Search Engine Optimisation

OK 500,000,000 users but can it really drive traffic to your website?

You have built your Facebook Fan Page in the vain hope that someone somewhere will say “wow” and share it with all their friends, and their friends and so on and so forth. It would be great if that was all you needed to do, there would be no need for this post to start off with!

You may check your analytics daily to see if anyone has visited your website from your Facebook page, or post links to your latest blog post hoping for visitors to crash your website server that the traffic is so huge! Sadly you need to do a little more than that to a) gain more fans b) find the fans that will promote it for you and c) integrate your Fan Page into your long term SEO strategy.

Build Links back to your site

The majority of links from Facebook are no follow. The one place you will get a link back from is your Facebook Fan Page Wall, so make sure you put your URL in the “write something about…” box under your profile picture (no need to add http:// anymore!)
I say “majority” as I am still testing this, however I have discovered that use of anchor text in your blog post that has been imported to the Notes tab of your Fan Page, will result in these links have a do-follow (although redirected). So importing your blog posts to the Notes tab not only increases your visibility on Facebook and gets fans to interact there and then with the post without having to visit your website, but you are building more back links using relevant keywords, everyday to your site.

Install a Facebook “like” button on your website

Every time a user of Facebook clicks a like button this zooms into their friends Newsfeed and is posted to their Profile page. Wallah a whole host of potential new visitors to your site now have a link to click through to. To put this into perspective lets say the average Facebook user has around 200 fans. Your site has just been put into their newsfeed, 5 people click through and 2 of those “like” your site as well. Now your site is in front of 600 potential new visitors…and so it goes on. As an example, I recently wrote a Facebook News story that gained 14 likes and 98 visitors within a couple of hours from Facebook alone. Now that is the power of Facebook viral marketing!

Interact with your Facebook Fans

You’ve gained your new fans, now what on earth do you do with them? Interact, ask questions, and most importantly praise those fans that DO interact with you. Return the favour, do they have a Fan Page too that they are trying to promote? Pop over to their page and interact with them there.

Be helpful, don’t be too self promotional. Share other businesses posts on your page (do any of your fans run a business? Have they posted any recent blog posts lately?)

Put your Facebook Page in your signature

How many forums do you visit everyday? I bet you only have a link to your Website and Twitter account at best. Add your Fan Page now! Remember the more fans n your page, the more interaction, the more traffic is driven to your website. Don’t just stop at forums either! If you write a guest blog or two, and articles that are distributed across the web, place a link in your author bio too.

If you need more inspiration on how to improve your Facebook Fan Page and in turn increase the traffic to your website then download a copy of The Essential Facebook Fan Page Marketing Guide packed with useful tips to help you do just that! Thanks to SEOAndy you are one step closer to finding out how Facebook can work for your business. Why not pop over and tell me about your experience on my Facebook Page?

Article & Guide Written By: Emma Ewers is an Internet Marketing VA specialising in Facebook Marketing, SEO and general Internet Marketing services for businesses. She offers a 4 week Internet Marketing Program for any business looking to improve their return in how they use online resources to promote themselves and connect with customers. You will often find her lurking on Twitter (@emmaewers) and Facebook or Blogging about her next big Facebook find on the IMVA website.

Download your FREE ultimate guide to facebook marketing here.

We all know its a little bit of a task to understand how search engines work, never mind try to explain it to someone else. So I’ve decided on 2 roots to explain how search works, today is the first – a simplified over view of how search works, the second will come in a few weeks in the form of a somewhat detailed guide to how search works and how you can improve your site to make the most of the known search mechanisms.

So without further ramblings…

Search Engines and more accurately their algorithms have always been something of a mystery. As the saying says; there are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Basically this means there are certain things we know, certain things we know change and things we’ve no idea exist as SEO’s because algorithms can change any seconds (and generally do) making for many more variables than you may think. Confused yet? If not, just wait a few moments as you continue to read this article.

This overview takes you from your content creation to search queries to the results page.

From Generation to Consumption

1. You create a new blog post / web page / add some content to some website

2. Search Bot crawling the web finds this content

• Search Bots (SB’s like google bot) will follow links on website and so if you have no or few links you are unlikely to be crawled.
• SB’s won’t index pages and directories if told not to by a robots.txt file.
• If a link has a rel=”nofollow” attribute SB’s wont index the linked page.
• SB’s may also find pages on your site using a sitemap (a specialised XML file).
• The more links a page has from higher ranking websites you have the better your quality score will be in the index. (as long as these linked aren’t nofollows)

3. Once crawled, shortly after another bot will come along and index the content.

• Meta tags (title, description etc) are considered to be stored in one index, used for broad match searching.
• “on page” content is believed to live in another index, used for more obscure long tail searches.
• It is important to remember, when you are searching you are not searching the active web, but rather a cache (store) of the web that the search engine holds internally – this is to stop SEO’s manipulating the index easily.

4. The search engine will then estimate your ranking, generally based on links to the content (though not always).

5. The search engine will cross check the content with the policies of engine.

• Web spam teams double check for real content, test the search algorithms and refines it.
• Google uses over 10K testers (normally in India I believe) to test the quality of results.
• Search Engines then check for spam reports.

6. User send a search query (searches the index)

• In reality you aren’t just searching one index of the engine but multiple indexes and factors of the search engine.
• During this process Google suggests relevant keywords.

7. Initial search results are shown.

• Google may show billions in the index of relevance, but only the top 10K are generally shown.
• Localised Search Results – google and bing will use your IP location to show localised results higher in the results.

8. Results are shown in accordance to search ranking, authority and duplicates are removed.

• The big search engines use the keywords of the search to find adverts and include these in the relevant hotspots of the results page.
• Many search engines also offer refinement tools alongside the results, such as “blogs”, “news” & “social” offering the user ease of access to data they want.
• Multiple pages from same domain are likely to be grouped together (“clustered results”)
• Trending sites (locally/nationally) move up the index temporarily.
• User personalisation – google will add your previous results searches and click through (clicks to website) into the results page, putting your most viewed and searched pages at the top.

9. The final results pages (serp’s) are shown to the user.

• From submission of a query to the results page showing take less than 100 milliseconds (generally).
• This crawl, index, rank & search route is the same for most types of content.

10. Search is a huge industry so what is said above is always changing to some extent, most of it stays the same but there are extra variables outside of the 9 steps above … such as how fast your content is indexed, how you achieve getting links, who you link to (apparently), whether you are known through social media … also websites/blogs etc are linked via the algorithms to your social media profiles … for example try searching your name your site and your twitter page may show up!

Do you have any questions about how search engines work? or how to get to the top of Google? simply tweet me @andykinsey or leave a comment below

Now before we begin, you must read the warnings below.

This page is NOT advice.
These tactics are NOT legitimate, you will be banned if caught using them.
Do NOT use these tactics or let your SEO use them on your site.

Black Hat SEO refers to the tactics used by some nasty SEO companies in order to “trick” search engines into ranking part of or a whole site illegitimately. There are many black hat SEO techniques, now I will only be mentioning the major few below – but there are many many others, so if your not sure ask me (@andykinsey on twitter). One little thing of note, sometimes these tactics will see you rise in the rankings for a matter of minutes, hours or days, but if you get caught you will be penalised or banned (your other sites may also suffer the same fate due to their relation).

My reasoning for this post is not to enable you to “trick” the search engines, it is simply to warn you of these tactics and to tell you that if any SEO ever recommends these actions (or maybe claims a “special relationship” with a search engine) … tell them to “go away” otherwise you may pay a very high price.

Note: Many of the tactics below have been simplified by many SEO/webmasters for implementation, many have also been made more complex to avoid easy capture of the tactics by search engines – I’ve decided to explain the principles and not how to implement them.

Black Hat SEO is No GO!

Keyword Stuffing
This I would say is the most commonly found form of spamming search engines. Generally you will find 3 forms of this: hundreds of meta keywords, highly stuffed content (keyword density 50%+) & footer spam (hundreds of keywords and links in footer). As you can tell Keyword Stuffing is essentially the use of a large number of keywords in any given area, primarily in the hope search engines will believe this is relevant content. However, I can tell you most search engines (especially the big ones) use 2 forms of checking for real content 1) human content reviewers 2) algorithms to check for similar words and anything that maybe considered “odd” language – generally point 2 will flag a link to a reviewer (1). Of course, Keyword Stuffing also goes hand in hand with “hidden text”.

Hidden Text
Hidden Text refers primarily to the hiding of text by changing it’s colour to match the background, however this is not the only way to achieve the effect of text not being visible (for instance hiding the text millions of pixels off a page or hiding text with CSS display notes). Most webmasters and SEO’s will know that if you hide something with the tactics above are easily detectable by search engines, this is good, what isn’t so good is that they still think some tricks around hiding text with images won’t be caught. It will it is blatant spam! and the search engines will catch you. Also if you are in a highly competitive industry and your site is under any real scrutiny you will find you will be reported for both hiding text and stuffing your keywords by competitors (usually within days).

Cloaking Content
In essence cloaking refers to the dark art of showing one piece of content to the user, and another piece of content to search engines. Generally this tends not to be whole pages as this is extremely easy to detect but rather in general the replacement of elements such as adverts or images on any given page, so where a user see’s an advert Google may see extra textual content. There are of course many many other methods of cloaking but this is the most common form.

Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are simple pages added to a website to target a specific keyword or keyphrase, generally they offer little or zero value to the user – they are simply a link-through page. As said above they target a specific phrase or term which is targeted in the hope that users will land on the pages from search engines, they will then proceed to the homepage or some content which may or may not be relevant to the user (indeed this is how a lot of malware gets onto peoples computers). This can be a very dangerous practice. Not only are many of the methods of injecting doorway pages banned by the search engines but a quick report to the search engine of this practice and your website will simply disappear along with all the legitimate ranks you have attained with your genuine content pages.

Redirection from a Doorway
Now generally redirection in itself can be dangerous for SEO, do it incorrectly and you cannot only appear spammy to search engines but you can also see any valid rankings you’ve gained lost through lack of using the right type of redirection. However, this is not the redirection I wish to talk about, no this is the redirection of users from doorways pages to various bits of content (usually you may find this is random, but not always). In essence you are again cloaking, allowing search engines to see your keyword rich doorway page but redirecting users to some content. For as many ways of finding redirections search engines you will find even more ways are being invented to avoid this detection – it’s like a dog chasing it’s tail.

Conclusion

So with these 5 major black hat techniques highlighted, I hope that you will steer clear of them and those who offer such techniques. Do you know any more common-place or not so common black-hat techniques you would like to share? leave a comment below or tweet me (@andykinsey)

Now there are many many SEO and general Internet Marketing myths that are floating around, and have been since the dawn of time. (Ok, dawn of the internet). Today I want to take a look at 15 of the most annoying myths, these are all a complete pile of poop.

Generally you will be told these via huge adverts on a website or over the phone when someone is cold-calling you to try and sell you a service – beware of these commission monkies.

So the 15 Myths which are a load of <insert naughty word> are:

1. We’re endorsed (or work with) Google / Bing / Yahoo.
2. Google Analytics spies on you, don’t use it.
3. Your PageRank (PR) is your search rank (or is highly related too).
4. You should have as many meta tags as possible.
5. Having country specific site’s (in different languages) creates duplicate content.
6. URL’s rank higher if you end them in .html
7. Trading (buying/selling) links increases search rank.
8. Linking to google.com will help your search rankings (or PR).
9. SEO is a one-time activity (or once per year).
10. SiteMaps aren’t for users.
11. There is no need to link all pages, spiders will find them via your XML sitemap.
12. Placing links in tiny (almost invisible) text at the bottom of  a page is effective for ranking.
13. Using an submission site to X thousand “search engines” is good for site ranking.
14. Hyphenated domain names are amazing for SEO.
15. Keyword Density = High Rankings

_{This post is sponsored by UKHost4U the UK’s premier hosting solution.}

Your navigation looks just like the one on your competitors website… only yours is more “user friendly”?

Well I’m sorry but the chances are you are speaking from your bum… for a few reasons

I want to make clear that some navigation’s are simply amazing I highlight some examples during this post.

1 – Going Over The Top

Now as all designers will know, especially if you’ve worked in an agency format… clients will always ask for you to “photocopy” something from a competitors websites. Now right away this has always sent me running for the hills, if only because each website has a unique audience and so called “photocopying” of in this case a navigation can lead to scary results. In this case I also suspect the client stakeholders have said “make it user friendly for our OLDER audience” … the designer has gone over the top with this idea and it is now not user friendly. So let’s take a look at 2 examples, one has a superb navigation and the other … well that is just scary.

Waitrose vs Wiltshire Farm Foods

Now, both of these two websites are aimed (in my view) at similar audiences, the elderly. Now with this in mind I guess Waitrose  have decided to go all out and make it so user-friendly… but wait wait, the over size text looks hideous, the almost zero contrast of grey and black is just stupid (what if someone has blurred vision?) – oh and lets not forget the scruffy coding! Now compare Waitrose to Wiltshire, WFF has the large text, the text contrasts well with the green background … oh and lets add to this the navigation is so much clearer WFF doesn’t use a drop down system … that is how intuitive the WFF navigation is. Oh and although I know I didn’t have too look at the code, it is nice on WWF – well done Headscape (as always – follow @boagworld )

Visit The Websites: Waitrose (www.waitrose.com) and
Wiltshire Farm Foods (www.wiltshirefarmfoods.com)

2 – Death to Flash

Ok my heading sounds a little like I’m itching for a fight from the “flash camp” … truth is I’m not. I have nothing against flash, unless you count I hate it, Search Engines hate it …oh and did I mention it isn’t user friendly. Ok, *deep breath* I don’t hate it as much as some people… I just hate it’s use as a navigation means, as a whole website or to hold anything but multimedia content … using it for special features such as video (see YouTube) is ok though.

I don’t think I need to say much more on flash navigation and how it really doesn’t work … but you will want an alternative… We call this CSS with a lovely mix of JavaScript tools (like JQuery & MooTools). If you want to see some great examples of lovely javascript css navigation scroll to point 2 on this (top) 50 beautiful navigations from Smashing Magazine.

You get the message don’t you? Don’t use FLASH for your navigation!

3 – That is a SITEMAP not a navigation

This point is something an annoyance and can cause all sorts of issues. In the world of design we know that simple navigation is king, so we say have 5 main navigation links – brilliant. We then add another layer to one or 2 links … still good stuff. But arghhh someone has gone over the top and bulked it all out to confuse everyone! … In essence you have made your main navigation into a sitemap – big no no and so anti-user it scares me.

Simple Navigation or Complex Sitemap

Argos, some people will think this is a nice “user friendly website” well ok, it is in some respects. But take a look at this navigation… talk about over the top. Almost 50 sublinks of the primary navigation! Who ever thought this was a “user friendly” idea needs a shot in the head – bit extreme I know.

Let me twist my point to illustrate what I really mean here. From the above you can see it’s over filled, utterly useless on the surface and surely there is a better way of doing this. So let’s take a look at a site where the multi-level navigation works very well and has a real purpose unlike this Argos website. Porsche have taken a multi-level navigation and made it work. Primary (car type) Secondary (model) final layer (car info) … it works, it’s interactive and it is simple.

Porsche Navigation is User-Friendly

Visit The Websites: Argos (www.argos.co.uk) and
Porsche (www.porsche.com)

Now I know there are many more reasons a navigation may not be user-friendly, such as not being intuitive to use. However, I’d like to know why you think site navigation’s don’t work, let SEOAndy (@andykinsey) know your navigation nightmares & also let us see some amazing examples of useful navigation’s.

Now this post title may evoke certain emotions within those involved in the web industry on a day-to-day basis, and of course the content creators of any business website (though of course creating good content isn’t just for the web). The one reaction I am sure many will have thought is “not this again” or “another post about writing good copy” (followed by pressing the back button of the browser).

Well if those people are still reading let me reassure you this isn’t going to be the usual dribble you get from many SEO Blogs, today I want to focus on “good content” in terms of the feelings you can evoke within the reader of your site, or even from the graphics you use.

Looking over various emails from current and previous clients, and correspondence between myself and those who are interested in SEO Services or just wanted to know more about SEO – I am given the feeling overall that they (in their mind) are saying “I could do that” and they all generally show the perception of developing good content is easy.

Now without being too blunt (and as any good copywriter will tell you) it is NOT easy. Indeed given the overpowering noise of the internet (you know the stuff you don’t want to know or where someone is rambling on before getting to a point, or maybe not getting there at all) and the need to be more than distinctively average, creating great content is not easy. Given that the noise to good content ratio is pretty poor (for most sites), I’ve formulated 4 key points to help you to create good content – and no, this doesn’t mean I’m saying that anyone can create good content.

Be Passionate

Even if you are selling what is the most boring thing on the earth (for example a toe nail) it is your job as the content creator to be passionate, if you’re not no body else is going to be (ever!). Boring content means bad bad results, ok you may get the odd sale but you will not sell more than if your passion for your work were evident for all to see. Now if you invented your product or service I am sure you will have no issue showing your sheer passion and belief in the product – and the user will feel your passion. If you are struggling to show passion for a product/service (you’re not alone) why not join the many who hire someone to inject that extra bit of passion.
Passion is a key selling tool to evoke emotion within a user.

Be Intentional

Think about this term before you read on, like those who read this article before I published it you may struggle to understand exactly what I mean. Plus even if you do, you may still struggle to do this with your own site(s) – like me (yes within these four walls I am sometimes guilty of this). Planning your content and the delivery method(s) you will use for each bit of content, if you use a trial and error method in posting analyse your statistics and you will produce more predictable results. In other words, this means you can start to create posts, pages and other content which will bring people back time and time again, or will create more links to your site – it also means you don’t waste time posting links (or other content) where you don’t need to, time you can spend more productively. Further more plan each article or page, do not dance around the main points in your content, make them stand out. At the heart of this point is one key point
Do NOT leave content and delivery to a “spur of the moment”.

Be Creative

Ok this in some ways speaks for itself, I’m saying be unique in what your content says both literally and emotionally. If you are writing the same kind of thing again and again then not only will your passion move away, but so will your users. We are all guilty of this from time to time. For example I was guilty of this for sometime with this site in the beginning, until I realised that wasn’t what people wanted, they wanted variety and to get something different from what any other site can offer. If you are not unique then why would anyone come to you? it’s simple they wouldn’t. Now although they say a picture speaks a thousand words, this is ok for humans so do include graphics to aid your points, but it is the word which feeds the search engine spider. My point is this
Unique content means happier users and search engines

Be Consistent

If you are the owners of a blog or a website which produces a fair amount of content then this is simple, create a schedule and keep to it, humans like things on a regular basis (think of your 3 meals a day, equate this to the number of posts per week or month and set days these are delivered). If you content is static – an information only site – then this is a little harder but here is where both you guys (and women) and the regular release content readers must take note. Content is the key to the gold passing your palm, keeping the tone, manner, style (and timing as mentioned above) is very important, especially for information pages. No body likes to get used to the tone of a page (which users do subconsciously) only to be unsettled on the next page because the tone has changed making it near impossible to read, it also means that they will miss much of your content as they can’t grasp what you are saying. My point is as follows
Chopping and changing style, tone & timing is not good for you or your user.

So despite the title of this article, creating good content is NOT so easy. It just happens to look easy. So if you create content here is my challenge to you. Think of content you have created, being brutally honest, did you put all of the above points into your content? If you’re as honest as you can be then you will be likely to say “yes there was effort, but no passion” or “maybe it could have been delivered in a better format or via different channels”. If you’re not so serious then i’m not sure what will happen other than you will continue on the path you have been on, I just hope that this some how subconscious makes your content better somehow.

Did you know that you can earn some cash from SEOAndy by referring one of our services to a friend? Click if, You want to know about our referral scheme.

Welcome to the penultimate article in the “building your brand” series, today I want to talk about the usage of social media to help promote your company, a product/service or yourself (personal brand).

To help illustrate the various characters that can be found in social media and to see which best suits you I am going to work with examples of a teenage party (18th birthday or leaving school type thing, where all are invited). The reason for this is that in my view social media is just a like a party, and the hosts are the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Ning, Digg and many others. You or Your Brand are the guests and just like partying teenagers its about “standing out” and “being the best” … not being the little ignored guy in the corner.

@ The Social Media Party

The guy/girl in the corner
Ok so this sounds like I’m being a little mean, but we’ve all seen the little shy guy/girl or person with few friends who is very quiet attending a party but not really doing much. Sometimes they sit alone sometimes with others but none the less they are quiet and unheard. This to me is like creating a facebook fan page for your brand and not shouting about it. Just because you attend the party doesn’t mean you will make any friends, you have to advertise and network to develop the relationships where by people will come and talk to you, or in this case join the fan page or follow your twitter account.

Consider:  If you answer “yes” to the following questions then you should start a conversation, otherwise next time you hear “everyone is doing the social media thingy, so should we” have the guts to say “no” because its not right for you. Do you have content worth sharing? Do you release content worth sharing on a regular basis (including blog posts)? Is your target audience under 35?

The Loudmouth Blabber
The loudmouth is the one that overcompensates for the lack of value they carry by blabbering on … basically decrease in quality in crease in quantity. The person is constantly demanding attention and never listens. This is exactly the same with social media (or blogging) companies whom are constantly “pimping” themselves and the products/services they offer, by not listening to feedback from the crowd you are in essence shutting the door in their face – they are unlikely to want to come back and talk to you (in our case less likely to deal with your business or brand).

Consider: Social media should speak for itself because your content should also, if your content doesn’t talk quality then you stand little chance in social media. In general the higher the quality of product/service the more people will talk about it on the social networks. The theory is that you should only need to post 1 link per post you write, it is then for the community you have to spread the word (from one to another and so on, the viral effect if you’re lucky).

The Sparkling Showoff
We all know who I’m talking about, the people who get out their smart phone or little gadget that does something special, or shows off something expensive or that he/she know one else in the room has (maybe an iPhone or the new iPad). People gather round (follow your group on facebook, follow you on twitter etc) to be closer to the centre of the party. Soon after they gathered begin to dissipate and back off because they realise that the gadget maybe inaccessible (they won’t get a go on it), the person/brand is intimidating or maybe they realise that the person/brand/product is bland and nothing special. This is like launching a new site online, there is a social media buzz and viral effect almost but after a few days the honeymoon effect ends because you haven’t maintained the connection with the others, you’ve decided that instead of you working you will let your product do the talking… not always the best route it is generally the connection and relationship you have with your clients that brings them back time and time again.

Consider: Beauty is skin deep, products and services have a limited ability to talk for you and sell themselves – it is for you to connect and show the real value and resource of your product… it is you whom the connection is with and you whom the community trust – not your service.

The Buzzword Adict
These are the people who namedrop constantly or are constantly talking about themselves and what they have done that is so amazing recently, even though for most people what they do is for them an everyday event! These people are those who go online mention famous names left, right and centre just to get attention – or perhaps they fill social content such as twitter with keywords and links … not only do people pick up on this but they will begin to ignore you and further to this search engines will take little to no notice of these events. The best bet and best practice is to talk naturally and not to act as you think you should be seen, social media is about conversation not campaigning for your product or services.

Consider: Remember what I said earlier it’s a converstation, it’s two way and it should be totally natural. If you decide to use social media it requires commitment to engagement, not commitment to a campaign.

Be a R.A.T.

Sounds like a peculiar thing to tell someone but being the RAT can make your social media branding exercise extra special and give it that x-factor that your competitors don’t have, after all if you are going to be the same as them what is the point – you need to be the best.

Responding Now
British Telecom are well known for having one of the worst customer service records in the UK. Unlike some companies (eg ComCast – telecoms company in the USA) BT are yet to find social media as a route to better service. ComCast offers a twitter conversation (via @ComCastCares) to its customers to help report and fix problems but the minor and major, they are not alone in doing this, one of the AKD partners UKHost4u also offer a similar service to repost hosting issues or outages. Responding quickly to current and potential customers is of the upmost importance, gaining trust isn’t easy but this is one great big leap you can take towards being trusted. As well as this it also protects your brand because you are acting in a very proactive manner to reduce larger complaints.

Adventure Beyond Competitors
Don’t be afraid to think outside the box and do something new or different, something from another industry or that has never been done before. A good way to do this is to offer a competition with a huge prize to draw attention, this is how big brands do it so try it with a smaller brand too, if they do it so can you.

Target Correctly
Targeting your audience is very important, you must target and speak to your audience in the correct tone and manner. Each type of person and audience requires a different approach – for example KFC or McDonalds would target the younger generations trying to take a tone which is “young and urban” maybe even using texting acronyms like Vodafone have done on billboards with the advert “unltd txts” … if you are selling meals on wheels to elderly people online then you may not use social media to begin with but if you do you will need a softer less abrasive tone which speaks on a friendly level with the client.

3 Steps to a Strong Social Brand

1 – planning
Planning your social events can be a crucial point for any business or brand (not so much if your selling yourself as a brand because that is you as a person and should be you talking naturally off the cuff not pre prescribed). You need to determine what you want to show your brand as being (consider brand position), plan what resources you want to show-off and consider why you want to show it off – don’t just do it for the sake of it because you can. Remember quality over quantity. Also plan which social media outlets you will use, facebook and twitter are the norms but if your technical you may want to take a look at Digg or Delicious.
Hint: Writing down your plan means if you go away on holiday the conversation continues.

2 – Implement
This is where the hard work really begins, you need to put your strategy into action – generally unless you’re your own brand this isn’t a one man job (though you can hire an seo like Andy Kinsey) to really help you out. If you get stuck and need help posting tweets on a regular basis you may want to consider auto-tweeting using socialtoo.com

3 – Analysis
Tracking and monitoring your implementation and time on social media can be very important, otherwise you won’t really know the impact it has had on your sales or visitors. There are many tools for doing this, one of the simplest is simply using analytics tools (such as google analytics) but generally this isn’t enough, there are a number of ways to check the number of times a link you post is clicked, several are paid but the one i favour bitly is completely free and they are constantly improving the analytics they provide (also bitly is a link shortening service).

Do you have any tips for using social media for branding? Is your brand currently in need of followers on twitter or facebook? Do you own a successful social brand? If you’ve said “yes” to any of the above then leave a comment below.

For the third (ok, fourth if your being clever) article in this series of “building your brand” I want to focus on your customers and how you can change certain aspects within a brand (and actions it makes) to make the consumer more receptive to the brand, including products or services you offer.

In the recent recession (and I say that knowing the UK has shown economic growth for the last quarter of 2009 and first of 2010) I watched carefully as brand after brand crumbled in the UK and around the globe, including many financial brands which most people were here to stay. Other than the banking fiasco causing the recession around the world, another thing which helped fuel the economic depression (and causes issues for many companies) is that prices are being driven lower. The reasons for this are many and varied, a number of companies believe that the customers have “been empowered with information” and therefore know where to go to compare prices or get it cheaper. In my view this is not so much the case, the drop in prices is down to a lack of strong brands, in the 90′s and early 00′s big brands such as Nike, Adidas, Microsoft and Apple dominated the global markets in many ways, looking at the same brands now adidas is slowly dieing, as are nike and microsoft, apple remains strong due to its market position as being “elite” and not so much for the ordinary punter… they price themselves in the upper market. As I said in my previous post about brand position:

The more obvious the connection is between the brand and the prospect’s daily activities, the greater the chances are that the chances of selling the product or service you are offering.

I recently did some research for these posts (as I do with all posts I make) and subsequently did an analysis of what I found and any data figures I could compare – and it is the 3 significant findings about customer loyalty I want to now concentrate on. The interesting part of this is that these cover all markets and industries not one specifically, the mindset of the consumer the world over doesn’t change very much in respect to these ideas.

Price Advertising = FAIL!

Time is the sales driver, not the price. (ok over generalising here but I will go into this in depth in a post in the future). Lets take the following common examples, when your reading these think carefully about if the product mentioned is changed to something you use on a regular basis what you would do.

Example 1

Slimming Pills – Buy 150 Capsules and Get 28 Free – £29.95

Example 2

1 Months Supply of Slimming Pills, Clinically Proven to Show Results in Less Than 3 Weeks of Continual Usage – More than 20% FREE – £29.95

Example 3

Slimming Pills – Proven to Work in Under 3 Weeks – 20% extra FREE – £29.95

These examples are taken from a discussion with a client selling diet pills Kaloss Trimmers

I admit these aren’t the best examples but lets unpack them. Example one is too the point and shows the sale clearly and effectively, but its lacking a real pull. Example two is very much wordy and as such is wasting the users time from the start, a claim of more than 20% free … so how much is free? also from a good point of view there are 2 time focuses, they do not align (1 month and 3 weeks, so whats the extra week for?) this is a messy advert and another bad example. The third example is clean and concise, it says what the product is, has a time attached and is proven (something easily overlooked in example 2) and declare 20% extra free – it is the combination of a short time period (shorter than most slimming pills) and getting something “extra” for free that pulls the consumer in, and it is this small wording change that can make a difference between them buying from you at £29.95 and from someone else with a similar product at £19.99 …. its about evoking the emotion of feeling that it will work, and you trust the product. Which neatly brings my to my next point …

Emotional Advertising Reduces Price Sensitivity

This may sound a little strange to even those who are market hardened and think they know their customers. But this is a trend that is becoming much bigger and more important on the web and tv, and it is only in the last year that it has really began to boom on the web (& tv) and also pick up in other media such as newspapers and adverts in supermarkets.

Evoking emotion in campaigns makes the advertising campaign around twice as likely to generate much larger sales figures than the “rational” (and boring) advertising of old.

If you can evoke certain emotions or memories, such as making an older person remember a good time in their childhood with an image or an old saying, my research shows that these campaigns does something quite amazing and powerful. The emotional campaign reduces price sensitivity, and means that a brand can take up the “premium” space in any market place.

A great example of this as I’ve already mentioned is Apple. In theory the products that they provide are based on the same hardware that E-machines, HP & Dell provide however they prices are much higher, this in part is due to the operating system being “great” (though i don’t think its that good) and the stylish nature of the products. The products and brand evoke a feeling of being executive and stylish – it makes you feel its high quality and therefore they can ask a premium price for the products they offer.

Loyalty Programs – Bringing Outside Inside

Again I apologise for skipping some detail here but there will be another post in detail about this specific topic, so I will cover the basics here.

One aspect that many brands use to inspire loyalty and promote a brand is to give a loyalty scheme, for example Tesco ClubCard and Nectar your build up points by shopping at various outlets and then you spend the points in store or online. Ok you’ve giving away 1 to 5% (on average) of your sale however you can be sure they will come back and spend that and it will encourage them to build up points because they want something free, we all do, its human nature. So you will get those sales, and if you make it one hundred points = £1 as with tesco the person has to spend £100 on a 1% basis so to get £10 back you spend £1000 (some nice sales begin to build up) and because the scheme only gives you so much and the person wants something nice for free they may be willing to pay any difference upto the amount of points again … so you get approx 50% of a sale … it all builds up.

Other schemes like affiliate schemes mean again you give away the same amount in sales to a person as commission for bringing you a sale, or you give them a  fixed amount say £5 per sale of a TV or Laptop. They do the leg work for you promoting your brand and website, and research shows if you let these people use the affiliation themselves they will also shop with you simply because again they are getting “something for nothing”.

So overall the three points above are things you need to consider in order to create a real base of customer loyalty. If you have any more ideas let us know by leaving a comments or tweeting @andykinsey

Finally – This article as with all of our articles is bought to you by and in association with Andy Kinsey Designs of Manchester whom have today (14/4/10) relaunched their home website andykinsey.co.uk – Again tweet your opinion of the site to @andykinsey

In today’s global market there are companies of all companies and stature, from large globe spanning companies like HSBC to small corner shop businesses … it may not appear at first sight these have much in common (if anything!).

However scratch the surface and you will see that no matter what the company size they are all fighting to market their company using both general marketing tools (adverts, seo etc) but also using the company brand to sell the company. Think of it as saying a small corner shop (eg. Bob’s Shop) maybe well known in a small area but the larger multi-national companies (eg. Nike) are known the world over not just in one single area… the reason for that is the same reason shops like PoundWorld (in the UK) have grown from a single store to a nationwide chain with well over 200 shops! – they have focused on branding … getting the brand right makes marketing a company much easier.

Before we go any further…
What is a Brand?

A brand is the emotional and psychological relationship you have with your customers. Strong brands cause thoughts, emotions, and sometimes physiological responses from your customers (and possible future customers). Let’s take Apple Computers as our example here. We’ve all seen the Apple logo (if not click here to see it, and if you have refresh your memory). So the Apple logo is used to elicit certain emotions within your mind, it makes you think “glossy”, “high end” and possible “the best”.

But a logo is not a brand, it is merely a representation of the brand. Take another look at the logo, but this time think about the emotions you would have if you have never heard of Apple Computers … you are pretty much left with “glossy” – not saying much for a world leading brand. A logo is simply a gateway to a brand, something everyone can remember. Having a good logo is like placing a shortcut in the mind of a person to make them remember your company. Brands are not made from concrete or steel, they are the thoughts, emotions, and psychological relationships between a business and a customer. And your brand is the foundation of all your marketing activities (not your logo). However, equally there are not many brands without a nice logo … its a combination of both that will bring success and ease of marketing. – If you need help designing or re-designing your brand identity then visit andykinsey.co.uk and get a free consultation today.

So you now understand what a brand is and isn’t … it’s now time to build on this knowledge and begin to understand how to build your brand image and (possibly) more important what your brand image should say about your company.

Your brand is used to suggest your position within all markets (this is generally subconscious in a customers mind). Your brand also dictates your strength within the global marketing network. To build any brand for any company it must be based on the true emotional feelings you wish to evoke (for example if you are a health based company it would be a very bad idea to make your company feel dirty or untrustworthy, you would want to concentrate on the opposites of being clean and honest).

Creating a Brand

To create a brand you need the following four factors: a big idea (something like a mission statement), company values (your ethics and codes of conduct are a good starting place), a vision for the future (where you see your company in 1 month, 1 year and 10 years) and finally, personality (normally this is a group personality, aka being friendly, caring and creative). Once you have these in place you have your “brand” or at least a starting block for you to grow and expand.

This time using Microsoft as our example, they started by simply wanting to be part of the game… soon they realised they needed an office, they rented a motel room! … not much of a brand here… they moved to an office where they we’re seen in a little better light … (they now went to see IBM and signed lisence contracts for DOS … which they then bought from a guy for 50K … they never wrote it … they tweaked it!) … at this point they move into larger offices and are seen as much more professional and a big player in the market – over time the logo changes from a hand drawn sign with not much effort to a pointed logo moving to today’s logo sometime later. (see microsoft logos here) – as you can see the brand developed as the company grew and took off … this is the same with 99% of businesses – the 1% left are generally companies spawned from another larger company.

Now we have a brand we need to market it, we need to market your company to make it memorable. This is all about one word…

Recognition

If you can create a brand that is strong and a logo that evokes the feelings of your brand then you need your logo to be stamped all over the place, from adverts to websites to other marketing materials (see below how Andy Kinsey Designs can help). To make your brand grow in recognition you need to be your values and achieve your goals, you need to work with other companies and the community to really get known – and send everyone some free promo stuff … it always helps.

Once you’ve got this sorted your home and dry (almost) you just need to get back to marketing both your products and brand … oh and don’t forget work on your websites SEO

To help promote your company (and/or products and services) you may want to consider the following items (not a complete list): posters, flyers, personalised pens, personalised mugs, personalised mouse mats, business cards, a website (or it’s redesign), press releases, search engine optimisation, social media optimisation and improve your customer care service and record (eg if you get an email, reply within a few hours at the latest – a quick response evoked professionalism).

To help improve your brand Andy Kinsey Designs have become partners with a special company which offers personalised gifts. We will design any type of “gift” including personalised mugs, pens & t-shirts – we then send it off to our partner who will send you the goods directly … This is an exclusive insight into a future service from Andy Kinsey Designs (not yet announced on andykinsey.co.uk!) … if you would like to know more about this service and our exclusive discounts on printing of these materials contact us today.

Andy Kinsey Designs also offer design and print services for all the graphic design services mentioned above as well as brand marketing services.

For a while I’ve considered posting the tools I use for various pieces of SEO from a general overview to getting information in more detail to finding out just how search engines see our site and how often a site is crawled. But I’ve pretty much always wrote the post and deleted it because the tools an SEO uses are pretty much his trade and he holds them a guarded secret. (I apologise for relating to SEO’s in a male term its just easier for me and not meant in any sexist manner). So I’ve always refrained from posting any of the tools I use in any post. – Though I am happy to share them face to face and over twitter most of the time it would appear.

Anyway, today I want to share a number of tools I use or used to use for SEO. Most of these are of former use as I’ve found the tool within another tool or there is an easier or better tool available, but that doesn’t take away from the nature of these being quite amazing SEO tools – it just means it may take you a little longer to realise various SEO factors. These tools are aimed at website owners in the main, however the tools can be used by anyone and are used within the Internet Marketing industry. Best bit of all is these are all free!

SEO Tools for Website Owners

Website Grader

Website Grader – 5 STAR
This tool is constantly updated an includes various factors such as number of inbound links, number of indexed pages, date of last crawl, checks meta tags, image alt tags, heading tags, gives advice on various other factors and one of its best features it allows you to compare your site to others easily. – One of the biggest draws for website owners is there is no coding involved at all. – Website Grader then gives you a total score based on your site and external factors including related twitter accounts, a related blog (if your site isn’t one) & your alexa ranking.

Also checkout these from the same company: twitter grader, facebook grader, book grader & press release grader.

Google Tools

Google Webmaster Tools – 4 STAR
GWT rates as 4 star and not the top of the pops because of one factor, you need to have some technical knowledge (you either add a line of code to your site or upload a file via ftp) so this tool maybe out of reach of some website owners. Once you’ve verified your domain by these means you can start to see various factors surrounding your site (if your site is new it can take a few weeks or months for anything to show up whilst data is collected) GWT lets you see where your ranking for keywords and phrases, shows your how important these terms on your site appear to google, your crawl rate & set the rate of crawl, your website targeting market (eg UK), number of links not just to your site but each page of the site, allows you to see http and crawl errors, submit sitemap(s), check for malware, check speed of your site and also allows you to fetch as googlebot (a nice tool). So although there is some messing around and waiting this bunch of tools is top notch. Also Google release articles on a regular basis about how search engine optimisation can work and what google are doing at the moment (and don’t forget the youtube webmaster channel from google!).

IWebTools

IWebTools – 3 STAR
This is a set of tools and is ranked in a lower manner as unless your paying you don’t get them bunched together nor are you able to store the data. However tools such as pagerank checker, link popularity, pagerank predictions, multirank checking, speed testing and ping testing there are some nice tools here so IWebTools is really worth a look, right after you’ve seen the other stuff.

SEO Chat

SEOChat Tools – 2STAR
Much like IWebTools but a much larger list of them, my problem with this site is that its not 100% reliable in results it gives (indeed some can appear random) and they are not all strictly SEO factors so you can begin to waster your time here – by the time I suggest this site you should have used the 3 above and not need to see repeat information like this site can give (though its always nice to check things twice)- I advise you use this for double checking things only, thats SEOChat.

SEOMOZ

SeoMoz.Org – 1 STAR
This is one of the most used SEO tools around the web, it is ranked very low in my working because of its you must pay &/or register before certain tools are available and even then they aren’t the most intuitive of things. There are a series of free tools offers by SEOMoz but nothing we’ve not seen in the above, even the paid stuff isn’t much different to the above – my advice is use the free stuff and search for a free version of the other things they ask you to pay for. Another great thing which i think is a better resource than these tools is the blog posts and the forum this site offers.

Have Your Say:

Let SEOAndy know what tools you use by commenting below

Also let us know what you’d like to see in our NEW SEO Book by tweeting with #seoandybook – helping us build a practical seo book.