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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We all know and understand the importance of setting goals in our personal and business lives if we want to achieve success. A colleague of mine’s favourite saying is, “If you shoot for the moon then even if you don’t make it then you’ll land amongst the stars”. Corny and clichéd I know but not without its wisdom. For all its motivational glory, let’s have a look at installing a guidance system to that rocket that will keep you on the right path for your Online Marketing Campaign so that even if you don’t hit your target, you’ll at least be in the right solar system.
In life and business we need to have clear cut goals to steer us and it’s no different for Online Marketing Campaign goals. It’s crucial to have clear, appropriate and achievable goals in order to ensure that the energy you spend on your campaign is spent efficiently and effectively. The problem lies in the development of these goals, how do come up with goals that are realistic and help ensure that your campaign brings you the return that you desire?
Businesses Online Marketing Goals will generally revolve around the following:
Rankings
Traffic
These alone are not specific enough, it’s all well and good to have 1 million unique site visits in a month but what if none of them are buying your product or requesting additional information. These broad goals will then need to be broken up into other more specific goals which must align with the overall goals and strategy of the business:
Branding
Lead Generation
Sales Conversion
Rankings will no doubt be the first thing on any decision maker’s mind when it comes to deciding on goals for their Online Marketing Campaign. Ask most business decision makers about their goals and the response will most likely be, “I want to rank first place for all my keywords.” The problem with this train of thought is whether or not it is feasible to rank No.1. There are many factors such as competitiveness of the industry, current online search capabilities and preparedness to invest in the campaign that need to be considered to reality check this goal. The reality generally is that most new businesses are not capable of getting top rankings in the short-term and should factor it in as a long-term investment.
Increasing overall traffic is another common goal but once again, not specific enough. As with the example I used earlier, how beneficial would 1 million unique site visits in a month be but none of them were qualified visitors? The goals you decide on must help steer and guide your campaign to success and ultimately bring about a return to your company.
When developing your goals, keep them as S.M.A.R.T as possible.
Specific
Measureable
Attainable
Realistic
Timely
The SMART method of goal setting is an excellent way of developing a set of goals. Developing goals in this manner gives them a greater chance of being achieved.
When developing your online marketing goals bring it back to the ultimate objective and ask yourself the following question, what do I need to achieve in order to bring about a return to my business from my investment in online marketing?
Many people seem to be totally clueless on what is involved when taking their site into other countries. After spending some time doing my own searches for related information I can see why, it seems to be a very controversial subject that no one has a firm understanding of.
In an attempt to over come this I have listed below some considerations for building additional sites to target specific geographical regions.
The main issues that we come across in making separate sites to target different locations is making the sites appear that they are uniquely built with the specific country/region in mind.
Though it is possibly and in many cases advised to keep the same website design for continuity and branding purposes, many other changes need to be made to effectively target other regions, following are a few of the more important factors:
- Having the URL for the region you would like to target. The URL if at all possible needs to be the same as the current URL that you have but with the country specific URL extension, for example if I currently owned www.ewebmarketing.com.au and were looking to get into the UK market, I would be looking to get www.ewebmarketing.co.uk and not www.coolmarketing.co.uk
This assists in avoiding any duplicate content issues as search engines can see the URL correlation.
- Separate hosting for each of the domains in the correlating countries. UK hosting for the .co.uk, Australian hosting for .com.au and so on.
- Having unique content for the site, relevant to the country you are trying to target. Though the best case scenario would be to have completely unique content site wide, we understand that in many cases this is simply not possible due to the amount of time and resources involved with building all new pages and content. The main pages that would need to contain unique content would be:
Home page (changing the content on the home page is critical as it is the most important page).
Contact page and contact details
Any other pages that contain Geo specific content.
Any product pricing would need to be converted into the local currency.
Industry news and information
Postage information
Pages that matter less are:
Product pages and their descriptions
Frequently asked questions.
- Different countries also use different languages and slang. All the pages on the site would need to be updated to include this change.
- Also each site would require a separate SEO approach. This would allow you to make changes to each site’s titles, meta data (including geographical data), and implement many other SEO changes, to make them look even more independent of each other. Getting links from directories and associated sites located in the correlating regions would alsobe advantageous.
As I am sure many are aware that the H1 tag is an extremely important part of the search optimisation process, in particular when working with Google. I would go as far as to say that it would be in the top five of the SEO strategies to be put in place on any site. Without a H1 many of a sites pages simply will not rank in a high enough position to generate traffic. Google and many other search engines use the H1 to determine the main subject of a page much like a person does when browsing a news paper. If a H1 is not present we force the search engine spiders to go looking in other places on the site which are less controllable.
I also believe from site usability testing that a site visitor finds comfort in seeing the words they have searched for stated directly on the page, as it implies the page is highly relevant. Seeing as the H1 plays such a large role in the optimisation of the site pages it is highly likely that the term a person searches for will be found on the landing page that they arrive on in a large text H1. Internet users are consider time poor and will often give a site page less than a few seconds before deciding if the page they have landed on is relevant to their search or not, again the implementation of the H1 can reduce the bounce rate of site by immediately revealing to the visitor in most cases the keyword term they have used.
Aside from all this I personally think that if placed properly the addition of the color matched H1 on the site header is aesthetically appealing.
More than ever before, journalists, potential clients, bloggers and industry influential’s use search engines to find subject matter experts, media alerts, past media coverage, media opportunities and media statistics and trends. A recent survey featured journalists and their search usage patterns conveying that 91% of those journalists, reporters and editors surveyed use search engines to do their jobs.
In the past search engine optimisation efforts have mostly been employed by corporate marketing departments. However with all the prospects to create significance and value in the form of increase online brand visibility, online media coverage and reputation management, public relation companies should be entitled and deserving of a seat at the corporate SEO table.
SEO expert Lee Odden believes that
“within the realm of Public Relations there are many types of content that get created and often promoted. Content that can be searched on cab be optimised, and that spells opportunity for extending the reach of PR and media relation efforts”.
Journalists and consumers alike are searching, why not make sure the content published to the web as part of PR efforts is easy to find via search?
Examples of PR content that can be optimised:
-Press releases
-Letters to the editor
-Online newsrooms
-Media kits
-Corporate b logs
-White paper
-Webinars/demos
-Newsletters
-Real world interviews published digitally
-Industry news and updates
-Archive section-pass reports and press releases
-Media alerts
-Invitations
Optimising PR content involves the creation and maintenance of keyword glossaries for which to pick the best phrases for optimisation as well to continually write and upload fresh unique articles incorporating keyword rich and phrases rich content.
The foundations for PR professionals that want to take advantage of SEO tactics is according to Lee Odden
“to extend the reach and visibility of content via search is to take inventory of the content being published digitally, in all formats”.
Further incorporate keyword optimisation within content development and publishing. Content creation and the promotion process should become essential aspects of the PR company. Make it an essential aspect of your business and a 10 min daily task to ensure your online PR activities are affected positively by SEO.
There can be lots of mistakes when attempting to optimise a site for targeted keywords, and keyword stuffing is just the beginning. I’m sure you know about the trouble we can get into for keyword stuffing and spammy tactics, and I’m also sure you know about how the search engines hate this sort of thing, but what we might not realise, is how much those strategies turn away our customers; they can harm our businesses even if the search engines don’t penalise our sites. One may also be amazed to see that our sites might receive an over optimisation penalty even if we haven’t crossed the line into ‘black hat techniques’ or spamming the search engines.
A search engine marketing expert Bill Hartzer gives us a classic example of how one can be effected by over optimisation by unfolding what happens when you put too much anchor text in your site,
“so that all the homepage links say ‘keyword keyword home’ instead of ‘home’”.
This leads to lost search engine rankings a few days later, but within a few days changing the links back, that rankings return. This makes it clear to us that over optimisations and getting penalised for it really does exist.
Knowing that there is an over optimisation penalty and that you don’t have to perform unethical SEO techniques what can we do to prevent this? Hartzer states
“that if you keep your main goal in mind, which isn’t just writing and creating a website to make the search engines happy you can avoid being penalised”.
We must remember that search engines, are businesses too. For example, Google wants the searches coming to their site to have a great user experience, otherwise they won’t come back, and next time will use a different search engine. Google tries to give their visitors the best experience by providing them with information and website that suite their needs and that users enjoy visiting too. So before naming links and writing content think about your customers and what they would like to see. Keep in mind that Google is a business and write and optimise for your customers primarily to ensure you are not penalised and your search engine rankings remain high.
Rachel Searles and Brian White, two of the leaders from Google’s Reconsideration team - which is part of Search Quality section of the company, have released a video on the Google Webmaster Central blog giving tips and advice on submitting a successful request for reconsideration after recieving a penalty on your site in Google.
One of the best things you can do to improve the rankings of your web site as well as get some extra traffic, absolutely free! is to get your site listed in the world’s largest human edited open source directory (more…)
