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!

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

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

In the meantime have a look through your website:

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

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

Wikipedia gives a good description of a bounce rate:

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

The formula used to calculate bounce rate is:

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

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

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

Other factors that may cause a high bounce rate are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So think about:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

So what can they do to fix this? It’s simple, just add http://uk.megabus.com/Maintenance.aspx to their robots.txt file.

What is a robots.txt file?

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:

1. Random pages such as your thank you or error pages
2. 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
3. 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)
4. 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!

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.