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On Page Optimisation

Getting It Right With Your Site Design

Coding For Search Engines Or People

Keyword Analysis

Much of the SEO work centres on the concept of ‘keywords’ and their use by potential visitors to your site. Keywords are important in the body copy, which is what visitors will expect to see when they visit your site, but also in the coding of the site.

The coding of your site pages provides the search engines with additional useful information to help them match the search results with the users search keyword or phrase. Keywords are what people are searching for.

Using keyword research tools like Googles Keyword Tool you can develop a comprehensive list of keyword options and search data that tell you something about the particular keywords. The type of data can include:

Search volume - the number of searches performed in the last month in NZ
Competition - the rating of competition

The image below shows an example based on the keyword phrase ‘tennis shoes’. We can see from the example that 1900 searches were done in NZ in September. The competition grading, the green bar, shows that there is a high level of competition for those keywords with PPC advertisers.

Site Design

Site design is equally important as the content. Bad structural design can adversely affect where your site will rank in the search engine results pages. The outline below covers some of the main technical design issues that affect your rankings:

Directory Tree – Try to keep your site structure and directory paths as shallow and as short as possible to flatten navigation.
Site Navigation – In addition to the main navigation method use a secondary navigation method like breadcrumbs so a visitor can see at a glance where they are.
Text Not Images – Search engines robots or crawlers index text and nothing but text. They can’t read images, Flash or videos. The Googlebot can’t understand what an image or video is about. Search engines love text.
File Naming – Keep your file naming conventions to short, simple, keyword rich URL’s. The longer your URL the less likely it will be indexed.

HTML Tags And Images

The HTML tags and the tags associated with your images are important coding that a search engine bot will recognise to determine the content of your site. For this reason, special attention must be given to these HTML tags. HTML tags do not appear in the users browser. They are part of the coding that tells a browser how to present information on screen, and provide a search engine with additional information that is used for indexing and ranking your site.

Title Tag – The most important tag. This tag is displayed in the tab right at the top of your web browser. Also, it is used in the favourites list if saved by a visitor. This is the first place a searchbot goes to determine the content of the page. You should include the name of your site and place your most important keywords in a descriptive page title name. Briefly tell people what the page is about in 12 to 15 words.
Meta Description Tag – Some search engines use this tag to display information to users in their search results. Think of this as a promotional paragraph about the page. A descriptive sentence or two of up to 25 words. They must be different on each page but you can use the same beginning and change the sentence to match the page content at the end.
Meta Keywords Tag – These are now much less important than in the early days of SEO. It is a good idea to include common spelling mistakes, and synonyms. Separate each keyword with a comma. It is common to have up to 50 words included in this tag.
Headings and CSS – Combine Headings (H1- H6) tags with Cascading Style Sheets. By doing this you’re telling the searchbot what is important. Make sure you have your most important keywords and phrases covered.
Highlighting keywords using () and () tags let the searchbot know that the word is important and relevant.
Images – Search engines can’t recognise images, only text. It is important to tell them something about the image using the (alt) tag. Write a descriptive name of the image remembering to include important keywords. Half a dozen words is sufficient. The (title) tag can be used also. This tag displays text when a user hovers their cursor over the image. The (title) is not crawled as often as the (alt) tag so for this reason is not commonly used for SEO purposes.

Optimising Copy Content

Creating relevant , useful, authoritative content for your site is the most important SEO technique of them all. Defining quality content is difficult because it depends on the subject matter of the site owner. However, we can assume that it is has correct grammar, punctuation and is easy to read. It may be educational, humorous, informative, or tell a compelling story.

As a generalization, the more content you have about a given topic the more likely it is that you have quality content and will rank higher than a competing or similar site with much less content. Many high ranking Google pages have 800 to 1,000 words of body copy.

Another reason to have better site content is to be able answer your visitors questions and have a richer site experience. You don’t want them visiting your site and have them click away (click bounce) due to a lack of information. Getting other sites to link to your site is easier when your site has genuinely useful content that answers searchers questions. And you know how important links are.

Creating Quality Content

Quality content is hugely important for a number of reasons.

Search engines want to serve the most relevant answers to their searchers questions. Quality and quantity of content is interrelated. Search engines look at text length and can place emphaise on the amount of text assuming that more information about a subject is likely to be of higher quality. More content also means more opportunity to have a keyword matched correctly to a searchers question.

For a product related website quality content means having full pictures, full description, model or brand background, technical specifications, warrantee/guarantee, customer service, testimonials, enough information to allow the customer to make a buying decision sight unseen.

Content should be presented in full grammatically correct, with property punctuation and sentence structure, and not just bullet points of facts. Google values quality content and will rank it higher in its results pages.

For many people writing is not something they’re good at. That’s when we step in helping you create the right image and tone with your site content that compliments the graphic design look and feel.

Copywriting

Some Copy Writing Rules to consider include:

Your content is written to appeal to customers and prospective new customers, not you. You need to get into the mind space of those customers. Thinking and writing content about your products and services from their point of view. What’s in it for them.? How will they benefit from your products.? Are you offering value for money.? What’s your Value Proposition for your products.?

This is the best copywriting tip of all time - You should be mentioning ‘you’ and ‘your’ at least twice as often as your brand name or how great you are. Customers want to know what you can do for them.

How Adwords advertising can benefit your business.

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Google News Watch

January 27th, 2012

For news on Google from international news sources and their official blogs. Covering Adwords, Search Engine Optimisation and other Search Engine Marketing topics.

Adwords - Love at first Search

January 26th, 2012

More and more people are falling in love with Valentine’s Day. According to a recent survey by ORC International, Valentine’s Day is now the number two gift giving holiday, right behind Christmas ... learn more >>

Google - Updating our privacy policies and terms of service

January 24th, 2012

In just over a month we will make some changes to our privacy policies and Google Terms of Service. This stuff matters, so we wanted to explain what’s changing, why and what these changes mean for users ... learn more >>

Adwords - Create more Automated Rules and undo changes

January 18th, 2012

We heard your feedback that you want Automated Rules to be even more flexible and useful, so we rolled out two improvements ... learn more >>

Coming Soon: Ad Group Impression Share Metrics

January 17th, 2012

Based on advertiser requests, we will soon offer ad group level impression share metrics for the Search and Display Networks. Once released ... learn more >>

Visit the re-designed AdWords Help Center today

January 10th, 2012

Brits, Aussies, and Kiwis: see what Americans have been buzzing about for weeks! We launched a new look for the AdWords Help Center and it's now available in your countries! ... learn more >>

New Tools and Controls to Manage Your Google+ Pages

December 22nd, 2011

Last month we introduced Google+ Pages to provide a new way for you to build a public identity on Google+. We’ve been listening closely to your feedback and today we’re introducing several new tools ... learn more >>

Migrating Conversion Optimizer and Enhanced CPC campaigns

December 14th, 2011

If you’re focused on conversions and CPA (cost-per-acquisition), you may already be using Conversion Optimizer or Enhanced CPC to optimize your campaigns to get you more conversions at a lower cost. ... learn more >>

Think With Googles December Adventure: Mobile Tips Recap

December 12th, 2011

Think With Google’s December Adventure continued this week with a focus on mobile. Here are the four mobile-related insights and tips we covered this week (and a fun factoid): ... learn more >>

+1 button in DFP for direct sold ads

December 6th, 2011

In March, we introduced the +1 button on search results to make it easier for people to get recommendations from the people they trust right when they’re searching. ... learn more >>