Search Engine Marketing Blog

If you have a new website, or plan on getting one, you need to be realistic with your expectations if you plan on using Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as part of your online marketing strategy.

If you’ve decided that you would like to move into new market or take your ‘bricks and mortar’ business online, you need to evaluate the current search landscape in terms of who your online competition truly are.

Whilst we perform full competitor analysis for our search engine marketing clients, you can perform some high-level research yourself that should help clarify the size of your task. You may even be in for a pleasant surprise!

Once you’ve established what keywords you’d like to go after (remember, be realistic with this!), you should perform a search for these phrases in the major search engines. Make a note of who’s in the top 10.

Once you’ve got your list, perform research into how old these sites are; more specifically, the age of the domain. (TIP: If planning a new site, is there a suitable aged domain for sale in the marketplace?).

Next, go to your search engine of choice and see how many pages your competitors have indexed. Just enter “site:www.example.com”.

Finally, go to Yahoo Site Explorer, enter a URL and then select the ‘Inlinks’ option with Show Inlinks set to ‘Except from this domain’ to get an idea of the link popularity of your competitor’s site.

In an earlier post, I outlined how with search engine marketing, you need to be careful what you measure, but knowing what you are going after in the first instance is just as important.

Armed with this information, you should be in a much better position with your SEO evaluation and have a clearer understanding of the size of your task.

As a UK Search Engine Marketing Company, we provide our clients with regular reports and updates on how their SEO campaign is progressing. Part of our client reporting includes information on where their keywords are in the major search engines. This is almost a given but it should not be the only measurement of success, nor even the most important aspect.

If you are planning your own search engine optimisation campaign, you really need to focus on your keyword research and understand which phrases are going to bring in the most relevant visitors to your site. It is often the case that a site owner will go after a ‘vanity phrase’ which is often a single word, highly competitive and, even if you were to get a top spot, would not necessarily bring in the ‘right type’ of visitor.

You should try and understand what phrases are more likely to bring in prospects for what you offer rather than the glory of getting hundreds of worthless visits to your site. Quality, not quantity!

We always recommend that you use a good quality analytics package. There are many in the market but, for most site owners, Google Analytics is more than sufficient. Once you have your account set-up and have implemented the code to start tracking visits, you will be able to uncover valuable data about your site’s traffic and will be able to make informed decisions about how well your search engine marketing campaign is performing. For example, you will be able to set up funnels to see how visitors progress through your site and (ouch!), what point they leave.

You will be able to determine your bounce rate* by keywords and see very clearly where you may have rankings that are not adding value or your site needs improving to convert those visitors.

*What Does Bounce Rate Mean?

It’s only natural to want your site as high up the rankings as possible but relevance is key.

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If you’re a UK business wanting to get more from your online marketing, you should review our Search Engine Optimisation Services.

Apart from being a dreadful word, canonicalisation is an important factor for Webmasters and site owners to consider. Basically, it refers to picking the URL that you want for your primary URL and re-directing the ‘other versions’ to it.

Let’s say you have:

• yoursite.com
• www.yoursite.com
• www.yoursite.com/index.html
• yoursite.com/index.html

Although you would imagine they’re all the same, technically they are different. Potentially, a web server could show a different profile, e.g. links and content, for each of these scenarios.

Try to get into the habit of being consistent with your internal links.

More importantly, go to your web server and set-up a permanent (301) re-direct from the other versions of your domain to the URL format you have selected for your primary.

The search engines are getting better at resolving this issue and Google Webmaster Tools allows you to set a preferred domain. However, you shouldn’t rely on this and instead use a 301 re-direct to ensure that you control which view of your domain you’d like the world to see.

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.

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.

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!

We are often asked to perform Search Engine Optimisation on sites that have little or no meaningful content, i.e. relevant text. Images are great but if you have a site and want to boost your natural rankings, you need to give the search engines a clue about your site’s purpose.

There’s much talk and spin about SEO copywriting but, for me personally, the very fact that ‘SEO’ and ‘copywriting’ get used in this context is a mistake.

If you are a website owner, you should focus on copywriting but not for SEO; you should create your content in the same way as any other marketing medium, i.e. for your visitors.

Having said that, here are a few pointers that you should consider when developing your web pages:

• Write naturally, i.e. the text should be created with the visitor in mind not SEO.
• Despite the reference to writing ‘naturally’, keywords that your page is about need to appear on the page. Sounds obvious? It is, but equally surprising how many times this has been over-looked.
• Use Header Tags, where appropriate. Break your paragraphs down with header tags which help with both your natural rankings and your visitors when they are reading the page.
• Internal linking helps with SEO, i.e. don’t use ‘Click Here’ or ‘More’ for internal hyperlinks. Try to use the title (or close variant) of the target page.

In summary, certainly think about the structure of your site and the way your content is developed but make sure you read it back. If it doesn’t flow naturally, consider changing. If you get tempted to ’stuff’ keywords in to your copy, don’t!

During our recent Business South show, we ran a competition for visitors to our stand to win a free ’starter’ Search Engine Optimisation Service.

We’ve now made the draw and the lucky winner was Steve McGrill of DemiFire Ltd. DemiFire are a leading Fire Safety solutions company based in Fareham, Hampshire. They offer a range of training, consultancy and testing services for companies with a responsibility for fire safety in the workplace.

We will now schedule in the free SEO service for DemiFire and look forward to increasing their site’s visibility in the search engines.

Those clever people at seomoz.org are running a survey for search marketers trying to gain as much data as they can from the SEO community.

It would be great to get some more UK involvement, so if you’re a UK SEO Company, why not take 20 minutes to contribute to this survey?

Just follow this link: The SEOmoz SEO Industry Survey