Let’s be honest here, normally you would only add a blog to your website for SEO reasons. I can’t imagine many people like to sit down after a hard day at work and write an article about their business. A blog is a great way to add more pages to your website and target specific long tail keywords. If you’re unfamiliar with the term ‘Long Tail’ it’s simply a very specific search. For example, “White IPOD USB Charging Lead”, you may think this wouldn’t bring much traffic to your website and you may be right but imagine over one thousand long tail keywords developed around your business and you could be looking at a lot of additional web traffic. It has also been proven that long tail keywords have a much higher conversion rate compared to more generic keywords. Another benefit to long tail keywords is that there is usually only very low competition making them very easy to rank and you may be lucky enough to find your blog posts automatically appear on page 1 of googles results without any optimization. If you are targeting specific more generic keywords for your main site, for example we are currently working on “Private Blog Network Services” and “SEO Services”. If you get used to automatically including these in your blog and making them look natural then google will see this and it will help improve the relevancy of your whole website for those keywords. It can be hard writing blog posts with long tail keywords in mind, but remember to keep your writing as informative and as useful as possible. If someone does find your website from your blog post then they are likely to read it before looking at the rest of your site. If the article makes no sense then they are more than likely just to hit the ‘back’ button and move on to the next search result. Remember SEO is a long term and on going process and every little helps, even if you can not write a blog post every day try to do one per week and over time you will have a great deal of long tail keywords which should increase the visits to your website.

The use of paid links in a search engine optimisation campaign is always the subject of much debate. On the one side of the coin it is believed that search engines devalue the weight given to paid links when determining the ranking of a web page. On the other hand it is difficult for search engines to determine whether a link is paid for, or not, if it is acquired using the appropriate means. One fact that remains constant though, is that a good link is a good link regardless of its value in search engine optimisation.

Search Engine Optimisation Goal

The ultimate goal of a search engine optimisation campaign is to drive targeted traffic to your web pages. Building links helps by improving your ranking in the search engine result pages for specific search words or terms. As such, building links is treated as a vital facet of an SEO campaign and marketers are constantly looking for cost effective methods of building high powered links to web pages with minimal effort for hopefully massive return. One method is through paid linking.

Paid Link Services

There are a number of services on the web that offer paid linking. Either they offer it through their own network of websites, or they broker deals between advertisers and publishers. Payment is usually determined by the Authority Rank of a web page and paid on a per term basis (monthly or annually, for example).

Search Engine Devalued Links

Search engines are known to devalue links when they are aware that they have been paid for. This could mean that a paid link is worth nothing more than the traffic it directs to a web page, and this is likely to be the best way to judge whether a paid link is really worth it or not. However, some point out that by using certain services it is almost impossible to be found out by the search engines for using paid links. Certain brokers give information about a potential link location but do not give specific details. In these cases, the link may have benefit to search engine optimisation.

A Good Link Is A Good Link

Whatever your views on the matter of paid linking, one thing is for certain – it is a genuine and viable form of online marketing. A link from a prominent position on a prominent website geared towards a related demographic of visitors as your own site can drive a lot of highly targeted and very active traffic to your web pages. In this respect, paid linking is greatly beneficial.

Paid Linking For More Than SEO

When looking at paid linking, it is best not to consider it a form of search engine optimisation. Judge each paid link on its own merit. If the search engines do determine it is a paid link then they won’t give you the benefit of that link when determining your search engine ranking. However, if the link is a good link from a relevant page that naturally attracts a lot of visitors in its own right then it is a viable form of advertising that should be considered. After all this is the goal of your search engine optimisation anyway.
There are literally thousands of factors that influence the natural listings, and it goes without saying that not all will have a positive effect on your natural listing results. I thought it would be a good idea to identify the top 5 mistakes that as an SEO programmer are all too frequent, and that any site owner or developer should stay clear of.

Spamming

– spam is a word used excessively when talking about modern internet usage, it basically means deceiving the spiders that read your code in terms of search engine optimisation. It’s most common form is same text repeatedly used as anchors or bold, some people believe that by cramming your keyword in 50 times Google will pick up its importance and rank you higher, this is true to en extent but the number of occurrences needs to be an optimum level in relation to how many words you have on a page.

Duplicate content

– Text that has been used anywhere else on the World Wide Web is classed as duplicate content, a site that this is found on is essentially discredited of any importance by the major engines. Although it is time consuming and boring, I cannot overstate the importance of writing fresh content about your main keywords on multiple pages on your site.

Low quality and reciprocal linking

– Linking is high on the agenda for search engine ranking, therefore good quality inbound links will take you to the top, and low quality will have a negative effect. Links from pages that are in bad neighbourhoods, irrelevant to your subject, or on a free for all directories are totally worthless, similarly reciprocal or link exchanges are no longer worthwhile.

Flash and JavaScript website

– Flash and JavaScript sites are flawed simply because search engine bots cannot read them, therefore there is no chance of realistic rankings. Search engines read code to decipher what your site is about and how relevant it is compared to all of the other sites in existence, if it can’t read this it basically does not know where to place you.

Hidden text

– This is absolutely criminal in accordance with web programming standards, as soon as Google discovers a site to have same colour text as background, sirens will ring and your site will get banned from the listings, no matter how clever you think it is, don’t do it! We would love to hear anyone else’s views on poor SEO tactics, or alternatively what you have seen to be successful in your experience.
Blogs are a fantastic Search engine optimisation tool even if nobody reads them, Google always does. It sometimes takes a while to convince a client of the benefits and they are not always suitable to some industries. A blog is not worth doing if you are not going to update it frequently, by this I mean an update at least once a week and even better once day. While this can be hard to arrange, it is well worth the time and effort. I will now go thought some tips for creating a fantastic blog: 1) Get a Google account and sign up to Google Alert for your industry then use this to keep your blogs up today with the latest industry news. 2) Keep your blog on your domain and not a sub-domain and also have snippets of your last three to five blogs on your home page. This ensures that your home page has fresh content on a regular basics, therefore Google will spider the site more often. 3) Have good URL’s for each blog relating to the title of your blog. This allows Google to easy identify what your blog is about. 4) Have an up to date ping list, this is a list of all the blog sites that your blog goes out to such as “Technorati”. This can be implemented by most pieces of bloging software. 5) Try to include one of your keywords in the title and the first two lines of your blog, remember this will go on your home page and add to the keyword density. 6) Write your blog with your user in mind and try to create a topic of conversation; this will have a viral effect around the web if done correctly.
Results released this week say that the click throughs for Google’s sponsored links for this tax year have only increase by 3% on last year. Now if this is true and you take into account there was an extra day in February, then Google click through’s have stagnated. Now it would be a bold SEO to say that this means Search Engine Optimisation is the new king of internet marketing, I am not that stupid, SEO has definitely been taken up by more companies in recent years and I think a lot of users are becoming aware of what a sponsored link is; they earn their position by paying for it. There is a belief that sites in the natural listings have earnt their position by merit, which is not true, they earn their position though good SEO’s such as the programmers here at Click Consult. I believe PPC can have a massive impact on a business if used correctly, although I believe the real culprit slowing the growth of Google sponsored listing could be the competition, By this I don’t mean MSN or Yahoo but social media sites. Its a true fact that people spend more time on social media sites than search engines and there is a wealth of information to be found using these sites. There popularity has grown due to the element of trust, these are real people with real recommendations or good SEO’s. The truth is that the best form of internet marketing is having the right people who understand the market place and uses the right methods at the time dependent on your business.