August 10, 2011Forum member "fabrizio" thought that adding more pages to his site would ultimately mean he would receive more search engine traffic, yet that's not what has happened.

Did he do something wrong?

See what other forum members think, and share your own thoughts here:

++Does Having More Pages Means More Traffic?++

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Labels: Advanced, Forum, Thread

August 10, 2011By Jill Whalen

How Small Conversions Can Lead to Large Ones

The ultimate goal of most websites is to collect leads and/or make sales. Which makes them important conversion points to measure with your web analytics program.

Leads and sales are also the reason why I'm a huge proponent of optimizing services and products pages. If a Google searcher lands directly on a page that is selling what they want, there's a strong likelihood that this will convert into a lead or a sale.

Leads and sales often come with a high price tag and are what I call "large conversions." Any conversion that potentially costs money is going to be harder to get than one that is free.

And let's face it, not everyone is in the market to buy right now. Some are just looking for information about your particular industry. Others may be trying to learn how to do for themselves what you are doing. And still others may be doing research for some time in the future when they may be in the market.

Serve Them Value-Added Content

Adding value to your website through free articles, blog posts, videos, and any other type of content that may be helpful to those at the not-ready-to-buy-yet stage, is a great way to gain extra traffic. The problem (if you want to call it that) with all this "value-added" content is that it brings those very people who will rarely convert into a lead or a sale. They're mainly there to partake of your free information. They want answers to their questions, and once they get them, they leave your website with nothing to show for it other than a "100% bounce rate" mention in your analytics report.

Converting the Freeloaders

Rather then having them bounce off your website, you should be trying to convert them in some small way. That is, providing your not-in-the-market-right-now site visitors (or freeloaders!) with one or more quick, painless (ideally measurable) actions they can take. These could be anything that keeps them connected to you and/or your website in some way ? signing up for your free email newsletter, following you on Twitter, "liking" your FaceBook page, subscribing to your YouTube channel, etc.

Be sure to feature your conversion points prominently where your free content lives.

For instance, at the bottom of every article or post add call-to-action wording such as:

"If you liked this blog post, let us email you when we've posted others."

"If you want to learn more about _____, sign up for our weekly newsletter."

"If you want to stay abreast of what's going on in ______, be sure to follow us on Twitter."

Clearly State the Obvious

Another type of small conversion is to get the visitor to at least click through to your services or product pages. For instance, if you have a lot of how-to content that shows people the ins and outs of the very services you offer ? make sure it's extremely clear that you don't just teach it, but that you also provide the service. (You'd be surprised how many people don't realize it!) There will always be some people who decide that doing it themselves is too daunting a task.

Make sure those folks see prominent and simple directions to your services pages by saying something like:

"Learn how we can help you do ______ today!"

Small Conversions Keep You Connected

Of course, if you're going to prominently feature small, quick and painless conversion points, it's essential that you follow through with your promises. If you promise you'll provide industry updates on Twitter, then you darn well better do it fairly often. If you told them you'd send email when you posted new articles and they don't hear from you for 2 months, then you're not keeping up with your end of the bargain. It's important to continuously give them what you said you would. Nothing undermines your credibility faster than collecting their email addresses and Twitter handles and then giving them to your sales team to start breathing down their necks. (Remember, they're not in the market to buy now anyway!)

Pay Attention to Low Conversion Rates

If you are prominently featuring small conversions on your website but not seeing much action, it could mean that your content isn't providing what the visitor hoped it would. Or worse, it could mean that it's just not very good. This is common if you're creating your content for search engines, not people. After all, why would people want to be notified when you've added more crap content? Take your low conversion numbers to heart and invest in content that fulfills a real need.

Small Conversions Can Lead to Big Ones

The whole idea of having small conversion points where people sign up to hear from you regularly is so that you will always be at the top of their mind and not forgotten a few minutes after they leave your website. Today's not-in-the-market-at-the-moment guy or gal may one day be a ready-to-buy-now guy or gal. When they make their Jekyll to Hyde switch, you want them to feel that there's nobody they'd rather purchase from than the one who's been nurturing them along from the very beginning of their quest ? YOU!

Jill

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Labels: Converting, Small, Visitors, website

Posted by admin on August, 12th 2011

Do clothes tend to miss the wardrobe and the drawers? Is it frustrating trying to find things you thought were in the wardrobe but have gone missing?

Maybe you’re a designer or a dressmaker and need something to keep clothing in check and hung correctly.

Then take a look at the Hanger King Pro, a piece of revolutionary wardrobe equipment that will sort out your wardrobe, or your clothing in moments and you’ll never look back.

What is Hanger King Pro? It’s a coat hanger that’s different. Its keeps clothes in place with an anti- static grip, so grabs hold of satin tops and silk or linen shirts. It’s shoulders protect the fabric and don’t get entangled within the loops of knitwear.

The neck of the Hanger King Pro is specially shaped so that clothing sits properly and doesn’t slip down the hanger, therefor stretching and ruining tops.

Trousers sit on the hanger and don’t move, skirts clip onto the Hanger King Pro with the special clips, even ties, belt and scarves have their place.

Not only do clothes sit and stay on the Hanger King Pro, wardrobe room is increased due to the fantastic feature of the Hanger King Pro, which allows you to add another hanger below, so you can have all of your shirts together, all of your trousers and so on. Your wardrobe space is tripled and clothing looks neat and tidy.

If you’re business is clothing you can stock many varieties and style of clothing on just one hanger by adding to the drop loop.

Worried about getting your wedding dress creased or it slipping down onto the floor? Put it on a Hanger King Pro, the dress will sit properly on the hanger and will stay crease free and clean.

The Hanger King Pro is ideal for home and company use, it’s a fantastic investment to keep your clothing neat and tidy.

Using Synonyms for SEO

When thinking about the main keywords you want to aim for with SEO you should also consider synonyms. Synonyms are words that relate to other words; these related words can sometimes be inter-changeable.  Google loves related content but can spot an obviously keyword stuffed webpage which keeps mentioning the same word again and again and [...]

Labels: Hanger

August 10, 2011That's all for today!

The summer seems pretty quiet workwise, which is fine with me. I've purposely taken on limited work so I have time to catch up and also just enjoy the nice weather. I'm also only taking on the type of work I enjoy the most, which is mainly high-level SEO consulting and training. In fact, I've got an in-house SEO training day scheduled for a client next week that I'm looking forward to.

All is fairly quiet on the home front, too. Which is also a good thing. It is hard to believe that my son Tim will be on his way to Brown in just a few weeks. Apparently quiet, the summer is going by quickly!

Catch you in 2 weeks! ? Jill

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Labels: Wrapup

July 27, 2011Forum member "ttw" tells of her client who has one site: www.yoursite.co.jp, which is a parked alias of another: www.yoursite.com/jp, which means you can visit each URL independently. She wonders if this is a good case for a rel=canonical tag.

Read the entire thread and share your own comments here:

Canonical Tag for DNS Redirect

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Labels: Advanced, Forum, Thread

July 27, 2011That's all for today!

I've still got Google+ invites if anyone wants one. Just let me know the email address you want to invite and I'll send one over to you. The more people on board there, the more we can see if it's a worthwhile online hangout! I'm still debating it.

Meanwhile, my ears are still somewhat blocked, although not quite as badly as before. Even worse is that Tim has caught the virus and now his ears are blocked also. I hope that his get better more quickly than mine because he depends on his ears even more than the average person since he has low vision.

Anyone taking a fun vacation? It seems that out-of-office replies have been rampant lately. We have no major plans at the moment. Our 28th anniversary is coming up this Sunday, and as far as I know, we don't even have plans for that!

Catch you in 2 weeks! ? Jill

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Labels: Wrapup

July 27, 2011++AdWords Audit from Group Twenty Seven++

You still have time to get in on the $600 AdWords Audit offer from Pauline Jakober of Group Twenty Seven. She'll be taking requests until August 13, 2011, on a first-come, first-served basis. If you're wondering whether your AdWords campaigns could be making you more money, you should totally take advantage of this offer.

To learn more, please fill out the Group Twenty Seven contact form and mention the discount code "HRA600" in your message.

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Labels: Might, Stuff

This week I asked my Twitter followers:

++What are your quick words of wisdom for a business owner just starting out with SEO for their site?++

Here's how they replied:

SonicSEO: Have a unique value proposition ? be able to clearly explain why you're better than the competition. Huge for conversions.

JVRudnick: Title tag + less than 70 chars + priority keywords in order.

Patrickberzai: Content! Content! Content! And SEO is not the be all. A great user interface and calls to action to get leads!

Kaidez: Focus on content first.

Matt_Siltala: I would say start with the basics in making sure your design or content management system (CMS) is search friendly, URLs, images, unique meta, folders, 301s, etc.

ErinJones: Stay organized! Don't rush through something thinking you'll have time to clean it up later. You won't.

JenJHodge: Don't get too attached to the content you wrote, no one's trying to hurt your feelings!

Abelmohler: Design your site for real visitors, not for search engines.

Nibfickle: Be patient. Be very, very patient. This is not what you've been told... #bewareforfakeSEOsharks #nextweek1inGoogleWontWork

ARileyWebDesign: Start with quality website.  Don?t use tricks or gimmicks and stay clear of anyone who advocates such methods.

Dbarra: Ignore toolbar PR, focus on conversions not rankings, obsessively organize/refine your site hierarchy, and test don't guess.

bran6141: Get on twitter and start following people in SEO and web development.  Great people sharing great information.

SEOMalc: Test the water with a targeted PPC campaign first to get data on traffic and conversion rates for later SEO targeting.

Sambeamond: Focus 1st on keyword research, build a list to use throughout SEO campaign. Then begin implementation with Title tags.

BFuniv: You are planting something that will grow.

Stevenapier: Employ a quality SEO agency.

MinkiKimSI: Stay patient & persistent in SEO. Focus on building a quality site, not just ranking high.

DKS_Systems: Build your website for users and for great user-functionality which includes quality content. Quality first.

Mercylivi: Clear and easy hierarchy website. Target localized phrases in KWs & content. Have your mantra as Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS).

Chingyun: Be patient.

DigitalEel: Start with clear objective for your website (helps dictate keyword selection/focus of each page). And site architecture!

Freelancemomcom: In depth KW research with emphasis on local if applicable. Test conversions with PPC. Content strategy--user 1st. Persist!

NickLeRoy: Absolutely need to choose two of the following: Money, Time or Results.

Pedalowebdesign: Obvious start point is working out who audience is, and research. Then building really good rich content.

Jill's Comments: Wow, great stuff everyone! @JVRudnick, I'm not sure I follow what you're saying, but I disagree that a title tag needs to be fewer than 70 characters. @Abelmohler, while that sounds good in theory, there are plenty of sites designed for real visitors which get no search engine traffic, making that advice somewhat hollow. I prefer to say, "Design for real visitors, while also keeping search engines in mind!"

Want to participate in the Twitter Question of the Week?

Follow @jillwhalen on Twitter.

Labels: Question, Twitter

By Jill Whalen

Dear Jill,

I have many questions about SEO. Any help you can give me will be greatly appreciated!

What would be the best keywords to draw the most people to our website? I have thought of some, but I'd love to have the advice of someone who really understands how this works.

Some I've thought about: variety music, 2-piece band, light rock music, rock music, new country music, Jimmy Buffett Band, Jimmy Buffett music, island/calypso music, North Carolina small bands, North Carolina party duos, etc.

Where should the keywords be put on our website?

How do I know if have a tracking code or not, and how do I apply the one that was given to me?

How can I go about setting up pay-per-click ads, and are they a good thing?

Please help me if possible!

Thank you, and best regards,

Nancy

++Jill's Response++

Hi Nancy,

That certainly is a lot of questions! It sounds like you're an SEO novice, which is fine, but it means you should start slowly and learn SEO in a systematic fashion.

You first asked about keywords, which is a good thing because they are the cornerstone to any SEO work that you will do moving forward. You're on the right track by brainstorming some keyword phrases that relate to what your business offers. However, your brainstormed words should be used as a starting point for performing research using Google's keyword research tool. Rather than go into the specifics on how to do that, here are two previous articles I wrote on the topic:

And here's where you can see all other articles that I've written about keyword research.

The important thing to note about keywords is that in terms of SEO, they are the phrases that someone looking for what your company offers might type into Google or any other search engine.

You didn't provide me with your website, but in looking at your brainstormed phrases, only 2 seemed to give me a hint at what your business might offer (North Carolina small bands, North Carolina party duos). I'm going to assume that you are part of a band that plays gigs in the North Carolina area. If that's the case, then phrases such as "light rock music" or "Jimmy Buffet Band" are probably not going to be good keyword phrases for you to target because they're too general.

Think Carefully About Searcher's Intent

Remember, you have to think about the intent of the person doing a search at Google. What are the chances that someone typing "light rock music" into Google's search box just happens to be looking to hire a band in the specific area of NC where you are willing to travel to?

More likely, they're simply looking for some playlists they can add to their iPod or perhaps specific singers who tend to sing in that style. Now, I suppose if you also sell CDs of your music, then there could be a bit of a fit. But because the phrase "light rock music" is extremely general, the intent of the searcher will not really be known. And while it would be pretty neat to have people coming to your site from such a generic phrase, it's likely not going to provide you with any new business (or what we like to call "conversions").

Where to Put Your Keyword Phrases

You also asked about where you would put the keywords once you've determined which ones you should use. Basically, the idea of SEO is to make sure your website is highly relevant for any and all of the phrases you've chosen. This means that what you say on your pages (in your content) about what you do and what you offer needs to naturally use those keyword phrases. You may want to consider purchasing my Nitty-gritty Guide to Writing for Search Engines.

In addition, you'll want to use the more important keyword phrases in your title tags.

Don't try to do too much or too little with any page of your site. Each page should have a specific focus. For instance, you may want to have a top-level page on your site that focuses on the different types of events that your band has been hired to play at. From this main category page, you might link deeper to each type of event (e.g., weddings, or birthdays) and show some videos and testimonials from past gigs. This will give you the opportunity to focus on specific keyword phrases such as "Wedding band in ____, NC" while also showcasing your abilities.

If you're still confused about keywords and how to build them into your website, I highly recommend taking my Getting Started With SEO Online Course at Lynda.com. You can watch all of the videos in the course (and all the other courses at Lynda.com) for as little as $25! I've got a few of the SEO Course Videos available to watch for free.

Tracking Codes

You asked how you would know if your site had a tracking code and where you would put one if not. I'm not sure what you mean there, but I'm going to assume you meant a Google Analytics tracking code. If so, then simply ask the company who created your website whether or not they set up a Google Analytics account for you. Most likely they didn't, or they would have told you about it, but some companies do this and don't tell you. (You can also view your page source code and look for the tracking codes.)

If you don't have a Google Analytics account, you can sign up for one here.

Once you sign up, they will provide you with the code that needs to be installed on every page of your site, along with information on where it should be placed. If you have a website developer, they should know how to do this for you.

I highly recommend using Google Analytics because it's how you'll know whether any of your SEO efforts are working. Be sure to log in and check things out on a weekly basis when you're first starting out. Eventually, if things start working well for you, you should review your analytics once a month or so, and make any website tweaks according to what you've found.

Pay-Per-Click Ads

You are smart to ask about paid search advertising. That's often one of the fastest ways to get targeted people to visit your site. You can look into setting up a Google AdWords paid search advertising account here.

While it's not too difficult to set up an account, there's a lot going on with AdWords, and you may therefore wish to hire a Certified AdWords Consultant to get your account set up correctly and perform regular maintenance on it. The idea is for you to spend less money for your ads and maintenance than you make in ultimate sales of your services. This can take a bit of time to get working correctly, and doesn't work for every business, but for most businesses it's certainly worth trying out. Just be sure you've hired someone who really knows the ins and outs of AdWords so that you don't waste a lot of money.

In addition to all of the above, for your particular type of business (assuming I guessed correctly) you may want to look into signing up with an online service such as GigMasters, which lists all sorts of bands and other forms of entertainment for hire by geography. They may be able to provide you with some good online leads for future gigs.

Good luck, and I hope this helps!

Best,

Jill

Labels: Questions

++Any tips for choosing keyword phrases?++

AJutah: Google Instant and news.

searchbrat: For organic? Use PPC and make sure that traffic lands on the organic page, not the PPC landing page. Biggest fail I see.

creativeonion: Look for keywords that combine highest search volume + lowest competition, Google to ensure relevancy, rinse, repeat!

macgenie: Look at your analytics reports to find potential phrases that you would never have thought of.

lauracallow: Analytics, Insights for Search, PPC, competitors.

nickleroy: Don't rely on keyword tools when determining Geo-related keywords. Check out and pick Geo's by population.

mjswebsolutions: My first approach is using Google's Autocomplete feature to type keyword phrases into Google and see what they suggest.

MichaelGrover: Internal and external search terms.

ShahMenz: Get to know the business/product as well as client does. Check comments and email from existing customers to see how they refer to product.

TheRealBoydo: Common sense is useful and often overlooked! ;)

aatishseo: Use mind to get seed keywords, tools (auto suggestion, keyword research), time to research repeatedly, belief & patience.

forestsoftware: Old fashioned but I like to talk to people that are not involved with the client to see what they would search for.

idea15webdesign: Focus on the keyword phrases for the products/services which pay your mortgage.

joshaer: I always start by asking 'What would I type into google if I wanted this?' Too many people go with proper technical terms.

Labels: Question, Twitter

++Any tips for choosing keyword phrases?++

AJutah: Google Instant and news.

searchbrat: For organic? Use PPC and make sure that traffic lands on the organic page, not the PPC landing page. Biggest fail I see.

creativeonion: Look for keywords that combine highest search volume + lowest competition, Google to ensure relevancy, rinse, repeat!

macgenie: Look at your analytics reports to find potential phrases that you would never have thought of.

lauracallow: Analytics, Insights for Search, PPC, competitors.

nickleroy: Don't rely on keyword tools when determining Geo-related keywords. Check out and pick Geo's by population.

mjswebsolutions: My first approach is using Google's Autocomplete feature to type keyword phrases into Google and see what they suggest.

MichaelGrover: Internal and external search terms.

ShahMenz: Get to know the business/product as well as client does. Check comments and email from existing customers to see how they refer to product.

TheRealBoydo: Common sense is useful and often overlooked! ;)

aatishseo: Use mind to get seed keywords, tools (auto suggestion, keyword research), time to research repeatedly, belief & patience.

forestsoftware: Old fashioned but I like to talk to people that are not involved with the client to see what they would search for.

idea15webdesign: Focus on the keyword phrases for the products/services which pay your mortgage.

joshaer: I always start by asking 'What would I type into google if I wanted this?' Too many people go with proper technical terms.

Labels: Question, Twitter

There are many ways to kill a cat and many ways to make money online.  While Craig will focus on the “How to make money” section and provide practical advise and channels to generate income and I will focus on the in-depth technical aspects of search engine optimisation, link building etc.  In a nutshell what needs to be done to drive traffic to your website to ensure that you have customers to buy your product or service.

Depending on what you are doing online and how niche a product it is, the technical considerations of setting up a website and how that is done is absolutely critical, so I will try and make things as clear and simple as possible.

I will also try and keep an eye out for all the latest tools and widgets that come on the market that should help make all our lives easier and better online marketeers.  There is so much content out there that I would encourage you all to send us an email if there is anything you would like us to cover in our blog.

Labels: Welcome

If you’re selling a luxury service or luxury items then you should adjust your search engine strategy accordingly.  Even with a small budget you can gain great profits in un-tapped or emerging markets online.

Let’s imagine you were selling the world’s best tasting, top looking and most expensive ice cream, so expensive in fact that it gets delivered by a freezer van straight to your door!  Traditional marketing and PR has brought in a suprising amount of revenue and you have invested in a snazzy, functional website catered around the ice cream brand.

Some company directors would want the brand’s website to appear at number 1 for the keyword “ice cream” in major search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.  Generally the company with the highest SEO company budget will have the sheer power and resources to reach number one in the search engines for any keyword. 

Would ranking number 1 for a generic keyword such as “ice cream” actually be worth it though? Most people in our example wouldn’t be able to afford the product and a lot of people who search for the keyword “ice cream” maybe are looking for local restaurants, recipes or information on the food-group.  Catering to a minority of wealthier people who want to splash their cash on ice cream would make the listing in the search engine irrelevent for most people, something search engine engineers are highly against!

If you have luxury customers then target luxury search terms.

You’d be amazed how easy it to rank for keywords that match these patterns:
- [luxury] [product name]
- [luxury] [service]
- [extravagant] [product name]
- [excellent] [product name]
- [excellent] [service]
- [quality] [product name]
- [quality] [service]

Whilst “luxury ice cream” is a silly example, you can see how easy it is to target in Google by using simple SEO tools: Google [luxury ice cream]

New products such as the iPad 2 are un-tapped markets for the luxury keywords, people are making money here by ‘blinging’ up products with gold plating, jewelry or customised covers.

Really expensive products such as helicopters, private cruise liners and private jets have very little SEO competition and usually website’s made to a poor standard, if anyone has a spare cruise liner they would like to sell then get in touch!

Labels: Luxury, products, Services

Here we are again for the next edition of our SEO basics blog series.  In the first post we discussed the various elements of on-page SEO which we will cover.  Our main focus was looking at preparation and making sure that you choose a set of keywords that you can realistically achieve good results with in the shortest period of time.

Today, we will be looking at the importance of page name.   Page name is a bit of a tricky one as there is no definitive evidence that it will help you perform better, just improved performance by people who apply the principle.

Let’s look at this logically.  If city-architecture.html was your page name, it is quite unlikely that someone would go to that page and expect to find information on say “dog washing”.

SEOMoz, one of the industries most respected SEO specialists apply a high level of authority to the domain name itself.  According to SEOMoz domain name is ranked #3 at 60% high importance for On-page ranking factors.  Unfortunately, not all of us are able to get the domain name with the keyword that we would like.  But what we can do is create the page with the keyword that we are trying to rank highly for.

You will also notice that when you do a search in Google the keyword that you search for is in bold in the search results text and usually the keyword as well.   See the image on the right where I have done a search on one of our other post “3 steps to help you make money online”.  All the word that are relevant are in bold in the page name.

The bottom line it is good practice to ensure that you either have the keyword in the domain or in the file name is you are trying to rank highly for that particular page.  Stick with these on-page principles and give yourself a better chance of performing really well in the Google ranks.

In my next post I will cover the important of Page Title another of the Top 3 most important aspects of on-page SEO.  If you have any questions or comments about the importance of page name, please share them with us here as we would love to hear your views.

Labels: Basics, importance

Does Google favour web pages with perfect HTML code or will it happily accept one with coding (syntax) or validation errors? Google’s spokesperson Matt Cutts (shown in this video on this topic) has said for many years that demoting webpages which don’t validate to the W3C standard is not something Google will ever consider.

Some web developers and so-called “SEO experts” will argue that compliant code will work in every web browser and take less time for a web spider to crawl and take the data/content out.  Therefore all search engines must prefer properly written code and rank web pages higher that meet standards.

It does take longer (and costs extra!) for search engines to crawl broken webpages on the world wide web. The main problem is that pages containing amazing information or content could be ignored due to a simple HTML error, also novice bloggers and hobby style websites would be unfairly held back if W3C standards were used as a ranking factor.

Google and all the other search engines want to provide the best results for all of their users, it would be a slippery slope if all the voices of non-technical savvy users were muffled!

So why is the odd HTML error not an issue on web pages?  All popular browsers automatically try and fix any broken or invalid HTML code, funnily enough Google own homepage doesn’t even validate to save on download times – check out the results here.

Would you leave a restaurant if you saw a typo in the menu?  Would you ignore someone at a party who spoke with a lisp? Google doesn’t favour W3C standardised web pages; search engine users want to present the best information from the most reliable sources possible, whether that might be from a big corporation or the casual blogger down the road.

The only way invalid code can do any harm is if the page DOESN’T show properly in certain browsers; make sure to test out your main web page templates on all the major browsers such as:

- Firefox
- Internet Explorer (6, 7, 8 & 9)
- Safari (on Mac and PC)
- Chrome
- Opera

Download all these browsers and use tools such as IE Tester (Windows) to test out the different versions of Internet Explorer to ensure your HTML displays correctly despite any minor errors.  Once you are happy that your site displays how it should do then stop worrying about valid/invalid code and concentrate on what really matters towards SEO.

Labels: Favours, Google, Pages, Validiated

SEO is such a diverse field and the truth of the matter is while a lot of people or experts proclaim to know everything,  no one truly knows the aboslute secret to success.  We all know the ultimate goal is to be #1 in Google for our chosen keyword or keyphrase, the holy grail of SEO accomplishment.   If someone could crack the Google algorithm they would be wealthy indeed.  However, there are several tried and tested principles which have shown to improve the ranking of a website and get them, closer to that sought after postition #1.

I am going to kick off our tech talk section with a couple of very basic elements and later look at each in more detail of each.  So let’s get started with a short list of the most important ON PAGE elements of SEO.  I guess now that I have said ON PAGE I should say that SEO is split into on page and off page SEO.  OFF PAGE is everything that takes place off your website.  We will go into this later in future blog posts.

PreparationPage NamePage TitleMeta TagsH1 and other Header tagsKeyword DensityInternal LinksImages and title tags

Preparation is probably the most important step when approaching your on page SEO.  This is the step where you will decide what keywords and phrases you will target to try and try and achieve a high Google ranking.

When choosing your keywords you need to do your research.  It is important that you select keywords that you will realistically be able to get a high ranking for in a reasonable time frame.  Choosing a keyword that will have a huge amount of competition by bigger or more popular websites will make it very difficult to achieve a higher ranking.

Here are some pointers.

Do a simple search on your keyword or phrase and see what sites are listed on page 1.  If you find sites that are mainstream and very popular, you might want to try a variation on the keyword or phrases.  So instead of “jewelry”, try something like “ladies gold jewelry”.  Use the Google keyword tool to find variations of a specific keyword: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal .See how much search traffic there is for the term and how much competition.  There are a number of tools to be able to do this.  Again, Google have a tool for this in their Traffic estimator:  https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox .  One tool that I use is a tool called Market Samurai which gives you a comprehensive overview of competition for any keyword or phrase combinations.Choose more than 1 keyword.  It makes sense to incorporate a couple of keywords or phrases per page to improve your chances of success.  It is better not to exceed 3 as this will dilute the richness of the page itself in terms of the SEO goals.

Now that you have done your preparation and are confident that you have a set of keywords that you will be able to achieve a high rank for and ultimately drive loads of traffic you can start to look at the actual page you plan to drive the traffic at.

Labels: Basics, Getting, Started

With all the talk in the SEO world focused on "content marketing" lately, many website and business owners are focusing their SEO attention on their blogs and the long-tail traffic they can receive from people looking for general information. While that's great on many levels, often I see that their main service and product category pages have been neglected in the SEO department. This is not only a shame, but a waste because these pages should be the cornerstone of your SEO campaign. When you optimize the top-level pages of your site, you can target competitive keyword phrases that will bring search engine visitors who are looking specifically to buy the products or services that you offer.

In my previous "Back to Basics" article, I explained how to research keyword phrases  for which you would ultimately optimize your website. Be sure to read that one first, and do the necessary keyword research before you try to choose which phrases go on which pages.

Keep this at the forefront of your mind: As you try to choose the best keyword phrases for each page, you will have to work them into the content of that page. They absolutely must be highly relevant so that you don't drive your copywriter crazy when s/he sits down to do the writing.

Without further ado, here are my 14 steps to choosing keyword phrases:

1. Create a new worksheet in Excel.

2. Using your existing website's navigational structure (or the wireframes if you're working on a new site), create a column heading for your home page and each top-level category page featured in your main navigation.

3. With your previously compiled keyword phrase list in hand, find 3 to 5 of the most competitive phrases that are highly relevant to your business and website as a whole, and paste them under the home page heading of your spreadsheet.

4. If you have existing content, do an internal website search to learn where you might already be using some of your important researched keyword phrases, and paste them into your spreadsheet under the proper page heading. In order to find the exact phrase within your site, be sure to use quotes when doing your site search. You can use Google for this by typing:

"your keyword phrase" +site:yoursite.com

into the search box.

6. Review your web analytics to learn which landing pages are currently receiving keyword traffic, and paste those phrases into your spreadsheet appropriately. (This is so you don't lose any existing search engine traffic.)

7. Using your original keyword research, match your main keyword categories with their appropriate main category landing pages, and paste the most relevant and sought-after phrases under their spreadsheet heading.

8. Review any leftover competitive phrases that don't seem to fit well into your top-level category pages, and determine if they would make sense on deeper product or service pages. If so, add those pages and phrases to your spreadsheet.

9. Review the rest of the keyword phrases for which you have not yet found a related page, and determine if they are truly relevant to what you offer. If they're too peripheral, remove them from your keyword lists.

10. Now try additional site searches for your phrases, but this time, do it without quotes. This will show you the pages of your site that are using some of the words that exist as part of your keyword phrases. Review the content on those pages to determine if your phrases would make sense within that content, and add them to your spreadsheet as necessary.

For phrases that don't seem to fit into the existing website, try the following additional steps:

11. Carefully read through each page and decide upon its ultimate theme.

12. Review your remaining keyword phrases, look for those that might be synonymous with the basic theme of each page, and paste them accordingly into your spreadsheet.

13. Once again, if you still have phrases that don't seem to have a good home within your website, determine if they really are relevant to what you offer, and remove those that seem to be stretching it.

14. Finally, if you *still* have phrases with no corresponding pages, find out why. It's likely that your website is missing important information, in which case, simply add new pages that cover the missing areas, and add them and their corresponding keyword phrases to your spreadsheet.

At this point, any keywords that are left are most likely the less competitive phrases, the long-tail type of keyword phrases. This isn't a problem, and in fact can help provide you with ideas for content that can use them in a natural way at some point in the future. Keep them handy and use them as a source for new content ideas on your blog or within videos.

What you should have ended up with is a page-to-phrase map that you can provide to your professional copywriter. This keyword map will provide the theme of each page of your site, as well as which keyword phrases to keep in mind while they're writing. If the writer has trouble using some of them, you may need to revise or rearrange them onto different pages.

Don't be afraid to make changes down the line as necessary. Think of this document as somewhat flexible. It's a lot easier to choose the phrases when you're not doing the copywriting, but that means you'll sometimes get it wrong. If you want the best content for your site visitors and the search engines, listen carefully to your copywriter's feedback and be sure to adapt accordingly.

Labels: Basics, Choosing, Keyword, Phrases

Today's feature article is a guest post from my friend and B2B marketing consultant Dianna Huff. If you're a B2B company in need of online content writing and marketing, you'll be in good hands with Dianna! In addition, she?s also hosting local, low cost, lunch time web marketing seminars in the MA-NH Merrimack Valley area.

Without further ado, read on as Dianna teaches you how to?

++Help People Find Your Blog Content with Categories and Tags++

By Dianna Huff

Although they work similarly, the categories and tags found on blogs have different functions. Categories, as the name implies, are a filing system. Think of categories as paper file folders in a drawer. When I pay bills, for example, I staple the check stub to the invoice and put the invoice in one folder: Telephone, Taxes, Insurance, AmEx, etc.

This makes it easy to find the invoice later.

Tags, on the other hand, are like the expense accounts listed on each check. If you go to Staples and use your AmEx card to buy some paper and a new chair, and you have the copy center print business cards, your check to AmEx might list the following expenses: Office Supplies, Office Equipment, and Advertising: Letterhead.

Categories are part of your blog's navigation

Because blogs lack the standard navigation found on websites (for example, Services, Products, About Us, etc.), categories help site visitors find the content on your blog.

When creating categories, it pays to carefully consider which categories to use in terms of:
Your audience ? Clearly defined categories help users find content quickly. Instead of having to troll through dozens of posts, users can click a category and see all of the posts in it.Your topics ? With a blog, it's pretty easy to get off topic, which can lead to lots of untargeted traffic (been there, done that). Having categories that relate to your industry, service, or product offerings helps keep you on message.Your keywords ? Categories are anchor text, which means they get indexed by the search engines. It pays to choose them carefully.
To keep things simple, you'll want to limit the number of categories to about 10. The longer your list of categories, the harder it is to file -- and find -- posts. Again, think about your paper filing system: The more file folders you have in a drawer, the easier it is to misfile and lose things.

Plus, a long list of categories is overwhelming to your readers.

Depending on your WordPress theme, you should be able to add a meta description to each of your categories.

Tags complement categories

Like categories, tags are anchor text hyperlinks. Unlike categories, tags don't appear in your blog sidebar (unless you include a tag cloud, a visual representation of the words used in your tags). Instead, tags appear in the footer of your blog posts.

Think of tags as subcategories. For one of my clients, for example, I created the broad category "Oral Health." I then created a tag, "Oral Cancer." Anytime I wrote a post about oral cancer, I used this tag. Website visitors could then click the tag and see only those posts tagged "Oral Cancer" -- as opposed to seeing the entire Oral Health category.

Used effectively, categories and tags can help your content get indexed and found in the search engines and drive lots of targeted traffic your way.

The Problem -- Tag Spam

As Jill has pointed out in articles and interviews, people use tags to spam the search engines. It's very easy to add half a dozen or more tags to your posts -- even if your company doesn't offer a product or service related to the tag.

As a test, I tagged my recent blog post about creating mobile-friendly websites with the tag "wp touch plugin." Google is displaying that post at position #11, which is pretty good considering that I don't actually have the plug-in available for download, nor am I a WordPress designer or developer giving a review of it.

The problem, from a marketing perspective, is that this tag won't deliver the type of site visitor I want -- therefore, it's useless. And yet, "high rankings" and traffic are how we judge the merits of our SEO and/or content marketing efforts.

For many SEOers and marketers, this type of search engine result is perfectly acceptable. It's exposure, right? And if someone clicks on it and goes to your site, then they learn about your company.

I disagree.

If you're getting high rankings and increased traffic due to spam tagging blog posts, but this traffic doesn't convert, you're not doing your job. Your job is to get your clients more leads and sales through traffic that converts. Therefore, keep your tagging to a minimum and use tags that relate to the post and to the services you, or your clients, offer.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't use categories and tags with an eye toward SEO. You'd be dumb not to. However, keep your blog visitors in mind when creating categories and tags because, as Jill is forever saying, "What's good for people is good for search engines."

Labels: Categories, Content, People

Why are header tags important to SEO?

Header tags are important to the web page SEO, because they are seen in a sense as an index to the page when spidered by a search engine.

So what are header tags?

Header tags are the used as headlines for either a copy section or paragraph.  H1 takes centre stage in SEO and should only be used once on any web page.  H2 is then usually used for paragraph sections, etc, and so it goes on.

When you put a heading in a Header tag it will bold the headline and force the following text onto a newline.  Here is how an html header tag is used.

This post is about header tags

.

What are the different types of header tags?

Most browsers will automatically style the header tags H1 through H3.  They will all be bolded and H1 will be the largest font size and will H2 smaller and so on.

There is no limit to the number of H tags you can have on a page, so you could go all the way down to H8.  It really depends on how many sub sections you have on your page.

How important is the header tag?

The general consensus amongst SEO specialist is that the header tags are of moderate importance.  It makes it easier for search engines to determine the content of the page and is a way for you to further reinforce the topic.

It is certainly good practice to use header tags on your web pages.

Labels: Basics, Header, Importance

This is continued from our first post – 10 SEO Secrets to Ranking Higher on Google.

10 SEO Secrets Part 2:

Always save all media, images and web pages with the keywords in the filename. This helps search engines better understand what each particular file contains and therefore makes it easier to be recognised and found.

For example, if your keyword phrase is “golf shoes” you’ll want to save the images used on that page as either ‘golf-shoes-01.jpg’ or ‘golf_shoes_01.jpg’

Filenames are also very important as search engines now let users to query using ‘inurl’ searches. For filenames on your screens page it could look like this ‘golf-shoes.html’ or ‘golf_shoes.html’

Top Media Tomcat Tip: Optimise the ALT attributes or titles of the images or media used on your site. Be as descriptive as possible e.g. alt=”golf shoes”

A sitemap is a web page that acts like a directory, holding links to all of your web pages on your website. This page can aid secondary, or even tertiary, navigation for your users as they navigate your site.

Sitemaps, if done correctly, can be very useful for search engine optimisation as they are a great way for search engines to find their way round your website. Sitemaps also increase the chances of indexing your website pages.

Here are some tips when creating sitemaps:

Each page on the sitemap needs to have its own individual name. 2 of the same names can confuse search engines and your usersIndent the sitemap so that it reflects the hierarchy of your siteAll headings need to link to its relevant pagePage name information in the sitemap should always be in textExpandable sitemaps could have an affect on the accessibility of your website so bare that in mind should you choose to do thisIf you can, make sure you have an XML sitemap in place which can be updated automatically by a CMS – content management system

Keyword density refers to the number of times a keyword is repeated on a site. It is normally measured by percentage and on a page-by-page basis.

The most important elements are:

Page titleHeadings in H1 & similar tagsMeta descriptionAlternative image descriptions

Keyword-rich content, together with a clear on-page SEO strategy will help search engines identify your site as highly relevant to those targeted keywords. On average, as a rule of thumb, try keep the keyword density to about 5% – so for every 200 words that keyword or phrase needs to be repeated about 10 times.

All links, internal and external, need a description or a title tag. Search engines, like Google, understand the relevance of a link and score them accordingly. Also, when you hyperlink you will also need to use the keywords as the link description.

An example will look like this “Golf Shoes Galore

In the example above “Golf Shoes Galore” is the link itself – this is called ‘anchor text’ and are used to describe to search engines what your links are about. Anchor text which include keywords are also great to optimise your site for SEO.

Google measures one-way links coming into your site. If these links come from relevant, high-ranking websites it will improve your overall page rank – especially if a link coming in has your targeted keyword or phrases within the link.

There are 2 ways you can increase incoming links to your website.

Article writing: Submit a number of articles to article sites like Ezine and include a self-serving link in the content as well as in the authors signature. If the article is published you’ll receive an incoming link to your site.Press releases: Press releases are another way as you can submit various news articles to a number of free press releases submission sites – these can also include links in the content along with a link in the signature. You may not always get the incoming link as the relevant PR site may choose not to publish the links – you’ll just have to test a few to see which ones are more lenient on publishing links.

Labels: Continued, Secrets

Upgrading an ecommerce website to a completely new system can have a big impact on SEO whilst the search engines ‘catch up’ with the new information.

Simply turning the old site off and switching the new site on will generally destroy a majority of organic traffic for a period of between 3 – 5 weeks in our experience.  For some established ecommerce stores, 3 – 5 weeks is a nightmare to disappear in Google’s search results as many hundreds of sales are lost (usually just after a large investment has been made on new development work also).

The new site under development should be hidden away from search engine bots and spiders before it’s released.  If indexed early the new site under development will appear in search engine listings and you could run into serious duplicate content issues later on which can really hurt your SEO.  We use the ‘double dutch’ method of ensuring that search engines such as Google don’t bother crawling development websites:

Double Dutch Development Website Protection

Robots.txt - Ensure that a robots.txt is present on the root directory disallowing all search engines – read more about robots.txt files here

Meta index blocking - Meta tags can be added to the section of every page saying that it shouldn’t be counted in any search engine index. The code for this is:

301 Redirects are the main method to tell search engines that each page has moved to a new location.  These can be done in the .htaccess file which controls the server-side URL re-writes.  301's inform both the browser and the search engines that the page they are looking for has permanently moved to another location.

A checklist of all the pages that need to redirected to it’s relevant page on the new site is:

- Category pages
- Sub-category pages
- Product pages
- Landing pages
- Generic pages (including homepage is URL is different)

There are a few major issues that can arise when setting up all of the 301 redirects, here’s some tips to keep in mind:

301 Redirect Issues

Different category structures – Category pages are the most powerful pages on an ecommerce site for SEO so it’s important to get these redirects set-up correctly.  A new ecommerce site may have more categories or sub-categories than the old site it’s replacing or even vice-versa.  When redirecting go for the best matching category on the new site, it doesn’t matter if 2 or more old categories filter into one new one.  If the category no longer exists then redirect the old page to the new homepage, any redirect is better than none, 404 error pages are harmful in many ways.

Too many products to redirect – Redirecting each product URL to it’s location on a new ecommerce site can be long and tiresome task if done by hand when there are many products.  It can be almost an impossible task with over a thousand products; you need to either automate the process or redirect whole sections of products with the .htaccess file.  Automating product redirects can be achieved by using either product XML sitemaps, crawling software such as Xenu/Integrity or self made XML parsers, all of which require a good knowledge of excel spreadsheets unfortunately (some great excel tips can be found here).  If this all seems too difficult or time wasting then the .htaccess file can be used to capture any URL’s with a generic structure such as “http://domain.com/oldcategory/[any product URL]” and generally redirect towards the main category on the new site such as “http://domain.com/newcategory/“.

No clear existing URL structure – Sometimes an old ecommerce site used a non SEO-friendly URL structure containing any mixture of parameters, id numbers, non-canonical category orders and tracking codes.  This creates a confusing mish-mash of URL’s which may produce millions of URL’s with masses of duplicate content.  The only way to overcome this SEO nightmare is to redirect all the top ranking pages you have time to find and then redirect the entire rest of the site to the new homepage.  Start by redirecting all the links found on the homepage, the homepage usually passes over the most SEO power to it’s linked inner pages, plus the main navigation bar links should be included on the homepage.  Next you should redirect the top 100/200 pages from the main search engines (we just use Google) by performing the search [site:yourdomain.com], you can get Google to display 100 results per page instead of the average 10 if needed.  If you have time then you can use crawling software such as Xenu (PC) or Integrity (Mac) to find more pages high up the site’s architecture i.e pages you can reach within a fewer clicks from the homepage as possible.  All other pages can be caught by the .htaccess file to redirect to the new homepage, remember that a redirect is better than a 404 page.

Google now informs us that nearly all pagerank power is passed on through 301 redirects, which is great news if you’ve been optimising a web-page which will disappear when the website is upgraded.  People sometimes naturally link to inner pages and product pages on an ecommerce store, the more effort you put into making sure every page is catered for, the better.

If done properly Google will pick up the new website structure in less than a day and frantically index many pages over the next few weeks, our last site transition experienced an average 25% drop in organic traffic for 26 days before returning to normal (shown below):

Planning to upgrade an entire site in November could be a big mistake if you rely on the valuable Christmas period, if you want to make a major change then try and do it when your target customers are least active.

Google Webmaster Tools shows any detected 404 pages, keep a close eye on it after upgrading a site, you can export a list of 404 pages into a spreadsheet if needed to quickly add to the .htaccess file.

Remember to leave the redirects in place for several months until all the search engines have no trace of the old site in their indexes and good luck!

Labels: ecommerce, impact, little, upgrade, website

Circles, sparks and hangouts… no, we’re not talking about a visit to the circus, we are talking about Google’s latest attempt at breaking into the lucrative social media market.

After two failed forays into the world of social media, Google announced it’s latest project this week - Google +: https://plus.google.com/

Billed as a more human way of sharing information online, Google + aims to tighten up the way we socialise online with different groups and make our sharing more selective.

Google+ is a lot like Twitter and Facebook in that users can create lists but the USP is the evolution of social media incorporating search and other fancy features like video chat. Google accepts that other social networks (i.e. Facebook) are already doing this but have slated Facebook by saying it looks like a bolt on and doesn’t work well. Check out JPR’s last blog post about creating lists on Facebook.

How friends are grouped is an important part of Google+. Alongside your ‘circles’ of friends, you can follow people without requiring people to follow you back and view your updates. This means that as you invest more time and energy into building your profile, the greater capacity you have for tracking different people and interests.

Luckily, this time Google has more up its sleeve and is offering a more feature-rich service, tying in the +1 feature that appears to have remained fairly anonymous since its launch. Another feature of this service is that if you enter in a subject of interest then Google+ returns loads of cool results to do with this subject which Google is calling ‘sparks’. But what about those people who are concerned about how Google uses their data? Google have thought about this in advance, Google spokesman Bradley Horowitz said, “We learned a lot in Buzz, and one of the things we learned is that there’s a real market opportunity for a product that addresses people’s concerns around privacy and how their information is shared“.

But is this acknowledgement really enough? At the moment, Google isn’t offering advertising as part of the service but it would be naive to think that advertising will never form a large part of the Google+ business model, the data it can (and has) gleaned from users is incredibly valuable to advertisers and marketers.

For those who love Gmail, they will be happy to hear that Google has carried its chat function over although it may not please Facebook who run a similar instant message function.

With the obvious rivalries in mind, has Google seriously set up a social network to rival Facebook or has it once again tried to fill a gap that just doesn’t exist?

Google Plus – Our First Thoughts

Today Real Web SEO gained access to Google+ and we couldn’t be more excited! Google+ (also known as Google Plus) is a well thought out mix of the best features from Facebook with instant messaging and video chat similar to Skype.  Here’s our initial reaction to Google Plus asking the question, will it be third [...]

How The New Twitter Could Effect Social Marketing

The new Twitter preview video shows some exciting features which could have a profound impact on how people spend their time online: Shortened URL’s no longer are mysterious links to webpages, twitpics and videos, they will soon appear within Twitter on the right-hand sidebar.  The only way to preview shortened URL’s currently is the very [...]

Google’s “Best Guess”

Google very quietly launched a new little feature in the SERPs recently, the search engine now gives its ‘Best Guess” at any commonly agreed information. Look at the example below for a Google search on a upcoming computer game called “Duke Nukem Forever”: Searching the game’s name plus the words “release date” sparks off the [...]

The social networking websites

If you ask your grandparents or even your parents about the great technological god that is known as the World Wide Web’ they will say that they haven’t got a clue as it ‘wasn’t around in my day’. But is this necessarily true? Let’s take social networking sites for example. Back in 2004 a young [...]

Solid SEO advice

However SEO changes in the future there is always some golden rules to follow that will never change (hopefully!). Whenever someone writes a book on SEO there are waves of people who say “…it’s out of date!” or “…this won’t be valid in one or two years time.” for example. It’s true that things will [...]

Labels: again, Google, lucky, social, Third, tries

 

The meta tags are hidden tags within the header of your web page and are designed to provide engines extra information about the page they are crawling.

As this is SEO basics I am going to stick to the basic tags.  The meta tags are broken into two main elements which are the “name” and the “content”.  Here is an example of what a meta tag looks like:

keywords is still a commonly used meta tag, but Google no longer uses the keywords meta tag in its search results.  Here is a Youtube clip by the Google webmasters:The description tag, unlike the Keywords tag, is still used by most search engines and should accurately describe the content that will be found on your web page.  The tag itself should be kept below 40 words where possible.The content-language meta defines the language of the page.  Most search engines don’t require this tag, because they are sophisticated enough to determine the language by the content.  A full list of language codes can be found here: Language Meta Codes.ROBOTS is a tag created for webmasters who cannot create or upload a robots.txt file.  The robot meta tells a search engine crawler how to index the page.  The following attributes are available; noindex, nofollow, noarchive, all, index, or follow.  You don’t really need to use the all, index or follow attributes because a search engine will crawl you site unless you tell it not to.

W3 provide a great resource list going through all the meta tag detail.  Check that out here: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.4.4

At the end of the day the meta tag you should give real attention to is the description and the one to avoid is the keywords.

Labels: Basics

Gone are the days when the only way to go online was to use a big, clunky computer at home; an ever-growing percentage of people now use smartphones to access the Internet on the move.

Surfing online with a smartphone is a completely different experience than a typical desktop PC with these noticeable differences:

- The download speed is a lot slower
- The screen resolution is a lot smaller (typically 320px by 480px)
- Website navigation is done with a touchscreen and not a mouse

Currently Google are making subtle changes to their results for smartphone devices, these have been recorded with high accuracy at the start of 2011.  Recently Google have added buttons to the smartphone version of the Google homepage, these apply to local businesses such as restaurants, pubs, bars, etc.:

 

With IP location and Geo-Positioning on most smarthphones, an incredible amount of searches performed on these devices are local searches.  30% of restaurant queries are now done on mobile phones, as you’d imagine people want to find a nearby restaurant that’s recommended whilst they are out and about: see more on this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-xh-lNpNhs

If you rely on local search engine traffic then it’s really important to have a listing on Google Maps, these listings add credibility to your business helping with SEO and also act as a free listing in local searches.  Smartphone searches on Google bring up local Google map listings more often than the normal desktop version, optimising your Google Local listing could really pay off for some businesses.

If you have an ecommerce site then Google Shopping results regularly appear in mobile searches and as the screen size is so small they can dominate the screen when scrolling past them.  Most ecommerce platforms such as Magento have an easy way to connect you product lists to Google Base (now called Google Merchant Center).  Give Google as much information as you can on the merchant center, thumbnails that really stand out will help your product click-through-rates also.

PPC ads might be a good option if you run a competitive local business such as a taxi firm or a restaurant which people will need on the move.  You can secure a top position in Google’s mobile results with relevant Google advert, these take up quite a bit of room and are likely to get clicked on.  If you are really on the ball then you can target your ads to only show on mobile devices and only at the times of the day when you really need them, the most savvy restaurant owner could even turn ads on when the restaurant isn’t entirely full!

People searching for services often will look for some type of rating to go along with it so make sure you encourage plenty of positive reviews on your Google listing. Also hunt out all the top directories for your area, for example TripAdvisor ratings are trusted enough by Google to appear in their local listing pages, hunt out which directories work well for your niche.

As Google announces special Adwords targeting filters towards tablet devices (to go alongside mobile only ads), what features of a website could hold it back in smartphone tweaked Google searches in the near future?

- Mobile friendly dimensions – The most used dimensions of smartphone screens is a resolution of 320 by 480 pixels which is far smaller than most websites built around the 1024px or 1280px resolution of PC monitors.  This means the user has to do some dreaded left and right scrolling to see the whole data which gives an awful user experience.  As Google wants to give it’s users the best experience possible and allow them to find out the right results they could possible demote listings which aren’t mobile friendly in some fashion to smartphone users.

- Mobile friendly navigation – Most smartphones use a touch screen to allow the user to navigate around the programs and browser and they seem to be moving away from the pen-like ‘stylus’ and just relying on finger touch.  This means that tiny little text links on website become frustratingly hard to actually press in practice with a relatively wide finger jab, something which may put Google off a little on smartphone SERPs.  Also dropdown navigation doesn’t always work on smartphones and you can only access limited content, this maybe something to consider checking on your own site.

- Fast Load Times - Browsing on a 3G or 4G network is painfully slow at times; statistics have shown that smartphone users will wait a lot longer to download the page as it’s currently the norm.  Whilst mobile phone networks become faster there is still no excuse not to optimise your site for speed,  this already plays a small role in Google’s normal ranking algorithm and could have a greater effect on smartphone results where it’s impact is felt greater.  A website with say a 2MB homepage with lots of rich content may take over a minute to appear on a smartphone device, by then the user may give up trying to load the page or forget why they visited it in the first place!

Whatever happens with Google’s smartphone search engine results in the future be sure that you make your website as useful as possible on the ever-increasingly popular technology.  Now is the time to act and get up top before you are playing catch-up with the webmasters who designed for the future.

Labels: Expect, Future, SmartPhone

The human brain constantly looks for patterns and relationships between objects, emotions, words and sound. When it comes to the ‘Science of SEO’ we need to put all emotions aside to separate the facts from our own feelings, values or emotions.

Google’s search engine algorithm still remains a closely guarded secret.  Knowing how Google works can be very profitable as high rankings equates to high traffic levels on a website, especially on keywords which many people enter in.

Google reportedly looks at between 300-500 signals to decide where websites will rank when a search term is inputted.  The only way to get an idea of how Google’s algorithm works is to take a scientific approach by looking at patterns in the highest ranked websites or by performing controlled experiments on obscure keywords.

Lots of people have their own ideas on how Google works, sometimes unfortunately they fall into these common traps below…

The website SEOMoz.org is well known for creating experiments on Google and reporting search engine ranking factors using real data from highly ranked websites. Even with this data laid out in front of people still people are going away with misconceptions about the data and what really matters in regards to search engine ranking factors.

One metric which has been discussed a lot is the number of Facebook “shares” relating to a better ranking in Google; more Facebook shares significantly correlates to higher rankings in Google. This led to many people proclaiming that Google now uses Facebook ‘shares’ as part of it’s ranking algorithm, i.e. proof that social SEO is alive & kicking.  This is not true though the shares are a consequence of high rankings and not a cause, this has recently been confirmed by Google top man Matt Cutts.

With this logic you could say that any car painted in Ferrari Red (Pigment Red 254 for any racing car fans) is faster than the average car.  Looking blindly at car colour statistics will show a significant spike in the average speed of cars painted in this red racing colour, a colour only fast Ferrari cars are allowed to use!  If I painted an average family car in Ferrari red paint then it’s not going to go any faster, the speed is a consequence of the colour, not the cause.

When I feed my dogs I rustle a big packet of dog biscuits and they come bounding in to the kitchen.  They associate the rustling sound with getting fed and as most people know, dogs LOVE food.  Even the sound of a rusting packet gets them excited and they start watering at the mouth!  Without going deep into psychology it’s plain to see that sights, sounds and words can trigger reactions in human or animal brains.  This can unfortunately backfire in something sensitive and emotionally attached as the SEO for your own website.

Many times we have witnessed some sort of change to a website followed by a increase or decrease in keyword search engine rankings.  However big or minor the change, it usually results in the website owner associating the change we made with the change in Google’s ranking.  Can you safely say that online change [A] resulted in ranking change [B]? The answer is ‘maybe’, it could have been a mere coincidence or the change really could have effected the rankings.  There’s sometimes no solid evidence backing up these changes unless you repeat the change in the same settings again and again and see the same results.  With knee-jerk reactions some website owners undo the change if this happens or start pointing blame at someone/something; this can hold a website back and cause un-due stress when it may not even have been a related incident at all!

Search engine rankings are quite fickle, there’s well documented variance around ranking positions which sometimes makes them bounce up and down for no reason.  One of our websites has been number 1 in Google.co.uk for the past 15 months for it’s main keyword; Google Webmaster Tools reports that surprisingly 7% of the time it’s actually not number at 1, a figure closely reflected in other websites we manage (including major brands).  Nothing is set in stone on Google, especially with new sites which can be promoted highly one week and be held back for another 3 months whilst they mature, it’s important just to plough on with SEO and stop worrying about little fluctuations.

Sometimes the biggest thing holding a website back is the website’s owner themselves.  People’s core values may hold them back from improving something that already works, they may have the “if it ain’t broken then why fix it?” sort of attitude. Conversion optimisation is a legitimate way to try and convert more visitors into customers by testing variations of pages or page elements and seeing which version makes the most sales overall.  Improving conversions is SEO-friendly, even Google have their own software to perform it and they state it will not change rankings.  Many website owners who are doing well are quite happy never to improve on their websites but they will fight to the bitter end to gain more traffic.  The ironic thing is that they could make more sales out of the existing traffic by improving conversion percentages; this is a much quicker and cost-friendly solution.

One of the most crippling values to have is to think that linking to your website from other websites deliberately is wrong or ‘un-ethical’. There are common fears that Google will banish or punish you for performing certain types of SEO, some people are so afraid of this that they never progress and end up not doing much off-site SEO in fear of what may happen.  Whereas it’s true that Google does punish people doing lots of bad SEO against it’s terms and conditions just think to yourself that if there was a way to harm a website then why wouldn’t online businesses be harming their competitor’s websites all the time by performing that same bad off-site SEO on their sites?!

Unless you’re website is based off a known brand it’s incredibly hard to promote yourself online and gain valuable backlinks.  Let’s say you sold something boring online like “A4 paper”, could you drum up links and promote your website without getting out there and promoting yourself firstly?  It’s not impossible but it’s very hard and your competitors at the top of Google will certainly be doing SEO whilst you site sits in the lower rankings.

Another dangerous value is thinking something along the lines of: “if it works for him then it must work for me” kind of attitude.  Paying for links and other black hat SEO methods sometimes works wonders in Google and can easily achieve number one rankings on semi-competitive keywords.  This is great until the website gets either reported for spam or eliminated by one of the new Google updates, then it will won’t appear for hardly any keywords and traffic levels will plummet for at least 5/6 weeks.  In the period of a spammy website being at the top of Google some competitors will look at the site (and possibly it’s backlink sources) and could be angry enough to get frustrated and copy the same techniques themselves.  This may not have instant ramifications but in the long term it could be a really bad decision when things turn sour.  Sometimes the original spammy site DOESN’T get any penalty by Google but the site copying the same techniques pushes things a little too far and DOES, it’s a dangerous game.

We’ve covered a lot of SEO myths such as the maximum keyword density percentage myth, W3C validation myth and the controversial NoFollow links counting in Google debate.  Funnily enough we hear time and time again these myths being recycled and ingrained into people’s thoughts on SEO, some people literally refuse that they are wrong because they read about a piece of mis-information about SEO in a book or by an ‘SEO expert blogger’.

Some old SEO tricks used to fool Google and placed websites highly un-naturally for keywords, unfortunately for the spammers Google is ever-changing and algorithm changes have eliminated many of these tricks.  One old SEO technique was to make mini blogs all catered around a certain keyword and then link to the main site on every post, page and footer possible, another was simply stuffing a page full of keywords and hiding the content with CSS tricks.  Whereas it’s sometimes funny to see people still trying to game the system in ways which clearly won’t work, it’s a sad fact that many online businesses resort to these old tricks and think they can get away with it.

Since so much changes online it’s important to learn the correct and latest SEO techniques and not be tempted to try any tricks to ‘fool’ Google.  However hard it may be to admit, your SEO knowledge may not be correct and you should question everything you know by reading the latest blogs and news.  When it comes to beating the competition, whether in war or business, the most flexible and innovative person always comes out on top.

I know it’s hard but try and leave your emotions at the door and do the best SEO you can for your website.  If rankings change when you change something yourself then step back, look at all the facts and think to yourself if the two things are related or if it’s just a coincidence.  If rankings aren’t as good as you hoped then don’t do anything drastic, aim for a easy term and don’t copy bad techniques you see elsewhere, SEO takes time to work.

Forget any moral values, SEO is about results and you are not hurting anyone by doing it; remember that Google’s rankings are calculated just by a clever piece of software.  If you live in fear about what external links may harm your site then remember that people would deliberately harm their competitor’s websites if there were ways to do it.

Be flexible to any opposing ideas on SEO, you never know you could have been doing something incorrectly for years! Relying on old techniques is dangerous, times change and so should your SEO strategy, keep up to date with the latest news and chat about SEO with people in the industry (there are many of them around).

Even if you are doing well there is more room for improvement on your conversion rate percentage, you could be making more sales out of your existing traffic or . If you are number one for a search term then don’t get complacent and stop SEO on that term, it’s always good to keep a few steps ahead of the ever-increasing competition!

Labels: Facts, Feelings, Science, Separating