What Search Engine Optimisation Can Do For Your Business

If you have any type of business you need to be on the web. Never before in history have you been able to reach so many people so quickly. Gone are borders and language barriers, you can sell your products anywhere in the world at the click of a button.

But, like the majority of websites on the internet, yours can’t be found. This is the big problem for many businesses trying to get their brand out. If your website is not seen, how can you ever expect to make any money online?

Two methods to being found online.

In the online world, there are basically two methods of being seen on the web. One is a paid method, and the other is the “free” method. I say “free” because you do pay for it with your time.

Advertising on the internet.

The internet is an excellent medium to advertise your website/business. The big guy in this field is Google. Advertising with their AdWords program is straight forward and simple to set up. The best part is you can start benefiting from almost instant traffic to your website. The downside is that you pay Google of every visitor your website receives.

That is why search engine optimisation is so important for any business. If you spend time creating a search engine friendly website, you will reap the rewards later on. Instead of paying for traffic that will convert into leads/sales, you will rank on Google for your keywords and will get this traffic for free. With a little bit of research, you can optimise your website to be extremely search engine friendly. Research the most valuable keywords, write your content accordingly and start your link building campaign.

Hopefully you can can see what search engine optimisation can do for your business. Like I said earlier, never before has there been such an opportunity to sell your products or services all over the world. It’s time to fully optimise your web presence now!

Testing Your Market For Free (Almost)

Smart market research is the most important aspect of running an online business. What is market research? Wiki describes it as “the process of systematically gathering, recording and analyzing data and information about customers, competitors and the market.” No point in selling menswear to a dominantly female audience, right? You can see why it is imperative that  that you choose the right market.

So how can you do this on the web?

I have touched on keyword research before and how important it is to your online campaign. Also I have written about what I personally think is the best keyword research tool around. With any research tool you can get estimates on the amount of times people are typing in a particular key phrase per day or month. The main word being ESTIMATES. Assumption is the mother of all fu#$ ups, right? So how can you get exact, accurate numbers that will tell you exactly which search terms to target on your SEO crusade?

We are going to use Google Adwords. Thats why this is *almost* free. On the internet we are lucky because in the offline world businesses pay big bucks to find out exactly what consumers are looking for. In our online world we can find this out in days, it will cost us hardly anthing – in fact, you will probably even make some money off it.

Here is what you do:

Use the Adwords Keyword Tool to come up with a list of the best keywords YOU think are relevant to your website. Now you will get some average search result numbers but now we are going to see which ones are REALLY getting searched. Divide them up into little groups (the more similar the better), put them in your Adwords account and make a few ads for them, pointing to the relevant pages on your website. Set a maximum of $10 a day and make sure you bid just enough to be on the first page of the ad results. Remember, we are not after clicks here, we are after impressions.

Why?

Because this will give us a great idea of which of the keywords are being searched for and which aren’t. Soon you will start to see impressions racking up in your stats and you will be able to determine which keywords you should be targeting with your SEO efforts.

So remember, there is no point in launching an entire website without knowing exactly what your target market is looking for.

How To Over Optimise Your Website.

Read an interesting article here about not over optimising your websites. I would like to add a few words to that. I have seen many website owners fall into this trap. What happens is that people get far to keen on trying to rank for a specific keyword that they lose track of the big picture. And what is that? Well, you are building a website for HUMANS and not for search engines. This is the fundemental idea behind having a website.

SO how can you over optimise your website?

First trap I see many people fall into is in their meta description tags. Stuffing you title, description and keyword tags with as many relevant keywords as possible is not going to do you any good. Remember you should be theming your pages around one to two keywords max.

Going heading crazy! Overuse of your heading tags will also probably raise some alarms. You should not have more that one <h1> tag and try and keep the h2-3 down to a minumum of two per page.

Keyword density. This is a little bit of a grey area. Obviously you can’t completely stuff a page full of keywords, but you don’t want to be too light on your main keyword either. Recommended: Stick to a density of around 2% and you should be fine.

It is easy for webmasters to get over eager and over optimise their sites thinking that they will rank better in the SERPS. Don’t let that be you!

The Great Duplicate Content Issue

You might have seen on the web that there are many people who sell content in many forms. What I am talking about today are articles. Content is essential to any website in order for it to look good for the search engines. Not everyone is a good writer and if you look around you can buy articles from anywhere between $5 and $20 for a 500 word article. But what is stopping these authors from selling the article again, or even using it themselves first? Why is this even an issue? Well, Google has something called a duplicate content filter where the big G ‘penalises’ websites for using the same content more than once.

Why a duplicate content filter?

Unfortunately there are many people who will steal other peoples content and use it for their own good. This type of manipulative or deceptive content reproduction is frowned upon by search engines. So they have come up with a way to combat this, namely, a duplicate content filter.

But hold on, its not quite as strict as it seems.

This is quite a grey area in the webmaster world. Remember, I used the words manipulative and deceptive before. If you have your own content and you wish to use it more than once, i.e use it on your website and submit it to article directories, in my experience, is fine. You might recieve a small penalty, but nothing too crazy.

Some duplicate content workarounds.

Rewrite your articles. Plain and simple. Make a few copies of your articles and avoid the penalty all together. The only problem here is that not everyone is a great writer.

Submit a shorter copy of the article to article directories. What I like to do is put the original article up on my blog or website and get it indexed then submit the a smaller version to article directories.

Search Results Bouncing Around All Crazy Like

Google has started updating it’s search engine results pages(SERPS) for September 2008. If you are a webmaster you might be experiencing really strange results for terms you are ranking for. Some of my websites have been all over the place in the last week. One of my websites started off ranking 5th in Google for two of its terms and then shot to page two and now one term is on the 5th page and the other is on the 3rd.

So what the heck is going on?

So word is that Google is focusing mainly on newer content and is trying to get rid of all the older, outdated stuff. Well that’s fine because we all have only unique content on our blogs right? RIGHT?

More importantly, Google are now looking very closely at link structures  searching for signs of unnatural link building techniques. Read more about it here.