Script:

Welcome to this weeks SEO Video blog, We are going to take a look into Google’s new search based keyword tool.

It is designed to automatically choose keywords that fits your websites content and suggest phrases to improve your Adword campaign.

The idea behind the tool is to increase the conversion rate and try and reduce your monthly spend. The searched based keyword tool analysis the content of your site and returns results based on what it finds within your site.

Based on search traffic, it suggests phrases that currently may not be in your campaign, but still generate large search volumes. So rather than you having to know your market online, Google suggested phrases that it thinks are related to your company.

Lets have a look at the tool in action and see what it suggests for a couple of Creare’s clients.

The first client we can test it for is a large website with nearly 6000 pages indexed, Hunts Office Furniture. You can see that it looks through the content and it shows which page it extracted the information from, along with the search volume, competition and suggest bid price.

The first result shown is:

furniture sale - 8,200 searches - $1.13 per click - extracted from: Special Offers : Showroom Clearance Sale : ICE Glass M

Secondly we are going to have a look at a slightly smaller website, PCS Maintenance - Plumber London with 69 indexed pages, It works relatively well picking keywords which we are targeting in the organic campaign.

The first result shown is:

Worcester Bosch - 12,000 searches - $0.50 per click - extracted from: Combi Boiler, Gas Boiler, Worcester Bosch & Shower installations.

It seems to have recalled some quite good results, they seemed to have a good search volume and relatively cheap cost per click.

In conclusion it is another addition to a ever growing set of keyword selection tools, with all the options out there for choosing keywords, it has become relatively simple to choose the correct phrases for both organic or PPC campaigns.

Thanks for watching and please leave any comments or questions on the Youtube channel or supporting blog post.

Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year!

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.

YouTube Channel = http://www.youtube.com/crearecomm

Script:

Nick: Hi and welcome to ‘what are meta tags’, my name is Nick and I am currently an SEO developer for Creare Communications, I am joined by my colleague James who is a web designer also from creare.

James: Hello

Nick: We intend to discuss the SEO, design and marketing aspects of Meta Tags.

Nick: The META element provides metadata such as a document’s keywords, description, and author. Any number of META elements may be contained in the <head> of a document.

James: So, Meta tags have various purposes, today we often see them used by SEO companies to promote keywords behind the scenes of a website. But from a design point of view, clients can often see their meta description in the Search Engine results page or SERP . This means it is important that they are legible and most importantly that they make sense.

Nick: This is an important point because often bespoke content management systems are sometimes designed to generate meta keyword and meta description tags automatically from a page titles, tags or similar, This often means that they make little sense and are not user or search friendly.

Nick: Historically Meta tags used to hold a lot of weight and were vital for internal optimisation, it was exploited by optimisers and Google had to evolve their algorithm as to prevent this from happening, Google now takes into consideration a wide range of different variables designed to keep optimisers guessing.

James: Although we are saying that meta data is no longer a vital SEO asset, we still believe its worth adding them in for alternatives to Google and as previously mentioned the description tag is shown in the search results by all search engines including Google, meaning you can use this opportunity to connect with your user and write something to attract people to click your listing.

James: We like to traditionally use the following tags:
<meta name=”distribution” content=”Global” /> - <meta name=”rating” content=”Safe For Kids” /> -
<meta name=”description” content=”" /> -<meta name=”keywords” content=”" /> 
<meta name=”author” content=” ” /> - <meta name=”copyright” content=”" />

Nick: So lets concentrate on the 2 most important tags, the meta keyword and meta description tag.

James: The Keywords tag is traditionally a list of keywords that you want your site to appear for in a search query.

Nick: I think the most important aspect to consider when writing a keyword tag is to be consistent with the rest of the internal optimisation on your site, so the search engine can see that your content reflects your chosen keywords.

James: As an example is we wanted to optimise for
•    air conditioning
•    commercial air conditioning
•    conditioning maintenance
You would separate each phrases and word with a comma as shown.
“Air conditioning, Commercial Air Conditioning, Air Conditioning Maintenance, Air, Conditioning, Maintenance, Commercial”

Nick: The description tag is similar, it will include all your key words but you also have to consider the way it reads and whether it catches the publics imagination. I would suggest that you include your clients company name and even the area that they are based in the meta description, This was users can immediately see whether the company fits their needs and location.

For example is you were to use the air conditioning keywords mentioned before you would write something like:
“’Your Company Name’ provides commercial air conditioning solutions throughout the UK, We also provide a maintenance and repair service for any air conditioning units that we supply.”

James: Despite the fact they no longer hold the weight as they previously did, they should not be overlooked. Any respectable web design or Search Engine Optimisation company should use meta data to its full potential.

Nick: We will be releasing similar videos in weeks to come both on Web design and Search Engine Optimisation. You can subscribe to our RSS feed or Subscribe to our youtube channel at youtube.com/crearecomm. Thanks For Watching.