August 28th, 2009
It is almost impossible in today’s business environment to be competitive without a marketing-driven website. This is your calling card to the world, your first and most important medium in your Internet marketing toolbox. Millions of people are looking for products, services and information every minute of every day.
But unfortunately many companies launch a website, and then begin marketing it. What they have done in essence is make their website another product that they need to promote. Your website should do the marketing for your company, not the other way around.
So when developing your website expect it to help grow and increase your exposure as you constantly create and publish high-value content that your customers or clients would love, therefore over time gaining backlinks and growing your search engine rankings, and therefore your leads or sales.
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Tags: hierarchical website design, sitemap, web design ireland
Posted in Conversion Optimisation, Web Design | No Comments »
August 18th, 2009
Meta description values are used by the search engines as the snippets that show up under the web page address or URL in the search engine results. For example when doing a quick Google search for the term “scaffolding Ireland” these were the results.
“In addition to Sale & Hire, our Contracts Department works with many of Ireland’s major building contractors to supply and erect scaffolding…”
“Scaffolding Formwork in Ireland, find whatever you need wherever you need it…”
“keycons003 / keycons003×34 20/08/2009 02:17:38 / A3 / B4 / 0.3603516, 66.249.65.21514. Scaffolding Erectors And Hirers, Ireland…”
Would you agree that these leave a lot to be desired?
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Tags: Google, meta descriptions, on-page seo, Search Engines
Posted in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation | 1 Comment »
June 23rd, 2009
Ok first up I have to say that we are all fans of Google Analytics here, with good reason: it’s zero-cost, its rich array of features: brilliant reporting capabilities, the ability to slice and dice the data in almost every conceivable way, the slick ajax-ified interface, and the support for advanced stuff like advanced segmentation and something that I really love using on e-commerce sites – goals and funnels, and for the nerds among us – filters.
- The analytics data is not available in real-time, you have to wait until midnight passes the next day to see yesterday’s data
- The data is not yours – it’s Google’s – and for all of the clean image that Google has (”don’t be evil”), forgive me when I say that I prefer to have my own copy of my website trend and visitor data.
- Google Analytics works by including a JavaScript snippet in your pages, but search engine spiders (”crawlers”) don’t execute JavaScript when they load your site’s pages, so their visits aren’t logged by Google Analytics. So when spiders from GoogleBot, Inktomi (Yahoo), Bing (Microsoft’s new search engine), Ask and Baidu crawl your site, you know absolutely zero about it from looking at your GA reports.
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Tags: crawltrack, googlebot, search engine spiders, Seo, slurp inktomi, website crawler statistics
Posted in Google Analytics, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »
June 5th, 2009
Google Local Search has recently kicked in with a vengeance in Ireland, with map results with local business listings being displayed #1 on the search results page when someone types in a search with a town or city name in the search term, when business listings which are taken from the Google Local Business Center match the searched for keyphrase and town or city name.
For example, a search on Google.ie as follows “online marketing cavan” yields the following results:
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Tags: Google Local Business, Google Local Search, Google Maps, Ireland, Irish Businesses Online, Online Marketing
Posted in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation | 1 Comment »
May 28th, 2009
Google have added a new tool to their already impressive array of search engine features and tools which can give you a great insight into how keywords relate in respect of real searches conducted on Google. One of the uses that this tool has is that it can really help you to structure your AdWords campaigns for maximum clout, helping your Quality Score and therefore your cost effectiveness and hence your profitability.
The name of the tool is Wonder Wheel and is available under the “Show Options” link to the top left of the main search results pane. Check out the screenshot below to see how to access it. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Google Search, Google Wonder Wheel
Posted in Google AdWords, Google Analytics, Online Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation | 1 Comment »
May 28th, 2009
Ok here is a post on how to do something extremely useful and ultimately profitable on an e-commerce site (online store) which was built on Zen Cart (or any online store system for that matter).
This can give you a crystal-clear view of what pages in the checkout process of your online store are literally losing you sales hand over fist. This post is an adjunct to an earlier post on this blog which is at http://webreach.ie/blog/checkout-goal-and-funnel-analytics-where-are-we-losing-sales-on-our-online-store/.
Once you can then see which culprit pages are scaring your customers away (just as they have taken out their credit card), you are thus armed with the knowledge of which pages need changing in order to boost your conversion rate and therefore your sales. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Checkout Abandonment, Conversion Optimisation, ecommerce, Funnel Visualisation, Google Analytics Funnel Setup, Google Analytics Goals, Head Match, online store, Website Optimisation, Zen Cart
Posted in Conversion Optimisation, Google Analytics, Zen Cart, e-commerce | 1 Comment »
May 26th, 2009
Ok so one of the most important things that you can do on an e-commerce website is to analyse how your pages are performing, especially in relation to your checkout process. This can give you a birds-eye view into which pages on your site (if any) are causing customers to abandon the checkout process just as they are about to take out their credit card. This scientific analysis of page performance reaps many long-term benefits and is a must for any site where the sales are not being clocked up despite a decent amount of site traffic.
In a blog post back in March, (“First Things First – Examine the Analytics Data & Establish the Facts” I wrote about a friend of mine who has an ecommerce website which had a fair bit of traffic but not many sales.
Since then we put a Google Analytics Goal Funnel in place on the checkout funnel pages to examine what site users were doing when they got to the point of checking out on the site. A screenshot of a one-month view of the funnel is below. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Checkout Funnel, Conversion Goals, e-commerce, Funnel Visualisation, Google Analytics, Ireland, Scientific Marketing, Zen Cart, Zen Cart Optimisation, ZenCartOptimization.com
Posted in Conversion Optimisation, Google Analytics, Zen Cart, e-commerce | 1 Comment »
May 5th, 2009
Most pay per click networks work on the simple rule that the higher you bid for a certain keyphrase, the higher your ad position. But this is not the way that the most popular (and fairest) pay-per-click network, Google AdWords, calculates your ad position.
In AdWords, bid price is only one factor in its ad position equation. The other main factor in the ad ranking equation is Quality Score, as calculated by combining a bunch of factors, the 3 main ones being (listed in order of weighting):
1. Click-Thru-Rate (CTR),
2. Ad Relevance (keywords in ad title and copy)
3. Landing page quality (keywords in landing page copy, structure, etc.) Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Ad Relevance, AdWords Algorithm, Bid Price, Cost Per Click, Cpc, Google AdWords, Hal Varian, Keyphrase, Landing Page, Page Position, Page Quality, Pay Per Click, Pay Per Click Network, Quality Score, Score Number
Posted in Google AdWords, Search Engine Marketing | No Comments »
May 5th, 2009
Ok now I make no secret that I like to build sites on WordPress whenever it is a suitable, as it allows us to do fundamental on-page SEO on a site pretty easily, and also the blogging system is easy to configure and tweak on WordPress. We have a client who is targeting the Life Coaching niche (Dating and Relationship coaching in particular), and we recently build a site for her, you can check it out at www.GoodLifeCoaching.ie. Its build on WordPress 2.7 and is also a bilingual site, as it allows the owner to write post and page content in both English and German, and allows the visitors to switch between languages by clicking on the appropriate link. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Description Tags, Google, Ireland, Keyphrase, Keyword, Keywords, Languages, Life Coaching, Niche Dating, Page Content, Regard, Relationship, Relationship Coaching, Screenshot, Search Volume, Seo, Wordpress
Posted in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Wordpress | 1 Comment »
April 13th, 2009
When you are working on doing your own on-page Search Engine Optimisation at first the task can seem daunting, but there is good news: fortunately there are only a few areas that you need to concern yourself with, so here is a guide to help you make sure that you are not missing anything.
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Tags: Google, on-page seo, organic seo, search engine rankings
Posted in Online Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Uncategorized, Web Design | No Comments »
