Keyword analysis: a double-edged sword

A decade ago, keyword analysis would have meant little to your marketing budget. The internet marketing industry was still a toddler compared to its sophisticated demeanour nowadays, so this tool was not being fully exploited – though it really was a worker at the frontier of the world wide web.

Most people know that when they are search engine optimising their online presence, that keywords are the information that links a website to a search engine results page (serp) – a business to its customer. It is one of the frameworks used by search engines like Google and Bing to decide whether or not to rank a web page in its results. This means that judicious and informed use of keywords can make a business website visible on the internet, or render it invisible if poor choices have been made.

There are a great many tools available for businesses to check out the keywords for their industry and sector. Choice of keywords appears to be based on common sense – for example, a company selling sheepskin boots might use the key terms “sheepskin boots”.

Unfortunately, because there are so many other companies selling sheepskin boots, using this key term might not yield the desired results. Aha – suddenly, the e-commerce landscape becomes more complicated! Still, often businesses can’t work out why they are not achieving high serp rankings and attracting more customers.

It’s important to remember that keywords are just one framework used in an internet marketing campaign to achieve success. They should be chosen to maximise serps and made to work in tandem with other elements, such as link building and pay-per-click (PPC).

An internet marketing agency with the know-how can radically turn around keyword success and raise the profile (visibility) of a website within a short time frame, attracting and driving in quality traffic (paying customers).

The ‘key’ to choosing the best keywords is in analysis and diagnosis. This shouldn’t be a tight-focus appraisal of the specific business or industry, but takes into consideration other essential data. An agency that knows what it’s doing will do a thorough assessment and use this to inform its marketing plan.

Improved keyword choices and their part in the marketing mix guarantee to improve a website’s visibility and encourage a better return on investment, making sure budgets are used to target customers in a way they didn’t do before.

There’s a neat little history of SEO right here, for those of you who are interested, which includes profiles and interviews with the first pioneers of search engine optimisation. There’s another one, this time an overview, here.

Google’s taxidermy ban: getting tough on Penguin stuffing

Last year the Panda update created some hand-wringing and frowning as business owners discovered their rankings had been degraded by Google’s major algorithm update. The search engine stood its ground and insisted the fight against low-quality content farming, duplication and scraper websites was fully-engaged.

Now we have Penguin (not as fluffy-cute as a panda but suitably enigmatic all the same), a major update which aims to tackle more of the minutiae of good quality versus bad quality. As usual, the secrets of the actual algorithm will ever remain secret, but what Google says is that this update will root out websites which are over-optimising and trying to trick it, and downgrade them.

What does this mean for business websites?

If you have an experienced natural search optimisation agency managing your content, SEO and backlinks it is unlikely you will have to worry about plummeting down Google’s Page Rank. Google values natural search and ethical linking campaigns and Penguin seeks to give superior websites the search engine rank they deserve by culling the chaff – the ones who have been exploiting the rules of optimisation but offering very little to enhance user experience.

However, if your website has been seriously impacted by the update – not sliding by a few places but by pages, or becoming invisible – some tough questions need to be asked of how your SEO agency is conducting business on your behalf.

The good news is that Google anticipates that only a small percent of British and American searches will be affected: the main perpetrators of keyword stuffing and spamming tend to be Eastern European, it states.

What questions do you need to ask about the quality of your website?

Google has defined the criteria for best practice. Your SEO agency should be fully aware of this criteria and act upon it at all times. Ethics are weighted heavily and the search giant has also defined what it considers constitutes a website worthy of a high ranking on its pages.

The guidelines are split into three sections: design, technical and quality.

They include an emphasis on well-designed navigation and well-written, accurate and appropriate content, very useful information on how to make it easy for their crawlers to index pages correctly, and an emphasis on how websites should be created for customers, not search engines.

All this information is available for everyone to read online, and Adrac recommends every business owner should familiarise themselves with these guidelines. Even if the technical side doesn’t make any sense, the reasons behind it do.

If Penguin has impacted upon your website rankings, take some time to assess your pages using Google’s information, then discuss it with your agency. If you are not happy with the content, it should be rewritten; if you are dubious about the quality of backlinks, ask your agency to draw up a new plan; if navigation is not enhancing your visitor’s experience, this should also be tackled. Also be aware your agency is able to contact Google and file a report if they feel that the update has affected a perfectly good website.

The good news is that something can always be done to improve search engine page ranks. The bad news is that not every agency is capable of doing this effectively. We think that not only will Penguin highlight critical flaws in some websites, it will also expose the weaknesses of those who try to exploit Google’s system because they don’t have the necessary skills or experience.

Taking the long-term view with SEO

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

The tools a business needs to succeed on the world wide web are openly available. These include Google’s guidelines, Google Analytics, build-your-own website provision and social media. There are numerous ‘How To’ guides which will tell SMEs how they can build a website and make it more successful, freely, and for free.

This is a little knowledge, and it is dangerous. Stand back for a moment and look at this objectively: nothing comes for free, there is always a cost. The first is time invested in learning to use these tools, becoming an armchair expert, building and maintaining a website, writing content, continually monitoring and developing, keeping abreast of competitors and industry developments.

All this is time consuming. For a technically-minded person, it might be an interesting hobby, but if you would rather be concentrating on manufacturing and selling your products and developing your core business, it could prove to be an expensive and distracting time-sink – the second cost.

The third is missed opportunity to have a great presence on the world wide web. It is a competitive marketplace and having the edge on your main competitors is essential. The edge, in this case, is professionalism and expertise. As with all sectors, SEO has its experts, time-served professionals who are qualified and experienced.

Another related cost concerns the pay-out for marketing campaigns and advertising. Less effective attempts at internet marketing tend to take a short-term, narrow view and waste money fire-fighting instead of investing with consideration and long-term-commitment.

At Adrac, we have asked so many times: “If your house needs a rewire, would you do it yourself, if you aren’t a Corgi-registered electrician?”

What can a professional internet marketing agency do for you?

A healthy website optimisation programme from an expert agency will tick all these boxes:

• Help you compete with the giants
• Gain you a larger share of the market
• Free you from ludicrous high-cost, low return SEO packages offered elsewhere
• Foster business growth
• Increase your profits

Adrac Ltd’s commercial director Will Montague explains: “Using a professional internet marketing agency is a cost-effective and targeted use of your budget on so many levels.

“It works alongside your own business plans and can be tailored to any budget. The savings and profits you make by using the experts are usually felt immediately on the balance sheet and reflected in our monthly reports.

“We are successful because we have a holistic approach to internet marketing, finely tuning all the elements so they work together to get your website to do what it’s capable of doing – making money.”

An ethical internet marketing agency will always be pleased to perform an initial assessment of your current website and explain more about how they could save you money before you commit. If you don’t feel that your internet marketing budget is working as well as it could, it’s time to get in touch.

Adrac

Google underlines value of ethical SEO

White hat – or ethical – search engine optimisation experts bring value to your website: it’s official.

Google recently posted a blog post in support of the expertise that an experienced SEO company can bring to business websites. They have said it before, but it appears to Adrac that they feel the need to repeat it more often because some people aren’t taking advantage of it.

A poorly-organised, do-it-yourself website will not only turn off your readers, it may even prevent them from seeing a website in the first place because the search engine crawlers – the programs that index every page on the internet – do not see or understand it properly.

A hastily created web page that does not take advantage of key words, professional copywriting, carefully constructed navigation and healthy, supportive backlinks does not tick the quality boxes of all the major search engines.

Put another way, a website is the digital reputation of a company and if it falls short or appears invisible on the world wide web, it was a false investment, a waste of time and money, because a website can be made to do what it was made to do: gain customers, make sales, foster profit, sustain success.

Many SME owners, for example, assume that because the tools of the internet (such as website building templates and pay-per-click) are available, they can easily get acquainted with the basics. This is true, but underestimates the value of expertise and experience.

Let’s take a look at Google’s argument:

“White hat search engine optimizers often improve the usability of a site, help create great content, or make sites faster, which is good for both users and search engines. Good search engine optimization can also mean good marketing: thinking about creative ways to make a site more compelling, which can help with search engines as well as social media.

“The net result of making a great site is often greater awareness of that site on the web, which can translate into more people linking to or visiting a site.”

 

It’s a compelling argument for professional SEO: quality = visibility = visits = customers.

Google underlines the importance of ethical – white hat – SEO. This means avoiding the virtual cowboys and choosing a company that has been around for a while, which clearly states its commitment to ethical SEO, and which has a transparent policy about what it is doing to improve your website’s performance, backed up by regular reports i.e. proof.

Bing web tools: mind-blowing info at your fingertips

While Adrac extols the virtues of using a qualified and experienced internet marketing agency to manage and make the most of a business web presence, we also like to talk about the tools made available by the major search engines.

These are on the internet for everyone to see and make use of: Bing, Google and Yahoo! (which uses Bing) have it in their interests to make public the main criteria they use to judge websites and guide people how to improve their products.

We’ve previously looked at Google’s webmaster guidelines, now it’s Bing’s turn.

Step by step

Bing’s help pages fall under several headings: Tools; What can I do next?; Where do I start?; How do I?; Where do I?; Marking up your site; and Why Bing Webmaster?

In Tools, for example, there is a topic on Crawl Summaries. A crawl summary will provide information about how many web pages on your site have been crawled in a certain time frame, and how many errors were detected. This is useful because it gives webmasters a heads-up about what they can do to fix the errors and promote better indexing and visibility on the world wide web.

Under What can I do next? webmasters can keep an eye on link details, who is linking to what pages and using what anchor text. The ideal scenario is that anchor text is relevant to the page link.

Site maps are the topic of Where do I start? – what they are, why they are important, how to submit a site map to the search engine, and so on. Site maps have two main functions – they help visitors navigate quickly to a page on a more complex site, and they assist search engine crawlers in their indexing process.

How do I? covers a great many common topics, like 404 error page best practice, how to create a robot.txt file and why, understanding crawl errors, how to get your website translated, and how to rid your site of a malware (virus) infection. If your website has fallen foul of malware, not only will customers blame you but the search engine will disable links to your website, (penalising it) and labelling it as dangerous. Only after the malware has been evicted will the search engine consider raising the ban.

Where do I? tackles queries like getting Bing to reconsider its website penalty via a support ticket.

Marking up your site promotes annotating structured content to make it more appealing for search engines and visitors.

Lastly, Why Bing Webmaster looks at the benefits of using this search engine as a main channel of your online marketing including the functions of enhanced results, visual search and Places.

Why Adrac?

The transparent quality of information on the internet is astonishing, wonderful and enlightening. However, we believe that unless you work in an internet marketing agency or have a leisure interest in being a webmaster, there is absolutely no need to become an expert yourself.

The best use of your marketing budget and your time is to use a qualified and experienced agency. A good agency will explain many of their processes – aligned to the high standards of the major search engines – but more importantly, they will do the complicated leg-work for you, in less time, with less stress and get a better return on your investment than you thought possible.

So, if you find Bing’s information fascinating yet mind-blowing, it’s time to call in the experts.

Adrac Ltd

Christmas is coming: Black Friday arrives on November 25th

By Matthew Kinlin

This year, we will see Black Friday arrive on 25^th November and with it comes a wave of excited shoppers looking to grab a great bargain.

Black Friday is the annual date that marks the start of the Christmas shopping season. On this day, a huge amount of retailers will offer promotional sales and bargains to kick off the Christmas season.

The following week will see the start of the Christmas shopping period with shoppers flocking out to find the best presents for Christmas. The start of the week has been named ‘Mad Monday’ to announce the arrival of the crazy shopping season.

This means that shoppers will be able to find some great sales to start the season. They can pick up specific items for reduced prices and track down some bargains.

This will help to kick-start the shopping season. Buyers want to get in there early and find what they want whilst stock lasts. Reduced prices will encourage buyers to start looking early for Christmas.

Black Friday is the official launch for retailers. It marks the moment they will officially start pushing Christmas products. Offering reduced rates will get people in the shops and on their websites looking for what they want.

Large online retailers, like Amazon, are offering a ‘Black Friday Deals Week’. This will feature hundred of deals and millions of pounds of savings for online shoppers.

With the official launch of the Christmas season, online shopping will become a much busier place and just like in shopping centres, the internet should be well prepared for this huge influx of custom.

Google Analytics updates visitor tracking

By Matthew Kinlin

Google has updated the way it tracks its sessions per visitor in Google Analytics.

Previously, a session would end when a user closed their browser. However now a session will complete based on clicks. So a user can click through and then return to Google and click on another site, and Google will recognise these as two different sessions, without the browser being closed.

Google Analytics has now changed their model so a session will end when any traffic source value for the user changes. Traffic source information includes: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_term, utm_content, utm_id, utm_campaign, and gclid.

This will benefit Google Analytics as it allows for more accurate sourcing. Previously Google would only recognised Ad Words and if a user returned to the site and click on something different, then the first Ad Words would only be recognised.

Now Google Analytics can base sessions on clicks. This means more accurate attribution information and should reflect more accurately how visitors engage with the website.

Google releases ‘Google Plus One’ button

By Matthew Kinlin

Google has recently released a new social tool called ‘Google Plus One’.

The tab is presented as a ‘+1’ button and works in a very similar way to the Facebook ‘Like’ button. In the words of Google, the button is a way of saying: ‘you should check this out’ to other people.

By clicking the ‘+1’ button, you give your recommendation to a web page. There is an option to keep the your ‘+1’ recommendations as a private record of your web highlights, or you can have them as public and recommend pages to your friends and the rest of the internet.

However unlike Facebook, the Google ‘+1’ tab has one vital additional app: Google-enabled search.

Google has placed the ‘+1’ button in two places: on the Google search listings next to each search result and at the top of individual web pages. Content providers have been encouraged by Google to add the ‘+1’ option to their web pages.

To use the tool, the user is required to have a Google account. Once the user is logged into their account, the ‘+1’ options for search results and web pages will be made visible.

It seems likely that Google will collate feedback to sort out good content from bad. Social data will probably be used to indicate popular, useful sources of data and these will be integrated with Google search.

In other words, they rise straight to the top of Google’s search page.

Review your PPC with Adrac Ltd

Bu Jackie Yeadon
 
Most small businesses believe that by running their own pay per click (PPC) campaign they can save money – they are not paying an agency to run it, they understand their own business like nobody else and, actually, they are getting some profit from the whole exercise.
 
There a good enough reason to try an agency, even if this is the case. Your PPC activities may well be bringing in some profit but with the right help, this could be so much more.
 

PageRank: how ugly is your SME website?

By Jackie Yeadon

Beauty is only skin deep, right?

Google updated its PageRank this week, so webmasters and SEOs will no doubt have been checking where they stand and where their clients are ranking.

It’s not like Miss World or Mr Universe, where only the top three positions win and everyone else is forgotten; or even the Beautiful People dating website that shunted 30,000 people off its database after a virus had allowed them membership normally elected by the consensus of its existing, gorgeous subscribers; PageRank doesn’t set websites against each other, but gives an assessment of the authority of their site, not a beauty competition but a beauty consultation.

Google’s search ranking, which PageRank has a small influence on, sets its own standard of attractiveness – meaning, if it fancies redheads, we must all dye our hair; similarly, if Google’s algorithm lusts after the one-eyed, frizzy-haired troll, we must all emulate the one-eyed, frizzy-haired troll.

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