Archive for the ‘SEO Tutorials’ Category

Search Engine Optimisation Wales

Search Engine Optimisation Wales

Having a business can be an exciting adventure especially if you have nurtured it from an idea into a fully functioning business. During these difficult financial times more and more businesses are required to think and act smart in order to survive. Using search engine optimisation techniques have helped rural businesses in Wales move their businesses from somewhere in the back of beyond on to the busiest high street in the world, the internet.

Whereas some companies have been able to see the benefits of using search engine optimisation as part of a Search Engine Marketing campaign straight away, many smaller companies are lagging behind a bit. This is because of the pace at which things change. If you were to take notice of every little offer that was being handed out to you, to make your business better then, you would hardly have enough time to actually run your business. What little businesses can do is take notice of what the ‘big boys’ do and follow suit.

This is what happens all the way down the chain. Campaigns that have been thought of and executed in America have filtered through to European counterparts. For instance Pepsi in 2009 decided to pull all advertising that it had on the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl was one of the most watched events in the USA. What was going to replace what had previously been such a large part of Pepsi’s advertising campaign? A social media campaign!

This was called ‘The Pepsi Refresh Project’. The idea is that the money spent on advertising would be put to use by funding projects that were of benefit to the community. Using portals like social media sites etc, Pepsi would allow followers of their campaigns to get involved with voting for who they would like to see win the place of having their project funded. This would be good for Pepsi in that those who bought their products thought that they were actively getting involved in helping people. Very clever! A spokesman for the company said that he wanted the campaign to be ‘less about a singular event, less about a moment, more about a movement’.

As previously mentioned this idea has now filtered down to companies within Europe. For example ‘Quaker Oats’ have launched their ‘Thank You Campaign’. Members of the public who help others in the morning are enjoying makeovers of their premises and fans of this campaign follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

The point of this meandering is, if you want to stay ahead of other companies in how you can use search engine optimisation, then look to what the big companies are doing and try to copy them in a small way. You will be surprised at what a difference in can make when you have been slowly plugging away for a few months. You at first may think that the work needed is insurmountable but remember the adage ‘a journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step’.

Online Marketing Wales

I remember the first time my friend asked me ‘have you heard of a blog’? I had to admit that I hadn’t. The word ‘Blog’ comes from an abbreviation of ‘web log’ and literally millions of people have them. It’s a sort of journal that you publish online which can include your thoughts, likes, dislikes how you feel about a certain subject etc. This is a way of expressing to the world things that are happening in your life and are growing at a fantastic rate.

With this established craze come with it many Online Marketing benefits. For example your blog may become popular with many visitors choosing to visit your page every time you publish. These visitors can be steered elsewhere on your site. They may click on an advert that you have. Whatever it is that you want them to do when they visit your site you can very often get them there by means of your blog.

If you have an online business that you are promoting then attaching a blog site to your main site is a great way of getting visitors to your site. Every time you post an article it also attracts the search engine spiders that help in ranking your site in the organic search results.

Online Marketers take any opportunity they can to attract unique visitors to their websites. Blogging is an invaluable tool to enable you to do this. Make your blog interesting and more people will return to read what you have to say. Give them information that they can use for their benefit and they will be more likely to return.

Announce your latest post to the world using social networking such as Twitter etc. Allow visitors to comment on your blog for a time to get some feedback on what people think. Beware though there are a lot of people spamming comments in order to get a link from your site so filter these out. The feedback can be invaluable information especially from more experienced bloggers who can very often give you tips and perhaps even link from their site to yours.

For more information on how to get started blogging please visit www.blogspot.com or http://wordpress.org.

Then please come back to us for Search Engine Optimisation Wales

Clearly looks sell. But if you are selling a product or service your website needs to have other elements than just looking good. A website that is effective all round will also show clearly what you are offering, be easy to navigate, be simple and easy to use and be search engine friendly.

Our website design team are able to give attention to all these features individually. Today an online business owner has to cleverly marry design with effective marketing. Money can be spent in one area but without an overall marketing plan that money can be easily wasted.

Effective web design does not have to cost the earth but it does require professional forethought. Why not give one of our design team a call for some free advice.

Can you remember the last time either yourself or a member of your family suffered from a cold? You normally rack your brains trying to think of the last person you came into contact with who had the cold, all so you can firmly place the blame on someone. We do that because we realise that the virus we caught had to be passed on by someone. Normally this happens because germs are spread by touch and through the air resulting in you being infected with the virus.

When we talk about viral marketing as part of a SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) strategy we are in no way talking of infecting someone’s computer with a malicious code. Rather we are talking about marketing that self replicates itself by being passed on and on. We all have received those funny emails that are passed on to us by friends and family which of course we pass on to our friends. Imagine the marketing power when you attach a company name or product to that!

Ok so how do you start? Firstly you need to find a group of individuals with a high social networking potential. This could be those who have a lot of people following them on social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter. These individuals are those who love to pass on anything of interest to friends and this is how our virus starts.

Next provide them with something which is going to get them fired up using video, games, email anything which you can attach your businesses name to. This gets your company name out there. After watching a really interesting video with your website name on many viewers want to find out more about the maker.

A recent example of this was with a TV advert for BT. A recent example of this was with a TV advert for BT. Bt advert characters Adam and Jane who have appeared in quite a few of BT’s adverts and who are well known announce that they are going to have a baby. This was after BT asked viewers to vote on whether the couple should announce it or not and received over 1.6 million votes.

BT marketing director Matthew Dearden explained that “The strand of ads we are doing at the moment are all about human interaction and human relationships [facilitated by BT products] and we thought about building the connection by getting people involved in the story of the campaign itself.”

Although BT has a massive marketing budget the same principles apply to any viral campaign. Engage your audience and let them put it out there. There are of course many more aspects to this kind of marketing which we will cover in future posts. In the mean time Happy Marketing Wales!

Keyword density is a very important factor to consider in any search engine optimisation project. As the name suggests Keyword Density is the number of times your targeted keyword or phrase appears in the content of your website.

Of course the main person to be targeting when writing content for your site is the reader. When you provide visitors with a pleasurable browsing experience along with rich content in what they are interested then that visitor will keep coming back to your site time and again.

When considering SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) though, consideration also has to be given to how the search engines read your content. At one time, those who saw the importance of SEO would fill their content with whichever keyword or phrase they were targeting. This was in an effort to fool the search engines into thinking that their sites were the ones that had the most information on any given subject. Search engines quickly caught on, and instead of ranking these sites well, they would instead penalise them for trying to capitalise on the way that they ranked them.

As you can see, a careful balance is needed. Keywords not appearing enough in content will result in them thinking that your content is not relevant, and too much and you could find yourself losing the position in the rankings that you have already achieved.

General consensus among SEO consultants is that around 3% to 6% keyword density in content produces the best results. As mentioned in the outset though, the best content is that which is enjoyed by your visitors. Coupling this with content that ranks well in the search engines will result in a successful website. Happy Writing!

Social Media Marketing (SMM). SMM is becoming a fast way to promote any online business. Just a quick example of one of the way in which it works.

One of our customers went to the opening of a nightclub and had a fantastic evening there with his friends. He now follows what they are doing on Facebook (a social networking site) and anytime they have an event on they put a shout out and generate interest/promote their events that way.

Joining Social Media sites allows people to have a look at who you are and what you do. You are able to create an online persona of your choosing. Giving visitors the option on your home page to follow you on these Social Media sites is also a good idea. Below is a few site which are the most popular. Sign up and have a go!

Delicious.com
Mix.com
Diggo.com
Buzzster.com
Facebook.com
Twitter.com
Friendfreed.com
identi.ca
Googlebookmarks.com
bookmarks.yahoo.com
url.org
connotea.org
bestofindya.com
a1-webmarks.com
reddit.com
bizsugar.com
Digg.com
buzz.yahoo.com
Kaboodle.com
Designmoo.com

When starting out in the process of teaching yourself SEO, a good place to visit are the SEO forums. These forums are where experts to amateurs can post questions and answers to the problems that arise in the SEO world. This can provide the SEO beginner with a lot of valuable information providing you understand the lingo. Like anything else those who are experienced in SEO come up with terms that can be difficult to understand by the newcomer.

We aim to develop our own SEO dictionary in the future but for the time being some helpful information can be found here.

Take a few minutes to familiarise yourself with some of these terms and this will help as you continue to grow in your knowledge of Search Engine Optimisation.

Online figures for those who watch videos online has risen sharply with peak results being recorded in the past month of May. Trends within the US are often mirrored around the world which is good news for those endeavouring to use SEO techniques to market their online businesses. 183 million users within the US watched online video. This can provide those engaged in SEO and Internet Marketing with a unique opportunity. How so?

The most popular online video centre YouTube reported that 14.6 Billion videos had been watched on its site in May. According to their reckoning that is over as hundred videos per viewer, which is quite staggering. With that amount of viewers, if you are able to pick a video that is extremely popular and advertise your website either before or after that video, then this allows you to reach an enormous amount of people with very little work.

Even better is being able to produce your own videos. If you own an online business selling for example beekeeping equipment, then producing a video on that subject will narrow down your audience to those interested in beekeeping, and will increase your chances of having someone search for your site following watching a video on beekeeping.

So with that quick tip it’s time to sign up for a YouTube account and get filming. Good luck!

One of the most important things to consider when optimising your website for search engine marketing is to know which keywords your website is targeting. For instance if you were an online business selling fishing tackle then it would be beneficial to provide content on your site which includes popular search words or phrases under that topic.

When search engines look at your site they are looking to see how well you provide information based on, among other things, the HTML coding of your site, the content of your site, what other people are saying about your site and how many quality websites are linked to yours.

If you can include words that people will be searching for within your site then search engines will believe that your site is better than your competitors and rank you accordingly. As we mentioned before if you were running an online fishing tackle shop then people will be searching under words like ‘buy fishing tackle’, ‘fishing tackle online’, ‘cheap fishing tackle’ etc. Include these terms within your site and you will greatly increase your chances of being ranked well.

How can you quickly find out what words and search terms people are searching for in any given subject? Search Engine Optimisation companies pay huge sums of money for specialised software which give them this information accurately but if you want approximate figures free then Google has provided a very useful tool.

The Google Keyword Tool can provide you with very useful information on words people are searching for. This is quite easy to find if you type it into the search bar of Google. Once you find the popular search terms or words people are searching for, include information with these words contained on your site and you will be sure to succeed.

This really only begins to scratch the surface of what keyword optimisation is all about. Next time we will be looking at how your keywords should be included in the HTML coding of your site.

Can you remember the last time you saw something and thought “I want to do that”. Whether it is a recreational activity like scuba diving, or a new business idea such as an online dating agency. Most that have had that “I want to do that” feeling try and find out as much as they can about that subject very quickly. Only a few years ago the library or a local book shop would be your first port of call to swat up on your chosen subject but not anymore. When people want information quickly most turn to the internet.

What has all this got to do with Article Marketing you may ask? Well the main idea of Article Marketing is to write an information article based on whatever your website content is. Then submit it to an article directory with a link to your website contained within the text. Some directories do not allow you to do this but instead allow you to insert a link into the ‘author information’ section.

When someone reads this article you will have grabbed their interest. Then they are more likely to click through to your website and see what else you have to offer.

Remember to give people what they want. Give them well thought out information. If someone is interested in a certain subject they will be able to clearly tell whether the author of an article has produced it out of a love for the subject or just as a search engine optimisation strategy. Put feeling into it and try and give them something different, something they would not get from any other article.

Steer away from the temptation to steal other peoples content. Some unscrupulous authors scour the internet and steal information that others provide. This tactic can quickly come back to bite you in the butt so resist the urge. Search engines can very often tell if you have duplicate content on your site and may very well penalise you for it.

If you feel that you just don’t have the time to sit and write information articles then many Marketers have these articles written for them. This can save you time but can also present many pitfalls. Some of the pros and cons will be outlined in a later article so keep your eye out for it.

This was just a quick post but keep coming back and I will try and provide some more basic search engine marketing and web marketing techniques for those just getting started in promoting their website.