search engine optimisation - intheopen

Proud to be UK

2007-01-30T16:22:00.000Z

Recently Google admitted to having found a problem with .com websites that are hosted in the UK not ranking well in the Google UK only search results. This is a problem faced by quite a few businesses who want to have a 'global' look and so choose the .com domain, yet really only want the UK market.

It just goes to show that thinking about every step of your business is vital. Don't be afraid of declaring yourself as a .co.uk if your prime target audience are UK customers, and at the same time I would certainly purchase the .com so that you can redirect to the .co.uk site for now and look to introduce a full .com site over time aimed at the US market.

Google are looking to resolve this problem where possible, but this will only show further 'holes' for a period of time, with many people looking at hosting abroad as it can be purchased cheaper, but then confuses the search engines as to where to rank the sites. Again, I would recommend spending a little more for a good quality UK hosting package if you are targetting the UK audience.

Be proud to be UK and be found by UK customers!

Google Rankings

2007-01-16T18:42:00.000Z

One of the things that many customers ask us is how we will increase their sales, and the honest answer we always give them is that they will have to increase their sales and not us. We cannot make anyone buy their products. This might sound strange and an admittance of defeat, but it is simply the truth. Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is not about selling peoples services or products, it is about getting people to the website who are looking for the product or service. The sale is the job of the website, the product and the pricing - which we have limited or no control over.

Yes, we always advice our customers if we think that improvements could be made to the website to aid sales (e.g. design improvements, customer sales process improvements, functional improvements, extra content / explanations, more product details etc etc), and if we have been involved in the initial website development, then we may even make some of these changes as part of the service, however the actual product and pricing is the site owners responsibility.

Before anyone commences with a website they should know that their product has a market and what that market is willing to pay for the product. At intheopen we will try our hardest to glean this understanding from you so that we can be sure that your market is the same target audience entering the terms and phrases on the search engine, but we cannot change your pricing. Why do I seem to have a bee in my bonnet about this? Well, we have had a long hard struggle with a customer who has been complaining about lack of sales. We have made many recommendations about improvements to his site and have many good rankings, but at the end of the day his products look to be hugely overpriced.

When we did a little market research, we found he was the most expensive we could find on the internet. So the answer to why the good number of visitors the site was now attracting was not showing as sales figures was very simple - his products cost too much!

So the moral of this story is? Well, from my perspective a marketing drive of any sort should be a joint effort between the company and the marketing partner. That is true for all marketing and not just internet marketing. Make sure you understand what to expect results wise, but also be honest and realistic about what you should expect. Visitors are great, but sales are better, and that takes a good look in the mirror as well as expert advice.

No, we have not fallen out with this customer, and yes we are still providing a good service, and yes he accepts his prices are too high....but he still hasn't changed them!!! ah well!

SEO via good PR

2007-01-15T16:42:00.000Z

One of the areas of SEO that is often missed is good PR. If you can regularly submit good PR articles to relevant news sites, or even just industry related websites, then you will be gaining good quality links back to your own website.

What stops most people taking advantage of this extremely powerful marketing tool? Time. People just do not have the time to commit to this additional activity. Yet it need not be that time consuming. Working with an SEO company that can provide PR services, means that most of this work can be taken from you. All you have to do is provide information. A good PR company can find the story within your business, you just have to provide as much information about what is going on in your business and in your industry as possible.

Ideally the place you want to reach is where people are looking to your site for the answers and the stories. When this starts to happen then your PR is working and so is your SEO, as this will mean that you will be quoted and referenced on other sites as a good place to find out the latest information. Each of these links will help to boost how the search engines view your site.

As always it is not rocket science, but it does require commitment and time. Two of the hardest things for a busy business to find!

I would suggest that you make the time though, as this will help to grow your business. At intheopen we encourage our customers to work with us to grow their own business. We don't want SEO to appear to be a mythical power, that they will never comprehend. It is far better for all concerned if we all know what is expected.

Also, remember that most news companies will be grateful if the news comes to them, rather than them having to find the news. Especially in specific industry related news. So you will actually become seen as a useful point of reference. Remember, make the article news worthy, make sure it uses the keywords that you want people to find you under, make sure it references back to your own website for more details on specific subjects and make sure you keep a history on your own website as well.

Suddenly that latest news page everyone dreads keeping up to date, could become your best friend!

Simply does it

2007-01-10T13:51:00.000Z

One of the things we have noticed about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is that people expect so much, so quickly and yet are not willing to compromise.

People are very protective of the design and format of their website, and rightly so, but are sometimes then blinkered to the actual purpose of their website - to bring customers! One of the common problems we come across is that people have spent a lot of money having a flash website built - and I mean using the technology Flash, and not just looking flash. Unfortunately, despite improving and always trying to change, most of the search engines just cannot index a flash site and so it is never going to rank highly.

If you have spent money on a purely flash website (a little flash does no harm at all), and you want your business to grow via the web, then unfortunately you have wasted your money. This is why, we always urge our customers to think long and hard about why they want a website in the first place, and to make this 'goal' the driving force behind the design and functionality and not the other way round.

The other area that people are protective over is their content. Again, it is very understandable why, but again there needs to be compromise. Your website, must say the right things to a visitor to convert them to a customer, but it must also say the right things to a search engine so that the pages are ranked for the appropriate terms and phrases.

Always keep in mind that a content heavy site will very rarely be read in depth by a visitor. Your sales text and imagery, needs to be short and punchy, but at the same time it can be search engine friendly.

All I ask is that you realise a good SEO company is trying to help you gain more business and not just get good rankings. Both the business goals and the search engines should always be considered at all stages.

Nice Break

2007-01-04T17:25:00.000Z

It was great to have Christmas and New Year off and to spend time with the family, but now it is back to work!

Whilst I was having time off, the search engines were still working hard to rank our clients websites. Many of them made great improvements in ranking during November and several have had a good increase in sales during the build up to Christmas, which is fantastic for our clients and great news for us to have happy customers.

Adding good quality links to the sites that we have put the work in with is key to seeing the improvement in ranking. The quality links referring back to our sites with the key terms and phrases enables the search engines to see that our sites are both relevant and important. And these are the criteria that the search engines are trying to find with any site, as important and relevant are the things their users want when they enter a search term.

Search engine optimisation is about giving the visitor and the search engines what they want. Both are looking for the same thing and that is a website that is relevant to the term entered. It is no use getting to position 1 on Google for a phrase that no one is looking for, or for a phrase that does not relate to your core business. And at the same time it is not possible for every business to appear at the top for the same generic phrase, so the ideal solution is to combine the core phrases with industry, location and/or product specific phrases that help generate appropriate traffic and therefore a return on investment.

It's not rocket science, but so many people seem to miss these basic steps when starting an SEO campaign. At the end of the day it is not the indepth analysis of the business that is key, but simply that the right visitors come to the site.

Avoid the Christmas rush

2006-12-19T11:50:00.000Z

One of the biggest mistakes people make when optimising their website is to try and rush as much in as possible. Optimisation is a game for the patient and not for those in a hurry.

With optimisation you need to make the obvious changes quickly to make the site search engine friendly, the on-going changes such as content and links need to be done patiently and over a longer period of time. Why? Two reasons really, firstly you need to be able to see the effect any changes have had on your search engine rankings, and this can take some time to show.

If you make a huge number of changes and the site suddenly moves up or down the rankings quite dramatically, you will not be aware of which changes were positive and which were negative.

The second reason not too rush is that if you bombard the search engines with new links and additional information there is always the chance that they will discount a lot of your work as spamming, rather than legitimate links. It is far better to work on gaining a good number over a longer period and showing that the site is constantly growing and developing.

Avoid the christmas rush and have a good holiday.

Now we're getting somewhere

2006-12-08T12:31:00.000Z

Where? Well at least one customer is going to Norway!

The client received their first confirmed booking from the Search Engines before the first months SEO work was complete. Now that is impressive. It isn't this way for all our clients, as some sites are not as well written as this one (though we did develop it, so it is understandable).

Is the site development the only reason? No. This site is well written, but it also has a lot of keyword relevant content, which makes it very appealing to the search engines. For some clients we have to develop this content with them over time, as well as adjust the site structure to be more search engine friendly and so this can take much longer.

The good news is that this client is moving onwards and upwards, and with close to 30 enquiries coming from the website daily it should not be long before the next customers are sending their cheques as well.

What next from us? We are now looking at how the information is displaying on the search engines and building up the link program. Some of the dynamic pages need to be more search engine friendly and this will mean tweaking the coding structure to ensure the search engines not only rank the site well, but also show the site to it's best.

Waiting for Google

2006-11-30T17:04:00.001Z

Now that the first raft of changes have been done on our holiday clients site we are now waiting to see the full effect on Google. This doesn't mean we are sat back with our legs up, though that would be nice. Instead we are now looking at the site itself from a visitors perspective to see how easily we think visitors will convert to customers.

Already this has resulted in a few recommendations (mainly text changes) that the client has implemented and quite a few other ideas that we are monitoring. these include improvements to the booking process, adding much clearer contact information and improving the page titles on some of the dynamic pages.

The reason for looking at these things is that great rankings are only useful if they convert to customers. Though our main task it too get the site ranking well in the search engines for the phrases that the client needs, we are also concerned that this be a successful process for the customers business.

We are judged by the return on investment and not just by the positions gained. In some instances this may mean the client has to go back to their original web developers or use us to implement these changes, but we are only making recommendations where we can see an improvement and more importantly where we can start to show visitors not taking the desired actions.

We have already noticed that a large number of visitors are looking at 5 or more pages which is extremely encouraging, but only a small number are using the website to make contact. That could be down to prices, it could be down to wanting to shop around a little more first, it could be they prefer to phone or it could be that they could not quickly and clearly see a means of communicating via the site. All of these have to be considered, some by us and some by the client, but I believe it is our responsibility to point these out.

So feet up and let's wait and watch!

Google likes it!

2006-11-24T17:51:00.000Z

After several conversations with the client we agreed the descriptions and extra content needed for the first stage of the optimisation process for the holiday site (www.taberhols.co.uk)

Quite a good amount of home page content has been added, but done in a manner that is both search engine and human friendly. So that it looks neat and provides useful information to both visitors and robots.

The meta-tag information has also been applied across the site and a reasonable amount of image and link optimisation has been done to ensure that as much information is provided as possible.

These changes, plus the introduction of a Google site map have had an instant and dramatic effect, with the site already ranking quickly on Google.

The next stage? - Links, lots of links, but not all at once. We will be looking for a reasonable number (25+) of good quality links each month, and I will explain 'quality' as we do this. Also we will do a little waiting to see how the site settles and then look at which phrases may require additional content adding to new keyword specific pages.

An exciting start, but a start is all it is!

and they're off!

2006-11-20T12:21:00.000Z

With the holiday company we have now agreed the final list of target keywords and are ready to start optimising the site for these phrases. This is done in several steps to make sure we cover as many of the requirements as possible and to give the site the best chance of being appreciated when we resubmit the site to the major search engines.

The first changes we look to make are to ensure that the page titles of the appropriate site pages make use of the important keywords and phrases. what is the page title? If you look at the blue band across the very top of your page you will see some text which is the page title (plus it may be followed by 'Microsofy Internet Explorer'). So we go through the site and identify the pages that best fit each phrase and term and where no appropriate page can be found we will keep these phrases for the next round of changes which will be to introduce new pages for specific keywords and phrases.

Also, one of the first things we look to do is update the home page with a good selection of the keywords included in the text. Making sure that we use headers 'h1' 'h2'or 'h3'text with the keywords as well so that the search engines can easily identify the keywords. Plus making sure the obvious meta tags and descriptions are updated on all key pages. Nothing rocket-science so far, but the simple steps are some of the most important!

Destination Customers!

2006-11-15T09:15:00.000Z

The first steps we have taken with our holiday client to get their site ranked well in the search engines is to identify the correct keywords and phrases to target. Sounds simple! but there is always a good amount of too-ing and fro-ing to acheive the perfect set of phrases, and even then we will always end up tweaking the final list as the optimisation process moves forward.

How do we approach this? the first thing we always do is to get the client to tell us what they believe to be the perfect keywords and phrases for their business. This always produces a list that includes their key products or services, some words that they associate with their business and quite often a lot of jargon. Though many of the terms and phrases that a client thinks their customers will use are actually never entered into any search engine, it is vital that we get this understanding of how they perceive their business.

What next? We then start to look for similar or related terms that are entered into the search engines. This is done using keyword research tools, the free overture keyword assistant and the Google adword tools. This gives a good selection of terms that are being entered, and often we will also throw in keywords and phrases that we think we would use to find this sort of client.

This results in a huge list that we then have to narrow down to the optimum phrases. We do this in two ways. One is to discount phrases that have a low search rate, but are very competitive as this will result in a lot of work for little return. We then ask the client to review the list and strip out the phrases that they think may bring the wrong sorts of enquiries or a high volume of low profit enquiries. This then leaves us with a list of target keywords and phrases.

The next step is then to look at how the site ranks at the moment for these terms. Why? This gives the customer a benchmark, it highlights to us where the work is required most and we are nosey!

Finding the customers

2006-11-13T11:39:00.000Z

It has taken a while, but we are now ready to start blogging!

We have had a variety of customers come on board in recent weeks and it has been interesting the different levels of service that they each expect. It seems that whilst some industries understand how the search engines can make a huge difference to their business others are doubtful that it will make any difference. Who is right? Probably both, but it never ceases to amaze me what people are actually looking for via the search engines and which businesses do succeed.

For example we had a company come to us a couple of months ago who sell printed tape and packaging, they were sceptical that SEO or PPC would benefit them at all, and I was honest enough to say that I had no idea either. After a review meeting the last week we were both extremely surprised at the amount of business that had been generated already. The exciting thing for the client was that it had also highlighted a gap in his sales process as many of the leads generated were not correctly followed-up. This is one customer we are excited for, now that we have seen the potential to help their business.

This week we are starting work with a holiday company and over the coming entries I will explain the step-by-step process we are taking to get them the customers they want.

Welcome to intheopen.co.uk

2006-09-01T13:42:00.000Z

Welcome to the intheopen blog!

Who are we and what do we do?

www.intheopen.co.uk are a search engine optimisation and internet marketing company. We specialise in helping people see a return on their investment via the internet.

We look forward to telling you much more.