Well, today we saw the emergence of the new google “wikisearch” for anyone who has a google log in - which is now most of us. Google has slowly bit by bit been “encouraging” internet users to sign up to their service and have a google log in. It began with the very attractive and brilliant email service of gmail (aka googlemail) Read the rest of this entry »
Is pay for click worth it? Let me start by running over what pay for click it.
PPC, also known as pay per click or pay for click is the term given to the google product that is sponsered links. What google do is allow you to pay to appear at the top of the search engines in the grey/brown sponsered links box. To be there you have to pay of course, but you do not pay a flat fee, you litterally pay per click. If you place a sponsered link at the top for gastric band for example, everytime someone searches for it, and then clicks on the link leading to your site you will pay google a fee.
Since google have implemented the appearance of google maps / google local at the top of the search results, the organic ranking focus has completely changed. What was once ignored, has suddenly become very important, as the google maps ranking instantly out positions all other google results! When this started happenning over a year ago, it took many search engine optimisers and internet marketers by surprise. As it took a firmer hold within the engines, people started to realise how important it was to be included in the local listing results.
Once again there are only 10 placed maximum in the results. So how exactly does one make sure that they appear in this newly sought after position within the search results? Well the first thing to do is ensure that you actually have a listing with google. This can be done for free. Simply go to the google business center and register your business. So now you Read the rest of this entry »
If you’ve got a business then you need a web presence.At one time this meant that you could buy a domain name for your coffee vending machine company, find somewhere to host it so that it could be viewed by anyone with an Internet connection and you’d stand a good chance of being found by new clients.Today the Internet culture is huge and if you want to get your business noticed you need to incorporate something more.You must SEO your pages so that the Internet’s search engines realize that they’re there.
Search engines, such as Google, are the research robots that glean the information from the Internet.They sift through every website for certain search criteria and when someone requests information about something at their search site, they produce a list of URLs that link directly to pages containing that search.So what does this mean for you? Read the rest of this entry »
In the world of online marketing, it is really important to accurately identify what your product is, what it is you are selling. This may seem obvious to most people, but in actual fact it isn’t always that simple. For many people however, they are selling a fixed physical product that is easy to define. A good example of someone we encountered recently is a company that makes roller banners. They have identified this as one of their main sources of income, and so they are really trying to make changes to their site to make it as relevant and legitimately helpful as possible. Now what they have done is all really good work. Read the rest of this entry »
Okay this is a slightly back to basic post but I think it’s important. Picking your keywords. Some poeple under estimate this, but if you get the search terms right in the first place you can find that it takes a fraction of the effort to get the same results that you might not have got if you had just guessed at them. Here is my quick guide.
Stage 1: Research your area.
Okay now the first thing that need to be done is for you to figure out what search terms are relevant to you (Personally I recommend wordtracker I think it one of the only consitent keyword reporting tool that is any good these days.) So what you want to do is come up with all the of the search terms that you can think of get as many as possible. Also try and think of relevant search terms, a good way of doing this is going to ask.com typing up the search terms and seeing what extra suggested other search appear in the left hand side of the page. Once you have a great big list you now need to start ordering them in some kind of useful way. What I suggest you do now is put all of the orginal search terms in a big old Excel spread sheet along with the amount of people that search on them a day.
Stage 2: Figuring out relevance
Now I suggest you create a second column this one should be chances of conversion, what I suggest you do is rate every single search term 1 to 10 (1 meaning definately going to convert, and 10 no chance that it’s going to convert).
So if you were selling Laser hair removal treatment in brighton, someone who was searching for hair removal mwould have quite a low chance of conversion probable a 9, someone searching for Laser hair removal has a sligthly higher chance so maybe you would rate them as a 7, but someone searching for Laser hair removal brighton is very likely to convert so you could give them a rating of 1.
Stage 3: figuring out Competition
Now this has taken me a long time to work out and I’m not sure it perfect but this is best I have come up with. The final figure in the calulation that is needed to pick the perfect search terms for your website, is the cost of getting ranked, if you can work this out accurately they you will be able to select the search terms which will bring the most traffic for the least cost. Now the cost of ranking on anything in the search engines is links. The amount of links you need to build in order to get a good ranking so to work out the cost you need to look at the links here is how I work out the competition for a specific search term.
1. Look at the top 10 ranking sites and select the one that has the 3rd from least total link reported in yahoo. Okay what you are looking for here is the result on the first page which has the least interferreance from other links, if you take the one that has the most links the chances are it has a huge amount of links point at the site and the site is huge and the only reason it ranks is because it has so much trust. For example wikipedia comes up in the first place for loads of search terms and thay has thosands of back links., but for most search terms you are not goign to need to build as many links as wikipedia to get a good ranking. So by picking the 3rd from lowest you hopefully are losing all of the huge site that appear on turst. this should give you a good site that is well optimised for the search term.
So what you want to do is now note down the total link to that site, so say for example we had picked up www.example.com as our 3rd from last and it had 100 links going to it in total. After that we would want to figure out how many targetting links were point to the site to do this we could use a algorithm like this in yahoo:
links:www.example.com -site: www.example.com search+term
Now you can use these two to figure out competition like this:
However we need to use one more modifier, position modifier. This is a basically designed to compensate for the difference in competition for the positions on the search. 1st place should return a considerable higher links than 10th place.
1st place : position modifier = 1
2nd place : position modifier = 1.1
3rd place : position modifier = 1.2
4th place : position modifier = 1.3
5th place : position modifier = 1.4
6th place : position modifier = 1.5
7th place : position modifier = 1.6
8th place :position modifier = 1.7
9th place : position modifier = 1.8
10th place : position modifier = 1.9
So for the example we have here www.example.com is in 1st place so the position modifier would be 1 and therefore wouldn’t have much effect. But say it was 10th place then the ultimate result would be nearly doubled.
((( Total links / 50 ) + Targeted links)) / 2.5 * position modifier = competition (or required links)
Okay now you have all you need simple hay! Basically you can just use these three figure to order each of the search term so you can figure out what you get the most relevant visitor to your links. This may sound complicated, but this is so worht it, if you pick the wrong search terms and then commit yourself to getting ranked on them you can waste a huge amount of time. Ow before I finish caould I just send some love to some guys who have been kind enought to help me aout with a bit of link love latetly sell my house and acne care oily prone skin.
It’s been a while now since I have been impressed by a SEO tool. But this one really seem to have made the grade. It’s not so much a SEO tool but a general internet marketing tool. Basically it’s an traffic analysis tool, for other peoples websites. Meaning you can how you are doing in comparison. For example here is the competition between Google.co.uk, yahoo.co.uk and msn.co.uk:
For a more close up verison click here. This basically tell me that google is wining, no suprise their, the bit I was supurised by was msn seems to be beating yahoo. I suppose this is due to the hundereds of people who don’t know how to change their homepage so they go to msn.co.uk before searching for google.