If you’re struggling to make your website work and feel that somehow or other you are just not hitting the target, here’s a good exercise for you to consider. Take a sheet of paper and imagine that somebody is sitting on the other side of the desk from you. This person is your ideal target persona. It’s your job to “interview” this person and to find out everything about them. You will need to determine their age group, their income bracket, their lifestyle, what they like and what they don’t like.

Your products or services might appeal to a number of different types of persona. In this case, you need to conduct your “interview” with each and every demographic persona, once again being very detailed in assessing who you should be trying to reach.

This is an interesting exercise and one which we should all do for our online businesses. It’s remarkable how many organisations simply do not take the time to create such a detailed picture, yet it is essential if we are to make the best of our online endeavours.

When you construct your website, you need to make sure that you are aiming it squarely at the demographic of the persona you have identified. Again, if you have several different targets then you need to create a strategy so that you are presenting your products or services to each, independently. Don’t think for a minute that one size will fit all and that you will be able to create a website that will generically work.

It can be difficult sometimes to get even the “warmest” visitor to stop and have a look round when they arrive at your site. If you have chosen the wrong layout, the wrong colours, the wrong graphic images and simply lack precision, you are going to lose potential clients.

Remember from a search engine marketing perspective as well, when you engage in link building you have to be sure that you are engaging with websites that appeal to your persona. Understand where your audience is likely to “hang out.” You need to focus your SEO services so that you get high traffic from your target audience and must avoid the trap of attracting random website visitors.

Some major organisations place a lot of effort on defining their client personas. Indeed, some consultant support organisations exist that will conduct extensive and very technical behind the scenes efforts to “nail down” the makeup of the persona, to the nth degree.

If you don’t focus on trying to attract the right kind of visitors, those who fit the demographic of your persona, all of your search engine optimisation efforts are going to be mediocre at best. You need to make sure that the traffic that you do bring to your website gives you a high conversion rate and you are simply not going to get that if your website and all associated efforts are simply too generic. Far too many organisations fall into this trap, basically because they just do not understand their audience.

Do you know who your target audience is? Let us know in the comment section!

According to Econsultancy’s Search Marketing Benchmark Report almost half of all companies in the United Kingdom are spending at least £50,000 a year or more on pay per click marketing. This is an increase of about 20% over the number of companies engaged since 2008. At the other end of the scale there is also evidence that the number of companies who spend only about a 10th of that sum on pay per click have markedly reduced, suggesting that companies across the board are investing more in this medium.

Using pay per click as part of your search engine marketing activity can really pay off. It gives you the opportunity to try many different configurations and to “play around” with your keyword strategy in ways that simple, organic search engine optimisation techniques cannot. So should organisations choose pay per click as one of their primary SEO services, dialling back their efforts in the organic search compound? It’s important to remember that pay per click exposure is basically a one-hit wonder. Your organic search results are intended to be around for the long haul and as such can, without a doubt, provide you with the potential for a lot more traffic as time goes by versus the alternative.

Some organisations find it difficult to place a true value on search engine optimisation, as their organic efforts are difficult to quantify sometimes. They find it difficult to assess a true return on investment on one side of the equation, while it is a lot easier to detail what is going on in the world of pay per click.

Consequently, pay per click appears to get more of a budget from critical CFOs. Either way, PPC should be used as a research tool to help you put together your organic campaign. Your conversion data from PPC is very useful in assessing potential for a longer-term organic SEO campaign. This is especially so if time is of the essence, of course. If something topical is breaking and you need to act fast, you can initiate a pay per click campaign to test various keyword strategies overnight, giving you the answers that you need.

Many SEO experts advocate that pay per click is the only trustable keyword research tool available these days. Certainly it gives us the impression of exactly what is likely to “sell” in the marketplace. As the information provided by Google and Yahoo does tend to fluctuate in its “usability” as time passes, we have to keep a wary eye on some of those other keyword research tools.

Don’t forget that if you are struggling to come up with meta-tags and titles you can use PPC copy testing to determine what could get you the better click through rate. Then it’s a case of balancing your on page SEO with your PPC sales copy.

While pay per click may not be for the faint hearted, so long as you’re careful with your budgetary allocation and make sure that you clearly understand what the results are telling you, it’s a good ploy.

What are your thoughts on using PPC in your SEO efforts? Tell us in the comments below!

If some of you are looking for a comment box to actually give us the password to your site, please don’t! As crazy as this notion might seem to most of us, in many respects we are compromising the stability of our websites by not paying enough attention to their security. After all, you might pay a great deal of attention to search engine optimisation and buying up as many SEO services as you possibly could, but if your site is compromised in any way all your efforts may be worthless.

Remember that search engine marketing is not just about establishing your webpage and getting a good rank, it’s about staying there. If one of those evil hackers manages to get into your site the damage that could be done is incalculable.

People tend to think of hackers as some rather mischievous individual who might somehow find out the password to your WordPress inspired site and post something rather naughty. However, some of the most malicious individuals out there are quite capable of instigating real trouble. They can compromise your site to such an extent that it loses its authority in the search engine rankings, which can be very painful indeed.

If you do use a third-party application for your website, make sure that you keep up with any new releases as and when they are announced. Top-quality service providers like WordPress do indeed go out of their way to make sure that they are addressing any security vulnerabilities, as and when they find them. Remember that time is of the essence and you cannot afford to ignore any updates for even a moment. After all, we should note that those vulnerabilities have already been identified and that the hackers are hard at work somewhere trying to do their damage.

Not only should you make it very difficult for a hacker to guess your password by coming up with something that is alphanumeric and is not in the form of a readable word, but you must also take steps to get out of trouble if something untoward should happen. In short, you need to keep a backup of all of your files just in case you lose all of your content. Build in redundancy here as well and make sure that you have more than one copy. For example, you could have a copy stored in the cloud and keep another copy stored on an external drive at your facility.

Never make the mistake of setting up a website and then leaving it for any length of time. You should be constantly monitoring it to make sure that it is not only online, but that you are aware of any comments and attached links that have been posted to your blog. Keep up with any industry related news by making sure that you are receiving RSS feeds from some of the more prominent SEO related authority blogs. That way, if anything really important related to site security should break you can be on top of it, as well.

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Winston Churchill once said that “we shape our buildings, therefore they shape us.” We could apply this analogy to search engine optimisation and site architecture as well. The way that we create our sites is very important from two different perspectives. On the one hand we need to make sure that we cover all the search engine marketing angles, but on the other hand we need to make our site credible, relevant, attractive and in a position to convert the visitors that we subsequently attract.

The way that you design your site is essentially all about information architecture. In short, how you deliver all the material that you have stored in your digital inventory. The architecture of the site has got to be based on solid, understandable workable design principles. You might think that you could simply employ somebody with a particular flair for graphic interpretation or graphic design to come up with your website. However, it’s important to have a good feel for how design principles match up with usability.

There is much more to this than meets the eye as you can see. As human beings we are naturally attracted to anything that is pleasant to the eye. You’ll remember that at one time flash graphics were all the rage. As the Internet developed from a relatively static medium to one that was able to titillate our senses, anything that actually “moved” on the web page would immediately attract our attention. In short, we would put a great deal of effort into adding all those “bells and whistles” in a sometimes frantic attempt to get people to stay and have a look around.

In its most basic interpretation, the website should be a logical rendition of a filing cabinet. Within the filing cabinet there are various drawers. Within each drawer there are various folders and within the folders there are pieces of information. Each element is in its place for a certain reason and we know where to go, logically, to find that information. This may sound intuitive, but when you are trying to create your site you will very often find that you are so engrossed in the subject that you lose sight of these principles. You may be so concerned with making the best use of your SEO services that you simply focus on keywords and linking and other elements, along the way making any logical set up somehow illogical.

There are a lot of technical aspects to consider when you optimise your site from a search engine optimisation and usability perspective, but thankfully there are any number of tools and services that help us to get those technical aspects right. Before you start, it might be a good idea to sketch out your site’s layout on a mind map. This is a great tool to help you really focus on how the website should be laid out, so that you get it right in the beginning. It’s easier to try and get it right first time than to try and unravel it later.

Please share with us in the comments below on this! We’d love to hear your thoughts.

As one best-selling book put it, “are you waiting for your cat to bark?” This is a funny, but sadly very true analogy, describing many an Internet marketer’s effort to attract business. It basically means that our sales funnel is full of holes and that we are not properly focusing our entire process. We might think that we are trying to attract targeted traffic and providing the right vehicle – a website – to convert those visitors, but somewhere along the line we are sadly missing the point.

Many online search engine marketing folks spend a disproportionate amount of their marketing budget just trying to attract visitors to their website in the first place. They may not be spending enough on the process of trying to convert the visitors who do arrive on the pages. This means that they are likely not providing pertinent and highly relevant website content. When somebody arrives at your landing page, it’s got to be glaringly obvious. You have to be able to convince them to take the next step, whatever that might be, according to wherever they are along that appropriate sales curve.

You can’t make the mistake of funnelling every one of your visitors, from each and every resource, to one page. Some of your visitors may be very hungry and eager to buy right now to solve a problem that is very pressing. Some may be mildly interested and in the process of information gathering. If you try and provide a “catch all” landing page that is designed to, magically, convert them all, chances are that you will convert none at all.

You really should consider creating landing pages for each and every marketing initiative that you develop. From a search engine optimisation perspective you have to be sure that the content on those pages is optimised. Also, if you do this you can check the viability of each and every marketing initiative through an analytics program. Structure the content on the page according to the message that you placed in the market to attract visitors in the first place. Whatever triggers them to visit your page must be reflected in the landing page that they get to.

You might think that creating all these different landing pages is a chore, but it’s so important. It’s amazing to consider that less than one in five prominent organisations consider webpage personalisation to be important in terms of both engagement and conversion.

This kind of landing page personalisation can greatly help. For example in one study in 2007, 91% of companies who paid a lot of attention to webpage personalisation reported increased conversion rates. Don’t pay so much attention to textbook SEO services that you ignore the kind of relationship building that you have to engage in, in order to get the sale.

If you create personalised, relevant webpages for your visitors, all of a sudden you will find that your sales funnel is not as leaky as it once was. You might find that your cat begins to meow for a change.

We hope these sales funnel tips were useful to you. Please Tweet this and share on Facebook!

Do you know how to manage a blog for best effect? Blogging has been around for many years now, but it is no longer simply the domain of the enthusiast. Created correctly and used well it can be a fabulous tool from a search engine marketing perspective, but only if you do it right.

It’s not easy to create and maintain a blog. If you are a one-man band Internet marketer you know that there are not enough hours in a day as it is, without dedicating all the time to creation and maintenance. However, one way or the other, you should allocate an element of priority to blog creation, as it is a very important tool in your arsenal. It creates relevancy and authority and can be a great primer for some solid interaction, which the search engines love as we know.

It’s a good idea to have a solid plan before you even think about creating the structure of your blog. Come up with a very clear database of keywords. We should all know by now that keyword selection is at the core of anything that we do online. Just remember that you have to be selective in your use of keywords and when you do use them, make sure that you are taking full advantage of them from a search engine marketing perspective.

Whenever you use keywords in a blog post, you should take the opportunity to hyperlink them back to other, relevant and appropriate, deeper pages within your blog site. Deep linking within your site is an important part of your overall back linking strategy. Indeed, you can increase your rankings within the search engine result pages simply by paying close attention to internal linking. As you have the most control over this element, doesn’t it make sense that you should get this part of your SEO services right?

Blogs are only as powerful as the effort that you put into them. If you set it all up and start posting for a week or two, only to let it fall by the wayside, you have wasted a valuable resource. The secret here is to come up with a variety of different ways to populate. For example, you can develop posts that are content rich, provide relevant news, conjure up resources and as you go on think of other, prominent blog operators who you could interact with.

Always aim to get comments and when you do receive comments, always be sure to interact with the commenter. You want to initiate the two-way flow of conversation and get as many people involved in this process as possible. This shows the search engines more than anything else that your site is dynamic, interesting and that people are willing to take the time to interact with you.

Your copywriting must be top-quality and you must aim to be the master of your keyword. Never fall into the trap of writing with search engine optimisation in mind first and foremost, as readability is after all what’s going to attract people to you.

Find these blogging tips useful to your SEO strategy? Please tell us in the comments below!

Should you be so concerned with search engine optimisation that you do not pay the appropriate amount of attention to your visitor experience? Is it all about those rankings, to see where you appear in relation to your competitors? If you are to get a good return on investment for your efforts you have to make sure that your pages are converting and not worry so much about where you appear in relation to your primary keywords.

After all, visibility is one thing but it won’t pay the bills. Sensible search engine marketing, therefore, must be about ranking for your keywords and making sure that your visitors have a great experience when they are there. You must be able to provide them with what they are looking for, assuming that they are highly targeted of course, and present no stumbling blocks along the path to your shopping cart’s checkout page.

When somebody lands on your page it has to make sense to them in the space of a second or two. We all know about the bounce rate and we must strive to keep this as low as possible. Remember that landing page credibility and suitability are very important factors and are considered by Google when they allocate the much vaunted “quality score” as part of a pay per click campaign.

As the process of deciding your quality score is essentially automated then you do, of course, have to make sure that your landing page contains relevant keywords and even synonymic secondary words as well. However, in so far as appropriately worded and targeted content is king, should you design your landing page with content in mind, first and foremost, or with the relevant product information to the fore?

You might be relying on organic traffic and believe that it is, essentially, free. You might like to consider some SEO services to help you to optimise your landing pages, however. Above all else you must pay particular attention to analytics to show you what happens when people visit your relevant pages. If you want to increase your conversions, should you increase targeted content? In so doing, are you more worried about getting more people to your page and less worried about the conversion behaviour of the people when they get there?

These are all valid points. For example, if you add content above the fold and push down your product information below the fold you might make your page more “relevant” from the search engine optimisation perspective, but are you now likely to cut down on the number of people who listen to your call to action and do something?

Be very careful when you create your landing pages. Even though you might want to rely on organic traffic as time goes by, you can get a pretty good indication of how this might work by testing your set up using a short term pay per click campaign. This will quickly get you information about how well, or otherwise, your strategy is working.

We hope you found this helpful to your search engine marketing efforts. Please Tweet this and share on Facebook!

In a time where conspiracy theories tend to abound, could we be forgiven, as search engine marketing advocates, for thinking that the major search engines are not too interested in providing us with certain elements of information? Is it possible that they don’t really want us to know how many back links are pointing toward our site, afraid perhaps that if we were armed with the correct information we might try to game the system in some way? If you’re involved in search engine optimisation, then you must know by now that the number of back links that you have pointed toward your site is a very important part of the business. Indeed, some would say it is THE most important element, bar none.

SEO is a way of persuading the search engines that your site is highly relevant and should be returned to those people, as an option for consideration, whenever they are looking for appropriate information. Search engines do use back link data to help them determine this cause. In their eyes, the greater the number of back links pointing to your site, so long as they are from relevant and authoritative sites, the better.

We have come to believe that Google, in particular, is not interested in providing us with an accurate inventory of back links. After all, if you do a search for links from this engine you get a very incomplete picture. For a company that provides us with so many, basically good tools to help us as Internet marketers, it’s clearly obvious that they don’t want to trust us with this type of information anymore.

Even though we know that Google is by far the most dominant search engine out there, up until now we have been quite happy to turn to Yahoo and the Site Explorer resource in particular, to get us a much more accurate count of the number of back links to our sites. It is strange indeed that we are trying to rank on Google but using Google’s main competitor to see exactly how we’re doing.

Sadly, it seems that Yahoo Site Explorer is going the way of the dodo. Following the merger with Bing, the new conglomerate is taking a leaf out of Google’s book. They have decided that we are not capable of dealing with the information that they were giving us in relation to our back links and are pulling the plug.

Now it seems as if we are going to have to turn to certain other proprietary tools or SEO services and come to terms with the information that they can give us. While we might not be able to get this information from the search engines anymore, or from the horse’s mouth if you will, we’re going to have to make do with the fact that the information that we do get from other proprietary services could be up to six weeks out of date.

Seems like physically taking one step forward and two steps back, doesn’t it?

What are your thoughts? Tell us in the comments below!

It cannot be overstated; you need to gather as much intelligent information as you can before you really get involved in a time-consuming search engine optimisation project. You basically have to know what you’re up against and whether it is worth you spending the time and money to optimise your site for specific keywords or phrases. You do need to know what your competition is up to and how they’re going about, in broad terms, analysing their search engine marketing efforts as well. While it is rarely impossible to achieve a goal in SEO terms, it can certainly be very time-consuming and a very lengthy process indeed to achieve any kind of ranking for some of the more competitive terms.

Did you know that the number of quality back links to your site is a key determinant in the eyes of the search engines? Back links affect a considerable portion of the search engine algorithms that are used and the secret methods employed by the major search engines as well. There is a reason for this. We all live in an interconnected world and we all rely on credibility and reputation, whenever we do business. The more people, i.e. websites, that provide a link to your site, the more those people are effectively telling the search engines that they trust and recommend your products or services.

Back link building is to be carefully handled. There used to be a time when you could sign up for some automated scheme or other and receive hundreds of thousands of back links to your site relatively quickly, ad infinitum. The search engines today frown on this kind of activity, can easily identify it and will discount it. This means that if you’re paying a lot of money for this as part of your SEO services, you are wasting your valuable shillings.

For a back link to count it must make sense. It must come from a site that has a logical association with yours. Ideally, the origin of the back link should contain the actual keywords relevant to the page that it is pointing to on your site. The more established and credible the originating linker, the more your site will score in those algorithms.

Therefore, when you assess competition you need to look at the number and quality of the back links that are already linking to the competitor’s webpage. This is the kind of information that you need to be aware of before you commence your own content building and distribution efforts, or employ the services of SEO UK companies to help you with your search engine marketing. It is likely, though not always the case, that the websites that appear at the top of the ranking for your specific keyword are employing some kind of search engine marketing activity. You need to make a judgement whether you feel that you can outrank them, or not, before you start. As that age old saying goes – “knowledge is power.” Use it wisely.

Find these tips useful to your SEO strategy? Please tell us in the comments below!

While search engine optimisation is essentially the process of making sure that your webpages are correctly formatted and that you get valuable back links from other websites to back up your credibility, search engine marketing is a way of using a variety of different methods to improve your ranking and to get ahead of your competitors. By improving your ranking you will become more visible, attract more prospects and make more profits.

Understanding how profitable Internet marketing can be, many choose to create websites and webpages to capitalise on the best opportunities. How do you go about deciding on a strategy, here?

If you don’t have a specific subject of interest, or have a particular product or service to sell, you might choose to go along a pretty popular route in Internet marketing and become an affiliate for other companies. Affiliate marketing can be very lucrative. In short, you use the traffic that you generate to help sell products or services from other companies. In return, you get a commission. Simple, isn’t it?

While it can indeed be very lucrative, it can also be very time-consuming or even time wasting if you don’t go about it the right way. You don’t want to be fighting an uphill battle by getting involved in a niche or area that is way too competitive. This is why you need to gather a lot of intelligent information before you start, so that you know where to allocate your resources.

There are a number of tools available and software solutions that embody many of the SEO services that you might be familiar with. In short, you’re able to go to one resource to find out a lot of the information that you need to know. For instance, you need to have a good idea that there is sufficient demand for the product or service that you will be promoting – i.e. how many people “search” for the keyword related to it. Also, you will want to know that there are not too many other competitors in this field, giving you a fighting chance from the start.

When you have determined that the level of supply and demand is acceptable to you, then want to have a good look at the competitors in the field to see just how established they are. Once again, some of the best SEO services and advice you can get from SEO UK expert consultancies can help you to narrow this down. Fundamentally, you will want to know how long your competitors have been in existence, how many of the all-important back links they have to their website and to the specific product or service pages and whether they have any particularly authoritative back links from government related sites or educational institutions. All this information is available and you can get it through a manual process yourself if you want to find out. However, you could also seek out tools provided by services such as Traffic Travis or Market Samurai, commercially available and specifically designed to make your intelligence gathering process a lot easier.

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