The internet is the place where, with the right seo company the smaller business can compete with the big boys. Getting the right advice is essential to success and it may not cost as much as you think. An SEO consultants can give you the tools you need to push your business forward online. If your willing to do the work yourself you may find a 2 hour session is enough to get you on the right track

What an SEO consultant will provide for you

• Keyword Research

Identifying the right keywords is the basis of a well performing website. Choosing the wrong keywords and you may only get a few visitors or you may get hundreds who don’t buy anything. My take on this is, try to become the perspective customer, identify what they want and why they buy then tailor your content to them.

• Improve Your Site Structure

Site design can have a large impact on your on page SEO efforts your agency will be able to advise you on how to structure your site for maximum benefit in the SERPS (search engine results page’s)

• Off-site SEO

Your SEO agency will give you guidelines to start your off site optimisation. Off site SEO is all about gaining links back to your site with good keyword focused linking text.

What constitutes a good link

A good link is a link that contains your keywords, is within page content and is on a page directly related to the theme of your main site.

Finding Links

A short list to get you going on link building

• Blog Commenting
• Posting blog posts
• Directory submissions
• Social Bookmarking
• Article Submissions

Smaller companies have different goals from larger businesses

SEO is the science of getting top search engine rankings, If you have a bottomless pit of money, getting top rankings is easy, you just chuck large amounts of cash at generic terms related to your business on pay per click marketing. Many small businesses don’t have this amount of cash to repeat this exercise month after month

If your a small business your marketing on and off line is your life blood. Without customers you are not in a position to continue trading. Larger companies have reserves of cash to fall back on if things are a bit slow. They will often employ teams of sales people banging the phone all day to produce sales and new customers.

SEO is Constantly Developing

SEO is in a constant state of flux. Search engines are constantly looking for the best way to return relevant results and on the whole are getting smarter at picking up on the automated drivel that once filled the search results. Although it is possible to perform your own SEO it is always best to get an SEO Agency in to help you. The cost of a few hours of SEO wisdom can pay huge dividends in the future giving you a roadmap to help your site get great rankings.

In the past

In the past,seo was all about being number one. The top spot was the prised position as there could only be one top spot. Competition was fierce and in the early days a lot of the returned results were pages designed to gain rankings not to entice visitors. Spamming was rife. Meta tags held a large sway with the then search engine algorithms, they would be stuffed with words in the hope of getting traffic. I must even admit to using some of these tactics in the early days. Using software such as web position gold in the hope of it telling me the magic numbers to make me an SEO God

Business SEO has Matured

Like all things, SEO has aged, looking back on it’s past and reminiscing how silly it used to be. The modern online marketing consultant is no longer just interested in rankings , now he or she is interested in helping you the business owner.

SEO has gone all holistic

As I said previously SEO used to be all about the position. Now from my point of view I want to get your website and online marketing working seamlessly together. Using the term  SEO is a little misleading as search engine optimisation is only a part of what a good internet marketing company does.

So what does a “good” internet marketing company do

SEO is still a major part of the mix but for it to be done properly you need your SEO involved from the conception stage of the web design process. By having them involved they can advise the web designer on how to structure the site so it is search engine friendly. The other option would be to hire an SEO web designer with the skills in place to build a search engine friendly website.

Keyword Research

One of the most important parts of an SEO’s job finding good high traffic keywords and phrases relevant to your business.

Ditching Keywords

Once your SEO has built his list of key phrases he or she will “ditch” the ones with to much competition (new sites) or not enough searches to be profitable.

Copy writing

Your website copy could mean the difference between making a sale or not, your SEO will help you with your copy giving you pointers to improve the wording or take on the project themselves using a good SEO copywriter .

Calls to action

Call to action is a common phrase in the world of online marketing simply put it is asking the customer to perform a single or set of actions these may be as simple as using the phrase “buy now” or using your phone number as a focus point with “call us now”

Converting visitors to buyer, website conversion rates

The ability of a website to make sales or enquiries is measured in its conversion rate. A conversion rate of a page or a site is calculated in the number of sales divided by the number of visitors. An example would be a websites gets a thousand visitors a month and from that thousand 35 people go on to buy the product or service we would have a conversion rate of 35/1000 = 0. 035 or 3.5 %.

things that can decrease or increase conversion rates are headlines, copy, site design, colour and calls to action. For the bigger budget projects your SEO would undertake some split testing of different layouts, wording, headlines,colours and images. A quick way to get some results for the conversion rates would be to use PPC (pay per click) sending half the clicks to one page and the other half to the other modified page and compare conversion rates.

Off Page Optimisation

Off page SEO is a whole subject in it’s own right. To give you an idea it mainly involves link building and the way link building is done is dependent on the SEO. It could be blog commenting, article marketing or the creation of micro-sites to feed traffic back to your main site the list goes on.

You know you need to speed up your site but how do you do it

Now that you know the benefits of having a higher page loading speed, how do you actually go about it? Well, most SEO experts will usually proceed by performing the following SEO methodologies considered to be the best in order to achieve higher web page speed:

• Reduce initial display time of webpage
• Resize and optimize images
• Upgrade CSS style sheets to the latest standards
• Optimize Java scripts
• Optimize multimedia content

What did you just say?

All this sounds great but if your a small business owner with limited experience with the web its a tall order in anyone’s book.  what you need is a step by step guide on how to do all the above tasks.

• Reduce initial display time of webpage

Well yes, that’s what were trying to do! ignore this one as it’s the out come of the methods we are going to put in place.

• Resize and optimize images

One we can work with. Often images on a web page are unoptimised. What this means is they are larger in file size then they need to be (larger the file the longer it takes to download) this can be because the image is using more detail then it needs, or the actual image dimensions are lager then is being displayed

these are both exactly the same image except one has been resized in the page mark-up

You can do optimise and resize your images online with www.webresizer.com

• Upgrade CSS style sheets to the latest standards

This is a bit misleading as its not upgrading your CSS as such,  it’s just re-writing it into a shorthand version. We use CSS tidy there was a hosted version at http://csstidy.sourceforge.net/ but it’s no longer there, we have our own copy hosted on our servers http://webmojo.co.uk/csstool/

• Optimize Java scripts

What this simply means is place all your Java scripts into one external file

• Optimizing Multimedia Content

Audio: First ask yourself whether your site really needs sounds or music! Having a midi file playing in the background is an annoyance (my opinion); visitors come to your page because of its contents and not to listen to music. However, if it’s imperative to include background sounds or music try to use a midi file or a small .wav file that loops seamlessly.

Video: Since video files can be quite large, it’s best to provide a link to the file mentioning the file size and leave the choice of viewing it to the visitor rather than forcing it to load in the page.

Flash: Flash is a vector based program. To keep Flash files at a minimal size try to use fewer fonts, reuse symbols, compress the included sounds, convert bitmaps to vector graphics etc. To judiciously decide whether Flash intros are required for your site.

http://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/design/optimizing_web_pages.php3

Web Design

For the dedicated web designer, designing a website is all about the look with considerations given to how well the design communicates the message. The use of graphics and typography is there to support the core communication. Many web designers come from a graphic design background and have a basic grasp of the code behind the design and may well depend strongly on web design packages such as Dreamweaver to help them produce the end product. Many of theses designers are able to produce designs that a visually breath taking

SEO

For the SEO its all about the traffic. Getting visitors to your site they rely on statistics and conversion rates. From a design point of view it’s all about making it easier for the search engines to crawl and index your website. The skills of good SEO’s should never be underestimated as they can help a business thrive by delivering targeted visitors, identifying search trends and even new markets.

SEO Web Design is …

When you combine these two disciplines, what you get is a web designer that can produce great looking websites while creating a design that is optimised to produce great search engine results.

On page optimisation is easer as the site structure is designed to place the most relevant content higher up in the page. As a rule of thumb, the closer to the top of a page a word or phrase is placed the more relevant it is.

Image optimisation

The optimisation of the web design images this is done by the use of file names, title text and alt tags this can be used to support the overall website theme

Linking text optimisation

Optimising the way the pages are linked by the use of keyword rich links as opposed to generic terms like “home” or “about us”

Conclusion

I have done my best to lay out the basics of why SEO web design is so crucial to long term success of any website. As you can see there is more to web design then just making things look nice or just getting traffic. For a website to work it has to appeal to the senses as well as perform well. You have to strike a balance between the search engines and the user, stray to far one way and you cancel out the other.

Off-line advertising

Newspaper Advertising

Pros: A range of advertising opportunities starting at classified ads to adverts on the front page.

Cons: Can be costly and the adverts have a short life span.

Directory Advertising

Pros: People only look in the directory if they are looking for a product or service, so conversion to business should be higher. More popular with the older generation. Adverts have a 12 month lifespan

Cons: can be costly, if you spend less by having a smaller advert the response rates drop dramaticly. Response rates are decreasing over time as the internet becomes the first port of call for a lot of potential customers. See
Is Yellow Pages and Other Paper Directory Advertising Dead

leaflets

Pros: Tight area targeting by demographics

Cons: Low response rates for most

Business Networking

In Doncaster we have a range of networking events with groups like the BNI and and 4Networking. We have a fantastic chamber of commerce in Doncaster extremely professional and pro active and I would advise any business in Doncaster to see what it has to offer.

Tap Your happy Customer

Happy customers can be great for business two ways to build on your success is firstly ask for referrals do they know of anybody who would benefit from your product or service. Secondly don’t underestimate the power of a positive testimonial that you can place in your marketing material.

Marketing ideas box

if you run a company that employs people, have a marketing ideas box so that staff can suggest ways to get new business. This not only get you now idears but also makes people feel that they are part of the team.

You could go one step further by placing the box in your reception and offering a prize to the customer that suggests any ideas that you use

Online Advertising and Marketing

The online world is full of opportunities for the small business to compete with the big boys all you need is a talented web designer and SEO like me . Having a website is a must for most businesses but if you have zero visitors seeing your site, its wasted money.

WebSite

Pros: when done correctly can produce large amounts of business for many types of industries. can be updated in a very short time so it can display your product offerings bang up to date .

Cons: Like anything it requires work. If you just place your site online and expect business then your going to be disappointed. you need to keep it up to date or get a web professional to do it for you

SEO

SEO or Search engine optimisation is the skill of getting your website up the search engine rankings for when people search for your product or service

Pros: Gets you qualified leads as we know having a lead pre qualified makes it a lot easyer to convert them to a customer

Cons: Takes time, like wine SEO and Websites get better with age.

PPC

PPC or Pay Per Click is paid advertising in the search engines. You only pay when someone clicks on your link

Pros: Quick, you can have qualified traffic to your website within hours.

Cons: Unless you know what you are doing you could find yourself with lots of clicks but no new customers.

Email Marketing

Pros: Cheap, the cost of DIY email marketing is only your time. If you have a good email list you can get lots of good business from it .

Cons:You need to build your list by an opt in process, meaning the recipient has to give you permission to send them the email. You have to include a way for them to un subscribe from your list. There are laws in place to stop spam so be careful that you don’t fall fowl of theses

Social Networking

Social networking is a way of communication with friends or perspective customers online. Sites such as Twitter and Facebook allow you to add friends, the friends then see your status updates (or your marketing message)

Pros: Like email if you have a focused friends list you can keep customers abreast of your latest offers

Cons: very time consuming

Yellow pages is synonymous with business advertising and has been for many years, but are its days numbered. Ten years ago you may have got some return fo

If you have ever advertised with Yellow pages, the process starts with a sales person coming to visit you to book your money making advert. For more and more of the advertisers the book is a money loosing proposition.

Normally the sales person tells you to expect lots of enquiries a week, that you will be rushed off your feet and the small monthly payments of 3 – 4 hundred pounds will be easy to meet as you will have so much business that this amount will be small change.

The reality is normally a lot different. I first advertised many years ago, fresh faced out of university after completing my degree in Media production, specialising in multimedia design.

I was eager to join the world of small business, selling my newly acquired skills to a hungry local business community. My advert in Yellow pages was going get me business the likes of I had never known. That year went slowly, I didn’t receive one call from that advert; not one single little enquiry.

I cant blame the directory completely, my advert was small but it was the only paid advert in the section. The web was all new and shiny,many businesses didn’t know about websites or thought them just a passing fad.

I even went and did it again a few years later and thought it was the size of my advert that was the problem the first time, so I splashed out on a full colour half page ad. I did get responses to that ad but twenty times less then the directory sales people were telling me the average response rate was for an advert of that size and in that section. I covered the cost of the advertising but not much else.

The thing was I didn’t know what I know now. Paper directory advertising is dieing, then it was just in decline now it’s on its way to the retirement home.

For some; paper directories like Yellow pages can be great but for these it’s normally out of hours services like emergency plumbers or services aimed at the older generation who don’t use a computer let alone the Internet. For most, it’s a dead duck.

Advertising is changing for the first time online marketing spend is going to over take traditional paper advertising

If you want a business or service nine times out of ten the web is the place you look first not last. I, being a person who makes a living online one way or another do everything online from shopping to research to entertainment it’s all there. I suspect I may be a little extream because of my comfort level online but I don’t think average Joe is far behind me .

If you run any sort of business you need to be found online so you need to establish a web presence now if you haven’t already got one. If you main form of marketing is paper directory’s then you need to be moving at least some of your marketing spend to online marketing now , not tomorrow.

We can use Google trends to see how the interest in Yellow pages and Thomson Local had declined since 2004

Yellow Pages

Thomson Local

As we can see the Yellow pages interest has dropped dramatically over the last six years to approximately 25% of the 2004 search volume.

Where is the interest going

Online marketing is growing with the biggest gains in search volume being in SEM an acronym for Search engine marketing

SEO

SEM

PPC

So as we can plainly see the interest in online marketing is growing.  I can see the growth slowing as we see with SEO (search engine optimisation) PPC (pay per click) is in a slight decline but I put that down to businesses trying to reduce costs.

Related Blog posts

Two More Studies Confirm: People Research Online, Buy Locally

whether social media sites, like facebook and twitter are of use to large corporations as traffic sources, or are they just vehicles for public relations and one to one, or one to many communications.

Now I both agree and disagree at the same time, let me explain. Social Media is about making connections with people which it does for individuals, but I don’t think it does for most businesses at this moment in time to make a marked increase in the profitability of a company.

Quality of Traffic

Social media like Facebook and Twitter do produce traffic. When someone clicks through what is the users intention. Is it to buy from or use the company’s services, for the most part , no. I myself see a link posted and click on it to be nosey.

With SEM or search engine marketing when a user clicks through from Google ,Yahoo or Bing you can be sure that they are actively looking for what you have to offer. The user has been qualified by the search engine. Of course some customers are more qualified then others but for the most part a user coming from a search engine will convert to a paying customer click for click a lot better then a user from Facebook or twitter.

The Flip Side

There is a flip side to this argument in that fan pages and twitter is like an segmented email list , it’s full of people who are interested in one way or another in what you have to offer. So per head, these interested people are going to convert quite well. when the right offer is presented.  These people are waiting to see the next big thing and simply have to be told about it . A well segmented email list can be a gold mine allowing you to sell to the same person over and over again. social media I see working in a similar way.

The Future

Nobody can be certain of what the future of social media and search marketing is going to be. My view is that we are going to see a total merging of the two, we see the beginning with Google and Bing showing tweets in search results. We will to have to wait and see.

Conclusion

Yes social media does have an ever increasing part to play in traffic generation for businesses we will just have to be creative in how we use these channels.

SEO It is time consuming

A SEO campaign is time consuming and very intense, a fine balance of words and weights. With no closer way of turning the written language into pure math, but with the exception that part of the equation is hidden from you and changing on a regular basis. This is where true skill is demonstrated from the search engine optimiser to bring your site from zero to hero.

Control your SEO expectations

In my opinion, planning a successful website should begin as early as possible, months if not in some cases years ahead. A new site will find it very difficult to rank for competitive terms until, like a fine wine it has matured. In the early days of a website going live try to aim for search terms that, as I call it; are low hanging fruit. For example, the term “web design” is highly competitive and the chances of a young site ranking anywhere near the top 10 for this is quite small. However, if you add some level of localisation to the mix like “web design Yorkshire” this “keyword phrase” would be easier to rank in the top position but still quite a lot of competition from other web sites. We can take this even further by adding a less common qualifier, “Web design Doncaster” Doncaster is a smaller graphical area then Yorkshire so it should be less competitive for this term. You would need to, or get your search engine optimisation company to research this more in depth.

Do your keyword research

Keyword research is so important, as targeting the wrong words or phrases can mean a great expensive site getting next to no quality traffic from the web. Not all traffic is created equal. If you sell nothing but “green umbrellas”, but you are targeting the keyword umbrellas, sure, you may get a lot of traffic but most of it won’t convert to a sale because some want a white umbrella some want a yellow.

Calculating the Return on investment

The return on investment need’s to be considered before you undertake any sort of outsourced search engine optimisation. It is always a good idea to get your SEO company to perform a feasibility study before you undertake spending out on the full project. A search engine optimisation feasibility study involves finding out the amount of searches taking place per month for a selection of key words or phrases related to your product or service. Then you will need to discover how many sites are competing for the same terms. Factor in the amount of profit you would get from selling your product or service. There will be some form of estimation on the figures from this you will get a better idea of the amount of work needed to get to the top of the search engines such as Google and Yahoo and whether getting to the top ten will turn a profit or not. Its better to spend a little then to waste a lot

I hope this short guide has been helpful to preparing to take on a SEO company with some of the things you need to know as a client

Back in October 2006, the guys over at seoroundtable told us that , Dynamic URLs? Google Is Officially ‘OK’ With Them. But even then, Google still recommended, “rewriting dynamic URLs into user-friendly versions” as good practice.

John Mu Explains

One of the reasons for that is that we can use the information provided through the parameters to better understand what your site is doing with those parameters. For instance,the URL http://www.mysite.com/search.php?q=keyword can give us information about what is happening, it could even allow us to recognize that this is a search form and perhaps let us attempt other keywords that might lead us to content that we haven’t seen for your site. On the other hand, a URL like http://www.mysite.com/search/keyword does not give us any information at all about what the “file name” is used for.

to follow this discussion