Great Internet Marketing

SEO Tips

1. Keyword Selection

- Use keyword tools (i.e. Google keyword tool on: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) to find the most targeted keyword phrases for your site.
- If you run ppc campaigns i.e. Google AdWords, look up most popular keywords which also convert well
- Develop grouped themes of keywords that reflect the different pages of your site.
- Keep within a grouped theme, choose different keywords to target each page.

2. Site Optimisation
- Decide on theme for each page targeting a small group of 2 or 3 keywords. The more specific you can be the better. More general terms may be hard to optimize for because you will be up against more competition when it comes to result page
- i.e. for the keyword “shoes” dedicate each page to the following themes
o Women high heel shoes
o Men leather black shoes
o Children sport shoes
o etc
Once you decide on themes follow

3. Page Optimization
- Use text-based navigation if possible
- If you already have, or insist on using, graphic navigation, use descriptive alt text on the images, and link to every primary page from your sub pages into footer of the sub pages.
- Use descriptive keyword breadcrumb navigation.
- Create an XML sitemap (read more about sitemap on : http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40318&hl=en)
- Check the text that links pages of your site to make sure it’s descriptive whenever possible.
- Link to resources outside your own site that improve each user’s experience.
- Deep link to related articles and content from you page copy.
- Rely as little as possible on the site navigation. Instead, guide your visitor through your site with link in the active content portion of the site.
- Avoid duplicate content issues. Ensure that each page has significantly unique content that does not exist on other pages on your site or other sites.

3. Page Optimization – for no more than 3 terms / keywords

- Put chosen keywords for the page in your page title tag, repeat them with prefix or suffix if possible
- Make sure your page title tag text is unique to each page and has around 65 – 70 characters.
- Write a description for the meta description tag. Make sure your description is unique to each page.
- Use H1, H2 and H3 tags throughout your page and include keywords in them
- Include your keywords in headings, the URL, in bold and italic. All this will reassure the search engine that the keyword is relevant to the content. Aim for keyword density around or over 3 % excluding stop words (i.e. the, a, and, etc) - although it’s best to use an optimisation tool to get the optimal density
- Use bulleted lists and bolding to make content easier to read (improving usability)
- Make sure your text is written for human consumption-not bots.
- Keep the page size as small as possible
- Outbound links – link to one or two high ranking sites under that particular keyword from every page.
- Use text links unless you have other good reason for using pictures etc.
- Use in-site cross links – cross link your pages to make the most of your whole site Make sure that main keywords are in the link leading to the keyword targeted page
- All pages should be linked to more than 1 pages unless there is other reason for them not to be
- Use anchors but do not repeat the exact same text every time

4. Home Page Optimisation
- Make sure your home page builds credibility and directs consumers to the most important parts of your site.
- Target your most competitive keyword on your home page or a page that is well integrated into your site.
- Link to major themes pages from your home page.
- Link to your home page from every sub page.

Posted by Olga

General, Search Engine Optimisation Google, Keyphrase, Keyword, Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO

Keyword Quality Score (QS) can make a huge difference to your conversion rate, cost and number of impressions. Google will give you a QS every time someone searches for your keywords. Google AdWords rates QS 0 – 10 where 0 – 4 is ‘Poor’; 5 – 7 is ‘OK’; and 8 – 10 is ‘Great’.

If you have a poor QS there are a few things you can do to quickly increase it.

You can work on your landing page (the page that your Ad links to) making sure that it includes your keywords in the title, meta tags, content and alt tags. Also make sure that your page doesn’t take too long to load which can have a negative impact on your QS.

A key element contributing to a good QS is the Click Through Rate (CTR) on the particular keyword. The CTR is the number of clicks per impression, i.e. the percentage of times a user clicks on your ad. If you get a large percentage of people clicking on your ad, Google assumes that your keywords must be highly relevant and will require a lower keyword bid price for the same position, and so save you money.

Another way of improving your QS is including the keywords in an Ad. I was achieving quality score 2 which was having a negative impact on the number of impressions that I was receiving and the cost per click. I reviewed the Ad and found that I didn’t have the particular keywords included in the Ad! I added the keyword into the headline and repeated it on the 3rd line of the ad. The Quality Score jumped up to 4 over the next 20 minutes! I increased my impressions by a whole 50% and my cost per click dropped down from £0.70 to £0.66 for the same position!

A note of caution, if you are making any similar changes keep an eye on the keyword position as it can improve very quickly and you might end up right at the top of the page which can cost you a lot more money especially if the keyword is expensive.

Submitted by Olga

Google AdWords adwords, Google, quality score

As mentioned in previous posts, there’s a great opportunity to promote your business using AdWords abroad, but, if your foreign language skills are like mine and limited to ordering coffee and beer then you’ll be pleased to know that Google can help.

Google has a free translation service at http://translate.google.com/?hl=en give it a try!

We use it for finding foreign key phrases to bid on too, it’s become an invaluable tool

Google doesn’t stop there either, remember, if someone from Germany (for example) does a search for your business, Google will offer an option in the results to translate your page into German, give it a try with your own company name, just go to http://www.google.de, do a search for your company and then click on “Google-Suche”, once you see the results, click on “Diese Seite übersetzen” to see the German version of your site!

A final note, Google can’t read any text in images so that bit won’t get translated!

Genießen Sie Ihr neues Spielzeug von Google!

Google advertising, adwords, foreign, Google, overseas, Tourism

Many people don’t know that you can use Google AdWords to advertise your business on websites too

Rather than having people search for you, you can publish your Ads on other people’s websites, such as information sites, blogs and the likes, Google call this “The Content Network” and they deliver these Ads using something called AdSense, you may even be doing it already and not even know!

In September 2008 this got even more exciting (in a sad online marketing kind of way) as Google introduced it’s AdBuilder service in AdWords allowing you to make your own image based and animated Ads

Here’s an example of a site displaying these type of Ads (you can see that these are text Ads in this example at the top right)

Content Network / Adsense Example

You can also make a bit of money yourself by publishing AdSense on your website too

Google AdWords adsense, advertising, adwords, Google, Tourism

It seems that more and more people are using their mobiles to search for stuff

don’t miss out on these searches, use Google’s mobile Ads via it’s AdWords system

You can add Mobile Ads to an existing AdGroup by choosing a different Ad format, although I’d recommend setting up a new campaign to contain your mobile Ads so that you can manage the budget for this form of advertising seperately.

Also, Google have recently introduced new options in the campaign settings for delivery of ads specifically to mobile devices

Get in whilst you can, competition is still weak in these Ad formats and you can also take advantage of Pay Per Call too!

Google AdWords advertising, adwords, Google, mobile, phone