This is quite a question and one that I believe depends on what market you are in and what you need to achieve from your website, if you have a long term view and you are time rich but cash poor then Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is with out doubt the way to go, you will not see dramatic results over night but in a few months you can get significant extra traffic by ensuring your site is set up properly for the search engines to crawl through and index.

If however you have a good budget and need to see immediate results then Pay Per Click (PPC) may be the best way to go, it will send visitors to your site from day one and with the statistics packages available you will be able to see the ads that resulted in conversions and the ones that were ignored by visitors.

This brings us to another important down side of PPC and that is that Ad blindness is worse than ever Comscore, the marketing research company shows that 16% of Internet users are responsible for 85% of all ad clicks on the web, so the vast majority of visitors from your PPC ads may well have clicked before, this may not be a huge problem if the sales levels are good but it is a disturbing trend.

It is important to have robots txt on your site, this allows you a degree of control over where the search engine spiders visit and what they report and store in their index about your site, this allows you to keep them away from commercially sensitive material or out of member only information if you have a membership area on the site.

Matt Cutts a leading engineer at Google has produced a video that explains the robots txt in more detail and and answes some questions such as

Why is my url showing up in Google when I blocked it in robots.txt? Did you fetch that url?

How do I make that url disappear from Google?

The video can be seen on Matts Blog at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/robots-txt-remove-url/

This is going to be be of interest to any one who needs to know how to sculpt the page rank of their sites to ensure they are getting the most from the search engines.

This is an important part of search engine optimisation and implementing these changes on your site in the appropriate manor can help your rankings in the search engines.

One word of advice, do not go too over board with the robots txt file or you might find you have stopped the search engines indexing some important parts of your website and this will see you fall in the rankings rather than rise.

No we are not talking about the Caffeine that fuels so many offices and comes in cups of lovely warm coffee, instead this is Googles latest change to there algorithm, the program that helps them rank websites on the internet and allows them to pull the correct results from the data base when you search for a term.

Caffeine, which is new technology that improves the indexing infrastructure is according to Matt Cutts of Google due to go live some time after the holidays, I have consulted my American to English dictionary and I believe this means in January.

Matt Cutts comments that this is so web developers can enjoy there holidays with out worrying about what effect the changes will have on their sites, although from the initial testing we have seen a well optomised and site with content that adds value to the internet as a whole will benefit rather than suffer when these changes take full effect.

The changes are designed to give a better experience to the user of Google and so if you have a search engine optimisation plan that is not spammy and that adds value to both your site and the whole of the web then you should be looking forward to the introduction of Caffeine.

Keyword research is not something that should ever stop, it needs to be something that you continue through out the life of your website.

The key words are the life blood of your website and ensuring you have enough relevant and commercially economic phrases to look at in the future will ensure you do not get to a point here you are unable to grow and your site becomes static.

There are a number of tools available to help with your keyword research, among them is Googles free keyword research tool, it gives good general information about suggested words to target, the levels of visitors and some idea of what you would expect to pay for a Pay Per Click campaign.

The number of keyword research tools is growing and the only limits are your budget, most good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) companies subscribe to 3 or 4 paid for services that can cost several hundred pounds a month, but as the research is important this is not a cost that should be scrimped on. >

Looking at the keywords and phrases that your competitors are ranked for is a good way of learning the phrases you need to consider and using some of the more advanced features of the paid software you can drill right down into this information to give you the competitive advantage you need.

Asking if it is best to spend more on Pay Per Click (PPC) or Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a little like asking if you would like cake or ice cream, it normally depends on the circumstances at the time.

Pay Per Click is a great way of getting an instant boost for your company, getting the traffic in through the doors when the site is new so that you can test to see how popular the products or services you are selling are going to be, using relatively mall amounts of just a few hundred pounds you will be able to gage if people are interested in what you are promoting.

Once you know they are interested you can begin your marketing in full force, increasing your Pay Per Click budget and bringing in SEO for the site, Search Engine Optimisation is a longer term strategy than the PPC, but it does have the advantage of continuing to run even when you have stopped paying for it, although if it is stopped prematurely in a competitive market you can see the good positions drop quickly.

You are a little limited with the terms you can promote for with PPC as budget is always a concern, but with SEO you can promote for as many phrases as you like and you will find you are being found for phrases you did not even know were of interest to your visitors.

Rather than using PPC or SEO you should be using a combination of the two so that they complement each other as you move your marketing efforts forward, testing new markets with the PPC and promoting your site into the profitable niches using SEO.

Asking if directories and link exchanges a waste of time for search engine optimisation is quite a big question, not all directories are created equal, DMOZ and Yahoo are two excellent directories and getting into either of them should defiantly help your positions in the search engines, however there are also a large number of directories that are not worth looking at.

Link building for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is more about the quality of your links than the quantity, it is easy to build links back to a website by trading them with other site owners and filling out directory listings, but you need to consider where is the value in this.

The main search engines employ very sophisticated software to calculate the importance of links, the relevance how difficult it was for you to get it. If link does not have a lot of relevance, is of low importance and was easy to get then you get a low value score for that link, if however the link is very relevant, has importance and was difficult to get then that link receives a higher score.

In a perfect world all your links would be of excellent quality and you would get a great SEO score from the search engines, but you do not get this in the real world and so you need to aim for as high a score as you can get but at the same time not get too obsessed with just the quality.

So a link from a relevant directory may be more valuable to you than one from a site that has no relevancy, the same is true for a traded link, so long as not all your links are swapped or traded and you have some quality along side the relevant but lower scoring links that is a good combination.

So as not all directories are created equal so not all links are equal either.

What percentage of my marketing budget should I allocate for online marketing?

This is a question we get asked a lot, how much should I budget for online marketing, and in truth there is no short answer, it is more about using the resources you have in the most effective manor.

One way to test the water and see if you product or service has an online market place and customers who are ready to buy is to run a small Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaign, a few hundred pounds is enough to test the water in most cases – you can use any of the main 3 search engines for this as they all have their own PPC sections.

The accounts are simple to set up you can set a budget for the campaign so you know how much it is going to cost you and once you have the ad and keywords in place you should set up conversion tracking to monitor the results.

One of the best things about PPC advertising is that you can change the settings as the campaign runs making tweaks and changes so that you get the most from your advertising.

Once you have established there is a market for what you are offering you can increase your budget and continue using just pay per click or for a longer term strategy you can invest in search engine optimisation (SEO) so your site can be found easily in the search engines.

So the answer to the original question is as much as you can once you have proven to yourself that it works, using the conversion tracking you can see how much each sale has cost you and from there you can work out the profit per £100 you spend on advertising and work out your marketing budget from there.

How to save money on Pay Per Click

You should be using the search query report that Google offers in its Pay Per Click reports, the search query report will help you identify two important pieces of information that will help you pay less for your clicks, increase conversions and stop you wasting your Pay Per Click budget.

The first thing you should look for are the terms that people have used to convert on your site, this can be completing a form or buying a product. Once you know what phrases people are using to buy your products you can change your keywords and advertisements to match.

The second is what phrases people clicked on but did not convert from, often you will find that people use words that trigger your ads but are inappropriate to your site, as an example we have a client who sells metal storage containers, people often search for the phrase plastic storage container this is obviously not going to be of use to our client as he does not offer this service. So what we did was use plastic as one of the negative keywords in his pay per click campaign, this stops his ads being shown when the word plastic is used in a search query.

Using negative keywords can reduce the clicks on your ads from people who are searching for products you do not offer and it can save you a lot of money on waisted clicks.

If you need help with your Pay Per Click marketing or any other aspect of on-line marketing complete the form on the right or give us a ring on 01747 858002 so we can discuss this in more detail.

SEO Job in Wiltshire and Dorset

Cravenplan computers the Salisbury web design company are looking for a talented and experienced individual to join their existing SEO team.

If you are interested in joining the team and have an excellent knowledge of search engine marketing or search engine optimisation contact Sean on 01747 858002 or sean@cravenplan.co.uk.

The following are considered essential for the successful candidate

Skills that would be an advantage

The salary is excellent for the right candidate, so if you think you fit the bill and are interested in working on the Wiltshire / Dorset Border, just outside of Salisbury send your CV along with a covering letter and salary expectaations in a PDF format to sean@cravenplan.co.uk

The salary is excellent for the right candidate, so if you think you fit the bill and are interested in working on the Wiltshire / Dorset Border, just outside of Salisbury send your CV along with a covering letter and salary expectaations in a PDF format to sean@cravenplan.co.uk

We kindly request that no agencies, or companies that do the same or a similar job to agencies contact us about this as I will not be polite and I will think you are very rude for not taking into account my asking you nicely not to contact me please.

Thank you

Sean

Welcome back, yesterday we looked at why Google does not hate your website it is just that they do not understand what the site is about as you have not provided them with enough information or peer approval in the form of quality links.

The increase in quality links combined with targeting the correct keywords and what you will learn today will; give you a firm footing on the clime up the search engine rankings.

So our next topic is

Use of keywords on the site

When you have your keywords for your site you have to use them so the search engines know what your pages are about.

You should try and use just 1 or 2 phrases for each page on your website, make the keywords relevant to the information on that page.

The keywords or phrases should be used in the title of the page, the description and the meta keywords tags, you should use appropriate alt text on any images, try to describe the picture in the alt text, the internal links should also contain the keywords so the search engines can see what each page is about.

You should have text on the page for the search engines to go through, it is also good for your visitors as you need to describe what the products or services are that your website is discussing, 300 + words is normally good but in that text you need to use your keywords, not too often as it will sound false and your visitors will not understand what you are trying to say.

Flash based site design

Flash can look great on a site and many people use this however the search engines can have problems searching through these sites as they are made of images and there is no text for the spiders to pick up on, avoid using too much flash and ensure you have text for your visitors that is not part of an image.

There are many other issues that cause the search engines to not rank a site but generally if you follow the simple guidelines here you should find the love returning from the search engines.