Over the past few months we have had team members, both internally and external contractors join the team as we weigh up if they match up to our exacting standards to deliver SEO excellence we offer to our clients within the industry. We feel it is important that you all know that the work on your campaigns is not carried out by a single person and it is a team effort to ensure we give you the best quality service you deserve. Unfortunately in the past few months we have had an external contractor that hasn’t delivered in the way that we had hoped and we have taken the appropriate action to ensure that this individual is no longer part of our valid team.

With this in mind I feel as the head of the team it is important to introduce the pivotal members of our team who work in house on all our campaigns and websites so you get to know them over the coming months as your website campaigns bring you new business.

For those of you who have had a website developed by ourselves you will have met the amazing Louise who is by far the calmest and most sane person in the office, and yes that is saying something. Louise has a degree in graphic design and develops our websites in WordPress working alongside myself making sure that the sites are user friendly and pretty at the same time.

New to the team (well the office team anyway) is Peter who is our new Operations Director and charged not only with some of the day to day running of the SEO campaigns but also with the ongoing running of the company. Having run his own business for the past 6 years he is more than qualified to make sure you are all well looked after and kept fully up to date on what is happing on your campaigns.

We are confident that the team we have is one of the best and our level of service will continue to improved and we can give you all the confidence that your website is in safe hands from both a design and SEO point of view. I will ensure going forward that team members deliver and that the blip of the past few months will never happen again.

I would like to thank everyone for coming along I really hope that you found it all helpful and I hope to see you all again very soon.

I get it! Honestly I do, I completely understand your annoyance and your frustrations at the whole situation of what is happening with a certain high street chain store and a few of the designers that have supplied them with products. But for the love of small fluffy animals you are digging your own online grave!!!! Now before you all go getting your something blue in a knot hear me out!

A massive part of the whole SEO thing is to build the reputation of your site, which means getting mentioned in lots of places that are relevant to your brand and what you are trying to sell. So over the past 24 hours all of the major organisations, major blogs, major designer labels and social media networks have been ALIVE with people talking about the brand that you are all so desperate to see go into bridal demise!

I hear screams of “What the hell are you talking about geek boy?” have you ever heard the phrase “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about!” (Oscar Wilde)? Well that works in the same way for social media and SEO. Although updates have stopped the Google algorithm stopping what was known as “Google bombs” (following the White House coming top for “miserable failure” during the George W Bush administration), it is still possible to get ranked quickly for tough terms with a lot of publicity, good or bad!

So below is an indication on how the brand in question has gained a huge amount of brand mentions in the past few days:

As you can see it is a fairly huge leap forward for them without actually doing anything to promote their new project! You the bridal industry is helping push this forward for them and making sure that your websites get outranked by the high street discount retail store.

This isn’t rocket science, every Tweet, Facebook post and blog post that you put out has a positive effect on them and a negative effect on your own website. I’m not saying stop it I am saying be careful about continuously mentioning the brand that you are looking to show your feelings for and think about how you can turn it into a positive for your businesses! I know not easy and your fuming at the moment but I honestly believe you will be more fuming when you are sat checking your Google Rankings and you suddenly see that you are out ranked by them because you have given them so much online publicity!

So as I sit here watching the snow fall with a hot cup of tea, my advice to my friends in the industry who have been so horribly upset by this whole situation is to find a happy nickname for this brand to vent at because they are rubbing their hands together at the fact that you are promoting their new project for them. And if you don’t want to do that then spend the effort and energy into promoting your own brand cause long term you will benefit!

And for those designers and suppliers looking to offload old stock, I completely agree with Rachel Southwood at Wedding Ideas Magazine that they should be looking to support charities and organisations such as The Wedding Wishing Well Foundation  to help those that need the help!

Lots of Love!

Steve

In my last post (http://www.ukweddingseo.co.uk/seo-in-2013/) I pointed out that a good social media footprint was essential for making an impact in the search engines these days. And I find myself a few days later wondering what some people actually think social means? Below we look at the difference between social and antisocial media.

I hear time and time again “I don’t understand social media and how it can help me?” it is normally about the same time they say “I don’t get many visits to my website.” I normally then go on to explain how the important side of social media is the word “social”. What do I mean? OK let me explain the difference between success in social media and making people fed up with your brand.

What not to do!

You get an offer from someone that wants desperately to sell you their services as a Social Media Manager. You say “Hell Yeah here are all my logins for Social Media!” and then let them get on with it. Then you end up with a whole bunch of messages going out to your followers that have ZERO interaction with your audience and the number of Spam accounts that follow you on Twitter goes up, as well as the number of people who “hide” your posts on Facebook. (yes people really do that when they don’t want to see your spammy rubbish in their feed)!

So that is the what not to do, basically where people just put their message out over and over and over again and don’t give you any real value, you know the ones. That automated software that says “In 4 hours time tweet this message” then when it has tweeted and you are in the bath or out walking the dog for a few hours and someone says “Hey I was asking that just the other day do you know xyz?” You don’t answer till the next day and in the mean time they have the answer from your competitor.

What you should do!

You get an offer from someone that wants desperately to sell you their services as a Social Media Manager. Understanding that the word SOCIAL means that you talk to people you respectfully decline their offer and decide that you are going to interact with your SOCIAL media audience.

Then you search through people who are asking questions about your business, products and even just help and advice on how your products can improve their lives. Once you have found the people offer help and advice to them. Once you have done this you build up this really strange thing called Trust.

While building trust you are also building what I like to refer to as the “Recommendation Engine” where once you have helped them they will recommend you to others. This builds your social following slowly but surely and you benefit from having loyal and happy followers that you interact with and they spread the word for you about your business, which also helps you get good reviews and citations and this helps build rank.

“WAIT” I hear you cry! “Surely the more I post the more people see it? Ummmm ok lets take a look at how that all works. To your right is an example of how the Facebook spam thing works, notice the posts don’t look natural and there is absolutely no interaction what so ever? Well that is because there is no real value in these posts they are just tweets where both Facebook and Twitter are getting the same message.

Sure enough……over on Twitter (strangely enough) the same posts with no interaction so looking at this we conclude this page of tweets was in fact a complete waste of time and effort. Or do we……. well looking at the analytics……Well a grand total of 9 website visits from all that work on social media. Also of those visits 33% left the site immediately.

There was also another downside to this. Where this site was doing well in gaining pace on its competitors for two major keyphrases that would bring in bucket loads of traffic, this little exercise has zapped those placings from the 2nd page of Google down to the 7th in under 48 hours! There are some good skills in that if you want your site to vanish over night.

So in conclusion if you are going to do social media, and you want to gain from the work that you do on sites like Twitter and Facebook, please do it right cause the wrong way will just make you look like you are spamming people and that will get you blocked and destroy your social signals. Do it properly or don’t bother!

For those of you that follow me on Twitter, you will know that over the past few months I have been sharing a lot of valuable content from some of the top SEO websites in the World in order to give you an insight into the wonders of SEO for 2013. I can tell you now there are literally thousands of people putting out posts making predictions on the next voodoo that will work with regards to the search engines, and I can guarantee you that most of them are now (after nearly six years of us working it out in the first place) singing from the same song sheet.

Before I go off into the few things that I know you will all say “Hang on a minute he told us that before!” to, let me just tell you that SEO is becoming more time consuming for all those involved, in many cases what took a few hours each month on some sites can now mean that it will take twice as long to make the same impact. Why? Well it takes longer to get good solid results that don’t get you banished from the Google results these days. A few of my clients suffered in the past year losing top rankings for good keywords based on old techniques that had been used to get them there in the first place (not our work I hasten to add). And it takes time and a lot of effort to combat the bad work that has done prior to the good work going in. So it is important that you get the strategy right and think about what you are doing in order to make your SEO campaign work for you.

1. Good quality content! Yep that old chestnut. Back in 2007 I was on a seminar with Andy Jenkins (of Video Boss and Stompernet Fame) and he said way back then “Good quality content will be the winner every single time” And seeing his old Medieval Weapon shop STILL ranking well after all this time, well it just goes to show he is right. Stop thinking “How many words?” start thinking “Someone has to read this, make sense of it, like it and want to come back for more!” Then you might be on the right track to what good quality is. If you wouldn’t read it….don’t expect others to.

2. Brand! Yep all the good quality in the world means nothing without a good solid brand behind it. The best brand, especially with smaller businesses is YOU! Get out from behind that damn logo and have a face and a voice and you will be better off. People will trust you more, people will give you more respect as they will know who they are talking to and most of all you will gain authority and in gaining authority you gain in rank as the popularity of your site and your business grows. YAY! Oh and if you have a problem with social media, well just put that computer back into the box it came in, give your iPad to a family member and buy yourself a ticket to go live in the jungles of south America. You need to be out talking to people, and I mean real people not just blasting your message out every day that is boring but talk to those that comment and if they aren’t commenting then comment on their stuff! To not do it is to have no voice and go back to the field of dreams method of marketing. If you build it they will not come they will not find you unless you tell them you are there!

3. Articles need to have better content uses but that doesn’t mean you fluff up what you are writing about, it means that you write more in depth about the subject. Don’t want to give away too many secrets? Get a grip. If Edison had kept the lightbulb a secret cause he thought someone might nick his idea then we would all be sat in the dark or using Teslar’s light bulb. If you want to be a success and you want to be a leader of your industry rather than a follower then get word out and get people talking about what you are doing. And if you are worried what people will say about your ideas, well you will never please everyone and criticism is good for developing good ideas into really really good ideas. Get your content out there on your website (that means blogging to those of you that don’t want to blog).

4. I’ve lost count of the number of times in the past 4 years I have used the phrase “Social Media Footprint” and people say “That doesn’t have any effect on what ranks or where it ranks, does it?” Well yeah it does, and over the next 12 months it will become even more important. Think of it logically Google have incorporated their local pages within their own social network, Google+, so with that in mind people will land on a Google+ business page every time they go to a local listing or write a review in Google+. You might also have seen these search results that have the image of the person who has written the content next to them? Guess where they come from…. yep it gets picked up from a Google+ profile of the author of the content. It is also important that your social signals (these are the posts you put out) have interaction with REAL PEOPLE on the networks that you write them on as well as not putting the same share text on each social media website. For example Facebook gets one description, Twitter another, Google+ another and LinkedIn another. This method gives you diversity in your sharing and increases the social footprint.

5. Broken record time….Video, Audio, Images and text is needed to give your site a good base for what you are doing. Video isn’t as expensive as people make out, everyone carries a HD video camera around with them in the form of a mobile phone and if you are worried about the quality if you hunt around and talk to friendly videographers then you will find a professional video isn’t as expensive as you think. If you have a video made or you make a tutorial video then you will need to make sure you transcribe the video and put the text on your website, the same with audio (again not expensive as you can get a 5 minute video transcribed for less than $2 if you search around). Google own Youtube, so Video ranks well, deal with it move on.

6. Get seen on other websites to become a leader in your field. Don’t write trash and send it top people to put on their blogs cause they will in the current climate tell you where to get off and your reputation will take a hit. Don’t write about yourself all the time (it gets boring) write interesting and helpful information for your potential clients and you will get a much better reaction from those guest blog posts than if you write trash. Talk to magazines and see if you can write for their website or if they need an expert on your specific subject if they would quote you. If you don’t ask you don’t get.

So there you go, that is the way that SEO is heading in the next 12 months (and beyond really) These strategies have worked time and time again, old spam methods will give you short term gain now give you a long time wilderness of no search ranking.

If you are scared by the prospects of making the above a success then please feel free to drop us an email to discuss how we can help you move your business forward for 2013.

So over the past few weeks there has been a lot of talk about a little project called Hero’s Wedding. Well if you have been to the site you have probably seen our name blasted all over the place so I’d better fill you in on the why and how it all came about for us.

I have a number of close friends who are in the armed forces putting themselves in a position to protect the lives we all cherish. To do this they go through a lot of sacrifice and I have seen the families go through the pain of loved ones being away from home for months and months at a time and the pressure that puts on them from both sides. Two of those friends wanted to meet due to the fact that one, a talented photographerby the name of Hayley, wanted to give away a wedding photography package to a military couple. The other friend Emma runs a website by the name of Military Wedding Discounts and knowing both and how they could benefit from the competition being run through both parties.

Well 40 minutes into a lunch with the pair of them we had made a few phone calls and all of a sudden we had 10 suppliers who were willing to give their products and services and the competition went from a photography package to a full blown wedding. Yep the whole thing, venue, dress, suits, shoes, photography and so on. Incredibly the wedding industry suppliers we contacted and who have contacted us have now given products and services in excess of £15,000 in value! (THANK YOU EVERYONE)

The competition is for a military couple to win their entire wedding! Having been through the whole wedding thing it is a completely life changing prize that will mean one couple will be lucky enough to save that sum of cash towards other possible life changing events. So again we can’t thank the suppliers enough for the efforts and services they have offered.

When it became evident that the project was a little bigger than we first thought, I offered to put together a website for the competition to be run through and www.HerosWedding.co.uk was born! So from us, if you know of anyone at all that fits the criteria of the entrants and you want them to have the chance to win a life changing (and we mean life changing) prize, then please push them over towards the website and make sure they enter before the end of September!!

Good luck!!!

Steve

Over the past few days there has been the release of a new piece of what we call Black Hat SEO Software. The people that use this software are looking for a quick SEO fix that will get found out and by Google and punished. However the massive downside of this software is a massive increase in the number of SPAM comments you will be getting on your blogs and websites if you ware using WordPress. This Akismet Tutorial should help you put pay to SPAM on your WordPress website.

The software seeks out WordPress websites and adds what we call a spun comment into the comment system on any number of blog posts. Frustrating and annoying for website owners everywhere SPAM is the biggest complained about website problem we come across.

Black Hat is a temporary fix not a solution and the people who use it are spending most of their lives doing one of two things, making website owners lives a misery or simply chasing their tails the whole time. I hope this Akismet Tutorial helps.

If you have any questions or would like to make a comment then please feel free to drop me a comment here and I will get back to you as soon as possible

Over the past few weeks we have launched 15 websites. Normally we would aim at 2 a week max but in the space of 8 days we launched 9 websites, so there hasn’t been much sleep going on at The Den I can promise you. However I have to say that most of the launches went fairly smooth without a hitch, others were a bit more complex due to external forces that the I have released my very own 005.5 to search and destroy.

The biggest issue of late has been email. Every one has a different email system, some download and store locally, others store things on a server. Some never delete ANYTHING others have 2 emails in their inbox and they feel they are being spammed as they have never had so many in one day (ok that is a bit of an exaggeration but hey it gets the point across). Emails going missing due to other peoples email servers being blacklisted, emails bouncing back because they are going to the wrong address, I’ve had the lot over the past few weeks. Well there is a solution for one and all and YES IT COSTS MONEY so if you don’t want to spend money on making sure your emails don’t vanish then don’t bother reading and please don’t moan (it’s like not voting in a general election, if you don’t do anything about it you don’t have the right to keep moaning).

If you want to get a mission critical (99.999999999999999999999% up and safe) emails system then I suggest and recommend using Google Apps (http://www.google.com/apps). It allows you to have your email through your own domain, your calendar attached to your email, shared documents, your Google+ and Google Places as well as your Contacts all on the Gmail system yet using your own email account. The cost is a whopping £3.30 per email address per month and for that if you decide you don’t want to delete anything ever you don’t have to cause you have 25GB of email space to store all your …..very important emails.

So why is it good? Well if your web server goes down or blows up your email still works. If you want to access your email anywhere and everywhere on the planet (iPhone, android, Windows phone, PC, Mac, iPad, Tablet etc) and the up time on it is incredible. As long as you have access to the interwebby you will be able to access your emails and contacts etc.

WAIT A SECOND….. before you run off to sign up then come back telling me I’m wrong and it didn’t work, you have to set it up properly. You need to import your files and you will need to read the help file on how to do this. You will need to import your contacts, your calendar and your email over, if you don’t IT WON’T BE THERE. So make sure you read the setup and you book in the time of the tech person you will need to move over from one to the other or you might well come a cropper!

So that is how I am now advising EVERYONE who asks me about email how to sort their emails issues.

A very good friend of mine, who I class as one of the best business brains I have ever had the pleasure to meet, hates the phrase “How long is a piece of string?” but in SEO that is basically a technical term for measuring time to get results. I’ve got sites running campaigns for 2 years with me that were penalised in the last Google update and are struggling to recover, but the owner of the site which suffered the most, completely understands the situation with Google being in control (not me strange enough) and is looking at other solutions as well as working hard with me to try to rectify the situation.

I get calls on a regular basis and emails by the hour selling me SEO services, gadgets, tools and get rich quick schemes, if I took them all up and tested them all I would get no work done and be extremely skint with a hard disk full of trash. Just tonight I had 3 emails trying to sell me a product I helped produce. So I thought it was time for me to kill a few birds with one stone and give a few quick tips on the BASICS of SEO and a little information on that infamous question “How Fast does SEO Work?”

The main rule of the Interwebby thing is that you control your own website and are responsible for the content. Guess what that means? Yep you got it, I am responsible for the content of this website and YOU are responsible for the content of your website, BUT that means that GOOGLE are responsible for their website (not me, can you believe that?). And the knock on effect of that is they can update their algorithm at any stage and change the way things work. Their aim is to make sure they give you the best results possible (This doesn’t always work and nearly EVERYONE I know can give 10 examples of a naff result, but they are normally looking a lot harder than most people).

So the first part of SEO is to understand that even if someone phones you up and tells you 100% they can get you to the top of the rankings, you probably won’t stay there without a lot of effort and dedication on your part not always theirs.

The next part and the most important part for any small business is that you have to put in a lot of the secret sauce which is……wait for it………you really will kick yourself when you read this one……………………….Hard Work. And if not hard work from you then it needs to be paid for so that someone else can put in the hard work for you.

One of the best projects I ever worked on was in a different industry but we took a company from no clients, no turnover and no website to over €10 Million in turnover, a fantastic website and nearly 10,000 clients in a little over 6 months. “My Goodness Steve!!! Can you do that for me?” is normally the thought in peoples minds about now, well the answer “Hell Yeah!” I had a team of 10 and a €500,000 budget to get that online campaign working. Even though we came in under budget and the SEO we put in place on that site is still working for them, it cost money, took time and a heck of a lot of effort to get them there. So again HARD WORK won the day.

Don’t aim too high. If you sell a niche item, aim low in the niche for what we call the low hanging fruit. Aim to get ranked for keywords that will bring you highly qualified traffic. I was lucky enough to sit in on a seminar given by Darren from Hitched on Monday afternoon and one thing he said very early on was to not go after “Wedding Gadget” but to aim more for “Wedding Gadget in Your Town”. I can see the look of horror on your face now “That won’t bring me very many visitors to my website Steve!” Do you know what, you’re right BUT it WILL bring you more qualified visitors to your website, people who are close to you and ready to book or buy. Ask yourself what would bring me more satisfaction 10 customers from 1000 visitors to your website or 10 customers from 100 visitors? I can tell you now the latter is easier to get and much more satisfying.

So what point are you trying to make with all this Steve? Making sure you get the right service to promote your website is important, but making sure you understand what you are getting for your money and making completely certain that you put in extra effort to work along side the efforts that your SEO company or marketing agency are putting in for you makes the project move along in a way that will get you results.

So a quick 123…..

1. Make sure your website is looking good and that your navigation is easy to follow.

2. Make sure you have read the Google Webmaster Guidelines (they come with pretty robot cartoons on to make them look technical).

3. BLOG! For the love of small furry animals BLOG!

4. Keep working at it, keep talking to people, keep promoting, keep pushing, keep telling everyone that will listen, keep social media going, keep building links and most of all keep your expectations in check SEO is a slow burner not an overnight fix. Remember the Tortoise and the Hare? Guess who won…….