I meet with business owners like you regularly, and everyone wants to know about the latest website design trends or Facebook algorithm or SEO hacks.

But there’s something way more important than any of this — and that’s getting the basics right.

I recently met with a restaurant owner who didn’t understand why his lunchtime trade was so slow. I looked him up online and, according to both his website and Google listing, the restaurant was closed for lunch. Luckily, this is an easy fix but it left me wondering how something this basic had gone below their radar.

Keeping your information up-to-date is vital. This is especially true for opening hours and contact details — how will people get in touch otherwise? How will customers know you’re open? Especially when so many people are using their mobile phone to get directions and make calls to businesses – information needs to be to hand, and accurate.

Here are five more marketing basics to prioritise right now:

1. Mobile-Friendly Website

How does your website look when you browse it on your mobile? With 71% of Australian smartphone users browsing the Internet on their phones daily, this is so important.

Not compatible with mobile? Website visitors are unlikely to stick around — which means you’re losing potential customers.

2. Basic SEO

Search Engine Optimisation sometimes seems like another buzzword, but it is important.

The good news is, the basics are straightforward to implement. Make sure your website is set up correctly and contains engaging and unique content. High-quality content that recognises and helps solve the problems of your target market is key.

If you can find time to blog (like I’m doing now), that’s a bonus!

3. Google My Business

Google My Business is a service offered by Google to help you engage potential customers.

The best part is it’s free (at the moment), so make sure you claim and make the most out of your listing — start by adding your correct opening hours!

4. Know Your Customers

Any good marketing strategy starts with an understanding of the target customers. This will impact everything else you do, so it’s worth spending some time getting it right.

Write it down, print it out and stick it on your wall. Make sure everything you do is focused on them – don’t get distracted.

5. Start an Email List

An email list is one of the most valuable marketing assets any business can have.

Use it to stay in touch with your customers, focusing on providing value over the hard sell. Remember — people don’t like to be sold to, so you need to think about the kind of content and messages your target market want to read.

Are you struggling to find time to do it all yourself? Get in touch to find out how we can help.

That’s where SEO comes in. As mentioned in a previous post on SEO, search engine optimisation is all about creating websites so that search engines (namely Google) can easily identify, categorise and select them when a user does an online search. This means that users have an easier time finding your site.

In the past, some companies tried to use underhanded practices (known as ‘black hat’ techniques) to improve their search rankings, such as duplicating content, putting in bad links or adding keywords into their page content just for the sake of getting extra keywords in there (a practice known as ‘keyword stuffing’). But Google is onto these tactics and constantly updates their algorithms to improve results for users and reward sites that follow legitimate, or ‘white hat’ SEO practices.

If you’re building a new site, it’s a good idea to include SEO best practices from the start, but you can also improve an existing site by making adjustments that keep Google (and your users) happy.

SEO is a huge topic (plus there’s onsite and offsite SEO techniques to consider too).  There’s way too much to cover in this blog – but here are 4 best practices for designing or updating a site so that it’s SEO-friendly:

1. Make sure your content can be indexed

Creating good, engaging content for your site will always benefit your company and your viewers. But you can do more to help Google understand exactly what your content is. Why is this necessary? When Google sends out its “spiders” or bots to crawl the web, they collect data to bring back to Google’s massive database. But the spiders can’t ‘see’ images like photos, Flash animation or videos – they can really only collect HTML text – so it’s hard for them to index this information.

Of course, photos and videos are very valuable, because they help you tell the story of your brand, sell your products, make your site more attractive and improve user experience. Therefore, the best thing to do is to help the spiders out by creating ALT text for photos and images (by assigning actual text that explains what’s in them), adding supplemental text for Flash images and providing a transcript for videos and audio recordings whenever possible. Your web designer can help you put all these in place.

If you can get keywords into your ALT tags and transcripts, that’s even better. On that note . . .

2. Watch those keywords, and use them wisely

It’s a good idea to work with your web designer to do some keyword research prior to building your website, because it can help you focus your content, build your meta data such as title tags and descriptions (more on that in a moment) and determine where you can target potential searchers.  To start, you’ll definitely want to include the name of your business as a keyword, as well as particular products or services you offer. If you have a local business, using your name with your location is important for searchers.

For instance, if you’re an accounting firm in Adelaide, you’d probably want to consider keyword phrases such as “Adelaide accounting firm”, “Adelaide accountants”, or “top accounting firm in Adelaide”. As noted above, it’s not a good idea to throw in more keywords just for the sake of getting those terms onto your pages. Doing so makes for bad content, and Google will punish you for this kind of ‘keyword stuffing’.  A good rule of thumb is to choose a couple of keywords to focus on for each page.

3. Title tags

Title tags are one of the most important elements of SEO. A title tag is the main text that describes what’s on a web page or in a document, and these tags appear in three key places: browsers, search engine results pages and external websites. Even though you probably won’t see them when viewing a web page, they’re in the source code and show up in searches.The text in blue below is an example of how and where a title tag appears in search results:

Ideally, each page of your site should have its own title tag – preferably including a keyword or two – so Google knows what each one is about (and so do your searchers).  However, don’t make your titles too long or they’ll get cut off – if you keep your titles under 55 characters, at least 95% should display correctly.

4. Meta descriptions

Like title tags, meta descriptions help search engines and searchers understand what’s on your web pages. Meta descriptions are in your source code and appear underneath your title tag and URL in search results, as shown in the grey text below:

A meta description gives you a chance to introduce your brand and what you offer to searchers before they come to your site – they act as ‘organic ad text’, helping connect searchers to your content when keywords appear in the text and match a search.

With meta descriptions, you have a little more text space than with title tags, but you still need to keep them fairly short and sweet. Ideally, your meta descriptions should be between 150-160 characters so they don’t get cut off.

As I said earlier, there is a lot more to SEO than I can talk about in one blog.  If you need help improving your onsite or offsite SEO, contact Breathe Marketing today.

The heart of SEO

Just to recap from our previous article, search engine optimisation is the art of creating websites in a way that makes it easy for search engines to identify, categorise and select them when a user does an online search.

There are many elements within SEO, but all of them can basically be broken down into two major groups:

• On-page (on-site) SEO, or the content within your website; and
• Off-page (off-site) SEO, focusing on content outside (and/or linking back to) your site

So why is this important? And what should you do?

First of all, here’s why this is important: When someone does a search in Google (or other search engine), only about 10 sites show up on the first page. Most people only click on the top few sites, and they’re unlikely to go past the first page of results. Therefore, if your site ranks at the top of the first Search Engine Results Page (SERP), you’ll get a lot of traffic to your site – and that’s good for your business.

However, if your site shows up on the second or third page, you might only get 1% of the search traffic that the top-ranked sites get. Therefore, it’s important to create great content and build good links to and from your site so Google thinks your website is more relevant and provides a better user experience for a particular search term that the remaining hundreds (or thousands) of results.

That leads us back to:

On-page (or on-site) optimisation

On-page SEO, therefore, is what’s displayed on your website, and it includes the written copy that visitors read and search engines see. To help with this on your site, make sure you write high-quality content that people can understand, incorporating the keywords for that particular page if possible in your heading and/or sub-headings as well as the body copy.

More technical aspects of on-page SEO include using keywords in your page titles, photograph labels and other ‘hidden’ elements such as metatags, but we’ll discuss that in a future post.

There is a need to add content regularly in order to continually appeal to Google.  An easy way to do this is by adding a blog to your website.  Add relevant content to the blog and promote interactivity with your visitors.  You can leverage this content on social media sites too, which really helps with SEO.

Here’s another tip: Make sure you have unique content on every page of your site. It’s definitely possible that there will be some overlap of information, but search engines recognise duplicate content that’s out there just for the sake of trying to get a better rank.

Then there is . . .

Off-page (off-site) optimisation

A good way of looking at off-page SEO is to think of it as work done away from your site but directly affects its rankings through building the credibility, relevance and profile of your URL. Off-page optimisation comprises many things, but a major element is the links your site has to and from other sites. Google and other search engines look at how many links you have, but they also review the quality of those links. As we noted in our post on Google and the Penguin, Google has recently updated their algorithm to penalise sites that put in links unrelated to their site content.   A really basic link to start with though, is to submit your website to the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) owned by Google.

Other factors that Google looks at are things like videos, infographics, press releases, guest blog articles, presentations and connections to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. These things all help with your ranking, too.

Have questions about this? Let us know – and stay tuned for more posts on SEO!

If your company produces a product that gets shipped worldwide and you don’t have a ‘brick and mortar’ store, this may not be such an issue for you. However, if you have a small business that provides products and services to local customers, you’ll want to make sure they can find you easily.

If you sell flowers in North Adelaide, for instance, you want to be on the first page of Google results when someone types in ‘flowers North Adelaide’ on their phone, tablet or computer. Unless you deliver in Melbourne or Perth, you don’t need to worry about customers in those areas – you only need to focus your energies on potential customers who want flowers (or want flowers delivered) in the Adelaide area.

So what can you do? Here are four tips to make sure your business gets found by local customers:

1. Make sure your website is optimised for mobile devices. According to recent statistics, over 50% of Australians now own a smartphone. Not only have that, but 19% of Australians searched for local suppliers and services on their smartphones on a daily basis. If customers can’t access or read your website on a phone or tablet, they’ll move on to another site and you’ll lose business.

2. Add your business on Google Places, Yahoo Small Business and local directories. Be sure to add your business to Google Places and Yahoo Small Business, which both have basic packages for free. In addition, sign up for local directory options such as Yelp and Yellow Pages.

3. Use local keywords. What areas do you serve? Do you have stores in more than one location? Do you offer on-site services for customers located anywhere between Gawler and Sellicks Beach? If your products and services are location-based, help customers find you by noting specific place names on your site.

4. Put your contact information in text (not an image) on every page of your site. This will help viewers find you and also help Google connect your business to local searches. Although be careful about including your email address which leaves you open to spam – there are workarounds you can do here. Preferably, you want to set up a ‘click-to-call’ feature directly from your site so that people can immediately dial your number from their phone once they find you.

Have questions? Need some help with improving your local marketing? Contact us today.

Why? Because when Google’s algorithm changes, it can have a major effect on how high a site ranks in a search. This means that a website that was ranking really well before the change can suddenly take a nose-dive and end up far lower in search results.

So what does all this have to do with a penguin?

As explained in our SEO 101 post, Google’s software uses tools called spiders to help ‘crawl’ website content, looking for information to bring back about sites they visit.  When spiders visit web pages, they’re looking for many things including the words used on pages, how relevant they feel a site is for a particular topic, how many links a site has and how relevant those links are. All this information is used to get sites listed in rankings.

Unfortunately, sometimes businesses use bad tactics – or ‘black-hat’ techniques – to try viagra online to get on the first page of search results. In 2012, Google released an algorithm update known as Penguin, the goal of which was to penalise sites that used black-hat techniques such as keyword stuffing, duplicate content, and linking to irrelevant sites (also known as “link spam”).

Google estimated that this change only affected about 3.1% of English language search queries, but some webmasters saw a major drop in their sites’ rankings. Now, in their continuing battle to penalise ‘black-hatters’, Google has announced that another algorithm change is coming in the next few weeks: Penguin 2.0.

Though no one outside Google knows just what to expect, there’s pretty clear evidence that sites with a high number of bad links, or link spam, will be targeted, and those sites will drop in overall search rankings.

What can you do?

First of all, don’t panic. If you’re currently using proper white-hat SEO techniques such as creating valuable, original site content for your customers and linking to legitimate sites that are relevant to your business products and services, you shouldn’t have any problem when Penguin 2.0 is released.

However, SEO is clearly becoming increasingly complex.  If you haven’t already, consider outsourcing your SEO activities to a reputable SEO provider.  Asking them how Penguin has changed their SEO practices is a good place to start in sussing out their expertise.  If they don’t know what you’re talking about then they may not be the right people to help you with your SEO.

For more on Penguin and link building, check out this article from Searchenginewatch.com.  What’s also really interesting is all the commentary at the end of the article – there’s clearly a lot of confusion out there right now about SEO and what these Penguin updates mean.

Have more questions about all of this? Need some help? Let us know – and stay tuned for future posts on SEO when Penguin 2.0 gets released!

What is a search engine?

An internet search engine is a database of websites, videos, images and other content. Search engines determine what to include in their database based on many things (such as content quality, level of authority, etc). Once a website is included in a search engine, it’s considered to be “indexed.”

Note: If a website is not indexed, it won’t show up when people search for it, even if they type in a specific domain name such as www.yourbusiness.com.

There are many Internet search engines, including Yahoo!, Bing, MSN, Ask.com and AOL, but Google is arguably the most powerful and well-known.

Google and other search engines include a search tool which people use to find information, products or services on the web. (You probably use Google all the time yourself.) When you type in words for a search – like “picture frames,” for instance – Google immediately searches from millions of existing websites to find the best matches for those words, and then displays all the known websites that match in the order it thinks best and most relevant.

How does that work?

Search engines use software tools called spiders to help ‘crawl’ content, looking for information to bring back the the database about sites they visit. The information gets stored, which helps you get your search results more quickly.

When spiders visit web pages, they’re looking for a number of things, but two of the main things Google spiders look for are:

1) What words are used on a page, and
2) Where those words are found on a page.

If a spider comes across a website that is not in the search engine’s database already – and if it determines that the site is good – it will include the information in the database.

So how does knowing all this help you?

When you sell products or services on the web, you want people to find your website easily – not only that, but you want your website to be on the first page of results when people use search terms that match what you sell.

By knowing what spiders are looking for and building your website content to match, you make it easier for search engines and customers to find your site and purchase your products and services.

Have questions about this? Let us know – and stay tuned for future posts on optimising your site for search engines!