The online world is no different

When we do a web search, we’re presented with a list of possible options and the only thing that we have to help us choose which website is the most relevant is the site’s title and two short lines of text.

For the non-HTML or SEO savvy, the title of a webpage is (appropriately) called the ‘Title Tag’ and the two lines of text below the title is most often stored in ‘Meta Description Tags’ which are usually located at the top of your website code. If your site doesn’t have a Meta Description Tag, then the search engines try their best to sum-up what your site is about from your content. For more info on how this works, you might find Matt Cutts’ video on website snippets useful.

Before Google ever existed the search engines would often use this Meta data to help determine the relevance of a website, but now that the search engines have evolved the Meta data doesn’t have any direct impact on the optimisation of a site – but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important.

The Meta Description is your websites ‘book cover’

It’s in these two lines (150 – 160 characters) of text that you have to do what a book cover does – you have to draw people in and make them want to click on your website over-and-above all the other sites listed on the page.

This is where you have a chance to briefly explain why you are different from your competitors, add a call-to-action to encourage people to click. Mention prices, model numbers, product manufacturers, special offers – anything that you think will attract someone who is searching for you and your products.

Turn your Meta Description into a Purple Cow

To borrow a quote from Seth Godin’s book The Purple Cow:

Cows, after you’ve seen them for a while, are boring. They may be perfect cows, attractive cows, cows with great personalities, cows lit by beautiful light, but they’re still boring. A Purple Cow, though. Now that would be interesting.

This is exactly what you want to do to your Meta Description – make it stand-out from the other descriptions by being so interesting, so outrageous, and so note-worthy that anyone looking at it won’t be able to stop themselves from clicking on your site.

If Meta Descriptions won’t help with SEO, why bother?

Even though I said above that the Meta Description tag isn’t something that the search engines currently use to determine how well your website will rank – it can still help your search rankings.

From some fairly thorough testing, we’ve found that user usage data, click-through and bounce rates can affect where your site sits in the search results. It’s the search engine’s job to provide its users with the best and most relevant results, so if you have a compelling description that attracts far more clicks than the sites above you, then it gives a very clear quality signal to the search engines which in turn can result in improved rankings.

Some Useful Tools

So now that you know what a Meta Description is and how it should be used, you’re probably wondering how to go about adding or improving your tags. These tools and articles may be useful:

• SeoBook’s Free Meta Tag Generator
• SeoBook’s Video on Optimising Meta Descriptions
• Google’s Tips On How To Write A Good Meta Description
• SEOMoz’s Making the Most of Meta Description Tags
• All in One SEO Pack Wordpress Plugin

You can’t judge a site by its Meta

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Both are bad habits but for some reason a lot of people partake in both activities – and to make matters worse, they do it on a daily basis.

Why shouldn’t you check rankings?

Don’t get me wrong – it’s good to know which keywords are working for you and how your search campaign is performing… but you don’t need to check the search results daily to see where you’re ranking to do this.

Search technology and algorithms are constantly changing and improving. Different results are shown to different users based on geographic location, personalized search data and universal search. To confuse the situation even further, algorithm updates also can cause the SERPs to dance around for a few weeks until the changes propagate across all data centres.

So if the search results I see are not necessarily the same as what someone else does… how should I measure my search marketing campaign?

There are a number of statistical and analytical tools that can be used to do this:

• Most web hosting companies will provide you with access to detailed statistics recorded from your website log files.
• If your host doesn’t provide statistics, Google Analytics is free and provides some reasonably impressive reporting features.
• Want to try another analytics solution? Have a look at StoneTemple’s 2007 Analytics Shootout for other alternatives.
• Google’s Webmaster Central can also provides you with a lot of useful data on how Google interprets your site’s online presence.

When you go through your statistics, look at which keywords generate the most traffic and then go back to the SERPs to see if you can find where you rank.

Whilst you’ll probably find your site for most of the keywords, I can almost guarantee that no matter how hard you try, you won’t be able to find a mention of your site in the top 10 for a few keywords that you’re still receiving traffic with.

What rank checking and nose picking have in common…

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Let’s use the most recent holiday – Halloween as an example.

Janet Meiners from Marketing Pilgrim explains how Halloween is big business with $5-7 billion in total spending in the US with the average adult coughing-up $65 on the holiday. If you check the Google Trends to see how the holiday ranks for traffic, you’ll notice that it starts to gain popularity around September and skyrockets at the end of October (funnily enough right when Halloween happens):

So as you can see, people start searching for ideas a month or so before the actual event. Rebecca from SEOmoz sums it up best in her post Plan for the Holidays Nice and Early By Analyzing Search Trends when she says:

if you’re doing SEO for Halloween-related terms, you would want to start building content and links towards the end of the summer so you’re more visible to searchers when they think to start doing research

The same applies to Christmas search traffic!

A lot of places have begun targeting Christmas related terms already and people have started searching for gift ideas – so if you want to take your share of some of this seasonal search traffic now is the time to do so. Here’s what Google shows for Christmas related search patterns:

What if I don’t have an online store that sells conventional Christmas gifts?

A lot of people who read this probably won’t have nice e-commerce stores selling things people would want to give as Christmas gifts. I sell SEO services and I can assure you that my family member’s eyes wouldn’t light-up if they received one of my articles on ‘how to perform effective keyword research’ or ‘a guide to social media’.

But just because no one would buy your services as a gift doesn’t mean that all hope is lost. There are countless ways you can create great baited articles based around the festive season. Examples could include – making a list of the naughty and nice blogs in your industry; a list of online tools, widgets or plugins that would help Santa organise his elves more efficiently; SEO Mistletoe – which SEO guys and gals would you like to see smack lips… etc. etc.

Each season offers a world of possibilities to further promote your business and connect with your clients in new and interesting ways. So what are you waiting for?… Christmas?

All I want for Christmas is more traffic

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How do they do this?

By looking at a number of factors, such as:

• Country-specific domain name – eg. .com or .com.au or .co.uk etc. etc.
• Where your site is hosted – be careful with this as a lot of hosting providers may have their offices in one country, but use servers and equipment based overseas
• Language used in your website content – even things like UK English vs. US English can make a difference due to spelling and colloquialisms
• Inbound Links to your site – are they mainly from other Australian websites, US sites, UK sites etc.
• Listing of your address / location / phone number on your website
• Location of people who look at your site – if your site has more traffic from Australian visitors it is likely to rank better in Google.com.au than it would in Google.com

7 Simple Geo Targeting Tips for Your Site

Knowing the above information makes it a lot easier to perform a Geo Targeting audit on your site. Here are the things I would do:

1. If you run an Australian website and your main customers / clients are other Australians, spend the few extra dollars and buy a .com.au domain name. If you’re targeting clients in the UK, buy a .co.uk. etc. etc.
2. Apply the same logic (as above) to the web hosting – spend a few extra dollars to have your website hosted in the country that you are targeting.

   Be sure to check that your hosting provider uses equipment based in your country too. If you still aren’t certain you can check their IP’s using SEOmoz’s IP Location Tool.

3. Take the time to check your spelling and use the type of wording your clients will understand and are familiar with.

   For example the term swimwear, swimsuit, beachwear, cozzies, bathers and togs all mean the same thing but people in Queensland, Australia (where I’m from) rarely use the term bathers or cozzies – we wear ‘togs’.

4. An inbound link is like a personal referral or testimonial for your website. Having links from other relevant local sites will be far more valuable with Geo Targeting than having lots of inbound links from overseas sites.
5. Submit your site to local business and local search directories – this can often be one of the easiest methods of attracting local links and local traffic.

   As a rule-of-thumb, just make sure the directory presents well and that you are comfortable being listed amongst the other sites that are in the directory. If you think the directory isn’t great quality, you’re probably right and it should be avoided.

6. Mention your address, location and contact details in the footer of each page – this is one of the easiest things to do which can help tell your clients and the search engines that you are a local business.

   The only time this doesn’t really help is if you have offices in multiple locations. Mentioning a dozen countries / cities in the footer won’t do much for your local profile in each of those places. If this is the case you should build separate sites (or at the very least separate pages) for each location.

7. Build your brand locally as you will usually rank well for your business name before you’ll start ranking for more competitive terms.

   Ensure you promote your site through off-line advertising methods, which can be as simple as including your website on your business cards, letterheads and other corporate stationary.

   This will help you gain local search traffic and as mentioned above, if your site has more traffic from Australian visitors it is likely to rank better in Google.com.au than it would in Google.com.

I know that implementing all the above suggestions may not be possible – so don’t stress if you can only do 3 or 4 of the things in the list.

Every little bit helps.

7 Geo Targeting SEO Tips

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Despite those terms being the most searched for, a few months ago, Google’s VP of Engineering – Udi Manber gave a presentation at Supernova where he said 20 – 25% of the queries typed into Google on a daily basis have never seen before.

I wasn’t able to find any totally accurate and current figures, but based on some reports over the last few months from Nielsen/Netratings, it suggests that roughly 515,000,000 searches are performed globally each day… which works-out to be approximately 6000 searches done every second.

Now imagine that one in every four (or five) of those searches is totally unique and has never been typed into Google before – that’s a staggering 103,000,000 – 128,750,000 unique searches every single day.

So how does Google and the other search engines rank sites when they don’t know what a quarter of their users are going to search for? It’s a tricky problem that Bill Slawski discusses in his article: Predictive Queries versus Unique Searches

As a website owner, these types of statistics are fantastic. A lot of sites tend to focus on highly competitive terms (and there’s nothing wrong with that as Hamlet Batista points-out) but there are still a lot of non-competitive terms that you can focus on knowing that statistically, someone is likely to search for at some stage.

So how can you ensure that you’re targeting as many appropriate terms through-out your site? Three simple words – Content, Content and Content.

The more relevant content you have on your site, the more chances you have of attracting long-tail search patterns.

So what are you waiting for – stop searching for ‘myspace’ and start writing some additional articles and other relevant content for your website!

People aren’t just searching for myspace, ebay, youtube and craigslist

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If you want your website to rank well and receive loads of targeted traffic then Keyword research is absolutely vital. Every seo campaign should begin with keyword research. You need to know what your target audience is searching for and what your competitors are doing about it.

We’ve put together a quick overview to keyword research below:

1. Identify your keywords
• Brainstorm and compile a list of keyword terms and phrases
• Behind every search is a potential customer. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes – what would you search for?
• Take the time to compile a very relevant and specific list, the better your initial list, the better the results you will get from your keyword research. Identify your keyword niches.
• Don’t rule out long tail searches – the more specific the query, the higher the chance of conversion
2. Research your keywords (using the tools below)
   • Add other relevant suggested keyword terms and phrases to your list.
   • Take note of the estimated number of searches for each keyword and phrase. Keep in mind that the more popular the keyword, the harder it will be to compete for it.
   • Prioritize your keyword list based on relevancy, your ability to optimise for these terms (i.e. include these terms in your content, links etc) and the traffic potential.
3. Research competition
   • Find out who is ranking for your keywords – conduct Google searches
   • Pay attention to websites that repeatedly rank for your keywords and compile a list of your main competitors.
   • Browse your competitors websites and take note of what keywords they use in their title tags, headings, internal links and content.
   • Add any relevant keywords you have not identified previously to your list
   • Identify other things that your competitors are doing that you could do – do they have a blog, newsletter or offer something unique and exciting to their customers? Get inspired!
4. Start Optimising your website! A few quick tips:
   • Examine your website for placement of keyword terms and phrases: title tags, urls, internal links, headlines and textual content should all be optimised to contain keyword terms and phrases but don’t overdo it – you will be penalised if it appears you are keyword stuffing
   • Anchor text is very important, where possible, ensure you include keywords in all inbound links.
   • Long Tail searches can deliver great value to any business. To increase your chances of capturing long tail searches add new content to your website regularly. Consider setting up a blog, news section, newsletter etc
   • Avoid ‘keyword cannibalization’ – targeting the same keywords on many different pages of the same site. This waters down your value of your keywords and makes it harder for search engines to decide which page to display to a searcher.
   • Content, content , content.

Useful Keyword Research Tools

Most of these are free or have a free service associated with them:

Overture Keyword Selector Tool – FREE
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

Wordtracker – FREE
http://www.wordtracker.com

Google AdWords Keyword Tool Estimator
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Google AdWords Traffic Estimator
http://adwords.google.com

Yahoo! Search Marketing
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com

KeywordDiscovery
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/

Google Trends
http://www.google.com/trends

Spyfu.com
http://www.spyfu.com/

SEObook keyword tools:
http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/

It may seem like a fair bit of effort to research, refine, test and measure your website’s keywords – but the effort does pay-off in the long run. Choosing the right keywords can turn an average website into a highly profitable one.

4 Step Guide to Keyword Research

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The problem is that Flash is designed to look appealing to human visitors but since search bots like Google, Yahoo! and MSN don’t have eyes, the effect is useless to them. Ok, it’s not entirely useless as Google is able to read some Flash files and can even extract the text-links contained within them, but it still can’t decipher text or content that’s embedded in a Flash file. This means that even though the content may end-up being indexed due to off-site factors (such as inbound links), it often won’t rank as well as it could because of the lack of spiderable on-site content.

Google’s official blog offers some good advice on some of the better uses of flash and although Google is against cloaking (the process of presenting website content differently to users from that of search bots), a representative states that as long as the intent is legitimate, placing text behind an animation can be acceptable. You can read more about this in this Google Groups thread.

If you would rather not place text behind animations, there are other tools available that can be of assistance.

SWFObject allows you to write a page in HTML and then using javascript, replace the HTML with the Flash SWF. This not only allows users without Flash will see the HTML content, it also means Google will be able to properly crawl your page. You can also combine this with SWFAddress (which is an SWFObject script) allowing you to deep-link inside your Flash SWF.

So with Google giving the thumbs-up to putting appropriate text behind Flash animations or even better-yet SWFObject and SWFAddress – there’s no reason why you can’t gain great rankings with a Flash site.

How to get Google’s attention if you’re a Flasher

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If you’re not sure what a dynamic URL is, here’s an example:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie&q=search+engine

You’ll notice that there are extra characters such as &, ?, = and + which are not usually allowed in a standard address, but some of these characters are required when a webpage has to query a database to display results.

Even though search engines are constantly improving and are able to index some dynamic addresses, it is best to avoid them for the following reasons:

• Dynamic URLs typically don’t rank as well as static URLs in the search engines.
• Search engines are known to index the content of static pages a lot faster than dynamic ones.
• Although this doesn’t strictly relate to SEO, static URLs are a lot easier to read and remember by end users.

How do you fix your site if it’s using dynamic URLs?

If it’s hosted on an Apache server, you can use mod_rewrite or for a similar Windows hosting solution, try IIS Mod-Rewrite which is just as good.

Search Engine Watch goes into great detail about how you can improve your dynamic URLs with their Mod rewrite tips and tricks and Aaron Wall from SEObook tells us How to Make Dynamic URLs Static.

One final thing to take note of is that when you go to the effort of rewriting your dynamic URLs, incorporating keywords in them certainly won’t hurt – sure using keywords in URLs isn’t as powerful as it used to be, but it’s still not a bad practice to try and keep. Talking about good practices, SEOmoz goes one better with 11 Best Practices for URLs.

Are your URLs playing nicely with the Search Engines?

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An Amazon employee described the Long Tail as follows: “We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.”

So how does this relate back to search engine optimisation? Well… the Long Tail of search targets all the keywords that are more precise and specific, and although being searched for less than the mainstream terms, they often yield a much greater return on investment – and the best part is that because they are so specific, they are often a lot easier to optimise for.

A recent interview with Udi Manber from Google’s Engineering department revealed that nearly 25% of searches done daily are completely unique and 5 – 6 Percent of Searches Spell Their Searches Wrong. This means that 1 in 4 people who do a search use keyword combinations that Google has NEVER seen before.

The SEOmoz site has some great articles on how you can Identify Long Tail Patterns and Uncovering the Invisible Long Tail… and once you can see these patterns, you can then incorporate some Long Tail Keyword Research.

So whether you are intentionally building content targeting the Long Tail or simply doing some updates to your website – the more quality content you add, the more chance you have of attracting the 1 in 4 unique searches done by people every day!

A short story about a Long Tail

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