Other blogs might give you a list of five important search engine optimisation factors or seven SEO mistakes. Some may even have ten things to remember when selecting your top search keywords. Well, I’m going to boil it down into one simple vital SEO fact.

To me, this is the essence of SEO

Google only wants to serve the most relevant search engine results pages (SERPS) for any given keyword. Therefore it follows that to get to get to the top of Google you need to create the best, most interesting, up to date website that puts interesting, unique and relevant information easily into the palms of the hands of Google searchers.

That’s it, the only thing you need to remember

Is There More than that to SEO?

SEO Companies in Stafford and across the West Midlands talk about loads more stuff than that one simple two sentence statement. They talk about the importance of keyword selection, site structure, on page optimisation, inbound links and a load of other stuff. Are they all SEO charlatans? Well, not all SEO companies in the West Midlands are.

The thing is all of those considerations will help your SEO endeavours but they should be used to help you achieve your goal of providing the best website in tune with letting Google know what a great site you have and not as a shortcut to SEO Black Hat glory.

Why Not Use SEO Shortcuts?

There are an absolute stack of SEO techniques that can help you climb the rankings on Google, Yahoo and even Bing and other search engines, so why not use SEO black hat techniques. The reason is simple and as follows
1. Google wants to provide the best, most relevant web pages for any given search term. That is why they are the biggest, because they were the first to put that goal at the heart of their business. Advertising came after that.
2. Google hire the best and the brightest minds from around the world. We are talking super bright, super nerds.
3. They ask these teams of super bright people to look for new black hat techniques and write new code into the ranking algorithm that removes them. Believe me when I tell you that your little SEO guy in Solihull, regardless of any claims or promises he may make, cannot outwit the Google web spam team long term.
4. Google is a multibillion dollar, multinational organisation. They are not stupid. Think about it, how useful would Google be as a web search tool if anyone could get to the number one spot just by putting their chosen keyword loads and loads of times on a page. Answer: Not Very.

So your clever black hat technique might work for a while, but sooner or later (and probably sooner) someone at Google will realise what you’re doing and write in a line of code and your site is gone from Google with no notice, forever.

Build Your Brilliant Website for SEO Glory

So learn the rules of how to promote your website to Google. Learn about the importance of selecting target keywords, site structure, back links and content optimisation. Learn also about black hat techniques like keyword stuffing, hidden text, doorway pages and link spam and work out how Google will spot them and why you shouldn’t use them.

But always remember the one simple self evident truth that Google wants to provide the best page for any given search term and your goal should be to provide that site.

Ok so we all know about online marketing, SEO, SEF, keywords, Meta data and numerous other acronyms that if you are anything like me drive me totally insane, but are we (that being the royal we) taking full advantage of the tools and platforms that we have readily available to us already.

Long gone are the days where Search Engine Optimization is a “Black Art” and only specific companies charging equally mysterious amounts in fees can help with your search engine optimization, search engine positioning and page rank.

Google has to be one of the most recognized search engines in the world, to such a degree that we actually use the term “Google It” instead of what we really mean which is to search the internet so I will base my comments and thoughts around them.

Google inc make no secret on how you can achieve good website position and page ranking in their search engine, they obviously don’t tell all but provide some great tips on what they see as important. They describe one of the most important steps to improving your website’s ranking is “Relevant Content”.
Google’s newest release “Caffeine” highlights the importance of marketing techniques such as blog articles, news articles and even forums posts. Caffeine web indexing means that new content will now be indexed faster and your website updates will appear in a more “real time” way.

So I guess what I am saying is Google just made the Social Web, Business Blogging, Forums and articles on our websites an even more effective way to promote your business.

Word Count – 263

Copywriters are talented people don’t get me wrong, but writing copy for the web is different than writing copy for print and using copy in your web page that has been design specifically for print could spell disaster for your online effectiveness.

In the cyber world it may seem like the programmers and designers have the ultimate control and power of either the success or the failure of our website, yet if you look closer it is the words, and placement of those words that drive user interaction. The specifically designed logo or the clever section of code that work seamlessly behind the scenes are all major parts of a successful website but it is the words that bear the weight of how we influence our users, convey our marketing messages and convert the sale.

5 Tips to Improve Your Website Copy

• Use Effective Headings
• Your headings should be eight words or less.
• Don’t use vague headings – remember you have only a few sections to grab your user’s attention before they move on.
• Include keywords in your heading text.
• Remember you can use your headings as links to more information within your website.
• Title, Title, Title
• Don’t under estimate the power of the title tag of your web page – this is another area that you should be looking to use keyword rich phrases.
• Use different titles, don’t just copy and paste, this is another opportunity to shine brighter than you competitors.
• Drive, Guide & Help Your User
• Drive your user to take the steps that you want them to take.
• Breadcrumb incentives are a great way in influence activity on your website.
• A clearly labelled activity path will increase activity along you “Customer Experience Path”.
• Stay Connected
• Make your pages and content naturally progressive, use links to expand on information and products
• Linking to relevant content or being linked to as the source of relevant content will be beneficial to your page rank.
• Know what you’re Selling
• DON’T babble on about what your widget is capable of by providing a huge list of features, it’s probably of little interest and is a poor way to fill what is prime Real Estate space on your page.
• DO tell your user how the widget will benefit them, how it will make them look or feel, be brutal and tap into the users “needy” side – we all have one.

This is by no means all there is to writing web copy, but maybe a few pointers in the right direction.

Word Count – 448

We all know that Google is a search engine but not everyone knows that Google as a corporation has not only shown the world the power of brand, product and service but also offers us some of the most powerful tools in the web marketplace – for free.

It was a stunning stroke of genius the day that the guy’s and gal’s at Google set to offering the world professional, useful web tools for free.

Google Analytics currently has over 52% of the world’s web tracking market and this is only set to rise as Google techies provide us with more and more powerful elements.
Measuring your marketing is no new thing but by providing anyone and everyone with an easy to use tool that collates, formulates and turns the data into a visual representation of what’s working and what’s not in our online marketing mix is in my option a tool that you would just be foolish to miss out on.

We include a Google Analytics Account setup for all our new clients free of charge, but for those who don’t have it set up or could just do with a little extra help getting started:

Go to the web address http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html to sign up or http://www.google.com/analytics/ and log into your Google account. If we haven’t set an account up for you or you haven’t got a Google Account you will need to set one up first and then create an Analytics account from your control panel. [Setting Up a Google Account]
Overview Page: This is where all the websites that you may be monitoring will be held, Click on the Account Name (which is a hyperlink) to look at the data on the individual websites, select ‘View Report’.

This will give you a visual view of your data:

The graph at the very top (as shown above) represents the visits to your site and breaks it down into daily figures in any one given month.
It provides you with Bounce Rate (the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance) which indicates how relevant your visitors found the entrance page, Average time your visitors spent on your site (which helps you judge content quality) and New visits (those that have visited your site for the first time)

The map overlay shows you which areas of the world (yes the world) are showing an interest in your website and the traffic overview shows you how those visitors came to find your site.

So immediately you can see the data that Google Analytics captures for you can help you track ROI, and help create a targeted and informative ‘next move’ strategy.

Totally Free and growing all the time ……

Look out for more blogs on this topic and feel free to add a request.

Ok, so by now we have all heard about Social Media how it works, how much time it takes and what’s involved, but maximising time for such web Marketing remains a challenge.
We were brain storming the other day during a meeting on how we could increase our productivity within the company’s networking activity. How we could still be active on our twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blog accounts while:

• It doesn’t consume all of our time
• We get a ROI on the time we do commit

Here are some of the suggestions that we came up with and thought we would share them:

• Be firm with either yourself or your staff’s time. Allocate an amount of time that you are going to participate in networking/social media and stick to it, there comes a point where ‘you can do no more’ to increase effectiveness so don’t waste valuable time.
• Don’t be shy at offering links, interaction buttons or even invitations wherever possible.
• Send out an E Newsletter to promote, publish and round up the months networking activities.
• Link your networking together with apps like http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools/
• Don’t *over do it*. Blogging, tweeting and profile updates that are done too often, seem to lose credibility quickly. Post often (@ least once a week), and post quality.
• Give things away. Don’t worry we’re not suggesting you give away a secret formula just give away enough to make your followers a) keep following and b) recommend you as a valuable/credible source.
• Measure! See our previous article. The above will all be totally pointless if you don’t.

Setting up an account is simple, but if you are still having a few problems then here are some pointers to help you on your way:

1. Open a Browser of your choice and go to web address https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount
2. Fill in the details, accept the terms and conditions and create your new account.

3. Google will send you and a verification email (so make sure you use a valid address) that contains a link.
4. Click on the link – hey presto you now have your very own Google Account.

You now have access to an array of tools including Gmail (a free email account), Calendar, Analytics, docs, webmaster tools …..  The list is quite extensive.

The dreaded Google First Page Guarantee. I have to get into this a few times a year with different customers and occasionally with the firms offering this guarantee on behalf of a customer. We all want our website to be on the first page of Google so you can see why people get sucked into wanting to believe it. The problem of course is that with Search Engine Optimisation there are no guarantees.

It’s usually pretty easy to find out where the scam lies. It’s usually that the guarantee doesn’t actually mean anything and you only find this out after you’ve been tied in for 12 months. Sometimes the guarantee is based on really low competition keywords (like your business name or a really long tail) and sometimes it is a pay per click deal where you end up paying loads of money in clicks for your keywords (and if you wanted a Pay Per Click Campaign then surely that’s what you would have asked for). Whatever the catch is, any company offering a Google First Page Guarantee is rarely a search engine optimisation company you want to anything to do with. 

A Helpful Sham

 I find that the Google First Page Guarantee is such a sham that it is actually a really good way of working out the scam artists early on. If they offer you a guarantee then scratch them from your list of companies that you want to work with.

This is new but if this is the first time you’ve come across this then you can Google search ‘Google First Page Guarantee’ and you’ll find loads of articles explaining in great detail why any guarantee is basically worthless. The short version as to why the guarantee is worthless is.
Google controls the algorithm that determines which web pages are listed at the top, and no one can change that. Google’s objective is to deliver the most relevant page to the user. They make billions doing this. Why would they want your page at the top if it is not the most relevant?
 

Nothing New?

This is nothing new, of course, so why am I banging on about this now? Last year I had to get into this for a customer who is well versed in SEO and how it all works, but thought they had found the exception to the rule.

The Offer:
You select whichever keywords you would like and depending on the competitiveness they will give you a price. For that price they will guarantee that you will be in the first 10 listings on Google. If for any reason you fall out of the first 5 then they will set up a paid campaign to get you back on the front page. There is a contract and it is for 12 months.

How It Worked:
They would use one of the websites that they owned that had sufficient juice with Google and graft a keyword rich page onto it for you. They had clearly built up the page rank on a number of sites over time for this specific purpose. The page would look like your own site and would also have your navigation on it and this would be how visitors would go to your site.

What Happened Next:
I played along and gave in some tough keywords for the industry in question. This was nothing as hard as keywords for the insurance industry, but pretty tough. The price came back with a contract and both seemed in order and reasonable. It was frustrating me because I knew that this couldn’t work in the long term (it really was just another form of paid search) but I couldn’t get this across to the customer.

What Happened In the End:
The keywords we had selected were seasonal and so we were set to go live earlier this year. Unfortunately (or fortunately), in between the initial sales call and the go live date, the company in question lost all of their page rank for all of their sites overnight. All the companies with websites who had been made grand promises suddenly found their grafted page was nowhere to be seen, with a possible penalty for their site due to the link from the now black listed site.

The Moral of the Story

There are no guarantees. Maybe this company upheld the guarantee they gave and created hundreds of paid search campaigns using Google Adwords, but I doubt it. I continue to work for this customer promoting their website by helping them create killer content and attracting inbound links. We promote them using Social Media. We help them in their SEO and PPC. In case your wondering, I didn’t stick my tongue out and say, ‘Told ya so!’ and they know about this article and don’t mind me publishing it, hopefully to prevent anyone else chasing Google Guarantees.

Networking -part 1 of 3

Facebook

Founded in February 2004, and currently has over 400 million active users.
Facebook claims to “facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph” and I wouldn’t necessary disagree. Facebook offers photo and video upload, chat, email, a forum (or wall), marketplace (to display items for sale), Event and Groups and additional Pages to mention just a few of its offer’s (full list on the websites fact sheet).
Adding an additional pages or creating groups within your Facebook account is where the term “Become a Fan” is relevant. Creating your own Business Page/Pages is an excellent way to promote you business and keep your “fans” up to date on Events, promotions and marketing info. By creating this community of loyal fans and by making your offerings of interest and benefit you can soon turn a static promotion into a viral one.
* For the few techies reading, Facebook is one of the most-trafficked PHP websites in the world, and utilizes one of the largest MySQL installations anywhere in the world, running thousands of databases.
Want to find out more about Facebook? It’s all here

Twitter

Twitter is the leading micro-blogging site; this instant messaging social tool allows users to blog 140 characters in any single string. Messages can be uploading via a variety of means. Web, mobile app, desktop app, via SMS txt … they really have thought of pretty much everything.
The basic starting point being, you set up an account (which is free by the way), search on areas of interest and follow them or perhaps follow users you may already know that have a twitter account and start micro-blogging about stuff you either find interesting or more importantly others find of interest.
Though all my reading, there seems to be an option that twitter and tweeting your events, announcements and points of interest is the future of PR.
Despite being based on a relatively simple structure (in techie terms that is), twitter allows us to follow others (even our competitors), interact and influence our followers, create lists and interact with the world instantly.
News travels fast, but faster via twitter.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has 60 million members in over 200 countries and with that in mind you can see that this is no small fry as far as social networking is concerned
According to the official LinkedIn press room, a new member joins the networking site, on average every second, with somewhere in the region of 50% of its uses outside the US.
LinkedIn is very much a business social networking tool. Like with the Facebook you are able to link with contacts/friends (LinkedIn call these connections) which can have second-degree connections and then third-degree connections. Within this web of connections you can build an interconnected network of experienced professionals from around the world. Sharing skills, knowledge, information, and business opportunities amongst your connections and even offering and accepting recommendations that the entire network can see.
With executives from all Fortune 500 companies being LinkedIn members

MySpace

MySpace was launched in 2003 by eUniverse (an internet Marketing Company based in LA). In 2005 eUniverse (and with it MySpace) was bought by Robert Murdoch’s News Corporation.
In April 2008, based on monthly unique visitors, MySpace was beaten by its main competitor Facebook.
In terms of users, the 100 millionth MySpace account was created on August 9, 2006 and on that basis I would guess they are doing pretty well.
As you would expect, MySpace has the standard blubs, a profile page, about me, who you would like to meet etc. What makes MySpace a little bit different to the others is the extent in how much you can change the visuals of your page. With significant editable sections of the site (both by “Profile Customizer” and html/CSS editing), users are able to brand pages making then total unique.

What makes MySpace stand out from the crowd is the ability to add music files to your pages – the music is added to a player which can then be embedded directly into your profile page.
So, it is no surprise that MySpace is the popular choice amongst the music industry.

Watch this space for Part 2 (Blogging) & Part 3 (Photo Sharing +)

As a follow-up to’ Make Your Website Design Engaging, not Frustrating’ I thought it might be useful to give you some honest to goodness practises that will help your web pages load faster without breaking the bank.

Starting with the very basics:

1. Images – very pretty, adds colour, interest and supports the textual based content on your website page, an image speaks a thousand words and all that, but also adds weight. By weight I mean the amount of data that is on the page and has to be requested and served by the web server. Now don’t get me wrong most websites have images but all too often, I come across the website that has IMAGES, Large (imposing on the page), pointless (offers nothing to the user) and Heavy (takes valuable seconds to load).When designing your website page make sure your image adds value to your page, are correctly edited and well proportioned in size for the page that they sit in and correctly compressed.
2. CSS– where possible use CSS files for layout and formatting. Your browser can cache the style and format of your page form an external CSS and loads your page a lot faster than if it had to parse through longwinded style script tags on every load.

Tables– try to avoid using tables for anything other than data, and nested tables are a definite ‘Don’t Do’. It takes the browser some time (valuable time) to work out which end tag belongs to what, match everything up and render your web page correctly.

3. Duplicated Code – If you are going to use the same piece of code multiple times throughout your website then you might want to think about putting it in an external script file. This way your browser will already have it in cache and will recall it much faster than if it has to run the script multiple times.
4. Clean Valid Code – Clean code is king. Search Engines love it, reward it and on top of all that your browser will render well scripted tags faster than any ill formed tag. If you happen to be using a WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) HTML editor, take care to remove the (never ceases to amaze me) oodles of unnecessary, pointless scripting.

If you’re unsure what any of these tips mean then you should ask your website developer or you can ask us (we will be happy to help) by either leaving a comment on this post or emailing us directly, we are really friendly and tend not to bite.

According to Nielsen, worldwide usage of Social Media Networking, such as Facebook, twitter, blogs etc is up 82% on the same period last year and with many companies adopting and enhancing their existing marketing strategies this is set to rise even further.

According to a study by BrianSolis.com in 2009  over 80% of professional usage of Social Media goes un-measured. Although Social Media Usage in the Business Sector has been around for some time, the requirement for consistent and continued ROI (Return on Investment) figures form such marketing methods means that anything you invest time into needs to prove its worth and have its performance measured.

Monitoring Software such as Google Analytics is free to use and is key to providing the data you need to build an accurate picture of your Social Media foothold in the marketplace. Date such as:

• Traffic Sources
• Network
• Interaction

 … Can be the difference between a tumble weed blog and a credible source that users come back to time and time again.

The most important thing to remember is to measure your Social Media Activity for your company. Monitoring Software will provide a mountain of data, but is only useful if you are collecting relevant data that you can turn into useful information and fits with your SMMS (Social Media Marketing Strategy).

Monitoring Area Ideas to help you get started

• Track your referrals – this will give you an indication of tandem or child feeds that are working well and those that you either need to allocate more recourses or drop from your SMMS.
• SMID (Social Media Interaction Duration) – It may be prudent to analysis the amount of time that your visitors and lingering on your site. This might help you build a picture of your visitors interests.
• Bounce Rate – are your visitors leaving within a couple of seconds? Perhaps your page isn’t clear; your copy may need changing or may need more interest adding.
• Interaction – are your articles getting comments? What are the comments and are you responding to them?
• Membership – are your followers, subscribers or members increasing? If not why not?

If your effects aren’t working then change them! For more Tips on maximizing your web social Media or online marketing efforts subscribe to our newsletter.