I was definitely intrigued by the post which is why I am sharing it but the more I think about it, there are a lot of missing components here. The article How Much is a Google Top Spot Worth? posted on the SearchEngineWatch blog is definitely interesting.

To sum it up, there are some graphs and pictures and stats that show how important the first spot is and how much more traffic a company gets if they are in the first spot as opposed to the 2nd and 3rd etc. While it is our goal in life to get people in these top positions on Google, there are definitely some things to point out here.

I am in no way, shape or form trying to diminish this article or argue with it. It is definitely important to be in the top spots in Google – if it wasn’t, Anduro wouldn’t exist how we do now. And I agree that the top few positions are where the eyeballs are but there is a point that is being overlooked.

What about conversion rate?  I agree that you want traffic but if it is unqualified traffic because everyone is just clicking on the first result since we all trust Google to know what we are looking for, maybe it is better to be a bit further down on the page and catch those people who are really, truly searching. Maybe those people are more qualified. Of course, it makes sense that the chance of getting a conversion increases with more traffic but I think this study is inconclusive. There are other factors to consider – conversion rate being one of the biggest ones.

Have a look at some of the comments under the post. Pretty interesting to see the different reactions from people.

What do you think?

I was complaining to my co-workers about this because the only way for me to check a site is to go through EVERY SINGLE PAGE of the site and check the html code to see if Analytics is there. This is, as you can imagine, incredibly time consuming. SEO-Browser makes this a bit easier because you can click through the pages of the site and it checks the html code for you.

Still though, you have to click on every link to every page of a site. Now you can imagine, this is no easy task if you are looking at a 100+ page site.

So while I was complaining, Jeff sends me a link to this great tool. I was skeptical at first but thought I would try it out. It is called SiteScan by EpicOne and it does just that – it scans any site and spits back a report letting you know if any pages are missing the code, and if they are, it gives you the URL of the page! Brilliant! The free version let’s you run 11 or 12 tests a day!

I have gone through all of my clients and checked. Luckily, there has only been one who had a bit of code missing. Phew! This tool saves me hours of time. Maybe it can help you as well!

He lists a variety of tools but the one that caught my eye was the Keyword Tree developed by Juice Analytics. To used the tool you need data in a Google Analytics account.

This tool combines the value of tag cloud and relationships. Very quickly you can see which combinations of keywords people are using to get to your site. The menu of keywords at the bottom of the screen show a list of all the keywords – it is so easy to use.

The Referrer Flow Tool is also interesting and valuable.

The purpose of this tool is to answer 2 questions:
a) What pages are visitors viewing?
b) Where are they coming from (referral page)?

The tool takes a bit of practice to understand but in about 5 minutes you can gain an appreciation for which pages are valuable and where referrals are coming from.

When you have a bit of idle time, try out these tools.

Let me outline how our company is using this tool to help our clients. We have a few clients in the industry of global positioning systems (GPS). One is a manufacture of industrial hardware and applications, www.novatel.com and the other is a retail seller of mobile GPS units for consumers, www.gpscentral.ca. For both clients we are preparing a “gap analysis” to determine how their website is ranking for terms related to “gps”.

Note: The following data is aggregated industry related data, not data specific to GPSCentral.

Our analysis for companies like GPSCentral is a typically along the following lines:

• Enter the search term “gps”
• Adjust the filters to your specific interest: Web Search / Canada /  All subregions / Last 12 months / All Categories to get the resulting page and graph
• Click on News headlines to see related news
• Click on Forecast get future trends (you must select 2004 – present for this function to be available)

If you login using your Gmail account you can get additional detail related to search volumes. When logged in, the y-axis becomes a percentage scale with 0 being zero and 100 being the highest volume during the selected time period.

For the gap analysis example, our next step is to review the Top Searches and Rising Searches and determine how the website is performing for these specific terms. For example, the top search term listed is “gps garmin”. When we look at Google.ca we can see that the website is performing well for this term – 2nd and 3rd positions. The website is also listed on the first page of Google.ca for the next 4 terms including “garmin”, “gps canada”, “magellan gps”, and “magellan”.  But when we search for the 6th term on the list, “gps review”, www.GPSCentral.ca is not listed in the first 10 pages – room for improvement.

By using the “site” command in Google we can quickly determine that a pages has not been specifically optimized for “gps review”. A few pages on the website contain this term but none of the pages have “gps review” in the title of the web pages.

At this stage we have a few options:

1. Select one of the existing pages and optimize the page for this term.
2. Develop some new optimized content and add that page to the site.
3. Start a linking campaign to improve the performance of the existing page or the new page

We haven’t started yet, but we will over the next few weeks.

Contact me if you have comments, questions or suggestions.

Jeff Nelson

http://www.seo-news.com/archives/2009/oct/8.html

This is something we do when optimizing for our clients as well – without access to title tags, it becomes very hard to optimize a website. When working on a client’s website though, I differ slightly from Jill’s method of putting the company name in the tags: though I agree that including the name is good SEO practice, I usually I place it at the end, rather than the beginning of the tag. So for example, a websites Title tags would look something like “Cat Food and Food For Cats – Umbrella Corporation Foods” after we optimized the site.

But that is a minor differentiation in technique.

We also find that we can usually fit up to three keywords per page – anything over that cap though and the Title tags (as well as other on-page elements) begin to look stuffed and unprofessional. This is not a hard rule however, as we have made exceptions in the past – but it is one we typically abide by for the most part.

Simple diagram. Great descriptions. Easy to navigate. Clear. Well put together.

Enjoy!

1. Hosting

Ideally, the IP address of the hosting server should be in the country of the target market.

For example, the hosting server of a website targeting the USA market should be located in the USA. Of course, this is not always possible but it does make a difference. I would like to say that this recommendation is critical; unfortunately it is not always possible.

2. Domain Name

The domain name should include the most important keywords that the company is targeting. This is rarely possible but it is powerful if it can be done. For example, www.antennacommunication.com is much stronger than www.antcom.com because it contains the word “antenna”. But “antcom” is shorter and that is the reason this company chose the shorter version. Of course, there are many other issues that are involved in the selection of the domain name including history, branding, trademarks/copyrights, length of the domain name, competition, and availability (price). This recommendation is not critical since the considerations listed above may take precedence.

3. Re-Directs

It is best to avoid re-directs from the domain name page to another page. For some strange reason website developers like to redirect www.company.com to www.company.com/index.html or www.company.com/home.php. In general, re-directs like this are frown upon because of issues related to the possibility of “clocking”. A worst case scenario is for a website to be banned from a search engine. The best case scenario is that the sub-page is much weaker than the real home page without the re-direct. From a user’s point of view a redirect to an internal page is awkward. It adds un necessary confusion. However, this recommendation is not critical since most search engines have figured out that the target page is the important page.

4. URL Structure and Format

Ideally, we like the URL to follow some logical format based on the URL, the folder for the website section and the file name. For small simple sites you can ignore the folder. Ideally we would add keyword phrases to the last part of the URL. For example, http://www.dell.com/business/laptops. As you can see this page is ranking well on Google.com for the keyword phrase “business laptops”. Ideally, the URLs should be decipherable as opposed to database references that are unintelligible. This recommendation is not absolutely critical. Many sites work well with the search engines without a URL format that is simple.

5. Frames

Avoid building websites in Frames. Everyone should know this by now but it is worth repeating because some developer are still using frames. For example, http://www.calgaryhotelassociation.com/. If you look at this page using www.seo-browser.com you will see that the content in the frame doesn’t show up. The frame just creates problems when search engines index the site. The search engine may index the content of the frame without the frame.

6. Flash

Flash is fine as long as it is a component (or file) on a HTML page. The search engines can’t read the content on sites that are 100% Flash (not yet, maybe in the future). Adding a page with special functionality, as we discussed, is fine. This page may not show up in the search engines very well but that may not matter for that single page. If you want the search engines to index the content of a website then this recommendation is critical.

7. Control of “Meta Tags”

With websites developed using static HTML pages this isn’t a problem. Changes and modifications are simple and quick. From and SEO point of view, the issue of manual overrides can be a serious problem when a site is developed using a Content Management Solution (CMS).

Selecting the right CMS is critical. To “optimize” the pages of a website it is critical that we need control (manual override) of the following sections on the web page:

• Title (absolutely critical)
• Description tag (absolutely critical)
• Keyword tag (search engines place no value on this tag but it is a great spot to place the keywords that we are using for that page)
• H formatting for content headings (changes should be possible with all CMS)
• Page content  (changes should be possible with all CMS)
• Anchor text related to links in the page content (absolutely critical)

8. Home Page

The home page of a website is the most important page to add keyword phrases. It is the most important page to optimize using the most important keyword phrases. See: www.paisley.com All of the keyword phrases listed on this page are working well (first or second page of results) on Google.com. This recommendation is critical.

9. Text Navigation and Site Map

Search engines need a way to find all the links to internal pages. To make this easy for search engines we recommend adding a text menu at the bottom of all pages and adding a site map with a link from the text menu or the home page. There are lots of ways that this can be done but the objective is basically the same: make it easy for search engines to find all the pages of the website. In addition we often use the site map as a good place to add links to the “Focus Pages” or optimized content pages that we create for our clients. See the links at the bottom of this page: www.novatel.com/sitemap.htm. This recommendation is critical.

10. Avoid Duplicate Content

Most search engines will only display one page if it has an option of two page with the same content. Search engines are unpredictable in how they react to two pages with exactly the same content. Google seems to pick a page whatever page it likes best – often the oldest page. Yahoo often picks the page that was updated the furthest back in time (that isn’t logical which is why it is a problem). Our recommendation is to avoid duplicate content at all costs. This includes websites with the same content on 2 URLs like .com and .ca. This recommendation is critical.

11. Robots.txt File

Every website should include a robot.txt file in the root directory of the website.

The robot.txt file tells search engines which pages NOT to index. This file also serves to give permission to search engines to index the rest of the site. Including it is a good idea because all major search engines look for this file. This recommendation is critical.

12. Form and Thank You Page

It is our experience that including a form on a website is much better than adding a link to an email address. With a form you can force the user to give you information like a phone number.

The main problem with adding an email address is that you are exposing that person to email spam. Who wants spam? We recommend adding a form and thank you page (after submission) to the Contact Us page. If we use pay-per-click ads as one of the online marketing strategies then we can add conversion tracking code to the thank you page. This recommendation is critical.

I hope these recommendations are valuable.

]]> http://anduroblog.com/2009/09/criteria-for-high-performance-websites-on-search-engines.html/feed 1 http://anduroblog.com/2009/09/forms-shmorms-why-have-a-form-on-your-site.html http://anduroblog.com/2009/09/forms-shmorms-why-have-a-form-on-your-site.html#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:13:28 +0000 Stefanie http://anduroblog.com/?p=494 There is nothing more frustrating than going to a website, finding out that whatever the company is offering is interesting to you and then clicking on the contact page only to see a long list of phone numbers and email addresses. I like contacting online. It is easy, it is fast.

Now this is obviously personal preference but there are real reasons why there should be a form on the contact us page – a short form that is, followed by a separate page with a thank you message.

There are a number of Analytics programs out there but for simplicity sake (and because I am most familiar with it) I will use Google Analytics as the analytics program of choice. It is free and collects really great, useful data.

Say you have a website, you have added all the Analytics code to the pages of your site and you are just sitting back, collecting data. Now let’s say you don’t have a form on your site. You can collect endless amount of data but at the end of the day, what have you learned? How many visitors are coming to your site? How long they stay? Which page they like the most? Which page they like the least? This is all great data but so what! Have they bought anything? You don’t know. Have they contacted you? You don’t know.

Of course, you can keep track of how many phone calls you received and how many emails Joe got on Tuesday but you have no idea where these leads came from. You know that you received 100 visits from Google Organic. OK, that’s great. But did any of these people contact you?

By simply adding a form to your site and adding a goal in Analytics, you take away a lot of the guess work. You will now be able to see where the people who competed the form came from, how long they spent on your site, which pages they enjoyed etc. etc. etc.

This is especially true if you are doing any paid advertising. Google AdWords, Facebook – all of these can be tracked in Analytics but you will only know whether your efforts are worth it if you can see conversions and how much you are paying for each conversion.

Forms are simple to add and you will get a lot of value out of them!

Apparently Hallmark had a promotion where customers landed on a page with only a video console and NOTHING else. No Hallmark branding or any indication of what to do next. Click here to read the actual article.

We see this sort of thing happen so often. A poorly designed page on a site is online suicide – especially if this page happens to be a landing page or conversion page. If a user lands on a page and is not slapped across the face with instructions on what to do next, he/she will get out of there faster than you can say, “Please stay”.

Landing pages need to make it blatently obvious what is expected of the user. Do you want them to read an article and then click to buy? Make sure the link is a BOB – Big Orange Button to make it as obvious as possible where to go.

Issues like this is why we at Anduro are offering “Increasing Conversion Sessions”. Three or four of us sit down and go through a website one page at a time analysing and evaluating every little part of it. Then we send a nice, neat and reworded (!!!) report to the client with suggeted changes. Amazing what a difference it can make to just make a few small changes to a site!

For more information about this or other Anduro services, call 403-410-3803 and ask for Matt. He’ll be able to help you out!

So I clicked on the icon. A new window opened up with the word and a definition. Very cool.

Try it. Go to this page: A New World: Scheduling E-Books. I’m following articles on ebooks because I think they have potential. I don’t own one, yet. (Hint to my sons, Riley and Daniel, my birthday is in September.) With your cursor, highlight the word “hardcover” in the first sentence. Notice the ? icon that pops up. Click on the ? mark. A new window will pop-up with the definition of “hardcover”. The alt tag suggests that this feature is called “Lookup Word”.

I still use Google to “define” words because I like the various perspectives that Google finds but this feature on NYTimes has value.