Internet Marketing Blog » On Page Search Engine Optimisation

Analytics Bounce Rate – Friend or Foe?

Andrew W — Tue, 17 May 2011 10:07:59 +0000

If you’re not familiar with Google Analytics, you’re probably not aware of what the Bounce Rate is, so let me explain it. The bounce rate is the number of visitors who leave a website on the same page that they entered, without clicking onto any other page.

There are many cases you might think the bounce rate is bad. You might ask yourself if your website is engaging enough, or does it make it easy enough to find the content the user is looking for. It should almost definitely strike bells with the question “Is my SEO working?”

Bounce rate can be good and bad…

The truth is, bounce rate can be both good and bad, but you have to do some investigation to find out which applies for your website.

For example:

A high bounce rate could mean that your site has lots of useful information that is very easy to find and is highly visible in the SERPs. It could also mean your site is horrible on the eye and looks spammy causing the visitors to look elsewhere when they see it.

A low bounce rate could mean that your site is engaging and includes other interesting articles for your visitors. It could also mean the user can’t find what they’re looking for.

It’s very hard to tell which of the above applies to your website, so you mainly have to use common sense. Ask yourself a few questions such as:

Does my site look spammy? Do I have lots of unnecessary links?

Is the site mess? Can you say “yes” to “can you find something if this was your first time on the site?”

Are the metas optimised for the content on this page?

Is the page well linked to?

Is the page at a shallow link depth (E.G. www.yoursite.com/page rather than www.yoursite.com/category/sub-category/article)?

By answering those questions you can quite easily determine if your bounce rate is good or bad. You may also look into adding a “Was this article useful?” poll to each page to allow your visitors to tell you if they found it useful.

Asking your visitors is by far the best way of determining if your site is user friendly, so utilise that as much as possible without becoming too intruding.

It’s worth familiarising yourself with other Analytics features as well. It’s one of the most powerful tools you can use with your website, and it’s free so don’t waste all of that information!

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Adding Hyperlinks To Keywords

Nick — Fri, 28 May 2010 12:42:07 +0000

When writing content it is well known that ensuring the text is relevant to the websites keywords is crucial to your search engine optimisation efforts. By ensuring that every page of content makes a reference to the keywords you can develop the page’s relevance and ultimately create greater relevancy for your site.

One way of reaping the rewards of adding in keywords is to include a hyperlink to a minimum of one keyword on every page. When you add a link to a page that is extremely relevant to the main text the page is more likely to be connected to that keyword by search engines. This in turn ensure the search engines can find the relevant information easily.

Although it is the norm for sites to focus on four to five keywords some sites can have ten or more making adding links a real hassle particularly if the links are added after reams of content has already written. If this is the case then you can utilise the benefits of automatic keyword linking tools. WordPress has a plug-in called SEO Smart Links that can be very useful in these instances.

SEO Smart Links gives the administrator the ability to add several keywords and a URL for each one. The plug-in then adds a link to every keyword automatically as the page is accessed by a search engine or visitor.

At Click Consult we can provide advice on all elements of SEO and can help you to develop winning results.

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Tips For On Page Search Engine Optimisation

James — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 08:03:54 +0000

As you may know search engine optimisation is made up of basic principles which will form the basis of a successful campaign to achieve high rankings. These include on page optimisation and link development.

On page optimisation is a major principle and relates to the website architecture that holds together all variables under the on page optimisation. Website architecture is used to describe the main structure of your website in accordance with the amount of page levels built in. This can also be seen as the amount of sub levels that your website has linked into your homepage. A common structure used by web developers is an architecture framework consisting of three levels. For example:

- Homepage

- Category level

- Product level

The main structure of a website is made up of several pages all interconnected by a series of links that join the page you are viewing to others that you intend to visit. This linking is created by using link anchors. If you have developed a linking structure that is organised and hierarchical then the link anchors will be known as breadcrumb trails. In conclusion, if you are designing a website, focus on developing a structure made up of three well linked levels. This ensures that categories and products rank higher and will be found easily by users and search engines.

For more ideas on how you can use an array of SEO techniques to increase your search engine rankings speak to us at Click Consult.

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Are you a prolific blogger?

Dan — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 08:34:38 +0000

Let’s start with an example: According to a survey done through e-Marketer Digital Intelligence there are 27.9 million internet users in the USA that have blogs they update at least once a month. Currently this is about 14% of the internet population. The survey estimates that there will be 27.6 million users by the year 2013 that update blogs monthly.

Now think about your own business blog and how regularly you update that. You are wasting your time if you update the blog once a month. Each of your blog posts is viewed as a separate web page.

This means that each of those blog posts can have its own search engine ranking for the content and the keywords used to optimise the blog posting. Updating your business blog monthly instead of daily, you are missing out on 353 web pages per year.

Blogging is marketing

Your business blog can bring you far more benefits if you make use of every advantage that it presents you with. Yes, your blog is the way for you to interact with your customers and that is great. This is also why people find blogs so appealing.

Yet so many website owners forget about the brilliant search engine optimisation opportunity each blog post has. You can boost your marketing efforts through optimising each of your blog posts for the search engines – also known as SEO.

Remember, the more effort you put into your business blog, the greater the benefits you will get from it. Blogging is a brilliant internet marketing tool that should not be neglected.

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What Is On Page SEO?

Nick — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 08:50:25 +0000

SEO (search engine optimisation) is the practice of making sure that your website is considered search engine friendly. Optimising your website is about getting good rankings in a search engine's results pages (SERPs). ‘On Page’ SEO refers to the content, including text, contained on your web pages and the task of structuring your pages so that a search engine can find, understand and index your website, ensuring that when a user puts in a search enquiry for your particular topic or product, your website is a highly relevant and good quality match.

One of the ‘On Page’ elements of SEO is the Meta tags which are inserted in a web page. These tags let search engines know what the content of your page is, although they must be backed by relevant content, otherwise search engines will ignore the tags. On Page SEO makes sure that your website is as friendly as it can possibly be to a search engine.

‘On Page’ SEO tactics should include making sure that all your web pages can be indexed. Site maps and internal linking from and too different pages on your site help the search engines to find all of the pages easily and simple navigation helps both users and search engines too.

Your content should be unique on each and every page. All your tags should be correctly arranged and must describe the content of all your pages, and make sure you label your headers using H tags.

Your URL’s must be SEO friendly and describe your content, ideally. Use hyphens and underscores where necessary. A good SEO company can ensure that your website is highly optimised for search engines because they have the experience and knowledge to know which techniques will bring success and great search engine listings results.

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Reasons why your WebPages may not be indexed by Search Engines

Nick — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 08:13:47 +0000

As any good Internet Marketing Company will tell you, getting your website indexed by the major search engines is the first step on the SEO ladder of success (although not the first thing an SEO agency will do – but that is for another day). Sometimes you may find that search engines are unable to index your website or certain parts of it.

Perhaps you are using JavaScript to embed your links? Search engines wont recognise them. If you are serious about the placement of your website on any major search engine, create your links in good old fashioned HTML or if you cant do that, build ones at the bottom of your page so that search engines can easily find them.

Perhaps your pages are not cross linked? Some search engines do not find your site from an index page; you need to add text links in your pages which link to each other. Doing this will avoid having only one or two pages indexed instead of the entire site. It is as easy as adding text links within your content or at the bottom of each page. Include a site map too.

Many free website hosts use methods in which they can host their own banners on your site and may cause incomplete indexing for your website. Ensure that your web host doesn't place their adverts on your pages to interfere with your SEO.

You might be using a Virtual Domain Redirection Service. While this makes it easy for people to remember your website address your website will be displayed in frames and your pages won’t get indexed by a search engine and your Meta tags will not get preference either. Give your true website address to the search engine instead and give your redirected address out only for customer use.

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Meta Tag ‘Attributes’

Nick — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 08:42:42 +0000

Meta tag ‘Attributes’ are considered advanced elements on any SEO toolbar. Their purpose is to provide information about a webpage. They are inserted into the HTML and are often not noticable or visible to anyone visiting a page.

More than a decade ago, search engines relied on Meta elements in order to correctly classify web pages, unfortunately not today, thanks in part to constant attempts to manipulate search engines by means of unscrupulous techniques which then led to high volumes of traffic and high rankings.

An example of Meta ‘Attributes’ are Keyword ‘Attributes’ which were popular in the mid 90’s. They became unreliable and misleading and were often used to entice users to spam sites. So, major search engines began dropping their support of them.

Description ‘Attributes’ on the other hand are still supported by most major search engines who fall back on this ‘attribute’ when information about a page is requested. They provide concise and accurate information which gives a webmaster meaningful data to use in listings. It is recommended that they be shorter than 200 characters.

Language ‘Attributes’ are used to tell a search engines what natural language a website has been written in. Natural languages are not code like HTML; they are English or some other known language. They are useful if a website needs to be created in more than one language.

Robot ‘Attributes’ complete this edited list of Meta ‘Attributes’. They control whether or not a search engine spider, or robot, is allowed to index a web page. They also control whether or not to follow a link. They are designed to recognise ‘nofollow’ and ‘noindex’ commands. Robot ‘Attributes’ are supported by many of the major search engines.

A professional SEO company can ensure that your web pages all carry the correct meta information to optimise them for search engines to easy find, index and rank. As part of a comprehensive website optimisation, this will help to maximise your online visibility.

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On Page SEO: Finding the keyword / Readability Balance

Dan — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 15:51:52 +0000

You have complete control over your on page search engine optimisation and that gives you great scope for integrating carefully researched keywords into your content. However we will probably all have seen those websites in which the keywords are so overused that the text becomes virtually unreadable, or it is so poorly written that it simply doesn’t make sense. These are traps which are easy to fall into when trying to boost your keyword density, but neither search engines nor potential customers enjoy badly written content.
Having more than one keyword or keyword phrase can help when writing your web page content, but the placement of the keywords is vital when considering user experience because the best websites are those which are easy to understand and yet informative. There is no point raising your website in the search engine rankings through using repeated keywords if once a user clicks on your site, they can’t easily find the information they need because the content is badly written.

Constructing simple sentences and focusing more on how the text reads is a good place from which to start your content. You can then go back over your content looking for natural places to insert your keywords. Paragraphs or articles that start and/or end with your keywords can be useful, but not every single time.

The best way to write good quality content is to know your subject very well, but bear in mind that the user may not. Always proof read your content and if possible, get someone else’s fresh pair of eyes to do so too. This way you have the best chance of finding the ideal balance between keywords and readability.

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Quality SEO Content

Dan Taylor — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 10:12:19 +0000

On page optimisation is one aspect of SEO that you have direct and complete control over. Following keyword research to identify the best keywords for each of your pages, you should proceed to optimise every aspect of a page. That doesn't mean cramming the keywords in at every given opportunity but it does include the provision of good quality, keyword optimised content pages. The better the quality of the content the more likely that your visitors will become sales and the more likely you will generate organic links from other websites.

Good quality SEO content should not only include your main keywords but also variations and different inflexions. This includes the addition of semantically or topically related keywords because these are highly valued by search engines looking for the best pages to rank highly. Writing natural website content is the process most desired by search engines but it certainly doesn't hurt to include your keywords throughout the content as you write it.

High quality SEO content not only helps to generate visitors in the first place but it can help to convert those visitors into sales. SEO is a desirable method of generating traffic but it is essentially a means to an end, with the end being the sale of a product or service, or the performance of any other desired action on the pages of your website. Search engines like to see good quality SEO content and will reward you with improved rankings and more targeted traffic for your site.

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Get Blogging Towards SEO Success

Dan Taylor — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 08:53:13 +0000

Search engines and human visitors like websites that are filled with unique, high quality content. Adding new pages regularly can also help improve search rankings while enabling a website owner to target more keywords and generate more traffic and conversions. As such, a topical blog can be used to greatly improve SEO efforts and has some advantages of its own.

Solid blogging, whether for SEO or any other purpose, requires the addition of regular content. Some blogs offer weekly posts, others daily or even more frequently. The more regularly a post is added the more often the search engine spiders will crawl to your website and index new pages. This means that the more frequently you post, the quicker your new pages and posts will get indexed.

Blogs offer other websites a reason to link to you. In SEO, building links is one of the most important ingredients to success. The blogosphere likes to spread the links and particularly popular blog posts can generate masses of links for very little direct effort but only if that site is already attracting decent traffic levels.

More pages means the opportunity to target more SEO keywords. Internal links can also help boost ailing pages and they direct traffic to the most relevant pages of your site. Blogs are quite unique in the benefits that they provide and a majority of successful SEO campaigns will involve blogging to some degree or another. A simple, regularly updated blog can prove enough to give a website a real injection of search engine traffic.

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