Roll up, roll up! Get your title tags here!
I’ve blogged a lot on title tags recently. There’s no better way of advertising to Google what your page is about.
If you’re in a competitive market, you’ll see from the amazing Google Trends tool that customers really shop around. Look at this analysis of the Vitamins Minerals & Supplements (VMS) sector.
In order to compare prices, browsers are tending to cut and paste the product title into their browser bar, e.g. Rosehip 2000mg 60 Tablets. So, an easy win against your competitors is to take the product title from a leading product on their site, and incorporate it into the title tag for your equivalent product page. Then you’re making it even easier for consumers to compare prices with your competitors - everyone wins.
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Change This - starting with a click
Quick site recommendation, and a favour to ask…
ChangeThis is a very cool site which was the brainchild of Seth Godin. It’s a site for perpetuating new ideas and new thinking. High quality ‘manifestos’ are published, and then the ChangeThis community spreads the idea.
I’m close to finishing my new book on how to become an ecommerce gazillionaire, and I’m going to pre-release the book for free on ChangeThis. To get ChangeThis to carry the book, I need lots of votes (this is the favour bit). So please please can you click this link, and forward it to your mates to click also.
Thanks to all who’ve voted already, we’re currently no.4, which isn’t too bad for 24 hours voting!
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Google drops pay-per action beta
Yesterday Google announced that it was retiring its pay-per-action beta. The beta programme followed the acquisition of DoubleClick, and at the time I was convinced it intimated a move by Google to take an even bigger slice of global ad revenue.
High conversion value sectors like recruitment or real estate carry Adword campaigns that are almost incidentally cheap. For instance, I’m running an Adword campaign for my parent’s house which is yielding ten targeted leads a day - the estate agent complains he’s getting more enquiries for this property than his entire portfolio. Cost so far : £54.13. Value to estate agent upon sale: £8,300.
So you can see why Google would be motivated by a pay-per-action model. I’m a great fan of Google’s conversion tracking tool, but I’m still skeptical about Google seeing the value of the sale. The temptation to artificially lift CPC must be irresistible, but at least for now, it looks like we’re safe.
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Slow site = More expensive Adwords!
Just over a week ago, Google introduced a new aspect into its Quality Score for Adwords. Google’s Quality Score for your Adwords affects your rank and your minimum bid amount - a high quality Ad will generally rank better and cost less. As always, Google rewards relevance. And a relevant (high Quality Score Ad) will be rewarded.
Take a look at Ten things Google has found to be true to find out more about Google’s founding principles. One of these principles is “Fast is better than slow”. And now, this philosophy has been extended to Adwords. If you’re landing page is slow, your Quality Score will suffer. It’s worth checking out how Google scores load times, as if your site is slow you’ll be hit on the Quality Score, and you’ll be hit by customers leaving before the page has finished loading.
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Testing times: split-testing rules
Wouldn’t it be great if you could buy a full page ad in the Daily Telegraph, but the print morphed evenly throughout the day, so you could see which ad was the most effective?
One of Adwords most powerful features allows you to do just that. For the same set of keywords you can display as many Ads as you like. By default, the Adwords manager is set to optimize which means Google will establish which is your best Ad, and favour that Ad.
If you’re checking into Adwords once a day (I live there), you should set to rotate. This allows you to choose the winner from your split-testing. You need 20 clicks before you can declare a winner, anything less is just not enough data. There’s a great tool at www.splittester.com that helps you check your analysis.
In split-testing we tend to focus on getting a high clickthrough-rate (CTR). CTRs are definitely important, as Google always rewards relevance, but a high CTR and poor conversion rate is a fool’s game. Don’t lose sight of the end game, which is winning customers.
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What’s wrong with this adword?
My apologies to Ink Cycle in advance, but here’s what’s wrong with this Ad:
This Ad was served as a response to a search for ‘HP 57 printer cartridge’. With the exception of the word ‘cartridge’ the adword makes no effort whatsoever to use the language of the customer.
The title and body copy carries no specific price information. This Adword will gain clicks but from browsers who don’t know what they want to buy. That’s wasting clicks.
The destination URL is to a general landing page. Now the customer is faced with a bewildering array of choices. More often than not the first choice will be to leave. Taking customers to a general landing page will often yield a deservedly high bounce rate.
‘Absurdly low prices’ is marketing speak. What’s absurd about them? If they’re so absurdly low, let’s see them!
Finally, the display URL is not utilised to enforce any messaging. If you’re really stuck with absurdly low prices, you might try: www.inkcycle.co.uk/aburd_prices.
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Writing for the web
Jakob Neilsen’s definitive article, How to Read for the Web, happily gives us guidelines for writing content that is optimised for search engines. It’s summarised below, and you can see immediately why it is Google friendly.
As a result, Web pages have to employ scannable text, using
- highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others)
- meaningful sub-headings (not “clever” ones)
- bulleted lists
- one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph)
- the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion
- half the word count (or less) than conventional writing
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Meta tags: what’s it all about?
Meta tags are read by browsers and search engines, you won’t see them on a web page unless you click view source. There are three main kinds of meta tags that people normally obsess over.
- <title>Meta tags: what’s it all about</title> - this is the tag that generates the page title that appears in your browser bar. I’d say the page title is about the most important semantic location for your entire page. If you’re targeting a keyword like ‘arthritis pain relief‘, you’d want ‘arthritis pain relief‘ in the title, but don’t forget to make the rest of the page about ‘arthritis pain relief’. Google’s looking for good content, and the page title should correlate with all other content on the page. [notice that Word Press with Permalinks switched on is generating a url with the page title included in the URL - these friendly URLs are also an important aid]
- <meta name=”description” content=”Baldy’s Blog is the definitive and accessible guide to the latest SEO and Adword techniques”> I don’t think (and I’m happy to be corrected) that meta description makes any difference to your weighting in Google, but the meta description is normally used as the description in Google’s search results. So, if you’ve written a good meta description, you’re likely to get a better click-through rate (CTR). A better CTR = more traffic = a higher ranking.
Note, your meta description must match the content of the page, and must only use the vocabulary found on the page. Anything else, will signal spam.
- <meta name=”keywords” content=”SEO, SEM, Google, Adwords, Baldy” />. In the old days you could slam your meta keywords full of anything, and it would deliver traffic. Meta keywords very vital in the days when searchbots couldn’t digest the content of pages. But they can now, and in my view you can forget meta keywords. If you do feel tempted to use them, make sure the keywords absolutely reflect the page’s content.
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Is it ok to buy links?
First off, why buy links? Links are the primary indicator of a site’s popularity. One-way links from high-traffic context-related sites are particularly valuable. The more links you have, the nearer you get to the top of the engine.
Google encourages users to report paid links, as some kinds of paid links violate Google’s quality guidelines. However, Google doesn’t ban paid link activity entirely, and seems to accept that is “a normal part of the economy of the web”, when done properly. And ‘properly’ means making sure Google knows this is a commercial relationship:
- Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
- Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
If you’re retaining an agency to buy links for your site, you must make sure that these guidelines are adhered to, or your site will be regarded as part of a spam network. Once Google has identified a spam site, it’s relatively easy to identify all the back-linked sites, and to penalise them accordingly.
So, it’s ok to buy links, as long as you do it properly, but if you attempt to pass PageRank - i.e., not identifying that inbound links to your site are part of a commercial relationship, you may be Google-slapped.
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Google Trends for Websites
The latest incarnation of Google Trends doesn’t just give you trend data on keyword searches, it also gives you great analysis of where else your target customers are going. Take a look at this analysis for MyMemory.
Not only will this analysis show where else your customers are going, but it also shows the keywords they’re also searching for. This kind of data usually costs lots of money (HitWise), and now you can have it for free. Enjoy!
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