What Search Engine Optimization Should a Good SEO Company Do For You?
December 19, 2009
When you are searching for a good SEO company to conduct search engine optimization on your blog or site do you know what to look for? This article provides a short checklist of the basics they should be covering and a few points of what they should not do to identify the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Keyword research
Ideally keyword research is done to produce a list of keywords that you want to rank highly for. These are the words that your potential visitors may type into a search engine query. You want your site to appear on the first page of results for these keywords. A good SEO company will be able to produce a list of keywords that are highly relevant to your site, have a high search volume and a relatively low competition. However, your competition depends on your niche. For highly competitive keywords you will have to work harder for good rankings or decide to not try to rank highly for them at all. A second list of long tail action oriented keywords is very helpful and should always be supplied by a good SEO service provider. You can use these secondary keywords when creating additional content for your site, especially in blog article titles and copy.
How the Keywords from your research should be used
Once a keyword list is drawn up, the site must be optimized for these keywords. This is done simply by adding these keywords in the best places on the site. The most important place to have your highest traffic keyword is the site title META tag and the page title HTML tag. This should be done as a basic part of the initial building of your site. When choosing a domain name it is advantageous to include a high traffic keyword in the URL. If you have not done this that’s okay, your web pages can be named using your primary keywords, for example www.yoursitename.com/additionalkeyword.html . Links on appropriate keywords in the copy of your site to other pages on your site that are appropriate for the keyword should be created; this is called deep linking and search engines will like this. However, this should not be overdone by making links of all your keywords in your copy as that will look spammy to the search engines. Keywords should be used in headings and the headings should be relevant to the content. Keywords should be used in the beginning of a document, in the ALT image tags (these are the text descriptions of images), and in META tags.
We advise to start with a top ten of primary keywords you want to rank highly for. A further list of ten long tail keywords could be added to this. Once your site is fully optimized for these keywords, you may want to move onto another list of top ten for a slightly different aspect of your site and optimize separate pages for these. Depending on how large you want your site to be this process can continue indefinitely.
What a good seo company should not do with the keyword research
You can tell a good SEO service provider from a bad one by what a good seo service provider won’t do. They should not use incorrectly spelled keywords. These may have high traffic but their use on your site will damage your search engine ranking. They should not aim to use too many keywords, the list should be short and highly targeted. In this case more is not necessarily better, and if they offer to optimise for 100 keywords you are not really getting a better deal. Avoid any SEO service providers who employ keyword stuffing. Any density of greater that 10% of keywords in your copy could be considered keyword stuffing and will damage your search engine ranking as it’s seen as spam.
Link Building
Your search engine ranking is increased by good quality inbound links to your site. This can be achieved in a few different ways. It can be done the old fashioned way, by finding a good quality site with a higher page ranking than yours, contacting the site owner and requesting a link to your site or a link exchange. When doing this a suggested anchor text tag for the link that includes a keyword should be supplied. Another way to build links is to leave comments on related blogs and discussion boards with your link. Many SEO companies will do this for you and it is a good idea but should not be relied upon alone. Back links can also be created by posting your own unique original content to social authority sites such as twitter, facebook, and posterous. As long as the content includes a link back to your site it will be counted as a link by the search engines. As links age the search engines like them more. Having too many new links appear at once suggests buying back links and search engines do not like this. The number of links on a page with your inbound link is important, fewer is better. Finally, and not many SEO experts know this one, the placement on the page of the inbound link to your site is important. Placement at the bottom of the page is an authoritative position that search engines love. This is what TwoKad blogmatics does for you.
Content Building
This is where most of your ranking will come from and this is the part that takes the most time. If you begin your site with the philosophy that you are building a site with unique valuable content that provides something for others you will rank well. You need at least two new pages every week to keep the site fresh. Build the site for your customers and the search engines will follow. Regular, unique content that is relevant to your site will build your search engine ranking. The best way to achieve this is through a blog attached to your site. When writing new content keywords should be used in page titles and titles should have a larger font size than the rest of the copy. Changing the text formatting such as using bold or italic for keywords is also helpful. It is essential to always adhere to copyright laws when creating your own content, breach of copyright can get you kicked out of the search engines completely.
Flash and SEO
Flash is a multimedia platform that can be used to create animated web pages. As long as alternative methods to display to search engines what your site is about are used correctly there is no disadvantage to using flash on your site. Here’s a great explanation of how a flash site can be SEO optimized.
Conclusion
Finding a good SEO service provider should not be hard if you know what questions to ask of them. At TwoKad we firmly believe most seo should be done as part of building a site by any developer worth their salt. Once your site is built you should not have to pay any extra money to any other service provider to optimize it for search engines. What can be beneficial to you after your site is built is building quality links and creating good quality content.
Ten Steps To Build A Mailing List
December 12, 2009
If you have an online business you need a business email marketing list. Your email list is essential for converting prospects into paying customers. But it needs to be done right to be effective for your business.
It is possible to purchase large email lists from online companies. This may seem like an easy answer and a good idea but further thought reveals this approach to be an illusion.
Purchased email lists post three main problems. Much of the information may be stale and out of date so that in a list of 5,000 emails only 3,000 may be current. Because of this the value is not always what it appears to be.
Have you ever received an email from an unknown source? If you have (and most people with an email account will have experienced this at least once) the most likely thing you have done is hit the delete key without even opening the email, especially if it looks like it’s promoting or selling something. This is what will happen to a large portion of the messages you send to a purchased list.
For those who do open and read your email many will complain they have been spammed. Your inbox will be full of complaints. This is because these readers know they did not explicitly sign up to receive emails from you or your company. They have probably never heard of you before. This is going to give your business a bad name before you’ve even started.
The answer to avoiding these problems is to build your own highly targeted email list. You build this opt list of people who explicitly opt in to receive emails from you.
When building your business email marketing list here are 10 simple tips to follow.
1. Use a free giveaway.
Write a short ebook, create a simple downloadable piece of software or an informative video. It doesn’t have to be large but it does have to provide some real value. Most importantly your free giveaway needs to be something that will really appeal to your target market. In this way you begin your email list building with only highly targeted prospects. Check out this example out from a forex niche. In this example the giveaway is perfectly tailored to readers of a forex blog where the offer is prominently displayed. It has proved to be very popular and hugely successful in building a very highly targeted email list.
2. Offer value.
This one seems obvious but you must regularly offer value to your email list subscribers. Send them messages that inform them of something they may not already know. Offer them the occasional sneak preview of a new product or service or an occasional discount.
3. Be honest.
If you state you will only email them up to four times a month stick to it. If you state you will only email them occasionally with special offers don’t start sending them a newsletter. Make sure that your ongoing use of their email addresses is in line with the original reason you got them to sign up in the first place.
4. Assure them of their privacy.
State that you will never give or sell their email address to another party (and stick with this promise). Tell them how many emails to expect from you in any one month and stick to this. You want to build a relationship with these readers based upon trust and reliability (yours). Don’t blow it!
5. Keep it interesting.
If you have a regular newsletter make it visually appealing and keep the content interesting. If you’re just sending the occasional text email work hard to make the content relevant and interesting to your readers.
6. Make your emails newsworthy with polls or questions.
People like to feel involved and love to be asked questions. Make the question funny or interesting and relevant. You can even use the results to write an article.
7. Make it viral.
Put a subscribe link at the bottom of each email or newsletter and ask your readers to pass it onto their friends if they find it interesting. Make sure it is as easy as possible for secondary receivers of your emails to opt in to join the list.
8. Put a subscribe link in a prominent position on your blog or web site.
This can be in addition to the free giveaway you offer to increase your targeted list. Make it easy for people to give you their email directly from your site so that they can subscribe to updates of your blog posts or special offers.
9. Don’t use the word ‘subscribe’ on your opt in form.
This puts people off giving you their email address because the word subscribe is used in conjunction with paid subscriptions. You want them to know you will not be charging them anything. Re-word it to indicate that the form is where they give their email address to receive updates of your regular posts, or further information, or whatever it is you want to send them.
10. Develop a relationship with your email list.
Keep the contact regular but don’t inundate them with too much. A general rule would be to not send more than one email per week, and at least one per month.
Once you have your list going, you can use this to increase your sales. But that’s another story!
Email list building may seem like a lot of hard work in the beginning when you set it up but it is essential for online business success. It is not something you can afford to avoid or ignore and when it is done right it can be a great tool to increase sales. Good luck!
Seven Steps To Landing Pages That Convert
December 9, 2009
Landing pages (sales action pages) for your product or services are immensely important as this is where you turn visitors into paying customers. This is where all your hard work in building traffic and trust in your brand pays off. There are a few simple tips for building a sales action page that will convert.
1. Make it relevant
The copy on your sales action page needs to be relevant to the product or service you are selling. Your headline especially needs to be relevant and better yet needs to echo words in your pay per click ads (if you are using this method for traffic). For example, a google ad with the title “Freelance Money Course” leading visitors to a sales action page with the clear title “Freelance Money” is a good fit.
2. Make the price obvious
Openly stating your price generates more trust than leaving it at the end of a drawn out shopping cart process. If people have to do this to find out the price many of them will be put off. If the price is not displayed but a buy now button is, many clicks on your buy now button will be from people only interested in finding out the price and not actually buying. This does not generate trust in your product or service and may generate suspicion.
3. Dont provide links for customers to leave
Once you’ve got them to your sales action page that’s where you want them to stay. Don’t ever provide links out, unless the product or service is not your own (as in the case of affiliate marketing) in which case the only place you should provide a link to is the purchase action page of the supplier where there is a clear opportunity to buy.
The one exception to this rule is if you have a site with a greater authority than your sales action page. You could provide a subtle link at the bottom of the page for customers to check out where you’re from. If they are taken to a recognised page that is clearly a legitimate online company they will be reassured and may return to the sales action page to make a purchase.
4. Make it easy for customers to complete a sale
It’s amazing how often this is not done. There should be a buy now button on the sales action page and if that page is long you need more than one button. Not everyone takes that much convincing and you want to make it easy for them to give you their money. You don’t want to make customers click through several pages as each time they have to make another click to get closer to that all important buy now button you lose some customers at each step. I have actually searched for a specific product online with the clear intention to part with my money only to give up after visiting a series of linked sites and not finding a buy now button!
5. Make it easy to follow
Your copy needs to be clear and concise. If English is not your first language (and the sales action page is in English) have a native English speaker proof your copy for grammatical and syntax errors. Use short concise sentences with few multi-syllable words. Use the vocabulary that your target market would use.
6. Get personal
Your product or service is there to solve a problem that your customers have. If you can outline the problem in personal terms and state how this product or service solved the problem for you, you will build trust and increase the likelihood of a sale.
7. Include these 4 points in your copy
When writing the copy for your sales action page follow this simple formula for how to write it and you will improve your chances of making a sale. You will need to do your homework on the competition and your keywords before you start writing. Write the copy to follow these four points in order.
- 1. Empathy: outline the problem and state how you know what it feels like to be in that situation; how frustrated/sad/angry you feel. Use emotional words.2. State why you are better than your competition: you have to do your homework for this one. As you research the services or products offered by your competition, what differences can you see between them and you? What are you offering that they do not? How are you better?
3. Outline how your service or product is current and appropriate for the customers needs. How does it solve their problem? How up to date is this solution? The internet changes so fast customers need to know your product or service is not stale.
4. State how your product or service will give the customer the results they want NOW. Immediacy is important. People do not want to wait for results. We live in a sound byte society. It’s okay to acknowledge that better results will take time, as long as your product or service can achieve immediate results too.
In following all of these seven steps don’t forget to test, test, test. I always advise split testing with only two options at a time. Take the better performing option and alter it slightly to replace the lesser option. Rinse and repeat.
If you use these seven steps for a better converting sales action page you are on your way to making a profit. Remember though that you still have to have done good keyword research first and the product or service you are offering has to be one that fills a need.
Twitter: How Could It Change Social Discourse?
December 4, 2009
It has taken me quite some time to come around to twitter. For a long time I avoided it because I thought it was so much trivialisation and hype. Now I think I’ve got it. And I want to share this journey of understanding with you. First, some background of where I’m coming from.
The medium within which we have our public discourse shapes the message. Prior to television (a generation that has almost passed from our midst now) the printed word was the dominant form of public discourse. A society whose public discourse is shaped by the print media is necessarily rational and reasonable (and literate!). 18th and 19th century America saw the beginning of mass education as the country strove for mass literacy. This goal was driven by the understanding that participation in the new democracy required the ability to read and write.
Reading is a rational activity. It is based in thought and understanding. Language guides thought. As you read a book your thoughts are guided by the language. As you listen to a speech your thoughts are guided by the language. 18th and 19th Century American print based society could endure upwards of 5 hours of public oratory based upon speeches delivered from carefully pre-written scripts. Could you imagine a public meeting today in America lasting that long and still having an audience? A hilarious idea.
The advent of the telegraph and photograph changed public discourse significantly. These two modes of communication are blended to perfection in television. When information of the ‘News of The Day’ is immediate from any corner of the globe it has no relevance (usually) to our daily lives. When information is delivered in sound bytes it is free of context, it is not tied to any function. The flow of information parading as news has nothing to do with its audience and requires no response. Further, the medium of television allows for no effective response. Previously information derived its importance from the possiblilty of action, with the rise of television information now derived its importance from simply knowing of facts and not about them or being able to act on them. It is no coincidence that the advent of crossword puzzles and other games such as ‘Trivial Pursuit’ occurred after television replaced print media as the dominant form of public discourse. For what else can we do with the volume of irrelevant information we assimilate each day? This irrelevancy makes Baekdal’s experiment in avoiding traditional news sources and relying upon social media for his news seem reasonable. At least his news will be relevant to him!
The reliance upon images rather than language for social discourse further decontextualises the message. Images require no context. American society has been transformed into one bizarre arena for showbiz. Public life is shaped by emotion, by sound bytes of information without context or explanation, by image and image is everything. Rationality is suspended and appearance is elevated above all else.
The rise of the internet may offer hope of a return to public discourse based more on rationality and objectivity because much of the net is based upon text. This blog you are reading, and the many others, are all text based (the digital version of the printed word). When I blog others read. Sometimes they reply in comments and sometimes they have a longer more thought out response that may take the form of another blog post, which has a trackback to my original post. This is a virtual world version of the 18th and 19th century speakers in public domains exchanging ideas in the form of long speeches, each carefully thought out then delivered to be followed often by a carefully thought out and delivered response.
However the internet is not just text based. UM’s Wave 4 report notices the rise of video. The internet has huge capacity to be purely visual and auditory. It is immediate and it has no space limitations. The medium that the internet is becoming is all of print, telegraph and television rolled into one new digital version. So how will it shape our public discourse? The answer to this question relies upon which of the many forms of communication offered by the net we choose to utilise most. I want to focus on Twitter as a growing medium for discourse, and one that is taken increasingly seriously by many people as a venue for social connection. Facebook has some attributes of Twitter in its status updates, but I will not focus on that here. One at a time!
Twitter has peculiar attributes that we need to be aware of when learning how it is best utilised in public discourse. If it were to be used as a full platform to provide discourse I fear that the discourse will necessarily be trivial and superficial. Let me explain why.
Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters. This simple reality should not be overlooked and has important implications. Messages via twitter are necessarily brief. They can have no context, they can have almost no explanation. They are sound bytes. A conversation using twitter can develop context, but in small sound bytes only. The conversation cannot have depth where explanation is excluded to such a degree, or is given in increments only and broken up by constant interruption by other unrelated messages.
I have seen very odd examples of ‘chats’ containing many people on twitter. The chats appear as disjointed comments. They can be full of insider jargon, a necessity where the message must be so brief but a barrier to the wider participation that the instigators, in choosing the public domain of twitter, may have wished for. These ‘conversations’ can barely be defined as such, with snippets of information absent of reasoning or explanation and with the assumption of prior knowledge for understanding. Can you really have a conversation with several people at once where you are allowed only 140 characters per message? It seems not, or at least, not with any depth.
I think the reason that people seem to think they can have a real conversation using Twitter as a venue is this: for a few generations now we have been used to life lived in sound bytes as television has shaped our public discourse. We think to live like this is normal and natural. We accept the constant flow of ‘news’ as important, although it has no effect on our daily lives and we can have little to no effect on the message or the outcomes. We have no option for action. We are left feeling powerless and impotent. Television is best if left to what it does best: entertainment. I believe the height of it’s utility is ‘Realiity TV’.
Twitters strongest point is that messages can contain links to other content on the net. A well written Twitter message to capture attention can bring many eyeballs to the content its linked to. This may generate a public discourse in another arena such as a blog where deeper meaning can be conveyed.
If we are to harness the potential of the net for the improvement of public discourse then we need to examine how our discourse has been limited by television and understand that we could have so much more depth now we are offered discourse based upon the printed word. If we use twitter as a medium for discourse and pretend that this discourse is serious we do ourselves a disservice. We are capable of better.
To utilise twitter best I’m now only following people whose interests converge with mine. If they have blogs, that’s even better. Their tweets lead me to their writing which leads me to their comments which leads me to other peoples writing that interests me and so I increase the people I follow. Before I was following over 2,500 people and the tweets that interested me were drowned out in the noise of direct selling and irrelevancies. Now I get the message.
I have come to the conclusion that twitter is best as a message service. It is best when it alerts me to interesting content that is placed somewhere else. Occasionally it can be good at providing a snippet of an idea, such as a famous or new quote. It is hopeless for conversations.
TwoKad’s Take on Branding
December 2, 2009
While reading comments on a PR post about branding I had an epiphany. A comment left by Walter Adamson made me think about the gap between what advertisers promise and what they deliver.
I know that many times I’ve purchased a product to have it not meet the expectations built up by the advertising, including the packaging the product came in. I know physical products have built in obsolescence to improve profits, we all know it. We know it so much that the new electrical device we purchased last week does not surprise us when it breaks down. It was cheap so we just go buy another one right?
Walter’s point made me think about how the changing economic environment will change our acceptance of built in obsolescence and the gap between advertising promises and what companies deliver. Because I think this is about to change big time.
As the economic climate worsens consumers will tighten their pocketbooks. It’s going to be harder to make them part with their money. If your brand has a reputation for over promising and under delivering you could be in trouble. In a buoyant economy driven by consumerism this gap can often be overlooked in the rush to buy more stuff. When people have less money and they’re buying less stuff they’re going to be more aware of value for money, and my guess is they’re going to be more pissed off if your brand does not deliver on its promises.
The rise of online social media gives more power to consumers and they’re in front of the advertisers at the moment. They’re in front because they have the ability to communicate with a vast audience instantaneously via social media sites like twitter or facebook. If they have a bad experience with your brand it’s not only their immediate friends and family who will hear about it, it’s possibly hundreds of thousands of other people too. Consumers have the same possibilities of reach as advertisers have been used to having with television up to now. And consumers have this instant reach today. Businesses that do not comprehend how this can affect them and change accordingly are missing a fantastic opportunity.
For all products, physical and digital, this may mean you will need to work smarter to build trust as it may be harder to get your customers to part ways with their cash. How can you overcome this?
Here’s my recommendation on positioning your brand for the coming economic storm: keep it real.
Don’t promise what you can’t deliver. Ask customers for feedback and post it on your site. Listen to your customers. If they did not like your product or service, how should you fix the problem? If they did like it, exactly why? Intensify the good and fix the bad. It seems like common sense advice, but strangely it’s often not followed.
Those businesses that continue to operate under the old ways of heady consumerism will not survive. Those that use the potential of new online social media to establish a dialogue with their customers and find out how better to sell to them will improve their chances of survival.
UM’s Wave 4 Yearly Report Concludes Online Social Networks Dominate
November 28, 2009
For the last four years Universal McCann has published a report on the changing landscape of the Internet and how people are using it. Wave 4 of UM’s research shows the main trend to be how social networks are coming to dominate the online world. Social networking sites such as facebook and orkut are the new focus for internet savvy consumers.
The other unsurprising trend is from text based information sharing to video. YouTube is a frontrunner here, but increasingly people are uploading and watching video on social sites. As broadband becomes more widespread video becomes more the norm.
Another trend seen in UM’s research is the consolidation of social media and social networks. From the origin of simple blogging with text and posting video and photos on seperate sites, people are now doing all of these things increasingly in one place. As traditional blogs change to become more media rich, businesses will have to keep up by providing media rich content to keep their audiences’ interest.
In the social media landscape it is vital for businesses to have a social presence. As more and more people sign up for social profiles, in ever increasing numbers, they are also spending time keeping them up to date and a large 71.1% will visit a friend’s social network page.
UM concludes with the message that increasingly the online world is socialised. Opportunity exists for businesses to reach their target markets online and engage with them more deeply than traditional media allows. Social networks also offer the opportunity to highly target your message.
In our experience direct selling via social networks simply does not work. To be successful online businesses need to engage and stimulate their audience. Their content needs to be constantly engaging using the latest rich media. In this way they can engage their target audience and build a relationship with them. If your audience does not trust you they won’t buy from you.
