Scotland SEO Blog

Many sites try to do too much at once, or worse still, they have no clear purpose. Web design should be reverse engineered by clearly defining what it is you want to achieve through your web site, then having your web design meet those objectives. If you really want your site to flashy and full of fancy graphics, they should be the last thing on the agenda.

If, for example, your website is a sales based site, you need to present the potential customer with a first impression that is not only going to keep them on the page, it is going to take them by the hand and lead them to that final ‘buy now’ button. Your web design in this case needs to be clean and well signposted. Research shows that buyers don’t want any more than three clicks from decision to final purchase.

Wherever possible, assign a secondary objective. It may be to sign up for a newsletter or catalog. It may be to print out a discount voucher to take to one of your store fronts. The object is to keep the visitor on your page for as long as possible. While they considering a newsletter or printing a discount voucher, your own well presented ads should be displayed in the peak eye catching areas of your page. Your web design needs to allow for all of these objectives.

Hopefully, if your web design has been accomplished with your objectives in mind, you will not only have sales, you will have interested people receiving newsletters or catalogs and perhaps also engaging in a little impulse buying as they are leaving. Ask any bricks and mortar business owner and they will tell you that impulse buying is high profit part of business. Make sure your web design can capitalize on it.

Link building is possibly the hardest part of any SEO program. The best links are natural one way links that have been created by someone linking to one of your pages through their own content.Sometimes it can be tempting to accept links from unknown entities. If these are link farms then you could be putting your site at risk.

Link farms can generally be identified through a number of areas. These include:

Mass links: A site that has pages of unrelated links is definitely not worth linking too. It doesn’t what it’s ranking is - somewhere along the way the search engines will penalize it for link farming. They will also penalize all the links associated with the site.

Little Content: Sites that little in the way of content will gain a decent ranking. If the site is not going to develop a decent ranking then it is not worth linking to anyway.

Owner Interaction: Does it look like the site is being maintained, or has it been thrown together and left to fend for itself with the only interaction from the webmaster, the inclusion of new links.

I have one simple rule when it comes to link building and link farms. If it doesn’t look right, then don’t accept any link arrangements. In fact I will go one step further and suggest you only enter into link arrangements when the site is closely associated to your own genre and has ranking that is worth linking to.

It should be remembered when developing links that a certain number of selective two way links are quite acceptable to search engines - just don’t overdo it. Link building is a process that should be natural and should appear to the casual viewer as a natural progression from one site to the next.

There are many search engines out there, however one is dedicated to the UK and Scotland - yell.com - are you listed on it.

Yell.com is one of those search engines that is easy to list on yet provides a wide range of options for users. You can do a search, find the business you want; check their map location; send the details to either your mobile phone or to a friend.

The search results display the business name, the trading address of the business and the businesses contact details such as phone numbers. As search engine, yell.com is a combination of business directory, telephone book and traditional search engine.

Yell.com supports nine different languages. You can advertise through yell.com as you would in any business directory or telephone book. There are a range of site tools that you can use including having a search link on your own web site.

You should use every avenue available to promote your business including dedicated local business search engines such as yell.com. It is easy to get listed and the results may surprise you.

Many businesses use dot com’s rather than local domains. There are many good reasons for this, particularly for businesses that are trading on the international scene. One of the awkward issues that needs to be addressed if you are trading with a US based dot com, is which laws do you need to trade under, your local UK and Scotland laws or the US laws where your site is hosted.

Generally speaking, if your business is registered here in Scotland then you should follow all local laws relating to business dealings. There are however situations where you need to be aware of laws as they relate to any business dealings through your web sites if they are hosted off-shore, in this case, in the US.

In the US, credit card laws are now changing. If you process any credit card transactions through an e-commerce site that is hosted in the US then you may be obligated to follow these new laws. Small Business Newz has the full story on what changes have been made. One line in the article is particularly true. Whilst changing how you process transactions may seem like a pain:

….losing the ability to process credit card payments or getting hit with fines seems worse, so try not to ignore it.

If you are using a third party to process payment on your behalf, it will be their responsibility to make the changes to comply with the new laws. You should still check to ensure that they are complying. You never know when something like this comes back to bite you.

If your blogging to promote your business and using WordPress then you should look at which version of WordPress you are using. Technorati has been a popular tool for bloggers over the years however they are now starting to remove sites using older versions of WordPress from their index.

The older versions of WordPress had security issues which enabled spamers to insert hidden links within your posts. This has compromised these blogs as they are no longer a trusted source. The simple solution is to either upgrade to 2.3.3 or go straight to 2.5. Companies that are blogging to support their main online presence often don’t see the upgrade as a priority. This could prove costly.

You can check your blog through Firefox by selecting Tools, PageInfo and clicking on the Links tab. This will display all the links coming from your blog. It is then a simple matter of scrolling through to ensure that all links are legitimate. Blogging is a powerful tool for small business so the last thing you need is a series of dud links that comprise your rankings.

While on the subject of updating WordPress, you can download an Auto Update plugin that does all the update work for you, quickly and painlessly. That is sure to make your blogging life a little easier.

There are many software solutions for analysing the traffic to your website and determining if your SEO strategies are working. There are however, several do-it-yourself quick checks that you can make that can determine how successful your actions have been.

The first and easiest is to simply go to the various search engines and perform a search on your keywords. If you like, make a note of the results and check again every few days. This can be a good way to check on your competitors as well to see if they are leap frogging you with their SEO strategies.

Other checks you can undertake are just as quick. Install a hidden page counter. This will give you an idea of how many pages are being accessed. They can provide interesting results that conflict with Google. They do give a quick indication of page views.

Keeping a track of the number of subscribers is also a good indication that the content you are providing is worthy enough for individuals to want to subscribe to for more. A drop in subscriber numbers may indicate a fall in the quality of your content as well.

If you are running a blog, are the comments increasing in number or falling? Increasing numbers in the comments could indicate increased traffic. It may also indicate that readers are finding your content engaging enough to inspire them to comment. If content goes by without comment, you need to look to that content to determine why.

Whilst these quick checks will never replace quality analytics software, they can provide a quick and interesting snap shot of your web pages that can indicate a general trend that is positive, or a trend that appears to be going backwards.

SEO is a specialist industry and requires a lot of skill, experience and local knowledge to deliver the best results for your website. Using an SEO consultant from outside your area may actually do more harm than good.

Many SEO ‘experts’ are no more than scammers praying on the lack of knowledge of small business owners. They promise the world with prices far cheaper than the larger firms - they promise number one spots in search results in days. Local SEO specialist will never make rash promises.

Local SEO consultants know what is happening on the local scene. They know what areas need special attention to obtain good rankings for your site. The added bonus is that you can often talk face to face with a local consultant. Local consultant are more likely to have some familiarity of your business, the brand or the products you are selling.

Overseas consultants, particularly from the sub-continent will often approach businesses offering free reviews of your site and then promising you a number one spot on the SERP’s, forget them. No SEO specialist will ever make that promise. Getting to the front page is the first goal and with a local SEO consultant working with you, the goal is achievable. Working from 10,000 miles away - forget it.

Your local SEO consultant also has a reputation that relies on delivering a good outcome. As SEO from overseas has little to worry about when it comes to reputation. They scam one country then move onto the next. When it comes to SEO, look to your local consultants first - price is not the main thing - reputation is.

Social Optimization is not just about getting onto Facebook or StumbleUpon and marketing your business. Social Opptimization includes submitting articles to article directories and listing your sites in directories.

Directories are often interesting particularly those that charge a fee for listing on their directory. I have seen some great ads from these directories making claims that sound great - until you analyse them a little deeper. The results may just turn you off them when it comes social optimization.

Let’s say you have a golf site and you are looking to get into some of the local directories. One charges an annual listing fee and sounds pretty good. They get 40000 visitors every month.

Look at those numbers and stop and think. 40000 is a lot - but how many are unique and how many are simply repeat visitors? Next look at how many categories they have. Say they have 100 categories. that becomes 400 visitors per category. If there are 10 other advertisers in your group, that is around 40 visitors per month each - around one visitor per day.

Now you can ask yourself if that directory is worth the annual fee. If we up the ante and add a zero to those numbers, 4 million visitors per month is a good count. That becomes 4000 visitors per category, 400 visitors per month for you which is ten per day. What is your conversion rate? If it is 10%, you are making one sale per day from that directory. Are you making a profit yet.

Directories are not always great and when it comes to social optimization, you may find your money and time better spent elsewhere.

Social marketing is all the rage at present and there are many social sites to choose from. Just to add to the confusion, I am going to throw another site at you - HubPages.

HubPages is a social site with a difference, rather than meet, greet and then bookmark pages, HubPages encourages you to create hubs, or pages of quality content. Unlike article directories, HubPages encourages social interaction between members including creating a fan list - one required component for social marketing.

Many smart hubbers are creating content based either on their websites activities or ‘how to’ type articles and then linking back to their sites. Some site owners are taking old articles and reworking them into fresh content before submitting. The social marketing power can be quite solid.

Like many sites, get your content voted to the front page and you will find yourself with even more visitors. Link your to your hubs (articles) wherever you can. A side benefit is that HubPages will time share their google Adsense units if you have a google account.

Use the same user name as all the other sites to broaden your social marketing exposure. HubPages is east to use and easy to setup. As another social site, if has its uses - social marketing being one of them.

Traditional marketing and viral marketing are two different fish in a very large ocean. Where traditional marketing has a start - finish, cost - return on investment (ROI); viral marketing has a start and cost but no finish and a difficult to determine ROI.

To plan for a viral marketing campaign, you need to be determined and prepared to take the good with the bad. There are however, three mindsets that need to be clarified prior to starting and three actions that require careful management.

Mindsets:

• Viral Marketing does not have a timeline: As I have already mentioned, viral marketing has prospective start date but no end date.
• Success bares no relation to investment:It is very difficult to determine ROI on a viral marketing campaign. However many campaigns can be delivered at a fraction of the cost of a standard marketing campaign.
• Don’t rely on stats for reach or impact: The online community is fickle so, whilst your stats may only show a marginal increase in traffic, hundreds or thousands may be discussing you or your products withing social sites. This may cause a trickle of traffic that will slowly increase over time. Not all viral campaigns lead to tidal waves of traffic. Accept the occasional king tide.

Accepting that viral marketing is difficult to measure and does not always deliver floods of responses, the following areas need to be carefully managed to capitalize on what responses are received. Failing to prepare can kill off a viral campaign as quickly as it gets started.

Management

• Innovate and Experiment: Be prepared to experiment using all technologies available. These include blogs, videos, podcasts, the social web and different styles of ad units. As you are experimenting, be prepared for failures. If one method is not working then pull it quickly and move on to another method.
• Listen and learn: Become active within the various social networks and spend time listening to what is being said. If your product or name starts to get mentioned, watch to see which target groups are talking. You can fine tune future campaigns by knowing who is prepared to talk about you.
• Engage, respond and act: if your viral marketing campaign does go into overdrive be prepared to participate fully. If negative fire-spots start jump in and water them down. If traffic arrives in their hundreds, be prepared to answer their needs.

The last point is one of the most crucial. I have seen campaigns designed to get newsletter sign-ups go horribly wrong simply because their database had not been set up to handle the number of responses. I have seen other campaigns where the site owner was not ready to handle the number of questions thrown at them.

With any campaign, remember the 5 P’s - prior planning prevents poor performance. This extremely true when it comes to viral marketing. The campaign may appear to be going badly, the minute you drop your guard, it will take off. Murphy’s law.