Posts Tagged ‘SEO’

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.