So a search engine likes my site - Now what?

This pattern is fast becoming a trend in the realm of Search Engine Optimisation. Website owners are finding that they have plenty of visitors coming to their sites all being pushed their by SEO techniques, Google AdWords and other Pay Per Click traffic generation methods.

The sad part is that all these extra visitors are not necessarily translating into extra enquiries and sales at the same exponential rate that the traffic to the site has increased.

The answer to this particularly perplexing conundrum is actually fairly simple : Search Engines Are Not People.

Search Engines may love your site and it may rank incredibly well in Google and other prominent search engines and get excellent keyword reach and relevancy from all the articles and content that you are posting to your site, but at the end of the day a search engine is not going to enquire about your latest and greatest product. So how do we get around the problem?

There are some very simple guidelines to design your landing pages to which will increase the chances of real people liking what they see and actually engaging further with you :

1. Keep the page simple. People have come through to that page for a specific reason and are looking for a specific thing, don’t complicate the page with tons of other “stuff”, just keep the info and required actions on the page relevant to what they were searching for.
2. Ensure that the visitor to the page is 100% sure about what it is that you need them to do on that page. If they need to send you a mail – tell them! And tell them a few times for the sake of clarity and ease of use. The worst thing you can have a user do is get to your landing page and say to himself, “now what do I do?”!
3. Test multiple landing page designs. Don’t assume that the first design you do is the correct one. Try a few designs and see which one gets you the best conversion results and then stick to this one. Be careful of trying to make too many changes at the same time because then you will not be able to judge which changes are the ones which worked.
4. Tell your visitor where they are. They have just come through to you through a search engine which told them that you were the right people to speak to; now reinforce that with some compelling copy that highlights what it is that they were searching for.
5. Once your visitor has completed the required action for that page, your site should direct them to a thank you page which will let them know that their enquiry has been successfully submitted. Now the cardinal sin of most websites is that they leave the page at that and they don’t try and cross sell or up sell a visitor who very clearly is interested in your product offering. Use this page to give them more info or to offer them something else that they would be interested in.

Using these guidelines will ensure that your landing pages do not suffer from having a multitude visitors but rather a throng of active participants who are willing to engage with you and take the next step in the buying cycle.

Google Enhancements Place More Emphasis on Content

The latest improvements to Google’s algorithm place greater emphasis on quality content. Ori Allon, who was responsible for developing the breakthrough Orion algorithm blogs about the integration of new technology which results in a great enhancement of users search experience.

Relevant content has always attracted excellent search engine ranking. Content which is interesting, relevant and frequently updated ensures that web-pages are indexed and served in search engine results pages. Content is therefore every websites foremost SEO concern. Last week, the search engine leader Google announced two improvements to their search engine results pages, both of which place even more emphasis on relevant content.

The two improvements which have caused so much excitement in the Internet marketing industry include an expanded list of useful related searches and the addition of longer search result descriptions. Now, this may not sound like much to the average marketer or business owner but to Internet marketer's across the globe these seemingly minute details have great implications.

The announcement came from the desks of Google's Ori Allon, Technical Lead: Search Quality team and Ken Wilder: Snippets Team Engineer. Ori Allon, as a research student in Australia developed the Orion Search Engine which was considered "revolutionary" for its ability to deliver search results not only for a specific keyword but also for phrases related to the key search term. Google purchased the rights to the Algorithm from Ori Allon in 2006 before hiring him to work at their California headquarters.

In a 2005 Interview Allon was quoted as saying "By displaying results to other associated key words directly related to your search topic, you gain additional pertinent information that you might not have originally conceived, thus offering an expert search without having an expert's knowledge." At the time even Bill Gates agreed that Orion would have far reaching implications for search saying "We need to take the search way beyond how people think of it today. We believe that OrionTM will do that."

Related search results appear at the bottom of the search engine results page. According to Allon and Wilder, the technology deployed last week allows the search engine to "better understand concepts and associations related to your search". This is the height of intuitive web technology. It means that search results are now even more relevant to input queries serving up not only what you need to know but what you did not even know to ask for. The second search engine enhancement applies to longer search queries. The results returned for longer queries are now more detailed and include a longer description. Together, the two improvements are an indication of Google's strong focus on quality results.

With this move Google have once again placed themselves way ahead of the competition. I predict it will be a long time before other search engines catch up. In the mean time Google will continue to gain market share. Once again looking at this from an Internet marketer's point of view, my advice to companies whose businesses depend on the sales generated through Internet marketing is to invest in content and reap the long-term SEO benefits that it delivers.

Dealing with Duplicate Content: A Practical Guide

The Internet thankfully is still all about great content. Despite all the new marketing disciplines (SEO, SEM, SMO, SMM, ORM and IM) punting guaranteed search results, search engines serve appropriate results rich in content, thus keeping the system honest and ensuring their own survival.

The issue of duplicate content is something which mystifies, even plagues many Internet marketers. Every Internet marketer fears a drop in their websites search engine ranking. Duplicate content could result in a drop in search engine ranking or worse. Being black listed and having penalties instituted against you could deal a devastating blow to your search engine marketing efforts and prove very hard to recover from.

Before getting into ways of preventing search engines from perceiving your content as being duplicated it is necessary to understand that there are different types of duplicate content. Some occurrences of duplicate content are un-intentional whilst others are due to malicious and unimaginative “black-hat” marketing tactics.

Google defines duplicate content as: “substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.” They also acknowledge that “mostly, this is not deceptive in origin”.

Duplicate content can occur in the following ways:

Having two domains carry the same content. When an organisation decides for geographical and/or other search reasons including canonical domains, to use the same website content on two domains, it confuses search engine robots causing them not to list the site at all.

Using Dynamic URL’s. Database driven websites, in which content is stored in a database and accessed on demand, may serve the same content under different URL’s, depending on the search parameters being used. Search engines can view this as duplicate content.

Circular navigation, in which there are multiple paths to the same website can also cause content to appear to be duplicated.

Providing printer-friendly pages. Users often require hard copies of the information on your website. It is therefore sometimes necessary to provide them with the option to print content. This can be done in one of two ways. You could either host a printer friendly copy (i.e. duplicating the content) or if you are using a CMS, the same content can be supplied in both web and printer formats by the system. Unfortunately, both ways cause your content to appear to be duplicated.

Providing a mobile-friendly version of your website. With the number of Internet friendly mobile devices hitting the market in recent days, it is becoming essential to offer a very basic version/format of your website specifically for user’s browsing your site from a mobile phone. As in the above case however you may run the risk of duplicating content.

Syndication: In cases in which your content is syndicated to other websites or when your articles and blog posts are submitted to content repositories search engines are likely to pick up your content as a duplicate and possibly link to the more “popular” version of your content.

E-commerce product descriptions: Common e-commerce products often have manufacturer descriptions which are used when they are retailed online, particularly in the case of affiliates. This too could be viewed as duplicate content and affect a websites ranking. The same applies in cases where products have multiple categorisations.

Plagiarism is presenting the written intellectual product of another person as your own without their permission. Copying online content is very easy to do and can be a quick fix for websites requiring content in a hurry. Although in most cases search engine crawlers can be relied on to select and serve a link to the originator of the content this unethical duplication of content could result in a loss of traffic.

Content Scraping refers to the use of a crawler to copy website content and rephrase it in an attempt to present it as unique content.

Preventing penalties

Whilst more advanced search engine crawlers do a good job of distinguishing between genuine cases of duplicate content and inadvertent instances, you can avoid being wrongfully penalised for duplicate content by doing the following:

Redirects: In order to ensure that search engines don’t view multiple domains and dynamic URL’s as duplicated content, select a canonical domain and use 301 redirects for permanent pages and 302 redirects for pages with content which is changed or updated often.

Robots.txt: In the case of printer friendly or mobile versions of your website, you need to indicate to the search engine that the information contained therein is not for crawling, use robots.txt to do so. You can also request that syndicated copies of your content be blocked using this method.

Style sheets: As an alternative to creating a duplicate of your webpage for print purposes you could program a style sheet for print. Provided that your website is programmed well, this may be a viable alternative to using robots.txt.

Link back to your site: If blocking syndicated content using robots.txt is not an option for you ensure that your articles contain links to your website.

Categorise and enhance product descriptions: It is really important to categorise products carefully, taking a user’s browser behaviour into consideration rather than duplicating a single page under various categories. Manufacturer’s product descriptions or reviews should be enhanced by providing additional unique content.

Use a content checker: You can detect duplicate content using online duplicate content software, a pro-active approach is required.

Claim ownership of your content: In cases in which your content is continuously ripped off and you are convinced that it negatively impacts your search engine ranking, you can file a DCMA infringement request with search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo.

Knowledge of duplicate content issues and how to prevent them could be beneficial when optimising your website for better search engine performance. It is important to keep in mind that your website could contain duplicated content and to take steps to ensure that preventative measures are implemented.

Check your site for duplicate content

www.copyscape.com

Relevant Content is the Key

The internet is a valuable marketing and PR tool, but getting the best out of it can be a daunting challenge, especially for smaller businesses with limited budgets.

Understandably, the agenda of the companies setting up websites is to sell their products and services. But it is no good setting up a website with no strategy and objectives behind it and hope customers and potential customers will flock to it.

Too many websites are designed to be ascetically pleasing and flashy with lots of graphics and little focus on content, says Ceri James, sales and marketing director at JD Internet Consulting.

"But search engines rank websites according to the relevance of their content." As much content as possible should therefore be presented in a text format that can be cut and pasted into a document as opposed to being embedded in images. "Search engines do not pick up and index fixed images," he says. So it is best not to just have fancy graphics on the home page without any informative text-based content.

"The first 300 characters of content on the home page are the most important for relevance ranking," says James. Option tabs used to navigate the website and the page titles they click through to should contain the same key words and phrases that should also relate to the content on the page. Search engines are more likely to pick these up than cute or clever titles that need to be interpreted.

"Google's main goal is to index the internet and rank websites in order of relevance," he says.

A company’s aim should be to achieve a higher relevance ranking for its target audience than its competitors as opposed to trying to be everything to everybody. Another consideration is that a 50-page website full of useful content has 10 times more chance of being picked up by the search engines than one with only five pages. Creating links to other relevant websites and getting listed on relevant portals and directories are just some of the ways to get a higher search engine ranking.

"A good internet consultant will set up these links as part of a package," says James. Having attracted the right audience, it is important to keep them on the website as long as possible.

The "stickiness" of the website will depend on factors like the overall look of the website, how easy it is to find what they are looking for and how relevant and useful the content is once they have found it.

Further attractions might include interesting relevant articles, product reviews and benchmarks, offering giveaways or special discounts and displaying prices of products and services.

Some companies are reluctant to display prices on their website, but competitors will get their hands on pricing information some other way if they really want to, says James. Informative articles will attract target audiences to a website and help to increase its search engine ranking, especially if the content contains key words and phrases.

Having found what they want potential customers will also need to easily access contact details, obtain further information or find out where to buy products or services.

“You want the customer to explore the content and then convert their interest into a sale,” he says.

When Robynn Burls set up her online company Encyclomedia, which provides a media contact database service, she realised that setting up a website that nobody can find is a waste of money.

So she started attending conferences and searching for information on the internet to learn how to optimise the website to get a good search engine ranking.

"Search engines look for keywords and phrases in website content that match the words users' type in when searching for information," she says.

Before setting up the company's website Burls first brainstormed with other people about which keywords and phrases to use.

She then used various internet software tools obtained from websites like www.keyworddiscovery.com and www.wordtracker.com/ to test out the effectiveness of the selected keywords. Both these websites offer a free trial of their software and the Wordtracker website contains expert articles and case studies and offers a free newsletter subscription.

Wordtracker will test keywords and report on how regularly these are used in searches and will come up with other related keywords. It will establish how likely users are to type in these words and phrases when they are searching for the type of information posted on the website. But it is worth remembering that a website that uses the most popular keywords will be competing with a lot of others that are using the same ones.

It may therefore pay to use more targeted keywords that are specific to the products and services on offer and are more likely to bring the website up first on the search listing when people type them in. For example, instead of just using the keyword "insurance," use "car insurance" or "budget car insurance."

Having established the optimum keywords, these need to be embedded in the text content on the web pages.

"Bear in mind that Google uses clever algorithms to test the relevance of website content," says Burls. So including words and phrases that relate to selected keywords is likely to increase the relevance ranking of the website. For example, if a person types in the words "public relations", Google will also pick up content containing related words like PR and perhaps publicity.

Having decided on a selection of keywords, the next step is to optimise the content on the website, make sure the text is easy to read and easy for the search engines to pick up and position the keywords strategically.

"I selected three to four keywords and phrases on each page and repeated them three times, once in bold type," says Burls.

Adding a blog to a website is a great way to continually create fresh content that includes keywords and invite comment from those reading the articles posted on it.

Burls says she also writes authoritative articles on the topic of PR for well known information websites like Bizcommunity and embeds some of her keywords in the text with links back to her website. This type of activity gets picked up by the search engines, adds credibility and increases traffic to the website.

Encyclomedia is staging a conference in Cape Town on 20 November (date expired since article was published) aimed at small companies that want to expand their knowledge of PR and what it can do for their business. Conference topics will include search engine optimisation, as an important element of web PR.

Leon Lategan, MD of Purple Cow Communications says in some cases it will pay a company to list its website on an aggregator portal because the chances are that it will achieve better results.

"An aggregator that has say 2000 bed and breakfast establishments on its website is likely to get more hits than an individual website for one B&B," he says.

Today, everyone seems to be offering search engine optimisation and it is important to choose the right one. The selection process should include asking for client references, testimonials, speaking to a few of them and asking them what the consultant achieved for them and how long it took.

Lategan says businesses often make the mistake of trying to pay as little as possible for website optimisation and end up being disappointed with the results. He says if a company wants to pay half the price it could take twice as long to get results.

Article Source

Business Day article published on Tuesday, November 18th

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