You are here: Home / Archives for Kent Routen

About Kent Routen

I use, promote and teach WordPress, SEO, SEM, Social Media and Email Marketing! I'm always keen to help businesses get results from their website.

With 13 years experience working in Europe and New Zealand, I can show you and get you excellent results for your business. I also speak French and like to travel and surf!

Feel free to comment and ask any questions. Kent Routen m: 021 160 7487. 
Join me on Google Plus

SEO copywriting for your business website homepage and about page

April 29, 2013 by Leave a Comment

seo copywritingGet the Kiwise SEO Copywriting Guidelines to help you write compelling copy about your business. Aim for 600 words of seo copywriting about your business for Page 1 in Google!

Write down your 5-10 seo copywriting Keywords you see as the most important for your business. If you need advice, simply send me an email to get you started.

 

The key objective for creating effective seo copywriting is to summarise your business, key services, products and what makes your business stand out from your competitors. We all have tons of information in our heads, but we need to get it online. I also recommend working with a seo copywriter.

Start with creating your website seo copywriting Homepage Title meta tag and Homepage Description meta tag.

Homepage Title Meta Tag

  • Step 1. Start with a title about your business. This will be your Homepage Title meta tag. The page title requires 40 to 70 characters. This is determined by how much space you see on the Google www.google.co.nz results page. Aim for 65-70 characters.

Example: “SEO copywriting for your business website homepage and about page” = 65 characters

Homepage Description Meta Tag

  • Step 2. Now your Business Description. This is called the Homepage Description meta tag. The Homepage Description meta tag requires 140 to 156 characters. Aim for 140 characters.

Example: “Get the Kiwise SEO Copywriting Guidelines to help you write compelling copy about your business. 600 words of seo copywriting about your business for Page 1 in Google!” = 156 characters.

This is the information that needs to be displayed when potential customers are searching for your products and services in Google.

Both meta tags are very important (for all pages of your website) and will display on the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Page) and hopefully on page 1! We need to encourage visitors to read and click through to YOUR website. Not your competitors. Use compelling call-to-action copy using good grammar and syntax.

Refer to my SEO checklist to understand the key objective to get free inquiries from Google Search. Simply Google “seo checklist” or go to http://www.kiwise.com/seo-checklist/

  • Step 3. Now you need to start your 600 word seo copywriting about your business. Google relies on good relevent website seo copywriting with good English, short sentences and easy to understand copy.

Start with the following seo copywriting information: Introduction

  1. Who you are
  2. What you do best
  3. How you do it
  4. Where you do it

Mission Statement sentence and Company information: Body

  1. Mission statement
  2. 3-5 Key Services (The services you wish to promote the most)
  3. Detailed information about when your company was founded.
  4. Directors, team, clients, community work, business networks, Associations and Accredited organisation you belong to etc.

How to contact you: Conclusion

  1. Summary and Conclusion of why and how to contact you including links to your Social Media Websites.

You could use the first 300 words for your Homepage and the other 300 words for the About Us page. This content can also be used for all your directory listings and Social Media business display websites.

To make sure you use the right keywords in your SEO copy, you can research what your customers are searching for with the Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox

Also read this excellent article from seomoz.org: 10-super-easy-seo-copywriting-tips-for-link-building

If you would like me to review your website, and provide you with the steps to optimise your website SEO, visit my bio page Kent Routen.

Filed Under: Blog

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation Guide

September 4, 2012 by Leave a Comment

In this Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Guide, you’ll learn 5 techniques to get targeted traffic from search engine results and some tips to prevent your website from being penalised.

Once you’ve applied what you’ve learned in this introduction to SEO you’ll have a head start to boosting your website traffic.

How to get FREE traffic to your website from the top 3 search engines Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

top 3 search engines for seoSo Which Search Engines Matter?

There are 3 major players in the search engine market. Listed here below by market share:

  • Google Sites (66.2%)
  • Bing & Yahoo! Sites (29.3%)

Source: Hitwise (http://bit.ly/comscore0212)

Five Steps to Get Free Traffic From Search Engines

Step #1: Keyword Research to determine which relevant search terms have the most queries per month in NZ.

Your website content needs to be relevant to what people are searching for.

If you sell women’s footwear, it might not be in your best interest to optimise for “Charlotte Dawson shoes” or even “shoes” by itself. Target leads, not traffic. Example. “best price on women shoes”, “women’s black heels”, “women running shoes” etc. If you have a local or regional business, add your location.

To learn what keywords are the most popular and what your competitors are using I recommend;

Step #2: Make Your Website Search Engine-Friendly

SEO is not some secret mathematic or scientific equation. In fact, everything you need to know about how the search engines interpret your website is available from all three of the major search engines.

Follow the rules and recommendations provided by each search engine and you’re on your way to higher keyword rankings. Here are the tools for each:

Simply submit your website to each of the tools above to get feedback on which keywords your website appears for, which websites are linking to yours, which links are broken, HTML errors and lots of other data the search engines want to share with you.

Step #3 – Scorecard Your Website

There are free tools available on the Internet that will analyse your website and give you a grade or benchmark. Check your website score every 6 months.

Here are my 2 favourite seo website tools you can use to scorecard your website and subsequent web pages:

free seo grader tools

Step #4 – Navigation and Internal Links

Did you know that images are read by search engines and translated to computer code (called binary)? 010101100…

Make sure you don’t use images to display important text like Home, About us, Services, Contact etc. Use text-based links for your navigation bar pages.

Images of yourself, products, services and people can now display on page one of Google Search. Make sure you name every image file with your business name and product or service keywords etc. You will also need to use the ALT (Alternate) meta tag for keywords.

images seo

Step #5 – External and Inbound Links

The next step in the keyword ranking process is what sites are linked to your website.

Every link to your website can be compared to a vote. The more trustworthy a page by the search engines, the more voting power each link on that page receives. Quality not quantity.

It’s very important to advertise your website in the top 20 Business Directories, Maps, Social Media sites, Forums and Blogs… = VOTES

The recommended way to get FREE traffic is to earn it with targeted keyword phrases and inbound links from authoritative websites. 

If you would like me to review your website, and provide you with the steps to optimise your website SEO, visit my bio page .

kiwise internet marketing seo

Filed Under: Blog

Kiwis spend 62 billion dollars on shopping

June 7, 2012 by Leave a Comment

online shopping nz94.9% of the 62 billion dollars that Kiwis spend on shopping each year still happens offline.

Yet eCommerce is hot and getting hotter. Perhaps that’s because every month there are more than 110,000 NZ searches for “how to shop online” – more and more Kiwis are venturing into the online shopping space, and local businesses need to be there (or risk losing out to more fleetfooted competitors, here and offshore).

The 2012 Nielsen Online Retail Report has recently been released and it reveals that just under half of New Zealand (49%) now buys products online! That translates to more than 60% of Kiwi internet users who purchase online – and 97% of NZ web users who research products and services online (even if they eventually buy the products offline).

Already 5.1% of NZ retail sales are made online

That percentage is expected to double over the next few years (it’s close to that already, in the U.K. and the U.S.).

What else can the Nielsen Online Retail Report 2012 tell us about eCommerce?

The number of online shoppers who have purchased an item via their mobile is up from 11% to 16% year on year. And note that this is for items not intended for use on a mobile – so that includes those who shop for airline tickets, accommodation, books, clothing, food and beverage etc.

In general, Kiwi online shoppers are buying more often. The number of customers who purchased six or more items in the past year increased by 21 percent compared to 2010 and those buying 11 or more items grew by 38 percent.

  • The number of customers who purchased six or more items in the past year increased by 21 percent compared to 2010 and those buying 11 or more items grew by 38 percent.
  • Why the increase in frequency? The Nielsen Report identifies some of the contributing factors:
  • It’s more convenient to compare products and prices online
  • Consumers are being regularly prompted by emails from daily deal sites
  • The increased availability of broadband (which makes all online activity easier)
  • Kiwis are increasingly accessing the internet via mobile phones (so it’s more convenient to shop online, more often, from anywhere)
  • Increased trust in the security of online transactions
  • Increased opportunity to purchase products outside of the consumer’s physical location

If you would like me to review your website, and provide you with the steps to optimise your website SEO, visit my bio page .

Article source: marketingweek.co.nz

Filed Under: Blog, ecommerce Tagged With:

Website Speed is now a Ranking Factor

March 27, 2012 by Leave a Comment

website speedJust wanted to jot down a quick blog post with my thoughts about two blog posts about speed. Matt Cutts has been writing both on his own blog and on the official Google Webmaster Central Blogto tell everyone what we knew was coming: site speed is now an official ranking factor.

Now I want to remind you that I’ve been writing about site speed for quite a while. I wrote about WordPress template optimization (a quite dated post now, btw) back in january 2008. And even in april 2007 I wrote about the effect a slow server could have on how Google spiders your site.

Now of course I do a weekly WordPress podcast together with Frederick Townes, who is the creator of the awesome plugin W3 Total Cache, so I talk about speed a lot, and I’ve talked more than once about getting proper WordPress hosting. And that is leading to what I wanted to tell you in this post: the fact that Google now officially has made site speed one of the (over 200) ranking factors, means that there can be no more excuses; you have to get proper hosting. Now.

Having said that, I should probably tell you that I recently switched to an even better CDN, which has made my site even faster. I’m now on MaxCDN, as well as still being hosted on a VPS.net VPS itself. My site now loads, depending on where you are in the world, in somewhere between 1 and 2,5 seconds. Am I finished? Of course not, there’s always room for improvement. Has this speed helped my rankings? Probably. I do know one thing: I’ve had several clients whose sites were too slow, and who, after being properly optimized for speed, got better rankings.

And heck, if it’s a ranking factor, this is one of the easiest ones to get right. There can be no discussion about it: 10 seconds is slow, 1 second is fast. Of course there’s grey areas, but why settle when your site is still loading in more than say 2 seconds? There are several pieces of research that show that decreasing load times on pages leads to an increase in sales, pageviews and other desired actions. Of course it does. A fast site is nicer to hang around on. Nicer to purchase stuff on. Nicer to subscribe to. In short: a faster site is more likely to make you money.

Do I need to say it again? Make your site load as fast as you can. Install W3 Total Cache if you’re on WordPress and you haven’t done it yet. Get proper hosting if it’s still slow after that (test with Pingdom, f/i), and yes, I urge you to try VPS.net in that case. Go do it. Now!!! Article source: yoast.com

If you would like me to review your website, and provide you with the steps to optimise your website SEO, visit my bio page .

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: , ,

18 Million WordPress Websites Now Available in iPad Format

February 17, 2012 by Leave a Comment

WordPress.com blog owners, rejoice! All of the hosting site’s 18 million blogs are available now in an iPad-friendly interface, complete with touch interactions and easy customization.

Automattic, parent company of WordPress.com, just flipped the switch on a new feature that transforms WordPress.com blogs into app-like destinations optimized for tablets. The company says it worked closely with NYC-based startup Onswipe to to create a whole new blog consumption experience for the iPad. Onswipe provides publishers with simple tools to create tablet-optimized websites.

“Our iPad-optimized view is app-like in its functionality, but pure HTML5 goodness on the backend,” said WordPress’s Nick Momrik in a blog post announcing the new feature. “It supports touch interactions, swiping, rotation and many other features of the iPad.”

The iPad-optimized blogs have a module interface, making it easy for publishers to switch up the look and feel of their websites. The WordPress.com Dashboard now includes options to change fonts, create personalized covers and change skins. The iPad optimization feature is also available as a WordPress plugin for anybody who runs a self-hosted WordPress.org blog.

“The iPad provides a ton of new opportunities for readers to experience the web and focus in on what matters: the content itself, while making use of what’s possible now with swipe gestures,” Onswipe CEO Jason Baptiste told Mashable. “Automattic powers over 18 million sites and believes in the open web, so it was a great place to start showing the benefit of the web over native apps.”

What do you think of the new iPad-optimized websites? Do you intend to create a tablet version of your WordPress blog? Let us know in the comments.

Article source: mashable.com

If you would like me to review your website, and provide you with the steps to optimise your website SEO, visit my bio page .

Filed Under: Apple, Blog, iPad, WordPress Tagged With: ,

Search and Social – you can’t get the cream out of the coffee

January 17, 2012 by Leave a Comment

On the 10th January 2012, Google launched “Search plus your World“, intermixing search and social and providing even more “personalized” results. There’s a lot of outcry about some parts of this, with people saying they don’t want “personalized” results. I actually think that normal users do want personalized results and that this is, for the most part, a good thing.

There’s been some outcry though, because Twitter and Facebook aren’t “highlighted” as much as Google+ in those new social results. Danny is doing some awesome reporting on this, first in “Search Engines Should Be Like Santa From “Miracle On 34th Street”“, later in an interview with Schmidt.

Google used to have access to the Twitter firehose, all the tweets coming in in realtime, enabling them to index tweets at light speed. Facebook used to show some friends of a person on a profile to visitors to that profile who aren’t logged in, now look at the cache for my Facebook profile: just other people with the same name.

As I said in a reaction to a Google+ post by Jeff Jarvis: what both Twitter and Facebook are afraid of is that they’re “giving” “their” social graph to Google, thereby allowing Google to easily grow its own social network because it would make it very easy for Google to suggest friends to you or say “these friends of yours already use Google+, shouldn’t you use it too?”. So by opening up, they’d open their books to a competitor.

This, ultimately, should be a users choice, not a platform choice. When it does become a user choice, of course Google should favor the social network the user is the most active on, so if I’m more active on Facebook than on Twitter or Google+, it should highlight that above the others. Right now, it seems to be mostly highlighting Google+, which will raise some eyebrows here and there and is food for discussion.

A while back at the first Fusion Marketing Experience in Brussels, Bas van den Beld of State of Search interviewed Olivier Blanchard and myself about search and social. We talked about how the two intertwine and can’t be unraveled, in fact, as Olivier said during the interview: “it’s like coffee and cream, once they mix you can’t get the cream out of the coffee”. See the interview here (the sound is not the best ever, I know):

The thing is: this is a done deal. There’s no way back. Search and social have now officially teamed up, so you might as well live with it. It also means that not using Google+ is… Not really an option if you’re a marketer, but I guess we had that one coming for a while as well.

So, what does this mean from a tactics perspective? For now, it means: share every post on Google+ too, make sure you have Google+ buttons on your posts and, most importantly: keep building relations with people! It’s not like that much changed; social mentions might have become a new and maybe even important ranking factor, but even quality links are usually the result of a relation, of social interaction.

The formula to success didn’t change: you have to keep building relations / followers / an audience, create great content and make sure people notice it. Article source: yoast.com

If you would like me to review your website, and provide you with the steps to optimise your website SEO, visit my bio page .

Filed Under: Blog, SEO, Social Media Tagged With: ,

The future of the QR codes for Small Business

January 5, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Over the past 18-24 months, the acceptance and use of Quick Response (QR) codes has steadily increased among marketing and creative professionals, as well as individual and business consumers, but the question remains, what’s the future of QR codes? Will the future show that QR codes were just a passing advertising fad — here today, gone tomorrow? Or, will the future show that QR codes were a viable direct response mechanism that marketers can use to engage and interact with a target audience on a permission-based, personal level?

As a marketing strategist, my answer to the question “what’s the future of QR codes” is probably much different than how a technologist, developer, creative professional, or futurist might respond, but I believe it is justified and has merit. Ask the question to this group and they might all begin to talk about the next version of QR code technology (e.g., QR code 3.0) and what that might be like and how that might work, or they might talk about other technologies — such as near field communication (NFC), augmented reality, digital watermarks, or image recognition — and how technologies such as these will be the death knell for QR codes, let alone other 2D bar-code types. But, if the question is asked of me, I believe the future of QR codes really lies in the response companies may give when they themselves are asked, “What are your future strategic marketing goals and objectives?” Probably not what you were expecting to hear was it? Please allow me to explain.

First, let me give you my definition of a QR code. A QR code is a tactical direct response mechanism used in marketing, advertising, and promotion which, upon scanning, enables consumers to bridge the gap between the physical and print world and the digital world and back again. By nature of the technology, QR codes provide for a relatively instantaneous interactive experience between a consumer and a product, service and, brand. The key to enabling the use of QR codes, by an advertiser or a consumer, is a smart-phone installed with a QR code reader app. Please read that last line again and keep it in mind as you read the remainder of the article.

When companies begin to consider the use of QR codes for advertising, promotion, or general business purposes, the majority seem to ask the same simple question: Do we want to use QR codes or not in our next campaign? But the real question to be asked is, “As a company, do we want to advance and enhance our integrated marketing strategy, as well as the goals and objectives which go along with it, to the point that the strategy includes an investment in and commitment to a mobile channel or platform?” If the answer from one company to the next is “yes,” then QR codes will have a future. If the answer from one company to the next is “no” then QR codes won’t have much of a future. Because QR code technology is based on a mobile platform and the use of smartphones (see definition above), it is essential for companies to first understand, believe in, embrace, and make use of a mobile strategy, before they try to understand, believe in, embrace, and make use of QR codes on a tactical level. Think strategic before tactical — it’s that simple. Article source: imediaconnection

If you would like me to review your website, and provide you with the steps to optimise your website SEO, visit my bio page .

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: