Contact Jan Klin – 01928 788100 or email jan@janklin.com

Your investment: £295 per person plus Vat. Includes refreshments, lunch and electronic copy of all training materials

This course will provide you with all the tools, techniques and know how to get you to the top of search engines and deliver new business.

Importantly it will include the techniques we have developed over the past 10 years – techniques which work for our clients and provide the quickest way to get sucess

In over 35 years of business life I’ve attended many training courses, and your one day SEO training was one of the best. It went at a good pace, was full of really useful information and the USB stick you gave us is packed with help and assistance. I came out of it energised and ready to tackle SEO! Many thanks. Kathy Guest, Director, Marketing Results Ltd

Our Search Engine Optimisation training (SEO training) is now updated to include the new factors to consider for 2012 – including ‘Google Instant’ considerations, site speed, personalisation, real time search and integration with Social Media. In addition how best to take advantage of Google’s latest ‘Panda’ its ‘freshness’ update and Google + integration.

Who should attend?

Anyone involved in internet marketing wanting to get the very best results for their search engine marketing budget including sales and marketing managers, online marketers and consultants.

How will you benefit?

Apply the learning from this course and your website ranking and position will be boosted within the results pages of all the major UK and global search engines, maximising the marketing return on your website investment.

SEO Course Module 1: Introduction and finding keyphrases
• An outline of the ‘best practice’ structured process to optimisation
• How to find the most effective keyphrases to bring relevant visitors to your site
• Using the latest web tools to identify the best keyphrases
• Assessing the ‘relevance’, ‘popularity’ and ‘competition’ for your keyphrases
• Harnessing the ‘long tail’ for maximum sales and conversions
• Keyword strategies for ecommerce sites
• Techniques for assessing the competition and how long it will take to achieve good results

SEO Course Module 2: Auditing your existing site and SEO considerations for new sites
• The major factors which will provide good SEO ranking – both within your website and external factors
• How search engines work and which are important
• Using web based tools to assess your current position versus your online competition
• Building a new web site – the essential for SEO success. Choosing the right technology and CMS (content management system)

SEO Course Module 3: Optimising your web pages
• Explaining metadata and identifying the most important metadata in your site for top search engine performance
• Structuring your title, description, keyword and H1 tags for optimisation
• Explaining ‘keyword density’ and the importance of effective copy writing for high SEO rankings
• Using web based tools to analyse your existing copy and keyword density
• SEO copywriting techniques – how to panda to panda
• Implementing your optimisation – matching pages to phrases

SEO Course Module 4: Developing backlinks and using directories
• A structured approach to developing your linking strategy
• The importance of backlinks to your SEO rankings
• How to develop and assess links from the best sources
• Structuring your ‘anchor text’ for optimum search engine performance
• Analysing your links and your competitors links using web based tools
• 8 key target areas for your links – from directories to social media sites

SEO Course Module 5: Monitoring our performance and fine tuning
• Monitoring your rankings and click throughs – using web based tools to see keyphrases and search engine positions
• Telephone tracking – relating enquiries to keyphrases
• Analysing what’s working for you and how to improve
• Which phrases are working for you, which search engines and directories are delivering results
• Fine tuning your SEO to out compete your online competitors
• What to avoid to remain ‘search engine friendly’

SEO Course Module 6: Utilising Social Media and understanding the latest Google ranking factors
• Working with Blogs to improve SEO
• Working with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN and Google+
• Google ‘universal search’ – including video, image and news SEO
• Local Search – make sure you are on the ‘Google Map’ for local searches
• ‘Digital Assetts Optimisation’ – including Video SEO (YouTube and others
• Real time search, personalisation and website speed issues

Please contact us now if you wish to benefit from this SEO training or find delivery locations near to you.

Your investment: £295 per person plus Vat. Includes refreshments, lunch and electronic copy of all training materials

Contact Jan Klin – 01928 788100 or email jan@janklin.com

Dear Jan,
I was on your excellent ‘Loughborough UNI Course’ and you blew my socks off! I was VERY impressed with your presentation and ‘Inside Track’ knowledge. ……Thank you for your effort to making it the best and most interesting business presentation I have seen in years!
Well done!
Yours sincerely,
Paul R Morton, Morton Connolly
MBA, MCIM, MA,DipCAM
Managing Director

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This has now been removed because Yahoo has completed it’s algorithmic transition with BING. So if you only used this tool to view your own links then good news; You can still use this tool through your BING webmaster tools. However if you used it to view your competitors links then you are probably thinking; Where Now?

There are quite a few paid link tools out there including:

adgooroo.com
linkdex.com
majesticseo.com

There are also some tools that provide small amounts of information such as the Majestic SEO Site Explorer tool that will tell you how many links a website has and will show you the top 5 links.

SEOMoz also has a Site Explorer Tool and this will give you a little more information than Majestic but if you are a registered user of SEOMoz you can get a more extensive report together with use of many other great tools.

We have looked around for free Competitor link analysis tools and Majestic and Open Site Explorer are the best. They don’t fill the gap but they can be used to give you an overview of what your competitors are doing.

Posted by Jon Seymour

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A Content Strategy

What underpins this then is some form of content strategy – this doesnt need to be as grand as it sounds – its just making sure, in a structured way, that…

1. We have good content in different forms (or we have plan to produce some)
2. We know which platforms the content will be distributed by (Facebook, Blog, website, RSS, email, press releases, etc, etc)
3. We know who is responsible in the organisation for its production, distribution and how often they will produce/distribute it.

A spreadsheet is a good way of recording this information – with different columns for the items above and possibly additional area for notes.

Here’s a partial Content Plan spreadsheet one of our customer’s produced to give you an idea…

The important thing here is a documented plan shareable amongst all th individuals who have responsibility for getting the content produced and distributed.

A good starting point is to do some sort of Content Audit – that is looking at the current content types you routinely produce then deciding on which platforms to publish through. For example you may already produce press releases but dont maximise publishing opportunities. There are loads of online distribution services to get this content out through – PRWeb, PR World, Market Wire etc

This type of activity will lead to identification of gaps – for example, you may decide, as we do, that you will produce regular blog posts to your contacts and distribute via RSS, Facebook, Google Plus etc. You may not do it at the moment so need to decide who will do it, how often what about and so on.

Incidentally a by product of this activity is aiding your SEO through link building activity – so another way of looking at link building is to treat it as a component of your content distribution strategy.

Another aspect of this is you may decide you dont have resources to do all that you think is necessary – you may decide you cant post to Facebook twice a day of you cant produce articles and blogposts as frequently as you think its needed. This is where 3rd parties like ourselves can help supplement you activities and even manage the whole content disstribution strategy for you if you wish.

Again, its worth repeating your type of businesses will determine to what degree you do all this. If you run an ecommerce site maybe the important things are product updates through the web, product offers through Facebook and Twitter, Getting users to review you products/services – so generating useful ‘User generated Content. Maybe if you are on line travel agent your priorities are different – producing regular unbiased blogposts about the locations and resorts you service for example maybe the most important thing. So at least think about it and think about the ‘sales funnel’ we discussed last time at how best to engage with your audiences at different stages – rememebring that its much more effective that you have multiple contacts with your audience at different stages rather than just expecting them to find you at the point they wish to make a purchase

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Inbound Marketing
The reason most outbound marketing activities fail to deliver the expected benefits is because most people are not interested in our messages and offers at the point we send them out. Thats why conventional marketing methods from telesales, email shots, cold calling, print advertsing and many others – are immensly wasteful and frustrating. Further we have increasingly sophisticated ways of filtering out unwanted marketing messages which means in general its difficult to get a return on outbound marketing initiatives.

The Case for Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing means we create an environment where people contact us at the point at which they are interested – by definition this contact will be much more likely to do business with us. As an example take search marketing – someone does a search for, say, ‘Japanese Knotweed eradication company’ and ends up on a web page that provides the service. That is someone has found you at the point at which they have an interest in buying – so much more of a qualified opportunity than us picking up the phone and calling around to see if anyone has a Japanese Knotweed problem. (Which is by all accounts very unpleasant.)

Of course they may not be interested in buying from us at the point of contact – they may be looking for further information, or looking for anwers to questions. So the trick is to be in a position to respond to people in an appropriate way depending on where they are in their sales cycle. This is where Social Media can play an important part.

Visualising the ‘sales funnel’ can be a good way of thinking about this…

Acknowledging that different information types and marketing techniques are relevant at different stages is important. It also means we need to be in a position to provide useful ‘value added’ information to build loyalty and credibility. We have to accept that ‘the more we give the more we get back’. The idea of giving away stuff (like we give away lessons for free and course materials) is not something every company is comfortable with – but it is a feature of Inbound Marketing.

Heres a list of the most important techniques and information and communication forms relevant to Inbound Marketing – not all these will be relevant to all companies (or indeed possible) but over the next few posts I want to try to go into these in some detail and also to give you some tools and processes for deciding which is the best approach for you. In short I want to help you put together an Inbound Marketing strategy…

Search Engine Optmisation (SEO)
Pay per Click Advertising
Link Building
Online PR
Online article and news distribution
Blogging
Facebook
Google Plus
Twitter
YouTube
Linkedin
ebooks
Email marketing (permission based)
whitepapers
RSS
….and of course a business focused, landing page and ‘call to action’ rich website.

So in future posts we’ll discuss….

Creating a content strategy -Good content underpins Inbound Marketing
Creating a work schedule – who is going to produce your content and which of the above will they use to deliver it
Which of the above items are important for us – prioritising the above
We’ll also look in detail at each item in the list above – where weve created a lesson in the past we’ll give you the link – we’ll also introduce some new lessons (Using Linkedin for business for example which we havent covered previously)
We’ll include examples of what some of our customers are doing
We’ll also detail some software tools to allow you to integrate all of this and manage all your web content and social media through a common interface -from content creation and distribution to prospect management and analytics.

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The rational for this is that tripling the traffic, say, generally leads to a tripling of sales (or enquiries if you dont sell direct). Quite often its a greater factor than this because the keyphrases captured are are more relevant leading to more qualified traffic – but its reasonable to assume there’s a direct correlation between traffic and sales.

Essentially what we do is work out what is a reasonable increase in traffic and over what period – we then work out what work needs to be done to achieve this. Its generally a mix of link building work ( directories, social media sites, blogs etc) and on-page SEO work.

The customer agrees to pay a set monthly fee for this – even though most of the work is done in the initial stages – the fee stays the same. Its a matter of balancing what is a reasonable expenditure budget against what the customer can reasonably cope with in extra sales and of course the timescale the increase in traffic is effective over.

As an example if the customer wants his sales increasing by a factor of 4 over the first year, and he knows he can cope with that increase (there’s a lot more to increasing sales effectively than taking orders!) then we work out a plan of activity and monthly cost to achieve this. If, for example, the traffic (God forbid!) only increases by a factor of 2 – then we provide a cash back on a pro rate basis ( half the money refunded in this case).

This works well for both parties – we are incentivised to succeed and the customer knows he’s working with a figure he can afford and will reduce commensurate with actual sales.

If its something you, or companies you deal with, are interested in – please let me know and we can do an analysis of your site and come up with a tailored proposal. You can drop me an email (jan@janklin.com) or call me direct on 01928 788100

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If you become a trusted store you get to show the Google Trusted Store logo to add credbility to your offering. Allied to this Google offers protection to your buyers – yet another strong reason why people should buy from you rather than your competitors. We believe this will have a significant impact on conversion to sales rates.

Its brand new and you can learn more here – Google Trusted Stores

Ally this with our Guaranteed SEO scheme and you cant go wrong!

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Very people know that Facebook has something similar – known as the ‘Edgerank Algorithm’- and in a similar way knowing how it works it can be utilised to give businesses and brands a commercial advantage. What follow is an explanation of how it works.

When you log on the Facebook you’ll see something like this….

So, here’s the important question – what determines whether you are at the top of the RECENT STORIES list or not? Clearly if you are a brand thats selling to me or trying to get my attention appearing high in this section is crucial – and its determined by the ‘Edgerank Algorithm’.

Its based on three factors (so far simpler than the google algorithm) – they are RECENCY, EDGE WEIGHT and AFFINITY.

Let me give you an example based on my own experience. Recently I logged into Facebook and this image appeared right at the top of my feed…

I was taken aback. This was my sister. I wasnt taken aback because it was my sister but because the bloke she’s cuddling up to was not her husband. I had no idea who it was until my wife told me it was a member of Take That. But why did she appear at the top of my feed? Its Edgerank in action.

RECENCY

When it occurred it was within a day of the post getting uploaded (practical tip: post often – say, twice a day to win on ‘recency’.) This is simple to understand but AFFINITY and EDGE WEIGHT need a little more explanation.

EDGE WEIGHT

If you post something then every action related to that post is called an ‘edge’. So commenting on a post, ‘liking’, clicking on a link – these are all edges. Some edges are more important than others – so video, photos and links have a high edge weight. (practical tip: ensure your posts are varied and include photos and videos where you can along with clickable links).

Every ‘edge’ is given a value and all edges relating to a post then added together to give an overall score. In this case it was cleary a photo (high edge weight) which attracted many comments from family and friends.

AFFINITY
This is the degree of closeness a brand or person is seen to have with you. The affinity score in this case was quite high. NOT because it was my sister but because the person who posted the photo was my sister-in-law with whom I have a high affinity. Facebook worked this out on the basis that I quite often go to Lesley’s (my sister-in law) Facebook page and click around (we have lots of family get togethers when photos are taken and uploaded – I visit the page to view the photos)

(Practical tip: encourage interactivity – the more your fans interract with you (your posts) the higher the affinity with them will be – encourage/ask them to click for example)

So the edgerank score is a value arrived at by multiplying each of the numeric values asigned to RECENCY, AFFINITY and EDGE WEIGHT together. If this value is higher than the values assigned to all other posts carried out by friends and fans since I last logged on – it will appear top. So, this value will determine where you are in the list relative to other posts carried out by friends and fans. Very similar to Google ranking in action.

We have several customers who utilise edgerank to ensure they always have visibility in their fans RECENT STORIES. It drives awareness and of course sales. In future posts I’ll showcase some specific example to show you some of the strategies in action – they all involve encouraging interaction (AFFINITY), posting often (RECENCY) and using photos, music, videos (High EDGE RANK elements).

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Panda – Google’s major update

When Panda was rolled out in the US many sites – around 12% – were affected. Some positively and quite a lot negatively. So, when it came to the uk around two weeks back there was some trepidation from some of our customers whose livelyhood depends on their Google rankings. Some have experienced negative affects on traffic and are still studying the reasons, but generally things havent changed that much in our customer base.

What sort of sites are affected?

Many people in the search engine world have voiced their thoughts that Google puts too much emphasis on backlinks to the the cost of high quality content. The new Panda update seems to be an attempt to redress the balance.

As alluded to previously, good quality content is what Google is looking to favour when ranking sites. Conversely, sites with poor quality, non original content are getting penalised. Specifically sites Google considers ‘content farms’ are ones that are suffering. Sites which have little unique content and rely on taking content from other sites – including shopping comparison sites, review sites, some ecommerce sites, and sites which exist primarily to support advertising ….

There’s a list of uk losers and winners here – Panda UK Early Winners and Losers.

This has clear ramifications for sites with ‘duplicate content’ and the message is clear – produce and rely on good quality original content if you want decent rankings. Producing well written, added value information is what counts and copying information from other sites is a definite no-no.

Evolution of other important factors

Obviously being a practitioner of SEO we have first hand experience of what works and what doesnt in search engine optimisation. In addition we draw information from a wide variety of authoratitive sources on a daily basis, and putting all this into the melting pot here’s a list of changes we need to be aware of ( Rather than peppering the post with links back to these sources Ive listed the links to these main sources at the end of the post to hopefully enhance readability)

- Good quality content is increasingly important. The Panda update emphasises this but recent studies have shown that, for example, webpages with larger amounts of informative, well written text rank better than shorter pages. So, dust down your copywriting skills and produce interesting and informative information with the end customer in mind (rather than search engines) that’s where the focus should be.

-Despite this backlinks are of course still essential but may have been, will be, slightly de-emphasised over the next year os so compared to content and other factors like social media (see below). One recent finding is that anchor text in backlinks is more significant for rankings where it doesnt ‘exact match’ the target phrase. For example, if we are targeting ‘Pembrokeshire hotels’ the variants like – ‘Great weekend breaks in Pembokeshire hotels’ and ‘Pembrokeshire Hotels package offers’ and other variants will probably be more effective than a load of anchor text based links using just ‘Pembrokeshire hotels’. (and its certainly less spammy)

-Still on the subject of backlinks, as well as unique domains being an important factor for your backlink sources (rather than muliple links from the same domain) it seems that getting a diverse range of different types of links (eg from article sites, social media sites, directories etc) is more important than many links form the same type of site – even if the one type are high quality

-There is now overwhelming evidence that activity on social media sites – particularly Facebook and Twitter – is a definite signal for Google and Bing rankings. Specifically ‘shares’ on Facebook are important (references/links to your site from your and your fans/friends walls). Google’s increasing involvement in Social Search is also indicative of this – particularly with the imminent arrival of ‘+1′ tagging (equivalent of facebook ‘Likes’) and the use of this in the SERPS. (Its just become available in the US and will be here soon)

-One last point about backlinks: ‘no follow’ is used by major sites (eg YouTube, Wikipeadia etc) to tell the search engine bots not to follow and not to pass ‘link juice’ to the site linked to. So the messgae from SEO professional has been not to treat these links for equity building in your site. It now seems there is increasing evidence that despite this the link could still count and pass through some, if not all, of the link juice.

There’s a list below of the main sources we derive our information from. You can get lots of detailed information on any of the points discussed from these. In our SEO Training Course we discuss how to account for these factors in your SEO strategies.

SeoMoz Blog
Searchengine watch blog
Social Signals and Ranking
Searchmetrics Blog – Panda UK
Webproworld – blog and forum

–

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Performance Based SEO

There are 3 distinct types of assured service clients are looking for which we offer:-

1. Keyword ranking position guarantees

2. Traffic increase guarantees

3. Sales increase guarantees (for ecommerce sites)

Each of these options starts with a technical analysis of the site, identifying any issues which may impede good optimisation of the site. We look at server related issues such as location, speed and so on, on-page issues, content management issues, coding issues – and report back to the client advising of what needs to be addressed before we can move forwards. Any issues identified can then be addressed by the client, his web developer or ourselves

1. Keyword Ranking Positions

This is the most basic service and is relevant to clients who have a selection of keyphrases they want rankings for – typically between 5-10 different phrases.

In this case we will carry out competitive analysis then propose a schedule highlighting target keyphrase ranking positions and associated timescales for the achievment of the rankings. Associated with this will be a monthly payment plan on a keyphrase by keyphrase basis.

For every keyphrase which does not achieve the target position a total refund will be made for that keyphrase. We will reschedule/recost the phrase and give the client the option of continuing with the phrase or not.

2. Traffic Increases

For many sites, particularly ecommerce sites, we can correlate traffic with sales. Doubling the traffic will double the sales. Actually is generally better than that since when we optimise sites we are generating more relevant traffic and also improving the landing pages to increase the enquiry or sales rate.

The starting point here is a more comprehensive keyphrase analysis which combines analytics information, with search volumes, current ranking positions and also competition…

From this we will devise a plan to get substantial traffic increases by focusing on moving currently ranked phrases into more prominent positions (ie above the scroll) and also bringing in new phrases not yet ranked.

We will propose a plan showing traffic increases on a quarter by quarter basis and our compensation will be related directly to achieving the targets – specifically we will generate invoices based on percentage improvements in traffic.

The work we will typically do here will be a combination of on-page and off-page SEO (link building). We will use all the link building processes defined here which will include blogs, directory submissions, article writing and distribution and so on.

3. Sales Increases

This is the ultimate of course but we need to be in a position where we can measure sales increases. Measuring traffic increases through analytics is straightforward – its a little more tricky with sales since although we can measure ecommerce transactions many sales will be made by phone – ie people will find the website through search but then complete the transaction by phone.

In this instance we rely on the honesty of our clients to report to us such indirect monthly sales achieved. It helps if the client has agreed to use telephone tracking.

Similar to 2 above we then tie our invoicing directly to sales made via the web – so true performance bases SEO.

The client needs to commit to a 2-3 year agreement since the project is front loaded with our efforts – mainly link building – with the substantail sales benefits being realised after year one.

Please get in touch if you wish to discuss any of this inmore detail or talk about your specific project (jan@janklin.com ; 01928 788100)

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The traditional response when people ask most SEO companies for guarantees is to recite the Google Webmaster Guidelines to them which encourages people to be wary of guarantee promises. We say the obvious things like because we have no control over what competitors do we cant really guarantee results – if we do a load of SEO work on the site and the competitors replicate the same work we all end in the same positions. We also say we have no control over the algorithm changes Google makes so cant guarantee what we do today will still have merit next month.

This is not a satisfactory response. In all areas of businesses where a customer spends money surely he has the right to know what return he is likely to get – and also has the right to demand money back if what he’s paid for doesnt work. The customer has the right to demand us to put our money where our mouth is. So how do we reconcile this need with the difficulty of providing ‘guarantees’ with SEO?

We can do it, and its what we refer to as Performance Based SEO where we tie the success of the SEO project to what we get paid. This is based on in depth knowledge of SEO over many years practical experience and success, knowing what results can be expected, and importantly building into the plan what the likely competitive response might be. There’s more detail on this below but before moving on to it here are a few of the most common forms of ineffective guarantees…

1. Using Pay per Click to provide the position.
I know dear reader – you know the difference between a PPC result and a natural listing but 35%-40% of Google users dont. So using PPC to ‘guarantee’ positions (which may only be in place for a short period of time – just enough to show the customer he’s in the top 3) is quite common.

2. Guaranteeing first page results.
Relatively easy to guarantee as at the bottom of the first page, for most keyphrases, its pretty uncompetitive and adding a few anchor text based links will get you to that position. The problem is though that its almost worthless. Click through rates below the scroll are single digit % points so not likely to give any enquiry or sales improvements which, after all, is the objective of rankings. Its in the top half of the results page where you want to be for commercial benefit.

3. Using low competition/low search volume keyphrases – long tail phrases for example. I could guarantee you number one position on ‘mikes pizza restaurant bolton’ no problem

PERFORMANCE BASED SEO

Performance based SEO (PBSEO) is our response to this. It starts with a thorough keyphrase analysis. We then decide with our customer the prioritised list of keyphrases we will focus the SEO work on.

We then look at competitive positions for these phrases – ie which sites are currently dominating the top ranking positions. We look at the SEO these sites have carried out and in particular their inbound link infrastructure.

From this analysis we can then work out a detailed SEO plan of action; what SEO work (and in particular the off-page SEO or link building work) needs to be done in order to take the target positions.

For each target phrase we’ll provide a costing and a timescale for a specific ranking position to be achieved. If the customer wants a position quicker we’ll give an additional cost of the link building required to achieve this – then when we have this plan in place we’ll tie our payment to the achievment of that plan.

For some sites we can even tie our compensation directly to increased sales via the site – certainly ecommerce sites but other sites also which have teletracking in place.

Of course competitors may react and make this more difficult to achieve, but in reality if we choose a range of phrases its unlikely that all of these will come under competitive pressure – so we’re be happy to pro rata the payment based on what percentage of the phrases occupy the target positions. Most people are more than happy with this approach – it gives our customers the assurance that overall their investment will yield positive returns and it makes sure we do everything necessary to achieve success.

The detail of this service is available and it will be posted on my blog within the next couple of weeks.

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