There has been a lot written about the impact of the Google Panda and Penguin algorithm changes that have been made over the last couple of years.  They have had a major impact on search engine optimisation and many of the techniques used by SEO companies now no longer work.  This has damaged the Google rankings of many sites that have used such techniques.  However, Panda and Penguin can actually be good news for your website.

Why Google Are Doing This

Let’s look at this from Google’s point of view.  They want to deliver the most relevant and quality web page content as a search result.  Therefore, anything which artificially promotes the ranking of content which is either less relevant or of poor quality is a bad thing as far as they are concerned.

Panda and Penguin are the steps that Google have taken to prevent poor quality and less relevant content being ranked highly.  Put simply Panda looks at the quality of the content and Penguin looks at the quality of the inward links to that web page (as Google ranks pages more highly if they have inward links from good sites).

How This Can Help Your Site

Therefore, if your site has poor quality content and dodgy artificial inward links then your rankings are going to get hit.  If you haven’t been hit yet, you will be!

The solution is quite simple.  Make sure that your site has good quality content that is relevant to the search terms for which you want to be found.  Also, as I’ve advised before, make sure that those desired search keywords are reflected in your URLs, titles, headings, link names and alternative text.  There are other things you can do including social sharing signals and customer reviews.  If you want inward links make sure they too are from quality sites that are relevant.  Also, take advantage of Social Media and online PR.

So, if you you have a site with relevant quality content then Panda and Penguin are going to help you because they are going to push down the rankings of your poorer quality competitors.

In addition to developing new websites, a lot of the work I do is in analysing, optimising and promoting existing websites.  Often, the websites I look at have been beautifully designed but aren’t working for their business because they’re either not drawing in enough visitors or not converting enough of those visitors into customers (or both).

Good Web Design is Not Enough for Search Engine Optimisation

A good web designer will build a brilliant looking website but, in my experience, they are rarely able to optimise the website for search engines and don’t pay enough attention to calls to action for converting visitors into customers.  Optimisation is specialist work that requires special skills, experience and tools.

How an Internet Marketing Consultant Can Help Your Website

Here are the sorts of things an Internet Marketing Consultant can do for your website and your business.

Competitive Analysis

1. Conduct a full analysis of your website and your competitors’ websites to see how you rank against the competition.
2. Identify the most popular search terms used by those searching for your products and services.
3. Determine the most effective keywords to help you rise above your competition.

Search Optimisation

1. Provide instructions to your web developer on how to deploy the selected keywords in content, titles, URLs, headings, link names and alternative text.
2. Ensure that page descriptions are compelling so that they draw in visitors when they appear in search results.
3. Provide instructions to your web developer on how to improve visitor conversion.
4. Review the changes made and ensure that Analytics are set up to monitor performance.

Website Promotion

1. Use directory listings, social bookmarks and article marketing to provide valuable inward links to your website.
2. Where appropriate use online PR to build high value links to your website.
3. Use social media (e.g. Linked-in, Twitter and Facebook) to further improve your online presence.

 How Your Optimised Website Will Help Your Business

With your website optimised for the search keywords, Google will properly index it and give it a better ranking in searches.  The online promotion will build inward links and further improve rankings.  The compelling descriptions will draw visitors to your site.  The conversion improvements will help turn more of those visitors into customers.

Here is a picture of an unhappy website – it’s very lonely.  It’s lonely because it’s not getting many visitors.

How do you help a lonely website?  Simple, you bring it more visitors by doing two things…

1. Make it easier for people to find.
2. Make it engaging so that people want to visit it.

Search Marketing – How to be Found on the Web

Imagine that you’re going to a sales presentation in a really big conference centre that has loads of rooms.  You’re going to need very good directions and signposts to find the right room.  Well, you can imagine that the Internet is like a conference centre with over 50 Million rooms so your going to needs some really good directories and signposts to help visitors find your site.

Signposts for your Website

You’ve got to market your site to search engines so they can help visitors find you – this is known as search marketing (or search engine optimisation) and these are some of the things that you need to do.

1. Make sure that Google indexes your website  against the search terms that prospective customers will enter when looking for your products and services.  Google will use titles, headings, link names and descriptions (not just keyword tags) to index your website.  You want to make sure that these titles, headings, link names, descriptions and keywords match up to the terms that people will use when searching for the products and services that you provide.  It’s particularly important to make your description tage compelling as this is what will appear when your website appears in search results.
2. Build lots of inward links into your website from other sites.  This has two uses.  First, Google ranks sites higher the more inward links they have so if you have lots of (relevant) inward links then you will appear higher in the Google search results (you need to aim to be on the first page at least).  Second, you are setting up more places on the Internet that will point visitors to your site – just like signposts.  Article sites and business directories are the best ways of building inward links to your site.
3. Make sure that you’ve set up your Google Place.  This is another free directory entry and will appear in search results when people search for your products and services along with a geographic reference (e.g. a city or region).
4. You can also use paid search advertising to drive visitors to your site.  This is useful in the early days as the indexing and link building will take some time to work.  Depending upon your business you may want to consider using Linked-in or Facebook for paid advertising in addition (or instead of) search advertising.

 Make Your Content Valuable

search engine optimisation brings website visitors

Once prospects have found your website they not only need to actually visit it they also need to make money for you buy buying stuff (or at least contacting you or signing up for your newsletter so they may buy stuff in the future).  This is known as ‘conversion’ (i.e. converting visitors to customers).

You do this by making your content and sales offers valuable (and hopefully unique).  The content has got to be engaging – interesting, useful or entertaining.  The visitors need to be given reasons for conversion (i.e.to  do what you want them to do).  These reasons need to be very clear and the path through your website blindingly obvious.

If you do all these things right then your website won’t be lonely any more as it will have lots of visitors!  Also, you’ll be happy too because those visitors will be buying stuff from you.

Although August is traditionally the ‘silly season’, there have been some significant events in the mobile marketplace.  Here’s a summary of them with the implications for mobile marketing.

Google Buys Motorola’s Mobile Phone Division

This puts Google into a similar position as Apple whereby it can control both the hardware (from Motorola) and software (Android) on its mobile devices (both phones and tablets).  This will result in Google branded devices with better user experience as the hardware and software will be managed as a whole rather than Android being spread out over many different devices.  There will also be a solid Google Android focus for the competition against Apple.  It’s worth noting that the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 3GS both outsell any other smartphone and that no other tablet has come even close to the iPAD (I reckon that Amazon have the best chance with a Kindle tablet).  The implications will be a better controlled platform for Android App development and lower prices as there will be a clear competitor to the iPhone.  However, HTC and Samsung (who make Android based devices) must be getting nervous.  RIM (Blackberry) have been losing market share to Android and this will accelerate.

HP Withdraw From The Mobile Device Marketplace

HP are giving up on WebOs and will be withdrawing from making smartphones and tablets.  Their much touted tablet offering failed to gain any traction at all (until its price was slashed to less than £100).  Generally, the problem faced by Apple competitors is that people don’t want a tablet – they want an iPad!  Again, this will focus competition.  One wonders now what will happen to RIM (under heavy competitive pressure) and the train crash that is Nokia.

Apple Announces iCloud

iCloud is Apple’s cloud based service for music/file storage and email/calendar/contact synchronisation.  It replaces the (somewhat unreliable) Mobile Me (which incredibly was more expensive than Google Apps).  The immediate benefit will be that you do not have to sync your iPad/iPhone/iPod with your computer – all your music etc will be held in the cloud and kept in sync automatically.  There will be a file storage service along the lines of Dropbox although I have my worries about reliability (I had a lot of problems with Mobile Me) and convenience (Dropbox has ‘normal’ folders in your directory structure that are kept automatically synced and backed up).   I expect we will see similar offerings from Amazon and Google.

Sony Playstation Network Hack

In an earlier post I said that privacy would be driven by consumer concerns and libertarian pressure groups.  The Sony Playstation network hack may have impacted 100 Million people.  Imagine their concerns.  Imagine the damage to Sony’s reputation.  Imagine the impact to their finances if they had to make a payout (even a small one) to many of those affected – we are looking at Billions and any regulatory penalty will fade into insignificance.  Look at what Big Brother Watch is saying about this.  Companies are now going to be more concerned about security and privacy because of the potential reputation and financial consequences than regulataory pressure.

Skype and Facebook (or Google)

There are rumours that both Facebook and Google are looking at either buying Skype or forming a joint venture.  For Facebook, acquiring Skype would make perfect sense as it would enhance Facebook’s position as a personal communications and interaction tool.  I’ve posted some thoughts before on this here, here and here.

Kindle and iPad Rumours

There are rumours flying around that Amazon is going to bring out a touchscreen tablet version of the Kindle in the second part of the year.  In my view, the Kindle is the iPad’s main rival.  The Kindle is a simple, lightweight and cost effective device with a great range of content.  Imagine how competitive a colour touchscreen version would be.  There are also rumours (perhaps less credible) that the next iPad will have a 3D screen.

Search Marketing

Search marketing is all about getting your website to appear when prospects search on something that relates to your business.  Search marketing covers both pay per click (PPC) advertising and search engine optimisation.

Here are some tips on both forms of search marketing.  Paid advertising will give quick results whilst search engine optimisation can take three months or more to build up an effect.

Paid Search Advertising

1. You must think like your customers and pick keywords that they will search on when looking for products and services that you provide.
2. Make your ad compelling to get searchers to click on it.  Remember, the higher the quality of your ad, the lower PPC cost is needed to win click auctions.  Create several ads so that you can monitor relative performance.
3. Your ad should link to a page dealing specifically with the search related products or services; not a general home page.
4. Use the Google tools to research keyword PPC cost and set realistic bids and daily budgets.
5. Monitor your campaign and optimise keywords, ads, bids and budgets as necessary.
6. There are now tools that automate a lot of this process for you and perform regular optimisation to maximise both cost effectiveness and conversion.

Search Engine Optimisation

1. A good general rule is what’s good for visitors is good for search engines.
2. Make sure that the keywords are reflected in your content.
3. In particular put in keywords into headings, titles and descriptions.
4. Make sure that all images have alternative descriptions that are keywords.
5. Make sure that you update your content at least once a month and that updates are dated.  People and search engines all love fresh and dated content.
6. Put in a site map.
7. Get lots of inward links from partner sites, directories, blogs, articles press releases and social media presence.