It's not what we say! It's the actions we take and the results we achieve.

The following is the full narration of the video "SEO Case Study".

You know, talk is cheap, but actions, well actions, they speak louder than words!

I mean, around the Internet today, you hear a huge amount about search marketing, SEO and optimising websites so that you can win more traffic from, as an example Google.

There is a lot of talk! But very little found which truly illustrates ACTIONS or RESULTS!

So I thought we could look at search engine optimisation outputs, rather than just concentrating on what it is. In this way, you will understand how making some changes will dramatically improve your websites productiveness.

In this video, I’m going to show you how a small e-commerce website increased their website traffic from Google™ alone by 30% and grew their exposure and position in all search engines by a massive 50%, all in just 3 months.

Back in May 2009 For-Keeps.co.uk, a small on-line retailer of fashionable bags. Started down the route of optimising their website. They had 2 options;

1. The first was to subcontract an SEO specialist or
2. Learn the techniques and concepts themselves  

Cost was obviously an issue, but they wanted to develop the skills within their business, they felt that they could make better decisions about their Internet Marketing strategy now and in the months and years to come.

So they opted to follow the Understanding Search Engines tutorials. This is what happened!

After working through the tutorials and before they started the optimisation process they did 2 main things!

1. They picked out 25 keywords they wanted to be found in search engines for and;
2. They benchmarked their position in the major search engines for all of those keywords.

What they found was that they had;

• 2 top 3 positions
• 7 top 5 positions
• 9 top 10 positions
• 11 top 20 positions and finally
• 15 top 30 positions

Now this is a summary of all 25 keywords across Google, Yahoo™ and MSN™ (or what is now called Bing™ ).This isn’t so bad really; they had a total of 9 top 10 positions across the search engines, which means they would be found on the first page of these search engines for 9 of the keywords they selected.

OK, so now they run through the optimisation tasks they learnt and record their statistics again 3 months later in August.

What do the figures look like now? Well, they now have;

• 3 top 3 positions, which is an increase of 1
• 7 top 5 positions which hasn’t changed
• 13 top 10 positions is an increase of 4 
• 19 top 20 positions is a big increase of 8 and finally
• 23 top 30 positions which is also an increase of 8

Now these numbers may appear small but if we add all of these positions up and work out the difference we will have an indication of what their exposure increase has been.

They started, in May, with a total of 44 and in August it jumped to 65. This is an increase of 21 or 50.17% more search engine exposure!

So we have seen that they are found more frequently and higher in the major search engines. But has this also increased the number of visitors they get?

Here we can see that in May, they received a modest 323 visitors. In August, they received 396 visitors which is still quite reserved, but shows a 22.6% increase. Imagine if they continue to grow like this every 3 months. After 1 year, they would have more than doubled their traffic.

OK, again, that’s all very nice but how about website traffic from Google? Well, back in May, Google™ sent 152 visitors to the website compared to 199 in August, that’s a massive 30.92%.

Again, in May, Yahoo™ sent 11 visitors but in August that increased to 22, that’s a 100&perc; increase. There is no doubt that the number of visitors need to increase, but again, just taking Google™ as an example, if they continued to send 30% more traffic every 3 months, the website would receive almost 3 times the traffic from Google™ in just 1 year.

Now imagine how this growth could affect your website! But before we go, what do you feel about getting 30% or more new visitors from Google™ every month? Would it benefit YOUR business if you received over 20% more visitors per month? It’s easy, it’s affordable but most importantly, as we have show here, IT WORKS!

The Understanding Search Engines DVD, get it today and grow your website tomorrow!

Get more information on the Understanding Search Engines DVD by visiting our SEO Training website.

One of the things that frustrate Internet searchers immensely is being directed to a page which doesn't seam to have any relevance to the actual search they did.

In some cases the cause can be that the web page has changed but the search engine hasn't been updated yet. Spam used to be a big cause also, but search engines are becoming much wiser to pages that just throw in keywords without any real relevance. However the main cause is that the relevant content is just low down in the page.

As we know, people are impatient and only a couple of people in a hundred will take the time to hunt down the information they want. So Googles release of deep links will mean that a searcher will be taken not only to the relevant page but also to the relevant part of the page.

So, how do website editors actually support the new feature?

Well Google^TM is implementing the functionality through named anchors. A named anchor has the structure of; <a name="keyword_here" /> What Google will do is generate a link as a standard website address (URL) and append a hash instruction to the end e.g http://mysite.com/mypage.html#keyword_here. The users browser will then automatically scroll to the position of the named anchor.

So a few tips are;

1. To ensure that you include a named anchor next to each heading in your web pages.
2. Also consider adding named anchors to sections of your web pages which have clear and concise messages.
3. Name your anchors differently and uniquely throughout your page.
4. Although its not vital, try to use keyword rich names, but do not use spaces or any other characters other than hyphens and underscores.
5. Finally, try to include a table of contents ate the top of your page. The links in the table of contents should link directly to the named anchors.

At the forefront of a marketer’s mind is the exposure of one's products or services to an audience that is either interested already or is likely to be interested in them.

Ad Networks like Google™, Yahoo™ and MSN™ can facilitate both of these types of demographic. Those people that are on-line and have an interest already can be engaged through normal search marketing and those that are likely to have an interest can be touched through exposure on related websites.

Search marketing is where an advert is delivered to an Internet user actively searching for a particular product, service or topic. Many products are known by name or in some cases by a code or ID of some kind. This is specifically relevant with books ( ISBN codes), electrical equipment and branded goods such as iPod Nano™ and Ralph Lauren Polo Shirts. Services are a little less obvious but the principles remain the same, search terms used (called keywords) will relate to the service in question.

Ad Networks provide a service where adverts are positioned on related websites, in most cases there are 2 primary forms of this advertising.

The first relates again to keywords, when an Internet user visits a website within the Ad Network, which in this case is called a “Targeted Network” or “Context Advertising”, the web page is scanned by the Ad Network for related adverts. Hence, a website discussing “Health care for pets” may display adverts related to pet insurance, pet food and other pet products.

The second is related to vendor requests, this is when the advertiser is more targeted to particular websites and can cherry-pick the sites, and in some cases, pages and locations on page where they want their advert to be displayed. In these cases the cost of showing the adverts is a little higher and charges for click throughs' are almost always levied.

Within most of these networks, marketers can also refine their demographics further based on age, sex, location, days of the week, time of day and technology being used e.g. PC or Mac based browsers, Phones and PDA’s.

When planning an Ad Networks campaign, the first question is what kind of campaign is being run. Is the marketer looking for immediate sales or is it a lower impact branding exercise?

The next consideration, and this is important, when dealing with paid search marketing and context advertising, is Profit-Per-Click. Unlike the terms pay-per-click or cost-per-click, profit-per-click is when you work back wards from what a sale is worth and apply it to your click through and conversion rates.

If your on-line marketing consultant or SEM provider is not discussing your products or services profitability, they are not doing their jobs!

Profit-Per-Click is the best model to ensure that your spend will generate profitable results. It works as follows:

Say your product sells for £1,000 and has a gross profit of £400.00. Now, to start with, we need to apply an average of click through rates. This can be anything between 1% and 5%, less than 1 is simply not good enough and your advert or keywords are wrong or your competition is over paying. More than 5% is unlikely so keep it within this range.

Now we have to guess a typical conversion rate, that is paid visitors that end up buying our product. Again a good range at this stage is 0.5% to 3%. Conversions below 0.5% are likely with very high value products/services or where competition is showing much lower prices. Conversions above 3% certainly do happen, but again, this is the best starting range.

We now just need to create a matrix to show our profitable levels and therefore maximum costs per click.

This table shows that we would require 200 paid visitors at £2.00 per click to break even at 0.5% conversion, whereas we would just need 34 visitors at a whopping £11.76 per click if our conversion rate was 3%.

The lower click through cost don’t give us much room to make any money, where as the higher conversion rate gives us plenty of breathing space.

Your SEM Company or consultancy should be discussing conversions with you and keep you abreast of ways to optimise your campaign and website to create better and higher conversion rates.

They should be discussing demographics with you to try and refine advert placement and views.

Finally your supplier should be looking at both keywords and potential target sites. The keywords are important to understand the frequency they are used and the competition chasing those words and phrases. The target sites should be scrutinised from a number of new and returning visitors perspective and look for placement targeting rather than site wide adverts.

Find out more about keyword research, link partners and website associations with the Understanding Search Engines DVD.

Are you getting the most out of Linked-In?

Many people in business have a Linked-In profile nowadays but many are not getting the most out of the service!

Some people see Linked-In as just another website where they can promote themselves or their companies. Well this is certainly the case but it also comes with features that are not only passive but proactive in lead generation.

The real value of Linked-In is your connections and the 2nd and 3rd removed connections. i.e. You connect to your business contacts that connect to others who connect to yet more people. This is called your “Network of Trusted Professionals” whom you are able to connect with either directly or through introductions.

As an example, if you have 50 direct connections this could translate to around 500,000 trusted professionals that you can leverage through introductions. (These figures are for illustration only)

Getting in contact

Lets say that you are looking to partner with a company on a particular project or are interested in connecting with a particular business sector. Linked-In provides you with a search function which allows you to find people based on criteria you provide.

From the results you have 2 options;
1. Be introduced to these people through an existing connection of yours or
2. Send an In-Mail^TM

Introductions are free to all users and can be quite effective especially if you are trusted and well-known by the individual who’s introducing you.

In-Mail^TM don’t require any intervention by your connections and can be sent to any Linked-In member that allows In-Mail^TM messages. However, this service is charged for but comes with a guarantee of response. E.g. If you don’t get a response from the member within 7 days of sending your message, Linked-In credits your account with an In-Mail^TM message. The chaps at Linked-In say that In-Mails^TM are charged for because they help reduce SPAM and therefore In-Mails^TM are normally considered by recipients of them as more of an opportunity than just junk.

Building your profile

Linked-In is a significant website, that is to say that it is trusted by major search engines. If you are a member of Linked-In and you search for yourself in Google, your Linked-In profile is very likely to be found. Likewise the information you have loaded into your profile will be associated with your profile page and if your profile links to your own website you could be adding value to your website as a result.

Your profiles completeness is recorded in the bottom left hand corner of your Linked-In home page, try to get this as high as possible by completing as many sections as you can.

Get Recommended

Recommendations are great tools in assisting your sales process and Linked-In provides you with the ability to ask for recommendations and approve those recommendations before they are published on your profile.

Once you have some recommendations on your account you can direct prospects to your profile and show them that these recommendations have come from real customers and business partners and show more credibility in your company.

Answer Questions

Linked-In provides a facility for any member to ask questions. Other members can then answer these questions and be scored by the answers they give. If you provide the best answer, the person that raised the question will normally flag you as the expert and this will be displayed on your profile.

Answering questions adds value in two ways;

1) Questions and answers are picked up in search engines such as Google and will be displayed to Internet users that are asking the same questions.
2) If you get flagged as giving the “Best Answer” you will be considered an expert in that field and again this can be used to add further credibility to your profile.

General points for social networking

Generally networking websites are great for distributing your message and getting in-front of a wider audience. Some are more effective than others and we feel that Linked-In is one to interact with at least once a day.

Others such as Facebook, Twitter, StubmleUpon and Digg (to name just a few) are also useful but are less business focused but can be used to increase the traffic to your website and in some cases improve your websites visibility in search engines.

So Twitter is all the rage! its in the news, on the web wherever you are and is now on your phone along with other PDA devices. Wow, what growth!

Many companies are now using Twitter to engage and connect with their customers and prospective customers. Its a great tool, not to sell with but to introduce with! What I mean by this is that it allows your business to start a narrative, a conversation, with your customers and potential customers. Many businesses use it for feedback, others for alerts and notifications. Some also use it for plain old, down your throat marketing.

We are going to extend our discussions on Twitter over the coming weeks and months, for now, we just want to share a few things with you.

Firstly, why not follow us so that we can keep you updated on our news. Our profile is http://twitter.com/BeginInterMktg 

Next, and this is really cool, you should take a look at TweetAdder its a really cool Twitter automation tool which allows you to schedule things like Tweets, Follows, UnFollows, Messages and a whole lot more. Even if you don't like the look of it, you should visit the Tutorials page and watch the first video at the bottom of the page. Note, there are 2 sets of videos on the page, watch the second lot. The guys have used a computerised voice, we just cracked up! Hey TweetAdder guys, why not voice over? Great product, really nasty voice over though :o)

24 is a great show! You just get hooked into Jack Bauers' hellish existence, a day-in-the-life of an all American super hero.

The season just gone (24 Day 7) brought with it a new president, Mrs Allison Taylor. At first, I was sceptical, we haven't seen a president as cool as David Palmer, played by Dennis Haysbert since the first few seasons. I wouldn't say Allison (Cherry Jones) was cool, but she was all good and although her decisions were tough, they are never easy in 24, she did the right thing in the end.

Hey, Cherry, well done on your award, day 8 is looming... Is Alison gonna play the part again I wonder?

p.s. I cannot for the life of me remember why I recognised her from many years ago. Did she used to be in a really popular show years ago. I seam to remember her as a child or perhaps a teenager. Any ideas anyone?

The technique of optimising a website so that it's found in search engines and, more importantly as high up as possible in search engines has been the dark secret of those that hold the key to the art form!

However, search engine optimisation (SEO for short) is only knowledge of what's involved. Ultimately, a website owner simply needs to know the processes and have an idea of what to do and when to do it. Furthermore, many business owners look to outsource many activities like SEO nowadays, but they certainly do this at their peril if they don't know what needs to be done and have an idea of how to track the effectiveness of what is being done.

The fact is that you can make a few, very simple changes, and see dramatic changes in your websites effectiveness in search engines such as Google^TM, Yahoo^TM, Bing^TM and Ask^TM.

Sure, after you have got the basics in place, it may well be time to pull in a specialist but to start with, you really need to bring your understanding up to speed and get the basics in place. Watch our introduction video and perhaps have a look around the contents of the Understanding Search Engines DVD features.

The DVD has been designed for both business and website owners as it covers both concepts and tactics which are ideal for management along with core hands on tools and techniques to be applied and used by website editors and administrators.

So, the blog is up and running!

We have our designers coming up with some ideas and we are looking at developing some widgets also. We did have a bit of a, well, aggravating time today. Mainly this was down to installation and the fact we forgot all about .NET as a whole. I guess this happened because we were installing a pre-built application and didn't think about this stuff. Anyway, to get to the point, here is a few gotchas to keep in mind.

Don't forget who's running your new Blog site!

If your hosting your new blog with a shared hosting provider, you must ensure that your App_Data folder has Read/Write permissions set to it. This will ensure that you can add posts, change settings etc.

If, like us, you are running on dedicated machines, you need to look at your application pool under IIS 6/7 and check the Identity of the process running the website. To do this follow these steps;

1. Open the properties of your new blog website by right clicking the website icon and selecting properties;
2. Select the Home Directory tab and make a note of the Application Pool at the bottom of this window. Click Cancel to dismiss the website properties;
3. Expand the Application Pools folder and right click the pool you previously noted;
4. Select the Identity tab. In here it will display the security account which is running your new blog.

Once you have the account which is running the application pool, you need to grant this user Read/Write permissions on the App_Data folder. The BlogEngine.net website discusses adding permissions to the ASPNET user which is correct for your development machine or localhost, however in IIS 6/7 this is unlikely to be the case.

Let me know if you need any further help on this.

Hey, .NET 1.1 don't get so upset!

So we have copied our blog to the server and setup a bog standard website in IIS 6. Then, hold on! everything stopped working! Hey BlogEngine.Net, thats not fair, whats going on?

Then we remembered, we have .NET 1.1 applications running and we setup the new website in the same application pool. The key thing here to remember is to setup your new website along with a dedicated application pool if you have multiple applications running. Then again, it doesn't need to be dedicated, it can be shared across applications as long as they are running the same version of .NET. Make sense?

Here's a few links that may help also on these issues and more.

• Complete Installation Video for BlogEngine.net
• Installation Query in Discussions

Have fun, its a great solution, well done chaps! 

Its taken a little while, but we now think it has life. Yep, it breaths!

We want to give our clients and followers an interesting experience when they visit our realm. We hope that this blog fits well in the scheme of things.

So what can you expect from our new weblog?

Well, we intend to keep our posts up to date quite regularly and rather than just post boring stuff about how you can improve your websites visibility across the Internet using our training material. (Hold on, is that boring?) We are also going to be touching on some current affairs and some entertainment themes, after all, we would like to keep you interested!

We hope you and enjoy, and don't forget to post any comments, questions or ideas of your own.