Category: Marketing

SEO Web Design Secrets: Search Engine Optimization Tips For Beginners – Web Design Tips – Web Development

Posted by admin – 28/02/2010

web design SEO Web Design Secrets: Search Engine Optimization Tips For Beginners

SEO web design is a skill that can be learned, though most search engine optimization for beginners courses dwell too much on linking strategy as opposed to web site design per se. There are many ways for most normal people to get an improved search engine ranking, and secure a high search engine listing, and while linking is important, good on-site SEO is also necessary.

Although it might not seem like it, getting a good listing on Google or any of the other search engines is not as difficult as many like to claim. There are rules to follow, and if you play the game properly then the outcome should be in your favour. The tips provided in this article are not really secrets as such; although many people offer to divulge marvelous secrets to you, all they are giving you is stuff that people have been using for years.

So you won't get any secrets here. I have nothing hidden away that I don't want anybody to know, and if I had I wouldn't tell you about it! Would you? If you had some secrets that were so valuable that they were making you money, would you give them away free in an article like this one? Of course you wouldn't!

So here are my not-so-secret tips on getting a good listing in Google and improving your search engine ranking. You likely know a fair bit about meta tags, and have been informed that most are not used by search engines. Well let me tell you something. If you Google' Article Services you will finds my website right at the top in the #1 position for that keyword. Check the description that Google provides right under the title: that is exactly as it is in the Description' tag that I have on the site. So don't let anybody tell you that Google don't use the Description tag, because they do. So do Ask and MSN (now Live Search), and Yahoo also uses it, but not the whole thing exactly as written.

The Keyword tag is another matter. Google aren't interested in what you tell them the keywords are: they decide the relevance of the page themselves from the text and Alt tags on the page. Google no longer need keyword repetition to understand what you are writing about: they have the LSI algorithm now, that will determine the meaning of your page from the character strings it contains. The algorithm is programmed to calculate a relevance factor from the vocabulary you use in relation to the rest of the vocabulary on the page. However, back to SEO web design, and some search engine optimization tips for beginners.

In addition to the Description meta tag, the HTML tags you should use are:

1. The Keywords meta tag. Although little used it only takes a second to put in, and does no harm. There is evidence that some search engines might use it. The rest of the meta tags are pointless.

2. The TITLE tag. This is the title of your web page, and should contain the primary keyword for the page. Each page should be written round one primary keyword that relates to the subject of your website or niche.

For example, if your niche is costume jewelry, the primary keyword for your home page would be costume jewelry'. You could then have a number of 'silos' with a main page title each. The title of one main silo page could be 'simulated diamonds' and the first page title of that silo could be garnets'. All of these are the primary keywords for their respective pages. Another silo could be colored gem stones', with that as the primary keyword for the main silo page, and that for your first sub-page in that silo could be citrine'. And so on.

Each page must have one primary keyword, and it should be included in the Title tag for that page. The Title tag does not appear in the body of the article, but in the HTML between the two HEAD tags in your html.

3. The H tag. These are heading tags, with H1 being the most important. The heading for each main section in your page should be contained within H1 tags, and many pages have only the one set of such tags. Subheadings, containing secondary keywords, should be contained within H2 tags, and so on. Thus, in the example above, the heading or your garnets silo could be could be Garnets in Costume Jewelry' in H1 tags.

After an introduction to garnets, you could then have an H2 heading containing The Source of Garnets: Where Garnets Come From', then another passage of text headed How Garnets are Cut for Costume Jewelry', again held in H2 tags.
4. The ALT attribute. Use Alt = within the Img tags of your images and graphics. This lets the search engines know what the graphic is about: search engines do not read graphics, and the Alt attribute offers you the chance to use your graphics meaningfully with respect to SEO web design.

TEXT FORMATTING

That's all you have to worry about regarding the HTML tags. You text formatting can be used to emphasize to search engines what the important text on your page is. Thus, if you use bold text, underscoring or italics, they indicate the important words and phrases. Thus, use the STRONG and U html tags in your heading.

WRITE NATURALLY

Don't worry too much about your keyword density (KD), other than having to much. Too high a KD could harm you if Google thinks you are making unnecessary use of them. Write naturally for human readers, and not robots. If your text reads well and makes it clear what the subject of the passage is about, then you will be fine. In my writing I ignore the concept of KD altogether. I use my keywords as indicated above, and also in the first and last 100 characters on the page (or at least in the last paragraph somewhere).

Good SEO web design is not keyword fixated, but contains good contextually related vocabulary that the LSI algorithm can use to target the relevance of the page to the search term being used by somebody using the search engine to find information. That's all a keyword is: a term used by somebody looking for information. If you cannot work without a target KD, then I would go for a max of 1% with plenty associated vocabulary, synonyms. Related terms, etc.

Thus, if you are writing a 400 word article on the keyword losing weight', use these words four times, not twelve (1% not 3%)

None of these are web design secrets, and I doubt if there are any such secrets left any more. I suppose the only thing even approaching a secret here is that my description meta tag is copied exactly by Google in the listing for my #1 placed website. That allows you to determine how Google users see the description of your site in the listing.

I have several more SEO web design tips to offer, but these will be the subject of another article. In the meantime if you implement these search engine optimization tips for beginners, then you should soon see an improvement in your website's search engine ranking.

If you want more SEO web design tips, you will find Part 2 of this article with more search engine optimization tips for beginners on Seocious Tips 2 along with a free gift for everybody from me, Pete Nisbet of SEOcious.

New project 4officecleaning.co.uk

Posted by admin – 18/11/2009

New website focused on providing office cleaning services nationwide http://4officecleaning.co.uk

We are now targeting SEO customers in Sheffield

Posted by admin – 14/11/2009

We are now targeting SEO customers in Sheffield. We are now actively taking on new SEO customers based in Sheffield

SEO Sheffield

We are now targeting SEO in Retford

Posted by admin – 14/11/2009

Webmojo is now actively targeting company’s in Retford who need to market their business online

SEO Retford

We are now targeting SEO in Worksop

Posted by admin – 13/11/2009

Webmojo is now actively targeting company’s in Worksop who need to market their business on the web

SEO Worksop

What Form of Online Marketing is Best for You

Posted by admin – 17/04/2009

marketing1On-line marketing seems to be creating buzz, lots of it. Marketing directors seem to be scratching their heads, they know how powerful a tool it is, but, don’t know just how it can be implemented to there current projects.

What I’m going to do today is layout the benefits and disadvantages of using particular on-line marketing methods. the two main SEM also known as search engine marketing solutions are SEO and PPC. I am also going to throw Email marketing into the mix as it has its place in any marketing plan.

SEO Marketing

SEO or search engine optimisation is my favourite form of on-line marketing, mainly because of its cost and conversion factor. A website at number one position, in a quality search engine can expect to attract approximately 50% of the clicks for a search term that they are ranking for. So if a term is searched for 1000 times a month, a good estimate is that, your page ranked number one will get approximately 500 clicks a month. With a good conversion rate of 3% (depending on how well your site converts)you could expect 15 new customers per month. Not bad eh!, what would 15 new customers per month, every month how could this improve your  business.

SEO Benefits

  • Once implemented correctly is cost effective
  • Improves with time
  • Highly targeted & qualified leads

SEO Disadvantages

  • Takes time to get to its full potential
  • Needs consistent input to be successful
  • Can only target a few phrases per page

Pay Per Click Marketing

Pay Per Click is the best way to gain traffic quickly, you can launch a website on Monday morning and have targeted traffic on your site by Monday afternoon. With a little research PPC can be very lucrative way of gaining visitors. The downside of PPC is that you have to pay a small (sometimes large) amount of money each and every time someone clicks on your advert. The rule of thumb is, you need to spend less on the clicks then the profit you can make.

PPC Benefits

  • Fast, very fast way of gaining traffic
  • You can target a larger set of keywords or phrases
  • Detailed click through statistics enabling you to fine tune your campaign

PPC disadvantages

  • Cost
  • PPC, click through rates are around 6 times less then organic search results

Email marketing

Email marketing, in the past, got a lot of bad press. With its affiliation with spam and people receiving a lot of unsolicited emails.

Email marketing can be an extremely powerful tool when implemented correctly. Email marketing has to be permission based ( at least have a way of un-subscribing if you’re working from a brokered list). People do not like receiving email that presumes that they are interested in your product.

The correct way to start an email marketing campaign

Build an opt in list, you do this by getting people to subscribe to your newsletter via your website. As a hook you could offer them something for free.

Do not just email your list with sales copy give them something of value, like information to help there business. If you are going to include marketing for your service make sure it is relevant to your target audience.

If they do not want to continue receiving your newsletter give them a clear way of un-subscribing

Planning Your Website Before Talking To Your Web Designer

Posted by admin – 30/03/2009

Website Planning
When you think about getting a website a lot of people under estimate the planning involved in creating a good website. As the old saying goes “fail to plan – plan to fail” and never is this more true , then with web design.

Building a website is not just about putting something on-line , its about thinking your way through the process. Knowing that it will work and knowing what you want it to do.

I have put together a few pointers to get you started with what you need to do before you actually get  anything onto the net.
The websites goal

You need to know, what you want your site to do,  i.e. is it selling a tangible product , an Idea , service, capturing names for a mailing list to name a few. Without knowing this your designer will be aiming without a target , defining your goal will make it easier to design something that will meet your needs.

Your target market
Who are you selling to and how are you planning on reaching them. Marketing options for a website are Search Engine Optimisation, Pay Per Click Marketing, Social Media and of course traditional advertising. Knowing your demographic will help the web designer to design appropriately, if your selling to teenagers you need a design that ties in with there values.

Research
Before we do any project we query the search engines for how many searches a day are taking place for that service or product. If nobody’s looking, then the project would be a waste of money. We don’t take on projects that do not stand a good chance of making a return, nor should you. If you find there is no searches for your product, move on to a new venture because you will not make any money

E-commerce
With regard to an e-commerce site take a generic core term related to your industry to find out the size of the market.

Colour schemes
Do you have a particular corporate identity that you would like to stay with, or is this a totally self contained site giving more freedom to the look.

Copy
With regard to written text for the site you would need to provide your designer with the text in electronic form, it would be preferable in rich text format , or you can source a professional copywriter.

Next stage
After you have ascertained that there is a market for your product or service contact your web designer who would then produce a mock-up of the design. and send it to you via email for your approval, once you have a design that everyone is happy with, you can then move on to getting the  website built and implemented

New Website design

Posted by admin – 19/03/2009

We are making over our main website and defining what we offer , after some feedback from customers who informed us that it was unclear as to exactly what we did other then web design so we have sectiond off our main site and made the pages more specific

Web Design

Search Engine Optimisation

Pay Per Click Marketing

We are also offering cheap website design to try and help smaller companies on a budget

Marketing Return on Investment Calculations

Posted by admin – 13/11/2008

Marketing return on InvestmentWhen you pay for any sort of marketing you need to track the return of your investment. Spending money on marketing without any way to track the costings and profit from such an endeavour is a fools errand.

The question arises as to the best way to measure this return, is it with sales or enquiries or is there another way you measure success with a marketing campaign. Marketing by definition is there to make money not loose it, so many company’s chuck money at advertising and marketing with the only measure being a rough idea that they are making a profit (sometimes)

What are the benefits of monitoring your return of investment

The benefits are many, the main one being that you can work out what’s making you money and what’s loosing you money and adjust your approach accordingly. If marketing method one cost you £500 and you make ten sales as a direct result of that particular marketing spend. Each sale is worth £100 you would make a profit of £500. If all things remain constant it would be fair to say that if you then went on and invested £1000 you should make twenty sales with the profit to match.

If you do not measure your marketing return you could end up in the following situation. Your company spend on marketing is £25,000 per year. This covers several marketing methods including newspaper radio and internet you only know that your turnover is 175k a year.

If you had been monitoring closely you would know that the newspaper and radio advertising is costing you 75% of your marketing budget but only contributing to 30% of your turnover. The other 70% is coming from the internet. So £17,500 spent on radio and newspaper advertising is accounting for £52500 in turnover where as £7500 spent on the internet is accounting for £122500 in turnover.

This is a very simplistic example but the moral of the example is you need to know where your income is coming from and how much it is costing you

Return on Investment Calculation

to calculate the return on investment we are going to use a few simple algebra equations

Number of sales = N
Profit From Sale = S
Total Profit form sales = P
Advertising spend = A
Profit Ratio = R (anything below one means a loss ie)
Cost Per Sale = C
Profit/Loss Per Sale =X

A/(N x S) = R
A/N =C
C-S = X

Advertising Spend / (number of sales x Profit from sale) = Profit Ratio

It Sounds a little complicated but when you break it down calculating your marketing return on investment is not that complicated.

Effective Small Business Marketing

Posted by admin – 15/10/2008

With a small business there is nothing more important then customers, without them you just do not have a business, period. However, getting to those customers can be difficult, so how can you overcome obstacles and press on with getting to those consumers who want to buy your product or service.

Effective Marketing Is the Key

First let us define effective, you could be advertising in this magazine and that publication and getting many customers but if the amount of profit you make does not cover your advertising costs and manpower expenses then it is not effective.

To be effective, expenditure needs to generate profit or have a good chance of generating profit. Any advertising is a gamble but you need to do a few things to swing the odds in your favour.

Know your customer

Like the hunter, you need to know your target. Define who your average customer is. You need to get as much information as you can, age, sex, and economic status is a good start. Anything that is applicable to why they would buy your product or service.

Once you have all this information you can then devise where to advertise and market yourself. Try to make this list of traits of your average consumer as detailed as possible, the more detailed the more targeted you can make your advertising

Highly Targeted Advertising

Targeted marketing will convert more customers at a lower cost per sale. If you were selling accounting software then an accounting trade publication would be an ideal place to advertise with a higher chance of conversion then say a fishing magazine.

Marketing online

Online marketing is unique because it is the only form of advertising where the customer is actively looking for your product or services; this by definition makes every enquiry a qualified lead. This in my opinion is one of the best forms of marketing for some industries and can take a failing company and inject new customers quite rapidly. However, you do need a good SEO company to help you. As with offline marketing targeting is key, pick the wrong phrase to optimise your website for and it can be a big waste of time and money. A good Search engine optimisation company such as WebMoJo can do keyword research and discover the phrases that pay for you.

Keyword research is a tricky business if a key phrase is to broad then you will get lots of traffic but very few will convert. To specific and you may not get a lot of traffic but the ones you do get will be highly targeted and more likely to convert.

Pay Per Click Marketing

Pay per click is a quick but costly fix; you can have targeted visitors to your website within a very short space of time. How it works is you will bid on keywords or phrases that appear at the side panel of the main search engines such as Google and Yahoo. The more you bid the higher up the list of sponsored results you will be. This can work for some businesses quite well but you need to do your keyword research

Marketing for the small business means targeting

As you can probably see one thing that runs through most marketing on a budget is targeting. The more targeted a marketing campaign is, then the more chance of gaining new customers.