Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the natural or organic method of getting your website placed higher in the search engines, as opposed to paying for online advertising.

As a result it is a task that is never ending, always requiring you to be one step ahead of your competitors, and any successes tend to be short lived, as Google responds to all new material that is posted online, and it is always the latest contributions that are indexed at the top.

But it is a process that should not be ignored. Even if your website or latest blog post reaches its desired placing for a short time, it has got there, and who knows will look at it or read it while it resides in its lofty position. The more times you manage to attain this prize, the higher the chances of recognition, acknowledgement and conversion through response.

To explain simply, SEO work on three main elements: new content, links and keywords. I know all SEO experts out there will be saying ‘Oh, but you’ve forgotten this element’, and of course they’re right, as experts they should have many tricks up their sleeves to attain the final goal: get as high as you can in Google. But if you understand these three elements, there is no reason why anybody can’t give it a try.

New Content: search engines rely on their spiders: mathematically driven robots that ‘crawl’ the net looking for new material that has been posted. Once found, they feed greedily on it before passing it onto their master, the search engine, to be indexed. If your website or blog, especially the blog, has regularly published new content, it stands a better chance of being placed higher than any old material from your competitors.

Links: spiders need to have a method of entering and leaving your website or blog. Think of links being the doors or portals spiders use to find new content. Incoming links allow spiders to enter and feed, and outgoing links (especially if they are relevant to the content and final destination) will enable them to leave and visit other suitable sites, giving you brownie points as they do so.

Keywords: relevance is vital for spiders to work effectively. Keywords should be relevant to the content, destinations of links, and popularity of searches, eg what people are searching for at that moment. It would be wise therefore to properly research suitable keywords that are not only popular but truly reflect your new material and business. It’s simply like a game of snap, and the best results are attained through correct recognition of a match!

Now that you know these three elements, take them into consideration next time you post up something new on the net.

An internet spider is a robot that crawls around the world wide web. They are also sometimes called crawlers. They use an algorithmic programme that follows links throughout the net searching for new content. This then fetches the new webpages and adds them to the search engine indexes. Google is a crawler-based search engine, as it relies on spiders to automatically create its listings.

Some spiders have even been given names, such as Mozilla for Netscape, Scooter for Alta Vista and Slurp for Hotbot. They leave evidence of their visits just like human surfers in analytics, code and stats.

Spiders enter and leave websites through links, which act as portals throughout the net. That’s why it’s important to have lots of incoming links to your website to encourage spider activity. If you provide lots of new content for spiders to feed on, they will remember to visit your site more frequently.

Spiders only see text on the webpages, therefore pictures and Flash programmes are invisible to them. You can add alt tags to your pictures which are written descriptions behind them, enabling spiders to understand your images.

Spiders are programmed to look for new content with links, tags and keywords. They particularly relish appropriately selected keywords combined with extremely relevant links and their destinations.  They don’t like hidden or invisible keywords, as they think they’re being fooled. If your site’s navigation is complete, spiders will visit every page, indexing anything that’s new. If you treat spiders well, they are more likely to return.

Spider top tips

• provide lots of new content for spiders to feed on
• remember to put alt tags behind your pictures
• gather as many relevant inbound links as you can for spiders to enter
• remember to add your tags within your blog posts
• create contextual links (linked key-phrases) for maximum effect
• make sure your links go to relevant destinations
• blogs are visited hourly by spiders, unlike websites who may not be visited for several weeks

Following on from my visible networking material idea I came across this business card from Jill Wigmore-Welsh. I wanted to share it with you because it stood out from all the other business cards at this networking meeting I went to.

Why? Because the first thing it said is what she does, but in a way that was beneficial to the customer. There isn’t much room, and she even managed a rhyme, but the aim of her business was the most visible element on the card, whereas her details took a back seat.

I like this idea, because the customer should always come first. Why should our networking material bang on about ourselves? The customer cares only about themselves and what they can get out of you and your business, not actually your business. Use the fact that we’re all naturally self-centered, so by turning the tables we can take advantage of this fact and steal a march on our competitors.

What do you think of this idea – your comments are always welcome!

Keywords or key-phrases are particular words that are the most searched for in search engines. Found through websites such as Wordtracker, they are, in fact, search engine spider food, and including them in your blog posts will help raise your status in search engine optimisation (SEO).

Keywords or key-phrases should be inserted into four places in your blog post:

• in the headline (because it later becomes the permalink or URL for that post)
• in the first paragraph (preferably in the first sentence so that both readers and spiders immediately ‘get’ the subject)
• in the middle (because that’s a place spiders look)
• in the final paragraph (another place spiders are programmed to search)

But remember to keep your writing entertaining as well as being aware of how relevant keywords are to the subject.

I was reading a post about article marketing the other day and I noticed how the author had incorporated his keywords into the post. He had followed the concept stated above to the letter. The final paragraph was so bad (every sentence had the keyword either at the beginning or the end), the result was it was so incredibly boring to read I didn’t bother continuing.

Here are some other points it might be good to take into consideration if you wish to retain readership as well as spider interest:

• be aware that people skim read an article or post to see if it is relevant
• bullet points are a good way of highlighting elements
• keywords should be positioned also to catch the reader’s attention
• only the first 25% of an article is truly read before the reader decides it is worth continuing with or not
• small paragraphs also helps with the reader’s comprehension as well as attention span
• the average amount of time spent reading a blog post is 96 seconds
• therefore short and sweet posts fare better than long ones

Another keyword tip I picked up is that spiders cannot ’see’ punctuation, so if you adjust your sentences by inserting full stops or commas into the middle of your key-phrase, this will add enough variance to help maintain readership interest.

Use keywords for your reader’s benefit as well as strategically placed for spiders, therefore not penalising your audience purely for search engine optimisation.

One young entrepreneur was asking for advice on her babies’ clothes business on a women’s business forum. She had decided to call it ‘Blackberry Babes’ and wondered if it was a good name or not. This is my response:

I’m still a little confused why you need to use ‘blackberry’ – is there some underlying reason for this? I immediately thought of the hand-held electronic system. I certainly agree that ‘babies’ is better than ‘babes’.

I should take a good luck at the USP of your product. What is special about it? What does it have that your competitors haven’t? Does it use special fabrics, are the colours significant, does it cater for specific kinds of babies’ requirements, or what?

Then I would think about how it change the lives of the babies, or their mothers. Concentrate on that phenomenon when you do your marketing. For example, an ironing service shouldn’t talk about what they do, ie your ironing, but what their customers can do if their ironing is done by the company, ie free time with the family, weekends free from household chores, no more ironing piles towering on your washingmachine! You should be describing ‘what’s in it for them’, not your product, because customers couldn’t care a tinker’s toot about you or your business, they only care about how it affects themselves.

What is so special about your babies clothes that marks it out as different from all the others, has a special element that makes the recipients lives better, and offers excellent value? Take these facts, work out your ‘keywords’ and create a name using them. For example, a courier service called ‘Fetch it now!’ – says exactly what’s on the tin.

Why this and not ‘blackberry’? ‘Blackberry’ doesn’t suggest to me baby clothing, it suggests to me more of food, or blackberry stains on sticky babies. If you are going to have a website for your company (hopefully an e-commerce one where mothers can buy on-line) by having a keyword rich name will not only make it easier for the search engine spiders to find your company, but easier for search engine users who type in those ‘keywords’ in their searches for baby clothes, not to mention the mothers who will understand exactly what you can do for them.

The result may be a little more boring than ‘Blackberry babes’ but if you want to survive on the internet, being cute and pretty won’t cut the chase.

You’re an entrepreneur and you want to start up a business. Great.

The first reaction to getting a slot on the internet is to get a website. Wrong!

Why wrong? This is because websites are notoriously expensive things! How much cash do you have? I suggest you should have a good think before you go throwing it away on unnecessary, inappropriate, uncostworthy things such as a website.

But surely everybody needs a website, or they won’t be taken seriously by prospective customers?

Of course you need a presence on the internet – it’s a requisite requirement nowadays. But not a website. What you need is a blog, and a good grasp of social networking. That’s how you get yourself known on the web. Only when you’ve made it, got a load of followers, built up your list of contacts, made some money, then you can go ahead and get yourself a website. By then you will know exactly what you want it for, and will build it with a proper purpose.

The trouble is, so many people get themselves a website, and it just sits there, looking pretty, and doing nothing. Absolutely nothing. They haven’t got the money to update it, because unless they have built it themselves they will have to pay a fortune to their webmaster to make any changes.

Now, if you have a blog, that’s exactly what you can, and should, do. This is because blogs are self-editable; they thrive on new material because they are designed for it. They are also little web magnets for internet traffic, as the search engine spiders are programmed to visit blogs extremely frequently, just in case there is something new for them to ‘read’. If they like what they find, and there are lots of keywords and key-phrases that match up to what is ‘hot’ at that moment, then you can get really high in the search engines!

And the other side of the coin is to get into social networking. The beauty of the web is that you can link and ‘feed’ all your blog content into social networking, so a lot more people can start reading about exactly what your business does – as long as you have written about it. And blogs are the place to write about your business: frequently, easily and regularly.

Don’t hide under a bushel – reach out and network. Tell the world about what you do. If people like what they read, you can start to make friends, contacts, business, liaisons, strategic alliances or whatever, all on the internet, through a relatively inexpensive blog – not by wasting your money on a website!

And does it work? There are plenty of businesses who are extremely successful today and have all started with just a blog, even before social networking got off the ground. Blogs are the beginnings of social networking, it’s just that the interactive side of the web (Web2.0) has developed a bit more recently…

I’m going to put forward a concept that has revolutionalised the internet world during 2009.

Start thinking in questions!

Why? There’s a question. Google constantly researches into how it can provide a better service for its customers (in fact, how it can make more money), and it has found out that people are now thinking of the internet in questions.

When people search on Google, they don’t type in single words into the search fields any more, they type in questions. This is because there are so many websites now on the net (several billion), single keywords are not enough to find out what you want. Questions which contain lots of keywords achieve a better result, because it increases the chance of getting what you are looking for.

Therefore you need to adjust your way of thinking on your websites into questions. Change your headlines on your webpages into questions, it may just tally with a search request; this can become a very simple SEO (search engine optimisation) method.

Questions actually focus more succinctly with the needs and wants of the customer. They also strike a chord with the reader, especially if the response is ‘Yes!’. Adapt the headlines of your blog posts and articles too, it makes the subject more conversational and is more likely to be noticed and read. And this is important for RSS (the subscription feed service) reasons, because it will encourage a higher readership and therefore more exposure, especially within social networking sites.

Ask questions, strike a chord, create an affinity, understand your customer, start to succeed!

This is another excellent post by Randa Clay about 10 ‘must-have’ books if you want to succeed in blogging:

http://randaclay.com/blogging/10-fantastic-books-about-marketing-your-blog-online/

A well worth read!

Hi Alice

I have a business blog: http://pensarmarketing.blogspot.com

I am not sure how to use it, I have heard different things from different people. My posts vary from personal to business as this is what I have been told works. To be honest I do not use it very often because I am unsure of how to get the best from it.

I would like to use my blog for business more than I do and possibly earn a small revenue from it eventually.

Any advice would be gratefully appreciated!

Thank you, Sara
www.pensarmarketing.co.uk

–oo00oo–

Hi Sara

Took a look at your blog, and I’m afraid my first reaction is why do you use a black background? It makes my eyes go shimmy and I find it very difficult to read.

Blogs are to provide your customers with another insight into what your business is all about. Fill your posts with valuable content to raise your expertise status. Keep them fairly regularly spaced apart (they don’t need to be done very frequently), bt regularity is the key: spiders will soon learn this and visit your blog accordingly.

Increase the search engine optimisation (SEO) by including categories and tags for your posts. The categories are like chapters which provide a place to store your posts for future search, and the tags resemble keywords that give the spiders food to help with getting your post into the search engines.

Add an RSS feed to increase your readership, especially within the social networking sites. Without one your blog is very lonely as it cannot be regularly followed whenever new content is posted.

How to make money? Each post should have a purpose, whether it is to increase your expertise and your following, link to your website for more traffic, guide your readers to sign up to an event or direct them to a squeeze page to pay for a service or product. Don’t blog aimlessly, it may be nice to read but not good for you.

Want to know more? Join up to my blogging newsletter from my blogging pages to keep in the loop! Or listen to my teleseminar on 14 May – watch this space!

Alice

A website owner was moaning to me about how much he had spent on pay per click (PPC) advertising and had got very little in return. This is probably because he had entered into the venture by himself, so obviously there were some concepts he was not using correctly.

To start with I would advise you to go see a Google Adwords expert, because this is the area they work in every day, so they understand how to effectively use this system and will get the best deal for you.

But if you don’t, then here are some things to consider. First, each PPC advert works on the effective use of keywords. You can find these out through sites like Wordtracker.com where you will see which keywords surfers on the net are using the most. But this means the most popular words cost more to use, so it is worth looking further afield or thinking outside the box to find more cost efficient versions.

Second, where are you sending your clickers? You may have produced an effective ad which get lots of clicks at a reasonable cost, but how can you maximise on converting them into paying customers? Consider the subject of your advert, and then look at the landing webpage. Is it relevant?

It’s no good having an advert on one particular subject, let’s say baked beans, and your advert’s URL directs your customers to the index page of Heinz. Your customers are looking only for baked beans, so give them a landing page which is solely about baked beans. Going to a more general page will not only put off your customers, they may get diverted onto another subject or leave through another link. Your landing page needs to be totally focused on the subject at hand.

Third, what is the objective to your PPC advertising? Your landing page should have one aim and that is to get your customers to do something: contact you for more information, sign up for a free gift or special report, fill in a questionnaire or whatever. Don’t expect people to respond to an unfocused or cryptic message, or just the index page of your website which doesn’t have the advert’s subject immediately available.

You need to effectively guide your customers to do what you want them to do, but without being condescending in your approach. Explain concisely and coherently the purpose of the advert, and limit the number of choices to achieve a more positive response.

Just a quick post to emphasise the importance of using contextual links for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) purposes.

This is when the reader sees a relevant word or phrase which is a link going to a particular webpage. The URL for this link isn’t the same as the word or phrase that is visible, the information or instructions behind what the reader sees takes the link to its destination.

For example, visit my website to find out more about Alice Designs isn’t my website’s URL, nor is it immediately visible, but if you were to mouse over that link above and look below where that URL is shown at the bottom of your web browser, you would see it. And if you were to click on it, it would go to my website.

Contextual links are excellent food for spiders (SEO bots), especially if the link phrase itself is stuffed full of keywords or relevant words to the URL in question. If the information in front of them matches up with what they find at the other end of the link, then that earns you extra brownie-points.

You can also use contextual links to help towards disguising your email link against spammers. OK, this won’t necessarily deter the sophisticated versions, but usually simple bots won’t recognise a cleverly constructed contextual link as a email address, thus reducing your susceptability for spam. Something like Want to know more? Then ask me a question doesn’t gjve the impression of being an email link to an ordinary spider because it doesn’t contain the ‘@’.

And for goodness sake avoid using ‘click here’ everywhere, this is a totally useless form of contextual link. Be far more imaginative!

Last week I ventured into the world of words in business. One aspect to consider is the words used in a website. Your webpages should be relevant to your campaign, so research into your target audience and then produce benefits for them: find the pain and offer a solution.

Dont’ forget to elaborate on your individuality or speciality, and you can make it more important by relating a successful scenario, or provide a series of examples and think up a brilliant call to action they cannot refuse. Gather customer details in return for something of value, to be used to form a relationship. But above all eliminate the complication factor: take your customers by the hand and gently lead them in the right direction: make it obvious but not condescending, enticing and relevant, worth-while but not dull.

Investigate into relevant website keywords by taking a step back and thinking like a potential customer; undertake research into what people type into a search engine to find your business and go to websites like Wordtracker.com to find out what the latest trends are and how surfers think.

If keywords are the building bricks of a website, then the tags in the code (behind the scenes) represent the mortar. These use the keywords to provide the necessary food to please the ‘spiders’ (search engine robots) and give them something varied and interesting to do. Links also contribute to spider happiness and come in the form of anchor, incoming or contextual (internal, external or descriptive), leading to lots of activity rewarded by recognition and eventually a higher search engine position!