boyd of ayrshire .com

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.

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.