Many businesses have realised that they need to be online in order to be seen by potential customers. With paper-based directories diminishing in size and with people becoming more mobile and being able to search on the move it is only getting more important to ensure you have a place online and are doing everything you can to be as visible as possible.

For those that are thinking of getting online or for those that want to push their online presence here are just a few tips that every small business owner should seriously consider if they are to be taken seriously in the online world.

Buy a Keyword Rich Domain

This isn’t the be all and end all with Google, but keyword rich domains tend to do much better. With a little bit of work and a well-made site you can soon find yourself at the top of Google.

If you owned a plumbers merchant in Leicester and you managed to grab plumbersmerchantsleicester.co.uk you’d be ideally placed to pull in some great quality traffic to the site and are probably one of the few URLs that people will remember instantly, give or take the exception of a few well-known brands.

Use WordPress

Most SEO companies will tell you that WordPress is a great platform for SEO. Easily customised, clean coding, constantly updated and search engines love it. Plus it’s easy to use and pretty much anyone can set it up.

If there’s one thing you do to your site to improve it, move it over to WordPress and you’d be doing yourself a huge favour. If you’re thinking of setting up a new site – make WordPress your first stop.

Blog Regularly

Following on from the last point, blogging regularly is key to showing the search engines that your site is up to date and relevant to visitors and it will be rewarded with more trust and better positions as a result. Google loves fresh content and it’ll be a matter of minutes before it’s running over to check out what’s new – it’s like waving a CurlyWurly in front of a chocoholic’s face.

Look to Your Suppliers

Have a brief chat with each of your suppliers or other industry leaders and see if they’ll place a link to your site. Not only does this help improve your site’s authority as a whole but will also help Google to see that you are a known and trusted resource – suppliers won’t link to just ‘anybody’, after all.

Although there are many other elements that help a website gain success online, these are some fundamental things you should look at to help establish your site online and can be used as a fantastic base to start a hard-hitting SEO campaign.

As my first official blog of the year, and with the Christmas break out of the way, I thought I’d turn the tables on the tradition of looking to the future at New Year, and look back to 2011. More specifically, I want to take a quick look at the predictions we made at the start of the year in this blog, regarding which way SEO was headed. Hopefully, but doing this we’ll be able to learn something/pat ourselves on the corporate back (delete as appropriate).

So the first prediction in the list on the list was:

1.    Better Google Algorithm
With this first prediction, it may look to you like we were hedging our bets a little by being deliberately vague. However if you delve a little deeper and see our explanation you’ll notice that we talk a little about the likelihood that Google would take bold steps to improve its algorithm and reduce the prevalence of content farms.

Well, with the introduction of the now infamous Panda update of February 2011, we weren’t far off the money. Panda reduced the rankings of sites relying on poor quality content and duplicated content. More than this, with continued updates throughout 2011, Google cemented its goal of hammering content farms for the good of the end user.

2.    Stricter Guidelines on Google Products
Again, we were pretty spot on with this one. Anyone who’s using Google’s Merchant Centre at present will no doubt be aware that in 2011 Google rolled out a raft of much more stringent requirements for successfully product listing. These included stricter guidelines on unique product identifiers and the need to update products more regularly so that information was up to date.

If these measures aren’t met then you could find your site’s account being suspended altogether. Visit our Ecommerce arm or type Google Merchant into the search bar for help with product listings for 2012.

3.    More New Google Products
Ok so maybe this one wasn’t quite so accurate. We predicted that Google Offers, which was tipped for release in 2011 would quickly become a big contender for online deals, rivalling Groupon by the end of the year. The latter services’ media controversies notwithstanding, Google Offers had a minimal if not completely nonexistent effect on SEO in 2011. Tellingly, the service is still in its beta stage and is only available to localised users in the USA.

I don’t think that the service will grow much more in the first part of 2012. With the popularity of Google places and the number of users it generates, I think most SEOs will continue to rely on this to boost their regional and local campaigns, rather than Groupon or Google offers.

Moving Forward

So two out of three isn’t bad and demonstrates how the seemingly chaotic progression of search and SEO can be predicted with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

What does this mean for your SEO campaigns? Well, it should show business owners that if they’re conducting their campaigns themselves, they need to keep themselves abreast of relevant industry news.

As SEO consultants, part of our jobs in innovating and researching to make sure Creare remain at the top of our game. With this in mind, keep checking back for tips, tricks and predictions regarding how best to optimise your sites in 2012.

We all experience creative droughts. Musicians get it. Writers get it. When you’re updating a blog on a regular basis you’re sure to come to a point where you really don’t know what to write about too.

So, to keep your ideas fresh and your inspiration running high grab a coffee and look over these ideas, let the caffeine run through your blood and you’ll be set for at least another few weeks.

Write Everything Down

“I’ll do it in the morning.” Ring any bells? It’s probably one of the worst things you can do. You’ll either forget to do it or if you do remember the effect most likely won’t be quite the same – and this doesn’t help with the whole ‘getting into the moment’ vibe you need.

Try making a list of things you want to write about and keep it on your phone or something that’s always available to you. When it comes to the actual writing you won’t be stuck for ideas and you can pick and choose what takes your fancy rather than having a last minute ‘stress’.

Read Every Day

Whether it’s the news or a magazine related to your industry, this will always give you ideas on what’s new and what people are interested in.

Think about the issues and how these affect people and look at potential solutions and discuss these.

Socialise Online

Take part in social media conversations with Twitter and Facebook to see what people are talking about in your sector and any problems they are facing. Pick one of these problems or conversations, research it (if you need to) and provide your findings in a blog post.

If one person is having a problem then hundreds or more probably are too and you can direct them straight to your blog post.

There are many other ways you can stay inspired and pull through creative blocks so you can keep you blog up to date so if you have any further ideas please feel free to add them below. Otherwise, it just leaves me to say Happy New Year!

Firstly, what is ‘bounce rate‘? It is the percentage of people that visit your site and leave without viewing any further pages. They literally bounce right off your site back to Google or another site.

There really is no good bounce rate. It depends very much on industry and the type of audience you are attracting and the intentions of your visitors.

For example, an informational site might have a high bounce rate as most people will find the information they want on the page they land on. Also, MOT centres or emergency plumbers or electricians are likely to have a high bounce rate as the client is more likely to call than email, typically speaking.

Pay Per Click landing pages are likely to also have a high bounce rate as are targeted pages, such as blog posts that are designed to answer a question but it doesn’t mean the user didn’t find what they were after if they leave without viewing further pages.

Sites that have a lot of information on different pages that a user is likely to want to read or those that don’t have a prominent phone number may – annoyingly – have a lower bounce rate.

Also a well-optimised site that has focused pages that cover the keyword areas well are also likely to have a higher bounce rate (more annoyingly!) if they give the user all of the information they need on the one page they land on.

Most people would probably normally expect an optimised site to have a lower bounce rate it seems it really isn’t the case. So, what can we learn from this way of looking at things?

If your call-to-actions are prominent enough a high bounce rate isn’t always a bad thing, providing your site is doing what it set out to do; attract business. Bounce rate isn’t the ‘be all and end all’.

Put another way, although a high bounce rate can sometimes be worrying to discover, providing it is contributing towards generating business at acceptable levels the site is obviously working well in terms of achieving its goals and doesn’t necessarily warrant making major changes.

Prominent phone numbers on the site should allow all of your visitors to get in touch with you easily if that was their intention, regardless of whether they bounced or not.

An interesting but very logical angle on something that is so commonly assumed to be a bad reflection of the quality of the site.

Suggestion: If you are still keen to lower your bounce rate, try Google Website Optimizer to A-B test two versions of the site and see which works best? A higher bounce rate that gives the user everything they need on one page or lower bounce rate that pushes the user to navigate around the site to find what they are after?

As Goole’s aim to rank genuine, quality websites becomes more of a priority, it makes sense that they can’t just rely on the number or quality of links a site has and place more importance on usability factors to determine what a good website is. One key usability factor to be considered is bounce rates,  so this week I thought I’d suggest ways to improve bounce rate, through typical onsite optimisation techniques.

What is bounce rate?

To explain my thoughts, I think it’s best to firstly define what bounce rate is. A ‘bounce’ is effectively when someone lands on a website and doesn’t look at any other page on the site before leaving that site. So if a site’s bounce rate is 60% then 60% of its visitors had landed on the site then left without viewing another page. This leads me to my first point – page title and meta description optimisation.

Page title & meta description

It’s all very well optimising your page title and meta description for your target keyword to encourage people searching that keyword to click through to your website, but have you optimised these elements for the right page? If you’re targeting the keyword ‘wooden toys’ and place these keywords in your page title and meta description, your visitors will click through expecting to find wooden toys on your landing page. In this case, you would make sure the page you’ve optimised actually contains wooden toys whether it be a category page dedicated to wooden toys or a page which contains images, banners, headings or a clear navigational link to that category page or products. If your visitor can’t see what they’re looking for straight away, they’re likely to bounce and go elsewhere.

Heading tags

As well as optimising the page title and meta description, a well-optimised page should also contain the target keywords in key areas. SEO’s know that including keywords in your heading 1 is best practice for optimisation, but this doesn’t mean that you can style your h1 tag in such a way that it’s just as small as your normal text, or hide it away below the fold because it looks better for your design. The whole reason search engines favour sites with keywords in headings is because they are supposed to stand out on the page for usability reasons. To stop your visitors from bouncing, ensure you heading 1 is acting like a well behaved heading 1 – it’s placed above the fold, is bigger than your normal text, and can be seen quite clearly on the page. It gives your visitor re-assurance that they have found what they’re looking for so they’re less likely to leave.

Page load time

There’s been a lot of speculation of page load times and whether it is an important ranking factor or not. Whether it’s a high ranking factor or not, it’s highly important for usability, and in particularly for bounce rates. In today’s impatient world, visitors are used to sites loading within 2-3 seconds. If your page load time is longer than this, it could be causing your visitors to bounce as they can’t be bothered waiting for the site to load. As the Google Analytics code is placed in the <head> it is common for it to load before the rest of the page has, and before users click the back button, giving that visit a bounce rate of 100%. Make sure you use the right techniques to reduce your page load time, or make sure your site is hosted on a big enough server for the size of your site. Your visitors are more likely to hang around if your site is super fast and they can jump from page to page in no time.

So remember that not only should you optimise the right elements of your site,  but also remember why these elements are key to optimisation in the first place (hint: usability!). Create a landing page using CSS styles as they should be used and choose the right landing page for your keywords to make sure the only reason your visitors are bouncing is because you sell space hoppers at a decent price…