Web Design & SEO Blog, Inverness Blogs

In my last post on small business SEO, I looked at the main issues of on-site optimisation, getting a local listing and ensuring you get reviewed.

Today, I will look at the issues of competitors and link building.

What’s With All this Link Building Stuff?

No website exists in isolation, and if it does it will be difficult to rank well in the search engines. This means you need to connect your website to the outside world.

Technically, it is better for search engine to initially discover your website through another website that has linked to you. But in reality, you need to be indexed earlier than you’re likely to get your initial links.

Links are Google‘s main indicators as to how to rank your website. Why is this? A link from a website is a ‘vote’ for that website – the assumption being that the website owner(s) approve of your website. The basic principle being that ‘votes’ aids ranking.

Quality, Not Quantity – sort of

Any links you want to obtain for your website should be quality – i.e. from an authoritative source which reinforces what your business does or where it is. Getting involved in local community forums or industry Q&A websites can be so valuable for this.

Authority can measured using Google Pagerank (although per Google, this is not regularly updated) and SEOMoz’s metrics of MozRank, Domain Authority and Page Authority (easily trackable using this SEO Toolbar).

For a full discussion of PageRank and Page Authority, see here

So if you want to know whether a site is worth getting linked to you can use these two metrics. You need a good quantity of links, but you must get some authoritative sources.

Where’s Your Competitors Getting Their Juice?

A key element in improving your rankings through link building is to analyse your competitors link base. How do we look for this? There are a few avenues:-

Google’s LINK Command

Firstly you want to find out who ranks for the keyword you have chosen. Continuing the elephant theme from my previous post, let’s see who ranks highest for ‘Elephant Migration’.

So we can see that Seaworld.org holds first place (Not the most obvious, as elephants don’t swim). So how do we find out where their links are from? By using Google’s LINK command, it will tell you where they are linking from:-

Yahoo’s Site Explorer

Often assumed to be a more accurate gauge of links, Yahoo’s Site Explorer is an excellent way to view your website’s links and those of your competitors. You can also exclude links from that website’s subdomains to look for purely third-party credit.

Open Site Explorer

By far one of the best tools for assessing competitor links and authority is another tool by SEOMoz, Open Site Explorer. Let’s look at SeaWorld again.

This excellent tool shows us the total links and domains link to that website – and the authority ratings too. On top of that, we can see the authority of the pages that link to Sea World – very useful!

So What Happens Next?

Now you record all the great places your competitor(s) are linking from and see if you can request links from those places. They are not all going to be possible, but if you use a spreadsheet you can easily narrow down which sites you can target and ensure you do not re-request links. Maybe more to follow on this later.

It’s been a while since I’ve had an opportunity to write. Reasons being that the Web Design business has been crazily busy the last few months. And that’s a good thing.

The majority of my clients are small businesses – sole traders or small limited companies. Some a really experienced people in their field, but are just making their move in the on-line world. Some want a new website, some have just had a website commissioned but are in need of Search Engine Optimisation because ‘I can’t be found on Google’.

So I wanted to try and address some of the key issues that small businesses face when going online and maybe help some of you out.

Don’t Try to Do It All

SEO is comprised of many different factors. Here’s a few:-

• What you write on your website – stuff your human visitors will see
• What’s coded behind the visuals of your website
• How well your website’s information is structured and how it inter-links
• The speed of your website and therefore the proximity of your Website Hosting servers to your target visitors.
• Your ‘local’ listings – whether that’s Google Places or Bing Maps for example.
• The number and quality of the sites that link to your website and how they link to you.
• If you have Facebook likes and shares of your content.
• What the industry may be saying about you.
• Do you blog about relevant topics?

For the small business just stepping into this seeming quagmire of issues, it can be overwhelming. Apply this principle: Do something well or don’t do it at this stage.

Each of the above issues will need to be addressed for relevancy to your business, but SEO should be planned. We develop strategies for a reason.

However, because budget is an issue in small business, having a strategy will not only address the sanity of your SEO efforts, but also spread the time and financial cost of improving the flow of visitors to your website.

So where should you start?

Small Business SEO Step 1: Start at Home

What’s on the Site?
Start with your website. If you already have one you will need to gauge how well the content represents what you believe to be that page’s core topic. Ensure appropriate, contextual use of keywords within the text. Search engines don’t like SPAM so if your text seems nonsense to people, it will seem nonsense to Search Engines.

Link Structure
Links to other pages should contain words appropriate to the target page’s content. Phrases like ‘Click Here’ or ‘How about it?’ are not going to cut it. Even the archaic ‘Home’ link should be replaced with anything more descriptive. And ensure any pages that could usefully link to other parts of your website do so. That way you improve the user’s experience, decrease bounce rate and strengthen not only that page’s SEO but the overall site’s optimisation as well.

Cut the Rubbish
Time to remove anything that’s not quality content. This means even ‘Links Pages’ should be controlled and only useful to your visitors. If you want to give another site credit, why not do it justice with a proper embedded link in some useful content.

Small Business SEO Step 2: Get Local

Unless you’re a business with a National or Global market from the outset, then focussing on your local area and local competition is a must. Ensure you set up a Google Places Listing and fill it out as much as you can and optimise that listing.

Google’s algorithm includes your Local Listing, so don’t miss out.

Small Business SEO Step 3: Get Reviewed

When acting for SEO clients I find myself revealing an old principle: it costs more to obtain a new customer than to retain current ones. So keep your current clients or customers happy. And when they are ask them to post a review and rate your business, either on your new Google Places page or on other sites such as FreeIndex or Qype (no apologies fot he UK directories there). Do you know why these are great? If a customer reviews your business on these two (and others), Google Places will also feature those reviews – so you get two reviews for the price of one!.

And potential customers love happy existing customers as it gives them confidence when they come to you for your products or services.

Next Time..

In my next post I will address Link Building and Social Media but if we can help you any way to Get You Known on the Web then get in touch with us about web design or SEO – we specialise in custom web design because we know every client is unique and we love seeing new businesses take on the competition!

So Google Instant Previews is Available

What does this mean?

After a quick look over at The Google Blog they give you the low-down on this latest development in Google searching.

The basic premise seems to be the user having the ability to view a snapshot of a site which appears in their search results (on the SERPs). This isn’t instant – you have to click the little magnifying glass to activate this feature. After which when you hover over other results of your search you get a preview on the right hand side… like so:

They also highlight for you the text from the site that may match what you’re looking for, because Google truly know what’s in your mind when you search.

So let’s consider some possible implications of this but first an important point:-

It still seems to be a feature for only logged in Google Account holders to activate
This means not everyone will have it and not all logged-in Google users will necessarily have it turned on. That is not to disregard it but to see the situation from all angles.

Your Visitor Rate May Go Down
As people are able to preview your website, they may not click like they used to. Google Previews helps people feel more able to discern for themselves the relevancy of your site appearing in their results. This means that visitors who would otherwise have clicked because they did not know whether your result was relevant enough may not visit now.

Of course on the flip side, if your site is very attractive, then you could get visitors who otherwise wouldn’t have done based solely on your TITLE tag and META description.

Your Conversion Rate May Increase
Conversions, whether based on enquiries, e-mails, telephone calls or sales, may possibly increase. If the aim of instant is to get more relevant visitors to the right content, then this may increase the chance of your conversion rate increasing. At the end of the day, 1000 visitors is not a good thing if no-one gets in touch or buys a product. But if you drive 100 visitors, of which 50 place an order because they’re already part- convinced in their own mind that your site is pretty close, if not precisely, what they want.

I say conversion rates MAY increase simply because people may search not knowing fully what they want with or without a site preview. But there’s certainly no harm in being prepared for lower visitors but higher conversions.

Your Website Needs to Look Good
I’m pleased to say that we’re starting on revamping our branding and website. Not that I don’t like ours currently, because I do. But with Previews, people can see roughly what your site looks like and an attractive website will attract more visitors.

Your Content Must Accurately Reflect Your Keyword Strategy
I can’t imagine this wouldn’t be the case, but as Google now thinks it can lift the correct content out of your website, ensure that your targeted words are used, in-context, and in non-header text, as it seems to be paragraph text that Previews is lifting. So review that content!

And finally for now…

Don’t Stress Out
Google Instant Previews can be turned off, the same as Google Instant and I must stress you must choose to activate the feature, at present. People may get excited over this and start to fret, but at the end of the day if you are assured of your branding and your marketing, can present a good business image and have an effective SEO strategy, then don’t worry about this. If you’re always ‘dressed to impress’ and are targeting the right markets and the right keywords then this feature is only likely to drive more of the right kind of visitor to your site. Which is surely what SEO is all about isn’t it?

And if you’re not yet sorted on branding, keyword strategy and your website is looking a bit outdated and shabby, then now is a good time to sort out your Web Design and present a good image.

We don’t know if/when Google Instant and Google Instant Previews will become mainstream for non-logged-in searchers, but they will want to roll it out sometime and so now is a good time to prepare.

Try It Out
If you have a website or run websites (which if you’re reading this, there is a good chance you do) then you can try it out Here. Always be aware of your competitors, tweak your content accordingly, get your strategy right and revamp your website.

Oh, and remember, there are also other search engines. Knowing about Google features is important, but seeing the bigger picture means you optimise your site to the best you can for the features, but don’t obsess over them.

And if this becomes big, then no doubt I will have revisions to this article to make!

If you would like to comment, have feedback or corrections to give do e-mail me at design [at] moxby dot org dot uk and I will credit any revisions. I had to disable comments due to SPAM.