E-Marketing – Online Website Advertising and Search Engine Optimisation

It is important to state at the outset that search engine optimisation (SEO) is not an exact science; in fact many of the largest search engine operators (esp Google) actively try to prevent SEO activities by constantly revising their search engine ranking criteria. The effect being that activities to optimise website placement which work today may not work tomorrow and those that positively affect one search engine may adversely affect another.

However, there are three truths which can help with marketing your website:

1. Design Services - Real world marketing is most effective. Advertising through mediums such as local papers, specialist publications, flyers, direct marketing etc is as important as it has always been and must be done to complement any online marketing.

2. Paid for website advertising (adwords, banner adverts etc) is likely to generate more immediate results than manipulating natural search engine results.

3. Natural Search Engine Placement - Recognised SEO techniques which increase the importance of your standing in the web community can help to ensure fair placement in search engine results.

Lamtha2 Can assist your marketing in all three of these areas.

We are able to:

- Create artwork to support direct marketing and online advertising activities

- Manage Overture/Google adword campaigns on your behalf

- SEO your website for better natural search engine placement

Design Services

We can offer design services to support both print and web marketing activities.

Utilising industry recognised applications (Flash, Photoshop) we can design and create artwork to support your marketing campaigns in any format your printer requires (.psd, .pdf etc). We can produce web artwork such as animated advertising banners as animated gifs or Flash media.

Paid For Online Advertising

We are able to utilise our experience in online marketing to manage your paid for advertising with Overture or Google.

We are happy to either research and identify keywords and phrases, create advert text and setup your account for you to take on it’s ongoing management or we can manage your account for you and make use of our time and expertise to maximise the effective use of your marketing budget.

SEO and Natural Search Engine Placement

The following activities are suggested as a programme to improve your search engine placement:

Search Engine Registration

Identifying your current placement and ensuring that your site is submitted to all relevant search engines is a basic requirement. We can:

- Check and report upon your websites inclusion/exclusion in top UK search engines.

- Submit your site to free search engines and advise on non-inclusion in paid search engines.

- Maximise indexing of your individual website pages through the creation of an xml site map and it’s submission to Google site maps.

- For dynamic websites such as shopping carts, the majority of product pages are generated from a database and this can result in some search engines excluding your pages. We can undertake a review of your listings and in some cases apply a modification to generate a search engine friendly url for each page.

Site Content

It is worth taking time to understand how prospective clients search for your product or service. A short cut to this knowledge is to research your successful competitors. We can:

- Review your top competitors sites, and use other tools to analyse and identify top search keywords/phrases for your service.

- Analyse and report on your current search engine placement for these terms.

- Update your site’s meta tags to include identified top search terms.

- Apply individual page meta tag descriptions and keywords.

- Conduct a keyword density analysis of all/or selected pages of your website against your key terms.

- Revise your page content to include identified top search terms and so increase your keyword density.

- Conduct a review of your site content and a comparison against key competitors to identify and suggest general content revision opportunities.

Reciprocal Linking

They say that on the internet ‘content is king’; site’s which are the ‘subject authority’ are the sites that get the highest ranking on the search engines. But how do the search engines identify the subject authorities? Simply by measuring a site’s ‘page ranking’. Page ranking is s system devised by Google to measure a site’s importance based upon the number and quality of other websites who ‘vote for’ that site. Reciprocal linking is the main influence and a link to your site can be considered a ‘vote for’ your site. If respected websites ‘vote for’ you then the search engine will consider your site a subject authority and rank you highly in their results. It should be borne in mind though that not all votes for you are positive; inclusion in some directories and link farms can actually count against you. A ‘vote for you’ from your best competitor is considered to be highly prized.

Getting good quality reciprocal links is very time consuming however it is worth the effort. You can take two approaches to get inbound links; either fill your site with content that others will want to refer their site visitors to or actively seek out reciprocal link partnerships.

We can:

- Identify suitable exchange linking partners e.g. primary schools, secondary schools, 11+ information sites, book stores etc

- Request exchange links from identified sources and update your website’s links page where appropriate.

- Creation of mini-websites to act as ‘doorways’ to your main site and thus increase the numbers ‘voting for’ you. This is a common technique used by so called ‘SEO experts’ but please note that repetition of content is likely to result in a page (or site) being de-listed. For that reason we recommend that every ‘doorway’ page/domain have unique textual content.

Measuring Results

SEO is not an exact science and positive results cannot be guaranteed. However, results can be measured:

Before and after the completion of any agreed SEO activities we undertake we will report on your website’s search engine placement for agreed keywords/phrases thereby demonstrating the effect of any changes made.

Lamtha2 can tailor their services to your requirements and are happy to quote for all or part of the services outlined in this paper. Please contact us with your requirements.