Now, I don’t mean this to be mindless self-promotion (although it all helps of course!), but more of an attempt to get some SME’s to think a little more logically about the management of their Adwords campaigns with a short example.

A small trader with a new e-commerce store came to me recently for a quote on managing his Adwords campaign. His store is a (very nicely designed) niche online gift store and he had been managing his own campaign with little success in terms of sales and he had got to that point (that I see very often) where his CTR was almost non-existent, his quality score was poor and his click prices had gone through the roof. His adgroups (and keyphrases) were illogical, his ad-copy all wrong, etc, etc…

His average cost per click was 37p and most of those were not targeted correctly. Suffice to say, he had no REAL idea as to how it was performing other than to say his sales were non-existent.

In short, it was a mess.

Anyway, when I first spoke to him on the phone, in the first minute he said the words that I never, ever, ever understand.

He said something like… ‘well the problem I have now is that I can’t afford to spend much on Adwords’.

Hmmm…

To that I said what I normally say…

[me] ‘OK… well, if you could find a way of buying 50 pence for 40 pence would you do it’?

[him] Err… yes… obviously…

[me] ‘And how much could you afford to spend on doing this?’

[him] *Laughs* – as much as i could buy…’

The Point? Well, if an Adwords campaign is correctly managed, this is possible, and in his case, is actually doing so. Less than 3 months on, his average click price is 24p, but, and here’s the killer part, we know that, on average, EVERY click is making him a profit.

How? Firstly, it’s about knowing how to manage an Adwords campaign (obviously), but less obviously, it is about measuring the performance of your ads and doing so constantly. You can use Google Analytcis to tell you exactly what return in terms of revenue each click gives and so once you have done this, you can see what a click is worth, and if you see what a click is worth, you know how much you will pay. After sufficient testing, If you know that a click on a certain keyword, consistenly results in an average profit of 50p per click, then you know what to pay up to.

So, in summary, if you are inexperienced with Adwords and need a single piece of advice, make very sure that you have installed Analytics and that you KNOW how to measure your campaigns performance.

It can be just like ‘buying profit’.

Building links is an important means to running a successful website. Incoming links improve your relationship with Google and influence your placement amongst the search engine results pages (SERPS). After you have exhausted any directories and other submission-type links with value, the next step is to begin building relationships with other websites in an attempt to earn yourself links. Below I have outlined nine top tips for writing link building e-mails.

1. Spend time targeting your desired audience
Begin by compiling a list of potential targets that you believe you could either negotiate a link from or who you believe you can offer something of value. Do not mass e-mail or spam people, it is important to research and contact other companies that are related or would have a reason to want to link to you. Consider bloggers – if you have interesting information or value to offer them, this could lead to them linking to you.

2. Keep your email short and sweet
Do not make your e-mail a daunting task to read or it will end up straight in the Trash. Get to the point and include only vital information and you stand more chance of your recipient actually reading it. Whether they reply is another matter, but getting them to read it is the first successful step.

3. Key information – who/why/what
Begin your e-mail by introducing yourself as a person rather than a company, and move quickly to informing them with why you are contacting them and what you propose.

4. Write the email with a personal touch
Try beginning your letter by describing why you like their site and use their names if you know who you’re writing to. It is important to the recipient that it does not feel mass produced and batch e-mailed as a personally written e-mail is much more likely to survive the trash. Mention individual content they have produced to personalise further.

5. Don’t ask for anything at first
If you go straight in asking for a link without offering anything first, the only thing you’ll get back may be an impolite response suggesting you do not contact them again. Instead suggest/offer something, such as interesting or related content or offer to write some unique content for them in the form of articles or blog posts. Also, iff you can generate interesting material, ultimately people will want to link to it.

6. Sign the e-mail off
Finish your e-mail off with your full name, contact details (including phone number) and company address as this looks much more professional, and gives greater credibility.

7. Be flexible
Be prepared to offer more than you originally offered. The person may come back to you with a slightly different proposition that you originally had not enquired about. However, if you are serious about securing links from external sources then you may need to meet them half way.

8. Build on your relationships
If you have successfully had a positive response, ensure that you continue to build on that relationship as this may help develop more links in the future.

9. Do not give up (but do not harass)
Try offering a product that they could review, or offer a product as a prize that could be presented as part of a competition on your targets website. This could lead to you ensuring a link on your targets homepage.

Right, now you are fully equipped to start building contacts with other websites.

Go get your writing hat on and good luck…

Keyword Research

Spending time researching which keywords to target for SEO purposes is imperative to the long-term success of any search marketing campaign, and yet it never fails to amaze me:

1. How few online businesses actually allocate time and resources to doing it
   
2. How misguided the research and subsequent results can be
   
3. How companies often ignore the ‘goldmine’ of existing data at their fingertips.

I would like to concentrate on (3).

We find that many of the companies who come to us for SEO advice and services have already embarked on some kind of Pay Per Click campaign, whether it be through Google Adwords or some of the other click providers. Adwords in particular gives the advertiser a wealth of information at keyword-level, including search volume, click through rates, the value of clicks and the earnings per click for individual keywords. So why not use this data and integrate it with your keyword research?

Essentially, keyword research should be used to identify viable target keywords based on:

• Search volume
  
• Relative competition
  
• Relevancy
  
• Commercial viability

Well a successful Adwords campaign can tell you the EXACT number of page views on the Google listings a search term will receive, and it enables you to spot and nurture the ‘golden’ keywords – those that convert and give you the greatest return.

So, use this data! Remember that keyword research and Pay Per Click data are not mutually-exclusive concepts and delve into those PPC stats to find the clues. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes!

I read a lot of SEO blogs and forums and it never fails to amaze me how the same, fundamental basic SEO questions crop up time and time again, and the same old advice is wheeled out, rinsed, and then wheeled out again. And then when that is finished, it is wheeled out again for good measure.

So, I thought I would compile the 10 most common SEO questions, and issues we come up against when assessing client’s websites.

• 1. URL’s and Duplicate Content: Do you have both a www version of your web pages AND a non-www version of your web pages? If so, Google sees these as 2 separate pages (the www version is effectively a sub-domain) and may determine either version as duplicate content. Also, natural incoming links may pass juice to either version of your page rather than a single one, diluting your incoming ‘link juice’.

• 2. Internal Links and Duplicate Content: Does any part of your internal page navigation link to a duplicate version of another page? The most common scenario here would be that your home page URL is ‘www.monkeyheadfood.com’ but your internal navigation points to ‘www.monkeyheadfood.com/index.html’ (or similar) which serves the same content. This also leads to duplicate content issues and the potential for incoming links to be split between the different versions.

• 3. Poor Keyword Selection: I think it was Darth Vader who said ‘the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant compared to the power of keyword research‘. Something like that anyway. All websites, new, old, good, bad and ugly, need to have conducted a full keyword research otherwise you are indulging in the webmaster equivalent of trying to nail jelly to a wall. If you haven’t produced a full keyword research document (or had one prepared for you) how on earth do you know what to target? How do you know where the search volume is? How do you know which keywords you actually have a chance of ranking highly for? You get my point.

• 4. Ignoring The ‘SEO Spine’: I have just made ‘SEO Spine’ up. Impressive little term, eh? Ok – I will move on. By ‘SEO Spine’, I am referring to your on-page keyword targeting. Ideally, your page should have your target keyword in the URL, the title, the heading tag, and the content, creating a ‘spine’ (but don’t over-do it and spam keywords). Can you see what I did there?

• 5. Images (only) For Navigation: The main search engines are still in kindergarten when it comes to reading text on images. They just aren’t very good at it. So, you should not be using images for navigation because you wont receive the positive ranking score from your anchor text, (which can be very valuable).

• 6. Title Tag Suicide: Your title tag is the ‘pocket dynamite’ of your web page. There isn’t a stronger signal of relevancy and Google loves to allocate bucket-loads of value to them. So, read this post about SEO and Title Tags now!

• 7. Unfriendly URL’s: Although the search engines can index ‘unfriendly’ dynamic URL’s these days, they still prefer the static versions of the same. I can tell you, for example, that Google certainly DOES prefer static URLs to their dynamic buddies. Perhaps more importantly, having keywords in the URL will increase your click-through-rate from the search engines as they appear in bold in the displayed listings.

• 8. Poor Site Architecture: Your website should be as ‘flat’ as possible to minimise the number of clicks from your home page to any other page (without using a search box). If you have less than 10,000 pages then you should, ideally, be able to reach any other page within 3 clicks.

• 9. Sub-Domains Not Sub-Directories: Google has changed the way it looks at sub domains and so, these days, it is much more beneficial to add any additional content (e.g a blog or an ecommerce facility) in a sub-directory. Reading reference: SEO Sub-Domains

• 10. Link Building:  We love link building. However, it seems that many webmasters don’t! A web page’s inbound link profile is the most important signal to Google when determining a pages trust and authority, which in turn, helps determine rankinings.We all-too-often see either very few links, or the worst set of spammy links since spam was invented in the world, ever, ever, ever. You need to build quality links, and when you have finished, you need to build some more.

Looking for a competitive SEO and/or link building quote? Contact us now!

Recently, I caught up with Kirsty McCubbin from Affiliate Stuff, a leading UK affiliate (now residing in the land of OZ), internet marketer, and all round good-egg. Lovely as Kirsty is, she agreed to a short interview relating to her dealings as an affiliate.

Kirsty McCubbin - Affiliate Blogger Of The Year

Here is the interview in full…

Welcome to the Webtistic blog. Please introduce yourself, and tell me how long you have been involved in affiliate marketing.

Ooh, it’s like affiliate Blind Date! Hi Cilla, my name’s Kirsty McCubbin and I’ve been a full time affiliate for 8 years but was first involved in the industry on the management side of things I think maybe 1 to 2 years before that. It’s so long ago now I don’t quite remember.

Are you able to disclose your main projects, and the traffic channels you work within?

My main areas of promotion are underwear through two sites, LingerieBrands.co.uk and BlokesUndies.co.uk. Those two are largely organic search with an almost insignificant smattering of PPC here and there.

Which of your achievements within affiliate marketing are you most proud of?

Still being here after 8 years. It’s not always easy being an affiliate when Google is throwing everything it’s got at you, we’ve all had to evolve so much in the last few years and the learning curve just gets steeper all the time. So long as I’m keeping up, and broadly understanding the flurries of new things we need to deploy to remain in healthy SERPS positions I think I’m doing A-OK!

How long was it before you realised that you could earn a living from affiliate marketing?

As soon as I found out about the concept of affiliate marketing I was immediately excited. Already working in digital marketing I knew how to generate good traffic for other people, but not how I could do it for myself without opening an online business. Within a few months I’d put up some test pages and was totally hooked. I left my digital marketing job about a year later in 2003 and my life has been totally affiliate funded ever since. I doubt I could get a job doing anything else now – if I was an actor I’d have dreadful typecasting problems!

What projects are you currently working on?

My main brain drain right now is dealing with some Panda issues on one of my sites. It’s been quite badly affected but I’m pleased to say I’ve worked out what needs to be done and I’m well into actioning it and am seeing pleasing results. It’s going to take a while to get it back to full strength but as always with these things it’ll be worth it in the long run. Alas I don’t believe there’s a quick fix for that particular bit of algo fun but I know I’ll have stronger sites in the longer term because of it.

What is the best thing about being an affiliate marketer?

The flexibility and being able to make more money than you could in a standard 9 to 5 gig. That aside, I love all the challenges, constant learning, and the great variation in the tasks you perform to keep your business running. It’s never dull. Sometimes stressful but I’ve never gotten bored and that can only be a positive thing!

What is the worst thing about being an affiliate marketer?

Those little surprises from a Googleward direction and the odd bit of unpredictability of income as a result of that and other factors such as merchants suddenly going bust or deciding not to pay you. That said, it’s the best feeling in the world when you get on top of these issues and beat them so even the bad times have their positive side (eventually!!)

If you had a time-machine, what would you do differently?

I’d have bought lots of generic keyword domains back in 1999 when I first got my job. I’d also have started a good quality content site right at the start of my career instead of spending so long mucking around with PPC. I’d also have bought those Google shares when I had the chance instead of worrying about making too big a dent in my beer money for a holiday

What do you do for fun outside of affiliate marketing?

Well I do love a bit of travel! Most recently I did a nice little jolly to NZ’s South Island and it was absolutely breathtaking. I also like cooking and gardening – domestic bliss or what eh??

Do you have any advice for people looking to get into affiliate marketing?

It’s hard work, there are no shortcuts, if it sounds to good to be true it probably is – remember that when someone tries to sell you something. Above all, create quality content and a resource that people will find interesting and useful and you should be OK. Easy huh…

I would like to thank Kirsty for taking the time to answer these questions. If you are interested in providing an internet marketing related interview, please feel free to contact us.

Google introduced Sitemaps back in 2005 in order to give site owners the ability to inform them of the pages within their site that were available for crawling or had been modified and needed re-visiting. Before Sitemaps, search engines required you to manually submit your site to them relying on their ability to crawl and discover the entire site in order for indexing. This had its short-falls, as some sites are hugely dynamic and therefore it was difficult for Google to find all the pages on the site and keep their cached versions up to date.

A Sitemap is configured in the form of an XML file, and its primary use is to list all the webpages you want to be indexed by the search engines. However they can be used to encase more information such as when a page was last updated, its importance and how often it changes. This can be vital for SEO purposes as it informs Google how often to re-visit a site and shows it which pages have changed. In order to specify which pages you do not want indexed you must do this in the robots.txt.

Sitemaps are particularly useful for larger websites that may contain a large collection of categories with many internal links that delve deep into the architectural structure of the site that the spider may overlook. By having a Sitemap, the Google robots can basically arrive to your site and know exactly what it needs to look at and where to find it. Don’t forget, in some cases the Google spiders/robots may not visit your site regularly so make the most of it when they are there. The less time the robots are looking for pages on your site, the more time they can spend retrieving useful information and indexing the necessary pages.

Image Credit: http://www.dataplex-systems.com/SiteMap.html

In some cases a Sitemap will not make a lot of difference to the discovery and indexing of your site if it is small and does not contain a lot of dynamic pages. It most certainly will not do any harm though and it is good practice to submit a Sitemap to the search engines.

A Sitemaps location is very important as it determines what can be included in the Sitemap. For example, if the Sitemap is located at http://example.com/images/sitemap.xml, then the Sitemap can include all webpages starting with http://example.com/images/. If the Sitemap is located at http://example.com/sitemap.xml, then it can include all pages on the host. Note that if it is located here, then it cannot include pages from http://subdomain.example.com/. Therefore it is highly recommended that you place your Sitemap on your root domain, unless you require different Sitemaps for different paths. It can also be included in the robots.txt in order for the crawlers to find it easily.

XML files should be UTF-8 encoded and this can usually be done when saving the document. Below are listed the valid XML tags used to make a working Sitemap accompanied by a definition to explain what each one does.

XML Tag Definitions

Attribute                 Description

<urlset>      required This is the root element of a sitemap file
                          and contains all individual <url> tags.

<url>         required    This is the storage container for an individual
                          URL within a Sitemap, and also contains the
                          <loc>, <lastmod>,<changefreq> and <priority>
                          tags.

<loc>         required    This contains the location of the URL on a sitemap.

<lastmod>     optional    This tag stores the date that the page was last
                          modified. Formatted as such: YYYY-MM-DDT00:00+00:0.
                          With or without the ‘T00:00+00:0’ where the ‘+00:0’
                          denotes the Time Zone Difference.

<changefreq>  optional    This element acts as an indicator to the search
                          engine for how often the page in question is
                          updated. Note that it does not have any influence
                          on the search engines likeliness to crawl your
                          page. Valid values are:
                            - always
                            - hourly
                            - daily
                            - weekly
                            - monthly
                            - yearly
                            - never

<priority>    optional    This value gives the search engines an idea as to
                          how important you think this page is relative to
                          other pages on your site. The default value if this
                          is not set is 0.5 and valid values can range from
                          0.0-1.0. Note that this serves only as a hint to
                          the search engine as to how you value the page in
                          question, and will not affect the performance of
                          a page in the search engine results.

Now that you know what the tags are, below is an example of what a Sitemap will look like when these tags are put into practice.

Example XML Sitemap

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

   <url>

      <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>

      <lastmod>2010-12-23</lastmod>

      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>

      <priority>0.8</priority>

   </url>

   <url>

      <loc>http://www.example.com/blog/</loc>

      <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>

   </url>

   <url>

      <loc>http://www.example.com/articles/2009/</loc>

      <lastmod>2009-12-29</lastmod>

      <changefreq>never</changefreq>

   </url>

   <url>

      <loc>http://www.example.com/directory/</loc>

      <lastmod>2010-11-15T18:00:15+00:00</lastmod>

      <priority>0.3</priority>

   </url>

   <url>

      <loc>http://www.example.com/about </loc>

      <lastmod>2009-10-28</lastmod>

   </url>

</urlset>

Whilst the Google bot is extremely intelligent, and will probably cope without you having a Sitemap, we recommend you create and submit one anyway. Firstly, it is good practice and is necessary if the website is continuously changing and growing. Secondly, if you manually submit it using the Google webmaster tools, you will know if your Sitemap was processed without any problems and you can get additional statistics about your site.

You can run a Sitemap generator which will create your Sitemap by crawling your site and providing you with a downloadable file which you can then put in your root folder on your server before uploading to Google. Check one out here.

Have fun, and Merry Sitemapping and a Happy New Year!

Introduction:
Welcome to the Webtistic walkthrough of our new Competition Keyword Tool. This introduction will give you a short walkthrough and a bit of an insight into just how powerful the new keyword tool is, and how you can use it to benefit your business.
-What is the Keyword Tool.
-How Does it Work?
-Importance of a Keyword.
-The Tool in Action.
-Video Tutorial.

Use the Tool

- What is the Webtistic Competition Keyword Tool.

Regular readers of our blog might remember that we launched our debut SEO tool recently in the form of the Webtistic Keyword Competition Tool.
The purpose of this tool was to do what we felt have been severely lacking in the SEO community for some time ( in a format that did everything we wanted it to.)

By developing this tool ourselves we managed to plug the gap that we feel has existed for some time, and we thought that, we can’t be the only people looking for a tool such as this, and so here, for your enjoyment is the Webtistic Keyword Competition tool.

The following blog post will give you a short walkthrough on how to use the tool, as well as offering a guide to the tools finer points, and some usability tips seeing as it is still being worked on.

So, without further ado, follow me down into the exciting world of keyword competition.

Here we have the main keyword page, this is after we have input our criteria and let the tool loose on the web.

The tool allows you to research up to 10 different keywords at any one time, and the results you get back are filtered,  so the top result ranking for that keyword shows up first, with the following 9 below them.

The keyword tool we have developed is designed to take the effort out of a task that SEO’s need to be doing on a daily basis. The tool is available from our site for free at present and it, as well as the other tools we will be launching are all still in a testing stage.

How Does it Work?

That’s a very good question…. It utilises a homemade algorithm that is designed to take into account ratings from other online optimisation tools and from that, generate its own
difficulty rating that it publishes on the results page, as you can see to the right.

By tying together many on and off page statistics, our tool can provide a genuine and accurate reading of difficulty.

Our optimisation tool looks at data such as whether or not the site ranks on yahoo and other search engines, in addition, it looks at:

Whether the site is on Dmoz
If the keyword features in the root domain,
whether it’s in the title, description or H1 tag.

The page authority of the site, the domain authority, and the domain age.

Our tool also takes into account a site’s pagerank, despite this not having been updated in some time and despite the fact it’s being deprecated it is still relied on by many webmasters and SEO’s as a useful indicator.

Importance of a Keyword.

So, ok, you have the tool, you’re prepared to watch our tutorial video and you’ve got your coffee ready for the visual walkthrough. But Why?

Why is your choice of keyword so important? Why should you spend so much time and effort choosing the right keywords for your site?

Keywords form the very basis from which your site will grow, they can be generic, or very specifically targeted. The trick is to identify a relatively small set of keywords that offer you the highest possible amount of traffic, for the smallest possible difficulty. Your keywords need to be relevant, and suitable for your site. They need to cover the main terms that your target audience actually search for. There’s no point in using ‘phones’ as you’re keyword if you sell cakes.

On a similar note, it is probably not worth using phones as your keyword even if you DO sell phones, unless you’re a large corporation. Keywords need to offset how difficult it will be to rank them, with the amount of monthly traffic they’re going to generate.

If you’re a new company, and your main keyword has a local monthly search of 30,000 but a difficulty of 95% – it’s really not worth the effort to try to rank, not until you’ve built up enough authority to try and challenge those who are pushing that difficulty up.

We made a blog post on the importance of keyword research some time ago, that can be found at: Keyword Research

Keywords form the very basis from which your site will grow, they can be generic, or very specifically targeted. The trick is to identify a relatively small set of keywords that offer you the highest possible amount of traffic, for the smallest possible difficulty.

The beauty of our tool is you can search and sort through hundreds of potential keywords to find those which offer you the best chance of ranking highly.

When you’re choosing your keywords, don’t neglect the difference between a singular version of a word and plurals. In addition, variations and slight mispelling’s can all work in your favour. Not everyone on the internet has a PHD or three.

Once you have begun to identify the keywords you want to try, our tool can really come into it’s own, allowing you to put in up to 10 keywords at a time, and get an accurate set of targeted results at the end of the search.

The Tool in Action.

The following annotated pictures give you a brief overview of the tool, and the video below them shows the entire process.

The homepage of the keyword tool is set up very simply. You have the main keyword box on the left, with the example entries for ‘templates’ and ‘free templates’. The right hand side of the screen only shows the search target where you can decide where you want your search terms to originate from, and below that the process button.

Once you’ve selected the keyword(s) you want to look up, and after you’ve selected the country you’re looking for, the process button starts the tool working.
Be patient at this point, it does take some time, but it gets there.

Once the tool has finished loading your results it will automatically take you to the results page giving you the analysis of your chosen keywords.

So, here we are, the results screen is set up to give you the maximum amount of information in an easy to understand and clear manner.

You can easily see the top 10 websites ranking for that keyword, and, within the same section you can also see some essential information such as the sites pagerank, it’s page and domain authority as well as the domain age for the site.

All the factors that are displayed on the results page contribute to the keywords difficulty rating which is displayed clearly on the far right hand side of the results page.

In addition to the factors already mentioned, the results page also analyses the pages that rank top for the keyword you’ve searched for, it looks for the keyword you entered in several on page factors, including: the root domain, page title, description and H1 tag.

These are shown positively or negatively, represented by ticks or crosses respectively…. as shown above.

Once all these results have been collated, the algorithm generates a difficulty rating that we believe to be truely accurate based on the search term, and displayed below the difficulty is a short description, telling you what that difficulty rating means.

At the bottom of the page is the restart button and next to that, the option to export your results to a format you can save them in. The file exports as a .csv for Microsoft excel, but this can be opened in whatever spreadsheet program you wish to use.

And thus ends the picture tutorial, if you still want to see it in action then the video below will give you a short noted walkthrough.

Otherwise, I thank you for reading, enjoy using the new Webtistic Keyword Competition tool and watch this space for news of other new tools we have in the works, and, as always, any feedback is greatly appreciated.

A lot of time and money can be put into the design and development of a company’s website as they move into the daunting world of online retailing. Of course nowadays, especially given the weather Britain has encountered recently which has prevented people venturing to the high streets, you really need to be online if you want to compete with your competition.

So you have bought your desired domain name, you have designed (or paid for) your website and it has just gone live as you launch the site that is either going to earn you your crust or is a bit of fun/provides some kind of helpful service to others. Let’s assume this is your shiny new portal to online sales, you now need people visiting your site. There are various ways of boosting traffic to your site as blogged about here. There are, however, some easy ways of finding such places as free and paid directories to begin spreading the word about your new site.

If you are a regular reader of these blogs, you will know that ‘Link Building’ is a powerful method of building your reputation with Google, whilst trying to avoid places such as link farms and link exchanging. So where do you start trying to find free or even paid directories where you can submit them your site?

Google! (Or your preferred search engine )

The power of Google is often underestimated and a bit like Photoshop or an Android mobile phone, you may be comfortable using it but deep down you know it can do more, it’s just being informed of its capabilities. That’s why we are here to help!

Search engines have been around long enough now that most people know that you can search using +, -, OR and “quotation marks”. However there is more to searching than this, so make the most of it. Below is a list of search operators that are useful for finding potential  link targets or directories that you can submit your site to.

Combinations you can use in order to find directories:

keyword + “suggest url”

keyword + “suggest a url”

keyword + “submit a site”

keyword + “submit your site”

keyword + “add a url”

keyword + “add a site”

keyword + “add listing”

keyword + “add your listing”

keyword + “submit a listing”

keyword + “submit listing”

keyword + “submit your website”

These search terms are identifying websites containing the keyword and are primarily directory submission sites.

As you can see you need to conduct your search, exploring every combination when identifying directory submission sites. This can be a timely exercise, but can be performed by anyone and provided you stick to free directories, this method costs you nothing more than the time you invest into it.

So there you have it, link building can be made easy by the use of Google’s powerful search capabilities. Just be sure to have a quick look at our blog about Google’s penalties to refresh yourself with the potential dangers of embarking on an aggressive link building campaign over a short period of time.

Robots, also known as web spiders, crawlers, or many other variations of insect, are a form of automated web programming that goes from website to website, mapping and gathering data.

They can have many different uses, from the obvious legal methods of web indexing and search engine development (which I will be talking more about later), but they are also used by less scrupulous technical minds to gather data such as email addresses, and other personal information that can be sold to agencies for spam emails, and can be a facilitator for fraud and identity theft.

The Standard for robot exclusion was defined on the 30^th June 1994 by the majority of robot authors and other people with an interest. Though this was launched as a standard, it isn’t backed by any official body and there is no regulation that a robot must adhere to the rules in the txt file, so some robots may ignore the txt file, regardless of what you put in it.

Robots.txt can be used to direct the flow of these automated scripts around one’s website. They can direct the robot to avoid a page, a subdomain, or an entire site altogether. It is important to note however that whilst a robot may avoid a page, the page, and the robots.txt file is still public, so it is not a good idea to use the robots.txt to hide data.

Robots.txt is an essential tool for anyone who is looking to optimise website ‘crawling’. Whether you create your own .txt file, or whether you have a professional company do it for you, ensuring that the flow of the robots is adequately controlled is essential.

The structure of a robots.txt is very simple, but if it’s not done correctly the robots will simply ignore it.

The example below shows a robots.txt that tells all robots to ignore the entire site. If you want to add reminders for yourself as to what your specific commands refer to, you can use a ‘#’ at the start of a line to denote a comment.

The next example below tells robots to ignore any pages that start with ‘/fried chicken/’ and also shows how the comments tag can be used.

You can also use the ‘User-agent’ command to tell robots to avoid a page or domain, while at the same time, telling a specific robot to ignore that command, this is particularly useful if you have your own robot that you want to trawl a page or subdomain but you would rather it were ignored by other robots, the below example shows this.

When we start to talk about robots and SEO, the advantages of being able to tell a search engine spider to avoid a specific page or set of pages are quite clear.

If your site has a log in page, or a contact us page that doesn’t add value to the site and doesn’t require indexing by a search engine then it is more beneficial for your site for you to tell the spiders to ignore those pages, which will, in turn, allow the spiders to use their ‘crawl quota’ on pages of higher value.

So when you’re looking to make the most of this very simple tool, you need to remember a couple of simple rules.

• You only want the robots to index the pages on your site that add value.
• If you don’t want your customers visiting a page, you probably don’t want robots going there either.
• Remember that any page, on your site that isn’t adding value as it’s crawled, is consuming ‘crawl quota’ that could be going somewhere more worthwhile.

Ensure that you can create even a simple robots.txt to tell the search engines where to look, and you could notice a marked improvement in the value of your site.

I’ve pulled together a few of our favourite tools that we have found to improve efficiency within our team over the past 6 months. Some of these tools have enabled us to save many man hours that we would usually be lost from day to day, most of these tools are free to use with some having limitations dependant on the type of use.

Toggl, The Online Time Tracking Tool

Dave, the MD at Webtistic discovered Toggl a few months ago and we have found it to be a fab tool for tracking the time spent of designated tasks and for improving the overall effiency of the team. We downloaded and installed the Toggl Desktop software free version but there are paid plans available with more advanced features.

In a busy, thriving office environment where you’re multitasking it’s difficult to recall exactly how long you spent on a specific task such as taking telephone calls or answering an urgent email but with Toggl you are able to create individual tasks and switch easily between them, thus enabling the ability to track everything with a single click. You can then view various charts online and interpret the data in the ways you wish. We have found to be very useful in informing our weekly meetings

We have found it a great tool for tracking the time spent on SEO milestones. This enables us to accurately and confidently invoice SEO clients on a monthly basis thus eleveating the worry that wasted time or interruptions don’t become part of the client’s invoice.

Through Toggl, all the time spent on various daily tasks are monitored. This should then provide the basis for improved productivity as you can go on to analyse exactly where time is being spent and where you can allocate time more efficiently.

Toggl is also available as an application on smart phones such as Android and iPhones downloadable from the iTunes store or Android Market Place. It’s also available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Ease of use 8/10
Time saving 9/10
Making efficient use of your team 10/10

Dropbox, Simple Tool To Share, Store And Sync Files Online

Dropbox has been installed on our desktops as a way for us to easily share and update files that are used within our office on a daily basis. The contents of the Dropbox folder automatically synchronises between everyone in the office. This eradicates the mundane task of emailing files to each other for updating and checking and allows for a single copy to be stored that can be edited, accessed and saved by everyone remotely on the Dropbox server. You might be thinking, ‘What if I delete a file by accident?’. Well, you can undelete files by logging in to the Dropbox site where you can also view changes to documents that have previously been edited.

For us Dropbox has cut out the need for sending documents internally via email and the fact we can can all edit the one document stored on the Dropbox server is proving to be a great efficient tool for us. I’m pretty sure the standard free 2 GB storage allowance is adequate for the majority of smaller set-ups but this obviously depends on the file types that are being stored on the server. Dropbox runs in the background on your desktop and simply works like any other folder saved.

Ease of use 8/10
Time saving 7/10
Making efficient use of your team 8/10

TeamViewer

TeamViewer simply allows you to take control of another computer so it enables you to remotely control a client’s computer to give them a tutorial, presentation or to assist with a technical enquiry.

Taking control of another PC is straight forward as no software installation is required as long as you run the application on both sides. We also had no problem with firewalls blocking the application unlike other similar applications.

In addition you can transfer files using the drag and drop functionality. Dragging a file to a partner’s screen during a remote support session will automatically initiate a file transfer, placing the file on the user’s desktop.

TeamViewer is available on Windows, Mac, Linux and as a Mobile Application and we are currently trialling this free for personal use to decide if it will enhance the support we offer our clients. The early signs are that this could potentially save an incredible amount of time with regards to solving client’s technical problems.

Ease of use 8/10
Time saving 10/10
Making efficient use of your team 6/10

Google Calendar

Google calendar is available for free and enables you to set up a calendar for your business and can be shared with each member of the team. This enables you to keep track of meetings, deadlines, scheduled telephone calls and various other events. You are able to assign different colours to staff so that you can differentiate who is responsible for carrying out a specific event or task at any given time.

If you’re organising a special event, the calendar enables you to invite colleagues to a function and they can reply even though they don’t use Google calendar. Google calendar will then track accepted invitations.

You can get event reminders sent directly to your mobile phone or sent straight to your inbox and the calendar is easily accessed from the Google homepage but in order to use this you must sign up with a Google account.

We have found Google Calendar really useful when setting deadlines for clients and is a great way to see exactly who is in the office on any given day in terms of staff holidays etc…

Ease of use 8/10
Time saving 8/10
Making efficient use of your team 8/10

Skype and MSN

Both of these are web-based internet applications that are widely used and are better known than the other tools mentioned above but with our business being based in Derby, UK we have many clients and partners whom are London based so the video chat functionality is very useful. Both of these tools allow file sharing but in my opinion is that Dropbox offers a more simplistic answer.

Using Skype you can have a video conference and we find it’s a great alternative to business trips, helping you work together and make decisions while spending more time being productive in the office. Both tools are cost effective as the only outgoing are your internet costs providing you make your call through the connection using the webcam, microphone and speakers.

Both of these tools allow you efficiently to make quick contact with people. We also use it for communicating with staff working outside of the office. Furthermore you can leave staff messages which they can retrieve the next time they login.

I’m a big fan of both these tools and this is why we have awarded them nearly 5 stars.

Ease of use 9/10
Time saving 8/10
Making efficient use of your team 9/10