Tag Archives: google
What is Local Search
The objective of online Local search is to make use of the search engines to get local customers in the door or on the phone to local businesses. Find out more about how it can help you.
Local search is when someone uses the internet to search for a local business. They might do this by using a search engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing or a smaller local online directory.
The number of people who do this is so significant that it is vital that local businesses harness these searches to get found ahead of their competition.
In April 2010 Google confirmed that 20% of online searches were for local businesses and this statistic has been increasing quickly with the adoption the Smartphone. That is 100 million searches each day. Smartphones allow people to search for what they want when they want it and the results that are delivered to them are local, making it a very valuable tool for the consumer.
Any business that services a local area or gets a significant amount of their business from their local area and is not advertising effectively on the internet is missing out on a huge amount of potential business. Where people used to let their fingers do the walking with the Yellow Pages, they now use their desktop or smartphone to find the services they need.
For business this is good news !
The cost of reaching potential clients is significantly reduced when harnessing online searches. Where a business in the past would need to fork-out for expensive Yellow Pages advertisements, weekly newspaper adds or overly expensive billboard advertising they can now use a myriad of inexpensive and in some cases free online advertising channels like the Google, Yahoo and Bing maps and places listings.
While some business owners find advertising online a daunting thought, there are many service providers who able to harness the latest channels for businesses at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising methods. These online marketing agencies let business owners concentrate on what they do best and that is running their business and servicing their customers.
The objective of online Local search marketing is to harness these local searches and get customers in the door or on the phone to local businesses.
Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimisation for Beginners
This article explains how you can use our industry knowledge as SEO specialist agency in Bournemouth to optimise your website using our so that you have the best chance of being on the first page of Google, Yahoo or Bing without being an expert. In the article we cover SEO strategy, Keyword research, Web page optimisation, Content Optimisation, Back-linking, social-networking-optimisation, and article syndication. Web design agencies in Bournemouth are sometimes asked to implement SEO, depending on the web design agency they may or may not be suited to do this specifically. This article is a simple step by step guide for the most basic web designer to implement key SEO in any website and give it the best chance of success.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can be a mine field; many clients I speak with ask the all too common question “How do I get to the top of Google?” The problem here is that there is no magic button to do this and even more frustrating you can spends hours, days or weeks optimising your site and after you leave it alone for a few weeks another site could jump above you for a whole number of reason. SEO takes time, research, skill and intuition, so if you do not have an extensive budget for SEO you can at least help yourself out by reading our following top 5 tips put together at Born4Digital web design Ltd and you can get some of the basics done yourself.
SEO Tip number One: SEO Strategy
What is strategy? First you will need to have an understanding of how competitive a keyword is based on competing pages, look at who your competitors are holding down the top listings on Google, Yahoo and Bing for example and the content link thresholds they exhibit. Expanding your base of modifiers to expand your keywords into other markets and searches that your competitor might be missing is always helpful in pushing you further up the search ladder. Understanding what your main keywords or phrases are going to be is the best SEO strategy you can put in place. Now you are ready to modify with…
SEO Tip number Two: Keyword Research
You now have your list of keywords, but you dont stop there! In order to maintain good SEO you need solid keyword research and sorting. Most SEO professionals are in too much of a hurry to get their strategy in place and see how it does, but a slow and methodical approach to SEO will see you achieving more success. You dont have to do this all on your own, use the tools that are out there right now such as the Google keyword tool, Google Insight suggestions, and such things as simple as the ask.com suggestions. Using these tools is going to give you a really clear indication of all the possibilities of keywords and phrases you want to use and what typical search volumes you are likely to see by using them. What now? Well you have some of the most important information for your websites SEO so… Save it! Open up a new spreadsheet, log the keywords and associated typical traffic and save it. Now you have this information you can start asking some interesting business questions and put your findings into action with
SEO Tip number Three: Web page optimisation
When talking about search engines, there are a few big ones that we are all aware of such as Google, yahoo and Bing. There is lots of other out there, but a bigger problem than the amount of search engines there are is that we do not know exactly 100% how each of the search engine algorithms work. Most of SEO is still calculated based on series of tests and studies to see how websites perform in the search under different conditions. The best practice is to optimise your webpage as accurately and as thoroughly as you can, submit your pages to the search engines and hope for the best. Make sure that you are being indexed and if you change any details on your site make sure that you resubmit your sitemaps. OK so if you are wondering HOW to optimise your pages then here is a little guide…
Title tag
Your Title should have an estimated word count of between 5 and 6 with a keyword count frequency of 1 and a keyword prominence (in the text) of at least 60%. A Keyword that appears at the beginning of a specific area will have a prominence rating of 100%. Keyword prominence plays a crucial part in determining web sites ranking, not just in the Search Engines, but also in directories such as Yahoo and DMOZ.
Alt
Your Alt tags that are attached to all images and other object data on the page should contain a word count of about 1 to 35 and have a keyword frequency count of 1 to 2.
Hyperlinks and anchors
Your hyperlinks and anchors should contain a keyword frequency of between 1 and 8.
Body Text
Your body text, the rest of any page, should contain a keyword frequency of between 1 and 6, a word count between 300 and 400 and a keyword prominence of about 50%. The webpage in general should contain a total frequency of between 5 and 20. A key tip here, take your time and optimise each of your webpages to the best of your ability, it is much easier to do this as you build a page than going back through them at a later date.
SEO Tip number Four: Original and Optimised Content
So once you have the guidelines above firmly in the front of your head you can start to write original content. If you ask many SEO professionals “If you could only give people one piece of SEO advice, what would you give” they will often say that having frequent, interesting and original content is often the key. Think about this; it ticks a lot of the SEO boxes (providing you do not break any Google search rules) if the content is interesting then people will want to read it, if the content is unique then your users will not find the content anywhere else (and you will have many other websites linking back to your content back-links) and if the content is regular then users will bookmark you and come back time and time again to see whats new.
This leads us nicely into our last SEO tip of the day
SEO Tip number Five: Page Links
As we said in the last tip, one of the contributing factors (if not the most important factor) is that of off page links, sometimes called back-links, deep-links, incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links. The first thing to make note of here is that the back-link game is not just a numbers game, but getting secure, consistent and reliable links from partners (especially of sites with relevance to yours) can be much more important. The second thing to note is that the name of the links given plays a large role in your Search engine optimisation, for example a local company called “property management southern” originally had off page links that pointed to the corporate site that simply stated “visit our site pssgroup.co.uk” for more information”. At present Google will mark pssgroup.co.uk as having a new inbound link but the SEO points, if you will, will match searches for those searching for “pssgroup.co.uk” not the keywords developed in the SEO strategy. A much better example will be to add link text that matches your key words defined in Tip number two, or that which matches what the end user will be searching for, such as ” visit our property management company in Bournemouth for more information” where the link behind points to the corporate site.
Warning: There are literally hundreds of ways to drive traffic to your site with page links, some great and some not so great. Services that offer 10,000 back-links in one day, personally, I would stay well away from, I have heard many stories of Google black listing sites because their internal links went from a few hundred to a few thousand overnight. Once you have been blacklisted or banned by Google (essentially removed from Googles indexing list) you will have to send a Resubmission request, these are looked after by real people who check your site and from my research have little chance of being re-listed once you break the Google webmasters rules.
So what are some ways in doing this that will not get you slapped on the back of the wrist by Google? Well they are the real secrets and skills that we charge out for but I will leave you here with a few ideas to get you started:
Social Bookmarking
It is very important to be a highly actively involved into social bookmarking activities. Join all the major Social Bookmarking websites like dig, delicious, stumbledUpon etc. Bookmark your own pages, articles and press releases over there, make friends and share your bookmarks. Social bookmarking websites are very well optimised now and are cached by search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing every day. If your websites content, link etc is bookmarked over there then you can expect your website to get cached by Google, Yahoo and Bing within twenty four hours as well see the power yet?
Social pages / Social groups
There are lots of social sites that allow you to create a page (Facebook, Myspace) or build a group (LinkedIn, Facebook) so use them. Make sure that you leverage these simple things and make sure that they have content that suits.
Article Syndication
Write articles and Press releases about your website, its products and services. Submit the articles into as many article submission and press releases into major press releases websites. Do not forget to leave anchor texts so that readers can come to your website as well.
Business Directories
If you are a business, selling products or providing a service you can register your business on many of the local business directories (Yell, Thomsonlocal)
This article has shown you how you can implement your own SEO strategy, keyword research, optimise your web pages, optimise your content and understand and implement back-links to your page. You have also learned some great tips and tricks, some best practice SEO and some shady SEO to stay wall away from.
Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimisation for Beginners
This article explains how you can use our industry knowledge as SEO specialist agency in Bournemouth to optimise your website using our so that you have the best chance of being on the first page of Google, Yahoo or Bing without being an expert. In the article we cover SEO strategy, Keyword research, Web page optimisation, Content Optimisation, Back-linking, social-networking-optimisation, and article syndication. Web design agencies in Bournemouth are sometimes asked to implement SEO, depending on the web design agency they may or may not be suited to do this specifically. This article is a simple step by step guide for the most basic web designer to implement key SEO in any website and give it the best chance of success.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can be a mine field; many clients I speak with ask the all too common question “How do I get to the top of Google?” The problem here is that there is no magic button to do this and even more frustrating you can spends hours, days or weeks optimising your site and after you leave it alone for a few weeks another site could jump above you for a whole number of reason. SEO takes time, research, skill and intuition, so if you do not have an extensive budget for SEO you can at least help yourself out by reading our following top 5 tips put together at Born4Digital web design Ltd and you can get some of the basics done yourself.
SEO Tip number One: SEO Strategy
What is strategy? First you will need to have an understanding of how competitive a keyword is based on competing pages, look at who your competitors are holding down the top listings on Google, Yahoo and Bing for example and the content link thresholds they exhibit. Expanding your base of modifiers to expand your keywords into other markets and searches that your competitor might be missing is always helpful in pushing you further up the search ladder. Understanding what your main keywords or phrases are going to be is the best SEO strategy you can put in place. Now you are ready to modify with…
SEO Tip number Two: Keyword Research
You now have your list of keywords, but you dont stop there! In order to maintain good SEO you need solid keyword research and sorting. Most SEO professionals are in too much of a hurry to get their strategy in place and see how it does, but a slow and methodical approach to SEO will see you achieving more success. You dont have to do this all on your own, use the tools that are out there right now such as the Google keyword tool, Google Insight suggestions, and such things as simple as the ask.com suggestions. Using these tools is going to give you a really clear indication of all the possibilities of keywords and phrases you want to use and what typical search volumes you are likely to see by using them. What now? Well you have some of the most important information for your websites SEO so… Save it! Open up a new spreadsheet, log the keywords and associated typical traffic and save it. Now you have this information you can start asking some interesting business questions and put your findings into action with
SEO Tip number Three: Web page optimisation
When talking about search engines, there are a few big ones that we are all aware of such as Google, yahoo and Bing. There is lots of other out there, but a bigger problem than the amount of search engines there are is that we do not know exactly 100% how each of the search engine algorithms work. Most of SEO is still calculated based on series of tests and studies to see how websites perform in the search under different conditions. The best practice is to optimise your webpage as accurately and as thoroughly as you can, submit your pages to the search engines and hope for the best. Make sure that you are being indexed and if you change any details on your site make sure that you resubmit your sitemaps. OK so if you are wondering HOW to optimise your pages then here is a little guide…
Title tag
Your Title should have an estimated word count of between 5 and 6 with a keyword count frequency of 1 and a keyword prominence (in the text) of at least 60%. A Keyword that appears at the beginning of a specific area will have a prominence rating of 100%. Keyword prominence plays a crucial part in determining web sites ranking, not just in the Search Engines, but also in directories such as Yahoo and DMOZ.
Alt
Your Alt tags that are attached to all images and other object data on the page should contain a word count of about 1 to 35 and have a keyword frequency count of 1 to 2.
Hyperlinks and anchors
Your hyperlinks and anchors should contain a keyword frequency of between 1 and 8.
Body Text
Your body text, the rest of any page, should contain a keyword frequency of between 1 and 6, a word count between 300 and 400 and a keyword prominence of about 50%. The webpage in general should contain a total frequency of between 5 and 20. A key tip here, take your time and optimise each of your webpages to the best of your ability, it is much easier to do this as you build a page than going back through them at a later date.
SEO Tip number Four: Original and Optimised Content
So once you have the guidelines above firmly in the front of your head you can start to write original content. If you ask many SEO professionals “If you could only give people one piece of SEO advice, what would you give” they will often say that having frequent, interesting and original content is often the key. Think about this; it ticks a lot of the SEO boxes (providing you do not break any Google search rules) if the content is interesting then people will want to read it, if the content is unique then your users will not find the content anywhere else (and you will have many other websites linking back to your content back-links) and if the content is regular then users will bookmark you and come back time and time again to see whats new.
This leads us nicely into our last SEO tip of the day
SEO Tip number Five: Page Links
As we said in the last tip, one of the contributing factors (if not the most important factor) is that of off page links, sometimes called back-links, deep-links, incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links. The first thing to make note of here is that the back-link game is not just a numbers game, but getting secure, consistent and reliable links from partners (especially of sites with relevance to yours) can be much more important. The second thing to note is that the name of the links given plays a large role in your Search engine optimisation, for example a local company called “property management southern” originally had off page links that pointed to the corporate site that simply stated “visit our site pssgroup.co.uk” for more information”. At present Google will mark pssgroup.co.uk as having a new inbound link but the SEO points, if you will, will match searches for those searching for “pssgroup.co.uk” not the keywords developed in the SEO strategy. A much better example will be to add link text that matches your key words defined in Tip number two, or that which matches what the end user will be searching for, such as ” visit our property management company in Bournemouth for more information” where the link behind points to the corporate site.
Warning: There are literally hundreds of ways to drive traffic to your site with page links, some great and some not so great. Services that offer 10,000 back-links in one day, personally, I would stay well away from, I have heard many stories of Google black listing sites because their internal links went from a few hundred to a few thousand overnight. Once you have been blacklisted or banned by Google (essentially removed from Googles indexing list) you will have to send a Resubmission request, these are looked after by real people who check your site and from my research have little chance of being re-listed once you break the Google webmasters rules.
So what are some ways in doing this that will not get you slapped on the back of the wrist by Google? Well they are the real secrets and skills that we charge out for but I will leave you here with a few ideas to get you started:
Social Bookmarking
It is very important to be a highly actively involved into social bookmarking activities. Join all the major Social Bookmarking websites like dig, delicious, stumbledUpon etc. Bookmark your own pages, articles and press releases over there, make friends and share your bookmarks. Social bookmarking websites are very well optimised now and are cached by search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing every day. If your websites content, link etc is bookmarked over there then you can expect your website to get cached by Google, Yahoo and Bing within twenty four hours as well see the power yet?
Social pages / Social groups
There are lots of social sites that allow you to create a page (Facebook, Myspace) or build a group (LinkedIn, Facebook) so use them. Make sure that you leverage these simple things and make sure that they have content that suits.
Article Syndication
Write articles and Press releases about your website, its products and services. Submit the articles into as many article submission and press releases into major press releases websites. Do not forget to leave anchor texts so that readers can come to your website as well.
Business Directories
If you are a business, selling products or providing a service you can register your business on many of the local business directories (Yell, Thomsonlocal)
This article has shown you how you can implement your own SEO strategy, keyword research, optimise your web pages, optimise your content and understand and implement back-links to your page. You have also learned some great tips and tricks, some best practice SEO and some shady SEO to stay wall away from.