SEO Advice

Christmas week is the time to get shit done!

December 29, 2011, by No comments yet

I love The week between Christmas and New Year. When most people are putting their feet up or worse battling through the high-street sales and its accompanying traffic jam, I prefer to use the time to get a good head start on the new year. This week is great! No one calls, emails are quiet, there’s few people in the office and no appointments to go to (except the one for me) which means you can really buckle down and clear all those niggly little things that have been on your to-do list for what seems like forever.

Here’s my top list of things to do this week:

  • Write some procedural manuals for the team – This helps keep the current team in check and ensures everyone is working to the same set of rules. It also means new team members have an easy to follow manual that introduces them to our (my) way of working.
  • Check Google Analytics and see if you can find any ‘low hanging fruit’ – As SEO usually achieves uplift across the entire website, you may discover some hidden gems. Look out for long tail keywords that are driving revenue/enquiries in position 3+ and give them some link building love to see a dramatic improvement.
  • Try out some new tools – This year I discovered a load of really great SEO tools and this week im getting the chance to set up some trial accounts to see if they can help improve workflow or deliver some super efficiencies in the way we do thing. If you’re lacking in anything to play with give buzzstream, raven seo tools and ontolo tools a try.

The down side to coming in is that the already difficult task of finding a really good sandwich in Manchester city centre is made worse in that most of the sandwich shops are closed.

Have a great new year folks…

Are TLD’s Like .info, .name, .tel, .mobi and .co as good as .com, .net, .org?

August 17, 2011, by 8 comments

I’ve been asked the same question in almost every job I’ve been in.

“Mark, I can only buy .info (or some other TLD) because .com, .co.uk, .net and .org have already been taken. Are these any good?”

My answer is always

“Yes, why wouldn’t it be?”

The next questions is,

“but I’ve never seen a .info (or whatever) ranking. Surely they can’t be as good?”

To clarify, these newer domain types have been created to give you more choice when buying domain names for your project as most of the good .com’s etc. has already been snapped up and often squatted on by other people. The reason you’ve probably not seen any of these domains ranking is more than likely due to the type of people buying them.

Businesses still want a .com, .co.uk or other regional TLD whereas the SEO community will buy pretty much any domain name that’s an exact match for a keyword due to this type of domain being rankable with only 10%of the effort you would put into a branded domain. The sad thing is that many of these exact match domains are under used, not even achieving the hundred or so unique links needed to get them ranking for their keywords. As a result they don’t appear to compete on page one of Google for any significantly competitive term.

It’s more a matter of effort than effectiveness.

Some of the newer TLD’s have certain bias i.e. .me, .me.uk and .name are all supposed to be for personal projects just like .org and .org.uk were supposed to be for not for profit organisations. However you can mostly forget that.

How can you make best use of one of these domains?

My advice is always to snap up as many exact match domains for your top performing keywords as possible and build a non-branded resource (your exact match domain should be your brand)|. Be careful to create content that doesn’t compete with the hone page’s target keyword and get your website to around 100 pages of content. Then cherry pick some links by using Open Site Explorers competitor backlink data and you should start seeing your new domain ranking pretty quickly. Think of them like lead gen sites. They should answer questions and offer solutions to problems and NOT be sales tools. You can of course add in a contact form or “if you need help call…” call to action in your header however I would encourage you to remove commercial intent from your content.

Ultimate Guide to SEO Effective Title Tags Part 1

August 16, 2011, by No comments yet

This is part one of a two part post… Stay tuned for tips 6 – 10.

When starting a new project or auditing an existing campaign, my number one tip that will guarantee you a higher search position is getting your page titles right. I start with this part of the process every time and clients are constantly surprised with how effective it is.

It goes without saying that your page titles should reflect the language used by your customers, Just because you sell a product called “abc123 widgetor in tangerine” doesn’t mean people are searching for that so your changing your content and title to read “orange widgets” would work much better for you and net you more traffic.

So what are my top tips for getting your page titles in super-efficient traffic driving condition?

1 – Don’t Using The Same Title Across Different Pages

I see this mainly with canonical domains, product categories that are paginated or pages where the web developer has forgotten to generate page titles. Having multiple pages using the same  text content causes Google to think “which page is right” and runs the risk of your most valuable content being replaced in the search results by some interstitial page.

Fixing canonical title duplication can be as simple as fixing your websites navigation or at least adding in the rel canonical tag to the pages affected. For paginated content simply start your title with “Page 2 – keyword string…” This should be enough to give Google the hint that this page is less important.

2 – You Don’t Need To Repeat Any Keyword More Than Once

Time and time again I see people squeezing repetition into their page titles. This is a wasted effort as Google is intelligent enough to understand the focus of your title and doesn’t need reminding by repeating one of your keywords every second or third word. Having individual keywords from your target text string is enough… Google will scan forwards and backwords through the string and match up phrase combinations from inbound anchor text with the individual words in your titles.

3 -  Don’t Use Chains of Keywords

I see titles that are “Keyword One | Keyword Two | Keyword Three” all too often. Yes if a site with this style of title is 1 or 2 it will get significant clicks however if you’re further down the page then it pays to entice a click out of the viewer by making your title more copy friendly. Try adding a call to action within a sentence that accurately depicts what the page is about.

4 – Start Your Title With Your Main Target Keyword

With the exception of your websites home page, every page on your website should have a title tag starting with your keyword. I recommend having your business name as the start of your home page reinforcing the brand and backing up brand keyword link anchors.

5 – Don’t Creating Titles That Compete Through Synonyms

Today I reviewed a website for a PR company where they had a title along the lines of “Brand X PR, Manchester Social Media Marketing and PR Agency”. Having done my homework and looked through Google’s synonyms it was clear that PR, Public Relations and Marketing are all synonyms of each other. This means that in Google’s eyes they’re the same (or there about). So by varying your inbound link buildings anchor text using these terms a shorter page title like “Brand X PR & Social Media Agency Manchester” would achieve the same result. What’s more this opens up some space to inject words like Services, Company etc which all help broaden the pages long tail appeal.

To find synonyms of your keywords enter each word preceded by a tilde symbol into the Google search box i.e. ~my ~keyword.

Hopefully you should now be on your way to effectively optimising your websites Title Tags. Stay tuned for tips 6 through 10.

Change The Way You Think About Web Design and Content

August 13, 2011, by 4 comments

When most businesses start to think about having a website designed they often turn to their peers for a source of inspiration. The problem with this approach is that this means that businesses looking to revamp or start a new web project are in fact looking at old sites for inspiration. The net effect of this is that every site in a niche starts to look the same, the content is dry and uninspiring and no one business stands out from the crowd. The same can be said of SEO too.

In the SEO industry, many SEO professionals first look to competitor backlink profiles as a way of filling each month’s link quota. In a similar fashion to the above, this means that all the SEO is doing is building links form the same sources, following the market leaders. This type of technique ensures that your website will never exceed that of those you are following and is a strategy that rarely succeeds.

So where should your SEO team be focusing their efforts?

In a Content Strategy.

You can fix both of the above issues by re-working your website’s design and content, replacing the dry, uninspiring corporate sales pitches with impartial guides, and documentation that offers  solutions and answers questions. By becoming a ‘thought leader’ in your industry, not only will your business attract more custom, it will also reduce your lead times, improve media exposure an develop links organically and may even get you some links from your competitors websites which are the best links to have.

It’s all good and well me telling you to do this and you may even think it’s a good idea but how do you start?

Whether you are a retailer or service provider my solution would be to think like a magazine. Magazines traditionally get hundreds if not thousands more hits per day than standard commercial websites. They do this by delivering high quality, impartial and thought provoking content on a daily basis. What’s more, this content is rarely unique in its subject, as most magazines run similar stories as others in  their niches.

Getting new topics to talk about is simple. By using Google Alerts, you can receive daily updates on topics in your industry. Once you’ve identified appropriate article titles then you can simply announce the news and add your opinion on the subject. It’s as simple as that. Maintaining your website should only take a few hours a day and can be spread out across your team. Your SEO company can also help by improving the targeting of your content to ensure it attracts the maximum amount of visitors across keywords that your customers are using.

Retailers can add in product recommendations, discuss trends and include related celebrity news. Service industries can promote industry news, trends, display analysis and write FAQ’s amongst a host of other content.

Your next question is probably “But Mark, this sounds like a lot of effort. How will it make me money?”

By being the clear expert in your field, answering your customers’ questions and genuinely providing impartial, non-sales content you will not only attract significantly more hits to your website, but also improve the number and quality of your enquiries. All you have to do is add a small panel to the top right of the page that states something along the lines of “For free help and advice call 0800 xxx xxxx or email you@yourbusiness.com”.

A Work Around for Adwords Brand Terms

August 9, 2011, by No comments yet

I have a client who had authorisation to use brand keywords in Adwords ads. Unfortunately that was in an account held by an old agency which is a major pain because it would really kick ass if I could have ads with brand keywords in it and I know the conversions would be higher.

At the moment I’m working around the problem interjecting keywords between the brand phrase. This works OK and people probably get that the products being advertised are from the brand but its less than ideal.

What I have found does work is having your brand in the URL. Currently there’s no restriction on that portion of the ad.

This kicks ass as at least theres some reassurance that the ad is for branded items.

…give it a go.

SEO Manchester

August 8, 2011, by No comments yet

With my recent Leeds based SEO experiment working pretty well (see the side bar) I thought it about time i tried one for SEO Manchester just to see if this keywords which nets around 5 times the traffic would be as easy a prospect.

Obviously I’m going up against lots of domains like SEOManchester.com and SEO-Manchester.co.uk which will no doubt be in there somewhere, still it will be interesting to see if this page ranks without too much difficulty

Google Says It Uses Valid HTML and CSS In Its Quality Score

August 8, 2011, by No comments yet

Found an interesting thread on Google Webmaster blog that states that Google now use code validation as part of its quality score.

This is pretty massive as for years now I’ve been saying that yes, valid HTML is best practice but that no, it doesn’t really matter to Google.

Of course, like me many SEO’s have until this point added validation errors into our on-site SEO analysis however with the advent of HTML5 and other techniques that can result in as yet, non standard practices (i’m thinking wrapping block level elements in a link).

So in short, get out your W3C validators and start hassling your clients web development team! They’re going to love you for this!

SEO ROI Calculator – 4 Chart Analysis To Estimate ROI Over Time

May 18, 2011, by 11 comments

I’ve been wracking my brains for over a month now with a persistent problem cooked up by the sales team… how to (as accurately as possible) calculate the ROI for an SEO campaign over time.

I completely understand that from a clients point of view ROI is all that matters however with a shifting landscape that is SEO this is not as easy as A+B=C.

What i have devised is a series of charts that when combined provide a reasonably solid foundation for an ROI calculation:

Rationale SEO ROI Calculator 4 Chart Analysis To Estimate ROI Over Time

 

Chart 1 shows click through rates for keywords within the top 20 results (you can find these anywhere or buy accurate ones from the excellent hitwise team).

Chart 2 uses data from the Google Adwords keyword tool to depict seasonality.

Chart 3 shows compression of traffic advancement. Basically the movement up the SERPS gets smaller as the placement gets higher.

Chart 4 is the actual combined chart.

To give this more weight get real enquiry to sale information and an average cost per order from the client and bobs your mothers brother… you have an SEO ROI calculator for your client!

I would publish our spreadsheet that does this but its a trade secret and i’d have to kill you lolz.

Have SEO ROI Calculated For Your Campaign

If you’d like us to calculate ROI for your SEO campaign then please give me a call on 0845 688 4491 or email markrush@gmail.com. We will need to take some sensitive data like your websites conversion rate, average basket value, keyword focus, budget and current rankings to give you the best prediction.

Thanks to James O – Maths wiz extrordinare for making my dream a reality ;)

Awesome Post Panda SEO Analysis

May 10, 2011, by 4 comments

The guys at smartinsights.com have put together a really great chart that shows the effectiveness of varying link types in the post panda landscape. This is really interesting as it basically means push-button SEO is dead… however I don’t see many SEO businesses moving their campaigns from directories and article marketing to direct link building/guest blogging.

Link Building Tactics 600x423 Awesome Post Panda SEO Analysis

Check out more on the post on their site

Post Panda Proactive Practices for SEO

April 13, 2011, by 6 comments

So Google Panda has hit across all English language sites and we’re currently experiencing indexation as SERPS bounce around as kinks are valued and data across data-centres are normalised. So far so good.

The only issues I’ve seen are with select ecommerce websites where products light on content have been effected… a quick trip to Hitwise shows that our clients are not alone with hits being down throughout March (partially possibly due to seasonal and external financial factors too)… however a few sites are bucking the trend and have shown growth throughout this time.

What do these progressive sites have in common? Well firstly they don’t rely on article marketing for the bulk of their link building activities, secondly they invest heavily in on-page content and have really gone to town to make their sites useful and resourceful for their visitors.

So i guess Rand was right… content is finally king.

For those of you who are despairing about the demise of article marketing my advice is to turn to blogger outreach and sites like myblogguest.com where you can place good content across a wide pool of domains… just get your content sorted out and for gods sake stop spinning those articles… that’s just madness now.