Project Objectives:

Fundraising Skills Ltd is an online training organisation based in Newcastle upon Tyne. They work with Tutors, IT Specialists and External Moderators to ensure schools, charities and community groups get the right combination of accredited training, tutor expertise and flexibility. Having trained and accredited over 1000 schools and community groups across the UK since 1999, Fundraising Skills Ltd wanted to take their business onto the next level via their new website and commissioned ONIT Solutions to develop an online marketing campaign.

When we initially agreed to take on this project, we identified some issues which would have had a detrimental impact on the success of the SEO campaign. Namely that the domain name was hosted in a foreign country and was .com as apposed to .co.uk, which is preferable when you are targeting a UK, based market. We had to do extensive preliminary work in the early stages of the project to identify the most appropriate solution in terms of minimal disruption to the client and also maximizing the SEO campaign from the offset. Subsequently we have managed to overcome these initial obstacles by liaising with Fundraising Skills Ltd throughout each stage of the initial SEO set-up phase and have gone on to enjoy premium placements in major search engines for all chosen keywords.

Domain Name: www.fundraisingskills.co.uk

Keyword 1: Fundraising Courses           Competition: 482,000

Keyword 2: Grants Training Course       Competition: 197,000

Keyword 3: School Fundraising              Competition: 3,080,000

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Project Objectives:

ONIT Solutions were approached by Sunderland based Hackett Property Services, to deliver a strong web presence for the new element of the business - Serviced Apartments. Following extensive keyword research and consultation with the client, we developed a bespoke SEO package which has enabled us to quickly establish the website as a front runner for all ten of the company’s keywords.

Domain in Industry: Serviced Apartments

Domain: www.hackettservicedapartments.com

Keyword 1: Hotel in Sunderland                                    Competition: 342,000

Keyword 2: Serviced Apartments Tyne and Wear      Competition: 31,300

Keyword 3: Hotel Sunderland                                        Competition: 1,850,000

Achievements:

• Achieved page 1 rankings for 10 keywords within 3 months.

• Achieved page 1 rankings for 10 keywords in Google.co.uk

• Achieved page 1 rankings in MSN.com and Yahoo.com for 10 keywords.

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Link Popularity refers to the number of links pointing TO your site FROM other sites on the Web. Building links is one of the most important factors in getting top placements on the major search engines. In very simplistic terms, link popularity refers to the number and quality of the incoming links that are pointing to your site. These other sites consider your site important enough to link to. So, in the engine’s view, your site is considered important as well.

Building Links

Link building is not about search engine optimisation, it’s not about boosting your Google PageRank, it’s not about publishing a link directory and it’s not about swapping links with as many other websites as possible.

Building links through reciprocal link exchanges is a simple yet very powerful website promotional tool. If done correctly, increasing your linkage will:

• Increase your traffic significantly.
• Improve your visibility in the search engines.
• Provide an added resource to your website.
• Save you a lot of advertising money.
• Save you time.

Link building requires dedication and consistent effort. It is the most difficult, time-consuming and important task a Search Engine Optimiser performs to get a website ranked well. The largest drawback with building link popularity properly is TIME. It takes time to:

• Find the websites to link with
• Make the link requests
• Wait on those link requests
• Process, organise, and manage the links
• Have the search engines find or “spider” your link partners
• Check to see if your links are still on your partner’s websites

Link building requires dedication and consistent effort. It is the most difficult, time-consuming and important task an SEO performs to get a website ranked well.

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Google and Yahoo this week announced 2007’s fastest-growing and top search terms, respectively, providing some interesting insight into the Internet’s collective psyche. Unsurprisingly, celebrity terms remained extremely popular, especially evident on Yahoo’s overall list. Yahoo’s 2007 list of top trends breaks up search terms into thematic categories that are a good reflection of media coverage trends; see environment (”Grass is Always Greener”) and crazy celebrities (”Celebrity Downslides”). This year they also added a list of searches on social bookmarking site del.icio.us, which are slightly more celebral than their top 10 overall list that is topped (again) by the venerable Britney Spears. Here’s that top 10 overall list (via WebProNews):

1. Britney Spears
2.WWE
3. Paris Hilton
4. Naruto
5. Beyonce
6. Lindsay Lohan
7. RuneScape
8. Fantasy Football
9. Fergie
10. Jessica Alba

Yesterday TechCrunch reported that Google exec Marissa Mayer revealed 2007’s fastest-growing search terms on the Today Show. Here’s the list she announced:

1. iphone
2. webkinz
3. tmz
4. transformers
5. youtube
6. club penguin
7. myspace
8. heroes
9. facebook
10. anna nicole smith

Note the relative absence of celebrities in Google’s list when compared to Yahoo’s. Google’s list is fundamentally different from a top 10 most popular list by definition, because it is compiled by determining the most popular search terms for 2007 and seeing how much queries increased compared to last year (at least, that’s how Google determined 2006 fastest-growing terms, TechCrunch notes). Yahoo’s trend list methodology sounds similar (emphasis mine): “To come up with the Top Trends of 2007, we analyze search queries based on a number of factors, including absolute volume and growth versus previous periods, to see which themes and trends bubble to the surface”; the continued presence of Britney Spears on their overall list, though, suggests that absolute volume is still a dominant factor in their equation. The end effect on the overall list is that Yahoo’s users end up looking a little dumber than Google’s users - perhaps this is why the overall list isn’t included on Yahoo’s trends page (in fact, I couldn’t find it on Yahoo though it was available on TechCrunch and WebProNews), though I’m sure the overall most popular list from Google would show similar queries.

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Remember - Quality Keywords Equal Quality Traffic.

Obviously you want the search engines to drive lots of traffic to your website. Our goal is to optimise your pages for the keywords that bring the highest numbers of visitors. We will work with you to find the keyword phrases related to your industry, that your target market is searching for.

On optimising your website, we would be looking ideally for 3 keywords which would need to be placed:

• in the subheadings
• headlines
• within the paragraph content
• meta title
• subtitle
• within links (anchor phrases)
• meta keywords
• images (alt tags)

Title Tag/Page Title

Title tag is the tag that defines the text in the top line of a web browser. The title tag is probably the most important on-page factor because search engines usually use the title tag to provide a link to the sites which match the query made by the user. Thus, adding your main keywords to the title tag will definitely boost your website’s rankings.

Header Tags

The header tag, referred to as the H1 tag, will be used as the title of the content on the webpage. As search engines read pages from top to bottom, so the H1 tag should contain your most important keyword and it should be placed at the top of the page which will be seen by your visitors.

If required, a sub-heading for your webpage can be added called an H2 tag. This will include your second most important keyword.

Page Content

It is important to use your keywords throughout the page content in natural ways and equally important not over use your keywords in your websites content.

Alt Tag

The alt tag of your images should also contain your keywords. Each image needs to have a different variation of your keywords. If each image is similar, search engines may see them as spam.

Meta Description Tag

Search engines will use your meta description tag as the short description of your website listed in their search result pages. Writing a keywords-rich description will help in improving your website’s position. The length of your description should not be too long, 2 to 3 sentences will be enough and the description should be encouraging people to click the link to your website.
On-page optimisation will improve your website’s positions but you can’t achieve top rankings with on-page optimisation only. To get your website to the top, off-page optimisation is needed. In fact it is the off-page optimisation that can get your website to the top. But this does not mean that on-page optimisation can be ignored because off-page optimisation is far more effective when on-page optimisation is in place.

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