All you really need to know about internet marketing for beginners.

Part 2

If you missed part one you can find it by clicking here.
We previously compared internet marketing to a can of drink. We previously covered off the ‘looking good’ element of the analogy, so this section is on the ‘taste good’ element.

So what do we mean by ‘taste good’? Well this has to do with SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). This is the process of optimising your website to affect its visibility within search engine results, essentially making your webpage appear higher/or more frequently in the page results. SEO can affect different areas of a search engine from image search, local search, academic search, video search and so on. There are now a lot more areas to consider than just traditional text searching.
As you can imagine, SEO is an incredibly important pillar in the Internet marketing scaffold, and therefore has to be dealt with if you want to get the best out of your internet marketing. The amount of time it can take to deal with SEO can sometimes be extensive and requires you to keep up to date with the process to ensure you are not left behind on important changes.

SEO involves everything from the technical optimisation of a site to link building and driving visitors. When trying to get to the top of search engine results you need to consider what keywords you should be aiming for. These keywords can be anything but some rules have to be considered:

Service or product - This might be quite obvious but what you need to do is consider what your business does. For example if you have an estate agents you want to be considering particular keywords which someone will search for in Google like “selling property, residential property, buying residential property” etc.

Location – Identify your business location and the area you wish to aim for to produce business. This is because identifying a specific locations (or locations) allows the ability to gain page ranking slightly more quickly than generic terms.  If you search for keywords like “Clothing”, “Shopping” and wide ranging keywords you will find that massive companies, firms and king retailers will appear in the highest ranking slots of a search engine. The technique we suggest you use is localised keywords that help filter other businesses from having the high rankings.

Example:
Competitors – A great way to identify what keywords you want is to look at a competitor’s site and identify what they are aiming for. This allows you to compete against them and identify what you need to do to gain higher rankings. Looking at competitors keywords allows you to adapt them and find others that may cover additional market space.

Amount – This needs to be taken into account how many keywords do you want to cover? Having too many keywords won’t allow you to focus on them enough, and this will affect the overall outcome of the page results, meaning it takes longer to generate results. This isn’t the end of the world, but needs to be considered when setting your expectations.

There are even more parts of a website that get the best out of SEO, like Link Building which is the process of creating links to the site via particular techniques. Once these techniques have been implemented then there should be a steady stream of visitors coming to the site from other areas of the web which are related to your business. Link Building is technical and has to be constantly monitored and maintained. This is a crucial part of the process and is unfortunately fairly time consuming, so time needs to be set aside for this purpose.

We produced an article about ways to gain links and we fully recommend checking it out as an aside to this article:
http://redcowmediaseo.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/other-ways-to-create-links.html

The world of SEO can take a lot of time and effort, and this can affect other parts of the business, that also need maintaining, which is why specialist SEO agencies are often engaged to carry out the process on your behalf.

There’s a lot more to learn about SEO, but hopefully this article has helped you identify simple strategies in getting the most out of your SEO.

Who are we?
We are Red Cow Media, an online marketing agency specialising in SEO, WebDesign and Social Media marketing. We provide services to enhance your online presence, getting people to connect with you and helping to spread your message and drive revenue. For more information you can talk to one of our friendly team or visit the website by clicking here.

Long Term Effects of Blackhat SEO

In a previous article we covered if businesses should prepare for the effects of targeted negative
SEO, but never got into the potential long term effects of negative practices.

This article is going to go through the long term effects of using black hat SEO techniques, how
it can affect your business site and prevent you from recovering the SEO of your site.

What is Black hat SEO?

The Reliable SEO Metro defines Negative SEO as “a black hat technique that uses bad text
links with negative connotations linking back to a competitor’s site, linking competitors to link
farms and free-for-all sites, etc.” It can also include hackers or malware that has infiltrated the
site to change or shut it down. When these techniques are used they act as a barrier, harming
the visibility of the site and causing it to be demoted by Google and the SERP (Search Engine
Ranking Positions) to be lowered.

Although in the past this form of SEO would have helped increase the ranking of your site, it
now only serves as a hindrance and prevents the site from gaining positions on a results page.
This was as a direct effect of numerous algorithm changes brought into play by Google, the most
notable of which was the Penguin update of May 2012.

Would using Black Hat SEO provide fast results in half that time?

To put it bluntly the answer is NO! Although it used to create fast results and costs less, it
doesn’t work that way now. Google have put into place a number of tactics to prevent the
unethical practice of Black Hat SEO. The key one of these is the development of a number
of complex algorithms that prevent any kind of black hat SEO from working. This has left a
number of unreliable SEO companies unable to offer their previously exceedingly cheap deals
for places on Google.

What are the long term effects of Black Hat SEO?

What some people don’t know is the continued damaging effects black hat SEO has on a website
even though the program may have been stopped. Each individual link is logged in the back of
the website and gives the site a form of portfolio. This portfolio is vital in influencing where the
site is placed in a search engine. Black hat SEO produces an influx of poor and irreverent links
at once to this portfolio which act as a black marker each time the site is reviewed and can push
it down the rankings. This will continue to act against a website until the offending links are
removed.

What can be done to resolve it?

The long term effects of this are that a large number of the links become irremovable and have
a persistent harmful affect on your SEO. To combat and these issues and recover the site takes
a long time and a considerable amount of effort. Such quick fixes like Google’s disavow tool
shouldn’t be the first port of call. The emphasis should be placed on trying to remove theses links
manually, to learn more about the approach for resolving negative links click here.

Many people go for cheap SEO thinking they are buying a quick and easy way to help their
website, this is not the case and many businesses that go for this option are in fact purchasing
the long term damaging effects of black hat SEO. We here at Red Cow Media provide a cost
effective and long term service that will help get the most out of your website.

For more information or if you’re interested in joining us, visit our website by clicking here