One might not achieve the desired higher ranking on Google search pages
without having planned and optimized the ‘content’ of their webpages very
meticulously. Basically, you need to work on the titles of your webpages,
the contents they carry, as well as the backlinks from other websites.

Often, webmasters tend to overlook the internal link structure
of a website; the internal link structure plays a vital role in any
website’s overall ranking.

Why You Should Pay Attention to Your Website’s Internal Link Structure
Links from external websites count more than the internal links. However, internal links are important aspects of generating signals in search engine algorithms. In the eyes of search engines, links are as good as votes. When you focus on optimizing your site’s link structure, you can create a clear path for the search engines to access the important pages of your site and also reveal the keywords you desire to rank high on.

What You Should Do

• Your optimization should start from the main navigation of your website
  The navigational links that are visible on every page of your website are the major navigations on your site. The most important aspect of your website navigation is the main navigation. 
  
  Typically, it includes a “Home” link – e.g. linked business logo image. It also includes links pointing to the major sections of your site.

  Don’t meddle with JavaScript and Flash Menus. A good number of search engines would often bypass such web pages in the course of indexing. A better way to design your website navigation is to use CSS as well as standard HTML.

  Don’t fail to incorporate your top prioritized keywords onto links in your main navigation.

• Ensure that the initial link on the page is the correct link
  It appears that the first link on a webpage is the only one that Google considers. Look at it this way; if Webpage A links to Webpage B with “more info” as the anchor text on top of the page, and uses another anchor text ‘buy golf items’ at the bottom of the page, Google is most likely to use only the first anchor text on top of the page. 

  Therefore, if you link to another page more than once, ensure that the first link on top of the page features your most important keyword – the one you desire to achieve a high rank on.

• Breadcrumb navigation may be excellent for sub-webpages
  Breadcrumb navigation can be highly beneficial to sub-pages. Usually, sub web pages are not often linked from the main navigation of the website. 

  Search engines find it easy to place your sub webpages into the appropriate context when you incorporate breadcrumb navigation links.

You can show visitors and search engines the exact location of a webpage by using breadcrumb navigation links.  Don’t forget to incorporate descriptive as well as keyword-rich phrases in your site’s breadcrumb navigation – for example: Golf bag > Golf shoes > Buy golf items.

Now owned by Yahoo, Overture created pay for performance (P4P) basically. They foresaw increase in online shopping, that online buying activities would skyrocket dramatically and that advertising had the potential of getting massive as a result.

Without visibility, web visitors may not get to your site to buy and may not also be part of your list. One of the great ways to increase sales as well as traffic is to place ads that are capable of directing people to your website. The service mentioned earlier, which is now in Yahoo’s ownership enables companies or sites’ ads to be visible based on the keywords that a visitor is using to search.

Your List Building Activities Get Better with More Visitors
A company that desires to generate more traffic to its site can take advantage of this service. More traffic promises more viewing of your site and increased possibility of actual purchase after the visitors must have benefited from the information featured on your site. It would eventually also result in more potential buyers joining your list. It is relatively quicker as well as easier to build your list when you have more traffic. There’s hope that a good number of those in your list may eventually become loyal customers as you follow them up tactfully.

Every business needs high volume traffic to survive, especially traffic that has high potential of translating to actual patronage of your business’s offerings. So, services such as Yahoo Overture – P4P (Pay for Performance) is a great way to make your site visible to targeted traffic.

How Does this Service Work?
If you are conversant with Google Adwords, you would easily understand how Yahoo Overture works. It is simply the use of search-based keywords to put up an ad on relevant websites. The choice of keywords by the surfer would determine the results that would be displayed. You will get to see ads on the result page’s right side when you carry out a search. The paid ads are featured at the top of the ads. The position is exactly what the company or site paid for the listing of their choice keyphrase or keyword.

For instance, if your business offers Dell Computers for sale and computer accessories, you would need to select relevant keywords that would cause your ad to come up when a web visitor searches with related keywords such as “Dell Computers” or “computer accessories.

When leveraging this service, you may not bother much about site content optimization for visibility on search engine results. However, don’t take chances, spread your traffic generation tentacles and do not solely depend on one technique. In essence, embark on other techniques that improve your ranking on search engine results.

Anyway, Yahoo Overture is capable of getting your site listed on search engine’s first result page, but it all depends on the competitive nature of the keywords you chose and the kind of budget you have for the service. Well, ensure that you are not generous with your budget using this service, until you see it working for you. Let me say that search engine optimization still remains the best way to get highly visible to web visitors.

]]> http://www.aceinternetmarketing.ie/search-engine-marketing/is-search-engine-advertising-a-lucrative-investment/feed/ 0 http://www.aceinternetmarketing.ie/google/google-news-the-top-result-on-google-generates-nearly-40-of-the-entire-clicks/ http://www.aceinternetmarketing.ie/google/google-news-the-top-result-on-google-generates-nearly-40-of-the-entire-clicks/#comments Fri, 01 Jul 2011 05:20:48 +0000 admin http://www.aceinternetmarketing.ie/?p=1976

A recently conducted study reveals that it is very important to rank very high in Google’s search results. The average click-through rate of the top results is almost 40%. The cost per click as well as the amount of searches is also an influencing factor on the clicks. What is the implication of this to your efforts toward search engine optimization?

The Exact Numbers
Based on the study, the web pages that occupy the first position generates 36% CTR (Click Through Rate). Second position’s CTR is 13%, third position up to the 10th position gets 10%, 8%, 6%, 4%, 3.8%, 3% and 2% respectively. You can see that the CTR for first position is higher than CTR of position 2-5 put together.

It may surprise you to know that the 11th position generates slightly more clicks compared to the 10th position. Perhaps, the reason may be traceable to the fact that position 11 tops page two of Google results.

There is relationship between CPC (Cost per Click) for AdWords and CTR
Based on the information curled from the study, high CPC (Cost Per Click) on Google AdWords generates lower click-through rate for organic results.

For a keyword that has a high Click Per Cost, the first organic result generates not up to 20 percent of the clicks. On the other hand, for keywords that have low CPC, the first result gets over 30 percent of the entire clicks.

The click-through rate is also Influenced by the search volume
The study further reveals that keywords with high number of searches generate higher click-through rate for the first position – the rate is 32% for widely sought-after keywords, while long tail keywords get 25%.

The overall click-through rate for long tail keywords on page one of Google result is better – 9% vs. 5% for popular keywords.

What is the implication of this to your SEO efforts?

• More than they appear on the surface, popular keywords are quite competitive.

If your optimization efforts are geared towards highly competitive keywords, you are not likely to see much result until you make it to the first 5 results.

• Long tail keywords optimization is a sensible thing to do.

There are several benefits attributed to long tail keywords; compared to popular keywords, long tail keywords are more targeted and the conversion rate is much higher as well. You are likely to generate more visitors via your long tail keywords; the exception is if you are ranking in the top 5 results for a keyword that is popular. Another benefit is that ranking high for long tail keywords is much easier since the competition is less.

For a larger part of the businesses,  it is quite easier to rank in page one for several long tail keywords and this is more beneficial compared to generating high rankings for only a couple of keywords that are popular.

Indeed, high ranking is very important; it is still far more valuable to rank on page one for a relevant keyword to your offerings than elsewhere.

Often, clients consult me to find out how the SEO techniques of their websites can be taken to a greater level. No doubts, these sites are already optimized as far as the previous SEO expert was able to go. However, I usually find out common SEO mistakes that are surprisingly made by most SEO experts. I’m going to discuss the major ones here.

1. Excessively Stuffed Title Tags
   Definitely, you can attempt to incorporate multiple search phrase variations in the title of a webpage. You are probably doing this to be on a safer side in case the search engines may decide to associate your page with majority or the entire variations. This may be effective at times.
   However, I discovered that when you populate a webpage with such multiple search terms, you are likely to alter the main message of that page; thus weakening meaningful ranking value for that webpage’s major search terms.
2. Concentrating Much on Google
   It has become rampant to see that business owners’ websites may have several of their pages indexed at Google, while only few are indexed in other major search engines such as Bing. In same manner, such clients may also be ranking on Google’s first result page for multiple webpages, while getting stuck on third or even fourth page at Bing.
   The SEO world tends to concentrate massively on Google, with the misconception that Bing would automatically work out things on its own. But little do they know that they are possibly missing out multiple businesses by concentrating solely or much on Google. The truth is that other major search engines such as Bing would possibly find it difficult searching out content all by itself.
   If you simply use the Bing webmaster system to submit a sitemap.xml file, this can raise the total number of pages indexed on Bing dramatically. It may interest you to also know that for each additional page in the Bing index, you can achieve a raise across your whole website. Well, there’s more to do at Bing, but this technique requires little or no effort – besides it is fast.
3. Being Philanthropic with Your Unique Content
   One of the most common mistakes I discover in most business websites is this; there’s something wrong with the way they create data feed on their offering listings for the purpose of shopping comparison. They tend to be philanthropic with the few unique content featured on their product pages, giving them away to multiple comparison sites – this results in significant duplicate content issues.   The worst part is when those data feeds get scooped by scrapers, which would eventually result in duplication of those product details on multiple scraper websites.

There are more common SEO mistakes that I surprisingly see in websites; however, the ones outlined above are more critical and should be addressed urgently.

The quickest way to have your website listed on Google’s search result page is to ensure that your website features all that is required by Google. And what are those requirements?

1. Your server has to be Google-friendly, in such way that it becomes easier for Google to index your page.So, what should you do to make your server and webpages Google indexing friendly?
   • Get rid of the ‘disallow’ lines in your robots.txt file if necessary.
   • Do not feature ‘noindex’ tags on your webpages – check to ensure that such tags are not found in your webpages.
   • Also, your web server would not be Google indexing-friendly if it uses cloaking scripts or bot blocking software.
2. Google indexes webpages with quality backlinks faster.Google bots often visit websites that have more quality backlinks pointing to them. Thus Google would be fast to feature your webpage on its search result page if your site has good backlinks that point to it.

   Bear this in mind; you need to wait for a while before Google can display your site on its search result page – why? Here are the reasons below;

   • Technical reasons: it is the procedure with this search engine, for an optimized website to wait for a while before it is indexed. Even when the bot eventually visits your website, it may only crawl some pages and leave some, and not all the pages crawled by the bot would undergo indexing.For the indexed pages, they would be parsed – the parsing process assigns the indexed pages to search queries. Again, why you must wait for a while is that Google would need to assess the content featured on your site and compare it with other websites’ contents, and subsequently rate your site in terms of quality. The entire process drags on for a while. However, if you have more backlinks pointing to your site, the process will speed up.
   • Competitive keywords: getting listed on Google search result page takes longer time for competitive keywords. So, you may need to target less competitive keywords first, then after achieving chains of top 10 ranking for these keywords, your chances of ranking higher for the highly competitive keywords would increase greatly.
   • Also, Google would take time to evaluate the quality of a new website, so ranking on Google’s top 10 search result page takes time for a new website. But as the website gets older and generates multiple quality backlinks, the chances of getting to Google’s result page increases.
3. Make your website meaningful to Google
   Google is slow to index single-page site. Google is likely not to find substantial valuable content on such site, especially a completely Flash site.
   Do not focus on just few pages of your website when optimizing your site, work on all the pages and fill them with valuable contents worth presenting to visitors. Google is concerned with presenting the most excellent webpages to web visitors who pass through it to search for information.

Don’t be deceived, there’s no short-cut to climbing to Google’s top 10 search result page. High quality content and valuable backlinks are necessary.

Before staking out any fund on SEO, your first task is to select the suitable keywords. In trying to pick the right keywords, you need to understand what is behind the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of people’s search. When people surf the web, they are looking for information on the solution to a problem as well as answers to questions.

Here are helpful tips for selecting the most suitable keywords:

• Have a brainstorming session: This is when you would embark on critical thinking to come forth with list of phrases you perceive visitors would likely employ when searching. The list would turn to be your intuitive word list.
• Take advantage of your competitor’s website: Look for the phrases your competitors are using, that are also applicable to your offerings. Another technique for uncovering the target keywords of your competitors is to visit sites such as keywordspy.com, or compete.com.
• Know when to go local: If you are competing for local market, it is better to go local with your keywords – local keyphrases help you rank higher in a faster and easier way. Example of local keywords include florist in Houston, painting contractor in Austin etc.
• Think like your customer, at least momentarily: A customer would enter a search query such as ‘home for sale’, while you may be using an expert term such as ‘real estate for sale’. So, you would need to bring your keywords to the level of the customers, their preferred search terms.
• Take advantage of keyword tools: The free Google Keyword Tool can be useful for this purpose. Also, paid Keyword Service such as WordTracker can be helpful.
• Consider the phrases used by buyers: This is usually 3 – 5 words or longer. They may also include specific locations and refine their searches in particular ways.
• Relevancy: The first keywords to choose from your keyword list are those that apply mostly to your offering. Avoid selecting the keywords that feature the highest search volume first.
• Search volume: After giving priority to relevant keywords, you can now come to keywords based on search volume and the number of competitors using exact or similar keywords. You would prefer to go for most relevant highest volume phrases, that probably feature the lowest competition.
• Analytics: Ensure that you look at your web analytics if you have a website. Check the conversion rate for each keyword. Determine the phrases with greatest time on page, and the ones with the lowest bounce rate.
• Implementation: If you are embarking on organic SEO, apply the keywords chosen for this purpose to the webpages that are most relevant and employ them in the visible text. Use the keywords or phrases in your visible text and titles for articles, social media campaign, as well as blogging.

Taking advantage of these powerful tips would help you achieve outstanding result with your SEO efforts.

Taking into account all the efforts, time and fund poured into achieving top Search Engine rankings and establishing a stream of regular organic traffic, it is high time to get cautious when building and launching a new website intended to replace an older one.

It takes a long time, even years sometimes to achieve top rankings; but if you are not careful, you can lose the ranking in just a couple of hours … and all the effort that took you several months or some years to achieve goes in vain! Here are certain guidelines that will help you keep up with the value of your website’s SEO, and at the same time reduce any likely undesirable effect on your website rankings.

Sustaining URLs and Linking Format

If you have owned a site on the web for some time, then it is wise that you establish some value for it via inbound and internal links. Prior to building a new website, it is very crucial to note that altering the URL of any previous website pages will reduce the quality or value attributed to those pages. Therefore, try and keep up with the URLs and linking structure of the previous website in this new one. For instance, if Google indexed a huge number of your website’s pages, or if your current websites internal pages are ranking already, ensure that you maintain the same URL structure in order to prevent redirecting previous links. Again, if the existing website employs a link structure that is search engine-friendly, the most excellent thing to do is to carry across that same structure to your new website for SEO purposes.

Google Analytics

Most times, a good number of website developers tend to overlook the practice of bringing over Google Analytics code to the newly built website prior to launching. Website developers should be careful to adopt this practice in order to make sure that no analytics data is lost when the new website is finally launched, giving you the opportunity to view the performance of the new website immediately. Also, you can create a footnote within Google Analytics for your new site’s date of launching. This makes it quite easier when comparing the performance of your website prior and after its launching.

Old URLs Redirect

Certainly, it will be perfect for the SEO of your website if the same URLs are kept; however, you may not be able to do this in certain cases. An instance is when certain pages on the previous website are no longer there at the launching of the new site. In such instances, although the link of an old URL is no longer obtainable in the new website, you can still keep up a substantial part of the SEO value; this is achieved by setting a 301 redirect from the previous link to a corresponding link on your newly built website.

Conversion Tracking

There are likely to be new actions with a new website, or modifications to the previous ones. Example is a new enquiry form to market your products.

The old adage ‘prevention is the best medicine’ holds true always, and launching a new website is no exception to this. It is better to prevent unfavourable things from happening when launching a new website.

One of the most excellent tracking and analytics software tool around today, is the Google Analytics. Majority of the leading sites now employ Google Analytics in tracking down their visitors. If you check through the sites that rank high on Google, virtually all of them have the Google Analytics set up. Do not underestimate the utility of this valuable tool, just because the software is obtained and used at no cost. If it is correctly used, Google Analytics can offer you what it takes to transform your website from the ‘usual’ to an ‘unusual’.

The number of reports you gain access to with Google Analytics is quite astonishing. It can be used to optimize your website performance and hence your sales and profits.

How to Set Up Google Analytics

If you look ahead to receive the most desirable website statistics, then it is compulsory to correctly set up Google Analytics. You may follow the below given procedure:

• Sign up for Google Analytics if you haven’t done that yet
• You will be prompted to include your website.  Do that and subsequently paste the provided tracking script on your site pages one after another.
• Next, click on Analytics Settings; have the website profile edited and establish goals for your website. Ensure that you add the thank you page – this is where your visitors are taken to following their completion of your online product purchase form; this step is very crucial and makes a better level of reporting detail available.

Now that tracking code is in place on each page of your website and you have set up your conversion goals, just commence with the analysis of your website in order to enhance its performance.

Essential Analytics Reports

The reports outlined here are very essential in understanding the source of your traffic and the manner in which they interact with your website.

• The Top Traffic Sources:
  you can access this report at Traffic Sources and it will give you information on where your traffic is coming from. The tool generally shows you referring sites, search engines, paid ads and others. When you know the exact source of your traffic, this will help you determine where to target your resources so that you can achieve maximum leverage.

• Keywords:
  to access this report, go to Traffic Sources, then to keywords. This will display keywords that web visitors are searching for – on Google and other search engines to get to your website. Having a solid knowledge about the keywords that are generating your website conversions will help you refocus your SEO to such result-oriented keywords.

• Search Engines:
  the search engines report reveals the search engines that are driving traffic to your site. If your website optimization is Google-based, it very possible that most of your traffic comes from Google. The search engine reports help you know which search engine to focus your SEO efforts on.

• Top Content: you can access this report from the Content Menu; it will reveal the most widely sought after pages of your website.

There are other numerous Google Analytics Reports as well, that are quite valuable and helpful.

Gaining optimum SEO rankings for a valuable keyword phrase requires the adoption of a link building technique that attracts other similar sites to place links of your site on theirs.
This is done using the keywords you desire to achieve a rank with. On-site SEO does not play a substantial role in the success of your overall SEO ranking; however, a well optimized website would need a lesser volume of reasonable links for attaining the higher rank.

The following are top website optimization tips for higher Google SEO rankings:

• Your Title Tags Should be Optimized
  The words that are displayed on the first line for a Google search result, is known as the title tag – this is your head line. Google includes title tags in the elements it uses to ascertain the theme or subject of a particular web page. Therefore, make sure that the keywords you desire to get a rank on, are placed within the title tags. Don’t forget that web visitors often read through this tag in order to decide whether or not to follow the link to your site. Make sure that your title tags are limited to 60 characters.
• Ensure that Your Internal Links are Optimized
  The first thing that comes to the mind of many when considering link building is on how to get other sites link to theirs – this is very essential of course. However, more often, a lot of people do not remember that they can use their own websites to establish links to their site pages which they desire to obtain a rank for. If you want to boost your SEO rankings, simply build a link from your own website pages to other relevant pages. And bear in mind that a larger website plays a positive role in better SEO rankings via internal linking – Wikipedia is a typical example.
• Every Web Page of Yours Should Have Unique Content
  When it comes to SEO ranking, duplicating content from another site or web page is a big issue. If you employ other SEO strategies correctly but fail in content uniqueness, the entire effort is in vain, particularly for ecommerce sites. A unique 300 – 500 word-count article on every page of your website will be a good basis on which Google and other search engines can differentiate your website from others.
• Each Profitable Keyword Should Have a Webpage
  If you want to achieve effective ranking of a web page for your keyword that is profitable, ensure that you remember to include that keyword in the web page’s title tags. Profitable keywords are those with monthly searches exceeding 1,000. Since there is a limit to the number of keywords you can incorporate into a page’s title tag, it is more realistic to integrate 3 – 5 keyword phrases for each page. Achieving ranking for more keyword phrases would necessitate creation of extra web pages on your website that targets the keywords, and don’t forget to integrate the keyword in title tags.

Webmasters are often striving to have their websites stay on top when search engine results are displayed.
This is not an easy task to attain and constantly maintain.
Outdoing your competitors and ranking higher in Google, MSN and Yahoo requires lots of effort.
It is clear to all that top ranking in search engines generate more organic traffic, resulting in spiralling revenues.
This is why website owners are constantly resorting to different strategies that help them achieve better ranks in the search engine results.

Gaining a top rank on leading search engines require a clear understanding of the search engine indexing mechanism.
Bear in mind that there is no determined criteria for achieving top ranking on search results.
What you need to do is to follow the fundamental direction given for a website, so as to be search engine friendly.
On the other hand, search engine professionals proffer different techniques and tweaks that may be helpful for easy indexing of your business site by search engine crawlers.

Your website content, Meta tags, inbound links, as well as the alternative text provided on your images contribute immensely towards easy indexing of your website.
Better ranking is achieved when these elements have been put in place on your website.

Another thing that is essential for excellent performance of your website in search engines is the choice of relevant keywords as well as content based on the chosen keywords.
Bear in mind that if you don’t target suitable keywords, the result you will get will be undesirable.
To this effect, in order to have this issue fixed, there is need to carry out a thorough analysis of your market niche and business domain together with keywords research, before even conceiving the plans for your website promotion.

Website tracking by Search Engines

Normally, your website is tracked by the search engines via two renowned systems:

• Links based tracking:
  Ranking on search result is determined by the amount of links pointing to your website.
  There’s high possibility of attaining high ranking when your business website has substantial incoming links from high authority websites in your niche.
  Quality inbound links can be achieved via affiliate marketing, search engine submission, press release, article submission, directory submission, as well as blogging.

• Contents-based tracking:
  Compared to other mechanisms for tracking your website, this mechanism is complex.
  It relies on the significance of Meta tags(keywords and description) with the actual contents on your  web pages.
  When your website content is unique, chances of your website being easily indexed are seriously improved.

Other techniques of online promotion such as banner ad placements, contextual ad, paid sub mission and social media marketing are also helpful.
The strategies help in achieving quick interaction with prospects.