Online Web Marketing Northamptonshire

New Google Algorithm 2011

2011-03-03T04:25:00.000-08:00

This is an update of a new algorithm that Google will be implementing.
An algorithm are settings or parameters that the search engine uses to determine how to rank a website.

If you took the advise in my second post about relevant content, there should be no mad scramble !
Understanding How search engines work

The new algorithm is set to place more relevancy on sites with informative, relevant, in depth content.

This is the exact wording from Google's Official Blog :

Our goal is simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible. This requires constant tuning of our algorithms, as new content—both good and bad—comes online all the time.

Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.
We can’t make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down. Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.

So Please think about how your website is structured and how you provide the relevant content. The days of pretty pictures with a bit of text are long gone. Even more those "SEO nightmare" sites built in Flash are over !

Meta Tags - STEP 2

2011-02-10T04:50:00.000-08:00

Hopefully you have followed on from STEP 1 - Understanding how Search Engines Work

If you followed from this step, you should have added some Keyword rich text to your pages, now search engines will be able to relate certain Search Terms, Phrases, Keywords to your Site.

So on to STEP 2

Meta Tags

You may need your web developer to add these to your site, if you have a CMS (content managed site) you will be able to add them yourself. (Top Tip, if you are just about to have a website designed, always ask for a cms function.

Meta Tags.

These are split into three areas:

Title Tag

This is the blue bar (internet explorer) at the very top of your screen. It also is the actual header in blue that Google displays its search results.

Find a plumber for central heating and boiler repairs. Plumbers install new boilers with a 5-year warranty. All plumbing work; bathrooms and kitchens ...
www.heatingcentral.com/ - Cached - Similar

Plumber, Plumbers, Central Heating, Boiler, Boilers

There is a fine line between, Keyword stuffing and engaging your customer. In the above they have all their keywords displayed BUT in a list of 10 per page will this entice you ?

Google is also placing relevance to Brands at the moment, so if you were creating a brand then it would be advisable to add your Brand name at the beginning.

Descriptive Meta

This describes briefly what the page is about. As mentioned about search engines they may only hit your site for a split second, they see your meta tags before any other page content, so it is crucial to get this right.

Keyword Description

Here you place keywords related to a the particular page. Do Not use the same for every page. On a page for boilers only use keywords for boilers.

To Recap.

Each page on your website needs to have Individual Title Tag, Descriptive Text, Keyword Text.

NOTE: Each Page of your site should be individual.

There is a great deal of debate within the SEO industry weather Meta Tags play a role anymore with Google algorithms. I personally believe they do.

One - You can see how they affect the listing display of your website

Two - A Search engine reads these before any other text on the page.

Changing your Meta Tags will in most cases bounce you up a page or two, I am not saying Page 1 but you are now moving in the right direction.

Here is a graph for one of my clients. The Keyword is for Personnel Vetting and just by fixing the Meta Tags you can see the Page Jump.

Social Media Marketing

2011-02-09T07:33:00.000-08:00

I did not want to get into social media marketing so quickly, this is a tool to use once we have correctly optimised your website, but I have already had several email asking about Social media marketing, in particular facebook.

There seems to be this mass scramble to facebook at the minute. I have attached some info on FB and marketing.

Please remember that FB is a “personal” sharing site – for companies to make this work they need to interact with friends / fans, you cannot place a page up and expect people to come to you.

Large companies that use FB successfully, designate a brand ambassador for the company , call him “bob”. Bob will add 2 status updates daily (stats dictate that 3 and above is disliked, unless of course something really good). Then Bob will sit there and “interact on a social level” with other people, comment on their posts, engage in conversation, create quizzes, take part in other peoples quizzes etc.

FB is a long term strategy. You will also find that FB users / fans may never ever go to the companies actual website and should be looked at as two different avenues of awareness.

Take Nike

It has 3 million Fans, however, crucially if you look at the target reach if you advertised nike you would only reach 86 000 people this is because the word nike is only mentioned by 86 000 people on their page, messages and posts.

Nikes “Bob” interacts daily he, talks sport, discusses upcoming fights, new coaching appointments. It has taken Nike 4 yrs to build this up.

FB has to be SOCIAL not CORPORATE

Before we start reviewing various Facebook promotion techniques, I'd like to clear things up a little bit. Essentially when someone "Likes" your Facebook page, they will be notified every time you update its status, it's almost the same as following someone on Twitter. To have your message spread on Twitter you need to have your followers retweet your post so that their followers could see it and retweet in turn. On Facebook, the principle is a bit more sophisticated: when someone likes or comments your status update, this fact is being reflected in his profile. And when your status update gets a decent amount of "likes" and comments it is promoted to the Top News section of a user's News Feed, so that more people could see it.

Now let's refer to a famous "90:9:1 Social Behaviors Rule" to understand what it takes for your message to become visible.

Let's consider that "Heavy Contributors" are those ready to comment on your update, "Intermittent" ones will probably "like" it, and "Lurkers" will read it or just scroll through. Say your page has 100 fans. Knowing the fact that only 12%-20% of all your "Fans" will see your status update in their Live Feed, we can see that:

I hope this delivers a clear understanding that Facebook promotion takes an enormous amount of effort to become successful.

Promoting Your Facebook Page Internally.

1. Using your Brand Ambassador.

Add to friends any people that may be your potential customers or somehow relate to your business. Recently, Facebook has added Skype integration, which can suggest you some Facebook friends from the list of your Skype contacts. Once you have a decent amount of friends use the "Suggest to friends" and "Share" buttons to promote your Facebook page to them;
Use Facebook Search to discover relevant pages, groups, events, people and even messages. With Search you can easily track any mentions of your brand and provide feedback - people really love that;
Once you join pages, groups and events, you are able to participate in the conversation, which is a great way of direct promotion. Moreover you can see the list of the group members and easily add them to friends;
Communicate. Once someone comments on your new status, a photo, or anything else - answer back. Moreover you need to make people love your brand and become active contributors and then brand ambassadors. 1/4 of search results on each big brand is UGC (User Generated Content).

Power Tip: When composing a message put the @ symbol and start typing the name of your business page to mention it, just like you mention someone on Twitter. This can be used as a signature to your updates.

2. Keep the page fresh and interesting.

People join your page hoping to receive some interesting stuff from you, so do not disappoint them. Facebookers usually prefer pictures, videos and links to plain text updates. Here is a comprehensive list of things that you should keep in mind to avoid losing your fans: don't post too many updates; don't automate your content; don't be a duplicate of your website and don't be boring. Your page wall is your social proof and a signal for people to get involved.

Understanding how Search Engines Work - STEP 1

2011-02-09T06:14:00.000-08:00

The first thing you as a website owner needs to understand is how search engines work. Then you will be able to look at your website and see what changes you need to make (we call this optimising) in order to make your site more visable to search engines.

Search Engines ( Google, Yahoo, Bing etc etc)
A search engine is where you type or search for something (Not teaching you how to suck eggs) but the terminolagy will be useful in later posts.

Now what you search for, that word or phrase can now be called a Search Term or Keyword.

Right back to Search engines, these are basically computer programs, they cannot see pretty pictures, flash design, they read text...text...text !!!

Let me show you :

Go to google and type in a Search Term related to your site (if your site does not appear then type in your domain name so your site appears in the Search Results)

I took Plumbers

PIMLICO PLUMBERS - THE FIRST NAME IN PLUMBING - has been established for over 30 years and with over 133 engineers Pimlico Plumbers are the largest ...
www.pimlicoplumbers.com/ - Cached - Similar

Pimlico Plumbers - Plumbing - plumber london | central heating repair

Now click on the word Cached

The site that will now appear is the cached version of the website. Search Engines are constantly trawling the World Wide Web. A great misonception is that the web is insatantaneous, well the cached version is when a search engine, in this case Google last visited the site and took a snap shot, it uses infomation during this visit to be able to display the site when someone searches for a related search term within the site.

At the top of the page you will notice a box :

This is Google's cache of http://www.pimlicoplumbers.com/. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on 1 Feb 2011 05:28:56 GMT. The current page could have changed in the meantime. Learn more

Text-only version

These search terms are highlighted: plumber

This tells you the page that was Cached and indexed, the time and date. Interesting to note that this was last visited (for a split second) on the 1st of Feb and today is the 9th of Feb.

It shows you the search term Search for by you.

Now if you click on the Text-only version, it will show you the text on the site.

The text only version will show you what the search engine has been able to read. Now if you have a flash based website by now you have realised that there is no text on my site, OMG, the penny drops again !!

If you have no text, very little text and text without "Keyword / Search Term" content, then how do you expect a little computer program like a search engine to relate your website to a search term typed into it ?

So that is the First lesson : Keyword Rich Content is KING

Homework: Look at your front page text and see how you may be able to expand this to include relevant Search Terms / Keywords in the text.

Rember not to Spam your keywords and your text still needs to engage your customers !

Welcome to the Online Web Marketing Blog Northamptonshire

2011-02-09T05:37:00.000-08:00

Welcome To Online Web Marketing Northamptonshire.

Having worked as an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) specialist for the past 10yrs and Living in Northamptonshire (Northants), I believe it is time to give a little back to this wonderful county. So this is my charitable contribution.

Most of my Online Marketing clients both in the UK and Abroad have large marketing budgets and are involved in highly competitive markets, but what about the small business, the small website that is not being found by search engines, well here is your chance to learn, ask questions without that large Web Marketing Budget. I will attempt to explain how Search engines work and how you can optimise your website accordingly.

Please feel free to post comments and ask questions.

I believe the biggest hurdle is that you have found this blog and "the penny" has dropped that your website needs to be marketed before it can be found, so well done !

If you would like to read some Harcore SEO Articles, here is a link to my Professional Blog
http://www.standoutuk.com/author/tim-capper/