There’s been a lot of discussion about exact match domains lately, mostly down to Matt Cutts mentioning at Pubcon that Google is reviewing their value. The chatter since includes a number of theories, all warranting a closer look. Lets take a look at some current examples of exact match ranking positions, the positive and negatives of exact matches, and if you’re an owner of an exact match domain, ideas about how to combat any Google change of algorithm.

Traditionally exact match domains have proven a very good option to rank very quickly for a particular keyword. Not surprisingly, finding an exact match domain for keywords that can drive lots of revenue are hard to come by. Rand Fiskin at SEOMoz recently blogged some interesting stats about the strength of varying degrees of exact match and how it seems .com exact match domains seem to be the most powerful.

The tactic of using an exact match domains is commonly used by affiliate marketers looking to get some quick traction on a new project, but the tactic also stretches out to local marketers, and even right up to some much larger businesses. Lets take a look at some examples.

On the local front, it shouldn’t take you long to find plenty of examples of exact match domains being prominent in the search results. I’ve chosen a particular keyword “locksmith Chelmsford” that I helped a local business rank for at the beginning of the year.

It seems most of the world’s locksmiths reside in Chelmsford, and not surprisingly the SERPs are littered with exact match domains. The top position goes to the exact match domain, with 4 out of the remaining 6 all going to variations very close to the exact match. I would presume the majority of the searches for a locksmith in Chelmsford are for that phrase so it’s no surprise everyone is looking to get any advantage they can, however Google favouring of the exact matches leaves other sites at a disadvantage.

Lets move up the ladder a bit and search for a highly competitive commercial term such as “public liability insurance” There’s some big guns in the SERPs for this term, including Compare The Market, Simply Business, More Than, and even Wikipedia. However, you’ll find an exact match domain listed at number 2. Based on looking at the strength of some of the sites around it, the site has no right to be there, and it wouldn’t if it didn’t have an exact match domain.

So as of today, it looks as if exact match domains are holding on quite happily to their lofty status. Some believe that Google will continue to support exact match because Google own exact match domains themselves, such as the recently launched boutiques.com

SEO Unique showed a differing opinion mentioning the volatility of two exact match sites they own, showing how they both dropped out of the SERPs completely before bouncing back, seemingly as if someone had just flipped a switch.

If you’re reading this and searching for exact match domains there’s a couple of thoughts you should consider. Aaron Wall makes a very valid point about the restriction of exact match. You’re essentially putting all your eggs in 1 basket which could be a risky strategy leaves you little flexibility for further keyword development. The birth of Google instant throws up even more issues should you own the singular version of an exact match when Google is promoting the plural, or vica versa.

However, if your business is built around one service that you can rely on to be a real revenue generator for you, then an exact match domain could be a viable option. If you choose to go down this route, I would suggest that you don’t simply rely on its current built in SEO strength, but to optimise your site just as would if you didn’t have an exact match. You’ll then not only provide your site visitors with a great looking site but give Google a viable site to be ranked on its own merits, with the exact match benefits as a nice added bonus.

Are Exact Match domains still a viable option for SEO? is a post from: Clear SEO's Internet Marketing Blog

Are Exact Match domains still a viable option for SEO? is a post from: The SEO Specialist Blog

I was in the middle of completing a couple of site audits for potential clients this week and apart from running into a mountain of duplicate content, the other biggest issue I found on one site was a host of internal broken links.

Broken links are exactly what they sound link, they are an internal link from one page to another within your site that is broken.

The problem with broken links is two fold. From a user perspective, you’re going to annoy your site visitors pretty quickly if they find links on your site that don’t work. Sure, there’s the back up of a cool 404 error page to take the shine off, but you’d probably be a lot happier  if you can avoid your site visitors ever seeing your 404 page in the first place.

The second issue is SEO related. You should always be pleased when a search engine decides it’s time to crawl your site. So welcome them in like you would your best mate into your house. You wouldn’t let your mate walk up stairs into the new room your renovating, but forget to tell him you haven’t quite laid the floor yet, so don’t do the same to a search engine.  Search engines spider your site content through its links, scurrying around from page to page. Don’t put any barricades in his way because he’ll get the hump and go home. Make sure all your links are active and your search engine spider will come back with a case of beer next time and hang out a little longer.

Fortunately, broken links are quite easy to fix and there’s lot of tools for you to use. I use dreamweaver for most of the sites I work on so I run a quick broken link check on the, yea, you guessed it, broken link checker option.

But I never trust any tool by itself, so being a good SEO consultant, I’ll always be checking a site’s Google Webmaster Central account for signs of issues. And, sure enough, there’s a broken link checker there that’ll tell you exactly where your issues are.

If some of your links are broken because you’ve deleted a page, or amended a URL, make sure that you set up 301 re-direct from those pages to salvage what page rank you may have on those pages and to improve the user experience.

If WordPress is your CMS of choice, there’s a plug in called, yes, you’ve guessed it, the broken link checker. This will inform you whenever something has gone awray in your linking.

All easy, straightforward stuff, but certainly something that needs to be kept an eye on to make Mr. search engine a happy camper.

Own up, Who Broke My Site Links? is a post from: Clear SEO's Internet Marketing Blog

Own up, Who Broke My Site Links? is a post from: The SEO Specialist Blog

Hands up in the room if your business is mainly local? Hands up how many of you have claimed your business listing at Google Places? Now, hands up how many of you have optimised your listing?

I hope it’s a lot of you, but for those who haven’t, here’s what I mean by optimising your listing. In short, fill in it, fill it all………the way in. There’s a few areas where I see businesses slacking a little with their local SEO. That’s great if it’s not you because their laziness is your gain.

It should go without saying that you should complete the hours of operation and payment options, but there may be some questions on the other sections that may need asking. So to get the most SEO benefits from your listings, let’s start from the top…

Business Name
Don’t keyword stuff it, use your actually business name. Play fair when all around you are in spam heaven. It’s make sense in the long run and I think searchers prefer to click on a business name rather than “24hrplumer”

Business Address
Use your real address, hopefully for you it’s right in the middle of town.

Categories
Make sure the first one is from Google’s own options. Even if it doesn’t fit exactly, it’s the best way to go. Use the other 4 categories to choose something a little more specific or go with Google’s options, but whatever you do, choose all 5.

Service Areas and Location Settings.
Choose between the option of customers coming to location or not, but I would not advise you choose for your address to not be shown on your Maps listing. Firstly, it’s more than likely a searcher won’t trust you if you choose not to show your address, but it seems that Google doesn’t trust you either as I’ve seen rankings drop because of this.

Distance from one location
The older of the 2 service area options to choose from and still the best. Set a radius from your address and off you go.

Using the list of areas served doesn’t seem to be a good idea right now. I’ve set this for a couple of clients with horrific results. Google still has some work to do on it. More than likely it’ll leave you in a no-mans land of not ranking for any areas, or ranking for lots of areas but on page 3.

Photos
You have room for 10 – Use them all. Seriously, I’m sure you can find 10 images that relate to your business. How about your company logo, some shots of your place of business, or even you. Add in your certifications and you’ve probably got 10.

Video
Ooh… thats too much trouble, I’ll leave that. Ok, walk away now, but if you did find the time for adding video, you’re giving yourself a great opportunity to connect with the searcher far better than a page of text can, and Google seemingly will reward you immensly just for trying. Nice Google.

Additional Info:
Find a section that is relevant to your type of business, even if it’s just parking. Complete the listing. Google will smile and we all love that right.

Once you’ve done that, certify your listing with Google, preferably over the phone and you’ll be on your way.

Need some more info, take a look at my local seo services.

How To Optimise Your Google Places Listing is a post from: Clear SEO's Internet Marketing Blog

How To Optimise Your Google Places Listing is a post from: The SEO Specialist Blog

“Hello, please can you help me? I was wondering if social media would be a good way of driving traffic to my website?” I get this question asked quite a lot these days as a SEO consultant.

Most of the people who ask this are referring to Facebook and Twitter when they talk about social media, but I class social media as a much larger area than this. Social media to me is blogs, forums, social bookmarking, and social networking.

All of the above are vital components of any SEO campaign, so in true Carrie Bradshaw style, “is Social Media just SEO anyway?”

To me, yes it is, because if you took the social media aspect out of the SEO equation, you’re cutting off the right arm of your campaign. Sure, you might do ok without it, but you’d do so much better with it. After all isn’t SEO a marketing skill not a technical one?

I like to use social media as one of the main tools for my link building because not only does it bring links to your site, but it naturally generates traffic that is going to continue to develop naturally over time.

I was listening to the SEO Rockstars podcast the other day. Eric Ward, was being interviewed about his Adgooroo link tool he’s set up. I’ve never met Eric, but I did hear him speak at SMX East in New York in 2008 and his talk was by far the best of the conference. I’ve been a convert ever since. There were too very important points Eric made.

Firstly, he was building links before search engines existed. So the only reason he was doing it was to build natural traffic to sites. How awesomely divine is that concept, because in reality that’s exactly what we should be doing now even though search engines are now very much in existence.

Secondly, he stated that the process of building real quality links is as close to offline PR as it can be. And he’s exactly right, because if you want to develop those high level links, you’ve got to be social, it’s got to be personable.

Social Media can be a brilliant space to build those types of relationships. It might not get you that link straight away, but by being involved and being yourself, when the time comes and when it’s a natural fit, that link might be a little more easier to negotiate.

So what’s my point? Well I guess social media can be the foundation to build those PR type relationships for links or anything else, but whatever may come of it, chances are you’re going to be building relevant, traffic to your site, and that’s SEO right?

Is Social Media just a part of SEO anyway? is a post from: Clear SEO's Internet Marketing Blog

Is Social Media just a part of SEO anyway? is a post from: The SEO Specialist Blog

It seems the very first steps most website owners take in building their number of inbound links are to start with the easy pickings. This usually starts with sourcing web directories and getting a back link profile up and running. It’s the default action as most web owners are in a rush to get any links into their site as quickly as possible and web directories usually are an option than offers little resistance. However, what comes with that ease, is little value.

I’ll quickly clarify that comment by stating that there are a few well known directories that can offer value and deliver a “seal of approval” that might be very important to a young site. The main ones are the Yahoo directory, followed by BOTW and DMOZ although lately getting listed in DMOZ seems about as hard as Robert Green finds catching a football. There are others that seem to get listed from time to time that may be worth a look at. Local directories can also offer huge value when optimising for local search as they can be a great resource for the business reviews and citations that Google seem to love.

When link building, I’ll run through the following evaluations to see if a directory is valuable to my site of not. If it passes them all, then we’re good to go.

1. Is the directory relevant to the types of services of my clients?
If so, how many companies are listed and does the directory give me the opportunity to list information about my site that would improve the chance of someone clicking through from the directory. I know you may think I’m being overly positive on this, but I don’t care.

2. What does the site look like?
I know you should never judge a book by it’s cover, but usually if the site is badly designed, has a less than professional look then chances are the site is not respected by its owners and therefore your listing isn’t going to provide much value to you. Another good tip off is the number of Google Adsense ads on the page. If it’s littered with ads all over the place, it might be a good idea to pass on by.

3. How many listings are on the page?
Take a look at the number of listings in the directory. Are there hundreds? thousands? will your listing ever get seen? and from an SEO standpoint, how juicy is that link going to be from a listing on a page with a thousand other outbound links.

4.Fees?
This one is really personal preference and project related. If the directory ticks all the boxes, then you may choose to pay the fee, however I prefer free directories as I can’t see a huge difference in value from a lot of the small paid directories and the free ones.

5.Reciprocal links
If the directory is asking for a reciprocal link, jog on.

6. What are the SEO benefits.
I’d take a look at the page rank of the site. Unless it’s a new site, if it doesn’t have a page rank, then I’d pass right there, unless it was EXTREMELY relevant to my type of business. It would be good to check the Page Rank of the individual listing pages as well and see if there is any authority there.

7. How old is the domain?
This is easy to check with a Whois check up and it’ll tell you all you need. Remember the older the domain the better, so if it says anything older than 2005 then you’re good, anything older than 2000 and you’re really good.

8.  What does Google think of the site?
Apart from checking it’s page rank, take a closer look at the number of pages indexed by using the site: command in the google search box. The higher the number, the better but also take a look to check the last time the pages were cached. This will give you insight into whether google is indexing the site regularly and if leaving a listing there is worth it. If it’s been longer than a couple of months, I’d not bother.

Let me know your thoughts and how you approach your directory link building.

Are Directory Listings Worthwhile for SEO anymore? is a post from: Clear SEO's Internet Marketing Blog

Are Directory Listings Worthwhile for SEO anymore? is a post from: The SEO Specialist Blog

Whenever a new clients calls me, I usually do a quick SEO site audit while I’m on the phone with them. I usually start with the very basics and more often than not, there’s a lot of room for improvement right off the bat.

So rather than calling me for some SEO consulting (seriously?) run through these five quick SEO checks and the answer to improving your search results might be right under your nose.

1. Page Title Tags
Make sure they are relevant to the content of the page.
Make sure they are different for each page.
Make sure they match the page title on the page.
Make sure you have the most important keywords at the start of the tag.

2. Keyword friendly URLs.
Make sure you’re URL structure is clear for both users and search engines.
Does the path make sense or are your users and the search engine spiders going to get lost, pack their bags and leave? Chances are if it has a whole bunch of numbers and letters that makes no sense, then you should think about changing them.

3. Internal Linking.
Do you have any? I presume the content on your site’s pages is based on a particular subject? Therefore it’s highly likely that it would be useful and relevant to link to other pages within the copy to provide a superior user experience. Using keyword specific anchor text is a great way to show the search engines what pages you consider important.

4. Alt Tags
About 50% of the sites I see have not touched the alt attribute for images. Use it, it helps your site visitors get a better site experience and it’s one more option for you to show the search engines what your content is all about.

5. Sitemaps.
How many times do you need a map when you’re going some place you’ve never been before? Probably quite a few, so help out the search engine spiders by offering them a map and they’ll be more than happy to crawl your content. Leave them hanging and they’ll probably pass you right by.

If you’re reading this and are thinking, “ah, I’ve done all this” just take a quick look over the site again as I bet there will be room for more optimisation if you look closely enough.

5 Simple SEO Checks That Will Improve Your Search Results is a post from: Clear SEO's Internet Marketing Blog

5 Simple SEO Checks That Will Improve Your Search Results is a post from: The SEO Specialist Blog

Most of my work as a SEO consultant is based around helping small businesses develop their companies online. The majority of this work is based around the fundamentals of SEO, however about a third of the businesses that approach me have template websites that make doing even the most basic SEO difficult.

The reason they have gone for such site builders is price. This is frustrating for me because I know I can’t help these clients because these type of site builders wont allow me to. It’s frustrating for the business because they realised they’ve locked themselves into a situation that is going to severely hinder their progress in the search rankings.

The solution is to move to a SEO friendly CMS or start again and build a new site from the ground up. If you’re a small business who is considering building a website with a template style website builder, you might want to make sure that you’re able to control the following.

1. Control over the page title, header titles (H1, H2, etc) and your meta description tags.

You think this was a given, but unfortunately not. Some do allow you to have limited control over these elements, but it defaults to resetting every page causing issues such as major keyword cannibalisation issues and many other problems.

2. Canonical Redirects

Make sure you have complete control over implementing canonical redirects. Make sure you can place the canonical tag in your header to start with, and make sure there aren’t any defaults that automatically create different URLs that will confuse the search engines.

3. Default Redirects

The only kind of redirect you’re interested in is a 301, and it must be simple to be able to set one up.

4. SEO friendly URLs

This can get you in a whole heap of mess. URLs are so important for so many reasons. Accurate, descriptive, organized URLs help search engines understand the content of the page and help the user navigate your site easily. Once dynamic URLs and session ID URL start coming into play you’re on a hiding to nothing. You need to look for a CMS that allows you to customise your URL structure anyway you like.

5. Control over Image ALT attributes

If it wasn’t important already, it seems the ALT attribute is becoming an even more important on page factor. Make sure you’re able to use it for all of your images as this is the best option for letting the search engines know what an image is about.

6. Internal Anchor Text

This is vital as you need the flexibility to customise the anchor text of your internal links to provide relevant link text for your site users and for the search engines to really understand the content of your site.

7. Duplicate content…

is something you don’t ever want on your website, however some CMS’s seem intent on creating this for you.

8. Breadcrumbs

I’m a big fan of breadcrumbs even on small sites. It holds the hand of the site user every step of the way. If you don’t know what they are, you’ll usually find them above the main content area of the page with info such as “you are here > home > seo > seo services.”

9. Sitemaps

Google loves XML sitemaps, it eats them up and next thing you know your site in indexed and in the listings. Make sure you can build HMTL sitemaps too, these are vital for your site users and the search engines.

10. 404 Error Pages

Another important one for the site user. Make sure you’re able to firstly have a 404 error page, but secondly that you’re able to customise the content. If your site doesn’t have a 404 error page, chances are your site users will leave if they get lost, and will loose confidence in your site very quickly.

If you’re just about to start building a new site. I’d suggest you make note of the ten points above and steer clear of anything that doesn’t have these options at a minimum. And remember, don’t get sucked in about how great some of these template site builders may look from a design perspective, because it doesn’t matter how pretty your site is if no one can find it.

10 SEO Friendly Necessities from your CMS. is a post from: Clear SEO's Internet Marketing Blog

10 SEO Friendly Necessities from your CMS. is a post from: The SEO Specialist Blog

Last week I wrote a little about the best types of external links to build for your site. Today, I’m going to run through some ideas about the huge SEO opportunity that during my SEO consulting I regularly see a great number of sites not taking advantage of. I’m talking about optimising your site’s internal link structure.

What are internal links? They are the links you create between the pages within your site. These should be used to improve the user site experience, usually providing further information on a topic, product or service. However they can also be used to help show the search engines what pages on your site you consider to be the most important.

Just as an external link into your site should increase the authority of the page it links to, the same premise goes for your internal linking. Lets break it down a little.

Lets say you are an electrical maintenance company and have a 100 page website. You consider 10 pages on your site a priority for your SEO at the moment. It’s these pages that you are looking to build in the SERPs to generate income for your business.

Lets take 1 page out of your 10 “SEO money pages,” which is optimised for the term “electrical maintenance services.” You would then take a look at your other 90 pages on your site and find the most appropriate, natural opportunities within those pages content to create a link to your page. It’s important to find the most appropriate content to link from as the link you create will look far more natural for both the search engine and the site user. There’s nothing worse than a “spam” internal link to annoy your site user, so always keep the user experience as close to the front of your mind as possible.

Let’s say you’ve found 15 pages where the content is relevant enough that you could create a link to your “electrical maintenance services” page. You would then create the link using the keyword rich anchor text of “electrical maintenance services” for your link. I hope it goes without saying, but just in case, the anchor text has to be relevant or the process is a waste of time.

By doing this, you’ve shown the search engines that the particular page you’ve linked to is important for the term “electrical maintenance services.” This should help you create authority for the page and the particular term. Do this regularly over an extended period of time and you’re really building a case for your keywords.

In a perfect world, you may find that your link passes more authority the higher up the page it is. You may find that it passes more authority if it is in the main content of your page rather than in your breadcrumbs trail or footer.

Internal links are also great at moving your sites “link juice” around. I won’t go into the specifics here, but essentially if you have a lot of quality inbound links to a page that isn’t important for you, you need to transfer that juice to the pages that are.

And finally, if you haven’t already noticed, I’ve created in this post exactly the type of internal link I’ve been discussing. See it yet?

Internal Links. Who’s your new best friend? is a post from: Clear SEO's Internet Marketing Blog

Internal Links. Who’s your new best friend? is a post from: The SEO Specialist Blog

I noticed a great blog by copywriting guru Andy Maslen the other day that brought up the debate on whether your website content should be written for search engines or for website visitors. Andy came up with a new term, HVO (Human Visitor Optimisation) suggesting this was by far the better way to approach content writing. I agree with him, because not only does it enable you to connect much better with your reader, but through providing a quality user experience, indirectly pleases the search engines too.

I think that sometimes when you approach content writing with SEO in mind, you can loose sight of the bigger picture. The ultimate goal usually for SEO is conversions not traffic. Traffic is just a means to ultimately, conversions. So while you may set out to write content that ticks all your SEO boxes and will supposedly improve your rankings, it will more than likely reduce your conversion rate. And, how much difference is a few extra keywords in copy going to make these days anyway? Aren’t the days of keyword ratios a thing of the past?

In my comment on Andy’s blog I suggested that his HVO idea could be extended out to include anchor text for internal linking within the copy and more importantly, to the meta description tag. I feel that because the supposed SEO importance of the meta description tag has diminished over the years that people seem to forgot what a powerful tool it still is.

If you’ve spent months, maybe even years on achieving great positions in the SERPs, at least pay your hard work the respect it deserves by spending time on nailing the content of your meta description snippet to drive those searchers you’ve worked so hard to get in front of to your page.

Make it difficult for the searcher not to click on your listing, do all those SEO 101 lessons you’ve stopped doing such as including the keywords, and make sure you come in under the 160 characters (for Google). It’s the first impression you give to your potential customer, even before your website, so make it a bloody good one.

Writing for SEO, Who are you trying to please most? is a post from: Clear SEO's Internet Marketing Blog

Writing for SEO, Who are you trying to please most? is a post from: The SEO Specialist Blog

Give any good SEO consultant worth his salt 5 minutes and chances are he’ll start bending your ear about the value of inbound links to your website. But what makes up a good link? I’m glad you asked because funnily enough I’m writing a blog post about it right now!

Firstly, I think its good to start at a very basic level. Sometimes when I start talking about links, some clients automatically think I’m referring to the links page they have on their website, you know the one, where they link out to other sites. While this might have been a good idea back in the 1990s as the internet was growing, the evolution of a link has grown considerably. While I don’t disagree with sites linking out when it’s appropriate (note to self, write blog post about appropriate outbound linking), the first thing any website owner should think of when the word “Link” is mentioned is “I need to get more links into my site!”

So now we know we’re talking about getting other sites to link to you, what type of links are best? Google’s algorithm (that’s the calculation that ranks you in their results pages) is largely based around the quality and number of links you have pointing to your website. Each link is classed as a recommendation. It’s as authentic as it can supposedly get. It’s the equivalent of getting a referral in the real world.

Just as getting a referral from the BBC might be a lot more useful to you than from Bob down the road, the authority of the site linking to you makes a huge amount of difference. You could say 1 link from the BBC might be as valuable as 1000 links from business directories. Anyone know anyone at the BBC?

Apart from authority, you need to consider relevancy. If you’re in the hairdressing industry and the Institute for Fabulous Hair (if it doesn’t exist, it should darling!) would be a brilliant link because not only would it be an authority link, but it would be a relevant link.

To cap it all off, the perfect scenario would be the for the Institute of Fabulous Hair to use a keyword term you are trying to optimise the page they are linking to in their anchor text. So if you were looking to rank for the term “crazy hair” and the clickable part of the link on their site was made up of the term “crazy hair” you’d be over the moon. Why? Well, lets look at it, you’ve got 1) an authority link 2) a relevant link and 3) a link containing the exact keyword you want to rank for. What does this tell Google? It says that your site is a trusted source for “crazy hair.” Now how cool is that!

The Basics of Link Building is a post from: Clear SEO's Internet Marketing Blog

The Basics of Link Building is a post from: The SEO Specialist Blog

In the current financial climate, it’s only natural to look for the most affordable options for SEO, but I’ve been involved in a couple of conversations over the last couple of weeks that have left me a little shocked about how people have been stung by SEO companies. With people being stung like this, I’ve noticed how some people can perceive me with extreme caution, and that’s a shame because I feel I’ve set out my stall to offer an authentic SEO option to small business.

The worst story I heard was a business being charged £500 a month “to get your business on the first page of Google” supposedly through SEO. The business owner was, like a lot of people, not overly knowledgeable of how SEO worked so just let the company get on with it. It was only after a few months, no traffic and little difference in business did they realise the SEO firm hadn’t actually done any SEO on their site, but had bought Adwords for them instead, thus “getting them on the first page of Google.”

There are more horror stories, but I won’t go into them, because I think you’ve already got the message. I’d rather talk about how you can find an ethical SEO company that’s going to help your business grow online.

I think the best place to start, as with most business, is to try and meet up face to face. You’ll get a vibe off them pretty quickly. Even if you don’t know much about SEO, ask them more general questions about how they intend to work on your site. Ask them “how” questions, ask them timeframes, ask them how the work can be monitored.

It seems a lot of smaller SEO firms charge by the page. I don’t have direct experience of this, but this leaves me to believe that this type of SEO is only limited to on site SEO considerations. Sure, this is a fundamental of good SEO, but it’s half of the overall job at most. Unless you’re in an uncompetitive market, all the wonderful on page SEO in the world isn’t going to help you unless you’re also building quality links into your site.

So with that in mind, next time you’re sitting down with Mr SEO and he’s telling you what a wonderful job he’s going to do on your site, ask him about what link building strategies he suggests for your site, and how he intends to go out and get them. If he doesn’t hesitate, you might have your man.

The Cheap SEO Myth is a post from: Clear SEO's Internet Marketing Blog

The Cheap SEO Myth is a post from: The SEO Specialist Blog

Everyone loves free right? You can’t beat free. I wish Starbucks was free, I wish Apple gave away imac’s free too. Anyway, I’m going off topic. There’s tons of SEO tools out there, most of which you need to pay for. But, if you’re on a budget and need to keep costs down, take a look at the following 5 tools from Google that’ll give you more than you need to start analysing your SEO.

Google Webmaster Central.

Google want you to have better websites, it improves the quality of their results and it helps them crawl your pages quicker. Google Webmaster Central is a great place to kick off. You can verify your site with Google on here in about 30 seconds and once you do that Google will provide you with lots of lovely information about your site such as the top search queries, backlinks, crawl errors, any issues with your on site tags, and how quickly your site downloads. It’s all laid out in a very simple, easy to navigate design and it’s a great basic resource to quickly check the health of your website.

Google Keyword Tool

I’ve used a whole bunch of keyword tools, but I’d pick this as my favourite. While I don’t advocate using just one keyword research tool, I think this is a great place to start your. The layout makes creating new lists, amending lists and terms very simple. You can download the information to excel and then you can play around with it for your hearts content.

Google Local Business Center

If your SEO is focused on your local area you should already be signed up to Google local business center. Much like webmaster Central, Google’s local business center dashboard gives you information on your site such as search queries, number of impressions your site had and how many actions people took after seeing your ad. For those of you who are more visual, they have some great graphs for you to play around with.

Google Alerts

This is a brilliant tool for you to keep up to date with your competition and marketplace and keep you informed about your brand. You can set it for any term and Google alerts you, usually through email whenever they index that particular term. It’s really as simple as that.

Google Analytics.

If you really want to understand your website and how well its achieving it’s goals then Google analytics is a must. This is the tool you should be using on a daily basis to monitor your traffic sources, and what your site visitors achieved on your site. Some people get nervous about adding the code to their site, but if you can copy & paste in a word doc, then you can do this just as easily.

I’ll be going into more detail on all of these tools over the coming weeks.

SEO on a Budget, 5 Free Google Tools for you to use today. is a post from: Clear SEO's Internet Marketing Blog

SEO on a Budget, 5 Free Google Tools for you to use today. is a post from: The SEO Specialist Blog

I could spend 2 days discussing PPC ads, but you’d get bored after about 10 minutes so I thought you’d prefer a 2 minute run down to help you on your PPC way. Ready, start the clock.

You ain’t got much room mate

It’s impossible to cram your entire sales pitch into your ad, that’s what your landing page is for. So keep it simple, don’t overload the searcher with too much content and ideas. Make use of every character you’ve got, because you’ve only got 95 without the URLs.

Connect with your audience

Make sure your ad is relevant to the searchers query, match the terms the searcher has used as closely as you can.  Make sure you’re speaking the same language as your searcher, do all you can to connect to the searcher as quickly as you.

Make them want to click

Offer a clear, concise, simple benefit statement that’s going to appeal to the searcher, whether that be a value proposition of some sort or a 3rd party endorsement, or even your price. Think about the type of content that’s going to appeal to your customers.

Sell a solution, not a product.

Remember all that marketing spiel you read about customers only tuning into “WIIFM”, well it’s true. They don’t want to know about your product, they want to know how your product can help them. So tell them.

Write, write, write

The better you can target your ads the more you’re going to convert. Make them as personalised as possible to the searcher and make sure your content matches the search query in both the ad and the landing page content. Write as many ads as it takes to do this. You’ll be glad you did.

Test, test, test…

Not more writing? Well kind of yea.. See what ads work the best over a period of time, then write variations of that ad, then test, and then write variations of that ad until you’ve got a chest of beautiful ads that people can’t help but click.

I think that’s 2 minutes..

How To Write Great PPC Ads in 2 Minutes is a post from: Clear SEO's Internet Marketing Blog

How To Write Great PPC Ads in 2 Minutes is a post from: The SEO Specialist Blog

Small Business SEO Basics.

Keyword cannibalisation? What you talking about you might say? I’ve never heard of that. It’s something that doesn’t seem to get much airtime in SEO land, but it’s an extremely important aspects of your on site SEO activities. So what is it? Essentially it’s where you optimise multiple pages of your site with the exact same keywords. You with me?

Lets go back to the old adage that you should optimise your website page by page, rather than by site. Let me explain, I think a lot of small businesses who start their SEO miss this important step. It’s a simple concept in theory, but something that can easily get forgotten when you move into the stage of deciding what keywords you want to optimise for.  Each page should be optimised on it’s own merits. The content on that page should be different to any other page on your site, so you should be optimising for that specific content rather than the overall content of your site.

For example a photographer may choose to optimise his entire website for the term “photographer.” So said photographer goes out and plasters “photographer” all over every page of his site. He’s putting it in every page title, using it in his alt tags and as his anchor text in his internal linking. He might even request his external link anchor text to be “photographer” too. Sounds good right, so what’s the problem?

The problem is that when the search engine comes to index your page it’s going to think every page is exactly the same. It won’t think, wow this site is really super optimised for the term “photographer” send that man to the top of the rankings, but rather it’ll choose only 1 of your pages that best fits the search query. If it chooses the wrong option, your conversion chances drop considerably as the searcher is going to find content that isn’t directly relevant to their search.

So what should you be doing?

When optimising a site, I think you should optimise for 2 keyword phrases per page. The more keywords you optimise for per page, the more you’re dividing your options. You’ve only got a certain number of options to optimise on a page, so don’t waste these by trying to optimise for loads of terms, optimise for 1 or 2 phrases and make sure the content fits those phrases. This will give you the best chance to rank for those terms and give your site visitor the information he’s looking for.

So using Mr photographer as an example, lets say he is a wedding photographer, kids photographer and a fashion photographer. He should have 3 specific pages, 1 for each individual service. So on his wedding photographer page he is optimising for “wedding photographer” rather than just “photographer.” His “kids photographer” page should be optimised for “kids photographer” and so on. Each one of the individual pages should then be linked to the overall “photographer” page.  While the amendment may be minor it’s vital in letting the search engines figure out the content of the page so it can provide its searchers with information that they will find useful.

Are you eating into your search rankings with Keyword cannibalisation? is a post from: Clear SEO's Internet Marketing Blog

Are you eating into your search rankings with Keyword cannibalisation? is a post from: The SEO Specialist Blog

Search Engine Optimisation for small business can be a challenging experience for many reasons. Knowing where to start is sometimes the biggest hurdle. Understanding the core fundamentals, and the reasons behind why you’re starting a campaign can make things a lot clearer for you. I’m going to run down some of the first steps you should consider when planning out your SEO campaign.

How well do you know your business?

I think this is always a great place to start. Try and look at your business as if you were a customer and see if the products or services you offer are clear to any potential customers heading your way. The better you understand what you offer, the better your keyword research will be.

Keyword Research

I see a lot of people getting excited when they see 26,000 people supposedly searching for their products when using various keyword tools. Rarely is this actually the case, because while 26,000 people might be searching for, lets say “blue widgets” 17,000 might be looking for some information on them, 3,000 might be wondering who invented blue widgets, possibly leaving 6,000 actually looking to buy one. The more you understand your exact services and how people are really searching for them, the better you’ll be able to find real targeted traffic through your keyword research. The more specific you can be, the better results you’ll get.

On Site SEO

You can’t afford not to get this right. There are so many variables in SEO, many that you don’t have control over, so take advantage of the things you can control and get them right. Make sure your website is easy to index by search engines by using HTML, make sure you’re optimised for all of your on-site SEO relevant tags, and make sure you don’t have any duplicate content problems. There should be no excuse for not doing this.

Who is your competition and what are they doing?

SEO is always dependent on your competition. Older, larger sites are usually at an advantage, but that doesn’t mean you can’t overtake them in time. Take a look at their on page optimisation, see what they are doing, or missing if that’s the case. Do some SEO competitive analysis and take a look at their backlinks and see who is linking to them. Can you get those links too?

Links, links, links..

Links make the SEO world go round and there’s no real shortcut to getting good ones. Go back through your site content and see if it is valuable to your customers and is it worthy of other people linking to it? If not, try and think of information you could provide to your customers that would help in the sales process and that would be link worthy to other sites. The more informed and interesting the content, the better your chances are for you to start to pull in some great links.

The 5 Fundamentals of Small Business SEO Success. is a post from: Clear SEO's Internet Marketing Blog

The 5 Fundamentals of Small Business SEO Success. is a post from: The SEO Specialist Blog

So congratulations for finding my website and you get a further five points for finding my blog. If I was standing next to you, I’d offer you a drink. But seeing as I’m not, I’ll just carry on typing as you may be wondering what this blog is all about and who it’s intended for.

My blog is really an extension of the consulting information I give to my clients. My company is based around the idea of providing small business with simple, jargon-free advice so they can make informed decisions about how they choose to market themselves online. The majority of my clients are new to the world of SEO, PPC and definitely new to social media. A lot of what I do can revolve around explaining some key fundamentals and the basic tools they will need to learn to be competitive.

So a lot of what I may post will be based around these basic principles of SEO, PPC and social media. I hope it will serve as a valuable resource for a lot of small businesses taking their first steps in their online marketing.

I didn’t name my business Clear by accident. I hope that everything I offer to clients and blog about is explained in as clear terms as possible. I’ll do my best to be as practical as possible, hopefully offering tons of how to guides to hold your hand through the process until you’re ready to send me packing.

I look forward to the comments, debate, discussion and wonderful brilliance that I know you’ll  bring to the blog. So let’s get started…

What’s this all about then? is a post from: Clear SEO's Internet Marketing Blog

What’s this all about then? is a post from: The SEO Specialist Blog