Managed SEO and Internet Marketing

Q.If clients can find us on the web, why do we need an Email Marketing programme?
A. Email marketing is useful for securing potential clients who've expressed an interest in your products or services. It's also ideal for keeping existing customers informed of new products and building a long-term relationship with them.

Q.Won't our clients become fed up with receiving emails from us?
A. The complete visibility of our email system allows you to have a complete audit trail of customer communications, thus giving you the ability to tend to each individual client's needs. Also, clients will always have the opportunity to unsubscribe from receiving emails.

Q.Won't our marketing emails just be deleted as 'spam' before they've ever been read?
A. Of course random mail-outs or badly targeted emails will probably be classified as 'spam' by the recipient or by their junk mail filter. However, well-managed and specifically directed and requested emails should be relevant to the recipient and are therefore lead to a high conversion rate.

Q.Why is SEO an ongoing process?
A. Criteria changes all the time. Search engines want to continually refine search results to be more relevant. We constantly monitor these changes in search engine criteria to ensure our SEO is effective.

Q.Will a new SEO strategy be able to achieve high search engine rankings straightaway?
A. It can take around 4-6 weeks for search engines to classify a new website or web page, and Google may take several months.

Q.Why do search engine rankings sometimes go down?
A. Markets constantly evolve, new competitors arrive and others improve their SEO. Besides, search engines are often fickle, and what works today may be less successful tomorrow. SEO is an ongoing process, and with our help you can stay near the top of the rankings.

Q.Why is Internet marketing important?
A. As with any marketing, the aim is to bring in as many sales as possible. Nowadays, the Internet is more accessible and popular than any other form of media, so not targeting such a broad audience would be a grave mistake.

Q.Why can't I do my own Internet Marketing?
A. It's time-consuming and usually much less effective without specialist know-how. However, by partnering our resources and expertise with your own knowledge, we can create a cost-effective Internet marketing programme, whilst leaving you free to concentrate on your core business.

Q.Couldn't you just create a website with a list of SEO keywords for search engines to pick up on?
A. This would be considered 'spamming', and search engines would penalise your site accordingly. With today's technology, your site must read well to achieve the best results.

Q.I already have a site. Will better copywriting alone make a difference?
A. Yes it will. It will persuade more visitors to stay longer on your site and to buy from you. And copy optimising the site will bring you many more visitors in the first place. However, for maximum results, you should also consider redesigning and marketing your site.

Q.How important is it to copy optimise my site?
A. Copy optimising your site makes a big difference to your traffic volume. If you would like to get new customers online via the search engines, copy optimisation is vital.

Q.Is SEO copywriting more expensive than ordinary copywriting?
A. Writing copy that includes keywords is a specialist skill, but in the hands of a professional is not in itself more time-consuming than regular copywriting. However, identifying which keywords to use can take some time and therefore add to costs.

Q.Do you offer any other kinds of copywriting?
A. Certainly. Our expertise covers all kinds of online copywriting, including banner ads, email campaigns, article writing and marketing, and so on. We can also provide general sales literature, brochures and so on.

Q.What if I prefer to keep my copywriting in-house?
A. That's not a problem. However, we do recommend you use a professional copywriter, and that you ensure he or she is familiar with writing for websites

Q.How important is good copy for my website?
A. It's absolutely vital. Professionally optimised copy will bring many more potential customers to your site. Well written website copy will keep them there - and convince them to buy from you.

Q.Why is an Error 404 Page beneficial to my site?
A. A site with its own 404 Error Page will look very professional. It informs the visitor that there is a problem and can give them contact details to inform you of such problems. It will also be registered in your log files and enable you to see what pages are missing on your site so you could put in redirects. This will make the site very user friendly and encourage people to continue visiting.

Q.Why should I have a sitemap?
A. One of the recent innovations from Google has been the introduction of xml sitemaps. These enable you to register the sitemap for the search engine to download from your host server and then index every page URL listed on the sitemap. The benefit is that indexing is much more efficient and changes are tracked more quickly because Google tends to download the sitemap daily. Here is an example: [example]

Q.What is a Robots.txt and why is it important?
A. Robots.txt is a file stored in the root directory, which search engine spiders read to determine which parts of a website they shouldn't visit. You can specify what pages to index or what search engine spiders are allowed to index the website e.g. you can specify that Google's spider is allowed but not Yahoo's spider. This is also useful to stop a website from being indexed by accident if it is still under construction of if you want certain areas of the web site to be hidden from the spider. This file is the very first stop for search engine spiders and therefore a very important one. For a good example see http://www.bbc.co.uk/robots.txt.

Q.What is a Favicon and why is it important?
A. Favourite's icon or Favicon is an icon associated with a particular website and is personal to it. This is checked by all browsers when a page is opened. If you have this missing it's logged as an error in your log files and if you study your log file, which is highly recommended, you will see the effect.

Q.What is Alt-text and why is it important?
A. The alt-text is the text that hides behind the images, and since the search engine spiders are not able to "see" any information that is held within an image, the alt-text provides a way for the search engines to tell what eachrnimage on the site signify. Alt-text is of utmost importance for images that are the object of a hyperlink because hyperlinked text (alt-text for images) is a factor that many search engines use to determine relevant terms for the site. It is a highly recommended approach to ensure that the site is indexed properly. Every img tag must have an alt attribute. If you use images in your web pages, it is good practice to include Alt text for every image that a visitor tornyour site will see. Such practice is likely to augment your search engine rankings; particularly if the Alt text contains a keyword or two that is relevant to the topic of the web page of which it is a part.

Q.Why are Hyperlinks important in optimising a site?
A. Search engine spiders consider hyperlinks as one important indicator (marker) while indexing a website. Title attributes are used to promote targeted keywords and phrases on search engines. Title attributes can be included when creating hyperlinks, so as to emphasise keyword phrases that are in sync with the targeted page's title and meta-description tag content. The content placed within the title attribute will be presented to the end user as a small description window when they place their cursor over the hyperlink.

Q.Why are Keywords important?
A. To successfully attain top rankings in the search engines, the words on your web pages should never be an afterthought but a major investment in your search engine optimisation campaign. A well-optimised title and a good heading certainly boost search engine rank but it will turn ineffective unless the page also contains some keyword-rich body text. Content is what the search engines really want to index. If logistics allowed them they would look at nothing else on a page except content. Adequate descriptive content allows search engine spiders to extract obvious targeted keywords and phrases. Content must be thoughtfully constructed to ensure correct information will be included in the search engines' indexing equation.rnThis is essential to generate enough information for search engine spiders so that they correctly index the website. Whether you're writing keyword-rich marketing copy from scratch or simply changing the keyword focus of yourrnexisting copy, it's not always easy to know where to place those keywords so that they don't interrupt the flow of your writing.

Q.What is a Title Tag?
A. The Title Tag is used to specify what text appears at the top of a browser window when visiting a web page. It also appears as the link text when your web site appears in search engine results. It is therefore viewed by both visitors to the site as well as by search engines. Title Tags influence rankings to a good extent, so spending time on them is worth it. Ensure that the right text is in it (i.e. include keywords / key phrases relevant to the web page). Title tags are undeniably one of the "big three" as far as the algorithmic weight given to the factors considered by Search Engines. They are equally important as your visible text copy and the links pointing to your pages. No search engine optimisation process is complete until you've added your keyword to the <TITLE> tag.

Q.What is a Meta Tag?
A. A Meta Tag is an HTML tag that gives information about a web page rather than its content to the search engines. The tags help search engines categorise them correctly and therefore are a useful SEO tool. They are hidden on the page with the HTML coding and are not visible to the visitor.

Q.Why are Dedicated Servers important?
A. Although the internet is not 'policed' as such shared webhosting IP addresses can be blocked if they are suspected of spamming, sending out viral email, etc. This why it is important to have your own dedicated server; if you shared a server with an IP address that is blocked the entire server is blocked not the individual IP address.

Q.Why is IP Location important?
A. The IP location is important because it informs the Search Engines which country the computer resides in. The Search engines are then able to return the relevant information to that country when you are searching for information. It also allows governments to control what material is being viewed by its residents by blocking access to certain information to IP addresses of that country.

Q.What is an IP Address?
A. An IP address (Internet Protocol address) is a unique computer address that certain electronic devices use in order to identify and communicate with each other. Any participating network device-including routers, computers, printers, Internet fax machines, and some telephones-can have their own unique address. The IP address, therefore, acts as locator for one IP device to find another and 'talk' to it.rnIn other words, the IP address acts as a locator for one IP device to find another and interact with it. However, it does not act as an identifier. An IP address, although acting like a street address, differs from other forms of contact information, because the linkage of a user's IP address to his/her name is not publicly available information.

Q.What is a SSL Certificate?
A. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), are cryptographic protocols that provide secure communications on the Internet for such things as web browsing, email, Internet faxing, instant messaging and other data transfers. This is a certificate which is installed on a secure server. It is used to identify the merchant using it and to encrypt the credit card, and other sensitive, data.

Q.What is a Domain Name?
A. Domain Name (UK & US) - The unique name that identifies an Internet site. Domain names have two or more parts separated by dots. For example www.bbc.co.uk

Q.How do Search Engines Index a website?
A. A robot, also known as a spider or a crawler, is actually just a programme that follows, or "crawls", links throughout the Internet, grabbing content from sites and adding it to search engine indexes. Robots only can follow links from one page to another and from one site to another. That is the primary reason why links to your site (inbound links) are so important. Links to your website from other websites will give the search engine spiders more "food" to chew on. The more times they find links to your site, the more times they will stop by and visit. Google especially relies on its robots to create their vast index of listings.

Q.What is DMOZ?
A. DMOZ is a directory run by volunteers under the Open Directory project, www.dmoz.org. The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors and is owned by Google, which is why Google gives it priority.

Q.What is Alexa Rank?
A. Alexa Internet is a subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is best known for operating a website that provides information on the web traffic to other websites. Alexa collects information from users who have installed an "Alexa Toolbar," allowing them to provide statistics on website traffic, as well as lists of related links. However, the Alexa Rank is only an indication and not a definitive. The Alexa Toolbar is only used by professionals rather than the wider World Wide Web community and therefore not a fair comparison.

Q.What is PageRank?
A. PageRank is one of the methods Google uses to determine the relevance or importance of a Web page. PageRank is a vote, by all the other Web pages on the Internet, about how important a Web page is. A link to a Web page counts as a vote of support. If there are no incoming links to a Web page then there is no support.rnOf course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it to determine if it's a good match for your query).

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