Mar
23
Using Search Engine Optimization And Website Usability Together
All week I have been working on how to test usability, what is important for the home page and how it is different from interior pages. Before I start drilling down to very specific usability issues on a website, I wanted to talk about Search Engine Usability. It is important for everyone to understand how visitors arrive at your site and what behaviors they are likely to exhibit, prior to implementing a site-wide usability makeover.
Search engines more than likely account for at least 80% of your traffic. Whether it is paid or organic search, unless you have non search engine affiliate campaigns, its through an engine that people find your site. If you are at all familiar with my site you know that I am always preaching to get your eggs out of the SEO basket click to read SEO World’s interview with me: SEO is Dead Long Live SEO! which gets right to the heart of the matter.
SEO is a great tool and along with Paid Advertisement, can account for a lot of traffic. But what happens with your income if you get caught in a Google Dance or Yahoo bans your site? What if your PPC budget gets cut because your site isn’t producing enough leads. What if both things happen at once! That is why I have invested a lot of time in alternative traffic options. Right now the best option for most of us is blogging. The thing about blogging is once you decide to use blogs as a traffic gathering option, you need to keep up on it.
Now that we have gone over the different traffic gathering options, lets get focused on search engine traffic. I am going to break search engine traffic down into the 2 primary categories: Organic Search & Paid Search.
Organic Search Usability Overview
When talking about search engines and users it needs to be understood that there are huge differences between Google and Yahoo (or Microsoft Live). Google is a pure search engine with a clean interface that is centered around just searching. That being said they are definitely moving into the portal space that has been “owned” by Yahoo, MSN and even AOL. The image below shows how the Google home page is before customization.
Looking at the above graphic I have highlighted 2 areas that are important, I also moved the “Personalize this page” and “Sign in” links from the top right hand side of Google into my graphic so you can see it. Looking at the above graphic and knowing what Google looks like, the core reason for it’s success has always been due to its simplicity and lack of fluff. I think that they have created the customized home page not only to compete with Yahoo, but also based on the vast amount of searches they get from the Google toolbar.
The graphic below shows a snapshot of my browser with the Google toolbar installed. Nothing is easier than just typing in what you are looking for and hitting go! As a bonus there is also spellcheck, pop-up blocker and even a translation tool (even though it actually is pretty lame.) The page rank bar is handy for site owners who want to know how important Google thinks your site is by fetching the page rank.
OK so Google is moving from a clean pure search to having portal type functions. The next graphic shows my customized home page in Google. You can get just about anything you need as far as news, weather and items of interest on your home page. I still use Yahoo because I can track my fantasy sports as well, and I haven’t seen a good local movie theater widget for Google. So it would fit in this post I changed the window to 500PX wide that is why it looks crushed together, but you get the point.
As you can see I have my blogs’ syndicated feeds on my home page, I also add other peoples feeds that interest me. On my blog if you click on the 
button on the lower right sidebar it will add this sites feed into your Google home page, it also works for Yahoo.
The next article is going to start looking at how people USE the search engines and how it directly relates to your site and more importantly your site’s conversion rate. Knowing these facts and behaviors will allow you to make solid usability changes to your website.
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Mar
21
Home Page & Interior Pages Usability Comparison
In this article we will be focused on the usability of a website’s interior pages. We have ascertained that in deep link navigation sites that use good SEO practices, as much as 40% of entry traffic happens outside of the home page. Another important factor is users normally read interior pages as opposed to scanning which is what happens on the home page. In fact one of the primary reasons I always create deep links is because website visitors read substantially more content on interior pages than they do on the home page. Again I am relying on the ever so important stat: “Average Time Spent”.
Looking at our 2 groups (check out Website Usability Testing if you don’t know what I mean by test groups) of usability testers, low experience users spend 35 seconds on the home page, but a full minute on interior pages! With the more experienced users it was 25 seconds on the home page and 45 seconds on interior pages. Keep in mind that the more experienced a website visitor is on the Internet, the quicker they leave if they don’t find what they are looking for ASAP.
The experienced group was also consistent in how little they were willing to scroll to find what they are looking for. These types of statistics are gathered strictly by recording the usability sessions, or from the testing document users created when recording wasn’t available. It is possible to gather some basic scroll stats using Google Analytics’ Site Overlay feature. There is a screenshot of it on my post: Website Usability And The Home Page. When looking at the overlay it shows which links were clicked on by users. By looking at links further down the page it is possible to get an idea of how many users click on links down there. Except for footer links (most experienced users expect there to be links in a sites footer and will scroll down to hit them) very rarely are lower content links clicked on.
One reason for the “average time spent on” to be higher on an interior page is due to the relevance of the page in the SERPS. Google and Yahoo will place interior pages higher than home pages especially when they are keyword heavy for a specific topic. That means that a visitor will actually read the page because it was more related to their task. This is yet another reason why it is critical that EVERY page on your site lets visitors know where they are, who you are, what the site does, what the page (or site on the homepage) is about and how it will benefit them.
Another interesting thing I saw in Google Analytics that was backed up by usability groups, was how so much more action happened in the content section of the interior pages. Most sites employ either a 2 or 3 column page structure with the center of the page being reserved for content. THAT is where users are looking for their answers. Most site visitors spend their time on the interior pages looking for something very specific and how to find it if it isn’t right in front of them. As a matter of fact putting together 2 reports on usability I did last year, I was amazed to find that almost 4700 out of 5000 interior clicks happened in the content area and NOT through the navigation!
Taking these ideas and implementing them is going to be the focus on the next articles. Now that we know how and why users look at the home page and interior pages, as well as utilize deep link navigation, we can start applying these lessons to real life scenarios.
Mar
20
Website Usability: The Home Page
Filed Under Website Usability | 2 Comments
Home Page Usability: So Much To Say So Little Time To Say It!
OK. We’ve covered deep link usability and in that post I told you that if done right, your interior pages will be bringing in 40% of your traffic. That leaves the majority of your visitors coming in through the front door. Another quick stat to throw out there is: the users that come in from somewhere else on your site, 75% of them will end up hitting your home page. This stat is lower on sites that have a root blog since more people are likely to hang out in the blog, but I measure the success of a blog directly to the number of visitors that DO go into the static site after hitting the blog.
I hope we have now agreed that the home page is important, in fact it is the most important page on your site. Today I am going to lay out some strategies to make the most out of your home page. One of the most fascinating stats I follow in analytics is “average time spent on”. Whether it is the time spent on the site or a page, this is a significant measuring stick of how usable your site is. I use Google Analytics now more than ever. In fact I used to resell Web Side Story and have been using that for years, but Google Analytics (it used to be Urchin before they bought it out) has really hit their stride. If for some crazy reason you aren’t tracking your website stats you really need to!
Looking back to my post about usability testing I told you how I break users down into 2 groups: experienced and not experienced. In plowing through 5 years of different usability tests in preparation for a major project (and for this blog series) I found some interesting facts. The average home page visit for an experienced user was 1o seconds less it was for the lesser experienced user! That means that the more a user uses the Internet the less patience they have with bad usability.
Looking at some general statistics available on the web as well as my own, I feel comfortable with the stat: 30 seconds is all you get! This isn’t TV after all, people are using the Internet as a tool more and more as their experience grows. Visitors don’t log on to space out after a hard day. Most content experts agree that all your pages, but more importantly your home page needs to be set up so visitors can scan a page, because they don’t READ it. My game plan is to keep the upper 700 pixels clear and concise, then put the paragraphs below for the search engines. Keep in mind that there is a limit to how much a page will be spidered.
30 seconds: A Home Page Usability Lifetime
Alright so you have half a minute, what are you going to do with it? Here are some of the primary things I try to communicate to a new visitor:
- What website they are on. (I know that sounds ridiculous, but you would be surprised at what I’ve seen!)
- What does this site have that will benefit the visitor.
- A quick feeling about the company or site, who are you, what do you do, and most important what is new!
- What choices do the user have and how do they get to the section that is relevant to them.
Keeping long winded paragraphs down to the bottom of the page is a good plan, but what do you put at the top of the site? Sure a nice graphic or Flash element is eye-catching, but you do have limited screen real estate so don’t waste a ton of it on something flashy. The fact is most people spend the majority of their 30 seconds figuring out where to go next, not reading the content, and certainly not reading it word for word. In number 3 in the above list I bolded “what do you do”, because it is important to get that message across, and get it across fast and furious!
One of the best parts of Google Analytics is the site overlay. It shows a picture of your site with little boxes over the links. These boxes show you what links the user clicks on to leave the home page. Here’s a screenshot of my site:
In conclusion it is best to take the most important parts of your online message and convey them clearly on your home page!
Mar
19
Website Usability Through Deep Link Navigation
The Internet is changing. How people use the Internet has changed greatly in the last few years. How people search on the Internet is changing, and more importantly to anyone that has a website, Search Engines Are Changing!
That last statement is the most important 4 words I have written in a long time. Google, Yahoo, MSN (Windows Live, or whatever they are calling themselves today) and Ask have all made major modifications in the last 12 months. As an Internet marketer, it is my job to keep up on the search engines and how they affect my clients. Everyone in the industry knows that all the engines are putting a lot more focus on fresh content. News oriented sites are ranking higher than static sites.
Just about everyone I know in the industry is getting on the social network marketing bandwagon. While that is great for business, it leads to long term problems. I have been blogging for 4 years now and have some very successful sites. It wasn’t some great insight or a psychic vision that led me to blogging, it was security. I had been running some very important forums and portals. They were getting tons of traffic and placing very well. The problem was the amount of hacking going on with PHP NUKE and phpBB. I couldn’t keep up with all the security issues and also moderate all the forums.
It was at this point that I started using Blogger as a means to keep fresh content and give my clients’ users the info they needed. Now everyone and their mother is blogging. Get Found Now uses multiple blogs including Blogger and WordPress. While you will get conflicting information about using sub-domains or even a new domain just for the blog, I always try to get a blog going within the root of a site. I don’t like sandbox sites for a blog and I really hate subs (like most search engines).
The picture I am painting here is with social network marketing platforms included within an existing website, the size of the site is going to triple at least, within a month of releasing a blog. That being said there are several tactics that MUST be included in your overall website game-plan:
- XML Sitemaps - you must have an xml sitemap so the search engines can get a clear picture of your site. Sitemap.org is the recognized standard by Google, Yahoo, and MSN. While you also need a static sitemap for your visitors, don’t think for a second that will work for Google or Yahoo. I generally have multiple XML maps for each section of the sites content structure.
- Navigation Elements - I like drop down navigation with search-engine friendly code. Since I use Dreamweaver for dev stuff, my navigation system is PluginLab. I also firmly believe in static internal links within the footer. If you follow the standard site page mapping that has little or no outbound links on the home page except to a sitemap, then you need not worry about internal link structure since your site will not be found easily by the search engines period!
- Easy access to contact info - I always put address and phone numbers on every page.
When creating a guideline for future site growth make sure you have a solid content guide. Know where your content is going for at least a month in advance. Try to do serial articles and be consistent with your topics. Having a solid outline will make it easier to implement the usability plans I am laying out for the next month.
Website Support For Deep Link Users
A large site has many pages, most of which are also entry pages. I generally try to get entry statistics somewhere around 40%. That means that 60% of visitors enter at the home page, and the others enter somewhere deeper in the site. That is why it is key to have site controls on every page. By site controls I am talking about easy means to find the home page, quote forms, etc. General search functions or home page links and phone numbers won’t count as duplicate content penalties, but if you are really worried about it, put them in a graphic file.
Guidelines for Deep Link Usability:
- Keep it simple! Always have these elements on every page - Company name or logo in the upper left hand corner - Direct, one click link to the homepage - Site Search, the best spot for that is top on the top right hand side. Tell users where they are… at all times and have related content or pages easily visible. You don’t need to list all the pages on your site, just the pages that correlate to the subject matter the visitor is actually reading.
- Orient the user to the entire site! If your site has a flat directory structure or a hierarchy to the content architecture, leave a trail or links the user can follow. This is known in the industry as a “linking breadcrumb trail”, and is the best way to show the user where they are, and how they got there. Again do not flood the user with unrelated content.
- Don’t assume the user followed the same path you would! Sure you can drill down your site and find whatever you are looking for, but you built it! Users can and will take different paths to find the data they are looking for. Always have links to the higher level pages in a content group.
The moral of this story is to create a solid linking structure that lets the user know where they are at all times, how they got to where they are and clear paths to where they are likely to be going.
Mar
18
Website Usability: Testing Your Visitor’s User Experience
Filed Under Website Usability | 12 Comments
Web Usability Testing
This article will be the first in a multi-part series dealing with website usability and how to maintain a solid user experience and still give the search engines what they need. There can be a happy medium between optimization and usability, if you take the time to properly plan and more importantly TEST your site. Depending upon the size of your company or your client’s company, you will need to put together a testing group. The usability testing group should be broken down into sub groups based upon user experience on the web.
One of the most important initial determinations is how to ascertain what level a particular user is at. The criteria for user experience is:
- How many years has the user been online.
- Excluding e-mail, how many hours online do they spend per week.
- Do they use advanced skills such as Instant Messaging, organizing and renaming bookmarks, do they have upgraded browsers, if they or on Windows do they also use FireFox, do they have a blog or myspace site.
- Can they download, install and configure software without support.
- Are they current on the latest Internet technologies, do they subscribe to online newsletters, etc.
- Do they have a customized home page through Yahoo or Google for example.
In my experience with setting up testing groups, most advanced users need to have at least 3 years experience on the Web and use it for over 10 hours per week.
Once the user groups are handled, the next step is to break down a number of tasks for the testing subjects to perform. These tasks should be specific to your business. The actual testing tasks also need to be broken down into both site-wide and web-wide tasks. The fact is if you give users a group of tasks and start them on your home page they will have a higher success rate then starting them at Google or Yahoo search. Another reason for breaking up tasks from site and Web is to also get some competitor comparison as well.
A quick example of some testing parameters:
Client: Online Florist, Nationwide Service.
I took this client’s website over a couple years ago. They had no search engine placement and were spending 60,000 a year on pay per click. I took the job in October preparing for a full on campaign for Valentines Day. That gave me 3 months for redevelopment. I had to stress the importance of testing to the client, who was highly concerned that testing would slow down the process. The fact is that the usability testing made the project go much smoother and by getting other people involved that normally would have no say in website design, the final product was far superior.
After separating 10 users into 2 groups based upon their skill levels, I had them:
- Use the site to send 1 dozen roses to various family members or friends.
- Create custom messages to the recipient.
- Place an order, then change the recipient address.
- Cancel an order.
- Change the order from roses to lillys.
Taking these tasks and performing them from the customer’s home page, and then doing them again from the Web gave us very valuable data about the website and how it functioned. The first version of the site which I had only optimized for search engines and hadn’t optimized for user experience, had a failure rate of 70% for experienced users and 85% for the less experienced users!
After taking the data and optimizing for visitor experience, our testing results was more reasonable with a failure rate of 12% for the experienced group and 25% for the lesser group.
I am happy to report that they surpassed their expected targets on Valentines day by 150%. By the time Mothers Day arrived the load balancing, and server replication changes allowed for even more sales!
Web Usability and Social Network Marketing Platforms
My company specializes in social network marketing and e-commerce sites. Most of our clients are trying to sell something whether it is a product or a service. SEO at one time was the only basket I ever promoted. Our goal was to get our clients out of pay per click and in using organic traffic. The focus was not just on obtaining traffic, but on what that traffic did once it hit the site! Through much trial and error I became a usability expert.
Now that I have added social network platforms to my arsenal, usability has become even more important. Since WordPress is my platform of choice we have had to deal with tweaking the deep linking structure of blog permalinking. When combining e-commerce and social network platforms, the fact is 40% of a sites visitors are more likely to enter the site on pages other than the home page.
I normally use a bread-crumb technique for visitors to always know where they are in relationship to their path through the site. This technique can also be used to give a visitor a clear understanding of where they are on a site at all times, but especially when they first arrive to a site.
Stay tuned for more on website usability.
Mar
5
Moving Website Fast and Without Problems or Downtime
I recently received an email from a small business owner who was having problems with their Internet marketing company. They are one of those service providers that make clients also use them for web hosting. While it is true that having a clients site located on my Rackspace servers makes my life easier, it isn’t required. Here is more information about Rackspace and a moving a website without penalty checklist.
The first thing when dealing with a web host or whoever has control over your site is it to not tell them you are planning to make a move. Yes, this sounds a little underhanded, but they can turn you off in 1 second and then you are out of luck. I have had that happen to some customers in the past where either their hosting company either just went out of business or turned them off. The first step is know everything you need about your domain!
Control Your Domain
If you don’t have your domain information handy you can always do a whois search, rather than the actual whois.com website I use a services called Network Tools which can dig up all kinds of info about your site and the server it is hosted on. Just check the whois button and type your full domain in the box where your ip address is. Here is a screenshot:
When you type in your domain name, only use the www.domain.com, not the http://
After hitting submit, the results will show up on the screen. The most important part is who owns the site and where the nameservers are! The nameservers are how your domain is found on the Internet. Every website has an IP address, that is like your mailbox or address at your brick and mortar business. The DNS handles pointing inquiring computers to your domain.
My site is protected so not all the info comes up in a general search. If you don’t know who has the ownership of your domain, the best thing to do is make contact with either godaddy.com or networksolutions.com if you are in the United States. If your host or web designer registered your domain for you, but kept the ownership under their name, you will have to go through the process of domain transfer. This can be a gruelling process, but the bottom line is if you own a company like Knight Roofing, and your domain is knightroofing.com all it will take is a fax to Network Solutions on your letter head and you will be able to get ownership of the domain.
Ambiguous domains or domains that don’t have your company in the name are going to be harder to obtain ownership if you have to fight it out. Unless your site has good placement and is well branded it might be easier to just start over.
The next task is to get a copy of the site so you can get it running on another server. This can be another problematic step. I have had to completely rip sites using custom GET scripts that literally rip everything about a site off of the server. A database driven site can’t be gotten this way, you must get a copy of the database.
Mar
4
Frames, JavaScript, and Flash
There are a lot of myths and misunderstandings about the way search engines handle frames, JavaScript, and Flash pages. The fact is that pages using these technologies can be optimized for search engines, but each presents its own unique challenges and difficulties However, if you find that you must use them, or if you’re optimizing a site that’s already built around these technologies, there are steps you can take to minimize their disadvantages.
Frames
By using a frames page in a very specific way, it is possible to send the <no frames> section of the page you want indexed to the search engine and the frames content to the browser (humans). The<no frames> section would be your optimized source code for the engine. The <no frame> section DOES need to have logical text that is relevant to what is being displayed in the browser window just in case a human reviews the page manually. The <no frames> area of the page is basically invisible to users unless they use the view source option of their browser. Just remember to keep the content relevant to the page the humans will see. Also keep in mind that shopping cart pages on a secure server that are wrapped in frames from a non-secure server won’t show the closed-lock icon on the browser window. You need to break out of the frame when leading people to the secure pages or they will understandably think the page is non-secure-even though it is. This may cost some sales because a lot of customers DO look for that secure icon.
A Word about JavaScript
Computer programmers who design fancy pages may hate to hear this, but what we said for Frames also goes for JavaScript pages. The more JavaScript, the less chances of showing up high on a search engine search. If you do have to use JavaScript, put the script contents in a remote.js file to avoid impacting your search engine ranking. Here’s how: In your .html page, reference the remote.js file like this:
| <script language=JavaScript src=javascript/remotefile.jsType=text/javascript></script> |
Then place your javascript code in the remote file (i.e.,remotefile.js). Technical reasons again, but if your sales depend on being found, skip javascript for now. There are plenty of other ways to spruce up your pages. In addition, our studies have shown that complex Javascript and Frames in general both reduce sales.
Flash Follies
Flash content can not be easily optimized for search engines, so you put yourself at a ranking disadvantage if you rely too heavily on it.
Flash content cannot be easily optimized for search engines, so you put yourself at a ranking disadvantage if you rely too heavily on it. There are always work-arounds and expectations, but, in general, search engines have difficulty with Flash. As you know, one of the most important ways search engines determine what your web pages are about is by using the keywords in your page’s text. Depending on the search engine, it is difficult to impossible for them to extract keywords from flash files. This means that any part of your web page that uses Flash will generally not contribute to your ranking. However, you can still use Flash on your pages as long as you observe the following rules:
- Don’t make your entire page one big Flash file. Make sure your page has abundant indexable content outside your Flash file. If you are just using Flash to animate part of your page, and the rest of the page is in normal HTML and contains keywords, then search engines will know what your page is about, by reading that HTML (even though they’ll likely ignore the Flash). However, if most of your page is embedded in Flash file, then it will be very difficult for a search engine to know what your page is about, and you will be at a decided ranking disadvantage.
- Use the<noembed> tag. This is a good approach to take if you are simply must create all Flash pages. If you program in Flash, you know that the link to your Flash file must be enclosed in an <embed> tag. HTML also contains a <noembed> tag. This is where you should put the HML version of whatever Flash you’re using on that page. Not only does this give the search engine something to read, but it also provides an alternative to those users who don’t have Flash installed in their browsers. Google is one search engine that has made some progress indexing Flash pages. However they don’t do it particularly well, so don’t count on this to put your site on equal footing with non-Flash pages. You will still be at a disadvantage, even with Google. There are sites like Oprah.com that use heavy amounts of Flash and do quite well in the search engines. But they generally have the same recognition and money to get them there, regardless of how unfriendly their site actually might be to search engines. If you have an Oprah-sized marketing budget and you really want that animated homepage, and then by all means, take the Flash route. Flash pages will always have to work harder to get ranked, whether through optimizing the HTML portion of the site or spending on advertising.
Use the techniques outline above to make sure the keywords you want to be indexed for can be found outside your Flash files.
Mar
4
Use a small Number of Keywords on Each PageEach page would be focused on no more than two or three keywords. There are a couple of reasons to limit the number of keywords per page: Your most important keywords should be places into your web page’s title tag. Since a title tag should be limited to no more than 60 characters, this functionally limits the number of keywords that can realistically placed within it.
If you optimize a page for to many keywords, you end up diluting the focus of that page in respect to those keywords. Each page on your site should be tightly focused to rank very highly for a specific set of terms. If you want to rank for a greater number of keywords, then you should increase the number of pages on your site. This does not mean that your page won’t rank for related terms. Often times, keywords overlap. Ranking highly for one keyword can also help your page rank highly for a whole host of related keywords. For instance, if your page ranks highly for the keywords direct marketing, then it is likely to also rank highly for professional direct marketing or direct marketing services, if you use those phrases somewhere in your<body> text.
Tagging related terms onto your primary keywords like this is a good way to rank highly for the broader range of searches without diluting the focus of your pages. Use the <Images Alt=” ” >Tag Wisely: Turn Images Into AssetsYour company logo may show what you are, who you are, and even state a benefit-but the engines can’t index your image. The search engine’s indexing-bot is oblivious to everything but text. The only indexable aspect of the images is the text content you place within the <image alt=“put text here”>tag.
You can turn all images into assets by placing keyword text within the Alt tags. Here is an example: <img src=“logo.jpg” alt+ “Beachfront Hawaii Vacation Rentals – lodging – villas – homes – accommodations – Oahu –Maui – Kona – Hawaii – Kauai – Big Island” height= “116” width= “537”>
Now you should not expect a big ranking boost from this strategy-in fact you may get none. However, engines have been know to index the content of Alt tags in the past and one never knows when the ranking algorithm will shift back again as it does from time to time. Three more reasons for using for using the alt tag are:
1. The content becomes visible when a mouse passes over the page.
2. The content disappears whenever the image fails to load.
3. The latest HTML specs require that images have an Alt tag. So be sure to use the Alt tag and make it work in your favor.
Check out our posts:
9 Steps to finding the right keywords
Mar
3
SEO Tips: Keyword Density
Filed Under Search Engine Optimization | 2 Comments
Keywords Density: An Enduring SEO Myth worth mentioning is the often misunderstood concept of keyword density. In pure form, refers to the number of times a keyword appears in relation to all of the words on the same page. For instance, if a page only contained one word of text, say…
If the only text on the page was… Eat at Chicago’s finest Seafood restaurant …then the keyword density of the word
Chicago would be 20%, since each word on the page represents one-fifth of the entire text.
Search engines ignore common words such as, the, at, of, etc. – therefore the word at would not be included in our keyword density calculation. Keyword density is one of the strategies that search engine optimizers (SEOs) place too much emphasis on. They are usually under the mistaken impression there is some “magic formula” for calculating the optimal keyword density that will appeal to each search engine.
While this was certainly true in the past, it has largely ceased to be the case. At best, keyword density is only a bit player in the big algorithmic search engine formula for top ranking pages.
First of all, the concept of keyword density does not take into account the location of the keywords on the page. As we mentioned in the previous section, keyword placement is an important element of optimizing for search engine ranking. To say that a page has a 10% keyword density says nothing about whether those keywords are featured in your title tags, header tags, link anchor text, or any other important places to feature your keywords.
Secondly, keyword density also ignores the distance between keywords on a page, a concept known as keyword proximity. In general, the closer your keywords are to each other, the better. For instance the phrase: Your premier resource for San Diego real estate information, …is better optimized for the keyword San Diego real estate, than the following phrase: Your premier real estate information resource for the San Diego area.
Top ranking pages in any search engine shows an enormous variation in the keyword density of those pages. Some top ranking pages have 50% keyword density. Others have as low as 0% keyword density. Indeed, we have found a few pages that rank highly for keyword in spite of the fact that it doesn’t even appear on the page! In such cases, it is the keyword in the anchor text of the offsite links that point to the page that is causing it to rank at or near the top (which illustrates just how important keywords into the anchor text of offsite links pointing to your pages!). As you might imagine, such a large degree of variation makes it all-but- impossible for anyone to determine just exactly what the “ideal” keyword density actually is.
The most effective search engine optimizers use keywords in ways that look natural and don’t waste time stressing over the exact number of times a keyword should appear on a page.
Mar
3
Basic SEO Tips: Title and Header Tags, Body & Link Text, CSS
Filed Under Search Engine Optimization | 7 Comments
Title Tags The most critically important location to place keywords is within your web pages HTML <title> tag. Search engines view the keywords found in the title tag as extremely important since they tell the engine what your site is about. Therefore, you should place your most important keywords within your <title> tag. You should also avoid waiting valuable space with words like your company name unless it is so well known that people use it as their primary keyword while searching for what you sell. Another mistake that we commonly see is something like welcome to our homepage this is useless because nobody will be searching for that phrase to search for your site. It is hard to overemphasize the importance of content within your <title> tag. Here are some points to remember:
- Your page’s title tag is one of the most important aspects of web page design in respects to scoring well on most search engines. It tells the search engine what your page is about.
- Your title tag is what the search engine uses as a link on the search engine uses as a link on the search results page. It confirms to your potential site visitor that your page is what they searched for. For example, you own a Bed & Breakfast in Hanalei Bay, Hawaii Island of
Kauai called Kiluhana Inn. You should not use Kiluhana Inn as your title tag. If you so, do your business will be handicapped, in search for anything related to Hawaii, or bed & breakfast, or Kauai or Hanalei Bay because none of those words appear in your title. You will more than likely be buried on the rankings by more knowledgeable competition.
A better tag would be: <title> Bed & Breakfast Kauai –Hanalei
Bay Hawaii</title> There are three reasons why this is a better tag:
1. The keywords Hawaii, Beach, Bread & Breakfast, Hanale Bay, Kauai are all keywords in your <title> that people are likely to enter when searching for this type of service.
2. The keywords Hawaii, Beach, Hanalei Bay,
Kauai are all terms that are entered when people are dong research related to your location. For instance, if someone does a keyword search for Hanalei Kauai your service has a good change of showing up near the top of the search results.
3. Engines and directories have been known to give an ever so slight priority to alphabetical order. Although this is a minor consideration, whenever possible we start our web page titles with a letter that begins early in the alphabet. Because of this reason, we favor the title Bed & Breakfast Kauai over
Kauai Bed & Breakfast. You should limit your title tag to less than 60 characters (usually about 7 to 10 words). Anything longer and you risk getting part of your title chopped off by some search engines. In the example above, it would be best to place Kiluhana Inn at the end of the title tag only if it fits within the 60 character limit and there are not any better keywords to use in its place. You should also avoid using what are called stop words or dead weight words in your title tags. These are words that have become so common that search engines either ignore them or return hardly relevant results whenever they are entered into the search. Examples include homepage or homepage, WWW, web and web page. These words are rarely necessary information to your titles. Other stop words you should minimize using in your title are the, of, that, is, and, to and so forth. These words have no meaning in a search and they waste valuable character space. However, keep in mind that these words so add to your title’s readability. So if you can write a title with minimal stop words that still makes sense and is full of keywords then you have the perfect title. But don’t risk a messy or unreadable title just because you want to stuff it with keywords. Remember, you may get your title to the top of the search result, but someone still has to read it and find it interesting before it does any good.
Header Tags After your title, your web page’s header tags are the next most important placement of your keywords. Header tags are specified with the following HTML code: <h1>, <h2>, <h3>,<h4>, <h5>,<h6>. Generally speaking, an <h1> tag is considered more important than an <h2> tag which is more important thane an <h3> tag and so on. Since your header tags will become the headlines on your web page, it is important that they look natural and appeal to customer who visit your site. A good example of rich header tags would be something like: <h1>Your San Diego Real Estate Research<h1> <h2>For Buying San Diego real estate and selling real estate in
San Diego, we’re your one stop source.<h2> <follow this with keyword-rich body text> Body TextYour page’s >body> text refers to the visible text on your page. While it is very important to place your keywords I page titles and headlines, it is also beneficial to feature your keywords throughout the rest of your page. Generally, web pages should have about 200-300 words of text with special emphasis on two to three carefully chosen keywords. Within those keyword rich <body> text, search engines respond favorably to keywords placed within style tags such as <b>, <strong>, <i>, <em>, and <li>. <p>the <b>San Diego Real Estate Resource</b> is your source of information and services for anyone buying or selling <b>real estate</b> in <b>
San Diego</b>. We specialize in <b>
San Diego real estate</b>and are committed to providing the expertise, professionalism and superior customer service today’s market demands. </p> Link Anchor Text
Link anchor text refers to the visible text in an HTML link. For instance, in the following link: Free Trial Keyword Research Tool The anchor text is Free Trial Keyword Search Tool. The actual HTML code for the link looks like:
<a href=http://www.wordtracker.com/trial.html>Free Trial Keyword Research Tool</a>
Keywords placed in the anchor text of links on your web pages are given a higher priority by most search engines. Whenever possible, you should work this fact to your advantage. When other site link to you with your keywords in the anchor text of their links that is even better. Therefore, try to influence which keywords are being used in the link anchor text of other sites that point traffic in your direction. This may be the single most effective strategy for boosting your page’s ranking. The Higher Up on the Page, the Better
It is very important that you place some of your best keyword-rich text as high up on your web page as you can. That’s because search engines index page content (via the utilization of source code) In linear order and give priority to keywords found closest to the to[ of your web page. This means that you should place your keywords in your first headline and in the first paragraph on your page, and limit the images, JavaScript, and other HTML code that precedes your keyword text.
Combining HTML Tags We know that text inside <h1> and <b> tags are given more weight by search engines. We also know that link anchor text is also given more weight. It follows that is can be beneficial to combine them, when formatting allows. Example: <h1><b><a href=’mypage.html’>Cell Phones<a/a<b></h1> Whenever the layout of the page allows, we will replace a sentence or two of text containing the primary keywords near the top of the page in an <h1> tag and then bold the keywords that we want to emphasize and make them links.
Cascading style sheets
(CSS) can be used to alter the standard appearance of any tag. In such cases <h1> tags do not have to make text unusually large, <b> tags do not necessarily make text bold, and links can even be made to look like links. It all depends on whatever style you have assigned the tags within your web page’s associated style sheet.css file. You can also use absolute positioning in CSS to arrange your keyword-rich copy so that it appears at the begging of the HTML source code regardless of where it actually appears on the visible portion of the webpage.
Be careful using CSS absolute positioning as it might also cause your page to look very strange if the site visitor uses their browser to resize the fonts for better readability. Be sure to test the look with different browser font size settings to ensure an acceptable design layout.