Tag Archives: search ranking

Typing ‘Google’ into Google in an attempt to break the internet…

Posted by alanduncan1980 on

A classic sketch in the early days of Channel 4 sitcom The IT Crowd is that ‘IT’ Manager Jen believes that typing ‘Google’ into Google will break the internet. Of course it’s not true but it highlights how little people know about the power of Google and the internet. But that’s not the subject of this blog (despite the title. And this opening gambit).

However, it’s about Google. Avid readers of my blog will no doubt have read my blog from last week about Advertising and the Tube adverts for Creativeagencylondon.com. Like any good marketer I review the stats of anything I do online (for instance, I’ve noticed that I get more hits from LinkedIn during the day, Monday to Friday and from Facebook at any other time) and I was quite surprised to see that for this particular blog, I had received quite a lot of traffic from Google Search. Interesting. What could people possibly be searching for to find my blog? So, I Googled ‘Creativeagencylondon.com’ and to my surprise, discovered that my blog article is ranked 5. Wow! I’m actually pretty impressed that I’ve managed to get my blog ranked 5th on the Google search for a major tube advertising campaign.

Now, I’m not going to blow my own trumpet but I know and get SEO. I’ve managed to increase the ranking of every organisation that has asked me to help them improve their search ranking(actually, that sounds like blowing my own trumpet. I’m so so sorry). So, I know how to use (and avoid abuse) keywords in order to improve search rankings. Things to consider for improving search rankings is using the keywords of what you want to be known for, sprinkled liberally from your title, dropping down through your H1 to H5 text. You also need to use a combination of hashtags, tweets, likes and +’s on Google + in an attempt to improve your search ranking. 

Which leads me on to confession time. This blog is all just a cunning ruse. As I mentioned above, I’ve got previous of improving the search rankings of organisations by ensuring their keywords are correct, and I’ve dropped more than a hint of ‘Google’ across this posting to see if Google will fail to notice that I’ve attempted to increase traffic to my own blog by referencing ‘Google’ as often as a I can without being overly intrusive.

Will it work? Of course it won’t, but the dreamer in me is really hoping that I’m going to check my stats tomorrow and see myself ranked just underneath Google’s Wikipedia post. Let’s just wait and see…

Simple tips for improving SEO

Posted by alanduncan1980 on

Around a month ago, I was approached by the ArabTrust – the Dundee United Supporters Society, and second largest shareholder in Dundee United football club, to help them improve their search ranking.

A simple Google search at the time revealed that the ArabTrust’s home page was appearing on the 3rd or 4th page of search results for ‘Dundee United’. Not ideal! Personally, if I run a Google search, it’s highly likely that I’ll just give up if I haven’t found what I’m looking for by the end of the second page. So, it’s likely that the ArabTrust is missing out on a lot of visitors because their website is not optimised for Google.

So, I took a look at their website and a few things lept out at me immediately.

Firstly, they did not have the key word (s) ‘Dundee United’ in their document title. Secondly, they did not use ‘Dundee United’ in the headline H1 text. Thirdly, they did not use ‘Dundee United’ in the body text.

All three were easy to fix which made a difference in the short term, however, that place is not secure. There are other sites, both fan and media that will be referring to Dundee United on a regular basis, so it’s important that the ArabTrust keeps producing timely and relevant content that refers to the subject matter – which should be fairly easy seeing as it’s why they exist in the first place. To keep momentum going, links to marketing outposts (such as Twitter or Facebook, where the AT is very active) need to be directing users back to the website. It’s all well and good having lots of followers on social media, but you need to be driving your followers to your site to increase visitor numbers, which will help the site rankings. Additionally, creating content that holds your customer on your site, to increase length of time spent on the site, page views, shares etc, will help improve the ranking of your site.

Moving forward, we’ll also look at the metatags of the site to ensure that the search terms are positioned accordingly, and look in greater detail at competitors for the search term. 

So, what happened? Well, as I said at the start of this blog, the ArabTrust featured on the 3rd or 4th page of a Google search for ‘Dundee United’. Now? It’s not just first page but ranked 5th on the first page:

Image

Thanks to Christopher Bennison and the ArabTrust (www.arabtrust.co.uk) for letting me use them as an example.