Showing posts with label search engine optimization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label search engine optimization. Show all posts

Friday, 24 August 2012

How to maximise your blog followers

No matter what online business you run, the majority of people will have their own online blog to help improve their SEO standing and create a platform to regularly engage with and inform their audience. 

As there are so many people producing a steady stream of content on a daily basis, how do you help your blog stand out from the rest and tell people that they must come to your blog because your content is a must read for anyone?

Originality

This is the most obvious aspect of any online blog. The content needs to not only be entertaining to your readers, it also needs to be as original as it possibly can. What you don't want to do is simply look through other peoples blogs, find an article you like and then copy it into your own blog. This is extremely bad for three reasons: 

  • Duplicated content is frowned upon by Google and will result in your search engine ranking going down
  • Readers won't want to visit your blog to read an article that they have just read on another website.
  • It will damage the whole credibility of your business as customers will see this plagiarism, instantly making you seem untrustworthy.

When producing content for your online store, you are going to find that whatever subject you choose to write about, it has pretty much been covered by someone else previously. However, blogs are a great platform for personal opinion. So taking this into account, look to put a different spin on the subject. Look at it from an angle that others previously haven't considered, including any personal opinions you have on the subject. This will give you the best chance to make your content as original as you possibly can. 

Place your content everywhere

If your content is interesting and appealing to an audience, you are going to get people who will specifically come to your blog to read your latest posts. However, you shouldn't just post a blog article then sit back and wait for them to come to your site. Like any good salesman, you should be out there advertising your content, encouraging them to come to your site and take a look at what you have on offer. 

This doesn't just mean sharing your content with fans and followers on Facebook and Twitter, you should be playing your content on social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon. The more external links you can create to your blog, the greater chance you have of people visiting it. You can also look to promote your content as a rebuttal on other blogs. For example, like I said earlier, you should look to create content that looks at certain aspects of your profession but at a different angle. You can then visit another blog that has a post on the same particular topic and link your blog post in the comments for readers to gain another point of view. 

Encourage interaction

When you place content out into the public domain, you can often be worried about any criticism or negative opinions it might generate. You need to get past this and understand that interaction on your blog is not only a great way to gain readers, but it is also a superb way to gain some exposure for your blog and your business as a whole. If someone disagrees with a point that you have made in your blog then reply to the comment with response to their opinion. This then encourages others to get involved and creates a platform for discussion, improving your relationship with these users. This is how you will build up some of your regular blog followers. 

When replying to a comment, you should always remember that you are seen as the authoritative, professional source. Even if someone's comment infuriates you, keep your cool and don't launch an attack on the user. This will just alienate a number of users from your blog and damage your public image. Reply in a manner that is professional and courteous, keeping your cool and explaining your side of the discussion in a clear, concise way.  

Be selective with keywords

 A large part of SEO comes in having the right keywords in your text and writing a blog is no different. The more relevant your keywords, the more likely your article is going to be found in search engines. When writing an article about a particular topic, you should always consider what keywords you wish to place in the text. This will then allow you to write the article in a way that includes these keywords, while still making sense to your audience.

If you are unsure which keywords to use in your blog, you can use a keyword program such as Google's Keyword Tool to find out which are the most searched for words both locally and globally. You can then incorporate these words into your articles to ensure that you have the best chance of people finding your article through a search engine and then visiting your ecommerce business as a result.

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Tuesday, 21 August 2012

Create the perfect SEO and user friendly website for your business

When building an online store from scratch, the layout of your store is everything, not just to appeal to visiting customers, but to also make your website SEO friendly, bringing more customers to your website through search engine rankings. Generally, when people look to set up an online store, they are eager to set it up as quickly as possibly in order to begin selling straight away. While getting your website up and running as soon as possible is important, it should be done in conjunction with ensuring your site is well designed rather than in sacrifice of.

As most people are now aware of, the most important part of on page SEO for your website comes in placing keywords that relate to your business throughout your site while still making sure all of the content is readable. If you are unfamiliar with keywords and how they can significantly help your website move up the rankings, check out my previous article on basic SEO for everything you need to know. (New Businesses Guide to SEO Success)

However, while SEO on your website is of vital importance, you need to make sure that the aesthetics of your website are as appealing to visiting customers as your keywords are to Google. It's no good having great SEO which moves your site high up search engine rankings, bringing a number of new customers to your site, only for those new customers to then be put off by the layout. When a customer first visits your site, they spend just under three seconds quickly scanning the whole page from top to bottom. This means that they spend around 180 milliseconds on one area of your site before moving on to the next. This emphasises the importance of making a good impression right from the get go or else they may leave your site and never return.  

Generally, people tend to read a screen the same way they would read text, moving from left to right. Therefore, you may want to have your business's logo placed in the top left corner of the page, meaning when customers visit your site, the logo is the first thing they see. This instantly creates a brand identity for your business as customers will become familiar with your logo. 

Although you want to have as much information as you possibly can on your pages to keep your customers informed, you simply do not want to flood your page with text. You may think "if I have a lot of text, it means I can put a load of keywords in there for SEO making it a good idea, right?" If you look at all major brand websites, their layout tends to be clean and uncluttered, meaning they have only the most necessary information on a page. As a person spends 2.6 seconds scanning a website before focussing on a particular area of interest, having huge chunks of text through the page is going to be rather off putting as they don't want to have to read through reams of text pick out the information that is of interest to them. 

As the only saying goes  "A picture paints a thousand words" and this is never truer when creating a website for your online store. If you run an ecommerce business that sells products such as clothing, electronics and other goods, images of your products and promotional animations are going to be much more appealing than text, as they instantly tell customers information that may have taken you a couple of paragraphs to relay through text. 

What most websites tend to do is have one focal image at the top of the page, underneath the navigation bar. This works as an appealing image to draw the viewers eye, encouraging them to work their way down through the page.

This idea of making your website as easy to navigate as possible should also be taken into account when displaying images of your products for customers to purchase. While it would be easier to just lay out your items all on one page and have customers choose from them, in terms of navigation, it can make it rather difficult to find the item they want. Breakdown your products into different categories in terms of what you sell with a separate page for each category and links to those various categories placed on either the top of side of each page.

First IMPRESSIONS of your website
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Thursday, 9 August 2012

New businesses guide to SEO success

In an extremely competitive marketplace, how easily people can locate your online business is going to play a big part in how many customers you get. For any website, search engine optimisation plays a huge role in improving your ranking in a search engine query. The higher you are placed up the a search engine ranking, the more people will visit your online store.

Search engine optimisation comes in two forms; on page and off page SEO. As the names suggest, on page SEO is the different techniques you can employ within your website's content to increase your search engine ranking and off page SEO is the ability to create link building campaigns to your website. When optimising your website for SEO purposes, you should look to establish on page SEO within your site before looking to create a link building campaign.

However, before you carry out any form of SEO on your website, you need to ensure that your website is of the highest quality. This means ensuring that the layout is correct and the spelling and grammar is as it should be. What you don't want to do is build up a great SEO campaign that results in your online business flying up the search engine rankings only to then have a website that is below par.

On-Page SEO


When carrying out on page SEO, what you need to do is place different keywords on your site that users regularly use within a search engine query. When someone searches for something on a search engine, the search engine spiders then crawl the website looking for websites that have those keywords. Depending on what your online business offers, you need to select keywords that relate to what your business does and what products you sell. However, how do you know which keywords and regularly searched for by users? Well this is where keyword tools come in to play. If you go on the Google Keyword Tool page, you can type in a keyword that relates to your business. The tool then displays all of the keywords that relate to this phrase and tells you how many local and global searches have been carried using these words. When selecting your keywords from this list, you want to select the keywords that have the highest search numbers.

Now that you have your list of keywords, where do you put them on your site? To truly maximise SEO for your website, you need to create a blog. This will be placed on your site and will include a number of different of posts and articles that consist of various subjects related to your online business. When creating these article posts you need to include these keywords that relate to your business. However, Google's algorithm penalises sites which just randomly place a load of keywords throughout the text, resulting in the website appearing lower down the rankings rather than higher. When placing keywords within a blog post, you should look to only have three or four keywords. When inserting these keywords, you need to make sure that the text still makes sense. What you don't want to do is insert keywords into a sentence that don't belong. Even with the keywords inserted, the blog post still needs to make sense and be readable to the audience. 

It isn't just blog posts where you need to insert these keywords, you should look to have these keywords on the various web pages of your site. These keywords come in two forms, keywords within the page's text itself and meta tags. Keywords in the text are similar to those in the blog posts. What you need to do is include the most searched for keywords within your web page text that relate to what your online business offers. 

Meta tags are keywords that provide information about the website. This information is hidden from web page viewers and is solely used as information for search engines. The same as the other keywords on your website, each page should have its own keywords that relate to what the page contains, while having high searchability by users. 

As I touched on earlier, when carrying out on-page SEO, you need to ensure that you do not carry out any techniques that are going to result in your site being penalised, these are known as black hat SEO techniques. 

Other black hat techniques you should avoid include: 
  • Duplicating content
  • Placing hidden links or keywords on your page
  • Duplicating title tags
  • Repeating keywords
If you are unsure what these various black hat techniques are, you can check out our previous post on the subject for more information: Black Hat SEO - At Your Own Risk!

Off-Page SEO


Now that you have created a website with a good layout, good content and on-page SEO techniques throughout, you next need to boost your website through off-page SEO techniques. This essentially involves creating a link building campaign that places a number of links across the Internet that directs traffic straight to your website. The more traffic you receive on your website, the higher your website will be placed within the rankings. The easiest way to do this is to place links to your website on various social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. This form of social commerce is the best way to ensure that you have constant links placed on these sites directly to your site is to constantly share the various blog posts you create. What this does is ensures that you are constantly placing new links on to the sites with fresh content, rather than just placing the same link over and over again.

However, it is not just the number of direct links to your website you have, but also the quality of those links. Having links to more established websites is going to play a greater role in improving your SEO ranking. When deciding which websites to place these links on, you should also look to include websites that have a similar interest to what your online business provides. 

When creating the links to share your content on other websites, you need to make sure that the URLs you use are SEO friendly. If you are new to creating websites, the URL is the address for your page that will appear in the address bar at the top of the Internet browser. When giving your web page a name you need to make sure that it is something relevant to your business with keywords inserted. You should check the URL of each page to make sure they are correct, as some content management systems simply insert random letters and hyphens as the URL. If a webpage has this random URL, it instantly looks like spam to both the user and the search engine, penalising the site as a result. Keep your URLs as short as you possibly can, only including the keywords that are to do with that page.

Another great way to increase the number of direct links your site has is to regularly interact with other users. Visit forums, comment on other peoples posts, respond to social media queries, all of these are great ways to spread links to your site. For example, if you comment on a popular blog post that someone has written, you can set up your own account so that your name on the comment then links to your website. This means that when someone reads your comment, they may be interested to find out more about you and will click on the link to go to your website. This is an easy way to increase your link building and can result in you having a number of new direct links in minutes.  

To take your ecommerce or eBay store as high up the search engine rankings as you possibly can, you need to make sure that you use all of these different techniques. However, it is not a case of simply doing them once and then you never have to do them again. What you need to do is constantly check which keywords and platforms are the most popular. You then need to constantly update your site's keywords and where you place the links to ensure you are always reaching as many people as you possibly can.

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