Cornwall SEO

Content Marketing Blog

Lyndon Antcliff

Writing Headlines That Reach The First Page

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Guest Post by Brandon Hopkins, let me know if you would also like to get a guest post published on Cornwallseo.com

There is no shortage of people telling you how to write killer headlines (my personal favorite is Brian Clark’s, How to Write Magnetic Headlines), but what these headline experts fail to mention is how a headline affects your search engine rankings.

I wasn’t born yesterday, and neither were you so we both know that a good headline should use your keywords and be compelling. After all, you do want people to click right? In addition to being compelling and using those keywords, you also need to make sure that you’re different.

Take a minute and go to Google and search for just about any 3 word phrase that a normal person might search for. I searched for “funny cat videos” and “top 100 songs” those two searches give some interesting information if you know what to look for.

Take a look at the titles for the top 10 results. Do you see any duplications? Do you see 2 sites that have the same title? That right there is a big secret many people are missing and they don’t even realize it. Are you creating a new niche blog about funny cat videos? Guess what, if your title is “Funny Cat Videos”, you’ll have a hard time ranking on the first page since Google usually only allows one site with that title. This means for you to reach the front page Google will remove the other site with that title and move them to the second page.

Go ahead and look through the first 5 pages of search results for “funny cat videos”. Do you see any identical titles on any of the pages? I didn’t think so.

What does this mean for your website?

1. Avoid the Urge To Simplify. Even though you really want to rank for “funny cat videos”, make sure and title your page “Watch Funny Cat Videos Online!” Using a title that isn’t already in the top 10 will ensure that you don’t have to force Google to choose between your site and an already established site that is ranking well. There is room for you both to coexist! Hopefully you’ll exist in the number 1 spot!

2. Write Compelling Headlines for Every Page. Don’t be lazy with your authority (or Pillar) content. For many niche sites, it’s tempting to just use your main key phrase (funny cat videos) as the title. Make every title compelling (Top 100 Funny Cat Videos).

3. Check the SERP’s Before Finalizing Your Title. If you’re great title is already being used by a site in the top 10, I would suggest changing your title.

4. Reevaluate Your Titles. Just because you had to use a different title doesn’t mean you can’t eventually change your title back to your main key phrase. Once you’re in the top spot, you can experiment with small variations to see if you can increase your click through ratio by just changing a few words.

5. Use Your Company Name. If your keywords don’t lend themselves to compelling titles then you can always use your company name or domain name. Take Ezilon for example, in the web directory market, you have to make yourself distinct. Ezilon did that by creating a regional directory.

While duplicate titles might be a very small ranking factor, it’s definitely something to keep an eye on!

Brandon Hopkins builds links for small and large companies all over the world. You can contact him at his Fresno web design website for more information on getting your site ranked #1!

ThinkVisibility 2011 – It’s all about the links

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This is a guest post from Claire Carlile, who had the not so dubious pleasure of attending ThinkVis this March.

Last weekend heralded the 5th ThinkVisibility, and my second visit to Leeds for this 1 day event that popped my SEO conference cherry last September. I was expecting some engaging presentations, to meet with friends old and new, and of course a modicum of debauchery. I was not disappointed.

Being of a linkbuilding persuasion one presentation in particular stood out for me, my takeaways from this detailed below.

Paddy Moogan: Let’s talk about links baby

Paddy starts by outlining his session:

  • site reviews with link suggestions
  • generic tips
  • plus some fun (shadier stuff).

Unfortunately he asked us not to blog the ‘fun stuff’ – you’ll have to pay up for a ticket to ThinkVisibility yourself for this 😉

SITE: Thefoodplace.co.uk
Restaurant review website

OVERVIEW:
Conduct a backlink analysis – always do this first, what type of links do you need?
Site has lots of sidebar / site wide links with 12.000 links from 383 domains, not very varied.
Needs more domain diversity.

LINKBUILDING IDEAS:
Use link bait and ego bait.

  • start with easy wins, for example ‘top 10 restaurants in Leeds’, ‘Top 10 restaurants in London’ etc
  • get people to come to your site and see that they are listed – shortlist the ones with websites that are likely to link to you.
  • run a survey on your website and then get people to vote on which of the top 10 is the best, that way the restaurants themselves will encourage their customers and community to visit your site – extra traffic plus links. Use poll daddy.

Using twitter for links (the easy way)
You need a reasonable following on twitter.
using twitter for links

  • Check which followers have websites; you can go through these people manually, or find all your followers and csv export them using friendorfollow.com.
  • Find their website URLs using qwerly.com , which allows you to do this without logging into twitter.

This can take a long time, but a solution can be offered by scraping 😉

Paddy talks about how to do this. Now, Paddy is not the type of chap that needs to take a humility pill, and post presentation he flagged up this post on getting links from your twitter friends that describes the process in a succinct fashion.

  • Reach out to them and ask for a link
  • Launch link bait targeted at them via twitter

This is a great way to grab link targets really quickly and easily – the list is ‘pre qualified’ in the sense that they’re already following you on twitter, and you already have a relationship with them.

NB You’ll probably want to weed your competitors out of this data (please don’t ask for links, as a slap round the face often offends)

no links given

Other ideas

  • Feature the restaurants in a newsletter
  • Promote their special offers
  • Review them on the blog

Site: Smartcatlearning.com
Children’s dyslexia test

OVERVIEW:
Current situation – not much domain diversity, but some good strong links

LINKBUILDING IDEAS:
Identify opportunities

  • Schools
  • Parent groups
  • Mummy bloggers (the internet is crawling with them)

mummy bloggers

I’m not sure this is the type of blogger we’re looking for….

How to find them?
start with the basics (seriously): search for “list of mummy bloggers”
when you find a good one click on ‘similar’ link in the SERPs

Use Followerwonk.com . Performs a search in twitter bios, identifies those with ‘mummy blogger’ in bio, and also gives lots if useful data including real name, location, and number of tweets, friends and followers.

SITE: Shopsafe.co.uk
Retailer reviews and vouchers

LINKBUILDING IDEAS:
Ego bait
awards for websites
give badges to winners
do across every category

Hit wise do this very successfully.

Blue sky idea – become a review aggregator
Encourage customers to leave more reviews
act as an independent review site
let retailers use reviews on their own site, in exchange for a link

Extra Tip
Implement microformats for shop reviews – reported 14% uplift in CTR from SERPS because of rich snippets (don’t quote that!)

SITE: acornprinting.co.uk
Offers t shirt printing


LINKBUILDING IDEAS:
Identify USPs:

  • Fair-trade supplier

Use advanced search operators to identify prospects:

  • get link targets from fair-trade.org.uk website. For example, get a list of local campaign groups, they likely be easier to target and more likely to link out.
  • think carefully about their existing customers – who do they supply? Charities and universities would of course make great link targets.
  • be careful – don’t overdo the anchor text optimisation – stick to targeting branded terms

Link bait
i.e. Guinness world record for the most t shirts worn at one time – they could see if they could break the world record, with their own branded t shirts

SITE: gifts4men.com
Erm, they supply gifts for men. Doh.

LINKBUILDING IDEAS:
Competitions are always a corker for easy wins.

    use

  • competitionhunter.com – Paddy can give you a list of links from competition sites if you email him (list of 20)

Guest blogging

  • find targets and do outreach first….find the link targets, contact them, get the content, get it approved etc
  • let them know you have 4 or 5 ideas, give them the overview, if they say nothing works for them ask them what type of stuff they would like? Then you can write for them specifically, they feel special / valued and are more likely to run your copy and links
  • when you have the contact and the person says ‘yes’ – get it produced (use oDesk, textbroker etc)
  • add links to the top of the article, try and keep it at the top if you can. Higher CTR, but also Matt Cutts at pubcon gave a big hint about how google views links in bios. Position of the link on the page is v. valuable.

Pro tip for agencies

  • Find top 10 generic sites and come back to them again and again with different clients, keep a data base of these sites

Top tips for e commerce sites

  • Safebuy.org.uk: you can submit to multiple categories and get a link from each, pricey but worth it
  • Get links to product pages by making a screen cast of the product, embed code in the bottom (sounds painful), people can use it on their sites and will create deep links to your product pages. Adfd HTML wrapper to your product page

General tips

  • If you’re a new start up get a link from Smarta.com in their ‘60 second start up’ posts
  • Links from journalists – use journalisttweets.com to identify journos on twitter in your area, and by niche

That’s it, phew! The other stuff was so top secret, if I told you Paddy would make me suck sick through a sweaty sock. So I’m not gonna.

See Paddy’s preso slides, and harass him on twitter.

Why I dumped Friends on Facebook

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At one point I had a few thousand “friends” on Facebook, most of these were business rather than personal. Not really trusting FB to keep the separation between business and personal as solid as I would like, I have set up a new FB account for this blog.

I realise you can set up fan pages and groups, but I wanted an FB account that was completely owned by Cornwall SEO and to be branded definitively with the blog and the link building business that Cornwall SEO offers.

So, you may find that I have removed you from my personal account, This isn’t because I hate your guts and curse the very ground you walk upon, but it’s the best way I can think of doing it. It would be nice if I could press a button and it all transfer everyone but it is what it is.

If you still think it’s worth connecting with me and Cornwall SEO on Facebook you can do so with this link.

It would be cool if you gave the like button on the right a tinkle too.

If you have an interest in Online Marketing and specifically social media marketing and link building, you may find it very useful.

See you on the FB.

Secrets of Link Building

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Yesterday I had three people from separate companies ask me to sign an NDA, actually they weren’t people they were clients. And clients have a much higher status than people, at least they do around these parts.

The bigger the client of course, the more you are likely to trigger an NDA and of course an NDA can cut both ways. It protects you if you are offering seo services and protects your client who is hiring the seo company. So, everyone should be happy and signing the NDA is all good stuff.

But that got me thinking. What’s the point of the NDA? Ultimately is about protecting confidential information and secrets.

Secrets!

It’s a massive word, much over used in online marketing of course. Come learn the secrets of link building, buy the latest ebook, SEO secrets revealed.

The Zen master will tell you that the secret to success is that there are no secrets. That the secret lies within yourself.

Megh!

Whilst there is truth in that, I know of a high ranking authoritative website where you can drop a dofollow link, point it at a target page, using the correct keyword and get it to rank quickly and rank well. But, I’m not going to tell you where it is. It’s a secret. If I published it on this blog the harvest would be shortened and the fruit would soon be over ripened and riddled with maggots.

So it stays secret. The point is, there are secrets, little bits of information floating around that would benefit your online marketing efforts.

No this isn’t a lead in to a “Secrets of Link Building” ebook.

To get to know these secrets of link building you do have to revisit the Zen Master and learn that there are no link building secrets. The reality is, there is nothing that you cannot know in the click of a mouse that will teach you all you need to know to create the most amazing online marketing campaign.

Because, it’s not the secrets to link building that will make you a great link builder. It’s the other stuff, the stuff that expert link builders give away for free on their blogs, it’s what gets talked about at SEO conferences, in free downloads of pdf files. It’s what given away in the seo books stacked on the shelves of you local book shop for a tenner.

The secret stuff, probably only makes up 5% of the mix, if that. The other 95% is hard work and focussing on what works.

The reason why people are looking for that link building secret is because link building is boring, simple and hard work. Which is why people outsource to link building agencies.

Which is the Best UK SEO Company?

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It’s an interesting question which people ask a lot.

However, the expert will tell you that there isn’t an absolute answer, the answer is relative. In other words, it depends.

The number of factors which you should consider when deciding which is the best SEO company are many and what you should really be asking is not which is the best, but which is the best for you?

For example:

How much is your budget?
What specific goals do you want to achieve?
What are your businesses resources?
Do you have a current SEO strategy?
What is your overall online marketing strategy?
Do you prefer a local company which can give face to face time?
What level of reporting do you require from the SEO company?
Do you have any in-house SEO or web design experience?
Do you need the same SEO agency to also be able to implement your social media strategy?
Do you need an SEO agency who has knowledge of Local search?
Is your website going to be pulling data from a database and deploying data dynamically?
Do you need the agency to provide in-house training?
Would you require Adwords expertise?
Are you comfortable with a “work from the bedroom-seo-ninja-mercenary-assassin”, who may laugh in your face when you explain you don’t know what .htaccess is, or do you need an agency with a pot plant in the corner and a fit blonde with very white teeth on reception and generic pictures on the wall bought from B & Q?
Do you need an SEO company that will not only get you ranked in Google but will understand you business and help you develop a customer conversion strategy that will increase your profit.
Do you need a link building service rather than a general seo agency?
Do you have your own access to writers or do you want to outsource your writing to the agency?

And I could probably go on and on. But you probably get the picture. An expert in the field will instantly know which SEO company will suit you. The answer to “Which is the best UK SEO company?” Is there isn’t one, it’s the wrong question to ask.

“Which is the best UK SEO company for my business?”, however, is a better question.

Although even that needs to be qualified. In my experience no two seo agencies offer the same type of service. You could hire an independent expert to find the best for you, but how could you really know they would not be biased?

The reality is, only an expert can truly spot another expert, which means you must go on other indicators.

The best way to find a great SEO service provider is through personal recommendations rather than asking Google.

But I’m sure you already know that.