If you were ever wondering whether Google, Yahoo and MSN has access to information such as bounce rate and time on site, without analytics the answer is yes. Alexa provides an average time on site, bounce rate and pages viewed data for any site. I would asume then that Google and other search engines take this into consideration and it should play a part in your search engine optimisation campaign.
So how would Google use this information?
Consider that your site is of high quality and the design reflects your industry and is usable etc. This means that users will not bounce away from your site, spend time looking at the rest of your site and also read the content increasing time on site. This then suggests to Google and other search engines that your site provide a good user experience. Google’s policy is to ensure the users search query returns the best result, so by providing a good quality site it is forfilling its promise.
This will then be directly related to your SERP. The other situation is that your sites design, usability and content is poor meaning users don’t want to remain on your site and will not spend anytime on the site.
Consideration for your target audience is vital within an online marketing campaign and listings aren’t everything, If the site isn’t up to scratch then Google will see the users opinions through the variables stated and the strenght of you site will be effected.
So, you have your shiny new website, full of functionality, great toys to amuse people, and its all set and primed with a good standard of SEO. So you wait. And you wait. After a few weeks, you still can’t find your site when you type your keywords into Google, and according to Google analytics, the Marie Celeste has had more visitors than you.
What have you done wrong?
Well, this is a problem that we often encounter. People do the right things for their sites, but leave out one or two vital pieces of the puzzle that makes the difference between and successful site and an unsuccessful one. A common mistake is submitting their site to the search engines that they want to list for.
Sometimes search engines need to have someone come to them and wave a flag and shout “Hey! Come here and look at the site I have made and have put on the Internet!” as you cant rely on them to pick up your site automatically.
So, how is this accomplished? Well, lets take Google for example. With Google, using their Webmaster Tools, you can create an XML sitemap and submit it to them for them to take a look at. This allows them to index your site, normally in a matter of hours. Other search engines use different methods. For MSN for example, you can go to http://search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx to submit your site. For Yahoo you could use http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/uk/free/request
These actions don’t guarantee that your site will work, but it is definitely good practice to submit them anyway. They could potentially bring an increase in business from the very moment your site goes live.
And isn’t that worth it?
Nick: Hi and welcome to ‘what are meta tags’, my name is Nick and I am currently an SEO developer for Creare Communications, I am joined by my colleague James who is a web designer also from creare.
James: Hello
Nick: We intend to discuss the SEO, design and marketing aspects of Meta Tags.
Nick: The META element provides metadata such as a document’s keywords, description, and author. Any number of META elements may be contained in the <head> of a document.
James: So, Meta tags have various purposes, today we often see them used by SEO companies to promote keywords behind the scenes of a website. But from a design point of view, clients can often see their meta description in the Search Engine results page or SERP . This means it is important that they are legible and most importantly that they make sense.
Nick: This is an important point because often bespoke content management systems are sometimes designed to generate meta keyword and meta description tags automatically from a page titles, tags or similar, This often means that they make little sense and are not user or search friendly.
Nick: Historically Meta tags used to hold a lot of weight and were vital for internal optimisation, it was exploited by optimisers and Google had to evolve their algorithm as to prevent this from happening, Google now takes into consideration a wide range of different variables designed to keep optimisers guessing.
James: Although we are saying that meta data is no longer a vital SEO asset, we still believe its worth adding them in for alternatives to Google and as previously mentioned the description tag is shown in the search results by all search engines including Google, meaning you can use this opportunity to connect with your user and write something to attract people to click your listing.
James: We like to traditionally use the following tags:
<meta name=”distribution” content=”Global” /> - <meta name=”rating” content=”Safe For Kids” /> - <meta name=”description” content=”" /> -<meta name=”keywords” content=”" /> <meta name=”author” content=” ” /> - <meta name=”copyright” content=”" />
Nick: So lets concentrate on the 2 most important tags, the meta keyword and meta description tag.
James: The Keywords tag is traditionally a list of keywords that you want your site to appear for in a search query.
Nick: I think the most important aspect to consider when writing a keyword tag is to be consistent with the rest of the internal optimisation on your site, so the search engine can see that your content reflects your chosen keywords.
James: As an example is we wanted to optimise for
• air conditioning
• commercial air conditioning
• conditioning maintenance
You would separate each phrases and word with a comma as shown.
“Air conditioning, Commercial Air Conditioning, Air Conditioning Maintenance, Air, Conditioning, Maintenance, Commercial”
Nick: The description tag is similar, it will include all your key words but you also have to consider the way it reads and whether it catches the publics imagination. I would suggest that you include your clients company name and even the area that they are based in the meta description, This was users can immediately see whether the company fits their needs and location.
For example is you were to use the air conditioning keywords mentioned before you would write something like:
“’Your Company Name’ provides commercial air conditioning solutions throughout the UK, We also provide a maintenance and repair service for any air conditioning units that we supply.”
James: Despite the fact they no longer hold the weight as they previously did, they should not be overlooked. Any respectable web design or Search Engine Optimisation company should use meta data to its full potential.
Nick: We will be releasing similar videos in weeks to come both on Web design and Search Engine Optimisation. You can subscribe to our RSS feed or Subscribe to our youtube channel at youtube.com/crearecomm. Thanks For Watching.
When considering the effectiveness of an SEO campaign, something that often gets overlooked is the usability of the site itself. Recent investigations indicate that bounce rate can have an influence in page rank.
With this in mind, its vital that designers and seo consultants work together to ensure that the site is both seo compliant and attractive and easy to use for visitors. Some things to consider when making a site usable would be the following:-
Navigation-Is it easy to use? Can you find all the buttons? Is it the same on each page?
Colour Scheme-Are you blinded by the display of luminous pinks and greens? If you are, so are your users. Yes it might be eye catching, but if there’s a chance you could permanently blind everyone who comes to your site, why do it? Show some restraint in your colour choices.
Content-Is the content on your site up to scratch? There’s no point advertising your site as having information that the user wants, only for them to come there and find that there’s nothing useful there at all. Make sure your content is relevant and useful.
Link Destination?-Make sure that all of the links on your site take the user to the advertised section. Leading users on a magical mystery tour of the internet is unlikely to get you much sympathy. Make sure your links take the user where they want to go.
These are simple points, ones that we can all make sure that we are following, but if you want to make the user experience of your site a pleasant one, AND keep them on your page, then they all have to be considered.
With the SEO industry expanding their are lots of companies that can offer their services, Creare included. Some websites perform better in search engines than others, this is often due to the sites architecture. Static pages, domain age, backward links and domain name can all help towards an SEO campaign. I have complied a list below of things that will set you in good shape for an SEO campaign as well as things that may mean that your website will need to be re-build from your search engine optimisation company.
Things to look for:
? marks in URL’s, This means that the page is a DB (database) query and can often restrict the performance of your site, Google and other major search engines do not rank these types of pages very highly. This can be fixed by converting them to permalinked (SEO friendly) extension. Most developers would provide this functionality, but otherwise it may have to be a rebuild.
Automated Meta Data & Page Titles, If your site automatically generates Meta data via a CMS (content management system) it can often cause issues, Search engines will see them as unusable and not accurate. This can also be fixed via certain development techniques.
Domain Age, if you have a brand new site and you want to optimise for a hugely competitive phrase you can often run the risk of the ’sandbox’. If Google thinks a site has been unnatural with its development and growth (i.e. an SEO company building pages and links) you can be removed from the search results. The older the domain the better, but nothing is impossible you just have to consider the time scales.
Flash Websites, flash websites can look great but the content will not be correctly read by search engines, you firstly have to ensure that your flash website is coded properly and that google can find a text based version of your site, otherwise it will not find anything. Also flash websites are usually based on 1 page, meaning as far as Google can see your site has no depth or additional content.
Frames, if you have a HTML site (not flash) and you browse through your site you can usually see the URL extension changing as you go, if it remains the root URL on everypage, the site has been set up using frames and the search engine will not be able to define your specified sitemap.
Domain names, A keyword rich domain name is great, but a domain that is 100 characters long full of keywords isn’t.
When considering SEO, a link building strategy is one of the many options that should be considered.
When deciding on the ranking of a website, the amount of links coming into a site is a major factor that influences the decision that Google makes.
So, how does this work in practice? When Google uses its robots to check through the websites on the internet, it recognises links on the sites pointing to other web pages. As an example, say you put a link on your website to www.crearecommunications.co.uk .
When Google checks the sites it would notice this link and would see this link as a “vote” for this site. Simply put, the more “votes” a site has, the more relevant it is seen as, and the higher the page ranking. This is a fairly simplistic view, as there are other factors to consider, but it still holds true.
So, are all these “votes” given the same weight by Google? The simple answer is no. Links from sites that have a high ranking are deemed to have more influence. A link from www.e-commercewebdesign.co.uk (a page rank of 4) to www.crearecommunications.co.uk would not be given as much weight as a link from www.bbc.co.uk (a page rank of 9) for example.
From this you can see that the link system does have to take vote strength into account. The number of links coming into a site can still be a good indicator of the relevance of a particular page, but its important to consider that one hundred low quality links to a site may not have the same influence as one or two very high quality ones.
So, when embarking upon a programme of search engine optimisation, take these factors into account if you wish to give your site the best start possible.
Google have released new search facilities that are a follow up to Google’s ‘Universal Search’, The universal search meant that videos, images, books, blogs and articles would be included in the organic listing for a users search query. It is important that Google evolves as their users intelligence increases, they can’t afford to lose market share and they would be surely gutted if they lost their monopoly.
The new features are designed to allow users to refine their search query, it is displayed in a ‘tool belt’ fashion down the left hand side of the search results. You can find this by clicking the ’show options’ link underneath the search box (shown Below).
Once you have clicked the ’show options’ link you get this array of options.
Lets break down each search refinement and look how the search results change according to the selection. We will use the example ‘web design’ to be consistent with query above, also we at Creare are quite familiar with the results for this search query, so it should give us a good indication to what the new options achieve for a user.
1.) Video Options
You can see that once you have selected the videos option you are then faced with 2 additional sections, ‘All durations’ and ‘Any Time’ these are designed to further refine your search and are pretty much self explanatory. As you can see the search results now only displays videos, on the first page the results include: youtube.com, Google.com, viddler.com and 5min.com.
2.) Forum Results
The forum results display communities and forums discussing web design, this is excellent for users. For example if you query ‘web design’ 75 % of the results on page 1 are companies selling web design services, Not everyone that searches for ‘web design’ actually wants to buy a website. This forum feature helps refine a users search.
3.) Reviews
I have used this feature already with a reasonable amount of success and will be used to find products, maybe not as relevant for services such as ‘web design’ but I am sure this will be one of the most used features. The search also allows you to refine your search via a time scale, this is great as you will want the most up to date review about a service or product.
4.) Images Only
I personally like this function, to allow you to see images pulled from a website. As you can see on the search results, it shows examples of the work for the web design companies.
5.) More Text
This again is pretty self explanatory and as well as taking your meta description tag, it also recalls various sections of your website to show to the user what your site is all about. Is this a chance to add that little marketing spiel that could make a user click your search result.
6.) Related Search
When you click the related searches link you get a variety of links appear at the top, these are the search queries that Google thinks are related to the initial search query. Could this be a clue for key word selection?
7.) Wonder Wheel
Similar to the related searches option, it allows a user to see their query and how it is related to other search queries and as you start to click the results the results change, displaying on the right hand side of what is now a 3 column display. The wheel relocates as you click through various search queries, this allows you to see where you have come from and return easily to previous queries.
8.) Timeline
The timeline feature allows users to see the search traffic from various sections of time, this can be refined into the past 24 hours, weeks, months and years. As you can see the demand for ‘web design’ has increased in recent years in comparison to the 90’s. This excellent tools gives a range of information that can be applied to the search industry, it shows the pattern of a phrase over a period time and then lets you refine your search down to a year, month or even week, meaning you can find press from a specific time period.
Conclusion
I was trying to imagine the implications this may have on the search engine optimisation industry, I think from a user point of view the new features are great and obviously Google doesn’t particularly like SEO. I predict a reduction in traffic for general phrases, but potentially a better conversion rate as the visitors will be interested in the product or service you office.
The first thing that you should do is ensure Google is aware that your site exists, you can do this by submitting your URL http://www.google.com/addurl.html, Then you need to help Google find all your content, Submitting your sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools is quick and easy and helps towards all of your pages being indexed. You can generate a sitemap by using http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
2.)Design and Content
You should ensure you site can be found from internal linking, Google states that every page must be reachable from a static text link, This can be done via a sitemap in the footer of your template. Offer a sitemap page which links to every page within your site, Google will also look for something named sitemap.html or similar.
Create quality content that reflects what you are trying to optimise for, you cannot perform well in any search engine if you key phrases are not mentioned within the site. Use HTML formats to emphasis your key words.
Check for broken links and make the usability as easy as possible. Domain URL’s should be as search engine friendly as possible and DB queries do not perform as well as static html extensions. i.e. services.html.
Keep links to a minimum, Google states that less than a 100 is reasonable.
3.) Technical Guidelines
Make sure your site is as readable for the search engine spider as possible, you can use Lynx to see what your site looks like to a search engine. This is worth doing if you have frames, cookies, fancy functionality such as flash and javascript.
Make use of the robots.txt to tell Google’s spider which pages, directories and content it should or should not index. You can find more information about this here: http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html.
Test your site in multiple browsers so that your site is accessible to wide range of users.
4.) Quality Control
Do’s:
Make pages for users and not search engines, write copy naturally, not for search engine optimisation and do not cloak any information. Avoid link building schemes to increase your PR, build links honestly through link baiting and social networks.
Don’ts:
Avoid hiding text or links, do not cloak or use re-directs. Don’t use software to query Google and don’t create pages that are irrelevant to your main content. Avoid duplicate content, meaning don not create multiple sites or sub domains with the same content on.
Just as in the written language, there is a right way and a wrong way to write the code that makes a website. Correctly written and valid HTML allows search engines to read the code of a site faster and easier, but with regards to SEO, it can have an even larger impact. Badly coded sites with mistakes in, can be penalized by the programs that check the sites content. Coding mistakes can also lead to your site looking different to different users on different computers. It might look fantastic on your Imac, but it may not work at all on a PC!
So, how do you check that your site is compliant with the standards? We use a tool provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3), an international group that works to ensure the long term standards of sites on the web.
This page offers some simple to use instructions on how to use the tool. By typing in the website address, the tool will automatically check the site to see if its coding is up to standard. If there are problems, the tool helpfully shows you where the problem is in the code, and also gives some brief information on how to fix it. After you have altered the code, simply re run the checker to see if the site is now up to standard.
Once the site has been checked and approved, you can add the following icon to the bottom of the web page:-
to let people that visit your site, know that you have taken the time and the trouble to provide a site that fits all the requirements for now, and tomorrow, on the World Wide Web.
If you are involved in search engine optimisation, the chances are that you are aware of an application called google analytics, if you have no idea what it is however, read on.
Google Analytics is a free service that is offered by Google that gives detailed and comprehensive statistics on the visitors to a given website. It is able to track visitors from all the different types of referrers such as search engines and links from other sites. Users are able to track where in the world the people who visit the site are from, what phrase they used to find the site etc. Google Analytics is also able to give users a fast insight into pages of the site that are not performing, allowing them to rectify the situation at an earlier stage rather than letting the issue become worse.
Google analytics is inserted into a website by using javascript code that is supplied by Google. This relatively simple process involves the placing of the information just before the last body tag on each page that you wish information to be gathered from. By using a separate line of code, it is also possible to see how many times a PDF file has been downloaded from a site. This can be useful for checking on the relevancy of information that is being provided to the public from a site.
While Google Analytics can be said to be highly accurate most of the time, there are some issues that highlight gaps in its abilities. Some programs, such as Firefox’s NoScript addon can block the tracking code. This can lead to inaccurate results, where more people may have visited a site than is being displayed. Users deleting or blocking cookies on their systems can also have a deleterious effect.
