E-book - The Secrets to Success on the Web - Instalment 3/4
This is the third (and penultimate) in our series of four instalments publishing Dorset Business Mentor Mark Snare’s e-book on The Secrets to Success on the Web. To read those prior please refer to our Insights page
In this instalment we publish Chapters 5 & 6 entitled ‘Links’ and ‘SEO’. Forthcoming Chapters will then cover ‘Paying for Traffic’ ‘Going multi-channel’ with ‘Free Things you should do’ bringing the publication to a close.
Chapter 5
Search Engine Optimisation, not all links are the same
SEO is a subject that deserves a book or two all by itself. The old days are over and the popular search engines really do a good job of seeking out the websites that are genuine authorities on their subjects. Or in the case of Wikipedia, authorities on pretty much any topic you can think of.
This is why we recommend choosing your specialisation and URL wisely, that is the first stage to creeping up the search engine rankings and becoming noticed by web surfers trying to find your products or services.
On-topic content that search engines can read will help, so in the early days of launching your website keep adding content, keep blogging and keep circulating your stuff round social media. Keep the content natural and avoid keyword stuffing (overusing your key search terms in a bid to aid SEO) as this will be obvious to the word counters within the search engines and your efforts will be penalised.
Avoid content voids, pages that are mainly images with minimal text will look bad in the eyes of the search engines, they won’t know what the page is about and will take a dim view. Although the web is now really about video and pictures for human eyes, text is important for the search engines to know what they are looking at.
The next vital ingredient in your site working its way up the search engine results pages are LINKS. High quality links are the holy grail of SEO. Gone are the days when you could circulate content on article sharing sites in exchange for a link back to your site, the engines are wise to this practise and a lot of article sites only offer “no follow” links (a link with code that neutralises the value of the link)
So you need to invest serious time and effort into working with other site owners and bloggers to gain links to YOUR site from other HUMAN OWNED and EDITED sites. This is a time consuming practise, but ONE decent link from an independently owned and ranked site is worth 200 links from junk sources. You will need to be patient but trust me, if you can add 10 links a month from bloggers and website owners who will swap you a link for some original content then your site will steadily march up the rankings. When you start, don’t waste time hitting up big name sites for a link, work with hobbyists, bloggers, influencers and web site owner / operators who will understand where you are at. This is called blogger outreach and it works. The deal is simple, find websites that have a level of synergy with yours then use the contact us page to write a nice email along the lines of:
Hi ********
I found your site on google last night and really like the work you have done, we run www.door-knobs-online.co.uk and are passionate about all things to do with architecture and self-building homes. Could we write you an original piece on selecting high security doors and windows for yourself build home or another construction topic of your choosing in exchange for a link back to our website? Let me know and I promise you that the piece will be original and unique to your site.
Kind regards, Mark
This sort of approach will let the webmaster know that you are serious and understand the need to keep content original and unique to the site it is part of.
PLEASE don’t fall for all the cheap link building services out there promising that they will blast your content to over 300 link sharing sites while “spinning” the content to be original each time guaranteeing you high quality google friendly links each time!! It’s not 2005 anymore and this just will not work.
More than likely nothing will happen OR worse still your ranking level will drop. With link building, add your site to a few industry specific directories, share some infographics then stick to building quality links. If your content is really good, the people will link to it of their own accord too, this is the ultimate approval of your work, someone saying “click on this and check out what I’ve just found” and that is why search engines like sites that other sites link to.
In Google search console you can keep tabs on sites that link to you, as this number creeps up, so will the perceived authority of your website. It must be said that every other website owner will be doing this too, so normal business rules apply, don’t throttle off or the others will catch up.
You can see how your competition is doing by running their url through a back link checker (just search on back link checker) this will let you know how many links they have but not the quality of those links. If you stick to quality link building and your site is optimised in the other ways I have covered you can catch up and out rank your competition with a few months of solid effort. Less if the search terms are not that competitive.
Anchor text, this is a chunk phrase for a simple thing, a simple link is looks like this (the bold text forms the link) :
go check out https://www.door-knobs-online.co.uk
This will link back to your home page AND has your search terms neatly in (one of the reasons good URL choice is important)
A more complicated link involving a little code is this
Go check out door knobs online I just bought a great front door knocker from them
Now this type of link looks neater and will be more common as bloggers and webmasters care about presentation. Using a simple piece of html code any text can become a link out to another site. This is called anchor text is simply the chunk of text that people can click on.
Internal links:
These only require you to cooperate with yourself, make sure your pages link to each other using natural anchor text that describes the page the link is heading to. This will help the engines crawl your site and to know what it is about. We relaunched one of our sites onto a new platform losing a lot of internal links in the process. The homepage hung onto its ranking well, while every internal page dropped away in the SERPs cutting our organic traffic in half!
We spotted the problem quickly and recovered the situation by adding internal links from one page to another.
Bit of a scare but everything can be fixed if you know what you’re looking for!
So link from your blog posts to your other blog posts and into your main site and from page to page and department to department, this will help readers and search engine crawlers navigate round your site. You can steer your own internal linking to focus your SEO project towards certain products or departments that make the most commercial sense to you. For example if you have a retail website that stocks a lot low margin products that pad it out while a few core products you import direct you can funnel links towards these higher margin products by making your internal links point to them. This will also help make the website rank well for these specific products too.
Building a search engine friendly website is time consuming, the purpose of this guide it to help you use your time well and not waste it. Quality link building is time well spent.
A quick word here on my experiences with the SEO industry, over the years I have paid various monthly retainers to various marketing companies with surprisingly consistent results. All except one small three person firm delivered disappointing results, sometimes even losing ranking on the site they were working on. Let me tell you why I think that happens. A lot of time consuming fiddling goes on which will just not effect much at all, secondly link building is hard and time consuming and it seems that most SEO companies just aren’t very good at it yet. Either they are slow to catch on or they think there is an easier way.
For me, the ideal SEO company would have a network of privateer blog owners on their books so they could easily add quality links to any new site they were working on, driving that site up the rankings. Instead they tend to talk big and deliver small. We tasked one small SEO firm to build links only and our site marched up the SERPs very reliably. BE CAREFUL with SEO firms as they usually tie you in for 6 months or more, it can be very frustrating and expensive, imagine paying money out while you watch your website fall down the rankings.
This goes back to you being the expert in your field, if you write a blog post on your profession it will be insightful and up to date. If a writer within an SEO firm pens a blog post on your behalf it may be the first time they’ve ever even thought about your specialisation. Its stands to reason that your blog post will be better and won’t take you long to write either.
In defence of SEO companies it is a tricky industry to be involved in because the goalposts shift all the time and customer expectation is high that results will come quickly. The key with SEO is to know what you are doing, invest your time wisely and be patient. The results will come.
The real payoff on the internet is if your content is really compelling like the electric car company Tesla or the current King of YouTube Casey Neistat no SEO is required, people will just naturally link to and share your stuff.
If you think about your content like that, and make genuinely stunning content then the SEO load can be lightened. Obviously building a 600HP electric car from scratch then housing it all in a giga-factory is all pretty interesting stuff, but you know what I mean, be cool, be funny, be original and the secret sauce of the internet will work for you!
Link on, and remember this one high quality link is worth 300 nonsense ones.
Chapter 6
SEO on your pages
If you have done some homework on the internet you will have heard the phrase “content is King” and this is very true. It keeps the humans flicking through your website and it tells the search engines what your site is about, how to rank it and of what quality it is. Here are my tips for writing good pages.
The meta data: Any website building software or content management system will give you full control over page title, description and probably keywords too. The relevance of keywords has faded in recent times so don’t worry about them too much. Google made it known some time ago that it ignores keywords. Page title and description are important and give you a great chance to tell the search engines all about the page.
Keep the page title short and to the point with a maximum of 70 characters, if it is a product get the brand, model and type in there so the page will work for people searching specifically for that product. For example “5 litre optimal duck egg blue kitchen and bathroom paint”
If it is a blog post offering a “how to strip your Border Terrier’s coat” guide then call it that. Be descriptive and use good English, do not attempt to disjoint the sentence to stuff an extra juicy keyword in there. The engines can detect wobbly grammar.
The description allows for more text, up to 140 characters is recommended so add a product specific like the material, category of product or what the product is known for. For example
“5 litre can of optimal kitchen and bathroom paint in duck egg blue, a leading waterproof coating”
For the blog post example try this sort of description “The best way of stripping your border terrier or other wiry haired small dog’s coat and the stripping combs and tools we recommend”
This will net more traffic as it expand search terms to include “wiry haired dogs” and “recommended stripping combs”
If you need help with your title or description then use the google keyword checker tool within AdWords, this will make suggestions and tell you which keywords get the traffic. Use it, it is quite surprising where the search traffic is!
On page text or copy is also read by the search engines as long as it is not trapped in a frame! On setting up a new website make sure you don’t trip over this most elementary website disaster, no frames!
Keep the text natural and relevant, you can use a keyword density checker online to avoid being penalised for accidental keyword stuffing (current thinking is no more that 2.5% of the same word or phrase on a page to avoid looking like purposeful keyword manipulation). Be descriptive and tell all you can about the product, service or information you are sharing. Remember you are writing for human readers not machines so make it friendly, original and don’t be afraid of being jovial.
When I am writing copy for the web I make sure it is authentic, I’m not a salesman and I don’t think people really enjoy being sold to anyway. Long term it is better to be accurate, informative and genuine. This builds trust and manages expectation. Also remember that you are writing for someone who probably knows nothing about the subject matter, so start with the basics and work up. Test your written content on friends and family who are separate from your business, ask them their opinion on the piece and if it was useful and informative. Invest time in this stage as once your content is published it may be a while before it is refreshed.
Blog posts can be even more friendly and casual as you are really talking to your audience with blogging, sharing your expertise and offering help and advice. My blogging is chatty and informal, easy to read and friendly. I find publishing helpful blog posts one of the most rewarding types of content marketing as blogs are there to help and inspire as well as draw traffic and social engagement. Remember there are people out there who know nothing about your skill set so this is your chance to help them. People search the internet for the help they need, you can be that help and you’ll be appreciated for putting you answers out there.
Rich snippets, schema and micro data
At the time of writing this rich snippets, schema and micro data are still relatively new. They are however all designed to improve search engine results and are easy enough to implement. If you run a WordPress blog you will already be familiar with adding rich snippets. This simply allows you to add a page type be it an article, product review, recipe, etc. From there a set of drop down boxes will appear that you can then fill in with nice specific data that helps the search engines deliver good results (which is what they are all about). This is why when you select a platform or a web design company you need a supplier that is currently up to date AND more importantly has a good track record on adopting new web technologies as they arrive. Don’t let your website gather dust.
Schema.org is a set of protocols the leading search engines agreed on as a way of presenting micro data in a uniform manner that would benefit search engines and publishers alike. If you search on “schema creator” you will find help creating your schema data and guides on adding it to the suitable pages of your site. I have found web publishing immensely enjoyable and rewarding but you must stay current to get the best results.
If you get involved with a web designer that insists on hosting your website (usually with shaky reasoning involving unique server technology or other such twaddle) you are entering into a marriage of sorts that can be hard to leave. If the design firm get lazy with updating their platform your once gleaming website can slip into obscurity through not keeping pace with new technologies as they emerge. I have experienced this with a web company continually taking the “it doesn’t matter line” when of course the major search engines value websites that keep up! If your website is slipping in the search engine results pages, not adopting new technologies could be a factor.
Your platform being up to date is one of the most obvious SEO “easy wins” out there and it is really a no-brainer, this is why I would recommend a web design firm that uses an open source e-commerce platform like magento that has updates released continuously rather than their own white label platform that they may be reluctant to improve. Again my aim here is to highlight these risky, high impact areas before you take the plunge as making a U turn is expensive and time consuming once all the effort has gone in.
Each page should be a technical and contextual strength to the website it is part of, don’t be afraid to delete old content as obsolete pages will make your website look like a shop with dusty old goods on the shelf. They are there but no one is interested in them and they drag the place down.
Mark Snare is a successful entrepreneur and gives his time as a mentor through Dorset Business Mentors’ program. When business owners approach us, either for personal or role mentoring within their business, we carefully assess the requirement and who of our mentors could add the greatest value. At the top level
Mark Snare is considered for matching as a mentor to business at all stages but most particularly that are fledgling start-ups, those looking to grow where e-commerce is a significant factor, and those who are considering exit options. His particular expertise is in marketing and trends, optimised use of the internet, common pitfalls as well as developing resilience and strategy. He is currently supporting two businesses and you can read one of two testimonials here, as well as Mark’s perspective here. As you will discover this business centres around e-commerce and his expertise and support is proving very effective in contributing to their growth. To request a Mentor to support you in your business please contact us for an informal conversation about the process and to answer questions, or you can send us an email through our contact page and we will be in touch.