The number of people I have spoken to over all my years of on-line marketing the one reoccurring theme seems to be, Google hates my website or my business is different and the search engines down grade my site because there are well known names in the same market.

These are pretty serious things to claim and when ever I hear them I like to dig a little deeper into why the site owner feels this lack of Google love, the answers are as common as the moans, the reason the search engines don’t rank you well is one of several reasons but they all come down to poor SEO, some of the more common issues are

Poor keyword research

If you have a small budget you are being unrealistic to think you can compete with people in the mortgage or insurance markets, at least for the broad terms, the big players in these markets have some advantages, they have contacts in the media who write storeys on them and this gets them some very nice authority links from places like the BBC and you will find it hard to do the smae thing.

However if you are in this market and do not have contacts and money to go after the broad terms you need to look at the keywords you can compete for, and there are loads, the time spent doing keyword research can seem long and tedious but it is worth money in the bank when you find the correct combination of high searches and low competition.

Poor link quality

Too many people seem to think that the more links back to their site the better, this may have been true in the past but now it is defiantly quality that counts over quantity. You need to look at different elements when you are link building, these include,

Relevance of the page your link is from – why would a site about cars link to a site about tables, it is much more likely that a site about cars would link to one about caravans.

One-way links, the links should be just pointing to your site not you giving them a link and them giving one back to you, link swapping is an old and out of date technique.

Too many links too quickly, we have all seen the offers in our email of 5,000 for $49 this is just going to start alarm bells ringing at Google HQ and there is every chance you will get slapped with a penalty. Link building needs to be steady and something that happens naturally over a period of time.

Paid links, this is something to avoid as Google especially dislikes people forcing their way to the top through the weight of their wallets.

Anchor text, this is the part of the link that is underlined, so instead of using terms like click here use the keywords such as Salisbury web design this allows the search engines to understand what the page you are linking to is about.

Tomorrow we will look at the use of keywords on the site and Flash based site design issues

It may sound a little unrealistic but it is something we have accomplished and we continue to accomplish for our Search engine optimisation clients.

Imagine what that would mean for your business, if you are getting 2,000 visitors a month we can multiply that number up to 28,000 visitors a month and if everything else stays the same that means that your sales and profits should also rise by 14 times.

But keeping everything else on the website the same will not help you make the most of this extra traffic so we will also look at the site to determine if we can increase the number of conversions you get and we have had some amazing successes with increasing conversions including one example where we changed just 1 thing on a website and that resulted in a 60% increase in conversions overnight. I made this change on a Wednesday afternoon and on the Thursday the site got 60% more conversions and the great news is that the increased level of conversions has continued to this day.

To get your business more visitors and more conversions complete the form on the right hand site of the page now.

Using 0845 telephone numbers and freephone numbers in marketing

Non-geographic numbers include 0845 telephone numbers and freephone numbers these are excellent telephone numbers when you are planning your marketing campaign.

There is quite a lot that can be done with marketing and what are called non geographic telephone numbers, it may sound a little complicated but it is just another way of saying telephone numbers that can be called from any part of the UK with out the need for an area code and in this case can be called for the same price. The other winner when it comes to 0845 telephone numbers and freephone numbers is that they offer an amazing caller tracking package, using the information gained from the non-geographic telephone numbers you can see where in the country you have been called from, if the call was answered, ignored or was engaged how long the call was and so much more.

Imagine what you could do with this information – if you see that you are getting calls on a Saturday morning but you have no answer phone on the line you would never know you had missed the important business telephone call, you can now change that and ensure that the phone has a machine to take messages and you could increase your turnover by doing no extra marketing just by using the 0845 telephone numbers and freephone numbers to measure the responses you are already getting.