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.

As the SEO department work away like little elves to get everything finished in time for the festive break, we thought it would be nice to take a moment to look back at how we have all celebrated Christmas in our own special SEO style.

Ssshhh…It’s Secret Santa!

Everybody loves a nice treat at Christmas, so Chris organised our very own SEO secret Santa. Although we didn’t have a Christmas tree to leave our gifts under like the web guys, by Wednesday afternoon we did have a festive filing cabinet covered in packages of all shapes and sizes.

Memorable gifts included a cracking Cliff Richard Calendar for Sukh, and a surprising amount of Justin Bieber merchandise for the content team. Chris loved his festively-shaped chocolate treat, and Kieran will be a force to be reckoned with in 2012 thanks to his new spud gun. Our love of a good tea break was also evident, with mugs aplenty – including a fancy self-stirring one for Tony, and a handy heater for Oli’s cuppa. Oh, and we can’t forget to mention Ravi’s incredible mini loudspeaker, which is sure to come in handy when a Friday quiz gets a little out of hand.

All in all, secret SEO Santa was a huge success, and it was nice to get a little treat to unwrap before the big day itself.

Christmas Challenges

The competitiveness of the SEO department has only increased over the festive period, beginning with a Christmas tree decorating challenge featuring Kieran, Pip and Brad. Kieran’s creation took the crown thanks to its festive star made from a post-it and innovative use of curly polystyrene as snow. He said modestly of his victory, “The best man won”.

The SEO quiz is the highlight of everyone’s week, and a Christmas theme began to appear quite early on this year. Hannah and Jenny’s round of anagrams proved popular, particularly with the content writers, whilst Viv and Brad’s challenge to name every one of Santa’s reindeer proved too difficult for most. We can only hope that the upcoming ultimate SEO quiz holds more of the same festive fun and games!

Festive Farewells

Our last working Friday of the year saw us say goodbye to two good friends and colleagues. Hannah left us to jet off Down Under to continue spreading the SEO message in the sunshine, and we all wish her well on her Australian adventure.

It was time for Michael to return to Oz too, and we hope he enjoyed his time at Creare – if not the great British weather. We wish them both a very merry Christmas, and we are obviously not at all jealous at the thought of them eating their festive turkey on the beach!

Meanwhile, self-appointed SEO DJ Chris has continued to share his unique song choices with the office throughout Christmas (slowly driving his neighbours to despair), whilst the content team got into the festive mood with a spot of Michael Bublé on repeat.

Speaking of Christmas songs, we are all eagerly awaiting the Christmas party where we can pull some SEO shapes on the dance floor and raise a toast (or two) to another fantastic year of success. Turn off your computer, put on your most sparkly, festive outfit, and let’s all enjoy Christmas in true Creare style.

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and a fantastic 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?

My desk is cluttered with pens, glasses and emergency snacks and I’ve made it onto the tea run so I feel I’m pretty well settled in and comfortable in my new role as a content writer. Although I’m well initiated into the team (my song choices making it onto the playlists!) it’s hard to believe it’s only been two months since I first took my baby steps into SEO.

Now as talk around the office buzzes about the upcoming Christmas party and the well-deserved break that we get over the festive period, it seems only appropriate to look back over these past few months. As many people will reflect over the break in a bid to set resolutions that, lets be truthful, most of us won’t keep, I thought it was a perfect time to reflect over my early days and with my new found knowledge I’ll attempt to explain how it compares to a good SEO campaign.

Link Building

Like your first day at school, it takes you a few weeks to get comfortable and relax with your new work colleagues, and with an office of around 100 people it was quite a daunting task to begin with. Now, I am nowhere near to knowing everyone’s names and who they are but I have successfully managed to put names to most faces and with the nice touch of the Friday evening quiz, it makes it a lot easier not just to sneakily learn people’s names but also to socialise with others that I wouldn’t get a chance to speak to in a day.

This works on a similar level to link building for an SEO campaign; if done correctly it will have huge benefits for your campaign. By gaining good quality links, you will benefit from having a reciprocal link back to your site. Just like making a friend who then introduces you to someone else in the team!

Lasting Impressions

Whilst I’m hoping I made a good impression in the interview stages (can’t have been all bad they gave me a job after all!) it’s important to ensure the first impression people get of you is a good one. If I had started my first day and came across as difficult to work with or annoying, people would definitely remember me, but for all the wrong reasons.

Making an impression is important with your SEO campaign too as you could have the best campaign in the world but if you have a poor web design, people will bounce straight off your site. So taking advantage of a good web designer that can create a website that leaves your customers with a lasting impression of your business will only enhance your campaign.

As the famous but controversial Jeremy Clarkson says “On that bombshell” I’m hoping that in my first few months I’ve managed to combat my new job like you would a successful SEO campaign.