Search engine optimization also referred to as SEO is an ongoing process to increase the qualified leads or sales to your website from search engines. The primary goal of a search engine is to connect the searcher with the most relevant page for what they are searching for. SEO is a process to persuade the search engines that your website is the most relevant for a given search and therefore your website should be shown first.

People are using search engines to search for products or services that your business sells every day. If you search for these yourself using a search engine you will see your competitors appearing in the search results. Successful search engine optimisation identifies all the various searches that your customers are doing and ensures your website is available for selection for all the searches relevant to your products and services.

Do Your Marketing Homework

Before starting any SEO campaign you should have a clear understanding of your own marketing strategy. That is, what your products and services are and what problems you solve for your customers. While this is may seem unrelated to SEO it is fundamental to the success of your SEO campaign. Your potential customers are searching for problems and solutions that you can solve. By understanding what the problems and solutions are and providing clear communication and steps to solve them you are providing the search engines with exactly what they want – search results that are relevant to the searcher.

Keyword Research, the Foundation of Search Marketing

I cannot emphasise how critical this stage is. Doing keyword research correctly will mean that you focus all your resources in the right place. Google provide a very powerful tool which you can use to identify what searches people are doing and how often. There are other tools which show how competitive each search is. All of this infomation should be put in a spreadsheet and analysed to provide a strategy of which keywords to focus on and which to target first.

On Page SEO, Improvements You Can Make to Your Website

On Page SEO refers to type of changes that you can do to your own web site to improve its rankings. Only a few years ago these techniques were the primary form of SEO but times have changed and this is no longer the case. Now it is worth considering on page SEO as a “best practice checklist” that you should use for any website that you are involved in. Doing it correctly forms a solid foundation.

Search engine cannot read website like a human, they require software programs to download and analyse the content and make assumptions about

• What the page is about and
• What pages are most important on the site.

On page SEO includes things like using html tags like; title, h1, h2 and avoiding use of flash. It also includes the navigation, performance and usability of your website. Stay tuned for future posts for an on page SEO checklist.

Off Page SEO, Winning the Popularity Content

Off page SEO is now widely accepted as the main factor search engines use to determine which sites are most relevant. The most important aspects of off page SEO to worry about are :

• Incoming links to your site
• The relevancy (to your site’s theme) of the pages linking to your site and the PageRank of these pages
• The keywords that other sites use to link to your site
• The keywords on your website in particular in places like page titles and headlines

A search engine’s algorithms are designed as kind of popularity contest where the most popular websites are considered to be the most relevant so they have the best chance of ranking well. A few links from hugely popular websites will have significantly more benefit to your website than hundreds from small websites. This is a huge topic so stay tuned for future posts about tips and techniques for off page SEO.

For any business SEO is the best medium to long term internet marketing strategy. SEO is a process which when applied correctly can provide significant future rewards. An understanding on page SEO provides your website with a solid foundation which can then be capitalised on with on going off page SEO efforts.

The use of the internet as a medium for business expansion has allowed organizations to take a look at the possibility of exploring new and innovative ways to improve their marketing efforts. Email marketing has allowed many business organizations to reach out to new and existing consumers at a global level. There has been a steady rise in online email marketing services in the last five years and it remains the most used marketing tool of the internet.

Email marketing services mainly use web-based software that minimises the time required and reduces the costs involved in reaching out to a huge number of people through the simple click of a button. Through the use of email marketing campaigns, it is possible for the business organization to cut down on its cost of communication with existing and new consumers and increase the effectiveness of that communication. Email marketing is particularly valuable in creating and building close relationships with your target market and existing customers and keeps your brand top of mind. Customers who know and trust you respond well when contacted with particular offers or advice. Email Marketing generates a high return on investment and it is recommended that it should form an important part of the overall marketing mix for a business.

Getting Started

Do not send newsletters from your email program, as they are not designed for this purpose. Ensure you utilise a dedicated email marketing program. It will ensure that: you use tested email templates so that your emails look professional when opened in all browsers (Outlook, Hotmail, Gmail, Mail for Mac); your pictures open and won’t be replaced by a big red X; you can personalise your communication (e.g. Dear John); you are spam compliant; you will have access to crucial reports (opening rate, clicks, bounces etc.); and finally, you can manage and sort your database and your newsletters

How to Create Successful Email Campaigns?

This is a broad subject which will be covered in more detail in future emails. However a fundamental is that your email campaign must form part of an overall marketing strategy. Your marketing strategy should detail; who is your target market?  What does your ideal customer look like? What do they want to know / what problem can you solve? And when is the ideal time to communicate? Ensuring you have a well thought out marketing strategy is critical to the success of your email campaigns.

List Creation

The basis of creating a list is that everyone must have given their permission to be contacted by you. If you already have clients or contacts in Outlook, Myob of similar, then these are a good place to start. Good practice says you should have been in contact with them or done business with them, within the past 2 years.  You can also create a hard copy sign up form and invite customers to fill this in when they come into your business (suggest you provide an incentive such as going into a draw to win xyz) and you can add a “subscribe” button to your website and a link in the footer of your emails.

Segementation

A term used in email marketing is blasting which implies you send a message to everyone. However this will give you the lowest success rate. Being able to deliver the right message at the right time significantly increases the chances that the reader will find the message relevant, will want to read it and take action. This can be achieved by segmentation. Segmentation allows you to carve up your list based on a variety of criteria that you can specify. A simple example is if you sell blue and red widgets. On the sign up form you can have a option to receive information about blue, red or both. You can create a campaign specifically about red widgets and deliver it just to that audience.

Deliverability

In email marketing deliverability describes all the potential problems that could stop your email from reaching the recipient. Common problems include bouncing. A message that bounces is basically a “return to sender” and there are a variety of reasons for this. A hard bounce usually indicates the email address is not valid – perhaps that person no longer works in the organisation, a soft bounce is often when a mailbox is full. All email software will try a few times until if reports a hard of soft bounce.

Branding

When someone agrees to be a subscriber they are allowing you to send regular messages to them. This is a perfect opportunity to reinforce your brand to them with each message. Through the use of pictures, colours and the style of writing you can introduce and reinforce the key messages of your brand. And in addition to your own branding, consider the overal impact of your newsletters. Put yourself into the shoes of your subscriber and think about what enewsletters you like to receive. Are they long or short; pictures or no pictures – this will help you design your enewsletter so that it suits your target market and will be opened and actioned.

Analytics & Reporting

Email marketing and website analytics software is incredibly powerful and a cost effecitve was to improve your return on investment. When used properly you can track how effectively your campaigns are and make deliberate changes which result in improvements. With each campaign you send you should be tracking a few key statistics -Views, open rates, bounces and clicks.  Imagine you are sending a message to 1000 people, 100 open the message, 10 navigate to the website and 1 purchases something. Each of these steps in the process can be measured and improved. So lets say you change your email in some way (perhaps you add pictures) and double the number of people come to your website. That means 1000 messages sent, 100 open the message, 20 navigate to the website and 2 purchase something. That’s a 100% improvement. Using analytics and reporting you can understand what is working and what isn’t and maximise your return on investment.

Spam

In Australia – Under the Spam Act 2003 it is illegal to send, or cause to be sent, unsolicited commercial electronic messages. Spam is a generic term used to describe electronic ‘junk mail’ – unwanted messages sent to a person’s email account or mobile phone. Reputable web-based email marketing software includes various features and checks to ensure you stay spam-compliant.

Businesses must meet the following three key requirements of the Spam Act: Consent – make sure you have consent to contact the recipient and can prove you have obtained it. Identify - include accurate information to identify yourself or your organisation as the authorised sender of the message. Unsubscribe – make sure your messages have a functional unsubscribe facility, so that recipients can unsubscribe at any time.

Search engines work on a pre-defined set of rules or algorithms. Most search engines have absolutely no manual human controls since they are required to analyze and organise such a massive amount of information which is constantly changing. Search engines tend to be as intelligent as the computer programs that have been developed by humans to do the job.

Search engines are basically a computer program that works by :

1. Downloading website pages from the the internet with a crawler
2. Index the content on that page and store it in a massive database
3. Calculate the relevancy of webpages against associated keywords

A crawler is a computer program whose role is to scour the internet and download pages of websites. The crawling program starts at known popular websites and follows links from one page to another.  Therefore, to get your website indexed in the search engines it has to have links from other websites, otherwise the crawler cannot find it.

After download the page it adds the page to the index. The index works like a database that is used for storing and future retrieval actions. The entire text of a web page is stored, it then also looks at the words and combinations of words(known as keywords) used on the page and associates the page to those keywords. Keywords are what people use in search engines to find content. For example if I wanted to buy blue widgets I would probably type into the search engine “buy blue widget”. It goes without saying then that if you want to rank well with a specific keyword then it definitely needs to used on the page.

Ok, so at this stage your web page is in the database and has been associated to a variety of keywords. Now the search engine needs to work out which one to show first, second, third etc. The goal of a search engine is to provide the searcher with a page that exactly meets the need of the search. If they can do that effectively every time you will return to their search engine. If they don’t you get frustrated and go somewhere else to solve your problem.

The search engine does this by calculating weight or revelancy to each web page. This is done by a very complicated algorithm that takes into account many aspects.

Since most of the content on the internet is changing every minute, the task of indexing and crawling is a continuous process. The spiders, indexing and relevancy programs are used to make sure that the search engine returns the most relevant results for any given search. Algorithms used for calculating relevancy differ from one search engine to another so success in one search engine doesn’t guarantee success in others.

Keywords play a vital role in SEO techniques since the website can be optimized in the best possible manner through the use of keywords that have been selected. Therefore, selection of the right kind of keyword is important for the success of your search engine optimization efforts. If you want to make sure that your webpage ranks higher then it is important to make sure that it is keyword-rich.

The positioning of the keywords on the webpage can improve relevancy to the search word. It is important to understand that search engines are not capable enough to read. They simply detect patterns of words and letter to execute matching work as best as they can possible do.

This includes newsletters or ezines as deemed appropriate to a list of subscribers who are interested in the business. The email-marketing tool offers a powerful method to enhance marketing activities without having to spend money or time as required otherwise. However, the structure of the email is the most important thing when you go forward with your email marketing activity.

Make sure to include a great subject line. Introduce a solid hook that is basically the central message for the mail. This portion should be clear and concise with respect to what the mail has to offer. Make use of the remaining portion of the mail to make sure that the entire mail conveys proper information to your subscribers. Use hyperlink to make sure that readers of the mail can actually visit your business website in the best possible manner.

While drafting the contents of your mail make sure to include short messages along with well-constructed paragraphs. The focus should be on the subject of your email. There is no use to include more than one offer while letting your subscribers know about your business. Offer things based on the request of your customers or the things that are in demand.

Make the page readable enough. Do not try to be too long or too short. Many email readers will block images so don’t rely on them to convey the message. Also many email readers will only show a preview so don’t waste too much of the top real estate. The use of bullets, colors, or white spaces will improve the overall quality of the mail. Make sure that your email marketing activity reaches the target audience without having any issues with the intermediaries. This mail is very personal and should not be routed via any other agency.

The subscriber should be given a choice to buy or seek more information as and when required. Through email marketing it will become pretty simple to find out the actual number of buyers who are interested in your product or services. Email marketing plays a crucial role by making sure that you can receive feedback and stay in touch with your customers.

The first step of email marketing is to find out who your target audience are, through the process of creation of an initial list. Then the next step is to determine how often you are interested in sending out your emails. Once or twice in a month is normal but make sure that you do not overdo the activity. Make sure to identify your major promotional goals and send out a few test mails before you go ahead with your full list.

Analyzing your mailing results will allow you to go for better email marketing campaigns in the future. Long and boring emails will never have the effect that short and crisp content will have mainly because it diverts the attention of your readers. If you need to highlight several points then it is recommended to present them one by one and highlight them with bullets instead of putting them all in a single paragraph.

The services that seo firms offer will vary depending on your budget and the type of business you in and what stage of growth your website is at. It also depends on whether you would prefer a long term relationship or a quick boost in traffic.

SEO Foundations for a Brand New Website or An Existing Website with Poor Traffic

In the eyes of a search engine a new website or a site with poor traffic has no reputation and so ranks poorly or not at all. To the average searcher therefore your site doesn’t exist. It is important as this stage to lay a solid foundation and build on it each month. Creating authority is primarily done by creating quality content and getting links from reputable websites to link to your content. Some of the activities that need to be done are :

• Optimise Your Site for Local Search
• Create a Facebook Page, Twitter Account and a Blog
• Keyword Analysis and Identify Searches Done by your Audience
• Create Content Relevant to Your Audience
• Get Links from Quality Websites to Your Content
• Setup Traffic Analysis and Reporting

It is important that you create quality content on your website. If you feel like you are giving too much away or should charge for the content then you are probably on the right track. People will want to link to your website if you provide something of value for them and by doing this you are showing the search engines that you are an authority site. The links need to be from sites with significant authority and also include relevant keywords in the link for them to be worthwhile.

Building links to a new website should be done slowly and consistently as sudden spikes will raise suspicion.

Your search engine marketing firm will be able to provide a quote for some or all of these service and by doing so will improve your rankings in the medium to long term. It is possible for you to pay an seo company a one off fee to set these up for you but for best results you should consider engaging them on a monthly fee so they can build the authority in your website over time for a broad range of keywords.

Boost In Traffic

If you can’t afford to commit to a monthly service or would prefer to “try before you buy” you can seo providers can give your site a boost in traffic. For a one time fee the seo provider targets some of your main keywords and does some intensive Internet marketing campaign to improve your rankings for just these searches. See our other blog post for how to choose an seo expert but in summary they are :

• Request a Keyword Report
• Agree on What Keywords To Optimise For
• Demand a Page One Ranking
• Guaranteed Or Your Money Back

When approached in this way it is very low risk for your business. You are guaranteed to get traffic for you most profitable keywords or you will get a refund.

Choosing the right seo services for your website can help grow your traffic quickly and reliably, transforming your business.

So what exactly is local search and how can you use it with in your seo marketing strategy.

Previously Google would provide the most relevant search results from their entire database. For example if you are living in Brisbane and did a search for a “plumber”. The business’ that came back in the search result could just as likely have been from America.

Google realised that this doesn’t provide you with the most relevant result. More often than not, when you are doing a search you are most interested in results that are from business’ close to you. It makes sense, if you are searching for business’ and services then you aren’t going to choose business’ that are in a different timezone!

Now they take into account the location that you are in and the location that each search result is in and adjust the Google rankings accordingly.

If you want to optimise your site for local search and work some seo magic then I suggest that you spend some time looking at this resource on Local Search Ranking Factors. The top 5 recommendations from this are :

1. Create or Claim Your Local Business Listing
   You should create or claim your local business listing. Google may have already created a listing for you that you would then need to claim. Through this process you provide more information to Google about your business and it’s location that it can use when providing search results.
2. Local Business Listing Address in City of Search
   When creating your listing you provide the location of your business. If the person searching is in the same location as your business then this will increase your chances of getting a good listing.
3. Associate Your Business Listing with the Proper Categories
   It’s important that you choose the correct categories when updating your local business listing.
4. Use the Product / Service Keyword in the Local Business Listing Title
   If it makes sense by all means use your product or service keyword in your local business listing title. Try to keep it so that it makes sense though.
5. Use the Product / Service Keyword in the Local Business Listing Description
   A well crafted, descriptive, keyword rich description is imperative for a local listing to succeed. It’s important to perform thorough keyword research to determine the highest relevant volume of local search terms in your geographic area to determine the keyword combinations for products, services, and location.

Local Search with these changes in 2009 has become a critical element to a small to medium business’ seo strategy in Australia and world wide. By understanding and using these techniques to your advantage you can help get your business ranked in the top 10 for your most profitable keywords.

Although there are many services that are often combined in seo packages you may want to just start with the 5 most important ones to begin with. Here is a list to help you get started.

Market Analysis and Keyword Research

It doesn’t matter how new you are to promoting your business via the internet, the first word that you will hear repeatedly is keyword, so obviously you know it is important, but perhaps not how much. Keywords are what the search engine optimisation will be based on. So needless to say you want to find the most important keywords applicable to your business. This is what a seo consultant will focus on when he is attempting to build your search engine rankings. In addition to this though the consultant must do a market analysis to determine what keywords are used the most for your particular website.

Site Navigation

You may feel that you have the best looking site on the web and you may very well have, but if the site is not laid out properly then it really is not going to help bring people to your site or keep them on your site. An seo consultant will make sure that the site is laid out so it can be navigated through easily, and that everything flows. Good navigation helps users and search engine robots.

Building Links

It is the primary responsibility of the seo consultant to put everything in place to get your site recognized by the major search engines in order to draw traffic to you site. Links are another aspect that the Search engines will look at. The more links you have to your website from reputable source show how popular you are. So the more links you have of good quality the better you rankings will be in the search results.

Fix Crawl Errors

There are many things that can take place behind the scenes of a website that can throw the search engines off when then are crawling your page for information about you. An SEO consultant will be able to identify this and eliminate them for you.

Site Maintenance

Once everything is in place that is not the end of the SEO consultant’s work, he has to ensure that everything he has put in place stays up to date. The internet is constantly changing and so is the mandates of search engines themselves. A SEO consultant will keep himself aware of this and adjust your website accordingly.

As you can see there are many responsibilities that a SEO company undertakes when they are performing their services. Ideally finding the best SEO package that will meet your specific needs are what you are searching for.

Search engine optimisation has been around since the search engines started and has been evolving ever since. Most business who provide web design, web hosting or other internet marketing services often add it to their list of services. Customers know that they should be optimising their websites for search engines so they request the service.

However, there is a big difference between making your website more search engine friendly and dominating the search engines. Business’ who have added this service rarely have the skills or knowledge to be able to get you ranking well where it counts, for your most relevant and high volume searches. Unfortunately weeks or months after paying them  you don’t see any significant boost to your traffic. Your business will not benefit from their work and you are left doubting the potential of the internet to bring you new business.

Request a Keyword Report

The first critical element to search engine optimisation is the keywords that your website is optimised for. For example if you sell widgets you might want to rank for “widgets”. General terms such as “widgets” are often searched for a huge number of times but the intention of the person searching isn’t clear. They may be interested for widget repairs or second hand widget’s so these keywords generate a lower return on investment. Customers who are intending on purchasing are searching for “buy widget” or “buy red widget”. These searches indicate that the person is in the buying phase so getting traffic from these keywords will generate a much high return on investment.

Agree on What Keywords To Optimise For

When you engage an seo company you must agree beforehand on what terms they should be optimising for. Part of their service should provide a keyword analysis report that shows the relevant keywords searched and how often they are searched for. This should be based on the number of searches, the relevance to your business. They should also be able to say how strong the competition is for each of these keywords.

Before making an agreement with a consultant agree on which keywords they should optimise for. By getting your seo consultant to focus their efforts on relevant keywords with a high volume of searches where the intention of the searcher is clear your business can only benefit if they can get you ranking well.

Demand a Page 1 Ranking

Appearing on Page 1 of the search engine results is the second critical element for search engine optimisation. 90% of all clicks are distributed amongst the results on the first page(with most going to the top three). So if your site doesn’t appear on page 1 for your most important keywords(identified in the report) then you aren’t going to see any significant traffic from the search engines.

If you choose the right keywords and you are ranking well in the results you are going to see some good results.

Guaranteed or Your Money Back

So how can you be sure that you actually have an consultant that can deliver on these results. Seo experts that are confident in their abilities will happily offer some sort of guarantee placement for your top keywords or you get your money back, significantly reducing your risk. Any consultant who says that this is not possible or makes excuses for why they cannot offer this isn’t confident in their abilities and should be avoided at all costs.

Search engine optimisation is a fundamental long term strategy for growing your website and business. Choose the right provider and realise your full online potential.