Scotland SEO Blog

Think search engine - think Google. Why? We have almost become brain washed into thinking that Google is the only search engine in town. Sure, they are the biggest but that doesn’t mean they are the best, especially when it comes to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

There is one thing I do know, for many of the competitive keywords they are certainly the most expensive - in fact for some keywords they are twice the price of other search engines. It can certainly pay to shop around. However, having said that, price should not be your number one consideration.

You most important consideration is very simple; where are your customers likely to be? Your PPC campaigns should be run on search engines that used by your customers. You do the research on demographics, but in simple terms, women are more likely to use Yahoo whilst men are more likely to use Google. Under 34 year olds are most likely to use either Google or Yahoo whilst most over 50’s will use MSN.

There are reasons for some of these numbers. For example, the over 50’s will use MSN because it is the default search engine with Internet Explorer. They are often more reluctant to install new software such as a browser, especially if the browser they are using is doing the job. If your customer target group is in the post 50 age group, you will find more users and possibly more sales by targeting your PPC campaign through MSN.

Rather than considering Google as the default search engine for ‘everything’ you do online; do the research and target your audience - through their preferred search engine, not yours. PPC can be effectively, it is even more effective when done right.

Out of the thousands, if not millions, of forums available, I often find it difficult to believe when someone says they cannot find a forum to suit their niche. If the niche is that tight then perhaps there is just not enough traffic to warrant a forum. On the other hand, there are many forums that may well suit the niche, but a poorly run and full of spam. If you cannot find a forum you like, you can always start your own - and they are really quite easy.

If your web host uses cPanel and Fantastico or similar, you can often find a couple of forum programs already available. It’s simply a matter of selecting the one that best suits you, installing and configuring and away you go. With some of the latest forum software around, you can be up and running in just a few hours - and you don’t need any software knowledge. phpBB and SMF are two of the common packages available.

Once you have installed the forum you will need to promote it to get visitors. You could use the forum as a way for your customers to interact with each other and your self. If this is the case, simply promoting it on your own web pages could be sufficient.

There are two important areas that you must be vigilant about when including a forum as part of your onsite presence. The first is to be very strict on spam and unrelated content. Nothing turns users off faster than seeing a forum full of spam. The second aspect relates to your business. Be sure to respond to questions and issues that are raised in the forum, particularly those that may have a negative impact on your business. Forums can be great for building reputations, they can also do a lot of harm to your business if not maintained.

Starting your own forum is easy, it can be of great benefit to your business, however they can also take you away from business time wise. If you have the time - try one out.

This year promises to be an interesting year with the world at large recovering from the doom and gloom that pervaded our news late in 2008. With all the doom and gloom, there will no doubt be casualties, this could also be the time to capitalise and prepare your business for the recovery - which will come.

2009 will also be an interesting year for online presences. Google are making moves to change the way they rate sites, possibly reducing the weight of inbound links and looking more to the social sector to help with the rating.

It is a timely reminder of two aspects of your online presence. Number 1 is to remember that the internet is always in flux. You can not now just build a site and leave it. Your web sites need constant attention, fresh content, and a way to interact with your visitors.

The second aspect to remember is that Google, while number one in search, is not the only search engine in town. Explorer comes with MSN as the default. Yahoo! still has a huge following. Together there are still hundreds of millions of searches carried out on these two search engines. Getting a good percentage of your traffic through them may be easier and more fruitful than through Google.

The team at ASM wish you all a very prosperous 2009. Don’t limit your ambition to getting your to number one on the search engines - follow our lead - we aim is to help you build a site that not only looks good - it delivers results.

You may notice from time to time that some search results include links to other pages within a web site. Google calls these site links and are only included on a small percentage of search results.

Unfortunately, you cannot ask to have your pages included. Google makes a decision on whether to include site links based on a formula known only to them. There are however some things you can do that may encourage Google to include site links when your pages appear in the results.

The following is only a guide and by no means a guarantee that your site will be included, however, you can but try. It’s all about authority and relevance.

• Age: Older sites appear to receive preference, however this may just be because they have build authority.
• Structure: Google states that a good clear web site structure is a definite requirement. If your web site doesn’t have good link structure then it may be time to clean it up. Even if you don’t appear in the search results with site links, you will have done your site, and your visitors, a big favour.
• Ranking: Having a search rank of number one or two for a particular keyword seems to be another requirement. It is not often you see a search result lower than one or two that has site links.
• Links: Good quality external links appear to help. Of course, these links also help you get to number one or two so it may be coincidental.
• Traffic: Gaining a lot of click throughs from search results also helps your case. Having a good description that ’sells’ your pages helps to increase that click through rate. If your site is important, Google will want to show more information - hence the site links.
• Quality: If your site is one that visitors tend to revisit and/or visit multiple pages at one visit (low bounce rate) also helps to build the authority of the site.

Google is trying hard to display the most appropriate results for a given search term. The more relevant and the higher the ‘authority’ of the site, the more likely it is that Google will display more information.

Having said all that, there is still no guarantee. As we all know, Google works in mysterious ways. The most important aspect is your internal linking structure. If your internal structure is hard to for the search engine to follow, you will not have a chance at being included in the site links program.

If you have one New Years resolution, it should be to tighten up your internal linking if you want to appear in the search results with Google Site Links.

Where were you in the week leading up to Christmas? On line I mean! It appears that over 10% of all UK traffic were visiting social media sites. Christmas day saw Facebook traffic account for almost 5% of all traffic, the number two most visited site in the UK.

Number one - Google Search of course accounting for over 8% of all traffic. At number three, for the first time, was YouTube knocking Windows Live Mail back to number four.

Is this a trend to look forward to in 2009? Perhaps. I think it is a more of a trend to prepare for during festive seasons such as Christmas, Easter and the various Mother’s and Father’s days around the world.

There is little doubt that social media is growing. Facebook and MySpace continue to add new profiles every day. Add to this the expansion of services, particularly those away from the site itself, such as mobile connectivity and the attraction will become stronger.

Peer pressure will be the next push into membership. I already get asked where I can be found on Facebook or LinkedIn. It will become a case of joining to be ‘in’ or being excluded. It’s a little like the cell phone. Notice how people ask for your cell number now, not your landline number?

For business large and small, having an online presence may well mean having to include social media, at least the ones most used by those involved in your niche. Networking with customers and colleagues has become much easier, and it is often not as time consuming as most people imagine.

Whether you like it not, social media is here to stay. The question is, can you use to your advantage? Social marketing will go to a new level in 2009. Make use of it because you can be sure your competitors will be.

It’s the Christmas - New Year period and for most it’s winter. If your looking for a few wintery link building tips then look no further. These you can do sitting in front of the fire with a couple of hot toddies.

• Article Marketing. Many say it’s dead but there is still plenty of value in writing the ‘right’ articles. You could get away with writing rubbish in the past - now you need well optimized keyword articles that readers will find valuable.
• Social Media. Another avenue that many will argue against. However, if all you do is build a profile on all the top social networking sites with links back to your target pages, the search engines will still pick up on them and pass some of the ‘link juice’.
• Squidoo Lens. Squidoo is becoming popular and with a PR of 8 can provide some valuable link juice back to your pages. Treat each Lens page as a page of your own. Optimize it around two or three keywords and link back to your sites most relevant pages. Don’t optimize for the same keywords, you may find your Lens outranks your web page - find closely associated keywords.
• Create a widget or valuable button. As mentioned in a previous post, widgets, buttons or themes can deliver links if you embed them within. Every time someone adds it to their web page or blog, it becomes another link to your designated page.
• Visit other sites and leave comments. This is an old tactic but it can still deliver some good results. You wont see a spectacular jump in your rankings, however you can give them a small boost. Make sure you select good quality blogs that use the ‘dofollow’ in the comments (hard to find these days). Add a quality comment and if the post is good quality and may be of interest to others, bookmark in one or more social bookmarking sites. Search engines may re-visit that page and re-index adding your link to the others. Try to pick posts that don’t have a lot of comments already - not that hard this time of year.

These are all basic suggestions that I am sure you have heard hundreds of times, however they are still valid and put together, make for a strong link building campaign. Spend a week or two on those activities and you will find your rankings and traffic slowly starting to rise.

This post will not solve your content problems in general, it will however provide you with a method to publish one post each week that also helps to develop your internal links.

Have you ever visited sites that produce a lot of content? I know of several sites that publish 5 or 6 (sometimes more) posts - each day. If your a regular visitor is becomes a little difficult remembering what you have read and what is new. The blog owners recognise this so they also publish a daily roundup - really just an outline with links to that days posts. They also publish a weekly best off.

You don’t need to go to those lengths. However, a weekly roundup of your daily content could help to draw new readers to your posts. I know there are times when I see an article which I mean to come back and read later. Of course, I forget and never do return. A weekly summary could act as a reminder and draw me back to the article. So to your readers.

A weekly summary has two benefits. I have already mentioned drawing your readers to other posts from that week. The summary can also help with your internal linking. Every post will have at least one internal keyword rich link.

If you are really smart, you can refer to older posts that relate to that week content while you are at it. I am not a big fan of monthly ‘best of’ type posts, but again they can provide valuable internal links and draw visitors to older content.

Content that helps with link building is easy to produce and provides you with a relatively easy day at the office. Your visitors will thank you and it may just help your search position a little.

Perhaps, perhaps not. Just because you create something, no matter how good it is, it doesn’t mean people come to visit. However, create something that people will share and you can often sit back and watch your links skyrocket.

Widgets are a good example. Create a useful widget that people can install on their website. Insert your own promo - for example, created by ### with a link to your pages. Every web page that uses that widget creates a link back to your site.

Themes are another good example. Create a great theme for any of the popular blog packages, again with a link back to your site. Every blogger that uses your theme sends a link back to your site.

In fact, for themes, and for widgets on blogs, every post and every page could be sending links. There are other examples. Badges have been a popular way to link in the past. The badge itself can be either unlinked or link to a worthy cause - however you can still have the created by link below the badge.

If you use your imagination you can come up with hundreds of linkable ideas - all helping with your own link building strategies.

Love it or hate it, honest SEO has always tried to achieve one aim, get to the top of a search engine for a particular keyword. Whether they like to admit it or not, search engines gained from the diligent work of SEO professionals. In fact, searchers gained as well since they could quickly find the information they were after.

It seems with the multi algorithms, the smart technology and host of different approaches to search, users are becoming more frustrated by the lack of results, rather than the improvement in results.

The frustration arises when the search engine tries to second guess you and delivers results based on what it thinks you are looking for. You could type into your search box - red widget with blue stripes - the results show red widgets at number one; striped widgets at number two; a widget video at number three; and so on. Finally on page four you find an entry for red widgets with blue stripes, and wonder why it didn’t show up at number one.

What is even stranger is that if you had typed that search phrase with inverted commas, the entry would have appeared at number one. That increases the mystery - if I enter a phrase then that is what I am looking - why do the search results go astray. It’s a question that needs answering by the search engines.

As we move forward into 2009, there are changes appearing in the search results. You may have noticed Google’s SearchWiki. It’s a nice idea and it’s here to stay. However, from the many conversations I have had with users, most don’t see the point. As one person pointed out to me:

“I enter a search, there are the results. I click on one of the entries and arrive on that page. From there I continue surfing. I am not going to bother going back to the search results to vote up or down any of the results.”

I have to agree. How can I ‘promote’, ‘remove’ or ‘comment’ if I haven’t yet visited the site. To do so would mean hitting the back button which I am sure the site owner would appreciate? Nice idea from Google, perhaps a little before it’s time. Having said that, rumour suggests Google may use the data produced in these searches as part of it’s ranking algorithms. It seems a little unreliable to me.

SEO will get tougher in 2009 - not because of the competition. It will be because search engines need working on if we are to produce results for our keywords. They are changing all the time, almost daily, so our SEO work needs to progress at the same rate. Chances are, search engines will make themselves irrelevant, particularly if social media continues to improve. Until then, we have to try and second guess them so that our pages can remain as close to the top of the SERPs as possible.

Following a short Q&A Session on Webforumz.com, Google explained a little more about bounce and what it means and how it is calculated. In summary:

Bounce has no bearing on time. A person can visit your site and leave the one page open for a week. If they then close the browser window having not made another click - that visitor has bounced.

The definition of a bounce from Google is ‘where a visitor lands on a page and completes no other action’. By this definition, a visitor can land on your page and immediately click through to another page then leave your site - they are not recorded as a bounce.

Where many web owners may fall into a trap is if they have use the ‘open in new tab/window’ option in their links. A click on this link will generally not register so although a visitor has seen several of your pages, the first page will still register as a bounce.

If your unlucky, they may visit ten of your pages, opening each in a new window. Each page will then register a new visitor and if they leave, that page will register another bounce. Ten pages, ten bounces.

Do bounces affect your rankings. Simple reading would have you thinking no - they wont affect your rankings. I still have my doubts in this department. However;

really don’t have specific guidance on bounces per se; rather, the key for webmasters is to make users happy so they find your site useful, bookmark your site, return to your site, recommend your site, link to your site, etc. Pretty much everything we write algorithmically re: web search is designed to maximize user happiness, so anything webmasters do to increase that is likely to improve their site’s presence in Google.

That is the word from Google.- Make your site better for your visitors and and you will rank well.