketers will be gladly you help you out!
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!
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)
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.
The first thing I ever tell my small business clients, no matter what marketing service they are using from SMEketing is “Get yourself a blog!”. Blogs are probably one of the easiest, cheapest and most effective marketing tools out there for small businesses today.
Link building is one of the most important aspects of 
With the majority of people (approx 80%) searching the internet before they purchase a product or before they get in touch with a company they want to work with, it’s vital that all small business have an online presence that conveys a feeling of trust and creditability.
Squidoo is a free site in which users can create single web pages on particular subjects. These web pages are called lenses. In February this year there were over 900,000 hand built lenses on a variety of different subjects – so no matter what your small business is, there is space for you to create your lens and to promote the knowledge you have of your product and/or services.
You can’t miss the doom and gloom of the current economic climate. All businesses, large and small, must carefully spend their marketing budget. Gone are the days of frivolous spending. So I wanted to outline five cost effective ways of spending your small business marketing budget. With online marketing become more and more vital as part of a small business marketing plan, there are many ways which small businesses can promote their business and help drive leads.
I’ve been very busy this week – visiting clients and prospects throught the South of England. I’ve been to Guildford, Portsmouth, Southampton and Eastleigh! So I’ve not had a chance to write a proper blog post. The aim of this blog is to provide educational content, to help small businesses understand the various marketing strategies they can use to help make their small business a success.
