We Love The Web - Blogorhea

Yeah, I'm bored of the web and decided to write about music instead. So, the big news this week is that Take That's official fansite uses our favourite CMS (Umbraco) and serves 6 million pages every 30th of a second or something.

Maybe not. It's actually about the very basics of Search Engine Optmisation(SEO). Getting your site in the top 10: that vital first page of search results in Google.

Dull, dull, dull, Why do you care?
Because it can double the number of people who find your site, see what you offer and decide to buy your stuff. When we rebuilt www.celebrityslim.co.uk and did SEO work, traffic nearly doubled, to 180% of previous levels (I've no hard sales data, sorry. Suffice to say our client was happy!)

Odd then, that it's the budget line-item that people most often cut from the build to 'save money'. To reprise an earlier theme: that's like spending £10k on a brochure and then hiding it in the cupboard. Nuts.

I understand though. It can be hard to make your client see the value.

So, Search engines: they're clever things right?
No. They are dumb machines, set up in complicated ways. They decide which sites are important using a complex set of rules designed to cover up the problem that they don't really 'understand' us humans (this is partly because most people don't understand us humans very well). Anyway, we work with those rules to promote your site.

Search engines do their best to work out where your site fits into life's rich tapestry by crawling through what they can see: text and links.

Important sites look like this:

• Well-made
  Good code tells search engines which bits of the page are important. Well structured content flags what that page is about to search engines in ways they find easy to understand.
• Lots of links
  People link to sites and articles they find useful or good. Search engines count how many sites link to yours to gauge your popularity and authority.
• Lots of content
  Plenty of original text and links to chew through, index and correllate. Search engines use that content to build up a picture of what you are about. Also, the more text and links there are, the bigger the site. Size is a proxy for importance.
• Lots of activity
  Things change regularly. Search engines use this to gauge how likely it is someone will visit the site often.
• Staying power
  Spammy sites come and go. Authoritative sites like, the BBC tend to stick around. Search engines like sites that stick around. Just being there for the last ten years can give you a better rank!
• No comic sans
  Sites using comic sans are downgraded by search engines for being amateurish.*

If your site looks important to Google, it shows up in searches for your products and services. And visibility + good product = sales.

* This is not true. It should be though. 

Boring note: lots of other things affect your ranking. These are just the main ones

How do I make my site look more important?
The usual way: rent a Bentley, don an expensive suit, go round to Google HQ and demand your due! Alternatively, follow our Five Step Plan.

• Step 1: who am I trying to impress?
  The most important question. What are your customers searching for, both metaphorically and on Google? We work with you to build a plan of what you want to be found for. We back it with real search data and measure the effect after doing the work, so you can see the benefit.
• Step 2: make the code help you
  We can restructure existing website code if you already have a site, or we can build fresh. The point of this is to structure the pages so that search engines can see what's important and what's not.
• Step 3: optimise the content
  This is a copy editing and writing job, but it's NOT a job for a generic copywriter. Too many website home pages are accidentally optimised for the word 'Welcome'. Get an SEO specialist copywriter to do this or you are wasting your money. You'll be amazed to learn that we can supply such a person.
• Step 4: get links
  You could do this yourself, but the truth is that you probably won't. Not only is it dull, slow work, you also need to know which sites are worth getting links from. Does your Yell listing link to your site and hit your keywords? Is your Google places record up to date? Are you listed in DMOZ? If you can't answer these questions, you'll benefit from our help.
• Step 5: implement your content plan
  You do have one, right? It's almost as important as the build.
  Too many people think: yeah: we'll have a blog and a twitter feed and news and ... and ... and ... STUFF! Since they haven't set any time or resource aside for it, no content ever happens.
  Having a community of users generating content is also a great way of improving search engine rankings and has many other sales benefits, but unless you have a Mrs. Miggins who organises and looks after that community, you may find it a non-starter.
  We can help you with that content plan.

And finally: as with all your marketing efforts, if you aren't testing, measuring the return and optimising then you have no idea what's bringing you sales. Surviving the afterlive is something we'll cover in another post.

Summary 

I (the person trying to sell you SEO along with your build) says that cutting SEO or trying to do it yourself is a false economy. Well, I would, wouldn't I? But the payoff is so unambiguous that it should be a no-brainer.

To find out how SEO could help you, give Frank and Jules a shout on
01422 847958, or email make.it.work@welovetheweb.com

Boot note: You may notice that I haven't used the word 'Metatags' once. That's because they are only peripherally useful: less than 5% of the job. So if you have an idea in your head that SEO is to do with metatags, then you may not fully understand the process.

Disclaimer: your mileage may vary for which of your search terms make it into the top ten. That's why we optimise for a whole spread of words and phrases.

If you have a friend or colleague who you think might like to receive these emails, get them to sign up for the We love the web newsletter. We won't share their email addresses with anyone else and we won't send through huge numbers of mails, just these how-tos, well, and the very occasional sales pitch, but we promise not to be 'in your face' about it.

'Should we promote our site using Google AdWords, or invest in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?' Which is better? I get asked this a lot.

SEO is a basic 'Thing you should do'. If you don't, you are throwing money away.

Not doing SEO on your site is like spending £10,000 on a brochure but keeping it in a box at the back of a cupboard. Silly, right? SEO improves the chances of your customers finding you. The basics are not even technical, but they do take time (this will be the subject of a 'how-to' very soon).

If you haven't done the SEO basics then you shouldn't even be considering AdWords.

Let's assume you've done the basics. Should you invest more in SEO, or spend money on AdWords?

That depends.

AdWords are good when:

• You've done all the basic SEO stuff
• You have a specific product, service or event to promote
• You need to get the word out 'Right Now!'
• You are prepared to spend time testing and measuring what leads to sales and what doesn't. If you don't, then you'll get a lot of click-throughs, but no sales.

Bad things about AdWords:

• As soon as you stop spending, the traffic stops.

SEO is good when:

• You have a reasonably stable target audience or range of products.
• You don't have a huge budget.
• You want to do some work now and reap the benefits for the next year or more.

Bad things about SEO:

• It's hard to test and measure results quickly.

We have used AdWords in the past with good results to refine keyword choices for optimisation. We use AdWords to work out what SEO we should do!

So: we have a very low budget Adwords campaign on a number of different keywords. At the end of the month, we look at which Adwords generated the most sign-ups/sales/enquiries. We then know how to optimise the site. This is a good way to make sure your SEO budget is used effectively.

Whatever you do, make sure you measure the outcomes to see what you get back from the money you spend.

If you aren't a techie, the myriad detail of web stuff can be intimidating.  So we're putting together a series of 'bitesize' how-to's explaining things that we find are puzzling our clients. This is the first.

Keywords and metatags
Clients have started to give us keywords these days to help with search engine positioning, but what we're seeing is that most don't understand the best way to do this: so here's the 2 minute guide to the subject.

Typically, our clients have been sending us keywords as a big block of words, separated by commas, to do with the client's business. That's a great start, but it's only about half the story.

On most web pages, there's a bit you can't see that is used by search engines to help work out what that page is about. This stuff is called 'Metadata' (which means 'information about information' or just 'summary' in plain English). There are two common 'tags' for Metadata on most web pages:

• Keywords: 35 words or short phrases summarising the page (up to 255 characters to be precise). For the We Love The Web home page for example, that might be 'We Love The Web, bespoke web development, eCommerce websites, Content Management System' etc.
• Description: A short paragraph summarising the page

So: how do you get maximum value from metatags?
Keywords are really about the page, not the website. A list of generally relevant keywords about the business is likely to be generally helpful in search-engine terms, mainly because your pages are likely to contain those words in the bits of text that you can see. It's not getting you maximum value in search engine terms though.

When writing copy for the site, bear in mind what you want the site to be found for, then include an extra couple of para's per page: one for keywords, one for description. Decide which are the most important words from that page and summarise the page into keywords and description. Make sure that the keywords and description tags both contain the most important phrases from that page: the ones you would like to float to the top in search-engine terms. It only takes 10 minutes a page and can really help your search engine rankings.

As ever though, if you are confused, then call us: happy to help.
Alternatively, if you have a topic you'd like to see us cover, then ask away.