We’re all very excited. Loads of training, planning and sock buying has been done over the last few months. Now it’s time to get it done.

As always… I’m going to relate this experience to going through the mammoth task we all have have when it comes to marketing a business online.

Have a goal

Our goal for this climb is to complete three mountains in Scotland, England and Wales in just 24 hours.

What’s yours online marketing goal? Is it to double the amount of leads you get from your website in the next six months? Is it to sell 50 products a week?

I’ll be honest, many business owners I meet aren’t that clear on what their goals are with online marketing. I find they’re often just copying what they see other people in their industry doing. If XYZ competitor is has a site saying that they have the best widget, it’s likely they’ll have something similar.

Have a goal. Make it plain.

The first bit is the steepest.

Once you get going with implementing your online marketing, there’s a great temptation to quickly think “this isn’t working as I expected”. I’m not any further up Google. I can’t think about anything to blog about. Our PPC money has run out quick…

You just need to know that starting out is the hardest part.

You know the goal, but you’re no where near it… but this is no time to give up or switch plan.

One foot in front of the other.

This is the time you need to do as the mountain walkers do and put one front of another.

90% of marketing strategies work because someone was willing to stick with it. It takes time to create great content online and even more time to gain people’s trust with your messages. But when you do, that’s when you start to make the sales.

There’s not many people up the mountain at 7am in the morning.

Some of my training for this challenge has been at times of the morning when there’s not a soul around.

Sometimes, the bigger the goal, the less people there are going for it. This can be a great thing in terms of marketing, but also a bit lonely. So make sure you build a team.

Who’s on your team?

There will be eight of us on this challenge, including a driver. We’re all at different fitness levels, but what i’ve found is that different people have different skills and perspectives.

Some have done it before so they bring experience. Some know about nutrition and training so they helped us prepare. Some … well, you get the idea.

Who do you have to make sure your business is keeping up online. You’ll probably be on the lookout for a designer, programmer, photographer, copywriter, social media person, strategist, ad buyer. The list goes on. If you try and do it yourself, you’ll be exhausted.

It’s easier downhill.

If you stick to a solid strategy, with the right people and the right determination, your marketing efforts will start to escalate. You’ll find your sales and leads increasing with less effort than it took at the start.

I’ll give you an example. When we first started out, I made it part of my marketing activities to contact directors online through LinkedIn of companies that I thought we could align with for referrals. This took a lot of effort at the time, but now it’s paying off with people referring clients to us. Even people I initially connected with three years ago are now calling us for the first time.

… and enjoy it, while you’re at it.

I’m not just looking forward to completing the challenge, i’m excited about the whole thing being a great adventure.

Ideally, that’s how you need to think about what you’re embarking on online. You’ll be learning new things, making mistakes and growing your business all at the same time.

Oh… and if I forgot to ask.. here’s where you can sponsor me… http://www.justgiving.com/chrisgreenandco

(icons on illustration from pyconic.com )

The post The Internet Marketing Mountain appeared first on Calloway Green.

This one is much different, here’s why…

The ‘Penguin’ group of updates was meant to tackle ‘over-optimisation’, that is, people who go out of their way to optimise a page or the links to that page in an unnatural way. For example, it’s long been known that linking to a page about blue cars with the anchor text “Blue cars” will heighten the relevancy of that page in the search engines. It’s like saying “here’s a page about blue cars and it should be found for ‘blue cars’”. Thing is, if you look at some of the links going to the blue car site, you’d see that lots of them had this anchor text in there. This is obviously unnatural because not everyone knows about anchor text and it’s pretty unlikely that everyone would be adding this particular link.

It was fair to say that if 40% of the links to the page has “blue cars” in the anchor text, the owner was responsible. So, Google took action.

They also took action against ‘easy links’, that is, links from sites where all you had to do was fill out a really quick form, or in some cases get a robot or automated tool to do it. Again, it’s likely the owner was doing this – those sites got a kicking.

This time the ‘over optimisation’ appears to be all about the on-page content and we’ve seen some patterns that stick out, here’s the skinny…

Relevant content

Let’s say you have a page that you want to rank for “Pink widgets” but all you had were some images, a video and not much text. We’ve seen plenty pages like this and in the past all you had to do was put some text in the title tag of the page. Job done. A good title tag with thin content always seemed to work OK, but not now. Now you have to make sure that the content on the page is solid, good stuff that will give people information, the information they would expect if they just found it.

Good images, plenty of explanatory text and links to relevant sites are what’s needed here.

We’ve seen sites take a tumble simply because their content is rubbish.

Keyword stuffed title tags

Again, this is a big problem where people try to get as many keywords as possible into their title tag and it looks messy and unnatural. It’s even worse if the page content doesn’t relate to the titles. Make sure your titles and content (including any headings) are relevant. This is by far the biggest issue we’ve seen but it’s an easy fix.

If you need to, create more pages for the keywords you want to be found for, don’t try to rank for all the keywords you want all on one page – no good can come of this.

External links

Don’t sell the links off your page, or if you do, make sure they’re ‘no-follow’. Some big companies have had nasty emails from Google telling them they’ve got paid-for links which is a big no-no. You could end up having your site removed from Google altogether if you get into this game.

Summary

All in all, this update isn’t as nasty as last year’s. It’s affected more searches, but it’s not effected them to the degree of the last one and website owners at least have more of a chance of fixing things this time. Simply look at your results and if they’ve changed you probably need to change some on-page content to make it all right. Certainly, I can’t see the need for much in the way of re-consideration requests this time.

Also, make sure you’re getting social with your SEO. Be there on the networks and communicate with people, use Facebook, Google+ and Twitter to get your message out. Google is definitely taking notice now of social signals.

Let us know if it’s affected your website.

The post Penguin 2.0 – Armageddon or just a disturbance in the matrix? appeared first on Calloway Green.

Open an account on Pinterest, go take some photos of your shop, upload them.

In the description, put a link to your shop’s website.

Link juice. Simple.

Someone told me it’s ‘no follow’!

Yeah, it is, but it’s still a valuable link.

Tomorrow I’ll discuss another tactic and then explain the concept of link funnels.

Now, the sun’s shining so go out.

The post Bored on a bank holiday? appeared first on Calloway Green.

When something becomes so popular that everyone’s using it, there’s a chance that some Internet scum-bag is going to want some of the good stuff so they’ll do their best to hack into some websites and see if they can highjack them.

There doesn’t seem to be a consensus on what the hackers were trying to do, but speculation is that they were trying to build a huge ‘botnet’ of sites that they own and which can then be used to attack other sites.

Either way, it’s bad and it can easily be stopped. In fact, all this attack did was try to log in to lots of WordPress accounts using the username “admin” and by trying loads of different passwords. Simple, especially when you realise that many people still use “password” as their password. Tsk.

How do I protect my WordPress site then?

There are a number of simple steps to take to make your installation a little more secure, although bear in mind that nothing is ever 100% protected simply due to the complex nature of software.

Step One – Username

Make sure your login isn’t ‘Admin’ and ‘password’. Yeah stupid but some people still do it. A lot of installs are still using the username of ‘Admin’ and while you’d think that would be safe, it’s still worth changing it.

If someone wants to log into your site and you’ve changed the username to something else, it means they have to find two unique bits of information with immediately makes the hacking job harder.

How to do it

• Log in as ‘admin’ and go to the ‘users’ section of WordPress
• Click on ‘Add User’
• Enter new user details, you’ll need to choose a different email address if you used your existing one as ‘Admin’.
• When you’ve added the user, log out
• Log in with the new user details
• Go to ‘Users’ again and delete the ‘admin’ login.

That’s it! You’re now more secure than you were five minutes ago.

Step Two – Password

So many people use the same password across all their sites which means if someone knows you or knows your details to one site they have access to all of them. So, choose a different password for each one, even better, make sure your password is totally random, not just some words made of your spouses name and your first dog.

The best passwords have lots of random characters, numbers, uppercase and all sorts of things in there making them pretty much impossible to guess, something like this : Rz5$xI&Inv

But how do you keep a note of them? You can’t easily write these sort of passwords down so we need to look at something to keep them for us, and my tool of choice is RoboForm (http://bit.ly/18ovsJH)

This allows you to store all your passwords in one place, even across multiple computers and browsers. When you visit a site that you’ve saved, you click ‘login’ and it does it for you, very neat and it means you can have a separate and totally unique and strong password for each site you visit, including your precious WordPress installs.

Step Three – Plugins

WordPress has about a gazillion ‘plugins’ available for it. These are little bits of code that allow you to add extra functionality to your website. They range from image galleries through to video players but the one I’m going to talk about here is ‘Login Security Solution’ (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/login-security-solution/)

This great little plugin will monitor access to your site and if it seems someone is having a lot of trouble logging in or is attempting to hack, it will slow down access until eventually not even giving them a login form. If they log in and it seems like it’s a breach, they’ll be immediately logged out and the account locked, forcing them to use the password reset utility.

This will stop the very type of attack that has blighted so many sites this past month and I suggest you install it straight away.

How to install it

• Head over to the ‘Plugins’ dashboard on your site and choose ‘Add New’
• Type “Login Security Solution” into the search box
• It’ll be the top result, click ‘Install’
• Relax a little bit

And that’s it!

Am I now secure then?

You’re fairly secure. There’s absolutely no-way to be 100% absolutely rock-hard iron-core secure so you should ideally take a lot of backups, too. I’ll talk about that in another post.

The post How to secure your WordPress site against hackers appeared first on Calloway Green.

Why different search types anyway?

When you’re doing a search, it’s unlikely that you’re going to search in the exact same way everyone else is. For example, let’s imagine you want to buy a waterproof watch and you did a search for ‘waterproof watch’. You’ll find some results and you might find the one you want, but if I were a company looking to get my website in front of you, I need to bear in mind that not everyone will do a search for just ‘waterproof watch’. Someone else might search for “cheap waterproof watch” or “casio waterproof watch” or even “casio watch that is waterproof”.

What I’ve just done there is given three different examples of a search string and Google categorises these differently in its keyword research tools. So, as a company looking to do a bit of research, I can take a look at the keyword tool and I get the option of seeing how many people are searching for a string based on these categories. Here they are:

Exact

“Waterproof watch” is an example of an exact match. If I pop this in the keyword tool then it tells me that on average 720 people type that exact phrase into Google. That’s the easy one.

Phrase

This is a bit different. Google tells me that people type in phrases containing these words, in this order 4,400 times. So that could include “cheap waterproof watch” or “waterproof watch for diving” and many more combinations. As long as the keywords appear in the right order, then it doesn’t matter what words are before or after, they will be counted. As you can see, this means there are many more searches.

Broad

Now the biggie. I’m told that there are over 18,000 searches for these same keywords but based on ‘broad’ search. What this means is that those words, in any order and in any search string are also being counted. It doesn’t end there though. With this type of search there could also be plurals and related word searches. So someone could search for ‘waterproof watches’ and that would be counted.

The effect on keyword research

This means that when doing your keyword research you need to be careful. If you’re only optimising for ‘waterproof watches’ then you’re potentially missing out on a lot of other searches and therefore sales. Luckily Google comes to the rescue and the very same tool that gave me these results also gives me a list of other keywords I should be looking at and the number of searches they get.

And, just because I could, I’ve gone and done a video. Why not eh?

The post Broad, exact, phrase – what’s that all about? appeared first on Calloway Green.

Well Facebook seems to be rolling out a change…

Now, don’t get me wrong – this is not recent news. As far back as November 2011 this little enhancement was mooted, but today is the first time I’ve seen it “in the wild” as it were so it appears it may start making an appearance outside of the US (or New Zealand, their adopted sandbox).

As you can see from the image, this is quite an innovation. Instead of simply being able to comment, you can now reply directly to the person who you would like to congratulate/take issue with/shower with abuse. No more will a conversation be disjointed and messy, instead they will be direct and hopefully the opening post will remain intact and meaningful.

Of course, this will bring with it a whole bunch of problems because it’s new and many people who have only ever chatted on Facebook will probably find it a bit annoying. However, over time, this could be a really welcome change that helps alleviate confusion and make for a much better social experience.

The post Nested replies in Facebook – ready yet? appeared first on Calloway Green.

So what does this mean?

Well Raven tools decided a few months ago that they were going to stop querying Google in this way and therefore wouldn’t be providing ranking information to clients any more. This is quite a big deal – many companies insist on this data and spend a lot of time analysing it to understand which keywords are ranking and how they can do better on the keywords that aren’t.

At the time the news was met with dismay by their clients and a collective intake of breath by other vendors. The expectation was that others would follow suit, however that hasn’t happened. It seems Raven are alone in their wish to bow to the all-powerful search engine and other companies carry on regardless. In fact, the irony isn’t lost on some commentators:

Laurence O’Toole – AnalyticsSEO

The words ‘Pot and kettle’ spring to mind.  Is there another company that crawls the web and scrapes more website content for commercial gain than Google?

Many people wonder what Google has to gain from this. Organic SEO is still a huge user of traffic, even given the encroachment of AdWords and Matt Cutts of Google (who everyone in the industry follows religiously) has admitted its here to stay.

Google has recently begun to limit the amount of searches that can be done from one computer (we’ve noticed it here), but it makes you wonder if maybe they’re leading towards providing their own paid-for or totally free ranking system? It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve taken an expensive and important tool and made it free for end users.

The post Why Google doesn’t want you to check your ranking appeared first on Calloway Green.

So if links can cause harm, how do we get good links?

Well here, dear reader, is your Friday fry-up of things to do to make sure Google loves you:

Social Media

It seems that social media is now having a huge effect on sites. If you have a website appear out of nowhere and suddenly get a gazillion links, that would look bad to Google. However if that site is also linked to a lot of social media activity then they’re probably a result of that.

Take away: Keep your eye on the social ball. Post updates to Facebook, Twitter and Google+

Good Information

Do you have good information on your site? Does it give stuff away for free? Do you answer everyone’s questions and help people?

Google wants you to bring information to the web that helps. Also, helping people leads to sales and happy customers – use this wisdom to give stuff away and you will be rewarded with love and rankings.

Take away: Have a great FAQ section and invite people to ask you questions. Answer them and stay active on your own site.

Syndicate

There are plenty of places where people are interested in your stuff. Instead of expecting them to all come to you, go to them. Seek out Facebook pages, websites and forums where people are discussing what you do and get involved. Speak to them, engage with them and help them. Every now and then you’ll be able to tell them what you do and where your website is. That’s an immediate great link.

Take away: Search for your product or service on Facebook and see who’s talking about it. Comment and take part.

These are natural ways to build links. Yes, it can take a while but that’s kinda the point.

The post More Google fear to come appeared first on Calloway Green.

What Google’s trying to stop is ‘over-optimisation’ and this roughly translates into ‘trying too hard to get un-natural links to a website’. For example, if you wanted to be found for the search term “rumulan face mask” then you’d try to get as many links to your site with that term in the text. Makes sense doesn’t it? Well it does, but you can do this the good way or the bad way.

The Bad Way

The bad way is to buy a ton of links off a site that sells them in bulk. Now, you know about ‘get rich quick’ schemes and you probably know that they’re all bunk but there are plenty of these on the Internet in the way of link building schemes. I mean, check this site out : http://www.sapelinks.com/. It’s safe at the time of writing, but y’know, make sure you’ve got your virus killer on.

Anyway, this company have been selling links for absolutely ages and people have been getting great rankings. So, when someone comes to us and says “Hey, these can get me loads of links for 50 quid, how come you’re so expensive” then we don’t really have an answer because y’know what, they work. For now.

The trouble with these sort of schemes is that they’re easy to detect. Google knows full well which links come from this network so they can very easily stop giving any kind of benefit to them. However, you know when I said “you can’t be in control of who links to you”?

Well here’s the thing, would you spend money on buying links to devalue a competitor’s site? I’m guessing Google think you wouldn’t so if they find a bunch of links from one place and that place charges for them, they’re going to make a pretty accurate guess that you bought them.

Links from SAPE appear to be being removed from the index and people are reporting sites are dropping quickly. The warning is very clear – if you find a place offering lots of links cheaply or rapid increases in rankings for very little outlay, it’s probably too good to be true.

SEO is unfortunately a very tiresome and expensive game, like any marketing. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t but don’t be tempted to use shortcuts, they could bite you.

The post Toxic Link Syndrome and the wrath of Google appeared first on Calloway Green.

However, there’s more to it than that.

Let’s remember that even in the business world and on business pages, this is still a social network. The idea is to break down barriers to communication, not raise them and so you have to be careful with how you handle yourself because you’re now dealing with potential customers.

Last weekend something happened to me that highlighted just how wrong someone can get it.

A page I follow asked a question. I answered. Now, the person running the page thought I was attempting to be ‘clever’ and decided to have a go back at me. I wasn’t trying to be ‘clever’, I’d actually answered with a perfectly good idea but he didn’t understand it and took umbrage. I retorted with “It’s a perfectly good idea” or thereabouts and his next answer was to threaten to ban me.

Now, I’m pretty thick skinned but this annoyed me. The first thing is, he misunderstood me. The second thing is, he decided to air his frustration on a public page in front of all his customers. If I were to visit the business page of someone and I found that person being anything other than completely cordial to someone I didn’t know, I wouldn’t deal with them. It doesn’t matter whether they’re right or wrong, the side you’re on is of no consequence.

Let’s imagine you were about to walk into a chip shop and a guy ran out looking puzzled followed by the chip shop owner chasing at him. Would you buy your battered cod from here or maybe walk on to the next place?

Facebook is full of arguments and spats over trivial things, but if you intend to have a rant at someone, do it as your personal account or in private, don’t take it on to the streets where you’re likely to be putting people off.

Social media is superb at getting your name out to people, but with a simple click of the ‘share’ button, your out-of-context rant could end up being seen by more people than you expected.

The post How not to use Facebook appeared first on Calloway Green.