Improving your website traffic

Improving
your
website
traffic
Neil Creagh and Alan Davis
Pathways to your website 4
How do search engines work? 6
Organic search results 7
What can you do? 8
‘Best practice’ advice for
Search Engine Optimisation 9
Paid or ‘sponsored’ search results 13
Traditional forms of advertising,
marketing & communications 14
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Pathways to your website
4
Improving your website traffic
5
How do search engines work?
Organic search results
Search engines are the telephone directories of the web. They
catalogue the entire world wide web, and allow you to search that
catalogue to find what you are looking for, providing results based
on your search criteria. There are two types of search engine
results you need to be aware of:
Let’s take Google as an example. When a person enters a search
word or term into Google, it does the following...
1. Organic search results
2. Paid or sponsored search results
a. Discards all web pages that don’t contain those
word(s) or terms
b. Lists the remaining results based on an order
determined by the following:
i. The focus and ‘relevance’ of the keyword(s) on the pages
Is the content on the page actually relevant to that search
word or term? e.g. Is it used as a heading on the page or in
the page title itself?
ii. The ‘page rank’ of the websites
Google then re-shuffles these results based on their page
ranking, which is basically a measure of your website’s
incoming links and their importance. Incoming links are
simply any websites that link to you.
Google awards every website a ranking from 0 – 9. Google
places a high-ranking site over a low-ranking one when
ordering their search results, so the higher you can get this
ranking (by getting incoming links) the better.
The ‘importance’ of these incoming links is judged by their
own page rank, so every website that links to your site will
help to increase your page ranking, and the higher their
ranking the better.
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Improving your website traffic
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What can you do?
1. ‘Best practice’ advice for
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
1. Follow ‘best practice’ advice for
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
The message from Google is very clear:
2. Invest in paid or ‘sponsored’ search
results through Google Adwords
3. Don’t forget about traditional forms
of advertising, marketing &
communications
do not focus your content on search engine
optimisation. Instead try to deliver the best possible
content for your users.
Google’s algorithm will try to ‘read’ your content
exactly like a human being would, so sentences
that don’t make sense or don’t read well should be
avoided.
Ensure you have a modern, well coded website
A search engine friendly website is well coded to the
latest web standards and uses CSS (cascading style
sheets) for layout and styling control, resulting in very
clean and accessible code for both search engines
and screen readers. For example, a website using
images for text is not ‘search engine friendly’.
...our advice for webmasters
is to focus on creating high
quality sites that create a
good user experience.
Matt Cutts
Google’s head of search spam
The biggest mistake is not
having your site crawlable
(i.e. searchable by Google)
Matt Cutts
Google’s head of search spam
Increase incoming links (to improve your page rank)
You should try to get as many incoming links as
possible, by requesting links from other businesses as
well as registering with any relevant Irish directories or
site’s relevant to your business, including Blogs that
might cover relevant topics. Ask associate businesses
and friends to link to your new website and announce
your web launch on Facebook / Twitter or on LinkedIn.
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Improving your website traffic
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You don’t want to just say
“Mount Everest elevation”,
you want to say words
like “How high is Mount
Everest?”
Matt Cutts
Google’s head of search spam
Target your keywords correctly
Decide on what key words and phrases you most want to target.
2
1
More content focus = more targeted results
Make sure that your search keywords appear in the
following areas:
1
.
The URL eg. www.yourwebsite.com/yourkeyword
2
.
The page <title> tag. This is the text which appears at the
very top of your browser window.
3
.
The page and paragraph heading(s) using <h1> or <h2> tags
throughout your page.
4
.
5
.
6
.
3
The actual paragraph content itself
(but not too many times… don’t overdo it!”)
In the Meta Description tag*
The Meta Description is sometimes picked up by Google as the
description of your website under the link in the search results.
This should be two sentences in plain English
<meta name=”description” content=”We’re a fami
On incoming links: If possible, change some of the incoming
links to your website to feature the target keywords eg. “Click
here for to see our Capel Street tool shop” or add a short
description with your link that includes your keywords.
3
* Google have stated that
they no longer include
Meta Keywords in their
algorithms, and other
Search Engines (Bing,
Yahoo!) do not prioritise
them - so you do not need
to use Meta ‘Keywords’.
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2. Paid or ‘sponsored’ search results
Other steps
• Install Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics) &
validate your website with Google in the process
• Adding your business to Google Places (www.google.ie/
places) will allow it to appear as a business listing on Google
maps
• Create an XML sitemap file and register it with Google
Webmaster Central (www.google.com/webmasters)
Avoid SEO ‘techniques’
Almost everything outside of the above could
be seen as ‘spammy’ or ‘black hat’ SEO
techniques. Google will penalise a website
(drop in ranking) for anything that it sees
as ‘spammy’ or ‘black hat’ search engine
techniques such as:
We encourage you to focus on
developing high-quality content
rather than trying to optimize for
any particular Google algorithm.
• Lists of words or phrases that don’t
make sense
Paid or ‘sponsored’ results are the links that appear in the box
adverts on the right side of the Google search results pages, and
also in the pale yellow box above the organic search results.
These results are created using Google Adwords (www.google.ie/
adwords). Adwords is a ‘pay per click’ (PPC) service which means
that you only pay when people click on your ad. You set your
preferred price for the PPC and are then effectively in a bidding war
with other competing adverts which have bidded for those same
keywords (in the same region). Whoever pays most (per click) will
appear at the top of the paid search result. You can set a monthly
cut-off budget for your ad. It will then stop appearing in search
results when you’ve reached that limit, so you won’t rack up a huge
Adword bill.
You start the process, write your own advert text and then choose
which keywords will trigger the ads: the fewer keywords you
choose, the more ‘targeted’ the search result will be.
Amit Singhal
Head of Google Search
• Words or phrases repeated too often
• Tiny text or blocks of hidden/almost invisible text.
• Use of ‘Link Farms’ / Doorway pages / Duplicate Content etc.
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Improving your website traffic
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3. Traditional forms of advertising,
marketing & communications
Terminology
AdChoice A paid web banner advertising
service used by many popular websites
such as YouTube.com and Amazon.com.
Adwords Paid (sponsored) advertisements
that appear in Google search results.
While it is not possible to ensure your placement in search engine
results through monetary means (i.e. you cannot buy your way to
the top), there are a number of other, more traditional ways that you
can increase web traffic:
1. Traditional marketing & advertising
such as Print, Radio and TV advertising.
There is no doubt that the more put your website URL ‘out
there’ into the public domain, the more website traffic you are
going to receive. Including your web address on every item of
communication you send (from your business cards, to email
signatures) is the first step. You could also consider running
specific advertising or marketing campaigns to drive traffic to
your website with the call to action of ‘making a purchase’,
‘finding out more information’ or ‘availing of a service’.
Regardless of your advertising or marketing budget, whether you
can afford to place a full page advert in a national newspaper, or
whether you were thinking more of placing a ‘classified’ advert
in a local newspaper, there are plenty of great opportunities out
there to promote your website.
PPC Pay Per Click is the billing model
used by Google Adwords in which you are
only charged when someone clicks your
Adword search result.
Search engine A website which
catalogues the entire world wide web, and
allows people to search that catalogue to
find what they are looking for.
SEO Search Engine Optimisation involves,
tailoring your website to a desired
search result.
URL Uniform Resource Locator or in
everyday language... the website address.
Further Information
Video: A short video from Google entitled ‘How Search Works’
http://youtu.be/BNHR6IQJGZs
Moz.com: Beginner’s guide to SEO (Chapter One)
http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/how-search-engines-operate
Smashing Magazine: The Inconvenient Truth About SEO
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/12/11/seo-the-inconvenient-truth/
1. Online advertising: Paid ‘banner adverts’ on popular
and relevant websites.
We’ve all seen banner ads on our favourite websites. Websites
such as YouTube.com and IrishTimes.com rely on this form of
advertising for revenue. The model is simple: take a popular
website which delivers interesting content, and gets lots of
traffic, and sell portions of the web page to advertisers who
want to connect with that audience. Some websites such as
IrishTimes.com manage their banner advertising themselves,
whilst others such as YouTube.com hire other companies (such
as YourAdChoices.com) to do it for them.
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Improving your website traffic
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Neil Creagh runs Fuel, a
graphic design and website
development consultancy
specialising in web design
and content management
systems (CMS).
Alan Davis is a graphic designer
and brand strategist who works
as both a designer for print
and online for a wide range
of companies, organisations
and individuals.
www.fuel.ie
www.alandavis.ie
Version 1.1
2013 © Neil Creagh and Alan Davis