Search Engine Optimisation

Had a phone call or two from Search Engine optimisation companies? Don`t panic , it`s common!

Recently SEO companies have been telling us to spend more money on Google in premium advertising, where ever you can spend spend spend!

Don't worry about generic searches just spend! Firstly lets fix that argument;

The things to know about Premium advertising

Google does not favour any company or person for positioning of premium adverts. If it did , we would go and buy the top positions for all keywords and sell them to you at a price premium, great business plan (joking!) ... but it is not going to happen!

Google would rather advertise to 5000 customers paying $100 month than 50 paying $1000.

When creating your adwords campaign, we recommend not adding 100's of keywords, all this will do is to reduce the visibility of keywords during major periods of the day to match your daily budget. Impressions and click through rates are very important. Impressions are the number of times that the keywords has been searched (including your competitors), so work on the 80/20 rule -

80% of your business is going to come from
20% of your keywords

Concentrate on positioning the keywords with the highest impressions and click through rates.

Something to consider also from our experience, MSN attracts a younger audience (under 30), a mixture from late twenties to late thirties between Google, Live, MSN and Yahoo, with Google dominating the over 40's. This should be considered when planning a paid for inclusion campaign.

Lastly as a foot note, your "Page Rank" in Google will not be affected by how much you pay or if you are included in Google Adwords. This is based purely on link relevance and content structure. Google have plans to phase Page Ranking out.

Free listings and good Search Engine Optimisation

Generic listings (or free) are still very important and to totally dismiss them is not doing your business justice. We agree in paid listings as dollar for dollar at the moment it is one of the most effective forms of advertising, but also in trying everything possible to getting free listings should be a priority!It is always nice to get something for free!

The Good Stuff that you need to know:

The importance of correct practices and a managed submission service for your website cannot be under estimated. A search engine listing strategy will result in increase traffic and increased revenue.

More people will find your site from Search Engines than any other way!

Increase your search engine rankings by utilising search engine optimisation services and search engine submission services.

What is Search Engine Optimisation?

Search engine optimisation is designing and writing your website so that there is a greater probability that your web pages will be listed with the major search engines and secondly, positioned near the top of search results when your prospective customers query your selected keywords and keyword phrases.

Our experience has shown that the options listed below are the most important when developing a successful search engine listing strategy for your website.

The main elements to a good search engine optimisation campaign are:

• Keyword research - find the most searched words for your business
• Copy writing and keyword placement - add these words to the content in sentence structure that makes sense
• Different title and description meta tags for each page
• Title tags on navigation buttons
• Use of H1, H2, H3 tags
• Inclusion of "alt" tags on images
• Meaningful URL's - eg www.yourbusiness.com/officeplants  
• Inclusion of Google and Yahoo sitemaps and Analytics
• Link popularity development - link with reputable websites only
• Not too much flash, use it to make your site look great
• Keeping textual content updated on the main pages
• Express paid inclusions - link to the page that is relevant to the ad
• Inclusion to other larger search engines via manual submission

Following this criteria will enable you to have successful listing in Google, MSN, Bing and Yahoo. After that it is a matter of refining. Remember Google updates once a month (check when your sitemap is downloaded), wait for a week and review your listings.