At last, some common sense about search engine optimisation

I’ve just read a great post on Aaron Wall’s blog about search engine optimisation. Aaron is one of the leading experts on SEO and just talks plain common sense.

Here is an edited version of his blog post:

“There are so many blogs on search marketing.

Then there are so many forums.

And Tweets.

So much SEO noise, and so little time. So how does anyone make sense of it? The deluge can be overwhelming for the experienced SEO, let alone the poor beginner. If you are just starting SEO, here are the ten areas you should spend most of your time on when you’re starting up.

1. Stop reading Blogs/Forums/Tweets/Facebook. Too much noise, takin’ all your time

2. Before you do any SEO, define your niche. What service does your website provide? Who are your readers/customers? What can you provide that your competitors don’t? How are you going to deliver your services and make a profit? There’s no point ranking well for a business that doesn’t work at a fundamental level.

3. Set business-specific goals and include a time frame. “I want to make x in 12 months”. “I want 20,000 RSS subscribers in 6 months”. It’s important to be specific. It’s difficult to measure goals that aren’t specific i.e. “be popular”.

4. Create interesting content. If you know your audience, you already know what content they will find interesting. If you don’t, revisit #2.

5. Links. You need links. Not just the Google-juice, PR-passing kind. Links are the arteries of the web, Traffic travels across links, so all links, crawlable or not, no-followed or otherwise, are valuable. Asking for links from people you don’t know is pretty much a waste of time. It’s a better idea to create fantastic content, then link out to the popular people who can spread the word. They’ll follow their inbound links back to you. Make sure that what they find is remarkable.

6. Do SEO. All that stuff you’re no longer reading in #1? It all boils down to this: put keywords in your title tag, write on-topic content, make sure your site is crawlable, get links to that content, get people to talk about you. Repeat.

7. After a month, look at your keyword referral logs. Take those terms and plug ‘em into keyword research tools. Create a list of 30 keyword terms that your audience would find interesting. Those are your article headings. Write 30 articles. Repeat.

8. Look at your competitors. Your competitors are ranking well for a reason. They’re being mentioned elsewhere for a reason. What are they doing that you’re not? Reverse engineer their sites i.e. who links to them, find out what articles they publish and find out who is talking about them, and why. Emulate them, then go one better. Either that, or stop competing with them directly i.e. define a slightly different niche.

9. Get social. Social media is often over-hyped, but the principles, and numbers behind it, are sound. Getting mentioned is the new link building. It’s about building connections between people. Google has a problem. Using links as a measure of relevant content doesn’t work as well as it used to, so you can be sure Google will be using an ever-more complex set of signals. These signals will involve the connections people make with your site. That’s really what Google wants to know - who is most relevant. Consider the many different ways people can connect with you, and enable those connections.

10. Start reading the blogs/forums/twitter. The irony, of course, is that I’ve linked to some truly great resources and thinkers

If you’ve followed the ten steps above, you’re 80% of the way there. The final 20% will take a while longer, and that’s where the minutae comes in.

Keep in mind that some of the most lucrative SEO information isn’t likely to be published in the public domain. Cultivate personal networks to get this information. This is true of any business endeavor.”

You can’t make pigs fly

Website owners often think they can boost their sales by hiring a search engine optimisation expert to get them more traffic.

While more traffic is always good, you need to bear in mind the advice of Bruce Clay, who is regarded as the world’s leading expert in search engine optimisation.

To quote Bruce: “It is not the job of search engine optimisation to make a pig fly. It is the job of the SEO to genetically re-engineer the website so that it becomes an eagle.”

In other words, it’s a waste of money sending more traffic to a website if the site doesn’t work effectively to convert those visitors into sales.

It’s far better to invest money first to transform your website into an eagle… so it really flies.

It’s much easier to double your business by doubling your conversion rate than by doubling your traffic

To quote another top marketer: “Trying to increase sales simply by driving more traffic to a website with a poor customer conversion rate is like trying to keep a leaky bucket full by adding more water instead of plugging the holes”

Most New Zealand websites are full of holes. The priority is to get these plugged (or in some cases it’s better to build a new bucket).

If you’re serious about selling online, you do need to work on search engine optimisation too. But that should come AFTER you’ve got your website converting at the best rate possible. And bear in mind, SEO (done correctly) is expensive. It’s easier and cheaper to double your conversion rate than to double your traffic.

How to Recession-Proof Your Business Using the Internet

I have just published a new report called
‘How to Recession-Proof Your Business Using the Internet’.

The report is too long to post here (about 9 pages). So I’m offering it to you as PDF to download. The report is free and you don’t even have to give me your email to get it

But if you find it helpful, I would like to ask that you will forward it on to someone else who might also benefit from it.

The Report covers:

• How People’s Behaviour Changes in a Recession and How to Profit from It [Page 2]
• What You Should NEVER Do in a Recession and What to Do Instead [Page 3]
• The 4 Reasons Why You Need to Market Your Business on the Internet [Page 4]
• The Top 3 Ways to Market Your Business on the Internet [Page 6]

To get the Report, Click Here.

‘Winning Websites for Small Businesses’ - a new handbook for New Zealand businesses

I have just finished writing a brand-new handbook for New Zealand businesses, called “Winning Websites for Small Businesses”.

I don’t believe there’s any other publication in New Zealand quite like this handbook because it’s aimed specifically at the unique needs of the New Zealand marketplace.

If you have a website for your business and it’s not getting you the amount of visitors, leads, or sales that you wish it was - this handbook has been written for you!

I’ve basically tried to summarise everything I know about website design and selling on the Internet, in a user-friendly way that is easy for the ordinary business person to understand.

This handbook is not about website design in the ordinary sense. It is about how to build a website that SELLS - and there’s a big difference

If you are keen to find out more about this handbook (and if you’re a New Zealand business that has a website, then you should be) then go to www.winningwebsites.co.nz.

Meta Tags … A Vital Part Of Your Strategy To Get A Top Search Engine Position

Meta tags are a vital part of your website. If you want to get a top search engine position, you must put the right content in your meta tags.

Meta tags optimisation is not magic. In fact, to get top search engine rankings there are just a few simple things you need to know. They set apart successful meta tags from the majority of unsuccessful ones. Do these simple things and you’re almost guaranteed to get a top search engine position.

First, it’s worth noting that many search engines now ignore meta tags altogether. But don’t get complacent because of this. The biggest search engine, Google, still relies heavily on meta tags - particularly the TITLE tag - when it ranks your site.

Given that Google provides more than 35 per cent of all search engine traffic worldwide, it’s important to optimise your site for this search engine above all others.

The all-important TITLE tag

So let’s start with the all-important TITLE tag. This is the key to creating successful meta tags if you want to optimize your site for Google.

(Before you can create your meta tags, you must select the right keywords for your site. If you haven’t already done this, you need to read the page on this site dedicated to keywords.

Once you have selected your keywords, you are ready to start writing meta tags that will get you a top search engine position.)

It is vital that you put your keywords in the TITLE tag. Don’t just put your company name. This is a mistake that many website owners make. You can put your company name as well as your keywords, if you like. (But if your title is more than 10 words, the last words will probably not appear in the browser bar.)

Sometimes the TITLE is the only information about your site that appears in search results. The TITLE is what people use for bookmarks. So it’s important to get it right.

Using your primary keywords in your TITLE tag is the most powerful thing you can do to boost your search engine ranking.

The meta DESCRIPTION tag

After the TITLE, the description is your second chance to persuade people to visit your website - or not. So it should be an accurate guide to what’s on the page. And it must be worth reading.

Ideally, you should use exactly the same keywords to start your description tag as you used for the TITLE. Then you can elaborate further on the content of the page.

How many keywords should you put in your meta KEYWORD tag?

The third meta tag is the keyword tag. A few years ago, people used to think the more keywords they could cram into this tag the better. They would list hundreds of keywords. Now, this is a waste of time. In fact, most search engines regard it as “spamming” and will penalize you if you repeat too many keywords.

So limit the number of keywords on each page of your site. It’s best to focus on just a few keywords for each page.

It is also important to use only lower case type in the meta keyword tag. This is because most search engine queries are typed in lower case.

As you can see meta tags are not rocket science. It doesn’t take much to create successful meta tags. And if you do it right, you are almost guaranteed to dramtically increase your search engine ranking.

Why Search Engine Optimisation Is Doomed … And Quality Content Is The Best Strategy For Your Website

If you have a website, sooner or later you’ll get interested in search engine optimisation.

It’s the art (or is it a science?) of tweaking your website copy and links, so your site ranks higher in the search engines.

There are many professional search engine optimisation firms (commonly known as SEOs) who will charge you substantial amounts of money to improve your website’s rankings for certain search terms.

It’s tempting to go down the SEO track, particularly when you find your precious site languishing far, far down the rankings on Google.

But I would never put my faith in the SEO industry, and I recommend an alternative, more reliable method of achieving a top search engine ranking in the long term.

The truth is, search engines are getting smarter and smarter at recognising sites that have been “SEO’d”.

The engines are constantly getting more sophisticated, to avoid some of the unethical SEO practices being used to trick them into giving a site a good ranking.

So SEO experts are on a continual treadmill to keep up.

Initially, SEO revolved mainly around keywords. Now, it seems to centre around building inbound links to the site, to get a higher ‘page rank’ on Google.

But I believe website owners are wasting their time and money by becoming too focused on either of these SEO techniques.

You’re better off simply adding more and more quality content to your website, to provide visitors with what they really want on the Web.

In other words: Make your content so good that others will want to link to you.

Certainly, bit of a push start by a solid, simple inbound link programme is a good idea but this doesn’t have to become an all-consuming pre-occupation.

All you need are a few popular sites, in your market sector, linking to you.

There are several ways to achieve this, including contacting the owners of sites you would like linking to you, and asking if they want to exchange links.

Once you have a few quality links to your site, that’s enough.

From then on, concentrate on adding more and more content to your site.

There is an important place for keywords on these new content pages. It helps to focus each page on one or two keywords (actually, it’s better to use key phrases, because these are what Web searchers typically use) sprinkle these keywords and phrases throughout your page.

You can find the best keywords by using a service called Wordtracker. This is particularly useful because it saves you from simply guessing which words and phrases people are searching on, and gives you the actual search terms being used  and how much competition there is for these terms.

I won’t go too much into keyword analysis here. Suffice it to say, if you focus mainly on writing content-filled pages that are of genuine value to your prospective customers or clients, you’ll be on the right track.

As the search engines see the content on your site continually changing, they’ll return more often. They’ll spider new content on your pages faster and faster. This is good news and helps your search engine rankings.

The only downside of this approach is that it does take time and commitment to keep adding content to your website. It may seem easier to pay an SEO expert.

But consider this. Even if you do achieve a good ranking in the search engines through SEO, if a visitor arrives and finds mediocre content, what’s the use. They’ll simply click away.

For most small businesses, with limited financial resources, the key to getting your website noticed in the search engines is a slow, steady approach of adding more and more pages with great, relevant content for your marketplace.

Then you can forget about SEO and every other trick.

Focus on building content and everything else will take care of itself.

Search Engine Optimization Made Easy - By Brad Callen

If you’re looking for the real facts about how to get your site onto page one of Google, I recommend this excellent e-book. It’s 90 pages long … and free! Parts of the book are a quiet sales pitch for the software the author sells. But whether or not you want the software, you can still get an excellent education in the basics of SEO from this e-book. 

Click Here To Download