Depending on your level of SEO knowledge you may not be getting the full picture from your agency. There are many pieces of information that may be being omitted from your progress reports and general interactions with your agency. Some are more important than others; below I’ve listed the first 5 that came to mind.

1. Paid links

Despite the fact it’s widely known that paid links are frowned upon by Google many SEO agencies (Including large and well respected ones) still utilise this tactic as a way to obtain links without too much effort, skipping the time investment of manually seeking relevant link placements. With Googles recent high profile clamp down on blog networks you should make sure you are aware of where you links are coming from. I would recommend randomly spot checking a selection of links from one of your monthly reports (If you’re not told the URL’s of your links you should find out why as this may be cause for concern)

2. You rank for that anyway

In some instances your website may already hold relevance for a broad range of keywords, and you already rank well without an active SEO campaign but you just don’t know. This could happen for a variety of reasons, perhaps your website is particularly old and has lots of content, a site like this even with no optimisation is likely to feature in the SERP’s.

3. Half of your reported traffic figures are bots

Traffic figures can be largely inflated by various bots visiting your site and being counted as real human traffic. Internet security firm Incapsula conducted some research into a sample of 1000 of its customers who have an average of 50,000 to 100,000 monthly visitors. The research revealed that 51% of the reported visitors to the sites were scraper bots, spammers and/or hackers. Besides the potential security threat to your business there’s also the simple fact that such skewed reporting errors dilutes the value that you can assign to successful SEO.

4. You would be better off doing it yourself

In some circumstances businesses would be better off if they managed their SEO themselves. This could be for a variety of reasons, typically because competition in the industry sector is particularly low and doesn’t require a large investment of time or technical skills. In this situation it’s highly likely that a website may only require a few hours SEO work per week or even per month to maintain rankings. Of course if the field does become competitive it may then become cost effective to hire an SEO consultant or SEO agency.

5. We outsource it all

Yes you read it correctly; there are many agencies that outsource nearly every aspect of their service to low cost overseas SEO’s. The idea is simple get a client that pays x, pay the overseas SEO y and keep the difference between x and y as profit. As a whole this isn’t so much of a problem as long as you know it’s happening, however you do run the risk of your SEO becoming a game of Chinese whispers with the person at the end of the chain not really understanding you or your online objectives.

If you’ve you read through this list and you’re unsure of your SEO providers stance on any of the points above it may be a good opportunity to pick up the phone or send a email and find out. Alternatively if you know exactly where your agency stands congratulations you’ve found you’re self a good team, just remember techniques change so keep your eye on the ball, today’s white hat technique could be tomorrows grey or black hat method.

Is your website a one hit wonder ?

Catchy title right, thanks. Sorry, no adult content here.

The idea behind this article is simple, what long term incentives or benefits do people have to return to your website once their initial enquiry has been satisfied. The answer to this question will determine whether you are growing a loyal customer base or just getting heaps of one off trade.

First of all let me explain the post title:

One night stand websites: Do not manage to turn a visitor into a returning visitor after their initial inquiry. Visitors typically don’t return because their first experience was forgettable or they simple weren’t satisfied the first time round.

Friends with benefits’ sites: Visitors return frequently + they are highly incentivised to return, they always leave satisfied sure to return again.

There aren’t many businesses that depend solely on one off purchases or onetime enquiries, of course there are exceptions that may only be purchased once every 5 or ten years, a car or refrigerator for example. But even in this instance you as a business owner will be better off if your past customers have a reason to continue returning to your site. By continually engaging with your customer base you keep your brand constantly at the forefront of their mind, this could provide you with a few beneficial outcomes:

• When they are next making a purchasing decision, your brand is already top of the list
• They will make more frequent purchases or use your services more
• They are more likely to refer you to somebody else

What kinds of factors will determine whether people will return to your site:

Website usability – How easy is it to get from A to B, how clear cut is the sites navigation

Content – How regularly do you add new content to the site, every day, every week, every month. What kind of content is it? Consistently sticking with informative content or “News posts” can easily get boring. Diversify; try interacting with your audience instead of just talking at them. Pose questions, run competitions, get people talking back to you. Not only does this get people actively engaging with your brands online presence, re-tweeting and sharing your content but it also gives you valuable insight into your target demographics interests and thoughts.

Finale

So the obvious culmination of this article is specifically “How do I keep them coming back”, unfortunately there isn’t a one size fits all answer. The solution will vary from industry to industry, a simple first step is just to put yourself in the shoes of your target audience, what day to day challenges do they face that your website could assist with. What kind of things probably interest them outside of work that’s related to your site, your options are many but there is no reason why you can’t try them all.

Essentially this article boils down to successful CRM (Customer relationship management) and conversion optimisation, ensuring that your CRM activity is integrated into your SEO activity. As my knowledge and experience in SEO grows the more I see the roots of a successful SEO campaign can be found in almost every corner of your business. Despite the fact that this is the first time SEO has been mentioned in this post, it is really at the heart of this topic. You can draw in the crowds but the message you pass on and the relationships you forge are an equally important part of the process.

By the way you may wonder why I chose to compare a one night stand website to a friend with benefits’ as oppose to comparing it to a happily married couple. The reason is simple, friends with benefits sounds catchier and was more likely to get your attention! Plus the action usually stops altogether when you get married.

If you enjoyed this article please share, if you didn’t feel free to tell me why on the form below.

This has been a problem that I’ve faced with one of my clients who have a wide selection out bound links , 90% of them pointing at websites with no relevance to their service or industry (I don’t have the opinion that all outbound links are negative, in fact if we think about it logically then they should help shape the theme of your website). Adding the nofollow tag to the links inside WordPress link manager will hopefully put a tap on the link juice being sent to irrelevant sources.

After a while trying to find a solution within the link manager, I then resorted to the thousands of WordPress plugins out there. After downloading and installing several I still didn’t have a satisfactory solution apart from fiddling with the HTML of each individual link which I saw as a risky and time inefficient option.

Eventually after hours of trawling the internet I have a solution which is as follows. (I can’t credit anybody with writing the code as I didn’t get the information from the source)

Get FTP access to your site and navigate to:

/wp-admin/includes/

Then open the following PHP file

meta-boxes.php

On line 857 enter the following piece of code:

Source code
   
<tr> <th scope="row"> nofollow </th> <td> <label for="nofo"> <input type="checkbox" name="nofo" value="nofollow" id="nofo" <?php xfn_check('nofo', 'nofollow'); ?> /> nofollow</label> </td> </tr>

That’s it, now when you go to the link manager inside your WordPress backend you should see the option to edit your links and add the nofollow tag. The tick box option should appear at the bottom of the Link Relationship box. Make sure that once you’ve ticked the box you remember to click the update link button or your changes won’t be saved.

And of course be sure to view the page source code to ensure that it has worked.

This blog post is a quick guide to redirecting non www traffic to the www URL

Why ?

There are two main reasons why you would want to do this, the first is that it’s highly likely that users will type in your URL directly into Google, now if they do this and type in your URL without the W’s then instead of landing on your homepage they’ll be taken to a blank screen which could easily mean that instead of tracking down your correct URL they will just look up your nearest competitor.

The more important reason why you should make sure your URL redirect correctly is because it could damage your rankings if you don’t. Without re-direction or “Canonicalization” Google sees the www and the non www version of your website as two separate websites and if you have the same content repeated on both URL’s then this equals a duplicate content nightmare. With no clear indication of which site is the original your search engine rankings could be negatively affected.

The easiest way to check whether your non www redirects properly is to try and visit the page by typing the domain into the address bar without the www’s, see below:

Yourdomain.com

If you’re not re-directed to your homepage then you know you have a problem.

The simple solution is to implement a canonical URL using Apache mod_rewrite (Don’t worry it’s not as complicated as it sounds)

.htaccess file

You need to append or create an .htaccess file in your websites root folder. (If there is already a .htaccess file there make sure that before you change you anything also back up this copy and save it somewhere safe).
To create a .htaccess file you simply need to open a blank notepad doc the select the save as, in the drop down box then select all files then name the doc .htaccess then click save. (Remember .htaccess is not the name of the file it is an actual file extension).

Apache mod_rewrite

Open the .htaccess file and paste the following code in at the top:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Upload this file to your website root folder via FTP (Usually uploded to /httpdocs or /public_html)

Mission complete.

If it didn’t work

If this solution hasn’t worked for you then you need to do a bit more research.

Hit the start button on windows and select run and type CMD (Command prompt) and press enter, if you have a older version of windows than windows 7 just type CMD into the start button search function.

When CMD opens type:

Ping yourdomain.com

If you don’t see any ping statistics (IP numbers, bytes received etc) then you need another solution which most probably will onvolve creating a DNS record to manage the redirect. This will be covered in a future post.