Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

52. Use of Panoramio for small business

Friday, September 28th, 2012

Panoramio is a tool owned by Google which affords the user help in including images as part of this approach but what makes this tool unlike other image sharing tools?

Various studies have proved that using images online can have the effect of engaging the user and holding their attention quicker than just using plain text. With this in mind, it would be prudent for any business in ensure that images are incorporated as part of their websites, blogs and any other online marketing and company branding strategies.

With Panoramio there is the facility to exhibit a symbol on a map, which will correspond to the place that the image in question was taken. This is fantastic for any business when a potential client asks questions about your business, for example; “Can you make available details of where your current customers are serviced or situated?” Rather than just offer a directory of areas or addresses, they can be accompanied by images which will help them connect more easily with the text.

Other capabilities of Panoramio are that you can effortlessly share your images on social networking sites such as Google Buzz and Twitter which will help increase awareness of your brand, products and services. GEO modifiers can be attached to an image which will help direct more traffic to your online marketing tools where people are specifically looking for your location.

There are also photographic communities within Panoramio. These groups are a place where like minded people can share images and have discussions about topics that they are enthusiastic about. These groups will help ensure that your business is connecting with and maintaining relationships with people that will want to be informed and kept up to date with what products and services you can provide.

Panoramio is free and easy to use and they provide a comprehensive resource section which will ensure that any user of Panoramio can reap the benefits to the fullest extent.

If you would like more information of local search services or how Panoramio can help with local SEO and marketing, please contact us.

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Posted in Local Mobile Search, SEO, Small business online | Comments Closed

50. How using Flickr can help your small business

Monday, September 24th, 2012

Flickr is a fantastic way with which to showcase any and all images that represent your business from photographs of products, social company events to trade fairs and much more. By allowing such images to be searchable on Flickr, you can create more exposure for your business.


Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Traffic can be driven to your own company website as Flickr gives you the option to upload a slideshow you have created onto your own site and for those companies using blog hosts such as Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr and Live Journal there is the option to post images automatically onto your company blog. Both these options will be catching the attention of visitors and showcasing your company immediately.

Integrated with this is the ability to attach a Title, Description and Keyword Tags to every photograph. Whilst Flickr is linked to the search engine Yahoo a well built site on Flickr where photographs have been optimised for search engines and been used creatively for marketing purposes will benefit your business through other search engines such as Google and more.

Flickr has become a fantastic resource for any person or company searching out stock photography for their blog or website. No matter what your company has to write about there will be photographs available to accompany any web content or blog.

If one of your goals as a company is to establish your business as an expert in your field, along with building recognition of your brand and creating working relationships and goodwill, then you may want to consider providing your own company photographs as stock photography via Flickr. Creating a Flickr account consisting of photographs which are interesting and engaging will encourage other people and companies to want to use your photographs.

The fact that you can store and categorise all photographs within a Flickr account has meant that telling your company story visually has never been easier. Your clients and staff can add to your archive by sharing their memories and experiences of your company which in turn can be used to market your business.

Flickr can also be used in conjunction with many social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, therefore, no matter your preferred choice for connecting with potential clients, the sky really is the limit with what you could potentially achieve by using Flickr.

Click to view the Digital Ark Flickr page. If you would like help setting up Flickr or for us to Do It For You, visit our contact page and send us an e-mail.

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41. Does you small business website REALLY contain the content Google now wants?

Wednesday, July 4th, 2012

In recent posts I have covered the changes to the Google search algorithm (Panda and Penguin) and in post 40, why you should not rely only Google for your traffic.  However, you can not ignore Google as they still account for around 80% of the search engine market.  So the question is, what is the most constructive use of a small business owners time to make their website appealing to Google?

What does Google want?

As mentioned many times, they want to provide the best user experience to the person conducting a search by providing the most relevant search results.  In order to do this, Google wants high quality content.

What does this mean to a small business?

Review the content on your website and ask yourself:

  • “does it provide value to the person searching”
  • “has it been written for the person searching or for the search engines”
  • “does the content answer burning questiond, provide information, etc”
  • “is the website easy to navigate, easy to find the information”
  • “can the information be improved and enhanced”
  • “is the information out of date / defunct”
  • “ask family and friends for their input”
  • “ask your clients (after all they know what they want”
  • “ask the people on your mailing list, followers on Facebook, Twitter, etc”

There are many other questions that could be added.  However, reviewing your site using the above will be a good start.

Take action – make changes

If you find areas that can be improved, make changes.  The sooner you make changes the quicker they will be picked up by Google.  Don’t sit back and wait.  If you have a big website, start that changes in tranches, don’t wait until you have reviewed all of your pages.

Action list

  1. Review website content
  2. Identify changes
  3. Rapidly make changes
  4. Repeat steps 1 to 3 on a periodic basis

Follow these simple steps and your website should become more useful to people searching meaning more relevant to Google.

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40. Is Google your single link of failure for your business?

Saturday, June 30th, 2012

Since the creation of the Google search engine, as well as the much publicised “do no evil”, their main objective has been to return relevant search results to the person who is looking for information. It is important to remember this as their objective is NOT to help businesses and organisations promote their website (however good it might be)!

Old way to improve rankings

Due to this objective, many small business website owners have looked for ways to help their website improve in the search engine rankings. Some have had success, others have not. A whole industry offering search engine optimisation (SEO) has been created, again with a varying degree of success. SEO can be split into 2 distinct areas, on page (the structure and content that appears on a website) and offpage (inbound links from other websites, directories, etc). It should also be added that social media (how many Facebook ‘likes’, Google ‘+ 1′s’, etc that your website is receiving).

Over recent years, Google gave a very high ranking to websites with many inbound links, especially where the anchor text of link was an exact match to a search phrase. Anchor text is simply the text that appears in a link i.e. Click Here. Many SEO companies focused on adding links with the anchor text matching the search phrase a website wished to rank well in the search engines. So if you were running a building company in Colchester, the anchor text would typically be ‘builders in Colchester’, ‘Colchester builders’, etc.

Old way made the searchers unhappy

The Google algorithm used to equate many links with the same anchor text to mean that the website must be a good match for the search phrase. This resulted in websites who practiced this approach rising to the top of the Google rankings. Unfortunately, the results that reached the top were not always the results that the person searching was looking for. This means that the searchers were unhappy that in turn means that Google was unhappy for not meeting their objective.

Google comes to the rescue

In April 2012 Google addressed this my adjusting their search algorithm to discount inbound links that looked like they were artificial and / or being used to manipulate rankings. This change hit a number of websites quite hard, unfortunately many innocent websites were caught in the cross fire. While there is still much debate on what is the best approach for SEO (just search for best seo approach post penguin), one thing is certain, building links using the same anchor text is no longer as effective. In fact it can hurt your rankings.

Important lesson

Facebook Business PageLike in business, you should never rely on one customer for all your business. What happens if they go ‘bust’? The same is true for search engine traffic. Google often makes changes to their search engine algorithm. If you are unlucky, you could lose all of your traffic overnight. Therefore, it makes sense to look to other channels as well for search traffic. For example, Facebook is the 2nd most visited website each month with many people using it to seek buying advice. Every business should set up their own Facebook Business page. It provides another source for visitors, and lessens the risk of single point of failure with Google.

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Posted in SEO, Small business online | Comments Closed

37. Google Penguin has changed the rules again for small business websites

Monday, May 7th, 2012

After the 23rd April 2012 did you notice any of the following for your website?

  • Drop in the number of daily visitors
  • Large drop on where your website appears in Google

If you did then your website has probably been hit by the recent change of the Google search algorythm, a change they have named ‘Penguin’.

Penguin

The Google Penguin change has been launched to try and address what Google refers to as ‘web spam’.  Websites that offer poor, sometimes duplicate content and / or engage in aggressive search engine optimisation  (SEO) practices to try and manipulate their position in search engine rankings.

Unfortunately, like with other changes by Google the end result is never perfect and some good websites have been caught in the crossfire.  The problem is that this is very unfair on the website owners, especially if it means in loss of business to competitors.

When Google make these type of changes it does act as a wake-up call, especially if you are guilty of (quite innocently) falling foul of these guidelines.

Link building can be risky

One area many small business owners get caught is buying a cheap deal to build 1000 links to your website for a very small fee.  What you don’t know is how those links will be built and, more importantly, the impact they will have.  For this reason it is very wise not to buy links.  In fact Google even states that links should not be purchased.

For a website with good content and serving a meanigful purpose, links will build up naturally over time.  The method of how these links are built will vary, not only by the ‘anchor text’ in the link but also the source.

For example, a natural link profile will come from directories, blogs, forums, press releases, social networks (like Twitter, Facebook, etc) and others.  They will also appear over time.  Buying links may result in 1000 backlinks all being built on the same day, all with the same anchor text and from the same type of source i.e. forum signatures.

Avoid duplicate content

Another important aspect of the change is to ensure that your website contains good quality content that is not duplicated across several webpages (or other websites).  Google can identify duplicate content and only gives credit to what they beleive is the source version.

This means that a small business owner should ensure that there is no duplicate content and ideally look to ensure that content is regularly updated.  This is where a pay each month service can be very cost effective by allowing regular updates to keep content fresh.

Google’s primary objective

I want to close by remnding you that Google is always thinking about search in respect of the user experience of the person searching.  If you keep this in mind when building your website and updating the content together with avoiding suspect SEO practices, you hopefully will not experience the wrath of the penguin.

If you would like more information, please do not hesitate to contact me.

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34. Five things you should do when writing a small business blog

Tuesday, March 20th, 2012

A business blog is a place where your company employees can converse with existing and potential clients in their own unique voices. A company can demonstrate their collective knowledge and experience of the company and through these comments have a conversation with customers informally and openly. When writing a blog, think about the following:-

 

Content

Good content needs to have a purpose whether to inspire, educate, inform, assist or entertain. It should engage the reader and provide something they can relate to. Fresh information is better than stale so even if you are writing about a topic that is timeless, it should be done in a way to make it new and exciting.

 

Headlines

The headlines of your blog will the first and perhaps the only impression you make. Without a headline that converts a browser into a reader, the content of your blog may as well not even exist. A headline can grab someone’s attention, a great headline will entice the reader into the body of the text you have written. In essence, a headline should promise some kind of advantage or reward for the person reading it in trade for their valuable time to do so.

 

Keywords and Phrases

In order for your blog to get noticed by people other than those working for your company you need to maximise the potential for it to get noticed on the various search engines used by potential customers. It is important that you use the best and most unique keywords and phrases for your blog as they provide these search engines with a brief description of what your blog is about and the easier you make it for search engines the better chance your blog has of being noticed.

 

Writing Style

A blog is not an advert or flyer for your company. The other sections of your website should provide these bits of information, so try to sound like you are chatting to someone when writing your blog. Read your blog back to yourself before publishing, does what you have written invite your customers to initiate a response?

 

Frequency

You need to ensure that your blog is updated regularly. Content should remain fresh but not overstretch your resources. At minimum you should set a time each week, however depending on your business requirements you may have a need to respond to or update on posts more frequently.

If you are interested in starting a blog to help your business or organisation and would like advice and guidance, please contact me on info@digitalark.co.uk.

If you are ready to start, you may be interested in our reliable web hosting packages with 1 click WordPress install.

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31. Importance of choosing the right key search phrases for your website

Thursday, March 1st, 2012

Your company name may differ from that of your competition, however, when it comes to promoting, marketing and advertising your business you cannot rely on your name alone. In respect of your website, using the right phrases and keywords is of the utmost importance, especially when you are looking to generate new clientele. The ones you choose can make a vast difference to the number of visitors that will find and use your website.

The greatest source of traffic for your website is those that are free. Usually these are people who have used search engines such as Google and typed in words or phrases relevant to what they are looking for. Research shows that many people using search engines like this will usually not investigate companies past the first three pages of results. So…you need to think not just about the obvious words that relate to your business but how to use them uniquely.

You may be using phrases that relate to what you have to offer but if they match what thousands of other companies offering the same as you are also using, the chances of your business showing near the top of the search engine results will be greatly diminished. The significance of your website being located near the top of search result lists cannot be overstated. If you are not positioned in the top percentage of listings then the amount of people using your website could be negligible.

Most SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tools will contain a keyword and phrase tool as part of the package they tender or these tools are available separately. It is worth researching these as the cost of these tools varies from company to company. Ensure that you find one that is capable of generating lots of varying ideas for keywords and phrases and that also affords you the ability to organise and report the results.

If you are still unsure of the importance of using the right keywords and phrases within your website, carry out a simple test. For example: – If you were a plumber and typed this into your search engine it will return over 69 million results! Obviously this is worldwide coverage, however if you entered it along with your location the results will probably still astonish you and show you just how many companies offer the same basic service as you therefore further  illustrating the need for unique keywords and phrases.

Key phrase analysis is a fundamental part of the website design process at Digital Ark.  If you would like more information please contact us by sending an e-mail to info@digitalark.co.uk.

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