A prospective client recently asked me ‘what do the search engines look for?’ A simple question you might say, but it’s deceptively simple and I spent quite some time thinking about how best to answer.
The difficulty was that they just wanted a top-10 list. And whilst choosing ten factors out of the hundred plus that we know about (check out this list of google ranking factors) could be potentially misleading, I didn’t want to overload them with too much detail.
WordPress is a great blogging platform. It’s free in its basic form although integrating into your website, as we’ve done at Cicada, may incur a fee. And there are loads of free plugins to enhance it for analytics, social, and anti-spam functionality to name just a few.
The more I use WordPress the more I’m discovering other great ways to enhance it and to find solutions to some of its shortcomings. One shortcoming I want to talk about today is this: whenever you create or use a category or tag in your blog, you provide multiple pathways for people to find your post. This is good. However, an effect of this is that you are creating multiple URLs for a single post. So you could find this article about Econsultancy’s Internet Marketing Strategy briefing over here or here or here or here.
Google is generally very good at delivering search results that are relevant to your query. But did you know there are ways to provide more specific instructions on what you want? Some of these work on Bing and Yahoo too, though I have to confess I’ve not tried all of them out on those search engines…
Advanced queries for mining deep information on the web are known as ‘google hacks’. And since I’ve been using them more and more recently I thought it would be helpful to share some of my favourites.
Starting with the basics:
Placing double inverted commas “like this” around your search string returns an exact match search result.
Donations are the heartbeat of any charity and essential to their lifespan. Often the main purpose of a charity’s website is to encourage donations and to provide information to encourage site visitors to donate.
There are lots of things a charity should bear in mind to ensure they’re making the most of their website. Here are some tips to guide you in the right direction.
This post is written by Pedalo, a London-based web design agency specialising in charities.
The homepage is the most important page on any website. It’s essential that the homepage provides an immediate positive impression. Concise text explaining what is contained within the site and guiding users to the next steps is vital. The key to the homepage is to communicate your core message and provide easy access to the next action.
One of the best SEO books I’ve read in recent years is “50 ways to make Google love your website” by Steve Johnston and Liam McGee and it’s available from Amazon UK here. Cheesy name I know but don’t be fooled by it: if you’re interested in SEO then get this book.
The thing I use most often from this book is the keyword research tool. In this post I’ll explain how the tool works and give it to you to download as a ready-made Excel spreadsheet.
Econsultancy have just published a 46-page Internet Marketing Strategy briefing which is free to download. It analyses five key current trends:
I know about this because they’ve just emailed to tell me. The email, from CEO Ashley Friedlein, said:
“It’s a bit unusual for us to make something like this free. It’s an experiment in ‘content marketing’ – a hot topic in digital marketing and something we examine in the briefing itself.
When disaster strikes across the globe, the internet can become a very competitive place. Charities often put increased effort into gaining exposure and support for their related interests, and the search engine results pages can get clogged up with authoritative news pages and multi-media content.
This climate can make it difficult for a charity to gain the exposure they need, so here are six things you can do to make sure your charity website is doing as well as possible in the search engine results:
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So we’ve been running Adwords campaigns for our client first Line IT for a few years now. It took a bit of effort to get them settled down, but they’re now delivering a productive funnel of sales enquiries and we don’t need to change them very much… on the basis of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”.
What we have been doing, is regularly checking Google Analytics to see which keywords deliver traffic to the site. Analytics gives excellent data on this, particularly if you use a filter to expose the actual keywords searched. Whenever we see a keyword that’s not relevent to the services provided, we make a note and add it to the negative keyword list for the Adgroup or Campaign.
Negative keywords?
Google Analytics allows you to create a list of words that could be related to your paid for keywords, but for you which you don’t want your ads to appear. For example, we sponsor the keyword “broadband providers” for the First Line Telecoms brand. A while back, the ad was fired when someone searched for satellite broadband providers. But First Line doesn’t provide satellite services, so the cost of the click was completely wasted. But by adding ‘satellite’ to the negative keyword list, we can be sure that that won’t happen again.
This is a pretty simple thing to do do routinely, say twice a month, and it’s pretty much all we’ve been doing to our Adwords over the last year. The results have been great:
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| Click to see a bigger image, you’ll see that Click Through Rate has gradually gone up, whilst impressions – as you’d expect, have gradually gone down. |
OK, here’s the story: in August 2010 we project managed the creation and launch of the website for First Line’s new telecoms business called, logically, First Line Telecoms. To keep costs and complexity down, we based the site design on the IT support site, changing just the colour scheme and of course, creating new content.
Now, telecoms is quite a technical business and is absolutely littered with acronyms. Since the First Line offer is aimed at non-technical as well as technical audiences and is based around great service as well as technology, we thought it would be helpful to create content in plain english. Easier said than done! We quickly found that online, there’s precious little telecoms content written in plain english.
Our next port of call was to spend quite some time hassling colleagues, getting them to explain the concepts so we could write about them in language that non-experts would find meaningful and helpful.
We’ve just come up for air after reviewing a website for a large international charity. It’s been an interesting piece of work for many reasons, not least of which because we found ourselves looking at SEO reviews by other providers. What this showed is that there is definately more than one answer to the question “what is SEO?”
Let me explain: Continue reading »
