Sounds a bit melodramatic but Keyword Research is where it all starts out.  If you are looking at lead generation and increasing traffic to your website then keyword research is a must.  Before you do anything else you need to understand what people are physically typing into the search engines, you need to understand any trends and look for gaps in the market.  You need to look at each individual keyword as a market in it’s own right remember as people often use different words to search for the same thing.

Google Keyword Tool

The Google Keyword tool is free to all and is a good place to start.  It allows you to enter keywords related to your industry and will return results of search volume on a global and national level.  It will also give you suggestions for other related keywords that you may wish to consider.  Alongside search volume it also helps you to gain an understanding of the level of competition for each keyword. You see, it’s not necesarily the best thing to target just the high volume keywords particularly if you are starting from scratch, these are usually the most competitive and therefore the ones that will take the most work and time to get results with.  I’m not saying don’t go after them, but just that you may want to consider what we call long-tailed keyphraes first.

Long-Tailed Keyphrases

This basically means where someone has used more words in the search bar, it is usually more descriptive of exactly what it is that they are searching for.  There are a few reasons to try and target these first for SEO:

• Less competition to get high rankings
• Less time required to achieve higher rankings
• This will also help in your bid to go after more generalised keywords
• Higher conversion rate for those searching
• Qualified traffic and so lower bounce rate and better overall results

Achieving Rankings

By rankings I mean that your website appears in the first few results on the first page that a search engine returns.  With a keyphrase that has less competition it is much easier for you to convince the search engines that your website is the most relevant and thus bringing you good results much more quickly.

Getting results for ‘other’ keywords

If the keyword I really want is yellow shoes, but I know that this is incredibly competitive I can start by targetting long-tailed keywords that have a respectable level of searches such as ‘flat yellow shoes’ (these are pure examples, I haven’t done the research.  This will help me in my bid to go after the more general keyword because I will already be ranking well for a related phrase.

Increased Conversion and Quality Traffic

By going after long-tailed keyphrases you are increasing your chances of converting those visitors into customers.  The more specific people are about what they want the more likely they are to buy as long as you offer exactly what they are searching for.  This also gives you quality traffic as the vast majority of people visiting your website are truly interested in your offering.  There’s no point having 10,000 visitors if they are all looking for black shoes and you only sell yellow shoes!

So going back to my starting point. Spend the time and effort on understanding your market before you get caught up in having a pretty website designed or going for keywords that you ‘think’ people are looking for.  It’ much easier to change things at the beginning than finding out after the first year when you haven’t achieved any sales.

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is all about increasing the ‘right’ kind of visitors to a website, there are lots of ways to do this.  In the early days it was enough to complete the meta data and keywords to ensure a website was ranked highly in the search engines.  As more and more websites evolved so did SEO.

Search Engines are really just trying to bring up the most relevant results based on your searches.  So the key thing these days is all about content and links.  It’s about having well written easy to understand pages on your website which helps a search engine understand what each page is about.  It’s also about having lots of links, both to link the pages together on your website so that a search engine can find its way around and having lots of incoming links from other websites.

Unfortunately there is no quick fix, if you are looking to increase traffic to a website immediately the only way to do it is through PPC.  SEO is a longer term strategy, but one that will ultimately pay off.

The advent of social has changed the way that SEO works and you really need to have an integrated SEO/social media marketing plan.  By having a social presence you can increase the number of links coming into your website, share your content amongst a much wider audience and help push up your rankings through gaining positive customer reviews.

There has been talk of SEO being ‘dead’ but I don’t  think this is the case at all, I think you just need to approach it in a different way and this is no different to how it’s been in the past.  The internet is such a fast moving environment that everything surrounding it also moves at the same pace.  SEO is no exception to this and we have altered the way that we tackle it for our clients countless times, it’s almost organic (excuse the pun).

Social Media has been talked about a lot over the last couple of years or so, everyone has become very excited about the prospect of spending part of their working day on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.  But what a lot of people don’t really think about is how your social media activity impacts your SEO efforts.  You see, if you take it back to it’s basics, a search engines job is to bring back the most relevant result based on your search term and the search engines have had to embrace social media in terms of deciding what website ranks where.  It’s only been over the last year or so that we have seen twitter results appear on page one of Google or your LinkedIn profile rank higher than your website.  Take a look at the recent riots in England, most people I know were following events via social networks as they were about 1/2 hour ahead of all of the news channels.

One of the greatest assets of social media campaign in terms of SEO is links, building link is the single most valuable thing that you can do to improve where your website ranks for different search terms and social media gives you an easy way to gain those links.  But how do you get them?

1. Create good content – a blog post, article, video which is related to your business that provides the reader with some value, do not use this as an opportunity to talk about how fantastic you are.

2. Post across the internet – get your content across as many areas of the internet as possible using social networks, social bookmarking, blog networks, article sites to try and get as large a reach as possible

3. Content sharing – if your content is valuable then people will share with their own contacts, spreading your reach even further.

4. Links – each of these pieces of content you produce need to link back to your website, therefore each post you make across different platforms will help you get those valuable links back to your site.

5. Monitor and engage – make sure you monitor what people are saying about your business and the comments that have been made about your content.  Be sure to respond to any feedback positive or negative.

6. Repeat – start again at point 1, this is a continual process and one that needs to be consistently followed to gain the best results.

Of course all of this will benefit your business in a number of ways but in terms of SEO it is critical to engage in this kind of activity before you start to see a detrimental effect on your current website rankings.  Find out more about SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is the key to having a successful long term online campaign.  It is more cost effective than relying solely on PPC and is essential if you want to be found by the search engines.  I always say to people that there is not point having a great website if no one can find you in the first place.  If people do not know your business exists and when they search for your products and services you don’t appear in the listings, then they will be simply going to your competitors instead.  Just think of the opportunity that exists for you?  It you don’t go after it then you can be pretty sure someone else will.

So what is Search Engine Optimisation?

Well, in a nutshell its about making sure that your website appears early on in the results within a search engine, but more than this it’s about appearing for the right search terms.  If I am a business selling window blinds then there is absolutely no point in appearing in the listings for paving slabs.  This is an extreme example but you really need to hone in on what it is that your business does and try to get found for this.  The more specific search terms you can be found for then the more likely visitors to your site will turn into customers.

Search engines use a huge number of calculations to decide which website appears first in the listings, the key is to understand as much about these calculations as possible and apply this methodology to your website and generally to your online marketing as a whole.  These calculations change all of the time and one of the reasons to engage with an SEO company is that they should be keeping up to date with all of the changes to make sure that once you are high up in the listings that you stay there.

Find out more about Search Engine Optimisation

Websites are a great way to share information about your products and services, engage with existing customers and generate new leads, but how do you go about doing this?  Well, firstly you need to make sure that when your target market are searching for your products and services they can find your website in the first place.

This is called search engine optimisation, it’s about making sure that your website is shown in the search engines as high up as possible for relevant keyphrases.  Now Search Engine Optimisation is a huge subject and covers a wide range of different things that you need to do to make sure you have the best chance of being found.