When embarking on a Web SEO campaign it is important to know who your competitors are – not only the usual ones you know offline, but also your online or ‘keyword’ competitors. There are a lot of factors that go into determining your competitor’s Search Engine ranking but by analysing their on page and off page SEO, you can improve the optimisation of your website and improve your Search Engine position.

Determine who your competitors are

You are searching for your online competitors who may rank highly on Search Engines. These companies do not necessarily command the biggest chunk of market share in your industry although the two usually do follow. Choose two of your primary keywords or industry relative searches that you want to rank for and jot down the 5 or 10 sites that come up on page one of Google.

Create a benchmark

Once you have a solid list of competitors, you can then set about comparing their Web SEO. Remember Search Engine rankings may change depending on your website and competitor’s website activity so make sure you take note of the date that you created your list. You now have a benchmark to work from to compare your results to your competitors.

Comparison techniques

Onsite or On Page SEO: Study your competitors’ websites. Choose the one or two sites that come up on both your searches performed above, and study the sites in detail. This is what you will be looking at:

• Title Tags, Page Headings (the headings in the content itself) – check what keywords they are using
• Meta description tags: right click on the pages and select “View Source” and find the “Meta Description” content at the top of the page – although not used completely anymore, this description is what would make a user click on your listing.
• Images – how are they used, do they have alternative text (if you move your mouse over them, does text pop up)

Keyword density and content: There are free and premium keyword analysis tools on the market that will be able to tell you what keywords that your key competitors are using. You will not always be able to rank highly for competitive keywords but there may be longer tail keywords or missed keyword opportunities that you can use to optimise your website.

Backlinks: Yahoo Site Explorer, Google and Open Site Explorer by SEOMOZ are all good at finding the links that your competitors have used to improve your Web SEO. Open Site Explorer is probably the best as you can export the data into excel where you can find valuable links that you should build for yourself. Here you are looking for quality links, those that appear first – the top 10 or 20, external links, are of interest to you.

Google Places: If you are in the tourism, hotel, retail or trade industry, you can use Google Places to see what reviews and links your competitors have as well – and aim to build similar links for your website. These may be links on suppliers’ or manufacturer’s websites, industry related links, business networking groups or directory links that your website should also be linked from.

Site map: Look for a sitemap link on the website and see how many pages they have – Search Engines like Google, prefer websites with a lot of pages and if you update your site regularly with new pages, it can only help with your Web SEO. If the website doesn’t have a sitemap, then type into the Google search box the site:www.competitorsurl.com.au command to see how many pages have been indexed. However, use this only as a guide.

Age of Domain: Check the age of your competitor’s domain. You can do this by visiting the Whois Database – this gives you free info on the domain name of a website and shows the age of the company and who the registrar is. The age of your competitor’s domains does factor into their ranking as they can be seen to be more authoritative and trustworthy sites in the eyes of Search Engines.

A detailed competitor analysis should be done by an SEO company before embarking on an Web SEO campaign. Analysing this data before you start your SEO strategy can help you get a better understanding of your competition, where you should focus your efforts and help map out the strategy for the campaign. Contact us and we’ll show you how we can give you the competitive edge and structure a Web SEO campaign that is targeted to your business to boost your Search Engine rankings and increase your ROI.

Link analysis tools are an important weapon in your ongoing battle to climb up the Google ladder. Your link profile is one of the factors that help determine relevancy for a search term and will improve your Search Engine rankings. With ongoing link analysis, you can determine what links are pushing you up the rankings and what links are just chinks in your armour and weighing you down.

What is link authority?

A Search Engine considers a link from another website as a vote or validation of your website and factors this into its ranking algorithm. The quality of your links will determine the authority gained by a web page through quality incoming links. This is for instance expressed in the PageRank given by Google named after the founder Larry Page. It is also referred to as link equity.

Search Engines will look at the total number of backlinks but will also analyse each link to your website and determine the quality of the link based on some of the following factors:

• authority, trustworthiness and credibility
• the anchor text
• links are dofollow links ie pass link value
• relevance of the link to your website
• the ranking of the website in Search Engines
• link context analyses how close a link appears on a page to keywords within the text of that page.

These are just a few of the 250 million+ variables that PageRank for example uses to evaluate your link authority. Search Engines will determine the importance of each web page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value.

So how do I analyse my Web pages with link analysis tools?

The best link analysis tools currently on the market are:

• www.opensiteexplorer.org – Open site explorer is powered by SEOMoz and offers more in-depth link analysis tools than Yahoo site explorer.
• www.siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com – Currently one of the better link analysis tools on the market, Site explorer will disappear when Yahoo and Bing merge.
• www.linkdiagnosis.com – Link diagnosis can only be used with a Firefox plugin that you download from their website.

How can I use link analysis tools to improve my website?

Use this information to structure your SEO link building efforts and analyse your competitor’s link profile. As well as competitor analysis, other applications for this data include:

• Research: Analyse the quality of the links that are pointing back to your website in terms of link authority, relevance of anchor text and so forth.
• Discover: Find any errors in the links that are pointing to your website and try to correct them or improve the links.
• Investigate: Look at the link profile of high ranking competitors and analyse the quality of their links in comparison to your website so you can replicate their efforts.
• Compare: Look at link metrics between multiple sites to determine the level of competition/difficulty/importance of your own site in comparison.

Then use the information gained from the link analysis tools to structure your SEO link building efforts. For instance, if the three sites ranking higher than you have the same page authority but have a higher number of linking root domains then you need more links from more domains. If the link analysis tools show that competing sites have less links but the links come from higher ranking sites then you should consider getting more links from more trustworthy (higher page rank) sites.

An SEO company should always analyse your link profile before beginning any link building activities so that they can tailor a link building campaign and structure their efforts according to what you need to do to beat your competitors. Contact us so we can show you these link analysis tools can become an important part of your SEO artillery and help you fight the ongoing battle for page one Search Engine ranking supremacy.

This is by no means an extensive or exhaustive list, but represents most of the common SEO expressions you will hear discussed. We’ve tried to stick to the basics and explain everything in layman’s terms.

A-E | F-J | K-O | P-T | U-Z |

A-E

301 code status: A 301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for Web page redirection. The code 301 is interpreted as moved permanently.

302 code status: A 302 code means that the file has been found, but is temporarily located at another URL. In the context of SEO, it is typically best to avoid using 302 redirects.

404 code status: A 404 code means that the file has not been found. This occurs is a broken link on your website when a page has been moved on your website or someone has typed in the wrong URL to find the page.

Algorithm: A set of programming rules which determine how a Search Engine displays the results of a search.

Alt tags: Stands for Alt tags. Alternative text to be shown in a web browser when images are not shown. Alt tags are provided for the benefit of vision impaired users but also used to optimise your website as Search Engines cannot read images. An alt tag should describe the image and not simply comprise a list of keywords.

Anchor text: A link created from a string of text. The “anchor” is the linked section of text. Effective use of anchor text involves linking targeted keyword phrases. For example, in this sentence Search Engine Optimisation is the anchor text, which in this case links to the home page of this site.

Auto-generated pages: Using a script or software program to create thousands of keyword-stuffed pages with content of no value to human readers. This is a black hat SEO strategy and Search Engines will take action against websites who are creating auto-generated pages.

Backlinks (or Back Links): External links or links from other websites to your website. Google’s Webmaster Tools can give you information on your backlinks but doesn’t always report all the links Google knows about. Yahoo’s Site Explorer can often give you a more complete picture.

Bad link neighbourhood: This is when questionable sites are linked back to your website in an attempt to increase your link equity/authority. The links usually include pharmacy, casinos, porn sites and so on.

Bing: This is a Search Engine owned by Microsoft and is one of the top three Search Engines including Google and Yahoo!

Black hat SEO: Search Engines like Google have guidelines which you must adhere to if you want your website indexed. Black hat SEO comprises of techniques and strategies which do not comply with these guidelines. Read more about black hat SEO.

Blogs: A blog can be part of your website or hosted on an external website. In the context of SEO, a blog is a series of articles that provide original and updated copy for your website and should be a key component of your SEO strategy. Read why you should have a company blog.

Bounce rate: Web surfers leaving a website within a few seconds (approx less than 10 seconds). A high bounce rate would indicate your site is not relevant to the search they performed or they judged your site to be poor quality.

Cache: A snapshot of your page taken when a Search Engine spider last visited. To see the cache of your page in Google type cache: followed by your page URL into a Google search box.

Call to action: A call to action is copy within text or an image used to encourage a person to complete an action defined by the company. This might be asking customers to fill in an online form, read more information about their products or directly book a hotel room on the website.

Citation: A reference to your site which isn’t necessarily a link, such as your company (hotel) name, telephone number etc.

Cloaking: This is a black hat SEO technique in which the content presented to the Search Engine spider is different to that presented to the user. This practice is used to manipulate the Search Engines and will likely to get your site banned or penalised.

Content: In the context of SEO, content is generally considered to be the readable text within the body of a page underneath the H1 heading as distinguished from headlines, subheadings, coupons, captions or illustrations and the like; also called body text or text.

Conversion: A conversion is when a desired action (goal/objective) has been completed. This could be a direct sale, a sales enquiry, subscription to your newsletter, downloading a brochure and so on.

CMS: Stands for Content Management System. This is a system that is inbuilt into a website that allows people to create, edit and delete content without needing any knowledge of HTML. Find out how to choose a SEO friendly CMS.

Crawl: When a Search Engine spider visits your site they are said to “crawl” your site. This is the process of collecting data and returning it to the Search Engine. Your site logs or analytics software can tell you which Search Engines have crawled your site and when that last occurred.

DMOZ: Also known as The Open Directory Project. DMOZ is a free, human, edited directory run by volunteers. A listing is considered beneficial for SEO, but getting listed can be a real challenge.

Dofollow link: A link has the no follow attribute removed. This type of link will pass link juice/equity to another website or page on a website. Typically, this encourages visitor participation.

Doorway page: Not to be confused with a targeted landing page, a doorway page typically has no useful content and exists only to redirect visitors to another area of the site. Generally frowned upon by Search Engines and considered to be a black hat SEO technique.

Duplicate content: Content that is identical to other content on your site or anywhere else on the Web. It should be avoided when possible but where legitimate reasons for it exist, measures need to be put in place to instruct the Search Engines which pages should be indexed and which pages should not be indexed.

External link: An outgoing link from your website to another website/or: to a location on another website/domain.

F-J

Facebook: This is one of the biggest social networking websites, owned by Facebook, Inc. You can share photos, notes, groups, events and posted items with your network. It also offers advertising opportunities.

Feed: A common feature of blogs. This allows readers to subscribe to frequently updated content by adding the feed to their reader software or email client (e.g. Outlook). Feeds are typically created in a format called RSS (see below).

Flash: A technology developed by MacroMedia Corp. that allows a Web designer to embed interactive multimedia into Web pages.

Footer: Footer navigation is often displayed on every webpage at the bottom of the page and as such is global navigation. Footer navigation typically links to administrative content; about pages, contact us pages, legal disclaimers, website feedback links, Social Media networks etc.

Google: Currently the Web’s largest and most influential Search Engine, accounting for the great majority of searches performed.

Google AdWords: This is one of Google’s most popular products and offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads.

Google Analytics: A popular analytics tool created by Google to monitor your Web statistics. Find out more about Google Analytics’ popular reports and tools.

Googlebot: Google’s Search Engine program which visits your site and returns data to Google. Also known as web robots, web crawlers, bots and internet bots.

Google Buzz: Google Buzz is Google’s push into Social Media and integrates with your existing Gmail account. Buzz appears as an extra tab in your Gmail inbox and allows you to post content and share files from Twitter, Picasa, Flickr and Google Reader. Find out more about Google Buzz.

Google keyword tool: A popular tool used to find keywords based on actual Google search enquiries. Read more about other popular keyword research tools..

Google Local Business Listings: See Google Places.

Google Places: Formally known as Google Local Business Listings, Google Places are different to organic or pay-per-click listings. They typically only show up when the user types a service oriented business followed by the city for their search. Find out more about Google Places and how this can enhance your local search strategy.

Google sitemap: A file placed on your Web server and submitted to Google indicating which pages on your site need to be indexed. See XML sitemap.

Google sitelinks: In some search results Google lists multiple deep links rather than a single link. See example below.

Google Social Search: When you are logged into your Gmail account, it combines Search Engines results with your Social Media networks such as Twitter, Digg and blogs. Find out more about Google Social Search.

Headings (heading tags): Generally considered important for on-page SEO and good Web design. Heading tags are constructed in HTML using a H1 to H6 tag. Styling can be modified using CSS.

HTML: Stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and is a commonly used programming language to develop websites.

Image SEO: Stands for image Search Engine Optimisation and is the process of optimising your images for Search Engines. Find out more about image SEO.

Inbound links: An external link from another site to your site. Inbound links are an important asset that will improve your site’s link authority/equity.

Index: A Search Engine’s database in which it stores textual content from every web page that its spider visits.

Internal links: Links from a page on your site to another internal page on your site. Optimising your internal linking structure will benefit how Search Engines can crawl and index the pages within your website.

International SEO: Sometimes referred to as global SEO or multilingual SEO. This is a specialised SEO strategy to capture traffic in foreign markets. Find out more about international SEO strategies and how to attract a global audience.

Internet Explorer (IE): This is one of the most widely known Web browsers but not necessarily considered the most secure or the best browser to use.

Invisible text: This is a ‘keyword cloaking technique’ and involves putting keyword-stuffed text in the same colour as the background so it is invisible to human readers but not to Search Engines. This is a Black hat SEO technique.

JavaScripts: Programs written in the JavaScript programming language. JavaScripts run on the Internet user’s computer rather than the web server’s computer. Search Engines find it harder to read JavaScript code than HTML code.

K-O

Keywords: Sometimes called Search Engine keywords. This is a word or phrase (long tail keyword) which potential customers may use in a search for content relevant to your site. Read more about how to find the right keywords for your SEO strategy.

Keyword density: This is a measure of how often a keyword or keyword phrase is within the content of a page.

Keyword stuffing: Using multiple keyword repetition on a web page HTML in such a way that it detracts from the readability and usability of a given page for the purpose of artificially boosting the page’s rankings in Search Engines. Search Engines prefer keyword usage that is more natural and used within context of the Web page.

Keyword research: This is a process to find the right keywords and monitor your ongoing keyword strategy. Find out more about keyword research tools.

Keyword rich: This is what you are aiming for in SEO copywriting – using keywords in an intelligent, seamless and natural way within the text.

KPI: Stands for key performance indicators. These are quantifiable measurements that reflect the critical success factors of an organisation, campaign or project.

Landing page: This is a page which targets a specific keyword phrase by including content relevant to that phrase. A landing page will typically include the keyword phrase in the title, description, headings, links and body content of the page. Find out how to optimise landing pages to increase your conversion rates.

Links: In SEO terms, this is generally considered to be inbound links to your site i.e. a surfer clicks on a link on another website and lands on your website. In basic terms, a Search Engine considers a link to your site as a citation or a vote, and factors this into its ranking algorithm.

Link authority: ‘Authority’ gained by a webpage through quality incoming links. This is for instance expressed in the PageRank given by Google. Also referred to as link authority or equity.

Link bait: Content which is useful, interesting or entertaining and encourages other websites to link to it and improve your link profile.

Link building: Having an ongoing link building campaign is an important part of your SEO strategy. It is the process of acquiring inbound links to your site. Read more about link building strategies.

Link Equity: See link authority above.

LinkedIn: One of the biggest professional networking Social Media sites.

Link juice: The value a Search Engine places on a link to your site. Links from a high authority and trustworthy site will have a significant effect on your rankings while other links will have no value at all.

Link farm: This is the practice of buying links or participating in linking schemes in the hope of increasing your Search Engine ranking. This is known as a black hat SEO strategy.

Long tail keywords: This is the strategy of targeting less competitive niche keywords rather than the hugely competitive broad keywords. An example of long tail keyword is ‘4wd rental perth’ while a short tail keyword is ‘car rentals’. Long tail keywords usually have a lower search volume but a higher conversion rate. Read more about how to optimise pages for long tail keywords.

Metatags (Meta Tags): HTML code which Search Engines read and use in various ways such as meta description tags and meta keywords tags.

Meta description: This provides a summary of the page content. Search Engines often use the meta description to display in their search results just below the title tag. Google says that they do not use the meta description tag but it should always be provided as a guide for Search Engines.

Meta Keywords: A list of keywords relevant to the page which has become less relevant over the years. Google has openly said they do not use the “keywords” meta tag in their web search ranking.

Mozilla Firefox: Mozilla Firefox is a Web browser that has steadily grown in popularity over the last few years.

Nofollowed link: A link which carries the rel=”nofollow” attribute. A link with the rel=”nofollow” attribute, doesn’t carry any weight, and doesn’t count towards your overall link authority/equity (also knows as PageRank in Google Web searches).

Organic Search Results: These are the unpaid search results delivered by Search Engines. This is a long term strategy to improve brand visibility and rankings in Search Engines. Find out more about organic search or organic SEO.

P-T

PageRank (PR): This is Google’s logarithmic formula for calculating the importance of a web document based on links. PR plays a pivotal role in Google’s ranking algorithm but just how much is hotly debated by SEOs.

PPC (Pay per click): Pay Per click also known as paid search is where an advertiser bids on keywords associated with an advertisement in order to achieve higher position on Search Engine results pages (sponsored links section) for searches on that keyword. Find out how PPC can work with SEO campaigns.

Penalty: A drop in your Search Engine ranking when you have broken the Search Engine’s guidelines with black hat SEO – trying to manipulate the Search Engines or artificially boost your ranking. Find out what to do is your website is penalised or banned by Google.

Ranking: A keyword position on a Search Engine.

Reciprocal linking: The process of exchanging links i.e. where site A links to site B, and in return site B links to site A.

Robots.txt: A robots.txt is a permissions file that can be used to control which Web pages of a website you want a Search Engine to index. The text file must be placed in a websites root directory.

ROI (return on investment): The benefit gained in return for the cost of investing budget into advertising or a project ROI is expressed as a percentage or ratio, and is calculated with the following formula: “Total Revenues (generated from campaign or project) minus cost of investment divided by cost of investment.”

RSS feed: This stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS feed uses an XML document to publish blog articles.

Search Engines: A Search Engine is a Web portal to find information on the Internet through using keyword searches. Major Search Engines include Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Search Engine banning: This is when your website has been removed from a Search Engine indexes. Do a site search by typing in ‘site:yoursite.com’ and see if Google return any results.

Search Engine Optimisation (also spelled optimization): In basic terms, the process of optimising a page through its on-page content, structure and link profile to rank highly for specific search queries. In broader terms, this is the process of increasing revenues and profits for businesses marketing their products or services online.

SEM: This stands for Search Engine Marketing. This encompasses all aspects of building traffic through search, including natural (organic) Search Engine Optimisation and PPC (pay per click) Search Engine advertising.

SEO: Stands for Search Engine Optimisation (Optimization). This focuses on natural (organic) Search Engine ranking (see below).

SEO audit: An SEO Audit is like a health check for your website. It looks at the technical infrastructure of your website, the on-page elements and off-page essentials to maximise any Search Engine Optimisation activities.

SEO copywriting: SEO copywriting is writing copy for a website that is keyword rich and designed to attract Search Engines spiders but still be compelling and interesting for readers. Find out more about SEO copywriting.

SEO consultants: Act as a business consultant and partner with you to reach your Search Engine Optimisation goals. Also known as SEO experts. Read more about what really makes an SEO expert.

SEO toolbars: Toolbars that can be downloaded and integrated seamlessly with your Web browser to give you important SEO resources at your fingertips to optimise your website and analyse your competitors’ websites. Read more about SEO Toolbars.

SERP: This stands for Search Engine Result Page. This is the list of links and descriptions listed on a Search Engine when a keyword search is performed.

Social bookmarking: A sub-category to Social Media that allows you to share, organise and manage your bookmarks, or favourite websites, with other users that use the same social bookmarking tool, such as Delicious, Stumbleupon and Digg.

Social Media: This is sometimes called Web 2.0 and used to describe user generated websites and blogs that encourage engagement and allow interaction. Popular sites include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs.

Social networking: A sub-category to Social Media encompassing ‘networking’ activities and includes social networks such as Facebook

Spider: Sometimes called Search Engine spiders. These are programs written to scour the web automatically for various reasons (to index Web pages, for spamming purposes, etc.) Also known as web robots, web crawlers, bots, Internet bots.

Technorati: Technorati is one of the biggest blog Search Engines.

Title Tag: This is also known as the meta title or page title. It is shown at the top of a browser window and is considered to be very important in on-page SEO.

Traffic: This refers to the number of visitors to your website.

Twitter: Twitter is a Social Media networking site that works like a micro-blog and lets you write and read messages of up to 140 characters.

U-Z

URL: This stands for Uniform Resource Locator. This is the Web address of a document and an important on-page element.

XML Sitemap: A list of pages you want the Search Engines to find which is created in XML format and submitted to the Search Engines.

VSEO: This stands for Video Search Engine Optimisation and is the process of optimising your videos. Find out more about VSEO.

Web 2.0: This refers to Social Media websites which encourage user generated content and social interaction online. Popular sites include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs.

White hat SEO: This is a process of boosting your Search Engine ranking by using methods approved by Search Engines. Read more about white hat SEO.

WordPress: WordPress is an excellent open source web publishing system or content management system (CMS). Find out more about how WordPress SEO .

Yahoo!: One of the oldest and established Search Engines. It is one of the best Search Engines along with Google and Bing.

YouTube: YouTube is an online video community and one of the biggest user generated content websites owned by Google. Find out more about how to optimise your YouTube videos.

Find out more about our SEO Packages and SEO Services and how our SEO experts can partner with you in your business to increase your Search Engine visibility and improve your bottom line. Contact us if any SEO terms need clarification or you would like any SEO terms to be added to the list.

Whether you embark on a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign, Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign or a combination of both will depend on your goals and objectives of your Internet marketing campaign. An SEO campaign is more of a long term strategy that is more cost effective but a PPC campaign may work well for a call to action strategy for a new website where immediate results are required which may offset the costs.

Let’s compare SEO and PPC side by side and how this can help your internet marketing campaigns.

At the end of the day the choice does remain yours, but in our experience, embarking on a strategic Search Engine Optimisation campaign with a top SEO Company is a better long term, Internet marketing strategy than spending your dollars on every click you get through a Pay Per Click system. Contact us if you would like to know more about Internet marketing and how we can get you more for your marketing dollar.

You have invested a lot of money in your web development, allocated funds to advertising and promotion but when it comes to SEO, you are wavering over whether you want to hire an SEO company or use an internal SEO expert. When you weigh up the costs of hiring an SEO consultancy against the potential return on investment, is it false economy to keep your SEO efforts in-house?

Cost effective: Hiring an SEO company may prove more cost effective than hiring a staff member. There is no need to purchase and maintain computer systems, purchase SEO related software or invest in expensive training and development of staff. Office space does not need to be allocated and there are no entitlements or any other costs that a full time employee incurs.

Dedicated SEO expert: By outsourcing your SEO, you have a dedicated SEO expert who is only a call or email away. An internal SEO consultant may work in-house but Search Engine Optimisation may not be their sole role and they may be balancing this task alongside a host of other duties. By commission an SEO company, you are hiring an expert who is solely focused on SEO.

Pool of resources: Outsourcing your search engine optimisation needs to an SEO company means you have instant access to experts with a wealth of knowledge and resources. Not only will the SEO consultant assigned to your website be able to bounce off ideas with others in their team but they may also have access to SEO copywriters and link building strategists.

Knowledge and expertise: By employing an SEO company, you are drawing on their combined knowledge and experience. SEO is a specialised task and part of being a professional SEO expert is devoting a huge chunk of their time to researching new SEO techniques, keeping abreast of industry trends and keeping up to date with changes in Search Engine technology.

Accountability: When using an SEO specialist who is part of an SEO company, they are not only answerable to their clients but they are also accountable to their direct supervisor who is overseeing the SEO campaign. One major problem of in-house SEO is that no one else in the company may have SEO experience and be able to determine whether they are actually doing a good job.

At SEO Works, Search Engine Optimisation is a team effort and your allocated SEO expert is drawing on a large resource pool of SEO consultants, SEO copywriters, link strategists and a Web design team that collaborate to create successful SEO campaigns. Contact us to find out how hiring an SEO company is an investment for your business and how increased exposure and traffic will result in increased revenue.

Google Places has replaced Google Local Business Centre Listings which will help strengthen the connection to Place Pages. Place Pages were launched by Google in September last year for more than 50 million places around the world. Google has assured owners of verified listings that Google Places will have all the functionality of Google Local Business Centre Listings with a few additional features.

These additional features include the following. Not all features are available to all markets but are being rolled out slowly by Google.

Service areas: On your Google Places page, you can now show which geographic areas you serve which is a major plus. This is a great feature that will allow business to not only reach the area they are based in but the areas their business services. In addition, if you run a business without a storefront or office location such as an online plumbing store, you can have the option of making your address private.

Business photo shoots: Google is offering select businesses in the US, Japan and Australia to take part in a Google business photo shoot where Google photographers come to your business and take photos of your company. These images supplement your Places Page listing and other photos you have uploaded to the page.

Advertising tags: For just US$25 per month, selected businesses in the US can further optimise their Places Page. Tags are yellow markers on Google Maps that highlight important aspects of their business such as coupons, price lists or updated menus.

Customised QR codes: Businesses can download a QR code that’s unique to their business, directly from their dashboard page. QR codes can be placed on business cards or other marketing materials, and customers can scan them with certain smartphones to be taken directly to the mobile version of the Place Page for that business. This is only available in the US market at present.

Favourite Places: Due to popular demand, Google is doing a second print run of decals for the Favorite Places program, and are mailing window decals to 50,000 businesses around the US. These decals also include a QR code that can be scanned with a smartphone to directly view the mobile Place Page for the business to learn more about their great offerings.

With one of five searches on Google related to location, Google Places is important for local search and should be an important part of any internet marketing campaign to reach the local market. So far, four million businesses have claimed their Place Page on Google through the Google Local Business Centre.

Read our article on the Best Practices for Your Google Local Business Centre Listing to find out how you can optimise your Places Page. Google is continually striving to improve the Places Page and since its inception, there has been other improvements such as real-time updates and coupons specially formatted for mobile phones.

You can find out more about Google Places by checking the Lat Long blog or post any questions or feedback. Claiming your Google Places is important for local businesses to increase their visibility in Search Engines and stay relevant in the local market. Contact us to find out more about Google Places formerly known as Google Local Business Centre Listings and how we can help you optimise your listing, increase your ranking and maximise your local revenue.

Optimising a website or doing an SEO audit is like servicing a car; you need to have regular checkups and finetune your car to make sure that it is running properly. Likewise, a website needs to be regularly maintained and tweaked to check and improve the SEO of the website. Google released a report of their SEO to identify potential areas for improvement in Google’s product pages. So isn’t it about time you did an SEO health check of your website?

Competitive keyword selection

Constant monitoring of keyword selection is important for the ongoing optimisation of your website. Realistically, you should do a website analysis and check the keywords you should be targeting every six to 12 months to see if they are the best keywords that you should be aiming for. Find out more about Keyword Research Tools and how you can conduct an SEO audit of your keyword strategy.

SEO copywriting & on page content

It’s always a good idea to go back and check your on page content from time to time and cast a critical eye over your content regularly. Look for opportunities where you can add fresh content to your website and update your content. Websites that are always reviewing, testing, monitoring and rewriting their content achieve strong conversion rates:

Find out more about SEO copywriting and how you can conduct an SEO audit of your copywriting and on page content.

Images

Image SEO is often overlooked on a website but searches on Google Images are also an important referrer of traffic to websites. Always keep in mind that Search Engines cannot read images, they can only read text. This makes optimising images all the more important to maximise every bit of your website SEO. Find out more about image SEO and how you can conduct an SEO audit of your website images.

Link Profile

Link building and maintaining your link profile is an essential part of SEO so checking your profile is an important part of the SEO audit. It’s also important to focus on your link building strategies. To create a natural link profile, you need to check anchor links have different variations, the type of links must include both dofollow and nofollow links and the links pointing to your website must be from a quality website related to your industry that is credible and trustworthy.

Internal link structure

It’s also important to check the links on your pages and how they measure up. The first thing you need to do is check whether there are dead links on the page by seeing what links come up with a 404 error. This is an important part of your SEO audit as Search Engines prefer websites that are well maintained.

Webmaster Tools makes it easier for you to detect whether the 404 errors or crawl errors are limited to your website or from external websites. You’ll have the information you need to contact them to get it fixed, and if needed, you can still put in place redirects on your own site to the appropriate URL.

Site speed

Google recently announced that site speed would be included in the search ranking algorithms. Site speed reflects how quickly each web page responds to web requests. Intensive research on site speed done by Google shows that users have a tendency to spend less time on a site that is running slowly.

Google has also blogged about free tools as part of your SEO audit that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site performance and how this affects your Search Engine ranking. However, while Google sees site speed as relevant, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page in Search Engine rankings.

Contact us to find out how we can conduct a full SEO audit of your website. This may be needed when you have just created a website, if your website suddenly loses traffic or your traffic is not growing steadily. The website analysis starts from a 50 point checklist of your current website, rankings and competitive analysis. From there, we’ll be able to customise an SEO program to suit your needs and budget. Doing an SEO audit of your website is a good risk management strategy and ideally should be done every six to 12 months.

SEO marketing is an important part of promoting your website – SEO can make quite a lot of money for your business – there are well over 90 million searches performed on the net every day. SEO is a cost effective way of marketing your product or service and should be seen as an investment and an important part of your internet marketing strategy. Before hiring an SEO company to optimise your website or starting the SEO process yourself, read this article about the most common SEO mistakes made.

Neeeiigh! Putting the cart before the horse

In this case, putting the cart before the horse means getting your website developed before you start thinking about the marketing. SEO and keyword selection is intimately linked to aspects of your website like your domain name and your navigation structure. This is one of the major SEO mistakes, and is incredibly frustrating because you’ll find that you’ve just completed a long, hard slog on a site and invested a lot of money only to be told that it all needs to change if you want good search results.

SEO marketing tips: When developing your website, it’s better to get an SEO expert or SEO company to help you create a Search Engine-friendly website infrastructure and do the necessary keyword research to develop your navigation structure for your website.

Shooting blind

Your keywords need to be chosen with your eyes wide open, and looking at the prize. The key thing to remember is not that you just want the top Google spot … but that you want lots of quality traffic. So, your keywords need to reflect the language that your customers use when searching for your services, various basic facts about your business, and also take into account the keywords that your competitors are using. Keyword research is the gold standard … simply putting down whatever comes into your head is like shooting blind.

SEO marketing tips: Keyword research tools may involve brainstorming initially but using keyword research tools like keyword tools, holding focus groups, looking at your own analytics, competitor analysis and so forth will help develop a strong keyword strategy.

Can the keyword spam!

One of the most common SEO mistakes, keyword spamming can melt your dollars away despite a top spot on Google. If you use your keywords unnaturally, excessively, or out of context your visitors will leave after viewing a couple of pages, because your site copy sounds like a demented, skipping CD! Some site owners grossly overestimate the keyword density needed for Google to rank the site highly. In reality, keyword density is but one of many factors that go into your ranking. It’s important to use keywords but don’t overdo it!

SEO marketing tips: Correct keyword placement is essential so Search Engine spiders crawling over the page can rank the page for relevant keywords. However, keywords need to be inserted seamlessly and naturally into your SEO copywriting and never out of context.

If you build it, they will come. Won’t they??

So many site owners believe that great content will be enough to create a successful website but people need to find your website first. You don’t only need great content – you need to grab a megaphone and drive down the street telling people about it! However, as we just mentioned … keywords, and the content containing them, is only one factor in several that go into creating your Search Engine ranking. You need to optimise the entire site, not just create great content.

SEO marketing tips: Great content and a high Search Engine ranking work hand-in-hand. You can’t have a high Search Engine ranking without great content because visitors will just bounce* off your page but similarly there is no point in having great content if Web searchers can’t find you.

The Perfect Match

SEO is not a ‘one size fits all’ strategy. Somewhere in the SEO landscape there exists a strategy that is the perfect match for your business. However, without extensive experience in SEO this can be difficult to identify by yourself. An SEO expert can help you identify whether your business model and goals will suit using organic Search Engine Optimisation, social media, Pay Per Click advertising (PPC), email marketing … or a combination of all of these strategies.

SEO marketing tips: SEO and PPC are two different strategies to drive traffic to a website. PPC is sometimes used to launch a website to boost traffic in a short amount of time but can be very costly. SEO is seen as a longer term strategy to drive organic traffic to your website and may be more cost effective.

Look to the Link

Link building is an integral part of your SEO campaign, and its importance can’t be underestimated. You need to actively seek out links, though. Remember that you need to get out your megaphone – don’t just expect that if you build it, they will come. That’s a huge SEO mistake to make! There are plenty of easy, simple ways to build links: participating in forums, doing guest blogging, listing in directories, putting out press releases and engaging with social networks are some of the more popular strategies.

SEO marketing tips: Link building is a simple yet effective strategy to boost your Search Engine ranking. In simple terms, a link to your web page is seen as a vote of confidence in your website by Search Engines. Focusing half an hour on link building strategies three times a week should result in an improvement in your rankings.

Myopic SEO

Don’t be short-sighted in your SEO strategy – remember what your ultimate goal for the site is. Your goal isn’t simply to get to the #1 spot on Google – that has no tangible value. You need to focus on the end goal to get customers buying from your website and sustaining your business. The way to do this is with a myriad of techniques known as conversion optimisation, all of which encourage the customer to buy from your site, or complete whatever other goals you have for your website. Looking only to Google is one of the definite myopic SEO mistakes!

SEO marketing tips: Traffic is important but driving quality traffic to your website that will enquire, purchase your product or book a hotel room is more important. Focus on conversion strategies, not merely traffic generation.

Change – The Only Constant

Change is the one thing the universe will always have. It is also the one thing your SEO strategy should always have! Search Engine’s algorithms are updated regularly to improve the integrity of Web search and people’s collective understanding and preferences will also constantly shift. Your SEO strategy needs constant revision to keep up with the times and make sure you also keep a close eye on your competitors and what keywords they are ranking for!

SEO marketing tips: Sign up to regularly blog updates such as the SEO Works blog, SEO Global Network blog, Google Webmaster Blog, Matt Cutts’ Blog, SEOmoz blog and other industry blogs to keep abreast of changes in the Search Engine Optimisation industry.

Forgetting the oil change

SEO is not a ‘set it and forget it’ activity – you need to constantly be testing, improving your content and updating your content, focusing on your link building strategies, posting on your social media pages and monitoring your Web analytics. This is one of the most costly SEO mistakes. Your analytics statistics should be checked regularly. As long as you want your website to be making money for you, that’s how long you need to be working on your SEO!

SEO marketing tips: Sign up to Google Analytics Alerts which will send you emails daily, weekly or monthly. You can customise your alerts to advise you of any anomalies on your website such as a drastic drop in traffic.

Huh? What Just Happened?

Seasoned marketers are used to the uncertainty factor that exists in advertising. John Wanamaker famously said that “Half the money I spend on advertising is completely wasted. I just don’t know which half.” That dilemma is less of an issue in the online space, now that we have web analytics. With access to current and more meaningful date, SEO allows you to more clearly focus your marketing budget on your target audience, making SEO a very cost-effective marketing method, when properly executed.

SEO marketing tips: The cost of SEO should ideally be factored in your budget when launching a new website, relaunching an old website or redesigning a new website. It should be seen as an important part of internet marketing to promote your business and draw traffic to your website.

There are plenty of guides to SEO on the internet … but you wouldn’t just read a book about white-water rafting and then jump in a boat above Niagara Falls! DIY Search Engine Optimisation is possible if you had the time, money, expertise and resources but the secret to a successful business is doing what you’re good at and outsourcing what you’re not. Contact us today to find out exactly how we can help you get real results from your SEO investment … follow these SEO marketing tips and avoid these costly SEO mistakes!

* Visitors leaving a site after visiting the original page of entry

Black hat SEO uses techniques and strategies which do not comply with guidelines set down by Search Engines and may even be illegal cyber-activities such as directing visitors to malicious websites*.

Black hat SEO can achieve high rankings but it is a high-risk strategy and at the drop of a hat, your website can be banned or penalised by Search Engines.

White hat SEO is designed to be a longer term strategy designed to drive quality traffic to your website to increase your conversion rates. We explain some of the risks of employing black hat SEO.

What is black hat SEO exactly?

Search Engines may be a free tool readily available to web surfers but they are in the business of supplying high quality and relevant information and set strict guidelines to websites who want to be included in their search results. Black Hat Search Engine Optimisation is defined as techniques used to manipulate Search Engine results in an unethical manner. Some of the differences in SEO techniques employed by black hat SEO and white hat SEO companies include:

 
So if the hat fits … reporting black SEO hat activities is important to preserve the integrity of the Search Engines. It is also important to report sites using black hat SEO which are competing in your space – especially if they use malicious code and downloads and so forth. But don’t panic, more than likely they will not last long and your ranking will return.

Why you shouldn’t use a black hat SEO company?

Search Engines may not be able to pick up your black hat SEO activities straight away but your competitors can report you to Search Engines who take breaches of their guidelines very seriously. There are two consequences of breaching Search Engine guidelines; being banned means your site is removed from the index completely and being penalised means having your rank reduced. Here are the consequences using a black hat SEO company:

• High bounce rates**: A high Search Engine ranking may drive traffic to your website but if they can’t find they are looking for, the pages are poorly designed and the content is badly written, they will just bounce off the page.
• Loss of revenue: If your website is penalised and drops in the Search Engine rankings or is banned altogether, there will be decreased traffic to your website which will lead to decreased online revenue.
• Potential redesign of website: A Search Engine ban can take years to recover from and it is very costly. You may need to rebuild your site on a whole new domain.
• Brand building: Link spamming and black hat SEO techniques may artificially increase your Search Engine ranking but your website will be linked to or associated with other websites that do not present a professional image.
• Reputation management: Legitimate, professional businesses and organisations do not want to be associated with SEO companies who provide services to cyber-criminals.

And why you should use a white hat SEO company…

It is true that black hat SEO can achieve high rankings but it is a fly by night and get rich quick strategy. Ever heard of the saying there’s no such thing as a free lunch? So while initially you may enjoy high Search Engine rankings which may drive traffic to your website, if your website is penalised, you may lose months or years of revenue while trying to reverse the process and get your website indexed again.

Using white hat SEO may take your website longer to rank in ‘organic’ web searches but SEO is a long term strategy and endeavour. Black hat SEO seeks to get results quickly by using high-risk techniques but solid, long-term results can be achieved easily by following Search Engine guidelines. Professional SEO companies are experienced, dependable and operate like any other reputable business. Leave black hat to the criminals and bottom-feeders of the online world.

Contact us and find out why white hat SEO is the new black. SEO Works uses white hat SEO and long-term, proven and dependable strategies to drive high quality and targeted traffic to your website that are more likely to buy or purchase your product and maximise your online revenue. Alternatively, find out more about the SEO packages and SEO services we offer.

* Malicious websites may contain spyware or viruses.

** The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter a site (or a page) and then leave immediately.

Binghoo – Microsoft and Yahoo join forces

It was announced mid last year (29 July 2009) that Microsoft and Yahoo are joining forces to take on the Search Engine giant Google. It is potentially going to be an 80/20 world for the Search Engines we predict as early as 2012 with Binghoo finally presenting some decent competition to Google in the Search Engine wars … but does combining two ordinary Search Engines make one good Search Engine – time will only tell. The real beneficiary of this relationship could be Ask.com who may stand a chance if the merger proves to be a bad move.

End to Site Explorer

The news is that the merger will see the end of Site Explorer. Sadly the portal to link information is likely not to be supported once Yahoo stops investing in maintaining their web index. Thankfully, SEOmoz have released their newly developed link popularity checker and backlink analysis tool aptly named Open Site Explorer.

Soft launch of Google Caffeine in the next few months

Google made an announcement late last year that the launch of a new Search Engine algorithm Google Caffeine would be launched early this year. According to reports, at this stage, it is only one data center and expected to roll out over the coming months.

Different to Google’s regular updates, our research has indicated that it will be a restructure of the calculations that Google uses to try and speed up the Google Search Engine and may not necessarily be a major change to the Google ranking algorithms. Google is unlikely to make a huge announcement that the algorithm has been changed.

Google Personalised Search is here to stay

Google Personalised Search launched in December 2009 is apparently here to stay. Personalised search uses your web searching and viewing history to deliver search results based on the things you’ve searched for on Google and the sites you’ve visited so you are served the search results that are most relevant to you.

Although the roll out in December received little attention, this is definitely shaping up to be a hot topic for 2010. However, Google’s follow up announcement about their extension of Personalised Search options to users who aren’t signed-in to their Google account created another round of buzz in the SEO industry.

Depending on how Google implements Personalised Search in the coming year, this may have a major impact on SEO and local businesses as Search Engine results are tailored to each user based on previous web history. However it is interesting to note that although Personalised Search was officially launched late last year, it has been in existence for a while now with people in different regions getting different Search Engine results based on locality.

The significance for SEO companies is that there should be a renewed focus on geo-marketing and link building activities. Social media networks and cross promotional opportunities and tactics will continue to gain more relevance in generating organic traffic to websites as well as concentrating on developing great content that will result in return visits to websites.

Google Personalised Search has yet to make a major impact on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS) but both the SEO industry and businesses alike should see this is as a challenge and opportunity to develop websites that encourage brand loyalty, repeat purchasers and increased conversion rates.

The end of Real Time Search as we know it

On the other hand, Real Time Search is turning out to be a big fizzer. After only 1.5 weeks of launch, the Twitter real-time updates turning up in the Search Engines seems to have created more negative media attention than good. An eye tracking study of Real Time Search results done by OneUpWeb consisted of two key groups; consumers and information foragers. The study showed that:

• 73% had never heard of real-time results before participating in this study;
• consumer intent drives first fixations: the consumer group averaged 9 seconds to the view the real-time results, where as the information foragers took a full 14 seconds;
• only 55% of the participants could easily find the real-time results;
• the majority of the participants surveyed were indifferent to the real-time results.
• In an effort to get the jump on its Search Engine competitors, Google may have released Real Time Search too quickly. It is already turning up less and less for search queries and it probably won’t be long until the engineers at Google go back to the drawing board.

Google Buzz creates no buzz

Google Buzz was launched in early February this year. It is Google’s push into social media and is integrated with your existing Gmail account. An autosuggest feature nominates people to follow who are already connected to your account. Buzz appears as an extra tab in your Gmail inbox and allows you to post content and share files from Twitter, Picasa, Flickr and Google Reader.

After the initial launch, Google was forced to respond to public feedback and made some quick adjustments:

• The automatic following feature of your Gmail contacts was replaced with an auto suggestion feature.
• Google Buzz no longer connected with your public Picasa Web Albums and Google Reader shared items automatically.
• A Buzz tab was added to Gmail Settings so users could hide Buzz from Gmail or disable it completely.

It is yet to see whether Google Buzz will be able to take a chunk out of Facebook and Twitter’s market share or whether Google has left their run too late.

Launch of Google URL shortening service

Google have now launched an URL shortening service. The service is called the Google URL Shortener although it is currently only available for Google products and not for broader consumer use. This timely announcement was made only one day before bit.ly launched their PRO service. This will be a wait and see if Google can compete with bit.ly who has already gained a huge market share for their products.

At SEO Works, our SEO Experts are constantly doing research, reading blogs and websites, going to SEO conferences so we can keep abreast of changes in Search Engine Optimisation and provide you with the best SEO Services. Contact us if you are interested in Search Engine Optimisation and our SEO Consultants will help you increase your Search Engine visibility, increase your conversion rate and maximise your return on investment.