To summarise, the best practice approach to SEO is as follows:
Site Performance Audit
Objectives Setting
Project Plan
Keyword Analysis & Selection
Content Development
Site Structure Optimisation
Link Building
Search Engine Submission
Reporting & Analysis
Maintenance & Improvement
Remember that search engine algorithms are constantly changing their Relevancy criteria – therefore a website that is number 1 today may number 13 tomorrow. As the search engines are continually updating their search engine algorithms, it is essential once you have completed stages 1 to 9 of the SEO process – to have a structure ongoing maintenance and improvement program.
You key objectives should include;
At a minimum, your continuous improvement should include the following;
Link building – Make link building one of your most important ongoing activities. Continue to find new target sites and request new links from highly relevant site and produce monthly reports showing your list updated target sites found and new links achieved. If possible, also send press releases and articles to your target sites list because they may be of interest to content sites. Read Frequently Asked Questions on link building.
Reporting – Continue to produce reports and trend graphs showing all measurables at least monthly. Compare results against your objectives set in the objectives setting process in stage 2 of the SEO process.
New content – Continue to update and create new relevant content. Don’t simply produce content about your products and services, but try to consider what information would be of interest to your target market. Good examples are tips, articles, ebooks and frequently asked questions. See step 5 on content development.
Monitor ranking Algorithms – Try to monitor changes in the search engine ranking algorithms and updates. The best place to get insider views on how search engines are changing their ranking algorithms are news sites and SEO forums such as WebProWorld, Search Engine Watch and WebProNews. See our useful links section for all the major SEO forums and news sites online.
Optimisation reviews – Review optimisation tactics and new methods. Always review and double check you are doing everything you can – alt text, internal linking, when you create new content link the new content to relevant sections that make it easier for your visitors. Remember that you should make it easier for your visitors, not just search engines.
Search phrase analysis – Continue to monitor new phrases and re-visit original keyword research as a reference point. Most search phrase usage volumes are seasonal and are always changing, therefore, it’s important to update all your counts as often as possible to make sure your strategy is based on the most recent keywords analysis, search trends and volumes. Also, search behaviour also changes over time, for example, more people are starting to run searches on SEM rather than search engine marketing – therefore as people become more savvy and knowledgeable there search behavior changes. See step 4 to review keywords research strategy and tips.
Conversion enhancement – Driving traffic to your site is only valuable if your site is effective at converting visitors to an action, such as quote request or download. If you are going to spend lots of time on SEO then without a conversion enhancement process you will losing opportunities that may be relatively easy to fix. Your monthly reports should identify how many conversions your site is generating, which means you can experiment with signposting, offers and navigation to entice your traffic to convert.
You can find other articles like this at www.clickthrough-marketing.com.
To summarise, the best practice approach to SEO is as follows:
Site Performance Audit
Objectives Setting
Project Plan
Keyword Analysis & Selection
Content Development
Site Structure Optimisation
Link Building
Search Engine Submission
Reporting & Analysis
Maintenance & Improvement
As with any marketing campaign, it is essential to continuously monitor the results of your search engine optimisation efforts over time. Plus, it’s important to measure where you are in relation to your objectives set at the start of the SEO campaign.
If you want to take monitoring your SEO campaign seriously, there are some basic things you need. Firstly, a quality web stats package and a search engine positioning tool to make checking your positions as easy as possible.
The only problem with stats packages is that they can provide so much information and you can spend hours going through the reports without actually learning anything about trends. It’s therefore worthwhile building your own Excel-based Report that can provide a simple central location for measuring metrics that you are interested in tracking and improving.

At a minimum you should produce the following reports regularly as monthly trend reports:-
Unique visitors – You need to monitor the number of unique visitors to your site and which pages they are visiting.
Search phrase positions – You need to constantly monitor search phrase positions and the traffic these positions are generating. It’s no use getting great positions on search engines if they are not generating traffic.
Conversions – There is no point in driving traffic to your site that does not result in conversions. You should track the number of conversions your site generates over time to truly show the return on your investment.
Link Popularity – It is important to measure link popularity (number of links to your site) on all the major search engines to measure the effectiveness of any SEO campaign and especially link building campaigns. How to check your link popularity.
Search Engine Inclusion – You need to measure how many pages of your site the search engines are indexing. How to check your sites search engine inclusion.
The vast range of excellent web traffic tools is already well documented; however, very few tools are great for measuring conversions. Your conversion tracking tool should ideally enable you to track conversions by a range of variables, such as Conversion by Country, Conversion by Search Phrase and Conversion by Referring URL.
The best tool we have found for this type of advanced conversion measurement is ClickMetrix (www.clickmetrix.net).
Tracking which referring search phrases are generating the best conversion rates split by number of conversions and/or sales revenue. As part of a search engine optimisation campaign this is crucial as it gives feedback on which search phrases are generating actual conversions on your site – meaning you can focus your SEO efforts on search phrases that are delivering conversions rather than just traffic
Conversions by Referring Search Phrase

Perhaps the most crucial statistic to be aware of is the bounce rates of first time visitors. Bounce rate shows how many visitors arrive at your site but leave without going any deeper into your site. This is important because your site may be driving loads of traffic from search engines or linked sites, but if a large proportion of people are bouncing then it could be a sign that your site does not look appealing or that you are not offering enticing links to further information on other pages.
Bounce Rates of First Time Visitors

More articles like this are available from www.clickthrough-marketing.com.
To summarise, the best practice approach to SEO is as follows:
Site Performance Audit
Objectives Setting
Project Plan
Keyword Analysis & Selection
Content Development
Site Structure Optimisation
Link Building
Search Engine Submission
Reporting & Analysis
Maintenance & Improvement
Once your search engine optimisation campaign is complete you need to ensure that the search engines visit your web site and index it in their databases. Unless your site is optimised properly, search engine submission will have very little or zero impact.
There are two types of search engines that are important; crawler based search engines and human edited directories.
Engines such as Google and Lycos are robot-driven meaning that they use automated technology called Spiders to locate and store the information from web sites they find.
If your site is already indexed in the major crawler based search engines it should not take more than 2-6 weeks for them to re-index the new pages of your optimised site and to recalculate your search engine rankings. Remember that if you have an already established site with good inclusion in the indexes then re-submitting will do nothing.
Checking your inclusion on Google is easy:
Simply type site: and then your website address followed by inurl: and your address into the search box and click Google Search. For example, to check the inclusion of www.clickthrough-marketing.com you would type site:www.clickthrough-marketing.com inurl:www.clickthrough-marketing.com
How to check inclusion on other engines
If your site is not already indexed properly by the crawler based engines, then you should certainly submit your site. However, remember that your link building program should quickly result in the Spiders finding their way to the pages of your site anyway.
When submitting your site to the search engines, avoid using automated submission tools that may save time, but can result in being penalised. It is quite simple to submit your site to the major crawler engines by hand.
Directories such as Yahoo and Business.com are searchable catalogues of sites that are created by human editors. These editors produce entries and descriptions for your site based on the information sent to them.
You need to select relevant categories for your site and submit descriptions to the editors that highlight your important pages.
Also, remember that you may also need to submit your site to Paid Inclusion search engines such as Overture.
Our July newsletter will review Step 9 – Reporting & Analysis.
Search has come along way in recent years – but what is the future of search in Europe and how do the major players see search developing over the coming years?
A special report from the Search Engine Strategies 2005 Conference, June 1-2, London
In the first session at the start of Day 1, Google, MSN & Yahoo were preparing to present their ideas and vision to a room full of marketers, press and agencies on how they see search developing and their own corporate strategies for 2005/06. Alongside the big 3 was Nielson/NetRatings and Hitwise there to give the raw facts and figures on the current state of the search market place. Future Vision
Ian Carrington, Google UK was up first presenting Google’s vision, which was ‘simply’ to make information more organised and most importantly universally accessible to everyone – whether via the web, mobile phones or any device from ‘anywhere’.
David Graham, MSN UK followed a similar theme and noted their strategy was to expand via multiple access points such as through other Microsoft software such as MSN Messenger, Outlook and Office.
Graham also mentioned the upcoming launch of MSN’s Search Toolbar to complete with versions from Yahoo and Google. Salim Mitha (Yahoo) noted the distribution of their Search Toolbar will be essential over coming years – hence the recent development of their Toolbar for the fast growing Mozilla Firefox. Interestingly, if this is so essential, MSN clearly has the upper hand with their immense penetration of Microsoft software brands worldwide.
When MSN’s Search Toolbar integrates with MS Office, how many people will stop bothering to open their web browsers and use other engines? And how much of Google’s share of the search market will begin to get eaten up?
MSN are already a dominant player at number 2 in Europe, and according to Graham, they have invested 100 million dollars in the previous 20 months. With Microsoft’s track record with software and games consoles it could easily be argued that there will be a new number one within years.
Things to look out for not mentioned by the big 3 are Pay Per Call, a new search model showcased by Espotting. Launched in the UK and US. They argue that this model is a big opportunity for SMEs, in particular those without a web site who target local geographical regions.
All agreed search is still buoyant and growing further. As expected Broadband penetration in Europe is continuing to fuel growth and people are spending more time online. Each of the big 3 also acknowledged the strong prospects in Mobile search.
Google noted the trend of integration of campaigns offline and trend to increase interest and traffic online from online methods. They also see the changing users behaviour as a factor and cited the mobile text language ‘I want 2 C U’ as something that search vendors need to consider.
Personalisation was talked about extensively by all search vendors. Yahoo talked about MyWeb – their excellent beta tool for saving exact copies of web pages which they believe will see the end of bookmarks. Another Yahoo beta tool is Yahoo Mindset which uses machine learning to give users choice on how search results should be sorted.
The importance of local search and delivering local relevance tailored to the user, country and language was repeated endlessly. The best examples are from Google with their maps, weather reports and Google Local UK which is already an integral part of their search offering.
Trends noted were the increase in news search, usage of RSS feeds, image and video search
According to Yahoo, Toolbars now account for 8% of search – of which Google and Yahoo own 95%. As a result of the aggressive toolbar distribution strategies by Google, Yahoo and MSN (coming soon!), the surprising 8% statistic looks set to increase strongly over coming years.
Currently Google and Yahoo are the most active with new beta tools being released continuously. In comparison MSN appear very quiet to outsiders, however, it’s no secret that their innovations may be released in the next major Operating System, currently codenamed ‘Longhorn’.
MSN showed a graph that identified percentage shares of the big 3 in Europe, which showed Google sitting at 61% with MSN sitting way behind with 20.6%. It was interesting that Graham showed this graph with the strap line ‘Google No.1 for now!’ – and given Microsoft’s huge 100 million dollar investment, incredible installed base of Toolbar-ready software, upcoming OS system and ‘new seriousness’ in search – some would argue these figures might be reversed within 2-3 years.
Nielson/NetRatings presented some useful stats on country shares of the search market. Germany (29%) and UK (23%) are the largest search markets, followed by France (18%) and Italy (16%). Europe is dominated by Google (1st) and MSN (2nd), but the market market is still big enough for local players like Voila (2nd in France) and Virgilio (3rd in Italy).
The coming year may see smaller players that focus on local country needs getting stronger, for example, Ask Jeeves in the UK who are currently running a million pound off line TV advertising campaign. Hitwise emphasised the huge opportunities for innovative new entrants and strong brands.
There are different challenges from different perspectives. From a marketer’s point of view the challenge is to focus on generating quality referrals from search engines that convert to sales or leads.
Things are moving fast, some of the beta tools being developed by Yahoo and Google are exciting. The challenge for them is to get these new tools properly integrated with their main search engine quickly.
Search is still undeveloped in some areas. Most of us love search, but being critical think about how search engines do not understand contexts/multiple meanings, the dead links/outdated information, and the poor quality pages you come across before finding the information you really want.
The mainstream search experience is still not personalised and does not learn or adapt to our behaviour. It is difficult to search off the web and is not particularly well integrated or east to use via Mobile and other applications.
The big challenge for the search vendors is who is going to solve these problems and how quickly?
In terms of innovation, so far Google have done an great job – and the vision statement presented by Ian Carrington of Google pretty much covers all the above. Yahoo is certainly trying to catch up and MSN are quiet but lying in waiting and not forgetting the smaller local players jockeying for a position.
The race is on, see you at SES 2006.
Part 1 to 5 in this SEO master class series dealt with stages 1 to 6 of successful search engine optimisation (SEO). Part 6 will review stage 7 – Link Building.
To summarise, the best practice approach to SEO is as follows:
Site Performance Audit
Objectives Setting
Project Plan
Keyword Analysis & Selection
Content Development
Site Structure Optimisation
Link Building
Search Engine Submission
Reporting & Analysis
Maintenance & Improvement
Link Building is the acquisition of incoming links to your website from other relevant web sites/directories and is an important strategy to help improve search engine positions as part of a search engine optimisation campaign.
An effective linking strategy establishes your site in the online marketplace that already exists for your industry. The key benefits of link building are:-
Increasing Link Popularity – most search engines place large emphasis on ‘Link Popularity’ when determining a sites ranking. Your sites Link Popularity is determined by the number of incoming links to your site – so the more incoming links, the greater priority your site will be given in the search engine rankings. This logic is based on the principle that if your website is of a high quality, more and more websites would want to link to you.
Driving Relevant Traffic – simply having incoming links will drive relevant traffic to your web site.
Brand Building – increasing the number of incoming links from quality web sites will build brand awareness and trust in your company or brand.
Before starting your link building campaign you will need to spent lots of time researching the online market place related to your product/services or subject area in order to create a list of target sites that are suitable link partners.
Finding link partners is an extremely time consuming process that involves manual research. One good method is to go to www.google.com and type in link:www.YourCompetitorSite.com or link:www.RelevantIndustrySite.com. This gives you a list of all sites linking to the web site you used in this link command. You can then go to each site, determine its suitability based on its relevance and its policies on giving links to other sites like yours.
Once you have built a list of target web sites, you need to contact the web site owners via email or telephone to request a link. Most importantly, you need to give the web site owner a good enough reason to link, so if your site has lots of good resources, articles and ebooks this will certainly help.
In your link building campaign, try to avoid link farms. Sometimes called free-for-all pages, a link farm is a big list of links where you can post your own link, in return for a reciprocal link. Often these lists will contain links on a range of subjects, with little or no actual descriptive content about the site. Search engines also discourage the use of link farms, and may penalise their use, so it is best to keep well away.
Overall, be prepared to invest serious amounts of time to your link building campaigns.
Happy linking!
Our July newsletter will review Step 8 – Search Engine Submission. This SEO Master Class series is based on our 18 page ebook titled ‘How to Implement Successful SEO’. This paper is available to download from www.clickthrough-marketing.com.
Google Sitemaps was launched a few weeks ago and plenty of people have added their opinion on the launch.
Sitemaps is, essentially, free XML inclusion. The kind of service previously offered by Inktomi and AskJeeves and now offered (in part) by Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions. The service allows web site owners to place an XML file on their site containing links to all the pages that they want Google to see. Google will then use this sitemap to help to help it determine the pages it still needs to index. In addition, the XML sitemap file can tell Google how often the page is updated, and the date on which the page was last changed.
Now, Google has a history of copying competitor’s services and going one better (something I like to call the Branson strategy) and Sitemaps is no exception. Although very similar to current and previous XML inclusion services, Google’s has many differences.
Firstly, XML inclusion lets you specify the title and description that appears in search results. With Google Sitemaps you can’t do this and because Google separately determines itself which parts of the site to crawl and how to rank the site, you get no benefit in search results by using Sitemaps.
Obviously, the main advantage with Google Sitemaps is that its completely free, whereas Yahoo’s Search Submit program requires an inclusion fee and a small charge for each click you receive. Such a huge difference begs the question of why Google would offer this for free. The answer is simple – Google’s aim is not to make money, but to organize the worlds information, and if offering free XML inclusion helps, then so be it (of course, they could make money as well, but they’re just too nice).
There are problems with Google Sitemaps, as pointed out by a number of people, but every new system has its downfalls which I’m sure will be ironed out over time. If you aren’t very technical you could be a bit confused by the whole thing, but there is help out there, and if you’re tech-savvy there is plenty to be getting on with, like plugins for Sitemaps. It’s probably a good idea to get a Google Web/News Alert for Sitemaps, in fact to help you along.
Part 1 to 4 in this SEO master class series dealt with stages 1 to 5 of successful search engine optimisation (SEO). Part 5 will review stage 6 – Site Optimisation.
To summarise, the best practice approach to SEO is as follows:
Site Performance Audit
Objectives Setting
Project Plan
Keyword Analysis & Selection
Content Development
Site Structure Optimisation
Link Building
Search Engine Submission
Reporting & Analysis
Maintenance & Improvement
The main objective of this stage in the SEO process is to ensure your site is search engine friendly.
If you have submitted your site to all the engines, but your pages are still not indexed properly, this tells you that your site does not have the right technical characteristics and code structure to be indexed or spidered successfully. (note: the inclusion analysis from Stage 1 – Web Site Audit should have told you whether the search engines are spidering your site successfully.)
Typical problems can include poorly implemented content management systems, poor internal linking structure, incorrect use of frames and tables and lack of site maps. Depending on your sites specific problems you may need to consider some of the following:
Our June newsletter will review Step 7 – Link Building. This SEO Master Class series is based on our 18 page ebook titled ‘How to Implement Successful SEO’. This paper is available to download from www.clickthrough-marketing.com.
The article How to Improve the Conversion Rate of your Site outlined some things to consider to help improve the conversion of traffic that arrives from search engine positions and the importance of having clear concise calls to actions on all areas of your website.
To expand on this, here are 5 useful tips and ideas to help you implement calls to actions that deliver more leads and sales.
Incentives & Value
Offering incentives have a clear persuasion effect and should be visible on all pages where possible. For example, a free ebook, free web site evaluation, 20% off or free delivery.
Urgency
Experiment with time expiry offers to convince your visitors to take action now or they will miss out. For example, orders in April get 15% off.
Email Newsletters
Over the last few years, almost everyone has a free email newsletter. Combined with the problem of email spam, this has resulted in plummeting newsletter subscriber conversion rates. Encourage visitors to subscribe by offering them something of immediate value like a free guide or ebook. Also, make it clear that you respect the subscribers privacy by telling them next to the submit button.
Graphic & Images
Try to use graphics and images to attract attention and persuade visitors to convert or take an action
Free Downloads
Don’t always request that visitors submit a form just to download a ebook or brochure. Ask yourself whether you really need the user’s information or whether your main goal is to get as many people to download it as possible. Remember that simply offering a ebook or brochure for download without a form can double the number of people that download it several times over.
Part 1 to 3 in this SEO master class series dealt with stages 1 to 4 of successful search engine optimisation (SEO). Part 4 will review stage 5 – Content Development.
To summarise, the best practice approach to SEO is as follows:
Site Performance Audit
Objectives Setting
Project Plan
Keyword Analysis & Selection
Content Development
Site Structure Optimisation
Link Building
Search Engine Submission
Reporting & Analysis
Maintenance & Improvement
The Keyword Analysis phase should have identified what your target market is looking for on major search engines. By mapping these needs to your company’s main strengths, you can identify the most relevant topic areas that you can provide content for.
Best practice content development is not about producing isolated content pages that are created only for achieving high rankings on search engines. It involves a number of considerations such as avoidance of spam methods, following web copywriting practices and conversion tactics. Also important is to provide real content of value to visitors and to integrate this content into the rest of your site – rather than creating isolated pages that only serve to drive traffic.
Off course it is very easy to simply create a series of keyword rich landing pages and link these in from a site map, however, this practice is classed as search engine spam. If you are very lucky this type of strategy might deliver some short term results, however, search engines are clever enough to know this is what you are doing and will penalise you on this basis. As a result, you may get in a worse position than when you started which can be difficult to come back from.
Here are some quick tips to ensure you follow best practices:
Write For Visitors, Not Engines
Remember that you are writing content for your target market visitors, not search engines! Write your page content naturally and don’t just insert keywords and repeat them over and over. Try to understand what content your target market would want and give it to them. For example, useful resources, articles, tips, ebooks, online calculators etc.
If you are lucky, text written just for search engines might result in search engine referrals, but your annoyed visitors will ‘bounce’ (leave your site on arrival).
Value = Incoming Links
Try to provide content of ‘real value’ that would actually encourage other sites to link to you. Encouraging other relevant web sites to link to your site is far more important than creating keyword rich content. Incoming links establish your site on the web and tells search engines that your pages are important and should be given priority in search rankings.
Additional Information
Consider what additional relevant content would be of interest to your visitors and make sure this is accessible and linked from your content pages. As well as being useful to visitors, this will encourage them to stay on your page and navigate deeper into your web site (rather than bouncing!)
Avoid Spamming
It is critical that you adopt safe strategies that are consistent with the guidelines provided by the search engines and SEM industry. Best practices will bring long lasting results without the risks and short term nature of spamming methods.
Remember that SEO is about giving your target market what they want, not tricking them to go to a page of useless content on your site. After all, they might go to your site but they are likely to leave immediately.
Driving Conversions
SEO is not about driving traffic, it’s about driving traffic that converts. If you focus your efforts on targeting phrases that you know you can deliver ‘real quality’ content for, then your conversions will increase as well as your traffic.
Our May newsletter will review Step 6 – Site Structure Optimisation. This SEO Master Class series is based on our 18 page ebook titled ‘How to Implement Successful SEO’. This paper is available to download from www.clickthrough-marketing.com
SEO is such a complex area, that each SEO company or consultant may use completely different methods and styles of implementing SEO services. Therefore, when choosing an SEO company to deliver optimisation services for your web site, there are a number of key questions to ask and things to look out for.
The top 5 questions to ask your SEO company are:
To answer why these are so important to ask an SEO company lets deal with each question in turn:
If an SEO company’s idea of an SEO campaign is simply creating keyword rich pages, then you can be certain that you are not dealing with a professional. Search engines use the number of quality incoming links from other relevant sites as an important factor in determining your rankings.
Link building is an important, but extremely time-consuming part of best practice SEO. If your SEO company is not allocating significant time to this activity then questions need to be asked. If they are proposing to allocating time to link building, find out what types of methods they use. Things to avoid are reciprocal-only link building, link farms and link exchanges.
Read some frequently asked questions on link building methods.
Getting high rankings and lots of traffic is meaningless unless this traffic converts to a desired action on your web site. A good SEO company should have experience of conversion enhancement strategies and should include this as part of their SEO proposal.
Conversion enhancement strategies can include copywriting tactics, advanced conversion reporting, call to action tactics and site usability. If an SEO company can improve your sites conversion rate, as well driving relevant traffic, this is a powerful and winning combination.
Related article: Copywriting: 6 Tips to Converting Traffic
Also check you will be receiving clear reporting showing the increase of conversions on your site, as well as visitor referrals and search engine positions. Some SEO companies tend to dazzle their clients with lots of detailed reports on search engine positions, which can distract you from the main objective of driving conversions.
One of the best web traffic reporting tools with conversion tracking capability is ClickMetrix – available on a free 14 day trial.
Best practice SEO is time-consuming and expensive. Therefore, contrary to what some SEO companies say, it is not a suitable investment for every business.
Before investing in SEO, it is important to calculate what the potential returns to your business are. ROI can depend on several factors such as size of your market place, geographical target area, the sales value of your products/services and the number people searching online for your products/services. For example, a software company selling globally would naturally have much greater potential ROI than an office cleaning business that only operates within a small local area.
When being sold SEO, it is very easy to be sold on the promise that you will be getting high rankings for relevant search phrases. However, this is meaningless unless these rankings bring in business to the level that out ways the investment in an SEO company.
An experienced SEO company should be upfront and help you work on ROI scenarios based on forecasted traffic levels, web site conversion rates and sales values of your products/services.
Try to determine if the SEO company you are considering uses spamming methods. Because there are so many variations on the definition of spamming, this can be difficult. However, simply put, it is the process of trying to mislead search engines into thinking that a web page is more relevant to search phrases than is actually is. To review a list of SEO methods that should be avoided, read the article Stop Search Engine Spam.
Off course, no SEO company in their right mind will admit to using spam and unethical methods. You need to ask as many questions as possible and get them to give you a detailed demonstration of the exactly what SEO methods they will be using. Also, look for materials on their web site that demonstrate their methods such as ebooks and articles.
It is common practice for an SEO company to put a limit on the number of phrases that they optimise for. However, when you consider that there may be hundreds or thousands of search phrases relevant to your business and if you’re paying a monthly retainer for SEO services – this is too limited. There may well be 10-20 most important phrases, but the others should not be ignored!