SEO Blog

For those who are interested in increasing their web presence, Squidoo offers an interesting opportunity. If you haven’t visited Squidoo, you might not understand what it is. Squidoo is a sort of cross between MySpace and Wikipedia. It’s a space where you can promote yourself, your company, and your ideas or simply write a page about any topic that you’re passionate about.

Lenses

Each page is called a Lens. Lenses are easy to create, and there is a Squidoo Wizard to help you do this. You can create a good Squidoo lens with about 30 uninterrupted minutes. Of course, keeping it up to date and fresh, will take more of a time commitment. Google seems to have a very positive attitude towards Squidoo lenses when it comes to SEO.

SEO and Squidoo

If you wish to use Squidoo for SEO purposes, then make a relevant keyword rich lens on Squidoo related either directly to your business or to an area of interest within your business.

But how do you get Google to power up the SEO value of your Squidoo page? This is simple and relies on our old friend the ever-important backlink. If you want your Squidoo page to assist with increasing your web presence, you need to ensure that people make backlinks using keyword rich anchor text from their site to your Squidoo lens. This is the best way to get a Squidoo lens indexed on Google. This helps Google to view your Squidoo page as relevant. The more quality backlinks to your Squidoo lens, the more popularity votes your Squidoo page gets, and the more relevant Google assesses your lens.

Squidoo Tags

Many people are unaware of the power of the tags on Squidoo. Experts debate their value. But the tags can make all of the difference between having your lens read and indexed by Google and seeing it end up discarded and lost in cyberspace. Adding keyword tags to your Squidoo lens will help Google in the indexing process and will help your Squidoo lens become searchable from the Squidoo index.

Traffic

If you’re going to make Squidoo work for you, you’ll want to get traffic to it. If you use backlinks and tags, that’s the first step, but there are other things. By giving something away of value on your Squidoo, you’ll likely increase your inbound traffic and potentially the quality backlinks that you need. So, if you’re able to write articles, or an entire e-Book on something of interest to lots of people, you’ll conceivably gain considerable traffic.

Squidoo for You?

If you’re interested in improving your web presence through SEO then Squidoo can help. It’s important to remember that Squidoo is just one piece of the entire SEO puzzle and that a blended approach to Search Engine Optimisation is still the most successful method of gaining the results that you seek.

At Impact Media, we can help you find your way through the social media maze with our social media marketing services. Get in touch if you’d like to know more.

On the 12th day of Xmas…

Links are the backbone of any good search engine marketing strategy and below are 12 ways you can get quality inward one way links to your website:

1. Directories – submit your website to quality directories such as Yahoo, BOTW and DMOZ. Being in these directories can not only get you links from very credible places but also generate traffic and also other links.
2. Forums – contribute to forums in your niche and use your website link in your signature as you will gain links and also be seen as a contributor to your industry.
3. Articles – create them specific to your niche and submit them to places like Ezine articles as people will pick them up and use them on their websites.
4. Press Releases – Submit these online to places like PRWeb as you can find you get local or national media coverage and have your press release published anywhere on the web.
5. Social Bookmarking – If you have a really good article or piece of content that you have posted to your website then be sure to ask associates to review it and tag it through places such as Digg and StumbleUpon as this can go viral very quickly.
6. Wikipedia – Add your website or product only if it is credible and suitable as if you attempt to spam this resource you will get banned straight away and have your entry removed.
7. Answer Questions – Use Yahoo Answers and Google Groups to answer questions and link to relevant resources, not always yours but if its relevant then why not.
8. Hub Pages – Set up pages for your products or service on social hub sites like Squidoo and Hub Pages and use these to link through to your website.
9. Start a Blog – Publish great content regularly on your own blog and people will naturally link to it
10. Flash games – develop a fun game that can be distributed and that is specific to your industry if its good and more importantly fun people will link to it.
11. Tools – offer free tools or services that people will want to link to to add value to their visitors, this will naturally attract links.
12. Videos – Publish informative videos on your website that will be of benefit to people in your industry.

Above is only a few ways to develop you inward links but you can get as creative as you need to.

On the 11th Day of Christmas, we bring you 11 AdWords Tips:

1. Invest time in researching keywords
2. Set-up conversion tracking from the outset
3. Move to a standard campaign from starter as soon as possible
4. Create separate campaigns if advertising on the Content Network
5. Ensure you understand the difference in the match types and use as appropriate
6. Use negative keywords
7. Test ad copy to see which is most effective
8. Ensure your landing pages are optimised for your keywords and ad copy
9. Improve your quality score by having a fast and reliable web host
10. Use the search query report regularly and often, particularly if using broad match
11. Use AdWords Editor to make life easier!

On the 10th day of Christmas, Impact Media brought to you…10 reasons why you may be banned from Google.

Toady we list ten common reasons why your site may have been banned or penalised by Google.  If you have suddenly disappeared of the face of the earth, you may find the reason below:

1. Robots.txt File
   A good place to start is your Robots.txt file. It may be possible that you have the wrong coding in place and this could be stopping Google from crawling your site. Ensure that you have the correct parameters set up. If you have set up a rule that is aimed at blocking Google from crawling a certain part of the site, be sure you haven’t blocked off the whole site.
2. Meta Tags
   Incorrectly coded Meta Tags can also stop Google from crawling your site. If you have a tag that reads: <meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOINDEX”> then Google will be sent away as soon as it gets to your site.
3. Cloaking
   If your Web Server is set up to return totally different content to Googlebot compared to the content your visitors see when they come to your site, this is classed as Cloaking and you’re more than likely to get a permanent ban from Google. Cloaking is seen as the tactic of trying to cheat your way to better rankings, Google don’t like this and, if found, you will be penalised.
4. Duplicate Websites
   A common practice or mistake that can be made is the use of multiple sites under different versions of the same Domain. People who are looking to secure rankings for .com, .co.uk and .net domains can fall into the trap of creating duplicate sites. This can result is getting one or all of these site penalised which could lead to losing all rankings instead of cornering the market. If you wish to cover all your bases by using multiple Domains, set up 301 re-directs to the main site.
5. Duplicate Content
   It’s also a common mistake to fill a site with the same content across a number of pages. This will again be classed as duplicate content. If Google catches onto this, you could find yourself dropped into the middle of nowhere. Make sure each page has its own individual content.
6. Hidden Text
   You should have nothing to hide. So don’t. Hidden text or text that is in the same colour as the back ground will backfire. This practice ironically is carried out so the search engines can see the hidden text but visitors to the site can’t. Usually the text is key terms the site is looking to gain rankings for yet if Google sees that you are trying to hide something from the visitor it will class this as spam and penalise your site accordingly.
7. Hidden Links
   This is much the same as hidden text. If you hide links you’re going to get punished.
8. Keyword Stuffing
   If you’re optimising your site you’re going to be looking to add important key terms to the page. If you over do it, you could find Google turning against you. Keyword stuffing not only stops your site from making any sense it’s also seen as spam. Your web page should always read naturally instead of a constant repetition of the same terms over and over again. Write for your visitors not the search engines and you won’t go wrong.
9. Page Swapping
   If you swap your well ranked page for something totally different, expect to see a reaction. Although this won’t get you banned in the true sense of the word, you will see a dramatic drop. Basically if your page or site is no longer relevant to the terms you have worked hard to gain rankings for, you won’t be appearing for them.
10. Linking to the wrong kind of sites
    Linking to other sites is a good thing but be careful who you’re actually linking to. Get caught up in the wrong company and you could find yourself disappearing. Linking to sites that aren’t exactly carrying out ethical practices will work against you. Adult and Gambling sites are an example of the types of sites to avoid. Don’t link to sites that spam. Avoid Link Farms. Only link to sites that are relevant and sites that would add value to the content of your site.

On the 9th day of Xmas…

On-page search engine optimisation is very important and below are 9 tips to help ensure you get the most from it:

1. Page Titles – Need to be unique, relevant, individual per page and most importantly contain your main keywords and these shout what your page is about so get them right.
2. META Descriptions – should be unique per page, include your keywords and be good sales copy as this will be displayed more often than not in the search results and is key to getting a searcher to click on your entry.
3. Content – This must be unique, good quality and contain your main keywords but do not spam it to the extent where the copy does not read properly as it will never convert.
4. Internal Linking – use keywords in the links you use to link the pages of your website together as this will increase the value of the link and the perceived relevance of the page you are linked to.
5. Headers – Make proper use of your headers starting with your prime title as a H1 and work down as this will be used to decide which phrases are most important on your page.
6. Alt Tags – Primarily used by screen readers to interpret an image to a visually impaired person, the search engines also use these to find out what the picture is about, so be sure to use your keywords where appropriate.
7. Sitemap – ensure you have a sitemap and that it is linked off of your homepage as this will ensure all of your websites pages get found and crawled.
8. Validate – go to the W3C website and ensure that your website validates. If it does it will be easier to crawl and the robots are less likely to get stuck on your site and give up.
9. Get a Blog – Blogs are fantastic as the search engines love fresh unique content and Blogs ensure they get it. Also its a great way of becoming a source of knowledge for your industry and will see you gaining more links and business.

These are 9 simple tips that if followed will see you gaining search rankings faster than you can polish of that turkey.

On the 8th Day of Christmas, Impact Media share 8 blogging resources:

1. Wordpress. Open-source blogging software. A multitude of uses
2. Free WordPress Video Theme, courtesy of Impact Media
3. BlogPulse. Find out what’s hot in the blogosphere
4. Backtype. Find, follow and share comments
5. BloggerDesign. Great tips on blog design and usability
6. Performancing Metrics. Blog stats, in real time
7. ProBlogger. Darren Rouse provides ‘sledgeloads‘ of tips and advice
8. BlogCatalog. A ’social blogger community’, i.e. blog directory with interaction between bloggers

On the 7th Day of Christmas, Impact Media gave me 7 copywriting tips:

1. Scanability
Website visitors are fickle, and if they can’t find the information they want on your website, they will move on. Make sure that when people arrive at your site they can scan the page and understand your content straight away.

2. Write for the Web
Don’t go overboard with your website copy. By all means write your text with search engines in mind, but always remember its people who read your website and too much text means confusion.

3. Use Headings

Not only will Heading tags (H1, H2, H3 etc.) break up your bulky text to make the page more readable, it will also help the search engines determine the subject of the page. Pick your headings with care and be sure to place your most keywords within them, else they are wasted.

4. Use Bullet Points

Using bullet points will help break your content into small pieces which will allow your visitors to scan the page easier.

5. Keywords Usage

Do not over use keywords in your content. It will be very tempting to stuff your keywords into the page to ensure you are ranked for it, search engines hate that, and your visitors won’t thank you for it either.

6. Anchor Text

Add keywords to your internal links to give credibility to the content. Avoid generic phrase such as ‘click here’.

7. Call to actions

Don’t just end your content with a statement, finish with a Call to Action. Determine what your want your visitors to do and write your whole copy with that in mind. finish with a link or clear direction to the next step of the process.

On the 6th day of Xmas….

Video on the web is becoming an essential part of the marketing mix and below are a 6 ways you can use video to promote your business online:

1. Video testimonials – from your clients saying how good you are and how you have helped their business do better. These work very well at getting you credibility and trust online.
2. Video reviews – for products you sell so people can really get to grips with what they are buying. Statistics state that people are more likely to buy when the sales message is supported by video.
3. Tips and help videos – these work very well and getting you ranked for long tail terms and enable you to show your knowledge online and this leads to further business and brand awareness within your niche.
4. Video introductions – to services on your website so you can guide them through the page and service being offered to save them reading it. Works well for people in a hurry and also those who dislike reading large amounts of text.
5. Walk rounds and tours – good for hotels, car dealerships and estate agents as people can really get a feel for what they are looking at and this also will stop wasted time as people wont bother doing a real tour if they don’t like the look of the video tour.
6. Screen capture processes – such as using applications and software to show how easy it is to use and this can also be used for the instructional guides that accompany it.

These are just a few ways you can promote your business online but all will do wonders for your online visibility.

Google have just announced the release of version 7 of AdWords Editor.

Having just upgraded and followed the instructions, as always, to back up before upgrading, I was dismayed to find that when I went to restore the account snapshot, my local unposted changes weren’t there.

In addition to this, the proposed changes just had all of the existing campaigns in the AdWords account I was working on flagged as deleted.

There is a known issue that Google have given details of here:

Upgrading to version 7.0 known issues. Sounds easy enough but unfortunately this didn’t work for me.

Normally, I always ensure that I’ve uploaded local changes first but given that the backup option is documented as an appropriate method, I assumed I would be safe to do so. I hope this post saves you from experiencing the same problem.

On the 5th Day of Christmas, Impact Media share 5 social bookmarking sites with followed links:

1. Furl.net
2. Spurl.net
3. Blinklist.com
4. Mister-wong.com
5. A1 Webmarks

All the above bookmarking sites will give you a do follow link. Not the most powerful links we admit but they all add up!

On the 4th Day of Christmas, we present 4 Google Analytics tips:

1. Ensure that the Google Analytics code is implemented on all pages on your site and correctly

How can you expect visitors to be tracked on a page which doesn’t contain any code to record their visit? Also make sure the code is exactly the same as the code shown in your analytics account, don’t make any changes as this could cause in error in the code and prevent good data from being recorded.

2. Set up Goals

Goals are there to help you find out if visitors are doing what you want them to do on your site, whether it be a purchase, completing an enquiry form or signing up to a newsletter. Goals are there to help you get more information out of your data so make sure you use them.

3. Link AdWords account to analytics account

If you are using AdWords you will want this traffic source to be identified within your analytics account so you can monitor your paid visitors’ activity.

Login to your AdWords account, and then click on the green Analytics tab, which is between Reports and My Account. As long as you have the same login email address for both accounts then AdWords should have automatically detected your Analytics account. If you have a different email address for you Analytics account then just, make sure the email address for your AdWords account is listed within the User Manager in Analytics.

You should also make sure that the Auto Tagging is enabled within your AdWords account within your Account Preferences – this should be enabled automatically.

4. E-commerce sites use e-commerce tracking

Shopping sites can enable the e-commerce tracking which Google Analytics offers. This is a little bit more complicated to implement and you may need your web developer’s help.

By implementing the e-commerce tracking you will be able to see sales values and transactions and identify pages which have contributed to a sale. Just remember that Google Analytics is an analytical tool and not a sales system so not all numbers may match exactly to your sales orders.

E-commerce tracking can also be used to track non e-commerce sites but this is slightly trickier, but can provide you with a great insight to user activity.

On the 3rd Day of Christmas, Impact Media share 3 essential landing page tips:

1. Have a clear conversion goal. Make sure you know what you want to achieve from the page and purely focus on that goal
2. Make sure that your ad or email are closely correlated with the landing page. e.g. The same keywords appear on both. Make sure the main page headline matches the keyword and the product on the page is closely related to the keyword
3. Minimise distractions, Keep the page nice and simple and have a clear call to action

On the 2nd day of Christmas Impact Media share 2 user experience tips:

Build a Text Based Site Map
Large, complex sites should always have a site map. Don’t let your visitors feel their way through the site, if they are lost or confused, a site map will help them find their way.

Use Consistent Navigation
People are impatient, and therefore so are the users of your website. Don’t confuse people by making them learn new site navigation when they have just made sense of your current one. Use obvious and consistent navigation throughout your whole site, and always have a link to your homepage from every page on the site.

On the first day of Christmas, Impact Media gave to me… 1 Free Online SEO Tool.

One of the most important starting points with any SEO work is the Title and Meta data.
But ensuring that these elements are adding much needed relevance is sometimes over looked.

You may well have created a ‘killer Title Tag’ but have you ensured that your Meta Description tag is also working in harmony with the rest of your site?

A good free online SEO tool that gives you a good indication of this is the Meta Tag Analyzer at seocentro. This tool will display the Title, Meta Description and Keyword tags implemented at the entered URL and then tell you their relevancy rating to the page in question. This gives you a good starting point to any SEO campaign.

And the help doesn’t stop there. This free tool also informs you of Anchor Text found on the page, the keyword density of each word found on the page, Alt Tags used and any errors within the Meta itself.

Don’t say we didn’t gave you anything for Christmas!

http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html

As it’s the season of good will, we thought we would spread some Christmas cheer by offering you our very own Search Engine Marketing 12 Days Of Christmas.

We won’t be singing but we will be posting 12 Days worth of SEO and PPC tips, tricks, advise and expertise.

From link building tips, free online tools, analytics advice to SEO do’s and don’t, our Christmas gifts will be more welcome than the inevitability unwanted gift from Gran this year.

Our 12 days starts tomorrow so be sure to come by and pick up your first gift. Better still, subscribe using RSS to make sure you don’t miss out.

Freenotes Ltd are based in Petersfield, Hampshire, and are a family owned business specialising in the manufacture of outdoor musical instruments.

The company know the value of effective online marketing, and came to Impact Media in order to improve their natural search engine rankings.

We are delighted to be working with Freenotes Ltd and we anticipate a successful campaign over the coming months.

To find out more about how we can help your business succeed online please feel free to visit our Search Engine Optimisation Services page.

Due to the success of Merlin Cycles 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 Merlin Cycles as their professional Search Engine Marketing (SEM) partner.

You have a well designed website with great content and you’ve decided to use paid search to increase the flow of quality traffic to it. You’ve created an AdWords advertising campaign in an attempt to get the most out of your website, but there’s an important factor when using AdWords that you need to consider.

Google AdWords try to present ads by relevance and quality. To ensure this, one of the things they do is to make an assessment of the ad and your website and give an AdWords quality score.

Google Adwords Quality Score

What kind of things affects the AdWords quality score?

• The Click through Rate (CTR) of the keywords in your ad
• The past performance of the CTR to the URL in your ad
• The relevance of the keywords in your ad
• The relevance of the keywords to the ad and the search query
• The quality and performance of your landing page

The quality and performance of your landing page is a vital factor in Google AdWords determining your quality score. The benefits of having a good quality score are:

• AdWords decreases your CPC rate
• AdWords improves your ranking position

This means that your ads will cost less and your chances of being clicked on will improve. Without a good quality score, it will cost you more to get people to visit your site and there’s less chance of them finding you if your ad has a low ranking position.

So what can you do to improve the performance of your website and attain a better Google AdWords quality score?

• Ensure your site contains relevant and quality, original content
• Improve site speed
• Improve server speed

Your website’s content always needs to be fresh, original and well written. This shouldn’t be new to you; content is king and always had been. Google assesses the quality, originality and relevance of your content against the ads you place. One final thing on content-relationship to ads, if you want a good quality score, it helps if the keywords in your ads appear on your website. That might seem obvious, but many people forget to do this.

Your site speed is also essential, slow loading pages will kill your quality score and put off human visitors alike. If your pages are full of heavy graphics files, slow loading Java Script or CSS feeds, you will damage your quality score. Strip back everything non-essential from your website landing page; keep it simple and to the point, your search engine and human visitors will appreciate it.

Likewise, if you’ve hosted your website on cheap, slow servers with a budget web hosting company, your quality score may also be badly affected. If your hosting service is providing you with poor server speeds, it’s time that you moved your site to a new host.

Remember, by making web pages that load quicker, you will save money on you AdWords campaign, and more people will stay longer on your website, increasing the chances of converting them from visitors to buyers.

Further Reading:

Improve Your Landing Page Quality Score, Save Money!

Garden Centre Online provide a large range of the highest quality garden goods at the lowest prices.

With new products arriving in the New Year, the company wants to raise their profile on the internet and increase online sales.

We are delighted to have been selected as Garden Centre Online’s Pay Per Click (PPC) partner and very much look forward to working with them on this project.

Claimtax specialise in UK Tax Claims and Self Assessment Tax Returns; the company wish to raise their profile across the major search engines natural rankings in order to generate a higher volume of high quality traffic, leading to an increase in web based enquiries.

We are delighted to have been appointed as Claimtax’s professional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) specialist, and look forward to working with them over the forthcoming months on their campaign.

To find out more about how we can help market your business online please visit our SEO Services page.

It is finally out of development and ready for download:

The theme aptly named “WordPress Video Theme” is just that and has a whole host of other goodies built in like:

• Video functionality
• Newsletter ready
• Blog included
• Contact form set-up
• Use as complete website or just a blog

Using the widgets module you just cut and paste your code and your video and newsletter is embedded  and can be easily updated at any point. Other useful features are:

• Widget ready
• 2.7 compatible
• 2 column design
• SEO friendly clean code
• Instructions included to make it easy to customise
• Video walk through to help with set-up and customisation

This theme is free to use and can be downloaded right here. If you are looking for a stylish theme with all the features you could want and need then this is for you and the best part is its totally free.

Why? because WordPress is a great platform and by promoting this theme we help further promote this great platform and make life easier for people starting out by giving them a great starting point.

We are going to keep this up to date and keep adding functionality to it so if you have any ideas or things you would like to see added, removed or changed leave a comment as we will be using this to work out the changes for Rev. 2.

To download the theme click here.

To download the instructions click here.

If you would like to be walked through the set up just watch the video below:

RPC Group PLC is the leading supplier of rigid plastic packaging in Europe, with manufacturing operations in 12 countries of the European Union (and one in the USA).

We are delighted to have been selected as RPC’s professional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) partner, to implement the companies natural search strategy.

To find out more about Impact Media’s services please visit our Search Engine Optimisation page.

It’s well documented that marketing to social networkers has not turned out to be the golden goose that many had predicted.

Where search dominates online marketing opportunities, many companies are finding that, despite reaching a level of maturity in Internet terms, the social media sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo etc., are struggling to turn high visitor numbers into meaningful ad revenues.

Now, an article from eMarketer – Social Networkers Aren’t There for Ads – highlights the fact that many social networkers still shun advertising with a high proportion seeing it as inappropriate to have their personal information utilised for marketing purposes.

At Impact Media, our social media marketing services can help you pick your way through this marketing jungle and develop a strategy that fits with your business objectives.

You turn your back for a moment and Google slip in another change to AdWords!

If you go to your campaign settings in AdWords, you’ll now see an option under ‘Networks and bidding’ to select “iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers”.

AdWords Campaign Settings for Mobile Devices

Not to be confused with mobile ads, this is simply stating that you do want your standard text and image adverts to be shown on mobile devices where a user conducts a Google web search or appear on the content (AdSense) network.

Given that the number of mobile devices with full browser capability is relatively small at the moment, the effect of this option is likely to be negligible but certainly worth experimenting with if your spend with AdWords is significant.

If you’re a Google AdWords advertiser, you’ve no doubt been affected in some way by Google’s Quality Score. This is the system within AdWords that rates a keyword “great”, “OK” or “poor”.

It is calculated using your keyword’s Click through Rate, the relevance of your ad copy and your landing page, i.e. the page that a searcher is taken to when clicking on one of your adverts.

What you may not appreciate is that having a poor quality score can cost you more than just pride. Those AdWords advertisers who create highly targeted campaigns benefit not only by higher conversion rates but they will also typically pay less for the click in the first place.

If you’re running your own AdWords campaign and it is littered with keywords flagged as “poor” it really is in your best interest to try and remedy the situation. This could mean deleting the keyword if you conclude that it is not appropriate or redesigning your landing page (or creating a new one) to improve the relevancy.

Google’s quality scoring system isn’t perfect and can sometimes leave even experienced AdWords users scratching their heads but to ignore it and do knowing is sure to end up costing you.

For more on this, watch Google’s introductory video on Quality Scores:

Google AdWords Quality Score Video