The seasoned SEO consultant is bound to know all the tricks of the trade, but those new to the search engine optimisation industry can improve their success rates by following a few simple SEO tips:

Know your Niche
Successful SEO marketing services always start with careful analysis of the client. Before you rush ahead and start reading up on SEO copywriting tips, do your homework thoroughly. Get to know and understand the client, as well as the product or service they are offering their target audience. Think about who your client will be competing with in the market and what sets them apart from their competitors.

Most sources offering SEO tips will also advise you to know the strengths and weaknesses of your client, as well as their level of establishment online, thereby helping you to strategically promote them in the appropriate niche.

I’ve always been a fan of the Joomla CMS system, well, for as long as it’s been around anyway. However, having more recently become more involved with SEO I’ve come across many individuals, Search marketing specialists and developers who claim that Joomla isn’t very search engine friendly and that other CMS systems, WordPress in particular, are more effective. As usual when faced with this sort of conflict of opinion, I decided to do some research and have a look what others have to say. Here is what I found out…

The fact is, when a Joomla website is used correctly, it is just as effective SEO-wise as any other CMS or regular website. Yes, in its most simple state it is not very effective, but this can be overcome by simply installing the Joomla sh404sef which effectively deals with clean URL’s and URL re-writing. It is extremely important though that you correctly use the SEF module from day 1 as this Joomla module does not re-write existing links to a web page that has recently changed its URL.

Having an opportunity to thoroughly review some keyword data for one of my proposals while traveling on a train up to Sheffield, I came to realise that as much as we talk about regularly reviewing keyword data we just don’t actually do it enough! We all know that every month something like 20% of all searches are unique and have not been seen by Google in the last 90 days.  

Image by Danard Vincente via Flickr

This can however be a double edged sword – lessons learnt in the past have also taught me that it is possibly even more important to pick a route and stick to it. It is all too tempting to see the vast variety of (search phrase) opportunities open to a website and to want to grab all of them. It very quickly leads to a scattergun approach, with just not enough weight behind any of it. Result: dilution, mixed messages, a multitude of pages with similar content, confusion on the site, and ultimately poor performance!

Having been in the online marketing industry for a few years now, I’ve often come across people and businesses that are convinced that they can do better SEO optimization than professional SEO specialists, free of charge. One mistake that these business owners and admittedly, some (not-so-professional) professional SEO companies often make, is that of over-optimizing their sites. Let’s take a closer look…

Overdoing your keyword optimization:

The very first thing everyone learns in SEO is the implementation of keyword optimization for pages and websites as a whole. Newcomers to the search engine optimization (SEO) game will learn that having the correct keywords on a page will tell search engines that the article is relevant to a particular subject that users have searched for. So the first thing they do is completely saturate their pages with relevant keywords. The problem is however, that Google and other search engines are not stupid. They can EASILY detect someone who is overdoing their SEO optimization with keyword stuffing and quickly penalize the page with low rankings and a damaged reputation.

The SES in London is in full swing and SEO experts from around the world are strutting their stuff and sharing invaluable amounts of knowledge that promise to boost the state of the entire industry. Brian Eisenberg yesterday did an interesting talk on website conversion and our very own CEO blogged on www.stateofsearch.com about this informative presentation. Louis’ blog boasts 21 steps on how to improve website conversion. I’ve summarized the most important tips from these two experienced gentlemen, right here, for your own reading pleasure:

Here are a few top tips to ensure that your site achieves maximum ROI:

1. Effectively communicate your UNIQUE value to the client

Whether you own an E-commerce site, an affiliate site or even a blog, it is important that you make the most of the numerous “selling seasons” that occur every year. In light of this, this blog post is aimed at optimizing your site for Valentines Day which is coming up in just a couple of weeks.

Now, I realize that you’ve only just removed the Christmas trees and snowflakes from your site as we move on from the Christmas selling season (if you haven’t taken your tree down by now, it’s bad luck), but that doesn’t mean that you can rest on your laurels for another 12 months until next Christmas. There are plenty selling seasons to focus on throughout the year – Valentine Day, Easter, Guy Fawkes, Independence day, Australia day, Thanksgiving and the list goes on depending on where in the world you are situated. It is massively important that you find a way to capitalize on these days and use them to your selling advantage.

I recently referred a colleague to an article written about duplicate content and why it is not good practice to regurgitate old content onto your website. My colleague read the article but struggled to make sense of it all as the article was just too technical for someone who is just getting started in SEO. So I had to go through the article with him and break it down into a more a more understandable format. This blog entry is a dummy version of what we discussed.

What is Duplicate Content?

There have been a few announcements bouncing around lately that the love-to-hate Google Toolbar PageRank has gone to ranking heaven, but as we can see, this feature is still firmly in place and Google are adamant on the fact that the Toolbar PageRank is here to stay. The truth is that TBPR is not a favourite amongst many but it is a lot like a car crash – you don’t want to look at it but you just can’t help yourself. In normal Google character, instead of the constant denying of the death of their TBPR, they have decided to show their satisfaction with this little green bar and update their Toolbar PR application. What many individuals find surprising is that this new and improved update has come happily along only a month after the last one, whereas a few years ago the Toolbar was only being updated annually.