It is apparent and a much talked about subject, that content is king. It is a bit of a cliché saying, but when it comes to optimization and rankings in search engines, the right type of SEO content on a website, makes an incredible difference.

A great looking website is a good starting point, design and interactivity are key to enable the user to have an experience when browsing through the site. When it comes to the content, users want to be able to find exactly what they are looking for quickly and even learn something from the site. If it is taking a while to sift through jargon, spam and over linked pages, this can turn users off. We need to engage, keep them on the site, keep them clicking through the pages, and ultimately contact or purchase from our clients sites.

SEO in Nottingham is not hard but there are ways it can done badly, including over use of keywords and phrases. This can cause search engines to class content as spam. Plagiarism is also a problem, even from the point of copying content from a client’s old site onto their new site. Fresh unique SEO copy is always the best way to move forward, climb the search engine rankings, and ultimately attract more customers to your site.

As a client, if you are having a new website designed and are considering your content options, always opt for fresh professional SEO Content, in the long run it will enable your site to rise up the charts and that extra little investment towards a professional content writer, will bring in those much desired customers.

As well as being a platform for personal and informal interaction with customers, co-workers and friends, social network sites are often used for content sharing. This is where a user will publish a link to an article, advertisement, video, image, product or anything else you can think of, on their profile, to share it with their peers. A user may choose to share something because it’s interesting, amusing, educational, inspirational, or perhaps controversial. Information is shared by using social media buttons, like ‘Tweet Me’ and ‘Like’ buttons, which are often found below articles, images and even products. Many e-commerce websites will display social media buttons under their products, for their users to share, should they wish to. This will publish information such as the product name, an image, the price and even sometimes the description or a review of the product, to a person’s social media profile.

Facebook is a great example of a place in which users will share content with their peers. Businesses can set up their own business page on Facebook, and gain ‘fans’ via people ‘liking’ their page. As well as allowing businesses to engage with their fans on a more personal and friendly level, using Facebook also helps improve brand awareness. Online communities like StumbleUpon are also places where content in regularly shared. On these websites you can generate links to your business website and product pages, along with a description to go with the link. The more votes you receive for your link, the higher it will be valued, and if you’re lucky, it can even be displayed on the online community’s homepage. Links from websites like this are very valuable to improving your SEO. It is essential that you plan the content surrounding the link, to make sure it’s attractive and eye catching to users, who could potentially be your next customers. Content should be straightforward and simple to understand, unique and of a high quality.

When a search engine like Google is determining how to rank a company, for a particular keyword search, they will take into account the activity that occurs surrounding the keywords on social media sites. Likes and Tweets, which are sometimes referred to as social media signals, will help to boost your rankings, which will in turn lead to a rise in traffic and hopefully conversion rates.

Unfortunately it is not as simple as publishing a few links to your website and products on social media sites, for you to gain a better ranking and improve your SEO. Search engines will take a number of factors into account when determining how important your website is. One of these may be the authority of the person or business posting the links. Authority could be judged on how many followers, fans or contacts a person has on a particular social media platform or it could be how long their profile has existed for. Their relevance to the link may also be taken into account, for example it may be valued higher if the link is appropriate to the industry they work in or perhaps is related to something they regularly post about online, on websites and blogs. Gaining links to your website from a number of different sources is highly valued by search engines, as is the popularity of these links, which is often judged by how many ‘likes’ or ‘re-tweets’ they attain. A final key point considered to be of importance is the text surrounding the links to your site. This text should be precise, relevant and generally well written in order to gain the attention of search engines.

Social media and SEO are both essential components in creating a strong internet marketing campaign for your business. Social media is no longer just a tool for businesses to speak to their customers. It takes a lot of hard work over a period of time, to gain better and stronger links to your site, but this will pay off in the long run when you are gaining more traffic to your website and increasing your sales.

Google’s search engine algorithm still remains a closely guarded secret.  Knowing how Google works can be very profitable as high rankings equates to high traffic levels on a website, especially on keywords which many people enter in.

Google reportedly looks at between 300-500 signals to decide where websites will rank when a search term is inputted.  The only way to get an idea of how Google’s algorithm works is to take a scientific approach by looking at patterns in the highest ranked websites or by performing controlled experiments on obscure keywords.

Lots of people have their own ideas on how Google works, sometimes unfortunately they fall into these common traps below…

Causes and Consequences

The website SEOMoz.org is well known for creating experiments on Google and reporting search engine ranking factors using real data from highly ranked websites. Even with this data laid out in front of people still people are going away with misconceptions about the data and what really matters in regards to search engine ranking factors.

One metric which has been discussed a lot is the number of Facebook “shares” relating to a better ranking in Google; more Facebook shares significantly correlates to higher rankings in Google. This led to many people proclaiming that Google now uses Facebook ‘shares’ as part of it’s ranking algorithm, i.e. proof that social SEO is alive & kicking.  This is not true though the shares are a consequence of high rankings and not a cause, this has recently been confirmed by Google top man Matt Cutts.

With this logic you could say that any car painted in Ferrari Red (Pigment Red 254 for any racing car fans) is faster than the average car.  Looking blindly at car colour statistics will show a significant spike in the average speed of cars painted in this red racing colour, a colour only fast Ferrari cars are allowed to use!  If I painted an average family car in Ferrari red paint then it’s not going to go any faster, the speed is a consequence of the colour, not the cause.

Emotions and Connections

When I feed my dogs I rustle a big packet of dog biscuits and they come bounding in to the kitchen.  They associate the rustling sound with getting fed and as most people know, dogs LOVE food.  Even the sound of a rusting packet gets them excited and they start watering at the mouth!  Without going deep into psychology it’s plain to see that sights, sounds and words can trigger reactions in human or animal brains.  This can unfortunately backfire in something sensitive and emotionally attached as the SEO for your own website.

Many times we have witnessed some sort of change to a website followed by a increase or decrease in keyword search engine rankings.  However big or minor the change, it usually results in the website owner associating the change we made with the change in Google’s ranking.  Can you safely say that online change [A] resulted in ranking change [B]? The answer is ‘maybe’, it could have been a mere coincidence or the change really could have effected the rankings.  There’s sometimes no solid evidence backing up these changes unless you repeat the change in the same settings again and again and see the same results.  With knee-jerk reactions some website owners undo the change if this happens or start pointing blame at someone/something; this can hold a website back and cause un-due stress when it may not even have been a related incident at all!

Search engine rankings are quite fickle, there’s well documented variance around ranking positions which sometimes makes them bounce up and down for no reason.  One of our websites has been number 1 in Google.co.uk for the past 15 months for it’s main keyword; Google Webmaster Tools reports that surprisingly 7% of the time it’s actually not number at 1, a figure closely reflected in other websites we manage (including major brands).  Nothing is set in stone on Google, especially with new sites which can be promoted highly one week and be held back for another 3 months whilst they mature, it’s important just to plough on with SEO and stop worrying about little fluctuations.

Values

Sometimes the biggest thing holding a website back is the website’s owner themselves.  People’s core values may hold them back from improving something that already works, they may have the “if it ain’t broken then why fix it?” sort of attitude. Conversion optimisation is a legitimate way to try and convert more visitors into customers by testing variations of pages or page elements and seeing which version makes the most sales overall.  Improving conversions is SEO-friendly, even Google have their own software to perform it and they state it will not change rankings.  Many website owners who are doing well are quite happy never to improve on their websites but they will fight to the bitter end to gain more traffic.  The ironic thing is that they could make more sales out of the existing traffic by improving conversion percentages; this is a much quicker and cost-friendly solution.

One of the most crippling values to have is to think that linking to your website from other websites deliberately is wrong or ‘un-ethical’. There are common fears that Google will banish or punish you for performing certain types of SEO, some people are so afraid of this that they never progress and end up not doing much off-site SEO in fear of what may happen.  Whereas it’s true that Google does punish people doing lots of bad SEO against it’s terms and conditions just think to yourself that if there was a way to harm a website then why wouldn’t online businesses be harming their competitor’s websites all the time by performing that same bad off-site SEO on their sites?!

Unless you’re website is based off a known brand it’s incredibly hard to promote yourself online and gain valuable backlinks.  Let’s say you sold something boring online like “A4 paper”, could you drum up links and promote your website without getting out there and promoting yourself firstly?  It’s not impossible but it’s very hard and your competitors at the top of Google will certainly be doing SEO whilst you site sits in the lower rankings.

Another dangerous value is thinking something along the lines of: “if it works for him then it must work for me” kind of attitude.  Paying for links and other black hat SEO methods sometimes works wonders in Google and can easily achieve number one rankings on semi-competitive keywords.  This is great until the website gets either reported for spam or eliminated by one of the new Google updates, then it will won’t appear for hardly any keywords and traffic levels will plummet for at least 5/6 weeks.  In the period of a spammy website being at the top of Google some competitors will look at the site (and possibly it’s backlink sources) and could be angry enough to get frustrated and copy the same techniques themselves.  This may not have instant ramifications but in the long term it could be a really bad decision when things turn sour.  Sometimes the original spammy site DOESN’T get any penalty by Google but the site copying the same techniques pushes things a little too far and DOES, it’s a dangerous game.

SEO Myths & Old Techniques

We’ve covered a lot of SEO myths such as the maximum keyword density percentage myth, W3C validation myth and the controversial NoFollow links counting in Google debate.  Funnily enough we hear time and time again these myths being recycled and ingrained into people’s thoughts on SEO, some people literally refuse that they are wrong because they read about a piece of mis-information about SEO in a book or by an ‘SEO expert blogger’.

Some old SEO tricks used to fool Google and placed websites highly un-naturally for keywords, unfortunately for the spammers Google is ever-changing and algorithm changes have eliminated many of these tricks.  One old SEO technique was to make mini blogs all catered around a certain keyword and then link to the main site on every post, page and footer possible, another was simply stuffing a page full of keywords and hiding the content with CSS tricks.  Whereas it’s sometimes funny to see people still trying to game the system in ways which clearly won’t work, it’s a sad fact that many online businesses resort to these old tricks and think they can get away with it.

Since so much changes online it’s important to learn the correct and latest SEO techniques and not be tempted to try any tricks to ‘fool’ Google.  However hard it may be to admit, your SEO knowledge may not be correct and you should question everything you know by reading the latest blogs and news.  When it comes to beating the competition, whether in war or business, the most flexible and innovative person always comes out on top.

Conclusion

I know it’s hard but try and leave your emotions at the door and do the best SEO you can for your website.  If rankings change when you change something yourself then step back, look at all the facts and think to yourself if the two things are related or if it’s just a coincidence.  If rankings aren’t as good as you hoped then don’t do anything drastic, aim for a easy term and don’t copy bad techniques you see elsewhere, SEO takes time to work.

Forget any moral values, SEO is about results and you are not hurting anyone by doing it; remember that Google’s rankings are calculated just by a clever piece of software.  If you live in fear about what external links may harm your site then remember that people would deliberately harm their competitor’s websites if there were ways to do it.

Be flexible to any opposing ideas on SEO, you never know you could have been doing something incorrectly for years! Relying on old techniques is dangerous, times change and so should your SEO strategy, keep up to date with the latest news and chat about SEO with people in the industry (there are many of them around).

Even if you are doing well there is more room for improvement on your conversion rate percentage, you could be making more sales out of your existing traffic or . If you are number one for a search term then don’t get complacent and stop SEO on that term, it’s always good to keep a few steps ahead of the ever-increasing competition!

Send us your comments below, have you come across anything mentioned above?

Trust is an emotional response making it pretty hard (but not impossible!) for computers to measure.

Web spiders can have a pretty good guess at which websites are deemed “trustworthy” by looking at certain factors.  Search engines such as Google always strive to get the best quality search results for any term searched for; trustworthiness is therefore a good factor to measure to weed out websites with shifty practices or those which have a bad user experience.

Looking at the website alone doesn’t give the full picture of trust, search engines look at other sites that have been linked TO and FROM and associated content around any domain names.  If you were employing someone for a Bank Manager role for example, would you chose a guy with 10 years banking experience or a guy who’s just had a 10 year prison sentence?

Like it or not your past actions and who you associate with effects your trust factor, see the top trust factors below…

In-bound Links

Who links to your website is quite important when it comes to your trust ranking.

Websites that practice SEO against Google’s webmaster guidelines are likely to pass on that negative effect to your site if heavily linking towards it.  Some sites have 100+ footer/blogroll links going to all manner of dodgy websites that have obviously paid to be in that position or are some sort of link sharing network.  These sites in turn usually have thousands of similarly dodgy links towards them creating a link network full of sites aimed at affiliate products, gambling, Viagra and other dubious products trying to make a quick buck online.  It’s not a good crowd to be part of yet shockingly many SEO companies rely on directories and paid links as their only linking strategy and only get semi-good results for their clients.

External links also work better if they come from related websites, if an authority site on your chosen topic links towards you then you are deemed more trustworthy than if you gain thousands of links from a content farm for example.

A quick way of seeing if your in-bound links are from quality sources is to check the PageRank of each page the link is on, negative sites usually have a PageRank of “N/A” on the page where your link is found.

Out-bound links

A lesser trust factor is based on the websites you link towards.

Again if your part of a spammy, black hat network then this can drag your trust ranking down and effect your search engine positions a little.  If you link towards a website such as “freebananapills.biz” (or something similar) and that site was full of copied content, keyword stuffed pages and hidden text then this could have a negative effect on your own site.  In a way linking to bad sources infects your own site, make sure when you link out to a site that it ranks well in Google for a quick check of trustworthiness or use tools such as the MozBar which has a trust rating (if you pay) .

Getting caught selling links can result in Google knocking down your website, it’s best never to do so unless they are legitimate partners or it’s another website related to your niche.

On site infomation

If you sell a product or a service then you should provide all your details on the website.  A site with a privacy policy, contact details with an address, VAT number etc. displayed on the website will be a lot more trustworthy than a mysterious website that hides it’s personal info (and usually has a lot of stock photography images!).

Turn your website into a brand, not a site catered towards your target keywords and other SEO factors, I could strongly guess that Google treats brands with a little more trust.  If you want to rank for local search terms the have a local landline number on the website, it helps a little with local search results (on Google/Bing maps) and can help your trust rank also.

Other Trust factors

The recent interview with Google engineers Matt Cutts and Amit Singhai hints at other more complex trust factors that Google are working on and have somewhat included in their latest Farmer update.  It’s anyone’s guess at what technical aspects of a webpage now make it less trustworthy in Google’s ever changing algorithm but I believe it may be something to do with how the content is written and where certain call to actions are positioned.

Overall it’s best to make an open website that isn’t involved in bad circles and seems trustworthy to real people, good luck!

Let’s face it, writing content, descriptions and blogs can be painfully boring.  You’d be amazed at the hundreds of website owners I’ve seen that start a website, start promoting it with SEO and then give up totally after 4-5 blog posts on their chosen niche.

Also the rewards of consistent copywriting aren’t instant, it can take a few months before traffic really starts ramping up through blogging.  By that time many people give up interest or try to figure out some crazy SEO method that will take minimum effort but provide maximum results!

Why is blogging so important then?

Search engine spiders are mindless programs that harvest data as quickly as possible.  The easiest thing they can find is content on a website making written content on your website the most important part of it.

When choosing where to ranks websites some of Google’s most important factors for copywriting are:

1) If the content on the page corresponds to the chosen keyword - This means you should write lots about your keyword and related keywords to it (synonyms).  Breaking up different categories helps an awful deal too as you keep each page on target with it’s main keyword and don’t dilute the content with other un-related words.

2) How fresh the content is – Google now prefers content that has been written recently (and so do we!).   Freshly written content is not only a boost for SEO, it can also enter social circles such as Twitter and recent news feeds on WordPress and the search engines.

3) How much content overall is on the site – The more you write, the more you can hit those long tail keywords and win more traffic than focusing on one main keyword.  Google again also looks at how big the site is (how many pages are indexed) and seems to give more authority to the bigger ones.  Just make sure all the content is unique and naturally written.

We now offer a copywriting for SEO service if you are interested, call us now on 01159 418 122…

It’s really easy to add a link onto a blog, social network or forum but as thousands of people discover with SEO, there is no easy way to optimise successfully!  If you’re going to create a link to promote yourself then you’ll have to be smart about it and put a little effort in…

An important ranking factor in Google is the surrounding content around a link.  When I say surrounding content I mean the text within the same tag in the HTML code of the website, typically you’ll see user data with tables, DIVs or paragraphs.  Google spiders actually looks at nearby keywords, metas and image names/tags when scoring a link which is bad news for your average spammer.

So getting your link onto another website’s blogroll may seem like an achievement but as it’s within a sea of un-related keywords the link is a lot less powerful than it could be.  Google will still count the link, just not as much as it would if it was surrounded by related content.

Footer links can be one step up from this, you could partner with another website and have a line such as:

“Find amazing umbrellas and umbrella accessories at XYZUmbrellaShop.com!”

These footer links can have a couple of related words around them but they are still are lacking in surrounding relevant content.

Finding related blog posts to comment on can bring some great results (especially if they are dofollow) as your link can be within a whole page about your keyword.  If you have a cookery website and you comment on another person’s cookery website then this link will be relevant and surrounded with lots of content on cookery for example.

Article submission sites sometimes allow you to place links within the article body, the best one’s such as EzineArticles.com are a little stricter about what you can do unfortunately.  Articles usually have little to no page rank in Google as there are so many of them, it is possible to do SEO towards an article but all that effort could be spent on your own site and not someone else’s who could one day delete your article or go bust.

Even better is to convince the blog owner to let you create a guest blog post in which you can write a whole post about one topic and give it away (with your links on of course!).  Some blog owners would love to display your guest post, it helps their website and it’s a friendly thing to do.  Your links will be within lots of related content and can have any anchor you wish to booster SEO, it’s a win-win!

So whenever you are creating a link make sure it’s within some juicy related text, good luck!

Most homepages on websites are a mish-mash of everything the website has to offer, for example a website about the latest news will have chunks of content about politics, celebrities, crime, technology, sport etc. etc.

Without landing pages (known as category pages for e-commerce) it’s hard to rank for anything in Google without a lot of external link-building with specific anchors.  If you create a whole inner page about one subject then the theme of this page will be mainly focused on that subject i.e. all the words on the page will be about the subject matter.

Google (and other search engines such as Bing) themes each page across the internet to focus on what spectrum of related keywords that page should rank for.  If you have an entire website about for example “fishing” then you could still rank for the keyword “racing cars” if you had a unique page just about racing cars on the site.  It’s important if you do branch out into more than one different subject on your site to use different folders for each subject:

Example news website: http://www.worldnewstoday.com
Example landing page address 1: http://www.worldnewstoday.com/politics/
Example landing page address 2: http://www.worldnewstoday.com/sport/football/
Example landing page address 2: http://www.worldnewstoday.com/technology/internet/google/

How to Make Landing Pages

1. First of all pick a title that contains the keyword you want to rank for, preferably put the keyword at the start of the title.

2. Write content for the page about the keyword title.  Make sure to write naturally and not focus too much on the main keyword or any keyword percentages.  Make sure to write at least 200 words or the page won’t get indexed, if you have time try and hit 400-500 words but make it interesting to read as people WILL read it.

3. Your landing page needs at least one unique image for SEO and to reduce the bounce rate.  Stick in a related image and name the image after your target keyword separated with hyphens such as “racing-car.jpg”.  Also remember to add the ALT and TITLE tags onto the image with a description of what it is including the target keyword again.

4. Make sure the URL of the page includes the target keyword again and that it’s in the right category (see above).  Separate words with hyphens again; for example you could name the page “racing-cars.html”.

5. If you mention other target keywords within the content then link to those pages using the same anchor text.  This makes your landing page more useful to visitors and helps a little with SEO.

6. Link from the landing page to your homepage with the target keyword somewhere in the content; this will booster your changes of a double listing in Google.

7. Create a site-wide link to the landing page using the target keyword as the anchor text.  Every page on your site should link to the landing page, if the landing page isn’t too important link to it from the footer or blogroll.

We are developing the brand image as well as improving the web design, website architecture, UI interface design and user experience. This immediate visual and online sales generating approah will be combined with a targeted offline marketing campaign.

Controliss sell a high quality product range focussing on stunning ranges, and the highest level of technology available for home automation. The core product range includes

Electric Roller Blinds

Electric Roller Blinds

Electric Venetian Blinds

Electric Venetian Blinds

Electric Wood Blinds

Electric Wood Blinds

To find out more about our SEO Company and how we can work with you please call us on

0845 544 1764

Please send CV’s to info@realwebseo.com and contact us directly on 01159 418 122

Real Web SEO

Starting out on SEO is like trying to fight your way out of a crowd of people, there are usually hundreds or thousands of websites out there targeting the same keywords as you who would love to be number one in the search engines.  The way to get out of this scramble is to work hard on the three key ares of SEO: on-site optimisation, off-site optimisation and content generation.

Once a website has broke free of the crowd the traffic levels usually increase at an exponential rate!

On-site optimisation should be the first part of your SEO efforts,  if the site is catergorised correctly and takes advantage of social networking systems such as WordPress then you are set for the other two key areas of SEO.

Off-site optimisation gives your site the initial kick it needs in search engines such as Google.  Linking back to your website from many other websites makes it look popular to the search engines and you will start seeing traffic for obscure “long tails” keywords that appear on your site.  An example of a long tail keyword is perhaps “Wimbledon yellow tennis balls” for a Tennis related website.
Continued off-site optimisation will bring in more and more traffic from search engines and from more and more precise keywords.  An example for a more precise keyword would be “Cricket Bat” for a Cricket related website; these precise keywords can have many thousands of searches in the search engines and could bring an amazing amount of traffic (visitors) to a website.

Content generation is ideal for gaining more traffic through longer tail keywords; the more you write about your subject, the more unique phrases or words you could rank for.  If you have a social media feed broadcast from your website then you can build external links just by simply blogging.  Spreading news about your content around the internet can also bring in in-direct traffic to your site, someone may have read a snippet of your article on an article site and decided to visit your main website from a link within it.

Continuing off-site optimisation and content generation will give you more power in the search engines whilst at the same time make you rank for more and more keywords.  Blogging and interacting with social networks can create a buzz around the content you produce, some of the biggest bloggers in the world get tens of thousands of people reading each blog post they produce and several hundred links towards to content they write; you can reach a stage where you can blog for backlinks which in turn promotes your blog, a snowball effect.

When people use search engines they usually click on the first results that comes up, this means that a ranking increase from position #3 to position #1 for your main keyword could incredibly bring in around four times the amount of traffic!  Below are some old Google statistics in the click through percentages for each position:

Money made from higher rankings can be poured back into website promotion whether it be offline advertising, PR or again more SEO.  This snowball effect can keep rolling until you have maximised the total possible share of the market you can realistically expect.

Our client DuffleCoatsUK.co.uk used this approach and now ranks #1 for every “duffle coat” related keyword you can imagine in Google.co.uk, give the search a go to see it’s results now if you wish.  Since creation they have gained traffic from 4,000 unique search phrases and have even recently got to position #2 for the single word “duffle”!

So get the (snow)ball rolling and stick at SEO until you break out from the crowd and gain momentum; who knows, you could do exactly the same system on another top-selling product or valuable keyword afterwards and really be successful!