SEO It’s Not Voodoo

I’m up late writing this SEO Liverpool post, because the subject has been on my mind for a few days now. I’m going to dispel a myth. The myth that has helped less reputable SEO companys peddle their snake oil and simply rip businesses off.

“The notion that there are 1001 things to do in SEO is ridiculous”.

I’m not a member of some sort of magic circle, I won’t find a horses head in my bed but some SEO’s won’t appreciate me telling you this.

There are labour intensive tasks that need to be undertaken, but please understand, it’s not that complicated. You don’t need some Matrix style coder and some über geek in residence. There isn’t a 2000 point route map that needs to be addressed for each client.

I’ll say It again ‘It’s an art not a science” and in my opinion, creative marketers make the best SEO’s.

SEO requires a comprehensive understanding of the business in question. The SEO team must understand their goals, have detailed product and brand understanding. You’ll need buyer behaviour insight and a good understanding of different persona’s of searcher behaviour and interactions.

You’ll need buy in from all the other associated departments and managers (everyone needs to sing from the same hymn sheet). Most importantly being able to manage expectations and a lot of creativity are invaluable.

Your SEO must be a reader, the first part of my day will be spent catching up with 20 or so blogs, and then check over my data.

Just wanted to let you guys know.

How Many Links Would be Too Many?

When I’m reading over notes for SEO Liverpool and Summit Online Marketing, I feel it’s quite important to revisit important information, especially if I’m receiving questions around the subject.

I received an enquiry about a website that had lots of links and believe they’re getting penalised for it. The copy seemed succinct, keyword rich and the meta data looked good.

A few years ago I remember reading that over 100 links on a page can be considered a link farm.

My quick bit of advice revolved around PageRank sculpting to enhance search engine ranking. The classic way to negotiate lots of links is in changing them to no-follow links. This is a quick and easy way of not passing on your hard earned ‘juice’ to unnecessary third parties.

Although how much juice still gets through is debatable.

On closer inspection they had gone with the classic ‘ball’ linking structure (Every page links to every other page). It’s not very effective at conserving and spreading the link juice (PageRank, link reputation and link popularity).

I wasn’t saying this was a bad thing, but with SEO, testing is key. I advised changing the structure to what is known as a ‘pyramid’ linking structure.

A pyramid linking structure

Typically all the links leaving the home page are no-followed, except the one leading to the sitemap. The sitemap has normal links to everything, except the home page. With internal pages, everything is no-follow except the link back to the home page. It creates a feedback loop, concentrating all the link love back to the home page. This could mean you’ll be getting a lot of traffic from your internal pages… depending on your content!

Food for thought.

Page Speed Loading Times

As I’ve mentioned many times here at SEO Liverpool I get lots of questions via email. A frequently asked question and something I’d like to talk about today, is the importance of web page loading speeds. Basically, page loading speeds can be important!

Just for clarity, we’re talking about when you click on a website and it takes longer than expected to bring all the elements to the page. This isn’t a broadband problem, you may end up with a page that has no real elements and lot’s of white space.

I’m going to tell you why it’s important from two important perspectives

Human point of view

0.1 load speed – this is instantaneous a 1 second load will also seem very smooth. If you take between 5-10 seconds then you’ll lose potential visitors who’ll click off. There is not a definitive number as some of us are ‘children of the dial up’ and may have more patience. Another person may have less patience or assume the webpage is broken.

Search Engine point of view

About 4 years ago online marketing consultants became aware that page load speed is a part of the Google algorithm. This is important, but I wouldn’t get to hung up on it.

If you use Google Adwords for your PPC then page load speed takes on a more important role. In fact a very important role! It will be part of the landing page (web page) quality score.

This means that you could reach the positions you want and conceivable pay less per keyword.

Factors that may be detrimental to page load speeds

  • Masses of Java, CSS or Flash
  • High resolution images
  • Hosting your own videos
  • Frames – if you’re still using frames then you need a website update

 Next Steps

If you look at the Google webmaster central blog, it has a selection of tools that will help you determine problems and provide help.

Negative SEO Is It Possible?

SEO training has evolved over the past 4 years, the fundamentals are still the same, but with vastly different ancillary objectives. As Summit Online Marketing, we go into businesses offering our tailored SEO packages. Generally, we discuss actions, provide robust strategic marketing plans and discuss relevant activities. Sometimes, a sheepish employee will asked this question “can we affect our competitors SEO efforts”?

Let me explain, a few years ago, we looked at the impacts, if any, of negative SEO on websites, and a discussion arose from an article on search sabotage.

A year later, we’re still discussing the consequences and seeing if negative SEO is still possible. In various threads we’ve read, the SEO community have indicated there are still ways to sabotage websites and rankings, from hijacking competitor’s DNS to doing it to yourself by killing your URL structure.

Now, though, there’s potentially more with the impact of new technologies. New concerns about sabotage may take the form of cloaked sabotage or reputation sabotage. This isn’t to say the impact of traditional techniques such as parasite hosting and embedding hidden links has been diminished.

We’d recommend that you need to be the one who protects your site, because Google isn’t necessarily reliable in that regard. (After all, Google is tracking billions of pages.) However, not many people know how to protect their own websites.

We believe that a lot of SEO sabotage attempts involve trying to trick Google into thinking that a site should be penalised and does not meet guidelines. That can be by directly modifying the site (through legitimate mechanisms to do so, or by finding vulnerabilities and exploiting them) and by modifying or setting up external references to a site.

Food for thought

Google’s Penalties

It never fails to astound me how people constantly opt for the cheapest deal. Cheap search engine optimization is a misnomer, if you want the best SEO you have to pay for it. If it was cheap and simple, then for £50 or £100 per month everyone would be Page 1.

I’ve worked on many campaigns at SEO Liverpool but up until about 4 months ago I was only aware of two real Google penalties. The outright ban, where a site will be completely removed from the Google index and the minus 40-60 penalty.

About 9 months ago I started talking to a local company about helping them with their SEO efforts. As usual, we sounded each other out and it looked like we could move forward. Typically, we had no contact for a few months, then unexpectedly, my contact called me up and said that all of his Google rankings had disappeared. He explained that the only thing his site was ranking for was its name. The site came up no.1 for his two word company name and no.1 for the domain. However all of the other positions the site had with the homepage, albeit not good ones had disappeared. I had a little play around and even when I tried searching for some unique text off the homepage (in quotes) it didn’t come up.

So I asked this guy a couple of questions, you know – have you made any changes recently that could have caused this to happen? After about 5 minutes, he confessed to talking to a guy he knew, who’d gave him some help… he was cheap… etc. His sage advice was to place lots of area names at the bottom of the homepage, which he did… in tiny text so that nobody could see!

I told him in 5 seconds “The site has been penalised, you put hidden text in and attempted to deceive Google”. We got rid of the hidden text, I told him what to say to Google on the reinstatement request and his site was back to where it was previously within a week.

The point of this little story is that SEO evolves at an incredible rate. If you’ve missed ‘Panda 2.0′ and probably the most devastating ‘Search plus your world’, then you might as well not bother calling yourself an SEO. Remember, if you pay peanuts you get monkeys. A search engine will penalise you! Use a respected SEO company, and understand that your nephew, his mate or the fella down the pub doesn’t have a clue.

Should We Optimise Phone Numbers

Firstly SEO Liverpool would like to wish all our readers a very Happy New Year.

Lets get to the first question of the year. Phone numbers, is there an advantage to having them on your search engine placement.

Would displaying a phone number in your title tag increase your click-through-rate for your search listing. Is the searcher actually searching for your phone number? We’re talking about the actual phone number not the phrase ‘phone number’…. depending on the business, maybe.

You could conceivably take away traffic from Yell, or other sites that list your business’s phone number.

The only interesting point for me would be optimising for competitors phone number, to draw in a click. You may possibly steal some traffic, but not a very nice tactic.

Personally, I think that meta data is to important to waste on phone numbers, use the local business listings for that type of optimisation

The Art Of Internet Marketing

Last week, I had a rather nice discussion with a top SEO in Liverpool. It was regarding the tricky subject of SEO outsourcing. Like others, we receive lots of unsolicited emails from companies who wish to partner with us. It’s very tough, as our reputation is the key component of our business strategy. To make sure we find the right candidate, we try to have a discussion around current marketing issues and this brought up some interesting points…

The way advertising used to work, is by interrupting you, by intruding on your TV or radio show, or with full page ads in print. Then the smart companies – all of whom produce very average products like soap and toothpaste – would take everything they earned and reinvest it back into more ads. Eventually, having heard or seen the message enough times, you might try the blue box instead of the yellow box, next time you’re in need for what’s in the box.

These days… the best advertising comes from your friends. From social networks. From the conversations of people with like minds and tastes.

What you need to do is to create something remarkable. Special enough that it evokes emotion and compels people to leave comments on your blog and discuss the idea. To be successful in today’s market, you need a product worth talking about.

Then you need to create a story. It’s the story that people will relate to, claim as their own, and repeat to anyone who would listen. If you tell a better story, you can ask a lot higher price for your product. Then having a remarkable product, and an exceptional story, people will find you, and buy your product for the story. They’ll want to tell their friends, family, coworkers and anyone else who will listen.

Suddenly everyone is running around telling your story. They start doing the interrupting, that the advertising used to do. That’s what it means to be remarkable. In the near future… who knows? Maybe you’ll create something remarkable, package it in a marvellous story, and have everyone talking… doing the interrupting, that advertising used to do.

Important SEO Practices

What are the Most Important Search Engine Optimisation Practices?

SEO Liverpool get lots of requests for tips and tricks?

1) When you start doing SEO, write down every thing you do and monitor results closely. If you make a change, write that down too — and continue reviewing.

2) If you work with clients, you may want to opt in for an NDA (non disclosure agreement) so that they don’t “reuse any specialist codes you might be using as part of [your] strategy to work that magic.”

3) Content creation is a full time job and SEO “is five minutes at the start and five minutes at the end.” Content creation entails keyword research, articles targeting the proper keywords, using appropriate titles, and using keyword-targeted links.

4) Create accessible sites and follow accessibility guidelines.

5) Review your analytics and see what works and what doesn’t.

Quick SEO Joke

SEO Expert Walks Into a Bar, Bars, Pub, Public House, Irish Pub, Drinks, Beer, Wine, Spirits, Vodka

If you don’t get it, you shouldn’t be reading this blog!

Re-defining Success with a PPC Brand Awareness Campaign

As an Online Marketing Company, we know the dynamics of an acquisition campaign are fairly simple. You bid on keywords, users click on your ads, and then do one of the following: complete the call to action, become a lead, make a purchase, or move on. Given that, it’s fairly easy to define success and justify the spend, whether it’s click through rates, cost per clicks, cost per leads, or return on ad spend.

However, when you use paid search for branding, rather than Web SEO, things are not so straight forward. Yes, you give users more freedom to interact with your site. However, it comes with a price: inability to track pure conversions. This can be scary territory for most search marketers. That’s why it is so important to redefine your success metrics. Not only will it help you accomplish your objectives and justify the spend, but it can also help eliminate the risk of not getting the campaign off the ground, or getting your budget cut due to either tough economic times or a less-than-convinced boss sceptical about the investment.

Successful branding PPC Campaigns: 6 key steps

1. The first step towards re-defining success is to segment your keywords into different buckets, depending on the intent of the user. To do this, you first need to put yourself in their shoes. Then, based upon the queries they conduct, think about how familiar they are with your brand. You can have several buckets, but in its basic form, you want to divide the keywords into groups of branded and non-branded terms. As you do this, try and assess what action or meaning the words denote. For example, with the non-branded terms, does the query indicate that they are a prime candidate to become a lead or make a purchase, or does it demonstrate that they are too new to the company to be ready to convert yet? You’ll need to take a close look at the branded keyword list as well, only here you’ll want to assess whether they are actively seeking what you have to offer, or if they are simply looking for information about the company or its products or services.

2. Once you have your keywords bucketed, start thinking about what would be important to know about your users. Fortunately, there’s a veritable goldmine of data available at your finger tips. Not only can you tap into data from the engines, but your Web analytics program should provide interesting data as well, and then there’s still more data available — though you may need to do some digging for it.

3. You should also examine what’s going on with your site. And while onsite metrics seem simple on the surface, most companies’ analytics packages are not set up to track these effectively. Given that, here are a few metrics to consider: the clicks your ads receive, page views, the bounce rate, and the percentage of returning visitors as compared with new visitors. In addition, you’ll want to track certain elements of your site that you deem more valuable than others, whether it’s a specific area, or a type of interaction such as downloading a whitepaper or starting a shopping cart. Remember, often the set up for such tracking will take some heavily lifting from your analytics. Also, aim to track each of the above metrics by engine, keywords, and channel. However, don’t mix-up your total site or organic efforts in this new tracking.

4. Next, you should consider looking off-site to track and monitor your competitors’ PPC activity to understand your share of voice for particular keywords or groups of keywords. Doing so will help you understand your brand impression share. Fortunately, there are some offsite metrics that are easy to track and use. For example, impressions and average ad position are two of the most basic, but Google now has a way for you to track loss of impressions.

5. Then there are conversion metrics that you can use to help guide the branding success metrics. For example, if you have an acquisition, add that into the mix, cost per lead, return on ad spend, call tracking, increased sales, or interactions at physical locations. This gives you data about how many times someone may visit the site from the branding campaign before they convert, or the downstream value of a user that does click on certain keywords.

6. Once you’ve decided on the data you want to track, start thinking about the best combination for the different buckets of keywords you have, and the weights you want to assign to each. Remember, no metric should carry equal importance in the overall definition of success. For example, visits to certain sections of the site, or increased pages views might be more important to you than the percentage of returning visitors. Then test. Tracking a PPC branded campaign takes a lot of effort and will require you to test the various combinations and weights in order to get the most out of your budget.

Putting it all together

To make the above work, you need to be creative; try different combinations and weightings of the vast amount of data available to you. And keep in mind that you get to define success metrics here, so it’s up to you to go and be successful.

Overall, a PPC marketer looking to leverage paid search for branding purposes needs to take the time to first redefine success. Not only will it help you accomplish your objectives and justify the spend, it can also help to eliminate risk, and instill the value.

Social Media – Who’s It For?

My SEO Manchester friends and I on occasionally, get down the pub for a few pints and go over some FAQ’s, Tips and generally talk about our industry. I thought we’d go a little social today.

The use of Social Media.

  • To connect with people. Reach the people where they are in the way they are used to.
  • Keep brand positioning. Keep brand awareness to relay offline marketing campaigns.
  • Generate more traffic for website
  • Enlarge the targeted segment. Different types of people use different types of media.
  • Increase the use experience, testing and engagement
  • Plus leverage current marketing results, get better brand awareness, get better brand management, get better user stickiness, get better quality products, get more sales.

The requirements for Social Media

  • Global means local. Because we deal with communities we need to be close to them. The communities are still local, if you want to go global, you need to be where they are an in their language.
  • Resources. Community managers need to get more focus.
  • Consistency. The effort should start and last. Be sure to keep users with your community.
  • Content. The content should get more focus and be relevant.

How you can use social media to benefit you in conjunction with or independently of your search marketing campaign?

Social media is really broad – Twitter, IM, Facebook, blogs, etc. We find the most viable part of social media is to increase your visibility, ranking, links to your site, etc.

Lets be honest, as an SEO Company we know all want you guys really want is a website that gets lots of relevant traffic. If you want a Google number one listing, the important factors are: Domain Age –  On Page Factors – links.

Links are much harder to get these days, especially with problems with getting paid links. Social media can really help you here with links, traffic, visibility, and branding.

How it  do it: create content on a section on your site, find specific communities that will react well to your topic (don’t put your political content on a dog site), and engage the people in these communities.People with blogs are looking for content and look at these communities. If you get your content on these sites, you get lots of exposure. People write about you, link to you, even talk to you outside of the web (TV, newspaper). You’re getting two types of links – community links (profiles showing what individuals voted on), and industry sites plus others that write about you. The second type usually has better visitors, and you get long-term influx of links (weeks/months).

Social Media Tips

  • Have a site that is social media friendly. Don’t plug advertising and marketing stuff. A week or so after you’re successful, then you can put advertising back on.
  • Pick communities you relate to. Research these communities, see what communities are appropriate.
  • Check what worked before. Do more research, see what was successful for others in your field.
  • Create high quality content.
  • Understand how to submit and push social campaigns.
  • Understand what to do with success.
  • Be social! Treat it like a real life social event.