On Site Optimisation

The first task in obtaining increased traffic from the search engines is to be sure that your own site is put together in the correct way. For starters, you ought to make sure that your preferred page specific keyword appears in the right areas on your webpage. As you can imagine, this is a bit more complicated than it may seem to begin with and search engine optimisation specialists will help you to ensure your keyword research in addition to keyword placing has been carried out in the right way. This procedure includes making sure that your meta tags, title tags and header tags all contain the right keyword you are attempting to rank for. You will also have to be cautious not to have incorrect key phrase density, which means that your key phrase should not show up too frequently, or indeed not enough on any of your site’s web pages. In past times, lots of web site owners applied significant key phrase density to their website pages in an effort to cheat the search engines into providing them with far better rankings but this is no longer effective. This is another reason why you need to enlist the assistance of a specialist search engine marketing company to optimise your web site.

Off-Page Search Engine Optimisation And Building Back Links

The factors we’ve already mentioned are extremely important and form the basis of just about any search engine optimisation strategy. When it really comes down to it, however, at present the most critical aspect in improving your search engine ranking positions is back link building. Typically, the greater amount of back links you have from other websites, the greater your chances of achieving high Google rankings and as a result improving your all round web traffic and profits.

Since the process is so simple, it is likely you do not require assistance from seo consultants, correct? Well, regrettably things are never as easy as they appear when dealing with the various search engines and you would definitely benefit from professional guidance to be able to develop the best backlinking plan for your web site. Here’s a few other elements to take into account with regards to carrying out proper linkbuilding.

Back Linking – Quantity vs Quality

It’s true that in general, the greater number of one-way links you can obtain from other websites the better. But the truth is, some are certainly more worthwhile than others. It is good if you can acquire a back link from an article directory or a blog comment but these kinds of links are definitely not as valuable as the ones from the most important websites in your particular niche. How do you evaluate the calibre of a back link? Well, examples of the factors include things like relevance to your website’s subject matter, the page rank of a web site (which is one of the many ways that Google measures the authority of a specific webpage, based partly on the quantity of backlinks it has acquired and the general popularity or brand name recognition of a specific site. For example, a back link from a well known website much like the BBC or a premier university or college would be way more valuable when compared with ordinary backlinks.

Link Velocity

Another area where search engine optimisation professionals can be extremely useful is when it comes to showing you just how important it is to build back links to your site gradually. The truth is, a large number of web site owners think that if getting a small amount of inbound links each day is good, then obtaining a huge number of back links in a short period will be better still. They use automated software programs to create thousands of inbound links from bad quality article directories and similar sources, typically in just a couple of days. It is significantly better to spread out your link building over a long period so it looks more natural to the search engines like Google.

Do You Now See The Need For Search Engine Optimisation Specialists To Generate More Web Visitors To Your Business?

Hopefully you have come to realise why you should work with search engine optimisation consultants. While there are many methods of obtaining web traffic, the search engines need to be the foundation of any sort of site business plan. Even though this requires a great deal of planning and cash in addition to time invested in advance, you can reap the rewards of organic, “free” search engine web traffic for a long time to follow rather than having to rely exclusively on paid for advertising.

Always have a purpose and aim – Like anything, in order to succeed you need to have a plan, make sure you highlight your goals when you set out blogging. Stick to these goals and review them from time to time.

Target a niche – I have seen the most success whilst targeting the “Epilepsy” community, I have seen my site traffics increase dramatically, SERP rankings have shot up out ranking some national charities, I have seen greater involvement from the “community” by way of guest bloggers.

Go that extra mile – Write your blog posts and continually promote them, monitor social channels for people discussing topics similar to your posts, drop into their conversation and mention your blog link. Various tools are available for this, I use “Hoot Suit” to monitor Twitter # tags and certain search terms. There is also a website called “board reader” this monitors web forums for people discussing certain topics, simply use the search function on board reader and it will hopefully send you some useful results back. Finally, use Google alerts to inform you of other bloggers discussing your topics.

Research – Don’t simply throw a blog together! Do some research, see what others are saying on the subject, equally see what they aren’t saying. If you are planning to write a post which other bloggers have already covered make sure yours is better, complements theirs and adds value.

Spread The Word – Tell the world and his mother that your blog exists! Visit similar blogs with similar posts and drop a comment complementing the blogger and directing them to your post as “further reading which his readers may benefit from”. This helps build your readers and also forms part of a “referral strategy”.

Try To Stay Relevant & Current – Make sure the information you are providing via your blog is up to date. You wouldn’t usually read a news paper from a few months ago would you? ( there are exceptions to this tip, if you are providing tutorials or trying for example)

Always Write With Your Blog In Mind – If in your job you find yourself writing a report, doing some research or whatever, always consider how you can convert it into a useful blog post, be careful with Privacy laws etc…

Get An iPad or Similar Tablet – Since I got my iPad a few months ago my blog output has increased dramatically. Why? Because I always have a word processor to hand when I need one. I tend to start blogging in strange places, coffee shops, buses, trains etc… iPads can be too expensive, good alternatives are the Samsung Galaxy Range, Advent Vega. These tend to be slightly cheaper.

Create A “Buffer” of blog posts – “Make hay while the sun shines” what does this mean? Basically when you are in the flow of writing make sure you churn out a few posts, there is a dreaded thing called “writers block”, remember my first tip “Stay Regular”. WordPress has the functionality of letting you provide a publish date and time, when this time occurs it will automatically publish for you. This is great if you are going on holiday / vacation but will require some forward planning.

Installing Magento can be tricky if you are not used to it. I have produced a video to help explain the process, from downloading to uploading it to your hosting and then on to running through the magento installation wizard.

Hope you enjoy the video, as ever if you think its useful please share it, link to it and also please comment on it below. (useful links are below the video)

Magento Home Page: http://www.magentocommerce.com/
Magento Installation Cheat Sheet: http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/magento-installation-cheat-sheet
The Web Design Group: http://www.thewebdesigngroup.co.uk/

Below is a video giving my first piece of advice relating to email marketing (shot in the car on my way home from the office). Have a look, and please feel free to leave me a comment.

Video Transcript

Coming soon… once I have found a piece of software to do them :)

Andy.

1) Decide On Your Topic & Aim

Before you start writing a blog you need to first know what you are going to blog about, sounds obvious doesn’t it? However people new to blogging will often begin writing with no real aim, or topic, this can make it very difficult to see any real result from your efforts.

You should treat blog writing like any other marketing technique, you should first understand what it is you are trying to achieve, here are a few examples of possible aims of your blog writing.

Possible Blog Aims

• Brand Awareness
• Provide Useful Information To Your Community
• To Appear As A Professional In Your Industry
• SEO Keyword Targeting
• SEO Link Building
  • Attracting Links From Other Bloggers
  • Manually Seek Out Other Bloggers To Link With

You may be able to think of more aims but you get the idea… They will make the blog writing process a lot easier.

Choosing The Topic

The overall topic of your blog will already be determined; mine for example focuses on the huge topic of “internet marketing”. Each blog post will also have a topic which should relate to a “category” on your blog.

There are a few techniques I use when trying to think of what to blog about.

• Current events (in your industry or related to your industry)
• What are people searching for and already finding your site for (what can you improve your rankings for).
• Using what you have already written up for “offline” purposes. (In the past I have written training documents, procedure documents etc… these can be “tweaked” for blog use.)
• Things you have learnt recently.
• Answers to questions you may have been asked recently.
• Write a product review or service review.

2) Research & Preparation

You should always try to research your post before starting to write it, this piece of advice is easier said than done, as quite often this is where I fall down with my blogging.

Research

In theory your should perform some aspects of “keyword research” to determine if people are a) searching for the topic you have chosen to blog about and b) the keywords they are actually typing into the search engines. This research will help you drive traffic through to your website once the post has been created. There is very little point in spending the time writing if nobody is going to be able to find what you have written!

You can use many tools online for finding these keywords, pay attention to your Google Analytics keyword referrals reports and also check out the search queries report in Google Webmaster Tools.

You should also determine how many other bloggers have covered the topic, and how well they have covered it. You should also look at how they have promoted their post and the types of people who have commented on their posts, this will give you an insight into the “audience” your blog post should be written for.

If possible try to approach the topic slightly differently to other bloggers (even offer and opposite opinion), this will help provide more value to your post and will also help you promote your post in later stages.

Preparation

If you are going to need some graphics creating, make sure you spend time using Photoshop to produce these. Always try to use original graphics, photos and artwork where possible. If you are going to include an “info graphic” in your post to help explain your topic, make sure you spend time creating a professional looking graphic, if you are not very skilled in Photoshop then consider outsourcing the production of these graphics.

You should always try to appear to be giving high quality information, if your graphics are low quality then you are going to struggle to convince people, and make them “trust” that you know what you are talking about. (Pay attention to the image file names, as you may get traffic via Google image search.)

The best bloggers are the people who research and prepare thoroughly, they are often the people who have the best success with using blogging as a marketing and promotional technique.

3) Create The Post

Now you should have researched and prepared the post, chosen the topic and bullet pointed what you want to cover, you should be well placed to start writing the post.

Try to stick to one style of writing, this will depend on the website you are writing for, if it is your own site then that’s fine. If you are writing for somebody else’s blog try to emulate their writing style.

I always try to write in such a manner that it reflects my personality, mainly because it is easier and more natural to me. (Be careful if you are blogging on behalf of a company or guest blogging for somebody else.)

Use the keyword research you have done in order to give your post the best chance of driving traffic through to your website.

Make sure you Optimise your post <title> tags, <meta> “description” and “keywords” tags. These will help the posts rank within the search engines and also help people find and read the post. Also make sure you mention your keywords throughout the post.

When writing if you mention other people or other posts on your own site then make sure you place a link through to them, this will help give your post more of an authentic feel and also help produce those all important “deep links” to other parts of your website. These deep links will help the search engines find and index all parts of your website. There is a great knock on effect from linking to other bloggers in your own posts, these links will create a “pingback” to their blog, effectively alerting them that you have linked to them, if they approve these “pingbacks” an automatic link will be placed back to your post at the bottom or their post (a method of SEO link building).

Proofread! Always make sure you proof read your writing before making it LIVE, I have learnt this the hard way, in the past I have had my readers tell me that I have left a typo or a spelling mistake in the post.

This is obviously not very professional.

I usually write all my posts in Microsoft Word or similar, this way I can take advantage of the spellchecking facilities, and also gives me the opportunity to save my work for use offline, I may be able to use what I have written as training material for my staff in my day job! Or use it when I give talks at colleges etc…

4) Promote The Post

Remember that with each post you write you are trying to add a small amount of traffic to your website, targeting monthly searches by your potential readers.

This step is vital in the success or failure of a blog post! Just because you have written something doesn’t mean people will find it. Sometimes you need to give it a little push, tell people about the great piece of content you have produced!

Spread the word over the social media channels; tell your Twitter followers, your FaceBook friends, your connections on LinkedIn etc… Some of these people will not only read your post but depending on your relationship to these people they may also share and promote it for you! FANTASTIC! (a large element to the success of this tactic is knowing how to build yourself a network.)

Social Media Groups, these can be very useful in helping promote your blog post. Join the LinkedIn or FaceBook groups which are related to your post topic (and overall blog topic). It is important that you are seen to be an active member of these groups, and not simple seen as a spammer. Place links to your blog posts on the “wall” of these groups, encourage some discussion around the subject via these groups. Often you will see that the community will comment either on the post itself or comment on the wall of the social media site, this will give you a great opportunity to respond and build your network and reader base.

Another great tactic is to find other bloggers writing similar posts to yours, comment on their blog posts pointing them back to your “useful” source of information. When you do this make sure you are seen to be adding value to their post, this way your comment is more likely to be approved. (adding a backlink to your post from a related webpage).

5) Backlink Building

An important part of running and promoting your website is to actively seek out and build backlinks. Blogging is no different; you should always try to build links to your individual blog posts. This is great as it will also help the SEO of your site overall – “The Rising Tide Lifts All Ships”, (read more about this saying on the SEOmoz site http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-rising-tide-lifts-all-ships).

There are various methods you can use for building links back to your blog post, I have already mentioned a couple (Social Media Mentions and Blog Commenting).

You can also try the following:

• RSS Feed Submissions
• Reciprocal Link Exchanges With Other Bloggers (Scratch My Back & I Will Scratch Yours)
• One Way Link Exchange (Seek out other sites containing your keywords and approach them for a one way link back to your post.)
• Link Baiting – Providing a useful source of information which will naturally build links.
• Ego Baiting – Massage somebody’s ego, tell them how good they are and they will likely link back to you, sing their praises in your blog post, and they will likely link to it. (we all like to be made to feel good).
• Guest Posting – When you write for somebody else, try to include a link back to your blog posts.
• Article Submissions – Write similar articles and reference your blog post within it, submit these articles to article directories.

6) Re-Visit The Post.

Now your post is live and has had links built to it you would be forgiven for thinking that you have finished with that particular post. You would be right in some instances, but generally there are always things you can do to improve the post and its performance. You may find that your post is being found for various other search terms (by looking through your traffic reports in Google Analytics) these additional search terms should be added to the content of your post (if appropriate to do so) when you discover them.

Your posts should always grow and evolve if you are to achieve the best result for your website, you should always try to spot link building opportunities for each and every post you write.

Final Thoughts

I hope my 6 steps have helped you understand the blog writing process and will help your blog acheive what you have set out to. As always if you liked the post or would like to add to it please fill out my comments section below.

You can also follow me on Twitter @Andy_Morley.

The campaigns themselves were pretty good to be honest when I got there, however there seemed to be one major element missing… Negative Keywords! The campaigns had a few but not many, this was leading to high volumes of “non-relevant” traffic.

Some of you new to PPC may not know what Negative Keywords are, by adding negative keywords to your PPC campaign you are preventing your ads showing for searches containing those negative terms.

It is extremely important that you include these negatives in your PPC campaigns as they help you focus your website traffic and only get people clicking on your adverts who are actually interested in your products or services.

A little PPC Scenario.

For example, you are the owner of an on-line shoe shop, specialising in men’s shoes, you sell all sorts of men’s shoes from sandals, to trainers (sneekers) and smart shoes to boots. You are running a PPC campaign targeting your products, you should include negative keywords such as “womens” “women” “stilettos” “red high heels” etc… you get the picture! If you didn’t include these as negative keywords you are likely to find the your adverts are being displayed with people looking for womens shoes.

Ok so now you see why you should use Negatives in your PPC campaigns, the question remains “how do you find negative keywords?”. Its pretty straight forward, you need to begin as you would any other kind of “keyword research” by thinking of keywords which are broadly related to your website subject but would bring the wrong kind of traffic. there are various methods you can use to help you find these Negative Keywords.

1) Adwords Keyword Tool – Simply enter your website primary keywords into the keyword tool and pick through the list it gives you, picking out all non-related keywords, I usually save these into an excel spreadsheet for use later.

2) Google Suggest – Use the suggestions which Google provides when searching, these will often lead to some good negative keywords, simply type your primary search terms into Google search and note down anything you think could be a negative. using our “shoe shop” example, here is a screen shot to illustrate my point:

3) Google Product Search (formally Froogle) – This is really useful to highlighting brands or products which you don’t stock, for eaxmple rockport & doc martins below…

4) Amazon Book Search – Sounds a little odd doesn’t it? But there will be book titles including the keyword “shoe” or “shoes”, as you are not selling books you might want to consider adding these book titles as negative keywords to your PPC campaign. Two examples below are “The Seductive Shoes” & “Shoes: A Celebration of Pumps, Sandals, Slippers & More”.

5) Old Campaign Data – This isn’t always possible as often you will be starting a new campaign from scratch, but occasionally you may have some old campaign data which will give you a good insight into what is being searched for in your sector or niche. You might discover search terms which were generating a lot of traffic which may turn out to be “non-relevant”. To discover these non-relevant terms you should tick the keywords which have driven a lot of traffic through the old campaign and “see search terms”, this only works for Broad and Phrase match types. It will display exactly what the searcher typed in to trigger your advert. Analyse this data to discover negatives. Below is a screen shot of where to find this tool (from my stop snoring ppc campaign).

6) IMDB Movie Search – Similar to the Amazon Book Search method from above, you can search IMDB.com for films / movie titrles which contain your keywords, you should add these as negatives to your campaign to stop your adverts being triggered. Below is another example of our “shoe shop scenario”.

7) Google Analytics Keyword Referrals – An obvious one here, people who have been working within internet marketing for a short while will undoubtedly know how useful Google Analytics can be for keyword research. Negative Keywords can also be found by using the Keyword Referrals report in GA. Below is a nice list of “Informational Based” searches which have triggered my campaign for an “anti snoring device” product based PPC campaign. This information searches are unlikely to convert into a sale of my anti snoring device so I should add them as negative keywords.

8) Webmaster Tools Search Queries Report – Another potential source of Negative Keywords, this report details which search terms caused your site to display in the “organic” search results pages.

Other Great Sources Of Advice

There are many more methods of finding Negative Keywords, and also many other sources of tips and advice on how to use them within your PPC campaign. I would strongly recommend the following:

• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/negative-keywords-for-positive-roi
• http://www.pureppc.com/blog/negative-keywords-find/
• http://searchengineland.com/tips-for-managing-negative-keywords-in-ppc-campaigns-107081
• http://www.ppchero.com/negative-keyword-audit/

Thanks for reading my post, as ever if you liked it or would like to add something to my post please use the comment section below, share and even link back to the post I would very much appreciate it.

Thanks, Andy – @Andy_Morley

I was surprisingly nervous the night before, not sleeping very well etc…

My new role is “Head Of Ecommerce”, I am really looking forward to getting my teeth into something new, something more challenging! In the past my Ecommerce experience has been somewhat limited, but my knowledge of search marketing and managing huge teams of web marketers should stand me in good stead to push on and achieve what needs to be done.

Medi Direct is fairly new to online shopping, only having “tested the waters” with it in 2011. This year is going to be different, we have our main website www.tower-health.co.uk which is currently using Zen Cart as the shopping cart system, this is going to be upgraded within the next few months.

We also have a range of WordPress websites which are focused on individual products, these sites are using the “wp-commerce” plugin linking to SAGE Pay. Not an ideal situation as these don’t link to the same system as the tower health site.

We also have and eBay shop and an Amazon store, so we have a multi channel eCommerce set up, all of which I have to get my head around and fast!

I will also be marketing each channel and revenue stream by use of traditional SEO, PPC and Social Media.

I will be building a new department to help me with these tasks, looking for professional internet marketers, content writers, admin and finally customer services staff.

Watch this space, or keep tabs on may Twitter account for me posting job specs.

I have found a few decent bloggers who seem to be giving good advice about how to get started.

As follows:

• http://remarkablogger.com/2008/02/03/start-video-blogging-in-five-easy-steps/
• http://www.hdvideoblogging.com/josh-rimer-interview/
• http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/220530

Testing!

Here is my initial test video… RAW! I know, it is a Sunday morning after all… I need to work on my video voice!

Ok… so where did I start?

Firstly you need to choose between hosting the video’s yourself or using Youtube, PodBean, Vimeo etc… Because of the power of YouTube and the ease of use combined with its huge following I have chosen YouTube as my platform for hosting. You need to  have a Google Account in order to set up a YouTube channel, my new channel can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/user/AndyMorleySEO.

Next, I shot a test video to make sure I know how my camera works, I also had to convert my video into a readable format (Prism Video Converter Plus), my Vista PC doesn’t have the codec for mp4 videos. I then imported the video into “Windows Movie Maker 2″ which I have installed on my PC. Movie Maker is really simple to use, and you should be able to pick it up fairly quickly.

I uploaded one of my test videos to my YouTube channel so I got a feel for how to upload to YouTube etc…

Watch this space, this is my first of many video bloggs! (hopefully).

A quick thank you to the website I borrowed this image from (http://www.bloggingshiksha.com).

Stay Regular – Once you start blogging you need to make sure you keep it up. Search Engines hunger for new content, if you feed them they will reward you with higher rankings and traffic.

Always Have A Purpose & Aim – Like anything, in order to succeed you need to have a plan, make sure you highlight your goals when you set out blogging. Stick to these goals and review them from time to time.

Target A Niche – I have seen the most success whilst targeting the “Epilepsy” community, I have seen my epilepsy site traffic increase dramatically, SERP rankings have shot up and it is now out ranking some national charities, I have seen greater involvement from the “community” by way of guest bloggers.

Go That Extra Mile – Write your blog posts and continually promote them, monitor social channels for people discussing topics similar to your posts, drop into their conversation and mention your blog link. Various tools are available for this, I use “Hoot Suite” to monitor Twitter # tags and certain search terms. There is also a website called “board reader” this monitors web forums for people discussing certain topics, simply use the search function on board reader and it will hopefully send you some useful results back. Finally, use Google alerts to inform you of other bloggers discussing your topics.

Research – Don’t simply throw a blog together! Do some research, see what others are saying on the subject, equally see what they aren’t saying. If you are planning to write a post which other bloggers have already covered make sure yours is better, complements theirs and adds value.

Choose Your Keywords – When blogging it is a great idea to do some keyword research, after all one of the aims of a blog should be to increase search traffic. Choosing the correct keywords is vital for you to take a slice of the search traffic in your target industry. You can get a good idea of search volumes for certain keywords by using the Google Keyword Tool.

Spread The Word – Tell the world and his mother that your blog exists! Visit similar blogs with similar posts and drop a comment complementing the blogger and direct them to your post as “further reading which his readers may benefit from”. This helps build your readers and also forms part of a “referral strategy”.

Try To Stay Relevant & Current – Make sure the information you are providing via your blog is up to date. You wouldn’t usually read a newspaper from a few months ago would you? ( there are exceptions to this tip, if you are providing tutorials or trying for example)

Always Write With Your Blog In Mind – If in your job you find yourself writing a report, doing some research or whatever, always consider how you can convert it into a useful blog post, be careful with Privacy laws etc…

Get An iPad or Similar Tablet – Since I got my iPad a few months ago my blog output has increased dramatically. Why? Because I always have a word processor to hand when I need one. I tend to start blogging in strange places, coffee shops, buses, trains etc… iPads can be too expensive, good alternatives are the Samsung Galaxy Range, Advent Vega. These tend to be slightly cheaper.

Create A “Buffer” Of Blog Posts - “Make hay while the sun shines” what does this mean? Basically when you are in the flow of writing make sure you churn out a few posts, there is a dreaded thing called “writers block”, remember my first tip “Stay Regular”. WordPress has the functionality of letting you provide a publish date and time, when this time occurs it will automatically publish for you. This is great if you are going on holiday / vacation but will require some forward planning.

Thanks for reading.

Please follow me on Twitter (@Andy_Morley)

I have decided that in order to further my career and learn new things, undertake new challenges I should switch jobs. I will be leaving the Web Design & SEO Agency life behind me for the foreseeable future, making the move “in house” becoming Head Of eCommerce for a company called Tower Health.

10 Years Agency Experience

At the time of writing this, I have amassed 10 years worth of experience working within web agencies, most recently for Adtrak LLP in Nottingham, UK.

A quick story…

I joined Adtrak as their first “web guy”, I was the first website designer employed by what was then a Print Design Agency. I helped Adtrak move into the modern age of the internet and website design. Adtrak started dabbling with web in 2006 where we would design small brochure type websites for our clients. Before long I was heading up a web department of 6 website designers.

We quickly moved into offering larger websites and eCommerce, with this came more staff expansion and a larger team for me to manage.

Adtrak began offering SEO services to it’s clients, which meant I had to learn the basics of SEO quickly! This was the start of my SEO career! We also employed an SEO person out right, the SEO department was born!

After nearly 6 years working at Adtrak, holding many different positions within the company including Web Design Manager and SEO Manager the time has come for a change.

Mixed Feelings

I have been at Adtrak for a long time and I have seen it grow from a small print agency into one of the biggest web companies in the UK with over 50 staff members. I have personally been responsible for employing roughly 40 of Adtrak’s staff members! This has given me a unique bond with the majority of Adtrak’s staff it is going to be very strange not working with these guys and girls.

I am looking forward to the challenge my new job role will bring, this involves building a new marketing team for a new company and working more closely with eCommerce.

These two things are something I am really looking forward to!

There may be some eCommerce based posts appearing on my blog soon!

Thanks.

Andy