It’s not uncommon for businesses to need change their website domain and I’ve come across this on many occasions. It could be that the company name is changing due to a takeover or rebrand, a better domain has come up for sale or perhaps even through a legal battle over a domain name. Whatever the reason, there is a right way of going about changing the domain name of a website.

You may think it should just be a matter of uploading the website to the new domain and publicizing the new company name/domain, but there’s much more to it than that, particularly when it comes to the search engines!

Chances are if the old domain has been around for sometime, it’s built up some history and has a reasonable number of links pointing to it. This can all be lost quite easily, so you need to tell the search engines to transfer your links to the new domain. This needs to be done using a ‘301 redirect’ and redirect the old domain to the new domain. That way the search engines will follow any old links to the new site. Google has an explanation about 301 redirects which you can read here.

Make sure you have a 404 error page on the old web pages and redirect visitors to the new domain. A 301 redirect should direct traffic but a 404 page is worth having as a back up too. I’ve written about 404 pages in a previous blog post.

If the structure of the new site is similar to the old site, you can redirect each old page to the equivalent new page via a 301 redirect as well.

Whatever you do, it’s inevitable that rankings will suffer, but these steps are important to minimize the impact! Bear in mind timing as well. If your busy time of year is the run up to Christmas, then avoid any major changes to your website and wait until the new year!

Have you changed your website’s domain? Please let us know why you did it and what the impact was.

At the end of last year I wrote a post about upcoming changes in the world of search in 2010, which you can read here. one of the things I mentioned in the post was the importance of how fast your website loads.

Google has rolled out ‘caffeine’, which is a change in the way it indexes websites. In order to index the web more efficiently, it is crawling website much faster and to satisfy this, your site needs to load in super fast time. You can find out how fast your site loads using Google’s page speed test and you can also find it in webmaster tools which I wrote about last week (link to post) You need to aim for your site to load in about 2 seconds.

If your site is on the slow side, there are a few things you can do to speed it up, which will probably require input from your web developer:

1. Ensure all your images are optimized for the web to load as fast as possible. The same with any pdf, video and other downloads you have on your site.

2. Make sure that the code of your web pages isn’t too ‘bloated’ as this can cause the search engines to slow down while they wade through it.

You can read a useful article about this here

3. Minimise use of flash as this takes time to download and search engines, let alone visitors to your website, won’t hang around for long waiting for it to download.

4. Use a reputable web hosting company and ensure you have adequate bandwidth. If traffic is increasing to your website significantly and as your site grows, it uses more bandwidth. if your bandwidth is inadequate, your site will load very slowly, which is really annoying for visitors to your site! You can read more about what website bandwidth means here.

How quickly does your website download? Is it fast enough to satisfy visitors with ever decreasing patience levels as well as the search engines?

Google has an array of tools to help website owners promote themselves and one particularly useful tool is Webmaster Tools. Whether you manage your website yourself or not, it’s well worth setting up or asking your web developer if it’s already set up for you.

The information provided by the application is very useful, albeit rather technical but gives insight into how well your website is being indexed by Google and if they’re encountering any errors on your site. Other information provided is

• when your site was crawled
• how quickly the pages load (important for Google),
• which keywords your website is being found for and which ones are resulting in click throughs to your site
• which sites link back to your website
• if any malware has been found on your site, i.e if your site has been hacked!

To set up Google webmaster tools, you need a Google account. If you have one already, for example for Gmail, you can use the same login. If not, create a brand new Google account. Once you sign up to Webmaster Tools, you need to verify that you own your website. In order to do this you need to paste some code into the home page of your site or upload a blank webpage – Google will provide the filename for this page. You can ask your web developer to do this for you if you’re unsure, it should only be a 5 minute job!

Once done, log back in and click that your site is verified, then you’ll have access to all this information. You don’t need to check the stats every day, but perhaps every week or so depending on how large your site is.

Let us know of any useful tools you use to keep check on how your site is performing!

The rise of social media is not only influencing how people are using the web and connecting online, but it also has an impact on search engine optimisation (SEO). The principles of SEO haven’t really changed that much over the years: a well designed site with keyword research built in, useful & high quality content, regular updates etc. However there are external factors which also influence a website’s rankings and this is where things are changing.

Years ago, just submitting your site to a few directories or exchanging links could help influence rankings, but these techniques don’t really work any more. The way links affect rankings is changing and this now has to be considered a major part of SEO.The diagram below may help explain.

Social media plays its part in several ways:

• Links from sites where you have a profile, which can be optimised.
• Links from blogs and other communities where you participate.
• Endorsement of your website/business from other sites and communities. This gives your site an element of trust which search engines look for.
• Social media activities are now integrated into search results, so your business could get found via your social media activity within a search.
• All online marketing activities contribute towards a website’s optimisation, e.g online PR, article marketing, blogging. Social media is no different and should be included in your online marketing mix.
• Social media raises the profile of your business which is important for recognition & branding, leading to more sales and enquiries.
• The search engines monitor everything you do to promote yourself and this is being increasingly included in the main search results, particularly on Google who now draws in results from a variety of media such as blogs, videos, images and ‘tweets’.

It’s important that social media isn’t seen as a separate activity but has to be included within your marketing mix, contributing towards the visibility of your website and those all important leads and sales.

For more on this please read our post ‘SEO Gets Social‘

Please let us know what you include in your marketing mix and how you make everything you do work together!

The latest Google algorithm update called ‘Mayday‘ has caused much frustration with webmasters. Google makes hundreds of tweaks per year to its algorithm (the way it ranks websites) and often these go unnoticed, but this latest update has got many website owners in a spin. In a nutshell, Google is placing more emphasis on the quality of pages within sites which may not have been deemed as important as other more prominent web pages.

These pages, often buried a bit deeper into sites such as individual product pages or article archives often get found for what is known as the ‘long tail searches’, which are often very specific niche searches usually consisting of 3 or more key phrases. Google is now placing more emphasis on the quality of those pages and if they don’t have a huge amount of relevancy to a search as some other pages, or contain poor content, the rankings for them are dropping.

Many websites rely on ‘long tail’ searches for a significant amount of traffic, so you can imagine that this is causing problems for some websites, particularly e-commerce sites. This means website owners need to spend more time raising the quality of the content of those pages, perhaps with customer reviews, additional content or improved product descriptions, linking to related products etc.

You can read more about this update on Search Engine Land, and also follow the link from the article to the video on YouTube where Matt Cutts (Google’s Search Quality Engineer) talks a bit more about the update.

(NB This post first appeared on the Forty First blog, but I thought as it was an important update, to reproduce it here for our Savvy Marketers followers)

I’ve created this short video to give you an idea as to how to use the new Google Adwords Keyword Research tool. There are a few changes from the old interface, but on the whole, the ideas you get from the tool will go a long way to helping you to identify new keywords to target on your site, or use to optimise existing pages on your website.

The instructions are for basic use and for SEO purposes rather than setting up a Google Adwords campaign. This is the first time I’ve done a video tutorial, so  hope you find it useful!

Click here for the Google Adwords homepage and here to access the tool directly.
Watch the video:

Going through the process of having a website built can be like navigating a minefield. Not only do you need to think about the design of the site and what information to include on it, but there are a whole host of different content management systems and techie options to consider as well.

A content management system (or CMS) basically means you can log into your website’s admin area and update pages or content fairly easily without technical knowledge or worrying about mucking up the design of the site. If you have a blog, these are essentially content management systems and once you get used to the interface, they’re fairly easy to use.

In fact most days I hear about a different content management system for websites so the choice can be confusing. So, if you’re about to embark on having a new site built, you need to consider what you want it to do.

1. Ability to update the site
This is probably one of the most important things when having a site built; being able to update the website yourself quite easily without having to pay your web developer each time you want to change something. It will allow you to be spontaneous and add offers or new content as and when required. It gives you that bit of control over your content and means you can be much more proactive with the promotion of your site.

2. Built in optimisation
Your content management system must allow you to be able to update the optimisation on key pages of your site, which include title tags for each individual page, meta description tags, header tags etc. This is really important to ensure the site is optimised as best as possible.

3. Integration with social media
Ensure you can integrate social media activities into your website. If you have a twitter profile, Facebook or LinkedIn profile, you want these profiles linked to or even integrated, e.g your latest ‘tweets’. If you have a blog, you also need it to be integrated into your website preferably on your domain rather than a free domain, for example www.savvymarketers.co.uk/blog rather than savvymarketers.wordpress.com.

4. Ability to move your site
New websites can be very expensive and you don’t necessarily want to tie yourself down to a one off bespoke system, particularly if sometime in the future you decide to move your site for whatever reason. It’s best to go with a system that can be moved to another provider or host without having to have a brand new website built!

5. Reputable web host
Make sure your website is hosted with a reputable company. Cheap hosting can lead to your site being hosted alongside less than reputable sites, which can cause problems with the search engines. You also want to ensure your hosting company has security in place to prevent hackers getting into your website and inserting malware on it.

This is only a few of the things you need to consider when having a new site built, and best to think about all of these things before you choose which provider to use!

In our ‘7 Ways to Get More Clients with Social Media Marketing’ talk, Louise and I explain how social media works with all the different online marketing activities which many businesses use as part of their marketing mix. One of those is how SEO works with social media.

It’s important to remember that almost everything you do online will have an impact somehow in the search engines. Search engines are now very sophisticated and can pick up almost anything that you put up online – your latest video, tweets, blog posts, images, social media profiles. How this is being indexed has also changed in the last few months – it’s exciting and something you need to be aware of.

In the screenshot below (click on it for a bigger image), which is a topical search for ‘volcanic ash cloud’, you can see the usual web pages in the search results plus video results from YouTube. What’s interesting is towards the bottom of the image. There are news and blog posts that are now appearing almost in real time. Google is indexing the web so fast that your blog post or ‘tweet’ could in fact appear on Google just after you’ve posted it! The way people use the web is changing search as the popularity of social media explodes and the search engines need to keep up with it all.

What it means for you is that the more active you are online, the more frequently you update your blog and participate in social media, the more likely your stuff could be found in a search within seconds or minutes of being put up. The downside is that search engines remember everything, so think twice about what you put out there, especially after you’ve had a few glasses of wine!

If you’d like to attend our talk, the next one is on 30 April at Basepoint Business Centre in Gosport, Hampshire. Go to our events page for more details.

I regularly speak to many business owners who want to be more visible for local searches. As many people now use the net to search locally rather than pick up the Yellow Pages, this is increasingly important.

Here are a few ways to ensure you get found for those local searches:

1. Google Maps
You can get a free Google Maps listing for your business (and if you work from home, you no longer have to show your address). Often these maps listings appear above the main search results, which means people are more likely to click here before the main results, so well worth ensuring your business is listed.

2. Local Directories
People still use local business directories, so make sure you list your business. In the Hampshire area, there are sites such as iHampshire, South Online as well as regional sites such as Touch Local, City Local and The Best of.

3. Yell.com
If you have a free business listing in the yellow pages, you should also have a free listing on Yell.com, so make sure you’re listed there too.

4. Google Adwords
If you’re running an Adwords campaign and you want local enquiries, you can set your ads to show within a certain geographic area. You wont get as many visitors as a national campaign, but those who do enquire should be more local. However, as ads are targeted by the IP address of a computer, it may not be terribly accurate.

5. Social Networks
Social networking can work well for local businesses, but make sure your location and the areas you serve is mentioned in your profile to ensure you get enquiries from customers in your area.

There’s lots you can do to raise your profile locally online, and trying a combination of the above should help towards achieving this!

I’ve recently being speaking to a couple of clients who’ve heard various rumours that duplicating their content around the web will get them penalized by Google, and they’ll lose their rankings.

There’s a lot of confusion around duplicate content to the extent that business owners worry about that any content they reproduce or recycle may succumb to the wrath of Google, but this is so untrue!

Businesses who are genuinely trying to promote themselves by showing off their expertise around the web (also known as ‘marketing’), need not worry about duplicate content issues. These days, search engines have sophisticated algorithms and they can quite easily work out the source of the content. The worst that could happen is that the search engine may favour the same article or blog post on one website over another, which isn’t really a disadvantage anyway! The advantage of passing your work around the web is that not only do you get your name more widely known, you also get links back to your site from those websites who are happy to display your content.

Google and the other search engines are far more worried about businesses who are blatantly trying to spam the search engines, trick the search engines in some way and use underhand techniques to promote themselves. If you use any techniques that try to exploit their algorithms (the way they rank websites) then your rankings may well suffer! Google displays guidelines for webmasters on it’s website, which you can read here:

Webmaster Guidelines and here: Duplicate Content

Jill Whalen, a leading internet marketer, also recently wrote an article about duplicate content, which is well worth a read!