September 28, 2011 in Blog by Admin

Let Your Website do the Selling for You

We are in the technology age but despite how much hype there is about technology, there are many people who are struggling to incorporate technology into their business. Every business needs a website. If put to strategically, your website might just turn out to be your most effective marketing tool. You must be curious to know how to make your website create magic for you. This article will touch on a few ways you can apply to make your website do the selling for you.

Be Different

If your website will be your primary marketing tool, make it special. Take every opportunity you have to differentiate your company from your competition. Ensure you provide all the necessary information regarding your business. It will help to have an attractive presentation. Ensure your website is interactive so that potential customers find it easy to navigate. If they enjoy navigating through your website, chances are they will feel comfortable doing business with you.

SEO

SEO? What SEO? Search engines are the most effective tools when it comes to marketing your website. To ensure that you take advantage of this tool, engage search engine optimization (SEO) tactics. Create your website content aimed at bringing you to the fore of search engines when potential clients search for your products or services. Do this by using keywords that relate to your products or services. You have to stand out from your competition in your SEO marketing so that potential clients can easily make a decision to use you.

Social Marketing

As you read this, maybe your phone is beeping because of a twitter update. Yes, we are in the days of Twitter, FaceBook and blogs. Those who caught on the tide earlier on have learnt that social marketing can only mean success for your business. Why not take their cue? Create a page for your business on every social engine you know and market it through your friends. It is simple and fun, just create your account and wait to see the magic it works.

June 7, 2011 in Blog by Admin

SEO and Keywords – Petting the Panda

Not long ago webmasters determined the best way to get traffic from Google searches was to yell at Google to get their attention. Webmasters stuffed their own webpages so full of keywords that the content was painful to read. To help searchers find useful pages rather than those only designed to make money through PPC and affiliate programs, Google is always changing the way it finds and indexes content on the Internet. Panda is one of those changes that has webmasters (and SEO agencies to some extent) sweating.

Trying to determine what Google is looking for, and how they index sites is a tough chore. Many experts feel that Panda is an attempt by Google to stop sending their valued users to bad, uninformative sites. If your site has seen a significant drop in visitors, it might be because the search engine has determined it is not providing quality content.

The Continued Importance of Keywords in SEO

One of the things that Google has always looked for is keywords; however, a little goes a long way. If you are adding keywords to your content at a rate of three or four percent, traffic to your website may be down. That percentage is excessively high now.

The longer the keyword phrase is, the more obvious the attempt at keyword stuffing. Consider a four-word keyword at three percent inclusion: The whole phrase has to be included three times for every 100 words. After about two paragraphs, your visitors will be long gone.

That is another thing to consider. Google is indexing sites with ‘stickiness,’ which is good written content that keeps visitors on the page. If the visitors are likely to leave your site right away (which is called bouncing) Google will not likely send them there. Remember, the idea is to send searchers to quality, helpful sites.

To keep your site from coming up low in the search rankings, or even being banned, make sure it has high quality, useful content that is not stuffed with keywords. You may feel it is not enough, but you should consider a keyword percentage of one percent or less, particularly for longer phrases. If they fall into place naturally, that is fine; but do not force them.

Do not stuff related keywords, either. Disguising spam will not help you. You should use related keywords, but keep them at a low percentage, too. Related words can be helpful in getting the search engines to understand the content of your site, but too many will probably hurt you.

The changes that Google makes from time to time are annoying to webmasters who are trying to make money from their sites. Those changes are a blessing to searchers because they are sick of junk sites. So consider this: If you want to make money from your site, provide good, solid content. The search engines will see it and send you visitors. All it means is that you have to do what you should have been doing before now, which is educating or entertaining your visitors.

April 28, 2011 in Blog by Admin

What Is SEO?

SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the process of getting your website to rank higher on Bing, Google and Yahoo. Over the past decade, online marketing has risen vastly in importance. What before was no more than a bedroom hobby has now developed into a multi-billion pound worldwide industry. Almost everyone is getting involved, from the local pet grooming store down the road to the huge globalised brands with shops in every shopping centre in every major city of the world. Those who are yet to get on board are being left behind, which is causing them to miss out on a very profitable income stream.

If you’ve ever wondered why why some companies websites appear higher in the search engines than others, you’d need to ask about their SEO companies behind their success. Be sure to ask them how much more money they’ve been making since they got to the top of the search results. Studies have shown time and time again that search engine users go for the first result much more often than any of the other ones. The simplest way to get extra traffic to your site (and hopefully more business) is by increasing your online presence so searchers can find you more easily.

If you’re not even on the first page, it’s unlikely that the average internet user will ever see your site, if they don’t get what they want straight away, they’ll think of another search term to find what they want.

There are no huge secrets to SEO. If you have the time to set aside and learn the industry techniques, you can do that by reading some of the top SEO blogs and newsletters. One of the first things you’ll learn is that SEO is not a one-off fix, but an ongoing process that needs continual attention. If you don’t keep up the work, your site will suffer while other companies overtake you in terms of SEO performance. Another thing you’ll learn is that the industry is constantly evolving and something that worked five years ago, or even five weeks ago, may not be effective any more.

The basics of SEO are simple. Create a website with well-constructed content based around your keyword research. What you write should have a certain level of keyword density (but not too much) so the search engines can pick up on the theme of your page, but it should be written with the human reader in mind. This content should be well linked to, in order to show a degree of popularity, and above all it should be unique. Unique for the internet and unique on your site. You’ll need to make sure your website is well-structured and that there are no obstacles for the spiders who come crawling to your site. Make sure your coding is all up to scratch and that you’re making use of specific tags such as title and H1. You may want a bit of advertising (PPC & Google AdWords) to help get things started and to aid the struggling keywords and you’ll probably need to engage in some social media. Do all this in a search engine friendly manner and do not try to dupe them in anyway. And you’ll probably want to keep on reviewing and updating your work.

If you have enough spare time to learn, carry out and continue reading about the industry, you can easily take SEO in-house. If, however, you’d prefer to focus on your area of expertise, there are plenty of SEO companies around who are willing to do this sort of work for you. Plus, it’ll save you the hassle of learning all the jargon and making all the mistakes the agencies have already learned from.

Picking your SEO company

At Edinburgh SEO services, we only engage in white hat SEO techniques. What this means is that everything we do is upfront and in line with the major search engine’s guidelines. While this sounds like it should be a given, many SEO companies try to get an edge on their competition by ‘thinking outside the box’, but this often leads to penalties in search rankings or even websites being banned from Google listings altogether.

Edinburgh SEO services was established in 2009 and like our company, we keep our ideas fresh. We may be a small company right now, but we think big and can offer a full range of SEO services. One of the advantages of a smaller SEO company is that our employees all know each other and speak to one another, sharing knowledge, ideas and solutions. We’re not overworked, we don’t overburden out staff with clients and we don’t rush through our work to make sure it all gets done. We do have enough time to spend some of each day focusing on a specific client, we are friendly and approachable and we do know our stuff. If you want to follow industry changes and learn more about SEO, we’ll also keep you up-to-date with out thoughts on our SEO blog.

At the start of any campaign we will provide a free SEO report for your site to show you where we think improvements can be made. We’ll then talk you through our suggestions for the site, the terms we think you should target and together we’ll agree upon the best course of action to improve your site’s ranking. We don’t see the point in targeting a vanity search term just because it’ll look good if you rank well for it, we prefer to aim for the terms and phrases that will bring in traffic with an interest in your products or services. If you want to know what we’re doing with your site (or why we’re doing it in a certain way) then you simply need to ask. Unlike some agencies, we have nothing to hide.

We don’t have a ‘one size fits all’ approach to the SEO services we offer. We do create bespoke campaigns for out clients and we have so far worked in a number of different industries for businesses based in Edinburgh and beyond. The one thing they all have in common? Appreciation for the work Edinburgh SEO Services carried out.

February 9, 2010 in Blog by Admin

SEO Edinburgh – The Keyword Research Phase

This is our second part in our series in how to rank for keywords.  If you have read the first part you will have know that we have chosen the term “SEO Edinburgh” as the keyword we would like this website to rank high in the search engines for.  As was mentioned in the last part, this information should be useful to any business owner as you can learn how we go about achieving high positions in the organic SERP’s.  You can then decide if you wish to do this yourself or failing that let us do the hard work for you.

Whether It Is SEO Edinburgh You Wish To Rank For Or Any Other Term, You Need Keyword Research!

So once we have decided what keyword we would like to rank our website for, it is time to assess the other websites that are currently occupying the top of the 1st page for that specific term.  There are many things we need to look at individually but to simplify things; each individual element can be boiled down to one of two categories:

• On Page SEO
• Off Page SEO

If you analyse the competitions on page SEO and off page SEO you will have a much better idea whether or not the keyword you are targeting is possible.  There are many occasions when the keywords you desire are unfortunately next to impossible to rank for, if that is the case then you need to move on and keep looking for keywords that have less competition.

If you do find that your main keyword is going to be harder than expected, don’t worry.  You will find that no matter what industry you are in, there are keywords that are there for the taking.  In fact, you would be surprised at the sheer number of keywords that sites rank for yet have never been optimised for that term, these kinds of keywords can be looked at as less competitive therefore you can certainly target them for yourself through a white hat search engine optimisation service such as what we at Edinburgh SEO Services offer to our clients.

So what sort of things do we look at for on page SEO?  Well for our SEO Edinburgh keyword there are a few things we looked at but they are mainly the following:

• Meta Data
• Keyword Usage
• PageRank
• Internal Link Structure

Once the above areas have been researched and covered, it is then time to look at what off page SEO our competing websites have implemented so that they are at the top of the search engine results pages (SERP’s).  Again, there are many individual aspects we dig into when doing keyword research but they main areas that cover the key individual parts are as follows:

• External Incoming Link Popularity
• Relevance of External Incoming Links
• Anchor Text Used In External Incoming Links

After we have done the above work we are in a much better position to determine whether or not we have a chance with whatever keyword it is we, or our clients, are aiming to rank for.  Of course for us, in this case and the case of this guide, we are looking to rank for the keyword SEO Edinburgh, however no matter what keyword we are targeting, the work relating to the keyword research will always be the same.

It is by employing this research phase we can identify easy keywords to rank for as well as avoiding any potential impossible keywords.  After all, if you are a brand new software development company, wouldn’t it be nice to rank for the keyword “software development”?  The fact is however that this term will likely be very competitive to the point where it is next to impossible to rank for.  If that is the case then think smaller and go for some other related keywords that WILL be possible to rank number one for and will still bring in many targeted visitors to your site.

At the end of the day, we have found that doing extensive and thorough keyword research will again and again save our clients time, money and a lot of heartache in the long run.  We pride ourselves in being honest and up front with our clients, that is why if we feel that you are not able to rank for a certain keyword, we will tell you.

That is of course unlike many other SEO companies out there who will promise you high rankings first and ask questions later.

The 2nd Part Of The SEO Edinburgh Guide Is Over, Looking Forward To Part 3!

We hope you have enjoyed our second part of this guide and are already working on part three.  As we did in our last part, we will give you the position this site currently ranks for the keyword SEO Edinburgh, we are at position 16 in Google.co.uk which is a positive jump of 153 positions.

January 25, 2010 in Blog by Admin

SEO Company Edinburgh

There are many businesses out there in Edinburgh today that are already using an SEO company, if you are one of them then this is not for you.  This article is aimed at those who are still on the fence.  To those that are, you may have heard about search engine optimisation but you are not sure exactly of the benefits of hiring an SEO company in Edinburgh.  Well today is your lucky day because we at Edinburgh SEO Services have decided to put together a short summary of some of the different advantages an internet marketing firm like us can bring to your company.

To begin with, there are literally hundreds of advantages that we could bring up that all relate to you hiring an SEO company in Edinburgh; however we have decided to stick with 3 of the more important ones for your easy reading pleasure! Read more »