SEO Training

WEBSHED RSS Poster. Post your Blog and other feeds to Twitter automatically

I haven’t yet fully integrated it into my site yet and it should be considered a beta version, but here is a sneak preview of a new free service on my main site….

It is an RSS feed poster that will take your RSS feeds and publish them to Twitter automatically.  More than that, it is a feed aggregator that allows you to combine up to 6 individual feeds into one feed.  Why?  Well, for example, facebook only allows you publish one feed to your notes page.  So this aggregator allows you to publish up to 6 feeds.

It is called the WEBSHED RSS poster and to use it just click Publish My Feeds To Twitter!

I’ll update you all more when I have it properly integrated into the site an prettied up a bit.  In the meantime I’d welcome any feedback or comments you have on it.

When starting out on an SEO campaign where do you actually begin? How do you organise and prioritise? What is more important: social media, link building, content?

These questions are valid for everybody. They are particularly relevant if you have been charged with your company’s online marketing and are not 100% sure exactly what to do in order to get results that will get you a clap on the back.

Your SEO campaign needs planning to make you look good.

It all has to start with SEO analysis.  My granny used to knit a lot.  The house was littered with knitting patterns.  Try building a house without blueprints.  The same is true for online marketing and SEO.  Without a clear picture of what has to be done you will end up with a proverbial one armed jumper (an itchy one at that) or a house with architectural properties similar to that of my own (and the builders actually had plans!).

SEO analysis allows you to work out exactly where you stand right now and provides pointers for where you can achieve that all important traffic and Google rankings. Think of an SEO analysis report as an SEO blueprint.  A good SEO analysis report will tell you:

• What keywords am I using currently?
• Is my website standards compliant? (good code base)
• How can my site structure be improved? (for ease of use and for SEO)
• How does my site compare to that of competitors for SEO?
• What keywords are competitors using?
• What sites link back to my site?
• What sites link to my competitors sites?
• What are my sites Strengths, Opportunities, Weaknesses, Threats? (SWOT analysis)

A really good report will also bring in social media and assess what can be done there too.  It will also explain the effects of these different aspects on your websites online performance.

Webshed offer a SEO Health Check that incorporates these features.  That is because it is the essential building block of any online campaign.

If you are about to start an SEO campaign, do not go into it blind.  Have a clear plan based on facts and your life will be made that much easier and there is less possibility of spending lots of time on little return.

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.

I've heard of a fire engine, but what is a search engine?

The difference between SEO and SEM is that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation while SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing.

Strictly speaking SEO means targeting just search engines.  It is concerned with getting your site as far up the Google, yahoo and Bing rankings for chosen keywords as possible.  Achieving that is done in many ways.

SEM on the other hand has several meanings in regular use.  Some think of it purely as PPC (pay per click) advertising campaigns.  These are the ads you see on the right of the search results in search engines, and occasionally occupying the top slots.  I like to think of it as much more than that though.

When I think of SEM the word marketing takes priority.  I like to think of Search Engine Marketing as encompassing SEO but taking into account the user experience.

Let me expand on that.  A site may be extremely well optimised from an SEO perspective, ranking well in the major search engines, but that does not mean that the site is a good user experience.

It is a mistake to put SEO ahead of user experience.  I’ll give you an example. The following is SEO optimised text

Car washing by the car washing experts.  At Car Washing Ireland we wash cars all day every day.  When it comes to car washing we are the number one car washing company in Ireland.  If your car needs car washing then you have found the right site.  Contact us and one of our mobile car washing units will be dispatched to you and one of our car washing experts will have your car gleaming.  You will be so impressed with our car washing that you will return to car washing ireland again and again.

Actually, that is terrible SEO.  I have exaggerated it hugely.  The point is that SEO optimised text is not necessarily particularly readable text.  If the quality of English is high, then you use different words or phrases to describe the same thing.  This is at odds with SEO, where you want to repeat your key phrases.

The object is to achieve good legible text that a user will read, while retaining a keyword density that is reasonably high (though not much above 5% of total text).  It would be entirely better for both SEO and the user experience to write the above text with far fewer instances of “Car Washing”.

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is all about S......elling!

SEM is more holistic.  It encompasses good SEO techniques for on page content (but not at the expense of the user experience).  It also covers Social Media as well as PPC advertising and even banner or button advertising.  Search Engine Marketing is about selling your site online.

A lot of SEO’s make the mistake of using the meta description purely to put in keywords.  Same goes for the page title.

In the case of the meta description it is fairly likely that google does not include that text in any meaningful way in its ranking algorithms.  I am not saying that you should not put keywords into the meta description or page title, but use them to better effect.

Better effect means using them to sell.  To stick with our car washing example, The title can be “Car washing Ireland”, the meta description could read “Get your car washed at home or at work.  We come to you.  Discount for online booking”.  No key words.  Just good descriptive text that helps sell the service.

The whole reason for this post was because I am writing about Social Media and somebody asked me “what has social media got to do with SEO training?”.

Well these days you can’t market your website online without at least paying lip service to social media.  And if you know your stuff (or get Social Media Training) then you can really make it work for you in a big way.  Look at what happened with the Susan Boyle clip on You Tube.  She became an overnight, international sensation, from a clip of an audition!  Wow.  That just does not happen with traditional media.

Why do companies invest thousands of euros in SEO training?  It’s all part of their marketing mix.  SEO is marketing.  Therefore, SEO is SEM and SEM includes SEO.  By the way.  I’ve just broken a rule there.  I’ve overused the phrases again (my site may pay for all this bad SEO!).  I was only playing with words, but be careful.  Remember we are dealing with dumb machines (no matter how good the algorithms are).  They do not see a bit of word play, but rather an attempt at keyword stuffing, which can hurt your ranking.

So, SEM is all about selling.  SEO is just about trying to get better ranking on Google et al.

One of these days I’ll learn to write short concise posts, but I hope that I’ve cleared up the difference between SEO and SEM somewhat.

Social Media Training, No sweat required!

Social Media Training?  What do I need that for?  That’s Twitter and other nonsense isn’t it?

If you are in business then you need to learn, and learn before your competitors.  Let me put it in old world terms….

If you open up your newspaper and see your competitors adverts plastered all over the pages, with no reference to your own business you would not be happy.  If you see a competitors advertisement on the television, and you are not advertising on it yourself, you would equally be a little worried.  Then you wake up in the morning and on the way to work notice that the $!@%’s have advertised on billboards too.  Who is going to take more revenue, you or your painful, advertising competitor?

The online world is no different when it comes to exposure equaling success.  Here we have a medium that is in just about every home and workplace in the developed world.  The potential for increasing your exposure is giganenormous!  The competition is, however, fierce.

Ok, so there is a lot of competition, are there any upsides?  Absolutely.  What was your budget for PR and advertising this year?  What if you could reach the same number (or many more people) and all it would cost you is a bit of time, and maybe some outlay on bringing in somebody to train you (which just saves you time and points you in the right direction).

Not convinced of the need?  Lets take a look at what is happening in recruitment right now.  I have chosen recruitment because I happen to be in the thick of it, and recruitment is at the cutting edge of online developments.  First we saw a reduced spend in traditional media like newspapers.  Before the internet took off newspapers are where everybody looked for jobs.  Then came the big job boards.  They made a lot of money, charging for every job posted on them.  Now there is a not so subtle shift occurring once again.   Recruitment Agencies are beginning to use social media and it is being so successful for them that they can afford to drop some of the expensive job boards.  They are saving money and finding the results fantastic.  Obviously this is not true of all of them.  This is where Social Media Training comes in.  You can waste lots of time on social media if you don’t know what you are doing.

So what should you be doing?  In Ireland there are three main sites to focus on.  They are Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin.

In following posts I will explain how they interact with each other, and how to harness them to help your bottom line.

In the mean time, if you want quick guidance and training on SEO and Social Media, drop a comment on this post. Do not forget to leave your email address and a telephone number! (No numbers will be published online)