The last few months have seen dramatic movements in the world of online marketing due to the many algorithm changes and updates being implemented by Google as part of their ongoing battle to clean up the search engine rankings and only reward sites that are deemed quality, relevant and informative to the search engine user base.

Google Panda has taken quite a few forms whilst the latest update; Google Penguin, has left many a webmaster, SEO agency and website owner wondering what has happened to their previously high rankings and also how to regain their once proud status.

How2Media’s team have read with interest many forum comments, blog posts, marketing emails and press releases stuffed full of opinions and theories on Google’s Penguin update and how to either protect or improve your website.

Thankfully our client base can be sure we won’t be offering advice in the way of what can only be deemed as guesswork; they can however be assured that we will continue to implement the same successful strategies and improvements to ensure that their rankings continue to be maximised and more importantly protected.

As we do not have an inside contact or spy within Google it would be so wrong of us to publish PR, write blog posts, produce email campaigns or any other form of marketing offering “expert” advice.

We have always stuck by the same ethics, cover every element of your website that can enhance the user experience as well as the search engines, whilst building a strong off page strategy to engage with social users,  build relationships with other websites and ensure your business has a presence in any relevant channel possible.

When it comes to implementing online marketing campaigns it is with confidence we can say that our methods up to now have worked and continue to work for clients present and new.

Regardless of what the future holds our question to anybody dealing with an agency or potentially looking for help would be, Google Penguin – Why Listen to Theories?

After all, unless all these “experts” are Google themselves how can they be 100%  accurate? The truth, they can’t!

It is with great pleasure that we announce our new clients and partnerships for May 2012.

How2Media are proud to work on a referral only or incoming enquiry basis and not go down the typical telesales method that annoys many companies, this strict way of working ensures that we only get clients as we deliver for existing clients. A referral only policy also helps to ensure that any potential new clients have established relationships with our long term projects; hence making the whole process from contact to implementation a smooth one.

This month we are proud to announce new partnerships and projects for Sharkflip, PressPort UK & ES, Lufbralets, The Sales Angels, Financial Marketing Services and Paul Worpole Photography.

We look forward to getting great results with all our new clients and partners in the short, mid and long term.

This week keep an eye out for our latest WordPress Web Design projects.

If you need a digital marketing agency who deliver contact How2Media today.

We have all heard that famous phrase “Rome wasn’t built in a day” and the same can be said for planning and implementing a successful social media marketing strategy.

As search engines evolve they are making it more and more difficult for websites to simply cheat their way to the top of the organic rankings, the same can be said for social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook; no longer do they want people spamming there way into other people’s thoughts.

It is for this reason that anybody involved at any level with online marketing should go down the ethical route. If you are a fan of spamming other people’s pages, mass adding Twitter users or constantly posting out content about your products and special offers how engaging is this to others? The simple answer is that it isn’t.

Building a solid foundation via any online channel is the right way to go, anybody can buy Facebook likes or Twitter followers, whilst purchasing back links for your website is simpler task than researching, approaching and gaining high authority partner links. This does not make it right and it will not give you long term stability.

Anybody taking this approach of cheating their way to what looks like success should ask themselves how many of their “followers” or “likes” actually bother to comment, like, re-tweet, reply or indeed visit your website. Again ask yourself if posting link after link about how good your business is to Twitter and Facebook really benefits your business, in summary it is a waste of your own time and will result in people either ignoring, reporting or un-following you.

When planning a social media marketing strategy why not think about who your target market is and how they are already engaging with your competitors online, think about ways to grab people’s attention so that they actually want to like, follow and interact with you.

A great approach is to introduce your business and pages through interaction with other relevant pages, obviously you do not want to tread on anyone’s toes but engaging with like minded pages in your area, sector and interest will also help produce a dedicated number of followers and raise brand awareness.

Running competition from time to time is a great way to get your company viral through forums, social media, pr and many other channels although it is wise to try and filter people who are interested from those who simply want a freebie.

Asking for potential customer feedback through surveys about product launches, new services and internal changes is a great way to see how people really want you to trade and should give you an indication of which customers will help to share, comment and again increase your brand awareness.

Keep your social media pages on the move, if you are seasonal why not update your timeline image, photos or avalon to reflect this. This is a great way to show your business is not static and is moving with the times.

When posting content keep it relevant to the business without always linking back to a product or service page within your site, there are hundreds of interesting, funny and informative stories for you to share about your industry with people to get them talking, laughing, sharing and engaging with your content.

These are simple ideas and suggestions to follow to ensure that you set some solid foundations that give you and your business the right sort of start needed to evolve your social media marketing into a highly successful part of an overall online marketing strategy.

How to Write SEO Content

A lot of copywriters, webmasters and web agencies have all faced the challenge of how to write SEO content many times. As the search engines, in particular Google, have changed their boundaries massively over the years, it has become even more of a challenge to create SEO content.

Google’s own Panda updates have made it paramount for every website to create unique, regular and relevant content that ticks the boxes with search engines and site users alike. Do you remember the days not so long ago when websites stuffed full of unreadable content and countless external links coming in dominated the organic rankings; these days are over.

Website owners and webmasters alike should embrace this new wave of attention to detail by Google, after all it has been put in place to prevent poor quality websites from retaining and gaining high search engine positions. Understanding how to write SEO content in order to get a nice balance between visitor experience and a thumbs up from the search engines is the key.

You also want people to link back to your content and drive traffic to your website as a result, consider why people would find your content engaging. The very best websites become a resource of their industry, not just a service provider or a sales entity, imagine having the benefit of people wanting to visit your site to increase their knowledge and also use your services; this really will make you a market leader in your industry.

Think about sites such as Wikipedia, you can type in almost any search term or phrase and they appear either at the top of Google or near the top. Their whole ethic is based upon relevant content that people will find informative and useful. As well as the subject sites like Wikipedia have made sure that the reader does not just look at one page of the site, carefully placed internal links have been added within the subject content and act as navigation links to other areas of the website.

Taking a moment to summarise, we have established that being relevant, informative, engaging with your intended audience and good navigation are all key factors in writing good SEO content; there are however other important factors.

If this article was thousands of words long how long would we keep your attention? Not very long in the majority of cases. Keeping articles, blog posts and content to a level of words that retains the interest of site visitors will leave them begging for the next installment.

Content that lacks depth will not engage the reader or search engines as there will not be enough instances of keywords, explanations or information to leave a feeling of satisfaction. Try to aim for between 450 and 750 words on average, article publishing websites will almost certainly want this amount of content if they are to re-publish your work and link back to it.

Adding the SEO Factor

Okay so your site visitor is happy with your content and we are presuming that they have linked and shared it. We now need to ensure that it ticks the SEO boxes.

Adding in a meta title that is relevant to the subject of your SEO content is paramount, coupled with relevant header titles such as H1 and H2 titles separating your text will really give the search engines an idea of the subject and keyword focus.

Highlighting the target keywords in a bold font is a good way to grab both user and search engine attention, although do not go to town with this; would you really consider good SEO content or any content readable if it was all in bold? We didn’t think so.

Images are also a great way to grab attention, make sure they are labelled with the right ALT attribute and the search engines will also notice them, we all love an article or content with a bit of life added to it.

As discussed internal links on keywords will also assist your SEO content effort of other pages, keep them relevant to the article and also ensure that navigation factor is considered to keep the visitor reading.

In summary, taking all these factors into account will ensure you stand a great chance of getting a nod of approval from both the search engines and site visitors, hopefully the issue of how to write SEO content will become a task that you enjoy and embrace as a new challenge each time it is required.

We would like to inform all of our customers and anybody looking to contact How2Media that we have changed our phone number to 0161 4083944.

The website contact section at the footer of our website has been updated and all company email’s and literature will also have the new number in place of the old one.

Many thanks!

Every webmaster and business owner looking to make an impact online must consider the right SEO keywords that will not only help their website progress, but also convert traffic into customers.

Too many web agencies and site owners are only considering being found for keywords that on the face of it are highly searched for, often ignoring SEO keywords with less search volume but that are more relevant to the businesses core products or services. These keywords are far more likely to convert if you are offering a relevant product or service.

When it comes to the issue of how to choose SEO keywords, How2Media would advise that all options and avenues are considered. The following methods are all popular but sometimes used incorrectly.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool – As it says on the tin; this method of researching keywords has been designed with Google’s paid advertising medium in mind, it is however an extremely useful SEO tool. We would recommend that you search using exact match over broad match so that you know exactly how many monthly searches there are, broad match will show more searches but this type of search will also include non-relevant searches that simply include your keyword.

For example; if you are an ecommerce website owner selling motorcycle tyres then it makes more sense to simply target all relevant and exact traffic based around your various product offerings. If you were to do a broad search Google will take into account the word tyres, motorcycle, cycle, motor etc and include them in the search volumes. People searching for anything other than your products will not convert into paying customers.

The other benefit of exact match searching is that it also helps you to understand your industry potential, if you know your business conversion rates from website click, to enquiry and eventually a sale, working out from the start the exact amount of traffic will help you to project potential return on investment via your website and also monthly and yearly turnover. Being able to produce accurate forecasts could help if you need to raise business finance or investment.

Be Realistic - Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will you dominate your chosen sector overnight for the most competitive of keywords. By this we mean that you should consider the short, mid and long term aims of your business and website when choosing SEO keywords.

Obviously you will want to rank highly for the highly search, relevant sector keywords as these will drive the highest amount of targeted traffic to your site; this will take time, effort and resource alongside a lot of ethical search engine optimisation work to achieve. We would advise you consider this challenge a mid to long term goal depending on the competition you face for these SEO keywords.

To get to the mid to long term stage you need to consider how to make an impact in the short term in terms of driving traffic and of course generating revenue from sales. How2Media would recommend that you look at all your product or service offerings and include them as a vital part of any SEO campaign.

Taking the example of motorcycle tyres again; this type of keyword would be deemed as a generic offering of your types of products. For example; a keen motorcycle enthusiast will know which tyres suit their riding style, the weather and bike the best so it is unlikely that they will perform a search simply for motorcycle tyres as a generic. They are more than likely to search specifically for a tyre that they know works well for them and only click on a website that reflects their desired search.

If you optimise your website for the specific product types, no matter how long tailed then you have a great chance of having a high conversion rate in the short term on lesser searched SEO keywords. As the product type and search will be so specific, the amount of competition on these types of SEO keywords are much less which means your site will rank highly in the short term if you implement your search engine optimisation strategy correctly.

Competitor Analysis – Any business and website owner should know who there competitors are. There are generally three types of competition to any business;

• Industry Leading
• Upcoming/ New
• Existing

It is essential when choosing SEO keywords that you understand all of your competition no matter how big or small a threat you deem them to be to your website.

You must think outside of the box, think about the primary industry leading SEO keywords such as the highly searched generic terms and also perform searches yourself for these terms. In general the websites appearing for the generic terms could be deemed as online industry leading websites as they are already at the stage of your long term goals. You should learn from their good work and look to better it through a well thought out and implemted onilne marketing strategy.

Performing searches for the more specific products will also help you to see who are existing rivals for your desired SEO keywords and give you increased knowledge of all the competition you face for keywords across the board.

Keeping an eye out for new competition by checking which websites are paying for Google Adwords will help you to see potential future rivals in the organic search engine rankings; also try and learn from upcoming, new competitors who look to be making progression up the rankings.

By taking into account all these factors when it comes to the issue of how to choose seo keywords, you will not only increase your online standing but also protect your business and website in the future.

When it comes to understanding search engine optimisation as a business or offering SEO as a service to clients, it is important that you know the service inside out and have a complete understanding of the basic mechanics of search engine optimisation before you begin to implement methods or indeed offer it as a service to others.

Google produced an extremely useful and simple to follow search engine optimisation starter guide to help assist both webmasters and business individuals alike back in 2008 and have released newer versions year on year to help with best practice. Our question to any business offering SEO services to others would be have you read the Google Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide?

More often that not the answer is no, they have not, or yes and they could not even begin to tell you how to locate it as it would provide interestig reading to any customer paying for SEO services and not getting a service that conforms with Google’s own guide.

How2Media have read the full document and we keep up to date with all Google webmaster improvements and advice simply by using Google’s free webmaster tools.

If you are considering hiring a search engine optimisation provider to help with your website ranking and SERP performance this document will help you decide if they are up to the job.

Please click this link http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf to view the document in full.

Hopefully this will help you increase your knowledge of SEO and also help save you wasted time and of course money!

April 1st 2012 marked the launch of our new company website.

We’ve had lots of great feedback from clients and people from within the digital marketing sector up to press, please feel free to contact us with your thoughts and any suggestions to help you navigate and enjoy your website visitor experience.

Friday 6th April marks the start of our daily blog posts where we will be creating a selection of useful online marketing related articles, company news and general digital marketing news. We would love it if you can share these via as many social media and viral channels as possible.

Thank you for visiting the website, we hope to be interacting with you soon!