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.
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
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.
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.
What should I budget for an ecommerce start-up?
It’s a good question that gets answered in lots of different ways. I’ve got £30k to spend on this site, and it should be better than Amazon.com is a quite frequent approach. Your web agency will always want to know what your budget is - in some ways it’s a fair question; how else can they know what they’re going to build for you.
But when you budget, you’ve got to think way beyond the site build. You should see the site build as opening the door of your new office. More often than not, clients come with an expectation that they’ll spend £8k on the website, and their Adword budget for year 1 is £2k. I’ve seen this 80/20 approach operate at all levels. It’s wrong (not Pareto, he’s never wrong). You’ve got to flip it. Spend 20% of your budget on the site build, and 80% on Adwords, link building and content work (spread this over twelve months, and don’t expect a return in year 1 - you’ll get one, but it’s nice to be surprised).
So, you’ve got a £10k budget. Spend £2k on the site, and £8k Adwords. Or, £20k on the site, and £80k on Adwords. That’s how it works.
Is hypertext important to Google?
It sure is. Hypertext is ordinary text with hyperlinks embedded in the copy. You should never see instructions to click here. Hypertext content is not meant to be read lineally. Instead, reading hypertext is random, chaotic, slightly disorientating as you hop around from one text to another, gleaning the bits you want, as you build your own story.
Older readers really struggle without the prop of a linear structure, and they also struggle with the notion that there isn’t a closed text (if you print out your emails, or your favourite web pages, you belong to this group).
But hypertext is foundational to the web, and so Google rewards texts (content, blogs etc) that have rich internal contextual linking. These are texts that have been well crafted, and also texts that encourage readers to hop off somewhere else; they are texts that want to help; not to sell. You should always encourage readers to hop off to a site that might be more helpful, if you’re site isn’t helpful, make it helpful, don’t encourage a buying decision that is invalid.
How to eat an elephant, (how to make an online mega-brand)
Making a new online store really work often feels as unachievable as eating the ubiquitous elephant. The answer, of course, one mouthful at a time. Here’s a selection of tasks you could consider as a mouthful. You just need to do one of these a day:
- Negotiate or create a meaningful hyperlink from an external website to your site (ideally, on a content link from a site with appropriate context, e.g. Rosehip. Reciprocal links (where the other site links back to you) are not worthless, but have less value.
- Add new and compelling content to your site. If you keep improving the content on the site, the GoogleBot will revisit more frequently. And frequent content changes are a powerful signal to Google that your site *must* have relevant content.
- Make a tweak on an adword campaign (but do remember to split-test, and pull weak ads quickly).
- Read your Analytics Data, find the most exited page, and change it!
- Write a blog entry that someone will want to share
- Approach a possible affiliate partner
- Make a cheese and ham sandwich
- Drink a cup of coffee
- Will be at ten soon, all good blog lists come in tens
- Remember to forward this post to a friend.
How to choose a domain name
Don’t worry about choosing some snazzy brand name. Choose the country extension for your primary market (e.g. .co.uk) (don’t be tempted to create duplicate sites at different country extensions).
Choose a URL that contains your target keywords, and if necessary break it up with dashes. (See this post from Matt Cutts - Google does not penalise URLs with dashes).
Browsers are searching for their target product, not your brand name - give them what they want!
What is robots.txt?
Robots.txt is a standard file that should be installed at the root of your website. It tells search engine crawlers what to index in your site (you might have folders with protected content in, that you don’t want appearing in Google).
You can verify it exists and whether it’s working at Google Webmaster tools.
Another plug for Google Webmaster tools
If you want to find out how Google’s viewing the inbound links to your site, and if there’s any problems indexing your site, you should start here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/