Want some cool pixel images to use on your website? Yeah? Ok then read below…

These two great images are very effective in getting the SEO message accross over to visitors to your website.

(PC Users: Right click save as - Mac users CTRL Click)

You can use them to promote your services, use them in articles, use them to increase sales - you name it - use your creativity. The only restriction is that you provide credit back to the authors (that’s us by the way). It can be a link or a mention of our URL - we’ll leave it entirely up to you.  (Linking instructions below) 

We’ve provided two images - one with an upward graph and the other with a downward graph. These can be used in positive or negative advertsing campaigns. For example you could use the negative trend image with an accompanying slogan such as “Is your website not attracting sales - if not then let us get you sales” or the other in a positive marketing slogan such as “See the fantastic results of our SEO”.

If you know pixel art at all then you will know that it takes many hours to create images like these so we hope you appreciate our efforts.

Linking instructions - please say “SEO image courtesy Breeze Media” and a simple link back to us at “http://www.breezemedia.co.uk”.

If you’re a decent sort then we would be delighted if you would use our anchor text below when linking back to us. The link will look like…

Search Engine Marketing Image

Code:

<a title=”Search Engine Marketing” href=”http://www.breezemedia.co.uk”>Search Engine Marketing Image</a>

SEO Edinburgh - results for Wynn Consulting

The search engine optimisation SEO of Edinburgh company Wynn Consulting are showing marvelous results on Google. We have optimised the site for key phrases relating to Government consulting searches.

Wynn Consulting rank on page 1 position of Google for their major key phrase “public authority consulting”.

The terms were carefully researched, selected then tested against other search phrases. We implemented multivariate testing for several months combined with heat maps to determine the best phrase combinations to attract searches from key “recruiter” personel withing local and government authorities.

From the results of our page testing we have seen the quality of visitor increase. Average site visit times increased markedly indicating the right type of visitor was reading the services. Bounce rates were reduced dramatically and the site is now ranking extremely well for key search phrases. This has seen a marked improvement in quality traffic and enquiries.

From heatmaps and testing we determined the best website optimisation so that users would be drawn to key areas of the site, or focus on press releases.

As part of the SEO we gave user training so that we could hand over the monthly updating to the client to make their own onpage optimisation adjustments inhouse.

SEO Edinburgh , keyword analysis and onpage search engine optimistion.

There seems to be a lot mud thrown in the direction of SEO companies recently. Comparing them to managment consultants (no offence), confidence tricksters and scammers, SEOs are being portrayed as the ‘Dick Turpins’ of the information highway because of the monthly SEO fees they charge. 

Ceratinly, the SEO service industry, just like any industry has its fair share of scams and rip offs but this does not mean that all SEOs are ‘highway robbers’.

This article (we hope) should give a little insight into good SEO practices and help you avoid falling foul of the ‘masked bandits’.

The “scam” defined…

It works roughly as follows:

• SEO Company guarantees client a “Top 10 Position on Google”
• Client appoints SEO company to get their website listed on the search engines
• SEO ties the client into an optimisation plus monthly fee contract
• SEO optimises website for low level key words/low competition phrases
• SEO tells client they need to keep adjusting keywords each month
• SEO (sometimes) tweaks these keywords/phrases
• SEO sends monthly website report to client
• SEO charges monthly fees (e.g. £200 - £500 pm) for “updates and maintenance”

The SEO may have performed the optimisation and obtained the “guaranteed” result on Google but has most likely used low competition key phrases to achieve this. For example they will use keywords such as the owners business name (the most common keyword mistake) or esoteric inhouse terminology such as “widget model v1.1 repairs”. Easy meat.

By ranking the site for phrases nobody wants the site can stay on Page 1 of Google for years to come. The SEO knows this and can impress the client each month in the monthly ranking reports. This is great for the SEO because they can earn monthly fees for literally pressing a button and therein lies the scam!

Monthly fees are NOT a rip off!

In order to calculate monthly fees the SEO has to evaluate the overall campaign goals. The first and most valuable part of any SEO campaign is the setup fee or initial consultation of the website. This is a skilled SEO service where you will learn everything about your website, your competitors, your goals and targets. This information is worth its weight in gold and not be be undervalued, so expect to pay fees anywhere from £500- £25,000 for this service. (Some large companies will pay a lot more!)

As part of your setup your SEO Company will tell you what services you require - whether it be PPC management, web page optimisation, display advertising, affiliate marketing etc. They will also advise you on the level of monthly “maintenance” required (if any) to achieve your goals. The fees themselves can be for services such as uploading daily data feeds to Google Base, analysing your visitors, spotting trends, making adjustments, performing a/b tests or analysing heat maps. These services are highly skilled and often too much for most companies to perform inhouse. Depending on the website, fees can range from £100 - £10,000 per month and rest assured they’re not figures plucked out of the air! They are carefully calculated towards the returns (ROR’s) on your campaign. So basically the SEOs are putting themselves on the line for your company.

How to select the best SEO company for your campaign? 

Look at their work and the length of time they have been trading. Look at their clients and the testimonials they provide. Look at their results and the competitiveness of their key phrases. Then look at the websites they optimise. Are you enticed to buy from such websites? A good internet marketing company will have all these on hand for you to examine from their website.

When you obtain advice at the initial consultation make sure to ask what’s involved in the monthly fees. If you have a brochure website and do not expect to sell products then it is unlikely you will need any maintenance - your SEO company will tell you this. If on the other hand you sell products in a competitive marketplace then it’s certain that you will need additional services to achieve your goals.

A carefully planned monthly campaign will bring good results and decent returns.

Part two of The Silver Experience Since starting work on the Silver Experience silver jewellery website we have already seen considerable improvements. The website is undergoing the following campaign:

• Onpage optimisation
• Link building
• Social media marketing
• Google product (froogle) marketing & optimisation

Improvements seen since campaign start:

• NEW TRAFFIC:
  58% increase - excellent improvement
• INCOMING TRAFFIC:
  Search engines - 48% - up by 42% - excellent increase
  Direct traffic - 45% - aiming to reduce this to around 10%
  Referring traffic - 6.5% - up by 6.5%
  [Previously 96% of visits came from direct traffic which was very poor. ]
• BOUNCE RATE:
  10.04% down from 18.9%
  Bounce rate is the number of visitors who leave your site after arriving on any landing page.
  A lower bounce rate percentage is better.
• AVERAGE TIME ON SITE PAGES:
  5mins 31 secs
  This is excellent improvement and correlates with low bounce rates. Page view times are encouraging on the product pages implying that visitors are reading product information.

As can be seen from the Google Analytics screen capture there is a definite trend increase in traffic sine we took over the optimisation. Page views and vists are following similar trends indicating that visitors are finding the site sticky. The Pie chart was previously all green which was very bad meaning all traffic was direct. This has shown a marked swing in favour of search engine traffic filtering through the organic results.

If your SEO company provides you with monthly statistical reports about your website then make sure your data has not been “ring fenced” otherwise you could have problems in the future! This article explains a practice used by some SEO and PPC companies using Google Analytics accounts to lock you into their services.

So what is Google analytics (GA) ring fencing?

Basically, its when your SEO Company registers your website on a free Google Analytics account but denies you access to that same account. Your website could be stored on a single account or a parent account with up to 50 other websites.

Here’s how it works:

Your SEO company contracts to provide you with monthly reports as part of your SEO package. They add your website to a GA account then place some Google tracking code on your website. After a week or so you receive your first report (usually by email). However the problems arise later when you ask for access to your online reports. You make your request only to be told your reports are “confidential”, “too complex” or you could “view the reports of other clients”. Hence your data has been “ring fenced”.

Why it benefits the SEO company.

This benefits the SEO company because they can lock you into their services in the following ways: 

• You can only obtain the reports from the SEO company
• You have to rely on the SEO Company for technical expertise on your data

but there are darker sides that benefit them such as:  

• They get to charge you fees for generating the (free) report
• They can threaten you with losing your historical data if you…
  • stop using their services
  • move your SEO to another company
• Tell you can lose your rankings (yes some actually say this!)

Conclusion

Any ethical SEO company should provide you with your own analytics account to which you can access your data any time. They will not charge you fees for reports but a small fee to set up the account is reaonable. They will not make claims about losing historical data or losing your rankings.The data if free and it is yours!

It is fair however to be charged for analysis of these reports and any adjustments to your website. The reports provide valuable data aimed at professionals which can be used to improve the performance of your website.

If your SEO Company is ring fencing your GA account then perhaps its time to look for alternatives.

Many new clients ask us the difference between Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) when they first come to us. There is much confusion and debate on the two terms - even by the experts, however the following should hopefully shed some light on the differences between the two terms…

So…what is Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?

Search engine marketing is really search engine advertising or “pay per click”. Other methods exist such as buying into trusted feeds and paid inclusion to search directories like Yahoo but these are less common. 

Pay per click is the most common and takes the form of paid text adverts such as Google’s sponsored links or Yahoo’s sponsored results. These appear on the right hand side of search results pages or sometimes above the main (organic) search results. They take the form of short text adverts. These adverts are bid for and placed on the page by the search engine. The higher the bid the better the position on the page.

The advert takes the form of a few words and displayed on the sponsored links area. The advertiser is charged a fee when a visitor clicks on the advert and this is known as a click through. The advert does not incur a charge if it is only displayed on the page.

Placing PPC ads on Google, Yahoo, MSN etc is very similar to placing clasified ads in your newspaper. It requires very little skills but it can be a waste of money if you don’t do it properly. It does rely heavily on understanding target markets, audiences, conversion rates and return on investments. The correct ad-writing skills also plays a vital part so this is where a professional search engine marketing company can obtain the best results for your advertising budget.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) - what’s the difference

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of optimising the pages of a website so that they can be found in the top results of search engines like Google, Yahoo & MSN. These pages are optimised for certain keywords in the title, description and body text of that particular web page. This is also known as “onpage optimisation”.  However this is very basic and there are many more factors involved. Search engines use something called “algorithms” to determine the suitability of a web page to be presented in it’s results. These algorithms are extremely complex mathematical rules and they look for many criteria such as number of key words on the page (keyword density), inbound links (offpage optimisation), meta information, page length, internal links and so on. It’s the combination of getting all these things right that makes a highly ranked page. 

SEO is not rocket science but a professional search engine optimisation company can produce the best results. 

Search engine marketing pros & cons

Advantages:
Search engine marketing is pretty much instant. You can literally set up an account with Google, Yahoo or MSN and within a few minutes you can have your adverts on the front pages of search engines. You can have your adverts displayed and be taking enquiries and orders over your competitors. You only pay for a click through and you don’t need to make changes to your website.

Disadvantages:
These (in our opinion) outweigh the advantages. SEM can be very expensive. Depending on the competition of the search term you can pay as much as £5-10 per click. A click does not guarantee an order so you have to get the landing page right and make it easy to convert to sales. Another disadvantage is that of “advert blindness”. This is basically a distrust of an advert by a visitor where they are so accustomed to adverts appearing in the results that they are ignored totally. This happens with a large number of many potential customers. The other downside is that of your competitors clicking your ad or people clicking by mistake - known as click fraud and can be costly.

Search engine optimisation pros and cons

Advantages
More trust is placed on a listing that has got to the organic results on merit. Click throughs are much higher than PPC, there’s no charge when someone clicks on your link and once you’re listed it tends to stay there for long periods.

Disadvantages
A lot of hard work is required to get top level rankings. Competition at the top can be fierce. A very good understanding of the algorithims and what search engines want is required. You have to opimise your pages at code and content level. You have to do off-page work such as building links. It can be very time consuming. Professional SEO companies are often required for best results. It can take a long time to get listed.

For all the above disadvantages, SEO is much preferred to SEM as the return on investment is often much higher.

If you rank top on Google then your sales will go through the roof - right? Well, erm, yes and no…

Many SEO companies will get you to the top of Google but that’s where they claim the buck stops. Getting any site to the top of the search engines is an achievement in itself but there’s a whole lot more to it than simply positioning your website in the top results.

You’ve probably heard the expression “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink”. Equate this then to a high ranking website on Google that gets lots of traffic but very little in the way of sales. But how is this possible? Quite simply, SEO is only half the battle and this is where a site needs to be optimised to convert visitor traffic into enquiries and sales.

A recent new client approached us bemoaning extremely poor sales despite occupying some desirable positions on Google after having undergone SEO by another company. We examined the site and whilst the SEO was fine, it was fairly obvious why the site was underperforming interms of new sales. We advised them that there would need to be changes to the layout of pages and the way in which they would present the information to new visitors. Understandably, they were very reluctant to change their site for fear of falling down the rankings. So to ease any fears we recommended an A/B split test to dip their toes in the water and see how things could be improved. Needless to say within a matter of days the pages were attracting new orders and the conversion rates soared. One happy customer later and the rankings improved as a result of new links.

What is A/B split testing?

A/B split testing is a method of website optimisation that is very effective at increasing clickthroughs and new sales. It involves creating two or more optimised versions of a sales or landing page. These pages are then rotated for every new visitor to the website. So if there were 2 pages then a 50% of visitors would see one page and the other 50% would see the other. Whichever page has the most clickthroughs and sales can then replace the page that was performing badly. Of course it needn’t be 2 pages - it could be any number of pages but this is not really practical. 2-4 pages is a sensible number with which to obtain significant data.

A/B split testing is a very simple way of improving your website, helping your visitors and increasing potential sales.

Affilate marketing is a very effective way for any website owner to earn money or increase sales of their products and services. Infact, its a very fast and extremely easy way to earn some moolah and there really are no limits to what can be earned.  However, it’s not as easy as some would have you believe. You require a degree of skill and must be prepared to put in some effort if you want it to pay dividends. Read more