“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?

Frequently website owners pay little to no attention to the composition of their website’s meta descriptions. All too often the descriptions are incomplete or poorly written. Meta descriptions are one of the key elements in optimizing your website’s content. When creating your website’s meta descriptions remember to use accurate descriptive nouns and adjectives rather than generalizations because they will prove much more effective in providing an accurate description of your website to your potential visitor and the search algorithms will rank your site higher.

An example of some empty phrases or less successful phrases can be found in Top Gobbledygook Phrases list compiled by David Meerman. Some examples of really bad meta descriptions are cutting edge, innovative, robust, value added, flexible, results focused, unparalleled and world class. All of these phrases do not actually say anything specific about a product or service. They are all very general phrases, and by making the description so general, it actually ends up saying nothing at all.

Specific Meta Descriptions are best

Good meta description phrases need to be specific about the product’s benefit for the customer. When you are thinking about the meta descriptions for your website, look at your product like you are your customer. What would make you click on a link to the product? What kind of benefit are you looking for from the product? What makes one version of the product superior to another? These are the types of questions that you want to answer before writing the meta descriptions for your website.

For example, does your product last longer than its competitors? Is your product a higher quality or does a service offer more integrity? Do you offer a bigger bang for the customer’s buck?

Once you zero in on the top reasons that your customer would want your product over your competition’s product, you can construct a really good meta description for your website. Here are some examples of the types of things that a customer may find valuable when considering your product.

• An offer – 25% off through the end of the month, Free with purchase of
• Associations – Approved by the BBB, or accredited by, authorized dealer, board certified, Winners of the … Award
• Time – Established 1972, Serving the Community Since 1959
• Expertise – Factory Trained
• Guarantee – Lifetime Guarantee, One Year Guarantee, Low Price Guarantee
• Service – Overnight Delivery, Easy Returns, Replacement Parts Included, Same Day Shipping
• Track Record – More than 1 Million Sold, Over 20,000 Satisfied Customers, Over 1,000 listings

The meta descriptions that you use can also be repeated throughout your website. For example, in a service industry it is important for customers to know that you stand behind your work. So adding the BBB reference in your meta description is a great idea. Then including the BBB logo on your website will repeat the guarantee in the customer’s mind. It is a small addition to your site that could potentially gain new customers for your business every day.

1. The analytics data is not available in real-time, you have to wait until midnight passes the next day to see yesterday’s data
2. 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.
3. 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.

To track these visitors that in the vast majority of cases go totally unnoticed, you need a server-side scripting package that logs all visits to a database, including search engine spiders. There are a few free ones out there, and one of the best of these is CrawlTrack – freely available to download at http://www.crawltrack.net/

The install for CrawlTrack is reasonably straightforward, and can be completed in a few minutes. All you need to do is upload the CrawlTrack files to a new directory on your hosting account, create a new database on your hosting account’s MySQL server, include a piece of CrawlTrack PHP code in your website code (in a header file, or another appropriate file, as indicated by the CrawlTrack documentation) and go through the automated installation procedure.

CrawlTrack does not interfere with Google Analytics, you can run them side-by-side no problem, and enables you to see which spiders are crawling your site and how often. Here’s a screenshot of the “Crawlers” activity view from one of my new websites just taken today.

This data shows the percentage of visits from certain spiders. A table at the bottom shows how often each spider is crawling your site, broken down by each individual spider. Note: a “Visit” is one individual page load by the spider.

You can click on the name of the spider (e.g. GoogleBot) to drill down into detailed crawl stats for that specific robot. This view will give you individual crawl stats for each page of the site crawled, as well as stats into what percentage of your site pages were not crawled.

This is great data for SEO as it shows the regard by which the search engines are giving to your site. This is very useful if you are publishing new content on your site, or updating it, and you want to see when the new content is indexed by the search engines, therefore enabling you to monitor the effectiveness of site changes, e.g. you update your site with a special offer, and wait patiently for enquiries to come in. But the thing is that you don’t know when the search engines will index the new content. With CrawlTrack, you can see exactly when this new content is indexed, therefore giving you the ability to correlate the offer with the response more accurately.

With CrawlTrack, you will also be able to see trends in your website crawl data that indicates interest from the search engines because of SEO activities like inbound link-building.

Then comparing your CrawlTrack data with your Google Analytics data may give you interesting correlates.

All comments welcome!

For example, a search on Google.ie as follows “online marketing cavan” yields the following results:

This is a massive boon to local businesses, especially those who have a website which can be displayed in the Google Local Business Search result.

So those business who may not have known how local Internet search has become will be pleased to find out that Google is favoring local business listings in their ever developing search algorithm.

Most businesses in Ireland are unaware of how uncompetitive local search is for their business niche. And this makes it even more tantalising to get into the online game. At a time when businesses are feeling the pinch and looking at new ways to market in a cost effective way, this subject is more relevant than ever.

I think I’ll write a post in a few days just on this subject.

Till then, take care.

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.

Now you get a sub-menu where there are loads of interesting filters for your previous search query, “fancy dress” in this case. There’s a Videos filter, Forums and Reviews filters and time filters which are useful for your average searcher. For SEO’s and keyword research though, the tool we’re interested in is the “Wonder Wheel” down near the bottom.

Ok now click on that baby and now we have a flash and ajax-ified wheel display which may resurrect memories of Set Theory in Maths class, showing search terms harvested from real search trend data in the Google database, which are related to the search term you had originally typed in. So for our original search term, “fancy dress”, we have the following:

We can click on any branch keyword from this star display to display both further search terms related to the branch keyword, which will also display new search results for the term we click on.

So how do we use this tool to help us with our keyword research and campaign setup? Well, we can start with a root keyphrase, such as “fancy dress” as we have in our example above, and split each of the keywords in the Wonder Wheel legs into their own ad group, using phrase and exact matching options. Of course this will also save us time, helping us to find keywords for our campaigns that we may not have found for a while through using analytics (see Building a Deep Keyword Google AdWords Campaign Without Third-Party Tools), or ever. Another great use of this tool is that it can help you to identify negative keywords for your ad groups.

This tool could also help us in a big way with how to lay out a website, helping to define hierarchy and categories etc, using a layout reflecting how the data is presented in the Wonder Wheel results.

Only certain users have been selected to test the prototype for this feature, so if it isn’t available to you then all you need to do to get it is to go to Google.com and paste the following Javascript snippet into your browser address bar and then hit enter:javascript:void(document.cookie="PREF=ID=4a609673baf685b5:TB=2:LD=en:CR=2:TM=1227543998:LM=1233568652:DV=AA:GM=1:IG=3:S=yFGqYec2D7L0wgxW;path=/; domain=.google.com");

So that’s it in a nutshell. Please do comment, ask questions, bookmark and subscribe to updates. Till next time, take care.

I spent a few hours doing the basic SEO work on this site, the same as I would do on any site we develop. At a minimum, the title and description tags are carefully written to target the desired keywords and of course the page content must be relevant and contain the keywords that the site is targeting also. There are of course, lots of other on-page SEO factors, and we took care of those also.  Within a week of launching the site, it is on the #1 spot of Google.ie for the keyphrase “dating coaching” (check out the screenshot below).

The keyphrase “dating coaching” does not have much competition in Ireland, so this was not such a difficult task.  The keyword “life coaching” is much more competitive so more effort will be required to get the site ranking for this keyword, more content is needed, and also a long-term manual inbound link-building campaign will be very useful in this regard.  “Dating Coaching” is a low-volume keyphrase (i.e. very few people actually search using those keywords in Ireland) but “Relationship Coaching” is much higher, and “Life Coaching” much higher volume again, so in this example the competition follows the search volume, which is usually (but not always) the case.

More updates coming soon, do subscribe and leave comments also, all appreciated.

DIY SEO Glossary

1. ALT Descriptions: The ALT description used to describe an image should always contain a keyword. Inserting the keyword in the Alt description strengthens your website?s SEO capabilities and if your graphic is unable to display, the reader has an idea of what the missing image is.
2. Anchor Text: Constantly use your keywords as anchor text for links, including all internal links as well as outbound links.
3. Bold Text/Italic Text: Any text highlighted with bold font or italic font is considered to have more weight with search engines when they are evaluating your site. However, you do want to be careful with these fonts, because too much font noise can confuse your visitor.
4. Entry Pages: Spend your time optimizing the pages of your site that you prefer the search engines find. These pages are called landing pages or entry pages, and they should generously use keywords. These pages should also be the targets for all inbound links.
5. Flash Animation: While it is tempting to use flash animation throughout your website, do not use it for any navigational elements. All navigation text should be keyword optimized, and flash elements are not visible to the search engines.
6. Footer Links: Links at the foot of the web page should make sense. They should be relevant, and they should be easy to navigate. While it may be tempting to include more links than necessary, this is not a good SEO practice not to mention that it just confuses your website visitor.
7. H1 Tags: Use keywords in your h1 tags, and your web page should never have more than one h1 tag.
8. H2/H3 Tags: These tags are used for sub headings, and they should include keywords.
9. Image Titles: All of your image titles should always contain keywords.
10. Internal Links: These links are very helpful to a visitor to your website as they navigate their way around your site. While they carry a little SEO weight, these links should appear on entry pages.
11. Keyword Phrases: These phrases are extremely relevant to visitors and search engines alike. These phrases must be included in the site content and while not overused, they must be used frequently enough before the search engines give a site a good ranking score. Always write for humans though, not for search engines.
12. Meta Descriptions: These descriptions show up in the search engine results page, so it is a good idea to put a little thought into these descriptions. For more info on this .
13. Meta Keywords: This field has been so overly abused that it is virtually ignored by search engines. I wouldn’t bother with it.
14. Meta Titles: The title tag is equally vital for SEO as well as for website visitors. Always mention your primary keyword here. Each web page should have a unique meta title. A title tag can also include a slogan or branding message by using a pipe bar | to separate the keywords from the brand.
15. Outbound Links: These links take the visitor to another website. If they are overused the search engines will penalize your site. These links do not gain you anything from an SEO standpoint, so use them very selectively and use anchor text whenever possible.
16. URL Structure: Always use hyphens instead of underscores when separating words. Your main keyword phrase should be part of your URL name. However, stay away from excessively long URL names because they are inconvenient for visitors to enter.

So anyway, my friend mentioned to me that he wanted to get an AdWords campaign going in order to get some traffic to the site and generate more sales as business from the website have been slow. I remarked “ah, ok, well how many visitors are you getting to the site per day at the moment?” to which he looked at me perplexed and replied “don’t know!”. So we hopped up to the computer and logged into his Google Analytics account.

We were presented with the Google Analytics dashboard:

Ok, now correct me if I am wrong, but 1535 visits and over 7000 pageviews in the past month is not bad going, given that the site has not had any inbound link building done or any real SEO of any kind. So I suggested to my friend that we should first concentrate on getting more sales from the existing traffic before we go throwing money into Google AdWords when the conversion rate is abysmal.  

So what does he do to improve the conversion rate?  Well, we can see that most of the traffic is from the UK, coming in through the parked .co.uk domain. So the first thing my friend is going to do is to take a look at his pricing, taking a good look at his main competitor’s pricing for the products on the most trafficked product pages on his site. He can see which are his most viewed products by going to Content -> Top Content.  So an experiment would be to slash the prices of the top 5 or so viewed products and then see if sales on those products pick up.

But there is more that can be done of course, using Google Analytics more advanced features.  So, from a scientific metrics point of view, it will be useful for us, using his most trafficked product pages as a starting point, to use Google Analytics’ Goals and Funnels to chart the purchase path (the series of pages starting at the product page on through to the order “Thank You” page), and see using the Funnel Visualisation tool which pages along the way are causing the user to abort the purchase process. If most are aborting on the product page itself then either the page needs to be changed and re-tested, or the price needs to be reduced, or perhaps both.  Other pages along the way to the “Thank You” page may be leaky also. We will use the modify and re-test approach for these also until we are happy that the conversion rate is reasonably good. There is no limit to what you can do with the right tools and the commitment to using them.  We can also use a website optimisation tool like Google Website Optimizer to test variations of the pages on the site, analyse,  improve and re-test. 

But one thing is for sure, we can improve the conversion rate using Analytics data and tools. And this is the best approach at this point. Once we have the conversion rate improved to a satisfactory level we can then consider sending more traffic to the site with organic SEO methods and Google AdWords.  I’ll write an update post at a later date to tell you how we are faring on this project.  

Update: Part 2 of series of articles is available here http://webreach.ie/blog/checkout-goal-and-funnel-analytics-where-are-we-losing-sales-on-our-online-store/

Please feel free to leave comments if you have any feedback.