Title Image

Blog

26/04/2012
In SEO

Google’s New Over-Optimisation Penalty Update

over-optimisation penaltyOver the past couple of days, Google have implemented some big changes to the way in which they rank webpages within the search engine result pages (SERP) and have started penalising ‘over-optimisation’. Google have said that this change is to promote the use of ‘white-hat’ optimisation practices, as opposed to ‘black-hat’ methods. This essentially means that they will be penalising anyone that is performing their SEO in an unethical way. What has happened, however, is that we have seen some dramatic shifts in the search rankings, and many websites have seen some harsh punishment for what could be seen as pretty legitimate SEO tactics.

Google stated in their recent blog post: “In the pursuit of higher rankings or traffic, a few sites use techniques that don’t benefit users, where the intent is to look for shortcuts or loopholes that would rank pages higher than they deserve to be to be ranked.“

What is Google Punishing?

Google is cracking down primarily on ‘webspam’. This can include keyword stuffing, abusive linking tactics, article spinning, and more. One of the other recent updates that Google made has affected a lot of the ‘black-hat’ linking networks and directories. These networks work in a way that you give a link to their site, and then they will reciprocate. This is then done maybe a couple of hundred times in order to increase the total links to the site. Not good. If you do have any links on these websites, make sure you contact them to get them removed as it will seriously affect your SEO.

Continue reading
25/04/2012
In SEO

Find the ROI of Gaining a Top Ranking Keyword

SEO ROI

As far as objectives go within an SEO campaign, getting your keyword to rank well in the search engine results is of paramount importance. By gaining the top position on the first page of Google for your chosen keyword, you are going to see an increase in organic web traffic, which could mean more potential sales leads in the process. What can be very hard though, is estimating exactly how much web traffic or leads you are going to get from any given keyword.

Each individual keyword that you use to drive organic search traffic through to your website is going to offer varied results. There are many different factors that can have an effect on this and what we will go through here is some quick ways to get a rough estimate of the kind of return you can get for each of your keywords.

Conversion Rate

Understanding your website’s conversion rate is essential toward being able to understand any return on investment that you are going to get from SEO. This is calculated by the total website visitors divided by the amount of enquiries/sales made through the website. A good conversion rate would be around 2-3%, whereas on average, you would expect around 1-1.5%. This isn’t to say that you cannot achieve more than that, and we have seen with some of our clients that double-figure conversion rates are most-definitely achievable.

Continue reading
12/04/2012
In SEO

Finding Potential Link Building Targets

Link building is arguably one of the hardest aspects of SEO and the level of success that is achieved from this can vary from website to website. As an SEO company, we have many different techniques that we can apply to increase this level of success for each of our clients. We are going to share a couple of these little techniques that can help you out with finding potential link building targets.

Link building itself is essentially the act of gaining backlinks to your website. There are, however, many different factors that come in to play that determine the quality of these links and how they will ultimately have an effect on your webpages within the search engine results pages.

Determining the Quality of a Linking Website

What you want to be doing when searching for a website that you could potentially gain a backlink from, is ask a few simple questions:

Question 1: Is the linking website relevant to my website?
Question 2: Does the linking website have enough credibility to positively affect my website?
Question 3: Could the linking website potentially have a detrimental effect on my website’s SEO?

Is the linking website relevant to my website?

You may be thinking that it doesn’t necessarily matter what relevance the linking domain has to your website, as long as it links back to you then that’s good, right? Not quite. When looking for more general link building targets such as online directories, finding a general business directory to submit your website’s link can be useful across many different types of websites. On the other hand, if you are looking to target specific areas of a website that is related in terms of content to your website, and more importantly to the anchor text of your link, then that link is going to be more powerful.

Continue reading
04/04/2012
In SEO

What is PageRank and How Can You Use PageRank in Your Link Building?

PageRank

As Wikipedia has probably already told you that PageRank was named after Larry Page, the co-founder of Google. It may also have told you that it is a ranking scale that takes into account the amount of inbound links that a webpage has, as well as the amount of outbound links there are coming from the webpage. From this, a webpage’s PageRank is determined. The PageRank equation can be expressed as shown below:

PageRank equation

This equation basically shows that when another webpage links back to the webpage in question (u), that page’s total PageRank is divided by the total number of outbound links on the page. This is then the amount of PageRank that is transferred over to page ‘u’ (often reffered to as ‘link juice’). The equation then gets the sum of all of the PageRank that is being transferred to page ‘u’ from the set of webpages that link to it (Bu). This then makes up the total PageRank for the webpage ‘u’.

Hopefully that hasn’t confused you too much because, in essence, it is a fairly simple idea, however; PageRank isn’t the ‘be all and end all’ of link building. Not only that but Google keeps these figures very closely hidden, so it is extremely hard to find out your exact PageRank. Google does, however, periodically post an inkling into what kind of PageRank a webpage as through the Google Toolbar PageRank (TBPR), which is ranked between 1 and 10 (10 being the best).

Continue reading
27/03/2012
In Social Media

How to Get Your Links to Display Correctly on Facebook

A common problem that you may have when you are posting external website links to your Facebook account is that the images are not being shown correctly on the post. This can be quite annoying for you and also very detrimental toward the click-through rate of your link. Another problem that you may have is that the information that displays about the link itself is appearing incorrect.

These problems can be solved through the use of a handy debugger tool that Facebook has developed. All you need to do is enter in the URL of the external website that you are having problems with and Facebook will display any problems that their crawler is having when reading the site’s meta data, etc.

social media birmingham

Continue reading
20/03/2012
In Wow Internet News

New Web Design, SEO and Social Media Project – Music Matters

HiFiWe are proud to say that we have developed and launched one of our favourite web design, SEO and social media projects to date. The client, Music Matters, are an AV company that represent some of the most well respected brands within the industry including, Bose, Bowers and Wilkins, Sonos and KEF.

When we started the project last year, the guys at Music Matters wanted to completely transform their online presence and offer a website to their customers that would be simple to use whilst putting across everything that their brand stands for. Together, we designed a site that provides extensive functionalities to the user with a simplistic and sleek design to match. We are all really happy with the end product here and will be excited to see what the Music Matters’ customers think of it.

Continue reading
07/03/2012
In Social Media

Building and Managing your new Facebook Timeline Page

Facebook have decided, in their divine wisdom, to change the way that Facebook fan pages are going to be displayed on the site. These changes will be mandatory and will take effect at the end of March, so redesigning your company Facebook page is something that needs to really be put to the top of the priority list.

The new changes have came about with the introduction of Facebook’s ‘timeline’. Here at Wow Internet, we are fans of the new changes as, in our opinion, the new layout offers more room for creativity and a chance to do something unique with your social media marketing. However, with any major change there are also going to be people who are not fans of the new designs, especially if you have just forked out a large sum of cash to have your Facebook page designed using the old standards! One other slight problem, which we are assuming it will be a short amount of time before Facebook fixes this, is that the new fan pages don’t automatically refresh once a user has clicked ‘Like’ which can cause the fan-gate designs to no longer function.

So how do you go about designing your new page then? Well, the first bit of design is the cover image (dimensions are shown below) and this will be the first thing that the user sees as they enter the page. As well as this is the profile image, which is a lot smaller than the cover image but it slightly overlays it.

Continue reading
Tap to Call