Google is charging businesses in Houston, TX and San Jose, CA a straight $25 a month for a yellow flag. This little flag goes beneath their local listing to help bring attention to their listing, but it also links to the page of your choice to help convert visitors. This sounds expensive at first, but when you consider the cost of other local advertising methods, SEO, and even services such as Yellow Pages, it’s easy to see the value in a service like this.

The Benefits of the New ‘Yellow’ Listings

Even if a business is already at the top of the local SERPs, this little yellow flag has the potential for making a big difference. First, it makes the listing jump off the page, and that’s never a bad thing. However, this may diminish as the idea gains popularity.

Being able to link to virtually any page gives businesses the perfect opportunity to integrate their listing with their marketing strategy. A restaurant, for example, could link directly to a menu and online order page. Or, it could link to a coupon to encourage visitors to come in. A page listing special sale items, an introduction to the organization or even just a special welcome video at the top of the home page can also be helpful here.

For Google, it has the potential for being a serious cash cow. At $300 USD a year, that translates into $2,100 USD for the seven pack per year, and that’s just for one keyword. Aside from a bit of extra accounting, this thing has no negative effects for the search giant.

Google’s ‘Enhanced Listings’ Aren’t All Sugar and Spice

Before handing over that coveted $25, there are a few serious things to think about. First of all, this yellow flag will be essentially useless if the business isn’t included in the seven pack, but it’s easy to see a number of businesses will eagerly hand over the cash without realising this.

The line between paid or ’sponsored’ listings and organic listing are being further blurred with this new system. This brings into question Google’s fairness and ethics to start. If it continues along this line, it will essentially have pages of paid listings. Should they? It might not get that far because it wouldn’t be in the best interests of the user, but it certainly could.

More emphasis on the seven-pack also means regular users could potentially pay less attention to anything else on the page since these listings push the regular results farther towards the fold. It also means there will be even more pressure on SEOs to get these companies into that top seven listings.

Lastly, this type of offering cuts out the ‘certified dealers’ and forces businesses to go directly to Google. So, this not only cuts out a profit opportunity and a chance to ‘game’ the listings, but you also can’t help but wonder what kinds of personal and private information they’ll be able to collect in the meantime. After all, it’s pretty obvious that if this goes well, Google will continue to build on this concept.

No Guarantees for Top Position

It’s important to note the $25 simply gives you a yellow flag linked to whatever you’d like. None of the articles say anything about guaranteeing a position when you pay the money. They only mention the enhancement to an existing listing, so if you aren’t already in the 7-pack, it won’t show up in the first page universal SERPs.

Google is simply testing this at the moment, so there’s no mention of when it will be rolled out both in the US, and here in the UK and Ireland.

It’s not buying top positions, it’s not a ranking factor, and it’s not guaranteeing traffic, but it is certainly changing the game by adding a new dimension.

What are your thoughts? Would you like this rolled out? Is it worth the cash?

Recently I was running an eye over the SERPS and checking out the rankings of one or two local companies. One of the listings stuck out like a sort thumb. All the other listings on the first page had page title’s with their company names, targeted keywords and a fairly comprehensive description. The site is question just had a short URL reference. Figure 1 below (just a mockup I stitched together) shows the difference between 2 listings. To hide the company’s embarrassment I’ve replaced the URL in the first one with my own, but you’ll notice the difference in a listing and a short reference.

Figure 1

A quick check of the source code revealed 2 interesting and conflicting lines in every pages’s code.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />


In a nutshell the first line basically tells Google to de-index your listing, and the second line instructs Google and other search engines to index the page. Judging by how Google followed these directions, the first was given priority and the site was de-indexed. Arguably when there a conflict’s and an obvious indexing mistake has been made Google should ignore both directives and include all pages in it’s index.

What Went Wrong

The site in question was running on Wordpress. My guess is that the site had been redeveloped, and that the privacy settings on Wordpress had been set to dissallow search engines from indexing the site while it was being redeveloped online. When the new site was moved across they forgot to take the privacy setting of, and the noindex remained. I’m not quite sure how the additional robots tag got in the code, maybe it was inserted manually.

Anyway, I fired them off an email but it wasn’t acted upon.

A couple of weeks later when I rechecked I noticed that the penalising code was still there. The homepage was still showing a short URL reference, all the other pages had dropped from the index, and the home page was no longer on the first page of Google, it had slipped down to second page siberia. Traffic through the search engines now must be a trickle.

I’m not a web developer, how can I tell on my own site?

On your browser toolbar, click view source and look for the robots tag, like the code shown above. If it’s noindex then this might start the alarm bells ringing, time to follow up with the developer.

What Can Be Learned

• Following a redesign or just going live, check that there is nothing stopping your site from getting indexed correctly.
• Keep an eye on Google Analytics or your stats software for any unexpected dips in traffic.
• Check through the SERPS occassionaly for your main keywords.
• Run a site command, site:yoursite.com and inspect your site’s listing. This is also great for noticing other things including duplicate content.

On a final point Google, Yahoo and Bing all showed a short URL reference. Ask was the only engine that didn’t even list a URL reference, it totally de-indexed the site in question. Not entirely sure what is the correct interpretation of the tag, but arguably with noindex the main engines shouldn’t even show a short reference.

Working on multiple sites and trying to do everthing manually just takes too much time, so below are some of the tools, websites and software I use to speed up the process and make life that little bit easier.

These tools concentrate more on the analysis side of things rather than the creativity side where software and tools are obviously lacking.

Google Webmaster Tools is as important as any tool, and one of the first things to do after developing a site is to add your site. GWT provides a great guide into how Google treats and sees your site.

The control panel provides alot of information, including information on crawl errors, 404 errors and links to your site. In the HTML suggestions section Google gives you feedback on duplicate and short meta descriptions and page titles. Improving these reduces duplicate content issues and helps your site perform better.

Amongst other things you can set the geographic target of your site, so for example is you’ve a country neutral domain such as a .com you could set it up to target Google.co.uk. There’s also the option to set the preferred canonical domain, and stop your site from multiple indexing and a weakening of it’s authority.

With Google seemingly attaching more importance to page load times you should keep an eye on the speed of your pages. Website Optimization provides a free website performance tool, and Google also seems to be rolling out a speed testing service in GWT.

Stats & Analytics

Google Analytics is an another awesome free analytics tool. Stats Counter is a free alternative. Google Analytics shows less traffic than Stats Counter as Google Analytics won’t count robots since it only works on javascript enabled browsers. GA also uses cookies to record visit details, so Google can also determine whether a visitor has arrived before and dismiss multiple visits.

Advanced Web Ranking is great for running keyword reports to show clients. No doubt SERP rankings for a website is a factor in judging the success of a site but shouldn’t be taken as the one and only factor. Many less experienced and knowledgeable clients may think this. I tend to favour a broad approach rather than just judging the success on the trophy keywords.

Page Rank

Download the Google Toolbar. One of the features of the toolbar is that it lets you see the toolbar Page rank of a page you’re on. PR although much maligned for me is still useful in that it definitely flags up warning signs and gives indications of the value that Google places on a page. So if you’ve a page that continues to accrue no PR it might be a warning sign that Google simply sees the page as a duplicate, untrustworthy or just content filler.

IP Address

Hide my Ass lets you surf the internet anonymously with no personalisation. Search from a different IP address in a different country and see how the results differ.

This Reverse IP Lookup from YouGetSignal lets you see who else is on your server. Enter a domain or IP address and discover other sites hosted on the web server. If there’s sites with explicit or improper content on a shared hosting environment then that’s a concern.

Broken Links, 404’s

You need to keep an eye on indexing issues, especially 404 status codes being returned. GWT is becoming a one stop solution for many of these issues and will identify these error messages. Xenu’s Link Sleuth is another alternative good tool for finding broken links on your site.

Site Map Generator

XML-sitemaps does what it says on the tin. For a larger dynamic site you might have to look at a different solution.

Content

The plagirism checker from Copyscape allows you to easily check for duplicate content. So you can check whether a page is duplicated and possibly being ripped off or whether a content writer has done the same work and presented you with it.

BackLinks

Yahoo Site Explorer allows you to check how many backlinks your site has and displays the top 1000. I’m sure there’s a way to display more, or atleast I think I came across it but of the top of my head can’t remember it.

Backlinkwatch is good in that you can see how strong the links are for your competitors and the amount of keyword anchor text they have. Rather than simply competing with getting the same links and a few more, try to look for different angles and plot your own campaign.

SEO Majestic’s compare backlinks tool lets you compare the domain name backlink history of sites. You can check how aggressive the linking campaign of your competitors is over a certain time period. Are they ramping up their campaign?

Run a bad neighbourhood test on your site and see if any flags are raised for deeper investigation.

Domain Age

There’s no doubt that Google places a great emphasis on domain age and authority. SEO For Firefox comes in handy for checking the age of the domain, but there’s other tools out there that do this.

Keywords

Google Keyword Suggestion Tool is certainly good for keyword digging, start at the top of the tree and check out the competition and what keywords they are obviously targeting.

WordTracker offers a free month trial and one month minimum term £28. If you’re putting a monetary site together and want to have a wide as reach as possible then well worth the investment.

Google Adwords itself is a great place to find keywords. If you get the call to work on a site that has had a PPC campaign running with tracking set up then Google Adwords can provide you with valuble keyword information, the better the campaign the more you’ll be able to see which terms work and which you should work on.

The way back tool allows you to check the history of a domain name. It certainly comes in handy if you’re about to invest in a domain name and build a
site on it. Last thing you want is to buy a domain that has had a penalty against it.

Link Search Tool is a keyword suggestion tool from Solo SEO. It certainly comes in handy when you wish to dig around for potential links.

Plugins FOR Firefox

SEO For Firefox helps me look at search engine results and make quick judgements based on the age of a site, the number of incoming links,
whether they are listed in directories such as DMOZ, Yahoo, the likely advertising budgets, and the extent to which a site has been promoted and whether it is continuing to be pushed.

HTTP Live Headers allows you to check the header status of a page. For instance if you’ve redirected pages on your site to a new page you can quickly verify that the correct HTTP status is returned. Does the redirect that’ve you’ve set up from an old page to a new page return a 301? This plugin will let you know.

How do you tell whether a link is a NOFOLLOW or DOFOLLOW link passing page rank and anchor text relevancy? This NOFOLLOW Plugin for FireFox is the answer. If you’re chasing Page Rank on do follow blogs, then it might interest you. It’s also an interesting tool to see wheter a site is breaking Google’s guidelines on selling links for Page Rank either unintentionally or not.

Firebug is a cool plugin for Firefox. This plugin lets me quickly see the source code for a webpage and to make sure the markup is correctly applied.
When I click ‘Inspect Element’ it will show the exact code for the section of the webpage you’re mousing over.

The Web Developer ToolBar allows you to quickly disable javascript and CSS, amongst other things.

The W3C Markup Validator tool which is also an option on the Web Developer Toolbar lets you check the markup of your page. Not that I’m convinced that valid CSS HTML code improves ranking and according to Matt Cutts it doesn’t matter, but it’s always good to check how valid your code is and to avoid any potential problems.

Browser Checking

This browser screen resolution checker shows what your web page looks like with the viewer’s monitor set to different screen resolutions.

One of the most painful things in building a site that isn’t structured with HTML tables is checking that it works in different browsers. This website comes in handy and can highlight the problems with cross browser CSS issues.

SEOBrowser will show you exactly what Google sees of your page rather than what the user sees. Obviously this is very important for SEO purposes. If you’ve just a page with paragraph markup, no headers, sub headers, and no keywords then the relevancy of your site might not be hitting the mark.

Others

Google Alerts allows you to recieve email updates of the latest relevant Google results based on the terms you select. Keep an eye on a keyword term that you are targetting or a competitor.

Search Google and return just the page titles and URL’s.

Not strictly a tool but running commands certainly comes in handy when searching for relevant sites. Pretty much like the Solo SEO you can run a number of Google Operators to mine for decent sources of links.

“Add URL” +”your keyword(s)”
“Add link” +”your keyword(s)”
“Add Website” +”your keyword(s)”
“Add a website” +”your keyword(s)”
“Add your website” +”your keyword(s)”
“Submit link” + “your keyword(s)”
“Submit your site” +”your keyword(s)”

You get the picture with those examples above.

Hopefully these websites and tools might come in handy and help you. If you’ve any other tools *worthy* of a mention then just let me know.

The recent addition of a dashboard highlighted Google’s commitment to local search and it’s ever increasing importance.

The screenshot below is from a short article I wrote on the adding your business to Local Business center.

It shows a search for the term ‘wedding photographer in Belfast’, with the 10 pack, 10 listings labeled A – J next to a map. Google has decided in their wisdom to cull this down to a 7 pack. The second screenshot below now shows a search for the same term with a 7 pack, 7 listings.

So what difference does this make?

• It’s less cluttered looking
• Getting listed in the 7 pack obviously becomes more competitive

If you had a listing that appeared at number 8 – 10, your listing will now have disappeared and banished from a potentially very profitable position on the front page of Google.

So why has Google made this change?

Unfortunately for organic SEO’s I doubt that Google has decided to reassert the priority of the free, organic and traditional search results that is was built on. Arguably, the reason is that Google is set to introduce Google Local Listings Ads that will offer local pay per placement ads targetted at local business. A less cluttered 7 pack certainly frees up space for these locally targeted ads and at the same time will generate additional revenue for the money making juggernaut that Google is.

Local Listings Ad Video Promotion

So what are Local Listings Ads and how do they work:

• Targetted ads that display when users search for businesses like yours in your area.
• Add your business to Google’s Local Business Center
• Pay a flat fee based on your location and business category
• Receive a full report on the no of clicks and more
• Appear at the top of Google search results and Google Maps
• Free call tracking to include the message ‘This caller brought to you by Google’
• First 30 days free

Local Listing Ads look like a dumbed down version of Pay Per Click, no campaign set up and management, just a fairly straightforward process that most businesses should understand. The simple pay per placement model should also help Google target online competitors such as Yell. A free 1 month trial won’t do the uptake figures any harm either.

For an SEO, a one strand organic listings campaign for a local business just doesn’t and won’t cut the mustard any more. Businesses can’t ignore Pay Per Click and Local Search. Add Local Listing Ads to the mix when it is eventually rolled out here.

Matt Cutt’s talks about the Canonical Link Element in the following video and blogged about it here.

So how does Google treat Canonical Mistakes?

In Matt’s video he mentions that the presence of the Canonical Link Element in the page’s code is a strong hint as to whether or not a url should be indexed or not. If a webmaster accidentally makes a mistake then, Matt says ‘we don’t promise we will abide by this 100%’ and Google reserves the ‘right to do what we think best’ for the user. So if Google thinks there’s been a mistake, that a webmaster has accidentally messed up, the page(s) may still be indexed.

So here’s how the 3 engines treated a Canonical ‘Shoot yourself in the Foot’ Mistake.

• Website with 30 pages of content, the canonical element with http://www.thewebaddress.com/ inserted into a header so that it was on every page of the site.
• Every page had quality and unique content with images. The site had unique titles and meta descriptions.
• There was a standard navigation and good internal linkage.
• The site had links and page rank.

So what happened?

Google clearly didn’t realise that this was a mistake , it only indexed 1 page, the homepage that had the canonical url in place. Google continually crawled the site over a 2-3 month period but only indexed the homepage. Yahoo and Bing indexed all 30 or so pages. After a while I got bored, when I realised Google wasn’t going to figure this out itself and removed the canonical element and the site’s pages got indexed.

If you haven’t signed up for a Local Business Account now’s the time to go ahead and do it. If you’ve already got an account log in and you’ll see a ‘view report’ link. Just click on the link and you’ll see the dashboard.

You’ll notice 2 timeline graphs under the heading Activity. The first timeline relates to the number of Impressions and the second relates to the number of Actions.

Impressions refer to the number of times your business appeared as a search result on Google Search or Google maps irrespective of whether a user clicked through to your website.

Actions refer to how many times users interacted with your listing in the time frame which you can specify. This number includes the amount of times the user clicked more information button, or they clicked through to your site or requested driving directions.

Below the timelines you’ll see a breakdown for the actions.

Below that is the top keyword terms that people used to find your website, along with the amount of impressions.

You can also get the Zip/Post codes where driving direction requests came from.

I’ve blogged about the increasing importance of local search before and this new dashboard only underpins the importance that Google is attaching to local search. Looking at stats from various campaigns that I’m running Local Search certainly drives traffic, and is a quick way to get listed on the front page of Google. Only Pay Per Click is comparable in terms of the speed but it costs.

So in a nutshell, what information does it tell you?

1. What people searched for
2. The number of times the business listing appeared as a result on a Google search or Google Maps search in a given period
3. The number of visits to your site
4. The number of requests for directions to your business and where they came from

What it doesn’t tell you?

It doesn’t tell you the regional terms that people searched for. Did someone search for web design Belfast, Malone Road, Lisburn Road or Northern Ireland.

The dashboard although valuable is pretty basic and easy to understand. No one could accuse it of being over complicated or difficult to understand. It certainly lacks the information that Google Analytics provides.

The dashboard sits on it’s own, maybe it could be integrated into Google Analytics at some stage.

I guess this is aimed at local business owners to attract them to Google’s search products and no doubt entice them into Adwords or at some stage to charge them for a local listing once they see the benefits of it.

It would also be nice to see how many times people click on the reviews link.

Learn more about your Geographic Market

The dashboard can also give you an insight into where your customers come from. If you can see that your customers come from within a certain radius then you can tailor your marketing to that area whether it’s local, regional or national. This might be fairly straightforward for a business such as a pizza takeaway, but for other businesses including my own web design business it can certainly help you decide your geographic market and where to pump the advertising spend based on how far people are prepared to travel for your services.

All in all it’s another valuable reporting tool. Although basic for the most part, no doubt over time it’ll become more powerful, with new features, stats and analytics and blossom like Google Webmaster Tools has.

According to this article on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow and an old article that I quickly dug up here www.searchenginejournal.com Google won’t index a page through the no follow attribute.

So when I posted a blog comment on a popular no follow blog and decided to enter the new website in the optional website textbox, a few days later the site was indexed in Google and Yahoo. The only link to the site is through the blog which Yahoo site explorer also shows up.

So I guess Google does indeed index no followed links.

Well here’s a before and after case study that might just help you make your mind up. It’s only a short time frame comparison but it was significant so I thought I’d post it.

I recently finished working on a site and while playing about with Google analytics noticed a big difference in bounce rates and some of the other metrics such as time spent on the site. For those of you that don’t know what a bounce, a bounce happens when a visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages.

High Bounce rates aren’t always a sure fire sign that the content isn’t what the user is looking for. I have one or two personal coding information sites, where the user just comes grabs the code snippet and away they go. For the site in question though, a guesthouse website, the high bounce rate off the homepage was worrying. Users weren’t checking the accommodation and availability pages, nor the local attractions so there was no chance the site would attract bookings.

First of all here’s the stats from Google Analytics.

The stats compare July 6th – July 7th v June 15 – June 16th, Monday and Tuesday.

The stats are quite staggering. Before the redesign the bounce rate was as high as 71%. Most people that visited the site, came and went with the home page being the only page that they viewed before exiting. The time on the site went from 58 seconds to nearly 4 minutes, and pages per visit went from 1 to nearly 7.

The bounce rate went down to 20%, which is a decrease of over 70%. A 20% bounce rate is very good, there’s always going to be a certain percentage that stumble across the site so you’ll never get a 0% rate. Digging down into the stats amazingly no body checked the accomodation page or the availability pages.

Ok so here’s a screenshot of the before and after, and you’ll see the issues straightaway. It doesn’t take a genuis to work this out.

Before Screenshot

After Screenshot

The difference between the two:

• The new design clearly enhances the business, the old colours are just too much
• The new layout is pretty standard, it’s easy to navigate, with the pages labelled well
• The images are now attractive, inviting, good quality with a stunning flash showcase
• Internal linkage is better as opposed to non-existant
• The content is better presented, it’s more readable and scannable and there’s more of it
• There are clear calls to action including the check availability button

I’ve no doubt that the conversion rates and bookings will go up dramatically and that the stats would be fairly similar over a longer period of time. What this says to me is that the investment in a professional looking design is well worth it. Design matters alot.

It’s also important to get the site working before going out and promoting it. All the traffic in the world, and the investment that goes with that whether it’s PPC, SEO, email marketing or offline marketing wouldn’t work on the site the way it was.

It’s also easy for website and business owners to check their stats package, if you have Google Analytics installed even a quick glance at the dashboard will help you determine whether your site is performing or not, you don’t need to be well versed in Google Analytics.

Before Google’s advertising program ‘Adwords’ appeared on the scene, creating a Google friendly website and targeting the free organic listing was the only option. In stepped Adwords, this offered businesses the opportunity for a page 1 ranking in no time at all, albeit a paid option.

(The adwords listings appear in the red boxes, the organic listings in the Google box)

Now Adwords management companies can deliver first page results and plenty offer a great service in doing so.

However over the last couple of years I’ve spoken to quite a few people and clients that have been offered Adwords management and 1st page rankings from companies claiming they are somehow associated with Google, and are authorised Adwords resellers when clearly they aren’t. The sales pitch is misleading and the service that they offer although it sounds like a great deal isn’t quite as good as it seems.

The pitch usually includes:

1. First page on Google permanently over the duration of the contract

2. Unlimited clicks for the traffic that will go through your website

3. 24 hour, 7 days a week listing.

4. Buy in bulk keyword offers

Number 4 is a falsehood, and if you’ve a daily budget then the others are clearly untrue as well.

I was recently speaking with someone who ran a campaign with one of these companies.

He was originally offered 5 keywords for £99 pounds for the 1st month and a small set-up fee of £30. For good measure an additional keyword was thrown in and the set-up fee waived.

The cost of the clicks came out of the £99, which was a nice sweetener. But hold on isn’t there an obvious conflict of interests here? the less clicks you have the more money they make.

The keywords were also very low competition and the number of search also very low.

I had a look at the report and what’s interesting is that atleast 4 of the keywords were pure rubbish, not just long tail keyword but non-existant terms that would never drive more than a couple of people to the site over the course of a year. The 2 major keywords according to Google estimates could be in position 1-3 for 4p, and with only 4 or 5 ads showing for those terms a top 3 placement isn’t going to break the bank. In fact if there was more than a few pounds of traffic through the pay per click adwords I’d be absolutely amazed.

When I had a look at the report, I noticed that nowhere does it mention clicks, it actually mentions impressions!

In the print in the email with the report it states ‘Impressions are the number of people that have actually seen your advert in google.co.uk’.

So when someone does a search on one of those 5/6 keyword terms that counts as an impression even though there’s no click thru to the site. It’s all bull.

With impressions for the month just over 100, even with a click thru rate of 5% that’s 5 clicks. Looking at Google Analytics for the main term and the only one that has a change of driving any traffic at all there was just 5 clicks, and the time spent on the website was minimal.

The report also noted that the terms were exact match, and that extensive keyword research had been conducted (ha ha).

It sounds like a good deal to an unsuspecting client but it’s Limited Adwords without the keyword research, campaign management and accountability.

I understand that for a £99 pound Adwords campaign the company can’t promise the earth, and that they have their costs, but atleast some amount of honesty and visibility might not be too much to ask for. The value the client was getting was also very poor.

You can find a list of authorised Google Adwords Resellers here.

Interestingly when you conduct a search on the name of one of these companies a listing comes up for from Google to ‘use an authorised’ reseller.

Obviously it’s the building blocks rather than a very comprehensive report with all the trade secrets thrown in, but there are plenty of suggestions here for Doon to get to work on.

The site in question is www.kissweddingmovies.com

On-Site

The first set of suggestions are related to On-Site SEO, in simple layman’s terms that’s everything to do with the structure, coding and set up of the site.

Page Titles

The Page Title on the Homepage is very short (you can see the page title highlighted), it’s ‘Wedding Video Northern Ireland’.

I would target 2 keyword terms, I would look for a secondary term that compliments the main term. For instance ‘Wedding Video Northern Ireland, Wedding Videos Northern Ireland’. Note the plural ‘videos’ and the inner term ‘Northern Ireland Wedding Videos’ minus the apostrophe.

Or perhaps another suggestion is ‘Wedding Video Northern Ireland, Wedding Videos – Kiss Wedding Movies’. This includes the plural and also includes the company name. Sure it misses the additional Northern Ireland but it includes the name that has the keyword ‘Wedding’ in it, and is less than the standard 70 characters that Google tends to only display for the page title.

Looking at Doon’s competitors the term DVD/DVDs also appears to be popular terms to bear in mind.

Google displays the page title in it’s returned results and treats it as a very strong indicator of the page’s content so make it unique and align it with the page and the terms you’re targeting.

Overall the page titles need to be better. An easy way to check the current page titles is to do a site: operator search on Google, providing the pages have been indexed.

Most of the pages have at best 3 or 4 keyword titles without a regional qualifier. Most people search for wedding videographers based on an area/region, so the title could be improved upon by adding the region and possibly another synonymous keyword term.

Meta Descriptions

Below is an image of how the Meta descriptions are displayed in Google’s Search Engine Results (SERPS).

These need improving and should be unique for each page particularly for the important pages within your site. As you can see the current homepage Meta description is ‘Wedding Videos Northern Ireland Premier Creative Video Specialist’. It’s very short and uninspiring, and more than likely won’t have as good a click thru rate as it could. I’d make it longer and throw in some of the main popular terms you are targeting. On Google these keywords will then be bolded when a search on that particular keyword is carried out. It’ll then attract the eye of the searcher and improve the click thru rate.

I’d maybe go a couple of sentences that include the main keywords of the page, something like ‘Wedding Video Services by experienced Northern Ireland Videographer Doon Storey….Personalised Wedding Video packages available.

Page Header

Kiss Wedding Videos is the main title on every page and surrounded by the H1 heading tag (The H1 header tag isn’t visible, it’s just the code behind the scenes).

This gives Google an idea of the main theme of the page or at least should do. ‘Kiss Wedding Movies’ isn’t the term that you should be targeting and it shouldn’t be duplicated across every page on the site. My personal preference would be to replace it with an image. I’d then use the H1 tag to be more specific on each page so for the home page have the H1 tag surrounding the text Wedding Video Northern Ireland or Wedding Video with a buffer keyword, and get rid of the H2 tag which is currently surrounding the text Wedding Video Northern Ireland. I’d do this for all the pages and have unique titles specific to the page.

Internal Linkage

The internal linkage could be improved though it’s not bad. Link back to the home page and the main pages throughout your site with keyword rich anchor text. So for the homepage, why not link to it from one or two other important pages with the terms ‘wedding videographer’ or ‘wedding video’. The current funnel to the packages page where the customers will learn what you offer is on the right tracks.

Canonicalisation

There are links both to www.kissweddingvideos.com and kissweddingvideos.com from within the site itself. The URL is indexed in Google not the web page, so although entering www.kissweddingvideos.com and kissweddingvideos.com into the address bar brings up the same web page content, it’s actually 2 different URLs.

Sometimes you might see the same page indexed in Google both for the www and non www version. The best bet is to have this uniform so that the page strength isn’t undermined. Pick a version and stick with it. As the site is new and not well established I’d go for the familiar www, make sure that you list your site with other sites with the www version and that from within the site you link to the www version. Even though the site is indexed in Google without the www, I’d change that as it’s very early days in the site’s history, you can set this up in Google Webmaster Tools (that I touch on briefly below) in the preferred domain section.

Images

All the images on the site should use an alt tag to let Google know what the image is about. If an image is for decoration purposes then just leave the alt tag blank.

That’s enough on-site to be getting on with. Here’s some off-site stuff.

Google Account, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics

Set up a Google Account. You can then set up a Google Webmasters Tools account and Google Analytics account and manage all the accounts under the one console.

The Webmasters Account needs you to verify your site. Once the site has been verified the GWT console will give you a heads up on issues such as duplicate page titles and meta description that you can then address.

It will also inform you of crawl errors, http errors etc.

Looking through the pages listed in Google I came across this one http://kissweddingmovies.com/page2/page2.html. Like many of the listings it just looks like an old page, floating about doing nothing. You can delete this page from Google’s index from within GTW.

Another thing you can do is set the region that the site targets. As Doon’s hosting is American based and the site is a .com, I’d set the region to UK as that’s where your target market is.

You can also install Google Analytics. This will allow you to benchmark the progress you make with your campaign. All the usual are there such as page visits, visitors, keywords, and search engine traffic, referrals etc.

Setting up one or two goals might be for another day, for instance a contact goal might give you some idea over time what keywords etc bring leads. One of the mistakes that I made early on was not tracking all the sales that I made for a couple of years, it was only looking back on this that I realised the error. If I had of known what terms converted, where they came from etc this would have provided valuable information.

Google Local

You need to promote your business on Google local Search and get your site listed on the local business results.

You can read more promoting your business on Google Local Search.

Links

Google is still a links driven search engine. Your site currently has zero links pointing back to it. It’s pretty anonymous and friendless. Your direct competition certainly won’t give you any links, but you may have a small number of business partners that will. You also need to get some authority editorial links preferably from highly trusted sites.

I’d recommend a 4NI listing. The amount of listings you get depends on your budget. You’ll need to invest simple as that if you want to get a good return.

Looking at the bottom of the page 1 results for the term ‘Wedding Video Northern Ireland’ there’s sites listed there with just 30 or so links which isn’t an awful lot. In fact even the higher up listings don’t have that many links to them.

As a small business creating great content that will attract natural links isn’t going to be easy especially when you have a business to run. Provide a great customer service, hang out in a forum or two, like the one I have mentioned below and raise your head above the parapet and you’ll get a number of links over time and more importantly referrals.

PPC

I would run a tight PPC campaign, especially as you won’t be high up in the organic rankings for a while, and keep running it even when you are top of Google providing it’s profitable. Together with your Local Listing you’ll have a 3-pronged strategy that will give you plenty of traffic and boost your online profile.

Pay Per Click can also give you valuable information on your clients, what terms they search for what works etc and you can then use this information to improve your SEO campaign. For example you can find out terms that people are searching for that you have overlooked in your SEO campaign and then take advantage of this, particularly if your competitors have missed these.

Time management is an issue so I’ve left out some of the Social media avenues you could go down etc. that can be quite labour intensive, but joining a forum where your target market and hang out such as http://www.weddingtalkforums.co.uk/ and contributing and building up a network of colleagues as well certainly won’t do you any harm.

I haven’t mentioned anything about client testimonials etc and a whole host of other things but follow these steps above, give the site a bit of time to age, invest, and your site will certainly get traffic. That’s the first part of the battle. Improving the conversion rates is for another day!

Good luck.