SpeedieConsulting

I thought it a good idea to share some ideas for what to look out for when choosing a SEO company. There are lots of good posts on this topic but I thought I would compose my own version too. I have noticed recently, that the whole SEO and web design market has returned to the 1999/2000 days of everyone saying they can build you a website or get you to the top of the search engines.

I get notes every day from so called SEO companies promising the earth until you ask a few simple questions. I want to stop these guys preying on your lack of knowledge.

Let’s get the biggie out of the way first

No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.
If anyone and I mean anyone, guarantees to get your to a number one in Google they are lying! Plain and simple. They have no control over the Google search engine so how can they make these promises. They can’t. Look for a company that is open and honest about this. Ask the question, how can you “guarantee” me a number one listing and then listen to the answer. A good SEO will tell you the truth; there are no guarantees with SEO. There are thinks SEO’;s do to increase the likelihood of a higher ranking but this can change overnight if Google changes it’s algorhythm.

Show me the money

If you are quoted a monthly fee, ask what is this being spent on? It is easy for some companies to hide this under the umbrella of oh it is all to do with the technical SEO or this or that. Get specific. Ask for a breakdown of what that monthly cost could entail. It could include Web Content, Article marketing, Link Building and directory submissions. Whatever it is a good SEO can break it down and give you a monthly schedule of works!

Are they being secretive and evasive?

This one is born out of the one above. If an SEO company is being evasive when you ask them what they are doing, this could be for two reasons. One, what they are doing could be considered as bad or a bit dodgy. Don’t for a minute think that your site couldn’t be removed from the major search engines, it could be. And it could take a long time for it to come back.

Or secondly, they don’t have a clue what they are doing!

Please don’t think that this post means that all SEO companies are bad, far from it, there are lots of great SEO’s out there. The main thing is though, you will be contacting them, they won’t be spamming you for business! Check their references, ask for examples of work or the best way of all is to get a referral from someone you trust.

Now while I don’t carry out much PPC work for clients, I do use it to promote my own businesses and products. One thing I do see with lots of enquiries is that companies use PPC but contact me because it is not as successful as they thought it could be.

So I thought I would drop down a few ideas to help boost the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns.

1. Take time building a keyword list. It is easy to go to Google Adwords and setup a campaign in 5 minutes flat. But if you do not research your keywords properly, you could be leaving a ton of money on the table or you could be keeping your average costs per click rates high.  Use services such as Wordtracker or the Google Keyword Tool, look at your competitors websites, and look at your own web server logs to see what people are typing in to find you.
2. Build dedicated landing pages. This is a shocker! Lots of companies build multiple PPC campaigns and drive the traffic to either their homepage or a product page. This can cause the user great confusion as they are presented with a ton of options when then hit your site and they may not even find what they were looking for. On this basis you are paying for people to get lost on your site!

   My advice is to build dedicated keyword landing pages or at the very least a landing page for each campaign you run. Each landing page should do one of two things only. Get an email address or contact details; or to make a sale in the case of an e-commerce site. That’s it! Strip out the main site navigation, remove the phone numbers (How will you track the true effectiveness of the campaign?) And make it easy for the visitor to do what you want.

3. Time schedule your ads. If you are collecting a filled in form to get back to the customer the same day, why have your ads running when your office is closed. That just wastes everyone’s time and your money.
4. Look to add negative keywords. They are words that you can add to make sure you do not appear for. This could be something that would appear in combination with your own keywords. The big ones are words like “free” or “guaranteed” or even brand names.

Hopefully these ideas will give you enough to start really using PPC more effectively and save yourself some money.

When you start a new business or look for ways to drive more business, many people turn to the Internet. With the promise of free sites, free blogs and free email addresses, most first time web marketers get pulled into the world of Blogger, Yahoo, or Google Mail.

Now these are okay for yourself to communicate with family or friends or to run a hobby site, but the minute you decide to run a business, the first thing you need to do is stop thinking about free.

Free web address and email addresses in a business context smells of cheap and will not do your credibility any good whatsoever. Also bear in mind that some of these sites will give you a really long and unwieldy domain name which will be difficult to promote and difficult for clients to remember. This will not be a good start.

Most of these free email services are frowned upon as they have been abused in the past by lots of people so your email might not get through. Some of the free site services have also pulled sites down without any warning. Blogger has done this in the past if they feel you are in breach of their terms and conditions.

If you want to make a good impression online, buy a domain name. They can be bought for a few pounds each year and can come with email addresses too.

In some industries or business opportunities, you are even given a fully functioning free website but you will have no control over it. You don’t and won’t even own the domain name. So what happens if you fall out with the company or the company goes bust? How does that leave you, you have spent all this time building someone else’s website only for you to lose out.

My advice?

What you could do initially, is to buy your own domain name, and have it redirected to your free site. In this way, you are marketing and promoting YOUR web address and if you decided to move companies or change services then you can easily point your domain name elsewhere and you will not have lost any of the marketing you have carried out.

I would only suggest these for those of you who are given a great looking and functioning site, some franchises will give you a website for example, or some networks or professional bodies will.

The other major downside to these free sites is that apart from your contact details, all the other pages and information of the site are the same as any other company that uses the same network as you. This could kill your website before it has even started. Google, for example, does not like seeing duplicated sites across its rankings and therefore will not rank duplicated sites. Therefore your site might not be listed simply because it was given to you by a network with hundreds of other clients.
I suppose the only saving grace, is that none of those will be ranking either.

Search engines can be a major live blood to any new business, so making sure you do the right thing by them is paramount.

I would strongly advise anyone that has one of these sites to make sure they also have their own, owned domain name and have some originally written content for it. There are low cost web packages available that will give you a fighting chance of getting your sites ranked in Google and the other major search engines.

Having said all that, there is a place for these free services. There is nothing stopping you building a free site or free blog that promotes your main website. In fact, I would actively encourage it!

Free services such as

www.geocities.com
www.hubpages.com
www.squidoo.com
www.blogger.com
www.typepad.com
www.freewebs.com
www.bravenet.com

are all good services to quickly build sites that you can link to your main website but do not use them or any other free service to build your main business website.

In summary, if you are looking at building your first company website, avoid freebies. Spend a bit of money to buy a business domain name and get yourself a website. It may seem an unnecessary expense when people are offering freebies, but if you want a website that drives you business, you will need to invest in it.

A new service has been launched by Finance and Insurance web experts, Speedie Consulting, aimed at attracting Associations and Networks who wish to help their members drive more business via their website.

The new service provides access to a range of free tools and content that will educate member firms on how to use the Internet to drive more business to their websites.

“With the increasing squeeze on business due to the current economic climate, lots of our clients are using the Internet to shore up their business as it is a lower cost per acquisition to more traditional means of attracting business.” says director Jason Hulott.

He continues “Clients are now diverting budgets from other marketing areas and spending with us to help them generate long term lead generation tools. We also feel the need to offer our expertise to help as many firms as possible really use their websites as an income stream and not purely as a brochure. The Internet can be a field leveller in many ways.”

The offerings – which are brandable and free – can be tailor-made for each Network or Association that comes onboard so that each can offer unique added value services to their membership at no cost.

The service includes branded online training courses, monthly teleseminars, discounted content, and one to one training services.

To receive more information or to make enquires please either email jason@speediepr.co.uk or call 01843 831088

Maile Ohye, Google said recently on the Google Webmaster blog:

“Inbound links are links from pages on external sites linking back to your site. Inbound links can bring new users to your site, and when the links are merit-based and freely-volunteered as an editorial choice, they’re also one of the positive signals to Google about your site’s importance. Other signals include things like our analysis of your site’s content, its relevance to a geographic location, etc. As many of you know, relevant, quality inbound links can affect your PageRank. And quality links often come naturally to sites with compelling content or offering a unique service.”

Notice that nowhere in this note, does it say anything about buying links or link exchanging, it talks about obtaining links editorially or via link bait.

If you are struggling to drive more traffic to your website, then one thing that you can implement is a link building strategy.

One thing I tell my clients is to create inbound links for a multiple of sources. So use article marketing, classified ads, forum posts, blogs, and a whole other range of inbound linking strategies.
By doing this, you are creating a diverse linking profile to spread the load and not to put all your eggs in one basket. I recently had a new client come onboard who had been penalised for buying links.

Buying links was an easy (and still is) way to build lots of links to your site. However, if you read Google’s terms of service, link buying is seen as an illegal activity and frowned upon. Sadly, Google doesn’t seem to penalise many link buying sites just yet, but the time will come.

If you are looking for a low risk, high reward way to build links then look at a multitude of different techniques to make your linking strategy a long term basis for your SEO efforts.

RSS or Really Simple Syndication is one of the oldest yet underused marketing techniques available to webmasters. Below is a list of the top 10 things to do with an RSS feed

1. Build one. You can’t do anything without having an RSS feed. They are simple to build. Go to google and carry out a search for building an rss feed.

2. Add it to your Google, Yahoo and MSN homepages. If you download our free reports as described in our resource box there is a step by step guide to adding RSS feeds to your main site homepages.

3. Include it on any social networking sites that allow you to import RSS feeds such as Ecademy, Myspace, Fast Pitch networking and others.

4. Add links to it on your website and attract users to add it to their feed readers. You can grab RSS icons at www.rssicons.com

5. Ping it! Use a Ping service to promote your feed.

6. Use a widget to allow other sites to add your feed content to their site. Try tools such as widgetbox. Build a seperate page on your site to show how other webmasters can syndicate or use your RSS Feed.

7. Use Javascript or php to add it to any other related sites you may have.

8. Submit it to all the RSS directories listed here: http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

9. Make sure you have a meaningful keyword loaded RSS title and Description as this is used by the RSS directory and RSS search engines to rank and display content.

10. Add it to your Google Webmaster tools account so you can track what keywords and what positions you are achieving with your feed.

If you currently run or are thinking about running your own affiliate program, then this article is for you.

There are 4 major things that each and every affiliate program needs to have if it is to be a success. Luckily for me they all begin with C so it is easy to remember.

Commission, Creative, Consistency, and Communication

Let’s take a look at each one in turn. To the affiliate this is the correct order of importance when joining a program. However, as the affiliate program manager this needs to be slightly altered but we will get to that later!

Commission

The biggest differentiator to the affiliate is money. How much will they get paid for selling your product or service? How you structure this is really dependent on the type of product or service you are offering but really you have 3 options. Pay Per Sale, Pay per Lead or Pay Per Click. There are other options but to be honest these are the main ones.

When deciding on what commissions to pay, be realistic. If you don’t really know how much you can afford to pay out then air on the side of caution. You want to pay out what you can afford to. Running a program for 2 months and then realise you have to reduce your commission payments to affiliates can be a program killer.

Creative

How many times have you joined an affiliate program only to find there are no creative to promote the program? How are they going to promote your product or service if you do not help them. You must provide the affiliates with everything they need to sell your product. If you had a real sales force, you would give them marketing materials in order to sell the customer, so the affiliate program is no different.

Banners, buttons, text links, HTML email, text email, classified ads copy, content, articles, and product reviews are all things that you can us to give the affiliate the creative they need to sell or pre-sell your product or service.

Consistency

Whenever you commit to running an affiliate program, be consistent, if you are sending out updates or updating creative on a regular basis make sure you remain consistent. If you want make it a certain day of the month. Affiliates will then get used to expecting things from you at a given time of the month. They can then almost factor that into their workloads. Remember affiliates can have two jobs, two hundred websites to manage so try to accommodate that in your thinking.

If you lose consistency, it will show the affiliate that you don’t care about there efforts. They will switch off you like a shot. Remember there will always be someone else out there running an affiliate program in a similar space to you. An affiliate will show loyalty if you treat them right.

Communication

Perhaps last but no means least is Communication. You need to communicate to affiliates for two main reasons. Firstly, to update them on any new product changes, new creative, new commission structures. So in effect , to keep them informed with what’s going on with you and your business that will help them drive more sales.

Secondly, you need to keep in touch will affiliates to make them feel important and to help train them. If you stay in touch on a regular basis and provide them with tools and training materials, they will learn more about driving traffic and sales to your products. They will be much more switched on to you for helping them.

Now I know some of you will be thinking that they will take your knowledge and help and use it elsewhere. Yes they will. But there will be lots of affiliates out there that will be joining an affiliate program for the first time or do not know who to do certain things and will feel loyal to you.

This is the most important C for Affiliate Program managers, building relationships and loyalty with affiliates through Communication. Think of it as an insurance policy so when a competitor comes along with the same product and offers the same commission or even in some instances a higher commission you will find you will keep your affiliates.

Running an affiliate program is a hugely rewarding project, get it right and you make a large sum of money of not just you but your affiliates too. Always remember the 4 C’s when constructing a program or revisiting a program which isn’t working that well.

There has been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing in the search engine world of late and there are lots of conspiracy theories as to why these things happen.

It is easy as a webmaster to get caught up in these webs of intrigue.

You get email notes about them, you view so-called experts’ thoughts on bulletin Boards – hey you probably even read things in newsletter articles!

Well I hope so anyway….

The big driver for webmasters currently appears to be content and link building.

While link building is important I don’t believe it makes Queen. Maybe a Prince. Content and links DO go hand in hand but, without relevance, the Kingdom is doomed. Sorry I will stop the analogy now!

If your site is about finance, then finance content is best supported by finance link exchanges. Relevance!

If your site is about finance, then finance content supported by casino link exchanges from a PR8 site while in the short term may help,…but all the signs are saying this is not a long term strategy.

Okay,so what is the best strategy?

Keep EVERYTHING relevant. It is that simple.

Make sure that you only swap or link to sites that are relevant to the content on your pages. Yes I am suggesting link exchanging on pages of your site not a links page.

Links pages seem to be being abused. There are rumours that pages called links, resources or partners are not passing page rank. You could be wasting your time building links that are not giving you any benefits!

Delivering relevant links from relevant content is the future.

Look at sites such as www.bbc.co.uk or www.independent.co.uk. News sites have the right idea. They have 2 or 3 relevant internal links to other articles on the same topic or links to internal tools that are related. These usually can be found at the right hand side of the article.

They also then have weblinks or external links to sites of interest that are related to the topic. These are relevant!

Another benefit of this is that with a content rich site you can add hundreds of links quite legitimately and really add some value both to your Rankings and your users.

With a content-poor site it is difficult, you have to add link pages or create a links directory. A five page site will need to add 10 or 12 good link pages to compete and even then with algorithm changes, this may not be prudent.

Having a site with 400 pages means you can easily add 3 links per page, so you have 1200 link options straight away.

Hopefully this explains that relevance runs a close second to content.

Always bear in mind when writing content that relevant links will not only boost your search engine rankings, but you will also add a service to your visitors.

Content provision is a key aspect to any company’s online strategy. Sadly, this seems to be one of the last things on most company’s minds, if it is at all. They feel that content provided at time of launching a site is good enough. Many sites have not added content to their sites in the last 3 or 4 years.

They would argue that the content is evergreen and therefore still relevant, but from a search engine and a user perspective, it is neither fresh, nor changing enough to warrant either to come back to the site with any regularity.
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