Archive for the ‘Website Conversion’ Category
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 |
Update: 4/20/08, Of course as soon as I post on my blog about Alexa’s inaccurate ranking system they decide to update their system. Time will tell if it is an better.
SEO companies are at the front lines when it comes to educating customers and potential customers about what is important when looking at web statistics. I guess I’ve hit my breaking point, which is usually when I start blogging, about Alexa rankings. We have clients that ask why there Alexa ranking is so high (which is bad) and even though they are ranking in the top 5 for their most treasured keyword phrases. They have high traffic that is converting above their industry standards, but still they Alexa ranking rears its ugly head too often.
So I want to put this issue to pasture and definitively state that we do not care about Alexa ranking and do not monitor Alexa rankings, other to see estimated trends for pure entertainment value. They are of little importance an not worth the time to view them. Not only are the extremely inaccurate, but they can also give a false sense of security when they inflate your importance. You must remember that unless you have the Alexa toolbar on your site, your web visits won’t be counted in the Alexa stats. What does this mean for the numbers that Alexa shows you? Well, think about who would have the Alexa toolbar installed: mostly people involved with Internet marketing such as SEO people, webmasters, consultants and other people whose job it is to track statistics. These aren’t your normal site surfers and they skew the traffic numbers higher for Internet-related sites. If you have been reading this blog long enough you know I’m a big believer in actual case studies and real data to prove a point. To that end I have done some research to show the Alexa Ranking Myth and break its spell.
The first chart shows stats from Alexa for this site (BigOakInc.com, a Internet marketing site) and a smoothie recipe site (Smoothieweb.com, a non-Internet related site) and you can see that Alexa shows the Big Oak site with more than double the traffic of Smoothie Web. If you were to view or stats on Alexa it reports our site as being in the top 100,000 sites on the web, specifically we are ranked at 94,204. My, aren’t we so important! Now,don’t get me wrong, we have a nice number of visitors, but to think we are in the top 100,000 sites is a bit much. While SmoothieWeb.com, a highly trafficked site is only ranked at 310,192.
Now that we know what Alexa is reporting, let us look at actual site statistics as reported by Google Analytics. If you look at the graphs below you can see the dramatic difference from Alexa’s reported rankings in traffic over the same 3-month period. BigOakInc.com has 20,311 visitors which is a very respectable number for a B2B site. But when compared to SmoothieWeb.com’s 210,190 visitors you can easily see that Alexa rankings are highly skewed towards technical and Internet-related websites. SmoothieWeb.com had 10x the visitor traffic according to Google Analytics but less than half according to Alexa’s estimates.
The BigOakInc.com site obviously pulls traffic from our competitors, webmasters in charge of finding a honest SEO company and research types for our informative SEO blog. And these users are more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed, if only to inflate their own Alexa ranking by visiting their own sites daily. And before you ask, no, I do not have the Alexa toolbar installed and neither does any of the staff at Big Oak. I think you can agree more web users would be looking for a delicious smoothie recipe.
To sum up, do not look at Alexa rankings with any more than an passing curiosity, for that is all it is. Instead look at your site’s analytics and try to see where you are getting traffic and what traffic is converting. Look at the keywords your site is ranking for and how the visitors from those terms are using your site. In short, look at all the data you can around your actual visitors and leave the estimated numbers based on a toolbar installation to those who need the ego stroking of a high Alexa ranking. And if anyone asks you about your Alexa ranking, please refer them to this post.
Popularity: 16% [?]
Posted in Choosing SEO Company, SEO Mistakes, SEO Research, SEO Tools, Website Conversion | 10 Comments »
Thursday, March 13th, 2008 |
Dr. Peter Carr is a long-time reader of our blog and I have corresponded with him previously. He has done quite well performing his own SEO tactics to his Seattle Chiropractic site. He was gracious enough to write this post about his success with local search rankings. I wrote a similar blog post on posting reviews last year.
I am a small service business, (chiropractor, to be exact) and I really only make money when people come through the doors. I perform many SEO tactics for my website www.dynamicclinic.com to the point where I’m #1 for Google searching for “Seattle chiropractor”. But people don’t come to chiropractors because of an organic #1 ranking, they come because of referrals. That’s where I’ve found that companies like www.Citysearch.com (a Ticketmaster company), www.Judysbook.com and www.Yelp.com come into play.
People (customers) want to go to hair stylists and chiropractors because their friends go there, and barring that, they want someone to say they like them.
Citysearch is a better bet in my opinion, as they have linked with Google to add their reviews on Google Local, which gives customers a map to the business location and number of ratings. I’m no expert, but it seems like only Judysbook and Citysearch do this.
Google local is trying to get in on the act, too, where people can leave reviews right on Google. Google prefers you leave your ratings and reviews with them directly.
The bottom line for SEO is this: Search engines exist to give the end user the BEST result for their search. If the search engine doesn’t, then people will go somewhere else. Yahoo accomplished this using humans “back in the day” to review individual sites, and now Google is doing something very similar, as well, with these review sites. After all, Google would love to refer you to the best chiropractor in Seattle (me) and have you be happy with their recommendation. Reviews provide that opportunity much better than, or at least more “humanly,” than any algorithm that Google could possibly come up with.
To that end, I request that all my patients who had great results with my service leave a glowing review on Citysearch or other review site, so that others can see how awesome we are. If you are in a service-oriented business, this is one area you simply can’t overlook in your SEO campaign.
Dr. Peter Carr, www.dynamicclinic.com
Popularity: 10% [?]
Posted in Google, SEO Strategies, Website Conversion | 1 Comment »
Thursday, January 31st, 2008 |
I’m sure there are worse offenders but while researching competitors for a potential client I found this “gem” of a URL that is abusing the use of hyphens in a domain name. Unbelievable.
http://house-painter-interior-exterior-alexandria-arlington-fairfax-va.com/
Hmmm….I wonder what they are trying to rank for? Sadly, it is working somewhat. When searching for the term ‘house painter Alexandria’ they show up as the #3 result in Google (1/31/08).
I thought posting this was appropriate considering Will’s post about keyword stuffing domain names. So until Google quits ranking spammed domain names I guess it will be a viable option for ranking, although I’m doubtful the conversions are very high. I personally think this is a SEO mistake.
Anyone have anything to share concerning conversion with these types of domain names?
Popularity: 5% [?]
Posted in SEO Mistakes, SEO Strategies, Search Engine Optimization, Website Conversion | 8 Comments »
Monday, January 21st, 2008 |
What are the costs and benefits of having keyword-rich domain names? Does having the keywords you wish to rank for in the domain name really give you an advantage over your competition? All things being equal, yes. But before you throw down $7.95 on www.hotel-rates-in-bangladesh.com, consider what your goals are with the domain.
High rankings are great; “brandibility” is better. A catchy domain name will increase brand awareness and is worth infinitely more than a domain name picked solely for SEO, especially if it’s difficult to remember and loaded with hyphens and underscores. The ultimate goal should be to have a domain name that is both catchy and filled with your keywords. When this isn’t achievable, you should pick a domain name based on how memorable it is. You can still attain domain names with keywords shoved in them and either redirect them to your primary website or use them to market your main site.
One advantage to having keywords in your domain name is that you don’t have to worry about using targeted anchor text when building links. This can come in handy in your quests to parse links on high PageRank pages that do not allow the use of anchor text, such as Digg comment pages. Links without targeted anchor text always look the most natural to Google, but be forewarned that rapidly link-injecting your keyword-rich domain name across sites like Digg will look unnatural in the eyes of Google and will not help you in any way, shape or form.
While acquiring a domain name for branding purposes reigns supreme, if you have an opportunity to snatch a keyword-rich domain name, do not hesitate to grab it and use it to push the agenda of your primary domain.
Do any of you consistently use this strategy?
Popularity: 6% [?]
Posted in SEO Mistakes, SEO Strategies, Website Conversion | 13 Comments »
Thursday, December 20th, 2007 |
I am a big fan of Marketing Sherpa and I have recommended them before when I posted ‘About Us’ pages can increase conversions. Well, another Marketing Sherpa study has caught my attention, describing how words increase conversions.
A few months ago I wrote an SEO tip explaining why you don’t want to use ‘click here’ for SEO, but we also know conversion rates increase when visitors are instructed to ‘click here’, ‘read more’, ‘buy now’ and so on. What is an SEO company to do?
How can search engine optimization and good user experience coexist? Both are important to the success of your website, but at times they seem at odds with each other. The solution is very simple, if not well known. Use the “nofollow” tag on the ‘click here’ links and make sure you also have a descriptive link with keyword-rich text available as well.
While the “nofollow” tag was originally set up as a spam fighter, it can be used with surgical precision to increase conversions, without hurting you SEO campaign. (Read more about the uses of nofollow) It helps because it will tell the search engines not to count or follow the link with the nofollow attribute. This means the keyword-rich link, without the nofollow, will be followed, helping the destination page’s link popularity.
How do you use nofollow?
Normal link:
<a href=”http://www.site.com/page.html”>Click Here</a>
Adding the nofollow attribute:
<a href=”http://www.site.com/page.html” rel=”nofollow”>Click Here</a>
Using it on your site might look like this:
Click here for the best deals on dog treats.
The HTML code would look like this:
<a href=”http://www.bestbullysticks.com” rel=”nofollow”>Click here</a> for the best deals on <a href=”http://www.bestbullysticks.com”>dog treats</a>.
Finally, SEO and Site Usability living in perfect harmony, until we start talking about graphics vs. text. 
Popularity: 8% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Link Building, SEO Mistakes, SEO Strategies, Website Conversion | 7 Comments »
Monday, October 8th, 2007 |
This is a niche SEO tip, but if you fall into the category of those who resell products and are going against many other competitors selling the same item you will find this extremely valuable. If the manufacturer supplies you with the product description then it is likely that many of your competitors are using that same description which means you may be devaluing your product page because the search engines see your product page as duplicate content. Or your page might not even show up as Google would consider your site duplicated material not relevant enough to make the cut due to lack of popularity when compared against other sites showing the same results.
Here is a perfect example of how duplicate content can hurt your site rankings and your traffic. I picked a random child’s toy: Turbo Twist Math by Leap Frog. I did a search using the manufacturer’s initial text in the product description (”Be a Math Whiz with Turbo Twist Math”) and here are my Google search results. If you visit the link you will see only one result with the following text underneath:
“In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 1 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.”
Google is telling you that this description is used so often that they are only showing you one result. You must expand the list to see other results which is still only 6 which could mean they are not even including the dozens or hundreds of other similar listings in the results. This is an extreme case since I’ve searched for a specific phrase, but the theory still applies: Duplicate content will hurt your rankings.
You will have a much better chance of showing in the search results if you add your own unique information about the product you are selling or the service you are providing. This is good for SEO but also for better converting potential customers. Feel free to interject your own opinions or thoughts on why the product is useful and include information your visitors might be wary to know. Anything you can write of add to distinguish your product information from other sites will help.
Being different is better.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, SEO Copywriting, Website Conversion | 2 Comments »
Saturday, August 25th, 2007 |
A search engine optimization company can sometimes forget about the little guy. Sometimes working for web sites who need search results for terms that have national competition can overwhelm you and blind you to the company who is competing for search terms in a local geographic area. I wrote a post on improving local search results a few weeks ago and in doing so discovered a new tip: Add Reviews. Or better yet ask your customers to add reviews.
For example I have done a search for Home Improvement in Richmond, Virginia. Click on the screenshot to the right and you can see the #1 search result is a client of ours, Creative Energy. You can also see they have 2 reviews listed. Local reviews can help boost your search engine rankings and if they are positive reviews they can boost your sales. imagine if you were looking at the results listed, wouldn’t you read the reviews? If they were positive you might visit their site or give them call. Every advantage helps.
So how do you add reviews? Visit Google Maps and do a search for you business by name and your city and state. When you find your business click the more information link. (Or you may see a review link to click from here, it depends on your search results). From there you will see a link to write a review. You can provide this link to customers and if they have a Google account, as many people do, they can add a review. You can also add reviews through other sites, Google will find them, such as Yelp and your local CitySearch.com, but they customers will need accounts to use these as well.
So am I telling you to manufacture or make up reviews? No, of course not. But if you have clients who have given you a written letter or verbal review it might be worth it to ask them to post a review online. Give them a coupon for future work or send them a gift of Virginia peanuts. Don’t think of it as bribery, think of it as good customer relations.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, SEO Strategies, SEO Tools, Website Conversion | 7 Comments »
Friday, August 3rd, 2007 |
In SEO, local search should never be overlooked. It can provide a boost in traffic has a higher tendency to convert more visitors to customers since most people prefer working with local companies, even SEO companies.
Here are some factors that Big Oak SEO feels are important and should be considered when trying to get higher rankings for your site, whether or not you are marketing to a national or local market. I have tried to list them in order of importance but it really depends how important local traffic is to your site.
Location in the Title of your Pages
Including your city and state, especially if you are counting on local customers is imperative. Don’t overdue it, but be sure to include it. I talk about this in detail on my SEO Titles: Using the Title Tag post.
Link Building with City and State Keywords
When building links to your site, include some with local terms like we do in this example: Richmond Virginia Search Engine Optimization Company. You get the idea.
Tell the Search Engines Where You Work
The physical location of your site should be on the footer of every page. If you work from home, get a P.O. box and list that address. It is important for the city, state and zip code be on every page.
Submit Your Site to Google’s Local Business Center
You can’t get found in a search unless Google knows where you are. Submit your business to Google’s Local Business Center even if you don’t have a website…yet.
Keep Your Contact Page Connected
Your physical address should be at the top of the contact page, above your contact form. At the very least it should be easy to find and accurate.
Link to your address on the Google Maps and Yahoo Maps. For example, go to Google Maps and then do a search for you physical address. After finding your location you will see a “Link to this page” link. Click that and then copy and paste that link on your contact page.
Adding written driving directions will allow for many local keywords to be included so having this in addition to a link to maps.google.com is a good idea.
List Coverage Area
Big Oak SEO is located in Glen Allen, Virginia, but very few people have heard of or search for Glen Allen. We are in the Richmond, Virginia area so we use Richmond in our footer and mention it on our company page as well as other local locations. Try to include the metropolitan areas on your site if that is what people will be searching for.
Add Listings in Yellow Pages, Superpages & Similar Sites
While I don’t often feel the cost is warranted for phone book sites, if you can get a free listing or a discount because you are already paying for a printed listing it can help to have a link pointing to your site from the online listing.
Provide a Local Phone number on Every Page
It is a no-brainer to have your 800 present at the top of every page, but be sure to list your local number in the footer as well. Don’t forget to include the area code.
List your Site in Directories for Local businesses
Sites like Yelp.com and Citysearch.com are good places for local businesses. They can also provide real traffic and not just higher rankings. I’m looking more into Yelp and hope to write a post about them soon.
Get your site or business reviewed
I think this is undervalued in importance, but getting a few reviews from a site like CitySearch and Yelp is a good thing for search engine rankings. Submit your site and ask friends to review for you. Of course this isn’t applicable to all businesses, but it should be part of the marketing plan if you count on local consumers.
Google Coupons
This isn’t new but not many people are using it. Google coupons was announced in August 2006. It may help your ranking, but it can’t hurt, especially if you have actual cost savings to offer over your competition.
Do you have any ideas or have any advice that has worked for you concerning local search. If so, send us an email or submit a comment to this post. We are always looking for new ideas to share.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Google, Website Conversion, Yahoo Search | 4 Comments »
Friday, July 6th, 2007 |
Why you should use a flat site architecture rather than a deep, or nested, site architecture if SEO is important to your site?
In my previous life as a website designer and HTML developer I loved to have a folder/directory for everything. While I’m not a organized person (ask my wife) I did like keeping my files structured in clearly labeled directories. So nesting directories 4 or 5 levels deep was common practice. When I transitioned to an SEO specialist my ideas on structuring files and site architecture began to change and here is why.
A flat site offers quick access to all the pages within the site. A minimal number of clicks are needed to find all the pages within your site, usually no more than three clicks is ideal. According to the views of the search engines (SEs), less clicks mean higher importance. The view of the SEs are that more important information will be easier to reach. Home page information is the most important, one click from the home page is secondary information and two clicks is tertiary information and so forth.
Think of it like bodies of water. Your home page is the ocean and off of the home page are large rivers and then smaller rivers, then streams, then creeks and brooks and finally the smallest trickle of water is all that is left. Don’t let you products, services or information be at the end of the trickle, drying up eventually. Closer to the ocean is always better and that is how the search engines will rank your pages too.
I’ve seen some site place everything in the root folder and this isn’t good practice either. Structure your sites as to what makes sense, but be aware that more clicks can mean less viewers, both for search engine traffic and visitors on your site.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, SEO Mistakes, SEO Strategies, Search Engine Optimization, Website Conversion | 7 Comments »
Friday, April 6th, 2007 |
Every page on your web site should have its own story and clear message. You must be sure that the search engines have no doubt what each page should rank well for. Do not mix signals or too keyword phrases on a page. If you are selling vinyl replacement windows, have a page directly focused on that product line. If you look at this example link from Creative Energy, a local client of Big Oak, you can see the focus on vinyl replacement windows is clear from the content.. Being a local Richmond, VA company, their goal for this page was top placement in Google for the search term ‘Richmond vinyl replacement windows’. They have the #1 and #2 listing. But we also have them ranked #12 for the term ‘vinyl replacement windows’. How did we accomplish this?
We gave this page individual attention and that made the difference. Let’s look deeper and check out the factors that make a web page unique in your web site.
Title
The title sets up the page for the search engine. Short and direct, this is a good title that states clearly what the page is about to the search engines.
<title>Vinyl Replacement Windows from Simonton Window | Creative Energy of Richmond, Virginia</title>
Meta Tags
While the importance of meta tags is questioned, using the description tag has its uses. And if you are going to use it, make sure it mentions your targeted key phrases. Thr meta description tag on our example page also contains the key phrase vinyl replacement windows.
<meta name=“description” http-equiv=“description” content=“Creative Energy, the exterior experts, installs vinyl replacement windows in the Richmond, Virginia region and recommends Simonton Windows to homeowners in central Virginia.”>
Even though the meta keyword tag is ignored for the most part, if it is part of your plan, make it count and make it different for each page.
<meta name=“keywords” http-equiv=“keywords” content=“vinyl replacement window, simonton window, replacement window, replacement window, vinyl window richmond virginia “>
Keyword Density
I just wrote post on the myth of OPTIMAL keyword density, but having the keyword phrase on the page, of course, makes good sense. If you check out the keyword density for this page for the term vinyl replacement windows it is 4.21%. This may be a little high but if you read the page it doesn’t feel “spammy” so it is acceptable. Remember, you are writing for the search engines and people.
Linking, External and Internal
Make sure you have a few keyword-rich links to your important pages from external sites and your internal links. This is referred to as deep linking and will help your site’s ranking.
Here you can see an article written for the replacement windows with the exact link text we want in the author’s box. For the internal linking, the footer on Creative Energy’s web site contains a link to the Vinyl Replacement Window page with the link text ‘REPLACEMENT WINDOWS‘, a good text link even without the keyword ‘vinyl’ included.
Building Your Web Site One Page at a Time
As you can see this page was given the individual attention it needed to show high in the search engine rankings, but the real message of this SEO tip is that this page is has its own voice on the client’s site. If you view the other product web pages for Creative Energy you will find they follow suit with targted titles, meta tags, content and linking. Take the time to craft each web page individually and take care to spend time on the components I’ve listed.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, SEO Strategies, Website Conversion | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 |
Finding your site in the search engines isn’t enough, we all know this. But once they get to your site, the real work begins. If a potential customer can’t find the product they will move on to easier pastures. Adding a search box or alphbetized links to products can help guide your customers to the right product.
In a study provided by Marketing Sherpas 46% of product marketers say tweaking internal site search is “very effective,” second only to shopping cart design as the most valuable site test.
See how a discount fragrance retailer increased conversion rates with an A-Z search tool that gets seven times more traffic than their regular search box. With the new feature working in tandem with the basic search tool, conversions are up 16.2%.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Posted in Website Conversion | 1 Comment »
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