How much does SEO cost?

SEO is an ongoing process and there is no glass ceiling as to the amount of work that can be done. The number of keywords that you target can always be increased and your link profile can always be bettered. Due to these reasons, SEO costs are very much down to your budget limitations. The real question is “how much should you spend on SEO?” Obviously this is dependant of the amount of revenue that you are going to achieve from the search rankings. Generally speaking, this is dependant on search volumes. The higher the search volume, the higher the revenue.

Getting to the top of the major search engines is an effective method of generating business. With this said though, you must generate more than you spend to make it worthwhile. Typically, local SEO campaigns will generate less revenue than national campaigns but they also cost much less as the work required is substantially lower. Read the rest of this entry »

How website functionality increases conversion rates and online sales

The functionality of a website is very important and has a huge effect on user experience and therefore conversion rates. Getting users to your site is only one aspect of a successful online campaign, the other aspect is getting these potential customers to convert into sales or sales leads. Once you have succeeded in bringing potential customers to your site, you have to convert these visitors into sales. To increase your chances of this happening, your site must be fully functional and user friendly. If your website is difficult to use, you increase the likelihood of users ‘bouncing’ to competitors websites. For example; if you have an e-commerce site selling cameras with a lengthy and complicated registration form, you risk users bouncing. Typically, the longer the registration form, the less people that will will it in. Read the rest of this entry »

Website load times

A successful search engine optimisation campaign not only provides top search engine listings for targeted keywords but also increased conversion rates. The better the users experience, the more likely they are going to convert into a sale. If your site takes a long time to load, you could be losing potential customers. Searchers tend to be impatient; unless they find what they are looking for straight away they will ‘bounce’ to a competitor’s site. Read the rest of this entry »

Meta tags

Meta tags play an important role in onsite SEO. While onsite SEO plays a relatively small part in the SEO process, it shouldn’t be ignored. At a basic level, it allows search engines to identify what your page is about. Read the rest of this entry »

The history of search engines

The major search engines of today started in the 1990s with the Yahoo Directory starting in 1994, LookSmart in 1995, Alta Vista in 1995, Ask Jeeves in 1997 and Google launching in 1998. Businesses quickly realised the economic benefit of having a top ranked site and began to engineer ways to improve their site ranking and improve site traffic. Very quickly search engine optimisation became a multimillion-dollar industry. Read the rest of this entry »

Why you need SEO

The world of business has quickly evolved with the introduction of the internet. Now at least half of the developed world has access to the internet and 90% of people find sites through search engines, predominantly Google, which drives online purchases. Online allows businesses to have a global reach at a fraction of the cost of normal businesses. It is not surprising then that online is growing at 40% each year in the UK. Read the rest of this entry »

Great content increases visitor numbers and conversion rates

Page content is arguably the most important aspect of any website. Good quality, unique content that provides the information that the user is after lowers bounce rates and helps to encourage sales and sales leads, therefore improving conversion rates. It is also an effective way of gaining back links as it encourages other websites to link to your site. This s known as link bait. Read the rest of this entry »

Using special text tags to improve page ranking

Special texts are any content on your page that has been formatted specifically to stand out from other content on a page. Special text tags include bold, italic, underline, coloured, sizing and highlighted text. Special text makes particular text stand out to the user and it is therefore more important than the other text. Read the rest of this entry »

How Google captured the market

Search engines provide the best matches to a users search query. They rank sites using programs called spiders or robots and return what they consider to be a prioritised listing to any query. Google is the biggest search engine and has over a 70% market share and are very much the focal point for all SEO and paid search campaigns. Google though, was not the first search engine the and actually began quite late. So why did people start using Google? In short, because they delivered the better results to the search queries than the other search engines. Read the rest of this entry »

Anchor text links

Anchor text links are a form of hyperlink on a web page that directs the user to a different web page or to a specific section of a web page. This is normally done for reference to aid understanding. A hyperlink can be a text or a image link. An anchor text link is a hyperlink with visible, clickable text and are an effective search engine optimisation (SEO) technique. Read the rest of this entry »