If you’re even remotely interested in online reputation management, and you should be, you’ll be aware of your brand listings. It’s a reputation management basic to manage the listings that appear in the SERPs for your brand keywords. Most businesses simply aim to get as many of their company-controlled pages into the first page of the SERPs as they can. What this strategy ignores is Google’s ‘Query Deserves Diversity’ algorithm.

The diversity algorithm is something that a search engine optimization agency will keep an eye out for and you can discuss it as part of your optimization plans with us at Searchengineoptimization.co.uk. It can cause problems because it throws unexpected results into the listings. It’s hard to predict but has far-reaching effect. It’s something you need to take into account when working on the first page for your brand-name searches.

How ‘Query Deserves Diversity’ affects brands

In basic terms, ‘Query Deserves Diversity’ gets in the way of Internet reputation management planning because it throws unexpected pages into the mix. Instead of a neat set of your own pages, your Facebook profile, your YouTube channel and your Wikipedia page, you get a number of sites that were on your periphery. This has obvious repercussions for your reputation management.

Happily, the answer to this problem is something that you should be doing during your reputation management campaign anyway. Unexpected sites do turn up in brand name searches so you need to have as much influence as you can on a broad range of sites. Invest in exploring your options.

Digital content is everywhere. It’s in our emails, our business reports, even our old newsletters. With so much pressure to produce content for website optimization, it’s crazy that so many businesses let such valuable SEO assets sit unused.

Scouting out content sources is something that everyone can do. No matter who you are, it’s guaranteed that there is something you’ve got you’re not currently using.

*Old content – everyone has old content lying around. With just a little effort, it can be freshened up to provide new content for a website. Old hard-copy newsletters are a classic example of content that can easily be posted to a site and made into a reviewable archive for site users. Got old email marketing sitting in a file somewhere? Why not scan it for potential fresh articles for your site?

*Website data – data analysis is something that your search engine optimization agency will be encouraging you to do. It’s also something you can use as a foundation for new content. Things like consumer trends, traffic fluctuations, pricing changes and even location data can all be made into interesting reports that your site users will want to read. Talk to us at Searchengineoptimization.co.uk about crafting attention-getting articles from raw data.

As you can see, you need to think outside the box when reviewing your SEO assets. Not only are these content sources useful for fresh content for your site, they can provide the kind of content that’s magnetic for SEO link building. Are you overlooking valuable SEO assets?

One area of link building that seems to get skipped over is relationship analysis. Link building services tend to concentrate on the ‘doing’ part of breaking down competitor link profiles, setting up link targets and linking. Very few SEO link building plans stop to take stock of what is really a site’s most valuable link building asset, namely the relationships it already has.

Every site has a series of relationships to rely on and link building really is about relationships. If you’re aiming for organic search engine optimization, you’ll be looking to make your link building look as natural as possible. Talk to our team about this at Searchengineoptimization.co.uk. This is where your existing relationships are most useful but you can’t use them efficiently unless you first stop to take stock of them.

How to take stock

Relationship analysis should be performed before the linking campaign begins. It’s really just a case of sitting down and mapping out who you know, who they know, and what everyone on your list does. This initial list can be done on paper and it’s good to map it out graphically to see where relationships meet.

Once you have your connections worked out, it’s time to figure out how to use them. Each person’s interest area should be linked to a keyword and a linking approach plotted out.

You may think you don’t know many useful people but almost everyone you know online can be of help. Simply work out your relationships and start viewing them as assets.

Imagine you’ve run a special campaign, and you’re only just now getting around to tidying up afterwards. There are a couple of pages promoting the new product or service, but they’re specifically related to the campaign and have to go. All you need to do is wipe them off your site map, sever all internal links and remove them, right? No!

Old pages can have a lot of value in terms of organic search engine optimization. Talk to us at Searchengineoptimization.co.uk about this. Pages connected to old campaigns can be doubly valuable. As they’re likely to have had a search engine marketing campaign as well as being put through your regular SEO systems, campaign pages are likely to have attracted lots of natural links and steady traffic. Some of what are now your regular visitors may have bookmarked the pages as their first point of contact with your site. Simply removing the page removes all the bonuses your SEO or search engine marketing company worked for.

What to do

Before removing any page, analyse its rankings. It’s a huge waste to throw away any page that’s ranking highly, even if it is an old one. Your analysis should look not only at the page’s position in the SERPs, but the links it has and the traffic sources it draws on. Once you know the score, it’s possible to decide whether to keep it or 301 redirect it.

Your pages can be valuable search engine optimisation tools. Simply throwing away pages is never a good idea.

It’s impossible to ignore the importance of content for SEO. Experienced site owners know that content needs to be well written, with keywords worked in as an integral part of the piece. There are still a lot of mistakes being made, however. This is because although most site owners are aware of the need for good text, they don’t put it in the right content.

Here are five of the practices you should be observing for your site’s content:

1. Create an update schedule and stick to it. Updates need to be regular to help with your SEO. If your search engine optimization agency has drawn up a schedule for your posts, stick to it.

2. Devise a production method. Set up rules on line spacing, image placement, headings and white space. This will make your content look good, and help the search engines read.

3. Keep it fresh. Although a content plan is a great idea, leave room for news. This will keep your content relevant.

4. Make your site content-focussed. Many businesses add a content branch to their navigation. This won’t draw traffic to important pages. For a good outcome, integration is key. Talk to our experts at SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk about this.

5. Promote it. Your content plan can help your social media optimisation and vice versa. If you’re obtaining social media services, find a way to work your content updates into the plan. Good content is no good if no-one sees it. This can help with SEO link building as well.

Believe it or not, protocols are one of the handiest SEO tools around. This doesn’t necessarily mean technical protocols such as robots.txt either, but rather the set of guidelines you put in place. They may not process information and hand back useful data sets, like most search engine optimization tools, but what they do is even more useful. They catch you before you make a mistake.

There are four protocols you need to develop as part of your on-going SEO plan:

1. A protocol for site design. Design protocols are something that should be set in place as early as possible in your SEO plan, to steer the site away from SEO-unfriendly designs. This is something a search engine optimization agency is likely to approve of, but not necessarily do unless asked, so it’s worth bringing up.

2. A protocol for social content. Guidelines for content are a must-have, particularly if you’re accessing content during SEO services such as those we provide here at Searchengineoptimization.co.uk. Such guidelines are doubly important for social media content. The fast flow of information and personal tone of the social media has got more than one business into trouble.

3. A page removal protocol. It is essential to have a review system in place for page removal. Not only will this ensure your site isn’t dragging dead wood, it will prevent useful pages from being removed.

4. A Sitemap protocol. Finally, a sub-clause of your design protocol should involve Sitemaps. This ensures the best communication possible with the search engines.

Do you want to know the most effective search engine optimization tools you have to hand? Words. Simple, everyday words. Search engine optimisation is built on the smart use of words, and although anyone with a nodding acquaintance with SEO knows about keywords, they often forget about the other ones.

Some of the biggest changes you can effect on your pages involve the smallest change of your wording. A classic example of this is SEO re-tuning of page titles, and you can discuss this aspect of SEO services with us at Searchengineoptimization.co.uk. Many companies, keen to standardise, launch their site with uniform page titles along the formula of ‘Our Company – doing what we promise in the subtitle’. A search engine optimization agency will swiftly alter this title to boost keyword relevance for each page.

Titles are an obvious area to hit when changing the wording of a site, but there are other, less obvious places. Take buttons, for example. While most sites have wised up to the use of keyword-rich text in hyperlinks, many have overlooked buttons. The average web form still features a humble ’submit’ at the bottom, even when it’s an on-page form. This is not only a waste of page space, but it’s also a wasted opportunity to urge a conversion.

Success on the web ultimately stems from your skill with words. Whether you’re trying to convince the search engines to rank your site highly, or trying to convince online shoppers to buy your wares, use your words wisely.

Conversion optimisation is an important part of SEO, and forms are a big part of conversions. The main issue with forms for conversion is the level of commitment required. Tests have shown time and again that users just don’t like dedicating time to forms. You can get around this problem with some fairly easy steps.

1. Miniaturise. Big forms are daunting. Shrinking forms and presenting them as a sidebar within a main page takes care of this problem. Not only this, it connects the form more intensely with your page’s content, meaning you’re using one of your strongest SEO tools to help achieve conversions. Talk to us at www.searchengineoptimization.co.uk about this.

2. Condense fields. Information gathering is what forms are all about, so it can be difficult to follow advice to restrict fields. You can achieve a lot simply by condensing fields, or making them optional. Name, address and email are the essentials of any online form, and can be condensed into three fields in total.

3. Break it up. Breaking your form into steps can be a way to gather more information in a non-confrontational way. Creating a multi-step form can be complicated, and does present a risk that the user will drop out part-way. A good alternative is to add a second, optional form which gathers more in-depth information. Start out with a form gathering the basics of name and contact details, and follow it up with a second-step form and a ‘No, thanks’ option that allows users to speed past.

Having trouble getting form conversions? Plenty of companies get their on-page SEO up to scratch, enjoying a rankings boost, but find that their traffic isn’t converting. When you’re after form conversions, it’s worth asking your SEO agency to make some adjustments.

There are a few things that you should look for to boost form conversions:

1. Brevity. Tests have shown that the fewer fields forms have, the more users complete the form. You can boost your conversions simply by taking out some fields. Reduce your form to the most basic information required, and follow up for more information later if necessary.

2. Trust. The majority of internet users these days have trust issues. You’ve probably been burned a few times by untrustworthy sites, and so have your users. A basic for search engine optimization services is to build trust. While ensuring things function properly is an easy way to boost trust site-wide, you can further build trust within forms simply by adding a brief privacy statement.

3. Usability. Usability forms a big part of organic SEO, and you can discuss this with us at Searchengineoptimization.co.uk. Boost usability on forms by reducing wordiness and clutter. Give simple directions, making it clear the information you seek. Form design will also contribute to usability, so make sure to stick to a simple design with as few elements as possible.

It’s good to note that these three things can boost conversions across your whole site. When you’re trying to boost your conversion rate along with your traffic, make sure you look at these elements.

Linkbait is a common tactic these days. Any good SEO agency will have a few sure-fire linkbait ideas up its sleeve for clients. Usually, link baiting involves placing a certain type of content on a page to boost that page’s linkability. But what if you could have pages on your site that were, in themselves, link magnets?

There are certain types of pages that are almost guaranteed to attract links. Strangely, many link building strategies ignore web pages. The goal is often to improve an existing page’s attraction to linkers. If you are trying to boost your link profile generally, however, it’s a good idea to add a couple of fresh pages which have linkbait built into their very foundations.

Take discount pages, for example. Many businesses weave discount offers throughout their site, to keep internet users browsing. This is a good tactic, but not particularly useful for link building. Some sites, however, gather their discount offers onto a single page, creating a resource that customers can return to whenever they’re looking for a bargain. The result? Instant linkability.

Another tactic is to create a how-to section within your site. Many SEO companies recommend how-to content for link building, and you can discuss this with us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk. Simply gather all of your how-to content into one place. The good news is that this strategy can be used for all sorts of sites, not just retail sites.

These strategies are all based on a central idea: turning web pages into resources. Make resource-building part of your SEO campaign.