Google’s mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

But I can hear many of you crying out that Google is giving poor quality search results.  What can you do if Google is ranking irrelevant or spammy or broken websites?  You can give Google feedback to get the site removed from the Google search results.

When Google delivers inappropriate results, it not only drives the searcher crazy, but it can make businesses frantic, too.  Business success can be make or break, depending on whether they’re getting customers from the Google search results.

I did a search for the phrase “marketing agency” and to honest I did not get the companies I expected to rank in the top 10, and I wasn’t very impressed by the top companies being offered by Google.

Not only were they not the quality of companies that expected to see, one of the top 10 companies listed in Google had a non-existant website.

If you were to visit the site, this is what you would see:

So, I know companies are going to be asking me how can a web page that is dead rank in the top ten results for such a competitive phrase?

The secret sauce for this site ranking well, of course, is inbound links.  This site has lots of high quality inbound links with the keyphrase “marketing agency” in the links.  And links, of course are trump, overruling even lack of any content as this example rather irrationally demonstrates.

But, what can we do to let Google know it is delivering garbage results? More specifically, how can we get this site removed from the results?

Scroll to the bottom of the Google search page, and you will be invited to give feedback:

And you should go right ahead and give Google feedback to get the site removed from the Google search results.

There are a range of options for reporting inappropriate site: spam sites, irrelevant sites, dead sites:

I’ve reported this result as taking me to a dead or broken link, and I’ll add a comment to let you know if, and when, this page tumbles from the results!

Recommended Reading:

What’s Wrong With My Website:  3 typical problems websites encounter

How important are Domain Names and Title Tags for Google rankings

Hallam archive of inbound linking articles

For small businesses playing the Internet Marketing game is tough.  It involves a big investment of your time and money and you need to know that it’s working for you.

But stop for a minute! Before you get started, read my guide to Internet Marketing mistakes that small businesses make, so you can get it right first time.

1. Not Working to a Business Plan

There are so many different aspects of Internet Marketing to get involved in, and you want to try them all.  You’ve got a web site, you’re using email, trying out Twitter, beginning blogging, thinking about AdWords – and that’s before you mention all the basic SEO work that you’ve been doing.

Be honest though, do you have a business plan for all of your efforts?  It’s hard to find time for all the different things that you could be doing, and if you aren’t clear about what you’re trying to achieve, you might find that your enthusiasm for it all fizzles out pretty fast.

It’s far better for you to choose one aspect to work on and to do it really well than to spread yourself thin.  For most businesses this may just be basic SEO – yes, social media may be sexy, but it’s far more likely that you’ll get quality leads from Google.

2. Looking for a Quick Fix

I’m going to let you in on a secret:  there is no easy way to get great results from Internet Marketing.

Whether you are working on SEO, social media or PPC you need to put time and effort into any Internet Marketing strategy.  Yes, it is harder this way, but you avoid potential penalties associated with the “quick fix” strategies that Google sees as spam.

3. Not Giving Your SEO Enough Time

You’ve taken the advice to stick to White Hat marketing techniques and you’re doing everything by the book.  So, why is it taking so long for you to take pride of place at the top of Google?  Haven’t you done enough?  Don’t you deserve it?

Unfortunately, these things do take time, and anything that you can do to “hurry things along” is likely to be penalised for spam.  (See my comments about quick fixes above).  It can be frustrating when it takes months to meet your goals, but you have to be patient and keep working at it.

4. Worrying Too Much About Your Competition

It is healthy to keep a watchful eye on your competitors, but it doesn’t make good business sense to obsess over what they’re up to.  If they are ranking higher than you, do some competitor analysis to see if you can learn anything from them and move on.

Constantly wondering how you can get one over on them is a waste of your time that is much better spent on your own Internet Marketing efforts.

5. Obsessively Checking Your Rankings

Or AdWords position, number of fans on Facebook, number of hits to your website, Page Rank…  It isn’t a good idea to focus too much on these details, because the simple truth is that in the grand scheme of things they don’t matter.

Think back to your business plan: was your goal to get to number 1 in Google or to increase the number of visitors to your website?  Did you simply want 1,000 visitors a day to your website or to increase the number of visitors who sign up for your services or buy your products?  You should measure your success against your original objectives, not an arbitary number.

6. Not Analysing Your Data

You had 1,000 visitors to your site last week, you’ve got a CTR of 5% on your AdWords account, your home page has a Page Rank of 5…  So what?

Yes, it’s good to know the stats, but what do they mean?  Again, you have to think about your bottom line.  If your site visitors – paid or otherwise – aren’t leading to conversions or qualified leads for your business, then you need to ask whether your Internet Marketing is honestly working.

7. Starving the Budget

The Internet is amazing – anyone can build a website, send out marketing emails and so much more – and it’s all free!

Sorry to disappoint, but that just isn’t true.

You can build a free website, but a professionally designed site is likely to have greater impact and to help you to achieve your marketing goals.  Not using an appropriate email marketing package can potentially cause difficulties with managing subscribers and data protection concerns.  Even if you have paid out for an AdWords account you have to remember that you can only do so much with a limited budget.

There are many low cost ways to use the Internet, but none of them are entirely free, and as with anything in life you get what you pay for.

8. Not Thinking About Links

If you can only do 1 thing to improve your websites visibility, build links to your site.  Too many small business owners avoid link building because it’s time consuming or simply too hard.

Yes, there are other things you can do to increase your ranking, but these will only have limited success. The most important ranking factor for your site is still the number of high quality and relevant external sites that link to you.  Without working on this, you will struggle to see results.

So, now you know what everyone else is getting wrong, you can get your Internet Marketing strategy right from the start.  Start out with a clear and realistic goal in mind, remember that everything you do should bring you closer to achieving it and you will do well.

More advice for small businesses:

Top SEO Myths

How to Use Internet Marketing to Boost Your Business

How Customer Reviews Can Help Your SEO

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Katie Saxon

Linking, linking, linking.  Search engine optimisation is all about getting high quality, trusted sites to link to your own site – but is there such a thing as the perfect inbound link?

There is no “one size fits all” answer I can give you for the perfect link, but there are certain criteria you can use to assess the possible value of any incoming link.  The more criteria it meets, then the more time and effort is worth devoting to getting “The Perfect Link.”

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Here are my top 21 signs that an incoming link is likely to be perfect:

1. The site that your link is coming from  must be relevant to what your business does or offers – it is essential to be “on topic”
2. The content that is on the page that the link is coming from should also be contextually relevant to your site
3. The link goes directly to the most appropriate content on your site, or the right landing page
4. The site should be trusted and authoritative, as measured by trust scores like Page Rank
5. The inbound link will have keyword rich, relevant anchor text
6. It is a text link, not an image or logo link
7. The link is likely to be moderated, meaning a human needs to approve the link, and it’s not an automated directory or free for all site
8. You’ve not paid for the link;  it is a gift
9. The link is not reciprocal
10. The link to your website will be the first link on that page
11. Even better if it were the only link on that page, or one of very few outbound links from that page
12. It should not be in the footer or sidebar – ideally it should be in the body of the text surrounded by relevant keywords
13. The page that the link is on should be frequently crawled by the major search engines
14. The site should not link out to any bad neighbourhoods (spammy links)
15. The IP address that the site is hosted on should not have any spammy sites on it
16. The site should be well established in age, but not out of date
17. It should have a lot of trusted inbound links itself
18. It should send as much relevant traffic to your site as possible
19. You want the link on a page that is likely to remain there for an indefinite amount of time (for ever would be nice)
20. The link does not have a NoFollow tag
21. The link is not redirected using a referral script

So many characteristics… and that is why there probably no such thing as a perfect link!

However if you can find sites that have three, or four or more of these criteria then what you just might have is your killer link…

Recommended Reading:

Recipricol Linking:  Good or Bad?

Link Building Strategy working with Bloggers

Getting Perfect Links:  Susan’s list from 2007

Developing your Inbound Linking Strategy

+++Wayne Barker+++

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So the summer is here and  business is a little quieter than normal – in other words it is the perfect time for an SEO Health Check. Rather than kick back and enjoy the sunshine use a little bit of your free time to ensure the SEO on your website is up to date, you will thank yourself later down the line when you have no spare time at all.

When giving your site an SEO health check it is important to make sure that you run through things in a specific order to ensure that nothing is missed out. To save you the trouble I have compiled a quick checklist so that you can ensure that all your bases are covered.

SEO Health Check

1. Make sure your Title Tags are looking good. Your Title Tags are the best way to ensure that the search engines understand what your site is about and it is essential to include the keywords that are most relevant to the page – and make sure your Title Tag is around 6o characters long. It is a good idea to avoid using stop words (like a, the, is, at) and using some form of punctuation the ‘pipe’ (the symbol that separates text | it looks like this |) is a  favourite over here at Hallam!

Never use Title Tags that mention ‘Home Page’ or ‘Welcome’ as they will mean absolutely nothing to a search engine. Never duplicate Title Tags across a site – make sure each one is unique.

Not sure about your Title Tags?  Then read our Title Tags Factsheet.

2. Check your Meta Descriptions. Although Meta Descriptions have no bearing on how well you rank within Google and the other search engines (at the moment!) they are crucial for usability reasons. The Meta Description is the two lines of black text that appears below the Title Tag in the search engine results. This gives you a golden opportunity to target more of your essential keywords in order to entice people to click through to your website.

3. Check your headings (h1, h2 and so on). Although recent investigation has shown that the headings tags do not carry as much weight as previously thought it is still important to include them for a usability point of view – it isn’t going to harm your ranking efforts either. Make sure they are keyword rich and relevant to the copy on the page. If you do not have the possibility of adding heading tags through your current CMS then don’t panic, some bold text on your keywords and featured at the top of the page will do.

4. Review the content of your site. Have a good look round the content of your site and ask yourself if it is useful. The content should be relevant to your business, be keyword rich and useful to visitors to your site. Put yourself in the position of the visitors to help you consider this. When reviewing your content you should also ask yourself if you have been adding enough new, fresh content – Google loves new and unique content more than ever. If you haven’t got one already you may want to consider setting up a blog on your site in order to add this fresh content (that is topical to your business niche) on a regular basis. Make sure your keywords are used in the body of the text but don’t worry too much over keyword density (there is no known perfect keyword density!)

5. Consider your keyword research. When did you do your keyword research? Is it still valid or are people searching using different terms now. There are a bunch of ways to carry out your keyword research and Katie wrote a great post on keyword research tools that you may want to have a look at. My personal favourite is the Google Wonder Wheel which is great for brainstorming new keywords. And don’t forget the trusty old Adwords Keyword Tool – which recently had a face-lift.

6. Check your Alt Tags. Recent research has shown that the Alt Tag carries more weight in the ranking process than we previously though. If you are unaware of the Alt Tag it is the text that accompanies a picture to help describe it if it is not able to be displayed, or to enable or enhance the user experience for people with disabilities. So with the Alt Tag carrying more weight than we once thought you may want to use your summer SEO period to make sure all the pictures on your site have relevant Alt Tags – just make sure they are descriptive and helpful and then try and squeeze a keyword in.

7. Check your internal linking. Make sure that all your important page are linked to from other pages on your site using keyword rich anchor text (anchor text is the text that is used for the link).

8. Check your inbound linking strategy. As you probably know link building is the bread and butter of any SEO campaign and every site should have an ongoing link building campaign. With your SEO health check it is important that you are using techniques that are up to date and do not break any of Google’s guidelines. Consider using guest blogging as a way of getting inbound links and spreading the word about your company and the services or products you offer. Never (ever) buy links!

9. If you have videos, photos and other media – optimise for Universal Search. If it has been a while since your last SEO Health Check then you may be missing the boat on this one. Make sure all your media is properly optimised in order to help your site get good rankings through other channels. Check out this post on Optimising for Universal Search for all the information you will need.

Whilst I don’t claim this SEO Health Check list is exhaustive it should prove to be the launching pad for continued success on the Internet, after all it is important to keep up to date if you want to keep the rankings you work so hard for.

+++Wayne Barker+++

International Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is all about getting your website found by potential customers in your target countries who are searching using their local search engines.

Quite simply, if you want to get new business in France, then you want your website to rank well in the French version of Google.

We are pleased to offer you a free copy of our White Paper:  International Search Engine Optimisation which provides an overview of the steps you need to take to optimise your website for foreign markets.

We have written this document to share our experience in delivering International SEO campaigns for client wanting to increase their visibility in the search engines for overseas markets.  We know that ranking well in the international versions of the search engines is not a question of just translating your web pages.  Indeed, a simple translation of your current pages is likely to to be one of your least effective SEO techniques.  And a straight translation will not reflect the searching behaviour, needs and attitudes of your target country.

We offer International Search Engine Optimisation services, helping your business to reach the right customers in the right markets.  Get in touch to discuss how your business can start reaching customers in international markets.

You may also be interested in these previous posts:

http://www.hallam.biz/blog/2007/03/improve-rankings-in-international.html

Would you like a business grant that you can use towards a private training/coaching session with me to develop your Internet marketing skills?

Small business owners/managers are eligible for a grant of up to £1000 towards the cost of business training and development designed to develop their strategic skills to drive their company forward.

Take advantage of this grant funding from Business Link whilst it’s available, and as always the case, when the money is gone, the money is gone!

I’m able to develop a training programme designed for your specific needs, meaning we can skip over the bits you know already, and focus on what you really need to know to make your business more competitive on the Internet:

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaigns
• Social Media Marketing campaigns:  Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Blogging
• Web design reviews
• Google AdWords pay per click (PPC) advertising
• Google Analytics and web metrics
• Improving Conversions
• E Commerce
• Email marketing
• International Web Marketing

One grant is available per organisation of up to a maximum of £1,000.  The first £500 is 100% grant funded, with an additional £500 available for you to match at 50%, for a total grant value of £1000.

Both business, public sector and charitable organisations with between 5 to 249 employees are eligible to apply. Organisations who accessed previous Leadership and Management funding initiatives from the LSC are not eligible. Funding is made available for the development of a senior manager or key decision maker.

Our training and consultancy services are a approved by Business Link in both the East Midlands and West Midland, and our training courses rated amongst the top three in the country.

Contact us to discuss your training requirements and learn more about how you can apply for a grant.

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Link building is crucial to any SEO campaign but it is also the most time consuming and frustrating. One of the best ways to get inbound links is from blogs that are in the same niche as your business and these offer some great benefits:

• Solid inbound links often within the body copy of the text on the blog
• They help your business reach out to a new audience
• Blogs can drive new, relevant traffic to your site
• It may lead to more exposure and natural links through social media sites like StumbleUpon, delicious and digg.

Like a lot of SEO techniques the key to success in link building with blogs is building relationships. Before this can be done you need to identify influential bloggers that write about topics that are related to your business.

Finding influential bloggers

There  are a number of ways of finding influential bloggers within your niche and these are some of the techniques I use:

• Go over to Google and search for the blogs that are using similar keywords to you. The blogs don’t have to be an exact match to your business – be creative and look for blogs that have similar ideas and concepts to your business.

• Make a list of the ones that you like the most – obviously the number of blogs yo0u choose will all be based on how much time you can give to the project. Set up a an Excel spreadsheet with the name of the blog and then it is time to do your research.

• Check the Page Rank of each blog – this isn’t the greatest way of measuring the popularity of the blogs but it is a good starter for ten. Remember the more trusted the blog the more link juice will be passed down to your site if they link to you.

• Run each blog through the Hubspot Blog Grader

• This is a great way to find out the quality of the blogs you are researching and it will show statistics like traffic, authority, frequency of posts and blog engagement. Pay particular interest to the traffic the blog is getting and blog engagement (twitter mentions, facebook likes and comments) as this will help you build traffic to the site as well.

Through some basic research you should now have found a number of blogs that you will want to get a link from – for both SEO purposes and for exposure of your business. It is now time for you to get the link and this is the difficult bit! As the title of this post suggest you have to build a relationship with the blogger in order to become successful in getting those killer links.

Building relationships with bloggers

• Most bloggers have Twitter accounts so begin by following them – everyone like to see their numbers of followers go up!

• Retweet their Tweets and comment on their Tweets. Don’t overdo this as you may come of as a bit of stalker let it develop over time so they start to recognise you. Tweet the occasional link to one of their posts.

• Comment on their blog posts saying how much you enjoy them. Make sure you have read the posts and comment accordingly.

• Link to the posts that interest you the most. Link from a post on your site or blog that is relevant to something they have written about.

• Locate the blogs that they post on and post a few comments there as well.

• If they are active on Linkedin and Facebook leave comments there as well.

• Connect with them on mybloglog.

• After a while you can send them an email asking a question or making a comment. If they recognise you this could lead to a few emails back and forth – and if you haven’t pushed it too hard you could possibly ask about the possibility of them writing a post about your fantastic business or product.

If you put the time and effort into building relationships for your links you will find you suffer less rejection. Bloggers are more likely to link to you if you have been participating in the community.

They key to success in getting links from bloggers in to give and then give some more and only ask for that link or review when the time feels right.

Follow these links for more information on linkbuilding:

Updating your Inbound Linking Strategy

How To Write Link Bait In Five Easy Steps

+++Wayne Barker+++

When starting out on an SEO project for your website, you’ll need to optimise your pages for carefully selected keywords.  But, finding the right keywords can be a tricky task.  While tools like Google’s Keyword Tool are excellent starting points, you might need to dig deeper and think harder to find the phrases that will work for your website.

To help you with that, we’ve put together 5 alternative sources for keyword suggestions, that might provide just the right phrase for you.

1. YouTube Keyword Tool

Did you know that YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google?  It’s hardly suprising then that they have their own keyword tool – and as YouTube is owned by Google the functions of their tool should feel familiar.

As you’d expect, they come up with some unusual suggestions.  What has the phrase “addicted to twilight” got to do with “engagement ring”?  The lead characters in the Twilight series of films get engaged, of course.  While this may not seem helpful, you might discover a new trend or hot topic that could become the subject of your next blog post.

2. Website referral logs

If you’re using any form of analytics software for your website, you should have a goldmine of keyword research waiting at your fingertips.  Your referral logs should be able to tell you what keywords visitors used to find your website, which might throw up some interesting ideas that you hadn’t thought of before.

3. Google Wonder Wheel

A quirky little tool that is like an online mind map – as created by Google.  Tucked away in the new search options down the left hand side of the Google search results pages is this neat tool. Click on “more search tools” to find the Wonder Wheel.

The Wonder Wheel shows you a mind map of search terms related to your search.  It also allows you to click on the related terms to generate new Wonder Wheels and give you more keyword suggestions.  This is a fun little tool that should give you some more ideas, but watch you don’t get caught up in playing with this.

4. Other Search Engines

Have you noticed that when you type a search term into Google, it tries to guess what you might be looking for?  This feature is known as Google Suggest and it looks like this:

Other search engines have similar features, while Google is by far and away the most popular search engine, smaller engines do still get traffic and they might have some interesting keyword suggestions for you.

5. Twitter Search

Or Facebook, or Digg…  Social media is big news and big business nowadays.  Most importantly for you, it tells you what people are talking about right now.  You might have to wade through more data to find some gems, but if you need an idea for a blog post to write this minute, search social media for what’s hot in your niche.

With a little bit of creativity, you can find a whole host of keyword ideas that your competitors are not already targeting in their SEO strategy.  Make sure you analyse any suggestions that you come up with, to ensure that you are targeting the most appropriate search terms to help you achieve your Internet Marketing goals.

We all know that Google visibility is crucial to online success; however an eagerness to appear in the first page of the Google results can sometimes lead you into trouble.

If you experience a sudden drop in rankings for your main keywords there are two likely reasons:

• There has been a change to Google’s algorithm and you have been one of the unfortunate losers.
• You have received a penalty from Google for breaking (or bending) their guidelines.

If you feel your drop in rankings may be the result of some infringement of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines it is important to correct them immediately. I am sure you are aware that Google will never make it that simple for you and many of the reasons they penalise sites is only known to those locked within the walls of Google headquarters. There are, however, some sure-fire ways to get yourself penalised (or banned) by Google:

• Linking into ‘bad neighbourhoods’. A ‘bad neighbourhood’ can include spammy sites, link farms or just generally sites that have no value to the Internet user as a whole. A good rule of thumb is: “if you are in doubt then it is probably best left alone”. If you want to check for sure then do a search for the Home Page in Google and if it doesn’t appear in the first page of the results it suggests that Google doesn’t trust it that much. Check out the Bad Neighborhood tool for help.

• Keyword stuffing. Always write with the user in mind first and the spider second. Stay away from repeating the same keywords over and over again.

• Excessive reciprocal link building. Some reciprocal link building can be considered natural – especially if you share the same topic in a niche. However stay away from unnatural amounts of ‘off topic ‘ reciprocal link building – always make sure your reciprocal links are from trusted ‘on topic’ sites and make your reciprocal links a small part of your overall link building campaign.

• Buying links. It is thought that that buying links can harm your rankings (like most things with Google though it has only been hinted at rather than confirmed!). It is always better to be safe than sorry so try and avoid buying and selling links and you are less likely to be penalised for it.

• Hidden text on your site. An old trick and very likely to get you banned – don’t make the text the same colour as your background, you will get found out sooner or later! The same applies to hidden links on your site.

• Check your site is considered safe. Here is how we check our site is safe:

Go to Google and type in http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=shcl.co.uk (obviously replacing the shcl.co.uk with your site). This we show you this screen which will give you Google’s details on the ‘Safe Browsing’ details of your site:

Other ways to reduce the risk of getting banned or penalised by Google by Google include:

• Make sure the anchor text of any links pointing to your site is varied as possible
• Do not link to any currently banned sites
• Avoid excessive cross linking with any other sites you own
• Avoid over optimisation
• Avoid excessive use of directories
• Make sure your link building increases at a natural rate (about 10% of the total number of inbound links you already have)

The final tip for avoiding Google penalties is:

• Use your common sense!

If you think that your actions could be construed as slightly dubious then stay away. Make your link building look natural and design and optimise your site with the user in mind and remember it can take time to rise up the rankings – patience is a virtue!

Here are some tools and links to help you with diagnosing and solving Google penalty issues:

Bad Neighborhood – Bad neighbourhood checking tool

Google Webmaster Guidelines

MajesticSEO – Backlink checker and neighbourhood checker

Google’s Malware help

Google’s reconsideration of your site page

+++Wayne Barker+++

If  you missed The Internet Conference 2010 then you missed one amazing day.  Our expert speakers shared a huge amount of knowledge, and feedback from the delegates says it was a great opportunity to network and connect with other businesses using the Internet.  We will be organising another event next year, even bigger and even better, so watch this space!

In the meantime, our speakers have kindly agreed to share their slides with you:

What’s New With Google

Susan Hallam:  Hallam Communications Ltd

Getting it Wrong:  Change and Measurement on the Internet

Charles Arthur: The Guardian

Essentials of Search Engine Optimisation

Ian Lockwood:  Ian Lockwood Digital Consultancy

Improving the Ecommerce User Experience