SEO | Web Vitality

Tag: SEO

Home > Blog > SEO

The Importance Of Blogging Yourself

As Web Marketing consultants we are heavily into blogging for our clients and actively encourage each of them to blog for themselves. When we make this suggestion it is usually greeted with a few different replies:

OK but how and what do you need?
Why should I, because that is what I am paying you for
I haven’t got time

The above three are by far the most popular replies we get. I sure you have noticed that two of the three are negative responses. The reason for this is because people still do not understand that competing in the internet arena is becoming more and more difficult with every day that passes. To succeed today you need to throw everything you have got at it to stand any chance of winning. Remember, if you’re not blogging your competitor probably is.

What we want to hear from our clients is “yes we will blog but can you give us some guidance?” The response we give also answers the other two negative replies above and hopefully will convince them that they should be blogging in addition to us.

Why Should I Blog?

More in-depth knowledge of the industry – We will never know the industry as well as the client so any blog produced by them will be much more relevant and industry specific
More long tail traffic – Relevant keywords and search phrases will be included within the copy of the blogs naturally, thus bringing in more long tail traffic to the website.
Industry Authority – Blogging regularly will keep the client in front of the competition and overtime may become the first port of call for people looking into that particular industry.
Increased frequency – A lot of work from an agency will be based around external sources so by the client blogging themselves they will be helping to keep the content on their website fresh, and Google likes nothing more than fresh content.

How Do I blog And I Haven’t Got Time?

There are no hard and fast rules to blogging, just keep it simple and follow the below rules:

Blog as often or as little as possible
Blogs can be as long or as short as you like
Keep them related to your industry and anything goes
Recruit as many people as you can from the company to blog as all blogs can be approved before making them live
Keep it original (no copying)

That’s really it. There is no secret sauce when it comes to blogging. The only stipulation is, make it as awesome as possible. It’s important that our clients understand that we are not asking them to do our job for us and get through X number of blog posts per month. All we need is for them to realise that by blogging themselves they will be speeding up the process of becoming an internet sensation.

If you would like to know more about how Web Vitality could help your website then why not give us a call on 0161 660 0423 or get in touch via email.

Home > Blog > SEO

How Long Before I See Results From My SEO Campaign?

It has been a while since my last serious blog post so I thought I would dust off the keyboard and knock something together.

We get asked a lot of questions during the prospecting process for new web marketing contracts but one question that pops up almost every time is “How long until I start to see results” The answer to this question can make or break the whole campaign which is why I wanted to share my answer here (just so I don’t forget it and can refer back to it when we get asked again)

In short there is no definitive answer to this question. What the prospective client wants to hear and unfortunately will hear from a lot of companies is that they should start seeing something either right away or towards the end of month three. In reality there are many factors to consider before making such a bold statement like this, and in nearly all cases the answer to the question is still a best guess.

Things we consider before giving a reply are:

Budget
How competitive an industry is the client in?
What are the client’s specific goal requirements?
Is the client insistent on pushing for vanity keywords?
Has the site suffered any search engine penalties?

Budget

How much a client is willing to invest in an SEO campaign plays a huge part in determining results. The more a client is willing to invest the more hours they will receive and therefore the quicker they will see results.

Embarking on an SEO campaign is a long term business investment and not a quick fix like a lot of companies believe. A good web marketing company should be able to portray this to a client easily by demonstrating their experience and knowledge of their own industry and the clients.

When using a reputable company (like us) it will become apparent very quickly that we put a lot of time and effort into all of our campaigns and try and produce something that is unique and isn’t easily replicated. This level of work is time consuming as we focus on quality rather than quantity and don’t just go through the motions. For this reason the more hours we are allowed to work on a project the quicker a client will see results.

Competitiveness Of An Industry

More and more people are becoming active on their websites which is making all industries more competitive to rank in. This is great for the internet as it means everybody has to step up their game and produce better content in order to out rank their competitors.

What this means from a results perspective is that there is more work involved from a research perspective and during a campaign. The level of research can vary from client to client dependant on the competitiveness of the industry, therefore it is impossible to give the same estimates for results to each client. In the case of Web Vitality we always try our best to complete the research stage of a campaign in month one even if it means going over our allotted hours.

It is only after month one of a campaign when all of the detailed research has been completed can we give a reasonable estimate as to results.

What Are The Goal Sets?

If I keep everything related to those companies that say you will see results in month three it makes it quite easy to explain this one away.

If a client comes to us with an established site that gets a reasonable amount of traffic yet doesn’t convert very well and simply wants to convert better, as opposed to a website that is also established yet has no traffic or conversion there is obviously a distinct difference in the desired goal set. Therefore we can tackle our response differently.

One goal set requires a lot less initial work to achieve the desired goals whereas the other requires a lot of work.
In the first instance the goal set demands an increase in conversion from an already established website that is already receiving traffic. From our experience (and a quick look over the website) we could probably identify a few common conversion mistakes that most websites make. Once these have been rectified a client will probably see an immediate boost in conversion therefore after our initial look we could in most cases offer some sort of timescale that would please a client.

Most websites are still designed to look pretty rather than to convert well (which is way these conversion mistakes exist in the first place)

The second instance requires a goal set of both increased traffic and conversion which puts it in the same category as a new website. The industry would have to be researched and traffic increased before we could seriously look at the conversion rate. By stating that it is plain to see that the work level before goal achievement is much greater therefore an answer on timescales would have to wait until the research stage of the campaign had taken place.

Vanity Keywords

Some clients come to us demanding what we call vanity keywords. A vanity keyword is a keyword that attracts a lot of traffic but in reality will probably not get as many conversions as a keyword that is more targeted.

Vanity keywords are highly competitive and as a result are extremely difficult to rank for. Put bluntly if you are determined to go after a vanity keyword ensure you have an extremely large budget and don’t expect to get results over night.

WARNING: Be aware that any companies throwing out ridiculously quick timescales for vanity keywords are probably doing something they shouldn’t. By using a company like this you are risking your brand name and your website so should be avoided at all costs.

Search Engine Penalties

There are many different types of penalties that can be applied to websites for various reasons. Some obvious, some not so obvious. If a website has suffered a penalty it will require a lot of work to get it lifted. I say this because to get a penalty lifted you first have to convince the search engine that whatever it is they penalised it for has been rectified. Once you have figured this out you have kind of got to sit and wait.

All of this needs to be sorted before any future work can begin therefore in the case of penalties timescales predictions can get thrown right out of the window

Summary

Before signing up with an agency do your homework
See your SEO campaign as a long term business investment
Don’t expect results overnight as quality is not easily achievable
Don’t expect a first class service unless you are willing to pay a reasonable fee

Timescales can (and should not) be provided until a full and in-depth analysis of the website and industry has been carried out. Done properly this should take at least a month so don’t expect to receive it commitment free.

We are a really nice bunch of individuals who are extremely passionate about our industry which is why it pains us to see all of the cowboys out there. Transparency and results is the key to our success. By choosing Web Vitality as your SEO provider you are making the best business investment you will ever make (probably)

If you have liked what you have read and want to know how we can help your website succeed then please get in touch

Home > Blog > SEO

How Google Might Identify Duplicate Content And The New News Attribution Meta Tags

As SEO’s we have all wondered just how Google decides which piece of content is the original source over the duplicate. It is extremly frustrating when you notice somebody ranking with content that you have produced instead of your own page. So how does Google decide which is the duplicate content?

We will never know for certain but reading into a new patent today it seems that in order to decifer which page to display out of a selection of teh same or extremly similar content they look for “quality signals”. Just what these signals are we can’t be 100% but we can assume that they will take into account:

Link information
Creation date
Some form of page scoring (possibly page rank as a page with some PR may indicate it has been round longer)
Anchor text information
Popularity information (social buzz surrounding a piece)
Age of the website producing the content

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that the above triggers are indications of ranking factors. All I am saying is that the above may be used when deciding upon the original content so don’t get confused.

What we can take from the new patent is that Google is definatly going to be getting better at identifying original content so always ensure you produce the new stuff rather than copying.

Another takeaway that might help us understand what may be coming from Google that may help identify original content is the release of the new “News Attribution Meta tags”

These tags are here for the benefit of the news producers. The idea is that if you are the source of a news article you tag it to say so. if you are syndicating that content you tag it as the syndicator. Google can then quickly look and display accordingly.

You may be thinking that if its that easy I will tag all my duplicate content as being the source. Google has clearly stated that it will come down hard on any websites abusing these tags and based on the above they have more ammunition to use to find duplcate content so is it worth abusing?

The “Agent Rank” patent from Google seems to be what Google are aiming for by releasing the “News Attribution Tags” in that they work in a simialr way in allowing you to tag a page as the source but on a much smaller more trackable vertical.

If successful I think we will see “Agent Rank” rolled out. Agent rank will also come in handy in terms of Google places in that Google places seems to use reviews as a ranking factor. What I mean is, that if agent rank comes into force and I have a high agent rank and leave a review on somebodies Google places page it will count more for that page than somebody with a lower agent rank.

All in all the whole article above revolves around one thing. Content is still king and if you continue to write top quality original content you wont go far wrong.

Home > Blog > SEO

Introducing: The SEO Blog Title Generator

Here at Web Vitality we’re constantly striving to push the boundaries of SEO and web development. Although the majority of our actions are performed purely for the benefit of our clients; occasionally we develop philanthropic intentions and provide information and tools which ‘give something back’ to the industry at large: the SEO Blog Title Generator is a prime example of this.

Addressing a Very Real Problem

Putting together carefully researched blogs on the subject of Search Engine Optimisation is a pretty major component of our SEO team’s workload and a great deal of attention is paid to sharing our knowledge to help others to improve their own search engine rankings. Despite our experience in the field, it can admittedly sometimes be a struggle to come up with new and exciting themes and titles for SEO orientated blog posts. In order to put an end to this niggling issue our SEO and Web departments got together and worked tirelessly to create a tool which resolves this problem once and for all. The result of this collaboration is the SEO Blog Title Generator.

This unique and potentially industry-changing tool takes all of the hassle out of coming up with a relevant and interesting SEO blog title- and as we all know; once you have a title, the blog almost writes itself!

Feel free to utilise our SEO Blog Title Generator to your heart’s content- but please don’t use this most powerful of applications for evil…nor hold us accountable if you publish a blog based upon a generated title and find yourself in trouble (which is at least moderately likely):

Home > Blog > SEO

Can Google Detect Paid Links?

There has always been a lot of debate in the SEO world surrounding this subject so I thought I would throw my spin on it. I believe Google can detect paid links to a degree but not in all cases.

As a provider of SEO services to other peoples websites I would ask yourself is it worth getting penalised for buying links when you are potentially messing around with somebody else’s lively hood.

Imagine how you would explain to a client that their website no longer ranks for their brand name because of some paid links you have purchased on their behalf. Would it not be far more cost effective and more productive to spend a little time writing some content that will attract quality links naturally? After all if your main SEO strategy is to buy links in for clients then you are not really a good SEO and your competitors can also do the same and in effect match you link for link.

By creating editorial links you are hopefully gaining the edge on the competition by obtaining links that they can’t. It may take longer but if dealing with somebody else’s website it’s a much safer option and will help cement your client in the rankings by proving solid harder to duplicate links.

I said at the beginning of this post that I believe Google can detect paid links but not all of them. What I mean is in some cases it is impossible to know if a link has been paid for especially if the particular link isn’t surrounded by any other links, is totally relevant to the page copy and isn’t specifically anchored using blatant keywords. However this could still be a paid link.

It would be unfair of Google in my opinion to penalise a website for buying links especially as in the example above there are probably millions of the above types of links all over the internet that are flying under the radar. If it’s on a huge scale then fair enough some action needs to be taken.

Let’s look at another scenario. If buying links will get your website penalised what’s to stop a competitor buying lots of links on your behalf from lots and lots of really bad websites and having them pointing to your website. This method would be far cheaper for a competing website than paying for SEO services on their own site. If this was the case then there are companies out there who would do this all of the time. How would you talk your way out of that situation when filing for re inclusion?

My conclusion is that I do believe Google have some form of algorithm in place that takes a best guess if a link is a paid link or not so if you are dealing with a clients website I would steer clear of link buying and focus more on top quality content.

P.S Isn’t using Google Adwords content network in effect buying a link???????????

If you like what I have to say and would to use my SEO Manchester services then get in touch by clicking here.

Home > Blog > SEO

Yet Another Happy Customer. Bathshop321 reveal why Web Vitality are the best for SEO

We at Web Vitality realise that it’s not easy to just take our word for it that we are the best, and have many happy customers who continue to work with us.

Bathshop321 have kindly agreed to let us use their SEO campaign as a testimonial so you don’t have to rely on our word that we are the best.

Who better to help promote our services than a satisfied customer…

Bathshop signed up with us and expected us to deliver results as quickly as possibe. Results are exactly what we delivered.

It was a brand new website with no prior traffic but you can see the statistics after one month of working with us:

Breaking the above down, you can see that in month one traffic went from zero to 69 visits with quite a high bounce rate.

After our initial months work you can see that the number of visits to the website increased significantly by 440%. Not only that, we decreased the sites bounce rate by 37%. For any website this is excellent and we haven’t even told you about the turnover or rankings yet.

Come month three everything dropped into place. We reached our target ranking and traffic went through the roof. Traffic increased by 1242% and reached a staggering 5006 visits in September.

These results speak for themselves and to date we can tell you that they are now turning over in excess of £200,000 per month and have many top ten rankings for multiple search terms and multiple pages.

Cheap Bathrooms

Cheap Bathroom Suites

Cheap Baths

As you can see from the three screen shots above, Bathshop321 currently hold the number one spot on Google.co.uk for the extremly competetive terms cheap bathrooms (23.9 million competing websites). Cheap bathroom suites (2.1 million competing websites) and Cheap Baths (2.6 million websites). These are just three of the many search terms that Bathshop321 now rank on page one for.

Currently bringing in over 25,000+ visitors per month, Bathshop321 is fast becoming a houshold name when it comes to bathroom suites in the UK, and Web Vitality will continue to drive it forward.

If you would like to ask Bathshop321 any questions about the level of our service, they are happy to take emails, so please contact vicky@bathshop321.com should you wish to do so.

Home > Blog > SEO

What Is SEO And How Can It Benefit Your Website?

As an experienced Search marketer I go to meetings on a regular basis during which I am required to explain precisely what search engine optimisation and search marketing is and how it can benefit that particular client. Having to attend meetings can be time consuming and this is time that could be spent working on other projects. However this is part and parcel of my business and unless I can explain fully what SEO and search marketing is and their benefits I couldn’t possibly get any new business.

I have decided to write an article explaining just that. So not only will this benefit me but also other Search marketers out there. Hopefully I can get all of this across in one article and provide answers to the major questions that I face on a daily basis. Although my initial intention was to put together an article which took a ‘question and answer’ form, on reflection it seems that a more flowing discussion is likely to be more effective.

Before I begin I would like to point out that SEO and Search Marketing isn’t something that can simply be built into your website when it’s being built. I do agree that during a website build you can make your site SEO friendly although on site SEO probably only accounts for approximately 35% of what is required, as today much of the really clever stuff happens off site but ill get into that later. If this article still doesn’t convince you check out our first class testimonial for Bathshop321.

Search Engine Underlying Principle

To define it concisely; Search engine optimisation or (SEO) is the science of helping a website to achieve higher rankings in the search engines for a chosen set of keywords. This is how I generally define the discipline during the course of general conversation when it turns to questions about what I do for a living. During a business meeting it is obviously vital to go into a considerably more detailed explanation. So I’ll start at the beginning and break each element of my initial statement down.

There is no point in having a website if nobody is going to see it. By creating a website you are saying to everybody out there “Hi! I’ve got something that I want to share with you.” People still believe that online success is as simple as getting a website built and waiting for people to flock in en masse. Unfortunately most areas of the internet are heavily competitive so unless you do actively do something to your website it is unlikely that many if any people will ever see it.

Search Engines

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing are portals for people to find websites based upon their interests or a specific query. The job of these search engines is to provide the searcher with the best possible websites dependant on what the searcher has requested. What I mean by this is, if you typed in ‘Office Supplies’, then you would expect to see a list of websites with a focus on office supplies. Now here’s where it gets a little bit more complicated: Currently if you check Google.co.uk, there are sixty nine million web pages all competing for the search term office supplies. The search engines have to decide which web pages to put in which order as not everybody can be on the first page of returned results.

Spiders

The search engine creators have decided on a set of rules which they use to determine where they rank each website. These rules are called ranking factors and are known only to the search engine’s creators. These ranking factors are grouped into what are called algorithms and form the basis of how websites are ranked. The next big job faced by the search engines is how they pull all of this together.
The search engines have what are known in the industry as ‘spiders’. They are called spiders because the search engines send these spiders out onto the internet’s linking system to crawl as many websites as possible and rank them based on their individual set of rules. Imagine the scale of this process and it all happens in less than a blink of the eye.

Keywords

Keywords or search terms are words or short phrases that people will type into a search box within a search engine in order to find a website offering information they require. AT Web Vitality our job is to make your website appear for as many different related searches as possible. Why? To drive more relevant traffic to your website.

So far I have covered what a search engine is, how they decide which websites to put there and what keywords are. What I will do now is explain precisely why you need SEO and Search Marketing for a website in order for it to be successful:

When the internet was in its infancy you could get away with making a few adjustments to your website (known as ‘on site changes’ ) in order to achieve success in terms of search engine ranking. On site changes are changes that are made to the code and content of your website. Other methods that were popular during the early days of search engine optimisation include:

Keyword Stuffing – Scattering your desired keywords all over your website making your site copy very un-readable, but more likely to be deemed deserving of a high ranking for these keywords in the eyes of the search engine.
Indiscriminate linking – Getting links to your website indiscriminately from any other website, in as high volume as possible.

These methods worked well in the past simply because there was less competition. Search engines soon got wise to these methods and were forced to step up their game and improve their algorithms. Even though SEO has been around since the dawn of the internet, many are still unaware of it and those who are aware generally still believe that you can get away with simply applying the aforementioned tactics, when in fact there is now much more to SEO.

Search engines today are extremely intelligent and are improving on a daily basis; it is the primary job of an Search Marketing expert is to keep up with these changes. Google last year reported 560 updates to their algorithm- an average of more than one a day. This volume of alterations and amendments really highlights the fact that you simply can no longer rely on out-dated methods of SEO and Search marketing if you want your website to succeed.

SEO as a recognised industry is becoming stronger and stronger every year and more and more businesses are employing an SEO to help them. This is making the internet arena more competitive and increasing the importance of the utilisation of an SEO professional to bolster your website.

As the search engines have evolved so has SEO. Combined with ever changing on site efforts, a lot of today’s SEO takes place off site. The successful SEO/Search Marketer today needs to be able to locate top quality websites and obtain a link back from them. A link acts as a positive vote from one website to another. So the key is obtaining as many high quality links as possible. In the past, as mentioned earlier, people would obtain links from anywhere in large volumes, focussing on low quality websites, such as directories. This method has largely become ineffective and the general rule is: If a link is difficult to obtain then it’s probably worth having. A professional SEO/Search Marketer will be able to source these top quality links and put suitable strategies together in order to obtain them. The search engines reward quality of links over quantity so its worth allowing your SEO time to spend the time obtaining one high authority link rather than allowing him to waste his time obtaining lots of easily obtainable links from such sources as directories (Which is another reason for our 12 month contract rule). I say this because if you can obtain these sorts of links easily, then so can your competition. By sourcing top quality links you are in effect getting links that your competitor’s can’t.

A few examples of popular linking techniques in modern SEO include:

Blogging
Article Writing
Widget Building
Guest Blogging
Social Networking
Improving On-Site Content

An SEO/Search Marketer has to be passionate about the subject and be prepared to put the time and effort into keeping up to date with all of the latest changes. In order to do this an SEO/Search marketer must constantly read blog posts, articles, forum posts, attend conferences and training seminars. This is a constant cycle as things change on a daily basis with SEO/Search marketing and what may be good today for ranking, may not be good tomorrow, which is why your SEO/Search marketer needs to be passionate about his or her craft.

There are numerous other factors, but the most vital role of the SEO/Search marketing is: to ensure your onsite optimisation is constantly kept up to date with all of the latest tactics; ensure your website content is excellent and link worthy; assemble effective link strategies and implement them and be able to participate socially on your companies behalf through the relevant social media outlets. All of these factors result in what websites ultimate want TRAFFIC. Our aim is to send as much quality, relevant traffic to your site as possible.

All that being said, I get asked a lot about timescales, as in ‘how long will it take before we begin to rank?’. Hopefully after reading the above you will realise that there is a lot to an effective SEO strategy and it’s for this reason that a reputable SEO company will not make time guarantees. We at Web Vitality ask for twelve month contractual periods because of the level of work we put in to each of our campaigns. Generally it doesn’t take twelve months to see improvements and in the vast majority of instances you will see improvements in traffic and conversion from the very beginning, but you need to give any firm at least twelve months to achieve real results, so it’s worth budgeting for this timescale from the outset when considering employing the services of SEO/Search Marketing professionals.

As you are paying for a professional service expect to pay professional fees. The level of work and expertise that goes in to each campaign is huge. There are companies out there that will offer SEO for a ridiculous rate of say £99 per month with guarantees of being number one on Google in an absurdly unrealistic period of time. After reading the above and having a complete understanding of how much work is involved, surely it is clear that anybody who is charging such a low amount will not be handling your account effectively and is more than likely using every underhand trick in the book. Although they may achieve brief success, the reality is that your website will be penalised by the search engines and potentially banned for good.

Web Vitality get a lot of referrals from website owners who have used low-quality services in the past and are still recovering from the mid to long-term damage caused. In life you get what you pay for: SEO/Search marketing is no exception. We offer a complete package that not only works to drive traffic to your website from any medium possible but we will also assist in converting that traffic once it lands on your website.

If you would like a free no obligation quote from Web Vitality to handle your Search Engine Optimisation then please visit our website and get in touch

Home > Blog > SEO

Are You Putting Enough Emphasis On Your Website Content?

Search Engine Optimisation is a science which is perpetually in flux. With each new day come fresh announcements which claim to revolutionise not just the industry but also the internet at large. Alongside these announcements are an almost limitless stream of blogs and articles written by self-labelled ‘SEO Experts’ which purport to provide guidance as to the definitive strategy to put your website at the top of search results. Opinions differ greatly as to the importance of various on-page factors, the worth of links from directories and all manner of other factors, whether minor or major. The one thing which is consistent throughout all of these competing claims and assertions is that they should not be the basis of a complete overhaul of your existing SEO strategy. Not only is Search Engine Optimisation a highly competitive arena but also one in which nothing can be known for sure: in fact there are so many variables that it is nigh on impossible to ascertain for sure why a website is or isn’t ranking as well as it apparently should.

Rather than claim that I have it from an informed source that Google’s search algorithm contains a specific command or that I can obtain your website as many back links as there are stars in the sky: I purely wish to share one idea, and it is by no means a new or original concept, just something which I fear many people have neglected in order to pursue quick fixes or forum derived trends. That one idea is that you spend some time on your website content. By this I don’t mean contact an overseas organisation who will string together reams of text for next to nothing, nor am I referring to the practice of syndicating the work of others blindly. Using a word or page count as your only measurement of quality will count for nothing: in the long term, the short term, or any other time constraint you wish to consider.

Spending time on your website content will not only mean that your website is more likely to be visible in the results pages of searches for relevant long tail phrases (which as we know account for more than 70% of all searches made through Google), but actually makes your website itself considerably ‘better’. By ‘better’ I mean that people will be glad to have found it, visitors are more likely to pay attention to your message, and a prospective customer is considerably more inclined to make the transition to satisfied customer. In short, your website content is key in terms of getting people to your website, engaging them and converting them. Great content can serve the role of ‘link bait’ and engage people to the extent that they link to it, it can be published as an article or blog to elicit interest from 3rd party publishers, it can be used to generate traffic through social media sources and can persuade the undecided potential product purchaser of your credibility and service.

Personally I can think of no other factor which has anywhere near the same impact on the success of a website than its content. Best of all: it’s been that way for years and won’t be rendered pointless by the ‘next Google update’.

If you would like to discuss your website’s content or any other aspect of Search Engine Optimisation then get in touch with the Web Vitality team: specialists in SEO Manchester and Web Design Manchester…and more than happy to help out those based elsewhere in the UK and beyond!