It is puzzling that many savvy business people who run an online company still view SEO as an unnecessary expense. Such individuals need to look beyond the initial cost of SEO and start seeing the bigger picture. They need to decide what they expect from an SEO campaign. Naturally, the whole point is to increase visibility on search engines which leads to a higher level of traffic and ultimately more sales. As SEO is a proven method of improving a company’s fortunes, it’s odd that certain companies refuse to utilise it. Perhaps the best way to truly understand the usefulness of SEO is to find out the potential return on investment and hope search engine optimization can deliver it.

Patience

The whole reason why you’re using SEO is to make a profit. However, you can’t expect to get a return on investment immediately. Strategies like link building can take several months to deliver results. Instead of looking at the investment in a month or two, analyse it after a year has passed. You also need to look at the number of leads and sales that have been generated by your SEO efforts. Google Analytics is a fantastic tool for helping you find out specific site statistics. Finally, you calculate how much each lead or sale cost you.

It should also be noted that the time you have spent on your SEO campaign must also be added to the cost. For example, if you spent an average of 10 hours a week on SEO for 26 weeks and made a gross profit of £1,300, your average hourly earnings from SEO would be £5 an hour which is certainly not good enough.

Lifetime Value

Another classic method of discovering whether or not SEO gives you a good return on investment is through the calculation of a customer’s lifetime value. For example, your average customer may spend £30 each time they purchase something from your business which they do 4 times a year for 4 years. In addition, the average customer refers your company to his friends and brings in 3 new customers who buy an average of £300 of goods each over a 4 year period.  The first customer spends a total of £480 (30 x 4 x 4) and his friends spend a total of £900 (3 x 300) so the lifetime value of your average customer is £1,380.

Conversion rate

Then you have the small matter of calculating the conversion rate of your SEO campaign. This is the total percentage of people who have visited your site and purchased something, subscribed to a newsletter etc. You can take this to a more complex level by looking at your conversion rate per keyword. For example, if 5 keywords convert at 10% and another 5 convert at 6%; your overall keyword conversion rate is 8% (10 x 5 + 6 x 5/10).

These are just some of the ways that will help you determine whether or not your SEO campaign is delivering a satisfactory return on investment. In all other forms of business, it is a well known fact that you have to invest capital in order to succeed and online business is no different.

Zeno are a well-respected online agency, providing search engine optimization services to small and medium business across the globe. In addition to serving end users, Zeno is a leading SEO Reseller, supplying some of the largest agencies with white label search marketing solutions. Contact us today to find out more.

A large percentage of websites are not designed to make money from selling products or services. Instead, they are simply informative sites that provide important news and updates on a given industry. Next time you see one of these sites, take a closer look and you will find out how sites which seem to sell nothing are actually doing a very good job of making their owner money.

You see, they are not selling goods, services or even their knowledge. What they are selling is space, website space. Online advertising is a multi-billion dollar enterprise and everyone’s getting in on it. Websites that are extremely well optimized, rank highly on search engines and most importantly, receive a lot of traffic are prime real estate for advertisers who will pay significant amounts of money to get their ads on these sites.

Overselling

However, a real problem with many sites that have been created solely for the purpose of selling space to advertisers is the fact that the site fails to offer any real value to visitors. Such websites are absolutely riddled with advertising but contain little in the way of content. Like everything else, advertising is a great money maker but only when performed correctly. Visitors who see 80% adverts and a few paragraphs of content will soon leave. Advertisers will analyse your site’s statistics, see a high bounce rate and withdraw their ads, leaving you out of pocket.

Therefore, you have to tread a fine line between saturating your site with adverts and having enough ads to make your site profitable. The main problem comes when a site is being designed. It’s common for the creator to focus more on where to place the ads than the actual content. The result is an absolute monstrosity with pop-up ads everywhere. As a result, content should come before all else. You must not only have great content for SEO, it should also be compelling to the visitor who actually has a reason to come to your site and stay on it in the first place.

Careful Placement

Ads should be placed strategically throughout your pages. Don’t allow any page to overflow with adverts. Also, keep the ads simple. Try and avoid adding advertisements that suddenly pop out when the visitor is reading a page. This is extremely distracting and annoying. At the same time, the occasional flashing ad can be successful as these have the ability to grab the attention of the visitor and possibly turn them into a buyer.

Only allow reputable companies to advertise on your page. It may be tempting to allow anyone who will pay you to come on board but allowing ’get rich quick’ scam ads on your site will quickly lower its credibility. You may make a quick buck yourself but it will be to the overall detriment of your site. Finally, offer readers a reason to click the ad. Perhaps you can offer them an opportunity to make money from advertising themselves. Overall, content should always be your number one concern with adverts taking a back seat. Clever placement of these ads, coupled with great SEO on your site should see your project earn you some much needed revenue.

Microsites have been hailed as another great way to improve a company’s overall search engine rankings. They are small static websites which are designed to give visitors specific instructions about particular products and services. Microsites are smaller and less confusing than regular company websites and should provide visitors with the instant information they crave. Statistics show that microsites tend to have better search engine ranking and a higher conversion rate than normal sites. The reason why it is better for SEO than your big site is because it is targeted towards certain products and the keywords that come with it. As the visitor is not confused by irrelevant information, they make quicker and more decisive purchasing decisions.

Time Saver

The advantages of a microsite are manifold. They are quicker to create than your large site though a certain level of skill is required to achieve the focus that is so vital to the site’s success. Your microsite should be your company’s sales representative and improve your primary domain’s overall value. As well as being great for SEO and conversion rates, microsites also inspire customer loyalty because they focus on important information only. Customers appreciate the fact that their time is not being wasted and are impressed enough with the site to come back looking for more, provided your products/services are up to scratch of course.

This type of site is known as a microsite because it is better at fulfilling the needs of the main site. Search engines love sites that are filled with specific, useful information only. This is seldom if ever achieved on a large site because of its size so a microsite is the next logical step. As microsites are only a handful of pages in total, they can be completed in double quick time and are navigated by users in a matter of minutes.

Keyword Control

If you are creating a microsite, make sure that you target long-tail keywords that have a moderate monthly search count and little competition. Google Adwords has a Keyword Tool that can be used for this purpose. The microsite should concentrate specifically on these long tail keywords which of course should relate to the product/service being offered. There is no point in seeking keywords that have a high level of competition. Keywords with low competition and low to moderate search counts are not glamorous but since the whole point of a microsite is conversion, the bottom line is making customers out of the handful of visitors that come to the microsite. With little or no competition, it should be easy to rank on the first page of search engines.

When creating microsites, remember that they are hosted on different IP addresses because they need to appear independent to IP tracing scripts. Be prepared to create at least 50 microsites in a single project with the idea being to drive traffic to your main website while making sales because of the information found on the microsite. Although each site only targets a small number of keywords, the entire project targets hundreds. When utilised correctly, microsites are a fantastic way of increasing your main website’s traffic and overall conversion rate

It is not uncommon for a business to acquire old domain names in a bid to reduce the amount of competitors they face. But is this a sound strategy? SEO experts say no and are usually unhappy to find out that a client has more than one domain for their company. The first big problem with having more than one domain is creating content for all the sites. Often, a company is lazy and simply duplicates content from one site onto the next. This is dreadful for SEO purposes as Google and other search engines tend to punish sites that have duplicate content rather heavily. If you insist on purchasing an old domain, at least keep it updated with fresh content. It’s extra work so be prepared to either DIY or pay someone else to do it.

Incorrect Motivation

One of the main reasons why companies buy old domain names is fear. They are scared that a competitor will begin a spree of purchasing keyword laden domain names and push their company into the depths of the search engine rankings where no one will ever find them. So they buy the domains first in a bid to keep rivals at bay. This strategy is not exactly worthless but in purely SEO terms it does nothing. Indeed, this tactic doesn’t even work when it comes to pushing down your rivals so perhaps it is worthless! If you have better SEO content and proper linkage, you will outrank a competitor no matter how many domains they have. Domains are useless unless they are filled with relevant SEO content that will rank on the search engines. Otherwise, they are dead sites.

Domination

Another reason why companies buy several old domains is to dominate the first page of the rankings. Although this has happened on rare occasions, there are too many drawbacks to make this a recommended strategy. For example, companies with one location should not have several websites as this will serve to confuse customers. Also, having multiple websites with the same address is quite close to being spam behaviour and as such, search engines will penalise you for it. Then there is the aforementioned problem of duplicate content.

Priorities

And if you have two or more sites for your company, which one do you prioritise? Do you offer products on one that can’t be found on another? Do you spend more time and money on one site than the other? There are a number of pressing questions that are thrown up by owning two or more sites. If your company has offices in different countries, you could get away with different sites but otherwise, it just isn’t a good idea.

While buying old domains is great strategy in theory, in practice, it only causes your company more problems. If you elect to run two or more sites simultaneously, there are no shortcuts. You have to write different content for both and risk alienating your customers. Maintaining both sites can be expensive and time consuming and the overall SEO benefit is negligible.

Did you know that the name of your website could be one of the best SEO tools at your disposal? Long before you fill your website’s pages with up to date blogs and articles which contain outbound links through anchor text which connects your site with another highly ranked one, you have the chance to get a massive head start over your rivals. Do not choose any old name for your website address. The key to starting SEO on the right foot is to choose an exact match URL. In this instance, the exact match corresponds to a keyword which is relevant to your business.

A Weighty Issue

Search engines see your website’s URL as a good indicator of what’s contained in the page and ranks accordingly. This is why you can’t be too clever with your website address. For example, which address do you think will show up after a user types in ‘golf’ in a search engine, www.golf.com or www.fiveiron.com? Although a five iron is part of a person’s golfing equipment, it will be buried beneath all the domains which have ‘golf’ in the title. It should be noted that it’s unwise to change the URL of a site that is already getting good traffic. Once you change a URL, you’re starting from scratch in the eyes of the search engines who essentially view you as a new site.

Simply put, domains with a keyword in them will consistently outrank sites that don’t have a matching URL. The reason why exact match URL’s are so important is because Google’s algorithm places a huge amount of weight on a site’s domain name. This weight increases the older the site gets which is why it’s so unwise for a successful site to change its URL. In essence, exact match URLs play the percentage game perfectly. An exact keyword will always be given 100% weight whereas any deviations whatsoever will lose weight and be worth say 80%. Once you start adding signs and symbols outside of the main keyword, your website’s URL dramatically loses its power.

Finding An Exact Match

However, it is pretty unlikely that an exact match URL will be available for your website. Of course, it’s always worth having a look and seeing if the .com, .org, .net and .co.uk names are taken. You could also look for less popular addresses but perhaps you’re better off concentrating on the main four above. One idea is to add your location to the keyword so a golf equipment company in Leeds could call themselves golfleeds.co.uk or golfequipmentleeds.co.uk. In extremely competitive fields, these URLs could also be taken. If nothing else, add the keyword to the end of the URL address so it would look like www.yourdomainname.co.uk/golfequipment.

Do whatever you can to ensure that your website’s address is as close to an exact match URL as possible because it weighs heavily on search engine rankings. Naturally, your site must still contain relevant content, keyword usage, links and other SEO tools but to get off to a flying start, get an exact match URL

The mere fact that 90% of all internet users utilise the search box where they enter keywords in a bid to find a site that appeals to them should be enough to convince you that SEO is a vital component of marketing. However, you can’t just throw in a few keywords that relate to your business and expect search engine spiders to rank your site above all others. Successful SEO marketers understand how keywords and content interact with one another as they look to gain the number one spot in the search engines rankings. But getting people to visit your site is not enough. You also need to convert visitors into customers if you want your business to stay afloat.

Why Does My Business Exist?

When you’re considering what keywords to use in your SEO marketing strategy, you must have the belief that your company’s reason for existing is to fulfil a customer’s need. But isn’t that why all businesses exist? You would like to think so but in reality, many companies exist to make a profit with the customer being viewed almost as a nuisance despite the fact it is they who decide whether a company lives or dies. The arrogance of some organizations is beyond belief but thanks to the internet, such frauds are being weeded out and destroyed. At its most basic level, the keyword research element of SEO marketing will help you gain a greater appreciation of your customer’s needs as you learn how to cater to them.

Money Doesn’t Talk

SEO marketing really levels the playing field. Back in the days of traditional marketing, companies could just throw money at any marketing campaign. Eventually, the saturated coverage of their product would win the day against competitors with smaller budgets and better products. To be successful at search engine marketing, you need more than money as this can’t buy you a high ‘quality score’. This score is calculated by the major search engines and involves looking at the content your buyers want coupled with the keywords used in the content. A high score can also be attained if your company is seen as a credible source. This credibility can be gained through links from other important sites. If a highly regarded sites links to you, this will do wonders for your quality score.

Advanced Methods

But SEO marketing does not stop there. Google is still the number one search engine by some considerable margin and it famously changes algorithms regularly. Allegedly, there are 200 or more of these algorithms and this process keeps businesses on their toes. As a result, understanding more specialized processes like anchor text, tagging and URL composition is a must for any company to succeed.

So why is SEO so important for marketing? Because online shopping is becoming more popular and will probably usurp its offline equivalent one day as the convenience of shopping from home will overtake queuing in the rain for bargains. Every day that you refuse to get involved with SEO marketing is another day where your company falls further behind the competition. Soon, the gap will become too big to close.

One would hope that you have some idea how to use SEO to ensure that your company is visible online. Some people belief that stuffing keywords in strategic places is the pinnacle of SEO but you know better, don’t you? An incredible number of businesses read huge swathes of information relating to SEO and believe that they have ‘cracked it’. Never mind the hundreds of ever-changing algorithms or your competition, once you have the SEO ‘key’, you are set for life. Even if this were the case (and it’s not), a remarkable amount of websites fail to optimize for success. They look for the quick fix and fail miserably. Those who rank highly for important targeted keywords are the companies that rake in the profit. Why can’t you be one of the SEO elite?

Secondary Phrases

First and foremost, you must do some keyword research and find your target audience. This is probably the most frequently espoused piece of information yet it is still the most readily ignored or ill-used. However, simply looking to rank for a single keyword is an enormous error as good SEO is more than just inserting a single phrase into your content and hoping for the best. You should also look for secondary phrases. For example, if your main phrase is ‘planting fruit‘, you could also have ‘apple seeds’ as a secondary phrase because surely a person that wants to know more about planting fruit will have some interest in apple seeds?

Graphics

But keywords aren’t all that search engine spiders look for and anyone who has ever ran a successful SEO campaign knows this. You need to be aware of the fact that the spiders don’t find every page of every website. Pages that are far away from a site’s root directory will be difficult for search engines to find for example. Also, flash sites or pages with a large amount of graphic content are also less visible to spiders. This means you need to hire a high quality web designer who knows what is immediately visible to Google and other search engines.

Pay For Good Content!

We mentioned the importance of having more than one keyword and this is where high quality content comes in. It is the firm belief of most SEO experts that a well-written blog or article will not only contain the necessary keywords, it will also have a variety of related phrases. Generally, this is part of the natural flow of great writing. This is why it is so puzzling to see a host of online businesses openly look to hire writers on the cheap. All they receive is low standard garbage that reads appallingly, is stuffed with keywords and incurs the wrath of the search engines. You should also know that search engines value up to date content to keep that blog updated with fresh and juicy information!

In a nutshell, the main rule of optimizing for success is to write lots of great content. There are scores of algorithms to worry about but concentrate on well-written content with correct usage of keywords and secondary phrases first and everything else will fall into place later on.

If you trawl through the internet, you will find a host of articles old and new which say that flash websites are harmful to SEO. It is said that the main problem with flash when it comes to SEO is the fact that search engines struggle to read your site’s content. Although there are occasions when the search engine gets into the site and follows the links, it is unable to separate the content into pages which ruins your chances of ranking high because targeted search results are not possible. However, Google has improved its crawling and indexing of Flash content and as it is by far the world’s largest search engine, suddenly Flash does not seem like the death knell to SEO it once was.

Simplification

In layman’s terms, Flash websites only offer a single URL for Google to index which means that your entire site only has one URL that can rank for keywords. Naturally, this is terrible for SEO. One method used by advanced web designers to ensure that Flash websites don’t automatically equal a terrible SEO ranking is through the use of simplification. Essentially, it means that a website needs to be built in a manner which ensures that it remains functional to a browser that lacks the highest level of support. This enables it to still load the page. The less advanced the browser is, the simpler your site becomes. Eventually, your site should still be functional with nothing more than plain HTML.

This means that Flash websites also have a non-Flash version that works for browsers that don’t have Flash support. Unfortunately, only a fraction of websites are built in this manner. Opponents of this form of site building point out that the majority of browsers do have Flash support. What they fail to realise is that this method also improves a site’s visibility when it comes to keyword search.

Flash Replacement

Even if 90% of visitor’s browsers have Flash support, you need to remember that search engines do not. Flash Replacement enables you to deliver Flash content to browsers that can handle it and non-Flash versions for browsers lacking this support which of course includes search engines. JavaScript is used to decide if the browser supports the Flash version or not and if it does, the Flash movie is loaded. If it doesn’t support Flash, the plain version becomes visible instead.

If nothing else, this proves that Flash content does not necessarily have to come at the cost of losing SEO rankings. However, there are a couple of problems when it comes to implementation of the above. The first is a complete lack of awareness on the part of most companies. Few online businesses are even aware that their Flash content is hampering them so badly. The second issue is one of finance. Hiring specialists to carry out the above techniques is a costly process and may be beyond the budget of most organisations. Although Flash websites are visually spectacular, failure to solve the SEO problem will ensure that few visitors ever see it