Posts belonging to Category 'Search Engine Optimisation'

3 Must-Dos of Optimising Your Website for Google

When you have your 7 keywords for every of your main pages, the next step is to place them on your website, in the correct way.

There are a few places where you definitely should have them – some are pretty obvious, some are slightly hidden – so let’s make sure you get them all right!

Title

<Title> is one of the most powerful SEO techniques you have, so make sure you use it creatively! When search engine results are displayed, e.g. on Google’s search results page, the title is the first thing people see as a link to your website.

You can also see the title of the website you are just viewing on the top of your browser window.

Thus each page should have a different <title> with 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning. The title should explain in a few short words (your keywords) the intent of the page. Don’t put your company name first – place your keywords first and if you feel you absolutely must have the company name in the title, add it second.

Despite its importance, rather do not overdo it with the length of the <title> tag; 50-150 characters including spaces should be appropriate, even though some SEO gurus recommend 70 max. You also should make the title enticing, so that the viewers of search engines listings will click to see your website.

Description Meta Tag

Below the <title>, there is usually the description meta tag which is considered by Google as the first sentence on a page.

The Description Meta tag is also fairly important. Your description should have 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning and so should your first sentence on the website. Just like the <title>, reflect the content and try to keep there no more than 200 characters including spaces. Change the words around enough so that you can hit various typings of your keywords.

Compared to title, description meta tag should be rather a sentence or two, not just a list of keywords. Make sure you use speech marks correctly as appropriate.

You should have a different title, description and a first sentence on each page. You may also want to try shorter titles with only one keyword or keyword phrase as this will raise you keyword relevance.

Keyword Meta Tag

Although many people rely on them so much when performing SEO, meta tags have decreased in importance recently, but are still worth using for clarity and search results. Their initial purpose was to help search engines find out important information about your page which they might have had difficulty determining otherwise.

The Keyword tag is now the least important but is still used by some engines. As you never know when the rules of the search engines will change, or a new engine will want them, so take the time to include these tags in all your web pages. We recommend you do not overdo it with keywords as well; your keyword meta tag should not exceed 250 characters including spaces.

When performing SEO, you should take the exact same keyword phrase from your keyword meta tag, and use it in the copy of your page, title tag, meta description, text content of the page etc. Any keyword phrases which are only used in your keyword meta tag, will not have enough prominence to help your listings for that phrase.

Now upload these meta tags to the web pages. You might need a hand from your web designer – it should be a very quick issue for them.

 

Online Marketing: How to Make It Easy to Contact You

Many your website owners do not make it easy, clear and secure for people to contact them – if you want customers to contact you directly from your website, keep the process simple.

In general, over 60 percent of online shoppers abort the ordering process once they’ve entered the shopping cart. It’s a pity that after gaining their attention, interest and desire you can still lose them due to a complicated, unclear or unsafe contact form. To prevent this, try to follow the advice:

  • Tell your visitors upfront about what they should do in order to get in touch with you.
  • Make sure that your contact pages and forms are easy to understand. Test them with your customers or relatives even if they don’t browse the Internet very often.
  • Make sure that your contact page shows an understandable notice if the customer forgets to enter the email address or any other required field.
  • Make sure that your contact pages work in every geographical area you target. Some countries don’t have postal numbers or their regional structuring can be different from yours.
  • It’s very important that your contact pages are secure.
  • Test your contact pages regularly in order to make sure they work.
  • Also make the contact form easier to fill in – in most cases, all you probably need will be name, phone, email, and the comment field – they don’t need to be mandatory.

After you implement the above steps, you might see that your online marketing has moved to the next level.

 

10 Key Indicators of Your Campaigns Performance

If you want your marketing strategy to prove effective, at the end of the year we need to check whether you stuck with the plan and how well you did with the individual campaigns.

Here is a clear description of what you should measure:

  • Campaign Start – When did the campaign start?
  • Expected # Leads – How many potential customers do you expect to contact you after the campaign?
  • Actual # Leads – How many leads did you actually get so far?
  • Expected # Sales – How many customers do you expect to buy from you after the campaign?
  • Actual # Sales – How many sales did you actually get so far?
  • Expected Sales Value – How much sales will the campaign generate?
  • Actual Sales Value – How much sales did the campaign generate so far?
  • Expected Budget – What is your budget for the campaign? How much will you spend?
  • Actual Budget – How much did you spend so far on the campaign?
  • Return on Investment – How much sales did $1 of actual budget generate?

If you manage to measure these indicators regularly, you’ll be able to soon evaluate your marketing strategy, even by comparing the results on a monthly basis.

 

How to Track Your Google Adwords

Providing that your keywords fall below the 0.5% CTR for the first 1000 impressions, they might get disabled. That is the first reason you need to track your keywords performance and modify them regularly. Remember, change your words around, use new keyword matching options, try out different capitalisation and spelling variations, use singular or plural versions as well as different punctuation and grammar tenses…

You can decide if you want to receive daily, weekly or monthly Google Adwords reports.

With Google Adwords, you can also create your personalised reports in only a few minutes. Click on the tab “Report“ => “Create a report now”. You can create a report to track the performance of your keywords, text ad, image ad, URL, ad group, campaign or the whole account.

In order to save money, you can delete keywords from your list which do not convert into sales. It is also recommended that you “peel” those keywords that get low CTR and “stick” them to a new campaign or ad group with an ad specifically targeting them.

Making tiny changes to your ad can have a strong impact on your CTR. Keep changing your ads around regularly. After a few weeks, you will be able to detect your best performing keywords. Your ad should include these keywords. In the same way, if you detect any under performing keywords, delete them from your ad.

Google also has a built-in “conversion tracking” tool that’s linked to AdWords.  You put their code in the “success” page on your website and along with your CTR statistics, Google will then show you the percentage of visitors who opt in or buy in your weekly, monthly or daily report, or contact you, or take any action you set as a conversion.

This is the crucial point of tracking your Google Adwords performance. Since conversions are what you are aiming for, you should always check that their number and value is growing from week to week.

 

8 Keys to Successful Website Content

When you know the purpose of your website, you should give your visitors a REASON to move towards the goal. Remember, it is not your goal that they will follow; in fact, people are always looking for what is in it for THEM.

Below follows a list of the vital elements of successful website content.

1. Benefits

To give customers what they are looking for, always list benefits (see Chapter 2) of your products rather than features.

Nobody cares so much about what procedures you used when creating your internal services manuals, or for how many years you’ve been around. Usually, what matters to them is what problems you can solve, and more importantly, how they will benefit from using your product.

In addition, websites offering services that managed to fix a problem usually get highest conversion rates.

It is also essential to make sure that your you:we ratio is high enough, which means that you use the word YOU more than WE, speaking about your customers, not yourself.

Remember again: customers don’t care about you at all. The only thing they are looking for is what is in it for them.

2. Call to Action

Once you have decided what you want your visitors to do and after revealing all the benefits they can get, it is crucial to tell them what to do next. It must be crystal clear what they need to do:

- Click here to contact us now!

- Sign up for the Free Newsletter with your Tips Here.

- Press Enter to continue. Etc.

In order to make a call to action more catchy and attention gaining, there is one smart trick: use the red colour every time you want to highlight something so that people will click on it. However, do not overdo it, since when your website is red on its whole, the particular spots will not stand out.

3. Testimonials

Add testimonials to your Testimonials page, and spread them over all the pages in an appropriate structure.

Be as specific as possible and make sure you use relevant testimonials on pages where you speak about individual services.

Always get the customer to allow you to use their testimonial in your marketing materials. For more on testimonials, read Chapter 12.

4. Privacy Policy

As soon as you collect any data from your visitors, you should create a privacy policy (you can use this free privacy policy generator or any other you find on the Internet). Add your privacy policy to the bottom of your pages.

5. The Best Website Structure & Navigation

There is nothing worse than arriving at a website and having difficulty to understand where to go for the information you are seeking. Have an easy to use, clearly marked navigation so that your visitors click-through instead of click-away in frustration:

- All your web pages should be no more than 3 clicks away from the home page.

- On every page you should link back to your home page and your main service(s).

- Make your logo at the top of every page clickable and going to home page.

- Structure your menu on the top in a way that will be clearer and more effective.

- Make it easy to contact you from any page.

You can use this structure or come up with your own – whatever you feel will work best for your customers and prospects.

6. Motivate customers to Come Back Again with Fresh Content

To attract your first time visitors to come back and to keep coming back, you must always have what to offer: nobody will keep returning to see the same pages all the time.

We all know that the more involved customers become with you, the relationship matures and builds: this could be done using an online discussion forum, blog, or just a simple option to post a comment. More on this towards the end of this part.

7. Attractive Design

They say, a picture is worth a thousand words. However, it is actually words that sell. This means that you should use a good mix of both – pictures with highly relevant and interesting content.

8. No Distractions: Keeps Your Visitors Focused

In order to keep your visitors focused on the steps you want them to take, keep all unnecessary distractions away.

If you are paying to bring your visitors to a particular page, so called “landing page” (because they “land” on that particular page from their search in Google), make sure this page is not stuffed with links that will direct them away from the page.

The only links your landing page should contain are those in line with your goal: links to your enquiry pages, newsletter sign up forms, etc.

 

8 Ways to Your Online Marketing Success

The crucial step of online marketing is setting a goal you want to achieve. What is it that you want your visitors to do? This could be one of the following:

  • Fill in a contact us form
  • Fill in an enquiry form
  • Register for a free consultation/appointment
  • Sign up for a newsletter with free your tips
  • Download a free ebook with your advice
  • Read articles for/about customers
  • Take a survey
  • Participate in a competition etc.

Ideally you will be able to put a value on each of your goals – i.e. how much is each step worth to your business? By stating this, you will be able to see clearly where your focus should be and how to work most effectively.

 

The First Step of Website Marketing?

While many online marketing handbooks would start with telling you how to drive lots of visitors to your website, we chose a different approach. There is no point in driving millions of visitors to your web pages, when nobody will do what you would like them to do – either contact you, or sign up for your newsletter or do anything else you want them to do.

Therefore we think the first step is to focus on optimising your website for customers, with relevant website content writing, and then you can look at how you can use search engines like Google, to bring more visitors to the website.

 

4 Areas of Online Marketing You Need to Know

Does your website work as a 24/7 sales tool, bringing in sales leads even when you sleep? Or are you having a problem with your website?

Why are you not getting more visitors that contact you or buy from you?

Could you use search engine optimisation, Google Adwords and powerful website content to get more online visitors, more online leads and more online sales?

How about focusing on the following 4 areas right now:

  • Learn what you can improve on your website, so that more of your visitors will actually contact you
  • Find out about the magic of search engine optimisation and how to have your website ranked in Google
  • Understand the power of online newsletters and blogs and know how to setup your own ones fast
  • Discover the secret of using online social networking websites for your business

 

Blog Directories You Should Not Forget

When submitting your blog to blog directories, just make sure that you include the following sites…

Marketing SEO blogs

Technorati Profile
BusinessRankingBlogs.com :: Defining Your Blogs Worth: TopSites:

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Internet Marketing Ireland – What the Heck It Means?

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Internet Marketing Ireland – would you rather read about 10 Tips for Websites Earning 1,000’s 24/7?

Then have a look at this snappy article and see how you can maximise the profits from your online business.

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