PR Fire press release - SEO in Bristol

PR Fire Press release : How To Find A Good SEO in Bristol

Advice for small businesses, article written my myself. Although based in Weston-Super-Mare, SEO work that I do is carried out all over the UK and I thought I would headline the article as Bristol to have a catchment area of Avon, Somerset and my nearest city.

100 free SEO tips

I am experienced in all of these, should you require a quote for some or all of these, please contact me.

1. If you're launching a new site, or new content, write an introduction and submit it to share sites like Digg, Reddit and Now Public.
2. Create a Yahoo Group in the niche your site sits.
3. Create a MySpace account and use it to publisise your site.
4. Bookmark your site on Del.icio.us and if you're really keen, add a Del.icio.us button to your homepage.
5. Create a Technorati account and "claim" your blog.
6. Submit your site to free, search engine friendly directories. An excellent list can be found here.
7. Conduct a survey. This is an excellent way to generate offline publicity.
8. Place a free ad for your company on Gumtree.
9. Syndicate your site's content by using an RSS feeds.
   Submit your RSS feeds to agregator sites like FeedBurner, Squidoo, Feedboy, Jordomedia, FeedBomb, FeedCat, rssmad, feeddirectory and feedfury. Stolen from DigitalPoint
10. Write an article related to your site and submit it to article sites.
11. Sign up to StumbleUpon and get your friends to Stumble your site.
12. Create a custom 404 page so that even if someone encounters an error on your site, they are re-directed somewhere nice.
13. Set up a 301 redirect to take traffic from your non-www address to your www address. See here for more info.
14. Add a link to your site in the signature of any forums you post on.
15. Tell your friends about your site. It's free advertising.
16. Speel cheek ur stie. Nothing appears more amateur than a site with typos or spelling mistakes.
17. Test your site and make sure it appears correctly in all major browsers.
18. Buy enough hosting. No one likes a slow site.
19. Don't worry about PageRank - worrying about PageRank is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum.
20. Offer something for free. Free is good. People tell their friends about free stuff.
21. Tell your neighbours, you never know what contacts they might have.
22. Offer your users as many ways as possible to contact you. MSN, Skype, Yahoo etc all complement email, phone and a real address.
23. Advertise your site on Craigslist. It's free, relevant and localised.
24. Do NOT use frames.
25. Submit your site to DMOZ.org. It may take time, but it's worth it.
26. Create an XML sitemap of your site and submit it to Google.
27. Get a custom t-shirt made with your website url on it, and wear it often.
28. Ask a large breasted lady to wear one too.
29. Sign up with an affiliate programme to sell your product, or if you're a publish, make some cash!
30. On your Contact Page ask people if they mind receiving your newsletter.
31. Send out a newsletter!
32. Go to a free seminar for Website owners. You might learn something.
33. Find quality and relevant blogs and leave a comment (with a link back to your site of course).
34. Don't pay people to submit your site to search engines. It's a waste of money.
35. YouTube and Google Video are excellent portals on which to launch a viral campaign.
36. Giving away an eBook is an excellent way to generate word-of-mouth about your site.
37. Sponsor a Wordpress theme or a phpListDirectory template.
38. If you sell products that are advertised on television by the manufacturer, add "As Seen on TV" to your site!
39. Avoid proprietry technologies like Java and Active X.
40. Put downloadable content on your site, but make sure it's not manufacturer specific - so mp3 rather than wma.
41. Learn about CSS. It's the new HTML.
42. Contribute to related subject areas on Wikipedia.
43. Ask bloggers and other Web site owners to review your site and/or products.
44. Have user friendly page names - most tools comes with some way to avoid http://www.yourdomain.com/pgInfoPage...CFE3AEDAF8DD9D
45. If you must have a Flash homepage, make sure you have a "Skip Intro" link.
46. Tell your local rag about your site. These newspapers are desparate for stories and you may well even get a pic of your ugly picture published.
47. Become a leading authority on your chosen subject.
48. Donate money to a charity and most will place a link on their site back to you.
49. Abide to W3C standards - it will help your site in the long term.
50. Your local community sports teams offer cheap, but highly effective sponsorship opportunities.
51. Publisise your site on related forums - but don't spam!
52. Ask bloggers to write about your site or product - in return for a link of course.
53. Offer a competition related to something in the news - so football around the time of the World Cup etc.
54. Add a "Tell a Friend" function to your site, so people can easily recommend you to their mates.
55. Have a Sitemap on your site to allow users to navigate around quickly and to aid the search engines.
56. Have a nice keyword rich title at the top of each of your pages. Users and search engines both like descriptive titles.
57. Include a Feedburner button on your site so people can easily subscribe to your feed.
58. If you use PPC then create a landing page for each of your AdWords - it'll boost your conversations no end.
59. Appear on Dragon's Den :)
60. Create a Press section on your site where can you store all your press releases, logos and banners.
61. Add a link to your site from within your eBay profile.
62. Ask your friends to give you honest feedback on your site.
63. The best way to find someone to do any kind of work on your site is through personal recommendation.
64. Gain exposure by submitting photos and pictures to Flikr.
65. Share your banners on banner exchange sites.
66. Make sure it's easy for your users to subscribe to your RSS feed.
67. Create a "lense" for your site on Squidoo
68. Ask friends, collegues and associates to "Favourite" your blog on Technorati.
69. You can add a Bulletin to your MySpace account promoting your site that all your MySpace Friends will see.
70. Response to your customer's emails promptly, even if it is with a simply auto-responder. No one likes to wait 3 or 4 days for an acknowledgement of their contact with you.
71. Get a professional Copywriter to give your site a once over. If you are on a tight budget, limit to the just the homepage.
72. Make a list, "Top 10"s work well. Update it regularly to give your visitors a reason to return.
73. What did you learn today? Tell other people and they might learn something too.
74. Do you have really hot content on your site that geeks would love? If so Slashdot will bring you a mass of traffic.
75. Deep link directories are an excellent way to promote inner pages of your site.
76. Meta tags might carry less weight than previously, but you should still have them on every page.
77. Ask your Gran for feedback on your site. Never ignore the silver surfers.
78. Include a "Add to your Technorati favourites" button on your site.
79. Google Analytics is free and will tell you all you need to know about who's visiting your site.
80. Search engines will find you. Don't pay money for your site to be "submitted".
81. Don't be afraid to link to other sites, especially if they are relevant and to highly respected sites.
82. KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid: use CSS to control layout, style and colours and use HTML text rather than graphics to represent text.
83. Validate your HTML and CSS. It'll help ensure your site displays well in all browsers.
    Small pages sizes and optimised graphics will give your site a snappy feel and won't require users to wait around for it to load.
84. If you plan to submit your site to lots of directory or article sites - create an email especially for this. Delete it when you're finished to avoid spam.
85. "Link baiting" means writing some killer content that people will want to link to. Like a "101 Tips to Improve Your Web Presence" list!
86. If your chosen field is technology related then write a "whitepaper". That's a posh name for an article.
87. Google receives roughly 50% of all search requests, Yahoo 25% and MSN just 10%. That's a good rule of thumb as to how much emphisis to put on each.
88. Make sure you have a robots.txt file in the root of your Web site. You can use this to control search engines, but if nothing else it'll reduce the number of 404 errors in your Weblogs.
89. Free online games, a forum or chatrooms will give your users a reason to come back to your site.
90. Ebooks with re-seller rights make an excellent "free gift" for your site.
91. Upload your product feed to Froogle. It's FREE!
92. Add ALT tags to all images
93. Search out unanswered questions on Yahoo! Answers and add your site as the "Source".
    PageRank is vanity, ranking is sanity.
94. Yahoo are catching up with Google with an excellent set of webmaster tools called Site Explorer.
95. Don't buy traffic. It's un-targetted and won't convert.
96. Pay Per Click advertising gets you fast results - and if it's handled well can be very profitable.
97. Upload a favicon.gif file so that your users have a nice icon when they bookmark your site.
98. Create a blog on blogspot (like this one)
99. Post responses to Yahoo! Answers (you can search questions with keywords)
100. Create and maintain a good LinkedIn profile - with a picture - research has shown people like to know who they are talking to

[Thanks to Matt K for his work in compiling this list]

Bristol / Somerset / Weston-super-Mare SEO consultant

The sooner people get over the idea of "top of google" as being a definition of SEO, the better. But it DOESN'T suit all businesses, just as other mediums don't. It's real, it's here to stay and for most businesses who plan correctly it can be hugely profitable.

You wouldn't believe a TV ad agency if they told you they could get your ad placed in the X-Factor breaks for £100, so why would you believe you're going to double your business for an equally suspect fee from an SEO company.

Research. Research. Research. People get scammed because in most cases they fail to conduct ANY research at all in the first place. It's basic business acumen. If you feel let down by a previous agency or consultant I would love to hear your story.

With a brand new website, position 1/2 in Google is achievable (in free organic search) with keyword research and regular emarketing I'd say 6 months in all honesty. I'm not going to lie about this and anyone who says different will just be taking your hard earned cash! However - with Adwords I can get you to google page one in a matter of hours. What adword daily budget would you set yourself?

I have worked with new sites and currently work full time on contract for a company who launched in October 2009, 39 hours a week just to put it into perspective the man hours involved are substantial.

The services involved are:

• Installation and reporting of Google Analytics
• Submission of URL to Google Webmaster tools, and code installed into your site to verify
  Simialr code verification for Alexa, Yahoo, Bing
• Adwords reporting, keyword researching
• Directory submission with full listing and images
• Article writing (500 words) submitting to article sites and press release sites
• Blog creation on wordpress, Blog on Google (blogspot)
• Google maps directory verification and submission
• DMOZ submission
• Posting on forums, creating identities
• URL submission using a tool for global search engines
• Facebook, Twitter, social networking accounts, creating proper profiles
• Setting up Google Alerts for competitors and your own URL to track appearance on the internet
• Meta tags and meta description for your website, Alt tags on images, proofreading for grammar etc
• Web page copy composition in a style to suit you

What I say to my clients with a low budget is to agree an arrangement of so many hours a week and I continue through this list and take payment as we go along. The work I carry out with contracting is done in the evenings and weekends.

Based in Weston-super-Mare I carry out remote work - there's no need for a visit - however if you are based in Bristol or Somerset I am happy to pop in and have a chat face to face about your SEO and website optimisation expectations.