Google Roll Out “Analyze Competition”
Some of you may have already been lucky enough to get to grips with Google’s “Analyze Competition” feature over the past couple of months, now Google have rolled out the service for all English language users.
We all know the importance of keeping ahead of our competitors when it comes to pay per click management and making informed optimisation changes that will benefit your account.
The new feature can be found under the Opportunities tab of your account, Google’s blog update gives us additional information of the new feature:
“In addition to the feature’s core functionality, you can now also see the Google search terms that triggered your ad for each of the most specific sub-categories in your account. Click a category name to see more specific sub-categories.
When the category name is no longer a link, you’ll know you’re at the most specific sub-category — this is where you’ll see a “See search terms” link. Seeing the search terms that triggered your ad can serve as inspiration for new keyword ideas or help you understand if your keywords have been miscategorized by our system.
If you see that the search terms listed for a given category are not related to the keywords in your ad groups, you may consider making keywords more specific or adding new negative keywords.”
The tool is something I am personally looking forward to using. Let us know what you think about the new feature and how you think it could benefit your accounts.
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SEO for beginners
What is SEO?
If you had asked me this question a few months ago, I probably would have said that SEO was the rather uncomfortable result of an over-promiscuous attitude to personal relationships.
Indeed, the very idea of entire companies devoted to the art of SEO is one that I would have found quite baffling. This all changed when I started working for search engine marketing company Vertical Leap, and I was required to go from unenlightened ignoramus to fully-fledged SEO aficionado in a matter of days.
As with any highly technical endeavour, the mountain of specialist terms and jargon that faces an SEO outsider can be quite intimidating. Search marketing, content marketing, content generation – all of these concepts can leave newcomers scratching their heads and wondering what on earth they’ve got themselves into.
For this reason, I thought it might be useful to devote this blog to the fundamentals of SEO, with a quick overview of the most important things for a beginner to grasp. A summary like this would have helped me enormously, and I hope it can shed some light on the inner workings of this booming industry.
A good place to start would be with the acronym SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which basically means tweaking and improving websites to push them as high as possible up the rankings on search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. The SEO process is obviously a lot more complicated than that, but the ultimate goal is to increase the number of visitors to a website and help it sit proudly atop the list of search results.
To understand why this is so important to companies, it might help to think of a search engine as a huge shop window. As a customer, you are more likely to choose the shiny, well-presented product at the front of the window than the sad-looking, slightly mouldy thing on the dusty bottom shelf somewhere at the back of the store.
Exactly the same rule applies when it comes to searching for a product or service on sites like Google. Web users will nearly always choose the site that springs to the top of the search results, because it’s highly visible and it’s clearly a popular choice for people looking for a similar service. Users will hardly ever go beyond the first couple of pages of search results, because the websites there do not attract as many visitors and have probably been gathering dust for a while.
So, many business owners hire specialist SEO companies to optimise their websites and make sure they attract as many visitors as possible. But how do they make this happen? Well, search consultants at SEO companies devote their lives to making websites “search friendly,” targeting the keywords that potential clients are most likely to type into search engines. For example, a builder looking for work might type “construction jobs”, or a journalist looking for sources might type “online news providers.”
Search engines use highly complicated algorithms to rank websites, but the likes of Google and Bing are essentially looking for websites with the best ‘reputations.’ As a rule, the most reputable websites are the ones which are recommended by and linked to other established sites. If other websites are directing users to your site, that clearly means that your products and services are of relevance to somebody, and therefore deserve better search visibility.
One of the most important ways for a website to improve its authority is to have fresh, well-written and industry-relevant content delivered on a regular basis. SEO companies such as Vertical Leap employ trained journalists to write quality content for websites on a daily basis, featuring the keywords that are most likely to attract visitors.
Not only does this increase the volume of visitors to a website, but it also helps to establish the site as an authority in its particular field. This is essential, as it helps establish the site as a trustworthy and reliable source of information.
So, that was my extremely broad overview of SEO, but hopefully it gives you a better idea of how the process works and why SEO is so valuable to a website’s success. If nothing else, next time you click on the first result on Google’s rankings, you’ll realise that the website most definitely didn’t get there by accident.
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5 more useful SEO related WordPress Plugins
There are many blogging platforms out there, and after many years of preferring the simplicity of approach of Blogger, at the start of this year, I began dabbling in my free time with the world of WordPress for my own websites, and looked to use all the extras that WordPress allows for to improve their search engine marketing results.
Wow – what a sea change it was compared to working with a restrictive platform like Blogger, and their later changes to remove the FTP publishing capability made me glad that I made the switch before this happened. Blogger is fine for those that want to write a blog and publish it speedily and easily, but it is definitely a limited platform compared to what really is essentially a CMS with WordPress.
Following on from the excellent 5 SEO essentials for WordPress from Hannah yesterday, I’m going to look at 5 more plugins that I typically have been using when setting up a new WordPress site:
1) W3 Total Cache – this increased my website speed incredibly when I first installed it – and prevented the whole site being down when having database issues (I really should change hosts with one of my sites in particular!)
It caches all aspects of your website and really does speed things up a hell of a lot – this is nearly always one of the first plugins I install.
2) Redirection – ok, I must confess that I use this plugin a lot due to laziness. However it is a great little plugin for handling those pesky 301 redirects that you don’t want to FTP up for and make changes to the htaccess file.
Also, for those less technical in nature, it provides a simple facility for the redirects that may be required for one reason or another
3) Disqus Comment System – I’m not really a big fan of the default commenting system integrated into WordPress, and find that a lot of my potential audiences are much more prepared to engage using Disqus – it allows numerous login options and sorting options for the comments themselves, and they are all added in an easily indexable method.
I have found that I get considerably less spam using Disqus than the standard WordPress/Akismet out of the box setup.
4) iRobots.txt SEO – This is another laziness plugin – I could quite easily go and FTP and alter this by hand, but having the option to do this via a plugin seems much easier to me.
It automatically blocks crawlers from some areas that you don’t need them visiting, and allows you to easily add more.
If anything, the level of customisation for this is a bit over the top for what you are likely to need to do with a robots.txt, but it does all the basics I wanted to do simply and easily.
5) Twitter Tools – I really liked this plugin to allow me to easily post to Twitter with new blogs etc, but it also has the added benefit of being able to add a widget to the blog itself with the latest activity from the Twitter account that WordPress is Tweeting to – I’ve seen a lot of people moaning about widgets, but for my current uses of WordPress sites, they seem fine to me, and the uses that I am putting them to on my sites.
I did have problems with this plugin for a while being unable to access Twitter, but this seems to have changed now that everything has to go through OAuth to access an account now.
I’m sure that there are tons of other interesting WordPress plugins I haven’t had to find a use for just yet, and would love to hear what other people commonly use as well with their WordPress installations!
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In House SEO – Find the Right People
The great thing about building your business through SEO has been for smaller businesses, it is really a level the playing field and allows everyone to be competitive. You could be a business that doesn’t have a tremendous marketing budget and really make a significant impact online with a little elbow grease. All you need to do is make some time and learn the craft of marketing a website in the online space and you can quickly gain some much needed visibility through your SEO efforts in house. Offline you didn’t really have that choice, you either paid for the effort or it didn’t happen and the online space has really changed the way businesses now communicate with the masses.
Just because you do not have a 1 million dollar yearly PPC budget doesn’t mean that you can’t make a significant impact online. Writing some press releases, articles and getting active in your social space doesn’t cost you anything but time. Often times the biggest challenges are finding an employee in your company that can help you market your business and pull together your SEO efforts online. Go through your current employees and shift some roles and responsibilities around in order to give an employee some new room to help you spread your message in the web space. Chances are you have an employee sitting around at your business that should be helping you market your business online over what they might be doing now. Sometimes all you might need is to send that employee to some basic search engine marketing training to give them that extra knowledge on how to grow your business online in order to really help you. If you are not capable of hiring a search marketing employee and have not begun to do anything online you need to start to think about making this type of shift. Your business can’t afford to wait any longer sitting dormant online.
Chances are your competitors have already found a way to market themselves to your exact audience in the online space. Sitting around and waiting for things to change on their own will not help your brand grow in the search results. You have to start marketing yourself now and building your in house SEO resources. Go through your employees and find which one spends time online and could really be able to help you, you will be happy you did.
Cherry Picking Search Engine Marketing Companies
O.k. so admittedly I can be seen as bias when advising people on picking out the search engine marketing company for them, but that’s not the purpose of this post.
I simply want to present you with the signposts in order for you to find your own destination.
Think of this blog as a decision road-map – which counsel you decide to follow is entirely up to you. It was George Elliot who once said that “The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice”.
As someone who has previously worked as an online development manager for a number of years, now happily working within an Internet marketing company I feel that I can offer some useful tips and advice in this locale.
Here are some starter tips to cherry pick the paramount from the poor:
- What case studies can you find for them? A tried and trusted company can provide their retrospective weight in Internet marketing gold
- Can you see a clear, identifiable process which outlines proven methodologies to achieve tangible results?
- BEWARE of any companies who offer guarantees. There is a myriad of information online in relation to this so I will not go into more details on this topic however; please beware!
When I have been the decision maker for outsourcing Internet marketing the first thing that I like to do is call the company.
There is no better way to assess the quality of any service provider than by gaining a first-hand impression over the phone. This will give you an idea of the quality of advice and information being supplied, the personality of the company (i.e. a personal, unique approach or a scripted, call centre service) and an insight into the levels of service you may expect to receive if you choose to work with the company moving forward.
Other top tips to consider include:
- Having a registered address for the potential out sourced company on their website along with contact details for phone as well as the standard online contact forms
- Check the stated service levels and out of hours support
- Look for any career opportunities on the website – a company offering new opportunities is likely to be expanding and therefore also likely to be one of the authorities in their field
- Review client testimonials. Yes, there are many testimonials that have clearly been concocted however; nothing tells you more about a company than genuine client feedback
- Use your gut feeling – you have this for a reason and a website really does tell you a considerable amount:
- What are your first impressions
- Is the site usable
- Does the site appear to be an authority in Internet marketing
- How long has the company been established for
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Analytics in YouTube
Video is everywhere. It’s on the TV, it’s on your computer, it’s on your phone… With companies now complimenting their SEO by actively promoting their products on video sites such as YouTube, it’s important to analyse which of your videos are performing the best, which are the most popular, where your visitors are coming from – exactly as you do for your website.
We’re occasionally asked how you can monitor video usage on YouTube. As you’d expect from a Google owned company, YouTube has analytics. Here’s where you can find them.
- Go to YouTube and log in;
- In the top right corner of your screen, click your account name and then select “Account”;
- Click the link marked Insight
- Hey presto! You can drill down to view stats on specific videos, demographics and more using the links at the bottom left corner of the screen. You can also download reports towards the bottom of the page.
Does this give you all the information you need about your videos? Let us know your thoughts!
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Our Wayback Machine for September
Many newer readers of our search marketing blog haven’t been exposed to plethora of great articles in the archives section of this site, so this is a monthly series that highlights a few of the best posts from one year ago, two years ago, and three years. We’ll call it our Wayback Machine.
- More on robots.txt – nice overview of the robots.txt file and its impact / relevance to SEO.
- Image Optimisation – Low Hanging SEO Fruit – a rare post by one of our tech’s on how to improve your Image optimisation.
- What happens when you change your website? – some sage advice on the perils of site design and structure changes to your SEO.
- PPC Marketing and Landing Page Optimisation – Paul Broomfield offers some advice on getting the most from your landing pages.
- 5 easy tips to improve website visibility – here’s a great list of DIY changes you can make to your site to help improve your SEO.
- New study reveals that few SEO companies are search specialists – great report from a trusted source on the number of generalists in the market.
- How to Make Google – Talk Like a Pirate – As International Talk Like A Pirate day is approaching (19 Sep) – take a look at this post on how to tweak Google to speak “Pirate”
- Dynamic URLs and Search Engine Optimisation – Some advice from Google on how to use dynamic URL’s effectively
- SEO Tip for ECommerce Product Sites – although some of the screen shots may be dated, the content is still relevant – especially considering Google’s recent Local Shopping announcement.
- Facebook Phenomena – do we need to search deep on which employees are wasting valuable time? – An early discussion on the impact of social media within businesses from our Australian office.
- Google accounts for 80% of all search click throughs in the UK – not much has changed in three years, really.
- Search Engine Optimization Tip for LinkedIn – some help on better utilising your LinkedIn profile for search
- Measuring the Success of an SEO Campaign: The Long Tail – on the importance of tracking long tail keywords.
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5 SEO essentials for WordPress
I’ve recently dealt with several WordPress installations. I am by no means an expert in this one so, you know – this is an amateur’s guide to the essentials. But sometimes an amateur’s guide is best. Yes? or No. I don’t mind – you can leave your opinions in the comments.
So – you’ve got your basic WordPress installation. Someone has promised to skin it for you to make it pretty, someone else has promised to link it in to the site so visitors and search engines can find it, another person is actually going to write the magic content. That’s everything covered isn’t it?
Nope. Really very much nope. Here are my 5 SEO essentials for WordPress:
1.) Top, number 1, really very big, super important thing to remember. Think Pete wrote about it a couple of weeks ago. Check you haven’t accidently blocked the entire website. You can do this by going to your WordPress dashboard and going to Settings > Privacy Settings and checking the Site Visibility and check that it says “I would like my site to be visible to everyone”.
2.)Google XML Sitemaps – this one generates a special XML sitemap which will help search engines. The one to watch out for here is to ensure that the root of the blog has a writeable sitemap file – so if you have told the plugin that you want the sitemap to be at mysite.co.uk/blog/sitemap.xml, then ensure that you have placed a file there with that name and ensured that it is writeable
3.)All In One SEO – after installation of the plugin, go to the “options configuration panel” and ensure plugin status is “enabled” and that you’ve filled in some good keyword rich stuff for “Home Title” and “Home Description”.
4.)Permalinks – a really good one that isn’t default. This is part of WordPress – no plugin required. Go to Settings > Privacy. The default option has question marks and parameters and numbers. This is not particularly useful – a far better option is “month and name” which includes the name of your blog post – hopefully getting some keywords into the URL structure. In order for this to work, you must ensure that the root of the website contains the .htaccess file and that the file is writeable.
5.)Google Analytics For WordPress – a straightforward one this, to ensure that all your posts of your analytics tracking script on.
Drat. I always think of a 6th essential point but 5 is snappier – let’s just say – another thing to consider then…
Another Thing to Consider.) Promoting your blog on Social Media – there are lots of auto tweet plug ins. I tried a few. I didn’t enjoy the experience on any of them very much. I’ve decided to stick, for now, with my trusty friend twitterfeed.com
