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Why great website content is critical for semantic search

Why great website content is critical for semantic search

Semantic Search seeks to improve search accuracy by understanding searcher intentGoogle’s focus has always been to be the best search engine, known for providing the fastest and most relevant set of results to the searches we enter.

Being the best is what has taken them from their small beginning of two computer geeks working together on a Uni project , to where Google is today: used by around 70% of the world’s population and, in locations like the UK, usage is nearly 90%.

Google has become the verb of search.

But Google’s ability to remain the premier search engine is founded on its ability to be able to increasingly index and understand information on the World Wide Web. To do that, Google search is changing to what is called “semantic search”. (For more information and understanding on semantic search, please read the first article in this series).

Semantic search seeks to improve search accuracy by understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of web content. For Google to improve search, the semantic index behind their Knowledge Graph needs to continue to consume information, understand it, and analyse its validity and authority.

Google’s search satnav system is locked on to a destination, moving Google search from being just a search engine to a knowledge engine, and your website has the opportunity to play a part in that transition. The content (text, images, video, audio etc) you present on your website has the potential to be a valuable resource for Google to display in their semantic search results, but first we need to consider why it may not.

A Lesson from the Garden

A wise rose gardener will tell you the importance of pruning. Wikipedia helpfully describes the process: “The practice entails targeted removal of diseased, damaged, dead, non-productive, structurally unsound, or otherwise unwanted tissue from crop and landscape plants” . The process of pruning is very important to increase yield and quality.

During the last three years, Google has been engaged in an extensive pruning programme. Through updates to its algorithms given cute names such as “Penguin” and “Panda”, but with not so cute outcomes for those affected, Google has targeted removing diseased, damaged, dead and non-productive links and pages from its index and search results. Google has been preparing the way for a better search experience that finds better content and ultimately better answers. In other words, search that provides increased yield and quality.

For Google to give the best search results relevant for those searching, it needs to find the best and most authoritative content. If we are honest, we wouldn’t expect anything less. When we search via Google, we want to find the best answers to the questions we are asking.

How can I help you?

So for your web pages to display in semantic search results for the questions your target customers are asking, your site needs high quality content focused on the meeting the range of needs presented by your customers.

When anyone searches the Internet they do so because they have a problem for which they need a solution, or a question that needs an answer. By writing and producing semantically rich web content (don’t just think text, think quality images, video, audio etc as well), your website will provide a rich source that can be harvested by Google’s web spiders and presented through search.

Consider, for a moment, the experience of walking into a shop in the days before supermarket-style self-shopping came about. As you opened the door and the bell above gave that inviting ring, the shopkeeper would come to the counter to greet you and say something like, “Good morning. How can I help you?”. That type of engagement not only made you feel welcome in the shop, but also gave you an assurance that the shopkeeper was ready to listen to you – the customer.

For semantic search, it won’t be enough anymore to just put up supermarket-style self-shopping pages that contain a few lines of text loaded with the right keywords. Content needs to engage with its audience, it needs to be able to greet the visitor and give that assurance that you have an answers for the questions they are asking.

In-depth content will also have an important part to play going forward, but don’t get stuck on that as a silver bullet to SEO success either. Quantity is not necessarily a guarantee of quality. As David Amerland says in Google Semantic Search (pg 181), “The guiding principle is, always, value to the end user as determined by relevance to a search query”. What counts going forward will be useful and valued content that answers the questions the customers in your target market are asking.

Optimising web pages for semantic search

Google search: How old was the King of Rock and Roll when he died?Consider too, the relationship between content and what may also be relevant to that content. Just as we can see in Google’s Knowledge Graph search result for the question, “How old was the King of Rock and Roll when he died?“, there are relational links to other information: e.g. his wife, songs and movies.

Google’s semantic search is capable of a much broader and deeper search experience than what we have become used to with the ten blue links of regular search. Google is now able to understand the intent of our search queries and provide personalised search results. This means that the answer to a given query will be different depending on a wide range of factors including your location or time of day and the connections you have in social media.

As we have seen above, the goal of semantic search is to provide relevance to a search query. When considering our own website content and optimising it for semantic search, we need to think relevancy, i.e. how we can build relational connections between our web pages to provide greater informational depth and value to each one through interlinking. By doing that, we can then increase the content value of each through, greater informational depth.

For each of the pages on your website and in respect of the search queries each page answers, ask yourself, what other pages may be relevant to that page? By doing that, you can increase the value of each page by extending its reach to answer further visitor queries, rather like a miniature “Knowledge Graph” experience

Creating a web page “Knowledge Graph”

For example, consider a website for a Garden Centre business. They will not only sell plants and shrubs for your garden, but, to name just a few, also garden tools, pesticides and fertilisers, garden furniture, and books on gardening.

Now think about a page that showcases some of the roses they sell. The page could just describe each type of rose for sale and nothing more. But what if that page also included a few blocks of additional information written in summary form, which linked off to the related articles? For example, the page could link to an article on the best pesticides to use for roses. Another link could be to a blog post on 10 top tips for caring for your rose garden or the history of roses, and yet another could link to a page of books on rose gardening.

What is more, the related articles included on the page could be changed to reflect the season, for example providing different related content for the spring compared to the summer. This will then more closely mimic the way Google’s personalised search provides search results, in this case, based on the season of the year. By providing Google with seasonally relevant content you can improve the chances of your web pages being displayed for personalised search queries.

Worlds converging

It’s here that we can perhaps see the merging of the needs of a ‘visitor’ to your website, be that a real person or a Google search bot. By providing a better, more joined-up, user experience on your website for people, you are in essence providing a better semantically connected indexing experience for Google.

If your website content is better understood by humans because of the way you have structured and connected it, then it’s very likely to be easier for Google to understand. The better you can help Google by providing semantically relevant content (think Knowledge Graph), the better the chances are that your site will be well indexed and understood as a resource to return in Google’s search results. The better your visitors understand how you can help them, the more likely they are to share that content with others through social media or from their own website.

Producing content for semantic search requires much more work than the magic spells cast in the past. Gone are the days when optimising a web page meant sprinkling the page with a few prime keywords dipped in secret sauce. 

Search engine marketing has, to a large extent, become harder, but it has also got better because it requires content that answers the questions your customers are asking. In essence, that’s what they have always been asking for. There are no shortcuts, no fixed formulas and before you think it does – the above suggestion shouldn’t be considered one either. But for those who are willing to give time to invest their expertise into the content they produce and do it right, the rewards will be worth it.

This is the second in a series of three articles on semantic search:

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Google Semantic Search – What’s that?

Google Semantic Search – What’s that ?

What is Google Semantic Search?Google search is changing. Coming up is a series of articles on why being ready for semantic search is important and what, if you have a business with an online presence or you are an Internet marketer, you need to know:

  • How Google search is getting smarter
  • What is the impact of Google’s Knowledge Graph?
  • Why great website content is critical for semantic search
  • How to optimise web pages for semantic search
  • Why social media for business is broken and how you can fix it

But first, here are some questions for you to answer…

Q1. How old was the King of Rock and Roll when he died?
Q2. What’s the cubed root of 74,088?
Q3. What is the answer to life, the universe and everything?

How did you do?

Here are some links to the answers.

A1. If you are not old enough to remember or you are not a fan of the man called “The King of Rock and Roll”, then the answer is here…
A2. If you are not great with numbers, then here’s the answer to the cubed root of 74,088…
A3. And if you didn’t grow up with, or haven’t been introduced to the quirky brilliance of the late author Douglas Adams, then you probably won’t know the last answer which is here…

If you answered 3/3 correctly, well done but unfortunately there’s no prize! Quite possibly, unless you are super clever with numbers, you wouldn’t have known the answer to Q2, but you may have been smart enough to work it out from knowing the other two.

Google search is getting smarter

The fact that the answer to all three questions above was 42 is not really significant, but if you clicked each of the links to the answers above you will have seen that for each question, Google was able to give you the answer – straight ‘out of the box’ – you didn’t even have to click through to another page.

Google says that there are over 60 trillion web pages on the Internet. That’s an astonishing number, especially when we appreciate that is the number of pageson the Internet; not the many more words, images or videos contained within them. Yet despite the astonishing amount of information available to us, the fact is that information (or just data which is what it boils down to) is only useful if you can make sense of it.

Solving the Information Explosion

As the World Wide Web has grown exponentially, search engines, like Google, have tried to keep up by serving us with useful answers to the questions and information we have been searching for. The problem is, the more the Web has grown, the more data has exploded, so the harder it becomes to mine the best answers from the ever deepening strata of information.

It’s not really the amount of information or the indexing of it that creates the problem. In the most part, Google’s index of keywords has enabled them to find information (e.g. in pages) and provide useful results to match the keywords we have entered. But until recently, there was not a way to connect that information and understand the meaning of it.

It may seem a strange thing to say, but Google search was dumb! Our reliance on Google to find the information we were looking for, was predicated on Google needing us to use the right words to get to that information. But now, the world’s leading search engine has been given a brain.

The idea and vision of the Web where computers were able to not just match keywords but understand the meaning of those words and how they interconnected was something Tim Berners-Lee wrote about back in 2001. Now, just 13 relatively short (but perhaps long on technology) years later, we are beginning to see that vision become a reality.

It is the interconnecting of information which is making Google search smarter. By their growing ability to understand the meaning of words and the interconnection of those words to other words to provide context and additional meaning, Google is turning information into knowledge. We are at the dawning of a new age of search. What is more Google is also able to understand YOUR search query which in some cases may be the same as mine (e.g. Roses to you could mean flowers, where as roses to me could mean a band – The Stone Roses) and produce different search results for both of us based on the information they know about our search history and interests.

So, what are we seeing now and what can we expect for the future on the Web?

The Impact of Google’s Knowledge Graph

Elvis Presley search on GoogleSource: Elvis Presley search from google.co.ukGoogle’s answer to mining the Internet’s information has been the development of its Knowledge Graph. Released in May 2012 (watch Google’s video), the Knowledge Graph is, as Google said at the time, “a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do” .

An example of Google’s Knowledge Graph at work can be seen in the question about Elvis. When asking, “How old was the King of Rock and Roll when he died?”, Google not only gives us the answer, but also provides further information that may be useful to us as it is relates to the answer.

Google’s “smartness” in processing this search result shows that it understands the meaning of the words we used and the intent of the question we asked. It then uses its understanding of our question to draw out the answer from its knowledge index – the Knowledge Graph.

Notice, we didn’t have to use the name “Elvis Presley”. Google knows, from the information it has gathered and understood, that Elvis is popularly known as the King of Rock and Roll. Google has connected those two things (or entities as they are called in semantic search, i.e. what is known about an item of data) and linked them together in its Knowledge Graph. Google has also interconnected other knowledge about him, not just the date he was born and died (and therefore is able to calculate his age when he died), but also who he was married to, the songs he sung and the movies he appeared in.

A brief, but important explanation about Entities

All of these independent pieces of information: Elvis, the songs he sung and the movies he appeared in, are entities which Google knows about, and for each it will know facts associated with them. For example, a movie has actors, a director, it can be shown in a cinema or you can buy it on a DVD. The facts about an entity can be many and varied, but by gathering the facts about an entity you can begin to make connections with other entities, for example, the composer of the movie score. Through the pathways created by the connections between related information, you can then uncover more and more information. By joining the dots, so to speak, you start to turn the collections of those facts into knowledge.

In the previous keyword-indexed web, information based on keywords alone was isolated and locked in siloes and it was up to us to extract knowledge from those siloes by the keywords we used to unlock them. In the semantically-indexed web which Google is able to uncover for us through semantic search, the siloes containing information are not just unlocked, they are removed completely, meaning that knowledge through search becomes much more accessible to us.

For a more detailed explanation about Entities, you may find David Amerland’s presentation at the SMX conference in 2013 useful.

From Strings to Things

Going back to the Knowledge Graph answer to the question we asked originally, we see that Google provides us with additional snippets of information that are all hyperlinked, so that if you wanted to drill down more, the information is right there in front of you. As we can see, this Knowledge Graph answer is just a summary of the knowledge Google is able to connect and discover for questions about Elvis Presley. Through the Knowledge Graph, Google is able to not only answer the questions we ask, but also provide us with answers to other related questions we may go on to ask or may not yet have even considered asking.

Through the Knowledge Graph, Google search is changing to what they describe as from strings to things, from a raw index of words to a rich index of knowledge. To start with, the Knowledge Graph (its semantic index) was limited to those things that Google knew most about such as “landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art”. But Google’s vision to develop semantic search means that it is steadily expanding its semantic index.

Google Search is changing. Queue your opportunity… the value of great content.

This is the first in a series of three articles on semantic search:

Footnote: Thanks to David Amerland for his book, “Google Semantic Search” and his generous help on the subject of semantic search on Google+. I encourage you to buy the book!

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Good SEO is focusing on the customer not the…

Good SEO is focusing on the customer not the search engine

Let your fingers do the walking!In our last blog post on Search Engine Optimisation, we concluded that contrary to the belief held by many business owners, 90% of good SEO is common sense.

In this post, we’re looking at where the main focus of our SEO efforts should be and asking the question…

Who should we optimise our website for?

As we’re talking about search engine optimisation, that may sound like an odd question to ask. The phrase “search engine optimisation” suggests we need to optimise our website for search engines.

Rolling back the clock, the term was first used in the early days of the World Wide Web and at the time and until recent times, it was a term that accurately described what was happening. But should it have been that way? Shouldn’t the focus of our website pages be on our website visitors and not on outmanoeuvring the search engines?

For the non-SEO initiated, don’t worry, we’re not going to delve deep into the mechanics of search. Neither are we going to examine how SEO people have worked overtime with tricks and tactics to try to outsmart search engines and promote their web pages to the top of the search results. But with recent changes in search and in particular changes Google have been implementing, suffice to say the optimising game as it has been played is over.

Search today is changing. Search today is about the customer. That’s not to say that SEO is dead as some have suggested, but as Eric Enge said in a recent blog post on Search Engine Watch, “Google is doing a brilliant job of pushing people away from tactical SEO behavior and toward a more strategic approach”.

Search then: the big Yellow Book

In a sense, search has gone full circle. Do you remember back before the days of the Google and that big fat book called the Yellow Pages? It was all about search. You were encouraged to “Let your fingers do the walking!”

When we had a problem we needed to solve we would pick up the big yellow book and use it to search, confident in the knowledge that it could help us to find an answer.

Perhaps we had a badly leaking tap. Or maybe we needed to say sorry to someone. Picking up our big yellow search engine we would thumb through to ‘P’ for plumber or ‘F’ for florist.

Or maybe we were fed up with our job and wanted to find a new one. If it was a Thursday we could go down and buy our local paper and look through the job adverts. But the good thing with our yellow search engine, it was there by the phone, waiting for us to use it to search to help us find answers.

So we would pick it up looking for ‘R’ for recruitment agency and browse down a page or more of search results. Which one would we pick? Which one should we ‘click’ on? Quite probably, if our gaze fell upon an advert for an agency that said they had jobs in the sector we had skills for, we would pick that one. Or maybe if we wanted to do something different and couldn’t decide what, we would be look for an agency that could help us in that way.

Having chosen one of them, you would then pick up the phone and call. A person would answer and say something like, “Good morning, The Recruitment Agency. I’m Dani, how can I help you?”

You would say something about what you were looking for and a conversation would follow. The person on the other end would listen to you and maybe ask you a couple of questions, but they would be listening so they could best understand what you needed. Their goal would be to help you to be confident that they could help you and it would be worth visiting their agency to find out more. Their focus was on their customer.

That was search then and that is how search is changing.

Search now: How can I help you?

Gone is the big yellow book to be replaced by a desktop computer, or a laptop, a tablet or a mobile phone. We don’t even need to type these days. On our smartphones we can just say what we are looking for.

I’m not saying that the Yellow Pages was the perfect example of how search should be. Marketing has changed. Then it was outbound, pushing messages and information at us in the hope we would respond. Today’s marketing is inbound where, as Hubspot say, it is about “aligning the content you publish with your customer’s interests, you naturally attract inbound traffic that you can then convert, close, and delight over time.”

But what have we often found when we search? What do we see when we click on one of those search results? Unfortunately, sometimes, maybe even often in the past, we have clicked on a search result to go to a page that doesn’t really answer the question we are asking. If it is a business, the page we visit possibly says a lot about the business, but tells us very little about whether that business can help us. When the page ‘talks’, it shows that the person who wrote it hasn’t really been listening. They haven’t asked: “How can I help you?”. Hopefully, the “how can I help you?” question is your intent when you pick up the phone to a customer. You want to undertstand what the customer wants, so you can answer their questions and help fix their problem. So why don’t we do that when we write on our website?

As I said earlier, it’s not that we don’t need to optimise our content for search and search engines, but SEO today is no longer about gaming the search engines with pages that are primarily optimised for search engines.

SEO today should maybe be called CEO. Customer Engagement Optimisation. The pages we write and the websites we build need to be focused on the questions the ‘customer’ (in the broadest sense of the word) is asking, the information they are looking for, the knowledge they want to gather. The conversation of our pages needs to engage with the customer – our website visitor – and encourage them to pick up the phone or send us an email saying “Tell me more…”

Google’s purpose when you and I search is to understand what we are looking for and serve a set of search results which will lead us to the answers and even give us additional answers to questions we were about to ask. The web pages that win in search will be pages that do just that, pages that Google can confidentially serve to the searcher with the answers they are looking for.

So when you next optimise your website and rewrite your web pages to suit, remember that good SEO must first focus on your customer not on the search engine.

In summary, good Search Engine Optimisation is about:

1) Understanding the questions your customer is asking and

2) Providing clear answers that engage with them and help them to engage with you.

You better get optimising!

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Good SEO is 90% Common Sense

Good SEO is 90% Common Sense

SEO DiceImage courtesy of SEOplanteIn the course of our business as an online digital marketing services company, we talk to a lot of business owners who are confused about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). In fact increasingly, particularly over the last 6 months or so, we have had more conversations about SEO than ever before.

SEO is high on the marketing agenda for businesses, but unfortunately most business owners don’t really know where to start. They feel like they need to spin a dice in a game of chance in which they don’t understand the rules!

Search Engine Optimisation has been around as long as the Internet or as least as long as there have been search engines to help people search the World Wide Web.

In the early days, search engines were pretty crude tools and as such, smart online marketeers found ways to exploit them and turn the results of searches in their favour. But over time,the top search engines have become more refined and a whole lot smarter. That’s good for everyone who searches online, but for the business owner who want their website to work harder for them it seems that there is more mystery around Search Engine Optimisation than ever before.

It is true that SEO is a huge subject and there is a lot you can do to market your website better, but SEO needn’t be complicated. Of course, there are many technical elements to optimising a website, but that doesn’t mean SEO is a black art which most people cannot understand. Many SEO agencies will tell you they have the recipe for the secret sauce, but we believe they are wrong.

The truth is that good SEO is 90% common sense.

  • It starts with understanding the needs of people looking for your products and services.
  • It continues with understanding the words or phrases that those people would most commonly use to search for your ‘stuff’.

And it ends, with making sure the content (words, images, video etc) on the pages of your website, is relevant to your customer, because it is written for your customer.

Yes, that is summarising and simplifying the process of Search Engine Optimisation, but that is where you need to start.

Watch out for a series of blog posts on Search Engine Optimisation. These will be articles covering the basics of SEO that every website owner should be following to optimise the pages of their website – for their customers first. So, if SEO in plain English is what you need, then make sure you subscribe to our blog updates or watch out for them via social media. If there are particular questions you have then please send an email to seo@crackingmedia.com and we will do our best to answer you.

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The importance of link building

The importance of link building

One of the most important SEO tools on the Internet today is Link Building. It is an extremely effective method of getting your site good exposure across the web, by letting people know what your website has to offer. The thing is, to take full advantage of this Internet resource, you have to know what it’s all about and how to do it right to get maximum benefit.

Why is link building so important?

The easy answer is an increase in traffic. The links that you create are doors that lead others to your website and the services you have to offer. The information on your site is your call to action so it’s very important that the links you forge are with sites of similar content, this helps you to target traffic that may be looking for services like yours.

This works on a very simple premise, if you sell dog whistles and you build links with websites in the cake baking sector, it’s unlikely that much of the traffic that comes through will have much interest in what you do.

Improving your search rankings

Links and traffic are taken into account by search engines and the relevance of the incoming links help to boost your rankings. If the visitors coming into your site are being directed to you from sites with related content, then this builds your reputation as a trusted resource on your subject.

Which links are best?

There are two types of links, two way links (also known as reciprocal links) and one way links. Two way links are traditional and are based upon you linking with a site and agreeing to link to each other. This is still valid and of some value, but the better situation is to have one way links coming in to your site with no return link. What this does is show the search engines that others agree with the content you are publishing on your site, once again helping to boost your reputation as an expert in your field and more relevant than your competitors.

Which pages should incoming links go to?

The old fashioned method of link building is to send all the traffic to your homepage. The problem with this is that the content on your homepage won’t be relevant to all your incoming links and leaves visitors with the task of finding the information they came for. They won’t! They’ll just move on! With the use of social media sites, SEO services and a web blog or constantly updated content on your site, you can build incoming links that land directly on the page the visitors want to absorb. Always link to the page that has the most relevance to the site you are linking from, this is rarely your homepage!

Things to remember for a successful linking campaign are:

Be sure that your content is relevant and easy to understand By doing this you can be sure that your readers will appreciate and approve of your offerings, employ the services of a copywriter to get the balance between information and promotion just right. Check your content for spelling and grammatical errors Always proof read your content, this small but often overlooked task helps to remove any signs of non-professionalism and helps to build confidence. You should always have a ‘Privacy Policy’ and ‘About Us’ on your website Remember these are two of the few tools you have to introduce yourself and your business on a more personal level. Make them easy to find so if visitors want to learn more, they can!

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Being ranked number 1 is good right?

Being ranked number 1 is good right?

So you have a great looking web site – well, maybe you’re not quite there yet – but you are ready to rock the Internet with your brilliant products or services. All that you need to do now is make sure your site is ranked number 1 on Google.

Right?

Well not necessarily…

We are all told that being number 1 on Google is the ticket to riches. You will have even received a marketing email or seen an advert by a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) company guaranteeing you top position or your money back.

Be number 1 on Google and:

  • you will be found by customers
  • people in their droves will visit your web site
  • the only way is up for your business.

But the truth is being top of the Google tree offers no guarantees for your business. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard people excited that their business web site has made top spot on Google (or they are listed on Page 1) for this, that or the other.

That is not to rubbish their claims. In most cases they are, but that is not the whole story. We had a new client come to us recently in exactly this situation. They had spent a lot of money on their site, had lots of good content and now, with their web site positioned first and second from over 50,000 search results, everything was set up for their business to grow. But they waited, and waited, yet hardly anyone came. So what happened? OK.

I ought to come clean… despite the headline to this blog post, being number 1 on Google can be extremely good for your business, but you need to understand that being number 1 doesn’t guarantee anything. In the case of our client, as is the case with many who are proudly listed on Page 1 of Google yet receive little traffic to their site, the problem was not to do with them being there but the fact that nobody searched on the term for which they were listed top. If that is what is happening to you, then that is why being listed on top for a term that no-one searches on can be bad for your business.

The likelihood is, just like our client, you could be sitting there with days and weeks passing expecting visitors to come to your site, when all the time they are going to your competitor’s web site. So, what’s the answer? The key to your web site being found is to optimise your web pages for the right search terms not just any terms, that is, not just the words and phrases you think people are searching on.

Here are some dos and don’ts for optimising for the right search terms:

  1. Check out the terms your competitors are using but don’t assume they are using the right terms either. You need to do some more research.
  2. Ask some trusted friends what words or phrases they would use to search for your products and services, but don’t feed them with suggestions. Allow them to decide themselves.
  3. Having gathered some suggestions, try them in Google’s free keyword tool. This will give you some useful suggestions based on the words you enter and will also give you an idea of how many searches use those terms per month both nationally and globally.
  4. Don’t optimise a single web page for more than one term, but do optimise for terms that include more than one word. A single term can contain several words that people will be searching for, e.g. ‘luxury hotel breaks’ will be indexed by Google for that term but also for ‘hotel breaks’, ‘luxury hotel’ and ‘luxury breaks’.
  5. If your business operates mainly locally or within a defined geographic region then consider including a city, county, state or country in the term, e.g. ‘luxury hotel breaks uk’.
  6. Once you have decided on your search term, you can then set to work on optimising your web page. There is a lot you can do to refine this, but you must as a minimum do some basic optimisation. Essentially, you need to make sure your search term is represented in the Title metatag of your web page (this is what appears in the caption bar at the top of your browser) as well as the Description metatag (which can be more descriptive).

There will be more on metatags and SEO another time, but for now Happy SEOptimising! But if you are stuck not being sure what to do next, then please visit our SEO Services page to find out more.

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Don’t be afraid to give away your knowledge

Don’t be afraid to give away your knowledge

Social media sites, such as Twitter, facebook, etc, have changed the web into a wonderful place where we can meet new people, stay in touch with friends and generally be social with the whole world. Is there more to Social Media? In a word yes! How do you find out about things?

  1. Phone a local specialist
  2. Look in the telephone directory
  3. Type your question into a search engine like Google!

More and more people are turning to the instant knowledge base that is the internet, a place where you can search for anything and almost certainly find the answer. By using social media tools, your business is able to showcase work and give out free yet valuable information about the work you do. By doing this your business can very quickly be seen as the expert in its field, and the place to come for accurate and relevant knowledge.

Why do I want to give out free information?

The keywords here are ‘Relevant’ and ‘Accurate’, search engines love, no they crave relevant and accurate information. There are millions of people out there, searching for answers, and by filling your website or blog with such information, then using your social media links to tell the searching masses where to find it, you are pushing traffic to your site, the search engines will take notice, others will tell people of the golden nuggets to be found on your site and you become the trusted expert.

Who do people call when they need help?

It’s already a given that the best form of advertising is ‘word of mouth’ and by becoming a trusted expert to many people, and backing this up using written, audio or video testimonials you’re increasing your credibility and building confidence in potential clients.

In a world where true knowledge and skill comes at a premium: Can you afford not to give away your knowledge for free?

Online Marketing Blog Content

An Introduction to SEO

An Introduction to SEO

Search Engine Optimisation – SEO

SEO is a complex balance of all the aspects within your website. Think about the different elements that come together to make your website, including the text content, images and titles through to layout, navigation and even the code that gives every page its structure. When everything that makes up a website works in harmony you have a firm foundation that will give the search engines an easy time indexing your site, and therefore you increase your chances of a high ranking.

But SEO doesn’t end there!

SEO comes in many forms which can be simplified in to two areas –

On Site and Off Site optimisation. The on site optimisation involves everything that can be done within your site to increase your search engine rankings. These are usually quite simple things that should be put in place as the site is built, and include elements like a descriptive domain name, page naming, clean code, accessibility and navigation.

Get all this right during the build and you stand a better chance of fulfilling the search engines requirements of having easy to find and relevant content for its users. Off site optimisation is all about exposure through avenues such as social networking sites (twitter, facebook, etc), relevant forums and bringing credibility to your site through content syndication (informational videos, articles, etc).

These techniques are more time consuming and take a greater amount of effort, but when used in tandem with on site optimisation they can really make you stand out from the crowd and should never be overlooked. SEO is a swirling cauldron of ingredients that can deliver you a successful and measurable strategy, but many agencies use underhand methods that can get you pushed to the bottom of the searches, or worse, struck off the list completely.

10 things to always consider when planning SEO in your site:

  1. Include the most relevant keywords in your title tags
  2. Consider professional copy, to ensure original, keyword optimised and informative textual content
  3. Fill in ALL meta, alt and description tags throughout the site
  4. When using a dynamic site, such as a CMS, always try to use search engine friendly page names
  5. Name your navigation links to match the page name and don’t over fill your navigation with unnecessary links. (See Below)
  6. Use a sitemap to give search robots access to pages not in your navigation
  7. Avoid using scripts or flash to build navigation lists, text versions are easier to optimise and for robots to follow
  8. Build reciprocal links with relevant website partners, only link with trusted sites that have a good reputation across the internet.
  9. Always name incoming links correctly and don’t link to your homepage only.
  10. If you turn to an SEO specialist understand that results cannot be guaranteed as it takes careful testing and a variation of techniques to get the results you desire

We’ve just scratched the surface of what is an endless subject. If you get the basics right you stand every chance of attaining the results you desire. Happy SEO!

Meantime, if you are stuck not being sure what to do, visit our SEO Services page to find out more.

Online Marketing Blog Content

Top tips for Successful Email Marketing

5 top tips for running successful email campaigns!

Email campaigns are very similar to direct mailing campaigns via snail mail, with the same principals applying to both. The better the quality of the message, the creative design and the higher the quality of the mailing list the higher the conversion rates are likely to be.

You may have all these elements correct and you send out to your list, sit back and wait for the flood of business. There are numerous other factors involved in running a successful email campaign starting with targeting the right recipients, measuring critical data such as open rates, click through rates and conversions.

Here are 5 top tips for running your own in-house email campaigns:

  1. Your emails should be thought of as a conversation, when writing your copy imagine that you are delivering it in person. Try and remove the remote online element from your message.
  2. Promotional material that works in a brochure doesn’t necessarily work online! Email is quite a personal method of communication, so your message may be more hard hitting but at the same time could come across to the reader as being too pushy. Try to include information that will be useful to your prospects rather than sticking to the hard sell.
  3. Give the “from” and “subject” fields of your message as much thought as the content. Once your email arrives these are parts of your message that will stand out and asked to be opened. Use a pertinent email address not just a name and use the subject line as your headline.
  4. “Call to Action” Think about the objectives of your message and the reaction you want to provoke in the recipient i.e. do you want them to pick up the phone, visit a specific web page or request a brochure. Don’t confuse the reader by offering too many actions.
  5. Consistency is everything in a marketing campaign of any type. You give the marketing department the task of writing your email campaign, and then use the same easy to understand language on subsequent contact, ordering or information pages. No matter how successful your marketing is, if the ordering process is over complicated or at all confusing, there’s a good chance that potential orders will be lost at the final hurdle.
Online Video Marketing Blog Content

Edius ACEDVio firewire driver problem

Edius ACEDVio firewire driver problem

Here at Cracking Media the Grass Valley Canopus ACEDVio has been a firm favourite for analogue to digital conversion on our Windows editing system, and has worked faultlessly as a firewire card for longer than we care to remember (as too with our ADVC-300).

So imagine the head scratching that went on when we upgraded one of our video editing suites to Windows 7 64bit, only to find that the ACEDVio no longer seemed to function. All was clear in device manager and all the hardware we plugged in to it installed in the usual way, but no capture was available in Edius or any other software.

Having tried many things to kick it into life we searched around the internet for a possible driver patch and found a fix on the Grass Valley site. Apparently the ACEDVio capture card isn’t compatible with the native firewire drivers in Windows 7 64bit. The fix is as simple as reverting to the legacy firewire drivers that are available in the update driver wizard.

The fix: Go into device manager and twirl down the ” ieee1394 bus host controller ” section, then right click on the ” 1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller ” and choose Update Driver Software, then when the wizard comes up choose to manually install the driver and click on ” 1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controler (legacy) “

We hope this helps if you where thinking it’s time to buy a new capture card or that your ACEDVio has given up the ghost. Though the ACEDVio may be thought of as a bit outdated, there’s still plenty of work for it to do in the world of Cracking Media. The reliability of all our Grass Valley Canopus equipment means we’re not looking to swap just yet.

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