Building Authority – Part 1
Search engines like Google use algorithms to define where a particular website sits in the search engine results pages (SERPs). These algorithms are constantly updated from a daily to hourly basis, depending on what can be improved; this helps ensure the most relevant websites are returned to the entered search query.
In order to help improve a website’s ranking, authority is required. Authority can be acquired through various factors, one of which is content. As crawling, finding and adding new content is the primary aim of all search engines; content clearly becomes a very important factor to every website owner.
Adding Content
To ensure maximum return on any content you add, there are a few simple steps to consider –
- Unique – Unique content is what search engines crave, once it’s added to your website, don’t duplicate it. Duplicated content can result in penalisation and potentially even banning your website from the search engines index.
- Relevant – Content that’s relevant to your site is essential, as it helps build what your site is about to both search engines and visitors.
- Plentiful – You can never have too much content, therefore when the opportunity arises, add more content. Furthermore, create pages with content revolving around a particular topic, helping boost your authority even more.
- Fresh – We love our fresh groceries and produce; well search engines love fresh content. Continually adding fresh, unique content will ensure constant updating of your site in the search engines indexes.
- Interesting – Keeping your content interesting will help improve your websites online presence, potentially opening the doors for natural link building, substantially increasing your authority.
Content is the foundation of any websites success, therefore combining all above factors can help start your website on the right track to building authority effectively.
Popularity: 18%
Read MoreNew Years Resolution: Be the top of Google!
As the economy recovers from global recession, businesses will continue to explore alternative ways to market their business. Also, as more people get easy access to fast internet connections there is plenty of scope for online business to expand rapidly.
However, getting visibility through the search engines is critical to success and one of the most cost effective marketing approaches available.
As search engines becomes more complex with the introduction of social networking feeds (Twitter) into their results, it’s high time for businesses to optimise their websites. Hence the New Year’s resolution for a business should be to get to the top of Google.
The power of search engines can only be experienced once your site is optimised and ranking well in the search engines. As the competition becomes fiercer amongst search engines in the coming year, it is very important to make sure your business is visible on all the major search engines.
This year is all about entering new markets and reaching the unattainable heights that is only possible through digital marketing. The success rate of SEO Marketing is higher compared to almost any other form of online marketing. Each and every single day, several billion users log into various search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo to locate business services and products. SEO can help your website to gain higher Search Engine Rankings and thus help in improving online visibility of your website.
SEO marketing is surely one of the ground-breaking marketing techniques which will help your website to gain more exposure on various search engines. It will also help you to reach out to a large number of potential customers resulting in increased revenue and ROI.
This is a New Year’s resolution you need to keep!
Popularity: 16%
Read MoreFlash Websites: Beautiful Outside, Ugly Inside
Flash websites are nice, they’re pretty and stimulating but still far from practical. In fact, in many cases, the prettier your site, the more complex message it sends to a potential or current client. Considering how far we’ve advanced in technology and with the Internet, you’d expect this primary focus would be clearer.
Unfortunately since we’re all wrapped up in these fancy improvements, we are focusing less on the potential/current client and more on our own wants and desires. Adobe Flash is one of these technological advancements which has utterly stunned everyone from the beginning, though it’s important to know the mechanics behind it and what effect it has on your pocket.
The first point I would like to make is that in my opinion you should never make your whole site entirely out of Flash, as this can be riddled with complications. In addition, I have provided other examples to why Flash isn’t ideal:
- Speed & Size – A full Flash site is simply too big in size. Majority of people do not have lighting fast fibre optic Internet, so they won’t be sticking around for long if they’re staring at a loading bar all day. Size has been reduced remarkably with further advancements, however catering for the majority is still essential.
- Dynamic Resolution Resizing – Catering for various resolutions isn’t possible with Flash, without spending countless hours and tens of thousands of extra dollars into creating multiple versions of one site. CSS (or Cascading Style Sheets) offers this option and is free and compatible with every browser!
- Mobile Web – Many unfortunately still don’t take mobile browsing into account, however this is critical in today, especially when mobile phones are replacing land lines (home phones) and some computers and laptops. Not to mention the revolutionary iPhone, enabling fast web browsing via 3G or Wi-Fi, many simply don’t see the need to carry around a 2kg laptop when they can carry a phone.
- Price – Flash takes longer and requires much more extensive knowledge, making a Flash designer worth their weight in gold. However with all these combined, comes one big hefty price tag. When you require a modification, you pay for it, and not lightly either.
- SEO – SEO is required for your website to achieve high ranking positions in the search engines and substantial traffic, which ultimately will be your potential/future clients. However, as Google can only read a very small part of Flash and other search engines aren’t unable to read it at all, you’re losing a great deal of potential clients.
This is not to say flash is bad, quite the contrary, as it engages users and creates a very dynamic feel, but it’s important to note with the combination of all these complications that creating a website in Flash is often only to impress or provide a “wow” factor to people, stimulating only their brains and not necessarily your pocket.
Popularity: 20%
Read MoreHow long does SEO take?
One of the biggest challenges facing any business undertaking SEO is understanding how long it takes. SEO should be considered like any other traditional marketing item – it can take time for meaningful results to filter through. The number one thing to remember is that SEO is a marathon not a sprint. And if your website is new, then you’ll have to be even more patient.
A new website won’t just pop up into the search engine results overnight without some SEO basics applied to the site first. Following that, search engines then have to find and index your site. And even once they’ve indexed it, it’s often another 3-6 months before any meaningful results occur.
Unfortunately, in most cases, results are not going to happen overnight. There are a number of external variables that are out of your control that can play a part on how quickly and successfully your website climbs up the ranks.
Firstly, the search engine algorithms are constantly changing as Google, Yahoo! and Bing endeavour to continually serve the most relevant search results to its users. Therefore, it’s highly beneficial to outsource your SEO to a SEO company who would continually monitor these changes in the algorithm.
Secondly, the competitiveness of the industry and search terms that you are targeting can also influence your ability to move up the rankings with ease. Generally broad search terms, such as “events” or “cars” will be much more competitive and more difficult to rank for than specific, targeted keywords that are relevant to your business and your website, for example “corporate events Brisbane” or “cars for sale Brisbane”. Usually, it will be much easier and quicker to rank for specific keywords that are less competitive and more relevant to your business. Additionally, if you choose your keywords strategically, you’ll also be more likely to get much more traction and draw high quality traffic to your website.
Finally, there’s no way to control what SEO tactics your competitors are using. Therefore it’s vital that you employ a long term SEO strategy to ensure that your website is constantly optimising against your competitors. If you stop applying SEO to your website but your competitors continue with their SEO, it won’t take long before you drop out of the ranks as your competitors overtake you.
In most cases, SEO is not going to happen overnight. The reason for this is because of the number of variables that cannot be controlled. However, by putting the right strategies in place, and by keeping an ongoing long term view of SEO, you’ll start to see meaningful, worthwhile results and add value to your business.
Popularity: 55%
Read MoreHow to do SEO: Keyword Research Considerations
One of the foundational elements of any Search Engine Optimisation campaign is the selection of keywords to optimise your webpages for. As such, it is of critical importance to understand a number of factors in order to lay the groundwork for success and to avoid optimising for the wrong keywords.
Keyword Phrases vs Generic Keywords
Search engine users type in keyword phrases in order to return results that will hopefully satisfy the intent of their query. It is important to differentiate between a keyword phrase and a generic keyword. Examples of generic keywords include singular words like “accountant”, “hotels” or “marketing”. A keyword phrase would be something along the lines of “accountant Brisbane”, “luxury hotels” or “marketing conference”. Generic keywords tend to have higher volumes of traffic associated with them but in most cases have a far lower conversion rate than more specific keyword phrases.
Keyword Search Volume
How often is the keyword being searched? There are various free and paid tools available for approximating keyword volume, such as Wordtracker, Wordze and the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. It is important to emphasise that the numbers these tools report are approximate and by no means a concrete measure of how many times a keyword will be searched. Additionally, most of these tools report only on US search volumes and may be a poor representation of the Australian market. A further point to note is the seasonality and/or spikiness (unusual spike in volume due to the term becoming a hot topic) of a given keyword which will skew the reported number of searches.
Keyword Competitiveness
A keyword phrase with a higher level of competition will be more difficult to rank for. How many other webpages are competing for the keyword phrase you want to optimise for? An easy way to get an overview of this is to search for your keyword phrase on Google. You will notice above the results something along the lines of “Results 1 – 10 of about 343,000 for [KEYWORD PHRASE]. (0.33 seconds)”. This means there are approximately 343,000 pages in Google’s index that are somehow relevant to [KEYWORD PHRASE]. Keep in mind that not all of these pages will be explicitly optimised for [KEYWORD PHRASE]. More often than not the keyword will merely appear on the page or within the anchor text of a link pointing to the page.
You can narrow down the number of real competitors in a number of ways:
- Include the phrase in quotes i.e. “keyword phrase”;
- Use the “intitle:” or “allintitle:” operator – see which pages have the phrase in their title tag;
- Use the “inanchor:” or “allinanchor:” operator – see which pages have links pointing to their site with those keywords as anchor text.
Commercial Intent of Keywords
Consumers will use different language depending on where they are in the buying cycle. Information seekers tend to use broader terms before narrowing their search to more specific keywords as they move closer to making a purchase.
Also, two searchers with different needs may use the same keyword phrase to find what they’re after. Generally, the shorter the keyword phrase, the broader the intent and the greater the potential for ambiguity. Traffic from longer, more specific keyword phrases (commonly referred to as “long tail keywords”) tend to convert better than generic keywords because the visitor has qualified themselves.
Furthermore, some words take on a different meaning through common usage or branding. Take for example the word “caterpillar”, with at least two very distinct meanings, i.e. the larval stage of butterflies and moths, or “the world’s largest manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, diesel and natural gas engines, and industrial gas turbines.”
Relevance of Keywords
Just because a keyword has a relatively high volume, low competitiveness and high commercial intent doesn’t mean it has anything to do with the goods and services you sell. Additionally, it may be completely relevant to your business but the content of your website might fail to adequately communicate this.
Striking a Balance
Keyword research, like many aspects of SEO, is a balancing act which requires the researcher to go beyond merely looking at the metrics. In tandem with cold hard numerical analysis, sucessful keyword selection requires an understanding of pyschology, marketing, language patterns and general knowledge in order to discover the right keywords for your business.
Popularity: 21%
Read MoreSEO Companies Need to Act Like Home Lenders
To get great results on a website with search engine optimisation (SEO), a business and their SEO firm need to be able to work in partnership.
For example, a site brought to an SEO company that is technically very sound but poorly visually designed won’t convert well, meaning no amount of SEO will be able to increase revenue because users will simply arrive at the site from Google, take one look at it and never come back.
By the same token, a fantastic looking site that is SEO-technically challenged will not look attractive to the search engines when being crawled. This means you’ve got a great looking site that no-one ever sees.
If the SEO industry wants to gain more credibility, then SEO providers need to start acting more like banks that process home loans. In a nutshell, not every home loan is approved.
For SEO companies, we must look at a range of conversion, design, technical and financial factors during the assessment period to ascertain whether the client is serious about SEO, whether they have the right website for SEO and whether they understand that it’s a long term process, and not something that happens overnight by throwing a few bad links around.
When a bank is assessing a loan, they determine whether or not a person is capable of paying back the loan over a period of say 30 years.
With SEO, we need to make sure that the client has the shared vision and commitment to ensure the website is initially designed well to suit their target audience, they are ready to add SEO friendly content when requested and most importantly they are prepared to take the time to read the FAQs and understand how the SEO process works.
Without this shared commitment, sometimes there isn’t any point in doing SEO for a client as it may leave “a bad taste in the mouth” for all parties involved and eventually hurt the industry itself.
For Reload Media’s SEO FAQs, please see: http://www.reloadmedia.com.au/seo-faqs.php
Popularity: 18%
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