at there is a Wkipedia article about the journalist so clearly, if Wikipedia says he exists, he must do.

SERPs for Roger Boyes

But hang on, look to the right at the PPC ads. Oh dear. Ebay has “Feed your passion on Ebay.co.uk”, Play has “Roger Boyes books £9.99″ and my personal favourite “Roger Boyes at Amazon”

I guess there’s a serious point here as well that you’d better make sure that if you’re punting at terms you dont clearly understand by an automated process, you got some big risk

In many ways the praises of deep links go unsung but in fact play an integral part in SEO. When building a campaign we want to build both the domain authority and individual page strengths. Deep links tie in to page strength as we need to in some way to tell Google (and other search engines) that our sites also have excellent content on pages other than that of the home page. To do this we employ a number of internal and external link development tactics.

I will now outline some quick and easy ways to gain deep links.

Link Bait

This is something that i don’t play with nearly enough but i certainly have a great appreciation for it. Link baiting is essentially where you create a piece of content that preferably goes viral to help develop links. It’s something that people would look naturally want to link to. You could literally write several books on this topic but i would recommend checking out SEO Shark’s blog. One of my favourite examples of link bait is the search engine smackdown game. Work of genius. All I will say is that link bait is a kind of art and the pay off can be significant.

link baiting Vs viral search success

Article Submissions

Article marketing has come under some heavy scrutiny in the SEO field over the last few years but it still remains an effective tool for creating one way links. Creating a well written article with links pointing to several pages in your site can help develop your number of links however the strength of these links can be fairly low. At least they are on topic and relevant. Some of the more popular articles sites include:

EzineArticles
Go Articles
Article Base

Directories

I think directories still have there place in SEO and they can be a nice way to build deep links to your site. You will find many directories offer one link pointing to the home page with an additional 5 links pointing towards your inner pages. One that offer deep links are often paid. I have found this particular tactic to be extremely effective in getting inner pages to rank well in the past.

Social Media

The number of social media sites is growing all the time and many of them are now offering do follow links. It’s a nice and simple tactic but its worth spending the time developing profiles properly. I personally like Squidoo as you build the pages up and develop reasonably strong page ranked links.

Internal Linking

This is without doubt the easiest method to build deep links and is proven to be extremely effective. Pointing internal links to key pages not only helps develop there status but also points users to your key content. It’s important to not over do it and review your site structure and content first. Don’t forget to use that anchor text wisely.

There are of course many ways to build deep links and i have mentioned some of the main ones above. Another key one for example could be guest blog posts. My final bit of advice is to review your sites structure and content first and devise a focused strategy.

Happy Hunting……

Although there are many factors that influence where your website will be ranked in the SERP some factors are more important than others. After taking a look at Bing for a few days now and carrying out some analysis it has become apparent that Bing uses a very different algorithm to Google. A good example that shows this clearly is searching for SEO Manchester in both Google and Bing.

The two SERPs looks very different, only one of the top ten results are the same and many big SEO agencies in Manchester are missing from the Bing SERP. You’ll also notice that the Bing Local Listings are not very competitive at all with only one agency being listed.

So which factors should you focus on to rank well in Bing?

• A mixture of inbound links including a good number with good keyword rich anchor text (see this great article on Link Building Secrets by Patrick Atloft).
• Make sure you write keyword rich, unique meta data which is also human readable.

If you have any other ideas on which factors are most important to rank in Bing please leave a comment and let us know!

Times are hard at the moment for many sectors, however there are still many opportunities to do good business. Some businesses are drawing right back on their marketing spend. In my opinion this is a serious mistake. You do not sell more by telling fewer people about what you do and what you sell. Being judicious with your marketing spend makes complete sense. You should demand that every penny be accountable and deliver a return on investment. There is no more accountable form of marketing than online. A well managed website should enable you to understand who is coming to your website; how they are finding it; what they are doing there and most importantly, how much it costs you to get them to do what you want them to do. This might be to purchase a product or fill in an enquiry form or even make a phone call. As a starter, we have put together 10 simple pointers to ensure your website is managed well and will start delivering an improved ROI despite the credit crunch.

If you are intending to get a new website or your first website, research it, plan it and write it down. Deliver your chosen website developers with a written brief and work with them to develop something truly appropriate and suitable to you. You’d be surprised how often we meet business who have spent thousands based on a verbal brief and not got quite what they expected. Writing a website brief

Ensure that your website is W3C compliant. The W3C define standards for the coding behind websites. If a website is standards compliant, it means that search engines stand a very good chance of finding and understanding all of the valuable content on your website. There are tools online you can use to test your standards compliance
HTML Validator
CSS Validator
Ensure that your website is accessible to people who are blind, partially sighted or disabled in any way. You have a responsibility to make sure your website is reasonably accessible to all parties. You risk prosecution otherwise. Happily, an accessible website is one that usually works well in search engines

Make sure that you have some form of analytics properly installed on your website. Measurement is essential. Google Analytics is free to use and is sufficient for the vast majority of businesses

Make someone senior responsible for the website. All too often the website isn’t an “owned asset”. And make sure that this person has time to work with the website and understands that their work is valuable, perhaps critical.
Understand the keywords and phrases that people use to find products and services like yours. There are many more relevant terms than you think. You can research search terms people are actually using

Make sure each and every page on your website is optimized for perhaps keywords or phrases that are relevant to that page. This is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Wherever you can, ask relevant businesses to link from their website to your website. Suppliers and customers are ideal as they are likely to be thematically relevant to what you do. Don’t get links from or to anyone who you would not be comfortable being associated with in real life. Search Engines like links from other websites. They are like votes of popularity.
Add content to your website regularly. People like it. It gives them a reason to keep visiting your website without getting bored. Search Engines think in a similar way. One way to achieve this is to add a blog to your site. This is a very simple tool that just about anyone can use to publish content to the internet.
Blogspot
Wordpress
Don’t be bamboozled by sharp sales people who offer you 5 page 1 Google rankings, guaranteed. There are no guarantees in search. Search Engines can change how they work at any time. Rankings are merely a tool. It is no use ranking well for a search term if no one uses that search term and you do not generate any business from it. It is conversion into business that generates an ROI.

Finally, if you’re serious about wanting to make sure your website is working for you, PushON will happily provide you with a free website MOT that will give you a simple overview of how well your website is working for you

If there’s anything else you think should be added, then please comment below.

404 page

Google is of course a strong believer of custom 404 pages and recently dedicated an entire week to 404 pages. Google is not the only believer as a quick search custom 404 pages in Google will provide you with plenty of sites offering tips on how to optimise your 404 pages. They include, what links are best to include and how to write exciting and enticing text. Some of them are well worth the read. Although there is some debate over the finer details I believe in just keeping things simple. When users arrive on your 404 page they essentially just want to get to where they are going. They don’t want to be provided with hundred of different options and long blocks of text. The other thing worth noting is that 404 pages, in some cases can improve bounce rates.

Please use all methods listed to ensure your website achieves absolutely nothing.

1. Add a splash page with music and heavy moving images. This is like a little dance to get people in the mood for visiting the actual content of your site
2. Create a completely Flash website
   • Make sure you don’t add any useful metadata
   • Don’t create a HTML version
   • Don’t check whether your visitor uses Flash, or what version
   • Don’t optimise your files, everyone’s got broadband now so it doesn’t matter
   • Don’t provide alternative text
   • Don’t use keyboard access
   • Auto play music files
3. Don’t use an analytics package to track what’s going on with your website, it’s much more exciting playing in the dark
4. Use a professional development package like Microsoft Frontpage, or even better MS Word
5. Use JavaScript for your menus
6. Keep your JavaScript neatly embedded at the top of your main pages, above your content
7. Use images for your text
8. Don’t bother with the alt text for your images
9. Ignore that new fangled CSS, use lots of in-line styles, you can change any text to any font/colour/style combo, mmm… colourful
10. Use frames to construct your pages
11. Use tables to lay out your content
12. Don’t do any testing, it’s important to avoid testing the following
    • Forms
    • Automated emails
    • Checkout process
    • The url your Pay Per Click adverts go to
    • How the site looks in different browsers or platforms
    • How your site looks with Flash, JavaScript and Images turned off
13. Make some of your pages PDF, Word or Excel files, variety is the spice of life
14. Don’t add anything to the metadata or the title of your document, the default should work for everyone
15. Make your users work for your product, remember you’re worth it
    • Make visitors register before they can browse
    • Ask as many questions as possible on forms – you never know when you’ll need to know your customer’s eye colour or fax number
    • Spread your checkout forms over a number of long pages
    • Don’t indicate how long they have left in the checkout process, it would ruin the surprise
16. Don’t reassure your visitors
    • If you have payment processes on your site, don’t bother with those SSL certificates, my mate Dave can get you one
    • When the purchase is complete, send them straight to the home page, you’re customers are strong, ‘thank you’ pages are for the weak
17. Use sexy add-ons that may make the site load time longer, but make your site look wicked
    • Use pop-ups
    • Use scrolling, blinking, flashing glittering text (think MySpace baby!)
    • Make your logo spin, once you’ve learnt how to do it, you can make every logo spin
18. Finally, once you’ve made your website, don’t change it, leave it to mature, like a lovely Stilton.