Britain’s universities are working hard to attract international students. With the government announcing British Universities are to expect a £950 million cut in funding over the next three years, higher education institutions need to look elsewhere for financial support.

The average non-EU student tuition fees for arts and science undergraduate degrees are around £10,000 per year, and with the potential to reach £20,000 depending on the course and establishment, the financial benefits for cash-strapped UK universities to recruit international students is obvious.

Having a strong online presence is vital. Statistics show that 31.7% of the 338m internet users in China are students. It is likely that students already look to the Internet as their primary source of information on UK universities.

Here are a few steps universities can take to ensure they target the right market, and that usability is optimised:

1. Identify key phrases specific to the target market.

   Incorporating them into the site will vastly improve SEO.

   Therefore it would be beneficial to feature a section on the university’s ‘ranking’ – a popular search phrase for Chinese students.

2. Localised research will give an insight into what students are looking for.A prominent London university points out that whilst business, law, and economics degrees are popular with their Chinese students, performing arts, media and psychology degrees are the chosen topics for Japanese.

   Marketing the subjects that are more likely to be popular within a nationality is more likely to bring ROI.

3. Social network sites are an effective way to market to potential international students.A vast majority of social network users are young people (aged 16-24). Again, it is important to keep in mind the locality of the market. Although Facebook and Twitter maybe the initial social sites that spring to mind in the UK, in China www.renren.com is popular with the student demographic.

Although Britain is currently second only to the USA in attracting overseas students, the competition is growing. France, Singapore and Germany are just a few of the countries who have employed strategies to attract potential international students, and with recent and upcoming changes to the UK’s student visa policy, it is more important than ever for the UK’s higher education institutions to up their stakes in international marketing.

The key to their success is to embrace modern technological advances.

If you’re looking to work your way up the search engine rankings, and who isn’t? Then one way to get some good insights into what works and what doesn’t is to see what your competitors are up to. What does that top ranking site have that your site doesn’t? It is surprisingly easy to find out these things, or some of them at least. One of the great things about the web is that finding who your competitors are is easy, as is comparing services and products. It’s a given that customers usually return to sites that are easy to browse and that have generous amounts of information, even if the visitors don’t partake of all of it.

Analyze The Top Sites in Your Niche

Once you find out what the top ranking sites in your niche are, what should you do? Well, here are several things you can do.

You can find out some very interesting facts. For example, you might discover that a lot of the inbound links come from websites that the competitor owns. This isn’t always easy to find out, but it’s very informative if you can. The “whois” information may not give you much to go on, but if you do discover that this is the case, you may realize that owning some legitimate websites on the side can help attract more traffic to your site.

You might discover when browsing through your competitor’s site that even though the information on your site is similar, their site has a very different structure – a better optimized structure. It could make a big difference in their search engine ranking. You might discover that your competitor is using a bunch of keywords and key phrases that you never even thought of.

Start off simply enough. Get a pad of paper and a pen and make notes as you thoroughly do your own “crawl” of your competitor’s site. Look over the pages as they appear first, then go back and look at the source html. On most browsers you get this by pressing ctrl+U. If not, this command can often be found in the “Tools” menu of your browser. Don’t worry. You don’t have to be an html genius to learn from it.

Look at their title tag. Is it well written? Does it reflect a common syntax used throughout the site? On the home page, look for the H1, H2, and H3 tags. If you find them, your competitor uses heading tags within the page. Try to identify the actual text used in the headings. You will more than likely find some key phrases within these tags.

Look for nofollow tags. These are used to spread PageRank throughout the site. Doing this is what’s known as having a themed structure, and it can be very beneficial to your ranking. If you find this pattern, they either know their SEO or they’ve hired someone who does.

How do they do their navigation? Is it in a drop-down menu? Is it search engine friendly? In the footer is there a text menu?

Look at the anchor text: is there a pattern of keywords there? If certain words appear there often, they are almost certainly target phrases.

Check the Google PageRank of the pages you visit. If a page has a notably high PR, pay closer attention to that page. These are often pages that have the information that visitors choose to link to. It could give you some clues for adding similar content to your website.

I think both organic seo and pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns have their respective places of importance: it depends on how much time and budget you have at your disposal and what are your immediate and long-term priorities. Let’s first quickly see what organic seo and pay-per-click mean.
Organic SEO

Organic SEO, or natural SEO fetches you higher search engine rankings without paying for the placement. Organic SEO makes the search engines like your website without you having to pay for the affection. For this you have to create and maintain a website that the search engines would love to present to their users when they search for terms related to your website. Organic SEO takes lots of effort and it often takes months to show some tangible results. You can achieve organic SEO by

* Creating lots of relevant content
* Getting quality inbound links
* Creating optimised markup

Pay-per-click

Pay-per-click programs get you visibility on the search engines according to the bid you are ready to place per click. This way you can start getting high-quality clicks from the search engines within fifteen minutes of activating your website You can see such links on Google at the top or the right on search engine results pages and on Yahoo under the “Sponsored links” section. Different search engines use different methods for displaying pay-per-click links. For instance, Yahoo places you higher for higher bids, but Google places you higher for the higher number of clicks your link generates.
So should it be organic SEO or pay-per-click

It should be a mixture of both the methods. It’s better to use your PPC campaign in the beginning so that your online presence gets relevant traffic from day one. If you don’t want to spend lots of money on your PPC campaign, you can target the least competitive expressions and start getting traffic for them. In the mean time you can continue your organic SEO efforts. When you feel you are getting good traffic due to organic SEO, you can stop bidding for your keywords.

Generally it can take anywhere between 2-6 months, this depends on a few things though.

One major factor search engines take into consideration is the age of a website. The younger a website is, the lower the trust is. Generally, a brand new site could take more than 3 months to develop even the slightest bit of trust.

The speed in which you will see high rankings also depends a lot on the competitiveness of your niche and the keywords you are targeting. Competing sites who take their SEO very seriously are obviously harder to beat than those who don’t have a clue.

The state of your online trust will affect your SEO campaign. If your site has been banned in the past for unethical SEO efforts then it will come back to haunt you. This can occur especially when someone has purchased an expiring domain or has paid for a black hat SEO to carry out work for them prior.

Putting right what may be considered black hat will depend entirely on the amount of damage already done. Any banned sites or url’s will need to be submitted for re-inclusion requests, and this can take months upon months of waiting.

Hopefully you won’t have this problem, but if you do, don’t worry, it can be corrected with the right approach and a bit of specialist knowledge.

SEO or search engine optimisation is essential to any website looking to increase their web presence and website traffic. However, SEO is not an easy subject to master. It takes time, expertise, and many hours of work from SEO professionals to be effective.

Ethical search engine optimisation practices or white hat SEO are terms that are often thrown around a lot with less than respectable search engine optimizers. Here’s what you should expect from my services:

* Extensive market & keyword research/analysis – Understanding both your market, and what people are searching for in it is vital to any successful SEO campaign. I will use the latest in online resources to gather the best keywords that bring the highest amounts of targetedtraffic for your niche.
* On page optimisation – Ensuring your html code is in order, optimising images; optimising Meta tags, Titles and content for conversion; load time, search engine accessibility, and more.
* Site Structure – Designing site structure for crawlability; internal link reputation, page rank sculpting, creation of sitemaps, cananonicalization, duplicate content issues, and more.
* Link Building – I establish links to my clients using only trusted methods and quality sites. You can expect link creation using; Authority directories, niche specific directories, Article submissions, Press releases, Linkbait pieces, and social media submissions.
* Visitor behaviour and conversion tracking – Knowing how your visitors are navigating throughout your web site, and how certain pages are converting are both key factors in your sites success.

Adam Woozeer is a search engine optimisation specialist. What that means is that he designs and rewrites websites with search engine optimisation at the forefront of all design and copy decisions.

However, how we optimise a website is very different from other SEO companies.

There are no tricks or shortcuts to SEO

Your website can look very similar to what you currently have. The object is not to reinvent the wheel, simply to make the website present the correct information, to the correct audience, at the right time.

Search Engine listings are the preferred way to generate website traffic. This is often called pure search, organic or natural search.

Search engine optimisation specialists can be classified into two sections. Companies who are forever chasing the search engines and trying to react to changes in Search Engines Algorithms, and experienced companies who focus on developing websites, with lasting marketing benefits.

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) and advanced search engine artificial intelligence now means that results obtained using “hardcore SEO techniques” are extremely short term and often cause more damage than benefit.

Adam Woozeer achieves this by establishing “trust” within the search engines . This equates to long term success.

With Search Engines receiving an estimated 90% of all Internet traffic, to be successful, it’s critical that your website is optimised.

Industry studies have consistently shown that Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) are the single most effective method of generating web traffic over every other method. Search Engine listings generate six times more sales per visitor on average than banner ads or pay per click.

However, to be effective, users searching must be able to find your website based on a few keywords or search terms when they do a search. By submitting your selected keywords that apply to your website’s content, your chances of being found greatly increase.

Search engine crawlers have to crawl your website in order to get indexed. If your website exists in total isolation , it is very difficult for the search engine crawlers to reach your website. To get indexed, or at least to get crawled (no matter how creepy the expression sounds) some other website, blog, or online directory must link to you.

If you already have a website or a blog that is already indexed and you want a new website indexed, there should be no problem. Just put your link on the existing website or blog and sooner or later your new website too will be crawled, and consequently, indexed. If you don’t have an existing indexed website or blog, then you have the following options:

Submit your website to the open directory project

Submitting to DMOZ is a good way of getting a quality, trusted inbound link. Once you are accepted by DMOZ, then you can rest assured that Google and Yahoo! should have no problem indexing your website. Before your website is included in the DMOZ directory, a human editor reviews your website thoroughly and this increases your website’s credibility.

Pay to get linked to

You can also pay webmasters and bloggers to put your link on their websites or blogs. If you feel uncomfortable approaching them personally, you can use the following link-brokerage online agencies:

* AdWords — It’s a pay-per-click program run by Google. Your link starts appearing on search result pages within fifteen minutes. It can be costly if you have a highly competitive niche, but it’s the fastest way of getting indexed by Google if you have nobody to link to you.
* Text Link Ads — They bridge the gap between those who have a link, and those who want to publish it. Once you submit your requirement to them, they’ll find the best niche your website needs.
* Text Link Brokers — They too create a platform where publishers and advertisers can interact and do business with each other.
* Pay Per Post — You can use this server to pay bloggers to write your new website’s reviews so that your link appears on their decently ranked blogs.
* Independent publishers — You can directly approach bloggers and online publishers: they might even publish your link for free if your website adds value to their blog or website.

Website Promotion is not an instant science. I do not control Google, or another search engine. I am not a magician, I do not have special software for link building, or underhand tricks that seek to manipulate search results.

“At the beginning of our project, Adam made us fully aware of the SEO costs and implementation timescale’s …..because we needed to be able to budget accordingly, none of us like nasty surprises. He has consistently kept to the exact figure quoted and has exceed his number of hours.”
P.Smith Freeport Mauritius

It is very similar to promoting a business using traditional marketing methods. It takes time and a concentrated effort of client and consultant. Successful website promotion takes numerous campaigns, reviews and monitoring to ensure success.

The price of a successful online campaign can run into the £1000s but the profit that a number of my clients have enjoyed runs into £100,000s.

The greatest factor in website promotion is information or commonly referred to as content. Our copywriters as skilled at:

Improving existing copyseo copywriting

Writing unique copy that is both interesting and informative

Optimising all copy for Google and Yahoo

Writing website copy is a major part of all Campaigns. Our copywriters provide unique content that is written specifically with SEO in mind. This does not mean that the copy is dull or ‘stuffed’ with keywords, rather it maintains user interest and presents the user with relevant information.

SEO phrases and keywords are often nonsensical. The phrases used in searches are rarely coherent. Google is extremely aware of SEO prepared copy and disdains it. There advice is clear and concise (see Google’s advice).

We sell Website Promotion to our clients, because we believe that “the essence of the internet, is providing the right information, to the right user at the right time.” » Internet Marketing Ethics

Some traffic is worth having and some website traffic is just a waste of broadband. For example, a client who was receiving a large amount of traffic for having an image called ‘spanner’ which was ranked highly under Google images.

Although flattering that so many users over the world would prefer our spanner image, the traffic was useless from a commercial point of view

“traffic is for vanity, web sales are for sanity”

At the end of the day traffic equals enquiries, and enquiries leads to sales and return on your website promotion investment (ROI).