New Top Tips to Improve Your Web Presence

[Henry Osadzinski]

Back in 2007, UKBF regular mattk set up an excellent thread full of advice on how to improve your presence online. You've probably spotted it as it was made a sticky and sat at the top of this list until recently.

Things have moved on a fair bit since '07 and, following recommendations from a few members, we wanted to start afresh and pull together your best short pieces of advice, handy tools and quick answers to what you feel are the most pressing questions that people may have.

Add your tips in here and, once we've got a good body of advice, we can turn it into a UKBF-produced guide to help anyone with questions about getting started when developing their online presence.

To get thing's started, here are some highlights from mattk's original post:

• Syndicate your site's content by using an RSS feeds.
• Speel cheek ur stie. Nothing appears more amateur than a site with typos or spelling mistakes.
• Giving away an eBook / whitepaper is an excellent way to generate word-of-mouth about your site.
• Giving away an eBook is an excellent way to generate word-of-mouth about your site.

 

[webgeek]

There's a fair number of occasions where RSS aggregator sites will pull content and then outrank the main site if that main site doesn't have enough authority at the time.

While RSS is great for humans, its use by aggregators is risky - and it's difficult to block one without the other, aside from settling for ad injection.

------------------

Giving away white papers, case studies and ebooks is a great way of doing lead capture. Get the people to fork over their contact details in order to receive it, then you can start nurturing them via email campaigns.

Word of mouth is easier to get when you use social sharing icons. Make it easy for people to mention socially, or force them to Tweet/Share it in order to download it. That's the way to get word of mouth going.

 

[webgeek]

Web 2.0 sites, when properly developed can be wonderful.

Article directories are a huge risk. There's a handful which will probably endure, due to strict editorial policies, but most of the rest have either been de-indexed, had their page rank stripped, or will soon face one of those two outcomes, as Google continues to try and "clean up" their index.

 

[awebapart.com]

I'll try to keep this high level...

I think the key phrase here is "web presence", and understanding that your "web presence" is far bigger than merely just your "web site".

Web presence is how you interact with your audience or potential audience as a whole over the web, and may include many things above and beyond your web site, including your presence on search engines (search, ads), your presence on social media sites (e.g. forums, youtube, facebook, twitter), other ads on other sites, your email communication etc.

And keeping all of this in mind, if there is one other important thing to understand from the outset, when determining where to invest your time, money, and energy, is an understanding of what areas you have the most control over long term. In most cases it is your website which you have the most control over long term. With web presence via other third party channels, it is the other channels that have the ultimate control.

The catch-22 here is that the area where you have the most control, your website, is not usually the area where your audience is, at least not at the start! Hence why web presence is important.

 

[Tin]

Ok, the aim of this new sticky thread is to compile a comprehensive list of 'best practice' tips for getting the maximum from your website. We'll collate the best ones into a new Top Tips sticky, accrediting each author.

If you want to debate or ask for info on any given point, please start a new thread in the SEO and PPC forum, referring to the post here rather than take this list thread off on a tangent.

I'd like to add something following on from Paul's post above about looking at what areas you have direct control over on your own website and give some examples of how web owners can attract additional traffic by being a bit creative when writing title elements on web pages.

Take these two simple keyword terms that I've highlighted below, flying lessons and flying lesson. The title is short but it also contains a 'hook', a hook is something added into the title that appears to readers when Google shows your serp in it's index and it can work very well if thought out.

The particular page I'm talking about offers a large mix of flying lessons provided by independent flying clubs throughout the UK. The page is solely about flying lessons so I created a title which contained the main term (on the left hand side of the title) and added an appropriate hook to the right hand side...

Flying Lessons Nationwide

In the title above, the hook is the word "nationwide" and simply by adding that word (it's not related to any keyword phrase I'm targeting), it can attract visitors because their interpretation is that there's lessons available near to them. Which there is but if I hadn't put that hook in the title I know I'd have had less traffic.

Another example targeting "rally driving" is...

Rally Driving from £79

The hook being "from £79". The title contains a stop word sure, but the hook pulls in extra traffic that I wouldn't get if the title only involved the keyword term.

Other examples...

Flyers and Flyer Printing from £37
or...
Cheap Flyers, Hurry!

Left hand and middle parts of the title contain the keyword terms and right hand side the hook, "from £37" or "Hurry!".

Restricting titles to 70 characters prevents an ellipsis (...) that doesn't mean they need to be that long, just choose your terms wisely, use the left hand and middle part of the title to frame the page theme and keep the page copy focussed too.

 

[Eathelin]

If you want to make a effective online presence then the content of a website should be unique and well written.Always try to follow white hat SEO techniques because it can give you positive result for a long time.

 

[Ali-v-8]

Programmed NFC tags are a cheap and effective gimmick to send out to consumers for re-ordering or repeat custom.
Programming these tags/stickers will ensure your client has:

Access to your facebook (add like)
Access to your website
Direct dial to your customer services.

IMO - next best thing to a compliment slip or business card.

Iphone 5 users - you will have to wait to see the benifits

 

[Ali-v-8]

When you check your rankings Via Google search engine :-
1) click your link
2) dont click back button
3) close tab or window.

 

[seoswat]

Make sure the colour codes match well, i.e dont have more than 3 different colours in your main website theme.

The money is in your list - ensure you have a sign up area on almost every page of your website

If you have a company phone number - put it in your header. Dont just have it in your contact us page. Have it clearly visible. This helps instill trust

 

[Ali-v-8]

Text font specifically colour - Make sure you use different font colour to background colour - this can be mistaken by spiders as an attempt to conceal content (spam) and cause content to be ignored.

 

[Metalfrogboss]

Ensure that you know exactly how your site performs on server speed. This is an SEO factor fast rising in Google's quality score. Cheap hosting normally means slow server, or worse!

 

[Ali-v-8]

By adding a simple conversion form to your homepage you can capture valuable client data and increase customer conversion.

Forms can be as simple as - Name, Email, Contact Number and Message.
Note that Pre-populated responses can sometimes hinder if they don't match the enquiry.

 

[Ali-v-8]

TELPHONE NUMBERS - you may have set up an online business, but people love to talk to human voices once and a while. Having a number in the title will help build trust with clients.

On the same note - Landlines or 0844/45 numbers are assumed more trust worthy and better than a Mobile Number - Better to display both on contact page.

 

[Ali-v-8]

Video is a great tool to gain traffic naturally from Google. Keep it short and sweet. Dont let it drag on. If its a long video try making it in sections.
Dont just add to your Video to Youtube. Get your video out to as many platforms as possible.
And make sure your video gives a clear message and a route to your website.

 

[Kevin007]

I am new to the forum but would like to add something to the discussion.

The tips given out fairly amazing. Just want to add some tips which might help.

Understanding the Customers Physcology: What's the intent of the a particular visitor when he/she visits the website. This can be better understood by the type of keywords they type in a arrive on the website. I will elaborate with an example:-

A visitor types in the "mobile phone" and lands on to a site which tell him/her what a mobile phone is and the technical details like operating frequency and so on. Since he/she has not typed in anything specific if they are served with a website result in the search engine related to the technicality of the mobile phone.

If and when a website tries to push for this particular term the amount of click-throughs would be high but the conversion rate would be low.

So its really important for a business to understand the customer in the marketplace and the type of keywords that would give them better conversions.

Then comes in the part of SEO/SEM into account to ensure that we get the right visitors on to the targeted pages to make sure that they can come back.

 

[Ali-v-8]

What kevin007 is on about is Keyword analysis (basic step of SEO)

 

[webgeek]

Trust signals form an important part of your website. If someone visits and is put off by the process, then all efforts to acquire them as visitors have been wasted.

Typical ways of inspiring trust on a website:
1) prominent phone number
2) prominent address
3) social media icons which link to active social media accounts
4) include testimonials
5) credit card payment symbols
6) verisign or other ssl provider icons
7) join and use better business bureau logo
8) join and use chamber of commerce logo
9) get hacker safe certified and include that logo
10) also include logos of sites where you are mentioned and/or appear/advertise such as UKBF

 

[SEO Manchester]

Hi Guys,

What is important to remember is (exactly the way Google works) to have the best interest of the user/consumer in mind.
This can not be compromised. If you have quality info that attracts and engages with people, your website will succeed.

With SEO not being an exact science it is hard to establish who is telling what you want to hear and who is genuine. (as SEO is a necessity really)
It is important to use SEO to boost an organic listing, however, this can not be at the sacrifice of anything else. It is important if you are going to do something to drive traffic to the site that the site will still be appealing to your demographic audience and/or people likely to be interested in you products/service.

To summarise, do what you have to do (organically and ethically) but remember the purpose of gaining more traffic and do not compromise your image, content or any of the values your company stands for.

Regards & Thanks all - some decent input on this forum.

 

[solenlil]

It is one other important thing to understand from the outset, when determining where to invest your time, money, and energy, is an understanding of what areas you have the most control over long term.

 

[Lightningjack]

A video above the fold.Make it professional no need to spend £1000's.A quality animated slideshow will suffice if you are on a budget but it must tell a story.I highly suggest you have a professional logo,it creates branding for your business.Ideally you'd have your logo animated at the start of any video presentation,again it builds branding,then your video presentation would follow.

Write down a sort of story board of the message you intend to put across,of course a video is there to sell your service or product,but create a story.

If you sell,say,perfume,you could have a picture of a woman getting ready to go out,then getting out of a taxi in town with some people looking,next going into a club and walking past some guys with them looking at her and finally a photo of a bottle of perfume with a price.Footage or photos,the message is the same.

Look at tv ads a vast majority have a story and it's about selling.In most scenarios you can take the photos or footage yourself using friends.If there is enough interest I'll write a quick guide,either way video is a must and remember youtube is the 2nd largest search engine!

 

[Lightningjack]

If you sell anything online your content is biased if you write it yourself,it is that simple.The key is making it look genuine.If you sell,say laptops,and you sell sony's what laptop are you going to recommend.Affiliate sites will recommend everything they have an affiliate link for,that's real world marketing.Indeed it an be worth linking to a secondary site which has all your affiliate links so the main site looks clean e.g gibson guitar,some content then a click here for an depth review,the indepth review has the affil link.

Yes you need half decent content,but it is way over estimated because people everything google says.Talk to any real internet marketer and they will laugh at anyone who takes what comes from google seriously,they want you to do their job,deliver quality content at the high end of the serps.

Social media done properly will certainly improve your web presence,facebook likes etc are powerful tools for gain an audience to market to.Quality content needs to be like the news,unbiased.Hire a respected professional in the field to do your articles,then find an appropriate spot to drop your link,thats how it is done by professional marketers.Yes it costs but worth every penny.You may strike lucky and even find a decent writer on fiverr but is it's a risk.You want all articles written as if for a genuine site then find the right sentence to drop a link.Most inexperienced writers write around the link instead and of course everyone thinks their site has the best content anyway lol.

 

[Business Mapper]

This is a little bit of an aside from the general web presence topic but is occupying my mind of late; expect conversion rates to start to feature in google's algorithms in 2013 as part of its continual push to get rid of spammy sites. Even if your website is not optimized for a certain niche, most of us are looking for a higher-ranking for specific keywords, which means the conversion funnel and conversion rates will be measured as part of the equation to determine how good your site actually is.

 

[thegadgetman]

Hi everyone, I've recently developed and launched a website and wanted to have a discussion about SEO.

The aim of this discussion would be to give out any advice, tips and tricks and also learn a bit more about SEO myself.

So let me start off with a bit of background:

As mentioned I recently launched my website and just had my first hands on SEO.

Here is what I know:

Meta-Titles - Very important, try and get a lot of keywords into here without spamming and explain the title of your page (With that said I need to fix my homepage Meta Title )

Meta-Description - Also very important, it is good to have keywords in here also but the main point of this is to make the person CLICK your website out of all the others. This could be because you appear to make yourself more relevant or cheaper or whatever else!

Meta-Keywords - No longer used by Google and apparently Bing uses these to tell if your a spammer or not (something along those lines)

Permalinks - These should be relevant to your page, if you are selling something a product make sure it contains the product's name etc.

Now page content also plays a big role here when the search engine crawls your website. Make sure to have a lot of content on your website as search engines love UNIQUE content.

Images - should contain relevant file names and ALT descriptions.

TIP: When naming files etc. Do not use underscores _ use hyphens - instead! I believe Google would interpret hi_there as 'hithere' and hi-there as hi there!

Backlinks - This is when other websites link to your website and search engines etc. Pick up on this boosting your popularity and ranking.

Now from my experience I have learnt that:

A) Once you rise to the top or around the top, you won't stay there forever you can drop off the next day!

B) You are not ranked the same on every computer - I believe search engines provide personalised search results!

C) Google and Bing/Yahoo are not the same! I have noticed that when searching for my website on Google I'm first, I try doing the same on Bing/Yahoo I'm nowhere to be seen! Not only that but Google crawled my website way faster than Bing.

It is important to use Webmaster Tools for both Google and Bing when working with SEO. Maybe even Analytics to check on your progress.

Also just to point out, if anything I have said is incorrect please feel free to correct me as this is a discussion. Any other tips would be very helpful even for myself. Especially with the Bing problem I mentioned I still have no idea how to overcome that. I wouldn't mind rising the ranks in Google neither!

 

[dolphinformations]

This is a little bit of an aside from the general web presence topic but is occupying my mind of late; expect conversion rates to start to feature in google's algorithms in 2013 as part of its continual push to get rid of spammy sites. Even if your website is not optimized for a certain niche, most of us are looking for a higher-ranking for specific keywords, which means the conversion funnel and conversion rates will be measured as part of the equation to determine how good your site actually is.

How will Google track this on sites not using g analytics/gg cro tracking?

 

[Lightningjack]

How will Google track this on sites not using g analytics/gg cro tracking?

It's bounce rate,if the site is poor the user clicks back to google,analytics is not needed on a site at all,analytics is simply an end user tool which googles shares a some information on your site it already has.

 

[dolphinformations]

It's bounce rate,if the site is poor the user clicks back to google,analytics is not needed on a site at all,analytics is simply an end user tool which googles shares a some information on your site it already has.

Ah when op said cro he meant ppl coming from a Google search and staying on site vs clicking back to search results, which like you say is bounce rate, not really cro

 

[Ali-v-8]

Unique is definitely the core to good website - Stand out from the crowd is my company tag line - so totally agree with you here.

Provided of course your content is unique, provides value, inspires trust and stand out from the crowd, yes.

 

Don't waste your titles by restricting to 65 characters .

Google will rank you for unique title words ,phrases,up to 50 plus words.

http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/google-you-can-put-50-words-in-your-title-tag-well-read-it/

 

[webgeek]

Don't waste your titles by restricting to 65 characters .

Google will rank you for unique title words ,phrases,up to 50 plus words.

http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/google-you-can-put-50-words-in-your-title-tag-well-read-it/

While Google can see it, there's a couple of reasons to avoid long titles:
1) Google often takes the long title, dumps it and replaces it with what it feels is a shorter semantic equivalent. Title and meta description form the organic "advert" in the search results. The last thing I want Google doing is rewriting my ad copy.
2) First words in a title start strongest and go weaker the further along the title goes. Increased title length results in less strength for each word in the title, thus shorter titles are stronger for SEO purposes. Only handy data is the searchmetrics white paper confirming.

Given the likelihood that adding more, weaker words will dilute my keyword strength in the title and risk having the search result title changed by Google, I'm thinking shorter titles for the win!

 

While Google can see it, there's a couple of reasons to avoid long titles:
1) Google often takes the long title, dumps it and replaces it with what it feels is a shorter semantic equivalent. Title and meta description form the organic "advert" in the search results. The last thing I want Google doing is rewriting my ad copy.
2) First words in a title start strongest and go weaker the further along the title goes. Increased title length results in less strength for each word in the title, thus shorter titles are stronger for SEO purposes. Only handy data is the searchmetrics white paper confirming.

Given the likelihood that adding more, weaker words will dilute my keyword strength in the title and risk having the search result title changed by Google, I'm thinking shorter titles for the win!

In 18 years of writting long titles I have never had a title replaced by google.

This is Matt cutts take on them.

"if you use a really really long title, Google may still use it in its scoring but when they are ready to show it to the user they may find a better title“.

In bold the relevant points.

If you write good titles then its not a problem.

But of course if they are spammy or repetative It posible may cause you problems.

 

[webgeek]

In 18 years of writting long titles I have never had a title replaced by google.

Yeah, they only started doing it 6-8 months or so ago. Prior to that they just truncated and displayed an ... if it wouldn't fit in the display space (because titles with W M type letters that go wide are truncated shorter than those with i l 1 type titles).

There's a lot of people, including myself, who have experienced the title rewrite issue.

The 2012 changes were been spelled out pretty clearly as several occasions when a title rewrite can occur:
- If title length > 70 chars [launch codename "tomwaits", project codename "Snippets"]
- If boilerplate text is being used [launch codename "otisredding", project codename "Snippets"]
- When it's more efficient for them to store and display a shorter, more meaningful alternative [launch codename "TopOfTheRock", project codename "Snippets"]

I just did a search for: red skateboard

Within the top results I see the Amazon result truncated, with the Outdoors part missing at then end (no biggie, it's expected).

Below that is:
title: Girl Skateboards - Red
URL: www.joinred.com/shopred/girl-skateboards/

Going to the page, we see

<title>(RED) | FIGHTING FOR AN AIDS FREE GENERATION</title>

There's 1 of 10
----------------

Further down the SERPs is:
title: Cargo Red/Red Skateboard Truck 5.0 - Native Skate Store
URL: http://www.nativeskatestore.co.uk/s...-c18/cargo-red-red-skateboard-truck-5-0-p7961

Going on to the page, we see

<title>Cargo Red/Red Skateboard Truck 5.0&quot; - Skateboard Trucks from Native Skate Store UK</title>

There's 2 of 10
--------------------------

I didn't check all the top 10, but at least 20% of the results were being rewritten.

Rewrite is only 1 of the 2 main concerns. The other is weaking of your primary term(s) being listed first in the title.

I really wish there was a case study or two handy with the SEO rankings benefit of using much shorter titles vs a longer equivalent. Might be a good one eh?

 

Not sure what you're point is ,but what google et al shows of a title is not all that it reads.?

Having a title that concentrates on one popular search term is in most cases not a good idea as 10 times + the traffic will in general come from long tail in again most cases.

 

[MilesWeb]

Guest blogging is something that is worth the effort. Identify established blogs related to your industry. Contact the blog owners for getting the content published and write informative articles for that blog. Although this might take a lot of time and efforts, the results are worth it.

 

[doctorlife]

Overall, SEO is all about uniqueness, if you are providing something unique, you will rank high.

 

[Tin]

Overall, SEO is all about uniqueness, if you are providing something unique, you will rank high.

The reason you'll rank high for providing something unique is that it's "unique" - you've no competitors in that same market space, that's not seo, seo is about ranking high amongst competition whether or not you say anything unique.

 

[sirearl]

As Rin Tin Tin.

 

[ReviewsThatStick]

I agree with Tin. Being unique is good but ranking high from all other competitors in your niche would be great. No point in being unique if you are the only one in your niche.

 

[KhanhHQ123]

Don't forget to have activity on Social Network. It's not only good for SEO but also improve your bussiness presence.

 

[theseomarky]

Some of you say link to social media websites.. but remeber to no follow them other wise you page rnak will be leaked pointlessly.

 

[HazelC]

Great Tips - my personal advice is that if you do decide to go on social media sites and put these links on your website then make sure these social media platforms are active and make sure you engage with people on them!