Posts tagged online marketing
The Keys to Freedom: When Will Google Remove My SEO Penalty?
Mar 18th
Google SEO penalties are more common than you might realise. They also happen to well-meaning website owners more often than you might realise! Google’s algorithms are designed to catch actions, not intentions, and so there are many honest webmasters out there currently serving time behind Google bars. It can be frustrating not knowing when your sentence will end, though – today we explore Matt Cutts of Google’s advice about how and when SEO penalties are removed. More >
5 Ways to Ensure Duplicate Content Doesn’t Dupe Your SEO
Mar 4th
You can’t dupe the duplicate content filter! However, you can have a fairly serious impact on your SEO by having too much duplicate content on your site, even if it is properly credited and legally allowed. There is ongoing confusion over the best way to deal with duplicate content on your site; here we check out the main methods.
Taking Over the World: Setting up Your Site for Effective International SEO
Feb 18th
The Internet is the great equaliser, allowing small businesses to compete with large, and everybody to put forth their own opinions. While there are some advantages to being a big fish in the WWW pond, there are also some tricky issues to contend with. The first of these is hosting and targeting for international websites – today we explore some SEO based recommendations for businesses that are trying to take over the world! More >
5 Website Essentials for Most Effective SEO
Nov 10th
SEO is an essential tool for the success of your website (unless you’re Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg!). Yet while SEO ‘gets them there’, your website has to ‘keep them there’. If your ultimate goal in undertaking an SEO strategy is to make more money for your business, make sure that your site has these five essentials in place while you’re undertaking your SEO campaign! More >
Web Marketing with Neuroscience – Tip of the Day #5
Feb 26th
People’s brains can do all sorts of tricky things … keep bodies alive, create the internet , that sort of thing. And if you’re in the web marketing game, understanding how they work can be of enormous benefit to your site, and your business generally. Today we continue our ‘Web Marketing with Neuroscience’ series, looking at short term memory and how it affects our internet use.
The limitations of short term memory
Short term memory is also sometimes called working memory. If our brains were like computers (fortunately AND unfortunately, they are not), this would be our RAM. Our short term memory has been observed to be able to hold between 4 and 9 items, depending on the test and the subject. The time duration is highly variable, but averages usually run around 20 seconds. Given the amount of info that we are exposed to on the internet, it makes sense to work with our website visitors’ short term memory limitations as much as possible. So how do you do that?
Working with short term memory
This is actually easier than you might think, and you’ll probably recognise many of the best practice guidelines from other posts we’ve done on usability and web design. So, before you forget what we’re talking about (!), here’s is how you can work within the limits of human short term memory on the web:
- Make sure your pages load quickly: If it takes so long for a page to load that users forget why they clicked it, they’ll just as likely click straight off. Don’t tempt people to look at other tabs while they’re in the middle of the checkout process on your site!
- Change the colour of links that have been visited: This is a site-specific issue, not a browser or computer issue. Every site owner has the responsibility to change the colour of visited links, so users know where they’ve been and feel like they’re running in circles.
- Categorise well: Try to create narrow categories and narrow pages … although not at the expense of maintaining a manageable menu structure.
- Provide a link to the homepage on every page: That way if people forget where they are, there is an emergency link to reset their search.
- Use breadcrumbs: Although, only if appropriate. Not all sites will naturally suit breadcrumbs.
- Offer Live Help and other assistance links within the body of the page: If people have to navigate to the Help section and then back to where they were, chances are that you’ll lose either a purchase or a visitor.
We recommend you check out the rest of our Web Marketing with Neuroscience posts as well … the brain is a fascinating thing, but especially when it could be making you more money 
.
What Nobody Tells You About Video Marketing
Feb 2nd
Video marketing … we all know that it has enormous potential for reaching audiences, that it is becoming easier and easier, and that it costs a bit more than text articles but also has greater potential. Bet you didn’t what we’re about to tell you about video web marketing, though …
Not many people are doing it
Video still sets you apart from the crowd. While Youtube is a huge website, and people are quite used to viewing online videos, if you’re in a smaller niche then utilizing video where appropriate on your site will still make you seem like an industry leader, not a follower.
Not every one likes video … not everyone likes text
This seems like an obvious point, but it leads us to a best practice that almost all sites miss. If people don’t have time to be led through a video on your topic, they’ll go elsewhere. On the other hand, if they’re looking for information they don’t have to process too much, they’ll look specifically for videos, and might miss your text-based info.
The point is this: always have a text based version of the info in your video … and if possible, always make a video version of your flagship content pieces.
Google is not good at handling video yet
Video marketing is still more in the realms of building customer engagement and word-of-mouth internet marketing than it is an SEO tactic. Tagging helps, but the best practice is to create a text-based version of your video for both the consumers, and the search engines.
You won’t always be able to ‘do’ video
Video is not good for all info, or all topics. Content that doesn’t suit the video format (ie, there is little opportunity to ADD to the content with visuals) should be left as text!
Youtube might not always be your best friend
Youtube is an independent company, serving their own and their visitors interests, not yours. There are thousands of people worldwide who have had their videos removed for violateing terms and conditions without even knowing they had done anything wrong. Hosting your own video can be expensive, but is sometimes worth it.
Web Marketing Experts is Australia’s leading SEO Company – we can help you with all video and internet marketing services.
4 Mega SEO Mistakes!
Jan 28th
SEO is one of the most popular subjects on the internet … alongside that other ubiquitous three-letter word that starts with ‘se…’! This prevalence of information often leads people to believe that SEO is quite a simple task – one that they can do effectively themselves if they read a few blogs. While you are often in a good position to do much of the legwork (writing press releases and website copy, helping with keyword research, etc), there are some common DIY SEO mistakes that really do NOT help your web marketing campaign! We look at the top 4 today.
Using Black Hat Techniques
You don’t have to be an evil Google manipulating monster to fall for what seems like an easier way to get search engine rankings … and which might anger the giant of web search! A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing when DIY-ers use what looks like an easy way out. These quick-fixes are almost always considered black hat, and will get your site banned or penalized in Google when caught.
Meaningless Meta Tags
Many, many people that write their own meta tags don’t realize that this is the only piece of text that search engines display alongside your main website title. It should contain your keywords – if only to tell searchers that the page is relevant to what they were looking for.
Correlating Content
Aside from on-page SEO, including your keyphrases in your site copy helps reassure visitors they have come to the right place, and helps tone down bounce rates (percentage of visitors that leave within a few seconds).
Ignoring the Power of the Address
Your URL is one of the most powerful weapons in your SEO arsenal – use it! You should spend at least as much time brainstorming and refining your URL ideas as you do on your entire site content.
How to Decide on a Keyphrase with Multiple Word Order Options
Jan 24th
One of the great practical conundrums of SEO, and often the first one people run up against, is the keyphrase word order problem. Does your business do ‘search engine optimisation Melbourne’ or ‘Melbourne search engine optimisation’? Do you have a ‘Bangkok hotel’ or a ‘hotel in Bangkok’? Today we help you decide!
The all important word order
Go by the numbers
The first (but certainly not the only) decision making tool you can use here is Google’s Keyword Traffic Estimator Tool, available at https://adwords.google.com.au/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox . Type in each of your alternate phrases, with quote marks around each, to tell the engine you want data for an exact match. List how many searches are performed for a certain time period for each phrase … but don’t just decide to use the most popular one!
Popular first
You will be making the highest search volume phrase the first priority – but realize that you’ll also be using the alternatives later on. Yes, the top search volume phrase will have the most competition. More importantly, though, it represents the language and word order your consumers and potential site visitors think in.
URL Tips
There will often be one phrase that sticks out as not making much sense – you can tell it will be difficult to incorporate in the copy, probably because people are simply being a bit lazy about typing the phrase in! Use this phrase in the URL – that way you can still optimize for it without your copy sounding odd.
On page copy
Focus on the main, highest traffic keyphrase in your site copy. Try to use it 3 or 4 times in your body copy for relevant pages only … and remember to keep it natural!
Anchor text
Then, use your two or three alternative word order keyphrase in your link building campaigns. This should give you a good mix of the alternative keyphrases, weighted in favor of the one which will sound most natural to your readers being in the site copy, and help with your mix of internet marketing strategies.
Applying The Immutable Laws of Marketing in SEO, part 2
Jan 22nd
Marketing and SEO go hand in hand – SEO is simply a new tool to achieve the same position that you used to have to get by taking out ads in the Yellow Pages, and by creating crazy jingles for radio and TV . Today we are continuing our partial look at the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing (as defined by Al Ries and Jack Trout), as they apply to your internet marketing activities. Check out our web-based analysis of the first four laws as a starter, if you like.
Owning a Word
Laws 5 and 6, which state respectively that “The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospect’s mind”, and “Two companies cannot own the same word in the prospect’s mind”. These realte to the entire discipline of SEO … only you have to own a word in Google’s mind, but not necessarily in your prospects. Nice parallel … but we did know that anyway!
Strategy Determination
Ries and Trout observe in the seventh law that the strategy you should use depends on what rung you occupy on the ladder. The ladder is generally understood to mean the hierarchy of products within a category that exist in a consumer’s mind … and the main difference is what you do when you are number one, versus number 2, 3, 4 or lower. This gets a little complicated when you start thinking about details though – a web marketing firm will be an essential partner for implementing this one!
Follow the leader?
The ninth law comes next in our partial review of Ries and Trout’s genius – and it states that if you are shooting for second place, your strategy is determined by the leader. That is, if you are competing with a very strong brand in your category, and can realistically expect to get to the number 2 spot on the strength of your company and product … you should do the opposite of what the #1 company does. People want an alternative, not an imitator … and there are plenty of ways to give yourself that label through your web marketing activities.
“Would You Like a Cup of Tea?” 4 Usability Steps to Keeping Your SEO Traffic Around
Jan 20th
It’s difficult to persuade people to do things (and even to remember things that you say) when you aren’t directly looking at them. This fact has been confirmed by neuroscientific studies across the world, but in SEO we are intimately familiar with it. Most visitors to websites leave within 8 seconds if they don’t see what they are looking for, or if the site seems like hard work, or if it doesn’t match their expectations. Today we are exploring the top 4 usability steps you can take with your website to keep all that traffic so hard-won through SEO, on your site long enough to see how great you are!
A clear visual hierarchy
Step 1: Make use of visual hierarchy rules
Things that are more important on your page should be made obvious with a combination of the following web design aspects:
- Being larger
- Being bolder
- Being more colourful
- Being closer to the top of the page
- Being surrounded by more white space
Step 2: Be conventional
This isn’t business or general marketing advice, but it makes good sense for web design. Take advantage of conventions like putting a search box in the top right of the page, naming certain parts of your site ‘About Us’ and ‘Contact’, etc. This makes you effortless to understand.
Step 3: Segment your pages
If you run Adsense, it’s tempting to make the ads look like content in order to get people to click on them. Design-wise, it isn’t optimal … it simply makes the site harder to understand, and likely to have a higher bounce rate.
Step 4: Link appearance
Make it obvious when something is clickable, either by making it blue and underlining it, or creating 3D effects on it. At the very least, put a single underline on your links. As a side note, you should always make both the picture and text related to a link clickable. If your users can’t figure out how to get round their site, they’ll click off … wasting all that precious web marketing time!