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Beware of spam SEO emails

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A client of mine recently received the following email entitled ‘professional analysis of kandtfootwear.co.uk’ and asked me to comment. I have seen an increase in these types of long SEO spam emails which contains inaccurate and false information misleading clients in to believing their web site is under-performing and need to pay a so called ‘expert’ to increase their visibility in the search engines. I have commented below on the email received.

Hi,

My name is [Removed name]. I’m a senior search consultant at Top 10 Guaranteed [A bit of research shows that they used to send exactly the same emails as a company called SEO Doctors and they are also known as The Web Clinic]. We are part of an IT Group that has been established for over 10 years as a leading specialist in all aspects of online sales and marketing.

Excuse the unusual approach, however I am writing to inform you that I recently visited your website, kandtfootwear.co.uk, during a routine survey of web sites which would be capable of achieving higher search engine performance. Obviously resulting in an increase in online sales or the generation of high volumes of additional sales leads. [hmmm.. debatable having looked at your own web site(s) top10guaranteed.co.uk has a page ranking of 0/10]

I am confident that this information will be of use to you, but if I have caused offence in any way through my approach I sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused. I’m hoping this will arouse your curiosity, since you are obviously attempting to gain new business through your website.

From my initial observations, your website is underperforming in at least one of the major search engines such as – Google, Yahoo, and Bing. You probably are aware that most people don’t look past the first page of search results. [The web site is actually no. 1 for targeted keywords. Try a search for ‘agricultural footwear‘] I struggled to find you in the first couple of pages for highly relevant keyphrases, which means that you could be losing out on a significant amount of business. As such I did a bit more digging… [You conveniently haven’t listed the highly relevant ‘keyphrases’ mentioned and you don’t know what is being targeted]

I ran a back-link check on kandtfootwear.co.uk first. Back-links are the number of times your site is linked to through another website. Your website has 5 back-links. [This is inaccurate – if you had researched this, you will find that the web site actually has 148 back-links!]

Back-links also contribute towards your Google Pagerank score. Pagerank is Google telling us how trustworthy your site is. A higher score = higher search rankings. Right now your website has a Google Pagerank score of 3/10, [3/10 is pretty reasonable for a small to medium sized business] which, when compared to other high ranking competitor websites, may be restricting your rankings. This can be down to many reasons which we can help resolve. The next check I applied on your website was page indexing. Search engines like Google scan the information on your website and feed it back to their database. The Google formula is then applied to the data to determine where your website should rank. As such the more pages your website has indexed with quality unique content, the higher you can rank with Google. Right now, your site has 14 pages indexed with Google [Google actually has 15 pages indexed – i’m not sure what methods you are using to gain this information or if you are even doing any research?], and Google is regarding some of that content as poor. This can be down to many reasons which we can help resolve. Finally I also identified that there could be a number of structural issues with your website which may be having a negative impact on your search rankings.

So, here’s a recap of my findings of gdock.co.uk [gdock.co.uk?!] :

– Your Google Pagerank is 3/10
– You have 5 back-links [Incorrect]
– Your website has 14 pages indexed [Incorrect]
– There are issues with content and site structure [Incorrect]

I have only scratched the surface of the factors impacting on your rankings [This is very true!!]. Unlike some of our competitors, I wanted to do some initial work to identify that it would be worthwhile for you to talk to us before contacting you with my proposal. The best way to deal with any problem is to first apply a thorough diagnosis. It would, therefore, be a sensible next step for us to apply a more thorough diagnosis of why your website may not be ranking well before discussing with you what could be done about it.

What we have to offer could prove to be the most value for money investment you could make for your business this year. In an economic climate that is difficult, to say the least, all businesses must invest in areas that will deliver maximum returns with minimal investment. [Again true ..but why would i invest in a company that sends spam emails with false information?] Only strong search engine listings offer real growth opportunities as consumer trends change.

So what do we have to offer? Many factors now impact on how and where you will appear on the search engines. Unfortunately, most business people overlook the things that prevent them from performing well in the search engines and throw good money behind advertising without understanding what their web site really needs.

Good SEO firms assess the needs of sites individually and address these by working on sites month on month. A one off fix just doesn’t work. As such we offer two approaches for you to consider.

We can produce a detailed 30-40 page Diagnostic Report for your site together with a personal telephone consultation with one of our SEO experts. Consultations explain the technicalities in our report in an easy to understand manner. Our normal price for this service is £499.00. If you are prepared to act this week we are prepared to offer this at a reduced one-off fee of £299.00. Following this consultation we can discuss how best to rectify the situation.

Alternatively we could provide this detailed Diagnostic Report for your site completely free [With accurate results?]. For this you would need to commit to take up our 12 month optimisation and consultancy service prior to our work commencing. The service is based around promotion of specific agreed keyphrases after discussing how to put right all issues highlighted in our report. We can deliver first page search results in the major search engines. For this we charge as little as £35 per keyphrase, per month, dependent upon the competitiveness of that keyphrase. Furthermore, we guarantee to refund your money should we fail to put you in the first page for the keyphrases once all changes have been implemented.

The reason why I’m so confident about our capabilities is because we have done it so many times before. To name a few examples: Maternity Clothes, Dubai Properties, Gravel, Health Store, Van Hire, Fire Extinguishers, Financial Advisers UK, Coffee Machines, Swimwear, Limo Hire, Mortgage Advisers UK, and more – all are on the first page of Google and all highly competitive keyphrases. We put them there. [There is no mention in your email about keyword analysis, this is extremely important as you may get the web site to no.1 but if nobody is searching for that keyword, there is absolutely no point in wasting your efforts]

Our own group website is in the first page of Google for Website Marketing Company and Internet marketing companies [You are currently on pg 3 for ‘Internet marketing companies’]. You will see our site listed as The Web Clinic [So are you The Web Clinic or Top 10 Guaranteed? – Confusing]. To satisfy you even further we can also provide you with comparative existing client’s contact details to serve as references for the quality of our work.

If you are genuinely serious about improving your online revenues and want professional website marketing for a low flat monthly fee or a one-off detailed report, please visit our service website at www.top10guaranteed.co.uk which provides more details about our excellent service and a call back form. See a selection of our excellent testimonials and example results achieved recently on behalf of our clients. Alternatively, if you prefer to discuss your requirements over the phone, then please don’t hesitate to contact me on 0844 7404951 and press Option 1 or simply reply to this mail with a convenient time to call you. [No, Thanks]

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards,

[Name & phone no removed]
Senior Search Consultant
Top 10 Guaranteed

Got a project in mind?

01536 391 745 hello@tjdesign.uk

How do I get started with Google Analytics?

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What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics (GA) is a small piece of JavaScript code. This is added to your website in the background and can track every interaction the user makes.

It’s really important to use this or a similar statistics package so you can learn the behaviour of a typical user.

This is my preferred choice of analytics package. Although it can seem a little daunting and complex to a beginner. If you would like a lot of data and have the time to analyse and act upon it, you can make informed decisions with your website changes. It really maximise your websites performance.

To get started, request that your website designer follows the steps below..

  • Create or sign in to your Analytics account:
  • Set up a property in your Analytics account. A property represents your website or app, and is the collection point in Analytics for the data from your site or app.
  • Set up a reporting view in your property. Views let you create filtered perspectives of your data. For example, all data except from your company’s internal IP addresses, or all data associated with a specific sales region.
  • Follow the instructions to add the tracking code to your website template so you can collect data in your Analytics property.
  • Now grab yourself a cup of tea and be patient as it can take 24 – 48 hours for the metrics to start showing within your account.

How do I navigate the Google Analytics dashboard?

Now you have GA installed on your website the next step is to sign in to your account. An overview of your websites performance will be shown as the dashboard.

The ‘reports’ section is very useful and displays data for the following categories…

  • Real-Time (what is happening on your site right now such as the number of visitors, locations and pages they have visited)
  • Audience (displays demographics including age and gender)
  • Acquisition (the source of your website traffic i.e. organic search engine results or social media campaigns)
  • Behaviour (the behaviour of your visitors which includes how long they stick around and the bounce rate)
  • Conversions (when a goal is set up i.e. an enquiry form or download, the metrics will appear here)

The above information from the reports is really valuable.

You may find out that 75% of your visitors are normally male millennials which mostly use mobile phone devices.  Then you can really optimise your website content to suit your audience. You will also know which channel needs more focus to gain more traffic.

Which metrics should I focus on?

  • Acquisition overview
    This report provides insight in to the source of where your traffic is coming from, each source will have a different level of conversion. If your number is low for a particular source, i.e. direct visitors, is your website URL easy to spell and simple to remember?
  • Social overview
    Measures the impact of social media, do you need to create more website content with a social media campaign?
  • Bounce rate
    How quickly a visitor leaves your website without performing any actions. If you have a high bounce rate, do you have poor quality traffic or poor usability?
  • Traffic sources
    Focus on your top sources, this is also beneficial to determine if it’s worth continuing to pay for that annual subscription to that online directory.
  • Page views
    When used with other traffic sources, you can determine why a page has had a large number of views. Are you offering high quality content or is it because your visitor can’t find what they are looking for?
  • Exit pages
    This is very beneficial in determining at what stage your visitors are leaving your website so you can investigate further and take action.

Summary

Analytics can be a difficult subject to get your head around with it’s own technical jargon and complexity, however it is so valuable to get the most out of your website and to be able to grow online.

The above doesn’t even scratch the surface when it comes to GA but the above will get you started on installation and delve in to the first steps of measuring your websites performance.

Got a project in mind?

01536 391 745 hello@tjdesign.uk

How to read AWStats to improve your website position

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AWStats is a powerful reporting tool used to track visitors to your website. Any hosting package from myself includes this feature already built in.

This article attempts to explain the main terms used in AWStats so you can make sense of where people are coming from, why they are coming to your site and how you can use this to improve your position in the search engines.

  • Number of visits and number of unique visitors
    A unique visitor is a person / computer that has made a visit to your page, this is counted once. The number of visits are counted multiple times so if two people visit your page twice in a month, there would be two unique visitors and four visits.
  • Visits duration
    The visits duration section shows how much time visitors are spending on the website before leaving.
  • Usage by months, days of the week and hours of the day
    These sections shows the individual statistics for each day of the month / week and hours of the day.
  • Domains/countries
    This is pretty self-explanatory. It shows which countries your visitors are coming from.
  • Most viewed, entry and exit pages
    The most viewed are the most popular pages from your website. The entry page is the first page viewed by your visitor whilst the exit page is the last page viewed during their visit.
  • Visits of robots
    This displays the top 25 robots that have visited the website. (A robot is an automated process which visits your site frequently and saves a copy to be listed in the search engines).
  • Search engines, keyphrases and keywords used to find your site
    115 of the most famous search engines are detected like yahoo, google, altavista, etc. The search keyphrases and search keywords section display the words and phrases most commonly used by people to find the website. You can also use the section called connect to website from to find incoming traffic from external websites.


…so how do we use this to improve your website position?

You can use the unique visits and number of visits to gauge how active your visitors are and how well you acquire new visitors and returning visits.

A high percentage of visitors who leave before half a minute is common as many of these will be robots as mentioned previously, but if you have a large percentage in the next bracket, it could be a sign that you need to work on more engaging content.

The hourly / weekly / monthly breakdown can be used to show trends in your customer habits and the effect of any online marketing campaigns.

If one particular exit page is appearing more than others, it may mean that your visitor has not found what they are looking for.

You can view the list of search engines and make sure that you are included in as many as possible.

The keywords and keyphrases should be similar to the ones you are targeting. If not, you may need to do some keyword research.

Check the connect to website from to find out if external links to your website are relevant and reputable. You can also exchange links with suitable websites and run social media campaigns to increase this traffic.

To summarize, the idea is that you see an incremental curve in the bar graph for your monthly history for unique visits and number of visits. Most companies have a quieter period but generally you should be expecting these stats to increase vs prior month and definitely prior year.

If you would like to know more about AWStats, contact me here.

Got a project in mind?

01536 391 745 hello@tjdesign.uk