Simple SEO strategies for soaring up the SERPs
As a search engine optimisation (SEO) professional, I naturally believe the best way to secure good placement in the search engine results pages (SERPs) is to invest in the services of a good SEO agency. However, that does not mean there are not a number of steps a company can take on its own.
What can a company do by itself to help it rise in the results? Here are some simple SEO strategies you may wish to employ as a starting point for your site...
Seriously stupid socialising: how to ruin writing
Engaging with potential customers through social media is one of the key tactics I urge clients to undertake. Blogging, getting involved in forums, creating social spaces and visiting consumers in their own webspace, social media effort enjoys a great deal of success.
Of course, by virtue of being online, the majority of such engagement is made through written copy, with a small amount taking place through online video. While the potential for such marketing is huge, it is frighteningly easy to get wrong, risking reputation and consumer wrath.
Here are my main concerns when it comes to online copy – as always, leave a comment if you think I've missed any.
25 SEO tips to create trust with the search engines
There's no two ways about this, Google and the other search engines have their favourites. I'm sure you've seen it all before, either working for your client or evaluating your competition. There are a number of sites in every niche, whatever content they publish they rank well whether or not the content is optimised, has any inbound links and without really trying too hard.
You, on the other hand might have worked hard to rank for that content, have got some great natural links, lots of buzz but you've got little to show for it. What you don't know is that these websites have managed to reach a high trust level with the search engines which helps their content rank highly.
50 SEO tips for online retailers
SEO for online retailers is the process of improving a website potential in order to gain more organic non-paid traffic from the major search engines. Normally, SEO uplift doesn't happen overnight and it can take a long while to rank well for non brand key terms.
The rule of thumb is this: the more competition a relative term has, the harder you'll find it to rank for the term. With that said, you've got to start somewhere and there at least 50 ways I can think of to improve your SEO.
A treatise on the ethics of search engine optimisation
Search engine optimisation (SEO) and the online marketing sector as a whole may not present the most ethically challenging jobs in the world but it does offer a few moral predicaments.
We may not need to wrestle with thorny moral debates on the nature of
personhood or seek to justify wars, but we are still challenged
regularly by everyday small moral queries, which I suppose is true of
any role.
Here are a few of the routine debates an SEO
executive may encounter. Let me know if you think I have missed any and
we can furrow our respective brows and thrash it out in the comments
page.
Q&A: Dr Mike Baxter on applying the 80:20 rule to digital businesses
Econsultancy has a breakfast briefing next week which will advise digital companies how they can optimise their businesses by applying the 80:20 rule.
The speakers at the briefing are Dr Mike Baxter, who has authored a number of reports for Econsultancy, and Robert Colquhoun, who specialises in multichannel customer acquisition and retention strategies.
I've been talking to Dr Baxter about the 80:20 rule, and how online businesses can benefit from its application...
You control your own destiny, Google doesn't
My post yesterday about Google's paid links smack down sparked quite a discussion and a bit of debate.
Good points were made all around on all sides of the debate.
When is a paid link not a paid link?
Google has a major problem relating the identification of paid links, but I believe it has an even bigger problem relating to the definition of 'paid links', and the very term itself.
Econsultancy’s Patricio Robles wrote about this earlier today so I don’t want to cover too much old ground, but I do want to comment on the difference – or similarity – between paid and commercial links.
Search queries keep getting longer
Search queries keep getting longer. Over the past year, queries of 8 words and over experienced the higher the jump in usage.
A Hitwise study finds searches of 5 or move words in length increased 10 percent from January 2008 to January of this year. Over the same period of time shorter queries of 1 to 4 words in length decreased 2 percent.
The longer the queries, the longer the long tail becomes. As searchers becomes more sophisticated in honing their terms, SEO gets correspondingly more complex, but also more potentially rewarding.
Improving results from SEO - what makes the biggest difference?
Where should companies focus their SEO efforts? This question is front-of-mind for me at the moment since from March, I'm the tutor of the new advanced SEO training course from
Econsultancy.
It's also a good time to review this since I attended and spoke at Search Engine Strategies (SES) in London last week, so it was interesting to see which topics got the most attention, and SEO was certainly more popular than paid search.
Social media: the best and worst of 2009
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
