“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.

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.