JDR Websites - Top quality web design, internet marketing and search engine optimisation

The Best White Hat SEO Techniques

2011-07-06T12:58:00.000+01:00

If you intend to be a hero or the good guy in search engine optimisation Derby, you should only use white hat tactics. There are certain limitations to the approach in the beginning, but you can be sure that your reputation stays stable for the long term. People will refer to your company more as a reliable source of products and information. You can get to your target market without having to resort to unacceptable means. Here are some useful tips.

The Use of Links

Internal linking is one of the easiest methods to help make your web site more visible to search engines. A lot of web sites use a type of script to enable fancy drop-down navigation and other complicated functions, thereby keeping search engines from crawling on the scripts easily. Your pages can become un-indexed as a result.

The effects can boost the visual appearance of your web site, but you have to be concerned about staying visible too, or else there will only be a very limited number of people who can appreciate the work. You can add text links and link internally to improve spidering to your web site because of the sophisticated scripts. You can put text links at the bottom or at your homepage that links all main internal pages. Also include a site map to all internal pages.

The Content

Content creation is highly different from doorway pages and the like. You have to make good quality and unique content that will grab the attention of your potential clients, thereby boosting value to the site and your reputation and credibility as well. The more content-rich the site is, the higher its value will be to search engines and human visitors.

You can invest in professional writers and ghost writers to update the content of your page every now and then. This is a good strategy in becoming a good resource in the industry. Having good content also means that you get to display keywords that will lead more people into the site through search engines.
You can post articles, blogs and posts in forums, blog sites and discussion boards online. People will want to read your works if these are related to their chosen topic. You can also build links back to your web site without having to reciprocate the deed.

Boosting the Site

Manipulating the content, site structure and words can improve the ranking of your web site in search engines. You should make solid meta tags and titles to boost SEO Derby. The optimization attempt should not go far from the main message and content quality contained in the web site. Always include the potential to sell and the quality of articles to maximize exposure on search engines.

SEO Effect of Duplicate Content

2011-06-22T15:23:00.002+01:00

There are a lot of ways that you can improve your site’s page ranking in search engines, unfortunately, not all of them are good. Some people employ certain methods in acquiring a high page rank in search engines, even if these are considered to be deceitful in the sense that they are designed to trick the search engines – one of these methods is actually duplicating web content.
What is duplicate content?

Duplicate content in SEO Derby is actually any web content that is considered to be similar to another site. Search engines have actually implemented new filters specifically to monitor these types of deceitful attempts to improve site’s search engine page rankings. A lot of people think that by creating multiple but similar replicas of their web pages or content, that they will be able to improve their site’s page rankings since they will be able to get multiple listings for their site. Since search engines are now monitoring these types of trickery, sites using duplicate content can actually end up getting banned from search engine indexes instead of improving their ranking.

What are considered as duplicate content?

There are a couple of duplicate content types that are being rampantly utilized by a lot of people, each one a bit different in their use, but all of them employed for the same purpose, which is to trick search engines to get better page rankings.

One way of getting a duplicate content is by having very similar websites or identical web pages on different sub-domains or domains that offer basically the same content. This may include landing or door pages aside from the content, so make sure that you avoid using this if you don’t want your site to become vulnerable to search engines’ duplicate content filter.

Another method of creating duplicate content is by simply taking content from another website or page and reorganizing it to make it appear dissimilar to its original form, though it is actually the same.

Product descriptions from many e-commerce sites are actually being utilized by other sites as well. Other sites simply copy the product description of manufacturer’s utilized by other competitive markets as well. And add the fact that the product name, as well as the name of artist, manufacturer, writer or creator would be included, a significant amount of content would show up on your page. Although this is much harder to spot, it is still considered to be a duplicate content, or spam.

Distribution of copied articles by other sites other than the one that distributed the original article can also be considered to be a duplicate content. Unfortunately, although some search engines still deem the site where the original article came from as relevant, some however, do not.

How do a search engines filter duplicate content?

Search engines filter for duplicate content by using the same means for analyzing and indexing page ranking for sites, and that is through the use of crawlers or robots. These robots or crawlers go through different websites Derby and catalogues these sites by reading and saving information to their database. Once this is done, these robots then analyzes and compares all the information it has taken from one website to all the others that It has visited by using certain algorithms to determine if the site’s content is relevant, and if it can be considered as a duplicate content or spam.

How to avoid duplicate content?

Although you may not have any intentions to try and deceive search engines to improve your site’s page ranking, your site might still get flagged as having duplicate content. One way that you can avoid this from happening is by checking yourself if there are duplicate contents of your page. Just make sure that you avoid too many similarities with another page’s content for this can still appear as duplicate content to some filters, even if it isn’t considered to be a spam.

For more information on SEO Derby, duplicate content or internet marketing go to http://www.jdrwebsites.co.uk/

Content and Link Building Strategies

2011-06-19T10:20:00.000+01:00

Keyword selection For SEO

2011-06-16T11:25:00.000+01:00

One of the main components that helps determine the success, or failure, of your search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign is your keywords selection. Although this may not appear much, choosing the right keyword to use for your website is one of the more gruelling parts of the entire SEO process, especially if you aim to find one that will be most effective for your site’s search engine optimisation.

When using keywords for SEO, you just need to follow a few simple steps in order to properly find the right keyword that will do the job. There are also a couple of things that you need to look out for in order to avoid any problems when trying to optimise your web page.

Make a list

The first thing that you should do if you want to be able to use keywords effectively is to start out by making a list of “key” keywords or phrases that are relevant to the content of your site, and by doing this, it can actually lead you to create or discover more keywords or phrases that may blossom from the original one that you have chosen.

Select key phrases or words

Once you’ve made a list, try to select ones that contain a “key” keyword or phrase that can help you identify your site’s content. Let’s say your site’s content is all about cars, using cars as a keyword won’t put you high up in the page ranking of search engines, especially since a lot of sites or pages have that as a keyword. Try to avoid using words or phrases that are too general, as this will not help improve your page ranking. By adding other key terms to your chosen keyword, such as “second-hand cars”, or “second-hand sports cars” will actually help improve your chances of going up higher in the page rankings. Just make sure that these are relevant to your site’s content.

Check your competition

It also helps if you took the time to search for keywords or phrases that your competition are using so that you can narrow down which ones to use, and which ones to avoid. There is no sense in using a type of keyword or phrase, such as “cars”, which a lot or most of your competition are using as well, and if their site’s are ranked high up in the search engine’s index, then you might have a difficult time going up against that.

Use your location

You can also improve your chances of getting a much better page ranking result if you incorporate your location to the keyword or phrase that you are trying to use. Let’s say your business is located somewhere in Hertfordshire, by simply adding the word “Hertfordshire” to your keyword selection (“Hertfordshire second-hand sports cars”), you can fair better in your page ranking. However, this type of method usually entails that people are planning on seeing you in person when they do searches like this, so make sure that you only utilise this technique if you are open to the idea of them visiting you in person.

Use your niche

Always try to choose the keyword that you specialise in, or at least the one that offers you with the most profit. Keep in mind that you want to offer the keyword that best describes your business, but if the search volume of users is leaning towards one that isn’t your main product, then you can actually opt to use that keyword instead, just as long as that keyword is still related or relevant to your site’s content.

7 Tips To Instantly Improve The Copy On Your Website Increasing Conversion Rates

2011-06-01T11:30:00.000+01:00

When setting up a new website, most business owners will focus on the design and the look of the new website. So when their web designer asks them for the text they often see it as a task to get done and out of the way as quickly as possible - the idea being that if the website looks good, you will get enquiries. Having now seen many professional looking website designs Derby that get lots of hits but few new customers, however, it is important to understand what a difference writing effective web copy makes. Most small business owners are experienced in their trade or profession but have little marketing experience, and as such most websites are filled with text that has been rushed, so busy in the day to day activities of their businesses that they don’t get much time to sit down and really plan their content.
So if you are reading this, you have either written your text for your website already, or are about to start, this is a simple guide which if you implement the ideas here, will improve your websites results.

Firstly, some questions to ask yourself:

What kind of people do you want to attract through this website Derby – who are your ideal customers (eg. General public, small business owners, men, women, teenagers and the older generation)? How can you tailor the content to those people?

What are the benefits of my product/service?

Why should they buy from your business, i.e. what is different about your business?

What action do you want them to take once they’ve read your website – do you want them to call you, fill out an online form or buy something online with their credit card?

1. Make sure content is easy to read

Most people will not read huge complicated paragraphs of text online, as it’s all to easy to click on to another website or another page, so it’s vital to keep your information simple, and to break it up into bite sized chunks. Here are some guidelines for the length of your content:

Headings: 8 words or less
Sentences: 15 - 20 words
Paragraphs: 40 - 70 words
Page word count: 250+ words

2. Break up the text wherever possible

Provide a summary of your information by clearly communicating the direction of your discussion. Use informative headings and subheadings with a paragraph of 4 to 5 lines that supports them. You only have a few seconds to grab your visitors’ attention.

Most will simply scan for the information they are seeking.

Use bulleted or numbered lists, boldface or coloured font to emphasize the points you wish to make. Include links at the end of your paragraph (or within the text) to direct visitors to other pages of your website for more in-depth information.

3. Write from a point of ‘you

The most powerful word in the English language is "you". As hard as it may be to swallow, let me be the first to break it to you that the people reading your website are not interested in you or your business – they are interested in themselves, and how you can help them. So your content must be written from their perspective, not yours, and must answer the question they will be asking themselves ‘what’s in it for me?’

4. Focus on benefits

Most websites will focus on the features of their products or services, not the benefits. Put very simply a feature is what a product does or has; a benefit is the reason why that is important, for example:

Heaters
Feature: It comes with a timer.
Benefit: Your house will be warm when you get home from work.

Mans razor
Feature: revolutionary triple-blade shaving system
Benefit: You will a closer shave

SkyPlus
Feature: Pre-programmable recording function
Benefit: You’ll never miss your favourite shows.

So you may have the highest quality service, or the very best product, but your reader will always be asking themselves ‘so what?’ A simple way to identify the benefits of your product/service(s) is to take a piece of paper, and on the left side, write down a list of your product or service’s features. On the right side, list the corresponding benefit(s).

5. Drive actions with content

What is the next step you want people to take? Each page should lead the reader on to another page – perhaps you want them to read about everything you offer, or perhaps you just want them to get in touch. One of the most common mistakes for a website is to have pages and pages of content which are all dead ends – if someone is reading about, for example, your new brand of widgets then they are interested and it is your job to tell them very clearly what to do next. For example: ‘enquire now’, ‘call us now to order your free brochure on 01234 5678910’, ‘come down to our showroom to talk to one of our team personally’, ‘add to cart’

6. Make your text descriptive so it gets found in the search engines

The search engines will read the text on your website, so if you want to be found for certain keywords it is very important to use those keywords in your content. For example, if you are a building surveyor in Birmingham, and want to appear high in the search results for ‘chartered surveyor in Birmingham’, then you should use those specific words, and make them bold so that the search engines know they are important words.

7. Write in your customer’s language

You may be highly intelligent, you may have a fantastic vocabulary - but if your customers don’t then they will not be impressed by your clever language or technical jargon. Similarly if your customers are highly technical and will want lots of detail, make sure your writing style reflects that – and get help if needed.

24 Ways To Promote Your Website Offline

2011-05-26T15:56:00.000+01:00

Getting large numbers of visitors to your business website has two major benefits:

1) The more traffic you get the higher your website will feature in the search engines – when Google is deciding where to rank websites in its listings, it is going to put a website that gets 20,000 visitors a month much higher than one that gets 20. Why? Because it takes the assumption that if more people are using a website then it is likely to be a good, relevant and informative website.
2) The more people visit your site the more opportunity it gives you to test and measure – you can experiment with your content, with offers, layout, and calls to action.

Ultimately though, the main reason to get people to your site is so that they buy from you!

Below is a list of possible places to advertise your website – some you may be doing already, some you may not.

1) Advertise your website address on your business stationery – business cards, compliments slips, letterheads and invoices

2) Include your website in your email signature so it is at the bottom of every email you send

3) Email all your contacts (customers, prospects, suppliers etc) to let them know you have a new website and give them a link to it

4) Advertise your website on your brochures or other company literature

5) Tell customers about it via telephone, give the address to all telephone enquiries, and if you are telemarketing give every prospect the address too

6) Include your website address in all quotes and tenders

7) Advertise your website in the signage of your premises

8) Advertise your website clearly on the signage of your company vehicles

9) Include the website prominently in your directory advertising (Yellow Pages, Thompsons, BT etc)

10) Ensure any salespeople are using the website to show potential customers

11) Direct mail potential or existing clients and include the website address

12) Include your website address in your leaflets and flyers

13) If you are a retailer, include the web address on your receipts, on your bags, window displays and in your point of sale displays

14) If you have a premises which customers visit, advertise the website via posters and signs at your premises

15) Run a newspaper or magazine advertising campaign to direct people to your website

16) Run a radio or television campaign to attract visitors to your website

17) If your website is newsworthy and you can think of a story the press would be interested in, do a press release including your website address

18) If you have a PR company make sure they are promoting the website

19) Make the website clear and prominent in any trade shows or exhibitions you do

20) Include the website on any promotional gifts you give (pens, calendars, diaries etc)

21) Advertise the website on outdoor posters, billboards, cinema or post office advertising

22) Ask for an ‘email this web page to a friend’ link on your website to encourage referrals

23) Include your website on any company stickers, fridge magnets, tags

24) Include the website address on your company uniforms/name badges

Updating Content

2011-05-22T17:00:00.000+01:00

When we introduced our website (which is a content management system which allows small business owners to easily edit their websites) we knew it was important that business owners could easily update the content of their websites, and you may be one of the many clients we have who chose to work with this system because of the fact that it is so easy to edit your website. However, we also come across many business owners who do not see the value of changing their website. One of the most common things I hear from business owners when I talk about content management (the ability to update your own website) is ‘but our business never changes!’
While it may be true that your core products or services have changed little over time, your business most certainly does change – the world is now changing faster than it ever has done before and your business is no different. Your industry is changing, you are doing new projects, working with new customers, there are new regulations, new opportunities, you have new members of staff, new procedures, new products, and your competitors are changing.

So why bother updating your website? There are two reasons for this. Firstly a website that is regularly changing is one that will perform much better in the search engines. Google will rank a website that is changing regularly higher than one that has stayed exactly the same for a year.
Secondly it gives your customers a reason to come back to your website – and the more they come back to your website, the more they buy in to your company message or identity, the more contact they have with the full range of your products and services and the more likely they are to buy again from you and refer you to their friends.

Stay Visible

2011-05-19T16:50:00.000+01:00

Much debate out there on the net about whether or not to include a sitemap, and after much though and reading and research, always include a site map page. Spiders cannot index your websites pages if these can not be crawled. Make sure you use a site map plus the correct HTML and other codes which will ensure you stay visible to spiders. The spider will easily comprehend the hierarchy of your site. Don't forget to have an easy-to-crawl navigation menu. You may discuss the details with an experienced webmaster to help you to improve visibility. For those who have a huge web site, make many site map pages. Every one should have less than 100 links. All your SEO moves should have a clear objective. Make use of web analytics software along with online experts to track the best methods and get rid of, time consuming and irrelevant efforts that don't produce results.

The URLs and file names should be friendly to SEOs. Use two to three hyphens at most to avoid your file from appearing like a spam. Always use hyphens and not underscores, in your URLs and filenames. Hyphens are considered as a "space", unlike underscores.

Relevance Matters

Always ensure that you have a relevant title and meta description on each web page. The title of your page is by far the most important factor of on-page SEO. It is extremely unlikely that you will rank high for a primary term if the word is not included in the page title. Disregard the keywords meta completely should you find that these are not relevant and only confuse visitors. Always write for both users and visitors. The content of your site and articles should always be associated with your industry and company.

Stay Visible

2011-05-15T20:05:00.000+01:00

Stay Visible

Much debate out there on the net about whether or not to include a sitemap, and after much though and reading and research, always include a site map page. Spiders cannot index your websites pages if these can not be crawled. Make sure you use a site map plus the correct HTML and other codes which will ensure you stay visible to spiders. The spider will easily comprehend the hierarchy of your site. Don't forget to have an easy-to-crawl navigation menu. You may discuss the details with an experienced webmaster to help you to improve visibility. For those who have a huge web site, make many site map pages. Every one should have less than 100 links. All your SEO moves should have a clear objective. Make use of web analytics software along with online experts to track the best methods and get rid of, time consuming and irrelevant efforts that don't produce results..

The URLs and file names should be friendly to SEOs. Use 2 to 3 hyphens at most to avoid your file from appearing like a spam. Always use hyphens and not underscores, in your URLs and filenames. Hyphens are considered as a "space", unlike underscores.

Relevance Matters

Always ensure that you have a relevant title and meta description on each web page. The title of your page is by far the most important factor of on-page SEO. It is extremely unlikely that you will rank high for a primary term if the word is not included in the page title. Disregard the keywords meta completely should you find that these are not relevant and only confuse visitors. Always write for both users and visitors. The content of your site and articles should always be associated with your industry and company.

The Blog Article

2011-05-11T15:07:00.000+01:00

Don’t have enough readers for your free blog website? Do you want to create your own blog the fast and easy way?
If you answered yes to any of these questions then free blogging sites are for you. Firstly, you might be wondering what blog is all about. A blog or a web blog is like an online log where you can use to build traffic for your website. It can contain any topics you want and it can even contain your diary.

So just how do you start blogging for free?

Creating your own blogging website is very simple. You can visit websites that offer free blogs which has step by step process on creating your blogging website. It will usually just take a few minutes of your time to create a blogging websites in sites that offer free blogging web pages.

However, before starting to go to websites that offer free blogs, you should first determine several factors for your blogging web page.

Firstly, you have to think of a name for your blog. To do this, you must first determine what kind of topic you will dedicate your blogging webpage to. Ask yourself what you want to discuss, what are your interests or hobbies or if you have a website that is dedicated to a particular topic, you can discuss that to. It can be anything, it can be dogs, cars, casinos, food, travel, and you can even create a blog about yourself.
After knowing what name your blogging site should have, the next step would be what to put in it. Basing from your title, you will have an idea on what to put on your blog. You can put in any comments you want with different topics regarding your title and headline. You can even post in surveys as your topic; this is very useful if you sell a particular product where you can get consumers opinion on how to sell your product more effectively.
Another way to generate interest in your blog and attract a lot of readers is to make your blog a bit controversial. People like controversies and making your blog one, can create a lot of curious people to read your blog. You should post comments that can be controversial and this can result in many people wanting to post in their comments too.

Now that you have finished creating your blog, with title or headline, a comment, how should you attract people into reading your blogs? One of the best ways is to write an article about a particular topic in your blog and post them into article submission websites. This can generate a lot of targeted traffic and in no time at all.
To make this work, you should write the article with your blog site URL included at the ending of the article or in the footnote. With a good article and a little bit of luck, your blog will be discovered by people and chances are, your blog will create a lot of traffic by word of mouth.

Free blogging websites are one of the most useful tools to generate targeted traffic to your website. It can even generate a lot of loyal readers or fans of your work to post in comments and suggestions regularly to your blogging website and will often recommend it to other people. The best thing about this is that it’s easy, convenient, fun, and as the name suggests, it’s all for free.

Natalie Eastaugh is the Internet Marketing Specialist for JDRwebsites.co.uk
If you wish to find out more on

Keyword Selection For SEO

2011-05-09T07:32:00.000+01:00

One of the main components that helps determine the success, or failure, of your search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign is your keyword selection. Although this may not appear much, choosing the right keyword to use for your website is one of the more gruelling parts of the entire SEO process, especially if you aim to find one that will be most effective for your site’s search engine optimisation.

When using keywords for search engine optimisation, you just need to follow a few simple steps in order to properly find the right keyword that will do the job. There are also a couple of things that you need to look out for in order to avoid any problems when trying to optimise your web page.
Make a list

The first thing that you should do if you want to be able to use keywords effectively is to start out by making a list of “key” keywords or phrases that are relevant to the content of your site, and by doing this, it can actually lead you to create or discover more keywords or phrases that may blossom from the original one that you have chosen.

Select key phrases or words
Once you’ve made a list, try to select ones that contain a “key” keyword or phrase that can help you identify your site’s content. Let’s say your site’s content is all about cars, using cars as a keyword won’t put you high up in the page ranking of search engines, especially since a lot of sites or pages have that as a keyword. Try to avoid using words or phrases that are too general, as this will not help improve your page ranking. By adding other key terms to your chosen keyword, such as “second-hand cars”, or “second-hand sports cars” will actually help improve your chances of going up higher in the page rankings. Just make sure that these are relevant to your site’s content.

Check your competition

It also helps if you took the time to search for keywords or phrases that your competition are using so that you can narrow down which ones to use, and which ones to avoid. There is no sense in using a type of keyword or phrase, such as “cars”, which a lot or most of your competition are using as well, and if their site’s are ranked high up in the search engine’s index, then you might have a difficult time going up against that.

Use your location

You can also improve your chances of getting a much better page ranking result if you incorporate your location to the keyword or phrase that you are trying to use. Let’s say your business is located somewhere in Hertfordshire, by simply adding the word “Hertfordshire” to your keyword selection (“Hertfordshire second-hand sports cars”), you can fair better in your page ranking. However, this type of method usually entails that people are planning on seeing you in person when they do searches like this, so make sure that you only utilise this technique if you are open to the idea of them visiting you in person.

Use your niche

Always try to choose the keyword that you specialise in, or at least the one that offers you with the most profit.

SEO Traps To Avoid

2011-05-06T13:17:00.000+01:00

Even though SEOs have been considered as very cost-effective and useful tools for online marketing, it is important that you understand the risks and potential drawbacks. You can help your business run more efficiently by staying prepared for the possible consequences. You can also determine which approaches will work best for your target customers, thereby giving them quality service and unique content each time. Here are some proven tips.

You first have to determine your current risk level to know what more you can do to protect your business completely. First of all, you have to gauge your level of expertise and experience in using SEOs. The more experience you have, the less problems you may encounter since you may already have gone through and solved a number of common pitfalls and problems. Consider the types of SEOs that you have used in the past, then check which ones can still work for your current industry.

Black hat SEO users are putting themselves at risk for losing credibility and even getting penalised or banned. Some web sites and webmasters have been banned by search engines because of the abuse or misuse of certain techniques. There are plenty of black hatters who still believe that overstuffing keywords and using irrelevant content that boosts visibility can work for them in the long term. You are only waiting for search engine crawlers to find the site and render it useless.

White hat search engine optimisation is the ideal since these promise you long term visibility and a good reputation. Your target customers can better relate to you if you follow the guidelines and rules given by search engines to boost rankings. It will take some time before you score high on search results pages, but the wait and experience will be worth the wait.

Reward is not proportionate to the workload given. A single click may be enough for some web sites to instantly land on the first page of search engine results. The hard work of other webmasters who practice ethical methods can be trampled by unapproved techniques like spamming, content aggregating, scraping and plagiarism. Manipulating an algorithm may temporarily catapult your site into the front page, but you can face greater consequences once your actions are discovered.

Although several black hat approaches can offer you visibility instantly, the results are only temporary. People cannot refer to you or your company as reliable if you resort to unapproved techniques in trying to get their attention. You can boost your reputation and experience by following the right guidelines and patiently waiting for the right traffic to start flowing into your web site. Over time, you will find that your client base expands continually as long as you maintain good content and quality service.

Try to write good and informative articles yourself. Visit online discussion boards and listen to what other online experts have to say. Check out other ethical methods used by top web sites and learn over time how you can also become a master in your chosen industry. You can start learning more about keywords and meta tags to improve your visibility. Review how search engine crawlers work and what items and elements are needed in your site to make it easier for them to find you.

The 11 Critical Web Design Mistakes Costing You Money

2011-03-08T19:20:00.000Z

Recently I spoke to a client of mine who had just made £250,000 from his website in the 12 months since we had designed it for him. His old website had generated approximately nothing. Zero. Was his previous site expensive? No. He wanted to keep the cost of the site down so he had it built through a friend of a friend for ‘mates rates’.
So he wasn’t losing anything, was he?

Yes, he was losing the £250,000 he could have made the previous year. In fact, in the four years before he set up his new website with a professional web designer, not having an effective website was actually costing him £1million in lost revenue and all for the sake of spending between £1-2,000 to get an effective website.

So how much did it cost to set up your website? How much do you spend on hosting and marketing the site? How much money would you be making if it was performing at its full potential? Every website is different – but there are some fundamental rules to having an effective website. If you are guilty of any of these 11 mistakes then get in touch with a professional web designer.

1) Nobody can find you. Have you ever had a set of company brochures printed that are still sat in your office somewhere? Never to see the light of day? How many businesses do this with their websites? Let me ask you a question – how many different ways do people have of finding your website?

Here are some of the most common:

• Pay per click advertising

• Search engine optimisation

• Email marketing

• General Directories (e.g. yell.com)

• Trade directories (e.g. Applegate)

• Affiliate programmes

• Article submissions

• Video submissions

• Banner advertising

These are just online strategies! What about offline?

• Business cards

• Invoices

• Packaging

• Brochures

• Direct mail

• Advertising

• Vehicle/in-store signage

How many of these are you using? If it’s not at least eight, your website is underperforming.

2) Your content is unclear, hard to read, boring - or all three. A wall of text is deadly for an interactive experience. Make sure your text is easy to read by using:

• Sub-headlines

• Bullet points

• Highlighted keywords

• Short paragraphs

• A simple writing style, and

• Speaking in your customers language – no jargon, waffle or ‘marketese’

3) You have no ‘calls to action’. One of the classic mistakes in marketing – telling your customers how great your product or service is, but not how to buy it, or how to get in touch. Make it clear and easy for your customers to buy, enquire, join your newsletter – whatever you want them to do, make it clear what the next step is. When browsing the internet people are lazy and will simply browse onto another site if you don’t get them to act on whatever interest your website has aroused in them.
So, include special offers, ‘buy now’ buttons, offer people a free brochure, tell them to call your free phone number (now!), complete your online form – but tell them to do something or you could be wasting money driving people to the site who then find it too easy to leave the site without taking any action.

Remember - your website has a conversion rate – it might be three in 100 people that visit the site, buy or enquire from you – if you increase that conversion rate by, say, 50%, you increase your website revenue by 50%! There are many ways of doing this – simply speak to a reputable website designer who will guide you with the right content.

4) You are not keeping in touch with potential customers. How many websites have you visited where you have been ‘researching’ a potential purchase or looking at something that you were interested in, but it wasn’t quite the right time to buy that product or service? Well guess what - people are doing with your website? So the question is – how do you find out who these people are – and how do you keep in touch with them?

Gather their details – people will trade their contact details for something of value. Why not offer a free guide on how to choose their purchase? A free ‘trial’ of your product or service? Maybe a subscription to a newsletter or website that will have lots of useful benefits? A ‘VIP’ Club? All they need to do is give you their name, address, phone number and email address.

You would be amazed at how many businesses have huge customer databases they do absolutely nothing with. There are two simple ways of staying in touch – the passive way is to have a section of your website you regularly update (you will need a good content management system to do this), a better way is to send direct mail either by email or by the traditional postal system. If you do, guess who these prospects will go to when it is the right time for them to buy?

If not? You could be wasting thousands of pounds driving traffic to your site, generating interest in your product or service, only to let them slip through your fingers and into the grateful arms of your competitors.

5) You have a poor website design. Have you ever clicked onto a website only to be immediately unimpressed and clicked straight off again? The choice of colour on the website is not only important for the visual appeal of the website design but also for usability of the website. Lack of contrast between the background and colour and the font colour on the website can make the font difficult to read and have a negative effect on the usability of the website. It is important to keep the colour scheme in mind when designing your web site. One of the popular principles in web design suggests that you should not use more than three colours in the design of your website.

You wouldn't send out a marketing brochure that's all words and no pictures. So why do so many companies create web pages without graphics or photos of any sort? If a single picture paints a thousand words, use a judicious number of them on your website to communicate volumes. Photos of your store or office, your products, your employees — these images make your business feel "real" to online visitors. Images give you a tangible presence and let visitors get a sense of the kind of business you run.

6) Your website is confusing to use. Jakob's Law of the Web User Experience states that "users spend most of their time on other websites." This means that they form their expectations for your site based on what's commonly done on most other sites. If you deviate, your site will be harder to use and users will leave.

Visitors to your website will use the navigation on your site to find information that is interest to them. Your own business or your web design company may have a good knowledge of your website and its structure so you may not have trouble locating information. However visitors to your website are less likely to have this knowledge and will rely purely on navigation that is available on the website.

Navigation is mostly available in the form of menus. The menu should be consistent on every page to avoid confusion. Customer behaviours and trends also need to be considered when designing the website. Studies have also shown that web surfers prefer the standard left or right side navigation over other layouts.

7) Your content is out of date. ‘Latest news – last updated 2003’… Ever seen that on a website? What about when you ring a business to enquire about a product that’s on their website and they tell you they don’t stock it anymore? The vast majority of small business owners still either can’t update their own website, or they don’t.
If they can’t it’s often because:

• They don’t have any kind of content management at all

• Their content management is difficult or complicated to use

• They have had no training

• They get no support, there’s no-one to ring to ask questions, or if there is they are held in a queue

So when hiring a web design company ask for a demonstration of the content management system, and ask how and if they will keep in touch on an ongoing basis.

8) Your website does not answer your customers’ questions. It sounds like another no-brainer, but you would be surprised at how many small business websites leave you looking at them for minutes while pondering, "What does this company actually do?"

What’s the first question most prospective customers ask you about your product/service? How much is it? One of the biggest frustrations with websites in not showing prices – it will be one of the first things they are looking for. Most business people usually say to this: ‘but I don’t want my competitors to know my prices’. They probably already do.

And am sure you know most of theirs. What other questions do your customers ask you? Have you created an FAQ’s page to answer these questions? If people can’t find the information they need on your site quickly and easily they will leave and go to someone else’s website

9) Your website does not show contact details clearly!

Your phone number should feature prominently on your website. Quite often people will read the information on your website for research but will actually phone you to ask questions. How easy is it to find the contact details on your website?

Contact information should be visible in a prominent place of the website and be clearly visible. It instills confidence in your visitors. This is particularly important for an e-commerce website that sells products on the site. It is advisable to have your contact information on every page instead of hiding it from customers who visit your web site.

10) Your website shows what you do but not why people should buy from you.

When someone searches for a product or service in a search engine they will be presented with thousands, possibly millions of websites – there is a lot of choice online. As such it’s ever more important to differentiate yourself in the market place by doing things quicker or better or in a different way – you need to define your USP. USP stands for Unique Selling Proposition – it’s what sets you apart from your competitors. Why should your customers buy from you rather than your competitors? What makes you stand out? With most businesses they either have no point of difference at all from their competitors or they differentiate themselves by being cheaper. So here’s how you can show why you are the right choice for your potential customer (how many of these are you using):

- Use of a strap line illustrating your USP (e.g. FedEx: ‘absolutely positively overnight’)

- Testimonials

- Case studies to show the quality of your work

- Before and after photos

- Logos of well known clients you have worked for (the theory being ‘well if they have worked for X then they must be a good company)

- A guarantee

- Accreditation symbols

- A benefits list

Sometimes a simple bullet point list of benefits or a testimonial from a satisfied customer can be the difference between making the sale and not making the sale. How many sales have you missed out on because your ‘why buy from us’ message is not strong enough?

11) Your website is too slow to load. Many small-business websites load far too slowly – and how many people will wait? How many people will lose patience and go elsewhere? Slow loading websites are due to images or videos that have not been compressed properly, or because of the platform the website is built with. There are a number of online tests you can take to measure the load speed of your site, if it is too slow then speak to your website provider about speeding up the process or consider setting up a new site.

What Can We Do For You

2011-03-03T17:18:00.000Z

How can we help you?

View our video and see what we can do for you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwCXvk2VIT4&feature=BF&list=ULCh_2rYF9gCQ&index=6

See What They Say About Us

2011-03-03T17:15:00.000Z

See what our clients say about us!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbeez8Ok4MA&feature=autoplay&list=ULCh_2rYF9gCQ&index=1&playnext=2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1X5YIhOG_g&feature=autoplay&list=ULCh_2rYF9gCQ&index=2&playnext=3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHzvY4E9tdg&feature=BF&list=ULCh_2rYF9gCQ&index=3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrHgvulv8bM&feature=BF&list=ULCh_2rYF9gCQ&index=4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS7wzqG0YrA&feature=BF&list=ULCh_2rYF9gCQ&index=5

Website Designers Derby

2011-03-03T17:13:00.000Z

Your number 1 choice in website design

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0tWhM1YVII&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

JDR Web Desigers Derby

2011-03-03T17:11:00.000Z

See our latest YouTube presentation video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBksdXAGb1w

Getting The Most From Your Website Content

2011-03-03T14:10:00.002Z

Once you have answered your questions, addressed in my previous article you are ready to compose your content, namely: what kind of people do you want to attract to your website, what are the benefits of your product or service, why should your prospective customer buy from your and what actions do you want them to take once they have read your website?

Here are a few guiding principles you should consider while composing your content and before you submit the content to your website:
1. Make sure your content is easy to read. Most people will not read huge complicated paragraphs of text online as it is all too easy to click on to another website or another page so it is vital to keep your information simple, and to break it up into bite sized chunks.

Some guidelines for the length of your content:
Headings: 8 words approximately

Sentences: 15-20 words

Paragraphs: 40-70 words

Page: 250– 200 words
2. Break up the text wherever possible. Provide a summary of your information by clearly communicating the direction of your discussion. Use informative headings and subheadings with paragraphs of four to five lines that supports them. You only have a few seconds to grab your visitor’s attention and most will simply scan for the information they are seeking, s here is how you can keep their attention:
o Use bulleted or numbered lists, boldface or coloured font to emphasise the points you wish to make.
o Include links at the end of your paragraph or within the text to direct visitors to other pages of your site for more in-depth information.
3. Write from a point of ‘You’. The most powerful word in the English language is ‘you’. As hard as it may be to swallow, let me be the first to break it to you that the people reading your website are not interested in you or your business – they are interested in themselves, and how you can help them. So your content must be written from their perspective, not yours, and must answer the question they will be asking themselves – ‘what’s in it for me?’
Your content is almost ready, just a few tweaks to make and you can go live publishing your masterpiece. Next week I cover a few more topics to help you write successful content for your website, so keep a watch out!

Make Your Website Content More Effective

2011-02-17T16:43:00.000Z

Websites Derby

2011-02-14T14:39:00.000Z

See our latest YouTube presentation video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBksdXAGb1w

Getting The Most From Your Website Part 2

2011-02-10T19:43:00.000Z

Now your website is up and running, maximise every opportunity to drive traffic to your website. Here are a few simple offline ways you can do this:

- Add your website address to your stationery – business cards, letterheads, complement slips and email signatures

- Include your website address in all your advertising and direct marketing

- Add your website address to invoices, receipts, bags and any other customer communication

- Add your website to your signage – vehicle decals, premises and uniforms

- Give people the website address verbally – over the phone or face-to-face

- Give your address to all potential customers you come into contact with

Keep your website up to date:

Check your website at a minimum every three months to review the content and ask yourself:

- What else can be added?

- What content or images needs removing?

- How can the existing content be improved?

By keeping your content fresh and up to date, will keep clients coming back to see what is new on your website. Because the search engines like to see new and relevant content present on your site, this will help your ranking position in the search engines. From a cost saving side, refreshing your content regularly will prevent a complete overhaul two or three years down the line.

Monitor your results:

Once your website is up and running, don’t fall into the trap many site owners make in neglecting to keep track of your results. Often just a few simple tweaks can make a huge difference on your overall results. By keeping track of your performance, you will spot and correct any potential problems or issues early. How can I do this?

- Set yourself up with a stat counter. Check your website statistics regularly.

- Ask every new enquiry how they found you

- Ask current customers for feedback on your website – what they like and what they don’t like

- Set your website up on Google Analytics

Getting the Most from Your Website through Online Advertising

2011-02-03T08:12:00.000Z

Once your web designer has completed the web design on your site, you are ready to go live. New websites can take as long as two to three months to be picked up, or indexed, by the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing). Your website position on the search engine rankings will, however, improve over time and how well websites positions rank, partly depends on your phrases or keywords you have chosen to optimise. However, there are several other ways you can promote your site online.

Add your website to Google Local. The map section you see at the top of any local search eg. ‘Plumbers Leicester’, and following their easy set of instructions.

Add your website to directories. Some online directories will charge you for a link to your website, however, there are many online directories that will list your business free of charge.

Pay Per Click advertising is offered by search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. This is a flexible way of advertising, where you only pay for the visitors who actually see your website. Costs per click can vary anywhere between 4p to £5, depending on the popularity of the keyword. You choose a budget per day, a budget per click and choose the keywords you wish to be found by.

Create links to your website. Get in touch with suppliers and friends in business, and any other organisations you are affiliated with eg. FSB, trade organisations, regulatory bodies, and ask if you can place a link to your website on their websites. It may help to offer a reciprocal link to their website on yours too.

Search engine optimisation (SEO). A SEO programme will ensure your website enjoys natural high rankings and consistent positions in all the major search engines and directories.

There are other ways of updating your content too, like writing articles and submitting them to various online magazines with links back to your website. Create social media accounts and a YouTube account so you can post updates about your business and content (used from your articles) to these accounts. The search engines will see this as a form of keeping fresh content flowing and will help your website, and sub pages through the rankings. I will be covering more on these last mediums in following articles as they justify more time in explanation.

Staying Visible for the Search Engines

2011-01-28T00:10:00.000Z

Stay Visible

Include a site map page. Spiders cannot index your pages if these cannot be crawled. You can use a site map and the right HTML and other codes that will keep you visible to spiders. The spider will easily understand the hierarchy of your site. Make sure you have an easy-to-crawl navigation menu. You may discuss the details with a webmaster to help you improve visibility. If you have a big web site, create many site map pages. Each one should have less than 100 links. All your SEO moves should have an objective. Make use of web analytics software and other online experts to track the right methods and get rid of irrelevant and time-consuming efforts.

The URLs and file names should be friendly to SEOs. Use 2 to 3 hyphens at most to keep your file from appearing like a spam. Use hypens, not underscores, in your URLs and filenames. Hyphens are considered as "space", unlike underscores.
Relevance Matters
Always ensure that you have a relevant title and meta description on each web page. The page title is the most vital factor of on-page SEO. It is unlikely to rank very high for a primary term without the word being included in the page title. Ignore the keywords meta completely if you find that these are not relevant and only confuses visitors. Always write for visitors and users. The content of your site and articles should always be related to your industry and company.

Understanding SEO Techniques

2011-01-16T14:52:00.000Z

Commitment to the Process

SEO needs to be consistent and requires a lot of work in your part. Search engine algorithms adjust regularly, so it is important to stay updated with the latest trends and approaches, since some of your methods may no longer work after a few months. You have to be prepared for the long term and view how your business will continue to grow through SEO. It takes a lot of discipline and patience to see results. At first, your methods may not seem to be working, but as you continue to enhance the steps and process, you can do good business and expand your client base.

Getting Information

You have to know how to ask the right questions from the right people. Ask for the specific details of your business, and learn more about the industry by talking to experts and other successful businessmen. Find out how SEO can be used to the fullest and how you can better get in touch with your target customers. One of the most effective methods is to ensure that your web site is easy to navigate. You need to always have good and fresh content. Update your blog and articles regularly.

Join online forums and discussion boards and talk to your target customers. You can place links in your signature and copy the same articles you have from your web site to boost credibility and reputation. Read other articles and visit other successful web sites. Find out which keywords will most likely be used by your target customers and use these wisely throughout your articles. You may hire ghost writers to help you make relevant and useful articles in a shorter span of time.

Natalie Eastaugh is the Internet Marketing Specialist for JDRWebsites.co.uk

If you wish to find out more on Online Marketing as well as information about JDR Websites, go to http://www.jdrwebsites.co.uk/

How To Be An SEO Content Writer (Part 2)

2011-01-09T14:56:00.000Z

Use keywords properly

SEO content writers should learn how to use keywords and phrases in getting their content across to the different users searching for those that are relevant to their search. Keywords play a vital role in any SEO content since this will help determine whether your created article for that particular keyword or phrase has any relevance to what users are searching for.

You need to be able to take into account the keywords or phrases that users will be using in search engines to find the relevant content that they are looking for so that you can incorporate it into the articles that you will be creating and posting on your site or page. You need to know where to place these keywords or phrases in the article, such as in the title tags and body of the articles, in order to help search engines find your content so it can get indexed in their database.
Aside from this, as a SEO content writer, you should try to avoid overusing keywords wherein you try to flood your articles with the keyword or phrase associated with it. This can only lead search engines to believe that the content that you are creating as spam.

Write quality content
The quality of your articles will also play a major and important role on how your site or page will do in the entire SEO process. Keep in mind that if you cannot offer users relevant content to their searches, they will most likely find it somewhere else, and all of your work in getting them to your site would have been in vain.
Being a SEO content writer limits you to certain rules when writing your articles. In order to avoid certain mistakes and errors, you need to follow certain guidelines that will help improve your site’s page ranking in search engines. One example of this is the use of keywords in your articles. The excessive use of such will result in getting your content tagged as spam.
You also need to not only write quality and relevant content for users, but you must also offer fresh and new content from time to time in order to be able to offer more content for your users. This can actually also help get your site recommended by other sites, thereby improving your chances of getting more traffic directed to your site.

Also, your articles should be original and engrossing for the user at the same time. Writing an article that users have read on some other site will not get you good points from them.

Examples:

Bifocals- what are they and how do they work?

Bifocals are very similar to varifocal lenses in that they have different sections- one for improving near-sightedness, one for improving far-sightedness. However, bifocals do not have a corridor like varifocals, instead, they have two separate sections with no graduation or variation in between..

Benjamin Franklin, who, like so many others, was fed up of constantly switching between his reading glasses and his distance-viewing glasses, invented bifocals. His solution was to cut his glasses lenses in half and fix the distance-viewing portion of the lens to the top of his glasses frames, and the reading portion of the lens to the bottom of his frames.

The basic idea behind the bifocal hasn’t changed since Franklin’s day, but with improvements in technology and understanding of the eye and vision correction, different types of bifocals have been developed to suit individual needs. The four most common types are round segment, semi-circular, small area and half-cut vision correction lenses. This means that the total area of the lens used for near or distance viewing differs to suit individual needs and lifestyles e.g. someone who spends more time reading or using a computer will have a larger reading vision improving section to their lenses than someone who works outdoors.
Bifocals are a great solution to having to have two pairs of glasses with you at all times. They also eliminate the nuisance of having to constantly change between one pair of glasses and the other, just so that you can see well. http://www.glassesframesandlenses.com/

Example:

Point of Sale- its true potential

A point of sale (POS) is the place where customer in a shop will go to pay for their items i.e. the till point. It is often said that the most memorable parts of a shopping trip are the arrival and the last thing the customer does in the shop- which is usually paying for their items. This is what makes the point of sale such an important part of sales.

A lot of floor space can be wasted around the till point and POS display units are a way of maximising the use of this space; this is particularly useful to small shops like convenience stores and corner shop news agents. POS displays are meant to grab customer attention and promote products.

There are several products available that serve as POS displays, but can be used elsewhere in a store e.g. entrance/ exits and at the end of aisles. Free standing display units (FSDU’s), dump bins and pallet wraps are a few examples. They are usually covered in the logo of the item being promoted and stocked with the product itself. FSDU’s can be used to display anything from make-up, to mouthwash to crisps, where dump bins are usually used for soft toys, magazines and sports equipment (e.g. footballs). Pallet wraps are more commonly used in garden centres and commercial wholesales, as they are displays that are placed over wooden pallets and can hold considerable weight and are used for e.g. bags of compost, dog food and supermarket “multi-packs”.

The other aspect of POS display is actually advertise products or specials at the till point itself e.g. till and shelf wobblers, counter display units (CDU’s) and leaflet dispensers. The most effective way of drawing customer attention is through movement, which is the main function of a till or shelf wobbler. They have two ends joined by a plastic strip, allowing them to be attached to the till or shelf on one end, leaving the other end free to bend away from the shelf or till and bob up and down, attracting attention.

The main aim of all of these devices is to sell the product they are advertising. Bold colour and clear text should be incorporated into these displays to make the most of their selling potential. http://www.clearpoint-print.com/

How To Be An SEO Content Writer Part 1

2010-12-29T11:32:00.000Z

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best online strategies and skill that you can learn and employ to get better page ranking in search engines for your site. However, there are some things that you just need help with, such as the type of content you should write about in your page in order to get good, relevant content for users.

Creating content relevant to your site for SEO requires a different set of skills, and demands you to perform a few tasks other than just simply writing and posting articles. Here are a couple of things that you should learn if you intend to become an SEO content writer.

Learn the SEO process

The first thing that you should learn if you want to become a SEO content writer is how the entire SEO process works in order to be able to create articles that have relevant content to what users are looking for, as well as create articles that will help funnel and direct market to the site or page that you are working on.

Search engines focuses on text and not images, so the written content of your page will receive the most amount of checking and analysis from search engine crawlers, and if deemed passable, will then get indexed in their database. This is why you need to make sure that your content is relevant and good in order to get a good chance of getting better results with search engines.

Research is key

In order for you to be able to write technically about a particular topic in a way that it can actually generate good SEO results, you need to learn how to do research on them. This will help you create content that is relevant and informative for users.

http://www.jdrwebsites.co.uk/

Examples of Quality Content:

Example 1:

Point of Sale Display

Point of sale or otherwise known as the checkout is the location in a shop where a transaction takes place. This transaction is the exchange of money for the goods wanted by the customer. The point of sale is however different to the point of sale display.

The point of sale display often found near or on the till points and are usually found in smaller retail shops. The actual displays are supplied by manufacturers wanting to sell their products in that specific shop. Normally items such as batteries, chewing gum, magazines and an assortment of chocolate and sweets including soft drinks are found in the point of sale displays. The displays are designed to be eye catching and aesthetically pleasing to a customer. Print design companies will make them eye catching by making full use of colour in the design of logos and product information on the outside of the display. They are often made from foam board or most commonly card board. This is so they can easily be replaced with new ones or disposed of if damaged. Though there are some that are permanent, for example a fridge for soft drinks would need to be designed by the manufacturer to be used over longer periods of time than a card board display.

Retail shops use point of sale displays to attract customers while there in the queue which psychologically makes them think about buying that product. Because they don’t have the choice to just walk by the products, like you would do whilst shopping down the aisles, the customer is more likely to pick up one of the products on display and buy it. This is because the customer can constantly see the product so it is on their mind, which makes them think more about the item this in some cases can cause the customer to buy the product.

http://www.clearpoint-print.com/

Example 2:

Artificial and synthetic grass

Artificial or synthetic grass is a practical and useful investment for many venues including sports grounds, sports clubs and schools. This type of surface can be used throughout the year, as unlike natural turf it will not become sodden and slippery after heavy rainfall. Having a safe, slip resistant playing surface means sportsmen are able to continue playing in all weathers.

Artificial grass is very versatile and is designed in a specific way to suit your needs. Many synthetic surfaces incorporate shock pads into the design, an important factor which greatly reduces impact in the case of a fall. Artificial turf can either be designed for a number of sports to be played upon it, or alternatively, to be used for a single purpose. The materials are also weather resistant, and will not be damaged by UV rays.

Synthetic and artificial grass is made to imitate the quality of natural turf for sports, at the same time ensuring the surface is as safe and practical as possible. It also has the added advantage of needing very little attention. Natural turf needs to be maintained, which costs money as well as time. Artificial grass and synthetic grass requires very little time and effort, making the overall cost cheaper in the long run.

Another advantage of using artificial grass for sports is the stability. The surface does not move or warp under extreme weather conditions or heavy use but remains even and stable. This is due to careful construction and planning. Before artificial turf is laid, the ground is prepared by laying a geo-textile on the existing ground surface, then a dynamic base of tarmac or stone, flowed by a shock absorbing layer, and then the synthetic grass.

Overall, artificial and synthetic grass is a practical and cost effective way to provide a top quality surface for sports.

http://www.radfordezynet.com/

Content and Link Building Strategies

2010-12-16T14:44:00.001Z

The entire search engine optimisation (SEO) process is often misunderstood by a lot of people, which is why they often commit a lot of SEO mistakes that can cost them not only their page ranking in search engines, but also lose traffic volume of possible clients. SEO can help you direct traffic to your site, but getting them to stay is a whole new different ball game.

The entire SEO process basically revolves around the idea of getting a good page ranking in search engines by employing certain strategies so that people can find your site easier. The better your page ranking is, the easier it is for users to find it, the more appealing it is for them to visit your site, thereby increasing the amount of traffic that your site is able to generate. However, if the users do not find any relevant content in your site, then your efforts to get them to your site would just have been in vain.

Link building

Building links is also another content strategy that you can employ to help users searching for a particular content to find your site offering relevant content to their search. Try to link to those other sites that have similar content, or at least uses the same keywords in tagging their site’s content.

This way, any user searching in those sites will be directed to your page’s similar content, making it easier for users to find your page.

Ensure that you can get users to stay in your site, by using relevant and original content and link building with relevant sites to your product or service.
Some examples of link building within an article. The links being relevant to the content and the website to which it links:

Example 1:
Ground and wall guards

If you run a school or a sports area, you might be looking for something to increase safety. In schools, it is very important that children are kept safe both indoors and out. Using wall and ground guards in school buildings and in the playground areas will ensure that children are protected from bumps, bruises and cuts in the case of inevitable accidents. In a sports area people are constantly at risk of injury, and again, using wall and ground guards greatly decreases this risk, and puts everyone at ease.

The use of safety ground and wall cushioning is suitable for use in schools, playgrounds and sports areas. With a unique multipurpose design, the safety ground and wall cushioning can also be used as a protective wall covering dramatically reducing the risk of injury from trips, falls and collisions.

These ground and wall cushions are made using an integral urethane skin rather than common PU material and comply with safety regulations. They are also highly durable – resistant to shocks and scrapes, a necessary factor when used for schools and sports areas. They are easy and quick to install and suitable for a diverse range of functions with various colour options including red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and purple. The ground guard is also suitable for use as wall protection in sports areas.

Ground and wall guards are an easy, no hassle and relatively cheap way to ensure safety in your school, playground or sports area. They are long lasting, and their easy to clean surface means any spillages which might occur can be wiped off with warm soapy water. The products are safe, durable, quality guaranteed. The products are flame retardant, waterproof, bacteriostasis, non toluene, non heavy metal and they meet the requirements and were bestowed the certificate of ST safe toys.

Example 2:

What are Window Wraps?

Window wraps are colourful and eye catching graphics that are adhered to the windows, of particularly shops, so as to advertise a product or service to prospective customers walking by. Window wraps can also be used to display corporate logos. There are several types of window wraps available – self adhesive, frosted glass effect and cut vinyl.

Health and safety laws state that large pieces of glass (like shop windows) must have some visual display on them to make in order to make the window visible to prevent people walking into them and hurting themselves. Rather than being a boring pattern, many companies choose to make it an advertising opportunity by placing graphics on these expanses of glass. Modern production processes mean that window wraps can be created as a one-off, or can be produced in vast numbers to meet the needs of a chain of shops.

Self-adhesive stickers are free from glues and adhesives that create a mess when removing traditional stickers, which makes them ideal for advertising promotions or seasonal deals as they can easily be removed at the end of the promotion. Vinyl self-adhesive wraps are usually text displays and come in a variety of colours and styles, making them easy to place where you like (inside or outside).

The frosted glass effect vinyl cut window wraps are an effective and cheaper alternative to real frosted glass. These stickers are etched, just like the glass would be, and can be designed to display a company logo or just a plain pattern and can be used for privacy or display purposes. They are usually applied to the inside surface of the window, so it is protected from the elements and damage caused by passers-by.

With the proper care and maintenance, window wraps can remain in place for up to 7 years, or can be put up and removed at will for temporary advertising purposes. Modern technology and chemical advances are combined to meet all the advertising and promotional needs of businesses large and small.

Example 3:
Good Posture in Children

For many years the children in our schools have been seated on a variety of Polypropylene or Wooden chairs, which are manufactured in different styles and sizes. Provided these chairs pass British Standards for strength, stability and safety they are welcomed into our classrooms.

Each manufacturer has their own agenda for their chairs. Some are manufactured to a price, some to a style and others to a best value compromise. However, none have been manufactured to a European Standard that first and foremost sets out to encourage good posture for our children.

Experiments in the US have revealed that giving children lessons on how to improve their posture, had very little impact and showed no noticeable difference to their posture, however, on the other hand, some uncomplicated amendments to the actual school furniture, in particular their chairs, have been made known to make a differences to posture without the training.

EN 1729 Part 1 is the standard drawn up by the Technical Committee for Europe, CEN/TC207, which now sets chair dimensions, heights, angles and back support contact points for every age group – so as to encourage good posture.

Good posture not only means our children will be healthier – it also means that they should be more comfortable – and therefore more attentive in class.

EN1729 Part 1 supersedes all other standards for chairs used in our classrooms and is the standard to look for.

The benefit of one piece Polypropylene chairs is well documented in terms of their longevity (15 year warranty), comfort and safety in the classroom. With no screws for practical jokers to remove, no sharp edges to cause damage, no metalwork to rust and full EN1729 Certification.

Many chairs will pass EN1729 Part 2 as this only applies to strength and replaces BS4875.

Relevant content

2010-12-10T20:27:00.000Z

As mentioned earlier, getting people directed to your site or page is one thing, but to get them to find relevant content and to stay is another. In order for you to be able to generate positive and profitable effects of the amount of traffic that you are able to divert to your site, you need to offer them exactly what they are looking for.

When users are looking for a particular content, they will employ keyword searches on search engines. Once they are directed to your site using those keywords, they expect to find relevant content pertaining to that keyword, so make sure that you have content relevant to their searches. Avoid using keywords that have no relevance to your content, but you use them anyway simply to gain more traffic directed to your page due to the popularity of that keyword. This will only result in users clicking back to their search engines, and not necessarily create any positive effect on your page ranking. Make sure that your choice of keywords would correlate to the content that you are creating in your page
More content is better
The more content or articles you create about a particular topic or keyword, the more chances you have of getting tagged and linked by other sites, as well as increase your chances of answering a user’s search for relevant content. Just like fishing, the more assorted baits you have, the better your chances are of catching a fish. One way that you can get the right user, you just need to offer more content for users.
Also, the different articles you create and post in your site as well as in other sites can generate a lot of backlinks which can lead users back to your site.
Keep content fresh
Creating and posting new content regularly can greatly improve your site’s chances of getting recommendations from other sites, especially those that are linked to your site. The more times you offer new and fresh content, the more opportunities your users searching for a particular content will have on finding one that is relevant to their search.

Examples of articles with quality and relevant content:

Example 1: Mesh Chairs

When you are working at the office, you need to be completely comfortable in order to concentrate on the work in hand. Sitting in the right chair plays a major part in comfort. But do you often find yourself becoming sticky and hot in your chair? Breathable materials are essential in ensuring the maximum comfort in your chair.

Now is your chance to bring together style, comfort and function with a breathable mesh office chair. With Office and Chair's mesh office chairs and ergonomic mesh chairs retailing at 60% below our competitor’s prices, you’ll be hard pressed to find a better offer anywhere else in the UK.

Mesh office chairs are made with an aerated mesh back which allows your skin to breathe freely. A durable nylon mesh is stretched over a shaped frame, and attached to a leather or fabric seat. The mesh is strong but flexible so it gives slightly according to your size and shape, making it a very comfortable option of seating.

Choose from our range of luxury and contemporary hi-tech designs, perfect for all office environments. Whether you’re after generously-proportioned executive mesh office chairs, or their sleeker, slim-lined counterparts, whatever your budget we’re confident can meet your needs. You can choose from swivel chairs or stationary chairs, low back or high back, and chairs with leather or fabric seating. Some of our chairs even have a lumbar support fitted into them, which is very helpful in preventing or aiding back trouble. These chairs offer all the advantages of a normal good quality office chair, including gas height adjustment and a fully reclining tilt mechanism. They are comfortable, stylish and practical.

In addition to offering delivery throughout the UK, we also offer generous discounts for customers looking to place bulk orders on our mesh office chairs.

http://www.officeandchairs.co.uk/
Keywords: mesh chair, mesh office chair, office chair

Example 2: Stickers for children

Anyone who has spent an amount of time with children will know that children love stickers. They are often fun and brightly coloured which makes them enjoyable for children to play with. They can also be used as a reward, and on charts for health, jobs and schoolwork or anything else you can think of!

Many schools use paper easy peel stickers as rewards for performance. This is a very effective incentive for children to work well, and to be proud of their achievements. Easy peel stickers are very cheap and can often be bought in bulk.

You can use this type of sticker for children in the home, as well as in school. You might have a star chart for your children which rewards good behaviour. Another popular sticker chart is one in which your children receive a sticker for doing a particular job around the house. There are many other uses for this type of childrens sticker.

Many children collect easy peel stickers, and use sticker books.

Window cling stickers are great for children. They can be used again and again, and leave no sticky residue. This type of sticker doesn’t actually have a layer of glue like the more common Vinyl or Paper stickers. It actually sticks to the glass of a window using surface tension. Children can have hours of fun using and re-using these stickers, whilst you have no worries about any mess being made. They can be used on the windows, on the fridge, in the car, or on specially designed sticker book surface.

Wall stickers are popular for decoration in childrens bedrooms, play areas, nurseries etc. They are hassle free, and very easy to mount, low in cost and a great and fun way to brighten up a room.

All in all, stickers are a cheap and easy way to reward children, and to provide creative and fun activity.

http://www.tradestickersdirect.com/

Example 3: The Rubber Moulding Industry

Rubber is a term that is associated with several elastic and resilient materials. These substances, or materials, can be moulded into many different shapes and items of great use.

Before the 19th century, rubber was not a commodity used very often in the Western part of the world and only after this period did rubber start coming to the fore. The rubber moulding industry was very small and limited to daily items like erasers and storage boxes for use in the household kitchen.

In the 1840’s, Charles Goodyear and Thomas Hancock patented the very similar process that made moulded rubber more stable and durable opening the rubber moulding industry further than mere pencil erasers. The rubber moulding industry grew in significance becoming progressively important in technology and industry today.

The rubber moulding industry consists of three basic types of industry, namely, compression, transfer and injection. Compression rubber moulding is the simplest and also the cheapest to manufacture. Transfer rubber moulding involves more wastage and furthermore the moulds are expensive to create, however, the results from transfer rubber moulding are of better quality than compression moulding. Injection moulding is more sophisticated than the previous mentioned moulding processes, but it is also the most expensive moulding process.

The disadvantage of the rubber moulding processes is that it is not suitable for small projects. For the smaller projects liquid latex and silicone rubbers are available and best to use. Sculptors and crafts people are most likely to use these types of moulding techniques. Liquid rubber is poured or painted over the object so this can be imprinted or the substance is poured into a small mould of an object being created.

The advantages of rubber are immense and rubber is a significant factor in so many of our products we use today. Rubber is wonderfully flexible and comes in great use in the manufacture of products like tyres. Rubber, because of its elasticity, is very useful as a shock absorbing material too. Rubber moulding has entered major manufacturing industries for the use in car and electrics, using rubber moulding to create versatile items in different shapes and sizes and because rubber expands easily and can also retain its original shape, makes it an ideal substance in this industry.

http://www.srm-industries.com/
keywords: rubber, rubber moulding, compression rubber moulding, transfer rubber moulding, injection rubber moulding

Article with Concise Title

2010-12-03T10:12:00.001Z

In this submission of my example articles for seo purposes, I wish to highlight the use of a clear and specific title to the article - giving keywords which are foremost relevant to the website product or service and follow the short tail rule - keeping to a three or four worded title rich in keywords means the search result will be more direct and successful in pulling this article or website:

Double Aspheric Lenses

Aspheric lenses are lenses which have a relatively flat surface, yet still offer the same vision quality as non aspheric lenses. This is because although the lens is thinner and flatter, it still refracts light to exactly the same degree as a conventional lens. They are often used for eye wear as the thinner lens has many advantages. They are lighter to wear, and less bulky. Also, with conventional lenses, if you require quite strong glasses, the lenses are very thick and this can make your eyes appear smaller, or distorted, depending on your prescription. However this problem can be eliminated by wearing aspheric lenses as the flat lens means distortion of your eyes is kept to a much lesser degree.

Double aspheric lenses are essentially an even better version of the already useful aspheric lenses. Not only is the front of the lens aspheric, but the back of the lens has the same aspheric design, hence the name, ‘double aspheric’. Typically, when you look out from the edge of your lenses, the image you see can be distorted. Double aspheric lenses limit this distortion of image right up to the edges of the lens. This is done by ensuring that a large area of the lens is the focal point.

For those of you who have a cylindrical prescription, you will find the double aspheric lens particularly useful. On a normal aspheric lens, if you require a high cylindrical power, the distortion at the edges will be increased. With double aspheric lenses, the curve on both sides of the lens ensures that distortion is kept to an absolute minimum.

Not only do double aspheric lenses greatly improve your vision, but they improve your visual appearance as well. This is because the lens is 10% thinner than a normal aspheric lens of the same power.

http://www.glassesframesandlenses.com
normal aspheric lenses, double aspheric lenses, cylindrical power, non aspheric lenses

Articles providing relevancy to your product - examples

2010-12-01T09:26:00.000Z

Title: Energy Stop for Creatine Supplement

Introduction:

Creatine is a naturally occurring substance. It was first discovered by a French scientist in 1832 but the first time the benefits of creatine were recorded was 1926. It was discovered in 1923 that 95% of creatine is stored in the muscle tissue. It is created in the liver, pancreas and kidneys and transported to the muscles through the bloodstream. Once in the muscle, it is turned into creatine phosphate which is the ultimate energy source.

Body:

Creatine phosphate is used to deliver extreme energy for short bursts but the amount of creatine the muscles store will be used up within 60 seconds. This means that taking a good quality creatine supplement can have a significant effect on high energy training and could also help improve endurance training.

Creatine has traditionally has a number of side effects attributed to it. These include muscle cramps, water retention and bloating. There has been some research into these side effects but there has not been any conclusive evidence to support these claims. It is also worth noting that these claims seem to have disappeared with the new forms of creatine that have recently come onto the market such as Creatine Ethyl Ester.

Creatine has been shown to pull water into the muscle cells, this has the effect of increasing muscle volume. New research has also shown that creatine can work as a lactic acid buffer. Lactic acid builds up during training and is responsible for the muscle burn that many athletes suffer from. By delaying the build-up of lactic acid, creatine can significantly reduce that burn and may therefore aid in muscle recovery.

Creatine supplements can help put the body into a state where greater protein absorption can occur, and the greater the protein absorption, the greater the muscle gains.

Word count: Body (220), Introduction (76)

Sourcing example in an article

2010-12-01T09:17:00.000Z

Title: Keeping your toddler safe in the home

Introduction:

It doesn’t take too long before your baby is a mobile toddler at a height where there are many potential accidents waiting to happen. Keeping your toddler safe in the home is a daunting and difficult task for most parents and one needs to continue in the fore of his growing curiosity and increasing mobility to keep him or her safe.

Body:

According to babyworld.co.uk, the top 10 danger points in the home are the stairs, doors, cleaning materials, electric sockets, furniture edges and furniture corners, overfilled playpens, fire, loose cables and cords, bath time and glass.

Because so much furniture in the home has sharp edging or corners, and are at the ideal height for young children to knock into, by simply fitting edge and corner guards you can increase the level of safety in your home. Corner and edge guards come in a variety of colours and are very easy to install.

Some common items of furniture you may wish to have edge or corner protectors on are:

Living rooms: TV unit, low level shelving, dining tablecoffee table, window sills and the fireplace.
Kitchen: Kitchen table, centre work area, cabinets, countertops, stove.
Bathroom: vanity cabinets, low level shelving.
Study: Desk, low level shelving, filing cabinets.
Bedroom: Headboard and footboard, dressing table, bedside units, low level shelving, chests, toy boxes
Entrance way: Storage units, small tables, low level shelving

Outside entertainment area: Brick or stone retaining walls, built-in fireplace, patio table, sharp corners on play equipment

Below are a few safety precautions, not taking much time, but keeping your little family safe in the home:

• Children should be supervised at all times.
• Keep floors free of toys and obstructions that can be tripped over.
• Always use a securely fitted safety harness in a pram, pushchair or highchair.
• Never leave babies unattended on raised surfaces.
• Do not place baby bouncers on raised surfaces.
• The use of baby-walkers and table-mounted high chairs is not recommended.
• Use corner guards or corner protectors on cabinets, coffee and dining tables, or any corner of furniture that does not have a rounded edge.

Word count: Body (293), Introduction (61)

Sources: Babyworld.co.uk
About.com: Pediatrics

corner guards, corner protectors, child safety, toddler safety

Articles providing relevancy to your product - examples

2010-12-01T09:10:00.001Z

Title: Playground fun and safety

Introduction:

Playgrounds are where children meet to have fun, have fresh air, get some exercise and socialise among swings, slides and playful running and jumping. This is the happy image we all want for our children. Unfortunately though, it is inevitable that playgrounds are where accidents do occur. Some accidents are minor cuts and bruises that go along with play and learn, but some playgrounds can be of concern regards safety hazards leading to serious injury.

Body:

Many accidents could be prevented by common sense, proper adult supervision and safety guarding equipment. Defective equipment, unacceptable surfaces, and careless behavior are safety hazards of many playgrounds. Most of these playground safety hazards could have been prevented with the proper supervision and appropriate safety precautions.

We can make the playground a place of fun and that is safe for our children by simply checking equipment for hazards and keeping to some simple common sense guidelines.

Moms, Dads and Caregivers can play a role in playground accident prevention by taking a few easy precautions. Foremost, ensure when your child has proper adult supervision. Adult supervision will help prevent injuries by monitoring proper playground behaviour, checking and ensuring playground equipment is safe for fun and is the right equipment for the age of the child, and the surface is appropriate - not uneven where trips and falls are likely. Should an unfortunate accident occur, an adult can help the child by giving first aid if necessary.

Accidents often caused on the playground when young children are permitted to play on equipment they are not ready to play on. Generally, monkey bars, climbing gyms or frames, long slides and the bigger swings are intended for the older child’s entertainment, not the young children. And vice versa, keeping older children off playground equipment deemed to young for their age group is important for their safety – some equipment may not hold their weight.

Appropriate dress code for the playground will also help in the prevention of accidents. Dress children for play, avoid ties and hoody tops or jackets which easily get caught in equipment, and could cause as serious an injury as strangulation. The appropriate footwear should be worn on playgrounds. Flops, sandals and open summery shoes can easily get stuck in equipment, and due to the shoe’s lack of grip, a slip or fall is more likely.

Avoid children being allowed to play on equipment that does not have safety cushioning, which is reinforced with a shock absorbing surface should a fall occur. Surfaces to play on are gravel, mulch, sand, or safety cushion mats. Children shouldn’t be allowed to swing, slide or climb over a concrete surface. Ground and wall cushioning are used in schools, playgrounds and sports areas -the surface has dramatically reduced the risk of injury from trips, falls and collisions.

Caregivers should carry out inspection of all playground equipment to ensure it is in good working order. Look for areas which are worn out or rusty, and check the temperature of slides and metal surfaces during the summer months – metal slides and equipment can get very hot and cause unpleasant burns, especially to hands.

Finally, educate your child to play safe and by teaching them the rules of the playground will keep them safer and less prone to accidents.

Word count: Body (480) Introduction (73)

Reading time: 2:58:08

Articles providing relevancy to your product - examples

2010-12-01T09:09:00.001Z

Title: Healthy Eating Food Essentials
Introduction:

The amount and types of foods you eat have a huge influence on your health, your body needs a huge variety of nutrients to work correctly and keep healthy. Its therefore important that you maintain a healthy diet. No single type of food contains all the nutrients and fibre you need, so it is important to always eat a large range of foods, eating the right balance from the five main food groups will ensure that your body gets all it requires to stay fit and healthy, the five main food groups are:

• Starchy foods
• Fruit and vegetables
• Dairy foods
• Meat, fish and other non – dairy sources of protein (such as beans)
• Fats and sugar

Body:

Most of the carbohydrate in your diet should come from starchy foods also known as complex carbohydrates. These include bread, cereals, potatoes, pasta or rice.

Starchy foods are usually bulky, so they fill you up quicker than other food groups. Wholegrain varieties can be particularly rich in nutrients and fibre, and therefore they should be preferred to white choices.

Fruit and vegetables are good sources of nutrients, in particular vitamins, minerals and fibre. You should aim to eat at least five portions of fruit and vegetables each day. Doing this could cut your risk of disease, including some cancers and heart disease.

Milk and dairy products such as cheese and yogurt are important sources of calcium, protein and vitamins.

Choose lower-fat options such as semi-skimmed or skimmed milk, low-fat yogurts and cheeses. Some dairy foods, such as butter and cream, should be eaten in much smaller doses because of their high fat content, especially saturated fats which have been linked to a higher risk of certain diseases. These food items should be regard the as members of the 'fats and sugar' food group rather than the 'dairy foods' group.

Red meat, poultry, fish (fresh, frozen or tinned), beans and pulses, eggs and nuts are all important non-dairy sources of protein. When preparing meat and poultry, you should always remember to cut off any extra fat and skin and don't add butter or oil when cooking it, if you feel it is necessary only use small amounts, consider grilling, baking or poaching meat, fish and poultry rather than frying it. Also try to limit amounts of processed meat (such as sausages) as they often contain a lot of fat and salt.

It's recommended that you should eat at least two portions of fish per week (one portion is about 140g), of which one should be oily. This is because of its high content of long chain omega 3 fatty acids. These fatty acids have a protective effect on your heart.

Butter, mayonnaise, crisps, cakes and puddings are examples of foods which are high in saturated fats and should only be eaten in small doses. Look out for low-fat options of these food types, which may be slightly healthier but should still be eaten in small amounts.

A certain amount of fat is essential for good health but if you eat too much of it, you're more likely to become overweight and may be at an increased risk of having a heart attack or stroke.

It's not only the total amount of fat in your diet that influences your health but also the quality of fat. Some types of fat have been shown to be very good for you, for example the long chain omega 3 fatty acids in oily fish, which help to protect against heart disease.

Foods high in refined sugar such as table sugar, sugary drinks and snacks provide "empty calories". This means that these foods give you energy but have very low nutritional values. Frequently eating sugary foods such as sweets and chocolate also contributes to tooth decay and gum disease, so its always best to try and limit your refined sugar intake.

Alcohol just like sugar provides empty calories and this is one of the many reasons why you should limit your alcohol intake, those who control there alcohol intake, tend to be a lot healthier than those who binge drink.

Word count: Body (564 ), Introduction (120 )

healthy eating, food essentials, carbohydrates, starchy foods, fruit and vegetables, fats and sugar, alcohol, dairy, non-dairy, protein

Article Example for SEO Purposes

2010-11-16T17:04:00.000Z

Over the past weeks I have been posting several blogs on SEO as an explanation thereof, but this time I thought it may be a good idea to post one of my articles as an example of an article written for SEO purposes. This is then disseminated to various quality and high ranking article submission sites. The content and linking in this type of article will offer the client good links back to his site, and furthermore drive traffic through to his site, for twofold reasons - the relevancy of the content and the value of the linkback.

Keep watching this space, or even better, subscribe to my blog, because as over the next weeks, I will break down the article and explain the importance of each section.

Example Article:

Title: Varifocal Explained

Introduction:

Varifocal and Bifocal lenses are corrective lenses used in eye glass eye wear to correct presbyopia and any other disorders of eye adjustment. Both varifocal and bifocal have a gradient of increasing lens power. Essentially, the gradient starts at a minimum at the top of the lens and reaches a maximum power at the bottom of the lens.

Body:

Varifocal lenses allow you to see near and far using only one pair of glasses, without any abrupt change and the advantage that there is no visible line in the lens, only an even transition from near to far. Basically, varifocal lenses help you see things clearly at all distances. Varifocal lenses take a little time to get used to, but once you are used to them, you will find that you can see clearly at all distances. Varifocal lenses are available in several designs, by design this is referring to the differences between the areas allocated through the distance, intermediate and reading zones.

Varifocal lenses are designed so that when you are looking straight ahead you look through the distance section of the lens. The reading zone is the lower part of the lens and the middle section of the lens allows you to view anything at arms length distance. The wearer can adjust the lens power required for clear vision at the different viewing distances by tilting his, or her, head to view through the appropriate section of the varifocal progression. Because near vision, such as when you are reading, is usually at a low visual field, this is the reason for the lower part of the lens being powered for near visual tasks.

Previous or older varifocal designs had a large distortion zone complexity, which often made it more difficult for the wearer to adjust to. Today, however, newer technology has made way for reduction of the size of the distortion areas, allowing easier adjustment for the wearer. The new varifocal lenses provide much wider viewing zones, therefore, giving a much clearer and more comfortable view. Because these newer designs of Varifocal lenses are easier to get used to, there is now only a small majority of people who may never get used to wearing varifocals.

Word count: Body (309), Introduction (58)

Reading time: 01:56:02

SEO Basics - The Do's And Don’ts

2010-11-04T19:47:00.000Z

There are a lot of people who can grasp the general idea of search engine optimisation (SEO), but still have no idea on how to go about the entire process. Unfortunately, not knowing the basic do’s and don’ts in SEO will create some problems for you and your website later on, so you must learn them as soon as possible.

The basic concept of search engine optimisation is that you can improve the page ranking of your site on search engines by using certain techniques and methods to help your site get indexed and ranked. By following this simple guide on what to do and what not to do, you should be able to get the desired results that you want to achieve in SEO.

Domain name importance

A good domain name, such as a dot com, can actually play a major role in your site’s page ranking, so make sure that you invest in a good domain name. People tend to trust domain names such as a dot com more over other types of domain names, and thus, they tend to look for sites that have this type of domain name. This can already give you an edge over your competition, so make sure that you do invest in a good domain name.

Keyword is key

One of the more important things that you should remember when dealing with SEO is that you must learn what keywords or tags to use for association to your website. Knowing which keyword to associate to your site will help drive the right traffic to your site, as well as make it easier for your site to get discovered by people online.

Once you figured out what keywords you want to use, try to place them in key locations, such as in the content or body of the title tag, since these are the places wherein search engines will give the greatest weight in the entire optimisation process. Also try to use the keywords that you have chosen in your URL’s, as well as in your HTML title tags, for these will also provide you with a boost in your page ranking.

Try to avoid using keywords that are too general, for chances are, a lot of sites would be using the same keyword, and this will definitely make it even more difficult for you to get high up in the rankings when you target general keywords, such as “lawyer”, or “music”.

Also make sure that you don’t overuse your chosen keyword, like using the same keyword three or four times within one sentence, for search engines are now monitoring this, and doing this can take your site out of the page rankings.

Relevant content is a must

The content of your site should be given a lot of importance, so do take the time to provide your site with relevant content in order to give your site the competitive edge to beat other sites that are also associated with your choice of keyword. Always bear in mind that there are other sites out there offering the same web content, so whoever offers the more relevant and superior content will win over the site visitor.
You will also need to take note of keywords that you use on your content’s titles and body. Since search engines tend to look into these aspects of your site, you need to focus the use of your keywords to certain parts of your content in order for you to be able to optimise your website so it would be discernable from other sites offering the same content.
Build links
Make sure that your site is not a “dead end” by building links with other sites that have relevant content to yours. By doing this, you can actually keep the traffic going from your site, to another’s, and then back to your site. You might think that building links with other sites will redirect traffic away from your site, but It actually does the exact opposite.
Instead, it creates a lot of ways for traffic to get redirected to your site through the use of other people’s sites, thereby also helping in your site’s page ranking later on, as well as help in getting traffic to go to your site without them having to access your site directly.

http://www.jdrwebsites.co.uk

2010-10-22T10:37:00.000+01:00

SEO Effect of Duplicate Content

There are a lot of ways that you can improve your site’s page ranking in search engines, unfortunately, not all of them are good. Some people employ certain methods in acquiring a high page rank in search engines, even if these are considered to be deceitful in the sense that they are designed to trick the search engines – one of these methods is actually duplicating web content.

What is duplicate content?

Duplicate content in SEO is actually any web content that is considered to be similar to another site. Search engines have actually implemented new filters specifically to monitor these types of deceitful attempts to improve site’s search engine page rankings. A lot of people think that by creating multiple but similar replicas of their web pages or content, that they will be able to improve their site’s page rankings since they will be able to get multiple listings for their site. Since search engines are now monitoring these types of trickery, sites using duplicate content can actually end up getting banned from search engine indexes instead of improving their ranking.

How do a search engines filter duplicate content?

Search engines filter for duplicate content by using the same means for analysing and indexing page ranking for sites, and that is through the use of crawlers or robots. These robots or crawlers go through different websites and catalogues these sites by reading and saving information to their database. Once this is done, these robots then analyse and compare all the information it has taken from one website to all the others that it has visited by using certain algorithms to determine if the site’s content is relevant, and if it can be considered as a duplicate content or spam.

How to avoid duplicate content?

Although you may not have any intentions to try and deceive search engines to improve your site’s page ranking, your site might still get flagged as having duplicate content. One way that you can avoid this from happening is by checking yourself if there are duplicate contents of your page. Just make sure that you avoid too many similarities with another page’s content for this can still appear as duplicate content to some filters, even if it isn’t considered to be a spam.
http://www.jdrwebsites.co.uk

Keywords: seo, duplicate web content, duplicate content, filter duplicate content, spam

SEO What is Duplicate Content

2010-10-15T10:24:00.000+01:00

What is Black Hat SEO?

2010-10-08T18:00:00.000+01:00

SEO approaches have been categorised into either black hat or white hat. White hatters are considered to be the good guys, while black hatters are known to be grabbing temporary opportunities that will ultimately be discovered and disapproved by search engines and halted immediately. A lot of individuals still use black hat SEO for a number of reasons. Find out if you should stay with the good side or take some risks as a black hatter.

Describing the Black Hat

Black hat search engine optimisation is described as using techniques that will lead to higher search engine rankings. The manner of achieving such ranking is, however, deemed to be unethical and unacceptable by search engines. Black hat SEO techniques are despised by search engines. Once found, the site or page will automatically be penalised or will suffer visibility problems, thereby rendering it useless for further marketing endeavours.

The Black Hatter

Black hat SEO techniques have a number of characteristics. The first includes the breakage of search engine rules, stipulations and regulations. Black hat techniques also provide a poor user experience, because of the unapproved means that are incorporated in the methods. Black hatters also provide content that are unethical, both visually and non-visually to search engine human visitors and search engine spiders.

Black hatters used to be legitimate, but they became labelled as the bad guys after a number of webmasters abused the techniques and incorporated a lot of items that only led to irrelevant and useless searches. There was a time when online visitors could not successfully research because of the misleading presentations by black hatters. Short term gains can still be achieved by black hatters in search engine rankings, but if you want to develop long term credibility and a solid reputation, you have to follow the guidelines.

Some Black Hat Techniques

Black hat techniques should generally be avoided by webmasters or they risk getting penalise. Keyword stuffing is the most common black hat approach wherein individuals put too many keywords in their page or site, and nothing else. The keywords can boost your search engine ranking temporarily and lead a number of people into the site who happen to type in the main keywords. They, however, immediately get turned off once they browse the page and find nothing else on it.

Invisible text is another method that you should avoid. It involves placing lists of keywords in white text against a white background to draw more search engine spiders. Search engine crawlers nowadays are much smarter and it also takes away more human users from your page. Doorway pages are considered fake pages that users never get to see. The approach is intended to draw more search engine spiders but human visitors cannot see anything useful or relevant once they visit the page.

The Temporary Effects

The use of black hat SEO can be very tempting for some, but you have to understand that the effects are only temporary. The site can rank very high for some time, but immediately get banned. You can also lose your credibility by choosing these types of technique. Talk to other marketers online and find out about the other white hat methods that offer long term benefits. Your web site can become a solid face in the industry, but it does take some patience and dedication to stay on top of the rankings.

http://www.jdrwebsites.co.uk/

The Myths in SEO

2010-10-04T13:54:00.000+01:00

Some people follow the book accurately when it comes to SEO. However, you have to understand that there are common myths that may only be detrimental to the growth of your company. Some of the approaches that used to be effective before may no longer be useful today, since the market and search engine crawlers are smarter. Debunk some of the basic myths and make the necessary improvements in your site to boost sales for long.

Myth #1: SEO Involves Techniques That Fool Search Engines

Fooling search engines mean that you are also fooling human users. Real SEO techniques involve more than just optimising content, using marketing schemes and getting additional links. A number of tactics can be used depending on the persons you are dealing with.

Some of the useful strategies that can be used for SEO to last a long time include benchmarks, competitive analysis, search marketing strategy, keyword analysis, web design, user experience, creative copy writing, server side issues, ongoing link building, code optimisation, information architecture, ongoing content development, web analytics, other channel marketing affecting SEO and conversion analysis.

Myth #2: Search Engines Aren't Used That Much

Based on research, around 4.9 billion searches are done every month by 133 million unique searchers. Search engines have become one of the most common tools used for people to gain information. Majority of internet users rely on search engines to get to different web sites, pages and companies. Search engines lead you to different online businesses and shops where you can instantly shop and get more updates. You have to determine how much useful and relevant content is available in the market, then aim on becoming an authority in the industry.

Myth #3: SEO Doesn't Work Because You Do Not Have Many Visitors

Keep in mind that SEO doesn't promise instant and significant results. You have to use the different marketing tools and strategies together with the approaches and SEO to make everything work together. Experts recommend that you spend about 6 months after the implementation phase to evaluate the results of SEO.

You also have to ensure that your web site can back up all the methods you have incorporated. If your site is not easy to navigate, does not have sound and unique content and is not relevant to the people you are targeting, then your SEO efforts will be rendered useless.

Myth #4: SEO Happens Only Once

SEO takes time to develop and you need to evaluate and assess each approach to determine if it should be improved. Search engines view about 100 to 200 factors or signals to know its relevance as well as decide how to categorised search results. You have to give SEO constant attention because there are several other sites and pages that also promise unique content, entertaining media and other tools to entice the target market.
Always brainstorm on how you can further improve your techniques like integrating with other offline and online marketing, creating new content, building new links and refining your optimisation approaches. If you have spent some time, money and effort creating the groundwork for your SEO, you have to ensure that operations continue to function and drive the right clients into your web site. SEO is not a one-time event. It needs checks and refinements every now and then.

The History of Search Engine Optimisation

2010-09-24T10:42:00.000+01:00

Search engine optimisation or SEO has been used strategically by thousands of individuals and companies all over the world to generate higher revenues. It is also one of the cheapest ways to continually advertise your web site and get a lot of targeted traffic who are truly interested in your services and products. It is important that you learn more about its history first to determine the right approaches that will appeal to your target market.

How It All Started
Web site content writers and webmasters started to optimise web sites for search engines during the middle part of the 1990s, since the initial search engines were still cataloguing the early Web. In the beginning, a webmaster can submit the webpage address or URL to different search engines that will send a spider to navigate and crawl the given page. The spider will gather links to other pages from the page and return the information located on the page to be indexed.

The entire process involves a search engine spider that will download a page and store it on the very own server of the search engine. The second program or indexer, will gather different information regarding the page, like words in the content and location, together with the weight for given words and all other links contained in the page, to be placed in a scheduler for later crawling.
Increased Value

Web site owners understood what it means to increase the ranking of their web sites and being visible to their target market through search engine results. They can then create the opportunity for SEO practitioners using either black hat or white hat. Danny Sullivan, an analyst of the industry in the 1990s, indicated that SEO or search engine optimisation may have been coined and used frequently in 1997.
Early versions of the search algorithms heavily depended on information given by the webmaster like the keyword meta tag or index files in search engines such as ALIWEB. Meta tags function by giving a guide to every content of web pages. The Meta data can be used to index pages that were found to be unreliable due to the choices made by the webmaster in the given keywords. It can become an inaccurate representation of the web site's true content. Inaccurate and inconsistent meta tags can change the rankings of various pages.

Keyword Density

Keyword density was incorporated very much during the early parts of SEO. Search engines would usually suffer because of ranking manipulation of overuse of given keywords. Search engines needed to adjust to make sure that results pages will only present the most useful web sites, instead of unrelated web pages that only had several keywords, but really did not mean anything. More complex ranking algorithms were created and developed by search engines to ensure that visitors only got the most useful results possible.
Modern Results

At present, rankings in search engines are very accurate and dependable. In 2004, search engines have used different factors in the algorithms of rankings to significantly minimize link manipulation. Some of the best search engines use more than 200 various signals. The algorithms are not disclosed by the biggest engines to prevent unscrupulous webmasters from manipulating the results. Some of the best SEOs have used various approaches, with different techniques and opinions posted in blogs and online forums.

SEO Effect of Duplicate Content

2010-09-17T09:37:00.000+01:00

There are a lot of ways that you can improve your site’s page ranking in search engines, unfortunately, not all of them are good. Some people employ certain methods in acquiring a high page rank in search engines, even if these are considered to be deceitful in the sense that they are designed to trick the search engines – one of these methods is actually duplicating web content.

What is duplicate content?

Duplicate content in SEO is actually any web content that is considered to be similar to another site. Search engines have actually implemented new filters specifically to monitor these types of deceitful attempts to improve site’s search engine page rankings. A lot of people think that by creating multiple but similar replicas of their web pages or content, that they will be able to improve their site’s page rankings since they will be able to get multiple listings for their site. Since search engines are now monitoring these types of trickery, sites using duplicate content can actually end up getting banned from search engine indexes instead of improving their ranking.
What are considered as duplicate content?

There are a couple of duplicate content types that are being rampantly utilized by a lot of people, each one a bit different in their use, but all of them employed for the same purpose, which is to trick search engines to get better page rankings.
One way of getting a duplicate content is by having very similar websites or identical web pages on different sub-domains or domains that offer basically the same content. This may include landing or door pages aside from the content, so make sure that you avoid using this if you don’t want your site to become vulnerable to search engines’ duplicate content filter.

Another method of creating duplicate content is by simply taking content from another website or page and reorganising it to make it appear dissimilar to its original form, though it is actually the same.

Product descriptions from many e-Commerce sites are actually being utilised by other sites as well. Other sites simply copy the product description of manufacturer’s utilised by other competitive markets as well. And add the fact that the product name, as well as the name of artist, manufacturer, writer or creator would be included, a significant amount of content would show up on your page. Although this is much harder to spot, it is still considered to be a duplicate content, or spam.

Distribution of copied articles by other sites other than the one that distributed the original article can also be considered to be a duplicate content. Unfortunately, although some search engines still deem the site where the original article came from as relevant, some however, do not.

How do a search engines filter duplicate content?

Search engines filter for duplicate content by using the same means for analysing and indexing page ranking for sites, and that is through the use of crawlers or robots. These robots or crawlers go through different websites and catalogues these sites by reading and saving information to their database. Once this is done, these robots then analyses and compares all the information it has taken from one website to all the others that tt has visited by using certain algorithms to determine if the site’s content is relevant, and if it can be considered as a duplicate content or spam.

How to avoid duplicate content?

Although you may not have any intentions to try and deceive search engines to improve your site’s page ranking, your site might still get flagged as having duplicate content. One way that you can avoid this from happening is by checking yourself if there are duplicate contents of your page. Just make sure that you avoid too much similarities with another page’s content for this can still appear as duplicate content to some filters, even if it isn’t considered to be a spam.

Build Site Traffic With Free Blogging

2010-09-10T13:03:00.000+01:00

Don’t have enough readers for your free blog website? Do you want to create your own blog the fast and easy way?

If you answered yes to any of these questions then free blogging sites are for you. Firstly, you might be wondering what blog is all about. A blog or a web blog is like an online log where you can use to build traffic for your website. It can contain any topics you want and it can even contain your diary.

So just how do you start blogging for free?

Creating your own blogging website is very simple. You can visit websites that offer free blogs which has step by step process on creating your blogging website. It will usually just take a few minutes of your time to create a blogging websites in sites that offer free blogging web pages.

However, before starting to go to websites that offer free blogs, you should first determine several factors for your blogging web page.

Firstly, you have to think of a name for your blog. To do this, you must first determine what kind of topic you will dedicate your blogging webpage to. Ask yourself what you want to discuss, what are your interests or hobbies or if you have a website that is dedicated to a particular topic, you can discuss that to. It can be anything, it can be dogs, cars, casinos, food, travel, and you can even create a blog about yourself.
After knowing what name your blogging site should have, the next step would be what to put in it. Basing from your title, you will have an idea on what to put on your blog. You can put in any comments you want with different topics regarding your title and headline. You can even post in surveys as your topic; this is very useful if you sell a particular product where you can get consumers opinion on how to sell your product more effectively.

Another way to generate interest in your blog and attract a lot of readers is to make your blog a bit controversial. People like controversies and making your blog one, can create a lot of curious people to read your blog. You should post comments that can be controversial and this can result in many people wanting to post in their comments too.
Now that you have finished creating your blog, with title or headline, a comment, how should you attract people into reading your blogs? One of the best ways is to write an article about a particular topic in your blog and post them into article submission websites. This can generate a lot of targeted traffic and in no time at all.
To make this work, you should write the article with your blog site URL included at the ending of the article or in the footnote. With a good article and a little bit of luck, your blog will be discovered by people and chances are, your blog will create a lot of traffic by word of mouth.

Free blogging websites are one of the most useful tools to generate targeted traffic to your website. It can even generate a lot of loyal readers or fans of your work to post in comments and suggestions regularly to your blogging website and will often recommend it to other people. The best thing about this is that it’s easy, convenient, fun, and as the name suggests, it’s all for free.

Keyword selection For SEO

2010-09-03T13:26:00.000+01:00

One of the main components that helps determine the success, or failure, of your search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign is your keyword selection. Although this may not appear much, choosing the right keyword to use for your website is one of the more gruelling parts of the entire SEO process, especially if you aim to find one that will be most effective for your site’s search engine optimisation.

When using keywords for SEO, you just need to follow a few simple steps in order to properly find the right keyword that will do the job. There are also a couple of things that you need to look out for in order to avoid any problems when trying to optimise your web page.

The first thing that you should do if you want to be able to use keywords effectively is to start out by making a list of “key” keywords or phrases that are relevant to the content of your site, and by doing this, it can actually lead you to create or discover more keywords or phrases that may blossom from the original one that you have chosen.

Select key phrases or words

Once you’ve made a list, try to select ones that contain a “key” keyword or phrase that can help you identify your site’s content. Let’s say your site’s content is all about cars, using cars as a keyword won’t put you high up in the page ranking of search engines, especially since a lot of sites or pages have that as a keyword. Try to avoid using words or phrases that are too general, as this will not help improve your page ranking. By adding other key terms to your chosen keyword, such as “second-hand cars”, or “second-hand sports cars” will actually help improve your chances of going up higher in the page rankings. Just make sure that these are relevant to your site’s content.

It also helps if you took the time to search for keywords or phrases that your competition are using so that you can narrow down which ones to use, and which ones to avoid. There is no sense in using a type of keyword or phrase, such as “cars”, which a lot or most of your competition are using as well, and if their site’s are ranked high up in the search engine’s index, then you might have a difficult time going up against that.

Use your location

You can also improve your chances of getting a much better page ranking result if you incorporate your location to the keyword or phrase that you are trying to use. Let’s say your business is located somewhere in Hertfordshire, by simply adding the word “Hertfordshire” to your keyword selection (“Hertfordshire second-hand sports cars”), you can fair better in your page ranking. However, this type of method usually entails that people are planning on seeing you in person when they do searches like this, so make sure that you only utilise this technique if you are open to the idea of them visiting you in person.

Use your niche
Always try to choose the keyword that you specialise in, or at least the one that offers you with the most profit. Keep in mind that you want to offer the keyword that best describes your business, but if the search volume of users is leaning towards one that isn’t your main product, then you can actually opt to use that keyword instead, just as long as that keyword is still related or relevant to your site’s content.

Avoiding the Risks of SEO

2010-08-29T19:36:00.000+01:00

Even though SEOs have been considered as very cost-effective and useful tools for online marketing, it is important that you understand the risks and potential drawbacks. You can help your business run more efficiently by staying prepared for the possible consequences. You can also determine which approaches will work best for your target customers, thereby giving them quality service and unique content each time. Here are some proven tips.
The Risk Level
You first have to determine your current risk level to know what more you can do to protect your business completely. First of all, you have to gauge your level of expertise and experience in using SEOs. The more experience you have, the less problems you may encounter since you may already have gone through and solved a number of common pitfalls and problems. Consider the types of SEOs that you have used in the past, then check which ones can still work for your current industry.

Black Versus White

Black hat SEO users are putting themselves at risk for losing credibility and even getting penalised or banned. Some web sites and webmasters have been banned by search engines because of the abuse or misuse of certain techniques. There are plenty of black hatters who still believe that overstuffing keywords and using irrelevant content that boosts visibility can work for them in the long term. You are only waiting for search engine crawlers to find the site and render it useless.

White hat SEOs are very ideal since these promise you long term visibility and a good reputation. Your target customers can better relate to you if you follow the guidelines and rules given by search engines to boost rankings. It will take some time before you score high on search results pages, but the wait and experience will be worth the wait.

Some of the Common Risks

Reward is not proportionate to the workload given. A single click may be enough for some web sites to instantly land on the first page of search engine results. The hard work of other webmasters who practice ethical methods can be trampled by unapproved techniques like spamming, content aggregating, scraping and plagiarism. Manipulating an algorithm may temporarily catapult your site into the front page, but you can face greater consequences once your actions are discovered.

Boosting Your Experience

Although several black hat approaches can offer you visibility instantly, the results are only temporary. People cannot refer to you or your company as reliable if you resort to unapproved techniques in trying to get their attention. You can boost your reputation and experience by following the right guidelines and patiently waiting for the right traffic to start flowing into your web site. Over time, you will find that your client base expands continually as long as you maintain good content and quality service.

Try to write good and informative articles yourself. Visit online discussion boards and listen to what other online experts have to say. Check out other ethical methods used by top web sites and learn over time how you can also become a master in your chosen industry. You can start learning more about keywords and meta tags to improve your visibility. Review how search engine crawlers work and what items and elements are needed in your site to make it easier for them to find you.

How Adwords Can Provide FREE Exposure For Your Website

2010-08-11T11:37:00.001+01:00

There are various reasons as to why your potential customers will use the web, but they are usually looking for access to information, or communication. The Web is now a vital tool for any business as this is where most of your potential customers are!

By investing in a quality website for your business you are not only making yourself available to local customers but you are making yourself available worldwide, why limit your businesses potential when you can increase your chances of potential business opportunities all over the World!

Setting up a good Adwords Campaign along with links to your website is an investment worth considering if you would like to maximise your online profits and increase your online exposure. If used correctly Adwords campaigns can boost your websites traffic and increase your online sales with a minimum of cost.

As you only pay for the visitors that actually click on your companies advertisements and not for the viewing of each of your ads, Google AdWords can provide your company’s website with fantastic FREE exposure!

Without even paying a penny your company name and web address will be seen by thousands of potential customers on a daily basis completely FREE of charge!

The Benefits Of Having a Website Continued

2010-07-20T12:13:00.000+01:00

Rather than contacting you over the phone or in person some of your potential clients would rather make enquiries regarding your business online. By having a company website you have an easily accessible way for them to do so.

There is no better way to promote your business than doing so through the internet, however if you are going to promote your business online you must ensure it is done so correctly. SEO and Adwords Campaigns are great online promotion tools for any website, and if used correctly they will give you a great return on the money you spend on your website and online promotions.

The Benefits Of Having A Website

2010-06-23T11:50:00.002+01:00

There are many benefits to having a company website. Your site could introduce many new, positive aspects for your company to explore, just a few of these are shown below:

It increases your chance of repeat business, encourages any current customers to remain loyal to your company.

Your Website can radiate a professional and modern impression to any potential clients.

It states any information and details unknown to any new and up-coming clients so it is always easily accessible to them should they need it.

It shows the reliability of your business/services to any potential customers

The Benefits Of Updating Your Website

2010-06-14T14:19:00.002+01:00

You can get the maximum benefits from updating your website by having a section on your home page that shows a snippet of your latest news, articles of blog posts. New content appearing regularly on your site will keep your site up to date and visible with the search engines.

If you do choose to add any of the above to your website then you need to make sure that you are going to update it regularly. At lease once per month, as it will appear very unprofessional if your latest news article contained information regarding the latest news from 6 months ago, it would also give the impression that their isn’t much happening within the business, which isn’t the impression you would want to give to potential customers.

One of the biggest aims of all website owners should be to get to the top of the search engines and one of the things all search engines love is new content. So if you are updating your site content regularly then you will be supplying the search engines with new things to index and get hold of. You will be surprised at the amount this can help your rankings in the search engines and is something we would always recommend.

The Importance Of Updating Your Sites Content Regularly

2010-04-23T13:57:00.002+01:00

We would always recommend that you update your website content regularly, this will help boost your websites visibility on the net and maximise SEO. However you should not update your sites content just for the sake of it, only add relevant information!

If you are updating your sites content regularly then you will be supplying the search engines with new things to index and get hold of. You will be shocked at the amount this can help your rankings in the search engines and is something we would always recommend.

Not only does updating your website help increase your rankings with the search engines but it is also great for visitors to your website. They will get to see the latest information about your company and your products and services which is good for your customers as when people are looking to buy they like to get as much information as possible. It also shows your customers that you update your website regularly which proves you are actively working on your site, giving your customers extra confidence in your company as it helps to demonstrate that you are a professional company offering a professional service.

The Importance of Good Copy For Your Website!

2010-04-07T13:54:00.001+01:00

Throughout the month of April we will be talking you through the importance of good copy for your website and how it can help your online business to acquire more online sales!

Often businesses fail to see the importance of good copy, which can eventually affect the company's reputation and profits. How your business reflects its products and services, policies and regulations, plans and achievements via words, can make or break a sale and build or destroy your companies online reputation.

your copy should not stop with just creating a good impression. It should get the customer to take action and do business with you. Good website copy is built on the basis of your keyword strategy and should be written to reflect this. Proper keyword research and selection all play a huge part in how search engines see your site.

For a successful search engine friendly profitable online business good keyword rich copy is essential!

SEO For Law Firms

2010-03-29T11:34:00.000+01:00

Search engine optimization (SEO) can be a useful tool for a lot of businesses, especially those that aim to attract possible clients online. This is actually being utilized by a lot of businesses already, including law firms, since this can allow them to get ahead of their competition. By optimizing their site’s visibility online through the use of search engines, lawyers and law firms are able to beat other, more well-known law firms by making their name more visible and easier to find for possible clients online. Keep in mind that people are now more educated in using the internet as their means of locating businesses and firms that offer legal services. Although more well-known law firms would appear more attractive to most, if they are not able to find those firms online, then there is a great possibility that they would be directed to another law firm, one that is easier to find online. Here are a couple of steps that you must do in order to be able to get a competitive edge over other law firms, and finally get more prospective clients.

Create a website

The first thing that your law firm must do is to create a website. You will not be able to get traffic to check your business online if you don’t have any website to direct them to. Make sure that you try to find a website designer that will be able to capture your vision on what your site will look like. If you find it difficult to picture out yourself, you can always seek help from professionals to design the site for you specifically.

Keyword choice

Once you have successfully created your website to your specifications, you must now try to figure out what keywords or tags you will need to associate to your site. Remember that people will use certain keywords to try and find law firms on the web through the use of search engines. Choosing the right keyword can help determine the success of your site’s optimization in search engines, which is why you must make sure that the keywords that you choose reflect directly on your site’s content. This will make it easier for your chosen keywords to get the right market or prospective clients that you aim to get.

Create relevant content

Creating the right content for your site is also one of the more important things that you should focus on, especially if you want to keep the people that are already on site. You need to make sure that you use the keywords that you have chosen on your site’s content. Having keywords or key phrases would be pretty useless if you haven’t created any content that relates to them, so make sure that you take the time to write down meaningful and relevant content.

Build links

You must also now try to improve the page ranking of your website on search engines. A site that is page ranked number one has a much better chance of getting more traffic directed to it than those ranked lower. If you want to make your law firm to become more visible online, then you must now focus on how you can increase your site’s page ranking, and you can do this through the use of effective link building. Link building can help get your site indexed on search engines. All you need to do in order to get the right type of market directed to your site is to link your site to those that have the same content as your site. Remember that people who are looking for legal aid regarding a particular issue will be looking for sites that directly relates to their situation, so make sure that you link to relevant sites only to help boost up your site’s page ranking when users type in a particular key word in search engines. Doing these steps is not a guarantee that your sales will go up with the increase in your possible clients list, but it can guarantee the improvement in how much traffic you can direct your way. Let this serve as your starting point, the rest is up to you.

How To Be An SEO Content Writer

2010-03-19T14:05:00.000Z

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best online strategies and skills that you can learn and employ to get better page ranking in search engines for your site. However, there are some things that you just need help with, such as the type of content you should write about in your page in order to get good, relevant content for users.

Creating content relevant to your site for SEO requires a different set of skills, and demands you to perform a few tasks other than just simply writing and posting articles. Here are a couple of things that you should learn if you intend to become an SEO content writer.

Learn the SEO process

The first thing that you should learn if you want to become a SEO content writer is how the entire SEO process works in order to be able to create articles that have relevant content to what users are looking for, as well as create articles that will help funnel and direct market to the site or page that you are working on.
Search engines focuses on text and not images, so the written content of your page will receive the most amount of checking and analysis from search engine crawlers, and if deemed passable, will then get indexed in their database. This is why you need to make sure that your content is relevant and good in order to get a good chance of getting better results with search engines.

Use keywords properly

SEO content writers should learn how to use keywords and phrases in getting their content across to the different users searching for those that are relevant to their search. Keywords play a vital role in any SEO content since this will help determine whether your created article for that particular keyword or phrase has any relevance to what users are searching for.You need to be able to take into account the keywords or phrases that users will be using in search engines to find the relevant content that they are looking for so that you can incorporate it into the articles that you will be creating and posting on your site or page. You need to know where to place these keywords or phrases in the article, such as in the title tags and body of the articles, in order to help search engines find your content so it can get indexed in their database.

Aside from this, as a SEO content writer, you should try to avoid overusing keywords wherein you try to flood your articles with the keyword or phrase associated with it. This can only lead search engines to believe that the content that you are creating as spam.

Write quality content

The quality of your articles will also play a major and important role on how your site or page will do in the entire SEO process. Keep in mind that if you cannot offer users relevant content to their searches, they will most likely find it somewhere else, and all of your work in getting them to your site would have been in vain.
Being a SEO content writer limits you to certain rules when writing your articles. In order to avoid certain mistakes and errors, you need to follow certain guidelines that will help improve your site’s page ranking in search engines. One example of this is the use of keywords in your articles. The excessive use of such will result in getting your content tagged as spam.

You also need to not only write quality and relevant content for users, but you must also offer fresh and new content from time to time in order to be able to offer more content for your users. This can actually also help get your site recommended by other sites, thereby improving your chances of getting more traffic directed to your site. Also, your articles should be original and engrossing for the user at the same time. Writing an article that users have read on some other site will not get you good points from them.

Research is key

In order for you to be able to write technically about a particular topic in a way that it can actually generate good SEO results, you need to learn how to do research on them. This will help you create content that is relevant and informative for users.

Using SEO Effectively

2010-03-16T09:23:00.000Z

SEOs can be very effective, provided that you understand your target market very clearly and incorporate the right approaches that will get their attention. You do not need to spend so much time and money to get to the right people who will actually purchase your products. There are so many methods and techniques that you can use to make the most out of search engine optimizers. Here are some tips on how to rank well in the pages.

About the Title

The title has to be highly related to your content, consisting of the right words that your target customers will most likely type in the search engines. Make sure you use only the most unique and relevant title and meta description on each page. The title page is the most vital on-page SEO factor. You cannot expect to rank high for a primary term of 2 to 3 words without the words becoming part of the title page. The meta description tag does not help you rank very high, but it is usually used as a text snippet below the listing. It should also include the useful keywords and be written the right way to entice searchers to go on and click on the listing. Ignore the keywords meta as a whole if you want. If you continue using it, you may place misspellings, as well as other related keywords that are not included in your webpage.

The Importance of the Users

Always write for the benefit of the users. Some of the biggest search engines use very powerful bots that crawl the web. However, the bots do not buy anything on the internet, inquire about a product or service or sign up for a newsletter. Always make sure that your content and pages are understandable and ignite the interest of your potential readers. You will need keywords in text, but do not stuff every page. The content should be unique and relevant to the particular product or service that you are offering. Online retailers need to face the challenge of selling a product that several other companies and agents may also be offering. You need to boost your reputation and credibility and establish your place in the market. Research on the right keywords using different online programs. You can also hire professional ghost writers to make the most useful articles possible.

How to Use Search Engine Optimizers

2010-03-09T11:32:00.000Z

Search engine optimization or SEO is the process of making a web site visible and friendly among search engines. It is most likely the most vital aspect of designing your web site. Several commercial web sites are designed and created by individuals who know little about SEO. The long page generally has the information and several other links that people need to know about to optimize a web site for search engines. You have to know more about the "search engines only index text".

On Indexing

When designing and optimizing the web site, you have to keep in mind that they generally do not index images, Flash is not indexed excellently too. Even though there are several exceptions to the approach, search engines only index text, even though search engines have been improved and are more intelligent. They are also now more capable of indexing files like graphic file captions and PDFs, as well as some of the text in a given Flash file. You can do several things when designing or redesigning a web site to get more treatment in the search engines. You can choose to optimize the home page for the most relevant and important keyword or keyphrase, as well as other pages that can be optimized for the given product. If you choose to sell various products on various pages, every page can be optimized for the given product. You can organize items this way. You should use SEO on at least several pages to get the results you want. Do not optimize pages wherein you do not have public content. Avoid pages that have "private policy" and "contact us" as well.

Choose the Right Domain Name

The domain name may not be entirely substantial in changing your search results ranking, but it does help you become more visible to other web sites and target users. Try to use the same words or terms that best defines your topic. Try to view other existing sites and find out which domain names they use.

The Web Hosting Company

You should also invest in a good web hosting company. Free web site hosting can provide you with some visibility, but you should not expect to be at the top of the list. You should have your own static IP address, which means that the numeric IP address should be very stable. It should not differ each time someone types your URL, which is also referred to as a dynamic IP address. Huge hosting companies usually use dynamically assigned IP addresses that function the same way. Search engines prefer static IP addresses for several technical reasons.

Final Tips

Aside from using the main keywords that your target market will most likely use, you should also incorporate secondary keywords to optimize your web site more. Keyword stemming is another useful approach, wherein you use words that have the same stem or come from the same root. The use of synonyms can be good for your web site too. You should try to optimize for synonyms of the target keywords, together with the main keywords.Links are highly important if you want to rank high. Try to use as many backlinks as you can. Look for links from other related and similar sites. Look for the origin of inbound links as well.

Getting Ads and Affiliates

2010-03-05T12:18:00.000Z

It is a myth that PPC ads can either hurt or improve your search engine ranking. A lot of users actually believe that running Google Ad Words can affect the organic rankings or cause their standing to go down or up.

PPC ads and getting more affiliates can help you stay visible to your target market through other web sites, but the approach does not immediately lead to better page results.

SEO Using Content Strategies

2010-03-01T14:19:00.001Z

The entire search engine optimization (SEO) process is often misunderstood by a lot of people, which is why they often commit a lot of SEO mistakes that can cost them not only their page ranking in search engines, but also lose traffic volume of possible clients. SEO can help you direct traffic to your site, but getting them to stay is a whole new different ball game. The entire SEO process basically revolves around the idea of getting a good page ranking in search engines by employing certain strategies so that people can find your site easier. The better your page ranking is, the easier it is for users to find it, the more appealing it is for them to visit your site, thereby increasing the amount of traffic that your site is able to generate. However, if the users do not find any relevant content in your site, then your efforts to get them to your site would just have been in vain.

If you want to be able to ensure that you can get users to stay in your site, you must learn some basic content strategies in order to do so.

Relevant content
As mentioned earlier, getting people directed to your site or page is one thing, but to get them to find relevant content and to stay is another. In order for you to be able to generate positive and profitable effects of the amount of traffic that you are able to divert to your site, you need to offer them exactly what they are looking for. When users are looking for a particular content, they will employ keyword searches on search engines. Once they are directed to your site using those keywords, they expect to find relevant content pertaining to that keyword, so make sure that you have content relevant to their searches. Avoid using keywords that have no relevance to your content, but you use them anyway simply to gain more traffic directed to your page due to the popularity of that keyword. This will only result in users clicking back to their search engines, and not necessarily create any positive effect on your page ranking. Make sure that your choice of keywords would correlate to the content that you are creating in your page.

More content is better
The more content or articles you create about a particular topic or keyword, the more chances you have of getting tagged and linked by other sites, as well as increase your chances of answering a user’s search for relevant content. Just like fishing, the more assorted baits you have, the better your chances are of catching a fish. One way that you can get the right user, you just need to offer more content for users. Also, the different articles you create and post in your site as well as in other sites can generate a lot of backlinks which can lead users back to your site.

Keep content fresh
Creating and posting new content regularly can greatly improve your site’s chances of getting recommendations from other sites, especially those that are linked to your site. The more times you offer new and fresh content, the more opportunities your users searching for a particular content will have on finding one that is relevant to their search.

Link building
Building links is also another content strategy that you can employ to help users searching for a particular content to find your site offering relevant content to their search. Try to link to those other sites that has similar content, or at least uses the same keywords in tagging their site’s content.This way, any user searching in those sites will be directed to your page’s similar content, making it easier for users to find your page.

Debunking SEO Myths

2010-02-26T12:01:00.000Z

Search engine optimization or SEO has been used widely across the internet as individuals and companies try to create and establish the right image and reputation that will entice their target market. If you want to gain long term stability in the industry, you have to understand which methods are working and which ones are just wasting your time and money. Debunk organic SEO myths and improve the way you attract your target clients.

SEO Myths
Some people say that you should submit your URLs to search engine first. This used to be true, but now, submitting these do not really lead to increased search engine rankings. Some individuals also require you to get a Google Sitemap. If your web site was created the right way or is crawler-friendly, you do not need to do such. The sitemap can be an added bonus, but you can also indulge in other tools online to help you rank better.

Banning SEO Myths
It is a myth that your web site can be banned if you buy a lot of links. Search engines do not find anything wrong with buying advertising on web sites. Another myth involves having your web site banned for ignoring the guidelines of the search engines. Guidelines actually provide you with helpful tips on how to rank better on search engines, but you have to be careful not to use the methods that they truly despise. If you go for black hat SEO techniques, you may be penalized. Banning of sites requires a lot of negative feedback that may involve several actions during different times.

On Words and Limitations
It is a myth that words in the meta keyword tag have to be incorporated on the same page. It is true that you can improve visibility of your site by using the right meta tags and keywords in the title, but you should not try to overstuff the page with the keywords. Invest in secondary and tertiary terms instead to stay visible. There are also no rules on which number of words is optimal for better search engine ranking. Some say that SEO copies have to be at least 250 words long. It is good to use just enough words in your content to provide sufficient information. A marketing copy that can be optimized for 3 to 5 key phrases or keywords is ideal. Go straight to the point in your articles and pass on the message of your company with each one.

The Practice of White Hat SEO

2010-02-19T10:09:00.001Z

The Practice
If you are still deciding whether to use black hat or white hat SEO, you have to determine the main functions and goals of your business. What are your plans for the long term? White hat SEO is ideal for businesses and companies who expect to boost their reputation and maintain credibility for the longest period of time. Black hats only wait until search engines discover their methods and eliminate these. Your manipulation tactics may be limited but you get more quality customers and visits by ensuring that your site or page has good and sound content. You should also incorporate all other important elements when trying white hat SEO. Find out how each approach works for you then determine which ones you should heavily invest in. You can rely on other webmasters and web site owners to help you find the best white hat SEO tools and methods that will sell your product or service better.

Boosting Reputation
Using white hat SEO provides you the benefit of having a solid reputation in the industry. People will start referring to your brand or company more as synonymous to quality and reliability. You get to gain your market's trust thereby keeping your company secure for the long term.

The White Hat SEO

2010-02-15T10:28:00.001Z

SEO approaches are divided into two namely white hat and black hat SEO. White hatters are known to follow the stringent guidelines in driving potential visitors into web sites. They also abhor the methods used by black hatters and try to find more ways to avoid problems in searches and page rankings. White hat SEO can be very effective, even if you are not allowed to use some techniques. Here are some more details about the type.

Definition of White Hat SEO

White hat SEO is known as the good or the hero in online marketing. It is also called "the good guy" among webmasters. The individuals who practice white hat methods are penetration testers and ethical hackers who aim to maintain the security and protection among IT systems. The ethical hackers are generally computer security experts, who ensure that information systems of different sites and companies are kept safe.
They use testing methods and other penetration practices and drills to keep black hat practitioners away. The professionals may also be called sneakers. Groups of the individuals are referred to as red teams or tiger teams. The security specialists can use different methods to perform various tests, like social engineering tactics, attempts to avoid security and gain entry to protected areas and the use of hacking equipment and tools. Defensive teams are called blue teams, while red teams are the aggressor teams.

More on White and Black Hat SEO

In SEO or search engine optimization, both white hat and black hat have been applied widely. Black hat SEO methods include spamdexing, wherein search results are redirected to different target pages. The approach is highly against the rules and stipulations of search engines. White hat methods strictly follow the rules and guidelines given by search engines to ensure that internet users are driven to the right content and pages that rank high in the search results page. White hats lead to results that you can continue to expect over a long period of time, compared to black hats that only find short term opportunities.

SEO - Effect Of Duplicate Content

2010-02-08T14:52:00.001Z

There are a lot of ways that you can improve your site’s page ranking in search engines, unfortunately, not all of them are good. Some people employ certain methods in acquiring a high page rank in search engines, even if these are considered to be deceitful in the sense that they are designed to trick the search engines – one of these methods is actually duplicating web content.

What is duplicate content?

Duplicate content in SEO is actually any web content that is considered to be similar to another site. Search engines have actually implemented new filters specifically to monitor these types of deceitful attempts to improve site’s search engine page rankings. A lot of people think that by creating multiple but similar replicas of their web pages or content, that they will be able to improve their site’s page rankings since they will be able to get multiple listings for their site. Since search engines are now monitoring these types of trickery, sites using duplicate content can actually end up getting banned from search engine indexes instead of improving their ranking.

What are considered as duplicate content?

There are a couple of duplicate content types that are being rampantly utilised by a lot of people, each one a bit different in their use, but all of them employed for the same purpose, which is to trick search engines to get better page rankings. One way of getting a duplicate content is by having very similar websites or identical web pages on different sub-domains or domains that offer basically the same content. This may include landing or door pages aside from the content, so make sure that you avoid using this if you don’t want your site to become vulnerable to search engines’ duplicate content filter. Another method of creating duplicate content is by simply taking content from another website or page and reorganizing it to make it appear dissimilar to its original form, though it is actually the same.

Product descriptions from many ECommerce sites are actually being utilised by other sites as well. Other sites simply copy the product description of manufacturer’s utilised by other competitive markets as well. And add the fact that the product name, as well as the name of artist, manufacturer, writer or creator would be included, a significant amount of content would show up on your page. Although this is much harder to spot, it is still considered to be a duplicate content, or spam. Distribution of copied articles by other sites other than the one that distributed the original article can also be considered to be a duplicate content. Unfortunately, although some search engines still deem the site where the original article came from as relevant, some however, do not.

How do a search engines filter duplicate content?

Search engines filter for duplicate content by using the same means for analysing and indexing page ranking for sites, and that is through the use of crawlers or robots. These robots or crawlers go through different websites and catalogues these sites by reading and saving information to their database. Once this is done, these robots then analyzes and compares all the information it has taken from one website to all the others that It has visited by using certain algorithms to determine if the site’s content is relevant, and if it can be considered as a duplicate content or spam. Although you may not have any intentions to try and deceive search engines to improve your site’s page ranking, your site might still get flagged as having duplicate content. One way that you can avoid this from happening is by checking yourself if there are duplicate contents of your page. Just make sure that you avoid too much similarities with another page’s content for this can still appear as duplicate content to some filters, even if it isn’t considered to be a spam.

The Best White Hat SEO Techniques

2010-02-01T11:43:00.000Z

If you intend to be a hero or the good guy in search engine optimization, you should only use white hat tactics. There are certain limitations to the approach in the beginning, but you can be sure that your reputation stays stable for the long term. People will refer to your company more as a reliable source of products and information. You can get to your target market without having to resort to unacceptable means. Here are some useful tips.

The Use of Links

Internal linking is one of the easiest methods to help make your web site more visible to search engines. A lot of web sites use a type of script to enable fancy drop-down navigation and other complicated functions, thereby keeping search engines from crawling on the scripts easily. Your pages can become unindexed as a result. The effects can boost the visual appearance of your web site, but you have to be concerned about staying visible too, or else there will only be a very limited number of people who can appreciate the work. You can add text links and link internally to improve spidering to your web site because of the sophisticated scripts. You can put text links at the bottom or at your homepage that links all main internal pages. Also include a site map to all internal pages.

Reciprocate

You should also start swapping links with other webmasters to have additional links leading back to your web site. The value of reciprocal linking has reduced over the past several months, but you can still expect good quality traffic by investing in the approach. When you build reciprocal links, make sure that you only place these in areas where you target market will most likely be lingering. Link to sites that are highly related to your own and sites that have good content that your target market will be interested in. It is a risk to place links in sites that have been penalised.

The Content

Content creation is highly different from doorway pages and the like. You have to make good quality and unique content that will grab the attention of your potential clients, thereby boosting value to the site and your reputation and credibility as well. The more content-rich the site is, the higher its value will be to search engines and human visitors. You can invest in professional writers and ghost writers to update the content of your page every now and then. This is a good strategy in becoming a good resource in the industry. Having good content also means that you get to display keywords that will lead more people into the site through search engines. You can post articles, blogs and posts in forums, blog sites and discussion boards online. People will want to read your works if these are related to their chosen topic. You can also build links back to your web site without having to reciprocate the deed.

Boosting the Site

Manipulating the content, site structure and words can improve the ranking of your web site in search engines. You should make solid meta tags and titles to boost SEO. The optimisation attempt should not go far from the main message and content quality contained in the web site. Always include the potential to sell and the quality of articles to maximise exposure on search engines.

The Background of Search Engine Optimization

2010-01-26T11:23:00.000Z

Search engine optimization or SEO has been used strategically by thousands of individuals and companies all over the world to generate higher revenues. It is also one of the cheapest ways to continually advertise your website and get a lot of targeted traffic who are truly interested in your products and services. It is important that you learn more about its history first to determine the right approaches that will appeal to your target market.

How It All Started

Web site content writers and webmasters started to optimize websites for search engines during the middle part of the 1990s, since the initial search engines were still cataloguing the early Web. In the beginning, a webmaster can submit the webpage address or URL to different search engines that will send a spider to navigate and crawl the given page. The spider will gather links to other pages from the page and return the information located on the page to be indexed.

The entire process involves a search engine spider that will download a page and store it on the very own server of the search engine. The second program or indexer, will gather different information regarding the page, like words in the content and location, together with the weight for given words and all other links contained in the page, to be placed in a scheduler for later crawling.

Increased Value

Website owners understood what it means to increase the ranking of their web sites and being visible to their target market through search engine results. They can then create the opportunity for SEO practitioners using either black hat or white hat. Danny Sullivan, an analyst of the industry in the 1990s, indicated that SEO or search engine optimization may have been coined and used frequently in 1997. Early versions of the search algorithms heavily depended on information given by the webmaster like the keyword meta tag or index files in search engines such as ALIWEB. Meta tags function by giving a guide to every content of web pages. The Meta data can be used to index pages that were found to be unreliable due to the choices made by the webmaster in the given keywords. It can become an inaccurate representation of the website's true content. Inaccurate and inconsistent meta tags can change the rankings of various pages.

Keyword Density

Keyword density was incorporated very much during the early parts of SEO. Search engines would usually suffer because of ranking manipulation of overuse of given keywords. Search engines needed to adjust to make sure that results pages will only present the most useful web sites, instead of unrelated web pages that only had several keywords, but really did not mean anything. More complex ranking algorithms were created and developed by search engines to ensure that visitors only got the most useful results possible.

Modern Results

At present, rankings in search engines are very accurate and dependable. In 2004, search engines have used different factors in the algorithms of rankings to significantly minimize link manipulation. Some of the best search engines use more than 200 various signals. The algorithms are not disclosed by the biggest engines to prevent unscrupulous webmasters from manipulating the results. Some of the best SEOs have used various approaches, with different techniques and opinions posted in blogs and online forums.

Myths In SEO

2010-01-19T15:12:00.001Z

Some people follow the book accurately when it comes to SEO. However, you have to understand that there are common myths that may only be detrimental to the growth of your company. Some of the approaches that used to be effective before may no longer be useful today, since the market and search engine crawlers are smarter. Debunk some of the basic myths and make the necessary improvements in your site to boost sales for long.

Myth 1: SEO Involves Techniques That Fool Search Engines

Fooling search engines mean that you are also fooling human users. Real SEO techniques involve more than just optimizing content, using marketing schemes and getting additional links. A number of tactics can be used depending on the persons you are dealing with.

Some of the useful strategies that can be used for SEO to last a long time include benchmarks, competitive analysis, search marketing strategy, keyword analysis, web design, user experience, creative copy writing, server side issues, ongoing link building, code optimization, information architecture, ongoing content development, web analytics, other channel marketing affecting SEO and conversion analysis.

Myth 2: Search Engines Aren't Used That Much

Based on research, around 4.9 billion searches are done every month by 133 million unique searchers. Search engines have become one of the most common tools used for people to gain information. Majority of internet users rely on search engines to get to different web sites, pages and companies. Search engines lead you to different online businesses and shops where you can instantly shop and get more updates. You have to determine how much useful and relevant content is available in the market, then aim on becoming an authority in the industry.

Myth 3: SEO Doesn't Work Because You Do Not Have Many Visitors

Keep in mind that SEO doesn't promise instant and significant results. You have to use the different marketing tools and strategies together with the approaches and SEO to make everything work together. Experts recommend that you spend about 6 months after the implementation phase to evaluate the results of SEO. You also have to ensure that your web site can back up all the methods you have incorporated. If your site is not easy to navigate, does not have sound and unique content and is not relevant to the people you are targeting, then your SEO efforts will be rendered useless.

Myth 4: SEO Happens Only Once

SEO takes time to develop and you need to evaluate and assess each approach to determine if it should be improved. Search engines view about 100 to 200 factors or signals to know its relevance as well as decide how to categorized search results. You have to give SEO constant attention because there are several other sites and pages that also promise unique content, entertaining media and other tools to entice the target market. Always brainstorm on how you can further improve your techniques like integrating with other offline and online marketing, creating new content, building new links and refining your optimization approaches. If you have spent some time, money and effort creating the groundwork for your SEO, you have to ensure that operations continue to function and drive the right clients into your web site. SEO is not a one-time event. It needs checks and refinements every now and then.

Understanding SEO Techniques

2010-01-11T09:29:00.000Z

About 65% of all web sites visited begin from a search via a search engine. Search engine optimization or SEO has become an integral part in every business owner's marketing scheme since you get to be visible to hundreds of thousands of potential buyers all over the world. You get to boost your sales by following the right methods and techniques. If you end up on the first page, you can expect higher revenues very quickly. Here's how.

Commitment to the Process

SEO needs to be consistent and requires a lot of work in your part. Search engine algorithms adjust regularly, so it is important to stay updated with the latest trends and approaches, since some of your methods may no longer work after a few months. You have to be prepared for the long term and view how your business will continue to grow through SEO. It takes a lot of discipline and patience to see results. At first, your methods may not seem to be working, but as you continue to enhance the steps and process, you can do good business and expand your client base.

Getting Information

You have to know how to ask the right questions from the right people. Ask for the specific details of your business, and learn more about the industry by talking to experts and other successful businessmen. Find out how SEO can be used to the fullest and how you can better get in touch with your target customers. One of the most effective methods is to ensure that your web site is easy to navigate. You need to always have good and fresh content. Update your blog and articles regularly.

Join online forums and discussion boards and talk to your target customers. You can place links in your signature and copy the same articles you have from your web site to boost credibility and reputation. Read other articles and visit other successful web sites. Find out which keywords will most likely be used by your target customers and use these wisely throughout your articles. You may hire ghost writers to help you make relevant and useful articles in a shorter span of time.

Stay Visible

Include a site map page. Spiders cannot index your pages if these cannot be crawled. You can use a site map and the right HTML and other codes that will keep you visible to spiders. The spider will easily understand the hierarchy of your site. Make sure you have an easy-to-crawl navigation menu. You may discuss the details with a webmaster to help you improve visibility. If you have a big web site, create many site map pages. Each one should have less than 100 links. All your SEO moves should have an objective. Make use of web analytics software and other online experts to track the right methods and get rid of irrelevant and time-consuming efforts.The URLs and file names should be friendly to SEOs. Use 2 to 3 hyphens at most to keep your file from appearing like a spam. Use hyphens, not underscores, in your URLs and filenames. Hyphens are considered as "space", unlike underscores.

Relevance Matters

Always ensure that you have a relevant title and Meta description on each web page. The page title is the most vital factor of on-page SEO. It is unlikely to rank very high for a primary term without the word being included in the page title. Ignore the keywords Meta completely if you find that these are not relevant and only confuses visitors. Always write for visitors and users. The content of your site and articles should always be rela

SEO Techniques For Beginners

2010-01-04T15:10:00.001Z

If you are not quite familiar with the processes and tools of SEO or search engine optimization, you can rely on different programs and individuals available online. As a beginner, you will find that everything is relatively easy to understand, provided that you have the right background and know your customer, products and services very well. Your company can benefit more through the heightened visibility and improved search rankings.

Boosting Page Ranking

The title is one of the most important parts of your web site or content. This is the name which you find at the top of the window of the web browser, or Title Bar. The title has to be descriptive but brief and short. It should also contain the targeted keywords that are highly related to your web site. The search engines also present the title in the search engine results. The title should therefore describe the site's content so that users can be more interested in entering your site time and again.

Keyword Use

The keywords are also important when using SEO techniques. Several web masters overdo keywords though, which you should avoid. You can rank high if you use keywords wisely, but your site can also suffer or lose credibility if you overstuff. You can find a lot of support in using and adding keywords, like ALT tags, other areas and anchors. These are generally used to help boost the keywords. These should also be relevant to the image or place where you plan to link. Most individuals try to stuff keywords in a lot of different areas in the site or article. As a general precaution, you should try to optimize a single page with no more than 3 keywords or keyphrases. You can safely use secondary keywords or terms by using keyword generating tools online. Start with one or two keywords and avoid overusing these. Tertiary keywords can also be used which are related or similar but not the same as the main terms. Using alternative keywords help drive other potential visitors that come from different areas and use different related terms.

Understanding Meta Tags

Meta-tags have two parts namely the description and the keywords. The description should generally be short, but it should also be both descriptive and logical to the reader. Several times, it will be the text that is found under the title during the search. You should aim for the reader to have a minor overview of the page. Include content that will help them understand what they need to expect when viewing the page or site and drive them more into clicking on your web site. The keywords should be the very same ones you used while running SEO research. These should also be used in the page text.

Using Links

The search engine spider can easily locate your site as other sites create web links leading back to your site. These links will be counted as a vote of support. More quality pages on the page link will eventually lead to higher search engine ranking. Submit your link to popular directories and use more links in your signature when joining online discussion boards and forums.

Always have informative and new content on your web page to keep your target market interested and keep linking back to your site. They will also refer other potentially interested individuals to your page over time.

Learning SEO For Beginners

2009-12-29T15:53:00.000Z

Search engine optimization (SEO) can be a daunting process to learn for any person who is unfamiliar with it. However, this process is one of the more important skills that you must learn and master if you plan on making some money on your online site or business. This seems like a tall order for a novice in the whole SEO game, but fortunately for you, there are a couple of things that you can learn about that can help you understand, and hopefully implement, the entire process to help improve your site’s ranking.

What is SEO?

The first thing that you must know before anything else is what search engine optimization (SEO) is and how it can benefit your online site. Just in case you do not know, search engine optimization is an important skill that will allow your website or webpage to get better rankings in search engines, such as google, thereby making it easier for people to discover it. There are a lot of techniques and processes involved in SEO, which is why learning how it works first of all is the most important first step that you must take.
Basically, SEO helps online sites, or online businesses, to get a certain amount of exposure on the web by making them more visible and easier to find through the use of search engine’s indexing software, thereby making it easier to redirect traffic to your site and business, improving your chances of receiving a steady stream of market.

How is your site or page ranked?

Before your website can make full use of SEO, you must first get it indexed by search engines. How this works is that search engines find your website or webpage through the use of different indexing programs, such as crawlers or spiders that basically follows all links that lead to your site or page and downloads copies of it as it goes.
After this, your site or page will be analyzed and indexed based on some algorithms and criteria set by the search engines, thereby giving your site its ranking. This can be achieved through effective link building, which requires you to create connections to other sites that have similar contents to that of your site.

Benefits of SEO for your site

One of the more obvious benefits of SEO is that It can help improve your site’s web ranking in search engines, thereby increasing the amount of web traffic that you website can generate. Since your site is now easier to locate in the web, it is a safe bet that there will be a significant change in the amount of visits from potential customers that your site can get. Keep in mind that making your site easier to find makes a whole lot of difference for your business’ survival, especially for those based online.

Avoid spamming

Spamming is one way of getting traffic directed to your website, however, this type of method will only work for a short period of time, and will ultimately lead to your site’s failure. This type of method works by literally tricking traffic to get redirected to your site through the use of some deceptive techniques, such as using irrelevant keywords and using duplicate content on other sites just to try and increase your site’s page ranking. Initially, this can generate some traffic to your site, but it will create some problems later on for your site, making it a big possibility that you might even lose some potential customers along the way.
Learning how the entire SEO system works is your first step on managing your online business or website, especially for a beginner such as yourself. Understanding how it works can help you determine what other steps you need to take in order to fully realize and take advantage of the entire SEO process in turning your business into a complete online success.

SEO Strategies You Must Learn!

2009-12-23T22:40:00.001Z

If you want your business or website to get and maintain a high page ranking in search engines, you need to learn a few strategies that can help you achieve just that. Keep in mind that mastering search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial if you want to have a competitive edge against other sites or businesses that offer the same type of services or web content as you. The better your search engine page ranking is, the better chances you have of getting higher volumes of traffic to go to your web page or website. Higher volumes of traffic can lead to a higher number of possible clients, translating to higher profit.

Here are a couple of SEO strategies that you can actually learn and implement to be able to get and maintain your high page ranking.

Find quality web hosting service provider

The first thing that you should probably do is find a good and reliable web hosting service provider, one that can assign to every domain an independent and unique IP address, to ensure that your host avoid any problems with the hosting service and avoid getting knocked out of the search engine database after it has been checked and indexed by crawlers during the time that it was down.

Keyword use

This is one of the more common, but nonetheless important, SEO strategies that you should learn in order to fully utilise the effects of SEO for your site. Make sure that you choose the keywords that will be used all around your site’s content, from the title to the body of texts within it. It is important that you place these keywords that you want to be found in your title or tags.You don’t need to put these in every page in your site, but only on those pages that are relevant to that particular keyword. So let’s say that the keyword that you decided to use is the word mobile phone, make sure that you link it to your site’s content that has its focus on mobile phones so that when you direct traffic to your site using that keyword, they will come across your site’s content about mobile phones.

Create links

Creating links will also help direct traffic to your site, thereby improving your chances of getting more possible clients for your business. However, linking to other sites is not necessarily enough to get them to visit your site. What you can do is to actually make sure that you are using your selected keywords in the text links that will help point to the content located within your site. In this way, if people are looking for a particular content, they will be directed to your site under the right web content pertaining to the keyword that they are looking for.

More pages, more chances

The more pages that you have created in your site, the more chances you have of getting your web content discovered by your possible clients. It goes to follow that more pages gives you more opportunity to increase your keyword density etc. One way that you can keep your page volume up is by simply creating new content every week, offering a different perspective, if not new, on a particular topic or keyword that you have on your other pages. This will help improve your chances of making content that has some relevance to what the users are looking for when they chose to visit your site using the keyword link.

Quality content

Having a lot of pages can help improve the chances of increasing the amount of traffic directed to your site, however, if your site cannot offer quality and relevant content to what the users are looking for, then the users will simply click back to the search engine after landing on your site, an act which can have adverse effects on your page ranking. If this were the case, then the search engines will take note of this, and will perceive this that the users did not find anything relevant in your content for their search.

Keyword Selection For SEO

2009-12-18T10:14:00.004Z

One of the main components that helps determine the success, or failure, of your SEO campaign is your keyword selection. Although this may not appear much, choosing the right keyword to use for your website is one of the more grueling parts of the entire SEO process, especially if you aim to find one that will be most effective for your site’s SEO.

When using keywords for SEO, you just need to follow a few simple steps in order to properly find the right keyword that will do the job. There are also a couple of things that you need to look out for in order to avoid any problems when trying to optimize your web page.

Make a list
The first thing that you should do if you want to be able to use keywords effectively is to start out by making a list of “key” keywords or phrases that are relevant to the content of your site, and by doing this, it can actually lead you to create or discover more keywords or phrases that may blossom from the original one that you have chosen.

Select key phrases or words
Once you’ve made a list, try to select ones that contain a “key” keyword or phrase that can help you identify your site’s content. Let’s say your site’s content is all about cars, using cars as a keyword won’t put you high up in the page ranking of search engines, especially since a lot of sites or pages have that as a keyword. Try to avoid using words or phrases that are too general, as this will not help improve your page ranking. By adding other key terms to your chosen keyword, such as “second-hand cars”, or “second-hand sports cars” will actually help improve your chances of going up higher in the page rankings. Just make sure that these are relevant to your site’s content.

Check your competition
It also helps if you took the time to search for keywords or phrases that your competition are using so that you can narrow down which ones to use, and which ones to avoid. There is no sense in using a type of keyword or phrase, such as “cars”, which a lot or most of your competition are using as well, and if their site’s are ranked high up in the search engine’s index, then you might have a difficult time going up against that.

Use your location
You can also improve your chances of getting a much better page ranking result if you incorporate your location to the keyword or phrase that you are trying to use. Let’s say your business is located somewhere in Nottingham, by simply adding the word “Nottingham” to your keyword selection (“Nottingham second-hand sports cars”), you can fair better in your page ranking. However, this type of method usually entails that people are planning on seeing you in person when they do searches like this, so make sure that you only utilize this technique if you are open to the idea of them visiting you in person.

Use your niche
Always try to choose the keyword that you specialise in, or at least the one that offers you with the most profit. Keep in mind that you want to offer the keyword that best describes your business, but if the search volume of users is leaning towards one that isn’t your main product, then you can actually opt to use that keyword instead, just as long as that keyword is still related or relevant to your site’s content.

Increase Your Websites Visibility With SEO

2009-12-14T09:41:00.000Z

When you use SEOs, you can expect your brand visibility to improve significantly. Search engines also get to navigate and crawl to your pages easily. All pages must be accessible to search engines, so your site becomes very easy for engines to appropriately arrange and index. You also enhance usability, so users can enjoy their stay and experience more. You can get more repeat sales and visits if you continue to enhance your onsite navigation tools and give vital information that will appeal to your customers.

Avoiding The Risks Of SEO

2009-12-13T13:28:00.001Z

Even though SEOs has been considered as very cost-effective and useful tools for online marketing, it is important that you understand the risks and potential drawbacks. You can help your business run more efficiently by staying prepared for the possible consequences. You can also determine which approaches will work best for your target customers, thereby giving them quality service and unique content each time. Here are some proven tips.

The Risk Level

You first have to determine your current risk level to know what more you can do to protect your business completely. First of all, you have to gauge your level of expertise and experience in using SEOs. The more experience you have, the less problems you may encounter since you may already have gone through and solved a number of common pitfalls and problems. Consider the types of SEOs that you have used in the past, then check which ones can still work for your current industry.

Black Versus White

Black hat SEO users are putting themselves at risk for losing credibility and even getting penalized or banned. Some web sites and webmasters have been banned by search engines because of the abuse or misuse of certain techniques. There are plenty of black hatters who still believe that overstuffing keywords and using irrelevant content that boosts visibility can work for them in the long term. You are only waiting for search engine crawlers to find the site and render it useless.White hat SEOs are very ideal since these promise you long term visibility and a good reputation. Your target customers can better relate to you if you follow the guidelines and rules given by search engines to boost rankings. It will take some time before you score high on search results pages, but the wait and experience will be worth the wait.

Some of the Common Risks

Reward is not proportionate to the workload given. A single click may be enough for some web sites to instantly land on the first page of search engine results. The hard work of other webmasters who practice ethical methods can be trampled by unapproved techniques like spamming, content aggregating, scraping and plagiarism. Manipulating an algorithm may temporarily catapult your site into the front page, but you can face greater consequences once your actions are discovered.

Boosting Your Experience

Although several black hat approaches can offer you visibility instantly, the results are only temporary. People cannot refer to you or your company as reliable if you resort to unapproved techniques in trying to get their attention. You can boost your reputation and experience by following the right guidelines and patiently waiting for the right traffic to start flowing into your web site. Over time, you will find that your client base expands continually as long as you maintain good content and quality service.

Try to write good and informative articles yourself. Visit online discussion boards and listen to what other online experts have to say. Check out other ethical methods used by top web sites and learn over time how you can also become a master in your chosen industry. You can start learning more about keywords and meta tags to improve your visibility. Review how search engine crawlers work and what items and elements are needed in your site to make it easier for them to find you.

Save On Marketing Costs With SEO!

2009-12-11T00:37:00.000Z

SEO is one of the cheapest ways to market your product or service. You do not have to spend so much on advertisements and affiliates. You can just update the content of your site, use the right title and meta tags and make sure that your content is unique and easy to read for visitors. Loading pages are also faster, since optimized files are generally smaller. There will be fewer server overheads and requests, as well as faster download times. Using SEO means that you get increased accessibility. Users get to connect regardless of their current situation.

SEO Helps You Get Targeted Traffic!

2009-12-10T09:29:00.000Z

Compared to random advertising wherein you just target several thousands of individuals online with the hope that some of them will eventually purchase or be interested in your company, SEO helps you get targeted traffic. This means that you actually get visitors who are truly interested in your product, service or topic. You can boost your reputation by writing sound articles and content and putting these in related sites and online forums.

Promotional campaigns last 24 hours a day and 7 days a week nonstop once you start any SEO approach. You stay visible to your target market any time of the day. People can visit your site regardless of their location. You do not need to pay people for working overtime or stay up late just to check on your buyers. SEO continually works for you even when you are off the internet.

SEO Boosts Your Income!

2009-12-09T09:24:00.001Z

The use of SEO can greatly enhance your ability to earn money. Your web site becomes more visible and available to several visitors all over the globe, thereby helping you get your ROI or return of investment back quickly. You get to stabilize your finances quickly too. Long term positioning is another benefit where you get to stay on top of search engine rankings as soon as your properly arrange and optimize the web site, compared to PPC wherein the outlay and costs are unpredictable and constant.

You get to boost your capability of earning more income by staying visible and ranking high on search engines. Search engine users may only view the first or second pages at most so you should aim to drive them immediately to your site by using the right tools and approaches.

December is SEO Month

2009-12-08T15:01:00.001Z

SEO can be very beneficial for your online company and web site, provided that you follow the rules and guidelines. There are several experts online who can give you quick tips on how to achieve long term business success.

SEO is very affordable and you do not have to spend so much time trying to grab the customers you've always wanted. Throughout the month of December we will be talking you through some of the many advantages of SEO and how to acquire hundreds of thousands of customers in a short time.

Welcome to the JDR blog

2009-12-03T10:26:00.007Z

Welcome to the JDR blog.

We are a company passionate about helping businesses succeed online and offline. We aim to supply you with useful information on an ongoing basis to help you make the most of your online and offline marketing strategies.

We will be posting some interesting information on search engine optimisation throughout the month of December so please come back regularly and feel free to leave your comments....

The JDR Team