Lots of site owners forget all about their real audience when they SEO. This is a shame because not only are human internet users the people you ultimately have to please, failing to please your human audience can have a big and bad effect on search engine optimisation. If internet users click away from your site, the search engines take note.

It’s reasonable to question why internet users can have such a big part in a process that is all about the search engines. The techniques of SEO might be designed to grab the attention of the search engines, but that’s only part of the equation. Mixed in with the other factors of the algorithm are factors of user behaviour. If your site develops a history of putting internet users off, or if it fails to attract clicks from within the search pages, your ranking will ultimately go down. You and the search engines are really pursuing the same goal: an attractive, gripping, informative site that closely matches the search query.

This means that if you want your SEO to succeed, you have to study what your target audience wants. There are a few questions you need to ask during your initial research period.

1. What do you offer? This isn’t a philosophical question, but a practical one. What sort of product or service do you deal in? Ask yourself what searches your target audience will be using to find you. This is a question you need to ask even if your site doesn’t directly get profit from its topic, such as sites displaying paid advertising. This will give you your main keyword categories.

2. What search engines are your users used to? Although Google has the lion’s share of the search market, some groups of users habitually use other search engines. If your target market is one of these groups, optimising for Google is a waste of time. Talk to us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk about defining your target groups for search engine optimization.

3. What information do users want? Most internet searches are about finding information. You need to be able to predict the kind of information each keyword is a search for, and provide it in easy-to-find form on your landing pages. Without this, you risk having frustrated users bounce right back to the search engines.

4. What style is most comfortable? It’s a consideration not many websites seem to account for, but design is very important to retaining users. If your target user group is used to professional-looking sites, having a site that is a little avant garde in its design is not going to put them at their ease.

5. What content is the most enthralling? Different types of internet users will be attracted to different kinds of content. Some users prefer to read things in a blog or article, while some like things presented step-by-step. Your content should always be a little varied, to keep things interesting, but it’s important to know which format your target group will be comfortable with.

It’s not always possible to spot a bad SEO company. Even if you’re on the lookout for the signs that indicate a company is not as up-to-standard as they should be, it’s possible for people to slip under your radar. Bad SEO does sometimes happen to innocent websites, leaving their owners wondering what to do to repair things.

Bad SEO, or black hat SEO, can have a long-term effect on a site. If someone has managed to get into your pages and place hidden text or other frowned-upon techniques, you might not know about it until your ranking takes a dive. Once that happens, the damage has to be found and repaired before your site can even be submitted for re-inclusion. After that, there is still a wait for your rankings to go back up again.

Why does black hat SEO have this effect?

Black hat optimisation techniques have this effect because they deliberately break the rules. When the search engines eventually pick up on this rule-breaking, they punish the site that features the bad techniques – in other words, you are the one who has to deal with the outcome.

The time lag comes from the short-term effectiveness of black hat SEO techniques. For example, paying for or hacking into thousands of good-quality links can artificially boost your link profile. This can convince the search engine algorithm that your site is suddenly popular. Over time, however, as the algorithm investigates the origin of these links, their real nature may be revealed. If it is, the search engine may either automatically filter out your page, or a harsher penalty may be imposed.

Not all rankings drops are necessarily the result of black hat SEO. The term ‘black hat’ indicates a deliberate misuse of optimisation techniques. While there are companies out there that use techniques in this way to produce swift results, enabling them to lure clients in and be gone before the rankings drop occurs, sites can also be subject to simple bad SEO. It might be that a helpful but misguided staff member has performed some optimisation on your site, or that an uninformed web designer has offered to include some search engine optimisation techniques in their design. Bad SEO can come from well-meaning people, but it doesn’t make things easier to repair.

Discovering the problem is half the solution

The hardest part of recovering from the effects of bad SEO is figuring out what went wrong in the first place. The search engines don’t send an email informing you of your infraction. In fact, even discovering that something is wrong can be tricky.

Once you realise that something has gone wrong, it’s important to check through your site carefully. If you’re really stuck, it can be well worthwhile getting a search engine optimization expert in, and you can discuss this with us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk. Tracking down the problem can require extremely close examination of all your pages. Once you discover the problem, it’s a matter of fixing it and applying to the search engines for re-inclusion.

In the corporate world, it has always been difficult to manage the reputation of a firm. For instance, it has always been far from simple to maintain the kind of image which impresses consumers favourably. However, the inherent difficulties associated with image maintenance have only been added to by various developments which have made the situation what it is today. These interconnected developments have had the largest impact on online firms.

Globalising Business

Although globalisation is in part driven by multinational corporations and the development of the net and despite the fact that capital accumulation has been enhanced by this shift in many instances, globalisation has not only been uneven, but it has also thrown up new challenges for reputation management. For example, a brand name which is effective in one culture can be offensive in another. Similarly, advertisements which deliver good results in one nation may wholly fail somewhere else.

The Evolving Net

The net has become a more complex environment over time. Despite economic ups and downs, online firms have become more sophisticated in their selling of goods and services. They have hired search engine optimisation outfits in the battle to get higher rankings in the search engine results pages. However, these firms have sometimes performed unethically and users can be suspicious about excessive manipulation of the search engines. Using the wrong SEO firm is easily done, but it can have negative implications with regard to reputation management. Negative comments about a firm can feature high up in the search engine results pages if the correct guidance is not sought.

The Emergence of the New Social Media

The emergence and rise of the new social media has given businesses new opportunities. However, some firms have lacked the expertise to exploit the vast audiences on Facebook and Twitter. Moreover, users of these social networking sites are hard to tempt by traditional marketing methods. In addition, the new social media give disgruntled consumers every chance to air their complaints. Some large and established companies have proven very vulnerable to unexpected attacks in this environment as a consequence of poor internet reputation management. At SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk, we have the expertise to ensure that a firm is not successfully ambushed on this new front.

The Review Problem

It is a great idea to encourage interactivity on a site. It can really develop the community ethos of a firm’s site which means that it can move towards the authority status which is the ultimate goal of many online strategies. If users are contributing their own content, if they are making comments, if they are submitting reviews, something very positive is taking off. However, a clumsy response to a negative comment or a hatchet-job of a review can be counterproductive in the extreme. It may be a deliberate provocation by a rival, or it may be a customer who lives to complain, but the kind of response which makes it abundantly clear that composure has been lost can be verging on the disastrous.

Doing reputation management independently can be a big mistake for a new firm. It takes time to gather experience in this sensitive area.

There is a lot that your home page has to accomplish when it comes to search engine optimisation. In fact, it needs to accomplish an awful lot, considering how small the space is that you have to work with. The home page is used as a kind of intersection and an introduction, an advertisement, an information desk and a news section all in one. A skilful home page can ensure you achieve the conversions you want; a ham-handed one will ensure that they go right back to the search engine results pages.

The danger is that you may expect your home page to do too much. A lot of home pages are too jam-packed with information for any individual item to be really understood. It’s hard for internet users to easily discover the information they need. This is exactly the opposite of what a good home page should be.

It seems like an impossible task to get your home page to do all you need it to do without making it too cluttered. It is indeed a hard task, but the key to a good home page is to keep things straightforward. This might mean some thinning out of information, and some simplification of other information. It also requires really well-thought-out design.

Good home page design requires thought

It can help to picture your home page as a front room for your business. If you fill any room with too much furniture, it not only looks cluttered, it becomes unusable. Similarly, if you fill up your home page with all of your products and services, internet users won’t be able to use it.

A lot of your ideas for your home page will come from its design. Consider the physical limitations of any home page: a computer screen. Many home pages extend beyond this first screen, but anything an internet user has to scroll down for will not get as much attention. It’s important to fit everything essential in that rough few square inches worth of space.

It’s a good idea to think about home pages that have appealed to you personally, and to look at the home pages of the successful sites in your industry. Different industries do tend to develop certain stylistic traits, which are usually worthwhile paying attention to. This can provide you with a good guide for the number of products or services you can comfortably fit on your home page as well.

It should go without saying that your home page will be one of the most important pages for your site’s search engine optimisation. Happily, a home page is usually one of the easier pages to optimise, as keywords tend to fit in more easily than content-heavy pages. You can discuss home page SEO with us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk.

The main thing to keep in mind for home page optimisation is to keep things simple. It will be tempting to crowd your home page with all of the information you need to tell your users. Resist this urge and your home page should work out well.

Search engine optimisation is just as important for your off-page campaigns as it is for your on-page ones. Just because the work you are doing is not on your website’s pages, it doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be in line with your SEO plan. In fact, any work you do online that doesn’t fit in with your SEO plan is a little wasted, as it doesn’t add to the strength of your optimisation.

This is an area in which many marketing experts fall into error. Many marketers fail to realise how important it is to integrate all the many streams of online marketing. Just as one brick isn’t as useful as an entire wall, online marketing campaigns can be much more effective if they work together. This is particularly pertinent when it comes to SEO and your social media campaign.

Using SEO techniques in social media campaigns

The techniques to be used when optimising for social media are quite similar to those you should use on your pages, but there are some differences. It is important to be aware of the needs of social media optimisation, and particularly of the different quirks of various social media sites themselves.

One of the most important things to keep in mind is that social media, by its very nature, is social. Most social media sites are completely controlled by their users, meaning that if you fail to please the users, your entire campaign will fail. It’s vital to thoroughly research the social media sites you plan to tackle. You can discuss this with us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk. Before you mount your campaign, it can be a good idea to spend a few weeks merely observing the site to learn its quirks.

With the touchy nature of social media communities in mind, it’s important that your SEO for your social media campaign is subtle. Put too many keywords into your social media content and you won’t have to worry about the search engines filtering you out, because the social media users will do it for them.

Another thing to be wary of is being too pushy with links. Most social media users are aware that social media centres are a good source of links. A lot of users are there to obtain links themselves. However, there is a certain code of conduct that will be offended by businesses that are too pushy when it comes to links. The key with any social media campaign is to be gentle, and respect the community.

Don’t play pretend

A lot of businesses have had their social media campaigns fail because they failed to approach sites properly. Many businesses and marketing experts expected social media sites to be open to manipulation. Their approach involved things like registering a false user name to try to secretly push business objectives. Their approach didn’t work. Social media users are fairly savvy and can spot a fake from a mile away, so it’s important to be genuine. Be up front if you want your social media campaign to benefit your site’s search engine optimisation.

Customer loyalty is an old-fashioned term to apply to the net. Not very many businesses seem to think of it. Some may think in terms of return traffic or repeat custom, but only very rarely do businesses focus on ways to make their customers loyal to them.

Loyalty is something that can have a major impact on your site’s search engine optimization. This is one area that many sites overlook when performing their optimisation, thinking that return traffic can’t really do much for them. This always proves to be a big mistake. Ignore the needs of your site’s users, and your ranking will eventually go down.

When you’re working on your search engine optimisation plan, it’s all too easy to focus only on your business needs. After all, you’re undergoing massive amounts of work to benefit your business. The unfortunate outcome of this is often that a site’s loyal users get left behind. Content becomes more about keywords than communication.

Not every site has loyal users, but every site should want them. Even if your business doesn’t rely on repeat custom, your website can benefit from it. Return traffic can boost your SEO, as the search engines tend to take it as a good sign. If your site fails to draw repeat visits, bounces users back to the search pages or fails to keep users on pages for long enough, the search engines could give it a bad ranking. This is a fairly serious consequence for failing to keep users happy.

Obtaining repeat traffic is not an easy thing, but there are things you can do to nurture loyalty in your site’s visitors. Good content is the basic requirement for this. As part of your search engine optimisation plan, you should be planning to provide your site with a source of constant, quality, fresh content, and it’s best to make this content relevant to your visitors. Creating a sense of community on your site is another way to encourage internet users to return, as is publicly replying to customer queries on the site.

When it comes to repeat traffic, the primary thing to keep in mind is value. If a site is valuable to your users, they will return. This doesn’t mean monetary value. In fact, sites that try to lure repeat traffic through offering things that are of financial benefit usually find their schemes backfiring in distrust. When it comes to the internet, the sort of value you need to think about is the quality of information you offer, its usefulness and the way that you offer it. Talk to us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk about information and your site’s content.

The technical nature of SEO can mean that site owners get bogged down in detail. This can be damaging to the general health of the site. Even optimisation professionals can be occasionally guilty of this. It is important, however, to take the time every now and then to stand back and look at your site from a user perspective. This can result in a better-rounded, profitable site.

A site’s content should have a big involvement in every search engine optimisation campaign. Not only is it the place to disperse your keywords, it’s a place to draw in your site’s users and keep them on your pages. For this and other reasons, it’s important to ensure that your content is top-quality.

Planning out your content should be a part of your initial search engine optimisation campaign, and should be discussed with your search engine optimisation consultant. Here are a few tips for making your content as good as it can possibly be:

1. Be targeted. Specificity is essential if you want to please your target user groups. Research your audience while planning your content.

2. Be informative. Information is the lifeblood of the internet. Being a good source of information can get you return traffic.

3. Be entertaining. Although information is very important when it comes to content, it’s not likely to retain much traffic if it isn’t entertaining. A textbook might have all the information you want, but a magazine is what you’re more likely to read.

4. Be current. No-one likes old information, although you wouldn’t know it from the amount of stale information that travels around the net. Your business is not going to profit from information that is out of date, so it’s best to check your facts. New information is also likely to keep internet users interested, and may draw them back to your site.

5. Be specific. Internet users tend to be more attracted to information when it’s presented in a specific form. Numbers, statistics and bullet points attract readers.

6. Be linkable. No business should be satisfied with any asset not working as hard as it can. Content serves a big purpose for your SEO plan just by being on your pages, but it should do more than that. If you’re going to invest in top-quality content, at least some of it should be attracting links. Content such as lists and how-to articles are eminently linkable. Do some research on how to get your content working harder for you, and talk to us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk.

7. Be moveable. Where possible, it’s a good idea to make your content able to travel. This makes it easier for internet users to share your content with their friends. This is something definitely to be aimed for. Every time a user shares your content, they’re bringing new traffic to your site on your behalf. Bookmarking buttons, ‘share this’ links and other forms of sharing are a good idea.

8. Be consistent. Your content style should remain true to your business style. Mixing up casual and formal doesn’t work.

9. Be pretty. Your design can affect your content. Make sure you’re always readable.

10. Be subtle. It’s important to be subtle with your SEO. One of the most common mistakes is to stuff content full of keywords. This not only puts the search engines off, detracting from the rest of your SEO campaign, it puts internet users off as well.

Any hard-working SEO expert knows that attracting links is a very difficult task. Some of the options available for link building are easy, like sponsoring or outright buying links, but these aren’t the way to get really good links. The way to get high-quality links is to provide something attractive for the linker.

In the normal way of things, links are attracted when a site has something of interest or value to the linking site. This is the way natural links generally happen. Many sites take this process a step further by researching and creating content that is likely to appeal to certain groups of potential linkers, and actively promoting it. This process is often called linkbaiting.

The qualities of linkbait

Linkbait can be anything that is likely to appeal to the sites you want links from for your SEO. As the term suggests, the content should be something tempting enough to make them bite. What this content ultimately is will depend on the group you are targeting.

The term is often used by those in the blogging community to describe particularly juicy posts which attract a lot of attention. Prominent bloggers discuss the ways in which they use linkbait when their blog needs a boost, many of them deliberately posting a provocative article to entice links out of their following. This is not the only form commonly used, however, and there is some argument as to whether provoking controversy is a good tactic.

Regardless of its specific form, good linkbait has a few essential qualities. Actually, ‘qualities’ is a most apt word when it comes to linkbait. Linkbait must be high-quality content as a basic requirement.

*Easy to read: This means not only in the psychological sense, but in the technological sense as well. Linkbait needs to be on a platform that most people can download easily.
*Free: Charging for content is never a great idea when it comes to search engine optimization, but linkbait needs to be freely accessible. This means you might have to forego taking registration details as well.
*Unique: This is the hardest factor of all, but successful linkbait has to have a certain quality that can’t be found elsewhere. It can be subtle, but it has to be there.

Although all good linkbait has the above qualities, the right sort of linkbait for your site will depend on the personality of your site and the qualities of the groups you want links from. It pays to define these groups well, and do your research. You can talk to us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk about researching potential links for your link building campaign.

Finding the right kind of content for linkbaiting is not easy, but the hard work is well worthwhile when the links come flowing in. The kinds of links that good linkbait attracts are of great value to your search engine optimisation plan, as they closely mimic the natural links that the search engines prefer. In selecting the right groups of sites to target and then researching your target groups, your links should be highly relevant to your pages.

Text is a big feature on any web page. Despite significant technological advances, we haven’t really moved that far from text on the internet. When you’re involved in search engine optimisation, you simply can’t get away from text, as this is the most effective medium for communicating with the search engines.

Just about every SEO technique involves manipulation of text. Frequent content updates, hyperlinks, even optimised URLs are all about using words to catch the attention of search engine spiders. Not only is SEO firmly seated in text, but that text has to be the standard form for the culture your site is based in. In the case of Western sites, that means the English language.

Standard English is not that easy for some to get their head around. Everyone has had a bad experience with the English language at one time or another. Not many people remember their grammar teacher with fondness. English is full of rules that seem to be nonsensical, and a lot of them are damnably difficult to remember when you’re writing.

They’re not that difficult when you’re reading. In fact, they’re pretty much subconscious.

Reading Zen: Grammar is Subconscious

Grammatical errors stand out sharply to someone reading your text. Most people pick up on grammatical errors because they feel that something in the text is just a little off. Although they might not be able to pinpoint exactly what’s wrong, they will be left with a feeling that the writing is below standard. This is not the impression that any business site owner wants to leave site users with.

Grammar is important for search engine optimisation simply because it is important to people. Most people will say they do not care about grammar, but deep down, they do. Proper grammar tells us that the piece we’re reading was written by someone who is able to communicate effectively, who has paid attention to the rules of communication and is telling us what they mean. Bad grammar, like it or not, gives an impression of non-professionalism.

Good grammar projects a professional image. This is what sets successful sites apart from less-than-successful ones. If your site doesn’t project professionalism on par with your competitors, you can wave your customers goodbye. You can also say goodbye to your desired ranking, as bounce rates and time-on-page statistics have an influence over the rankings calculation. Talk to us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk about ranking factors.

Grammar Rules are There for a Reason

The final reason to ensure that your SEO content sticks to the rules of grammar is that grammar rules ensure that ideas are communicated effectively. How many times have you come across a badly written sentence and been unable to work out its meaning? The rules of English are there to ensure that when a sentence is written down, it will mean the same thing to anyone reading it. Good grammar is an investment in ensuring your site’s users receive your message.

It’s true of any form of marketing that a broader range of campaign will get you more coverage. If you are running a stall at an exhibition, having two tables is going to allow you to see more people than just having one. Running an advertisement for one week won’t be as effective as running it for two. Multiplicity gives you a broader range.

The same is true of SEO. Some businesses base their search engine optimization campaigns around one set of keywords, often for just one page. This gives the campaign a very narrow focus.

Although there’s plenty of debate in almost every other area of SEO, most SEO professionals will agree that keyword research is central to the success of a good search engine optimization campaign. It’s only logical. People use many different words to describe individual concepts, and individual businesses may not be aware of the range of words their target group uses.

Once keyword research is over, it’s almost always necessary to cut down the range of keywords for the search engine optimization campaign. This will be done according to the level of competition the business wants to engage in, and the range of keywords they would like to cover. You can discuss with us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk the process of choosing a keyword list. Often, however, businesses cut the list down too far.

Using a small range of keywords severely limits the scope of your SEO. Think about it: how often are you satisfied with just one search on a topic? Studies have shown that most internet users use a range of keywords when researching a particular area, using small changes to narrow down the field until they find just the right site. Internet users are increasingly using this method of search even when the first list produced contains some relevant sites. It’s a case of cross-referencing being used to determine which pages are truly the most relevant. If your site only appears for one of these searches, your chances of being picked are quite small.

Your choice of keywords will be necessarily limited by the amount of time and budget you can devote to the SEO process. It is important, however, to remember that search engine optimization is a long-term thing. The keywords you choose could be with you for a long time. Almost certainly you will want the room to add more keywords as time goes on. It’s vital to keep an open mind and to keep the future in mind when you’re first planning your initial optimisation.

The search industry is getting more and more competitive as more businesses get online. Today’s SEO strategies have to be sophisticated and cunning, taking predictions of future market behaviour into account. Only in using a large number of keywords can you hope to compete. By using the keywords central to your business, as well as the ones used by your competitors, and throwing a few user terms into the mix, you’re covering all of your bases.