Search Marketing Consultant

I have not posted on my blog for a while.  I seem to spend a lot of my time looking at other people’s websites and not my own.  Anyway, I have been looking at what my competitors are offering in terms of SEO services and it seems that many SEO companies are offering 3 or 4 standard packages. You know, Bronze, Silver and Gold packages, that sort of thing.  So a typical package would give you, say, 20 bookmarks, 25 RSS feeds, 1 article, 10 article submissions, 1 press release 5 press release submissions, 30 forum profile etc etc etc.

Get the more expensive package and you get a bit more of the same.

So how do you know which package to choose?  Supposedly the more expensive the package the quicker you will achieve top rankings.  Doing this  every month will improve your rankings providing all the on page SEO factors are in place, but by how much?

I like to take a more individual approach, by looking at competitors’ websites and finding out what links they have and how quickly they are building links I can work out what exactly needs to be done and how long it will take.  The approach may be different for each keyword, for example, if your website is new and has very few or no back links and your competitors for your main keyword have 200,000 back links and are building at the rate of 5,000 links per month, it could you a while to catch up.  I you immediately start building 5,000 backlinks per month to a new website it will probably get  banned.  You may want to choose some other keywords that are less competitive to start with and when your website becomes more estatblished you can target some more competitive keywords.

All Back Links are not Equal

But, its not all about the number of backlinks, the quality of each backlink is very important.  My website is showing nearly 12,000 backlinks, one of my competitors is showing 100 times that number, over 1.2 million! But my website still ranks higher for one of my main search terms “Kent SEO”

Conclusion

Keyword and competitor analysis is very very important.  By choosing the right keywords and analysing what the competition is doing you can save yourself a lot of time and money but building the right back links.

If you are just starting out with blogging then you will find that one of the best options is WordPress. This platform makes the whole process easy, and you can achieve a lot without spending any money. You will find that when it comes to SEO (search engine optimisation), that there are many built in features that you can use but there are also things that you can do yourself. What follows are just a few SEO tips for your WordPress blog.

• You must ensure that you have enabled the trackback feature on your website. What this does is notify the owner of any website that you decide to link to. You want this to happen so as to encourage that individual to return the kindness. It can be great to link to another person’s site because it will put you on their radar and this will help in terms of SEO.

• You have to ensure that you are using plenty of internal links. Try to link your new content to the older content on your site but try not to go over the top. Not only will this encourage visitors to read more of your stuff, but the search engines also seem to like it as well.

• Try to add links to other quality content on the web. The content that you are linking to should be something that will be of use to the reader. Your profile will be raised when you do this but it will also show that you are trying to help your readers. The large websites might not get around to ever repaying you for sending traffic their way, but you never know.

• Your article titles should really have the main keyword in them if possible. Try to make your titles sound clever because these will interest people. If it is too vague though, it can make it hard for search engine traffic to get to you.

All website owners understand the benefits of getting Search Engine Marketing. SEO firms may help you with your website by many means, and some of these are article marketing. Expert help is always a benefit with regards to SEO. SEO isn’t really the only thing you need to consider though because, web hosting are equally important.

1. Use low contrast text, black on black or white on white.
2. Use tiny text. Any smaller than 9px.
3. Keyword stuff your title tag
4. Keyword stuff your decription meta tag. This should not be any longer than 165 characters and be something that describes your service or products.  A list of keywords will not help your click through rate or your ranking.
5. Keyword stuff your your header tag, body text or anywhere else on your web page! Only use keywords once or twice in header tags and 3 or 4 times in your body next.  Having a high keyword density will be considered as search engine spam.
6. Submit to the search engines every week/month or pay someone else to do it. This is completely pointless.  All you need is one link from a website that has been indexed and the search engines will crawl and index your site.
7. Submit your site to link farms, low value sites or 10,000 directories for $9.99. Another pointless exercise. The search engines probably  won’t even find these links.
8. Try and attract business from out of town by creating loads of identical pages and just change the town name.  This will be considered as duplicate content and Google will only rank one of the pages.
9. Use free hosting.  This will not help your ranking. If you are serious about your website pay for a domain name and hosting.
10. Create a Flash web site. I mean Adobe Flash. While Google claims it can now read and index Flash .swf files they can not be optimised as well as html.

I have seen a few website design companies offer free SEO with their websites.  I have also seen specialist SEO companies charge £400+ per month per keyword for SEO. So what are these companies actually offering for free and what more do you get if you pay?

To understand the differences between to two extremes you first need to understand the basics of SEO.  SEO comes in two parts:

1. On site Optimisation.  This includes making your website easy to read by the search engines putting your keywords in the correct places in the right density. This includes adding your keywords in the title and meta tags as well as the main body text and many other places.
2. Off page Optimisation.  This is all about building incoming links to your website.  You can spend a lot of time asking other website owners to link to your site, adding your details in directories, posting in forums, commenting on blogs and social media sites etc.

Both companies above will do the on page SEO, I would assume the SEO company would do a lot more keyword and competitor analysis first to determine the best keywords to use to get relevant traffic to your website as quickly as possible.  The web design company would probably ask you which keywords you want to use or simply use appropriate keywords from the text on your site.

When it comes to off page SEO the offerings will be completely different.  The SEO company will actively build backlinks to your website from a variety of relevant websites with keywords correctly placed in the anchor text.  They may also build web 2.0 websites to link back to your site and post relevant articles with links as well as pro-actively building links from many other types of websites.

The web design company will give you a completely different story.  They will say “backlinks should be built naturally, what SEO companies do can be considered un-natural by Google and could get your site banned.  The only way to build backlinks is to create unique useful content and other website owners will then link to your site.”

The problem with the ‘natural’ way is it can take a very long time to get good rankings.  If no one can find your web site they will not be able to read your wonderful content and therefore won’t be linking to it.  You should also consider what your competitors are doing.  You want to be on the first page of Google for keywords relevant to your product or service.  Look at the 10 websites already on page one for your keywords.  If they are all building backlinks at the rate of a few hundred a month and you wait for links to build naturally your website may never catch up and never appear on page one of Google.

The ‘build it and they will come’ natural method may work for long tail keywords that are not very competitive but it is unlikely to work for competitive keywords.

To find out how competitive your market is, request a free keyword and SEO analysis from Sytec a Web Design and SEO company.

To gain top rankings on the major search engines you not only need to optimisation your web pages by adding your keywords in the title and meta tags etc but you will also need to build in bound links to your pages from other websites. 

Read my new report on my top 10 link building methods to find out the best ways to increase your websites link popularity.

Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land, recently wrote an article about how links on Facebook and Twitter affect organic ranking on Google and Bing.

Google’s Matt Cutts replied on a video explaining that things have now changed.

Read Danny’s article here and watch Matt’s video here.

It is now definitely time to look at social media more seriously for business.

My Facebook page has recently been launched, please go and ‘like’ and my twitter account has over 1,500 followers so I will be spending more time developing these and other social media pages.

Google has changed they way they display results for local search terms.
The local results seem to dominate the page more than before.
Previously for local searches Google displayed a local map with up to ten results from the Google Places business listings above the natural listings.
Now, the map has moved to the top right of the page and moves down the page as you scroll down.
The Local listings take up more of the page and in some cases the local listings seem to combine with the natural listings.

So if previously you had a number one listing on the local and natural listings both these listings are now conbined.
See my combined listing below

Google Local Listing combined with Natural listing

What does this mean?

Well I think the goal should be to acheive a combined listing as above.  It is a shame the paid listings appear above these.  So focusing on the natural listings as well as your Google Places listing has now become more important for local SEO.

Boddington’s Technical Plastics come to Sytec earlier this year asking if we could create an easy to use content management system and get their website on page one of Google for their primary key phrase “Plastic Injection Moulding” Of course we said yes.  After recreating the website on our hosting platform and integrating our CMS we started working on the SEO.  After 4 months Boddington’s was on page one of Google and a couple of months later is now ranked number 2 for Plastic Injection Moulding as well as some other relevant keywords.

To see more Sytec success stories go to our case studies page.

Since the introduction of Google Instant last month many website owners have reported an increase in traffic from long tail keywords.  This is probably due the they way Google search now makes suggestions as you type your search string.

To take advantage of Google instant, type in your main keyword and then make a note of the 5 suggestions.  These long tail phrases will probably be seeing an increase in traffic and should be easier to optimise your website for.

Use the technique along with your normal keyword research and pick up some extra easy traffic.

Search engine optimization is so popular because it enables webmasters to get a great return on investment. High rankings for the right keywords can have a big impact on your revenue.

The following instructions make it clear why it is so important to choose the right keywords for SEO. You can make a lot of money by choosing the right keywords.

How to find the financial value of your keywords

1. Start a Google AdWords campaign for the keyword, select “exact match” and point the ad to the page on your website that is most relevant to the keyword.
2. Track the impressions and the conversion rate of the ad. To get useful data, you should track at least 500 clicks. With that data, you can make a guess about the value of a visitor that finds your website through that keyword.

Here’s a concrete example

• Your ad might have had 10,000 impressions during a week and 200 visitors have clicked the ad to visit your website.
• 6 of these visitors purchased something on your website and the total profit was $500.

The keyword delivered 200 visitors and 6 buyers to your website. As the total profit was $500, the average single visitor who finds your website through that keyword is worth $2.50 to your business (200 visitors created a profit of $500: $500/200 visitors = $2.50/visitor).

What does this mean for your search engine optimization campaigns?

The average number one ranking for a keyword has a click-through rate of 40% (according to several studies). In the example above, your ad was displayed 10,000 times.

While your ad was only clicked 200 times, you would get 4,000 visitors per week if your website was listed in the regular results on the top position.

As the average visitors adds $2.50 to your profits (see above) you would earn $10,000 per week with that keyword.

That is $520,000 per year with a single keyword! That is why businesses love search engine optimization.

This sounds unbelievable but search engine optimization makes it possible. It’s simple maths and it really works.

Resource:
Our popular tool IBP helps you to get your website in the regular top 10 results on Google’s result pages for the keywords of your choice. If you haven’t done it yet, test the latest version IBP 11.7.5 now!