As a business, in order to find success online it is important to have a fully functional website.

Firstly, it should tell customers exactly what your company does and secondly, it should show them exactly how they could purchase your products and services online.
It is also essential that you are aware of how you can market your site effectively, making it visible to your customers in the search engines.

Online developments, particularly in relation to search engines such as Google, have meant that there is now a wide range of ways that businesses can implement a successful marketing campaign, using a variety of techniques.

Through Google’s Universal Search, consumers can search using particular specifications including, videos, articles, reviews and forums. This could potentially attract a wider audience to your site, boosting ranking in the search engines and increase your companies business.

Creating videos about your business or related to the services that you offer, not only enables you to target a wider audience but it also offers a more personal, user-friendly service for the user.

Employing an SEO strategy to your site is one way of increasing its’ traffic, professional online marketing agencies could offer the best advice as to how you can get yourself noticed online.

I often wonder at the marketing skills of technical optimisers and do we (the optimisers) get caught up too heavily the listing and not look at a customers site objectively enough? Within the Creare SEO department we implement all sorts of techniques to ensure all aspects are addressed and i believe that some people are naturally better at this than others.

I also believe that PPC click campaigns allows optimisers to take and step back and look at such important factors in terms of conversion rate and making sure that the site provides the user experience required. At Creare any issues regarding this are minimised and this is why;

Creare specialise  in marketing, web design and SEO which means that we have the required skill sets to offer a fantastic service for all out customers whatever your industry.

As in previous posts, we are going to look at positive strategies for increasing traffic to your web site. In this brief article we will look at the areas of concern and the separate sections of your web site which need to be optimised.

* In site Optimisation
* External Backward Links
* RSS Feeds
* News Articles
* Forums

- In Site Optimisation -

1. This area covers internal key phrase rich links to pages within your web site, you should link key phrases to the page your working on, a related product page, external related sites and contact pages.
2. Headings are also important and should replicate you page title almost, Only one H1 tag on each site is also important.
3. Meta Tags (description, Keywords) should be individual for each optimised page and removed from un-optimised pages.
4. The content within you site is highly important and remember that ‘content is king’.
5. Layout out within sites is also very important, use div classes if possible and replace images with classes where possible.

- External Backward Links -

1. Create Key phrase rich backward links from your customers as you probably have control on the phrases returned more than ever.
2. Directory sites, whether this be in a general directory site or one specific to your industry.
3. Related sites - this could be a product manufacture that your company supplies, they usually have larger PR and will be glad to have a distribution center for their products linked on their site.

- RSS Feeds -

1. RSS feeds offer the chance for interested users to subscribe to the content that you post on your web site.
2. Also provides search engine friendly articles that can be traced back to your site.
3. Give the user something worth reading and they will read it, again content is king, if they like what they read then they will return time after time.

- Forums -

1. Forums are a great way of sharing industry news, with colleges and other industry buffs.
2. A way for starters in an industry to ask questions of the professionals and also gives a sense of realisum for the web site user, not just a robot.

Search Engine optimisation & search engine marketing by First Search SEO

Web 2.0 has had many success stories as the integration between web content and user interaction becomes evermore seamless. However, the most popular of this new series of web technologies is blogging – a means whereby users can post articles and opinions on any topic of their choosing on their own web space. The result of this is an online community where posters and readers can post comments, and more importantly, hyperlinks. As a SEO strategy, this can be a very effective method of communicating not only the existence, but the significance of your website in the industry, especially if corresponding blog posts speak favourably of your site. The major benefit is that blogs can reach very wide audiences if implemented and promoted correctly.

Imagine a situation where everytime you had an idea to share, 5,000 people who trust your opinions see it in your blog. The majority of those 5,000 people also write blogs in your field or related fields. Some of those bloggers may frequently mention your site on their blogs, and they themselves could have thousands of subscribers. Within a short space of time your blog could have the attention of hundreds or even thousands of users. Where people go search engines follow, so if many users link to your blog, it will also boost the search engine ranking for other parts of your site.

It is important however that your blog postings avoid ‘commodity status’, which includes short comments on somebody else’s work, and simply posting for the sake of generating optimised keywords. Posts must maintain quality, originality, depth and have its content driven by the user’s expertise in order to acquire popularity amongst web communities. I have studied in-depth, the work of usability expert Jakob Nielsen, and I have found an interesting article of his; Write Articles, Not Blog Postings, which encapsulates this matter perfectly. He asserts that leadership (or prevalence of the poster’s expertise) in blog postings, blog-post variability and regularity are of high priority in gaining trust and recognition. I believe he wants to encourage you to personalise your posts, by giving your own opinions and judgements on your subjects to provoke interest and even raise debate.

He also points out however, that if the content isn’t the main concern for your site, and you simply want to communicate simple answers to your user’s questions then “you should comply with the bulk of content usability guidelines: be as brief as you can; use bulleted lists and highlighted keywords; chunk the material; and use descriptive headings, subheads, and hyperlinks.” These guidelines all fall nicely into the standard Search Engine Optimisation requirements. I believe it is therefore essential that blog postings for SEO manage to achieve a balance where expertise and content usability can work together simultaneously to bring the right users to your site.

One of the chief objectives of Web 2.0 and web logging is to make the Internet a more community-based entity, and by using the blogging practice in the most effective way for your website, you can take advantage of this. This doesn’t just mean writing articles on your chosen topic and leaving it there, but it means interacting with the wider community. Quoting and linking to other popular bloggers, leaving useful comments on other related blogs, writing articles for other blogs and actively soliciting & replying to comments can really push users towards your blog.

With RSS feeds also enhancing the likeliness of your articles being noticed and linked to, it will only improve your website’s probability of being picked up by Search Engines, making blog posting a valuable resource for optimisation.

Reference:

Wall, A M (2007). Search Engine Optimisation Book. California: Aaron Matthew Wall. 87-91.

Jakob Nielsen (2007) Write Articles, Not Blog Postings [online] available from <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/articles-not-blogs.html> [15 January. 2007]