Paul McIntyre's SEO Blog

Let me get straight to the point: Do you want customers to find your website and buy your products or do you want to maximise traffic to your site? Think carefully before you read on...what's your answer?

You may say, very reasonably, "Well, uh, let me think, probably both." You may be surprised, but I would politely suggest that this is the wrong answer - and here's why;

Now, come to think about it, you probably don't want anyone coming to your site unless there's an outside chance that they'll either become a customer or that they will spread the word about what a wonderful organisation you are and what a unique product or service you are offering. Otherwise, they're wasting your bandwidth and, more importantly, your site is wasting their time. Now we don't want to hack anyone off, do we?

So, now we've got that straight, how do you go about starting to promote your website to get it to the top of the search engines? Well, you may be surprised when I say that you may not always want to do that.

"Hold on a minute", you say, "but you're selling products and services to do exactly that, so why would you tell us differently?"

Well, the reason is that, whilst these products and services have that capability to dp just that, you need to firstly decide if that's exactly what your organisation needs at this point in time. We'd rather be helping you to do what's right for your business in the long-term. You'll come to thank us for it in the long run and others in your business will be thanking you.

Instead, I'd suggest that the question that you should be asking is "How much would we like to grow our order intake over the next 3 months/12 months/3 years?", rather than "How can we come top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).

If you're responsible for marketing via your website, those in charge of providing the products and services to customers won't thank you if you don't deliver the goods. However, they'll probably thank you even less if you bring in demand far in excess of what can be fulfilled in a timescale that is vastly ahead of forecast.

Ungrateful, I know, but they've a reputation to keep, and so has your company, so if they've no hope of fulfilling the demand in a reasonable time, customers will cancel orders and many will never return. That's why search engine positioning is important. A slowly but surely approach that allows you to modify your campaign; to fine tune your positioning amongst various search engines, will pay dividends in the long run. It will also stand a much better chance of pleasing the people inside your organisation who have likely sponsored your web marketing efforts.

So don't always aim for top of the engines, unless you know what terms are bringing you conversions, and never believe anyone who promises to put you there - only the search engines themselves know their algorythms. Slowly but surely will save both money and headaches for all concerned, and avoid scoring a spectacular own goal, like this athletic chap...

SEO and PR – Compete or Collaborate?

SEO are PR are more closely linked than many assume. Both disciplines are complimentary, closely entwined and each contributes to the success of the other. Both aim to build greater awareness of a company, product or service, by boosting visibility and influence with key audiences. Both PR and SEO depend on regularly producing and supplying relevant, high quality content that interests a well-defined target audience.

SEO is much more than on-site methodological optimisation. Off- site optimisation is increasingly important. Sites rely on quality content, relevant to the user’s search query, being picked up and spread by other websites, blogs, directories, business affiliations and social media. In this respect, PR can really help from an SEO standpoint.

To benefit from the successful integration of PR and SEO, PR content must reflect the key words and key phrases used in any SEO campaign. Both disciplines should promote a clear, consistent, uncontrived message, based around the organisations core value propositions.

Not only can SEO optimised content be used for PR, but great PR content can likewise be used in SEO. With this consistency of message and unity or purpose, SEO and PR can feed each other and maximise their reach. Two plus two really can be more than four.

Mass marketing doesn’t work any longer. Sophisticated consumers and business customers alike know what they want before they go looking for it. PR and SEO need to support the aims of an organisation’s entire marketing mix, and in particular social media marketing. Each of these three fields  can support the efforts of the other two, and there is capital to be made from aligning the efforts of all three.

PR agencies and SEO consultancies should not compete against each other, but work together to maximise the value for their mutual clients. PR and SEO can be used together extremely effectively  to maximise exposure, get people reading and talking, to increase your profile, gain inbound site links and increase traffic. Combine the two effectively and you can gain a real advantage over your competitors. Ignore the potential of what they can do by being properly coordinated, and you'll be losing out on the massive potential of what can be achieved from a great alliance, a bit like this pair did...

I spent some time with my Office Services Manager, Ruellyn, this morning. She wanted to find out what we like and don’t like about the office and the services they offer. Fortunately the list of things we like was long and the other list very short indeed. It’s nice to know the company that manage our office want to do the best for us. There’s a lesson for us all there that we need to spend time actively listening to our customers.

It got me thinking about how this applies to bringing prospective customers to websites. Assuming they are positive results, it might help to publish the results of this “survey” on your website, in such a way that customers from competitors are alerted to how much better off they could be – financially or otherwise – by using your services. If your clients think you're good, tell the world about it. “If you’ve got it, flaunt it”, so to speak, in a refrained manner, of course.

Tell the local press about it – it should be seen as a success. They may well put something in their publication about local business successes. You may even get a link back to your page from their online version, which will only help rankings and relevant traffic. Do this and you should increase local enquiries.

This is just one example of creating a link magnet – something that others want to link to. In this case, it may be the local press, the local council, the chamber of commerce and local networking groups. In case they don’t know about it, tell them on LinkedIn, and publicise your LinkedIn post through Twitter.

There’s plenty of ways to create link-bait (or link magnets – same thing essentially) and the more creative the better. Collect any ideas you can and don’t dismiss anything initially. If it’s a little controversial and you can get away with it (think Benetton) so much the better on many occasions. It needs to be either an authoritative reference, such that others want to link to it for that reason, or something that creates an emotional response – funny, sad, caring, etc.

Here’s some examples:

1. Give awards to other sites for something they have achieved. This can work well if you already have good PageRank.
2. Create something amusing such as a clever or funny video. Remember to host it on your own site, unless you want YouTube to get all those valuable links.
3. Create a “Secrets” or “Top 10” list. These can work really well and you may be surprised at how effective they are. Maybe you might publish “Secrets of Online Selling” or the “Top 10 Customer Retention Activities.”

The variations are only limited by your own creativity. Make sure you get both the time and the right people around you to allow your creative ideas to flourish, and if in large organisation, maybe push the boundaries? No one want’s to read “Ten reasons our life insurance policies are the best”.

Next time I want to explore the links between PR and successful SEO. For now, I need to go and write my “Top ten reasons why wine is good for you”…

If you read my tweets, you’ll have seen that I was kindly invited to visit Trefor Davies  ( @tref ) at Timico, probably the largest company on the business innovation park we share in Newark on Trent. Timico provide businesses with premium connectivity, storage and managed network solutions, and I can tell you, they’re not playing at it. Whilst most of us around here use two empty yogurt cartons and a bit of string to get our “broadband”, they have pipes as big as you like, it seems.

I’ve been “doing IT” for over 2 decades now, and I can assure you, theirs is one of the most impressive setups that I have ever seen. Teams of people quietly monitor everything, that all clearly runs smoothly, on a bank of 10 x 55 inch LCD screens joined up together. I bet the football would look good on that! Their latest building ( and there’s more coming) is full of state-of-the-art, high tech security. Anyone who keeps data here should sleep peacefully at night. Very! Even the presentation room is massive, holding over 200 I’d guess, and has such things as chairs that can convert into desks – yes, really.

So why am I mentioning all this in my SEO UK blog, you may ask? Well, it got me thinking about web hosting speed and access issues and how relevant they are to SEO. And the fact is that with the latest Panda updates from Google, hosting has just become an increasingly important part of the SEO ranking equation, and here’s why.

Google wants to provide searchers with the best results it can, and in doing that, it doesn’t want to keep users who click on a result waiting for those results. It assumes quality sites will be hosted on decent infrastructure, not on a slow server shared with several hundred other websites. Hosting issues are things that can be easily solved, but if left unsolved can lead to massive issues.

Google’s spider (or ‘bot) won’t wait around to index your content if your server’s slow. It’s got billions of other pages waiting, so it may not even index your site or at least some of your pages. If you ever get server timeouts when accessing your site, you have a problem that you need to resolve pretty quickly.

If you were trying to provide the best information possible when writing your content, you may rightfully provide links to other websites that are relevant. Would you send your visitors to a page on a site that took ages to load? No, of course not – and nor will others, so speed up your site if you want people to link to you.

Try not to have a shared IP address, as this provides opportunities for other sites to eat up the entire server’s bandwidth and make your site slow or inaccessible. And make sure your system administrator is not blocking access to individual visitors more than a certain number of times in any time period – it may be the Google Bot.

Make sure you have plenty of bandwidth available. You really don’t want to go away and then come back to find your site ran out or bandwidth while you were away and has been unavailable since. Make sure your host is providing you with a reliable and consistent server. You can use external monitoring services that will notify you if your server goes down or is unavailable and these cost only a few pounds each year. Very worthwhile if you consider that can take some time to get your “reputation” back, and if you have an e-commerce site, it being down could kill your business.

Lastly, it’s always a good idea to have your web server physically hosted in the country that is your target market. Google does look at where the IP address is hosted, and make sure you affirm this targeting in your Google and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Keep to these standards and your site should have a great foundation and hosting will be one less thing se be concerned about. Ignore them at your peril and watch your rankings fall as fast as Jeb Corliss in this video.

Next week, I want to look at specific ideas and examples of attracting links and link-bait. In the meantime, you might want to check to see if you need to use some oil and spanners on your hosting platform.

Link Building for High Rankings - Never Give In.

So, you’ve read all about writing unique, interesting content and you’ve populated your site pages and now you need people to read these pages. You’ve probably submitted your site to the search engines, and your pages have been indexed, so it’s only a matter of time before these pages are appearing high up in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Right?...No, wrong!

Ranking is like politics – its votes that count. What you need here is LINK JUICE. Link what? Ok, here’s a brief explanation.

Link Juice is the amount of benefit to a particular page of your site that an inbound link passes from the page that links to it. Though not scientific – because only Google know the full content of their ranking algorithm – it’s safe to say that it’s better to have fewer links from pages with higher PageRanks than lots of links from low or zero PageRank pages. The more link juice you get, the higher will be your rankings. There’s an excellent in-depth explanation of “What is Link Juice” here, if you want to get more detailed information.

So we’ve established that your pages need link juice, but how to get these high-quality (according to Google) inbound links? There’s no easy fix for this; if there was, everyone would be top and there would be no value to visitors to search engines to clicking on highly ranked sites. The best thing you can do is provide the best value on your pages to visitors for the search terms they are using – here are guidelines.

1. Be consistent, assertive and resilient in implementing your link-building strategy. Achieving high rankings for competitive keywords and phrases is a large effort. You’ll need to do it better than your competitors, and they may also have an aggressive strategy. You’ll need to drive hard and keep on driving.
2. Constantly measure success, re-evaluate and modify approaches. Your initial approach may work for some time and then become less effective. You’ll need to constantly review your efforts and keep generating and testing new ideas.
3. Educate everyone who publishes to your website – or who published anywhere else on the web – about the benefits of link-building and well-structured anchor text. Make sure that the benefits of link-building and implementing it are fully understood by, and ingrained in the principles of your staff across your organisation.
4. Keep doing it! Never stop link-building. SEO isn’t a one-time effort and link-building especially need to be done continuously, as a key, essential part of SEO maintenance.

You might want to implement a link-bait strategy, having something that people want to link to. This could be something newsworthy, interesting, authoritative, funny or controversial. Just keep in mind, when designing a link-bait strategy, that you want links from other sites “in the same market space” if at all possible. That’s where the most valuable links will come from.

Let people know about your content through the social networks and know which social networks work best for your business. For example, LinkedIn works better for business-to-business (B2B) websites, whereas Facebook can work well for business-to-consumer (B2C) sites. You’ll soon find out what works best. Put social networking icons on your pages for people to recommend the page if they find it useful. Remember to click on others' icons to return the favour.
Once a few people know about your pages, if their of value, interesting and attractive (content, rather than design), the word will spread and inbound links from related pages will come. And always remember, in link-building, keep going, NEVER give in!

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EFFECTIVE LINK BUILDING

Last time I promised you more information on how to build links to your site. Remember, it’s important where those links come from more than the number of links, and that bad links can hurt your site’s credibility. So, today I’m going to explain how you should go about getting links that will help your site.

Keep in mind that everything you do should be to make your site the best it can be for your visitors. That also means bringing visitors from other sites who are looking for information that your site provides. These people arrive via incoming links.

If you follow Google’s guidance you’ll never pay for links and never trade reciprocal links with other sites. I can honestly say that in eight years of doing SEO, I have never paid for a link or exchanged reciprocal links with any other site. So how do we get links?

There are three reasons why a valid link may get created:

1. The author on another site saw value in something you wrote, to his site audience, and decided to link to it due to its relevancy.
2. Your site content created an emotional reaction in the author on another site, triggering a link. This could be something funny, clever, newsworthy, inflammatory or otherwise.
3. There is a business relationship that triggers site links. For example, your distributors or sales agents may wish to link to your site, to provide their customers with more product or service information.

There are many things you should avoid – I don’t intend to cover them today – but if something is done with the intention of fooling the search engines, rather than making the site better for your visitors, I’d strongly advise you to avoid it.

The one thing that these reasons have in common is great site content. They don’t involve picking up the phone or sending out blanket emails asking for links. Yes, there may be appropriate online business directories – we’ll cover this in the near future - in which you should be listed, and these may have links to your site. But the ones that really count are the links to your site that are created because of interesting, expert, unique or emotion-triggering content.

Of course, the content can take multiple forms – written articles, video, cartoons, online games, free tools, and so on. But remember, if it’s great, unique content, there’s only one place it can be found, and that’s on your site. Don’t be afraid of linking to other site’s content. If it’s appropriate and useful for your site’s visitors, it’ll only add value to your site, and that’s a good thing.

So you’re inspired to create loads of interesting, unique and relevant content, and you put it on your site. So how do you let people know it’s there and they should be looking at it? That’s for next time – in the meantime, I wish you a highly creative Christmas – isn’t that what holidays are for?

HIGH QUALITY INBOUND LINKS

Link building is seen as the most daunting task of anyone charged with promoting their website. It's the easist to put at the bottom of the task list. But it shouldn't be there and it should be near the top.

Fortunately, done properly, it's not at all frightening. If you're in this procrastination category - don't be shy, there's many of you about - I'm here to help.

When it comes to getting results from being ranked high by search engines, inbound links come a fairly close second to a site's content in importance. Without links from a well respected page on the web to the page you want people to arrive at on your site, your chances of success are going to be small.

With links, quality means so very much, numbers of links so little. One or two really highly respected links will outweigh a thousand poor links, and very poorly respected links may even have a negative effect. So how does a link get "respect"?

Respect is a measure of a link's value and is computed by search engines to be a combination of a site's perceived authority and the page rank of the individual page from which the link comes. The difference between the two? Well perceived authority takes account of links from within the same "market space", whereas PageRank does not - it is a raw measure of link value from other sites.

What does this tell us? It tells me that if we want to get the most benefit from link building activities, we need to attract links from sites within the same market space. So if you sell software, for example, inbound links from a respected page with high PageRank on a software review site will have a much more beneficial effect than a link from a high PageRank page on a florist's site. If you're a florist, however, you might want to look at links from the British Florist's Association, for example.

As you may know, links from link farms are pretty worthless, paid links can cause you to get penalised and reciprocal links - or link exchanges -  are seen by Google and other search engines as limited-value bartering.

So how do we go about getting high value links without bribery, extortion or any form of underhandedness? That's for next time, but do take away from this that done properly, it will add teriffic long-term value to your site for your visitors, and will be far less daunting than you might imagine. I promise!

 

GIVING A CONSISTENT MESSAGE TO YOUR VISITORS

 

 

WHY SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS AREN'T THE HOLY GRAIL OF SEO

 

 

WHAT DO YOU GET WHEN YOU BUY SEO SERVICES?

Over the years, many people have said that buying SEO services or SEO consulting is like buying mist – you can’t really see what you’re getting.

SEO acts like concrete, in that great SEO is the most solid foundation for your website marketing you can have.  And like the concrete foundations of a house, you don't see them once the house (here, read "website") is fully built, but without the foundations, everything falls down.

This seems to be the same no matter where you go for your SEO, and even with analytics, it can often be unclear whether it was the SEO or just other market factors that made a difference to any improvements in sales conversions.

And I have to say, I agree; these people – you may be one – have a good point. Especially in these tough economic times we find ourselves in, it’s important to be able to measure the effectiveness of marketing and advertising spend. Our clients have been pleased (it seems) with results from our SEO efforts, but I wonder, can we give them more?

With this in mind, we’ve been working on a secure client reporting section of our website, designed to give our clients access to all their reports whenever they want them, wherever they are. This section is currently being tested and will be live shortly. We intend to improve the availability, quality and usefulness of our reporting for our clients to be the best they can – like everything we do, I like to think.

 

 

SEARCH HIGH HAVE A NEW OFFICE

 

 

EXCELLENT SEO RESULTS NEED A SOLID FOUNDATION

 

 

If, like me, you spend some time reading through the various SEO forums, you may get the impression that SEO, as a profession, is highly technical as a discipline. And yes the truth is that in order to do great seo, it is necessary to know some technical wizardry to have working knowledge  of HTML, PHP, ASP, and so on. But more importantly as in many disciplines, it is critical that we first built solid foundations on which to lay these technical factors.

It’s all very well doing complex redirects, 404 pages, canonical tags, and so on, and it’s not unimportant. But if the basic SEO foundations are not in place all these time-consuming technical efforts will most likely be wasted. It’s great to display technical expertise, but is this always really giving the client what it is they want? Well, not on its own.

It’s here that we have to really take a step back and think about what SEO really is. It’s about a lot more than simply bringing traffic to a website. The traffic needs to be targeted visitors who are likely to convert, whatever that means to the client, be it a sale or an enquiry. But more than this the visitors need to be turned into actual conversions. 

Our clients are not paying us to increase their web traffic, but to increase their sales, increase their web enquiries, make their phone ringing off the hook, and to ultimately make them more profits. Without this understanding of the client's needs, any SEO efforts are going to ultimately fail, and your efforts to build any long-term clients will collapse.

So next time you’re looking at a client site and tempted to get all technical, that’s fine and dandy - a certain amount of technical knowledge is essential - but it’s not everything. You need to regularly take a step back and look at the client site to see if it’s really doing what it needs to do, in order to fulfil the client’s needs.

Is the site easy to use? Is navigation of the site simple? Does the site content and text take the reader through the site as the client would wish, enhance the visitor’s desire to act and ultimately help them to perform the desired action?

Great SEO is not just about technical brilliance. Far from it! It’s about understanding people and their behaviour, the psychology of conversion, satisfying desires, and ultimately about us understanding what the client wants their visitors to achieve. If we can regularly step back and look at a site’s SEO in this way, getting the bigger picture, then solid SEO foundations will more easily be put in place. Only then can we progress onto spending our time on the important, but perhaps less critical technical factors that allow us to tweak a site’s performance.