Continuing with our blog series on meta tags, this post looks at the meta description. The meta description tag plays an important part in optimising your site (SEO) and a crucial role in gaining click throughs from the search results.
The meta description tag is a piece of hidden HTML coding (known as a tag) that allows some search engines to display a description of your site in search results.
You will normally find the meta description within the < head > tags, just below the title tag. The code will look like this:
<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”The description of your web page will go here”>
Your meta description will most often be shown in the search results:
Google will normally show the meta description if it feels it is relevant to the searchers query (which if your page is relevant to the search query and is being shown in the search results, hopefully your meta description is an accurate account of what can be found on that page, so Google will most likely always show your meta description). If you don’t have a meta description, Google will extract a piece of text from your page and display that.
The meta description can play an important part in getting searchers to click on your page within the results. Just because you’re on the first page of search results, it doesn’t guarantee you any clicks. You have to compel people to click on your page and not the other 9 (or other 10 or so paid listings). This is where the meta description comes in handy. You should try and craft a description with a strong call to action. Linking the content to the title tag content is also a good way to reinforce your message. Have these two tags working together to persuade people to click. If you can get some keywords in here, that’s great. You’ll notice in the search engine results that the terms you’ve searched will be highlighted in bold in the search results. So if you have some keywords in your meta description (and title tag), then these will be made bold if they match the search query.
It’s a good idea to try and keep the meta description to within 150 characters. Different search engines display different amount of text in their results, but if you keep it to within 150, then you’ll generally be covered in all.
If you need any help crafting some effective meta tags, please get in touch with a member of the SMEketing team.
One of the most basic, but important things you can do for your website (in terms of search engine optimisation – SEO), is to ensure that each and every page has its own unique, keyword rich title tag .
The title tag can be found at the top of your source code within the < title > and < /title > tags (on a web page, click on View > Source Code to view the page code).
Where will I see my title tag?
The page title will be shown within your site in the web browser here:
It is also shown within the search results here:
Because the title tag is shown in the search result pages, creating a well crafted title could also lead to an increased click through rate.
What should I include in my title tag?
We’d recommend a mixture of your company name and keywords. If you’re targeting a specific geographical area, include this as well. It’s important to remember that search engines only display a certain number of characters within your title. It varies between search engines, but if you aim to keep your title under 70 characters you’ll be fine.
For example, if you were an accounting firm in Fareham in Hampshire called Bill & Ben, you would may want to include your company name, your target area of Hampshire, as well as some keywords (which you would have hopefully researched already!). If you’re aware that the term ‘book-keeping’ and ‘tax returns’ are two of your major keywords, you could craft a title that looks like:
Bill & Ben Tax Accountants Hampshire
or you could have
Bill & Ben Book-Keeping Accountants Hampshire
However, you could try and fit it all in:
Bill & Ben Accountants – Tax Returns & Book-Keeping Hampshire
or
Tax Returns & Book-Keeping Hampshire > Bill & Ben Accounting Fareham
You can seperate or split the title using various characters. The common ones are: – > and |. There’s no “correct” one to use. Sometimes a ‘|’ might be better to split up different subjects such as ‘Tax Accountants | Book-Keeping’. Whereas a ‘>’ can be better when the next section follows on from the first, i.e. ‘Hampshire Accountants > Bill & Ben’.
You can use proper sentences if you like ‘Bill & Ben are Hampshire based accountants’ would also work well.
Try not to get into the trap of spending hours fiddling and obsessing over your title tags. Just make sure they make sense, conveys the content on the page well, and include your desired keywords.
If you’re ranking well for a particular search term, but you’re not getting a lot of clicks, it could be that your title tag isn’t compelling enough. Sometimes it can take a bit of testing and tweaking to get it right.
Our next post will be focusing on another important website tag – the meta description!
Until then, cheerio. If you have any questions or comments regarding your title tags, or if you’ve seen a vast improvement in your rankings because of changes you made to your title tags – let us know in the comments below, or email us on info@SMEketing.com.
Here are two fantastic videos that present some incredible statistics about social media and the Internet in general:
Social Media Revolution
Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? This video details out social media facts and figures that are hard to ignore. This video is produced by the author of Socialnomics.
Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
% of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
JESS3 – The State of The Internet
JESS3 designed and animated this for the JESS3 lecture at AIGA Baltimore in Feb 2010
1.73 Billion Internet users worldwide
90 Trillion Emails Sent in 2009
81% of Emails were Spam
126 Million Blogs on the Internet
27.3 Million Tweets Per Day
Faceboook serves 6 million pages per minute
4 Billion photos hosted by Flickr
182 Videos watched on average per month (per user)
The last post discussed why online brand reputation management is important. This post will explain how you can monitor the web for mentions of your brand.
Reputation management used to be about scanning newspapers and magazines. However, the world is changing fast. It’s quite likely that your customers spend more time online than they do watching TV. Surfing the Internet, whether for business or pleasure is now the most common pastime in the Western world. People socialise online, shop online, do business online; everything. So its important that you track what people are saying about you online.
You might think that your business maybe too small and no one talks about you, or maybe you think that you already monitor your website, blog and Twitter and that’s good enough. Well that’s where you are wrong! People are constantly talking online – sometimes they’re talking to you, othertimes about you. You need to make sure you’re monitoring the whole of the world wide web for your keywords (namely your business name). Only then can you respond to people when they mention you. If someone makes a negative comment about your company in a forum shouldhave processes in place that would alerted you to it. Then you’ll be able to instantly respond to it, fix the situation and show them how good your customer service actually is.
So where are people making comments about your business?
Blogs
Twitter
Social Networks (such as Facebook, Mebo and MySpace)
Social Media Sites (such as the reviews within Amazon)
Wikipedia
Blog Comments
Message Boards
Forums
Consumer Websites
Article sites
Video Sites (such as YouTube, Moveo)
Photo Sites (such as Flickr, Google Picasa)
Monitoring your online brand reputation will allow you to gain further understanding of what people think of you and your products and services. You can view trends and find out what is and what isn’t popular, and be made aware of any potential issues.
Our next post on Monday will outline what tools you can use to monitor your online reputation – make sure you don’t miss it. You can be alerted to all our post updates by entering your email in the box to the right.
If created well, landing pages can be used to make a ‘hard sell’. Not in a hammy, used car salesman way, but in the sense that you have visitors where you want them. Show them what they need to see, present the information with a focused message and hit them with some strong call to actions – remember we talked about your goals in the previous post? Landing pages allow you to create a pre-planned funnel/path, pushing visitors to complete those goals.
How do you create good call to actions, and how do you get people to do what you want? Well there’s no secret recipe I’m afraid. It’s a case of trial and error – test your landing pages and constantly tweak and amend them based on the results you get.
Here are the main things you need to be aware of when creating landing pages:
Colourful, big and bold buttons: Hit them with a call to action in a visually appealling way with good quality buttons that tell them to ‘Buy Now’, ‘Sign up for our newsletter’, ‘Take a Free Trial Today’, ‘Download Now’ etc.. Make these buttons stand out from your page through the use of colour and good quality design
Limit the use of links and menu options on the landing page: The more links on your landing page, the more likely people will click off elsewhere, get distracted and never complete the action you want them to
Clever content layout: People scan webpages, they don’t read them (this goes back to the ‘lazy, demanding and impatient’ bit I mentioned in the previous post!). So make it easy for them to get the key information – use bullet points, short paragraphs, bold text and colour
Make it easy for visitors to complete the goal: If your goal is to have them contact you, make the contact form small and simple. Do you really need their full address, date of birth and favourite colour? Think about the minimum amount of information you need in order to follow up that lead and only request that. If you’re trying to get them to make a purchase, don’t make them go through hoops. Display your delivery details and return policy clearly to instill a feeling of trust, and make sure you let them know that your online payment process is secure. Don’t give them any reason to start clicking about off the path you’re directing them down
Make sure the key information is above the fold: This goes back to newspapers – when they’re delivered or displayed in newsagents, you can see the top half of the front page – this is where they put all their major stories and headlines. The same goes for landing pages – make sure your most important information is towards the top of your landing page – above the fold. Anything people have to scroll down to view is below the fold. Remember that people have different monitor sizes too, so what may be above the fold for you, may not be above the fold for all your visitors. Why is this important? Again, people are lazy, demanding and impatient and can’t be bothered to scroll down the page to find the information they want! If they view the content above the fold and it looks relevant to their query, then they may make the effort to scroll. But if not… bang goes the back button!
Remember that not everyone will convert: Not all visitors will be in the position to buy the item they’re searching for (or contact you for the service your offer). They could just be in the research stage of the purchase process. Do you have anything you can give them? If you can’t fulfil your primary goal of a sale, what secondary goals do you have. Can you get that visitor to sign up to your newsletter, or can they download a guide with advice on the purchasing process (possibly via a form to capture their details)? It’s important to try and make the most of each click, and understanding that not everyone will convert is important. Give people more than one option – so create more than one call to action on your landing page.
If you have any other landing page tips, leave them in the comments below. Have you tried something that had amazing results? Share it with us.
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is now one of the fastest growing forms of advertising. Most of you will be familar with Google AdWords – you bid on particular keywords, create adverts relating to those keywords, set a maximum amount you want to pay for each click on that ad for that keyword – and bingo! Lots of high quality traffic heading your way (as long as you’re bidding on the right terms and have a budget that allows for more than one click a day!).
PPC advertising, especially Google AdWords are a fantastic way of increasing the volume of traffic to your site. Many types of websites and businesses will benefit from PPC:
If you have a new site which is not yet ranking well in the search engines
If you’re in a very competitive market and don’t really stand a chance for ranking on your key terms
If you haven’t got any optimisation on your site, so probably won’t rank for your desired terms
PPC is a great way of getting traffic to your site, but that’s only half the battle. Once someone clicks on your advert and lands on your website, what happens then? You need to carefully think about what your goal is for that visitor:
Signing up for your newsletter
Making a purchase
Registering for an event
Making contact via your ‘Contact Us’ form
Once you know what your goal is, you then have to think about how you’ll achieve that goal. This is where landing pages come in. A landing page, simply put, is the page that visitors ‘land’ on when they first enter your site. With PPC you have control over this (whereas in natural search it’s most likely to be your homepage, however other pages will rank also, but unless you’ve optimised a particular page for a specific phrase, it’s unlikely you’ll have much control over this).
Anyway, back to PPC where you can specify the landing page you want your visitors to land on. So what is the best page on your site to direct them to? You may think that your homepage is the best page – let the visitor click about and go to the content they want to see. But that’s where you’re wrong. The Internet has made us all lazy, demanding and impatient! We don’t want to have to search your site for the information we’re looking for – we want it presented to us straight away!
For example, if you’re selling bikes and have an advert running for the keyphrase ‘Ladies red bike’, when a searcher enters that term into the search box, they’ll get a list of natural and paid results. If they click on your advert…
Ladies Red Bike
Wide Range Of Bikes For
Ladies Who Like To Ride www.yoursite.com
…where will they land? Do they land on your page featuring all your ladies red bikes, or do they land on your homepage? What makes more sense to you? If they can’t see immediately what they’re looking for, they’ll hit that dreaded ‘back’ button and click on another advert, and you’ve just been charged for a click with no result.
So it’s important that you direct people to landing pages that are relative to their search query.
Come back on Monday to find out what our top tips are for creating landing pages with conversions in mind; getting people to take the action you want. The more conversions you get, the better return on investment you’ll get from your PPC campaign.
In the meantime, if you’ve had any success using landing pages in your PPC campaign, leave a note in the comments telling us abou it! And remember, SMEketing are dab hands at creating high quality landing pages. If you’d like us to overhaul your PPC campaign and help you get more conversions, get in touch with us on 023 8083 7271 or email us on info@SMEketing.com.
If you’re using Twitter you will hopefully be starting to see the benefits. All businesses, large and small can benefit from using Twitter. Broadly speaking, the main benefits from using Twitter for business are:
Promotion
Market research
Networking
Lead generation
Education
So if we’re focusing on the first point of ‘Promotion’, we need to look at one of the key differentiators between you and your competitors – your Twittter background. When people are deciding who they want to follow, they only really have a few things they can use to help them decide – the content of your tweets, your bio and contact details and your wallpaper. If you’re using one of the generic Twitter backgrounds, you’re missing out on a trick! Your background is free advertising space, so use it well.
One of the best ways of using this space is to customise it using an image editor (such as Photoshop). Depending on your business and industry, you could create a radical, jazzy Twitter background, or maybe one with a more corporate, professional feel.
So what key information should you add to your Twitter background?
Synopsis (of your company, your role in the company, your interests – just who you are)
Company logo
Contact details
Email
Telephone
Website
Any other social media sites that are relevant – Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn etc
Other extras you could include are:
Photo of yourself
Interesting details – such as your interests, passions
Contact address
Special offers (you could update these on a regular basis)
Once you’ve got the content you want, you then have to decide on the style of background. Do you want it be be vibrant and colourful, match your corporate colours, be one plain block of colour… the options are really endless.
If you’d like us to create a customised Twitter background for your Twitter account, get in touch today on info@SMEketing.com. With prices starting from £40, there’s bound to be an affordable option for you and your business.
Have you already got a customised Twitter background that you love? Let us know in the comments by leaving your @ Twitter details, and remember to follow SMEketing on @SMEketing.
Blogs are now extremely commonplace and are part of a large majorty of websites. You may understand the business benefits of a blog, but what do you do if you’d like your organisation to start blogging, but senior management aren’t so sure.
This has happened to a few of our clients, and over time we’ve put together a pretty strong case for a blog. The below is a summary of the business case we would present to someone who is a bit hesitant about blogs:
Why Should You Start Blogging?
It will allow you to engage in an open dialogue and exchange of ideas with customers and potential customers
It will establish trust and build relationship with prospects
It shows you as an expert and builds authority
It will provide added value to the people that visit your site
It will show that you’re up to date on current trends within the industry
By giving away advice and education it will engender gratitude and loyalty from your followers – which will either be existing customers, or prospects
It will have a huge beneficial impact on the search rankings of your website
Building relevant traffic
Increase ranks in major search engines
It will give you greater brand visibility and can be used as a PR tool
It gives a more personal face to the business – if you pride yourself on the quality of your employees, why not show them off via the blog
What are the Drawbacks?
Managing and maintaining a blog takes an investment of time.
How Should You Manage Your Blog?
Ideally a new post should be published at least once a week without fail.
To help spread out the responsibility, you could have a different department being responsible for creating a blog post each week. This also helps to make the blog more well rounded; you don’t want it to appear like it’s constantly managed by a ‘marketing droid’, but by real employees with real relevant skills. It will also give an added depth to the blog. For example, if you are an IT firm, some posts could be quite techie which will please the IT/techie customers and prospects reading, others will be more support based which may be of interest to the end users of solutions, others will be sales which will be of interest to the decision makers and people responsible for purchasing your solutions. There needs to be different type posts from different people to target every type of reader and for the blog to be well rounded
You should have one person overseeing the blog, who can provide subjects ideas for each post and an outline of how the post can be written
There should be no strict guidelines to post length – some can be short and to the point, others can be more in depth
It’s a good idea to create a library of pre-prepared posts that can be published at anytime, allowing a level of flexibility
You need one person who will be responsible for the maintenance and management of the blog – this will include monitoring and responding to all comments, as well as promoting each blog post using various marketing methods
You can use free blogging platforms such as Wordpress, and ideally have it hosted on your own domain
Another surefire way to convince management that a blog is the way forward is to do a bit of competitor research. If your key competitors are blogging, then you definitely should be too. And if they’re not, you can be the pioneer, leading the way and getting a nice headstart on them.
If you need help setting up a blog, or want someone to write optimised blog posts for you on a regular basis, please get in touch with us on 023 8083 7271 or info@SMEketing.com.
Video is fast becoming a key differentiator between companies that are actively marketing themselves and engaging in communication with their prospects and customers, and those companies that are plodding along, relying on the same old tactics to keep them afloat.
If you want to take the step into video, you might be unsure as to what you can create and how you should promote it. This is where we come in! Read on..,
There are many topics that you can create videos on:
How to guides
Demonstrations of your products
Interviews with staff
Interviews with customers
Interviews with leading industry members
Showcasing your office
A summary showing a recent event you attended/hosted
Advice on industry related topics
The list is really as endless as your imagination. Depending on your industry, your videos can be very lighthearted in their approach, or may have to be more serious. However, there really isn’t any company out there who wouldn’t benefit from promoting themselves and their website with videos.
So what are the basics of promoting and making the most of your video? This post doesn’t go into too much detail about the do’s and don’ts of shooting your videos and the content you produce, but focuses on what you should do with your videos once they’re ready to be let loose!
Ideally the video should be hosted on the main website and on other video sites such as YouTube; there are benefits to both, but in order to get full earch engine optimisation (SEO) credit, it must really be on the main site as a stand-alone video.
Making the Video
Make sure that there is a logo/branding on it all the way through so people can’t reuse it without passing on credit to you
Try and keep video length to under five minutes
Make sure there is a strong call to action at the end along with your contact details
Try and make the video thumbnail attractive to convince people to watch
Hosting the Video
Use keywords in the filename of the video, and any titles and descriptions and the URL of the page it sits on
Ideally all videos should sit under one URL on the main site – www.url.com/videos/
Each video should have it’s own URL – www.url.com/videos/video-1
Optimise the page on the website that is hosting/linking to the site, i.e. good title, meta description, good copy (paragraph or two explaining what the video is), good headers, use of bold text etc
If the video is going to be hosted on the main website create video sitemap and submit it to video and content engines. This is quite technical (there isn’t really an easy way of doing this, so someone techie may have to do it. See Google’s advice page: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=80472&ctx=sibling
Create a transcript
This can be used as a blog post, which can be linked to the video
This can also be uploaded on YouTube (under the ‘Captions’ section)
Uploading the Video
When uploading to video sites, make sure the titles, descriptions, tags are keyword rich
Put the main URL at the beginning of the description, i.e. “www.url.co.uk/videos/video-1: This video looks at the produc X. How does it work and how can it help you?”
List of video sites you may want to upload to:
Download.com and CNET TV – www.cnettv.com
Youtube - www.youtube.com
MetaCafe – www.metacafe.com
Revver – www.revver.com
MSN Live Video Search– http://video.msn.com/video.aspx.
BlipTV – www.blip.tv
When you upload to BlipTV, your videos can be syndicated to accounts you have on other Web sites such as blogs, iTunes , Yahoo Video, AOL Video, MySpace, FaceBook, and Feedburner.
Veoh – www.veoh.com
When you submit to Veoh, they syndicate your video to youtube, myspace, and google video.
AOL Video – www. http://video.aol.com/
Myspace Video -http://vids.myspace.com/
Break– www.break.com
DivX’s Stage 6 – http://stage6.divx.com/
Daily Motion – www.dailymotion.com
Vimeo– www.vimeo.com
Sevelload – en.sevenload.com
TubeMogul is a free toolto submit videos to multiple video sharing sites in one go. Currently it works with Metacafe, MySpace, Yahoo, Revver, AOL Video, DailyMotion, Blip, and BrightCove
Promoting the Video
Try and make some links to the video – blog post, article, press releases pointing to the source
Promote the video with the standard social bookmarking sites (Digg, Stumbleupon etc) to build links
You can also visit relevant forums and mention it when appropriate
Tweet about it
Upload to your Facebook business page
Submit the video itself to video engines:
http://www.blinkx.com/
http://en.fooooo.com/
http://video.search.yahoo.com/
http://uk.truveo.com/
http://www.videosurf.com/
http://video.filestube.com/
http://clipta.com/
http://www.pixsy.com/
http://video.aol.com/
If you want any further advice or assistance with your promotional videos, please give us a call on 023 8083 7271 or email us on info@SMEketing.com
Reputation management used to be about scanning newspapers and magazines. However, the world is changing fast. It’s quite likely that your customers spend more time online than they do watching TV. Surfing the Internet, whether for business or pleasure is now the most common pastime in the Western world. People socialise online, shop online, do business online; everything. So its important that you track what people are saying about you online.
We’ve established in the last post (
If you’re using 
Blogs are now extremely commonplace and are part of a large majorty of websites. You may understand the business benefits of a blog, but what do you do if you’d like your organisation to start blogging, but senior management aren’t so sure.
Video is fast becoming a key differentiator between companies that are actively marketing themselves and engaging in communication with their prospects and customers, and those companies that are plodding along, relying on the same old tactics to keep them afloat.
