There are many people out there who have been into internet marketing for years, many who make some money online but have never quite managed to turn it into a full time income. If this describes you, and you know lots about web marketing but you’ve never quite managed to find the right vehicle to make the web your full time income – how about becoming a full time, or part time web marketing assistant, as a job?

The web is fast becoming mainstream, so whereas in the past only the larger companies were investing in online marketing, now the majority of businesses are doing so. This has created a fantastic opportunity for large numbers of people all over the world, who have invested thousands over the years in learning about online marketing, and who can now cash in on this skill & knowledge by doing web marketing for a living.

Web Marketing Assistant job description

In a nutshell, it involves managing all website marketing activities for your employer, usually it’ll involve various disciplines, SEO, PPC, social media, affiliate marketing, display advertising, content creation, general web master work. It depends on the size of the company, but usually if the job is being described as web marketing assistant, it’s usually a single position rather than a team position – if it’s a larger company with a web marketing team, the title is usually slightly different.

This is a GREAT gig for web marketers who supplement their income with online marketing but would like to make it their full time job –   it’s EASY, it’s fairly well paid, it comes with autonomy, and as most people within the company will have no clue about web marketing, usually, you probably won’t have some boss breathing down your neck & telling you what to do – all they’ll want you to do is make sure that the web marketing is looked after, as they won’t know what to do, it’s hard for them to tell you what to do….

Obviously it’s a job, so you’ll have management etc – but if you get in with a company that is a pain to work for, try to stick it out for a year or so for the CV, then move on.

Web marketing assistant is a client-side position, so you’d be working directly for the company you’re doing the work for, not agency-side, which is where you work for a marketing agency working on clients sites. Agency-side work is generally a lot more competitive, more difficult to get into, it can be particularly well paid, but there’s often a lot of other “crap” you need to do, such as sales related stuff, dealing with clients, conference calls, explaining reports and so on (I know, I did a stint as SEO manager for a UK web marketing agency) and it’s generally more stressful and less fun than a client side marketing assistant position.

Many people in this position are on a cushy number, tucked away somewhere at a desk, listening to their Ipod, drinking coffee, chilling out & doing  the kinds of marketing stuff they could do with their eyes shut – doing exactly what they’d be doing anyway if they weren’t working – but getting paid for it.

So if you love web marketing but you’ve not found a way to make much money from it yet – this could be for you, especially if you’re broke, as many web marketers are!

If you’re wondering how you’re going to pay the bills, this is a million times better than flipping burgers, far better money, far less stressful, much easier work, and you’ll love it if you love WM.

Give it some thought, and search for web marketing assistant jobs locally.

So your website is ready, and now SEO is needed in order to start the flow of targeted search engine traffic. But, is SEO the logical next step – the answer is no, don’t jump the gun or you may waste time & effort.

Before you start doing SEO or paying someone to start doing it for you, what you need to do, or to get someone to do, is keyword research, then figure out which search terms you need to focus on for maximum results – then start SEO activities.

Many people get thuings back to front, they build a website, start working on SEO or investing in search engine optimisation services, then when they see they’re not getting much of a return, at some point they’ll realize that they need to go back to the drawing board & conduct keyword research first.

So without a doubt, SEO is needed – but it’s only worth doing once you know which search terms you need to focus on.

If you’re looking for a description of SEO, you’re not alone – many clients I speak to, including some very successful business people, are not quite sure what SEO is, and what it involves.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation (or optimization if you’re in the states).

In short, SEO means optimising a website to be able to rank higher on in the organic search engine results positions (SERPS for short) for your important search terms.

If you’ve heard the term “SEM” and wonder how SEO & SEM are different – SEM is the acronym for Search Engine Marketing,  and encompasses both SEO & PPC (pay per click marketing). For more info about PPC see my recent post PPC Vs SEO.

SEO is for ranking in the organic search engine results positions – not the paid search, pay per click marketing is different and you can find more about it in my PPC vs SEO post that I’ve just mentioned.

There are two parts to search engine optimization – onpage & offpage.

On page optimization means tweaking the pages of your website, to make it relevant for your important search terms. Page titles, meta description, header tags, alt image tags, internal linking anchor text etc (I will explain all of these in other posts, this is just a brief description for now).

Off page optimization is about improving the search engine’s opinion of your website, by gaining links to your website from other websites, known as “backlinks” – again, I won’t go into detail in this SEO description, but the general idea is that you want links to your site, from as high quality, well established sites as possible – and the “anchor text” which means the text used in the hyper link, should be a search term, so instead of “click here” you would use the search term that you want to rank for.

Some quick SEO tips:

1: Do search term research – or you could be wasting your time trying to rank your website for terms which bring no traffic, or which are far too competitive for you to expect to rank for in the near future.

2: Aim for page one – most buying visitors do not browse beyond page one of the search results.

3: Focus on buying search terms, not research search terms. Think about the search terms your clients are likely to search if they’re looking to buy, they will often be different terms than they would use if they were looking for info. It’s fine to rank for info terms too, but buying terms are where the money is.

4: Target your home page at your most important 2-3 search terms, and then sub pages should focus on one main search term each don’t try to target dozens of search terms with one page.

5: Page titles are very important, make sure your page titles are different for each page, keep the page title short & make the most important search term for each page, the first phrase in the page title.

6: Install the SEO quake toolbar into your browser, so you can easily research the competition.

7: When figuring out which search terms to focus on, search for the term in quotation marks “like this” , to see how many competing pages there are, if there are under a hundred thousand results then that’s an indication that it may be a lesser competitive term, if there are millions of results for the term, then it’s probably going to be a tough search term.

8: Once you’ve done the above, research page one using SEO quake plugin, or another tool, to check out how competitive the other sites are on page one, so you can see if you think you’ll be able to out-rank any of the sites currently on page one. If they’re all very well established sites with thosands of backlinks & masses of indexed pages, and a long website history, then it’s going to be tough, and you may want to look at focusing on a lesser competitive search term to begin with.

9: If you use PPC marketing and you have conversion tracking running (and if you don’t, then how do you know if you’re getting a return?) then use your PPC keyword data to figure out which search terms to focus on.

10: Write lots of unique content, search engines love fresh, unique content.

I hope you found this short SEO description informative – best of luck with your plans, and don’t forget to come back soon to see my other SEO & web marketing posts.

I’ve been asked quite a few times about the SEO vs PPC. First of all, to the uninitiated, I’ll explain the difference. If you already know the difference between SEO & PPC then you can skip this bit.

Organic Google Search Results

The organic search results are the results on the left under the block of three paid results which you’ll usually see first (unless their are no ads for the search term, which is unusual):

Organic results are the free results, and results are shown in accordance with Google’s search results algorithm which is designed to allow the best, most valuable & most relevant content for any given search term, to rise to the top.

Paid Google Search Results, AKA Google Adwords, Pay Per Click, PPC

The paid results, PPC (Pay Per Click), are the results you see at the top of each page, and on the right hand side:

You get your website into the paid search results with Google Adwords, and the results are ordered by the adwords algorithm which takes a number of things into account including bid amount, click through rates & quality score (which aims to rank the quality and relevance of the landing page).

So there you go, if you weren’t sure of the difference, hopefully this simple explanation has helped.

SEO vs PPC

So which should you focus on, which is best, SEO or PPC, which would win in a fight??

I’m kind of biased because although I do have quite a bit of experience with PPC, organic SEO is my forte’ & my passion – so I’m inclined to say that SEO is best, but the truth is that it’s a case of “horses for courses”, i.e. it just depends.

The first thing I will say about PPC, is that many, many businesses are pouring good money down the drain with it! PPC is a fantastic tool if used right, if used wrong it’s a quick way to lose all your money & see zero return, and from my experience, most businesses use it wrong. But I’ll get to that shortly.

In terms of which is best, it really depends on your business, and your website.

I’ll back up a little bit first and talk about website function. All business websites should be thought of (in my opinion) not as “websites” but as business tools. All business websites are tools, but they need to do different things for different businesses. If you’re selling online, then your website is an online selling tool – if you’re not selling online but you’re generating enquiries online, then your website is an enquiry generation tool. If you’re booking appointments for your sales team with your website, then your website is an appintment booking tool, if you’re building an email marketing list with your website, then it’s a list building tool (and you then use broadcasts to your list to convert to sales / signups / sales / enquiries) , if you’re doing a number of different things with your site, then your website is a Swiss army knife

One of the mistakes that many (most) businesses make (and not only small businesses) is that they do not properly identify what kind of a tool their website needs to be, and then when it comes to marketing they apply the wrong kinds of marketing strategies, and the website marketing is doomed from the outset.

So what kind of a tool does your website need to be?

If you’re a traditional offline business, and you do not sell products or services online, then your website is either going to be an enquiry generation tool or an list building tool. If you sell products or services online, then your website is a direct sales tool.

It’s all about being able to track conversion. The better you’re able to track the conversion & the return on investment, the more practical it becomes to be able to safely invest in PPC marketing. You can track conversion very easily with direct sales websites, Ecommerce websites – but it’s not so easy to track conversion & returns with enquiry generation & list building websites, so it’s harder to ensure that you’re making a profit from PPC with these kinds of websites.

Direct sales tools work great with PPC – they work well with organic SEO too – but the great thing about PPC is that you can generate sales straight away (if you do it right.) The reason direct sales tools are great to use with PPC, is that as you’re paying for the traffic you need to be able to measure the return, and with direct online sales you can measure the return very effectively, as long as you have conversion tracking set up (which is a must), then you can see straight away what return you’re making from SEO, and if you’re not making a profit you can tweak accordingly, and test & measure until you’re seeing great results. SEO is great for direct selling websites also, and you can set up conversion tracking with Google anayltics so you can see which search terms are bringing a return via organic search. But organic search can take some time, so if you have some budget for PPC, I’d advise that you start with PPC to get some traffic going, and then use the data you generate from PPC (i.e which search terms are bringing the best returns) to then begin your organic SEO campaign to generate organic traffic for the search terms which are bringing the most profit.

Enquiry generation & list building websites can be tricky when it comes to PPC, for the reason that the website isn’t directly converting the sale, so you can’t work out a direct return. It could be that you think PPC is generating sales, but actually your sales are coming from other marketing avenues & you would do better  cutting the PPC & investing into the other area which is actually bringing the sales (i.e. SEO or offline marketing methods).

Lets say that you have an average profit per sale (of a product or service) of $100, for example. If you’re selling online, it’s very easy to  see that if you have an average sales conversion rate of 1%, and you’re paying $0.50 per click, you’re paying $50 to make $100.  So with online sales you can carefully track conversions, and drop any terms which are costing too much or which aren’t converting. Even if you’re not making any return, at leas you know this & you can act accordingly.

But when you’re not selling online, it’s harder to work out your exact conversion rate, as the sale is converted via a process which can’t be tracked online. Well actually, it can be, there are some tools available now which can convert from ppc traffic through to telephone enquiries, but they’re not particularly cheap & they’re fairly complex to set up & run properly.

I’ve had direct experience of this – years ago I had an offline business, with a website which did have some online selling but it was mainly an enquiry generation website, I was pumping money into adwords just assuming that this was where a chunk of the sales were coming form as it seemed to increase as I put more cash into PPC, but one day I decided to pause the PPC campaign, and I discovered that it made no difference at all to sales, and that in fact the sales were coming in mainly via organic SEO and some offline marketing I’d done – figuring this out saved me about a thousand dollars per month, and if I’d known this 18 months earlier….

Don’t get me wrong – PPC can be fantastic, and there are people making a LOT of profit from it – but equally there are some businesses wasting money on PPC, either just because they’re not using conversion tracking, or because their website is an enquiry generation tool so they cannot figure out whether they’re making a profit from PPC marketing.

When PPC started out, you could get onto page one with google adwords for pennies per click, now however it’s got so popular that many search terms have expensive minimum page one bid amounts, many of which are higher than $0.50 per click, some which are $1 per click or considerably more. Average online sales conversion is usually somewhere between 0.25% – 1%, which means you need between 100 and 400 clicks in order to make a sale, so lets work this out:

If you’re paying an average of $0.50 per click, the cost of sale is between  $50 – $200. So if your average profit per sale is $20 – OOPS!! If you’re paying an average of $1.50 per click, the cost of sale with an average conversion rate is $150 – $600.

This may seem steep, but this is the issue many have when it comes to PPC, they don’t have high enough conversion rates, and/or high enough average profit per sale.

If you’re making a couple of grand per sale, then you’re probably safe as your profit level will cover the cost of sale even if you’re paying a fairly high PPC & your conversion rate isn’t amazing, but if you’re only making tens of dollars per sale, then you can see that it’s not going to be very easy to make money via PPC.

So, PPC is good for direct sales sites, and particularly good for high profit sales, but you need to be able to track conversion & profit.

SEO on the other hand is good for enquiry sites, and list generation, because you’re not paying per click – so if you get to page one for a search term which is performing, then you have a traffic generation system which will feed your enquiry generation or list building website, without having to continually pay for the traffic.

There you go, hopefully this has given you a better understanding of SEO vs PPC

I’m here in the sunny (it actually is today!) United kingdom, quite a bit of the traffic to my SEO blog comes from the states, Australia, India, various parts of Europe & various other parts of the world – but I can see that some visitors are reaching my blog by searches related to SEO united kingdom, UK, GB etc.

I’m assuming that while some people may be tying to find out if there’s a different way to approach SEO in the UK, I think probably most of these searches relate to business people searching for SEO services here in the UK.

If you do have a question relating to what is the difference between SEO in the US or anywhere else, and SEO in the United Kingdom, there’s only really one major difference, here we spell it optimisation, not optimization . Other than that, the search terms are often slightly different, there are spelling differences, differences in competition levels – which are usually counter balanced by differences in search volume.

I’m not going to plug my SEO services – due to the fact that I very rarely take on SEO clients now, I’ve just got too much going on, with my business website design business, and SEO consultancy for a few key clients with whom I’ve been working for several years in some cases –  I take on the odd new SEO client by referral, usually as a favour more than anything else, but I don’t really have the time or inclination to take on lots of SEO clients – I only have one pair of hands, and they’re quite busy.  I do enjoy writing about this stuff, which is why I blog when I have a spare few minutes (I type fast!), but I do this because I enjoy it, I’m not really looking to further my career in any way with my SEO blog.

So – anyway, there you go, a little – possibly pointless but nevertheless quite enjoyable (for me, anyway!) post about SEO United Kingdom

As you’re probably aware, content is king when it comes to SEO. Many people forget this, or probably they try to ignore it & hope it’ll go away, and that they’ll find a way to get great search engine rankings without great SEO content writing, because it’s time consuming. If you’ve been searching for SEO magic bullets – I can say from experience that you won’t find one – and if you try to omit great unique content from your plan, then I would put money on your plan not working too well.

Once people realise that despite their best efforts, they’re unable to find anything to do away with the need for unique content – the next thing many try (speaking from experience…) is inexpensive content. The old rule – you get what you pay for – is true when it comes to content. What I have found is that cheap SEO content is flawed in one or more ways, either it’s not unique at all, or it’s badly written, I’ve had some articles delivered which just don’t make any sense, quite often Indian content writers & others for whom English isn’t the first language, while it may be grammatically brilliant in some cases, what I often find is that it just just doesn’t read in the way that English speakers are used to. I know some people don’t believe that articles need to be well written, or need to make perfect sense, or need to be enjoyable to read – as many are of the opinion that content – especially when it’s for article submitting, is for marketing purposes & not for readers, but personally I think it makes sense to focus on creating content which you are proud to distribute,  produce content for visitors first, SEO second. I believe that if you stay focused on quality over SEO score, focus on creating content which your visitors will like – you’re investing very, very soundly – yet if you’re pumping out poor content, you may just be treading water, and as Google continue to become even more intelligent in the way that they allow the cream to rise to the top, I’m confident that if you take my advise – in the long term you’ll find it was worth it.

What you have to remember is that all of Google’s algorithm is designed to allow the cream to rise & the crap to fall – if you generally focus on making your site the cream, rather than trying to pass off junk as cream and hoping it’ll rise – then in the longterm I cannot see how you can fail. In terms of SEO that is, and traffic – that isn’t to say that this guarantees that your business will make a profit – which brings me to another point that I’ll take up more in a future post – being sure that your SEO efforts are not all for nothing. There are websites which are doing great for SEO, which will never make money – don’t forget that SEO is just a way to get traffic, you need to make sure that your website converts visitors into customers.

So to conclude this post – I would recommend that you either write your own content, or that you hire great, experienced content writers. This will cost you, but its an investment, as quality content is what you need – in fact, a decent SEO content writer will probably cost you roughly ten times what you can get cheap lesser quality content writer to write content for, but in my opinion it’s worth it for a great content writer, as a well researched, well written article or page of content is far, far more valuable than a cheap, poor quality page of content.

Last night I wrote a short post about search terms – I cut it short when I realised it was close to 2 AM…. oops, I love blogging, get carried awway sometimes! Anyway, who needs sleep??  Anyway, I started talking about the importance of keyword research, and I promised I’d write a more in depth post, so here we go.

Google & the other search engines, are not like the old phone directories, where you go to a category and scroll alphabetically – they’re search driven (you know this of course, you’re not stupid, but I just want to make this analogy to make it easier for some people to understand the importance of search terms).

So because search engines give results only to searches – there is no such thing as “getting to the top of Google” – unless you understand WHAT it is that you’re getting to the top of Google for.

This makes getting to the top of Google COMPLETELY POINTLESS – in certain cases – and ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL in other cases.

If you’re at the top of Google for a search which your potential clients do not search for – then it’s completely pointless – yet getting to page one of Google (and other search engines, but Google is by far more important than the others, in my humble opinion) is absolutely essential if you’re to get business from your website.

So, hopefully if you were confused at first, you’re now starting to see what I’m getting at.

If a SEO sales firm phones you & says “We can guarantee you page one ranking on google for xxx per month!!!” you can reply “OK great, sign me up – now, my keywords are : make money, SEO, lose weight, online casino, when will I be top of Google??” At which point they’ll probably hang up on you, realizing you possible no more about the subject than they do (and I’m not talking about ALL SEO telesales people, but many are just given a patter to follow.)

I have previously known clients who have paid money to so called SEO companies who claimed to guarantee them page one ranking, without ever even discussing with the client which search terms they were guaranteeing page one ranking for – how is that even possible? One such client, when I looked into it for them & advised accordingly, the client wrote to the company, and the company wrote a letter back proving that they were in fact on page one of Google….. FOR THEIR OWN COMPANY NAME…. since they were the only company with this company name, of course they were on page one of Google for the term, but this would have happened by default anyway without any optimization work being required, and in terms of new business, it’s completely pointless, seing as only folk who already knew the business would be searching for the business name, so where’s the potential for new business from a page one ranking for your own company name? Crazy!!

So it’s all about search terms. Sometimes we say “keywords” but really search terms or search phrase, or keyword phrase is a better description, as most of the time we’re wanting to rank for a string of two or more words, not just one word.

So you need to be found at the top of Google for the search terms that your potential clients are typing into Google when they want your products or services.

Lets say you’re a plumber, and you’re in Birmingham – then you’ll be focussing on terms like “plumber in Birmingham”, “plumbers in Birmingham”, “plumbers Birmingham”, “emergency plumber in Birmingham”, etc., be careful about making quick judgements about which are the most important search terms though, as you may well be wrong (most people are when they make assumptions about which search terms they need to be focusing on ranking highly for). For example, you may be right about the search term that you have assumed to be the best one in terms of volume & relevance, but it may be that this search term is way too competitive for your website right now – for example, if your website is new, and the other sites on page one for that search term are all very well established websites with hundreds or thousands of web pages, and hundreds or thousands of backlinks, then it’s not practical to expect it to be quick or easy – or affordable, to gain page one ranking.

This is where keyword research comes in – proper keyword research gives you a list of relevant search terms, with search volumes & approx competition levels – from here you can research further to find out how competitive page one is for each term, and see which relevant terms with traffic appear to be practical terms to be able to rank on page one for in the not too distant future.

Good keyword research is an absolute must – in my opinion, if you’ve not got well researched keyword data – you shouldn’t waste your time with SEO at all! It amazes me just how many businesses – including some fairly large companies, go into SEO without proper keyword research, it just doesn’t make any sense – and in my experience it’s one of the most common reasons for businesses not to get the kinds of returns they expect from their websites.

So – go do some keyword research!! I’ll write another post in the near future about how to do keyword research step by step. Hit control & D to bookmark the blog, and call back in a few days.

Yeah, of course you want to be found on top in Google, but for what?

I’ve been asked this so many times, “How do I get found at the top of Google?” and I’m often met with confusion when I reply “for what search term?”

Sometimes I’ll say “for which terms?” – and I get the reply “I just wanna be found on Google”

Many people reading this will be saying “durr, you don’t say….” but equally, there seem to be many folk out there, some of them very successful business people, who just don’t get this search term thing – so if that’s you, then read this.

Very simple – you need to be found on Google for what your potential customers are searching for. If you sell zipple ding dong window plier sealers (which I doubt you do, as I just made that up), then that’s what you want to be found page one of Google for. If someone phones you & says “pay me  xxx per month and I guarantee you page one Google rankings” – put your card away, until they commit to ranking you on page one for specific agreed search terms.

Keyword research is very, very important – it can make or break a website. I’ll write another more in depth post about this another day, probably tomorrow – I’ve just realised it’s nearly 3 AM, and I should sleep!! Night…

So you’ve heard all this talk about Google Panda, and how it’s been effecting some rankings etc – here’s a huge secret for you….ignore it!

Yup, you heard me – if you’re doing business on the web, then you really don’t need to be getting bogged down with all of the intricate details of what Google is doing every five minutes – don’t worry about it, just stick to good old fashioned SEO & website marketing tactics, and make your website as high quality as possible, and that’s really all you need to worry about.

I started doing this web marketing stuff  in my late teens, I’m 35 this year – and guess what, I don’t pay all that much attention to what’s going on, the latest algorithm updates, latest pagerank updates, Google Panda, bla bla bla – it all means very, very little if you’re focusing on  creating great websites, focusing on quality, and old fashioned SEO – good keyword research, quality original content, great onpage SEO (page titles, descriptions, header tags, alt image tags, etc), and common sense organic offpage (backlinking).

Many web marketers waste so much time worrying about what’s going on at Google – aghhhh, someone at Google broke wind I’d better change my strategy…. really, doesn’t matter – unless of course you’re trying to cheat by getting poor quality sites to rank well on Google, with auto duplicate content etc – in which case, good look with that, but you’d probably be better in the longrun just focusing on making the web a better place by building great quality sites with great quality unique content.

Hey – this post isn’t about SEO – so sue me! It’s about Model trains for beginners. If you’re interested in SEO then you’ll actually understand what this post is all about, and you may want to review what I’ve done in terms of on-page stuff. If you’re into model trains, then you’ll understand the trains bit but wonder what the heck am I talking about with this “SEO” stuff, don’t worry about it, it’s just that this blog is about web marketing stuff – but sometimes I go off at tangents & write things which are about something off-topic.

I’ll be honest right now – I have no interest in model trains,  if you’re a beginner or intermediate model train enthusiast, then I’d suggest that you check out Model Trains For Beginners by Dan Morgan, he will show you you can have an incredibly realistic model railway layouts regardless of your space availability & budget.

Previously, newcomers to the hobby may well of found it particularly difficult to build an intricate & detailed model train layout, especially those of exhibition / show standard.

Up until now, any beginner trying to build a detailed and intricate model train layout similar to the ones you see at the model train shows, will have found it incredibly frustrating.

Included in “Model Trains For Beginners” :

This electronic book (which you can download instantly here and be reading in minutes!) includes:

• The Fundamentals of building a model train layout.
• Exactly how to plan the entire layout
• How to build the railroads, tracks, a realistic-looking surrounding scenery, and most importantly, the essential electrical skills you need to know to make the trains run

>>Read More…