If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is, however, there are some firms out there that will promise the earth and leave it to an account manager to ‘manage your expectations’.

Hiring a professional to provide a quality service does come at a cost and the size of the market will decide how much effort it will take to compete, but  successfully run campaigns should always pay for themselves, many times over.

Google Toolbar PageRank (the green bar you see on the Google Toolbar) may not be as important as it once was, however, you should still have cause for concern if a website owned by an SEO company has a value of 0 displayed. This could imply that the site owners have received a penalty and their practices may not be sound.

The reason this domain has a PageRank 0 is because it has only just gone live and Google has yet to assign a value.

This site used to be known as www.kesphelps.co.uk which has been online since 2002 and there has been a recent migration from www.kesphelps.co.uk to www.linkjuice.co.uk.  The appropriate 301 permanent redirects were put in place from www.kesphelps.co.uk to www.linkjuice.co.uk which tell Google the web pages have ‘Permanently Moved’  and their new location. Also, Google Webmaster Tools has been notified of the change of address.

This is the Google endorsed approach to migrating domains and is recommended to minimise the risk of lost rankings and traffic.

NB: when migrating domains always back it up with a strategic link building campaign.

Rankings have held and traffic hasn’t dropped. Now it’s just a case of waiting for Google to do it’s thing and the mystical green fairy dust to reappear…

The new Link Juice website features fresh new branding and an update summary of all the SEO consultancy services offered by the firm, including SEO audits, link-building, social media advice and more. “Our new site projects a much more professional image, as befits an SEO consultant operating in today’s market,” comments Kes Phelps, Link Juice founder and principal SEO consultant. “However, we’ll still be providing the same care and attention to all our clients, new and old. Working with Link Juice is about personal service and measurable results, not visiting flashy offices or dealing with account handlers.”

The newly launched Link Juice will trade as a limited company. “We feel that a more corporate image, coupled with limited-company status, will give clients the reassurance of dealing with an established, stable SEO consultancy,” says Kes. “We’ve been around for three years now, weathering the recession and serving some key clients since day one, and we want our public profile to reflect that.”

The name Link Juice reflects the central importance of link-building, or gaining links from reputable third-party sites. “We’re not saying that other elements of SEO aren’t important,” says Kes. “But link-building has moved centre stage as the largest, most important task for the SEO consultant. Most firms understand that their site has to be developed in a particular way in order to be searchable. However, there’s an ever-growing need to gain permanent, high-quality one-way links from reputable sites if you want your site to rank highly.”

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A Western visitor looks on while a venerable Chinese fisherman punts his raft out on to a wide, slow-moving river at dawn. At the front of the raft perches a cormorant. Soon, the bird is plucking fish from the water, helping the fisherman to swell his catch.

These images are from a recent TV advert produced by HSBC, the leading multinational bank. As the voiceover explains, ‘fishermen in Guillin, China, use local experts to help them catch more fish’. This is used to promote HSBC’s local knowledge as a support to its investment expertise – another aspect to the ‘world’s local bank’ angle that HSBC has been using to promote its brand for several years.

The cormorant is a large bird native to coasts and rivers that lives off fish. There are around 40 different species that are found almost everywhere in the world. The name cormorant means ‘crow of the sea’. Cormorants can fly at 50mph and are excellent underwater swimmers, which is why they are so good at catching fish.

In some countries, notably China and Japan, cormorants are trained to fish in rivers under the control of human fishermen, in a practice that is over 1000 years old. Cormorant fishing has also been recorded in Peru as long ago as the 5th century AD, predating the first instances of the practice in Japan.

However, the process of cormorant fishing isn’t such a friendly partnership as it might appear. On fishing days, cormorants to be used for fishing are not given food, so they are hungry by the time the boat goes out. To prevent the cormorant from swallowing larger fish, the fisherman will place a metal ring around the lower part of the bird’s throat. This allows it to swallow small fish, but not larger ones. When a cormorant has caught a fish in its throat, the fisherman brings the bird back to the boat with the snare and has the bird spit the fish up. Cormorants can capture fish as large as carp, which can weigh as much as 1.81kg (4lb). Some cormorants are so well trained that they can catch up to 60 fish an hour.

This aspect of the process seems to be largely absent from the HSBC advert, where the bird appears to be catching fish and returning to the boat of its own free will. Because of this, it has been argued that the advert romanticises animal cruelty, by ‘airbrushing out’ the suffering of the animals involved. Others feel that, because the bird can still eat smaller fish, the practice of cormorant fishing is no more cruel than using a horse to pull a cart. Presumably HSBC has carefully considered the potential impact on its brand of using this type of practice to promote its services?

Well it wasn’t quite as straight forward as that. Here’s the steps I went through:

Firstly the Web Platform Installer wouldn’t add the database user i’d previously created so I went back to the Wordpress famous 5 minute install and went through the process manually.

The server wouldn’t let me import my old RSS feed so I had to add each post manually and change the Published On dates.

Initially friendly URL’s/permalinks wouldn’t work and just returned a 404 error. After a few tries Wordpress suggested I add a web.config file and provided the code. After fiddling with the Rewrite path and uploading to a few different locations the friendly URL’s worked fine.

<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <rewrite>
      <rules>
        <rule name=”wordpress” patternSyntax=”Wildcard”>
          <match url=”*” />
            <conditions>
              <add input=”{REQUEST_FILENAME}” matchType=”IsFile” negate=”true” />
              <add input=”{REQUEST_FILENAME}” matchType=”IsDirectory” negate=”true” />
            </conditions>
          <action type=”Rewrite” url=”index.php” />
        </rule>
      </rules>
    </rewrite>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

I then manually added canonical and meta refresh tags to every page on my old blog to the new pages. This was a bit of a pain but the old blog was hosted on a Windows shared server and the pages were all flat HTML so 301 redirecting on a page-by-page basis wasn’t an option.

And there you have it. A search engine friendly Wordpress blog hosted on a Windows server.

….

Phase 1 – Strategy

Understanding objectives
Market research
Define site structure
SEO review and recommendations
Recommendations
Programming
Agree KPI’s

Phase 2 – Initial link building

Phase 3 – Ongoing maintenance

That’s it in a nutshell! I’ll be expanding on these points over the coming weeks. Feel free to add your comments below…

To get the most from these links you should ensure the linking page is relevant to the target keyword and URL. This means the target keyword should appear in the META title, header and evenly throughout the content of the linking page. Of course the target keyword should be used as the anchor text of the outbound link.

Remember these points when using article marketing for link building to get the most from your efforts.

To remedy this you can place a 301 Permanent Redirect from the non-www version of the domain to the www version. Detailed instructions on how to do this can be viewed here: http://www.stepforth.com/resources/web-marketing-knowledgebase/non-www-redirect.

You can also login in to Google Webmaster Tools and set your preferred display URL to the full www version.

Article marketing & online PR

Publishing articles and press releases related to your products or services on high traffic websites is a great way of gaining more targeted visitors, and links!

In exchange for providing unique, well written and researched content for their readers, you receive a link back to your own site. Readers already interested in your products or services follow links to your site and search engines reward your increased ‘link popularity’ with higher rankings.

Link baiting

Link baiting involves placing a feature piece of content on your website that has been designed to attract links organically.

The content is designed to appeal to websites that are not just relevant to yours, but also offer exceptional link value i.e. hub and authority sites.

Directory submissions

While there are thousands of directories online at any-one-time, only a handful are considered worth submitting to in terms of link popularity.

We maintain a list of high ranking and high traffic, major, general and niche directories that we can manually submit your website to for improved visitor levels and increased rankings. On completion you receive details of the directories we’ve submitted your site to.

Customised emails are sent to the site owners and the link bait is submitted to social bookmarking and tagging sites for more links, traffic and brand exposure.

Link building consultancy

Occasionally it’s more appropriate for you to build your own links, however, it’s extremely important that when you do so, you spend your time effectively.

Using innovate tools combined with our experiences in some of the most competitive online markets, we will analyse your competitors’ in-bound link profiles to uncover where they get their ‘link juice’ from, and how much of it you will need to compete!

We will also select the most appropriate and relevant websites for you to gain links from, which saves you wasting time approaching ineffective sites.

On completion, you will receive a large database of sites where you might gain links from, including Authority, Educational and Government domains, and a comprehensive strategy/blue print designed specifically for your link building needs.