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5 SEO Tactics to Avoid
Using a Blog to Strengthen Your Search Engine Rankings
Magnifying Your Success with Cross-Media Marketing
Is Your Company Too Focused on Traffic?
Google Targeting Paid Links
5 SEO Tactics to Avoid
Search engine marketing is one of the most successful and cost-efficient methods
of spreading the word about products and services online. Search engines are a
huge source of targeted, motivated traffic, and the way your website shows up in
search results can have an enormous impact on your company’s bottom line. For
that reason, savvy e-businesses today are paying attention to website
optimisation for better indexing in search engines.
However, not all optimisation methods will help your business; some will even
cause you to be de-listed from the results pages of major search engines. If you
use spam tactics, either accidentally or to trick the engines into giving you
higher rankings, you could get booted out of one of your major sources of free
traffic. Here are five SEO techniques that will do your company’s website more
harm than good.
Black Hat SEO Techniques that Could Hurt Your Website
1. Stuffing Text with Keywords
If keywords are good, then lots of keywords must be great, right? Wrong. If your
content is riddled with keywords, it starts to sound like gibberish. Even worse,
search engines know that this is an attempt to put the importance of search
engine rankings over the user experience, and actually penalize it in search
results.
2. Using Unrelated Keywords
Search engines want to help browsers find what they are looking for. The
websites that rank well should, by extension, be the ones that provide this
information. However, many webmasters make the mistake of trying to find what
searches are popular and then using underhanded tactics to rank well, thinking
that more traffic will automatically raise profits. These tactics are easy for
search engines to recognize and penalize; but even worse, it’s a bad business
decision, as the visitors you trick to your site will leave it frustrated,
giving your business a bad reputation and no profit.
3. Doorway pages
Doorway pages are an extreme example of using unrelated keywords. Entire pages
are devoted to ranking well for a keyword that may or may not be relevant to the
business at all. They are usually visible only to search engine spiders, and not
to human visitors, violating two major guidelines of most search engines.
4. Displaying Different Pages for Search Engines and Visitors
Customers of one of the major providers of online shopping carts have seen their
pages dropped from Google for just this reason. The shopping cart provided a
JavaScript-enhanced page for human visitors to use, while directing spiders to a
plain HTML version that people can’t access, thinking that it would help the
spiders index the pages.
Google’s quality guidelines specifically prohibit including pages for search
engine rankings alone, and they have yanked the offenders. Even though the
intent was not to game the search engines, the result was the same – blacklisting from Google, and lots of lost profits.
5. Using Link Farms
Links are good for search engine rankings, right? So if you participate in a
scheme where you add a few links to your site and get hundreds in return, that
will skyrocket your pages to the top of the rankings, right? Wrong. Search
engines do not reward links from low-quality sites and “link farms” and
participating in these schemes can get you thrown off the lists.
By using an experienced SEO expert, you can avoid making any of these common,
and costly, optimisation mistakes. If you would like a no obligation
consultation regarding your SEO activities, call 01242 577073.
Using a Blog to Strengthen Your Search Engine Rankings
More and more companies are turning to corporate blogs not only to reach out to
their current and potential customers, but also to raise their visibility in the
search engines. Learn why blogs are so popular with search engines and how to
use them to your best advantage to drive visitors to your website and increase
profitability.
Understanding Why Blogs Have Become a Powerful SEO Tool
Blogs tend to get great rankings in search engines because they adhere to the
same kind of structure that search engine algorithms reward. For example, each
blog post tends to centre on a specific topic, which gives it plenty of relevant
keywords. Posts are usually organized into categories, which help spiders to
understand and properly index the content. Links to and from other blogs work
much as the reputation system used by Google and other search engines – great
posts get a lot of inbound links, helping spiders to assess their quality.
Furthermore, many directories and listings have been created just to list blogs,
which can help search engine spiders and human traffic alike find your writing.
Using these listings in addition to normal topical directories can really boost
your blog rankings.
However, getting a high ranking on your blog pages will only help your business’
bottom line if you can transform the people who read your blog into paying
customers. You can do this with an intelligent linking strategy, where blog
posts refer to articles and information on your main website. Those articles can
then encourage your site visitors to take the next step in the purchase process.
To have the best effect, keep blatant marketing out of your blog posts. Keep
your tone light (or technical) and informative rather than “sales-y.” Use links
to your website to reinforce your statements and provide more information.
The great part of this strategy is that not only can your higher blog rankings
help improve the rankings of your regular web pages, but also that your blog
will be driving highly targeted, motivated traffic directly to your site. The
people who follow your links will be actively searching for information on your
business topics, meaning that they are primed to be converted into paying
customers.
Furthermore, if your blog is doing its job well, they already consider you an
expert on the subject, raising your company’s stature in their eyes. Blog
traffic can be far easier to convert than regular site visitors. This makes a
corporate blog an extremely powerful tool in today’s online marketing
environment, both for SEO and for conversion purposes.
If you would like to create your own business blog or require some assistance in
marketing your existing blog call 01242 577073
for a no obligation consultation.
Magnifying Your Success with Cross-Media Marketing
If you are trying to find new ways to make your internet marketing stand out, consider going offline. Although that might not sound like the most logical step for an e-business to take, an integrated marketing plan that incorporates both online and offline methods can amplify your message, making it resonate more strongly with your potential customers. Here are five good reasons why e-businesses should consider incorporating offline marketing into their budget.
How Combining Marketing Methods Can Reinforce Your Message
Establish Your Business as Trustworthy
Even as e-commerce becomes more popular, people still tend to trust companies more when they have also heard of them through offline sources. After all, there are a lot of fly-by-night online businesses, but most of them don’t make the effort to get the word out through offline media as well.
Make Sure You Get Through the Static
People today are deluged with marketing, and many of them have taken steps to cut down on the amount of advertising they see. Some of these methods are pop-up blockers, strict email filters, and using digital recorders to screen commercials out of their television programs. By using more than one marketing channel, you increase the chances that your message will reach your intended audience.
Help People Remember Your Business
The Radio Ads Effectiveness Labs conducted a study to test how people reacted to hearing advertisements on the radio and on the internet. The surprising results were that people were dramatically more likely to remember company names and advertisements when they heard one ad on the radio and saw one on the internet, compared to hearing two ads on the internet. This held true for each gender, every race, every level of education, and every age bracket. In many cases, more than twice as many people were able to recall an advertisement heard on both media as those who could remember it after seeing two internet ads.
Reinforce Your Message
The more people hear something, the more likely they are to be influenced by it. This is especially true if they hear your marketing message in more than one environment. Each additional repetition reminds them that they intended to look into it more, making them more likely to do so.
Online and Offline Shopping are Connected
More and more people today are learning about products offline, then turning to the internet to research and study them, before buying, either off- or online. By giving your advertisements both online and offline appeal, you are mirroring what your customers already do naturally.
Establishing a multi-media marketing campaign is a sure way to reinforce branding, encourage people to shop with you, and increase your e-business’s bottom line. Radio, newspaper, and direct mail ads are affordable ways to create a strong integrated media campaign.
Is Your Company Too Focused on Traffic?
Many e-businesses invest a lot of money and time on driving more traffic to
their websites. The first priority of banner ads, contextual links, SEO, and
other such methods is getting eyeballs on the page. The basic idea is that if
you throw enough gooey stuff at a wall, some of it will stick. The problem,
however, is that if your wall is too slick, you’re going to be paying an awful
lot of money to buy goo, even though your real problem is in your walls.
That’s why traffic alone is simply not enough to make your website successful.
Companies that develop tunnel vision about driving traffic to the exclusion of
their ability to convert that traffic into paying customers will waste their
advertising budget and turn visitors off their products and services.
Why Driving More Traffic Could Do More Harm than Good
In order to make optimum use of your traffic, you need to design your website so
that it fulfills your visitors’ needs and persuades them to take the next step
in the sales process. Here are five tips that will help you do this:
- Anticipate your visitors’ expectations. Make sure that your
visitors are greeted by the information that they came to your website to
find. That means that if they clicked on a banner ad announcing a sale, the
page they land on should give more information about that sale.
- Give them clear road signs showing them where they are and where they
can go. Don’t lead your visitors to dead end pages. Always give them
options for finding more information, making a purchase, or exploring your
site more deeply.
- Persuade them to take the “right” actions. Use prominent calls of
action to encourage visitors to take the steps you want them to, from signing
up for newsletters to reading more information.
- Pay attention to where you’re losing visitors. Use your server logs
to determine when people are leaving your site, and try to figure out why
those pages are driving people away. If necessary, use surveys and test groups
to find the answer. Fixing those holes will drive your conversion rate up.
- Provide reassurance when and where visitors need it. Many visitors
get discouraged and leave because they have a question or concern that isn’t
answered in a timely manner. For example, the promise of a money back
guarantee should be prominently displayed on the sign-up page, to reassure
visitors that they have recourse if they are not happy with your product or
service.
By taking these five easy steps, you can put the traffic that you receive to
work for you. Once your site is converting well, you can start thinking about
driving up the number of visitors.
If you would like to review the strength of your persuasion architecture, call
01242 577073
for a no obligation consultation.
Google Targeting Paid Links
Matt Cutts, Google engineer and prominent spokesman, shook the online marketing
world when he asked companies to voluntarily report paid links on their websites
to help Google refine their algorithms. Since many websites use some form of
paid links to drive traffic to their sites, a lot of marketers are worrying
about what kind of impact this news could have on their Google rankings. Here is
a summary of some of the most important issues in the paid links topic.
Will Google’s Paid Link Policy Impact Your Business?
Why Is Google Concerned with Paid Links?
Among other factors, Google uses a type of reputation system to help them
determine where sites should rank in their search engine results. The idea is
that sites with useful, relevant content will be linked from other websites on
the topic. That is, if your company publishes an amazing article about how to
buy a new car, other sites whose users would be interested in the information
will link to it.
The weakness of this reputation system is that not all sites link because the
information on the partner website is so good. Sometimes they do it purely to
get links back in response (i.e., as part of a “link form”) or because they are
receiving money to do so.
Google’s quality guidelines prohibit trying to circumvent the natural rating
system. Buying links purely for the purpose of improving your page’s rank in the
search engines falls under this prohibition.
Is Google Saying that Paid Links Are Bad?
No, Google has no problem with paid links in general; they are trying to reduce
search engine spam results by ignoring links that are made solely for the
purpose of raising the page rank of another site. To determine which paid links
fall within the Google quality guidelines, you should consider factors like:
- Does this link provide genuine value for my site visitors?
- Are the other links on the page also relevant and of high quality?
- Would I buy this link if search engine ranking wasn’t involved?
To be absolutely sure that you do not cross Google’s quality guidelines in
the links that you display on your site, you can add text that makes it clear a
link has been paid (by displaying “Sponsored Link” underneath it, for example)
or using the nofollow tag.
Can Competitors Hurt Me by Linking To Me?
No. Google knows that you cannot always control which websites link to you. The
only effect that low-quality inbound links would have on you is that you would
not receive a boost in your page ranking from those links.
In this case as in so many others, the cardinal rule of search engine rankings
apply: focus on creating plenty of content that provides the best possible
experience for your site visitors, and the search engines will respond
favourably.
If you would benefit from a no obligation consultation regarding your online
advertising activities, call 01242 577073.
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