SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION SEO COMPANY

Every day as more people become connected with the internet to communicate and conduct business, the prevalence of online scams has been on the increase. With the latest statics release by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), online fraud had increased 16% last year, with about 20,000 people reporting becoming victims of online fraud and being exploited up to $70 million from Australians last year.

The ACCC last week launched an Australian Consumer Fraud Taskforce 2010 Fraud Week, issuing two new publications for online shoppers and small business owner’s advice and tips to help avoid scams/online fraud such as:
-    Protecting your identity online
-    Sending and transferring money safely
-    Dealing with suspicious or unsolicited offers sent by email
-    General online golden rules
The ACCC publications will be available free of charge from the ACCC website or by calling the ACCC Info line on 1300 302 502.

The basic ACCC internet tips to help steer clear from any online scams or fraud:
•    Talk to your internet service provider about spam filtering or, alternatively, purchase spam-filtering software.
•    If you want to access an internet account website, use a bookmarked link or type the address in yourself: NEVER follow a link in an email.
•    Install software that protects your computer from viruses and unwanted programs and make sure it is kept up-to-date.
•    Beware of free websites and downloads (such as music, adult sites, games and movies). They may install harmful programs without you knowing.
•    Check the website address carefully. Scammers often set up fake websites with very similar addresses.
•    Never enter your personal, credit card or online account information on a website that you are not certain is genuine.
•    Never send your personal, credit card or online account details by email.
•    Try to avoid using public computers (at libraries or internet cafes) to do your internet banking.
•    Do not use software on your computer that auto-completes online forms. This can give internet scammers easy access to your personal and credit card details.
•    Choose passwords that would be difficult for anyone else to guess.

It’s not everyday Google admits they need to improve their own SEO skills.
However - the day (and report) has arrived!

Google recently conducted an audit on its own website’s (including the Google home page) and it seems not even the Search Engine giant can master their own algorithm.

One of the biggest issues identified was Google’s current title tag. For those of you without an expert SEO company on board to explain what a title tag is, it is the blue line that appears on the top of every web page.

So, what did Google learn from this - they need to use more more descrptive words and phrases in their title tags.

Google even had images that led to “404 pages” (For those out of the loop, these are error pages that exist once the URL is obsolete).

Solution - any page that no longer exists should be redirected to its new location.

Now, let’s not get carried away with being too harsh on the Google’s SEO team though!

They scored well in regards to their internal linking structure, both from an SEO and usability perspective.

What can we learn about this?
Now that we have a bit more of an understanding in regards to the metrics Google used to give themselves this “improvement needed” evaluation - we needto be sure our website fulfills the criteria.

As a member of the BRW Investec Fast Club, our CEO, Gary Ng, was interviewed by BRW magazine’s editor in chief Sean Aylmer discussing the challenges businesses face in raising finance for growth. Alongside Gary Ng, the Fast Club also interviewed other entrepreneurs from different industries, all belonging to the BRW Fast Club . These entrepreneurs included Braeden Lord of Aussie Farmers direct, Matt Hartley of Empire Glass and Aluminium and Danny Kordahi of DK Blue.

E-Web Marketing is a member of the BRW Investment Bank Fast Club, a collaboration of senior executives from the BRW Fast 100, Fast Franchises and Fast Starters. This club was launched in late November 2009 and celebrates the achievements of successful Australian entrepreneurs who have created fast growing public and private companies. In 2009, E-Web Marketing appeared on the BRW Fast 100 list, being the only SEO company winner, after their first ever submission with a ranking of #43.

Gary Ng is the founder and CEO of E-Web Marketing and has been in the SEO field for 10 years, starting the company in 1999. E-Web Marketing was initially a Web Development company, however in 2004; the company changed to purely focused on providing Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) services. The business has expanded greatly since then with more than 500 clients and a growing base of over 30 staff.

To view the full interview, follow the link http://tv.brw.com.au/video/20758?play=1.

Often I see clients who are caught up in the rankings and traffic trap where they can’t see the forest for the trees, the trees being rankings/traffic and the forest being the website objectives. We can get caught up looking at traffic statistics and fussing over individual keyword rankings that we can forget about putting effort into want we want website users to do. A big piece of the puzzle but an often neglected part of a solid online marketing campaign is conversion ability

A ‘conversion’ can be a sale, newsletter signup, completed contact us form or request for more information, or one of the main different possible actions you might want your site users to take. In the words of one of my favourite self-development writers Stephen Covey, “Begin with the end in mind”. Knowing is half the battle and the rest is reporting and clever design.

Why put all this effort into the conversion friendliness of your site? Simple maths.
Let’s say your site receives 3000 hits per month and has a conversion rate of 2%. This equates to 60 leads. With those 60 leads you might be successful at making 20% of them satisfied customers, leaving you with 12 of these a month. Therefore, if you could double your website’s conversion rate to 4% then you could in theory increase your leads to 120 and double your monthly sales to 24!

How do I do this you say? How can I double my monthly sales from online marketing? Check out these pointers and put them into action:

1. Make your content easily understood and user friendly. Put your content in subsections which concentrate on the benefits of your products/services, not the features.
2. Simplify your contact/lead form. Only ask of your customers what you need from them in order to consider them a lead.
3. Make smart decisions with smart data. Your website’s analytics data will offer a lot of useful data that you can leverage to improve the performance of your landing pages.
4. Make good use of images when creating landing pages. The use of images on landing pages can be powerful as they attract the eye and can help keep a user on the page.
5. Leverage landing pages for extended user engagement. Do you have a Facebook fan page, a blog, press releases, a newsletter or an RSS feed? Invite your users to connect with you through these mediums as they seek solutions to suit their needs.

For more information check out Christopher Wallace’s blog here.

Last week’s expected decision on the controversial Google Books Library Project by a US federal judge has been postponed. The judge told a crowded courtroom last week that he will listen with an “open mind” to the arguments for and again Google’s settlement with authors and publishers about the right to scan and publish book titles. U. S. District Court Judge Denny Chin walked into the courtroom at the U. S. Court of the Southern District New York with a tall stack of comments from each of the parties, and stated: “To end the suspense, I’m not going to rule today. There’s too much to digest”.

The Google Books Library Project aims to make it easy for people to find relevant books online. Google’s objective with this project was to enable people to find books that they couldn’t normally find as might be the case with out of print books. The homepage for the project states that the ultimate goal is to “work with publishers and libraries to create a comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalogue of all books in all languages that helps users discover new books and publishers discover new readers”. Google, which has yet to present their case to the judge, have emphasised that the number of books included in the settlement is a small portion (3%) of all the titles in the world. They plan to make 20% of the catalogue free and if they choose, users can purchase the rest from Google.

The project has been under much criticism since its inception from competitors such as Microsoft and Amazon who argue that allowing the project go ahead will basically mean giving Google a license to profit from orphan works and get an unfair advantage. Other critics include some library groups, authors and other competitors. Another concern is that nothing in the settlement would protect users’ personal habits and information from being tracked for behavioural advertising. “The proposed Google book settlement is not a philanthropic effort to bring literature into the 21st century and bridge a literary divide,” opponents Microsoft, Amazon and library groups wrote in a recent filing through the Open Book Alliance. “This de facto exclusive license will provide Google with an enormous advantage over its search competitors.”

There are advocates for this plan such as the University of Michigan who praised the deal because they believe that most of the books in the settlement are scholarly works that are collecting dust on university bookshelves and wouldn’t otherwise be read. Other advocates include blind support groups who say that making publications available online means that people will have easier and cheaper access to works that are hard to come by today.

The settlement is part of Google’s ambitious effort to put the entire world’s books online, aiming to eventually be the main source for searching and buying titles.

So your business has just installed a blog onto its website and you aren’t exactly the world’s best writer. Yet you know how important it is for you to regularly update your website in one way or another. So you spend an afternoon trawling through the Internet looking at your competitor’s blogs, your family blog, possibly even your friend’s Facebook updates - only to realise that you are still out of ideas.

Well have no fear anymore. What I am going to propose for topics and ideas to blog about here isn’t exactly rocket science or the secret of getting hundreds of extra visitors per month. Rather, it is meant to give you a framework of what can be posted that is both useful and potentially interesting to your readers and clients. By being just a little more transparent on the blog about the organisation, you are allowing people to become involved and hence feel a part of what is going on.

1. Introduce new staff members - A great way for people to get to know those who they are dealing with is to announce them online. Now obviously not everyone will be outgoing enough to have their picture and a few bits and pieces about themselves online for all to see. However, even just by letting people know there is a new member of the team (use first name only if you must) and explain the role they will take - you might even find people are coming in and specifically asking for that individual.
2. New product announcement - The first thing you do whenever you launch a product should be to broadcast it online. It is by far the cheapest and easiest way to get the word out. Instead of issuing a press release or distributing it in other ways - the blog leaves all those other methods out to dry in terms of exposure.
3. Share client successes - In your business dealings you will come across many that will truly appreciate the product or service you are offering. It is those stories that can go on the blog and be shared with everyone. These testimonials can build trust in your organisation and the brand, encouraging even new businesses or customers to try your offerings. Trust and new business go hand in hand.
4. Charity & Other Events - For one reason or another, many organisations are afraid to mention what they get up to besides their core product. If your organisation has helped some specific charities or participated in some relief assistance (such as Haiti currently) - that is something your company should be proud of. It is ok to show that you care about the community and the world around you, and people respect those organisations that give back. Even if you participate in community initiatives or join in local festivals or shows - take photos, videos, even Tweet from specific events if need be to prove how active you are. Even if you are attending a trade show or seminar to help you improve, that shows that your organisation is growing and is concerned with bettering itself and its employees.
5. Commenting and giving your opinion on events that affect your organisation or clients - This is another option that is constantly overlooked. For example, if there is some form of new legislation that will be or has been past, where are your clients (even the employees) going to find out? Sure they could go look at some government site in a badly formed PDF - but wouldn’t you rather they came and got their news from your website? I know I would. By being on the cutting edge as well, it makes you an authority for a particular industry or skill set. E-Web on our blog does this by always commenting on what is happening in the search space and how it will affect Australian businesses, big and small.

So I guess the next stop after this is getting out your notepad (unfortunately no iPad as yet) and start brainstorming ideas from this. Then you can go crazy and make sure your website is doing the job you want it too.

Just when you thought there could be no more social networks left to invent, Google joins the social network party again. The reason is they say again is that roughly the same time last year, they made an announcement about a little project that was to become Google Wave
Then there was Google SideWiki which was another social functionality provided by the search giant.

So my question is where does Google Buzz fit into the equation? And the answer I have come to is that I am not too sure.

When Google Wave was announced, I had many of my non-tech friends come up to me and ask plenty of questions about the news. They wanted to know whether or not they needed Facebook, Skype, et al anymore because Google was going to promote this fantastic collaboration tool for both business and pleasure.

Last night however, not one of those people was asking me about Google Buzz.

Now I am not saying it is a guaranteed fail on Google’s part – it’s not really comparing apples with apples. But one of my associates on Twitter (@DDsD) made a very good point:

@BenTortora Not entirely,Google Buzz is like a non-real-time wave.. but that’s what people are used to, wave is too complicated for most.

And I completely agree with that statement. That is the exact spot where the application needs to sit. However, many people are active on one of the following networks:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Foursquare

And from our research and questioning of social network users, not many want another aggregator or somewhere else to connect with people. With Facebook and MySpace about to launch full-blown email services, taking with them their massive existing user base – it seems Google is on the defensive trying to make their email client social.

Another reason why I am not completely sold on the service is the same reason why those aggregators never really perform as well as the networks independently – people are connecting with different groups of people on different networks. I know myself personally, I do not add anyone I have not met face-to-face on my Facebook; I don’t have any personal connections – only business – on LinkedIn; on Twitter I connect and share with both friends, strangers, industry leaders and bloggers that I follow. Aggregating all those different status updates and links would add more noise to those networks - the last thing any user wants from a service.

I guess it all boils down to the fact that I am not really a power user of Gmail to begin with, and the announcement hasn’t really swayed me to become one. And if Google wants it to be Wave for the masses, they are going to need to bump their awareness campaign past forcing people to check it out when they sign into their Gmail.

There is some talk around about how Twitter has the potential to claim some of Google’s pie in the realm of real-time search. The ability to search for information via Twitter has the distinct and differentiated advantage over Google where the information is being presented real-time and comes direct from the user. For this reason some believe that Twitter is better than Google for researching companies, products and services for real customer feedback, breaking news and live events/conference updates.

The speed at which users can post information via Twitter and for this information to be made searchable instantaneously is an advantage over the slower process Google takes to crawl and list website information. The most common tweet is a link and a small insight.  The value of this link and the insight is quickly voted on as people respond and retweet. Relevance would then be determined by the amounts of these votes, making it a human powered search with the potential to provide very fresh and valid information.

Google Search results example for term ‘google translation’

Twitter search results example for term ‘google translation’

What does this mean for SEO?

Any switched on SEO practitioner will tell you all about the importance of links and its ability to impact your websites rankings. An easy way to generate a good amount of links can be achieved via blog posts. The theory goes that the tweet is the new blog post. In the past, the insight and the associated links were most favourably passed by on through blogs but as Twitter’s already impressive popularity increases, the amount of people posting on blogs will, in theory, decline. With a decline in these ‘votes’ will Google alter their algorithm to balance things out?

What does this mean for Google?

Twitter is differentiaed from Google by the potential to provide relavant and popular information through it’s millions of users. A search tool which provides information direct from a person who has purchased a particular product, viewed a film or used a service you are interested would be of interest to me, how about you?

It could simply be a matter of time before Twitter figures out a way to capatilise on this and claim search market share from Google. Ultimately, I believe it will be the users who decide the vailidity of this assumption. Either way it will be interesting to see how this play out. How will Twitter evolve in the coming year and what will happen with the potential rarefying of the inbound link and what impact will this have on the Google algorithm?

For more information on this endangered link theory, check out James Duthie’s post here.

Since coming into the market last year, Bing has helped Microsoft improve its market share in the search engine market by offering users something different. Microsoft wanted to see what users thought of their new venture, and so enlisted the help of a qualitative research firm to study if Google users were willing to switch to Bing. The firm recruited 15 Google users and simply asked them to use Bing exclusively for one week. They did not tell them the study was sponsored by Microsoft.

The study revealed that of the 15 Google users who participated, 10 confirmed they plan to switch from Google to Bing. Their experiences are shown below:

There are a myriad of factors to take into consideration when optimising a website for search engine visibility which leaves things wide open for mistakes. It’s important to consider that all the actions you are taking might not all be beneficial to your cause. Each and every day we deal with excited and proactive clients with whom we love to work with but can rush into some SEO activities without consulting us which can be detrimental to their campaign. ‘Think then act’ is best policy. If you don’t know if the changes you are making to your website are going to be in its best SEO interests then seek out the expertise of your friendly E-Web Campaign Manager to help you out.  If you don’t have access to a wealth of SEO knowledge such as that then check out the following list of common mistakes to avoid when managing your SEO campaign.

1.   Failing to plan to continually work on SEO endeavours and just making a ‘once-off’ effort. SEO takes time to regularly analyse and make appropriate changes to keep the site evolving and fresh

2.   Changing mind mid-project on what keywords to target

3.   Impatience - not giving enough thought that an SEO campaign is a long term strategy and results  won’t be evident in the first weeks or even months (in competitive markets)

4.   Failure to do proper goal setting and not establishing required target to get ROI

5.   Not using the valuable data available from a concurrent PPC campaign to monitor converting keywords

6.   Failing to have any form of conversion tracking software on the site to see what keywords are the ones that you have to go after

7.   Allowing keyword choices on the basis of “the MD checks this every day”

8.   Chasing unrealistic keywords for your budget

9.   Choosing keywords from internal industry-speak rather than consumer-led terms with actual traffic

10.  Not reviewing keyword choices to understand where your site is failing to convert visitors and why

11.  Stuffing content with unnatural frequencies of keywords

12.  Creating content that has no value to human readers and fails to back up your market messages

13.  Placing a large block of keyword-stuffed “seo content” a mouse scroll below the footer on the home page

14.  Not using the correct 301 response for old content that has moved to a new URL

15.  Failing to label images with relevant alt attributes containing keywords as appropriate

16.   Not using other properties you own (parent company websites, partners etc) to direct keyword equity to your target site

17.  Going for link volume rather than looking at quality

18.  Using ‘click here’ and ‘read more’ as default choices for internal links, rather than more descriptive phrases containing keywords where appropriate

19.  Deploying lots of inline Javascript and CSS and increasing the site’s download time

20.  Denying access to spiders through Robots.txt

21.  Not keeping the SEO company in the loop with changes to the company’s wider strategy

22.  Allowing web developers to build/change things on the site willy-nilly without informing and consulting with SEO

23.   Not responding to requests for information and content

24.   Not ensuring that SEO recommendations are implemented as fully as possible

25.   Blaming SEO partners for falling traffic without first seeing if there are wider market reasons such as seasonality that could be playing a part

For a more extensive list of common SEO Mistakes check out David Naylor ‘SEO 101 Common Mistakes‘ article.