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’ve written a couple of posts previously about how the search world is changing and some of the things that will keep us on our toes on 2010, but as there’s so much to keep up with, I thought it would help to summarise some of these impending changes.

Here’s a quick summary of some of those posts:

Google Search Getting More Personal

Bing & SEO in 2010

1. Bing & Yahoo – sometime next year, Yahoo’s search engine will be taken over by Bing (Microsoft’s new search engine). Yahoo will continue to exist, but their own search engine will disappear and results will come from Bing.com instead. This means that Microsoft’s share of the search market will double overnight, so now’s the time to start taking a bit more notice of Bing and how your website is faring on it.

2. Google ‘Caffeine’ is rolled out – you may have heard that Google is introducing a new ‘algorithm’ called Caffeine, which in fact is now being slowly rolled out.  This affects how Google will index websites and what is going to become important is how quickly your web pages load. Google will be looking at the speed of your site, and if it loads too slowly, you could find your website doesn’t fare so well in results. You need to start looking at how quickly your site loads and if there are particularly large files, e.g images or pdf files, then you need to reduce the file sizes right down. Ask your web developer to check this for you and check your site out on a site speed test, such as Google’s site speed test.

3. ‘Real time’ search becomes more important – with the advent of the social networks and sites such as Twitter, real time search is becoming more and more important and search engines need to keep up with this. Google Caffeine has been introduced partly to address this, so in order to index web sites more effectively, they’re having to speed up the indexing process. This means that more real time search results may appear in search engines and blog posts may appear in results more quickly. The more proactive you are with promoting your site (e.g blogging on a regular basis), the more frequently your site may be indexed.

Probably all sounds rather daunting doesn’t it? Don’t worry we’ll keep you posted with everything that’s going on and debunk it as much as we can!

One of the most common things I discuss with clients and prospects is keeping their website up to date. I often come across sites which haven’t been updated in a long time, their news is out of date or they’ve never updated the site since it was launched several years ago.

Keeping a website regularly updated is vital for a number of reasons:

• It’s more interesting to site visitors who can see that you’re keeping up with what’s going on in your industry, you’re busy and you’ve got something to say.
• You’re changing stock regularly and adding new products.
• The search engines wil crawl your site on a more regular basis.
• It can help with rankings as search engines like to see sites being promoted proactively.

In my mind, there’s nothing worse than visiting a site which was last updated 5 years ago! With all the new technology available, updating a site couldn’t be easier. You can always add on a free WordPress or Blogger blog if it’s going to be costly to have your site redeveloped so that you can update it more often yourself.

One final note, there’s going to be a lot of changes in search in 2010. Google are testing a new algorithm called ‘Caffeine’ which allegedly is going to crawl the web more aggressively to keep up with real time search, i.e. what’s being said now in the social networks. This won’t just affect social media sites but all sites, so to encourage the search engines to visit your site more regularly and ensure your rankings stay intact, you need to prove that your site is deserving of a visit!

Last week, Louise and I had a discussion about Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, Yahoo and what effects this may have on your website next year. The interview was recorded as part of Louise’s Blog Talk Radio Show and you can listen to the recording here.

If you’ve not taken much notice of Bing to date, then you do need to start taking notice now. At some point next year, the new deal between Microsoft and Yahoo will take effect and Bing will begin to serve results on Yahoo. Yahoo’s own search engine will no longer exist and will be replaced by results from Bing. If you’re currently getting good results on Yahoo, then those results could disappear overnight.

The principles of SEO remain the same for Bing; whatever you do for good results on Google should work for good results on Bing as well. However, you may find that changes you make to your site will take longer to show up on Bing than on Google. The downside of the new deal is that it gives us even less choice in search – only really two search engines to choose from. A far cry from when I started out in SEO almost 10 years ago when there were loads of search engines to choose from and everyone seemed to have a different preference.

At the moment Bing is probably only referring a small amount of visitors to your site, but this is set to grow, so it’s worth checking the quality of those visitors and checking how your site is performing on the search engine. You could even try out the Microsoft Adcenter pay per click advertising platform. At the moment it’s much cheaper than Google Adwords so won’t cost much to try it out.

There’s going to be a lot of changes in search in 2010, so you need to start preparing your website and ensuring those changes don’t affect your site too much.

I realize that what I’m about to say is going to make me unpopular.  For some people, it’s going to come as a big disappointment, almost on a par to when they found out the truth about Father Christmas!

The odds of getting rich quickly on the internet are even less than winning the lottery (assuming you buy a ticket every week).  There will of course always be some winners, but the overwhelming majority of us won’t become millionaires overnight.  Indeed when you study the success stories, they didn’t either.

Many non internet-business owners who want to find ways to attract more clients and increase sales look to the internet with unrealistic expectations.  They expect visitors to flock to their website, even though they’ve done little or no optimization to enable people to find it.

Some enlightened souls start a blog.  They announce its launch with great fanfare and think they’ve really cracked it when friends and family ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’ over how beautiful it looks.  They may even post diligently at first, until it all becomes too much effort and they leave it to slowly gather dust until eventually joining the growing cyber-graveyard of abandoned blogs.

Social networking is the latest trend amongst those hoping for instant results.  They connect with as many people as they can, as fast as they can and promptly bombard these unfortunates with ‘buy my s***’ messages and links to their sales pages.  After a week or so they complain that social media doesn’t work.

Using these internet based marketing methods without understanding how they work is pretty much a waste of time and effort.

If there were a magic pill or secret potion to get rich quickly, there would be no need for so many people to be selling get rich quick products.  There would also be no poverty.

The real secrets of using the internet to get rich involve hard work, determination, perseverance and a liberal sprinkling of good luck.  Sorry if that isn’t what you wanted to hear.  Now, about the Easter Bunny ……

Last week I read a blog post by a leading internet marketer, Jill Whalen about some SEO practices that are a waste of time (it caused quite a lot of ‘discussion’) and it got me thinking about how much things have changed over the years.

Search engines are much more sophisticated than they were even 5 years ago, which means they deliver much better search results, and are much better at indexing sites. In the past some very large sites built on content management systems or e-commerce sites could cause headaches, but most new technology is much more search engine friendly. However, there are still some SEO practitioners out there that will charge for anything they can get away with and here are some of those things you need to look out for:

1. Submissions
You do not ever need to pay to have your site submitted to the search engines, let alone the zillions that the SEO cowboys will claim you can submit to. The major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) will index your website by following a link to it. If you launch a new site, just get another site to link to it such as your web designer’s site, and you’ll soon find it’s been picked up by the search engines.

2. ‘Content Pages’
The dreaded ‘content pages’ are still practiced by some firms, whereby pages are created around a particular keyword and added into a sitemap. These are basically keyword rich landing pages, often stuffed full of nonsense. It’s much more important to create great content on your website that not only attracts visitors and retains them, but makes your website much more link worthy. Creating keyword rich pages for the sake of rankings really doesn’t do much for your credibility nor for your wallet if you’re paying for it. These are a couple of very poorly written page on the aferry.co.uk website – guess which keywords they’re targeting!
http://www.aferry.co.uk/ferry-to-scotland-ferries-uk.htm
http://www.aferry.co.uk/p-and-o-ferry-uk.htm

3. Keyword Stuffing
This is related to point 2 above, and I still see sites with keywords stuffed onto pages, particularly in a pale grey colour at the bottom of web pages. Stuffing keywords into every possible orifice of a website is not going to help with rankings, and also give the visitor a bad experience – in my mind there’s nothing worse than visiting a site that has keywords in grey text stuffed into the bottom of each page.

Whatever you do, if you’re new to SEO, make sure you don’t fall into the trap of using these very out of date and bad practices.

You’re probably wondering why I’m writing about age this time, but it’s not your age, but the age of your website. I’m not talking about youthful age, but older age, and yes, it does have an effect on how your site performs in the search engines.

In some of the blog posts I’ve written for Savvy Marketers, I’ve talked about things that the search engines use in the way they rank sites, such as keywords, content, meta tags, links etc. Another of the things search engines look at is the age of a website, and unfortunately it does have an effect on rankings, particularly for competitive keywords.

When a brand new website is launched, it does take a while before results are seen, not so much for niche keywords, but for more competitive keywords. Google uses trust in the way that it ranks sites and since a brand new site has no history, and usually, few, if any sites linking to it, it doesn’t have much to go on in terms of trustworthy sites linking back to it. This also means that sites trying to artificially inflate their back links using link farms and other dodgy techniques won’t just get to the top overnight. It’s always quality over quantity.

So, what does this mean for your fledgling website? For starters, it does mean that you need to be patient and find other ways of attracting visitors to your website. However, as I mentioned earlier, generally it’s the most competitive keywords which are harder to come by, so why not seek out niche keywords that are easier to rank for, and could mean that you stand out from some of your competitors? Ranking for niche keywords which are less competitive not only means that results can be seen more quickly, but also that those people who find your site are going to be highly targeted visitors and hopefully, even more likely to enquire or buy from you.

It’s important not to get too obsessed with high traffic competitive keywords, when often it’s the more niche keywords that convert well, leading to sales and enquiries. When your site is more established with a number of quality links pointing to it, then you can try to target some of the more competitive mainstream keywords. But if your niche is serving you well, then you may find you don’t need to compete for these keywords anyway.

So in the case of SEO, having older age on your side does help, which is fine by me!

Recently I’ve noticed that more and more people are shopping around for prices before they decide to commit themselves to a service provider. People have always asked me, often before they know exactly what I do, how much I charge, but now as more and more businesses are dipping their toes into online marketing, the cheapest option always seems to be their number one priority, particularly in the current economic climate.

However, cheap often leads to a lot of disappointment, and here are a few reasons why choosing the cheapest will probably lead to a less than cheerful experience:

The service will probably leave a lot to be desired, will you ever get hold of your consultant? Will they actually do the work they promised? Will you ever see any results?

You may find that your site’s home page is the only page optimised, or you’re charged per keyword, the cheapest option being 1 keyword. What’s the point in having a website optimised for only 1 keyword?

Your ‘optimisation’ won’t be done on your site but on external pages hosted by the SEO company who will drive traffic to your site from doorway pages. As soon as you decide to stop, the traffic gets turned off and you’re left not only with no visitors but with an unoptimised website.

Generally inadequate SEO, with keyword stuffed pages and meta tags which never really gain good rankings and show your site in a bad light in the search results.

So beware, the lure of a cheap service can lead to a lot of frustration later on, with little or no improvements in rankings and a mess for someone else to clear up afterwards! If you’re still lured by the cheapest then at least get some references before you take up the service.

I expect you’ve all heard about ‘meta tags’ and that they’re “something to do with search engine optimisation”. Yes, meta tags are an important part of SEO, but they don't do the job on their own.

So, what are meta tags?
Meta tags are tags which are placed in the html source code of a website. Visitors on your website can't always see them, but the search engines can. These tags typically are the ‘meta description’ tag and the ‘meta keywords’ tag. The other tag that is extremely important is your title tag. Although not a ‘meta’ tag, this tag is even more important than other meta tags.

Why are they important?
Firstly the title tag. This is the title for each of the pages on your website. They are a descriptive title reflecting the content that is on that web page and need to include your keywords. Since each page of your website is unique, so should be your title tag. You therefore shouldn't have the same title tag on each page of your website. This tag is displayed in the search engine results page and is the clickable link through to your website, it is approximately 70 characters long.

The meta description tag is an objective description of your web page. It should be compelling and not too wordy. Lists of keywords are definitely a no-no! This tag is displayed below your title tag in the search engine results pages, so ideally you want your link to be clicked on instead of your competitors' in the list of search results. You therefore need to bear this in mind when writing the meta description tag.

Finally the meta keywords tag. Since this has been spammed so much in the past, search engines take little notice of it, it won't make any difference to rankings and you don't even need to include it anymore.

To demonstrate the above points, here are the tags in the source code of the Forty First website:

And here they are in the search results:

The rules to follow with meta tags:
1. Remember that your title tag is one of the most important tags in your optimisation.
2. Write unique title tags for each web page, which include targeted keywords.
3. Don't just list keywords as your title tag or meta description tag – it’s lazy and won’t compel anyone to click on your link in the search results.
4. Write different meta description tags for each page to reflect the content on that page.
5. Meta tags are not the be all and end all of your optimisation – meta tags alone will not get high rankings in the search results.

Bad practice in search engine optimisation (SEO) and online marketing in general, is something that I come across from time to time and when I do, I’m still surprised that there are people out there using these techniques to gain rankings for website owners, most of whom are unfortunately none the wiser about these practices.

At Savvy Marketers, not only do we want to educate you about online marketing that works, but also what techniques can damage your rankings (even your reputation), so that when you’re looking to choose a provider, you don’t get ripped off.

In terms of SEO, these are some of the common bad practices that I come across:
Hidden text – this is when text on the page is the same colour as the background colour, so that it isn’t seen by visitors to the website. However, search engines can see it. It’s bad practice and won’t do anything for your rankings.
Keyword stuffing – stuffing keywords into the meta tags, and ‘alt’ (image) tags, sometime greyed out keywords at the bottom of the websites’ pages.
‘CSS’ spam – this is basically spam in the code of the web pages, a bit like hidden text but rather than the text being the same colour as the background of the page, it’s hidden in the code.
Redirects – using ‘meta refreshes’ to redirect one (spammy) page to another.

What can happen if these techniques are used? Rankings may be depressed and at worst, your website could be banned from the search engines and it’s not easy to get it re-listed. Search engines have strict guidelines as to quality of web pages and you can read Google’s webmaster guidelines here.

It’s worth reading these guidelines so that you don’t get stung, and if you’re really not sure, just ask either myself or Louise!