1: Search Engines

The whole point of having a blog in the first place is to keep customers informed and improve your search engine ranking. Google has started to take a shine to blogs which are updated on a regular basis. Therefore, sites with no blog or an inactive one are already at a disadvantage. When a blog is updated regularly, search engine spiders visit your site more often. If the blog is not updated, the Googlebots won’t search as often as it knows the blog is stale.

2: Your Brand

The majority of online businesses have static sites that look dead and customers aren’t even sure if it is being managed or not. As a result, visitors are unsure if they should waste time completing the ‘Contact Us’ form. When you update your blog, visitors know you’re active and gain familiarity with your company and brand. It increases trust and this in turn leads to better sales.

3: Authority

Rather than using your blog to sell company products and services, write about your personal experiences and knowledge. Readers respect bloggers who are open, honest and appear to know what they’re talking about. Think of your blog as a communication tool and use it to write about the most recent occurrences in your industry. Be as detailed as you can without alienating your readership. Soon, your blog will be seen as the place to go for new developments in your industry.

4: Engage With Customers

Regardless of the industry you’re in, the level of competition is likely to be fierce. With a constantly updated blog, you are in a position to respond immediately to the queries and concerns of readers and customers. Instead of being forced to listen to endless corporate spiel, visitors feel as if they have a voice and are more likely to do business with a company that is seen to listen to its customers.

5: Joining Forces

Every online business needs help and if you get the chance to collaborate with another well-respected blog, grasp the opportunity with both hands. This allows you to send your message to a wider audience using another company’s blog as a vehicle. There are a number of world class bloggers with huge audiences who don’t have the time to blog regularly. They are thrilled to accept guest posts from high quality writers. When creating a guest blog post, be sure include a link to your site at the end.

Updating your blog constantly gives you continued exposure. If you don’t update it, you’re doing your company a disservice.

Keywords

The first and most obvious problem relates to keyword usage. It’s highly likely that you have no idea what keywords your target audience uses when searching for content similar to your blog. You simply must find out which keywords to use or else you may as well be writing in an alien language. The Google Keyword Tool is an essential piece of free kit. You can enter different phrases which you think are relevant in the search box and see how much traffic they actually get. You will also see whether or not there is stiff competition. Don’t be afraid to slip keywords in whenever you can but ensure that this process doesn’t affect the blog’s readability. Also, avoid using too many keywords in a single post. One or two used cleverly is good SEO practice.

Images

Images can break up large blocks of text and including them is a good idea but only if you add descriptions for each one. Google can’t see images unless there is text attached. Use an ALT tag or caption and be sure to use a keyword in this description. In terms of making your blog easier to read, there are few simpler devices than bullet point lists. As well as being more aesthetically pleasing to your readership, blogs with bullet point lists are also picked up better by Google’s search engine spiders.

Links

As important as keywords are, they will do little for your search engine rankings unless that are accompanied by links. Link building can be a real pain but there are a few easy ways to get started. You should definitely add links to your old content as this provides additional value for visitors. Although you don’t want to send visitors away from your website, there is some value in linking with other bloggers. Naturally, you don’t want to link to a direct rival but if you can add links to highly rated blogs, Google will give you credit for sharing quality content with readers.

Content

Ensure that your content is always original. In Google terms, original simply means no plagiarising. Therefore, don’t lift content from other sites. Take the ideas espoused in other websites and rewrite them using your own inimitable writing style. As a blogger, you can’t afford to be lazy. If you’re in a fast moving industry, you need to keep your finger on the pulse and fingers hovering over the keyboard. Also, make sure that your blog is shared on social media networks where there are a multitude of potential readers.

If you’re putting heart and soul into your blog posts, start using your head too and ensure that your hard work is seen and you get the credit you deserve

Here are some tips that should help your site rank higher on Google as well as a few words of warning.

?  Headings: Always make sure that your site’s headings appear in order (h1, h2, h3 etc) on the page.

?  Intro: Your website should have an excellent introductory paragraph which explains what your site is about in clear terms to readers as well as containing relevant keywords.

?  Links: Every single page on your website needs to have text links. These links should describe where they are sending the reader rather than just saying click here. You should also ensure that your links are updated regularly. Google frowns on outdated links.

?  Site Map: You need to have one of these but ensure that there are less than 100 links a page.

?  Title Tag: A good title tag will make you stand out above rival websites. Google search results only show titles so generic titles will not rank well.

?  Flash and Images: Google’s spiders find it hard to read sites containing too many images and Flash websites. By all means use images but keep Flash to a minimum.

?  Content: Don’t fall into the trap of writing your pages for Google. It’s possible to write a high quality article for readers that also contains the requisite keywords. In fact, good writing normally contains the necessary phrases as a matter of course.

What To Avoid

?  Hidden Text: Don’t try and be clever by using hidden text. This is when the text and background is the same colour. Sites try and do this as a means of slipping in extra keywords and links while keeping the content’s integrity intact. This doesn’t work as Google only ranks text and links that can be seen by readers.

?  Cloaking: This is a black hat technique which involves sending search engine spiders to a different site that visitors don’t see. Again, this site will be filled with keywords and links that would make it virtually unintelligible.

?  Keyword Stuffing: Google changed their algorithm years ago to ensure that all sites had quality content. The practice of keyword stuffing is outdated and simply won’t work. You can keep keyword density relatively low and still rank high if the content and links are of sufficient quality.

?  Loopholes: If you ever think you’ve found a loophole that will ‘beat’ the Google search engine, forget about it. Even in the unlikely event that it works, Google will quickly catch on and penalise your site.

Improving your site’s search engine ranking is a long process that requires hard work and patience but if you follow the above tips, you’ll already have an advantage over lazy competitors.

10: Don’t Let Keywords Dictate

You should worry more about increasing targeted traffic to your site through link-marketing than focusing solely on keywords for SEO. It is foolish to risk your site’s future on a single strategy. Devote at least as much time to link-building as keyword placement.

9: Look For Link Patterns

Do relevant topical keyword searches on Google to see which sites rank highly for certain keywords. Create a list of the top 50 sites that are an accurate representation of the competitive landscape. Use link analysis tools to find patterns between the sites in your top 50. This may help you find out which links your rivals are getting that you aren’t.

8: Don’t Just Copy Your Rivals

However, you can’t just copy the links your rivals have. In order to beat them, you need to find links that they don’t yet have.

7: Clever Link Purchasing Is Okay

As link building can take a long time, there are plenty of companies offering to do it for you at a price. Yet you need to avoid SEO companies that use spam links as this will see you being penalised by the search engines. Buying links is fine, just make sure you use a reputable company and don’t fall into the J.C Penney trap.

6: Forget Link Exchanges

A link exchange involves you reciprocating links with another site. This won’t work as Google sees it as an attempt to manipulate their system and won’t rate it highly.

5: Look To Get Listed In Online Directories

Web directories are useful tools as they list your business and have a backlink to your site. Directories edited by humans and ones relating to your industry are your best bets.

4: Be Generous

Create high quality content that has a link to your site and offer it to another high ranking site. Offer to write a blog but make sure you know the target audience of the site you’re placing the content on.

3: Focus On Quality

Another word for content that is relevant, meaningful and inspires debate is ‘link bait’. This type of content is readily shared by users on social networking sites and these links do wonders for your search engine ranking.

2: Stay Legitimate

A handful of links from sites with authority and a good reputation are worth far more than hundreds of spam links from sites of dubious value. Try and ensure that your links come from sites that are in the same industry as your company.

1: Ensure Quality

Once upon a time, merely having more links than another site was enough to get you ranked above theirs. These days, Google only cares about quality links. Therefore, any time spent pursuing links from pointless sites is wasted. You’re responsible for checking out sites that link to you. Ensure that these sites provide visitors with value.

The above tips should be more than enough to get you started on the road to success when it comes to link building.

Communication Breakthrough

So, how do social media help your business? For a start, it opens up dialogue between your company and customers. This ensures that there is better communication between consumer and business than ever before. Online consumers don’t like dealing with companies unless they know the organisation is legitimate and a social media presence can certainly increase your credibility. Now that customers have the power to vent their fury online and savage a company that has underperformed, businesses need to tread carefully. By constantly remaining in contact with consumers, you can get an insight into what they want. In return, they will gain familiarity with your brand and hopefully be loyal customers for years to come. It makes sense to include social media as part of your marketing strategy.

Unlimited Audience

Before the internet was created, the audience a business could reach was limited by its budget. You couldn’t hope to gain a worldwide customer base unless you had incredible funds to branch out. Thanks to the internet and social media networks in particular, you are in touch with potentially hundreds of millions of customers. Estimates vary but Facebook alone has somewhere in the region of 500 million users. Social media enables you to contact potential customers from any country in the world. Your market is only limited by your imagination and ingenuity. Best of all, social media marketing campaigns are relatively cheap so this worldwide reach can be achieved by companies with a moderate budget.

Stay On Target

Finding your target audience used to be an expensive and frustrating process. This is no longer the case with social media. You can use the tools on Facebook and Twitter to gain an insight into the demographics of your customers. For example, Facebook Insights allows you to learn the personal details of potential customers. Perhaps even more importantly, you can find out what interests prospects and tailor your marketing campaign accordingly. The previous alternative was to engage in a ‘hit and miss’ strategy which was relatively fruitless and overwhelmingly expensive. Businesses that don’t use social media risk wasting thousands of pounds marketing to the wrong target audience.

The remarkable expansion of social media proves that it is here to stay. As things stand, there are an array of innovative marketing tools on these sites that are free to use. You would be doing your business a grave disservice if you neglected to use them.

Defining The Duo

On-site SEO is the basic process of ensuring that your website is found by Google and other search engines. There are many different elements to on-site SEO including finding suitable keywords and using them with the correct density. It also includes creating a blogto make it easier for search engines to find you. off-site SEO involves building inbound and outbound links. Inbound essentially means you create links on your pages that link to other pages on your site. Outbound means linking to other sites and vice versa.

How They Are Connected

Although it is popular to analyse on-site and off-site SEO separately, it should be noted that they are linked. Your on-site SEO efforts are what allow you to create the links associated with off-site SEO. The high quality content you create makes your site a more attractive proposition for sites looking for places to swap links with. Of course, when you create these links, you still have to make the effort just to get readers to click and take them to your site to see the content in the first place. Therefore, sites with badly written content will struggle to get links and having no links will ensure that fewer people will see well written content than should be the case.

Some sites have an incredible number of links but the site itself is poorly optimized and takes a long time to load. As a result, search engines won’t even be able to index all your pages because they have been badly laid out. Therefore, one would imagine that a slick website that loads extremely quickly, has excellent keyword usage and well written content will rank very well on search engines. If this were the case, then off-site SEO wouldn’t really matter. However, Google prefers sites that have plenty of links and this takes quite a lot of effort on your behalf. Google sees natural links as a sign that the public chose to link to a certain page because they felt it was worthwhile.

Playing To Your Strengths

In effect, neither on-site nor off-site SEO is ‘the best’. You need one to make the other work and without both, your site will not thrive. From a website creation point of view, if you have the ability to write great articles with excellent keyword usage, concentrate on this and hire a professional to do the off-site SEO. Conversely, if you have the ability to create good links, find a top class writer to do on-site SEO. Few people have the ability to do both so find your strength and hire someone else to deal with the weakness.

Research Or Fail

Everyone who uses SEO knows that keywords are vital but a low percentage of companies use relevant keywords correctly. Using keywords without finding out more information about their popularity/level of competition is a waste of time. There is no point in having a beautifully optimised website that uses keywords which have just 14 monthly searchers. Equally, it’s futile trying to rank for ultra popular keywords such as football or golf as the level of competition is too high. If you go down this route, prepare to spend a lot of money on your SEO campaign. Instead, you need to use long-tail keywords and take advantage of Google’s free keyword tool which shows you the keyword competition.

Headings/Subheading

Optimizing the basic blog and article content is not enough, you also need to optimize title tags, headings and subheadings. A lot of businesses waste time trying to optimize meta keywords tags without realizing that Google don’t count these tags in the ranking criteria. HTML tags and meta tags need to be different on your website’s pages if you want these tags to be stored and used in search results. Your homepage title must be less than 66 characters as Google does not display anything longer. When assembling your page, make sure you only use one H1 tag for your heading while using several H2-H6 subheadings. Of course, a page full of headings doesn’t read very well so enter text which contains important information relevant to your company ensuring that keywords are sprinkled throughout.

No Duplicate Content

All content that appears on your site needs to be regularly updated, created with the right keyword density in mind (1-2%) and also contain numerous links to other high ranking sites. The content needs to be useful and original because search engines heavily punish duplicate content. To be honest, you have no excuse to plagiarise when there are tools like Copyscape available to check all your work and ensure it doesn’t clash with other work on the web. Photo and video content works well too just don’t add too much flash content as this does not get picked up by search engine spiders.

In the end, SEO is not nearly as complicated as certain people make out. Yes, Google algorithms change almost daily it seems and this does keep online businesses guessing but in general, sites that use white hat SEO techniques effectively are not penalised. Keep your content fresh and relevant, perform a keyword search before using them and optimize headings and your site will stay well ranked on search engine pages for a long time.

First Changes

?  The Google Toolbar was launched in December 2000 with Toolbar PageRank also introduced. This is when the SEO race really began.

?  The search engine proceeded serenely for almost two years until an update was made in September 2002. Even today, no one is entirely sure what happened but webmasters were convinced that it altered search engine rankings.

?  The Boston update occurred in February 2003 and was the first to be named. It was announced in Boston and involved algorithm changes and a host of index refreshes. Originally, Google were going to make monthly changes but it soon became clear that there would be minor alterations on an almost daily basis so these plans were eventually scrapped in July 2003.

2003-2009

?  The Florida update of November 2003 really upset business owners as thousands of websites lost their ranking overnight. It was to see the end of techniques such as keyword stuffing as Google strived to improve the searcher’s experience.

?  The Brandy update of February 2004 saw the introduction of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) which increased anchor text relevance.

?  January 2005 saw the introduction of the ‘no follow’ tag which was used to prevent spam comments.

?  There were a host of minor changes to deal with technical issues made thereafter but in May 2007, Universal Search was introduced. This was to see traditional search results integrated with video, news, local and other search results. It was said that the traditional 10-listing SERP was now dead.

?  Real-Time Search was introduced in December 2009 with Google News, Twitter feeds and numerous other sources integrated to create a real-time feed.

Recent Changes

?  In April 2010, a significant change was made which was to affect the way local businesses advertised forever. Google Places was created to help local businesses rank in the top pages of organic search results. The idea was to remove well-optimised sites that had nothing to do with the area.

?  The following month’s May Day algorithm changes severely affected long-tail keyword usage as sites with thin content suffered the most.

?  On 23 February 2011, one of the most far-reaching algorithm changes was made in the form of Panda. It was another attempt at quality control by Google with the search engine rankings changed by as much as 12% though many SEO experts believe the impact to be even greater.

?  Google + was the search engine giant’s most successful foray into social media with 10 million followers joining within a fortnight. This occurred on 28 June 2011.

?  The most recent update came on 19 January 2012. It affected sites that had too much ad space ‘above the fold’.

As you can plainly see, Google algorithms change faster than the weather. These are just a small number of the changes that have occurred in the last 10 years. Expect more to come quickly after this article is published but please bear in mind that the majority of these changes are attempts by Google to improve the quality of sites visible to search engine users.

Instant Rankings

The chief benefit of Google Places is the fact that it enables you to suddenly usurp larger, more established organisations in terms of search engine rankings. Let’s say that you wanted to rank for Leicester Pizza. Trying to get ranked in the top page for that particular long-tail keyword could take more than a year if you went through the usual channels. With Google Places however, you will be able to immediately shoot to the top of the rankings even if you have created a brand new site.

Mobile Users

Another major benefit to getting on Google Places is the fact that you’ll automatically be seen on Google Maps and searches from iPhones. If this doesn’t seem significant, then you don’t realise how quickly iPhone and Smartphone usage has increased in the last couple of years. If you own a salon in Leeds and an iPhone user in Leeds types ‘Leeds Salon’ into the search box, your location would show up on Google Maps. If they are in a hurry and your shop is nearby, you may gain an instant customer!

Photos

One of the most remarkable things about Google Places is that they are willing to perform free photo shoots for companies located in major cities. The photos they take are of premium quality and the process actually helps them too. Having high quality photos improves their listings and ensures that they are seen as an authority on local businesses. From your point of view, Google confirms that your business is legitimate because they have actually been in the place and photos make your company look more professional and real which heightens your chances of gaining new customers.

Free

Google Places really provides a winning situation all round. It is free to use for businesses and provides them with a number of amazing advantages over rivals who have not yet seen the Google Places light. You can also drum up interest in your business by offering discount coupons on the site. This helps you gain more customers and the public gets to sample your products/services for a significantly reduced price.

It seems as if Google has decided that local businesses need a boost when it comes to local search engine rankings. From Google’s point of view, Google Places ensures that visitors to the search engine find only the most relevant content. This stops people switching over to rival search engines. As a result, they have created something that will help your ranking, ensure that you get greater publicity and hopefully more customers. Whether they keep coming back for more is entirely up to you.

Thus far, social media ROI has been measured in less than accurate ways. So-called ‘soft’ metrics such as the number of likes a company’s fan page has are currently being used. Indeed, almost 68% of CMO’s used traffic to measure their ROI in 2011 while just under 50% used revenue as a measure of ROI. However, as we already know, the revenue that a social media marketing campaign directly generates is still unknown.

Social Media Marketing Is Now Essential

In 2008, around 40% of online companies used social media marketing to promote their business. In 2011, this had increased to 80% and is certain to rise still further. Soon, all online companies will use some form of social media marketing in their advertising campaigns. In 2010, just over $2 billion was spent on social media but in 2015, this is set to increase to $8 billion so companies are understandably eager to see whether or not their campaigns are actually responsible for them generating profit. In 2009, only 16% of companies attempted to measure their social media ROI but in 2012, almost every company is looking to do so, despite the fact that no hard data can be found.

Solutions

Without specific figures, companies need information on how they can begin to approach the Herculean task of calculating their campaign’s ROI. You need to realise that social networks are communication tools first and foremost. Some marketing experts believe that social media is comparable to business cards in terms of calculating ROI. If you hand out 500 business cards at a conference, how do you really know the ROI? For now, companies are advised to look at social media for its potential rather than for cold, hard statistics. It should also be noted that traditional marketing methods such as phone calls and email marketing are not bound by ROI. Essentially, your business needs to view social media as a starting point rather than a finishing line which is basically what ROI measures.

Perhaps there will never be a truly accurate way of calculating the ROI of a social media marketing campaign or maybe one will be found within the next 12 months. Even if no data is found, the amount of potential customers you reach indicates that social media marketing is a worthwhile exercise, even if you don’t have the figures to prove it.