CAT | Search Engine Marketing
23
A Free Online SEO Tool
0 Comments | Posted by andy in Blogging, SEO Glossary, Search Engine Marketing Resources, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Search Engine Resources, Webmasters
As Christmas approaches a good will gift from us , Slipstream’s… 1 Free Online SEO Tool.
One of the most important starting points with any SEO work is the Title and Meta data.
But ensuring that these elements are adding much needed relevance is sometimes over looked.
You may well have created a ‘killer Title Tag’ but have you ensured that your Meta Description tag is also working in harmony with the rest of your site?
A good free online SEO tool that gives you a good indication of this is the Meta Tag Analyzer at seocentro. This tool will display the Title, Meta Description and Keyword tags implemented at the entered URL and then tell you their relevancy rating to the page in question. This gives you a good starting point to any SEO campaign.
And the help doesn’t stop there. This free tool also informs you of Anchor Text found on the page, the keyword density of each word found on the page, Alt Tags used and any errors within the Meta itself.
Don’t say we didn’t gave you anything for Christmas!
http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html
Source: SEO Resources | SEO Blog
23
List of Search Engine Marketing Blogs
0 Comments | Posted by andy in Blogging, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Marketing Resources, Search Engine News
We hope that you enjoy reading the information in our blog. It’s intended to be a mix of information for anyone interested in search engine marketing, together with observations and news stories related to the Internet and “search” in particular. We also use it, of course, to announce news related to Impact Media such as when a new client chooses us for their SEO or PPC management.
However, if you’ve read through the information in our blog and are still hungry for more, you really should pay a visit to the BIGLIST of Search Marketing Blogs.
BIGLIST of Search Marketing Blogs This is a comprehensive resource listing some of the most popular blogs related to the search engine marketing industry and has over 400 entries at the time of writing this post.
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Published by SEO Prof Andy
23
Bing using DMOZ Description
0 Comments | Posted by andy in Bing, Local Search, Pay Per Click (PPC), Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Marketing Resources
With the launch of Bing, many website owners have discovered that the description of their site is not all it should be.
Whilst, as most site owners understand, the description on Google is taken from the Meta Description tag, Bing has taken the decision to extract the information from their listing in the Open Directory (DMOZ).
In fact, this is not new; MSN Search and Live Search both did this but with the publicity the newly named search engine is receiving along with its growing popularity among users, this issue has gained more focus.
For an example, see Bing’s description of their colossal competitor Google:
To ensure that the description of your site on Bing is how you would like it to read, the following Tag needs to be introduced onto your page:
<META NAME=”msnbot” CONTENT=”NOODP”>
Simply, this tells the MSNBOT not to grab its content from the OPD and select your Meta description instead.
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Published by SEO Prof Andy
23
Free SEO Tips and Tricks Blog
0 Comments | Posted by andy in Articles, Blogging, FAQ, FAQ - Analytics, FAQ - PPC, FAQ - SEO, Internet News, Keyword Research, Landing Page Optimisation, Link Building, Local Search, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Marketing Resources, Search Engine Resources
Although we at Slipstream here in the UK, we recognise that some webmasters just love doing search engine optimisation themselves and, for that reason, we make a lot of SEO information freely available in our blog.
However, if you’re looking for free SEO tips on a regular basis, i.e. daily, then I recommend you take a look at the Daily SEO Tip blog.
This blog is dedicated to giving free SEO tips and was founded by SEO specialists, Loren Baker and Ann Smarty.
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Published by SEO Prof Andy
23
How to Boost Your Website’s Ranking
0 Comments | Posted by andy in Copywriting, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Marketing Resources, Search Engine News
When it comes to boosting your websites rankings it is important to remember that ‘Content is King’. Having a good deal of unique, helpful content on your website will help push you up the search engine rankings, whilst keeping your visitors happy.
Sometimes content is overlooked by marketers or executives in the mistaken belief that it’s better to have light copy and more images to attract visitors; but, barring an overkill of epic proportions or some fool-hardy black hat tomfoolery, the truth is language is the one thing that satisfies both the visitors and the search engines.
Having a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s) section on your website is a great opportunity to create keyword-rich copy to increase rankings whilst still providing visitors with useful information. Some examples of what to include in your FAQ section;
- Find out what the most commonly asked questions are that members of your company get asked on a regular basis.
- Target non-branded keywords, so that you can be found for more than just your brand.
- Use Social Media – this is the marketing tool of the moment and it is a great way to find out what your customers are saying about your company/industry, or target specifically what they’re looking for.
- Check web analytics data to find out specific keyword phrases and questions.
FAQ pages also allow companies to promote multiple topics and optimise for multiple keywords on a smaller scale.
Local search is something that bigger companies often neglect, despite the fact that a large percentage of people actually still much prefer to look for businesses within their surrounding area. Determining the best locations to create content for can be done using tools such as Google Insights. This has been developed to provide an insight into the terms people search for in Google by creating a visual representation of regional interest on a map. Typing in a keyword will bring up the top regions that have an interest in that keyword topic – allowing you to focus special efforts on reaching that demographic.
This is undoubtedly a growing field and one that SEO agencies are beginning to push more and more due to the commercial benefits. While it might not help someone that is searching for services on the other side of the globe, in terms of getting the most focussed target audience, there aren’t many practices better than local search.
The strength of a site is often determined by the number and, more importantly, the quality of inbound links. Whilst there are hundreds of ways to get a link, through directories, articles and press releases, why not try something more adventurous?
Link baiting is by no means a guaranteed way of building your inbound link portfolio, but it is one of the most creative and potentially advantageous. If you’re a creative company, show off your creativity. Develop and distribute a unique game, provide a free software sample, write a provocative blog post, just get your message out there and see if people are interested. Whilst the short-term traffic may be nice, it’s the long-term authority generated by the link structure that will ultimately pay dividends.
Whilst SEO as a dicipline is highly focused, to really maximise a sites potential you need to be covering all the bases. So that means that link building, local search and SEO copywriting all need to be addressed. Of course you can get good results with either one of these areas; however, by combining and optimising each of them, you stand a far greater chance of really boosting your web rankings.
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Published by SEO Prof Andy
23
The Friday Afternoon Online Itch
0 Comments | Posted by andy in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Marketing Resources, Search Engine News
Friday afternoon is almost a dead zone for webmasters and search specialists everywhere. Not just because it’s the last few hours of the working week and a good portion of the lunch hour is spent in the local pub. No, the real issue is that any changes you make to a website will be live throughout the weekend.
This leaves you in something of a quandary. Do you a) carry on regardless, hope that the new site alterations go without a hitch, b) test, re-test and then make an informed decision on whether to set any changes live or c) just hold fire until Monday?
Well the safest option, and most preferred is c) just hold fire until Monday. The reason behind this isn’t laziness, but straightforward logic. If you leave a paid search campaign running over a weekend without monitoring, you could blow the budget and ruin your campaign’s previously creditable CTR. If you launch a new site or a page within an existing site, any error could trigger a complete malfunction, ensuring a pretty awful start to your next week.
Internet marketing, paid advertising and website development is all about monitoring progress. If 404 errors start flashing up all over the show, you know that something needs to be done pretty quickly. Without being onsite to monitor this kind of issue, your site is wide open to cataclysmic failings throughout.
This is particularly pertinent with the release, or re-release of an entire website. Whilst you might be confident in the programming you’ve been doing for the preceding months, setting it free on a Friday is a major gamble. If people come along to a site opening but encounter error messages or slow loading times, that can leave a negative impression that is hard to turn around. By waiting until the next week, when your specialists are on site and ready to make any tweaks, you can minimise this potential damage.
But it goes beyond simply releasing a new site. The Friday afternoon issue can affect anyone. How about if you write a blog post with a glaring typo or any other major errors, what then? Well for two days that blog post can remain untouched and picking up traffic, making you look bad all the while. Of course you can’t just stop writing or working just because of an impending weekend, but added care is often key to ensuring that your two days off aren’t spent worrying about a Monday morning full of comments from disappointed blog readers.
The paid search issue is an area where simply setting live and hoping for the best really isn’t recommended. PPC campaigns require regular maintenance and must be observed in order to ensure that no costly errors have sneaked in. You could find that your budgets are wrong or even that erroneous clicks have maxed out your weekly projected spend in a single weekend. Key terms and negative keywords need to be defined and refined, so allowing them to simply run ‘green’ through the weekend is a risk, although of course some may see it as one worth taking.
SEO of course can be done at any time. There’s no issue of immediacy as it can take days to change a ranking and edits can happen continually behind the scenes, well away from any visitor’s eyes. So that doesn’t mean you have to shut down entirely. There’s always a lot to do when it comes to building, maintaining and marketing a website, just be careful with the Friday afternoon itch.
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Published by SEO Prof Andy
23
7 Ways SEO Can Help Ecommerce Websites
0 Comments | Posted by andy in Accessibility, Blogging, Online Ideas - Thinking Outside The Box, Search Engine Marketing
Whilst there are clearly many things that SEO can’t achieve, not least on the business side of your online enterprise, it can help you where it really matters, online visibility.
This blog post explores 7 ways that SEO can help your online business succeed. From the obvious to the obscure, you’d be surprised how a little optimisation can go a long way for any ecommerce site.
1) Outrank your competitors – If you’re seen by customers first, then you’re far more likely to convert. SEO will help improve rankings throughout, including for individual product pages, which should help to attract more search visitors.
2) Convert visitors into customers – SEO copywriting not only helps to optimise a product page, it can also help visitors dip into their pockets. A strong call to action and emotive writing throughout can make all the difference.
3) Improve SERPs and on page clarity – A major part of SEO is ensuring that page headings, Meta descriptions and sub-headings are optimised for both search engines and visitors. Therefore it may help you to provide added clarity within SERPs as well as on the page itself. Customers know what they’re looking for, you just have to convince them that you’re the one to buy it from.
4) Identifying site issues – SEO isn’t just about adding keywords to a site left, right and centre, it’s far more complex than that. Any SEO Company worth their salt will work hard to see if there are any duplicate content or page load errors blighting your site. These can be off-putting to customers and undermine hard work elsewhere so it is vital that they’re picked up.
5) Encourage additional traffic streams – Whilst search engine optimisation is primarily targeted at search engines, stating the obvious, often the work that is completed will help open up other avenues of business. For example, whilst developing a link building strategy and carrying out directory submission, SEO provides you with added visibility and may well increase targeted traffic from these additional sources.
6) Attract local customers – One strand of SEO is called Local Search. This is effectively where you optimise a site to be shown in search results for certain geographical localities. So if you have a physical store as well as an online ecommerce presence, this presents a fantastic opportunity to promote both, whilst targeting consumers within your immediate surroundings.
7) Gain targeted traffic – SEO is all about improving rankings and online visibility; with the increase in exposure that you gain, you can attract more eyes, more clicks and more customers. Whilst there’s no finite guarantee, SEO is still the best way of making sure the right people find your site; the first step to creating a successful ecommerce business.
For all of SEO’s many positives, one thing it can’t do is cure the incurable. If your business is failing due to poor service, high prices, an unprofessional website and an overcrowded competitive marketplace, SEO won’t provide a magic cure.
On the Internet consumers can leap from site to site in a matter of seconds. If they like what they see, are happy with the cost, then you may have yourself a customer. But if you can’t back up your online ranking with the same high standard of service, they will simply move on and find somewhere that does.
SEO is, however, ideal for the purposes of helping a good site get better. Making sure that it gets the attention it deserves and boosting its income as a result. SEO is certainly a solution, but don’t expect it to be a miracle cure.
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Published by SEO Prof Andy
23
Is SEO Essential or an Outmoded Scam Touted by Charlatans? Part I
0 Comments | Posted by andy in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Marketing Resources, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
If this were a law court, the title of this blog post may be deemed something of a leading question. However, the question over the validity of SEO is one that continues to be raised, and rarely more vehemently than in a recent piece by Derek Powazek.
As a representative of the accused, you shouldn’t expect much of the following retort to be all that sympathetic to Mr. Powazek’s assertion that SEO is an industry full of ‘Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists’; however, a riposte may be necessary to raise a case for the defence.
First and foremost, SEO is what you make of it. Powazek himself is a designer, and just as some web designers out there are more intent on peddling profits than they are in producing quality content, the same is true in SEO. In fact, most industries, offline or on have their fair share of charlatans; but why single out SEO?
SEO Improves Visibility, Your Website Should do the Rest
The argument that a good quality site with good quality content should effectively market itself is interesting, if a little flawed. First and foremost, content is king, if your site is good it should succeed; there can’t be any arguments over that. But imagine this figurative site had a fantastic design, offered exceptional services but had no copy or navigation. You can extol the virtues of an aesthetically vibrant site all you want, but if nobody finds it, what use is it to anybody?
Great sites need to be found. SEO can be a natural process; you may write pages of optimised copy without even realising it and gain a number of links back due to linkbaiting qualities of what it offers. To take the element of chance out of it, you need to find an SEO expert.
There is no mysticism to SEO; all the information you could ever need to optimise a site is out there, ready to be absorbed by anybody who cares to find it. Unfortunately, most businesses – particularly smaller ones – don’t have the time or the resources to self-educate themselves in the relative benefits of keyword implementation, link building and local search.
What may be obvious to one person, might be complete nonsense to another. In the same way that I could rewire my entire home from scratch if I followed advice, the likely outcome is a lot of wasted time and possibly a result that was worse than before. We hire experts for their knowledge, regardless of whether or not we could actually do it.
Optimise for Google & Visitors, Not Each Individually
The mantra offered by Derek Powazek is as simple as it is baffling - ‘Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.‘ ‘Make something great’, this should be the objective of every business. We all, knowingly or otherwise, seek out quality in all walks of life. Unfortunately it falls down somewhat at ‘tell people about it.’
Who do you tell? Your friends? Family? Peers? Competitors? Animals in the zoo? There could be any number of great things that are out there lying dormant and undiscovered. Surely it’s about telling the right people. How do you go about contacting the right people? You get yourself noticed.
The assertion that everything that deserves to be found will eventually fall into the right hands is hopeful at best. Whilst we all hope that it will happen; hope is not enough to guarantee success. Not that SEO will guarantee success of course, but it is one more marketing channel that will help get your website extra exposure online.
SEO is an enabler. Bad sites will in all likelihood be unsuccessful, SEO or not; good sites though, no matter how small, may thrive due to a little optimisation intervention. This is why any ethical SEO Company will discuss your site, the business behind it and the aspirations for it; if the quality is low and the expectations are unrealistic – you won’t outrank Microsoft! – then they should say.
Where there’s money to be made, people will take advantage of that. Just as you get cowboy builders, financiers and designers (heaven forfend), there are bad eggs in SEO. As a website owner, it’s your duty, if you can’t do the optimisation process yourself, to weed these out and find a genuine company, with genuine testimonials who can offer genuine services. It’s not as difficult as it may sound.
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Published by SEO Prof Andy
23
Is SEO Essential or an Outmoded Scam Touted by Charlatans? Part II
0 Comments | Posted by andy in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Marketing Resources
And so we enter the difficult second post. My defence of SEO so far has centred on its ability to get content noticed, rather than relying on divinity or good fortune. With this post, I want to tackle the accusation that it is to blame for clogging the Internet with spam.
If you haven’t read the original article, Is Is SEO Essential or an Outmoded Scam Touted by Charlatans? Part I,then first and foremost I recommend it, and secondly you may be completely oblivious as to what the purpose of this follow up is. Essentially SEO comes in for a lot of criticism, often from those in and around the website development sphere; this post comes in response to a particularly stinging criticism from Derek Powazek – a noted designer.
Whilst the ideas that Mr. Powazek discusses about the need for quality in website production are absolutely correct, his ideological stance on the way that they should be marketed offers more questions than it does answers. The overriding question of course is, without SEO, how are people supposed to find your site?
The assertion that SEO is spamming the Internet isn’t entirely disingenuous, but it would take some erroneous logic to suggest that this was the exclusive domain of the ‘SEO experts’. The days of promoting websites at all costs are long gone. Black hat SEO techniques are slowly evaporating, leading to a far more productive, and far less damaging set of practices to promote a website. A modern, more ethical form of SEO.
Black Hat, DIY & Professional SEO
No SEO professional is going to claim that what they practise is a mystic art. We all have the tools at our disposal to promote a website online; but as with most things that are within the realms of our physical and mental capabilities, we don’t always optimise this opportunity.
In his attack, Mr. Powazek, whilst damning SEO as a spammy process, also suggests that people should and could do it themselves. I would be tempted to suggest that the SEO DIYer is far more likely to indulge the dark arts of black hat SEO than any seasoned professional. Armed only the basic knowledge that links and keywords are the pathway to success, those who attempt SEO, rather than fully understand it, could well find that they lose sight of what their actual objective is (i.e. provide a website that is both optimised and visitor-friendly). This then leads them to shamelessly self promote on every forum, blog and comment box that they stumble upon, effectively spamming Google and the wider community of web users.
Whilst we don’t condemn those who do SEO on their own, and certainly wouldn’t suggest that the aforementioned practises are widely used, the blame for spamming the Internet shouldn’t fall solely on the shoulders of the SEO professionals.
If you’ve got a bad product, marketing or not, you’re on a hiding to nothing. Often we are blinded by our own creations – I’ve written copy that was seemingly immaculate to me, but then when analysed by a second pair of eyes was justifiably pulled apart – making outside help essential. If you’ve poured your heart and soul into a website project, it isn’t always easy to take a step back and analyse its failings. An SEO can do this for you. So whilst quality is essential, so is the understanding of how to transfer that into a meaningful long-term online success.
Is SEO Spammy or Just representative of the Internet?
One of the major arguments against spamming the search engines is that it creates ‘noise’. With hundreds of links flying around, websites ranking higher than they should and tireless self-promotion in evidence wherever you look, it’s no wonder people single out SEO for criticism. But in most cases this is completely unjustified.
The simple fact is that for as long as search engines reward sites for optimisation, people will keep optimising. The algorithms continuously update to ensure that underhanded techniques aren’t benefiting, which is helping remove these unethical techniques. In an industry where the strength of your link infrastructure is ascribed such importance and keywords play a part in dictating a site’s relevance to SERPs rankings; SEO will always be essential.
The Googlebot can’t see what your site looks like. It doesn’t have the ability to read a flash image. It can’t see your cutting edge photographs. What it sees is just plain, ugly, text. Your content needs to be up to scratch, but so do your H1 and H2 headings as well as your background Meta. It’s not as simple as creating an awe-inspiring site and assuming it will get picked up.
SEO is Relevant for as Long as Search Engines Remain Popular
To steal (and misuse) a hip hop cliché, people should understand that online you don’t hate the player, you hate the game. In this instance the ‘player’ is search engine optimisation itself, whilst the ‘game’ is website marketing. Until user quality ratings are introduced, something Google has touted, or a search engine crawler can scan a page in its visual entirety, people will use SEO – whether organically or otherwise. In fact, even if these things are introduced, SEO will still always be essential as long as search engines use algorithms dictated by automated crawlers to create rankings, it just has to evolve to adapt to the changes.
I myself have questioned whether the Internet has become too noisy, but for me at least, the ‘noise’ that is being generated is largely the result of an overabundance of unofficial news sources (yes, I appreciate the irony of that statement) and social media. So if SEO is spammy, what does that make its heir apparent social media? But with so much financial incentive on the Internet and such a high level of competition, we are all drawn to optimise through any channel; professional services merely fulfil the supply and demand quota for those who are unable to do it themselves.
Final Installment
Tackling the issue of SEO as a spammy practice and finding out, with this in mind, just how much it differs Powazek’s proposed solution – social media.
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Published by SEO Prof Andy
23
What Tests Should I Try On My Landing Pages?
0 Comments | Posted by andy in Landing Page Optimisation, Link Building, Local Search, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Marketing Resources, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Landing page testing and optimisation has really started to pick up over the past six months and with more and more advertisers conducting tests, the more difficult it becomes for those of you who are not.
If three of your main competitors are frequently conducting tests, they will be collating extremely valuable data on how visitors react to their web page design.
Testing elements of landing pages is now playing a fundamental part of increasing a website’s conversion rate. There are a number of key elements on a page which warrant testing to find out what works for your customers and what doesn’t. How do you know unless you test?
The idea for this blog post came about when I was looking around the web for elements that I could test within a web page. There are lots of sources out there giving us ideas, so I thought a summary of my findings would benefit all.
Page Structure Tests
Page structure tests involve changing a key element on the page to differ completely from the original.
- Size and contents of the page header
- Size and contents of the page footer
- Horizontal vs. vertical navigation bar
- Trust symbols and accreditation logos
- Size and location of forms
- Swapping page sections from left to right
- Single vs. multiple columns
Main Headline Tests
People respond differently to the way a headline on a page is written, some respond to capitalisation, some respond to numerical statistics etc
- Asking a question
- Website not ranking for key terms?
- Is your website not ranking well for your key terms?
- Do you know how to get your website ranking for key terms?
- Business focus vs. customer focus
- We can help you increase your visibility in the search engines
- You can increase your websites visibility in the search engines
- Capitalisation vs. non capitalisation
- We Can Help You Improve Your Search Engine Rankings
- We can help you improve your search engine rankings
- Bold, capitalisation, underline, normal and italic
- We can help you improve your search engine rankings
- We can help you improve your search engine rankings
- We can help you improve your search engine rankings
- We can help you improve your SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS
- We can help you improve your search engine rankings
- Statistics
- We have helped 100’s of websites achieve page one rankings on Google
- We have saved customers £100’s in AdWords spend
Content Tests
We all worry about what a page looks like. Would you be surprised that some of the more plain web pages convert better? Testing colours and font styles have been known to drive significant increases in a websites conversion rate.
- Long paragraphs of text vs. short paragraphs of text
- Bullet points
- Punctuation
- Font size
- Font style
- Call to action button colours
- Call to action wording
The BBC News website posted an article which really brings home how much first impressions count on the web.
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Published by SEO Prof Andy
