WHAT OUR SERVICE INCLUDES

We will build you a blog integrated within your domain and in addition we’ll ensure your articles and blog posts are included in all the major social bookmarking sites and blog directories.

WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES?

In short, its a great way to increase your web site traffic AND improve your search engine rankings (Full details and the background to this and the benefits are included here)

What we’ll do for you:

The Blog will use Wordpress technology - the most effective blogging platform for features and SEO compliance

The blog will match your website design - so your visitors will have the same look and feel between your blog and your site, and will be able to seamlessly navigate between the two.

We’ll set up your blog with a series of categories and other content areas specific to your needs (It can include video and image content)

Options will include - calendar, blogroll, keyword clouds, comment feature, trackbacks

We’ll ensure a RSS subscription and social bookmarking options are included.

We’ll provide telephone assistance to get it working well for you

Every month we bookmark your article or blog post to 6 social bookmarking sites
(This could be the same article or blog post or a new one created by you)

We’ll ensure that the article gets ‘tagged’ correctly with the relevant keywords - so people doing keyword searches at these sites will find your link

In addition we’ll ensure you are included in all the major Blog directories

NEED MORE INFORMATION?

please call Jan Klin on 01928 788100 or email at jan@janklin.com

YOUR INVESTMENT

£495 plus £95 per month - plus vat

NOTE: If you decide you dont want a blog, but still want all the advantages of social bookmarking, we can replace the blog production with ‘article’ production. What this means is that we would create a keyword/backlink rich article for you, include it in a relevant place on your website and apply the social bookmarking process to it.

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What I hope to do in the post is provide you with a practical self contained strategy which will have a large impact on your website traffic and visitors.

Each of the items discussed here - blogs, links, social bookmarking - are very important items in themselves for increasing your website traffic, but used together in a coherent way, it really is a case of one plus one plus one equals five (or maybe even seven!).

So, lets discuss them one by one, then we’ll show how to interlink them into a coherent online strategy.

BLOGGING

The benefits of blogging are well understood - but I’m going to repeat them nevertheless:-

-Firstly, from an online marketing perspective, what you want is a blog which is part of your domain and integrated in your site. That is, not externally hosted but actually a part of your site. (Wordpress.org is what we use for our clients).

The reason for this is that the search engines will see this as part of your site (eg www.yourdomain.com/blog) - so the links into it (good blogs will always attract links naturally) will count towards your Google Page Rank. Also if you are regularly adding new content to your website search engines will see this as a positive factor.

- As already stated providing you offer value added content on your blog (educational information about your industry, your services, recent legislation; tools and useful articles people can use to help with their business etc - there’s no shortage really) you will attract links naturally which will bring visitors directly and add to your Google Page Rank.

(Incidentally, another neat idea is to create ‘product reviews’ where you can objectively discuss the pros and cons of specific products, allow customers to comment -moderated of course - with a link back to the specific product on the website)

-Also your blog, by definition, will be text and keyword rich so naturally disposed to getting good rankings (many people find their blog ranks higher than their main website) and the major blogging platforms - Wordpress, Typepad etc - automatically generate metadata in a search engine optimised format.

- The final point is that RSS sign up to your blog and social bookmarking options are a standard part of the technology, and these two items again are great tools for automatically keeping you in touch with your clients and prospects and increasing your web visibility.

So, in short, blogs are good for you. They will increase you search engine rankings and increase your direct traffic. But read on….
(Incidentally if you dont have the time to set one up your self we can do it for you - Blogs and Social Bookmarking Service)

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

What is social bookmarking? Its very similar to using bookmarks in your browser for sites you want to remember - the difference is its web based so everyone can see your ‘favourites’ and you can see everyone elses.

There are many different social bookmarking sites, all with their own features and quirks. Some of the more famous ones are del.icio.us and Digg, in fact you can see the top 30 here.

Digg allows you to rate articles and the more highly rated the article becomes the higher it rises in the rankings. Del.icio.us is different again in what it does - the important thing is its other people providing comments on your articles/blogs.

So how will this help with your web traffic and how can you go about exploting these sites?

There are two ways, the first relates to search engine optimisation (SEO). The fact that you have links from these sites to your blog will have an impact on its (and your websites) rankings. (NB Some of these sites - not many as it happens - use ‘nofollow’ in the link meaning that the google spider will not follow and therefore not pass on any ‘link juice’. So if this is you sole purpose in using them then you need to use ones which dont use ‘nofollow’. There’s a list here.)

The other reason of course is that they will drive traffic directly. These are very popular sites - the top 10 account for around 20 million visitors per month so having visibilty on them is a great way to generate visitors to your site/blog. Tagging your articles/posts with the correct keywords will enable searchers at these sites to find your link directly.

An example of how this works can be seen on this blog - you’ll see lower down you have the opportunity to ‘bookmark’ this article through several of the important bookmarking sites. If you did this my blog would get more visibility and an all important link.

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER

So, imagine having links from these sites to your own. It will help boost your search engine rankings and also bring additional direct traffic.

The process to implement this is quite straightforward:-

1. Build a blog (integrated with your website)
2. Write useful articles/content for your blog
3. Encourage people to ‘bookmark’ you - like I do in this blog
4. And…(very important!)….Get someone (eg us) to ‘bookmark’ your blog articles with all the major sites.

If you dont want to do it yourselves we can do any, or all, of this for you in a very SEO advantageous way:-

Here are the details of the service we offer - Blogs and Social Bookmarking Service

Either way you should get it done - it will make a big difference to your online marketing.

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Its a well known statistic that around 90% of clicks happen at the first page of Google (more for some keywords) and that around 3%-4% happen on page 2.

What that means is that by moving from page 2 to page 1, in broad terms, you will increase your visits twenty fold! - and in some cases much more particularly if you can get into the top 5 positions.

I’ve also noticed there are an awful lot of websites on page 2 which just shouldnt be there. They should be on page 1. I’ll give you an example in a moment but the point I want to make is that if you are on page 2 for some of your important keyphrases, it may be that you have to do very little to get elevated to the first page. There are some factors to look at below to help you assess this but first an example.

Do a Google search for ‘ground source heat pumps’ (incidentally - if you go to ‘Google Trends’ you’ll see this term has been rapidly growing in importance over the last 12 months). You’ll see that www.gshp.org.uk - The Ground Source Heat Pumps Association - is languishing half way down page 2 (surely they cant want to be there given that their sole reason for being is to inform people about heat pumps!).

What they have got going for them is lots of inbound links (177), represented by a Google Page Rank of 5 and their domain is around 4 years old. Basically all the essentials to get a good ranking. We used to say if you have a PR 4 some basic on-page SEO is all you need to get a top 3 ranking. Its not quite as simple as that nowadays but you would certainly expect to quite easily move this site to page 1 with some basic on-page SEO. In fact that’s all they need to do - get properly structured tags (they dont even have a meta description and keyword tag!), get a few more paragraphs of text with a few more repetitions of the keyphrase in question. Possibly a few anchor text based links from some other of their pages and that should be it. It’ll certainly be enough to get them to page 1 and possibly in the top 5. Two hours work at most.

So the important factors, if this is something which you are affected by:-

1. Check you backlinks and Page Rank - If you have a PR 3 or above then, generally this is enough to get on to page 1 If…..
2. You domain is at least two years old, and….
3. you have at least 250 words of text on your ranked page.

If you satisfy these 3 points it should be just a matter of tweaking your meta tags (see Lesson 6 and Lesson 7) adding a paragraph or two of text and repeating the keyphrase a few times. Possible adding a few anchor text based links from other pages.

Obviously each case is different and so much depends on the degree of competition, but in 9 times out of 10 cases this is all we have to do for our clients.

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