That’s where advanced search operators and combinations come in handy.

With the right combination of search operators and keywords, you’ll never have to dig through the SERPs for the gems again.

Search Operators and How They Work

There are tons of search operators out there, each one refines the search results just a little differently. Here are some of the ones you’ll find you use the most:

• ["keyword"] – Quotes tells Google to look for that exact word or phrase
• [keyword site:example.com] – searches that site for a particular word
• [keyword site:.co.uk] – searches only .co.uk sites for your keyword
• [keyword1 -keyword2] – Returns results that include keyword1 but NOT keyword2 (exclude)
• [keyword1+keyword2] or [""keyword1 keyword2""] – only returns results that include the phrase exactly how you typed it
• [keyword1 OR keyword2] or [keyword1|keyword2] or [keyword1 keyword2 OR keyword3] – Returns results with either of those results. For results that include both keywords, leave out the ‘OR’.
• [keyword1 * keyword2] – if you’re looking for information, but aren’t quite sure about the terms, you can use a wildcard and Google will return various possibilities. For example, [top * web design companies] also [keyword1*.co.uk]
• [~keyword] – Brings up similar terms and synonyms
• [link:example.com] or [linkdomain:example.com] – Brings up pages linking to that URL though note Google will only show a small subset of links
• [inurl:keyword] or [intitle:keyword] or [intext:keyword] or [inanchor:keyword] – Only brings up results with the keyword in the url, title, text, or anchor text

Examples include:

1. Look for guest blog opportunities for an SEO Consultant – [seo consultant "guest blogger" OR "guest blogger wanted"]
2. Find blogs in the Irish market related to web design – [intitle:web design inurl:blog site:.ie]
3. Find web design sites that are built on wordpress – [intitle:web design "powered by wordpress"]
4. Looking for a photographer in Ireland – [photographer +Ireland site .ie inurl:blog inurl:photography]
5. Test out competition in your market – [intitle:web design inanchor:"web design"]

Using Combinations of Search Operators

The search operators listed above do a great job of refining the search results, but if you’re still finding lots of junk, you’ll want to use combinations of the operators listed above.

So, if you want to search for certain types of sites linking to a particular URL, you can use [link:example.com site:.gov] or for those using certain anchor text [link:example.com inanchor:keyword] or [link:example.com site:.gov inanchor:keyword]

Want to find out who links to other sites, but not yours? Try [link:example.com -link:yoursite.com]

Looking for a place to submit your posts? Try [intext:"submit a new story" intitle:register]

Maybe you want to look for niche directories? Use your keywords with common phrases found on these sites. Try variations of [keyword +"intitle:directory"] and [keyword +"submit url"].

Find Dofollow Blogs

A large number of webmasters and SEOs are always on the hunt for relevant dofollow links. So, how can you find them? Simple! [keyword inurl:ifollow*.gif] or [keyword ifollow*.gif] in Google Image Search will reveal all the relevant blogs using the “U Comment – I Follow” badge. Alt tags leave a footprint. If you go to Google image search and type in your keyword plus “U Comment I follow” with and without quotes you’ll find a list of do follow blogs.

[keyword +"Commentluv Enabled"] or other variations such as [keyword +"Enable Commentluv"] will look for relevant sites with the Comment Luv Plugin. ([keyword +"Comments protected by Lucia's Linky Love"] works for that plugin too!). [keyword +"last blog post"] will help you find blogs that post a link to your last blog post (not necessarily dofollow). You can do the same with press releases by using [keyword intitle:press +release "allowed html tags"]. Use [keyword +"KeywordLuv"] for the Keyword Luv plugin. You could also come up with a search to scout for the “Top Commentators” plugin.

There are many more options out there and it’s always best to test them out and see what works for you and what doesn’t. Ann Smarty has a great piece on using the Google wildcard operator for link building and a good collection of link building search queries as well.

Other reading includes:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/long-list-of-link-searches
http://socialseo.com/getting-crafty-advanced-search-operators-to-find-the-best-backlinks.html
http://searchengineland.com/21-link-builders-share-advanced-link-building-queries-29848
http://soloseo.com/tools/linkSearch.html
http://www.seobay.com/tools/link-suggestion/

Advanced Search Operators Are Not Just For Link Building and SEOs

It doesn’t matter if you’re looking for information, working on a school project, or simply looking to satisfy your curiosity, advanced search operators and footprints are a great way to find what you need without wasting time.

Simply by using the right combination, you can find virtually anything without having to dig. What combinations have you found helpful?

RMS Titanic (Credits)

I noticed that one of the sites had gone from the very top of the results to page 1 – 2 and sometimes page 3 for one of the markets that I keep a close eye on. The site seems to fluctuate if not on a search by search basis then a day by day basis. The positions are fairly stable for other sites as it’s not a fast moving and nothing exciting really happens.

My first thought was that something had been changed on the site, possibly a tweak to the page title, and that the site would bounce back right up to the top, so I thought nothing of it.

A couple of weeks later and the site was still bouncing about from spots 11 to 30 so I decided to keep a closer eye on it.

I hadn’t visited the site, just looked at it in the SERPS. Next I thought that maybe a few of the site’s links had been dropped, but when I did visit the site, the reason the site had dropped in Google stuck out like a sore thumb.

In it’s own block totally separated from content was a text ad. With keyword rich anchor text and totally unrelated to the site there’s no doubt that Google would view this as a paid link. Not even a no-follow. What’s worse, there were more than 1 text links.

I decided to look for a footprint, and searched Google for text to see if this had been a large volume campaign by the buyer. Yes the text of the ad was appearing on other sites, and other unrelated sites. I just quickly worked my way through these and it was noticeable that some of these had taken a hit and dropped down the search engine ranking positions not for their brand but for the keywords they targetted.

One other of the sites in question that I looked at in a bit more detail had bombed into no mans land for it’s own unique page title. The site had decent authority but didn’t rank anywhere near where you’d expect it to.

Moral of the Story

Moral of the story, don’t sell links on your main business site. Know the risks involved and what it might mean for your business. For 20 – 30 quid a month, if you offer a service and rely on the business generated from your website’s rank then you are running a risk that doesn’t way up. If you are going to tempt fate then at the very least make sure it’s related.

Interesting the company in the competitive market that was obviously purchasing links ranks in the top 3 in Google.co.uk for the term that they were targetting. The big company that possibly made approaches to these website owners have broken Google’s guidelines, and yet the small business owner, the guys that rely heavily on the business that Google Search offers have been deemed to be the offenders and hit the hardest.

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.