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5 Affordable Quick SEO Fixes: Perfect for a Small Business or a Small Budget

4 May 2012

Prioritising your strategic activities is difficult if not overwhelming, especially for a small business. So adding in the task of Search Engine Optimisation for your website is often the task found on the bottom of your ‘To Do’ list.

Whatever time or money you have spent on your website can be completely wasted if you are not investing in the ongoing optimisation of your site. If your potential customers can’t find your site easily in search engines (such as the ubiquitous Google), they won’t find you.

Whilst there are many ways to improve the visibility of your website in search engines, here are 5 affordable fixes which you can implement easily.

1.  Keep Your Content Fresh

You don’t need to be a Hemingway or Shakespeare to keep your content alive, relevant and fresh. Making small regular updates, adding information or even just re-sharing social media updates allows your users to enjoy having a regular relationship with your site. An added benefit, is the more often you update your site, the more often the search engine spiders will return to crawl your site, thus ensuring all of your content is getting indexed for those engines.

2.  Think about your keyword phrases

Each page could be focussed on only one or two keyword phrases for content. Decide if you will be looking to attract a small ratio of visitors for a short and highly competitive keyword, or maybe carve out a profitable niche by controlling a large ratio of targeted users with a long tailed keyword phrase. For example, would you like 1% of the traffic from ‘fashion’ (who may or may not be ready to buy) or could you make better use of 70% of the traffic from ‘online plus size fashion race carnival Melbourne’? Just remember to do keyword research before committing.

3.  Site maps and Search Engines

Once you have your website complete, prepare two site maps. One is for users to find each page on your site if they are lost, and the second, is a specific site map which you can create using Google Webmaster Tools and submit to Google (and other search engines) which makes it much easier for the search engine spiders to find all of your pages. This is especially true when your site contains quantities of flash and script.

4.  Make the effort to create understandable URLs

Whilst Google appears to not attach much weight to well described keyword rich URLs, many other search engines do. Importantly also, your human users will benefit from well designed URLs. So, rather than having code-like names for your URL pages (eg www.COL.com/W12/T157), consider a self explanatory URL convention. For example you may be an online clothing store called ‘clothes online’, with one URL something like: ‘www.clothesonline.com.au/winter/tops’. Not only is this clear to search engines, it makes sense to a user, who could safely expect to find tops suitable for winter wear on this page. Never underestimate the power of a clear URL when it comes to users choosing a page from the search engine selection. When presented with a page of results from a search, if the URL is unreadable or looks ‘dodgy’, visitors are far less likely to click on it.

5.  Be clean and mean

Do a full spring clean of your site. Check all links that they work properly, try and look at the site as an outsider. Is it logical, connected and clear? Have someone else look over the pages for readability and errors. It is important to ensure everything works, as you want the search engine robots to view and index all of your content. Don’t give them an excuse to drop off your site without being finished.

As a small business owner, search engine optimisation can appear intimidating, it will take time, and it does take regular administration (such as loading new content often), but once you follow these simple steps you will be able to maintain an affordable basic SEO program. If nothing else, you will know the right questions to ask your Web site manager or Trainer should you take the next step and complete a quality Search Engine Optimisation course.

Filed Under: SEO Tips Tagged With: , , ,

Pinterest and the SEO Equation

20 April 2012

Pinterest, one of the myriad social networking platforms, has created itself a niche that is focussed on the visual. Pinterest is essentially an internet based pin-board full of things that excite you. Users include links and pictures of anything that holds their interest. From home decorating to craft, motorcycles to DIY, there are opportunities for everyone.

From a business perspective, this is an exciting way to engage with customers, especially if something you do can benefit from being portrayed visually. Human beings by nature are very visual, connecting images with memories, thoughts and feelings. These connections can create very strong calls to action if you connect genuinely.

If you think of Twitter as being the Shakespeare of social networking, then Pinterest is the Da Vinci. Beautifully crafted images or just very well targeted pictures are the keys to success. Pinterest has grown 52% (source: comScore Media Metrix Mar 2012) in total unique visitors between just January and February 2012. This exponential growth says something about the human need for connection and the strength of the visual medium.

Users can pin to their account information from websites they find interesting as well as uploading their own pictures. The use of information from other sites allows businesses to benefit from viral marketing when it works well. Businesses can gain most when they contribute images to engage, entertain and inform. If you do this well, the Pinterest community will want to follow you, and when they do, you can showcase your products and services to those who are really interested in what you do.

Enterprises with rich grounds for mining images include:

  • services which ‘sell’ a look such as hairdressers and makeup artists, specialist motor spray painters, interior designers and other artists
  • products which need to be seen before a sale is made, such as fashion designers and  clothing retailers and home decor retailers
  • products which may not be easily recognised by name such as plant types from nurseries and specialist food products which may benefit from showing all the different shapes and types of pastas or chilli peppers
  • Products or services which generally engender little emotional connection can create a ‘feeling’ through video. Some may remember the old advertisement for international direct dialling by the Australian company OTC (by George Patterson), which showed images of families in Greece and the UK amongst others, with tears in their eyes and shouting for the rest of the family to come to the phone when they received a call from their family which had emigrated to Australia…cue the highly emotive and visual Barbra Steisand song ‘Memories’ in the background. This award winning ad (it was the first Australian advertisement to win the Grand Prix in Cannes) had people crying in front of their televisions in the 1970s and reaching for their telephones like never before. This created an amazing depth of feeling especially as telephone calls were intangible, were utilitarian and had traditionally held no obviously emotional connection until this ad came along. Connecting images with feelings creates an incredibly strong bond so that when you ask for the sale, you have fertile ground for acceptance.

The SEO connection

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has generally not benefited by social networks (other than Google+) as links have tended to all be of the ‘no follow’ style. Pinterest currently allows ‘follow’ on all the links within its domain. Therefore, take advantage of this wonderful free tool. Set up your Pinterest account and start sharing targeted images linked back to your website (don’t upload from your desktop). This allows all of those images to be associated with your website, thus increasing your legitimate back links and not only being attractive to your audience, but all the while improving your website’s organic rankings.

Take note however, that this will probably come to an end, there are always those unscrupulous internet fraudsters who will utilise this helpful tool to increase their backlinks in an inappropriate manner, this will force Pinterest to remove the ‘follow’ from posts as Facebook and other social networks have had to do.

Another area of concern is that of scammers putting links into pictures which imply safety but are in fact redirected to a scam site. The way it works is a picture related to a high profile organisation is tampered with by hackers who attach their own coding to the image, thereby redirecting users to a site which may be porn, gambling or just trying to sell something you don’t want. Vigilance is currently the only way to stop this, check your links regularly to make sure they lead where you expect them to lead.

Pinterest is now the 3rd most popular website for sharing, thus giving you a useful tool which is large and continuously growing. A further attraction is that it is one of the only sites to successfully aid in the ‘discovery’ of video online. So where there are video clips available for various interests on say, websites, Pinterest is a way of collating and making these available to many others who would never have found them.

As one of the newest method of connecting with people, Pinterest is a visually appealing, enjoyable sojourn into each others worlds which we can use for enjoyment, networking with like minded people and showcasing our businesses.

Filed Under: Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engines, SEO Tips, Social Media

At Search Engine Academy Australia we’re gonna party like it’s 2002, and you get the presents!

13 April 2012

SEO Training Academy is celebrating it’s 10 year anniversary!

Founded in the USA in 2002, that original 5 day SEO mastery course was the first hands on search engine optimisation workshop available. From those early days with John Alexander and Robin Nobles, Search Engine Academy has gone from strength to strength expanding throughout the world.

In Australia, the Search Engine Academy Director is Sue Cooper and with almost 30 years experience in the technology game. Sue is delighted to be able to be the gift giver here in Australia offering a whopping $450 discount off the 5-day Master level SEO workshop- this is rolling back the prices to 2002 levels!

These hands on workshops enable all the students enrolled to receive individual attention working on their own websites in the classroom with the other participants. There is also a Free 6 month mentoring package included with the wonderful gift offer.

Alexander said, “Our goal all along has been to teach SEO skills to people who want to learn in a supportive and instruction-rich environment.”

Students come from every possible business and background. Business owners, marketers, online retailers and corporate web masters amongst others. Working on their own websites solidifies students immediate understanding of the processes and tools which will give them much greater visibility in search engines such as Google.

Individuals or employers who wish to receive their birthday present from Search Engine Academy Australia can register online or Freecall 1300 838 070 for further information.

 

Don’t wait until your next birthday- ACT NOW 
Filed Under: Uncategorized

7 Steps to Pinpointing your Facebook Target Market

13 April 2012

Do you now have a page for your business on Facebook? Are you at the stage where you would like to both increase the visitors and ‘likers’ of your page? The answer may be to create advertisements in Facebook.

Rather than waste your hard earned money on hit and miss hard copy media advertisements such as local newspapers or billboards, you may find your product or service has less mass market and more niche market appeal. If nothing else, you will probably get more ‘bang for your buck’.

Facebook are handing marketers a serious target audience on a platter by having the ability to target ads to quite specific groups. So how exactly do you use these wonderful targeting functions Facebook are offering? Below are sound steps to executing a communication plan to market your product or service.

1. What is it you want to offer, go through the marketing basics-

a. What is it?

b. Who will it appeal to?

c. What are its benefits (rather than just listing the features)?

d. What problem for your audience will it solve?

Once you have worked out all of the questions above, you can start.

2. Go to your business Facebook Admin panel page and click on ‘Build Audience’. This will give you a drop down box of Create an Ad. You may need to click on a ‘continue as <yourself>’ button after this to get to create an advert page.

Create An Ad

3. Continue by choosing the basics of you advertisement

a.who is advertising (your business, not you);

b.do you want to create a new advert message or utilise a previous post

 

Design your ad

 

4. Plan the first segmentation of your market- Location and Age Demographics

Facebook target marketing

So, for Search Engine Academy, the course we are advertising is in Melbourne, so we can maximise views and remove location ineligible views; then our SEO training courses are not targeted to high school students, so we can limit the age to over 18.

5. This is where it all starts to get interesting where the rubber meets the road! Facebook are utilising everything they know about individuals and allocating them into broad target categories. This is information worth gold to any marketer. For example, under the ‘Broad Categories’ heading you have ‘Activities’. These include cooking, dancing, craft, gaming, dining etc. For example, a Melbourne restaurant that hosts swing dance nights would be able to choose activities with dance and food in Melbourne for over 18s. The big plus with this, is that you also see an Estimated Reach for your advertisement that FB calculates:

 

Market segmentation categories

 

6. They could go one step further and plan ‘blind date nights’ and invite a special crowd using the FB Advanced demographics of singles and college educated to try and match the crowd.

 

Advanced Demographics

 

Now we have a very targeted 23120 individuals who live around Melbourne, are over 18, enjoy dancing and eating out, are single and have graduated from something. How much more effective would your advertising campaign be with this sort of information? If an average letter box drop secures a mere 1% of respondents, what sort of response do you thing you could get with this FREE information?

7. To finalise your advertising, you now just need to do the administration, campaigns, pricing and scheduling.

From now on, niche marketing and heavily targeted advertising is no longer the realm of the large Corporates with deep pockets for research.Facebook have made market segmentation and the corresponding target marketing a real option for businesses of all genres and sizes.

Filed Under: Marketing, Social Media, Uncategorized

All links are not created equal

4 April 2012

LinkedIn is the social media platform which is all about genuine networking with connections in your industry, connecting with suppliers, customers, potential employees and capital providers amongst others- don’t be caught out thinking LinkedIn is only for B2B.

The user statistics are impressive

  • Greater than 150 million users, including over 3 million in Australia alone. (http://press.linkedin.com/about)
  • There are more than 2 million company pages
  • Over one million groups have been created servicing parties with their niche interests

Incoming links from LinkedIn carry relative strength depending on where they come from. Your checklist to achieve stronger link ‘juice’ for increased visibility of your website’s organic listing includes:

  • Having a LinkedIn company page which references the website you hope to increase organic visibility for
  • Have your LinkedIn company page associated to all of your employees
  • Ensure your employees have their public profiles optimised (see instructions further down)
  • Ask your employees to share important updates on their own profiles
  • Encourage sensible user (read employee) activity- being active in LinkedIn will be good for optimisation as well as engagement with your greater community
  • Don’t automatically have every update from every social media stream carry into LinkedIn. It’s a bit like the boy who cried wolf- if you see ‘exciting’ updates 3 times a day from one user, you will doubt that any of them are worth reading.

 

Having a specific LinkedIn Company page, which is associated to employees, carries far stronger link value than having a page which people, who happen to be your employees, link their profile to.

How your employees can optimise their Public LinkedIn Profile:

  1. They need to log in to LinkedIn and go to their own Home Page
  2. Then hover over their name in the top right corner of the profile screen and choose ‘settings’

  3. In the settings section,  choose ‘edit your public profile’ and then

 4. Tick the box which says ‘make my public profile visible to everyone’

 

There is great value apart from links in having a quality LinkedIn Company Page. LinkedIn talk about the company page this way “It’s a centralized location where millions of LinkedIn members can go to stay in the loop on company news, products and services, business opportunities and job openings.” (http://learn.linkedin.com/company-pages/)

Take a look at the LinkedIn Company Page for Search Engine Academy Australia as an example.

You can think of your LinkedIn Company page a little like giving your company a personality and creating this individual on LinkedIn. Use this as an opportunity to give a ‘voice’ to your company page which reflects the persona of your branding and engages the audience you are targeting.

Essentially, utilising the company page in LinkedIn in conjunction with your employees and adding great updates and content can improve the organic rankings of your website, this is continuously and especially useful when all other things are equal, especially with your competitors.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engines, SEO Tips, Social Media Tagged With: , , ,

Free Social Media?

10 March 2012

What is social media? What it is, is an interactive and infinitely accessible tool. It is scalable, has immediacy and currency whilst being very usable to the masses. What it isn’t, is cheap.

One of the greatest fallacies of social media is that it is free. If you are using social media for fun, not profit, then it may be considered a cheap entertainment. However, if you genuinely want to connect with your customers and potential market and be involved in the greater conversation happening constantly, there are costs involved.

The other fallacy is that social media stands on its own. From a clever business perspective this is just not true. Social Media is just one bow in your armoury of a marketing communication strategy.

Let’s talk about strategy, how much does it cost to take the time to research and create a quality marketing strategy? This planning cost starts your social media spend. Whilst your strategy will include multiple marketing elements, social media will bear some of the cost of this.

As part of this strategy you need to carry out research. Knowing the target market for your product or service gives you the back bone of an integrated marketing communications plan. Once you know your target market, then you need to do a social media audit.

Having a complete understanding of which social media platform works best for your offering, how those users like to be communicated with, and creating something that will be a genuine interest for them is the key to your social media foray working. All of this takes time and knowledge which all costs money.

Speaking of knowledge, are you just going to tweet away whenever you have something to say, or are you going to outsource to a professional to run your social media campaign? Would you have your teenager draw a picture for you to scan and add a few words before sending off as an advertisement for the Sunday newspaper? Unlikely. Unless you are adept at copy writing and have a thorough knowledge of social media, it is worthwhile to enlist an expert, internally or outsourced.

Monitoring the social media platforms that you are involved in is a critical part of the endeavour. Positive responses in social media will be reinforced by gracious replies by your team. Similarly, negative responses critically require immediate responses. A great response to negative comments can create raving fans from naysayers. This is a very public forum and if you have issues being raised, whilst you handle them well, you may also find your customers become your advocates to negative comments. This is the pinnacle of achievement in social media. But, all of this monitoring, response and adjustment come at a price.

There is a cost in everything we do in business. In summary, social media needs a marketing strategist (social media expert), a community manager to maintain the social media persona, post and respond to comments and possibly third party specialists to measure. This part of being active in social media could cost over $150000 per annum. $10000 would be a minimum in adding a mobile application to augment your social media and this all adds up to not being a cheap form of media.

In the past, we lamented the lost productivity of chatting around the water cooler, by effectively using social media we can improve our marketing by being willing to pay for it. By communicating strategically using social media, we create our own social media water cooler, invite our customers to it, pay the bill for it, but benefit from it as well.

Filed Under: Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Social Media Tagged With: ,

Search Plus Your World with Google

2 March 2012

Search Engine Optimisation has generally been a level playing field for all businesses provided they took the time and energy to understand search engine optimisation, in particular, Google’s requirements. This meant a website was clear about who and what they were about, basically had integrity by disclosure and didn’t try and ‘beat’ the system.

Google has now created a shake up for their searchers and search-ees. Beginning so far only in the US, Google have added a new string to the SEO bow. Traditionally when you used the Google search box to find a person, business, product etc, the results presented included elements from the web, public Google images, videos etc. The Search Plus Your World concept has an added personalised ingredient. Your search results will now include content that has been shared through your private social network (of Google+) with the publicly available web content in a consolidated listing.

This is a further step in personalisation of search, the concept of which Google has been using in some format for almost 5 years. The change is that there is an addition of content that has been shared with and by you through Google+, to your existing behaviour and social connections in a combined search result list maximising its personal validity.

Thus, in a nutshell, the search results include web listings weighted due to your personal behaviour, your social connections, public Google+ posts and photos (including Picasa) as well as any private or “limited” Google+ posts and photos shared with you. To receive this extremely personalised search result you must be signed into Google.com.

What’s missing?

The major social networks including Facebook and Twitter have none of their content included in this search. They say their terms of service do not allow them to share this information.

Issues?

Privacy seems to be the one on everyone’s lips. The Facebook change which added the Timeline view of your past created a minor furore with old forgotten photos and posts again being easily accessible. Similarly, all of those from Google+ will resurface in the same way and may well be best forgotten!    Whilst Google+ has many users signed up, there are ludicrous numbers not actively using it, so comparing its value to Facebook or Twitter is not valid. This exercise is almost forcing us to rectify this situation.

When Google+ first came into being, they entered the social network sphere as a big player but lagging behind the strong incumbents including Facebook and Twitter. The expectation was that at some point, to secure the Google+ social network as well as to restrict market entry of a new search engine from another strong social network, Google would somehow use the data from Google+ to manipulate search engine rankings.

Thus, it is not surprising, that this is the outcome. Anti-competitive behaviour proponents will certainly see this change as detrimental to the other players in social networking and is quite strongly forcing businesses in particular to maintain and use a Google+ presence over any other platform. Google will no doubt be hoping go leverage this strength to enable data sharing from its competitors, such as Facebook.

Search rankings are impacted by the ‘shares’ and recommendations driven from Google+ which means that businesses with a target market demographic which may use Google searches frequently, but not social networking, will be vastly disadvantaged.

Integrating public, private and social data is a commendable act which will add a lot of value to individual searches and help many. However, making it an opt-out situation and not being able to exclude certain information individually is a negative to an otherwise good idea.

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engines, Social Media Tagged With: , , ,

Why you need a mobile version of your website

23 February 2012

Firstly why do you have a web site? To garner more traffic and show off your wares. These may be products or services. Once your users have found you, you want them to make a decision and do something. This activity may be to buy, subscribe to a newsletter, tell a friend, make a booking etc.

Now, what is a mobile version of your site? Basically, this means making your website useful for mobile users, be it on a mobile smart phone, iPad or other tablet. Your mobile users will be able to see everything that is important on your site and be able to act as you wish them to.

Before you scoff at people doing business on their phones, consider this: when you walked out the door this morning you picked up your keys, wallet and mobile, or your handbag which had keys, wallet, makeup, tissues… and mobile phone. In any one room of business people, or any gathering of Baby Boomers, Gen X or Y, you would have a difficult time finding a person who does not carry a mobile phone. Based on the ubiquitous nature of the mobile phone, by far more used than newspapers, TV, radio or any other mainstream mass media, you need to have a web site which can be utilised by these devices.

Whilst every mobile phone is not web enabled, the latest research shows that 37% of Australians have a smartphone (Source: The Mobile Movement Study, Google/Ipsos OTX MediaCT, Apr 2011), which is # 2 worldwide for smart phone penetration (Singapore is #1).

This very same research established that there was a 220% year on year increase in retail queries by mobile (2010-2011), only 20% of retailers have a mobile website. Wouldn’t you like your business to be in the 20% rather than the hidden 80%?

Depending on the type of business you run, you want to decide if your mobile site will be fully transactional or just offer a selection, be it information or sales. The mobile environment is particularly appealing to having a simply loaded site with locations, times, phone numbers etc- the basics. This means a quick solution to encourage visits to bricks & mortar outlets. Additionally you may add stock levels (such as Ikea) or specials only.

The future of geographic offers is coming, using locational technology, offers can be tailored to where you physically are. It will be easier to move to these specially targeted offers if you already have a usable mobile site.

Currently many websites are not suitable at all for mobile viewing, they are disjointed and can take 60 seconds or more to load. For those that are creating mobile sites, they see their traffic and conversions increasing as soon as a mobile version is implemented.

When a potential user has a poor experience, either your site is unreadable, very slow or doesn’t load at all, this can lead to a bad impression of your organisation. Turning around that negative interaction is an added imposition to businesses which never needed to happen.

Three basic ideas to work with which will improve your website for mobile users include:

  1. Reduce bandwidth to make your site load faster
  2. Scale back some of your content and lower resolution, keep the essentials: maps, directions, phone numbers, operating hours etc
  3. Have an interface that shows the content most applicable to mobile users first. Geographic offers, maps, phone numbers, directions etc.

Your website is the front door to your world, don’t forget that not everyone will walk the same path to it. For a small investment, be in the earlier adopters with a mobile version of your website and your site may be the only one in your category that users ‘on the go’ can enjoy!

Filed Under: Mobile Websites, Search Engine Optimisation, Site Architecture, Web Design Tagged With: , , , ,

Using webmaster tools to work smarter, not harder

17 February 2012

As all business people know, there are only so many hours in a day. Each time Google or other online tool adds a new variable or application, there is the potential for webmasters to feel that they just cannot do any more. We have discovered that adding Webmaster tools to your routine may in fact save you time and make you more efficient.

What are ‘Webmaster Tools’?

These are a set of free tools created by Google to highlight the relative ‘health’ of any of the websites you manage. It’s a bit like a doctor scanning the chart at the end of a hospital bed, looking at the most important factors and focussing just on anomalies. Without having to review in detail every potential web measure, you can spend time on those that have issues. The end result is improved visibility of your site to Google’s search engines, this will make your site easier to find by your visitors.

To initially set up your site with Webmaster Tools, you need to go to the Google Webmaster Tool to register your account. There are several ways to verify your account, these are all presented to you in this registration section. Once you have added the details, it may take a few hours to actually become available.

On registration, your site will be visible in the Webmaster Tools page. Click on your site and you will be taken to the Dashboard. The Dashboard includes a summary of:

  • Search Queries which have brought traffic to your site
  • Crawl Errors – check at a glance if there are any roadblocks for the Google search bots on your site which may stop them finding your content
  • Keywords- the most common words on your site. These are useful to identify if you are using enough of the keywords you believe your potential users would look for.
  • Sitemaps- you can check there is a valid sitemap for your site as well as the ability to create and test one. Sitemaps are a critical entry point for the Google bots to begin searching your site.
  • Links to your site- who and how they link to your site

From the Dashboard you can click on each item to investigate further. The critical factor to enjoy with Webmaster Tools is that it presents you with this summary. Become the master of exceptions, which means you no longer have to review every single piece of data available for your web site, merely the items that stand out as issues or opportunities.

Therefore the outcome of working smarter using Webmaster Tools and not harder is to free up your time for more creative, proactive or business building experiences.

Filed Under: Tools Tagged With: , , ,