1. Define content objectives

You need to define the type of visitors you want to attract to each page and its content. It is also important to define the messages you want visitors to read in search engine listings and when they land on the page.  Each page needs to be unique and have a purpose. What do you want to achieve when visitors land on each page. Sign-up, download info, sell product or service, explain your business model etc…

2. Identify relevant keyphrases

Each page needs to have a unique focus and needs to relevant to the overall focus of your website. It is critical to perform a keyword research and analysis before you prepare and write your copy. Each page should target a unique keyword, ideally a search term relevant to the page with high search volumes. Equally each page should be structured so the keyword focus fits into the overall keyword cloud of your website.

Write down the most important phrases, grouping according to the emphasis you are going to place on them.  Think of your website like a pyramid with the most relevant keyphrases at the top (in you homepage) and long tail keyphrases in sub-pages, the lower down the less relevant. Each page should also have its own emphasis:

Primary Keyphrases for which you want to optimise for

Secondary Keyphrases which are part of a keyword group but unlike primary keyphrases they do not feature in the title tags and are slightly less frequent.

Tertiary Keyphrases which might be very long tail keywords are less important but worth listing on the page a few times.

3. Choose keyword rich document name and file location

The page file name and sub directories should contain keyphrases. Both are  shown in the search engine results page (increasing relevance to searchers). Including keywords in both also increases relevance with search engines.

If you can, include your primary keywords in file names and directories. If you use a CMS that creates file names, make sure the file names are created correctly or use URL alias.

4. Define unique, keyword rich title tag

Title tags are important as search engines place strong emphasis on the keyphrases in the page title. Always put the most important keywords at the beginning of the tags. Your brand names to the end. Don’t go over board, make titles no longer than 10 words.

Titles are also shown in the search engine results page and if relevant to searchers titles improve click through rate.

5. Define Meta tags

Google places little or no emphasis on meta tags in determining your site’s ranking position. Other search engines do read them to check the relevance of content, so it is best practice to create unique tags for every page.

The meta description tag is important for your audience since it is often displayed on the search results page and may encourage people to click through. Make sure the description contains page target keywords and is unique for every page.

The description should also have a unique selling point and call-to-action so searchers want to click through to your page. Try to keep to 150 characters.

Keep meta keywords tag simple and only use the keyphrases most relevant to the page you are writing. We recommend 10 – 15 worlds not more.

6. Keyword enrich body copy

The keyphrases frequency in the body copy is considered an important test of relevance by a search engine algorithm.

Copy should be minimum 300 words. Try to repeat each keyphrase 3 times per page (more if content is longer than 300 words) and place most important keywords at least once in the first paragraph.

Aim for a keyword density of 5% but don’t forget keywords in title, tags, Alt tag and links count towards your density. Don’t overdo it in your main body copy.

7. Use Headings

Using heading styles <h1> for headings and <h2> subheadings, etc containing target keyphrases has some positive effects for SEO and also helps with accessibility and scannability of the page.

8. Cross link pages

Cross linking your pages via hyperlinks is the most powerful page markup feature, both from an SEO point-of-view and for conversion. Hyperlinks highlight the calls-to-action to get the visitor to engage with page and site.

Make sure you place hyperlinks in the page body copy with keyphrases in the anchor text.  Think about whether there are other pages on your site for which this page would be relevant for readers and then link to the new page using anchor text containing your target keyphrases.

9. Tag images

Graphical images on each page can have an Alt text associated with them.  Alt text are not seen by page visitors but indexed by search engines and used to determine relevancy. Always cross link images to related pages and use keywords in the Alt text.

10. Keep optimising pages

You need to check your that your copy is effective and modify where necessary.  Regular updates and enhancements are good for SEO and your site visitors. Check your web analytics to review visitors entering site on your page and review your listing positions for different search engines.

Optimising copywriting for SEO is not difficult, but can be time consuming. Optimised copy is the foundation for SEO, it is not optional.

Search Engines in general don’t like duplicate content and strongly dislike repetition and replication.  Copying content from other website has been  common practice amongst website owners. It is a bad practice and can be easily detected by search engines.  The original content publisher gets all the  credited and all duplicate pages and sites get penalised.

Duplicate content is generated accidentially or even carelessly by website owners.  Often as a result of  poor content management or lack of knowledge. Creating pages by just copy & past content with a small change in keyword focus does not make your content unique. Lack of attention when DNS / domain mapping can also lead to duplications.

Google for example can detect exact duplicates and near duplicates all the way from the crawl, through the indexing, through the rank scoring.

Typical scenarios of duplicate content:

1. Identical pages within your site because they contain only minor changes such as keyword replacements.

2. Localised pages within your international sites could be considered identical.

3. Campaign landing pages with minor keyword changes to original pages.

4. Identical page to pages published on other websites.   If the other site has a better PR, your site’s content might be considered duplicate and may be removed from the index.

5. Press releases or other articles containing similar content syndicated across different sites.

Make your pages unique

The best way to let search engines know that your content is unique by making all copy and all the page mark-up factors unique:

• Document / file name
• Meta title
• Meta description
• Meta keywords
• Vary first paragraph copy
• Heading 1
• Heading 2
• Heading 3
• Alt text
• Vary link text to other pages

If you can’t avoid duplicate content (often the case for ecommerce sites), exclude the duplicate pages in your robot.txt file.

If unsure about the uniqueness of your content check your content regularly with copyscape (www.copyscape.com) and see if there is any duplicate content on the web.

SEO is about defining your business goals and online marketing objectives, followed by a continuous, focused and well structured process of search engine optimisation. In most cases, SEO success will take months if not years to deliver successfully.

Here some of our tips on how to deal with SEO Spam emails:

Ignore SEO email promising guaranteed, instant results.
Nobody can guarantee results and by making such claims clearly shows only one thing: The SEO company making this claim does not understand SEO. They are just fishing for new SEO business. The best strategy here is to ignore the email, mark or report it as spam and delete it from your inbox.
It is fairly easy to spot these types of spam SEO pitches. They normally have a headline grabbing subject line like ‘guaranteed ranking’. They tend to be sent from free google, hotmail, yahoo email addresses or domains without a website.

If in doubt, check how the SEO company can help your business.

If you think the SEO email received is well written, does not make to many outrageous claims and has got some substance, you might want to take it one step further. After all what have you got to lose. However, make sure you respond to the email with some very specific questions. Ask specific questions on what the SEO company will deliver. Best to challenge them immediately on how much they know about your business and what they can do for your website. Questions should include:

• What search terms would you suggest to target for my business?
• By how much can you improve my target traffic?
• What do you know about my business and my target market?
• Where is your business based?
• Explain the process of optimisation (specific to my website and my target market)
• Provide case studies for previous successful SEO optimisations delivered

If you consider engagement, ask for a proper SEO cost proposal.

If you feel the SEO email is very interesting to your particular business, make sure you ask for a proper SEO cost proposal. It is important that you fully understand all elements of SEO, all associated costs and cost to deliver a successful SEO campaign. Typical cost drivers for SEO campaigns are:

• Keyword research & analysis – one-off
• Optimising your website for keywords (on-page optimisation) – one-off
• Building inbound links for your website (off-page optimisation) – monthly

The more keywords you are trying to target, the more expensive the SEO campaign will be. As a rule of thumb if you aim for a 12 months campaign for 10 keywords you should budget £5k. Your budget should be significantly higher if your target keywords are highly competitive. Lower,  if your target keywords attract little competition. Things you should ask for in the SEO proposal:

• How many keywords will be targeted?
• Who will make keyword selection?
• How will keyword research be delivered?
• What exactly will be analysed?
• Who will be writing content for your website?
• Who will be making changes required to your website?
• Who will be maintaining your website to make sure it stays optimised?
• How many inbound links will be built by SEO agency?
• What type of links will be built?
• Is all the link building done manually?
• What will be the success criteria?
• Will the SEO agency make some gurantees?

Any serious SEO company will be more than happy to submit a well structured cost proposal.

How you will find a good SEO company

As a general rule, good SEO companies know the value of inbound marketing and get work through referrals, word of mouth or by being found on search engines. Good SEO companies don’t rely on spam emails to find customers and will have many other ways of customers finding them. If you need the service, you will find a good SEO professionals and not found by spam emails.

These are some examples of the kind of SEO Spam best to be avoided:

‘Guranteed #1 Rankings! No Cost Website Analysis and Ranking Report of Your Website! Is Your Website Ranked at Number One in The Search Engines?’

‘We are interested to increase traffic to your web back to us in order to discuss the possibility in further detail.’

‘Your site should be at the top of the major search engines.
Want a free site analysis? If you are interested, just reply to this email and we can give you a free appraisal with no strings.’

’75% of WEB SURFERS searching the Internet will never find your site unless you’re located on the first page of Yahoo, Google and MSN. If I assist you to achieve at least 7 times more WEB traffic to your online business by getting you to the top of the search engines would you be interested?’

‘At No Cost to You, our search engine optimization experts will run a ranking report showing you exactly where your website currently stands in all the major search engines. Then we will email you our analysis report along with the recommendations of how we can increase your ranking, and improve your websites traffic dramatically!’

‘I’m going to be brief and straight to the point. I will list your website in our search engine for free with static links to your website. With thousands of our pages indexed by Google and Yahoo!, you will literally get hundreds of links to your content pages in relevant static pages. These are the example of pages our users benefit from (just examples, your site will be listed in pages relevant to your content)’
If you have a website out there I am sure you will have  seen many more spam SEO emails. They are fairly easy to spot!

1. Identify Your Target Audience

What is it that you are offering? What is your unique selling point (USP)? Who is going to be interested in your offering? What kind of  information, products and services are search engine users searching for? You will be surprised by how much you will be able to identify by investing in some research. A quick way of understanding demand and target audience, can often be search term research and analysis.

2. Uncover Your Competitors

Once you understand your target audience and what kind of things they are looking for on the web you can start looking for your competitors. How many other companies and websites are in the same space? How crowded is the marketplace for what you want to offer or sell? The good news is that in the online world, competitors are not hiding. They want to be found and they want to be visible. You can uncover most of your serious competitors by searching for your business keywords on popular search engines and see who is getting listed on page one. Beware online competitors might not have the same offering as you, but by occupying top search ranking positions they prevent you getting access to your target audience.

3. Develop A Clear Business Model

You know your target audience, your identified keywords and your main competitor for your chosen products and services. How are you going to make your money? What makes your visitors part with their cash or how are you going monetise your visitors in other ways? There are many business models you could follow. In addition to selling products or services online you could develop innovative subscription models, capture data and leads, implement affiliate schemes or just build email lists, which you can monetise. Whatever you business model, make sure it is unique, clear for users to understand, compelling and good value. A well structured online business plan will help you focus and succeed.

4. Align Your Website With Your Business Needs

Produce a site that fits your immediate requirements but build it so it is scaleable for your future business needs too.  If you are planning on selling products locally you require a shopping cart and a  reliable online payment system.  However if you are planning on selling products globally, you will require features such as multi-currency, localisation and advanced security. If you have to add and edit high volumes of  content you will require a suitable content management system (CMS).  Draw up a road map of what you need to start with and what you think you will need inside the next three years.  A typical life cycle of a website is three years.

5. Optimise Your Website

The Internet is cluttered with websites that do not have any visitors and no visibility. It is estimated that last year alone over 47 million new websites were created. Your success will largely depend on how visible your online business will be and how you’re going to attract visitors to your website.  It is paramount that you optimise your website for your target audience and your target keywords. This can be done for new and existing websites and there are plenty of search engine optimisation companies out there eager to help.

6. Increase Your Online Visibility

Search engine optimisation is a must. However it is not the only way to increase your websites visibility and site traffic. If you have the budget you can try PPC to  generate instant visits to your site.  Social media, blogs and organic link building are equally valid but often lower cost methods to drive traffic to your site. Expert Marketers can help you with email- and viral marketing techniques.  Anything to get the word out and bring visitors to your site

7. Reassure Your Visitors

When you’re setting up a new site  it’s essential that you stand out from the crowd and communicate to your visitors what your site is all about. If visitors find your site useful, trustworthy and your site satisfies their needs or solves their problems they are more likely to buy or subscribe.  Make sure you are clear on what you are offering otherwise your hard earned visitors will bounce.

8. Convert Visitors

Call-To-Action, Call-To-Action, Call-To-Action. Encourage your visitors to do what makes your online business successful. Get them to buy, subscribe, register, download and participate. Whatever it takes but make sure your visitors convert into sales, leads or enquiries.  Make it easy for them to buy, make it clear where to register and encourage them to consume more content until they convert.

9. Retain Visitors

New customer acquisition is more expensive than existing customer retention. The internet is no different. Recycling exiting website traffic is less expensive than generating new traffic. Make sure you give your visitors and customers reasons to come back to your site. Use of CRM tools, publishing of unique interesting content, free tools, email based  promotions and offers will give visitors a reason to come back to your site.

10. Measure Your Success (Or Your Failure)

Web analytics can help you to gain insight into your site traffic. Where are your visitors coming from? How are visitors responding to your site and your content? Why are visitors exiting the site before being converted into business?  There are lots of packages to choose from – some paid, some free. Google Analytics is a very  good package to use if you’re just starting out.

If you get most of the above right, your web-based business will be successful. Don’t despair, nothing is ever perfect from day one and online marketing techniques evolve permanently. Consult an online marketing company for some of the specialist areas.

1. No control over all SEO elements

Rankings will always fluctuate and are  never permanent because you or your SEO agency will never be in control of all elements affecting Search Engine rankings

2. Search Engine algorithms change.

Search Engines are notorious for changing the algorithms used to display results. Changes to Search Engines can severely affect your site’s ranking almost overnight – positive and negative.

3. Competitors optimise too.

Competing websites might target the same search terms (keywords) with their own SEO campaign. This will affect your ranking, how much will depend on your competitors success.

4. SEO results depend on data centre

Search Engines use different local data centres, which will show different rankings in different regions for the same search terms and same websites.

5. Don’t log-in to check rankings

Your rankings will depend whether Search Engine users are logged in or not. For example when you log-in to your Google account all the search results will be customised to your history and will be different to when you log-out.

6. Some websites have more clout than your site

Popular social media sites or dominant news sites might publish articles with the same keyword focus as your site. Because these sites have a large number of indexed pages and are indexed hourly you might find your site loosing rankings as soon as a relevant article is published

7. Website age matters

New websites are more likely to fluctuate in ranking than mature websites because of the age of indexed content and the lack of clear keyword significance.

8. Website content matters

Uncontrolled uploading of content to your website can cause keyword dilution  and changes to the keyword significance Search Engines allocated to your site.  Even small changes to your content, especially  page titles can adversely affect rankings over time.

9. Consistent link building

Poor link building strategy will cause your rankings to fluctuate substantially. Spam links, infrequent link building, high volume link building activity followed by no activity at all will all make your search results less stable.

10. Keep your site up and running

Frequent website downtime and pages that can’t be found will over time form a picture of unreliability in Search Engine’s indices. Access, loading and technical problems will result in adverse and fluctuating rankings. Make sure you choose a good hosting provider and check all your links on your website.

There are a lot of other elements impacting your rankings such as age of your domain name and age of your content. For this reason alone never throw away your existing content and never launch a new website without proper redirection of your old pages. If in doubt, consult your Search Engine Optimisation company.

Don’t give up just yet!. We have complied our top ten tips on how to select an online marketing agency and make the business relationship successful.

1 . Do it yourself

Don’t delegate the selection process to a junior member of your team.  You have to be able to work with and trust your chosen agency. Make sure the chemistry and communication is good. You’ll be ideally working together for a long time (12-24months) so make sure you’re a good fit. Only you will know!!

2. Demand good business acumen

Good online marketing is firstly about understanding your business. In fact it is all about understanding your business.  Don’t appoint some bedroom SEO guru or some remote online agency with a bulk standard, off the shelf ‘service plan’.  Online marketing is about ideas on how to promote your business and how to get those ideas delivered.

3. Look at search results

Look at websites that rank well for important (high volume) keywords – in your industry or comparable industries. Find out which agency does their search engine optimization and online marketing and invite them to pitch.

4. Understand the basics

Read SEO and online marketing articles (the Internet is littered with them) so you have a basic understanding or at least have some specific questions on subjects you don’t understand. Don’t believe everything you read but use a little knowledge to structure your conversation in an agencies’ pitch.

5. Get recommendations

Surely you know some other business people or website owners. Who are they using, what are their views and what are their recommendations?

6. Get client references

As for client references early on in the agency pitch.  Ideally phone numbers of current clients that you can call and talk to. Find out if  online marketing has improved the overall success of their business, not just improved search engine rankings. Pick the agency that you feel has the best record of success and is most likely to help you grow your business.

7. Get a quote

If you get a standard proposal and a price list for standard services then you’ve got the wrong company. If you get a price range, keep talking and find out the likely cost for your specific needs. If you get a customised quote but it is outside  your budget, consider it anyway.  The higher cost might get you additional or accelerated benefits.

8. Understand services provided

Don’t haggle over price but let the agency explain the specific services provided. By knowing the services you are getting you can potentially reduce agency fees by trimming ‘non-essential’ services. You can always add those services back in at a later stage, if necessary for the success of your online marketing campaign.

9. Define delivery period

Understand time required to deliver on your requirements.  Many agencies ask for twelve-month contract.  Online marketing and in particular SEO takes time o implement and to see the results can take many months. Don’t try to cram everything into a few months, as up front cost will be extremely high. Longer contracts give both you and the SEO campaign more security and reduce the pressure of having unwarranted expectations that cannot be met. You can also ask for the same amount of work to be performed over a longer period of time. This will create a slower path to improved performance, but will fit your budget better without cutting essential services.

10.Have limited budgets?

If your budget is too small to buy you an online marketing campaign with a reputable agency, find one that offers consulting on a hourly or day rate basis.  Good SEO advice from an expert agency is well worth a few hundred pounds per day and you won’t have any long-term commitments.

Here is our guide on Social Media and the key steps in the Social Media process:

1. Content, content, content

If you are not able to generate good quality, unique and useful content on a regular basis you might as well stay clear of the Social Media route. Good content, if promoted correctly, gets you an audience. Ongoing good content gets you a following.

2. Become the expert

Not only do you need to publish good content you also need to become an expert in your field, publishing on blogs,  writing articles and white papers,  answering questions on niche forums.

3. Keyword focus

Make sure each post, document, video or status update you publish includes keyword rich anchor text to relevant pages on your website.

4. Automate content distribution

There are many ways you can automate communication with your target audience.  RSS feeds and ping allow users to subscribe to your content.

5. Publish, publish, publish

Publish your content wherever and whenever you can.  Avoid duplicate content and article spamming. Use blogs, forums, social networks, potcasts, youtube, flickr and other websites to publish quality content and comments.

6. Capture emails

Wherever you can, make sure you capture email addresses, that way you can support your Social Media activities with targeted email campaigns.

7. Drive Traffic to your main site

Anything you publish should link back to your main business website,  ideally to a page with relevant content. the web page should also have contact information and email sign-up forms.

8. Maintain Conversation

Keep in touch with your audience through social networks, forums, twitter, blog comments etc. Maintain the same identity so your audience can identify you as a trusted source.

9. Maintain steady effort

Keep up your Social Media effort at the same or increasing pace. Don’t stop and start.  Try to do something every day.

10. Budget for Social Media

Although most social media sites are free to use, your time is not.  Larger companies have teams to deliver their Social Media strategies. Other companies outsource to agencies at substantial costs. Social Media Marketing requires considerable effort and time.

Social Media is not free. Don’t fall for it.

Here is what we include in  SEO audits and what we think you should look at when you define SEO projects for your business:

1. Business Objectives

SEO needs to be aligned with your business objectives. You need to know what you want to achieve and how to measure this. Especially if you are thinking of outsourcing SEO or recruiting staff to deliver SEO

2. Understand your Competitors

SEO success often depends what other companies do. Find out who your competitors are, both direct and online and what  their visibility is online.

3. Keyword Research and Analysis

Identify all business relevant key phrases. Think out of the box. What would search engine users type in to Google to find your business? Read more on keyword research.

4. Check indexation

If you have an existing site, make sure the website is indexed in search engines. Make sure there are no access limitations for robots, no site or server performance issues , no dead links or  site loading issues.

5. Ranking Report

You have to understand your current rankings for all major search engines. Which URLs are shown for which search term and at which position. You don’t want to undo good rankings. Equally you want to focus on rankings that can be improved.

6. On-page Optimisation

Is your current site keyword optimised? If you are launching a new website for your business make sure you define the optimal site structure before you build the website.

7. Internal Link Structure

Are you web pages linked in a ‘search engine’ optimised way. Have you used relevant keywords as link text between pages. For new websites, we highly recommend that you have a well defined link structure before you build your site.

8. Inbound Link Analysis

External links to your site are critical for SEO success. If you have existing links, are these links SEO optimised? Do they come from good neighbourhoods ? What links do your competitors have?

9. Resourcing

Search Engine Optimisation requires both upfront and ongoing resources. Do you have internal resources that can be trained or do you need to get an agency involved to deliver all or part of your SEO project.

10. SEO Budget

SEO costs money. Even very small SEO projects can cost £10k or more to achieve good rankings for a small number of keywords. You have to define your budget before you start SEO. Running out of money half way through any SEO campaign will do your ranking more harm than good. If you only have a small budget, set smaller targets.

If you want to find out more on SEO audits and our services please contact us or sign-up to our newsletter.

Here some factors to consider:

1. Is your business idea / business model truly unique. If not can you improve on the existing business models?
2. What are your USP (unique selling points)?
3. Are you entering a market which is mature or growing. Either way, will the challenge for your business be a different one?
4. Where will you get your business leads from and at what cost?
5. Have you had an independent view on your business model, other than approval from friends and family?
6. Have you checked out size and sophistication of your competitors?
7. How long can you run your business on zero income?
8. Will your business model still be required in two years time?
9. Is your business satisfying a consumer or business need or are you just realising your own dream?
10. What ongoing time commitment and capital will you require to run the business for the next two years?

We hope the above list will get you thinking and planning before you even spend a penny on business collateral. Remember logo / website designs come fairly cheap these days but they are still a waste of money if you do not have a business model.

Before you start spending money on realising your web idea, there some things you should consider. Here is our ‘reality check’ or feasibility check list:

1. Do you need income from your project or is it just a little fun?
2. Is there existing demand for you idea? If not, why not?
3. How many sites / businesses are doing this already?
4. Is your idea commercially viable – will there be potential users?
5. What revenue models are available to fund your idea?
6. What search volume is available to drive traffic to your site?
7. Will it be feasible and cost effective to optimise your site?
8. Are there existing competitors that could deliver your idea?
9. Are there any open source apps you could use to realise your idea?
10. Could you partner with another company to realise your idea?

You see, it only takes a little web thinking to qualify and quantify an idea before you start spending money on it.