Yes, you read the title correctly. Most websites are shy and they show it. We often let our websites get away with things that we wouldn’t do in person. Here are my top tips to build your website’s confidence – in the eyes of the search engines and your visitors.
If your site is just a brochure, it’s time for a redesign
Unless the sole purpose of your site is to save you a few pence on printing costs, it needs to be much more than just an electronic brochure.
Site visitors are used to things like videos so if your business lends itself to a video, use one. It doesn’t have to be a full-on BBC style production. A talking head filmed on your digital camera works. So does a PowerPoint style slide show with a voiceover. They’re both easy to do and will lift your site.
Give your site a personality
Sure, some people won’t like it. But you can’t be all things to all men.
You’ve got a personality in real life. Let it shine through on your website. You’ll alienate some people but that will be more than made up by the number of people who – by the time they’ve finished reading your site – think they actually know you and are happy to call you to do business with them.
If that’s a step too far, get a personal blog and show your personality there, linking back to your website at appropriate times.
Engage with your visitors
A lot of sites offer an email newsletter of some sort. If you don’t do this, it’s a good way to keep in touch with people without forever pestering them.
The trouble with email newsletters is that we get so many of them (some of which we’ve even asked for) that you need to find a way to break through the white noise that passes for your email inbox. Think personality as well.
It’s also well worth giving people a reason to hand over their email address to you. Simply saying “give me your email address” doesn’t cut it nowadays. A free report or a discount voucher is more likely to grab their attention.
Or you could get them to like your Facebook and stay in touch that way.
Don’t waffle but don’t sell yourself short
Google thrives on words. It’s what it does best. So if your idea of a long website page is one that’s more than two or three sentences, think again.
Put a call to action “above the fold” (near the top of the page) but then write engagingly about your subject.
Use a good design so it doesn’t look daunting.
Use short paragraphs.
And bullet points.
And images.
So that your long web pages don’t look like a wall of text that has to be climbed.
If you’re no good at stringing words together, find someone who is. Or talk your page and let your computer type it for you – you can do this with Windows Vista and Windows 7, it’s built in but hidden until you activate it.
Follow these simple ideas and you’ll find that your website starts to brim over with confidence. And that will translate to more visitors and more business.
Click here for more help to get your website getting more business for you.
Organic search engine marketing is the art (or science depending on your point of view) of getting listed in the regular “organic” results of the search engines. These are the listings that are outside the lightly shaded “ads” or “sponsored results” section of the particular search engine you’re using. These organic search results have the major advantage that you don’t pay Google or anyone else every time someone clicks through to your site. It stands to reason that these results can’t be “bought” whereas the ad results are based on a combination.of your advert, the page it is leading to, how high your click rate is and the amount you’re prepared to pay.
Because each extra click they generate is essentially free, coming high up in the organic search results is the holy grail for many companies. Like everything else in life worth having, it takes time but the results are worth it. Here’s a quick overview of how they work.
Google, Bing, etc start off by sending their robot – often called a spider – around your site. They take a snapshot of your page at that time and store it for processing before it gets placed in the search results.
Whilst the exact algorithm – or scoring system – is a trade secret, there is enough evidence to know the kind of things that are being analysed to decide where to place your site in the search results.
Page Title
This is probably the most critical part of the equation.
Your page title is displayed as a blue underlined link in the search results. Because of this, it’s the thing that most potential visitors to your website will read before they even click through to your site.
If it’s dull and boring – and a lot of page titles are – then there’s a good chance that the searcher will skip your site in the results and will choose someone else’s site to visit.
You’ve got about 65 characters, including punctuation and space, to play with. You can use more but the search engines will cut you off at around about that figure. So you need to make the words you place in your title count.
They should appeal to both search engines and users. Personally, I go with the emphasis on users as the search engines take into account things like click through rates and length of time spent on site when they’re deciding where to place you in the organic search results.
Meta description
After the page title, this is the other critical part of the equation.
If you miss this out, Google will pick some text that it thinks is relevant, which may or may not be the case.
If your site uses a WordPress blog, this description will likely include the date of the post unless you use a plugin such as WordPress SEO to suppress this. Unless the information on your page is date sensitive, I’d strongly suggest removing the date so you have more characters to play with.
The meta description should be about 160 characters long. Like the title, it can be longer but will get cut off at around this length.
Make the description as enticing as possible, backup any statements you’ve made in your title and generally encourage people to click through to your site.
There are lots of other elements involved in organic search engine marketing but they will all be in vain if you don’t get the above two items right. You could be number one in the organic search results but with a boring page title and a useless description, people still wouldn’t click through to your site.
Click here for our affordable organic search engine packages.
Inbound links are something you hear about a lot if you read almost anything about search engine optimisation. Everyone assumes that you know what they’re talking about when they mention inbound links but what if that’s not the case for you? Just what are inbound links? How can you get more of the things? And are all inbound links equal or are some of them more equal than others?
An inbound link is any link that is pointing towards a page your website from a different page. Sometimes they are also called backlinks, inlinks or inward links.
Checking inbound links
The main search engines will let you check your backlinks to an extent:
- Google simply don’t report all the backlinks they know about.
- Yahoo report a decent quantity of inlinks but won’t show you all the ones they’re aware of. Their Site Explorer tool will only show you the first thousand links.
- Bing will let you search in much the same way as Google do.
The ways of keeping track of your inbound links aren’t not particularly accurate for a number of reasons:
- As mentioned earlier, Google deliberately under-report the number of backlinks.
- Yahoo and Bing (obviously) aren’t Google, so you can’t be positive that the results they show are the same ones that their major competitor is aware of.
- It takes time to track down and process links so there’s always a time lag between a backlink being created and it being found and acted on by the different search engines.
There are all sorts of opinions flying around about the importance of inbound links but the general rule is that they count towards the importance of your web pages.
Which brings us on to whether all links are created equal.
The general consensus is that this isn’t the case. But that’s where the consensus stops.
Some people will tell you that they think links from educational (.edu) and government (.gov) sites are more important than common-or-garden sites such as .com.
Others will tell you that isn’t the case.
Without access to the inner workings of the search algorithms, it’s speculation as to which view is correct. But this brings us on to the next part of the equation:
The importance of the home page of the site the link comes from.
Google gives every page a “score”, some of which is based on inbound links. There is a very rough – and very out of date – approximation of this on their tool bar, called Page Rank.
Some webmasters obsess about this figure but, truth be told, the publicly available figure is very close to sticking your finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing.
That said, it’s as good an approximation as we’re going to get.
The page rank (the real one, not the fiction shown in the toolbar) of a page affects the power of the links it points to. Each link passes on some of this “link juice” to the recipient site.
If you were lucky enough to get a link from the main page of the BBC or CNN, this would be a lot more powerful for your site than a link from your aunt’s blog with photos of your childhood holidays.
The importance, or otherwise, of each of the pages on your website is judged at least in part by the company of the sites that link to it.
Getting more inbound links is one of those internet things that needs constant attention.
You may be lucky enough to get links just by asking for them but it’s more likely that you’ll have to give something in return: an article, a video, etc.
You have to keep on top of these links, always creating more, as they disappear over time. Whether that’s with site redesigns, domains not being renewed or regular computer glitches.
Get more inbound links with our SEO packages.
How to do keyword research on Google is a hot topic. It’s all very well getting found high up in the search results but you need people searching for you. That may sound obvious but a lot of people get preyed on by firms promising to get them to the first page of Google – which sounds cool and sexy – but neglect to ask what keyword phrases they’ll reach the first page for.
What to use for keyword research
Whilst there are a number of paid-for keyword tools, most of these just put a fancy looking wrapper around the results that you can get for free using the Google keyword tool.
This tool was designed to help people who are advertising with the Google Adwords program find profitable words to get their adverts placed for. But it works equally well for the rest of us – we’re just limited to 100 results per search, which is not a major issue, and have to fill out one of those annoying Captchas every now and then, which isn’t a deal breaker either.
Once you type in a word or phrase, you’ll get a screen like this:
When you first log into the Google keyword tool it will present results by what it calls “broad match”. This means it will include all sorts of things that are vaguely related to the search term and whilst it’s good for encouraging people to place adverts, it’s not much good for meaningful keyword research.
Fortunately there are two other options that you can choose – they’re in a tick box list on the left of the screen and ticking or unticking them will update the results.
The two options are:
- Exact match – this will give you numbers for just that phrase, no other words.
- Phrase match – this will give results where the phrase was included. So “keyword research” would include numbers for “online keyword research”, “how to do keyword research”, etc.
Which of these you choose is up to you. I tend to prefer the phrase search but occasionally use exact match for my keyword research.
To the right of each keyword phrase you’ll be given a bar chart for advertiser competition. This is a good reality check – if there’s competition for advertising there’s probably money being spent for that phrase.
Next are figures for Global monthly searches and Local monthly searches.
Local defaults to the country you’re in – United Kingdom for me as you can see from the screenshot.
If you’re targeting a worldwide market then use the global figures. If you’re only aiming at your own country then the local figures are a better guide.
One important thing to remember with this keyword research is that the search figures are only approximate.
They are historic – Google can’t predict the future – and they are definitely approximate. But they’re better than nothing.
Another thing to remember is that even if you’re in the first position on the page, you won’t get all those searches. The exact proportion will vary according to lots of different things but a good rule of thumb is to expect no more than half if everything else is in your favour and you’re at the top of the results. Lower positions can expect lower results.
Once you’ve done your keyword research you’ll have a shortlist of keyword phrases that you want to target.
Generally the bigger the number of searches the more competition you’ll have. But that’s not fixed in tablets of stone and you can often come up high in the search results for a highly competitive phrase, albeit only in your local area.
Experiment with your keyword research and you’ll get a feel for how it works in your area in your industry.
Or get our experts to help with your keyword research.
There are times when you need to think about moving your website to a new host. Sometimes this is because you’ve outgrown your current website host but more often than not it’s because you’re not satisfied with them. Maybe they’re charging too much, maybe their customer support is less responsive than you’d like it to be, maybe your site is too slow through no fault of your own.
Whatever the reason, you’ve come to the conclusion that moving your website to a new host is the only answer.
Sometimes this needs to happen in a hurry but more often than not you will have the luxury of planning your move.
Steps to follow for moving your website to a new host
Start by deciding who your new website host will be.
This isn’t as easy as it sounds as most reviews online aren’t exactly unbiased. There’s a decent amount of commission flying around and this tends to bias people’s views.
If possible, get an unbiased third party recommendation. If not, this hosting company are usually a good choice.
Then set up the new website hosting account. Sometimes this happens immediately, other times it can take a number of hours. That depends on the individual hosting company.
Next, copy all your files to your new host. If you’re using a system such as WordPress, check with your technical person to make sure you get everything right.
You’ll be given a temporary “url” with your new website hosting – use that to test and check that everything is working as expected. Pay special attention to images and any links.
You will also need to set up your email forwarding when moving your website to a new host. This is usually straightforward enough but you need to remember to do it!
Once you’re happy that everything is working as expected, it’s time to change the domain name servers (DNS) to point to the new website. These are the internet’s equivalent of the phone book and they tell the computers that work behind the scenes where to find your website.
The DNS takes time to “propogate” (work its way around the world) so there will probably be instances where your website is in limbo and you’re not quite sure whether it’s being sent from your old website host or your new one. That’s normal.
One other possible complication is if you bought your domain name from your old web host. You have the option to leave it there or move it. Personally I prefer to use a completely different company for my domain names.
If in doubt, it pays to consult a specialist company to make sure that moving your website to a new host is as painless as possible.
We can help with the process of moving your website to a new host – just contact us here.
“How do people find your website?” – that’s such an innocent-sounding question!
It’s a shame there isn’t a simple answer to it.
Because people find your website in a wide variety of different ways…
Take a look at your log files – whether they’re the files your web host provides or something like Stat Counter or Google Analytics. That will start to fill you in on how people come to your website. But it’s by no means the complete picture.
Let’s say that you give out business cards with your name and website address on them.
Some people will squirrel these away in a nice neat file and go back through that when they want to find you. In that case, they’ll probably type in the website address so your logfiles won’t know where they came from.
Other people will remember your name and will type that into a search engine in the hope that they’ll find your profile and – from that – that they will be led to your website. If you’ve got an “about me” page on your own site you should work on the on-site optimisation so that you come up high for that result. Remember to include a picture of you on that page and to use an “alt” tag to help the search engines recognise who you are.
Yet others will “kind of” remember your company name and will expect it to come up in the search results if they type it in, maybe with the town they remember – or think they remember – you came from.
Then there’s links pointing to your site:
Business directories sometimes provide traffic direct to your site. Other times they help the search engines to find you more easily. Either way, add as much information as you can within the constraints of the directory site to help people to find you.
Other sites may also link to you. Maybe because you asked them to. Maybe because you wrote an article and they reprinted it. Or maybe because your profile on that site included a link back to your site.
Checking through your log file analysis will give you a lot of clues as to how people really are finding your website.
It may also tell you which page they “land” on first when they visit your site. The bigger your site, the less likely this is to be your main (index) page. So pay attention to all those pages that you think don’t really count. There’s a very good chance those are the first impression someone has of your site.
So, the answer to how do people find your website is a long and complicated one. So make sure that you pay attention to your whole site, not just the main page that you hope will be the one that your visitors land on first.
The simple answer to the question “Why Bother With Web Page Titles?” is because they are probably the single most important element on your pages if you want to get traffic from the search engines.
Take a look at the image on the right – which page title would you click on? Which one is most likely to give you help with your web page titles?
My guess is that you chose one of the first two links. The third one looks a bit techy but would probably also do the job. As for the 4th and 5th ones, I’m pretty sure you’d scroll right past them.
Your web page titles are your headlines
As far as the search results go, that’s true.
Google will bold the keywords you searched for so that you’ve got an “at a glance” affirmation that they delivered the results you were looking for.
After that, it’s your choice which web page title you’ll click on first.
If Google and the site owner have done their job well, it’s the first title. If it’s not that (and assuming you’re not clicking on the sponsored results) then one of the next couple will likely do the job.
So you need to pay attention to your web page titles.
And, since – short of banning the search engines from your site – you can’t control which page(s) from your site show up in the search results, this applies to every single page on your website that isn’t specifically blocked in your robots.txt file.
Treat every single one of your web page titles as special. Because they have the potential of being found in the search results. Maybe not for a keyword phrase you’re specifically targeting but they could appear on someone’s search results.
And when that happens, you want your web page titles to have maximum impact so you increase their chance of getting clicked on.
You’ve got approximately 65 characters to play with.
Any more than that and the search engines will cut your title off at the nearest word less than that number of characters and put in an ellipsis (these three full stops …) to show what’s happened.
It follows that if your web page titles are likely to end up longer than 65 characters for whatever reason, your most important keywords should be in that first section.
Because computers know that in the Western world we read from left to right, they’ve also been taught that words closer to the start of your web page titles are more important than ones found later on.
So keep that in mind when you’re crafting your web page titles!
In order to stay on top of the search results, you need to develop a search engine optimisation strategy. It’s a bit like having a business plan – it provides a road map for what you want to achieve and pointers for how you are going to achieve it.
The first part of any search engine optimisation strategy should be to optimise the on-page elements of your website. These are under your control and you can find out more on our optimising your website page.
Once you’ve got that done, remember to check it when you add a new page to your website but it’s then on to developing your SEO strategy.
Search engine optimisation strategy tips
Consistency is good. Going out, getting lots of links to your site in a few days and then forgetting about getting backlinks for the next few months or years isn’t a good idea.
Whilst Google won’t find all the backlinks to your site immediately, it will find the more popular links you create fairly fast. Its algorithm takes notice of the speed that backlinks are added to sites – this is often called link velocity – and takes this into account when it works out where to place you in the search results.
This means that consistency needs to be a part of your overall search engine optimisation strategy. Whether that’s adding a couple of articles a month or a couple of articles a day or whatever other tactics you use to get backlinks to your site, do your best to keep it reasonably consistent.
Next up it’s worth making sure that your SEO strategy includes a variety of links.
If all the backlinks coming to your site are from the same – or similar – sources then that’s not as good as if you have a variety of sources.
As a minimum, I’d suggest including article submissions, press releases, local directories and – if your site lends itself to it – videos.
If you can also extend that to things such guest blogging, where you write content specifically for other people’s sites, then that helps as well.
Above all though, keep doing the various things in your search engine optimisation strategy so that you keep the backlink momentum going.
Quite simply, natural search engine optimisation is the process of getting your website shown in the regular search engine results rather than the sponsored links sections. Years ago this used to be just a matter of publishing your web page but with the masses of competition we face nowadays, it’s not quite that simple.
How to go about natural search engine optimisation
For the most part, natural search engine optimisation is a matter of following a few simple rules. Following these rules will increase the chance of Google understanding what the pages on your site are about and, in turn, featuring those pages nicely in the search results.
If you’d like some free tips to help you with your natural search engine optimisation then just put your email addres in the box towards the top right of this page and I’ll keep you posted.
In the meantime, make sure that your website pages are optimised for search engines as well as real users.
Search engines are essentially just computer programs that process an unimaginably large amount of data in crazily short periods of time.
So they have to make a snap decision about your website pages before showing them in the results.
You can see just how much guesswork is involved by searching for something fairly obscure and then trying to go to the last page in the results. Often the original figure shown for the number of results will be cut down as the search algorithm re-thinks it’s answer. Almost as though it phoned a friend to check whether its original idea was correct.
Natural search engine optimisation means you need to give the search engine as many clues as possible about the subject matter of each page.
Home in on a keyword phrase (several words relating to the topic of the page) and make sure that phrase appears in the title (the clickable part shown in the search engine listings), a headline, ideally as the alt text for an image on your page and sprinkled throughout the actual words on your page.
The main words on your page should be designed for human readers first and foremost, search engines second. Partly because computers can’t read in the same way as humans can, partly because search engines take into account a number of factors about a page and that includes whether or not your site visitors are interested enough in what you’re saying to hang around and read it.
The helpful Google Toolbar you installed gives them information about this. So does Google Analytics. They also try to measure how long it takes a site visitor to click back to the search results (this isn’t necessarily precise for a number of reasons). Plus they take notice of whether a site visitor likes or dislikes your page via some of the extra options that often appear on the search results.
On top of that, natural search engine optimisation also involves getting links pointing back to your site pages – a bit like a more sophisticated version of being friends with people on Facebook as the search engines take into account how popular your website’s friends are.
Natural search engine optimisation is a lot to concentrate on but is well worth doing to keep your pages high in the search results.
At its most basic level, local search engine marketing works much the same way as any other form of search engine marketing. You optimise your site for the search terms you’re trying to get website visitors for and you promote your site with the aim of getting backlinks pointing to it.
The difference is that there’s usually (but not always) less competition with local search engine marketing.
Ideas for local search engine marketing
As always with search engine optimisation, do your keyword research first. This means working out what real people are searching for in real life. Not what other people in your industry are searching for – they’ll almost certainly use industry specific jargon that real humans won’t have a clue about.
There are a number of places you can do keyword research for your local search engine marketing. Start with the log fies for your own site – most website hosts will give you access to these in a fairly friendly “wrapper” such as AWStats or Webalizer. You’ll be able to dig through these stats and see what search terms are currently being used to find your website. Google Analytics will do a similar job, so choose the option you’re most comfortable with.
Then put one of your more popular keyword phrases into Google. Towards the left of the screen are a pile of links you’ve probably ignored. One of these may say “Wonder Wheel” or it may say something like “more search tools”. Either way, dig around until you get to the Wonder Wheel.
This will show you related phrases that Google thinks are relevant to your initial keyword. It’s only a computer program, so it’s not always right, but often you’ll get a number of other potential keywords that are related to your local search engine marketing. Write a blog article on any that take your fancy.
Posting new content on your site on a reasonably regular basis may be almost all you need to rank well in local search engine marketing.
Unless you’re in a market where suppliers don’t actually need to be located in your town, in which case you’re probably going to be up against some stiffer competition.
If that’s the case, you’ll need to get some decent quality inbound links pointing to your website to round off your local search engine marketing.
Directories are a good place to start doing this: sites like HotFrog (weird name), Yelp, Touch Local and lots of others will give you a free link back to your website. Often in the hope of selling you more services.
Make it a habit to add some fresh content to your website on a regular basis and to seek out some backlinks as well and you’ll be well on your way to beating your local competitors and dominating local search engine marketing for your town.