Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ Category

Website Success Guide

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

My long promised guide to Business Website Success is on its way, thank you for being patient while I found the time to construct my thoughts!

I doubt that this is the most comprehensive of guides, I am only scratching the surface. Hopefully it will act as a quick guide for busy small business site owners to help them cover the main issues, and discover help resources and information points and tools to aid them along the way.

First two sections covering planning and keyword research have been written. The keyword research section will hopefully keep you busy enough until I have written the next section that will cover Design & Usability. Once written I hope to revisit the sections and bring in case studies so please do check back occasionally.

You can visit the guide to successful business websites here.

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SEO Changes & 2010 Web Predictions

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

If your’e signed up to as many newsletters as I am you will no doubt have received numerous predictions of what will be hot or not this year.  One good thing from getting a number of these is it appears there is a general consensus of opinion on what to look out for in 2010!

It’s good to see that some of these are old friends that businesses should have considered, if not been actively engaged in, a few on the other hand are going to have an effect and businesses may need to adapt their strategies to keep up.

In my view the following are going to be the most relevant for small businesses in the coming year.

Top 5 hot topics in Search Engine Optimisation

  1. Personalised Search Results
  2. Research
  3. Real Time Searches
  4. Local Results
  5. Inbound Links

Top 5 web topics for this year

  1. Video Video Video
  2. Undertstanding Your Visitors
  3. Increased Conversion
  4. Twitter et al.
  5. 80/20 Marketing

Not sure what I mean by some of those? Then read on I will cover them to some extent to give a rough outline of the issues, if you would like to discuss how these apply to your business as usual just give me a shout.

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Local Search Update – Don’t forget Bing

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

Back in June I covered the importance of capturing location based traffic searches for businesses that operate geopgraphically. Local search is still important but with the appearance of Bing and predicted increase in search market share, I would suggest including this in your strategy.

The basics are the same, think about where your customers are and monitor your site statistics to determine which location areas you wish to optimise against and include those in the meta and site content. Just as you would include a Google local business entry, complete similar for Bing Local Listing Centre.

Bing has a supplemental website area to the listing, which can be used for link to subpages, a hotel for example might link to tripadvisor ratings, online booking page, or seasonal offers.

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Search Engine Check Workshop @ Business Link – Fareham

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

Tonight I will be running a search engine check workshop for delegates at Business Link’s open evening in Fareham.

The session is aimed at giving attendees the tools and techniques to be able to perform a basic search engine assessment of their website. For search engine success it is widely accepted that onsite optimisation accounts for only around 20% of the activity required, with the other 80% contributed by offsite online activity.

With that in mind to assess your onsite optimisation follow these basic steps:

  1. Measure current visitor levels
  2. Undertake search phrase/keyword research
  3. Select search phrases per page
  4. Check that those terms appear onsite
  5. Tweak & measure

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Inbound Links – boost your ranking

Friday, July 10th, 2009

I often talk to businesses about how they spend lots of time and money optimising their website but they still struggle to get good search engine rankings. After we have looked at their onsite optimisation elements I usually ask the question ‘what’s your inbound link strategy?’

Usually businesses are plagued with calls from perhaps less reputable companies offering to get them onto page one by building links for £200-£400 pcm without any thought for relevancy. Some website owners have built their own thought through plan, however more often than not it is an area that is overlooked and unclear as to the approach to take.

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Website Review Session – from Google's perspective

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

Getting a site right that will promote its core services and products to meet the objectives of the business and all in a search engine friendly approach is the holy grail for many website owners. Business Link has its ever popular website review service that attempts to help businesses get to grips with the issue, which is by far the most in demand service of the team.

Matt Cutts of Google has recently released a video of a session he ran which is a lot more search engine focussed of course, but gives a really good insight into the balance between good site techniques to please your visitors and how these can benefit your search engine rankings.

You can watch the video at Matt’s blog at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/webmaster-site-reviews/

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Links from Gosport SEO & eCommerce Seminar

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

Good to see you all at the seminar last night in Gosport, thanks to Charles of ICG who gave a cracking presentation. It is available online at http://www.internetconsultantsgroup.co.uk/

Below are the links that I mentioned that you may also find useful.

Search Engine Optimisation
There is a great tool that checks to see if you have the basic onsite elements at http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/

Business Link has a couple of guides as well http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/layer?topicId=1081852287

The Google Keyword Tool that can help you determine which phrases to optimise against is at https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal

From the eCommerce session
The payment gateway comparison which can help you decide which is the most cost effective can be found at http://www.electronic-payments.co.uk/

The shopping basket software comparison which is a sister site to the above is at http://www.ecommerce-comparison.com/

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Reading SEO 2.0 & Google Analytics event

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Great to see nearly 70 of you at the Business Link Search Engine event last night at Green Park. The evening had a really good buzz to it and there seemed to be some useful networking taking place. Good to see so many familiar faces in the audience.

Feedback from you all was greatly appreciated, it is always hard to pitch content to appeal to as many as possible, on the whole feedback scores are really good and a number of excellents so thank you for that. We will be making a couple of tweaks to the presentation to take into account a couple of comments given, as we have another five events around the South East to go.

The questions at the end of the sessions were really interesting to hear, and hope you all got a chance to raise your own. If you didn’t or have thought of any since please do use this as a platform to ask or to keep us updated on how your efforts are going, and tricks or tips that you find along the way. You can also email me at my Business Link address or find me on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesccope

Technology permitting we will be podcasting the event so that you can recap on the presentation when you need too, my colleague Sarah will be putting the note round when this is up and running. I would expect this to be availble early July but don’t hold me to that. In the meantime you can download the presentation from http://www.internetconsultantsgroup.co.uk/internet_resources/seminars.html

One of our delegates, Nigel Woods, has also give me details of a Chartered Institute of Marketing event this Thursday on Web 2.0 and social marketing if anyone is interested. They will open up the event to any of you that wish to attend, details of which can be found on my events page.

We are currently developing the August/September seminar which will build on the basics of this seminar to look at website conversions and email marketing tp help develop your web presence a step further so what this space!

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SEO 2.0 + Google Analytics – June Seminars

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

Have been busy this week meeting the presenters to put final finishing touches to Business Link’s June seminar series. This time it’s an update on search engine optimisation with the presenters take on SEO 2.0, youve all heard about web 2.0 well this is the next step for search engine success.

Also falling under the spotlight is Google Analytics, by far one of the most widely used stats packages the presenters show some common KPI’s that website owners should be looking at and how to get clever with the package that will save you time and money, gain more customers and bring your website visitors behaviour to life.

If you are a small or medium sized business in the South East you can come along to the seminar free of charge, visit the site http://www.innovationevents.co.uk for more details and to book your place. See you there.

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Power of local search – tip of the week

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

A number of the small businesses I talk to work within a specific geographic location, but often over look the power of local searches.

My tips here are usually to make sure you include mentions of the area you operate in within the usual meta data of the site, and within the body copy.

Keep it local by including testimonals from any well know local clients, people will have more confidence in your services if they are supported by a good comment from a peer in the community, a business they have heard of, or perhaps someone they know.

Add your business to Google local, its free and easy and as more and more searches seem to be including local search results its a really good technique. More information on that at http://www.google.com/local/add/splashPage?hl=en-gb&gl=GB

Local business directories and council directories are good sources of traffic, consider tripadvisor.com if you are a B&B or a hotel, checkatrade if you are a service company. Also get links from any local businesses websites that you can build working relationships with whose customers may find your own services useful.

Those are a few to start with, feel free to chip in on any that are working well for you.

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