search engine optimisation (SEO) vs search engine marketing (SEM)

At present, there seems a lot of confusion and debate surrounding these terms amongst both web site owners and the SEO/SEM industries. This is mainly down to the fact that over the years, these terms have morphed and been adapted, even interchanged. In this short article I'll attempt to explain the terms and how they came about, in order for you to better understand the services that we and thousands of other SEO/SEM companies offer.

how it used to be

To start, there are two basic ways for your web site to show up in search results:

organic / natural listings:

These are listings that appear without anyone paying for them. They are the returns of a users search engine query, sorted in order of relevancy to the search term. Your site's position in the search engine results is determined by a number of factors including is accessibility, structure and presence.

paid search / PPC listings:

Search engines also have paid search ads. If you pay, you get listed. When you stop paying, your listing goes away. A PPC listing's position is determined by the price you wish to pay to list in comparison to other listers.

In the beginning, search engines only offered organic listings. As the internet grew and competition for places increased the concept of paid listings evolved. At this time SEM was defined as "The act of marketing a web site via search engines, whether this be improving rank in organic listings (SEO), purchasing paid listings or a combination of these and other search engine-related activities." SEO, the process of improving the visibility of a web site or a web page in search engines via the "organic" or un-paid search results, was a subset of SEM.

how things are

Over the last few years, this definition has changed. Whilst SEO retains it'd definition of improving organic search engine visibility and positioning, the definition of SEM has evolved to "A form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion."

These changes in definition imply that SEO is no longer a subset of SEM. SEO is aimed towards organic listings, whilst SEM is aimed towards paid search results and PPC. They are 2 seperate entities and should be treated as such. The evolution of the definitions provide a web site owner with a clearer understanding and choice in what can be a confusing concept, and should force SEO/SEM companies to be more open about their practices and results.

At Heppiness Web Design we offer both SEO for organic listings and SEM for PPC listings with Google Adwords.

Contact Matthew 7 days a week, 9am - 7pm on 01204 300154 to make an enquiry. Alternatively, use the contact page to send an email.

effective link building campaigns

Author: Heppiness Web Design Bolton

Google's aim is to list the results of your searches in order of relevance to the search words, with the most relevant being placed at the top. One of its principle tools for measuring your web page’s relevancy to these searches is by measuring its popularity or presence.

A key indicator Google uses in measuring presence is the number of external links to a web page. External links are clickable links on other web sites that direct the user to your web page. A simplified explaination of how Google uses external links to guage presence and relevance can be seen in our SEO tips section. It therefore follows that if you can get another web site to display a clickable link to you web site, Google will read this as an endorsement of your web site's content, this will in turn result in improved search engine position for your web site.

how do I get external links?

• Manual Link Building: Find websites where you can place your links as comments, user profiles, guest posts, etc. Social media, blogs and forums can all be useful. Contact other web site owners and suggest a mutually beneficial link swap. Submit your site to web directories (Click for a list of directories). Promote your blog posts through article directories.
  
• Automatic Link Building: The invent of software that can submit to blogs, article directories, social bookmarking websites, web directories, etc has made link building easier, quicker and more organised but does have its pitfalls.
  
• Outsourcing: Sometimes you simply don't have time to do the backlinking yourself, but do not overlook its importance. Hiring a local seo professional to do the work will reap rewards. A good link builder will use a mixture of the manual and automatic link building, may already have contacts in your field and will know how to avoid the pitfalls of link building.
  
• Buying links: Don't waste your money unless your web site is well established already and generating high income. Spend the money on hiring a professional. This is also a dangerous method, in many cases de-indexing and loss of Page Rank can be an outcome of buying links.

what rules should I follow?

• Ensure your web site conforms to the seo basics described in Parts 1-4 of our Basic SEO Tutorials.
  
• Have a consistent approach. Have a realistic target for links achieved each day/week and stick to it. A steady incease in back link numbers over time will achieve better results.
• Have quality anchor text. Make sure that the keywords or phrase that make up the link are of relevance to the keywords you are seeking to be listed on top in Google.
• Vary your anchor text. Change the wording in your links across varying web sites.
  
• Check Google will find your link. Make sure it is on a page indexed by Google. 
• Try to make sure that the site you are putting your link on will keep it there for a reasonable period of time.
• The linking site doesn’t have to be relevant to your industry, but the more relevant the better.
  
• The linking site doesn’t have to be the same ones your competitors use, but they are worth targeting.
  
• If someone wants to link to you accept, just don’t always reciprocate with a link back to them. Links that are one-way are better than link exchanges. If you do agree to a reciprocal link, i.e. you link to them and they link to you, honour it.
• Monitor you links and resulting search engine performance.
  

search engines & potential customers

Whenever I begin the process of keyword and keyphrase analysis with a new client, they are often amazed by the number of searches being performed for their business type or industry, in their local area. Whilst the Yellow Pages used to be a faithful friend for anyone needing a local piano tuner, a pizza delivered or an emergency plumber; it now ranks behind online search engines as the most used method for finding local businesses.

Google's Keyword Tool provides and excellent insight to the number of potential customers looking for the services or products you provide. Results show the number of searches made on Google both locally and globally for a particular search term, and whilst these results do not provide any information on who was searching or why, it does provide undisputable evidence that your business needs a web site.

The following table shows the number of local searches for a given search term (singular and plural) as reported by Google Adwords Tool for the month March 2010. All searches were suffixed with the town name Bolton to give results for local searches for local businesses.

Now do you understand why my clients are so amazed? Even if we make the assumption that only 10% of these searches are made by genuine customers looking to make purchases from or employ the services of any of these businesses, that's a lot of potential customers that having your own targetted web site could make into real enquiries.

The rest of course will be up to you. Having a web site will not transform your business, but it can provide you with more targetted and qualified enquiries.

seo tips part 1 - introduction

Author: Heppiness Web Design Bolton

It is every web site owners dream to be top of the search engines, but as the internet grows competition for these hallowed positions grow.

Over the next few days I will publish a series of tips for web site owners to apply to help search engines access, read and rank your site. They are based on proven techniques and if followed will improve your web sites position in Google searches. These techniques apply to Google's 'natural' or 'organic' searches. These are the listings that appear due to relevance of the search terms, as opposed to being Paid or Sponsored Listings. You can pay to be on Page 1, however surveys show 72% of searchers ignore the paid listings and click on the organic listings.

Google's aim is to list the results of your searches in order of relevance to the search words, with the most relevant being placed at the top. It does this by reading the content (the stuff you can see), the coding (the stuff you can’t) and the popularity of a web page. Then, by putting this information though a complex mathematical equation, it compares your web page against all the others that were relevant to the search words and creates a list of web pages in order of relevancy.

It therefore stands to reason that if a web page is written in a way that promotes its relevancy to search engines, it will be listed higher in your customer’s searches. The process of writing or updating a web site in this way is what has come to be known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and whilst some SEO companies charge a fortune for it, mystify it and in bamboozle you with the jargon; SEO is simple.

In coming discussion topics, I will split the SEO basics into 5 areas: Keyword Selection; Domains, Meta-Tags, Headers and Content; Access and Indexing; Web Populariy and Link Building; and finally Performance Measurement.

seo tips part 2 - keyword selection

Author: Heppiness Web Design Bolton

A term or a phrase used by a searcher to find information on a particular topic is called a Keyword. Keyword selection is the first step in SEO. Find the right keywords and you are well on your way to bringing targeted qualified visitors to your site. Pick a keyword that is not used by the people searching for your product or service and you simply won't get visitors.

Throughout this section I will use the example of a local plumber who is looking to gain more custom through their own web site. Figures used will be from Google web searches and Google’s Keyword Tool on 12th April 2010.

The first part of Keyword Selection is to put yourself in your potential customers shoes. Just because you know your industry terms doesn't mean that everyone does. Don't just think of the words you use to describe your products or services, think of the words you would use if you knew nothing about it other than the fact that you needed it. Whilst our plumber may prefer the term ‘residential water and waste engineer’ to describe himself, everyone else calls him a plumber and that is phrase that would be used to search for his services.

Searching the phrase ‘plumber’ on Google returns 9,550,000 results and there are no actual plumbers in the top 20. There are descriptions of what a plumber does, directories of 1000’s of plumbers, job vacancies for plumbers, a hotel call The Plumber, etc. There is no sense in trying to optimize your pages for super-competitive keywords where you don't stand a chance of ranking well, most one-word key phrases fall into this category. The time and money required to compete will never be recouped.

It is therefore important to start being more specific and turning your keyword into a keyphrase. The more specific your keyphrase, the easier it will be for your site to rank well in the area you wish to compete. You should therefore target keyphrases with two or more words to significantly improve your chances.

Searching the phrase ‘plumber Bolton’ returns 255,000 results and begins to bring up some of our plumbers competitors. We are clearly heading in the right direction. By using this keyphrase our plumber is targeting customers in his local area in a search he can compete in.

It is now time to start using some tools to help us in honing in on the best keyphrase to use as our primary keyphrase. There are many keyword suggestion tools available, in this example used Google’s own at https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal

Typing our keyphrase ‘plumber Bolton’ into this tool reveals that whilst our initial selection was good, there is a better option. ‘plumber Bolton’ was searched 480 times in March 2010, which is a lot of potential customers. Whereas ‘plumbers Bolton’ was searched 720 times. A quick search in Google returns 485,000 results, which is still a relatively easy number to compete with and rank well against.

Our plumber now has his primary keyphrase ‘plumbers Bolton’. We can optimise his web site on this phrase to bring targeted and qualified potential customers to his web site. We will not dispel our original keyphrase of ‘plumber Bolton’; after all there were 480 searches for that phrase. It will become a secondary phrase along with several others that relate to some of the services he offers. The process can be repeated to provide more secondary keywords and phrases for all pages throughout the web site, ensuring that all key services are covered.

seo tips part 3 - domains, meta-tags, headers and content

Author: Heppiness Web Design Bolton

Now that we understand the concept of SEO and have our keyphrases, it’s time to look at how we can implement them within a web site in a way that search engines understand and will use to improve the position in organic search listings.

In this part we will look at the thing parts of your web site that Google looks at to gauge the relevancy of your site to your potential customers based on their search terms and your keyphrases. For simplicity, I will continue to use the example of the plumber that we used in part 2 when determining our keyphrases.

Domain name: If your URL (web address) includes some part of the expression "Bolton plumbers", e.g. boltonplumbers.co.uk, Google will rank it ahead of those sites that don't (if everything else is equal). Likewise, other pages within your site should be titled to match the keyphrases for the services or products related to them, e.g. boltonplumbers.co.uk/boiler-repairs.

Title Tags: The website title meta-tag, that shows at very top left of the browser, is a very important item to Google. Every page should have its own unique meta-title. The words used in the title meta-tag should also show on the web page itself, otherwise they might be ignored or even have a negative effect on your search positioning. Amazingly, some web masters simply put the words "Home page" into the title tag. That makes a web page very relevant to people searching the internet for a "home" but, not relevant to a search for "Bolton plumbers".

The title meta-tag is also the text shown as the link to your page in search engine listings. Having the right words here could be what makes a potential customer choose your site over another. Having “Home page” tells them nothing about you or your business. Using “Bolton Plumbers 24 Hour Emergency Service 01204 111222” looks more appealing and gives more information.

Description: The description meta-tag should contain the keywords and phrases chosen in Part 2, even though very little weighting is given to its importance by Google. Each page should have its own, unique meta-description. The words in the description meta-tag should also show on the web page itself, otherwise they might be ignored or even have a negative effect on your search positioning.

Again, this is an area that is often misused by some web masters as they try to cram in all the keywords they can think of. I tend to consider the description meta-tag to hold its importance in where it is seen. The description is shown beneath the page title in search engine listings. Having the right words here could be what makes a potential customer choose your site over another.

Headings: Google pays particular importance to the headings of each page or section to a web page, but do not be tempted cram too many heading titles onto 1 page. At the top of the page, before the page content, put the primary keyphrase for that individual page. Keep them short and succinct and wrap them up in <h1> tags for maximum impact. Our plumber would put something like “Bolton Plumbers – Heating, Boilers, Drains, Bathrooms & Kitchens” on his home page. If any other sections on the same page require a heading, wrap them up in <h2> tags and use researched keyphrases again.

Navigation & Internal Links: The menu of a web site should ideally be text with hyperlinks to the inside pages. The text can look like buttons or tabs with the help of some CSS styling. This will avoid the problem that Google ignores images (apart from “alt” tags) and most javascript or flash based navigation bars.

In the body text of the home page more points can be gained for keywords if they are hyperlinks to inside pages, e.g. where our plumber writes boiler repairs, the text should ideally be to the page where boiler repairs are the main content.

Content & Body Text: The volume of information counts towards the relevance of your web site to a search. Look for a 1 page web site on page one of Google for any search, there are none. That’s because information and content is king. The best way to get qualified and targeted visitors to your site is to write lots of good quality, relevant material that is engaging and up to date.

Within the text on each page use the researched keywords and keyphrases that are relevant to the information, but don’t overdo it. Make sure that all content reads well and isn’t turned into keyword overload, your target keyword density should be somewhere in the region of 2-4%. There is a fine balance to be struck, but the sites who strike it are often the most successful. Using a Keyword density tool http://seotools.seozy.com/tools/keyword-density-checker/ will help to prevent you keyword spamming.

In the next section we will look at some of the behind the site SEO techniques you can employ to improve your search engine positioning for researched keywords.

seo tips part 4 - seo access and indexing

Author: Heppiness Web Design Bolton

So, on to Part 4 – The Stuff You Can’t See. By that I mean the simple things you can do, behind the scenes that will help the search engines access, find and therefore index all of your web pages and content.

There is some disagreement in this field of SEO as to whether this is a necessary step to improving your position in search engine listings. Some say that if a web page conforms to the structures and protocol of a well written site, there would be no need to perform the tasks below; whilst others argue it is imperative.

Personally, I am of the belief that what Google wants Google gets and Google Webmaster Tools asks for a robot.txt file and a sitemap.xml file. Below are instructions how to create and implement both.

Access: All search engines collect information about web pages and their content by use of programs referred to as robots and spiders. These programs access and crawl your web pages reading them for information highlighted in Part 2.

There are several reasons you may wish to prevent these spiders accessing certain areas, functions and directories of your web site. A robots.txt file does just that by advising spiders and other robots which directories or files they should not access. A slight error in this file may result in some information, pages or even your whole web site being hidden from search engines. This will impede your aims to improve search engine positioning or in the worst cases prevent a whole web site from appearing at all.

Writing a robots.txt file is extremely easy. It's just plain text file that you create and place at the root of your domain. For example, if your domain is www.example.co.uk, place the file at www.example.co.uk/robots.txt To allow all robots across all directories, files and pages simply use the following text in the file:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Find: Spiders and robots will only visit your web pages periodically, crawling and reading any number of pages and over time they should index your whole site. As with any search for information, it is helpful to have some kind of index as to where it can be found.

To assist search engines in finding all your web pages you should provide them with a sitemap file. By doing so you provide the major search engines with a list of the all the pages on your website, thus allowing them to learn of the existence of pages which they may have missed in the past.

You can hand write your own sitemap file, but there are several sitemap generators available on the internet that will perform the task for you. I recommend http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ for its simplicity. Simply follow the process and download the resulting uncompressed sitemap.xml file. Then upload this file to the root of your site.

To help spiders find your sitemap, return to the robots.txt file and add the following line. Sitemap:=http://www.example.co.uk/sitemap.xml. Where example.co.uk is your domain name and sitmap.xml is the name of the uploaded file.

Index: The search engine spiders that visit your site will automatically look into your robots.txt file before spidering your site. When they read the file, they will see the sitemap file listed and load it for more information. This will enable them to discover the pages that they have missed in the past. In turn, this will send them to index those files.

By performing these 2 simple procedures, search engines can now access and find all the web pages within your domain. When completed along with steps 2 & 3, you will be on your way to improved search engine listing positions.

In part 5 we will look at how to increase your site’s popularity on the internet and how this affects search engine positioning.

seo tips part 5 - web site popularity and link building for seo

Author: Heppiness Web Design Bolton

In part 5 we will look at how your web pages popularity affects your search engine position and how we can improve its popularity through a campaign of link building.

Google's aim is to list the results of your searches in order of relevance to the search words, with the most relevant being placed at the top. One of its principle tools for measuring your web page’s relevancy to these searches is by measuring its popularity. Primarily Google does this by recording the number of external links to a web page. External links are clickable links on other web sites that direct the user to your web page.

Why does Google consider popularity so important? The answer is simple and best explained by the following examples:

Imagine 2 competing web pages covering the subject “What is SEO?” are identical in every way, we’ll call them Page A & Page B. Page A has no links to it from other web sites, whilst the owner of Page B has worked hard to get other web sites to link to their page and has 100 external links. When looking at Pages A & B, Google sees that they are identical but has to place 1 above the other in its search engine listings for a user who has search “What is SEO”. It’s decision is simple, to it Page B appears to be more relevant to the search phrase as 100 other web sites say so. It will therefore position Page B above A.

These rules also apply outside of the example of 2 identical pages:

Imagine 2 different web pages on a similar theme. Page A covers the subject “Why do SEO?” whilst page B covers “What is SEO?” Page A has no links to it from other web sites, whilst the owner of Page B has worked hard to get other web sites to link to their page and has 200 external links. A Google user searches “Why do SEO” and sees that A & B are on the subject of SEO and has to place 1 above the other in its search engine listings. It’s decision is more complicated this time, but despite the fact that Page A may have slightly more relevant content, Page B could appear to be more relevant to the search phrase as 200 other web sites say so. It may therefore position Page B above A.

Therein lies the importance of external links and popularity; and a campaign of link building can begin. Send emails, make phone calls, advertise your content through social media but aim to make sure that your inbound links are of quality.

• Use keyword specific words in the link title.
  
• Make sure it is on a page indexed by Google.
  
• The linking site doesn’t have to be relevant to your industry, but the more relevant the better.
  
• The linking site doesn’t have to be the same ones your competitors use, but they are worth targeting.
  
• If someone wants to link to you accept, just don’t always reciprocate with a link back to them.
  
• If you do agree to a reciprocal link, i.e. you link to them and they link to you, honour it.

Do the stuff above (and a lot of it) and you’ll slowly build a link profile that will boost your web pages popularity. It is an ongoing task and you should dedicate time to it each day / week / month.

seo tips part 6 - seo performance measurement

Author: Heppiness Web Design Bolton

So, you’ve completed parts 1 to 5 and have a web site and pages that have keywords and phrases that are targeted at your potential customers’ searches; these keywords and phrases are in the places Google can find them; you’ve opened access to robots and spiders and shown them where to look for content; and you’ve embarked on a campaign of link building to increase your web page’s popularity. It must be time to sit back and enjoy increased traffic, more customers and higher turnover. Right?

Wrong.

Search engine optimisation is an ongoing process that is never quite complete. You must monitor and re-evaluate all of your basic SEO on a regular basis checking that keywords and phrases are still relevant; all of your pages are indexed; and that your link campaigns are successful.

Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/) is one of the best tools out there for analyzing traffic on your website. With a little bit of setup, it will give you an enormous amount of information about who is coming to your site, what they're looking for, and how they're getting there. Although it involves a few technical steps that may be hard to learn at first, using Google Analytics is something that gets much easier as time goes by and you get a better feel for the exact kind of data you need. The best way to learn is by doing, but there is a great basic tutorial at http://www.youtube.com/profile?v=_qfG2d9etvk&user=googleanalytics&hl=en

By interpreting, evaluating and actioning the information supplied by analytics, you can continually improve your web pages’ relevancy to your potential customers searches over time. By doing so you will improve search engine positioning for the keyphrases used by those potential customers. This will result in increased traffic and hopefully you can turn potential customers into paying customers.

That is successful SEO.

At Heppiness Web Design Bolton, we offer a range of SEO products and services to suit any site and any budget. Please contact us with any queries.

does a retailer need a web site?

Absolutely

With online sales still on the increase year on year you'd be daft not to. Ecommerce web sites allow your retail business to sell products, accept payment and communicate with customers worldwide.

However, if you are not ready for the increased costs and responsibilities involved in an Ecommerce web site, there are other reasons why you should have presence on the internet.

• Addition of a Web site address to an advert, even a very small one, means that anyone intrigued by the ad can immediately access much greater amounts of information about your company.
• Much company time and effort is often wasted by repeatedly providing the same information either by phone or in person. Have a section on your site that provides answers to frequently asked questions.
• Post a printable map showing your location and how to get to your shop.
• Publicize sales and special offers, entice new customers with vouchers.
  
• Include a downloadable brochure displaying your products.
  
• Looking for employees? Post the positions and let prospects contact you by e-mail.

Prices vary depending on the specifics of each individual site. But when considering the benefits that even the simplest web site can provide, the question to ask is not "Can I afford to have a Web site?" than "Can I afford not to have one?"

Call Matthew on 01204 300154 or 07879 404804 to discuss you needs, alternatively send us an email requesting a quote by using the contact page.

do service providers need a web site?

Absolutely

For these types of business a web site is especially valuable. Those who traditionally advertise in the Yellow Pages, local classified ads or other local print publications benefit the most as a web site provides an accepted way of showcasing your areas of specialization.

Gardeners, builders, hairdressers, dog walkers, etc are all shifting their advertising to the internet as circulation of previous form of advertising become more expensive and circulation decreases.

• Do you have a specialisation? Flaunt it.
  
• Awards? Display them.
  
• Articles or case studies that demonstrate your credentials? Place them online.
• Accreditations and citations? Show them to your potential customers.
• Special offers? Share them.
  

Then back all of this up with a method for potential customers to get in touch.

Prices vary depending on the specifics of each individual site. But when considering the benefits that even the simplest web site can provide, the question to ask is not "Can I afford to have a Web site?" than "Can I afford not to have one?"

Call Matthew on 01204 300154 or 07879 404804 to discuss you needs, alternatively send us an email requesting a quote by using the contact page.

do creative designers need a web site?

Certainly.

For these types of business a web site is pretty much expected. Interior designers, landscapers, architects, photographers, writers are all perfectly suited to web site ownership as a it provides an cost effective way of showcasing your talents.

• Publish a portfolio of work completed.
• Display awards and accreditations.
• Show testimony to work completed.
• Convey your style and ethics.

Then back all of this up with a method for potential customers to get in touch or how to find you.

Prices vary depending on the specifics of each individual site. But when considering the benefits that even the simplest web site can provide, the question to ask is not "Can I afford to have a Web site?" than "Can I afford not to have one?"

Call Matthew on 01204 300154 or 07879 404804 to discuss you needs, alternatively send us an email requesting a quote by using the contact page.

do restaurants & bars need a web site?

Without doubt.

In such a competitive industry, providing customers with up to date information on what you have to offer can be a huge advantage.

Restaurants, bars and clubs can all benefit from:

• Showcasing their venue.
• Advertising special offers and promotions.
• Displaying up to date menus.
• Promoting special events.
• Email marketing.
  

Then back all of this up with a method for potential customers to get in touch or how to find you.

Prices vary depending on the specifics of each individual site. But when considering the benefits that even the simplest web site can provide, the question to ask is not "Can I afford to have a Web site?" than "Can I afford not to have one?"

Call Matthew on 01204 300154 or 07879 404804 to discuss you needs, alternatively send us an email requesting a quote by using the contact page.

do clubs & groups need a web site?

Of course.

Most people with a passtime or hobby love to share it with others. Whether its a hobby based club, a sports team or social group - a web site is the perfect way to showcase what you do, keep current members up to date and attract new members.

• Showcase your club or group.
• Publish news items.
• Create a social network for members.
• Provide details of meets and events.
• Attract new members.
  

Then back all of this up with a method for potential members to get in touch or how to find you.

Prices vary depending on the specifics of each individual site. But when considering the benefits that even the simplest web site can provide, the question to ask is not "Can we afford to have a Web site?" than "Can we afford not to have one?"

Call Matthew on 01204 300154 or 07879 404804 to discuss you needs, alternatively send us an email requesting a quote by using the contact page.

do charities need a web site?

Unquestionably.

For all charities it's important to establish credibility. By documenting your organization's progress, achievements, contributions, news, etc you may be found by sectors of the public that you'd never have been able to otherwise identify and reach.

Then back all of this up with a method for potential fundraisers or benefactors to get in touch and how to find you.

Call Matthew on 01204 300154 or 07879 404804 to discuss you needs, alternatively send us an email requesting a quote by using the contact page. In many cases we will offer a discounts to charitable organisations.