Search engine optimisation

Who else wants a free website audit?

Sean — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 11:19:20 +0000

Is a free website audit right for you?

Do you know if the search engines like your website, do the search engines know what your website is about?

This is something you need to be concerned with as a well built and targeted webpage can attract visitors that you can convert into customers, but a non targeted page will not and it may turn people away from your website and stop them becoming your customers.

Cravenplan Salisbury SEO are offering a free audit to websites who are looking for ways to improve the number of visitors to the website and improve the number of sales you get from the website.

All you need to do is complete the form on the right hand side of this page and I will get the free audit to you.

I hope to hear from you soon

Sean

The best place for Royalty free stock Photos

Sean — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:41:19 +0000

Bloggers have voted Shutterstock the Best Royalty Free Stock Photos Site, this was from a survey carried out by the readers of Online Marketing Blog.

With an impressive 38% of the vote Shutterstock was a clear winner, the only other site to get more than 30% was iStockphoto with 31% no other site got above 10%.

I am not a great user of stock photos as I think a personal touch can bring better results but if you are looking for royalty free images then checking out Shutterstock and iStockphoto would not be a bad place to start.

Just a quick word of warning check the small print to ensure you have the right to use the images the way you wish, royalty free does not mean that they do not have copyright issues – always read and understand the terms of use.

Local marketing pages added

Sean — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:46:10 +0000

Cravenplan have just updated their website with 4 local pages that are aimed at giving more Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and on-line marketing guidance to those of us in the Salisbury area.

Salisbury search engine optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation Salisbury

SEO Salisbury

Salisbury SEO

If you would like any specific on-line marketing or SEO questions answered please let us know and we will add them to the blog.

Free email marketing seminar a great success

Sean — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:37:24 +0000

Cravenplan held another of their excellent seminars yesterday, this one was on email marketing, it looked at

What software to use for the email marketing

How to set it up

How to create a subscriber list

How to us Subject lines to grab attention

What to include in the email

How to avoid being labeled as a spammer

How to measure success

And a whole lot more.

The seminar was well attended and the feedback after was excellent. This was the latest in the schedule of free seminars run by Cravenplan, the next is on 15th April and is entitled the law and the internet.

If you are interested in attending the event you can register at Free internet Seminars.

Does your mum use social media more than you?

Sean — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:04:14 +0000

A new report at emarketer.com reviles what many of us have long suspected, the baby boomer generation have embraced new media and social networking on a scale that puts their children to shame.

This may not be so surprising as we are talking about the children of the 50′s and the young adults of the 70′s who were the first to have telephones as a standard in their homes growing up, communicating and sharing ideas and values has always been an important and integral part of their lives and the growth of their use of social media is just an extension of that.

The reports author Lisa E. Phillips said that “Creating and renewing personal connections online is the biggest draw for these boomers,” “About 47% of online boomers maintain a profile on at least one social network, according to several sources. Their contacts include family, friends and co-workers of all ages.” she went on to explain.

More detail on the report can be seen at emarketer.com, but it would be good to hear from you on this topic, post your comments below and share your thoughts with the rest of us.

Get links over time not all at once

Sean — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:45:02 +0000

Getting to many links all at the same time can harm rather than help you in the search engines, not only does it not look natural to Google to have a ton of new links suddenly appear to a site that the month before was not getting any links or whose link acquisition has been steady for a period.

There can be legitimate reasons for a sudden increase in links such as the launch of a new site or new product or something that has been picked up by the news media or bloggers sphere that has been discussed a lot and commented on.

This needs to be taken advantage of and the link spike needs to be continued so that the level of links coming into the site remains high but the spike flattens off.

If this is done properly with links pointing deep into the site the number of pages that Google will list in the index for your site will increase and not drop as pages fall out of the Google listings.

The more pages you have in the listings the more chances you have of ranking well for a variety of key words related to your business and there for the more chances you have of attracting visitors to your site.

Not all links are created equal

Sean — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:38:03 +0000

You may all ready know that in search engine optimisation and on-line marketing one of the most important things is to to have links pointing back to your site.

These are seen as votes by the search engines and one website should only link to another if the information on that website is going to be of interest or value to the visitor.

As a website owner you want to promote your website and get it found in the search engines so you need to make other website owners aware that you have great content on your site that their visitors will find useful.

So you now have the whole internet to choose from to get links from, the problem is that there are so many websites and you just do not have time to contact them all and tell them about your site, so reducing the number of sites you need to talk to is vital.

The first thing to do is look at relevancy, you can dismiss large numbers of sites as not relevant to the topic you are discussing, the next is quality, would you recommend this site to a friend of yours? If not do not get a link from them.

The links that are going to be of most value when you are working on your search engine optimisation strategy plan are the ones you find relevant and from sites that you would recommend to others.

How you can learn from your competition

Sean — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:33:15 +0000

When it comes to marketing there are very few new ideas and this is the same in internet marketing and website promotion as with any other form of business promotion.

So when you see another website above yours in the rankings what can you do about it?

The first thing is to prepare a Search Engine Optimisation strategy plan and one of the best places to start this is to identify your competitors and see how they are outranking you at the moment, you need to analyse the structure of there site, what keywords have they targeted, how have they used the keywords on the page what links to they have coming back to them and which of these links is producing the most benefit for them.

You then need to prioritise the work that needs doing so you can get the most benefit from it in the shortest time.

The keyword research is the key to this and once you have this solid base you can more forward from there to take advantage of the other things you have learned about your competitors site.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) better than PPC?

Sean — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:55:45 +0000

This is quite a question and one that I believe depends on what market you are in and what you need to achieve from your website, if you have a long term view and you are time rich but cash poor then Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is with out doubt the way to go, you will not see dramatic results over night but in a few months you can get significant extra traffic by ensuring your site is set up properly for the search engines to crawl through and index.

If however you have a good budget and need to see immediate results then Pay Per Click (PPC) may be the best way to go, it will send visitors to your site from day one and with the statistics packages available you will be able to see the ads that resulted in conversions and the ones that were ignored by visitors.

This brings us to another important down side of PPC and that is that Ad blindness is worse than ever Comscore, the marketing research company shows that 16% of Internet users are responsible for 85% of all ad clicks on the web, so the vast majority of visitors from your PPC ads may well have clicked before, this may not be a huge problem if the sales levels are good but it is a disturbing trend.

Robots txt your questions answered

Sean — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:50:19 +0000

It is important to have robots txt on your site, this allows you a degree of control over where the search engine spiders visit and what they report and store in their index about your site, this allows you to keep them away from commercially sensitive material or out of member only information if you have a membership area on the site.

Matt Cutts a leading engineer at Google has produced a video that explains the robots txt in more detail and and answes some questions such as

Why is my url showing up in Google when I blocked it in robots.txt? Did you fetch that url?

How do I make that url disappear from Google?

The video can be seen on Matts Blog at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/robots-txt-remove-url/

This is going to be be of interest to any one who needs to know how to sculpt the page rank of their sites to ensure they are getting the most from the search engines.

This is an important part of search engine optimisation and implementing these changes on your site in the appropriate manor can help your rankings in the search engines.

One word of advice, do not go too over board with the robots txt file or you might find you have stopped the search engines indexing some important parts of your website and this will see you fall in the rankings rather than rise.