Coaching For Success
Posts tagged Marketing and SEO
Google Instant And Your Business SEO
Sep 10th
Once again Google have made changes to their search engine. The all new Google Instant apparently hails a new dawn in the way people will search and get information for related keywords. This post gives a brief overview of what Google Instant is and how to ensure your Internet business remain visible and relevant in searches.
What is Google Instant
Google Instant helps users find information faster by showing relevant results as a query is typed. As users get this immediate feedback, they’re able to refine their searches more quickly and find the results that more precisely match what they need. So in essense in addition to keyword suggestions, users will now also get instant search results based on their past queries displayed as they type.
Normally when you put in a keyword or phrase, you press search and you are served a list of results. Most of the time you will find that they are correct for what you were looking for, however occasionally the result will be inaccurate, it is these inaccuracies that Google’s new Instant seeks to rid you of by adapting search results as you type.
According to Google the benefits of this system are that your searches are faster by simply predicting what you are searching for and showing results before you finish typing, which should cut down the time wasted in searching. Also the smarter predictions feature can help guide your search by giving options to aid your search so that as soon as an option appears that is correct you can click it and get your results. The final benefit is the fact that results are served up automatically before your eyes as you type. If you want to see it work follow the link below:
http://www.google.com/instant/
Google Instant Search Result - Notice how it is filling in the blanks in the box your are typing in and making suggestions below
Basically search results evolve and change potentially as you type each additional character, into the search box. By speeding up your search results, Google believes that you will be a happier to do more searches on a more frequent basis as they have made it easier for you to get access to the information you require.
So what does this mean for your business SEO?
In essence it means if you want your site to be seen as one of those that comes up as a person searches Google Instant that your SEO efforts must be specific, targeted and that your site needs to be well optimised. Google have clearly said that their ranking algorithm will not change within Google Instant.
For many clever business owners these new search functions will help them become more visible as they will have already concentrated on visitor needs as a major part of their SEO to understand the needs of their visitors/ potential clients.
This is usually simple things like what products or services they are looking for what issues they may have that your products or services can solve or simply an understanding or the language and terminology of your sector.
The new search features in Google Instant can also help you gain a better insight into finding out some of the things mentioned above in order to better serve your market sector/s or for your business to create new products or services to fill the gaps you may uncover.
For those who have not done their site optimisation in this way, do not be disheartened now is the time to update the way you optimise to ensure you stay visible on Google Instant. Search Engine optimisation (SEO) like all things is evolving, so too should the way you build your Internet business site to address these changes and your visitors needs.
Reciprocal Link Tips
Aug 16th
You need to ensure you understand fully the type of site you request a reciprocal link from, this requires research.
It has taken time to develop your site and you are now finally ready to launch, this should be the end of the hard work but the true is it is only the beginning as visiblity is everything. Once you launch your new internet business website, it is not always easy to get yourself noticed, it takes time to get your site indexed and infront of prospective customers.
You should not expect traffic to your site will flow straight from the beginning and this might not be because of how your site looks or how it operates although they do play a part. Sometimes you need to use strategies to obtain visitors to your site, one such strategy is reciprocal links.
Reciprocal links are a method many newbie internet business owners and old hats alike use to try to boost the page rank of their site. Search engines do often rank your site higher if you manage to obtain links from other sites that have authority. Requesting links to such site is a common practice but you have to be aware that the rate of rejection is quite high.
A site that has already been established as an authority site, has little or nothing to gain by accepting reciprocal link requests, while a lesser ranking site has everything to gain. You should not try to obtain reciprocal links from sites that are not relevant to the contents of your site as this can lower the chances for your request to be accepted, linking to irrelevant sites is not beneficial for you and your visitors either.
Google states that - “Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity.
However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results”
Before focusing on getting reciprocal links, start by making sure your internet business website is so useful that you will not need to ask for links if your site is good people will ask you for links to your site. Make sure you have a site that is attractive, has relevant content and is easy to use.
Try to highlight the particular services or products that make your site useful and unique. This will be of enormous help when you will go looking for partners. Instead of trying to get plenty of reciprocal links, just focus on several quality links to sites that are authoritative in a niche that is relevant for your site as well.
When you make a link request be specific about what you find interesting on their site and why you have linked to it for your vistors, explain how what you do maybe of interest to their visitors. If you are both in the same field and both deal with specific parts of it this maybe a good match but do not presume because you are that they will accept your request.
99% of the time if you are refused it boils down to things like, not be relevent, non useful or original content and the biggest reason is a templated request letter where you fill in the blanks. Come on if you are serious about your internet business flourishing do you really think this approach will work, if someone sent you a template email request to do something would you bother?
The fact is if you are going to request a link to a few good quality sites in your niche do it properly craft an individual letter to the person involved. Do a bit of research find out who to write it to – do not just address it to webmaster, whom it may concern or worst just put in hi.
It takes a little research and lots of common sense but if you do the research and understand the other internet business owners site it will show in the letter you craft and guess what – they will be more inclined to read it. None of this gaurentees a link but goes a lot further in getting your email read, than a templated, non-descript email.
Outsourcing SEO Tasks To An Internet Marketing Service.
Aug 7th
Internet Marketing Services Help Hit The Target, Freeing Up Your Time To Concentrate On Your Core Business
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an important element in making you website highly visible. A degree of expertise is required to incorporate SEO into a website and make it popular among the search engine results returned. It is undoublty a time consuming process which needs constant monitoring. A website’s SEO development is just one of the many activities which an online business owner must undertake to stay in business.
However it is not the key function for many business owners who decided to trade online and in many cases ends up consuming more of their time than the actual matter of doing business. Instead, of doing this time consuming process and outsourcing it, many business owners fail to take the options opened to them of outsource for fear of cost or poorly done work. This post will look at the advantages of outsourcing your SEO to a specialist or Internet Marketing Service.
Outsource labour intensive tasks
SEO has many labour intensive tasks attached to it, many need manual intervention, which in order to complete properly and this is where an Internet Marketing Service could help you. Take for instance ‘Keyword Research’ which is a data collection process which requires data handling techniques, though anyone can do this it is labour intensive and can suck up hours of time especially if you are unsure of what you are doing.
Worse still is if you choose after all that time the wrong keywords to target, these task are far better left with the professionals who specialise in them and do them day in and day out. This type of task is easily outsourced to an Internet Marketing Service.
If it is a really brain numing task and extremely basic then you could use services like ‘Mechanical Turk’ , but remember these people are not skilled so cannot give an informed opininon on what you ask they will merely perform the task as you set it down for them regardless of whether you have set this correctly or not.
Likewise you have the task of ‘Competitive Analysis’ which requires information gathering about the strategies of businesses and their websites who are in competition with you. Once you set the framework for the processes, it becomes repetitive and can be easily handled by an Internet Marketing Service who will be able to present the final analysis of any research in a report format which can be easily understood.
An Internet Marketing Service Can Help You Get All SEO Angles Covered
The task of ‘Content Creation’ can be very difficult particularly when it comes to getting the article so that it is SEO Friendly, this task for most business owners is hard to do or to contnuially sustain, it is far better to opt for a company that can help you with this rather than do it yourself.
Another reason to use an Internet Marketing Service to aid you here is a report published by emarketer.com show that good web content creation and useable articles are extremely important to help you engage with new customers as well as current ones. For more information see our post on this Content Creation For Lead Generation
Constant testing and monitoring of search engine rankings, site statistics, marketing split testing and further improvements in the content is practically a full time job in itself and if you try to do too much yourself you will end up not working on other ares of your business. All of these repeative tasks can be performed by specialist trained to track search engine rankings test and update the content regularly to make the improvements.
As we have seen, you can save lot of time when you outsource your SEO tasks to an Internet Marketing Service. There is large amount of expertise which you can access through outsourcing to them. The time saved can be utilised for core business activities to generate more revenue for your business. Hence, outsourcing your SEO to an Internet Marketing Service is a smart way of achieving economic efficiency which will help you to manage your business more effectively.
Newbies Quick Guide to Adding a Site to Directories
Aug 2nd
There are many directories that you would like to add your website to in order to become visible, but knowing where to start is just not easy. Contray to the misinterpretion of Matt Cutts comments about directory listings being dead, we firmly think it is important and still underpins the main body of all online business visiblity. As long as a site needs traffic – and directories exist – a general trend then getting listed with them will always have advantages.
You get traffic by attracting visitors to your site. How do you attract people? You make an offer they can’t refuse such as a discount, entry to a contest, or you offer free content, so they will keep coming to your site. And you can attract people with social networking strategies and linking strategies.
If you have your site ready, you can add it to directories related to your work. Directories such as Google, Bing, Yahoo! Directory and DMOZ score high-ranks in search engines and contain a vast array of categories, ranging from Arts and Economy to Recreation and Media. You can link to all the directories that you want and find relevant to your endeavors. Just sign up for an account and pick your preferences.
Apart from these you can go to any search engine or blog catalog and type in your area of expertise and see what comes back , look for blogs, forums and other related sites and build a list in Word or notepad. Also check what your competition is doing and see what directories they are in and add your self to those. Once you have generated your list all you need to do is build a link in that directory. Below isa quick guide how to do this for Yahoo, however the principal and what to look for is about the same in all directories so all you need is follow the quick guide.
Let’s look at what you have to do:
1.First check if you are already listed in the Yahoo! Directory. Just follow this link: http://dir.yahoo.com/
2.Enter the URL of your site. If you can find it in the Directory then you need not go further with the steps, for you are already on the Directory. If not, you have to add you site.
3.If you want to add your website, you must click on the various categories until you narrow down from the top-level ones to the specific ones that you find appropriate for your business.
4.Below the search box, there is a link called Suggest a Site. Click it and you will be asked about your details, and whether you want a fee-based program, if you have a commercial site. Always remember your Security Email ID for future correspondence regarding your listing.
Below we have listed some URL’s and links to high-ranking directories and blog directories where you can add your website. You will find them useful for increasing your site’s exposure and traffic.
http://www.blogpulse.com/index.html
http://www.blogdigger.com/index.html
http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx
UK
http://www.dotukdirectory.co.uk/
There are thousand of directories that you can enter your business into and it always good to do these over a period of time rather than trying to do too many in one go.
Good luck with your directory building.
Backlinks: Some mistakes to avoid!
Aug 1st
Backlinks are very useful for a website as they increase its page rankings on search engines. A whole lot of host websites, known as affiliate websites, post such links for another website and hence increasing its visibility.
If you want to get backlinks for your website, then you have to catch attention of these affiliate websites. However, it is easier said than done. This article presents the difficulties faced while getting the backlinks. These difficulties are classified for two way backlinks, where two websites mutually post each other’s links; and one way backlinks, where one website makes efforts on its own.
‘Some bad practices’
Assuming that your website has got good content and it can add value to its visitors. Still you face issues when you request affiliates for backlinks. One of the most prevalent issue is of ‘link trading’ where, one website refuses to post links of the other website until that latter does not post its link. This practice is always bad as it brings your site and the quality of your content into question; bribery is never a way to get a link, it sends out a bad name for your site as it is considered unfair, if your content is useful then it will automatically get back-links.
Another bad practise when trying to get links is forming a ‘link farm’. A link farm is a group of websites hyperlinked to each other in a group. A link farm is a form of spamming the index of a search engine by repeatedly posting useless links, to manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine. The repercussions of being a part of link-farm may be serious iand could ultimately get your site banned from search engines altogether.
‘Insufficient efforts’
Getting backlinks is a time consuming process which requires patience and lots of efforts. Posting quality content and regularly updating it calls for a lot of research. A lot of effort is needed to find a website and convincing it to post your backlink. You can outsource these jobs to third parties like freelancers but that will cost you and also, you need to monitor the work regularly.. If you are going to outsource it is best to use a reputable internet marketing service company and preferably with knowledge of your geographical locale as this will make all the difference to the types of backlinks that are made and there true relevence to your business.
‘Quality issues’
The content of the website which requires backlinks should have high quality standards which we refer to as ‘Link Quality’. These standards are similar to the standards set by the search engines for listing their websites. Directories like Yahoo, DMOZ and Google mention these standards as guidelines on their pages. High Quality Links are not easy to get.
Affiliate websites don’t rank them on basis of PR. Instead, they look for content which adds value to their content and hence increasing their visibility as well. If your copy is questionable then you need to sit down and redo it or hire someone with more expereince to do it for you like a copywriter.
‘Spamming issues’
Like you, there are many other websites which are trying to get their links posted. Not everyone is genuine and and many of the site are just not up to the quality standards. As a result, affiliate sites get excessive requests for a link and so most are turned as they are seen as spam.
To ensure that your website is not lost among the spammers you must prepare a nice request proposal in a concise manner, so that the affiliate understands the value of your proposal without spending much time wading through a long drawn out letter. Try to discuss specifically which part of their site is useful to your visitors and which part of your site might be of interest to their customers, give a link to that specific area. If you offer to put a link to them do not later threaten to remove it as they have not linked to you, if you continue to request them to put a link and show that your site is relevent eventuallly they will link to you.
In spite of all the above difficulties, back-links are still very popular. The whole exercise of getting backlinks can highlight the shortcomings of your content and hence helps you to improve its quality. In a nutshell, getting backlinks requires creativity, hard work, expertise and patience. When executed properly, the results are encouraging.
