Sleep well at night!

Missing ALT tags

Plug in SEO is a great free app that assures me I’m on the right lines in terms of on-page optimisation.  Our site Fancy Dress Party Ideas contains over 1,000 images, so I was worried that I’d have missed a couple, leaving them without tags.  Plug in SEO told me which ones were missing alt text in an instant (it was only a couple actually!) so that was really easy to fix.

Slow site speed

The speed of my site was also flagged as an issue, one which I had not been aware of at all.  I realised another app I had previously installed was slowing the site down massively, which I know can have negative effects in terms of direct user experience and search results (Google actually factors website speed into its SERPs, I found out).  So, again, Plug in SEO saved me there!  A quick uninstall of an app that I wasn’t even using made a huge difference to the page load time – from about 12 seconds down to a very impressive 4.

Good value

Of all the apps that I’ve installed, this one is the most efficient, effective and, of course, worth the price!  I have used the Live Chat feature on a couple of occasions, and both times the expert has been really helpful and allowed my limited knowledge of coding to be enough to fix the problems I was experiencing on my site.  They talk you through it step-by-step, so it becomes very simple.

Overall, a massive thumbs up for Plug in SEO from me!

It's great to hear from customers that we've been able to help out with Plug in SEO.

collection of famous fairytales with modern instances.

More than twelve illustrations, including seven coloured plates.

Containing

Three Little SEOs

The Webmaster's New Feature

The Scraper And The Creator

The Web Analyst Who Cried Broken

You may obtain this publication without charge here.

"On my own I was getting 15 - 20 hits a day. Now some days I am doubling my traffic."

It's always good to hear a success story, large or small, so we were delighted to hear this from Jessica at Deep Relief Massage Therapy in Massachusetts, just a week of following Plug in SEO's advice.

There is no magic bullet when it comes to driving more traffic - well, actually that's not true: you can spend a lot of money on advertising and you'll see traffic quickly.  But if you're running a small, local business like Jessica's, you want to see results without spending a lot of money.  If you spend a few minutes every day on writing content and building links, you'll make a difference.  And as Jessica says, "I know some things may take a couple of weeks to take effect."  Be patient and stick at it, and use Plug in SEO's advice to concentrate your efforts on what's going to be most effective.

Plug in SEO will automatically suggest keyword terms for you to focus on, based on various factors including the search volume, but it needs to be "seeded" with some terms to get started with - think of this as pointing us in the right direction.  The better your initial search terms, the better Plug in SEO's recommendations will be, at least to start with.

Get narrow

Don't worry too much about all the people you're missing out on who are searching on those broad, competitive terms. Reports vary, but somewhere between 68% and 90% of users click on the first page of results, so you're much better off focusing on narrow terms where you can rank well, than broad terms that are dominated by big players.  You will get far more business by appearing on the first page for a term that 100 people search for today, than to rank on page 10 for a search term that 1,000 (or even 10,000) people search for.

If you really want to dig into the detail, you can use the Google keyword tool to understand how many people are searching for different terms - this is called the Search Volume, and it's one of the factors Plug in SEO takes into account when making recommendations.

Niche capabilities and specialities

Pick keywords that highlight what's special about your particular business.  Think carefully about what distinguishes you from your competitors.

• How would you describe your company, or its products or services?  Add adjectives (fresh, tasty, cheap, wholesome, quick, reliable, spicy) to the nouns (cheese, haggis, car rental, dog food) to make them more specific.
• Do you have products or services that target specific events in the calendar?  Halloween, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Mothers' Day....
• How would your customer or the product end-user describe themselves?  Student, senior, girls, boys...
• What might people want to learn about your products?  History, making of, recipes, size...
• Are there alternative names for your products?  Milk drinks, milkshakes, milk shakes. How about protein drinks too?

So for example, if the thing that's special about you is that you make haggis in a whole range of sizes, you might choose keywords like individual haggis, family haggis, giant haggis. And since it's so good for Halloween, and you know your customers tend to be families celebrating together, why not put specifically target family haggis on Halloween (and variants like Halloween family haggis). You'd probably want to design a specific page focussing just on that particular occasion, so that users find information that's directly relevant to exactly what they searched for.

Location and locality

Google's local business search results help small businesses with a physical location

If you serve a particular locality, pick keywords that include the name(s) of the towns and areas you work in.  For example, Florist is much harder to rank well on than Guildford Florist or Surrey Florist.  The chances are, if your customers are looking for a convenient local business, they'll enter the city, country or state name as part of their search term.

This isn't strictly about keywords, but while we're thinking about the SEO benefits of having a physical location, like a shop, make sure the address is listed on your website, so that you can be picked up for Google's local business search results.   Why not also list your business (with links) on sites like Yelp or Foursquare?

Use your keywords in your content

So you've picked some niche keywords that you'll focus on - now what?  Targeting a particular keyword is not as simple as typing it into Plug in SEO, sitting back and waiting for visitors!  You do actually have to include those keywords on your website.  Unfortunately, content doesn't write itself so you (or someone in your team, or an outside contractor) need to put some effort in.

Review your website and look for places where you could use the more specific keyword term in place of a broad term.  Where your copy says We sell our haggis at the Easton Farmers' Market, how about We sell our tasty, organic haggis at the Easton Farmers' Market. But don't sacrifice natural, easy to read text - your site still needs to appeal to human visitors.

Keep building up your content, making sure it includes the keywords you picked.  Creating frequent content makes a huge difference. Plug in SEO makes suggestions about writing blog posts or creating content containing your keywords.

For more guidance and resources on picking keywords, check out our Paint By Numbers Guide to Choosing Keywords.

We'll be picking the winner of the Amazon vouchers out of a virtual hat very soon, and crunching all the numbers, but I couldn't resist sharing a couple of really exciting outcomes with you all straight away.

87% said yes, you would recommend Plug in SEO

93% agree that Plug in SEO gives you valuable advice

So pleased that we're able to help!  And we'll work on the other insights you have shared with us to make Plug in SEO even more useful.  Thank you again!

Clicking a Get It Done button, and let us know a little about the help you need, and we'll pass your request on to one or more of our partners, who will get in touch to discuss your needs and quote for the work you need done.  No obligation, no fuss.

Our goal is to make it as simple as possible for you to improve your search traffic, with as much or as little outside help as you need.  Our partners are qualified experts - no black hat here!  And we'll use your feedback to make sure our partners are up to scratch.

If you're an SEO expert, web developer or content creator interested in becoming part of our ecosystem, contact us at hello@pluginseo.com for more details.  Black hatters need not apply!

Following on from our earlier case study, the folks at Qlockwork time tracking just sent us this nice screen shot.  They told us, "We loved seeing all those green arrows showing how our keyword positions, visitor numbers and conversions are rising!"

"We've still got work to do - the red crosses are keywords we aren't ranking on yet - but it's great to see evidence that our efforts are paying off.  Once you get into the habit, it's easy to check in with Plug in SEO and follow a piece of advice every day.  We've found valuable link sources that we would never have identified before, and the benefits are really paying off in terms of increased sales."

For the technically minded we've:

• Reduced our over-the-wire page sizes by up to 75%
• Moved all static content to a faster CDN with more points of presence
• Introduced smarter paging to cut database requests, with client side ajax request queuing
• Added 60% more server capacity

I hope you love the difference.

So if you've got an exclusive photo of a new-born haggis, don't just copy the pic straight off your camera and onto your website with the filename IMG4043.jpg.  Rename it to something meaningful, like baby-haggis-emerging-from-shell.jpg, to give the search engines a chance of understanding what's in the image.

Presumably the multimedia file is relevant to your business, so try to include one of your keywords or keyphrases in the filename.  If we just called that image baby-emerging-from-shell.jpg, omitting the word haggis, the search engines won't identify the real niche that it's relevant to.

It's best to separate words using hyphens or underscores to separate words - after all, that's how most blog and CMS systems  construct URLs from your content titles, and it's what URL rewriting tools do to build meaningful URLs from product catalogues, so we know search engines are good at interpreting words separated that way.

*Though they are working on it