Joebee's SEO Blog

Franchise Opportunities

2009-12-02T08:48:00.001Z

Select Your Franchise is a helpful information resource for those looking for franchise opportunities and franchising information

in reference to:

"Franchise Opportunities and UK Franchises for Sale"
- UK Franchise Opportunities, Franchises for Sale and Franchise Opportunity Directory (view on Google Sidewiki)

Keep your Wordpress blog secure

2009-09-08T10:22:00.004+01:00

As an avid user of Wordpress I came across this post by Matt on the Wordpress site. With the latest Wordpress worm running around messing with out-of-date Wordpress versions its timely to get the inside view. Certainly upgrading is the way forward... keeping your version up to date is essential as each update patches any security holes and ensures any recently found exploits are kept out of your blog.

Basically the view is Upgrading can be a pain... but sorting out the mess left by a hacker is so much more of a pain. If dealing with a hacker is treatment for an nasty ailment then upgrading is the vaccine which would have prevented the ailment in the first place. Do yourself a favour an upgrade.

Read Matts take on it here: How to keep Wordpress secure

Adwords Content Network : Tips and Hints

2009-08-13T12:40:00.005+01:00

I've heard alot lately about Adwords Content Network and many complaining it performs badly or costs them money without return. Actually in my experience the Content Network can outperform search campaigns if used correctly. So here's a few hints which might help to separate the chaff from the wheat:-

Setup a separate campaign
Use a separate campaign for Content Network... don't run it inside a search campaign. Setting it up separately give you better control and also allows you to set separate budget for your Content Network ads.

Use the most Generic Keywords for your market
The Content Network doesn't work like search. You are not selecting keywords that will match a search query since the ads are displayed on sites which Google determine are relevant to your website subject. So simply enter a few of your most generic themed keywords here with no exact or phrase matching options. Google will use them in conjunction with your landing page and ad text to determine the most relevant sites to place your ad.

Conversion tracking
Make sure you have conversion tracking in place. This is absolutely essential to track your return on investment and ensure your are spending in the right places.

Test and improve
After a week go back to your Content Network campaign and click the Networks tab. Here you can see a list of the sites that Google placed your ad. By sorting by the conversion rate column, you can see where your ad performed best. I recommend downloading this to a spreadsheet so you can sort it properly and then scroll down until you reach the URL's which have not converted at all. Depending on impressions and clicks, you may decide to leave some running as there may not be enough data to give a decent average. But anything with a high spend/clicks and no conversion is costing you money with no return.

At the foot of the page, click to expand the Exclusions section. In the right hand Campaign Level column click the Add exclusions button and you are ready to enter any sites you do not wish your ad to appear on again.

Once this is done you should have your ad now appearing on websites which convert... and excluded your ad from sites which don't. The result will be less spend and your overall conversion rate increasing.

I recommend reviewing the Content Network sites every few weeks and again removing any you feel are performing poorly.

Twitter Verifies Identities

2009-07-21T15:54:00.002+01:00

OK so theres alot in my blog about Twitter lately... but it seems its my current project in terms of working out all that can be achieved.

Nice little addition lately is that Twitter have been verifying identities for some of their accounts such as well known personalities or celebrities. Its always infuriating to search for your favorite celebrity to follow only to be faced with a page full of results and no real clue who is the real thing!

Hopefully this latest addition will help to identify more quickly that you are following who you want to follow and not just some squatter who is posing as his or her favorite personality!

More on Twitter verification here: http://twitter.com/help/verified

Twitter Linking Hashtags

2009-07-02T16:19:00.005+01:00

For those Twitterer's out there.... hashtags in tweets now appear as links which is great news for those who use them. For those who haven't, you might have already seen hashtags on Twitter and not realised what they are. Basically they are similar to tags on a blog. Twitterer's use the # symbol before keywords in their tweets and this can make it much easier to find tweets of interest to you.

Now that hashtags appear as links, its easy to click on it and see other relevant tweets with that same hashtag. A useful addition in my view so that you don't have to retype the hashtag into Twitter search.

If you interested theres a helpful article detailing more about hashtags here.

Twitter Growing Fast | Social Networks

2009-07-01T09:38:00.003+01:00

I came across a huge stat this morning as I was doing my morning rounds of frequent forums and blogs. Between Feb 08 and Feb 09, the social network site Twitter grew by a massive 1382% according to Nielsen. When compared to other social networks thats an amazing stat and one that can't be ignored if you are interested in promoting yourself, services or products online.

Click here to read the news article and stats

For those that have never been into Social Networking or ignored it thinking its irrelevant in business (and I have to admit its a fairly new area to me as well but fortunately learning fast), social networks allow you to build an interest group and build up trust and authority around an interest. Its a different angle to the usual interruptive advertising which we are all so used to. But in this day and age when more and more interruptive advertising is being blocked by the target audience, Social Networking is fast becoming an essential part of business promotion.

In a later article I'll lay out a few angles to approach these networks and how to make the most of them.

Keyword Based Design | Basic Website SEO

2009-06-30T23:41:00.000+01:00

OK, so with a good SEO friendly structure in mind what are the important things to keep an eye out for as you build pages and content throughout the site.

Relevancy

This is a word you should always have in mind as you build your website and in all your activities to promote it. Relevancy of your pages in relation to what people are looking for is what will make your site found in search engines, relevant forums, directories, social networks, etc. On-site optimisation is mostly about search engines and helping them to index your site and its content correctly and thereby ranking you well for your relevant industry search terms.

Search Engines are all about relevancy and there's a number of ways that websites such as Google, Bing and others use to decide how relevant the web pages of your site are for a search term input by a user. Best rule here is to research what people are looking for BEFORE you start building your website. But also its possible to restructure and write new content for an existing site if you already have one built.

Research

Fortunately you can find out what people are searching for to find services, products or information that you might want to present on your website. One of my favorite tools for researching is Googles Keyword Tool. This allows you to put in general keywords that would form the main theme for your website. For my franchise websites for instance I can type in simply 'franchise' and the Keyword Tool will give me plenty of more focused keywords related to franchise along with helpful information on traffic volume and advertiser competition. I also use this as a rule of thumb for the amount of competition there is likely to be in natural listings also. The higher interest there is in Adwords competition, the likely hood there is that people will be focusing their efforts on ranking well in the natural listings also.

So with relevancy in mind what factors are important on the pages. Although search engines are extremely complex using many different factors to assess relevancy, the principles are mostly common sense. If you were to look in a library for a book... what would be the main indicators that the book is relevant to the subject you are looking for? Certainly the title of the book would be of utmost importance... then you might look for a more relevant chapter which is closer to the exact question or point of interest for you. Finally, you will expect to find highly relevant content within the chapter which will be as close as possible to the subject you were looking to find.

Search engines do alot of the hard work for us by indexing down to individual words on a page so that we don't have to look for the book and chapter first. But when building a website this should also give you a good indicator on how you should approach building your content in a way that it will help search engines to correctly index it, and ultimately potential visitors to find your website pages.

Title Tags
The title tag appears in the header of the page and appears in the title bar of the window (not actually on the web page itself.) Continuing the book analogy, a good construction for titles I have found currently is to use: 'Main keywords of this page | Main subject of website'
Remember to title individual pages to ensure they are all relevant for whatever that page is about and to use good english statements here... not just a string of keywords. The worst case of titling I have seen is every single page of the site being titled just by the website name. This will not help search engines to index the site properly.

Meta Tags
These are actually hidden tags in the header of the page which don't appear visable on the page itself. I hear all the time that these are now irrelevant and whilst I agree their use is much diminished... I have found evidence in my own SEO experience that shows its better to have them there than not. In particular the description and keywords tags are worth putting in, not least that some search engines use this description under your title link in their search engine results.

H Tags
The heading tags, especially H1 and H2 are important to have on your page. Use your keywords for the page here again but make the headings meaningful so they also help to lead visitors to relevant sections for them.

Image ALT tags
The ALT tags is effectively hidden text behind images designed to give a description of the image if the image has not loaded for some reason. It also appears when a visitor hovers their mouse over the image in Internet Explorer. You can use this tag to put in keywords again.

Body Content
The most underrated part of your page! And one I see neglected time and time again. If you have many images on your page... add some text! Even if its 200-300 words. Create good relevant content that is proper english, is unique and relevant to the keywords for that web page and will interest visitors. If you stick to these principles then the search engines spiders will love it too. Remember that search engines spiders read text... not pictures... if your page is full of images and they will find nothing to feed on. Content is food for search engine spiders... give them what they want!

URL
If possible you should be building your site on a domain which has your main keywords in the domain name itself. In the case of my Number Ones site.... you will notice the domain name itself is number-ones.co.uk. This helps to increase relevancy of the domain which is a small factor in ranking. Additionaly, its helpful if the directory structure and filenames also reflect the keyword focus for each individual page. If you already have a website where the domain is already established but doesn't contain keywords... you may do better to stick with what you have, as age of domain also plays a part, and concentrate on producing good filenames for your pages.

Finally, don't spam!
Remember that all SEO is, is effectively making it as easy as possible for search engines to see what your copy is about by providing relevant information in all the right places. Don't stuff in lots of keywords over and over again in the same places... because the search engines will penalise your pages for doing so. Mention them once or twice in each place (except meta keyword field... just once for each keyword in there) but keep it good english so it reads correctly.

Good Website Construction Principles | Basic Website SEO

2009-06-28T21:20:00.000+01:00

OK, so to give some sort of perspective I thought it would be helpful to understand my approach to basic website construction and on-site optimisation. The main focus of this blog will be to look at external promotion and marketing of your website but my aim is to provide a little background here. My usual approach to a new website or a re-design is a pyramid type structure with pages funnelling upwards to give overall emphasis to a website. If you have a quick look through my test site www.number-ones.co.uk you will see this 3-tier approach in action as I based the whole site on this model.

This is really a rule of thumb more than anything. Some of the sites I have worked on have only 2 tiers where the 2nd 'Sub-Topic' tier is not included. These are usually sites with fewer pages.

1st Tier
The first tier is basically your home page, or main theme. This is the main focus of your site and the most general keyword you are targetting (one or two word phrase).

2nd Tier
The second tier (if its required) is a sub-topic which in most cases looks more like a list of focused topics or a directory of third level pages which all fit within that category. In relation to my Number Ones site, this is the equivalent of selecting a year or an artist to see a list of number one hits that occurred in that year or a list of hits for that particular artist. This is the 2nd tier which gives access to the third bottom tier by way of links.

3rd Tier
The third tier is the main content of the site. This features the most focused content detailing the exact single product, service or detailed piece of information to the visitor.

The theory of building a site in a pyramid is that each tier receives a 'push' from the pages underneath it, with the 1st Tier receiving the biggest 'push' because it has so many relevant pages underneath it in the 2nd and 3rd tiers. In the case of my Number Ones site the actual search 'number ones' doesn't actually feature first page in Google. The main reason for this is inbound links but this site was more for testing structure than anything else so building links has not been the priority. However, a search on the newly named Bing though shows the structure alone with very few links can still be very effective: http://www.bing.com/search?q=number+ones&go=&form=QBLH&filt=all

The real power of the structure in terms of Google becomes more apparent on the second tier with this site. A search for 'Madonna Number Ones' for instance features highly in Google: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=madonna+number+ones&btnG=Search&meta=

I generally use this principle on every site I build and so far to good effect. That's not to say that there maybe other effective structures but this is one that I found has worked for me.

Hopefully this gives a quick overview on the kind of website structure which can provide a good organised layout that search engines will like and will generally perform well if your keywords are well researched. And this brings me to my next topic... In my next blog I'll talk a little more about researching keywords and other elements on your website pages to look out for if you want to make sure your pages work well in search engines.

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Welcome to my SEO Blog

2009-06-26T17:06:00.001+01:00

Hi there... welcome to my first blog posting. Currently I am Technical Director for a Franchise Directory site called Select Your Franchise UK Ltd. Over the next year, I have been given the task of focusing solely on increasing traffic and conversion via our website www.selectyourfranchise.com. This blog was born to share my experiences and observations over the next year (and most likely beyond!).

So a little about me. I have been working on websites since 1995 when I developed my first website for the small company I was working for at that time. It was quickly ranked #1 (which wasn't so hard in those days - who remembers that lol!) for some big key industry terms in the major search engines at that time. These days much has changed and particularly now with the Internet seeing a transition of web users into more of a 'participation' mentality with blogging, social network sites, etc than a 'come-online-to-get-something' mentality. This shift in the focus and expectation of web users presents a challenge to the traditional interuptive advertising of any business and those serious in continuing to be successful on the web need to move with with current trends and not be left behind.

I hope you will find the content on this blog to be informative and help with your own on going web marketing and promotion strategies. I will be welcoming comments and contributions from anyone out there interested in this huge topic. My continuing work will be looking at innovative ways to build relevant, quality back links for websites, article writing and building, digital PR and social bookmarking along with any other good stuff I come across on my journey.

I look forward to feeding back and discussing. Although I will be moderating all comments to keep the spam out, all relevant discussion points and genuine comments will get posted.