Google’s Toolbar PageRank (PR) has a mixed reputation amongst SEOs. Some say that it is deliberately misleading, as it has no relation the PageRank algorithm that determines listings. Others however, find a use for it. Here at the FirstFound Blog, we’ve found that it can be useful in identifying sites to request links from.

PageRank – The Theory

As numerous search engine bloggers, SEO experts and people with common sense have discovered, links in to your site from high PR sites carry more weight with the search engines than links from low PR sites.

Although toolbar PR isn’t always an accurate reflection of a site’s real PR, it does have it’s uses as a rough indicator. That means that you can use it to priioritise a list of likely links, to make better use of time spent on building links.

Using Toolbar PR as a Link Building Tool

Step 1: Identifying Sites

When identifying sites to get links from, bear the following in mind: You want relevant sites. Industry blogs, niche directories, suppliers – these are the sorts of sites that will carry weight with Google. If you’re a garage in Farnborough, a link from a restaurant on the Isle of Skye isn’t going to score highly on relevancy. Keep links local, or in your niche. You also need more links from unique domains, rather than dozens of links from the same domain – being featured in a site’s sidebar links is always subject to diminishing returns!

Step 2: Prioritising Sites

Use the toolbar Page Rank tool, rank your sites in order of PR, from highest to lowest. Then, start to target the highest ranking sites first. Don’t disregard anything with a low Page Rank though, as sometimes it isn’t 100% accurate. As a rule of thumb though, you should be focussing your efforts on any sites with a PR of 3 (the average) or higher.

Step 3: Requesting Links

Now it’s just a matter of getting the sites you’ve identified to link back to you. Google frowns upon paying for links, but you can offer a reciprocal link, or ask if you can write a guest post for a blog. Just remember that when you’re requesting a link, a personalised and friendly email goes down much better than anything starting “dear sir/madam”.

For more SEO advice, visit FirstFound on Facebook, or keep up to date with us on Twitter.

… make sure you test your website.

When was the last time that you gave your site a quick once over? If you’re like most website owners, it could be anything from a few hours to a few years.

If it’s been a few months, then you could be missing out on leads. Changes to your website, issues with your hosting company, or changes of email address can all render contact forms and email links useless.

So what are you waiting for? Load up your website, and put your contact methods through their paces. It could be the difference between being an online success, and failing to make any money through your website.

For more SEO, website and online marketing advice, follow FirstFound on Facebook and Twitter, or read this issue’s Optimise Magazine.

We know, we know. It’s July. The sun is shining. People are wandering the streets of Manchester topless (why?). Beer gardens are full.

Who’d be thinking of Christmas at a time like this?

Well, you should be for starters.

If you’re running an SEO campaign, you need to stop thinking about margheritas and start thinking about Eggnog. Why? Because November 29th is far too late to start changing your SEO to target those lucrative phrases. After all, people start their Christmas shopping in October!

SEO Christmas Timeline

July – Start considering the phrases you want to target
August – Make sure the site is set up to target those phrases
September – Fire off a few Christmas-shopping themed blogs and offers.
October/November – Christmas shopping season starts
December 25th – Turkey.

Photo Credit

The World Cup is trying to teach you something. You might not be able to hear it yet, over the drone of the Vuvuzelas and the muttering of Mick McCarthy, but it’s speaking to you.

Despite the sponsors, it’s not telling you to drink more cola, move your money to a particular bank or wear a certain pair of trainers.

And despite the players, it’s not telling you to swear at referees, roll around on the floor or spill a ball into your own net in a tragically comedic fashion.

No, what the World cup is really trying to make you understand is that success isn’t about one person striving out on their own. It’s about a team effort.

Whether you want to win the World Cup or succeed in the online marketplace, you’re going to need to put together a team. So let’s introduce you to the players at your disposal.

Goalkeeper – Search Engine Consultants

Without a good ‘keeper, you’re going to struggle to get out of the group stages, let alone win the final. Your goalie’s job is to keep you in the game, stop anything unexpected from causing you trouble and help you build from the back.

Sounds like your search engine consultants to us. They’ll be there to bring your SEO and AdWords into play, stop a sneaky breakaway from the search engine algorithms derailing your whole campaign, and generally to provide a safe pair of hands when you need them most. Just make sure you select a Gordon Banks or Dino Zoff. Robert Green need not apply.

Centre Backs – On Page SEO

Good centre backs are the solid foundations on which winning teams are built. Unflappable, dependable and consistent, they’re essential to any side. And if they can pop up with a goal or two from set pieces, so much the better.

Your on page SEO needs to be just as reliable. By consistently ranking on the search engine results pages, on page SEO provides a sustainable level of traffic – and just like a towering centre back rising to score at a corner, it will lead to a fair number of conversions too.

Fullbacks – AdWords

In the modern game, a fullback has to do it all. Remain steady in defence, and rampage forward in attack to create space. Versatility is the name of the game, and speed is needed to back that versatility up.

Fast and versatile? Sounds a lot like AdWords to us. When you need to keep it steady, your AdWords campaign can focus on your core areas. Then, in an instant, it can switch, probing forward to find spaces, trends and unexploited key phrases.

Holding Midfielders – Inbound Links

Possession. Holding territory.  Supporting the defence. You can’t win a World Cup without a holding midfielder, as Gennaro Gattuso can attest. By supporting the defence and neutralising the opponent’s advantages, the holding midfielder is the key to a team’s success.

And by supporting your on page SEO and giving you a competitive edge, inbound links are the key to your online success. Good quality inbound links fortify a website’s rankings, and building new links is a great way to gain ground on the competition. It might not be pretty, but it’s rewarding.

Wingers – Social Media

Always probing forward, looking to link up play and create openings and opportunities – the winger is the prime creative force for any football side. Nobody in the side reacts quicker, and the winger is always looking to turn a situation to his advantage.

In the modern game of online marketing, social media is your way of reacting quickly to unfolding events. It also helps you create openings for conversions by building up relationships, and by monitoring what potential customers want and need, it shows you a myriad of opportunities.

Strikers – Online Shop

Despite what Emile Heskey’s apologists will tell you, a striker has one job. Convert chances into goals. Simple.

Your online shop has one job. Convert visitors into customers. Simple. So make sure it can do its job, and then set up the rest of your side to create opportunities for your star striker to convert.

The Manager – You.

Football is a team game, but there’s still got to be someone to stand up and take responsibility. Someone to put the strategy together and make everyone on the team pull in the right direction. And the same is true of your online marketing strategy.

It’s your company on the line, so you need to be the one to take charge. Sure, you can rely on your goalkeeper to command the defence, but you need to give him clear instructions.

But if the pressure gets to you, remember one thing. Unlike the World Cup, there’s no chance of you being knocked out on penalties.

If your team needs a safe pair of hands at the back, call FirstFound now on 0161 909 3400. We’ll even coach your wingers for free with our handy Social Media Guide.

Webmasters around the world are still trying to get their heads around the announcement that Google is adding SSL encryption to its primary search engine. For the moment the new encrypted search engine is at https://www.google.com (Notice the extra “s”).

What does this mean? To put it as simply as possible it means that webmasters will not be able to track where you came from, what search term you used or even how you got to their site. To put it in even simpler terms, your analytics software running in the background will be as useful as “an asthmatic ant with a heavy bag of shopping”

At the moment this new encrypted search is still an optional beta, but Google have announced that they hope to expand the service.

I still have mixed feelings about this idea but one thing is for sure, Google are trying to once again prevent any 3rd party from seeing their data. Good or bad? Watch this space for updates on the new SSL search.

Image by Keith Bacongo (flickr)

Online marketing has acquired a bad reputation over the years, and it’s thanks to scam artists. For every professional company committed to ethical techniques and White Hat SEO, is a band of rogues just trying to make a quick buck. To try and help you distinguish the one from the other, the bloggers here at FirstFound have put together a Scam Guide. It’s by no means comprehensive, but it will help you avoid some of the more prevalent scams.

The FirstFound Scam Guide to Shady SEO

The Number One Scam – Guaranteed Rankings

The whole point of SEO is to get your business listed as high up on the search engines as possible, as that’s where your prospective customers are looking. It’s the goal every SEO company strives for.

But sometimes, it just isn’t possible. So any company that out and out guarantees you a page one listing is being economical with the truth. Either that or they’ve got a keyword lined up for you that nobody is searching for. Also be sceptical of anyone saying a “space has opened up on Page One” – that’s not how search engines work.

FirstFound’s Tip to Avoid the Guaranteed Listings Scam: Ask them what keyword they want to target, and then ask yourself if you can imagine anyone putting it in to Google. Also check that they’re talking about organic search, as with enough of your money, they can get to the top of the Pay Per Click listings.

The Too Much of a Good Thing Scam – Link Spamming

High quality, relevant, dofollow, one-way links are SEO gold dust. We’re not going to take issue with that. In fact, we wholeheartedly agree that a few good links are usually essential for SEO success. No, what we take exception at is the people who only remember the last part of that sentence. If someone tells you “links are SEO gold dust“, you need to dig deeper.

When you’re talking about thousands of low-quality backlinks from unsavoury sites, links are not gold dust. They’re potentially harmful. At worst they’ll get you blacklisted, at best they’ll waste you money. Either way, they’re not going to help your listings.

FirstFound’s Tip to Avoid the Link Spam Scam: Ask them where these links are coming from. If they can’t tell you, or mention astronomical numbers and no guarantee of quality, steer clear. You want to hear words like “relevant” and “good quality”.

The 2D Pyramid Scheme Scam – Triangular Linking Schemes

As we touched upon above, one-way links carry more weight with the search engines than reciprocal links. Cunning scam artists have found a way around this though. If you link your site to site B, site B will link to site C, and site C will then link back to you.

But if site B and C both need more links, then surely they won’t have any authority to pass back to you? The triangular linking scheme sounds good on the surface, but you can be sure the sites you link to and are linked back from won’t be of a good quality. They probably also won’t be relevant. And a relevant reciprocal link is generally better than an irrelevant one way link.

FirstFound’s Tip to Avoid theTriangular Linking Scam: Ask the SEO in question what the Page Rank of the two sites you’re linking up with is. Then compare it with your own. Chances are that you’ll all have a PR of 0-2, and will be passing very little authority round in a circle. Also ask for URLs and check out the sites yourself. On the off chance that they are relevant, email the owners yourself and save a few pounds!

The Your Site Isn’t Your Site Scam – Intellectual Property Rights

This applies more to web designers than SEOs, but it serves as an example as to why you should always read your contracts. Once you’ve paid for a domain name to be registered, paid for a site design, paid for the build and then paid for it all to go live, you’d think you now own a website. It’s a reasonable assumption.

However, some companies retain IPR on website designs, meaning that if you decide to leave them, or have work done elsewhere, they’ll turn your website off and redirect your domain name back to their site. Leaving you with no website, and considerably out of pocket.

FirstFound’s Tip to Avoid the Intellectual Property Rights Scam: Always, always, always read the small print. If it looks dodgy to you, make sure you at least buy your own domain name and hosting through a third party. That way if they do ever turn your site off, you’ll be in a position to have a new site built straight away, and you won’t lose any links or authority your domain has built up.

The My Mate Said Scam – We’ve Got an Insider

This is a particularly transparent scam, but one that seems to be used a lot. Sometimes an SEO will claim to have a “man on the inside” at Google or Yahoo, and have access to “secret knowledge and techniques”. Without wasting too much of your time, they don’t.

The Search Engine algorithms are changed almost daily by teams of dozens of engineers. The chances of one of those engineers knowing all the inner workings of the search engines may not be astronomical, but the chances of such a person selling that knowledge to SEOs is.

FirstFound’s Tip to Avoid the Insider Scam: Laugh. Laugh long and laugh loud. Then hang up.

We’re not here to name names, to comment on selling practises or to try and drum up business at the expense of our competition, just to provide you with honest advice on some of the more unscrupulous tactics and techniques the shadier quarters of the SEO industry employ. If you have any additions to the FirstFound Scam Guide, please leave a comment in the comments section below.

You’ve spent hundreds on having a designer create an eye-catching site that sticks in the memory. An expert copywriter has crafted copy that has your visitors drooling over the prospect of owning your products. A team of SEOs have done their job, and you’re top of the search engines for keywords that you know your target audience use.

And you haven’t had a single, solitary enquiry.

Why?

What’s gone wrong? Has your designer sold you a lame duck? Is your copywriter’s clever prose just all smoke and mirrors? Have your SEO team dropped the ball?

Or has something else not happened?

Have you made a mistake that’s rendered all their hard work and your investment almost useless?

Four Common Mistakes that Stop Your Website Generating Enquiries

In the excitement of making your online presence felt, it’s all too easy to miss something that on the face of it seems glaringly obvious. But don’t worry. You’re in good company. Hundreds of people have made the mistakes on this list, and there’s no shame in it. So long as you fix it!

Who’s Answering Your Phone?

This might seem obvious, and anyone with a full time call centre at their beckon call can skip this one, but who’s answering your phone?

If you’ve plastered your office number all over your website, people are going to call it. And when you spend all day out on site with your mobile for company, they’re going to get your answer phone.

And people hate answer phone messages. You might not think you want your mobile number on the Internet, but it could be just what you need to turn a click into a client.

Of course if you desperately need to have an answer phone, make sure it’s personalised, and make sure it picks up quickly. Nobody’s leaving a message for “Orange. Answer. Service. 0 – 7 – 7…” and nobody’s hanging round for six rings to give you money.

You Need to Know What?

When you asked for a contact form, your web developer wasn’t trying to make his life easier by suggesting you didn’t need nine separate fields. He was just pointing out that visitors to your website won’t submit an essay when they want to buy a product.

If you’re asking for more than a name, contact details and general enquiry, you’re asking for trouble. And it’ll still be a rare click that will stick around to give you any.

Zealotry Isn’t an Attractive Feature

Especially in a spam filter. Chances are that a large proportion of your online enquiries are going to come from the Internet. And the main way people communicate over the Internet is email. So far, so obvious. The issue comes when you think about who’s going to email you. People you don’t know. People with webmail addresses. People that your over-zealous Spam Filter might incorrectly label as Nigerian Royalty with amazing investment opportunities.

Do yourself a favour. Check your spam filter once in a while. You never know what could be lurking in there.

Search Quantity isn’t Everything

Yes, wedding bands gets more searches than wedding musicians. You know this because you’ve argued the point back and forth with your SEO until you thought you might have to introduce their skull to a snare drum. But you stood firm, got what you asked for, and you’re on page one for wedding bands in your town.

So why is your bounce rate so high? A quick image search will show you a few 24 carat, diamond encrusted reasons why. Sometimes a phrase gets more searches because it’s a synonym. And no matter how good your site, you’ll find it hard to sell three hours of guitar pop to someone who’s looking for a ring.

Of course, there are dozens of other reasons that your site might not be living up to its potential, so it won’t hurt to get a second opinion. For expert advice on SEO and online marketing, call FirstFound now on 0161 909 3411.

“SEO isn’t a matter of life and death. It’s much more important than that.”

Ok, that’s not exactly what Bill Shankly said, but that’s because he wasn’t an SEO. Optimising your website might not literally be a matter of life and death, but poor SEO can be fatal to your online aspirations.

If your website is underperforming, and you’re worried that your website might be suffering from potentially fatal flaws, then our rundown of these all-too-common website mistakes (and their solutions) could just save your internet marketing life.

Fatal Mistake #1: “So, what exactly is it that you do?”

Take a look at the copy on your homepage. I bet it’s just lovely. Telling your clients and the search engines that you’re an “innovative purveyor of bespoke manual earth relocation solutions for the agricultural or horticultural professional”. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it?

But do you think that your clients are looking for “manual earth relocation solutions”? No, no matter how innovatively you might be purveying them, your clients are still looking to buy a spade.

Lifesaving Tip #1: “Call a spade a spade”.

The search engines don’t know that when you say “bespoke manual earth relocation solution” you really mean spade. So when it comes for them to put together a search results page, they won’t group you in with the other spade sellers. And they definitely won’t put you in position one.

Fatal Mistake #2: “Spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam” “But I don’t like Spam!”

It’s all well and good mentioning your products a few times, but when every third word is the name of your main product, you’ve taken things a little too far. And going too far leads to problems.

First of all, your clients don’t like spam. If they’re confronted with paragraphs that are clogged by keywords, they’re not going to read it and think about buying. They’re going to read it and think about hitting that back button.

And second, search engines don’t like spam either. They’ll drop a spam-filled page quicker than you can quote a Monty Python sketch on the subject.

Lifesaving Tip #2: Organic produce will outsell canned pig snouts

Make your copy organic. Your clients and the search engines will expect to see your products in titles, so that it grabs their attention. They’ll expect to see you mention your products in your body text. They might even expect to see it in your footer – especially if that links through to a product page.

So give them what they expect. But make sure it sounds natural. Make sure it’s organic. Just like product placement in films, your clients should suddenly decide they want a Pepsi. But they shouldn’t have noticed the Pepsi cans liberally scattered across the set.

Fatal Mistake #3: No man is an island. So why is his website?

You’ve built that website. You’ve written it and you’ve released it out into the wild. To bob around happily on the high seas of the internet.

Alone, and ignored.

How exactly are people going to find it then?

Lifesaving Tip #3: “It’s called the web for a reason”

To quote a much wiser man than I:

“Links are what gives a website its power. They surround sites, penetrate sites and bind the internet together”

So make sure that those links are binding your sites to others. So that they can pass on authority and traffic – and so that they can point the search engine crawlers towards that technological marvel that you’ve created.

Fatal Mistake #4: “There’s no such thing as society”

Social Media’s just a flash in the pan, isn’t it?

I mean, Twitter is just full of celebrities and egotists telling you about endangered radio stations or their lunch plans, and Facebook is just the world’s most boring Massive Multiplayer Online Farming Game. Then you get to Bebo and Myspace. But let’s not even go there.

Wasting time wittering away at your “friends” on Twitterbook and Myface isn’t going to turn you into a dotcom millionaire, is it?

Well, wasting time on them isn’t. But neglecting them entirely might just end your dreams of a luxury yacht.

Lifesaving Tip #4: Get by with a little help from your friends

We’re not suggesting you fire up Farmville or hang on Stephen Fry’s every word, but intelligent use of Social Media can make a real difference. Twitter gives you access to data on what your target audience is interested in at that exact moment. FourSquare can be a real revenue generator for local businesses. Facebook is bigger than Jesus Google.

Put simply, Social Media can turn you a tidy profit if you use it as a tool.

So that’s our top four fatal mistakes, and hopefully after reading our lifesaving tips you won’t be making them any more. But we’re always interested to hear what our readers think.

If you want to share your absolute no-nos with us, or let us in on your secrets to success, leave a comment below.

When Andrew isn’t writing for the FirstFound Blog, he’s easily found on Twitter and LinkedIn. Or being a nerd. But you’d know that from all the pop culture references.

Google’s Official Webmaster Blog has finally confirmed what we’ve all suspected for a while: That they are taking note of how long your website takes to load, and using that as a ranking factor.

So what does this mean for you?

Well, firstly, that you need to streamline your site. If you’re still packing your pages with animations, rotating gifs and other 1990′s leftovers, then you’ll be doing yourself no favours when it comes to getting listed.

Make sure that all your pictures are as small as they can be (in terms of file size) – do you really need huge, high resolution pictures on every page?

Finally, don’t panic too much. There are hundreds of ranking factors that the search engines take into account, and page speed is just one of them. Yes, having a faster site will help, but you won’t necessarily need a digital Usain Bolt in order to claim that top spot.

See what other SEOs have to say about FirstFound, or check out the FirstFound LinkedIn profile.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the fastest moving industries I have ever been involved in, yet one core activity seems to consistently dominate – link building. Even though link building methods and trends change, the basic principle remains the same. How can you maximise the effectiveness of your link building campaign and future proof your link building strategies for 2010?

Obtaining Links from Highly Respected Pages

The key to effective link building depends on you being able to identify high ranking sites that might host a link to your site, whether they are business directories or other websites. Factors such as Google Page Rank will play a smaller role than in previous years, but still give a good indication as to Google’s opinion of the site. A small handful of good links from some very highly ranked and popular sites will always be more effective than hundreds of links from unpopular ones with no page rank.

Making the Most of Social Media

As social media plays a more central role to SEO, all those essential inbound links from your Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit and Stumble Upon accounts will start to carry more and more clout. Google often uses your article’s success with the native users of social sites when deciding how to rank it for the broader masses.  Clearly and article with 157 Diggs is going to have wider appeal and is likely to be more popular than one with 3. Google pays keen attention to these, making it important for you to get involved in social media in 2010.

Keeping Your Links Context Relevant

An often overlooked factor in any link building campaign is the relevance of your site to the linking one. Links that offer further information about a topic will not only conduct better traffic, but will have a greater impact on your SEO.  Keep your links within the same language as your site, and find reasons why people will benefit from your link.  For every product and service, there is usually a fan base, or enthusiast group waiting to be tapped in to. Are there any popular forums or discussion boards relevant to your products or services? Perhaps you might place an add in an online magazine for your industry? Sometimes the way to do this, is to post a comment and get involved.  Many free sites and comment systems allow you to include a signature, or a website URL in a profile or comment. ( Be sure to check the site terms and conditions, as different webmasters will place different rules around promoting sites! )

Maximising Your Naturally Generated Links from Good Content

A website with useful and informative content will naturally pick up inbound links that other users add. It is easy to convince yourself that this is down to others, and cannot easily be influenced from your site itself. But there are some simple rules that will help you maximise this area. All you really need to do is consider what you can offer people, which they cannot easily find elsewhere. As an expert in your industry, this might be anything from inside product information, industry news or practical tips about a product or service. If you can think of at least one type of person who would benefit from this knowledge, then write it! More content is always a good thing.

Be Aware of Creative or Hidden Link Building Opportunities

Often there are neat sites which you can obtain links from easily. Does your domain have an entry at www.aboutus.org? Have you a review on www.reviewcentre.com? There are also domain information and company information sites that are readily indexed by Google, and by taking five minutes to create an entry for your company or website, you will be generating some more informative, permanent back links that will improve the profile of your website.

In a nut shell, link building is almost a science in itself. You cannot go far wrong, provided you don’t add any links from spam websites, or websites of a different language.  By keeping mindful of where you might add links to your site – and never losing sight of the people who would benefit from this, you will maximising the effectiveness of each and every link added and contribute to the structure of the web itself.