On Line Marketing

Your Very Own Integrated BLOG and Social Bookmarking Service

2008-08-27T08:41:00.007Z

WHAT OUR SERVICE INCLUDES

We will build you a blog integrated within your domain and in addition we'll ensure your articles and blog posts are included in all the major social bookmarking sites and blog directories.

WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES?

In short, its a great way to increase your web site traffic AND improve your search engine rankings (Full details and the background to this and the benefits are included here)

What we'll do for you:

The Blog will use Wordpress technology - the most effective blogging platform for features and SEO compliance

The blog will match your website design - so your visitors will have the same look and feel between your blog and your site, and will be able to seamlessly navigate between the two.

We'll set up your blog with a series of categories and other content areas specific to your needs (It can include video and image content)

Options will include - calendar, blogroll, keyword clouds, comment feature, trackbacks

We'll ensure a RSS subscription and social bookmarking options are included.

We'll provide telephone assistance to get it working well for you

Every month we bookmark your article or blog post to 6 social bookmarking sites
(This could be the same article or blog post or a new one created by you)

We'll ensure that the article gets 'tagged' correctly with the relevant keywords - so people doing keyword searches at these sites will find your link

In addition we'll ensure you are included in all the major Blog directories

NEED MORE INFORMATION?

please call Jan Klin on 01928 788100 or email at jan@janklin.com

YOUR INVESTMENT

£495 plus £95 per month - plus vat

NOTE: If you decide you dont want a blog, but still want all the advantages of social bookmarking, we can replace the blog production with 'article' production. What this means is that we would create a keyword/backlink rich article for you, include it in a relevant place on your website and apply the social bookmarking process to it.

Blogging, SEO, links and Social Bookmarking - Too good to be true?

2008-08-25T11:10:00.007Z

What I hope to do in the post is provide you with a practical self contained strategy which will have a large impact on your website traffic and visitors.

Each of the items discussed here - blogs, links, social bookmarking - are very important items in themselves for increasing your website traffic, but used together in a coherent way, it really is a case of one plus one plus one equals five (or maybe even seven!).

So, lets discuss them one by one, then we'll show how to interlink them into a coherent online strategy.

BLOGGING

The benefits of blogging are well understood - but I'm going to repeat them nevertheless:-

-Firstly, from an online marketing perspective, what you want is a blog which is part of your domain and integrated in your site. That is, not externally hosted but actually a part of your site. (Wordpress.org is what we use for our clients).

The reason for this is that the search engines will see this as part of your site (eg www.yourdomain.com/blog) - so the links into it (good blogs will always attract links naturally) will count towards your Google Page Rank. Also if you are regularly adding new content to your website search engines will see this as a positive factor.

- As already stated providing you offer value added content on your blog (educational information about your industry, your services, recent legislation; tools and useful articles people can use to help with their business etc - there's no shortage really) you will attract links naturally which will bring visitors directly and add to your Google Page Rank.

(Incidenatlly, another neat idea is to create 'product reviews' where you can objectively discuss the pros and cons of specific products, allow customers to comment -moderated of course - with a link back to the specific product on the website)

-Also your blog, by definition, will be text and keyword rich so naturally disposed to getting good rankings (many people find their blog ranks higher than their main website) and the major blogging platforms - Wordpress, Typepad etc - automatically generate metadata in a search engine optimised format.

- The final point is that RSS sign up to your blog and social bookmarking options are a standard part of the technology, and these two items again are great tools for automatically keeping you in touch with your clients and prospects and increasing your web visibility.

So, in short, blogs are good for you. They will increase you search engine rankings and increase your direct traffic. But read on....
(Incidentally if you dont have the time to set one up your self we can do it for you - Blogs and Social Bookmarking Service)

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

What is social bookmarking? Its very similar to using bookmarks in your browser for sites you want to remember - the difference is its web based so everyone can see your 'favourites' and you can see everyone elses.

There are many different social bookmarking sites, all with their own features and quirks. Some of the more famous ones are del.icio.us and Digg, in fact you can see the top 30 here.

Digg allows you to rate articles and the more highly rated the article becomes the higher it rises in the rankings. Del.icio.us is different again in what it does - the important thing is its other people providing comments on your articles/blogs.

So how will this help with your web traffic and how can you go about exploting these sites?

There are two ways, the first relates to search engine optimisation (SEO). The fact that you have links from these sites to your blog will have an impact on its (and your websites) rankings. (NB Some of these sites - not many as it happens - use 'nofollow' in the link meaning that the google spider will not follow and therefore not pass on any 'link juice'. So if this is you sole purpose in using them then you need to use ones which dont use 'nofollow'. There's a list here.)

The other reason of course is that they will drive traffic directly. These are very popular sites - the top 10 account for around 20 million visitors per month so having visibilty on them is a great way to generate visitors to your site/blog. Tagging your articles/posts with the correct keywords will enable searchers at these sites to find your link directly.

An example of how this works can be seen on this blog - you'll see lower down you have the opportunity to 'bookmark' this article through several of the important bookmarking sites. If you did this my blog would get more visibility and an all important link.

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER

So, imagine having links from these sites to your own. It will help boost your search engine rankings and also bring additional direct traffic.

The process to implement this is quite straightforward:-

1. Build a blog (integrated with your website)
2. Write useful articles/content for your blog
3. Encourage people to 'bookmark' you - like I do in this blog
4. And...(very important!)....Get someone (eg us) to 'bookmark' your blog articles with all the major sites.

If you dont want to do it yourselves we can do any, or all, of this for you in a very SEO advantageous way:-

Here are the details of the service we offer - Blogs and Social Bookmarking Service

Either way you should get it done - it will make a big difference to your online marketing.

Are you optimised for Google's second page?

2008-06-23T11:35:00.003Z

Its a well known statistic that around 90% of clicks happen at the first page of Google (more for some keywords) and that around 3%-4% happen on page 2.

What that means is that by moving from page 2 to page 1, in broad terms, you will increase your visits twenty fold! - and in some cases much more particularly if you can get into the top 5 positions.

I've also noticed there are an awful lot of websites on page 2 which just shouldnt be there. They should be on page 1. I'll give you an example in a moment but the point I want to make is that if you are on page 2 for some of your important keyphrases, it may be that you have to do very little to get elevated to the first page. There are some factors to look at below to help you assess this but first an example.

Do a Google search for 'ground source heat pumps' (incidentally - if you go to 'Google Trends' you'll see this term has been rapidly growing in importance over the last 12 months). You'll see that www.gshp.org.uk - The Ground Source Heat Pumps Association - is languishing half way down page 2 (surely they cant want to be there given that their sole reason for being is to inform people about heat pumps!).

What they have got going for them is lots of inbound links (177), represented by a Google Page Rank of 5 and their domain is around 4 years old. Basically all the essentials to get a good ranking. We used to say if you have a PR 4 some basic on-page SEO is all you need to get a top 3 ranking. Its not quite as simple as that nowadays but you would certainly expect to quite easily move this site to page 1 with some basic on-page SEO. In fact that's all they need to do - get properly structured tags (they dont even have a meta description and keyword tag!), get a few more paragraphs of text with a few more repetitions of the keyphrase in question. Possibly a few anchor text based links from some other of their pages and that should be it. It'll certainly be enough to get them to page 1 and possibly in the top 5. Two hours work at most.

So the important factors, if this is something which you are affected by:-

1. Check you backlinks and Page Rank - If you have a PR 3 or above then, generally this is enough to get on to page 1 If.....
2. You domain is at least two years old, and....
3. you have at least 250 words of text on your ranked page.

If you satisfy these 3 points it should be just a matter of tweaking your meta tags (see Lesson 6 and Lesson 7) adding a paragraph or two of text and repeating the keyphrase a few times. Possible adding a few anchor text based links from other pages.

Obviously each case is different and so much depends on the degree of competition, but in 9 times out of 10 cases this is all we have to do for our clients.

Google Base SEO - A free tool for you

2008-06-19T15:00:00.004Z

The virtues of successfully optimising for google base are well known to you. (Here's a couple of striking examples Plumbnation and Copiersforsale).

One of the keys to ensuring you are optimised and stand a good chance of grabbing the top positions is firstly that you need a XML feed which you can resubmit regularly (lets say once per week).

Here's a free tool we've developed to enable you to do this...

Google Base XML Feed Generator

Best Wishes with it

Optimising for Images and Photos - Image SEO

2008-06-19T11:27:00.004Z

Why bother optimising your images and photos? There are two good reasons - one is that 'image search' is growing rapidly (see the Hitwise graph below) and on Google is now the number one vertical search option second only to Google's main search.

The other is that with Google Universal Search images will quite often appear in the main search results....

People like to see what they buy before they buy, particularly in the research phase, so there are good ecommerce reasons why you want your images will be found. Also having an image of yours appear in the google results maximises click throughs - it stands out from the rest and often dominates the maximum click through positions in the search listings.

How to carry out Image SEO

There are a few important things you can do to ensure your images get found, here are the main ones:-

- ensure the image file includes the target keyphrases in the filename (ideally a .jpg file rather than gifs which are for graphics with limited colour ranges)

- ensure your filenames are descriptive and naturally include the target keyphrase(s) (make sure words are separated with hyphens NOT underscores)

-Associate an 'alt' tag with the image - again a keyword rich description rather than keyword stuffing.

- Set up a Google sitemap specifically for the images and ensure search engines have access to your image folder

- Ideally links to the images should include keyword rich anchor text

-Ideally have the image on your webpage surrounded by some contextually relevant keyword rich text. Or at the very least a keyword rich description next to the image on the page.

In addition to this of course you'll want to ensure the metadata on the web page the image appears on is optimised and in particular ensure that the word 'image' and 'photo' appear in the TITLE tag as many people will use these words when searching.

Best wishes with it.

A hot new tactic for SEO?

2008-05-12T15:20:00.002Z

'PR Sculpting' is the tactic, and it involves using the 'nofollow' tag to hoard your link juice into specific pages and thereby increasing the rankings for that page.

How it works
As most of you know the Google 'Page Rank' of a specific page is a major factor leading to the high rankings of a specific phrase and the web page associated with it. (A crude measure of this is the green Page Rank indicator you can see at the top of your browser). Here's an example of a high PR (9)on the BBC site:-

The factors leading to the Page Rank of a page are the links coming into that page (both external links and also links from internal pages) and also links OUT of that page. Its a bit like the leaky bucket analogy used in marketing, but specifically here the quest is to maximise the inflow of link juice and minimise the outflow.

Maximising the inflow obviously involved increasing the backlinks to the page and also finding internal pages which can be used to link to the target page in an appropriate way.

Minimising the outflow involves using the 'nofollow' tag. There's a good article on the nofollow tag here where you can also see examples of how its structured. Essentially you are just telling the spider NOT to pass any link juice out to the linked pages. (Human viewers can still follow the link of course its just that the spiders wont).

What sort of links is this relevant to?

Obviously there are some pages you want to pass link juice to but many you dont - including the obvious 'terms and conditions', 'about us', sign up forms etc.

We're experimenting with this at the moment and so far the results are encouraging. Here's more detail on it Page Rank Sculpting and here's a good example - SeoMoz example.

Give it a shot - you have nothing to lose and only better ranked pages to gain.

A Website that does the business

2008-05-12T10:50:00.008Z

Here's an example of a recent web project that delivered an extraordinary return on investment.

Again the return was down to the power of Google Base. You can see the search example below for 'ricoh copiers' (click to enlarge the image) and the little shopping bag icon indicating the snippet has come from G Base.

This 'top of Google' result was delivered within one week of the website going live (it took around 2 weeks to build) and was responsible for - along with similar searches - the whole cost of the web project being offset within 2 weeks of going live. That represents a staggering return on investment. I cant give you the actual figures for the obvious commercial confidentiality reasons, but I think you can see that moving into pure profit after a couple of weeks if pretty impressive stuff.

Its quite a simple website as you can see below (click to enlarge the image).

Essentially its just of collection of very good product landing pages, with good calls to action with traffic driven from Google Base. So, if you've got products to sell get them on Google base and ensure you drive people through to relevant and well constructed product pages. You cant fail to generate business.

Thanks Google! - a great new solution to an old problem

2008-05-09T07:55:00.003Z

Ive discussed the issues of SEO and hosting before - in a nutshell where your site is hosted could have an impact on your search engine rankings. In particular if you have a .com (or .net, .biz etc) google will use your hosting location to determine where to give you rankings (eg - a .com domain hosted in the US will provide rankings in the US - so hard luck if you want good UK rankings). To check where you are hosted and for full details here's the full post - Rankings and Hosting

Google Webmaster Central to the Rescue!

We now have a neat solution to this problem - at Google Webmaster Central (GWC) you can now tell Google where you want your rankings. Just go to 'Tools' then 'set geographic target'- see below. Of course you'll need to register with GWC first - which is free - and which holds many other advantages.
(Click on the image to enlarge)

Some Other Useful Stuff you can do at GWC

You can see the details above but particularly useful is the 'crawl diagnostics' feature, and the 'statistics' which shows you amongst other things the top keyphrases you are getting found on.

Another problem in the past has been getting to know where your inbound links are coming from - the 'link' command at Google is notoriously unreliable, but now through GWT you can get a full and accurate summary of all links coming into your site.

The 'sitemap' facility is a good way to communicate to Google your web pages to ensure they all get spidered. Anyway, register and hava a play - its really useful.

Helping International SEO

It also provides a neat solution to the issue of getting rankings from different countries through the same site. Here's an example:-

Lets say your site is www.yoursite.com and you are looking for rankings in the UK. Lets say you have some translated French pages, German pages and US specific pages on your site through which you want to attract relevant keyword searchers from people searching in those countries.

You can use subdomains for these pages (eg www.francais.yoursite.com) or folders (eg www.yoursite.com/german) and either way you can use the 'set geographic target' facility to properly inform google where you want search results from for these pages. That is, you can tell google that specific parts of your site need to attract traffic from different areas.
If you want more detail on this here's a video clip at the GWC official blog.

Help needed - but theres' something in it for you...

2008-05-07T09:44:00.001Z

We have several customers who need specific help with their rankings on specific keywords. How can you help?

You are aware of the importance of quality links, in particular quality nowadays means links from sites which are authoritative themselves (lets say as measured by Google Page Rank of 3 and above); have some contextual relevance; and have the right anchor text in the link.

So, here are a few customers of ours who would like such a link from you. In return, I will give you a link from a Page Rank 3/4 from my own website (or blog if you prefer) which will be a quality link as defined above. Here are the specific companies and web sites. Please get in touch with me if you wish to partake and I'll sort out the detail for you.

Towmaster UK.

This company manufactures and distributes exhibition trailers and a wide variety of other types of trailer including catering and box trailers. If you visit their site you will also see a gallery of their products which includes advertising trailers too. The phrase they are seeking to improve on is exhibition trailers. Are you happy to link to them?

Plumbnation

A hugely successful web venture and now, after six months, one of the leading suppliers of plumbing and heating products on the web. One of their main products is heating boilers of various types. For the term 'Worcester Boiler' we have great natural and Google Base rankings but need some help with another major brand, Vaillant Boilers. Again if you are happy to trade a link get in touch please.

ALS World Movers.

This company has had great success with 'pay per click' advertising. The company ships products from any place in the world to any other place. International shipping and excess baggage is their sector and they are looking for good links on the phrases - shipping to australia, shipping to New Zealand, Dubai and Canada. Will a link exchange be relevant to you?

Cloggs uk

A major online brand for the sale of all types of shoes and other fashion items. They have great natural rankings on all major phrases including dr martens, converse trainers, skechers trainers and many more. Because of an upsurge in competition in Ugg Boots, this is a term we want to focus on. Is it relevant to you to link using this term in exchange for a quality link back?. Give me a call or drop me an email and I'll sort out the details.

Ross Handling

This company's specialty is in the provision of industrial castors for a wide variety of applications including shopfitting, point of sale and product display applications. Some are of a specialist nature like the heat resistant ones supplied to the bakery industry. Their castors come in a range of materials including rubber, nylon and steel.

A Hot New Tactic for Pay per Click?

2008-03-15T16:10:00.001Z

So, last week I was running a course in the Lake District for hoteliers. It was one of those courses where I meet the same people several times over a few weeks. Each week I tell them about something, they go away and do it, then come back and report their success, or otherwise.

The topic was 'pay per click' - something most had a passing aquaintance with and some already used extensively, but the challenge was to have another go using the 'best practice' principles I'd taught them.

I asked them to feedback their results. Predictably most had a reasonable level of success, but one stood out. They'd had overwhelming success. In fact their campaign had generated literally tens of thousands of impressions (not traffic because fortunately their budget restricted the number of visitors) but enough to fill their hotel.

What they'd done (inadvertently as it happens) is a great lesson to us all.

Firstly they'd thought laterally about their keyphrases. Most used the predictable 'lake district hotels', 'weekend in the lakes', hotel grasmere' etc , etc. as you might expect, but these folks thought about what people could do at their hotels - eg 'scrabble holidays' and variants around similar terms was one such theme.

Now has it happens they used the Google 'Content Network' facility (you may know you have the option of having you PPC ads appear on the main google page and/or external sites - those people that support Adsense). One of their ads appeared on Facebook. Unbeknown to them (and me) there is a large community at Facebook interested in online scrabble, and google's wonderful technology placed their ad in a contextually relevant area which drove masses and masses of interest.

Moral: (as well as thinking laterally about keyphrases) Dont underestimate the power of social networks in your online marketing. These networks - and Facebook is one of several - are the busiest places on the web. Go to Alexa.com and look at the top visited sites in the UK, you'll see that Facebook, Myspace and Bebo are all in the top 10.

Action point: go to these sites, find out what's hot on people's agenda's and see if you can correlate relevant keyphrases to your own products and services. Use Google Adwords(or Facebook's advertising services direct) to engage with these people. Also if you go the Facebook 'groups' section you'll see, for example, there are around 14,000 active participants in interior design. What a great place to communicate if this is the business you are in.

We're trying to 'package' a relevant service around this approach as we speak so I'll keep you posted about what we come up with

Success in SEO in the highly competitive Travel Sector

2008-02-28T18:03:00.002Z

Interview Between Jan Klin and Colin Maddocks of Future Travel Ltd

Preamble by Jan Klin:

The last time I met Colin was during a SEO course I was running. Surprisingly he had little content on his homepage and NO metatags (no title , description or keyword tags) but still ranked number one on Google for 'Nile Cruise'.

This is a great example of the importance of building quality links to get top rankings. After the interview below Colin explains in detail how he went about getting these links. A great lesson for all of us....

How would you describe your company and its mission?

We are an “online” retail travel agency business. We used to have 3 “high street” bricks and mortar shops on Merseyside but sold them to Going Places and moved “online” about 10 years ago.

Initially we had a “generic” travel website that allowed clients to search for almost any type of holiday but over the last few years we have started to create “niche” travel websites where we target specific specialist destinations, such as “Nile Cruises”, “Cape Verde Holidays”, “Cuba Holidays”, etc, etc.

How long have you had a website and what is its main purpose?

We have had websites for about 10 years but have had our “niche” websites for about 3 years and are adding to them all of the time. Our first real “niche” website was www.Nile-Cruises-4u.co.uk and our latest are www.ChinaHolidays4u.co.uk and www.goaholidays4u.co.uk

The great benefit to being online is that when we had our bricks and mortar agencies we basically only had our passing trade and when that passing trade had booked their holidays we found it hard to increase our sales. Plus there was great competition on the High Street which made getting our share of the passing trade that much harder.

Of course there is great competition online but I think the playing field is much more level. By that I mean that you can be a tiny company “offline” in terms of employees and resources but if you are reasonably interested in grasping “online” optimisation and strategies you can compete with the big players. In fact, because a small online company is usually able to create their own sites quickly and economically as well as alter them in an instant I think that they are much better placed than a major player to act very quickly to react to changes in the marketplace on a daily or even hourly basis. Plus its’ much easier to be “proactive” rather than “reactive” as a smaller player.

Does the site work for you? i.e. deliver the benefits you were expecting?

Yes the sites really do deliver the results we were looking for. Obviously it has taken a bit of time to reach the position we are currently in but now we know a lot more about what we are doing we can create and get a new “niche” site online within days, and, using an initial Google Adwords campaign, can be getting potential clients to the site the same day. In fact its’ a fantastically exciting business model. Un-reaptable in any other format.

What is your online marketing strategy? - which methods do you use to attract potential customers?

Our main strategy is based on trying to reach the first page of Google’s natural search results.

Our Nile Cruise site is currently fluctuating between number one and number two for the key phrase Nile cruise out of 567,000 and we are number two for the second search term Nile cruises out of 189,000.

Thanks to attending a breakfast seminar led by yourself last November and really taking onboard your recommendations, particularly back-links, we have reached those current placements pretty quickly and the difference is amazing.

Prior to being at number one or two on Google we conducted a Google Adwords campaign for the site that meant we spent £40 a day to bring in traffic. We usually paid about 60p per click which meant we were guaranteed to get a least 66 visitors a day to the site.

Now being at number one we get an average of 600 visitors a day to the site and as you can imagine our conversions from site visitors to actual sales has risen tremendously.

In January we received approximately 18000 visitors. If we were paying Google 60p per click/visitor that would have cost us £10,800!! Which we just could not have done.

How does your online activity mesh with your offline marketing?

To be honest we do not have any “offline” marketing strategy or budget. Everything is done online.

How much business do you do on the web?

100%

How do you see the future regarding your online activity?

To keep on developing “niche” travel sites, following on the “long-tail” concept that even though some of our “niche” sites will not do massive sales by having a large number of such specialist sites the combined sales figures will be excellent.

Plus, of course, implementing the various strategies I have learnt from attending your recent full day “Search Engine Masterclass” which I found fascinating, exciting and marvellously practical. So I’m very excited about our future online development.

What is the single biggest lesson you have learned about your web activities?

That it takes time, effort and enthusiasm. Plus you need to seek out the experts, (like yourself) and learn all you can from them. Then…keep on keeping on.

Can you imagine life without a website?

No. Our websites are our business. I would never go back to operating on the High Street. We now have thousands of clients from all over the country and from many countries overseas. This could never have happened without us being “online”.

How I Build my quality links.

Normally I will take my top 5 competitors for the same keyword/phrase that I'm trying to compete on and do a search for their links. For example I will use the "link:www.firstcompetitorsdomain.co.uk" search on Google to find out how many backlinks each of my competitors has. (Actually a more accurate way is to go to www.linkpopularity.com and click on the Yahoo 'click to view' option.) Then I'll take that list of back link partners and visit each one individually looking for an "add your site" button so that I can obtain a backlink too.

I then go through each competitor in the same way, searching out their backlink partners and asking them for a backlink to me. I sometimes have to provide a backlink from my site but not always.

I also use the list of directories supplied by SEOMOZ.com and I have also paid the $299 to Yahoo Directory as I have read many times that this is worth paying for.

Finally, I search out for "on-topic" blogs that I can add a post to ensuring that I add my name as whatever anchor text I'm trying to create backlinks for. So if I'm trying to be found for "Florida Holidays" I will "sign" my blog post answer as "Florida Holidays" which means that my name is my chosen "anchor text". I know that some blogs have a "no follow" rule for posts but just as many dont' and I have found this method a good way of getting good backlinks.

Search Engine Optimisation - What's different in 2008?

2008-02-28T14:35:00.004Z

As ecommerce continues its relentless rise (According to Nielsen, 98% of UK internet users now shop online) and Google continues to dominate the way we find products and services (around 76% market share whether we are researching or buying) you probably dont need me to remind you of the imperative to increase your website's visibility.

Here's the best way - Google Universal Search - I know, Ive talked about this before, several times, but its still the biggest thing to change the search landscape and provide real opportunities for exceptional traffic. For example, look at this.....

Anyone not on the map is effectively non existent as far as the searcher is concerned. As you may remember from previous posts over 75% of all visits come from the 'above the scroll' positions.

Its essential if you are a hotel to be on the map, but when you consider that almost half of all searches are for local services (insurance company kent, solicitor preston, lawnmower supplier manchester, search marketing company liverpool....) then there is a great opportunity for most companies to differentiate themselves from the masses by appearing on the map, like for example the following....

Of course this cabling company on the map will get a disproportionately higher number of visits than his competitors.

Here's how to do it from a previous post - http://janaklin.blogspot.com/2007/06/quick-way-to-google-top-spot.html

This is a good example of Google Universal search in action, where Google will bring in the most appropriate results, not just little blue snippets from its main database.

So, if you sell products get into Google Base, like Plumbnation....

If you have anything newsworthy post to Google News...

Why not get video clips on You Tube and images in Google images...

The point is you have a real opportunity to show up in different forms from different locations courtesy of Google Universal Search.

Over the coming months I'll be publishing a detailed lesson on each of the important areas you can optimise for (G Base, video, maps, podcast, image, news, etc, etc) so over a period of time you can make sure you maximise your exposure, your traffic and of course your business through the web. I'll refer to this as ADVANCED TRACK.

I'll also be republishing, and updating, my lessons for you to DIY your optimisation. I'll refer to this as FUNDAMENTALS TRACK.

In addition future posts will also have case studies and/or Q&A sessions - all designed to help your business get to grips with search marketing.

Meanwhile you can see some of the many companies we work with who are achieving great results through search marketing at http://www.janklin.com/clients.html

Q&A Spot: Does it matter where my site is hosted?

2008-02-28T13:58:00.002Z

Question: I've just discovered my website is hosted in Germany (that's where my hosting company chose to put it). Does this have any impact on my search engine rankings?
Angela Dunbar, Allied Equestrian, Perthshire

Answer: It doesn't matter in your case because you have a .co.uk domain name, so Google knows you are a UK company. On the other hand if you had a .com domain google would use your hosting location to determine your country of origin. In this case it would think you are German and give you good German rankings but poor UK results.

TIP: For any of you out there who think this may be a problem - go to http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/website-country/

Here you can check where your site is hosted. If you have a .com domain and you are hosted outside the uk, this means you will not get good uk rankings unless you transfer to a uk host.

More background information on hosting and search engine rankings.

When people carry out a google search, google wants to serve up the most relevant results. More often than not, local results are more relevant than others. For example if you were searching for new lawnmower, Google would assume a local supplier would be mor appropriate than, say, a German one.

How does Google determine where websites are in relation to the searcher? As alluded to above, if you have a .co.uk TLD (top level domain) Google assumes you are a UK company. If, however, you have a .com it uses the server location to determine which your country of origin is. As in the example above a .com domain and a German hosted site would conclude you are German, which would mean your UK search results would be poor (your German ones could be OK though!)

Taking this a stage further you can see that ideally, to get good rankings in a specific country, you need a local TLD ( .de, .fr, .it etc). If this is not possible a good compromise is a .com ( or .eu for Europe) and get the site hosted in the relevant country.

Even better you can use subdomains for your non uk sites with the subdomains hosted locally. So, www.yoursite.com in the uk; www.de.yoursite.com in German and hosted in Germany; www.fr.yoursite.com in French and hosted in France, etc.

If all this sound too much like hard work then 'pay per click' is the best route open to you since you can specify the country you want your ads to appear in.

Internet Marketing Nirvana

2007-12-05T15:47:00.000Z

Different types of internet marketing methods can all yield great results used separately, but use them together and optimise the way they interrelate and the sum is much greater than the individual parts.

Lets look at how and why using a combination of Pay Per Click (PPC), Search engine optimisation (SEO), Email marketing and website landing page optimisation does the business.

Pay Per Click

Many people use pay per click as their only form of online marketing - its easy, everything can be monitored and theres no need to make large scale changes to an existing website.

Just make sure you do the basics right:-

- choose a large number of relevant keyphrases (so you capture the 'long tail' as well as the volume terms)

- make sure your ads are written effectively (ensure the keyphrase searched for is repeated in the ad and that the ad entices a click through; and ideally ensure the url of the landing page contains the keyphrase)

-drive searchers through to an appropriate, optimised landing page.

If you do these things your campaigns will be effective and you will receive a reasonable to very good return on your investment.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Consider this search for 'dr martens':-

As you can see here Cloggs have two snippets in the top positions - a pay per click ad and also a SEO snippet.

In average terms you can argue that this is at least doubling your return on investment. Because once the SEO snippet is there its there for free so you are getting two click throughs for the price of one - actually its better than this because in average terms you get three times the click throughs on the natural, or SEO results, than on the paid-for ones. Any way you look at it your ROI is improved dramatically.

Landing page Optimisation

Consider this page - the landing page for a search for 'Worcester Greenstar Boiler':-
(Click on image to enlarge)

After doing the search for 'worcester greenstar boiler' and clicking on the snippet this is the page you land on, which is optimised, and by this we mean:-

- the searcher knows he's found what he's looking for - it says 'Worcester Greenstar Boiler' at the top of the page

- there's also an image of a greenstar boiler and a comprehensive description

- There are appropriate 'calls to action' that is the searcher can go on to buy the product if he wishes by using the ecommerce functions on that page OR, and very importantly, he can call the supplier via the very prominent phone number at the top of the page.

This is what we mean by landing page optimisation, a page which maximises the chance of soliciting the desired response from the searcher. (in addition to being optimised for natural SEO results)

You may know also that google promotes a PPC result higher in the rankings based on the effectiveness of this landing page. (ie what people do when they get there) and there is a further bit of synergy here between SEO and PPC. This page is optimised for both.

Email Marketing

Where does email fit into the picture?

Its an unpalatable truth folks that most people visiting your website wont do what you want - that is they wont buy or wont make contact with you, and certainly they wont try to remember your url for later consideration.

So the onus is really on you to keep the communications going, and this can best be done by asking them for their email address when they visit (obviously in return for something they will value in a regular newsletter) - educational information, seasonal offers, promotions - whatever is relevant to your audience but really the key is to keep the name in front of them for when they are ready to buy
(incidentally 4 to 5 of you reading this will become customers of ours as a result of this communication - so be careful!)

Collecting emails is simply done:-

The point is:-

-Dont ask them for anything other than an email address

-Spell out the advantages of what they'll get in return

-Make sure you include sign ups on many pages - not just one or two (AND, certainly on all your optimised landing pages)

So there you go, a well put together blend of SEO, PPC, Email and landing page optimisation will do the trick for you and deliver a huge return on investment compared to any other form of marketing you will do.

Please call if we can help and have a Great Christmas and New Year

Jan Klin - 01928 788100 - jan@janklin.com

Incidentally if you are a Manchester based manufacturing company (I know, its only a few of you) you can get a 50% grant for your ecommerce web projects - call if you need more.

High Quality Links Make the Difference

2007-11-06T16:46:00.000Z

Firstly, those of you who decided to swap a link with me recently thanks very much. I thought I'd let you know how successful its been and remind you how quality linking really works.

We are promoting local services in Manchester, Chester and Liverpool so wanted to gain some visibility by being top for appropriate phrases. If you search for 'seo Liverpool'; 'search engine optimisation chester' - and many other variants I'm now in the top spot after 2 weeks of creating the page.....
(click on image to enlarge)

In fact I needed only four links to get this position for 'Search engine optimisation chester'.

Just a reminder that to get the top spot you dont need many links you just have to make them 'contextually relevant' - mainly by making sure that the correct anchor text is included.

Below is an example of how this appears on one of your sites - note the link includes the phrases we want a high ranking for. (ie the correct anchor text)

Of course, in addition to this, the target page has to be optimised. If you go to the target page you'll see a great example of SEO copywriting at work.

I hope its been as successful for you as it has for me - so thanks again.
If anyone out there wants to see the specific piece of code I asked to be included as the link drop me an email and I'll send it to you. (jan@janklin.com)

SEO Magic! - A New Way to Hit the Google Top Spot

2007-11-06T15:37:00.000Z

Let's get straight into an example to show you what I mean....

You can see here that our customer, www.Plumbnation.co.uk , takes the top spot and their snippet has the shopping bag icon next to it indicating this result has been drawn from Google Base.

(Incidentally, Plumbnation will be the largest low cost, heating and plumbing ecommerce site in Europe - a great place to get the best deal on a Worcester Boiler)

There are a few important points to make about this:-

- They were number one on Google within a few weeks of their brand new website going live! on the search term you see above and many other variants of 'boilers'.

(In fact Google will display results for you within 24 hrs of you submitting your products to G Base.)

- These entries are free! - not only this but are more effective for click throughs than conventional SEO and pay per click because the shopping bag icon makes them stand out.

So, how much better can it get than having rankings which are both free and better than Pay per Click?

So much for the myth that new sites take a long time to get free rankings.

I cant tell you how much money this customer has made since their site went live, customer confidentiality prohibits me from divulging this, but I can tell you its surpassed everyone's expectations by a very wide margin. (I hope that seems understated enough - I'm trying desperately to suppress my desire to go overboard and hype this)

So, how does this work and why is it so effective? more detail later but there are a couple of points to make you aware of:-

1. The listings have been 'optimised' for G Base. A similar, but easier process, than conventional SEO.

2. Google Universal Search (which I may have mentioned before?) has a major part to play. Up until 6 months ago you would have to go to Google Base and do a search to see this result, but now, Google brings in results for its main search page from all over the place. (Including Google Base)

So, you need to go to Google Base and learn how to do this...
http://base.google.com/
Its all there including what sorts of products and services its for (most actually)

If you dont have time to learn about it and do it - we can do it for you. Just give us a call or email and we'll send you the details (jan@janklin.com; 01928 788100).
We have limited availability to run trials on this for some of you if you may be interested.

Dont hesitate too long....

'Whitelabel' SEO Services for Web Design Agencies

2007-10-04T16:46:00.000Z

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Use SEO Science and Make Money for Your Company

The ‘black art’ days of SEO are now a thing of the past. It’s now a recognised marketing science with the power to deliver real business benefits.

We offer a tried and trusted, credible, money-making subscription service to make it easier for you to get it absolutely right.

We’ve developed systems to ensure that you can give your clients higher rankings, tangible results and increased business.

Simple Service – Tangible Business Benefits….You and your clients win

It’s a “white label” service, at a reasonable price, so you could mark-up by as much as 100% and brand it as your own.

The benefits to you are obvious but worth repeating:

• A source of revenue – an add on service for your agency (with a typical 100% margin on our standard rates)
• Additional source of revenue – through client website updates and improvements
• Puts you at the forefront of SEO development
• Increases customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy – because of their high search engine positions
• Provides your agency with new skills, without the added cost of recruiting.

How does it work? We can help you identify your top three clients who would gain most benefit from enhanced SEO. This gives you the confidence to offer a full SEO service, knowing that these clients would get immediate improvements in rankings and a related increase in business.

We would provide:

• A comprehensive SEO report for each client, with detailed instructions on how to optimise their sites and maximise rankings
• Keyphrase and technical analysis from professionals with a long track record for working with the major search engines and web developers
• Guaranteed prompt e-mail and telephone technical support
• A monthly report showing keyphrase positions against major search engines (typically the top ten)
• Regular reports direct to you, the client or both - branded according to your specifications
• Copies of marketing materials to promote the SEO service
• Free access to our authoritative 'SEO Webinar’ to train your staff (normally costs £250 through the Institute of Direct Marketing).

How much does it cost? Its designed to ensure you make money from it – so you’ll get up to a 50% discount off our normal pricing.

What to do next? To hear about the benefits in more detail, question me on why our service is at the leading edge and offers tangible results, please call me or email.

Yours sincerely

Jan Klin

Jan A Klin & Associates -
01928 788100
07946 513521
www.janklin.com
email:jan@janklin.com

Would You Like a Link from Jan Klin's Website?

2007-10-04T14:52:00.000Z

Hi Folks

I will create a link for you from my site (from a Page Rank 4 page) complete with relevant anchor text for your most important keyphrase.

I'll also make it 'contextually relevant' for you.

Those of you who know the power of this type of link building should be answering the question above with a yes, yes, yes please Jan (but what's the catch?).

There is no catch - all I need in return is a link from your site to mine (from any page which does not have a Page Rank 0).

If you wish to do this (honestly you should because it will make a difference to your rankings) just drop me an email (jan@janklin.com) and I'll send along the details to you. Or call me if you wish. (01928 788100)

Best Wishes

Jan

Search Engine Optimisation Services - SEO - For Companies in Liverpool, Manchester and Chester

2007-10-04T14:33:00.000Z

I think its well known that we offer a range of Search Engine Optimisation services throughout the UK. In addition, because of our geographic location, we offer an extended range for companies in Liverpool, Manchester and Chester.

What do we offer:-

In addition to our normal SEO services and associated consultancy we offer training courses throughout the year in each of these cities. Dates and venues for the courses can be found at the following:-

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Liverpool
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Manchester
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Chester

Also we are able to offer 'in company' training designed to your specific needs where we will take you through the whole process of optimising your companies' website (or your clients if you are a web design company).

If you are a company in Liverpool, Manchester or Chester (or of course the surrounding area) you can see full details of the SEO training courses and all other associated services at our website www.janklin.com/SEO-Local.htm

Please get in touch if you wish to discuss your specific needs - Jan Klin - Direct Line: 01928 788100.

SEO Success in an Garden Office Business

2007-10-04T14:12:00.000Z

Interview Between Lynn Fotheringham, Director of Iobuild (www.iobuild.co.uk) and Jan Klin

How would you describe your company and its mission?

Small with a big website! Everyone who contacts us presumes that we are a large national company. I don’t think we are misleading them, I think because we have good rankings they assume we must be big.

Our mission is to design and build top quality additional living space in our client’s gardens. We solve accommodation problems in a unique way by building ‘housing quality’ home offices in people’s gardens.

We also design and build en-suite guest rooms and granny annexes for the bottom of the garden. A great alternative for people who don’t have the space to extend their house.

How long have you had a website and what is its main purpose?

We have had a website since the day we started trading four years ago. Our website is our only route to our customers. Because our clients come from diverse backgrounds and interest groups and can live anywhere in the country, contacting them through targeted, printed media is difficult.

Does the site work for you? ie deliver the benefits you were expecting?

The site does work for us, but I do need to work on expanding our marketing to drive more prospective customers to it.

What is your online marketing strategy? - which methods do you use to attract potential customers?

Our on-line strategy is purely based on search rankings. Thanks to your effort (Jan) we are positions one and two for our two main search terms.

More specifically for the term garden office we are second out of 157,000,000 competing pages! and for the term garden offices first out of 4,700,000!

Adwords for niche markets such as ours is prohibitively - up to £2 per click.

How does your online activity mesh with your offline marketing?

The market we are trading in is new and I have yet to find a reliable form of off-line marketing. I am always open to suggestions for off-line activity!

How much business do you do on the web?
100%

How do you see the future regarding your online activity?

I find it alarming that we have to rely 100% on the web, so I do value your work (Jan) as a way of protecting our valuable position.

What is the single biggest lesson you have learned about your web activities?

We have to fight hard to keep our position using ethical methods. Some of our competitors aren’t interested in trading ethically on the internet and use cloaking and other dubious techniques. I think this makes them the losers in the long run.

Can you imagine life without a website?

It would be nice, but I wouldn’t have a business

Largest Web Site for Heating and Plumbing Products Launched

2007-10-03T17:04:00.000Z

With the help of my company and several others www.plumbnation.co.uk is now live!

Plumbnation will eventually offer over 30,000 products making it the largest heating and plumbing supplies company in the UK.

The site sells every thing from major brand products - like Worcester Boilers - to the smallest pipe and fittings for DIY enthusiasts.

The site will be promoted through conventional offline means and of course aggressively through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay per Click advertising.

Remember the 'google sandbox'? This site was number one on google for a 'Worcester TR212E' within one day of going live!

I'll keep you posted.

Jan Klin

Your Opportunity to Stand out from the Crowd

2007-10-03T15:55:00.000Z

'Google Universal Search' is something I've mentioned before, but I'm now convinced it will have a dramatic effect on the way Search Marketers go about their business.

It also means those of you who exploit it stand to gain substantial advantages over your online competitors.

Look at the following search:-

What you see here is one company dominating the first 5 positions. The significance of this of course is that their competitors are being kept out of the frame so their click throughs, and the number of sales or enquiries, is maximised.

(Remember that these 5 positions account for anywhere between 50% to 90% of click throughs.)

This possibility has been brought about through 'universal search'. Essentially it means that Google is now bringing its results from different databases to try to deliver the best results for searchers - not just their main index. As you can see above YouTube clips are also integrated.

Where else does Google bring it results from?

So, Google will now bring results from its main index, from You Tube, from its image database (like for Britney Spears below):-

Takes a good photo doesnt she?

And many other sources including blogs, google news, google local/maps and of course Google Base.

Raising The Bar for Search Marketing

So, the task for our clients is not just to get them one snippet at the top of the hitlist but to get multiple snippets in there to maximise click throughs.

Its not difficult to submit your images to google images; its easy to set up a blog; its simplicity itself to upload a clip to YouTube; Its essential to submit to Google local and get yourself on a google map (see previous post on how to do this).
Last, but by no means least, enter your products or services at Google base.. By doing this you'll even appear in search results if you havent got a website!

Of course as you do these things you'll need to optimise your submissions to ensure you get high rankings for them. For example if you add images to the Google images database you'll need to make sure the filenames include a keyphrase. I could go on but there's oodles of stuff on the web about this already - just do a search, for example, for 'google images SEO'. Interestingly if you do this you'll even get (courtesy of Google Universal Search) a videoclip of a chap from Google explaining how to do it.

If you need help dont hesitate to call us (01928 788100).

Q&A Spot: How important are the Keyword and Description tags for SEO?

2007-08-31T15:25:00.000Z

QUESTION: How important are the keyword and description tags for SEO ranking? Someone recently told me thay have no value

Imogen Davies, FreshFields Packaging, Carlisle

ANSWER: The keyword tag is relatively unimportant, however it should be completed as some minor search engines still appear to use it. There's some evidence that the search engine spiders look for consistency across the metatags even if they dont use them for ranking purposes so best to populate them.

In the past some people have commented that Yahoo may penalise you if you have keywords in the keyword tag that dont exist on the page. So, something like 4-5 words in the tag is what we generally do nowadays - making sure all words exist as visible text on the page in question.

The description tag is an important tag. Again its not generally used for ranking purposes (although I have seen pages ranked where the phrase getting searched on doesnt appear on the page but does appear in the description tag).

The main use of the decription tag is for maximising click-through rates. Look at the following example snippet:-

This is not bad. The term searched for is 'dr martens'. You can see the way Google highlights the term searched for in the description tag (and the title) so this is what your eye gravitates to in the searchlist thus maximising the click-throughs.

We always recommend that you repeat the keyphrase in question 3 times in the description tag which generally works quite well.

Also, you have 25 words available. Use them all to maximise the visibility of your snippet and push the competitors that bit further down the list. Make it a bit salesy as well, as in the above example, to encourage people to click through.

A final point on the description tag: If you dont enter one the search engines will take content from your page to populate the snippet. You dont want this to happen. Also sometimes your snippet content gets taken from the Open Directory (DMOZ) if you have an entry there; and sometimes from the Yahoo directory.

You can override this by using the NOODP tag and the NOYDIR tags in your code so your snippet content is taken from the optimised content in your description tag.

SEO Success in a High Tech Business

2007-08-29T16:24:00.000Z

Interview between Lisa Walker, Marketing Manager of Blue Chip Technology and Jan Klin

How would you describe your company and its mission?

Based just south of Chester, Blue Chip Technology designs and manufactures a range of embedded boards and industrial grade, rugardised computer systems.
Our single board computers bring the functionality of a complete computer to a very small board, roughly the size of a beer mat, which is then embedded into niche applications such as blood analysers, factory lasers, intelligent security cameras etc.

How long have you had a website and what is its main purpose?

The website has been in existence for best part of ten years, our target audience are mainly engineers who will go to the web as their first port of call when researching potential products.

Does the site work for you? ie deliver the benefits you were expecting?

We updated the website about four years ago - bringing in more material such as case studies and improving the structure. However, our Google referrals dropped, Google has always brought us the most enquiries and subsequent business. We worked with Jan Klin&Associates to improve our organic rankings - it didn't require any huge changes in content just more focus with things like key word placements, page titles and link building. Over a period of a few months we have seen huge improvements bringing us to a top five position across many of our key search terms.

For example if you do a search for “ industrial computers “ or “ single board computers “ we come 4th in Google out of 156,000,000 and 75,200,000 competing web pages respectively!

These terms get searched for tens of thousands of times per month and our positions bring in loads of enquiries.

What is your online marketing strategy? - which methods do you use to attract potential customers?

As well as SEO we pro-actively seek out industry relevant directories to appearin with a link back to our site. We also have a programme of e-shots, including a general newsletter and specific promotions/product launches. All communications include an opt-out. Respondees who do opt out are automatically blocked from receiving further communications from Blue Chip Technology.

Any activity like this is only as good as the database behind it - we're starting a program to clean and segment our data making it possible to tailor future communications.

How does your online activity mesh with your offline marketing?

We tend to combine a number of communications in any one campaign - e-shots, traditional post and telephone follow up. For example, we have metrics in place which collect open and click rates on e-communications which we can then use to prioritise any follow ups.

How much business do you do on the web?

Most of our sales - over 80%, our generated from web searches whether they come through via an enquiry form, e-mail or telephone call. Our customer base is proficient in using web technology and our product range is technically sophisticated - making the web the perfect marketing forum.

How do you see the future regarding your online activity?

I see improving our organic search engine rankings as phase 1, the next stage is to analyse the way people are using our site. Where do they come from, how do they navigate, what's popular, is there anything turning them off?

What is the single biggest lesson you have learned about your web activities?

When designing your website you will obviously strive to make it accessible and informative for your potential customers but don't forget about the Google spiderbot. On the whole, a website with a good repository of well structured, up to date information forms the basis of good search engine ranking but it does need to be optimised to really achieve it's full potential and put your name ahead of your competitors.

Can you imagine life without a website?

Absolutely not - it's our window on the world, today I've found out about the Low Pin Count bus, applying for a Russian visa and a recipe for Onion Soup.!

Changing Your Website and Search Engine Rankings

2007-08-29T13:38:00.000Z

A question we get asked a lot (and a problem we come across even more) is whether by changing your website you are likely to affect your search engine rankings.

Well, it depends. Its very easy to preserve your rankings by doing the rights things, its also very easy to screw them up by doing, sometimes inadvertently, the wrong things. So, what's below is some guidelines on what to do to maintain your hard earned rankings.

1. Here's the simplest scenario, that of just making design and textual changes to your existing webpages. This shouldnt present any problems at all. The only thing to watch here is to ensure you maintain the keyphrase density. For example if you are ranking for the phrase 'nile cruises' look at the number of repetitions in your current page and make sure you preserve this in the new. So if you have repeated the phrase 3-4 times on a page of 250-300 words, make sure this density is preserved.( Remember also these phrases can go in hyperlinks and navigation links as well as on the actual text.)

2. Here's the other end of the scale. A wholesale redesign of your site. Again there are no problems here providing you stay with the same pagenames/filenames for your web pages. The problem is quite often this will not be the case. For example one of your existing pages might be http://www.yoursite.com/?OB=5. On your new site the new web technology and content management system may generate urls' differently - the new equivalent new page for example may be http://www.yoursite.com/newpage.html.

As far as google is concerned this is a new page and you'll have to start earning your stripes again with links, ageing and so on. But there is a simple solution, and its called a 301 redirect.

301 Redirects

a 301 redirect will say to Google 'this old page has permanently moved to this new page'. The important thing here is that the Google Page Rank equity will be transfered as well, meaning that the rankings will be preserved (again, as long as you adhere to a similar keyphrase density as mentioned above.) In addition to this anyone trying to access an old page (maybe its in their favourites) will be seamlessly redirected to the new one. So, both users and search engine spiders will be kept happy.

NOTE: dont use a 302 redirect - this tells the spiders you have moved temporarily and they wont transfer the Page Rank equity.

How to Implement 301 Redirects

There's oodles of information about this on the web but here's the information in a nutshell and more references below for you.

For a Linux Apache server its just a matter of doing the following:-

1. Locate or create a .htaccess file on your server. Your .htaccess file gives search engine robots instructions on security and redirects.

2. If you don't have an .htaccess file on your server, you can easily create one using a text file. Name it ".htaccess"

3. If there is already an .htaccess file scroll down past the code that is already there and begin your new redirect instructions.

4. Put in your redirect information, which should look like this:
redirect 301 /directory/file.html
http://www.domainame.com/directory/file.html

*Note: The first part "/directory/file.html" is the location of the file being moved and the second part "http://www.domainame.com/directory/file.html" is where the file is being moved.

5. Upload the file to your server (The placement of the .htaccess file limits it effects: if you put it in your document root, it affects your entire website, but if you put it in a subdirectory, it affects that subdirectory and everything in it.)

For a Microsoft IIS Platform there are a couple of options:-

Method 1,
IIS Redirect
• In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect
• Select the radio titled "a redirection to a URL".
• Enter the redirection page
• Check "The exact url entered above" and the "A permanent redirection for this resource"
• Click on 'Apply'

Method 2,

• Edit the old page.. “http://www.yourdomain.com/oldurl/”
• Remove the old code
• Place the following code in the page

<%
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"
Response.addheader "Location", "http://www.yourdomain.com/newpageurl/"
Response.End
%>

Heres some more references for you:-

Theres a neat little video clip here about 301's and also some extra resource links below it:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/

Moving a Domain

This is a related point - moving your site to a new server, sometimes when you have your website redeveloped by a new company. Sometimes you'll want to change servers for different reasons.

Again, this is quite straightforward, its just a matter repointing the DNS to your new host. There are a few things to be aware of though and some complications if you have a complex site, so what Ive done below is reproduced an article Matt Cutts of Google wrote to help people with this.

I hope its useful, but please contact us if you need any help in doing this. It would be a dreadful shame if you lose the equity you have built up in your site over the years. (jan@janklin.com; 01928 788100)

Article by Matt Cutts of Google on Redirection and Host Changes

Moving a Domain
Several people have asked for the recommended way to move to a new webhost or IP address without having problems in Google. I tested this method this past Sunday and everything worked fine for me. I’ll walk you through my example, which is moving mattcutts.com from one IP address to another IP address by changing hosts. This is not an example of moving mattcutts.com to someotherdomain.com. I’ll talk about that a bit at the end.

If you have a static site or can afford a day or so where your site can be in limbo between two IP addresses, life will be easier. If you have a dynamic site with databases and such, it’s trickier, even though the idea is the same.

Step 1. Find a good web host and sign up for an account.

Step 2: Make a back-up of your site at the new webhost.

Step 3: Change DNS to point to your new web host.

Step 4: Wait for the DNS change to propagate through the net.

Step 5: Once you are sure people or Googlebots are fetching from the new webhost/IP address, you’re done. You can shut down the old site.

Let’s talk through these in a little more detail.

Step 1. Find a good web host and sign up for an account.
Research + references should help you find a good host. I liked my current webhost (csoft.net) quite a bit and I did a lot of research, but the site readership was growing faster than I expected. I asked a (non-SEO) friend who runs a heavily-trafficked site what he uses, and he uses pair.com. In this example I’ll refer to things by IP addresses, and we’ll be moving from csoft with an IP address of 63.x.x.x to pair.com with an IP address of 65.x.x.x. Just as a reminder, DNS is the system that maps pretty names like www.google.com to an actual Internet Protocol (IP) address that a machine can use, such as 66.102.7.147.

Step 2. Make a back-up of your site at the new webhost.

If you have a static website, this isn’t that bad; just copy the entire file structure over to the new webhost and you’re done. Harder is something like a blog, which usually has a MySQL or other database for storing posts. Harder still is some e-commerce site that has to have its database kept in a sync’ed state. In that case, you might have to set up database replication between the old location and the new location while you are doing the transition.

But let’s take the example of a WordPress blog with a MySQL database that can be down for a few hours without too much trouble. Assume that you’ve already used tar or FTP to copy the static files from one webhost to another. First, you want to create a new MySQL database at the new web host. Ideally, you can make it have the same database name and user name. If not, you’ll want to tweak the WordPress wp-config.php at the new location to update the database/username/password/etc.

Now that you’ve got the MySQL database ready to copy over, dump the old MySQL database, copy it to the new webhost, and load your database at the new location. Those three commands would look like this:
mysqldump –add-drop-table -uoldusername -poldpassword olddatabase > mysqlbackup.20051009.sql
scp mysqlbackup.20051009 user@newhost:~/
mysql -unewusername -pnewpassword -hnewdatabasehost newdatabase < ~/mysqlbackup.20051009.sql

Bear in mind that you have a username/password to login to the old and new webhosts, but you also have separate username/password for the databases at each location as well. You might even have the MySQL database stored on a different host, which is why I showed the -h (host) option when restoring the database. Again, if the new host has different options for your database, you’ll need to edit your wp-config.php file or WordPress won’t be able to access your database at the new webhost.

Now you have identical copies of your site at two different locations. If you’re just running a blog with a comment or two a day, it’s not a big problem if someone posts a comment or otherwise changes your database while you’re doing the transition to a new web host. If you run a big, industrial-strength forum or e-commerce site, you’ll need to do extra work to keep the two databases and/or file systems synchronized.

Step 3: Change DNS to point to your new web host.
This is the actual crux of the matter. First, some DNS background. When Googlebot(s) or anyone else tries to reach or crawl your site, they look up the IP address, so mattcutts.com would map to an IP like 63.111.26.154. Googlebot tries to do reasonable things like re-check the IP address every 500 fetches or so, or re-check if more than N hours have passed. Regular people who use DNS in their browser are affected by a setting called TTL, or Time To Live. TTL is measured in seconds and it says “this IP address that you fetched will be safe for this many seconds; you can cache this IP address and not bother to look it up again for that many seconds.” After all, if you looked up the IP address for each site with every single webpage, image, JavaScript, or style sheet that you loaded, your browser would trundle along like a very slow turtle.

You can actually see the TTL for various sites by using the “dig” command in Linux/Unix:

% dig mattcutts.com
; < <>> DiG 9.2.1 < <>> mattcutts.com
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER< <- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 37526
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;mattcutts.com. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
mattcutts.com. 3572 IN A 65.181.152.150
...

In this case, the Time-To-Live for the IP address for mattcutts.com is 3572 seconds (a little less than an hour).

Time-To-Live is an important factor for a site’s DNS. Some sites like google.com, yahoo.com, and msn.com have really short DNS TTL settings like 300 to 900 seconds. Why? Well, if you have multiple data centers, you might want to take one data center down so that the data center mechanics can sprinkle fresh, magical index data onto the machines. With a short TTL, you could pull a data center’s IP address out of the rotation in just a few minutes.

That also helps explain the “Google Dance” of days gone by. The Google Dance would last for about a week, and people would see both old and new results, depending on which data center they happened to hit. The underlying reason was that each data center was brought down, loaded with new data or algorithmic settings, and then brought back up again. It took several days to switch the data at all data centers. During that time, webmasters used to love to check www2.google.com and www3.google.com because those DNS aliases usually pointed to the newest data centers. These days our production system is better equipped to switch things around quickly instead of over several days.

There, a little easter egg for the people who care about DNS. Okay, where were we? Right, switching DNS and Time-To-Live. You should care about TTL because if someone loads your website in their browser just before you update your DNS settings, and your TTL is one day, then that person’s browser will try to use your old IP address all that day.
In fact, it’s even worse. DNS is hierarchical. At the top of DNS there are 13 root servers that can handle any DNS lookup for a .com domain, but DNS caches flow all the way down to ISPs like Comcast or Cox. If someone on Comcast looked up your IP address just before you changed your DNS settings, all of Comcast would use the old IP address until the Time-To-Live expired.
So the upshot is that if you can make your TTL short (like an hour) instead of long (like a day), you’ll be in much better shape. Everyone will move to your new IP address in short order instead of having a mish-mash where some people are using the old IP address for hours.
The actual switchover process is pretty easy. Your new webhost will give you a pair of nameservers to use as the primary nameservers. If you have a domain registered with GANDI (the delightful French registrar that I happen to use), you go to account settings and switch from the old webhost’s nameservers to the new webhost’s nameservers. GANDI (and probably other registrars) is smart enough to recognize nameservers that are already present in the DNS system, so it can make the change pretty much immediately. If you’re going with a nameserver that no one has ever heard of before, you might have to wait 24 hours or so for things to percolate into the system.

Step 4: Wait for the DNS change to propagate through the net.
This is mostly a function of TTL and whether you’re switching to nameservers that are already present in DNS. Remember that DNS is hierarchical, and you have to wait for DNS caches to be flushed as Time-To-Live is exceeded. If you are using a smart registrar and a well-known set of new nameservers, the switch at the root level of DNS can be pretty quick. To verify that the root servers have the new nameserver, you can use the “dig +trace domain” command in Linux/Unix. The “+trace” option tells dig to go all the way up to the DNS root servers for the lookup:
dig +trace mattcutts.com
; < <>> DiG 9.2.1 < <>> +trace mattcutts.com
;; global options: printcmd
…
mattcutts.com. 172800 IN NS ns00.ns0.com.
mattcutts.com. 172800 IN NS ns176.pair.com.
;; Received 111 bytes from 192.5.6.30#53(A.GTLD-SERVERS.NET) in 84 ms
Above you can see that my nameservers have switched to pair.com nameservers. After that, you just have to wait for TTLs to expire for your new nameserver (and thus IP address) to wend its way out to everyone. If you are on a Windows XP system, you can use the command “ipconfig /flushdns” to flush your machine’s DNS cache, but it probably won’t do much good by itself. Remember that DNS is cached at each level, so your ISP probably has cached the previous IP address until the TTL expires.
Step 5: Once you are sure people or Googlebots are fetching from the new webhost/IP address, you’re done. You can shut down the old site.
When you ping your domain and see your new IP address, you know that you’re getting close. Previous visitors might still be using the old IP address from their DNS cache, but new visitors are getting the new IP address. It’s still a good idea to give a day or so in case anyone had a long Time-To-Live set, but most TTLs are a day or a few hours or less. After a day or so, it should be safe to deactivate the hosting at the old location. If you want to be ultra-safe, check your logs. When you see Googlebot fetching from the new webhost and no more visitors in your logs at the old location, it’s okay to turn off your old webhost.
Moving to a different domain

Now let’s talk for a minute about moving from mattcutts.com to someotherdomain.com. All other things being equal, I would recommend to stay with the original domain if possible. But if you need to move, the recommended way to do it is to put a 301 (permanent) redirect on every page on mattcutts.com to point to the corresponding page on someotherdomain.com. If you can map mattcutts.com/url1.html to someotherdomain.com/url1.html, that’s better than doing a redirect just to the root page (that is, from mattcutts.com/url1.html to someotherdomain.com). In the olden days, Googlebot would immediately follow a 301 redirect as soon as it found it. These days, I believe Googlebot sees the 301 and puts the destination url back in the queue, so it gets crawled a little later. I have heard some reports of people having issues with doing a 301 from olddomain.com to newdomain.com. I’m happy to hear those reports in the comments and I can pass them on to the crawl/indexing team, but we may be due to replace the code that handles that in the next couple months or so.
If it’s really easy for you to wait a couple months or so, you may want to do that; it’s always easier to ask crawl/index folks to examine newer code than code that will be turned off in a while

OnLine Success for an Innovative PR Company

2007-06-25T11:29:00.000Z

Interview between Paula Gardner MD of DoYourOwnPR and Jan Klin

How would you describe your company and its mission?

www.doyourownpr.com teaches small and growing businesses how to do their own PR, saving them thousands of pounds in PR agency fees every month. I've been in PR since the early nineties, first working for other agencies and then as owner of a PR consultancy myself. However, as the owner of a business with offices and staff to pay for I found that the clients I ended up working to pay the bills with weren't necessarily the most interesting for me. I wanted to help the smaller guys, the one that couldn't really afford big PR contracts. These were the companies with the innovative ideas that still had the passion for their business. So, Do Your Own PR was born. We now show businesses how to do their own PR in a variety of ways. These are :

* A straight forward email 30 day PR course that takes them through how to plan and run a PR campaign
* PR coaching where we have a monthly teleconference to work on their PR campaign
* A full PR consultation, where we put together a PR plan and write a press release for them.

How long have you had a website and what is its main purpose?

I have had a website since 2002, this particularly version since 2004, and its main purposes are to sell the courses and also encourage people to sign up for my newsletter. After they've had a few months of getting our suggestions of how to do their own PR they often get in touch to move onto becoming clients.

Does the site work for you? ie deliver the benefits you were expecting?

We can definitely see it growing and see SEO as a vital part of our overall promotional mix.

What is your online marketing strategy? - which methods do you use to attract potential customers?

I write articles and post them on article sites, offer them to other business people for their website or newsletter. We obviously do a lot of Pr too! I used to do a lot of online networking which worked very well when we were starting up and had more time. I just don't get the same time to do that now but it's something I feel is important. Our own newsletter is vital - we get about 80% of our business through it.

How does your online activity mesh with your offline marketing?

Offline I do a fair bit of networking and speaking which works well - we have people coming to us who heard me speak four years ago and remembered it. I also write for business magazines on the subject of PR.

How much business do you do on the web?

Numbers of sales are split equally, although our offline sales tend to be larger.

How do you see the future regarding your online activity?

I want this to increase. We have a number of courses, not just the PR course, but also courses on creating a newsletter, networking, copywriting and cold calling, and I feel that we haven't really even got going on the marketing of these yet. We've also just put together a course of how to start and run your own PR agency which I feel has huge potential.

What is the single biggest lesson you have learned about your web activities?

Persistence - little and often seems to work both for the business and for us as it's not too overwhelming and can be incorporated easily into the working week. I aim to do something promotional every day, whether it's visiting a networking lunch, posting an article on the site or someone else's site, or just dropping an email to an old contact.

Can you imagine life without a website?

No! not at all - it's part of me and what I do now. Even my kids want one now - my 11 year old wants one to sell his home made comics and my 9 year daughter to sell her home-made cards. Good to know they're learning about business early!

DoYourOwnPR - specialises in PR strategies for Businesses

Get to the Google Top Spot in Two Weeks!

2007-06-25T11:00:00.000Z

Here's a quick way to the top of Google by taking advantage of the number of people doing local searches.

As an example:-

You can see from this that the search for 'data cabling liverpool' has delivered www.interconnect-ns.co.uk as number one (out of 765,000 competing pages!).

(The 'map based results' come before of course - more about this later when I'll tell you how to get on this list also.)

The significance of this is that around 45% of all searches are done for local products and services (based on some research that Yahoo did recently). Specifically many people are including geo variables into there search string - liverpool, cheshire, uk, london, northwest, york - etc, etc. so the point is why not capture these searchers? You'll still get ranked for the root term as well, in the example above the root term is 'data cabling'. It will take a bit more effort to get to the number one spot for this more general term but while you are waiting why not take advantage of the more specific searches?

The other thing to note about this is that a more specific search leads to more qualified traffic. If someone types is 'data cabling liverpool' what is he interested in? Exactly, he's declared his intent and when he lands at your site he's a pretty well qualified opportunity to take advantage off.

So, here's what to do...
Decide on a specific geo term you want to capture - kent, manchester, cheshire - along with your root phrase. Lets say you offer acupuncture services in york then the term to capture is 'acupuncture york'. Put this in your homepage 'title tag'. (make it the first two words in the tag and remember no more than 10 words in total)
Make sure you then repeat this phrase a couple of times in the text on your homepage and voila! The next time the spider visits (give it a couple of weeks) you'll get a great google ranking.

Whether you are number one of course will depend on the level of competition, but I'll guess 90% of you will be in the top 5 results; and 10% will be number 1. Please let me know how you do. (jan@janklin.com)

Google Maps - Local Business Centre

Now, let's get back to the map based results. I think its speaks for itself that its a great advangtage to be in this listing. Its also free courtesy of google. All you need to do is register at Google Maps - Local Business Centre:-

www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter

You should see what's below, then just follow the instructions:-

Once you are in people can click on your snippet, see where you are and get directions using all the Google Maps/Google Earth functionality.

One bit of advice to optimise you listing and maximise the chances of being in the number one position. When filling in your decription, position the keyphrase (eg 'acupuncture York') right at the beginning of the text you enter.

If you need help let me know (jan@janklin.com; 01928 788100)

A Quick Way to the Google Top Spot

2007-06-25T09:00:00.001Z

Here's a quick way to the top of Google by taking advantage of the number of people doing local searches.

As an example:-

style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_2CHPPhSF6DQ/Rn-VhY-2DRI/AAAAAAAAAC8/Smq_4k-F0Ao/s400/interconnect-3.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5079943305571470610" />
Here's a quick way to the top of Google by taking advantage of the number of people doing local searches.

You can see from this that the search for 'data cabling liverpool' has delivered www.interconnect-ns.co.uk as number one (out of 765,000 competing pages!).

(The 'map based results' come before of course - more about this later when I'll tell you how to get on this list also.)

The significance of this is that around 45% of all searches are done for local products and services (based on some research that Yahoo did recently). Specifically many people are including geo variables into there search string - liverpool, cheshire, uk, london, northwest, york - etc, etc. so the point is why not capture these searchers? You'll still get ranked for the root term as well, in the example above the root term is 'data cabling'. It will take a bit more effort to get to the number one spot for this more general term but while you are waiting why not take advantage of the more specific searches?

The other thing to note about this is that a more specific search leads to more qualified traffic. If someone types is 'data cabling liverpool' what is he interested in? Exactly, he's declared his intent and when he lands at your site he's a pretty well qualified opportunity to take advantage off.

So, here's what to do...
Decide on a specific geo term you want to capture - kent, manchester, cheshire - along with your root phrase. Lets say you offer acupuncture services in york then the term to capture is 'acupuncture york'. Put this in your homepage 'title tag'. (make it the first two words in the tag and remember no more than 10 words in total)
Make sure you then repeat this phrase a couple of times in the text on your homepage and voila! The next time the spider visits (give it a couple of weeks) you'll get a great google ranking.

Whether you are number one of course will depend on the level of competition, but I'll guess 90% of you will be in the top 5 results; and 10% will be number 1. Please let me know how you do. (jan@janklin.com)

Google Maps - Local Business Centre

Now, let's get back to the map based results. I think its speaks for itself that its a great advangtage to be in this listing. Its also free courtesy of google. All you need to do is register at Google Maps - Local Business Centre:-

www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter

You should see what's below, then just follow the instructions:-

Once you are in people can click on your snippet, see where you are and get directions using all the Google Maps/Google Earth functionality.

One bit of advice to optimise you listing and maximise the chances of being in the number one position. When filling in your decription, position the keyphrase (eg 'acupuncture York') as near to the beginning of the text as possible.

If you need help let me know (jan@janklin.com; 01928 788100)

Huge OnLine Marketing Success using Forums and Search Marketing

2007-04-16T15:47:00.000Z

Interview between Melanie Hatton of BumpMagic and Jan Klin.

How would you describe your company and its mission?

Bump Magic is an online store, information centre and community forum for women who are pregnant, trying to conceive or new mums. Our goal is to become the preferred online resource for every pregnant woman in the UK.

Bump Magic was conceived while I was on maternity leave in 2005 following the birth my little boy, Ethan, largely due to the desire not to have to go back to work in an office while he was still young and the fact that the internet was my main source of entertainment and information while I was on leave! Every mum-to-be has a thirst for information about the changes affecting them during pregnancy, a struggle to source good maternity clothes and products, and an insatiable need to share their experiences with others, so I set to work creating Bump Magic based on my own needs as a mum-to-be.

How long have you had a website and what is its main purpose?

The Bump Magic website was launched in September 2006, and is an online presence only operated from my office at home.

Does the site work for you? ie deliver the benefits you were expecting?

Yes and no. I was initially expecting the online shop to be the major source of activity on the website. With so much competition in the market place however, it became clear that that was not going to be the case straight away. The forum on the other hand, was initially an after-thought which my web developer suggested to me a couple of weeks before the website launched. I was familiar with forums having used them on occasion in the past, but the Invision Power Board software which he demonstrated to me was so much more advanced than what I imagined that I agreed straight away to add it as a feature to the website.

Ironically it is the forum which now generates 90% of the website’s activity.

Originally the online shop was targeted at products required by pregnant women. The forum has however attracted a huge number of members who are trying to conceive, and so the online shop is expanding its product range to cater for that market also.

Whilst the online shop remains an important feature of the website, it is clear that the main attraction is the forum. This has opened up a potential new income stream for me and

I am arranging to have Google Adsense and other third party advertising on the forum pages as a means of generating income. The forum also has the functionality to require members to “subscribe” to otherwise “locked” areas of the forum, which only become accessible to the forum member upon payment of a regular subscription. Whilst I have no intention of introducing subscription payments to the Bump Magic forum members for the forum as it currently stands, I do have some ideas for new and optional aspects to the forum and for which it would be appropriate to charge a subscription payment and which I will be exploring over the next few months.

What is your online marketing strategy? - which methods do you use to attract potential customers?

At the launch of the website I followed the guidance detailed in your blog to and spent a month’s worth of evenings in September 2006 creating one way links to the website in the recommended search engine directories, creating articles to add to online article banks and also creating some reciprocal links. In order to keep costs down, I primarily listed the site in directories that didn’t require a payment, the few that did require a payment I only listed if the requirement was no more than £5 for an evergreen listing.

After a month, I moved away from search engine optimisation as other areas of the website required my focus.

Over the last 4 months I have focussed on advertising the forum aspect of the website through Google Adwords and Microsoft Adcentre, the response was phenomenal and the forum has taken on a life of its own. Today we have 386 registered members and over 14,000 individual posts. Although it was very labour intensive for me in the beginning (try creating conversations with yourself online and then remembering which conversation you have had with which of your other aliases) it now requires minimal time management from me– I now have 5 forum members who have taken on the responsibility of being forum moderators, and on a voluntary basis.

The forum is an amazing tool which generates rich content and search engine saturation relatively easily – the members create the content themselves. As a result my organic search engine listings are high and so I have recently been able to reduce the budget on the Adwords and Adcentre campaign by over 50%.

In February 2007, I was pleased to discover that the website had a Google Page rank of 3/10. An incredible achievement considering I had only focussed on search engine optimisation in the initial month of the website’s launch back in September and had paid little attention to it since!

The statistics speak for themselves:

Hits: September 2006 – 4,908 March 2007 – 628,701

Visits: September 2006 – 137 March 2007 – 17,276

Once I have the website in a position where it generates income from third party advertising, I then intend to place affiliate advertising for Bump Magic on third party websites and spread its online reach that way.

I have also yet to advertise the online shop aspect of the website via Google Adwords and Microsoft Adcentre, and so that is also a campaign in waiting too.

How does your online activity mesh with your offline marketing?

For the first 3 months I invested in advertising in the classifieds in the glossy magazines aimed at our target market, it was expensive and generated a poor response, and I have vowed never to go down that line again.

A particular product line which we have in the online shop is imported from the US, and the UK market is not yet fully aware of it. It will therefore be necessary for Bump Magic to spend some time and money advertising this particular product within the editorial section of the magazines aimed at our target market over the coming months, but that is a product specific activity as opposed to marketing the Bump Magic business generally.

How much business do you do on the web?

Bump Magic is an online resource only and so 100% of our business is online.

How do you see the future regarding your online activity?

Having seen the benefits of my initial search engine optimisation activity I am about to start another period of SEO activity to maintain and improve the website’s ranking, focussing on improving the presence of the online shop.

What is the single biggest lesson you have learned about your web activities?

Don’t be afraid to let your business idea change direction if the opportunities which open up to you are not the ones which you originally planned to follow.

Can you imagine life without a website?

Yes (I would probably have an early night once in a while!), but generally I couldn’t imagine life without the internet I would feel lost without it.

Anything else you want to add?

I often read that people who start their own business felt like giving up on many occasions but were pleased that they persevered. When your business is only a part time business/hobby then you really do wonder what you are doing it all for! But I’m pleased to say that I am persevering and beginning to see the results of the risks I have taken.

Q&A Spot: What's New in SEO since your Webinar

2007-03-27T16:24:00.000Z

QUESTION: Ive used your webinar very successfully over the past six months but is there anything new I should be aware of since it was produced?

Mike Hardcastle, GeoMapping Ltd, Somerset

ANSWER: The first thing to say is that the webinar (and the blog lessons also) are still valid and will bring you great success in your seo activities.

I would like however to outline some new points - mainly changes of emphasis you should be aware of :-

1. The first module focuses on Keyphrase analysis and the tools /techniques approaches are all very relevant but we place less emphasis on KEIs nowadays (keyword effectiveness indices).

There's a more accurate method for deciding and prioritising keyphrases outlined in a recent post.

2. The third module focuses on optimising your content. Again all perfectly valid but the search engine spiders are getting cleverer so LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) is an important factor as well as density issues - see this post for more information.

3. The fourth module covers the subject of backlinking. Again still very important but 'google bombing' George Bush no longer works. Does this mean big G has changed it algorithm to prevent 'google bombing'? - some say so, I think not as getting good anchor text in inbound links still makes a big difference (other say it was a 'hand job' where specific bombs were defused for political correctness).

Much more on the value of the Page Rank indicator in assessing backlink quality at a recent post.

I'll make you aware of any other changes you should be aware of as they arise.

A Fresh Look at Keyphrase Selection

2007-03-27T09:51:00.000Z

What's below folks is a little technique for you for deciding on keyphrases you want to go with.

We've discussed this before at length - lots tools and techniques at previous posts( see postings on keyphrase analysis )

However, this area of optimisation continues to be crucially important so here's more useful stuff, below is a step by step process for you but before that lets review some of the basics.

What are the most important factors in deciding on your keyphrases?

There are three you must consider:-

Search volume - how may times a day is your phrase searched for? (get a feel at www.digitalpoint.com)

Relevance - to your business objectives and what sort of searchers you want to capture

Competition

Its this last factor which is the real indicator of how easy/difficult it might be to get good rankings.

The classical way of doing this is to see how many pages are returned when doing a google search, for example on doing a google search for "international relocation" in the top right hand corner of the results google will say 'results 1-10 of about 34300 for international relocation 0.09 seconds'

Its this figure of 34300 we normally take as the competition figure. (dont forget to include the search term in quote marks if you do this so you return just the pages with the exact phrase).

But are these really competitors just because they include the phrase in a page? They could be, but there again many of these pages may not be optimised so its a crude measure. This is the figure use when measuring the KEI (keyword effectiveness index) so confirming why KEI is only a crude measure and should be used as such.

Here's a more accurate way.

Lets stay with the term "international relocation" as our example.

Lets say our first objective is to get into the top 5 positions. This is a good target because we know now that this 'above the scroll' area delivers most visits (around 85%).

Doing a google search for this term will show us our top competitors. We will take the guy in 5th position and examine him to see how difficult/easy it might be to get above him. Below is the snippet in 5th position.

We then look at two main variables which have given him this position.

One is his degree of on page optimisation; the other is his backlink profile.

Much can be gleaned from viewing the snippet above in terms of his on page optimisation. We can see that the title above (the first line of the snippet and very important as I'm sure you will remember) is not particularly well optimised since the term 'international relocation' is not in there.

We can also see that the 'description' (the two lines below the title which are the contents of the description metatag) is not well optimised (again the selected keyphrase is not in there). Finally if we click on the 'cached' (on the last line of the snippet in red) we get:-

This is google showing us the repetitions it has recorded for this page and you can see there are no significant repetitions of the phrase. In fact all we need to do is to repeat the phrase 'international relocation' a few times in our page, include the phrase as the first item in our title tag and bingo we've out optimised him.

So how come this guy does so well in google if his on-page optimisation is so poor? It must be that his off-page optimisation (ie his backlinks) is good.

We can confirm this by looking at his Page Rank.
If you remember you need to download this from http://toolbar.google.com

As we can see (by scrolling over the PageRank indicator above) his PageRank is 4.
If we now check how many backlinks he's got (many ways to do this but going to yahoo and typing in the following is as good as any):-

If you did this you will see he has around 1000 backlinks. Now we know why he ranks so high!

So, if we check our own backlinks we can work out how many and how long it will take to be in a position to compete. As an example lets say we have 600, so we need another 400 (lets say adding 100 per month for 4 months and that would do it.)

This is a rough guide only - it may be that by getting better quality links (more 'contextually relevant' better anchor text and so on.... all stuff we've discussed before) we dont need so many links. Also this is pretty exceptional for a small business, most of you wont need anywhere near so many links. (please note the limitations of Page Rank also - see the last post)

So I hope you can see this is a good way of working out how easy and how long it will take to get good rankings on specific keyphrases. Sometimes its very simple, perhaps just changing some on-page factors, some times more difficult (like the example above).

If you need any more input on this dont hesitate to call. (01928 788100) - always happy to speak with you...

Best Wishes

Jan Klin

What's new in SEO in 2007?

2007-03-07T14:38:00.000Z

The SES (Search Engine Strategies) Conference in February was massive. Almost 1000 companies from all over the world were in London to hear assorted luminaries from the top companies speak - from Matt Cutts the Google celebrity 'engineer' (how many engineers do you know worth over £100m?) to executives from major search companies.

Here are a few impressions/facts I can away with you may find interesting:-

Google has become dominant - you probably knew that, may be what you didnt know is that they now have over 70% market share in the UK, BUT Yahoo have grow faster in the last year (by about 15% but still only around a 10% market share). MSN continues to slide and ASK is now up to a 5% market share. Surely when thinking of optimising our sites we dont need to think much outside of these stars?

Major companies are increasing their spend in SEO - sometimes spending 100's of thousands per annum on getting top rankings. The good news for small businesses is that there are not too many big ones to dominate the page one spots (did you know over 90% of

companies have less than 10 employees?). The other good news for small businesses is that 95% of your competitors dont do SEO (worse still they assume their website designer has done it for them!)

More free tools for SEO are available - even some I didnt know - Have a look at this http://tools.seobook.com /

Every free tool you can think of from from keyword analysis, to backink checkers to sitemap generators and ranking checkers. Including spider simulators (to see what bits of your site spiders can see) to metatag generators - and more - and all for free!

Talking about tools - here's a special one - Google Webmaster Central -one which has recently become available and provides all you need to improve your google position http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Search Engine Spiders are getting cleverer - for example it used to be that 'keyword density' was a major factor - nowadays the spiders are into 'Latent Semantic Indexing' (LSI) meaning that, for example, a page containing 'romance', 'love', 'heart' and 'valentines day' is more likely to be about valentines day that a page stuffed with many repetitions of 'valentines day'.

The experts dont like the Google 'Page Rank' indicator anymore - You know the little green indicator telling you how much google likes your page. In fact one MD said that downloading from http://toolbar.google.com/ was a sackable offence in his search marketing company and referred to it as 'little green fairy dust'.
My own feeling is that its still a reasonable indicator of ranking - we just have to remember it is a function of the number of inbound links mainly and doesn’t take account the 'contextual relevance' of the link (you know, if an incoming link to a page on 'wedding rings' is from a wedding related website and is surrounded by text about best places to buy wedding rings - that is contextual relevance - and its increasingly important for google's ranking)
Neither does it take into account 'anchor text' - in the above example the anchor text (or link text) would be 'wedding rings'.

Social networking sites are important for SEO - The likes of MySpace, Bebo etc where you can communicate with like minded dickheads - as one speaker delicately put it, and 100 million knobheads a day cant all be wrong (I think this was from the same speaker - a guy from IBM I think).
The point here is you can legitimately leave links from these sites but in terms of relevant traffic its only going to attract a very specific (and probably non business) demographic.

Backlink quality is more important than ever - in fact a new area of specialism has developed called link baiting. Essentially its a simple as saying if you have good quality content and can get the message out there people will link to you automatically. Blogs seem to be the favoured way of facilitating this. Also RSS is increasingly used as away of distributing your links automatically. There are some good postings on this subject at SEOMOZ (see, thats how it works!)

Pay per Click – is getting more expensive by the month , and even prohibitive in some sectors like finance, telecoms and gambling. So you really have no alternative but to embrace SEO for long term sustainable search success!

Finally though (and reassuringly!) some things never change - providing you do the following you are well on your way to out competing the masses:-

-Ensure you have well written, keyword rich (but not stuffed - see LSI above) content on very page - say 250 nicely formatted, and well laid out, words.

-Ensure your title tag includes 1-3 of the phrases you want to capture (which also of course appears on the page)

- Ensure these title tags are different on each page as are the other metatags - particularly the keyword and description tags.

-Make sure the keyword tag ONLY includes words that are on the page.

-Make sure the description tag includes the keyphrases in question a couple of times and is a bit salesy (this tag will get listed in the rankings list so will have an input on whether people click through or not )

- Make sure you have good navigation between pages - eg a list of links at the bottom of each page pointing to every other optimised page; a google sitemap is also a good idea especially if you have a database driven site. If there are links from within each page to other pages (with the relevenat link/anchor text) so much the better

- Build quality backlinks - easy to say, difficult to do, but definitely worth it in the long run - cos this is your route to free advertsing on google, so what if it does take twelve months, you're in business for ever arent you?

All this explained in a structured way in the rest of this blog and in my webinar. Also don’t hesitate to call if you need any help – I’m always happy to hear from you. (Jan Klin – 01928 788100)

Q&A Spot: How do I decide which pages to optimise

2007-01-11T14:07:00.000Z

QUESTION: I've generated a list if keyphrases I want to optimise my site for - can you help me work out which pages to use to capture them.

Paula Chalmers, OfficeBuild, Kendal, Cumbria

ANSWER: Here's the best approach - bearing in mind that typically we are choosing one page on which to capture one phrase.

There is a command you can use at google which you need to know about - the SITE command.

If you type in site:www.yourdomain.com in the Google search bar, Google will list all the pages of your website it has in its index (database). Clearly these are the best ones to optimise since they are already indexed by Google.

If you do this and discover that only your homepage is listed then you need to look at your navigation - the easiest solution is to use a Google sitemap (drop me an email and I'll send you a link). Lets assume you dont have this problem and have most of your site indexed.

The next step is to choose one of your target keyphrases and type:-

site:www.yourdomain.com keyphrase

eg site:www.janklin.com internet marketing

If I did this it would list all the pages in the Google index that already include the phrase 'internet marketing'.

Clearly then, since the phrase already exists in this page it becomes a contender for optimisation. (ie changing the density of the phrase and the a associated metadata)

Quite often this will deliver several pages for you so you will have a choice. How to decide is discussed below. If no pages get shown then you will need to develop a new web page to capture this phrase or convert one of your other pages.

Choosing the best page in the list

Assuming you have several options the factors to help you decide which one to choose are:-

Relevance - how relevant is it that this page's content gets rewritten to incorporate the phrase the requisite number of times.

Page Rank - The higher the Page Rank the easier it is to get good rankings

Filename - if the file/page name already includes the keyphrase so much the better.

...and that's it. Just repeat the above for each of your phrases. This is the way that we do it and it works really well. But please call or email if you have any problems. (01928 788100; jan@janklin.com)

SEO in an English Language School

2007-01-11T14:00:00.000Z

Interview between Jan Klin and Srisail Panjugula, IT Manager, of Manchester Academy of English

How would you describe your company and its mission?

Our mission is “To lead in high quality, truly international education whilst being immersed in Manchester’s unique cultural setting.”

Manchester Academy of English is an international English language school. Established in 1991, we welcome more than 50 different nationalities each year. We are accredited by the British Council, a member of EnglishUK and English in the North, a consortium of recognised English Language establishments located in the North of England.

The company was sold in 2005 and the new management has raised the turnover by 20% approx.

How long have you had a website and what is its main purpose?

Since 1998.

The main purpose of our website is to promote our company, our products and our services on a worldwide basis round the clock.

The website is a great tool to generate business for direct bookings (which arrive to us without any commission given to an intermediate). But also a good reference to potential agents which we are targeting for new businesses development.

Does the site work for you? I.e. deliver the benefits you were expecting?

Yes but we need to look at tapping into the potential the Internet offers, e.g., e-learning, virtual classroom, correspondence courses, etc…

What is your online marketing strategy? - Which methods do you use to attract potential customers?

Our online marketing strategy is not strong enough as the correct tools to measure our results have never been developed by the Sales and Marketing department. We need to develop it further. We do sometimes take part in special offers targeting some segmented market (i.e. Asia) or get an exposure through Google.

How does your online activity mesh with your offline marketing?

Our Sales & marketing strategy is not sophisticated as an example, we just start building some marketing intelligence through country reports.
We have a data system “Class” but we don’t maximise its use.

In the future we should eventually:
- measure the correlation between direct enrolment and statistics of hits
- Measure the number of agents using our website/ ask for their results
- Change our approach to communicate with our clients/Use Skype
- Develop intranet for agents

How much business do you do on the web?

Traditionally the direct bookings are 60% of the whole business and 40% agents. However the development of new businesses will be toward new niche markets which will be developing though agents.

What is the single biggest lesson you have learned about your web activities?

Not to neglect it and think that it is a secondary function within the organisation. The web is the “face” of the organisation. We must keep up and take a more dynamic approach.

Can you imagine life without a website?

Yes, only if mankind did not use the Internet.

SEO in a Major Lancashire Legal Practice

2006-10-26T07:12:00.000Z

Interview between Bob Kipling and Jan Klin

How would you describe your company and its mission?

We are a firm of solicitors serving a client base centered around Lancashire & Cumbria. We cover Commercial Property, Corporate law, Commercial and Personal Litigation, Family, Probate and have a specialist Rural Business department. More than 50% of our business is with business clients and a fair amount of that is repeat business.

How long have you had a website and what is its main purpose?

We've had a website for around three years now. This is its second incarnation and we are already looking at a redesign to keep it looking fresh and new. The is essentially a brochure site, with news items to keep clients updated about areas of law that affect our client base, and news of the firm. We have also recently added a password protected Extranet area where we can hold documents such as auction packs, and property information so potential buyers or agents can download them.

Does the site work for you? ie deliver the benefits you were expecting?

I don't suppose initally we expected much from our site. It was set up as a defensive measure, we had to have one because everyone else had one.
There was never any intention to "sell" any services through the site, we have seen various other firms try that and none have really succedded. In Law, the personal service is very important. We did hope that if anyone was looking for a new lawyer, they might see the site, contact us and eventually become a client. As there was no optimisation, we got few visits to the site and it generated little new business.
It was mainly there so people who had seen our web address on stationary, etc could visit, or via one of the links from various directories such as the Law Society directory, Yell.com etc.

What is your online marketing strategy? - which methods do you use to attract potential customers?

We now have an optimised site that appears well up in the rankings for our chosen serach terms. We also utilise PPC advertising on Google as well and have increased the number of links from other sites.
The strategy is to try and get people viewing our site

How does your online activity mesh with your offline marketing?

What we are starting to see now is an increased number of new clients who have initally viewed our site and then made an appointment to see us, turning into clients

How do you see the future regarding your online activity?

Unless there is a significant change in the legal lanscape, then I feel our website will continue as a non transactional presence. The firm is growing rapidly and is in the process of merging with another sizeable firm in Preston and East Lancashire, hence the present redisign to match our new corporate branding.

What is the single biggest lesson you have learned about your web activities?

If you don't get your website optimised, its invisible. Prior to optimising our site I searched under one of our chosen phrases. I got down to page 50 on Google and we still hadn't appeared. With the right tags in place we now have most of our chosen phrases on the first page, some in the top 3. It takes some thinking about and some work but if you want your site to be seen, its worth it.The stats package we now use use shows us how many hits per day and which pages are viewed so it makes it easy then to see whats going on.

Can you imagine life without a website?
I can when I've got updates to make and precious little time to do it!. In truth the website is an excellent tool for what we want and we are starting to see new business as a result of it. I certainally wouldnt want to be without it now.

Thanks Bob - Napthens Solicitors Preston

How long does it really take to get number one on Google?

2006-09-27T10:00:00.000Z

This is a question I get asked a lot….and the short answer is…’it depends’. However it is relatively easy to work out, and if you want me to work it out for you get in touch and I’d be happy to do a little analysis and give you an idea.

There are some good examples below but the two main variables are:-

- The keyphrase you choose and the level of competition for it
- Where you are starting from – ie your existing reputation with Google (and as you know Page Rank is a good indicator of this.)

Here’s a company that took two weeks to get there. www.iobuild.co.uk. For their chosen keyphrases ‘garden office ’ and 'garden offices ’ they were on the second page of Google and getting no enquiries, and although these are quite competitive phases, because of their existing page rank ( 4 and 5 for several pages) it was a simple matter of optimizing one page and within a couple of weeks they are number one and two on google. This was the time it took the google spider to revisit after the page had been optimised. Now of course they get lots of enquiries.

Hi Jan, - We have jumped to position two on google for 'garden offices' So well done, and thank you! Kind Regards ,Lynn Fotheringham, InsideOut Buildings Ltd.

Here’s a different example – www.ampwire.co.uk have a relatively new website and therefore low page rank. However because their main competitors have not optimised for the phrases they chose – ‘wire mesh radiators ’, ‘wire mesh grilles ’ to name but two. They have a number one and a number three ranking respectively (out of 350,000 and 750,000 competing pages). This was achieved with a couple of weeks of the website going live despite a Page Rank of zero on the optimised pages! So, if your competitors don’t optimise (and most don’t) you’ll get rankings very quickly and business as a result.

Jan , I am over the moon with the results from the site, I have seen a significant increase in enquiries generated via the internet, thank you. Pam Wilson, Managing Director, Ampwire.co.uk

This company – www.lantex.co.uk – were number one on google on ‘textile manufacturing company ’ within days of their site going live (out of 11,400,000 competing pages!). Although a brand new site was produced we preserved their existing page rank (5) by keeping the filenames the same. This, and the little serious competition enabled good ranking to be achieved very quickly.

Hi Jan ....We have had approx 6 new clients since web page posted - great stuff. One
from USA today! Regards David
David Hardman, Chairman, Lantex Manufacturing Company Ltd

A similar story with www.heskins.com – new website, preserved page rank, number one rankings on ‘anti slip tape ’ and ‘non slip tape ’ despite over 15,000,000 competing pages. They’re exceptionally busy generating masses of business from all over the world.

Jan, that really is good! Best regards,Larry
Larry Longton, Managing Director, www.Heskins.com

….A different example from a different type of business. www.manchesteracupuncture.co.uk does what it says on the tin. In this case it took a bit longer (about 3 months) because of their low page rank and reasonable level of competition (1/2 million competing pages for ‘manchester acupuncturist ’)

Hi Jan,
Thanks for the report, I am very pleased.
Just to let you know I have such a great response to the web site since you have been optimising it, there is very little other advertising that I need do.
It has been great to be able just to let you get on with it with confidence.
With best wishes. Abbie Richardson, www.manchesteracupuncture.co.uk

As you can see most of my clients send their thanks and appreciation (and some send me cash as well!)

So, give me a call if you want me to estimate how long it will take for your company to start getting serious business through your website.

jan@janklin.com
www.janklin.com
07946 513521

Success in Search Marketing - www.vinylexchange.co.uk

2006-08-21T15:01:00.000Z

Interview between Jo Bindley MD of Vinyl Exchange and Jan Klin

How would you describe your company and its mission?

Vinyl Exchange is a second-hand record, CD and memorabilia business, established in 1988, with 2 shops in central Manchester. We buy, sell and exchange items from the '50s to the present day. We are open 7 days a week and currently employ 24 members of staff, each with their own area of expert knowledge. In a world where recent technological advances can pose a threat to our business (downloading, eBay leading to less use of middlemen such as ourselves), we are aiming to take advantage of the potential benefits of these same changes (selling to a global clientele online through our website, using eBay ourselves etc).

How long have you had a website and what is its main purpose?

Our website started in 1998, and underwent a major revamp to its present bespoke form in August 2004. We list our rarer and more interesting stock online, and customers are able to buy online through a secure shopping cart system. The website is constantly live, and automatically updates as items sell.

Does the site work for you? ie deliver the benefits you were expecting?

Yes it works well, and levels of sales continue to increase. The challenge for us, as our retail shops become quieter, is to increase our online selling. The downside of this method of selling for us is that it is more labour-intensive to list and display items with full descriptions and scans than in the old days when we could stick a sleeve out in a record-rack for a customer to browse at his leisure.

What is your online marketing strategy? - which methods do you use to attract potential customers?

We sell on eBay and Amazon and use this to introduce customers to us and direct traffic to our site. We selectively advertise on a popular music discography website (www.discogs.com). Not to mention your site optimisation and search engine work which is very successful for us!

How does your online activity mesh with your offline marketing?

We push the website's existence via all our print advertising, whether in magazines, directories, our carrier bags and signage in the shop. Only a small proportion of our stock online is currently available to customers coming into the shops (though we are aiming to expand this proportion significantly in the coming months), so it's most important that our regular customers are aware of our online store.

And vice versa, we encourage online customers to visit us should they be in Manchester.

How much business do you do on the web?

Online sales have at least doubled over the last 2 years, and now form approximately 20% of our total turnover. As shopping habits continue to change, we will be aiming to increase this to 40% over the next 2 years. This may, in the long-term, result in our reducing our high street presence, with attendant savings in rent, rates and maintenance costs.

How do you see the future regarding your online activity?

We need to increase the percentage of our stock that is simultaneously available online and in our shops to take advantage of the global clientele still interested in collecting music in its physical formats. The number of our local customers will fall over the coming years as younger generations will be accessing music solely in digital format through their computers and MP3 players. We are developing our EPOS system to enable this.

The website will need to be maintained and improved, so that we stay abreast of customer expectations when they're shopping online. For example, we hope to be introducing soundclips of many of the items, so that customers can listen to tunes prior to purchase. And any technological advances which speed up the data entry process need to be incorporated.

What is the single biggest lesson you have learned about your web activities?

That we need to apply the same high standards of customer care to online shopping as in our high street shops. Putting ourselves in the shoes of the customer and trying to provide what they might be pleased with, rather than what is technically most convenient for us is key.

That running an online presence is not necessarily labour-saving.

That you need to have high standards in your equipment and staff at every stage of the online selling process, e.g. it's no use having a fantastic website if the mail-order department is under-staffed and overwhelmed, or having a great database system but an incredibly slow scanner, which massively slows the data entry process.

Can you imagine life without a website?

Not now. For anyone in our line of business, the future would be bleak indeed!

Thanks Jo - Anything else you want to add?

You can find us (and many thousands of fascinating items) at www.vinylexchange.co.uk! where you can get rare cds, promo cds and rare dance vinyl.

Success in Search Marketing - www.cloggs.co.uk

2006-07-03T11:13:00.000Z

Interview between Nick Thomas MD of Cloggs and Jan Klin

How would you describe your company and its mission?

Cloggs.co.uk is an online retailer specialising in fashion footwear, jeans, denimwear. The website evolved out of a locally-successful independent retail store based in Birmingham. After the first website went up, we immediately uncovered people willing to search for and buy our brand name fashions through the internet. From a handful of weekly orders, we now handle many thousands of monthly orders.

Our mission is to provide a first-class alternative sales channel for our brand-focussed customers at the forefront of ‘Etailing’ technology, supported by the highest standards of fulfilment and customer service.

How long have you had a website and what is its main purpose?

Our first website was created in 1999. It was hard-coded with an out-of-the-box shopping basket and complimented an original small-scale mail order operation. We showed to ourselves fairly quickly that there was a market for interactive online fashion mail order and that we were in a position to service that market. By the end of 2002 we began to properly promote the site and expand the offer significantly, causing us to require a much more sophisticated website infrastructure and backend administration platform. This allowed us to manage our growth and continue to provide a high quality of service to existing and new customers. The main purpose is simply to provide a competitive online sales channel for the products we sell.

Does the site work for you? ie deliver the benefits you were expecting?

Our current choice of platform works in the sense that we are able to take a large volume of orders in a scalable way and is fairly robust from an operational perspective. However, the technology never seems to be entirely free of glitches or errors that have varying degrees of knock-on effects to the business. We have to take a pragmatic approach to this though – as long as you can step back and look at a business that works for our customers, our staff and commercially, that is the main thing. I think that it is very hard to find a perfect technology partner or solution that is as flexible as you need it to be commercially and does everything you would need it to without problems.

So, ‘yes’ it ‘delivers’ pragmatically speaking and ‘no’ it doesn’t always in a strictly commercial sense.

What is your online marketing strategy? - which methods do you use to attract potential customers?

We first and foremost try to encourage repeat business. That means delivering a valuable service to the customer that beats alternative sales channels, fulfilling orders quickly and providing excellent after-sales service, amongst other things. It is very easy to gain business through the internet in the short-term but if you can’t meet customer expectations, the marketing costs of gaining those first-time customers are too great to be profitable. Our online marketing costs can only be justified if a high proportion of customers liked their experience enough to come back and buy from us again.

We have a number of partnerships to support traffic to the website – pay-per-click campaigns, affiliates, shopping channel agreements. These diversify dependence on any one particular source of traffic but are very costly to justify in simple sales terms; you have to look at it as investment in a customer database. Because of this, we are focussing most attention at the moment on our position in natural searches which deliver free traffic.

How does your online activity mesh with your offline marketing?

Our offline marketing consists only of communicating with existing customers through short-run pamphlets promoting particular lines and encouraging them to remember who we are and to come back again at some point. Offline advertising is something we are yet to explore – as a small independent business it would be hard to justify the expense when the returns may take some time to materialise and may also be intangible.

The attractiveness of online marketing is that returns are very visible in real time and you can just work with the numbers to justify or discontinue any expense.

How much business do you do on the web?

About 65% of our business is now online, but rapid growth is pushing that figure higher all the time. It is hard to see us being a pure-play online business because our brands like to work with bricks-and-mortar businesses and there will always be customers who won’t buy footwear and clothing online. Sales online do not always reflect shop sales either – certain lines do better in our store than they do online and vice versa. They will always be complimentary operations for us, although online success may now provide the opportunity to expand the offline business.

How do you see the future regarding your online activity?

We want to continue to provide a service that is valuable to customers and will push the growth of that business as far as we can take it. We want to be at the forefront of the technology because customers are more and more demanding and it is so easy for them to shop elsewhere – we have to provide the best all-round experience available. People have been saying it for years and we are still only just seeing the beginning, but the internet represents the future of shopping and an online component will be almost unavoidable for retail businesses in the future.

What is the single biggest lesson you have learned about your web activities?

Concentrate on two key working relationships. Firstly, focus on building a strong partnership with a reliable technology partner who understands the commercial requirements and can deliver upon them. Secondly, find an effective, affordable online marketing partner and/or strategy which concentrates on highly qualified traffic. Don't be so concerned with cost and would only ever select partners with proven track records, provide excellent references and already handle businesses bigger than your own.

Can you imagine life without a website?

Yes, it would be lot less stress, I could being involved with technological issues on a daily basis and the world would be simpler. But it would be commercially disastrous for us.

Anything else you want to add?

There is no one single solution or model for everyone else to copy. The things I’ve described above apply to our experience and has worked for us but it may not be relevant for lots of businesses. A pragmatic approach is the key – if it works, keep doing more of it; if it doesn’t stop doing it. Accept that there will always be flaws and work around them.

Cloggs handle many major brands including Levi Jeans, Merrell Shoes, Oakley Sunglasses and many others...

Success in Search Marketing - ASG Services Ltd

2006-05-15T08:20:00.000Z

Interview between Tony Gresty, Managing Director of ASG Services and Jan Klin

How would you describe your company and its mission?

ASG Services is a service based company that manufactures and installs location labels, signs and line marking solutions to the materials handling industry.

We supply to mainly large distribution companies as well as directly into the materials handling industry, racking manufacturers and IT providers.

We have offices in Warrington and Atlanta, Georgia. Where we employ approx 26 people comprising production, installation, sales and support staff.

Our mission is to provide our customers with the most appropriate solution available that represents the optimum value to the client.

How long have you had a website and what is its main purpose?

Our initial web site went on line approx 8 years ago now and was aimed at supporting our sales team as a reference site to direct potential customers too.

Our next site was quite technical with several down loadable data sheets and information about or products. (www.asgservices.co.uk)

Then we started to look at e commerce as a way of generating sales enquiries and this is when we started discussions with you about how to completely shift the focus of the site towards tangible returns.

This subsequently involved a complete redesign of the site so that it was as completely search engine optimised as possible.

Does the site work for you? ie deliver the benefits you were expecting?

When you mentioned in a meeting that search engine optimisation could easily add in excess of £200,000 per annum to most small companies turnover I was quite sceptical.

After getting embarrassed about my current site when you informed me of all it’s short comings we put down an action plan to go forward.

Search engine optimisation has added significant benefits to the company.

Once we added pay per click advertising and blogs etc I can safely say that over £200,000 has been achieved already and we are changing our business strategy and products because of it.

What is your online marketing strategy? - which methods do you use to attract potential customers?

Our online marketing structure is very direct. We had done very little traditional marketing other than through our sales team. Subsequently most of our work came from within the industry.

Now we produce more quotes every month from sales team of fewer people and subsequent cost. That means we have been able to employ a full time marketing manager to manage not only E commerce but also other marketing activities that we weren’t doing before such as press releases etc.

It remains to be seen how more direct work will affect our average order value within our business but it has certainly reduced the cost per quote by a significant margin.

How does your online activity mesh with your offline marketing?

Online marketing is a great way of providing the sales team with direct opportunities to quote customers.

These customers need to be responded to very quickly as compared with our other routes to market such as referrals etc. We keep a very tight control on branding but this is done not only by our marketing manager but also by our designers that are constantly able to offer fresh materials within the same brand image.

This is vital as keeping a tight brand image adds value to customers perception of the company.

Other minimal forms of marketing such as advertising within the trade press and exhibitions are done on a very minimal budget and on the same basis of our Web culture. i.e.to provide the maximum amount of active sales leads for the minimum amount of spend.

I believe within marketing circles brand awareness marketing such as exhibitions is called “Willie waving!”. I am of the opinion that markets are changing and with customers being less loyal if we aren’t constantly focused on lead generation we may in future not have a Willie to wave.

How much business do you do on the web?

I suspect we now generate approx two – three leads per day from web based activities. While many of these are for small order values of just a few hundred pounds we have received massive enquiries for both the UK and USA market which have directly lead to contracts. We have had particular success around some of our most important keyphrases - Floor Marking Systems and Warehouse Rack Labels

Some the 42% sales growth we achieved last year was from an improved UK materials handling industry market but it was by no means all of it. We have been able to offer more products and services to a larger customer and industry base as a means of our web based activities.

How do you see the future regarding your online activity?

I have changed my opinion of e commerce completely over the past 18 months. I now view search engine based marketing as a priority in our marketing activities and don’t see how that we change in the foreseeable future. I am conscious that as other businesses look at how to capitalise on search engines as a way of generating business that this may impact on the cost of pay per click advertising but feel more than confident that our generic search engine results will continue to strengthen and reduce the opportunity for competitors to compete.

On top of that I believe that with the support of SEO knowledge gained from you and also constant detailed reviews of how search engines operate I am sure we will be able to stay ahead of our competition in this field as well.

What is the single biggest lesson you have learned about your web activities?

Ignoring the bigger picture on e commerce could have cost us the lead on our competitors in the UK. Spending a few months getting this section of your marketing correct can give very big returns to your sales figures.

Can you imagine life without a website?

Life without the web would be a lot slower like it was in the good old days when you could drive to an appointment and enjoy the drive as we didn’t have mobile phones either!

Anything else you want to add?

The web tools available to provide essential marketing information, that in traditional marketing are difficult and costly to find, make making web based decisions easier to make.

Having an open mind to new ideas in this as well as other fields should provide larger benefits to companies than the cost of implementation.

Thanks Tony and happy willie waving

What does it take to get no 1 on Google?....About 60 Minutes

2006-04-17T15:29:00.000Z

Jan's Webinar - An Online Training Course to get you Top Rankings and More Business

Businesses have had their sales transformed by getting high rankings on search engines, here's your opportunity to do the same.

Who is the Webinar for?

Its for you if....

- You want to get new profitable business through the web
- You are happy to commit some time to learning the 'best practice' process and the latest web based tools and techniques.

What is a 'Webinar'?

An online presentation delivered as it would be in a training environment - see a sample here ... Webinar Sample

What does this webinar comprise?

5 x 12 minute presentations covering the following:-

Module 1 - Introduction & Finding Keyphrases
Module 2 - Auditing Your Site & Advanced Keyphrase Analysis
Module 3 - Optimising Our Web Pages
Module 4 - Developing Backlinks & Using Directories
Module 5 - Monitoring Our Performance & Fine Tuning

The modules cover all the latest web based tools and techniques to DIY your web optimisation to get you high rankings.

Free tools will be referenced for you in each of the modules.

Examples are shown so you know exactly what to do at each stage of the process.

You'll be expected to do some work between each module applying what you have learned to your own web site.

How much does it cost?

Its free if you are a subscriber to Jan Klin's (free) online newsletter (drop me an email jan@janklin.com putting SUBSCRIBE in the subject box and I'll subscribe you).

Otherwise it costs £195 plus vat (If you dont increase your sales twenty fold you'll get your money back!)

Are there any additional benefits to paying for the webinar?

Yes

1. You'll get unlimited access to all the modules right away (rather than one per month)

2. You'll get a comprehensive course 'workbook' to accompany the programme which will allow you to capture all your actions in a structured way and act as a complete blueprint for your optimisation.

- The workbook covers all the slides presented, detailed instructions on what to do and templates and checklist to capture your actions

- Also provided is an Excel spreadsheet on which to conduct your keyphrase analysis which automatically calulates KEIs.

- Details of some futher tools, case studies, strategies and techniques to out compete the fiercest competitors.

Please email me jan@janklin.com if you wish to order or if you need more information or call - 01928 788100.

I look forward to helping your succeed

Q&A Spot: Bringing it all Together

2006-03-17T15:20:00.001Z

Question:

I got to know of this blog only a few months ago. Is there an easy way of guiding me through the whole process rather than having to go back to the 'archive' and 'previous' for all the early lessons?
Susan Marks, Property Consulting Ltd, Grantham

Answer:

I've listed all the lessons below, with hyperlinks, in the correct order for you so you can use this to guide yourself through the process in a logical fashion.

This is where the process to successful SEO is outlined, essentially the stages we will follow to optimise our site:
http://janaklin.blogspot.com/2005/03/search-engine-optimisation-seo-diy.html

Lesson 1 is about auditing, checking on ‘where you are now’ with your important keywords:
http://janaklin.blogspot.com/2005/03/lesson-1-understanding-how-you.html

Lesson 2 is more on auditing – checking whether there are any issues preventing good rankings:
http://janaklin.blogspot.com/2005/05/lesson-2-identifying-roadblocks-to-seo.html

Lessons 3 and 5 are about the all important finding of effective keyphrases (lesson 4 is about ‘pay per click’)
http://janaklin.blogspot.com/2005/06/lesson-3finding-keyphrases-to.html

http://janaklin.blogspot.com/2005/08/lesson-5-better-keywords-will-bring.html

Lesson 6 is about structuring the TITLE tag – the most important metadata in your site as far as SEO is concerned:
http://janaklin.blogspot.com/2005/09/lesson-6-hot-title-tags-for-no-1.html

Lesson 7 is about structuring your visible content and other important metatags
http://janaklin.blogspot.com/2005/10/lesson-7-optimising-on-page-factors.html

Lessons 8,9 (and part of 10) are about the important process of Link Building
http://janaklin.blogspot.com/2005/11/lesson-8develop-backlinks-to-bury.html

http://janaklin.blogspot.com/2006/01/lesson-9-lets-get-linked.html

Lesson 10 covers monitoring, measuring and improving you SEO:
http://janaklin.blogspot.com/2006/03/lesson-10-end-of-road-measure-and.html

Lesson 10: The End of the Road: Measure and Modify

2006-03-17T15:20:00.000Z

This is the last lesson in our series and from next month the newsletter will take a different (but still very interesting) stance to help you improve your search marketing, but more about that next time.

You've probably had enough of me talking about link building so I promise this is the last input on the subject, but it will complete a very important topic.

I also want to introduce you to a (very low cost) resource you may wish to use to do this work for you and then talk about some measurement tools so you can keep track of your search marketing activities. But first....

The Last Word On Link Building

It really is, and for those of you who want oodles more detailed information on the subject there's a great and comprehensive article called 131 Legitimate Link Building Strategies at http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/2160301.

It covers off how to put together a courteous letter to potential link partners, different strategies and sources of links and much more. If you dont want to read it here's a shorter version of ways to get more links:-

1. Reciprocal Linking - your business partners, customers, suppliers, websites with complementary services - you know, I'll give you one if you give me one. Not as good as one way links but almost if the content is relevant

2. Set up your own blog (like this one) and leave a link to your site. Also comment on other blogs and leave a link (careful though, you intent needs to be sincere - not just a device to get a link). There's more information on this at http://janaklin.blogspot.com/2005/05/qa-spotto-blog-or-not-to-blogse.html

3.Participate in newsgoups and drop your link - http://groups.google.com/

4. Search with one of your more important keyphrases - who's at number on in the list? Of course its your top online competitor. Check out his backlinks using one of the tools you have leaned about (Marketleap, Linkpopularity.com, Linkdomain at Yahoo). Maybe you should get some of the same links as him?

5. As 4, but try to find some not directly competitive sites in the top rankings and maybe approach them for a link.

6. Local trade organisations you may be a member of (eg your local chamber of commerce, Federation of Small Business etc)

7. Sites with geographically local content - local city council site, business link, tourist board etc

8. Professional bodies you may be affiliated to - Chartered Institute of Marketing, Institute of Directors, Fellowship of worshipful stomemasones etc

9. Set up an affiliate scheme. NB Make sure you set up your own scheme (for example My Affiliate Programme from www.kowabunga.com) rather than using an intermediary like Commission Junction, so you own the link not the intermediary.

A Useful Resource

If you want to outsource this the of course you can. The going rate for link building is around £12-£15 per link if you do this, however, here's an interesting option.

www.elance.com is an online marketplace for web related services. Here you can post your requirement and get guys form all over the world bidding for your business. You'll get some guy from India offering to do your link building for, lets say, a very competitive price. As little as £3 per link.

The suppliers on elance are all star rated by people who have used them so you can get a sense of the quality they offer. I've used the site a few times with good results. The trick here is make sure your specification is detailed enough. You can see what other people have specified as a guide but please get in touch with me if you want input and I'll share with you the spec I used for link building.

Measure and Modify

You'll need two essential tools to monitor your search marketing effectively. One’s a ranking checker so you can check your progress with the keyphrases you have chosen with the search engines you want good rankings in. The other is a graphically oriented web stats tool. The good news is you can get good free tools for both of these needs.

Ranking Checker

Marketleap can do this for you. If you want something a bit more automatic look at the tools I've mentioned previously at http://janaklin.blogspot.com/2006/01/qa-spot-good-tracking-tools.html.If you want something completely automatic use what I use - Internet Business Promoter from www.alexa.com.
I paid for my version (which does an awful lot more than rank checking) however it does rank checking very well and you can download a free version.

You can feed in the keyphrases you are interested in, tick off the search engines you want to check, and IBP will check and report back on your positions by keyphrase for each search engine.

If you check regularly and do the things I’ve suggested you will see a gradual (sometimes sudden) improvement in rankings and of course ultimately more business.

Web Stats Tool.

There are many – a good free one is www.statcounter.com. A more comprehensive one is www.dataplain.com and even more comprehensive is www.deepmetrix.com. The last two you’ll need to pay for so try statcounter it will probably be all you need, at least in the early stages.

What do you need to monitor?

At the very least you’ll want to display nice graphs of your monthly, or weekly, visitors so you can see the upward trend.
You’ll also want to see which search terms and which search engines are bringing you visitors.

Another useful thing to measure is your ‘keyphrase market share’. For example you could find out on the keyword assistant at Yahoo how many searches per month the phrase ‘designer giftware’ generates (don’t forget to multiply by 2.2 to take account of google). Lets say its 1000. You webstats tool will tell you how many click throughs you get for this phrase. Lets say its 10. Work out the percentage – in this case its 1% - so there’s lots of room for improvement. If its 20% maybe you’re as optimised as you can get.

Actually there’s no limit to what you can measure and how this may hone your activities.

Remember one other thing about search marketing which is different from most other forms of marketing is that when people arrive at your website having searched for a relevant phrase – you have a qualified prospect. If you sell ‘Sony Vaoi z1sp laptops’ and someone types in that phrase and lands on your site you have a high possibility of converting the visitor to a sale. This again points to the all important keyphrase selection stage.

Anyway best wishes with it and let me know how successful you are and call if you need help (Jan Klin on 01928 788100: jan@janklin.com: www.janklin.com)

Q&A Spot: Good Tracking Tools

2006-01-22T10:21:00.000Z

Question: Is there an easy way of checking on a daily basis how I rank with specific keywords? I do this manually at the moment by typing some keywords into each major search engine but its time consuming.
Anita Baldrick, Web4U, Halifax

Answer:
Try this http://www.checkrankings.com
Its free, and it allows you to check up to 10 keywords daily with the major search engines. Better still it graphs out you results so you can visually see your trends over a period of time.

Another one is http://www.prsearch.net, this tools focuses only on Google but allows for the checking of 15 keyphrases and displays the results in an easy to see format.

Here's some other interseting tools you may also find useful:

Robots.txt and tags

You can restrict what search engine spiders see at your site, which links they follow etc. using the Robots.txt file and the robots metatags. This is useful if there are content pages you dont want to be indexed - Your 'contact us' page for example, or pages you have dedicated to specific customers.

There's a whole host of useful tools and examples at http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/robotcheck.cgi

Google Mashups

...is the term given to the overlaying of data onto Google Maps. Many of you will have come across google earth and google maps. An interesting application is to look at a map of where your web visitors come from. All you need to do is copy a bit of javascript to your site and away you go; get it at http://www.gvisit.com

Want to track and map bird migrations, solar eclipses, pubs in London? - whatever you want to see graphically on a google map probably someone has already done it - see http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com

Link Building

A couple of tools related to this months topic..

Try - http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html
A fascinating tool which allows you to see graphically how Google sees you in relation to similar sites.

...and another useful link tracking tool - http://www.linkhounds.com/link-harvester/backlinks.php

Lesson 9: Let's get linked!

2006-01-21T16:12:00.000Z

Last time we discussed the importance of developing backlinks and some associated factors to be aware of, like anchor text, Page Rank and relevance. This time I want to provide you with an approach and a process to enable you to conduct link building in a structured way to out rank your competitors.

We will also kick start the process this time by concentrating on web directories - one of the most important sources for backlinks to your site. Next time, and in subsequent postings, I will provide you with information on the myriads of different sources for developing backlinks.

The approach I want to suggest to you is as follows:-

1. Estimating the number of links you need to outlink your major online competitors

2. Produce a list of sources for these links

3. Workout and execute a plan of activity to achieve this over a period of time.
(The time period I will suggest is 4 months - but you may wish to vary this up or down depending on the number you need and the time you have available)

Link building is of course an ongoing process so I hope you'll continue to develop links after the four month period, however, we all need to set targets with SMART objectives so we can achieve some good short term success to fire us up. I'm sure many of you are familiar with SMART objectives (Specific; Measurable; Achievable; Realistic and Timebound.)

I have found that spending around 1.5 hours per week over a period of 4 months has a major impact for most small businesses. The other thing to be aware of is that search engines prefer a gradual, rather than sudden, build up of links. I'll give you lots of other link sources next time so you can add to your programme after the four months.

What I have found useful as a starting point is to construct an Excell spreadsheet in which to record the sites you want links from along with other useful information. Such a document might include columns for the site/directory name; the url; the Page Rank; free/paid for; link status etc - I'm sure you can think of other useful columns also.

In fact I have one already set up which references around 300 directories. If you want a copy of this send me an email (Jan@janklin.com) put DIRECTORIES in the subject box and I'll send it to you.

1. ESTIMATING THE NUMBER OF LINKS YOU NEED

The starting point is to select a major keyphrase you want top rankings on and search for it in Google.

The resulting list will be of course your major online competitors.

Choose the one you consider to be your nearest and most relevant competitor. It may be the guy in position one; don’t go below position five.

Next, determine how many links he has. You can use any of the tools I told you about last time or simply go to Yayoo.com and type:-

Linkdomain:www.competitor.co.uk -site:www.competitor.com

The number of his links (excluding internal links) will appear in the top right and look like this:-

Results 1 - 10 of about 120 for linkdomain:www.competitor.co.uk - 0.45 sec. (About this page)

You’ll need to store this number somewhere, ideally in your spreadsheet if you set one up. Divide it by 16 to give you the number of links per week you’ll need to generate – assuming you are working to a 4 month time plan.

2. GENERATING YOUR LIST OF DIRECTORY LINKS

As you generate this list you may wish to record them in your spreadsheet along with relevant associated information – Page Rank, How to register (look for ‘add url’, ‘Join Directory’, ‘Add Link’ or whatever the method is) and any other relevant information. Also you will need to prioritise them. This may be based on Page Rank, whether or not you can add anchor text and relevance. You could have a column of your spreadsheet to record the relative importance of the directory.

You could record them and add them later, or of course you may wish to link as you find them.

How to generate them?

1. As already mentioned I’ve got a general list of 300 or so you are welcome to.

2. Simply by doing a google search on keywords relevant to you will generate some directories. For example typing in ‘wedding’ or ‘hotels’ will generate a hit list which will include oodles of wedding and hotel directories.

3. You may wish to be more specific by searching for, for example ‘electrical engineering directories’, ‘business directories’, ‘legal directories’, ‘ecommerce directories’ etc focusing on the industry sector and business type relevant to you.

4. You can use one of the standard directories , like the Google Directory,( http://directory.google.com/) and click on "Reference” then click on "Directories" then select the “categories” most relevant to your site.

5. If you go to http://www.isedb.com/html/Web_Directories/Specialty_Directories/ you will find a directory of topic specific directories.

6. http://www.incominglinks.com/ is another good source of useful directories organized by category

The above will allow you to identify as many directories as you can manage, but one more thing before we move on.

The Yahoo directory and DMOZ are two really important ones (Page Rank of 9 and 8 respectively). Unfortunately you will have to pay around £200 to get listed in the Yahoo directory but it really is worth it. Also DMOZ (www.dmoz.org) is managed by volunteer ‘web republicans’ who give their time for free and who vet every site submitted. Because of this it can take 3-9 months to get listed but its well worth the effort. DMOZ is the largest free directory on the web and is the input source to all the major search engines including Google.

3. YOUR ACTIVITY PLAN

We’ve covered this already really. But this is just a matter of setting some time aside each week. (say 1-2 hours) to find the directories and create the link. You should easily be able to add 20-30 links per week and over a few months this will build quickly to outlink your competitors.

Be aware that every time you add a link you are not only increasing your search engine rankings but increasing your exposure to potential customers, and it really works.

Since spending a couple of months link building ASG Services (www.asgservices.co.uk) are now number one on Google for several phrases including ‘warehouse rack labels’.

Just before Christmas their delighted MD called me whilst travelling to London to pick up a £90k order. Needless to say the enquiry came from the web and that was why he called. My reward was a delightful bottle of expensive red wine. So, when you start getting large orders as a result of your search engine rankings (which you surely will if you follow my advice) you may feel compelled to demonstrate your appreciation in a similar way.

If this is the case please don't think you need to wait 'till next Christmas since I've discoverd the delights of drinking all year round.

Best wishes for great success in 2006

Lesson 8:Develop Backlinks to Bury the Competition

2005-11-21T15:58:00.002Z

So, I've shown you how to generate the best keyphrases, how to identify spidering issues, how to structure your metadata and how to write visible keyphrase rich copy -is that it? Will that get me top rankings?

Quite often, but it depends on how competitive your online competitors are. If they do all the things you do you'll need to out link them to out rank them.

Now before you get fazed by this backlinking process, let me assure you it is quite straightforward if you do it in a controlled and structured way). In fact I'm going to spoonfeed you and starting next time I'm going to guide you through a process, such that over a period of a few months you will out rank your competitors. But for the moment lets see why this is so important. Also I'm going to show you some great tools for checking your current links ( and your competitor’s links). Remember also, you are not trying to outlink Amazon, just your nearest competitors - which is a doddle by comparison.

Backlinking - What is it and Why is it Important?

In short, its just getting your url on other websites such that people will click the link and end up on your site. Not a bad thing in itself as this will lead to more traffic and sales, in fact if you are on a major directory, like Yell, or Applegate or Kellys - to name but three - people are quite often more likely to find you that way than directly finding your site. (I'll show you how to find the important directories for your site later).

However its more important than that, we have a double whammy affect here because the more backlinks you have (sometimes referred to as 'inbound links') the more important you are in the search engines eyes and the higher up the rankings you go.

Its obvious really if you think about it, this is the basis of conventional offline networking - the more authoratitive you are in a subject, the more likely you are to get other people in your network to make referrals to you. Its the same with websites and this was basis of Google's grounbreaking algorithm and why they generate such relevant results.

All Links are not Created Equal

This is also obvious I believe - getting a link from your mum's site is not as important as getting a link from the BBC site, so when we start the structured process we will prioritise the sites we want links from. In fact there are several important factors relating to the quality of links you should be aware of:-

1. The more authoratitive the site you are getting the link from the better (We have a rough way of measuring this which we call Page Rank - more about this later)

2. The more relevant the interlinked sites the better - clearly if you are a hotel, getting a link from a travel directory is more important than a link from the local lingerie shop.

3. The better structured your link is the better.

This last point is crucial - because not many people know about it its a sure fire way of going one better than your competitors. Quite often just restructuring some of your existing links will give an immediate boost to your rankings.

Essentially what we mean by this is including the keyphrase your page is optimised for in the link text of the incoming link. For example if the keyphrase in question is 'crunchy widgets' then this phrase should be included in the inbound link text (sometimes referred to as 'anchor text'.)

the way the link would appear in the code in the external site ( the one linking to you) would be as follows:-
href="http://www.domain.com">Crunchy Widgets

All that would appear on the external site would be the phrase 'Crunchy Widgets' and clicking on it would hyperlink to your site.

You don't always have control over the way people will link to you but where you do, for example your suppliers and customers websites, you should send them details of the link text you want them to use.

Incidentally this is the basis of 'Google Bombing'. Some guy at a conference asked the audience (about 500 of them) to put a link from their site to George Bush's site and include 'dumb idiot' as the anchor text. Subsequent Google searches for 'dumb idiot' listed George's site in number one spot, thus showing the power of structured backlinking.

We can measure the importance of a site through the Page Rank (PR). PR is a number Google assigns to every web page out there as a measure of its importance ( from 0 to 10). For example the BBC News site has a PR of 9, most small businesses are anywhere between 0-6. Clearly the higher the PR of the site linking to you the better.

How do you measure Page Rank? Go to http://toolbar.google.com/ and download the Toolbar - it takes minutes and will give you the PR of every site you visit. (Incidentally there are other goodies to be had with this tool including an effective 'pop up' blocker)

Be careful about getting links from sites with a PR of zero. Sometimes this means the site has been penalized and this could have a negative impact on your rankings.

Some Useful Web Tools to help with your Linking

Here are some tools to help you understand your own link performance and, importantly, your online competitors. A good strategy is to look at your competitors links and use this as the benchmark for your own efforts. This is the strategy I’ll guide you through next time.

www.linkpopularity.com is a reasonable way to estimate your backlinks. Just go to their site, type in your url and your links will be displayed. You will see that it shows you links identified by different search engines. The reason for this is that in order for a link to be recognized by, for example, Google, the Google spider needs to have spidered both interlinked pages – yours and the external page linking to you. Clearly this will not always have been the case and this is one reason why different engines report different links.

This will show your internal pages linked as well as external links. Also Google only shows some of the links.

There is a command you can use at Google to find the links. At the search box type in links: yourdomain.com and you’ll get them listed. NOTE links is plural, there is a space between the colon and the domain name, and also there is no www. (link:www.yourdomain.com doesn’t work anymore).

My personal preference is to use the tools offered by yahoo.com – it doesn’t really matter which agent you use to check your links. A link is a link regardless of whether search engines have recognised them yet or not. So, at yahoo.com you’ll have the following options:-

To check links into a domain (complete site), type –

linkdomain:www.yoursite.com

To check links into a domain (complete site) excluding internal links, type –

linkdomain:www.yoursite.com –site:yourdomain.com
(note the space before the minus sign)

To check links into a specific page, type, for example -
link:http://www.yoursitse.com/subpage.html

To check links into a page excluding internal links: link:http://www.yoursitse.com/subpage.html –site:yoursite.com

As you can see from above its also useful to know what anchor text has been used in a backlink. You can check this at Google. For example to check the links into www.yourdomain.com that contain the anchor text ‘yellow widget’, at the Google search bar type -

inanchor:yellow widget site:yourdomain.com

(Hopefully you wont have any ‘yellow widget’ anchor text links!)

Finally, if you want to automate all of the above in a useful web tool, there are a couple of freebies I use. They are in beta at the moment but seem to work OK but you’ll need to download them. They are ‘Back Link Analyzer’ and ‘PR Weaver’.

A Google search will locate them for you. My favourite is Back Link Analyzer which shows each link and the corresponding anchor text, all on one line for each link.

So have a play with these and next time I’ll take your through the process of out-linking, out-ranking and out-competing your competitors.

Give me a call if you need any help – 01928 788100.

Q&A Spot: I think Ive been Jaggered!

2005-11-21T15:58:00.001Z

QUESTION:

My rankings have gone haywire, I use to get top ranking on phrases like ‘sales recruitment’ and ‘specialist sales personnel’ and now I’m nowhere to be found.

My web designer says its something to do with Jagger (I know its nothing to do with Mick, here’s been nowhere near the site!). I jest, I know this is something to do with the latest Google update, but is there anything I can do to return to normal?

Incidentally, your readers may like to know we’ve had extraordinary success in recruiting and retaining sales people for our customers, just visit our site to find out more www.highgrowthltd.co.uk (sorry about the blatant commercialism but Ive been jaggered!)
Peter Hills, HighGrowth , Manchester

ANSWER:

Glad you can retain a sense of humour. The web forums are awash with people suicidal since their rankings have disappeared. Some claiming they are rapidly going out of business.

Yes, Jagger is the name given to the latest Google update. Their stated aim is to eliminate spammers – those guys cheating their way up the rankings – but inevitably there is collateral damage with some innocent bystanders getting caught in the crossfire. Word on the street is that it should right itself in a couple of weeks (if you are not actually spamming) so hopefully normal service will be resumed. Let me know if its not.

The main specific transgressions the update is trying to address seem to be as follows:-

1. Hidden text on your pages. In particular if you use CSS check the stylesheets that contain visibility: hidden;. It may be that these are considered spammy.

2. In bound link structure. Too much artificial use of the same keyphrase in the anchor text. If you use anchor text then you need to vary the keyphrases used and link to a relevant page/content on your site.

3. Link farm issues. Too many non-relevant sites linking to you. Make sure the sites linking to you are as relevant as possible (non relevant sites shouldn’t harm your rankings but if you have many of them, and they appear very quickly, it may be that your are considered a link farm spammer.)

Incidentally we’ll address the last two points in our ‘link strategy process’ in the next issue.

This, I also believe, indicates the importance of not becoming reliant on any one search engine for your business.

Q&A Spot: Is there a Quicker Way?

2005-10-28T15:04:00.000Z

QUESTION:
I need to get my site optimsed quickly - so I cant really wait for each of your lesson posts. Do you offer courses or workshops for this?
Andrea Diggle, SmallWorld Touring Holidays, Skipton

ANSWER:
Yes, there are one day courses ( please call me on 01928 788100) and also a new range of workshops running from January next year in various locations throughout the country.
The workshops actually take you through the process and you will arrive at a complete optimisation plan - I have included full details on another part of the blog at http://janaklin.blogspot.com/2005/10/what-does-it-take-to-get-no-1-on.htmlAgain - please call if you need more info.
Best Regards
Jan

Lesson 7: Optimising 'on page' factors for top rankings

2005-10-28T12:58:00.000Z

We're going to finalise our discussion on optimising 'on page' factors this month. If you implement this lesson, along with the previous lessons, you should start getting really good rankings.

Next month we'll discuss 'off page' factors to add icing to the cake and get you above all your competitors.

You will remember that last month we focused on the TITLE tag and stressed its importance. The other tags you will need to optimise are the KEYWORD, DESCRIPTION and H1 tags.

THE KEYWORD TAG

The KEYWORD tag used to be important for ranking. It's not anymore, however, it's best practice to include entries here as some search engines still pay some attention to them. Also there is evidence that the major search engines look for consistent entries across the tags.

So in the keyword tags put the keywords (actually keyphrases) you discovered in your keyword analysis. Actually you need to restrict it to a maximum of 25 words. Also use lower case and separate each phrase by a comma and a space.

A perfect example can be found at the following site. Select 'view' than 'source' to view the metatags behind this site - www.youreventsltd.com.

Should you have the same keyword tag on each page?

Ideally you should change the order of the phrases, and put the phase being optimised for at the beginning of the list. So in the example above the homepage is being optimised for 'event management', so this is the first phrase in the list.

THE DESCRIPTION TAG

This is more important than the KEYWORD tag ( but less important than the TITLE tag).
Quite often this gets listed in the hitlist directly below the title so it will have an impact on whether people click through or not.

For example:-

Your Events, Manchester UK - Christmas party organisers
Christmas party organisers by Your Events uk, looking after your christmas
production, venue, catering and entertainment.
www.youreventsltd.com/christmas.php - 14k - Cached - Similar pages

This is the result of a google search for 'christmas party organisers'. (Yes folks its nearly that time again!) The first line is the contents of the TITLE tag; the text below the content of the description tag. So ideally it needs to be a bit salesy - encouraging people to click through.

Again - no longer than 25 words, and put the phrase being optimised for at the front of the description.

If you do a 'view' and 'source' at http://www.youreventsltd.com/christmas.php you will see a perfect example of this.

THE H1 TAG

Unlike the other tags we've discussed the contents of the H1 tag appears as visible text on your web page.

Its best practice to include a version of the title tag as the H1 tag.

If your title tag says 'Briggs International - Technical Translations and Software Localisation Services' The H1 tag could be something like 'Fast Turnround on all your Technical Translations and Software Localisation'

That is, a bit more 'call to action' oriented. Essentially this has the affect of placing your keyphrase for the page being optimised for as a headline at the top of your page. Something the search engine spiders seem to like a lot.

I this case the page is being optimised for two phrases - 'technical translations' and 'software localisation'. Generally we should try to optimise one page for each of our keyphrases. Sometimes we can get away with two but three is pushing it as you will see when we discuss copy writing below.

There's on more thing to do to ensure your pages get top rankings....

WRITE 'KEYWORD RICH' VISIBLE TEXT FOR YOUR OPTIMISED PAGES

Search engine spiders thrive on keyword rich content. Also the higher placed it is on your webpages the better.

If you can get 200 words of text at the top of each page of your site (ideally right below the H1 tag content) and include your keyphrase (the one the page is being optimsied for) around 6-8 times, that is pretty optimal.

This is not always easy and we'll discuss some issues in later lessons to help when it isnt.

Essentially the TITLE tag content for a particlar page is compared to the keyphrases which appear on that page. The more the better, within certain guidleines.

Here's an example of someone who thinks he's optimising his text for the phrase 'yellow widgets'....

'Our Yellow widgets are the best in the UK and if you buy our yellow widgets you will be sure you have bought the best yellow widgets you can buy and absolutely envied by the rest of the yellow widget buying community both here in the UK and the rest of the yellow widget buying community throughout the world. Yes, you really need to buy our award winning yellow widgets. Click here to buy yellow widgets.'

Obviously a pretty naff bit of copy writing, but this guy doesnt care - he's writing for spiders not humans. Actually even the spiders will choke on this.

The trick is to stay within certain 'keyword density'(KD) limits. Around 3%-9% is good. Five keyphrase repetitions in 100 words would be a KD of 5%.

This should satisfy the spiders and also you should be able to put together reasonable copy for human visitors.

A good axample can be seen at www.asgservices.co.uk. Note the repetitions of 'warehouse rack labels'.

If you want to check the keyword density of your pages go to:-
www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html
Type in your url for the page in question and you will get an analysis.

The keyphrases with optimal density will show up in green. Other colours highlight problem keyphrases - too dense or not enough.

So that's it folks. It's about all there is to it. Do this for one or more of your pages and you'll begin to get good rankings.

Next month I'll show you how to out compete even the fiecest of online competitors. Until then happy optimising and don't forget to get in touch if you need help. Our 'Traffic Builder' Service goes from strength to strength as you can hopefully see from the above examples and the quotes below( but not the 'yellow widgets' guy - I made him up).

"I employed Jan Klin Associates to get me higher rankings at all the search engines.
Within a couple of months we were high in the rankings for our products and now some six months later we are in the top three on all the major search engines."
Steve Bithell, Managing Director, Noisekiller UK, www.noisekiller.uk

"Jan has been able to give our search engine optimisation efforts a structured, focused and analytical backbone with some striking and immediate results."
Nick Thomas, Managing Director, Cloggs UK, www.cloggs.co.uk

“From being very cynical about what search engines could do for my businesses I am now reaping the benefits of having number one rankings in Goole and the other major search engines for all my important keyphrases. This is as a direct result of working with Jan Klin to achieve this”
Tony Gresty, Managing Director, ASG Services Ltd, www.asgservices.co.uk

What does it take to get no 1 on Google?....About 9 Hours

2005-10-06T16:03:00.000Z

A DIY APPROACH TO TOP SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS

Nothing exists …..
until it is communicated ….. David Ogilvy

How effectively is your web site communicated?

Businesses have their sales multiplied by getting top rankings on Google.

Here is your opportunity to join them.

There’s no reason to pay expensive consultants to do it for you, the process for you to DIY it is straightforward, and that’s what you’ll learn in this powerful new workshop – the secrets of getting top rankings.

What you will take from the workshop:

Your own structured action plan completed from the workbook provided to get you top search engine rankings

- Knowledge on how to use the latest tools available on the web to help you get high rankings

- The latest techniques and approaches for out-competing your top competitors

This is not a seminar presentation – this is a workshop which will provide you with the tools, knowledge and structured plan to enable you to succeed in Search Engine Marketing.

You will also have access to the course tutor (who is an acknowledged expert in the field) during and between workshop sessions to address your own issues.

What is expected of you:

- Attend 3 x 3 hour sessions, once per week for three weeks (morning or evening)
- During the sessions you will be encouraged to complete your structured action plan as the modules progress
- In between each module you will have some ‘homework’ to do on your own site (tools and templates will be provided to simplify this)
- You (or your web site designer) should then implement the plan you have put together and watch your business increase.

What is the cost?

£97.50 plus Vat per module (£292.50 plus Vat for the whole course)

If you implement your plan following the course this should represent the highest return on investment you could ever hope to get through any business activity.

To sign up for a course in your area call Jan Klin now on 01928 788100 or email at jan@janklin.com.

"Having been on the course I can say that applying Jan's teachings has certainly paid off for Maid2CLean and our Alexa rankings have gone up by some 400,000 points. Frankly, the course was worth every penny"
Mike Hanrahan, Managing Director, Maid2Clean, www.maid2clean.co.uk

The modules in detail:

The tutor will guide you through the process to successful optimisation, showing you real live examples and the use of web based tools. As the course progresses you will make appropriate entries in your structured workbook leading to your blueprint for high search engine ranking performance.

Module 1:

Content includes:

- An outline of the ‘best practice’ structured process to optimisation
- The major factors which will provide good ranking – both within your website and external factors
- How search engines work and which are important
- Using web based tools to assess your current position
- How to find the most effective keyphrases to bring relevant visitors to your site
- Using the latest web tools to identify the best keyphrases
- Assessing the ‘relevance’, ‘popularity’ and ‘competition’ for your keyphrases

Homework: Using web based tools and the spreadsheet provided to identify and shortlist your keyphrases.

Module 2:

Content includes:

- Identifying ‘roadblocks’ – are there any impediments in your site preventing good search engine performance?
- Using web tools to identify any issues
- Assessing your sites ‘spiderability’ and internal link structure using web based tools
- Explaining metadata and identifying the most important metadata in your site for top search engine performance
- Structuring your title, description, keyword and H1 tags for optimisation
- Explaining ‘keyword density’ and the importance of effective copy writing for high rankings
- Using web based tools to analyse your existing copy and keyword density

Homework: Optimising your metadata and existing content for optimum search engine performance (for your homepage; it’s the same process for all other pages). Structured online templates will be provided to facilitate this for you.

Module 3:

Content includes:

- Submitting your site to search engines and directories
- Some web based tools to help with the process
- A structured approach to developing your linking strategy
- The importance of backlinks to your search engine rankings
- How to develop and assess links from the best sources
- Structuring your ‘anchor text’ for optimum search engine performance
- Analysing your links and your competitors links using web based tools

Homework: Progressing your link and directory strategy. Online templates will be provided so you can do this in a structured way; Kicking off your optimisation blueprint.

Typical agenda for each module:

8.30 Registration and light breakfast

9.00 Session 1 starts for this module

10.30 – 10.45 Coffee Break

10.45 Session 2 starts for this module

12.15 Close

Who should attend:

This is for senior members of small and medium businesses who wish to generate more businesses through their website. You may be a business owner, or you may be responsible for your company website. The course will be delivered at a business level (not technical) although additional content will be provided in the workbooks for the more technical delegate’s requirements.

It is not sector specific – it is relevant to all business sectors and as much to service companies as consumer focused and manufacturing companies.

Lesson 6: Hot Title Tags for a No 1 Ranking

2005-09-23T22:00:00.000Z

Previously we have discussed the importance of finding good keyphrases for attracting potential buyers to your site. Having found them the question is what do we do with them.

Many of you will know the importance of building good content around these phrases and this is something we will discuss in detail later. In addition there are other important areas to put them; in fact there are four main places:-

1. In your metadata ( the part of your site that search engine spiders see and human visitors dont)

2. The visible content - keyword rich content as referred to above - visible to both humans and SE spiders

3. Internal links - to different parts of your site

4. External (in-bound) links - in the anchor text of these links - more about this later.

and other places - alt text, footers etc

Many would argue that the TITLE tag (part of the metadata) is the most important in terms of ranking. Here I'm going to give you the optimum structure and content for this tag. That is, one that actually works.

The search engine spiders will scan this when they visit your site to work out what your site is all about.

If your site is about selling 'yellow widgets' you need to include 'yellow widgets' as part of your title tag on your homepage.

More specifically you need to include different title tags on different pages of your site reflecting the different content on that page. For example if you have part of your site devoted to tandoori widgets - this keyphrase needs to appear in the title tag. This practice gives searchers multiple access points into relevant parts of your site. Those searching for yellow widgets would be directed to the homepage; those for tandoori widgets to the page relevant to that content.

So, here's an action point for you:-
Check your title tags by choosing 'file' then 'view source' from your browser toolbar.
(You'll see you title tag at the top, in the HEAD section of your code just before the meta description and keyword tags.)

Do they reflect the content on the pages they appear on?

Anyway here's an optimum structure for your tag. The example here is for a company who are pretty hot in the widgets market (incidentally, the only company I know in the UK that sells edible widgets)

Jones Brothers Bury UK - Yellow Widgets and Dark Crispy Widgets

(this should be enclosed in the title tag delimeters as you can see in the examples referenced below - eg www.universalarches.co.uk)

Note: The company is Jones Brothers - always good to have your company name up front in the tag and UK put in there (if you're looking for primarily UK based customers).

'yellow widgets' and 'dark crispy widgets' are obviously the two keyphrases we are optimising the page around (ideally it should be one keyphrase per page, but often we can get away with two; three is pushing it)

No more that 10 words, because most search engines dont read beyond this number.

No words repeated more than twice

No identical words next to each other.

Steer clear of non text characters (particularly & which sometimes causes problems with some search engines; hyphens, commas and pipes are OK).

Thats it! Do that on every page and you're moving in the right direction and sometimes ( if everything else has been optimised) this will have an immediate effect.

Here's a personal example; Mrs Klin runs a B&B. Incidentally, in two years Mrs Klin's B&B has gone from 90% of guests coming from the UK to 90% coming from overseas - all to do with the power of the internet and that fact that she sleeps with an on-line marketing consultant (most nights). By changing one word in the title tag ('Kingsley' to 'Frodsham') rankings moved from nowhere to number 2 on Google. This is because the directory she is a member of (doesnt have her own website!- not big enough) had included lots of content on the page about Frodsham. Admittedly its not always as simple as that but it does show what a major contributor the title tag is in the Google algorithm.

When your site gets listed in say, a google hitlist, the first line shown, which is blue, is your title. This is where it gets displayed. So in our example what will be displayed in the google hitlist would be:-

Jones Brothers UK - Yellow Widgets and Dark Crispy Widgets
Makers of fine edible widgets in a wide variety of flavours and colours...

Hopefully in position one where we will get a 15% click through rate!

The sentence in italics below the title is from the description metatag which we'll adrress next time.

So you see the title is also important because searchers will see this and it will determine whether they click through or not, which of course is the ultimate objective. In the example you will see that I have used capitals to begin each word. Search engine spiders are not case sensitive but the reason I have done this is to make it more searcher friendly and maximise the click through rate.

Here's another example - and a perfect example of how to structure your meta tags - go to google and type in 'profile bending'. You will see that www.universalarches.co.uk comes pretty near the top. Go to the file menu at your browser then select 'view' and 'source'. You will see that the title tag is perfectly structured as detailed above, but also the keyword and description tags are also good models on which to base your own.

Best of luck and please feel free to call me if you wish to discuss or get clarification. (01928 788100). Also you may wish to consider our 'Traffic Builder' service as a cost effective alternative to doing it yourselves.

Q&A Spot: How do I measure my strongest competitors

2005-09-22T15:17:00.000Z

QUESTION:
I have been doing the keyword analysis along the lines of the last lesson and have found some really good keyphrases which I'm sure will help my business. One thing occurred to me whilst I was doing this. We have assumed that if a web page out there includes our keyphrase - for example 'marine sound proofing' then they are a competitor, but surely just because they have the phrase in their text doesnt mean they have optimised their site? Is there another way of measuring competition?
Jim Bain, Hartlepool Marine & Auto Soundproofing

ANSWER:
I hinted to this at the end of the last lesson. (Lesson 5) Actually I think that if any web page includes your keyphrase it is a competitor. However they may not be a serious competitor. A better measure of how much serious competition there is, is to use the Allintitle command: If you go to Google and type in allintitle:marine sound proofing - in the search box. You will see that there are only 14 sites out there with this phrase in their title tag, so indeed very little serious competition (although there are over 28,000 pages which include this phrase in them).

The TITLE tag is the subject of this weeks lesson ( Lesson 6) - and you will see that it is a major factor in optimisation, so its a good assumption that those sites which include your keyphrase in their title tag have optimised their site to some degree. You can construct and prioritise another KEI list based on the allintitle results - but this is seldom necessary unless you are in a very competitive online business. The good news is,you have found a phrase with very little serious competition.

Q&A Spot: Can I cheat like my competitors do?

2005-08-29T13:38:00.000Z

QUESTION:
I suspect I know the answer to this, but here goes anyway.
I have been optimising now for around six months and have achieved some impressive results. I'm always in the top 5 on all major engines for the most effectice keyphrases. However, for some keyphrases there is always a competitor (the same guy who will - with reluctance- remain nameless) who is always number one. On looking at his source code he has hidden a load of keyword rich text that is obvioulsy resulting in his high ranking. Can I do the same thing?
Al Leftwin, Bradford Hauliers

ANSWER:
Like you thought - don't be tempted to follow this practice. If you get caught by the search engines you may get blacklisted. If you do the problems in getting reindexed are colossal, as your competitor will ultimately (very probably) find out.
I have several clients who are always number 2 on Google ( several who are number 1 also!) and its for the same reason, we have done everything right except that there is a spammer in front of us. Its frustrating and very tempting sometimes to react.
The practices vary from hiding text, to having masses of dooway pages to 'cloaking' but the effect is the same - they have cheated themselves to number 1.
Console your self with the thought that the click through rates for positions 2 and 3 are not dramatically different than the number one spot and that, almost certainly, your competitor will eventually get his comeuppance.

Lesson 5: Better Keywords will bring you More Business

2005-08-29T10:30:00.000Z

More on keywords now folks.
We've discussed this before in Lesson 3 but its such an important factor in bringing you the right traffic ( and hence more business ) that I'm going to outline a more scientific approach to getting the right keywords. Remember, the objective here is to get you high rankings in the most appropriate and effective keywords and this will lead to more web based business. Well start discussing where to put these keywords in your website next month but for now let's concentrate on identifying the best ones.

We'll use a fictional company involved in furniture removals. (Incidentally I use the word 'keyword' and 'keyphrase' interchangeably to mean the same thing in the following discussion. 'Keyword analysis' is the generic name for this process; referring to 'keyphrases' accepts that nowadays people use multiple words when seaching)

There are four stages to the process:-

1. Identifying the popularity of certain keyphrases ( ie How many people search for the phrase each month)

2. Identifying the competition for the keyphrase (ie how many web pages out there include the exact keyphrase)

3. Working out the KEI factor ( the 'keyword effectiveness index' has been discussed in Lesson 3 and is a measure of the importance of the phrase for optimisation - the higher the KEI the better)

4. Prioritising the keyphrase list.

The example I'm going to give you relates to the UK market, but the same process is equally applicable to any market. Fortunately, the Overture Keyword Assistant ( see the detail of how to use it in last months posting) allows us to be country specific when researching keywords so this is an ideal tool for us to use.

STAGE 1 - Estimating the Popularity:
Lets take this company involved with furniture revovals. If you go to the Overture Keyword Assistant ( The UK version at www.content.overture.com/d/UKm/ac/index.jhtml and listed under 'tools') and start trialing a few keywords you think may be relevant to searchers of such servivces - eg 'removal services', 'furniture removal', 'removal services uk' etc. You'll come out with a list of keyphrases (some suggested by Overture) and their corresponding 'count'. Count is the estimated number of searches per month for the phrase. (It is based on all search engines except Google, so a good rule of thumb is to double this for the actual number on the basis that Google accounts for around half of all searches)

As an example, you'll see that you get counts of 906 for 'removal services' and 1616 for 'furniture removal'.

You may like to construct an Excel spreadsheet when carrying out this analysis with columns for 'keyphrase', 'count', 'competition' and KEI, so eventually when you have your complete list you can do a simple sort to get them in order of importance.

STAGE 2: Estimating the Competition:
This part of the process is a matter of going to Google and checking for the competition for each of the keyphrases you have identified.
At the Google search box type in the keyphrase in question. Enclose the keyphrase in quotation marks since we are looking for exact matches, check the 'pages from the uk' button since we are looking just to focus on the UK market in this example.

For the two examples above - 'revoval services' and 'furniture removal' - you will see you get figures of 77500 and 7380 ( You will see these figures in the top right hand corner of the Google results page, for example, Results 1 - 10 of about 77,500 for "removal services". (0.06 seconds) . These are the number of pages in the Google index with an exact match for the phrase, that is, a measure of the competition.

Fill in the relevant part of your spreadsheet with this competition figure for all your keyphrases.

STAGE 3 - Calculating the KEI:
The detail and rationale behind the KEI calculation is included in Lesson 3, but here it is a simple matter of calculating the figure. This is achieved by squaring the 'count' and dividing by the 'competition'. So for 'removal services' we get 906 times 906 divided by 77500 that is a KEI figure of 10.6.

For 'furniture removal' the figure you get is 353.8. Clearly 'furniture removal' is a far better phrase to ompimise around than 'removal services'.

STAGE 4 - Prioritising yor Keyphrases:
If you use a spreadsheet you can obviously include the KEI formula to perform this calculation automatically, then its a simple matter of using the sort facility to get all the phrases in ascending KEI order.

That's it! you now have a list of keyphrases ordered in importance for effective optimisation.

Incidentally you will see that 'removal services uk' has a KEI of 720.5 showing that a phrase which is less popular in terms of searches can still be very effective for optimisation since there is far less 'competition', in this case only 19 competing pages.

For many situations this is as rigorous as you need to be to find the best keyphrases and will work very well for you. It's certainly a more scientific process than the vast majority of companies engage in. There are some situations however that are very competitive areas and for these we need to go into more detail and look at other aspects of competition.

For example using the google 'intitle' command to see how many sites out there have included the keyphrase in their title tag, and using the 'inanchor' command to see how many links to websites include the keyphrases as anchor text. These are measures of much more serious competition and we can work out KEIs relating to these figures also. Give me a call if you want more info on this but as Ive already indicated the process above will be more than adequate for most of you and will help you get much more web based business.

Best of luck and as always, if you want any help on this, please consider our 'Traffic Builder' service as a cost effective alternative to doing it yourselves.

Q&A Spot: Google versus Overture Ranking

2005-07-23T14:07:00.000Z

Question:

With Google AdWords I am towards the top of the list first thing in the morning then I disappear even though I've still got credit in my account. Why does this happen? Also, even if I bid the top bid price I'm still sometimes low down the list with Google although not with Overture. Can you explain what is going on here?
Mike Lomas, Northern Training, Bacup, Lancs

Answer:

Firstly Google's algorithm for displaying your ads is more complex than Overture's. With Overture if you bid for spot number three in the rankings that is where you will appear. With Google its different. They take into account not only your bid price but also your click through rate (they appear to multiply one by the other to get the ranking position).

The reason they do this is that they wish to reward you for putting together effective ads. Conversley, if you are getting poor click throughs you will be penalised (event though you may be bidding a higher price than others). So, good ads are good for you (and Google).

In terms of the first point they also seem to 'spread out' the appearance of your ads over a period along with competitive ads. This is also a function of your bid price and how much credit you have. I have also noticed that quite often when I have upped my credit the ad appears more regularly even though it doesnt cost more overall.

Although some argue Google is easier to use, its certainly the case that Overture is much simpler to understand. They both deliver good results though.

Lesson 4: Success in ‘Pay Per Click’ Search Marketing

2005-07-23T13:05:00.000Z

Were taking a break from the Search Engine Optimisation process this month and, by popular demand, we’re taking a look at how to make ‘pay per click’ advertising a success.

PPC is becoming huge for small to medium businesses. We should remember that its only over the last two years that it been a useable method of marketing for small businesses and what I’ll cover in this posting is the best practice principles to make it a real success. Actually it works for every type of business from taxi firms, to steel foundries to retail sport shops on line – no exceptions providing its done properly it will deliver results

What exactly is PPC?

I think many of you will be aware that it’s the little ads that appear on the right side of the Google hit list which are ranked according to how much you decide to pay per click. The other main player is Overture (part of Yahoo) which drives PPC on all other search engines (Yahoo, Altavista, MSN…..). The services are much the same but there are key differences also, the main one of which is discussed in the Q&A spot in this posting.

Transformational Marketing?

I think so. If someone searches for ‘Sharp Aquos 32in TV for less than £600” and an ad pops up repeating that search phrase and taking you through to a ‘landing page’ where the requirement could be fulfilled – that’s transformational, it cuts out the waste and gets straight to the point. (Unlike conventional marketing where 98% waste rates are the norm). The key point is being very specific in your keyword selection so you attract well qualified prospects.

The Process

There are three stages for getting it right

1. Keyphrase selection
2. Scripting your adverts
3. Effective Landing pages.

I’ll focus on Overture in most of the following discussion but using Google’s AdWords is much the same. Lets look at each of these stages in turn…

1. Keyphrase Selection

The point about this is we can be as specific as we want and we can generate as many keyphrases as we want since phrases that don’t work - ie people don’t click - don’t cost anything so we can be as profligate as we wish.

Overture has a wonderful tool for helping us with our kephrases (which is free). Their ‘keyword assistant’ can be used found at : www.content.overture.com/d/UKm/ac/index.jhtml then clicking on the ‘keyword assistant’ option. This is for the UK, if you are interested in traffic from different countries use the appropriate flag on the Overture homepage.

This tool allows us to type in a keyphrase, for example ‘vitamin supplements’ and we will see that 3465 people searched for this over the previous month. Directly below this you will see other phrases that were searched for containing the words ‘vitamin’ and ‘supplement’, so this helps us decide on the specific phrase we want to select based on relevance and popularity.

Lets say we go for ‘vitamin c supplement’ since we have products relevant to this search. We can see that we can expect around 105 searches per month for this phrase.

The next step is to see how much it will cost us (per click) to include this phrase in our advertising. For this we use the ‘view bids tool’ which is directly below the ‘Keyword Assistant’. We will see a list of competitors and how much they are bidding for the phrase. We can see that (at the time of writing) it would cost us around 17p per click to be in position 3 on Overture’s partner search engines ( Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, etc).

We can do all of this without setting up an account. Setting one up is easy and only requires that we provide our credit card details and set limits on what we wish to spend.

2. Scripting our Adverts

If you look at the little ads that appear on the right hand side of, for example, the Google hitlist you will see that the ads are quite salesy and generally are attempts to encourage people to click on them. Unlike organic search marketing we have total control over these ads and there is a knack to writing effective copy in such a small ad. Incidentally below there is an offer from Overture I’ll tell you about and this includes help in setting up your ads.

The key point here is that when you script your add you should repeat the keyphrase which is being searched for. For example if someone searches for ‘Sharp Aquos 32” TV model ts32-1’ then including that phrase in the ad is 50% more likely to get a click through than if it was not included. Incidentally if they type in that phrase guess what they are interested in buying? And this is a key point, attracting such a specific searcher is attracting a pretty well qualified prospect.

This implies of course that we need separate ads for all our important keyphrases. A common mistake for beginners is to use one ad for all keyphrases.

3. Effective landing pages

I think we have already established that the whole point here is to make sales – either directly from your site, or getting them to make contact with you by telephone or email. Either way its all about providing effective calls to action.

A key part of this is taking people through to the relevant landing page which then leads people through the process to satisfying their search.

Again, a common mistake with beginners is to take people to the homepage. If I search for ‘Norwegian cruises’ a travel site taking me through to their homepage where they are advertising a whole range of different holidays will have me clicking back. We have total control over where we take people once they click through so we should use this feature so we can maximise the chances of making a sale.

As we have already mentioned this form of marketing is not restricted to making sales on line, its relevant to every industry sector, its just the ‘call to action’ that’s different. If you are selling vitamin pills on line it will be to get people to provide their credit card details, if you’re a solicitor it is likely that the call to action will be a phone call, or email, to you so that the requirement can be progressed.

So there we are, choose keyphrases carefully based on relevance and popularity, bearing in mind the more specific the phrase the more likely we are to get a qualified prospect. Make sure we produce effective ads (repeating the keyphrase searched for in the ad) then take people through to the right part of the site where there needs can be fulfilled. Do these things and it will work wonderfully well for you.

There are good ‘tutorials’ at both Overtures and Googles sites where you can learn more, but the best way to learn is to try it, so here’s an offer on behalf of Overture:

Its either a £50/£50 split – ie if you risk £50 Overture will provide a further £50 contribution. Alternatively, and this is the one I’d go for, if you provide a further £19 Overture will help you with the keyphrases and ads. Give it a shot and when you get your first order drop me an email saying ‘Thanks Jan’. Send no cash, a thank you will be fine.

If you want to take up the offer drop me an email jan@janklin.com and put OVERTURE OFFER in the subject. I’ll get Overture to make contact with you.

Using ‘pay per click’ has immediate impact (unlike Search Engine Optimisation which will take a few months to kick in) so using them in a combined way is a common strategy – ppc for immediate effect, developing SEO in the background so eventually you get them both working for you. Don’t forget our low cost Traffic Builder service which will get your SEO moving quickly for you.

Best Wishes for great success with your search marketing.

Jan

Q&A Spot: Search Optimisation and Hosting Issues

2005-06-12T12:14:00.000Z

Question:
I was told that the hosting company I use to host my site can have an affect on my search engine rankings and performace, is this true?
J Todd, Reflex Systems Ltd, Cannock, Staffs

Answer:

There are a few points to mention here. The first one, as reported previously in the question about attracting traffic from different countries, is that the search engine algorithms for ranking seem to give preference to locally hosted sites. For example, all other things being equal, a search for, say, 'Norwegian Ffiord cruises' carried out in the UK will give a higher ranking for sites hosted in the UK compared with sites hosted in the USA. (again, stressing the 'all other things being equal' - which they seldom are). So if your target market is the UK, getting your site hosted in the UK is a good idea.

Another point worth mentioning regarding hosting and search engines is that in some occassions (although rarely) the security around the server your site is hosted on prevents the search engine spiders accessing your site. More specifically it has been reported that certain firewall settings will prevent sites using the robots.txt file getting spidered. You will of course know if this is a problem from your webstats and it would be worth checking with your hosting company if you cannot find other reasons your site does not get spidered.

There's more information on how this works at:-http://software.sonicwall.com/applications/ips/index.asp?ev=sig&sigid=1600

Something else worth being aware of is that certain hosting companies will give multiple sites hosted by them on the same server the same IP address ( to save money ). If one of the sites on the same server as you is blacklisted by Google say - then this will have an impact on you also. This is only likely to be an issue where you have been given free space. so its worth checking.

A couple of good sources of information about hosting companies can be found at:-
www.web-hosting-reviews.org and www.thehostingchart.com

Lesson 3:Finding Keyphrases to Transform your Fortunes

2005-06-12T11:01:00.000Z

So here we are, at arguably the most interesting - and certainly the most strategic -part of search engine optimisation.

We’re at the keyphrase selection stage – identifying those keyphrases which are going to get you top rankings and lead to more business.

Finding these gems then optimising our site and content around them can have a dramatic affect on our fortunes. We’ll discuss where to put them in your website in future lessons but right now we’ll concentrate on finding good ones. The ones people are typing in to Google and the also rans (only kidding Yahoo!) to find our products and services.

It’s a two stage process which roughly equates to taxing our right brain then left brain:-

1. Identifying a list of relevant keyphrases
2. Analysis and shortlisting the best keyphrases

All the time we will be focusing on three variables – these are relevance, how relevant is a search term to what we are selling or providing. Popularity, how many times per day are people using this keyphrase, and competition – how many web pages out there include this key phrase.

The relevance one is quite interesting; what we think people type into find us and what they actually type in are quite often substantially different. Imagine the manager of the Hilton Hotel in Paris suggesting search terms to his web site designer – not an enviable task. (Yikes! I’ve just inadvertently added to the already 17,100,000 pages out there containing the keyphrase Paris and Hilton). So the manager may have a little competition on his hands as well as relevance issues.

Perhaps a less extreme example is where a client considered ‘groundcare equipment’ a relevant keyphrase when in fact people were typing in ‘lawnmowers’, ‘strimmers’,’rotavators’ etc – ‘groundcare equipment’ was a term they used internally to collectively describe the product category. So it needs some thought. The backstop of course is to type these phrases into search engines and see what sites actually get listed.

So lets start stage one of the process, how can we generate a starting list of potential gems? Here’s a few suggestions:-

- Brainstorm with your self and others you work with

- Look at what competitors use (‘view’; ‘source’ then see the meta data and visible text)

- Any brand names or generic product types which are relevant

- Take you mates down the pub and ask them what they would type in to find you

- You could even ask your customers and suppliers

- Hint/Tip – quite often thinking of markets rather than products can be beneficial – eg ‘vitamin pills for vegetarians’ rather than ‘ vitamin c pills’ – will generate less hits but probably more well qualified and likely to buy prospects.

- Here’s a useful tool for you to try courtesy of Google – Google Suggest.
If you go to http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en and start typing in your keyword suggestion, you will see that Google will try to guess what you are typing based on popularity. The numbers on the right hand side are the number of webpages containing the phrase and you can use the left hand side to identify keyphrases you may not have thought of.

Some of the tools we’ll discuss below and in subsequent lessons also will identify possible phrases ( in their thesaurus and lateralus).

How many words should there be in your keyphrases? – more than one (too general) and less than five (too specific). Most people nowadays are typing in two to three words to find your products and services.

How many keyphrases should you arrive at? – it depends on your industry sector and product portfolio but a good working number at this stage should be between ten to thirty. Remember – for each phrase you select we will need to optimise a web page for it – that is one page per keyphrase if you want to do it successfully.

Stage two is where we get more scientific and subject our list of potentials to a little rigour.

Here we are trying to address mainly the popularity and competition issues. Fortunately there are several tools out there to help with this. I’ll concentrate on the popular www.wordtracker.com but I’ll introduce you to other tools and methods in later lessons (and in particular how to target specific UK traffic).

You can trial Wordtracker by offering your name and email address, you can also buy one day’s use ( for about £5). Either way it allows you to type in keyphrases you think may be useful from your list of potentials. It generates a whole load of useful stuff – you will see this and have it explained to you when you use it so I wont go in to the detail here. It is simple to use and the important thing is that for keyphrases you type in it will estimate the daily searches ( the ‘predict’ number) and also the number of competing web pages.

You will see that for each keyphrase you select it will generate a KEI ( Keyword Effectiveness Index) - essentially a number which is a measure of both the popularity and competition. What you are looking for is keyphrases with high KEI’s. These are the phrases which will give you high rankings in the search engines and more business (once you have optimised you site for them).

How high is a good KEI? – the bigger the better. I tend to focus on ones with a KEI greater than 40 for my clients. Wordtracker will tell you to forget ones less than 10 and consider ones above 400 a gift! ( if you can find one!)

Just to give you an indication of how valuable these KEIs can be here’s a little story about how they can potentially transform your fortunes.
I found one for a client of mine with a KEI of 28152!. This equates to around 4000 searches a day and only 800 competing web pages. Even my granny could get you number one on Google for this phrase.

I could hardly contain my excitement when I called my client to tell him about how I was going to make him rich.
He wasn’t excited. I asked him why.
‘I don’t sell used Honda engines’ he said.
So there you go – a great web business opportunity for one of you out there. Just remember to send me a Christmas card form Barbados with a ‘thank you Jan’. Send no cash unless you feel you have to.

More on keyphrases next time, in the meantime if you need any help don’t hesitate to call (01928 788100) or consider our excellent ‘Traffic Builder’ service.

Lesson 2: Identifying Roadblocks to SEO

2005-05-04T16:21:00.000Z

Before we can move on to the more positive stuff, we need to identify any major issues with our existing homepage which may inhibit search engine optimisation.

There are ways around all of these roadblocks so don't despair if you have them - but you will need to plan to do something about them.

You may have noticed if you used Marketleap (www.marketleap.com) to see your existing search engine saturation (in Lesson 1,). That not all of your pages are indexed by the search engines. If you were unfortunate maybe the search engines are only recognising your homepage.

The idea here is to get total saturation so the search engines see all your pages, and searches for specific products and services throw up the relevant page of your site -not just the homepage. So here are the main culprits preventing this and guidance as to what you should do:-

Use of Frames technolgy to develop your site.

If Frames were used this will inhibit search engine optimisation.
You can easily check this by viewing your source code and seeing references to frames, like this for example -

function loadFrames(frame1,page1,frame2,page2) {
eval("parent."+frame1+".location='"+page1+"'");
eval("parent."+frame2+".location='"+page2+"'");

If you have no intention of redeveloping your site the get around is to include readable content as 'noframes' content surrounded by the relevant tags

Your website designer can hopefully do this for you but get in touch if you need help. For a fuller discussion of how frames affects SEO see:-

www.websight.net.au/search-engine-optimisation/frames.asp

Flash

The use of Macromedia Flash technologies is great for making sites look good and interesting; the downside is it can impede the search engines if it's not implemented properly. By properly I mean embedded and used sparingly. This is a bit technical to get around - you'll know if you've got it and its causing search engine problems - so get your web designer to help and again, call me if you need help.

Database driven sites

It used to be a problem but the search engines are getting better at reading the database behind your site. Google has no problem. Its only a real problem if it hasn't been set up properly and too many parameters appear after the domain and certain characters like ?.

Marketleap will let you know if your database is indexed.

Javascript Navigation

You will have seen on many sites - possibly even your own - drop down menus as you mouse over the main navigation tabs. This is great for users but search engine spiders cannot follow these links.

Search engine spiders are essentially simple souls, they can only get their teeth into html code (think of html as spider food). So the solution here, if you use this form of navigation, is to ensure there is also html navigation to the other pages. Using a site map is useful for this; another common techniques is to include a couple of lines of links at the bottom of your page linking to each of your other web pages.

These tend to be the main issues; there are others - if in doubt get a comprehensive analysis done.
(Its a bit like a dental check - takes time and costs money but the benefits are worth it!)

We do this as part of our traffic builder service and give specific instructions as to how to overcome the issues.

A simple experiment for you...

Lastly, here's a simple experiment to do to see what the search engines can actually see when they visit your homepage:-
1. Go to your website homepage
2. CNTL + A (to highlight the elements of your page)
3. CNTL + C (to copy to the clipboard)
4. Open Notepad
5 CNTL + V (to copy in the content)

This is what the search engines see when they visit your homepage. It should be good readable content rich in your strategic keyphrases. Chances are this is not what you got.

Once you've got a good optimised homepage with links through to the inner pages we can then optimise these to ensure they get listed when relevant searches are done.
Is it necessary to optimise all of your pages?
I'll quote what my dentist said when he'd taught me the interesting technique of flossing.
Do I have to floss ALL of them! I asked.
No, just the ones you want to keep, he replied.

Just off to to the dentists. Next time back to more positive stuff; I'll show you some great tools and techniques for unearthing some powerful keywords and phrases.

Q&A Spot:To blog or not to blog....SE Optimisation and blogging

2005-05-04T13:53:00.000Z

Question: I understand that blogging can have a significant impact on search engine rankings - is this true? If so how does it work , is it do with getting links from the blog to your own site?
Melanie Teesdale, HotGadgets Ltd, Sheffield

Answer:
Blogging is huge, according to some the fastest growing part of the internet. Michael Howard's wife has started blogging so you know it now must be mainstream.

If you havent done it or don't know what it is just go to www.blogger.com and follow the 3 step process to set up your own blog.

What is a blog?

According to Blogger.com 'A blog is a personal diary. A daily pulpit. A collaborative space. A political soapbox. A breaking-news outlet. A collection of links. Your own private thoughts. Memos to the world....

...In simple terms, a blog is a web site, where you write stuff on an ongoing basis. New stuff shows up at the top, so your visitors can read what's new. Then they comment on it or link to it or email you. Or not.'

You're now reading my blog and I have to say, since having one, my seach engine rankings have improved enormously. Why is this?

SEO and Blogging

There are several reasons it helps, the main one is the one you suggested above. Its a great way of getting an inbound link from a major site (some of you will know an important factor in getting high rankings is getting links to your site from other important and relevant sites - we'll cover this in detail in a later lesson). You can't get much bigger and more important than blogger.com - how else are you going to get a site with a Page Rank of 9 linking to your website for free! ( We'll cover Page Rank later - for now just accept that its a measure of importance on a scale of 1 to 10).

The thing to remember is to always include a link from your blog to your site ( as I do below)....and of course there are other blogging sites you can get links from - blogit, blogwise, bloglines etc. although blogger is best (owned by Google, also known to be good for search)

A word of warning....dont join other people's blogs, make comments and drop a link to your site habitually just to get these good backlinks - if you do too much of it it'll be considered as spamming.

Any other reasons its good for search marketing?

Yes, people may find your content on the blog (and then find you )before they find your site. This is because your content on the blog will get higher rankings to similar content on your own site, for the reason above and also for other reasons...good keyword rich content (assuming you are blogging about the same subject matter which exists on your site), good clean code and so on. Ive got oodles of other detail on this subject if you want it - just drop me an email or give me a call (jan@janklin.com ; 01928 788100)

...But most importantly get blogging! Share some of your valuable expertise with the world. Its a good habit to get into and will bring you rewards.

Here's the all important link back to the main website - its very easy to do as you will see when you set up your blog - (Traffic Builder)

Lesson 1: Understanding how you currently perform with search engines.

2005-03-21T11:14:00.000Z

Its always good practice to work out where you are now before planning for any improvements.

At this stage we are going to check out two things:

1. Your current exposure to the major search engines
2. Your current performance with your major keyphrases with the major search engines

1. The first question is whether or not you are being recognised by the search engines – that is, has, for example, Google spidered your site and included you in its index (its database)?
Its easy to check this by simply typing your domain name into the Google search box (and also for the other search engines). If you are indexed it will then show you what is included.

There is a simpler way. Fortunately we have some online tools (I’ll be introducing you to several as we move through the lessons). The one I’ll introduce you to at this stage is www.marketleap.com.

If you go to this site you will see three tools in the central column under ‘Search’, they are Link Popularity Check; Search Engine Saturation and Keyword Verification.

It’s the second one we want – Search Engine Saturation. If you click on this tool then type in your domain name a report will be generated for you. This report will tell you how many pages you have indexed with all the major search engines ( if they recognise your site). You’ll need to keep a record of this report since we will use it as the baseline for improvements as we move through.
If most of the pages in your site are recognised by all the major search engines that is obviously a good starting point.

2. The second question is where are you ranked with your major keyphrases with the major search engines.?

This time we need to click on the Keyword Verification option at Marketleap. This will allow you to type in one of your keyphrases (eg for me it might be ‘web marketing consultant’).

The report generated will tell you whether this search term ranks you in the first 30 results with all the major search engines.

Obviously you can do this several times with different search terms you think are important to you. You will see also that you can identify how you competitors rank.
Again you need to record this information somewhere since the objective of the lessons is to enable you to make big improvements on you current rankings.

In future lessons we will show you how to identify the best keyphrases for you, or, if they are the ones you have used above how to improve your rankings with these keyphrases.

Please get in touch if you need any help 01928 788100 ; jan@janklin.com or look at our services (Traffic Builder) to help you do this if you don’t want to do it yourself.

Q&A Spot : Optimising for Foreign Languages

2005-03-15T16:23:00.000Z

Question:

I’m a manufacturer of a wide range of industrial fasteners and wish to target specific European countries with my products (notably Germany and Holland). How far do I need to go in terms of translating my site from English and ensuring people in these countries carrying out searches in their own language can find me? – Tony Greasby, ASL Fasteners, Stockport.

Answer:
Ideally you need to do the following if you are really serious about business from these countries. Before hitting you with this optimal list you should be aware that is seldom necessary for companies to go to these extremes as we’ll discuss later, but here it is:-

- Have you site translated into the target language and use the appropriate domain eg www.asl.de

- Ensure the search engine optimisation is carried out in that language – ie all the things we talk about in the lessons on this blog need to be done – identifying keyphrases ( in German, Dutch etc), incorporating them into the metatags, writing appropriate content etc.

- Identifying which search engines and directories are important in those countries (surprisingly Google with its 54,000 servers delivering results in less than 0.2 seconds is not dominant in every country – its not even in the top 15 in Korea. Incidentally much more detailed information on search engine regional variations this can be gained at www.searchenginewatch.com)

- Submit to local search engines and directories – ie .jp, .it, .de etc versions

- Have your site hosted in the target country ( search engine ranking algorithms will give preference to locally hosted sites)

Phew! Sounds like hard work.

It is, so maybe you will need to compromise ( remember the above is the optimum). Many companies are happy with just foreign language pages (optimised) but part of the main UK site. It maybe this is all you need to do; its worth a try before going down the optimum path.

Another great way of targeting specific countries is by using the ‘Pay per Click’ services of Google and/or Overture. With these guys you relate your campaign to specific countries (eg at www.overture.com you click on the relevant national flag and go through the bidding process). You still have to put your ads together in the foreign language and you will need foreign language landing pages, but its still a lot easier than the above.

On a closing point its worth remembering that we are fortunate in that the English language is still the dominant language of the web ( although rumour has it that those Chinese guys out there are catching up fast.)

Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you need more info or wish to link with some local resources to help you with the above – jan@janklin.com ; 01928 788100. www.janklin.com

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – A DIY approach.

2005-03-14T17:10:00.000Z

Whether you decide to do this yourself, or get someone to do it for you, it probably represents the best return on investment you will get in online marketing.

The postings on the blog will give you all you need – approaches, tools, resources, know how – to enable you to do it yourself. If you need to talk to me at any time, please feel free to call ( direct line:01928 788100).

Each month we will address a key stage of SEO showing you exactly what you need to do. Over a period of time this will form a complete DIY kit for you.
Its worth re-iterating that the first page on search engines is where the action is regarding sales. Over 80% of buyers buy from sites listed on the first page; 85% of traffic is driven by the top five hits, etc, etc – you know this and that many people have obtained tremendous success through their page one ranking. Here’s you chance to get amongst them.
It may be that to get success you don’t need to do too much – its down to how much competition there is for your target keyphrases. The fact that the vast majority of companies (I estimate over 95%) don’t know about this subject means you will have a head start to get positioned above the masses.
The process I will take you through is the following:
1. Understanding where you are now – the audit
2. Identifying the ‘roadblocks’ – what are the factors inhibiting your ranking.
3. Identifying relevant keyphrases to optimise your site around
4. Ensuring your site has the ideal structure for search engine spiders
5. Inserting the keyphrases into the relevant metatags in the correct form, and also in other key areas of the site
6. Inserting the keyphrases into the relevant visible content ( paying due attention to keyword density issues)
7. Submitting your site to search engines and directories
8. Building an effective backlink strategy
9. Content development techniques.
10. Monitoring and measuring your impact.
So, over a period of time you will become very knowledgeable and WILL be successful if you give it the attention it deserves. It’s not a short term fix but will deliver solid results for you in the medium term.
Each of the above steps will be communicated to you as a ‘Lesson’ in my blog postings. Lesson 1 will take you through the audit process. If at any time you wish to speed up the process then you should consider our ‘Traffic Builder’ service which is also posted on the blog.
Again, if at any time you wish to discuss anything with me don’t hesitate to call – 01928 788100. www.janklin.com

SEO Essentials - optimise, submit and measure

2005-03-09T17:00:00.000Z

TRAFFIC BUILDER SERVICE

Optimise your site, submit ALL pages to top 50 Search Engines to get maximum saturation, and monitor what happens. The essentials of Search Marketing.

The TRAFFIC BUILDER service is designed to do just this.

THE SERVICE

…is designed to get you top rankings in all the major search engines, keep you up there and ensure your web based sales increase.

I describe the service below in detail but in essence it follows the teachings in my seminar events - that to gain consistent top 10 performance your site needs to be optimised for the major search engines ( without trying to mislead them) then submitted and monitored on a regular basis. It works wonderfully well and will undoubtedly bring you more business.

The service comprises 3 elements...

1. Site Analysis and Improvement Report
2. Implementation of Recommendations
3. On-going Site Submission and Reporting

1. This is a comprehensive report which will make recommendations about keywords, phrases, site structure and other points which, when implemented, will increase the number and type of visitors to your site and ensure the traffic is aligned to your web marketing objectives.

Further it will address all the areas preventing your site achieving optimum rankings with all major search engines, for example problems that result from the use of technologies such as flash, javascript, dynamically created sites and frame sets etc, and advise on how to overcome them.

2. You will need to carry out work to implement the recommendations. ( Or we could do it for you) In some cases this may be trivial but in others require more effort. We will advise on the essentials and those areas which could be implemented at a later date.

3. We will then submit the site to the major search engines and directories. Specifically around 50 which collectively cover over 95% of all searches. The rankings will be reviewed on a monthly basis and re-submissions manually carried out (in accordance with the search engine rules) if and when necessary to give higher rankings.

NB The reason for including some major directories is to ensure you are getting some significant in bound links which also helps your ranking.

A report will be generated on a monthly basis showing the position - with a live link into each engine so the position can be verified. The overall objective here is to systematically move higher up the rankings over a period of time such that eventually top ten rankings are achieved for all the major search engines.

The first report is sent to you approximately 6 weeks after the recommendations we make have been implemented, thereafter monthly.

Its essential, its low cost and it works - for pricing contact jan@janklin.com or call 01928 788100