Search engine optimisation is a fairly new industry, but the importance of SEO is increasingly recognized.

Results of a recent study in which 467 small firms were questioned, found that a large number of businesses recognize that they have failed to address SEO and have never attempted to improve their internet rankings. Nearly half (41 per cent) of the companies questioned admitted they had never optimised their website.

If your company is one of them and you understand the benefits seo could bring to your businesses’ website, there is nothing stopping you getting in touch with a search engine optimization company, unless you are unsure how to go about choosing one.

When choosing a seo company there are a number of things that can be done to ensure you are choosing the best supplier. The best thing you could possibly do is check their own rankings. Google search terms such as seo, seo services, internet marketing etc., it’s also worth localizing the search to the geographical area in which the company operates, to see how they fare in comparison to their local competitors.

After making contact, ask for phone numbers of clients they are currently working with who will be able to provide you with references. Do not just trust quotes on the website, sometimes they are solicited so do not use online testimonials alone. Speak to their customers; find out their ranking achievements, how soon did they see results? Do they find it easy to contact their campaign delivery manager? These are the types of questions you should ask.

Steer clear of companies that are secretive or fail to explain clearly exactly what they intend to do. Look for trusted search marketing companies, ultimately the company you hire is your responsibility so ensure you know exactly how they will ‘help’ you. Beware of SEO companies that claim they can ‘guarantee’ you a number 1 ranking for certain keywords. There are no ‘special’ relationships with Google so don’t be fooled.

Employing a SEO company to work on your website is a positive thing and it’s worth remembering that the firm you employ should share the same passion you do for your businesses’ website.

What is the point of decorating your home, fitting it with a new kitchen and adding a loft conversion if the foundations are poor? In other words, there is no point in spending all your energy writing search engine optimised copy, building up excellent complementary links when the basic structure of your website is faulty.

Websites need to be designed and built by website experts who have a clear understanding of website construction and the way search engines crawl web pages. Getting your site right should be an integral part of your Search Engine Optimisation strategy. Of course, if your server is unreliable then no matter what the level of SEO brilliance, if you’re off line because your server is down then that is simply your money pouring down the drain.

Assuming that your server is reliable, and then you need to look at how your various web pages interact and, at the same time, ensuring that your html is accurate. Ideally, for good SEO practice, it is reckoned that web pages should not be bigger than 150k as larger pages than that are generally not completely cached by the servers and, therefore, will not be read by the search engine spiders. In other words, SEO is only truly effective if the entire copy on a web page can be read by the search engines. Also, another point to bear in mind, although most people have reasonably fast broadband services, the larger the web page the slower it is to download – and people get bored very easily.

If you build it right, they will come and that is especially true if SEO is incorporated within the title tags and Meta tags and, if possible, within your website’s URL. If you can distribute a few key words into the tags, it will add to your website’s overall search engine optimisation profile. Of course, it is equally important to keep your URL reasonably short but it should include enough recognizable information to be able to tell an observer who you are or what your website sells.

Lastly, your website copy should be really well written, not too long but rich in key words that have been researched and are relevant to your products and services.

One of the best ways to drive interested visitors to your site is through pay per click (PPC) advertising. It is common sense that if you provide someone who is looking for a specific product with a link to that product they will buy it instead of just getting more information about it.

Though, when you make a mistake with your PPC campaign it can cost you a great deal. If you are new to the game you may forget to do several important things. For one, you may not remember to place a cap on your daily bids. Even PPC veterans with high traffic campaigns sometimes have lapses in judgment that result in untargeted clicks which do not convert.

Monitoring your click-through-rates (CTR) and conversion data is a necessity once your campaign gets established, after which you can adjust your things accordingly. This is where PPC bid management comes into play.

If you use an automated bid management system which both analyzes your conversion data and CTR you can reduce the amount of time and effort you need to dedicate to your campaigns. This means that you can react much quicker to campaign fluctuations because they are identified sooner. But when looking for a good automated system you need to remember that often times you get what you pay for.

As much help as a PPC tool is they are still not as useful as regular, hands-on maintenance. Software can only interpret data in certain ways, requiring a human to properly understand the numbers and information. Constant scrutiny is required in order to get the best possible performance from your PPC campaign. Still, as your campaign becomes bigger and the scale or budgets increase, an automated bidding system becomes an invaluable tool for PPC advertisers.

1. Google AdWords Keyword Tool Set To Broad Match

The Google AdWords Keyword Tool defaults to “Broad match” mode, which yields useless data from an SEO perspective — useless in that the numbers are hugely inflated to include countless phrases incorporating the search term specified. For example, the Keyword Tool reports 30.4 million queries for “shoes”, but that includes multi-word phrases such as “dress shoes,” “leather shoes,” “high heeled shoes,” and even “horse shoes,” “snow shoes,” and “brake shoes.”

In Exact mode, the search query volume for “shoes” drops to 368,000. The difference between those numbers is striking, isn’t it? So always remember if you are doing keyword research for SEO in the AdWords Keyword Tool: untick the box next to Broad match and tick the box next to Exact.

2. Disallowing when you meant to Noindex

Ever notice listings in the Google SERPs (search engine results pages) without titles or snippets? That happens when your robots.txt file has disallowed Googlebot from visiting a URL, but Google still knows the URL exists because links were found pointing there. The URL can still rank for terms relevant to the anchor text in links pointing to disallowed pages. A robots.txt Disallow is an instruction to not spider the page content; it’s not an instruction to drop the URL from the index.

If you place a meta robots noindex meta tag on the page, you’ll need to allow the spiders to access the page so it can see the meta tag. Another mistake is to use the URL Removal tool in Google Webmaster Tools instead of simply “noindexing” the page. Rarely (if ever) should the removal tool be used for anything. Also note that there’s a Noindex directive in the REP (Robots Exclusion Protocol) that Googlebot obeys (unofficially). More on disallow and noindex here.

3. URL SERP Parameters & Google Instant

I just wrote about parameters you can append to Google SERP URLs. I’ve heard folks complain they aren’t able to add parameters to the end of Google SERP URLs anymore — such as &num=100 or &pws=0 — since Google Instant appeared on the scene. Fear not, it’s a simple matter of turning Google Instant off and URL parameters will work again.

I am sure you have heard a lot of talk about blogs and I am not just referring to the Gossip Blogs, I am referring to business blogging. A role a lot of businesses has taken on because of it multiple benefits. A blog plays a significant role in boosting your SEO, but it also helps to build relationships, establish yourself as an expert and keep people tuned in to your website that can lead to increase conversions and sales if executed effectively. Today I want to share the top five ways a blog helps to boost your SEO efforts

Automatic SEO – A blog can be configured to automatically optimize any content that you add. It is extremely search engine friend and it creates unique page urls.
Link Building – You create links several ways with a blog. If your blog posts are great, people will link to it, they will bookmark it, share it with a friend or with their social network. Secondly, when you create a blog, you link to other pages on your website that directly relates to the blog post.
Keyword Tags – When you create a blog post, you can add as many keyword tags to that blog as possible. Keep it related though for it to be effective.
Content – Search Engines love fresh content. This is probably one of the most important roles a blog plays; it allows you to easily add fresh content to your website. Even if it’s a couple paragraphs. Most importantly, blogs have plug-ins that automatically ping the search engines to let them know that your website has been updated, so that they can come back to crawl your website each time a post has been added.
Blog Comments – If visitors are commenting on your blog, most likely they will use keywords or keyword phrases that are related to the blog topic in the post that you may have or may not have used, which will increase your keyword density on the page, which in turn increases your chances of being found for that keyword
Get Found Online – Getting found online is a bonus from having a blog, so many people that I speak to, who don’t have seo, but has a business blog, is able to show up on search engines results, by using effective blogging tactics, such as included keywords that their target market will use to find them in the blog title and throughout the posting.