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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Online Lead Generation – Great Follow up Strategies that WILL lead to sales

OK, so your generating sales leads online, but it’s not working as well as you would have hoped! What’s going wrong?

Well if you want your lead generation efforts to generate decent sales, you need to build a robust lead follow up system.

Ideally what you want to achieve is for your lead follow up system to manage your sales leads automatically.

Here are the things that you need in place to help you towards your goal of online lead to sale.

Create a landing page

Hopefully you have taken this first very basic step in generating great sales leads.

This page should really hold two purposes:

1. Get them to buy online - if your prospect buys straight away then you don’t have to bother with any additional sales process!
2. If they fail to buy then you want to capture their details, in my last post I talked about great ways of capturing prospect details. The prospect capturing system could be part of the online sales process – start by asking for an email address on a single page, then if they leave the sales process part way through you have their email contact details to enable follow-up.

Prompt contact is key

If your lead leaves your page, then it’s possible that the left because they wanted to take a look at someone else’s offering before they make their final purchase decision - if you can get in touch with them within a couple of minutes then you're highly likely to retain the sale - the longer you leave this recontact, the less likely you are to get the sale.

What’s the Score?

If possible, ‘Score’ your lead.

If they have been on your site for a while or visited numerous pages or emailed you then they are probably more interested in what you have to offer.

Other factors like their geographic location may make them a better prospects - or in B2B sales did they leave you with a ‘real’ business email address or just an anonymous Gmail or Hotmail account?

Follow up by email

As soon as you have your contact details, it’s time to start following up with them. Email is easiest and quickest to do and you can automate the process.  But as soon as you can, you really need to get a real sales person trying to contact them.  Remember people buy off people, not off automated emails!

The initial immediate follow up will ensure that you are still very fresh in their mind.


Get them in your list

Many businesses mess about with having a separate list for prospects and one for customers, get them all in the same database, it’s much easier.

Ensure that you are able to track all the communications that you sent them or the name of any campaign that brought them into you (all very useful analysis).

Also ensure that you have an ‘opt-out’ field in case they decide that they no longer want to hear from you, but only ensure that you stop sending them communications if they ask.

Keep sending the updates and newsletter etc along with your regular customers.



These simple steps can help you put your lead follow up virtually on autopilot so you have time to work with clients and hot prospects rather than constantly prospecting for new business.

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Online Lead Generation Magnet

Why a magnet?
By its very definition, a magnet is something that attracts objects – in this case we want to attract leads.

There is a vast amount of traffic online, and what every single website wants to do is pull that traffic it into their website – but online traffic management mustn't end there!

What if someone visits a few of your pages and then leaves – you are likely to have spent time and effort (and perhaps money) in attracting that visitor in the first place, and they have leave your site without providing you with any value whatsoever!

Now the ultimate value is that they buy from you; but even if they don’t buy they could have left you with the next best thing – their contact details.

Many, many site and business owners never think about collecting visitor data to use as a remarketing tool, but it is incredibly important that you do; the more details you get about visitors who are interested in your product and service, the better, more profitable business you can generate.

So how do you generate these sales leads?

The best way is to provide some useful information.

We all love information on the internet that can help us – maybe help us do our job better, save or make us money, and your potential customers are no different.

Now they might not be willing to part with hard cash for the information you have, but they might be willing to leave you their email address at the very least!

There are numerous ways we can do this online, but the best ways are:

• eBooks - needn't be huge, a decent 20 page eBook can be a great way to establish leadership and authority in a marketplace
• A downloadable “kit” - worksheets, videos, articles etc
• Free quote or consultation - these could be delivered in person, my email or over the phone. The great thing about these is that the requester knows that they will need to part with a good amount of information to get the best advice or quote from you.
• Email course - send out a series of informative and educational emails. Over the course of a few weeks or a month you could send numerous emails automatically building authority and trust with the recipient.
• Free samples - if you are the type of business that can send out samples then they make a great lead generation tool.
• Activate a trial - software companies always collect visitor details if they want to download software and get a free trial. During the trial period ensure that you send out automated emails to encourage a conversation with them.
• Whitepapers - a white paper is basically a smaller version of an eBook – so if you find you can’t provide enough detail to make a convincing eBook, make a convincing white paper. They are inexpensive to develop and will add greatly to your credibility.
• Newsletters - do you have information that you can regularly send out as a newsletter?
• Invitation to a webinar - people love webinars, mainly because they are usually free to attend; they are a great way to delivery the same piece of information to a wide audience and they are very cost effective to do.

In Summary

As already mentioned, once you've built up a steady stream of internet traffic, your job is far from over. You now have to implement some type of lead generation magnet(s).

With the automated delivery of follow up emails you’ll start to see some great results and you’ll find that some of these prospects will start to known on your door.

Best of luck.

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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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Is guest blogging really dead as Matt Cutts suggests?

Matt Cutts recently mentioned on his blog suggesting that guest blogging (the practice of providing a blog post to a site with the ultimate aim of getting a link back to your website) was dead.

In his post he actually says

“Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.”

Is he 100% right in what he says? Well yes he is.

Managing the number of company blogs that I have in my time you do get a lot of emails from people you've never heard of offering to write a post for your blog and in return all they want is a dofollow link back to their website – this in itself is against Google Webmaster Guidelines.

The point from Matt is that it’s becoming increasingly popular for spam bloggers to request some space on blog to help spread the news about their product/service and get that valuable link back to their site.

They claim that they’ll provide you with 100% original fresh content – where the likelihood is that they will write one blog post and spin it in numerous ways so that in reality very little changes for each different blog.

The point is IF you undertake this sort of strategy to get post in other peoples blogs then you are now doomed to failure.

Google are going after these spam bloggers that are trying to game their system by getting links whilst adding little or no value to blogs. They are after the spam bloggers that automate their blogging or just spin weak content.

Blogging for business is about adding value to your audience; guest blogging is still a valid part of the online marketing mix, but it should never be the whole story.

Guest blogging as an audience building strategy is still incredibly useful and does work. Provide genuine blog posts to one or two blogs that match your audience requirements exactly; write with the intention of adding value to the blog owner’s readers and not with the intention of getting a link back to your site.

If you do want a link back to your site then ensure that the link is directed to a page that provides additional highly relevant content to the reader.

Internet marketing is a people business - you need to speak and communicate to people through what you say and the information you provide.

Think about building relationships with bloggers and your audience.  

Adding true value with guest post – this will NEVER died.

Guest blogging with the right intention will work.

Matt Cutts is not wrong, listen to what he’s saying and add value to your guest blogs, don’t just access other peoples audience to get backlinks.

BTW, if anyone wants to guest blog here, just ask ... I might just say yes!

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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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The NEW Social Media Strategy - how to get rankings from your social channels

During the last quarter of 2013 I started to change my view on Social Media and the benefits from it to search engine ranking; tests that I was undertaking didn’t really give any credence (improved ranking) to the fact that Google love it when you post and engage with people of social media.

Sometimes there was a improvement in ranking, but constant Retweeting, Liking or Sharing of posts on Twitter and Facebook did nothing to improve ranking.

The majority of people I know in SEO would swear blind that I should see some benefit, but no!  Absolutely nothing! So what’s going on?

On further investigation I noticed that the social channels that saw a jump in rankings contained a sustained stream of related (or themed) posts; could this be the secret!

I tested a little more and indeed, I realised that I definitely seemed to get ranking benefits from accounts and sites that contained lots of themed social posts.

Then, mid January, Matt Cutts confirmed this approach (see my other post here).

What Matt basically says is that where they can get access to profile and posts, Google treats them just like any other website, they will look at the authority that you provide and pass that onto any linked sites.

So the strategy for the use of social media for ranking now seem very clear; view your social channel as a microsite; ensure that you tweet or post lots of themed (related) posts often (ensuring that you add the URL’s that you want to rank for). 

Ensure that your posts contain your keywords (like any website don’t spam them).

Treat your social channel like you would any small website, remember that content is king because you still want people to engage with you and link to your social posts; follow this simple advice and you’ll soon find that main webpage starts to see an improvement in ranking.

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