Top myths about SEO

Many myths about SEO keep floating around the internet. SEO experts at Pipon Solutions leave no stone unturned to ensure only genuine knowledge is used to serve the best interests of our clients. As a step in this regard, we’ve tried to highlight the two first steps to creating an SEO strategy.  This will be followed by a further post later on this week detailing the next steps needed to create a successful SEO strategy. 

The first bit of advice for anyone beginning an SEO campaign is to make good use of Google tools such as Analytics and Adsense.  Without using such tools it is difficult to ascertain how well your campaign is doing and where you can improve your SEO strategy.  Through monitoring and following the advice contained in such tools one can find some quick fixes that will aid your SEO strategy. 

Link building is the next most important aspect of an SEO campaign.  Although some webmasters believe that external links are harmful for a website’s rankings, arguing that you ideally should not want visitors to leave your website, data actually shows that there is a positive correlation between the number of external links and higher rankings. The key to this is making sure that you are linking out to high-quality, relevant sites to help Google better understand the content of your page and thus improve rankings.

To learn more about the different SEO strategies one can put in place please visit our website or get in touch with us.  We will be posting our next SEO tips and techniques later on this week so stay glued to this blog and watch this space!

Link building skills you need

As every established digital marketer knows, link building is one of the most essential components of effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  As a leading SEO company, we here at Pipon Solutions have outlined some of the most vital skills that are needed in order to polish up your link building techniques, some which have been outlined below:

Familiarity of internet culture: Link building is made a lot easier if you are consistently up to date with what is happening in the digital world.  For example the daily reading of social media sites such as reddit, and engaging with people on twitter, helps you keep familiar with internet culture and keep your eye on the best places on the net to establish contacts and post/request links.  

Selling skills: Reaching out to people through the internet is not very different from cold calling or business development. Hence, sharpen your selling skills to become more effective at link building.

Analytical skills: A link builder should have the basic understanding of data analysis to conduct competitive link analysis, perform research and break down large sets of complex data into simpler forms.

Creative skills: SEO is gradually moving closer to traditional marketing, where creativity is an essential requirement. Creativity cannot be taught, but every person is creative to a certain extent. Hence, it is important that you bring out those inherent creative skills to help you build links.

Perseverance: This in often an understated and underestimated characteristic that people tend to overlook. Link building is often hard manual labour and it helps if you are the sort of person that never gives up.

Technical skills: Some of the best link builders are those with web development experience.  Although we all cannot have these IT skills, some of the basic technical skills that you can develop are –

• ·         Intermediate knowledge of (X)HTML/CSS
• ·         A very basic understanding of at least one modern programming language
• ·         How to build agile tools in Google Docs
• ·         Ability to upload files via FTP

Pipon Solutions, has, over the years, built effective link building strategies as part of our SEO packages and services. We have taken the time to develop an effective link building strategy designed to make your website more accessible.  Contact us for more information about our link building strategies or check our blog for further updates on effective link building skills.    

Tips to get more natural links

Do you need more ‘natural’ links to your website to promote your search engine rankings? Link building is an essential component of any SEO campaign and through using the following simple techniques you can ensure that your website is fully optimised for natural search engine rankings.  

Email signatures are a great way to naturally show people your website and promote the unique content in it. Most of the people you usually converse with through emails may not even know that you have a website. You may choose to send a friendly and helpful email to your friends and acquaintances with a signature linking to your website. You can do this with html code or you may also choose to use wisestamp – a plugin that allows you to create a graphical signature including your social media icons as well as links to your website. It works with a variety of email clients such as gmail, yahoo, AOL and hotmail in Chrome, Firefox and Safari web browsers.

Use links on your social media profiles. Many users forget to add links to their websites on their social media pages such as Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and other networks. Twitter and Facebook allow you to add URLs to your pages and Linkedin allows you to add anchor text. Make sure to add links on other social networks too and watch incoming traffic to your website increase from these avenues.

Use a badge for your website. Create a nice little badge to help fans of your website share it with others. 

Furthermore, you should make it easy to link to specific pieces of content by using html embeded code for infographics or videos and simple links at the end of each article that call on readers to "like" your posts and share the content with others.  

Search engine optimization is a difficult task without a solid accompanying link building strategy.  As a leading SEO company Pipon Solutions uses a number of advanced link building methods to help you get on the right books search engines that value natural links to your website. For more information on link building why not view our earlier posts on the topic or contact us for more details.  

SEO strategies you must avoid

There are numerous proven SEO strategies out there that can take your website to the very top of search engine results pages (SERPS). But, you should, at all costs, not resort to ‘black-hat’ techniques to promote your website. There are also other seemingly ‘natural’ strategies and methods that you must avoid if you want your website to reach the top of natural search rankings:

·         Targeting your competitors’ keywords: If you are a small business owner and unsure as to which keywords you must use, you might be tempted to look into which keywords your competitors are using and copy those. Your competitors’ keywords might suit them because those keywords may fit into their overall marketing strategy. Just like you cannot simply copy somebody else’s marketing strategy, you cannot simply pick up someone else’s SEO keywords.

·         Using link building only for your homepage: You must devise link building techniques for the whole website, not only for your home page. This is because your home page will most probably be generic and will be more of an index. When a user searches for a specific item such as, for example, a black umbrella, you’d like him/her to land on the exact page selling black umbrellas, not on a generic page with links to pages selling umbrellas, rain coats and boots. Hence, you need to build keyword targeted links.

·       Creating pages just for the heck of it: With Google’s panda update, pages with multiple links to useless content will be punished severely. It is very important to remember that quality and not quantity is more essential as far as SEO is concerned, especially after Google’s recent updates.

·        Resorting to unnatural reciprocal linking: By now, you would have received thousands of emails asking you for links in exchange for links back. Participating in such schemes is bad practice and you will be penalised by search engines for following such practices.

·         Creating one domain after the other: If you are a small business owner and do not know the tricks of the trade, you might resort to starting up multiple domains for multiple requirements. SEO experts advise that you will be better off trying to focus your SEO efforts on one domain and getting it right. If you want to talk about a different topic, why don’t you open separate sections on the same website instead of starting up new websites?

As a leading SEO company Pipon Solutions offers comprehensive SEO packages to help you focus on what you need to focus on – your overall marketing goals and business strategies. Our SEO services are completely customised to your needs. We work with you right from the start to identify where your needs are and what we can do to help you get there. The whole idea is to understand your business better and develop apt SEO strategies that fit into your overall marketing plans. Contact us for more information, or look at some of our earlier posts for further advice on the top digital marketing strategies out there.  

The Importance of Link Building

Link building remains one of the most essential components of a successful SEO campaign.  However well structured, informative and optimized a website is, it would still remain an arduous task to run an effective SEO campaign for that site if it did contain any quality, relevant links.

There are three main reasons as to why link building is so important for an SEO campaign. 

Link building firstly increases traffic through creating directions to your website that are highly valuable, not only for visitors to find your site, but also for the search engine spiders that are dependent on links to locate relevant websites on the net.  Internet users follow links like cars follow road signs, and the more ‘road signs’ you have directing people to your site destination the more traffic you will receive.  Furthermore, search engines care as much about what other people say about your site as the actual content on the site, therefore good quality links from relevant websites inform the search engine that your site is reliable, relevant and most importantly, popular. 

Secondly, links prove relevancy.  Possessing a large number of quality links means that your site is seen as relevant within the industry that you specify in. Relevancy is constantly a term that search engines use when giving advice on the latest updates to their algorithms. 

Lastly, incoming links indicate that your site offers quality content that would be highly relevant to a search.  It is for this reason, therefore, that Google gives PageRank on the basis of links that are relevant. 

Despite this importance, link building remains one of the most difficult tasks of an SEO campaign.  Over the next few days I will be looking at some key tips for successful link building, such as how to approach a site for a link and getting natural links. 

If you cannot wait, however, then contact Pipon Solutions for more information on implementing successful link building strategies and thereby running an effective SEO campaign.  

3 Key Points to SEO (Basics)

This article is written to give a basic understanding of SEO, however it is important to note that what is written here is not the full spectrum or detailed aspects of search marketing practice.

Below are the three points anyone interested in SEO should know, this includes business owners, marketeers or those who are new to SEO.

    1.    Submitting your site to the search engines

A search engine will only show websites it has in its database. It is important to submit your site to the key search engines. This can be done by creating a site map and submitting it via webmaster tools. If you are unsure about how to create a site map an easier, albeit less effective way to submit your site to search engines is to do it via their submission page.

Additionally, it is also important to submit your site to various relevant directories. This will not only help to get your site found by search engines but may also help to drive traffic.

    2.    Content is king - Part I

A search engine will rank a website high in the search results due to numerous factors, one of them being web content. The content of a website, especially text content, allows a search engine to determine whether a website is relevant to the search query performed by the end user.

For this reason you will hear a common phrase in SEO world that says 'content is king'. The general rule of thumb is to write content for your website that is engaging to the user while also using your core keywords within the page, as frequently as possibly but without the text sounding in any way unnatural.

    2.1    Content is king - Part II

Equally, you should also generate useful articles, or write a blog, that links back to the most relevant pages of your website. And rather than writing 'click here' for more information, you should always use keyword rich anchor text (sometimes referred to as hyperlinks) to link back to your site. In our case, for example, we might be writing something along the lines of 'for more information about our fantastic SEO Services please contact ...'. As you can see, the anchor text we use is relevant to what we want people to find us under in search engines.

    3.    Link Building

Link building is another important, if not the most important, area to focus on to get a website ranking high in the search results. A link from another website to your site is like a vote of confidence, or a reference. For this reason, search engines value this highly.

There are various methods of Link building, two of which have been mentioned already: gaining directory listings (generally this is considered reasonably low value); and writing articles that link back to your website. There are a great many other methods involved in link building and they are too numerous to be included in this article. Check back soon though for a more comprehensive article that will be dedicated to link building.

And a final word of warning. Be careful when link building. Several methods are considered to be unethical and, if you are found to be employing these methods, can get you banned by the search engines.

So, if you do want more information about our fantastic SEO Services that take the headache out search marketing, then contact one of our SEO Consultants today. Call 020 7001 2000 or Email: info@piponsolutions.com

Top 5 SEO Tips

We often get asked what are the most important elements of SEO so today I thought I'd point out the top 5 most important.

1. Keyword Research

Great SEO always starts with thorough keyword research. There's not much point in working really hard to achieve top positions in search engines for keywords that don't drive much traffic. That said, there is room to develop a strategy that incorporates the 'long tail' keywords, but the point being that there is a strategy behind this and it's important to understand which keywords will only bring a small amount of traffic and which will bring a lot.

There is a good free tool available for keyword research called the Google Keyword Tool. Here you type in a few keyword that you think are relevant to your website and it spits out several more keywords that might be relevant, as well as traffic estimates for each one. You do still need to sift through the data but it allows you to get a good feel for which keywords generate the most traffic, as well as giving you lots of new ideas for other keywords you perhaps had not thought of where there are many people searching.

2. Optimise Your Website Navigation

I would recommend doing a wireframe of your website so that you can clearly see the whole navigation of your site. At this point you should check to see how 'deep' your website goes. Does it have a more horizontal look to it, where even the deepest page is only 2 or 3 clicks away from the home page? Or do some sections of it go very deep with pages that are 5 or more clicks/stages away from the home page?

The ideal situation is that most of the pages should be within 3 clicks of your home page. This makes it more likely that the search engine spiders will be able to crawl your whole site. Play around with your navigation to see what you can do to achieve this balance. Don't worry too much if a few pages go quite deep though, as long as they are not pages that are very important pages.

The other factor involved in optimising your navigation is to ensure that your URLs are keyword rich and do not contain any unnecessary characters. Once you have completed step 3 it is best to come back to this. You will need to name your website's directories and files using the relevant keywords. You should also make sure that you don't leave a space in the file names or this will place the percentage character in your URL, which isn't ideal. And additionally, if your URLs have more than one question mark in them (possibly due to your CMS or because you have a database driven site) then you will need to use a URL re-write.

If you are unsure how to go about this please contact us and we will be happy to provide you with a Search Engine Optimisation quote. Our number is at the top of this page, or please feel free to email us and we'll get straight back to you.

3. Match Your Keywords To The Pages of your Website

Once you have created your extensive keyword list it's time to match up your keywords to your web pages. Use your wireframe to match 2 or 3 keywords to each page. Ideally these keywords should be semantically linked, although on the homepage this might be a little more difficult if you have several different products or services you are talking about.

These will now be the keywords that you are optimising each page for. It is important to take your website on a page by page basis, while at the same time not losing site of the whole.

You should now go back to step 2 and optimise your URLs based on what keywords are relevant for each of those pages. If you must only choose 1 words out of the 2 or 3 keywords for that page, use the keyword that you most want to optimise for, which perhaps might be the keyword that drives the most amount of traffic.

4. Optimise Your Page Titles, Meta Keywords, Meta Description and H1 Tags

The next step is to go into the code of your pages (or you might be able to do this via your CMS) and optimise your meta data. If you're looking at the code you will find this in the section of the page.

• Page Titles - Create unique page titles for each page using your page specific keywords. Make sure these aren't too long and put your brand or company name at the end rather than the beginning. For example: 
• Meta keywords - Each page should have a unique combination of meta keywords. These should include your core 2 or 3 page specific keywords plus a few others that are relevant to that page. For example: meta name="keywords" content="seo, search engine optimisation, pipon solutions, pay per click, PPC, search engine optimisation, SEM, SMM, paid search management, google, adwords, london, UK" />
• Meta Description - This is often the description that you will see in the search engines. You should use your core page specific keywords but also make your sentence compelling enough to entice users to click through to your website. Again this should be unique and should describe the content of that specific page. Ideally this should not be more than 165 characters, including spaces. For example:          
• H1 Tags - Use your H1 tags wisely. This is what a user will usually see as the title of the page. It's similar to a title in a word document and, as such, there should be only one instance of this. Use your most important, page specific core keyword here. For example:                                                    

5. Link Building

Link building is a whole topic in itself for SEO so I can't go into the full details here of how to acquire them. However the important thing with link building, that often gets overlooked, is to ensure that you are link building using the appropriate keywords and linking them through to the most relevant page. You don't need to always place links coming into your homepage when you might have another page with more specific product information on it.

An example here might be a clothing website. If your homepage talks about the range of products you do and is geared up to rank for the more generic terms, such as women's clothing etc then you should link build to that page only for those generic terms. Whereas for the deeper pages, such as a page dedicated to women's jeans, should have links coming into it for the keyword women's jeans.

For a very quick and far from comprehensive overview of how to get links, think about some of the following:

• Directory submission, writing and submitting articles to other websites, blogs and article directories, contact any partners or suppliers to ask them for a link from their website, press releases using an online PR site.

As you can see, even with only 5 top tips there is still a fair amount of work involved with SEOing your website. The key thing to take away from this however, is that the most important aspect is keyword research and planning. This forms the corner stone of your SEO strategy.

If you are interested in SEO and would like Pipon to give you a quote please call or email us today. We have SEO packages to suite almost every budget and welcome the opportunity and challenge to work with businesses big and small.