Expressly Seo

Google Defends Search Changes
Google has defended the introduction of a panel on the left-hand side of its search results page, after it received criticism from surfers. The change, along with slight modifications to the Google logo and colour scheme of the search engine, happened earlier this month.

“A common way to expand the flexibility of a website has been to add a left-hand panel of links, often I referred to by designers as a ‘left-hand nay’,” said Jon Wiley, senior user- experience designer at Google.

But 60 per cent of visitors polled on Webuser.co.uk said that they didn’t like the new design and wanted to return to the old version of Google’s results page. “Why could they not simply make it optional? For example, there could be a very narrow ‘column’ on the left that users could expand to see all the options by clicking on it,” one visitor wrote.

PPC Landing Pages
Setting up a Pay per Click campaign, such as Google Adwords and attracting visitors to your website will not necessarily create sales for your particular product or service. Having a poor quality landing pages could mean click thru’s – and therefore your money, are wasted by the client being taken to a page that does not provide the specific information the visitor is looking for.

Your landing pages should be a direct reflection of the copy used in your Pay per Click advert. Picking one generic page of your website to send every visitor to is not the right approach and, as I’ve already said, it’s likely that, with this approach, youl could well be losing potential sales and money with this approach.

Having your visitors land on the home page of your site is not the most effective strategy for any Pay per Click campaign. Look to have a targeted landing page to send your PPC clicks thru’s. Not only do you want the page to reflect the details from your Pay per Click advert but it is very important to have some sort of call to action items on your landing page.

 If you want the visitor to call you don’t assume that they will know to do this. Make the contact telephone number and other contact details stand out as much as possible in multiple areas of the landing page.

Put yourself in the shoes of the person clicking your ad and anticipate where you would like to land. What would you think of the landing page? Would it induce you to part with you hard earned money?  Does the landing page offer the product advertised in the Pay per Click advert, is the page attractive and is there a call to action which is both simple and tested. Make sure it works!

Finally, check to make sure link is not broken on your advert. You would be amazed at how often this happens and it is a sure fire way to put a potential visitor off from visiting your website as well wasting your PPC campaign budget.

In short, if you want to make the most of your Pay per Click campaign, make sure you have good quality, advert specific landing pages set up.

Internet Marketing by Direct Submit

Making a Website Work for You
In a perfect world, SEO would be developed while a website is still in infancy. While this ideal situation rarely occurs, the following steps summarise the process as it should occur every time.

(1) Key Phrase Strategy and Website Development
Before building your website, you must have a keyword strategy. Select key phrases that are relevant to your business and receive an acceptable level of traffic. It is often appropriate, particularly for smaller / new businesses, to avoid the most competitive phrases where the level of competition you would be up against would be significant. You can always develop to these phrases as your business grows.

Once you have selected your keywords you can begin to develop the website using basic SEO site structure principles. These include the Meta titles, Meta descriptions, linking strategy, clear site navigation, optimised coding and great content.

(2) Web Analytics
Try to include some web analytics platform that will allow you to monitor users are coming from and what search terms they are using. One free example is Google Analytics which provides a reasonable level of feedback on the traffic levels and sources to your website. This information will enable you to monitor and update your website to try and achieve the best results possible within your market sector.

(3) Driving Traffic to the Website
Obvious really, but look to get your web pages listed in the main search engines as quickly as you can.  You can submit the website, but also look to get your URL linked to from websites already in the search engines. Subscribe to directories and develop a strategy for effective link building. Remember, with links, it’s about quality, not quantity; a handful of links on top-notch sites is worth hundreds of links on irrelevant, insignificant sites.

Incorporate off site and traditional marketing methods. For example, include your web address on your stationary and have it displayed on the side of company vehicles.

Consider employing the services of an Internet Marketing specialist to help with the Search Engine process. At Direct Submit we regularly see clients who have spent thousands on a website wrongly assuming, the traffic will just come, only to find their lovely looking website is not SEO friendly and they have no identifiable SEO strategy in place.

(4) Monitor, Evaluate & Refine
After you campaign has run for a time, review and look to assess how the project has been working. Are your keywords receiving the most traffic and bringing in the best ROI, is your website listed in the major search engines and do you need to update /refine the website content.

XML Sitemaps
Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft all support a protocol known as XML Sitemaps. Google first announced it in 2005, and then Yahoo! and Microsoft agreed to support the protocol in 2006. Using the Sitemaps protocol you can supply the search engines with a list of all the URLs you would like them to crawl and index.

The benefits of Sitemaps include the following:
• For the pages the search engines already know about through their regular spidering, they use the metadata you supply, such as the last date the content was modified (lastmod date) and the frequency at which the page is changed (changefreq), to improve how they crawl your site.
• For the pages they don’t know about, they use the additional URLs you supply to increase their crawl coverage.
• For URLs that may have duplicates, the engines can use the XML Sitemaps data to help choose a canonical version.
• Verification/registration of XML Sitemaps may indicate positive trust/authority signals.
• The crawling/inclusion benefits of Sitemaps may have second-order positive effects, such as improved rankings or greater internal link popularity.

Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team has explained Google Sitemaps in the following way:

“Imagine if you have pages A, B, and C on your site. We find pages A and B through our normal web crawl of your links. Then you build a Sitemap and list the pages B and C. Now there’s a chance (but not a promise) that we’ll crawl page C. We won’t drop page A just because you didn’t list it in your Sitemap. And just because you listed a page that we didn’t know about doesn’t guarantee that we’ll crawl it. But if for some reason we didn’t see any links to C, or maybe we knew about page C but the URL was rejected for having too many parameters or some other reason, now there’s a chance that we’ll crawl that page C”.

Adding a URL to a Sitemap file does not guarantee that a URL will be crawled or indexed. However, it can result in pages that are not otherwise discovered or indexed by the search engine getting crawled and indexed. In addition, Sitemaps appear to help pages that have been relegated to Google’s supplemental index make their way into the main index. This program is a complement to, not a replacement for, the search engines’ normal, link-based crawl.

Internet Marketing by Direct Submit

Understanding Landing Pages for PPC
Do not invest large sums of money into PPC advertising, such as Google Adwords, without first thinking about landing pages. A landing page, often referred to by PPC systems as the target URL or destination URL, is the page that people are sent to when they click a link to your site. In this context, of course, a landing page is a page that a PPC ad points to.

A good landing page helps sell. It’s the first step in the process of convincing the visitor to your site to buy from you. Thus, when you point a PPC ad to your site, in many cases, you won’t want to simply point to your home page. Why? If you sell 100 products and your ad is pushing a particular product. Pointing to your home page may not effectively promote the product and may result in you losing a lot of potential customers.

For further information on developing a succesful Pay per Click  and online marketing campaign contact Direct Submit Internet Marketing.

Google to Use Page Speed as Ranking Factor
Google have recently announced that they started to use site speed as one of the 200 signals that influence the position of a website in the search results:

“As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.  We’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.”

Will your website rankings drop?

Google’s Matt Cutts says that the change will affect only some websites:
“Fewer than 1% of search queries will change as a result of incorporating site speed into our ranking. That means that even fewer search results are affected, since the average search query is returning 10 or so search results on each page.

So please don’t worry that the effect of this change will be huge. In fact, I believe the official blog post mentioned that ‘We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing.’

The fact that not too many people noticed the change is another reason not to stress out disproportionately over this change.”

Common Ecommerce SEO Mistakes
As an Internet Marketing Service, we are regularly asked by clients with an online shop to suggest some ways of improving their rankings. This article in the NET magazine, written by a guy called Mark Buckingham we thought may be of value in that it reveals some of the mistakes that could send your ecommerce website tumbling down the search engine rankings.

If you’re running an ecommerce site, you’re almost certain to be fighting a fiercely competitive battle with rivals over search engine rankings. It helps to avoid key mistakes which may otherwise nullify the potency of your efforts.

Firstly, avoid the cut and paste trap. The majority of ecommerce sites acquire product descriptions from the manufacturer, and it’s all too easy to copy such text word for word. Be wary of such shortcuts. They go against the bedrock of optimisation – making each page unique and consistent to the overall theme or product/service.

Instead, hone your product descriptions and emphasise the strengths of your brand. Think like your buyer why should someone buy and what incentive is there for them? Make a list of all niche keywords relevant to that item and work them into the body copy, headers, sub headers, titles, meta description and image tags. Aim for a sensible density and consistency, and never overlook the buyer’s conversion path. What do you want prospective buyers to do?

Secondly, be wary of making site-wide changes overnight. In the rush to adopt the latest search fad or SEO craze, or simply as part of a redesign, making wholesale, rash, alterations to your site can affect otherwise acceptable search coverage. I often advise clients to be very clear on what they want to improve, evaluate the outcome on a small (isolated) group of pages, and monitor the changes, then adapt and proceed cautiously.

Finally, don’t be afraid to speak your mind and educate members of the team or those working with your client as to what is and isn’t accessible. A beautifully eye-catching site with all the bells and whistles might look nice, but if it’s Flash-heavy and sluggish, or incorporates programming that isn’t especially Google-friendly, the site might be disadvantaged. If in any doubt, consult Google’s munificent Webmaster Guidelines and steer your site to success.

Local Search Engine Optimisation Services
Local search, or searching for local businesses on search engines, is becoming one of the most popular search types on the web as more and more people start to use search engines to search for a local service.

More and more people are using the search engines to search for such as “motor home rental North East” or “Van Hire Newcastle” and it is reported to be one of the fastest growing areas for ‘searches’ online. Perhaps you own a restaurant or hotel in the North East, a florist shop or landscaping firm in Sunderland.

Local Search Customers Are Twice as Likely to Buy
People who use the search engines to search for local products or services are reported to be far more likely to be at or near making the decision to buy a particular product or service right now.

Local search visitors could be one of the most critical groups of people to visit your online business, so doesn’t it make sense to make sure you’re website is optimised for local search traffic and you are doing all you can to convert each one into a satisfied customer?

Our local Internet Marketing service is helping many local businesses succeed. If you would like to discuss your local SEO project, call us now on 0191 2673030 or email us at mail@directsubmit.co.uk. We look forward to your call.

Choosing the Right Keywords
One of the most important aspects of Internet Marketing is the initial key phrase research.  Many webmasters and marketers spend their time optimising for keywords that are virtually unattainable or offer little return or value.

It’s important to know where to invest your time and resources to get the most return from your investment.  So here are some ideas to help you for choose the right keywords. 

Think about the subject of your website. Write down all the keywords that you think people are most likely to use when searching for the information that you have. Important – get the opinion of other people such as friends, family and customers. Ask them what keywords they have used or think they would use to find your website. This will often differ to what phrases you think they might search on.

Review & refine this list then look into how often a phrase is searched for and how competitive it might be. Use Google’s Adwords Keyword Research Tool to help with this research. If competitors are trying to buy your keyword(s) on Google Adwords, then it’s something people want.

Find out what keywords your competition uses. Look for the keyword tags in the source code to find these keywords. To view a website’s keywords, while viewing the website in your browser click “Source” in your “View” menu.

Once you have identified your key phrase list, you will need to apply these to your website content and optimisation process.

Choosing the best SEO keywords is extremely important to making your website work for you and the good thing about properly executed & researched SEO is that the work you do now will continually produce results for you for a long time to come.

The ‘H’ tags & Search Engine Optimisation

Using the ‘H’ tags with your search engine optimisation can make a significant difference to the success of your Internet Marketing campaign.  So what are they? ‘H’ tags are used to denote section titles in your content.  <H1> tags are normally used for the main title of the content and then lower ‘H’ tags (such as <H2> and <H3>) are used for sub-headings within your webpage content.

HTML has six heading elements: <Hi> through to <H6>. Use <H1> for your main page heading, then <H2> for sub-headings and so on. Remember when using these tags to prioritise your website content accordingly.  Search engines view the <Hi> tag as the most important title of the page and then <H2> as the next most important and so on. 

You should always make sure your <H1> tag contains your most important keywords. Try to make sure your <H1> tag corresponds to your page Meta Tag Title. This highlights to search engines exactly what your page is about, and helps identify the most important key phrases.

Don’t overuse your these tags though.  Just use one <H 1> tag with your most important content, then use as many <h2> and <H3> tags as you need alongside your content.