Entries Tagged 'search engine optimisation' ↓

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll know that Search Engine Optimisation is a frequent subject that is visited.

It is vital for all internet marketers to get their heads round the concept of SEO as it is probably the most effective long term solution to gaining great Google rankings. And yet, many businesses are still opting for PPC campaigns which are not ideal long term and simply generate traffic quickly (if done correctly).

So what happens when your budget runs dry and you have to back off the PPC for a while? You guessed it, no traffic.

Investing in SEO may not give instant results but, if done correctly, will over time provide great organic listings and a constant stream of traffic.

So what’s the first step?

Keyword Research

One of the most important aspects of any SEO strategy is identifying the keywords you want to target. If you are unfamiliar with this term, your keyword(s) are the words and phrases real people (i.e. your potential customers) would search for to find your business.

But you have to be careful not to be too general in your choice of words. For example, copywriter in Google UK returns in the region of 3,820,000 results and is therefore a very competitive term. But, by going for a more regional term, such as Suffolk Copywriter (which returns 50,700 results) there is less competition and consequently more chance of you hitting the front page.

Keyword Tools

There are a number of tools available out there, but the most popular is Google’s Adwords tool. But, to get the most out of it, you have to learn how to use it effectively. I recently came across  this post on dailybloggr.com – “Tips to Use Google’s Keyword Research Tool Effectively” which will help you understand how to find the optimum keywords for your industry to ensure you attract the right traffic to your website.

Why not pop over there now and take a look and take the first step on your SEO journey.

Sally Ormond – freelance copywriter

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Content is King!

How many times have you been told that?

Well, it is true. Internet marketers have been telling you for years if you want more organic traffic you must publish more web content targeted at your long tail keywords. Finally, you’re taking notice and more and more companies are adding page upon page to their websites of new content.

But of course, hiring a talented copywriter doesn’t come cheap. So, adding hundreds of new pages of content to your website is going to be expensive.

Now, there is a group of you out there who think you’ve found the perfect solution to this. I can see you patting yourself on the back because you think you’ve got the best of both worlds – shed loads of new content without the high price tag. If that’s you, you’ve probably done one of two things:

• Out sourced your content writing to an Indian company or elsewhere in the world where you can pick up loads of articles for next to nothing
• Decided to take the DIY approach and written it yourself

Big mistake!

Yes, you are increasing your web content at a great rate of knots – but at what cost? And I’m not talking about how much you’ve paid for it; I’m talking about the cost to your reputation.

Why you shouldn’t value quantity over quality

Watering down the quality of your website content in this way could have a seriously detrimental effect on your rankings. Remember those? You’ve quite possibly spent years working on your search engine optimisation to achieve great rankings, do you really want to jeopardise them now?

A big part of your SEO strategy is building back links. Of course, people will only link to you if you provide great content. If you start to water down the quality of your content with poor articles, people won’t want to link to you. And if they don’t link to you…you got it, you’ll start sliding down the rankings faster than soap down a helter-skelter. If you want to attracts links, your content must be entertaining, intertesing and appealing.

But there is a more serious consequence – yes, even more serious than affecting your rankings. Low quality content will have a detrimental effect on your company’s image. Now for the science bit – take a look at these equations:

Great Content = Increased value + Positive effect on your company’s image

Poor quality content = Disappointed readers + Negative effect on your company’s image

OK, so maths was never my strong point but I’m sure you get the gist.

Why am I telling you this?

Because, if you don’t invest in quality content for your website you are going to do some serious long term damage to your reputation.

If you’re not particularly bothered about anything I’ve warned against here, go and hire a company that will generate oodles of content for you for just a few pounds. But if you do care about your image and reputation, invest in a quality freelance copywriter and focus on getting quality content. Yes, it will cost you more but the long term benefits speak for themselves.

The choice is yours.

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Every business that uses the internet wants to get found. That’s pretty obvious, right? But how to you go about getting found?

Search engine optimisation is obviously a big part of this, which is a subject I’ve talked about a lot on this blog. One aspect of that is building back links.

What’s a back link?

If you want people to find your website, you need lots of arrows pointing to it – these ‘arrows’ are back links. Take, for example, the paragraph above. As you can see there’s a link – search engine optimisation – that is an internal link as it points you to a previous blog post. However if I were to write about a freelance copywriter who would be able to boost your businesses visibility and sales by producing eye-catching sales writing that inspires customers to buy, that is a back link because it’s pointing to an external website.

How do you get back links?

Encouraging people to link to your website takes work. Generating high quality content is the key. If you are providing great information regularly, people will  want to link to you. Creating hints and tips in your chosen field will also help elevate you to expert status, and with that comes more links.  But there are ways you can also generate links yourself.

Blogging and article marketing are two very effective ways of building back links, especially the most sought after type – the keyword hypertext link. I showed you an example of that earlier by linking the words ‘freelance copywriter’. This just happens to be one of my key phrases. These are the most valuable links as they relate to your chosen keywords. You can generate a lot of links by submitting your website to directories, however they tend to just link by website name (e.g. Briar Copywriting) rather than by your keywords.

Going back to article marketing for a moment, when you post an article and insert a keyword hypertext link into your text, you are effectively funneling a bit of link juice to your website. That might sound a bit strange, but this is how it works. If you use an article site with a high Google Page Rank (e.g. ezinearticles) and they allow you to add hypertext keyword links which are follow links (as opposed to the no follow link), a little bit of page rank is also passed along the link. Therefore the more links like that, the higher your chances of increasing your own website’s page rank.

Another way of generating back links is by guest blogging and using social media and social networking sites. These are great because you can add your profile details to widen your ‘internet footprint’ therefore boosting your chances of being found online. Some sites even provide facilities to create your own micro-site which gives you even more exposure. Taking advantage of opportunities likes these and contributing to forums etc., will boost your exposure.

One giant step…

Generating back links is invaluable and you would do well to get into a routine to create blogs and articles that constantly generate links for you. Make sure the content is fantastic and keyword rich to encourage others to link to you.

But don’t forget about the other elements of SEO. Back links should just be one part of your SEO strategy. You must also consider your website’s structure and content.

All three elements are essential if you want your website to be found online. But you must remember that SEO is an ongoing process. You have to constantly review your keywords, constantly tweak and update your content to get the optimium amount of traffic and conversions and you must continually build back links.

Your competitors will be doing all of this, so if you stop you’ll gradually become invisible to online customers.

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When people think about search engine optimisation, they immediately start thinking about keywords and search engine rankings. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you spend every waking hour worrying about that, you might be missing something more concerning; something that could be happening right now.

Every website owner should use Google Analytics. This small powerhouse of stats and graphs will show  you how your website is performing. Information such as which keywords bring you the most traffic, sources of your traffic, which pages get the most hits and the geographical spread of your visitors is all at your finger tips. But one of the key stats that will show how effective your website is, is the bounce rate.

What is bounce rate?

The bounce rate is a figure that shows the percentage of visitors to your website that leave within the first 10 seconds. And that’s not good. If visitors are leaving that soon it shows that they haven’t found what they were looking for. A site with a low bounce rate (say below 30%) will be a website that is converting its visitors into customers. A site with a bounce rate of 50% and higher is one that isn’t converting – it’s failing.

If your rate is 50% and above, its time to take a look at your SEO.

Factors affecting bounce rate

Traffic to your website comes from a number of different sources:

• organic search results
• backlinks from referal sites
• repeat visitors
• social bookmarking traffic
• PPC traffic

The source with the lowest bounce rate should be your PPC traffic – if you use pay per click. If the highest rate comes from your organic traffic this would suggest that you have a mismatch with your keywords.

As a freelance copywriter it won’t come as any surprise that that is one of my keywords. So if people Google freelance copywriter they’ll find me. But what if I’d targeted something like marketing agency and they were looking for a company to deal with all their design and branding needs? When they land on my home page they’d find great information about my freelance copywriting services but no mention of design or branding. The result would be that they would click away from my site which would lead to a high bounce rate.

Therefore it is essential you ensure your keyword selection truly reflects what you do. Shed loads of traffic is useless without conversions.

But it might not be just down to your keywords. Here are other factors that may be causing people to click away from you site:

• too much advertising – this could be making your site look messy with too many messages
• videos and music – especially if they are on auto play as soon as your website is opened. The can be really annoying
• navigation choices – too many and your visitors will get confused, too few and they won’t know where to go next
• slow loading speed – peopel don’t like hanging around waiting for websites to load
• excessive corporate speak and jargon in your copy will be a huge turn off
• bad design – if you site looks unattractive it won’t encourage people to stay

So, if you are experiencing high bounce rates take a look at your site and compare it with the list above. Take another look at your keywords – are they really reflecting what your site is about?

If you can bring down your bounce rate you’ll boost your conversations.

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The internet is taking over – hardly breaking news, but it is if you are a business owner. More and more people are searching for local companies through the search engines so it’s never been more important to ensure you have a strong local SEO presence on the web.

Many company websites concentrate on their products and services and omit their geographical details that will help them get found by consumers. With the advent of increased and improved mobile search, it is vital you stand out in your local area. And the best way to do that is by utilising the power of local search.

Location, location, location

If your company covers a specific geographical location, make sure those details are added to your HTML through page titles. You should also try and use these details within your copy and headings. But ensure you are sensible about it. Remember you are first and foremost writing for your reader – if you over do it, the page will look clumsy. Other areas for location information are within the footer along with your address and also within your internal hypertext linking structure. Instead of linking freelance copywriter, use a geographical reference such as Suffolk freelance copywriter.

YouTube

As well as optimising your website for local search terms, you can boost your presence by using video marketing. Upload your video to YouTube and then use very localised tags – without being spammy. The chances are (depending on the competitiveness of your keywords) you’ll be able to get these ranked and the more entries you can get on a front page local search results, the fewer your competitors can have.

Wider areas

Many buisnesses will serve multiple geographical areas. If this is the case, you should consider creating specific landing pages for each area. They should have unique content (you don’t want to fall foul of the duplicate content trap) and should be optimised for each specific area. Hypertext links within these pages can then drive your visitors to your main website.

Boost your profile

Social networking sites make it easy to spread your name and your business name to a wide audience. Set up social media profiles, again relating to your geographical region. But, as with the landing page content, make sure each description is different. You should also utilise Google Places, Yahoo local, and Bing Local to boost your local profile.

So the name of the game is local search – when creating your website always keep in mind your main business location and use it to its full potential.

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