MMO SEO

Search Engine Marketing is vital today. So we now need to look carefully at where the commercial market-place is going. Any service or product related company must have a website – that’s a given. But a web presence by itself won’t bring results. Purchasers won’t necessarily be able to find you.

Let’s compare it to a new store opening up… A lot of money has gone into setting it up. They open for business… And see where they are – in the middle of nowhere, down some side-alley. And no-one has given any thought to advertising their location. Is anyone likely to buy from them? This is exactly the scenario for 99% of ALL commercial websites in existence.

The World Wide Web has caused a paradigm shift in marketing. Around the time of the millennium, it was thought that having a website was everything. Vast amounts of money were spent on all singing/dancing web sites. This trend was cheerfully encouraged by on-line design companies, who relished the business! But just the existence of the site didn’t bring in the customers. They’d thought that simply having a site on the web meant customers could see them. In fact, this wasn’t the case at all.

Web marketing needs a whole new approach. Traditional marketers would say your site is an advertisement of your products or services. And so to get people to visit the site, they’ll promote it in the press and media, and on TV and radio. Basically keeping it within their frame of reference. They produce the pretty brochure and then market every possible avenue to generate enquiries to send that brochure to. However, this process illustrates an absolute misunderstanding of website marketing.

This process only utilises the web as viewing gallery, which is quite wrong. It allows us to search and research – to discuss ideas and interact with others. It’s completely interactive, bringing massive choice to billions of people. We can find the sites we’re looking for because Google, Bing and Yahoo etc. have formulated huge site directories to simplify the task. Can you imagine trying to find something in Yellow Pages if there wasn’t an order and an index? We’d be forever frustrated and disappointed.

Search Engines have sorted all this. But in doing so, they’ve radically changed the face of marketing forever. Because now, if you want to be found in the vast sea that is the internet, you have to be indexed in the Search Engines. Even that isn’t enough though. Statistics reveal that almost no-one looks ‘below the fold’ on the 1st page.

So to give all companies a chance to be on the first pages, the Search Engines came up with a new form of paid advertising. You only pay when someone actually chooses your advert – hence the name ‘Pay-Per-Click’. This caused quite a storm when it happened. Basically, the only time you now paid was when someone who was already interested asked to look at your site. This is an incredibly targeted way of advertising, and done properly, can yield some exceptional results.

Alas, the market is bombarded with this form of advertising these days. Prices have risen hugely. This is mostly due to high bids being put in by marketers with no experience. Some words and phrases command such high click prices that profits aren’t possible for many companies. This happens mostly where lots of clicks are essential to get one buyer. So Search Engine Optimisation is now becoming a preferred method for many to get to page 1.

To illustrate the challenge: Visit Google now and search for some of your company’s keywords. Do you feature in the first three lists? Most likely not. In other words, you’re no-where to be found. If the answer was yes, are those terms actually being used by customers?

You may have some successful experience of PPC advertising. Can you be sure you’re working it as efficiently as possible? Is your ROI satisfactory? Have you got an eye on the stats that measure your results? It’s important to split test your campaigns – are you doing this? If you don’t know what your stats are, then guaranteed you’re not getting the best results for your money.

Sales statistics are now clearly showing that both UK and worldwide commerce is undergoing a paradigm shift towards online sales and marketing. Companies must acknowledge this, to survive and flourish in today’s economy.

(C) Jason Kendall SEM. Pop over to EvolveSEM.co.uk for the best information on SEM Experts.

We’ve discussed the basic premise of Search Engine Optimisation, (including factors pertinent to ‘on-page’ optimising) in an earlier feature. However, what really matters concerns off-page SEO. It’s rather like a voting scheme. One website volunteers a link or vote to another website. They’re suggesting the site is worth looking at.

There are 2 main bits to the link. First, the actual URL or web address of the page they are pointing to. Then secondly the keyword phrase. This will be highlighted on the web page. That page can then be seen as receiving one ‘vote’. In other words one ‘vote’ to push the website up the natural listings.

It always works in this way. There’s an irrevocable connection between the page pointed to and the anchor text. Or the process can’t happen. The Search Engines use the anchor text as an explanation of what the page is all about. It’s ESSENTIAL to understand this – Your site will only come up in searches it has anchor texts for.

Can you see therefore why a ‘Click Here’ link serves no SEO purpose? The phrase ‘CLICK Here’ is what we’ve voted for! Who would choose to search for Click Here? No-one of course.

That is why the anchor text is SO important. Because that’s what controls the phrases you will rank for. And by the way, if you DO Google “Click Here” you will always find the Adobe Reader download site at the top. Is that an important term to Adobe? Of course not! But they’re up at the top because the phrase “CLICK HERE to Download Adobe reader” features on so many websites.

So to count a ‘vote’ for a web page, the Search Engines always go to the anchor text. It is the logical thing to do. Google wants to emulate what a real human being is looking for and would like to find. In several ways it doesn’t matter what your page is about. The Search Engine ‘knows’ your page is about ‘green buses’ if that’s your highlighted anchor text. It’s undeniable!

Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that… The Search Engines also take into account a pages’ title and its wording. Plus a whole bunch of other factors as well. Just as an example – they’ll look at the spread and relevancy of the ‘voting’ sites.

The bottom line is – to SEO successfully takes a ton of back-links. If these back links come from a variety of sites and have well phrased anchor texts, then so much the better. The quality of a site counts too… A back-link from Microsoft.com or Adobe.com would be worth a lot more than a back-link from a local hardware store!

It takes knowledge and skill to identify the best keyword groupings for your site. (Research your competitors well before you plump for yours.) It really boils down to one thing: When someone is looking for your product, what words do they use for their search? Find the answer to that, and you’ve got your keywords.

However, you can’t just use your ‘best guesses! Quite often, the phrases you’d expect to see don’t rate very highly. We all have different ways of expressing ourselves. You may think to Google “quality mattresses” if you’re hoping to sleep better. A different person though may choose to write the words ‘I need to sleep better’.

You just can’t trust your ‘gut feel’! The importance of the investigation, testing and measuring of these phrases cannot be underestimated. They are fundamental to generating your leads on the internet. It’s just like having an ad in a telephone Directory. If you’re a Plumber and you’re listed under Stationary Providers, you won’t get much business! It’s very important to be listed for the right terms online. Solid SEO research will take care of that.

(C) Jason Kendall SEO. Try EvolveSEM.co.uk for logical information on SEM Consultants.

SEO is an evolving study of the factors which search engines use to ‘rank’ you in their natural listings.

When we search for anything, up come the natural search lists. They’re in addition to the PPC lists. On the major Search Engines, you’ll see a box at the top, and a column down the right hand side. These are the paid adverts. The ‘natural’ listings are straight from the main index. They show sites listed in the order of importance and relevance – according to their algorithm.

We want to be right up there where we can be seen. No-one’s going to find us if we’re listed on page seven. It’s impossible to know about all the SE’s rank determining factors. The SE’s really don’t want anyone to know – so you can’t manipulate or ‘game’ their system.

So, over the years a complete industry has grown up around this. On the one hand there are SE’s purposely filing a wide array of new patents. Causing much mystification about their methods! On the other hand, there’s Search Engine Optimisation. This utilises a series of tests and measurements to determine the most pertinent factors.

The objective is to maximise both ‘on-page’ and ‘off-page’ optimisation. Off-web criteria also play a part in SE listings, (e.g. demographics). This doesn’t come under the remit of SEO though. For a full discussion of Off-Page factors, please refer to our other article on this subject.

On Page Optimisation

This involves making your web pages ‘friendlier’ to the Search Engines. This is quite straight-forward – it simply requires correctly setting up your site. For instance: Seeding keywords in suitable places and at the correct density; internal-linking, using H1 & H2 header tags, and to a lesser extent, using meta-tags.

It doesn’t matter if all that sounds very confusing.

It’s very easy to control on-page factors. But to be quite honest, they have the least relevance to your ranking these days. To be blunt, some would say it hardly has any effect at all. It used to be possible to ‘trick’ the Search Engines with on-page factors several years ago. That hasn’t been possible for a long time though.

On-Page can still be important though if Off-Page has been taken care of. When that’s happened, on-page factors can be optimised.

Some Words Of Caution…

Avoid doing SEO on keywords that have millions of listings. For example, on Google’s Search Engine you’ll see 70 million listings in the UK for the term Car Insurance. It’s not rocket science to realise that competing in this area wouldn’t be productive.

However… When I search for “Southampton Car Insurance”, it comes down to a more manageable 300K. (If car insurance in Southampton was my business!) A big number still it seems – but actually quite a small number when it comes to web searches.

I would have a far better chance of getting ranked for that phrase quickly than I would for just ‘car insurance’. In actual fact, it takes very deep pockets to get a premier listing for a term like ‘car insurance’. My competition would be the huge corporations. So not a great idea – especially, in fact, when there are much better ways to go about it.

In fact, what we really need are terms that more specifically reflect our product or service. These ‘long tail’ phrases might contain a number of specific keywords. It depends on your competition, but long-tail searches can be up to 6 or 7 words. Typically they will be 3 or 4 words long.

In general, our recommendation is to begin SEO’ing with keyword phrases that reveal fewer than 500,000 results. (If the sites on the front page haven’t used SEO techniques, then we might go with bigger yields). Over time we’ll gain ground on the larger search terms. This will happen automatically through building back links. If we put in enough effort, we can go after those big phrases in 3-12 months time. This strategy is also far more targeted at the start. We go for the phrases that people who are looking to buy are using.

Don’t just limit building back links to your website’s home page – link them up to various sub pages as well. Google and the other Search Engines like this ‘deep linking’. Category or Product Group pages are a good example. These pages are usually linked to particular product pages. This means it can be very productive to drive search terms directly to them. Don’t just create back-links to your home-page. How your site’s pages are managed and listed is gaining more and more attention from Google, Bing and Yahoo.