Archive for the ‘SEO And Site Analytics’ Category

If you feel that your web site just isn’t working as hard as it could be, are envious of how well your competitors are ranked in the search engines, or want to make sure your site is doing all it can to promote your business effectively, you may be happy to learn that Google have just released their Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF - 550KB).

Primarily aimed at webmasters, if you’re prepared to roll up your sleeves and make some minor and (in most cases) straightforward changes to your web site, you’ll find the guide to be a great help and a useful resource even if you don’t know how to develop a web site. The guide offers this description on the importance of SEO:

Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results. You’re likely already familiar with many of the topics in this guide, because they’re essential ingredients for any webpage, but you may not be making the most out of them.

The guide includes the following sections, each containing a concise overview introducing the topic, clear examples showing the techniques in use, and a guide to good practices - including what to avoid:

• Create unique, accurate page titles
• Make use of the “description” meta tag
• Improve the structure of your URLs
• Make your site easier to navigate
• Offer quality content and services
• Write better anchor text
• Use heading tags appropriately
• Optimize your use of images
• Promote your website in the right ways
• Take advantage of web analytics services

If you don’t feel like getting your hands dirty with what goes on under the bonnet of your web site, being familiar with what goes into making an optimised site is still a great idea. You could always treat the guide as a checklist for how well your site measures up, or refer to it when hiring in a company to develop or modify your site. If your web site is important to your business, being able to perform your own web site health-check, without the need to call in the experts, will pay huge rewards to your web presence and give you an idea of where you need to invest precious time and resource.

If you think your site is failing to measure up, or think you don’t have enough of the guide’s suggestions in place, Google have also put together some helpful tips for hiring an SEO company, so you can make sure your making the right decision when calling in the experts to fix it for you.

You can read Google’s announcement on their webmaster blog, and grab the Google SEO Starter Guide here.

Page titles - probably not the most glamorous aspect of a web site, maybe an after-thought for many web design companies, just a bunch of characters at the top of your browser, right? Wrong. Page titles are a vital part of any SEO strategy, and well deserve their position at the top of any page.

What are page titles?

Every web page has a title. It is the phrase that appears at the top of your browser screen, and is used (or should be used) to describe and define the contents of the web page you are viewing. A page title is also used as the primary phrase to list your page in Search Engine Rankings, and should therefore be treated as an important piece of communication - to both potential visitors and to search engines.

Google says about page titles:

“Your title tags… contain important information that Google uses when indexing your site. Descriptive information will give us good information about the content of your site. In addition, text contained in your title tag can appear in search results pages and useful, descriptive text is more likely to be clicked on by users.”

Why should I care?

What do page titles mean to you and your web presence? Well, as search engines crawl your site, they look at your page title as an indication of the content that can be found on your page, this creates an opportunity to describe your web page to search engines with relevant keywords. A poorly constructed page title can also be penalised by search engines, and your site might not be listed as high as your content deserves.

As search engines use page titles to display web pages in Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERP), it is also the first thing a potential visitor to your site will see (when coming via a search engine) - the more relevant and descriptive your page title is when introducing your web page, the more likely it will be clicked. Similarly, if your page titles are poorly written, or do not describe the content of your page, a visitor may decide not to waste any of their precious time clicking on it.

You may be missing opportunities to attract new visitors and to boost your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) with badly written page titles.

Page Titles - Doing it right

Primarily, a good page title should accurately, quickly describe what can be found on the page it represents. As the page will generally be viewed by users when skimming search results, a short, descriptive, content relevant phrase should be used to convey the details of your page. Around 65 characters is usually a good length for a title, and is well worth the time and effort to strike a balance between too much and too little description - consider it an exercise in distilling the message you want to convey down to it’s core.

Page titles should naturally contain relevant keywords that explain what content can be found on the page - if you’re describing your page effectively, then keywords will appear in your description. Never try and force keywords into your title, this could be seen as keyword stuffing by search engines, and your site penalised as a result.

Each page should feature a different title - after all, each page contains different, interesting content for your visitors, right?

A good rule would be to design your title for users first and search engines second. Describing your page content effectively is vital when trying to gain favour with both.

Next Steps - Review Your Page Titles

Check your titles: Browse your site and look at the titles - do they describe the content that is found on each page? As a user, do they give you an idea of what they may find on that page, are they descriptive and compelling?

Check your rankings: Type your business name or a key phrase for your business into Google or Yahoo. Take a look at how your site is listed - this is how the world will see your site. Would you click to find out more about your site based on the page title?

Check your competitors titles: Which of your competitors rank highly for the keywords and terms you would like visitors to use to find your business/products/services? Type a phrase into Google or Yahoo and take a look. You will find the top ranked pages all contain very descriptive titles, which will almost always contain at least some of the term you used in your search.

Ask yourself some questions:

• Do my page titles describe each of my web pages accurately?
• Do my page titles contain relevant keywords?
• Would I click on some/all of my pages if I read those titles and was searching for the content that features on my page?

Your site’s page titles sit at the top of the browser - it should feature high on your SEO priorities, too.

A south London estate agent recently launched a new web site that had taken many months and many thousands of pounds to build. The new site looks good and works well in terms of usability and purpose. Unfortunately, it launched with no metrics in place. That meant there was no way to tell if the new site was working better than the old site. (Imagine the correct Homer Simpson response here.  If you need help imagining the response, just watch the quick video below.)

You’ll be relieved to learn that the site now has metrics installed.

Web sites, if they are to be a serious aspect of your company’s marketing strategy, are about performance. (It could be argued that, if your web site doesn’t play a serious part in your marketing, you should shut it down. A feeble site will almost certainly do your brand more harm than having no web presence at all.)

So, it’s about performance. And you have no way to measure the performance of your site if you don’t install some form of metrics. When you fail to measure, you have no ability to learn, change, and improve.

In meetings this past week with a number of prospective clients - all large and successful companies aware that their existing web sites are just not cutting it - the common theme was that they knew something was wrong with their sites but couldn’t specify exactly where the failings lay. Now whether it was low traffic, old-fashioned design, poor usability, or confusing content and unclear messages, all the sites had one thing in common: insufficient metrics.

Web metrics has become an increasingly specialised area of web site build and on-line marketing. As it has become more specialised, more and more companies seem to be ignoring it rather than embracing and exploiting its full potential.

Here is a quick list of essential reasons for installing - and using - web metrics:

1. Web metrics tell you WHO is coming to your site
2. Web metrics tell you WHERE they’re coming FROM
3. Web metrics tell you WHAT they’re doing on your site
4. Web metrics tell you WHY they’re coming to your site
5. Web metrics tell you WHY they’re leaving your site

These measurements - combined with the rather more sophisticated data that sit behind them - are the foundation of any successful analysis of your site’s performance. This becomes the structure that directs and supports site changes, improvements, and redesigns.

It’s no accident that the list reads like the traditional recipe for a press release. This is the other side of the ‘reach your market’, after all. You’ve created something that is meant to appeal to a target audience. Now you need to know whether that audience is, indeed, finding your site and how they are reacting to it.

We’re not boastful by nature but I think a recent success story with Chase Inventory Services is worth a quick blast on our own trumpet.

At the start of August, Chase asked us to manage the rebuild of their web site. The existing site was a good few years old and was looking a tad ‘old-fashioned’. There’s also a back-end, which the company uses to upload, store, and retrieve the documents that form a core part of their business. They were keen to see results quickly, of course, and wanted a soft launch for the new site at the start of September.

We had the guys at breeze design create a new look and then we put the new site together in good time. As part of the build, of course, we employed a range of SEO techniques - of the white hat sort and along the lines of the SEO report we do for sites - we believed would help Chase in their search engine rankings.

Chase are delighted with their new site and they have had a lot of positive feedback from both customers and their own staff and contractors. Best of all, however, is that within one month of launch, they are the first organic result returned for a Google search on ‘inventory services’. Try it.

How well does your web sites URLs communicate the contents of your web pages? Your web site may not be ranking quite as well as it could with search engines if it struggles.

A URL (uniform resource locator), or web address, generally comes in two flavours; static or dynamic. Using the right type could give you an opportunity to describe the contents of the page and promote relevant keywords to both your visitors and the search engines.

Let’s look at an example…

Perhaps there is a site selling bicycles, called example-bikes.co.uk. Let’s suppose we want to promote a mens mountain bike - a TREK 100, let’s also say that it’s the latest, shiny 2008 model.

A typical dynamic address - www.example-bikes.co.uk/products.php?id=146&category=3&filter=price_ASC - does show the web site address, and clicking it would probably take you to the relevant product, but this address contains no descriptive text (or keywords) regarding the contents of the page. The information after the ? shows the parameters for this particular page, but it does nothing to tell the search engines what might be contained on that page, and more importantly, whether it is a relevant result to show users who are searching for ‘TREK 100‘.

A static address, on the other hand - www.example-bikes.co.uk/mountain-bikes/mens/trek-100-mountain-bike-2008 - doesn’t contain endless parameters and ID numbers, instead, it is formulated to provide a decriptive title about the page you will be visiting. Static addresses, when built properly, give a site rich, descriptive, relevant keywords to use as it’s addresses. These will be more appealing to a potential visitor, who can be fairly sure the link they are about to click in Google will be the correct bike they are searching for, but will also give search engines a good taste for whether the page does indeed contain information about a ‘TREK 100‘ bike.

Why should I care?

When search engines crawl your site, there are a number of factors that they look at when deciding where a page should rank in their results pages (SERPs), and your URLs is one of the factors. At the very least, if your URLs aren’t written using descriptive, optimised keywords you may be losing potential visitors who are reading the URLs from search engine results, or worse - your site might be suffering as a result of where it is placed when visitors search Google, Yahoo and MSN for products that you sell (and that’s usually a lot).

Dynamic, parameter filled URLs may be functional, but visitors to your site will probably struggle to repeat a 150 character address of random number and letters if they would like to share the page address with a friend.

So, your traffic may be lower than it could be as a result of unhelpful URLs, Google and Co may be scratching their heads at what content may be found on your pages, and people may be unable to easily share pages that are deep within your site architecture. Tut.

Doing it right…

• Try to include descriptive keywords which relate to the content/product/services your page promotes.
• Seperate words in your URL using hyphens (Google treats hyphens as spaces, so would see trek-100-mountain-bike-2008 as trek 100 mountain bike 2008).
• Your URLs should also be no more than 4 directories deep (e.g. www.yoursite.co.uk/category-1/subcategory-2/descriptive-product-title-3).
• Try not to make your page title exactly the same as the pages URL.

The benefits of keyword rich, static looking URLs include:

• Potentially rank higher in search engine result pages.
• Tells the search engine more about the contents it can expect to find on the page.
• Makes it easier for visitors to share web addresses with others.
• Gives a potential visitor more information about your web page before they click it within search engine results.

What next?

Take a look at the URLs within your site, read them and ask yourself:

• Are these easy to repeat to someone, if I needed to guide them to a particular page?
• Do they describe they contents/products/services that are displayed on the page?
• Are any of my keywords feature within the URL?

If you answer no, your traffic may be suffering as a result of your URLs not saying very much about you at all.

Adam and I have both had conversations in the last week with companies keen to talk about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Companies that still needed persuading a couple of years ago that the web would be a key part of the their business future now see SEO as a panacea for all their traffic ills. If only they could find the right level of SEO skills, the phone would ring off the wall, their turnover of widgets would explode, and the company directors could take early retirement. This belief is reinforced by digital marketing agencies hyping SEO: take a look at the ads at the back of a magazine like NMA and you’ll see pages of SEO services on offer. So it must work.

Well, not quite. Skilfully applied SEO ‘magic’ may increase your search engine rankings in the short term but it’s really a question of diminishing returns. Success will always be temporary because it is subject to the arcane algorithms applied by the ranking engine. SEO is really Search 1.0. Let’s face it, publishing a web site without at least some level of applied SEO nowadays is like publishing your company details in the Yellow Pages using yellow ink: you’re invisible. SEO, therefore, is something you build into your site at birth.

Relying solely on SEO, however, is like putting up a billboard and then expending huge amounts of time, effort, and cash to erect a traffic management system that directs all cars past your advertisement. Described like this, you can see immediately how SEO has its roots in the old rules of marketing: make them look at me! We’ve moved on. (And the traffic will soon find a better and quicker route home.) You may get to the top of the rankings but that’s not much use if all your traffic is clicking through from Poland and Lithuania and you only deliver in a twelve mile radius of Manchester.

It’s the SEO experts who benefit
There is an increasing war of attrition between SEO experts and more wonga is probably spent on fine-tuning what lies behind the site than on the content and usefulness of the site itself. We know: we’ve done SEO in the past. This state of affairs ignores the fundamental truth of a successful web site: the most valuable visitors arrive through recommendation and they return because your site is sticky.

Recommendation leads to valuable visitors because they have already taken some self-qualifying steps before they arrive. They know what your site is about and they are either interested in the subject or even ready to buy. It means, for a start, that your home page or landing page can get down to business quickly. Contrast that with a click through from Google based on a simple link.

Bad love
Talk of recommendations raises the question of back links and link love. Google loves links, of course, but it’s choosy in the same way you would be choosy about recommendations. If I’m looking for a restaurant in a new town, I might look for further confirmation if I discover that the first two people who raved about the food and service at “Hank’s Especially Greasy Spoon” were the manager’s son and Hank’s wife.

Staying with the restaurant theme; if the manager shouts loudly enough then people will come. But what if the food’s dreadful, the service appalling, and my partner’s a vegetarian and the chef only does meat? I won’t be making another booking as I leave and I’m not going to be telling friends, colleagues, and family to hurry on down for a meal.

Acquiring visitors through recommendations and positive conversations means there will be fewer disappointed customers. Save the money you may end up spending on SEO and hire a better chef - or at least some bigger wine glasses.

While writing this I received an email asking if I wanted my web site to be ‘top of the Google rankings’. This sort of SEO promise is becoming increasingly like the other spam I get offering to add inches to my manhood - and I guess they’re not talking about my height. To be fair, the SEO offer, however shady the methods applied, might have a better chance of success - but not for long. The problem with using underhand tactics to manipulate rankings is that sooner or later - and usually sooner - Google notices and your site will be penalised. That means it more or less disappears from view. Yellow ink applied by Google.

Find them before they find you
The answer is to engage with customers before they arrive at your site and then, once they have visited, make sure your product or content is vital enough that they keep returning. (Maintaining core content is a subject for another post altogether.) So, less SEO and more CIE - Customer Interaction Effort.