In a previous lesson we have shown you how to set up a Google account.

One of the main factors of ongoing SEO is to track the progress of your website. This needs to be set up from day one. Here is a step by step guide to setting up a Google account for your website.

Please go to www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and login

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This will take you to the “Dashboard”.

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On this page please enter your domain name and click add site: www.etc…

On the next screen the first action is to verify your website by clicking on ‘Verify your site’ in the pink box.

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On the next screen please click on the drop down box “Choose Verification Method”.

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If you click on “Add a meta tag” simply copy the meta tag that is displayed and add this in the code of your websites homepage in the section.

If you click on the “Upload an HTML file” then please create the Google file and upload it to the default directory on the hosting server.

Once one of these methods is complete please click on the “Verify” button.

The next screen should be a success page.

Your website has now been verified.

Adding an XML Sitemap To GWC

If you have created a XML sitemap you can also add this to the webmaster tools. If you haven’t but need one here is a great tool to create one online, this tool will allow up to 500 pages: XML Sitemaps
If you are still logged into Google Webmaster Central please click on Dashboard in the top left corner. If you are not please login, as soon as you click on Webmaster Tools this will take you to the dashboard.

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Click on ‘add’ under ‘sitemap’.

Next please enter your sitemap name into the text box (I have called my sitemap sitemap.xml as you can see below) then click ‘Submit Sitemap’.

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The next screen should be a success page.

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Please go to http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html and enter your Google account login details to sign up.

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On the next window please click “Sign Up”

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On the next window please enter your website details and change the Time Zone Country to United Kingdom (If you are in the UK) then click Continue.

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Next please enter your contact details and click Continue.

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Please read through the Google Analytics agreement tick the ‘Yes, I agree to the above terms and conditions.’ box and click ‘Create New Account’ button.

On the next screen copy the code and add this code just before the end of the body tag in the code on every page on your website. Once this code has been copied you can click the ‘Finish’ button.

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As we all know Google is the main search engine, so it makes sense to make use of all Google has to offer when optimising websites for search engines. Here is a step by step guide to help you create a Google account.

First please go to https://www.google.com/accounts/ to set up your account.

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To set up a Google account please click on ‘Create a Google Account’ in the bottom right hand corner.

On the next screen simply enter the details asked for, read the ‘Terms of service’ and click ‘A accept. Create my account’.

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Once you have done this you will receive an email to confirm :

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Click on the Gooogle verification link and this wil take you to the Google verified page.

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Now click on the ‘click here to manage your account profile.’ link to view your Google Account.

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You’ve probably had enough of me talking about link building so I promise this is the last input on the subject, but it will complete a very important topic.

I also want to introduce you to a (very low cost) resource you may wish to use to do this work for you and then talk about some measurement tools so you can keep track of your search marketing activities. But first….

The Last Word On Link Building

It really is, and for those of you who want oodles more detailed information on the subject there’s a great and comprehensive article called 131 Legitimate Link Building Strategies at http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/2160301.

It covers off how to put together a courteous letter to potential link partners, different strategies and sources of links and much more. If you dont want to read it here’s a shorter version of ways to get more links:-

1. Reciprocal Linking – your business partners, customers, suppliers, websites with complementary services – you know, I’ll give you one if you give me one. Not as good as one way links but almost if the content is relevant

2. Set up your own blog (like this one) and leave a link to your site. Also comment on other blogs and leave a link (careful though, you intent needs to be sincere – not just a device to get a link). There’s more information on this at http://www.janklin.com/blog/qa-spotto-blog-or-not-to-blogse-optimisation-and-blogging/

3.Participate in newsgoups and drop your link – http://groups.google.com/

4. Search with one of your more important keyphrases – who’s at number on in the list? Of course its your top online competitor. Check out his backlinks using one of the tools you have leaned about (Marketleap, Linkpopularity.com, Linkdomain at Yahoo). Maybe you should get some of the same links as him?

5. As 4, but try to find some not directly competitive sites in the top rankings and maybe approach them for a link.

6. Local trade organisations you may be a member of (eg your local chamber of commerce, Federation of Small Business etc)

7. Sites with geographically local content – local city council site, business link, tourist board etc

8. Professional bodies you may be affiliated to – Chartered Institute of Marketing, Institute of Directors, Fellowship of worshipful stomemasones etc

9. Set up an affiliate scheme. NB Make sure you set up your own scheme (for example My Affiliate Programme from www.kowabunga.com) rather than using an intermediary like Commission Junction, so you own the link not the intermediary.

A Useful Resource

If you want to outsource this the of course you can. The going rate for link building is around £12-£15 per link if you do this, however, here’s an interesting option.

www.elance.com is an online marketplace for web related services. Here you can post your requirement and get guys form all over the world bidding for your business. You’ll get some guy from India offering to do your link building for, lets say, a very competitive price. As little as £3 per link.

The suppliers on elance are all star rated by people who have used them so you can get a sense of the quality they offer. I’ve used the site a few times with good results. The trick here is make sure your specification is detailed enough. You can see what other people have specified as a guide but please get in touch with me if you want input and I’ll share with you the spec I used for link building.

Measure and Modify

You’ll need two essential tools to monitor your search marketing effectively. One’s a ranking checker so you can check your progress with the keyphrases you have chosen with the search engines you want good rankings in. The other is a graphically oriented web stats tool. The good news is you can get good free tools for both of these needs.

Ranking Checker

Marketleap can do this for you. If you want something a bit more automatic look at the tools I’ve mentioned previously at http://www.janklin.com/blog/qa-spot-good-tracking-tools/.If you want something completely automatic use what I use – Internet Business Promoter from www.alexa.com.
I paid for my version (which does an awful lot more than rank checking) however it does rank checking very well and you can download a free version.

You can feed in the keyphrases you are interested in, tick off the search engines you want to check, and IBP will check and report back on your positions by keyphrase for each search engine.

If you check regularly and do the things I’ve suggested you will see a gradual (sometimes sudden) improvement in rankings and of course ultimately more business.

Web Stats Tool.

There are many – a good free one is www.statcounter.com. A more comprehensive one is www.dataplain.com . The last two you’ll need to pay for so try statcounter it will probably be all you need, at least in the early stages.

What do you need to monitor?

At the very least you’ll want to display nice graphs of your monthly, or weekly, visitors so you can see the upward trend.
You’ll also want to see which search terms and which search engines are bringing you visitors.

Another useful thing to measure is your ‘keyphrase market share’. For example you could find out on the keyword assistant at Yahoo how many searches per month the phrase ‘designer giftware’ generates (don’t forget to multiply by 2.2 to take account of google). Lets say its 1000. You webstats tool will tell you how many click throughs you get for this phrase. Lets say its 10. Work out the percentage – in this case its 1% – so there’s lots of room for improvement. If its 20% maybe you’re as optimised as you can get.

Actually there’s no limit to what you can measure and how this may hone your activities.

Remember one other thing about search marketing which is different from most other forms of marketing is that when people arrive at your website having searched for a relevant phrase – you have a qualified prospect. If you sell ‘Sony Vaoi z1sp laptops’ and someone types in that phrase and lands on your site you have a high possibility of converting the visitor to a sale. This again points to the all important keyphrase selection stage.

Anyway best wishes with it and let me know how successful you are and call if you need help (Jan Klin on 01928 788100: jan@janklin.com: www.janklin.com)

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We will also kick start the process this time by concentrating on web directories – one of the most important sources for backlinks to your site. Next time, and in subsequent postings, I will provide you with information on the myriads of different sources for developing backlinks.

The approach I want to suggest to you is as follows:-

1. Estimating the number of links you need to outlink your major online competitors

2. Produce a list of sources for these links

3. Workout and execute a plan of activity to achieve this over a period of time.
(The time period I will suggest is 4 months – but you may wish to vary this up or down depending on the number you need and the time you have available)

Link building is of course an ongoing process so I hope you’ll continue to develop links after the four month period, however, we all need to set targets with SMART objectives so we can achieve some good short term success to fire us up. I’m sure many of you are familiar with SMART objectives (Specific; Measurable; Achievable; Realistic and Timebound.)

I have found that spending around 1.5 hours per week over a period of 4 months has a major impact for most small businesses. The other thing to be aware of is that search engines prefer a gradual, rather than sudden, build up of links. I’ll give you lots of other link sources next time so you can add to your programme after the four months.

What I have found useful as a starting point is to construct an Excell spreadsheet in which to record the sites you want links from along with other useful information. Such a document might include columns for the site/directory name; the url; the Page Rank; free/paid for; link status etc – I’m sure you can think of other useful columns also.

In fact I have one already set up which references around 300 directories. If you want a copy of this send me an email (Jan@janklin.com) put DIRECTORIES in the subject box and I’ll send it to you.

1. ESTIMATING THE NUMBER OF LINKS YOU NEED

The starting point is to select a major keyphrase you want top rankings on and search for it in Google.

The resulting list will be of course your major online competitors.

Choose the one you consider to be your nearest and most relevant competitor. It may be the guy in position one; don’t go below position five.

Next, determine how many links he has. You can use any of the tools I told you about last time or simply go to Yayoo.com and type:-

Linkdomain:www.competitor.co.uk -site:www.competitor.com

The number of his links (excluding internal links) will appear in the top right and look like this:-

Results 1 – 10 of about 120 for linkdomain:www.competitor.co.uk – 0.45 sec. (About this page)

You’ll need to store this number somewhere, ideally in your spreadsheet if you set one up. Divide it by 16 to give you the number of links per week you’ll need to generate – assuming you are working to a 4 month time plan.

2. GENERATING YOUR LIST OF DIRECTORY LINKS

As you generate this list you may wish to record them in your spreadsheet along with relevant associated information – Page Rank, How to register (look for ‘add url’, ‘Join Directory’, ‘Add Link’ or whatever the method is) and any other relevant information. Also you will need to prioritise them. This may be based on Page Rank, whether or not you can add anchor text and relevance. You could have a column of your spreadsheet to record the relative importance of the directory.

You could record them and add them later, or of course you may wish to link as you find them.

How to generate them?

1. As already mentioned I’ve got a general list of 300 or so you are welcome to.

2. Simply by doing a google search on keywords relevant to you will generate some directories. For example typing in ‘wedding’ or ‘hotels’ will generate a hit list which will include oodles of wedding and hotel directories.

3. You may wish to be more specific by searching for, for example ‘electrical engineering directories’, ‘business directories’, ‘legal directories’, ‘ecommerce directories’ etc focusing on the industry sector and business type relevant to you.

4. You can use one of the standard directories , like the Google Directory,( http://directory.google.com/) and click on “Reference” then click on “Directories” then select the “categories” most relevant to your site.

5. If you go to http://www.isedb.com/html/Web_Directories/Specialty_Directories/ you will find a directory of topic specific directories.

6. http://www.incominglinks.com/ is another good source of useful directories organized by category

The above will allow you to identify as many directories as you can manage, but one more thing before we move on.

The Yahoo directory and DMOZ are two really important ones (Page Rank of 9 and 8 respectively). Unfortunately you will have to pay around £200 to get listed in the Yahoo directory but it really is worth it. Also DMOZ (www.dmoz.org) is managed by volunteer ‘web republicans’ who give their time for free and who vet every site submitted. Because of this it can take 3-9 months to get listed but its well worth the effort. DMOZ is the largest free directory on the web and is the input source to all the major search engines including Google.

3. YOUR ACTIVITY PLAN

We’ve covered this already really. But this is just a matter of setting some time aside each week. (say 1-2 hours) to find the directories and create the link. You should easily be able to add 20-30 links per week and over a few months this will build quickly to outlink your competitors.

Be aware that every time you add a link you are not only increasing your search engine rankings but increasing your exposure to potential customers, and it really works.

Since spending a couple of months link building ASG Services (www.asgservices.co.uk) are now number one on Google for several phrases including ‘warehouse rack labels’.

Just before Christmas their delighted MD called me whilst travelling to London to pick up a £90k order. Needless to say the enquiry came from the web and that was why he called. My reward was a delightful bottle of expensive red wine. So, when you start getting large orders as a result of your search engine rankings (which you surely will if you follow my advice) you may feel compelled to demonstrate your appreciation in a similar way.

If this is the case please don’t think you need to wait ’till next Christmas since I’ve discoverd the delights of drinking all year round.

Best wishes for great success in 2006

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Quite often, but it depends on how competitive your online competitors are. If they do all the things you do you’ll need to out link them to out rank them.

Now before you get fazed by this backlinking process, let me assure you it is quite straightforward if you do it in a controlled and structured way). In fact I’m going to spoonfeed you and starting next time I’m going to guide you through a process, such that over a period of a few months you will out rank your competitors. But for the moment lets see why this is so important. Also I’m going to show you some great tools for checking your current links ( and your competitor’s links). Remember also, you are not trying to outlink Amazon, just your nearest competitors – which is a doddle by comparison.

Backlinking – What is it and Why is it Important?

In short, its just getting your url on other websites such that people will click the link and end up on your site. Not a bad thing in itself as this will lead to more traffic and sales, in fact if you are on a major directory, like Yell, or Applegate or Kellys – to name but three – people are quite often more likely to find you that way than directly finding your site. (I’ll show you how to find the important directories for your site later).

However its more important than that, we have a double whammy affect here because the more backlinks you have (sometimes referred to as ‘inbound links’) the more important you are in the search engines eyes and the higher up the rankings you go.

Its obvious really if you think about it, this is the basis of conventional offline networking – the more authoratitive you are in a subject, the more likely you are to get other people in your network to make referrals to you. Its the same with websites and this was basis of Google’s grounbreaking algorithm and why they generate such relevant results.

All Links are not Created Equal

This is also obvious I believe – getting a link from your mum’s site is not as important as getting a link from the BBC site, so when we start the structured process we will prioritise the sites we want links from. In fact there are several important factors relating to the quality of links you should be aware of:-

1. The more authoratitive the site you are getting the link from the better (We have a rough way of measuring this which we call Page Rank – more about this later)

2. The more relevant the interlinked sites the better – clearly if you are a hotel, getting a link from a travel directory is more important than a link from the local lingerie shop.

3. The better structured your link is the better.

This last point is crucial – because not many people know about it its a sure fire way of going one better than your competitors. Quite often just restructuring some of your existing links will give an immediate boost to your rankings.

Essentially what we mean by this is including the keyphrase your page is optimised for in the link text of the incoming link. For example if the keyphrase in question is ‘crunchy widgets’ then this phrase should be included in the inbound link text (sometimes referred to as ‘anchor text’.)

the way the link would appear in the code in the external site ( the one linking to you) would be as follows:-
href=”http://www.domain.com”>Crunchy Widgets

All that would appear on the external site would be the phrase ‘Crunchy Widgets’ and clicking on it would hyperlink to your site.

You don’t always have control over the way people will link to you but where you do, for example your suppliers and customers websites, you should send them details of the link text you want them to use.

Incidentally this is the basis of ‘Google Bombing’. Some guy at a conference asked the audience (about 500 of them) to put a link from their site to George Bush’s site and include ‘dumb idiot’ as the anchor text. Subsequent Google searches for ‘dumb idiot’ listed George’s site in number one spot, thus showing the power of structured backlinking.

We can measure the importance of a site through the Page Rank (PR). PR is a number Google assigns to every web page out there as a measure of its importance ( from 0 to 10). For example the BBC News site has a PR of 9, most small businesses are anywhere between 0-6. Clearly the higher the PR of the site linking to you the better.

How do you measure Page Rank? Go to http://toolbar.google.com/ and download the Toolbar – it takes minutes and will give you the PR of every site you visit. (Incidentally there are other goodies to be had with this tool including an effective ‘pop up’ blocker)

Be careful about getting links from sites with a PR of zero. Sometimes this means the site has been penalized and this could have a negative impact on your rankings.

Some Useful Web Tools to help with your Linking

Here are some tools to help you understand your own link performance and, importantly, your online competitors. A good strategy is to look at your competitors links and use this as the benchmark for your own efforts. This is the strategy I’ll guide you through next time.

www.linkpopularity.com is a reasonable way to estimate your backlinks. Just go to their site, type in your url and your links will be displayed. You will see that it shows you links identified by different search engines. The reason for this is that in order for a link to be recognized by, for example, Google, the Google spider needs to have spidered both interlinked pages – yours and the external page linking to you. Clearly this will not always have been the case and this is one reason why different engines report different links.

This will show your internal pages linked as well as external links. Also Google only shows some of the links.

There is a command you can use at Google to find the links. At the search box type in links: yourdomain.com and you’ll get them listed. NOTE links is plural, there is a space between the colon and the domain name, and also there is no www. (link:www.yourdomain.com doesn’t work anymore).

My personal preference is to use the tools offered by yahoo.com – it doesn’t really matter which agent you use to check your links. A link is a link regardless of whether search engines have recognised them yet or not. So, at yahoo.com you’ll have the following options:-

To check links into a domain (complete site), type –

linkdomain:www.yoursite.com

To check links into a domain (complete site) excluding internal links, type –

linkdomain:www.yoursite.com –site:yourdomain.com
(note the space before the minus sign)

To check links into a specific page, type, for example -
link:http://www.yoursitse.com/subpage.html

To check links into a page excluding internal links: link:http://www.yoursitse.com/subpage.html –site:yoursite.com

As you can see from above its also useful to know what anchor text has been used in a backlink. You can check this at Google. For example to check the links into www.yourdomain.com that contain the anchor text ‘yellow widget’, at the Google search bar type -

inanchor:yellow widget site:yourdomain.com

(Hopefully you wont have any ‘yellow widget’ anchor text links!)

Finally, if you want to automate all of the above in a useful web tool, there are a couple of freebies I use. They are in beta at the moment but seem to work OK but you’ll need to download them. They are ‘Back Link Analyzer’ and ‘PR Weaver’.

A Google search will locate them for you. My favourite is Back Link Analyzer which shows each link and the corresponding anchor text, all on one line for each link.

So have a play with these and next time I’ll take your through the process of out-linking, out-ranking and out-competing your competitors.

Give me a call if you need any help – 01928 788100.

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Next month we’ll discuss ‘off page’ factors to add icing to the cake and get you above all your competitors.

You will remember that last month we focused on the TITLE tag and stressed its importance. The other tags you will need to optimise are the KEYWORD, DESCRIPTION and H1 tags.

THE KEYWORD TAG

The KEYWORD tag used to be important for ranking. It’s not anymore, however, it’s best practice to include entries here as some search engines still pay some attention to them. Also there is evidence that the major search engines look for consistent entries across the tags.

So in the keyword tags put the keywords (actually keyphrases) you discovered in your keyword analysis. Actually you need to restrict it to a maximum of 25 words. Also use lower case and separate each phrase by a comma and a space.

A perfect example can be found at the following site. Select ‘view’ than ‘source’ to view the metatags behind this site – www.youreventsltd.com.

Should you have the same keyword tag on each page?

Ideally you should change the order of the phrases, and put the phase being optimised for at the beginning of the list. So in the example above the homepage is being optimised for ‘event management’, so this is the first phrase in the list.

THE DESCRIPTION TAG

This is more important than the KEYWORD tag ( but less important than the TITLE tag).
Quite often this gets listed in the hitlist directly below the title so it will have an impact on whether people click through or not.

For example:-

Your Events, Manchester UK – Christmas party organisers
Christmas party organisers by Your Events uk, looking after your christmas
production, venue, catering and entertainment.
www.youreventsltd.com/christmas.php – 14k – Cached – Similar pages

This is the result of a google search for ‘christmas party organisers’. (Yes folks its nearly that time again!) The first line is the contents of the TITLE tag; the text below the content of the description tag. So ideally it needs to be a bit salesy – encouraging people to click through.

Again – no longer than 25 words, and put the phrase being optimised for at the front of the description.

If you do a ‘view’ and ‘source’ at http://www.youreventsltd.com/christmas.php you will see a perfect example of this.

THE H1 TAG

Unlike the other tags we’ve discussed the contents of the H1 tag appears as visible text on your web page.

Its best practice to include a version of the title tag as the H1 tag.

If your title tag says ‘Briggs International – Technical Translations and Software Localisation Services’ The H1 tag could be something like ‘Fast Turnround on all your Technical Translations and Software Localisation’

That is, a bit more ‘call to action’ oriented. Essentially this has the affect of placing your keyphrase for the page being optimised for as a headline at the top of your page. Something the search engine spiders seem to like a lot.

I this case the page is being optimised for two phrases – ‘technical translations’ and ‘software localisation’. Generally we should try to optimise one page for each of our keyphrases. Sometimes we can get away with two but three is pushing it as you will see when we discuss copy writing below.

There’s on more thing to do to ensure your pages get top rankings….

WRITE ‘KEYWORD RICH’ VISIBLE TEXT FOR YOUR OPTIMISED PAGES

Search engine spiders thrive on keyword rich content. Also the higher placed it is on your webpages the better.

If you can get 200 words of text at the top of each page of your site (ideally right below the H1 tag content) and include your keyphrase (the one the page is being optimsied for) around 6-8 times, that is pretty optimal.

This is not always easy and we’ll discuss some issues in later lessons to help when it isnt.

Essentially the TITLE tag content for a particlar page is compared to the keyphrases which appear on that page. The more the better, within certain guidleines.

Here’s an example of someone who thinks he’s optimising his text for the phrase ‘yellow widgets’….

‘Our Yellow widgets are the best in the UK and if you buy our yellow widgets you will be sure you have bought the best yellow widgets you can buy and absolutely envied by the rest of the yellow widget buying community both here in the UK and the rest of the yellow widget buying community throughout the world. Yes, you really need to buy our award winning yellow widgets. Click here to buy yellow widgets.’

Obviously a pretty naff bit of copy writing, but this guy doesnt care – he’s writing for spiders not humans. Actually even the spiders will choke on this.

The trick is to stay within certain ‘keyword density’(KD) limits. Around 3%-9% is good. Five keyphrase repetitions in 100 words would be a KD of 5%.

This should satisfy the spiders and also you should be able to put together reasonable copy for human visitors.

A good axample can be seen at www.asgservices.co.uk. Note the repetitions of ‘warehouse rack labels’.

If you want to check the keyword density of your pages go to:-
www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html
Type in your url for the page in question and you will get an analysis.

The keyphrases with optimal density will show up in green. Other colours highlight problem keyphrases – too dense or not enough.

So that’s it folks. It’s about all there is to it. Do this for one or more of your pages and you’ll begin to get good rankings.

Next month I’ll show you how to out compete even the fiecest of online competitors. Until then happy optimising and don’t forget to get in touch if you need help. Our ‘Traffic Builder’ Service goes from strength to strength as you can hopefully see from the above examples and the quotes below( but not the ‘yellow widgets’ guy – I made him up).

“I employed Jan Klin Associates to get me higher rankings at all the search engines.
Within a couple of months we were high in the rankings for our products and now some six months later we are in the top three on all the major search engines.”
Steve Bithell, Managing Director, Noisekiller UK, www.noisekiller.uk

“From being very cynical about what search engines could do for my businesses I am now reaping the benefits of having number one rankings in Goole and the other major search engines for all my important keyphrases. This is as a direct result of working with Jan Klin to achieve this”
Tony Gresty, Managing Director, ASG Services Ltd, www.asgservices.co.uk

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Many of you will know the importance of building good content around these phrases and this is something we will discuss in detail later. In addition there are other important areas to put them; in fact there are four main places:-

1. In your metadata ( the part of your site that search engine spiders see and human visitors dont)

2. The visible content – keyword rich content as referred to above – visible to both humans and SE spiders

3. Internal links – to different parts of your site

4. External (in-bound) links – in the anchor text of these links – more about this later.

and other places – alt text, footers etc

Many would argue that the TITLE tag (part of the metadata) is the most important in terms of ranking. Here I’m going to give you the optimum structure and content for this tag. That is, one that actually works.

The search engine spiders will scan this when they visit your site to work out what your site is all about.

If your site is about selling ‘yellow widgets’ you need to include ‘yellow widgets’ as part of your title tag on your homepage.

More specifically you need to include different title tags on different pages of your site reflecting the different content on that page. For example if you have part of your site devoted to tandoori widgets – this keyphrase needs to appear in the title tag. This practice gives searchers multiple access points into relevant parts of your site. Those searching for yellow widgets would be directed to the homepage; those for tandoori widgets to the page relevant to that content.

So, here’s an action point for you:-
Check your title tags by choosing ‘file’ then ‘view source’ from your browser toolbar.
(You’ll see you title tag at the top, in the HEAD section of your code just before the meta description and keyword tags.)

Do they reflect the content on the pages they appear on?

Anyway here’s an optimum structure for your tag. The example here is for a company who are pretty hot in the widgets market (incidentally, the only company I know in the UK that sells edible widgets)

Jones Brothers Bury UK – Yellow Widgets and Dark Crispy Widgets

(this should be enclosed in the title tag delimeters as you can see in the examples referenced below – eg www.universalarches.co.uk)

Note: The company is Jones Brothers – always good to have your company name up front in the tag and UK put in there (if you’re looking for primarily UK based customers).

‘yellow widgets’ and ‘dark crispy widgets’ are obviously the two keyphrases we are optimising the page around (ideally it should be one keyphrase per page, but often we can get away with two; three is pushing it)

No more that 10 words, because most search engines dont read beyond this number.

No words repeated more than twice

No identical words next to each other.

Steer clear of non text characters (particularly & which sometimes causes problems with some search engines; hyphens, commas and pipes are OK).

Thats it! Do that on every page and you’re moving in the right direction and sometimes ( if everything else has been optimised) this will have an immediate effect.

Here’s a personal example; Mrs Klin runs a B&B. Incidentally, in two years Mrs Klin’s B&B has gone from 90% of guests coming from the UK to 90% coming from overseas – all to do with the power of the internet and that fact that she sleeps with an on-line marketing consultant (most nights). By changing one word in the title tag (‘Kingsley’ to ‘Frodsham’) rankings moved from nowhere to number 2 on Google. This is because the directory she is a member of (doesnt have her own website!- not big enough) had included lots of content on the page about Frodsham. Admittedly its not always as simple as that but it does show what a major contributor the title tag is in the Google algorithm.

When your site gets listed in say, a google hitlist, the first line shown, which is blue, is your title. This is where it gets displayed. So in our example what will be displayed in the google hitlist would be:-

Jones Brothers UK – Yellow Widgets and Dark Crispy Widgets
Makers of fine edible widgets in a wide variety of flavours and colours…

Hopefully in position one where we will get a 15% click through rate!

The sentence in italics below the title is from the description metatag which we’ll adrress next time.

So you see the title is also important because searchers will see this and it will determine whether they click through or not, which of course is the ultimate objective. In the example you will see that I have used capitals to begin each word. Search engine spiders are not case sensitive but the reason I have done this is to make it more searcher friendly and maximise the click through rate.

Here’s another example – and a perfect example of how to structure your meta tags – go to google and type in ‘profile bending’. You will see that www.universalarches.co.uk comes pretty near the top. Go to the file menu at your browser then select ‘view’ and ‘source’. You will see that the title tag is perfectly structured as detailed above, but also the keyword and description tags are also good models on which to base your own.

Best of luck and please feel free to call me if you wish to discuss or get clarification. (01928 788100). Also you may wish to consider our ‘Traffic Builder’ service as a cost effective alternative to doing it yourselves.

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We’ll use a fictional company involved in furniture removals. (Incidentally I use the word ‘keyword’ and ‘keyphrase’ interchangeably to mean the same thing in the following discussion. ‘Keyword analysis’ is the generic name for this process; referring to ‘keyphrases’ accepts that nowadays people use multiple words when seaching)

There are four stages to the process:-

1. Identifying the popularity of certain keyphrases ( ie How many people search for the phrase each month)

2. Identifying the competition for the keyphrase (ie how many web pages out there include the exact keyphrase)

3. Working out the KEI factor ( the ‘keyword effectiveness index’ has been discussed in Lesson 3 and is a measure of the importance of the phrase for optimisation – the higher the KEI the better)

4. Prioritising the keyphrase list.

The example I’m going to give you relates to the UK market, but the same process is equally applicable to any market. Fortunately, the Overture Keyword Assistant ( see the detail of how to use it in last months posting) allows us to be country specific when researching keywords so this is an ideal tool for us to use.

STAGE 1 – Estimating the Popularity:
Lets take this company involved with furniture revovals. If you go to the Overture Keyword Assistant ( The UK version at www.content.overture.com/d/UKm/ac/index.jhtml and listed under ‘tools’) and start trialing a few keywords you think may be relevant to searchers of such servivces – eg ‘removal services’, ‘furniture removal’, ‘removal services uk’ etc. You’ll come out with a list of keyphrases (some suggested by Overture) and their corresponding ‘count’. Count is the estimated number of searches per month for the phrase. (It is based on all search engines except Google, so a good rule of thumb is to double this for the actual number on the basis that Google accounts for around half of all searches)

As an example, you’ll see that you get counts of 906 for ‘removal services’ and 1616 for ‘furniture removal’.

You may like to construct an Excel spreadsheet when carrying out this analysis with columns for ‘keyphrase’, ‘count’, ‘competition’ and KEI, so eventually when you have your complete list you can do a simple sort to get them in order of importance.

STAGE 2: Estimating the Competition:
This part of the process is a matter of going to Google and checking for the competition for each of the keyphrases you have identified.
At the Google search box type in the keyphrase in question. Enclose the keyphrase in quotation marks since we are looking for exact matches, check the ‘pages from the uk’ button since we are looking just to focus on the UK market in this example.

For the two examples above – ‘revoval services’ and ‘furniture removal’ – you will see you get figures of 77500 and 7380 ( You will see these figures in the top right hand corner of the Google results page, for example, Results 1 – 10 of about 77,500 for “removal services”. (0.06 seconds) . These are the number of pages in the Google index with an exact match for the phrase, that is, a measure of the competition.

Fill in the relevant part of your spreadsheet with this competition figure for all your keyphrases.

STAGE 3 – Calculating the KEI:
The detail and rationale behind the KEI calculation is included in Lesson 3, but here it is a simple matter of calculating the figure. This is achieved by squaring the ‘count’ and dividing by the ‘competition’. So for ‘removal services’ we get 906 times 906 divided by 77500 that is a KEI figure of 10.6.

For ‘furniture removal’ the figure you get is 353.8. Clearly ‘furniture removal’ is a far better phrase to ompimise around than ‘removal services’.

STAGE 4 – Prioritising yor Keyphrases:
If you use a spreadsheet you can obviously include the KEI formula to perform this calculation automatically, then its a simple matter of using the sort facility to get all the phrases in ascending KEI order.

That’s it! you now have a list of keyphrases ordered in importance for effective optimisation.

Incidentally you will see that ‘removal services uk’ has a KEI of 720.5 showing that a phrase which is less popular in terms of searches can still be very effective for optimisation since there is far less ‘competition’, in this case only 19 competing pages.

For many situations this is as rigorous as you need to be to find the best keyphrases and will work very well for you. It’s certainly a more scientific process than the vast majority of companies engage in. There are some situations however that are very competitive areas and for these we need to go into more detail and look at other aspects of competition.

For example using the google ‘intitle’ command to see how many sites out there have included the keyphrase in their title tag, and using the ‘inanchor’ command to see how many links to websites include the keyphrases as anchor text. These are measures of much more serious competition and we can work out KEIs relating to these figures also. Give me a call if you want more info on this but as Ive already indicated the process above will be more than adequate for most of you and will help you get much more web based business.

Best of luck and as always, if you want any help on this, please consider our ‘Traffic Builder’ service as a cost effective alternative to doing it yourselves.

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PPC is becoming huge for small to medium businesses. We should remember that its only over the last two years that it been a useable method of marketing for small businesses and what I’ll cover in this posting is the best practice principles to make it a real success. Actually it works for every type of business from taxi firms, to steel foundries to retail sport shops on line – no exceptions providing its done properly it will deliver results

What exactly is PPC?

I think many of you will be aware that it’s the little ads that appear on the right side of the Google hit list which are ranked according to how much you decide to pay per click. The other main player is Overture (part of Yahoo) which drives PPC on all other search engines (Yahoo, Altavista, MSN…..). The services are much the same but there are key differences also, the main one of which is discussed in the Q&A spot in this posting.

Transformational Marketing?

I think so. If someone searches for ‘Sharp Aquos 32in TV for less than £600” and an ad pops up repeating that search phrase and taking you through to a ‘landing page’ where the requirement could be fulfilled – that’s transformational, it cuts out the waste and gets straight to the point. (Unlike conventional marketing where 98% waste rates are the norm). The key point is being very specific in your keyword selection so you attract well qualified prospects.

The Process

There are three stages for getting it right

1. Keyphrase selection
2. Scripting your adverts
3. Effective Landing pages.

I’ll focus on Overture in most of the following discussion but using Google’s AdWords is much the same. Lets look at each of these stages in turn…

1. Keyphrase Selection

The point about this is we can be as specific as we want and we can generate as many keyphrases as we want since phrases that don’t work – ie people don’t click – don’t cost anything so we can be as profligate as we wish.

Overture has a wonderful tool for helping us with our kephrases (which is free). Their ‘keyword assistant’ can be used found at : www.content.overture.com/d/UKm/ac/index.jhtml then clicking on the ‘keyword assistant’ option. This is for the UK, if you are interested in traffic from different countries use the appropriate flag on the Overture homepage.

This tool allows us to type in a keyphrase, for example ‘vitamin supplements’ and we will see that 3465 people searched for this over the previous month. Directly below this you will see other phrases that were searched for containing the words ‘vitamin’ and ‘supplement’, so this helps us decide on the specific phrase we want to select based on relevance and popularity.

Lets say we go for ‘vitamin c supplement’ since we have products relevant to this search. We can see that we can expect around 105 searches per month for this phrase.

The next step is to see how much it will cost us (per click) to include this phrase in our advertising. For this we use the ‘view bids tool’ which is directly below the ‘Keyword Assistant’. We will see a list of competitors and how much they are bidding for the phrase. We can see that (at the time of writing) it would cost us around 17p per click to be in position 3 on Overture’s partner search engines ( Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, etc).

We can do all of this without setting up an account. Setting one up is easy and only requires that we provide our credit card details and set limits on what we wish to spend.

2. Scripting our Adverts

If you look at the little ads that appear on the right hand side of, for example, the Google hitlist you will see that the ads are quite salesy and generally are attempts to encourage people to click on them. Unlike organic search marketing we have total control over these ads and there is a knack to writing effective copy in such a small ad. Incidentally below there is an offer from Overture I’ll tell you about and this includes help in setting up your ads.

The key point here is that when you script your add you should repeat the keyphrase which is being searched for. For example if someone searches for ‘Sharp Aquos 32” TV model ts32-1’ then including that phrase in the ad is 50% more likely to get a click through than if it was not included. Incidentally if they type in that phrase guess what they are interested in buying? And this is a key point, attracting such a specific searcher is attracting a pretty well qualified prospect.

This implies of course that we need separate ads for all our important keyphrases. A common mistake for beginners is to use one ad for all keyphrases.

3. Effective landing pages

I think we have already established that the whole point here is to make sales – either directly from your site, or getting them to make contact with you by telephone or email. Either way its all about providing effective calls to action.

A key part of this is taking people through to the relevant landing page which then leads people through the process to satisfying their search.

Again, a common mistake with beginners is to take people to the homepage. If I search for ‘Norwegian cruises’ a travel site taking me through to their homepage where they are advertising a whole range of different holidays will have me clicking back. We have total control over where we take people once they click through so we should use this feature so we can maximise the chances of making a sale.

As we have already mentioned this form of marketing is not restricted to making sales on line, its relevant to every industry sector, its just the ‘call to action’ that’s different. If you are selling vitamin pills on line it will be to get people to provide their credit card details, if you’re a solicitor it is likely that the call to action will be a phone call, or email, to you so that the requirement can be progressed.

So there we are, choose keyphrases carefully based on relevance and popularity, bearing in mind the more specific the phrase the more likely we are to get a qualified prospect. Make sure we produce effective ads (repeating the keyphrase searched for in the ad) then take people through to the right part of the site where there needs can be fulfilled. Do these things and it will work wonderfully well for you.

There are good ‘tutorials’ at both Overtures and Googles sites where you can learn more, but the best way to learn is to try it, so here’s an offer on behalf of Overture:

Its either a £50/£50 split – ie if you risk £50 Overture will provide a further £50 contribution. Alternatively, and this is the one I’d go for, if you provide a further £19 Overture will help you with the keyphrases and ads. Give it a shot and when you get your first order drop me an email saying ‘Thanks Jan’. Send no cash, a thank you will be fine.

If you want to take up the offer drop me an email jan@janklin.com and put OVERTURE OFFER in the subject. I’ll get Overture to make contact with you.

Using ‘pay per click’ has immediate impact (unlike Search Engine Optimisation which will take a few months to kick in) so using them in a combined way is a common strategy – ppc for immediate effect, developing SEO in the background so eventually you get them both working for you. Don’t forget our low cost Traffic Builder service which will get your SEO moving quickly for you.

Best Wishes for great success with your search marketing.

Jan

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