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

Regularly refreshed content shows users (and search engines) that a website is current, up-to-date and worth visiting again - so it’s well worth the effort to write something new as often as you can. Updating a news page is a great way to do this, in support of the more permanent, long-term content on your website.

If you stick to a couple of simple rules, you’ll soon find that writing fresh content is a rewarding and straight-forward process.

Don’t stress about your ability. You don’t need to be a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist to write content. If you’ve got something worth saying and you can write to a basically grammatical standard, then you can do it. Like most things, the more you practice the easier it becomes.

Stay on topic. Take time to think about what you’re writing and why you’re writing it. While it may be tempting to use your website to tell the world about your latest pair of novelty socks or a funny-looking cloud you saw the other day, it isn’t a good idea as people simply aren’t interested. Why would they be? Worse still, irrelevant content will detract from your main focus and could end up driving users away. Take the search engine approach and give the users what they are looking for - which categorically isn’t a load of random nonsense that they’re not expecting.

We launched the Tuscany Restaurant website at the end of February, and were pleased to find some great search engine rankings already. The website is appearing as the first non-directory result on the first page of Google.com for the search “italian restaurant whitley bay”, and the first page of Google.co.uk for “tuscany restaurant” - great results considering the relevance of the keyterms, level of competition and the fact that the site has been live for less than two weeks.

Achieving results on Google can be a time-consuming process, and often depends on a massive number of variable factors. However, as Tuscany’s immediate results show, when a website has a clear topic, good coding standards and relevant copy, the process can be rapidly speeded up.

One of the most common ways in which web developers try to trick the search engine system is ‘keyword stuffing’. This rather crude technique involves the repetition of a keyword either in the website copy or somewhere on the page, in the hope that search engines will consider the use of the keyword to be proof of authority and give a high ranking in return. Keyword stuffed copy, as it is written for robots, never reads very well and sticks out like a sore thumb. It is basic, ugly and a nightmare for real world users. We’re amazed that it is still being used on some websites, and we continue to see it in action online. When websites use keyword stuffing they trample all over what should be the heart of the experience - good content.

 Google and the other major search engines are all about the user experience. It is the most important factor by some distance, because if a user can’t find what they’re looking for then the search engine isn’t doing its job, and most likely won’t be used again in a hurry - a scenario that the search engines simply can’t allow to happen too often.

 So, how do you please search engines and users at the same time? It’s easy - write better copy! Copy for websites is a specialist area, but it is one that can be successfully negotiated by following some very simple rules. Obviously the demands of your copy will vary massively between websites, but the following points will always be valid:

1. This is web, not print. Forget what you know about inverted pyramid articles, the 5 ‘W’s and the like - you’re not at school, you’re not writing for a newspaper and it’s not 1955, so why follow these old rules? Web users have their own set of demands. They usually have less time (and patience) to plough through a load of text, so keep it short and to the point. If you haven’t made yourself clear early on then you risk losing your reader. Think about it - it’s far easier to click an ‘X’ and close a browser window than it is to discard a newspaper that has been paid for.
2. Remember what you’re writing for. What works for one rarely works for all, so adapt your style accordingly when writing for different websites. Don’t blindly stick to what has been a successful approach in the past, be sure to make a considered decision based on what is specifically required in each and every case.
3. Keep it relevant. The search engine’s tireless demand to create the best user experience means that your copy must - and we mean must - be relevant. Every single word should be there for a reason. Don’t get side-tracked.
4. Keep it fresh. So now you’ve got great copy that has been recognised by search engines and you’re ranking well as a result. Brilliant. Job done? No, unfortunately it isn’t. Fresh content is what keeps users - and search engine spiders - coming back, so update regularly. A news section is ideal for this.

Greenmedia have been doing search engine optimisation (SEO) for a long time. Long enough to know what works, what doesn’t and what’s happening in the industry as it develops day by day. SEO can be tricky. It’s an unfortunate fact that the market is full of people who claim they can work wonders for your company on search engines, when in reality they don’t have any authentic SEO specialism whatsoever. At Greenmedia, we’re not into smoke-and-mirror SEO. Just tangible, results-driven search engine performance that creates a positive return on investment.

In short, if your SEO isn’t generating traffic and paying for itself over time, then it isn’t working. After all, SEO is simply another form of marketing and it should be judged on the same merits as your other promotional work, ie; ROI.

SEO misconceptions and the real world

Contrary to what has become popular belief, SEO isn’t just about appearing in a respectable position on Google and the other major search engines. Yes it is great to be top or on the 1^st page for a search, but you’re achieving very little if the keyword is so obscure that no-one ever actually enters it into Google. There’s no skill in getting ranked on these types of terms, and there’s certainly no business benefit. If you’re ranking top for “dogsshoes”, well done, but you’ve got a select audience of none – and you’ve paid for the privilege. The genuine benefit of SEO in the real world – something that our clients can vouch for – is getting high rankings on the keywords that people are actually searching for.

When you start getting results on these types of searches SEO becomes less of a vanity project and more of an accountable marketing technique with astonishing potential.

Check out a few of our recent client SEO results – all on popular keyterms - to see what we mean, or get in touch to find out what we can do for your business search engine performance.

Audi – “audi north east” : 2.5m competing pages

G2IS – “cashless payment” : 1.45m competing pages

Protocol Education - “supply teaching Newcastle” :1m competing pages

Peugeot - “peugeot 107 sunderland” :15,500 competing pages

Direct Ford – “direct ford” : 7.24m competing pages

Green Consumer Guide – “environmental news” : 248m competing pages
Technorati Profile

While we at Greenmedia are fully paid-up devotees of the ‘content is king’ school of SEO, we know that content makes up just part of a websites overall search rankings. One of the other big themes that we advocate, and really gets results, is link building. Link building should form a significant part of your SEO programme, and if you’re ignoring it then your search results will most likely be suffering – or at least not working to their fullest potential. So, what is link building? Link building – the process of getting your web address on other people’s websites – is roughly made up of four different approaches; 

• Buying links on directories – These can be as little as £30 per year, and many offer the chance to create a ‘profile’ style link containing your key USPs.
• Reciprocal links – Swapping links with like-minded people in your industry is a good way of getting your link out there. Be careful to avoid spammers offering these exchanges.
• Forums and blogs – Find an industry forum for your company and post a link. This can also stimulate debate on your products or services.
• Automated requests – Put a page on your site with instructions on how best to link to it.

 These four techniques are all as important as each other, and should be factored into your strategy ongoing. Once you’ve got a good level of links, keep going! The more the better, and the process becomes quicker and easier over time. 

Why is link building important? 

Two reasons; firstly, the more links you have out there, the more chance people have to end up on your website – meaning more visitors. Secondly, and most importantly, major search engines clock the amount of incoming links your website has, and if these links are relevant it means that your site has a good level of credibility in its field and must be worth looking at. Just the same way as good, relevant content creates the all-important good user experience, lots of relevant links suggest there’s something of value on your site with the same end-result.

Google responded to calls for more clarity on their quality guidelines this month by updating their explanations for web developers. While the guidelines themselves have stayed the same, this was a welcome move from Google in shedding light on what has become a recurrent thorny subject in the industry. Despite the many individual dos and don’ts of SEO, the basic premise of search engine success is a simple constant – build your website for real users, not search engines. One of the main issues in fulfilling this, if not the main issue, is content – more specifically, relevant content.

Greenmedia has always produced websites with the user experience in mind. We believe that if a site is difficult to use or presents any problems at all for those accessing it then it isn’t doing its job. As well as our all-encompassing SEO work, our services include content management systems (CMS) to help you keep your website fresh and up-to-date, and bespoke copywriting that is researched and created to appeal directly to your target audience. Both of these are expressly designed to boost your SEO performance in an organic way, focusing on keeping things relevant for users.