Internet Marketing Essex

We are constantly hearing how important content is to improve your search engine rankings, whether it’s content on our website or content for articles to publish elsewhere, but just adding content for the sake of it isn’t going to do as much good. It needs to be relevant.

Some people think that if they write articles or blog posts about a really hot topic and then link it to their website that they’ll attract a lot more visitors. This may be true, and it can be very effective, but only if the page is somehow related to the topic discussed. Otherwise visitors may well click on the link only to be disappointed at what they find or irritated that they’ve been ‘tricked’ into visiting that page, and this will ultimately backfire.

If you try this, not only will that person never want to visit your website ever again, but the high bounce rate (people clicking away from a website as soon as they’ve arrived) may adversely affect the way the search engines view your site.

Another problem with adding articles or pages about any- and everything to your website, is that ultimately, you want the search engines to consider your site as important with regards to your niche. When they analyse the pages on your site, they are trying to find out what your website is all about. If you’ve diluted it with a lot of irrelevant content they are much less likely to rank you highly for the keywords people would be using to find what you’re offering.

So do your keyword research and get busy writing that content, but keep it relevant.

With smartphones becoming a popular way to interact with the internet it is increasingly important to ensure that your website is up to the challenge. It's all very well if your site ranks really well, but if when someone clicks through to your mobile site, what happens if they find the user experience poor?  Well, you probably aren't going to achieve the results you want from your mobile website.  Our tips will help keep you on the right track.

1.Simplicity is the key here, make sure your user can find their way around the site easily and that navigation is simple.
2.Be aware of loading speeds, images take a long time to load so make sure you test out the speed that your mobile website takes to load.  
3. Make sure any functionality that you use is supported with mobile devices, they do vary so check out the most popular devices.
4. Stay away from over complex functionality too, frames, fiddly tools and pop ups are a real no no.
5. Make sure the design and colour scheme works with a mobile device, what looks good as a normal web page may not look so good on a phone.
6. Stay away from cookies.

The overall message here (in case you hadn't guessed) is simplicity, I cannot stress how important it is to the user experience with mobile websites.  if your user has a hassle free pain free time, they are more likely to be your customer than someone that can't find the information they want, or they find information that is presented in a way that is unsuitable for mobile.

If you go to all of the effort of producing a video for your business, ou need to follow SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) principles to make sure that you optimise your video in the same way you would a page of content on your website.  Video is without a doubt going to be around for some time to come, you only have to look at YouTube's meteoric rise to see how important it has become.  

In the same way you research keywords for your website, you need to do the same for your video, think about what people will be typing into search engines or indeed YouTube itself to look for your video.  Make sure you use a good keyword tool to find out the kind of traffic levels that are searching before you optimise your video for that specific keyword.  Remember that what you would type in isn't necessarily the same as your target market, so do the research properly, if you get it wrong at this stage it can take a lot of time and effort to put right.

Find out what keywords your competitors are using, they may not necessarily be doing the right thing either, but it will help to give you a starting point.  Use a good keyword tool such as the Google Keyword tool or Market Samurai to do your research.

Try and use what are called long tailed keywords.  These are specific phrases that people type in that are more than two words long.  The more specific the search, the less competition and the easier it is to get your video found.  Do be aware though that there is a fine balance between numbers of searches and competition, there is no point going after keyphrases that aren't competitive but by the same token, don't have much in the way of traffic.  So remember:

• Make sure you optimise your video
• Research relevant keywords
• Don't assume people use the same keywords that you do
• Use a good keyword tool to find the best phrases for your video
• Check out what the competition are doing
• Use long tailed keywords
• Make sure when optimising your video you get a good balance between search volume and competition

I hope these tips will help you when looking to optimise your video before submission to YouTube, after all there is no point putting a video together if no one is ever going to watch it.

Find out more about how to use YouTube to market your business

Sometimes it’s easy to get so caught up in the details of optimising your website and articles that you forget to focus on the content itself. Of course it’s important to make your website pages and your articles as search engine friendly as possible, but sometimes it’s possible to over analyse to the point where it’s unproductive.

Staying on top of SEO trends can be a full time job in itself, so for someone who is just trying to do some of the basics for themselves it can seem overwhelming. When you try to apply everything you hear and read, checking every detail with every tool available, there’s a chance you will spend far more time on a project than is worthwhile. Sometimes it’s best to just keep it simple, or outsource it to someone with more experience.

Writing articles is a good example. We all know that keyword research is important, and that the article should make good use of the chosen keyword without overdoing it. However, there are too many articles written that are so caught up in adding exactly the right number of keywords at exactly the right places that they end up being unreadable. Often the keywords are forced in where they don’t belong, or in a strange word order, and the article’s quality suffers as a result.

It can also make adding web content and doing article marketing seem like such an onerous task that you end up dreading it and constantly putting it off. It’s far better to regularly add several decent articles or pages that are not perfectly optimised than to write only one perfectly optimised article in a blue moon.

At the end of the day, adding relevant content to your website and getting decent articles published offsite will help the search engines to take you more seriously whether they are perfectly optimised or not. Content is king, so don’t allow the paralysis of analysis to stop you from getting on with creating as much of it as you can.

How do I start with SEO?

First things first, when the site is complete and live submit the site to Google and other favoured search engines. The best way to do this is via the creation and submission of a sitemap. This basically says to the search engines, ‘hi, I’m here, this are the pages I’d like you to look at.

The search engines will then go and read your site and ‘index’ it, i.e. decide what pages it can recognise and list them in search results.

With the first step out of the way, the work can start. Depending on how competitive your market and search phrases are, it can take months or even years to rank well in the big search engines.


Remember this is only the start of the SEO marathon

However, don’t be put off; assuming you're doing things properly you will get there. There are obstacles even for you guys doing the job properly. Websites with new web addresses are going to have a tougher time than sites with older web addresses. Google rewards sites with established URL’s. The tip there being, buy an established URL with history where possible.

Bear in mind SEO is a marathon not a sprint. Take things one step at a time. Do your keyword research and initially go after phrases which have less traffic, but which almost certainly less competitive. Additionally, don’t go after every phrase you can imagine, rather start with just 4 or 5 and concentrate on those. When you start to see your search engine positioning move upwards it’s very rewarding and shows you are doing the right things. Then it’s time to look at a few more phrases.


Search engine results may go up as well as down...

As I said earlier, search engines fairly frequently change the rules by which they determine who goes up and who goes down the rankings. It’ll happen to you too. Don’t be disheartened. Go back to the search engine help pages or blogs etc and read up on what’s new, and what has changed and the apply it yourself.


Never be tempted to cheat with SEO.

It’s happened more times than I dare to count. Either horror stories I have heard of questionable SEO companies doing silly things or clients asking their SEO consultants to do naughty things. It’s simple; Search engines want to serve up relevant to people searching. They constantly evolve their calculations to identify and catch sites who are cheating and don’t want to play by the rules. Getting a decent search engine position after being one of those has been blacklisted will be a lot harder than if you had just tried to play by the rules in the first place.

We get asked this all of the time. That and “when do I get results from SEO?” Or “When will the SEO work you are doing get me on page one?” I completely get why people want to know this. If you are paying someone to do this mystical search engine optimisation stuff, it matters to have something measurable and tangible to see if it is working. To be honest, in the online world, where every click is measurable, I don’t blame people for asking.

But.... There is always a but!


It’s a ‘how long is a piece of string’ answer I am afraid.

The reality is that search engine optimisation is a never ending piece of work with regularly changing goals, so you never truly ‘get there.’ Rather you just keep going, staying abreast of the latest search engine guide lines and constantly adding, changing, reviewing and refining.

It helps sometimes to think about this in traditional marketing terms. In the offline world of TV ads and billboards etc, a business couldn’t survive and thrive with the first ever campaign it ran. It would have to constantly change and evolve its message as its product and consumer evolved. The job would never truly be complete, just ongoing. Such is the nature of marketing


SEO – When can I stop doing it?

So, you may well have gathered by now that SEO is never finished, just like traditional marketing is never finished. This is one of the most difficult things to get clients to grasp — SEO is a long-term strategy, it doesn’t start and stop, it just becomes part of the strategy, month in month out.


What if someone gives me a guarantee their SEO will work?

I’d add to this that there are no guarantees. In fact if you do your homework, and look around on the internet, there are pages on Google help which state:-

“Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue.”

"No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google."

Take a look for yourself - Read Google's view of this

So my advice here is turn and run the other way the moment someone suggests that they can get you guaranteed SEO results.


And now on to the more positive stuff

Search engine optimisation does work. It is a long term strategy but think months and years not days and weeks. It takes patience, a lot of effort, some trial and error and quite frequently and change in direction.

I’ll tell you how to actually get started with SEO in my next post.

All a search engine is trying to do when ranking your website is give the searcher the most relevant information.  So a search engine will list those websites that it believes most match the searchers keyphrase.  The key to SEO is to make sure that your website is firstly found and secondly highly ranked by search engines for those keyphrases that are relevant to your business.




In order to do this you must make sure you research the following:

• demographics of your target market
• keyphrases that are actually being searched upon more frequently
• your competitors, what they are being found for
• less competitive phrases that your competition aren't being found for, but have a high number of searches

Once you understand this, you can start planning how to ensure that your website is ranked for those phrases that are important  There are some things you can do to help improve your chances of success.

1. Try to include a keyword in your domain name wherever possible, so if I am selling horseboxes then horseboxes.co.uk would be a great url for me to have.
2. Have lots of great content on your website which is discussing those keyphrases.  Don't keyword stuff your pages though and make sure that the content can be easily read.
3. Make sure each page is constructed to aid a search engine, include meta data, page titles, alt tags, h1 and H2 tags and include your keyword in each.
4. Don't duplicate this information, make sure each page is unique not only in it's content but all meta data, titles, etc..
5. Ensure that you include relevant images, but again don't use too many and ensure that your images don't effect the page download speed.
6. Keep an eye on the market, the most popular keyphrases change and you need to ensure that you continuously work on SEO to make sure that you keep up with your market.
7. Embark on an effective link building strategy by leveraging directories, article sites, video, and social media networks.
8. Keep at it, once you have great content, make sure you don't stop there.  The easiest way to keep adding new content to your site is by writing a blog on a  regular basis, at least once a week will help to ensure that you keep the interest of the search engines, they will want to keep crawling your site if they keep finding new and interesting content.

This morning at my weekly business forum, i stood up and advocated the use of blogging in business. It's not the first time I have promoted the value of blogging and fairly certain it won't be the last either. I once came across a colleague in the US who's mantra for the businesses she worked for was 'blog or die.' Whilst I do think that blogging in business is vitally important, there are limits...

What I have found is that with some business owners, is that it helps to spell out in more traditional marketing terms what blogging is and why they need to do this for their business to succeed online.

I tend to suggest to them that blogging is really just the modern day online equivalent of providing great customer service by helping potential clients. Ultimately it's most likely to be helping them to make a choice which could lead to a sale, but not necessarily so.

What this means is that when providing information via your blog, don't try and do the hard sell where you ram the 'buy from me' message down their throat. Think about yourself in this sort of situation. You go into a shop, you get jumped on by a sales assistant, and they don't leave you alone. If you are anything like me, the first thing you want to do is run a mile and certainly not buy from them.

The same is true of blogging in business. It's all about helping, providing valuable information or support and hopefully if you get it right it will mean engaging the customer in conversation.

It's been said, that people buy from people they like (and trust). That's great in a face to face world where you get to look into the whites of someones eyes and build up an impression of them, and get to work out, 'do I want to do business with this person?" Online, it's a little trickier, but ultimately the same. Your potential buyer wants to get to know you a little, can they trust you, do you give great information, are you helpful?

I'll try and demonstrate this with an example. If I was a plumber, I may well write a blog on the best way to fix a leaking tap.

What I would have done is essentially given free advice. It would be my view based on my experience in my industry. I wouldn't have tried to sell anything or get you to call or anything like that. However, if what I had said was read by a potential customer, then great, it at least has started a conversation. Just by having read this and perhaps other posts, they could go out tomorrow and try to fix their leaking tap. But will they do that?

In some cases yes, however, in other cases, they won't. They may well think, I'd like to give it a go, but I don't have the time, or I don't have the right tools. However, they still need that leaking tap fixed. Therefore they are more likely to call that particular plumber as they see them as the experts, and most importantly they did try and help.

No matter what industry you are in there is always something you can blog about for your market. Showing you are the experts in your field.

Thanks to everyone who turned out for our Facebook webinar, the response was overwhelming.  If you wish to download the free whitepaper on how to leverage Facebook for your business then click on Facebook Whitepaper. Due to the high level of attendee's i know that some of you were unable to have all of your questions answered.  Please ask away if you still have any burning questions.

From feedback received we have developed a programme of webinars for the remainder of 2010.  They are listed below.  I will post more information about each webinar closer to the time.

• April - Video Marketing & YouTube
• May - Web Analytics
• June - SEM (Display and Directories)
• July - Twitter
• August - SEO
• September - Lead Nurturing
• October - Email Marketing
• November - Conversion Website Copy
• December - Marketing Optimisation

If anyone requires any further information about any of these subjects, then please get in touch and we will answer your queries asap.

Most businesses understand the importance of SEO, or search engine optimisation.  There's just no point spending time and money developing a website that just sits there.  You need your target market to be able to find you and whilst most companies work on optimising their sites, there are still a number of common mistakes that are made during the search engine optimisation process.

1.   Make use of Titles - Make sure that you include your keywords in the page titles, the biggest mistake that i see all the time is giving your homepage the title 'Home', how is that supposed to tell search engines what you are all about?

2.   Trying optimise the whole site for the same keyphrase - each page should be optimised for a specific phrase, one that your target market are actually typing into the search engines, why miss out on an opportunity by optimising your site for one keyphrase.  You will be missing out on traffic that will no doubt end up on your competitors site.

3.   Make use of social media - If you haven't already adopted social media, then you need to start now.  Enabling people to connect with social networking sites via your website is a great way to encourage people to connect with you in different areas.  Make sure you include social media plugins to make it easy for people to bookmark your page or write a review.

4.   Call to actions - think about what you want people to do when they visit each page, you need to use strong call to actions to encourage them to take the action that you want them to take.

5.   Keep it simple - don't cram too much information into each page, make it easy to navigate around your site, you want your call to actions to stand out and your visitors to not be distracted by busy and confusing pages.

6.  Content - content is so important, ensure you have loads of fresh new content that is well optimised, search engines are like hungry monsters that want to keep eating up fresh new content, not keep returning to stale uninteresting content.

7.   Links - links to your website from other sites are still really important, search engines see your site as a valuable resource if you have large numbers on incoming links.

Search engine optimisation is still just as important as it ever was and by avoiding some of these common mistakes you help ensure that your site is well ranked by the search engines.