How I got started.
I’ll make this brief but I am often asked, for various reasons, how I started out in SEO.
I worked for Hewlett Packard for many years as a Business Analyst. I left HP in 2001 and retrained as a Hypnotherapist. As I was always interested in the web and website design I built my own site, using wordpress, and then realised that a site without rankings was of no use whatsoever.
Therefore I spent many hours, plenty of experimentation (including websites that completely failed) and a fair bit of money (information can be pretty expensive) discovering the processes involved in SEO and before too long I was ranking in the top 3 of Google UK for ‘hypnotherapy’ and ‘hypnosis‘. In those early days you could get a top 10 ranking with good on page optimisation and just a handful of incoming links.
Now however the competition is much more fierce for just about every niche, however even though I no longer work on my hypnosis site I am pleased to say it still enjoys page 1 rankings for its main keywords, so it appears that good, strong historical SEO still counts a lot in the SERPS! (SERP – Search Engine Results Page)
Anyway, having had a fair bit of success with my own site a friend of mine asked me to do the same with his local cleaning business, and referrals came from referrals until before I knew it I was running a full time SEO business. So I’ve never had to make a cold call, or send out a sales email or letter as the business has always been there. Referrals are definitely the best way to grow your business!
Some of my clients have now been with me for several years and are rock solid at the top of the rankings.
I think that’s it, told you it would be brief.
Thanks….and if you would like to find out more about my services and how I can help you grow your business then please feel free to contact me and we can see what we can do.
Cheers
Mark
SEO Tips
SEO Tips
Just some random SEO Tips which may or may not be of interest. Thanks.
Using Search Engine Optimisation To Help Your Business
Understanding how your website’s rank in search engines has an effect on the success of your online site is important. This article includes tips that will help you rise to the top through search engine optimization.
You should know all about SEO before you start your journey. Websites are ranked by search engines based on proprietary algorithms. Read here to learn how to use these formulas to your advantage.
When ranking your website, search engines consider a number of different factors. One of these factors is the keywords found on your site and heading. Your website’s activity is important because search engines use this to rank it.
Your efforts at search engine optimization will be rewarded if you apply yourself with dedication and patience. You should add the keywords you are most concerned with all throughout the content on your site, including headings and page titles. This boosts the relevancy of your website to the search engines. Be open to new SEO ideas to implement, and always afford them enough time to start showing results. It is important to start with patience. Gather all of the information you can find, and put it to good use. Once you decide on the keywords for your site, place them in the text, as well as the titles and headings on your web pages. Doing all this will make your site seem more connected with the keywords and cause the search engine to rate it as more relevant. It is important to dedicate your time and patience if you want to improve your search engine ratings. Use all of the tips and suggestions you can to implement those ideas, and then give them some time to take effect. Once you have figured out which keywords you want to use, put them into your titles, headings and body of your text. This will increase the search engines’ perception of your site’s relevance. It takes time and patience to promote higher rankings on search results pages. Be patient, do your research, and give it time to work. Once you know your site’s primary keywords, you can add them to your text and page headers. This will let the search engines know that your site is about the keywords you chose.
You will not be able to simply pay for better ranking. If you have the money to spare, you can pay to be a featured result or have a sponsored ad, but the cost is usually prohibitive. Although you are guaranteed to show up at the top of the listings using this method, people know that they are sponsored links. The fact that they know they are paid links makes them less likely to click on them. Plus, the larger websites often grab these premium advertising locations.
You can greatly improve your site’s ranking by taking SEO to the next level with linking. Find ways to backlink to your own content, share your links on other websites, and exchange links with others in your niche. Or you can just contact the site owner and ask if you can have a link agreement and share with each other.
To generate profit, it is important to get targeted visitors to your website. Targeted visitors are basically visitors that you are most likely to covert into customers. You will also have plenty of visitors that are just browsers. When you get a random visitor, there is a very slim chance that they will help your business. Getting targeted visitors to your site requires using the proper keywords and advertising on similar websites.
If you are a business owner, you will miss out if you do not have a website. Having a website is great because sometimes your customers may want to purchase items from you online, especially those who are not able to get into your store. Look at your website as something you have to have and give it all the attention it deserves. I hope these SEO tips help in some way.
SEO Basics
You Can Have A Successful Business By Mastering The Basics Of Search Engine Optimisation
You do not need to operate your website for long before you get a feel for just how vital it is to get ranked favorably by the search engines. This is important if you want to see an increase in the number of visitors to your site. Read on for some sound advice on how to increase your search engine rating.
To start, you need to realize exactly what SEO is. Search engines use algorithms for determining where your site is ranked for specific keywords. The algorithms used get their data from search engine spiders which crawl all of the websites that are indexed. This is where the point of search engine optimization becomes clear. Search engine optimization manipulates the data that search engine spiders pick up, so your website will receive a higher search engine ranking than it would otherwise.
The position your site reaches on the search engine results page derives from a lot of different concerns. Your site is ranked based on keywords and how much activity your website gets.
Keep working to optimize your site for the engines, even if you aren’t seeing immediate results. Include keywords in titles and subheadings whenever possible. This is a great way to improve your site. Do not forget, though, that this will take time.
Sponsored or featured ads that typically appear above the listings on a SERP can be purchased. However, large corporations are generally the only type of business that can afford them. Most websites do not have the financial resources to pay for these placements.
There is much more to search engine optimization than just dropping word clusters into your website content. You can also get good notice and rankings based on how you link to external sites, link to sections inside of your own page and even more by having external sites backlink to you. Make the most of any associates you have at other websites to seek reciprocal link exchange agreements.
Your sales will come from targeted visitors who find your website. This type of consumer is specifically interested in your product. As a result, he or she will be far more likely to actually make a purchase than someone who has just happened to chance upon your site. Choose keywords that apply to the products and the type of customers you want. You will want to put these ads in places they will be visiting.
Being a business owner means you must do what is necessary to set your business up for success. A website is the best way to garner a wider customer base, so having one for your business is essential. Not all of your customers need to reside near your physical location. In fact, a website makes it easy to expand your customer base to include both those who sometimes come to your physical location, and those who simply purchase online. Either way, you give customers more ways to buy what you are selling. Look at your website as something you have to have and give it all the attention it deserves. You receiving that message is our main purpose, and we hope that your business does well with this newly acquired knowledge.
Google Bowling – Fact or Fiction?
Google Bowling is a concept that has been around for several years now. It is well understood that the search engines rank websites partly on the number of links pointing to that site, as they see it as a sign of popularity. However they are also concerned about site owners who create inbound links purely for the purpose of inflating rankings without the site necessarily being backed up with relevant content.
Google Bowling occurs when a competitor deliberately creates thousands of spam links pointing to your site in order to get that site slapped down the rankings.
Now, according to Google “There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index”
There is the worrying use of the word ‘almost’ in that paragraph!
So, my question to you is whether or not you have evidence that Google Bowling actually exists, whether factual or anecdotal, and if so what can be done about it?
Thanks
Mark
Web Traffic SEO
Is SEO becoming Spam?
Hi all. Well I own an SEO business, but recently, more than usual, have been inundated with SEO spam. I receive at least 2 phone calls per day, and maybe up to 20 emails, all from SEO companies promising me top rankings for my chosen keywords. Clearly they haven’t bothered to check my website as there is a clue in the name as to why I don’ty need their services.
There was a time when I would write back to some of these businesses and point out the error of their ways, but this also was to no avail as they would simply come back with an offer for me to outsource my work to them. So for a while now I have been ‘junking’ the emails and not hearing from them again.
The same goes for the cold callers, except they can be a little harder to get rid of unless I am feeling particularly belligerent, in which case they get the short shrift. (Ordinarily I’m very polite).
So, my question to you, is do you receive a large volume of unwelcome emails and cold calls from alleged SEO professional, and do you consider this to be spam? Would love to know your thoughts or experiences, so feel free to comment.
Thanks all
Mark
Web Traffic SEO
Content is King
Content is still King. And this is great news for us all.
With the recent Farmer’s Update on its ever changing algorithm Google has given a clear indication that content is king. This update targeted content farms and sites that had scraped articles from various sources, due to a mad rush to get as much content onto websites as possible as this benefited rankings.
Now then, Google’s ultimate aim is to give its users the best surfing experience. If a search is returning a stack of low quality, duplicated articles then this is clearly in no-one’s interest. And so the farmer update. Suddenly sites that had been top of the rankings found their traffic numbers plummeting. I know this from experience. I have many ‘tester’ sites, sites that I use to practise and test certain SEO techniques on, and one of these was a low quality scraper site. Its traffic dropped by 90% overnight!
This was something I have been expecting for some time, I was surprised how long this update had taken to materialise, and I must admit I was equally surprised at just how hard hitting it was on the traffic numbers. Fortunately this was just a test site which has been battered and bruised over the years with various experiments performed upon it!
However, and this is the key point, my other sites have seen an increase in rankings. This SEO site and my Hypnosis site have articles and content written only by myself, with maybe 1 article from the BBC. And reports from all around the web are exactly the same. Article directories and content farms have been hit hard; sites with well written, unique content have seen a rise in visitors.
Ezinearticles were reported to have been hit with a 35% reduction in traffic, even though they deny being a content farm, and so are putting measures in place to protect themselves. These measures include increasing the minimum word count to 400, increasing quality checks and no longer accepting articles via wordpress plugin and API. They have to do this to ensure their site is seen as a good source of quality content. I like Ezinearticles and have been submitting articles there for years (and will continue to do so) but in the last 2 years I have been using only them and not submitting the same article to the many, many other article directories, simply because I didn’t want a whole load of duplicate content pointing back at my site. And now I am glad I took this decision!
So, in my opinion, this is all good news. If you write useful, well written articles, blog posts and web copy then you have nothing to fear from the Farmer Update and everything to gain. Put some thought into what you write and thing about who is going to be reading it. There will be other major changes to the search engine algorithms over the coming years, of that you can be sure, but if you stick to the basics then content will always be King.
Thanks and speak soon
Mark
If you would like more information about SEO or details on how I could boost your rankings please use any of the methods on my contact page to get in touch. Alternatively browse my SEO packages.
Thanks!
Free Websites
Please note, this offer is now closed
This is going to be a really quick post….just to let you know that if you take out an SEO package with Webtrafficseo then I will also build and host a website for you.
Obviously this is going to be more pertinent to those who do not currently have a website, or perhaps those who are not happy with their current site.
The great thing about my sites is that they are built in weordpress…this makes them versatile, easy to handle and, most importantly, the search engines love them!
They are built using CSS (cascading style sheets) which makes it easier for the search engines to read your site, as they are looking just at the content, which is what they are interested in.
Anyway, email me if you are interested from my contact page
Thanks and speak soon
Mark
What is RSS
What is RSS?
RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. (Sometimes it is referred to as ‘Rich Site Summary’). Basically RSS delivers updated and changing content to anyone subscribed to that particular RSS feed. News feeds are very popular for instance as news is constantly updating throughout the day. If you were to have to continually monitor a news site for new information this would quickly become tedious and very time consuming.
The first thing you will need is an RSS reader. There are many of these and are either browser based or a downloadable application. Personally I use iGoogle and this is the most popular, although your could try My Yahoo, Feedster or Bloglines. They all perform the same function of notifying you if there is any new content in your subscribed RSS feeds. You only need one reader for all of your RSS feed subscriptions.
The obvious advantage of browser based RSS readers is that they are accessible from any computer, similar to an email hotmail account. Downloadable applications allow you to store the information on your computer, as you would your email in outlook.
Once you have chosen which reader to use you simply have to decide which content you would like to subscribe to. For instance a weather buff could subscribe to the BBC weather feed. Simply go to the BBC weather page and look for the familiar orange RSS feed button. Click on this to subscribe and all content will be delivered to your RSS reader. When there is an update you can just click on the headline to take you back to the new content on the subscribed website.
As the feed itself is more a means of notification than anything else, the information contained is very basic. Usually it is a clickable headline followed by a short description, and this is fine because that’s all we need. Some RSS feeds are set up to display the entire content of an updated post, but a brief headline is more common.
More and more sites are now taking advantage of RSS, and you can tell if a site has a feed as it will display the standard square, orange button on its page, or else this same button can be found in your url browser, usually on the right hand side.
From a search engine optimisation point of view, RSS feeds provide great backlinks to your site, and allow direct traffic from surfers interested in what you have to say. Blogging platforms are very popular with RSS as it is such an easy way to discover when your favourite blogger has added a new post. Social media also use RSS, so you could maybe subscribe to the feed of your favourites on Twitter, and be alerted as to when they post an update, rather than continually checking back to their page.
So why not subscribe to my updates now by clicking on the orange RSS icon above right, with the word ‘POSTS’ after it.
Thanks
Mark
Which Domain name?
Which Domain Extension?
Domain name is the address you type into your web browser ending in .com or .net or .co.uk ie google.com or google.co.uk or twitter.com Domain names can have a big influence on your SEO (search engine optimisation) and can influence the speed of indexing and how high your site is ranked, and can also have a very direct impact on how much money you can make.
It can be a difficult choice. You are looking for an SEO friendly domain. Keyword research is very important in any optimisation as ideally you are looking for a keyword that is searched for many times, but has low competition. This is an idealised view, and rarely seen so easily, but you get the general picture.
Once you have you a keyword or phrase it is important to use this phrase when choosing a domain name. Although the search engines haven’t come out and admitted it, all the evidence points to the fact that they see keywords and phrases as an important factor in ranking.
There are three categories of keyword matching options. Exact match, phrase match and broad match.
Exact Match matches your keyword or phrase in the domain exactly. For instance if your keyphrase is ‘bird seed’ then the exact match domain would be ‘birdseed.com ‘
Phrase match has the keywords in the right order in your domain but with an extra word also to create a new phrase. Using the bird seed example that could be ‘buybirdseed.com’
Broad match has the keywords in a different order, also with an extra word or two thrown in. For example ‘seedbirdonline.com’
There is also non keyword optimised domains, which don’t have any of your keywords included. Again taking the above example this could be ‘avianfood.com’
Generally non keyword phrases are most suited for companies with an established brand, or trying to build a brand. This doesn’t mean that these domains can not be used for your chosen keyphrase, it just makes it a little more difficult.
With all other ranking factors being equal then the search engines will rank in the following order: Exact, then phrase and finally broad.
In my next post I will discuss choosing the best domain if your keyword has been taken.
QR Codes
Posted by Markcb on December 24, 2010 · 3 Comments
What are QR codes?
They are a 2 dimensional code that can be scanned by a smartphone to automatically pull up information such as urls, phone number, videos, photographs, music, text etc.
QR stands for ‘Quick Response’ and QR codes were first developed in Japan by a company called Denso-Wave in 1994. In essence QR codes are 2 dimensional bar codes that can be read both vertically and horizontally. The codes consist of a grid of tiny squares. This allows for far more data to be encoded in a much smaller space than a conventional bar code.
QR codes are readable by smartphones and QR scanners. Initially they were used to track car parts in Japan, where they are very popular, but now they have a much wider commercial use within the digital world. They can be added to a business card or an email to send someone with a reader directly to your website.
So, whereas a bar code pretty much can only identify a product and needs a special device to be scanned, QR codes can embed much more information and trigger an action when read such as downloading a music file or launching a website directly on your phone.
Imagine how easy this make it for someone to go to your website, without the bother of actually typing in the url, especially useful if you have a less than memorable or difficult to spell web address.
Some popular uses of QR codes:
Contact information – add all your contact information including phones numbers, office address, website and email
Name tags: Add all your information to your name tag at a conference and colleagues can simply scan it to download all your details.
Art: Street artist Banksy has a piece of work in a disused railway tunnel in London which includes a QR code, when scanned this code takes you directly to his Wikipedia page.
Shop Windows: In the US Google is sending out QR code decals to small businesses on Google Places, to be placed in the shop windows for passers-by to scan.
QR codes are still fairly alien to most people, so make it a little easier for them by adding something of value. Don’t just send them to your website when scanned, maybe send them to a special offer page, just for users of QR codes, add something of value to encourage your users.
Feel free as always to comment or to add your own QR code uses below.
Thanks
Mark
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