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!

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.

What should you track?

• Search engine referrals: What search engines are sending visitor to your site and what keywords are being used to find your site?
• Other referrals: What other sites are directing visitors to your site? This will show you where your valuable links are coming from. For example, seeing that 10% of your traffic came via your articles on eZine may prompt you to boost your article marketing campaign
• Returning Vs Unique Visitors: Are most of your new, unique visits, or are they returning visitors? This metric will show you how often people are coming back to your site – if you have a site that consistently produces regular content, you will want to see a high number of people returning to your site to read it
• Entry and exit pages: What pages do most people land on when they arrive at your site, and what are the pages that people are leaving from. If a lot of visitors leave from a key page, you may want to think about amending that page to try and reduce that figure
• Pathways: What path do visitors take when they’re on your site? Ideally you should create a ‘funnel’ where people land on a specific page and are guided through your site to the desired action page (such as a checkout or the Contact Us form). Understanding the path people take will help you improve the usability and conversion rate of your site
• Popular Pages: What pages are viewed most on your site? You can use this information to improve other pages that aren’t so well visited.

Of course the main thing you need to track are your conversions, and the route leading up to those conversions – what keyword was used, what search engine, what entry path did they take, what pages did they visit, how long did they stay on your site, were they a new or a returning visitor? Tracking your success will help you build a stronger, more focused campaign.

However, it’s equally important to measure failure – what isn’t working, what pages have a high bounce rate, what keywords have a high bounce rate, what article got no views at all etc… These are all important metrics that can be used to enhance your campaign plan.

So that’s it – the six part series explaining the basics of SEO is over. If you have any questions, please get in touch or leave us a comment. At SMEketing we’re passionate about search engine optimisation; if you feel we could help you and your site, please get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.

Below are the main areas that are involved in optimising a site:

• Design: Ensuring that the graphical elements and layout combine to create a user friendly and search engine friendly website
• Information Architecture: Creating a search engine friendly organisational hierarchy
• URLs and Meta Details: Creating descriptive URLs and unique, keyword rich meta details
• Navigation: Creating a navigation system that guides users easily through both top level and deep pages. This also includes the use of breadcrumbs, alt tags for images and well written anchor text
• Functionality: Ensure that all tools, scripts, images and links function as intended
• Accessibility: Focusing on removing broken links and ensuring that content is visible and accessible in all browsers and without special actions
• Content/Copy: Ensuring content is optimised with 3-5% keywords, keyphrases and synonyms, uses keyterms in relevant placing within the copy and has correct use of H1 and H2 headers

Creating Quality Content

The phrase ‘Content is King’ could not be truer for SEO. At the end of the day, search engines want to produce a list of high quality, relevant pages to their searchers. What makes a good quality site – one with hardly any content that is never updated, or a huge site with loads of fresh, new, unique content? What would you rather spend time on?

Users will probably enjoy spending time on a site if it is full of good content. Likewise, good quality content also helps to generate links – helping the popularity of your site even further.

For more information on why quality content is important, read these blog posts (they are based around how blogs can help you create content, but also include details of why and how fresh content helps your site in terms of SEO):

• Top Ten SEO Tips For Small Businesses: Part One
• Top Ten SEO Tips For Small Businesses: Part Two

Part five will be published on Wednesday and will discuss how you can build links for your site. Make sure to come back and read it! As always, any comments are apprecitated!

Keyword Research

Targeting the right term is a vitally important part of SEO. This is more than just measuring the level of searches a keyword gets and going for the one with the most. Proper keyword analysis will look at the keywords and phrases that are likely to convert (whatever your conversion is – be it a sale or the completion of a Contact Us form), the predicted traffic levels for various relevant terms, how much value the conversion on one keyword is worth compared to the conversion of other keywords (i.e a term such as ‘dining room table’ maybe convert into a higher value sale than ‘coffee table’). Finally, the analysis should look at the competition levels of each term – is it worth competing on a term that is extremely popular, or is it better to compete on a term that has a lower volume of searches, but is less competitive?

It’s important to take into consideration all the above elements. Unless you know the information surrounding a chosen keyword, how can you tell if it’s likely to be profitable for you? A big mistake in SEO is to go straight in, optimising your site and your link building strategy for a keyword that either won’t convert or is so competitive you don’t have a chance of doing well in the search engine result pages. A small independent bookshop shouldn’t try competing on a term like ‘books’ because Amazon and Waterstones and WH Smith have that market pretty closed!

What is a Long Tail Keyphrase?
The ‘long tail’ was a concept developed by Chris Anderson in his book and blog (The Long Tail). He explains it very well here:

“The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.”

So taking the example of ‘books’ again. The term ‘books’ is at the head of the keyword search, and will produce a great number of searches. However, there is a large amount of value within the other longer, unique searches, known as the ‘tail’. These would be terms such as ‘books on the history of Hampshire’ – the value of these searches lie in the fact that they will be less competitive, and more likely to convert. The person searching for history books in Hampshire is more likely to buy from you if you present him with a page on your Hampshire history books. Whereas if the same searcher searched for ‘books’, he’d probably have to crawl through a few different sites before he came across what he was looking for.

Stay tuned for the next installment in this series. Part four will be posted on Monday morning and will dicuss how you can optimise your site. If you want to find out more about SMEketing and our SEO work, you can get in touch with us in a variety of ways:

• Phone: 023 8083 7271
• Email: info@SMEketing.com
• Twitter: @SMEketing
• Facebook: SMEketing Business Page

When looking at a particular page, the search engines will look for key areas where they would expect the search query to be located – the title tag, meta description, heading tags and body copy. If a page is relevant to the query, it will most likely have that keyword or phrase featured in the above areas.

Search engines also base relevancy on how popular they feel your page is (yes, it’s like going back to school again – the popularity contest never ends!!). This is why links – and good quality links, are important. Search engines will look at the links pointing to a page and analyse the type of link (whether or not the anchor text is relevant to the search query), what else is said on that page (is there information and copy near the link that contains the query term? This is why lists and directories aren’t generally classed as high quality links). They also look at whether or not the page in question links back to the linking site (is it reciprocal?) and how trustworthy the linking site is (for example a public sector domain such as .gov is more trustworthy than a .net, and Wikipedia is more trustworthy than wikidirectory.biz etc…).

The search engines combine the outcome of these two factors with many other smaller aspects and filter the total results through their algorithm. The algorithm then decides the score for each page, and will then present the list of results in order of most to least importance.

So you why link building is such an important part of SEO. If you have thousands of other websites all linking to your site, then the search engines will assume that your site is extremely popular and must have a certain level of value. If all your links come from well respected and trustworthy sites, then the power of the link is even greater. However, if you have a thousand links all coming from low quality sites or link farms, the search engines are likely to recognise this and eliminate the value of those links (or they even penalise you for trying to cheat the system).

What makes a good quality link?

• The anchor text: Anchor text is the text the link is made from. For example: ‘SMEketing: Marketing agency working with businesses in the South’ has the word ‘SMEketing as the anchor text – this tells the search engine that the word ‘SMEketing’ is relevant to www.SMEketing.com. A better anchor text would be : ‘SMEketing: Marketing agency working with businesses in the South’ – this tells the search engines that www.SMEketing.com is relevant to SMEketing marketing agency, which is much better.
• Popularity of the site: As mentioned before, it’s all about popularity! A popular site has a high volume of quality more links pointing to them.
• Text around the link: If the link has text surrounding it that is on topic, that link will be deemed better than a link surrounded by other links, or text that is not relevant

The next post (3 of 6) will focus on keyword research and will be posted on Friday. In the meantime, you can view the first post here: What is SEO (search engine optimisation)?, or get in touch to find out how we can help boost relevant traffic numbers to your site – call us on 023 8083 7271.

What Is SEO?

Search engine optimisation is the process of optimising a website by improving internal and external parts in order to increase the volume of relevant traffic to your site from search engines. It is important to note that it is the increase in ‘relevant’ traffic to your site – there is no point gaining 100% more visitors if they are not the type of visitor that will convert for you (whether your conversion is a sale, request for more information etc…).

Search engines are very clever, and they will be able to find your site without you manually submitting it to them. However, SEO is all about helping you to boost your website rank for the specific keywords or phrases that you feel will convert into good traffic for your site. The online environment has never been more competitive, and this is why SEO is used; optimised sites will have a large advantage over their competitors in terms of visitors and customers.

How do Search Engines Work?
Remember that search engines do not display websites in their search results – they display web pages. This is an important thing to remember when optimising your site.

So how do they work and how do they decide what pages to list and in what order? I’ll try and keep this simple

1. They have ‘bots’ or ‘spiders’ that crawl the web, using the hyperlink structure to ‘crawl’ the pages and document that make up a website
2. The index those pages and documents – basically they store it all in a huge database which they call their ‘index’
3. When someone types a search into the search engine box, the search engine retrieves from its index all the documents and pages that match that query. A match is made in a variety of ways, but mostly it’s determined by whether or not the search term is found in the webpage or document (and in what format – if the searcher put quotes around their search, the search engines would only list pages that contained the query in the exact same format)
4. The search engine will then use its algorithm to work out what order (or rank) to place each result. This is based on what it feels is most relevant to the searcher.

The next instalment (2 of 6), will focus on how search engines decide what a ‘relevant’ site is. Make sure you come back on Wednesday to read all about it! In the meantime, give us an email if you want to find out how we can help improve your website: info@SMEketing.com

So what’s the second reason blogs are brilliant for small business search engine optimisation? Keywords. If you are writing a blog post about your products or services, you will naturally include a number of keywords which are the terms prospects use to search with.

Not only will your blog posts contain your all important keywords, but they’ll also probably include a host of variations on these keywords – plurals and synonyms are almost as important as the original keyword in the first place. An addition to your keywords, you’ll be using keyphrases – these are often known as the ‘long tail’. These are longer phrases that people may use to locate what they are searching for on the web. An example of this search would be: “how can I clean paintbrushes without damaging them?”, this is a typical example of a longer search query that a searcher may enter into Google. If you have written a well rounded blog post on your easy to clean paint brushes, there is a good chance that you will match this long tail search term, and your blog post will rank high in the search engine results.

A well written blog post will be focused, with keywords naturally occurring in the title, headers and body section. There are many schools of thought on keyword use, but all agree that in order to rank for your desired keyphrases, you need to include them in certain aspects of your website copy. The recommended ratio of keyword to text is about 5-10%. Don’t go over 10% as this may appear like you are ‘keyword stuffing’; a very old technique which only serves to get your site penalised by the search engines.

Because your blog post will be focused on a specific area, this, combined with the fact that it is new and unique content, means that Google and the other search engines will rank your blog post higher in the search results for the keyterms used in that post than possibly static pages  of your competitors. Getting people to your site via your blog is a great way to drive an increase in relevant traffic, and if you provide high quality content with strong call to actions, people will contact you/make a purchase/or whatever other result you are looking for.

If you’re still unsure whether a blog is right for your small business, call us on 023 8083 7271, and we’ll be more than happy to try and convince you! Or, if you know that a blog will help your small business website (which it will), get in touch and we can help create it for you.

Let us know of any other reasons why you think a blog makes a great tool for any small business – leave your comments below, we love reading them!