Retailers: ever wondered just how important your product images are? The answer is in. With an increased concentration on image-based searches, product images now count toward your success on-site and in the SERPs.

Product images have always been fairly important for online retail. Internet customers tend to be comforted by a good picture of the thing they’re about to buy. Still, most retail sites make do with the images provided by manufacturers. It’s a cheap option and it gets the job done.

Or does it? Using the same image as your competitors isn’t the best way to get ahead. It doesn’t help your website optimization much either. Now, with Google making improvements to image searches, ignoring your images could mean you’re missing out on a valuable, easy source of search traffic.

Good images get listed in image searches

Product searches aren’t just conducted in the main search page. When shopping around, internet users make use of image search to narrow down their options. This means image searches can be a good source of traffic.

Good images give you an edge

It’s always been true that better and more varied images of products help online retail conversions. Your SEO company can tell you that it works well for optimisation as well, as new images of the product will keep your customers on your pages for longer, helping your rankings and increasing your chances of a conversion.

To improve your rankings and sales by including images in your professional SEO services plan, talk to us at Optimization.co.uk

Blog comments are great for search marketing. It’s something you’ll learn from your search engine optimization agency for promoting your blog. Something you don’t often hear, though, is how easily you can ruin your campaign with blog comments.

Like any other form of organic marketing, commenting on blogs only works if you’re subtle and you can discuss this with us at Optimization.co.uk. If you dive right in, only talking about your business, you can put people off – to the extent of being blocked from future comments. The key is in a gentle, genuine approach:

1. Read the blog. Reading is an essential part of blog commenting. If you haven’t read the blog, and more importantly the page you’re commenting on, you can’t provide insightful comments.
2. Read the comments. Ever tried to make an insightful comment at a party, only to find that someone else has just said the same thing? It’s an awkward situation. It’s more awkward online, undermining your reputation. Find out what other people have said before putting your comment in.
3. Make your links relevant. Comments are a technique used in link building services because they draw traffic as well as link juice. However, they only do this when they explain or add-on to the topic of the blog post. Never, ever comment with just a link – it looks like spam and is likely to be deleted.
4. Don’t be greedy. If your comment includes a couple of links, your signature and a promotion for your site, it looks like spam. Settle for making a single reference.

A lot of business owners worry about how often they should tweet. Frequency is something Twitter is famous for but if it’s the biggest worry on your mind, you’re concentrating on the wrong thing. Twitter’s golden rule is about content.

Twitter is great for promotion. What a lot of business owners forget however is how low the social tolerance is for outright marketing. In other words, if you spend all of your time promoting your business in social media, people will tune out. The answer is to mix in a little more general interest with your promotional material.

The rule: one in ten

The golden rule for Twitter should be one marketing tweet in every ten. One in ten may seem like a small proportion of content being devoted to marketing, but it spreads out marketing messages to roughly once a day. It ensures that your followers aren’t just getting a tweet line of promotional messages.

Why do this? Even in Twitter, Internet users are wary of spam. When they see ten tweets in a row about your fabulous new product, they’re likely to drop you. You can discuss this kind of social media strategy with us at Optimization.co.uk

Content is definitely king these days. Any search engine optimisation agency concentrates on it because, more than anything else, it’s the key to Internet success. A lot of people forget the principles of SEO content writing when they jump onto Twitter. Keep your audience’s interests in mind when you tweet and follow the golden rule.

Ever wondered how you could make your SEO plan easier to follow? There are three incredibly simple things you can do. The best thing is, not only are they easy but they’ll have a direct impact on the success of your site.

Do this once: change your signature

Most business emails end with something like, ‘[Name], [Position], [Company]‘. Particularly, marketing-savvy companies encourage the addition of a motto, which does catch the eye. But what about promoting your site? Change your email signature to advertise your blog, shout your site’s praises or even just provide a link.

Do this once a week: answer a question

A key to good, organic search engine optimization is reputation. Answering questions on popular sites is a splendidly simple way to build reputation and you can discuss using this as part of your SEO plan with us at Optimization.co.uk

The most arduous part of this plan is finding a question site that is relevant to your business. Have your SEO agency research the user profile of various Q&A sites, or just choose one that you would use yourself. Answering questions can help with SEO link building as well if you drop links to relevant content.

Do this once a month: spy on people

One of the best things about the net is how easy it is to reach people. Your audience is on social media sites and reading blogs all over the place. Dropping into these places once a month helps with SEO content ideas and promotional avenues.

Got a blog, but it’s not really doing much for your rankings? Blogs can be successful without actively helping a site’s position in the SERPs. If you’re trying to use your blog for SEO and marketing and failing dismally, there could be a very simple explanation.

1. It’s not SEO-friendly. This is a basic, but something that can easily be trampled on. Is your blogging software easy for search engines to read? Are you archiving posts properly? If you haven’t already consulted your SEO services company about your blog, it’s past time to do so.

2. You’re not socially sharing. A blog does little more than update your pages unless you also promote it. The easiest way to promote blog posts is by sharing them on social media sites. The resulting traffic and links will boost your blog pages and help your SEO in general.

3. You’re not analysing. If you’re working on your SEO, you’ve got a lot of analysing to do and that includes your blog traffic. Too many businesses ignore blog traffic in their site analytics.

4. You’re not building. Do you have subscriptions open? Part of your blog’s purpose should be to build audience and links. RSS feeds and subscriptions help this along. You can discuss this with us at Optimization.co.uk.

5. Keywords are being left behind. Blog keywords are slightly different from main keyword lists. While blog posts should aim to promote your pages for your main keywords, the blog is a better SEO resource when it also turns up in blog-specific searches.

Search engine optimisation results aren’t always the easiest things to decipher. In fact, it takes time and experience to uncover exactly what your SEO agency or campaign is doing for you. When you’re first investing in SEO, there’s a lot of catching up to do. It helps to be aware of the typical panics most people face when looking at SEO updates.

Scenario 1: Your rankings haven’t gone up.

This scenario is the most common for site owners new to SEO and one you’ve probably already passed through. It only takes a little experience to realise that website optimisation takes time. If rankings don’t go up after a few months, it’s time to reassess and you can talk to us at Optimization.co.uk about your concerns.

Scenario 2: Your traffic rate is down.

Traffic is not necessarily a KPI for website optimisation. Look at the outcomes for the traffic you get. You might be getting better results from less, more specific, traffic.

Scenario 3: The CPC rate has gone up.

If you’ve invested in search engine marketing, your cost per click should be a concern. However, in reassessing search marketing during SEO, it’s entirely possible you’ll discover you’ve been going the wrong way. Your CPC might jump but your conversions might have jumped as well.

Of course, there are times when these things should make you panic. If your costs are going up but you’re not seeing any improvements across the board, it’s time to reassess. Make sure you look at all benefits before panicking.

There’s been a lot written about content and understandably so. For organic search engine optimization, good content is a keystone. Yet, for everything that search engine optimisation copywriting experts have said on the subject, site owners still struggle with the eternal problem, Namely, how on earth do you get people to read your pages?

The key to truly great content is a lot simpler than you’d think. Like most things to do with SEO, it requires listening to your audience. In particular, writing to match the level of the great content providers in your industry.

First of all, you need to find the sites that set the standard of content for your industry. These are the sites that your target market goes to. Blogs, industry magazines and even competitors fit into this category. Pick five and study them.

Next, start writing for them. This is the hard part. Your articles need to match the quality level on those sites. Write as though you’re guest posting and fairly soon, you will be. It can be useful to access SEO copywriting services for this level of writing and you can talk to us about this at Optimization.co.uk.

Attracting readers to web pages is just a part of the job for good content but it’s also part of the content’s success. The direct traffic your content may draw may be small in the scheme of things but the content’s attractive qualities can net you links, social media attention and authority with search engines. When drawing up content ideas, think about your audience.

There is an awful lot of SEO out there that is short-sighted. Many of the strategies designed to give you a boost in the short term utterly fail in the long term. It’s part of the reason so many SEOs stick to the white hat path. One area where site owners are consistently short-sighted is link building.

One-way link building is important is for healthy site rankings. This fact prompts many site owners to dive into link building, looking to boost up their profile with whatever links they can. In doing so, they overlook the avenues of link building that will work best in the long term.

What sort of link building works in the long term? The kind that has a broader goal than just getting a few links on the profile by next week.

This includes link building that:

* Gets the message out to as many unique sites as can be reached – building up relationships which will deliver unique links for organic SEO
* Mimics natural patterns as much as possible – using techniques such as linkbait, social networking and relationship-building
* Taps into the possibilities of social networking – concentrating on building a community to tap into

You’ll notice the word ‘relationships’ has a strong presence here. The best techniques build those foundations which return links over a long period of time.

Unless your link building strategy is broad and looks to the future, you’re wasting part of your investment. Talk to our team at Optimization.co.uk about developing ideas for link building in the UK that will work in the long term.

Are you struggling with SEO in the wake of last year’s Panda updates? Do you feel you’ve got all your SEO ducks in a row but still aren’t ranking where you would like? Is your Search Engine Optimisation agency advising you to look at content? There could be a few things you’re missing.

Panda shook up things for a lot of websites and many are still struggling to recover. As you will know, the Panda algorithm update focused on content. The only real way to deal with problems caused by Panda is to fix up your content. This isn’t as easy as it sounds for some websites.

If you’re still experiencing problems post-Panda, here are some things to get your SEO services company look at:

* Is new content taking up the most space on the page? In other words, are you posting more than a paragraph or two when you update? The best size for an article is 250–300 words. Just a sentence or two of new content won’t cut it.

* Are ads getting in the way? Google has been cracking down on sites that have excessive advertising, particularly those top-heavy with ads.

* Are you saying anything new? Many sites have hundreds of pages that paraphrase the same information. Invest in a fresh approach.

The safest option, if you suspect that Panda is affecting your rankings, is to post entirely fresh pages. Only by freshening up your approach to content can you battle the Panda. Talk to us at Optimization.co.uk for more information.

Changing part of the text on your page isn’t sufficient to turn it into a new page. Obvious, yes? You might think so but for many sites, their ‘fresh’ content just isn’t fresh enough. When you’re updating content or search engine optimisation copywriting, you need to make sure that your update counts with the search engines.

Consider this. You have a rigid page template you’re unwilling to change. Your modus operandi with fresh pages is to simply insert a body of text into the appropriate slot and post. However, that body of text, weighed next to the company blurb, menus, ads, call-to-action buttons and other paraphernalia, doesn’t represent the majority of content on the page. Google’s actions when this happens are difficult to predict because there isn’t really much fresh content on the page.

Some sites do even worse. Instead of changing the body of content, the site owner merely makes a change in the side-bar. Retail sites are particularly prone to this when the site owner is enamoured with the product. You can talk to us at Optimization.co.uk about SEO for retail sites.

Avoiding these situations is fairly simple. When you or your Search Engine Optimisation company are updating your web pages, make sure the new content makes up the bulk of the page. This may seem difficult to do with some pages but allowing room for new content will pay off in terms of not only the search engines, but your site users as well.