First SEO Completed - Now What?

Ok, so you've completed the first round of your Search Engine Optimisation. You have made your site comply with all the current SEO knowledge and now you can just sit back and watch the traffic roll in, right?  

Wrong.

There is still plenty to do, because unless you're ranking at #1 position for every keyphrase you care to associate yourself with, there is always more to be done.  

There are things you can do (some of them unassisted) that can maintain or improve your Search Engine Ranking Positions.


LINK BUILDING

Inbound links to your website make Search Engines consider your site to be more of an authority and therefore of higher importance than other sites, pushing you up the list of results. The more links the better.
If you know of any online industry directories or resources that will be happy to add a listing and link to your website, go ahead and submit your URL to them.  
If there is link text to specify, use keywords. If your website promotes Joe's Milkbar in Sydney, make the link text read “Sydney Milkbar”, or “Cheap Gobstoppers” not “Click Here” or something equally useless.
You also may know someone else with a website who wants to link to your site. George's Hardware around the corner might be happy to put a link to you on their site. Be aware that they'll probably want one back.
Contact Melbourne Online if you would like us to arrange links for you.


FRESH CONTENT

Search Engines love new content. Update your page. Add a blog to it and write frequently. Keep your product information fresh. Put up new images, new pages, new links, new everything! Use your keywords everywhere you can, but make sure it belongs there, don't just pack irrelevant keywords into a page.
If you have a Content Management System, editing your site will be a breeze, but if your site is more customised then you may need to contact your designer to add content. 
Contact Melbourne Online if you would like a blog or content created or edited for you.


BLOG COMMENTS

Find blogs relating to your business. Comment on those blogs. If you are Joe and own Joe's Milkbar in Sydney, use the following info when commenting:

Name: Sydney Milkbar – Joe
email: joe@joesmilkbar.com.au
Link: http://www.joesmilkbar.com.au
Comment: Insert relevant comment here, something other than “Good blog.”

Make sure your comments are highly relevant to the blog. Add ideas, information, oppinion, even get controvercial if you like, but make sure your comment adds value to the blog, not just a boring post for the sake of it.


Ongoing SEO

Regular SEO work means constant analysis, modification and improvement. We look at your site content, the content of your competitors and then we modify your site to get the best possible results. Ideally this should be carried out monthly but quarterly can suffice depending on your requirements.
Contact Melbourne Online to arrange monthly or quarterly SEO updates for your site.

Visit Melbourne Online for more.

Recession – Sink or Swim

The word recession produces different reactions in different people. There is no doubt that times are hard and they're about to get harder, but is it the end of the World? Is it the end of your business? For some it is. I put it to you that there are four categories business operators fall into at this time.

1) The Over-extended
For these folk their business was already walking the thin line between operation and insolvency and any downturn in income would have tipped them over the edge. A recession is truly insurmountable for them. By now these businesses have probably already failed.

2) The Oblivious
These people have businesses which could, with a little effort, survive or even prosper in a recession. The problem is that the people running these businesses have not planned or prepared for a recession. They think that by not acknowledging the economic downturn it will just go away. These businesses will probably fail in the coming months. If they do manage to survive they will come out the other end much worse off.

3) The Overly Cautious
We've all worked for or dealt with one of these companies. These are the ones who, at the first mention of economic hardship, pucker up so tight that not a single cent gets spent. These are the companies laying off workers, slowing production, stopping advertising, canceling orders and, in all ways possible, feeding the recession.
Sadly they do this because they know it means they will survive the recession. They will worry later about the hits they've taken in the process – lost market share, lost suppliers, lost skilled employees and lost brand confidence.

4) The Opportunistic
These people don't see recession, they see opportunity. These people find a way to not only survive the recession, but to come out on top. They find a way to pick up the business lost by other companies; they take advantage of cheap advertising rates to build their brand; they forge new corporate relationships with like-minded companies and together they move forward. They know that any weakness of others can be a strength of theirs. They know that it is easier to implement a new idea now than ever.

This is a sink or swim moment for businesses. New businesses are at an advantage, not having the investment of established companies.
The Internet holds great potential for new and expanding businesses to cheaply build their brand, their customer and supplier base and to establish themselves as leaders in their fields.

Take advantage of great opportunities.

Search Engine Optimisation – How to Optimise Your Site

SEO is a difficult process. There are many tricks, many intricacies and many pitfalls.  
Leaving aside the lesser points, here are some SEO instructions that will cover the main points to optimise your web page.

1) Optimise one page at a time. Google looks at each page individually as well as your Website as a whole. If you have a Website about farm animals, don't try to optimise every page for horses, cows and sheep, have one page for each.

2) Select well-performing keyphrases. Ensure the keyphrases you select are keyphrases someone might actually search for. You can do this using the Google Keyword Tool. Read more about selecting appropriate keyphrases.

3) Page URL is important. Name your pages with keywords ie. www.farmexample.com/cows.html. This is Google's first indication that your page is relevant to a search for “cows”. To name your pages like this, the file you create for your page must be titled cows.html (or .asp or .whatever). Remember that if you are renaming a page you must 301 redirect to the new page. For example if your cows page is currently named page1.html then you should 301 redirect page1.html to cows.html otherwise Google will see it as duplicate content

4) Page Title Tag is the next most important item. The aim of your title is to provide an accurate title with as many keywords as possible. The Title goes in the head section of your page. For example: 
Cows | Example farm animals Australia | Cows, Bulls and Calves
The length of your Title Tag is up to you and there is no definite word limit, but Yahoo has one of the longest Title displays at 120 characters so certainly keep it below that. Google displays up to 66 characters, so perhaps that's a good length to aim for. My opinion is that Titles rarely need to be lengthy, so unless you can see good reason to do otherwise, aim for approximately 60 characters or less.

5) Page Description Tag is also up there. Make sure you don't just list a whole heap of keywords in here, make it a description worth reading because Google may actually display this in the results. You should use your description to sell your site whilst also including keywords. For example:  
Cows information in Example Farm Animals Australia – Information, photos and videos of Cows
Again there is no real word limit. My opinion is that the description should be longer than your title but not novel length. I personally aim for 100 characters or less.

6) Page Content. This is the body text of the page – the text people read once they land on your site. The SEO cliché is that “Content is King” and as sick of reading it as I am, true it is.
This is the part where I feel it would be unjust of me not to point out that the most optimised page in the world will convert no customers if the page content is meaningless. DO NOT fill your page content with keywords. Keywords will flow readily if the content is relevant to the keywords. It is of no use writing simply “Cows eat grass. Cows give milk. Cows have four stomachs.” This will only disappoint the page viewer and they will click back faster than your page can load.  
My technique is to write the page copy thinking nothing of keywords. I then read back over it and if there are places where I can substitute keywords without disturbing the flow of the page then I do so. NEVER sacrifice content for keywords.

So there you go, there are the basics. If it already looks too hard or time consuming or if you are competing for more sought-after keyphrases simply contact me for an SEO quote.

I'm actually pretty open to being contacted about this stuff so if you have questions ask them in a comment on this blog and I'll be happy to answer.

Visit Melbourne Online for more.

Search Engine Optimisation / Search Engine Marketing – Which one is for me?

Increasing Website traffic is a great way to boost business for most companies even if their core business is not online-based. Getting more people looking at your Website means more exposure for your business, higher company profile and more chance for word of mouth.  
There are a few ways to get traffic and two of the most popular are Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM).  

Search engines are the best place to start steering customers because now this is the first place people go to find a product or service. Gone are the days where we turn to the yellowpages; now we head straight for Google.

So which is the solution for you? Let's look at the differences.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Organic search results are the unpaid results that appear in your search. These are the Webpages the search engine thinks are the most relevant to your search.  
Searchers tend to pay a lot of attention to the first three organic results, some attention to the rest of the first page, occasionally they will navigate as far as the third page and they will almost never look any further.  
SEO is the art/science of enhancing the visible and invisible parts of a Website to gain increased volume and quality of traffic to the site. The aim is to make the page highly relevant to certain Keywords and phrases and for Google to consider the site highly relevant for searchers of those terms and, therefore, display the site in the organic search results. 
If your site appears on the first page for a certain Keyphrase you are guaranteed to get a share of that Keyphrase's traffic. The higher in the results you appear, the better.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
The paid advertisements on the search results page of Google are at the top of the page and down the right hand side. In other search engines they can be in different positions including at the bottom of the page and scattered throughout the search results.
The benefit of paid appearances is that they appear on the front page for your chosen Keyphrases regardless of how poorly optimised your site is. You can spend as much as you like to ensure you appear on the front page for as many Keyphrases as you wish (some limitations apply).
The disadvantage is that users do have a tendency to skim over ads and concentrate more on the organic results.  

In Summary
SEO is a long-lasting effect, putting your site in a credible, highly visible position for people searching for your type of site. It will pay dividends long after you have forgotten what it cost.
SEM is just as targeted and more guaranteed but only lasts while you're spending the money. The cost over time will be far greater than SEO.  

My Advice
Use both. Target your keyphrases hard by also paying for listing even if the organic and paid results appear on the same page. Pay more for keyphrases for which you can't achieve front page ranking.

Search engines are where Internet traffic starts. Make the most of it.

Visit Melbourne Online for more.

Search Engine Optimisation – Recent Successes

Some successes recently that I feel the need to brag to you about:

Voltage Health and Fitness - a personal training business located in Burwood, have just started up their company. Their website was put together themselves, but the SEO was done by Melbourne Online. On first analysis Google didn't even know they existed.
Two weeks later they now rank number 3 on Google for Personal Training Burwood.
Check out their great search ranking for Personal Training.

WaveAV.com.au is an audio visual service in Sydney. We redesigned their website from scratch. Search Engine Optimisation strategies were employed during construction only, no SEO update has been undertaken and yet the site still ranks on the first page at number 9 for Seminar AV Sydney.
See their great search ranking for Seminar AV.

Our own website, MelbourneOnline.com.au concentrates on Internet Marketing and Online stores. It now ranks #7 for Melbourne Internet Marketing and #8 for Melbourne Online Stores. These are tough keyphrases to optimise for, given that Internet Marketers are generally fairly switched on with SEO.
Check out our great search ranking for Internet Marketing.
Check out our great search ranking for Online Stores.

Think about your own core business and check to see where you rank for it on Google.

Visit Melbourne Online for more.

Search Engine Optimisation – Keywords, Keyphrases or Longphrases?

Web designers know that what you are interested in from them is a good looking, functional site with no glitches, so Search Engine Optimisation is rarely at the top of their list of priorities.
If you are doing your own SEO you are going to be considering exactly what search terms you want your site optimised for.
It's sometimes difficult to know what somebody looking for your product would type into Google to find you. If you had a hamburger shop for example you might think you should simply optimise your site for “Hamburgers”, but is that what you would type if you were looking for one?

Selecting Keywords:
Keywords are easy. In our hamburger shop scenario the obvious Keyword is

• Hamburgers.  

The store may also specialise in 

• Cheeseburgers and 

• Fries.

So now we have 3 Keywords.
That's the easy bit.

Selecting Keyphrases:
It's very rare that a searcher would find what they were looking for with a single word. Living in the Northern suburbs of Melbourne I would not expect my local hamburger shop to pop up when I Google “Hamburgers”. I would expect that I would need to enter three or four words before finding exactly what I want. Keyphrases are often referred to as “Long Tail Keywords”. Why? I don't know, “Keyphrases” works better for me.
To produce a suitable Keyphrase from your Keyword, a good idea is to add a location or a description to your Keyword.

• Best hamburgers Melbourne, 

• Best cheeseburgers Melbourne and 

• Best fries Melbourne
  

might be appropriate Keyphrases. 
When entering these Keyphrases in your Website, use them in your metadata and your copy. Where possible, use the entire Keyphrase but partial is better than nothing if that's all that fits well.  
Remember where the possibility of fitting a Keyphrase clashes with good copy, favour good copy every time.

Selecting Longphrases:
Google has reported a recent rise in the number of Longphrases (search phrases of five or more words) entered into a search. A Longphrase is very specific, so if a user lands on your site after searching for it, there is a good chance they want exactly what you are providing.
A user may search Google for

• Low fat cheeseburgers and fries in Melbourne,

• Hamburgers order online Halal Melbourne

• Where is the best place to get Hamburgers in North Melbourne?

A great way to get these Longphrases into your text is to add an FAQs page to your site. This will allow you to write down the question in the form a searcher may type it and then answer the question with other Longphrases relating to the same point. If you keep it factual you will add value to your content.

Even if you have a Search Engine Optimisation professional to do your site SEO for you, it is a good idea to start thinking about these Keywords, Keyphrases and Longphrases because nobody knows your business and your clientele like you do. It's no good letting your SEO firm assume you are also a fish and chip shop if all you do is hamburgers and fries.  

Visit Melbourne Online for more.

Search Engine Optimisation – How much should I spend?

Search Engine Optimisation is still considered a black art to some extent, because only Google (and other search engines) programmers really understand the science behind it.
What you're paying for when you hire an SEO professional is not only their time spent on your site, but for the expertise they are constantly accumulating by keeping up with changes to search trends and search engine behaviours.
SEO professionals spend a lot of time at the start of their career using trial and error to find the best way to get sites ranking higher on Google. You're paying to skip straight to the results, to not spend hours obsessing over wording, layout and headings. You're paying, as with any profession, to not have to learn the art yourself.

So how much is a reasonable fee for SEO?
SEO comes in a few forms, so lets look at them separately.

What is a reasonable fee for a single SEO analysis?
I have heard of ridiculously high costs for a single analysis – up to $80k in one case, but that was for an intricate analysis of an extremely large corporate site so it may have been justified.
Rest assured that this is not the ballpark for most businesses.
In general if you want an SEO analysis including recommended changes for a site under ten pages you should expect to pay $600 - $1500 depending on the number of keywords and pages you'd like analysed.

What is a reasonable fee for a one-off SEO analysis including implemented revisions?
This will depend on various factors relating to both your industry and your site such as:

• Quality and quantity of competition for your selected keyphrases 

• How many keyphrases you have selected

• How many pages and how much text on your site.  

• How much content needs to be written from scratch

For an analysis with implemented changes again on a site under ten pages you would expect to pay $900 - $2000. You should make sure you get a before and after analysis with this.

What is a reasonable fee for ongoing SEO?
This will depend on all the same dot points as above, but in general you should allocate $2k - $8k per year for ongoing Search Engine Optimisation. This should include monthly reports so you can monitor the effectiveness of SEO efforts. Most SEO companies will want you to agree to at least 6 months.

Prices increase if your site has more pages, if you want to optimise for more keyphrases or if you are trying to tackle high-demand keyphrases. If you want to incorporate link-building, that's an entirely different task again.

Visit Melbourne Online for more.