Tag Archives: social

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 don’t 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 don’t 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 site’s 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 webpage’s 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 what’s 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 Google’s 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 website’s 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.

Social Media Management Companies on the Increase

Many business facebook pages are suffering from a complete lack of ‘likes’ and many business twitter account are looking a little poor due to a lack of followers?!

This businesses have tried sending out facebook page invites to friends and and businesses to gain likes but still only have a few dozen likes on the facebook page of a so called well established and thriving internet business and have literally run out of ideas, how do people get so may likes and followers!

businesses using twitter have also tried following masses and masses of people via their Twitter business account in an effort to get people to follow their account back and found out that the ratio of follow backs is so low they end up with one of those silly accounts following 1000’s of people but with of a few hundred or even less followers. now their account is locked and they cant follow anyone else until they get more followers to balance things out…

Well… businesses in this situation should not despair, there are now many online social media management companies now offering premium social media based services to the public and can literally add 1000’s or tens of 1000’s of real facebook ‘likes’ and 1000’s or tens of 1000’s of real twitter followers to your business facebook and business twitter accounts for low one off fees, most of these companies don’t even require your facebook or twitter passwords they just need the facebook page name or your twitter id, plus the likes and follwers are added within days.

So Why would businesses Purchase Facebook Likes anyway

By investing in their facebook business or fan page to increase their likes they will be a step ahead of the competition as they will have a base of fans built that really truly want to participate in their page and purchase their products or services. They will also build their social proof at the same time, showing that they are an established, trustworthy business.

Social Media Vetting

You may have heard of companies looking at the facebook and twitter pages of potential employees to get an idea of the person they are thinking about hiring? well it works the other way around also, before most companies and individual decide to do business with you they will now look at your social media pages to established whether you are a safe company to work with and that you have in fact been a around for longer than just a few months, the main reason lots of internet businesses ( even the we’ll established one’s) lose potential clients and customers is when a visitor sees just a few hundred ( or less) twitter followers or a few hundred or less facebook likes on a so-called well established business page and feel that the company or business just isn’t established enough

Facebook is clamping down of businesses using personal pages

lots of companies are setting up fake personal pages and naming them after their business rather than using an actual name, some do this simply out of ignorance as they don;t know how to set up a proper business or fan page but others do this on purpose because friends are far easier to get than likes, you simply send out friends requests to gain page friends or followers and get your products and services out to the masses in that way, these businesses think they are being clever but it look so unprofessional and if facebook find out your account is closed for breaking the rules. Business and Fan pages however gain ‘likes’ rather than friends where the visitor has to click that they like your page or product to get your posts appearing on their own personal facebook profile page, this shows the real popularity of the business and the reason these pages where invented in the first place. In recent months though Facebook has had a large number of complaints about businesses not playing fair and setting up personal pages instead of a local business page or fan page and as a result these personal pages are now being closed down.

Why get more Twitter followers?

Imagine having 500, 1,000, 2,000 or even 3,000 plus Twitter users following your regular Twitter updates! You can send them titbits about your business or products, let them know about your special offers and tips to build up brand awareness. Twitter micro blogging gives you a quick and easy way to reach literally thousands of potential customers on a daily basis! a high amount of twitter followers can also give your business or brand a more established feel, there is nothing worse than a potential customer visiting your fantastic website only to follow your social media link and find out that you have just a few dozen followers, even having just a couple of hundred followers looks bad.