Coaching For Success
Marketing and SEO
Google’s New Check-Ins Add To LBS Mix
Mar 30th
You may already be promoting your internet business on such location-based services (LBS) as Foursquare, Yelp or Facebook Places, and are well aware of the benefit to your business of this type of service.
Now Google has announced that it’s adding check-in capability to Latitude, which is the social feature of Places, Google’s location-based service. This should alter the LBS horizon significantly, especially when you consider that, according to a study sponsored by Microsoft, Google Places was already the most widely used LBS, beating out Facebook Places. Google Check-In also has some additional features that are very popular with users: location check-out and ability to set notifications.
There Are Apps For That
In addition to its massive user base and global search dominance, Google also has the increasingly popular Android operating system as its mobile platform, through which it offers Google Places apps for both Android powered devices and the iPhone. These apps integrate Google’s other location-based services, including Google Navigation and Maps.
Combine all this with Google’s global expansion of its review and ratings service, HotPot, and Google now offers users the ability to share locations and review and rate local businesses on their mobile platform.
Let’s Make A Deal
Google obviously sees offering deals as a major new opportunity – recall the $6 billion offer to buy deals leader, Groupon – and is rumoured to be seriously looking into launching its own deal service, provisionally named Google Offers.
In the meantime, Offer Ads allows businesses to send coupons via SMS and e-mail to users to drive foot traffic to their physical locations.
A Winning Combination
With all these various services combined into a neat, tidy package, Google is positioning itself to be the business owner’s one-stop shop when it comes to mobile services.
Business owners already using Google Places to promote awareness of their products and services may well see this convergence of all these service offerings as an advertising perfect storm of social, mobile and local marketing.
Now that Google’s home page offers internet business owners check-ins, ratings and reviews and coupons, there’s no need for businesses to go scouring the internet to find the best option for one or other of these services when the world’s leading search engine offers them all under one roof, so to speak.
Using Google Places and related services can boost your business’s exposure both on- and off-line, so contact a UK internet business coach today for increased exposure tomorrow.
Advanced Link Development Strategies To Improve Your Search Engine Rankings
Mar 23rd
We’ve already discussed the importance of building external links to your internet business‘s web site, and we can’t emphasise that enough when it comes to improving your search engine optimisation (SEO) results.
Having discussed some basic steps to take to get started with the new process known as link development, it’s time to look at some more advanced strategies to move your link building efforts into high gear.
Just to recap the reason for this new approach. The search engines, and Google in particular, are now looking for more natural, organic links that are of high quality rather than just any links to any sites. It’s now about deep link building rather than just link building, so let’s look at more advanced ways of doing so.
Powerful Techniques For Developing Links
The tactics discussed here may take more effort, but are the best way to develop high value links that will reward the effort extended now and for a long time in the future.
1. Build A Widget
This technique is extremely powerful as building a widget is fairly simple, but getting that widget adopted on a large scale is the tricky part. Your widget must offer a strong value proposition such that thousands of web site owners decide to add your widget to their web sites, but this is complicated by the fact that you’re competing for advertising space and web site real estate with such powerful players as Google Adsense.
2. Information Graphics, Or Infographics
An infographic is a visual representation of data or knowledge or information that is used to explain a complex issue in more simple visual terms. In other words, it needs to be useful as well as informative and/or entertaining in such a way that it has the potential to go viral and be widely adopted by your peers.
Tracking Your Link Development Efforts
Once you embark on your link development campaign, it’s important to keep track of how your efforts are going so you can see what’s working and what’s not and double your efforts in the areas that are working and abandon, or, at least, reduce those that aren’t.
Let’s look at some ways to track your efforts:
1. Google Webmaster
The tools offered within Google Webmaster have grown and improved in proportion with Google itself. Practically all SEO efforts can be tracked, including internal and external links, click-through data, visits and keyword ranking. Some of the most important features include:
- Site performance evaluation
- Monitoring external links
- Sitemap submission
- Tracking crawl errors
- Monitoring internal links
- Tracking duplicate Title and Meta Tags
- Traffic and revenue projections based on search query analysis
2. Open Site Explorer
This tool provides information on how your link portfolio is shaping up (your link graph), your site’s trust ranking and your anchor text distribution.
a) Anchor Text Distribution
This can provide you with a benchmark of how your site compares to other sites when it comes to keyword-specific anchor text links pointing back to your site as compared to your competitors.
b) Link Graph
The tool will show you updates to your external followed links, which you can then use to plot your own link graph, showing you graphically how your external link efforts are working.
It should be obvious by now that link building has changed and will no doubt continue to change as search engines look to optimize their users’ experience. But, one thing that hasn’t changed (and shows no sign of doing so) is the importance of high-quality external links to your internet business, so take the above link development steps and watch your rankings start to improve.
Check with a UK internet marketing consultant for all the help you need to formulate and execute a successful link development campaign.
Maximise Impact By Integrating Your Testing And Analytics
Feb 7th
We’ve discussed the importance of testing and analytics previously in separate articles in relation to your internet business, but integrating the two is an important next step, which we’ll cover here.
Testing And Analytics Are A Natural Fit
Combining testing with analytics is a natural extension of just performing one or the other. Testing helps improve your site while analytics examines user behaviour and interactions and helps quantify the success or otherwise of changes made. Integrating the two provides companies with an expanded view of overall testing.
Another advantage of combining the two is that not only will your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) efforts be improved but your understanding of user behaviour will also deepen.
Information Flows Are The Answer
If you already have a measurement tool in place, it’s then just a matter of setting up information flows, which will allow testing to be evaluated across multiple segments not available through observing web site behaviour alone.
Companies are often disappointed when changes made to their web sites don’t result in dramatic improvements. The main reason is that companies fail to define what success means to them in terms of the results of their testing.
Define What Success Means To You
Success can be measured in various ways:
- Increased revenue
- Increased visitor interaction
- Reduction in site errors leading to greater visitor satisfaction
- Ability to change your site’s appearance without negatively impacting results
On the other hand, where testing is concerned, there’s really no such thing as failure – only learning opportunities. For instance, if you place an image on your site that doesn’t cause conversions to increase, you may have learned that either the image itself isn’t engaging your visitors, or it may just need re-positioning to get the results you’re looking for.
Integrating Testing And Analytics
Whatever the systems you have in place, it’s a matter of exchanging data gathered from testing, which can be done either offline in batch mode or in real time.
One of the most important data items to be passed is a test identifier to enable analysis at the visitor and/or transaction level for each test run. The deeper you can dig into your test data via your analytics, the better, so loading metadata would be ideal. But, if your system’s not currently set up to handle that level of testing, bear this in mind for future use as you upgrade your analytics systems.
Integrating your testing and measurement systems can help quantify your test results and allow you to determine the impact of your testing on your business’s performance.
Testing and analysing the results of your testing are vital to the future success of your internet business. For assistance with your testing and analytics, contact a UK internet business consultant, who will show you how to benefit fully from your testing and analytics.
It’s Time For A New Year SEO Checkup For Your Internet Business
Jan 31st
Regardless of how successful your internet business was in 2010, the start of a new year is always a good time to take a look at your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts and review what worked well and see in which areas there’s room for improvement. Basically, it’s time to perform a checkup of your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy to set your business up for a move to the next level as far as your results and overall success are concerned in the coming year.
Take Away The SEO Barriers To Your Success
The first part of the checkup is to remove the barriers to SEO success within your web site. If there are errors on your site’s pages that prevent the search engines from crawling your entire site, this can harm your rankings in the search engines.
The most common problems that prevent pages from being crawled are broken links, so it’s important to track them down and at least reduce them by either building the pages that don’t exist or creating a 301 redirect to an existing destination. A useful free tool for doing this is W3C Link Checker.
Eliminate Duplicate Content
Another problem area is duplicate content, normally found in such areas as title tags and product descriptions. These can be located using tools like Xenu Link Sleuth (detects broken links but data can be exported to help find duplicate content) and Yahoo Site Explorer.
Make Sure Your Site Is Relevant
One thing that can really mess up your site’s rankings is irrelevant content. Google’s Webmaster Tools can show you the most relevant keywords for your site’s topic, from which you can develop focused content.
Another option is to develop a tag cloud focused on relevant keywords, using such tools as TagCrowd.com.
Keep An Eye On Your Site’s Rankings
It’s essential that you know where your web site ranks for a given keyword so you can tell whether the changes you are making are working or not. Again, Google’s Webmaster Tools provides a set of reports called Search Queries, which shows how your site ranks for various queries.
Reviewing the above Search Engine Optimisation factors on a monthly, rather than an annual, basis will help you keep your internet business on track as far as your SEO strategies are concerned and at least maintain, if not improve, your site’s rankings.
A UK internet marketing consultant is well versed in all aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO) and can provide you with the expertise you need to make sure your SEO checkups are thorough and effective.
Free Marketing And Search Engine Optimisation Tools
Dec 29th
In Internet business we try our best to ensure that our sites and the tools we use to ensure they get in front of customers can do the job. Many Search Engine Optimisation tools can be quite expensive so we have put together a list of SEO tools to help you do the same job for free.
1. Search Combination Tool
This Search Engine Optimisation tool will generate lots of different combinations of two separate lists of keywords. This can help your internet business finding new ways of promoting your website and reach your audience by allowing you to broaden the keywords you use to reach them. This SEO tool can be used to change and optimising title tags, URL, and the internal structure of the binding.
2. Header Checker Tool
The Header Check tool can be used to check the labels of any web page header. Use this tool to check any web page’s header tags, this helps you ensure your pages are returning the correct status codes and that your redirects are working properly, as incorrect redirects can cause indexing and ranking problems.
3. Keyword Density Analysis Tool
This tool allows a healthy balance of keywords to ensure your content is well balanced on page. When you enter the URL of your internet business site it shows you the keyword density of each sentence on the page.
4. Spider Viewer
See your site like the spider sees it. This view links to important information about your location. It allows you toevaluate the internal links, metadata and page content.
5. Google Webmaster Tools
This can be used to make sure that there are no errors which may be preventing search engines from indexing the content of your website. It also shows top search queries.
6. Google Local Business Centre
SEO Tools 1
Sometimes when we look for local businesses Google shows a small map. This adjacent map is the links to local businesses which matched the description people searched for. It is important to an Search Engine Optimisation efforts you make that you are listed locally.
7. Wordtracker Labs Keyword Questions
The majority of people online are seeking information and to that end will often type questions into search engines. This new tool will allow you to find these questions, answer them and get some great search traffic. If your business uses it to target long tail keywords and to provide content that readers want to read and link to then your SEO and traffic it generates to your internet business should go through the roof.
8. Facebook
Google has started indexing Facebook fan pages. As a result many people are looking towards Facebook to increase their Search Engine Optimisation rankings.
9. Google AdWords Keyword Tool
This free tool is dedicated to those marketers who are looking for the best keywords for their Google AdWords business. It can give you a sense of how often people use a particular keyword, or variations of it, in Google searches, and how competitive a keyword might be to rank highly for it in Google search queries. It can give you an idea of how people often look for a particular keyword or variants. This Google tool can also suggest keywords related to existing Web pages. It should really be the first tool you use when you start brainstorming keywords or new content for your website.
10. Google Insights for Search
Google AdWords Keyword Tool displays you the volume of searches conducted using different keywords for your site where as Google Insights for Search tells you about the trends of keywords research.
All of these free Search Engine Optimisation tools are out there to help your internet business to become more visible online and generate more traffic. Go search them out now and use them.
