Stop asking ‘How’ Google rank websites and start asking ‘Why’.

Seriously, if you are interested in improving your ranking for your website then you must stop trying to guess what ingredients are in the Google ‘secret sauce’.

What makes up the Google algorithm takes up way too much thinking time, just accept the fact that Google pushes websites through their machinery and out pops the ranking for your site.

A better question to ask is “Why do Google rank sites the way that they do?”

From a users perspective Googles aim of is very simple; it wants to understand what information you want to see when you query its search engine and then it wants to ensure that it shows you the very best results.

Why is understanding this a better way to understand Google? 

For Google to do it's job properly it needs to ensure that:

1. It understand what your site is all about
2. When visitors get to it they engage with it (good time on site, low bounce rate etc)
3. They potentially share your content

This all means that you can stop focussing your precious time on tying to get others to link their sites to you, spamming forums and blogs with your links and stop tweaking META Tags and focus on the important area … your content.

With the right content Google will understand your pages and be able to determine whether you can satisfy a search query well.  So your content needs to be able to answer visitor’s questions, the content needs to be exactly what the visitor is expecting to see when they click on your link in the search results.

This means that you need to ensure that you answer the questions you think that the market has for your products and services – this might actually mean developing a formal FAQ section, but it also means ensuing that they easily understand what your website and pages are all about, and how exactly you can help them.

Seriously, understand what Google is trying to do and help them to help you, and you will start to rank well within Google. Period.

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Web Site Usability - what do you need to consider!

Web usability is all about taking a look at sites, pages and designs to better understand the customer journey - the reasons why visitors are there in the first place, understanding any barriers that stop visitors from taking their desired action.

In essence, your web site should provide your visitors with an efficient and enjoyable user experience.

Web pages should be self explanatory and obvious.

The MUM Test

When considering the basics for web page usability, I like to ask the following simple question 'Would my Mum be able to use it!'. You see my mum wasn't a tech head, she wasn't particularly well educated in these modern technologies, so she wasn't at all web savvy; and if we think of our potential visitors in this way then we will always ensure that our sites are a simple (and easy) to use as possible.

Basically, if my mum could navigate a web site and get what she wanted, then it was a good site.

Key Areas to consider

Intent - what are you visitors intending to do on your site?

Web site Structure (appearance) – what your visitors see and interact with.

Whitespace – clean space that makes your site easy to view, read, understand and use. Good use of space can draw the visitors eyes to the important parts (and links) of the site.

Noise – is information fighting for attention or does any other element vie for the visitors attention (strong contrasts next to text for example (i.e. bold graphics or images next to key information can force eyes away from this text)).

Length – short page length, visitors shouldn't have to scroll too far to get to the information that they want, information “below the fold” will not get seen as much as information above it.

Consistence – across navigation, fonts, layout, colour etc

Images – need to be relevant and compelling.

Functionality – how well the site interacts with visitors and visitors with the site.

Organisation of information – and links. Do users know where they are and where to get to the common information they might need? Can visitors get to the action you want them to take easily.  Are the web pages split into clearly defined areas.

Speed – how fast the site loads (< 2 second is ideal) as customers may leave if they have to wait to view the information on your site. Site speed is also important for good Google rankings.

Interactivity – how well can visitors interact with your site, does search work well for example?

Things visitors should never ask themselves

• Where am I?
• Where do I start?
• Where did they put ….?
• What information do I need on this page?
• Why did they call it that?
• Why is that there?

Common questions to ask

• What is the first thing you notice on the site? Is your USP clearly visible?
• Is there a clear visual hierarchy? (headers, important information etc) – newspapers do this REALLY well!
• Are the pages consistent (everyone knows instictively how to read a newspaper and what the headlines mean, bold intro text, main story, caption under images, we know to go to the back pages for the sport and somewhere close to the middle for TV listings etc). Familiarity is reassuring.
• Do you think it's too cluttered?
• Are you having a hard time finding the information you want?
• Does the site feel well organised?
• Do you have to scroll to get to important information?
• Is the site slow?
• What do you think of the fonts, colours and images?
• Can you easily search for product information?
• Can you easily find the contact information?

The Search Engine Ranking factor

I've already mentioned that site speed is important for Google ranking, but also IF your site doesn't look very good to visitors they are likely to press the BACK button on their browser quickly.  This visitors action is classed as a Bounce by Google, and a high Bounce rate will go against you in rankings!

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Panda 4.0 and how to survive it

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Learn from Politicians!

In the UK the local elections are happening this week, so it gives us an opportunity to take a leaf out of our MPs' books and raise the profile of your business and website?

Just like our politicians, you too can build a professional online brand and profile for your business with some very simple tips; and changing the way your website portrays and promotes you could do wondered for your sales too!

The Personal Statement

Just like the political parties your business should employ a personal statement. Your personal statement and the way your present it on your web site is critical as this is one of the first ‘things’ that a visitor who doesn't know you very well will seek out (whether they are aware of it or not!), and it has the added benefit of helping them understand more about your business.

Your company's personal statement simply needs to be the top 2-3 things that you want your visitors to know about your business, they should show how you can help your prospects.

For example, you might want your visitors to be aware of your huge selection of products, the fact that you are an award winner, your customer service stats, your low prices etc – whatever it is that you think your market will go wild over and that you can satisfy.

Once you've decided on what your business personal statement should be you need to ensure that it is easily and quickly seen on your site. Are these 2-3 statements obvious on your site? Are they mentioned at all or hidden in your navigation?

Put them to your homepage and make them easily viable throughout your site.

Your Professional Profile

You only need to take a quick look at any of the political parties web sites to see what views, experience and values their leader has.
You can find out about their history, achievements, what they stand for and how they believe that they can personally help you.

Does your site portray its top Directors in the same way? Is it easy to find out about them, what skills, experience and background they have, and what they think that they can do for your prospects?

If you don’t talk about the top people in your business then you are missing a trick; research constantly shows that the “About Us” pages are usually one of the top pages that prospects visit on your site and these pages can help sell yourself and your business if done correctly.

Say what you want about our political system, the parties and politicians, they do know how to promote themselves and how to get us following them and believing in them, and by following these simple tips you will be able to better promote your site and make you more appealing to your prospects.

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POTS and PANS!

What type of site so you own or manage? Is it a Pretty Ordinary Trash Site (POTS) or a Pretty Amazing Natural Sites (PANS) site?

Obviously you don’t want to own a POTS, these tend to be trashy, thin content, poorly linked to sites, where as the more superior PANS have lots of lovely content that visitors want to read and share, their content also attracts links naturally.

A site needs to have a clear and definite purpose; if this can be portrayed successfully to visitors then half of the battle has been won.

Sleek, modern design is a winner. Visitor needs and design trends change often, sites that don’t follow these will look dated very quickly and will be an instant turn-off.

Content needs to be unique and fresh and needs to speak concisely to your target market – avoid waffle and clutter and keep the messages as simple and as concise as possible.

Ultimately for any website to be successful it needs people to use it; site design and appearance are very important, but they will never replace the need for excellent usability.

A websites navigation affects how usable it is, and when developing or redesigning an existing site then the navigation (how you visitors are doing to find the great content) should be your primary concern.

In Summary

	POTS	PANS
Site Design	Designed in the 80’s/90’s. Cluttered.	Appealing Modern – fresh, clean.
Content	SEO focused. Doesn't read well.	User focused. Clear, well-written content.
Clarity	Visitors confused. Unsure what you site is about.	Purpose clear. Visitors feel happy on your site.
Usability	Confusing leaving visitors impatient. They will leave.	Simple to use. Customers stay and look around.
Navigation	Visitors can’t find what they need. No structure to site at all.	Visitors can find what they need quickly. 1-3 clicks and they are there.

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Should you undertake Link Exchange with other businesses

In recent years the practice of arranging to create links to sites that link to yours has been frowned upon (especially by Google), but can this practice actually have a good and lasting effect on your website, traffic volume and rankings?

The idea of exchanging links with other websites, typically on some kind of special ‘we recommend’, ‘our partners’, ‘friends of ours’ or something similar, used to be a primary method of building links to sites.

One of the major ways that the Google ranking algorithm works is in making the suggestion that a link to your website from another one is a positive vote from them to you, Google used this vote to basically determine your reputation (in fact it still works this way today).

The problem was that as this method of gaining links if very cheap and very easy to do, suddenly all sites had hundreds (if not thousands) of links pointing to them, and search engines like Google realised that these types of links weren't really an honest vote of recommendation for the websites but rather just a way for businesses to boost their rankings.

Whilst website owners can still do this, this approach to link building is nowhere near as beneficial as it was in the past.

As a result, less weight was ‘reputation’ weight was given to what were labelled ‘reciprocal links’ – a term which covers the scenario I have just referred to.

As it became common knowledge that reciprocal links had been devalued, many businesses simply gave up on them. Some even went to the length of deleting all of the reciprocal links they had in case they incurred a penalty against their site.

It’s actually a myth that reciprocal links result in a penalty. These types of links have just become devalued, which is very different to them attracting a penalty.

Reciprocal links still provide value to the sites involved, however, the level of that value is less than it was before; but if you are struggling for links then some value is better than no value at all – so it would be a huge mistake to ignore reciprocal links altogether. You just shouldn't make this your only linking strategy, providing good quality content to attract natural and real links is always be best approach.

Two sides to every coin!

Whilst we are talking here about using reciprocal links to gain improved search engine rankings, there is also the other side of the equation and benefit to consider, that is, traffic referral.

Each link you have on another site is a chance that one of their visitors make click the link and come to your site; the way reciprocal links are tend to be set up (on special ‘links’ pages) then you probably won’t get much referral traffic from them, but again, some traffic is better than none.

Reciprocal links are not created equally!

Some reciprocal links are always going to be better than others and you do need to be very careful about who you exchange links with. For example if you sell soft furnishings and you have a link from a website that sells car parts, I don’t imagine you get any visitors at all!

Link partners should be in some way related to your own. In our example above, your soft furnishings site would be much better served if you had a link from a home improvement site!

Always think before exchanging links – “Would someone else consider this link to be logical? Or would they be confused as to why my site has a link from this one!”

A few links from irrelevant sites isn't a big deal, but the more you have the more confusing your site’s back link profile becomes, which makes it more difficult for search engines to clearly establish the topic of your website and which keywords to rank it well for.

Also, too many irrelevant links can look very spammy and would start to lead you to a penalty by the major search engines.

Quality wins!

Also consider the quality of the site you want a link from (Google will!), ensure that their content is of excellent quality and unique to that site.

If search engines see that you are linking to low quality sites, again this is a red flag to them and you may get a penalty (or just reduced ranking).

So, if you’re unsure about the quality or trustworthiness of a website then play it safe and don’t link to it.

Approaching other sites

Once you have a list of sites that look relevant and have great content, then it’s time to contact them, the best way is to use email or call them; explain that you have found their site, you love the quality of it and you think that a link between the two sites would be useful to both businesses.

You’ll find that the success rate for link exchange isn't great, and it takes some time and effort, but it does work. The key is to do a bit of research on them first. You shouldn't just send out hundreds of emails using the same set template. That might seem like the easiest way but your emails will mostly get ignored.

Finally!

As already mentioned, done well and carefully this can be a good way to get links to your site that WILL help ranking and gain real visitors to your site.

But this approach should be a low level tactic and not the main way to gain links, like I said earlier, great content will always attract natural links from other sites.

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Checking AdWords

If you have a significant Google AdWords account then checking it on a regular basis to ensure that it’s performing at it’s optimum can be a drain on resources; I've previously spend days at a time ensuring that all keywords, ads ad landing pages are performing well together for particular AdGroups that contain thousands of keywords.

Whilst it works as an approach, it is very time consuming, and we don't always have the time to do a thorough check (although you should try to do one at least once a month).

If you want to spend less time working on your AdWords campaigns, but you also want to spend your time constructively, my advice would be to focus on the important elements of your campaigns.

Each week download a full list of your keywords - just click on the Keywords tab from Campaigns, then click on the Download Report icon). Ensure you are just viewing data for the Last 7 days.

This will provide you with a complete list of your keywords with all the relevant data you will need to check how your keywords and ads are doing.

Once downloaded, open the report in Excel (or your favourite Spreadsheet application).

Now you have your data, perform the following tasks:

High CTR, No Conversions

Sort the data by CTR (Descending) then by Conversions.  What you are looking for here are keywords with a high click through rate but low or no conversions. Note: You’ll need to make a judgement call on what you think are high and low values for your industry/site – but it should be clear that if a keyword has received a 50%+ CTR but no conversions, then something is wrong!

First of all check your ad(s) to ensure that they are clear on the benefits that your prospect will get, tweak the ad(s) if need to be ensure that they are crystal clear. Remember you can always have more than one ad, so if you want to make a change add a new one so you can check later which one had the best results.

Next check the landing page, are the goals clear? Is the benefit that you have suggested on the ad(s) clearly visible? Is the call to action nice and clear?

Low CTR

Next check your keywords that have a low CTR.

Your ads here just aren't working for you. Look to see how they can be reworded to make them more appealing, are you clearly getting across your core benefit?

Make sure your budget isn't running out too quickly.

Low Impressions

Low impressions are usually down to either low budget, low bids.

Consider adding more relevant keywords to help trigger your ads, slightly increase your keyword bids.

These are the absolute basic checks that you need to make every week, keeping up with these will ensure that your campaigns are in good working order.

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What Content should you write for your website?

Content is the life blood of your website, which in turn is likely to be the lifeblood of your business.

Content, the right content is amazing stuff; it can drive high quality traffic to your website and also convert these visitors into customers.

But what content should you write?

Until recent Google changes you could take a look at your Google Analytics to see what search terms brought traffic to your site, but with Google now protecting the privacy of users up to 80% of your traffic will be showing up as “(not provided)”.

So how else can you capture what topics visitors are interested in?

Most websites have the ability to give you subtle clues as to what you need to write. When a visitor comes to your site, IF what they want to see isn’t clear to them then many of them will go to your search function to find the content within your site.

All you need to do is capture these search strings and you have the start of your content funnel.

A quick search on Google will show you how to unlock the onsite searches for your particular CMS (Content Management Systems), but let’s take the example of WordPress, one of the most popular for websites.

In Google Analytics. From your site profile click on Admin.

From here you’ll see a sub-tab for Profile Settings. Click on that to bring up the Edit Web Profile Information screen.

Scroll down to the bottom the Edit screen to the Site Search Settings. Ensure that you click the radio button to track Site Search.

Next you need to enter a query parameter. On a typical WordPress installation, the query parameter is simply the letter “s”.

How can I be sure that “s” is the query parameter for my WordPress site?

If you go to your WordPress site and do a search via the search widget, you’ll notice the URL of the results page will look something like http://www.yourdomain.com/?s=search-phrase.

Whatever is between the ? and the = is your query parameter!

Now Google Analytics will start to collect your entire on site queries, it can take 24 hours to start collecting these so please be patient.

Once you have these search queries you’ll start to get a better understanding of what content your visitors want to see.

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What the future of SEO?

When Google entered the search engine market back in the 90’s they changed the game.

Before Google all you needed to do was stuff your web site full of keywords and as long as you had more keywords stuffed than anyone else you appeared at the top of the rankings for that particular ‘stuffed’ term.

Since Google started spreading their magic on the search landscape things have changed, suddenly keyword stuff got you absolutely nowhere and links to site became the most important factor (as links suggested that the page was liked by someone).

Then Google started to look more at the quality of the links that link to you – if a high quality, relevant and trusted site linked to you then Google rightly took more notice of this link and trusted it more than lower quality sites that linked to you.

Things are changing again with Google Panda (rolled out in 2011) and further more with Hummingbird (rolled out in 2013) – now the quality AND meaning of your content is looking more important.

So with these algorithm changes and other developments, what does the future hold?

As SEO practitioners we are still providing good quality content that answers visitor’s questions whilst chasing those important linkbacks, but will all this activity be beneficial in the next few years!

Backlines are still important and will continue to be until something else comes along which can help Google understand the reputation and trustworthiness of a site; but as links can be easily gained AND the value of link erodes over time then a new way of working out Reputation needs to be brought into play.

Reputation networks like Klout, PeerIndex and PeerReach are examples of other networks trying to understand the reputation of a site, business or individual by trying to understand the context of any engagement; predominately in a social media context.

But it’s this social context that holds the key for reputation in real-time; with the erosion of link value over time then Google admit that once a link to a piece of content is provided it almost immediately starts to become out of date (hence the erosion of value over time), so real-time analysis MUST be the way forward.

The reality of the future of SEO and the question of reputation probably lies in a mixture of the types of work; i.e. the analysis that Klout, PeerIndex and PeerReach are working on and the latest Google Hummingbird platform changes.

A merger of these two sides would mean that Google would have a idea (in real-time) of how a brand, business or individual is being talked about, and from this it could be determined whether that discussion or engagement looks to provide positive or negative reputable (lots of links/mentions from could mean that it’s a valued resource for example).

Also with the Hummingbird update Google is showing that it’s starting to understand natural language and the semantics on how question and answers can be phrased.

I imagine within the next ten years Google (or AN Other) will be able to determine the basic reputation of a site or author (by links and real-time reputation analysis) and understand the real meaning of the content on a site; with these two pieces of information a search engine provider will be able to provide search engine results that provide the very best answer to a question with a higher degree of certainty.

But as we do not live in this world right now then links and great quality content are the way to go.

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The new Lead Generation Content Strategy

If you are responsible for sales or lead generation then you will no doubt be familiar with the classic sales funnel.

Traffic or Leads are basically thrown in at the top of the funnel and due your magnificent sales and marketing nurturing you pass these leads through the different levels of your particular sales funnel all the time attempting to create a customer at the end of the process.

It’s a classic image used in business today and it works well ….. up to a point!

You see what this model doesn't adequately explain is that THIS process is a process that converts traffic or leads that have shown an active interest in your product or service.

But there are many, many more individuals or businesses that are not yet interested in you, but you can still get them into this funnel, they might not buy yet, but they will be aware of you when they are ready to purchase and by changing the way you talk to your market will help you to become “front of mind” in their future purchase decisions.

To change this mind-set within your market all you need to do is talk about something closely related to what you sell; so for example if you sell computers, then create guides to help people use them or understand common problems and how to resolve them.

This would mean that you are then likely to attract people who (whilst not ready to purchase) use computers, and your great use of associated content means that there is now a chance that when they are ready to buy you will be “front of mind”.

This is a fundamental shift on how businesses look at content and their content strategy, but this simple tweak to make content available that is closely related (and helpful) to your core business offering can bring in more prospects.

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Inbound Marketing: The SECRETS

Actually, there was a small mistake in the subject of this blog, because there isn't really a secret in great inbound marketing – other than ensuring the right people see your content at the right time!

Inbound marketing is all about your prospects finding you, which means that it’s important that your precious and brilliant content is found when it’s needed to be found.

I’m sure we've all done the same thing at some point in our careers; we've created a brilliant piece of content (website content, video, article, blog or social media post etc) we have lined up several online channels to host and promote the piece and clicked send … then sat back ….. and waited ….. and waited some more …. but nothing happens!

No interest at all in our lovely, well crafted content, but it was perfect, what went wrong?

Well the chances are that simply your excellent message just didn't rise above the rubbish and the clutter – image this from a social media perspective, as soon as you click the send button your piece of content is the freshest and newest piece out there and it appears at the top of the stream, but second later it’s buried in a pool of noise.

As an experiment I simply tweeted the hashtag #Marketing and within just two minutes it was buried in my own twitter stream with by all the other stuff I follow, Even when I searched Twitter for my update after only 10 minutes my tweet has disappeared under 187 tweets – for all intents and purposes this post was now gone.

So what could I have done differently?

Very simply I just needed to make my post rise above the clutter and this is easiest done with my advocates – and virtually everyone and every business has some of these. These are your greatest fans, your enthusiastic followers.

These people serve two key functions:

1. They a can extend the life of any content by simply sharing it for you, but more importantly, 
2. They take on a valuable “word of mouth” presence.

What you might not realise is that a large percentage of new business comes from some sort of referral (whether these be Friends, Relatives, Acquaintances or Unknown online networks etc), and word of mouth has always been the most trusted form of advertising.

And whats even better is that these advocates are still working for you when you aren't around, constantly posting, sharing, and mentioning your brand.

How do you find your advocates?

They should be fairly obvious to spot if your close to your online marketing channels, these are the people that will readily retweet, like, favourite or share your content; they respond to your requests, they comment and talk about you (and often without being prompted).

The trick is to recognise these traits in your social networks and recognise the individuals - network with them, thank them, provide easier access to your best staff, provide extra content, training or even prizes. If your industry is suitable for it then try rewarding with gamification (providing points and badges etc).

Numerous big businesses understand the importance of their advocates and work with them – Google have supplied advocates with freebies in the past as a thank you; Samsung provide special events for their advocates and chances to get their hands on the latest devices (the recent Samsung Unpacked 2014 in Barcelona was a great example; Walmat creates specialised online communities of shoppers to help spread their messages. It is everywhere.

It’s the very importance of these advocates is the reason that I seem to find the constant need to explain to people that it’s not the number of Followers or Friends, Retweets or Likes that important, but who Follows and Likes you, who Retweets or Likes your posts.

One good advocate is worth more than 1,000 Followers that don’t listen to you.

Summary:

So listen to your channels, discover your advocates and build a relationship with them, then the life of your precious content will be lengthened allowing your important messages to reach more people.

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Keyword Stuffing

A huge mistake made by marketers, business owners and bloggers every day is the practice of stuffing irrelevant keywords (keyword stuffing) into web pages and articles in an attempt to dominate Google search for particular search terms.

You need to know that Google’ has grown very wise to this practice, and as soon as they consider that you have undertaken any form of keyword stuffing you will get a Google ranking penalty and in severe case be delisted from their index (i.e. no-one will be able to find you from a Google search).

Avoid keyword stuffing at all costs, and only include the major keywords that will assist your pages in being indexed properly by ALL search engines.

For an example of an overstuffed web page, take a look at this >> keyword stuffing.

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So what does Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) give you?

SEO utilises modern search engines (such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing etc) to increase the visibility of your website or individual web page which in turn ensures that your potential customers find your website rather than your competitors when they are searching for a solution you provide.

Typically a SEO professional will handle and provide on website design, content marketing and website optimisation tactics - all designed to provide the search engine visibility that you need.

Bottom line with search results is that the higher your site appears in the search results, the more people will come and see your site, the more visitors you get, the more customers you will get.

KEY BENEFITS OF MY SEO SERVICES IN YORKSHIRE

• Expert advice on how to achieve desired results
• Drives high-quality, profitable traffic to your website or individual web pages
• Gives your business long-term visibility, never short term hope.
• Introduces your brand to a much wider audience
• Increases traffic to your website
• Provides a cost-effective method of reaching your target market
• Establishes trust and credibility in the marketplace

Contact me for further details.

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Don’t forget your keywords in your Social Media

Most webmasters and (hopefully) all internet marketers know the importance of properly understanding keywords for website ranking, but that nugget of knowledge seems to be forgotten when thinking about and posting on social media channels.

But the keywords are king rule is as equally important in social media, and this is why.

At the moment Google views everything online as if it was a website – in fact in essence that’s all your social channels are.

Take your Twitter account for example – it’s just a page (albeit a long one) of content, same for your Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest accounts etc.

So if Google does see your social streams as a web page element, doesn't it make sense that these also contain your best keywords - just as your web pages do!

So when you post, think carefully about what you want to say and craft them carefully to get your valuable keywords in.

This will ensure that in search these could be more easily picked up by search engines, but also your brilliantly crafted accounts start to show your authority, which will be passed to your website and web pages when you link back to them.

AND like your web pages, please don’t add posts purely to spam your keywords, Google is wise to this trick just as it is with websites and it could lead to a social penalty!

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3 minutes to a better website

There are a couple of things that websites MUST DO.

1. Visitors MUST be able to understand instantly what products/services you provide. 
2. Visitors MUST be able to find products or services to buy from you. 
3. Visitors MUST be able to understand your value proposition 

MINUTE 1:

Choose a close friend; choose someone who isn't close to your business.
Get them to look at your website and get them to write down what product/service they think you provide.
They have 1 minute to complete this task.

MINUTE 2:

Choose another friend; again, someone who isn’t close to your business.
Give them 4-5 products of yours to find and see if they can easily find them on your website.
They have 1 minute to complete this task.

MINUTE 3:

This is about your Value Proposition.

A Value Proposition helps you to connect to your customers; it says to them ‘we know you’, ‘we know what you’re looking for’. It’s the value proposition that makes them love you and your products. A good value proposition explains how you can solve your prospects problems, it tells your prospects why they should buy from you.

Choose yet another friend; again, someone who isn’t close to your business.
Get them to look at your website and get them to write down 3-4 reasons why they think they should buy from you.
They have 1 minute to complete this task.

You're done!

OK, that’s your 3 minutes. Take a look at the results and see if it tells you anything.

• Is your offering obvious?
• Can people find your products/services easily?
• Are reasons obvious as to why visitors should buy from you? 

The answers to these questions should help you to amend your website to make it more relevant to your visitors.

Good luck

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Old skool SEO still works

Matt Cutts and the team at Google have had a lot of press lately about how SEO should be done; a lot of people took some of Matts comments the wrong way and seemed to suddenly stop wanting to do any old school SEO in fear that Google would find out and deindex their website or pages.

Matt was only really repeating what he has basically said from day one, and that is that you can do pretty much anything that is ethical to help promote your website, but just don’t be spammy about it. Rule number one always has been and always will be – think about your market first and ranking second.

So what “old school” SEO still works?

The truth is that pretty much everything!

Guest blogging

Ok, this was the recent big topic that started to get webmasters a bit jittery, you can still be a guest blogger for someone else, there are just some very simple ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’ that you need to follow.

Do guess blogging as it can drive targeted visitors to your own site. Always add value to the blog that you are writing for – consider their audience AND yours. Consider creating a separate landing page for this guest blog post that adds value to the post.

Don’t use the same article that you have used elsewhere, this simply doesn't work. If you like the theme of a previous article you have written then consider a heavy rewrite of it. Don’t write a heavily weighted keyword article. Neither should you expect a link to your website, if this is your only motivation then don’t guest blog.

Forum backlinks

Do try to get links back from forums – there still is SEO value in doing this, but ensure that the forum is highly relevant to the pages that you want to link to. As with guest blogging consider creating a landing page that provides additional value to the forum comment you post – give the readers a real reason to click on your link.

Don’t create lots of spammy low value comments on Forums with a link back to your site, and don’t put your keywords in the Name field, and NEVER use automatic blogging software – that is so 1990’s and it will get you a Google penalty.

Directories

Do continue to use directory sites, but ensure that you are listing your website in a high quality directory that is likely to delivery good quality traffic to your site. Look for Directories that have strict submission guidelines. If you are a local business then local business directories can work well.

Don’t bulk submit your details to every directory that you can find, and NEVER use automated listing software.

Your own link pages

Do have quality outbound links to relevant websites, use pages that are highly themed and only consider links that are relevant to your audience.

Don’t have pages full of random outbound links, Google know that this type of activity is usually from link exchange programs and it could get you a penalty.

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SEO benefits of Social Media

Most businesses now recognise the fact that social media doesn't necessarily directly lead to a sale, but I know for a fact that it can help that sales process; instead most big businesses now look at social media as having SEO benefits and allowing their website and webpages to gain better rankings than their competitions, but how!

Let’s take a quick look at the benefits that social media could bring your to your SEO.

Social Media in general:

There are a couple of linked reasons why we would want to use social networks in the first place.

1. It allows people to share your information and links with their Friends and Followers 
2. It allows a greater chance for more people to see your brand and your products 
3. You get a spread of profiles and individuals that link back to your site 

Google+:

Specifically Google+ looks good because of the obvious tight integration with Google Search; this benefits you because Google has a good chance of knowing a little about everyone that use its services.

It knows for example if individuals are interested in or an expert in ‘home decor’ or ‘flooring’ because of their Google+ profiles and/or their search patterns and/or their Gmail topics etc – now if you sell flooring and one of these individuals shares or +1’s some of your content (image/URL etc) then Google will naturally believe that your site or specific page is more important than a competitors that hasn't been shared by these interested parties.

Social sites as information hubs:

We also look at social media sites now as information hubs (a bit like mini websites).

If we take the above example about a flooring business and they focus on posting good content about flooring then Google will understand that their Blog, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Pinterest account is about ‘flooring’; and as such any links from it back to that site will generate a little more link juice.

The future of SEO and Social Media:

We (the SEO community) also don’t yet fully understand how Google looks at social engagement (individuals sharing social content), but whether it happens now or in the future, if individuals engage with your social content and brand then it can only benefit ranking.

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SEO techniques you should NEVER try

We all make mistakes, but if you end up making a mistake of your SEO then it could really start to ruin your business.
Many businesses, including some top international companies, have fallen foul of Google Webmaster Guidelines and have been penalised by being removed from Google index.

Google has developed sophisticated algorithms to look out for websites and website owners that look like they are attempting game or beat Google at their own game. You can’t win.

Here are a couple of tips to ensure that it doesn't happen to you.

Keyword stuffing

OK, so you have worked out what keywords will bring visitors to your website; once you have this knowledge the temptation is to stuff these keywords all over your pages!

This is a definite violation of Google Guidelines and will result in getting you delisted from their index. Write your pages as if you were talking to someone about that product or service, use your keyword, but use then sparingly.


Automated comments

It doesn't take long searching the internet to find companies that are willing to sell you software that will enable you to leave comments automatically on blogs and forums – this can’t go wrong can it as we all know that Google loves to see links to your website.

Actually Google employs some very clever software that detects instances of when you attempt to leave lots of comments on blogs and forums, leaving lots of comments simply isn't natural behaviour. It’s fine to find forums and blogs that are related to your business and leave comments on them (in moderation), but do so with the understanding that your comments need to help a wider community, you need to add value to these sites, not just expect a link back to your site.


Paid links

Lots of high profile websites offer to sell links to other sites to help their ranking, and it can be very tempting to use these services as a quick win for ranking.

Google knows the sites that sell links and will penalise sites that they link to, also many of these site will again be unrelated to yours and so Google will see these links as unnatural (i.e. these sites wouldn't naturally link to yours).


Generic Directories

There are lots of internet directories that offer (either paid or free) to provide a link back to your website. As many of these directories are just pages of links to websites then Google again sees these as unnatural linkage and if you are found to have listings in lots of these directories then they are likely to take actions against your site.

Linking from directories that are dedicated to your market or location are better, as are using well known household name directories. These can be a useful way to gain traffic, but don’t reply on this tactic for ranking purposes.

Cloaking or Hidden Content

This is a technique that attempts to hide content from website visitors but is instead made available only for to search engines to see; again Google is now really clever at spotting these techniques.

All content should be available to your visitors, it should be informative; it should make sense and read well.


Doorway Pages

This isn't a technique that is used much today, but Doorway pages are pages that are again just written just for search engines and typically have content on them that is not able to be seen by website visitors. They are used to try to build a large amount of authority into a single page; these pages then automatically take visitors off to a completely different website.

Again, they tend to be stuffed with keywords, but once again it’s a technique that Google are very good at sniffing out.


In Summary

There isn't any way that you can beat Google and fool it into giving you better search engines rankings that your site deserve – always write pages with your visitor in mind.

Good quality, well written site will always (in time) rank better than poorly written, low quality ones.

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