A Quick ‘How to’ on Title Tags

Posted on April 20, 2011 by Richard Green

In terms of placing keywords in your site title tags represent the most critical element for search engine relevance.

A title tag must correspond directly with the content of a particular page for it to be effective, and here are 8 rules to follow to optimise their benefits:

1. Place your most important targeted keywords at the start of the title tag.

Many businesses opt for placing their brand name at the start of their title tags. This may offer some branding benefit, and assist on searches for your brand name. However, from an SEO perspective greater benefit is likely to be gained from the effective positioning of key targeted search words at the head of the tag.

2. Limit the title tag length to 65 characters.

Google supports up to 70 characters, but it’s known that at best other search engines cut off what is displayed in the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) at 65 characters. Any words after this are highly likely to be given less or no weight by the search engines.

3. Ensure your key targeted keywords/phrases

Ensure your key targeted keywords/phrases for a particular page are incorporated into the relevant title tag.

4. Use a divider to split up the words/phrases you’re including in the title tag.

Such dividers can include |, >, -, and :

5. Target searcher intent.

Bear in mind the reasons why a visitor has come to your site. For example if it’s to make a purchase ensure that they can see that they can doer this through the title tag. Conversely if they’re looking for information make the tag more descriptive. In other words tailor it to the intent of your visitors.

6. Be consistent.

Once you’ve arrived at a formula that works do stick to it. AS searchers get used to seeing your sites on the SERPs they will become conditioned to seeking you out through your tags, so make it easy for them to identify you.

7. Target longer phrases as relevant.

To help in supporting the structure of your site use longer descriptive keywords if this helps to ensure that you target phrases effectively within your page structure. This gives you a greater opportunity for targeting more granular terms and helps to avoid keyword cannibalisation in your tags, i.e. using the same keywords within the title tags of different pages.

8. Focus on conversion and clickthrough rates

Always remember the objective is to get searchers to view your titles and be inspired to click on to you pages. This can be difficult to measure, but you can experiment with different tags to measure the impact on conversion, in a similar way to split testing different title and ad contents as part of a PPC campaign.

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A Quick ‘How To’ on the Meta Description Tag

Posted on April 20, 2011 by Richard Green

Though not directly impacting on the ranking of your website on the search engines it is nonetheless very important for a number of reasons:

  • Typically this will be the text that the search engines display under the title tag in its summary return on the SERP.

A Quick How To on the Meta Description Tag

  • It can act as a good advertisement of your products and services in a similar way that PPC advert does.
  • It should display your targeted keywords so that viewers can clearly see what your website is about.

In essence they have a critical role to play in converting viewers of your search return to actual visitors on to your site. Remember your end goal should relate to an action being undertaken on your site rather than just getting your website returned highly on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Spending time and thought on writing a good meta description for each page can way great dividends in converting web traffic.

Some quick rules:

1. Be Honest

Make sure you tell the truth in your descriptions. Trying to pass yourself as something you’re not will only leave visitors with a poor impression of your brand, and not lead to a sustainable customer relationship.

2. Be succinct

You’ll be wise to limit yourself to 160 characters as this is all that Google displays. Yahoo actually displays up to 165 and Bing in excess of 2000, but given Google’s relative importance, this should be the default.

3. Make it salesy

Always treat your meta description as if it is effectively and advertisement for you product, though also ensure that you are clearly descriptive. Use the manta of good ad copy: make your phrase informative and compelling.

4. Test, Refine, Test Refine…

Just as if you are testing a PPC campaign using different ad treatments, test different variants of your meta descriptions and analyse over time to see which are most effective in terms of actual conversion.

5. Understand the psychology

Don’t automatically assume that good PPC ad text will make for a good meta description. Searchers who respond well to an ad may simply be looking to buy something, whereas natural searchers may have a more complex search rationale, and be trying to find information.

6. Include your targeted keywords

You must include your important keywords within the description, as this is likely to have a very significant impact on your clickthrough rate. It also makes it more likely that the search engines will use your meta description text as the description in the SERPs.

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Some great pointers on how to sell successfully using social media

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Richard Green

There’s a lot of hype out there about social media, and no doubt it’s use continues to grow at rapid rate of knots…HEADLINE…300 million businesses are now on Facebook.

One word of caution…….it may be the be all and end all for your business or it may just be one more weapon in your marketing armoury that effectively supports your overall marketing efforts. The key lies in working this out and planning effectively…….don’t just jump in because the latest guru on the block tells you it’s the saviour of your business.

Having said that there are now plenty of examples of companies that have and are using social media effectively to bring significant growth to their business.

With this in mind the article linked here, 8 ways to sell succesfully using social media, provides some useful examples and insights. From Henry Kissinger to good old givers’ gain (BNI members please take note), and even the thought that your social media efforts should extend off line (That’s right it’s not all about the internet!), this article provides some useful guide sticks and food for thought on where you may want to take your social media efforts.

Please review in the context of your own business and feel free to post for followup comment.

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Free webinar opportunity

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Richard Green

An interesting free webinar opportunity landed in my inbox today: Optimising 60 landing pages in 60 minutes. Sounds like a challenge, but I’m sure they’ll pull it off. Here’s the link: Free Website Optimisation Seminar. Enjoy!

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The Value of Links

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Richard Green

Without a doubt an effectively established link strategy is a critical part of a search marketing strategy, particularly in highly competitive markets, but what is not so easy to determine is how you can measure the value of particular links.

There is no easy answer to this, but there are some key elements that can be used to determine a link’s value, and here’s a quick list to act as a guide.

1. Linking page SERP rank

The first thing to look for is where the page that is linking to you sits in the search engine returns in terms of ranking for the keyword you’re targeting. For example if you’re getting a link for the term ‘Ipad’ from the page that ranks at number 1 position in Google for the search term ‘Ipad’ you’re probably getting as good a link as you can get. In fact if you can achieve links form any of the sites ranking on the first three pages of Google you’re almost certainly going to receive significant search benefit from the link.

2. Title Tag analysis

Take a look at the title tags of sites linking that you may want to link to you, and get an understanding of how that site ranks on search for key terms within its titles. If it’s achieving good ranks for these terms then chances are it will be good to get links from here.

3. Avoid No Follow links

Some sites deliberately set up their links as being “no follow” in which case no link juice benefit will be passed on. Therefore, from a search engine perspective, such links will have no value.

4. Does the linking site sell links?

If you can obviously see that a site overtly sells links then chances are that the search engines can see this too, and consequently such sites may lose their ability to pass ‘link juice’. There’s also a chance that sites undertaking such linking activity will receive a penalty from Google.

5. What’s the relevance of the linking page/site?

For a link to be truly effective it should be designated by the search engines as a ‘quality’ link. One of the key measures of quality is the relevance of the linking site/page. If the page on your site that you require a link for has the primary topic of pink elephants and you are targeting this as a key phrase hen it’s important that linking page should be in tune with and relevant to this theme. Again this doesn’t mean stuffing pages with that particular key phrase, but the pages should include good quality content that is relevant to the targeted subject matter and key phrases.

6. Link anchor text

Links that include your targeted keywords will be of more value to you from a linking perspective, so this should be borne in mind when establishing your links.

7. High ranking competitors’ links.

Though not necessarily a guarantee of good quality links, an examination of the linking sites to your competitors who are ranking highly for the keywords/phrases that you are looking to target, can provide some good signals of sites that could be highly effective to obtain links from.

8. Number of external links on linking pages

As the amount of available ‘link juice’ from a page is split between the number of links it has on it, you will be better served by gaining links that have fewer links as you will then gain more benefit from the level of the available link juice passing to your site.

9. Links in to the linking page

An analysis of the number and quality of links into the page that’s linking to your site can provide clues as to how important this page is and how it is viewed as a reliable and authoritative resource for the topic that you are targeting.

10. Page rank of the domain of the linking site

You shouldn’t get to hung up on the concept of page rank as it has lost some relevance over time, and there are many examples of sites that actually rank very well on searches for targeted keyword thank you very much without having a high page rank. None the less it is worth paying some reference to the page rank of the domain as an indicator. This can actually be a difficult number to get at, s it’s often better to take the page rank of the site’s home page as a best approximation.

Incidentally the Google Page Rank measure can be obtained by downloading the Google Toolbar on to your internet browser.

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Black Hat SEO: How to Get Your Site Banned by the Search Engines

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Richard Green

There are some critical mistakes that you can make when making efforts to improve your online search performance. Even worse you may come across organisations who deliberately apply these techniques to bring about search performance improvement. Best advice is to avoid them at all costs; they may create an initial boost to your search performance, but if an when the search engines actually detect that you’re applying such techniques the most likely scenario is that they’ll apply penalties and send you search engine rankings into oblivion. Here are some of the common ‘Black Hat’ tactics that you should be on the lookout for:

1.Keyword stuffing

This is a method that some people use to get higher keyword density on their pages without altering their design/look.

2.Hidden Text

This technique basically calls for hiding text away from human users, but enabling the search engines to see it. The most common form of this is to create keyword stuffed text which is the same colour as the page background, thus making it invisible to the human eye, but not the search engines which will then obviously pick up the keywords within the hidden text. A less extreme version of this is to ‘hide’ text right at the bottom of pages where you would not expect visitors to scroll, but is obviously still visible to the search engines.

3. Cloaking/Redirection/Doorway pages:

This is one of the more common methods of bad SEO and can get you banned. The developer would build a high-density page targeting a few specific keywords. In the header, the page uses JavaScript or some other scripting method to forward browser traffic to a different page (often the home page). Because spiders do not read or use JavaScript, it sees the high-density, optimised content and indexes it. When a real user clicks the indexed page in the search engine, they are forwarded to an entirely different page. Redirection in almost any form outside of 301 (permanent redirect) is not SEO-friendly and could seriously damage your rank.

4. Triangle Linking

Triangle linking is a method by which someone forms a ring of one-way links between their sites. Site A links to Site B links to Site C links to Site A. In this way, they’ve built a chain of one-way links. Google and other engines consider this an exploitation of their one-way linking weight.

5. Link Farms

Link farming is the practice of getting a bulk of links from a site that is usually just remotely included on your page. A link farm is a group of websites created for the sole purpose of creating a high volume of link, but unfortunately they aren’t real sites and therefore links from them do not confer any real quality value. Typically many of other sites use the same page of links in the same order. Search engines do not like sites acquiring bulk links in this method and it is very easy for them to detect.

6. Duplicate or cloned content

It is a bad idea to have duplicated content on your site. Simply writing a few paragraphs of content and pasting it on all your pages will not only fail in helping your rank, but could actually get you penalised. It is important that your pages are unique and are not more than 70% similar. Some sites try to auto generate content in order to create high volumes of additional online content, but as you may imagine this type of content does not have an end user in mind (other than trying to trick the search engines) and consequently is of little value. Other sites may just lift chunks of content form other sites, which again the search engines will be alive to an penalise accordingly.

The bottom line is that you should avoid any techniques that are designed to “trick” the search engines as the chances are that they will identify the activity as just that an respond accordingly.

Stick to “Whit at” policies and concentrate on making your website a useful resource for human visitors; if you do this well you’ll receive the blessing of the search engines and ultimately reap the benefit in terms of improved SERPs rankings and rising visitor levels to your site.

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42 Signals to Help Identify Low Quality/Spam Sites

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Richard Green

Though the appearance of some of the elements detailed below doesn’t positively mean that the particular site is low quality, they can be used as likely indicators and should be used as part of an overall assessment particularly if you intend to link your site either physically or in a broader marketing sense. Your online brand reputation is vitally important to you and you should therefore take steps to ensure that you do not do anything to jeopardise it.

  1. The domain is registered for a short period (maybe 1 or 2 years)
  2. High ratio of advertising blocks to content
  3. JavaScript redirects from initial landing pages
  4. Use of common, high commercial-value spam keywords
  5. Few links to high quality sites
  6. Many links to low quality, spam sites
  7. High keyword frequencies and keyword densities
  8. Small amounts of unique content
  9. Very few direct visits
  10. Rarely have short, high-value domain names
  11. Often contain many keyword-stuffed sub-domains rarely contain privacy policy and copy
  12. More likely to contain multiple hyphens in the domain name
  13. Less likely to have links from trusted sources
  14. Less likely to have SL security certificates
  15. Less likely to be in directories such as DMOZ, Yahoo!, Liberian’s internet index, and so forth
  16. Unlikely to have any significant quantity of branded searches
  17. Unlikely to be bookmarked in services such as My Yahoo!, Delicious, Faves.com and so on
  18. Unlikely to get featured in social voting sites such as Digg, Reddit, Yahoo! Buzz, StumbleUpon etc.
  19. Unlikely to have channels on YouTube, Facebook, or links from Wikipedia
  20. Unlikely to be mentioned on major news sites
  21. Unlikely to register with Google, Yahoo or Bing
  22. Unlikely to have a legitimate physical address or phone number on the web
  23. Likely to have the domain associated with emails and blacklists
  24. Often contain a large number of snippets of ‘duplicate’ content found elsewhere on the Web
  25. Unlikely to contain unique content in the form of PDFs, PPTs, XLSs, DOCs, etc
  26. Frequently feature commercially focused content
  27. Many levels of links away from highly trusted websites
  28. Rarely contain privacy policy and copywright notice pages
  29. Rarely listed in the better business bureaus online directory
  30. Rarely have small snippets of text quoted on other websites and pages
  31. Cloaking based on user-agent or IP address in common
  32. Rarely contain paid analytics tracking software
  33. Rarely have online or offline marketing campaigns
  34. Rarely have affiliate link programs pointing to them
  35. Almost never have .mil. .edu or .gov extensions
  36. Rarely have links from domains with .mil extentions
  37. Likely to have links to a significant portion of the sites and pages that link to them
  38. Extremely unlikely to be mentioned or linked to scientific research papers
  39. Unlikely to use expensive web technologies (Microsoft Server)
  40. Likely to be registered by parties who own a very large number of domains
  41. More likely to contain malware, viruses, or spyware.
  42. Likely too have privacy protection on the Whois information for their domain.
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Organic (Natural) Search vs Pay per Click (PPC)

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Richard Green

Many people are confused the difference between organic search, often referred to as natural search and Pay per click, also known as PPC, or Google Adwords.

The fundamental difference is that PPC is paid advertising i.e. your appearance in the ranking charts is largely determined by what you’re prepared to pay, whilst organic search performance is determined by a number factors, such a s site build, content and links.

Though this writer would always state that establishing a good search performance organically is a superior strategy to a reliance on PPC, both have a place to play in an online marketing strategy.

Both have pros and cons:

  • A note of realism has to be established with regard to achieving strong natural search performance, dependent on the competitive landscape relevant to the search terms you want to target. It can take up to 3 months to achieve notable ranking in some cases. In others the costs and work involved might simply be impractical. For example if you were in an online market where you needed to go head to head with the BBC, you’d be up against a site with thousands of content rich pages and with thousands of links. The sheer scale of what you would have to match, or exceed might make this a non starter.
  • PPC advertising can effectively place you into an auction situation, where you may find yourself outgunned by someone with deeper pockets. Nonetheless there are many companies out there who make very good returns from a well crafted PPC campaign, and it can also assist in situations where achieving good natural search is particularly challenging.

Both organic and paid options should be considered as part of a rounded online marketing strategy, and robust cost:return analysis undertaken.

Here are some interesting numbers that help to shed light on relative effectiveness:

  • It is estimated that only some 20% of web surfers actually click on PPC entries, so a strategy focused her alone will limit your access to the overall available market.
  • The relative visibility of search returns varies between paid and natural results:

Visibility of natural search results:

Rank Visibility
1 100%
2 100%
3 100%
4 85%
5 60%
6 50%
7 50%
8 30%
9 30%
10 20%

Visibility of paid search results:

Rank Visibility
1 50%
2 40%
3 30%
4 20%
5 10%
6 10%
7 10%
8 10%

In essence natural search results are far more visible than paid results, by a magnitude of up to 6x at ranking position 5. From an investment perspective a high rank in natural search should therefore outperform a similar ranking achieved through investment in PPC.

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Header (H1, H2, H3) Tags

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Richard Green

The H tags define the content hierarchy of your pages. H1 essentially acts as the headline for the page, H2 are subheadings, and H3 are sub sub or tertiary headings. From a search perspective the engines tend to favour keywords that appear in the headers, most notably the H1 tag.

Beware ‘stuffing’ all of the headers on a page with repeats of the same keyword as this may be interpreted by the engines as spammy, but do use the headers as a reinforcement of the major keywords you have signalled through your title tags.

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The Value of Links from Online Directories

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Richard Green

We’re often asked the question as to whether there’s any benefit from an SEO perspective to obtaining links from directory sites. In order to answer this question it’s important to understand what the search engines look for when examining directories.

  • If a fee is paid for appearing on a directory site is the payment made for editorial review purposes rather than to get a link?
  • Are the editors of the directory able, as they choose, to change the location, description and title of the listing.
  • The listing can be rejected by the editors.
  • The directory publication has the right to keep the fee even if the listing is subsequently rejected.
  • The quality of the sites listed within the directory is high.

Directories can be classified into three broad types:

1. Directories that provide sustainable links
These essentially are sites that follow the outline guidelines detailed above. It’s likely that such sites will continue to provide sustainable ‘link juice’ over time.

2. Directories that are probably not sustainable
Such directories don’t follow the guidelines detailed above. They may actually provide short term search benefit, but you run the risk of them losing effectiveness once the search engines have had chance to properly evaluate their merits, and you should bear this in mind if you intend to use such directories as part f your online marketing activities.

3. Directories that don’t provide ‘link juice’
These are directories where the search engines have identified their ‘true colours’, as sites set up to effectively ‘sell’ links. Once identified as such the search engines ensue they don’t pass any link juice, and consequently they have no ‘search’ value. The worst case scenario is that you link to a number of these sites, which the engines may then identify as spammy activity and apply penalties accordingly.

How to assess if a directory will provide any search benefit

  • Investigate their editorial policies to make sure they follow the guidelines detailed above.
  • Check out the sites that already feature on them. Are they high quality sites that rank well on searches.
  • Do they have a reputation for and history of enforcing their editorial policies.
  • Check out the online ‘noise’ about the site. Are there any posts or available information that might indicate that you should stay away from it.
  • Do an online search to see if the directory shows up in returns. If it doesn’t you can safely assume it’s one to be avoided.
  • Does it offer premium listings for a higher level fee. This may be an indication that it’s primary focus is to attract fees for links rather than provide a valuable information resource.
  • Check out the inbound links into the directory. This will provide clues as to it its policy ethics.
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