Microsoft and Yahoo are teaming up. Bing will eventually be taking over all of Yahoo’s search business. Previously search engine optimisation concentrated on Google as Yahoo only had a 9% share of searchers and Microsoft only 6%. The new combination and the likelihood that the new Bing will keep increasing its share means that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has to pay more attention.

A recent document published by Bing for webmasters reiterates the importance of optimising your website for all the search engines. Bing says:

‘If webmasters don’t provide search engines with good, keyword-oriented, well written caption source data, the resulting captions created by algorithm, no matter how hard we try, won’t represent your website as well as those websites whose webmasters did provide this unique and important data.’

1) Keywords. There has been a lot of talk recently that keywords are not as relevant as they once were. Not so for Bing who have reiterated their importance. Choosing and using your main keywords is essential to the correct optimisation of your site but so is making sure that your writing is natural. Keywords should ‘pepper’ your pages not be stuffed in there willy-nilly.

2) Titles. Bing likes unique titles and meta descriptions for each page.

Your page title tags are what search engines use as the link and main title of a page’s listing. Its the first port of call so they need to be good.

Having unique titles enables more of your pages to be ranked for relevance. Your titles need to reflect the content of the pages you are submitting. Important keywords need to be within the page content and in the title tag too.

Meta descriptions should describe what your page is about. Again relevant keywords that reflect your page’s content need to appear in the meta descriptions.

3) Inbound links from sites that have your keywords in the title tag. The purpose of this is so that sites that are linked are as relevant to each other as possible. This provides a relevant user experience. If you are looking for widgets and have found a site that sells them you are more likely to click on a link for other widgets than you are any other link on that site.

Writing well informed and relevant content is a good way to get inbound links. Other sites will want to help their readers by sending them to you. It takes time to build an audience this way but the results are worth it.

4) Ethical link-building campaign. Don’t use spam link tactics or buy links. These are ‘black hat’ search engine optimisation techniques which Bing will not approve of. Black hat techniques are for the desperate or the ill-informed.

5) Submit to Bing. If your site is new or has been altered in anyway it is important to submit it to Bing. This seems obvious but it is surprising how many companies fail to do this. You will still be searched if you do not submit your site but doing so should increase the speed at which you are trawled.

6) Use Bings tools: The Bing Webmaster Center offers lots of information to help with website optimisation.

How a website looks and how easy it is to use are very important for everyone who uses the internet. If a site is unappealing or awkward to use it may even put people off investigating further no matter how good the information on your site.

So, website design is vital. But, and this is a very, very large but ….. None of this matters if you do not have your website optimised for the search engines. You are wasting your time – you won’t get many visitors and you will wonder why.

Design and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) need to go hand in hand. If you are looking to redesign your site to make it more appealing and user friendly you need to work with a designer that works with SEO as well. If you are doing it yourself then you need to learn the basics immediately otherwise most of your hard work/time/money will be going to waste.

The transition from one site to another needs careful consideration.

Don’t Loose Old Traffic
The internet provides bio feedback. Looking at the results that your efforts bring will inform your future decisions. There will be things about your old site that were good and attracted more visitors. Some pages for example may have attracted more traffic than others. Don’t ignore this information, let it guide the development of the new site.

Changing urls
Every page on a website has its own url. When you build a new site unless you have the exact same structure for the new site then you will still be getting traffic trying to access your old site. This traffic is important so you need to make sure it comes through to the new site. This involves redirecting old pages to new ones on the redesigned site. Implementing what is known as a 301 redirect means that your old pages are permanently redirected to a new address.

Check for incoming links to your site from other websites and blogs. These are particularly important pages to redirect as they will be live and people who show an interest will get a blank page unless you do something about it.

Checking the new site
When developers are working on the final stages of a website they need to test it online. Usually your old site will still be running. Having duplicate content on the internet is not looked at favourably by the search engines. The new site will look like it has copied content from the old one. You can be penalised for this. You will not get good traffic and its very difficult to remedy the situation once your site is out there.

Luckily its a situation which is easy to avoid. You just need password protection on the site. This means that search engines cannot just scan the site until its ready for release.

Over the coming weeks Propero digital will be providing SEO tips that will help to explain how sites can improve their ranking.

Rankings for large or corporate sites rely on capitalising on the good name and trust that consumers already have in you. There are numerous ways to improve your position and gain a larger percentage of the market share. For larger well established sites internal links will have the greatest impact so focusing on these first will bring you the greatest return.

1. Careful Planning
   Its important to have a well defined strategy for web changes in place. What are your overall objectives? Who will implement them and when will you know if they are successful? A large site will require systematic and carefully planned changes.
2. Your Audience is King
   On the web every move you make needs to have your consumer at its heart. Even meta-tags (the words that you see when you appear on the search engine) need to be written for your audience and lower ranked pages may get a better if they are more relevant and appealing.
3. Content! Content! Content!
   Good content is the cornerstone, particularly for Google. Search engines do not rank a website, they rank each page individually so you need to focus getting as much quality content on each page as possible. This means that if you have a large site you have many more opportunities to attract traffic to you. Each page needs to be as different in order to make it more attractive to the search engines.  The search engines will penalise repeated content.
4. Keep Your Ranking
   When redirecting pages make sure you don’t loose your current ranking. There are two different codes that tell Google about redirections: 301 and 302. A 301 code will inform Google that the old URL has been updated and this should trigger a new indexing of your page and hopefully ensure you don’t slip in the rankings. A 302 is only a temporary redirect .
5. Put Your Company Name in the Title Tag
   Leverage the trust your brand already has by placing your company name in the title tag of each page. Searchers looking for other things may click on your page when they recognise a trusted name.
6. Have a Blog
   A blog is a great way to add content to your site. You can either have it on your site or create separate one that links to you. Blogs create valuable content for your site and that’s what the search engines want.
7. Internal Links
   Internal links which help visitors to navigate around your site are very important. The idea is to create a ‘web’. Search engines like internal links and if your website is already established then internal links are even more important. If your site is very large then a site-map will be useful, not just for your visitors but also for your rankings.
8. External Links
   The search engines like external links too. Your objectives here need to be the quality and quantity of links. The aim is to develop one-way links from sites that are highly ranked. The links need to use your targeted keywords.
9. Social Media
   Social media, such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, are being used by more and more individuals and companies are capitalising on this growing form of marketing. With Facebook, for example, you can submit adverts which provide links to your site or open an account where you can attract ‘fans’ and potentially create a ‘buzz’ about your brand.
10. Testing
    When you are making changes testing is important so that you can monitor your progress. Using advanced web tools such as Google Analytics, makes this easier as you will be able to see which pages are being spidered and which are not. Having this information allows you to target any further adaptations more effectively.

Dantran Media asked 3,000 marketing and media executives what marketing strategies they felt had been successful so far in the current economic climate and what they felt would help them do well in 2009 and beyond. The results show that a varied range of online-marketing techniques were considered to be the most fruitful strategies. The most successful of all strategies was email marketing:

-80.4% of respondents found that email was a successful marketing technique
-58.5% of companies were planning to increase their spending on email marketing
-69% were planning to integrate marketing messages into transactional emails

What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing involves using email as a strategic marketing device:  as a one-to-one communication tool and a mass-market vehicle that spreads your company’s message.

The Importance of Email Marketing
1) Its cheap – in tough times the most effective methods must also provide value for money
2) Its time saving: its quick to put together, quick to deliver
3) Its time responsive: companies can very quickly respond to public needs and changes in the market
4) It has huge potential for viral marketing* making it even more cost effective

What are the features of a great email?

• As with any marketing campaign attention to detail is paramount. Email partners-up with your website as your virtual shop window. It will help you to promote your brand – your logo, your company message, your signature – are all devises that will promote brand recognition and professionalism. It all adds to the picture that says: this is who I am, this is what I stand for and more importantly, this is what I can do for you.
• It is very important to have a standard email template for all your employees. The details of day to day work-related emails are just as important as layouts for major marketing email campaigns.
• Great emails help to create a relationship between you and your customers and future customers. Relationships are created through contact and preferably interaction. You send an email and it requires your customer to do something: read a newsletter, click on a link, enter a competition. By encouraging an interaction you are strengthening your relationship with your clients. Strong relationships engender loyalty and loyalty creates greater income for you.
• Great emails are part of a wider marketing campaign. Creating back links to targeted website pages is a great way to increase your search engine rankings and encourage more visitors to your site.
• Great emails provide something that will be useful to your customers. They give good value, they do not just sell.

As the Dantran Media survey suggests there is likely to be an increase in email marketing which means it is even more important to get it right. Consumers are adverse to being ‘badgered’ online so limited but focused and well designed campaigns will be the order of the day.

Propero Digital, a fully comprehensive online and search marketing company launched today with its full A to Z offering of digital marketing services. 

Pulling together experts from such disciplines as eBranding, web site design and development through to web site usability, visibility and organic search engine optimisation to online business development, online advertising and ‘offline’ appointment setting, Propero Digital provides an holistic, full digital service to improve company’s sales.