If you want results, it’s time to jump on this bandwagon, because 2009 will be a big year for online video and what it can bring you. There are various techniques in optimising your video content. It’s important to categorise your video content correctly, whether by tagging, titles or keywords and even transcriptions. There are numerous ways to ensure that your video content is indexed correctly and it can possibly bring a huge amount of traffic to your website. Talk to us to find out more!

Some interesting things are happening on the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) front, especially with Google and how they approach the organic ranking of websites.

2009 is going to see some shifting in how Google works. I don’t think it will be a major ‘flip the switch’ moment, but from what I’ve learned, Google is striving to improve their search results even more.

The ‘voting on search results’ that I recently discussed forms part of Universal Search. Universal Search brings about customised search results, based on many factors. In essence Google tracks what you’ve searched for historically (even when you’re not logged into Google) and this, including your geographic location will ensure biased search results.

If you’ve got a history for example of having an interest in travelling, your search results might serve up more travel flavoured results. What this means is that the user gets more results in line with their interests and historical search trends, therefore Google is serving their needs better.

In 2009 it will also be important to engage your website visitors better. It will be extremely important to track your analytics properly and ensure that you engage the visitor on multiple fronts, like video, flash, audio, images and written text. The reasoning behind this is that Google’s spiders (the little bots that index content from websites) will continually improve on extracting content from these mediums and it might give a slight competitive advantage.

If you engage your visitors better and give them more of what they want, they stay on your site longer, which also means your bounce rates (the percentage of visitors that arrive and leave immediately) will be reduced. All of this is part of the increased number of variables that determine rank for web pages in Google. It’s said that this figure is now hovering around the 200 variable mark. This means there are 200 different factors that come into play in how well your website will rank.

For SEO’s, this will mean some adjustment in the way we approach search engine optimisation. Very importantly though, there is no exact recipe (apart from the obvious standard compliance tweaks) to achieve perfect results for each client. It will be more important to focus on conversion and how well you can get your website traffic to convert (I’ve been preaching this for years!).

If Google sees that your website is converting well, it will probably influence your ranking positively as your website is able to provide visitors with solutions to their search queries. How they measure whether conversion takes place (if you haven’t got Analytics with conversion metrics installed) is still a mystery, but it will be interesting to note.

My suggestion for companies busy looking at their online strategies would be to look into going multimedia (where applicable) and to offer the best possible user experience. It’s not just about trying to get the most possible traffic! This doesn’t mean that you should put ‘Flash all over your website’ or ‘blinking text’ as was the craze when that specific technology first came out, but rather experimenting with all your options and closely monitoring results through your analytics to see what brings about the most quality conversions.

That’s not all, if you’re a signed-in user of Google you can leave comments, all wiki-style.

I’m not sure whether this is going to stay on mainstream search results and what influence this will have, but I’m assuming it’s personalised results and that Google will ‘learn’ your preferences.

I can’t see it influencing general search results as that would open the system up to gaming of all sorts (according to Seth Godin), but there is value in it for Google to show users more of what they want to see.

It’ll be interesting to see how comments will be moderated… Only time will tell!

Old sites that sit and gather dust (I’m talking anything that’s older than 5 years with reasonable traffic) can be compared to classic cars. Some of them has to be scrapped and resold as recycled material and other are gems that will be worth much more than their unsuspecting owners might think.

continue reading "Pimp that old website"

What I meant by ‘Springleap your company’, was being able to get active results in search engines, not just in competitions. If you really want to have SEO done on your site it should be a long term strategy with long term sustainable results. Contact Us for more information!

Awareness campaign in this case, all fine, but if you want to see real monetary value you got to rank well for ‘t-shirts’ or ‘custom t-shirts’ etc, because if you’re ranked number 1 for your company name you’ve still got to tell everybody about it and spend precious time to get them to actually search for your company name (if it’s not something obvious). Many people don’t keep that in mind…

There are several ways to increase conversions on your websites. If you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about it might be a good idea to read further! I have written about goal driven web design before, so I’ll try and focus on a specific element of web development which is often neglected.

continue reading "Want to increase your website conversions?"