Building links is an essential part of any SEO’s list of daily tasks. Whether it’s guest blogging, submitting to directories, blog commenting, distributing press releases or contacting industry sites or webmasters – it’s all part of the job and without it the campaign would stall.

But many of my clients ask what they can do to help with the process. Sometimes they just want to see results quicker and other times they just want to be as involved as they can in making their site (and business) succeed.

Obviously any business owner can contact previous or current clients as well as authoritative figures within their industry but there are other ways they can boost their business exposure at the same time as contributing towards the link building campaign.

I’ve listed a few ideas below, some of which may suit some of your own clients that are keen to help with the process:

Write Articles

Obviously these need to be written to a certain standard and cover certain criteria, but once they’ve got that they can really help the campaign. Whether they are submitted to external article directories or are contributions to guest blogging sites, providing they contain a link back within a suitable piece of text they’ll be of benefit.

Family and Friends

Do any of your relatives or friends have their own website or blog? Give them a quick call (it’s more personal) and see if they’ll link to your site. It takes 2 seconds and should be more than happy to help a new business venture for a good friend or relative.

Network

I’ve attended a number of networking meetings in my past and got to know some great business people. Business cards are commonly exchanged but there’s no reason why you can’t use this opportunity to ask for a link to your website to show their support to local business, even if it means providing a link in return.

Help a Charity or Non-Profit Organisation

You probably don’t realise how many non-profit organisations operate within your city or county and can almost guarantee that there’s one that could use your help, however trivial. Whether it’s painting a community centre sports room or contributing to a local magazine, everyone can offer something to help. If you can offer something freely, you can quite easily ask for a link in return – and who is going to say no to such a tiny request when you’ve helped them out for a couple of hours?

Use Video

How much fun would it be to create your own video on something you love and upload it to youtube? If you create a fun and engaging video that people want to share this will attract links like nobody’s business. Make sure you include your business URL in the video somewhere so that if anyone that shares the video and doesn’t give credit with a link you’ll still see benefit.

Those are just some ideas as to how a client can contribute to the link building campaign at very little cost to themselves and could help see their site perform within the search engines much sooner for more competitive phrases. Not only that but these ideas could also boost their local exposure in the offline world too!

You’ve heard it a million times – and if you’ve read many of my posts on the Creare SEO blog, you’ve probably read it a million times too – but a faster site is a more successful site.

Whether you look at it from an SEO, user experience, conversions or from a design perspective a faster site is a far better site and should be on the long list of things to do when a site is being created, optimised or edited.

One of the things you can look at is making sure your stylesheets are well optimised. By this I mean reducing the way the stylesheet is coded and making the file as small and efficient as possible.

Here are some examples of ways you can shrink and optimise your CSS files:

Use shorthand properties

Not optimised: margin-top: 5px; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 10px;

Optimised: margin: 5px 10px 0 10px;

Or

Not optimised: border-width: 5px; border-style: solid; border-color: #FF0000;

Optimised: border:5px solid red;

Compress colours where possible

Not optimised: background-color: #FFFFFF;

Optimised: background-color: #FFF;

Remove unused styles

Remove the last semicolon for each style

Ensure your CSS validates: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

Those are just a few ways you can speed up your site to aid your SEO and user experience on the site as well as reduce bandwidth usage on your server and should be seriously considered when designing and/or optimising a site for SEO or user experience.

There are also some really handy online tools that will do the job for you, optimising the time spent tweaking the site too!

As the 1st of December is finally here, and the Christmas spirit is spreading around the Creare SEO department in the form of Bing Crosby and gold tinsel, it’s certainly time to think about Christmas SEO strategies… for 2012 that is. If your Christmas strategy for 2011 isn’t well under way by now then I’m afraid you’ve missed the boat. Or maybe you’ve recently launched your e-commerce site and you’re only just starting to create your overall SEO strategy. Christmas next year might seem like a long way off, but follow my tips and you’ll save yourself a lot of hassle when the time comes next year.

Choosing keywords – grab the data while you can!

This is one of the main inspirations for this post, since Google stopped reporting keywords in Analytics for signed-in users, there have been various posts reporting that the update has affected 9% – 23% of visits. Without that percentage of data, you might find it more difficult to track exactly which keywords are driving you sales this winter. Plus if Google have their way, this percentage will only increase as more and more people sign into the various Google products. So ensure you have Google Analytics installed on your website and grab all the data you can get this year, it’s more valuable than you think.

As for new e-commerce sites, you might not even gain organic traffic from your top Christmas keywords this year, so the easiest way to discover which keywords have higher levels of traffic and whether they’re likely to convert , is to do pay-per-click advertising. Gaining traffic almost instantly through PPC campaigns will not only allow you to see which keywords have the most potential, but should also generate you some sales. Set yourself a PPC budget and treat it as research which could save you money in the long term – there’s a lot to be said for choosing the right keywords at the start of an SEO campaign and sticking with them. You don’t want to spend months building up your rankings to discover that those keywords have a lower conversion rate than alternatives would.

Landing pages – test now, reap the rewards later

A key ingredient in gaining organic rankings is content, and that content sits on the landing pages that you want to rank, the pages you will then be driving traffic to. So not only do you want to ensure you have original, relevant content for SEO, you also want to make sure your landing pages will convert that organic traffic into sales. Monitor and evaluate the combined conversion rates of your landing pages and the keywords they’re optimised for. Christmas is a good time to do this as more people are shopping online and you should get more figures to improve the statistical relevance of your findings. If any of your top landing pages have a lower conversion rate than your site’s average – spend the next 11 months improving these so you can increase your return during the festive season in 2012.

Link building – find the festive freshness

Carry out competitor research this year – monitor which sites are ranking for the keywords you think you’re likely to target next year and see what links they have using the those terms as anchor text. With Google’s recent algorithm update placing importance on freshness, perform some searches this month with your target and related keywords – you might just find some news sites that you can approach to gain some coverage and traffic this year, all whilst starting to create seasonal links to help your rankings for Christmas next year.

Let us know your thoughts – do you have any seasonal research tips? Do you too get driven crazy by the sound of Wizzard’s one hit wonder?

Considering the amount of people who use the internet and the amount of statistics out there about ever increasing amounts of money being spent online year on year, it still bemuses me that many companies strategy for drawing traffic to their website falls solely in the lap of SEO.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of SEO and well aware, as an employee of Creare, the positive results that can be gained. However, I’m also a big fan of PPC which is why I don’t understand when people say my SEO is working well, what do I need PPC for? Isn’t it just a waste of money?

I believe what people often forget is that despite organic listings drawing 65%-70% of clicks from the SERPs the other 30%-35% is drawn by PPC. If you were a clothing manufacturer you wouldn’t make clothes that only fit 70% of the population, so why would you want your site to only be eligible for 70% of the traffic from search engines?

It seems perfectly logical to maximise your websites exposure a strategy for both SEO and PPC would be best. Especially when you consider PPC will only cost you when clicked on, brand exposure in prominent positions on the SERPs across a vast array of keywords costs nothing.

I’ve also seen data that suggests conversion rates of a site can be affected by the differing methods of sending traffic to a site. In the report, I read a series of tests were conducted on a site that’s average visitor was web savvy (knew the difference between SEO and PPC for example) and the conversion rates of the site based on traffic source were as follows:

SEO Traffic Only – 15.1% conversion rate

PPC Traffic Only – 15.3% conversion rate

SEO & PPC Traffic – 15.4% conversion rate

As you can clearly see, conversions are marginally better when traffic is sent to a site via both SEO and PPC. On a site that doesn’t get much traffic, this higher conversion rate wouldn’t have too much effect but on a site that gains thousands of visits a day, this extra .1% could make a significant difference to the bottom line.

Another major benefit of running SEO and PPC campaigns at the same time is the ability to share data. For example you can test the effectiveness of new keywords via PPC before spending months optimising for them via SEO.

SEO and PPC also complement each other very well in many other instances and often when one method has a weakness, the other has a strength so using both mediums also helps makes your online strategy a lot more robust.

In conclusion, what I’m trying to get across today is that even if your site is doing well and your SEO is working, the amount of traffic to your site and conversions resulting from it will increase with the addition of PPC. So perhaps in 2012 you should rethink your strategy and consider adding some PPC to your strategy.

By now, most of us that are involved in SEO to any reasonable level should know that the speed of a site is having an effect on a site’s rankings. Whether it’s the speed of the server, more streamlined code or the use of optimised images it all matters and Google has just confirmed this to us once again by incorporating site speed into Google Analytics.

If releasing a page load analysis tool and adding a sub-section dedicated to site speed within Webmaster Tools wasn’t enough, this is surely a step to make any good SEO pay attention and start looking at everything they can to make a site run as fast and effectively as possible.

In many ways it comes down to user experience. It makes sense that Google rewards sites that provide the best user experience possible and can be measured partly through the speed of a site.

A fast-loading site suggests that the site owner has spent money on a good hosting account or server, has optimised all images and only included them where necessary and has optimised their code to run as streamlined as possible in order to give their visitors what they want quickly and effectively.

Not only that but it also benefits you directly in the way of reducing disk space on your hosting account as well as bandwidth costs which, depending on your host, can be costly if you use more of your allocated ‘allowance’.

Site speed is only available in the new Beta version of Google Analytics and we’re seeing some results trickling in.

So if everything else wasn’t enough to make you want to speed up your site, now is the perfect time to do what you can to help your site perform better within the search engines as well as give your current visitors the best user experience possible while they’re on your site and get the most out of each and every hit.