Search Engine Optimisation

Why Should I Use a Professional SEO Agency?

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If you’re serious about marketing your business online, you’ve probably considered search engine optimisation. Ranking your website at the top of search engines such as Google can mean much more traffic, and this can convert into massively increased sales of your products or services.

To call in the professionals though, you’ll have to make an investment. Let’s take a look at why you should make the decision to use a professional SEO agency.

SEO is a complicated process

Keeping up with the latest developments in the field of SEO is a full-time job in itself, and it’s almost impossible to do it alongside running a business. Activities that were commonplace just a few years ago can now result in your site being penalised, so it often isn’t worth trying to do it yourself. UK SEO services will help you to rank without any of the headaches.

Your competitors are doing it

Try searching Google for products or services just like yours. If you haven’t carried out any SEO activities, it’s likely that you’ll find dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands, of businesses which will be found first. To get a competitive advantage, you need to think about where you’re ranking. And if your competitors aren’t doing it, it simply means that there’s even more potential there for you!

It’s cheaper than employing an SEO expert

Unless you’re running a massive corporation, it’s unlikely that you’ll need someone to look after your SEO efforts on a full-time basis. As such, taking on an employee will be costly and unnecessary. An agency will often operate on a much more flexible basis, giving you the option to choose the level of service that you require. Whether it’s a few hours a week to keep your site ticking over, or a full-blown campaign from scratch, there’ll be an agency out there that can help.

Your investment will last a long time

For the best results, you might need to carry out some SEO activities on a regular basis. Once your site is optimised by a professional though, you’re likely to see high rankings for quite a while into the future. In this respect, it’s a much wiser investment than pay-per-click advertising or social media marketing. The same can be said for offline advertising in newspapers and magazines.

As you can see, using a professional SEO agency can be a wise decision for any business owner. If you’re determined to up your marketing ante and start seeing higher sales, it’s something that you should certainly consider.

Have you ever considered SEO for your business?

This article was brought to you by Ruth Hinds on behalf of WebSearch SEO. WebSearch is based in London and offers risk free, ‘pay on results’ SEO services including link building for online synergy and success.

Link building tactics – What lessons can we learn from Interflora?

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As you may already be aware the large UK Florist Interflora have been hit by a Google penalty, wiping out the search positions. Interflora have done a great job to cover the gaps left from the drop in organic search traffic, although it may never become clear how much impact the drop had. So what lessons can we learn from Interflora, how have they maintained their success despite the drop and why did they get the penalty in the first place?

Why Did Interflora Get The Penalty In The First Place?

Although it has not 100% been confirmed yet, it is believed that the penalty has been as a result of paying for links. Interflora have tried to get around the penalty by awarding people gifts offline when they blog about their products. Google do state that this is against their advertising policy and are fairly hot on things like this. Google pride themselves on delivering quality search results and although some results are questionable at times, they do have a web spam team dedicated to fighting low quality sites that rank high due to using unnatural techniques.

The reason that the alarm bells started ringing after Interflora had been hit was when bloggers started to tweet that they had been told to remove any links they have pointing to the Interflora site.

Dont Try to Cheat the System

Unfortunately, no matter how much you try you will not out smart Google. The Google Algorithm is constantly changing but the fundamental rules are there to be seen in black and white, you cannot pay for links. The act of giving gifts off line is just the same as paying someone in cash to link to your site.
The only way you can get quality links is by offering a good service and by creating quality content.

What Other Areas Of Marketing Should You Consider?

You may want to consider looking at other areas of marketing. One of the reasons why Interflora did not worry too much about the drop in organic positions is because they had already established their brand using offline material such as print material. Businesses like Interflora that offer gifts that are bought annually rely a lot of repeat customers. Having already got a postal address from the customer and with the person already being the customer you will expect a repeat purchase. This works well in industries such as travel insurance which is a very competitive market.

One area that Interflora do well is social media, this is another area that works well especially as people trust companies their friends have bought from before. Google are trying to get into the social media market with Google+ although at the moment their is not enough users to be essential. Promotional Products and Bags

A great way to market your business is for other people to do it for you. By producing promotional products such as promotional bags customers will put your brand in-front of people that are outside your business.

Article By Daisy Burgess – Professional blogger for offline marketing companies including Bag Store

12 Great Tips for Using Pinterest for Your Business in 2013

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Many businesses today are turning to social media in order to better promote their products and Pinterest is one of those Medias. So, if you are interested in getting your product into the eyes of millions of people and gaining new customers for your business at the same time Pinterest is the way to go.

1. Get Connected If you really want to boost ratings or gain customers through Pinterest you should link your new Pinterest account to your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

2. Put A Button On It Adding a Pinterest Pin It button will make it easier for people to follow your product line or to show off the products that they have pinned. The buttons are free to use and easy to add to any page.

3. Follow Your Followers Keeping your company in the eye of the public can be done by following those who are following your products. The next thing that you want to do is follow the big guys because they in-turn will almost always follow you back.

4. Keep It Interesting Adding material that is interesting to your Pinterest page is a great way to keep folks coming back. You can even add photos and videos to your page. You want to keep followers interested in your products never put material on your page that has nothing to do with your products.

5. Don’t Forget To Link Back Pinterest doesn’t give the option to sell your products therefore it is very important that you always link back to your own website.

6. Likes and Re-pins Visit other Pinterest pages, make comments, and be sure to follow the pages that get lots of Facebook likes, Pinterest re-pins, and Twitter Follows.

7. Picture Perfect You must have high quality photos on your page and keep all of your photos about the same size. Fuzzy or out of focus photos don’t get pinned.

8. Proper Tags Tagging photos is with words that are directly related to or describe your product correctly is how they get indexed and later found during searches. Take your time and carefully consider each tag before you enter it.

9. Help Your Virtual Neighbors Everyone needs a little help from time to time and when they get it are quite grateful. Grateful enough in fact to follow your page and recommend your products.

10. Keyword The Keys To Being Found Adding keywords to the end of you product descriptions can help people to find your products more easily.

11. Browser Bookmarklet “Pin It” Easy to install the Bookmarklet Pin It button can be added to your Internet Browser in seconds and it makes keeping up with things that you like easy to do.

12. Mind Your Manners Often referred to as etiquette minding your manners and being polite are all very important to any type of business. Another good idea is to keep a positive attitude about your followers even if you don’t agree with their comment or content.

Citations:
Featured images:

Ben Sawyer is an Social Media Marketing consultant for Arverne, well known real estate company from New Yowk These are some of his tips about Pinterest, based on his own experience.

Why public relations and SEO are the best mesh ever!

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So who knew that using public relations could really be an advantage for your SEO? Frankly this is one of the most brilliant ideas out there. If you know what public relations is all about then you will see how much in common it has with SEO. When things are similar and have something in common, they match very well as they complement each other. Public relations are one thing that can strengthen SEO in a tremendous way. After reading this article you will actually wonder why you didn’t think of this to begin with.

Getting other aspects to be involved with the SEO strategy can be quite tricky but Public relations have proven to be a good match. However it is very important to understand what public relations is all about and how it thrives online. In a nutshell, public relations or PR is the section in a company that is in charge of generating affairs and connections with other large publications or companies that will offer promotion for your corporation. PR has so many responsibilities and one of them involves online work. We can see that PR has almost the same job as SEO with regards to creating relationships and bringing in visitors and traffic. So how can PR help SEO?

  • Networking /connections: PR finds media outlets so as to promote business. These media outlets are usually very big. So imagine getting connections with those big businesses which are very authoritative, there is a high chance of your website being recognized by these big companies. This becomes a big thread of connections where the other company connects you with many more companies.
  • Content Experience: PR experts usually have a very good way of working with the media. They also know the media world really well. They know exactly how to write things that will absolutely explode. Why is this, those in PR have known what the public wants. Make sure that those in PR read your content to help you know what works best. However you could learn PR on the side and if you are doing SEO use the principles of PR to help you. When doing SEO, you have no idea how much PR professionals come in handy.
  • Traffic/visibility: Yes PR will really help SEO but in this one, PR could totally benefit from SEO making it the best of both worlds. This is called killing two birds with one stone. When you use the right keywords, you will clearly get all the visitors out there. This goes for press releases hence helping PR.
  • Reputation: PR is used to lobby for a company. SEO can use PR to advertise your site out there hence making it credible and highly regarded.
  • Communications: PR practitioners know so much of communication. This way they can help you write the best content for SEO.

PR and SEO are almost co-related to each other, the above points should motivate you to use PR wisely today!

Author Bio: Jems Holden is an Internet marketing blogger cum web designer who has been serving the web since 2009 with web design agency Manchester Sizzle Media. So far he has written several articles with advice and suggestion for creative web designing and eCommerce web design.

10 Incredible Things to Try on Your Blog

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What is a Blog?

A blog is a discussion or an informational site usually published on World Wide Web and consisting of the discrete entries typically displayed in a reverse chronological order. In this write up we are going to look at ten incredible things that you can try on your blog. Scroll down this article to know more on this.

Basically, your blog can usually be very many things such as your online rants and musings, your personal expression, a chance to inform or entertain. However, after a while your blog can start suffering from s bit of stagnation. In case of this, you must ensure that you inject new life onto it. Here are the 10 incredible things you should try on your blog in case of such a situation.

10 Incredible Things to Try on Your Blog.

1.Writing a Letter

You can write a letter and encourage your audience to chime in with their own suggestions for the letter. However, your letter has to put some thoughts or information for your audience.

2.Spreading the News

It is essential that you ensure you make a collection of the interesting things which your reader may like. You can as well select articles as they come up on your blog and share your opinions and thoughts on the different topics.

3.Reviewing the Possibilities

You can start a new series on the blog whereby you review relevant locations, services or items. This may assist you arrange for some free products or services on trial basis.

However, you must be honest while reviewing and avoid payment for the review sort of products which can be sketchy.

4.Making Lists

Your list should be humorous and actually very helpful. Ensure that you go with what you well know about and share at a time few tidbits. For instance, you can make a list of the things you should not eat before coding for 10 hours.

5.Telling Your Secretes

Getting into your basics may easily add some depth as well as interest to your blog. However, you must not tell everything about yourself.

6.Disagreeing With Something Big

This involves looking for a hot topic and then disagreeing with it. For instance, if majority of your readers are in favor of one football club, make it a point to disagree with all of them.

7.Revisiting Old Posts

This involves going through your posts and identifying the ones you wrote longtime ago. This will assist you in removing any dead link.

8.Picturing Montage

This involves posting a series of pictures or creating your own photo montage. For instance, you can post a series of funny persons about your industry.

9.Guest Blogging

This involves considering accepting the guest blogs. If the blog is top ranked in search engines, you can allow others take part in the fun of sharing.

10.Caption Contest

If you’ve got already a loyal following, it is essential that you provide your readers something new by providing them with a caption contest. However, set some guidelines in order to prevent profanity. This trick will be best if you use it with your WordPress Video Blog .

Last but not the least; ensure that you always keep your blog interesting as well as fresh all the time.

Author bio: This article has been written by Tracy. She is an  Drupal Search Engine Optimization expert. She loves to give new tips and tricks to bloggers for keeping their blog fresh and attractive.

A Brief History of SEO

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Anyone who used the internet in the 90’s knows that search engines have evolved in the past two decades. The term “Search Engine Optimization” (or SEO) is believed to have been coined by John Audette of the Multimedia Marketing Group in 1997, and it been big business ever since. In the early days of the internet, webmasters simply submitted their site’s URL to a search engine and the engine would send a spider to catalogue links on the page for indexing. Search engines relied primarily on key word density and meta tags, allowing webmasters to improve their rankings by “keyword stuffing”, or using the same words over and over again in page’s text. This, of course, led to websites with poor content skyrocketing to the top of search results.

Search engines had to improve their methodology in order to retain their users. Back Rub was one of the first search engines to implement complex mathematical algorithms that took into account the number of inbound links to a website, which its creators, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, dubbed “PageRank”. In 1998, Back Rub became Google, which still uses Page and Brin’s PageRank algorithm today.

Not to be outdone, webmasters soon found ways to manipulate PageRank, giving rise to an industry of buying and selling links in order to improve search rankings. The term “Link Farm” became the perforative name for websites that did nothing but host links.

By 2005, Google started began tracking individual users’ search histories and location to personalize search results. Their spiders also began searching for the “nofollow” HTML tag, which instructs the engine not to take a link into account when determining PageRank. Ideally, nofollow was meant to prevent spamming on blogs that allowed any user to post text, though webmasters soon saw the benefit of tagging all outbound links as nofollow in order to keep their competition’s PageRank down.

Google Panda
Google Penguin

In 2010, Google announced Google Instant, an algorithm that took time of publication into account, giving more recently updated sites (such as recent news articles) higher rankings. Over the past two years, Google has started to seriously crack down on webmasters who try to manipulate their algorithms with the Panda update in 2011 and the Penguin update in 2012. These measures penalize websites that duplicate content from other webpages or use other unfair tactics such as stuffing keywords in hidden text. Today, most search engines employ human quality control through companies like Leapforce. Leapforce agents rank webpages based on their relevance to given keywords, the quality and timeliness of their content, and their adherence to search engine guidelines.
It seems that every time search engines improve their algorithms, the SEO industry grows even stronger. This is probably a good thing, as websites are being judged more for the quality of their content rather than how well they can “trick” search engines. More and more webmasters are relying on outside help to ensure that their site ranks high without violating any guidelines that could get them banned altogether.