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Too Much Research Bad For SEO

Monday, August 2nd, 2010
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Knowing too much knowledge is a dangerous thing, especially when it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO). By constantly searching for new techniques on optimising your website you are only likely to effect your website negatively rather than positively which means the time spent discovering new ideas you can try with your website will go to waste when in fact they could go in to creating fresh content and hunting down high quality links to your site.

So why can too much research be bad for SEO? By looking for information available on the Internet you may come across suggestions which are out-dated due to SEO forever changing. Other information may be untruthful and black hat techniques which will only knock your off the search engine result pages rather than improve your page ranking.

The best way to learn SEO is to learn from mistakes and watch what people are doing in your niches. By understanding how they approach SEO you are able to do the same for your site which will have the same results as them in the end. The main thing to remember is content and linking is key, by having these under control your website will eventually end up where you want it to be.

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Internet Marketing for Dummies

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
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Internet marketing is known to be associated with many businesses due to its diversity amongst several business models, but because some companies don’t understand its advantages (and disadvantages) they choose not to use it. This is okay for some companies who may not have the money to spend on building a reputation for themselves online, but because the Internet is forever evolving more companies are beginning to put more money into the marketing scheme.

The purpose of this post to help you understand what Internet marketing is and how it can help your business evolve over time. You don’t need to have masses of money – you need to have time to spare to learn how companies (such as yourself) use the Internet to evolve. If you feel you can’t do the  job yourself then all hope is not lost – companies such as Weblinx can help you and your company create a reputation online.

What is Internet Marketing?

So what exactly is Internet marketing and why should I spend my money on it? Well there’s a lot of evidence that exists out there why you should think about investing in the market. Because the Internet is global it allows companies that are used to being local to spread world wide as long as they have the products or services that appeal to a big market. By competing in the same industry as other companies it can be a lot harder to convince people to use your company, but due to the interactive nature of Internet marketing you are able to respond quickly to web users with opinionative replies.

Different services are available through the Internet that allow you to market your products and services at little to no cost. Depending on your industry there is an ideal service that will be able to assist you in finding and attracting new customers that you may not be able to get through traditional advertising. Before deciding how you can intergrate Internet marketing into your business model to promote your products and services you should revise the possibilities. If your company depends on sales of goods then e-commerce may be the way to go for your company, or if your company offers a service which depends on leads then a website can be set up to collect details from possible clients to be contacted.

Internet marketing doesn’t have to be expensive either. Because statistics can be collected and analysed the right type of advertisement can be deployed without hoping for a hit or miss like you will get from traditional advertising. Traditional advertising can be things such as billboards, newspaper advertisements, radio adverts or TV adverts.

The statistical data that can be collected through Internet marketing can be an extremely helpful tool. By being able to discover what type of people are viewing your websites or advertisements you are able to research into what you can do to attract other people. By discovering trends such as genders, age and locations you can aim to please this trend of viewers or try and modify your Internet marketing attempts to please others just as much.

If you use Internet marketing and have any suggestions on what people can do to help promote themselves online then please leave a comment.

Internet Marketing

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SEO Company Hoax Tell-Tale Signs

Thursday, June 17th, 2010
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When choosing a search engine optimisation (SEO) company to optimise your website you must be careful. This is down to companies saying anything they can to take your money and then give you nothing in return. It’s unfortunate that companies will do this and even more unfortunate that it works all the time. The reason it works is simple, because people don’t understand what they are buying companies will make SEO sound more complex than it actually is and create a load of promises which are in reality unachievable.

Not to worry though, not every SEO company will lie to you and will give you the results you’ve paid for. But to be on the safe side here are a few points to remember when looking for a SEO company.

  • If a SEO company promises you results then put the phone down instantly. No SEO company should promise you results as there are no guarantees you will achieve the results. You wouldn’t ask a lawyer to promise you you won’t go to prison so why ask a SEO company to promise results?
  • If they try to make search engine optimisation sound far more complex than it is then be careful, they may try to make you pay for things you probably don’t need.
  • If you’re asked for a huge amount of money then you’ve every right to be skeptical. Look for other quotes before deciding on a company as you may lose money to a company that doesn’t achieve the results other companies could have.
  • If you don’t hear anything about keywords then stop stop talking and walk away. SEO is all about the keywords you choose, if they don’t mention keywords then they couldn’t possibly know what they are talking about.
  • If you can’t find the company on the first page of Google for any of their keywords then there’s no point using them. If they can’t achieve results for themselves then how are they possibly going to help you gain results?

The world is full of cruel people who are all about money and not about pride. Be careful with who you choose as this may not only destroy your website but may destroy you in the process. This doesn’t mean SEO isn’t worth investing in, search engines revolve around websites being search engine friendly, just beware that if a deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

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Experienced Copywriters Can Assist Your Internet Marketing

Monday, June 7th, 2010
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If your company is pumping money into an Internet marketing strategy it may be advised to hire an experienced copywriter, according to Tori Hywel-Davies of the Liverpool Daily Post. This is to help ensure that all text displayed on your website is easy to read and creates the correct messages wanted.

By having content which is both fresh and gripping your website is much more likely to perform better in terms of search engine optimisation (SEO) standards. It is said by Google themselves that by composing compelling content is the main factor to remember when optimising a website to rank highly in search engine results. This will help assist in creating a better reputation for the website as it is much more likely to draw readers attention resulting which will result in recommendations amongst friends.

“As any professional writer will know – that is, one who understands how to work online media and the meaning of brand strategy – there’s a true skill in getting it right,” Ms Hywel-Davies explained.

By doing the appropriate research into what content should be displayed on your website you have a better chance in acheiving high positions in search engines for your chosen keywords. There are hundreds of factors to take into account when creating content for your chosen keywords but this will happen through trial and error. Don’t be reactive be proactive, by frequently updating your content through features such as blogs you are able to give your website a fighting chance against other websites with similar keywords.

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Your Images Can Benefit From SEO

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010
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When using images on your website it is good practice to treat them as you would with text. Despite the fact that search engines spiders may not be able to see images like we can they can read items such as alt tags. By ensuring you optimise your images correctly you can help your website not only appear in the search engines for websites but for images as well. Here are two tips you should bare in mind when adding images to your website:

  1. Not everyone searches for websites on search engines, they will also search for other types of media such as images, videos or music. By giving your image the potential to appear highly in the image search results your website will have more chance of being discovered. Despite the fact the traffic won’t be as much as it would be from appearing in the web results any traffic is good.
  2. By adding alt tags to your images you will help assist websites users who may have bad eye sight. This is because most people who don’t have much vision or at all will use computer software that reads out alt tags added to images on websites. This gives them a chance to understand what they can’t see.

You should always ensure your images are optimised as much as you would for anything else on your website, not everyone has the privilege of sight as we have. Ensure that your images are named accordingly so search engine spiders can crawl your website and pick up everything that is contained on your website and give your site even more strength for your search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign.

search engine optimisation

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Subdomains or Subfolders Best for SEO?

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010
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When it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO) there are always different approaches that can be taken. This is no different for subdomains and subfolders. Both are used by websites throughout the Internet, but which is the best to use when it comes to SEO? There are different facts regarding both subdomains and subfolders which can be listed, these are:

Subdomains:

  • Displayed in the URL by the characters after “http://” and the ones before “.site.com”
  • Are viewed by Search Engines as totally unique sites independent of the parent domain
  • Site Authority (in other words, the ability for the site and its subsequent pages to rank in the search engines) is not passed down from the parent domain

Subfolders:

  • Represented in the URL by the characters after “.site.com/” and before “filename.html”
  • Are viewed by Search Engines as a subdirectory within a site
  • Site Authority is passed down from the main domain

By analysing the above facts it is clear that subdomains can make SEO campaigns much more of a challenge due to pages being viewed as unique sites. This means pages would need greater quality of content, promotion and more link building. This can prove very costly. The advantage of using subdomains is the ability to optimise separate pages rather than the whole website which means different keywords can be optimised on different pages.

I advise that you use subfolders if you don’t have a big budget or have topics which need extensive content, a separate navigation or a different design. If you do use subdomains then ensure that it is of great enough quality that it will collect links and stand on its own.

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Link Building is Still a Major Part of SEO

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010
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Search engine optimisation (SEO) is made up of many different sections, meta data, linking, alt tags, title tags and more. The issue that I’ve noticed recently is that some sections are being ignored due to recommendations by other websites. The problem with so many recommendations floating around the Internet is that it is hard to find the truth from the false. Linking has always been a vital part of an SEO campaign, but recently websites have started to spend more time on other things such as creating new content and less time on getting internal and external links.

It is true that Google frowns upon purchased links and spamming, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. By obeying certain methods you will be able to get a high quality linking structure for your website which will help you much more than concentrating on fixing little things such as missing alt tags or adding new meta data on pages. By submitting keyword-optimised articles to a variety of news websites, getting involved in social media marketing, or implementing a Google News feed you are able to legitimately build links which will avoid your website getting penalised by search engines.

When contacting websites to request link swapping you must ensure the websites page ranking is of good quality. By using websites with page rankings of 0,1 or 2 you needn’t bother, it won’t do much for your website. By aiming for highly ranked websites you will have a much better chance of getting a higher page ranking yourself. It doesn’t matter if it’s only 1-2 websites, if they have a high page ranking then they will do your website a huge favour.

It’s easy to get plenty of links to your website once you know how, but it’s also easy to forget where your links exist. It’s essential you monitor all your links to ensure they all go to existing pages on your website, any broken links can affect your SEO campaign which means all the time spent on building links has gone to waste. If any of your links appear to be broken then it’s recommended you either contact the web master to fix the link or create a 301 redirect to another page.

Don’t believe everything you read on the web, not everyone is as clued up as others which will effect your website if you don’t research techniques thoroughly before using them.

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Can You Localise Your SEO?

Friday, May 7th, 2010
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Any website can be accessed anywhere in the world, but that doesn’t mean they will. This is exactly how you should look at your website. Ask yourself a question, does your website need to be seen by people across the nation? If the answer is no then localising your search engine optimisation campaign may be the best option for you.

When was the last time you looked at a paper based directory for a business? Probably a long time ago. It is clear that the Internet has taken over due to the easiness of searching for local businesses. Other reasons for the Internet being ideal is due information being updated as it happens unlike paper based directories which must be delivered after every update, other sources of information are available and not everyone has a paper directory.

So how can you localise your SEO? The most important part of optimising your website for localisation is the keywords you are using. Most likely you will have targeted short-tailed keywords such as ‘Gardener’ or ‘Pub’, these are highly competitive keywords and can take a lot of time and investment to rank highly in search engines result pages. To get a better chance at ranking highly for your local surroundings is not only cheaper but easier, depending on your location of course. For locations such as London, Manchester or Liverpool may be harder due to them being big cities, but for smaller places such as Burnley, Colne and Earby it is much easier to get the rankings for your website.

So what can you do to your keywords? There isn’t much that needs to be done except for a few tweaks. You must first decide the locations you want to target, commonly the location of the company and surrounding areas. Once you’ve got your locations, you must add them to the keywords you are already using, for example ‘Burnley Gardener’. This may still come up with a lot of results but this is due to pages containing the chosen phrases, it hasn’t been optimised which means in reality you haven’t got much competition.

Localisation isn’t ideal for all websites, but if your website is struggling against the big boys then it may be the best option for you.

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