Structuring your content to reflect your business, include your keywords and help your SEO is tricky.

You have designed your site, you have carried out keyword research, now comes the time to sit down and write the content. If you are like me sitting here now, you are probably wondering where do I start…?

Well, I’m hoping you have your list of keywords, and you have identified a list of long tail keywords to support these. Your long-tail keywords won’t be massively competitive, and are most likely to reflect your best selling products or services, they tend to be very industry specific and will usually convert better.

I would also advise typing your keywords into Google and checking them against Google’s Wonder Wheel. This will give you a spider diagram indicating other words Google associates with your chosen keywords. It would put you in good stead to try and integrate these into your copy.

Step two is how you structure these into your content. Firstly remember your content must be written for your audience, and structured to rank higher in search engines with maximum emphasis on your chosen keywords. I will outline 5 ways you should structure your copy in an attempt to fulfill this criteria.

1.Heading tags should be structured chronologically, your h1 being the most important and should include the exact keyword you are targeting. Working down the page to include the long-tail keywords you have identified.

2.Aim to use an exact match of your keyword within the first paragraph below your heading.

3.Following on from the above, the first reference to your keyword should be in bold for maximum effect.

4.Use a variety of your keywords, long-tail keywords and other phrases you have identified from Wonder wheel naturally throughout your text.

5.Finally optimise your page title tag with your main keywords. Google has a limit to the number of characters it will display so bare this in mind.

Only you can decide what is appropriate for your site, your clients and your readers. Every site will be different (different is imperative, make use of Copyscape to ensure you have no duplicate content).

Keep it professional but don’t be afraid to use a little humor, keep your paragraphs short and concise, include images to back up your message (don’t forget to make use of alt tags). Finally ask someone to read your copy before publishing it, to check for spelling and grammar, you want your copy to flow naturally, the more you read it the more you will over look mistakes.

Welcome to this weeks SEO video tutorial, we are going to produce a 3 part series on Google Places. This will include the setup, optimisation and analysis.

Google places as it’s now known has evolved over the years, previous being called local business center and Google maps.

The tutorial this week will show how to add your company to Google Places.

Go to Google.com/lbc

Add new business

Login with your Google account or register with a new account.

Fill in the information about your business and click next.

Select either claim listing or add new listing.

Add the service information about your company including videos, photos, area’s of business etc.

The last step is to verify your listing, You can do this a number of ways including, Phone, SMS and Postcard.

Once validated, you will see listing in the Google places dashboard

Thanks for watching, next week we will show you how to optimise your new Google places listing to improve the possibility of impressions.

SEO and CRO aren’t mutually exclusive, there is overlap…significant overlap.

Let’s say you have a website, you’re getting the traffic, but barely anyone is buying/registering/enquiring, well what do you do now?

You need to find the problem and fix it. That’s the essence of CRO.

Audience, trust, usability, design, keywords and many more elements need to be considered when trying to improve your conversion rate.

I recently discovered an ancient set of catacombs below Leicester, where I stumbled upon a treasure chest of useful conversion rate optimisation links. There were too many for me alone, so I have decided to share them.

But first, here is the link to Google’s free website optimiser, it will hold your hand as you try to test and improve your conversion rate, have a look/gander/perusal.

Basic way to conduct CRO

Path to conversion

Landing pages

Don’t overwhelm users with too many options

Quick CRO

Influencing users

Different types of landing pages

Scientific papers about CRO

CRO with a focus on SEO’s role

Step by step process for CRO

It’s common knowledge there are multiple techniques and methods to work on and improve your SEO and that the techniques have been split into two camps; White Hat and Black Hat.

But what does the colour of a hat have to do with SEO? Well the coloured hats are metaphorical for good vs bad, or in other terms search engine approved and non search engine approved.

A SEO tactic is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines guidelines and involves no deception. Essentially this means your site should be built to provide the visitor and search engines with useful, legitimate information which is presented clearly and is easy for the search engines to index.

There is a saying in internet marketing that “content is king” and this is the cornerstone of white hat SEO. There is nothing more valuable you can do to optimise your site for search engines than offer unique well written content. Therefore by doing so, you improve your own chances of ranking well as a search engines aim is to provide the most appropriate website for any given search to the end user.

The major benefit of white hat SEO is that it’s free, the majority of the work such as making the site easily crawlable, pages well structured with well distributed keywords and well placed internal links can all be considered and implemented in the design stage. Leaving such (still free) methods as link building and article writing for after.

As a basic rule with white hat SEO if you follow Google’s guideline of how to construct a website you can’t go far wrong. The only drawback with playing by the rules is that to reach the elusive top spots of the rankings can mean investing a lot of time and effort.

Which is where Black hat SEO comes in as some webmasters aren’t prepared to wait months even years in some cases to rank well. Therefore they attempt to ‘trick’ the search engines into ranking sites and pages based on illegitimate means. Whether this is through the use of doorway pages, hidden text, interlinking, keyword spamming or other means they are meant to only trick a search engine into placing a website high in the rankings. Because of this, sites using black-hat SEO tactics tend to drop from these positions as fast as they climb once it is noted the search engine underhand methods are at play.

Below are brief descriptions of the major black hat techniques used as it can be useful to be able spot these techniques. Creare in no way uses these techniques and does not advocate using these techniques because it can only end in tears for listing of your website.

Keyword Stuffing - This is probably one of the most common techniques of search engine spam. Essentially this is when a webmaster or SEO places a large number of the targeted keyword phrase in the page in the hope that the search engine will read this as relevant.

Hidden text - Text that is set at the same colour as the background or very close to it. While the major search engines can easily detect text set to the same colour as a background some webmasters will try to get around it by creating an image file the same colour as the text and setting the image file as the background. While undetectable at this time to the search engines this is blatant spam and websites using this tactic are usually reported quickly by competitors and the site sandboxed by the engines.

Cloaking - Is a method of presenting different information to the search engines than a human visitor would see. There are multiple methods of doing this but they are being discovered all the time. Even if you were to discover a method that currently works you still run the risk of a competitor discovering it and reporting you leading to an inevitable blacklisting.

Doorway pages - pages added to a website solely to target a specific keyword phrase and provide little in the way of useful content to a visitor. Generally the content on these pages provide no information and the page is only there to promote a phrase in hopes that once a visitor lands there, they will then go to the homepage and continue on from there.

Redirects - Redirecting, when used as a black-hat tactic, is most commonly brought in as a compliment to doorway pages. Because doorway pages generally have little or no substantial content, redirects are sometime applied to automatically move a visitor to a page with actual content such as the homepage of the site.

Duplicate Sites - When affiliate programs became popular many webmasters would simply create a copy of the site they were promoting, tweak it a bit, and put it online in hopes that it would outrank the site it was promoting and capture their sales. As the search engines would ideally like to see unique content across all of their results this tactic was quickly banned and the search engines developed methods for detecting and removing duplicate sites from their index.

There is a consensus that black hat SEO techniques are unethical, the ideas and content they promote certainly can be but to describe the techniques themselves as unethical depends on which school of thought you are from and how much you like to push the boundaries.

However, as mentioned several times in this article the implementation of a black hat SEO techniques may result in short term gain but overall it would be a poor choice to implement them. Like the saying goes “cheaters never prosper” and you’d be much better off playing safe, following the rules and guidelines of the search engines and employing white hat techniques if you wish to run a successful, long term, online marketing campaign.

How to use Google Analytics Event Tracking

Your internet marketing campaign and the structure of your website consists of many aspects that need fine tuning to ensure that you get the best return on your investment. You need to be able to analyse your website with a program like Google Analytics to gain an insight into how well or not visitors interact with your site.

Google Analytics Event tracking enables you to take your investigations that step further by giving you a way to see how people interact with internal components of your site and not just what pages they have viewed.

These actions taken within your pages are great indicators as to where the strengths and weakness within each page lies and will most likely be contributing to the success or failure in getting your visitors to complete the conversions you are expecting.

Google Analytics has a method integrated within it called event tracking that you can use to gain these vital statistics that you can use to create actions that need to be taken to improve your SEO.

As with any marketing strategy, before you move forward with this you need to look at your site in conjunction with the objectives set regarding your website in your business plan and decide what aspects of your site you want to find out more information about.

What is the data you wish to receive results for? What internal components be it Flash web videos or “on click” actions, will give you useful information and knowledge into how a visitor experiences your site? Can you think of certain actions that can be taken from the possible data you will receive? If the answer is yes then this event will be worth tracking.

Now you have decided which events to track you need to take action by adding certain code to the pages of your site.

Each page object, widget or video that you wish to track the interaction with will need to use the

_trackEvent ( ) coding.

Within the brackets of this code, certain aspects need to be added including the category ( name for tracked objects), the action you wish to track, and two additional optional aspects being the label and the value can be used.

Detailed examples of how this coding should be written for different types of actions you wish to track is provided by Google within their page “Setting up event tracking”

One example they provide is:

gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Downloaded', 'Gone With the Wind']);

This code would track how often a video was downloaded from a site.

With videos that are viewed on site you can not only track if visitors clicked  to play them, but also if they were paused or stopped half way through. This information will guide you into how useful your content is and may highlight areas in content that may need updating to make the site more engaging and relevant to what your visitors are looking for.

The tracking of quick contact forms displayed on the homepage that on click of the proceed button will copy and paste the details into the true contact form to complete the conversion, are great to track. You can identify from this what percentage of visitors who use this form carry on to make a full contact page conversion.

It is also an excellent method to see how many near conversion you have from your site and may highlight possible area for improvement within the conversion funnel process.

Websites for showrooms or actual shops where the customer would be more likely to just visit them can track on site actions to Google Maps to see if web visitors have gained enough from the site to make them want to know how to find their location.

Look at your site and see where you can use the google analytics event tracker to assess the quality of your web pages and improve on the goal and conversion rates you currently achieve.