Really Simple Keyword Research

Let's remember that Googles aim is to deliver to the user the most relevant results possible. So keyword research should focus around INTENT and TOPIC RELEVANCE to your business.

HEADLINE KEYWORDS

Single words or acronyms i.e. "Beer" - these are the worst type of keywords to optimise for (mainly because the intent is not clear, and typically usersresearch and more information), as intent is not clear, traffic will be poor and conversions will be low, but worst of all is that competition will be massively high and you'll need a ton of money and manpower to rank successfully for them.

BODY KEYWORDS 

Typically these are 2-3 word keywords i.e. "Best Beer" - while the intent of the searcher is a little clearer, it's still not 100% clear what they are trying to achieve with their search. These terms are often very competitive, because as keywords they are generally easier to find, this high competitiveness and therefore expensive in time and money to rank well for.

LONG TAIL KEYWORDS

4 or more words i.e. "Best Beer From The Supermarket" , these are the best type to optimise for as the intent of the searcher is much clearer. It will also be a much less competitive keyword.

It's important in the early stages of keyword research that 100% of keywords identified should be based on INTENT, yes search volume is important, but INTENT will ensure that anyone that finds your site WILL BE more likely to purchase. Your conversion rate will be higher, and will likely generate more good quality leads, plus competition will be lower, meaning ranking high for these keywords will be much easier.

PHASE 1 - EXISTING KEYWORDS

Use your existing searches and keyword data to give you inspiration for your keyword analysis, the easiest place to find these is in your Google Search Console, Google is already suggesting that you are ranking well for these keyworks, so it will be easier for you to take advantage of them.

Categorise these keywords into:

LOW HANGING FRUIT - keywords that are currently ranking from positions 2 to 15. Remember to prioritise keywords that based on INTENT and RELVANCE to your business.

EXISTING KEYWORDS - these are ranking from position 16 to 50. Make these your second priority keywords to look at.

POSSIBLE OPPORTUNITIES - these are keywords that are ranking from position 51 to 100. These keywords are outside of the top 50, so would suggest that you are simply not putting enough effort into these pages. On these look at the long tail key phrases and consider writing a blog post around each phrase.

PHASE 2 - KEYWORD DISCOVERY

Use SEMRUSH to help you discover new keywords (you can create a free account).
Navigate to 'Keyword Magic Tool' to discover for free some new ideas for keywords.

• Start looking at Keywords that are ranked at VERY EASY.
• Create a list of possible new keywords for you to rank for.
• Once you have a list of possible keywords, I sometimes like to search for these on Wikipedia and that can sometimes provide you with additional topics and keywords that are highly relevant to your site.  Use these new and related phrases in SEMRUSH to get more keywords.

PHASE 3 - ALSO ASKED

At the bottom of any Google search is a section that is often forgotten about called 'People Also Searched For', you can use some of these as your keywords, or try alsoasked.com to get a clearer picture and more potential keywords. 

Again, enter one of your best keywords into the search bar and it will provide you with a list of relevant phrases and questions that searches are looking for right now. These tend to make great topics for blog posts, and the chances are your competitors will not be using any of these terms.  Now while these won't bring you lots of traffic, they will make your site more relevant in the eyes of Google.


IMPORTANT:
When it comes to creating content one your website, remember to use only ONE PRIMARY KEYWORD.
Your Primary Keyword MUST address the intend of the searcher. To help decide what your primary keywords should be consider:

• What are you currently ranking well for
• Aim for keywords that have a search volume of at least 200 searches per month
• Only choose a primary keyword with a low competition
• Consider the intend of the searcher
• Make it hyper relevant to your offering
• Click potential - linked to intent, if someone searches for this primary keyword and finds your listing, how likely are they to click through to your site!

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New, unconfirmed Google ranking update ‘Fred’ shakes the SEO world!

"New, unconfirmed Google ranking update ‘Fred’ shakes the SEO world!"

I love this headline from searchengineland; we get this news a couple of time a year and it never fails to make me laugh!

It looks as if Google could have released yes another algorithm change that take a long hard look at the quality of a websites links before deciding whether that sites ranking needs to be improved or demoted.

But again it, this new ‘Fred’ update seems to have caught the SEO industry off-guard as is sending waves of panic across the community, but why this always makes me laugh is that if these SEO practitioners did their job right in the first place and looked to place good quality content on webpages with good quality (not spammy) links linking to the content then there wouldn’t be a problem.

The worry look on the faces of SEO professionals out there is a clear sign that they know that they have done something bad (black hat SEO) in the past and they are scared that their past is going to come along and bite them in their @rse.

I for one (as well as others like me), sit back and actually watch our ranking improving; I was struggling with one competitive term that seemed stuck as #8 suddenly yesterday leapt to #2, and I’m seeing positive moves across a range of sites and keywords.

I’m sitting pretty, I just wish all of my colleagues would learn and start doing their jobs properly!

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Why is it so hard to rank well on Google?

I have recently been involved with a discussion about ranking on Google on LinkedIn, it has become more difficult to rank highly now, but why, these are my notes on it.

Any web marketer or somebody who owns a website realises (or should realise) the importance of high search engine rankings. Any webmaster who is serious about succeeding online should know that you need to be on the first page of Google results, but more importantly you need to be at positions 1, 2 or 3.

There was a time when achieving high search engine ranks was not really very difficult, all you had to do was create content, didn’t particularly need to be useful or of high quality, dump some keywords in it loads of times and *BANG* you were done and could with little effort rank highly.

Google changed a few its indicators around 2005, so with the same content you just had to throw some links in (predominately from link farms, article networks, blog networks and directories) and you ranked well.

From about 2007, things really started to get really difficult, and as every year marches forward Google just keep making the SEO role more and more difficult.

Today, there is a huge amount of competition out there in all markets. Achieving a page one rank in Google (and the rest of the search engines) has become extremely tough, unless of course you are working smart.

Working smart will often mean here the ability to choose the right set of tools – tools that can rocket your web visibility by taking your website from the lower ends of search engine results all the way to very top. See a previous post - Internet Business Promoter (IBP) Axandra Software Review.

A page one rank is all you need to rocket your web traffic that will blow your mind, however, traffic is just one side of the coin and if you want to convert traffic then you need to look at Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO), but that’s a completely different subject.

Anyway, the real reason why it’s more difficult to rank on Google is that they want to present the very best results to us searchers, and their tweaks and modifications to their algorithm is all just designed to ensure that the sites that are well liked, with the best content rise to the top – it’s that simple really.

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Internet Business Promoter (IBP) Axandra Software Review

I’ll say right from the start that the way that most SEO software products try to rank your webpages doesn’t work; sure they can help you decide which keywords to use and where they should go in your webpage, but other than that they really can’t push you to the top of Google.

 

I’ve been working in digital marketing for more years than I care to remember and to be honest with you; Internet Business Promoter, or IBP as it is popularly referred to, is the best thing for ranking since sliced bread!

 

Obviously it’s a good idea to analyse your pages to ensure that they are perfectly optimised for the given keyword(s), but unfortunately Google simply doesn’t work like that.

 

Google doesn’t care about your optimisation in silo, they want to know how good your site is against your competitions sites, it quickly works out which sites are worthy of being on the first page of their results; so it would make perfect sense to optimise against these top 10 results – and that’s exactly what IBP does.

 

Once you enter you primary keyword, IBP does a search (either on Google or your preferred search engine) for that term then analyses the top 10 sites to see where they have put their keywords, how many times, are they in bold, the title, description etc., and then it presents you with the results in an easy to follow report that is your roadmap for updating your page to be as good as these on the first page.

 

This on-page SEO analysis isn’t the end of it for IBP; it also looks at the inbound links so you know if there is room for improvement there too.

 

One of the great things about IBP is that it will never offer any advice that will be a short-cut to SEO success. It may take some time (as any SEO does), but if you follow its advice your website is more likely to succeed. But remember, just like life, there is no guarantee that it will actually work.

 

IBP is actually a suite of tools from Axandra. These tools allow you to do the following:

 

1. Research the most potent keywords in your niche/market
2. Optimise your website for these keyword(s)
3. Generate high quality back links for improving your Page Rank and rankings, and
4. Track the position of your website as it improves its search engine ranks.

So all in all it’s an excellent piece of software that I use in my professional role on a day to day basis, the only thing I would say is that you shouldn’t expect magical results, the software is excellent and keeps updating itself as Google releases changes to its algorithm, but even if your page(s) were exactly like pages in the top 10 with more links into it, there could still be indicators that Google looks at that could still put these sites above yours (i.e. design, architecture, bounce rate, times on site, previous penalties etc.)

 

But all in all, if you are serious about ranking well on Google then you need to invest in this software.

Download it for a FREE trial now.

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SEOPressor Review: How to dominate Google search rankings when using WordPress

Effectively SEOPressor vs Yoast SEO

The first time I managed a WordPress site it came with Yoast already ready for me to continue the SEO, and for a long time I really didn’t know any different; but I became concerned that my SEO work wasn’t having the effect that I needed, so I started my search for a new WordPress SEO plugin.

After a fair bit of searching and testing I landed on SEOPressor, and loved it, but if you want a little more detail then hopefully this short review will help.
Start taking a closer look at SEOPressor today, click here for more information.

So which SEO plugin is best for your WordPress website?

If you’re just starting out or you’re simply looking to make the most out of your website content with videos, articles, categories, tags etc. then Yoast SEO should be good enough for you.

On the other hand, if you are serious about marketing your website and squeezing that little bit extra out of your SEO, then I would highly recommend using SEOPressor Connect.

For the basic stuff they can both pretty much do the same thing, but never versions of SEOPressor now comes with some really great features that really does push your rankings higher.

For a FREE eBook about speeding up your WordPress site (to improve rankings), just enter your details below.   Name:   Email:

click here for your free autoresponder

Choose up to 3 Keyword/Phrases
OK, it’s the free Yoast SEO plugin that only lets you choose a single keyword/phrase for SEO purposes, but to get multiple keyword focus on Yoast costs a minimum of $69. Whilst you do pay for SEOPressor, the standard version lets you focus on three keywords. Making it easier if you don’t know (or not sure) which term to rank for immediately.


Real-time LSI Recommendations

The best part of the latest version of SEOPressor is real-time LSI recommendations; it will actually recommend Latent Semantic Indexing keywords to use, this is important as Google uses LSI to better understand what your webpages and website is all about. Once you enter your primary search term(s) into SEOPressor the LSI keyword recommendations start suggesting other useful keywords and terms you should be using in your content to get Googles full attention and to ensure that you really dominate the rankings for your chosen term(s). This is not available on any other WordPress SEO plugin and is a priceless addition to WordPress.


Real-time Keyword density

If you’re heavily into your keyword density (which I’m not) then this is a really useful feature as you see your keyword density on the fly, it can be really useful if you want to get the keyword density down you can see it going down as you add more content in real-time rather than having to ‘run’ a request.


Over optimisation alerts

If you are working on a page that is overly optimised (which could seriously damage ranking), you’ll get a real-time alert letting you know that something has gone wrong and you need to look more closely at your optimisation.


Social SEO

Usually when you share content, the social platform you are using will automatically pick and display the Description of the page, whilst this can sometimes be all you need, but social channels are more personal that webpages and Google search, so it makes sense to alter key landing pages to add a little more personality into your description. This is particularly true if you sell to Businesses and Consumers – typically Businesses might only see you on Twitter and LinkedIn (SEOPressor doesn’t actually support LinkedIn yet), but you could in theory have a more professional description on Twitter to that on Facebook to help talk to your different target audiences.


Internal Link Manager

SEOPressor allows you to effortlessly fix, build, and manage the perfect internal link structure to increase your reader’s retention and reduce bounce rate.


Other great features:

SEO Score: SEOPressor let's you set a lower limit for SEO score, if the content you have created doesn't pass the limit it won't let you publish it.

SEO Checklist: SEOPressor uses a checklist approach so that it becomes easy to create great content time after time, useful if you have a team of content developers and you want the same quality from the team.

Overall

SEOPressor just seems to have been built with Google rankings in mind, and take it for someone that has been in the digital marketing space for more years that I care to remember, this works the closest to how Google actually thinks and ranks, making it a clear winner in my books.

For a FREE eBook about speeding up your WordPress site (to improve rankings), just enter your details below.   Name:   Email:

click here for your free autoresponder

SEOPressor Review

This is a quick video I put together that explains some of the key differences.

 

Best of luck with your SEO :-)

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Link Building in 2015

Links, the lifeblood of websites, without these your website will not not highly on search engines, if you can't be found on search engines then you'll not get the visitors your business desperately needs.

Link building is fraught with difficulty, recent Google updates mean that if you get links from a poor website, then it will negatively effect your ranking.

But how can you get these all important links?

Two recent posts on LinkedIn help show the way:

• Link Building For A Brand New Website
• Link Building in 2015

These articles offer practical advice to help you improve your search engine rankings.

Good Luck

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Stop asking ‘How’ Google rank websites and start asking ‘Why’.

Seriously, if you are interested in improving your ranking for your website then you must stop trying to guess what ingredients are in the Google ‘secret sauce’.

What makes up the Google algorithm takes up way too much thinking time, just accept the fact that Google pushes websites through their machinery and out pops the ranking for your site.

A better question to ask is “Why do Google rank sites the way that they do?”

From a users perspective Googles aim of is very simple; it wants to understand what information you want to see when you query its search engine and then it wants to ensure that it shows you the very best results.

Why is understanding this a better way to understand Google? 

For Google to do it's job properly it needs to ensure that:

1. It understand what your site is all about
2. When visitors get to it they engage with it (good time on site, low bounce rate etc)
3. They potentially share your content

This all means that you can stop focussing your precious time on tying to get others to link their sites to you, spamming forums and blogs with your links and stop tweaking META Tags and focus on the important area … your content.

With the right content Google will understand your pages and be able to determine whether you can satisfy a search query well.  So your content needs to be able to answer visitor’s questions, the content needs to be exactly what the visitor is expecting to see when they click on your link in the search results.

This means that you need to ensure that you answer the questions you think that the market has for your products and services – this might actually mean developing a formal FAQ section, but it also means ensuing that they easily understand what your website and pages are all about, and how exactly you can help them.

Seriously, understand what Google is trying to do and help them to help you, and you will start to rank well within Google. Period.

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Web Site Usability - what do you need to consider!

Web usability is all about taking a look at sites, pages and designs to better understand the customer journey - the reasons why visitors are there in the first place, understanding any barriers that stop visitors from taking their desired action.

In essence, your web site should provide your visitors with an efficient and enjoyable user experience.

Web pages should be self explanatory and obvious.

The MUM Test

When considering the basics for web page usability, I like to ask the following simple question 'Would my Mum be able to use it!'. You see my mum wasn't a tech head, she wasn't particularly well educated in these modern technologies, so she wasn't at all web savvy; and if we think of our potential visitors in this way then we will always ensure that our sites are a simple (and easy) to use as possible.

Basically, if my mum could navigate a web site and get what she wanted, then it was a good site.

Key Areas to consider

Intent - what are you visitors intending to do on your site?

Web site Structure (appearance) – what your visitors see and interact with.

Whitespace – clean space that makes your site easy to view, read, understand and use. Good use of space can draw the visitors eyes to the important parts (and links) of the site.

Noise – is information fighting for attention or does any other element vie for the visitors attention (strong contrasts next to text for example (i.e. bold graphics or images next to key information can force eyes away from this text)).

Length – short page length, visitors shouldn't have to scroll too far to get to the information that they want, information “below the fold” will not get seen as much as information above it.

Consistence – across navigation, fonts, layout, colour etc

Images – need to be relevant and compelling.

Functionality – how well the site interacts with visitors and visitors with the site.

Organisation of information – and links. Do users know where they are and where to get to the common information they might need? Can visitors get to the action you want them to take easily.  Are the web pages split into clearly defined areas.

Speed – how fast the site loads (< 2 second is ideal) as customers may leave if they have to wait to view the information on your site. Site speed is also important for good Google rankings.

Interactivity – how well can visitors interact with your site, does search work well for example?

Things visitors should never ask themselves

• Where am I?
• Where do I start?
• Where did they put ….?
• What information do I need on this page?
• Why did they call it that?
• Why is that there?

Common questions to ask

• What is the first thing you notice on the site? Is your USP clearly visible?
• Is there a clear visual hierarchy? (headers, important information etc) – newspapers do this REALLY well!
• Are the pages consistent (everyone knows instictively how to read a newspaper and what the headlines mean, bold intro text, main story, caption under images, we know to go to the back pages for the sport and somewhere close to the middle for TV listings etc). Familiarity is reassuring.
• Do you think it's too cluttered?
• Are you having a hard time finding the information you want?
• Does the site feel well organised?
• Do you have to scroll to get to important information?
• Is the site slow?
• What do you think of the fonts, colours and images?
• Can you easily search for product information?
• Can you easily find the contact information?

The Search Engine Ranking factor

I've already mentioned that site speed is important for Google ranking, but also IF your site doesn't look very good to visitors they are likely to press the BACK button on their browser quickly.  This visitors action is classed as a Bounce by Google, and a high Bounce rate will go against you in rankings!

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Should you undertake Link Exchange with other businesses

In recent years the practice of arranging to create links to sites that link to yours has been frowned upon (especially by Google), but can this practice actually have a good and lasting effect on your website, traffic volume and rankings?

The idea of exchanging links with other websites, typically on some kind of special ‘we recommend’, ‘our partners’, ‘friends of ours’ or something similar, used to be a primary method of building links to sites.

One of the major ways that the Google ranking algorithm works is in making the suggestion that a link to your website from another one is a positive vote from them to you, Google used this vote to basically determine your reputation (in fact it still works this way today).

The problem was that as this method of gaining links if very cheap and very easy to do, suddenly all sites had hundreds (if not thousands) of links pointing to them, and search engines like Google realised that these types of links weren't really an honest vote of recommendation for the websites but rather just a way for businesses to boost their rankings.

Whilst website owners can still do this, this approach to link building is nowhere near as beneficial as it was in the past.

As a result, less weight was ‘reputation’ weight was given to what were labelled ‘reciprocal links’ – a term which covers the scenario I have just referred to.

As it became common knowledge that reciprocal links had been devalued, many businesses simply gave up on them. Some even went to the length of deleting all of the reciprocal links they had in case they incurred a penalty against their site.

It’s actually a myth that reciprocal links result in a penalty. These types of links have just become devalued, which is very different to them attracting a penalty.

Reciprocal links still provide value to the sites involved, however, the level of that value is less than it was before; but if you are struggling for links then some value is better than no value at all – so it would be a huge mistake to ignore reciprocal links altogether. You just shouldn't make this your only linking strategy, providing good quality content to attract natural and real links is always be best approach.

Two sides to every coin!

Whilst we are talking here about using reciprocal links to gain improved search engine rankings, there is also the other side of the equation and benefit to consider, that is, traffic referral.

Each link you have on another site is a chance that one of their visitors make click the link and come to your site; the way reciprocal links are tend to be set up (on special ‘links’ pages) then you probably won’t get much referral traffic from them, but again, some traffic is better than none.

Reciprocal links are not created equally!

Some reciprocal links are always going to be better than others and you do need to be very careful about who you exchange links with. For example if you sell soft furnishings and you have a link from a website that sells car parts, I don’t imagine you get any visitors at all!

Link partners should be in some way related to your own. In our example above, your soft furnishings site would be much better served if you had a link from a home improvement site!

Always think before exchanging links – “Would someone else consider this link to be logical? Or would they be confused as to why my site has a link from this one!”

A few links from irrelevant sites isn't a big deal, but the more you have the more confusing your site’s back link profile becomes, which makes it more difficult for search engines to clearly establish the topic of your website and which keywords to rank it well for.

Also, too many irrelevant links can look very spammy and would start to lead you to a penalty by the major search engines.

Quality wins!

Also consider the quality of the site you want a link from (Google will!), ensure that their content is of excellent quality and unique to that site.

If search engines see that you are linking to low quality sites, again this is a red flag to them and you may get a penalty (or just reduced ranking).

So, if you’re unsure about the quality or trustworthiness of a website then play it safe and don’t link to it.

Approaching other sites

Once you have a list of sites that look relevant and have great content, then it’s time to contact them, the best way is to use email or call them; explain that you have found their site, you love the quality of it and you think that a link between the two sites would be useful to both businesses.

You’ll find that the success rate for link exchange isn't great, and it takes some time and effort, but it does work. The key is to do a bit of research on them first. You shouldn't just send out hundreds of emails using the same set template. That might seem like the easiest way but your emails will mostly get ignored.

Finally!

As already mentioned, done well and carefully this can be a good way to get links to your site that WILL help ranking and gain real visitors to your site.

But this approach should be a low level tactic and not the main way to gain links, like I said earlier, great content will always attract natural links from other sites.

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What the future of SEO?

When Google entered the search engine market back in the 90’s they changed the game.

Before Google all you needed to do was stuff your web site full of keywords and as long as you had more keywords stuffed than anyone else you appeared at the top of the rankings for that particular ‘stuffed’ term.

Since Google started spreading their magic on the search landscape things have changed, suddenly keyword stuff got you absolutely nowhere and links to site became the most important factor (as links suggested that the page was liked by someone).

Then Google started to look more at the quality of the links that link to you – if a high quality, relevant and trusted site linked to you then Google rightly took more notice of this link and trusted it more than lower quality sites that linked to you.

Things are changing again with Google Panda (rolled out in 2011) and further more with Hummingbird (rolled out in 2013) – now the quality AND meaning of your content is looking more important.

So with these algorithm changes and other developments, what does the future hold?

As SEO practitioners we are still providing good quality content that answers visitor’s questions whilst chasing those important linkbacks, but will all this activity be beneficial in the next few years!

Backlines are still important and will continue to be until something else comes along which can help Google understand the reputation and trustworthiness of a site; but as links can be easily gained AND the value of link erodes over time then a new way of working out Reputation needs to be brought into play.

Reputation networks like Klout, PeerIndex and PeerReach are examples of other networks trying to understand the reputation of a site, business or individual by trying to understand the context of any engagement; predominately in a social media context.

But it’s this social context that holds the key for reputation in real-time; with the erosion of link value over time then Google admit that once a link to a piece of content is provided it almost immediately starts to become out of date (hence the erosion of value over time), so real-time analysis MUST be the way forward.

The reality of the future of SEO and the question of reputation probably lies in a mixture of the types of work; i.e. the analysis that Klout, PeerIndex and PeerReach are working on and the latest Google Hummingbird platform changes.

A merger of these two sides would mean that Google would have a idea (in real-time) of how a brand, business or individual is being talked about, and from this it could be determined whether that discussion or engagement looks to provide positive or negative reputable (lots of links/mentions from could mean that it’s a valued resource for example).

Also with the Hummingbird update Google is showing that it’s starting to understand natural language and the semantics on how question and answers can be phrased.

I imagine within the next ten years Google (or AN Other) will be able to determine the basic reputation of a site or author (by links and real-time reputation analysis) and understand the real meaning of the content on a site; with these two pieces of information a search engine provider will be able to provide search engine results that provide the very best answer to a question with a higher degree of certainty.

But as we do not live in this world right now then links and great quality content are the way to go.

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So what does Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) give you?

SEO utilises modern search engines (such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing etc) to increase the visibility of your website or individual web page which in turn ensures that your potential customers find your website rather than your competitors when they are searching for a solution you provide.

Typically a SEO professional will handle and provide on website design, content marketing and website optimisation tactics - all designed to provide the search engine visibility that you need.

Bottom line with search results is that the higher your site appears in the search results, the more people will come and see your site, the more visitors you get, the more customers you will get.

KEY BENEFITS OF MY SEO SERVICES IN YORKSHIRE

• Expert advice on how to achieve desired results
• Drives high-quality, profitable traffic to your website or individual web pages
• Gives your business long-term visibility, never short term hope.
• Introduces your brand to a much wider audience
• Increases traffic to your website
• Provides a cost-effective method of reaching your target market
• Establishes trust and credibility in the marketplace

Contact me for further details.

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SEO benefits of Social Media

Most businesses now recognise the fact that social media doesn't necessarily directly lead to a sale, but I know for a fact that it can help that sales process; instead most big businesses now look at social media as having SEO benefits and allowing their website and webpages to gain better rankings than their competitions, but how!

Let’s take a quick look at the benefits that social media could bring your to your SEO.

Social Media in general:

There are a couple of linked reasons why we would want to use social networks in the first place.

1. It allows people to share your information and links with their Friends and Followers 
2. It allows a greater chance for more people to see your brand and your products 
3. You get a spread of profiles and individuals that link back to your site 

Google+:

Specifically Google+ looks good because of the obvious tight integration with Google Search; this benefits you because Google has a good chance of knowing a little about everyone that use its services.

It knows for example if individuals are interested in or an expert in ‘home decor’ or ‘flooring’ because of their Google+ profiles and/or their search patterns and/or their Gmail topics etc – now if you sell flooring and one of these individuals shares or +1’s some of your content (image/URL etc) then Google will naturally believe that your site or specific page is more important than a competitors that hasn't been shared by these interested parties.

Social sites as information hubs:

We also look at social media sites now as information hubs (a bit like mini websites).

If we take the above example about a flooring business and they focus on posting good content about flooring then Google will understand that their Blog, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Pinterest account is about ‘flooring’; and as such any links from it back to that site will generate a little more link juice.

The future of SEO and Social Media:

We (the SEO community) also don’t yet fully understand how Google looks at social engagement (individuals sharing social content), but whether it happens now or in the future, if individuals engage with your social content and brand then it can only benefit ranking.

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SEO techniques you should NEVER try

We all make mistakes, but if you end up making a mistake of your SEO then it could really start to ruin your business.
Many businesses, including some top international companies, have fallen foul of Google Webmaster Guidelines and have been penalised by being removed from Google index.

Google has developed sophisticated algorithms to look out for websites and website owners that look like they are attempting game or beat Google at their own game. You can’t win.

Here are a couple of tips to ensure that it doesn't happen to you.

Keyword stuffing

OK, so you have worked out what keywords will bring visitors to your website; once you have this knowledge the temptation is to stuff these keywords all over your pages!

This is a definite violation of Google Guidelines and will result in getting you delisted from their index. Write your pages as if you were talking to someone about that product or service, use your keyword, but use then sparingly.


Automated comments

It doesn't take long searching the internet to find companies that are willing to sell you software that will enable you to leave comments automatically on blogs and forums – this can’t go wrong can it as we all know that Google loves to see links to your website.

Actually Google employs some very clever software that detects instances of when you attempt to leave lots of comments on blogs and forums, leaving lots of comments simply isn't natural behaviour. It’s fine to find forums and blogs that are related to your business and leave comments on them (in moderation), but do so with the understanding that your comments need to help a wider community, you need to add value to these sites, not just expect a link back to your site.


Paid links

Lots of high profile websites offer to sell links to other sites to help their ranking, and it can be very tempting to use these services as a quick win for ranking.

Google knows the sites that sell links and will penalise sites that they link to, also many of these site will again be unrelated to yours and so Google will see these links as unnatural (i.e. these sites wouldn't naturally link to yours).


Generic Directories

There are lots of internet directories that offer (either paid or free) to provide a link back to your website. As many of these directories are just pages of links to websites then Google again sees these as unnatural linkage and if you are found to have listings in lots of these directories then they are likely to take actions against your site.

Linking from directories that are dedicated to your market or location are better, as are using well known household name directories. These can be a useful way to gain traffic, but don’t reply on this tactic for ranking purposes.

Cloaking or Hidden Content

This is a technique that attempts to hide content from website visitors but is instead made available only for to search engines to see; again Google is now really clever at spotting these techniques.

All content should be available to your visitors, it should be informative; it should make sense and read well.


Doorway Pages

This isn't a technique that is used much today, but Doorway pages are pages that are again just written just for search engines and typically have content on them that is not able to be seen by website visitors. They are used to try to build a large amount of authority into a single page; these pages then automatically take visitors off to a completely different website.

Again, they tend to be stuffed with keywords, but once again it’s a technique that Google are very good at sniffing out.


In Summary

There isn't any way that you can beat Google and fool it into giving you better search engines rankings that your site deserve – always write pages with your visitor in mind.

Good quality, well written site will always (in time) rank better than poorly written, low quality ones.

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Best Practice SEO on a budget

Many individuals and smaller businesses don’t have a budget for SEO work, but if you plan to do your own SEO then all it will only cost you is a little bit of time and effort.

Here's some thing you want to get done:

Keywords:

The first step is to think carefully about how potential visitors are likely to find you when they fire up their favourite search engine; what are the key terms that you would expect them to type into the search engine to find you.

Don’t be too general here, if you are repair clocks and you live in Bristol then “Clock Repairer in Bristol” is a very good start. When putting your list together, consider the ‘transactional’ keywords that someone might use for your service, these are words that might be used in an internet search that would suggest that some if ready or likely to buy, and could also help you understand how you might be trying to position yourself as a business.

So back to our “Clock Repairer” example, they could use something like:

“Cheap Clock Repairer in Bristol”
“The best Clock Repairer in Bristol”
“Order a clock repair in Bristol”

Also consider informational searches that someone might try; these are terms that show that someone is looking for more information before they make a purchases decision, those could be things like:

“Is my clock worth repairing?”
“How do I look after a clock?”
“How much is my clock worth?”

The idea with a lot of these informational terms is that you are looking to show that you know what you are talking about; you are building trust and credibility with your web pages.

Once you have 3-5 key terms that you think visitors will type to find your services then ensure that these terms are on your web pages (then search engines will get the idea that these are the terms that you want to rank well for).


Writing your pages:

It’s always worth writing your pages as if you are talking to someone who doesn’t know anything about what you do or sell, this way you are more likely to talk to your visitor in the right (consultative) way.
 Always remember to add more words like “you” and “your” etc and less of the “me” and “us” etc, that way you will be writing with your audience in mind.


Tagging:

Remember to include unique META Tags on each page, specifically ensure that the META Description and META Title are completed and unique for every page.

Ensure that the META Title is around 50-60 characters in length and the META Description is 100 and 150 characters in length.

Links are important

Links are the lifeblood of your website ranking, without any links to your pages you will not rank on any search engines and you’ll never found.

Think about any relationship you might have with other businesses – partners, suppliers, trade bodies or associations etc. See if you can get links from any of these websites.

If you create good content and people like your site and you’ll start to attract natural links.


Social Media

Use some form of social media when you start off, whether it be Twitter, LinkedIn, a blog, Facebook or Pinterest, and post often, several times a day is good, and make the post relate to your business.

To start off with pick one network and work hard at it – social media posting can take a lot of time and effect and it’s not worth spreading yourself thinly. You’ll have a good idea where most of your audience hang out – post there.

The search engines will quickly pick up the fact that you are posting quality content and hopefully engaging with your audience – this will help with ranking.


Can’t do it yourself?

As you won’t be able to afford to pay for speculative SEO work by an agency then look around for an SEO company that is willing to offer a ‘Risk and Reward’ deal. With this type of contract they will agree that they won’t get paid unless then get you on the first page of your chosen search engines for agreed keywords.

If they are successful then it will cost you money, but at least you know you're only paying for keywords that are on the first page of search engine results.

WARNING: Never pay an agency who guarantee that they can get you onto the first page – no-one can guarantee it.


It isn't quick:

Don't expect great results overnight, doing SEO like this without much effort isn't easy and getting on to the first search engine results page is very difficult, but see how you get on in 3-6 months and take things from there.

Top SEO agencies can't get you sustainable results overnight either!

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Get Engaged, Socially Engaged!

Without a shadow of a doubt, a business that is socially engaged online will always get more business than the ones that aren’t; even if they only generate a little more traffic, it’s traffic that they wouldn’t have got otherwise.

But social engagement is more than just generating traffic; it’s also about learning from your market, having conversations with buyers and potential buyers, building a relationship with them, and maybe - just maybe, helping your search engine rankings along the way.

So how does a business become socially engaged?

Here are 6 great ways to become socially engaged.


Do things differently

Think differently – your website might be absolutely professional to the core (as it should be), but social engagement is about having a conversation with your market, and being 100% corporate isn’t always the best policy.

Try relaxing your grasp on corporate speak a little, try having a little fun, talk to your audience in the relaxed way that I’m sure many of them will want to be talked to.

Be prepared to take a well thought-out risk – this will enable you to test and learn. Digital media is ever changing, as a business you need to be flexible and nimble to keep up with it.


Earn your way (by listening)

Listen in social media is really important – remember you’re using social channels to have conversations (not just sell your products and services), so listening must play its part.

Millions of people might be talking about your business, your brand or products and services that you supply; you need to listen to what they are saying so that you can respond correctly (and timely).

Great insights from your market will help you create better value for your market, and therefore better value for your business.


Make social a culture

Don’t make the mistake of sitting one person at a computer and ask them to do social media as well as their current work. Make social a cultural shift within your business by recruiting staff into social roles, report on their activity at least monthly so that everyone inside the business see’s the activity been undertaken and the benefits that are being generated.


Be big and bold

When you start off in social media, it’s easy to fall into the trap that you think no-one is listening and no-one is interested in what you have to say, but they are.

Be bold, talk about topics that are not only important to you as a business but also what is important to your audience. If you provide credit cards or bank accounts then be bold and discuss debt; if you sell mortgages talk about the problem of not been able to keep up with repayments; if you sell software then help people to understand what might happen if that software fails – be brave, be bold.


Creation and Curation

It’s not always about posting topics that you have created in-house or starting your own discussions; sometimes it’s important to comment on other’s work, maybe other similar businesses. Content can come from many different sources, look and listening to what’s outside of your business to see which of it can help you to engage with your market and get the conversation going.


Internal Collaboration

As already alluded to, Social media is a huge role for just one person in a decent sized business; but it is also true that social media is bigger than just one department. Call upon your colleagues in Sales, Customer Services and Support to help facilitate content, topics and discussions; these teams can help provide real-time insights as to what’s important to talk about.


None of this happens overnight, but if you are starting your social engagement journey, consider these points and getting you towards your end game will become much easier.

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SEO for YouTube

Putting video onto YouTube is very simple to do; getting people to watch the video can be a little tricky.

You could help yourself my making your video easier to find through Google or YouTube search, here are some of the techniques you could try to get your video to the top of the rankings.

Remember that YouTube is the second most popular search engine and is owned by Google and they want to ensure that the right videos are shown in results for the right queries.

Video Title

When YouTube first started, the best way to get your video on top of the search results was to stuff your keywords into the Title and Description; things aren't as easy as that anymore, Google takes every effort to ensure that their YouTube search results are as good as their primary search engine results.

The video title is where it all starts - you need to ensure that you have a good, clear Title that has your keywords in it.

Description

Again, in plain English describe your video using your keywords.

If you typed out a script to follow then cut and paste that in here too.

Many site also benefit from having the URL of their website right at the top of the Description – try it out, every single benefit needs to be exploited.

Video Name

Use your keywords actually within the name of the video before you upload it; lots of video production software create default filenames (i.e. MOV0001.AVI), this isn't very informative to Google about what the video is about – “10_Secrets_To_Weightloss.avi” is a little more descriptive!

The viewer of the video will never see this filename, but it does appear that at the moment you upload it to YouTube and it could give you a small relevancy credit.

Engaging Content

YouTube should be seen as any other website, and in that case CONTENT becomes the most important part.

Like any other website, Google gives credit when someone watchers your video, the more of it they watch the more credit they will give you - the basic principle is that if they watch it all then it must be good, so keep your videos entertaining and engaging.

Closed Caption

YouTube provides a Closed Caption (or Subtitle) functionality, as a default it uses voice recognition software to determine what is been said and converts it to text, so when a viewer wants to watch a video with Closed Captions the automated text shows.

Unfortunately it isn't 100% accurate (I've actually never known it more than 50% accurate!).

As Google can't understand the actual content of the video you have made, it uses this Closed Caption information to get an understanding of what the content is about – if it doesn't do a good job on recognising the spoken word then you don’t stand much of a chance of getting credit for the content.

Luckily YouTube provides the ability to amend the Close Caption text – looks for the “CC” button in the bottom right hand corner of your video when you are logged in.

From here you can go through all your scenes correcting the text – remembering to add your keywords of course.

This is probably one of the most important factors and YouTube will always rank better a video that has proper CC than one that hasn't.

Authoritative YouTube Channel

As I mentioned earlier, YouTube is just a like any other website, and like any other website your fresh new channel will not have any authority when you first start out, so Google will need to know about it and you will need links to it.

Ensure that you provide a link to your video or YouTube channel from your website or other social media account.  Also to build authority of your YouTube account you need to undertake a link building campaign just like you probably do for your website.

Social Triggers

Google will take some social engagement triggers to help decide how liked your videos are, if viewers like them, they will Favorite them, Like them and Subscribe to your channel.

The more of these activities that take place, the more respect you’ll get from Google/YouTube and the better your ranking.

If you struggle to get these Social Triggers then drop me an email letting me know what you want to achieve and I can provide a quick quote to get you YouTube Favorites, Likes and Subscribes.


Hope you found this small article insightful, a small comment will always cheer me up :-)

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Twitter doesn’t use Twitter and Facebook social signals to rank pages

Matt Cutts (Google's head of search spam) yesterday explained this in a video (see below) that whilst the Google algorithm doesn’t treat social sites any differently to aid (or otherwise) webpage ranking, where they can they do still crawl and index the page like they do for any other website.

What does this mean in practice for website owners and brand managers that currently undertake social media in order to gain improved rankings? Simply don’t stop what you are doing!

Whilst the fact that you are engaging with your market doesn’t explicitly mean that your rankings will improve, some of this engagement will lead naturally to users taking a look at your site and offerings; this traffic is highly desirable.

The fact that Google does crawl and take notice of social channels does mean that a well crafted and themed channel presence could still rank well in the Google index or be seen as having a good amount of authority and any links back to your webpages become more influential in your own rankings.

In the future think about your Twitter, Facebook or Google+ page as being more of a microsite for your business and brand.

Great content

The learning to take from this video is that we should all continue to do what Google have always recommended and that is we develop great content that visitors will want to read and share through their social channels and other web properties.

Future

There is no doubt that in the future things may change, especially as Google become more adept at understand the value and authority that a particular author may have. If for example Matt himself comments on someone else’s SEO themed blog post then it is unlikely to change anything about their ranking; when Google fully understand that the Matt Cutts who just commented on that blog post has some authority in SEO, then it could affect ranking.

In Summary

Continue to do what you do in Social Media, do not ignore the content, don’t expect great leaps in ranking though your social engagement.

The Full Video

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SEO: What to expect in 2014

Improved Webmaster Communications

First and foremost with Google constantly looking at Link Devaluation and more Penguin updates expected this year, I’m hoping that Google start to help webmasters out a little more by providing a tool that can quickly detect poor linking patterns and allow you to simply Disavow links that you don’t want to be associated with anymore.

On the subject of Disavowing links I’d like to see Google working towards helping webmasters by providing an easy way to send a request the webmasters of external links by using the Google Webmaster Tool inbox. The advantage here is that Google will be able to see clearly when a webmaster is trying to clean up their act.

Content, content, content

Quality content creation will become the watch word for all SEO practitioners during 2014 (if it isn't already!) as Google will tighten the noose around the neck of thin sites.

Content needs to be seen as a valuable business resource that can be reused or reworked for web pages, social media, audio and video etc

The technical aspect of SEO

SEO will become more technical, so that we can deal with the likes of schema, authorship, crawlability, etc.

KISS – Kall It Sales Stupid!

I see more of us focusing on real lead generation, conversions and sales rather than simply how are our keywords doing in SERPS!  We need to move to really help businesses with the bottom line.

Personalisation

If nothing else then the personalisation of search results will change what SEO means; when I search for “Dolphins” I expect Google in the future to provide more personal results for me and supply more Miami Dolphin sites; if my eldest daughter (who wants to be a Marine Biologist) conducts the same search I would expect her results to show more instances for the marine mammal.

Other stuff

I see further strengthening in AuthorRank and now we have Hummingbird, more natural language capabilities.

Finally I see lots of ‘SEO’ people around the globe complaining that Google updates have ruined their ranking simple because they failed to follow good practice!

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Social Media for Ranking

Top retailers will tell you that Social Media isn’t very good for generating traffic direct from the links that you put in your Twitter feeds, Facebook pages or Pinterest boards; but what it is good for is providing the big search engines with suggestions on your engagement with the social sphere.

If you post lots and people engage with you more than others in your market, then that alone is a good indicator that your pages might need to rank higher than your competitors. That is the REAL value of social media to businesses today.

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Your Search Engine Profile

SEO (Optimising your site for search engines) is a balancing act and its becoming much clearer to more and more SEO professionals that this balancing act can be a very delicate one when looking at activities needed to help a webpage move up the rankings; and these activities go towards developing a Search Engine Profile for a particular page or site.

There are numerous factors that you can spend your time on, some of the more basic ones being:

On Site Factors

• Is the HTML coding clean and correct?
• Can search engines easily see all of your webpages within a couple of ’clicks’?
• Is your navigational structure working in favour of visitors and search engines?
• Are all your internal pages linked to from other internal pages?
• Do you have a good robot.txt file on your site?
• Etc etc

Off Site Factors

• Are you Followed and Liked on key social media channels?
• Is your site mentioned often on social channels?
• Do you have a good number of backlinks to your site?
• Are ALL backlinks of a good quality?

Do too much of one element and not enough of another (i.e. too much time with social media without building fresh new content on your site) and you’ll find it difficult to rank well, you need a good blend of a number of different factors (social, on site elements and quality link building etc).

But to what degree you do each of these (your Search Engine Profile) differs from sector to sector and website to website, the important element is to work out what your key competitors are doing and what their likely Search Engine Profile is, then attempt to get somewhere close to that.

It is unfortunately a long, manual job, but it’s a job worth doing and will pay you dividends in the long term.

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