SEO For Business why its importent

The business world is firmly embracing the art of SEO like a long lost, much loved relative. Of course SEO is another way of marketing a business. It is like traditional advertising but at the same time its totally different.
In the past

In the past,seo was all about being number one. The top spot was the prised position as there could only be one top spot. Competition was fierce and in the early days a lot of the returned results were pages designed to gain rankings not to entice visitors. Spamming was rife. Meta tags held a large sway with the then search engine algorithms, they would be stuffed with words in the hope of getting traffic. I must even admit to using some of these tactics in the early days. Using software such as web position gold in the hope of it telling me the magic numbers to make me an SEO God
Business SEO has Matured

Like all things, SEO has aged, looking back on it’s past and reminiscing how silly it used to be. The modern online marketing consultant is no longer just interested in rankings , now he or she is interested in helping you the business owner.
SEO has gone all holistic

As I said previously SEO used to be all about the position. Now from my point of view I want to get your website and online marketing working seamlessly together. Using the term SEO is a little misleading as search engine optimisation is only a part of what a good internet marketing company does.
So what does a “good” internet marketing company do

SEO is still a major part of the mix but for it to be done properly you need your SEO involved from the conception stage of the web design process. By having them involved they can advise the web designer on how to structure the site so it is search engine friendly. The other option would be to hire an SEO web designer with the skills in place to build a search engine friendly website.
Keyword Research

One of the most important parts of an SEO’s job finding good high traffic keywords and phrases relevant to your business.
Ditching Keywords

Once your SEO has built his list of key phrases he or she will “ditch” the ones with to much competition (new sites) or not enough searches to be profitable.
Copy writing

Your website copy could mean the difference between making a sale or not, your SEO will help you with your copy giving you pointers to improve the wording or take on the project themselves using a good SEO copywriter .
Calls to action

Call to action is a common phrase in the world of online marketing simply put it is asking the customer to perform a single or set of actions these may be as simple as using the phrase “buy now” or using your phone number as a focus point with “call us now”
Converting visitors to buyer, website conversion rates

The ability of a website to make sales or enquiries is measured in its conversion rate. A conversion rate of a page or a site is calculated in the number of sales divided by the number of visitors. An example would be a websites gets a thousand visitors a month and from that thousand 35 people go on to buy the product or service we would have a conversion rate of 35/1000 = 0. 035 or 3.5 %.

things that can decrease or increase conversion rates are headlines, copy, site design, colour and calls to action. For the bigger budget projects your SEO would undertake some split testing of different layouts, wording, headlines,colours and images. A quick way to get some results for the conversion rates would be to use PPC (pay per click) sending half the clicks to one page and the other half to the other modified page and compare conversion rates.
Off Page Optimisation

Off page SEO is a whole subject in it’s own right. To give you an idea it mainly involves link building and the way link building is done is dependent on the SEO. It could be blog commenting, article marketing or the creation of micro-sites to feed traffic back to your main site the list goes on.

The meta tags and SEO

Posted by SEO South Yorkshire

Here’s short post on SEO meta tags. For the majority of search engines the meta tags have zero relevance to ranking a page in the search engine algorithm. It hasn’t always been like that in the past the main ranking factor was the meta tags, like any thing that can be humanly changed we had the years of the meta tag stuffing where keywords would be placed in the description and keyword tag area often not relevant to what’s on the page. This would lead to higher ranking but made for a crap user experience with pages returned that were not relevant to what the person was searching for. Today it’s all about relevancy and user intention.

So should you use the SEO Meta Tags

Yes you should, let me explain why. The keyword meta tag is all obsolete for the search engines. There is a but, Some social bookmarking sites read the keyword tag and use it to auto generate tags for bookmarking and sharing. This will save any user bookmarking the page time and effort. Thus making the process of bookmarking more striate forward.
The description tag , although this tag is not used for the ranking of pages this text is displayed under the page title in the search engine results page. This gives you opportunity to write attractive and enticing copy to increase your click through rates


Remember to choose the keywords as if your were tagging the document .

Note from Google on the Keywords meta tag

Recently we received some questions about how Google uses (or more accurately, doesn’t use) the “keywords” meta tag in ranking web search results. Suppose you have two website owners, Alice and Bob. Alice runs a company called AliceCo and Bob runs BobCo. One day while looking at Bob’s site, Alice notices that Bob has copied some of the words that she uses in her “keywords” meta tag. Even more interesting, Bob has added the words “AliceCo” to his “keywords” meta tag. Should Alice be concerned?
At least for Google’s web search results currently (September 2009), the answer is no. Google doesn’t use the “keywords” meta tag in our web search ranking. This video explains more, or see the questions below.

Complete article  http://webmojo.co.uk/blog/seo-meta-tags/

How to Price for SEO

SEO is very important to the online business with on average the number of leads the search engines produce being anything from 60% – 100% of the visitors to a website. So as an SEO how do you work out your SEO pricing. I find this part of the job one of the hardest. Search engine optimisation and pricing, it is a minefield. Price too low and the client thinks your unskilled at your art, price too high and your run the risk of pricing yourself out of the job. So where’s the middle ground.
SEO is a two stage process the first being the on page optimisation where the structure and content is optimised to take full advantage of how the search engines rank a page / site. The second stage is off site optimisation this involves building links to the site from relevant sources across the internet. Pricing should always reflect the amount of time that is going to be spent on the optimisation process. A rule of thumb is an newly trained SEO’s time is worth £25 per hour and an SEO at the top of their game can be worth up to £175 an hour. So you should be pricing for your SEO service accordingly.
Word of warning, if you are a new to the world of SEO, know your own level. You don’t have to tell your customer, but if you price according to the the results you expect, then you shouldn’t go far wrong. There is nothing more irritating then an SEO who is over confident and under skilled, they give the whole industry a bad name.

Method one: Price on performance SEO

This sounds simple, you get the customer on first page and they pay you. This method is problematic especially with the introduction of personalised search. You may find yourself educating your clients on the search engines so they can validate the data you send over in your monthly report. I’ve talked to business owners who have used this type of service and it seems to turn into a pay us if you want to relationship. With the client only paying when they think the seo company has done enough. This may seem the fairest but its often the SEO company that is left out of pocket.
This opens the system up to abuse by not having a set metric. I normally see this sort of SEO pricing at the lower end of the market with uncompetitive phrases and localised search. Price wise you are looking at £50 – £150 a month on phrases with moderately low level of competing sites.

Full article on SEO pricing

simple layouts for web designers just starting out

There are many good web designers out there and some who are just starting out. If your one of those beginners, you can have some problems coming up with web design ideas. having a basic design formulated in your head is half the battle and actually building it is the other half.

There are several simple models that you can use to base your site on. Here are a couple of different models to help you with your ideas.

The first type of configuration is a three column with header and footer. It comprises of a header section three columns and a footer with the main page content taking up the centre column.

The second type of configuration is the header menu content footer layout set out top to bottom header at the top with the menu directly below set out horizontally then content and finally the footer section.

latest projects moneymakingmummy and more

Here is a list of our latest projects
Moneymakingmummy.co.uk we are working closely with getting paid to work at home expert Syreeta Dent on this project providing SEO support

Babykingdom.co.uk 
We are working on this project selling baby equipment  

and lastly we are working on payasyougogo.co.uk a site about everthing pay as you go from mobile phone to credit cards

SEO Web Design Explained

SEO Web design as the title suggests is an amalgamation of website design and SEO. There are some strong reasons why you should use a company that is expert in SEO and website design. To explain this further we need to break down what is website design and what is SEO
Web Design
For the dedicated web designer, designing a website is every about the look with considerations given to how substantially the design communicates the message. The use of graphics and the typography is there to support the core communication.
Many web designers come from a graphics background and hold on to a basic grasp of the code behind the design and may depend strongly on web design packages such as Dreamweaver to help them produce the end product. Many of theses designers are able to produce designs that a visually very attractive
SEO
For the SEO its every about the traffic. Getting visitors to your site they rely on statistics and conversion rates. From a design point of view it's all about making it easier for the search engines to crawl and index your website.
The skills of good SEO's should never be underestimated as they can help a business thrive by delivering targeted visitors, identifying search trends and even newborn markets.
SEO Web Design is...

When you combine these two disciplines, what you get is a web designer's that can produce great looking websites while creating a design that is optimised to produce great search engine results.
On page optimisation is easer as the site structure is designed to place the most relevant content higher up in the page.This is where SEO web design comes into play As a rule of thumb, the closer to the top of a page a word or phrase is placed the more relevant it is to the search engines.
Image optimisation
The optimisation of the web images this is done by the use of file names, title text and alt tags this can be used to support the overall website theme
Linking text optimisation
Optimising the way the pages are linked by the use of keyword rich links as opposed to generic terms like "home" or "about us"
Conclusion I hit done my best to discover the basics of why SEO web design is so crucial to long term success of any website. As you can see there is more to website design then just making things look nice or getting traffic. For a website to work it has to appeal to the senses as well as the search engine algorithms. Striking a fine balance between the two gives SEO web design it's strength.

Author: Web Design in Doncaster

Skip Flash Intro

Your users hate your portal! Cunnington says "Users hate flash because it's a barrier to the site." When users enter your domain or locate you after a rigorous Google search they are expecting results, all too often they find a site loading bar and the option to 'skip intro'.

As much as you may have enjoyed the story your web designer gave you when developing your site, your users are contributing to the largest statistic on the web because of your decision, "Flash animations are an obvious, yet stellar, Example of what users hate in a Web site; the skip intro button is the most used button on the Internet." says Theresa Cunnington, senior usability consultant with services firm iFocus. Your fun, funky and fancy video is standing in the way of the results your users are searching for and if this is how you introduce the site chances are they will have various other areas that they will have to waste time awaiting the site to load.

Consider this, your user will revisit your site at least one other time after their initial visit, if they are loyal or in need of the information on your site, do they really need to see your flash video each time they access your site? Here contributing to the skip intro button being the most used button on the internet. In addition to the chances being slim that a user is really that captivated to view your video, will it be 30 seconds, 5 seconds, either way they don't know ahead of time and they are not willing to waste the time to find out. Save your users time and your stats bounce rate, invest time into make your site an authority on the subject matter you are presenting. Take the simple and clean approach to presenting the information, cut down on the clicks needed to access information on your site. Your users will thank you by spending more time on your site instead of moving on to your competitors.

http://www.mediagourmet.com/