The number of people I have spoken to over all my years of on-line marketing the one reoccurring theme seems to be, Google hates my website or my business is different and the search engines down grade my site because there are well known names in the same market.

These are pretty serious things to claim and when ever I hear them I like to dig a little deeper into why the site owner feels this lack of Google love, the answers are as common as the moans, the reason the search engines don’t rank you well is one of several reasons but they all come down to poor SEO, some of the more common issues are

Poor keyword research

If you have a small budget you are being unrealistic to think you can compete with people in the mortgage or insurance markets, at least for the broad terms, the big players in these markets have some advantages, they have contacts in the media who write storeys on them and this gets them some very nice authority links from places like the BBC and you will find it hard to do the smae thing.

However if you are in this market and do not have contacts and money to go after the broad terms you need to look at the keywords you can compete for, and there are loads, the time spent doing keyword research can seem long and tedious but it is worth money in the bank when you find the correct combination of high searches and low competition.

Poor link quality

Too many people seem to think that the more links back to their site the better, this may have been true in the past but now it is defiantly quality that counts over quantity. You need to look at different elements when you are link building, these include,

Relevance of the page your link is from – why would a site about cars link to a site about tables, it is much more likely that a site about cars would link to one about caravans.

One-way links, the links should be just pointing to your site not you giving them a link and them giving one back to you, link swapping is an old and out of date technique.

Too many links too quickly, we have all seen the offers in our email of 5,000 for $49 this is just going to start alarm bells ringing at Google HQ and there is every chance you will get slapped with a penalty. Link building needs to be steady and something that happens naturally over a period of time.

Paid links, this is something to avoid as Google especially dislikes people forcing their way to the top through the weight of their wallets.

Anchor text, this is the part of the link that is underlined, so instead of using terms like click here use the keywords such as Salisbury web design this allows the search engines to understand what the page you are linking to is about.

Tomorrow we will look at the use of keywords on the site and Flash based site design issues

It may sound a little unrealistic but it is something we have accomplished and we continue to accomplish for our Search engine optimisation clients.

Imagine what that would mean for your business, if you are getting 2,000 visitors a month we can multiply that number up to 28,000 visitors a month and if everything else stays the same that means that your sales and profits should also rise by 14 times.

But keeping everything else on the website the same will not help you make the most of this extra traffic so we will also look at the site to determine if we can increase the number of conversions you get and we have had some amazing successes with increasing conversions including one example where we changed just 1 thing on a website and that resulted in a 60% increase in conversions overnight. I made this change on a Wednesday afternoon and on the Thursday the site got 60% more conversions and the great news is that the increased level of conversions has continued to this day.

To get your business more visitors and more conversions complete the form on the right hand site of the page now.

Using 0845 telephone numbers and freephone numbers in marketing

Non-geographic numbers include 0845 telephone numbers and freephone numbers these are excellent telephone numbers when you are planning your marketing campaign.

There is quite a lot that can be done with marketing and what are called non geographic telephone numbers, it may sound a little complicated but it is just another way of saying telephone numbers that can be called from any part of the UK with out the need for an area code and in this case can be called for the same price. The other winner when it comes to 0845 telephone numbers and freephone numbers is that they offer an amazing caller tracking package, using the information gained from the non-geographic telephone numbers you can see where in the country you have been called from, if the call was answered, ignored or was engaged how long the call was and so much more.

Imagine what you could do with this information – if you see that you are getting calls on a Saturday morning but you have no answer phone on the line you would never know you had missed the important business telephone call, you can now change that and ensure that the phone has a machine to take messages and you could increase your turnover by doing no extra marketing just by using the 0845 telephone numbers and freephone numbers to measure the responses you are already getting.

 Have you thought about using surveys on your website to track where your visitors are coming from and how they heard about you. You can see a great example of this at Cravenplan

Surveys are also a great way to discover what your customers think of the service you are offering and it is amazing the insight you can get on what products they were hoping to find.

Using this information you can target your advertising to the right market and can make sure that you are stocking products that these visitors want to buy, this will increase conversion rates and you can make more money per visitor.

As you may already know SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is how your site can be picked up and ranked highly in the search engines, such as Google.

One of the key elements of SEO are links, you want to get links pointing back to your site, however not all links are the same and you want the best sort of links coming back to your site rather than any old rubbish.

The best sorts of links are ones from sites that contain similar content to your own, so if you have a fishing site you would like to see lots of links coming back from other fishing sites, you may be thinking that at this point you know you can not get lots of these links because the companies like yours are your competition and they are not likely to help you get better rankings than them.

This is where planning comes into play, you need to think about what would make a potential rival want to give you a link from his site, what do you have that he values more than a link? If you are thinking at this point that you will link back to him in exchange for his link then you would be wrong, this used to be a trick used to fool the search engines but they are onto that one and the two links would be given a very low score.

Rather than swapping links you could offer the other site an article that would be of interest to their visitors, in this article you could include a link back to your site for more information.

Now you may not be able to do this with your closest rivals but if you can do it with similar but not directly competing sites this is a very good way of getting links, however writing all the articles and contacting all the sites can be a very time consuming process so to ensure it is done effectively and correctly you should use a SEO company to get the most from your linking.

Are your expectations of search engine dominance realistic? People have different feelings and thoughts as to what they need their website to achieve for them, some need it to be found for lots of different phrases that bring in visitors looking for information on a varieties of subjects while others are focused on one term that they are convinced will see the site become a roaring success.

In reality you need to understand that you are not going to be able to compete with the big mortgage companies if you do not have a huge marketing budget to throw at the keywords. Trying to compete for phrases that are unrealistic is the single largest cause of internet business failure other than people not promoting their sites at all.

The other main reason for people not succeeding with their internet business is trying to be all things to all people, if you are trying to be number 1 for 100 different phrases and you are trying to do this all by yourself you are almost guaranteed to fail.

It is better to focus your attentions on a few carefully chosen keywords that you can dominate in the search engines, a professional SEO company will be able to recommend phrases that are related to your business, have a low competition rate and also have people searching for it month after month and this is exactly the sort of phrase you should be competing for.

Do the search engines know what your site is about?

You need to ensure that the search engines are able to read what is on your page, there are a few things that will stop the search engines reading your content, the two main things that cause an issue with search engines not being able to see the text on your pages are frames and Flash elements.

You have probably seen flash elements on websites in the past, they are images that often run like small film or roll through a slide show type presentation that often includes text, unfortunately it treats the text as though it were an image and there for the search engines can not read the content.

Frames allow content from a different place to be included into a page this is often used by sites that do comparisons on prices where they draw in content from databases or for sites that do not want people to have to download the header graphic every time they go to a new page, unfortunately this causes the search engines some problems as what they see are 2 pages one with the navigation and the other with no navigation just content and it confuses them.

To get the most from your website it should conform to the W3C standards.

So how do you get found in the search engines?

Well with the search engines where you are found or your positioning is all important, it is estimated that Google find and index approximately 30 billion pages a year – that is around 6 new pages for every person on the planet – you need to be doing something special to be found amongst all the background noise, and this is where Search Engine Optimisation or SEO comes in.

Search engine optimisation is all about telling the search engines what a page on your website is about and suggesting to them the best way for them to index it.

If you were to look in the search engines for this website, you know it is called “be found or die” but that is all the information you have, putting this phrase into Google brings back an astounding 174,000,000 pages – obviously for a business such as ours it is important for us to be found at the top of that list (and we are) and it is SEO that enables us to do this.

We tell the search engines what the pages on our site are about and the search engine then includes them in the appropriate index, they have a scoring system to ensure that the most appropriate pages are delivered up to visitors for the various searches completed and this is what is known as the Google algorithm it is a scoring system that takes into account approximately 100 different factors to deliver the correct pages to the searcher.

I have been asked a number of times why we give away so much information and advice on Search engine optimisation on this blog and at our monthly seminars we have been accused of giving away the SEO secrets, but I feel this is a very short sighted view.

The more you make people think that Search Engine Optimisation is a secret and mysterious art the more you will build distrust and the more people will shy away from using it, and this is the oboist of what we as a business want and it is not going to be good for your business if you are not utilising the best SEO practices.

We offer seminars free of charge that explain in great detail how SEO can be used to get your site found in the search engines, we also have books on SEO and on-line marketing that we are happy to give you again at no charge there is the blog that will give you answers to lots of internet marketing questions and then of course there is the option to have us look over your site and produce the free of charge SEO report.

All this is designed to make sure that more people in business know about SEO and that they mystery of SEO and on-line marketing is removed and when the smoke and mirrors is removed you will see that what you are left with is a professional and dedicated SEO team that are here to promote your business in the search engines.

Cravenplan computers in Salisbury will be holding the latest of its seminars, this time it is the Law and the internet

This is a new seminar not one that Cravenplan have run before and features a guest speaker who is an expert on the subject on the Law and the Internet, this promises to be a very interesting seminar for anyone who is running or plans to run an on-line business.

The date and time of this seminar are:

Law and the Internet (NEW) – 23 April 2009 at 13.00

Places can be booked for the seminar via the Cravenplan website at web design Salisbury