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Day 20: Keywords in headings

01/02/202002/01/2016 by scmarketing

Headings for SEO

Heading tags – what are they? A heading tag is a piece of HTML code that defines text as a heading. There are 6 different tags, h1 to h6.

To a lot of beginners, the thought of editing HTML code will sound like a daunting task. You don’t need to be afraid as a lot of good CMS sites will have a formatting drop down that allows you to simply highlight your text and click the heading type you want.

The importance of each heading tag is simply 1 as the most important, and 6 as the least. So, your most important heading should be a h1 heading, then a sub heading as h2 and so on…

It is vital that every page on your site has a defined h1 tag.

Advantages of heading tags

The heading tag is used to tell the search engine what the most important information on the page is. For example, if your business sold red shoes and your page had a title of red shoes that was defined as a h1 tag, the search engine will know that is important information and it is relevant to your business, improving your chances of appearing higher up in the search engine results pages.

SEO

Relevancy
• Search engine spiders check the relevancy of the header tag with the content associated with it

Keyword consistency
• The search engine spiders check the keyword consistency between the header tag and the content on the rest of the page.

The importance of h1
• The h1 tag is the most important tag, and should not be missed on any page. Search engine spiders pay great attention to the words used in a h1 tag as it should contain information about the content of the page, just as the <title> will.

Keywords
Before writing content for your pages, you should always have your keywords planned for what you’re writing about. You should use as many of these as you can in separate heading tags. This gives your keywords greater authority and tells the search engines that the topics you’re talking about are important and relevant to your business, resulting in your website ranking higher for those keyword searches.

Things you should not be doing with your headings

• Do not stuff your heading tags with keywords (no more than 2 per heading tag)
• Do not use more than one h1 tag on a page
• Do not use heading as hidden text
• Do not repeat heading tags on different pages
• Do not use heading for styling text. Use them to organise and structure your pages

Day 19: Internal links for SEO

08/03/202101/26/2016 by scmarketing

The best practices of internal linking are greatly discussed throughout the web, lots saying that it is a complex task that only experts can do. Here at Smart Cow Marketing, we believe that it is a relatively straight forward task, and we’re here to give you some great tips and advice for a killer internal linking strategy.

The purpose of internal links:

1.Helps with website navigation
2.Defines the architecture and hierarchy of a website
3.Distributes page authority and ranking power throughout the site.

Create lots of content

In order to create lots of links, you need lots of content! This can be done by regularly posting to your blog/news page. If you don’t have a page, click this link to read the importance of a blog for your SEO strategy (that’s an example of relevantly linking between pages).

Lots of internal linking strategies propose extremely complex layers of pages and silos of content and a mathematically-balanced formula for number of links to levels of pages. With our experience, we’ve found that it really doesn’t make any difference, just so long as you have loads of links pointing to specific helpful places.

Use anchor text

You should use Anchor text for your links as opposed to linked images. Image links are fine, just as long as they are correctly alt-tagged.

Avoid these

There are two links you should avoid linking to in your content:

Home page. Most websites already have too many links pointing to your homepage. It is better to link to your internal pages to strengthen those and help further boost the overall SEO of your site.

Contact us. This is a common mistake made by a lot of people. We see it in the majority of blog posts we read, at the end of the post there’s a line of text saying ‘give us a call for more awesome stuff’ (or something similar). Only link back to your contact page if it is 100% necessary.

In general, you want to avoid linking to pages that are already in the main menu, as these will appear in every page already.

Natural links

Ensure that your links are natural to the reader. If the link matches the context of the content, the reader is more likely to click on it, even if it’s an external link (see what we did there?) as long as it’s something that the reader will be interested in. If it’s an internal link, the visitor will stay on your site longer and become much more engaged with your website experience.

ONLY USE RELEVANT LINKS there’s no point talking about a pair of cool new trainers and linking to a site about the wild adventures of an exotic parrot. Your visitors will get frustrated and bounce right out of your website. Read more about bounce rate and the impact it can have on your site’s performance.

Use a reasonable number of links

You don’t need to cram your blog post full of hundreds of links pointing to every page in your site. Nobody knows the amount of links that’s ‘reasonable’ you’ve just got to try and not take the P!$$. The posts we usually write are around 500 words. And we only link to 4 or 5 internal pages.

There are already a large number of links on all of your pages, in your menu, footer, adverts, main brand logo pointing to your home page (if you don’t have this, do it) and maybe some other places depending on your site.

Don’t make the mistake of having loads of links in your footer. If you have a site with thousands of pages, these links will soon multiply into tens of thousands of ‘spammy’ links and you’ll quickly be penalised by an algorithmic change that happened in 2013 and caught out loads sites that were found doing this. You don’t have to spend loads of time doing this either. You can work through your old content as and when you have the time and it really doesn’t take much time.

In conclusion, if you follow these tips, internal linking is not too complicated, or difficult.

SEO agency Croydon

As a digital marketing agency in Croydon, we’re well placed to offer local businesses digital marketing services and online marketing advice on relevant Local SEO Services and content marketing to help increase presence in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Get in touch to chat about your business goals and how a tailored SEO campaign can help your marketing strategy.

Keyboard being used to perform email marketing

Day 18: Email marketing Croydon

11/08/201901/23/2016 by scmarketing

Here at Smart Cow Marketing, we understand the importance of a targeted e-mail campaign and the positive effect it can have on your ROI.

First things first, you don’t want to use your standard Outlook, Gmail or other basic e-mail system to be sending hundreds or thousands of emails, it will take too long and the system probably couldn’t handle that amount of outgoing traffic.

We suggest you use a campaign tool such as Constant Contact. This organises your emails into campaigns and sends them out without crashing.

Here are the things you need to do to achieve a successful email campaign:

The Basics

• Matching templates to existing brand identity and layout.
• Use analytics to track the success of your campaign and also see where you can improve.

You need to target:

• People who previously opened an email
• People with related interests
• People who have visited your website
• People who have mentioned you in social media

Avoid inappropriate or irrelevant email messages

• Make sure that you stay on topic with your email campaign. We wouldn’t send a campaign talking about online marketing and then tell you about a great book shop. Your readers want to know about YOUR businesses products/services and why they should purchase.
Personalisation
• Send the email as someone’s name, through experience we’ve found that emails received with someone’s first name as the sender get more clicks than just having your business email. This is something that may change for you, so play around with it and track your analytics what works for you.
• Use call-to-action buttons to make it easy for the reader to know where to go.

Test, Test, Test

• Send out two types of emails, with two different layouts, sender names, call-to-action buttons. Run both campaigns at the same time and see which one performs the best and go forward using that one.

Link to your Website!

• The most important part of the campaign is to get people to your site, more importantly to the correct landing page, so that you can generate sales.
• The more links back to your site, the better your site will perform in the search engine rankings as this is one of the key factors of your SEO strategy.
• To find out more about external links click here.

We hope that this has been useful and good luck with your campaigns!

For more great SEO advice from Croydon’s Online Marketing Company read our 30 day SEO guide.

Day 17: PPC – what is it?

06/14/202101/21/2016 by scmarketing

PPC stands for pay-per-click, a type of online marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Essentially, it’s a way of buying visits to your site, rather than attempting to “earn” those visits organically.

Search engine advertising is one of the most popular types of PPC. It lets advertisers bid for an ad placement in a search engine sponsored link when someone searches on a keyword that is related to their business offering. For example, if we bid on the keyword “Purley AdWords” Google will choose the most related advert to show at the top of Google’s results page.

Every time that advert is clicked, sending a visitor to the site, they will have to pay the search engine a small fee. When PPC is working correctly, the fee is trivial, because the visit is worth more than what you pay for it. For example, if you paid £2 for the advert, and then went on to make a £300 sale, then they made a very good profit.

A lot goes into building a winning PPC campaign, from researching the correct, specific keywords, to organising those keywords into well-organised campaigns and ad groups, through to setting up PPC landing pages that are optimised for conversions. Search engines reward advertisers who can create relevant, intelligently targeted pay-per-click campaigns by charging them less for ad clicks.

What is Google AdWords?

Google AdWords is the most popular PPC advertising system in the world. The AdWords platform enable businesses to create ads that appear on Google’s search engine and other Google properties.

AdWords operates on a pay-per-click model, in which users bid on keywords and pay for each click on their advertisements. Every time a search is initiated, Google digs into the pool of AdWords advertisers and chooses a set of winners to appear in the valuable ad space on its search results page. The “winners” are chosen based on a combination of factors, including the quality and relevance of their keywords and ad campaigns, as well as the size of their keyword bids.

More specifically, who gets to appear on the page is based on and advertiser’s Ad Rank, a metric calculated by multiplying two key factors – CPC Bid (the highest amount an advertiser is willing to spend) and Quality Score (a value that takes into account your click-through rate, relevance, and landing page quality). This system allows winning advertisers to reach potential customers at a cost that fits their budget. It’s essentially an auction.

Conducting PPC marketing through AdWords is particularly valuable because, as the most popular search engine, Google gets massive amounts of traffic and therefore delivers the most impressions and clicks to your ads. How often your PPC ads appear depends on which keywords and match types you select.

While a number of factors determine how successful your PPC advertising campaign will be, you can achieve a lot by focusing on:
·         Keyword Relevance – Crafting relevant PPC keyword lists, tight keyword groups, and proper ad text.
·         Landing Page Quality – Creating optimised landing pages with persuasive, relevant content and a clear call-to-action, tailored to specific search queries.
·         Quality Score – Quality Score is Google’s rating of the quality and relevance of your keywords, landing pages, and PPC campaigns. Advertisers with better Quality Scores get more ad clicks at lower costs.

PPC keyword research

Keyword research for PPC can be incredibly time-consuming, but it is also incredibly important. Your entire PPC campaign is built around keywords, and the most successful AdWords advertisers continuously grow and refine their PPC keyword list. If you only do keyword research once, when you create your first campaign, you are probably missing out on hundreds of thousands of valuable, long-tail, low-cost and highly relevant keywords that could be driving traffic to your site.

An effective PPC keyword list should be:

Relevant – Of course, you don’t want to be paying for Web traffic that has nothing to do with your business. You want to find targeted keywords that will lead to a higher PPC click-through rate, effective cost per click, and increased profits. That means the keywords you bid on should be closely related to the offerings you sell.

Exhaustive – Your keyword research should include not only the most popular and frequently searched terms in your niche, but also to the long tail of search. Long-tail keywords are more specific and less common, but they add up to account for the majority of search-driven traffic. In addition, they are less competitive, and therefore less expensive.

Expansive – PPC is iterative. You want to constantly refine and expand your campaigns, and create an environment in which your keyword list is constantly growing and adapting.

Managing your PPC campaigns

Once you’ve created your new campaigns, you’ll need to manage them regularly to make sure they continue to be effective. In fact, regular account activity is one of the best predictors of account success. You should be continuously analysing the performance of your account and making the following adjustments to optimise your campaigns:

Add PPC Keywords: Expand the reach of your PPC campaigns by adding keywords that are relevant to your business.
Add Negative Keywords: Add non-converting terms as negative keywords to improve campaign relevancy and reduce wasted spend.
Split Ad Groups: Improve click-through rate (CTR) and Quality Score by splitting up your ad groups into smaller, more relevant ad groups, which help you create more targeted ad text and landing pages.
Review Costly PPC Keywords: Review expensive, under-performing keywords and shut them off if necessary.
Refine Landing Pages: Modify the content and calls-to-action (CTAs) of your landing pages to align with individual search queries in order to boost conversion rates. Don’t send all your traffic to the same page.

You’ll learn more about all of these elements of PPC campaign management as you move forward through the coursework in PPC University.

If you’re ready to get started with PPC, skip ahead to learn how to set up an AdWords account.

If you’ve already got an AdWords account, we suggest you use our FREE AdWords Performance Grader to help you zero in on areas of improvement. In 60 seconds or less, you’ll receive a customised report grading your account performance in 9 key areas, including click-through rate, Quality Score and account activity.

Pay per click Croydon

If you need a boost in search engine results pages (serps) or want to specifically target an audience segment then Pay Per Click advertising (PPC) can help your firm be found and to stand out in local search results against your competitors.

With many digital marketing tactics whether social media, new website design, search engine optimisation (SEO) or PPC management, we can help guide your online marketing.

We can provide a tailored digital marketing strategy for your business needs. Book a free consultation.