1.Content and context.

When writing Blogs it is important that content is informative and comes across in the best possible way. Making your writing direct, informative and well structured will provide your Blog with a better reputation and keep readers more interested. This can produce better all round results and increase visitors’ brand awareness.

2.Use deep linking within your Blogs.

Deep links should be an area given a lot of attention when producing a Blog post. This will give you better results within the search engines, leading to a better reputation. Deep links will not only make a search engine look deeper but if done in the correct way will also increase your SERP’s.

3.Use keywords or phrases.

Researching and providing relevant keywords will give you the opportunity to compete within the specific market you are aiming at.

4.Keep posts regular.

Try to keep a schedule so regular posts are being made. Ideally once or twice a week, but if this isn’t possible do try to keep them updated with relevant content as often as you can.

5.Use marketing techniques for your Blog.

As there are more marketing strategies becoming available to us, you can also use some of the information you have put together for your Blog to build your reputation and increase traffic to your site, in the long term growing a larger business.

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There are two types of SEO to look at when trying to improve your site’s ranking and receive a higher importance in regards to the way search engines view you.

Firstly, there is on page SEO which is all the optimisation on the pages within your website.

On page SEO has some different areas to produce an all round finish. Some of these include:

• The way the pages within your website link to each other giving a simple searching technique when operating and looking through the site. If information on your site isn’t easy to find it could result in a potential customer losing interest and looking elsewhere with a competitor.
• Producing a good layout of informative content with relevant keywords will build a positive outcome for people browsing your site.

There is also off page SEO which consists of building links back to your website. There can be various ways of receiving these and will have a huge effect on your overall ranking within any search engine.

• Choosing the right links back to your website is largely dependent on the business you are in. The relevance of back links you choose will be highly important, as the aim is to target the audience within your area of business.
• These links can either be taken from writing articles or blogs. However links can also be submitted into directories or direct links can be received from another website.

Increasing your visibility online and receiving a high overall rank on the search engine results pages will deliver the results to keep growing your business further and really compete with other companies within your industry.

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Alison’s work:

Daniel our MD’s work:

The phrase “don’t give up your day job” springs to mind.

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If you would like to understand more about how social media can benefit your business contact us today.

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The use of the NOFOLLOW attribute on HREF elements is widespread and is often applied to blogs and other web resources that have largely user generated content. This makes sense as it discourages blog comment spamming and highly devalues the link. The nofollow attribute was introduced in 2005 and is now widely supported.

Use of the NOFOLLOW attribute on your own web site

Many people have used the NOFOLLOW attribute on their own sites to prevent passing link weight internally to pages that do not need to rank, for example a contact us page or privacy page.

<a href=”contact.php” rel=”NOFOLLOW“>Contact</a>

This can also be applied globally to a page by using the following code which means no links on the entry page are followed by Google.

<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow“>

Whilst this technique has been widely employed my personal opinion has always been “If you can’t vouch for the content on your own site, what does that say about the quality of your site?”.

After seeing several examples of high ranking sites employing this technique and reading what Google and Matt Cutts had to say I thought I would revisit the situation.

Matt Cutts wrote an article on Page Rank Sculpting that explicitly states that NOFOLLOW links do not pass Page Rank (PR) or any link weight to the page that is being linked to.

“Nofollow links definitely don’t pass PageRank. Over the years, I’ve seen a few corner cases where a nofollow link did pass anchortext, normally due to bugs in indexing that we then fixed. The essential thing you need to know is that nofollow links don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results.” – Matt Cutts, Google Engineer, on Page Rank Sculpting.

What this means is that you can use the NOFOLLOW attribute on your own site to prevent links passing PR to unwanted pages and therefore retaining more PR for the pages that you do want to rank. Google’s SEO Guidelines also discuss the correct use of the NOFOLLOW attribute however they stop short of discussing the use of it to pages on your own site.

There have been lots of controversial forum posts and articles on NOFOLLOW for PR Sculpting but after much deliberation I feel that today, it is an acceptable technique to use.

NB: The use of the NOFOLLOW attribute does not prevent a page from being indexed, it merely prevents any link weight from being passed through the link.

Useful Resources

• http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/- Page Rank Sculpting by Matt Cutts
• http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf – Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

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This is something that we’ve just spotted here at Ikroh, and it definitely caught our eye in the Search Engine Results Page, so we wondered what everyone else thought. What had we spotted? A star in the search listings! Adding &#9733 into your meta description inserts an eye-catching ★, which won’t affect your position in the SERPs, but will it make it a more eye-catching result? Another symbol you can add is &#9658 which results in an arrow.

Are these symbols worthwhile, or do they look spammy to potential visitors? Do they display all the time or in every browser? It’s something we will be thinking about as we write our meta descriptions for our upcoming site update, as obviously we all want our listing to be the one that stands out & is clicked by searchers.

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Ikroh SEO have just launched a solution just for you – SUO AdWords. Designed to suit smaller businesses and start up companies, who never know what’s round the next corner, SUO AdWords doesn’t tie you in to a contract and doesn’t have a minimum spend on Google.

Reach A Targeted Audience Of Visitors Looking For Your Products

It’s all very well having a website, but if it’s not working for you, it’s wasting money. You may even be getting visitors, but how many are sticking around and becoming customers? A Google AdWords campaign can deliver visitors to your website who are actively searching for your product or service. This means they are already half way to becoming customers!

Leave It To Us

Ikroh SEO will;

• offer advice on realistic budgets
• help with keyword choice
• continually monitor your keywords, adding new ones and removing ones that aren’t performing
• keep you up-to-date with monthly reports

This new solution is available from as little as £195 plus VAT. For more information click here, or call us on 01908 379938.

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Many smaller companies make the mistake of focussing intensively on their website while it is being designed and set up, only to practically ignore it for months or years until they decide it needs updating. Larger or more internet-savvy companies, will be constantly analysing the performance of their website to ensure it is ‘earning its keep’.

We always consider a website a work in progress – it should be continually evolving with fresh content as well as being marketed on other sites to gather new traffic. A good website is a business tool like any other which needs to be bringing in new visitors and converting them to sales, and it can’t do this unless it’s up-to-date.

Of course, the larger companies will have a dedicated department, or team, who can concentrate on the website, write new content, design pay per click campaigns and comment on other people’s blogs. Smaller companies may feel they have neither the time nor the manpower for this kind of effort. However, when you consider the website is a sales tool which should be increasing your revenue, you will probably decide it’s worth the minimal effort needed to keep it actively earning you money.

So what should you be focussing on? It does depend how much time you can give to the project, but as a guideline, you should spend most of your time adding original content (adding a blog to your website is the easiest way to do this) and then binging Google to let them know your website has new content. Content that is interesting and thought-provoking will encourage people to bookmark the page on a social bookmarking site, and if you manage to write about something slightly controversial, you could have loads of people talking about (and linking back to) your blog.

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As far as Google AdWords is concerned, a click happens when someone sees your Pay per Click ad and clicks on it. An impression occurs when someone enters one of your search terms into the search engine, and your ad appears.

This difference is crucial as you aren’t charged for an impression, even though the person searching the internet may have seen the ad. You are only charged for actual clicks. If you are targeting the right keywords, and your advert is correctly worded leaving potential visitors in no doubt about what you offer, this means that you can be sure the people clicking through to your site are interested in your product or service. You already know they were searching for one of your keywords, and as your ad explains it further, effectively your site has less work to do to convert that visitor to a customer.

Even though you only pay for each click through (Cost Per Click), it is important to keep track of the number of impressions, as well as the number of clicks. If you have a consistently high number of impressions with a low number of clicks, you may need to rethink the wording or placement of your ads. Adjusting the time of day it appears, specifying a longer keyphrase, or rewording your ads can help boost the click to impression ratio.

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The first step is to analyse your business and determine what your busiest times of year are. For some businesses it will be immediately obvious which are the busiest times of year – companies that sell gifts or balloons can generally guarantee that their market will sky rocket each time the Christmas party season arrives. For other companies, it may be more subtle, but most industries will have peak times, so it’s worth being thorough in your analysis. Even companies that think they know when their peak times are should still spend some time doing this, as they may discover an untapped peak – for example, perhaps a certain holiday is gaining in popularity year on year and a bit of advertising at the right time may help you tap into it. For many businesses, peak times may be governed by their principle customers – for example, if your main customer’s financial year runs from January to December, then January will probably be a peak time for you.

Once you have this information at your fingertips you can maximise the amount of search traffic that is driven to your website at this time by allocating the right budgets to each Pay Per Click campaign. This can have a massive impact on your bottom line, by giving you a larger share of the peak season market. Forward planning is critical here – you need to know when your peak seasons are ahead of time so you can set the right budgets. If you wait until you’re in the middle of a peak, the chances are it will be too late and your competitors will have snatched the largest market share.

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So what’s the solution? If the page no longer exists you just need to add a 301 redirect which will direct the visitor to your home page instead. Normally this page is named “index.html”. If you have replaced the dead page with a new page which falls under a different URL, then just add a 301 redirect leading the visitor straight to this page. If you don’t know how to add a 301 redirect, your web developer will or you can contact us.

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I think it’s great for business to be able to put out news items, questions, or just random thoughts, and have real time feedback. It opens the channels for communication between a company and its clients, potential clients, and other companies it associates with. Anything that gets us all talking has got to be a good thing!

We’re now wondering where Twitter will go from here? Currently, Twitter themselves have admitted they aren’t making a profit from the service. They describe themselves as in a research phase during which they are working ‘to create a compelling service and great user experience for millions of people around the world’. This is very commendable, but they have also acknowledged that the service does offer ‘many appealing opportunities for generating revenue’, so presumably, once they have a sufficient number of users they will begin to implement some of those opportunities.

Another social networking service, Facebook have moved into paid advertising and are building that up quite rapidly, so perhaps that will be the next big thing for Twitter. After all, in this economic climate, revenue has to be maximised, and Facebook users don’t seem to have been bothered by the adverts running down the side of their screens, so the chances are that people who Tweet won’t mind either…especially if it’s either Twitter with ads or paying for Twitter.

Ikroh SEO

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1. Identify the words the will bring you traffic

Just because a word or phrase is related to your business doesn’t automatically mean it is one you should choose for your Adwords campaign. The best keywords are ones which balance popularity with cost while remaining relevant to your company.

2. Content comes straight to the point

You only have a limited number of characters to sell yourself in – make them all count. You should try to mention your product or service in the title line as this is the one that will be underlined, so the visitor’s eye is already drawn to it.

3. Before starting ask yourself, “What am I trying to accomplish with this campaign?”

As in any marketing campaign, you need to understand your goals and know who it is that you are trying to target. With that information you can focus on the key phrases they are more likely to search for, at the times they are likely to be online, and word your ads to appeal better to them.

4. Including a call to action

All marketing copy needs a call to action, and an AdWords ad is no different, you just have less space to put it. Even something as simple as ‘Click here to buy now’ tells the potential visitor that they should (a) click, and (b) do it now!

5. Give multiple ways to respond

On your landing page have the option if appropriate to email or telephone you or fill in a contact form. Giving your visitors more than one choice makes it more likely that they will pick at least one!

6. Testimonials are proven to increase conversations by up to 29%

Adding testimonials to your landing page increases buyer conference as it is a vivid demonstration that you already have client’s who trust you.

7. Track results through an analytics package

You should continue to tweak your Adwords campaign so it continues to perform, but without knowing how it is performing NOW, you won’t know how it needs tweaking. An analytics package will provide the information you need.

8. Split Test Your Ad Copy

Look at having different adverts serving the same keyword to see to gauge which has the highest click through rate. You can then ditch the lowest performing ad and replace it with another in a slightly different style. Continually tweaking like this will ensure your ads are as effective as possible

9. Make sure you differentiate your business to others

With several other ads on the same page, you need to make yours stand out. Think about what makes you different, and see if you can make that clear in your ad.

10. Get someone else to do tips 1 – 9 for you!

Yes I know I said there would be 9 tips, but the easiest way to do all of this is to give us a call and we can manage your pay per click campaign for you, and ensure that your landing pages are effective.

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Over the past year we have seen a large increase in clients utilising Facebook’s ad space. So the big question is when will Google look at trying to obtain shares again? Microsoft currently have an interest of 1.6 per cent stake which sounds small but when you consider the company has an estimated value of $3 billion, it sounds like more of a good deal….

Moving forward we can see Facebook becoming a strong alliance for search companies like us to help our clients generate new business opportunities. It’s certainly one we’ll be keeping our eye on.

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We are told that it finds more relevant UK-focused results. The ability to preview the web page before you actually click through should speed up the process of finding the right page, and you may not have to even take the time to type the whole of your search query – after the first few letters Bing will make some suggestions for you. Some of the features are less practical, but make it more of a search experience than other search engines. For example, there’s a new image on the homepage every day. Will it affect your search results? No! But it is a little more exciting than seeing the same page all the time.

www.bing.com has a user friendly interface, and many of the features seem instinctive, and…well…obvious! Being able to see a possible list of related searches, or flick easily to other categories such as image results, is helpful. And the infinite image scroll is just inspired. Whoever thought we wanted to click on to page 1 of 72, 2 of 72, 3 of 72….? You can even  narrow the choice of images by specifying the size, layout, colour, style, & if there are people in the shot, how much of them you want (head and shoulders or just faces).

The most exciting thing about Bing is that it’s evolving fast. It’s still in Beta testing, so new search features will be introduced to improve the user experience even more.

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TopSEOs looks into many aspects of each SEO company before making its selection. Their evaluation process looks at a company’s knowledge of SEO and the overall customer experience, as well as things that are important for potential clients to consider when choosing an SEO company such as the return on investment.

As a smaller, younger company than many of the others in the top 30, we are proud to see that we are successfully competing with the big UK SEO firms. You can rest assured that we will continue to work hard to drive traffic to all our client’s websites, and increase their return on investment.

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OK…so maybe I should expand on that! A common error when managing your own Google Adwords campaign (or any other pay per click campaign) is to set it up and then forget about it. So when you get round to updating your website, you completely forget to check whether or not you are killing off any links attached to active campaigns.

What does this mean in real terms? Well, potential clients are searching for your chosen key terms, they see your PPC ad and click on it…but they get taken to a blank page (a 404 error page to be precise). However, you have still paid for that click. And when this happens, your potential customer doesn’t then find your home page and look for the information they wanted…they click back to the rankings page and click on someone else’s link. Essentially, you end up paying for the privilege of losing a customer!

It is easy to avoid this unnecessary cost and missed sale – your web designer just needs to put a 301 redirect in place whenever they change the address of a page. This means that although the PPC ad link still goes to the original address, the potential customer is then automatically sent to the new address. If your web designer neglects to do this and you’re not sure which pages have had their addresses changed, you’re in for the long haul! You need to go through each pay per click advert in Google Adwords Manager and click on the link to check it’s still active. This may take a while, but it’s better than paying for clicks that don’t earn you anything.

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A UK SEO company will still help take your brand global while also offering a multitude of benefits that only come from being based in the same market as you. By having a better understanding of the market you are working in a UK based company will be able to understand your needs better and tailor your web marketing strategy to suit you. And if that means optimising your site, and running PPC campaigns for foreign markets also, then that’s fine…but a UK based company will appreciate that you are coming at it from a UK perspective.

Not all UK SEO companies are equal

So you’ve decided to go ahead and choose a UK based SEO company…there’s lots of them, so it should be simple, right?…wrong! Actually a surprising number of UK based companies outsource a proportion of their SEO work to other countries, so you may still find that the people working on your site lack a detailed knowledge of the UK market. Be sure to check with the company you choose whether or not they outsource.

SEO Copywriting – not the place for cutting corners

While it can be argued that for certain aspects of SEO it doesn’t matter too much if they are outsourced to another country, copywriting is not one of them. SEO copywriting needs to be carefully thought out, and the last thing you want is your company image tarnished by poor copy on your website. Obviously you shouldn’t automatically assume that the copy won’t be as good just because a company outsources their SEO copywriting. However it is very difficult to write without to a certain extent drawing on your cultural experiences, and if you are drawing on similar experiences to the majority of your readers (or visitors), then this will resonate with them and helps them begin to relate to your company.

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Drive More Traffic To Your Website

ROI is discussed a lot in business, especially when it comes to marketing your services or products as everyone wants to spend their money wisely to achieve a high Return On Investment. This is where Pay Per Click and SEO solutions come in to their own by driving more traffic to your website, which in turn converts to a sale, enquiry or telephone call. As a business owner if you haven’t looked at either of these options you are missing a trick…and it’s highly probable that your competitors are making the most of your absence. Taking advantage of Pay Per Click and SEO solutions to maximise your business potential is a shrewd investment of your marketing budget, particularly nowadays when everyone is researching every purchase more thoroughly, often using the internet.

Only A Small Portion of Your Profits – a Breakdown of the Real Costs

Many people worry about spending money on SEO as it doesn’t give an instant ROI in the same way that offline marketing is thought to, and can seem expensive to begin with. But is it really expensive? No! Let’s imagine your site gets 100 visitors a day, 20% of whom convert and spend an average of £20 each, then you’re making £400 a day, or £12000 a month. If you’re spending £500 a month on SEO then that’s only about 4% of your profits. And that’s just as things stand now…the whole point of SEO is to increase the number of visitors to your site AND the number of conversions, and this increase should continue to grow on a monthly basis. Yes it does take a little while for all the changes to take effect, but once they do , the number of conversions you get per month should continually increase…but the cost of the SEO stays the same, so as the months go on you are spending less of your profits. The eventual Return On Investment renders the initial & ongoing costs of SEO insignificant.

SEO – Marketing For The Modern Businessman

I think it’s safe to say that most businessmen will have heard the old adage that you have to spend money to make money. The internet is a case in point, and no doubt you’ve already spent money having your website designed for you. If you don’t also spend money to ensure your site is optimised, it’s a bit like opening a shop on a little back street no one walks down, and not telling anyone it’s there! Once you starting telling the world (or the search engines) about your website, your visitor’s increase in number and become customers, SEO proves it is worth the investment. As long as you can honestly say that people would choose to buy from you if only they knew about your company and your products or services, then it is worth allocating part of your marketing budget to SEO. Search Engine Optimisation may seem new and scary, but in fact it is simply a modern form of marketing for the internet age.

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The ‘sponsored listings’ that appear at the top of the search engines are actually Pay Per Click (PPC) advertisements. They are basically a very targeted form of advertising as they are only seen by people actually searching for your products or services. These advertisements are a quick way to get your brand to the top of the search engines while you are waiting for your search engine marketing campaign to have an effect.

But perhaps you’ve survived for this long without significant search engine presence, so do you really need to set up a Pay Per Click campaign in the interim? Why can’t you just wait until the search engine optimisation of your website does its job?

Well, you can. Assuming everything else stays the same your business will just tread water until the SEO starts having an effect. Unfortunately things don’t stay the same in business, and in these days of economic slowdown you can guarantee all your competitors will be fighting for a share of your industry’s customers. It’s always worth checking where your main competitors are on Google, as well as yourself. If they appear before you, you’re already at a disadvantage; can you really afford to wait for the SEO to work? A Pay Per Click campaign can boost your visibility almost instantly, and with careful keyword selection and a well worded advert, you can ensure that a higher proportion of people clicking on your ad convert. With a high conversion rate, a Pay per Click campaign can pay for itself in no time!

What if you already appear high in the search engine rankings pages? Why would you need any PPC ads? Now we are firmly in the age of the internet, no doubt the first place you choose to tell your customers about any special offers is your website. But what about the millions of people who want to buy your product/service but don’t visit your site? How do you tell the world at large that you have a special deal on? With most limited time offers, there won’t be enough time for any SEO work to have a great deal of impact, but a Pay Per Click campaign can tell anyone who’s searching for your products that you are the company to buy from and the time to buy is now.

Whenever you need immediate visibility and instant results on Google, a Pay per Click campaign ticks all the right boxes. It’s quick to set up and it’s quick to deliver results.

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