Coaching For Success
Posts tagged Search Engine Optimisation
New Changes To Googles Algorithm Mean Content Reigns Supreme
Mar 9th
As an internet business owner, one thing you have to do, if you want your business to be found in the search engines, Google in particular, is stay abreast of changes to search engine algorithms as best as you can.
Google’s Changing Things Up Again
Google recently announced a major change to its algorithm that, according to their blog, may affect as much as 12 percent of sites on the web. This change will target sites Google regards as providing low value due to poor content or duplicate content or simply because they just aren’t very useful. And those sites will end up having their rankings lowered, so this is potentially very damaging when it comes to a site’s position in the search engine results.
As with all changes to Google’s algorithm, ignore this at your own peril!
Give Google What Google Wants
If your site is made up of quality, informative content that provides value to your visitors, you won’t have to worry about losing your rankings. That worn out old epithet that you may be tired of hearing that says “Content is king” looks like it may be truer than ever going forward.
The sites that will probably be in serious trouble are such as the ones known as content farms. These sites are more concerned with quantity rather than quality and up until now they’ve profited from the volume of content they contain, resulting in a lot of poor quality content littering the search engine results.
And, as long as Google is upping the ante in the content stakes, you can guarantee the other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing won’t just sit around and watch the quality of their results sink compared to Google’s. So, watch for similar changes to be announced by the other search engines before too long.
Quality Content More Important Than Ever
What’s obvious here is that quality is going to rule supreme from now on, with quantity taking a back seat, but that seat will be waaaaaaayyy back compared to content.
Bloggers beware! Posts need to offer something new or at least a new twist on something that may already be familiar – just re-publishing a story or news item won’t cut it going forward. The emphasis for Google needs to be on quality, original content, meaning that you need to be saying something new, or risk losing out in the rankings.
Overall, this should be a change that’s a win-win for everybody – those seeking good, original content and those producing it.
What This Means For Your Internet Business
The first thing you should do (and this is something you should already be doing as part of your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy) is keep a sharp eye on your analytics to make sure your traffic numbers haven’t been adversely affected.
One thing to bear in mind is that search isn’t the only way to get traffic. Now’s the time to boost your social network presence; if you have an e-mail list, begin to interact with them more and work at expanding your list, or if you have newsletter subscribers, the same advice applies. In other words, increase your user base.
Work at increasing the number of inbound links by soliciting links from sites with quality content using anchor text that is keyword-rich. Quality inbound links are still an important factor as far as search engine rankings are concerned.
Vary your content by adding videos on YouTube, post photos on such sites as Flickr and create podcasts. The search engines love variety.
You may also want to look into hiring a good writer to produce quality content for you. Excellent content will help attract links and improve the overall value of your site in Google’s virtual eyes.
As you may gather, internet business owners need to evaluate the content of their sites and, if necessary, consider the above steps to make their rankings more secure.
A UK internet business coach will work with you to ensure your content is of the highest calibre and that your search engine rankings aren’t adversely affected.
Google Putting Greater Emphasis On Social Search Recommendations
Mar 4th
OK, so nobody can say we haven’t talked about this and that we haven’t tried to emphasise its importance to you and your internet business, but now the proof of how much effort you’ve been putting into the social networking area of your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts will soon be evident.
Google’s Really Going Social
That’s because Google is putting more emphasis on social search results (it may be more accurate to refer to them as social recommendations), bringing them more to the forefront by actually listing them in their search results pages.
These results will be mixed in with the rest of the search results based on their relevance to the query submitted by the user and also taking into consideration the content from the user’s social graph. Results will also be dependent on which accounts the user has connected to their public profile on Google.
This represents a major change in Google’s philosophy, since social search results were previously only listed at the bottom of the page. Now they can appear anywhere in the results and a notation will appear alongside the results showing their origin, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Twitter Firehose Makes Results More Comprehensive
In 2010 Google paid a lot of money for access to Twitter’s database of tweets (also known as the firehose) and is finally using that data to produce more comprehensive socially based results, meaning that links shared on Twitter may now be displayed as part of the search results.
Overall, it’s highly possible that, if someone is connected to you and your business publicly and decides to share a link, that may well appear in Google’s search results.
The More Connections The Better
The obvious takeaway from this (at least, we hope it’s obvious!) is that, if you haven’t done so already, you should be out there in social network land building a fan base and a following for your business. The more social connections that can be established between your business and social media networks the more search results may be displayed with references to your internet business.
We can’t emphasise enough the importance of establishing a presence for your internet business on the social media platforms from a search engine optimisation (SEO) standpoint, and, with Google’s latest initiative, that fact has become doubly important.
Check with a UK internet marketing consultant for help getting your business established on the social media networks to take full advantage of Google’s latest search initiatives.
Long Tail Keywords Attract More Traffic And Higher Profits
Feb 21st
In internet marketing, search engine optimisation is one of the most important strategies used to get web sites in front of users’ eyes, and one of the important factors in search engine optimisation is the selection and optimisation of the correct keywords for your web page content.
But, what are the correct keywords? Well, the exact nature of the keywords you use on your site obviously depends on your market and the particular topic of your individual web pages. But, Chitika, an online ad network, has recently released the results of a study, which shows that, if you can rank high for keyword phrases of three to five words in length, you should be able to achieve optimum results for both traffic and conversions.
In other words, the correct keywords for your web site are ones from three to five words long that are relevant to your site and the topics of your site’s pages.
Multi-Term Keywords Produce Best Results
The study looked at search traffic coming into the network over a period of six days and was based on a sampling of more than forty-one million impressions.
Three word searches accounted for 26 percent of all search traffic, while 19 percent of all traffic was generated as a result of keywords made up of two terms and 17 percent of search traffic came from searches where keywords were made up of four word phrases.
An interesting side note is that one word keywords accounted for only 14 percent of traffic, further emphasizing the power of multi-term keywords.
Also, queries longer than five words result in much less traffic, an indication of just how fragmented the traffic resulting from longer queries is.
Longer Search Terms Result In More Revenue
Another interesting fact that surfaced from the survey results is that it seemed that the more words used in a search query, the more likely the searcher was to click on an ad. In fact, the most profitable queries in terms of ad clicks were those consisting of 5, 6 and 4 words, in that order. In other words, the longer the search query in terms of the number of words, the more profitable it was likely to be, with the magic number once again appearing to be 5.
So, what does this mean for you and your internet business? It means that, if you’re not targeting traffic using keywords of 3 to 5 words in length as part of your search engine optimisation strategy, you’re missing out on some substantial and potentially extremely profitable search engine traffic.
For help optimising your web site for these long tail keywords, contact a UK internet business consultant who will set your web site up for success for longer search terms.
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.
