SEO

If data is the next ‘Intel Inside’ then Google Analytics is the operating manual for websites operators trying to understand how to improve the usefulness and success of their site.  Google Analytics tracks and stores data, collected via JavaScript on the host site, of every visitor. This data includes information on how the user got to the site, and how long they stayed, what browser they used, and where geographically they are located.

From the huge range of features in Google Analytics I will discuss the following two examples to demonstrate how Google Analytics leverages the data it collects to return useful information to the user:

1. Industry BenchmarkingArguably one of the biggest advantages of using Google Analytics over other web analytics tools is the opportunity to gain access to the aggregate data of other websites for comparison.  To gain access to this feature users must opt-in to “share the account data in an anonymous, aggregated format”^[1]. Once enabled, Google Analytics assesses the profiles in your account, categorises them by vertical market and number of visits and aggregates the data for inclusion in the benchmarking project^[2].  Once the inclusion process is complete the user can compare their profiles against data for their own category or choose from a list of others; each category consists of at least 100 websites^[3].  Although the ability to review the data collected about how users are interacting with the site is very useful for reviewing things like the effectiveness of improvements or advertising campaigns, benchmarking also enables you to investigate how your site is doing in comparison to its peers. This will help guide decisions on where energy should be spent to make improvements and where certain negative figures are to be expected.

   Website’s new visits benchmarked against similar industry

   

   Website’s new bounce rate benchmarked against similar industry

   

   Both these diagrams show that the website they are taken from is performing at around the same level as other sites in that industry of a similar size. Without the benefit of being able to compare the results against an aggregate this would be impossible to tell, and instead the web master would be left to guess at how well their site is actually doing.

2. Keywords Overview
   There are two types of traffic that come to a site through search engines; organic(unpaid) and paid. By reviewing the keywords users are entering into search engines, web masters are able to get an overview of the organic traffic that is coming through their site.  Not only are the number of visits received displayed, but also a wealth of other relevant information to help determine not only how much traffic is being generated by the search term but also the likeliness that the visit was of some benefit.  For example, if a keyword has a high ‘average time on site’ associated with it, the visit was probably of more value to the user than a visit resulting from a keyword with a low average time on site.  Keywords with a high average time on site are ultimately more beneficial to a website in comparison to keywords that get a large amount of very short visits, as the long visit hits indicate that the user found what they were looking for from the search and were intrigued enough to further investigate the site.

The data collected for Google Analytics is stored on Google’s own servers. This has the advantage that it is then easily accessible to be used in benchmarking and benefits from the speed and sophistication of their servers that smaller localised implementations may not be able to replicate.  Google also offers this service at no cost with regular updates and ongoing feature improvements.

Another analytics application that offers many of the features of Google Analytics and is free to use is Piwik. Its main difference with Google Analytics is that the data collected about your site is stored on, and accessed through, your own website.

Although Google Analytics clearly states that they do not use any of the data collected for their own purposes unless you expressly allow the information to be shared,^[4][5] there are some issues with not having direct control and access to your own data.  For example if you wished to change to another analytics software, you would have to start from scratch which would result in losing all your history.

Although Google Analytics lets you do a multitude of comparisons on a website’s data it does not allow you to directly compare against other sites.  If a Google Analytics user managed more than one site from the same account there could be advantages to being able to analyze the data from one site against another.  This would be most beneficial where a user has similar sites and one site is not performing as well; being able to display and compare the data together could reveal an insight into where improvement must be made.

SEO for your web pages

Pretty pictures and web pages full of flash may wow your website visitors, but you need to get them there first! It’s important to remember that if you want to search engines to send traffic to your website, content is always king. The old saying “a picture tells 1000 words” doesn’t apply the same way to search engine bots as it does to real life. A search engine would much rather 1000 words over a picture anyday.

If you want to rank well for a particular keyword combination in search engines, then the first step is to make sure your content contains these keywords. Ideally, each page of your website should  target a particular keyword combination.  Therefore it is important that  in it a certain amount of times (explained further down). This really helps search engines notice your website is targeting that word, as it wants to display the best results possible for the user.

In the past people used to put literally thousands of hidden words in the content for search engines to find. Nowadays your site can actually be black-listed for this, so the best way to try and have a nice website is to ensure you have good, relevant content. This is obviously a win-win for the search engine as well as the user.

The general consensus at the moment for good “Keyword Density” on each webpage is as follows:

• Minimum: 250 - 300 words
• 2 - 5% density of the targeted keyword (mention the keyword/s roughly 10 times)
• Is mentioned in the last words of the content

It must appear in quite a few other places like the webpage’s URL, H1 tag, Title Tag, etc.

If not, you are missing out on some great SEO

Most Business owners market their products to a specific geographic market / location. This can be done in a number of ways; direct marketing, snail-mail, coupons, word of mouth etc. Depending on the business you may even create TV ads, buy radio time, hand out flyers, or pay for billboard space. If you are doing 1 or a number of these things, that’s great, you’re probably doing more than most do to market their business. More and more people are using the internet as their main source of advertising, and consumers are using the internet to search for and evaluate local businesses.

Studies show that most people under the age of 40 (and of course many over 40 years old), never use the yellow or white pages anymore (or any kind of book based directory). Google has stated that 73% of all online activity is related to local content. Also, according to a study done by TMP Directional Marketing, 61% of the local searches are resulting in purchases.

So what does this mean for your business?

Basically, it means you need to develop a quality web presence. This means a nice, functional, straight forward website. You have to remember that people who do use the internet to browse businesses will judge your business from their first impression: Your Website!

Another great thing to have is customer testimonials. Consumers want to know how reliable your business is, so testimonials that speak about the quality, services, and the products you have to offer are great. Obviously if you have such testimonials you should be showing them off everywhere you can!

Great photos are a must. Think of it this way; when you walk into a food court, there are always a few dodgy looking places with iffy pictures of food, so you are usually drawn to the nice classy, professional looking photos. Well the same goes for websites. People browsing will remember a nice professional shot of your products, as apposed to a digital camera shot in poor light. The “Before and After” shots are always a great touch!

Another thing to remember is when you have a website, you want to get inbound* links to your website. Local search is a good way to do this. Also, when you search a search engine for your business, even if your actual website doesn’t show up on the first page, the local business listing might, and that counts for a lot!

If you need help setting up your Google local business listing, contact us for a quote!

* = Inbound links are websites that link to your website. The opposite to an Inbound is an Outbound link; which is when your website link’s to a page outside of your website

A highly effective way of adding valuable content to your site is to encourage your users to contribute to it in a productive manner.  This is achieved by creating an architecture of participation that interacts with your users either explicitly or implicitly to gather information.

Explicit participation is when a user actively contributes data to your site, a site that does this extremely well is Amazon.  At Amazon users can rate products, upload images and write reviews.  This has become a fantastic resource for amazon, as people who want to research a product end up on their site reading reviews, and half the battle for an e-commerce store is actually getting people to your store in the first place.

Explicitly gathering worthwhile data from your users can be quite a difficult affair as you actually have to get them to go out of their way to contribute, so it helps if you can give them some sort of incentive.  Incentives for submitting information can be anything from just having their name on a big sites web page to having some sort of ranking attached to them in the site.  The second example, having a ranking, is a very popular tool for forum sites where the respect of their peers is a very keenly sought after objective.

Implicitly adding value to your site is achieved at a programming level and involves gathering information on how your visitors are using your site and relaying this back to them in a worthwhile manner.  Using my earlier example of Amazon again, they track everyone that goes to their site and correlate this data in a multitude of ways.  The two most obvious of which are displaying products that other customers bought when they bought that item and products that customers who looked at that item eventually bought.  This information is invaluable from the point of view of a seller, as people end up buying things they didn’t even originally consider, and extremely helpful from the point of view of the buyer, as they end up with a more educated purchase.

When setting up a website with the aim of harnessing collective intelligence a few simple rules should be followed.

• Don’t force people to sign up just to have a look around, a visitor should be able to look around your site or at the very least access information pages about the purpose of your website.
• Make sure that collecting information doesn’t get in the way of what the user came to your site to do in the first place, if a user has to fill out a long list of forms or make a load of contributions before they can get some benefit then they will quickly give up and go elsewhere to fulfill their needs.
• Make the sign up process as simple as possible, when designing your sign up form keep it simple and only try and aim to gather actual relevant information, if you need to gather allot of information try and split the process up into a series of steps.
• Trust your users, people tend to do the right thing and contribute in a positive manner so don’t try and vet everything before it goes up but this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make sure you have the power to remove anything that isn’t suitable.

If encouraged, with an intuitive interface in place, you can successfully make your site into a hub of information for your target audience.  All this information will become a  powerful asset when it comes to improving your ranking in search engines and, of course, the more useful and full of relative information your site is the more popular it will become.

What is ‘Search Engine Friendly’ web design?

Search engine friendly web design is web design that is planned around known search engine optimization principles. If ranking well in the search engines is important to you then the first step towards this goal should be a search engine friendly web design. Fortunately, search engines like much the same things that users do - great content, clean layouts, easy navigation - so it’s well worth the time it takes to carefully plan your website page by page.

A ‘Search Engine Friendly’ website is one that search engines can easily scan and understand; it allows search engines to easily jump from page to page of the website, read content, determine what keywords are relevant, and then deliver search results accordingly. Although there are other factors that will affect the search engine success of a website (in particular, link popularity) - search engine friendly web design is a very important element of search engine optimisation.

Some of the points below contain some technical details that your web developer should be able to take care of for you.

How to achieve a search engine friendly web design:

1. Well structured and keyword rich content
   As you’ve probably heard time and time again, content is king. There’s nothing more important than content. Just like users, search engines like useful heading tags, bullet points, highlighted words and keyword rich content. Here are some tips to writing good web copy.
2. Make sure all title tags are unique
   Title tags should uniquely identify the content on any given page - title tags give search engines the first clue as to what a page is about. With ecommerce websites, every single product page should have a unique title tag, it can make a big difference to ranking well for individual product names (ask your web developer to have these generated automatically for you based on the product and category names).
3. Avoid keyword cannibalization
   Following on from the 2 points above, when structuring content make sure you target different keyword combinations on each page. Keyword cannilbalization is when the same keywords are targeted on many different pages of a website. This dilutes the value of the keywords on any one page and makes it harder for search engines to decide which page to display in search results.
4. Update often
   It’s worthwhile investing in a CMS (content management system) or asking your web developer to setup a blog for you (WordPress is fantastic, and free!). There are many of benefits to updating your content often, including:
   • Keyword Count
     It boosts your keyword count and the potential for getting found via web searches for an ever increasing number of keyword combinations (long tail searches: search phrases that are typically longer and more specific than normal)
   • Natural way of building links
     Every time you add relevant content to your website you increase the likelihood that other websites will link to yours, thereby increaseing your link popularity. There is nothing more powerful from a search engine optimisation perspective than incoming links, particularly if they come from relevant and/or valuable sources. Why not get involved in some related forums and other social media avenues (facebook, twitter etc) and announce to your audience each time you release new content along with a link straight to it!
   • Search engines will pay regular visits
     The more often you update, the more often search engines will visit your website to check for new and upated content.
5. Clean layouts work best
   The cleaner the coding of your website, the easier it is for search engines to access the website content. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) should be used for design implementation and all scripts should be contained within external files.
6. Easy navigation
   Navigation should be obvious (near the top of the page) and clean (avoid flash menus or javascript for hover effects, use css instead). Search engines (as well as website visitors) need to be able to easily navigate from page to page of your website. If your website has a lot of deeper level pages then make sure you setup a sitemap and link to this from your home page so so that search engines can them.
7. Meaningful directory and file names
   Something like: www.clothes.com/jeans/levis/ is a lot more meaningful to search engines than www.clothes.com/index.php?cat=10&subcat=12. Your keywords should be included in directory and file names wherever possible.
8. Avoid the excessive use of FLASH.
   There are many obstacles to achieving search engine friendliness in Flash websites, so use it sparingly. Flash can be great for creating some eye-catching ads or dynamic flair to your website but should not be heavily used.
9. Avoid embedding text in images
   Search engines can’t read text that appears in an image - so you’re better off displaying your content in real text wherever possible. When it is necessary to embed text in images then ALT tags can be used to describe the content to search engines
10. Link to your domain, not index.html (.asp, .php etc)
    Every-time you display a link to your home page, you should link to your full domain, not the file name. The number of pages linking to your home page (both external and internal) is an imporant element of seo, you don’t want to divide the total number of incoming links to your home page between 2 different links! You can read more about link popularity here.