So in no official order, below are the top ten most read blog posts of 2011:

Top Email Marketing Checks To Do Before You Hit Send

Email marketing is a very effective way to communicate with your current and prospect customers. It’s quick, inexpensive and can give you instant results. But it’s important that it’s done right. Make sure you make the most of each eblast by making the following email marketing checks: From Name Is your ‘From’ name recognisable? Will [...]

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Google+ For Business

If you’ve been in a coma recently, you might not have heard about Google’s new social media platform, Google+! Even though it’s been around now for a few weeks, there’s still some confusion over how to use it and what it could mean to you both personally and as a business. The service is Google’s [...]

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Building Your Email Marketing List : Research Results

A couple of months ago, MarketingSherpa released the results of a study they had undertaken, into the most effective methods of growing an email marketing list. The researchers asked more than 1100 marketers to indicate the effectiveness of various methods used within their organisation. This is what they found: Although these results are based on [...]

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Top Black Hat SEO Techniques You Must Avoid

Wikipedia describes black hat SEO as “SEO tactics such as spamdexing, attempt to redirect search results to particular target pages in a fashion that is against the search engines’ terms of service and is often considered unethical SEO.” The alternative is white hat SEO, which are the techniques that are approved by the search engines [...]

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Reciprocal Linking – Good or Bad SEO?

If you’ve got a new website and you’re trying to optimise it and improve it’s position in the search engine results for your desired key terms, you may be aware that link building is an important area of SEO that you need to focus on. So it could be tempting to respond positively to an [...]

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Secrets of Successful Blogging

The term “weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, “blog,” was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase “we blog” in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999. Ever since then, people have been blogging for business and for [...]

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Top Ten Google AdWord Mistakes – Part Two

Following from our previous post last Thursday, here are the additional five mistakes that we see people make in their Google AdWord Campaigns: 6. Not targetting the right group of searchers: Is your product or services aimed towards a particular demographic or geographical location? Did you know that you can set your AdWord campaigns to target those [...]

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MegaBus Robots.txt File Fail

I am organising a trip up to London with some friends in September. We’ve decided to save some money and use the MegaBus to travel from Southampton. Due to my love of all thing organising, I was put in charge of sorting out the costs etc. So first thing I did was to Google MegaBus. [...]

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Online Promotion: How to promote a new offer, product or service online

Online promotion is a key marketing method for small businesses. If you’re promoting a new offer, product or service, how can you market it online? One of the key benefits of the Internet is that it creates an even platform – allowing smaller businesses to promote themselves at a relatively low cost. But you still need [...]

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Small Business Branding, Logo and Corporate Identity – What’s the Difference?

Okay small business owners, I have some questions for you here: How many of you reading this, know what your logo is? (I’m really hoping you’re nodding along, safe in the knowledge that you know what your logo is! I’ll be scared if  you don’t, unless you’re just starting a new business and haven’t had a [...]

Read more »

If you want to start 2012 with a bang, get in touch. We love helping businesses grow through using effective online marketing. So if you want more leads, more sales and more growth in 2012 drop us an email or complete our contact form.

So what is Panda and how will it affect the search results? Well in a nutshell, Panda was designed to try and eliminate low quality pages and sites from the search results. These sites include those that scrape content from other websites, farm links and generally provide a low quality service to visitors.

If you notice a sudden drop in traffic levels to your site, it could be that you’ve been affected by this update. If you work hard to create useful, unique, valuable content then you should be okay. However, if you feel you’ve been negatively affected and aren’t deserving of it, you can add a post with your details to this Google Webmaster Forum thread.

In the meantime have a look through your website:

• Is all your content original?
• Can visitors navigate their way around your site easily?
• Have you updated your site recently?
• Are all your pages useful and engaging?

If you think you’ve been affected by Panda, get in touch. We can have a quick look through your site and give you some pointers to help improve it.

Wikipedia gives a good description of a bounce rate:

Bounce rate (sometimes confused with exit rate) is an Internet marketing term used in web traffic analysis. It represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and “bounce” (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site.

The formula used to calculate bounce rate is:

Bounce rate = total number of visits viewing only one page / total number of visits

The bounce rate is really the easiest web stat to understand, and can be the best starting place when looking to improve the performance of your website.

First, list all your landing pages (the pages people land on when they arrive at your site) with the highest bounce and look at the keywords people use to arrive at these pages. Do these correspond with the content on the page? Where do you think you should be putting these keywords? In the header, the title tag, the copy. By doing this, people will feel reassured that they are on a relevant page and are more likely to stay put. Sometimes just making some minor changes like this can have a big affect on your bounce rate.

Other factors that may cause a high bounce rate are:

• Slow loading pages: Who wants to hang around for a page to load?
• Cluttered pages: We like to see well designed, clean web pages
• High number of adverts: If you include adverts on your website, make sure they’re relevant, well designed and kept to a minimum. You don’t want to run the risk of looking like a spam site
• Poor navigation: Is this a standalone page? Many landing pages for PPC (such as Google AdWords) have their navigation removed as part of the landing page strategy (to help boost conversions). However, this might not work for your industry or service/product and is something you should test

So what else can you do to improve your bounce rate?

• Test everything! Test your copy, your headers, your images. Test anything that you think will have an impact on your bounce rate
• Do you have a video or music that plays automatically? This can really put people off so think about removing it. Not everyone will be in an environment that can accommodate sound (i.e. public transport, a busy office, a sleeping baby next-door!)
• Think about the images you use. Are they relevant to that particular page? Are they high quality images or cheap looking ones taken from ClipArt?
• Test your website and key landing pages in a variety of browsers and versions of browsers. If you look at what browsers people actually use to visit your website you’d probably be surprised at how many people are still using really old, dated versions
• Stay above the fold. The ‘fold’ is the area of the website that you can see in your monitor without scrolling. Taken from the times when people used to buy newspapers (which they still do, but not so much!), the fold was the section of newspaper that people could see when it was sat on the newspaper stand. It was important that headlines and images grabbed people and convinced them to buy. The same theory goes for your website – what can people see without scrolling? Is it relevant and pleasing on the eye?
• Are you in an industry that uses specific language or jargon? Slipping in some relevant terminology from the start will show your visitors you know what you’re talking about
• How is your content laid out? Are you using nice small, bite-sized paragraphs, headers and bullets? People get put off by large chunks of text
• Either keep your content up to date or remove dates from your site. It can put people off if they land on a page that’s dated three years ago

If you want any help improving the performance of your website, please get in touch. We love working on websites and seeing their sales and leads increase as a result of our advice and work. Give us a call on 023 8083 7271 or email us on info@SMEketing.com. Alternatively, leave us some questions in the comments below and we’ll answer them straight away!

You can check the loading time of your website in your Google Webmaster Tools account (which will also tell you whether its performing well compared to other sites), or you can use free online tools like http://tools.pingdom.com/.

So what steps can you take to ensure your site loads as fast as possible?

• Reduce the size of your images: Having lots of large images on your site will slow it down. Make sure you’re using small file-types such as .gif’s and keep the size to a minimum. There are free services such as http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/imageoptimizer/ which will reduce the size of your images for you
• Keep images to a minimum: Don’t use images to display text – this is bad in terms of load speed, but also SEO. Search engines can’t crawl text built into images, so you may be harming your site by adding text this way. Using CSS you can pretty much make text look anyway you want to anyway, so there’s no need to use images to present text
• Avoid tables: Use DIVs for layout if possible
• Keep your CSS and Script files externally: Try not to include your Javascript or CSS code in your HTML documents. Create separate files and then call out to them when you need to
• Clean up your code: You can use free tools like CSS Tidy and Clean CC to help clean up your code. Remember to take a backup of your files before you start optimising though – you don’t want to accidentally ‘tidy away’ some key bits of code!
• Use trailing slashes: This is just a small one but it helps. If you have a folder called ‘blog’, link to http://www.SMEketing.com/blog/ instead of http://www.SMEketing.com/blog
• Avoid excessive use of flash: Flash isn’t the demon it used to be, but try not to go OTT. Heavy usage will seriously slow your site down
• Invest in a good quality hosting provider: Sometimes the cheapest isn’t always the best.

Have you ever had any issues with load speeds? Have you got any other suggestions? Let us know in the comments below.

A conversion is an action you want someone to take on your site. There are a range of conversions that you might want to track – such as when a visitor downloads an ebook, registers for an event, signs up to your newsletter or makes a purchase.

When you create a goal in Google Analytics, you are effectively telling it what your desired conversions are. When you get down to the nitty gritty; goal conversion are really the primary metric for measuring how well your site fulfils business objectives.

Setting up goals is easy. We’ll take you on a step by step walk through of setting up a goal – this example goal will be tracking when people complete a Contact Us form. All we need to know is the URL of the page people are taken to once they have completed the form. For this example we’ll use www.SMEketing.com/thank-you.html. Most goal pages should be pages people only get access to once they have completed an action. So they’re most often thank you pages – thank you for signing up to our newsletter/thank you for contacting us, we’ll be in touch shortly/thank you for buying our product… etc. It’s important that you know the page/URL you want to measure and that visitors can only access this page by completing the desired action.

So…

1. Log into your Analytics account – on the Overview page, select ‘Edit’ on the right hand side:

2. Scroll halfway down and click on ‘+ Add Goal’ (your goals can be split into four sets, each with 5 goals = 25 goals in total overall. The image below is selecting to create the first goal in set 2):

You will then be presented with the following page:

Give your goal a name. For this example we can call it ‘Contact Form Completion’. Then select ‘URL Destination’.

You’ll be given some new fields to complete (below). In the Match Type field you can select either Head Match, Exact Match, or Regular Expression Match. You can find out more about the different type of matches here: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en_GB&answer=72286&utm_id=ad

Then enter in your goal URL, select if it is case sensitive or not, and then enter in a value for the goal. This is optional, but if you know that the conversion you’re tracking is worth a certain amount, it can help you get a better idea of the ROI you’re getting from your website.

If you have a specific sales funnel that you have created, you can set this up to be tracked also. For example, you may be directing people to a landing page (via Google AdWords or some other form of online advertising), they then click on a call to action button which takes them to a page with a form, they then complete the form and are taken to the thank you page. So your funnel looks like:

1. www.SMEketing.com/landing-page.html
2. www.SMEketing.com/landing-page-contact.html
3. www.SMEketing.com/thank-you.html

The funnel section is optional. Once you’re happy, you can click on ‘Save Goal’ and you’re done!

Tracking Goal Conversions

You’ll be able to track your goal conversions throughout Analytics. You’ll see a special ‘Goals’ section in the menu where you can see all the information and statistics.

You’ll also be able to track the goals on various other pages. For example

• If you look at the Referring Sites report, you’ll be able to see how many goals were completed from traffic arriving from various sources.
  • Did Twitter send 100 people with 68 conversions? Then you know that you’re getting a good ROI from your social media.
• Looking at the Browser report you’ll be able to see how many goals were completed by people using various browsers
  • Did more people using Firefox convert than Internet Explorer users? Maybe there’s an issue with your site in Internet Explorer?

Tracking conversions is an extremely important part of online marketing – if you can track what works and what doesn’t, how can you improve your marketing efforts?

As always with Google Analytics, this is a huge subject. If you have any questions about creating and monitoring goals, please leave a comment or email us on info@SMEketing.com.

And this is what I was presented with:

So I had the quite reasonable impression that their site was down for maintenance. As an alternative I logged onto the National Express website to see how much their coaches were.

Once I had my information from the National Express I emailed my friends to tell them that I couldn’t get any information from MegaBus, but that the National Express seemed pretty reasonable and that we should just book with them. It was only then that my friend said she’d also tried the MegaBus site and was able to access it without any problems. So I went back to check and realised the error I’d made.

Even if you type ‘MegaBus’ correctly into Google, the maintenance page is still the third result. It would be interesting to look at their analytics to see how many visits this page gets; I bet it’s shockingly high.

So what can they do to fix this? It’s simple, just add http://uk.megabus.com/Maintenance.aspx to their robots.txt file.

What is a robots.txt file?

A robots.txt is a file you can create in which you can list all the pages (URLs) of your website that you don’t want the search engines to index. There are many reasons why you wouldn’t want certain pages to show in the search results. This MegaBus maintenance page is just one such example. Other examples include:

1. Random pages such as your thank you or error pages
2. If you are in the process of building your website or new pages and don’t want your unfinished work to appear in the search results
3. If your website includes information that you don’t want people to find whilst searching online (such as member only information that isn’t hidden behind a password)
4. Any duplicate content you may have. For example if you had content in both a web page and in PDF format you would want to add one of those to your robot.txt file to avoid being penalised

The file itself is a simple text file, which can be created in Notepad. It must be saved to the root directory of your site – which is the directory where your home page or index page is.

You can find out more about robots.txt files and how to create them here http://www.robotstxt.org

Have you ever found any pages in the search engine results that you shouldn’t have? Let us know in the comments!

Dashboard

• Tells you a summary of your key reports – search queries, crawl rate, keywords, sitemaps and links to your page

Site configuration

• Sitemaps– this page will show you what sitemaps you’ve uploaded, how many indexed URLs it contains and if there are any issues with it.
• Crawler access– if you’ve added a robots.txt file, this is where it’ll be. If you haven’t, this is where you can generate one. A robots.txt file is a list of URLs that you don’t want Google to index. This would be useful for private, out of data or duplicate content.
• Sitelinks– sitelinks are links to a site’s interior pages. If you have any, you’ll be shown them here.Change of address – this page tells you what to do if your website is going to move to a new domain.
  
• Settings – this is an important page. Here you can tell Google what country you are targeting which is important if you only work with customers in one country. You can also set what your preferred domain is: either http://www.SMEketing.com or http://SMEketing.com.

Your site on the web

• Search queries- here you’ll see a similar graph to those within Google Analytics. You’ll see how many impressions your site had and how many clicks. You’ll also be able to see what keywords people used to find your site – how many impressions those keywords created and how many clicks resulted. You can also see your average position for these terms. It’s important to remember that this tells you how people are finding your site at the moment – if you are optimising your site for a particular keyterm, but are not yet ranking well for it, it’s unlikely to show up in this report. This report is useful in telling you where you can direct a little bit of effort to get improved results – if you are ranking 4 or 5 for a keyword you know converts well, with a bit of extra effort you could improve his rank and massively improve click throughs.
• Links to your site – Here Google will tell you the number of links pointing to your site. It’ll also tell who what pages those links point to. Like most websites, the homepage will normally have the most links. Not all of these links will be great quality – link building is all about quality over quantity (although having a huge quantity of great quality links is the ideal!). This report will help you see if you have important pages with a low volume of links pointing to it – so you know where to direct your link building activity.
• Keywords- If you’ve done your keyword research you should have a good understanding of what your website should be optimised for. This Keyword report tells you the most common keywords Google found when crawling your site. The terms at the top are those which are mentioned most often. These should match the terms you’ve optimised your site for. If there’s an important keyterm that’s not reflected in this list, you need to go back and amend your copy (although remember, no keyword stuffing!! Keep keywords to within 3-5%). If you click on one of these keywords, it’ll show you what pages of your website this term appears on.
• Internal links – This report tells you the internal links you have to each page. Internal linking is an important part of SEO. Your most important pages should have the highest number of links pointing to them. The volume of links should go down for less important pages.
• Subscriber stats – If you have an RSS feed associated with a blog, news page or any other page, this report will show you how many people are subscribed to them.

Diagnostics

• Malware - Malware is a piece of software, such as a virus or spyware that can attach itself to your site. You should see the message “Google has not detected any malware on this site.” Call your IT guys if you’re not getting this message!
• Crawl errors- This report tells you if Google has found any problems whilst crawling your site. The most common issues would be 404 pages not found and broken links. However, this report can often show pages/links that dont’ exist anymore. It’s not a great report in terms of accuracy. If you want to find broken links on your site, visit Xenu at http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
• Crawl stats- This graph shows you your site’s crawl histroy over the last 90 days. It shows you the pages crawled, kb’s downloaded and the time spent downloading on a daily basis.
• HTML suggestions – This is a useful area. It’ll tell you if Google has found any issues with the content of your site or with the title tags or meta descriptions (notice it doesn’t mention meta keywords here… that’ because Google doesn’t pay attention to them anymore!).

Labs

• Fetch as Googlebot- You can request to see pages as Google bots sees them – without any snazzy design, pictures of any of that bumf! You can use this to check that Google is seeing your site in the way you want it to.
• Site performance - Google is beginning to place more importance on the load speed of your site. People don’t to wait ages for a webpage to load, so Google is starting to place preference on faster loading sites. This report gives you a nice looking graph showing how your page download speeds have averaged over the last few months.

So that’s Google Webmaster Tools explained. It’s best if you spend some time clicking about and exploring the reports. It’s pretty easy to use and can give you some excellent information to help improve your site’s performance. Even though this is Google Webmaster Tools, making changes to improve your site will also help its rankings in the other major search engines.

Find out more about Google Webmaster Tools:

• What is Google Webmaster
• Adding Your Website To Google Webmaster
• Adding An XML Sitemap To Google Webmaster Tools

• What is Google Webmaster
• Adding Your Website To Google Webmaster

There is a huge amount of valuable information that you can get from Google Webmaster, but you need to know where it is, and what to do with it.

Firstly, you should submit an xml Sitemap. This is basically a list of all the URLs in your website. It helps to tell Google about all your pages; including pages which for some reason or another they may not be aware of.

There are many reasons Google may not crawl every page on your site naturally, so this is why Sitemaps are helpful. Google states, that Sitemap’s are useful if:

• Your site has dynamic content.
• Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process—for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or images.
• Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn’t well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
• Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

To create an xml Sitemap:

• Visit http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ add your site URL to the box (ignore the other boxes and options) and click on ‘Start’.
• You will then need to save this and upload the file to your website.
• Click on ‘Site Configuration’ and then ‘Sitemaps’
• Click on ‘Add a Sitemap’
• You will be presented with a box with your domain name with a field at the end of it – type in sitemap.xml and then click on submit.

And that’s it.  Google will tell you if there is a problem with your Sitemap, but if you have followed these instructions you should have submitted it successfully.

Our next post is the long overdue explanation of what information Google Webmaster Tools can give you and how to interpret the data to improve your website.

If you found this information useful, but feel like you don’t have time to manage your online marketing, please get in touch. We’re online marketing experts and love nothing more than getting stuck into websites, helping our customers get more business from their online endeavours! Email us today on info@SMEketing.com.

In order to get the benefits of Google Webmaster, you first need to register and verify your site with Google Webmaster. It’s a very quick and easy process. To find out how to do it, watch the video below:

The next blog post will outline what information you can get from Google Webmaster and how to use it to make your site perform better in Google.

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.