Why is it a great advertising medium?
Google AdWords is a highly effective advertising method due to 3 key reasons: it has a global reach, it is highly targeted and it allows you to accurately track your advertising campaigns. Google AdWords offers a variety of different charging models including cost per click (CPC), where you only pay when your ad is clicked on and cost per mille (CPM) where you pay per thousand impressions. You are able to set the cost of the advert by entering your maximum bid and therefore it is available to the smallest companies all the way through to the largest companies.

Which network is better?
Which Google AdWords network is better for you all depends on what your advertising objectives are. The search network is more suitable if you want to run a direct response campaign because users are specifically searching for your product or service and therefore you are fulfilling a demand. The Google display network is more suitable if you want to run a brand awareness campaign because your ads run on targeted sites that are related to your product or service. As you can you image and video ads, they are ideal for generating demand.

The display network is also a great way of increasing conversion rates through its remarketing tool. Remarketing is where advertisers’ ads are shown to users once they have visited the advertisers’ sites. The user is more likely to buy from you if they see your ad afterwards or you can use the remarketing tools to advertise new products lines particular offers.

The search network tends to deliver better returns on investment and therefore it is recommended to begin with the search network. To gain the best results though, you will utilise both networks. This will ensure a good return on investment and great brand exposure.

Getting to the top of the major search engines is an effective method of generating business. With this said though, you must generate more than you spend to make it worthwhile. Typically, local SEO campaigns will generate less revenue than national campaigns but they also cost much less as the work required is substantially lower.

Understand search volumes

It is important that you understand the amount of traffic that you are likely to receive by being at the top of Google for particular search terms. Google’s keyword tool is a useful tool for understanding search volumes and it also gives an indication of the competitiveness of each keyword. When looking at the search volumes though, bear in mind that the number 1 listing in Google will probably on achieve 50% of the search traffic.

What’s the difference between white hat and black hat SEO?

Google believes that white hat SEO is where you write great content and people link to your site because of it. The theory is, if your site has great content, people will want to link to your site. This sounds great in theory but doesn’t work in practise. Obviously, if you do not appear anywhere in the search engines, no-one will find your site and thus no-one will link to it. As such, as far as Google is concerned, most SEO is deemed as black hat.

In the SEO industry though, white hat is manual link building and black hat is automated link building. As white hat SEO is manual link building, the quality of links is generally much higher but it is also much more expensive. Grey hat SEO is a mixture of both white hat and black hat SEO.

It is recommended to always hire a white hat SEO firm as you are less likely to get penalised by the search engines.

Get quotes

Most SEO agencies offer free quotations. The best way of gauging the cost of SEO is to get a number of quotations. Make sure though that the quotations target the same keywords though otherwise it will not be a fair comparison. Also make sure that you understand the work that is going to be done to understand whether the agency will deliver on their quotation.

How do I know if my website’s functionality is effecting conversion rates?

In an ideal world, your site will go through a thorough testing process. This however is not always possible and even when it is, websites can always be improved. You therefore need to track users to see which pages are performing well and which need improving. You can analyse pages effectiveness with most analysis software. Google analytics is particularly good as it allows you to set up a filter system to track the progression of visitors towards your conversion measure. If you find that a large percentage of users are ‘bouncing’ at a particular stage in the filter, you can modify the page and analyse the difference.

Do Load times affect Search Engine Listings?

Since early 2011, webpage load times are a factor when determining search engine rankings. This though is a relatively small factor though. Given that load times have an big influence on user experience and thus will effect bounce rates, it is important that your website loads quickly.

What is the ideal web page load time?

The page load time standard is considered to be 2 seconds. You should aim to get all of your web page load times below 2 seconds which will improve user experience.

Title Tags

The Title tag is displayed at the top of your ad in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and can be used to encourage searchers to click on your link. They play a crucial role in search engine optimisation and are one of the main factors in on-page SEO. The Page titles are situated at the top of the page and are generally the first bit of text that the search engines find acting as a ‘first impression’ to the search engines where they evaluate the importance of the page based on the presence of keywords.

Description Tags

The meta description tags give a short and concise summary of the web page content. The description tag is often used in the search engine results pages below the title tag and describe the page. A good description tag will be under 160 characters so that it all displays and summarises the web page. It is a good idea to include keywords where applicable to encourage click through rate (CTR) as these will be show up in bold.

Keyword meta tags

The importance of this is very low. People who are new to search engine optimisation tend to obsess over keyword meta tags but many search engines do not consider them at all as they are easily manipulated. They are still however worth putting in for the few search engines that are still use them.

Robot tags

The meta robot tag allows you to specify whether a page is indexed or not. This can either be “follow” for sites that you wish to be indexed or “nofollow” for sites that you do not want indexing. For most sites, all pages should allow robots to index the sites content. The more good quality content available, the greater the likelihood of your site ranking highly in the SERPs. Only pages that you do not want to be indexed should contain “nofollow” tags.

Most search engines support the meta robot tags though it is a good idea to also include a robots.txt file too.

Other meta tags

There are many other Meta tags such as “author” and “date”. These have no effect on search engine crawlers and are designed for internal indexing of websites. Author rank may become important in the future so this meta tag may become more popular.

Methods of seeding websites quickly developed with many businesses striving purely to increase site traffic with the belief that more site traffic equals more sales; whereas search engines aim to provide the most relevant sites to a users search. Effective search engine optimisation is improving site traffic for relevant searches only thus ensuring conversion rates are high and bounce rates are low. This will improve sales and keep search engines happy.

In the early days SEO companies had huge success by have keywords in the URLS, page titles, and meta tags with the search engines believing the indicators would return correctly seeded results.

Search engine algorithms progressed and keyword densities and inbound traffic became important. The idea being that a site with repeating keywords and a popular site will return more relevant search result. As this method became abused, so the search engine algorithms evolved and became extremely sophisticated. Search engines now use over 200 factors to determine page ranking. The main factor being back links.

Successful SEO is achieved by have on onsite SEO and a great, natural looking back link profile. Links should come from authoritative sites, be relevant and be diverse. They should also have a diverse anchor text and have a high number of partial match anchor texts vs. exact match anchor text.

Search engine optimisation is a highly competitive industry and in order to be successful you must be ahead of your competitors. Link popularity has the means to make or break your SEO campaign. A site must offer good quality, relevant content to act as link bait to encourage other sites to link to your site otherwise sites with genuine authority are unlikely to deem your site worthy of a back link as it is there reputation at stake associating themselves with you.

Link building is a virtuous circle, the higher your search engine ranking, the more sites will link to you.
Website content is obviously key, however if the search engine can’t find your content, your site will not rank well. Links act as portals for the web-based crawlers to travel through, the fewer back links, the less likely the search engine robots will find your website.

Relevance

Search engines search for relevance to a searchers query. Make sure that the sites that link to your site are relevant otherwise search engines may think your links are spammy. Google Panda was designed to penalise sites that have a lot of spammy links.

Authority

The best links are those that come from authority sites. The higher the authority, the more the link is worth. Not only does high authority links reduce the number of links that you have to build but they are also much safer. A site with a lot of low quality links looks very spammy and risks getting penalised.

Links must look natural

Google believes that building links is unethical and thinks that if you write good quality content, sites will automatically link to you. While link bait is great and definitely the best way of building links, link bait is not always possible and therefore you have to build links in other ways. When doing this though, you must ensure that you link profile looks natural.

Companies cannot afford to have a low search engine ranking and this is why search engine optimisation or SEO is important. SEO is the modification of internal and external aspects of websites to achieve a top search engine ranking for specific keywords. SEO is widely accepted as having massive economic benefits. 21 billion web pages battle for search engine supremacy.

Search engine ranking

It is important for your web site to be seeded highly in the major search engines. The higher your search engine ranking for relevant keywords and phrases, the more visitors your site will have and, presuming a good conversion rate, the more sales you will receive. Achieving a search engine ranking in Google is not simple; there are over 200 factors that determine search rankings.

Have you started SEO on your website?

Most people know that a search engine provides users with relevant search results to their search queries, however not everyone understands how search engines do this. Below details how Google delivers their search results.

1. The web server sends the query to the index servers. The content inside the index servers is similar to the index in the back of a book – it tells which pages contain the words that match the query.

2. The query travels to the doc servers, which actually retrieve the stored documents. Snippets are generated to describe each search result.

3. The search results are returned to the user in a fraction of a second.

Why good quality page content is necessary

The better your content is, the more likely people will want to read it. In terms of search engine optimisation, the best content is new, up to date, unique content. The content has to be easy to read, portraying the key content quickly and concisely providing the user with the information they are looking for and selling the product or service offered. Users tend to be impatient; unless they are provided with the information they are looking for immediately, they are likely to ‘bounce’ and potentially go to a competitor’s site. It is paramount that once you have got a potential customer to your website, you keep them there with quality content so that they convert into a sale.

The content should target specific keywords

Relevance is very important and therefore it is vital to have quality content that is specific to the keywords that you are going to target. This will help to ensure low bounce rates and great conversion rates. Search engines are very hot on spam these days too so having relevant pages is essential.

Quality Content Increases inbound links

Your content is in effect link bait. If your site has good quality content, other sites are more likely to link to your site and thus increasing the number of inbound links to your site. Search engines see inbound links as votes; the more links you have the better your site is likely to be and therefore you will rank higher in the search engines. Any technique to encourage links should be utilised if you intend on being at the top of the major search engines.

The balance between text and images in website content

The balance between text and images is dependent upon the site in question. E-commerce and flash sites tend to have image dominant content opposed to static sites. These sites look great and offer a great user experience however they are not search engine friendly. They are now becoming search engine friendly with Google now indexing flash sites and image rich sites through alternate text tags, though they are still much harder to gain high rankings compared to static html sites.

There are many SEO methods to improve the ranking of image rich sites though where possible content should be encouraged as search engine crawlers can only read text.