In our scramble to keep up with all things bright and flashy in the internet space, we sometimes forget to use our logic and basic common sense.

Most website owners and marketing managers spend endless hours sourcing the next best method of optimising their website, making sure it is climbing higher on Google’s natural rankings and trying to weigh up which paid marketing services can be employed to increase sales.

While all of these are vital elements to ensuring your visibility online, don’t forget the usual logic that applies to offline business. You would never allow a spelling mistake to appear on your printed brochure for fear of the message it would send out to your potential clients and the damage it would do to your brand. Yet I see so many websites with the most atrocious spelling, no punctuation, terrible spacing errors and downright dodgy English!

While this might appear petty, you have got to remember that everyone who sends you an email enquiry about their holiday to Africa has almost certainly sent the same enquiry to your competition.

This attention to detail can be the difference between gaining or losing a potential client’s trust in your brand. So go forth and conquer the web but PLEASE don’t forget to spell correctly!

Don’t be fooled by too much of the hype and jargon that is flung around the industry. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is no more than the commonsense application of offline principles to the internet.

Google has become a lot smarter! Keep in mind that you are writing for Google just as much as you are writing for your users.  

Yes it can be complicated. No your site won’t get to number 1 on Google’s natural listings overnight. Yes it will improve the traffic to your website overtime. And no it’s not all about how your site is coded.

There are plenty of smaller aspects of SEO that are both logical and easy to implement. First off, don’t forget to focus on your keywords. Many companies understand the logic behind keywords within content but very few actually apply it consistently and continuously.

Constantly re-evaluate your content and make sure that your keywords are still relevant and targeted. Decide on several words for each page or each category within your website and make sure you include as many of these in your content as sounds natural. Long gone are the days of keyword stuffing in your content. Google has become a lot smarter! Keep in mind that you are writing for Google just as much as you are writing for your users.

Explaining to your users where a place is and what it is near to and reiterating its position affirms that they have found the product they are looking for and it also tells Google that this would be a good page to show to users looking for “x”.

If you start to understand that SEO simply employs logical methods to organising and arranging information – it will start to seem less intimidating!

Usefull links to Hints and Tips

Content is King

SEO Title Tags Guidelines 

So you have settled on an agency to run your Google advertising campaigns for you and now you can sit back and watch the enquiries roll in. Wrong!

PPC campaigns require input from the advertisers, specifically when it comes to Ad copy.

Large PPC campaigns are complex and time-consuming to manage and are best left to the professionals but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a say about Ad Copy.

Google doesn’t leave us much space to punt our wares with a total of 95 characters per Ad (excluding the URL) but spending time on good Ad copy not only improves the success rates of your campaign statistics but also improves your brand.

It’s no good being a major player in your industry but your Ad copy doesn’t do you justice. If your agency is not familiar with your products or services then there is no harm in assisting them with writing the Ad copy.

At the very least it will be essential to spend some time explaining a little more about your company, its target market and some background on the products and services that you are entrusting them to market.

Mandy Schreiber is an Online Media Strategist for Traffic Brand