Included at the bottom of this post is a special discount offer code. More information…

I am asked all the time questions like ;

"How can we get more visitors from search engines like Google™?"

To which I normally exhale and say my normal response of;

"Well, it depends on why you want more visitors! I guess you're really asking for more buyers from Google™ aren't you?"

Most of the time, the person asking the question looks at me kind of funny and says, "I thought you are an Internet Marketing guy, not a shrink!" I guess I have to expect such reactions when answering a question with a question!

Anyhow, there isn't a single, simple answer to the question, because it is about the purpose and function of the online material. Ok, hold the phone, what the hell is Online Material? Well, this can be a commercial website, blog, Facebook page/group, Twitter page, Linked-In profile, YouTube video etc, etc. So for the purposes of this post, let's just call it a website or blog.

So now we want to look at the words "more visitors" a little closer. If you sell Fridge Freezers and other kitchen white goods, I'm guessing having 100% more visitors from the student demographic is not really what you're looking for! What you want are more relevant visitors. So you really want people who are in your marketplace and interested in what you have to sell or discuss.

Funnily enough, this is exactly what search engines like Google™ want to do also! So your both singing from the same hymn sheet, your ships are sailing in the same direction, you're both speaking the same language! Google™ wants to send relevant visitors to you, and you want more relevant visitors. A match made in heaven!

However, communication with Google™ is a little different to explaining something to a customer in person or online. After all, Google™ is software at the end of the day, very smart software, but its computer code and doesn't interpret nuances or inflection in speech or the written word. It certainly doesn't understand images or cool looking animations and definitely doesn't get catchy or friendly titles.

If you are looking for a quick win, e.g. sales straight away, you should be looking in the arena of Pay-Per-Click or affiliate marketing. Having said this, promoting your website and/or blog through the natural organic listings in search engines (the free ones), is and should be the ultimate goal of any and every website owner.

In order to improve your position in the natural listings you need to play the game with Google™ and communicate effectively with it. At the same time, you mustn't forget your real target audience is still human, they want and need to be able to find the information quickly, they also don't want to crawl through pages and pages of text, just to get to the point. Hmmm, maybe I should shorten this post!

So, a few points to consider are below, but if you want more in-depth knowledge and understanding why not take advantage of our 10% discount promotional code available on our Understanding Search Engines DVD. The discount code makes it a steal at just over £35.00 including worldwide shipping. Users of the DVD have found that they received 30% more visitors from Google™ after using the training DVD! More information…

Things to look at and think about on your website;

• Webpage copy includes the keywords people are using in search engines regularly. (Finding the best keywords to use is discussed & demonstrated on the DVD)
• Each webpage has unique meta page titles and descriptions, uses well structured images, links & headings (The DVD explains this fully)
• Each webpage has a unique and specific purpose. If this is not possible each separate section of the webpage is clearly broken up with headings indicating the purpose and information found underneath. (Examples of this are provided for on the DVD)
• You publish your website or blog to search engines regularly through Xml Sitemaps and other publication methods such as directories & postings. (Examples of search engine publishing is both discussed and demonstrated on the DVD)
• You seek out related and relevant websites and blogs to create link partnerships with, in order to make your webpages popular in search engines eyes. (The DVD demonstrates the process of finding possible link partners and also discusses contact and communication strategies)

The list goes on! So if you are looking to improve your position and visibility in the natural listings of search engines, start by using the Understanding Search Engines DVD as a kick start.

Have you ever added a comment on somebody's blog, just to find it removed or never pass the authors screening?

Most bloggers want to see comments on their posts, but they want to see related ones. We spend a while each day clearing the deluge of bogus and automated comments in a hope, an almost desperate hope, that one may be serious.

The fact is many Internet Marketers see blogs as being a quick and easy way of growing links to there own blogs and websites. However, most blogs instruct search engines not to follow comment links (see our post on no-follow mechanics). So they are, to a certain extent, wasting their time.

Having said this, adding related and relevant comments helps you build rapport with the author and over time you may be able to leverage the relationship to your advantage. Perhaps the blogger may post some information about you or your company, they may consider you when carrying out other day-to-day business activity. You can look at the comments section of a blog as an opportunity to network.   

So here are some guidelines;

1. Always read the article first!
2. Always read the article first! (No, this is not a mistake, we want to be sure you get what we're saying here.)
3. OK, now that you have read the article, think about what interested you about it and make some notes. Did you agree or disagree with the post? Do you have any thoughts that may extend or improve the information within the post?
4. Now write a sentence or short paragraph about your thoughts. Don't just compliment the author on how great she is, that's just annoying!
5. Use your name in your comment, not your company name or the keywords you want to be known for. This is a sure fore way of getting your comments deleted really quickly.
6. Always use your real email address. Most blogs don’t publish your email address, and using free Gmail and Hotmail email addresses is sure to make the author think very carefully about keeping your post active or not.

Today our friends at Google(tm) released Fetch as Googlebot. This is a new tool available in your webmaster control panel (http://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/) under the Labs link in the Dashboard links.

It's purpose is to display what Google sees when it visits your web pages. The reason this tool is going to be useful to webmasters is that it will enable them to ensure that what Google received is what you intend them to see. This is not a tool to allow you to change the content you send to Google, that would be a real no, no and is a sure fire way to get your website blacklisted. However, it is intended to allow you to check all of the;

• HTTP headers
• Cookies
• Content types
• And overall web page content

At the moment the results are very raw and displays a basic dump of your web pages headers and HTML markup. We feel there is more to come though, we are going to add some comments to Google Labs feedback to include;

• Highlight ignored page elements
• Highlight issue elements found on page. e.g.
  • Poor markup
  • invalid doctype
  • invalid links
  • not followed links
  • un-indexed page areas
• Page Improvement recommendations
• Heat map of indexable content so that a webmaster can see areas of the content which are going to have higher index priority than others.

Why not let us know your thoughts and together we can make the Fetch as Googlebot a tool for everyone to benefit from.

PageRank™ is passed from web-page to web-page. It does this through links, everytime you link to a page on your own website or to pages on a partner or an information website you pass across PageRank™. You vote for that page!

So this is a good thing for who you're linking to and can be a good thing for you also, it demonstrates a sense of sharing and helps Google™ and other search engines crawl the web, you have now become a source of links. However you are not yet trusted!

To be trusted you too have to grow your own PageRank and have others vote for you, but that's another post and tutorial all together. If, however, your interested in this check out the Understanding Search Engines DVD.

OK, so on with the topic in hand. What can you do when you wish to link, but not vote? In real world terms it's like telling someone you know a plumber but can't vouch for them as you haven't used them before. In this case you can direct Google™ not to follow a link. There are 3 ways to accomplish this;

1. Meta tag directive 
2. Anchor (link) tag directive 
3. Robots.txt files

Meta tag directive

The meta tag directive is a small piece of code you add to your HTML head tag. It has a number of different settings, but in terms of PageRank voting, you need to use the 'nofollow' attribute setting as follows.

<html>
 <head>
  <!-- Other tags such as Title, meta description etc. --> 
  <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOFOLLOW">
 </head>
</html>

This instructs the search engine not to follow any links found on that web page. You can also instruct the search engine not to index the page by using the following snippet;

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW">
 

Anchor (link) tag directive

Similarly to the meta tag directive, you are also able to add no follow instructions at the lower level of just a single link. You may have a number of links on a page and only a handful are not to be followed, in this instance using the Meta tag or robots.txt file is not suitable. You use this tag as follows;

<a href="http://www.targetsite.com/subpage.html" title="something interesting" rel="nofollow">Stuff I may not trust in the future</a>

The rel="nofollow" directs Google™ not follow this link.

Robots.txt Files

A robots.txt file sits in the route folder of your website and provides search engines with hints of what it can and cannot crawl. Therefore the robots.txt file is more of a NOINDEX directive than a NOFOLLOW one. A basic file may look like this;

User-agent: *
Disallow: /links/

However, you can add specific instructions to certain crawlers by adding the crawler name to the User-agent like this;

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /links/

This would have the effect of stopping Google™ from crawling the links folder but allowing other search engines to crawl it.

We hope this helps, please comment if you have any questions.

BlogEngine.Net is very cool! One of the best things about it is an integrated Ping service. A ping service allows your blog to inform syndication services around the Internet that you have new content. It's a bit like saying "Hello World, something interesting here for you to see!"

Anyway, we have been looking around for a list of ping services for a while now and we stumbled upon Mads Kristensen post here. Now the Ping service class that Mads provides here is already available in the current version of BlogEngine.Net, but at the very bottom of his post is a link to a gem of a post.

As always, we like to share! This post provides a nice big list of Ping services, we haven't checked them out fully, but the post is here, take a look and include them in your blogs ping service. Blog Ping Services.

Google^TM has recently updated their verification process for their webmaster services. The changes are small but are slightly different to those described and shown in the Understanding Search Engines DVD.

The first change is that the Meta tag verification will no longer be generated based on your email address. Previously it was and caused verified sites to become unverified if your email address changed.

The second is to do with the file verification process. Now Google^TM will provide a file for you to upload to your website rather than just providing you with a file name to create. Therefore to verify your website using a file, use the download link they provide and then upload it to your website as instructed on the SEO Training DVD. 

Today Google Translate has gone on-line. The new system from the search giants is available as a small snippet of HTML & Javascript code which can be placed on almost any web-page. The result is a translation of the page to any of the following languages:

Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified),Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Welsh and Yiddish.

You should consider however that only standard text will be translated. Text in images and flash movies won't be translated. In order to support these elements as much as possible remember to add well worded alt tags to your images and titles to your links. You can find out more about alt tags and title tags as well as best practise for managing images on websites with the Understanding Search Engines SEO Training tutorials.

You can find out more here about Google Translate.

It's not what we say! It's the actions we take and the results we achieve.

The following is the full narration of the video "SEO Case Study".

You know, talk is cheap, but actions, well actions, they speak louder than words!

I mean, around the Internet today, you hear a huge amount about search marketing, SEO and optimising websites so that you can win more traffic from, as an example Google.

There is a lot of talk! But very little found which truly illustrates ACTIONS or RESULTS!

So I thought we could look at search engine optimisation outputs, rather than just concentrating on what it is. In this way, you will understand how making some changes will dramatically improve your websites productiveness.

In this video, I’m going to show you how a small e-commerce website increased their website traffic from Google™ alone by 30% and grew their exposure and position in all search engines by a massive 50%, all in just 3 months.

Back in May 2009 For-Keeps.co.uk, a small on-line retailer of fashionable bags. Started down the route of optimising their website. They had 2 options;

1. The first was to subcontract an SEO specialist or
2. Learn the techniques and concepts themselves  

Cost was obviously an issue, but they wanted to develop the skills within their business, they felt that they could make better decisions about their Internet Marketing strategy now and in the months and years to come.

So they opted to follow the Understanding Search Engines tutorials. This is what happened!

After working through the tutorials and before they started the optimisation process they did 2 main things!

1. They picked out 25 keywords they wanted to be found in search engines for and;
2. They benchmarked their position in the major search engines for all of those keywords.

What they found was that they had;

• 2 top 3 positions
• 7 top 5 positions
• 9 top 10 positions
• 11 top 20 positions and finally
• 15 top 30 positions

Now this is a summary of all 25 keywords across Google, Yahoo™ and MSN™ (or what is now called Bing™ ).This isn’t so bad really; they had a total of 9 top 10 positions across the search engines, which means they would be found on the first page of these search engines for 9 of the keywords they selected.

OK, so now they run through the optimisation tasks they learnt and record their statistics again 3 months later in August.

What do the figures look like now? Well, they now have;

• 3 top 3 positions, which is an increase of 1
• 7 top 5 positions which hasn’t changed
• 13 top 10 positions is an increase of 4 
• 19 top 20 positions is a big increase of 8 and finally
• 23 top 30 positions which is also an increase of 8

Now these numbers may appear small but if we add all of these positions up and work out the difference we will have an indication of what their exposure increase has been.

They started, in May, with a total of 44 and in August it jumped to 65. This is an increase of 21 or 50.17% more search engine exposure!

So we have seen that they are found more frequently and higher in the major search engines. But has this also increased the number of visitors they get?

Here we can see that in May, they received a modest 323 visitors. In August, they received 396 visitors which is still quite reserved, but shows a 22.6% increase. Imagine if they continue to grow like this every 3 months. After 1 year, they would have more than doubled their traffic.

OK, again, that’s all very nice but how about website traffic from Google? Well, back in May, Google™ sent 152 visitors to the website compared to 199 in August, that’s a massive 30.92%.

Again, in May, Yahoo™ sent 11 visitors but in August that increased to 22, that’s a 100&perc; increase. There is no doubt that the number of visitors need to increase, but again, just taking Google™ as an example, if they continued to send 30% more traffic every 3 months, the website would receive almost 3 times the traffic from Google™ in just 1 year.

Now imagine how this growth could affect your website! But before we go, what do you feel about getting 30% or more new visitors from Google™ every month? Would it benefit YOUR business if you received over 20% more visitors per month? It’s easy, it’s affordable but most importantly, as we have show here, IT WORKS!

The Understanding Search Engines DVD, get it today and grow your website tomorrow!

Get more information on the Understanding Search Engines DVD by visiting our SEO Training website.

One of the things that frustrate Internet searchers immensely is being directed to a page which doesn't seam to have any relevance to the actual search they did.

In some cases the cause can be that the web page has changed but the search engine hasn't been updated yet. Spam used to be a big cause also, but search engines are becoming much wiser to pages that just throw in keywords without any real relevance. However the main cause is that the relevant content is just low down in the page.

As we know, people are impatient and only a couple of people in a hundred will take the time to hunt down the information they want. So Googles release of deep links will mean that a searcher will be taken not only to the relevant page but also to the relevant part of the page.

So, how do website editors actually support the new feature?

Well Google^TM is implementing the functionality through named anchors. A named anchor has the structure of; <a name="keyword_here" /> What Google will do is generate a link as a standard website address (URL) and append a hash instruction to the end e.g http://mysite.com/mypage.html#keyword_here. The users browser will then automatically scroll to the position of the named anchor.

So a few tips are;

1. To ensure that you include a named anchor next to each heading in your web pages.
2. Also consider adding named anchors to sections of your web pages which have clear and concise messages.
3. Name your anchors differently and uniquely throughout your page.
4. Although its not vital, try to use keyword rich names, but do not use spaces or any other characters other than hyphens and underscores.
5. Finally, try to include a table of contents ate the top of your page. The links in the table of contents should link directly to the named anchors.

Are you getting the most out of Linked-In?

Many people in business have a Linked-In profile nowadays but many are not getting the most out of the service!

Some people see Linked-In as just another website where they can promote themselves or their companies. Well this is certainly the case but it also comes with features that are not only passive but proactive in lead generation.

The real value of Linked-In is your connections and the 2nd and 3rd removed connections. i.e. You connect to your business contacts that connect to others who connect to yet more people. This is called your “Network of Trusted Professionals” whom you are able to connect with either directly or through introductions.

As an example, if you have 50 direct connections this could translate to around 500,000 trusted professionals that you can leverage through introductions. (These figures are for illustration only)

Getting in contact

Lets say that you are looking to partner with a company on a particular project or are interested in connecting with a particular business sector. Linked-In provides you with a search function which allows you to find people based on criteria you provide.

From the results you have 2 options;
1. Be introduced to these people through an existing connection of yours or
2. Send an In-Mail^TM

Introductions are free to all users and can be quite effective especially if you are trusted and well-known by the individual who’s introducing you.

In-Mail^TM don’t require any intervention by your connections and can be sent to any Linked-In member that allows In-Mail^TM messages. However, this service is charged for but comes with a guarantee of response. E.g. If you don’t get a response from the member within 7 days of sending your message, Linked-In credits your account with an In-Mail^TM message. The chaps at Linked-In say that In-Mails^TM are charged for because they help reduce SPAM and therefore In-Mails^TM are normally considered by recipients of them as more of an opportunity than just junk.

Building your profile

Linked-In is a significant website, that is to say that it is trusted by major search engines. If you are a member of Linked-In and you search for yourself in Google, your Linked-In profile is very likely to be found. Likewise the information you have loaded into your profile will be associated with your profile page and if your profile links to your own website you could be adding value to your website as a result.

Your profiles completeness is recorded in the bottom left hand corner of your Linked-In home page, try to get this as high as possible by completing as many sections as you can.

Get Recommended

Recommendations are great tools in assisting your sales process and Linked-In provides you with the ability to ask for recommendations and approve those recommendations before they are published on your profile.

Once you have some recommendations on your account you can direct prospects to your profile and show them that these recommendations have come from real customers and business partners and show more credibility in your company.

Answer Questions

Linked-In provides a facility for any member to ask questions. Other members can then answer these questions and be scored by the answers they give. If you provide the best answer, the person that raised the question will normally flag you as the expert and this will be displayed on your profile.

Answering questions adds value in two ways;

1) Questions and answers are picked up in search engines such as Google and will be displayed to Internet users that are asking the same questions.
2) If you get flagged as giving the “Best Answer” you will be considered an expert in that field and again this can be used to add further credibility to your profile.

General points for social networking

Generally networking websites are great for distributing your message and getting in-front of a wider audience. Some are more effective than others and we feel that Linked-In is one to interact with at least once a day.

Others such as Facebook, Twitter, StubmleUpon and Digg (to name just a few) are also useful but are less business focused but can be used to increase the traffic to your website and in some cases improve your websites visibility in search engines.