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Why Your Unique Content is So Valuable

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Louise

Unique content, everybody knows, is something every successful website needs, even more since the arrival of Google’s Panda update. Terrific content is well and good, but you need to optimize it to gain the best organic search engine position. If a search reveals that your content is being copied and pasted into other, unrelated websites, there are measures you can take.

It is counter-productive for your website if its content is being ‘scrapped’ by other websites. It is unique no longer. You won’t be the sole authority anymore and will have to compete with other sites for content that belongs to you. This is exacerbated if the content concerns a product or service you’re offering. If the website that is using your information is also a competitor, you can lose customers. Sites using your content could even end above you in the SEO search engine rankings, depending on their design and the number of their back links. You could end up being the loser. The search engine could even pick up on the duplicate content and hold you responsible for it. It will consider the content on your site as low grade and this will have a negative impact on your ranking.

There are measures you can take to safeguard your site against this type of piracy. It is not compulsory to carry a copyright notice, but if you do, you will pre-empt any attempt by the pirates to claim the content as their own. If you discover that your stuff is being used on other sites, it is best to go straight to the source to try and remedy the situation. Often all it takes is a reasonable request to remove the content. If they should resist, you can send a much sterner notice to the webhost and owner of the site to tell them to cease and desist. If they can’t supply provenance for the content, they are constrained to remove it. A lawyer could be the last resort. This could lead to legal action against the pirates and if they lose the case, they could be forced to pay restitution.

It is in the nature of the Internet for content to be duplicated on a large scale. Safeguarding your content against it, can take a lot of effort, but sometimes you won’t have any option. Your content is precious and can be the key to the success of your website and business. Don’t be the patsy that has to suffer lower rankings and lose customers. Look after your content. It is worth it.

The fastest way to check if your content has been scrapped or stolen for use on another (or multiple) websites can be seen here : http://www.copyscape.co.za

 

Posted in SEO Company Johannesburg, SEO Techniques | Tagged , , | Comments Off

Landing Page Optimisation for SEO and PPC Conversion

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Jerome West

Landing pages are crucial in all your Internet marketing strategies, be it PPC efforts, organic SEO projects, e-mail marketing campaigns or social media launch pads.  Your business and the rate at which it converts visitors to customers and deliver results, will benefit from improving the quality of your website’s landing pages. You need to take note of a few measures you can take to optimize your landing page. It will inevitably lead to greater Internet marketing success.

Landing Page Optimisation and SEO

You need to be clear upfront about the value you can offer them on your website. The minute they open your landing page, the visitors must be involved and must be assured that it will be worth their while to spend their precious time on your site. You need to give them a very clear, very direct message about the benefits of your products or services. The visitor cannot be expected to sleuth around on your site. Tell them quickly and be straightforward about the way in which your products or services will fill their particular needs. You need to do your market research so that you will know what it is that they want from your offering. Be direct, be brief and engage your visitor.

Even if your visitors are convinced that you have exactly the right product or service they need, at exactly the price they want, a lot of business will slip through the cracks if you do not have a clear call-to-action field above the fold. An effective, cleverly designed website will use its call-to-action to channel customers to the next step where the sale can be closed. In this way more leads will become customers.

A proper landing page makes it easy for the visitor to navigate on it. A cluttered, confusing landing page repels visitors and they will leave your site before you can convert them to customers. If navigation on a landing page is unnecessarily complicated, the site will experience an unhealthy bounce rate. A neat, uncluttered page, on the other hand, will help visitors to focus on the pertinent information and to find out how you can fill their needs. It is no co-incidence that pages with good conversion rates are also user-friendly.

Well-chosen, welcoming images will make your visitor feel at home on your page, and in a mechanical environment, which the Internet can be, this will be a great advantage. A happy shopper is one that is willing to spend money. Good, snappy, amusing images go a long way to make the visitor’s stay on the website a pleasant one and you will notice the improvement in your business’ results.

Posted in AdWords, SEO Techniques | Tagged , | Comments Off

Website Design and SEO – Keep it Simple

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Jerome West

The first rule of marketing, for websites as for anything else, is to find out what the client or user wants. It seems ease of accessibility and user-friendliness is top of the list. HubSpot ran a study and concluded that more than three-quarters of users prefer pages which open easily and is straightforward to navigate. A website is not a puzzle and you should not expect of your visitors to sort through clutter to find what they are looking for.

Website Design and SEO

Ease of access will draw more visitors to your page and ease of navigation will make them stay longer and this will give you a better chance to convert leads to sales. If in doubt, opt for a basic layout and concentrate on organizing it well. The user has so many websites vying for his attention, you’ve got to seize the opportunity if a visitor enters your site.

While a basic layout is to be preferred, it is also true that you could err on the side of blandness. Today’s Internet user is visually literate and expects to have a pleasant visual experience when visiting a webpage. There is a fine balance between interesting and cluttered, as there is between basic and boring. The best websites are visually appealing, intrigue the visitor, yet maintain a clear layout which is easy to navigate and use. Take care not to use gadgets which could hurt your SEO rankings. Using Flash, for instance, can really pep up your website, but it will hurt your rankings because it takes longer to load. Bear in mind that you have to serve multiple platforms and Flash is incompatible with a great proportion of smartphones. Find other visual devices that will spruce up your site but won’t be detrimental to your rankings.

The temptation is to make your company name the focus of your website, but remember,  people are not looking for your company, in the first instance, but your services or products. The Golden Rule of Commercial Websites is to focus on search engine optimisation and to  build loads of links to lure your visitors. The Internet is a jungle out there and your main aim should be to let users find your website. If they don’t find you, well, what they don’t see will have no effect on them, no matter how well or how shabbily it is designed.

Always evaluate your website to make sure it is user-friendly and easy to navigate. The users have spoken. They prefer a website that is straightforward to navigate and easy to use. If you keep those principles in mind, you will reap the benefits in visitor-to-customer conversions. If you find this conversion rate lagging, it’s time to go back to basics and in this case it means having an honest look at the ease of use of your website.

Posted in SEO Techniques | Tagged , | Comments Off

Optimising Reviews for Local SEO Search Results

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Richard

Word of mouth remains the most cherished form of advertising and for at least a century advertisers have asked themselves how to generate it. With the dawn of the Internet, this question has been transplanted to the web. The best Internet efforts at word of mouth are sites like Yelp and Google Places. They come in the form of personal reviews of products given by ordinary consumers. These pages draw huge numbers of customers looking for an honest opinion on products and services.

Google has adapted its local search facility by allowing descriptive terms to be used in local search. This is a boon for your local SEO efforts. Not only will Yelp and Google Places reviews be useful to channel customers to your business, if you are creative they will also have a beneficial effect on your search engine rankings.

Hordes of people are using Google Maps to search for local businesses. It is also catching on rapidly on mobile devices. In Google’s drive to continually add new features and improvements, they have fine-tuned Google Maps to accept descriptive terms in the search facility. This should any SEO specialist’s ears perk up as it will base a local search on keywords and phrases. You need to constantly reconsider your keywords and expand its use on your pages. This will lead to a better SEO ranking and will manifest in more visitors, more leads and more customers.

Local Search SEO

Local businesses should make the smart move to optimize their reviews to harness this local SEO opportunity. It’s vital that your business fuels great reviews in the places it needs to be. By using specific keyword phrases in your company description on pages like Yelp, you’ll be compelling consumers to subconsciously use those keywords when they’re on your Yelp page to write a review about how awesome your company is. This valuable keyword density coming from consumer reviews will benefit your business when Google fully implements descriptive terms (right now it’s only on Google Maps but will soon be on Google Places and Google Maps for mobile).

Posted in SEO Techniques | Tagged , , | Comments Off

New Opportunities for Marketers in The Cloud

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Louise

A new cloud is moving in over the digital world, not bringing rain or thunder, but a new era in computing. Up to now computing mainly took place on local machines which had programmes installed on their hard drives and stored data on these same hard drives and other local media. Computing power and storage were limited by the user’s budget. Very few people have the money to buy mega-powerful computers with huge storage capacity. Internet companies, on the contrary, could and had to invest billions of dollars in this very kind of infrastructure. It did not escape the notice that these mega-computers were accessible to ordinary users via the Internet. Internet users have in fact been using these resources for quite a while. People who use web-based e-mail services like Hotmail or Gmail have been using its software and have stored their e-mail messages on it without downloading its specific software. They have, in effect, been using the resources of what is now being called “the Cloud.” The idea is now to have the Cloud so finely tuned that whatever you do, your content will automatically be saved in it while it is also forwarded to your devices.

Internet Marketing Opportunities from the Cloud

In June the Cloud got a huge boost with the official stamp of approval by the world’s most dynamic IT developer, Apple, and it’s legendary CEO Steve Jobs. He announced the release of the iCloud, Apple’s main thrust into this new digital phase. The desktop computer or the Mac or the laptop used to be the centre of the personal computing universe. The Cloud is now poised to take over. The first benefit would be not just almost unlimited storage space in the Cloud, but, indeed, safe storage. Gone will be the days when a person’s business life, personal life and career became unhinged because his PC’s hard disk crashed. This storage will take place without the user even thinking about it. Apple’s ICloud demonstrates this perfectly. Take a photo on your iPhone, for instance, and it is automatically stored in your exclusive space in the cloud while it is also immediately sent to your Mac or iPad for use.

One thing we have learned is that every new phase in the digital revolution brings new opportunities for marketers. The Cloud appeals to mobile users. Mobile devices are of necessity smaller than desktop equipment. Even with the remarkable expansion of internal memory, a smartphone or pad’s onboard storage space remains limited. This fits in neatly with the Cloud strategy. The Cloud will in all probability push the bulk of online searches towards mobile use. According to forecasts it will not be long before the number of mobile users exceeds those using computers. Be sure your website is optimized for mobile use.

And keep your eye on the Cloud, its particular environment, atmosphere, culture and customs. Try to identify idiosyncrasies and trends particular to the Cloud. Your company’s future and fortune may well depend on it.

Posted in SEO News / Internet Marketing News | Tagged | Comments Off

SEO Tips on Keyword Selection for SEO

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Richard

SEO Tips

An Internet user looking for a product will most often do this by typing in a search word or phrase into a search engine. If your keyword corresponds with this word, and if your search engine ranking is high, chances are that this user will visit your site. The trick is to choose the right keywords as this not only has a direct bearing on channelling the right visitors to your site, but the right keywords will also boost your rankings. Let us tell you how:

You start off by identifying the search terms most commonly used by people looking for your type of product or service. These search terms can be “short-tail keywords,” consisting of a single word, or “long-tail keywords” of two to four words. You should include a combination of these when you select your keywords.

It is very important that there is a close correlation between the content on your webpage and your keywords. If there is not a close relationship between content and keywords the search will clearly not lead back to your website. You need to trawl your website’s content to find the words which best describe what your company does. If you find that there is not a close correlation between content and website, you need to make adjustments. Ensure that the keywords are used in titles and throughout the wealth of information on your website.

There are some great SEO tools to make the keyword selection process easier. You can find many of them on the Internet. These include Overture Keyword Selector, Keyword Discovery Google AdWords, Wordtracker and Google Correlate.

It is important to get these keywords in the right order and to take note of word variants. You need to cast your net as wide as possible and to do that you must use your keywords in a variety of ways and in different combinations to try and cover any search for these keywords. You may be in the dog trade so your keywords and keyword combinations should include “dog for sale,” “dogs to sell,” “selling dogs” and “buy my dog.” These simple variations can make a huge difference in your SEO efforts.

Another SEO Tip for checking potential keyword targets in Google is to use Google’s Instant Search – the drop down suggested list that Google provides as you start to type in your search term. Also look at the bottom of the results page for futher suggestions on related terms considered important by Google.

Posted in SEO Techniques | Tagged , , , | Comments Off

Backlinks or Inbound Links and your SEO Programme

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Richard

We had previously talked about how linking or backlinking boosts your website’s rankings and gets your company website found by more people.

Backlinking, as we emphasized before, will push your site up through the rankings which will let more people find it.

Now, we want to go in-depth a bit further and explain why inbound links are so crucial to your Internet marketing success. If you want to use the Internet to grow your business, you need to have an SEO strategy that incorporates inbound linking.

It is simple, if you want to boost your business by using the Internet, inbound linking must be a high priority in your SEO campaign.

Inbound links are the links coming into your website from other websites. When it comes to boosting your site’s rankings and getting more traffic, inbound links are what really matter (this is still true despite changes to the Google Algo..). Outbound links, that is linking being sent from your site to other sites, do little to improve your exposure with Google however linking from your site to a few reputable websites can do no harm. Just do not link ‘out’ excessively – we are talking 2-3 a page and not all pages.

Links coming to your website from other sites are inbound links. These are the links which are of importance in pushing your site up the rankings.

This is because links are an important reference from one site to another. For Google and the other search engines, if other websites are sending links to your website then this validates you as a valuable member of the online community. Thus, you are reward with a high ranking for your chosen keywords.

Watch our video to learn more about how inbound links can grow your business.

Posted in SEO Company Johannesburg, SEO Techniques | Tagged , , | Comments Off

Page Speed and SEO – Is it Important?

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Richard

The time it takes for your page to load, or page speed, is important. Recently Google’s Mark Cutts uploaded a video on his blog about the extent to which page speed affects SEO. Page speed, it transpires, is important, but how much does it matter and how do you increase it? Google does use page speed for your page’s overall ranking, but there are 200 other variables that also contribute. Only if your page speed is so sluggish that Google can’t access your page to rank it, does it become a priority in page ranking. That does not mean that page speed is unimportant in the SEO scheme of things.

An Internet user has an enormous number of choices in websites. You need to get as many visitors as possible choosing your site and spending as much time as possible on your website to get a good ranking. Therefore you need a properly designed website with loads of interesting information. The best content in the web, however, is of little value if the page takes too long to load. The most effective way to increase your page speed is to prune unnecessary coding and other media elements which can be distracting. You should make your site easy to navigate. While good content is crucial, it would be to little avail if the visitor has to trawl through a thicket of unnecessary content which slows down your page speed and will repel visitors.

Google has a nifty tool with analytics report that you can use to measure your site speed. Use this tool to find out which landing pages are slow, what the download speed is on different browsers and the difference in page speed in different locations.

This tool has a lot of benefits. If it turns out that your target audience is in an area with slower page speed or your site takes longer to download on a different browser, you can make valuable adjustments.

You can only concentrate on the things you can change. You can’t control everything that affects download speed. Factors beyond your control are Internet connection speed, how far the visitor’s computer is from your server and which browser they’re using. By streamlining your website and getting rid of unnecessary text, images and other media, more visitors will come to your site and they will stay longer. This will be reflected in your site rankings.

Posted in Google News, SEO News / Internet Marketing News, SEO Techniques | Tagged , | Comments Off

Making Facebook Fans into Customers

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Richard

Facebook Logo - Facebook Fans

Facebook is rapidly becoming a hot tool for businesses. Companies are absolutely flocking to this social-media network to market their products or services. Starting out as a place to find and hang out with friends, Facebook has developed into a fantastic platform for brand promotion. Not only is it a tool which provides enormous potential to reach out to new customers, it also gives unprecedented interaction between company and customer. This kind of instant feedback makes it possible for companies to adapt their marketing approach and even rework their product strategies.

It is crucial, however, not to confuse social success with commercial strike rate. A plethora of “likes” on your Facebook page does not necessarily translate into marketing success.

People may like your Facebook page, and even become “fans” of your company, but this just means they are aware of your business. They don’t inevitably morph into customers. You need to focus on ways to turn Facebook fans into customers of your business.

As always in Internet marketing you need to guide your Facebook fans to take action. You must, therefore, have calls-to-action in prominent places on your Facebook page. After they’ve confirmed that the y “like” your page, you must be explicit about what they need to do next. You can use a form for a quote or a subscription for a newsletter, for instance, but make sure that it does not consume too much space, 3 or 4 fields being adequate. Bear in mind that social-media users are conditioned to use straightforward forms with two fields. To not complicate the situation or they just won’t follow you to the next step.

The charm of Facebook is that it is personal. The consumer is no longer merely the target of form letters or general messages. When they make an input, you can react rapidly. A Facebook fan responding to one or your posts or comments on your discussion board, is already involved with your company. You have a wonderful opportunity to tie this consumer into a relationship with your

You need to reward your fans for taking an interest in your Facebook page, and the best way to do that is by giveaways. The majority of Facebook consumers, according to one study, “like” a brand because they are on the hunt for freebies like coupons or discounts. Any action on the Internet has elements of a journey and nothing is better than to stumble upon a treasure, however large or small. Reward the users with giveaway contests or exclusive coupons as a reward for becoming a fan.

A coupon has rewards, not only for your fan, but also for your company. If you give them, say 25% discount, it will not only lure visitors to your site, but it will encourage them to buy something. These freebies, all those sweepstakes and contests and coupons, will not only improve traffic to your business site, it will also convert visitors to customers.

Remember to constantly guard against your content becoming stale. Continually update your Facebook page. This will lure visitors back to your page. The idea is to make a visit to your page a part of their ritual. Furnish links to your regular blog posts or news about your company and its products or services. You could also post regular tips which your Facebook fans will find useful. If your Facebook fans find that there is a benefit to visiting your company webpage, you are well-positioned to improve your SEO ranking and create more customers.

Posted in SEO News / Internet Marketing News, Social Media Marketing | Tagged , , | Comments Off

SEO and Duplicate Content

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Richard

It is much easier to lure visitors to your site than to keep them interested in it. SEO companies know that it is all about content:  obviously that is what interests the visitor. A well-conceived SEO effort will create a daily blog and other embellishments. An SEO campaign will be severely thwarted, however, if this content is duplicated. In SEO terms duplicated content is the same material on separate pages. There are good reasons why this is a bad idea.

Duplicate Content

The most obvious reason is that the user will not enjoy the experience. Your site will fail in its purpose of supplying solid information. The user that finds the same content on multiple pages, will feel cheated and is unlikely to return. Duplicate content will have cost you a valuable potential customer.

Moreover, search engines do not react positively to duplicate content. The search engine is likely to see it as spam. Duplicate content can also cause search engines to register your website more than once. If the search engine picks this up, your site will be penalized and the user will learn about it. Users are becoming savvy and are likely to skip a site that appears multiple times in a search engine.

Duplicate content could appear on your site even without your knowledge. It could  happen that two homepages are created, a default page and an original page, the two having different inbound links. The panda Google update makes this a particularly poor idea. It may interfere with your SEO link building, and this could only be bad for your website and business.

Your SEO company should constantly look for ways to eliminate duplicate content. There should be an effort to get fresh content continuously. There could be a similarity in content but duplicating words on every page will thwart your SEO campaign.

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