Enpiem Internet Marketing Blog

The challenge for all search engine marketers is to know or be able to accurately anticipate what keywords users will enter when performing a search on their chosen search engine. We have been working recently with a small personal training business that have a fixed geographic catchment area that they will travel within for home-based training or clients to their gym will realistically travel to for regular training sessions. Therefore keyword phrases such as ‘personal trainer’ and ‘personal training’ were far too broad and generic to deliver quality traffic (and unrealistically competitive given our clients marketing resources). It was vital during the keyword discovery phase to find out how a variety of clients referred to our client’s service as (e.g. training, fitness, working-out, health etc.) and also the geographic word usage employed during searches to find our client (county, city, region etc).

Following a detailed discussion with our client and analysis of their Google Analytics account, we had a good base from which to start looking at previously used keyword phrases by searchers. As you would expect, there are a number of resources online to assist with this task, some are free, some require registration and login and others require subscription purchase. The following are all free resources that provide instant results without any logging in, registration or payment:

• Google Adwords Keyword Tool – enter some base keywords and results are displayed matching your base keywords plus a wide selection of assumed matches that don’t directly match your phrase. The default information includes Adwords advertiser competition for that keyword phrase, local search volume for the previous calendar month and global monthly search average. By changing the ‘choose columns’ drop down option you can discover a variety of useful metrics such as the month when the highest search figures were recorded as well as the average cost-per-click if you were considering running a PPC campaign as well as organic search
• SEO Tools – again, enter the lead keyword phrase that you anticipate users will enter and a table of suggestions is presented. In addition to the keywords themselves, supporting information includes Google, Yahoo and MSN estimated daily searches for that keyword phrase as well as links to other research applications such as Google Trends, Google Insight (showing search volumes on a daily basis, useful to match to your own Analytics data)
• Webmaster Toolkit – enter the lead keyword phrase then select the search engine you wish to use as the research platform and then click on ‘research keywords’. The information is purely keyword driven with no supporting information on volume or seasonal variance
• Spacky – a simple to use tool returning a comprehensive list of keyword variations and suggestions. Keyword is listed on the left side of the results table with monthly search volumes relating to each word for Google, Yahoo/Overture and MSN results. You can reorder the list to any of those engines to assist with your keyword prioritising. There is also a single click feature to save all the keywords to a text file for import to applications such as Excel or directly into Adwords or other keyword tools

Client requirements differ in each case, but with clients such as our personal trainer, volume wasn’t the key to success and three word phrases with geographic references continue to provide the best targeted traffic and inbound enquiries leading to new business acquisition.

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide a full Search Engine Optimisation service including on-page and off-page optimisation, link building and copywriting. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

Keyword density is a key part of effective on-page SEO, however, if approached incorrectly it can be a hindrance to your search marketing. A content rich website should offer information that naturally contains a number of contextual keywords and phrases associated with the market/sector the site is in. There are a number of useful free resources online that allow you to assess your website keyword visibility at a page-by-page level.

SEOChat.com provide an excellent keyword density tool that allows you to define a number of parameters prior to running your check. This includes variable length of results to display, control over which elements of the code should be included such as meta data, alt attributes and title tags. You can also specify whether numeric characters should be included. You can specify the number of words per phrase that should be assessed so you can get a more accurate picture of your/your clients keyword phrases to optimise. For example when we first set up our own website we checked the density difference between the keywords ‘internet marketing’ and ‘enpiem internet marketing’.

The keyword phrase ‘internet marketing’ appeared 18 times on the page when we included META tags, ALT attributes and Title. This delivered a density of 8.78%. When we removed the META tags, ALT attributes and title this dropped to 9 repetitions and a keyword density of 6.04%. For the three word phrase ‘enpiem internet marketing’ the density is 3.41% with 7 repetitions. Webconfs say that the recommended density for good practice SEO is 3-7% so we removed five inclusions of the keyword phrase ‘internet marketing’ from META content and ALT attributes and this dropped the repetition to 13 uses of the keyword and a keyword density of 6.74% without changing the visible page copy or title of the page.

Another useful resource is the Webconfs keyword cloud tool. A keyword cloud is a visual representation of the keywords that appear on your web page with words appearing in a larger font where there is a higher density. Your leading keyword phrase should ideally appear at the start of the cloud in the largest font. Again, we used the two keyword phrases ‘internet marketing’ and ‘enpiem internet marketing’ from our homepage.

As you can see, the words ‘internet’ and ‘marketing’ are the most prominent with ‘enpiem’ in third position. Stuffing a page with keywords will almost certainly result in you being penalised by the major search engines so using tools like these can be very beneficial when trying to maintain the balance of engaging copy with a clear indication to search engines as to the priority of the page.

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide a full Search Engine Optimisation service including on-page and off-page optimisation, link building and copywriting. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

We were asked earlier this week about the ‘nofollow’ META attribute and the difference between that and a rel=”nofollow” hyperlinks attribute, so let’s have a look at each of them and their respective impact on SEO.

Both NoFollow tag instructs visiting search engine crawlers to still index the page they are on, but not to attribute any credibility to a subsequent outbound link. The difference between the two tags is the level of inclusion that is made. The META NoFollow attribute is a page-level command that is the same as putting rel=”nofollow” on ALL the links on that particular page (not site-wide). You can use the rel=”nofollow” more selectively if you only want to block a certain outbound link from gaining any credibility from your page’s PR.

Whilst this has been effective at curbing the volume of unwelcome spam comments made on blogs, it has also caused legitimate link building to suffer (i.e. useful and context relevant links referenced within blog comments). The NoFollow attribute has been adopted by Wikipedia and Google recommends paid links are tagged with NoFollow attributes. However, it has been criticised that a blog with efficient human comment editing should not need to use NoFollow because those spam comments will simply be deleted.

The choice of attribute is up to the individual webmaster and their specific circumstances. We would recommend addressing this on a page-by-page basis and not being too heavy-handed unless necessary. Links are still the lifeblood of the Internet and taking a sledgehammer to crack a walnut isn’t a good thing to do.

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide a full Search Engine Optimisation service including on-page and off-page optimisation, link building and copywriting. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

It was once argued that the content network on Google Adwords was unfocused and would simply burn budget whilst skewing your CTR figures with high impression counts and low click activity. Until relatively recently we rarely used the content network for our client PPC campaigns, preferring to direct our attention to Google search and search partner channels. But things have changed for the better and Google have introduced content network Placements giving the advertiser the ability to hand-pick specific sites that have signed up to the content network for advertising.

To begin using the Placement option, click on the ‘Placements’ tab that is located between the ‘Keywords’ and ‘Ad Variations’ tabs. There you will see a brief explanation of the Placement process. Click on the ‘Find and add Placements’ button. Placements work on your existing campaign keyword and phrase portfolio, although you can vary the CPC for the placements separate from your primary search and content network bids.

There are three ways to locate appropriate placements for your requirements – ‘browse categories’, ‘describe topics’ and ‘list URLs’. The browse categories option allows you to select a broad topic such as ‘animals’ or ‘automotive’ and then it drills down to a number of sub-sets with corresponding placements. There are in total 361 topics listed. With the ‘List URLs’ option you enter a URL to see if it is participating in the Adsense programme. Describe topics is our favourite option, as this allows you to immediately narrow the search to your chosen keyword phrases.

As an example if we were running a campaign for a client that sold model railway products we would enter keyword phrases such as ‘model railway’ and ’model trains’. This returns a number of placement options that sound perfect for our campaign such as ‘newrailwaymodellers.co.uk’, ‘ukmodelshops.co.uk’ and ‘modelr.co.uk’. Next to the URL of the placement you can see the ad formats available. It should be noted here that you aren’t limited to just text adverts, on many sites you can also choose display advertising formats or even video ads. You can also see the impressions per day figure for each site so you can gauge traffic volumes. When you have selected the placements most appropriate to your product or service, click ‘add’ for each site and then click ‘save and continue’. In our case we are just planning to show text adverts and we are asked to set a CPC for the placement portfolio. At this stage you just enter a single figure and can change this site-by-site later. Then return to the campaign and click on the ‘Placements’ tab and you will see your chosen sites displayed in alphabetical order.

To change the bid amount and also the destination URL for your placements click on ‘edit placements and bids’ and then modify your campaigns to the following format shown with our three model train sites. We have assumed a £1 generic bid for placements but we want to modify two Placements above this and change the landing page for the third site:

modelr.co.uk ** 1.20
newrailwaymodellers.co.uk ** 1.35
ukmodelshops.co.uk ** http:// www.youdomain.co.uk/yourpage.htm

The bid is changed by entering a space followed by two asterisks then another space and then bid amount without a currency symbol. The destination URL also follows a space and then the full http prefixed URL.

You can run placements as well as general content network sites determined automatically by the Adwords system. However, if you want to limit your content network exposure to just those sites that you have selected as Placements then go to the Campaigns screen and select Edit campaign settings near the top of the screen and go to the ‘Network and Bidding’ section and ‘Content’ subsection where you can select the radio button for ‘Relevant pages only on the placements I target’.

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full paid search marketing service from keyword discovery to ongoing management, optimisation and reporting. Contact us to discuss your paid search requirements and how we can help your business succeed online.

Having a visitor sitemap is a core piece of website content, helping your visitors to find sections, directories and specific content not readily available from prominent links. In the same way, having a sitemap file for search engines to locate content on your site is just as important. Producing a sitemap.xml file allows search crawlers to ascertain information such as which pages you have on your website, the importance you have assigned to them as well as the change frequency of these pages. We covered the production of XML sitemaps in an earlier blog entry (http://www.enpiem.co.uk/blog/xml-sitemaps).

With a sitemap.xml file in place you ‘hope’ that the search crawler will visit your site, find the file and index your whole site for search engine inclusion. There are several ways of aiding the search engines in finding your sitemap – these include registration with webmaster tool applications such as Google Webmaster Tools and MSN Webmaster Tools which provide a sitemap upload function. But now you can reference your sitemap in the robots.txt file which is the first piece of content a search crawler interrogates on arrival at your website.

The ‘big four’ search engines (Google, Microsoft Live Search, Yahoo and Ask.com) collaborated on a standard protocol for recognising the source location of a sitemap.xml file from within a robots.txt file that their crawlers would use to navigation to the sitemap(s) and thereby conduct their indexing from the sitemap. This is a process known as autodiscovery.

Referencing your sitemap.xml file from a robots.txt file is very easy to do, simply enter the following code (replacing the example URL with your own domain):

Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/sitemap.xml

It is still essential that you maintain a regularly updated sitemap.xml file so new pages are indexed and changes to existing pages are reflected in the change frequency parameter. But this robots.txt inclusion of the sitemap location is a useful aid to assisting search crawlers finding your sitemap.

Enpiem Internet Marketing develop robots.txt files containing sitemap.xml locations as a standard part of our website development service and search engine optimisation service. Contact us to see how we can help you promote your business online.

It is almost universally agreed that static frames aren’t used to present a website to users because of the issues with indexing and a lack of navigation if anything other than the correct frameset are presented. The iframe was seen as an evolutionary step from static frames by dynamically injecting content directly into a web page. The following is an example of iframe HTML code:

<iframe src=”http://www.yourdomain.com” height=”500″ width=”600″ frameborder=”0″> </iframe>

So are iframes all they’ve cracked up to be, and what is the effect on your search optimisation as a result of using them? iframes are used to insert a wide variety of content into web pages such as form data, display advertising and 3rd party text feeds. But how do search engines cope with the presence of an iframe and will it help or hinder your search optimisation?

It is widely believed that iframes serve no SEO benefit to a website because the content is not actually located on that page – the source code of that page includes an instruction to insert the content of a destination URL at that point on the page, but not the actual visible text so a search crawler doesn’t actually see and associate that content with the web page it is presented on.

There are three arguments against the use of iframes if you are considering their use:

• > Navigation difficulties – the iframe content, if text, will usually only contain the raw copy as opposed to a complete visitor-friendly web page. This means that if the content of that frame is indexed by the search engine, then any subsequent visitor will be presented with a page that contains no navigation by which to explore the rest of your site.
• > 3rd party control of content – if you are relying on a third party source to provide the content displayed in your iframe then you are trusting them to provide high quality content that you are effectively presenting as your own – from your brand. In extreme cases site owners have suddenly found undesirable content featured on their site because of the use of iframe content.
• > Security concerns – some users actively block iframe content because of the possible security problems when a website they have given a ‘trusted site’ status features iframes and then unknowingly serves malicious/damaging content into that trusted page

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide a full search engine optimisation service including on-page and off-page optimisation, link building and copywriting. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

Many advertisers who use Google Adwords as their PPC tool are unaware that there is more than one bidding strategy that they can take advantage of within the system. Currently there are three types:

• > manual bidding
• > conversion optimised bidding
• > budget optimised bidding

For the purpose of this blog entry, we’ll be concentrating on the conversion optimised option.

With manual bidding it is the responsibility of the advertiser to determine their maximum cost-per-click according to their required marketing ROI (return on investment). For example, if you make £30 profit on a £100 transaction and require £20 after marketing costs, then you cannot afford to spend more than £10 on acquiring a customer through PPC. If your conversion rate is 20% of click-throughs then this means that you cannot afford to bid higher than £2 per click on average as this will take your costs above the £10 limit and eat into your profit margin.

With a portfolio of active keywords into the hundreds or thousands, this can become a very time consuming task to constantly monitor your conversion rates and tune your CPC to ensure you remain profitable. The CPA bidding tool takes away this headache by managing per-keyword bids according to historical data from your campaign, thereby saving you time and ensures you limit your acquisition costs.

When conversion optimiser was launched there was an initial requirement for 300 goal conversions to be registered within 30-days which was a tall-order for many smaller advertisers. Currently the UK account management interface states a requirement of 50 conversions in the last 30-days. Whilst this reduction in the required conversion total means more advertisers will be able to take advantage of this feature, there is also a school-of-thought that says the more data collected – the more accurate the Adwords system will be at meeting your requirements. In your Google Adwords account the system will have already determined if you meet the minimum conversion threshold and will either show the strategy as an active option or greyed out.

If you are eligible, the Adwords system will provide recommendations as to what the CPA should be (based on the historical data it has). The system then calculates a maximum CPA for your keyword phrase by dividing the maximum CPC by the conversion rate. One criticism that has been made against this feature is that it can’t factor in ROAS (return on advertising spend) at a product level. For example, If you have a lower converting product with a high profit margin and a higher converting product with a lower profit margin, the system would most likely select the higher converting product over the lower one, despite your business realising a better return on the lower converting product. If your account determines you are eligible to use conversion optimised bidding you might want try it and see if it can save you time and effort managing your account.

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full paid search marketing management service from keyword discovery to ongoing management, optimisation and reporting. Contact us to discuss your paid search requirements.

Having spent a significant amount of time and effort on your search engine optimisation, redevelopment or re-structuring of your website can be a daunting prospect for the Internet marketer. This is especially true when URLs and even page name suffixes are changed (e.g. from .htm to .aspx). Those inbound links you cultivated with other websites can suddenly resolve to missing pages and ‘Error 404 - File not found’ messages. Your organic ranking can be severely disrupted if proper planning and preparation isn’t carried out.

Take time before the new site goes live to prepare for the relaunch and how you will preserve your search ranking and link integrity. At the heart of this planning is the implementation of redirection codes. There are a number of different redirect codes, the one we are interested in here is the 301 code. This is an instruction that the redirect is permanent (the code 307 denotes a temporary redirect).

Do not be tempted to use the META refresh command (meta http-equiv=”refresh”) as this is widely regarded as a technique used by spammers and therefore search engines frown upon its use. A 301 redirect is a much safer and more efficient way of redirecting users and search engines without compromising your hard work on SEO and link building. The same is true of custom error pages. Whilst this method resolves to an actual page on your website, it puts the burden on your visitor to try and navigate to the new page. Search engines will assume that the page no longer exist and you will lose your ranking.

So how can you ensure that this doesn’t happen? On Windows servers you can manage redirection through IIS. Right click on the domain name and selecting the properties option, then click to the home directory. Select the ‘A redirection to a URL’ radio button option, enter the redirect URL (new URL) and ensure that the ‘A permanent redirection for this resource’ box has been ticked. Then close IIS and test the website to ensure the redirection is working properly.

On an Apache server you manage 301 redirection through .htaccess. Where a file has changed, you can use the following statement (substituting your existing and new URLs for the example ones shown here):

Redirect 301 /sample-directory/pagename.htm http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/new-directory/newpagename.htm

In addition to redirecting from a specific page to another specific page, you can also redirect an entire site (where the directory and filenames remain the same) using the following statement (note that the ‘/’ represents the existing site top level and everything within in):

redirect 301 / http://www.yourdomain.com

Search engine crawlers will read the .htaccess file and over a period of time replace the legacy URL with the new one. This may take some time, but gradually your listings will be modified and hopefully your ranking preserved.

Enpiem Internet Marketing manage 301 redirection as a standard part of all website development projects. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

Whilst traffic analysis applications such as Google Analytics offer a rich insight into your site traffic and visitor behaviour – how can you assess your SEO at the pre-click stage short of typing in your assumed leading keywords and searching through pages and pages of results looking for your URL? And how do you discover keyword phrase variations that trigger your organic search listing that could provide a new stream of business to your site? Today we’ll look at two tools that can help you determine this.

Firstly is Google Webmaster Tools – a free solution that provides insight into both keywords triggering your organic results as well as those phrases driving actual traffic to your site. The ‘top search queries’ option (located within the ‘statistics’ navigation tab) provides the query that visitors entered into Google and your website was ranked for that keyword phrase. This goes beyond your assumed keywords and provides invaluable insight into phrases that customers are searching on. With the position assessed you can determine suitable resources to invest in improving the ranked position with additional SEO efforts for that keyword phrase. The statistics are split into impression searches and traffic searches.

The second resource is Web CEO – an excellent tool for managing a portfolio of keyword and rank based metrics as well as competitor SEO information and page-optimisation. Here we will concentrate on the ranking tool. The ranking tool contains six report categories with drill-downs to further information as well as isolation of individual metrics for analysis:

• > site ranking – requires you to define a portfolio of keywords and a selection of search engines before it analyses keyword ranking across those engines to the desired SERP depth. Over time this report expands to show ranking trends
• > indexed pages – after your site has been crawled and pages catalogued, the software assesses if each page is listed on the major search engines (and which are not and therefore require further work)
• > competitor ranking - analyses your organic positioning in relation to your direct competitors (as specified by you) on the keywords you specified for the site ranking report. It also shows you how many other websites are listed for that search keyword so you can gauge competitiveness
• > competitor’s indexation - shows how many pages you have indexed by the major search engines in relation to your competitors, so you can determine their site footprint
• > ranking score - provides a concise summary of your prominence compared to your defined competitors such as how many top 10, top 20 etc. positions they hold as well as changes week on week
• > SE results snippets - shows the title and description that is used for your site across the major search engines or keywords so you can optimise your title and description tags

Both tools are free (or offer free versions) and very useful to keep on top of your organic ranking, saving you time manually assessing your positions or guessing keyword phrases.

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide a full search engine optimisation service including on-page and off-page optimisation, link building and copywriting. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

There are four match types in Google Adwords campaigns which dictate how inclusive or exclusive the keyword matching is. This provides a useful way of further targeting your user traffic, especially on short-tail, higher traffic phrases and determining further keywords. The four match types are: broad match, phrase match, exact match and negative match. The default match type in Google Adwords is broad match.

Broad match is the most inclusive match-type and allows your ad to show if the keyword phrase words are entered by the user in any and with any other words before or after the keyword phrase. For example, if the keyword is ‘broadband modems’ then the search phrase ‘cheap broadband modems’ and ‘buy broadband computer modems’ would trigger the advert.

Phrase match is a more targeted and restrictive match type than broad match and requires the search query to contain the keyword phrase in specific order. although it does allow for additional words to appear before and after the keyword phrase. With our example of ‘broadband modems’ as  a keyword, phrase match typing means that the search query ‘broadband computer modems’ will not display the advert because ‘broadband’ and ‘modem’ do not appear directly together as in the keyword phrase. Phrase matched keywords are denoted in Google Adwords with quotation marks either side of the keyword phrase. Our example keyword would appear as “broadband modems” to be a phrase match type.

Exact match is the most targeted and restrictive match type in Google Adwords. It requires the keyword phrase and only the keyword phrase to be the search query and in that exact order. The example keyword would only be triggered if the search query was nothing more than ‘broadband modems’. The ad would not show for ‘cheap broadband modems’, ‘modems broadband’ or ‘broadband computer modems’. Exact match keywords are denoted in Google Adwords with brackets either side of the keyword phrase. Our example keyword would appear as [broadband modems] to be an exact match type.

The forth match type is negative matching. A negative keyword is applied at the ad group level and applies to all keyword phrases in that group. For example if your ad group used the keyword ‘cheap flights’ but you didn’t offer flights to france and spain then the negative match inclusion of france and spain would exclude your advert being displayed if the search phrase included your primary keyword phrase plus the negative phrase (e.g. cheap flights to spain). You could then keep the primary phrase on a broad or phrase match type without generating traffic for the countries you couldn’t offer flights to.

In practice many campaigns begin with keywords using broad or phrase match to ascertain impression volumes and effectiveness, then they are narrowed to an exact match by running search query reports and determining more targeted phrases that you haven’t initially included. Google Analytics data can further help by identifying search phrases.

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full paid search marketing management service from keyword discovery to ongoing management, optimisation and reporting. Contact us to discuss your paid search requirements.