Script:

Welcome

10 year deal has been completed and is designed to accelerate innovation by combining both companies to try and compete with Google.

It will essentially use the Bing algorithm and paid search platform, but use aspects of Yahoo’s technology to help other aspects of the business.

What does Bing offer that google doesn’t?

On first impressions, it does pretty well, visually stimulates more than Google with the lifestyle images set as the background.

They have also introduced a feed: search query with allows your to refine your search to a RSS feeds only. Similar to Googles ‘blog’ search I assume as most blogging software supports RSS.

You can also refine your search with file types searchs, So if you were to type in something like filetype: pdf + simple seo guide you can see that it returns the creare SEO PDF , In fact so does Google with the same query.

I came across a interesting website while researching the pro’s and con’s of bing which compares the two. If you go to www.bing-vs-google.com you can search both international searches.

So lets test with some recent news, Michael Schumacher is stepping in for a injured Felipa Massa in the F! world championship, so lets query both with ‘Michael Schumacher Ferrari’ and see which returns the best results….

Results— Pretty similar

Conclusion – They will have to work hard to challenge the superpower of Google and its monolpy on the search industry, Also all you SEO will have to watch carefully and start to perfect the Bing optimization for yourselves and your clients.

Thanks and Goodbye.

There are two key ingredients that have the potential to make a website a success, these principle elements are design and content.

One of the main reasons why people choose to use the internet is because it offers them the opportunity to access information quickly and easily. For this reason it is important that the content within a clients’ website offers information about their business in a format that is easy to retrieve.

From an SEO standpoint, one way that this can be achieved is by having a high key word density on each page. This not only means that search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN can crawl these pages, picking up on key phrases and boosting rankings for their SEO. But, it also allows users to navigate around the website, accessing suitable information that they want to read.

Alongside a professional design and good usability, potential customers will be able to move around a website efficiently.

From a writer’s perspective, the content that we add to our customers’ websites must always contain good grammar and spelling. Not only does this reflect upon the author but it also has an effect upon the integrity of the business who owns the website.

We try not to write reams of text for any of the pages on our websites, all content is kept concise and to the point. The main reason for this is because it has been proven that those websites with a high saturation of text also have increased bounce rates.

Obviously we understand the importance of businesses communicating their main points to their audience and so we tackle this by offering our clients Videos, whereby a presenter can explain their products and services.

Our web designers and content writers work closely with customers to create products that are suitable for them. As a result of this we begin to understand a little about their ideals and target audience. One thing that we try to do is to write in a way that will engage this audience. We develop web sites for a range of industries each with their own idea of how they are portrayed. We write to reflect their needs and with this in mind always consult with the customer about the style and tone that they want their text to incorporate.

Put simply, here at The Creare Group we always try to create web content that reflects our clients and makes accessing information simple yet effective.

The other day I overheard a conversation / ongoing argument between two colleagues. One said that the reason our websites climbed up a few notches in Google for the competitive keywords Web Design and Search Engine Optimisation was entirely down to our new venture in Video Blogs the other said it was due to the internal architecture of the sites being improved.

I can’t help believing that the reason our sites have climbed the rankings is for both these reasons, and a few more besides.

I started to think that Search Engine Optimisation is a little like making an elaborate cake where the ingredients keep changing and improving to make the recipe richer and the cake better.

There is no one answer to achieving good results in SEO. There are many different ‘ingredients’ to consider.

Good Keyword Research

Keyword research can be a tricky one. Often the keywords that you may consider to be the best are not the ones your customers’ would use to search for your site. There are many tools that help you choose keywords; Wordtracker and Google Adwords Keyword Tool are some of the better ones available.

Once you have a list of keywords you should do a KOI (Keyword Opportunity Index) report. This should give you a list of keywords that have low competition but high search volume.

Internal Architecture

I like to think of the internal architecture of a site as being like the foundations
of a house. You can build a house with shaky foundations but sooner or later
it’s going to start falling down. The same applies to websites.

If you build your site with the search engines in mind by making it easier for them to do their job: crawling, and then indexing the content. You’re closer to achieving a lasting presence in the search engines results.

Regular Interactive Content such as Videos and Audio

Regular interactive content helps with SEO because it can increase the ‘time on site’. This indicates to Google (and other Search Engines) that your site is a useful resource, and that people stay there once they visit it. Also Google indexes audio content now.

By placing videos on YouTube you can get more traffic to your site and increase the exposure of your videos.

We have also started to supply a transcribed version of our videos. This is for two reasons; one for accessibility so that deaf and hard of hearing people can still enjoy the content, and for Google to index the relevant content.

Have a Blog with Regular New Content

Blogs are an excellent tool for SEO. They provide regular new content (if updated! Note: Update your blog!) for Google to index. The real benefit of having a blog is to tell your customers and potential customers about your company and your products. You can quickly become an ‘expert’ in your field by regularly providing new content that is both informative and written with your keywords in mind.

Social Media

Ah, Social Media! This could be a blog post in itself; it’s such a massive subject! Social Media is a useful marketing tool to promote your business. With so many people now relying on Social Media to connect with others you’d be a fool to ignore it.

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon can create a vast number of links and visitors to your site.

Link Building Through Directories

Though directories are less important than they once were, industry specific directories can be really useful for getting relevant links. Be careful about the ‘neighbourhood’ of your chosen directory and you should be fine.

Link Building Through Asking Begging for Links from other Webmasters

This is my least favourite aspect of SEO. I must have written hundreds of emails to webmasters with the hope that they will add my link to their site, only for the request to be turned down, or, more usually, ignored. But, for the few that say ‘yes’ this can be a really valuable exercise for link building. Sometimes you get lucky.

I often bypass UK companies on this and concentrate on overseas sites where you are unlikely to be in direct competition with the site you are targeting. This will still give you a relevant link.

Blog Commenting

This is a bit of a grey area. Some SEOs consider blog commenting to be a form of spam. And it certainly has been abused so much so that the majority of ‘blog comment’ links are ‘nofollow’ links and almost entirely useless. However, I do believe that by reading and engaging with others within your field you can quickly become an ‘expert’. By writing well-informed and interesting comments about the post your link may be clicked on by a fellow reader. Reading blogs and keeping abreast of your industry is an excellent way of learning more about your industry.

Article Marketing

Article Marketing is a great way of getting keyword rich links within relevant content. Articles are distributed across the Internet via article sites. The content is also indexed quickly, giving faster results.

Press Releases

Press releases are an excellent way of gaining interest in your product or service. By writing them with your keywords in mind and placing keyword rich links within the copy you can get results quickly.

There is also the possibility that they may be picked up by the Press thus gaining you even more exposure.

Content Writing with SEO in Mind

Content that is both well written and full of keywords can be a difficult thing to achieve, but it is extremely important for SEO as well as conversion. Take time over your content it could be one of the most valuable things on your site.

So, there you go, one of these ‘ingredients’ alone won’t make your site go page one, number one, but a combination of some, or ideally, all of these will help your site achieve high listings.

There are many places online people can go to find information about a whole range of subjects they are interested in. With this in mind, there are intense levels of competition and pressure to ensure that your content is original.

For people who stumble upon your writing; whether it is through a blog, article, a press release or integrated into your web design, your writing needs to be new to gain the interest of your target audience.

So where do people find inspiration for fresh content?

Well, the Internet changes every single day and as more ambitious subjects are being developed, the most useful way to gain new knowledge and fresh content is through planning and research.

Many people choose to add new information to their web site for Search Engine Optimisation purposes and often forget that it also has to be informative and relevant to their audience.

One modern example that has occurred in recent years are social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Since these sites have taken off, many people are looking for ways to use these sites to their advantage. Because of the demand of information wanted by social media users, many people have provided articles and press releases based around this phenomenon alone.

With the amount of expansion that occurs online there is a vast amount of knowledge that people express through online marketing. The secret to fresh content is to look at what has been written previously, and the format and style it has been attempted to be expressed.

One aspect that writers face is the worry of repetition in their writing. However, all content is a rewrite of previous work so it is important to find a different angle and express it in your own individual style.

Reading, research and re-write are the keys to original content and can make inspiration come together to create pieces of writing that stand out from the rest.

Downloads:

simple-pie-example

Script:

Nick: Welcome SEO Video Blog – RSS Aggregators (PHP) My Top 3 and Simple Pie Tutorial.

James: If you have a blog installed on your website, its good from both a usability and SEO point of view to have your latest news aggregating on your HP.

Nick: Our last post shows how to burn your feed using feedburner, I would recommend that you use your feedburner feed URL where possible as it speeds up loading time.

James: Most aggregators allow you to display the title, date, description, author and thumbnails. It is an excellent way of showing google and other search engines you are adding to your searchable index and providing fresh dynamic content to your website.

Nick: My top 3 recommendations for aggregators are:
1.) : Simple Pie - www.simplepie.org
2.) Magpie RSS - http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/
3.) RSS Aggregator - www.rss-aggregator.com

Tutorial on how to set simple pie up…

James: Nick is going to show an example of using an aggregator:
http://www.crearesites.co.uk/simplepie

Nick: I have chosen to show simplepie as it is the simplest to use and set, up I have set up an environment at http://www.crearesites.co.uk/simplepie and the files will be available to download on the creare communications blog.

So starting at simplepie.org or The Creare Communications Blog download the files needed, unzip and just removed the simplepie.inc and index.php page as these are the only 2 files you need.

Open the index.php in your file editor or ftp client (dreamweaver), change the feed url so http://feeds.feedburner.com/crearesearchengineoptimisationblog and then ensure that it links to the .inc correctly.

Upload see feed displaying…

You can then edit your feed to display how you like, using CSS.

You can place this feed in your footer, sidebar or where ever your design permits.

“Content is King”: It’s a cliche everyone in the content-writing and SEO world will have heard at some point. There are pages and pages on the internet devoted to promoting this old adage, but not quite so much information available on what it actually is that goes towards making expert content. The ways people process information on the web varies greatly from how they might read a book, poem, or even a newspaper, so here are a few tips on how to produce quality content.

Be Clear — Whether you’re trying to write a witty blog post, an informative article, or a persuasive piece of product promotion, ideas must be communicated clearly.

Clarity begins with organisation, and although a detailed plan is not always necessary, noting down all the points you want to include in an appropriate order is a good start. In order to produce the best possible content, ensure you write naturally. A conversational style is often the most likely way to forge a connection with your reader, but don’t try too hard to sound funny or overly educated or you run the risk of alienating your audience. Keep it simple and easy to understand.

Be Concise — Studies indicate that by writing concisely, the usability levels of content can rise by up to 58%.

With this information in mind it is a good idea to focus on using short paragraphs and short sentences. By doing this, your writing will appear less intimidating, easier-to-read and much faster to process.

Avoid Jargon — Part of writing clearly and concisely is ensuring that any kind of unnecessary technical or business jargon is avoided. There is no need to ‘procure’ something, if you can ‘get’ it, and no need to ‘utilise’ if you can ‘use’ – lengthy, wordy explanations don’t appeal to web users, who have less patience than other audiences, and who will simply click away from your page if they get bored. Steer clear of irritating clichés and any potentially irrelevant information.

Target Your Audience — Communication is the central aim of all writing, and your content should be targeted at communicating a specific audience. From adults looking for the latest in quality home improvements, to students researching the best ways they can use the internet in a recession, make sure you know who you’re writing to. Good content is not about showing off how well you can write, but about your ability to make words mean something to a particular person. Any audience must be able to identify with and understand what you are telling them.

As one participant in an influential study into web users’ browsing habits said: “You can’t just throw information up there and clutter up cyberspace. Anybody who makes a website should make the effort to organize the information”. It’s not a difficult task to spend a bit of time on, but writing expert content can make all the difference to your site’s success.

Currently, there are a wide range of websites focussed upon connecting people and businesses, examples of these sites include LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

At first sight it may appear that these sites are the domain of teenagers, yet business owners and PR people should take note; coupled with techniques such as press releases and blogging, social networking can play an important role in any online marketing campaign.

Most recently, Twitter has proven to be beneficial to both large corporations and small businesses. It differs from Facebook and LinkedIn as it allows people that do not already know one and other to connect.

There are various benefits of social networking sites such as Twitter, particularly when looking to increase the traffic to a website.

It enables businesses to build up ‘followers’ who can then be directed to blogs, industry specific news feeds, articles, press releases or websites, through links added into the continuous updates.

From a business perspective it is a useful tool for companies looking to engage with their target audience. It can give a business a voice and make consumers feel as though they are part of a community.

Online marketing techniques such as press releases, blogging and articles shouldn’t be forgotten, they are still important when increasing rankings in search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

Specific keywords and phrases related to a business can be incorporated into this literature, linking back to a business’ website. This helps to boost rankings in the search engines which in turn can increase the traffic to a website.

Alongside other SEO techniques, social networking sites have proven to be useful as part of online marketing campaigns. Utilising various methods could help your business to reach the top spots in the search engines.

Explanation of the Google Feedburner service and a tutorial on how to set your feed up via a Google Account. You can see all our web design and search engine optimisation videos on our youtube channel at www.youtube.com/crearegroup.

Video Script:

Hi and welcome to our SEO video blog, This week we are going to discuss the benefits of using Google Feedburner and demostrate how to set up a Feedburner account via a Google Account.

Google Feedburner originally just ‘feedburner’ is a free service that is designed to help you make the most of your RSS feed from your blog or similar.

The main benefits of feedburner are:

1.) It allows you to keep track of the amount of subscribers you have on your feed.

2.) It allows you to move the URL of your blog or site, but keep the same feedburner address meaning you don’t run the risk of losing readers.

3.) The feedburners  XML platform is browser friendly, meaning that you can a wider potential audience.

4.) The feedburner system allows uses to subscribe via email alerts, so you can directly update your readers directly into their inbox.

5.) Possible the reason for myself using the platform, is that it re-hosts the feed, which reduces the stress on your server, meaning loading times are reduced. It also means that you can easily aggregate multiple feeds onto a web page without it slowing down loading time.

Demo:

If you open up Google.co.uk and type feedburner and select the result feedburner.google.com, you are then promoted to log in using your google account.

Once inside you can add the feed of your URL, so if we use the one generated by our wordpress installation which is : http://www.crearecommunications.co.uk/news/feed.

It then prompts you to suggest a feedburner URL, find one thats not taken of works well for your company and click next.

Once inside you can use the various options to analysis and optimise your feed. Have a look around and see your analytic stats, you also have the option to edit your feeds as mentioned earlier.

You can now source your feed in the <head> of your document by using the following code:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”Search Engine Optimisation Blog - SEO Blog RSS Feed” href=”http://www.crearecommunications.co.uk/news/feed” />

Thanks for watching.

I’ve held off writing about Microsoft’s new search engine because when it was first released in June it seemed to be premature to write an article about something that I’d not used myself.

My first impressions of Bing were (and still are) “Wow, the photos look amazing”. The cleanness of the interface is great; I like the simplicity of it. However upon further inspection I can’t help thinking Bing has a long way to go before it takes over from Google.

The search results for simple queries such as ‘Plumber Leicester’ give results that seem to be based on domain name rather than the content of the site. The number 1 site has almost no content whatsoever, except a bit of spammy stuff in the footer and some lists about what the company do. The second listing has been suspended by BT (or hacked?), the third listing is Freeindex (a directory). All pretty useless.

search results in Bing

Compared to Google’s results for the same query this seems like stepping back in time. Yes, there are some of the same search results in both lists, but the first search result in Google has more copy on the page, and although the site isn’t a complicated one, it tells a potential customer far more about the company and what they do that Bing’s number one listing.

Search Results in Google

All this leads me to believe that Microsoft needs to work a lot harder to get the core of their service right before rolling out extras such as the shopping search and xRank.  Google have built up their products over time, and their search results are on the whole the best. I really want Bing to do well, because it is unhealthy for any industry to have just one major player, as we have at the moment with Google. But, until the competition bring out something that works as well as Google, or even better than them, then I don’t really think Google have much to worry about just yet.

Nick and James explain the benefits of using a .htaccess file and Mod Re-writes to generate SEO friendly URLs.

.htaccess code:

RewriteEngineOn

RewriteCond %{HTTP HOST}!^www.domain.co.uk$[NC]

RewriteRule^(.*)$http://www.domain.co.uk/$1[R,L]

Options+FollowSymLinks

RewriteCond %{THE REQUEST}^.*/index.php

RewriteRule^(.*)index.php$http://www.domain.co.uk/$1[R=301,L]

Other .htacess commands for Apache PHP servers:
http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/mod_rewrite-tips-and-tricks.html

Script:

Nick: Hi and welcome to our SEO video blog, we’re Nick and James from the Creare group.

To day we are going to go through the Mod Re-write function for Apache PHP servers and how to create SEO friendly URL’s.

James: So this is how you want your domain to display:

http://www.domain.co.uk/

There are variations that can get cached by the search engine bots for example:

http://domain.co.uk
http://www.domain.co.uk/index.php

Nick: So we do this to stop the search engines treating the same content as the 2 different pages. I have seen index pages and defaults pages that have picked up different PR (Page Ranks) to the root directory. This isn’t good practice and it also mean that any incoming links are re-directed back to the root directory.

James: So in order to use the Mod Re-Write settings, you need to ensure that your server has mod re-write enabled. We use one and one and fasthosts, both their re-seller packages and dedicated servers which are supported on their.

What you have to do to use the mod re-write settings is to create a .htaccess file, which is uploaded to the remote view.

Nick: There are 2 write conditions, the first re-directs back to www.domain.co.uk/ and the other re-directs away from /index.php.

I will show you a quick example of this now on Creare Communications. If we have a look at creare communications and remove the www. press enter we can see that it re-directs back to www.crearecommunications.co.uk and if we add index.php on the end it also re-directs back to the root.

James: Thanks Nick, the code that we used for that example is available on the blog post and can be copied and posted.