Author Archives: sue

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Why Include Video Content on Your Website?

If a picture is worth a thousand words, I have only one question, ‘What is a video worth?’

Internet marketers have been telling us for years that content is king, well in my view the king of content is video.  Not any and all video, but really well produced, engaging video content.  A well produced video can tell your potential clients about your product and service and if it’s good enough, set you apart from your competitors.

In Ireland YouTube registered 2.4 million unique visits in January of 2012.  A unique visitor, a common measure of website traffic, is based on a computer’s IP address, not on individual people, and is determined by cookies. YouTube has changed the media landscape forever. Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006 and in 2010 YouTube became the second biggest search engine in the USA, according to comScore.  Google’s long term plans for Google TV is to integrate YouTube into every television, via the internet, not surprising given that YouTube gets 4 billion video views per day.  Apple has similar plans for AppleTV.

Google is featuring more video content in its search engine results pages (SERP’s)and getting your video thumbnail in those search results could be really valuable and here’s why.  A recent eye-tracking study came back with some very interesting results.  The study tracked subjects’ eye movements on the SERPs to produce a heat map.  The search term “How to make pizza” produced video thumbnails in position #2 and #3 in the Google organic search engine results page.  The heat map showed subjects focussed on the first video thumbnail, possibly at the expense of the number 1 organic search result.  In general,  where the eye focuses is where the click happens. Getting your video thumbnail in the SERPs could result in more clicks than a number 1 organic listing.

Integrating video into your website has multiple benefits; it gets your message to your potential customers in a dynamic, engaging way.  Great videos means you can feature on the second biggest search engine in the USA, YouTube and getting your video thumbnail into the organic search results on Google could means more clicks, more traffic and ultimately more business.

 

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Search Ranking Trends April 2012

Over the last month, Google has been testing what appear to be some significant algorithm changes, which have cause significant changes in ranking for a variety of sites. There are some facts and opinion below, but first I want to make sure you have some tangible actions.

1. Check to see if you’re affected, and by how much. Do a quick search on Google for your brand name, domain name and for any high-volume head terms. If you find that you are not ranking on the first page for your brand name, or if other terms have significantly slipped in rankings, then it’s a likely sign that you’re suffering. Looking at your analytics will give you more insight into how your total organic traffic is looking. This will also help you find out when your site first suffered.

2. Don’t panic, and don’t make any sudden movements. It might feel like the sky is falling around you right now – particularly if your traffic for a really valuable term has just slumped to zero – but an immediate response isn’t likely to be helpful. Also, any changes you’ve made to your site in the last few days / week are unlikely to be the cause of your particular issue; don’t worry too much about them or try to ‘undo’ things. As discussed below, there’s a chance that Google has been overzealous and made mistakes here; if this is the case, then we would expect to see some of the impact reversed in the coming days.

3. Be prepared to clean up your SEO. If your company has benefited from ‘shady’ SEO techniques, then this is a perfect time to get your house in order and take a more honest approach in future. Now would be a good time to put the brakes on any low-quality link building practices, and to start cleaning up any poor-quality techniques you’ve been using, either on-page or off-page.

A Short Timeline / Background

During March and April, Google has been sending out a significant number of messages to webmasters (via Webmaster Central) – many were ‘Unnatural Link Warnings’, telling the site owners that Google recognised ‘artificial or unnatural links’ in their backlink profile. Google also issued warnings to the SEO community about penalties for ‘over optimisation’, but with scant details on what factors they were assessing. At the same time, Google has been aggressively trying to penalise large link networks. Sites that relied on using these kinds of services for link-building suffered from the drop in link equity to their site. On 18th April, Google tried rolling out an update to recognise parked domains (and presumably reduce their rankings or remove them from search.) It was publicly announced that there was a bug in this change, which mistakenly impacted some sites. However, it’s clear that some sites are still suffering significantly lower rankings, indicating that either this update’s issues haven’t been fully reverted, or that another algorithm change has come into effect.

Our Thoughts

The effects of these changes have been an update targeting exact match domains (EMDs) that got out of hand. If I launch a slew of domains such as CheapCarSalesGalway.com with thin content and a lead generating form, then Google is probably quite right in trying not to give the site much credit. Buying EMDs is a pretty cynical tactic, that’s definitely been used as a ‘quick and easy’ way into the top results.

One theory is that Google is not mis-categorising sites, but actually mis-understanding search phrases. There’s also a strong feeling (among SEOs talking online) that Google may well admit to a mistake here, and undo or dial-back the impact of some of the recent changes. (There is precedence for this: in the days after the Panda Update, some sites saw their rankings return to roughly their pre-Panda positions). It is with this possibility in mind that we made the recommendation above to not panic.

If you are confident that your site has a clean link profile, and there’s nothing murky or egregious in your site’s SEO history, then it might be best to lie-low and see what changes over the coming days. For sites that have used any questionable tactics in the past – particularly if you have any ‘grey’ links in your profile – now would be an appropriate time to take action on that. Better still, it’s an opportunity for people to take a closer look at what might have happened in your specific case, and try to plan so your site regains its rankings and traffic. If you would like to talk about some specific issues you are having, please feel free to email me on sue@ezsales.ie and I’ll offer whatever advice I can based on the information supplied.

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Link Building or On-page SEO. Where do I spend my Money?

We get asked all the time whether our clients should be focussing on On-page SEO or Link building. Unfortunately, the answer tends to be both honest and frustrating – “That depends”. No one wants to hear that because they’re back where they started – having no idea what to do next. Here’s four examples to give you an idea of how I’d allocate your budget for each one.

What Is On-page SEO?

“On-page SEO” can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. It could mean keyword research, writing good TITLE tags, internal linking and crawl architecture, even content creation has been dumped into this pile of options. For the purposes of this post, on-page is anything you directly control in the code or content of your site.  Simple, right?  As a rule of thumb, think of the analogy of trying to build a house on sandy foundations, in the rain.  If you don’t have good strategy and site architecture in place with a good base of content and relevant information – forget about driving more links, you’re driving links to a pile of blocks that have fallen down and are crumbling in the sand.

Case #1: The Elephant

70% On-page, 30% Link-building

The Elephant is an established site with a solid, trusted link profile and usually a good base of content. In many cases, it’s a site that’s evolved “organically”, which is a fancy word for “without a plan”. The Elephant could be suffering from any or all of the following:

  • Keyword research is 5 years out of date
  • Keywords are cannibalised across many pages
  • Internal links have grown like weeds
  • Site architecture doesn’t reflect business goals
  • Page TITLEs overlap or are duplicated
  • Old but valuable (i.e. linked-to) content is 404’ing

 

In many cases, no one notices, because The Elephant’s strong link profile and solid content keep it ranking well. The problem is that you’re sitting on a gold mine of untapped potential. Of course, The Elephant should keep building solid links, but a shift in focus (even for a few months) to really planning and focusing on on-page issues, from keyword research on up, could produce huge dividends.  They say elephants never forget and that’s positive but there’s an element of “What have you done for me lately” that cannot be overlooked.

Case #2: Perfect Pat

30% On-page, 70% Link-building

Perfect Pat often comes out in new webmasters. They’ve read 500 SEO blogs and are following all the “rules” as best they can, but they’ve become sooo obsessed with building the “perfect” site that they’ve hit the tipping point of effort versus results. Perfect Pat wants to know how to squeeze 0.01% more SEO value out of an already good URL by moving one keyword.  Ouch, it’s going to take hours to achieve that 0.01% and that won’t deliver significant enough a return to justify the effort or expense.  You’re not quitting, it’s a case of doing the things that will make most difference to your sales growth.

It’s time for Perfect Pat to remember the 80/20 rule (Pareto principle) – there comes a point where your on-page is good enough, at least for now. You have to get Google to your site to put that on-page magic to work, and that means building links. It’s important to develop content (which is why I’ve left on-page at 30%), but put almost every other on-page tactic to the side temporarily and spend a solid 6 months developing and implementing a link-building campaign

Case #3: The World of Pain

90% On-page, 10% Link-building

The World of Pain is a Google engineer’s fantasy (or possibly nightmare). She’s broken every single rule of on-page SEO, which worked fine for a while, but then came “May Day” and “Panda”, and now Google is even talking about penalising her for optimising too much. The World of Pain has let something (Likely a lot of things) spin out of control, including:

  • Blocked crawl paths and bad redirects
  • Massive URL-based duplication
  • Excessive internal search, categories, and tags
  • Aggressive advertising-to-content ratio
  • Extremely “thin” content
  • Nonsensical site architecture and internal linking
  • Keyword stuffing that would embarrass 1998

 

In some cases, this could be “over-optimisation” and an attempt to manipulate the search engines (Inadvertent “Black Hat SEO” stuff), but in other cases the World of Pain is just that – a painful mess of garbage that has had every trick in the book fired at it without any strategy or structure whatsoever. Whatever the cause, put down everything and start fixing the problems now. Chasing new links without fixing the mess is like having your carpets cleaned while your house is burning down, or trying to sell the house to the fireman who’s putting out the fire.

Case #4: The Red Card

10% On-page, 90% Link-building

Finally, there’s The Red Card – he’s broken every rule in the Google link-building playbook, and they’ve finally noticed. This could be a large-scale devaluation or a Capital-P Penalty, including:

  • Paid links
  • Link farms, networks and exchanges
  • Excessive low-value links
  • Aggressive anchor-text targeting

 

If you’ve been naughty enough, you could be facing a serious ranking penalty or even de-indexation. At that point, all the on-page tweaks in the world won’t help you (I left 10% just to keep the site up and running). You have to fix the problem and address the problem links. Bare minimum, you have to stop doing what got you into trouble and show a pattern of positive link-building. You may even have to file for reconsideration. The fix can be tricky, and depends a lot on the situation, but until you fix it, The Red Card isn’t going anywhere.

 

But What About Social?

Before I get a tonne of comments, I purposely left social factors out of this post. I think the influence of social is growing and it definitely deserves your attention (and budget), but I don’t want to confuse an already complicated issue. Also, at this point, there are no major social “penalties” (small-p or Capital-P), so it’s hard to have an SEO crisis related to social media. Still, social should certainly be a part of any healthy mix in 2012.

One Size Never Fits All

I’ll try to keep the point short and sweet (Those of you who know me, will understand how difficult that can be for me :-) when it comes to the right mix, there is no one-sized-fits-all solution. On-page SEO and link-building are both important, but how important each one is really depends on your current strengths and weaknesses. Long-term, everyone should pursue a mix of solid on-page structure, unique content, an authoritative link profile, and substantive social presence. Diversity is the best way to future-proof your SEO – if the algorithm changes or you hit a snag on one pillar, at least there will still be enough left standing to keep your roof up and your doors OPEN FOR BUSINESS.

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Internet Marketing Intelligence – Keeping up with Search Ranking Trends

Developing an internet marketing strategy requires a breadth of knowledge across multiple disciplines.  You need to know:

  • How to develop a great website
  • What marketing messages are right for your product or service.
  • How to integrate social media messages into your strategy
  • How to reach your target audience and get your website found on the internet.

Staying on top of how search engines rank websites is a really important aspect of an overall internet marketing strategy.  Online marketing  is not the same as traditional marketing, you can have the coolest website, a great product and some cutting edge marketing messages but if no visitors come to your website, you are not going to sell any products online are you?

Google issues a very general monthly report that it labels ‘Inside Search – Search Quality Highlights’.  It gives a broad-strokes overview of where it is taking its ranking algorithms, allowing you to see where the trends are heading.  In February Google announced that it made 40 changes, the highest number to date, which shows that search moves quickly!  Here are the major trends in my opinion:

Local Search

More locally relevant predictions on YouTube:  For example a for the query [U2  in] performed on the US version of YouTube Google might predict [U2 in America], whereas the same search done on the Australian version might predict [U2 in Sydney]

Improvements to ranking for Local search results:  improves the triggering of local universal results by relying more on the ranking of main search results as a signal

Improved local  results: new system to find results from a users city more reliably, can now detect when both queries and documents are local to the searcher.

Freshness

Google continued its work on promoting ‘fresh’ content in the changes it made to its algorithms in February. Google disabled two old classifiers relating to query freshness, it also updated its algorithm for image search to surface fresh images when they appear on the web, they have also applied new signals which allows them to surface fresh new content more quickly when it appears on the web.  Google has also consolidated its signals for spiking topics, so they can rely on signals that they can compute in real time, keeping them ‘on trend’ for the spike in popularity of a particular topic.  They have also updated the data in the Panda System making the famous ‘freshness’ update more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes in the web.

Authority

Google likes authority, which means knowing that they are returning the user with a reliable source for their particular query.  In February Google adjusted it algorithm to more accurately detect official pages.

Cleaning up

Google has also updated its SafeSearch algorithm for both image and search to ensure that it is better at detecting adult content in image searches and also making it less likely that irrelevant adult content will appear for most queries.  Google has also worked on their auto-complete policy to make offensive and inappropriate terms less likely to appear.

Google also turned off a method of link evaluation that they have used for several years.  They didn’t say which one, or how it affected links, that remains to be seen.  I can be sure of one thing, having looked at the search trends over the past few months, you can bet that it prioritises high-quality in-bound links from authoritative sources and negatively affects anyone engaging in ‘black-hat’ SEO such as link-swapping or link – farming practises.

Evaluating Googles Search Insights it is apparant that engaging in a search engine optimisation strategy that focusses on great content that generates high quality in-bound links, combined with ‘fresh’ updates that engage your consumer, will reap long-term rewards. Google are trying to eridicate black-hat SEO techniques, by changing the way they evaluate links and promoting fresh relevant content. I’m certain I won’t be proven wrong on that one!

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Just Why Is Content King? – The Science Behind the Statement

We get asked this question all the time and I suppose the answer hasn’t changed for some time. The way in which the search engines are tracking content however has. When a search engine is asked to search for a service provider, for example to replace a “Flat tyre”, the person looking for the service wants to find a solution, not just information. The way websites rank in the search results depends on the strength of your keywords and how frequently you have used them in the areas of your site that are crawled by search engines. They run algorithms that will seek out the frequency of your keywords and add that to the number of times that your site has been visited and again further to check how often people have linked to your site through recommendations or Backlinks. It all starts with content in this process and the algorithm is using Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI. To embrace the science, you first need to understand the basic principles and that’s important when we try to explain to our clients the benefits of having a cohesive internet marketing strategy when developing great, fresh content. We want to see reward for their efforts.

What is Latent Semantic Indexing?

LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing is a complicated term with a simple explanation. The main concept behind Latent Semantic Indexing is to discover words and phrases that are related in the context of any document or group of documents. Search engines, Internet Marketing Professionals, and Website Designers often use LSI in their day-to-day activities.

Latent Semantic Indexing is the discovery process for finding related terms and phrases. LSI is a mathematical equation that will fold words into a matrix for analysis that will draw out semantically related terms. This equation relies heavily on the context in which any given word is used. For example, if the term “flat tyre” is used in a document, some semantically related terms would be: car, vehicle, repair, wheel, tyre pressure, and wheel brace. You can see that all the words in the list are related to the term “flat tyre”.

The Inner Workings of LSI

The actual work of Semantic Indexing is very complicated and can only be performed by computers running specialised software. These computer programs will build a word and document matrix and run a semantic analysis and output the semantically related terms. These related terms are commonly known as LSI terms. These programs can analyse one document or a group of documents, one website or many websites.

How Do Search Engines Use Semantic Indexing?

Search engines, such as Google, use Latent Semantic Indexing as part of their search analysis, when trying to decide what websites will show up in their search results. The goal of every Search Provider is to provide the most relevant results for any query. For example, if a user searches for the term “flat tyre”, Google must decide what websites or documents are most relevant and display them in the search results. LSI plays a key role in what is returned on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Why is Latent Semantic Indexing Important to Me?

As teams or individuals create content for the Internet, there is often an overriding goal to have this newly created content found by the search engines. To do this, they need to use the terms that are the most related and relevant to their keyword or phrase. If I fix flat tyres, I want to be found for flat tyre repair in my city or town. My internet marketing success depends on the search engines finding my web content and showing that page in the search results when someone types in the query “flat tyre repair Galway”.

What Do You Do If YOU Don’t Have Time To Work This Out Alone?

Well, that’s easy. We help our clients to develop strong keyword strategies and then we can assist them in building great content that is LSI centric. After all, if you are committed to improving the ranking of your website, you’re going to be working on new content all the time, right? Why not work smarter rather than working harder? Allow us to guide you on the science and let the science drive your creativity by providing focus on the things that matter most.

Isn’t it great when everything works in harmony?

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Internet Marketing – Why Choose a Professional

Marketing your business on the internet is a great way to generate new leads and enquires, and ultimately increase your turnover.  Getting started with an internet marketing strategy can be done very cost effectively.  A great internet marketing strategy can produce a really positive return on investment, because generally the initial outlay can be kept relatively small.

It really makes sense to speak to an internet marketing professional before embarking on your first campaign, this can really help you to identify what it is you want to achieve from your strategy, and how to integrate the different elements of your internet marketing strategy to to achieve those goals.

Here are some of the things you need to analyse before you start your first campaign:

  • Which main products and services are you promoting?
  • What geographic areas are you targeting?
  • What level of demand is there for your products and services in your target area?
  • Is the strategy primarily focussing on lead generation, enquiries or on-line sales?
  • Do you need a shopping basket or an e-commerce solution?
  • What is your competition doing?

if you do not have a clear idea in your mind of what it is you want to achieve with your internet marketing strategy and how you are going to achieve it, the results will not be effective and even more importantly it can lead to costly mistakes if you need to change things in the future.

For example you may need to change:

  1. The structure and layout of your website
  2. The e-commerce solution you selected
  3. The software designed to add functionality to your website e.g. survey software

The knowledge that you have about your own business is invaluable when you are embarking on an internet marketing strategy, however marketing a business on the internet is completely different to traditional marketing.  An internet marketing professional can take the knowledge that you have about your own business and translate it into an effective internet marketing strategy that really works at generating additional revenue.

Remember according to VISA €2.96 Billion was spent on-line by Irish consumers in 2010.  That’s a lot of reasons to invest a little in an internet marketing specialist to help you to tap into that market!

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Search Engine Optimisation Training Course – e-book

Thanks to all the participants who attended our introduction to search engine optimisation training course today.  We hope you found the material interesting and that you now have a better feel for the general principles involved.

As promised we have prepared our notes into an e-book for you to downlaod.  Please feel free to share it with your friends, colleagues or anyone who you feel may find it beneficial.

If you would like ongoing tips and advice on SEO,  internet marketing and sales strategy we recommed that you follow our blog.

Thanks again for coming today.  Download the notes from our SEO workshop now. SEO – Search Engine Optimisation training course.  If you found the course content to be valuable to you or if you enjoyed the style of our presentation, please connect to us on LinkedIn and if you could post a recommendation for the training you have received, we would really appreciate it.

 

 

 

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FREE tips and tools to test your new website

Tips and Tools for testing your new website from EzSales business consultants Galway.

STEP ONE – advance preparation.  Define your internet marketing strategy and set the goals for your new website.
STEP TWO – marketing messages for your new website, how to come up with great original content.
STEP THREE – search engine optimisation and your new website.
STEP FOUR – tips and tools for testing your new website
Now that your new website is SEO ready, has a great layout and content to help you achieve your internet marketing goals, you need to test it.  Here are my TOP 5 FREE TOOLS.

When building web pages, the temptation to view the web only in terms of your favourite browser is hard to avoid.  It is important to remember that visitors to your website will view it using many different browsers and across multiple versions of those browsers.  For this reason you need to make sure that your website works on browsers such as Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Opera.  This is one of my favourite free testing tools.  It allows you to test your website on multiple versions of several browsers at the same time.  Check it out at http://spoon.net/browsers

The next free tool tests your website for broken links.  A broken link on your site will result in a 404 object not found error, which looks really unprofessional and to be avoided at all costs. The W3C link-checking tool is free, easy to use and works very quickly. http://validator.w3.org/checklink

Having great content is really important, so once your website is launched you will want to analyse how visitors to your website are interacting with your content.  Having this information will help you to evaluate the goals of your website and it will also assist in developing new engaging content. Google Analytics is free software that allows you to track lots of useful data on visitors to your website.   You can set up a Google Analytics account at www.google.com/analytics

Building links is one of the most important elements of any good search engine optimisation strategy.  How do you track when someone links to you?  One great way to do this is to set up an alert for your company name.  Google Alerts will automatically send you an email when it detects a fresh mention of your business name of on the web.  Set up a free alert at www.google.com/alerts

My final free tip is to submit you new website to the major search engines.  You can do this for Google by creating an XML sitemap.

EzSales are an SEO company in Galway.  We are also internet marketing and business consultants. We help SME’s in Galway and Ireland to develop cohesive sales strategies and marketing plans based on their core business strengths. We help our clients to implement a system to measure the results of their sales and marketing activities.

 

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Irish Times Pricewatch

EzSales experience as Hospitality Consultants featured in the PriceWatch column of the Irish Times at the end of August 2011.

Geoff Kinsella Partner and Business Consultant with EzSales discussed how running a successful early bird menu can help restaurants in these difficult economic times. He discusses both the financial and promotional benefits of this sales strategy.

Here is the entire Irish Times article in which Geoff features as a Galway based hospitality consultant.

 

 

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FREE Search Engine Optimisation Training Course

With thanks to Galway Executive Skillnet, EzSales are pleased to announce that we will be running a FREE training course on search engine optimisation. The course will cover all the basics of search engine optimisation and discuss some free tips and tools that you can use to implement an ongoing search engine optimisation strategy for your business.

The course is being run by EzSales as part of Galway Executive Skillnet upcoming
series of free events. It will take place on Tuesday 13th December from 09.30am to 12.30pm at Harbour Hotel, Galway. Sign up here for a free search engine optimisation training course.

This course is now fully subscribed.  We will keep you up to date with information on additional courses in 2012.