How long are you prepared to wait for a website to load until you get impatient and click away? One second? Two? Google recently carried out an experiment where they intentionally decreased the speed of their own website from 100 milliseconds to 400 milliseconds. The results showed decreases in the average number of Google searches from 0.2% to 0.6%.  Users were turning their backs on Google as the time taken for search results to appear was too long. Even after Google returned their site to the original speed they found that searches continued to decline for the next five weeks!

It is because of this dramatic affect that speed has on user’s experience of a website, that Google has announced faster websites will be ranked higher. This is the first time that Google has officially announced that Speed does have a direct effect on Rankings. SEO guru’s have suspected this for a while and a fast website is always desired for usability reasons, but Google’s announcement has put any debate over this issue to rest.

Google uses its Googlebots to test how long a page takes to respond as well as Google toolbar to test page load times. Generate UK have invested a lot of time and money into our server capabilities. This means that the sites that we host on our server have quick and smooth load times. As demonstrated by the Google experiment speed not only judges your Google ranking but that the amount of users actually decreases with a slow website. This in turn will also have an effect on your conversion rate. With a slow running website traffic is less likely to stick around and ultimately not buy into your services or products.

A lot of people are concerned that this change will really only benefit larger organisations as they can afford to pay more for hosting. I believe this is a misconception. Small sites can often react and respond faster than larger corporations can to changes on the web.  Making small changes on a larger website can often be a slow process due to internal bureaucracy; whereas smaller sites can often make those small changes to help increase the speed of their website.

Currently less than 1% of search queries are effect by site speed according to Google. However Google have already released a list of tools to help test your sites speed. This could only be the beginning for the importance of site speed. Google’s passion for fast internet and dedication to releasing new tools demonstrates that this could be an extremely important signal for the future. Google have been using speed as a signal for several weeks now and there has been no dramatic change. But this simply could be the beginning of a bigger campaign for faster websites.

Generate UK has invested in a high performance server infrastructure for customers websites we host. We ensure that our server is fast, efficient and reliable. Google says that a 0.5 second delay in the page load speed of your website can reduce traffic by 20%. As a business can you afford to lose this amount of traffic? Generate UK servers deliver up to 35% more speed over traditional hardware, this is to ensure that your website does not suffer because of server speed restrictions.

On page content can also affect the speed of your website. Having a large number of images, flash files or Javascript can increase the time your page takes to load. There are tools that you can use to run reports on your websites speed which will tell you exactly how long each page takes to load as well as identifying areas that are slowing you website down. Follow this link to see which tools Google suggest you use. Alternatively there are other sites you can use such as websiteoptimisation.com.

It is important to remember that this is only one aspect or signal of SEO. Along with speed we still have to take into account on page and off page SEO. These are all areas of search engine optimisation that Generate UK specialises in. If you would like to get your website ranking higher in Google then why not talk to one of our SEO consultants. We can help advise you on areas of your site that may need improvement to benefit from higher rankings.

5 SEO Fails!

SEO is vitally important to help your website gain valuable traffic for desired keywords. There are two types of SEO, on page and off page. On page includes meta titles, keywords and quality content. . . all the things you would find on a web page while off page includes back links and all the things relating to your web page that aren’t on your page, simple. Many Search engine optimisation companies or SEO ‘Gurus’ will make huge promises to you offering you top spots on Google by optimising your site or buying links for you. However you do need to be slightly cautious of such people. In this blog I have compiled I list of things NOT to do in SEO, which I have appropriately titled SEO Fails! They say people learn from their mistakes, well here are a lot of other people’s mistakes for you to learn from!

1) Make sure all your URL’s are friendly.

The tagline of this site is ‘Internet made easy’ ironically their URL is not easy to read. Google hates URL’s like this, it is long, complicated and says nothing about what content is on this page. Make sure none of your pages look like this or have any % or ~ in them, keep it nice and easy for example www.generateuk.co.uk/seo.htm. The two other problems I have highlighted on this page is the navigation keywords are in white, therefore not readable as well as the content not actually being found! You do not want this on your website.

2) Use appropriate page titles

I think this site sells guitar straps . . . it’s just a guess! Although repetition gets your point across it also looks incredibly spamy! This website was ranking number one, but Google took disciplinary action and they are now on the second page. The title of you page is a great place to put your keywords, but make sure it doesn’t look like spam!

3) Don’t link to too many other websites

Although reciprocal links and link exchange can be a good way to increase your rankings, you again don’t want to come across as spam. This is an example of a website which has almost 100 links in its footer. Not very user friendly at all!

4) Make sure you own your own domain name!

This domain name is www.jimmatheson.com! So there is just one small thing wrong with Jim’s site and that is that it is promoting Claudia, his opposition! Make sure you own your own name or company name as a domain otherwise you are open to attack from competitors! For those who are going to try and find this site, it was taken down after the American election.

5)Do Not Keyword Stuff

Not only has this website stuffed its page with keywords he has also made them internal links. In terms of on page SEO, keywords and internal links in content are good. Just not to this extent!

All the above sites are examples of bad SEO. Hopefully by looking at these sites you would have laughed as well as learned something new. At Generate UK we take Search Engine Optimisation very seriously and want to make sure that your site ranks highly for your desired keywords. If you are concerned about your current Search Engine Optimisation or don’t actually do any SEO and would like to, then why not talk to one of our SEO Consultants.

Oh dear… has your site been banned by Google? I know the feeling you currently have, that gut wrenching fear and loss of control. Where has the site gone? Why has the site gone? When will it be back? I have been developing and marketing websites since 2003, many of those sites I promoted using techniques that today would be considered “alternative”. I don’t shy away from this because it means that I have the scars of battle with the search engines…. believe me, you can quickly achieve a short term gain with Black Hat techniques, however long term it is not a viable marketing strategy.

View the search engines as your source of free targeted traffic. Don’t mess with them, give them what they want… great content and information. Play by their rules and they will reward you. Every business in the UK should follow the webmaster guidelines, if you don’t then you’re running the risk of being banned.

If you do not know whether you are following Google Webmaster Guidelines, then start asking some questions. Click on the link and read through what they say. If you work with an SEO agency, get them to confirm and demonstrate that they are not risking your business by using SEO techniques outside of the guidelines.

Ok, if you’re on this page it is probably an emergency and you’re keen to get to the meat of the problem. So let’s have a look at some of the reasons your site might be banned, or lost its ranking. We’re looking at the quality (sometimes technical) part of your website, rather than the look and feel. Please note this is a summary of potential issues, if you know your site fits into any of the points below then it is worth doing something about it as not doing anything will affect your rankings.

Broken Links and incorrect HTML

There’s not much more frustrating that broken links, 404 pages, error pages etc. If you consider that Google wants to provide relevant and helpful content to its users and your site and your competitors site have similar content; the next step for Google will be to check the quality of the links and code. If your competitor matches W3C and has not broken links compared to your site, then guess who gets shown first.

Dynamic Pages

You won’t get banned from Google for having dynamic pages, however it is not going to help you. An example of a dynamic page is a URL that has a ? in the title and is created because the site has queried a database; often this refers to shopping carts. A dynamic page URL by nature changes, whereas a static page does not. This means it can be indexed by the search engines, which is good.

Number of links on your page

You should not have more than 100 links on your page. That is a rule and part of the Google Webmaster Guidelines. If you have more than 100 links on your page, then you have broken their terms. Lots of sites do this, especially today when a lot of sites include links to social media and bookmarking sites. If you’ve lost a bit of ranking recently and not sure why, then this could be one of the reasons.

Make your web pages for users

There is a temptation for website owners to try and deceive the search engines, the upside for this is more traffic and more sales, so you can understand why people are tempted to do it. One method webmasters have used is cloaking, which means that the search engine is presented with one set of content and the user is presented with something completely different. This is a technique that will get you banned.

Don’t use tricks to try and outsmart Google

Google is one of the biggest companies in the world today; they are also the smartest search engine and know their onions for sure. So why anyone would want to try and outsmart them is beyond me. As already mentioned in this post, in the short term you may get away with it, however if you’re looking for a long term search marketing strategy, it will not work for you. In simple terms, anything outside of the Webmaster Guidelines is a trick, so try and keep to the rules.

Links

This is a big one. In the early days of the Internet, optimising your website was simply about throwing a website up and getting loads of links. This strategy no longer applies and falls into the “tricks” category. The areas to look into here are:

1.       The sites you’re linking out to… bad neighbourhoods don’t go near them. Don’t be associated in any way with them.

2.       Link building schemes - Run for the hills. It is about natural link growth, if you’re part of a link exchange scheme, this could be having a detrimental effect on your ranking. If you need more information about the definitions, visit Google’s Link Schemes page

3.       Reciprocal links are ok, they are not going to get you banned but it is worth considering your reciprocal link strategy.

4.       Buying and selling links is not a good strategy for increasing your search engine rankings. If you’re buying links to increase traffic, this is slightly different and can be neutralised from a SEO perspective by using the “nofollow” technique.

We recommend that you think about why you are linking to a page, is it for the benefit of your visitors/users or is it because you believe you are getting an advantage from the search engine. If it is the latter, then you’re playing the wrong game.

Hidden text and links

I have to be honest, this used to be one of my favourite techniques. It would be very easy to hide text and links on a page and the search engines never used to mind. Times change and Google very much discourage this technique, usually if you are caught you will be subject to a ban.

Make sure you do not have malware or other bad code on your site

This is a serious one and has been on the increase in recent years. The premise of this advice is simple, don’t create pages that phish for information, install Trojans or virus etc. So this is quite obvious why Google would not want to rank your site. However, sometimes this types of software can be installed on a site without the webmaster being aware of it. So this can be about security of your site. We saw an example recently where phishing pages had been uploaded to a website. The only time the customer knew about it was when their server company contacted them to say they had suspended their site.

Keyword stuffing

A lot of webmasters “keyword stuff” their pages without knowing the affect. Unfortunately, it is an issue within our industry and a result of poor advice. Too many keywords on a page is keyword stuffing, so try to create content first and foremost to be read by your users.

Duplicate content

There are two types of duplicate content, one type is content that has been taken from another website and repurposed in the same way. There are many reasons why you would do this and it happens regularly without issue as long as a credit is applied. The challenge happens when you try to rank well for that page. If you think about it logically, Google has already indexed a piece of content that is the same as yours. The original piece of content was there before yours, so why would they choose to rank you above the original source?

The other less known issue with duplicate content is when you have duplicate content on your own site. Sometimes this can be an issue when a site has not defined its www.domain or http://domain properly. Google effectively has 2 pages to look at and decide which is most important, this can impact your rankings significantly.

There are a few other reasons your site could be banned or losing rankings. The important thing to note is that whatever the issue, as long as it can be identified and fixed; then your website has every chance of recovering its Google rankings. If you would like any help and advice in this area help and advice in this area, please feel free to contact with our SEO Consultants.

Tell me… Could you describe and explain social media and online marketing to your grandma, in such a way that she could confidently use it to potentially better a business? I know I couldn’t.

I did however go to a seminar today on this very subject that did exactly that! No the room wasn’t full of ‘grandmas’, but it did break down the mysterious lore that is social media and online marketing into easily digested nuggets of knowledge.
This seminar was hosted by Generate UK at the spectacular Donnington Grove in their ‘Cloud Suite’. The ‘Cloud Suite’ is a luxurious room lined with lovely old paintings, overshadowed by a fantastic painted ceiling. There was free tea and coffee, there was glorious sunshine and there was a friendly buzz as attendees began to arrive.

We were all seated in some rather fancy chairs and we covered a variety of things from e-marketing myth busting to the fundamentals of the ‘twitterverse’. I already knew some of the basics that were covered but it was nice to see that all the fundamentals were explained so that everyone else understood the more advanced things that were to follow. Overall it was very well presented and it left no one guessing.

Over the course of the morning I mentally noted a number of clever marketing devices for later use. I learned that no more are the days where one could simply post a few thousand identical links all over the Internet to rank their page from ‘unheard of’ to ‘the industry authority’ in a matter of weeks; nor can you purchase links on leading websites to boost your own rankings… Well, not without major repercussions anyway. The emphasis nowadays is on natural link building, quality and content with a hint of tweeting; although the ‘Tweeting’ is optional.

Natural link building is the activity that promotes the recommendation of your online presence by getting other online entities to refer to your site naturally via a link; this could be as a point of interest, or perhaps in the form of a recommendation of your products or services. This is done of their own accord. This is now necessary because the search engines have ‘wizened-up’ to those manipulative chaps that have previously gone out to the marketplace to spam every existing website with their own links and false recommendations; all in a bid to rank higher on the search engine results. The current digital marketing paradigm now dictates that it is better for a company ‘footprint’ to grow gradually over time as more and more web users begin to trust the site in question and recognise it as an authority in the field.  For those of you that didn’t know, an online footprint is the measurement of your own online presence size… Yet another vital thing I learned today that I have lovingly passed on to you.

Now, can you tell me of something currently going on in your life or workplace that you’ve told other people about? I bet you can. Yet, many companies with an online presence clam-up and communicate next to nothing. If you have some experience in a particular field, enough for you to generate money from, it must be worth shouting about surely?
This is where we come on to the subject of quality and content. I learned today that some companies are beginning to embrace this as a guideline for their online activity. Not too many years ago the majority of companies had a static website that was occasionally updated with some generic company news. Nowadays however, the early adopters of new digital marketing methods and technology are beginning to share their knowledge, views and information online. This interactivity allows users to communicate with the company in a dynamic fashion allowing the aforementioned businesses to stay firmly on the industry pulse; this is due to their grass roots interaction with the end consumer, so businesses are more aware of what these consumers are thinking right now.

How is this done? In a surprisingly simple way actually, it’s all a question of sharing targeted, interesting and relevant content with the web surfers you want to attract to your business.  This does require that you embrace some of the new social media platforms that have recently come to power though i.e. Facebook, Twitter, del.icio.us etc. So although the process may seem straight forward, there is a significant learning curve involved which puts many companies off.
Let me give you an example. Imagine you and I run a fashion outlet for customised clothing and accessories. We could do our traditional market research, develop prototype designs and then hope that when these items finally go on sale they will indeed, sell. This is admittedly, a very short-sighted example but now imagine this; instead of doing our in-house research with a few participants… We opened up a website listing all of our latest designs. We could then use a platform like Twitter to ‘Tweet’ (post information about) those designs to the masses whilst linking back to the main site. This would then open the door to other ‘Twitterers’ (Twitter users) for them to offer valuable feedback on our designs and to perhaps make some valuable recommendations for change. Not only that, but by engaging with the fashion conscious community on Twitter, we could explore what other people in the field are talking about and then throw in our own ‘two cents’ on the subject. We have just outlined a way to improve our customer interaction, improve our market research and product design process as well as establish ourselves as an authority in the field of fashion by expressing our expert opinion in up-to-the-minute conversations on the subject; all the while building natural links and generating traffic to our sales website, hopefully earning some extra money. Of course such a strategy would require much more thought and planning, but such a scenario is not uncommon where clever individuals have managed to leverage this powerful technology to their own business benefit.

The basics however are centred on sharing relevant, quality content with other users in an engaging way so that these users will interact with your business. Got a new product line? Tweet it. Planning a big PR event? Set up an events page on Facebook. Little things like this as part of a wider marketing plan can really level the playing field when competing for business against larger faceless corporations. Consumers like to know there is a bit of humanity in the business workings somewhere, something they can relate to. This is what makes quality content sharing on these innovative platforms so damned powerful.

When-ever you venture into Internet marketing or think about putting up your business on the web, it is not worth if your WebPages are not ranked within the first three or four of the first page of Google or any other search engine search results. When I started with my website, I had to know about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and just knowing did not help. To get my site exposed to that level of being noticed, I had to learn the SEO techniques and as I gathered the experience from the results I achieved, I found my website having an excellent ranking by Google.

The Internet marketers use all kinds of marketing techniques to get a formidable ranking which gives them the advantage of having created for themselves a leading edge over other similar Internet marketers. There are various marketing techniques used. However, the most important is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), which forms the basic foundation in driving more and more traffic to your website. You need to have your business known to people, and SEO, if done correctly, provides you the automated way in getting traffic to your website. The important thing about doing SEO correctly is to research for correct keywords that you need to use. This needs your effort in spending time to find the keyword phrases and use them with the other known marketing techniques.

You need to learn SEO techniques only once, and as you gather the experience and get to understand the technique better, you should be able to apply the knowledge to all your future website designs. The main thing is selecting the proper keywords and keyword phrases for each of the websites you design which affects greatly the traffic driven to your sites. In order to succeed as an Internet marketer you would need to learn the other techniques involved, but SEO remains as the most important technique which can have your website exposed to the people looking for whatever you are trying to sell.

The intention in marketing your products, services, and anything else is to earn money, and more correctly you apply the concepts of SEO techniques and have traffic driven to your website, you stand a better chance to promote your business. There are tools like Google Adwords Tool which helps immensely to search for the right key phrases. There are several free stuffs available for SEO experts for proper handling of your advertising techniques, and when you combine these with the techniques for advanced marketing methods you get the results that you want.

SEO is vital to your Internet business since the traffic driven to your website is mainly through search engines. In order to gain the leading edge over your competitors, SEO plays a vital part in designing your website, and it is virtually the only way you could get a decent ranking in search results obtained through Google or like search engines. Search Engine optimisation techniques applied correctly to your website makes all the difference between high traffic frequency and being lost amidst the numerous other businesses.

It has been a manic summer so far with companies doing all they can to promote themselves within the search engines and vying for every scrap of business that’s available. Having the opportunity to compete over price is now seen as a luxury; it’s being found in the market that is now seen as the biggest challenge.

Search engines feed on keywords; these are the phrases that users type in when they are looking for a websites, services, products or specific pieces of content. It is important that you do your research to understand what keywords or phrases are being used by your potential visitors and customers. To research these statistics there are a number of keyword tools that are available to use, some free and some usually via a subscription.

Fighting over the competitive keywords to increase the level of traffic is a priority for many business owners. From our perspective, we cannot stress enough how important it is to do your keyword research and we don’t mean do it once and think that the jobs done! Markets change, companies change, people change in the way they search, therefore so should your keywords.

Keywords should be considered as the platform for your online strategy and should be used throughout your website and all online marketing collateral.

When researching your keywords, don’t put all of your eggs into the most popular keywords. Whilst it may be true that they are important for your business, they may also be the most competitive and therefore will take a more sustained approach to build good ranking. Consider your locality, your products and your service.

Ideally you are looking for keywords that generate good levels of traffic i.e. highly searched for, however are relatively low in their competitiveness i.e. the amount of times they appear as keywords in other websites.  These Keywords are calculated using a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) out of 10 and the higher the KPI the better.

As we have already mentioned in other areas of this blog that research shows that people do use multiple keywords rather than just one. Categorising your keywords into groups often helps structure your approach, taking the generic word and creating more targeted phrases from them, for example Restaurant > Italian Restaurant > Italian Restaurant in Newbury

As a strategy, decide upon your primary keywords and choose a number of secondary keywords for each page.  Ideally you’ll have 10-20 highly focused keywords for your home page, and approximately 2-3 secondary keywords for each sub page. This may equate to approximately 20 secondary keywords in total.  Be careful not to have too many as this can dilute the importance and effectiveness of each page and therefore have a negative impact.

Have faith in your keywords and use them in all your online marketing collateral. Use them in the titles, heading, meta descriptions, Alt texts and anchor texts i.e. links within the content itself. This will help the search engines understand what your content is about and provide you with a greater opportunity to move up the search rankings when your keywords are being searched.

Are You INTO TECHnology?

Donnington Grove Country Club is one of Newbury’s ‘best kept secrets’; as well as offering a first-class golf course the venue also offers fantastic conference facilities, an intimate wedding venue, a beautiful hotel and a newly opened restaurant. 

The existing website did not do justice to the growing Donnington Grove business and therefore, Generate UK were tasked with delivering a fresh yet functional new site. 

It was important to Donnington Grove to have the flexibility to make regular changes to the site content to reflect new promotional activity, special offers and specific event information. These changes needed to be managed in-house whilst still maintaining the professionalism of the rest of the site and therefore the Generate UK Content Management System (CMS) was utilised. 

One of the biggest challenges with the Donnington Grove site was to deliver a design that show-cased each of the different business areas but was also easy to navigate. Equally, Donnington Grove had to manage the conflict between promoting their core golf business over and above the other areas of the company. 

The website has been launched and very well received by both customers and staff alike. The CMS has given Donnington Grove a very simple and user friendly interface that enables the team to make changes to any aspect of the content without the worry of inadvertently changing the site’s main structure. 

The CMS system provides a great platform for search engine optimisation through search engine friendly URLs, keywords, descriptions and page titles. This has enabled Donnington Grove to compete with other businesses for keywords that they were previously not listed for. 

The website analytics have shown an increase of 130% in the daily number of unique visitors to the site alongside an increase of 420% in the number of ‘sign-ups’ for the Donnington Grove Newsletter and special offers. In particular, new membership enquiries have increased and are25% of the number of new ‘sign-ups’. This has meant that Donnington Grove have been able to reduce their marketing spends in other areas. 

Oscar Inaraja, Deputy General Manager of Donnington Grove Country Club stated “The main challenge the new management team faced when they took over Donnington Grove was to make people aware that Donnington Grove existed and was open to the public. We are not just a golf venue, we have conference facilities, a wedding venue, a great restaurant; all of these services have a different set of target customers, which means that we had to adopt a flexible approach to marketing to ensure we were able to deliver the right messages to the right people.  

Generate UK have proven to be a great partner to work with, they have delivered more than what we agreed and are proactive and flexible in terms of helping us to identify new opportunities to increase the awareness of Donnington Grove. The new content managed website is the platform we needed to help promote our fantastic Golf Club.” 

Click here to visit the Donnington Grove website

If you would like to discuss how the Generate UK CMS could drive your website please do not hesitate to contact us on 01635 550431.

The Red House, an independent pub and restaurant in Whitchurch, has recently been opened after an extensive refurbishment.

The Red House has been a part of the Whitchurch community for over 50 years and has now been sympathetically modernised, retaining much of its traditional charm. The original open fires are now complimented by a warm and friendly atmosphere, great service, an excellent menu and some very ‘fishy’ wallpaper! 

The Red House quickly realised that managing their online reputation was paramount in encouraging customers through the doors; local customers needed to be made aware that The Red House was again open for business and the venue needed to be found by potential customers from outside the area who may have never visited before. 

The Red House also wanted to focus on making their site as visible as possible in the search engine results through a campaign of search engine optimisation. This ensured that location based searches delivered ‘The Red House’ website as a result, raising the venue’s profile both locally and nationally. 

The results are clear; using web based review and directory sites, a significant growth in the volume of site traffic has been measured (an increase of approximately 270% since March 2009). In fact, 25% of all website visitors are currently from these sites. Traffic generated by search engine referrals has also grown and is now up to approximately 40%. 

This substantial increase in the number of unique visitors to The Red House website has not only generated more reservations and Internet enquiries, but has also promoted The Red House brand to a substantial number of homes and businesses. 

Generate UK look forward to a very successful year working alongside The Red House team. 

Sandra Bryant, Proprietor of The Red House Pub and Restaurant stated “The key challenge for any new business is letting people know that you exist. Generate UK were confident from the outset that they could build an online presence quickly that would help build our business reputation.  The work Generate UK are doing is brilliant; they are professional, always deliver their promises and have a very grounded commercial thought process. I’m very excited about the work that Generate UK and The Red House will be completing in the future.”

Click to view The Red House website 

If you would like to discuss how online PR or search engine optimisation could help your business please do not hesitate to contact us on 01635 550431.

In the last few months we’re seeing more and more of our customers turn to Pay Per Click (PPC) as a cost effective route to market. In these tough economic climates companies want measurable results and through the use of on-page analytics, understanding the conversions rates versus the investment has never been easier to measure.

PPC is certainly the best way to make an impact and to be visible on the search engines, especially if your organic listings are not quite there yet. We advise clients with new sites to carry out some form of PPC activity while their organic listings mature. The problem most businesses face when approaching PPC is knowing how much budget to use and what keywords will bring the best returns.

Understanding what budget to use really boils down to how much you’re willing to invest and how much you’re prepared to pay for a prospect to click on your advert. As a company we always advise an initial test budget so that we can understand what keywords are providing the best returns.

Of course each keywords and phrase costs money, how much money is dependant on how competitive those keywords are. Understanding each keyword’s KEI (keyword Effectiveness Indicator) is really important as this determines the cost versus competiveness.  KEI is a measurement of how many times a keyword is searched for against how many times the keyword appears in other websites.  Ideally you want to seek out the keywords that are obviously relevant to your business, that are highly searched for and do not appear too many times, therefore making the KEI high. A simple equation is normally to divide the number of searches i.e. 100 by the number of time the keyword appear i.e. 30 equals a KEI of 3.3. The higher the KEI the better!

Often or not we find that a company’s keywords are too generic and industry related rather than user related.  Employees can be caught up within their own corporate bubble and the way they normally search for related products or services are not the way their customers do.

Research shows that people now search using two, three or even four words rather than just one so categorising your keywords into groups often helps structure your approach taking the more generic words and creating more targeted phrases from them i.e. mechanic > motor mechanic > motor mechanic Swindon . This also avoids people clicking on a generic keyword i.e. mechanic only to find that they are after an air-conditioning mechanic wasting your valuable budget!

However keyword research only provides an ‘estimate figure’ and through understanding actual result through a trial period will allow you to drill down and hone in on the keywords that are providing the most amount of traffic and the returns you seek.

It’s really important to keep a close eye on your PPC accounts and the statistics it provides. Often people new to PPC waste money in the early stages of their campaigns as they do not understand the processes involved. We also advise, certainly in the early stages to cap a budget i.e. if your budget is £30 per day and the budget is reached then the account automatically turns itself off making sure your spend does not become out of control.

In terms of the advert and relevance, we always ask our clients to think about the advert itself and landing page in which you are driving people to. The reason is that you’ve worked hard to position your advert in front of a prospect you must make sure that your advert stands out from the crowd and that the content is relevant to the advert i.e. The ad is not just taking the prospect through to your home page.  Most annoying and you’ll find that the prospect won’t stay around for very long!

To summarise; I like to think of PPC as the game of Poker, as it always takes a while to learn the game and to understand the hands (keywords- KEI) and your competitors, often you may waste a little but the rewards can be great!

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If you’ve been to any of our seminars or met anyone from Generate UK, you’ll know how passionate we are about blogs. Particularly their importance when it comes to increasing your online footprint.

If you follow webmaster guidelines, it’s unlikely that you will be able to get your site to top rank for more than a dozen of your key phrases. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule, but generally a site is pretty static and narrow in its focus. This is where blogs can really help in terms of widening the net.

This is fundamental to our approach to digital marketing and it really works for our customers. The blog post below provides some additional information about what it takes to build and maintain a successful blog.

The Birth of a Professional Blog

The 3 main ingredients needed to build a successful professional blog are the ability to supply quality content, the need to develop and maintain a base of loyal readers, and offering quality products.

Working together these 3 components can create a steady and significant online income for the right individual.

What does it take to for an aspiring internet marketer to create and maintain a money making blog such as this?

Let’s take a look at the 3 key components needed to be a successful professional blogger:

Quality Content

The origin of any popular blog is the quality of content posted to it. Whether your posts are shocking, interesting, or informative, you need to gain the attention and then the approval of new visitors with content that appeals to them. By doing so you’ve increase the chances of them returning. Another important aspect of your content appeal is its ability to motivate visitors to recommend your site to others. This ‘viral’ effect will help boost traffic to your blog and hopefully the recommendations will continue to spiral upward from that point forward.

Maintaining Reader Loyalty

First and foremost the content of the blog must remain consistent with the original theme or purpose for which the site was created. To deviate from the original purpose of the blog would create confusion and disillusionment amongst the readers. This would eventually lead to a decrease in the subscription base.

The content now needs to supply ongoing value to readers. The heart and soul of any blog is the ability to provide useful, thought provoking, entertaining, insightful, or informative content to its readers. Failure to provide this will reduce the reader’s loyalty or discourage them from further recommending your blog to others.

Quality Products

Now that you’re maintaining reader loyalty and attracting a growing subscriber base we can make a couple assumptions here.

1) Your readers have an interest in the theme upon which your blog is based

2) You command a certain respect from your readers pertaining to your knowledge of the blog’s subject matter.

It is at this point that you can passively start to make recommendations to your readers on particular products that would fit their needs or interest.

The way you introduce your passive promoting is up to you. It can be in the form of a post that reviews a particular product, a post where the subject may naturally lead into a product referral, or even banner ads.

Take caution here not to crowd your blog with advertisements or hammer your readers with sales pitches. Remember they originally subscribed just for your content and not to be sold anything.

In order to build a successful professional blog you’ll need to maintain your consistency with the reader base. Continue to supply them with the content they desire while offering to them helpful products using a soft sell approach. You’ve worked too hard to gain their loyalty just to drive them away with your ‘overselling’ them!

T.J Philpott is an author and Internet entrepreneur based out of North Carolina.

For more information on succeeding in blog marketing and to receive a free guide that demonstrates how to find both profitable markets and products visit: http://blogbrawn.com

What do you think? Was this blog post useful? Please comment below or add to the debate. Please do not hesitate to contact Generate UK for more information and ideas about how to we can help you set up your own business blog.