February 14th is just around the corner, and with this momentous day millions, in fact billions of us will be heading out to the shops to buy gifts for the special ones in our lives.

Although its origins are fairly unknown it’s a tradition that has grown across the world and with 1 billion cards sent annually it has become the 2nd most popular card selling holiday after Christmas.

As we all get loved up and think of ways in which we can show our true love you should consider ways to love your SEO campaign to keep it fresh and exciting.

Find Me

An age old tradition at Valentine’s Day is to leave your chosen card anonymous instead choosing to sign it with the simple words “From your Valentine”; this is perfect as a romantic gesture and will leave the object of your affection in wonder trying to work out who their secret admirer is.

Anonymity isn’t something you want in an SEO campaign; the main purpose of any campaign is to ensure that when your customers boost up a search engine your business is the first one to be delivered in the results.

If you want to be number 1, let’s be honest who wouldn’t, you need to be careful in your keyword selection. Think about what your customers will be trying to find and use places like Google Adwords or analytics to find out the highest search terms in your area.

Trust Me

Over the Valentine’s Day period there will be hordes of men heading into shops rushing to find that perfect present; do you trust that your partner won’t bring back a bunch of flowers from the local petrol station? There’s a shocking statistic that says 53% of women will dump their partners on Valentine’s Day if they don’t buy them a present! And who says love is dead??

Trust is an important aspect in any relationship whether it’s with your loved one or with the customers of your business. With this in mind why not consider ways you can reach out and increase your brand image with some handy SEO techniques. Social signals such as Twitter and Facebook have become valuable tools for a campaign; not only will you benefit by getting your name out there it will also make your business more personal to your customers, therefore increasing the trust they have in your business.

Fax Me/Email Me/Page Me

The sugary treats Love Hearts made famous by the Swizzel company are a Valentine’s favourite for many because of the individual messages applied to each one, apparently you won’t find more than 3 repeats in each packet of 20, pretty impressive stuff. They strive to constantly add new messages to keep their sweets relevant to the world we are living in and with a few simple words they can create a long lasting personal message.

This is something you should take on board with your SEO campaign, keep an eye on the changing times and trends. Google often update their algorithms and so will rank websites differently according to various factors. You SEO consultant will have the knowledge to understand these changes so it’s worthwhile taking on board any advice or guidance they offer.

As Valentine’s Day approaches put some love back into your SEO campaign, with the help of a professional SEO company the success of your business is in your hands.

So I leave you with this poignant poem:

Roses are red, violets are blue, your SEO campaign begins and ends with you.

Ok, so your trusty SEO company has got you onto page 1 for your search phrase. Competitive or not, it’s an achievement that places you right in front of the eyes of people looking for your products and/or services and allows you to grab potential sales or leads from being visible in the right areas. But is Page 1 really considered a success?

For some campaigns, it definitely is a major achievement to get a competitive keyword onto page 1 – I have a few! But the campaign really doesn’t stop there.

Research from a study by Optify recently shows that almost 60% of people click on positions 1-3. Position 4 only sees 7.9% of clicks while position 10 gets a measly 2.2%. Positions 1 really is the place to be with 36.4% of all clicks.

With this information we know that to get the most of being on page one you really have push hard to be to be in position 1-3, although there are other attributes that may skew this information. Things such as video and image listings, or non-blended and blended places results.

It’s also worth noting that positions 1 on page 2 actually gets more clicks that the bottom of page 2.

The information was taken in December 2010 and based on the US version of Google‘s search results pages, analysing 250 randomly selected sites for keyword visits to sites within the B2C and B2B.

Optify noted that ranking beyond the top 20 results (2 pages) has almost no business value and concluded that that you won’t see “huge benefits until you get to the top few positions”.

From our perspective it shows that there are two distinct goals, particularly for bigger campaigns; one to get the site onto page 1 and another to work our way up page 1 to get to position 1-3. Do they have different strategies? Potentially.

It’s something that needs more thought and analysis but clearly there are two different – and easily measurable – goals and, although the overall goal is very similar, allows us to set smaller goals within this that can be tackled individually.

After all, if you’re consistently taking small baby steps one day you’ll look back and see that you’ve not just pottered forwards but you’ve actually taken a giant leap towards achieving a much larger goal!

If you’ve been involved in the SEO industry for very long at all, you’ll undoubtedly be aware of the importance of robots.txt files in certain circumstances.
Robots.txt files can be very useful in determining how your site is viewed by Google and the other search engines out there. Not only can you forbid the search engines from seeing (and therefore indexing) your site at all; you can also hide specific pages from their view.

For bigger sites, such as ecommerce platforms with hundreds and hundreds of pages, this can mean configuring quite a sizeable robots.txt file. And this is exactly where the problem can occur. Via his Google + page, Googler John Mueller recently reminded SEOs that, ideally, robot.txt files should be no larger than 500kb in size.

According to JM, Google’s web spider, or Googlebot for short will only read the first 500kb of any robots file. This means that if you have important information in your file, but it’s larger than 500kb then you could be leading Google to disregard said information. This could lead to serious problems and could even mean that your robots.txt file doesn’t succeed in performing the task that you originally configured it for – potentially causing big problems with your SEO campaign.

More than this, an unnecessarily large robots file could be exactly that; unnecessary and could suggest that the entire build and coding of your site might need a rethink. With Google and SEO in mind, remember to check your robots file after any work is done on the site, and remember that the simpler your site is to navigate, the better chance Googlebot has of doing so successfully.

As the title of this post suggests, the Content Team here at Creare are recruiting and we want to know whether you have what it takes to join our creative, dynamic group of writers. We’re a friendly bunch and are currently on the lookout for new members to become a part of our team. From writing and distributing articles for businesses in a plethora of industries through to taking part in the random discussions down here in Content Corner, we aim to ensure you look forward to coming into work each and every day!

If you have a love of writing, you certainly won’t be disappointed as in the Content Crew you will get to write about almost every business imaginable- within reason of course!! On a serious note, fresh and regular content plays a huge role in the success of a business’ SEO campaign and as a member of the content team you will of course be playing a pivotal role.

With a writing background and English-based degrees, whether they be in English, Creative Writing or Journalism, our current team is made up of friendly, light-hearted individuals who simply love to write. It is no secret that we also love a good laugh so a good sense of humour and the ability to literally talk about anything, from the serious to the downright ridiculous, is a must!

The Content Team is set to grow and grow over the coming months as content continues to play an increasingly important role in an SEO campaign. Alongside adding informative articles to a client’s website, we also write guest posts on a regular basis which gives you the opportunity to unleash your creativeness and get your written word out on an even larger scale.

So, have you got what it takes to become a member of the Content Crew? If you have a passion for writing, an English based degree and love to be part of a friendly team, the answer is most certainly yes!! For the opportunity to join our crew, simply send your CV through to jenny@creare.co.uk.

We can’t wait to hear from you soon!!

Google have announced a nice update to Webmaster Tools this week that I’m quite pleased about, and sometimes I wonder if Google follow the bad news, good news rule as this welcomed update comes after a potentially controversial algorithm change which Joel blogged about a few days ago.

Previously the sitemaps section in Webmaster Tools simply allowed you to submit an xml sitemap, and displayed the number of pages submitted alongside the number of pages indexed. That was it basically, and the fact that this feature had little data to get you excited about could misguide someone into thinking that xml sitemaps are not too important when it comes to SEO.

I certainly witnessed the power of sitemaps last week when a designer asked me to look at a new site they had just inherited which didn’t even rank for their own brand name – which was not keywordrich.com by any means. After a quick xml sitemap submission in Webmaster Tools, the site jumped straight up to position 4 on the first page of results within 2 days.

Content-Type Data

What’s really great about the latest version is that there is a dashboard which displays the data separated into content types – web pages, images, video and news. For each content type you can see the number submitted to Google, and the number indexed by Google – and even presents this information in a colourful bar chart – data-obsessed folks love charts right?

Sitemap Errors

Another nice thing about the new feature however, is the data in the table below the graph. Webmaster Tools now show the different sitemaps that you’ve submitted, and the number of errors or warnings for each one, if there are any. It helps you to see the types of issues better apparently, although I haven’t seen this for myself yet (phew!).

Test your Sitemaps

Probably the best thing about the update is the ability to test your sitemaps before you submit them. So you can upload one and test whether it has errors or warnings and then fix them before submitting it to Google. On their blog, Google say it only takes a few seconds for the test to come back with results which sounds good, but they’ve also stated that not all errors or warnings will show up in the test, so you should probably check Webmaster Tools after you’ve actually submitted your sitemap to make sure.

Now with Google’s latest update to the sitemaps feature, I think this is the attention xml sitemaps deserve. Oh, and it’s worth noting that the video sitemaps feature in Webmaster Tools is no longer, now that this data is shown in the main sitemap section.

What feature in Webmaster Tools would you like to see updated next?