Pearl Blog: Search Engine Optimisation, Web Design and SEO tips, and more http://www.nacremedia.com/blog/ Nacremedia Ltd en http://www.nacremedia.com/blog/social-and-viral-marketing/making-the-most-of-facebook With every business should come a Facebook fan page. With over 500 million active users on Facebook, if you're not already on the social scene then it's about time you were! There are thousands of success stories about how Facebook has helped businesses to grow and as Google continues to give more importance to social media and 'word-of-mouth' - this avenue of SEO becomes evermore vital! So once you have a Facebook fan page, how do you make the most of it? Get what you give It's very easy to set up a Facebook page, but for it to be successful you need to dedicate some time to it! Facebook pages are for life, so keep them well fed with company news updates, new products / services or exclusive offers to keep people coming back to your page. Offer an incentive! For the most part, potential customers aren't going to be concerned about the new office plant you've tagged in your latest photo album. Like any good book does, you need to draw people in and get their interest. This can be done with any kind of offer or promotion that they can't find elsewhere.Make your Facebook fans feel like they are part of an exclusive group and reward their loyalty. Do this by giving sneak previews, or releasing news to your FB fans before the general public. No suits and ties Remember that this is a social media scheme and your customers will (90% of the time) have you on their personal Facebook account. Facebook defines interactive communication and nothing worse than having to be overly formal or being "put on hold"... so RESPOND! Get back to people as soon as you can on a personal level, using first names and the occasional smiley, because it never hurts :) Start the conversation People aren't likely to post on your page unless they have a problem, or they are extremely impressed or grateful. This means that you need to get people talking and interacting and there are many ways to do this: Create a poll asking for opinions Run competitions that award decent prizes Create small, interactive games themed around your business Facebook is a vital PR and SEO tool, so go get your business fan page today! http://www.nacremedia.com/blog/search-engine-optimisation/why-are-paid-links-bad Unfortunately, when it comes to paid links and SEO, Google doesn't really like paid links at all. In fact, they even have an online form for you to report paid links on a website! But aren't paid links what define online advertising? So is advertising wrong too? The basic reasoning for treating paid links as a bit of a bad practice in SEO is because it can be seen as trying to cheat the way that Google works. The more links that you have coming to your site, the more 'points' you get, the more trustworthy and relevant you become.If you have paid for the links coming to your website, you are effectively paying for your website to do better in search engines - and because Google strives to maintain the natural quality of their search engine, this can go against their intentions of delivering naturally relevant results and cause your site to be penalised. The 'work-around' At some point, most websites will want to advertise in some way - so there must be a work-around for this? Well thankfully, there are a couple. When you want to advertise on your site or have affiliate / partner links and whether or not you're getting paid for those links - they will stand out to Google. What Google likes for you to do is basically admit that these links are there, taking away the value that they carry as links. There are a couple of ways to do this. Start off by using the following code in all of the links: <a rel="nofollow" href="somewhere"> As long as this nofollow part is in the HTML of the link somewhere, this will nullify the links value because you are telling Google not to follow where this link is going. In this way, neither you or your partners are benefitting from the full (search engine) value of the links - you only get the visiting traffic that the links provide. Make it obvious Matt Cutts explains how making these links as clear as possible will go in your favour. As long as you have some sort of indication (such as a standard, text heading) for your links in question, then this will help Google to futher understand what these links are there for and not penalise you. So in summary - Google doesn't encourage paid links. However, as long as you make it painfully obvious what these links are, then you don't run the risk of looking like a "spammer" instead! http://www.nacremedia.com/blog/google/track-the-competition-with-google-alerts How are your competitors maintaining their place in the search results? What places are they getting links from? What SEO keywords are they aiming for?! If only you knew the answers to these questions... well, ladies and gentleman - "there's an app for that"! Google Alerts is an amazing tool for monitoring new content indexed by Google. What this means is that you can track any new content found on any websites, blogs, social media websites and even videos, by simply typing in keywords that you want to filter out. What happens is that you recieve an "alert" via email listing all of the websites that have your specified keywords in, either as-it-happens, every few hours or once a week - so keeping an eye on your competitors has never been so easy! Secrets Revealed! To find out what your competition are up to, all you need to do is put their website address into the 'search terms' box and you will recieve every new bit of information found about them. By watching what your competitors are doing (especially those larger than you), you can gain hints as to how they are working on their SEO and also about how they run their business! This gives you great insight into how they are where they are and most importantly, how they stay there. Use this great tool to see who else is aiming at the keywords you are and how they are doing it. Check it out now at www.google.com/alerts! http://www.nacremedia.com/blog/search-engine-optimisation/using-long-tail-seo An odd expression, but what does it mean? "Long tail" is the term given to longer phrases (search queries) which would typically contain over three words. For example, a short tail query would be somebody searching for "SEO Norwich" - whereas "the best SEO company based in Norwich" would be a long tail search query. Cover every angle Many companies often report that over 70% of their traffic is from longer search queries. Deciding what long tail searches you want to focus on is a crucial part of putting together your SEO strategy. It is good to have at least 3-4 long tail queries that you optimise for, but because these terms don't usually bring in much traffic individually - having a few more isn't going to hurt! As we breifly discussed in our recent article on Geographic SEO, the volume of traffic (amount of people searching) with more refined, long tail or localised search queries will be very few compared to people using generic short tail phrases. However, you have a much higher chance of getting to the top results for less-common, long tail search terms than you would for the popular ones (because the popular ones are what everyone else is after!). To illustrate further, the scenario is quite similar to selling cars (the figures below are approximate): Sell cars for lots of money + sell to a minority = Short tail phrase + reach position 15 or more. Sell your cars at an affordable price + sell a lot = Long tail phrase + reach the top 3 results. The beauty of SEO is that in time, you can have have a short tail phrase AND reach the top three results - but this is most definitely more of a long-term goal. There is nothing to stop you from taking both approaches at the same time and working on each goal simultaneously. So in summary, don't just focus on getting the top positions for short tail phrases, because not only is this a long and challenging process, but you are also completely ignoring a niche of people that are potential paying customers. In the short-term, set up your long tail SEO, start building authority and trust and slowly but surely rake in those forgotten visitors! http://www.nacremedia.com/blog/search-engine-optimisation/never-neglect-generic-traffic There are two types of people that visit your website. Those who arrived and left ("generic" traffic) - and those who arrived and bought ("relevant" traffic). Quite obviously, and for good reason, there is a lot of focus put onto getting relevant traffic. This is because the SEO and the client want to see a return on their SEO investment sooner rather than later - and why have someone visit the site who isn't interested anyway? It doesn't do either party any favours... That's all very well, but aren't we forgetting something? Traffic is an SEO factor Many will argue this case, stating that as long as the website and the content is magically super-optimised then the site will take-off and fly up the rankings. No it wont. So on the other hand, if a website is continually getting thousands of visitors - does this not mean anything? This is actually how social media works. Google doesn't actually count links from Facebook and Twitter, because both of these sites use "nofollow links" anyway, so their worth is almost completely nullified. But if there is a sudden influx of thousands of people to your website from Facebook and Twitter, you can rest assured that Google is going to notice. Matt Cutts was once quoted to have said that Google uses over 200 SEO factors (see here too) that are used to calculate your relevancy position in Google's search results. It's very safe to assume that traffic is at least one of these factors. Ranking = Traffic, Traffic = Ranking The cruel reality is that the higher up the rankings you go, the more traffic you get - and the more traffic you get, the higher you go up the rankings. If your website is position 8 in the SERPs (Search engine results pages) and it is getting more click-throughs than any of the above, this indicates to Google that position 8 must hold more relevancy or interest than the above. In time, it is very likely that this page will move up the rankings. The point to take away from this is that all traffic is good traffic. It may not be "relevant" traffic, but relevancy comes in time and in the detail - whilst you have lots of traffic, do all you can to maintain it - because it will pay off! http://www.nacremedia.com/blog/seo-quick-tips/giving-links-and-getting-links No, we're not talking reciprocal links (as that's actually quite a "grey hat" area now, unfortunately). One of the best ways to build links to your website is to be generous in giving links to other websites. Of course - as there is with everything, there is a healthy balance to maintain. As an example, for every 10 links you get in you should aim to have about 2-3 links to other websites (a percentage somewhere between 20-35% is great - any higher and you will be loosing valuable SEO 'weight' from your pages). Google's coming! Quick - act normal...! In case you were wondering, there is logical reasoning behind this. Google is all about 'the natural flow and workings of the internet' and it looks quite suspicious if you have 1000 links to a website and none coming out. It also looks a bit strange if all of the links coming to your website are to your homepage, so keep that in mind too when link building. There is an art to link building whilst making things look as 'natural' as possible - you basically need to seem as though 90% of your link building wasn't done on purpose... It's true! If your campaign is to get 5000 relevant links to your website over night, then this will draw a lot of suspicious attention to you - especially if you pulled it off! It would be more realistic if a website gained 5000 relevant links over at least a few months, if not a few years. Obviously though, if your website gains this much attention over night for credible reasons then there's not going to be a problem. A gradual process "Link building" is a good name for it, because you build links gradually - i.e. "brick by brick". You build SEO authority with Google in the same way. Why does it take time? Because over time you are adding to Google's data records. They can't take your word for it straight away - Google will take time to get to know your website inside out and learn to trust you as a good, credible resource. So to summarise - the best way to get links in is to (gracefully, yet reservedly) give links out too. If you find things of interest, give it a link -- Write something interesting, get a link back! :) http://www.nacremedia.com/blog/seo-quick-tips/keep-domain-names-simple How many well-known websites do you know with really long domain names? One or two? What about websites-with-lots-of-hyphens-in-the-domain-name? ... None? With anything to do with SEO, it's vitally important to keep things simple. What ever the name of your company or the industry you are in, remember to keep it short and simple. If you can get a keyword in your domain - great! But if not then don't worry, just make it memorable. Your domain name doesn't have to match with your company name (e.g. B&Q's website - DIY.com) and it doesn't have to be descriptive either. After all, what does the word "Confused" have to do with comparing car insurance? :) With everything regarding SEO - keep it simple, because human friendly is SEO friendly. http://www.nacremedia.com/blog/search-engine-optimisation/localised-and-geographic-seo Small companies need to focus on a geographic seo strategy. Why? These days, the yellow pages have almost become obsolete, because the majority of people are searching on Google for their local businesses. Even if your company doesn't have a website - it will still benefit from having some sort of online presence and there are many ways to do this. Why keep it local? I want to reach the WORLD! Lets pretend that you're a plumber in the city of Norwich running a small business. You have a small website with a little bit of information on, but most importantly some contact details... Now consider: Are you likely to appear on the first page of Google for the keyword "plumber"? ... No. What about your chances with "plumber in Norwich"? More like it. Because there are hundreds of thousands of websites out there to do with plumbers and plumbing, packed full of information that you will never have time to read, let alone begin to write your own unique content about! Your website will be lost among the masses. So getting to the first page isn't likely and with your small, local business it wouldn't be much help at this stage either. You can always come back to it once you decide to go international. Unless you would like to travel around the world and back to fix a toilet! But less people would be searching locally? Granted, the only people searching for "Norwich" will be those living in or near Norwich, but these people will be far more ready to use you and be converted into paying customers - even more so when your company offers a service. These people should be your first target audience and priority regarding geographic SEO. But be careful. You need to think about which specific location you promote. Is it best to use your small village or the city nearby? You want to be specific to a local area, but not too specific. It is much, much better to target a city of 200,000 people rather than a village 10 minutes away with a population of 100 - so take this into consideration. Where to start To begin with, your location needs to be as prominent as your main keywords. Put it in title tags, the first paragraph of your site, spread it around the site - especially on your contact page as that's where it belongs! Make sure you use it in adverts, use your local telephone number with the area code... go (sensibly) mad! The most important thing to do is to submit your company to Google maps. For this you will need to sign up for a Google account if you do not have one already. The great thing about this is, you are listed on Google straight away and it's already localised! Here you can submit your company details whether you have a website or not and over the next couple of weeks, anyone searching for you or your service in your local area will have a nice little map like this: I'm not sure about you, but I tend to click most of these links here and not even bother about the first organic listing. Whether you are marker A or marker G, you're already above what is normally the first place result! Also, once you have a google account you will need to look at Google's Webmaster tools and how to set your geographic location there. Points to consider In summary then, I will leave you with some main points for setting up your website for serving your local geographic area. Consider a .co.uk domain address. This immediately indicates that you are based in the UK and will likely rank better for UK search results. Get links to your site from local newspapers or free local advert listings. Use Google and the tools available to help the search engines pinpoint where you are. Sprinkle mentions of your location around your website to help search engines tie in this area and you. There is always scope to go national or international at any stage, so don't worry about being specific to begin with - these are the foundations on which you need first in order to one day go global :) http://www.nacremedia.com/blog/google/building-seo-authority-with-google What is your site worth, in terms of how much value it adds to the web? Is your website a reliable source of information? Authority is a big thing regarding Google and SEO. It's synonymous with importance and trust - and if you are important and trusted - you're not going to find it very difficult to get to the top of the search results now and then. The way Google sees it, is that if people go to your website for the latest news and people link to your website to share it and discuss it, then it must be of some importance. This news could be about anything from international news, to about your new pet hamster, Keith - the good part is that the principle remains the same. Although, with building SEO authority, it may not be the aim of your website to be a resource for the latest news, so how else do you gain this trust and respect on the web? Getting in with the big guys... With Google being Google, the only people that really know what's going on and how it all works are (a couple of) people that work there! As a result, there's no definitive list of websites or organisations that Google seem to trust or hold as a valuable resource. Although, they do follow a suit that you would expect them to - so Governments and similar International Organisations tend to come first, then further down the line are the (more trustworthy) media (i.e. not "hot gossip" magazines, but rather CNN and the BBC). Then comes big websites, FULL of information such as Wikipedia and thousands of other high-traffic websites with high PageRank's and thousands of links... Then, finally comes you. Depressed yet? Well, don't feel too overwhelmed or lose hope... It does take time, but there are many ways that you can begin to increase your SEO authority. Links Generally speaking, you want links from wherever you can get them, especially from those with a higher Google PageRank. Why? Because sites with a higher ranking are generally more reliable, have more authority and usually have much more traffic! Getting a link from anywhere like the BBC website (PageRank 9/10) will help a vast amount towards building your authority, no matter what the cause is for them linking to you. Traffic Whether or not the people coming to your website are the people you want, lots of traffic to any website will suggest to search engines that it is somewhat important and of interest - which makes a fair amount of sense. If a website is steadily growing in popularity and many people are finding it from respectable and well-trusted websites, then that website would very likely be a good resource of information. Your Domain You will often find that older domains will come higher up in the rankings because they have earnt 'trust' over the years, so keep hold of your domain and maintain the same domain owner for as long as possible. It can also come in handy to have a more 'authoritive' domain TLD. Anyone can go and sign up for a .com or .co.uk, but in order to get a .edu or .ltd.uk you have to go through a long registration process, prove your identity and have a good reason for wanting one! Your Website Does you website contain unique content that is easy to read and follow? Is it human-friendly? Is it growing with information, depth and interest (links)? It's self-explanitory that the answer to these questions should be, 'yes'. If they are, then in time you will see that things generally pick up. It's always hard starting from scratch, or re-gaining that lost momentum with anything and it's the same with SEO. Once you get the right things in to place and get the ball rolling. Over time, your authority will gradually increase along with your Google PageRank and you will become a trusted source of high-quality information and this will help to get you to the top of those search results. http://www.nacremedia.com/blog/search-engine-optimisation/content-vs-links Which is most important? Over the years SEO has seen many different techniques and methods for getting to the top of the results. A vast amount of what used to work a few years ago will make little difference to a website these days and a lot of it is even now considered as black hat! So the face of SEO is always changing. With this in mind, it has always been the assumption that 'Content is king', but is this really still the case? 12 million pages of results and you. Sure - unique, relevant and captivating content is a must on any website. It can bring in links and make your website a good resource for information and will help a search engine to consider you as a good resource in this way too... eventually. But have you seen how many other websites there are like yours, full of their own well-written, unique and informative content? Hundreds or more? So what makes your reams of amazing and useful content better than all of theirs? In truth, the answer is quite likely to be "not much"... But apparently, it doesn't seem to matter too much either way, because the website that is in the first place in the search results has hardly any useful information at all, compared to you!? Does this scenario seem familiar? We see it all too often... So what's putting these websites first in the results!? It really comes down to a number of little factors such as domain age, etc. and one other, big SEO factor. They have more links! All SEOs across the industry, Matt Cutts and everyone else at Google know that link building is amongst one of the hardest things to do with SEO, mostly because you have the least control over it. Let's face it - anyone can write content - but to get lots of good quality links from lots of different websites, is often a hard feat. However, what if you do have more links than your competition? This will mean that the websites linking to your competitors will have lots of links from more relevant websites. For example, if your website is about football and you had lots of links from accountancy websites, then you're not likely to rank as well as another football website with links from thousands of other football and sports-related websites. Logically then, with thousands of websites out there with good content, it makes sense to then rely on the quantity and relevancy of a websites links to help determine its reliability. After all, reliability and trustworthiness are vital in the world of SEO and help a long way towards building authority. During the website's building process, content should of course come first and a lot of time and effort should be taken to ensure that it is well-written for both search engines and humans to read. But then focus on getting links, because that is the part in which will have the most impact on where you rank in the search engine results pages! http://www.nacremedia.com/blog/black-hat/what-is-black-hat-seo Ok, so you're probably wondering where the term 'black hat' came from. In Western films (... yes, stay with me), the bad guy or villain will usually wear a black hat, whereas the good guy will generally wear a white hat. The computer industry also refers to a black hat as a 'malicious hacker', so you can see that anything to do with 'black hat' comes with a bad reputation. Regarding SEO, black hat is the name given to the general means of trying to 'cheat' your way higher up into the search results. Does it still work? Actually, yes. Various Black Hat techniques will make a website rank very well in the search results... but not for long.These days, search engines are very quick to pick up on this and have no doubts that the offending website will be prompty banned from the search results entirely. Nobody can really afford to risk their website being banned from search engines. Google famously removed car manufacturer BMW from the search results after some black hat SEO practices were found on their website (See the BBC report)! After some profuse apologising on behalf or BMW, they were allowed back in the search results provided they removed the offending content. So what sort of things might they of been doing? Popular Black Hat Techniques Hidden Text - This refers to having any extra content on a page that is usually stuffed with keywords or phrases (see 'keyword stuffing' below) and purposefully hidden from sight of any visitors - but is visible to search engines. For example, if the text was white, against a white background, the visitor wouldn't necessarily be able to view it but a search engine would. This kind of practice is prohibited. Keyword Stuffing - Where a website has 'too many' keywords in the page content, in a short amount of space. For example, be very careful if you have paragraphs with more than three mentions of your targetted keyword(s) in, as a search engine may well suspect you of trying to "stuff" your page with keywords in an attempt to rank better. Cloaking - The various means of showing different content to search engines and visitors. Typically, ifa search engine visits the website then the content shown will be "over-optimised" and generated purely for the purpose of getting a page ranked higher in the search engines. This is bad, because search engines aim to give users the search results that they are after in the most relevant and natural means possible - so any manipulation in this way is frowned upon! Duplicate / Mini-sites - This used to be quite a popular method of bringing in business via search engines, but as search engines became more aware of it, it has quickly become a bannable offense. Be very careful when setting up new websites to advertise new products or services. Setting up more than one website per company isn't fair on the rest of the market or industry. This method is also commonly used for link farming (see below). Automated Submission / Link Builing - Using any software or other means of automatically submitting any content on the internet, in favour of your SEO, is another bad practise to avoid! Link Farming - This involves setting up multiple websites or attaining links in a 'un-natural' way. Whether or not you own any of the websites linking to you, setting up multiple websites all linking to eachother can look strangely suspicious to search engines. So be careful! Be sure to stay away from anything that seems to undermine the nature of search engines. It isn't worth the risk... is it?! http://www.nacremedia.com/blog/search-engine-optimisation/simple-diy-seo Search engine optimisation needn't be a big mystery to any of us. With SEO, a little knowledge actually goes a long way - and as long as you follow some simple best-practices, anyone can roughly audit their own website! Half of the mystery with SEO, is often just finding out what the initial problem actually is! What to look for... Navigate to your website and whilst you browse through, ask yourself the following questions: Is everything on the page presented in a clear, logical and organised manner? Has each page got a different title and a description? Does my page content flow naturally / is it easy for people to read? Does each page have a good purpose and therefore, is the content on it informative, unique and fulfilling the need of your target audience? Are the URLs (or address) for each page on my website short and simple, yet descriptive? Can I easily navigate to any part of my website, directly, from every page? Are there more than 3 levels of navigation / depth to my website? If so, why - and is it compulsory? Is there any way that parts of my website (not including main site structure) could be duplicated across other pages, or do my pages have multiple address for the same page? Regardless of whether you know how to fix these issues or not, you should now have a good idea of what work needs to be done on your website. http://www.nacremedia.com/blog/nacremedia-news/norwich-seo-site-launch! After setting up Nacremedia Limited back in December 2009 we have been working hard behind the scenes putting the new website together and the time for launch has finally arrived! As a new contender for SEO in Norwich, we look forward to helping all of those looking for Norwich SEO and website design. If you're looking for an SEO expert to help give you the most return on your website, please feel free to contact us today for a non-obligatory quote. Alternatively you can find out more about Nacremedia and our Norwich-based SEO services. We look forward to hearing from you and watch this space! TW @ Nacremedia