Tag: SEO

How Do You Tell Your Client about the SEO Work You’re Doing?

A common question from a small business SEO

How does one who may sell SEO services for their SEO company in the future give away information without giving away too much information (and fearing that the client will run away with the proposed strategies and implement them himself/herself?)

That’s a difficult situation and one I think a lot of people find themselves in. They are compelled to sell themselves by proposing a strategy but are afraid it can backfire. However, many clients who solicit the advice of SEO services are doing it because they cannot execute that detailed plan.

A great analogy that should make you feel a little bit better about providing that information:

Here’s an example: We were recently at an arts festival watching an artist scultping a log with a chainsaw. Suppose that artist were to spend time with me explaining his technique and showing me how to do it – even what he was thinking when he applied his technique. Then suppose he handed me the chainsaw and told me to do it myself. I couldn’t do it. Because I would lack the basic understanding of the skills of using a chainsaw. And even though he explained the technique…I couldn’t do it. It’s a combination art, technical ability, and experience that I don’t have with a chainsaw.

That should alleviate those fears you have about giving away SEO ideas (unless the client is well versed in this area of marketing). Most people can hear your suggestions but have no idea about how to execute. In the end, giving out more information does seem to show that you have the expertise and indicates that you’re willing to help.

6 common website mistakes that could be costing you money

As an SEO Company we’re always dealing with clients who seem to have a little bit of SEO PPC or online marketing knowledge. Here we’ve put together 6 really common website mistakes and get they could be costing you money.

1. JavaScript or other crawler-unfriendly navigation that may impede indexing. Most newer sites don’t have this problem, but there’s almost always at least 1 site we review in every class that has its main navigation pretty much invisible to the search engines. If your navigation basically doesn’t exist as far as Google is concerned, then it’s very difficult to get all of the pages of your website indexed.

2. Navigation that buries important pages within the site architecture. The deeper that pages are buried within the website, the less importance they are given. For SEO, as well as usability purposes, it’s often helpful to showcase important sections of the website up an additional level in the site’s hierarchy. This can usually be achieved via a search-friendly CSS mouse-over menu.

3. Duplicate “pages” getting indexed under multiple URLs. While Google has, for the most part, worked out many of their canonical issues of the past and now generally realize that www.example.com/index.php is the same as www.example.com, many content management systems (CMS) take things a step further and provide a whole array of URLs for any one particular page of content. Sometimes this is done purposely for tracking reasons, as with session ids or tracking links appended to the end of URLs; but other times, it’s simply done because the CMS was never designed with search engines in mind. This is not a good thing, as it can cause the spiders to be so busy indexing the same content that they miss the more important stuff.

4. No keyword phrase focus in the content or conversely, keyword phrase stuffing. It never ceases to amaze me when people claim to have optimised a page, but there are no keyword phrases anywhere to be seen within the content. I suppose this might happen because they’ve put them in the keyword meta tag and assume they’ve optimised. (It’s a good thing they’ve come to our class when this is the case!) On the other side of the coin, there are those who seem to think that 4 instances of a keyword phrase in one sentence must certainly be better than just one! The fix, of course, is to provide a balanced focus on the optimised keyword phrases so that a trained SEO would know what the page is optimised for, but the average reader wouldn’t find the copy repetitive.

5. An optimised home page, but that’s it. While optimizing just the home page is better than not optimizing anything, it’s not going to increase the website’s search engine traffic by that much. Without fixing all the issues on inner pages and optimizing a number of them for their own set of keyword phrases, the site will basically be leaving money on the table.

6. Additional domains owned by the company are not properly redirected. In the old days, it was fine to park any additional domains that the company owned as an alias of the main website; however, today it’s much better practice to 301-redirect all additional domains to the main website. This enables the company to control which domain is the one that the search engines index, and avoids any splitting of link popularity between the different domains.

These 6 are by no means the only website mistakes we see. I’m going back through the sites we reviewed, I found tons of additional mistakes which I’ll save for a future article. My hope is that at least one of these may ring a bell to you as something that needs to be fixed on your own website. Once you take the time to correct the issue, you should find that your website will start gaining a lot more targeted search engine traffic, and ideally start making you more money!

Does Google Conduct Minor Toolbar PageRank Updates Between Major Updates?

Summit Online Marketing are asking the question most people who participate in search forums ask themselves. Does Google, on occasion, update the toolbar PageRank score of a particular web site between the major and mass toolbar PageRank updates that are reported?

As an SEO company, why do we ask this question? Well, if you visit enough blogs and forums, you are bound to see a thread or five with the title, “PageRank Update.” These threads are fairly noticeable and we find spot them on a fairly recent basis.

Real Webmasters involved in SEO outsourcing are noticing updates to their PageRank scores in the Google Toolbar. This happens all the time, and then they jump to the forums to be the first to announce the next PageRank update. But then you see a mass response of replies saying, “no PR update here.”

So is it possible that what that SEO Webmasters have noticed was a true toolbar PageRank update for his site? Maybe. There are a few possibilities, the most likely is that he or she is hitting a different data center with different PageRank scores. But I would not rule it out that Google does push minor PageRank scores to the toolbar between major updates.

Duplicate Content Filters… Myth or Reality?

Here at SEO Liverpool I’ve spent a lot of the day chatting with various people about duplicate content filters… do they exist or not? Well, the answer seems to be yes. BUT, as far as I can tell, there are no penalties for using duplicate content. The only problem is that the page with the best PageRank, will be the one to appear at the top of the search engine results, for a search matching a phrase, which is found on multiple pages. When you think about it, it makes sense. Effectively it means, “sure, go ahead, use duplicate content, but be aware that unless you have the best PageRank for a particular page, that content isn’t going to do you any good.” … which effectively stops people who are slapping up sites with the same content everyone uses, but doing very little to promote their sites, from getting top search engine placement. … and also explains why an original article, when submitted to a high PageRank article directory, results in the article directory being listed at the top of the search engine results for a matching phrase, above your original page containing “your” article.

So… you have several options…

1: Use freely available content, and know that your site is unlikely to get good search engine rankings, unless you heavily promote your pages and get them good PageRank.
2: Use freely available content and re-write it extensively.
3: Write your own, original, content for every page.
4: Use articles that very few other people will be using… from sources such as Article Underground (http://www.scamfree.com/articles/) as I’ve been recommending. If each page you create has 20 similar pages out there on the web, do some promotion, use the Article Underground blogs as announcement services, get your page to PR3 or 4, and your page will be the one at the top of those 20 pages in the search engine results.

Wikipedia (A good value link)

At SEO Liverpool we always try and help clients find ways gaining leverage in Google. About two years ago Wikipedia certainly was… it’s popularity as an SEO tool seems to have diminished in the past year (or maybe i’m wrong)

Why?

Ever notice – when you search for a person on Google – that Wikipedia entries often come up in the top 10 search results? Have you ever wondered how you’d benefit from such a listing, and the traffic it would bring? Herein lies the conundrum.Wikipedia links are a no follow but the benefits of a wikipedia page are really worth the SEO effort.

Now you’re not supposed to write about yourself, or your company, or edit the entries about you. So how do you get in? Why not get a friend to interview you and do it for each other. Better yet get five friends and make it a team effort. Provide your buddies with a complete bio and life history. Decide on a team captain to start the entries. Then each one of your team can enter additional info. Just remember that it’s online encyclopedia, not a social bookmarking site. Read their “What Wikipedia Is” and “What Wikipedia Isn’t” pages, to stay within their TOS and abide by all their guidelines. Try to remain objective, unbiased and maintain a neutral point of view. Be sure all info is verifiable and based in fact, not editorial opinion. And don’t go crazy with links and references.

Give it a shot… If you’ve done anything significant, like won a national award, written ebooks, spoken at seminars, are a CEO, or have done anything noticeable, or remarkable, ask a friend to make a Wiki entry for you. Then, if you’re lucky, and they accept your entry, maybe your name will start appearing at the top of the Google search results.

This is a quick win!

Successful SEO with B2B part 2

This is the next part in my collective sessions on SEO and Site Architecture. I’ve be discussing creating a successful SEO campaign with a B2B site and this post is going to elaborate on keyword research.

2. Determine relative popularity

Once you’ve created a full list of potential keywords, you need to determine the relative popularity of those search terms. Often paid search keyword research tools (such as Google’s Traffic Estimator) won’t have data because traffic for these terms is low. In some cases, there will be data, but it will show very low activity. That’s okay. Don’t pay too much attention to that. Rather, use tools like Keyword Discovery to determine relative historical popularity of your keywords. This will give you some idea of which search terms are used more often than others on your list. The actual raw number of searches for a given search term really doesn’t matter much.
When you’re doing this work, remember to enter the starter keyword(s) or starter keyphrase, letting your research tool return permutations and long-tail options. Not only will this give you a larger list to consider, but the results will often lead you down a path you hadn’t previously considered.

At SEO Liverpool we use Worktracker as our Keyword discovery tool. It’s an excellent resource with the ability to dig around keywords, save campaigns and most importantly you can revisit and add to your projects. This is paramount in keeping your campaign viable and responsive to change.

When I’m looking for some quick data you can’t beat the Adwords keyword tool. It’s great for checking the value of core keywords. We use this data when meeting with clients to make them aware of potential clients numbers looking for there products or services.

Stick around for the next instalment.

The fastest way to gain a high search engine ranking

I’ve dug out some information for an SEO Client of Summit Online Marketing Liverpool.

This is an incredibly common question and not very easy to answer in it’s current form. I’ve read a variety of posts on the subject over the past couple of years and here’s the general consensus.

Question: What’s the fastest way gain a high search engine ranking?

Lets break it down, all seasoned SEO Consultants understand the mantra ‘Content is King’ therefore the more relevant the content the better. A natural reaction to informative relevant and contextual content are links and these certainly help the cause.

So how do you generate content;-

Answer: From your Blog/News, any website that doesn’t generate content has a massive disadvantage unless awareness of the brand is already high.

I’d like to add that you can generate links from someone else’s blog, anarticle submission, a press release, or a directory like Yahoo. It doesn’t really matter where the links come from. But it’s the quality of the link that
has the most impact. The more PR (PageRank) and link popularity that a page has, the more of its “juice” that it will pass on to you. For example, the “real” purpose of most blogs, are to get deep incoming links to my main site. I post just a portion of an article on my blog, and then I deep link to the full story on my site. That way, all stories on my main site, have at least one incoming link.

In addition to the PR of the page hosting the link, what you say in the link is very important. Use your keywords in your links. They will build a Reputation for the pages that you link to. And that’s important for good SEO.