But unfortunately many companies launch a website, and then begin marketing it. What they have done in essence is make their website another product that they need to promote. Your website should do the marketing for your company, not the other way around.

So when developing your website expect it to help grow and increase your exposure as you constantly create and publish high-value content that your customers or clients would love, therefore over time gaining backlinks and growing your search engine rankings, and therefore your leads or sales.

By performing two simple tasks you can go a long way towards making your website work for you. First of all, as I mentioned above, make sure that it contains compelling, valuable content for your visitors to read, and then ensure that search engines can crawl and index it as effectively as possible.

Then work on getting other sites to link to you. The more popular the site linking to you is, the better your traffic will be for a couple of reasons. The search engines award high rankings to sites that are linked to by a diverse range of other sites.

Even though your website is unique to your product or service, there are good design practices that should be implemented on all successful websites. Obviously your target customer and your product dictate a lot about the form and function of your website, but there are certain characteristics that most successful websites share. Some of these main points are discussed below.

Home Page
You home page is like the reception area for your business. It is the first impression that a customer gets when they enter your site. A visitor may find your website through another page with the help of a search engine, but it is the front door to your online business. As such, you need it to do a good job of representing you and it should make the customer want to continue deeper into your website and hopefully do business with you.

Not only is your site’s home page a visitor’s first impression of your online business, but it should also accomplish a few goals, namely:

• Display Branding – Your site’s home page should reinforce your brand. You want to use this opportunity to display any graphic images or logos that your company uses to identify itself.
• Showcase Products & Services – Your site’s home page outlines your product line or your services for the customer at a glance. From your site’s home page they can delve further into the details of a specific product or service, but they should be able to take a quick look at your website’s home page and know what your company has to offer.
• Generate Interest – Your site’s home page needs to not only display your products and services in a quick overview format, but also the page content and presentation needs to be interesting. It has to grab the visitor’s attention and hold them there long enough for them to appreciate what you can offer them. You can gauge the effectiveness of the page’s effectiveness by monitoring your site analytics Bounce Rate percentage. High bounce rates means that you should change and test your page using a testing tool such as Conversion Chicken or Google Website Optimiser.
• Convey Trust – You site’s home page needs to present a solid, trustworthy first impression. If it is too flashy or gimmicky it will not convey that element of trust that you want your customer to have. You know that you are trustworthy, but your visitor has to take a leap of faith and give you a chance. Make it easy for them by having a thoughtful, solid home page.

About Us Page
Your website’s About Us web page helps a visitor get to know you and your company. The type of information that you want to include on this page are things like how long you have been in business; how much experience you have; what business organisations you belong to; what guarantees you offer; any specific training or special talents that you bring to the table, and it is an excellent place to introduce your staff, if you have any.

Your site’s About Us web page helps you be a tangible entity in the customer’s mind. Think of it like the conversation that you might have with a retail customer as they are checking out. They are learning a little bit about you and your company, and they feel good when they walk away. This page should build confidence in your customer.

Contact Us Page
Your site’s Contact Us web page should only request minimal information (name, email, phone, message) for the user to contact you, as this is an important conversion event. This page is also a good place to include your businesses hours of operation and hours for phone support if different. For example, while office hours may be 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday to Friday, you may offer customer support from 6:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. every day. Your Contact Us page is the perfect place to display this information.

Products & Services
If your site sells goods and services, then you need to have pages dedicated to product description details and photos. If you only offer a single product or service, then you may be able to include this information on your home page, otherwise you will need to detail the information on your product and services pages.

Your Product and Services pages should be complete with every detail that you customer may want to know or see about a product including color, style, price, size and specifications along with photos including zoom capabilities to showcase product details. The design of your product page should be clean, easy to read and easy to navigate, and of course (and this may be stating the obvious but its not obvious to some people!) should feature a conversion event, i.e. “add to cart”, or a contact form.

Site Navigation
When you are designing your site you want to take the time to look at it from your visitor’s point of view. Site navigation should be intuitive. You never, ever want a customer or visitor to get tangled up or lost in your site. You also absolutely do not want a customer to click any link on your site only to end up in the middle of someone else’s site, unless that is expressly intended; think of this: do you really want to go to all the effort of attracting a visitor to your site only to have them invited to leave it?

A well-constructed site lets the user move easily throughout, and it offers a sitemap so they can quickly find whatever they need.

Here are a few things to designing the navigation for your website.
• Be Consistent – The navigation buttons or tabs should be in the same place on each of your web pages, and they should look the same. Whether you use buttons or drop down tabs, you want to be consistent throughout your site.

• Be Obvious – This is where a sitemap can really come in handy. At a glance your customer can tell not only where they are, but also where they want to go. You can also use breadcrumb trails/links to remind customers where they came from. Whatever method you choose, be consistent and try to make it virtually impossible for anyone to get confused and lost in your web pages.

• Be Helpful – Again the sitemap comes in hand to allow customer to get a good overview of where everything is on your site. You do not want customers to have to dig around for what they need. Consistent section headings throughout your navigation can help a customer find what they are looking for. Another helpful feature that you may want to include in you website is a site search, but if you include it, make sure that it works properly, and also make sure you track it’s usage in Google Analytics

Putting It All Together
If a website is well constructed not only will it be easier for the customer to use, but it will be simpler for you to maintain as well. When you are using your website to broaden the reach of your company regular maintenance is absolutely necessary to keep your website up to date and functioning properly. So when you make the commitment to go online, take the time to design a visitor friendly site that will keep your customers coming back time and time again.

“In addition to Sale & Hire, our Contracts Department works with many of Ireland’s major building contractors to supply and erect scaffolding…”

“Scaffolding Formwork in Ireland, find whatever you need wherever you need it…”

“keycons003 / keycons003x34 20/08/2009 02:17:38 / A3 / B4 / 0.3603516, 66.249.65.21514. Scaffolding Erectors And Hirers, Ireland…”

Would you agree that these leave a lot to be desired?

Frequently website owners pay little to no attention to the composition of their website’s meta descriptions. All too often the descriptions are incomplete or poorly written. Meta descriptions are one of the key elements in optimizing your website’s content. When creating your website’s meta descriptions remember to use accurate descriptive nouns and adjectives rather than generalizations because they will prove much more effective in providing an accurate description of your website to your potential visitor and the search algorithms will rank your site higher.

An example of some empty phrases or less successful phrases can be found in Top Gobbledygook Phrases list compiled by David Meerman. Some examples of really bad meta descriptions are cutting edge, innovative, robust, value added, flexible, results focused, unparalleled and world class. All of these phrases do not actually say anything specific about a product or service. They are all very general phrases, and by making the description so general, it actually ends up saying nothing at all.

Specific Meta Descriptions are best

Good meta description phrases need to be specific about the product’s benefit for the customer. When you are thinking about the meta descriptions for your website, look at your product like you are your customer. What would make you click on a link to the product? What kind of benefit are you looking for from the product? What makes one version of the product superior to another? These are the types of questions that you want to answer before writing the meta descriptions for your website.

For example, does your product last longer than its competitors? Is your product a higher quality or does a service offer more integrity? Do you offer a bigger bang for the customer’s buck?

Once you zero in on the top reasons that your customer would want your product over your competition’s product, you can construct a really good meta description for your website. Here are some examples of the types of things that a customer may find valuable when considering your product.

• An offer – 25% off through the end of the month, Free with purchase of
• Associations – Approved by the BBB, or accredited by, authorized dealer, board certified, Winners of the … Award
• Time – Established 1972, Serving the Community Since 1959
• Expertise – Factory Trained
• Guarantee – Lifetime Guarantee, One Year Guarantee, Low Price Guarantee
• Service – Overnight Delivery, Easy Returns, Replacement Parts Included, Same Day Shipping
• Track Record – More than 1 Million Sold, Over 20,000 Satisfied Customers, Over 1,000 listings

The meta descriptions that you use can also be repeated throughout your website. For example, in a service industry it is important for customers to know that you stand behind your work. So adding the BBB reference in your meta description is a great idea. Then including the BBB logo on your website will repeat the guarantee in the customer’s mind. It is a small addition to your site that could potentially gain new customers for your business every day.

1. The analytics data is not available in real-time, you have to wait until midnight passes the next day to see yesterday’s data
2. The data is not yours – it’s Google’s – and for all of the clean image that Google has (“don’t be evil”), forgive me when I say that I prefer to have my own copy of my website trend and visitor data.
3. Google Analytics works by including a JavaScript snippet in your pages, but search engine spiders (“crawlers”) don’t execute JavaScript when they load your site’s pages, so their visits aren’t logged by Google Analytics. So when spiders from GoogleBot, Inktomi (Yahoo), Bing (Microsoft’s new search engine), Ask and Baidu crawl your site, you know absolutely zero about it from looking at your GA reports.

To track these visitors that in the vast majority of cases go totally unnoticed, you need a server-side scripting package that logs all visits to a database, including search engine spiders. There are a few free ones out there, and one of the best of these is CrawlTrack – freely available to download at http://www.crawltrack.net/

The install for CrawlTrack is reasonably straightforward, and can be completed in a few minutes. All you need to do is upload the CrawlTrack files to a new directory on your hosting account, create a new database on your hosting account’s MySQL server, include a piece of CrawlTrack PHP code in your website code (in a header file, or another appropriate file, as indicated by the CrawlTrack documentation) and go through the automated installation procedure.

CrawlTrack does not interfere with Google Analytics, you can run them side-by-side no problem, and enables you to see which spiders are crawling your site and how often. Here’s a screenshot of the “Crawlers” activity view from one of my new websites just taken today.

This data shows the percentage of visits from certain spiders. A table at the bottom shows how often each spider is crawling your site, broken down by each individual spider. Note: a “Visit” is one individual page load by the spider.

You can click on the name of the spider (e.g. GoogleBot) to drill down into detailed crawl stats for that specific robot. This view will give you individual crawl stats for each page of the site crawled, as well as stats into what percentage of your site pages were not crawled.

This is great data for SEO as it shows the regard by which the search engines are giving to your site. This is very useful if you are publishing new content on your site, or updating it, and you want to see when the new content is indexed by the search engines, therefore enabling you to monitor the effectiveness of site changes, e.g. you update your site with a special offer, and wait patiently for enquiries to come in. But the thing is that you don’t know when the search engines will index the new content. With CrawlTrack, you can see exactly when this new content is indexed, therefore giving you the ability to correlate the offer with the response more accurately.

With CrawlTrack, you will also be able to see trends in your website crawl data that indicates interest from the search engines because of SEO activities like inbound link-building.

Then comparing your CrawlTrack data with your Google Analytics data may give you interesting correlates.

All comments welcome!

For example, a search on Google.ie as follows “online marketing cavan” yields the following results:

This is a massive boon to local businesses, especially those who have a website which can be displayed in the Google Local Business Search result.

So those business who may not have known how local Internet search has become will be pleased to find out that Google is favoring local business listings in their ever developing search algorithm.

Most businesses in Ireland are unaware of how uncompetitive local search is for their business niche. And this makes it even more tantalising to get into the online game. At a time when businesses are feeling the pinch and looking at new ways to market in a cost effective way, this subject is more relevant than ever.

I think I’ll write a post in a few days just on this subject.

Till then, take care.

The name of the tool is Wonder Wheel and is available under the “Show Options” link to the top left of the main search results pane. Check out the screenshot below to see how to access it.

Now you get a sub-menu where there are loads of interesting filters for your previous search query, “fancy dress” in this case. There’s a Videos filter, Forums and Reviews filters and time filters which are useful for your average searcher. For SEO’s and keyword research though, the tool we’re interested in is the “Wonder Wheel” down near the bottom.

Ok now click on that baby and now we have a flash and ajax-ified wheel display which may resurrect memories of Set Theory in Maths class, showing search terms harvested from real search trend data in the Google database, which are related to the search term you had originally typed in. So for our original search term, “fancy dress”, we have the following:

We can click on any branch keyword from this star display to display both further search terms related to the branch keyword, which will also display new search results for the term we click on.

So how do we use this tool to help us with our keyword research and campaign setup? Well, we can start with a root keyphrase, such as “fancy dress” as we have in our example above, and split each of the keywords in the Wonder Wheel legs into their own ad group, using phrase and exact matching options. Of course this will also save us time, helping us to find keywords for our campaigns that we may not have found for a while through using analytics (see Building a Deep Keyword Google AdWords Campaign Without Third-Party Tools), or ever. Another great use of this tool is that it can help you to identify negative keywords for your ad groups.

This tool could also help us in a big way with how to lay out a website, helping to define hierarchy and categories etc, using a layout reflecting how the data is presented in the Wonder Wheel results.

Only certain users have been selected to test the prototype for this feature, so if it isn’t available to you then all you need to do to get it is to go to Google.com and paste the following Javascript snippet into your browser address bar and then hit enter:javascript:void(document.cookie="PREF=ID=4a609673baf685b5:TB=2:LD=en:CR=2:TM=1227543998:LM=1233568652:DV=AA:GM=1:IG=3:S=yFGqYec2D7L0wgxW;path=/; domain=.google.com");

So that’s it in a nutshell. Please do comment, ask questions, bookmark and subscribe to updates. Till next time, take care.

This can give you a crystal-clear view of what pages in the checkout process of your online store are literally losing you sales hand over fist. This post is an adjunct to an earlier post on this blog which is at http://webreach.ie/blog/checkout-goal-and-funnel-analytics-where-are-we-losing-sales-on-our-online-store/.

Once you can then see which culprit pages are scaring your customers away (just as they have taken out their credit card), you are thus armed with the knowledge of which pages need changing in order to boost your conversion rate and therefore your sales.

Ok so when you log in to your Google Analytics account, click on the website profile name that you want to add the goal and funnel tracking to, and on the next page click the the “Edit” link on the right hand side of the website profile. Next appears the website profile for your Zen Cart site. Click on the “Edit” link for the first available “Conversion Goals and Funnel” profile.

Next, enter in the data into the required fields as shown in the screenshot below.

So firstly, you have an Active Goal, then use the Head Match option with the Goal URL (the checkout_success page), name the Goal something like “Checkout Complete” and then fill in the details for the checkout Funnel, which starts with the “login” page, then the checkout_shipping page, then the checkout_payment page and then the checkout_confirmation page. The Goal URL should be the exact same value as the one entered at the top of the page.

If your site is not built on Zen Cart, just replace the URL’s in the sample above with those from your site, starting with the URL of the first page which begins the checkout process, and the Goal URL being the page URL which is displayed to the user when they have completed payment (the “thank you” page). Make sure to leave out the dynamic query parameters part of the URL (i.e. everything after the “?” in the URL).

So that’s it, click “Save Changes” and you’re all set! Now you will be able to view all of the Google Analytics Goals reports for this website profile. It will take a day or so before any data is available of course, and may take a week or two before you have enough data to make accurate judgements about what needs changing.

Make special use of the “Funnel Visualisation” report which is shown in my previous post at http://webreach.ie/blog/checkout-goal-and-funnel-analytics-where-are-we-losing-sales-on-our-online-store/. This is a very powerful chart showing visitor behaviour in your checkout funnel, visitor entry and exit points etc. and will show you what pages along the way in the checkout process that people are abandoning their purchase, giving you vital information about changes you need to make to your site pages.

Your questions, comments and feedback are welcome, and please do bookmark these posts and share the link love!

In a blog post back in March, (“First Things First – Examine the Analytics Data & Establish the Facts” I wrote about a friend of mine who has an ecommerce website which had a fair bit of traffic but not many sales.

Since then we put a Google Analytics Goal Funnel in place on the checkout funnel pages to examine what site users were doing when they got to the point of checking out on the site. A screenshot of a one-month view of the funnel is below.

This shows us that almost 9 out of 10 people who click on the “Check Out” button abandon the process along the way. See that only 18 of the 90 people who attempted to check out proceeded on to step 2 of the process, i.e. 72 people abandoned the check out on the “Login/Create Account” page. So we have an almost 90% funnel abandonment rate!

So this Login/Create Account page is the major culprit, causing the loss of 80% of potential sales on the site). So we need to take a very good look at this page and redesign and re-test it.

This site is built on Zen Cart, which is a great open-source template-based online store system. Now the default templates that come with Zen Cart are usually just customised by adding page styling by the web designers who build the site, as is the case with this site, but the overall structure and wording of the page templates are not changed. These default checkout page templates leave a lot to be desired regarding conversion optimisation, and they really need to be changed to achieve better performance.

A great resource for getting off to a flying start with optimising your Zen Cart site (or an online store site built on any platform for that matter) is the free e-book written by Eric Leuenberger from ZenCartOptimization.com. The ebook is available for free download at http://www.zencartoptimization.com/2007/05/09/20-surefire-ways-to-increase-sales-using-zen-cart/. This ebook details ways in which you can change your e-commerce page and site design so that you achieve a much higher sales conversion rate.

So that is where we are at now with this site. We are going to totally overhaul the Login/Create Account page, and keep an eye on the Goal Funnel, to see how the new design performs. From that we can expect at least a doubling of sales on this site.

Other pages such as the Checkout Payment page, also need an overhaul (its causing 30% of visitors to bail, just as they are about to pay), so we’ll implement the suggestions from Eric’s ebook on this also.

We will update this series of posts with a post on how our newly optimised pages are performing, and I will also be writing a separate blog post on how exactly the funnel is implemented on the Google Analytics account in a short while. Its pretty simple really, when you know how.

We appreciate your comments in the meantime.

In AdWords, bid price is only one factor in its ad position equation. The other main factor in the ad ranking equation is Quality Score, as calculated by combining a bunch of factors, the 3 main ones being (listed in order of weighting):
1. Click-Thru-Rate (CTR),
2. Ad Relevance (keywords in ad title and copy)
3. Landing page quality (keywords in landing page copy, structure, etc.)

Then Google takes your Quality Score and multiplies it by your bid price (Max CPC), and generates a number, called “Ad Rank”. The higher this number is compared to that of your competitors, the higher your ad ranks on the page for the given keyphrase.

Then, your Cost Per Click for your ad is calculated by dividing your Quality Score into the Ad Rank of your next competitor (thus, higher QS = lower CPC).

Here is an example of how this works, with 4 ads all bidding the same amount for a given keyphrase, but all having different Quality Scores.

Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian, posted a video on YouTube back in March explaining how all of this works. The video is embedded below.

So this all points to how important it is to maintain a high Quality Score on all of the ads in your AdWords campaigns, in order to make sure that the ad is relevant for the user (ensuring a possibility of making a sale or gaining a lead) and also to keep costs down.

In my experience, it not good if your QS for a given keyword drops below 8. Incremental improvements to QS can be attained by constantly split testing ads against each other in each ad group in order to improve CTR and also by constantly testing and improving landing pages.

Hope you enjoyed this post, please do subscribe to our feed (or email updates) and we also welcome your comments.

I spent a few hours doing the basic SEO work on this site, the same as I would do on any site we develop. At a minimum, the title and description tags are carefully written to target the desired keywords and of course the page content must be relevant and contain the keywords that the site is targeting also. There are of course, lots of other on-page SEO factors, and we took care of those also.  Within a week of launching the site, it is on the #1 spot of Google.ie for the keyphrase “dating coaching” (check out the screenshot below).

The keyphrase “dating coaching” does not have much competition in Ireland, so this was not such a difficult task.  The keyword “life coaching” is much more competitive so more effort will be required to get the site ranking for this keyword, more content is needed, and also a long-term manual inbound link-building campaign will be very useful in this regard.  “Dating Coaching” is a low-volume keyphrase (i.e. very few people actually search using those keywords in Ireland) but “Relationship Coaching” is much higher, and “Life Coaching” much higher volume again, so in this example the competition follows the search volume, which is usually (but not always) the case.

More updates coming soon, do subscribe and leave comments also, all appreciated.

DIY SEO Glossary

1. ALT Descriptions: The ALT description used to describe an image should always contain a keyword. Inserting the keyword in the Alt description strengthens your website?s SEO capabilities and if your graphic is unable to display, the reader has an idea of what the missing image is.
2. Anchor Text: Constantly use your keywords as anchor text for links, including all internal links as well as outbound links.
3. Bold Text/Italic Text: Any text highlighted with bold font or italic font is considered to have more weight with search engines when they are evaluating your site. However, you do want to be careful with these fonts, because too much font noise can confuse your visitor.
4. Entry Pages: Spend your time optimizing the pages of your site that you prefer the search engines find. These pages are called landing pages or entry pages, and they should generously use keywords. These pages should also be the targets for all inbound links.
5. Flash Animation: While it is tempting to use flash animation throughout your website, do not use it for any navigational elements. All navigation text should be keyword optimized, and flash elements are not visible to the search engines.
6. Footer Links: Links at the foot of the web page should make sense. They should be relevant, and they should be easy to navigate. While it may be tempting to include more links than necessary, this is not a good SEO practice not to mention that it just confuses your website visitor.
7. H1 Tags: Use keywords in your h1 tags, and your web page should never have more than one h1 tag.
8. H2/H3 Tags: These tags are used for sub headings, and they should include keywords.
9. Image Titles: All of your image titles should always contain keywords.
10. Internal Links: These links are very helpful to a visitor to your website as they navigate their way around your site. While they carry a little SEO weight, these links should appear on entry pages.
11. Keyword Phrases: These phrases are extremely relevant to visitors and search engines alike. These phrases must be included in the site content and while not overused, they must be used frequently enough before the search engines give a site a good ranking score. Always write for humans though, not for search engines.
12. Meta Descriptions: These descriptions show up in the search engine results page, so it is a good idea to put a little thought into these descriptions. For more info on this .
13. Meta Keywords: This field has been so overly abused that it is virtually ignored by search engines. I wouldn’t bother with it.
14. Meta Titles: The title tag is equally vital for SEO as well as for website visitors. Always mention your primary keyword here. Each web page should have a unique meta title. A title tag can also include a slogan or branding message by using a pipe bar | to separate the keywords from the brand.
15. Outbound Links: These links take the visitor to another website. If they are overused the search engines will penalize your site. These links do not gain you anything from an SEO standpoint, so use them very selectively and use anchor text whenever possible.
16. URL Structure: Always use hyphens instead of underscores when separating words. Your main keyword phrase should be part of your URL name. However, stay away from excessively long URL names because they are inconvenient for visitors to enter.