Firstly when I joined Equator in Glasgow around February I had the great pleasure of meeting the techie geek Michael Briggs, it was great to meet a code/server side SEO guy to compliment my sell, sell, sell style of SEO,  even better news was that the two of us would be working together on most projects for Equators clients.

Michael persisted that I get a blog many times, but he always got the same answer “Blogs are crap, how do you sell stuff on them?” After a while he convinced me that it’s all about the community and meeting similar like minded people. The first step for me was to setup this wordpress blog and sit around thinking of something to write, now the idea’s are flowing for mini networks and niche social networks ( I’ll hopefully launch my first niche social network in January 2008)  and for someone with a “Sell First” attitude to everything online it was easy for me to find way to monetize social networks in a non intrusive manner which many social networks have failed to do in the past.

The people you meet via blogs, linkedin and mybloglog are simply amazing. Who would have known that one of the best affiliate marketeers comes from Girvan in South Ayrshire and that there was another SEO guy from Kilwinning (where I’m originally from) I’m still surprised that they have broadband in Kilwinning.

Along the way I have also meet some interesting Scottish SEO people and learned  new ways of doing things that I’d just never thought of before and would probably never have thought of.

It’s a growing community, maybe someone should build a social network for it. Opps! There’s another idea.

Many businesses don’t consider their position on search engines below the number 1 spot. Out of the 10 listings on search engine pages most businesses presume that people searching for there businesses will click on the correct URL. How does a new customer know which is the correct URL?
A while back one of the eye tracking reports suggested that 85% of visitors to Google click on the first 3 positions. You need to ask yourself these questions.

Do you have a website listed in all 3 positions that promotes or protects your brand?

Do you control the content on all 3 websites?

Are you OK with letting 15% to 60% of potential business slip away?

If the answer is no you need to do more to protect your brand online, now.

By using these simple tips you can protect your brand terms on search engines from unsavory reviews and also claim back some business from resellers and affiliates or if your operating within the Travel industry, GDS systems.

• Domain Names
• When many companies enter on the internet to trade the usual only purchase a handful of domain names that incorporate there brand term. I most cases businesses purchase www.brand.com and www.brand.co.uk. This is a fundamental mistake, the remainder of the other domains, .org, .net, .tv etc are then left available for anyone to buy. Many of these domain names will be picked up by resellers and affiliates trying to generate sales of the back of brand terms being searched on Google, Yahoo and MSN.
  
• Solution: Buy up all variations of your brands domain name.

• Land, not Redirect
• A common mistake made by businesses when they purchase additional domain names relating to the brand terms is to simply redirect them to the main site i.e. point the .co.uk domain name to the .com domain name using 302 redirects. This offers zero benefit when protecting your brand, search engines will simply consider the main domain name to be the original site and then devalue the other domains that point to it.
• Solution: Create landing pages for the other domain names, the landing pages can consist of some sales material and deep link into the main site, it doesn’t have to be a full blown website. Setting up these landing pages on a separate server from the main site will also offer a small benefit.

• Blogging
• Get a blog, Get one now! Using a blog to output the latest news or special offers can help to combat brand theft. By simply signing up to a free blogging service such as wordpress.com and using your brand name in the blogs names such as http://brand.wordpress.com you can pick off another one of those positions on the search engine for your brand term.
• Solution: Open a wordpress.com account and use your brand term in the name of the blog. Remember to blog often and grow within your industries blogging community.
  

• Alerts
• You really need to be knowing when other websites are commenting on aspects of your business whether good or bad. To do this on a higher signup to Google Alerts, this will notify you when a website is talking about your brand and identify you websites using your brand terms to gain business. A way to monitor blogs and websites outside of Google is by setting up RSS feeds for search terms on Technorati,  visit Technorati and search for your brand, within the search you’ll see a RSS  subscride button. Add this to your preferred RSS reader.
• Solution: Setup Google Alerts and Technorait RSS feeds.

• Shift Focus
  
• When you start to receive bad online press and it filters through onto blogs one thing to do is to shift the focus by putting a press release or a special offer. Use the blogs you’ve created to distribute the new shift in focus. It is also possible to pay for blog posts on top bloggers websites. This could be a quick solution if your new blogs aren’t quite up to scratch.
• Solution: Push on new news via your blog and look at using a pay per post system like www.payperpost.com

I hope that some of these tips help you protect your brand within the online environment, these tips are just a sample of a full Online Brand Protection and Monitoring strategy. Hopefully they’ll be applied to your strategy.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: seo, travel, online brand protection,

1. Get listed in local online directories.

Examples for Ayrshire: http://www.browseayrshire.com, http://www.ayr-web.co.uk
How to find more: Search Google for Region or City plus directory

2. Join your local Chamber of Commerce.

Most UK Chamber of Commerce websites have an online directory of members and there websites.
Example For Ayrshire: http://www.ayrshire-chamber.org/directorylisting.asp

3. Get your service or product listed in local online classified ads

Example for Ayrshire: http:/./glasgow.gumtree.com, http://ayr.iclads.com/

4. Include your domain name on your business cards, flyers, ad’s etc

5. Write good content for your website.

This will help to retain visitors to your website and help to convert to sales over time. Remember to include the region and city that you operate in.

6. Start a blog.

Wordpress.com, Blogger.com and many more offer free hosted blogging services, use this blog platform to communicate with previous customers, leave testimonials and also describe products and services in greater detail. These blogging platforms are always very search engine friendly and would help to promote your business with really doing not much more than talking about what you do.
Example for Ayrshire: http://ayrshirescotlandbusinessnews.blogspot.com/

7. Check out your local council.

Some local councils have directories of all the companies within the local area.
Example for Ayrshire: http://www.south-ayrshire.gov.uk/Business/business_directory.asp

8. Good old Word of Mouth.

Tell everyone you know about what you do, get them to tell there friends and if they have a website, myspace or bebo account get them to link to your site or add you as a friend. If your friends do have myspace and bebo accounts get them to give you a free lesson on what it does.

9. Good old Shop Windows

If your along at your local shop and they have ad’s on the window then get your business listed in there, remember to include your website. People might see the ad and remember the domain name rather than the phone number.
Examples for Ayrshire: Most Spars, Tesco, Asda and Homebase

10. Get listed on Google Maps

Google maps in a great way to get listed at the top of google for your service or product. Simply set an account at google and follow the instructions to get listed. Google Local Business Centre http://tinyurl.com/3a8sh4

Blogged with Flock

Tags: SEO, Local, Google, Business, Marketing

This is my first post from Flock to my Blog and is simply a test to see if it works. I was never a fan of firefox as the toolbars I downloaded left me with no space on my browser to actually see the websites.

My first reaction is that this is a great tool, it would also be great if it was possible to make Flock MyWorld templates that could to distributed out like wordpress templates. Maybe in the future this will be available.

One thing I do think will happen is that I’ll be posting shorter posts and more often, the rss feed reader is a great tool to help keep me up to date in the SEO world.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: SEO, Flock

Has it gone for good?

UPDATE: It’s back….:)

Most have been any update or something

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 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.

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.