October 26th, 2009 by Bruce

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) should at all times be conducted in an ethical way so that the Search Engine Placement of the client website will be on the initial page of a list of organic search engine results. These results will in general come after a list of sponsored sites that are pertinent to the search keyword(s) typed in.

The procedure by which a search engine, e.g. Google, sorts out which web sites are relevant to the keyword(s) submitted for search, is by having previously indexed the pages and stored the results in a database. Thus by looking through the index for the keyword(s) a fast response is assured, usually in less than a second.
The search engines use a program to do the indexing, known as a robot or spider, and these robots have been built and refined to identify unethical practices that they find on web pages, which they might well then exclude from the database. In some cases the web site may be excluded in it’s entirety.

The robot grades the web pages by several methods: The number of times a keyword is found on a page, and the number of times independent sites link to the page.

For clients operating Online Marketing services, it is important that their web sites have longevity as they may well sustain many other clients.

Keywords:
Unethical Practice:
Keyword Stuffing is an unethical exercise of repeating a keyword many times in a web page, in general by using text that is the same colour as the backdrop so that it won’t be viewed by a visitor but will be seen by the robot.
This can also be used for keywords in Meta tags in the html head of the web page code.
Ethical Practice:
Ethical exercises focus on what the user experience will be, so the page text should be significant to the page title and the page title should mirror the link that was used to reach it, as well as the actual content. Content should be cautiously written in good English with no spelling or grammatical errors, and should emphasise the product or service that the page is about. Keywords should be part of the typical flow of text and repeated only as often as sensible reading allows. For keywords in Meta tags a exclusive list of keywords should be used.

Links to the page:
Unethical Practice:
An unethical developer may create what are known as Doorway Pages, where the text is probably just keyword stuffing and a link to the promoted web site.
Ethical Practice:
The ethical method is to create significant pages that can be read by a user and have links to the client site.

If looking for a SEO Company, ascertain which methods they use before committing yourself to their services.

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October 24th, 2009 by Bruce

If you have invested in an online marketing service from a SEO Company you will have with a bit of luck been through a useful process of business and customer assessment. Ideally what should happen is that the optimization company spends time with you recognising and then valuing keywords, then decides how those keywords should be woven into your existing website. Next the process of making certain the correct coding is shown to the search engines is done, and finally the off page promotion of your site. At this stage you should start to see your website progressively improve in it’s Search Engine Placement positioning. It may take some time for the site to arrive at page one of the search engine page listings but in the end, possibly after a month or two, this should occur.

Once it is, sales will not usually increase at once, unless you have a commodity based product. However over the coming weeks visitors numbers to your site will increase seriously. Searchers become farmiliar with seeing you on that first page, book marking you for future reference and sending your link on to colleagues or friends. It is then that the sales or enquiries should start to grow, and it could be anything from one to six months after the success of your search engine placement depending on what type of purchase you are asking clients to make.

With any luck discussions about how quickly the benefits of the online marketing drive would be seen were part of the service received from the Search Engine Optimisation Company. If this was not the case or if these timescales look as if increasing even after getting page one ranking it could be time to evaluate the way you website is working. Re-visit the keywords identified to make sure that you are targeting the precise customers and re-check competitor sites to see if you have been left behind in any area. Online Marketing is a continuous process, if the page one listing is not delivering extra business in to you in the predicted time frame it may be that the service has been below standard; your industry has transformed in the time taken for the campaign to achieve it’s goal; or just that the design of the website is not helpful to bringing that custom in.

It may be the error of the Search Engine Optimisation Company or it may be down to other circumstances either way the best course of action in this situation is to get back in touch with your contact and ask for a detailed explanation.

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October 23rd, 2009 by Bruce

Having a website constructed can turn into a costly project that may or may not be sensible in terms of effort and costs. Before you embark on the project, and even before you pick a web designer think about your company and what it essentially wants to accomplish from a website. Once you have some answers to this question it will give you a good idea what kind of designer (if any) you could do with and a basic overview with which to get going.

Do you merelt want to have your business particulars listed on the internet so that clients who already know about you can find basic information such as your email address or your opening times? If this is all you really need, because your business is say for example a hairdressers shop on a high street you will probably find that your requirements are already dealt with by the many business directories that are now on the web.

Do you need to provide a service for existing clients, providing them with information, backing and service once they have already located you via another path. In this case your site may well need to be technically very well built, easy to revise but will require no Online Marketing to promote it to the search engines.

You may like to sell goods online, having a product which can be bought without been seen as it is standard, for example dvds or cds. If this is the case then outlay on a website that can cope quickly and easily with payments is vital, the site will need to have a good Search Engine Placement so that a huge number of searchers are alerted to the products but the detail of the objects themselves may be small.

If your product is a niche one, for example say you dealt in antique silver letter openers, you may find that there is very little need for any search engine promotion as there are so few competitors for your items on line. You may find that you therefore achieve a good enough Search Engine Placement position without paying out for the services of a SEO Company. People looking for these niche items are ready to browse through a few more search engine results pages than they would for a commodity. However if you expect to get sales from the site you will have to think very carefully about how you display information about your goods, you will probably need access to a designer who offers a cost effective ongoing service to keep the items updated and also a decent photographer as images will be crucial.

Try to think about which of these examples would best match your company and then choose your designer on that basis, if you still need one!

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October 20th, 2009 by Bruce

Search Engine Placement is vital for a company who seeks to expand it’s online sales. The logic being that if a customer does not know that you as a business and service provider exists he has to search for you through a keyword or phrase. That search should if possible bring the customer and business together and end in a sale. Every business has competition and this competition is compounded on the internet as geography does not curb it. So frequently a business will find that as it does not appear at the top of search engine ranking results, it sees none of the thousands or millions of clients. They are merely picked off by the competition placed higher up the list.
The function of the Search Engine Optimisation Company is therefore to make sure that the customers website appears on page 1 of the search engine results for the appropriate keywords. This in sequence ensures that the company is visible to all those customers and provided the website then does it’s job selling the actual product or service, the company benefits.

This is not as straightforward as it may appear. Firstly the Search Engine Optimization Company and the business have to agree what the appropriate keywords are. Often the business has specific ideas what these should be but when the research is done there are regularly some differences in the way the majority of customers search for a product and the way the company describes it. The research will highlight this and result in the best possible keywords and phrases being used.

The website can then be modified to take into account these new keywords, slotting them into text where possible and also into the coding of the website, again the Search Engine Optimization Company will work with the organisation and in this case even the web designer to attain an optimized site. Some of this work may have been completed initially by the web designer but if the correct keywords and phrases were not picked out then the correct searchers will not be attracted to the site.

Online Marketing is then done on behalf of the business, working explicitly with the keywords or phrases chosen. This final stage of the package eventually ensures a page 1 listing for all the keywords and phrases used and that in turn should see visitor numbers to the site increase greatly.
This is not a quick fix to increasing your internet traffic, but it is ethical, it will send customers interested in your products or services to your website and will increase your sales without coning anyone concerned.

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October 18th, 2009 by Bruce

All companies will benefit from some presence on the internet, even if it is only a simple listing on a site such as yell.com or one of the other business directory sites. That way, even if customers would not contemplate ordering your product or service over the net at least they can find your address details so that they can pop in.

It may be that a little more information would be of use to the customer, say for example you are a wedding shop the chances of a bride buying a dress from you over the internet are slender but she may very well want to know a few things about your business before deciding whether to pop in. Times of opening will be important as will knowing if a meeting is required. She may also want to find out what price range of dresses you sell, which designers you work with and whether you sell accessories, bridesmaid dresses etc. All of this information means that a small 3 or 4 page website would be well received by a customer base who are more and more used to locating what they want on the internet.

That said, the business you will attract will still be comparatively local as people will come to visit you in person so there is no requirement to spend huge amounts on listing the full range of your stock, having images of everything taken and offering a “buy on line” service available. The cost of a useful simple information website should only be a few hundred pounds and there is no need to spend on Online Marketing or worry about your Search Engine Placement as customers will search for you via your shop name.
Other businesses, whose customer base is more suited to national or international sales will need to invest heavily in their website if they are to tap into the potential of the net. If we look at a business that sells car windscreen wipers on line we can see the difference straight awat. If the customer knows that the wipers she spots on the website will fit her car and that they are a reasonable price she will buy from wherever she is. This could mean national and international purchases for the company that they would simply not get from having a shop on a high street. Money spent on Online Marketing provided by a Search Engine Optimization Company is however in this illustration crutial. If you do not have a good search engine position none of those potential customers will find you as they will not know you by name; so outlay in both site development and Search Engine Placement is crutial.

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