I always get asked as an SEO what is your opinion on ad-words?   My answer is usually its a good short term solution, but at the end of the day it contributes more to turnover than profit, people always ask how can this be proved……………….So I came up with an idea !

Around a year ago, I blogged about ppc and the common mistakes that people made with their campaigns (read the ppc article).  I also blog one hell of a lot about SEO.  Around a year  ago, I decided to start a little case study on one of my clients who spends £21k per month on ad words and £4k per month on SEO to see the difference with traffic and return of investment.

Please see below the month of June overview for traffic to the site, notice the ppc is bringing in more traffic at this point,

Now above, you will notice 65.12% of traffic comes from the CPC campaign, but after looking at the goals we set up in analytics, we saw that 80% of sales came from ppc and only 17.5% from organic traffic. When we cross reference this with the keywords they were being found for, we noticed that no one keyword was generating a mass percentage of the sales through SEO. More so, a vast amount of different keywords bringing 1 or 2 sales each. When we looked at the ppc campaign to find out which keywords were converting, we noticed the complete opposite, 3 keywords were bringing in 60% of the 80% sales which is obviously their most costly keywords.  The 20% of the ppc keywords that converted showed a similar pattern to the seo, there were a long list of keywords only producing 1 or 2 sales each.

I could do the same maths and look at the goals for each month, but to be honest you would not continue reading, so instead below is last months review based on the above.

You will notice in this month the tables have completely turned. The organic traffic contributes to 57.92% of the overall traffic, where as the same ppc spend of £21k which has been tweaked and optimised is contributing 24.7% of the sites overall traffic. I then checked the goals which have not been changed from a year prior. The big thing I noticed was the percentage of sales from the SEO campaign compared with the ad words campaign. The SEO campaign contributed to 84% of the overall sales for the website and the ppc was 11%, the rest coming from direct traffic and social media.

You can now start to see the big difference and why my point is making sense.  SEO always has the longevity of any online business, but adwords can help boost sales at the beginning, your adwords will help you start off and grow whilst your SEO strategy becomes its own monster. I like to think as PPC being the cherry on the cake of a successful business. At least with seo, if you come on hard times, you maintain traffic with a lot lower re-occuring overheads on your business.

My clients products value is a medium value, averaging around £100.00 per sale, there ppc campaign has always been profitable for them. However, there SEO Campaign proved over the space of the year to be more valuable and more profitable by a country mile. The picture below is a comparison of the 2 months and the one below that is the year we have worked on the site.

If you have had similar cases or would like yours reviewing please be in touch, I want to hear feedback on this its why it was written.

Moving on…..a completely different subject I have observed recently…

Now I have noticed two more companies have 301 redirected their old domains as follows;

1. www.justsearching.co.uk – this now permanently 301 redirects to www.justsearch.co.uk

2. www.highposition.net – this now permanently 301 redirects to www.hpseo.co.uk

Both juggernauts of the SEO industry and I am pleased to announce their redirects have worked, just like a couple of the other companies I pointed out months back on page 1 of google.co.uk for the search term seo. These guys seemed to drop back on google for their main keywords, now they are back. So guys, moral of the story…if seo companies are doing this, think about it yourself.

If you are struggling with a domain name of your company and it doesnt seem to move, this tactic is great. Buy a brand new domain and 301 redirect the old one you have to this. All the old domains PR and strength will then move through to the new domain.

With the latest update to googles algorithm, the google database is looking for the most relevant pages to the keyword searched for. Therefore, why load your homepage with 5-6 keywords when you can setup seperate landing pages and spread your net out wider by link building into many landing pages that are relavant to fewer keywords per anding page, thus you increase the likelihood of making the pages as relevant as possible.

For example, if a law firm offer many many services like personal injury, IP law, Criminal law services etc, the best thing here to do would be to categorise each section out and have content relevant to each section of law.  Then when doing your link building campaign, target these pages seperately. Then, when people search for a particular legal service, this relvant landing page will appear in the search engines, not your homepage which should be more generalist.

In my experience, this is how you generate websites that get super traffic. It is also a much more solid strategy for longevity and growing traffic.  If you top load your homepage, things can go wrong and you can loose alot of traffic over night. This landing page strategy is crucial for longevity for your website traffic growth and will help you adapt and stay future proof to google and other search engine updates. Making your pages relevant helps you refine and hone your website and it the way to dominate any particular niche online.  Call us today and I am available to discuss this to the end of the earth.

OK so in October my client enquired on our website they told me how they didn’t have much money to spend and times were really hard. I put together the best keywords for there industry and analysed their competition , i made them a deal that i would turn things around for them at a cost of £350.00 per month with no contract to sign, they were receiving no traffic to there site through search engines only through direct traffic this needed to change.

Month1

The first thing i did was all their on page changes and instructed my team to start link building to the relevant pages of the site, we instructed the client to keep writing blogs and increasing the content and size of the site. although we saw a massive spike in traffic in month one sales did not increase.

Month 2

By month 2 they were ranking page 2 for 50 percent of their keywords and page one for buy land this did not yet have an effect on their sales but was generating more enquiries, I kept a close eye on the analytics and noticed a high bounce rate so we changed a few things on the homepage.

Month 3

Month 3 saw a big increase in traffic it saw the jump from an average of 80 visits a day to around 150, with more traffic and some good changes made to the site, bounce rate decreased to 15%. We saw a good increase in sales and revenue into the business, at month 3 of the campaign we were ranking them page 1 for 80% of the keywords and they were number 2 for a keyword receiving 15,000 monthly hits.

Month 4

Month 4 saw the biggest change in traffic going from an average of 150 up-to a massive 300 hits a day just from the search engines, we saw another increase in sales and 70% of keywords were in the top 3 results, in month 4 they received a phone call from their competitor who owns a 80% share in that market owning 40 websites they asked who they used for SEO and if they would consider selling up, they decided selling up was not an option and to become a market leader would be a better investment. sales continued to flow in and the company was making around a sale a day,

Month 5

We are currently in the middle of month 5 I have included the analytics below so you can see this is not made up babble, now currently ranking all keywords on page 1 and receiving around 450 visits per day, this company has benefited greatly by taking the jump to promote on-line, they are now launching a new site and have increased their SEO plan by targeting 150 regions of the UK . when i spoke to them over the phone they estimated to me since doing SEO their sales have increased and they have sold around 50 plots of land making around 1.4 million .

In Summary this can be the same for a lot of business who have a website and just don’t want to risk taking that step to SEO, SEO does not have to cost the earth and can make dramatic changes to a business, i hope you have enjoyed this case study as much as i have enjoyed achieving this for my client there reaally is nothing more rewarding than a well earnt thank you.

Page Size: - Page size is the size of the HTML code on your web page, size of images, external
CSS and JavaScript doesn’t effects to your page size. The lower is the size; the lesser will be
the load time of your page. Search engines and visitors like sites which load fast on browser.
You can use Page Compression techniques to reduce page size and load time.

Page Caching: – If your site is a database driven website then you must use page caching to
lower the server load. Mostly, in database driven websites, whenever a user request a page
server must connect to the database to acquire information about page before sending that
page to browser. Page caching will decrease you server load by using a pre compiled page or
pre cached page it will connect to the database only once and store a cached version of page or
static HTML version of that page.

robots.txt:- The robots.txt is a file that contains a small text of code that instructs to search
engine robots. It indicates to search engine what part of your site is off (allowing/blocking) for
some or all search engine robots.

sitemap.xml:- A XML sitemap is a file that lists all URLs of sites which are open for
web crawlers. An XML sitemap helps search engines to crawl the site more effectively,
URL Canonicalization: – In simple words if I say something about URL Canonicalization it is
use of different URL for same page. What happens is that search engines get confused about
the correct URL to index? To get rid on this problem you can use MOD_REDIRECT.

Nested Tables: – Use of HTML table within another HTML table is referred to as nested table.
It will result in a slower load time because when this kind of a page is loaded in a browser, the
latter has to find the end of table before displaying entire page.

Images Expires Tags: – Image expires tag prevents your regular users’ browser to re-fetch the
unchanged images from your server, thus saving your bandwidth usage. Image expires tag will
help the user browser to cache the images until the specified expiry date.

Inline Styles: – Inline Style or CSS will help to reduce the code by using repetitive codes and
styles into external file. It will also help in faster page loading.

1.  Always ensure your domain is not linked to any adult, penalty site, and gambling website

2. Your server IP is not blacklisted, or hasn’t been banned by Google. If otherwise, you must change your server immediately

3. Don’t deploy keyword stuffing in meta titles, description and keyword tags

4. Always avoid Hidden Text and Hidden Links

6.  Excessive two-way link exchanges will put you in trouble. Should be done only if relevant with your niche

7. Always use one-way links for your site slowly.  Always use different anchor texts on one way links

8. Remove Malware, if any, as soon as possible. You can check with www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=yourdomain.com for further help on this

Google has introduced a lot of SEO friendly tools such as Google Webmaster Tools. This is where you can check out the guidelines laid by Google with respect to Search Engine Optimisation.

Static URL: — http://www.example.com/catalog/cloth/0010/

Dynamic URL: — http://www.example.com/catalog.asp1category=cloth&prodID=0010

Static URLs are always good for search engine indexing and attract decent traffic. On the contrary, Dynamic URLs are generated by Database driven websites, which generate content with help of dynamic scripts like PHP or JavaScript.  Mostly websites, or rather portals, having thousands of pages choose a dynamic website over static website.

Risk with Dynamic URL: – Dynamic URLs were very risky with SERP point of view, because they can cause Canonical URL Issue, and hence are not favoured by Search Engines. Typically Static URL Rank in SERP is better than that of Dynamic URL, because they get indexed quicker than the latter. Static websites are much easier for end users to view and understand, which increases the click count and average website time.

A Search Engines always want to index unique URLs, they disregard the URLs after a specific number of variables such as ? & =;

For Ex.:–

http:// www.example.com /forums/thread.php?threadid=125&sort=date
http:// www.example.com /forums/thread.php?threadid=670&sort=date
http:// www.example.com /forums/thread.php?threadid=139&sort=date

All three URL are three different pages  but if search engine cut off the URL after ? mark then

http:// www.example.com /forums/thread.php?
http:// www.example.com /forums/thread.php?
http:// www.example.com /forums/thread.php?

Another Issue with dynamic websites is that they generally don’t have any keywords in URL, which is quite important from an SEO point of view.

Solution: — Now What! What you will have to do to resolve this problem? Should you recode every single page of your site into static site?  Is it a feasible solution?  Here’s what you can do:

MOD_REDIRECT:–

Write the code in .htaccess  and replace the same on www.example.com /forums

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule thread-threadid-(.*)-sort-(.*)\.htm$ thread.php?threadid=$1&sort=$2

Notice the change in the URL:–

Before:-

http:// www.example.com /forums/thread.php?threadid=125&sort=date

After:-

http:// www.example.com /forums/thread-threadid-125-sort-date.htm

Solution For Directory Type URL :–

Write the code in .htaccess  and replace the same on www.example.com /forums

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule thread/threadid/(.*)/sort/(.*)/ thread.php?threadid=$1&sort=$2

RewriteRule thread/threadid/(.*)/sort/(.*) thread.php?threadid=$1&sort=$2

Before:-

http:// www.example.com /forums/thread.php?threadid=125&sort=date

After:-

http:// www.example.com /forums/thread/threadid/125/sort/date/

Recoding every page may not be the best of the solutions. Using minimal scripts, you can easily make your dynamic URL search engine friendly and this will help with your SEO .

Clarification: there is a real duplicate content penalty for content that is duplicated with minor or no variation across the pages of a single site. There is also a “mirror” penalty for a site that is more or less substantially duplicating another single site. What I’m talking about here is the reprint of pages of content individually, rather than in a mass, on multiple sites.

Another clarification: “penalty” is a loaded concept in SEO. “Penalty” means that search engines will punish a website for violations of the engine’s terms of service. The punishment can mean making it less likely that the site will appear in search results. Punishment can also mean removal from the search engine’s index of web pages (“de-indexing” or “delisting”).

How have I exploded the “duplicate content penalty” myth?

* PageRank. Many thousands of high-PageRank sites reprint content and provide content for reprint. The most obvious case is the news wires such as Reuters (PR  and the Associated Press (PR 9) that reprint to sites such as http://www.nytimes.com (PR 10).

* The proliferation of content reprint sites. There are now hundreds of websites devoted to reprint content because it’s a cheap, easy magnet for web traffic, especially search engine traffic.

* Experience. I’ve seen significant search engine traffic both from distributing content to be reprinted and from reprinting content on the site.

How I Doubled Search Engine Traffic with Reprint Content

When I first started distributing content for my main site, I was stunned by the highly targeted traffic I got from visitors clicking on the link at the end of the article. Search engine traffic also slowly increased both from the links and from having content on the site.

But I was even more stunned with the search engine traffic I got when I started putting reprint articles on the site in September. I had written quite a number of reprint articles for clients and accumulated a few webmaster “fans” who looked out for my articles to reprint them. I wanted to make it easier for them to find all the reprint articles I had written.

I didn’t want to draw too much attention to these articles, which had nothing to do with the main subject of the site, web content. So I secluded the articles in one section of the site.

The articles got a surprising amount of search engine traffic. The traffic was overwhelmingly from Google, and for long multiple-word search strings that just happened to be in the article word for word.

Why was I surprised with all the search engine traffic?

1. The articles had so little link popularity. The link popularity to the articles came primarily from a single link to the “reprint content” page from the homepage, which linked to category pages, which linked to the articles themselves–three clicks from the homepage. The sitemap was enormous, well over 100 links, so its PageRank contribution was minimal. Since these articles were on the site such a short time I strongly doubt they got any links from other sites.

2. The articles had so much competition. These articles had been reprinted far more widely than the average reprint article, which is lucky if it makes it into a few dedicated reprint sites. As part of my service I had done most of the legwork of reprinting my clients’ articles for them. In fact, I guarantee at least 100 reprints on Google-indexed web pages either for each article or group of articles. So that’s up to 100 web pages, sometimes more, that were competing with my web page to appear in search engine results for the search string.

Why Do Reprint Articles Get Search Engine Traffic?

You would think Google would just pick one web page with the article as the authoritative edition and send all the traffic to it.

But that’s not how Google works. All the search engines look at factors beyond just the content on the web page. They look at links. Google, at least, claims to look at 100 factors total. Many of these must relate to the content on the page, but not all of them.

The whole experience has given me great insight into what factors Google uses in addition to what we would consider the page itself, and the relative importance of each.

* Web page titles (the one in the html title tag) are extremely important as tie-breakers between two otherwise equally matched pages. Most reprinters waste the html title, using the article title as the web page title. Set yourself apart by creating unique five-to-ten-word web page titles that include target keywords.

* Content tweaks. You can also introduce the article with a unique, keyword-laden editor’s note, and finish the article off with some keyword-laced comments.

* Intra-site link popularity and anchor text (that is, for links to the article page from other web pages on the site) are also important. If you can’t link to the page from the homepage, keep it as close to the homepage as possible and weed out extraneous links (try putting all your site policies on a single page).

Reprint articles, like the search engine traffic they bring, cost nothing. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Forget the “duplicate content penalty.” Get in on content reprints and share the search engine wealth.

i would like to point out that this blog has been written by Bryan Seawell and i have found it very interesting and wanted to share it with you all.

Social Media is an emerging tool for speeding up a website’s indexing. One can use social media links to speed up the indexing of websites. Interesting fact is that Search Engines consider these links by social media even if the links are not followed. Hence, it can be said that social media buzz functions as an important indicator for search engines. However, an important question arises here, does social media buzz disturbs the rankings directly?

Danny Sullivan had a short interview with search engines, in which he asked if the data, which comes from social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, are used as an indication and whether it influences the usual search results. Both search engines- Google and Bing- answered in the affirmative and stated that they not only consider the data, but also scrutinize and assess the authority of the author and the quality of the post.

Here is an excerpt of the hottest question answered in the interview:

So how do Google and Bing evaluate the Social Media Buzz?

One thing needs to be clear at the outset that the focus should not be only on social media. The fact of buzz affecting the ranking does not make it the most important cause for higher ranking. Both the search engines stated the limits of effects of buzz on ranking, as they properly calculate and perform computation to filter out spam.

Even then, as our uncertainties cleared, we can easily reflect on the keys, which are used to assess Social Media Buzz by Search Engines. For example, we can say that the prime target of search engines is to filter out the spam, guarantee the popularity of the page, asses the trust and authority of the links, authentication of author and to get a pointer regarding the topic or theme of the post.

There are certain attributes, which can influence the essence of the social media links. These attributes are listed below; but please note that these attributes are not confirmed officially by Search Engines.

However, several web services and tools have used most of them to examine Social Media popularity:

1. The number of Followers on Twitter
2. The number of Fans on Facebook Fan Pages
3. The number of tweets & RTs on Twitter
4. The number of Shares & Likes on Facebook
5. The ratio between Followers-Friends
6. The authority of the people that follow you
7. The authority of the people that share your content
8. The average quality of your previously shared messages
9. The number of unique mentions/shares (similar to Link Diversity)
10. The rate and the source of links that you share

In addition, it is liable that search engines use Social Media buzz to resolve:

• The freshness of a particular post
• The validity/usefulness and update of a page
• The current trends
• The particular terms related to a particular post. They are expected to use the keywords and the hash tags, which are found in the subject matter of the shared messages.
• Each Author’s expertise and theme. Experts are those users who post high quality messages on a particular topic. Search Engine- Bing is already using this trait by suggesting users on Twitter.

Conclusion

The popularity of Social Media can be gauged from the numbers of people who are plugged in to various social media sites. On the other hand, Search Engines have made many deals with social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in the past to include social media results in their SERPs. Therefore, the news of buzz serving as a signal is not new for the industry, as we all assumed its use to resolve trends, authority, popularity etc. Concluding we are looking for more information and indications regarding the importance of certain attributes.