Getting SEO Support In House Part 2

Continuing our the SEO Liverpool post on In House SEO.

In reality it maybe simpler, in fact so simple you may have overlooked it.

Most of the time, employees are simply busy! This could mean a couple of things

  1. People do not take kindly to new work being added to their work flow.
  2. People may not wish to be told they’ve got to learn new things.
  3. People have their own goals which measure performance, they want to meet their own targets and goals, not yours.

So what is the simple solution? Well, it’s a combination of listening, clear thinking and detailed planning.

Listening

This relates to goals, everybody needs their own goals to meet. In your case, you rely on others to perform tasks to meet your own goals. The likelihood is you’re not the person updating code or delivering and changing content. So through the goal may be stated simply enough (increasing inbound traffic) getting to it is absolutely a team effort.

In my experience the best way is to listen to people and help them achieve their goals. Then plan a way that shows how your effort will help them reach or exceed them. e.g. How the marketing mangers support will result in them exceeding targets and tapping into more markets, or using online marketing to gather data that will prove invaluable in offline campaigns.  This type of motivational approach won’t work in every instance, so what do you do to influence the rest of the teams, and make sure your tasks are undertaken?

So, we’ve covered the listening and we’ve touched on motivating others to implement your suggestions. We’ll cover the more in Part 3

Getting SEO Support In House Part 1

Here at SEO Liverpool, we provide SEO training to small and medium sized company’s with the resources in-house to implement a home grown SEO campaign.

If you’ve started, or considering the same…

You’ve decided, quite sensibly to start your in-house SEO programme. It was probably a very tough sell to convince the directors, line managers and other associated company directors to take on board your idea. Firstly, they probably didn’t understand the requirements first time round. You’ve been asked to provide your projected return on investment, which as every full time SEO understands, is very difficult. Factors outside of your control, such as algorithmic updates and other companies that already have a robust SEO strategy and varying budgets, dictate that you can’t stress any rewards against definitive time scales. You may have only been given a meeting or even a couple of slides to really engage the teams. Everybody was probably really shocked when you spoke in terms of years instead of months, regarding investment.

… It was a very tough sell—but you did it!

You’re project gets the green light and you’ve been busy stressing the benefits and long-term returns. It’s consumed you since you came up with your SEO plans. You’re basically a 24/7 SEO strategist, you live the successes and bang your head against the wall when you hit the barriers. But you’ve done it, it’s up and running, people in the company no longer thinks SEO is a fallacy, and things are going well.

Or are they?

In recent months you’ve been feeling that things aren’t moving. Your bosses are inevitably looking for results, even more so since the substantial investment of time and money you’ve put in. You’ve hit a serious bump in the road, but with your superiors and department heads making the right noises you convince yourself you’re past the worst.

Now you’re seeing the reality of the situation, the support is nice, but those who implement your suggestions are slow to respond. The planned work, the prioritisation based on the projected R.O.I is not making it into the work flow. You hear that everybody wants to do the work but it’s a matter of resources.

What Do You Do?

How To Keep Up With SEO Changes

As we discussed in the previous posts, search engine optimisation is in a constant state of change. As the search engines evolve, so does the web landscape and therefore SEO.

We have no classrooms, universities and no single website, conference or book that 100% keeps you ahead of the SEO curve.

Reading blogs, press releases and various other sources of information can help provide some insights about SEO changes.

Here at SEO Liverpool we feel that forums, conferences and social networks help filter out the rubbish, collective testing and best practice sharing are the only sure fire way of ensuring a technique is viable. It’s not easy and sometimes you’ll be taken in by the nonsense. It’s not easy to distinguish between good advice and less reputable companies that just want to sell a product or service. Our advice is simple…

READ, READ, READ… TEST, TEST AND THEN TEST SOME MORE.

If you’re a a little more advanced we’d recommend patent filing blogs. These detail recent patents by the search engines on how the may handle data and can therefore be of benefit. Although this may be considered a little advanced even for established SEO companies

My Cheese… Who Moved It?

Lots of enquires here at SEO Liverpool in recent weeks from SEO’s and businesses alike, about falling rankings. Every time we have a major Google Algorithm update the Liverpool based SEO company‘s are bombarded with questions and help requests.

Consider This

If you’re familiar with the story, “Who Moved My Cheese?” by Dr. Spencer Johnson, you already know that when change happens, you either adapt or perish. If your cheese supply dries up, you have to go looking for new cheese. The gist of the story is; change happens and the cheese keeps moving. And like the little mice in the story, you must change and adapt, if you want to be keep ahead of the pack. The search engines are a lot like the cheese. Google in particular – with over 85% of all search – have changed the algorithm in relation to social, and most noticeably links… this has significantly impacted certain sites.

The Panda and Penguin updates which have really got to grips with spam links in particular, are considered a real test in SEO. Particularly those that have used poor SEO techniques to try and gain a sustainable competitive advantage.

Sometimes things change and they’re never the same again. According to Dr. Spencer Johnston, “If you do not change, you can become extinct. Get out of your comfort zone and adapt to change sooner. Take control, rather than let things happen to you.” According to Forrester Research, “Stop the denial. Get over it, get on with it, figure it out. Or end up in the dustbin of history.” Once upon a time, it would take up to three months to get properly spidered and indexed. Now that time has been reduced to just a few hours.

Over the past months I have achieved great SEO results. But the question everyone seems to be asking is… “Will it stick?” Will the marketing tactics that I’ve been using of late, lead to lasting search engine results? Maybe not, but it’s important to adapt and adopt new strategies and be innovative. If it’s a little spammy, then know that the next updates may devalue your work. Try new things and never stay static and test.

Old School SEO… The Sacrificial Website

At SEO Liverpool we try to look over old techniques for driving traffic to particular digital assets. Last week we started talking about the sacrificial site.

You’ve all seen full page adverts in magazines, at certain points it can be beneficial to move this offline advertising strategy to online.  Internet marketing and leveraging websites can help replicate this strategy for your business. A lifestyle magazine will generate ad revenue for a client in an almost totally unrelated field, just through sheer value of people using that site.

So if you’re looking to generate sales, either via affiliate links or to a product, then create two sites. One for the product and one for ads.

Important Point – The first point is ad sites are penalised depending on the amount and position of the adverts. We’ve found this particularly with Ad Sense.

Important Point  – The second point, it will be beneficial to host your domains on unique IPs, which can result in a big advantage for you in terms of search engine rankings and to help stop getting penalised.

How The Sacrificial Site Works

Let me explain… A good example would be a website in a competitive category, such as Travel . Advertise your digital camera site on it. The two are related as complimentary sites but one generates income for the other. You own both, and one site will advertise on the other.

E.g.

Jokes and funny t-shirts. The joke site itself, has very few jokes on it. It acts more like a directory leading to other joke sites. There are a total of 10 internal pages with different categories of jokes. On each category page, You would list 5-10 joke websites, with a quick two sentence review, taken from the headline of each destination site.

So what’s the purpose of my jokes site? It’s to sell or generate traffic referrals to t-shirt sites. To the visitor, it looks like a directory of the top 50 joke sites, with ads strategically placed on it. It’s really just a way to leverage the entire jokes site to advertise another product. If you find a popular category, you will make sales due to the amount of traffic you can generate. You’ll also generate a varied link profile as you leverage one web property to advertise another.

Evaluation

It can be a lot of work. It will cost you to set up. It will be a disater if not implemented correctly.  But… I do think in some situations it’s a valid strategy, and it is proven to generate income for certain businesses. Affiliate links will probably get the most value but those sites with affilate links to Amazon can generate serious revenues.

Quick Hits For SEO

SEO Liverpool always try to give advice based on questions we’ve received in the last few months. Here are a few subjects we’d like to briefly go over.

Alexa Rank

We’ve had a few clients and more than a few queries about Alexa Rank over the past 3 months. People want to know why they aren’t getting a high traffic rank on Alexa. Some have bench-marked themselves with other companies based on other continents. They can’t understand why they get less traffic when their analytical packages show a substantial volume of traffic.

It’s simple Alexa Rank depends on the volume of people who have the Alexa Rank installed as a browser extension, meaning that’s how their data is collected. This means depending on the nature of your business and geographical location the results don’t really mean anything.

Geo-Surf

I’ve a client who competes really well in this country, they identified a competing businesses that statistically generates more enquiries and therefore is a more valued by their partners. Our client has all the number one keywords we’ve worked for and still generates a lot of business, but wanted to know why their competitor does so well.

Another simple answer and solution, you’re keyword positions vary in different countries, so you may only be position 1 in your country. A competitor could be getting better results in other countries and therefore more traffic. Use this browser extension http://goo.gl/uSpbVand watch the video, it will tell you how to check your rank in other countries. To improve in those countries you’ve identified, use more targeted content and leverage local links from that country.

De-personalise Search

All search marketing consultants should know that you can de-personalise search. Try these 3 ways to find out what the real search engine results are without any bias.

&pws=0

If you’ve been in SEO for a while, you’re familiar with the “pws=0” de-personalisation parameter. By adding it to the end of a Google query URL (“&pws=0”), you can theoretically remove history-based personalisation. A simplified URL would look something like this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=seo+liverpool&pws=0

  • http//www.google.com = Google search
  • /search?q=   = ready for a search query
  • highlited text is for your own keywords with the + to separate words =seo+liverpool
  • &pws=0  = personalise web search

Signing Out Of Google

This one’s pretty straightforward. Just sign out of your Google account. Although my research would suggest, Google still works a bit of its magic to bring you a personal result.

Incognito Browsing (Chrome)

Google’s Chrome browser has a built in “incognito” mode that supposedly removes any traces of your browsing activity, such as cookies or search history. Yet again, still uses some data.

The Best Way

Sign out of Google and then add a &pws=0 parameters, for the best results.

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.

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