Optimising your website will be the most important thing you can do for your online business. If you are a small business or a start-up business, then employing an SEO Expert to optimise your website may not be financially possible. You can of course learn SEO and optimise your own website, and this post details some of the many benefits of doing this. However, if you are looking to employ an SEO Expert for website optimisation, then here are some of the benefits for doing so.

Quickly fix problems with your website

A good Search Engine Optimiser will be able to quickly fix any existing problems your website may already have. This includes issues with duplicate content, indexing problems, bad website coding, missing links, keyword misuse, structural and file naming issues, and many, many others. Giving your website a good bill of health can quickly bring more traffic to your website.

Monitoring and Reporting on visitor traffic

They can also set up visitor analytics and begin reporting on important visitor information to your website. By understanding where visitors come from and where they go on your website, you will quickly identify and resolve where your SEO efforts should be focused so as to maximize your visitor experience.

Draw on their knowledge of SEO

The main reason for employing an SEO Expert is to draw on their knowledge of SEO. They should be able to hit the ground running, making changes that will instantly have a positive effect on your visitor traffic. They should also be able to explain and detail the reasons for their changes to you in plain English. Taking the time to learn the basics of SEO yourself will greatly improve communication and help to reduce unrealistic expectations.

Obtain a great online presence

As well as on-page optimisation, your SEO Expert will be able to build up a natural online presence for your businesses via link building, social site marketing, forum and blog participation and content promotion. Their knowledge should help your business grow quickly into the areas you want to market your business most. Their knowledge of Social Media marketing should promote your business on social sites quickly and effectively.

Monitor your Online Reputation

Knowing what your visitors and customers are saying about your business and where they are saying it is paramount to building a successful online business. Online Reputation Management is the process of monitoring comments made about your business and managing where necessary on behalf of your business.

Not all SEO Experts are created equal

The hardest thing will be to get someone who really knows their stuff. There are many people claiming to be an expert in search engine optimisation so how do you know who to trust. The first thing I suggest would be to learn some SEO yourself. There are many great resources for doing so and most are free – including my blog! You don’t need to become an expert yourself but learn to speak the same language. Follow what they do, listen to their explanations and keep asking questions. If they can’t explain their actions in a language you understand, then they probably don’t know what they’re talking about. Also, if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.

The quick answer would be to employ myself of course to do the job for you. However, not everyone has the money to employ a professional SEO expert to optimise their website, which is exactly the reason why I started to learn SEO myself many years ago. There are benefits to optimising your website yourself and also benefits to employing an SEO Expert to do the job for you. Here are just a few of the reasons why you may wish to do the job yourself.

You don’t have to pay someone else

This will probably be the main reason you want to do the optimisation yourself. There are some great resources online including websites, books, forums, blogs, social sites and SEO experts who happily share their knowledge to the online world. Much of what you can learn will be free. Please contact me if you would like some great places where to start your SEO efforts.

You can do it in your own time

SEO should be considered a long-term investment and not a quick fix. By taking your time to learn what to do and apply it yourself, you will be spreading the SEO over many months, which is a good thing. Just spend an hour each day and you’ll be surprised how quickly your SEO knowledge will grow.

You have your own interests at heart

You know you are going to do the best job you can because this is your business at stake. How do you know if an SEO Expert actually knows what the best optimisation and promotion is for your business? If you go for an SEO Agency, then your business will be passed on to an SEO individual who will have to share their time with the many other businesses they also have to optimise.

You are the best person for your business

No one will know your business better than you. If your business is going to be an online success, then you need to know about SEO yourself so that you can make the right decisions, at the right time and at the right places. Social Media is where you want to focus your efforts now, but this may all be different in a few year’s time.

Be in control of your SEO

If this is your business then you have probably made the great decision to get out of the rat race and be your own boss. What a great choice this is, not to be employed by anyone. Learning SEO to promote your business on search engines puts you in complete control and not be at the mercy of trusting another person to make the right choice for you.

Social Matador Tip

Take control of your business and learn SEO today. Even if you do employ an SEO Expert at some later date, at least you’ll know what they’re talking about.

Most SEO experts believe it is good to be writing articles for your website as part of a link building campaign. Articles are optimised to appear for a certain keyword and at the bottom of the article a small promotional paragraph sells your service or product with a couple of links back to your website. So it is good for visitors and also good for SEO purposes. Best of all even Google approves of it.

Bad Reasons for Article Writing

On the other hand, writing articles solely for SEO purposes and syndicating the content to article directories is doing nothing but adding crappy content to the internet that no one is likely to see. The idea of syndicating articles is for other websites to use your content as their own and this in its very nature means that these websites are going to be pretty crappy too. What you end up with is a lot of websites displaying your content, duplicating the content many times and all of them linking back to your website. This Google doesn’t approve of.

Good Reasons for Article Writing

Writing articles can be a great way to add content to your website. Every business, whether they offer a service or a product, can find something to write about that will give their visitors something useful and interesting to read. They should be written for visitors and not search engines. If you are writing about your business, then it is automatically going to have relevant keywords within its content. If you want to target a certain keyword phrase then make the subject about that phrase rather than trying to squeeze your keywords into the content wherever possible. Articles should become a natural part of your website, which grows with your content.

Promote your Articles Online

If you have taken the time to write great articles, then you need to let people know all about it. If you have written an article that you feel other people would find useful, submit it to places they would like to find it. Submit to a handful of respected free article directories. Remember you should be getting visitors from a variety of sources and not relying exclusively on search engines for your traffic. Ensure you promote your content through relevant social sites. Also mention your content through your social media marketing, guest blogs, forums and news promotion sites if you feel this is relevant. The article will also be in your RSS Feed, notifying subscribers as soon as your new content appears.

Writing Articles for SEO Purposes

Every page of your website should be optimised for your business and articles are no different. Article writing should be viewed as simply adding optimised content to your website which your visitors will find interesting and relevant to your business. So that your visitors know you have added new content, promote your article as widely as you can. After all, Google just loves great content.

Many businesses monitor the success of their SEO campaign on their rankings on search engines. Whereas a sustained increase in rankings over a period of time for keywords you want to be found for is a metric I would use to help me monitor the success of my SEO campaign, it is far from being the only metric.

Number of visitors to your website

You need to know the number of visitors to your website and where they originate. A good SEO campaign will increase visitor numbers over time and also increase the time they spend on your website. There are many analytics programs to help monitor visitors to your website. Google Analytics is a good place to start and it will not cost you a penny.

Conversion rate of visitors to customers

Unless you can turn those visitors into customers, it doesn’t matter how many visitors you get from your optimisation efforts. A visitor will be a customer if they perform a desired action on your website, such as buying a product, enquiring about a service or registering for your newsletter. A good analytics program will let you track your visitor-customer conversion funnel and analysis will show where conversion optimisation improvements can be made.

Number and quality of incoming links (backlinks)

Where would your SEO campaign be without generating links to your website through off-page optimisation. It is important to monitor the quality and variety of websites that link to your website. You will be waiting for an eternity if you think websites will link to you naturally just for having great content. If you want to beat your competition and you want great rankings for your keywords, then you need to manually increase your backlinks from a wide range of quality sources. A good SEO campaign will do this.

Increase Fans from your Social Campaigns

The internet is one huge social network. Social Search is here to stay and could easily become the dominate factor for internet search over the next few years. Search Engines are already positioning themselves for their own social-slice of the action, and you don’t want to miss out either. Start your social campaign today and start building your presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and any other social site your target market is. Interact and engage. Be visible and transparent. A good social marketing campaign should be increasing your brand outreach and influence on a weekly basis.

Understand what SEO is all about

If you employ an SEO Expert, even a successful SEO campaign can be seen as a failure if you don’t know what optimisation is or what it can do for your business. I have met many business owners with unrealistic expectations of what Search Engine Optimisation can achieve. SEO is new to most businesses, large and small, and until website owners take it upon themselves to understand what optimisation is and what it can do, there will always be doubt to the success of an SEO campaign.

Social Matador Tip

After all, can you trust the SEO Expert who is contracted to optimise your website? Are they doing it for your benefit or for theirs? If you own your business and you want your website successfully optimised, then you need to take the time to understand what optimisation is and what an SEO campaign can deliver.

Yesterday I bumped into a friend who runs his own SEO recruitment company and he said something that I thought was quite strange. He said when a company reaches the number 1 spot on search engines for their keywords; they don’t need to do any more optimisation. They don’t need an SEO anymore. To me this is quite ludicrous, but it brought back memories of when I was self-employed SEO specialist and living in Spain.

Top Rankings on SERPs

While in Spain, I worked on many small businesses, mainly Estate Agents who wanted their websites optimised as quickly and as cheaply as possible. For most of the companies, the only thing that was important was to appear at the top of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for the keywords they wanted to be found for. Once they were number 1, many thought that was all that was needed to be done. They thought they had done all the hard work and now there was no need for anymore optimisation.

SEO is Ongoing

You can be sure that any website that reaches the top ranking on SERPs for their keywords will be working damned hard to stay there, and that goes for all businesses, large and small. No matter what service you offer or what product you sell, you will have competition online for the keywords you want to be found for.

This competition will always be trying to beat you to that top spot while new competition will be appearing all the time. Not only that, but search engines are continually changing their ranking algorithms. Not all of these will have an effect on your top ranking, but you can be sure over time, if you are no longer improving your on-page optimisation and link building profile, then you will lose that number 1 ranking to a business that is working harder than you to get to that number 1 spot.

Google has introduced Instant Previews which show you a visual representation of your search results. At the end of each link you will find a small magnifying glass which if you click will display a preview of the web page for that link. By clicking once, you then activate it to appear as soon as you hover over any of the search results on that page. However, if you don’t like it, then click the magnifying glass again and Instant Previews will stop.

Benefits according to Google

• Instant Previews now allow you to quickly compare results and pick the right one for you by giving you a visual comparison of the search results.
• It allows you to pinpoint relevant content by highlighting where the search term appears on the web page so that you can judge for yourself whether it is the page for you.
• You can now interact with the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) by allowing you to see the layout of the web page before you visit.

Benefits according to the Social Matador

Finding a website that provides me with what I am looking for on a search engine is hardly ever easy. Anything that makes my life easier I am all for so I was interested in checking out Google Instant Previews.

• I can now see what a web page looks like before I visit it, which is nice. I can’t see how I can decide if it is the right one for me because I can’t read any of the text and it is really the content I am interested in.
• The highlighted text is only displayed for a selected few as I only saw it on a handful of website previews. For websites to appear here in the first place they must have relevance for Google, so I can’t see why only a selected few should have highlighted promotional text and others not. Surely this favours some more than others.
• I can see the layout of the web page before I visit. It is nice to see where I am going before I click. I don’t really want to go to a site that looks ugly.

Instant Previews Conclusion

It’s difficult to judge a page simply by looking at the page layout itself. The highlighted promotional text could be a good idea if it was displayed on all results. It is good Google is making results pages more interactive for visitors but for me it simply displays images of the websites ranked.

Google has recently introduced Google Instant, a new way of displaying search results which they hope will be a success and that searchers will take to it. If you use Google search engine then you will no doubt have noticed that the way your results are displayed have changed. Instead of waiting until you have typed in your whole search term and pressing Enter, Google now displays results as soon as you start typing, constantly changing the results as you continue to type keywords.

Google Instant Results Pages

I like to think I am the best judge at knowing what I am looking for when I go searching on the Internet. I go to my favourite Search Engine and I type in different combinations of keywords until I find websites that I feel will give me the service, product or information I am looking for. The introduction of Google Instant seems like yet another addition by Google to control as much of the search process as they can. The more they have control over, the more they have control over the results displayed.

Before I have even typed what I am looking for, I have Google Instant displaying websites which more often than not are not related to what I am looking for, while Google Predict displays other website links that it thinks I may be interest in based on what other people have searched on. As soon as I start typing, the Search box has moved from the centre of the screen to the top, and the results screen constantly updates with new links with each new keyword I type. Instead of simplifying search for me, Google Instant has managed to make it more confusing.

Google Instant will Hit Small Businesses

How will Google Instant affect your business? Well, if you are a large business, already established on the Internet with a large marketing budget to ensure your website is well optimised and you have a constant flow of quality backlinks pointing to your website, then you should do better out of Google Instant. As searchers type in their first couple of keywords, Google will display the top ranking websites for these keywords, ones who are already well established within Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). A number of searchers will click on these websites before typing the keyword phrase they were originally going to search for.

However, if you have a small website, limited marketing budget, a new online business just starting out, then you will be relying on ‘long-tailed’ searches for your visitors. These are searches of 3 or more keywords that are less-frequently searched on, but also have less competition. These are the keywords small businesses and websites need to optimise for if they are going to have any chance of getting organic visitors at all. With Google Instant, it is likely they will be losing visitors who decide to take one of the websites suggested by Google before their website even has a chance of showing.

Be Fair to Everyone Google

Google tells small and newly started businesses to optimise their websites for niche and long-tailed keywords that are specific to their business to give them a chance of ranking on the first page of their search engine. Whereas before it was already difficult for these businesses to get traffic to their website, it seems as though it will be even harder now with the introduction of Google Instant.

If you want a successful online business, then you need to ensure you consistently add fresh content to your website. Search Engines visit websites to check for new content on a regular basis. By adding fresh content, you can ensure search engines will keep returning to your website, will crawl deeply through your file structure, and will index any new content you have added quickly.

Add a Blog

A blog is a great way to add content to your website. Most blogs are now designed with well structured html and easy setup of search engine optimisation. All you have to do is to add the content. Maintaining a blog also requires minimum effort and plugins that facilitate easy upgrades, creation of an XML sitemap for submission to search engines and also automatic pinging of blog directories when new articles are added.

Adding fresh content couldn’t be easier

The blog I use is WordPress and there are others to choose from so give one a trial-run and see which you like the best. Adding content couldn’t be easier and if you get stuck just drop me a line and I’ll point you in the right direction. The hardest thing is likely to be finding something interesting to write about. However, if you are passionate about what you write, then creating optimised content shouldn’t be a problem.

Blogging tips for your business

Blogging shouldn’t be considered a quick fix to your optimisation efforts. Like SEO, it should be viewed as a long-term goal. To blog successfully, you need to blog frequently and as often as you can, preferably at least twice a week. The whole purpose of creating content is for visitors to read so keep it interesting. If they find your blogging posts are stuffed with keywords and written for search engines, your visitors are quickly going to go elsewhere, closely followed by the search engines.

Social Matador Tip

Put passion into your posts and more importantly, enjoy what you do! Check out my blogging tips for your business or personal blog.