is your Site SHOUTING the Right words?

I penned an article way back in Nov 2007 on this subject, which is really all about 'putting the keywords into pages in the RIGHT way'. What I said then still holds true today (a fact that goes to show that the rate of change in how site's are ranked does not change as much as some would have you think.

So the question is Does your site:

1. Use the right words?
2. In the right way?
3. In the right place?

To answer the first question you need to have carried out some Keyword Research in order that you can identify the phrases that people are using, and can therefore, (bearing in mind the competition) chose which ones to target.

Once you have that list, you need to use them in the copy on the page, aiming for a density of between a 2% and 4% (percentage of time the words are used on the page), whilst, and this is important, still making the page readable.

Using them in the right way is a bit more difficult as for best effect you need to include the phrases in the order that they are used, in other words don't split up a phrase if you can avoid it. More importantly, you need to put these words on the page in the right way. To explain, imagine that you are reading a newspaper that instead of using HEADLINES to show what is important on the page, used the same size text (with no bold etc) on its pages. You can imagine how difficult it would be to see at a quick glance what the main topics were. This is exactly the problem the Search Engines will have with your site UNLESS you use the (old fashioned) HTML Header tags, H1 to H6.

HTML is a form of 'mark up language' and has it roots (interestingly enough) in the world of print, the 'mark up language' being the way of telling the print setters how to layout the page and what fonts etc to use. Thus the Header 1 tag (H1) is the MAIN header, whilst the H2 is the next most important, all the way down to H6.

So, think of the Search Engines as someone looking at your pages in the same way as those print setters, they NEED to be told what is important and THE ONLY WAY of doing this (in the page copy at least - see later) is to use the HEADER tags (and to a lesser degree the Bold, Italic and List tags). Oh and by the way, if you are worried about using the Header tags because it will compromise the look and feel of your site, don't worry, you can over ride their appearance using style sheets, ask your web designer about that one.

So, you have dealt with the copy on the page, but you have still missed the Biggest Trick and that is the TITLE of the page, not the one on the page, but the one in the Browser Header Bar (the bit in blue). This is the most important bit of real estate on a page as far as Search Engine Optimisation is concerned, as it 'tells' the Engines what the page is all about, so choose it carefully, bearing in mind:-

1. It MUST match the copy on the page
2. The first words are the most important
3. Only the first nine will be used by the Engines

That about wraps it up at the initial level. There is more of course, such as the rule on prominence, but more on all that later.

Is Your Site a Black Hole?

Is your site a black hole where visitors arrive and then are never seen again? Do you know what they did there? What they liked and disliked? If they started the shopping cart (or enquiry system) and then left half way through?

Today, thanks to Google's free analytics (always worries me that, Google giving something away - but that is another story) many sites now can tell a lot about what their visitors get up to. Whether this data is used correctly is (yet) another story and we won't go down that route today, no let us concentrate on whether ALL the data that could be collected IS being collected.

The difference between a Black Hole a Grey Hole and a White Hole

As above, many sites are now using analytics and will therefore not have a black hole for a site, but they probably still have a grey one as they are not using Filters, Tagging and Event Tracking, all three of which will add a whole new dimension to the data collected and will allow you to better understand what is going on. Used correctly you can see Everything and your site becomes not black or grey, but bright white (at least data wise).

For instance, did you know that with 'Tagging' you can split your visitors into the right groups, those coming in via a Newsletter being separated from those coming in via Banner ads etc.

With 'Event Tracking' you can see if people click a 'mailto' link to send you an email, or to go to another site. Better still you can use it to see at what part of filling out a form users stop, something that could save you a lot of lost business (cause you would know what they did not like and could therefore change it).

Filters on the other hand allow you to see the data in clearer fashion by only collecting data on a particular section of visitors, plus, they can also be used to 'filter out' visitors from your own business etc.

As you can see, there is a whole lot more to Google analytics than meets the eye.

The question is, is your site a Black Hole a Grey one or one where you see it all..?

More tomorrow

Bounce Rates and Your Home Page

If you are amongst the group of website owners (or webmasters) who use Google Analytics (or another analytic tool) one of the first things you will be looking at is the 'Bounce Rate' (the number of visitors that come to the site and leave straight away, think about it in the same way as a shopper going through the door of a store and then turning right around and leaving without looking at what was on the shelves - not something that would fill the owner with confidence if it happened a lot !).

This Bounce rate is probably the most important statistic there is as a high bounce rate means that people are just not getting the chance to see what you can do for them, which means you have lost a potential sale 'EVERY TIME someone Bounces'.

Now don't get me wrong NO site has a zero bounce rate, and the rate will vary tremendously depending on how the visitor got to the site (e.g emails sent to a list of qualified customers will (should) always result in lower bounce rates than visitors from the Search Engine results), but if you have a high bounce rate then you are in trouble, that's a fact.

So how can you improve matters?

The first thing I would do is to check the download time of your site and see if it is this that is causing you issues (these days people will often leave sites that take too long to download). Tip, if you want to be really clever you can also make changes to your home page to see if it is downloaded in full every time, quite useful to know if you are having doubts on the matter. You could also see if users with particular browser are leaving more than others (here a sign of incompatibility with the browser).

However, once you have checked all these 'technical' issues, the next step is to ask yourself three questions:-

Does your Home Page

1. Tell Visitors WHO YOU ARE?
2. Tell Visitors WHAT YOU OFFER / DO?
3. Tell Visitors WHY THEY SHOULD BUY FROM YOU?

If your site does not do these three things correctly it could well be the reason your visitors are leaving, without looking around the store, in high numbers.

So go check it out, just off to have another look at mine now too....

More tomorrow

PS If you have not got analytics of some sort on your site, get it sorted now! You are really missing a trick as you simply won't be able to tell what the important people - your potential customers - think about your site and how they are reacting to it.

Don't Forget Bing When Building Your Links..

There is not a lot of 'chatter' on the SEO street about the rules that Bing uses when assessing a site for ranking, but Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center has come up with some advice in the form of some dos and don'ts of link-building (for Bing.)

As you would expect, this advice is not a lot different to Google's, but it is always good to get news from the 'horses mouth' in areas like this (getting it wrong could be fatal).

Bing views links in a similar way to Google, placing emphasis on the 'quality' of links when determining rankings. Rick is however at pains to point out "Just don't make the mistake of believing it will result in instant gratification. Successful link building efforts require a long-term commitment, not an overnight or turnkey solution," adding, "You need to continually invest in link building efforts with creativity and time."

So What Should You NOT Do

Do any of these and there is a good chance that your site will be closely reviewed by one of Bing's 'quality engineers'. The penalties were also spelled out by Rick "When probable manipulation is detected, a spam rank factor is applied to a site, depending upon the type and severity of the infraction and if the spam rating is high, a site can be penalized with a lowered rank. If the violations are egregious, a site can be temporarily or even permanently purged from the index."

1. So don't increase your links too fast as this smacks of 'artificial' engineering. Yes, I know you can go and 'buy' a 1,000 (non paid) links in the form of blogs and forum posts, just don't do it overnight!

2. Beware of having too many inbound links from irrelevant blog comments and forums.

3. Never use hidden links in your pages

4. Avoid the paid link farms, link exchanges programes and any other "bad neighbourhoods" on the Web

5. Be careful who you link out too. Remember as this is far more easily controlled by the website owner, so a lot of mistakes here can really get you into trouble. Thus linking out to 'known' web spam sites is a no no (I always check sites to see if they are in Google's index, if they are not then they are probably 'trouble' and not worth linking too anyway.)

What You SHOULD Do


1. Develop your Brand and ensure that relevant industry experts, product reviewers, bloggers are aware of your site and it's content and encourage them to link to you.

3. Use Online Press releases

4. Publish 'expert articles' on the many online article directory sites available

5. Try to participate in as many conversations on blogs and forums that are relevant to your site, using links / your ID script to refer / link back to your site (when applicable).

6. Use the social networks in order to increase the 'footprint' of your site / brand, but here ensure you have links to your site in all your profiles.

7. Use E-newsletters and to notify all of the new content on your site and keep both the site and the E-newsletter fresh and informative.

8. Have a blog or forum on your site, or at least linked to the site.

All of this is not really news to any search marketer who has been around the block a few times, but if you are new to the game, following this advice will help your rankings on Bing and Google and that can't be bad now can it?

More Tomorrow

Google's Caffeine Update & Site Speed

There is a lot of talk about the new ranking algorithm update due from Google any time now. According to Matt Cutts this update will not be rolled out in full (only one data centre will be operation) until after Christmas and even when it does it will not make that much difference.

The other thing that is on the cards, one that could really make a difference is all about the topic of site download times. Here Google's idea is that the web should be fast and that it will therefore give faster sites better rankings than slow ones. In other words slow site will be handicapped in the race (just like the favourites are in horse racing). The moral here is of course, make sure your site is fast (and not all Flash - some designers please take note) and just to help, Google have provided a set of tools for you.

Check out the video on http://videos.webpronews.com/2009/11/13/matt-cutts-interview/

For details of the speed test and other add on's for Firefox see:- http://code.google.com/speed/

More tomorrow

Less can be More when Conversions are Wanted

You may have heard the phrase 'less can be more' before and it is true on the web too.

One of the best examples of this is having too much 'going on' on the home page of a site. This I'm afraid can just confuse people so much that they either forget why they came (distraction being the issue here) or cause them to get so fed up trying to make out what you do or what they do next, that they simply go away.

This 'simplicity' is said to be one of the reasons that Google is so popular, as unlike Yahoo it does not clutter up the screen with anything other than the important bit, the space where you type in what you are looking for. Bear this in mind when you are designing your home page. Ask yourself, 'why has someone come to my site and how do I best serve them?', crack this and you will see an increase in conversions.

The second issue on conversions is also about clutter, but this time it's about the number of products you display on each of your product pages. Tests have shown that decreasing the number of items from 9 to 6 can increase the conversion rate by as much as 6%. Why, well it is reckoned that people can (a) see the product more clearly (it has more room on the screen and thus is bigger) and (b) they are not as confused about which one to pick. Either way, sites that have employed these tactics have seen an increase in sales.

More tomorrow

The Two Type of Visitor

When it comes right down to it, there are basically two types of visitor to any Ecommerce website, those that will look and look for what they want and those that will 'go and ask'.

This mirrors people's behaviour in the shops when you come to think of it. Many shoppers prefer to drift around a store, glancing at the directory signs to see if they can spot where they need to be (just like you do on the navigation bar of a site), looking in the different isles (on the web = pages) until either they get fed up and walk out (click to another site) or find what they want and potentially buy it. These shoppers are of the 'We'll do it ourselves' variety and can well be put off if approached by an assistant (or by an 'annoying Can I help you?' chat box appearing on the screen).

The other type of shopper will make a bee line straight for customer information or the nearest assistant and ask where what they want can be found. In the shops it is highly likely that the assistants will be able to point the shopper in the right direction, often taking them to the item themselves, all very helpful. On the web however it can be very very different. On the web the helpful shop assistant is replaced by the SEARCH box.

The first thing that the 'I will just ask' web shopper has to do is to locate the Search Box. More often than not this is on the top of the screen and is easily found and often has the word 'SEARCH' in a button by it. This is great and makes it easy to find and better still you know what to do next, click the button. Some such boxes are not however that easily found and may have a magnifying glass icon instead of a nice big button. Now I'm not saying that people don't 'get' the connection between the icon and the action, but remember not everyone is a Sherlock Holmes fan and may not therefore associate the icon with the action 'to search' so beware and keep it Simple.

The next potential pit fall on the web is the quality of the Search Results. This is totally dependent on the quality of the programming behind the search facility and in many cases the results are far from helpful, being incomplete, inaccurate, poorly laid out and in extreme cases leave the user thinking 'so what do I do now?' which in web terms is always, always a very bad idea.

So, if you have a Search Facility on your site, you MUST ensure that the results are true and accurate and that using it all is like falling off the proverbial log. If you can manage that you will have gone a long way to increasing conversions on your site, after all, we have all turned into 'I will just ask' shoppers at sometimes in our lives.

There is however one more trick that the wise website owner should know about when it comes to the Search Box, more on that in the next post.

Increasing PPC Conversions

I attended an interesting Webinar yesterday run by our friends Google. It was all about how making small changes to a website can really increase conversions.

One of the most important points was that of 'Disconnection' (my term not theirs) . This refers to the fact that many adverts say one thing and then deliver the visitor to a page that says another. The example they gave was 'buy an electric drill for £88.99' and then be taken to a page that only mentions drills from £100. The 'Disconnection' here is obvious and visitors will often just leave at that point (the figures prove it).

What you HAVE to do is to ensure that things mentioned in the advert are on the 'landing page' AND THAT they are clearly visible (best to smack the user in the face with it in my opinion so they can't miss it) and not buried somewhere on a page full of other products etc.

Improving the 'Connection' between your adverts and landing page will reduce the 'Bounce' rate by as much as 20%...

If you would like some assistance with a troublesome PPC campaign, please see www.serendipity-online-marketing.com

More tomorrow...

Link Building using Articles

There is talk on the SEO 'street' that using Articles for links is now a process best forgotten, the buzz being that the Engines have now decided that the article engines (where most articles end up) are just another form of Free For All (FFA) links site. As you know, such sites (indeed to some degree also pages on sites that are just a list of links) have been to all intents and purposes disregarded by the Engines for some time now, so if this is true, is it worth all the effort and expense of placing articles on the web?

The fact is we don't know for sure what is in the mind of Google etc on this matter, but we can take steps to make sure that our articles work where the competitions does not, the result here being that we still get traffic and rankings and they don't.

How is this done, well it is a three stage process.

1. Make sure that the articles you right are original and worth the time it takes to read them
2. Make sure that you don't submit exact copies to a whole list of sites, cause if you do Google's 'Duplicate Filter' monster (a nasty beast) will 'get you.'
3. Do some research and find sites that want articles and then contact them directly.

Follow these three simple rules and you'll find that Article's are far from dead in the SEO world.

Link Building for SEO

There is a lot of talk at the moment about the way that link building strategies are going to have to change again now that Twitter and Facebook and other Social Media websites are in the market place and, and this is perhaps the major factor, that Google and Bing are climbing into bed with them so very readily.

Talk is that Tweets will be a part of the algorithm used by Google when deciding who to rate for what, other talk is that it will soon be all about Branding. Both of these may well be true and further examination of this critical area is needed.

If you are interested, then please see our online search engine optimistation articles.

Twitter and the Stock Market

It may be a funny thing to say but there are ( or could be ) similarities between Twitter and the Stock Market. Why so I say this, well, it is a fact that computer systems are used to track the fortunes of shares (are they going up and down?) and that in many cases, decisions to buy or sell these shares will either be made by a computer (or at least suggested by one). The price of shares will therefore be to some degree or another decided by computers. Now if these computers make their decisions based on the market place and this to a degree is effected by other computers you could imagine that shares could go up and down like mad things, all with little intervention from humans, a few of whom may have unwittingly 'started the rollercoaster' by the purchase or sale of a critical amount of stock.

Now I'm sure that there are safeguards about this in the Financial Sector (well OK I hope that there are) but what about Twitter...

With the automated software you can get today, you can easily 'tell it' to go and follow hundreds of accounts and they, if they are using similar software will no doubt follow you back (even if only for a short while). The outcome of all this automation will no doubt be more followers (I can prove that) but are they 'real' people or is just a computer reading the tweets?

As you can see, computers are used in both areas in big ways, let's just hope that Twitter does not suffer in the same way as the Financial sector just has..

Social Media Workshops

Seems that the number of Social Media Workshops on offer today is rising by the minute, some are free, others can cost you £600 for a two day course. The question is are they worth the money, or are they (especially the free ones) just designed to show the attendees that the job is just far too hard for them to do and they'd best leave it to the 'professionals'

Having been in the SEM world for nine years now, I know just how difficult it is for anyone trying to understand what it is all about, after their skill sets are different, so courses can be useful, but what do people really get out of them, do they follow up the time spent at the course with great Tweets and Facebook pages, or is the time wasted.

Also, how many just decide to leave it with the 'professionals' like Serendipity Online Marketing?

Love to know...

Silver Bullet or Not?

In the world of SEO, the search has been long for the famed 'silver bullet' the thing or method, that would enable anyone to take a site to the top of the rankings and get all the traffic (and hence sales) that they wanted.

Of course, you'll hear many people say that they have just that, but most (all?) are just after your money, their book, program or training course really being about making them money not you.

And now there is Twitter and everyone is falling over themselves to use it saying this it IT, The Way to make it happen.

So is Twitter that famed bullet?, I think that the jury is still out and it's true value won't be known until all the 'hype' dies down. Some (albeit few experts) are already talking about the 'emperors new clothes' but we will have to wait and see.

New Source of Info on SEM & SMO

There is a lot of hype at the moment about Social Media Optimisation and as expected a whole host of information about it all, too much for most people to read, let alone assimilate.

To this end, we'll be doing our best to provide some snippets from it all, thus giving you, our reader a chance of understanding what is going on....

We'll be doing our best here, but it is not going to be easy.

The best advice we can give at the moment, is don't be sucked in by the hype until you have had a chance to consider all the factors.

Until later...