A blog is so important to the online success of all small businesses that it can truly be called the real heart

Have we convinced you yet that your blog is important? OK, here’s why it is:

It is the heart or hub of your online presence, and is the bridge between your website and the social networks.

For service business owners especially, a blog is where you can demonstrate your expertise by regularly adding written, audio or video examples of what you do, and provide proof that it works. It also a place to announce new products or services in a non-salesy way.

It’s the place where you can build online relationships with your readers who, if you’ve targeted them correctly, are also prospective clients for your business. Your blog gives them the opportunity to get to ‘know, like & trust’ you much more easily than  short updates of 140 characters.

It’s where you can send social networking connections to learn more about you, somewhere that isn’t just a sales page. It always amazes us when people still do this.

When you publish a new blog post, you instantly create new material to use as informative updates and share on your social networks.

By regularly adding new posts you increase the occasions on which Google & Bing will return to visit your blog. This in turn increases your general online visibility and rankings in the search engines. It’s a vital component of your content marketing strategy as this excellent post by Ardath Albee shows.

If you have chosen a self-hosted blog then your blog is a part of the internet owned by you. Which is more than can be said for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc…… even if you do pay for hosting and buy a premium blog theme, setting up a blog is still an extremely cost-effective way to establish a professional presence online for your business. It’s also where you have total control over the content and are free to make as many changes as you wish, as your business develops and grows.

If you’d like to learn more about blogging, here are details of a short guide which may be helpful.

So, how are you treating the real heart of your business online?

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I’m hoping that 2012 is going to see me diversify my income more, not only with our plans for Savvy Marketers, but for a new sideline of my own – my first foray into e-commerce! I’ll reveal all once my new site is up and running, but in the meantime, if you’re planning on starting something new, whether for extra income or a brand new career, here are a few steps you need to take to get started online, even if you’re not ready to have your website built.

Get a Domain Name

This is the first thing you need to do, and try and get a domain name that is related to your business name. It’s getting more difficult to find nice domain names which aren’t taken, so brainstorm a few variations and see what’s taken and what isn’t. It’s worth checking that your domain name isn’t too similar to an existing site (as you don’t want to be sending visitors to your competitors if people get mixed up with your domain). If similar domains are taken, but their business offering is quite different from yours, then you’re probably OK to use it. Register your domain and any standard variations, e.g .com & .co.uk. Also hyphenated variations. When I started Forty First in 2002, fortyfirst.co.uk was registered but not being used, so I registered and started to use forty-first.co.uk (and registered .com). Since then fortyfirst.co.uk came up for sale, so I bought it along with the .com version. I don’t use them but own them, and it’s important that a competitor can’t get hold of variations of your domain. We’ve done the same for Savvy Marketers by buying up variations of the .co.uk and .com domains which are available.

Do Some Keyword Research

You may think that researching keywords is a little premature, particularly if you’re in the early stages of starting up your business, but it’s important to find out what keywords people may potentially use to find your products or services. It can also help with your market research. Once you find out how people search for your products/services, it can give you ideas for a niche and even how you may want to structure your site when you come to build it. Online market research is just as important as offline market research and you need to know not only the keywords to use for your own offering, but research other businesses in your sector which you can also find from your keyword research – find out what they offer as well as how they offer their products or services.

Put Up a Holding Page

Once you’ve registered your domain, put up a basic holding page saying your site is coming soon (even if it isn’t!) and link to the page from a website that is already in the search engines’ database. Even if you’re not going to be thinking about a website for a few months, the earlier the search engines know about your domain the better. Age is taken into consideration in how search engines rank sites, and although you don’t have to wait for your site to rank if its optimised and promoted well, any help you can give your site before it goes live will contribute towards it being found faster by potential customers.

Register Your Social Networking Profiles

Again, you may not be ready to start participating on social sites, but if it’s going to be a part of your online marketing, then it’s worthwhile making sure the name you want to use for your social profiles is available. Keep your name the same across all social networking sites so as not to confuse people. Sites you need to consider claiming your name on include Twitter, Google+ (pages, but you do need a Google+ account) & Facebook (again you need a Facebook account to create a business page). Don’t forget YouTube and Flickr if you’re going to be sharing videos and photos – you can create a YouTube Channel and Flickr Photostream with your business name.

So if you’re starting a new venture this year, best of luck and hopefully these tips will help things move along a bit quicker!

Resources:

Using the New Adwords Keyword Research Tool

What’s in a Domain Name?

Time to  Spring Clean Your Social Networks

What advice can you give to someone about to start a new business venture? 

Website showing lots of ads before any useful content

Many businesses take ads on their site as a way of generating revenue, so does this mean that businesses who do this are going to lose their rankings?

Not necessarily! It all depends on how the site is set up and on the content that goes alongside the ads. Google’s aim is to filter out low quality sites with little useful content for visitors. The type of sites which will be affected by this update are generally those which have been set up with the sole purpose of having lots of ads to maximise revenue from them. Essentially, sites which are full of ads with little or no content along side them. There are plenty of websites around like this and I’m sure you’ve come across them while surfing the net.

If you’ve created a site where you regularly create useful content, but carry ads alongside this content, then you shouldn’t need to worry as long as the content takes priority over the ads. So, for example, having a blog with ads in the sidebar, or perhaps between posts as well, shouldn’t lead to any loss of rankings.

If you’re not sure whether or not your site will get hit in these updates, then take a good look through it from a visitor’s perspective. Will visitors have to sift through the ads to find the content when they arrive on your site? If so, you need to make changes to make sure the content takes priority.

Do you take ads on your site? Are you generating much revenue from them? Please share your experiences with us in the comments! 

Guest post from Adrian Bold of Bold Internet

Google announced last week a major change to the way signed-in users, i.e. those logged in with a Google account, will search within Google. The short version is that “many” signed-in users will be redirected to the secure (SSL) version of Google, i.e. https. Google have offered privacy and security concerns as the driver behind this.

One of the consequences from this is that these search queries will no longer be available to those of us who use services such as Google Analytics in order to see what keywords are driving traffic to a site.

As with most things to do with Google, this already appears to have stirred up a hornet’s nest with lots of those involved in the SEO industry appearing to be ‘up in arms’ over this. See this summary in Search Engine Land as an example: Reactions From SEOs Come Loud, Fast and Often Angry to Google’s Switch to Encrypted Search.

For my part, I’d rather wait and see ‘how bad’ the outcome is before tearing Google apart. One aspect that caught my eye in Google’s announcement was the reference to “…default search experience…”. I wouldn’t pretend for one moment that most users will turn off the default but I’d rather keep my powder to dry to see how this develops in practice.

Of course, Google have said that those search queries resulting from a click on a paid ad (AdWords) will still be seen. To me, this seems perfectly fair. If you are paying for advertising in AdWords, you should have complete visibility over where your money is going.

With the rest, I always try to remind myself who the service belongs to and the fact that these services are free to use (Search, Analytics, Webmaster Tools etc.). We are very fortunate that so much data is provided for free. I’m never going to be Google’s biggest fan but I do know whose toys I’m playing with!

Google’s announcement in full: Making search more secure.

Adrian Bold is the owner of Bold Internet Ltd, a Hampshire company providing SEO and PPC services. A Google AdWords Certified Partner offering AdWords campaign management.

I’m not going to go into monitoring the technical performance of your site in this post, but look at how you can find out how your site is performing in a search. This is a great tool and if you’re not using Google Webmaster Tools, then you need to do so!

When you log into your account, you need to navigate to the option, ‘your site on the web’, then ‘search queries’. This section will show you which search queries your site is ranking for, their average position in the rankings, whether the rankings have improved or decreased in the dates shown (default is last month to date), as well as which pages of your site are ranking for those terms. It also gives you an idea of impressions (when your site was shown in the results) as well as an idea of click throughs. You can see why this is useful.

The image below is a snapshot of this report for my Forty First website. You can see a list of terms the site is being found for in a search, their rough position and impressions (NB I’m no longer actively promoting this site, hence the low rankings!)

Google Webmaster Tools Search Query report

Clicking on each keyword on the left of the report (under ‘query’) will take you to information about the page(s) ranking for that particular keyword. This is very useful if you’re actively promoting your site in the search engines as you can find out which pages are ranking for a particular keyword and work out if some pages need improvement – perhaps you’re expecting certain pages to show up and they’re not. It can also help you to focus your keywords better too, you may find that a page is ranking for a keyword that isn’t very targeted and therefore need to refine the content and/or keywords used on the page.

Scrolling down to the bottom of your search query list allows you to download the data into a spreadsheet and also click through to your Google analytics keyword report where you can see which keywords resulted in traffic to your website.

Other tabs at the top of the report also show top pages performing in the search results (in this case it’s the home page of the site), and you can also filter results to show particular countries, and type of search e.g. web, mobile or image etc.

If you’re looking to make improvements to your website’s overall optimisation in the search engines, this report is a great place to start and more useful than relying on rankings reports or checking rankings manually yourself.

If you’d like to find out more about measuring and tracking the performance of your website, then check out our new Online Marketing Tracking & Measurement Guide.

We never liked the .html at the end of the links and also wanted to get rid of the dates in the links too. The reason we kept the old format when we moved was so we didn’t lose any initial rankings we had, but looking back, it would have been a lot easier to change the permalinks back then as there were far less posts and we might as well have changed everything at the same time (e.g gone the whole hog with moving the site). As an aside, don’t change the urls on your site for the sake of it, only if you have good reason for doing so (although you could argue that perhaps we could have lived with our old permalinks!).

We decided to tackle this once and for all, but there is a right way of going about making these changes to make sure you minimise any loss to rankings in the search engines. It was very laborious, but now the work is done, we’re glad we did it. These are the steps I took in case you decide to do a similar thing with your website. If you have a webmaster, it would be best to ask them to do this for you:

1. Copy and paste the urls (permalinks) of each of your blog posts onto a spreadsheet. We have over 300 posts so this took quite a bit of time.

2. Back up your WordPress database! This is important as you don’t want to lose any work in case things go wrong. We use the WP-DB Backup plugin.

3. Install 301 redirect and broken link plugins. We used the ‘Redirection‘ plugin and the ‘Broken Link Checker‘ plugin.

4. Disable any plugins which link to posts. I disabled a couple of plugins we use called LinkWithin which links to selected posts at the bottom of each blog post and Tweet Old Post, which automatically tweets out old blog posts.

5. Decide which format you would like your posts to take, we went from the format of year/month/post-title.html to category/post-title/. Make this change in the permalinks section under ‘Settings’, making sure you format the links correctly. The correct format of our new permalinks is:
/%category%/%postname%/

6. Record all the new permalinks of each blog post onto the spreadsheet you created earlier. It’s important to put the new urls in a second column against the old urls. This will take as long as it took in the first instance. I don’t know any shortcuts, but let me know if you do!

7. Using your new 301 redirect plugin, redirect each old url to the new url. This is very time consuming, but very important! It has to be done so that you don’t lose any rankings in the search engines and so that any links to posts in the old permalink format redirect to the new urls. Visitors clicking on a link in the old format will be automatically redirected to the blog post in its new format. Once done, do a few random checks to make sure the redirects are working.

8. Back up your site again.

9. Check the broken link checker for broken links and fix them (this doesn’t have to be done specifically for this exercise, but it’s good practice to check your site for broken links and fix them).

Now you can see why I put off doing this for a while! I would advise making any major changes to your site like this to a time when you’re a bit quieter with work. Don’t tackle it when you’re busy or during important trading times, e.g for retailers, during the run up to Christmas in case anything goes wrong and it affects rankings.

Although this is specifically for WordPress sites, you need to follow similar steps for any website if you plan to change the urls for any reason. The most important thing is to make sure the redirects are put into place properly. Your webmaster should be able to advise the best way of tackling it for your website.

The last week has seen Google going even more ‘social’ with the introduction of the +1 button, where people searching can effectively ‘like’ sites in the search results (a bit like Facebook’s like button) and Google+ – a new type of social network (just to make it even more confusing)!

So here’s a quick summary of the changes and what it means for your website:

Content
Create unique, useful content for your site visitors on a regular basis. This is usually done via a blog. There are a number of benefits of doing this:

i. It provides fresh, up to date content on your site.

ii. Shows off expertise and credibility in your industry sector.

iii. Encourages the search engines to visit your site more often.

iv. Encourages interactivity with visitors on your website.

v. Encourages distribution of your content via the social networks (so it’s important people can easily share your blog posts or content)

vi. Useful, unique content will enable you to prove that your site is worthy of higher rankings.

Social Signals
This means that participating in the social networks is no longer just an option, but an important part of your online marketing. The search engines are looking at how your content is distributed, if people like it and how influential those people are who share it. To help your site benefit from social signals, you need to:

i. Participate in the major social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter & Facebook (although you don’t need to do all three)

ii. Plan how you will use the social networks and what your objectives are.

iii. Connect with other people and encourage distribution of your content from your blog/website and also by sharing your own links and other people’s links in your social networks.

iv. Be aware that people can now ‘+1’ your website in Google’s search results (if they have a Google profile), so your listing needs to be relevant to their search and serve their needs when clicking through. This could ultimately affect rankings and influence whether or not people click through to your site or another site that may have been +1’d by people in their network.

v. Be proactive within the social networks – it may help to share this task with a few staff members.

Analytics Data
Finally, how people interact with your site is becoming increasingly significant in the way search engines rank websites too. Google knows a huge amount about most sites on the web from people clicking on a site’s link from the search results, whether people click through and leave immediately (this is taken into account in the bounce rate stats in Google Analytics) and if people stay to browse your website.

This means that the information on your site needs to be relevant to people searching, useful when they arrive on it and encourage people to stay on your site. Useful, fresh, relevant and linkable content again is what people and the search engines are looking for.

Have you adapted your online marketing strategy to take into account the recent changes in search and social media? Have you seen any effects on rankings for your website? Please share your experiences here.

Fast forward about 10 years and ‘social media’ is the new darling. Want to be on Twitter and Facebook? Want to learn how to use these sites, learn what message to send and how to interact? You can find plenty of help and lots of tips here on Savvy Marketers.

Let’s face it, SEO has never been the sexiest form of online marketing, having connotations with geeks and technical things that people don’t really want to know about. But however sexy social media has become, SEO still plays a very important part in the online marketing toolbox.

Whatever the message you want to spread through the social media channels, ultimately your audience will come back to a web page, whether it be a blog post (the most popular type of link distributed), a sales page, static web page, report or Facebook page (and no, Facebook pages aren’t a replacement for having a website!).

Once your visitors land on the link you’ve distributed, chances are it will be a page on your website. That’s where the visitor experience of your brand will start and where SEO plays an important part. SEO isn’t just about gaining rankings in the search engines, but making websites ‘search engine friendly’ which goes hand in hand with web usability, the visitor experience. After arriving on your site, your visitors should easily be able to navigate around it. Relevancy is also key. A visitor clicks on a link and expects to land on a page relating to that link. The design of a site is often (at least should be) influenced by SEO. In fact, going one step further, your social media activity should also be ‘optimised’ for relevancy and of course, getting found on the social networks themselves. (You can read my post from last week Have you optimised your Facebook page?)

Sending visitors to a poorly designed or optimised site, or to an irrelevant page from your social media activity isn’t really going to do you any favours and can have a negative impact on the success of your social media marketing. If your site isn’t up to scratch then that should really be addressed before you even begin distributing your message on the social networks. Bear in mind that all your online marketing activity works together, none can be done in isolation, and generally a large part of the interest you gain will go back to your site. Therefore, the better the optimisation of the site, the more successful your online marketing campaigns will be!

I’d be interested in your thoughts on this – perhaps I’m missing something! Even so, I believe that SEO still plays a major part in online marketing and the more popular social media becomes, the closer the ties it has with SEO. Comments below please!

Image: Free Rainbow Sprinkle Ice Cream Cone Creative Commons by Pink Sherbet Photography, on Flickr

I’ve tested the search facility on Facebook by entering keywords to see if a list of company pages is generated based on my query, however, the pages served in the results all happened to contain the keyword I searched on in their page title. So one of the ways to get your page found for a search within Facebook is to include keywords relating to your page within the title of the page itself. So for example, if your page is about ‘cake decorating’, this needs to be included in the page title when you set the page up. Unfortunately, once you choose the name for your page, it can’t be changed! There is a lot more to Facebook search than keywords in page titles and you can read up about it in this comprehensive blog post: Ranking in Facebook Search – Take Notice from VerticalMeasures.com

There are also techniques to optimising the page itself. When you’re logged in to Facebook as an administrator, click on ‘Edit Page’, then ‘basic information’. Make sure this is completed as comprehensively as possible including well-written descriptions, which include your keywords. You can read more on Facebook optimisation here: How to Optimise your Brand’s Facebook Page for Search Engines from ReadWriteWeb.com.

Completing these steps should help to make sure your page gets found for a search not only on Facebook itself, but also on Google & Bing. When it comes to ‘status’ updates, Google started incorporating page updates into its search results around February 2010. Google’s Realtime search indexes the web at almost realtime so blog posts, tweets and Facebook page updates can appear in search results within seconds or minutes of being posted.

Privacy settings on Facebook have to be respected so the search engines are only allowed to index pages or profiles set to ‘public’. If you don’t want your profile or updates being found on Google, you must update your privacy settings to ensure your profile can’t be indexed. You can read more about this here: Facebook Will Be Google-able (if your profile is set to public) also from ReadWriteWeb.com

If you’re active on social media, it’s not just your Facebook profile that you should be optimising. Twitter and LinkedIn also need to be optimised as part of your social media marketing strategy and we’ll be discussing this in future posts!

Have you optimised your Facebook presence? Has it worked for you? Is it driving more traffic and ‘likes’ to your page?

I still find that many of the basics of SEO are still overlooked, so thought I’d share a few tips to remind those of you who are looking at optimizing your website, or have attempted to do so, but aren’t very happy with results so far.

1. Site Structure
This is how your site has been built (also known as ‘site architecture’) and the structure of your content, which can have great impact on how your site performs in the search engines. A poorly built site with poor content structure, or content buried away into the site can really affect rankings, so this is one of the first things to consider. A site built entirely in flash is a definitely a no no! The search engines need to be able to index the pages of a website easily and if they can’t, or content is buried away too deeply into the site (think more than 3-4 clicks from the home page), you risk your pages not being crawled or included properly in the search engines’ databases.

2. Keyword Research
This is one of the most important aspects of SEO. The right keywords to target for your website need to be researched properly, and this step can’t be skipped! A poorly targeted site can result in few sales/leads or the wrong type of leads, difficulty in gaining rankings or just general lack of visibility. If you have a lot of products on your site, it can be time consuming. It’s usually best to start with key pages on your site (e.g home, main categories, main services) then work your way down to pages within the 2nd or 3rd layer of the site (in fact specific product pages can be easier to optimize than the key pages). If you need help with this important step, then our guide, Getting Started with Keyword Research will give you the tools and tips you need to make sure your target your site as best as possible.

3. Meta Tags
Once you’re happy with the structure of your site and have researched the main keywords to target, you can then begin writing some of the meta tags for your pages. Meta tags help the search engines to identify what your web pages are about and are used by the search engines to display your website in the search results. Therefore, your meta tags need to be well written to encourage people to click on your listing rather than a competitors’.

The title tag plays two roles: it can influence rankings and is displayed as the clickable link to your site in the search results.

The meta description tag won’t influence rankings, but is displayed below the title tag in the search results. You have about 200 characters to write a meaningful description of the page the visitor will land on (and don’t just duplicate the same meta description tag across your website).

I’ve written about meta tags before on Savvy Marketers and you can read more about them here:

How Do You Present Your Website?

A Simple Guide to Meta Tags

These are some of the most basic aspects of SEO, but if you can get these right, it’ll go a long way towards helping your site rank for your target keywords.

Have you attempted to optimize your website? What has worked or not worked for you? Please share your experiences with us in the comments!