Generate business success - get ranked #1 in Google

Anyone can be ranked #1 in Google – How to improve your website ranking

As the World Wide Web has become more popular with businesses all over the world, it has proven more difficult to rank a website on the first page of Google and other search engines through natural or organic listings.  It can still be achieved, but can depend on the strength of your competition and whether the company is using so-called ‘white hat’ (legal and moral) strategies.

So when you next receive an email or cold call guaranteeing #1 in Google, be cautious but open-minded.  I believe it is better to be candid and honest with all my clients.  I will not guarantee something I cannot be absolute on.  But by aiming at #1, even if you don’t make it,  you will make your website more focused and achieve a much higher ranking than if you leave it to chance.

The SEO (search engine optimisation) tips below will give your company website focus which, if followed correctly, will strengthen your position in Google’s natural listings – the main list you do not pay for!

To begin…look at your website from your customers point of view

1. Make a list of words that you think your target audience would type into Google to find your website.  This list may not include the same words as you would use to find the site yourself, so it is important to consider the terms your customers would use. These words are known as your ‘keywords’.

2.    Now separate the keywords so each page, product and service has its own short, concise list.

3.    Narrow each list down to between 6 – 10 keywords.

4.    Add the keywords to the page content 6 times or more.  Reiterate the keywords where possible being careful not to interrupt the flow of the text.  Also include them in the page titles and any page associated filenames, such as images, videos etc.

5.    When including images, be sure to add keywords in the image caption and ‘Alt Text’ description (this text shows when you place your mouse over the image).

6.    Finally, get as many good quality, relevant websites to link to your website pages.

With links from authoritative websites and well written content that includes focused keywords, Google will increase the ranking of your pages.  Once your pages are ranked in the top 10 (first page of Google) it will be easier for you to get better quality sites to link to your website.

Lastly, don’t give up too soon.  This may take some time.  Furthermore, don’t stop once you have achieved your goal.  It’s tough at the top; and if you don’t keep a focus then one of your competitors will only too gladly take your place!

Many businesses do not have the time to spend on managing their website which is why companies like Buzzin Fly undertake successful internet marketing campaigns for small businesses.

For more information visit www.buzzinfly.co.uk.

In Google’s terms, the Panda update is designed “to reduce rankings for low-quality sites”. These are generally large content aggregator websites or ‘farms’ that “copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful”.  According to Google, as many as 12% of search results were affected, with many sites losing significant visibility online.

“This isn’t a temporary measure either”, says Jack Adams, senior search manager at SearchCatalyst. “Google’s Panda update has been a long time coming, forming part of a more concerted effort to improve the visibility of unique, quality content in Google’s organic rankings and ultimately improve the user’s search experience.”

For every site that loses a ranking, one must gain; in this case, sites that purvey high quality, specialist content on a subject.

Adam’s concludes:

“With most UK SMEs being experts in their respective fields, the opportunity to attain search presence at the expense of large content aggregators – which previously would outrank smaller websites based purely on the inbound links spread thinly across their mass of content – is now more possible than ever before. Coupling this with potentially increased capital as a result of the revised Enterprise Investment Scheme, UK SMEs now also have the funding to realise this opportunity too”.

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.

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.

“Expat-like terms” – made available in a way that is freely sharable, modifiable and redistributable, similar to the Expat software package, whose terms are published at http://www.jclark.com/xml/copying.txt – this is often used as a clear, simple example for encouraging wide distribution of electronic resources (software).

“clandestine Google Analytics” – Google Analytics is a service from Google, Inc for tracking users through a website in various ways. I believe the Data Protection Act means that English websites should obtain informed consent from users by publishing a Privacy Policy on their site which discloses what the GA service will be used for and linking through to GA’s own Privacy Policy. Some websites attempt to run Google Analytics on users’ computers without explaining why and without any Privacy Policy. That is what I mean by “clandestine”.

“valid xhtml” – validating against the eXtensible HyperText Markup Language standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) – the underlying language of the web. There is a test service provided at http://validator.w3.org/ and passing it is a key stepping stone towards making an accessible website. There’s not really such a thing as “invalid xhtml” – if it doesn’t pass validation, it’s not xhtml. So I guess I’m guilty of using a tautology sometimes – sorry about that.

Is it worthwhile knowing those three phrases? Are there other key technical phrases which you think site owners should know?

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!