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Easy Do’s and Don’ts for On-Page SEO

11 May 2012

The process of quality on-page SEO (search engine optimisation) on your website content entails a lot of user-centric changes that will inevitably bring more traffic to your site. This does not just mean following formats or peppering your content with keywords and links. Below are some of the most useful and effective, not to mention easy to implement, SEO efforts for any type of web site.

Do Make Your Content Relevant

Remember that your goal is to entice people to enter, for them to think of your site as a helpful site. A sure way to do this is to create content that they will be reading on their own, without any promos or discounts from you.

Expand your content topics to those slightly outside of your business. For example, instead of just writing about your rooms and services in your hotel business, write about travel tips, how to book flights for a family, creating kid-friendly itineraries and the like. Think about your target audience and what they would most likely want to read.

Do Think That Any Page Can Be An Entry Point

Every page in your site can be an entry point from a search engine. It is not just your home page that is exposed to Google or Bing. Your Contact Us page is an excellent page to place keywords that can easily draw attention to your customer support staff, for easy inquiries.

Another sought-after page is the Gallery. This is an easy way for your customers or visitors to get a gist of your product line up. Scatter relevant keywords and links to different pages so that it is not just your home page that is being displayed in Google.

Do Clean Up Your Website Code

Create code that is easy to edit, compact and neat. This way, it is a lot easier for the search engine spiders to index or catalog your site for their reference. Always include a sitemap of the site in the website itself and within the code.

Do Read About SEO Efforts Regularly

Stay ahead of the pack by reading up on SEO blogs and news regularly. Make this your Wednesday morning habit, for example. Reading up on your competitors should also be in your agenda but staying well informed and updated is something that you should definitely do.

Don’t Duplicate Content – Ever!

One of the biggest mistakes you can ever make when you are working on web content is to post duplicate content, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Make sure to check the copy of your content via anti-plagiarism applications such as Plagium or Copyscape. This is a highway to getting blacklisted from the big search engines if you are guilty of this.

Don’t Embed Text In Images

Text that is a part of the image means that you are “wasting” valuable keywords. They are not read by the search engines since they are considered part of the image. If possible, include these words in the image description or as part of the image file name.

Don’t Use Splash Pages

Splash pages don’t add much value to the site, they do not give you higher search engine rankings and people just click through them regardless of their content. Just present your site as is.

Filed Under: Content Tagged With: , , , , ,

Internet Marketing and #SEO Workshops for April 2012 Announced

28 March 2012

The Search Engine Academy has announced their slate of upcoming internet marketing courses scheduled for April 2012 at locations in the USA, Canada, and Australia.

Toronto, Ontario, Canada (PRWEB) March 27, 2012

The Search Engine Academy announced that they still have openings in their hands-on internet marketing courses throughout April, but caution that those interested in the classes should register soon before they fill up.

John Alexander, Founder of the Search Engine Academy, said, “We are excited to continue to bring internet marketing and SEO classes to various cities around the world, and the April line-up hits some of the more popular spots.”

Upcoming dates include:

  •     April 9, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
  •     April 12, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
  •     April 16, Washington DC, USA
  •     April 23, Oakland, CA, USA
  •     April 30, Denver, Colorado, USA
  •     April 30, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Each student is asked to bring a wireless-enabled laptop and work on either their own website or their client’s in the class. They are each given class time to present problems to the other students, get constructive feedback, and help each other on solving common online marketing problems.

The Academy starts the week by teaching an easy six-step process that gets its students ramped up quickly without having to know technical code.

“Anyone can learn our six-step process and get good results without knowing much HTML,” Alexander adds. “The rest of the week is spent learning more advanced techniques that can get a business listed on the search engines many different ways.”

Once a student has completed the workshop and passed the exam, they receive a certificate showing they have a thorough understanding in search engine marketing. Graduates of the Master-level workshop receive six months of mentoring and support after the course ends.

Alexander said, “The six months of follow-up mentoring for Master SEO students is probably one of the most valuable parts of the program, because we cover so much material in one week. This gives students additional support after they leave the classroom.”

The Search Engine Academy courses are eligible for college-level continuing education units (CEUs), and employers whose employees need to meet annual educational requirements each year can apply for the CEUs for a small fee.

Business owners, web designers or employees in charge of marketing can register online at the Search Engine Academy’s internet marketing class registration page or contact them directly +1-905-716-4472  to get more information.

Filed Under: Workshops Tagged With: , , ,

Google’s New “Page Layout” Algorithm Seeks to Penalise Sites Which are Top-Heavy with Ads

6 February 2012

If you are tired of swimming through all those ads on top of the screen when landing upon a certain page, then you have a reason to be happy as Google announced on January 19, 2012 that it will be identifying sites which are doing this practice and will be penalising them accordingly. Sites identified as violating this page layout algorithm will be tagged by Google and shall not be ranked as highly as they used to or should be in succeeding searches.

Google refused to set a firm guideline however as to how much ads on top of a page is really “too much” so to speak, instead they are letting the individual publishers decide for themselves and encouraged them to use their Google Browser Size Tool and other similar tools to make a decision as to how much of their page’s content should be left unobscured by ads at first glance.

Google further stressed that this new algorithm will only be affecting those pages which have an abnormally high number of ad placements above-the-fold such that it eventually makes it difficult for users to find the actual content. Sites which are placing ads above-the-fold in a normal manner don’t have to worry, as they will not be affected, especially since Google also recognises that these are prime real estate for advertising spots which make up a major part of the monetisation program of most sites.

By Google’s own estimate, there are not that many websites that would be affected by this change however. They reckon that it will only affect less than 1% of all searches globally. Website publishers will know if they have been tagged for violating this algorithm if they suddenly see a drop in traffic to their site and they know that they have been top-heavy with ads all along then chances are they have been tagged because of this new algorithm. Their site’s ranking will be decreased once they are tagged which explains the sudden drop in traffic to their site.

If a site is already tagged, publishers can actually implement the necessary changes in order to gain Google’s good graces once again but the penalty may not be immediately lifted as fast as they would want it to be. Google explains that even though the page layout algorithm automatically detects any changes that may be adopted, it will still take as much as several weeks for their system to assess the overall changes of an entire site depending on the number of pages in the site and how efficiently Google bot can crawl the contents.

While this news is a welcome development for most users, some would still contend that much is still to be desired as far as regulating these advertisements are concerned as there are still way too much advertisements in some sites which cannot be categorised as above-the-fold per se but are very annoying still the same.

Google closed their announcement by saying that this change is just one in about 500 improvements that they expect to implement within the year in their continuing effort to deliver the best possible user experience.

George Peterson currently works for one of the leading search marketing agencies in Denmark – Outrider. He currently works as a SEO manager.

Filed Under: Search Engines Tagged With: , , , ,

Make 2012 the Year Your Company Gets Into Social Media

27 January 2012

Next time you’re in a public place, take a look around you. How many mobile phones do you see? I bet the answer is “several”. Most likely, people aren’t talking into those phones. They’re probably staring at the screens – reading the latest tweets, posting to Facebook, checking in on Foursquare, or spying on their circles on Google+.

If your company doesn’t have a social media presence, you’re at a serious disadvantage. To the people who are glued to their phones, you may as well not exist. Fortunately, it’s easy to get started in the world of social media. If you make 2012 the year that you connect with your customers, it won’t take long to establish a presence, and before the year is out you’ll find yourself wondering how you ever managed without having such an easy and convenient way to reach your customers.

Social Media is About Engagement

When you first get involved in social media, it’s easy to get carried away; to post too often, or to think of social media purely as free advertising. This can be a very damaging mistake. Social media is about conversation.  Your goal should be to talk to your customers, to answer their questions, to ask them questions, and only occasionally post advertisement.

In the early stages, it’s best to pick just a couple of networks to be very active on. You should join all the networks you can think of. Or, if that’s just a very short list, ask an online marketing agency to sort out the important accounts for you. Set up those extra accounts to point to the main accounts such as Facebook and Twitter.

If you expect to have a large number of followers, then you may want to hire a social media manager to look after your accounts for you. A social media manager will be able to answer questions, find interesting topics to talk about, and pick the right times, and the right frequency, to post advertisements.

Smaller, local businesses, may be able to manage their own social media accounts, but companies that have customers in more than one time zone, or that cater to a large number of customers, are probably best off enlisting the help of an online marketing agency.

If you do try to manage your own account, the most important thing to remember is that your posts, once put up there, are instantly visible to the entire world. If you regret something, you won’t have time to delete it – it’s already out there and has probably been seen by a lot of people. Don’t post anything that you don’t want associated with your brand. That means, stick to positive messages. Avoid getting involved with flame wars, and avoid politically charged messages unless your brand wants to be associated with a specific political stance. It’s all too easy to let things get personal on the Internet, but when you’re posting as a brand, it’s wise to keep a professional distance.

Written by Amy Fowler, social media manager at online marketing agency, Boom.

Filed Under: Social Media, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

4 Tips for an Effective Facebook Campaign

24 January 2012

Facebook Ads have become an increasingly popular alternative to in-site advertising solutions such as Google Adwords; with a massive potential user base of over 800 million people and an abundance of personal and preferential information to aid you in honing in on your target audience. However, with only a small snippet of text and a little picture to convey your message, a lot of thought and effort has to be put into the planning of your campaign for maximum impact.

Find Your Target

With so much information willingly given up by its users and stored by Facebook you can choose, to an accurate degree, who views your ads. However, if you don’t know your own target markets then these options are next to useless, so the first thing you have to do is ask yourselves a few questions:

  • Are my customers male or female or both?
  • How old are my customers?
  • Where do my customers live?

Facebook helps you to find these helpful bits of information out, using its Insights feature to analyse your page and its users. Using this tool you can extract valuable answers to the above questions without having to do masses of in depth analysis. Take a look at your users and see how they relate to your business. If your business’s main client base is local then you know to target that specific location, but if customers travel to you remember to include the main areas they come from in your location targeting. Try to keep the number of locations to a minimum though, larger ranges raise your cost per click (CPC) as well making your ad less relevant to users, which in turn will make the odds of people clicking on your ad less likely.

Customisation

Now you have your target in sight it is time to make ads that cater specifically for them. This is why you don’t throw all of your eggs in one basket with one specific ad. Run multiple campaigns to further focus in on your target market; creating different ads for men and women for example.

The more different campaigns you run alongside each other the lower the CPC on each as they have smaller target audiences.

Standing Out From the Crowd

There are a lot of ads to compete with and only 135 characters to convey your message so you need to maximise its impact. When selecting your image make sure it is clear and close up; you only have a small image to make use of so it must be strong enough to grab the user’s attention.

As for the text, what are you offering to persuade the user to click?  Make sure it is short, punchy and catchy with a call to action for the user to take. People love specials and sales, so this could be the ideal bait to lure them in.

Test, Test and Test Again!

By running multiple ads at a time you can split test ads, so you can tweak the text and try out different images for maximum effect. Over time you will see what works and tailor your ads to use these features while abandoning campaigns that are less successful.

Also, by continually updating and improving your ads it is possible to keep abreast of the latest trends, fads and tastes. By keeping your ear to the ground you can use these to make sure that by being current you will attract more users to your ads.

Based in Brighton, Silicon Beach Training offers a wide range of courses to help improve your skills and knowledge, including widely popular courses which offer full Social Media Training and PRINCE2 Practitioner Training to help give your career that extra boost.

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

What is conversion optimisation testing?

7 October 2011

If 100 visitors come to your site, how many of these end up in a sale (be it buying a product or service, signing up for newsletters, retweeting in Twitter or ‘liking’ a post on Facebook)? These ‘sales’ are known as ‘conversions’. Understanding what works best to create these conversions is known as conversion optimisation testing.

If you create any advertising campaign, in any media, there is a risk of a low return on investment (ROI). Fortunately, instead of having to keep a track of how many coupons are returned to your shop, or asking every new client where they heard about you, the online environment has methods that can show you where your business is coming from.

Your website is a main media platform which is a 24/7 advertisement of your business. Conversion optimisation is all about having more of your visitors actually take action. Optimisation conversion testing is all about measuring which changes you make to your site have the best impact on converting your customers. It can take several similar forms, but essentially works on steps such as these:

  1. Plan a targeted campaign to sell something to a specific group. For example you may be a travel agent wanting to launch a newsletter about travel to the beach at Noosa for families because you are now managing a holiday unit development there.
  2. Create a web page, or section of a web page that includes information for your target market with a call to action (CTA) to encourage subscription to your newsletter.
  3. Create a second page with similar information done differently, also with a CTA for the subscription.  The first page may be text heavy verse the second which is mainly images.  Or you could test different colour options or image placement options between the two pages.
  4. By comparing the path of your visitors from each of the two pages to a final action (subscribing, in this case) you can compare which of the two web pages was most successful in gaining the end result.

There are various other testing methods available such as split testing and multivariate analysis but the reason you use them is all the same – to work out what is most attractive to your users to result in a conversion.

Conversion optimisation testing is both an art and a science. You start with a working hypothesis and use the science to look at the quantitative website statistics to understand what is working and what isn’t. It also has the element of art in that conversions are often a response to the visual, qualitative message components of the site.

In most industries traditionally, it is much more economical to sell more to an existing customer, than to continually try and find new customers. Web site commerce is no different. If for every 100 visitors who come to your site, 1 buys/signs up/retweets (converts), you have a conversion rate of 1%. If by spending some money on conversion optimisation testing increases your conversion rate to 5%, ROI benefits to your business can be staggering. Additionally, your website is constantly available, not some billboard advertisement only there for 30 days, or a newspaper advertisement for a week.

When ROI is difficult to calculate on many forms of marketing, conversion optimisation testing can significantly improve conversions whilst being measurable at the same time.

Filed Under: Return On Investment Tagged With: , ,

10 top tips on how blogs help SEO

5 October 2011

What is a blog? A blog (the shortened form of weB LOG) is an online series of entries rather like a journal, which can have content added to it very simply and quickly. They have a front end which allows the user to merely type in their content, no coding required. You click on the ‘publish’ button and instantly your article is available for all to read.

So in what ways does a good Blog help with Search Engine Optimisation of your website?

  1. Good fresh content – everyone rewards great content that is new – users enjoy the result and return frequently to your blog as do search engines. It is so easy to add content using blogging platforms, there is no barrier to timing regular content updates, both users and search engine love fresh content.
  2. More pages for your site – there appears to be a correlation between the total number of pages on your web site and how frequently search engines visit you and thus index new content. Because it so quick and easy to add a blog post, you can quickly increase the number of pages on your site with quality content.
  3. More keywords – by completing your regular keyword tracking, you will know what keywords your audience is searching for. As this changes, you can quickly respond to the market by creating relevant blog posts including an optimal number of keywords in each post to satisfy both users and search engines. There are even some software plug-ins for blogging which works out the perfect keyword placement for you.
  4. Take advantage quickly of long tailed keywords – there is evidence to show that users who query using 4 or more keywords in a phrase are those most likely to convert into a sale. The longer the keyword phrase the closer the user generally is to the purchase decision in the buying cycle. Thus it is sometimes helpful to garner a small number of highly qualified buyers using long tailed keywords, than to get a huge amount of traffic that are really only “carpet crushers” and not ready to buy. Blogs can help you take advantage of these long tailed keywords simply and quickly to meet changing market needs.
  5. Helping users – why do you really exist? To inform, make sales, communicate, provide a service….. any number of reasons. Most importantly, to achieve any and all results, you need to help your user. As a blogger, you are in an exciting position to do exactly that – help your users – on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis by providing information that will help them. There is no other way in business you can have such an immediate relationship with so many people at the same time so simply.
  6. Users want to come back – because you are so successful following tip #5, you will know (or hope) that many of your readers will want to read your wise words regularly. To do this, they will link to you or subscribe to your feeds. In doing so, you will gain followers and link popularity, all great fuel for good SEO.
  7. Suggest your link to others – humans love to share. One of the three cornerstones of great SEO is links (the other two are awesome content and an architecturally sound site). To gain links you need good content as well as regular feeds. If you follow those principles within your blog, you are adding value and others will want to read your blog, share it and link to it. SEO is built on great links.
  8. Blog software has clear URL structures – making it easy for search engine spiders to crawl and index, this comes under the great site architecture part of SEO. As part of this concept, you can build your blog on a blog company’s domain (e.g. www.blogspot.com) or you can have your blog on your own domain (e.g. www.yoursite.com/blog). To gain the most SEO benefit, it is better to use you own domain. I have seen some writers suggest hosting your blog completely separately, even on a different host company so that you can link from your blog to your business web site, garnering links. I disagree, whilst in the short term your rankings may improve due to increased links, your long term goal should be to gain links from other real sources because your blog is genuinely linkable, not because of dodgy administration.
  9. Connecting with more people – Blogs are great at linking with other blogs and social media, they create an active community. There are even software plug-ins to help linking and improving the conversation. Good blogs encourage citations and contextually relevant links that are generally attractive to search engines and thus rewarded.
  10. Doing it for the right reasons – Remember you are using a blog to communicate – not just to get SEO rankings. By genuinely targeting your blog to meet a need in your audience you will gain in SEO organically.
Filed Under: SEO Tips Tagged With: , , , ,

How can I make sure my site is SEO friendly?

3 October 2011

Before you can ask yourself “how can I make sure my site is SEO friendly”, we need to discuss what is SEO? Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the website equivalent of being in the main entrance of the local Westfield or high street shopping centre. You want your site to be the most visible site your users see when they type a keyword phrase into the query bar of a search engine such as Google.

However, before we continue, I preface the rest of this article with the caution – search engines do not buy from you, they are not your target market – what we try to say is that it is important that your site is SEO friendly so that it appears in searches, but at the point, it must be human user friendly to create the relationship or make a sale.

To gain a great position on the first page of a search for keywords relevant to your business is the result of a multitude of factors, a few of which we will briefly discuss here. In the beginning, as in all marketing, you need to know your customer and know what they want. In the “satisfying search engines world”, that means knowing what keywords your potential visitors are currently searching for. This is the first step,

1. Do constant keyword research. There is a plethora of keyword research tools, not least is the free Google Keyword Tool. By knowing what keywords your target audience are searching on, allows you to keep your content current and aimed at the searches. This inherently makes your site SEO friendly.

Each page you create on your website must first be indexed by a search engine. The search engine spiders trawl sites on a cycle related to how often that site has new content. Which continues our list of SEO friendly behaviours with one of the most important items:

2. Maintain fresh new content. Regular new content will attract the search engine spiders to revisit your site often, thereby regularly indexing your new content. This means your visitors will have access to that content faster when searching.

3. Good quality content, written for your users (not just the search engines) means visitors will want to read your material and come back to your site.

4. Because you are maintaining fresh, current, and useful content, your users will want to come back time and again as well as sharing your usefulness with others. The outcome of this sharing is that your users will link to your site – a critical factor in making sure your site is SEO friendly. The more genuine links you have (with other related, credible sites) the more respect your website gains, thus showing the search engines you are a preferred site, thus improving your rankings.

5. Live in a nice neighbourhood – reusing the shop front analogy – if you don’t like visiting businesses in dark alleys surrounded by tattoo parlours, houses of ill repute and illegal drug labs, don’t expect search engines to stick around if you have links with sites that are known for spamming or other anti social behaviour. Make sure you know exactly who you are linking to.

By following these top 5 tips, you are well on the way to making sure your web site is SEO friendly.

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimisation Tagged With: , ,

Google AdWords – should you use the service?

28 September 2011

When you perform a web search using Google, the keyword phrase you search on brings up a list of the most relevant results to match your search. This list is known as ‘organic’ search results. At the very top of the list are generally 2-3 results which have a very light coloured background, with a tiny ‘Ads’ printed at the top right hand corner of the background. These are always paid for advertisements. Similarly, the right side panel is also filled with paid for advertisements also known as ‘sponsored links’. These advertisements are Google AdWords.

Google AdWords work the same as any advertisement in any media, you work out what you want to say, who your target market is, how much you want to spend, then place your ad.

However, due to the enormous amount of data that Google has been able to accumulate about us and our habits, we can make our AdWords advertisements targeted better and more useful to our potential clients.

Top 4 Positives of Google AdWords -

  • It would appear that if a user is one of the 5% who click on the advertisement, they tend to be closer to the purchase point of their buying journey.
  • You only pay for the advertisement when someone clicks on it, so no traffic, no cost.
  • You bid for the maximum amount of money you will pay for the advertisement containing the keywords you want. This means, you can choose and pay relatively little for long tailed keyword phrases which will attract a small, but very qualified user.
  • Google provides an excellent set of tools to initially define a quality set of keywords and then to analyse the actual results from the AdWords campaigns.

Top 4 Negatives of Google AdWords -

  • Of all the searchers who search for your keywords, only about 5% of them will click on an ad or sponsored link as opposed to 95% who will first choose to read one of the organic listings offered.
  • As with any form of advertising, these sponsored results will not carry as much trust as an organic result.
  • Google AdWords does have an interface which can sometimes feel unwieldy- it is, but with a little practice you will find your way around eventually.
  • There is a lot to understand when it comes to how much to pay for a click, how to bid etc. Take the time to read the instructions, view the videos – make time to make money.

So, who can benefit most from Google AdWords?

  • New websites which have not yet gained organic rankings as yet. The AdWords campaign can help drive traffic to the site.
  • For new product lines which are unique or not well known as a product group at all in your target market
  • Where you have a volume of products or services you wish to ramp up quickly, such as a year end sale, or you stock items for seasonal use only such as Christmas etc.
  • If you want to specifically target a group to see your advertisement, you can choose language, region and many other customised parameters which will enhance your results.
  • AdWords is an economical platform to test advertising. You can use an A/B landing page tester which allows you to track conversions from different landing pages.
  • There is also the ability to ‘remarket’ using AdWords. Remarketing is reaching out to an audience that has previously visited your website. By tagging groups of pages with a keyword, you can match these tagged keywords to specific ads you run.
  • The results of testing your niche using Google AdWords can provide the analytics to improve your overall site and improve search engine optimisation for organic searches.
  • Done well, a very small enterprise can benefit as much from AdWords advertising as can a very large corporation – a situation where it isn’t true that ‘size matters’.

Final thoughts

Unless you are trying to raise a profile for a charity or other Not for Profit, AdWords are not really designed for non-monetized websites. Why spend money when you don’t intend to make money?

Lastly, on a different path, if your site already ranks highly for organic searches, paying for advertising using Google AdWords is not a good economic decision, you will gain little for your investment – put your advertising dollars elsewhere.

Filed Under: Pay Per Click Tagged With: , , ,

Organic SEO is Dead!!

26 September 2011

Have you heard that organic SEO (search engine optimisation) is dead?  It’s a presumption that has been tossed around a lot over the last few years, and we confidently believe it to be a false claim!

The reasons why many have taken this claim at face value, is that anyone working on an organic SEO strategy consistently see their progress moving forward at only a snail’s pace – or worse, going backwards.  If I were in that position, I may very well think along the same lines, throw my hands up in the air and accept that there is no point continuing on this impossible task.

WRONG!

SEO is not deadThe problem is that when everyone follows the same path (fighting for the same keyword visibility), using the same techniques and listening to the same “expert” knowledge base, of course the competition is going to be tough.

A better and more rewarding approach is to search out your “low hanging fruit”, those keyword phrases that aren’t as popular but much easier to achieve high visibility.  Imagine if you have 28 various keyword phrases that each received about 100 qualified searches each week.  That’s the opportunity for 2800 qualified visitors to your site.  Now close your eyes and imagine if you had 100 of those same keyword phrases.  Do you like what you see?

When we talk about being qualified, that is, the visitor is not just browsing generally, but much closer to the purchase phase of their information search. These visitors often use long tailed keyword phrases. Long tailed keyword phrases generally contain quite a few words making it quite a specific search. For example instead of ‘ladies bike’, they might choose, ‘ladies aluminium 3 speed hybrid bike Brisbane’. At this point, they are qualified visitors and very likely to be your ‘low hanging fruit’.

There is nothing magical or too technical that cannot be achieved for organic SEO results.  It’s a case of weighing up the competition and having a logical plan of attack.

And by the way, when you have your 100+ high ranking website pages, they will naturally boost your tougher, more competitive phrases.

Organic SEO is not dead – it’s more about knowing what to do and who to listen to.

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimisation Tagged With: ,