We wrote last week about how it was absolutely critical for businesses to continue marketing during the economic downturn in order to keep their message out there in front of prospective customers. Well, exactly the same approach should be applied for website search engine optimisation (SEO).

SEO is about getting your weblink in front of people precisely when they’re looking for what you offer. Looking at it from such a brass tacks angle, it’s the ultimate form of web marketing and as such it really shouldn’t be optional for business anymore - it’s nothing less than essential.

Organic SEO is an incredibly rewarding process at the best of times, but the value of a regularly high-ranking position on a prominent keyword during a downturn cannot be underestimated. It’s as effective as any targeted marketing and it’s out there all of the time, 24/7, on the world’s most used medium.

To find out how you can take advantage of SEO during the downturn and beyond, get in touch.

“Click here” is one of the most enduring terms used online, and has been around from the start. In fact, searching for “click here” on Google brings in an incredible 1.3 billion results, demonstrating how ubiquitous the term has become. It’s the second-nature anchor text choice for a lot of web developers and search copywriters, although moving away from it is so easy - and beneficial.

While “click here” still has great relevance in email marketing for obvious reasons, you’re missing an ideal SEO opportunity if you continue to use it indiscriminately on websites. From both a user accessibility and search engine indexing perspective, the term isn’t exactly the most helpful. Thinking about the search engines, if an anchor text and tag uses some of the keywords relating to the page that it’s linking to, then it’s far easier to classify - boosting the relevancy to a given topic. What’s more, your real-world users will know instantly what they’re clicking on, so you’re enhancing their visit as well. “Click here” doesn’t offer any information whatsoever, other than the presence of a link.

It’s another example that usability and creating a positive web experience should always be at the forefront of your web development and copywriting.

So, try to come out of the “click here” safe zone and you’ll soon find that SEO benefits will follow.

Maile Ohye followed up her outbound links article on Google’s Webmaster Blog last week with a succinct explanation on the value of good quality incoming links, and the importance of a well thought-out strategy. It’s another good example of how Google is opening up about its processes, and it also backs up what we’ve said about inbound links for a while now.

Another thing we’ve said over and over on Green Notes is that there’s no secret with this anymore. The whole point of a search engine is to enhance the user’s experience, so if you’re doing something that goes against this then you’re likely to be damaging your SEO potential.

Google Webmaster Blog’s Maile Ohye posted a really useful article this week on the subject of outgoing links on your website. It answers some common questions and worries about adding links, and explains how they can provide a reputation-boosting effect to your site.

The importance of incoming links is well-documented, as are the various processes to follow when developing a link building strategy - but outbound links haven’t been so clear-cut, until now.

Ultimately, like everything else relating to SEO and websites, outbound link strategies revolve around providing the user with the best experience possible - and employing a healthy dose of plain old common sense.

Take a look - here.

There isn’t any single big secret about SEO - it’s largely a combination of clean up-to-date structural coding, good copy, strategised in-depth link building programmes and regularly refreshed content (all things we’re good at here at Greenmedia.) There are so many myths and misconceptions about what makes good SEO, some based on out-dated web practices, lots based on unethical methods and quite a few based on nothing more than bad guesswork and plain ignorance.

In this article we’re covering two topics that regularly crop up in SEO conversations - meta description tags and meta keyword tags. Neither is particularly important these days, but this doesn’t stop them being the invariable reference points for every amateur SEO expert out there. Perhaps it’s just because they sound a little bit technical… who knows?

Meta description tags

This is the copy that can appear on a search engine results page, and is literally just a description of what’s on the page that’s being referenced. The important thing to know regarding meta descriptions is that they don’t have any bearing whatsoever on your search engine ranking. None at all. Despite this, it’s still worth giving them some attention as they may well be the difference between a click-through and being ignored from a search results page. Write at least one definitive meta description for your website, and if your content is diverse enough then write them for individual pages. Just don’t expect that that they’ll boost your search ranking, they won’t.

Meta keyword tags

SEO would be a far easier practice if it was simply a case of filling up your webpages with meta keywords, but the general experience and usefulness of search engines would also go through the floor as everyone would be doing it - which is why it isn’t so simple now. Meta keyword tags are a legacy of what can be called, in web terms at least, the ‘old days’. Things have moved on. They’re essentially irrelevant now, and the major search engines don’t place any ranking priority on them whatsoever. Google and MSN ignore them completely in this regard. Yahoo and Ask do briefly consider what is in the tag, but they don’t prioritise it over the body content of the website and don’t use it at all for ranking.

Always keep in mind that you’re writing for human users and that the goal of the search engine is to maximise the user experience. The whole idea of a meta keyword tag - loading a line of code with words that the user can’t see - goes against this entirely.

We made our annual visit to the Online Marketing & Media Show this week at the Business Design Centre in London, to check out the latest developments in the world of SEO.

Dealing with our level of clientele it’s essential to stay ahead of the game in order to continually deliver the best results. At Greenmedia we invest a lot of development time into refining our SEO - it’s a constantly moving topic that’s always producing new opportunities - so the UK’s biggest industry gathering is naturally the best place to see the latest advancements on a national scale.

We spoke with some of the best people working in the industry today, and a fair few snake oil salesmen along the way. Seeing the latest and greatest SEO techniques in action and hearing explanations from global pioneers, we once again found that here at Greenmedia we’re at the forefront in terms of search potential. In fact, several of the ‘frontier’ search techniques that were discussed at the show were ideas that we’ve been using for some time to great effect. However, hearing fellow experts extolling the virtues of these methods justified where we’ve taken our SEO in the last year, and invigorated us for some exciting developments in the coming weeks and months.

Transparency is a crucial factor of SEO. If a company can’t - or won’t - tell you what they’re doing with your website then it’s entirely possible that they’re winging it or indulging in optimisation of the black hat variety, with neither being acceptable. With this in mind, it was great to hear SEO-guru GarytheScubaGuy openly delivering his top tips for 2008 at the show. Gary’s presentation has become one of the must-see talks at Online Marketing & Media, and it was once again a highlight.

All in all, this week’s show underlined that the world of search really is evolving faster than ever before, which means that if you (or your SEO provider) aren’t looking at the very latest techniques then you’re likely to be left behind.

The new websites for Beamish Wild haven’t taken long to get to the top of Google, hitting top spots for some prime keyterms in less than a week of going live - making the County Durham visitor attractions our latest SEO success stories.

With the official launch of the ropes activity and birds of prey conservation centres just weeks away, it was important to gain a foothold on search engines for what will become the most sought-after keyterms in the coming months. Both sites have achieved an immediately visible web presence and are already beating some established competitors on their main search terms.

We’re supporting our organic SEO work on the two sites with a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, boosting awareness of the Beamish Wild brand across relevant searches and ensuring a healthy level of launch period click-throughs.

See the organic SEO results for yourself:

ropes activity centre - 1st - 220,000 competitor results

highwire ropes - 1st - 138,000 competitor results

ropes activity - 1st - 458,000 competitor results

birds conservation centre - 5th - 2.8m competitor results

birds of prey conservation centre - 2nd - 1.17m competitor results

In a post on his blog last week, Udi Manber, VP of engineering at Google in charge of Search Quality, revealed that the company was ready to start opening up on information that was previously kept highly secret, in an attempt to clarify certain elements of how it works. This came as welcome news to SEO companies everywhere, but perhaps some are expecting too much and in doing so are losing sight of the fundamentals that have been available from the outset.

Google is famous for being extremely guarded on how its algorithms and ranking systems work. As Manber explains in his article, the company has ploughed one thousand “programmer years” into developing the processes, and that’s not something that any corporation is overly willing to open up to competitors and the public. While the protective stance is understandable, it has directly led to frenzied speculation that makes up a good proportion of the SEO market today. The internet is full of companies that spend their time - and their client’s budgets - trying to fathom the inner workings of the Google system in order to manipulate search results in their favour. There’s an entire team of technicians at Google who are solely responsible for identifying and stamping out these activities, but it still goes on to an enormous extent.

While it will undoubtedly be interesting to see exactly what Google reveals in the coming months, it’s worth bearing in mind that the most relevant SEO fact has been freely available from day one - and that is that user experience is the single most important issue. It was at the start, and it still is today. It’s likely to be the case as long as search exists in its current form. If the user experience is lacking in quality then people will drift towards alternative search methods, and that’s something that Google simply can’t allow to happen.

What does this all mean for your website and its own SEO? Well, always put the user first. Create an easily understandable layout and design. Write content for humans, not search engine robots. Clearly define titles and tags in a descriptive and straight-forward way. Link in and out with other relevant websites. In short, always remember that your website is meant for your users, so everything on there should work for them. When your users are happy, the search engines are happy, and Google’s revelations - whatever they turn out to be - aren’t likely to change this.

We’ve seen some extremely quick SEO results here at Greenmedia on our recently launched websites, but one of our latest client sites has exceeded them all - hitting the top spots almost immediately upon going live.

The Thorne & Derrick Cable Joints website was set live late on Friday 16th May, and is already topping searches on Google.co.uk. The site is beating competitors on a whole range of sought-after industry keywords, despite being live for just over four days. Most of the competitor websites have been established online for a number of years, making the results even more impressive.

With such outstanding results from the outset, we’re looking to continue maximising the SEO potential of the Cable Joints website in the coming weeks and months.

As with all Greenmedia-built websites SEO was a priority from the start of the project, an approach that has paid immediate dividends in this case.

Swiss Physio, the Tynemouth-based sports injury specialist physiotherapists, came to Greenmedia in April looking to improve the search engine optimisation of their website. While the site was looking the part and performing a fantastic service for its users, the company was aiming to rank higher on its most relevant service searches.

It’s less than a month since we carried out our initial SEO work on the website and we’re already seeing some great results. From a total of thirty agreed targeted keyterms we’ve achieved significant ranking improvements on twenty-one so far - with seventeen first page placements on Google.co.uk. As the SEO work is only just beginning we’re hopeful that we can improve these rankings even further in the near future.

See the results to date for yourself,

Pilates Tynemouth - 651,000 results

Sports injury Newcastle - 610,000 results

Physiotherapy Tynemouth - 252,000 results

Physiotherapy Newcastle - 435,000 results

Yoga Tynemouth - 508,000 results