SEO Training

Online Marketing Forum

I have just created a brand new Online Marketing forum on my home site.  It will cover SEO at all levels, online and offline marketing and PR.  That’s just as a starting point.

I observed that while there is a huge interest in the business community regarding SEO and Online Marketing in general, there is a natural reluctance to ask questions to real life people.  I understand this completely.  Nobody likes to appear ill informed.  Social Media and SEO are relatively new fields though.  They are also fields where there is a lot of bad information available online.  Online Branding is a new concept to many businesses, particularly for SME’s.

SEO training and Social Media training are my own preferred areas, but while I can personally add a lot to the forum in these areas, I want people to freely express their own views in all areas.  The forum is to be a free information resource.

My purpose in creating the Online Marketing Forum, was to create an environment where people could ask the “silly questions” with a degree of anonymity.  It should also become a place where professionals can argue the pros and cons of their latest thinking.

The forum is brand new, so therefor it is fairly empty at the moment.  Don’t hold back.  If you are involved in Online Marketing or want to find out more about it then join it.  Post a question, comment or hypothesis.  This is a resource for you.  This is a free resource and while it is hosted on the Webshed site, I hope that it will be populated by professionals in competing companies as well as my own.

Mean Hearted SEO's add nofollow tags to their links for no good reason!

Recently Google admitted that no follows (rel=”nofollow”) on links do not actually stop “link juice” from leaving your site.  They just stop the target site from receiving any juice.

How long has this been going on?  Over a year!!!

Why didn’t they tell anybody?  Well, nobody actually noticed so they didn’t feel the need to announce it.

Is there any point in using no follows at all?  Yes.  There is if you do not want Google indexing a page (eg a dynamic form) because it could lead to you having duplicate content.  When it comes to linking to other sites though, if you were happy to link to them for your visitors, you may as well let Google follow.  You are taking the hit anyway.

What is really interesting is that Google were doing this for a year with nobody noticing.  To me that says that there is little damage done by linking out of your site without nofollow.  In fact, it’s just plain mean hearted.

Blogs in particular are full of outbound links.  They still rank pretty well in my experience!  I actually have a theory that the quality of the outbound links is important to SEO.  That is to say, that linking out to good, related pages can actually help your site, rather than hinder it.

This flies in the face of recognised SEO training but, while I have yet to prove it, I am quite convinced.

In the last post I was discussing PPC budgets.  It is easy to think of PPC as the only thing to be included in online marketing budgets, but that is not giving the full picture.  This site is all about SEO training.  Some think of SEO and PPC as being interchangeable.  They are in reality two quite separate topics.

SEO can be seen as a gamble by companies when compared to PPC

I found some stats the other day about budget spends on SEO/SEM(PPC).  The results were quite startling.  In general, over 85% of an online spend is on PPC ads, most notably Google Adwords.  This leaves less than 15% of the budget allocated to SEO.  In this instance, when I refer to SEO I am talking about organic Search Engine Optimisation.

This doesn’t seem like a big deal until you realise that only 14-16% of clicks on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) are actually on the Pay Per Click ads.

Why are so many companies spending such a high proportion of their online marketing budget on something that only yields 14-16% of return?  Why are they not concentrating on trying to get a larger slice of the 85% or so clicks that are coming from “natural” listings?

The truth is that most companies have tried.  However, only some can be successful, because of the limited number of top positions.  For the sake of the argument, let us assume that success is your site appearing on the first page of results.  Let us factor in normal company politics and in particular the accountants. What is going to happen?

Well firstly, somebody, either from Marketing or from IT is going to mention that some work needs to be done on the companies web presence.  Discussion will take place about what needs to be done.  The answer will be “SEO, and we can try some adwords too”.  The accountants will hear, we need to do some “ghrjldjfsdkhf” and we can try some “alkjwonjaef” too.

It needs to be explained.  SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation.  It’s about getting the website up the ranks of google.  Adwords are online ads, where you only pay for each click – as little as 8 cents.

“OK, how much is SEO? Can’t the IT dept do that?”

Ah, but the truth is they have probably already tried.  They may even have had some success and claimed that it is not possible to do much better because of company size, the level of competition, the sun being in aquarius etc.  Put on the spot the only recourse is to offer that SEO is an expert area that requires dedicated consultants to push the site even further. (quite true really).

“Ok, so how much does a consultant cost?…”

“How much?????? And what results will they give us.”

Here they are going to be told that nobody can actually 100% guarantee results.

Let’s sum up.  You can have a fully budgeted spend on adwords, where you can measure results and ROI with ease, or you can spend what seems like a lot of money on an SEO consultant (compared with 8c per click) and have no guaranteed result.

What has been forgotten is that approximately 85% of your potential clicks are coming from the SEO work… not the adwords campaign.  Further more, once the bulk of your initial SEO work is done, so is the bulk of the expense.  Adwords keep charging as long as you need them.  SEO can be dropped for short periods of time without the same total loss of revenue.

Invest in SEO training and your IT staff can maintain and even improve your rankings on their own without the need for massive ongoing spends.

I am not against PPC.  Budgeting 85% of your online spend on adwords is not actually sound financial sense though.  It is aiming for catching a minnow instead of a tuna fish, and the spend is not exactly different over time either.

If you are spending 85% of your online budget on adwords, then your online marketing budget is wrong!

Use internal links to chain your site together and make it work as one unit

One of the things I forgot to mention when I was talking about on-page SEO was internal linking.  This was very remiss of me so I thought I should cover it immediately.

Internal linking is the practice of creating links in your text that point to other pages on your site.  It is a part of SEO training that is often not covered.

Why use internal links?  After all you have a navigation menu so what use are more links to the same pages?  Navigation does not generally allow you use the keywords you would like a page to be found for.  The “home” navigation item is a prime example.  You could forgo the word “home” and put in something that relates to the actual page, but that would be at odds with good heuristics (ease of use) for your user.  Visitors to a website expect to see a home page.  So we need to give it to them.  The trouble is that the word “home” does nothing as far telling a search engine what the page is about (unless you have a property site perhaps).  The same is true with all your navigation links.  They do not give an ideal idea of what the page is about.  They are usually only one or two words long for a start.

With internal linking in your body text, because you control the website, you have total control over what text goes into those links.  Let’s look at it from a search engines point of view.  They look at links, the text in the links and the relevance of the page the link points to.  They assume that the text in the link is representative of the page you are pointing to (otherwise it’s a pointless link).  If you have descriptive text in a link, it tells the search engine a bit more about the page than it could gain from simply crawling the page itself.  You are telling the search engines that the keyword(s) you use in your link are important for that page.  The search engines take that information, and when somebody else types those same keywords into the search engine, the search engine goes, “oh, I know, This page here is about that”, simply because it has been told it is by the link text.  Link text is a prime SEO factor.

That over simplifies it a bit, but it’s all you really need to know about it for now.

How to use internal links.  Like with all areas in SEO, moderation is king.  But I thought it was content that was king I hear you say.  Well yes, but Moderation in SEO efforts is vital.  Otherwise you are stuffing.

Here is a wonderful benefit of using internal link text.  You get the benefit of the words twice.  Say, for example you have a front (home) page on your site (which doubtless you do).  On that page you want to inform visitors about the whole sites’ contents.  To do this you write text that talks about all the things you have going on in the site.  Within that text will be keywords that you want to be found for, and those keywords will relate to other pages on the site.  Make a link out of them and point them to the other pages.

By creating a link in text you are saying to both users and search engines that they can find more information on the subject of the linked text by clicking on it.  The keyword is on the page and at the same time you are pointing out that another page on your site is also related to that keyword.  Sweet.

Blogging is a prime example of where this technique is used well.  I don’t do enough of it.  I sometimes write these posts just to remind myself of what I should be doing.  Take a look at copyblogger though.  Not only do they have a fair few internal links, but they also do a great job of teaching you about writing internet copy (that’s text to you and me).  They also write nice short posts in general, something I should learn from.

A word of caution.

I have seen this done to excess.  Try not to make your pages a horrendous looking sea of links.  Remember that guidelines say that you should have less than 100 links per page.  That includes all your navigation by the way.

Also, I should point out that including several links to the same page within your text is regarded by some (myself included) as a waste of time.  There is some evidence that if you use two different keywords to link to the same page, the first keyword will be given preference and the second will be ignored.  Somebody actually set up an experiment to test it and it would seem to be the case on Google.

Make sure the keywords you use in your link are relevant to both the page you link to and the surrounding text on the page you are linking from.  This is important.

I should have given you the short version of this post really:-

Create internal links with relevant keywords and don’t overdo it!  It will do you wonders.

The 80-20 Rule for onsite/offsite optimization. Yes the 20% is that important.

Following on from the last post on On-page SEO, it occurred to me that I had not mentioned the 80-20 rule.  That’s the trouble with SEO training, there is always something that gets left out!

The 80-20 Rule is quite simple.  Only 20% of your seo ranking will be based on your on-page optimisation.  I think I can hear a collective sigh and a head or two banging against desks.  I know, I know, you thought that if you followed the advice in the last post on On-page SEO that you would be celebrating much in terms of gained rankings.

Sorry, It doesn’t work like that.  That is not to say that On-page SEO is not important.  Indeed I consider it to be the very foundations of SEO.  I am appalled by SEO’s who say they will do all of a sites SEO off page.  20% is not to be sniffed at either, it’s a significant part of 100%, and, as you will have seen from the last post it is not very difficult either once you know what you are doing.

What we are left with though is a massive 80% of our SEO work still to do.  It is the off page SEO that sorts the men from the boys, the women from the girls and the hermaphrodites from the younger hermaphrodites.  Just keep an eye on this blog and we will get there!  I would also suggest you keep an eye on Hobo and grab the SEO e-book available there. I have not got around to writing an e-book yet.

The 80-20 Rule is a myth!

It is certainly not a hard and fast rule.  Nothing much is when it comes to SEO.  Talk to too many SEO’s and you will end up feeling confused.  There is much we disagree on.  As I started out I used to take the commonly held beliefs as fact and then experiment with some of the more “out there” claims made by some SEO’s.  Ultimately I found though that much of the content on the web was out of date.

There is tons and tons of out of date material out there on On-page SEO.  You could end up with half your page being taken up with useless or at least suspect meta tags alone.  These are largely tags that once held some value but no longer do.  Some of them were only relevant to some search engines.

Should you ignore all meta tags?  Not at all. But you can probably apply the 80-20 rule to them as well.  I often don’t bother with the keywords tag.  I certainly don’t bother with things like author tags.  I do however use the Google only “unavailable_after” tag which looks like this….

<meta name='GOOGLEBOT' content='unavailable_after: 12-Jan-2010 01:00:00 GMT' />

I use it where I have pages that are set to expire on certain dates.  It is fairly good at making sure people do not reach expired pages from a Google Search.  Does it have any SEO value?  I think not.  But it is good for visitors, and let us not forget that visitors are the whole reason for this SEO nonsense in the first place.

I’ve done it again, started out with a short post that starts rambling.  I’ll leave it at that for On-page SEO for now.  If you have any queries leave a comment, or contact me through Webshed.  Indeed, if you disagree with what I have written entirely I welcome your comments.  Debate is how we all learn and no SEO is EVER finished learning.