Brighton SEO

I’ve been looking at the quality of various outsourced articles and although it is cheap, the quality is mediocre. This can be changed with a few quick edits, which can make the content more valuable. This article’s topic is about agency versus inhouse SEO, and although makes a moderately interesting read, there are word count fillers such as “generally speaking” and “upper hand” which all help to bolster the length of the piece. I’m not sure of the validity of the piece either, most just seems to be conjuncture and opinion but hey, the true purpose of this article is just to keep the blog fresh. I added the h2 tags. Anyway.. let the article begin:

Finding the right SEO is essential for any business that relies heavily on online promotion to increase their revenue. Companies want to find the most efficient way to increase the relevance of their web page, make it more attractive to their consumer base, all while making sure that their page can be easily found through online search engines and indexing softwares. The question is, do you hire an agency SEO or do you opt for your own in-house SEO? We can compare an agency SEO and the in-house SEO so we can make our decision:

Agencies have a greater understanding of the SEO industry

• Though agency SEO specialists are not entirely focused on one single field like the in-house SEO, they do have much more experience when it comes to spotting algorithm shifts, such as the panda and farmer updates, new market trends among different websites, and seasonal trends within the client’s specific market. Agencies also tend to have a better comprehensive view of the overall SEO industry and can track both a competitor’s and a client’s search engine rankings using such tools as SEOMoz, WebCEO, Raven or SEObook’s rank checker.

Agency SEOs are more experienced

• Setting up an in-house SEO can be difficult if business owners are unsure as to what types of skills they should be looking for when hiring. Do they require commercial soft skills, or hardcore technical programming skills? When seeking out an in-house SEO team, business owners need to learn extensive knowledge about digital marketing, and allocate time in familiarizing themselves with their competitors, Google insights and trends, ranking and analytics data before they can make their decision. By directly outsourcing their SEO needs through an agency, business owners will be able to save time and unnecessary effort.

Greater Return on Investment

• It is always best to bear in mind business expenses when deciding on the right SEO. Generally speaking, it is much more cost-effective to hire an agency SEO, rather than an in-house SEO. With agency SEO, companies will be able to get their hands on the maximum resources and desired services, all under one single fee. An in-house SEO, however, requires the business owners to put out money for both services, as well as the costs of the necessary supplies.

SEO Testimonials

• One of the advantages of an agency SEO is that business owners have the ability to look into the agency before making a decision. They can research the agency’s prior track record, look into their success rates, and overview testimonials before choosing the right SEO. Directly hiring an in-house SEO could pose as a risk for business owners, since they are less experienced, and cannot always guarantee high success rates. In the end, leaving your SEO project in the hands of a professional is the better option. Agency SEO services are much more reputable and reliable, and definitely have the upper hand when it comes to experience.

Just having a look at the upcoming SEO conferences and can’t believe the cost of some of these conferences. Nearly one and a half grand for an all access pass at SES London, which, seeing as SEO is learnt from the internet, the price tag seems a little bit steep - my broadband is little more than 30 quid a month! I’ve been to a few of these, written speeches for some of the key note speakers, most of which is just knowledge gleamed from the internet. Check it out if you have money to burn. If not.. why not click on some the blogs and sites on the right hand side, you will learn just as much

The release of Google Search Plus has coincided with the release tomorrow of Facebook’s Open Graph Actions. The roll out of Search Plus Your World seems like Google is upping the anti by trying to force users onto Google + so it can get it’s hands on the valuable social data that Facebook possesses. As Microsoft (bing) and Facebook are expanding their partnership, the combination of bing’s search algorithms and facebook’s edgerank could potentially be a Google killer; which must the reason for the aggressive roll-out of Search Plus Your World.

This is also an incidental test to rank for a combination of the two keyword phrases.

Normally when starting a SEO campaign the client will require a preliminary research phase so the SEO can assess how hard or difficult the campaign is going to be. This will normally be comprised of:

Keyword Analysis
A thorough analysis of the keywords which are typed into the search engines to find the client website. Keywords will be carefully selected in order to attract relevant traffic through all of the major UK search engines.

Reports and analysis of these keywords should be communicated and selected before any site op-timisation work is carried out.

• Identifying keyword phrases specific to the target market.
• Analysis of each keyword against major SEO factors and competitiveness.
• Niche areas, levels of traffic and convertible phrases will be identified.

Then comes:

Competition Analysis
An analysis of competing websites for the keyword search terms selected during the keyword analysis will be conducted. This will provide us with a good guideline for phrases to target. For example some phrases might have steep competition, high proportion of links, high page rank, high number of websites with keyword and competing title tags. Once this has been assessed against the competition you can determine which keyword phrases to target.

• Identify the amount of keywords, titles, links and PageRank of competing websites.
• Provide a conversion sheet for keyword research to proportion ROI.

And finally Ranking Benchmark

• Provide a rundown of your website’s position in all major Search Engines, Google.com, Google.co.uk Yahoo & Bing.

Running an SEO agency can be time consuming, there’s clients to see, presentations to create, websites to audit, keywords to research, the list goes on. But I must remember to blog, these things are important you see, because if I didn’t blog about running a SEO agency how else would I get to the top of Google for such terms as SEO Brighton agency.

Still I’m looking forward to the next #Brightonseo meetup with the Brighton SEO community which should be fun. Kelvin at sitevisibilty has organised it so there should be lots of lovely presentations by various agencies, freshegg, propellernet icrossing and other grovvy seo marketing people.

To get in contact for seo services in Brighton please get in contact here. We create websites in Dreamweaver rather than bare bones text editors as to conform to Xml standards set by W3C. Using CSS for design and layout, we can use either tables to update the website or divs to aids the crawlablity of search engine spiders. Alternatively if you prefer to be able to update the website your self we can set up the website locally on your computer and design the website so you can alter it via your own WYSIWYG.

•    Creating keyword rich meta tags using SEO phrasing conventions
•    Create favicons so clients can see an icon of your website when they add you to your favourites
•    Use php includes so you can modify sections of your website dynamically rather than selectively i.e. headers footers and left and right hand navigation.
•    Use either a tabular or div system so you can either update your website using a WYSIWYG or code editor.
•    Create css systle sheets so you can apply style and classes such as cell padding, borders and header styles to elements.
•    Set you on the path to SEO glory with statistical data using extreme tracker, google webmaster tools, xml sitemaps, resource pages

When you are writing alt tags it is especially important to have your keyword phrase placed in these. Alt tags are little notices that appear when you mouse over an image. It’s a way of telling Google what the image is, so it can be referenced if anyone searches for an image. Your alt tag should be no longer than 3 words long and again should apply to that landing page, category and section. If I got my Motorola l6 page, I would want my pictures to apply to the Motorola L6 rather than just say mobile phones. If you do this your content will be more specific and reflect the content of that page. This way Google will know that you are building a website with good information architecture and a structure that reflects both the navigation and the way the website is internally linked. These will look like: <img src=http://www.awebsite.com/wherevermyimageis.jpg alt=”Motorola l6”>

Link Title Tags

Some people don’t really like using title tags because they can look ugly. When someone mouses over a link and the link comes up with a little notice that says what the link is, it can appear unnecessary to the user, because the link already tells them what the link is. However, it can be a good idea to add title tags for SEO. It’s another piece of additional content which all goes towards building your website. They are also pretty handy because the same keyword phrase can be copy and pasted into the links quickly and easily. These will look like:<a href=”http://www.websitelink.com” title=”Motorola l6”>

SEO Prior to Development:

SEO needs to be considered before development, because there can often be problems which need to be reverse engineered once the website has been built. Developing a website is much like building a house, imagine if you didn’t lay the foundations before you built the house. The houses will either have to be rebuilt or will collapse if you leave it.

SEO is usually an afterthought, because clients mistakenly assume that Search Engine rankings are based on:

•    The amount of times someone clicks on a website
•    Adding ‘SEO’ code

There is no relation between the amount of time someone clicks on a website and where it ranks in Google. If this were the case, all you would need to get high up in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) would be an army of people clicking on your website. Secondly that SEO can be done to a website by adding SEO code. There is no secret to SEO, really all SEO means is, making a website that Google (or any other Search Engine) can understand, which in other words just means making a good website.

Google ranks websites in three major ways, the better (or more) you do each one the further you will get up in Google.

•    Lots of unique content.
•    Well-written metadata.
•    Lots of backlinks to your site.

Clients require websites that are designed well - they want high customer conversion, retention, brand visibility and a pleasant shop face. This often leads to clients spending a large proportion of the build time, on the way a site looks and feels and less time, considering how design or programming elements will affect SEO. Because design is subjective it can tend to take up a large proportion of the build process and development can often take longer than is expected, due to testing, extra functionality, SEO is often left as an afterthought, once the website has been made.

Once the website has been created, it looks good and it goes live, for many clients this will be the first time they consider SEO. This normally comes at the end of the process, however this is the most crucial aspect of the web build. SEO has to be considered during the build otherwise the SEO will have to liaise with the developer in an attempt to reverse engineer the website.

There may be many aspects of programming or development, which are conducive to the demands of the development brief, but not conducive to demands of the SEO. Because SEO is a speciality in itself, the developer and designer may over look important SEO requirements. Here are some of the main examples of web build, which can affect SEO.

•    Website written either entirely or has large chunks written in flash. Flash is a type of programming that allows you to create animations and interactive games. It often looks great but Search Engine Spiders can’t read flash.
•    Dynamic URLs. Search Engines can follow short dynamic URLs
http://www.mysite.com/?something=type but after a specific number of variable strings (e.g.: ? & =). Search Engines will no longer follow these URLs and index the content on these pages.
•    Creating important text navigation links on a flattened gif.
•    Burying important body content towards the end of the page, due to the way the mark-up has been constructed.
•    Using AJAX menus.
•    Using complex JavaScript links.
•    Overusing inline CSS styles.
•    Duplicating dynamic URLs.
•    Duplicating content.
•    Not blocking site from Search Engines prior to going live.
•    Not blocking proportions of the site that are duplicated content.
•    Placing content in Iframes.
•    Using unoptimised images.
•    Using unoptimised alt tags.
•    Generating generic Meta data with specific keywords for dynamic websites. Meta data are a series of html tags at the top of a webpage that tell a search engine what the webpage is about.

<title>This is my webpage!</title>

It will appear as the words in the blue bar in your browser. A dynamic site might be created in such a way where it is not possible to generate the title tags for specific subsections of the site. The site may be divided up into different sections which make it easier to program. However after keyword analysis or competitor analysis has been performed, we may want to divide up these subsections in a different way to how the programmer has.

For example imagine I have a site that sells widgets. Widgets come in type A, type B, type C, type D. The programmer or developer has divided the website up into sections by type. Now it comes to keyword research and competitor analysis and the SEO discovers that no one actually searches for widgets by type A, B, C, D but by colour, Red, Blue, Yellow, and Green. However all these different colours and mixed in with type. E.g. type A has blue and green - type B; Blue, yellow, green – type C; red, green – type D; red, blue, yellow, green. Now because the way the website has been made, the SEO is stuck with creating Meta tags that refer to sections by type, rather than what he wants to do - by colour. Consequently he is stuck with a less than ideal optimisation without reverse engineering the site.
•    Placing whole sections in tables. Generally it is better to place elements within divs rather than tables as these are followed / scanned easily.

In summary:

It’s OK having a website that looks great and works fine, but organic listings are one of the most important revenue streams as well as lending to brand trust and integrity. Subsequently, SEO should be considered prior to design and build.