boyd of ayrshire .com

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.

53 URL’s to add to your ping list:

http://1470.net/api/ping
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/

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.

I HAVE A PLAN!

A very good plan and should it work I will explain in great detail how it was done.

What’s the Plan Boydie? I hear you scream.

Well, I writing a cunning plan to hijack the google search postions for a very profitable term using some newly purchased domain names and free blog systems. It’s more widely known in the SEO industry as ring fencing, this is the art of owning most of the positions on google for one particlular term. When you do a search on Google for an item most people have there results set to return 10 results, of these 10 results I’m going to try and get as many websites that are belong/edited by myself.

For this test I’m going to use a website that belongs to a friend.

www.fish4ituk.co.uk this website is an online store that sells things related to fly fishing, personally I know nothing about fly fishing and the art of making flies so this makes the test even more real.

Follow the steps as I complete them and you can also use this as a guide to doing it for yourself.

So, I do alot of SEO for travel related clients having cut my teeth with argusrentals.com a few years back and getting them to position 2 for the term “car hire” thats my claim to fame, although I was contacted on MSN messanger by the guy that’s currently at argus asking “what do you think would happen if I changed the title tag?” I wouldn’t want to name him so we’ll call him Mike. Well!, I said, change nothing and nothing will change. “nah!” said Mike, He wants to target long tail terms with the homepage and risk losing there position for the term “car hire”, they changed it, and down they went, it was changed back and up they came. Ta Da!

 Anyway, this post really has nothing to do with that, I’m just getting claim to fame out the way.

A few large clients that we have the pleasure to work for have been asking us to optimise there sites for the term “leisure breaks”. So, after a very simple bit of research ( aksing people I know what they typed into to google the last time they booked a holiday) and using Aaron Wall’s SEO Book keyword research tools I quickly discovered that the volume for “leisure breaks” was quite low, about 1,500 search a month, even if I was to get first place and the meta description was great I would be lucky to get 20% click through rate. This would only be worth 300 visitors a month max. not that great. Armed with this info I jump on a plane and head of to the “Leisure Breaks” meeting with the client.

When this hot information hits the desk of the client a screwed up face turns and says “Our customers are searching for Leisure Breaks”, eh! no there not, but hey you pay me, so yes they do, and good day to you kind sir.

After several weeks of relentless SEO for the term “leisure breaks” we break into the first page of google.co.uk and gradually climb up to the rankings. Postion 2!, great, job done. We wait a month to see the traffic and sales fly in, we’re still waiting.

After a month of being in Position 2 for the term “leisure breaks” the new visitor count for that term doesn’t read well, 60 visitors. Oh no! Back to the drawing board. But the clients happy he’s second on google for a term that HE thinks people are using.  So in a blazing “Blue Peter” moment we spin on our heels and point the client in the correct direction. Weekend Breaks, Weekend Breaks, Weekend Breaks, that’s where the pot of gold lies. Another visit to SEO Book and we’re looking at returing half a million searches and with the same amount of SEO required it proves why clients hire professionals because, we know best.

Had the client listened to us early on in the process not only would there site be highly ranking for a value term but they wouldn;t have the big bill to change there website around from Leisure Breaks to Weekend Breaks.