SEO strategies for E-commerce sites

SEO Strategies for E-commerce sites

SEO Strategies for E-commerce sites

 

SEO is essential to modern business’s, in the on going battle to get to the top of the search results. But when it comes to an e-commerce site, many companies struggle. With having to make so much content, and so many products SEO friendly. This can mean loss of sales, which is easily preventable. 

So how can you optimise your site, to ensure you are attracting as many prospects as possible? Well in the world of rankings there are a huge amount of factors which count towards getting you to that number one spot. Here are just a few simple steps that could help you reach your SEO goal.

 

Let’s begin:

There are a few background steps you should take to begin with. These set you in a good starting position, and mean your strategy efforts have a good platform to start on.

What are your competitors doing?

It is one thing to have your page up and running. It is another to see if you are in the game, and your products will get the recognition they deserve. Spend time assessing your competitors: their products, their prices, and how usable their site is.

How easy is it to navigate your site?

Using your site as a customer, or sitting with an unbiased volunteer to use your site, is a completely different experience to using it as your companies. See how easy it really is to find your products. Does it take 2 clicks or 10? Is it a frustrating process? Look at optimising your site’s internal search function, so customers can get to what they want quicker and easier.

Good meta descriptions

Ensuring your pages have good, unique, meta descriptions is an essential before you start with on page SEO. Explaining to customers what they are about to view means that not only does Google up your ranking for providing relevant information for their users. But you also get more qualified prospects visiting your site.

 

 

Maintenance:

Once you’ve established your good platform, you now have to maintain a healthy site. By maintaining the following points, you help to maintain your results as a constant. Rather than all your efforts being focused at one point, when you have the time.

Keep your out of stock item pages up and running

Though you may not have it now, you may do in the future. Offer either an alternative option for your customers, or provide a date or when that product will be back in stock. If you have products that no longer exist, don’t just delete the page. Redirect to the later model, similar stock, or the main category page. This way you don’t lose customers to error messages when they can’t find the page.

Keyword Research

Keywords are something that have been around forever, but now need to be used smartly to achieve a result. You need to ensure your keywords are relevant to terms your customers actually use, rather than internal terminology. There are a number of tools through Google you can use to find new keywords, or see how yours are currently performing. You need to ensure you keyword is in the URL, the title and the text to ensure your SEO is optimised, but tread carefully! You don’t want to saturate your content with keywords. The text should still read well, so always make sure you have a fresh pair of eyes glance over everything to ensure you haven’t been keyword heavy.

Create unique product descriptions for every product

Make your product stand out with a unique description. If your product is being advertised by other sellers and maybe the manufacturers themselves, you have a lot of competition. By taking the time to create unique descriptions, you instantly make yourself stand out. As well as perhaps inspiring your target audience as to why they should buy your product.

Include Pictures or videos for every product

Not only does including pictures or videos or each product make it more appealing for customers. It also gives you another opportunity to improve your SEO. By creating great alt tags, you not only improve customer experience, meaning happier customers. But Google also takes this into account when they consider your ranking.

 

 

Updating:

Once you’ve got in to the rhythm of steady maintenance for your site, you may want to push yourself a little further with some updates, and see what results you can achieve.

Create seasonal categories to maximise seasonal attention

When (like now) the winter starts to roll in, most people will quickly realise they are not prepared. They will search winter coats, scarves, hats etc. You can make the most of this demand by ensuring your pages are ready with a seasonal category. One that is ready with related products for your customers to browse.

Google Ads

If you are really looking to boost your search results and to encourage sales, it may be worth considering Google ads. To get those clicks through to your product. Google Ads can be extremely complicated, so take the time to understand it before you begin. To ensure you get the best results. Keep your eyes peeled for our upcoming post on simple steps to setting up AdWords.

Encourage user reviews

As part of your updating process, you need to actively encourage user reviews. Not only do reviews help to reassure buyers, or push them further down the sales funnel, they also help with your search results. If you’re not confident on how to gain reviews, why not take a look at our blog why customer reviews are important and how to get them.

 

SEO is an ever changing landscape, so for the best results, you need to be up to date with the latest news and changes. As well as implement those changes within your own strategy. By staying up to date, you stay ahead of your competitors, and enable your customers a great experience every time they visit your site. There are a number of sites that cover SEO news, including our own blogs.

If you need a helping hand, or some guidance on how to best utilise your website’s SEO, you can take a look at our SEO services, or call us for a no obligation chat on 01543 495752.

SEO Jargon Buster – Updated

up to date seo jargon buster

up to date seo jargon buster

We published our first SEO jargon buster in 2012 (with just 26 definitions!), and a lot has changed in SEO since then.

Our latest iteration has expanded hugely and now contains over 80 definitions.

Numbers

301 Redirect – If you switch domains, or delete a page, the URL will present users with an error message. If you carry out a 301 redirect on these pages, users will be taken to another page on your website and will not see the error message.

404 error – A message that appears with a web page no longer exists, or has moved to a different URL.

A

Above the fold – The part of a web page that users can see before scrolling down the page. It’s recommended that you place the most important information above the fold.

Algorithm – A formula search engines, programs, and computers follow to solve a problem and come up with a solution. In SEO, search engines use algorithms to decide what order to show search results in.

Alt text – Text used to describe an image. This will show up in place of an image if it cannot be loaded. Alt text is also useful for people using screen readers. And for telling search engines what the image is of.

Analytics – Data which shows how something is performing. For example, your website analytics will show how many people have visited your website, the most popular pages, your bounce rate, and so on.

Anchor text – The clickable text that is part of a hyperlink. For example: “Find out more about our marketing services”. In this case ‘marketing services’ is the anchor text.

Authority links – Links from authoritative websites, such as the BBC, .gov, the NHS, etc.

B

Backlink – A link to your website from another website.

Below the fold – This is any part of a website which users will have to scroll down to see.

Blackhat SEO – SEO techniques which do not comply with best practices. Blackhat SEO techniques are used to try and trick search engines into giving a website a higher search rankings than it deserves. Using these techniques can mean you are penalised or de-indexed from search engines.

Blog – Short for weblog, a blog is traditionally an online journal. However, it has evolved to be somewhere that businesses can share useful hints and tips about their products. Information about offers, events, and more. It has become a way for businesses to connect and engage with their audience.

Bounce rate – The percentage of people who visit your website and leave before visiting another page.

C

Canonical URL – If there are multiple URLs that show the same piece of content. A canonical URL is used to tell search engines which one is the original and which one should be counted.

CAPTCHA Completed Automated Public Turing test to tell Computer and Humans Apart – A ‘test’ used to figure out whether the user is a computer or human. You will often see these when submitting forms. The test usually involves typing letters and numbers into a box.

Cloaking – A technique used to show search engines and users different content. This is usually done to try and improve a page’s search ranking.

CMS – Content Management System – A system, such as WordPress or Concrete5, that allows you manage and update a website.

Content scraping – Copying content and posting it on another website without permission.

Conversion – When a user completes a ‘goal’. This can be a purchase, downloading an ebook, filling in a form.

Conversion rate – The percentage of people who visited your website and completed a ‘goal’. For example, the percentage of people who visit your website and then purchase. Or maybe the percentage of people who visit a landing page and download your ebook.

Cookie – In this case, we’re not talking about the delicious things you eat. Cookies are used to identify users and improve their user experience. For example remember your log in details.

Crawl – When search engine bots visit your website and follow links to other pages on your site. Even out to other websites, this is called crawling.

C Abbreviations

CPC – Cost Per Click – In Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, your CPC is how much it will cost you every time someone clicks on the advert.

CPM – Cost Per Thousand – This is the cost per thousand impressions.

CSS – Cascading Style Sheets – This allows web designers to create ‘style sheets’, which give them more control over how a page, and the elements that make it up, will look.

 

D

Deep link – This is a link to a page on a website that isn’t a homepage. For example, linking to a specific blog post would be considered a deep link.

Directory – A website listing businesses, containing information about their name, what they do, their contact details, their website, opening hours, and more.

Dofollow – A dofollow link is a link that you are telling search engines to ‘count’, which will pass on some SEO benefit to another website.

Domain name – A domain name is made up of the name of a website followed by a generic top-level domain, such as .co.uk, .uk, .org, etc.

Domain authority – This is a 100-point scale developed by Moz, that predicts how well a website is likely to rank in search results. It’s a measure of the ‘strength’ of a website.

Duplicate content – Copy which appears exactly the same in multiple places, either on the same website, or different websites. An example of duplicate content is several retailers who are all using the manufacturers description for a product. Duplicate content can result in SEO penalties.

E

Ecommerce – Buying or selling products or services electronically.

External link – A link out to another website.

G

Grey hat SEO – SEO techniques which bend best practice rules, rather than completely breaking them.

H

Hits – A request for something on a web page to load, such as the page itself, or an image. Hits are not a good indication of how much traffic your website has had as each image count as a ‘hit’. If you have 10 images on a page and the page was loaded twice, you’d see 20 hits.

HTML – HyperText Markup Language – This is the language used to tell browsers how a website should look and how to display it.

I

Impressions – The number of people who have seen something. For example, if 100 people see a search result, or an advert, it will have had 100 impressions.

Index – These are the databases search engines refer to. It will contain information about websites that have been crawled. It is possible to be removed from the database (de-indexed), which means your website will not show up in search results.

K

Keyword density – The percentage of times a key word, or key phrase, has been used on a web page. It’s important to note that there is no ideal keyword density, so don’t feel that ramming copy full of keywords will help your search rankings.

Keyword research – When you carry out research to see what kind of words and phrases your audience use to find your products and services.

Keyword stuffing – When words or phrases are stuffed into copy as much as possible, which often makes the copy hard to follow and understand, in an attempt to improve search rankings.

Keywords / key phrases – The words and phrases your audience use to find your products and services, and the words you want to perform well for in search rankings.

L

Link bait – Content that is created in an attempt to generate links back to the website / piece of content.

Link building – Techniques used to build links back to your website. This includes creating helpful content that people want to share.

Link farm – A group of websites that all link to each other with the intention of boosting search rankings by creating links. This is not a recommended SEO practice.

Link juice – A colloquial term used when talking about SEO benefits gained from / given by a link.

Linking C-blocks – This refers to IP addresses, and is used by search engines to determine whether websites linking to each other might be related. If websites on the same server, with the same c-blocks, are linking to each other, it’s a signal that the links might not be natural and might be owned by the same person.

Local SEO – When you specifically target higher search rankings in the geographic location around where your business is / has locations.

Long tail key words – These are key phrases made up of a few words. For example “purple non-leather dog collars” is a long tail key phrase. It’s much easier to try and rank higher for a long tail key phrase than a short tail keyphrase.

M

Meta description – Tells search engines what a page is about. This shows up as the description in search results, so it needs to be interesting and engaging to encourage people to click on your results.

Meta keywords – A meta tag that allows you to list keywords used on the page, and tells search engines what a page is about. Due to the abuse this feature received, meta keywords hold very little SEO value now.

Meta title – This is the title of a page that shows up in search results.

Mobilegeddon – A colloquial term to describe Google’s algorithm update in April 2015 that means websites with mobile-friendly websites may perform better in mobile search results, and those without a mobile-friendly website may have their rankings decreased in mobile search results.

N

Nofollow link – A link to another website which you are telling search engines not to count as providing any SEO benefit.

Non-organic search results – These are paid advertisements that appear on search result pages.

O

Off page SEO – Techniques used to improve a website’s search rankings that are not carried out on the website itself. For example, link building.

On page SEO – Techniques used to improve a website’s search ranking that are carried out on the website, such as making sure your website is responsive.

Organic search – These are search results that are not paid for.

P

Pagerank (PR) – This is what Google use to rank websites in their search results.

Pageview – The number of views a page has had. For example, if one person visits your page twice, it has had two pageviews.

Panda (Google Panda) – A Google algorithm that was first released in February 2011, and focused on improving rankings of websites providing high quality content, and lowering the rankings of poor websites that provided low quality content.

Penguin (Google Penguin) – A Google algorithm launched in April 2012 that aimed to catch and lower the search rankings of websites using black hat SEO techniques, such as buying links or keyword stuffing.

PPC – Pay-Per-Click – An advertising model where the advertiser pays for each click on the advert.

R

Ranking – Where you are showing up in search results.

Reciprocal links – When two websites agree to link to each other. Done correctly, the websites will link to each other because website A provides useful content for readers of website B, and vice versa. Excessive reciprocal links, especially when there is no relevance or need to, could harm your search rankings.

Rich snippets – Extra information that appears in a search result, such as star ratings, price range, and time required to complete a recipe, and so on.

ROI – Return On Investment – The financial return, or benefit, you will get as a result of an investment.

RSS feed – Really Simple Syndication – If an RSS feed is set up on your blog, new posts will be sent to anyone who subscribes to your RSS feed. You can choose the send the entire post, or just a snippet of it.

S

Schema markup – Code you can put in your website to give search engines more information about you, and give users better and more relevant results. For example, if you’re a venue, or a performer, you could share dates. You can share things like price, star ratings, how long a recipe will take.

SEM – Search Engine Marketing – A marketing method which focuses on improving search rankings, by doing things such as ensuring a website is SEO-friendly, and creating SEO-friendly content.

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation – Techniques used to improve a website’s visibility in search results.

SERP – Search Engine Results Page – The pages that show a list of search results.

Short tail keywords – (Also known as broad match) These are key phrases which contain around one or two words. For example “Black shoes”. Due to the small number of words, these are often very broad search terms.

Site map – A list of pages on a website that people and search engine crawlers can get to. An XML sitemap makes it easier for search engine bots to crawl your website, while a HTML sitemap can make it easier for users to find their way around your website.

Referrer spam – When spam bots ‘visit’ your website, skewing your analytics data.

Spiders – A program used by search engines to crawl web pages.

U

Unique visitor – The number of individuals who have visited your website.

URL – Uniform Resource Location – The address of a web page.

W

White hat SEO – SEO practices which comply with search engine guidelines. Do not attempt to trick them into giving a website a higher search ranking than it deserves.

 

Need help getting to grips with your SEO? Contact us today on 01543 495752 for a no obligation chat. Or you can read more about SEO in our blogs. 

A dog’s view on SEO

a dogs view on seo

a dogs view on seo

I’ve heard the humans talk about the importance of SEO, but I’m not sure if we’re barking up the same tree! My whole life is SEO, sleeping, entertaining and ogling, but the humans seem to think it’s something to do with a search engine?

George the business dog

All I know is I have a really hard life. For example, every day the humans drag me to work, they make me walk all that way! That’s like at least 100 metres! As you can see I am a very busy business dog, and I do not need to be wasting valuable energy on something like walking!

 

Sleeping 1

 

So how does a successful dog like me run my day? Well the first thing I have to do, once I’ve said hello to everyone of course, is to have a little sleep. The humans say I snore, but really I’m just multitasking and protecting the humans from nasties by making my presence known.

 

George playing with bin

 

Then its play time, I love to be social and have to get everyone to give me a fuss and choose a toy. Sometimes its snake, sometimes it mouse, sometimes it’s even the bin. I thought it was brilliant I could even make the chore of emptying the bin fun! But instead the humans laugh at me and talk in weird baby voices, so at least I know I’m entertaining them.

 

George ogling cake

 

Then I have to ogle at the human’s food that they are mean enough to keep away from me. One day, I will ogle enough that they will give me their lunch! It hasn’t worked so far, mum never cuts me a slice of cake! But sometimes Laurie gives me a bit of ham … he might be coming round …

 

George the marketing dog giving tips

 

Then once I have given David my professional opinion on business things, I usually have another snooze. Funnily enough when I wake up to go home, he doesn’t seem to have used any of my ideas of an extra paw print here and there, adding my toys to exhibition stands or making the brochures sausage scented. So I will try again tomorrow …

I’d woof love to hear if you agree with my idea of SEO (Sleeping, entertaining and ogling) but I suppose if you want to see what the humans say about SEO, you could click here.

What is SEO, and why is it so important?

What is SEO, and why is it so important?

What is SEO, and why is it so important?

SEO stands for search engine optimisation; it’s a method used to help your website show up higher in search results.

The reason SEO is so important is because the higher your website shows up in search results, the more visitors your website gets. And if your website works well, that will translate into more leads and sales.

A study carried out in 2014 found that on average, 71.33% of searches resulted in a click through to one of the organic search results on the first page. Additionally, the first five results account for 67.60% of all clicks.

As you can see, ranking on the first page of search results can bring you a lot of traffic that you just won’t get from search engines if you’re below page one.

SEO is not an exact science. You should run a mile from anyone who tells you that they can guarantee they’ll get you ranking first in search engines.

Depending on how much you know about SEO (but we’re going to hazard a guess that you don’t know a lot if you’re reading this). You may have heard that it is all about building links, and the more links you have the better. Well, that’s still kind of true, but not in the way it used to be.

A little history

In years gone by, you could literally buy thousands of links, and that would result in your website ranking better. It didn’t matter what kind of website was linking back to yours, or the quality of your website. If you had lots of links, your website would rank well.

But then, to the joy of internet users, search engines got wise and their algorithms improved.

It’s easy to see search engines as ‘the bad guy’, but their role is to provide users with the best possible search results. This means they have to rank websites in order of the most useful and relevant first.

If they don’t do that and show irrelevant websites on the first page of search results instead. They aren’t answering the user’s questions, and the user will switch to another search engine. That results in less users for the search engine. Which translates into less revenue from advertising because the audience is smaller.

This is why whitehat SEO is now about providing visitors to your website with the best experience you can. The better their experience on your website, the better your rankings.

 

 

What’s this “whitehat SEO” you just mentioned?

If you carry out SEO which adheres to search engine’s rules, it’s called ‘whitehat SEO’. This means you’re doing it by the book, and search engines have no issue with your practices.

As you might imagine, blackhat SEO is when you carry out spammy techniques (such as buying links, hiding content, keyword stuffing, etc). Which search engines do not approve of, and you risk being de-indexed.

Greyhat SEO is somewhere in between the two. Where you carry out some blackhat practices, or things that search engines aren’t particularly clear on.

The best thing to do, of course, is to only carry out whitehat SEO practices. Yes, there are times where you might see a website ranking above yours that is using blackhat SEO practices. But algorithms are updating all the time, and it isn’t worth carrying out blackhat techniques and risk getting de-indexed and losing visitors.

 

What happens if I do blackhat SEO?

As we mentioned above, blackhat SEO involves using practices which try to trick search engines into giving a website a higher ranking.

If you do this, you may end up being penalised or de-indexed. If you’re penalised, you may see your search rankings take a hit. Whereas if you’re de-indexed, you won’t show up in that search engine at all.

Either way, the result will be a loss of traffic, and potential leads and sales, from search engines.

If you clean up your act and your website, you can submit a reconsideration request. If the search engine decides you are no longer spammy. Or no longer using blackhat techniques, you will start appearing in search results again.

Be mindful that if you buy a domain which was previously owned, the previous owners actions can result in your website not being indexed.

A couple of years ago, one of our clients bought a domain. We developed a website on it, but it wasn’t indexing in Google at all. We hadn’t carried out any spammy techniques. And we’d developed the website exactly the same as the hundreds of other websites we’d developed.

In the end, it turned out that the previous domain owner must have carried out blackhat techniques. We had to submit a reconsideration request to Google. The request was processed, and the website began appearing in search results.

 

 

How do search engines crawl websites?

To crawl websites, search engines use software robots called spiders. Spiders work by ‘visiting’ a website and following every link on that site and indexing the websites it crawls.

This helps search engines to discover pages on that, the contents of the website, and the websites it links out to. This creates a big ‘web’ or an index.

Search engines then store all this information for later to create a cache. When you search for something, the search engine will search the cache, rather than live searching the web.

Submitting a sitemap to each search engine is a good way of helping the spiders find and crawl your website.

That is a brief overview of how search engines crawl the web, but if you want a detailed review, Woorank have a really simple, and in-depth explanation.

 

How do search engines decide what order to rank websites?

Search engines use complex algorithms, which no one other than those who work on it completely understand, to decide what order to rank websites in when you search.

What factors (called ranking factors) they take into account when deciding on ranking varies from search engine to search engine, and again, no one knows exactly what is taken into account.

That being said, we know that websites which perform well often have these traits:

  • Have good user experience – users don’t have any problem navigating these websites.
  • Contain truly useful content – users find what they’re looking for, and don’t leave immediately with their question unanswered.
  • Load quickly – 47% of people expect a website to load in 2 seconds, or less.
  • Is mobile-friendly – as of April 2015, mobile-friendly is a ranking factor; if your website does not perform well on a mobile, your rankings in mobile searches may suffer.
  • Have, and attract, high quality inbound links – the better your content, the more likely you are to attract links from top, authoritative websites. If your website has a lot of links from high quality websites, it’s a sign you too, are a high quality website.
  • Have a low bounce rate – to search engines, a high bounce rate (this is the number of people who leave your website having only visited one page) means users didn’t find what they were looking for.

 

How do I get my website to rank at the top of search engines?

SEO is no longer just about building links, it looks at every aspect of your website, especially user experience.

To reach the top of search rankings, you need to be providing your visitors with the best possible experience. In short, your website should be very user-friendly and contain high quality, useful content.

If your site has lots of backlinks from other reputable websites, that’s also a clear sign to search engines that your website is trustworthy.

It isn’t an exact science at all, and the best way to approach SEO, is to think about your customers, and your own experience using websites; think about how to give them the best experience you can, and your rankings will improve.

To find out how you can improve your content, read our recent blog post about how you can create the best, most useful content in search results.

 

But, how do search engines know if my content is useful?

It might seem like a bit of a mind bender; how does an algorithm understand whether or not content is useful?

Since they can’t understand content like we can, algorithms look at a huge amount of information, including:

  • What keywords content contains
  • Whether content has been scraped or stolen from another website
  • Whether or not it contains spelling or grammatical errors
  • If it has a very low word count – content that is very short, is not likely to be as helpful as long content
  • How long people spend on a particular page
  • The bounce rate – that’s how many people enter your website and leave before clicking through to another page
  • Links to it and the kind of website those links are coming from

 

SEO is a huge beast, which covers many aspects of your website, but the best thing to do is to create a website, and content, which gives your user’s the best experience possible.

 

 

If you are struggling with SEO, or your website isn’t performing as well as hoped, get in touch to find out how we can make your website work hard for you, and improve your website. Or, you can read more about SEO in our blogs. 

What are meta descriptions and why are they important?

what are meta descriptions and why are they important?

what are meta descriptions and why are they important?

Meta descriptions are used to describe the contents of a page. And are often displayed in search results by search engines.

The meta description is the black copy in search results underneath the page title and URL. (See image to left)

In Google, meta descriptions no longer have any SEO benefit. As they were abused when people rammed them full of keywords.

Yahoo and Bing however give a small amount of weight to meta descriptions. Though if you ram it with keywords they will penalise you.
Meta-descriptions

It’s worth remembering that search engines won’t always use your meta descriptions. If they feel there is a piece of copy on your website that is more relevant to the users search terms than your meta description, they will use that instead.

 

Is it worth using meta descriptions then?

You can see why people would ask this question. Adding meta descriptions can be time intensive, especially if you have a lot of pages.

The best way to think about meta descriptions is as an advert. It will be one of the first things users see in search results. You need to convince people to click through to your page and not your competitors.

 

Meta descriptions best practice

Ideally your meta descriptions should be around 155 characters long. If it’s much longer you might find the end is cut of in search results as 155 is around the maximum they can show.

As we said earlier, the best way to think about meta descriptions is to imagine they’re an advert. So you need to write some short, interesting and compelling copy which encourages people to click through.

Your meta descriptions need to stand out from competitors and tell them why they should go to your website and not anyone else’s.

Don’t be tempted to use the same meta description for every page. If you’re going to use them, make sure they are unique to each page.

 

How do I add meta descriptions

How you’ll add meta descriptions depends on how you edit your website.

If your website is hard coded you need to put the following code between the <head></head> tags.

<meta name=”description” content=”this is where your meta description goes.”>

If your website has a CMS system, like Concrete5, there will be a place for you to add a meta description.

For example in Concrete5 you hover over ‘edit’ and select ‘Properties’. Under the ‘Custom Attributes’ tab you can see the option to add a meta description in the left menu. You then type your copy into the meta description box and press ‘Save’.

If your website is an ecommerce website there may be an option for you to add a meta description to each product where you edit the products information.

Some of our clients use Magento and when you edit a product, there is a ‘meta description’ tab in the menu on the left hand side. Which allows you to add a meta description.

 

If done right meta descriptions should help to pull more people into your website. Giving you more opportunities to sell your products or services.

 

Are you looking to do more with your companies SEO? Why not contact one of our friendly team today to see how we could help, and in the meantime, you can read more about SEO in our blogs. 

Six SEO myths debunked & what to do instead

six seo myths debunked and what to do instead

six seo myths debunked and what to do instead

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is constantly evolving and it can be hard to keep up with the latest best practices. Which leads to confusion about what businesses should be doing.

We’ve reviewed six of the biggest SEO myths and debunked them, telling you what you should be aiming to do instead.

 

SEO is dead

We saw so many articles last year claiming that SEO is dead. But unsurprisingly it’s still alive and kicking.

SEO has evolved plenty of times over the years and is now heavily involved with marketing. As long as search engines exist, SEO will exist.

 

SEO is spam

We understand where this idea comes from because being a spammer used to help your search rankings.

Unfortunately some people still use those outdated practices.

The best example of this is the unrelated and sometimes unreadable comments you may see on your blog or website which link back to irrelevant websites.

Using outdated spammy SEO tactics like that will probably result in search engines punishing your search rankings.

 

I need to rank number one

Out of all of the myths, this one is the one with the most truth to it. Ranking first isn’t the be all and end all but trying to rank as high as you can is important.

Studies have shown that the number one result gets 33% of search traffic. But you can still get visitors and gain customers by ranking sixth or seventh.

For some small businesses it may be impossible to rank number one because they are competing against internet giants such as Amazon.

If you find yourself in that situation it isn’t the end of the world because your website will still receive visits.

It isn’t solely your ranking that counts. If you’re ranking well but you aren’t giving visitors what they’re looking for then they will never convert.

 

I need to earn as many links as possible

Search engines are no longer just interested in the number of links you have. They’re also interested in the quality of these links.

If your website is linked to by hundreds of low quality websites, search engines will think that your website is poor quality. If your website receives links from high quality websites they will see your website as trustworthy.

It’s better to have 10 links from high quality trustworthy websites than 100 links from poor quality websites.

In fact, Moz’s Rand Fishkin believes that co-citation will become more important, which doesn’t even involve a physical link.

What happens is Google may ‘see’ that a brand name is being mentioned alongside a keyword quite often. It will begin to improve that website’s ranking for that keyword. Despite it not being linked to much and in some cases the keyword doesn’t appear on the page that often.

To use one of Rand’s examples if you search for ‘backlink analysis’ you’ll see that Open Site Explorer is ranking really high despite the words ‘backlink analysis’ not being mentioned on the homepage.

In part of the snippet it uses for Open Site Explorer is text from an article on another website about Open Site Explorer.

 

The more times we use a keyword the better

Search engines are no longer influenced by the number of times a keyword appears on a website.

Using a keyword as many times as possible is known as ‘keyword stuffing’ and is something a search engine will punish your website for.

You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘content is king’ used enough to last you a lifetime when it comes to SEO but that’s because it’s true.

If you focus on creating brilliant quality that will help people who visit your website. Make sure that you do add some instances of keywords you want to show up for, you will slowly begin to see your ranking for those words improve.

 

Directory listings are important

Like many of the other SEO myths, directory listings were once considered important because they sent a link to your website.

People abused this and as a result search engines aren’t heavily influenced by directory listings anymore.

That isn’t to say that directories are completely useless when used properly. There are hundreds and thousands of directories on the internet but not all of them are equal.

If your business is listed on a directory that people use and trust, such as Yell, Dmoz or Yahoo, it will benefit your business. As well as send traffic to your website and hopefully generate leads for you.

Being listed on a directory that people don’t visit won’t bring your website much traffic or generate many leads. And being linked to by lots of low quality directories could damage your rankings.

 

SEO can be daunting to begin with. But you’ll find it easier to understand when you think that the aim of a search engine is to provide users with the best, most trustworthy and relevant results they can.

Understanding this will help you to realise that SEO is more than keywords. It is about pretty much every aspect of your online presence.

 

If you’re based in Burntwood, Lichfield, Staffordshire or the West Midlands and need help with SEO, get in touch to find out how we can benefit your business, or you can check out more our SEO blogs here. 

What are alt tags and how do I use them?

what are alt tags and how do i use them?

what are alt tags and how do i use them?

Are you confused about what ‘alt tags’ are, or how to use them? If so, keep reading. We’ll explain all and send you away with a few tips for implementing alt tags on your website.

 

What are alt tags?

Alt tags are a small and simple piece of HTML code which is used to describe an image.

For example, the image to the left is a picture of our French Bulldog, George, sat on a desk. The alt tag for this image is ‘French bulldog George sat on a desk’. If that image could not load, you would see the words ‘French Bulldog George sat on a desk’.

 

French Bulldog George sat on a desk

Why are alt tags useful?

If an image is unable to load properly or a user has images turned off in their browser the alt tag will be shown. So that users can see what image was supposed to be there.

Additionally, alt tags are useful for people who are visually impaired and use a screen reader as it will be able to read the alt tag and tell them what’s there.

They also help search engines as they cannot ‘see’ what an image shows. So alt tags tell them what’s in the image which can help your images show up in image searches.

 

Do alt tags help SEO?

They won’t make a huge difference to your search rankings but they can help your website gain visitors through image search.

 

How do I use an alt tag?

If your website runs on a Content Management System (CMS), such as Concrete5 or WordPress, there will be a small field when you upload your image where you can simply type in your alt tag.

If your website is flat coded, your alt tag will look like this:

<*img src=”georgeonadesk.jpg” alt=”French Bulldog George on a desk”/*> (Remove the * to use this code)

 

Tips for using alt tags

  • Describe what’s in the image using keywords
  • Write your alt tag for users not search engines
  • If the image shows a product, use the full product name
  • Don’t stuff it full of keywords

You should be using alt tags on all of the images on your website to enhance user experience.

 

If you need help applying alt tags to your images or help getting the most out of your website, get in touch for a free no obligation chat about how we could help your business. Looking for tips on your SEO? Read more of our SEO blogs here

Six Reasons Why Long Tail Search Terms Are Important Too

six reasons why long tail search terms are important

six reasons why long tail search terms are important

Ranking number one for a one or two word search phrase seems to be every website owners dream. However, sometimes it’s better to go for long tail search phrases which are more specific and have less competition.

When Ask.com was released it encouraged users to ‘talk’ to the search engine in a conversational manner. Which made it quite popular, especially with people who were new to the internet.

Years later when 65.8% of the UK population have smartphones and more and more people use voice search, long tail keyphrases are more important than ever.

 

What are long tailed search terms / key phrases?

Long tailed search terms are search terms which are made up of three or more words. For example, ‘dog treats’ would be a short tail search phrase. Whereas ‘how do I make homemade dog treats’ would be a long tail search phrase.

 

Long tailed search terms are easier to rank for

It’s much easier to rank for long tail search terms. As there is much less competition for a long search term.

How-do-I-make-homemade-dog-treats-search-results

For example for the search term ‘dog treats’ there are 112,000,000 results. But for ‘how do I make homemade dog treats’ there are 40,000,000 results. While 40 million is still a lot of results, it’s much less than 112 million results.

Generally, the longer the search term you want to rank for is the less competition there will be.

 

Long tail searches provide more accurate search results for users

Short tail keyphrases can be quite vague. Whereas long tail keyphrases are more specific. Meaning you get results which are more accurate and much closer to what you were searching for.

Keeping with the dog treat example. If you search for ‘dog treats’, you get a list of fairly big well known retailers selling dog treats. If you search for ‘how do I make homemade dog treats’ you get a list of articles which tell you how to make homemade dog treats.

This means the search results answer your problem or question much better than a vague short tailed search term.

Studies have also found that people using long tail search terms have higher conversion rates than those using short tail search terms, which makes sense because long tail phrases are more specific meaning that person knows what they’re looking and is closer to converting.

 

Long tail searches are more conversational and natural

Being able to use a search term which is quite conversational is easy and natural for us to do. It also means search engines are much easier to use for people who don’t use the internet all that often or are new to it.

More conversational search terms are even more important since Google has released Voice Search which means people will ‘talk’ to Google in a conversational manner and ask things like ‘how do I made homemade dog treats’ rather than ‘homemade dog treats recipes’.

 

Long tail search terms with well with content marketing

Long tail search phrases work well with content marketing, especially if you’re creating titles which are quite conversation or are a question themselves.

For example, we know that for us our most popular blog post are how tos and people search for things like ‘how business use hashtags in Facebook’ which we know links to our blog post we recently posted about how businesses can use Facebook hashtags.

 

Long tail search terms help you

Up until recently you could figure out what your most popular type of content was and what people were searching for to reach your website by looking at the organic search terms in Google Analytics. Google have recently put a stop to this to protect users, which means all search terms will now show up as ‘not provided’.

To find out what your most popular content or pages are look at how many visits each page gets.

For example, if your website sells gardening gifts and one of your most visited pages is a pink gardening set, you know that your visitors are interested in gardening gifts which appeal to women and may be buying for their wife, girlfriend, mother or sister.

 

Long tail search terms will help you rank well for short tail search terms

Search engines, Google especially, are doing their very best to provide users with the best answers to their searches and are doing so by encouraging them to be more specific, conversational and use long tail search terms. If you aim to rank well for long tail search terms it will also help you rank well for short tail search terms.

Sticking with the dog treat example, imagine you create content such as;

  • How do I make homemade dog treats
  • Why are organic dog treats are better for your dog
  • How many dog treats should I give my dog a day
  • Dog treats for dogs with food allergies
  • Dog treats for dogs on a diet

As you can see all of the above points have ‘dog treats’ in the title which is a short tail search term in itself, so it will benefit your short tail rankings.

 

You don’t need to focus on just long tail or just short tail; it’s possible to do both, especially if your long tail phrases contain a short tail phrase. It’s important not to rule long tail phrases out because they get less searches; yes, they do get less searches but people using long tail searches know what they’re looking for and are more likely to convert.

 

Contact Us

If you’re a business based in Burntwood, Lichfield, Cannock, Staffordshire or the West Midlandsand need help creating opportunities to sell by improving your websites SEO and search rankings, get in touch to find out how we can help you. Call us on 01543 387 047 or email us at contact@themarketingpeople.com. In the meantime, why not check out more of our SEO blogs here. 

How to Write SEO Friendly Title Tags

How to write SEO friendly title tags

How to write SEO friendly title tags

Title tags tell both search engines and people what a page is about. It’s vital to get your title tags right and make sure they’re SEO friendly. As they show up in search results and need to encourage people to click through to your website.

 

 

What is a Title Tag?

As we mentioned above, the title tag tells people and search engines what a page is about. You can find a list of SEO terms in our SEO Jargon Buster if you want to expand your knowledge.

 

Where does a Title Tag Appear? 

Title tags in Google search results

Title tags appear in search results (as shown above) and in people’s browsers (as shown below) at the top of the window and as the title of any tabs open in the browser.

Title tag in browser

 

Can I use my Company Name?

Yes, you should definitely use your company name!

 

If a user already knows the name of your company, they may choose to click through to your website based on your name alone. Especially if they’ve had a positive experience or know someone who has. If a user doesn’t know you, using your name may help to build up brand recognition.

 

How long should a Title Tag be?

It’s recommended that your title tag is no longer than 70 characters. Since that is the total amount of characters a search engine can display in search results.

 

A title longer than 70 characters will not damage your search rankings. It will just mean the entire title won’t be seen. Similarly, a title much shorter than 70 characters won’t harm your SEO. It will mean that you’re missing out on opportunities to use keywords.

 

Tips for creating interesting SEO friendly title pages

Now we’ve answered a couple of burning questions you might have, here are three really simply tips to help you write interesting and SEO friendly title tags.

 

What’s it about?

The first and most obvious tip is to ensure the title tells people what the page is about using important keywords. Don’t be tempted to fill your title tag full of keywords as keyword stuffing may harm your SEO.

It’s important to get the right mix of informative and attention grabbing so that people read the title and want to go to your page because it sounds interesting and/or sounds like it will answer their question.

Sometimes it can be really difficult to try and fit everything into 70 characters, so make sure you aren’t using words such as ‘and’ or ‘if’ and are only using words which are absolutely necessary.

 

Make sure titles are unique

It’s really important to make sure your titles are unique.

You shouldn’t have two pages the same or with the same content on your website, therefore your titles should all be unique.

Don’t be tempted to use the same title across all of your pages, because although it may save you time it may reduce the number of visits you get from search engines because people are confused about what’s actually on the page.

 

Most important keywords first

Make sure you put your most important keyword right at the start of your title tag.

SEOmoz carried out some testing and found that the closer to the beginning of a title the keyword is the more impact it will have on search rankings.

If you want to learn more about SEO, why not check out our post on what is SEO and why is it important?

If you’re a small business based in the Burntwood, Lichfield, Cannock, Staffordshire or West Midlands area and need help improving your websites title tags, SEO or search rankings, get in touch with us to find out how we can help you. Call us on 01543 387 047 or go to our SEO service page for more information. You can find more of our SEO blogs here

Eight SEO Techniques to Avoid & What To Do Instead.

8 SEO techniques to avoid and what to do instead

8 SEO techniques to avoid and what to do instead

It’s natural for a business to want their website to rank first in search engines and black hat SEO techniques can be tempting. However they can do more harm than good.

Black hat SEO techniques are techniques which break search engine rules and basically trick a search engine into giving a website a higher search ranking than it deserves.

Search engines ‘frown’ upon black hat techniques and are smart enough to know if you’re using them and will punish a websites search rankings if you are caught. In some extreme causes they may even remove a website from its listings altogether.

SEO is a long and ongoing process, so using black hat techniques to try and get a quick win will do you more damage in the long run.

Not only can these techniques damage your search rankings, but by choosing to use these techniques you won’t be giving any readers any kind of benefit or useful information, so it really is better to put some time and effort into creating useful content.

Search engine algorithms are incredibly smart, and there are a number of things they will take into account when deciding which order to display search results, here are just a few;

–          Relevance to keywords searched for

–          Is the content high quality and helpful?

–          High quality inbound links

–          Traffic to the website

Below is a list of eight black hat SEO techniques you should be avoiding and what you can do instead to naturally improve your websites search ranking.

 

Keyword Stuffing

This is probably the most common black hat technique as it’s fairly easy to do. It involves ramming your content with keywords and keyphrases to the point it probably makes little sense to anyone trying to read it.

The idea behind this technique is that the more instances of keywords you want to rank for there are in your copy, the higher you’ll rank in a search engine.

Thankfully search engines are smart and can distinguish between high quality content that is naturally keyword rich and content which is just crammed full of keywords.

What to do instead

Carry out some research into keywords you want to rank for, look at keywords your target audience may use to reach your website and carry out a Keyword Research Report (KRR).

Once you have done this you can begin creating helpful and useful copy which is keyword rich and makes complete sense to the reader and which will help you improve your search rankings.

 

Hidden Text

Hidden text means creating text which is the same colour of the background.

A user will be unable to read this hidden text, however search engines can read it no problem.

Since search engines can read hidden text and users can’t, hidden text is used for keyword stuffing.

What to do instead

As we mentioned above; carrying out keyword research and writing high quality, useful content will benefit you, your website, your users and your business far more than hiding a massive list of hidden keywords.

 

Buying Links

Parting with £9.99 and receiving 5000 links sounds like a good deal, doesn’t it? No.

Inbound and outbound links can benefit your SEO, especially if you’ve got incoming links from authoritative websites, such as the BBC or .gov websites.

However if you’re spending £9.99 and receiving 5000 links in return, the chances are they’re all going to be incredibly poor quality and will actually damage your search rankings.

If search engines see that thousands of poor quality websites are linking to yours, they will assume that your website is low quality itself and won’t provide a reader with useful information, and they will therefore decrease your search rankings.

What to do instead

Work hard to create great, useful and shareable content that people will want to link to. You could also write guest blog posts for similar and relevant websites which would provide you with a link to your website.

 

Comment Spamming

Commenting on blog posts or news stories which allow you to link back to your website is one of the quickest and easiest ways to gain backlinks.

Some website owners abuse this and leave poor comments on any and every blog post or news story which will allow them to link back to their website.

This is called ‘comment spamming’, and the chances are that if you have a website or a blog with a comment section you’ve been a victim of this. You know those really vague comments with a link back to a completely unrelated website? Yeah that’s the stuff.

What to do instead

Leave useful and helpful comments on blog posts or news stories which are related to your area. It really is that simple.

 

Directory Listings

There are very few directories which are high quality and are worth listing your website in nowadays. Search engines really don’t award much to being listing in directories, however being listed in some can be useful.

There is no punishment to being listed in directories, unless perhaps you pay to submit your website to thousands of low quality directories in one go. As we mentioned above, having thousands of low quality incoming links can harm your SEO.

What to do instead

Go for human edited listings which are often much harder to get into and require more information, for example, Yahoo Directories or DMoz.

 

Mass Article Submissions

If you write a brilliant piece of content it make sense that you’d want as many people as possible to see it. However submitting it to as many article directories as possible isn’t the right way to do it.

You’ll be creating duplicate content which will all be linking back to your website. Search engines don’t like duplicate content, as it could infringe copyrights and is a poor way to try and improve your search rankings.

What to do instead

Get your content in front of as many eyes as possible by promoting your content through social media or email marketing.

If you really want to submit your content to directories, submit it to a couple of the highest quality ones that give you the most traffic, instead of the low quality ones which probably don’t send any traffic your way.

 

Content Scraping

For an honest website owner abiding by white hat SEO techniques, this has to be the most frustrating black hat SEO technique. It involves copying content from one website and posting it on another website without attributing anything to the original creator of the content.

Sometimes scraping websites may link back to the website where the content came from, which could actually have a negative affect on the original websites search rankings as they are a poor quality website.

Not only is content scraping a black hat SEO technique, it’s also illegal as it infringes copyright laws.

If you find that your website has become a victim of content scraping, Google allows you to report scraper pages.

What to do instead

Nothing good will come of content scraping, at all. Research what kind of content your target audience want and create useful, high quality content which people will want to share.

 

Cloaking

Cloaking involves displaying different content to the website users and search engines. If your website is found to be using cloaking you be removed from a search engines index altogether as they are unable to do their job properly if you are showing them one thing and users another.

What to do instead

Instead, focus on building a great website which offers users a great user experience and contains useful and informative information that will help you to generate leads and hopefully sales.

 

Are you a business based in the Burntwood, Lichfield, Cannock, Staffordshire or the Midlands? Is your website not performing as well as you’d like in search engines? If so get in touch with us to find out more about our SEO services and how we can help improve your websites search rankings. Or you can check out more from our SEO blogs here