5 Common SEO Mistakes Small Businesses Make

I have found that a lot of businesses who think they have gotten SEO in the bag, and believe that their websites are in tip top shape, in order to rank well in the search engines, make the same easy to fix mistakes. Of the mistakes I have seen made, or of those that could potentially be made, here are the 5 most common SEO mistakes.

SEO Mistakes # 1:

Using the same Meta tags in Title, keyword and description on all of their pages. If you have a site that offers different services it’s good to have a page for each one with DIFFERENT keywords descriptions etc.

For Example if you are an accountant and you do tax returns, bookkeeping, financial planning etc. You should have a general home page and then other pages that target the individual things. Search Engines think you are irrelevant if you have the keyword “bookkeeping” in a page that is all about financial planning.

What many small businesses do is have meta keywords like “Accountancy, chartered account, bookkeeping, financial planning, tax returns” on every page.

SEO Mistakes #2:

Not putting ALT text with their imagesSmall business man Confused by SEO. “IMG -234″ etc  is not a useful search term.

If you have images on your site use the ALT text field with relevant keywords for the description. This is good for search engines and good for people. The Alt Text field is the text you see when the image can’t be displayed. People see them sometimes when they have a certain set up on their computer and it’s what programs that read sites for the vision impaired use to describe the picture to people who can’t see it.

Its also what google images use to find relevant images in that search, so relevant ALT text can improve your SEO on many levels.

NB Some websites use “images” as their menu buttons, it’s VERY important if you are doing that that you use the ALT text to name the internal link. Also, some templates use images for their graphic design, too many of those just look like a mess to the search engines and it’s probably better to re-do the whole site in a different way. ( This is what I have to do with my natural therapies site). Its easier to re-do it from the start and copy the text than to try and get in and fix it all.

SEO Mistakes #3:

Using too many Key-Words. You should only use between 3 and 10 keywords in the meta tags per page. Most small businesses try and think of anything their customers might be searching for and whack it in the meta tag. Search engines see this and think you are not focused enough. They are trying to find the most relevant page for the search query. The more you have the less relevant they figure you must be to any one search term.

Related to this is putting in nearby suburbs as keyword tags. Unless you mention the suburb throughout your page google think you are trying to “keyword stuff” , they don’t like that!

This is where keyword research comes in. You can’t be all things to all searches, you need to pick a few targeted keywords that people are searching for and are relevant to the particular page. This leads us to common mistake number 4…

SEO Mistakes #4:

Poor choice of keywords placed in the META keyword tag. Sure it might seem logical to target the word “printers” if you run a printer repair business in Blanchardstown, but think about it, even if you succeeded in ranking well for such a competitive term (you won’t), how many of the people visiting your site as a result of this search would leave as soon as they saw your home page? That’s right, most of them. All the people who wanted to buy printers, all the people looking for businesses outside Blanchardstown, all the people not looking specifically for printer repairers.

Does it become clear now that targeting such a generic word is a waste of time? What you need to do instead is optimize your site for search terms and phrases that are highly targeted to your precise business. Use a tool such as Google’s Keyword Tool to find what people are actually typing in to the search engines to find goods and services similar to yours and concentrate on ranking well for those terms. The more qualified your site visitors are, the more likely you are to convert those visitors into paying customers.

SEO Mistakes #5:

A Lack of Optimized Body Text. This one is very common. How often do you visit a home page that is made up entirely of graphics? You know the ones, they consist of an enormous Flash file or maybe a large logo or a montage of images, but the thing they have in common is a distinct lack of text. Think they look professional? Think again. No matter what you read or hear, if a site has no text on the home page, it hasn’t been correctly optimized and has little chance of ranking well in the search engines. Now that’s unprofessional in my opinion.

Beginner SEO’s often make the mistake of creating an optimized title tag and META tags and believing their work is done. WRONG. If you want a web site to rank well in the search engines, you need to give them what they want to see, visible content that is optimized just as well as the invisible content. That means adding keyword-filled body text to any page you want ranking high. Why? Because most search engines can’t index images. Some engines don’t even index META tags anymore. So a site with no visible content becomes effectively invisible to a search engine and has almost no chance of appearing in the rankings for logical searches.

Also, search engine algorithms have become smarter and are now checking that sites contain highly relevant content before including them in their index. If you expect to rank well for a particular keyword or phrase, it’s not too much to expect to find that keyword or phrase within your site is it?

So if you think you have your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) covered for your site, it might be a good idea to run through the above checklist.  Better to be safe than sorry.

Search Engine Optimization – Vrs – Paid Search: Which To Choose?

As a search engine marketing company, we are often asked by clients and prospects which is better, should we choose Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) or go for paid advertising, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) traffic.  Do we have a preferance of one over the other or whats our thinking when it comes to organic search engine optimization and paid search advertising.

“Is one tactic more favorable than another? How do I know which channel to pursue? Should I do both?”

Without a hard look at your company’s goals and unique situation, there really isn’t a concrete answer to these questions. The true test of pursuing either an SEO campaign or PPC advertising (or both) is knowing that it all boils down to your company, it’s ROI objectives, budget, and countless other monetary and marketing factors. To determine which, or what combination of both, might offer the most bang for your buck, let’s examine five types of “models” that my search engine marketing company often deals with.

1. SEO Only.

Some clients are strictly interested in kicking off an SEO campaign, usually for a few basic reasons. They often have tried pay-per-click and decided it didn’t work, so they aren’t interested in trying it again in the foreseeable future (whether the initial campaign was set up effectively and the channel should be revisited is a subject for future discussion). They also often feel that since they themselves ignore PPC ads on the right hand side of the page, everyone else must do the same.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with pursuing search engine optimization exclusively, it can take awhile to achieve rankings for competitive, profitable keyphrases, and there’s simply no way for your search engine marketing company to accurately predict (as they probably can with some degree of accuracy with PPC advertising) exactly what the initial results will be, and precisely when they will appear. However, for companies which do not have an immediate sense of urgency in their online marketing initiatives and who for whatever reason do not want to pursue PPC, organic SEO still offers a great, albeit slightly delayed, return on investment.

2. PPC Only.

Alternatively, a search engine marketing company may encounter the clients who are primarily interested in PPC … and nothing else. Even with a limited spend, clients can turn their campaigns on and off as needed, making market segments easier to control than with an SEO campaign. Pay-per-click also allows clients to achieve a somewhat predictable ROI if the campaign is managed effectively: “If I spend X, I’ll get back Y.”

The clients that fall within the ‘PPC advertising only’ category may have worked with a search engine marketing company before, pursuing SEO exclusively, and achieved less than stellar results. Despite all the positive press hyping up what search engine optimization can do for website visibility in recent years, it still tends to be viewed as more voodoo than science by most companies pursuing online marketing for the first time. With such companies, organic SEO is usually a topic we broach after achieving success with PPC.

3. SEO with PPC Stopgap.

The first and most common question a search engine marketing company may hear concerning an SEO campaign is how long it will take to achieve results. Naturally, clients want to be able to see the investment almost immediately.

This is where the PPC stopgap approach comes in. Though a client’s budget is usually fixed, they are often willing to spend a little more on the front end to see immediate results. Once positive results are evident, PPC spending is scaled back as SEO takes hold. An advantage of this approach to clients with limited budgets is that it can be managed on a very granular level. When top organic results are achieved for a given keyphrase, PPC bidding for that term can cease. Over time, PPC expenditures can theoretically be eliminated entirely. This model appeals to those who want a wide range of coverage and immediate results but have a fixed monthly budget that they do not control.

4. Hybrid Model.

A hybrid model is similar to a stopgap model, except that the client has no intention of eventually leaving the PPC arena entirely. Rather, the client has their search engine marketing company do a full on optimization AND paid search campaign at the outset, with the expectation that PPC costs will be reduced but not eliminated as the organic campaign takes hold.

In this model, a client recognizes that in an organic SEO campaign, they will be limited in the number of keyphrases that they can target by the amount of real estate on their website. With a PPC campaign, however, there is no downside to targeting thousands upon thousands of relevant “long tail” keyphrases, that is, search terms that are comprised of longer strings of words. Using the hybrid model, a company removes keyphrases from the PPC campaign on a granular level as they achieve top organic results for those phrases, but continue to bid on keyphrases that the site does not currently target.

5. Full Out SEM.

This approach calls for both SEO and PPC initiatives running at full speed. These types of clients are generally those that consider these two efforts as separate ‘beasts’ and frankly believe that showing up highly in both channels is a good thing…as long as the return justifies the spend.

These clients are happy to spend as much as possible with with their search engine marketing company and do not usually have a set marketing budget – just strict ROI objectives. As long as each channel is performing within acceptable ranges, they are happy to reap the benefits. Generally, they treat the two disciplines as unique channels and monitor the results independently.

Choosing the Right Model

Which approach is right? It depends (you weren’t expecting a definitive answer, right?). The decision between SEO efforts vs. PPC advertising depends on means, goals, budget, comfort level, corporate restrictions, and many other elements. Keep in mind that these are only five possible models that we often encounter. Many clients do not fit neatly into any of these scenarios. Some clients may start out with one option and evolve into another. Some switch back and forth depending on their own ever-changing situation. The most important thing is to be aware of your options and pursue a path that fits your current goals.

If you are new to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and would know how you can take advantage of a well optimised website then be sure to check out our SEO Education 101 Training Video. Click the link to go there now.

Article By: Scott Buresh

Great Search Engine Optimization Tips That Will Deliver More Website Traffic

If you want a booming online business then it’s essential to be able to take your business to the front page of the major search engines. However, few people really know how you can do this. In this article, I’m going to give you a “crash course” in what to do to get your website moving towards a page one listing and to rank it highly. I’m going to go over the basics in an easy to understand way so you can apply what you learn here straight away.

First and foremost…

Keywords Research

Keywords are the words that your user types into Google to try and search for websites. What keywords and phrases do you want to rank highly for? I can’t stress highly enough how important this step is in the optimisation process. If you get this step wrong all that follows will be wasted effort. It is vitally important to choose what keywords and phrases you want to rank for before you start optimizing your website.

You can see how much volume keywords get using the Google Keyword Tool. When you have chosen some good keywords you can also determine if its a good buyer keyword using microsofts, online commercial intention tool.

Now that you have determined what keywords you want to optimise for, you need to use then properly.

Optimize Your Title Tag

Make sure your main keyword appears once or twice in the title. If you have a secondary keyword, put both of them in the title. Don’t have any keyword more than twice.

Optimize Your Website

There are many other factors that are important for on site optimization. Two of the big ones are your header tags and your keyword density. Use heading tags for your headers. In between them, ensure you mention your keyword at least once.

Use your keyword often in your text, but don’t make it sound weird to do so. These two factors have an influence on Google, but not nearly to the same degree as before simply because people abused the system.

Get Quality Backlinks

The next thing is to get good backlinks from sites that are related to yours. Getting good quality back links to your website is what is known as off page optimisation.

There are many ways to do this. Here are some of them:

Submit free press releases

Offer to write articles for other sites in exchange for a back link

Pay for it

Submit your site to directories

Link to them and ask them to link back

Post comments on related blogs

Post comments on related forums

Etc

Be creative. Come up with ways to get back backlinks to your website.

Optimize Your Anchor Text

If you can, ask the website owners who are linking to you to create their link with good anchor text. A good anchor text is a link that has your keyword in it, rather than just click here.

For example, if you’re selling woodworking workshops:

Bad: *Click Here* To learn About Woodworking Workshops

Good: Click This Link to *Learn About Woodworking Workshops*

Where ** is The Link Text

Wrapping it Up

If you select your keywords carefully, optimize your title, your h1 tags and your keyword density, get quality backlinks and optimize your anchor text, you’ll be far, far ahead of your competition.

In fact, you now know more about how to get your site to rank well in the major search engines than most webmasters on the internet.

Now it’s time to put this knowledge to use and really see the results. What you learned here can literally double your business overnight.

If you would like some help with implementing this for your website then you can request a free consultation by clicking here.

How do You Go About Marketing Your Online Business?

So you’ve got yourself a web site and you think the leads and profits should start rolling in. Well guess again…Unfortunately it won’t take you long to realise there is more to generating great traffic to a web site than getting your site launched. What I’m going to go through in this article is what you need to do to generate traffic to your website and how you can effectively market your online endevour. Ok, so lets look at various ways in which you can market your online business.

The reason for marketing an online business is in order to get that all important traffic to visit your site. This traffic consists of visitors, who will then become your customers and start purchasing your product or service from you.

The first thing you need to do is learn how to optimize your website so that it will start getting ranked in the top three search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN. The sooner you do this the faster it will get ranked and the sooner the traffic will start to appear at it.

A couple of great way of doing this is by investing in either a book, E-book or Ecourse on how to optimize your site, or engaging the services of a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) specialist, or you could try some of the following methods instead. The best way in which you can optimize your website is by ensuring you have back links to your site. This is where you have links to your site placed on other sites through various different methods. Below we provide you with some that are useful in order to get those all important back links to your website.

Link Exchanges

This is where you exchange links with other websites that have complimentary products or services to your own. It will not only give you direct traffic from the link, but will help to increase your pursuit for getting ranked higher in search engines.

Write Articles

It is important that the articles you write are interesting and full of useful information regarding your niche. This is probably one of the best ways around for gaining more traffic to your website. Not only is it free, as there are many article sites around where you can have your articles published for free, but each article you have published will be providing a link back to your site. This means that you are helping to gain even higher rankings where search engines are concerned. When writing an article, you should always include information about you, the author (this will usually be in a resource box at the bottom of your article), and do not forget to include that all important link to your own website. By distributing to numerous article sites, you are not only gaining traffic (as when someone sees it on there, they will click on your link if they like what they saw), but also you get a link that points directly back to your site, which the search engines use to rank sites. However, if you are someone who dislikes writing, then you could always look at using a ghostwriter. There are many sites around today who offer ghostwriting services, but when initially setting up an online business, this may not be an expense that you want to incur.

Online Forums

When using these, do not forget to include your signature line at the end of any comments that you make, as this will then provide a further link back to your site. The best bet is to stick to forums that are on the same topic as what you are trying to sell. Not only will you be learning about your potential customer’s desires, but you’ll be able to establish yourself as an expert in the field.

Blogs

Blogs are a great way of ensuring you get back links to your site. So why not start a blog on your website? But ensure that you post to your blog several times a week and think of it as news page for your site. Certainly blogging has become the in thing at the moment on the web. You only have to do a quick search to find out just how many there are.

Discover 7 Great Tips For Generating Traffic To Your Blog

Have you set up a blog with the expectation of attracting a lot of traffic, only to have your blog collecting dust and not getting enough traffic? It’s a common problem for bloggers. Their blogs are good, but no one is coming to visit. The burning question then becomes “How do I increase Traffic To My Site?”. Increasing traffic is actually easier than it seems–provided you know how. In this article, we will go over 7 specific methods of increasing traffic. These are guaranteed methods to draw more visitors to your blog. You should include these in your ongoing internet marketing campaign for your site.

Tip #1: Sign Up For Pinging Services

It seems pretty obvious, but most bloggers, even those who are more experienced, don’t sign up for pinging services. If you’re new to blogging and don’t know what pinging means, pinging basically means that when your blog is updated, a “ping” is sent out by the service to let pinging sites know that your blog has been updated. People who are visiting sites with pinging services will then see your blog flash across the side of the screen as “newly updated”. Pinging services include Yahoo’s blo.gs, weblogs.com, Google Blog search, and ZingFast.

Tip #2: Sign Up For Technorati

If you go to technorati.com, you’ll see an option on the left side of the screen to “Claim Your Blog”. Doing so allows you to get updated link counts, add your photo or branding to Technorati, and see your Technorati link. Having your blog claimed on Technorati helps to increase traffic because the millions of people who go to that site will have a chance to see your blog on there.

Tip #3: Sign Up For FeedBurner, a RSS Service

What FeedBurner basically does for your blog is it helps you to promote your blog’s content, build your audience and measure your audience. In other words, it helps you increase your blog’s traffic.

Tip #4: Bookmark Your Blogs At Places Like del.icio.us

You can set up an account and profile at del.icio.us. Then, using that, you can add links to your blog along with excerpts from your blog. Anytime someone visits your profile on del.icio.us, they will see a link to your blog and excerpts. There are other social bookmarking sites that you can use in much the same way. The bottom line is, using these social bookmarking sites can help you increase traffic. Using social bookmarking can really improve search engine optimisation (SEO) and boost your traffic.

Tip #5: Post comments at other blogs

No, this doesn’t mean you should go and spam other blogs with comments that are only there to promote a site. It means that you should visit similar blogs to your own, post legitimate comments and then sign your name(along with a link to your blog). This way, people know you aren’t there just to promote your site—you’re there to post a good piece of feedback and also say where you’re from. This tip should form a prominent part of your internet marketing strategy as it is also an excellent method of enhancing your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts.

Tip #6: Ask Owners Of Other Blogs To Post A Link To Yours

Find other blogs that are similar to yours. If they seem to be decently popular(that is, they have a good amount of comments for each post), you can try to contact the owner of the blog to add a link to your blog if they have a links section. To make them really want to do this, you can offer to link back to their blog on your blog. People do this reciprocal blog linking all the time and it does help to increase traffic.

Tip #7: Use Keywords In Your Blog

Like regular web pages, having a good keyword density on a blog is a terrific way of getting search engine spiders to notice your page. (FYI: Search engine spiders are programs from search engines that browse sites and report back their findings to the search engine database, which then lists that site. The more keywords on your site, the more likely it is for a search engine spider to pay a visit)

If your average blog posting is around 200 words, try to use 2-6 keywords per blog post. 2-6 keywords in a blog posting of 200 words is a keyword density of between 1 and 3 percent, a respectable number. Remember that you don’t want to use too many keywords, as that will make your blog look bad. Also be sure that the keywords used are relevant to your blog. Before even making a blog posting, decide what the post will be about and then select a keyword or two to use in your post. Then do it. It’s a surefire way of getting more traffic to your site!

P.S. Signing up with a service like Technorati is a quick, painless way of increasing traffic to your blog. So sign up today!

That’s it for this post, hopefully that will help you in your ongoing Internet Marketing efforts and generating extra traffic to your blog.

For further indepth information on generating floods of traffic to your website then you should sign up for our newsletter and you will receive absolutely free a copy of “Traffic Overdrive”, containing Top Traffic Building Strategies That Will Put Your Site on High Octane.

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