I thought I would go with something that may seem quite controversial to a number of you, with this being the first entry for my new site . I am tal...
I thought I would go with something that may seem quite controversial to a number of you, with this being the first entry for my new site . I am talking with business owners who are very frustrated with Pay per click advertising every day. Concerned at the cost, unsure of the result it delivers and having no idea as to what to do next with their online presence.
The answer in my opinion is simple but let me cover a few points first:
The results from our Pay per Click marketing has been declining for some time however the cost to run our campaigns has almost doubled. So over the course of the last few weeks I have been doing a great deal of research into Pay per Click advertising and whether we should continue using it in a number of our businesses. What is the best method to deliver us the best return for our investment.
While researching Pay per Click we have been actively focusing on SEO, using our own online marketing techniques to drive and improve the positioning of our own websites. The results have been quite exciting in that we have see our sites improve their front page positions by over 3 spots. Now this may not seem much but when you review the impact this has on website activity and click throughs you will be surprised.
It is well known that a First position in the main search engines for your most searched keyword or keyword phrases will generally capture around 50% of the people searching.
* Position 1, approx 50% * Position 2, is less somewhere between 12% and 19%, * Position 3, between 11% and 18%, * Position 4, between 7% and 15% * Position 5-9, between 2% and 4% * Position 10, approx 3%
So let’s compare that with the clicks or traffic that Pay per Click advertisements attract:
* Sponsored ads at the top of the search page attract between 2% and 4% of Clicks * Sponsored ads on the right hand side of the search page attract between 1% and 2% of Clicks
The numbers tell an interesting story. A number one ranked website will attract over 25 times the amount of traffic or viewings or clicks that a Pay per Click advertisement will. So if you are spending $1000 a month on PPC and that generates 100 click throughs to your site, a website that ranks number 1 will get over 2500 viewings. It is pretty clear where you should be investing your money – Organic Search Engine Optimisation!
No some of you may disagree with me and that is fine. However if you are a business owner who is spending large amounts of money on Pay per Click advertising, and some of you are then it may be a good time to re-evaluate. Look at investing some of your funds into Optimising your website more effectively.
Organic Search Engine Optimisation outperforms Pay per Click advertising by 2500%. Want better results, take advantage of Heatley Gilmore’s . Just enter your details to see how you can be improving your instantly.
Alistair Darling last week presented his economic budget to the country, making headlines and stirring up a big media fuss. With such an event you might expect a quick Google search of terms like ‘budget live’ or ‘Budget 2010′ would find the official Prime Minister’s website www.number10.gov.uk but it doesn’t appear at the top, in fact it doesn’t even appear in the top 50 for either of these phrases, outranked by news articles and critical blogs. For something so important with such big public interest this should be a priority, to avoid critics appearing higher up in the rankings and generating political influence against the government.
From a Search Engine Optimisation perspective you can take a further look at the website to understand what the problem might be; to avoid ever doing it yourself or to see what a useless web agency is really capable of.
The Downing St website, under further inspection appears to have incredibly poor SEO, they make simple mistakes like having no ‘title tag’ or articles that are poorly optimised with no keywords or descriptive text. The website is stuffed with seemingly random keywords such as ‘tattoos’, ‘piercings’ and ‘polish armed forces’. Upon further inspection of the general SEO of Number 10 it appears the brand gets lost in translation, the official YouTube channel is located at www.youtube.com/downingst rather than number 10 and both refer toe their media content as ‘number10tv’ even though a Google search for that term definitely doesn’t find what you’re looking for.
On a further note, Gordon Brown’s tweets come from @downingstreet rather than @number10 or @primeminister. All of these mistakes are fundamental basics when creating a digital presence for a brand and you might have thought the British Government could have done a little better than this.
Many companies will also buy up relevant URLs to redirect to their website or prevent their competition buying from them; incidentally both www.number10tv.com and www.number10tv.co.uk are both up for grabs. Depending on whether Gordon Brown has an in house SEO or an agency, he needs to get rid of them.
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Search engine optimisation techniques can usually be placed in one of two broad categories. Search engines will scrutinise the activities of webmasters and how they improve a website’s position in search term rankings and to ensure they keep their practices ethical.
‘White hat’ practices are more ethical and due to their compliance with the guidelines of the search engines, tend to have longer lasting effects on their search results. ‘Black hat’ activities are usually picked up by the search engines which often cause websites to get banned from their results and people who use these techniques expect to have only short term results.
‘White hat’ SEO techniques have no intent of deceiving the search engine and are used to ensure that the content the engine indexes and ranks is the same content the user will view. The common attitude of white hat practices is to produce content for users, not engines rather than exploiting the algorithms and tricking the spiders.
‘Black hat’ SEO techniques involve the cheating of the search engine. It includes techniques such as using hidden text filled with keywords that is located off screen or in the same colour as the background and cannot be seen by humans. Some black hat SEO’s will ensure a different web page is seen depending on whether it is being requested by a human or a search engine, giving the search engines exactly what they are looking for, this is known as ‘cloaking’.
Sites found using black hat techniques will be penalized by search engines by either reducing their ranking or removing them from the results completely. Automated algorithms will usually do this but it can also be completed manually. A big example of this would be in 2006 when BMW Germany was removed from Google results for using unethical techniques; they quickly apologised, fixed the pages and were eventually restored to Google’s listing.
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Make your prospects purchase your products online is not easy, but have you ever thought that you’re making the process twice as difficult for both parties if your prospects are convinced but don’t know how to buy from you? No matter how good you are at convincing your prospects, they won’t buy if they find the process cumbersome.
First, you will want to check that people can find your order form easily and hassle-free. You can write a clear, concise paragraph to direct your prospects to your order form so that you can minimize the chances of them getting lost. You can also reduce the chances of losing prospects by putting a prominent link to your order page from every other page on your site.
Also, do you offer multiple payment options? Some people may feel comfortable paying via Paypal, some may only want to pay with their credit card and others might want to send a cheque. The more options you offer, the better your chances of covering your prospects’ desired payment method. After all, it wouldn’t make any sense to sell hard to a prospect only to find that they won’t be able to pay you when they want to.
On the other hand, you will want to prove that you are a credible merchant. Is your order form secured using encryption technology? You would want to look into SSL for this. You can also offer a money back guarantee so that people will feel confident about buying from you. How about after sales support? Who do they contact when they have problems after purchasing?
Alternatively, you can add customer testimonials, your contact information, address, and so on to boost your prospects’ confidence. Make them feel safe about buying something from you, a total stranger to them on the other end of the Internet.
As a conclusion, it would be very pitiful if you sold hard and sold well to a prospect and something goes wrong when he or she is ready to pay. Eliminate any chances of that to maximize your profits!
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Normally, if you want to have professional designers custom build your site, you must be prepared to dish out at least a few hundred dollars. All this can change if you know where to find the best deals, the best designs for the lowest price. Here’s a rough guide:
First, you must understand that it is a rip off to get companies to design websites for you. Have you ever seen those advertisements in newspaper classified ad sections that offer a 5-page website at $500? These companies are established companies with physical locations, therefore they have to increase the amount they charge to pay off some overheads: office rent, designer’s wages, advertising costs and so on.
Therefore, it would be wise to find freelance designers who work from home. These people are often working from home so they do not have a high operation cost like that of a company. On the other hand, they will be able to design images with quality similar to those of designers from big companies, so it’s a “no-brainer” choice.
However, choose freelancers with care. The best way to do this would be to go to elance.com. There, you can post the abstract of your project and get thousands of freelancers to bid on your project, so you will surely get the best deal. On top of that, you will be able to choose the designers based on their experience, past transactions and ratings, so your value for money is secured.
Another route you can take is to design your website yourself. Think about it, if you only need 5 simple pages to present some simple information, why waste hundreds of dollars for it? Just spend a little time to sit down and do it yourself. You’ll be able to design your own sites even if you do not know a single line of HTML code with the help of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) programs such as Microsoft Frontpage, Macromedia Dreamweaver and so on.
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A lot of successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The credibility issue just melts away. Hence, keep your visitors coming back to your site with the following methods:
1) Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox
When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers — all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.
2) Start a web log (blog)
Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website.
3) Carry out polls or surveys
Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.
4) Hold puzzles, quizzes and games
Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.
5) Update frequently with fresh content
Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!
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When designing your website and the attention should be paid to make sure the website perform correctly . Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.
1) Do not use splash pages
Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.
2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements
Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.
3) Have a simple and clear navigation
You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.
4) Have a clear indication of where the user is
When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!
5) Avoid using audio on your site
If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.
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Wordpress out of the box permits fundamental management of the main SEO meta information. To expand the functionality we add our own super-charged version of the All-In-One-SEO Pack. The SEO pack makes it easy to modify the page title and page meta description.
The All-In-One-SEO Pack is a great WordPress plugin that completes the SEO aspects for WordPress. For some unknown reason WordPress still has not got the SEO fixed out of the box.
The All-In-One-SEO Pack provides for you to change the most significant page elements – page title and page description. It also allows you to modify the page keywords, but as we all know, search engines no longer take note of these because they have been spammed too much in the past. Google stopped using the keywords for page ranking in the early 2000’s.
Page Titles
This is the No1 SEO element to manipulate. Always make sure that you control the page title. The page title appears in the browser window at the very top of the screen. Search engines use this in the listings and show it in their search results.
Ideally the page title comprises only of appropriate keywords and nothing else. To make the text more human readable then we often add a pipe character (
The page title is the MOST significant SEO page element because it is like the title of a book. And just like a book title, if it is good it will be more attractive to readers.
If your page needs to extend to cover 2 or three keywords we have found that you can still get effective rankings from adding multiple keywords to the title. But do remember that the closer the page title is to the keyword you want to rank for the better.
If you are a larger branded company you will probably want to add your company or brand name into the page title considering this is exposed on Google. Keep it short and simple though. Do not add your brand statement just your brand or company name.
Page Descriptions
This element is NOT used by search engines for ranking purposes. However, most search engines will use this in their search results so it is important. Google does not use the description all the time but we find that it uses it about 80-90% of the time. At other times Google will use the first piece of text that it can find on the page. On Flash pages this can be an issue seeing there is no content. This is one reason why you should constantly add at least one sentence of HTML text on a Flash based page so Google and other search engines have something meaningful to display in the search results.
By having a good description it will increase your click through rates because the text will be more engaging to people. Ensure that you use a maximum of 156 characters. If you use any more characters Google will cut short the rest. If you can keep your descriptions to–0 characters or less this is even better seeing Google sometimes adds a date to the beginning of the description which is part of the 156 characters it displays.
SEO Meta data shown on Google listing
Changing the meta data and page title
At the bottom of every page and post you will find the meta tags plugin details. Update the details appropriately. Note: If you can only use see the title for the plugin and no details, just click the title and the section will expand.
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1. The chances of your website getting targetted traffic is increased if you place your chosen keyword into the title of your website. This is because it makes it easy for search engine roberts to find out what your website is about. You can find the title tag at the top of your website between the head tags.
Treat the title like a headline. Try to draw attention to your site with a good headline because this is what people will see in the search results.
2. Try to link pages within your website together with your chosen keyword as the anchor text. The more links you have the better.
3. Ensure the text with the title tag is used in the body of your website. Search engines do not like it when your title doesn’t appear to be related to the body.
Also when writing the body of your website, use your keywords once or twice. You can bold them to make them stand out or highlight them. Use them in some of the subheadings too.
4. Make sure you change the title tags on each of your websites. If search engines scan your website and see that it’s got the same title it may think all the pages are the same and therefore may not index the site.
5. Many website novices place too much attention on the metatags – these simply are not as important today as they once were. Only use two or three targeted keywords here… too many will dilute your website and can actually harm your ranking.
6. Never link to a link farm website. Search engines know what these are and will lower your ranking for it.
7. Do not use doorway pages. Doorway pages are designed for robots only, not humans. Search engines like to index human friendly pages which contain content which is relevant to the search.
8. I alway ensure I have a contacts page and terms of use page on my website. Not only does this look more professional to users but search engines also like this!
9. For every image on your website make sure that it is described usnig the alt tag. This not only helps website users out but more importantly allows search engines to index your page.
10. Submit your website manually to search engines. If you use a submission service or software your website might get banned.
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SEO Meta data shown on Google listing