The SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Expert UK

Capturing Video with Snapshot

2009-11-30T13:39:00.005Z

I get a lot of people asking me how to capture video in the form of a photograph and if it hard. It is in fact very easy and here's how:

1. Open up your video player. The very best if VLC Player because it plays just about everything i.e. far more than most players and it is free.

2. When you are playing video right click with the mouse and then select Video --> Snapshot.

3. That is it! A picture will be saved to your computer of video frame which is showing when you click snapshot.

Pay Per Click Advertising - where to start?

2009-11-16T13:55:00.002Z

If you are fairly new to Online Marketing i.e. because you have just built a website for your business and now need to get traffic to your site, where do you start.

It can take a year plus to start getting good search engine positions and thus you might need to get instant traffic and custom online. In this case, Pay Per Click advertising can be your best bet.

By Pay Per Click it literally means you only pay if someone clicks your ad and goes to your website. If you look on Google on a search results page, you'll see these ads on the top and right side of the page. These are sponsored results. You literally bid what you are willing to for certain phrases.

There are 3 main options for online PPC.

Google Adwords (The best in terms of the most structured and developed and best reach online).
Facebook Advertising (Can be much cheaper than Google Adwords but less refined).
Bing.com PPC (Is a very new system from Microsoft and different to get any real significant traffic right now. This will change over time though, quite likely.

My advice is to start off with Google Adwords but with a small budget. Ensure you carefully set your monthly budget to cap the expenditure. You can read more about Adwords PPC and training here..

Twitter site is down - site crashed?

2009-08-06T15:30:00.003Z

Well, I have heard that twitter has been under attack for a while by hackers but it seems maybe they have finally succeeded. Twiter ha snow been down for a few hours (6th August 2009) and there seems little information online and from twitter about when it will be back.

Is twitter can go down then it does not bode well. Watch this space and we'll keep you updated. I have tried caling twitter direct for more information but culd not get through.

Twitter is down but I am sure they will be back very soon!

Analysing competitors links

2009-07-11T22:34:00.003Z

As part of promoting your own website, one way to work out good link opportunities and good sites to build partnerships with can be to analyse your competitors inbound links. So how can you do this?

A very easy way to analyse your competitor links is to do a Google search and enter the term:
link and then the URL you are analysing. An example is:

link:www.cuba-culture.com

if you dealt with holidays in Cuba and wanted to analyse the site www.cuba-culture.com. To analyse the links on Yahoo then you would enter into a Yahoo search:

linkdomain:www.cuba-culture.com

Simply replace the URL cuba-culture with the URL you want to analyse. Once you then start going through the links that go to competitor sites you will start to see partner sites you might also want to consider, article submission sites which seem to work well and the online Directories which you might also want to consider.

Google Ocean and taking a few minutes break from SEO

2009-05-17T17:19:00.005Z

SEO and eMarketing in general is very time consuming and building your sites value up does not happen over days or weeks, but months. So, taking a few minutes out to enjoy what the Internet has to offer, is sometimes as important as just using the Internet for work.

Apart from my favourite sites whereby:

I order far too much from amazon.co.uk and play.com
Enjoy learning about the stock market via the Naked Trader
Am forced by my wife to check her Belly Dance website :(
Checking the latest on BBC's HardTalk
and always booking new holidays

I also cannot help but be fascinated by Google Earth's latest addition - Google Ocean. If you have not already tried it out it is worth doing so. Dive under the ocean and experience 20 layers of visualisation and see what ocean planners see. This is an amazing feature. The only question is - what next from Google. It seems as though Google are taking over the world.

Online Marketing in a recession

2009-04-25T16:41:00.005Z

Paul Symonds, UK SEO and eMarketing expert:

A lot more eMarketing news and ideas coming soon especially for companies ot market in a recession.

URL length problems and issues

2009-02-11T16:58:00.004Z

If you are adding a link to some forum signatures or on other sources, one problem you might have is that your URLs are too long and that the end of the URL gets chopped off in searches.

One of the tools I came across recently which I think is excellent for overcoming this problem is 'Tiny' URLs. I do not work for them and have no relation to Tiny urls but I just think they are an excellent idea and thus am happy to share the idea with you.

Tiny URLs are excellent and incredibly easy to do. All you do is add your URL into a box, click 'Enter' and then they create a very small URL for you. If you take the URL
http://www.promarketingonline.com/adwords.htm for example, it makes it into
http://tiny.cc/fDtFA

This new URL is said to be one which will be permanent and unique and the idea seems good. I just hope that in 10 years time Tiny URLs do not suddenly become unusable. That would mean a whole load of lost links. So if my URLs are short enough I will still use the original URLs.

Online and Internet Branding

2009-01-18T13:17:00.005Z

Online Branding or Internet Branding (according to which way you prefer to say it) is something which is fast gaining popularity and it is not hard to see why. Marketing online means you immediately have a window open to the world and if you get the Internet Branding right, you could do extremely well from it.

There are a number of ways to go ahead Online Branding. To start with, I would advise you to start with an overall eStrategy. There are so many possibilities with Online Branding that pre-planning could literally save you a lot of money.

Once you are ready for Internet Branding the first and most obvious way to go about it is directly on your website. Getting the logo right, positioning your logo appropriately site-wide, ensuring your site is branded as a whole.

Then there is branding through search results. With the Triple Branding Effect (Symonds 2008) you can really gain a presence to open up traffic opportunities for your site. Getting on the top of Page 1 in Google Results for Adwords, Google Local Business Listing and the organic search results, will give you a triple presence on the every same page. As you can imagine, this is powerful branding and very effective.

You can learn more about Online Branding from promarketingonline.co.uk

Theming and SEO

2009-01-02T14:56:00.003Z

Have you ever wondered why some search results are indented as shown in the image below? Well, this is called Theming and in SEO Theming is an important technique.

Theming is actually something which will occur naturally if your sites theme runs down through the site with a natural architecture. So what is theming?

Theming is where you have a common theme which runs through the site. On the above example if you type in 'Bristol SEO' into google.co.uk, ProMarketingOnline.com will often come 1st or 2nd and also with a result underneath it which is indented. This is achieved by having subpages which also use the words you use on the Home-Page and in the Home-Page Meta Tags. In other words, there is consistency throughout the site.

So to get indented search results think more about theming and how the information flows through your site.

Google Chrome to wipe out SERPs?

2008-12-18T21:46:00.005Z

Some of you might have noticed that starting from a few months ago, google's search page predicts the text you are writing to try and auto-complete the phrase you may be looking for, based on the current search results. There is also a small number of the amount of results that google could display for you on the right hand side of the drop down option bar.

Google's Chrome has gone one step further - including the search bar within the actual address bar. Chrome has had a rapid rise to fame and has been the quickets Google product out of Beta, with over 2 million followers, accodring to Google themselves. There are obviously improvements to be made along the way, considering the fact that it is a brand new concept in browsing, and the direct competition - Microsoft Internet Explorer - is about to release explorer version 8, and this is only from continued testing and correction of problems.

At the moment, a user can write in Chrome's address bar as if it was the search bar, and google with then throw up a SERP, or in some occasions, a result directly. Google is collecting and storing a massive amount of data about search through custom search, Universal search, Google wiki, Adwords and AdSense, and is in the most powerful position with regards retuning search results - even now, certain results are given to you based on your search history, or are "personalised".

I would not be surprised to see in the future (maybe not too distant) to see that the search term you type in change directly into the top result of a SERP - as this is what is considered to be the most relevant result. There is even talk of Chrome being pre-installed on certain computers, almost as an OS which would mean even less use of Google toolbar or Google homepage to show SERPs - bad news for numbers 3-10.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the clever people at eyetools have also shown that 100% of users in a controlled test look at position 1, 2 and 3 for longest and first. This means that people expect to find their answer to their search term in the first 3 results. If Chrome decides which one to show you in the toolbar, too, then this means SEO as we know it is changing.

Never more has conversion tracking, maintianing users onsite for longer, and "real" marketing and sales been more important. What's the use of having huge amounts of traffic if your sales skills or online presentation is terrible? Please feel free to comment on your thoughts and idea regarding this new possible shift.

David Brydon is an expert in SEO and runs Barcelona SEO. The company also offers comprehensive in-house SEO Training in Barcelona.

Google Insights

2008-11-19T21:36:00.001Z

In case you have not yet noticed, Google have introduced what is a fascinating facility which goes by the name of Google Insights and which is in Beta version at the time of writing. This new tool is invaluable if you have a business online and use Adwords and want to further utilise your website.

Google Insights enables you to view a varity of information including:

Seasonality and search numbers.
Geographical Distribution for Google searches.
Search volumes by time, trend and much more.

The statistics available to you potentially could be overwhelming at first but with time and effort there are some extremely handy stats available. The seasonal trends for example can be extremely useful if you for example work with travel and want to spend higher budgets on phrases which change seasonally. Google Insights is free and personally I find ivery useful and thus recommend it.

Bristol SEO Expert

2008-11-14T00:20:00.000Z

For Bristol SEO work and web design just a quick cheeky plug for our friends at ProMarketingOnline.com Ltd who are specialists in Bristol SEO and Emarketing. They have a number of SEO Training Packages now available and these 1 Day in-house training programs include:

Search Engine Optimization
Adwords & Pay-Per-Click campaign Management
Link Building Training
E-Marketing Basics

They also deal with Cardiff SEO. A quick hello by the way to Valeria and good with your new site on Cardiff belly dance. I promised you a quick hello and good luck with the new classes and you owe me a beer from the other night. I am not sure if any of you who are interested in SEo and read this blog are also interested in belly dance but guys do do belly dance as it happens. I think I'll give it a miss myself though :)

Useful SEO Tools

2008-11-11T01:52:00.000Z

There are a number of very useful tools and sites out there for SEO people and Online Marketers. Some of the tool sI find very useful include the following:

Google's Keyword Tool is intended for Adwords but you can use it without Adwords and this tool is great for analysing niche terms and words to target on your site.

The Bad Neighbourhood Tool is also very good and it helps you to ensure that you are keeping your site clean and thus avoid upsetting Google search spiders.

Creating a Favicon can be very simple. What is a FaviconI hear you ask. Well it is the small icon which you see in your Favourites folder and sometimes in the address bar, for sites you have saved as a Favourite. To easily make or create a favicon you can go online to http://www.chami.com/.

How do I market my business online?

2008-10-17T11:15:00.000Z

Words such as SEO, PPC, Organic results, Adwords and many more are words you will begin to hear as you research the idea of doing Online Marketing for your own business and your website.

It can be a bit of a minefield when you get started and it can be frustating trying to learn the differences between immediate impact online marketing with PPC, natural building through SEO and opportunities with services online such as Google Products and Local Business Listings. We have added a new page to cover some of these issues for starting and marketing a business online.

Mindshare and TrustRank

2008-09-02T14:51:00.000Z

Many webmasters completely avoid outgoing links or have outgoing links but add NoFollow code to all of the outbound ones (learn about DoFollow and NoFollow) but there are a number of webmasters who feel that having outgoing links can in fact add value to your site and in fact look good in the eyes of the likes of Google.

Mindshare is what it is about in that Google want webmasters to have outgoing links on their site so why would they penalise them, unless though linsk are blatantly spamming. If you use Mindshare to create a page which links for example, to airlines which fly into a specific location i.e. Rome, if you have a website about Rome, then you shouldn't be pelanised. It might in fact build your rating.

The links you would be linking too should not be too many and in the case of airlines you'd be linking to high PageRank sites, i.e. PR4, 5 and 6 or higher so you are linkng out to Authority and valued sites. Using Mindshare with high PR and trusted site links you can improve your mindshare value and also at the same time, add the content available to users.

Producing Videos for SEO and EMarketing

2008-07-06T21:58:00.001Z

A surprisingly simple way, yet one which is largely unexplored by many people, for driving traffic to their site is to use resources such as youtube.com. Youtube are the biggest video submission website on the Internet and videos tend to get a significant number of visitors particularly over time.

The good thing about creating some videos and highlighting your web site address during the video is that it is very simple to create a video. You do not even need to have video as such because photographs can be used and once you add different effects the video can be surprisingly good. You can pan photographs for example to give the effect that you panned a room with running video.

As well as youtube, you can also submit the link to your youtube video and then include you video in sources such as:

Facebook
Gumtree
Your own website

Here is an example of a movie I made in 30 minutes from start-to-finish.

You can learn more about SEO and Video production from Promarketingonline.com

The DoFollow movement

2008-06-25T21:59:00.002Z

DoFollow is becoming a more and more popular expression as bloggers and people involved with SEO realise that making a blog a DoFollow blog rather than leave it with the usual default NoFollow code.

The benefits of DoFollow are that if you market your blog as a DoFollow blog, other webmasters are going to be much more willing to leave comments on your blog (comments you can still moderate). The highest rated blogs tend very often to have 10-20 comments per blog post and this certainly suggest that comments are part of the algorithm towards creating highly rated blogs.

You can change youe blog in blogger.com from NoFollow to Dofollow by deleting the code
rel='nofollow' in part of the html in the layout. Be careful though what you delete and if possible take a backup first of your blog code!!!

You also need to ensure that 'Expand Widget Templates' is enabled to see the code you need to delete.

Once you have set-up your blog as DoFollow then you can submit your blog URL to
www.dofollowblogs.com

Adwords and Dynamic Titles

2008-06-15T22:26:00.000Z

A lot people who manage Adwords accounts do not realise that it is possible to creat dynamic headlines yet this can be an effective way to improve your conversion rates.

If you have a keyword list in an ad-group for the words:
English red wines
English white wines
wines in English
Cheap English wines

and your ad header is:
{KeyWord:English wines}

then the search term (provided it matches one of your keywords i.e. from the list above) will replace the header text to be the search term you entered. This in effect will make your ad seem much more appropiate to the person searching.

Why not test it out and see how it affects your conversions!

Email Signatures: Missed SEO Opportunities

2008-05-21T23:42:00.000Z

There are so many factors involved in optimising ones website and in E-Marketing ones business and some of these techniques are free, whilst others cost money. The techniques which are free and fairly easy to do, you might as well get done and thus benefit from some free trafic to your website.

In terms of free SEO, some things you might want to do include or do are:

Sorting out your Meta Tags
Submitting articles online to sites such as ezinearticles.com (and including 2 links to your site/s)
Trying to get into Google Images
Adding an Email signature to your work and/or personal email account.

Adding a signature to your email account is very easy, regardless of whether you are using Outlook, Yahoo, Hotmail or some other work email account and the benefits for something which takes only 5 minutes are worthwhile.

Getting traffic through a source such as Google Images or from click throughs via your email signature will never be your main traffic, but they will supplement it and its free. There are a few things you should consider though when creating your email signature.

You want for example to consider the link text because if you are aiming to achieve good search engine results for a certain term, let's say 'Cardiff SEO', you are best off including the keywords in at least one link. You might want to have one link as your Company name, for branding purposes and then one with specific keyword link text.

Below you will probably see example I have on my own personal email.

-----------------------------------------------

Online Marketing, SEO & Adwords & Online Marketing blog.

Chocolate, Travel Photos & Sicily Villas.

Branding, SEO and PPC (Pay-Per-Cick) advertising

2008-05-07T13:59:00.000Z

The idea of using Pay-Per-Click advertising as part of your E-Branding might seem a slightly strange idea but it can make a lot of sense and it can be powerful. Even with good natural organic search results, if the PPC costs continue to create a good ROI (Return on Investment) and Conversion Rate, you might want to keep the PPC going. Consider how powerful your branding and presence will be if for a given search term, and if you come:

In the top 5 for the organic search results
You also show in a good position for the PPC ads, and
You also happen to show in the Google Maps and local business results (for free as well).

Having your companies name, site and ad sat in 3 key positions on 1 search results page, and if you do this for several keyword expressions which are key to your business, it can be a very healthy way for you to start branding your company using PPC and E-Marketing. For tips on building your natural search results we will soon we going through the top 20 considerations on the next blog (so you might want to subscribe to this blog via the icons on the right side menu) and you can learn here how to get added to Google Maps.

Want to learn more about using EMarketing, SEO and PPC for branding.

PPC using Facebook - Part 2

2008-04-29T21:47:00.000Z

Having used and tested out Facebook Pay Per Click now for a few weeks, it has become clear that there are some definite advantages and some definite disadvantages to using Facebook Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising over Google Adwords PPC.

Overall I have to say that I do like Facebook PPC and in the long-term one has to remember that it is very likely that Facebook will improve and greatly add to their present PPC system. This is very much the beginning I am sure, for the PPC set-up with Face-Book and such is the increasing popularity of this Social Network site, that I can no longer ignore it. Anyway, the advantages I have found so far with Facebook’s PPC advertising is that:

You can as mentioned on the first blog, target people for PPC on Facebook with geo-demographics i.e. by location, age, marital status etc.
You enter a keyword/s and this keyword with the words a person enters in their profile
The CTR (Click Through Rates) so far for me have tended to be a 3rd of the price of CTRs in Adwords. This is logical in that Facebook PPC is so new compared to Adwords PPC and thus there is far less competition right now (although reading this blog might change that a little J).

On the negative side of Facebook PPC:

The reports and statistics available at this time are nowhere near as detailed as those you can use with Adwords.
There appears also to be no way to set conversion tracking.
There are more limitations on writing the Ads than in Adwords.

I would love to know your thoughts so feel free to comment on this blog in the comments section to share your own experience with PPC.

Using Facebook Groups and PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising for your company (Part 1)

2008-04-13T17:27:00.000Z

As well as getting involved with areas such as free advertising with Google Maps and offering free gadgets to build traffic, another area which it is essential to consider these days is Social Book Marking and Sharing. Social Book Marking and Sharing are now said by some sources to be accounting for almost 40% of online traffic; a significant amount of traffic I am sure you agree. If you have a business or company which you are looking to promote online and to generate more traffic to your site, you cannot ignore Social Book Marking and Sharing.

There are many such sites and some well known ones include:

FaceBook
Del.icio.us
MySpace
StumbleUpon

So how can you utilise a site such as FaceBook to build traffic? What some companies are doing and which yourself can do, is build a FaceBook or a profile. For a profile people can then choose to be a 'Fan' whilst in groups people can become group members. Many companies now are pushing products, show-casing their business and building client lists via Facebook Groups and profiles. You can read quite a bit more about building traffic through Facebook Groups and in the next blog more details about the way in which you can target specific geo-demographic groups with Facebook Advertising and how to do it.

Free SEO and Google Maps

2008-04-01T21:52:00.000Z

If you have a business and website whose business is based on the local area, then you would be mad not to submit your details for free to Google Maps. This is a free form of advertising and can give you coverage on the top of search pages and it only takes a few minutes to set-up.

A sample of Google Maps is shown in to the left in the image. All you have to do is go to http://maps.google.com/ and set up your local business listing and then you need to validate the listing by receiving a code by SMS which you then enter online or by receiving a postcard to your business address.

Dot.Asia Domains

2008-04-01T21:43:00.000Z

In addition to dot.cn (China) domain suffixes, dot.asia's are another domain you might be interested in. Dot com's are without doubt the best domain to have and are the most universally accepted so if you are involved with business in Asia, you might still want to aim for the dot.com version of the domain you would like.

Dot.eu's have been around in Europe for a while and despite the initial excitement, dot. eu's have now lost mass appeal as people aim for the dot.com suffixes. Dot.asia are thought to be being bought quite a bit at the moment so the choice is really yours as to how valuable you yourself feel this suffix may prove to be.

More than anything, if your business is really aimed at the whol eof Asia an asia suffix might be more of a marketing ploy more than anything for you. One company dealing with this domaoin suffix is www.ASIAdots.com

SEO and traffic via Gadgets

2008-02-06T00:23:00.000Z

New ways of caturing web traffic are continually coming into play and Gadgets is one way which can get you large traffic to your site.

Article submissions, blogging, one way inbound links are all still extremely useful and effective, whilst social networking is becoming helpful. Gadgets though is a form of traffic building which can involve the need for some programming work but in return you could find the traffic gained is huge.

Google Gadgets is one of the main sites worth checking to get an idea of the types of gagdets you can create and what they are all about. In essence, you create some feature of mini-game etc which people are likely to want to put on their site. You are in other words link baiting with a link to your site being in the code of the gagdet you create. Gagdets include things such as:

Mini clocks
Mini aquariums
Scoreboards
Finance news ticker tapes
Photo of the days