Basic SEO

Some SEO is difficult and complicated. Some of it isn’t. Heres some basic SEO tips & guidance that cover some of the basic elements of SEO that most people can apply to their sites.

How to set up conversion tracking in Adwords

What is conversion tracking?

If you want to succeed with Adwords you need conversion tracking set up. Conversion tracking allows you to measure KPIs of your Adwords campaigns i.e. form fill enquiry, brochure download, sales etc. With conversion tracking you can easily identify what is producing conversions and identify what the cost per conversion is, giving you the data required in order to make for example bid changes per keyword. Lets look at a simple example…

conversion tracking example Click image to view large table
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What is link juice (or link equity)?

Link juice in SEO – an introduction

Links, both internal on your site and external – those pointing from other sites to yours are what help search engines find and index your content. The distribution of links, particularly the quality of those linking to you and the volume is a significant search engine ranking factor. For example the bbc.co.uk linking to your site tells Google that a really influential web site is ‘voting’ for your content. Voting is a bit of an odd term to use here so it may be better to think of it that if another site feels that your content is of significance, and links to it, then that is a good reason why search engines should rank your site higher for terms relevant to that content.

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My article recently published on Moz

I recently wrote an article about why the humble meta description is still mega important. MOZ included it in their YouMoz blog and it has been well received.

It covers:

  • An explanation of what the meta description is
  • Why it’s important
  • How to write great meta descriptions
  • How to write unique meta descriptions when you have 100s of pages.

Check out the Moz article here.

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Recommended SEO reading & how to read it!

I’d be willing to bet that few of my friends or associates NEED to read relevant industry news and opinion as much as I do. Working in the industry is challenging and exciting, not least because of how rapidly changing, complicated and advanced it is becoming. If I don’t keep up with whats going on in the industry daily I feel like i’m out of touch. A little OCD maybe, but  whether you are a fellow SEO or site owner or marketer it’s important to keep up with the latest best practises and tactics that can improve your site or your clients sites performance.

In this post you will find:

  • Recommended reading for basic, advanced SEO and latest news
  • Recommended reading specifically for Worpress SEO
  • Recommended reading for PPC
  • Manageable ways to read SEO
Recommended SEO reading
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Have you grabbed your G+ vanity url yet?

I’m a light G+ user. From an SEO and B2B point of view it is my preferred social platform,partly because it allows me to decide, with greater flexibility, what to share and with whom. Though it has does have SEO benefits that Facebook doesn’t, for many the jury is still out on the real value of G+ as a means to promote your business. Personally I think it’s value will grow as the platform develops and the latest development is vanity urls now open to all (who meet the criteria).

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What is conversion tracking?

Over the years i’ve had many conversations with prospective clients who I can tell from the glassing over of their eyes when i’m talking to them in person or the extended silence if speaking over the phone that ‘conversion tracking’ is a fairly alien concept to them. Of course it sounds fairly nerdy but essentially all we’re talking about is measuring the desired outcome or outcomes of their site i.e. purchase, if the site is e-commerce or lead if the service promoted is service based e.g. Solicitors. Many other things can be tracked as a conversion if desirable e.g. brochure download or contact us page view.

A conversion is measuring the desired outcome or outcomes of a site e.g. purchase.

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Importance of unique product descriptions on ecommerce sites

duplicate product descriptions result in poor rankings and CTR

Ecommerce sites can be a haven for duplicate content. Many site owners wonder why it is that they can have such poor rankings and traffic when they have so much content. Much of the time its because the content that they rely on – the product descriptions – are not unique. In fact not only are they not unique seemingly everyone else selling the same product on the net has the same description!

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Find and fix duplicate page titles and reap the ranking benefits

If your site has a lot of pages and especially if its an ecommerce web site one of the really quick and legit gains you can make in the SERPS is by addressing the duplicate page titles you may have on your site.

Why are duplicate page titles bad?

Page titles still remain ‘the’ most important on-page element in helping to rank for specific phrases so having a whole bunch of page titles that are duplicate, and worse – not even representative of the page content/product is a really wasted opportunity. Unique and descriptive page titles should be one of your SEO priorities. Ensuring all your page titles are unique and represent the page content is a major step to maximising the number of pages on your site that can rank well for a wide variety of terms.

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