So I thought I’d give Rob a ring. Yes he had spoken to the guy, no he had not referred him on to us. I sort of guess that PRWD wont be using Energize either.

Why would I begin a relationship with an agency that introduces themselves with a lie?

Give that some thought before you consider using Energize Recruitment of Manchester

If you are involved in any form of online marketing in the UK, you or your online team should be at SASCon if you want to  establish or maintain your competetive advantage.

When reporting we often talk about conversion rates and sometimes clients will ask why a conversion rate isn’t 80, 90 or even 100 percent. These people are often new to SEO and in need of educating but I think Tim Ash of sitetuners.com explains perfectly why the 100% conversion rate doesn’t exist. He believes there are three types of visitor to a website.

Noes – These are people who will never take the desired action in order to complete a conversion. There are endless reasons as to why someone might not take the desired action. For example they maybe simply surfing the web and thought your site looked interesting or simply don’t have the financial means to use your service or products. It would be difficult to change these people’s minds.

Yesses – These are the people who will always take the desired action. They are not put off by shocking registration or check out processes and are often sold on an item before they arrive at your site. If you are the only seller of a particular product or service then they have to use you. People who fall in to this category don’t need convincing.

Maybes – The title is pretty much self explanatory and it is likely that you are converting some of these already. This is where you should focus your attention as testing different landing pages can improve conversions here dramatically. Tim goes on to break down this group further and can be found on the graphic below.

For one reason or another you can never satisfy all the visitors to your site. This is because they often have different intents. For example many searchers will research a product or service before making a purchase. They will look at maybe 3 or 4 sites before making a decision. Are you likely to convert every one of these? Unlikely.

So when explaining this to clients i start to look at ways with them at trying to convert the maybes. I do this by exploring possible user mind sets. What is their intent and how can we convince them to purchase our products and services over others. Once i have looked at the various options i move onto landing page testing.

People have written whole books on this topic so i couldn’t do it justice in this post. I recommend reading ‘Always be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer‘ by Brett Crosby though. At the moment i am using Google Optimiser for testing but there are plenty of other great tools out there.

I guess the take away point from this post is that you should never assume that every visitor is a potential buyer. The 100% conversion rate doesn’t exist and you should spend time refining your landing pages.

built by Media Spin

The immediate answer would be right now but if you have an old site and are thinking of upgrading it then this might be the time to launch an SEO campaign. Companies such as the Venture Hotels Group have recently invested in a new site and decided on running an SEO / online marketing campaign. They had a clear understanding of the need to develop new guest opportunities and improving the online presence of the site. The group had seven hotels and decided to bring it into one simple and easy to use website. Launching a campaign at this time can be extremely effective as you can alter the design, feel, navigation and usability of a site to fall inline with your SEO campaign. So for example you can look at keyword theming and site navigation.

You may be wondering why SEO is so important however these stats might give you a small insight:

The top result on a search page gets 42% of the clicks
The top 3 results get 79% of the clicks
The top 5 get 88% of clicks

Put simply if your not on the first page then the likelihood of your hotel being found is greatly reduced. Although hotels are found in many ways this is a huge opportunity and can be an effective place for hotels to spend their marketing budgets.

So to the good stuff…..

Hotel SEO Tactics

We could spend a lot of time going in to the various different tactics but I wanted to discuss some of the key areas in which you should look at optimising your hotel site.

Firstly looking at geographically based search. Many users when looking for hotels will search by location. For example if your looking for a hotel in Chester then you may use the search term Chester Hotels. This is because people are going to get much more relevant search results rather than lets say searches for just hotels. It is important to take advantage of this through the SEO of your site.

Optimising your site for geographical searches is usually fairly straight forward. It’s a case of optimising your content and page titles for these geographical terms. You would for instance want to look at title tags, page headings and of course content. Hotel owners can also take advantage of Google local business listings. This provides a quick and easy win for geographical searches.

The other key area hotels will need to look at is the booking process. The booking process can have a huge impact on your conversions (bookings) and requires careful planning and analysis. If users find it difficult to make a booking then they are likely to go elsewhere. Hotel owners need to optimize the site so that it is easy for users to make bookings. You effectively need to optimize the process.

Tools like Google Analytics can be used to monitor and measure the performance of your booking process. Any site owner should be using tools like Google Analytics to measure the effectiveness of their SEO campaigns.

Beyond SEO

Of course optimising your site is just beginning, as successful hotels will make use of other innovative online marketing techniques to promote their hotels. Social media and review sites provide plenty of opportunities to interact with potential guests. For example many people use Trip Advisor to help make decisions on which hotels to stay at. Hotels can do certain things to improve the feedback left on these sites and identify key issues for visitors.

Content also plays a valuable part in a campaign. People need to know about attractions and facilities in the area of your hotel. You need to give people a reason to stay with you. Providing guides can be invaluable and researching what customers want is key.

The key to any SEO campaign is research, testing, analyzing and developing. You need to set out objectives and find what your customers are looking for. Once you have done this you can implement your plans and begin testing. Once testing is on progress you should analyze your results. Then you must make changes to improve the campaign.

The perfect link-profile is the imperfect link-profile

Any link-builder will tell you that the perfect link is one from domain x, appearing in the body there, with this anchor text, and the page title, heading and x, y and z this, this and this. But a whole link-profile that replicates this would be hugely unnatural and as a result you might be overly optimising – missing out on some real superstar wins.

• Quality link-building is less about being correct and more about measured mistakes.
• Boolean search engine algorithms are old school; topic semantics and naturalist styles are the way forward.

The temptations in link-building…

Nepotism, link-buying and using your own portfolio of sites to build links provides a big temptation to those that partake in this activity to drop links onto those sites using highly optimised short-tail terms.

If, indeed you do have control of over the anchor text, the link title and location of the link…why not mix things up? Throw in some ultra long-tail, some URLs, some domain name links, short-tail, some random tail, etc, etc…it’s for the greater SEO good, trust me!

Are patterns natural?

I carried out a site review recently, and approximately 45% of the site’s link-profile was made up of 4 very close variations on a very short-tail term, across 1,000’s of links. This is not natural, and flagged excessive keyword targeting in the link-building activity in a a huge industry, when really they should be optimising for a broader range of terms.

More often than not, you will see the domain name or the URL as the link for the site, not an overly imposing handful of short-tail terms. In this instance, those links also sat on unrelated pages and sites with blogrolls including ‘Replica Rolex watches’ and ‘Cialis’ links, et al…not exactly the ideal online neighbourhood to be associated with.

All it would take is for a search engine to flag this irregularity, have a human moderator review that link-profile and devalue those links – causing a massive shift in the site’s visibility. This is quite obviously not good SEO service.

Empirical Methodological Naturalism

Methodological naturalism, or the testing of causes and events in our surroundings to support or reject our hypothesis, is a great way of developing our understanding in SEO. I for one follow the mantra that it is possible to over-optimise. A contradiction of terms? Well no, I don’t think so.

Experience and some understanding of search engine algorithms tells me that as much as search engines want to provide the exact match, the best and most relevant result, it has to resolve two things…it must satisfy queries with unspecified searcher intent and in doing this, it must filter search engine spam.

A generic search for “DVD”, could have the intent to make a purchase, rent a DVD, informational research, get news, view latest trailers, get an image, etc, etc…It therefore must piece together the most relevant result using a variety of metrics, looking at things like historic searches, possibly behavioural metrics (e.g. frequency or % of returning visitors to a website), etc…As a result you need to optimise for intent as much as you do a keyword.

Optimising for “DVD” might therefore be very unhelpful but optimising for “DVD rental” or “DVD shop” communicates to the search engines that you are online with a commercial intent and therefore the search engine can look to provide the most relevant visitors at the least effort. For this reason, although it’s important to specify your intention, it’s good to mix things up. For this reason you need a healthy list of modifying terms at your disposal.

Variety is the spice of life!

Nofollow, stop words, miscellaneous words, various lengths of anchor text, semantic variations, modifiers, typos, synonyms, IP… these all make the naturalness of the links that much more natural. A site can obviously take quite a number of these ‘perfect links’ but I wouldn’t want to ever suggest that you

The search engines have more data than is possible to imagine – so be mindful of that next time you want to buy a sack full of links and dump them on your link-profile; how natural is that going to look over time?!! Any link profile can of course absorb quite a number of perfect links in a natural way but be mindful of how this occurs and at what rate. A search engines link-graph consists of masses of data so anomalies can stand-out a mile (check-out Majestic SEO for some insights on previous link-profile activity).

More Reading

OK, so maybe ‘sabotaging your link-profile’ is a slight exaggeration but it’s massively important for longevity of results in my opinion. If it’s a topic that’s new to you, make sure you do a load more reading…

There’s loads of stuff out there, but a couple of my favourites that inspired this post will provide you with plenty of reading, include Marie-Claire Jenkins post on Huomah and Shaun Anderson’s over at Hobo << really cool stuff.

What are your thoughts?

Does anchor text density play a major part in your link-building activity?

About Guest Poster, Ben McKay

Ben is a SEO Manager at Mediaedge:cia, and writes about SEO consulting over at Just Me and My and more recently Greensplash Design, SEO Scoop and Search Engine Journal.

Ben’s a huge fan of some of the geekiest SEO blogs around, and has a number of favourite SEO blogs, and hates writing in the third person! He’s a sociable chap so make sure you say hello to Ben on Twitter.

Using Googles External Adwords tool, we can get some data as to what is used to find a broad range of SEO services. Here’s a completely inexhaustive list using a small set of seed terms with no regional qualifier:

Interestingly, SEO doesn’t appear in any phrase until position 9. Internet Marketing appears to generate the most queries. Whether it converts into enquiries is another matter. It is a familiarity of terminology and perhaps a vanity of our own industry that we want to be King of SEO in Manchester. But does the potential client care?

The approach for the project is to create a bespoke PPC campaign and begin optimising the site over time. The site currently has a very limited link portfolio and it will therefore take some time to rank well. The PPC campaign will drive timely sales while we build a strong link portfolio and develop the sites content.

For this campaign we also aim to leverage numerous social media sites including YouTube and Flickr. We have identified some early opportunities for using video and images. The company also works on a range of exciting projects which we aim to share in exciting ways.

At PushON we are really excited about the project and are looking to achieve the maximum amount of ROI for our new client.

The Bing Toolbox gives you the latest blog posts from the webmasters blog while incorporating the usual features such as submit sitemaps. It’s very similar to Google and Yahoo’s versions however it feels more intuitive in some ways. The feedback it gives you is also excellent and very much worth in to.

To submit your sitemaps etc head over to http://www.bing.com/toolbox/ and follow the ‘Add A Site‘ link

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……