Typical SEO Services

SEO services can differ between different companies due to tactics and resources, however one thing is always true: the aim of SEO is to take a website and push it as high up the Google organic results as possible. Depending on the marketplace and level of competition, this can be very difficult and one step out of line can be all it takes for Google to de-index your site. So that’s why the experts offer SEO services. People who know SEO inside out not only know how to get you where you need to be, but are aware of the landscape and know how to stay within the law. Whether they choose to or not is another story and I’ll get to that in a moment.

Here are some of the most commonly used methods by SEO’s; not all of these are used by SB Web Consulting and not all of our tactics are listed here:

Link Building

Backlinks are the currency of Google Rankings, so if you want to rank well in a competitive marketplace, you’ll need to have a lot of these, or a few incredibly good ones. For those who don’t know, backlinks are links from another site pointing back to yours. The rule of thumb is, the more backlinks the better, but there are exceptions.

Article Spinning

This tactic has been around almost as long as search engines have. It’s the act of using thesaurus software to rewrite variations of the same article hundreds of times so that you can place the same article all over the web and increase the chances of gaining backlinks.

Directory Submissions

Adding a site or business to an online directory can often yield backlinks and citaions and is a widely used tactic in most local SEO services.

Blog Commenting

Most comment fields on blogs and websites allow the user to specify their own website and also leave a link in the comment section. This is a widely used tactic for generating links.

On-Site Keyword Placement

Placing Keywords on your website in the right places can tell Google what your site is supposed to be ranking for and is a widely utilised tactic.

There are way too many tactics to go through in just one post, but there are dozens. Again, not all of these are used by SB Web Consulting and not all of our tactics are listed here.

Local Listing Optimisation

A few years back, Google brought out their Maps service and allowed businesses to be listed on there. This also has a ranking algorithm of its own and some companies, such as ourselves, offer a local listing optimisation service to help people rank well in their locality. This is particularly effective for business types that thrive on local foot traffic, such as hardware stores, hairdressers and more.

White Hat SEO Services vs Black Hat SEO Services

SEO is a long term strategy and can deliver brilliant results. However, some people want the results a little quicker than usual. This is where black hat SEO comes in. By breaking Google’s terms of service, you can rank extremely quickly for incredibly difficult keywords. However, Google invariably finds out and there is often a big ranking penalty or even worse, being removed from Google’s index altogether.

As an ethical SEO company, we utilise white hat SEO tactics, preferring to work hard towards SEO results rather than putting our clients at risk for the sake of a short-term win.

So that’s today’s post on SEO services. Be sure to tune in for more SEO tips.

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Ecommerce SEO Targeting

With SEO it’s about targeting keywords and optimising the right pages for the right phrases. For eCommerce, it’s similar, but not quite the same. eCommerce stores are laid out differently to most sites, with products as part of categories and maybe even sub categories. Rather than attempting to optimise the home page to rank, optimise the categories, sub categories and products. Ideally, you’ll want users to land directly on the product pages and/or categories, rather than having to navigate once they land on your home page.

SEO-Friendly URLs

It’s a universally agreed-upon fact that the URL is a key contributing factor in SEO ranking and ecommerce is no different. However, you can give yourself a little bit of a head-start.

Slugs

People at the end of the buying process tend to add the phrase “buy” to the start of their search terms. So the phrase “blue widgets” will be replaced by “buy blue widgets” for someone ready to make a purchase there and then. The search volumes are significantly lower, but the conversion rates are invariably higher. A trick that some people use is to incorporate the phrase “buy” into their URL. Most CMS e-commerce setups will allow you to specify a pace for the base of the store. Replacing the default slug (usually “shop” or “store”) with “buy” is an easy way to pick up those ready-to-buy searchers.

Titles

Simple rule of thumb for this one, your categories should be the broad keyword (e.g. “Blue Widgets”), your product titles should be the exact product name (e.g. “2nd series Blue Widget AC217″). This way you’re hitting two types of searchers – the ones who are browsing the market and those who know what they’re looking for. Again, the broader keywords have the highest search volume, but the exact product names fall under the category of long-tail keywords and will have a much higher conversion rate. The same goes for the URL. Make them the same as the titles and you’re away.

Descriptions

Product descriptions are where a lot of the smaller stores fail miserably on their ecommerce SEO. They’ll simply copy the descriptions from the manufacturers, triggering a duplicate content flag, leaving the manufacturer’s site to rank higher because they’re the authority and leaving you to rank absolutely nowhere.

Take the time to rewrite the descriptions and SEO them properly. 200 words should be enough and remember to put the product name in the description as well as the title and URL. Try and get the category keyword in there too, and link out to it. Most of the big ecommerce stores don’t do SEO properly simply because they don’t have to. They naturally accumulate links and traffic, so their SEO is lazy, if not non-existent. By optimising your product pages and categories properly, you can get a real foothold over the competition.

Blog

I don’t care what anyone says, build a blog on your e-Commerce site.

It allows you to have continuous, fresh content and build internal links to your products and categories. Not only that, blogging gives you more opportunity to exploit social media platforms and build up a following. Not only that, blogs are good for link-building, increasing the domain authority and even promoting your own products.

So that’s the lot for our free ecommerce seo tips. If you’d like more info or you want someone to do your ecommerce SEO for you, get in touch with us today!

The post How to do Ecommerce SEO appeared first on SB Web Consulting.

The most notable quote from the whole thing was the promise “not to ruin it”. However, within a few hours of the acquisition, over 70,000 members exported their blogs to rivals WordPress.com.

What this means for Tumblr

Monetisation

An acquisition of this magnitude isn’t just a matter of jumping in with the big boys, there’s money to be made. And in the world of search and social media, that equates almost invariably to advertisements. However, Tumblr has its own monetisation setup already in place by way of promoted posts. I’ve used them myself and they’re really quite useful and I can’t see them going away in the future. In fact, if anything, they’ll probably increase. However, promoted posts are the acceptable form of advertisement. People are on Tumblr to see media rich blog posts and that’s exactly what they’ll get via promoted posts. Maybe Yahoo will tweak them in order to allow them to be slightly more targeted than they are right now, but either way, that’s the main way that they’re going to make any kind of money from this deal.

This gif clearly displays the views of a large section of the Tumblr community

Yahoo! Integration

Everything from the press releases suggests that Tumblr and Yahoo are going to be run separately, but we’d be fools to think that they aren’t going to integrate the two services in some way. However that remains to be seen. New account creation with Yahoo accounts is most likely to be part of it, which ties over nicely to my next point…

Data

Data is the biggest commodity in the world right now, everybody want the most information possible and whilst Google are in the lead, that hasn’t stopped everyone else getting a hold of what they can. By buying Tumblr, Yahoo also own their data and will probably seek to implement ways of generating as much data as possible from the millions of Tumblr users worldwide.

Will Tumblr Suffer?

No. Yahoo (hopefully) learned their lessons from Geocities (remember them?). Not only that but they’ve kept Tumblr’s head honcho in charge and maintain that Tumblr and Yahoo will remain as two separate companies. However, the exodus will continue for a while and with WordPress becoming more and more like Tumblr, the people who leave won’t miss Tumblr as much, even though Tumblr is quite superior.

Either way, it’ll be interesting to see what the future holds for Tumblr and whether they’ll benefit from Yahoo’s swollen wallet or if Yahoo’s questionable reputation will prove difficult.

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WordPress SEO by Yoast

Joost de Valk has set the standard for SEO plugins with the world famous Yoast plugin. This tool is an SEO dream, monitoring keyword placement, keyword density, H1 & H2 usage, canonicalization and many more straight from the page editor.

It also has its own settings where you can choose to force rewrite the page titles, connect your site for easy Google+ Authorship and so much more. There’s a light system which tells you how well each page is being optimised for its relevant keyword so even beginners can make the most of their on-site SEO.

ShareThis by ShareThis

Social Media is an integral part of Online Marketing and every marketer in the world is trying to go viral or at least get noticed in the fast-paced world of social networking. Of course, the key to all of this is to get your audience to share your content with their friends and followers.

Why not make it as easy as possible? The ShareThis plugin leaves a floating module on the side of your website allowing users the opportunity to share any page from your website with consummate ease.

Pinterest Pin It Button For Images by Canha

Pinterest is without a doubt something of a holy grail for online marketing, with the social network full of image-sharing users that are often looking for ideas on how to make a purchase. Pinterest has been heralded (depending on whose figures you believe) as one of the biggest converters of traffic on the web.

This plugin allows you to tap into that more easily than ever. By hovering over an image on your site, the user can then click on the “Pin It” button that appears and instantly share the content on Pinterest.

Tweet Old Post by Ajay Matharu

You may well have written posts a short while ago that still have relevance or carry weight. Well if you want them to remain relevant in the eyes of your audience, you’ll want to put it in front of them more than just once.

Tweet Old Post does exactly what it says on the tin, but allows you to select which posts get repeated as well as the time between posts and how many get shared at the same time.

Brilliant for extending the life of your content and sharing it with people who may have missed it.

Twitter Cards by Niall Kennedy

Every so often, twitter sends a bulleting to its users about the content that their network has been sharing during that day, week or month. Often, you’ll see a section for “stories” where articles are shared as opposed to raw tweets. These are posts with the Twitter Cards markup applied to them. Whether it’s an image, video or just a webpage, almost any kind of content is eligible for rich display in Twitter and a potential spot in the periodic bulletin.

This plugin adds the markup to your site for you, then all you have to do is make twitter aware of the markup on your site and it’s all onwards and upwards from there.

Well this is our top 5 list of WordPress plugins for online marketing; did your favourite make the list? Did we miss a real gem; do you have a completely different list? Tell us yours in the comments!

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Black Hat SEO Tactics

At about 25 seconds in, the advert shows the business owner searching Google for fashion bloggers. She then sends the blogger a satchel in the hope of favourable reviews, links or maybe both. This is clearly against Google’s own terms of service as published here. In particular this part:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link.

Now, the question on my mind is whether this is any different from what Interflora did when they gave away free flowers to bloggers in the hope they would receive favourable reviews and/or links. Once Google found out they slapped Interflora’s rankings down, as reported on Search Engine Journal and many other places.

This isn’t the first case of double standards by the search engine giant. Take a look at this post on seobook.com for another instance of ‘do as we say and not as we do’!

Please add your opinion below.

The post Are Google Now Promoting Black Hat SEO Tactics? appeared first on SB Web Consulting.

Personalization and SEO – Whiteboard Friday

It’s no secret that Google uses your search and location data to personalise your search results to try and give you the best results. Naturally this has an effect on SEO, simply because the same search terms may yield different results for different users. SEOMoz head honcho Rand Fishkin talks about it in his ever-popular Whiteboard Friday videocast.

Watch it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/personalization-and-seo-whiteboard-friday

Black Hat or White Hat SEO? It’s Time to Ask Better Questions

Dr Pete, who writes on occasion for SEOMoz has stated that instead of simply categorising things as black or white, better questions need to be asked. The post goes into extensive details about the value of links, the risk level of certain tactics and the speed of achieving the goal. It’s definitely one of the better SEO articles that I’ve seen in a long time and should definitely cause you to take any tips with a pinch of salt with a lot of consideration.

Read it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/black-hat-or-white-hat-seo-ask-better-questions

Google Penalized One Article On BBC’s Web Site

It seems that nobody is above the law that is Google. Not even the BBC. The BBC posted an article which was penalised for unnatural linking (not that they’d need it) but the rest of the site remains unscathed. So this gives way to a whole new school of thought: Can the authority of your site limit the damage from any Google penalty, or is there more to it than meets the eye?

Read more here: http://searchengineland.com/google-penalized-one-article-on-bbcs-web-site-151954

Study Finds Google’s Penguin Update Getting Stricter Over Time

Penguin is becoming less and less tolerant according to a Study by Portent. This article on Search Engine Land shows that Google is lowering the tolerance towards spammy links in a site’s backlink profile and shows now signs of slowing down. They want natural results and they won’t stop until they can eliminate spam from their results.

Read more here: http://searchengineland.com/study-googles-penguin-algorithm-triggered-by-fewer-links-over-time-152213

It’s always worth reading the comments in these articles to see what other SEOs have to say. The sites have great community elements to them and you can find great SEO tips in comments as well as the articles. That’s all for today, I’ll be back next month with more!

The post SEO Tips for March 2013 appeared first on SB Web Consulting.

What Separates a “Good” Outreach Email from a “Great” One?

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This particular article from SEOmoz isn’t taking into account the amount of genuine followers, the amount of bots/fakes, which tweets generate the most interactions, etc.

A more fitting study would have been to see how well his promotional/marketing tweets do (incredibly well, is the answer to that) and a study on how to engage with your audience in order to generate these retweets.

There’s a lot that we can learn from Justin Bieber’s social media success, but any social media analysis that is born from raw statstical data, without considering the behavioural aspect of SM, is due to have holes in it.

read it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/justin-bieber-and-you

The post Justin Bieber Gets 32K Retweets Per Tweet appeared first on SB Web Consulting.

The conversion rate was astounding, and whilst it took a lot of time, the results were much better than those that I would have got from broadcasting.

Another really personal method is the email. It doesn’t get much more personal than that. I give out my phone number more often than I’ll give out my personal email, and as anyone at SB Web will tell you, I don’t like talking on the phone. So, for anyone to actually get to me via email is a feat in itself, but then to generate a conversion of any sort is even more of a battle.

However, the brilliant Rand Fishkin has blessed us with another whiteboard Friday giving us the ideal template for an outreach email.

watch it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-separates-a-good-outreach-email-from-a-great-one-whiteboard-friday

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read more about it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/top-1-seo-tips-for-2013

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