Author: Paul Tagent

Videos for even better SEO

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Traditional search engine optimization has mostly been centered on actual written content.  Yet more and more the content on the Web is in video form rather than written in text.  What some people do is make videos and maintain their own channel on YouTube that mirrors their on-site content strategy. That way they can embed the video into their blog with their written text and this can result in a better browser experience and more engagement sites’ brand.

Use your phone if need be!
From a blog, browsers can usually click on the video channel and then see other related videos in your channel, leading them to spend more time viewing content from your brand or site. This longer engagement of the user with your site can often lead directly to higher levels of conversion.

There is also a strong argument that having a mixture of text, photos and videos on your page makes the page appear more “interesting” in the eyes of search engines which see it as you offering more content to your users, and rank you higher since they perceive that as potentially being a higher quality page.



Link exchanging, yes or no?

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When looking to generate “inbound links” to your website, some of the easiest to get are ones where your website links to a website who is linking to you; a reciprocal link.  To do this generally requires some sort of communication between the website owners and then an agreement to link to one another.
Exchange links!
Since it is difficult to obtain most links from coveted and trustworthy sites, it is easy to get carried away exchanging links with other new or unestablished sites just because of the comparative ease of obtaining the links in link exchanges.

However, be warned, link exchanges are much less effective now than they used to be in the past and they have been known to cancel each other out. A savvy link-exchange campaign can give you one of the best boosts when your site is still new just because many of the other methods of obtaining links are just too tough for new sites to pull off.
If you do use link building as a way of boosting your websites’ SEO credibility, only do exchanges with websites in your market/sector that are reputable and trustworthy. Refrain from interlinking with other unestablished sites because more often than not you will just end up in bad link neighbourhoods which can actually cause you SEO damage instead of benefit.

Like any sort of online marketing activity involving links to your website, my advice is to seek help from someone professional who has experience of running these types of campaigns and use a combination of initiatives to give you the right balance.

Social Media for SEO

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Social media was not originally a part of SEO, but that is changing. Google is now sending out its bots to crawl for “tweets” and “posts” and also developing other ways to determine whether a site is strong in social media and then using this information as a factor in determining the overall quality of the site.

Just as links are a sign of popularity among websites, social bookmarks are sometimes signs of whether people approve the content or not.

The important factors in considering using social media for SEO is relevance and quality. I feel that the importance of social media is growing and in order to maintain search quality, search engines will need to pay attention to the social side of the Web so having a large social reach will likely reflect positively on SEO results.

If you need help in this area, get in touch with me! Email: paul@bathmarketingconsultancy.co.uk

Build quality, inbound links

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This might sound obvious, but by continuously building links into your site your rank in Google will be infinitely improved. However, be very aware of using black hat link building as this is a sure fire way to get your website black listed so, to make your links as successful as possible, your link creation should look natural to create the appearance that you earned these links.

Try and make the links that come into your site look natural and in Bath Marketing Consultancy’s opinion, avoid reciprocal links (a situation where you link to a site that also links to you) as that looks unnatural to Google and these links tend to cancel each other out.


Strong links really help SEO.

When discussing link building into your site, there is also the practice of asking for links. It is a common (but not attractive) SEO practice and is necessary to some degree. What you do is identify and then email a few hundred respectable and highly reputable sites in your niche and politely ask if they would link to you. Depending on the quality of your site you are likely to have a c5% success rate. This rate will be significantly lower if you have a new, recently launched, or a somewhat non-professional looking site.

However, if the sites you email are reputable, the very few links you will get will go a very long way in helping you grow trust in the eyes of search engines. Often, a few great links is better than thousands of low-quality links and if the quality of your site and product is high people will take notice and be more willing to link to you.

Create Content for SEO

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Having quality content is a fundamental requirement for all websites if you want them to perform organically within search engines. There are probably 3 main considerations when looking at the wording you use that will influence SEO-driven content:

1) You must be as prolific as possible in your content creation.
2) You must balance the speed with which you create content with the highest possible quality of that content as possible.
3) You must also have an effective promotion strategy beyond onpage SEO + possibly some sort of link-building strategy for the content you produce.

Write original content.
In Bath Marketing Consultancy’s opinion, try to write content that is likely to attract links on its own and make sure that the content is written to a high level of literacy and is at least 300 words per page (more is often better). Also, if there are pages within your site where the content is written by someone else within your organisation, if possible, give them access to that page so that they can control the relevancy of that page.

By applying these initiatives, you will have the high quality content you wrote yourself and another part of the site that is kept fresh by other users.

Always try and make your content original and compelling and be warned, if you copy content from someone else, search engines will eventually detect that and will penalize you by removing your pages from the search engine rankings all together.
If you need help, engage a dedicated copywriter like The Copysmith in Bath….(or talk to a marketing company with a good track record in SEO about your online marketing requirements!)

Long-term authority is the name of the game!

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Once launched, a new website is unlikely to see much SEO traffic to start with, so Bath Marketing Consultancy’s suggestion is to focus on making long-term plans to get your website onto the radars that you want to be on. I have identified the need for your website to build “trust” and to ensure that your expectations of organic dominance be realistic, so below is an idea about the long term strategies you could consider.


I know I am in charge

One great strategy is to become an authority in some niche area. If you do this, you will earn links when other webmasters will need to link to credible sources and they will quite possibly link to you. When search engines see many consistent, new (quality) links into a website, the search engines begin to think that this site has authority and having authority is one of the biggest single determining factors in the rankings of pages within search results.


Unfortunately, if you are like a lot of websites, you don’t and won’t have real authority so it is up to you to make this into a non-problem. It is possible to mimic authority by providing a widget or an embed tag that lives on other sites. Since every time someone uses your widget that is hosted on your site, it also creates a link to your site, over time this will create an appearance of authority when many sites link to you just by using your widget.

However, a widget is not an easy thing to do so another way is to position your site as an expert in its field thus encouraging sites to link to you for reference purposes. For example, I have a client who operates in a very niche market and I suggested he get in touch with other (more established) site owners within his sector asking them to link to his site as the content he had written would support their site. In addition, I encouraged him to leave comments wherever possible on relevant Blogs and/or sites demonstrating his credibility within the sector. 


Sure enough, this process resulted in his website becoming more and more credible in its field and hence its position within Google has started to increase.


My next post will be on creating content for your website…..



Focus on Building Trust to increase your rankings

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It’s a lot to do with trust!

Following on from my previous post, new websites are given a little bit of trust by search engines, but simply not enough to rank for any significant terms. Trust has to be built and, once built, your website will start to climb the rankings within Google and its friends.

There are a number of ways to make a search engine view your site as what I would call “trustworthy.” One such way is to get into the habit of updating your site regularly with good quality, relevant content. By consistently creating good quality and new content, your website may well be good enough to earn links on its own.

Another great way to build trust is to get sites that are big and already trusted to link to your site. For example, for my website, a link from Marketing or Brand Republic would benefit me hugely as these sites are relevant to my industry and both far outperform me on a national level.

However, there are millions of trusted sites that very hugely. Links from sites that belong to universities (.edu domains), non-profits (.org domains), or large companies can carry quite a bit of trust with them. In a search engine’s mind, if a university (usually professor or student page) trusts you enough to link to you, then it is much more likely that your site can be trusted, and will likely rank higher.

In sum, to establish trust, always keep an eye on what you write and how you write it and look to better performing sites to link to you.

Bath Marketing Consultancy has got a total of 11 articles to write on the subject on Google positioning so keep your eyes peeled!

Lower Your Expectations

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Organic SEO

In order for your website to be successful as a marketing tool it needs to attract traffic.This traffic usually arrives from one of three sources, namely –

1 – by typing your address directly into the browser
2 – from a link on another site another
3 – via a search engine

The latter is one of the most important aspects of online marketing and it is the new website that I am going to address for this. 

In a nutshell, new websites have very little trust, no authority, usually only a few pages and therefore, very little unique content. If need be, see this site to check where your site is – http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

In my experience, expectation from clients are always high as they invest in a new website and immediately want to see it perform in Google and hence offer a potential for a return on the investment.

Fact – there is absolutely no way that new sites can get high levels of traffic from SEO or rank in the top10 for high-volume and competitive searches.

Once your website is “trusted” by search engines, you can produce relevant and SEO friendly content and see your new pages in the top-10 or top-20 of Google. Unfortunately for new sites, it takes much longer to achieve high rankings in search engines. New and untrusted sites without much authority must take to heart the old “it takes six months for SEO to work” approach.
Instead of hoping for immediate results, new sites must instead focus on making long-terms plans. There must be a plan to build trust and authority in their niche, consistently create optimized content, and a great overall product to which people will find it natural and helpful to link.If you expect strong SEO traffic in the first 6 months of your site’s existence, it is not going to be easy to accomplish.

You may want to rethink your initial goals and lower the expectations from SEO until your site is trusted and has built up some authority.

The next article will focus on Trust.

Why hide things? Be transparent!

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……..why hide things indeed and what exactly would I be hiding?!!

Be clear!

The reason for this post is to share some experiences which have helped cement client relationships for me in the hope that it will reassure you that there is nothing wrong with being transparent in the way you work.

For nearly 20 years I have been working in the advertising and marketing industry and in that time I would like to think I have learnt a great deal…….. I will also admit that I have made some mistakes, some bigger than others!

At a previous “agency” I was taught to say “yes” to every client request and then worry about how to deliver it. For example, “do you do xyz” or “can you help me with xyz” ? Basic questions, yes,  but the agency in question didn’t have strengths in areas like SEO and therefore it was outsourced……unbeknown to the client. We then took the credit for the work marking up the actual suppliers cost. This is actually quite common in my industry and it made me feel very uncomfortable.

When I set up Bath Marketing Consultancy, it was my aim to deliver the best marketing to each client and if that meant I couldn’t physically deliver a certain initiative, I would work with an associate who is better at it than me. Why hide this from the client and pretend that it is me doing everything? Surely no client would expect you to be the best at absolutely everything so tell them what you are doing and the benefits they will have from this situation….??!

In another “coming clean” scenario, I have previously put a proposal to a client based on an initial brief, done some more detailed research and market analysis and then discovered that I could actually do the job better and cheaper if I did it differently – sometimes meaning a cheaper re quote. I could have kept quiet, but I informed the client and the result was real appreciation and gratitude.
Both the above scenarios demonstrate that it never hurts to be clear in how you work and what resources you employ. In my opinion, people buy people and, like any relationship, transparency is key.

If you cant do what you want, find someone who can. After all maybe that particular door will swing both ways and, you can also tell the client that, because of your connections and relationships, you can bring in an expert to help you solve his problem saving him/her time and money. In addition, if you feel that you have to back track from a proposal, be honest about why and outline the benefits to the client. I am confident that this will lead to a long and lasting relationship.

Does any of this strike a chord? Do you have any similar experiences?

2011 – 20 pointers to look at to ensure success

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What can be better for a small business than looking at a full diary; a diary that has lots of potential new clients booked in?!

Marketing Check List for 2011

In my opinion, getting a meeting with someone new is a great achievement and essential to business growth as, without these sorts of meetings, your business is likely to really struggle. Yes, it is great to “network,” to get referals and to interact on Twitter etc, but it is getting new business that is the core to business development.


So……always be thinking of that little bit extra. Perseverance and tenacity will always be rewarded, especially if accompanied by flair. Don’t expect results overnight, but do expect results from your sales and marketing.

Below are 20 golden rules to try and stick to –

Plan
Create a fire; you cannot just flick a switch
Invest time AND money
Treat your business as a brand – research it and define your USP
Remember marketing is not just new business/sales
Construct a clear vision of where you want to be
Aim high – but have a safety net
Do a few things brilliantly rather than loads averagely
Remember the competitive framework
Look after your database
TEST new ideas and initiatives
Use all the tools you can
Invest in training if need be
Consider contra deals
Work on “selling” a meeting in the first instance
Try and get to know local editors
Make sure you have a good team & suppliers
Keep in touch with clients and prospects
People give business to people who really want their business

 With 2011 pretty much upon us, why not give Bath Marketing Consultancy a shout or come in for a coffee and a chat to discuss your marketing?