Honk if you think 2011 went by in a blur (*honk*).

I know, right?

The main question that has been on my mind, as a Digital Marketer, is what does 2012 have in store for SEO, along with the general field of Online Marketing?

Content

What’s the score?

First things first, I know that content will remain King, although a lot more emphasis will be placed on the ‘freshness’ (thanks to the ‘Freshness Update’ Google applied to its algorithms on 2nd November 2011, which affected approximately 35% of searches) and quality (thanks to the ongoing iterations of Google’s ‘Panda Update’, originally launched in February 2011) of the content.

What can be done?

Make sure you update your site regularly with high quality, insightful, UNIQUE content which contains original analysis. Readers don’t want to see re-hashed articles on your site when they could read the original article in more depth on someone else’s site.  Remove or improve shorter articles because it is better to have one longer, in-depth piece on a topic than two pieces of shorter content virtually saying the same things but in a slightly different way.

Make sure you talk about timely topics as soon as they are relevant, to capture users who want information from your site’s point of view about a trending topic. However, there will be times that you just can’t generate enough original comment about a topic to put out a full article on it – in this case, write a tweet/Facebook post/Google+ post to acknowledge the event and here you will be able to at least express some sort of feeling about the event and what it means to your business. These social media posts may well be pulled by the search engines when someone searches for the topic.

However, bear in mind that search engines will also want to display general or historical information about a topic when it develops and pops up in the news again. Therefore, you need to make sure that your site contains ‘evergreen’ content about all relevant topics for which you want to have ‘expert’ status. ‘Evergreen’ content isn’t as time specific so can be read all year round. An example of this might be a ‘how to’ article on a bank’s website, for example ‘How to open a bank account’.

Authority and Trust

What’s the score?

Search engines want to rank authoritative and trustworthy sites well. This is all part of trying to provide the best user experience to searchers when suggesting potential pages to them in search rankings.

If users click through to your site from the search engine rankings, the search engine would rather the user enjoy the experience (website design is also important here) and stay on the site because it is a huge indication that your site is relevant for the search term that made your site appear.

Authority and trust play huge roles in user experience – who hasn’t gone to a website, seen the first page, screamed in horror in fear that just being on the site is going to end up in the theft of their identity and/or credit card details and clicked the back/close button faster than The Flash? I figured the number would be small.

Users are also looking for indicators that the information they are reading is accurate and that the person who wrote it is somewhat of an expert in their field. Are you more likely to click on an article about interviewing celebrities by ‘Parkinson’ or ‘Joe Bloggs’?

Remember that if a user (is logged into Google) visits your site from the search listings, is horrified by what they see and exits quickly back to the search results, Google registers this ‘speedy exit’ and then displays a ‘block this site from the search results’ link for the user to click on. If the user clicks this link, they won’t see results from your site when they next search using the same term (and it won’t reflect well on your site in Google’s eyes). You will have lost a potential customer and will lose traction with Google, who will likely reduce your rankings as a result.

What can be done?

Make sure that your site is designed well and contains accurate content by people who know what they are talking about. Proof read your content to check for factual and spelling/grammatical errors (I will NEVER buy stuff from sites that have spelling and grammatical errors – if they can’t be bothered to proof their text, how careful are they going to be with my credit card details?).

Give your authors an online presence by using authorship markup to enable Google to list your article along with the author’s name and a picture of him/her. Your readers will start to recognize the author (it’s easier to remember a face than a name) and want to click on their other articles when they see them, especially if they had a great read from the first piece?

If you are an ecommerce site taking payments online, register for industry standard security protocols (e.g. an SSL certificate) and display a badge, on your homepage, to show your users that the credit card information they enter will be safe.

Make sure that your site users can contact you and display contact information prominently. This will help because users will be able to see that they can contact someone who runs the site if they have an issue (and that it’s run by a real person/company and not a fraudster who is going to rip them off) rather than clicking back to the search engine results after 10 seconds.

Social Media

What’s the score?

Social media equals lots of user-generated content (blogs, images, videos). Firstly, search engines love new, fresh, unique content. Secondly, because people are looking for this type of content, search engines want to keep the users happy and want to present this type of content in search listings.

Social media is a great way to raise awareness of your brand because search engines will display items like Tweets, blogs and YouTube videos in the search listings. If you don’t have a presence in these areas, you won’t be there for search engines to list when the time comes.

Also, if you can get your users to talk about your brand and share content related to it, more people will hear about you and link to you which should increase the likelihood of being listed in relevant search listings.

What can be done?

Engage with your users via social media platforms, especially Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Do this by posting regularly and frequently. Share great deals on social media sites, tell users about your new blogs/other content.

Encourage your readers to follow your social media pages by adding buttons from sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to key pages on your site.

Also, encourage your readers to share your content with their friends/followers by adding Facebook ‘Like’, Google ‘+1’ and Twitter ‘Tweet’ buttons to your content.

Finally, make it easy for readers to share your content on social bookmarking sites by adding buttons for sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and reddit to your content.
What are your thoughts for how to keep up with Digital Marketing in 2012?

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As you may, or may not be, aware, WDL employed a new Digital Marketing Specialist at the start of December 2011 to look after new and existing clients’ Internet Marketing accounts. That new employee is me, Emma.

I wanted to write a company blog post to introduce myself and explain more about my background, the work I do, and the work I will be doing, at WDL.

Colchester, here I come

Life in Colchester began for me when I was 18 and I moved from a very small town in the West Country – Devizes, in Wiltshire, is famous for its castle, the Wadworth’s Brewery (famous for its 6X ale sold across the UK) and having one of the most impressive set of canal locks in the UK.

‘Why did I leave the gorgeous countryside to come to Colchester?’ I hear you ask; I moved to study a degree in Linguistics at Essex University and hopefully start a new life in a bigger town with more opportunity than the small town I was leaving.

During my stint at Uni, I specialised in foreign languages (Spanish, Portuguese and Italian), how people learn foreign languages, the hidden meaning behind what people say (Pragmatics) and the neuroscience of language (how it is stored and recalled from the brain), including language disorders (e.g. Specific Language Impairment and Aphasia).

I graduated from Essex University in 2007 with a 2:1 (Hons) in Linguistics and moved into my first job five months later as Online Editor of Compareandsave.com.

What on earth is SEO when it’s at home?

Initially, I was employed solely to write the content (e.g. news, blogs, guides, etc.) for compareandsave.com but, to do this well, I first had to get to grips with how the internet can be used to increase the visibility of products, services and opinions.

So, it was here that I was introduced to the world of Digital Marketing (I define this as ‘communicating to your target audience about something, using the internet as the medium in which the communication takes place’), including Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, Email Marketing , PR and, most importantly, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), which I’d never heard of before.

Within the first few days of my new job, I started to learn that a degree in Linguistics was actually going to come in handy in Marketing and SEO, much to my surprise.

After all, in my humble opinion, Marketing is about communicating to others and my knowledge of the language used to communicate was going to help. Plus, search engines need to be ‘linguistically trained’ in order to understand what a searcher intends to find when he types a query (a word or phrase) into Google or Yahoo so that the most relevant results (web pages) can be returned. What’s more, search engines need to know how queries/words relate to each other in case other results/pages might be helpful to the searcher (i.e. synonyms).

Being fresh out of Uni, I could write – I’d done nothing but write essays for the last 4 years (there was a bit of partying in there too, though) – and the search engines love content so it was a match made in heaven.

Oh yes, the worlds of SEO and Marketing are all about the Linguistics.

What does this mean for WDL’s current and prospective clients?

I have the training, tools and experience to help you achieve increased online visibility and get your site in a better shape to rank well in the search engines – and it’s something I love to do.

For example:

If search engines love content then, so do I.

After solely managing all the content for one of the UK’s biggest comparison sites, I bring with me the tools to advise clients on tailor-made content strategies for their website(s). Once the content is planned out, I can write (or commission someone else to write) content that meets your customer’s demands and those of the search engines.

If search engines like looking at your site(s) in minute detail then, so do I.

Search engines rank websites based on hundreds of relevancy factors. I have the understanding of these (publicly-available) relevancy factors and the keen eye to find elements on your site(s) that need to be fixed in order to have a better chance of appearing for the queries that your potential customers make in the search engines. I can also look at the wealth of information provided by analytics programs to find areas where your site is and isn’t performing optimally for your users.

Of course, my experience can mean a lot more to you than the above two examples so, if you are looking to improve your website, not only for the search engines but to give your customers/users a better experience on the web, get in touch with me and I will do my very best to help you on the way to Online Marketing success. I look forward to working with you in the future!

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A few months ago WDL posted a small article outlining our Twitter and Facebook Setup service.

Since then we have developed the service beyond the setup stage to include posting and following.

Details can be seen below:

Twitter and Facebook -  Setup

To setup accounts with Twitter and Facebook using your business branding and company information.

Twitter and Facebook – Posting & Following

Option 1 (available weekly, fortnightly or monthly)

WDL consults via phone to establish 5 different posts
WDL posts to Twitter and Facebook over the course of a week, fortnight or month
WDL researches and finds 5 follows for Twitter

Option 2 (available weekly, fortnightly or monthly)

Client delivers 5 posts by email
WDL posts to Twitter and Facebook over the course of a week, fortnight or month.
WDL researches and finds 5 follows for Twitter

Option 3 (available weekly, fortnightly or monthly)

WDL consults via phone to establish 10 different posts
WDL posts to Twitter and Facebook over the course of a week, fortnight or month
WDL researches and finds 10 follows for Twitter

Option 4 (available weekly, fortnightly or monthly)

Client delivers 10 posts by email
WDL posts to Twitter and Facebook over the course of a week, fortnight or month.
WDL researches and finds 10 follows for Twitter

Option 5 (monthly)

WDL consults via phone once a week to establish 10 different posts (40 in total)
WDL posts 2 each working day (Monday – Friday) to Twitter and Facebook
WDL researches and finds 40 follows for Twitter

Option 6 (monthly)

Client delivers 10 posts by email on a day of the week to be arranged (40 in total)
WDL posts, 2 each working day (Monday – Friday) to Twitter and Facebook
WDL researches and finds 40 follows for Twitter

NB: Other combinations of the above or WDL can plan a bespoke package to suit your business needs.

For more information on why social media is important for you business, take a look at our blog post; Why Social Media Is Important For Your Business

For information about pricing and related services please Contact Us

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What are you doing with your marketing? Have you done any recently? If you are struggling with where to start, or even if you already have a marketing department, the best place to focus your attention with any online business is with SEO. If you can pull together a well thought out and implemented SEO campaign, you’ll generate more traffic coming to your website and as a result you’ll engage in more communication with prospective clients.

If you are a business that has a web presence the key thing to remember is the best customer service and most incredible content means nothing if no one can find you.

If you don’t know where to start here’s three ideas to get you going.

1. Site Structure

Search engines need to ‘spider’ your site to rank it and display it in their results. The idea is to make it as easy as possible for them to work out what your site is about and find it’s way around. To help them, make sure that your navigation is not just flash animation and images, it needs readable text, well structured menus and relevant content. Link between pages and use ‘anchor text.’ (use the actual text to link not just phrases like ‘Click Here’ and ‘Read More’.) These little fixes will sometimes have a big effect on your site. Remember this is just the beginning and will need to be reviewed regularly.

2. Get Inlinks

In an ideal world getting the content right and optimising your site and it’s structure would push it up the search rankings and put you in first position for the search terms that you have optimised your site for. But, it It doesn’t work like that and there are many factors involved in raising your sites profile in search engines. We’re only touching the surface of the complicated algorithms that they use to rank your site. Google and the other big search engines like to rank sites for their popularity as well.

The most popular sites are the ones that have the most votes (inlinks). This is the most time-consuming area of SEO and it needs to be ongoing. You have to contribute to blogs, forums, and message boards relating to your website, write and submit articles, become an expert in your field and actively use social media. In essence you need to contribute something of worth to the internet. If you can do this you will generate inlinks to your site and this in turn will help you rank higher.

As an online business it’s not an option to ignore this, you need to work out if you have the time to do it, or get someone else to do it for you. Doing nothing about it is business suicide.

3. Research Your Competitors

Chances are that you know who your competiotrs are. If you don’t know, then work it out! Study their websites, think about how they are ranking higher than you for certain keywords and phrases, or indeed why they are not ranking as high as you. Check how many links they have to their site (use a backlink checker – there are some resources here www.seorankings.com.) Are they using video? Are they on Facebook? etc.

Keep up the research, or you will never know how to leapfrog your more succesfully placed competitors in the search rankings.

Take some time, give it some thought, use the ideas above to gain a little more insight and act on it.

SEO is complex and relentless, but if you decide to implement and organise your own SEO campaign make sure you do it properly, plan it carefully and stick to the plan. If you don’t have the time or the resources contact us and see how we can help.

 
To see SEO in action type ‘website design colchester’ into Google and see where we appear (no.1 just under the ads…).

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