Ecommerce SEO Graphic

Our new graphic is live

21 essential tips for Ecommerce SEO.

Have a look and let me know what you think.

http://www.infaweb.com/seo-aberdeen.shtml

Number 1 for "Edinburgh SEO"

Today Infaweb hit number one in Google for "Edinburgh SEO".

We have been in the top few spots for a little while for "SEO Edinburgh" and "Edinburgh SEO" but today we hit number one. "SEO Edinburgh" is sat at number two, hopefully that will move up soon as well.

Want your website to rank as well? Give is a shout 0131 208 1313.

Why you should not sign up to £50 PM SEO

I hate the fact that companies can get away with charging £50 a month ( or a similar amount) and claim to be giving a company’s website SEO. Generally what they are doing is giving them a monthly automated report. It’s scandalous.

Search engine optimisation is about taking your website, making is user friendly and thus search engine friendly and then building authority to it. It’s not about pumping out a report that means nothing and thinking that’s enough.

If someone or company offers you SEO for £50 per month walk away. It’s not what it seems. We base our prices on time, for £50 a month we would struggle to do anything productive in terms of SEO, it’s just not enough time to;

1.      Manually check webmasters tool to ensure everything is as it should be

2.      Run website audit checks on any changes that month to the website

3.      Manually check and report on progress

4.      Research links

5.      Build links

6.      Give you some advise when you need it for key website decisions

7.      etc

SEO it not an overnight marketing tool that you can do in an hour, it’s a long term strategy to help your company change from being as you are to being a lot bigger!

SEO Multi Platform Marketing - Desktop, Mobile and Tablets

So you have a nice website and it looks great but have you checked it on a mobile or a tablet? There are things you need to do in terms of design and technical to ensure your website variables are SEO friendly. By doing this you also optimise them for the user.

To do list;

• Get access to: a windows + Android + Apple desktop, tablet and mobile
• Get you developer and designer to come up with solutions for each platform
• launch a test site for each
• Test they work and look great
• Ensure you put the correct code in to tell the search engines they are the same site just different versions for each platform
• load the sites
• track activity on analytics
• use CRO and UX design to continuously improve

This is very effective for ecommerce platforms and if it’s done correctly it can result in huge improvements in turnover.

We do have experts to help with all these areas if you need a hand http://www.infaweb.com/contact_us.shtml

PPC and SEO - its all about being relevant

Google makes one thing clear at the moment. Make sure its relevant.

What does this mean and how does it impact pay per click and search engine optimisation?

Relevant just means making sure the content on your website is related to that of the websites linking in, any marketing campaigns you are running and the social media activity that links in.

Help full tips;

1. Make sure you release related articles on your website every week
2. Make sure your blog ties into the website theme/topic
3. Make sure your social media theme is also relevant to your website
4. When doing SEO make sure that you tweak your on site optimisation to emphasis relevancy
5. When link building ensure links are in topic and relevant

The golden rules;

1. Relevant
2. Quality
3. Purpose

If all your efforts meet these points you should be heading in the correct direction.

Schema.org for Ecommerce

I will not cover this in huge detail as this link -
http://searchengineland.com/e-commerce-seo-using-schema-org-just-got-a-lot-more-granular-139236?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=linkedin&goback=%2Egde_2976409_member_184311975

covers most of it. But its important and interesting information.

So what does this mean and what is Schema.org? What this does is allow you to tell the search engines information so they understand it. If you mention a "red balloon" on a page the search engines can pick up the words but not understand them, with Schema you tell the search engine the the product "balloon" is "red" in colour.

In terms of Ecommerce this is very important. you can know tell the search engines in very clear detail everything about each product.

Another hit on the web developer labour bill but hopefully you will see better results in the search engine for it.

New Google Layout

You may have noticed it on your mobile or other devices well its on its way to your desktop. The new Google layout is being rolled out.

Google say this is for consistency across platforms, so its true not even the biggest websites can keep their platform static. Ever evolving and improving websites are the ones that make a mark and get used!

Keep your eyes peeled...

The fight of the animals, How to beat off Panda’s, Penguins, EMD’s etc

I know EMD’s are not animals but the title was great up until then!

I can summaries this in one sentence;

Make your site user friendly and remove any rubbish links.

Sounds easy doesn’t it but everyone who has been involved with a site that has been hit knows its not straight forward. Key things to look at on your website;

• Duplicate content
• Remove or use a canonical link
• Thin pages (pages that are content light or have no value)
• Remove or tell the search engines to ignore them either using robots.txt or meta tags
• Bad links
• Look at the anchor text on your links, do you have lots of exact match keywords?
• Do you have some dodgy looking links
• Remove the above

• Usability
• Make sure the sites code is valid
• Make sure you don’t have adverts everywhere
• Make sure the content is worthy of being read
• Make sure your keyword density is low
• Make sure the content reads naturally
• Check the navigation flows as it should

I hope this helps, for more detail give me a shout...

Disavow has arrived to Google

Have you got bad links hampering your rankings? Then worry no more!

After trying to remove links you always end up with a chunk left that you can not get rid off. This is caused by lots of problems, you can now submit those URL's to Google using their new webmasters tool and get them ignored. Yay. Great news for those people who have used keyword heavy links or bad practises in the past.

We are testing it on a website at the moment.....we will announce the results once we have them.

Conflicting data between Google webmasters and analytics

Do you see different information in Google analytics and Google Webmasters?

I currently see my site speed in analytics at 4.9 sec and in webmasters its 1.7.

My clicks from Google are also different and I see this on lots of sites.

Its good to know that all the information comes from a central point!

I take analytics as true because its directly from my site but I had hoped that webmasters was more accurate.

Google is not playing fair I hear people shout

I guess the bottom line is if you don't like it don't use it!

Think about it a different way, as if it was you business.

Your core profit comes from paid adverts, what is your focus going to be? Obviously its going to be paid search.

One thing is for sure though, Google offer one main service/product to its customers and that is good search results. They take that away and watch the users flock over to see Bing.

You have to play ball as it’s not your playground, its Google's. It's not good that they have such a monopoly on the online world but there is little we can do until some bright spark comes up with an idea to outdo them. The problem is when someone does Google will just hand over a couple of million and their problem goes away.

So if your fed up with Google and how it ranks websites then unfortunately there is little you can do about that. What you can do is accept it and play ball. By doing so you will see lots of traffic come to your website. The true sense of SEO will never die as long as it’s done to focus the website on the user not the search engine.

If you want to avoid the next search engine update then start usability testing your website, not checking out the new trick to con Google. I don’t think everything they do is correct but it's their business, do what they want.

A Google number one spot

Our latest article is live - the importance and impact a number one spot in Google can have over other rankings http://www.infaweb.com/google-number-one-spot.shtml

How to Generate Links without Requesting them

Natural link building at its most natural form happens without you requesting the links, but how do you do it?

There are lots of ways to generate link “bait” so that people link to you and this is a list of some good ideas. The key is creativity;

• Free things
• Good applications
• Useful functionality
• A great service
• A catchy marketing campaign
• A new product
• Having a good USP over your competitors
• Having a dedicated area on your website for each member of the team (especially the directors)
• Regular and worthwhile content
• A good blog/news area
• Information that no one else has
• Advice you normally have to pay for
• Good graphics
• Funny things!
• Videos
• Tutorials

All these things are great but remember people can't link to them if they don’t know they are there. So tell people on your social networks, email your clients and generally spread the word. From that you will hopefully receive some nice links.

Keyword Match Domain or a Brand?

Should you buy a domain with a keyword match or should you go for a brand? This question is asked by thousands of people and the answer depends on your business.

If your a small company and you are looking for some extra traffic then I would go with an exact match domain if possible. (For those who do not know what I mean; exact match would be seocompany.com and a brand would be infaweb.com. SEO company is a keyword and people search for the exact phrase.) The reasons are simple; you don't need to do as much SEO and your ranking for that phrase will be easier to get a number one spot for.

If you are looking for more than just a couple of keywords in the search engines and brand awareness is important to you then you need to get a branded domain.

A branded domain takes longer to get results but in the end people look for it. With an exact match keyword domain you will only get traffic for the keyword and people will not remember the brand.

If you are in a very competitive market it helps to have your main keyword in the url but you need to think about it in terms of what people will type and what they will remember.

I hope that helps, in summary if your a small business go for an exact match and if your a larger company then go with a brand. if you sit in the middle you can always launch a couple of sites?

What to rank in Google for Christmas?

Yes I did say Christmas!! Plan and roll out your plans for Christmas, it could take you 3 months to get your Christmas products listed above your competitors.

You cannot launch your products in November and expect them to be cached and ranking well before December. If you have a website with a lot of authority you might be OK but for the average ecommerce website you need to plan it ahead and put it into your SEO campaign.

Need help as always give me a shout.

Conversion From User to Customer

Check this page out that we have just launched http://www.infaweb.com/conversion-rate-optimisation.shtml

This should give you some insight into CRO and how it can help you. Conversion rate optimisation is very good for site with traffic but need to increase sales so check it out, it might help you!

The Google Mind Games

Yes its true and you can see why!

Google uses trends and reactions to see if you are a spammer or a good webmaster. Don't fall into the trap of jumping at every Google movement, just make sure your site is spot on and leave Google to do its thing.

Make sure your onsite work is 100% and make sure your link profile is healthy. If those two are OK then you don't need to worry, just keep doing what your doing. Let Google mix it up a little and give you some strange results, don't react and start changing everything as it will cause you more issues.

Google needs to strip out the rubbish this is just one way it tries to do it. Unfortunately every time they do it some innocent sites get caught in the mix. Unfortunate.

Want more information on Google and what signals you can get to see if its just testing you or if you have an actual issue? Give me a shout 01312081313.

Thanks

Next penguin ready for launch?

People are talking and it appears that the next big update is on its way.

Over optimisation seems to be in front on the main focus.

Tom (our link builder) says "Just a hunch but I think it will be carnage!"

So make sure the page titles are different to your headers, the word density is low and all the other spammy techniques are removed.

Lets see what happens :-)

Duplicate content (Google update on dmca requests)

People create duplicate content all the time, most of the time not even realising. But what is most annoying is when someone takes it from you.

Google are rolling out a new update and it will devalue content pages and websites that have lots of dmca requests submitted aganst them. (These are just reports from people saying that their content has been copied).

This is good and bad: good as it helps us get rid of copied content, bad as its hard to control. It could give the spamming community another tool to hit our websites with for example.

Google will accept any request submitted to them unless challenged. If you miss the updates that reports have been filed against you then down goes your content. I may be wrong but this update could go one of two ways!

If the update works then great but I will sit back and watch before I commit etheir way. Fingers crossed for all us natural and ethical companies.

A quick guide to working out a budget for a PPC campaign

How do you approach pay per click marketing? The first step is to see what sort of budget you need and this is a guide to work out a really vague estimate of what you will need. Why is this helpful? Because it allows you to look at your budget and decide if you should spend the money on PPC or another form of marketing.

Step 1 – what is the cost per click for your keywords? Use this tool from Google to have a look. Just follow the steps and look at the prices.

For this example let’s say its £0.50 per click (ish)

Step 2 – How many sales would you like to gain per day, now think about this don’t just say as many as possible. Take a realistic amount using current sales levels in you organisation.

For this example we will say 10

Step 3 – How much do people spend per shop, on average? This depends on what you are selling, if it’s a service then chances are its one item, the service, if you are an ecommerce site then how much on average do people put in their basket?

Lets say for this example £100

Step 3 – How much of the shop is profit, again on average?

Let’s say for this example its £20

Step 4 – how much profit are you able to sacrifice for PPC? Think about repeat sales when you look at this, chances are if the service is good they will come back again direct and it will not cost anything on advertising

Lets say for this example £10

Step 5 – Let’s do some math.

On average it takes about 18 clicks per sale. So each sale in this example costs around £0.50 x 18 = £9

Cost per day for 10 sales is about 10 x £9 = £90

Say 30 days per month so a monthly budget would be 30 x £90 = £2700

Summary;

• Cost per sale is £9 which is less than the maximum you can afford to spend on PPC (£10) per sale. If this was more you would have to cap your budget at a lower price
• Monthly budget would need to be around £2700 to gain your 10 sales per day (300 per month)

This information enables you to start to think about costs and see where you want to go. This information is all based on estimates and a little calculated guess work but isn’t all marketing like that!

We do these calculations for free for anyone thinking about going down the PPC avenue, give us a shout if you want some help 0131 208 1313. We will also give you a lot more guidance than this and if you decide this is for your company we can manage your campaign.

The future of onsite SEO

What does Google have in store for us over the next round of updates? Well you can go through the internet and find lots of rumours or you can use some logic. What would you do if you where Google?

One of the main aims of Google is to eliminate spam. One of the biggest spam techniques is placing the keywords in strategic places on the page to get good rankings using PPC power phrases. This is normally coupled with spammy links with lots of keyword rich anchor text.

So do you want to avoid the updates? Then make your content reads better, more natural, reduce word density and gain natural links.

Good luck!

keep tracking progress

Its easy to think you are progressing and everything is on track but its not until you look at the figures you realise you are not moving anywhere very fast or in fact your actually going backward.

Be proactive and try to stop the problems before they occur and always make sure things are moving in the correct direction.

Google webmasters, Bing webmasters, Google analytics, Alexa and SEOMoz all have great figures to help you track progress (and these are just a few, there are hundreds).

Happy analysing :-)

Why use PPC when doing SEO?

Why would you split your marketing budget between Pay Per Click (PPC) bid campaigns and Search engine optimisation(SEO)? SEO is so much cheaper long term why waste your money?

The answer is simple - while you are working on your SEO you are missing sales so missing out on revenue. So if you don't do PPC you are losing money!

Although PPC costs are not the cheapest, especially in competitive markets, they still bring in sales when the campaign is done correctly. As long as you know where your cut off is with how much you can afford to bid then you are OK. (And always make sure to watch your analytics!)

There are so many people/business at the moment doing work for cost and not making any profits which sounds crazy but when you are trying to make sure you can keep all your staff employed you do what you have to. If you use PPC you can get a new stream of customers that will help you make that profit that you need to make your business viable.

I am not saying don't do SEO as I think it is crucial for every website to have SEO but sometimes you need the results faster and you can't rank for everything with SEO so you have to strike a balance.

Its all about getting your marketing strategy correct from the start and we can help you with that as well as running you SEO and PPC campaigns.
Happy online marketing to one and all....

Do you have the .co.uk and .com for your site?

If the answer to the question is yes then make sure one re-directs to the other and you do not display the same website on both domains.

I have seen this a number of times and some people do not even realise. Make sure if you key domain is the .co.uk then any other domains 301 redirect to that. Otherwise you have duplicate content and a hole raft of issues.

Google release index status in webmasters

Google have now decided to release the index status of your website in Google webmasters. If you go to health in the left hand navigation and then index status you can see your website information.

This is great and Google has articles to help you understand the data, I just wish it was more. It lacks detail, you get high level numbers but no real information about actual pages. This is a great added extra but we still need to use the search engine to find some of the key information.

It does pull up some interesting stats though, happy analysing :-)

Has your ecommerce sales declined due to Google updates or the recession?

There are two very distinct reasons why the vast majority of ecommerce websites sales have declined over the last 18 months and its easy to blame the wrong candidate.

If you use Google analytics then it’s easy to see if your rankings have dropped in the search engines and you can identify the correct candidate but if you don’t then how do you know which one is to blame?

If your traffic has dropped its crucial not to just blame Google or the recession, look at the data because your solution will differ depending on the answer.

If your pages rank lower than they used to and you no longer hit page one for some key phrases then chances are you got hit with one of Google’s updates over the last year or so and you need some search engine optimisation. The problem comes in when you don’t know how you used to rank or for what terms. Changes could be subtle, if your product pages have dropped from number 3 to number 6 on page one you will see a huge reduction in website traffic.

If your pages still rank very high and your product pages are still where they where then unfortunately it’s the recession. There is nothing I can change about that so what you need to do is find new areas to gain relevant traffic from. This can be done by looking at; new keywords, social networking, PPC, offline marketing or just optimising your website to rank a little higher for the product pages. Ranking number 1 or 2 will see far more traffic than ranking number 3 or 4.

If you don’t analyse your website then start today as it could help you answer difficult questions in the future and help you make the correct decision.

Our new SEO news area is live

We have moved our news area to blogger today from http://www.infaweb.com/seo_news.shtml. we will keep our old posts on that page but any new posts will be on this blog.

Happy reading :-)

Its been an interesting week in the SEO world after the penguin update hitting. How has your site been hit?