Category Archives: Search Engines

PPC: Think Before You Pay

Posted on by Posted in Optimisation, Search Engines
search engine optimisation auckland

SEO – incremental growth in traffic and enquiries

Are you considering using Pay Per Click (or PPC) advertising to grow your online sales? While PPC advertising channels like Google’s Adwords or Facebook Adverts has the benefits of immediate traffic and can cope with seasonal events, it is also very expensive and complicated to run.

Adwords and SEO (search engine optimisation) are competing and complimentary online marketing strategies. In Adwords you bid for position on the search results pages against your competitors. The budget required is generally well over $1,000 per month and few small businesses can afford it.

SEO works to bring your web site up higher and higher on the organic or unpaid results on the search results pages and a monthly budget of $300- $500 is required of a 6 month period. Ideally SEO would be ongoing.

Five Reasons to Think before you Pay of Adwords

  1. Adwords is really expensive
    Especially since April this year when Google changed the page layout of its search results pages to remove the right hand column of ads, thereby reducing the number of ads displayed per page load and making those remaining more expensive to bid for.
  2. No audit of click fraud
    What say your competitor saw your ad and clicked on it? Who pays for that? Google says they have a way to monitor and mitigate click fraud, but honesty, how can they? They wont disclose how they do this, so we cant test their claim. It would not take too much effort to make clicks on Adwords ad appear to be authentic.
  3. No investment in your site
    While you are distracted monitoring daily bids and monthly budgets in Adwords, you are missing the biggest opportunity: your website. You could be investing time in new content, on-page optimisation, new inbound links and myriad of other strategies to funnel traffic to your site… for free.
  4. People tend to ignore sponsored ads
    A recent survey revealed that 82-percent of people claim to ignore sponsored listings when searching via Google. Think about it; do you tune out advertising when you search on Google or post a status update on Facebook? When you are truly task focused, you never look at ads. One web marketing company recently said:  Overall, the study finds that online ads are ignored by the largest share of respondents (82%)  …the survey indicates that banner ads are ignored by the largest share of respondents overall (73%), followed by social media ads (62%) and search engine ads (59%). In each case the propensity to ignore ads rises alongside age – by a significant degree. (source)
  5. People are skeptical of advertising
    People have become skeptical of advertising, including PPC. Marketing efforts are looked upon negatively because, people know that you are trying to sell them something. And people don’t like to be sold or having advertisement constantly presented when they are trying to surf the web, pay a bill or browse status updates on their favorite social networks.

Summary: Adwords and PPC advertising are becoming more and more expensive and is out of reach of smaller companies. SEO activities, like building content, building inbound links and directory listings persist far beyond the month they were created in… and cost half the price. Adwords is renting the house: SEO is buying the house.

 

Select the Best Keywords for Your Web Site

Posted on by Posted in Keywords, Optimisation, Search Engines

Find below Dynamic Web Solution’s easy three step program to select killer keywords for your website.

1. How to Find the Best Keywords or Search Terms

Firstly, find out what your competitors think are good keywords for your industry class or product type. They may be completely wrong, but it is worth checking and it only takes a few moments. Here’s how…

  1. Go to three of your closest competitor’s websites
  2. On the homepage go View > Source
  3. Look for two lines of code at the top of the page that look like <meta name=”description”… and <meta name=”keywords”…
  4. Make a short list of search terms you think are worthwhile

Now, go and test your short list of these keywords on Google Keyword Planning Tool. You will need a Google account to log in. Select the country on the right that is relevant to your website, then supply a single phrase that you want your website to come up under.

For the keyword “real estate”, see how “house for sale” is also searched on thousands of times per month. Who would have guessed?

Recap: looking at your competitor’s web sites and using a keyword planning tool has a single purpose: to get real about what people are actually searching on. NOT what you think they are searching on, but what they are actually searching on. It is a litmus test. You are looking for synonyms to your search phrases.

Tip: the keywords you choose are not in fact words, but phrases. There are too many web pages that conform to a single word so people search using phrases.

 2. How do I Add my Killer Keywords to My Web Site?

Much has been written on this topic, so what follows are broad principles and not specific instructions.

So, you have your shortlist of keyword phrases and you now need to work them into your website – in such a way as to make it 100% clear to search engines what your site is all about.

But not all places on a webpage are equal as the following list explains.

  1. The <title> tag is glowing white hot. If you only do one thing, make sure each page of your web site has keywords in the title tag specific to that page. Many webpages are listed as “Untitled” in search engine results. These sites are missing the single biggest opportunity they have to present keywords phrases.
  2. The first link on your homepage is also burning hot for search engines. Try to include at least one keyword in it.
  3. The first main heading on your page (H1 or H2 tags) is burning hot. Tell those search engines what the page is about.
  4. The first para on the page is the one that introduces the subject of the page. It is cooler, but still very important. Add your keywords to it.
  5. Likewise, the closing para sums up the page. Put your keywords in it.

Any body familiar with direct mail marketing (now a thing of the past) will see some parallels between the above hierarchies and writing sales letters.

Recap: What does all this mean? It means that there are some parts of your page that are scrutinised more closely than others. Use this logic to present your keywords to search engines.

Tip:you are looking for 5% (not more) keyword density on your chosen phrase(s). Use www.seocentro.com/tools/seo/keyword-density.html to calculate your keyword density in relation to your competitor’s sites.
Tip 2: make sure your page is comprised of valid hypertext mark up. Go to http://validator.w3.org to make sure.
Tips 3:if your site is made with frames or Flash, get a web designer to rewrite it with tables or divs and css. Frames and Flash are old and out moded.

3. Evaluation: well, did it work?

To evaluate the success of the work above you need a ranking report. A ranking report takes your web address and chosen keyword phrase(s) and looks for your position or “ranking” on search engines.

There are free tools that do this like www.serps.com/tools/rank_checker but they tend to be blunt and not very helpful. If Dynamic Web Solutions made your web site, it is likely that we are submitting it to search engines and can give you a free emailed report of your search engine ranking on the leading search engines.

Summary:

  1. Compile a short list of keyword phrases you are going to target after researching competitor’s sites and using reverse look up tools like Goolge’s Keyword Planner
  2. Work these keyword phrases into strategic parts of your web pages
  3. Review with ranking reports at 12 week intervals. Google Analytics will provide traffic and visitor stats that will show you what your gains are.

If you have done the above, you will be clear what your objective is and you will have a subjective means of evaluating your progress.

This article was written by Peter Mitchell of Dynamic Web Solutions Pty Ltd

I Have Made My Website, What Is Next?

Posted on by Posted in How Tos, Optimisation, Search Engines

What's next?During the construction of your website we have been focusing on design, layout and technical issues and not focusing on marketing the site. It won’t take you long to realise that web marketing is as bigger job, if not bigger, than actually making a website.  It is also an area in which a lot of money is changing hands at present, and probably this trend will continue into the future. So what is next?

1. Links, Links, Links

You need to immediately find inbound links to your site. The first place to start is with directory websites such as Localist, Yellow Pages or Finda. Make sure you have a pin and a listing on Google Maps – which is very important for mobile searches. Do not delay in this task.

Getting inbound links from other websites greatly advantages you in two ways:

  1. firstly you start getting traffic from the link as soon as it is live
  2. secondly Google will have more conduits into your site and therefore will find your site easily and index it more quickly.

More importantly though is that each inbound link into your website will be viewed as a vote of confidence by Google and the other major search engines. The more votes of confidence that Google collects on your site the higher it will move you up the search results pages.

It’s worth mentioning two Google resources at this point: the Google tool bar and the Google website for Webmasters. The Google Toolbar has an important tool on it that measures the current page’s PageRank™. PageRank™ it is a patented Google technology that ranks pages according to Google’s own special algorithm. The Toolbar will show you the rank of any page from one to 10, 10 being the best.

Even large websites that have good traffic find it difficult to get a high page rank. If your site has a page rank of five, that would be very good. The Google website for Webmasters is an interesting place to find out what Google recommends in terms of linking and optimisation. It’s a good place to start and offers an excellent orientation to the world of search.

2. On Page Optimisation

You should be careful not to remove critical keywords or keyword phrases from your website. Your homepage in particular should repeat your most important keywords a number of times. The WordPress content management system has special, page by page title, description and keywords fields for you to complete. You will find these fields underneath the WYSIWYG editor. The three that start with “Meta” are the ones to focus on.  Meta means “information about information”. These three fields gives you the opportunity to feed information to search engines directly.

But on-page optimisation is about a lot more than just meta tags. In fact everything on a page: its headings, the amount of text, the frequency and density of keywords, how the HTML is structured… all count towards its PageRank™.  Ideally, each page on your site would be optimised for a different search phrase. You will need expert help with this, see the “SEO” link above.

3. Build E-mail Lists

E-mail marketing is cheap and fast. You will need to study up on issues of compliance regarding the Spam act, but if you can satisfy these requirements, e-mail can add real dollars to your bottom line. There is no need to hesitate, you can simply start collecting e-mail addresses and sorting them into groups immediately in your desktop mail client.

Once you get over a couple of hundred e-mail addresses you will need a more robust e-mail marketing solution (than sending e-mail from your desktop) as most ISPs choke large volumes of outbound e-mail.  This will include a third-party websites such as mailchimp.com who will report on bounced mail and report on who clicked what links in your outbound email. Mailchimp has HTML templates that allow you to dress your email up, but note that a plain text email will pass through spam filters more easily than its HTML counterpart. This is because spam filters look for hypertext links and images in email and can falsely categorise you HTML email as spam.

Mailchimp also has mobile apps so you can monitor “campaigns” (outbound messages) and see stats on your lists and sent mail. You can also use these apps to harvest email at your POS or tradeshow stall, say in conjunction with the chance to win some product or service. More on email marketing here.

4. Accelerate with Google Ads

You may wish to consider a Google Adwords campaign – although Adwords have become quiet pricey as more and more people compete for the same keywords. You probably need to allow a budget of $500 -$1,000 per month as a starting point.

It is going to take some time to get the search engine position that you want – more than 3 months and probably more than 9 months. If you are not working on linking as described above then your website will never really perform very well on search engines. If you need immediate traffic to your site from Google then you may consider running a Google ad campaign for the first 3 to 6 months after your website goes live. Here is more discussion on paying for ads on Google’s Adwords platform.

5. Social Networking

There is still a lot to understand about social networking and how it can be used to market websites. Be wary of hyperbolic statistics that do not relate to NZ and Australia as social networking sites are used much more in the US and UK.

Also, social networking does not apply to every type of business e.g. pubs and clubs do well with Facebook when promoting a visiting band. A manufacturer will not do well; they will collect 12 “likes” and 2 “friends” and their Facebook page will float out there as negative advertising.

Although there are some spectacular examples of social networking creating massive traffic to a website, in most cases there is an enormous amount of time invested in building an audience before networking would produce any money. Many businesses for example have a Facebook page and use it to interact with their customers but converting this  interaction into sales is tricky and can even contravene the user policies of the social networking site. So while it might be good to start to understand more about Facebook and Twitter there is a lot more water to go under the bridge before they become everyday marketing tools.

Web Marketing: Best Practice

Posted on by Posted in How Tos, Keywords, Offline Marketing, Other Authors, Search Engines, What NOT to do

I am being asked more and more often about where and how to spend money on Internet advertising. People rightly perceive that traditional display advertising, such as magazines and newspapers are offering less and less value. The paper telephone directories, which have been the cornerstone of many small businesses marketing efforts, have also lost their teeth. In this context, small business people are exploring what Google Adwords and SEO operators have to offer.

The web used to be a far more democratic place: if I wrote valid HTML, focused on and reused carefully selected keywords, I could get a small B&B site up beside a major chain hotel in the search engine result pages (SERPs). Those days are long gone. Google’s SERPs favour larger or aggregation sites like Wotif and Trivago over a individual accommodation providers web ste.

So we are no longer on a level playing field, and to mix metaphors, what is the game now?

What follows is a discussion of the most widespread means of web marketing… as it is today – it is a moving target and will change probably in less than 12 months. This isn’t a shopping list. Don’t cherry pick from it: do it all.

  1. Search engine submission. This is simply telling search engines that you have published a site and what the address is, and in some cases offers the search engines some meta information about your site. It doesn’t guarantee that your site will be indexed (visited), or in a time frame that suits you or that you will come up on the SERPs pages where you want. There is some discussion surrounding the value of search engine submission, but on balance I believe it has a place, certainly in the first year of a web site going live. Another trend to note is that CMS packages (WordPress, Joomla and Drupal) upon which increasing numbers of web sites are based, have a built in update service that alerts search engines to changes in a page, article or blog area of a site.
  2. Google Adwords campaign. Google Adwords are all over the web. You don’t have to go far to see them (they are even on this page!). You use Google Adwords to place an ad with your web address close to search results related to your chosen keywords. Obviously, if you are already in the free results, you needn’t pay for an ad. But if you are out on page 3, 4 or 5 of the SERPs or worse, you may consider Adwords.
    Adwords however do not come cheaply. Allow up to $300-$500 per month. The final cost is determined by the amount of competition for the keyword phrase(s) you are chasing. You have to bid for these in an auction environment. The good news is you can cap your monthly budget. Once your spend is exhausted, you ad is removed from rotation.
  3. Inbound, unreciprocated links. The objective here is to create “link popularity” for your site. Allow $7.50 US per link. You need up to 150 links or more than your nearest competitor to head toward that number one spot in the SERPs. There are other articles on this blog that discuss how you can find out who is presently linking to you so you can determine the size of the task ahead. You can do some of this work yourself at no cost. Start with directory sites.
  4. Social Networking. Activity on Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook (in that order) is fast becoming the next big trend in web marketing. Books and blog articles are emerging explaining how these media can be harnessed for marketing and sales purposes… even though that may run contrary to the use policies of the sites. The objective is to create an audience interested in your product i.e. be “followed” on Twitter, have “friends” and “likes” on Facebook, build a professional network on Linkedin. There is time involved in social networking, but no dollars. Be careful. You need to read the terms of use policies to avoid having your account closed for misuse.
  5. Newsletter. Like Google Adwords, there are newsletter subscription boxes on every second web site. The ones that work offer a real incentive to hand over your email address, say a PDF of an ebook, or exclusive information only available via newsletter, specials or notice of a sale. Only do this if you have something NEW you want to tell or offer people weekly or monthly. Just telling who you are and what you do wont lead to many more sales.
  6. Blogging.  Blogging (or writing articles) has also become widespread on the web – the so called “self-publishing” phenomena. If you write well, this may be a web marketing option for you. Blogging demonstrates the breadth of your knowledge and builds credibility with your readers. From a search engine perspective, it shows you are investing in content – watering the garden so to speak. Search engines love to see new or changed, keyword rich content. If your site has more information on it than a competitor site, search engines will reward you with higher rankings. Blogging is time expensive, but no cash is required. It is possible to employ writers, but this becomes costly. You can download articles from free article libaries, but these are sometime poorly written and not always precisely on topic.

Having said all the above, I must stress, there is no substitute for compelling content, and content that is update and refreshed. Content is king. What is the point of link popularity, if when people arrive at your site it isn’t saying much and offers little value to the visitor. Ditto a Goolge ads.

The Super Skinny on SEO

Posted on by Posted in Search Engines 1 Comment

search engine optimisation

  1. The Super Skinny SEO Summary
  2. The 5 Most Common Reasons Web Sites don’t come up on Search Engines
  3. The Importance of Inbound Linking
  4. Don’t Do These
  5. How Long Should it Take to come Up on Search Engines?
  6. Paul Boag’s SEO Summary

The Super Skinny SEO Summary

There are 2 halves to good search engine rankings:

  1. compelling text content that is relevant to your audience and frequently added to or updated
  2. quality links coming into your site. Quality links on your site to other sites

The 5 Most Common Reasons Web Sites don’t come up on Search Engines

  1. Too little content. There is not enough plain text available for the search engines to really infer anything about the site.
  2. Unfocused content. Not enough thought has been given to what keyword phrases the site should be built around. This should be known before a single stroke of code is written. Your site has to be demonstrative; it has to really be clear what the topic is.
  3. No backlinks. The site lacks quality in bound links. The inbound links should be themed, and not from random sources.
  4. No attempt to link out. The site does not demonstrate an effort to link out to other web sites i.e. the site does not add value to your visitor’s experience by recommending other sites.
  5. Just plain old. Newer technologies are better understood by Google eg. WordPress is very well indexed by Google. Old sites often have old code structures that hold a site back e.g frames, iframes, Flash, slicing, cloaking and redirects.

The Importance of Inbound Linking

  1. Try to get a minimum of 75 in-bound links from sites with relevant content to your user group. Try to develop a theme with your inbound links so a search engines is in no doubt what industry group you belong to.
  2. Look for inbound links with high PageRank™. Links from pages with zero or low PR may hold you back.
  3. Try to “theme” your in-bound links.
  4. Use your keywords in your in-bound link labels i.e. the text that the link is under on the referring site.
  5. Link out to important and busy resources, try to think of what outbound links will add value to your visitor’s experience of your website.
  6. Avoid FFA (“free for all”) link directories as your may be penalised for listing on some of them. They can look like spam to Google.
  7. Don’t spam guestbooks or comments boxes (a technique that dynamically inserts links on web pages with a comments section or guestbook).
  8. Use keywords in your link labels, not “click here” or “more”.

Don’t Do These

  1. No tricks (bogus links pages, text the same colour as the background, doorway pages, many urls that forward into your site)
  2. Frames sites do not work – avoid frames, or bury them in the 2nd level of your site
  3. Flash sites do not work. Macromedia has a tool from converting a flash animation/presentation to a an HTML document… not sure exactly what you would do with it after that…
  4. Use cloaking (serving one page to a Search Engine and another to a user)
  5. Have Java navigation. Java is difficult to index and links may not be followed. Also, maybe be difficult to use on a tablet or mobile phone.
  6. Put text content in jpegs or gifs because it looks better. Text that is part of a picture can not be read by Google.

How Long Should it Take to Come Up on Search Engines?

Well, if your site only has a little text and is poorly constructed, it will simply not happen. If you site is a Flash animation… ditto. If your site is in frames… ditto.

If your site has good text, the domain name has been around a while, the site is linked well, it’s content changed or improved frequently… about 4 days… but unlikely to come up on the first page of search results.

Substantial revisions to your site may improve its ranking almost straight away. The Google bot does after all come by every 3 to 5 days.

SEO Misconceptions

Posted on by Posted in Optimisation, Search Engines

Search Engine Submission – all the major search engines offer a URL submission page where you can tell the search engine a new site exists and you want them to visit and index its pages. Search engine submission is now futile – and has been for years –  as Google returns to your site every 4 days looking for changes! As soon as your site is linked from anywhere, it can be found.

Keyword Meta Tag – is a little line of code in the header area of a web page. Widely abused and therefore no longer useful eg. spammed with “sex”, “free”, “Olympics”. It has been ignored by the major search engines for probably the last decade – yet many web site owners believe its the magic bullet and all you have do to come up in the search results pages.

Paid search helps bolster organic results – wishful thinking! Some people believe paying for Google ads boasts your organic results. This would be illogical: why would Google undermine their advertising revenue by giving away position to advertisers who are prepared to pay for it. Illogical. There is no relationship between paid and organic search results.

Domain names with keywords – maybe this was a ranking factor 6-7 years ago and lead to some over registration activity with people registering 100s of names. No evidence today to suggest domain names with keywords works better than without.  However, having multiple domain names that resolve to a single web site IS a useful thing to have, but for non-SEO reasons.

Traffic gets traffic – “all I need to do is get my friends to click on my web site and Google will see how popular it is and move it up the page“. Complete rubbish. If it were only that easy!

Things my mate said I must have – your mate doesn’t know, can’t know and following their advice will get you off to a bad start. The web and SEO practices are changing too fast for the opinionated amateur to keep a handle on it.

My kid/brother-in-law/neighbours dog said they could make my website – very bad idea because:

  1. They don’t get around to it… and while it remains unmade, you are losing potential business
  2. Young people tend to be focused on form and not function, whereas purchasers – normally older – are focused on function. Its the difference between your website being “cool or tool”.
  3. They use free or very cheap services that are limited (eg. no email or storage space) and in far-off lands (ie. no support).
  4. They are focused on making it work in a browser window and not making it work on a search engine, totally different skills sets.

Summary: you’re probably an expert in what you do right? Would you get an amateur to do your taxes, spray paint your car? No, you would take it to someone who knows.

Link Your Web Site

Posted on by Posted in How Tos, Search Engines

This is a web marketing, self-help page. The two activities below are the first and most basic things you can do after your site goes live on the web.

Google takes results and feeds results from many other search engines

Google takes results and feeds results from many other search engines

Search Engine Submission

Search engine submission is the process of saying to search engines “hey, there is a new web site over here. Come and look at it“. Site submission doesn’t guarantee you of first page position on Google, but it puts your site in the search results pages. You only need to do this if your site is brand new and you have no links coming to it. Read more about submission here. Submission URLs follow:

OK, that was easy, what’s next?

Linking: “Inbound” or “Back Links”

You need links: lots of them. Go to each of the sites below, create an account and add you business details. Record all the login user names and passwords you use, so you can return and update your business listing later, say if you change a phone number or postal address. The main directory sites are:

Minor directory sites that you could also add your business details to include:

… and any others you can find for free. You need a lot of inbound, one-way links: not 10 links, but 100.

Note that the large directory sites have approached Google about the structure of their sites and are working with Google to get their content listed highly on the Google results pages. This works for Google as well, as there is no easy way to spam results in these directories as an account and verification is required. This creates more “trusted” content for Google.

What Else Can I do?

  • You can make sure your offline marketing (business cards and outdoor signs) carry your web address in large writing. Many people forget this
  • You can buy Google Ads. A budget of around $300 a month is required
  • You can start a spam compliant email list
  • You can start blogging (article writing)
  • You can use social media
  • More on web marketing here: www.dynamicwebs.co.nz/category/search-engines
  • Learn more about search engine ranking

90 Day Plan to Search Engine Success

Posted on by Posted in How Tos, Search Engines

Your Road Map to Web Marketing Success

Follow this plan to beat your competitors on search engines and sell more.

A website is a powerful marketing tool – if used correctly. It is not a “set and forget” tool. Gone are the days of building a simple website and then sitting back while you wait for the phone to ring. While it may be a potentially powerful marketing tool, it is also like a garden – it needs to be maintained in order for your audience (and business) to grow. So you have your shiny new website. Now what? Here is your road map to web marketing success.

Week 1: Google Local Places

Claim your pin on Google Local Places. To ensure you are the rightful owner of the map pin or business, Google runs a verification process which includes sending you a post card with a PIN. This stops other people claiming your PIN or pretending to own your business. Why is this so important? Your local places listing will occur in search results in summary beside a map when a city or town name is used in a Google search query. Also, your listing is verified with a real-world verification process making the information you supply very valuable to Google and its partners. Your business information will occur on all Google mapping applications like Google Maps, Google Earth and Google Android apps.

Week 2: List on directory sites

List your web address on major business and links directories such as:

The process of getting in-bound links is called building “link popularity”. It means getting more links to your site than your competitors. Google views links going to your site as votes of confidence in your content. If you don’t have link popularity, your site wont perform on search engines.

How many? More than 100 will be required. Over what timeframe? 3 links a months is the ideal way to build link popularity, but run slowly, if you add too many links too quickly then search engines will see this growth as unnatural, and you may be penalised in terms of your search engine placement.

Why should people give you links? No reason, they don’t owe you anything. You’re just asking. Record all the links you request and the day you requested them. You will need this information in weeks 6 and 8.

Week 3: Promote your URL

Now you have a web address, you may need to update your off-line marketing. Does your business card carry your new web address (also called a URL)? Can you add you web address to a uniform? Letterhead? Classified advertising? To the back of your car? To your office signage? To the signature of your email messages. Put it up in lights: its arguably more important than your business phone numbers.

Week 4: Build an Email Lists

Start building a spam-compliant email list(s) so you can communicate quickly with your customers and prospects. There are many great web-based email marketing systems available, but start at MailChimp. The first 2,000 contacts are free and DWS (Dynamic Web Solutions Pty Ltd) can integrate this system into your content management system quickly when required.

It is important to note that unless you have your customer’s permission, your messages are illegal and are “spam”. Your clients need to “opt in” to your mailing list. A good way to do this via your website is to have a tick box on your contact form saying “Keep me informed” or “Send me newsletters”. Some web sites offer a free give-away, an incentive, if people join their mailing list. Generally mailing lists don’t work without offering something of real value to the customer.

Week 5: Social Networks

Anecdotal evidence suggests social networks can be used to build good traffic to your web site, but be careful, a lot of time is required to build an audience for your Facebook page, Twitter feed or LinkedIn profile. If you work with professionals LinkedIn is your starting point: build your profile then “invite” others to “connect”. If you own a pub or event based business, a Facebook page can be used to engage a customer group and create a community around your product or service. Twitter, a micro blogging site (much more popular in the UK & US than Australia and New Zealand) can be used to send service updates, expert opinion or whatever would add value to your audience. Some people believe social networks will replace email marketing and traditional CRMs. A warning, the spectre of MySpace hangs over all these sites: here today, gone tomorrow.

It is worth noting that there is a difference between a Facebook Profile and a Facebook Page. A page someone can “Like”, and it will appear on their status stream and their profile as a “Like”. The number of “likes” will also appear at the top of your Page and overtime can help show people how popular your business is.

Week 6: More Links

Return to the hunt for links. Find another 3. Getting links is like watering a garden, do it regularly and your traffic will increase month on month.

Record all your linking activity in a spreadsheet: the title of the site, the URL, the date you asked for the link, the email address of the person your wrote to or telephoned.

Week 7: Mobilize

Mobilize your web site. Ask DWS to install a mobile friendly plugin on your web site. Searches on mobile phones are now outstripping searches on desktop machines. Our mobile-friendly software will reorganise your site on a mobile phone and make it faster to load. This will be helpful until mobile data speeds improve.

Week 8: Review

Its time to review: where did you get to with your linking effort? How many can you count? Where else can you look? Do you have any business associates who sell a complimentary or aligned product? Can you reciprocate a link with them? Your WordPress links panel is the ideal way to link out to other sites. Once you have linked to them, you have some leverage to ask them to link back to your site. This is called “reciprocal linking”. Its not as valuable as unreciprocated links from pages with high Google PageRank™, but it is better than no link.

Week 9: Water the Garden

Change your web site! This is why we made it with a content management system. If you were Google and you had to decide which site to put first, would you advance a site that had not been changed in the last 2 years, or one that is being changed once a month? So frequent changes to your site are good. Try to repeat critical keywords in headings and throughout the text of your page. DWS web sites are SEO-friendly and provide you with a way to add title, description and keywords to every page, which are some of the ingredients to getting your site found on search engines.

Week 10: Tools to Help you Close Sales

There are a number of software additions to your site aimed at getting you talking or chatting (in text) with your customers:

By phone…

  • We Call You Now: users click a call back icon on your site, they give their phone number and a VoIPs servers calls you, then rings them back putting you in touch with visitors to your site in real time.
  • Skype: integrate Skype “I’m Online” button on your site.

By chat…

  • Who’s On: see who is entering your site and what pages they are looking at as the visitor arrives. Engage them in a chat if they seem stuck on a page.
  • IM: short for “instant messaging. Allow your customers to initiate a chat session with you to answer questions or get help. These work well for retailers.

The text chat tools rely on you being in front of a computer much of your day, so phone may by preferred.

 Week 11: Webstats

With all this diligent marketing activity, what is the outcome? How can you benchmark or compare month to month. Is traffic growing? Whether it is Google Analytics or DWS’s very detailed server stats, you can find out where your visitors are coming from, what search phrases they use, what sites sent traffic to you, where they are in the world and just as importantly, how many are visiting your site each month/week/day/hour… and many, many more metrics. Ask DWS for a PDF report each quarter or to integrate Google Analytics into your site. If you can measure it, you can manage it.

Week 12: Summary

The 90-Day Plan is actually your every 90-Day or any day plan.

  • Get as many links as your can. Build links up slowly or “organically”.
  • Change and grow your web site’s content.
  • Build email lists. Segment them. Send only relevant offers or information.
  • Create profiles on social networks. Build audience.
  • Review and repeat the above.

Is there a Google Sandbox?

Posted on by Posted in Search Engines

well, maybe.

First up, the so called “Google Sandbox Effect” is only a theory, and has in no way been confirmed by Google. Secondly, even the developer community are in two minds about it – some assume it is a purposeful action on behalf of Google (the conspiracy theorists), others say it is just an aberration of the ranking algorithm (the mathematicians).

So what is it? Being “sandboxed” in Google means your site can’t be found. When I say “can’t be found” I don’t mean that it is 10th on the 100th page, I mean it is no where. Obviously if you have just paid for a web site, that is a problem for you.

Why would Google do this? Maybe to undermine the attempts of search engine optimisers and take some of the teeth out of their activities.

I have experienced the sandbox a couple of times – but that is only two times, and I make about 35 web sites a year. So if some unconfirmed phenomena like the “sandbox” does occur, it is rare.

And, after all, so what?

There are other search engines to get a position on. There are other web sites to get links from. There are other ways to get traffic to your web site eg. write a blog article or a review. In other words, don’t freeze in the headlights. Get cracking on non-Google web marketing.

If you had to choose just one thing to over come the so-called “sandbox”, get inbound links. Not 2, not 6, but 50 plus. Make them relevant to your site – not just found anywhere. Start with directory sites and work outwards. Think about suppliers and customers. Do they have web sites you can get a link from?

Only time will tell us if Google created a sandbox. In the mean time, get busy with links.

Link Your Website

Posted on by Posted in Optimisation, Search Engines

Disclaimer: nothing that you read below has been confirmed or approved in any way by major search engines such as Google. At best it is a summary of what industry commentators say about successful linking strategies. Some of these have been tested, but many can not be proved with testing and must be considered speculation.

Introduction – life before Search Engines

Unbelieveably there was a time on the web when there were no search engines. So how did people find web sites? They traversed links from one site to another. This act became known as “surfing the web“, or “browsing the web”. Therefore, in the very first years of the world wide web, people who made web sites knew they had to both link out and get links into their web site.

This focus was lost as commercial interests quickly entered the Internet in the late 90’s and weren’t that keen on linking out to other sites for fearing losing traffic. Some even wanted to control who linked into them.

Today search engines strongly reward sites that have good links exiting and entering them. This is the reason why you should spend time cultivating links.

How to Find Good Inbound Links

Browse the web, its as simple as that. To break it down

  • Go to a search engine and search on a topic close to or strongly related to your web site’s topic. In other words you are going to theme your links, i.e. group them by topic
  • Find a number of sites you like and you believe would add value to your web site in the eyes of your users. If you have the Google tool bar installed, aim for sites with a 3, 4 or 5 page rank. If you do not have the Google tool bar, get it. You going to need it.
  • Pen an email to the owner (or call them) and suggest a link trade between your site and theirs. Remember email can be caught in spam traps and can be easily ignored, so a call maybe more effective
  • When they agree add their details to a spreadsheet of links you are forming (column headings could be date, web address, email address, date requested, spoke to, sent my link)
  • Then check back in a few weeks and see if they have added your link. If not, send a reminder

Reverse Links

Finding out who is currently linking to you, and who linked to you after you approached them for a link is very simple. Go to www.yahoo.com and search on link:www.yourdomain.com.au. Obviously substitute yourdomain, with your domain name. You can do a similar search on Google, but inexplicably its results are no where near as comprehensive. Note also, that if you just use link:yourdomain.com.au you will get different results. If you only have a handful of reverse links, you are in trouble and need to address that as soon as possible.

How to Present your Outbound Links

There are two preferred ways to present your links on your link parter’s web site.

  1. You could just ask them to add a link under existing text in a para on their site
  2. or you could provide them with a para of text with your web site title above it in bold as the link

Two is the most common approach, as you get the opportunity of optimising the text around your link with further keywords. Follow up is going to be critical. People may agree quickly to give you a link and then do nothing. You will have to chase them.

Timeframe to Success

This is a good question, and it has two answers:

  • the benefits of linking are immediate in the sense that you will get traffic from your link partner’s site as soon as they upload the page with your link on it and their site visitors can see it. The volume of this traffic depends on how busy their site is. If it is an obscure resource with a low page rank, then the benefit will be minimal but if it is a high trafic site, you will get a share of that traffic.
  • the benefits of linking in terms of the SERPs are less immediate. A 9 to 12 month period is minimum. So the sooner you start the sooner you get results.

How Many Links Should I Get?

The short answer is as many as you can. Another short answer may be, many more than your best competitor. A dozen links may get your site on the radar. Twenty links will start your ascent on the SERPs, 60 to 100 and your are starting the blitz your competition and look very important in the eyes of search engines.

Tip: do not add more than 60 links per page as this page may be consider spam to the search engines.

So What Does Google say About its Search Engine?

Google is not completely silent on it’s search engine. It publishes guidelines to webmasters and summary information about it’s technology. It does not however confirm specific strategies that webmaster may believe to be effective. Interestingly the main thrust of Google’s comments is to focus on your content: create great, compelling content and they will reward you. In other words, make your web site good for your human audience and we will do the rest.

In my experience as a web developer, I know that the hardest thing for people to create is compelling content. It is a challenge. One well worth pursuing though.

Should I Pay for Links?

Obviously the process described above is lengthy and requires ongoing attention. Like a garden, you have to tend it. If you find that you are not securing 3 or 4 links each month, you should outsource this task.

A warning though, if you outsource you will not have hands on control, or any oversight of who your site links to and who links back to you. This will be in the link traders hands.

Similarly, you should NOT pay for any single inbound link unless the person offering it for sale can demonstrate to you that it is worth the price they are asking for it. Your web stats will tell you if the link you are considering buying is worth it. With web stats you will be able to monitor all inbound traffic. If you get 50 hits a month from their site, and your Google adsense click through price is .50 cents, dont pay more than $25.00 per month

Is That It?

By no means, there are many more things you can do to “optimise” your site for search engines. Links are important though, and you have to cover this early. Other ideas and issues concerning optimisation will be included in this blog.

Glossary

SERPS, search engine results pages, that is the results that come up when you use Google and Yahoo. This screen has “sponsored” or paid for ads on it and “natural” results.

PageRank, this is a Google trademarked tecnology, according to Google

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

Optimisation is the process of analysing a web site for the prominance of its chosen keywords and then maximising the prevalence of these keywords throughout a web site. It also includes a good in and out bound linking strategy. Keyword analysis is covered elsewhere in this blog: see Keyword Effectiveness Index or KEI,

This article was written by Peter Mitchell of Dynamic Web Solutions Pty Ltd
Copyright 2008

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