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.

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.

An important part of your SEO work is the creation and submission of an XML sitemap file. The XML sitemap is a webmaster resource that provides search engines with information to assist their indexing and crawling of your website. The file contains a list of URLs plus additional meta data such as frequency of change, importance of the page (within the site) and when it was last modified. The XML sitemap is especially important for sites that don’t have easily indexed navigation such as flash-heavy websites. The sitemap file follows a standard format with an entry looking like this:

<url>
  <loc>http://www.example.com/pagename.htm</loc>
  <priority>0.9</priority>
  <lastmod>2008-11-14T20:16:26+00:00</lastmod>
  <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>

The full path URL must be included and prefixed with http:// and the file should be placed in the root directory and follow the UTF-8 encoding method. The URLs in the XML sitemap must be on the same host as the XML sitemap file. It should be noted that provision of an XML is no guarantee of a page being indexed or where on the SERP it will appear, it simply provides assistance to the crawler when indexing. Page importance or priority is not determined by the order of URLs specified in the XML sitemap.

The XML sitemap file should be no larger than 10Mb and contain no more than 50,000 URLs. If your site contains more URLs than this then you need to create multiple sitemaps and create a sitemap index file. The sitemap XML file complements robots.txt.

Sitemaps can be generated manually in notepad or similar text editor, although there are sitemap generators online that do this automatically such as http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ which generates sitemaps for sites with up to 500 pages.

Enpiem Internet Marketing create XML sitemaps a standard part of all website development projects as used by major search engine webmaster tool applications. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

Inbound links are vitally important for both direct traffic generation to your website and a fundamental part of organic search engine ranking. In an earlier blog entry we looked at backlink analysis and how you can monitor and assess how optimised your existing inbound links are. Here we are going to look at some points to note when considering adding additional inbound links.

• > Link page SEO – how effective is the link site/page’s SEO? Within context of your sector/market does the page rank highly in its own right? If the link target page is highly ranked, this will mean the link carries more weight when linking to your site
• > Content relevance – does the content of the link target page compliment your own content type? Is there a logical link between the two sites (i.e. a gardening tools website linked from a gardening forum)
• > Google page cache – has the link target page been cached recently? This will give some indication of how current the site is and when a subsequent crawl might find your website via the link on this page
• > Robots.txt – is the link target page excluded for indexing within the robot.txt file? If it is excluded then future visits won’t be made to this page for indexing
• > Page development – is the page complete or under some part of development? Are there any mentions of ‘under construction’
• > Link volume – how many links does the host page currently have? Are these contextually relevant links like your own or irrelevant links/ads to other sites? The less outbound links on the page is better for you as this makes your own link more exclusive

When you are satisfied that the site and link page will offer the greatest benefit your site, ensure that the link that’s requested is to your most contextually relevant page and the anchor text of the link is the lead keyword phrase to your landing page. For example, our garden tools site would seek to have a link to their hedge trimmer products with the words ‘hedge trimmers’ as the link text rather than the name of their company.

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

Its no secret that inbound link (or backlink) building is a vitally important part of any SEO strategy. Whilst this is often a time consuming process, it pays dividends in improving your search engine ranking. There are a wide range of site analysis tools such as Google Analytics, Webtrends etc. showing inbound referrers that have generated traffic to your website, but is there a way you can check all your inbound links irrespective of click activity?

The simple answer is yes. Fortunately there are a number of free tools online for checking and assessing your inbound links. In addition to this you can not only assess which sites are linking to your site but also find out the anchor text that is used with the hyperlink. A keyword or brand specific anchor keyword will be more beneficial than an unfocused call-to-action such as ‘click here’ or ‘find out more’.

An excellent (and free) tool is provided by Webconfs that helps you determine the nature of your inbound link source including the linking site’s URL, the anchor text and even image ALT text if they are displaying your logo. To try the tool visit: http://www.webconfs.com/anchor-text-analysis.php and enter your chosen URL. For the purpose of this article we chose the popular UK wedding planning website ‘Confetti’, entering www.confetti.co.uk in to the Backlink Anchor Link Analyser. As you would imagine with a strong brand link Confetti a lot of the anchor text result were for ‘confetti’ but there were also a number of other trigger phrases including ‘wedding website’, ‘wedding planning’ and ‘wedding resources’. Using this information, you can determine if this is the most appropriate text to provide maximum benefit to your search positioning. If you have top positioning for your brand then maybe concentrate on contextual anchors and request these and ALT tags reflect this (pointing to relevant sub-pages of your site). For example ‘wedding planning’ as anchor text could link to the planning section homepage on the confetti website (http://www.confetti.co.uk/category/view/7559-0-Wedding_planning.do). Although it could be a further time-consuming task to go back to and request changes once you have successfully gained a quality inbound link it will be worth it in the long-run.

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.

All too often, user testing is carried out pre-build on a site development project then forgotten about. Successful Internet marketing relies on the marketer’s ability to continually test, modify and re-test campaigns in order to optimise for best results. But in addition to functionality within the online promotional tools, this requires flexibility in the site structure (including content management system environments).

For example, standard user testing will confirm vital information such as the optimal pixel resolution for development in order to ensure that promotional copy is visible without unnecessary scrolling. However, variations in promotional messages, welcome pages, special offers etc. require the flexibility to create multiple pages for testing and this is sometimes a tall-order with developer time at a premium.

If you’re lucky enough to either have a flexible CMS or friendly developer sitting nearby, there are a great many AB tests that can be carried out through almost every digital marcomms channel and provides essential data in order to optimise campaigns. Some can be divorced from the website itself (such as subject line testing in emails or ad-copy testing in PPC) whilst others rely on custom website pages being created as landing-pages tailored to the user.

• > PPC – Google Adwords provide rotation ad-serving where you can create two similar adverts with different landing pages (denoted in the full-path URL). This allows you to differentiate the conversion rates to an assigned call-to-action
• > Email marketing – most ASP broadcasting solutions provide excellent potential for AB testing. Subject lines, ‘from’ names as well as image/copy positioning and click-through URLs can all be varied then tracked to determine the optimal output on test segments prior to a full list mailing
• > Display advertising – multiple creatives served proportionally on an ad-server can yield vital data on performance from CTR to completion of a call-to-action

AB testing should be a continual process and allows you to get best return on your marketing investment – without trying to second-guess your users preferences.

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide a range of campaign planning and implementation services including testing and refinement with AB testing. To discuss your requirements contact us  and see how we can help you realise your online business potential.