blog.wsiwebbasedmarketing.co.uk

Here’s something I just found out yesterday that you might find interesting if you’re interested in getting the best from your web site.

If Google doesn’t think your page title properly represents your page content they can change the title on the fly as they present your site in their search results page. Yes really!

The page title is the most important item on any web page and should be unique. It should describe the content and target subject of the web page.

When I do a web site audit this is one of the first areas I take a look at because if it’s not right then your site will have little chance of getting a good ranking for the subject matter.

Don’t put your company name in a title as you’ll already rank well for your company name, use the title to say something about the page. For example if you are a hotel in say Crail with a restaurant and you want to attract visitors to your restaurant page don’t use “Crail Hotel restaurant”. Try something like “Fine dining in Crail in our beautiful beach front restaurant” or “Restaurant in Crail offering superb food from local sources”. Think about what your potential customers are searching for and address their requirements. Your title should be no more than 70 characters long.

What I didn’t know was that Google can actually display a different title on the search results to the one you have created for your web page. This is very important as it shows how much importance Google attributes to this tag and it also means that if you’re doing a poor job Google will try and fix it.

Here’s a video from Matt Cutts at Google talking though the benefits of snippets. In the first 2 minutes he discusses the titles issue.

If you’d liek to read more you can see the Google Support page on the subject here http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35624

When the person doing your SEO asks you for access to your Google account I am sure you just hand over your username and password without thinking about it.  If they are completely trustworthy (like myself ) then that’s fine but sometimes this is a new relationship and it needs to grow a little before that level of trust exists and you may not want to upset them by saying no. But in actual fact they won’t be able to do their job without this data.

Also, in my opinion, if you use your Gmail account for your business correspondence then no matter how much your trust someone you shouldn’t give them access to your main account, it’s too risky.

So how do you avoid doing this whilst giving enough access for your SEO team to do their work.  Actually it’s very simple.

Here are the instructions on how to setup your SEO person as an Admin in your Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. You can easily unlink them as should the situation require it.

Google Analytics

• Login to your Google Analytics
• Click the ADMIN button in the top right and you’ll see this window
• Click on the breadcrumb marked in red and you’ll see this window

• Select the USERS tab marked in red and click on +ADD USER

• Add in the new users email address area and select the permission level. For full access select ADMINISTRATOR
• If you want to notify the user by email select this option then click ADD USER
• DONE

Google Webmaster Tools

1. Login to your Google account and get to the PRODUCTS area, usually in the menu on the left.
2. Select WEBMASTER TOOLS
3. Select the web site to add your SEO person to if you have more than one site on your system.
4. From the menu on the left select CONFIGURATION > USERS
5. In the top right select the link for MANAGE SITE OWNERS next to ADD A NEW USER
6. At the bottom of the page select ADD AN OWNER
7. In the email area please add the required email address and click CONTINUE
8. In the future if you want to remove me go back to this area and select UNVERIFY

You’ve got to admit that this is an impressive achievement. Although, that said, I still think Google+ and +1, and Google pages, and Google local, and …  are still quite confusing for most people out there.  The Hangouts and Circles in Google+ do make a compelling case to get involved but until they are populated by your friends, colleagues and customers it’s still going to lag behind Facebook.

To have achieved 400 million users in just 12 months is exceptional but they did already have many Gmail and Google accounts to convert.  What Google don’t mention is usage, just the upgrade/take up to Google+

It would be really interesting to find out what their actual user usage and engagement is, my guess is they are still a long way from Facebook pound for pound, and Facebook are now at 955 million active users, incredible. You can see the original post about the Google+ progress by Vic Gundotra here.

If you’ve not got a Google account you should set one up specifically for your business marketing.  You can then have all your Google services in one place.  If you’re unsure how to do this we can set-up and document a full set of Google marketing properties including analytics and webmaster tools for just £195 (excluding your content) so what are you waiting for. Get in touch at alan.tomkins@wsiwbm.co.uk

Those of you out there with an interest in keeping your site performing well on Google will probably have seen the announcement of the new update called Penguin on the 24th April.

Penguin is really a fine tune of the previous major update called Panda, seems more like Edinburgh Zoo every minute.

Panda was created to stop content farms and duplicate content getting good search engine rankings and to allow the original creators of the content to get the benefit of their work. That’s just the gist but basically Google is trying to reward those of us creating good quality content by giving us good rankings.

As those of you that have spoken to me will know content and keywords and my “banging my drum” subjects.  Google’s role in life is to deliver us as users the results that are most relevant to our search, and it can only do that if we are creating good quality content based on keyword phrases that are being search for.

If your site has seen a drop in its ranking over the last 3 weeks you might want to review the pages that have dropped based on the information below.

SUMMARY

It’s hard to know exactly what Google have changed but here’s what our research has shown are the issues Google are penalising:

• Internal links. If you are using internal links on your site (we all are and should be) based on keywords then you should consider adding more variety to the keywords you are using as the anchor text.
• Internal links. Keep keyword linking down to around 60% of your overall links.  Use words like “Click here” or the URL for the other 40%.
• Social relevance now has a higher importance to Google. If you are in a business that benefits from social media now is the time to take this more seriously.
• Web sites that are over optimised will be penalised.  This means if you have done any of the following:
  • Stuffing keywords in your titles
  • Overusing keywords in your headings
  • Overusing keywords in your content
  • Content that is designed for Google and not people
  • Hiding keywords in text that can’t be seen
  • Using ALT tags that are keyword stuffed
  • Inbound links from poor quality sources like link farms will have a detrimental effect on your ranking. Google has removed many of these link farms used by cheap generic link building services from its index.

ACTIONS FOR YOU

1)      Review your web site for the points above and rectify them immediately.

2)      Start to create new content for our site.  This can be new pages or blog posts.

3)      Consider Article Marketing to develop good quality inbound links.

Need help?  Just give me a call on 07860 659076 or email me at alan.tomkins@wsiwbm.co.uk

I am sure you’re all familiar with Google Maps and you’ve probably played with the Street View option as it’s truly spectacular (assuming you ignore the privacy issues). Now there’s a new service Google are launching and it’s called Business Photos.

Think “Street View” for your business.

Google have just put this new service offering on their site so you can see an example of a Business Photos application.  Like street View you can use the mouse to navigate and walk from room to room.  Check out an example here http://maps.google.co.uk/help/maps/businessphotos/

The service is only available from a limited number of photographers as they need to be trained by Google, purchase the equipment, and be authorised to load the images onto the Google servers.

The “walk through” of your business will be hosted on the Google servers in the same way you would embed a YouTube video so there’s no data transfer additional costs with your hosting company.

If you’re a shop, tea room, restaurant, pub, hotel, club, hairdresser, guest house, or any business that would like to show off its public areas then this is a very cost effective way to do this, with the added benefit of the search engine ranking, being linked to Street View, and getting a place mention on Google Maps.

From a local perspective the service was soft launched in Glasgow a few months ago and is now being rolled out to other Scottish towns with Edinburgh just going live now. Even if your outside Edinburgh it’s worth asking Derek (see below) for advice as there may be the odd exception.   If you want to get in early then you’ll need to talk to a Google authorised photographer and I would highly recommend Derek Fett of Fett Images. Derek has completed all the Google certifications and is currently creating these incredible images for businesses in Scotland. Derek is listed on the Google accredited photographers list here (at the end under Edinburgh)

I can almost hear you thinking… “that looks expensive” but you’d be wrong.  Costs start at £99 for a small area but top out at £300 for a larger area like a hotel or club.

So what are you waiting for, get in touch with Derek at info@fettimages.co.uk or call him on 07785 763571 or 0808 9000 572.

Alternative call or email me and I can discuss this with you before you speak to Derek.

If I had a pound…  How can I measure my social engagement without spending a fortune on a dedicated package. Well Google now has an answer.

I won’t repeat the post here but if this is of interest to your business you can get much more on the Google blog by reading the post here http://analytics.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/capturing-value-of-social-media-using.html 

Like all measurement tools on the internet this isn’t 100% accurate but it will give you some very useful information and you can measure the trends for your social engagement based on the efforts you, or your marketing team, are putting in.

If you’d like some assistance with setting this up please get in touch.

Enjoy!

Optimising your site to rank for the keyword phrases you’ve decided will achieve the goals you’ve set for your site is critical for your success. OK that’s an obvious statement but…

In a recent interview Matt Cutts at Google pre announced Google’s intention to penalise sites that are “Over Optimised” to “level the playing field”. Listen to the audio interview here.

For several years I’ve been told by clients that they get a call every week from someone promising to get their site to the top of Google for a monthly fee, sometimes a huge monthly fee.  Some of the methods to achieve this will leave your site more attractive to machines (search engine spiders) than it is to humans. BAD NEWS.

I have always advised that the most important attributes for your site content is that it’s relevant and engaging.

Here’s my top tip for not getting caught in the “Over Optimisation” trap.

CREATE CONTENT FOR HUMANS NOT SEARCH ENGINES AND MAKE SURE IT’S GREAT CONTENT, RELEVANT, INTERESTING, USEFUL, AND GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT.

OK so now we have that out of the way here are my 7 top tips for getting your site found by optimising your “On Page” SEO.

1)      Carry out your keyword research diligently and for every page, product and service on your site.  Yes it’s time consuming but not doing it is like building a house without foundations.  You can use Google’s free keyword tool, it really isn’t that difficult.

2)      Ideally your page URLs should contain the keywords. For example if you had a page about generating more sales then this is an ideal URL: http://www.wsiwebbasedmarketing.co.uk/generating-more-sales-for-your-business  If you are creating new pages always take this approach.

3)      Make sure on every page you have a relevant, unique and grammatically correct page title with the most important keywords at the beginning. Remember 65 characters is a good limit guideline.

4)      Make sure every page has a Heading1 title on the page, just one as we don’t want to confuse Google.  This should include your keywords, see a pattern forming here?

5)      Your content should have your keywords in the first paragraph and perhaps twice more if it fits into the word flow on the page.  Remember most people will only read the first paragraph or the “highlights” but Google will read everything.

6)      Use Heading2s, Heading3s, bullet points, bold and italics on the page to highlight important words, especially keywords.

7)      Use keywords as links to other relevant content. So a link to a “How to create a LinkedIn company page” should look like this:-  How to create a LinkedIn company page.

If you just follow these simple guidelines you’ll have 80% of your on page optimisation done and you can fine tune as you go along.

Good luck and get in touch if you need advice, it’s always free.

Alan Tomkins alan.tomkins@wsiwbm.co.uk

A short public information reminder announcement about AdWords

To inform and protect a user’s information, Google some months ago enforced a new policy to all websites advertising with them. All pages on a website collecting personal and financial information via a form require a privacy policy.

Google provides a guide here, you can even ask for a review of your privacy policy if you’re concerned The policy must include:

• What personal information is being collected in the form
• How the information will be used by the company
• If and how personal information will be transferred to 3rd party companies
• Instructions on how users can modify or delete their personal information
• How users can opt out of future communications

For those websites without the policy present, Google may flag the campaign, and therefore, prevent the campaign from spending until the policy is added.

If WSI Web Based Marketing is running your AdWords Campaigns we will ensure you comply and if not we’ll review this immediately. If you are running your own campaigns we would recommend you take a few minutes to review this very soon. If you need advice please just ask Alan Tomkins on 0800 9885534 or drop me an email at alan.tomkins@wsiwbm.co.uk

Many of my clients use AdWords to promote their businesses both locally and nationally, and in many cases I help run their campaigns for them.  This is mainly because setting up and using AdWords is daunting requiring much more than just writing an advertisement.  Here are some areas where we spend time during a campaign; keyword research, ad copy, split testing, constant monitoring and tracking, managing different campaigns, allocating budgets, setting up landing pages, conversion monitoring, and adding new advertisements.

Adwords Express takes many of these areas out of the equation by simplifying the entire process.  It’s specifically aimed at small traders with a local customer base. Hotels, restaurants, bars, cafes retail, dry cleaning, repairs, the list is endless, but any business that targets local customers.

We can help by giving you a £50 credit on your new account, no strings attached. Just ask me at  alan.tomkins@wsiwbm.co.uk

Although Google says you don’t need a web site, you can use your places page, I would disagree.  When someone clicks on a link for your products or services you want to offer them exactly what they are looking for. Making the most of every click through that you are paying for really requires a landing page aimed to get the user to call, text, email, fill in a form, or visit your premises. A generic places page just doesn’t offer this level of conversion capability.

So here are the headlines:

• LOCAL TARGETING – Attract clients locally: AdWords Express campaigns target end users who are nearby the advertiser or search for a specific product/service offered by the advertiser
• SIMPLE – No need to create and manage the campaign: Keywords are automatically selected based on the categories of the business
• TRANSPARENT – Cost control: Monthly budget limit specified by the advertiser
• MEASURABLE – Simple performance tracking: simplified dashboard directly accessible from Place Page
• GREATER ELIGIBILITY- No need to have a website: the Place Page can be the destination page for the ads

Google have provided an excellent guide to Google AdWords Express (14MB) to help you through the entire process so why not give it a go?  Allocate say £100 per month and see how it goes.  I know AdWords work, I have clients that have based their entire marketing strategy on AdWords and have been very successful, so give it a go, there’s not much to lose and a great deal to gain.

If you need help just get in touch, alan.tomkins@wsiwbm.co.uk, I can even offer you a £50 credit on your new account, no strings attached, so if you like you can use this to help set up AdWords Express if you’re not sure.

You can see Googles AdWords Express pages here.

Yesterday Google announced the launch of Google+ Pages so we can finally setup a Google+ business page, but how do you go about it?

It’s actually surprisingly simple and very similar to setting up your Google+ personal profile. Incidentally if you’ve not already setup a Google+ profile you’ll need to do so.

Google’s help files are excellent so if you go here http://www.google.com/support/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=1710600&topic=1710599 and look in the left hand column you’ll see all the help you need to get through the entire process.

I’ve just setup a basic profile in a few minutes, see it here https://plus.google.com/108921145564808713160/posts All I needed was a bit of information about my business, a main profile picture and 5 images to put across the top of the page to make the page a little more interesting.

There’s lots of potential here and I’ll be exploring this in more depth over the next few weeks and adding a few videos I’ve done, so why not follow me to get notified when I put these online.

Enjoy.