boyd of ayrshire .com

Many people ask me what’s the best way to make an SEO plan for a client, so I knocked together a simple process to follow that also lets the client know what stage of the SEO process their campaign is at. This works well with all of my clients and once completion dates and dependances are added it builds into a valuable document to help out account management.

SEO Process

Keyword Research
• Define Keyword Groups
• Define Keywords
• Submit fro Approval

Market Investigation
• Analysis of competition
• Analysis of the market
• Investigation of links
Measuring and Reports
o Propose KPI’s
o Submit Proposed KPI’s for approval
o Discuss with Client what’s to be reported on and frequency
o Discuss Goals of the Campaign with client
Site Audit
• Server Checks: 404 etc
• Submit Server Changes for approval and implementation
• Site Code Checks: H1 etc
• Submit Site Changes for approval and implementation
• Title Tags and Meta Data Review to be inline with Keyword Research
• Submit Title/Meta Data changes for approval and implementation
• URL Checks: Search engine friendly and inline with Keyword Research
• Submit for approval and implementation
• Sitemaps and Google Webmaster tools review
• Submit Sitemap/Google changes fro approval and implementation

 Site Content
• Review existing content
• Submit changes to existing content to be inline with Keyword Research
• Review of new content to be written
• Submit titles and explanation of new content for approval
• Write new content articles
• Submit for review and implementation
Links
• Investigate number of links needed to be competitive
• Link Building Strategy
o Free Directory Listings
o Paid Directory Listings
o Reciprocal Linking
? Not suitable for all clients
o Press Release
o Blog Linking
o Create “How to”
o Interview your industries experts
o Article Submission
o Article Digging, Digg, Del
• Submit Strategy for review
• Implement Link strategy

So Google has went out and bought Postini for over $600 million. 

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/07/welcome-postini-team.html

Postini provides corporate clients with communication security that in the future could integrate with both Goolge Talk and Gmail.  When I saw the first news article about this I thought that Postini would provide securtity solutions to companies that display valuable information on there servers that is then indexed by google and returned in the results set.

A Glasgow based company have also been working on similair security features for corporate clients http://websafesolutions.wordpress.com the service that Web Safe Solutions plan to provide once beta testing is finished will help to indentify files and folders indexed by search engines that my contain business sensitive information.

Is this the start of the security age?

Google the well known search engine growth massivly in terms of popularity due to the fact that the seaqrch results it returns where of better quality then the other search engines existing at the time.

So when I had to find a Web Design company in the Ayrshire area I was amazed to find that Google incuded two website design companies from England.

As this result set is not very competitive I would expect most Ayrshire based web design companies to out rank these English sites.

From the 10 websites listed on the first page of Google.co.uk the term “web design ayrshire” only 3 of them have Ayrshire addresses, 4 have Ayrshire telephone numbers. Now that I’m in the process of looking for a reliable web design company that isn’t going to vanish over night. I have a choice of 3 companies that clearly display both there local telephone number and there local address, out of 10.

Is Google really that great at sorting out the real results from the results optimised by SEO tactics?

For most people that either own a web based business or promote there products or services via the internet the task of online marketing and search engine optimising is never that far away. For many search engine marketing seems daunting, as it is. For other “have a go” heros it’s provides the perfect balance of learning something new while promoting our own website, the benefits of this are that you know ever piece of code on your site and completely understand link building.

For the first group of people there are only two tip and a must do.

1. Read a copy of Search Engine optimization for Dummies twice. It costs about £20 and although you might not understand most of it you’ve started at the same point as most SEO guys.
2. Find a good SEO agency. When looking for an SEO agency try to find one that already done work on one of your competitors websites. Don’t worry about conflict of interest the chances that you and your competitor have more than 100 matching keywords is highly unlikely and if there’s a high volume keyword that you and your competitor are chasing they being second on google for that term isn’t such a bad place to be, considering the agency will get your site highier ranking quickier than your competitor as they already have all the plans and link lists from previous strategies.

Most do’s:

Reports: SEO guys hate doing reports, so my advice is not to ask for any. Your company probably needs reports so don’t use my advice on that subjest.  You should always ask for month on month comparison reports and if possible year on year, this gives an overview of your business growth.  Most reports should include:

1. unique visitors
2. average page views per visitor
3. average time on site
4. traffic split by search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN
5. new versus returning customers
6. bounce rate
7. top landing pages, 5 or 10
8. top referring websites ( not including search engines)
9. top brand keywords
10. top non brand keywords

These figures should be shown on a running monthly chart so you can see spikes in traffic and drop offs.

If you’re website is of the ecommerce varity as most are then these figures should also be included in the reports

1. Sales
2. Conversion Rate
3. Booking Drop Rates by stage
4. Average order value

If your site contains a booking engine then this should be included

1. Look to book ratio

Once you have all this stats avalible to you then it’s easy to build up a very clear picture of what’s driving business to your business and where the focus of any SEO activities should be targeted.

All these stats are available on most stats programs.

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Tonight I was having a look around some local web design and online marketing companies.

What I found was that none really had a good client list or proof of there skills. Then I discovered what can only be described as a ‘good con”

I found a new website www.dynamic-webs.co.uk 

oh what a way to show off your great seo achievements, what they have is a table showing the positions of a keyword on loads of differant search engines, at first sight it looks good then with a closer look I saw the con. The keyword used in the table was “mini jetcleaner” this I would think would need a bit of work to achieve great search engine ranking for this term, then I clicked on the google link to check that there listed client actually has a 2nd spot on the selected search engine as described on the table.

Then I glanced at the results numbers: Results 1 - 10 of about 339 for mini jetcleaner

339 oh my god I should start selling mini jetcleaners there’s no competition.

Opps. what happens if I put a space between jet and cleener and then search for “mini jet cleaner“

What a differance! Over 1million results and the clients website no where to be seen. Now I know that when a client contacts an SEO company to make there website out perform the competition, they expect to pay for valid information, otherwise the client would do it themselves.

These are the companies that keep SEO in the dark and dodgy bracket as it’s time they got flushed out, if anybody finds similiar so called SEO companies then post them here and we can all have a look.