What keywords should we target?

It is therefore extremely important to rank high on the first page. This helps explain the exponential nature of increasing difficulty as one ties to move up the rankings. Unless you can get onto the first page of the SERP’s, you may be wasting your time and investment in creating the page. It is therefore absolutely critical that in the early stages to try and identify the best terms for which you think you can get on page one for. This is something that we spell out very loudly (hence the bold) to clients when they engage our search engine optimisation services. Even if these terms have less traffic, it’s better to get a big slice of a small pie than to get a crumb from a big pie.

What are your visitors searching for?

It is easy to think that most of your website traffic comes from those terms for which you rank the highest. However, this is often not the case. Although the popular search terms generate a high number of searches, the majority of searches done online are not for these popular search terms. When analysing our clients’ Google Analytics traffic, it is excitingly interesting to note that for many of them, the top 100 search terms that brought traffic to the website, account for less than 45% of the total search traffic. So, what does this mean and why should I care?

Allow me to introduce Mr Long Tail

On most websites we look at, the majority of traffic comes from long tail searches. If you find yourself in a highly competitive market (and if you don’t now, you will soon as more and more businesses flock online to grab marketshare), where the top search terms generate huge amounts of searches, you need to start considering what else might be getting typed into the search engines. This type of lateral thinking is the key skill in keyword research.

Does this contradict the idea that you should try rank high for your big search terms? Absolutely not! Think of your top search terms as the bow of a boat. It breaks the water and helps bring the long tail in its wake. The better you rank for the primary terms, the higher your page will rank for other terms on that page.

Time to start kicking goals

The real lesson of the long tail is the importance of having diversified content on your website. A page should include a healthy variations of words, this is what feeds long tail searches.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that every potential searches uses the same language or terms that you do. As an example, you would be surprised at the number of misspellings that drive traffic to our clients’ websites. Good keyword research includes looking at alternatives to the most popularly used search terms and developing a content plan around those terms.

Putting in place an effective keyword and content strategy is one of the services we live and breathe in every day, so when you’re ready to start getting more enquiries through the door, give us a call on (02) 8971 8103.

Unity Admin are a finance company specialising in fund, investment administration and taxation services throughout the Asia Pacific region. Connecting Digital provided Unity Admin with a professional and corporate looking website as well as provide on-going search engine optimisation work. The client has seen a continual improvement in their rankings and traffic to their website since engagement.

Vision Direct is Australia’s largest online optical store, and part of the Smart Buy Glasses Group, one of the world’s leading online designer eyewear businesses operating in over 30 countries. The website has over 100,000 products.

Connecting Digital provide on-going search engine optimisation services with the goals of increasing keyword rankings and conversion rates.

Vision Direct appears at the top of google.com.au for over 90% of their targeted keywords. Connecting Digital undertakes on-going off-site search engine optimisation activities for this client and has achieved spectacular results in an extremely competitive industry.

As all of our loyal fans know, Google places emphasis on both the quality and quantity of inbound links that are pointing to your website. The main purpose of the penguin update was to try and slow down the rapid growth of web spam that is increasingly appearing in Google’s search results.

A little bit about natural links

Before we go into more detail, it is important to explain a little about Google and links. For ease of explanation, Google considers links to your site as like votes, but when looking at these votes, it not only considers the quantity, but also a range of other factors including the quality and relevance of the website that links to yours, the speed at which your votes increased as well as the clickable words (anchor text) used by the linking website.

Now for the bad stuff – unnatural links

A common theme of websites that were affected by the penguin update had is that they had limited numbers of natural links and great numbers of unnatural or spammy links.

Some of the unnatural link habits that Google is on the look out for include:

-          Paid text links that use your keywords as anchor text. Buying links from websites with the exact matching anchor text for the keyword you wish to rank for is a spammy practise. Having too many of these in relation to other types of inbound links acts as a red flag and is against Google’s guidelines.

-          Comment spam: trying to stuff specific keywords into signatures or user names on websites when providing comments or feedback relating to a topic.

-          Guest posts on low quality, non-relevant websites: writing guest posts on relevant, good quality blogs and websites is a great way to get sites linking back to yours. On the other hand, submitting low quality content on websites such as article directories that are of low quality or not of a relevant topic just for the purpose of getting a link back to your site using anchor text, is a bad practise and now more so on the radar of Google’s robots.

-          Links from dangerous websites: any inbound links from sites that have been flagged with malware or other spammy issues are sites to be avoided. “Bad neighbourhood” websites promoting things such as porn or drugs should be avoided.

Google hasn’t really changed anything that they consider unacceptable. They have merely tightened their methods of control  to better catch those who are looking for loopholes in their ways to achieve better rankings.

If any of the above mentioned unnatural link building methods are your sole method for building links, then you are not doing enough to ensure high rankings on Google.

Where to from here?

It’s never completely clear when the next update will rock the world of SEO, but what is clear is that the search engines are determined to make the results user driven, so as long as you are producing lots of great content, intended to help users, then your SEO results should reflect your efforts.

One thing that is clear is that search engines like Google are getting better at analysing content. Focusing on strong links from niche sites, pruning back weak links, and producing great content are ways to ensure stronger search results.

If you feel like you have been hit unfairly, you can always complain to Google by completing a penguin feedback form.

To make it easier for a digital marketing agency too overlook and perform the process of the migration there are some guidelines to follow. A Migration should always be divided in phases.

The first phase should always be just about planning. First of all talk about the goals for the new website, what is expected from the process, what should be prevented and how much time is necessary. Once this all has been planned and discussed everyone included in the process has to be aware of the proceedings. Last but not least you have to decide on the time the migration should be carried out. Such works on the website should always be planned for a time the business usually isn’t too busy, so that if something goes wrong the loss of sales can be absorbed.

Website Migrations always differ in what the client requires. He could require content changes, site architecture and many more changes. In the second phase a digital marketing agency should work on analysing and working on the legacy site. This includes the crawling of the legacy site, the export of the URLs that contain inbound links, the cleaning of the website, which involves the export of 404 pages, an analysis of the site performance and the analysis of the rankings of the legacy site.

In the third phase of a migration process it is all about redirecting the URLs. All the relevant URLs of the legacy site should all be redirected to the new site. This should always be done using 301 redirects rather than 302 redirects. Using 302 redirects could in the worst case cause major ranking drops.  The URL redirecting process has to be fulfilled very carefully and can’t leave out any relevant pages.

The last phase of the website migration focuses on the upload of the new site on the test server. But before the digital marketing Agency should start uploading there are a few tests that should be made. First of all the access to the site has been denied to search engine crawlers. After that the next steps are to create a XML sitemap and a HTML sitemap, to control and optimise the 301 redirects and analysing and fixing some other common problems.

With new ways to share content and design an individual brand or product page Facebook’s timeline can be from great interest for companies. The companies are able to draw attention to their unique history or other developments within the company. New products can be introduced and an identity built or refined.

Because the companies are able to share their believes and history on the Facebook timeline page it shows the visitors a much more personal side of the company. It’s one new feature which has the makings to become an important instrument for Search Engine Marketing Sydney.

Not only is the new Facebook feature a good way for companies to spread new content, it is also a lot easier for the admins to design and edit the page. Facebook has created an admin panel with which you can make changes to the page, update it and answer private messages right away. To use facebook for Search Engine Marketing Sydney becomes a lot easier and effective this way.

So it isn’t enough to just make your website visible it also has to be well designed and structured. In order to achieve good Web Design & Usability for your page there are mainly two important things to pay attention to.

First of all the website has to appeal to one’s eye. This includes readability, which can be achieved by creating visual contrast, good placings of the site name and the navigation and a certain structure that can be easily followed. When trying to improve a websites structure the web designer should not only take care of text but also the correct placement of images and other visual content.

Secondly the Navigation through the website has to make sense so that it’s easy to handle and understand for every visitor. In order to create a good navigation system for your website you have to keep in mind that you have to make it understandable for every possible visitor. Knowing that every individual is different and therefore operates different it would be a good idea for your website to include 2 or 3 options to navigate through it. Even though it’s good to have more than one navigation option on your website, don’t exaggerate. If you have 4 or more ways to navigate through your page it gets too confusing and crowded.

You see it’s not that hard to improve your website so that it contains good Web Design & Usability it just takes a little thinking and a sensible eye for details and design.