Script: Welcome to this weeks SEO Video Tutorial, we are going to take a look at Google Analytics site search settings. This includes how to set it up, what the results look like and how it can help your organic SEO campaign.

The first step is to identify what search functionality you have on your website, this may include Google’s site search it’s self, a blog search, eCommerce search, CMS search of even the 404 widget supplied by Google.

The process is relativity simple..

Once you have completed the analytic site search set up, you can start to see results under the content tab within your Google analytics dashboard.

Now you have all the pieces in place and the ’site search’ is returning data, you can analysis the information to identify what users are searching on your website. This could show on an eCommerce shop that users are searching for a product that you currently don’t stock creating a sales opportunity or on a regular website a particular service that relates to your industry.

Thanks for watching if you have any questions or comments, please leave them on the supporting blog post.

Script: Welcome to this weeks SEO Video Blog, we often use the term ‘SEO architecture’ used in our video blogs and throughout the SEO industry.

We believe that it is important to ensure the sites architecture clearly reinforces your search engine optimisation strategy.

Good site architecture allows the search engine crawl bots to easily index your site and prioritise content within your website.

The process is relatively simple, Nick has put together a tutorial which explains the way in which we believe you should approach the development of a website when considering SEO.

Ill show a couple of examples, starting with a small website that Creare built for elite windows. http://www.elitewindows.info/

You can see the range of products and services they offer from their navigation, the URL then reinforces this principle.

You can see that if we click through to the windows page, that the URL changes to http://www.elitewindows.info/windows.php. The same principle applies to the doors, conversatories and roofing product pages.

The optimisation then is consistent with this. If we query ‘Front Doors Reading’ which is optimised on the doors.php page we can see that the search result is the individual product page and that Google has highlighted and Identified the doors.php extension.

The second example i’ll use is a client called MR fire and security, http://www.mrfsgroup.com/. You can see we are in the /security-products/ section of the website.

All the products that MRFS supply are then organised with keyword rich file names. For examples the CCTV section is simply /cctv.php. The Fire Alarms page is simply /fire-alarms.php and so on…

The best advice we can give is if you have a large website and lots of products and services, treat you architecture like an eCommerce website.

Organised /category/sub-category/product-name.php this will allow Google to easily identify what each service and product relates too and ensure that they perform on a individual basis.

With large sites it is also recommended to use bread crumb trails, this helps usability and Google can return the breadcrumb results in the SERP.

You can see if we query ‘Creare Design Portfolio’ the location of the page is shown in a inline breadcrumb trail.

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=creare+design+portfolio&aq=f&aqi=g2&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&fp=3bb5f9b520ad2ad3

We hope this has been of some help, always remember to correctly use sitemaps to help crawl bots index all of the content on your website.

Check out the video blog we did covering HTML and XML sitemaps for more information.

Also we have also re-designed the Creare Communications blog at www.crearecommunications.co.uk/seo-blog/ so take a look, we would appreciate any feedback.

Thanks for watching please leave any questions of comments on the youtube channel or supporting blog post.

Nick and James explain the basics of sitemaps and how to generate search friendly sitemaps online, both XML and HTML.

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.