Twitter marketing and SEO tips

We believe that Twitter is one of the most important marketing tools available to businesses online and offline today.

• Keep customers updated of any downtime for your app or service – if the unthinkable happens and your site or service becomes available because of server problems or overloading issues, notifying your customers via Twitter is the quickest and easiest method of doing this.
• Connect with your clients and receive direct feedback.
• Launching a product to a mass market online can be extremely difficult and costs can be high with PPC advertising – why not try a promoted Tweet? This service is commonly used by those in the media industries to create a viral marketing campaign and create a flow of conversation through the social networks.
• The SEO and traffic driving potential of Twitter is huge when used in the correct way linking to your sites pages from Tweets whenever useful content becomes available on your website will help create a steady flow of traffic.
• You can actually gain new clients through Twitter! Become a regular user providing useful information and using your followers list to broadcast tasteful call to action marketing tweets. (Don’t spam though!)

 

Marketing methods

Create a legion of passionate followers by engaging with them – using the @ function on Twitter to mention a user, thanking them for joining or using your service or website is a great way of making them feel special.

You can upload images and short video clips with Twitter, use these options to notify your followers about new products and works in progress.

Create a Hashtag movement – creating a Hashtag to promote your product can have a viral effect, creating trends on the Twitter network.

 

For more information on combining your social strategy with SEO contact us today.

 

If you are using WordPress for your blog or even to run your website, you probably already know that WordPress is extremely search engine friendly – in fact Google absolutely loves WordPress! We’ve got some tips to help you to maximise your WordPress sites potential.

Create amazing, useful, funny content

Create content that is going to be useful to your readers, is related to your sites message and most importantly – original! Don’t try to stuff too many keywords into your articles as your human readers will notice! Creating good content will over time keep people linking back and re-visiting your blog or website.

Clean URL’s

A clean URL is a URL is a descriptive link to your content ie. http://www.vibrocentric.co.uk/web-design-warwickshire as opposed to http://ww.vibrocentric.co.uk/?p=3/ gives the user a good idea of what content is going to be on the page ahead of them. This is in theory the attribute that Google and other search providers pay the most attention to. To ensure that you have clean URL’s enabled access the WordPress Dashboard and go to: Settings > Permalinks. WordPress will then give you a range of choices as well as an option to customise this setting, we however recommend choosing ‘Month and Name’. Choosing a descriptive (but not too lengthy) title and URL is the most important aspect for SEO on your site.

SEO plugins

The fantastic thing about WordPress is the great range of high quality plugins available to us for free! If you haven’t already we recommend at least installing an SEO & Meta tags module and a Google sitemap module.

Why not try:

Gregs High Performance SEO

This plugin is probably the most comprehensive SEO module available for WordPress. You can configure everything from the meta keyword and description tags to page titles, main titles, secondary titles and paged comments.

Available here http://gregsplugins.com/lib/plugin-details/gregs-high-performance-seo/

Google XML sitemaps module

A good quality, up to date site map is extremely important to ensure your content is indexed as quickly as possible. This plugin will generate a sitemapindex.xml file which contains an index of all of your posts, pages and categories. You can then submit this to Google, Yahoo and Bing to ensure that your content is indexed as quickly as possible.

Available here http://betterwp.net/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps/

Use of a CDN

If your blog or website experiences a high volume of traffic, site speed can be effected (depending on your hosting type), Google particularly also looks at site speed from a user experience point of view and having a slow site will affect your Google rank. If you are using a shared host then one solution to this could be to use a CDN (Content delivery network) such as Cloudshare, similar services are offered by providers such as Amazon and there are specialist WordPress CDN networks available. Another solution to this could be to use a dedicated or VPS server from a provider such as Rackspace.

Traffic driving tips

Social media integration is now standard throughout the web. You should use Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Youtube etc to promote your blog posts and articles, as you can reach a huge amount of people. Twitter has rapidly become an excellent ‘micro blogging’ tool allowing you to connect with your audience and is becoming a marketing and customer care channel of choice for companies big and small.

Submit your articles regularly to article submission sites and directories, this will increase your pagerank and acquire you backlinks whilst increasing the amount of traffic coming to your website. A reciprocal link exchange with other blogs and content providers will help you to increase your website ranking, as well as act as a source of traffic. Adding a link in WordPress is extremely easy, just click Links > Add link on your dashboard.

If you require professional SEO services in any of these areas please do not hesitate to contact us, we provide link building, on and off site optimisation, social media optimisation and brand management solutions. Read more about our search engine optimisation services.

On-site optimisation

This is the first stage that most SEO’s go through when they start optimising a project – a quick analysis of the pages meta tags. These are the tags that provide the first clues to the search engine of what the site is about and where to rank it. There are 3 main tags that you must pay attention to, the title, ‘keyword’ and ‘description’ meta tags. They look like this:

Placing these tags in the section of your web page is the first basic step to telling the search engine what your site is about. Choosing a short description – no more than a few sentences and for your keywords ensure that you include relevant keywords (separated by comma’s) and their variations but ensure that you do not over use this.

If you have a large website, it is important to avoid duplicate title and descriptions, this is most common with large database driven sites. You content will not rank anywhere near as well as it should if you do not have relevant page titles and meta tags throughout your site. This can be tricky if have a static page site, but with many popular content management systems – such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal there is already a vast array of plugins available to help you to achieve this.

Link building

Building inbound links (links pointing to your domain) will help you to increase your Pagerank – this is the technology used by Google to grade websites and many of the other search engines use this as a basis for their rankings. The ideal way to build links organically and ethically is through directory submissions and reciprocal link exchanges with related sites. Contacting site owners directly proposing a link exchange is one of the best ways to go about this, with a friendly personal email. Many website owners will be happy to exchange links if your site is related to yours and you have a good amount of quality content.  Usually you will just need to provide the anchor text (the text that the user clicks on to visit your site) this text should always contain your main keywords. When Google re-indexes the outbound linking site it will see that the site owner has linked to your site and in the eyes of the search engine, will increase the importance of your site gradually.

Paid links may seem like a good way to go about this, but the Google Algorithm is incredibly intuitive and will eventually pick up on this, getting a few good quality links from reputable, related sites is worth more than hundreds of worthless auto generated backlinks.

Our SEO services are unique in terms of our link building expertise. We have a large portfolio of partner websites and existing relationships. This enables us to create a completely bespoke SEO strategy for our clients.

Tools and resources

In order for you to gauge the success of your SEO efforts you can track your visitors using Google Analytics, this will give you a the statistics with regards to specific visitor numbers and which visitors arrived via Google and other search engines, referring sites or direct traffic. Installing Google Analytics is as easy as embedding a script into your websites <head> section. Opening a webmaster tools account will allow you to view the approximate number of impressions your site has daily (the amount of times it appears) in the search engine results for specific keywords. This is an extremely useful diagnostic tool in the SEO process and will feed you lots of other information about your site such as load times, HTML suggestions and inbound links.

Sitemaps

Creating a sitemap and submitting this to Google is one of the single most important steps you can take to ensure that Google index’s as many of your pages as possible. A sitemap is usually an XML file created by the webmaster giving the receiving search engine a complete list of all of the pages on your website. It has been shown in many SEO benchmarks that this speeds up the indexing of content dramatically, there are plenty of tools available to create a sitemap, your CMS might even have an inbuilt functionality, but if there are plenty of free web based generators such as this one: www.xml-sitemaps.com. Once you have your XML sitemap, upload this via FTP into the root directory of your webserver and through Webmaster tools, you can submit your sitemap.

Professional SEO services

These basic techniques will help you to get started, for more information on an SEO campaign built around your business needs contact seo@vibrocentric.co.uk. SEO can actually save your business money through cutting your advertising costs and ensuring that your target audience always find your site.

Read part 1 here – What is SEO?

This is the first part of our series of SEO articles. This is a basic introduction to SEO that you can apply to any website and help you to improve your rankings.

In the last few years SEO has hit the mainstream and is no longer thought of as the dark art that it once was! You don’t have to be a technical mastermind to achieve great rankings with your site it all just depends on these main factors:

Great content

Great content is original, useful to the reader, captivating and it should be related to the cause or aims of your web page. This could be writing a guide to your businesses products or software or simply keeping your audience updated with recent developments in your world. This will all help create the stickiness factor that will bring visitors back to your page. Don’t worry too much about keyword placement to detriment of the quality of your content but we will cover strategic keyword placement in future posts in the SEO category!

Backlinks

Backlinks are other websites linking back to yours, in theory this increases the importance of your webpage in the eyes of Google and the other search engines. This should be done ethically and not using spam techniques (such as leaving large amounts of unrelated comments on forum and blog pages), the Google search algorithm can detect this. A good way of gaining good quality links is promoting your website through social media, contacting related site and blog owners directly for a link swap or submitting your site to related directories.

Throughout an SEO campaign for a client we typically concentrate 80% of our efforts in gaining good quality backlinks using these methods. There is no set number of backlinks that you should aim to achieve per month but always choose quality over quantity, paid links may seem tempting but can harm your SEO efforts. Starting out with a few per month after just launching your site will help reduce what is known as the ‘Sandbox’ effect which is sometimes applied to new websites by Google which seriously limits the rankings that a new domain can achieve.

On-site optimisations

Weather you have a static web page or are using a database driven CMS such as WordPress or Drupal you can make the basic SEO optimisations through the use of plugins or if you have some HTML knowledge you can do this manually. The first place to start is by looking at your sites meta keyword and description tags – which are found in the <head> section of the HTML markup. Make sure you choose your keywords carefully and create an informative short description for your page to help the search engines as well as your users.

If you are unsure how to implement this, keep reading through our series as we will be covering on-site optimisation in greater depth in future articles.

Tools you will need

In order for you to monitor your site’s Google rankings and traffic reports you will need to have your site registered and verified with Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools. Analytics will display detailed statistics on your sites traffic and is important for monitoring inbound search traffic. You can also generate extensive reports, which is important so that you and your team can monitor your sites progress. Webmaster tools will provide you with keyword ranking reports and will display your search impressions (the amount of time your site has shown up in searches) as well as providing suggestions with regards to HTML tags and duplicate content.

Wherever you are with your SEO campaign, it is important to remember that it will take time to reach your goals and be prepared for the high and low points of search engine optimisation but making small changes frequently really is the key. There are many other techniques applied by professionals to compliment these basics

Vibrocentric Web Services provide results driven Search Engine Optimisation services, if you are interested in us putting a campaign together for you give us a call on 0844 822 2612 or email seo@vibrocentric.co.uk and a consultant will contact you immediately. We are on hand all day everyday to help you reduce your online marketing costs and maximise the potential of your website.

Read part 2 here – Basic SEO techniques

Developing on your WordPress projects locally on Windows is the quickest and easiest way to start working on your site locally. This is a complete guide to help you get up and running with WordPress!

Setting up your server

First you will need to download a couple of items:

• Download the latest version of WordPress from http://www.wordpress.org/. Keep this in a safe place for now.

• Download and install the latest version of WAMP from http://www.wampserver.com/en/.

Note: After installing and starting up WAMP goto http://localhost/ to verify that the server is running, you should be presented with a screen similar to the following:

Create your database

WordPress is a dynamica database driven CMS and all of your posts, options, file paths etc are stored in the database.

• To create a database point your browser too http://localhost/phpmyadmin/.

Note: PHP MyAdmin is the MySQL administration tool provided with WAMP, you should now see a screen similar to this:

SCREENSHOT

• Enter your database name and click ‘Create’ – you have now created the MySQL database from which the WordPress website will run.

Upload WordPress

• Next using Windows Explorer head to C://wamp/www and create a new folder – this will hold your WordPress site.

• Unzip the contents of the WordPress archive that you downloaded earlier. For demonstration purposes I have named this folder ‘WordPress’.

Note: I recommend WinRar for ease of use and speed when unzipping archived files such as .zip and .tar.

Install WordPress

• You can verify that all of the files have been uploaded to your server directory by visiting http://localhost/wordpress-folder-name/

Note: But remember to replace ‘WordPress’ with your chosen folder name.

• This is the installation screen, you can now proceed with the installation by filling out site name, site slogan, email etc.

• When you enter your database name ensure that you enter the name given when you created your database in PHP MyAdmin.

• When asked for the database username and password the default username for PHP MyAdmin is ‘root’ and there is usually no password by default. This is fine for development locally however on a live server you would need to select a very strong password.

Once your installation is complete you are presented with the finished screen with the site login details.

Congratulations! You can now visit your site at http://localhost/wordpress-folder-name.