Archive for the ‘Articles’ Category

A question over at Small Business Brief made me think how good it would be to share the information I have gleaned on how to cut your advertising spend.

I think it was John Wanamaker that said “Half of my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half”, well the technology of the web allows you to find out which half, or, in other words, it can multiply the ROI no end, as wasted money is wasted!

How many people that run adverts containg a link to their website, simply add www.yourdomain.com without any thought of ad tracking whatsoever, without any thought of page targeting whatsoever? If you do this, then your throwing away a golden opportunity to track the effectiveness of your advertising choice, and your adverts individually.

One of the best things you can do is evaluate your advertising returns properly, and one of the easiest ways to do this is to ask the visitor where they came from.

When the telephone rings, you speak to your customers, and, at the end of the conversation, one of the last things you should do is ask them ‘where did you get our number’? If they say ‘yellow pages, local newspaper etc, ask them why they chose to call you’ you do this because many people will pick up yellow pages to look for your number after having been referred to you by a friend, asking the ‘why’ question will give you the actual source rather than the vehicle for finding your number. If your not doing this THEN DO IT!

But how can we transfer this online?  for sure we get referrer logs, but they will simply show up as direct referrer IE, they typed your URL directly into the browser with no search engine or link page involved .THIS is where the real power of online offline comes to the fore. Simply give each of your adverts a unique URL, and your direct referrers from your logs will tell you how many people have visited as a result of seeing that advert, or having been referred to it by word of mouth (WOM). It really doesn’t matter how they got there, be it first generation or WOM, the initial response will be as a result of THAT ad in THAT publication.

I would definitely recommend sub-domains for this, as people will start typing from the beginning of the URL, and as such will add the sub-domain, and not leave off the sub folder details, as they will sometimes with sub-folders. We use a combination of add tracking and publication tracking sub domains (all excluded with robots.txt to prevent the possibility of their getting confused with doorway pages), and it works a treat!

By doing this we have been able to weed out the poorly performing publications, and increase the spend in those which work best, while finding new publications and refining ads. Sub-domains are perfect for this. 

Yellow Pages is a perfect example. Many people have multiple adverts in YP, take for example a wedding car hire and limousine service. (this is a true life example of one of my clients). They advertised in

wedding services
Chauffeur driven car hire
Limousine Services
Specialist travel Services
Airport Transfer

They did not know which of these adverts were working, and at almost £1000 a piece per year it was crucial they found out. by using sub-domains of
weddingS.ourdomain.com 
Chaeuffeur.ourdmain
limo.ourdomain.com etc.
we were rapidly able to identify that two of these adverts were bringing in ABSOLUTELY no business whatsoever. enter a saving of £2000 per year to spend on other things. At the same time we identified that one of them was performing very well, so we increased spend on that one, and totally worked on the advert.

I can not tell you how important it is that you grasp the fact the world wide wen, is NOT an advertising tool, it is a marketing tool. Use it as a marketing tool and you will increase your business. Look at entry and exit pages at least weekly, identify where people are leaving your site and find out why1 identify potential problems with that page, correct them, and get them back into your site. 

I had a client who made bespoke bridal gowns (posh names for wedding frocks ) I was able to tell her which of here designs were the most and least popular. She was amazed and asked me how I could possibly know that! I pointed out to here that it was simple, as the click throughs from the images of those gowns told us that. We changed the images, removing the underperforming ones and replacing them with softer styles, and business went up.

Log stats reading is a boring as hell, but it is the key to success on the web.
 

Firstly, some of you might be asking, “what is a bad neighbourhood”?
When you link to a site from your own, it is the online equivalent of recommending a business to a friend. If they turn out to give a bad service then YOU catch it in the neck from your friend, and your reputation with your friend is tarnished slightly. 

This is the same online with links. If you link to (recommend) a site, and it turns out that the site is a bad site in the eyes of the search engines, then YOU too will be seen as ‘bad by association’.

More information on Google Quality Guidelines can be found here Google Webmaster Information on Quality
OK SO now I have worried many of you, spoiled your breakfast, or sent you running to your links pages to look for bad neighbourhoods, I guess I should sort of help you identify these bad sites.
You can find a bad neighbourhood by going through the following process. 

1 . Check page rank with the Google toolbar. If this is 0 or greyed out, that is a warning sign (new sites also have this so do not listen to people who say PR0 = ban they are confusing cause and effect).

2. Run a site:www.domain.com search on them, and if they come up with 0 pages in the index then that is also a warning

3. Run a search for their company name on Google and see what is brought up.

4. Check the ownership and age of domain. (this will help distinguish potential banned, from the site simply being new, as the signs are very similar)

5. Finally run a back link check.

This is where we get to the crux of the matter as links are the key. If a couple of year old site has no pages listed and no PR, then there is reason for caution. If however the site is showing no backlinks, then it might well be a genuine case of the site being new to the web.

If however the site is a few years old, has no PR, no pages listed, yet has hundreds of backlinks, there is a fair chance that site has a penalty against it.

These are simple checks designed to help answer the question of ‘am I linking to a bad neighbourhood’?  I can not tell you how important it is that you vet your linking partners. There is a lot of false information about bad neighbourhoods, including stuff like. I don’t link to gambling sites because Google doesn’t like them. Google doesn’t care about the genre of sites, it cares about the specific practices that each site and cluster of sites uses. Sites like ‘William Hill Bookmakers’  are not banned, nor are they bad neighbourhoods, yet they ARE gambling sites. Sure gambling sex and pharmacy sites are more likely to get into bad linking practices and spamming, but if you are in the same business, then they are on topic links.
One last thing though. When linking, keep these questions in mind. Am I linking to and from the most relevant pages of the sites?. Is this link on topic? Will I get traffic from this link? I am NOT saying you have to stick to the sites where you can answer yes to all, but I AM saying that if you CAN say yes to all those questions, then you will have just given your internet marketing a big boost.

I was Moderating over at Highrankings earlier today, when the above question was asked. I gave the standard reply of  as many as it takes but keep it to readable chunks. I was then asked what a readable chunk is defined as!

What is a readable chunk? I would say that it is a section that covers a topic, and finishes when you are ready to move on to the next bit. One or two A4 pages is enough, but it totally depends on the subject matter as well. I mean if you asked me if a film was worth going to see and I droned on and on with a scene by scene breakdown is that too much? On the other hand, if you were to ask me the best way to rebuild a transmission, you would not be happy with ‘get some spanners, take it all apart, replace the broken bits and rebuild it’ would you

At LONG last, Google has worked out a drum that I have been banging for a long time now. You can NOT fiddle outbound links!

In his blog Matt Cutts has posted how a change to the algorithm has altered rankings and crawling dramatically, and how your outbound links can affect how your viewed. WELL HELLO GOOGLE! So you have finally woken up to start smelling the coffee

 For a long time now I and a few others have posted across forums how it is nigh on impossible to spam out bound linking. ? How so OWG I hear you ask . Well it is simple—-

 Just say you want to game the search engines by linking out, so off you go and you get some good copy written for your page, in your page you get some research done for the sites that are most relevant. It takes some time, but you figure ‘hey I WILL spam this algorithm, I WILL beat the search engine system’. Eventually your page is complete, you release it to the spiders in all its glory, decked out in quality focused content, with top quality out  bound links on it to what you consider to be the best resources on the page subject. HA! You Beat the search engines

 Or did you?

In your attempt to spam the algorithm, you have in fact created a VERY valuable page in the grand scheme of the internet. Your copy is on topic, your extensive research has created one of the best resources online for that particular subject. As realisation dawns that in fact you have NOT ‘beaten’ the algorithm, in fact it has beaten YOU, you crawl away to sulk having put on your sad face that is normally reserved for sad Sunday!

But wait, HARK, what is that noise? It is the annoying bleep bleep of your mail programme telling you you have mail. YOU have MAIL? but your a spammer ? WHO would send a spammer mail? Curious you take a look. The mail all starts off with the same sort of words, such words are alien to you…….

Hi there, I just wanted to say thanks for the information I found on your site at www. spamtheworld.com.

WHAT are these people talking about? I mean people don’t THANK ME! Are they nuts? This is a spam page designed to game the algorithm!!!

In time you get more mails, as those who sent you the original thank you emails thank you further by linking to your site so others can enjoy the site. This results in an ever increasing spiral of visitors emails, thank you’s and MORE people linking to you. WORSE than the fact they link to you is the fact that THEIR sites are relevant to yours, so they are sending more and more traffic.

But HA— YOU have the last laugh because these people that are coming to your site, buying stuff from the affiliate links you have on the subject, or clicking on the adverts you have on the site are DUMB, because they don’t realise they are being spammed, and they visit, come back and click again, many of them even link to the site they are so dumb. They just don’t realise they are being spammed.

As the cheques arrive, you sit back and laugh, thinking,  ’how good is this on topic resource building spamming is!’ You drift off to sleep deep in the thought of how you can spend many hours creating your next high quality, top notch page to fool the search engines.

——————–

The moral of this story is that it is almost impossible to spam outbound links. comments appreciated!

So far we have covered the basics, set out our stall, and began the process of keyword research. Today we roll our sleeves up and lay the foundations for a successful website.

OK, you now have a list of words that are relevant to your industry If you have used word tracker overture etc you will have ‘some’ idea of the potential importance/popularity of these phrases. Nothing is going to give you data however like a live advertising campaign will. The added bonus of running a live campaign is that you are going to be delivering traffic to your site which really should deliver sales. I always try to evaluate the potential ROI for keywords for the client, as you should not really rely on organic listings for your business.

Google is the most popular search engine, and with this in mind you should run your test data on a Google ad words campaign. The amount of money you spend will be directly relevant to the industry in which you work, that said so will be the returns. Remember now that one of the aims of this exercise is to find out how many searches there are for your chosen list of words, this will help you decide what phrases to attack later. Armed with this fact, you are going to have to make sure that your advert is appearing in the top 4 or so, certainly no lower than 6. Google delivers 8 ads per page, and by ensuring your ad is top 4 you can be sure that the number of impressions is going to 100 equate to the number of searches for that word.

 It is important that you do not run the campaign just on a broad match basis, as this is going to skew your results. The way I do it is to run the list broad (without any operators) Phrased (you place the keywords into quotation marks “word” and also exact (you place it in Parenthesis [word] ). By doing this you will see which brings in the most traffic, which converts the best (if you use the tracking code).

Run the test for a realistic period on a normal time, i.e. don’t run it for three days that include only a weekend, as you will miss the traffic from people who connect at work. Try not to run a test over a holiday weekend, for the same reasons. The longer you run your test the more accurate your data is going to be, better to spend a few extra £$ etc now than to get it wrong and go for the wrong words. It is essential that you keep a close eye on your spend however, and, if need be split the words into groups of possibles probables, maybes etc. This will make it easier to control the daily spend.

I have my data, now what?
You now get to the fun part; you have to ‘grade’ your keywords. You know how many searches a phrase gets, but that alone is not enough. Right away you can dump the phrases that no one searched for during your test period. There is no point in attacking words that no one searches for is there!

Should you attack the words with the largest search volume? Of course you should, as that is going to bring in the most traffic right? YES it is right, but it might also be the most competitive word, and be one that is going to take 12 months 2 years or more to get a ranking for, in some cases you might never get it. The key here is to gauge the competition, but how do we do that?

Many people post in forums that they are working in a very competitive arena, as there are over 6 million pages returned for a search. WOW 6,000,000 competing pages? NO there are not that many, there are just 6m pages returned for that phrase.

The most basic piece of SEO is the page title, if a page does not have the phrase in the title; it is unlikely to be trying to compete for the phrase. You can find out how many pages compete by running a simple operator on google like this :-

Intitle:”your phrase here”

The above will tell you how many pages have those words in the page title. Putting it in inverted comas will give you how many pages have it in the phrase. E.G intitle:”your phrase”.  

OK so we now know that x number of pages have that phrase in the title that is a better idea of the volume of competition.

Can we further investigate competition?

Yes we can, and in part 5 we will discuss it further.

Well I was going to  answer some questions today, but due to the many emails I received, I am continuing with another section of the basic guide to SEO. I am now glad that I set up this blog, as had I not, then I doubt this article (well it is an ebook really) would ever have seen the light of day!

In part I & II we covered the basic, elements of a website. I covered these as I believe in holistic SEO, in other words, ranking alone is not my goal, as my goal is to make a site as good as it can be to maximise conversion of traffic into clients.

In Part III we move onto some more Traditional SEO elements — enjoy

SEO can really be broken into 3 stages:

Research
Implementation
On-going (tweaking).

Research:
This includes the reason for living, and getting a better picture of what everyone expects the site to do, and as importantly, what it has/hasn’t done in the past, and what it is doing currently. This helps plan landing pages for PPC campaigns etc.

Keyword Research:
Is a cornerstone of successful SEO/SEM if you’re targeting the wrong phrases, then no matter how successful you are with your efforts, you will still end up with nothing to show for your effort. Accurate marketplace information is 100% essential, and is something that should really be treated as the lifeblood of the site and should involve both the SEO & the client.

Implementation:
This is the next stage after the research. Armed with your agreed list of keywords you now have to ‘match’ them to your existing site, and either split pages into more focused individual pages, combine pages to give them better topic focus, or create pages to accommodate the content to match what your clients are looking for

—————————————————————————————————–
Keyword Research.
Get this wrong, and no matter how good your optimisation is, you’re just going to get rankings and not traffic, worse than that the traffic you do get will be poor quality traffic that serves only to cost you bandwidth aplenty, with the odd sale mixed in.

How do you decide what keywords to go for?
Ideally you start with as many as possible, and then break them down into different groups. I usually brainstorm with the client, then research some more from that list, test them and get back to the client with the findings to decide on the final list.

Single words rarely describe enough what your target visitor will be searching for.

E.G. ‘bicycle’
While that might appear on the surface to be great, and ideal for your business, with a little more thought into the purpose of your site, the ‘reason for living’, you will se it is not.  If you sell bicycles, but do not offer an out of state/country mail order service, then what good is attracting traffic from outside of this geographic area? The phrase ‘bicycles UK’ would produce far more qualified traffic, even though they traffic will be lower volume. When researching your keywords you must keep in mind what you intend to do with that traffic for that particular phrase. The phrase ‘bicycles Uk next day delivery’ is so specific that if you capture traffic for that, and you provide that service, all else being equal your going to make money on your efforts.

So how do you research?
You research by talking to the client, but and this is a big but, get them out of talking technical. Many industries use technical references that the public do not use. A printer for example might use ‘4 colour process digital printing’ but a client will look for ‘colour leaflet printing’ you have to get this across to the client, and get them to really think about this initial seed of the keyword process.

Armed with this seed list, you then go about using a thesaurus; you research by using the online tools provided by the pay per click suppliers like Google AdWords and Overture (please not this is the UK version, other geographic regions are available) Overture is now part of Yahoo search marketing.  You can research using word tracker, or Keyword Discovery (free or paid). Do not hold back during your initial research, now is not the time, while you may think a word or phrase has little baring, it might turn out to uncover more relevant phrases a little later.

You as an SEO need to put trust in your client to remove the totally non relevant words/phrases. An important note here is to let the client know that they are not deciding which phrases to attack, they are removing phrases not relevant to their industry After all they are the ones who will know their technical jargon for their industry.

So there you go, you now have some keywords, well probably hundreds if not thousands of keywords to play with! But what do you do with these keywords? Part4 will tell you about this.

In part 2 we follow on with the basics of design as part of optimising your site. In Part 1 we ended with the following list and explanation:-

Look
Feel
Speed
Navigation
Focus

Although the above are really design considerations,  design is one of the keys to good rankings and having a successful website. With this in mind I will briefly run through them.

Look:
The site has to look nice, it has to be easy on the eye, and must never be difficult to look at. The only movement on a page should be to draw the eye to a call to action or other very important element. Music should be opt in, not opt out, as this is a no no. Plug in technology should be avoided if it is not bundled with the main browsers. Many people do not have the ability to allow downloads, as they will be visiting from their place of work, or, even at home will be reluctant to download anything for fear of viruses.

Feel:
The site must feel right, IE the feel/tone of it should match the aim of the site. If your product/service is up tempo then so should be your feel. Bright reds etc are mad colours, and will stir the emotions, whereas soft pastels will relax.

Speed:
Although broadband in pretty much the norm, there are still a lot of people on dial up, or slow connections, to force large sites on them is to lose clients. Keep the site fast to load, and if you must have images, make sure the text comes down first if possible.

Navigation:
This is the first real SEO related element. The search engines can only add pages to the index that they know about, with this in mind, the easier your site is to navigate, the faster you are likely to get spidered, and also the easier it is for your visitors to find what they are looking for.  You should have a small navigation element on every page, that as a minimum takes you to the main category pages within your site.

The search Engines have to build their opinion of your pages from the content on the pages, and what others think of your site, there is nothing else for them to work with.  The early days of the web, you would read pages of text, some of the text on those pages would be blue and underlined, we knew that meant they were hyperlinks. The only way to know what to expect when following the link was to read the text that was within the link itself, this is known as ‘anchor text’ and now, only a few years later people are realising that it is important, while it always has been, many simply forgot.
The anchor text within your navigation system is an important part of helping the search engine algorithms to understand your pages, where possible, you should use anchor text that describes what to expect from visiting the target page. Please note though that at no time should this be allowed to affect the usability of the site.

Focus:
This is another key element to SEO/SEM. Many of the DP (donkey Pooh!) pages have no focus, and because of this the quality information is simply lost in the flood!
An essential part of the success of your site is the way you deliver your information. Before you put pen to paper you must carve in stone the ‘reason for living’ that is your site. you MUSt decide what you want your site to achieve, what the initial aims and goals are for the site. What do you expect the site to do? So I say again, decide the ‘reason for living’ ask yourself, WHAT IS THE REASON FOR BUILDING THIS SITE? An answer like ‘to get me business’ or ‘to attract customers’, simply isn’t good enough. the reason for living should be clear and measurable. EG.

The website exists to let people know who we are and what we do. The ultimate aim of the site is to get more customers to our services. We will achieve this via them contacting us via online and offline methods.

Unless you focus on this question, your site is never going to reach it’s full potential. Once the reason for living has been established, then and only then can you begin your SEO.

Part 3 Monday, together with some answers to the MANY questions I have received from you all.  

First off let me say that no Search Engine Optimisation company can guarantee you top rankings in organic search results (SERPS). As such please don’t think that this is a blue print for SEO top rankings, it isn’t, what it IS, is a paper to help you understand the methodology that will set you on the road to bettering your rankings, and understanding the workings of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). It is hoped that the information in this paper will take you up the road by something in the scale of two years or more from a standing start.

The search engines are constantly tweaking their methods for evaluating pages (algorithims), and as such this paper is aimed to prevent you ‘algo chasing’ the flavour of the moment, and setting you on the longer road to better long term rankings and, more importantly, traffic and conversions of visitors into clients. One thing that you should always keep in mind is this simple bit of logic, People need information to allow them to make a decision, and as such, the aim of your site should be to provide enough information to help them make the decision. Then and only then can you ask them for the order.

The job of Optimiser is to work with the search engines, not against them, it is not a war, it is not a fight, it is a client pupil relationship, with the job of the SEO being that of the teacher, and the Search Engine the pupil. It is the job of the SEO to make sure that the course content is delivered to the pupil in such a way that they completely understand it, and go away educated as to what your site is all about as a whole, and where each page fits into it.

Most websites are lousy, make no bones about it, they are piles of donkey poo! The sites that are not DP are the ones doing the business (no pun intended), and this is mainly because they are well thought out and well presented on all the basics.

Look
Feel
Speed
Navigation
Focus

Although the above are really design considerations,  design is one of the keys to good rankings and having a successful website. With this in mind I will briefly run through them.
In part 2 we will run through the above and move forward