Some helpful SEO tips for your website

SEO is the basic principle of making your site friendly to search engines. It’s important to also get other websites linking to yours. This shows the search engines that you have power. SEO is important to any business because search brings in a lot of visitors to your site. Lots of online businesses rely on this method of promotion for most of their sales and leads. What should you be doing to make sure your website is friendly to the bots? Here are 5 simple tipsfor SEO success and a well balanced website:

Optimise your copy by making rich use of your keywords. Make sure you mention your terms plenty of times so the engines can see what you are about. Reflect this in your titles and header tags. There should be around 150 words of copy on each page. Add images to these to balance the content. Include internal links to other pages on your website so users do not reach dead ends as these may cause visitors to leave the site as they cannot find what they want.

Use Social Media because everyone else is. Social media allows you to connect with users. It also helps with indexing new webpages and your site for the bots. It is proven that using social platforms to promote your site can help it in the rankings.

Get high powered links so the bots can see your site has power. Links from blogs and website with a high Page Rank will help the most. Think quality rather than quantity with links. Powerful sites will funnel some of their juice to your sites through links. Make sure you optimise the anchor text.

Research your keywords so you are targeting the right phrases. Is there enough search volume for your words? There might be better opportunities or words to target. Make sure the words are not too competitive too or you will struggle.

Get listed in directories such as DMOZ. These are free and easy. Some directories will mention your site for free and some require a small fee which is fairly justifiable if it is a bloog directory. These are easy ways to get links from good domains. Social bookmarks also count as directories in a way.

Brighton SEO Conference 2011

Brighton SEO took place on Friday; a full day of pure SEO geekery! (yeah, so what? :P). The event has grown over the last 3 years from what was a handful of professionals in a pub, to 160 enthusiastic SEO and digital marketing pioneers.

The proceedings kicked off early from 8.30am, where a bombardment of keen SEO's starting registering and taking their seats in the theatre.  People were pushing through the queues, eager to get in. This was typical form for an SEO, always desperate to get to number 1! :P


The day started with a debate on the future existence of SEO, which was actually great! You could see a few bodies squirming in their seats questioning their job security, but the message at the end was constructive. SEO needs to move away from a technical exercise and be treated with more of a marketing discipline. Anticipating the site users wants, needs and behaviour. Things not even Google can know.


Speakers for the day included expects in their relevant fields from Fresh Egg, iCrossing, White Hat Media, Clearleft, Leapfrogg, Propeller Net and Site Visibility. All the talks were well recieved, short and sweet at 20mins a piece, they packed punch, content and some humour. The day was smoothly run by Site Visibility and Kelvin Newman deserves a lot of credit for keeping the day running so smoothly!


What were my highlights? I found the Social Media metrics that Fresh Egg demonstrated early in the day fascinating. It's good to see that social media is starting to become more measurable. Another highlight was from Clearleft, a Brighton based UI company. Harry spoke about Dark Patterns and bad practice in terms of user experience and site design.


It was a great day and there's very positive feedback across the board. It was a great place to network and i really did discover the digital marketing scene is full of nice guys, it isn't cliquey or arrogant. The next Brighton SEO will surely be another great conference.


Twitter:


@FreshEgg
@SiteVisibility
@LeapFrogg
@WhiteHatMedia
@ClearLeft
@iCrossingUK
@PropellerNet
@KelvinNewman


Check the stream out too @ #BrightonSEO

Example AdWords campaigns on my website

This is for my IT382 Digital Marketing module.

This proposed AdWords campaign is for my website: nowtweet.it . The website is a URL shortener optimised for Twitter. Looking at the keywords and discription, I have proposed the following two AdWords Adverts:

Shorten those long URLS
Use Twitter? Shorten your URLS
the simple way with Now tweet it
nowtweet.it

Free Twitter URL Shortener
Nowtweet.it is the best way to get
your long URLs into Twitter!
nowtweet.it/shortenURL

Proposed Keywords: Twitter, URL, shorten URL, shrink URL, tweet, tweet URL, post URL, Twitter tool, free Twitter tool

The estimated search traffic that the Google tool shows is fairly low, but with a limited budget it should be adequate. The campaign can be monitored based on average costs per click and will be shown in countries where Twitter is commonly used; for example the UK, USA, Brazil and Canada.