SEO Blog

Prodec Networks are a well established company having been formed in 1998, they are a specialist consultant for new and refurbished voice and data communications equipment.

We are delighted to have been selected as Prodec Networks professional search engine marketing partner, and look forward to building a lasting business relationship over the coming months.

Due to the continued success we have seen with BOX-IT’s Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign we are delighted to announce we have been appointed to manage the companies Pay Per Click (PPC) account.

We look forward to further success in the future as we continue to work with BOX-IT as their search marketing partner.

When reviewing your websites statistics in Google Analytics just be careful when you are reviewing the statistic Average Time On Site from your Dashboard. It is important to remember that this data can be skewed really easily by a small number of visitors to your website.

It only takes one visitor to leave your site open in their browser while they take a telephone call to increase this stat.

If you see improvements with this statistic drill down deeper in your analytics account and view the report, Time on Site for All Visitors. This report will show the average time on site broken down by day. This will allow you to see if they have been any days where there is any extraordinary user activity on your website.

Go on, you may be surprised by the results.

Shapes of Virtu was created by a group of independent photographers and provide abstract, macro and contemporary photography printed on stretched canvas.

We are delighted to have been selected as Shapes of Virtu’s search engine marketing partner of choice and look forward to working with them on this project.

Is your business showing on Google maps?

If not it’s a very simple thing to set up and has many benefits.

All you need to do is enter your businesses details into Google’s Local Business Centre. You may have to register for a Google account if you don’t already have one. In your business listing you can include details of your Business including opening hours and payment taken. You can also include Photos and link to Videos you may have uploaded to You-tube.

Having your business on Local Business Centre means that you may well appear on local searches on Google. For example the search Southampton wedding photographer in Google shows a map with the top 10 Photographers marked on it at the top of the search results.

Microsoft recently launched its Live Search Cashback service in the United States. The basic concept is that you have a free Cashback account and when you search Microsoft Live, you will earn a percentage of your online purchases. Once you’ve accrued over $5, you can get this rebate sent to you using the more common payment methods, e.g. direct deposit to bank account, Paypal or cheque.

Whilst very early days, and only available in the US, this at least offers a new twist on the business of search. Will it be enough to erode Google’s market share? Probably not. Do searchers really want to earn pennies per purchase or know that their search results provide them with the most accurate results and wide ranging choice?

Hats off to Microsoft for demonstrating that innovation within Internet search is still possible but I fear this will be no more than a minor inconvenience to Google in terms of the ’search engine wars’.

What’s really needed is a fresh, innovative, dynamic company to enter the fray, take on the ‘big boys’, not do evil, not take over the Internet and not buy up every company that’s doing something good online. Any suggestions?

At Impact Media, one of the areas that seems to crop up regularly is the issue of can we guarantee rankings for our search engine optimisation projects? Unfortunately, we can’t do this for the simple reason that we have absolutely no control over the search engines! That one aspect alone means it is impossible to guarantee anything and to do so would have to be a lie or, at the very least, sales spin.

Further, we do not know what may have happened with a site previously nor what the competition are doing. Regardless though, the bottom line is that no one can give assurances of achieving a certain position for a given key phrase within a specified time scale in the natural listings.

Now, of course, you may find a search engine marketing company who do offer a genuine, no strings, guarantee to get you a top 10 ranking in the organic results. If you come across such a company and the case studies, testimonials and contract terms all confirm that, then my advice would be to ‘bite their hand off’!

You need to ensure that when a company says ‘front page listing in [major search engine] within 24 hours’ that they aren’t simply talking about sponsored listings, or Pay per Click.

The other consideration is how long are you going to be tied in to a contract whilst waiting for this guaranteed position? At Impact Media, we don’t lock companies into any lengthy contracts (just 30 days notice required) instead preferring to work in partnership with our clients knowing that we can only retain their business if we add value to theirs.

So, if you are in the market for search engine marketing services and someone is offering guaranteed top 10 rankings, make sure you get all of the facts and not just the headline!

Jacaranda Jewellery sell Jewellery from around the world including Baltic Amber Jewellery, Native American Jewellery and Indian Gemstone Jewellery.

They wish to raise their visibility within the major search engines organic results, in order to increase web based enquiries and maximise ROI from the site.

We are pleased to announce that we have been selected as Jacaranda Jewellery’s search engine marketing partner to implement their search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign.

Are you using a H1 Tag on your site? If so, are you using it to it’s full potential?

Many people seem to realise that they should include H1 Tags on their site but not many seem to use them in the most productive way. Most sites will wrap their company name or worst still their company logo into a H1 Tag. Other favourites seem to be “Latest News” or “Other Products”.

What a waste!

So many sites are missing the benefit of the H1 Tag. Search engines class the text used within this tag as highly important, so why fill it with useless information like “Latest News”? That’s not a phrase you’re looking to be ranked for.

Your H1 Tag is also a page heading for your visitors as much as a tool used to inform search engines about important terms. So use it as such. If your site is focused on selling “Wooden Widgets” then shout it out and use your H1 Tag as your megaphone. Let the search engines know. Let everyone know. Use strong relevant terms and help let the search engines know what your site is really about.

Consegna UK, specialist consultants within the Management Consulting, Technology & Telecoms and CSR & Sustainability sectors have selected Impact Media to raise their online visibility through natural Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is an important part of Consegna UK’s marketing mix, and working with proven experts in the field will ensure the most effective strategy is developed and implemented from the outset.

We are very much looking forward to working with Consegna UK on this project.

Blogs are now being adopted more and more by business’ but why? That’s easy, because not only can they communicate to your clients and potentials clients but they can also be a great source of traffic for you. If you have a business and you are knowledgeable on your niche then the chance are you have a lot to offer people in the way of information.

Information you can blog about are:

• Tips
• How to Guides
• Articles on different subjects
• Latest products
• Discounts and offers
• New Clients
• Latest Company News
• Jobs and Recruitment

There are many benefits to blogging within your business but the main 4 are:

1. Increase your online visibility for the blogged about subjects
2. Become an industry authority on your niche subject
3. Create a rapport with potential clients and show you are a real company not just a pretty site
4. Keep existing clients informed

Blogging does take effort and discipline to ensure it is kept up to date and current but it is well worth it when you start seeing the results.

The only warning I would give is if you are not prepared to keep your blog up to date you are better off not having one as nothing puts potential clients off like an out of date blog.

Although there is some debate to whether the search engines will penalise your site directly for duplicate content, in certain circumstances it can directly affect your websites rankings.

There are a vast amount of pages for the Search engine bots to crawl so to make things more efficient each bot arrives at a website with a “crawl budget”. If you have a large amount of duplicate pages on your site this budget can get used up before the entire site is crawled. As a result fewer pages may end up getting indexed. Incidentally this is another reason it’s worth keeping JAVA script in external files and using external CSS style sheets rather than embed the code on the actual page.

Another issue to consider is when a search engine comes across duplicate pages how does it decide which page to show in the rankings.

For example many companies choose to have both the .com and .co.uk versions of their domain names. Unfortunately this often results in duplicate content issues as the search engines end up seeing each domain as two separate, but identical, websites.

Identical Pages from both sites can get indexed but there is no control over which page ends up getting ranked. For instance the .com/products.html may have more links than the .co.uk/products (because the .com domain has more links) but the search engine chooses to show the lower ranked .co.uk version instead for a particular keyword. A lower ranking means less traffic.

Fortunately this scenario can be easily rectified by using an .htaccess file to 301 redirect the .co.uk domain to the .com domain. From then on the search engines will only see one version of the website.

Sometimes duplicate content on a website is impossible to avoid. For instance you may have a print version of a particular page as well as the web version. In this circumstance it is simply a matter of telling the search engine bots not to crawl the page by using nofollow links to the print version and a Meta noindex on the page itself.

Although an AdWords Search Query Report can give you some idea of what search queries are triggering broad and phrase match keywords much of the useful data is hidden under ‘….other unique queries’ entries.

This data is an absolute gold mine for identifying new keyterms and negative keywords.

So how do we find out what some of those hidden terms were?

By using Google Analytics thats how. By following the simple instructions shown at www.semvironment.com you can easily start to use this vital data.

Did you know it only takes 8 seconds for your website’s visitors to decide to leave your website?

First impressions really count in business and they can make the difference between your business’ success and failure.

Things that can make visitors hit the dreaded back button are:

• Slow loading speed (caused by big page sizes and bad hosting providers)
• Poor navigation
• Unprofessional design (made in your bedroom type designs)
• Background music (elevator music is not a good idea)
• Flash only sites (some people don’t have the applicable plug ins)
• Site is an obvious ad farm
• Not displaying correctly in all browsers (very common problem with websites)
• Excessive pop up or pop under adverts
• Poor spelling / grammar
• Hard to read text (too small or non standard colours of text or backgrounds)

Are you making any of the above mistakes? If so you know what to do, fix them!

Micheline Arcier are a aromatherapy specialist with a salon in Knightsbridge, London. They also develop exclusive aromatherapy products and wish to raise their online visibility in order to increase online sales.

We are delighted to have been appointed as Micheline Arcier’s professional search engine marketing partner, and we are very much looking forward to working with them on this project.

It’s amazing with an industry such as Search Engine Marketing how many people know a lot about it but, for whatever reason, fail to implement the basics, even on their own site.

Just as interesting is how many web designers, in fact anyone who’s job involves using computers, seem to have gained an inside knowledge into the finer points of search engine optimisation or building effective pay per click campaigns without needing to do any form of study.

In his recent article, Don’t Hire a Butcher to do a Baker’s Job, Mark Jackson, has written an excellent piece explaining why you really shouldn’t trust your site’s search marketing success to someone who just happens to “know a bit”.

Before you let your web designer, IT support technician or Milkman loose on your site, check their credentials. Get evidence of success. Case studies? Testimonials? Anything!

Of course I’m going to suggest that if you’re a UK business you at least have a chat with us but, whatever you do, don’t just leave your site’s search marketing to chance. Getting it wrong could leave you more than just a bit disappointed; you could find yourself worse off than if you did nothing at all!

Connex Education are an industry leading education recruitment specialist, looking to increase their online visibility across all of the major search engines within their target market.

We are delighted to announce we have been appointed as Connex Education’s search engine marketing partner, and we are very much looking forward to working with them on this project.

We are yet again, due to our continued expansion, recruiting. This time we are looking for a sales executive to join our proactive sales team.

Ideally we are looking for someone who has experience in the search engine marketing field but we would be prepared to train from the ground up if the right candidate presented them self.

If you are currently working in sales and and are looking for a new challenge then please send in a copy of your CV with a covering letter detailing why you would make a great asset to the team.

For more details please have a look at our search engine marketing jobs page.

Do you know how many people leave your site as soon as they arrive? Do you know where these visitors came from? If the answer is no, then you had better sign up for a Google Analytics account immediately.

The bounce rate can be found on the dashboard in Google Analytics and quickly provides you with a snapshot of the user’s first impression of your website.

If they found your site relevant to their search they will stay and explore your site further. This lets you know that the user found your site relevant and as a result your bounce rate will be low. However, if the page the visitor arrived at was not relevant and they left your site without visiting any other page, then you would expect to see a high bounce rate. Remember the landing page may not always be your homepage.

Your bounce rate has a relationship with your conversion rate so if you are able to lower your bounce rate and become more relevant to user’s searches then you could see in an increase in the number of sales and leads.

Use the reports within Google Analytics to identify individual pages which have a high bounce rate so you are able to improve landing pages and spot traffic sources which are delivering unqualified visitors.

Carehome Selection are a well established company who help patients and their families choose the right care home; the information they provide helps people to make an informed decision with regards to their choice of home.

We are delighted to announce we have been appointed as Carehome Selection’s professional search engine marketing partner; and we are very much looking forward to working with them on this project.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation announced yesterday that their social networking site, MySpace, will not hit its annual revenue target of $1 billion, falling short by some 10%.

Revenue in the third quarter fell from $233 million in the preceding 3 months to $210 million.

As discussed in this blog previously, there is certainly a place for marketing in the social networking sites but are they really the best place to find buyers desperate to buy your product or service?

Will Murdoch offload MySpace if it’s not the cash cow it first seemed? Now, who’s got money to burn?

“Phone call, Mr. Gates..”

Impact today welcomes new search engine marketing specialist Colin to the team.

Colin brings with him over 2 Years experience within the search engine marketing industry and will be specialising in creating and maintaining clients Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns across a number of different search platforms.

Colin previously worked with accessibility market leaders Nomensa so he brings a wealth of knowledge regarding the subject of website usability and accessibility.

Digg.com is a Social Media website that allows you to share articles, videos and images with others.

What most people don’t know is that Digg is also an excellent tool for getting your pages found quickly. Did you know that Digs submissions can be indexed and ranked by search engines within hours? This is ideal if you’re looking to get your site noticed straight away for topical related content or if you’re running a marketing campaign. You don’t even need your submission to have a high Digg rating. Most submissions can be indexed with simply one Digg and sometimes in hours.

Submitting your targeted page couldn’t be easier. Once you have opened your Digg account, simply “Submit New”, enter the URL of the page your wishing to drive visitors too, choose the media type, add a brief description and your done.

Being able to gain almost instant exposure for a subject you would otherwise have to wait to be ranked for opens up endless opportunities and could drive traffic to your site that you would have otherwise missed out on.

Omega Wire Limited are a wire manufacturer; with a modern manufacturing facility based in Dudley, West Midlands. They wish to raise the profile of the company website through the introduction of a professionally managed Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign; in order to increase to volume of relevant web based enquires they receive.

We  are delighted to announce that we have been appointed as Omega Wire Limited’s professional search marketing partner; and we are very much looking forward to working with them on this SEO project.