There cannot be any guarantee that your website is going to be ranked #1 in Google so beware of anyone who wants you to part with money for such promises.  But what I can confidently predict is that if you are not doing the following, then by doing so you will increase the ranking of your website exponentially.

1.    Make a short list of keywords and key phrases that you would type into Google to search for one of your closest competitors.  The more refined your words are, the more targeted your website will be.

2.    Refine your list to the point where you have a maximum of six keywords or phrases for each separate page & make sure keywords are included in each title.

3.    Make sure the keywords also appear at least four times in the main content of the page.

4.    Include images on each page and use the same keywords in the image filenames and also add the keywords to the image Alt Text, and if possible the image caption too.

5.    Most importantly, get other good quality sites to link to your website.  Blogs rank high in Google so consider targeting blogs as part of any inbound linking strategy. Google is based on strategic linking and inbound links are very important.

I don’t want you to think by following these five simple steps you will automatically appear in Google and other search engines ranked #1 or even on the first page for more popular keywords, but if you are not undertaking the above, then I am confident you don’t stand a chance.

For more information on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) & internet marketing visit www.Buzzinfly.co.uk.

At the same time I was fortunate in that my position was in a marketing and not a design department.  That way, I got to learn how to websites needed to work as a promotional tool rather than look pretty.

So when internet marketing became a buzzword, I was already there!

With the growth and importance of web-based search engines such as Google came a whole new discipline - SEO (search engine optimisation).

Search Engine Optimisation is crucial to every business success

Once you have a professional-looking design and the functionality is working correctly, you need to constantly market your business online.  Keep regularly updating your website and business blog. Fresh content keeps both the search engines and potential customers interested and aware of your products and services.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
An ongoing SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) program is vital.  Don’t think a one-off ‘makeover’ is going to be enough.  The search engines are looking for your website and blog to continually add relevant, authoritative and good quality in-bound links.

Furthermore, once you start to receive high ranking for popular keywords, your competitors will also be attempting to leapfrog you in the rankings.

There is plenty of help at hand as search engine marketing is big business in 2010 and so it is crucial to setup a good ongoing working relationship with an SEO company you can trust.

Here are five tips to help a small business to set up a successful Google Pay per Click (PPC) campaign.

1. Don’t only use broad match keywords
Google offer three ways in which your PPC advert can be included in a search listing – broad match, phrase match and exact match.  By default the keywords use a broad search.  This will give you the most traffic, but it will be unqualified and result in quantity not quality leads.

Broad match catches all searches looking for one or more of the keywords you have listed; whereby a phrase match will only include your campaign if all the keywords are included in the search.

An exact search will only list your PPC campaign if the search exactly matches your keywords.

Read How to be successful with PPC for a more detailed explanation.

2. Mistyping the URL or Landing Page address will cost you
Be very careful when adding the PPC campaign destination URL or what’s known as a Landing Page.  If you mistype your website landing page address you will pay for the traffic being sent to a non-existent page.

Google will take some time to report this problem.  So always test your links from within the Google AdWords admin.  That way you can be confident the link is working and will not be charged for testing the link.

3. Google’s Content Network isn’t good with a small budget
By default, your new campaign will not only show on relevant Google searches, it will also be included throughout Google’s Content Network.  This means your advert will show on blogs, websites, other search engines and web directories.

Google’s Content Network can work depending on the campaigns, but the traffic will be less focused and therefore more quantity than quality.  Therefore, this is best avoided for campaigns with a small budget or low profit margins.

4. Separate your PPC keywords list & setup smaller campaigns
Setting up one campaign with a long list of keywords is another way of throwing money away.  You need to divide keywords into small associated lists and create several smaller campaigns.

Your campaigns can then focus on a few specific keywords and use those keywords in the title and body of the relevant PPC campaign.

Google will reward your campaigns for relevancy.  More keyword-targeted campaigns will also receive a stronger CTR (Click through Rate); meaning your campaigns will receive a higher percentage of quality traffic.  All of which will increase your campaign ranking.

In many cases where I have been asked to turnaround a badly setup PPC campaign I see one generic campaign with a list of hundreds of keywords using broad match.  In many cases the PPC campaign has been setup using automated PPC software.

5. Target your PPC campaigns by using negative keywords
Once you have created smaller, more focused PPC campaigns with specific keywords you will also need to add a list of ‘negative keywords.’

A negative keyword is a way of further concentrating a search with any keyword matching.  For example, if you were a finance company offering a factoring service, and your keyword list including the word factor, you would want to exclude any searches for, say X Factor or Max Factor.

To add negative keywords to your keywords list you need to add a hyphen before each keyword:
-x factor
-max factor

Negative keywords, along with an effective keyword matching strategy will allow you to focus your PPC campaigns which in turn will offer you much greater success with Google AdWords.

All UK businesses are looking to cut costs, spend less and hang on to their customers. But while certain expenditure can most certainly be contracted or cut altogether, whether a corporate golf day or lunch time visits to Marks And Spencer, there’s one area that many businesses look to cut when I recommend they increase their budget spend, especially in times like these.

Internet Marketing will help your business by attracting more customers through visibility.

Furthermore, as businesses stop trading you will need to be accessible, easily found on the web and listed high in Google, if you are going to capitalise on gaining their clients.

For those of you without a company website – where have you been?

Your business not only NEEDS a website but a professional looking, highly functional website should be at the hub of every business marketing plan.  Not having a company website is almost as bad as having a badly designed website!

For those businesses with a good website, you need to promote it with an internet marketing strategy. Internet Marketing should be responsive to your business and sector requirements, but must always include a strong strategic link building focus and an emphasis on ranking as high as possible in Google for your specifically targeted keywords.  Inbound links, topic relevancy and site authority all go towards ranking your website higher.

Now, if you are already employing an internet marketing consultant or company to manage your online marketing but are not getting a ROI (Return On Investment) or new business from this service, then it’s time to question whether they are doing a good job!

Many so-called SEO companies have sprung up in the past 2-3 years in the UK are not experts in the field of web marketing.  Most use automated tools and send pages of next to useless data showing SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), but this is not going to help you or your business without a managed strategy and analysis.

What your business needs is an internet marketing program being managed by experts who manually monitor and recommend what is right for your business to acquire more visibility, more traffic, more leads, and ultimately more customers; and the most important consideration is to analyse the results.  To do so, your online marketing strategy will need to harness the power of web analytics.

Armed with a good website analytics tool and an expert internet marketing team to build, monitor, manage and offer recommendations, your internet marketing program will help you  to beat your competitors and survive the recession.

To help start the year off on the right path, here is some free internet marketing advice to help you get and stay ahead of your business competitors.

Free Advice Free Offers
Entice your website and blog visitors by offering special incentives; and there’s no better way to grab someone’s attention than to include the word FREE!

Offer free advice, free postage, free information.  Things you know your competitors are charging their customers for.  Be honest, and traffic will grow.

Search Engine Optimisation is vital to your business success in 2009

You need to constantly market your business online.  Keep regularly updating your website and business blog. Fresh content keeps both the search engines and potential customers interested and aware of your products and services.

Set up regular Google Alerts for your company name and any products and services with recognisable or trademarked names.  This way you can monitor what is being written about your business, good or bad!

Similarly, www.IceRocket.com & www.Serph.com are websites that allow you to track who is publishing copy that may affect you, your name and your business.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
An ongoing SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) program is vital in 2009.  Don’t think a one-off ‘makeover’ is going to be enough.  The search engines are looking for your website and blog to continually add relevance, authority and good quality in-bound links.

Furthermore, once you start to receive high ranking for popular keywords, your competitors will also be attempting to leapfrog you in the rankings.

Target Potential Customers
Always target Google, and continue to use Google as a focus, for all your SEM (Search Engine Marketing) but never forget there is a target audience waiting for you on other search engines and directories such as Yahoo, MSN, DMOZ, AllTheWeb, Ask, Alta Vista and AOL, to name a few.

The Internet is global but don’t forget local business is as important, and in some cases easier to convert. Local search strategies should include geo-targeted paid search and natural search engine optimisation campaigns. Geo-targeted keywords restrict campaigns to consumers in specific areas where your company is looking to improve its reputation and increase sales. Include ‘landing pages’ that are specific to campaigns and promote single products and services to increase conversion rates.

Website Traffic Analysis
All focused internet marketing and website development activity will need to be analysed if you are to maximise the results.  The more information you can gather using website traffic analysis, the better.  Many traffic analysis software programs are free.  But many of these programs offer very little in the way of useful information.

We offer clients a free website stats program by AWstats but employ a much more powerful tool for serious in depth analytics.

Internet Marketing Plan
Finally, it is very important to have an internet marketing plan that you can  refer to, whether you undertake the work yourself or outsource to an internet marketing consultancy such as Buzzin Fly.

An internet marketing plan should set out the aims and goals of the program.  I also recommend a quarterly meeting that should discuss the program and provide results and recommendations for the next quarter.

2009 is going to be a difficult year for many companies, especially small businesses and SMEs.  But if you are looking for more revenue consider an internet marketing strategy as an  essential part of your marketing budget spend.

In general, it’s a little disappointing when you get a “null pointer” from a private company, but it’s particularly annoying from a university. University mistakes like “technology transfer programmes” (that stop software becoming free software available to social enterprises) are justified by a need to get more money – but clearly this particular university has money to waste. How about others?

If there was a way to subscribe to email or blog news of their research publications, I probably would have subscribed. Instead, I’ve just ranted here (without rewarding them with a link) and now I’m going to recycle the flier. I’ll probably have forgotten the three-letter acronym by next week. It’s simply bad marketing. It’s paper spam. Please, if you are putting things into conference handout packs, ask yourself why? What are you hoping to get out of it? How are you going to measure its success?

1. JavaScript or other crawler-unfriendly navigation that may impede indexing

This one is best avoided at design-time, by including Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Level A in the design brief, but if you’ve ended up with JavaScript-based navigation on your site (check by doing “View Source” and searching for the code for your home page link and so on – if you can find it, then it’s probably not javascript) and it’s based on some template system, a webmaster can probably do a whole-site edit to put the navigation links in the page properly – or at least add a useful <noscript> tag.

2. Navigation that buries important pages within the site architecture.

The structure of the website’s files and the structure of the link menus do not need to match, so if there’s a page that you feel is important, get your webmaster to add it to the navigation links across the whole site.

3. Duplicate “pages” getting indexed under multiple URLs.

This usually happens for one of two reasons: one is inappropriately-parked domains, which is mistake 6 below and often fairly easy to fix; the other is a misbehaving web application, which you’ll need to get a programmer to fix.

You can do a simple test of your web application by starting at your homepage and following links to a particular page; then open a new browser window and try to reach the same page by different links (or a site search) and compare the address bars (the bit of your browser showing http://) – do they match? If not, you’ve got this problem.

4. No keyword phrase focus in the content or conversely, keyword phrase stuffing

You can use a good word-counter on the text to see how common different keywords and keyphrases, or use the “webmaster tools” section of some search engines to see what they’re focusing on.

Keyword-stuffing can be fairly easy to see. If you “View Source” on a page and there’s a large block of keyword-intensive text somewhere in it that doesn’t appear it when viewed in a browser, then it’s probably stuffing. Many sites regard stuffing as a sort of spam, so you don’t want to be found doing this.

To fix these problems, rewrite the page text appropriately.

5. An optimized home page, but that’s it

Repeat your checks from problem 4 on a few pages other than the home page to discover whether you suffer from this. Also, see whether your website statistics show search engine visitors arriving at a variety of different pages (these are sometimes called “Entry Page” statistics).

6. Additional domains owned by the company are not properly redirected

If you usually use .co.uk, but you also have a .com domain, try visiting a random page on your website, then click in the address bar and replace the .co.uk with .com – what happens?

If the page is Not Found, then your domains aren’t properly redirected and you need a Redirect adding to the second one.

If the page displays but the address doesn’t change itself back, then your domains are probably pointing at the same webspace but aren’t properly redirected, which will mean you’re probably making mistake 3 above. Usually, the simplest way to fix this is with a conditional redirect. On Apache webservers, you can add a .htaccess file containing something like:-

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.co\.uk$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/$1 [R=permanent,L]

That even works on BT Business web hosting, by the way. If it doesn’t work, try asking your web hosting provider to enable mod_rewrite for you or ask them to suggest how to achieve the same result.

The above list of mistakes was published on Search Engine Land last week. The correction methods are all things used by my webmaster cooperative.

Make a bigger web footprint by managing an ongoing internet marketing campaign.

Make sure your developers are well versed in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM).  Don’t be surprised if they’re not!

Many companies offer website design & development, while others simply concentrate on online marketing.  It is preferable to deal with one company who are experts in both, or at least will oversee the whole project, as both are necessary for a successful eCommerce business.

It’s no good having the best looking eCommerce website on the Internet, offering the best prices in the UK, if no one can find your site!

To be successful online, make your eCommerce website visible

Since a large majority of your new customers are going to be introduced to your website via a search engine such as Google or a directory such as Yahoo, you will necessarily need to spend time and money on getting your eCommerce site seen in the major search engines.

It is difficult to break into competitive online markets, but the longer you lave it the harder it becomes. You can either hire a professional internet marketing company to manage this for you or carry out Internet marketing by yourself.

Associate your web site with others providing complimentary products or services

This will again help you in increasing your web presence both for search engines and for your customers.

You’d be surprised how many business websites, including household names, have been online for years without any consideration or understanding of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

Over the past 11 years I have worked with businesses of all sizes, from self-employed sole traders, SME’s and large multi-national corporations who have had less online success with their businesses because they were either unaware of SEO, didn’t think it necessary or have been stung by a company who haven’t actually been managing any SEO even when they’ve been paying for it!

Blogs are no different to websites when it comes to choosing what keywords to target.  But it is easier because with a blog post you can be much more specific in the keywords & audience you are targeting.

So how do you know what key phrases & keywords are going to work for you & your business?

Well, all your keywords and key phrases need to be relevant to your website pages & blog posts.  The more relevant, the better results you will receive.  Here I am judging ‘results’ on search engine ranking and Google PR.

Furthermore, if you are running any paid inclusion advertisements (Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing etc) then using the same keywords in your adverts as are visible to the search engines on your landing pages will be rewarded in much the same way. This will also result in higher quality leads.

If you choose to target popular keywords, it stands to reason you will receive more traffic.  But only once you have broken into the market & your website or blog has become visible.  As a rule, high levels of traffic are usually followed by competitive markets.

You will gain more immediate success if you are to target less popular keywords, especially if your market is saturated or your competitors have much deeper pockets!

It is best to brain storm a list of keywords & then research their popularity.  Relevant but less popular keywords will reap less traffic, it’s true.  But with less competition, you will get a bigger slice of the cake!

However, whether you want your success to be online because you would like the freedom to work from home, be your own boss or work the hours you want, when you want, the simple truth of the matter is that online business success is attainable, as long as you have a solid business plan and start your online business venture for the right reasons, using the right people and tools, and being dedicated and committed to the cause.

If you start by thinking it will be easy then it will probably end in tears. But if you have a plan, seek the right advice from the right source, use the right tools and people for the job and push yourself to keep on top of everything, then the possibility of succeeding and generating a successful online business is relatively greater, quicker and cheaper than if you were to start an offline business.

Firstly, consider your business plan thoroughly before putting thoughts into action. If you start with the confidence that you are sure your idea is water tight then you will have 100% commitment to your business. This confidence and commitment will show when you discuss the business with others.

Secondly, I have come across so many companies, big and small, over the past 11 years that have a great business idea but their website is awful. Whether the design is poor quality or the website is difficult to use, don’t attempt to cut corners with cheap website design and development. To me a cheap looking website is a bad advert for your company’s products or services.

It’s strange but a company will always have a professional graphic designer to create an advert or brochure, so why do they not use professional web developers?

Finally, once you have a professionally -designed and developed website, you must undertake and manage an online marketing program. Whether it consists of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) or Paid Inclusion for SEM (Search Engine Marketing) such as Google’s AdWords, you must monitor your traffic and website stats.

So, in conclusion, follow these steps to generate online business success:

• Make sure your business plan is solid before stepping out into the WWW (World Wide Web)

• Employ the services of a professional website development agency

• Setup & Manage a SEO/SEM program

• Monitor the results with website and traffic stats software

And finally, Act on the results!

For Website Development & Internet Marketing contact www.BuzzinFly.co.uk