Lives are more and more time constrained.  We want to exercise more, eat healthier and we promise to write more content for our website.  But we don’t  do any of them.  I know as I am guilty of this sin of omission on all these fronts.  I am typing this at 9 at night in front of the television after a hectic day.  Today I met three clients – it was a pretty meeting heavy day which to be honest is far from my normal schedule.  The dice just fell that way.

Make Our Website Number One in Your Time Starved Diary

They all had the same request of me.  When will we be number one.  I blog regularly about this but from being an irregular noise from clients in the past it is now an incessant buzz. It blocks out all the other noises in my website design conversation.  I won’t go into a yawn inducing list of the many, many things that people can do to improve their content and work to get better rankings.

Generally all of the tips involve time.

Can’t Even Finish One Sentence

I met my first client today at 9.30.  Lets say his name is Kieran (it actually is which makes for confusing conversations).  We were closing out a few bits and pieces and I said to him that I bet he hadn’t updated his website since late December when we had last met. He asked me to show him (again) how to login to the website and we fired up the front page.  He noticed that the front page had some out of date information.

His site is in WordPress so it was easy  to open it and he did and starte typing.  He got to the third word before the phone rang with a Caller ID he had to answer.  Then someone from the warehouse called in and before long his nice heading  sat there incomplete.

“Kieran I said you either have to make the time on your calendar to update your site or hire someone”.

He grinned sheepishly and hung his head (he actually did – it was funny I laughed with him).  He knew it.  But he still wanted to be number one.

If It Was Easy Everyone Would be Doing It

Creating content isn’t easy in a busy schedule.  You need to find the time or the resources, money to get content created.  I won’t bend your ear about great content, in many cases it is even getting anycontent down on the page is a challenge.  The blog by Copyblogger about  Aurélien Amacker who had a great content creation strategy is worth reading on this.

It may mean blocking off all distractions and writing those 2-300 words on a Friday night when you could be drinking a glass of wine.  It may mean hiring an interne or part time writing staff.  It might mean getting an Internet marketing team on board who will take responsibility for a full content plan.

If it was easy everyone would be doing it.

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One of the common tactics at the time was keyword stuffing the tactic of stuffing your pages with a competitive keyword to help you get a good position for it. It worked then and people still think today that it will work. It  doesn’t!

However it does help to at least have some examples of keywords in your post. However make sure that you don’t just write something to have the keyword in it. It is a waste of your keystrokes. You are better off working a a high quality piece of content than just pumping out 2-300 words with the only goal to have a page with those words in it.

It does make sense to do the following with your keyword strategy for
a page

• Where possible put the keyword in the title of the page. This is usually a H1 or H2 HTML tag
• Have the keyword in the title of the page (this is different from the heading)
• Have at least one or two instances of the keyword in the text of the page. It also does help if the article is actually about the topic!

Even using the above tips for low volume search items will help you show up in search algorithms.  I always tell my clients it is as well to show up for these as high volume as the person will see it click and if you have taken myt advice to write something worthwhile they will stay and take some action.

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The web abounds with headlines like the one above. I read them every day and of course they are attractive. No doubt about it.  We all want more visitors to our website.  However more visitors does not equate to more business and interaction. Conversations that begin with “I would like to increase my traffic” are inherently flawed.

The online consumer is changing massively these days. They surf faster, are more clinical in how they choose products and services, and at its most basic level are increasingly more educated and well read on the online space (also more cynical).

In parallel there is a huge untapped market of consumers out there who do not rely on the Internet as a useful tool. This post is not about building links or social sharing or even writing good content.

I it is about convincing one person of the benefits of visiting your site.

The Power of One

We have all done it. Went to a restaurant, shop, and now even a website and had a superb experience. My personal example is Evernote. I constantly praise it as I use it daily on many devices. Another that I actually purchased recently was Balsamiq for Wireframing websites. Now I mention these products to people at least once a week. I am their walking notice board.

They achieved this (in my opinion and many others) by having excellent products. The same can in theory apply to your website or even a page on your site.

Case Study – School Bags

Lets take an example that I have completely made up that is quite contextual at the moment but non existent. It can show you how good content can become popular (no I didn’t say Viral I said popular!)

Currently lots of Irish parents are getting ready to get their kids back to school. They are buying uniforms, books and related supplies. I know we are there at the moment. One of the big issues year on year is the size of school bags. A related issue is the quality of bags. There aren’t a lot of great school bags out there. It is hard to find a good quality, high volume school bag. It is even harder to find a bag that has school cred. You have gotta look good on the bus these days.

If you wrote a comprehensive review of the bags available on the market and their prices it would be a valuable resource if you made it rich and worthwhile by doing the following as ideas.

• Pictures of each of the bags and a description
• Pictures of the bags with actual books in them
• A video of you packing the bags with actual books
• Pictures or video said bags.
• Commentary on ebooks and the current state of affairs of ebooks in Ireland
• Video of kids commenting on the bags
• Comprehensive list of locations of shops both online and bricks and mortar that have these bags
• Forum for people to comment on school bags and add some ideas of what they do.

Now this takes some work.  Good content takes work but yuour goal is to provide something for one person alone.

Your New Marketing Executive

Imagine you are meeting a  parent end of this week and they will spend €1000 on school bags with you if you provide a report for them.  A good solid school bag can cost between $60-100+.  If you can convince this one person of the benefits of a €100 bag and they become advocates to 10 people then you have made the money from a relatively small amount of effort.  Plus the effort will be of benefit again and again as more people learn about it. A good web page can do this for you.

Bonus Tip

The above logic can apply to many of thousands of services and products.  Most people don’t do it.  If you do then don’t forget the bonus tip.  Keep the content up to date.  Products and services change.  If you want to be perceived as someone or a website that has good quality information and products you need to be constantly working the content.

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• Where the people who visit your shop come from
• What items they actually look at and how long they spend looking at these items
• How they actually found your shop in the first place
• How they arrived to your shop in the first place
• How they left the shop if you have several doors
• If this was their first visit to the shop  or whether they had visited the shop before.

Most shop owners would and in a lot cases do pay a lot of money to get this type of information from market researchers

Know Your Website Visitor Traffic

In the past week I have spoken to several people with websites who don’t have this type of information about their websites.  None of them realised that they could collect this information for FREE with the addition of a few lines of code from Google.

One of the people I spoke to had a site selling online products and claimed it was doing well.  When I asked what pages people visited and where people were dropping of the site he literally had no idea.

You can’t claim to have control of your website if you do not have this type of statistical information.  It is critical information to have and takes less than 30 minutes to set up.  If you wish to understand the data that it generates it does take a little longer.  In a few hours however you can get a very solid understanding of the main highlights of the traffic that your site gets.

Go to Google Analytics website  and sign up today to get this code.

Get to Know Your Customers Without Meeting Them

• Once you have Google Analytics installed you can answer a lot of simple questions like
• Do my customers prefer mobiles or do they use their desktop – Google Analytics tells what medium people are using.  Knowing this can fuel you deciding if you should have a mobile option for your site.
• You can see the landing pages that people prefer and track their paths through the site.  You can then improve and tweak specific pages for these visitors.
• You can see seasonal trends.  When does traffic drop off.  When are there peaks.
• What keywords do people find you with?

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So lets look at some of the basic terms to help you understand SEO.

Keywords

Keywords are the words that you type into the search engine to try and find what you are looking for. There is a n unlimited number of keywords that you type. The more keywords you type often the more successful your search will be.  In the example above I typed in “Best Website Design Company in Cork“.  Look its my post so I can be selfish with my keyword choice.  So in this cae I typed 6 keywords.

The word long tail is a phrase that is used a lot in SEO and relates to larger quanmtities of  of keywords that people can type.  It is a reflection of someone with a more focused search like Black Golf GTIs with Leather seats is a more focused search than Golf GTI . The general consensus is that even though the search volume for a long tail keyword may be lower than that for a two or even three word phrase the person searching is more likely to click on a good result.

So it makes sense that you should if possible write content for this type of search volume.

Search Volume

Of course people aren’t always searching for what you think they are. Google provides an online tool called funnilly enough Google Keyword Tool that very effectively gives you god indicatgions as to what people  search for. Spending some time with this tool is of great benefit for when your are structuring your site and creating content for it.

If you think that you want to rank for a specific keyword set you should visit this site and pay attention to what it is telling you.

Now you shouldn’t write exclusively with keywords in mind but it does not make sense to write without some sort of site structure and content strategy in mind. I always say look at the keyword tool as an aide memoire but still write naturally and with your normal tone of voice and as a result the search engine notes this and rewards you accordingly.  Don’t just believe me Matt Cutts says the same thing and most major SEOs will tell you this as well.

Ranking – SERPs

SERPs stands for Search Engine Result Pages. For some keywords it is literally impossible to rank for the keywords without a medium to long term SEO campaign. The reasons for this are simple.  For high volume and value search terms the rewards for click through are significant and most comapniues in this space are spending marekting and SEO money to retain their positions.

The rewards however for this effort can be significant if you can get some of the top 1-4 positions on the above SERPs even for a range of keywords.

With a more focused effort on long tail keywords on and off your site you can get good results and perhaps generate a better level of engagement with visitors as the content you have created is exactly what they needed and this can lead to solid engagement.

No Its Not Just Links !

There are many factors that influence your ranking for the above keywords. Yes. Links from other websites do help but they are not everything. Of course getting a good reputable link from a business in your niche or general area is of great benefit but there are many many other ways that complement this. Link building IS a part of an SEOs toolkit but there are many other methods that are very important and are part of the whole approach to ranking.  This post isn’t goingto cover these but have a look at this chart which I use regularly from SeoMoz a respected blog on SEO which shows an estimated breakdown of the relative importance of the different factors.

FInally….

In the very first place after reading above my core advice is to get active with your site and start creating content that is valuable, useful and do this regulkarly.  Once a week is good,  3 times a week is great 5 times a week is amazing (only if it is useful content though).  Then think about some of the factors above and how you want to publicise your business online thoruh a host of other mathods.  Select a plan and go for it.  Be prepared to review regularly and accept that everything doesn’t always work perfectly.

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I  can show at least 50 excellent website designs that have said good designs with single digit traffic.  Design does not attract customers.  Marketing and content attracts customers.  You must have what they want and whatever way you look at it

Design does not attract customers.

You can now purchase or even get excellent free themes for less than the price of a pint and with hosting and domains at great prices from companies like Blacknight your actual costs are less than 100-200 Euro.  If you employ a website designer they usually wont charge you more than 80-100 Euro for installing WordPress and a free them like this.  Maybe a bit more if you want some added bells an whistles.

Look at the theme above from Theme Kingdom (www.themekingdom.com) which has a decent small  range of themes and with even the free one above that will allow you to get online.  Is it a great design? – No.  Is it possibly now even a design in the most exacting contect perhaps not but it is credible,  As we say in Cork “It does the job boy”.  Why not start with this save your money on marketing social media training and some SEO to help your product spread. If your customer base and traffic grows then excellent design will help a lot but for now get going.  Good will do.

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You do not just want a static website with a contact form you want a site that works for your business and does tasks like

• Display Product Portfolios
• Take bookings using PayPal
• Sell their products and display related products
• Show Events dynamically and with calendars
• Display their social media activity
• Have a dynamic gallery of products
• Provide calendars for their local and remote staff

The days when above would take days of development are now long past as bringing these features to a site now  takes a small amount of development once the clients needs are clearly understood and documented

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It may be easy to snigger at this but SEO professionals and website designers need to consider this and cater for it.  You need to make sure that you have crisp titles,  good meta descriptions (even though they do not factor in search they do factor in decisions to click).

For Facebook the effort put into creating a powerful landing page is worth it if your audience uses Facebook.  I encourage businesses to think about Facebook but if your target audience does not use then it should not be a priority.

If it is however you should spend the time and effort in marketing your business and making the Facebook page a place people would want to visit and engage with you and your brand.

Facebook is the number one choice for social login and its gains over the past two years have it now approaching 50 percent penetration among social login services, a new study shows. In analyzing at the 365,000 websites that use its services,  Marketing Land

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It is now over 2 weeks since it was rolled out and if you aren’t seeing any change in your rankings as a result I am not surprised as lot of these updates are geared towards two ends.  Rewarding people who are doing the right things on their site and punishing those who are trying to game the search engines.

As always SearchEngineLand wrote a nice post on the Google Penguin Update which explains that simply put it is geared to tackling web spam which is still with us and is like doping in sports, people are always thinking of new ways to game the engines.

So don’t worry too much about the animals.  Will the next update be a Piebald?

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