Just a Tool – Why SEO should not be used alone
People have long debated whether SEO is compatible with an informative site? In truth they need to work together and it is vital you don’t over complicate matters by making SEO too big a focus. The best traditional journalism sold newspapers. Those newspapers may have moved online but they are now amongst the world’s most popular internet sites. SEO of course plays a part in that, as does reputation established over years, but good quality content regularly upated drives people back to websites time and time again. However, good you are at SEO you have to have great content, great stories and good writing before it is even worth employing SEO. An SEO driven site may bring in clicks but as a business you want repeat visitors. You want to build loyalty and encourage others to share your content. If it is not interesting they won’t do that and all your energy and budget spent on SEO will have been in vain. Equally too, remember your site needs to look good. It doesn’t need to be a work of art but it needs not to jar the eye and it needs to be usable. A lot of SEO focus will be upon the naming convention for pages and articles within them, but of equal, if not more importance, is how those pages are navigated. SEO will help you drive traffic but it won’t have a great effect on how visitors use your page once they are there. Have a look at heatmaps and see where people are clicking. Look at research and see where people’s eyes track when looking at a website. All of these are relevant tools, as relevant a tool as SEO. Only in combination can you take your site to the top of the rankings. Remember having a site people want to ‘buy’ into is the best sales tool you can ever have. Make what’s on your site, what people want to see and read and your SEO results will also rapidly improve. Do you agree? We’d love to hear your thoughts, even if you disagree. Leave us your comments.
Ifttt may make your life easier
The home page for IFTT simply reads: “Put the internet to work for you” It’s so simple, you think somebody must have invented this before, but to be honest this is the first time we’ve come across IFTT or any of its ilk and we love it. So what is IFTT? Well IFTT stands for “If This Then That”. In programming terms its the very basic function that makes the internet, applications, operating systems and the like, all work. Now with the help of APIs and some clever tweaks it is being put to use on the internet and internet driven applications. So if everytime you take a photo with your phone app you want it published to Twitter and stored in your online drive you can. The very steps that might take you an hour to manually complete, you can automate within seconds. You just use IFTT to set up the triggers and hey presto no more worrying about human error meaning a missed-out step. It is all based around tasks, triggers and actions. Simply choose the channel – Facebook, Google Calendar, etc and follow the step-by-step instructions. You can turn actions on or off, edit them or delete them. Yet its value is in the fact that if you set it up once correctly, you may never need to worry again, you can automate the ‘knock-on’ actions. You’ve probably been using similar tools without knowing. Plug-ins that automatically tweet your latest blog, automating Facebook comments to be tweeted etc. Yet IFTTT goes even further. You can even include the weather. We’ve just set-up an auto-tweet to send out a message to our followers when the weather is predicted to drop below 5 degrees C. So like other tools you can schedule your tweets but with IFTTT that needn’t be based on time, it can be based on various other conditions. What’s more you don’t need a smartphone to use it, just a plain, simple browser. We are only just getting to grips with IFTTT ourselves but what we’ve seen so far we love. We’re sure there will be many clones to follow. Life just got easier. Have you used IFTTT? Can you recommend anything similar?
Understanding searchers to maximise your site
The Google Keyword Volume Tool has been around for years in some form or other but via the odd tweak here and there has now evolved into a ‘must visit’ site for anybody designing a new web project. The Keyword tool is linked with Google Adwords designed to find you words you might want to bid on and use in any paid for campaignsm but you don’t need to be logged in to use the Keyword Tool. Searching is simple and the results show you how many searches have been made for that term in the past month – both locally, based on your location and globally. The Competition bar also shows how competitive the market is for buying up adwords for that term. If you think there is value in you moving into a pay-per-click campaign then you can get an idea as to how much that might cost you by using the Traffic Estimator link on the left. This will provide as estimate on the likely cost per click of the keyword and also the likely volume of traffic and how much that is then likely to cost you per day. All your research ready prepared and easily presented. If you are designing any new site, even just planning a new project the Keyword Tool is something you can’t fail to ignore, the results offfer valuable insight into words to use on your site both hidden and visual and even your site name. Do you use Google’s Keyword Tool? Any tips? If you want to drive more traffic and sales to your site, read more about our Pay-Per-Click management solutions to see how we can help.