Google, Yahoo and Bing have added into their conventional search,the ‘where’ allowing people to search with postcode, town or city added to whatever they are looking for. Bypassing the previously dominant players with large directories with thousands of pages, search engines have moved towards Local business, products and services.

With mobile devices and smart phones increasingly being used to search products and then buy, if you are not appearing in that search, it’s a potential sale you have lost. Just Eat is a site where you put in your post code, find your restaurant, order your meal, pay for it and get it delivered. Needless to say, there’s an App for that too, so you can phone your order in on the way home from work, collect or have it delivered.

The Apps available for mobiles, tie in to Google maps, eliminate irrelevant listings and include niche lists only. They supply reviews, business details and directions to get to you, all at your customers fingertips. If you are not listed locally then you have lost another customer.

All of the search engines are vying for local information so now is the time to make sure you have your local SEO in place and your business listing is optimised. Studies show that organic traffic converts at better rates than most other channels as people are actively searching for you, they know what they want and need to find the right person to buy it from!

Do you need help to optimise you site for local SEO? Email us here, or telephone Tamara on 0203 468 8594.

At the moment existing Facebook business pages with existing custom tabs (built with FBML) can still be edited. If you have been procrastinating about getting Facebook pages for your business you need to stop and take action now before Facebook introduce this change. With only just over two weeks left of the FBML style Facebook and pages taking a few days to build, make that decision and contact us now to get your Facebook business pages.

As one of the largest social networks with 500 million users worldwide, Facebook now directs more web traffic than Google. It shares and finds more weblinks, providing an incredible platform to advertise your business. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to spread the word about you and your company.

We can set up your Facebook Business page or fix existing ones. For those ready to take action and get ahead of the last minute rush we will install Google Analytics on two of your Facebook Business pages at no extra cost. So make that decision now and contact us to get your pages before it’s too late.

Why? Because it’s a title (like an accountant or a coach) and doesn’treally tell them anything about what I do and how I add value to my clients’ businesses.

So what would I tell them instead?

My answer is that I’m a business problem solver (or a productivity expert specialising in online marketing depending on who I’m talking to). Because that’s exactly what I do. Let’s look at a few examples of problems that you could have and how we here at TJConsulting can provide you with a solution.

Your Problem:You wish you had time to create an e-book from your blog content, articles or other original content, but you don’t even know where to start.
Our Solution: Send us your material and we can create that e-book for you,complete with images, links, exquisite formatting and proofreading. We will then set it up a product in your shopping cart along with a 3D product image to promote the ebook on your site.

Your Problem: You wish you didn’t have to run to your web developer every time you needed a special event or announcement added to your website. Or maybe you wish you could just give the entire site a facelift: for example, you’d love your WordPress site to have a more customised look, or at least a customised header and colours.
Our Solution: Let us help you move your website to WordPress, and make it super easy to add those special announcements and little tweaks. We can give it a fresh new look, with all the benefits of great SEO and social media integration.

Your Problem: You have a blog that’s been doing nothing since after the first 2 posts you managed to publish. You feel that you just don’t have time to blog!
Our Solution: You would be pleasantly surprised how much easier it will become when you send your draft content and let us complete it with links, keywords, images and proofread.

Your Problem: You are aware that using email marketing helps keep your business visible to clients, but you are not sure how to actually get started.
Our Solution: We can help you choose the perfect service for your email marketing campaigns, design a user friendly template, set up integration with your website and social media, create and implement an email marketing strategy to get your offers out to your clients on a regular basis.

Your Problem:You need to create a presentation for a conference you are speaking at but slideshows take forever to create.
Our Solution: Send us the material (Word document, hand-written or drawn slides, notes, links to online resources etc.) to be included along with your desired branding and we can create a PowerPoint template and slides for you. You will save time, stop feeling all frustrated with new technology and will get a fabulous looking, all singing and dancing, PowerPoint presentation.

Your Problem: You’ve managed to get a big report completed but don’t have time to format it.
Our Solution: We can help with formatting, styles, layouts, proofreading and creating a table of contents. You will get a consistency formatted and professionally looking document back saving you time and effort.

Your problem’s not listed? We are confident we’ve got the solution though.

Send us your problems by commenting on this blog, e-mailing directly or tweeting to find out how we can solve them (or enhance your personal productivity and business revenues by strategically implementing relevant online tools and an effective online marketing strategy – depending on how many clever long words I’m using when talking to someone!).

Have you lots of ideas and jottings you want to share? The thought of starting a blog appeals but learning all the necessary programs and jargon does not! A virtual assistant can take you through the various stages required to get your idea out on the internet.

From design through to maintaining your presence, we can assist. Your WordPress blog can be free or self-hosted. Self-hosted may well involve finding someone to host and pay a small fee for the service and registering a domain. If you have a website already, TJConsulting Virtual Assistant can arrange for your blog to be installed on your site, and if you haven’t , we can attend to the alternative.

If you have loads of ideas of things you want to include in your content but don’t want the hassle of learning another programme,we can transcribe what ever you send to us, convert it and upload for you. With a list of titles and topics you would like to cover, and no time to put them together, leave it to us and we will write them for you. Images can be added to your blog, whether they are your photographs (always a good idea, because there is no problem with copyright) or linked to a site like Flickr, we can also manage this.

Let’s liven up your post and embed a video or a podcast, both great ways to entertain your readers. If you find it difficult to put your words down on paper but enjoy talking to people, perhaps we can create a video which we can embed on your post and place on YouTube or Vimeo, for your followers to view.

If you want to make your blog more organised and SEO friendly, TJConsulting Virtual Assistant can, categorise, tag and keyword your post. We ensure that your blog has all that it needs to really make a splash on the internet.

WordPress has a very good spam filter which sorts the comments which have been made on your posts, into ones that they regard as spam and those you need to acknowledge. Comments are a good way for your readers and you to interact, and TJConsulting Virtual Assistant can respond and moderate the comments for you. It’s good idea to respond to all the comments, even if it’s just to say ‘thank you’. Responding to comments can start a conversation and you then make a connection with your readers.

In a nutshell:
You = idea for a blog

Virtual assistant =

You = published and followed

TJConsulting Virtual Assistant can help you get your blog up and running and maintain your presence on the Internet. Call us on 0203 4688594 and let’s chat about what we can do for you and your blog.

In this fourth part of a series guide to search engine optimisation, we’re going to look at SEO considerations for content. It is extremely important that you are familiar with keyword research, and I would recommend reading part 3 of this series (Keyword Research) to help provide a solid foundation.

Once you have identified your keywords you then need to implement them in the correct manner on your site, including in the user-facing content, and also the source code, or CMS for your site, (in the meta- data, header and other appropriate tags). Today we’re going to focus on content…

It is important to ensure that the keywords you have identified feature in your content. I mean… why wouldn’t they? Having your keywords in your content is the most natural thing to do, providing you got the keyword research stage correct. Although this will contribute towards ranking your pages for the terms you have identified; most importantly this provides a consistent user journey and helps to assure visitors that your page is indeed relevant for the query they have initiated.

Some SEO practitioners may advise you to consider and optimise your keyword density, (which is the number of times a keyword may be used in any given piece of content, expressed as a percentage of total content). Whilst having your keywords in your content is important, I would advise against this approach. Come on now – if all we had to do was drop your keywords a magic number of times then the web would be full of dull pages of auto-written crap. It’s not the 90’s anymore!

I strongly urge you not to obsess about an optimum density, and instead focus on writing relevant and attractive content for your users.

More on debunking the keyword density myth (amongst others)!

Also check out this excellent piece on “promotional vs informative” copywriting, from web copywriting expert Angie Nikoleychuk.

About the author: Nichola Stott is a highly regarded search and social media professional with over a decade of experience in online communications. Nichola is director and co-founder of theMediaFlow, a search and social media agency; and is a regular conference speaker and contributor to online industry media including Econsultancy, SEO Chicks and State of Search. You can contact Nichola on linkedin  or twitter.

In this third part of a series guide to search engine optimisation, we’re going to look at keyword research. Keyword research is possibly one of the most important (if not the most important) foundation of an optimised website.  You may also wish to read the other posts in this series, which are the introduction to SEO and technical SEO factors.

Keyword Targetting

Search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo! use crawlers to retrieve information about all the information on the web. Complex weighted algorithms are then applied to determine which websites are relevant matches to a keyword search. Although these algorithms are sophisticated, and the crawlers are numerous and frequent; they are still not human, so we need to be clear and concise when constructing web pages so that the words people would use when searching for the products and services we offer appear in content, meta data, title and image tags.

To help you with keyword targeting there are a number of tools you can use. The important things to think about are:

Depending how much volume and competition there is on a keyword, you may prefer to choose a less competitive term. If a term is less competitive, then you will stand a better chance of ranking for that term, possibly in a shorter time too.

As an example if I offer a “virtual assistant” service, the term is highly competitive according to Google External Keyword Tool. It may make sense for me to also target “virtual assistant UK”, which is less competitive.

Free Tools for Keyword Research

Google

Spyfu

Wordtracker (offers free trial)

In part four, we’re going to take a look at where and how to apply your keywords in site content, in site meta data and in your HTML tags (such as title and image tags.)

About the author: Nichola Stott is a highly regarded search and social media professional with over a decade of experience in online communications. Nichola is director and co-founder of theMediaFlow, a search and social media agency; and is a regular conference speaker and contributor to online industry media including Econsultancy, SEO Chicks and State of Search. You can contact Nichola on linkedin  or twitter.

Objective: Our objective is to ensure that our technical set-up and foundation is optimal, so that anything we build on top of that can be more easily found and indexed.

To read the complete article click here

About the author: Nichola Stott is a highly regarded search and social media professional with over a decade of experience in online communications. Nichola is director and co-founder of theMediaFlow, a search and social media agency; and is a regular conference speaker and contributor to online industry media including Econsultancy, SEO Chicks and State of Search. You can contact Nichola on linkedin  or twitter.

The Guide to Search Engine Optimisation for Small Businesses – Part 1.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practise of ensuring that your site is built, and marketed in such a way; that search engine crawlers can more easily identify and rank your site, for the type of content and business you offer.

Why is this important?

Search is one of the most common online activities, and often the greatest driver of visits to any online business or blog, providing your site is optimised correctly. In fact the global search market place drives more than 100 billion searches a month, and as a region Europe drives the highest percentage of these global searches, according to leading global digital measurement company comScore.

During the course of this five part series, we are going to be looking at the fundamental areas of search engine optimisation, which are technical considerations; site building considerations, and site marketing considerations. In the final fifth edition, we will be looking at myths and common misconceptions, including practises to avoid, as well as credible sources for further reading.

In today’s post we’re going to look at the current state of the search engine market place and the very first steps…

Historically there used to be a number of different search engines, including Alta Vista, Alltheweb, Ask Jeeves, Hotbot etc. As Google began to rise in popularity and search became an extremely profitable business, due to the sponsored listings served with natural listings there was a lot of acquisition and consolidation in the marketplace. Yahoo! bought Alta Vista and Alltheweb, a number of partnerships were struck whereby the most popular search providers now power the search engine on popular online destinations, e.g. Google provides the search on AOL.

Today in the UK, Google has around 91% of the search engine market share, Bing and Yahoo! have around 3.5% each, Ask has 1% and the remainder is made up of a number of smaller search engines combined.

What this means is that to work smartly, any small to medium online business should focus on ranking well in Google first and foremost.  Additionally, tracking your appearance in search engines should be limited to Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

As a first step, you should ensure that you register for Google analytics, to help you monitor and track all traffic to your site, so that you can chart your progress. Secondly, you should also verify your site in Webmaster tools, which will help you to analyse how Google sees your site and also identify any errors.

Both of these Google tools are freely available to help you monitor and improve your traffic and website. We will be looking in more detail at these and other freely available tools, to assist you in optimising your website, throughout this series.

About the author: Nichola Stott is a highly regarded search and social media professional with over a decade of experience in online communications. Nichola is director and co-founder of theMediaFlow, a search and social media agency; and is a regular conference speaker and contributor to online industry media including Econsultancy, SEO Chicks and State of Search. You can contact Nichola on linkedin or twitter.

Within Google AdWords there are tools that will allow you to find keywords that you might not have considered that not only receive a decent search rate, but have little competition and will therefore cost less. There are many free and paid keyword research tools available but using Google’s Keyword Research Tool is the best to make decisions based on Google-only data.

• This tool is free
• Google has more search data than many other services
• It shows bid prices and search volume estimates next to keywords
• It shows your current page titles and keywords
• It shows the % of organic and paid traffic going to a URL

For any keyword, the Google Search-based Keyword Tool will show up to 800 related keywords with cost and search volume estimates. The tool also works to show you 100 keywords related to a site that they think you could bid on which are not already in your account. The data is easy to export using a handy export button.

For further reading go to Get Elastic The Ecommerce Blog .