Hi and welcome to my 1st Blog on SEO Positives new website!

Each week I will be providing you with my digital marketing Top Tips on how your online business can stay ahead of your competitors! We look after some of the biggest clients on the internet, here are a few of them: promocodes.co.uk, luggagesuperstore.co.uk, voijeans.co.uk, partybritain.co.uk and spabreak.co.uk for more examples please see our case studies.

1.    Blogging

Creating a Blog on your website is an essential part of your online marketing strategy and vital to keep your visitors engaged with news about your business. Your blog is like a newsfeed, so it’s essential to create unique interesting articles which contain links to relevant pages back within your website. If you copy and paste another article and re blog it, remember Google could penalise your site for copied text. As a general rule of thumb only use 1 link per 100 words, this will help Google crawl for keywords associated about your business. A perfect example to see how it’s done is by clicking on the words that are underlined within this article. Remember to update this as much as possible and I would suggest you spend 30 minutes daily doing this task which will benefit your websites online presence massively.

2. XML Sitemap

Your website is like a book, your menu bar is like a contents page so this needs to be clear and simple so that your visitors can navigate around your site and look at pages. You may already have a site map on your website which is like an index page in a book. By creating an XML sitemap which is tailor made especially for Google, allowing it to crawl/read your keywords on all your pages. Please see our website for an excellent example of an XML Sitemap.

3. Google Analytics

Any one that has an online presence for a personal website, small or giant online business should have Google analytics. It’s a vital part of your marketing strategy and its one of the most powerful web analytics tracking solutions that will help you understand customer trends visiting your site. This will help you improve and implement new strategies for customers to purchase or contact you resulting in a conversion. In addition Google Adwords (PPC) customers can even see their Analytics data from inside their Adwords account, plus Google Analytics is free for anyone to use.

Press releases are often considered the secret weapon of SEO companies. While there are many things businesses can do to raise the profile of their website (marketers can, for example, set up a regularly-updated blog to encourage interest in the site and add a unique sense of interactivity to the platform), press releases remain a sure-fire way of increasing the exposure of your firm and cementing its reputation within your business sector.

However, it’s important that marketing directors assess the impact and implications of purchasing the service and pick a package that suits their exact requirements. Many companies may choose to write these articles themselves, but here at SEO Positive we believe that employing professional writers to create your releases remains the most economical way to utilise this advertising approach, as you may find that your own marketing team may struggle to find the time and resources to distribute press releases regularly. Producing press releases for the online arena is different to writing for traditional outlets such as newspapers and magazines, after all.

Below we’ve listed the pros and cons associated with press release writing and distribution. These points will help you decide whether this service will suit the vision (and budget!) of your business.

Pros:

- Writing and distributing press releases boosts link juice and is notoriously good for SEO because many PR sites are authoritative and have a high PageRank. Remember that making use of anchor text links in the articles is especially beneficial for your campaign.

- Press articles can be distributed at the click of a button to relevant industry sectors, encouraging quality traffic to your website. Although many consider the typical press release format to be a more traditional form of marketing, this template remains an age-old favourite with the media, which means that editors are more likely to take a look at what you have to offer as all the information they need is easily identifiable and in one place.

- If written well, press releases can help with the corporate branding of your company. These kinds of articles add credibility to your firm and signal to your competitors that you’re a force to be reckoned with in your industry.

- These kinds of articles can support your online reputation management strategy, too. Well-distributed press releases will often appear high in the search engine results, pushing down unflattering entries and making your company appear in complete control of its image.

Cons:

- Competition for distribution is high and there is no guarantee that your article will be successful.

- Finding newsworthy topics can be difficult. Standard, run-of-the-mill press releases are unlikely to be picked up by online editors and journalists. However, if companies choose to partner with professional press release writers, they are able to leave this side of the process to creative individuals who will be able to provide a fresh take on the news story.

- Press releases will only remain in prominent positions on associated PR sites for a short amount of time. This means that if the approach is going to remain worthwhile for your business, you need to be writing regularly.

Put simply, writing and publishing press releases will dramatically improve the image and standing of your company on the web, but you will need to review whether press releases are as valuable as other marketing channels. Investing in an on-going service can be daunting for small to medium sized firms who are used to running similar projects in-house but with the knowledge and support of the right provider, you can save your team time and money by choosing to outsource the work to the professionals.

Our expert copywriting team at SEO Positive are able to tailor their press release packages to your needs, so we recommend you get in touch today to learn a little more about what we can do for you.

For bloggers using social media networks know as Google Plus, there is a way, it has been available for a few months, to claim an article as your own. Having authorship of an article has a few benefits.

What’s The Point?

The first and most obvious when seen is that your Google+ photo appears in search results. This is more of a vanity feature but it is a cool one and makes blogging a real form of writing. Very similar to a hard copy book In the way that the author is given a lot of credit for it.

Another benefit is that it makes all content written by an author easier to find, when you find the author icon on a search result then there will be a link for more by that author. So this makes finding content by a specific blogger easier than ever.

One of the biggest points is that it puts your name on your own articles, which means that the problem of having articles stolen is finally combatted. This problem will no doubt continue, but if someone is stealing an article, it is easy to prove who the content really belongs to, which will make it embarrassing to be proved wrong and that you are stealing articles.

How To Do It

Matt Cutts has made a few videos explaining how to add authorship to content and this can be found easily on Youtube. The simpler way is to add HTML code. I will show an example, for your reference “URL” would be the URL of your Google Plus profile. <a href=”URL”?rel=author> +You</a>. The text within the link can say whatever you want but its best to say +”your name” but it really isn’t essential.

According to the instructional videos, the next step is to share the article on your Google + profile, this seems simple enough and if you are an active Google + user you are most likely already doing this.

Conclusion

The benefits of having authorship are definitely worth the effort of inserting a small chunk of HTML code, and if you’re a heavy Google + user then the only thing you will have to do differently is add the HTML code which can be copied and pasted.

Written by + Lewis Austin

We’ve talked a lot about the impact of SEO on social media platforms, but, if you’re a news reporter, journalist or other general media professional, how can you use search engine optimisation to your advantage? More and more users are turning to the web to search for breaking news, as the internet provides the masses with an easily-accessible, real-time news feed, ensuring that the population is kept up to date with current events second by second.

As an example, way back in 2009 the BBC announced that it was to start optimising its headlines for better SERPs and many other broadcasters have followed suit. This has resulted in a highly competitive battle for first page positions and triggered most online journos and bloggers to consider the advantages of good SEO.

Writing for web users is entirely different to writing for print. It’s true that great content will engage readers no matter where it is published, but as the internet is an ever-changing medium that‘s greatly influenced by the impatience of its users, you need to consider a couple of different points if your articles are going to gain the online recognition and attention they deserve. Creating web-friendly content is the first step towards successful search engine optimisation.

• Your headline is the most important part of your post. With so many other similar articles to choose from (from countless different sources), you need to be sure that your tagline offers something particularly attractive and unique. You also need to make sure that the subject of your piece is clearly stated at the very beginning of your title. Remember that your article might not be immediately recognisable as relevant to a particular subject (and therefore to a specific target audience) – readers will find your post as a result of a search but more often than not will come across it in amongst a never-ending feed of unrelated articles.

Including your most important keywords and search phrases in your title will also aid your SEO efforts, as it’ll be more likely to achieve great rankings within the major search engines. The bots indexing your site consider your title tag to be one of the most crucial elements when it comes to matching up your post with a user’s specific search.

Naturally, these tips condemn the use of puns in your titles. Stylistically, many writers rely on wit to grab the attention of the reader, but you need to be sure that the wording you choose won’t affect your relevancy to a particular topic. By all means be creative but consider the impact on your SERPs.

• Make sure your article meets the criteria that will ensure it’s indexed by the Google News feed. This kind of exposure is second-to-none. There are no clear guidelines as to how to achieve this but plenty of discussions raging within online forums, and even a few vague points released by Google itself. The general gist of the ideas gathered by journalists encourage writers to include a visual element such as a relevant image in your post, not posting an article that’s simply a video or a graphic, and not updating your article once it’s been published (instead, post an entirely new piece).
• Regardless of what you’ve heard, keyword stuffing is frowned upon. There’s been a lot of argument recently as to the ‘ideal’ keyword density for SEO and no SEO experts can agree on the exact figure. With the recent updates to Google’s algorithms, most now believe that quality content surpasses the need for keyword repetition and will be ranked according to its relevancy and value. Stick with your writing style and make sure that your text is likeable and informative.

Once you’ve written what you consider to be the perfect article, there are a number of tricks you can employ to extend your exposure even further. Linking is a huge part of successful search engine optimisation and can be easily achieved. Simply link back to your homepage, use keyword-rich, text-based anchor links to direct the user back to previous articles that might be of interest to the reader, link to interesting sources that will compliment your post – all of these techniques will not only impress the search engines but will make sure that your reader is gaining as much from your post as possible. After all, you’re ultimately writing your article for humans, not bots!

The mention of the human element brings us to the last point. The internet thrives on the ability to share links and information between infinite numbers of users. Once your post has been published, don’t just simply sit back and wait for it to be found. Actively promote your work and develop a standing within relevant circles. Make it easy for your readers to share your posts via social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and now, of course, Google+ – set up accounts with these networks and dedicate a certain amount of time to gaining fans and recognition. This move will not only generate a huge amount of interest in your articles, it will also work in your favour when it comes to SEO. Search engines are gauging the importance of social signals in its ranking process, so the amount of ‘likes’, ‘tweets’ and ‘plus 1s’ you receive will be a great indication of your new-improved online presence!

So we’ve dealt with the technical aspects of copywriting, but how do you learn to write with that enviable charisma and style that keeps the users interested and reduces your bounce rate? The psychological side of sales writing is intricate but interesting and something that all SEO companies or SEO specialists should consider. Below are several points to bear in mind if you really want to play on the instincts of your audience without coming across as too pushy and intimidating.

1. Users are not interested in how much you love your product. Along the same lines, if they want a detailed profile of your products or services they’ll go elsewhere on the site – the sales copy is intended to convey the real advantages of what you’re offering. You need to SELL your business and there’s no better way to do this than to point out how your products or services are going to benefit your potential customers.
2. To do this effectively, you need to give the user examples of the benefits in action. Part of good sales writing is to convince the user that they really can’t live without your product. Because the reader will automatically associate the relevancy of your product to their personal circumstances, you need to demonstrate how your product has helped consumers similar to them in the past. Short and simple stories are most effective. This can also be achieved by positioning flattering testimonials either in the body of the text or elsewhere on the page.
3. People like imagery. Using great metaphors and analogies will capture the imagination of the user and sustain their interest, and also prevent your text from becoming too uniform and stale.
4. A good technique to consider when writing sales copy is the ‘so what?’ philosophy. If your reader finds themselves asking ‘so what’ at any stage they’re likely to become uninterested. Discourage this by putting yourself in the consumer’s shoes. Cover all bases, explore every eventuality and tell the user why they should be excited by your product or service and everything it can do for them on a personal level.
5. Exploit the emotion of your reader to a certain degree. Individuals will first make a decision based on their emotional response to the text and tend to think about the finer details later on. For as long as possible, curb the urge for the reader to start thinking logically and ensure they have been persuaded to justify their need for your services or products.  ‘Do the thinking’ for the reader and provide them with as many positive aspects to your services as possible before they find themselves beginning to dwell on the negatives. The positive aspects generally evoke good emotion; the negative aspects will pre-empt the logic.
6. Avoid making hollow promises to your readers. A good example is the use of the word ‘guarantee’ – unless you really can guarantee everything you’re claiming it’s best to avoid its use altogether. Readers are very quick at discarding copy that seems too good to be true as a standard, hollow marketing tactic and you need to inspire confidence in your business by proving that what you intend to deliver is possible.
7. Sometimes it’s effective to create a sense of urgency within the text. If readers are told that they can only get hold of these great deals for a limited time, they’re more likely to buy sooner rather than later. However, avoid lying to your audience or bullying them into making a purchase when that same deal will still be on offer the next time they visit your site.
8. Finally, ALWAYS finish your sales copy with a clear call to action. Let the user know what they need to do next and how to go about it. This could include a link to another page or clearly displayed contact details.

Sales copy is intended to persuade the reader to support a particular opinion or view. In the context of the web, copy is used to sell the ideas, services or products of a particular website and motivate users to enquire further or purchase an item. This kind of sales text can also be used for ads, email marketing and social media profiles. Generating well-written, captivating text for your web pages is essential, especially as part of your search engine optimisation campaign – it’s also important to make sure that all the content on your website is unique otherwise you may be penalized by the search engines (duplicate content looks suspicious).

To make sure their site copy is of the best quality available, businesses will normally outsource their copywriting to qualified professionals, but if this isn’t a viable option for you there are simple copywriting principles you can follow to achieve similar results. It’s also best to consult a reputable SEO company or SEO specialist for some handy advice.

1. Identify the theme or the message of the copy – and stick to it. Users want to read clear, concise text that doesn’t digress from the main idea.
2. Set yourself a word count and don’t exceed it. Again, this won’t just help you out in terms of time management, but keeps the text direct and to the point.
3. Don’t be afraid of redrafting. You’re unlikely to get it right first time, so make sure you take time out to explore different structures and approaches to your sales copy.
4. Use short sentences to convey clear points. If your sentences are too long you run the risk of rambling and the text will look poorly constructed. As an additional note, try to limit the use of adjectives, as these can water down the content and distract readers from the idea behind the fancy words.
5. Make your strongest points at the beginning of the text and expand on them later. This is an easy way to grab the attention of the user.
6. Remember that internet browsers are impatient. They will often only spend a couple of seconds weighing up your page, and if it’s too difficult for them to find the information they need they’ll simply go somewhere else. Make your main points easy to find, perhaps with the use of well-placed titles.
7. Use your chosen keywords as the basis of your copy. It’s more important to make sure the text reads well than focusing solely on how many times your keywords are repeated, though.
8. Your keywords should also be used cleverly in the titles.
9. Finally, have a thorough read through the text before you add it to your page. You’ll be surprised how many spelling mistakes and grammatical errors get overlooked at the end of the writing process. Think carefully about how you want your text to be positioned on the page, too, as it needs to be noticeable and seize the attention of your potential customers.

After an extensive keyword research you have finally decided on the keywords that you are going to utilise however due to the number of keywords that you have chosen you have no idea on which ones would convert best. Using the keyword research tool indeed would allow you to gather so much keyword and according to the scale that may have been set by your keyword research tool they are all viable keywords. However, in reality some keywords from your list may convert better than the others this is why it is important to narrow down your list in order for you to utilise only those keywords that would actually give you the traffic and return of investments that you need.

In order to determine the value or whether or not the keywords you have initially chosen is right for your SEO campaign and your website then you have to determine the value of your keyword, its relevance and its ability to convert.

To determine all three you have to ask yourself several questions and you have to put yourself in the shoes of the search engine user. First question that you should ask yourself is “how is your website going to benefit from the keywords that you have chosen?” Answering this question would help you determine how exactly valuable such keyword is.

Second question is “Is your chosen keyword relevant to the content of your website or the products that you offer?” By answering this question SEO consultants are given a better view on which of the keywords would convert better since relevance is equated with conversion.

Third Question that you should ask yourself or what SEO companies should ask themselves is “Will my keywords with action question be likely clicked by the user?” It is a proven fact that call to action phrases or keywords would likely make your visitors click such link.

To determine the potential ROI of such keywords you or SEO experts should ask themselves the question on what is the Search Demand Volume of the keyword, its Strength in terms of relevance, link power and targeting power and its Number of search results? Answering such question with a high value would mean that the potential ROI for such keyword is also high.

Content development is one of the most tedious tasks of every SEO company, this is because of the fact that it would drain every creative juice in your brain formulating or developing viable content. With the advent of the Panda algorithm the need for fresh and well written as well as high quality content has increased. However, one question regarding content has come up and that is, “is there a need to delete previous contents posted in your blog or website?” the answer of course would depend on whether the content is original or not. If the content is of high quality and it is original then such should not be deleted, however if the content was just copied from another source then by all means delete it from your blog posts.

Writing a high quality content is no laughing matter because it would really take a lot out of the writer or the content developer, this is why nowadays writers are paid more or less around ten to twenty dollars per article, because there are only a few “high quality” writers or content developers out there. With such huge investment in content development such articles or blog posts need not be idle once it has surpassed its usefulness for the web page. Here are some things that you can do with your old articles or blog posts so that it would help you in your SEO campaign.

1. Re-write your blog posts – pick out an old blog post that has gained so much attention via comments, discussions and maybe some social media likes. Re-write such blog post, this time make such post longer and in detail. Create links from the post to your other site pages related to the keyword you are using as a link, to expand and build more links you should submit such rewritten articles to article directories.

2. Use old articles – rewrite your old articles, especially those that were submitted to Article directories, this time however summarise everything and compress your content to around 200-300 words, from there utilise the rewritten article as news feeds and or newsletters.

Your investments in content development should not end with the article output but rather you should recreate it in order to serve a different purpose in the cases stated above the contents are used to build links.

The release of Google’s Panda Algorithm worldwide has made several “winners” and “losers”. Winners are those who benefitted from the change in the search engine algorithm of Google while, Loser of course were those that lost their search engine results page ranking after the release of the new algorithm.

Google’s panda algorithm targets websites that are utilising duplicate contents in their website; this means that their contents are repeated or unoriginal. However, it should be clear to SEO consultants that duplicate content does not only emanate by copying content from other websites, there are also other ways on how one could unknowingly introduce duplicate content to his or her website.

One possibility of integrating a duplicate content is when developers are not consistent with their links. For example the website URL http://seopositiveltd.co.uk and URL http://seopositiveltd.co.uk/index.html may be interpreted as two separate URL but both will point to a single page and that would be the index page or the first page of the website. Inconsistency in links may result to interpreting a single page to be having a duplicate page thus to avoid this from happening it is advised that SEO companies should be consistent in incorporating or writing their URL in their webpages.

Another instance when duplicate content may arise is when some of your site’s pages are still under construction and place holder pages are integrated. Place holder pages are those pages that contains generic information like “Page under construction”, which of course has higher probability of having content similar to that. To avoid this, it would be advisable to first finalise your website and all pages should already be finished to the last detail and all place holders should be changed with the actual content.

If the content is being shared through syndication it would be prudent for SEO experts to protect the sites’ content from being copied by other people and plagiarising such content. To avoid being copied it would be wise to place a link in your content pointing to your home page or to your website, further you can also incorporate a date and timestamp on your content.

Utilising these strategies would definitely help protect your site from accidental duplicate contents.

Ever since Google started to release the Panda or Farmer algorithm, SEO consultants have been worried about their SEO campaign especially for those who have utilised generated content for their website. This is because of the fact that SEO companies who have been utilising low quality and auto generated contents are now being weeded out by Google in its search engine results page.

As a small backgrounder, the Panda algorithm was developed to identify websites that are capitalising on low quality content in order to generate their backlinks. Due to the tediousness of content development many have resorted to the use of duplicating original contents and or utilising content feeds as way of automating the incorporation of content in their website.

With the advent of the Panda algorithm automated content generation and duplicate contents have no place in the world of search engines, well at least for Google that is, that is why it is important nowadays that your contents should be of high quality. However the main question is what makes a quality content?

Google has not released any guidelines on what qualities should your content have for it to be considered as high quality content. However, the following are some guidelines that may be utilised to make use as your benchmark for quality:

1. Relevance – your content must always pertain to your websites’ overall theme and that it should not dwell into different topics other than what your website should contain, this would further help you utilise your chosen keywords properly and meld it into your content.

2. Elaborate content – your website must not only contain a single content, but rather every silo in your website must always be updated or at least some parts of your websites’ silo must be regularly updated with content where such contents are unique and of course relevant. In simple terms your content must not only be composed of a few sentences but rather it should be composed of an elaborate text.

3. Content must be unique – the goal of the Panda algorithm is to identify and ban websites with poor content, this is why for a content to be considered to be of high quality such should be unique and not just copied from another website.