SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION SEO COMPANY

A blog is a very powerful SEO tool that I encourage all my clients to invest time in developing. Not only does it encourage you to stay abreast of what is going on in your industry, it serves multiple purposes beneficial to any search engine marketing initiative.

Ultimately, a blog contributes to your page count, keeps your site fresh and relevant, and provides content that people can link to. In addition, a blog acts as a resource for your business that your customers can reference. In this client facing capacity, your blog reinforces why people should do business with you.

The following tips are here to provide you with some direction on how to specifically write posts that will appeal to people who might link to you. Asking for links is good if you have the contacts. If you don’t have any friends with cool websites then check out below how to attract links through a relevant and intelligent blog.

1. Scope out the competition and identify your link market

See how people already utilising this strategy are making it work for them by check out who is linking to your competitors. Pay particular attention to the deeper pages and what type of information they are linking to. Brainstorm similar topics you could write about or expand upon.

2. Identify your angle

After you find the pages that are attracting links in your industry, try asking fellow bloggers about what topics they would like to see researched and written about. It might be hit and miss but the information you get will be worth every minute spent ensuring you are not wasting your time.

3. Write it up

You heard me!

4. Promote your content

Approach the bloggers you did your research with, find other bloggers to recommend the content to, chat to people on forums about the article, and ask people their opinions. If you’re really good then you can spread the word via social media.

I hope you got some good ideas and info out of this article. Please share it with your friends and link to it from your blog if you rate it. I’d like to thank Melissa from Distilled for inspiring this post. You can find the original here.

It may come as no surprise that some links cost more than others. This is because the higher the authority of a webpage; the more effective a link becomes and ergo more expensive. There are no real metrics for determining the authority of a webpage (Many use PageRank) as the sole determiner of a page’s authority but this is not an accurate measurement.

Many site’s that appear prominently in the search results have little to no PageRank and often above websites with considerable PageRank.

How do I check a site’s authority?

If you are looking to advertise on a website and you want to measure it’s authority for the keyword you want to target, simply do a Google search and if that website appears in the results then it’s a good indicator that the website in question has authority for that particular keyword.

The exceptions?

Having said that, there are exceptions to this rule. The Open Directory Project (DMOZ) and the Yahoo Directory (Y! Directory) very rarely will appear in the search results but are known to be highly authoratative and powerful directories. The Yahoo Directory has a $US299 recurring annual fee as well a $299USD non-refundable express submission service*.

* The Yahoo Directory offers a Submission service that guarantees your site will be submitted, but does not guarantee inclusion or prominent rankings

For all those in the know - and especially those who aren’t, there is one strong commandment that you should live your online life by. What is this you ask?

CONTENT IS KING!

Content must be part of any Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy - and there must be sufficient, unique text on each page of your website. There should also be a strategy in place so that you can continually increase the page count of your website and a content management system is the easiest way to do this.

However, the benefits of great content extend beyond the realm of SEO and can be the primary way to build your brand awareness as well as conveying your key messages to your target audience.

There is also much debate in relation to how this content should be written - for the user or the search engine?

Well, content should always be written with the user in mind - however are there certain steps you can take to ensure that this content is also beneficial from an SEO perspective.

Writing keyword-rich content is an integral part of ensuring your website ranks well on search engines.

Now, there is a fine line in terms of what constitutes “keyword rich” the key is to think of the key phrase you want your page to rank for and centre content around that.

No need to get a calculator out to ensure your key phrase appears X times - but keep this phrase in mind as you generate your content and what you will find is that it appears naturally within the body of that content anyway!

Any reputable SEO firm will be able to guide you in terms of what content should appear on the website and will do the grunt work in terms of ensuring that the key phrases appears in all the areas that search engine’s look for. These key area’s tend to be your website’s navigation labels, page titles, header tags, alt descriptions (for images), image titles, anchor links and file names.

Traffic first - conversions next!

As your organic rankings increase, so too should the organic traffic numbers to your website. However - the important aspect to remember now is that you must lead this traffic to perform the action intended by your website.

Your calls-to-action should offer compelling benefits. Write them using action verbs and commands that convey a sense of urgency, such as ‘Discover’, ‘Sign up’ and ‘Buy now’.

Short and simple wins the customer

Most visitors to websites quickly seek out words and images of interest to them! It is important that your website caters to this style of reading so that you do not lose your potential customers interest

1. Write short, hard-hitting sentences

2. Keep your paragraphs concise and to the point.

3. Use sub-headings highlight and draw your reader’s attention to the main messages within your text

4. Use bullet points to help make your copy easier to readand to break up the text on your page

I’d love to hear any feedback or stories of success you have been able to achieve for your website with the addition of content.

A number of my clients recently have had some really good questions based around what keywords to target as part of their SEO campaigns. The predominant belief is that one should go hard and fast for the shorter and most competitive keywords to bring traffic to a site.

However, this is usually not the best option, as industry data and our own experience shows that we can much better serve the purpose of a website by having a good blend of long and short tail keywords.

But first thing’s first: what exactly do I mean when I talk about short tail, long tail and the competitiveness of keywords?

Short tail keywords

• keywords 3 words or less, e.g. ‘branding consultants’
• higher traffic volumes
• more competitive

Long tail keywords

• keywords 3 words or more, e.g. ‘where can i find branding consultants in sydney’
• lower traffic volumes
• less competitive
• generally more qualified

These are the keywords that have lots (millions in most cases) of other pages to compete against in the search engines and many competitors trying to rank for that one keyword, i.e. ‘office furniture’ or ‘buy car’.

There are some Search Engine Marketers who focus their attentions mostly on the short tail - the shorter, more generalised keywords which have the biggest search volumes and highest rates of competition. There are other SEMs who work on the longer keywords, which being less competitive are easier to rank for, but also generate less search queries.

The SEM writing this post believes, as with most things in life, the balance between the two must be found. Targeting a smart and thoughtful array of short and long tail keywords will give you a well-rounded SEO campaign, capable of bringing in large amounts of qualified traffic.

To focus on only highly competitive, short tail keywords is putting all your eggs in one basket. These keywords require a lot of resources and, depending on the size and authority of your website, will take much more time to get decent rankings. The long tail keyword strategy enables your site to rank quicker, but requires more keywords to be able to generate a similar amount of traffic that you would see from a smaller amount of more competitive keywords.

Benefits of targeting both short and long tail keywords

• Long tail keywords rank faster therefore bringing traffic in the early days of a campaign
• Quality of traffic will vary between keywords and only targeting short tail keywords reduces your ability to get the usually more qualified traffic from the long tail keywords
• Depending on how large and competitive your site it, it might be a relativity that it will take a very long time to rank for short tail keywords related to your business
• Focusing efforts on the two strategies give you a good spread across the search demand curve (see image below)

Search Demand Curve

Adobe Flash looks great on websites and provides hours of entertainment in the form of online games.

It is also is unsearchable on Google and unusable on your iPhone.

This can be frustrating when you don’t want to download apps, but want to play “free” games online. It can also be annoying when you are building a website that would best display in Flash. But as all web developers and SEOs know, Google doesn’t read Flash, and Apple has shown how cool HTML5 is.

So does this mean they Google and Apple are intent on shunning Flash developers?

This may have been considered unlikely in the past, as Google and Adobe have been recorded as saying that they would try to work together to accommodate Flash in Google’s search engine results. The first such announcement of intended collaboration was made two years ago, and only seven months ago there were rumours of Google providing new SEO-friendly resources for Flash developers.

So should we be expecting another announcement in the near future? Perhaps not, if the demo on Apple’s website showcasing HTML5 is anything to go by.

Whether this is Steve Job’s attempt to make up from the iPad’s failure to load the Wall Street Journal is unknown.  But if you spend some time on Apple’s site, it becomes clear that HTML5 is actually really cool. It delivers Flash-style effects without the SEO restrictions, can embed massive amounts of text using CSS3, and the “typography demo” is truly revolutionary.

So whether Google and Apple both had HTML5 in mind when refining their algorithm or their mobile devices is yet to be known, but it does seem likely. Once again however, only time will tell.

Looking for easy ways to keep your company blog loaded with interesting and relevant content? Check out the following list of simple strategies that will keep those posts flowing.

1. Answer Common Customer Questions

Filter the emails and enquiries you receive from customers and turn these into a FAQ or a simple list of common questions and answer them via your blog. Depending on how involved the questions are you can dedicate entire posts to particular questions or group similar questions.

2. Gather and Report on Industry Information

Compile industry statistics, images, videos etc and put them into interesting articles that will be useful to your clientele.

3. Explore other Media

Publish video or audio interviews of industry figures/experts. Post images from events.

4. Enlist Help

Approach others to write for you. Work smarter not harder and incentivise people in your industry to write for you. Does an employee in your company have a specialty? Get them to write a post!

5. Create Lists

How-to, best-of, etc. Make them useful, specific and relevant.

6. Chart It Up

You can’t go wrong with useful data displayed in a graph. They make it quick and easy to get your idea across.

7. Think Like an OpEd Writer

OpEd writers argue a particular side of an issue and no doubt there will be points of contention in your industry. Pick a hot topic and write an opinion piece on it.

8. Analyse your Analytics

Web analytics can tell you useful information about your users such as where they are from, what info they seek, what computer/browser they use and even what phone. That info can help you come up with ideas to peek your customers interests.

9. Review Stuff

Read books (or even watch films or documentaries) related to your industry. Review them for your clientele via your blog.

10. Break News

Scan the news and media to find out the latest in your industry and write a post on the event/development.

Check out more detailed information on the above pointers in the original post by Kipp Bodnar here.

The importance of link building in SEO cannot be ignored. As with many things in life, what you have to work the hardest for will more often than not have the biggest value and return. Having said this, I am going to talk about the need to think outside the box when working your link building strategy. Why do we need to think and strategise for link building? The main reason being the importance to search engine rankings; we know how important they are considered by Google and to ignore this means that a website’s ranking potential will never be realised.

The prominence of link value in the Google algorithm is not only getting stronger but more complex, as they take into consideration elements use as user data, domain age and other relatively hard to fake factors. A link is a popularity vote. The more popular kids always get chosen to play, right? If you are counted as popular by the bigger and trendier kids then that would be more powerful than being adored by all the primary school kids. Now I’m not going to carry on about website popularity like an episode of 90210 however it’s important to consider, what makes a site popular and what can you do to encourage people to link to you?

Some ideas to get your creative linking mind working:

• Create content and dress your site for success - make your site attractive for others to link
  • E.g. Create 10 easy tips to help you <insert topic here> articles as these are easy to link to
• PPC - boost your traffic through a targeted PPC campaign that will attract people to your important information in the hope they will then link to it
• News and Syndication - get involved on other sites that encourage users to post information and news such as EzineArticles, GoArticles, iSnare, etc.
• Directories, Meme Trackers and Social Bookmarking - submit your site to directories, paid and non-paid. Tag related sites on social book marking sites like Del.icio.us. Memetracker - if you write about popular and spreading ideas with lots of unique content (and then link to some of the original resources), your site may get listed as a source on a meme tracker site.
• Network - capitalise on your social and business networks by developing strategies to reach out to those who will want to link to your site

There are many ways in which you can build links and the more creative you get then maybe the more effective that strategy will be. As getting links gets harder the more important it becomes to think outside the box and plan for linking success.

Check this article here for an expanded list of ideas on how to build links.

The first thing that many people address when it comes to improving their exposure on search engines is the position of their keywords on the SERPs. Time is devoted to link building, content writing, and reaching out to partner and affiliate websites. Add this to the fact that everyone is clamouring to jump onto the social aspect of the Internet (we are looking at you Facebook & Twitter), webmasters overlook the power of pictures and video.

Why You Need to Make Sure Your Images are Optimised

The simple answer is to take advantage of many image-based searches that conducted often online. Not only that, in many cases, these images are positioned above-the-fold (before you have to scroll down) and sometimes even above those that are position 1 for a particular keyword!

This strategy is not exactly applicable for every industry, but we thought we would list a few that could definitely benefit:

• Online Clothing Retailers – When it comes to buying clothes online, you can never have too many pictures. But if you run garment based searches (little black dress, designer denim jeans, etc) you will see there are plenty of images that are displayed.
• Car Models – Whenever a new make or model is announced, many rev heads want to know basically two things: how it looks and how it goes. So if you have optimised your images for queries like this: new golf gti, 1969 ford mustang you have a fantastic chance of being clicked on because the answer is right there up the top.
• Furniture – Think of the exposure you could have if you might not have the time or resources to go after some highly competitive keywords such as kitchen tables, but have the ability to optimise your entire image gallery for a greater chance in having them appear above-the-fold.

I don’t really want to use the tired cliché here but rather than these images telling a thousand words, they can definitely lead to thousands of additional visitors to your website.

But I am a Celebrity, Why do I Need Image Search?

Oh this is an easy one – it can be incorporated into your online reputation strategy. If there are many images of you that you do not want people to find, you can work with a team of SEO specialists to do all they can to make sure the images you want to come up in front of those you are not too proud of is an actual reality. Wouldn’t that be nice?

The Big Question - Will I Get More Web Enquiries if I do this?

Well any reputable search marketer will never give you a guarantee with any online marketing adventure. But due to the low costs in getting this done (renaming files, internal and external linking strategies, alt tags, and including meta/geo tagging inside the image) it is probably something your team should make time to implement.
You can use your web traffic tools (Google Analytics for instance) to monitor traffic if you tag the links appropriately and take a web traffic snapshot before you begin.

INTERESTING NOTE: Some image-based searches actually do not appear as search engine traffic but rather appear as “Referring Websites.” If you want to include it as part of your organic search traffic, talk to your web analytics programmer to make sure they have made the appropriate changes to the javascript code.

After you have done that, you can run the experiment for 3 months, collect the data (especially your conversion based data) and compare it to all visits coming from any image based search (not just Google – if you haven’t already, have a look at Bing’s Image Search tool. Very sexy). If there has been an increase, you can talk to your search marketing team to make sure every image from here on in will be optimised according to the elements listed above.

For the SEOs – Have you tried this?

We would love to hear feedback from those that have tried this technique and achieved great results. Feel free to leave a comment and share with our readership how Image search has benefited your campaign.

If you have any further questions about it, feel free to contact us for more information about how we can help you implement these suggestions for your website.

Google has recently released news that it will now be officially using page speed as another ranking factor, saying:

You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests

In the Google Webmaster Central Blog, it is stated that Google is speeding up the internet for all users, as faster sites create happy users, and happy users are users that stay online longer. According to Google, faster sites also reduce operation costs

Google found that a 400 millisecond delay resulted in a -0.59% change in searches/users. What’s more even after the delay was removed, these users still had -0.21% fewer searches, indicating that the slower user experience affects long term behavior

Google has listed a number of tools to test your website’s speed:
• Page Speed Firefox plug-in
• YSlow Free tool from Yahoo!
• WebPagetest
• Webmaster Tools

Although this change only effects less that 1% of search results, on Google.com and in English, Google recommends web site owners to start looking at your sites speed to optimise the site result, and users web experience.

It’s common knowledge that link building plays an important role in succeeding in Search Engine Marketing. The active word in the term is ‘building’ so we know that it’s an ongoing process that needs a concerted effort overtime. This article summarises 10 ways in which you can capatilise on a powerful resource you have at your fingertips, your employees. There are many reasons to invest time and resources into link building for your site, two of the most important being; strong rankings and establishing barriers to entry for your competitors.

1. Posting Presentations Online
If an employee creates a presentation deck or slideshow, put it online.
•    Post a conference presentation on the relevant website
•    Submit it to sites like Scribd and Docstoc
•    Post it on your blog
•    Social bookmark it
•    Share it on your twitter and Facebook profiles

2. Event/Seminar/Conference Websites
Add relevant company and employee information up on the associated website. Maximise the effect and specify the anchor text of the link pointing back to your site with relevant keywords. Spread the word using social media.

3. Personal Profiles/Blogs
•    Encourage employees who have their own personal website or blog to add a brief about the company and a link back to the site.
•    Get all employees to create accounts on  Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter and link to the company site through them

4. Employee Networks
Strategise how you might be able to tap into your employees’ networks to see if there are opportunities to acquire links. Run competitions, advertise for partnerships etc.

5. Link Lead Generation
Link lead generate through your employees who would be visiting lots of websites whether they are at work or at home. Encourage people to look for opportunities to gain a links or ways to market the website and/or promote the company.

6. Expert Articles
Investing some time into creating an authoritative article, whitepaper, or piece of content which can be used as a great form of ‘linkbait’.

7. Guest Blogging
Get in touch with popular bloggers in your industry and see if they accept guest posts.

8. Blog/Forum Participation
Encourage employees to read and participate in relevant industry blogs and forums.

9. Re-purpose Old Content
If you are lucky enough to have a heap of potential website content sitting around (in both electronic and hard copy formats) plan to repurpose it. Build it all up and use it for blog and content submission sites.

10. Social Media
Encourage all employees to engage on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. Get your employees to share fresh content through with their networks. Socially bookmark the content as well to get a multiplier effect.

Whatever you do, it is important to have a link building plan as part of your online marketing strategy. Work hard in the beginning to systemise ways to do this easily and/or establish a culture of link builders in your company and you won’t be far from SEM success.

Click here for the full article by Matt Thompson that inspired this post.