Above shows example of web spam

Google have often stated (Google SEO guidelines video) that they have no problem with SEO. The issue they have is with webmasters, site owners and SEOs who try to gain an unfair advantage using ‘black hat’ techniques, or what Google refer to as ‘webspam’.

A couple of weeks ago, Matt Cutts of Google published a post in which he outlines again some of the benefits a good SEO can bring as well as some of the webspam tactics Google are ramping up their efforts to try and combat against.

In terms of some benefits of using a professional SEO, these can include:

1. Help improve usability of site

2. Help create good content

3. Help improve site performance

4. Help with the marketing message of the site

Some of the webspam they are constantly trying to beat include:

1. Keyword stuffing
–> Overuse of the phrase someone is trying to rank for

2. Link schemes
–> Trying to gain an advantage with link trickery

Google are rolling out changes to their search results algorithms all the time but this announcement makes it clear that more major updates are coming. From some of the rumblings on the Internet, this may well be happening so expect search results to fluctuate.

They stress again that site owners need to concentrate their efforts on creating good quality websites with unique, valuable content.

You may decide that you can outsource every aspects of your site’s SEO but I believe that the days of simply handing the reigns over to someone else and expecting them to get fantastic results just on the back of some dodgy link tactics are, if not long gone, rapidly on the decline.

You, as the site owner, need to take responsibility. It may be that you need help with some technical aspects of your site and an SEO could be the ideal fit. Or it may be you just need some help with creating content for your site. Again, perhaps you’ll turn to outside help to get this but don’t think you can just take a back seat and wait for the magic to happen.

There are some good individuals and companies out there offering professional search engine optimisation. Not everyone involved in the SEO industry is egocentric with more interest in buying fake awards than helping you. Take the time to speak with them and see if they are a good fit for you and your business.

To re-cap:

• Use Google Webmaster tools to find out how your site is performing
• Improve its speed and overall performance
• Use analytics to understand how your visitors engage with your site
• Add valuable, unique content to your site
• Engage naturally with your community
• Help and assist
• Use experts to help with specific tasks
• Outsource where necessary
• If you see a short-term surge in links to your site the moment you commence with an SEO company, ask how these people have worked such miracles?
• Can they also turn water in to wine?
• Run away as fast as you can from any muppet* claiming to guarantee you top spot in Google

Read the full article from Google here: Another Step to Rewarding High Quality Sites

*Disclaimer for the American market: This post has not been endorsed by The Muppets nor is it in any way associated with them.

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 understand because I do it too, or at least I used to before learning that a few extra checks meant more people would read the post, be encouraged to leave a comment, and hopefully hang around to explore the rest of the website. Here are a few of the checks I do.

Readability

• Your post should be structured to make it easy for the reader to follow. If you go off on tangents or start rambling too much, people may not read to the end.
• Take a couple of minutes to read your post out loud. This really is the only way you can find out if it ‘flows’, and you’ll also pick up any previously overlooked spelling and punctuation mistakes.
• Keep sentences and paragraphs short.
• Make use of sub-headings to separate sections, break up blocks of text and allow your reader to get the gist of the post without having to read it all.

Purpose

• What do you want your reader to do after reading the post? Every post should have a Call to Action, but one that isn’t a blatant sales pitch. For example, we often ask people to comment or to share the post with their social media friends if they enjoyed reading it.
• What do you want your reader to take away? Provide helpful tips or how-tos, especially on topics that you know people are searching for (a bit of keyword research is a good idea here).
• Of course you want to promote your products or services too! This can be done in a more subtle way, like the hyper-linked text in the point above.

Attraction Factors

• The heading is the number one way to make people want to read your post. All too often it’s treated as an afterthought, but actually needs more attention than the main article!
• Images are important too. They provide a visual ‘lift’ to blog posts and any block of text. Remember to make use of the SEO opportunity and add a strategic ‘ALT’ tag.

Carrying out the above checks before publishing each post won’t take long, but they will make a lasting difference to the response you get from your blog.

For a more in depth and technical checklist, take a look at this article and free pdf download from blogger David Risley.

If you found this post helpful, please share it with your friends using the buttons of your choice! 

So we hope you’ve moved on from some of these very out of date methods

1. Keyword Stuffing
I still see sites where keywords have been stuffed in, in a number of ways. Long lists in the meta keywords tag, which search engines don’t use to rank sites, so not worth it. Keywords included in text at every opportunity, so the content on the page sounds stilted and unnatural. Even keywords in greyed out text at the bottom of pages. These out of date keyword stuffing techniques won’t get you anywhere in the rankings and make for a bad visitor experience.

2. Bad Site Design
As the design and architecture of a website is one of the most important parts of SEO, a badly designed site will hinder any hope of gaining good rankings. This is still a common sight with services all crammed into one web page with lengthy text, products so many clicks away from the home page you wonder if you’ll ever get there! Or just no thought as to where content should go. If your site hasn’t been redesigned for a number of years and content not updated, then now’s the time to tackle it!

3. Outdated Link Building
Having quality links pointing to your site is a very important part of SEO – and this isn’t going to change. However, the old fashioned way of going about link building doesn’t really work anymore. Gaining quality links is getting harder and harder, and should be done by a link building expert – someone who knows how to approach other websites in the right way. Submitting sites to random directories isn’t going to make much difference, nor is swapping links with whoever will agree to link back. There’s still a place for online directories, but generally getting listed in those within your industry sector will make more difference. Having decent, up to date content will attract readers, which in turn will help you to gain links naturally, whether it be from other websites or via link sharing on the social networks. Good PR can still go a long way towards quality links too.

We’ve written about all of the above before on Savvy Marketers, but we still see the same mistakes time and time again. If you’re still dabbling in these outdated techniques and wondering why you’re not getting the results you want from your website, then now’s the time to update your SEO!

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?

If you found this post helpful, please share it by clicking one of the links below.

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.