Author: troy

  • Google to become second biggest social website in 12 months

    Upon examining the first month of results since the launch of the new social media platform Google +1, it is set to become a key competitor to Facebook & Twitter.Uptake has been strong, with Google reporting over 25 million accounts have already been set up – and they are still in the Beta testing stage. This could be a little pre-emptive however, but there are signs it is heading in the right direction based on some of the survey’s findings:–          45% of users report reading content once a day or more (only Facebook’s 62% is higher among social networks) –          46% of Google+ users report creating content (e.g., creating posts; sharing links) at least once a week. This competes with Twitter (42%) – where effortless content creation is its heart.Perhaps more interestingly, is the finding that the demographics of Google+ are substantially different to the other main social platforms. The current uptake of users shows the majority from a young male demographic.–          3 men for every 2 women (vs. 1 man for every 1.2 women on Facebook)–          43% of membership is 18-29 (vs. 31% for Facebook–          59% has a college degree (vs. 37% for Facebook)–          48% are single (vs. 33% of Facebook users)Again, this is limited data – as Google+ is so new (and only a small number of people were interviewed), but it does suggest the platform could be being used in a different way to Facebook – although social, it is less focused on the profile page and more on the sharing element; it has features that definitely appeal to a different audience. Some of these features include Circles- the ability to separate groups of friends – you choose who and what they see within that particular Circle. For example, you can create a ‘Co-workers’ or ‘Family’ Circle. This is easier to navigate than Facebook friend groups and lists. This is also one of the features that is clearly separating Google+ from Facebook. Whereas Facebook advocates a more public disclosure, Google+ is the opposite – promoting the idea of separating your social groups quite literally.  Whilst at the moment Google+ is still in its testing phase, it seems quite simple to manage these Circles. However, we envisage it could potentially get quite tricky to organise all your Circles, especially as usage grows. Although the number of Google+ users is expected to rise dramatically over the coming year, there are still doubts as to the incentive for Facebook users to move to the Google network. Those that have a Gmail account are much more likely to try Google+ due to the fact they are already in the Google ‘clique’. Also, Facebook are not likely to make it easy to leave – it is quite difficult to export data from the platform – such as photos, information, contacts. Another thing to remember is that Facebook got really entertaining when all your friends signed up and it did not develop in a day – it took time. The Google Project has great potential but has a long way to go yet…Reference: YouGov interviewed 1,003 adults, nationally-representative of the US online adult population, online from 29 July–2Aug 2011.

    Article by Freedom SEO

  • PPC or SEO? Where should you invest your money?

    SEO vs Adwords Advertising

    If you’re trying to promote a website online then you’ll probably be familiar with two terms that can help you do this. The first being ‘Google Adwords’, or pay per click advertising and the second being ‘SEO’. As these are both acronyms they can be fairly impenetrable to the layman but are fairly easy to understand with a little bit of explanation. Once you know the ins and outs of each you can then decide which is best for your particular needs and where you should be channelling your resources.

    Google Adwords PPC

    ‘PPC’ stands for ‘Pay Per Click’ which refers to a particular type of advertising. As the name suggests, this form of advertising means that the companies only pay when someone clicks on their advert. This is in keeping with a fairly new model of business that can be found in various forms in a selection of industries whereby the client only pays when they get a result with no need to put in an investment up front (‘POD’ or ‘Print On Demand’ is the same in the publishing industry, whereby printing companies only print copies, and therefore only charge commission, when copies of their client’s titles are sold). By ‘bidding’ on how much you’re willing to pay for each click, you can then increase how regularly your advertising shows up on other sites and search engines. The most popular PPC provider is probably still Google who will publish your adverts on their search pages (targeted to come up as ‘sponsored links’ only when people search for relevant keywords) and on the websites of their business partners. There are many other popular options however with Facebook recently becoming quite a major player in targeted PPC advertising.

    Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

    SEO on the other hand stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization’, which describes the various methods used by webmasters to get their websites to rank highly in the main search results on sites like Google, Yahoo and Bing without paying for the privilege. This is achieved by researching ‘keywords’ or ‘keyphrases’ – which are the terms that visitors search for regularly on sites. By writing the content on the site in such a way that it includes these precise phrases, webmasters can then ensure that Google recognises those articles as being relevant and brings them up when the users search for those terms or similar ones.

    There is more to SEO than this however, and other methods involve changes the names of images and html files, and tailoring the meta tags to help the search engines’ ‘spiders’ to find the pages. Another method is to ensure that lots of links on other sites point towards yours which can help the search engines to find it as well as making it look more important and respectable (the more highly ranked the page that links to yours is the more the link will be ‘worth’). One of the easiest ways to do this is by submitting articles to article directories with links embedded in the text.

    Both of these options have strengths and weaknesses. While PPC has a more immediate effect, it is limited to the amount of money you put into it; whereas SEO has the potential to generate massive amounts of self-perpetuated traffic for a short amount of money with a little bit of luck. One option then is to split the funding across the two methods in order to draw traffic in in the long term and the short term, or to learn to use SEO yourself rather than outsourcing the service for a bigger price (though you will likely get a more efficient service by using a professional service and will yield greater results more quickly). The correct method however will eventually depend on your business and on your personal preferences.

  • Strategies For SEO

    One of the most important aspects of any SEO campaign is to have an effective strategy in place as son as possible. Depending on what kind of industry you are in, the strategy you choose to implement will differ. This will mostly be due to the amount of competition for the keyphrases you want to be found for.

    For easy phrases to rank for, your strategy might be simple. Get your onpage right and then do lots of link building. But for more competitive and generally lucrative phrases, you will probably need a more advanced strategy involving many more SEO techniques.

    This is one reason why employing a successful SEO company to help you with your search engine optimisation is usually a step in the right direction. You can beat your head up against a wall as often as you like without a productive strategy and the result will be the same for a long time, you will have a headache.

    Maybe you need more article marketing or blogs to be set up. Maybe lots of satellite websites for greater lead generation and increased SEO power. A structured campaign that runs on time every time will always bring better results than a made up effort by somebody who does not have lots of experience ranking a wide variety of websites.

    Now I understand their will be people reading this who are thinking, dah, I knew that years ago, but well, this post just isn’t for you. It is for the people out there who are not as well versed in SEO knowledge as others. Like business owners who just want their website to be found on Google for their main keyphrases.

    So if you don’t know what sort of strategy will work best for you, why not start speaking to SEO companies today, to see how they can help and what you might be able to learn.

  • A Healthy Dose of SEO

    The last five years have seen unprecedented growth in the web development industry and one can attribute much of the growth to SEO firms who have shown businesses the way forward. Experts in the field have played and will always play an instrumental role in helping websites achieve online success. To understand why good search engine optimisation works wonders for almost all online businesses alike, you have to understand the key components of a good SEO package.

    Website Analysis and Audit

    Usually a part of the starters, a thorough website analysis and audit helps one to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of a website. This can then help one identify the areas that are under performing and need improvement. Basic ease of use and search engine friendliness is also determined as this tells whether a website has been programmed incorrectly or not.

    HTML Code Optimisation

    Following a general website analysis, good SEO would include a clean and valid html code as incorrect codes prevent indexing and crawling of a website. Code cleaning is usually achieved by rewriting completely for static sites while employing CSS for dynamic sites. Even though this does not always improve rankings in the search engines, it is important from the keywords point of view.

    Keyword Analysis and Optimisation

    Choosing the right keywords to optimise for is one of the key aspects of a profitable search engine optimisation campaign. Target the wrong keywords and no matter how much you spend, you will not make a return on your time or money spent. Therefore, it is essential that a deep analysis of the most relevant keywords related to your online business is done. Then your website may be optimised keeping these primary and secondary key phrases in mind.

    Back Links Analysis and Link building campaigns

    Now that you have got a fully optimised website, it is time to enhance your website’s visibility by ensuring that your main keywords rank on the first pages of Google and Yahoo (maybe BING). The number and quality of back links to a website plays a very significant role in better search engine rankings. However, links from bad neighbourhoods such as link farms or ‘spammy’ websites can adversely affect your website. One quality back link is much more useful than hundreds of useless links and therefore, one must ensure that proper and quality link building is done. For example, links from high authority, ranked and aged websites usually signify quality. Such websites include government websites, academic or research related sites etc. Apart from these, link building can also be done by distributing articles, submitting to web directories and social bookmarking.

    These are the most important features of any healthy Search engine optimisation campaign that you want to buy for enhancing your online business. However, also remember that you have to gain authority and trust from your visitors also so over-optimisation must be avoided at all costs. A clean-coded website, with a good balance of keywords and a focus on user-friendliness should be the end result of an SEO package.

  • 10 wordpress plugins to boost your blog’s SEO score

    One of the reasons wordpress is such a popular blogging platform is the ability to use plugins which enhance the functionality of your blog. So when it comes to search engine optimisation, several plugins are available along with newer ones that are continuously being developed by the wordpress community. This list covers the top plugins which can boost your blog’s SEO score.

    1. All In One SEO Pack

    One of the most popular and widely used wordpress plugins, All in One SEO does exactly what it says – it has the ability to twist and tweak every corner of your blog for proper search engine readability and indexing. Add proper Meta keywords and descriptions, page titles and post titles with this plugin. Yoast is also an excellent SEO plugin. This post is pretty old now, and we often prefer Yoast these days.

    2. Google XML Sitemaps

    A sitemap enables the Google spiders to quickly index the posts and pages on your blog. This plugin automatically creates and updates a Google compliant sitemap to ensure that no post is left unindexed.

    3. SEO Smart Links

    Interlinking your blog posts can boost the SEO score of your blog significantly and also leverage fresh traffic to older posts. As doing this manually is time consuming, one can simply set keywords and their target urls to link to and also specify other attributes through this plugin.

    4. SEO Slugs

    Another great plugin to optimise your permalinks, SEO Slugs removes stop words from permalinks which are ignored by search engines by default. For example, a post with ‘the best SEO plugins for your blog’ in the link would be automatically re-named as ‘best SEO plugins blog’.

    5. Simple Tags

    Tagging posts is a great way to improve navigation and simple tags is the most powerful plugin to help you add tags to your posts.

    6. Robots Meta

    Duplicate content is a heavily under looked area of search engine optimisation particularly when it comes to a blog. This plugin enables you to specify the sections that you want to be indexed and not indexed such as archives, comments, tags, etc.

    7. SEO Friendly Images

    Organic traffic from images can only be enhanced if all your images have proper tags associated with them and SEO Friendly Images ensures that this is done every time you add an image to a post.

    8. Nofollow Case By Case

    If you have a new blog which desperately needs exposure in the blogosphere, then removing the ‘nofollow’ attribute from your comment links can help attract attention. This plugin removes the attribute, positively encouraging your readers to comment and receive link love.

    9. Redirection

    Most blogs tend to undergo several changes, both major and minor, over a period of time. This affects the permalinks of older posts and can lead to dead links on your blog. Redirection is a highly useful plugin which ensures that users are redirected to new the permalinks.

    10. Yoast Breadcrumbs

    Very few people realise this but putting breadcrumb navigation on your blog can significantly perk up site navigation – both for users and search engine crawlers. ‘Home>SEO>plugin’ is an example of breadcrumb navigation.

  • Long Term SEO Strategies

    When many people begin their SEO campaigns with us, they do not have a longer term strategy for seo and what they want to achieve through SEO or even their website. I can understand this, because many people are busy running their businesses and do not have time to plan for such things.

    However, I think it is an important consideration, especially after you have been running an SEO campaign for a few months or more.

    When people start out on an SEO campaign, they usually have one or two short term goals. Those goals are mostly, ‘rank number one for some important phrase’ or ‘get above a competitor for some phrases’. Which is great.

    Achieving these results should bring a boost to enquiries or sales for your business, as long as they are for phrases related to what you do. But when they are achieved, what is your next goal? Where else can you go?

    A good SEO company or internet marketing company, should recommend other courses of action when these short term goals are realised. There must be other ways online to get more targeted traffic, so you should be planning these next steps before the original goals are reached.

    Continuing with SEO, you could start to target a wider variety of phrases, target specific regions where your products or services are required, create new niche product websites, and optimise those to further corner the market. Add further pages to your site to strengthen your rankings and branch out to capture other phrases. There are many more options too. Write a blog to promote yourself as an industry leader, or also to capture rankings on niche phrases searched by potential clients.

    Then depending on your business, you could consider advertising on other industry specific sites, comparison websites, forums where your customers can be found, just to name a few.

    Getting top rankings for your main keyphrases is great. But what i guess i am trying to say is, your outsourced seo company, should also be suggesting ways in which you can achieve more, after your site is ranking well. If not, your online business may be stagnating and maybe you should be looking for other more forward thinking companies to take your business in a new direction.

    If you have any feedback or experience with topics mentioned, do not be shy to leave a comment. We approve any that are relevant to long term seo strategies.

  • Search Engine Optimisation Services

    It is difficult for most businesses or even large companies to judge what they should be expecting from search engine optimisation services. Even if you have a marketing manager, there is still a good chance that they will be fairly in the dark about how SEO works and what results you can expect.

    For this post, lets assume you have chosen a good seo company that knows what they are doing and apply there experience well for you.

    If your website has not been built with search engine optimisation in mind, this should be the first thing that a search engine optimisation company should be fixing for you. There are many key areas on your website that Google uses to work out what it is your website is about. The more of these bases are covered in a professional way, the more simple it is for Google to ‘respect’ your website. This does not have to change the way your website feels, but some navigational changes and text changes should probably occur.

    These initial changes should cause a sharp rise in rankings within a few weeks. This makes sense because Google is going from having no idea what you wanted to be found for before, to a clear understanding of your sites objectives.

    For search terms with low competition, this can be enough to increase your visitor numbers already, due to first page rankings. These days however, things are more competitive so you should not expect instant results.

    Along with this, there should be a dedicated link building campaign in put into place by your seo company. This can include directory linking, article marketing, social bookmarking, forum and blog marketing, press releases, paid links and so on.

    All of these linking steps are helping to build the reputation of your website for what it is you want to be found for. The more quality links the better.

    Depending on the amount of different phrases you want to come up on Google for, you should start to see some results within the first few months. This will probably not be for the most competitive phrases in your industry.

    ou have to remember that your competitors may have years head start on your SEO company, so it is not realistic that you will pass them all within three months. Even with the most dedicated SEO effort this just might not be possible.

    Remember that SEO is a long term investment. What is important in the first few months is that firstly you do see some improvement in rankings, thats for sure. You should also be able to ask questions of your seo company and get sensible answers about what is happening. They should be able to tell you what they are doing in a precise way, not in abstract answers.

    By the fifth or sixth month periods, you should see the majority of your keyphrases on the first page, with some of them fighting for the top positions, unless you are in one of the most competitive industries. I think it is not a good sign if your rankings just sit around on the second page for a few months. It would make me wonder how pro active the seo company is that is handling your project. There should be some consistent movement upwards, even if it is slow.

    If your rankings are very erratic in the early months, this is not a bad sign. If you were not ranked very highly, then you are page two one day, page one the next, page five after that, then page two again. This is fine for a while, at least Google is testing your site out, and is obviously visiting it often. Wobbly results like this should not continue for a long period of time though, within a month or two, the rankings should start to stick of your seo service provider is working consistently.

    I think it is good to begin search engine optimisation services with a short term agreement, or even on a month to month basis. This allows you to test the water and see if you are getting any results for your money. It would be a shame to agree on a yearly deal, only to find out that the people working for you were not driven to get the results you want.

    To track results well, you should have analytical software installed that tells you where your visitors are coming from, including Google organic visitors. During SEO the amount of Google organic visitors should grow, and the amount of keyphrases you are found for organically should also grow. This is a good sign that your website as a whole is becoming trusted more by Google and that inner pages are also being indexed highly.

  • Low Cost SEO

    In the last days I have been getting enquiries about low cost SEO from a variety of sources. There are lots of companies now offering low cost seo services these days in Australia, but lets take a look at what you are getting and whether it is worth it.

    Some of our clients have been getting an email from these sort of guys saying that they offer page one rankings, money back guarantee and all the yaddah yaddah, can you afford not to, sell thousands of dollars worth a week and the usual non realistic hope building sales rhetoric.

    This kind of low cost seo is a massive risk. What can you expect them to be doing for $300 per month for many phrases in a competitive industry like ‘fitness equipment’. That is the one they were targeting. If it was as easy as they try to market it as to people, wouldn’t everyone rank on the first page? Don’t get sucked in.

    In the first month they should spend more than four hours doing your on page optimisation. They need to look at your competitors websites and make their strategy. They need to do hours of link building on directories, do some seo copywriting, maybe write an article or at least edit one, maybe set up a blog, get some social bookmarking going, create some reports for you. Let me tell you honestly, this can not be done responsibly for a small amount of money.

    Like anything, these cheap cost seo options will often be a complete waste of money, your time and worse, build up false expectations that not only leave you disappointed, but can cost money in planning for success that does not happen.

    What I am getting to, is the same old thing you should have heard time and time again if you are new to SEO and want to get someone who will do the right thing from the start. Ask them questions and get answers that you understand and make sense, not just rhetoric. Hire people with open reporting methods. Hire people who have solid references in competitive markets for their competitive phrases. Ranking number one for ‘low cost seo’ for example is not a good reference. It is exactly a trick you should try to avoid basing your decision on. I would love to list the other SEO companies we know are good here, but I am still not sure I should be doing that.

    Finding a good SEO company without an experienced referral can be difficult. But I think if you can talk to the person who actually does the work and they are not trying to oversell their service you might be on the right track. Like any spam email, you have to be curious, so don’t rush in to any offers you get. Take your time. Try to learn a little bit about it first and then ask informed questions.

    Like everything you mostly get what you pay for. If you want honest advice about this from someone who just hates to see people get no return for an SEO investment, ask questions through a comment. I will not try to sell you our service unless you ask and just answer your questions from an informed point of view.

  • Recent SEO Results vs Adwords

    Hello. Do I need to be polite and say Happy New Year!… there you go 🙂

    I have been monitoring our and our clients campaigns over the last months and have noticed changes it the trends compared between SEO and Adwords. We manage both for many of our clients websites and so it is always interesting for me to see where their visitors come from and what campaigns are bringing a higher amount of visitors.

    Before I used to be one of those people (was i the only one?) who thought Adwords was only a short term solution until you had good natural rankings. But now I think that was completely ridiculous of me. I mean, I never thought Adwords was a waste of money, this is definitely not and never was true, but I thought, get in the top five organically and turn your Adwords off. Unless you are very aggressive of course. I thought you could just keep using Adwords for the phrases that brought good traffic to your site that you didn’t have a high organic ranking for. (plus I was in an SEO sales team)

    Now though, as I said, this seems completely naive. The main reason for this I think is that the public’s perception of sponsored links has changed. I will explain.

    When it was new, I think people saw it as invasive advertising and did not trust the websites found there so much as they do now. So they would click less and buy less from Adwords sites. Now however it is common place and totally accepted as a relevant and targeted place to buy, or find the information you are looking for. I think that is the main reason anyway, it has heaps more credibility from the users point of view than before.

    One reason I think this happened, aside from just the time, is that Adwords has become more and more busy and people have got better and better at using it. The sites in the sponsored links are either very relevant to what you search for, or are from the super popular, get as many people to your site as possible websites. It is easy to weed out the latter if you are not interested in what they offer, based on the text in their ad. Which brings me back to the point of advertisers being better at using Adwords.

    Because Ads are much more targeted in the sponsored links, the click through rate is also becoming higher. Users are also becoming used to the sponsored links bringing them straight onto the most relevant page of the website depending on what they search for, so it is quicker browsing. Price shopping is made easier this way.

    From the evidence I have, it seems that you need to rank in the top three places organically, if you want to get more traffic than from a well run Adwords campaign these days. At least in the different industries I am exposed to……which is pretty diverse.

    If you budget allows you to run both, do it. Then you have the best of both worlds. Different people are more inclined to click on sponsored ads or organically listed websites than others, so this way you attract both. If you are found in both lists, it also may help to make you look more professional.

    Obviously the more you can target and manage your adwords accounts the better. Get someone to break it down as much as possible for you if you need to keep your cost per click down. And keep up to speed on the latest developments in SEO.

    Anyway…I don’t want to carry on too much. Let me know your opinion or experience on this subject.

  • SEO – Create a Sticky Site or Information Hub

    Yet again I am drawing inspiration from an article about leading entrepreneurs and what they do to make the most of their websites. As an SEO company, this particular post has relevance to improving Google rankings to.

    It makes sense, once potential customers are on your website, you want to keep them there for a slong as possible. This will naturally increase the chance of making a sale. Smart web owners are using tools, calculators, checklists, maps, comparisons, live chats, and many more to get people interacting with their website, providing them with useful information.

    My Net Phones founder Andy Fung said his site is unique in his industry because of the touch and feel aspects. He says “It’s exciting, interesting and stimulating. Just like a retail store or an office, you feel comfortable and want to hang around and see more things”. Instead of customers just buying a phone and going away, they come back time and time again to top up their account, see the latest upgrades, enter competitions, and view their call history. They believe it is an important tool in their overall business because it communicates with their customers.

    Sites like the green energy website Green Energy Watch, interact with the visitor and let them see how carbon emission they can save, what this will achieve, who is the cheapest to get it from and they also run competitions. All of these things keep visitors on their page longer and encourage them to act.

    Google likes to see this too. If you don’t know, Google tracks everything its users do. They know how many people click the back button from your site, how long the average person stays, which pages they view, where they leave from and more. The data they collect makes sense. They want to see if their users are finding what they are looking for. If they do great, promote the site. If they don’t, why would they show a website for that keyphrase.
    A good search engine optimisation strategy should include techniques to improve your visitors experience and the time they spend on your site.

    The next post is about using design to stand out.