Definitions: Local SEO

Search Engine Optimisation for Local results is the process undertaken in aiming to obtain results for local search queries. This Search “Vertical” is not exclusively dominated by local businesses but also features companies with a local presence or reach appropriate enough to be considered local.

Searching using a local search modifier on Google often results in a map of the location appearing within the Search Results Page alongside results from Google Places, a service specifically designed to target the local search segment. A search following the format “service + location” would produce such a result.

Local SEO carries a different set of ranking criteria to other vertical search segments, including:

• User Generated Content including Reviews and Local Citations
• Microformatting of business addresses and contact details
• Physical locations of a company’s premises

Elements necessary to rank in SERPs for a local search are often additional to ranking factors required to obtain positions in other organic search result segments.

Each year David Mihm conducts a useful survey of industry professionals on Local Search Ranking Factors.

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BlueGreen provide Local SEO in Chester and UK areas.

Image Credit: Joost Ijmuiden

Digital Hosting Tips from Medway Digital

Medway Digital Hosting Tips

1. Your Host Up time Guarantees and Support

   You will want to find a hosting company that has a history of excellent customer service. Remember, every moment that your site is offline,
   you are losing out on money and potential visitors, readers and customers. Research any hosting company that you are interested in and
   check out its user reviews before making the purchase.

   Now days support policies are changing some what and you’ll need to read the hosts terms of service carefully. Since hardware infrastructure
   is becoming more resilient (fail overs, load balancing and high availability) on cloud computing, hardware support is becoming less frequent.

2. What is really offered for free?

   When looking at the specials, free offers and discounts, look very closely at a) the terms, b) the period over which they extend and most importantly
   c) what happens at the end of the “honey moon period”.

   Many people and small businesses get caught out by these “free offers” as they usually advertise heavy discounted prices if taken over 3 years. This would
   tie you into the same host for that period, even if there support and up time is not what it says on the tin leaving you with 2 options: 1. Transfer away
   and loose money already spent, or 2: Stay and hope they improve as a risk of loosing more business. Look for short terms deals with money back
   guarantees.

3. Hosting Control Panel

   Most people and small businesses are not techies when it comes to understanding the ins and outs of hosting, so having hosting with a
   control panel such as Plesk or cPanel will make your life easier. You can quickly add addon domains, create FTP accounts, setup your
   email accounts, read your email online, edit your website with the file manager and many other things with it.

4. Application or Software Considerations

   When you got to the real essence of your hosting, you’ll probably already have decide on which platform to host on, whether is on Windows
   or a flavour of Linux. You’ll also already have decided on the scripting platform to, such as Microsoft’s Active Server Pages or PHP. Many of the works free
   open source scripting applications (for the web) are built on PHP (aka Personal Home Page or later known as PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor).
   Ensure the host supports your chosen programming language or application.

5. Additional Services Available

   You need to think about services that the host could offer you (as reasonable prices) such as e-commerce integration, backup and resilliency, internet marketing
   and web site optimisation. These are only a few of the services you may need, but will help increase your awareness and portfolio on the net.

   .

   SAAS – is it available? What is SAAS? Sofware As A Service. This is a reasonably new service that many larger hosting companies offer. The service really manged hosting
   of open source applications such as wordpress, joomla, os-commerce and the like. SAAS is not for everyone, but does offer increased gaurentees
   for upgrades to the latest versions, security patches and more.

Definitions: Conversion Rate Optimisation

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is an activity of refining web marketing efforts. Once a campaign is in progress and has started to produce sales or leads there are often aspects of the campaign which can be altered to increase the number of leads or sales relatively easily.

Conversion Rate Optimisation simply refers to optimising, or increasing, the number of those who come to a website and convert. Examples of a conversion include a sale on an ecommerce website, the capture of an email address to be used in an email marketing campaign or having a prospect use the contact form to get in touch with a business.

There are many ways to increase the rate of conversion, including:

• Altering the messages used in advertisements
• A/B or Split-Testing ads or landing pages to see which is more successful
• Multivariate testing by altering aspects of the same landing page or media

Conversion Rate Optimisation is often mentioned when analysing web marketing campaigns at scale. However it is often a subconscious process which takes effect during the production of a first campaign, or  a conscious process for the experienced online marketer.

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Definitions: Link Acquisition

Links, “backlinks”, “in-links”, “followed links”, “acquired links” are all terms used frequently within search marketing circles. Links are a key aspect of search engine optimisation.

Link Acquisition is the process of gaining a link from another website to your own. There are a number of ways to achieve this, including:

• Hosting any kind of linkable asset, including linkbait, on a website
• Manually creating links from a website under your control
• Submitting your site to other sites which will link to you for free or in exchange for a fee or a reciprocal link
• Developing relationships with others who may offer you a link for free or in exchange for goods or services
• Buying links, although this is discouraged by search engines

Link Acquisition as a general term is often and perhaps more commonly referred to as ‘Link Building’.

Definitions: Pay per-click Marketing

Pay per-click Marketing is an advertising tool used by marketers to promote goods and services online using auction-based advertising platforms including Google AdWords and Facebook ads.

An advertiser bids for their advertisement to appear on a website for a given search keyword or to a specified demographic. The system in use determines whether to show the advertisement by judging criteria including:

1. The highest bidder
2. The suitability of the advertisement to the keyword or demographic
3. Restrictions on advertising behaviour determined by law or the policy of the advertising platform company

If an advertisement is approved and appears online users of that site will be able to see the advert content and click through to the advertiser’s website. The advertiser will be charged an amount similar to the amount they bid to show their advertisement using the Pay per-click platform if they are using Cost per-click bidding. Some advertising platforms allow for Cost per-impressions bidding where the advertiser will bid an amount to pay once their advertisement has appeared a number of times on a website.