Small businesses are always asking me, “How do I get to number 1 in Google?”, invariably my reply is, “How much are you willing to spend?”, with a wry smile of course. I do have to remind myself that even now in today’s switched on world there are lots of businesses that still don’t understand how search works. And to be fair why should they, it’s not what they specialise in.

One of the ways to ensure favourable positions within Google or any other search engine is to focus on a niche or long tail term. For new business this would make good business sense full stop, not just for search. Get known for doing a core activity well, then you can expand your offering. For existing businesses this opportunity may not be available, but one niche that is available to nearly all small businesses is the local niche.

For example selling antiques is a wide market, selling a specific type of antiques, say art, is slightly more niche. But selling Antiques in Colchester is a good niche that doesn’t narrow your offering. Now I am applying this to antiques but it could just as easily work for a bakers, hairdressers, pub or  restaurant. Yes I also here you shouting, “This is only any good if anybody is searching for the phrase”, of course this groundwork and research has to be done. Expectation of search traffic on these terms should be kept within reason but being so simple to implement local is one niche you should definitely cover.

Google do things at times that really change the game. Not only can the competition not keep up but they find it hard to know in what direction to go. In a further bid to dominate search, and at the benefit of the end user as well, Google has launched it’s new search functionality “Instant”.

For an in depth explanation of instant please see the Google blog but I will provide a basic overview.

Now when you search on Google, in addition to predictive suggestions appearing as you type, Google starts to present search results in real time based on what you are typing. So, as you type the word Hotel, Google starts displaying results related to Hotmail when you get to “Hot”, then switches to hotel related results when you get to “hote”.

For the end user it means quick access to potentially accurate results.

For the web site owner it could mean your site will never appear in the search results ever again!

Okay, so that’s a bit dramatic, but going forward you need to think clearly about not only what key-phrases you wish to be found for, but what is seen in the results as they are typed in. Long tail phrases are particularly at risk.

An example here would be a product model number, these are great long tail terms for e-commerce stores to target. The customer is in buying mode, typically, as they know what model there after. It’s now down to availability, trust in the vendor and price. So as I type in “Sony Bravia BX300″ what happens? As I type the word “Sony”, as you would expect Sony web sites dominate the natural search, but John Lewis appears in paid search. As I get to “Br” the natural search is still dominated by Sony itself but Marks & Spencer and Amazon have now joined the paid ads. As I complete the word “Bravia” Littlewoods joins the paid ads and now other sites start to appear in the natural results.

In addition Google is suggesting the Bravia 3D, whoa! Customers may now consider their decision making, they’ve been presented with an alternate product choice and they haven’t even finished typing, the results reflect these choices also. So let’s pretend our customer sticks with it, the nearer I get to the end of the model number the faster the results change, valid competitors I wouldn’t have seen on the full term appear in the results for the partial term. In fact Google have been so efficient with their deployment of this technology I wonder whether an end user will ever get to type a full phrase into the search engine again?

The saving grace. Google Instant currently only works if you have a Google account, are logged in and are searching on the standard search page. Your first search in iGoogle or using a toolbar will not be affected by Instant, at the moment. And if you are not logged in or don’t have a Google account Instant won’t be seen either.

Google have done a fantastic job for the end user, in my view, and they have presented a great challenge to site owners and SEO experts alike.

After my last few posts on SEO I thought there was a piece missing and that was the how to from all of this. The part most have trouble with is gaining backlinks so I thought I would try to do a quick guide to gaining quality back-links for your web site.

Search engine positions are largely driven by backlinks. Having a site that is search engine friendly helps and I would suggest that any business give thought to why they shouldn’t be using WordPress. Google will determine the quality of a site largely by the number and quality of links to it, from other websites. Sounds good so far.

So I can just go out and pay people to put links to my site from their site or offer to exchange links? Well that’s one solution but not a quality one. When working on gaining backlinks there really is no shortcut to hard work and time. You can of course employ someone, or an agency, to do this for you if you have the budget but with a little regular work you can do it yourself.

The first part to have in mind is that you must have content worth linking to, nobody is going to link to poor content. So once you have some decent content you can then start the linking process.For some of the examples I give you will also need quality content to place on 3rd party web sites.

There are a number of places that you can add links straight away without permission. Look for forums focussed on your speciality, join the forum, ensuring you read the forums terms of posting. In most forums you should be able to add a signature to your posts and within it a link to your website. If the forum allows this, ensure your link contains the key phrase you wish to rank for and links to the relevant page with the content on it. Then all you have to do, as an expert in your field, is answer peoples questions or join in the discussion on the forum on a regular basis. Do it naturally and add value, do not spam forums with lots of advertising you’ll get banned.

News sites also offer an opportunity for links. Every time you write a new piece of content for your site that is news worthy, not just selling something, you can add a link to it in sites like Digg, Reddit, Propeller, Sphinn, Stumbleupon or see this list for more social news sites. Again do this in moderation and do not spam the sites in question they will only ban you.

Article sites are another great way to gain links. You can write content on your field of interest and post them on article websites again with keyword rich links back to your site in the authors biography at the bottom of the article. Article sites have very strict rules and you should follow these carefully to ensure you’re articles are not removed. Here are some suggested article sites. The other benefit of article sites is that others can take your content and put it on their site with the stipulation that they maintain the links and attributions. Therefore with some well written articles you can build a network of links automatically.

Then come what are known as, web2.0 sites, these provide a convenient way to create links back to your site. These sites are regarded as high authority by Google therefore links from them carry some weight. Squidoo and Posterous are two such sites, very much like the article sites, the idea is to write unique content on these sites and link back to yours.

If you have announcements that are news worthy PR sites such as PRWeb can be another great way to gain links.

The same principle of spreading popular content and thereby growing links comes from the use of social media. Linking to your new articles and blog posts on Twitter can have a far reaching effect. But also if the item is relevant to others they may well link to it from their blog or reference it in their articles.

Commenting and guest posting on other related blogs also develops links, with comments you are unlikely to get keyword rich links but they will still help. With guest posts you can build not only links but also a reputation that can lead to referrals.

Linking is what the web was originally built on and it remains as important today as it was at the inception of the web. In addition, content is what we go on the web to digest. Quality content and quality links will feed each other to produce a site that cannot fail to rank highly in the search engines.

Book cover photo: Guided busway by eddiemcfish, on Flickr

I have read so many books, blogs and articles on search engine optimisation tips, tricks, advise and dos & don’ts over the years you start to wonder what to believe. Actually it is quite simple when broken down, there are only a few components to good SEO.

Although this is a basic list you can spend much time and go into greater depth on each item. That said there really is no need to and when you have an existing business many of the research and choices you need to make will be driven by business requirements anyway. Also a simple list doesn’t mean achieving good search engine position is easy, it still takes time, dedication and hard work to attain and maintain a decent ranking for a search term. So let’s get to that list:

1. Research: Is your keyword or phrase being searched for – no point in spending days, weeks or months trying to get a number 1 position only to find out nobody is searching for that phrase. To do this it’s relatively easy, go to Googles Keyword Tool, put in your chosen phrase and it will tell you how many searches are being performed in a month.
2. Competitors: Competition for a phrase could mean a lot of work. That doesn’t mean you should ignore the phrase, just be aware of the type of competition you face. Take your phrase wrap it in quotes and do a search in Google. This means searching for the exact phrase, see what the number of results are, over 100,000 and you are going to be doing some work to get number 1. Over 1 million results and it may take quite some time before you get any results. That said it is still possible.
3. Content: This is the key to search and engaging customers once they arrive. Ensure you have a page based around your key phrase, written naturally and with calls to action where necessary. Importantly, just write for the end user not the search engines.
4. Title: The page title, otherwise known as the HTML title tag, is one of the most important things to have correct. Ensure your key phrase is at the beginning or as close to the beginning of your page title as possible.
5. Backlinks: Now you have done all of the research and “on site” work required. It’s time to do the most time consuming but important job that will effect your search position. The amount of links your site has from other sites is one of the most important factors that Google uses to asses your site and it’s ranking for a particular phrase. But not all links are equal you need to ensure you have links from good quality and relevant sites. No point in getting links from directories on fly fishing when your site is about basketball. Take your time and acquire links from related sites, ensuring those links have your key phrase text in them.

Doing just these tasks will be enough to get you ranked well for your chosen phrase. Forget all the talk of keyword density, meta tags and page sculpting. Yes some of these can help but they have a minuscule effect when compared with the above factors.

A while ago I wrote about positioning in the search engines and demonstrated what effect different positions had on traffic to a web site. Just this week I came across an anomaly in my results for one of the sites I run. For two very competitive phrases we had been working hard to gain position in the search engines. The idea was based on generating volume rather than targeted traffic.

Now normally you should focus on niche phrases, which makes your job easier when it comes to position and the result more accurate and targeted for customers when they click through to visit the site. But sometimes you do just need to increase traffic to your web site.

You could just buy ads through Google Adwords but this can be expensive as well as resource intensive to maintain. A much more cost effective route to gaining large traffic volumes is to attain position for some highly searched key terms, usually!

After spending many months trying to achieve just this for these particular phrases we are now second only to Wikipedia in the search results on both phrases. With competition in the region of 63 million results on one and 30 million on the other and over 500k searches being performed per month on these phrases.

When I tracked the figures with Googles Webmaster Tools I could clearly see that the web site was getting a large number of impressions from the search results on these phrases. But to my surprise it was not getting any traffic from them!

Looking closer at the results it was easy to see why, the resulting page and title that Google was displaying in the search results was not very attractive. It did not entice people to click on the link and therefore we were seeing no benefit of that position.

So more work to be done on that front and I take back what I said previously, for now. There’s a bit more to it than just being number 1!

Search Engine Optimisation and Social Media are now heavily entwined, success in either will rely heavily on your use of the other. Each discipline is now having a massive impact on the other. It’s not just about your Twitter conversation appearing in the real-time search results either.

As you will be aware one of the key aspects of Search Engine Optimisation is links, one of the things Twitter and Facebook are great at is linking. If something you tweet is popular and it contains a link back to your web site it is likely that link will find its way onto a 3rd party blog or web site building up your back links. Conversely if your web site performs well in natural search and you post a popular article it is likely that this will get tweeted or added to Facebook, again completing that circle of linking and popularity.

Therefore the key to getting this referral engine to work on autopilot for you is by ensuring you write about things that are remarkable and therefore linkable.

Photo by: http://www.flickr.com/photos/intherough/ // Creative Commons

A lot of importance is put on being number 1, coming first, being better than the rest. But does it really matter?

Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats for example came 3rd in the UK General Election, and look at the power they’re are now wielding, or Susan Boyle from Britain’s Got Talent 2009 who is certainly not complaining. But when in the world of “Search” coming second is a different matter!

I’ve just been going through Googles Webmaster tools, a mine of information about your site, which supplements Google Analytics. Specifically what you can now see in Webmaster Tools is the quantity of impressions your keywords or phrases get in the Google search results and the number of clicks they produce. You can also drill down to see how many clicks you get dependant on your position in the search results.

Clicks by position - click for larger view

What you can see from the results is a stark contrast between appearing first or appearing second in Google. If you click on the image for a larger view you’ll see that in both first and second position for this search term my result appeared 590 times. For position one I got 320 clicks but when my result appeared second I only got 73 clicks.

Now lets put that into perspective, say I sold products and that the site had a conversion rate of 2%, click to sale, with an average spend of £50.

• Position 1 becomes worth £320
• Position 2 becomes worth £73

Therefore, being first in the search results can be worth over 4 times as much in terms of revenue with the right keywords or phrases.

LCD TV search results

As you are probably aware product reviews are a vital part of any e-commerce store, providing useful feedback both for your company and other consumers along with validation of your brand. Reviews are now so popular with consumers that a whole industry has grown to provide review services. There are also countless blogs, online videos and web sites dedicated to reviewing products. So it is no wonder that Google now sees this content as relevant to search results.

Now Google have been displaying external product reviews within it’s search results for quite some time now, as show in the LCD TV search results image.
What’s new is that Google can now display the reviews from your own web site in the snippet text for your listing in the search results. Using their new Rich Snippets combined with correct coding on your web site you can now make your products stand out from the crowd in the search results. Of course all other SEO best practise applies to ensure you appear in the results to start with, but with the reviews displaying your links become even more clickable.

The Importance of Being Earnest review

Using something called microformats you can now add specific tags to parts of your web site that will allow Google to extract and display this information. If you want to start using these just pass the links to the technical details your web developers.

As well as reviews, Google can now pick up on and highlight event information and information on people from social networking web sites in the results. See Googles’ latest blog post for more details.

By the way you don’t have to be selling the products yourself to use the code to show the reviews and star ratings!

Google’s release of it’s real-time search functionality is being greeted with mixed emotion. Along with opportunity words of caution are being expressed.

Rae Hoffman of Outspoken Media highlights the opportunity not only for spam but also for the more unsavoury aspect of the web to rise to a promonent position, in his article “Google enables real time spam and more“.

Whilst this is undoubtedly true at present, I am sure Google will be onto these loopholes to ensure they deliver quality and relevant results, which is their business model.

Amongst the controversy lies opportunity, especially for the honest small or medium sized business. If you’re an SME  using Twitter to any extent or even writing a blog to promote your business, the front page of Google is now an open door. Best of all you can appear for multiple key terms for no more cost than the time it takes to send a tweet or write a blog post.

Let’s say you have an iPhone application to promote or you even sell iPhones. How much would it cost you for an Adword for the term iPhone? Or do you think you could beat Apple or O2 for search position in Google? Of course not, you would have to come up with some creative ways to attract traffic with a limited budget.

With real-time search a Tweet or Blog Post could see you appear just below Apple, and above Wikipedia, on the first page of results on Goolge.

As you can see in the above screenshot, highlighted in red – click for a larger image, the real-time results appear in the middle of the page.

Okay so your traffic is not that targeted and you only appear for a few seconds but with some creative thinking you could ensure your business maximises on this free advertising opportunity. See Google’s Blog for more information on Real-Time Search.