Search Engine Optimisation Advice

Over the last couple of months we have been working hard on getting our new irish seo company website up and running. With lots of patience and a keen eye for a bargain we managed obtain seocompany.ie as our new domain name for the Irish side of the business.

As a result we now have 2 blogs to maintain and look after so unfortunately the posts wont be as frequent but will still be packed full of top SEO tips for you all to use.

The Irish side of the company provides the same seo services and online advertising solutions, after all when it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

I have been lucky enough to work with a couple of companies who have enjoyed success in the world of TV.

The power of TV can never been under estimated and with the right mention can propel a company to the big time overnight. This was especially true of the company LookandTaste (formally known as iFoods) I did the search engine optimisation work on which then appeared on BBC 1’s Dragons Den several years ago. Literally overnight the website became inundated with thousands of hits, eventually bringing the server down for several days. From this platform the company has gone to great success.

I have heard through the grapevine of another lucky company www.hidbin.ie to make it into the Dragons Den, this time on RTE1. It is not yet know whether they struck gold in the den but either way they are likely to strike gold with the extra traffic !

Why do online advertising agencies offer pay per click management services? What value is there for the customer and why is it important to seek professional assistance with your google adwords campaign?

Things change
As with everything, things change with time. This is extremely relevant with pay per click campaigns that are setup once and not touched again. When you create a new campaign or ad group you are using keywords that are generating traffic (based on traffic tool estimators) and linking the adverts to pages on your website that are most relevant.

Keywords
Keywords are nearly almost certainly generated through a process of brainstorming and then research to see how much traffic these terms generate. The problem you encounter with an old campaign is that these keywords are not necessarily as important as they once were. Perhaps some of the keywords you originally selected were “buzz” words that at that moment in time were very popular and now they are a distant memory. Perhaps the range of products you have been promoting are now outdated and there is a newer model on the market. Perhaps you quoted prices or figures in your advert text that is no longer valid and out of date.

Website

The majority of websites are living, breathing things that are constantly changing. It is not uncommon to find that major website pages (homepage and main category pages) can have a major overhaul at least once a year. This means that where once your ppc campaign was originally setup with your adverts linking to those highly relevant landing pages on the website it now points to pages which may not be as relevant.

In many cases page layouts and text can been changed to effect the old calls to action that might have once been there. This is a bad place to be; users will lose think that your website does not have what they are looking for and your advertising costs will be higher as a result.

All of these things could be severely impacting the performance your ppc ads, costing you money and losing you business.

Just a quick post to outline that google appear to be having issues with their PPC advertising.

Client have been noticing an extra variable in their url when clicking on paid adverts. This extra variable takes starts with “gclid=” and looks something like “gclid=CIfd2tC1mqACFR88lAodpFKYdw”.

If you are using a .htaccess file to redirect your webpages you may find you will have issues with your redirects when pages are loaded from Google adverts.

Every website owner is concerned about how to get the most out of their website. Depending on the website you have a conversion can be many different things. It may be when somebody purchases a product or service directly from the website; it might be when a visitor fills in an online form or even when they interact with the website for a set amount of time. What constitutes a conversion is entirely up to you and your business model.

Look at the simple things. Believe it or not reviewing and changing some of the more simple things on your website can make a huge difference. Here are a few simple tips to help you on your way.

Phone Number

Is your company phone number visible without having to look around the page for it? Ideally your company number should be in larger font than your standard text and present on every single webpage. Placing the number in the page header is the ideal place.

Contact Form

Does your website have an actual contact form? There are a lot of websites that have just a mailto web link for users to contact the company. The problem with this is that you are reliant on the user having their own mail client installed and you cannot specify what information you want to collect. If you have a proper contact form on your contact us page you can specify what information you want to collect e.g. name, phone number, email address, website etc.

Another great tip is to introduce a mini contact form on each webpage. This means no matter where you are on the website you can send an enquiry.

Website Design

Does the design of the website give the visitor confidence that you are a reputable / professional business? If you have created your website yourself the website design might be very basic. Given that nearly all internet users searching for a product or service look at multiple websites before making a decision it is important that your website does not stand out for the wrong reasons.

There are many ways to generate links to your website, some better than others. It is important to say straight away that not just any links will not do when link building, you only want to attract and build links from reputable websites with some kind of tie to your own site, e.g. they offer the same types of products, services or information.

So now we know what types of websites we want to get links from, how do we get them?

1 – Just Ask

First things first just ask the owner or webmaster of the site that you would like to have a link from. You would be surprised by the number of website owners who are willing to give a link for free or in exchange for a reciprocal link back to their own site. If you don’t ask you will never get!

2 – Pay

Target a number of websites you feel are very valuable to your business and be willing to pay to have a link on them. The website might be a valuable one if it has a high page rank or is a site frequented by your key demographic. If you don’t have a budget available then try to offer your services as payment for the link.

3 – Blog

Blogging is a great way to introduce new links to your website. Webmasters are often looking for interesting and useful articles to use on their own websites or use as a reference for their own discussions. By creating good quality articles you will be linked to as a good information resource, over time 1 article can be responsible for dozens of incoming links.

4 – Current Customers

Don’t overlook your current customer base for generating links. You may have already performed a service for a customer who has a website that you could automatically get a link for free. You may also have provided a client with a testimonial that they are using on their own site that is not currently linking back to you.

5 – Social Internet

Get on to web forums and help provide information to people or solve their problems. Being an active forum member means that your replies can be viewed by hundreds of people. By adding a signature to your user profile with your web address on means that your link will be present on dozens on web pages as well as being viewed by a new audience.

Loud SEO are pleased to announce that Giftmaster have recently established themselves as one of the major 1^st page Google companies for Irish Gifts and Presents.

Giftmaster approached seo company Loud SEO looking to increase their online visibility to customers and to get ranked on the 1^st page of Google for their key products. Having been an online business since 2006 Giftmaster had already gained a great reputation for quality of products and speed of service but was not getting the traffic they knew they could get from the 1^st page of Google.

Working with Loud SEO, Giftmaster took a step back and re-analysed what their priorities were for keywords and what would drive profitable business to their online store. Through keyword research they selected a range of keywords that were highly profitable and very well targeted to their products on offer.

Next Loud SEO performed a range of website optimisation changes to the website code and content, making it fully optimised and focused. With these changes Giftmaster were able to increase their existing search engine rankings and obtain a solid 1^st page presence on Google.

Giftmaster plans for the future are to continue with the search engine optimisation campaign for a whole new range of keywords which will help them expand and grow their business.

Giftmaster have also embarked on email marketing campaigns using HTML emails. These were optimised by Loud SEO and tracked using specially designed links for tracking in Google Analytics. This has given Giftmaster a great feel for their ROI on certain product lines and campaigns.

Giftmaster have 2 more branches of their online business.

Yankee.ie and Casinoshop.ie are both very successful online stores, specialising in the sale of yankee candles and poker chips, poker tables and other poker accessories.

This week’s quick fire seo tips session covers how to link your website internally to make sure your high page rank pages let the page rank flow through to your deep pages through the use of sitemaps.

That’s right people; sitemaps is a plural which means more than one! You wouldn’t believe the number of new websites that are out there without both an XML and HTML sitemap. If you pick 10 websites at random you are almost guaranteed to find at least 50% of these sites have only one version of the sitemap (believe me I have done this).

Why are Sitemaps Important?

For those who need reminding or educating here is why sitemaps are important. When a new website is launched there will be a point in time when a search engine will visit your website for the very first time. Wherever the search engine spider lands is irrelevant, (homepage, contact page, it doesn’t matter) the spider will move on throughout your site via the html links that are available on that page.

Here is where the problem lies. If you look at your website files as a directory structure, your homepage and other main pages will be the top level folders which are all accessible via the main navigation of the website. Most websites will have a sub navigation of pages which are only accessible through links on a main page, e.g. subcategories list on a category page. There is also a scenario where there maybe another level of pages (sub sub) that are again only accessible from links found on its respective father page.

This means if a spider lands on one of the main category pages it can take a very long time for a spider to eventually work its way down to the lowest level of pages, by caching the page at hand, leaving, revisiting the cached page and moving onto one of the links found on the cached page.

In real terms this means that some pages are never found by search engine spiders and never cached to be available in the search engine results. This could be for many number reasons; the anchor text for the page is very vague and therefore is never followed, the page is buried so deep in a website etc.

This is why the sitemap is so important – it contains all links to your pages in one place for the search engine spiders to find.

HTML Sitemaps

Now you may ask “what happens if the spider never finds my sitemap?” well this is why it has become almost a web and web user standard for the sitemap to be present on the footer of every page. This means that every page your website visits it has the ability to follow your sitemap link. It can also be speculated that search engine spiders will purposefully follow any sitemap link they find as they know that they will find a rich index of the website.

XML Sitemaps

There is also a XML sitemap to talk about. XML sitemaps are made so that they can be submitted to search engines such as Google directly, thus cutting out the middle man, the search spider. This is a very useful tool and should always be checked frequently to make sure that it is up to date and no errors exist (a common problem as most XML sitemaps are auto generated).

To submit your sitemap to Google all you need to do is log into your webmaster tools account and go to the sitemap link, following the instructions on the screen.

As part of the quick fire seo tips series we are going to discuss the importance of images.

Images are one aspect of search engine optimisation that are often missed by web developers and are an integral part of the modern day search engine and search engine user. Here are the key bits of information you need to remember when designing or optimising your website.

Image Name

Search engine spiders are now capable of reading the name you give every single image on your site and by utilising keywords in the image name will not only keep the keyword focus on the page high (which aids search engine optimisation) but engines such as Google will also include these images in their Google images search results – a great way to generate more traffic to your site.

Alternate Text

The Alt text attribute is an important element required to give accessibility to users. Giving images a descriptive alternate text allows people aiming to optimise their website an additional way to introduce secondary keyword text. The goal is not to spam the page with additional, repetitive keywords but instead to give the reader and search engine spiders a way to describe the contents of the picture.

The other important element to the alternate text attribute (which most web developers forget about) is that for a web page to be W3C compliant all images require the alternate text attribute. Even though the alternate tag is required to be present it does not always need to be populated e.g. alt=“”.

For presentational images there is no added benefit from providing a descriptive alternate text, this is only really required for other images. In practical terms this means a background image does not need the alternate tag of “blue shaded background image” where as an image of an Audi A3 would best be suited with an alternate tag of “black Audi A3 turbo diesel”.

In order to make sure your search engine aspirations are not just a flash in the pan, you need to make sure that you put a proper search engine optimisation plan in place.

As already discussed in previous articles the first step for any seo work is keyword research, this is an integral part which will help you map out what goals you will set and how much work will be required to get to your goal.

Generally the next stage requires website seo, onsite work that will improve how search engine friendly the code and content is. In every single website I have ever reviewed, not matter how new or old there has always been work required at this stage. It is very important to go through your website code and content with a fine tooth comb to make sure that all the work you do to get search engine spiders and visitors alike to the site is not in vain.

Once you are happy that the website has the correct format, structure and content the real work begins… building your website’s online profile. This stage of the work is where the long term element comes in. Depending on the keywords you have chosen to optimise for, you will need to generate new inbound links to your website steadily over a long period of time to gain the trust of the search engines and improve those search engine rankings.

The main method of generating new links to your site is through article creation and syndication. This is where most people have difficulty, each article needs to be planned around the keywords and themes you are aiming to rank well for and ideally consist of 300 words plus. Once you have your article written you can choose to publish it first on your own website before syndicating it around the internet on other sites. I personally prefer this method where possible as the page, if written well enough, will begin to rank in its own right and bring in its own traffic.

The time needed to plan, write and syndicate articles on a regular basis each month is quite high, some businesses do not have the time or internal resources to dedicate to link building which is why they look to outsource to companies who provide article creation and link building services. Loud SEO provide such services to a number of clients, some who utilise both elements of the service and some who write their own articles and outsource just the link building process.