Calm Mediacentre

The majority of people think of (SEO) Search Engine Optimisation as an art to improve their search engine rankings, being a time studied profession that, without putting a great deal of time and effort into it,should be left to the techies. Wrong! Yes, improving search engine rankings in competitive areas does require a huge amount of knowledge and expertise and search engine optimisation techies are needed, but most websites aren’t in hugely competitive areas. Many of them can achieve effective rankings by applying some of these search engine optimisation basics.

SEO is the art of achieving high search engine results, increasing website traffic. It’s when the content is set out so the search engines can read it easy and effectively, and most importantly, it is about creating real value for the searcher. SEO is about attracting visitors specifically focused around predetermined key search terms. A valuable user experience will be rewarded by the search engines by increasing your Google Pagerank. SEO is all about making sure your website delivers what it says it will!

SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimising a website involves writing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords. Sometimes a site’s structure must be adjusted too. Because of this, SEO needs to be considered at the design phase of any project and a strategy created specifically. It is critical that all the elements work together including the content and how the website is designed:

• Keyword analysis
Using our SEO expertise we will research and refine keywords into a definitive list. Using our specialised software Calm Asylum will run searches on keywords to understand how many people are searching for them and how competitive they are. The aim being to find popular search terms which are specific to your offering allowing you to rank as high as possible.

• Title tag
The keywords or phrases must be present in this tag. The priority of the keywords run from left to right in the title tag, so more important keywords are placed first. The title tag is indexed by the search engines in its own right and its influence is multiplied if the keywords within it are also used inside other elements.

• Meta keywords
Meta keywords allow you to provide additional text for search engines to index along with the body copy. Although this tag is indexed by search engines, text appearing within it only has limited relevancy as it is text and cannot be seen by the user. Like title tags priority runs from left to right, separated by commas. Keywords should never occur in meta keyword tags unless they also appear in the page text and generally should not be any longer than 255 characters including whitespace.

• Meta description

The meta descriptions allow you to influence the description of your page with search engines. The meta description has to contain your keywords and also relate to the copy on the page and be ideally no longer than 128 characters in length.

• Keyword distribution
It is essential that the predefined keywords are evenly distributed throughout the web page without simply keyword stuffing or spamming. To prevent this, keywords should not be used to often, but used in every paragraph, heading, subheading and also links. This simply allows the search engines to know that is what the content is about.

• Page URLS

Search engines love static URLs as they are sure that the pages content is less likely to have changed since last being indexed and not have duplicate information. An affective URL should be short and contain your most important selected keywords making your pages more trustworthy to search engines.

So as a round up if you have a spanky website and are fed up paying for Adwords why not contact Calm Digital for a chat and discuss in further detail how Calm can help.

Gone are the days of spending thousands of pounds a year allowing you to track and monitor your customer journey on your website. Now you are able to use a free web analytics solution, Google Analytics. This allows website owners and also bloggers who previously couldn’t justify the cost to take a good hard look at how hard their site is working for them. Just like another saying my Father taught me, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”

Its all very well having all this data on your customer journey, but how do you use it to your benefit without getting bogged down. I have put together some top tips on how to use your analytics to improve your website in laymen’s terms (I am Scottish its the only way I know how)!

Page views

No matter what kind of site you have, you will most likely benefit from visitors viewing a higher number of pages on your site. With every statistic you aim to improve, get an average number and investigate further before attempting to increase. Think about what you can do to your site to increase the number of page views.  Do your research and check out your competitors (nick their idea’s) and be willing to change things. Are you cross-promoting similar products people might be interested in?  Are you providing useful content to go along with products, as we all know content is king!

Referring Links

Take a close look at your inbound links, what sites are referring traffic to you through normal links. Why are they doing so? Is it possible to improve those relationships to get even more traffic from them? Are there more sites like these that could be approached and perhaps linked with via a reciprocal relationship?  Are there any types of sites you think you should be getting links from but aren’t? Why not? If not, maybe you should focus on your content and create some good quality content to go with your products. If so, are there more links you could get from external sites who like / need your content. You have to have something they want i.e (content, tools) that would add value to their site and their customers.

Geographic Reach

Examine your geographic location statistics and see what areas of the UK or world you receive the majority of your traffic from and the areas you are weak in. What can you do to improve traffic in places you’re weak and what can you do to strengthen your traffic in areas where you’re strong? Are you marketing yourself to your weak regions?  Should you invest in Pay Per Click or optimise your site for searches in your weak areas? Contact me if you want to know more about PPC marketing.

Organic Search Terms

Just like referring links, what can you learn from organic search terms? Can you get more traffic and better rankings for the terms that are doing well? Are there terms you’re not ranking well for? Can you create more  content for those? Should you consider reviewing your current strategy and contacting a digital agency.  It is likely you will need to review your SEO strategy and adjusting your link building strategy accordingly.

Constantly update your content

Examine your most commonly visited content and analyze why. Is it because it has the most links to it? Because the way the website is structured? Or is it because it’s the most useful or relevant content to visitors? Once you know why, expand that content and add further depth.  Your most popular content may be a certain product or category. Is it possible to add more products of that type or category? Are your most desirable products being found and is it possible to create feature rich content that Google will love. Is the top content really the products you want to have the most traffic?

Monitor Your Bounce Rate

Generally your top [hot] content generates traffic from natural search listings and becomes an entry point to your site. This because either organic search terms or links send visitors to your top content first. Google analytics and most analytics tools have a Bounce or Exit rate. This is vitally important as the percentage indicates the visitors that have exited on the same page they arrived on, not finding what they were looking for.  A low percentage indicates they clicked on other parts of your site before leaving, and a large percentage is very bad as it means they have just viewed the page and left.  Obviously the lower percentage the better as ideally you want them to find the information they were looking for and move on to look at other pages and ultimately convert the sale. (happy days).  Investigate the path you want your visitor to take from the landing page to reach the information you would like to supply them with.  Is your sales process working correctly?  Are you giving the visitor all the information they require in order to make an informed decision and complete the cycle and purchase?

Monitor Website Parameters

Google Analytics and most analytics packages allow you to see things like what operating system your customer is using, what resolution their screen is set at, if they have Flash installed, what browsers they are using and host of other data which can be used.  There’s nothing worse than finding out 50 percent of your audience are Apple users and you’ve never seen how awful and un-rendered your site looks on an Apple Mac.  Check this regularly to make sure your site is designed to look and operate well as much of your audience as possible. You should rigorously perform cross-browser testing to make sure your not providing a bad user experience – once a customer has had a bad experience you’ve lost them for good.

Goals

Always establish your goals in advance as you can always change them once you’re up and running.  Google Analytics and most other analytics apps allow you to setup conversion goals of different types.  This isn’t always a sale; on a non ecommerce platform it could be a set goal of having someone request further information or subscribe for a news letter, view a certain amount of pages, or view a particular page or just pick up the phone and contact you. Once you have set up these goals, you can then track them and monitor how well you are performing. There are loads of analytics and analysis that can go into this which I will be discussing at a later date.  But basically track your conversion rate (visitors divided by sales) new avenues for relevant traffic, and improve your statistics from your average stats.

Page Rank And Alexa Traffic Rank

These are important gauges of how well your website is performing and often over-looked.  Google Page Rank is on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest only available to the likes of the BBC. This is scored by Google indicating the web pages relevance and also value. Alexa Traffic Rank is based on 3 months combined traffic computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. A tool I found useful for checking other sites particular competitors is yowzaa and also a cool tool bar which will allow you to monitor every website you visit is toolbar.

Round Up

Start spending a bit of time looking at your analytics, because like me once you start it is like being on eBay, it’s addictive…..  Allowing you to work out exactly how many visitors you need to reach your revenue goals and changing content constantly watching the money roll in.

Its great having this data as it will allow you to improve your website and gain a better understanding of your customer journey which is invaluable. I hope this helps and should you need any clarification please don’t hesitate to contact me.

A free event: Wednesday 4th February 2009, Crathorne Hall (near Yarm), 9:15 – 12 noon.

Calm Asylum Communications presents a one-off seminar that will give you valuable tips and insight into ways in which you can steer your business calmly through the current financial storm, without any big-spending.

We will give you solid advice that you can really use, and let you in on marketing, business and sales secrets that you can implement yourself so that you can see 2009 through with a stronger profile than ever before.

You will walk away with a raft of ideas that translate into real value for your business. And you could also walk away with some fantastic prizes:

A free Financial health check from Harland and Co.
Valued at £500.00
Calm Media Centre: web syndication for your news etc
Valued at £2,500.00
A New You – Book by Author Nicola Cook
Valued at £10.00 (but the content is Invaluable)!

Calm will be delivering this event in partnership with Harland and Co. Financial Planning and engaging speaker, Nicola Cook of Aurora Training.

Presenters:
Simon Brown – MD, Calm Asylum
Bianca Robinson – Calm Asylum
Philip Murray – Harlands
Nicola Cook – Aurora Training/ Nicola Cook.

There are only 30 places available for this one-off event. Book now and reserve your place visit keepcalm.calmasylum.com or phone  0845 058 0511 .

So why is link building so important?

This is perhaps one of the most common questions I get asked at Calm Asylum on a daily basis. There are so many reasons why this is such an important element to any serious marketer’s online marketing strategy. So, will link building increase opportunities on my website?

My dad brought me up with the saying which I feel relevant, “slowly slowly catchy the monkey”. Let me explain…

Imagine your website is a monkey hunter with loads of plump bananas and the scout-spider-monkeys are web-bots (search engine spiders) and they are out looking for the most succulent bananas (your content) and then report back to the head spider-monkey (Google) who decides which websites have the best food to take the mob of monkeys (web traffic) to have a party with.

The jungle you are hunting in is massive and there are thousands of other hunters all setting up their traps. Meanwhile the scout spider-monkey (web bot) swings past, sees your lonely banana and carry’s on swinging (your banana is nothing special – this spider-monkey is looking for big banana plantations).

Being a more experienced monkey hunter and having a Masters in monkey hunting you have a strategy. You position another trap and monkey sign-posts (a reciprocal link or links on external sites pointing to your site) and continue to lay out traps until you have loads of traps covering the ground.

Now when the scout spider monkey swings by it sees loads of big juicy bananas (content) and goes and tells head spider monkey (Google) what fantastic big juicy bananas it has found.

The head spider monkey will then organize a monkey mob rave and have a banging party (web traffic to your website)!

I hope this all made sense and the moral of the story is CONTENT (bananas) IS KING !!!!!!

If you are unsure if your current strategy give us a call and let’s talk monkey nuts (and bananas).

To play one of our favourite monkey games, click here.

Subtitle: What is Calm’s Blog, [AKA] ‘A Space to Talk Differently’, [AKA] ‘A Bit of Daily Calm’ ALL ABOUT?

Well, it is our firm belief that companies need to be real and touchable. They need to converse with their potential customers, otherwise those customers will just go ahead and initiate conversations without them! (Think Dell Hell). So that’s what the team here at Calm have set out to do.

We talk about what we know -  we have some fascinating people in here who can talk passionately about every aspect of marketing – starting from brand and filtering through to the kaleidoscope of ways in which brands realise themselves – design, media, message, digital, social etc. We also post things on our blog that we think represent the way we think and show you videos, pictures and link to other blogs that say it better.

Also, we want to be found! We want more business than we can [currently] handle. And the Calm Asylum will grow to fit! A blog that talks about the things we do best has got to be one of the best ways we can think of to get into Google’s top ranks without even trying! See David Meerman Scott’s blog for more on this.

We really want you to see a bit of our personality in this blog. So you’ll also find stuff about things that tickle us pink from time to time. We also want you to participate, comment and get in touch. Think of our blog as a little peek into the minds of the inmates at the Calm Asylum – welcome to our space (and grab a free poster while you’re there)!