On-page optimisation helps you get rankings in the search engines but – importantly – it is also useful for drawing people into the site, as well as making sure that once they are there they are inclined to stick around and buy from you.

Content

Content is king! That’s a much used and slightly trite statement but nonetheless true. The content on your website can be used to encourage people to see the value of your site, and to see how your products or services are right for them.  From an SEO point of view, content also tells the search engines that you are an expert in your field and that you offer value to potential customers as a result of this knowledge.

Make sure you offer a range of different content on your website, including product descriptions, company information, guides and how-to information, news, blogs. You can also include videos, infographics and webinars to make it a touch more interactive and dynamic.

Adding regular content to your site can help to encourage both visitors and search engines to return to your site more regularly.

Information architecture

This is how pages on your site can be found. If visitors and search engines can’t access your content – because it’s hidden too far down the structure, or because your menu is flash or doesn’t work on mobile devices – then you will find fewer people engaging with you.

Make sure that Google can find all of the pages on your site and that none of your pages are orphaned. Orphaned pages are pieces of content which aren’t linked to on your site and pages which can only be accessed if you know the URL.  All your content should be linked to and not hidden away.

Don’t make your site structure really complicated.  If the products and services you offer are hidden seven clicks from the homepage, then no one will find them and no one will interact with them. This reduces your chances of making a sale and being able to get visitors to your site to then see the benefits of using your service.

It’s also important to make sure that you don’t have any broken links, as these can interfere with how both users and search engines experience your website.

H1 tags

H1 tags are used at the top of the page to show what the page is about.  The H1 tag is a useful tool for both users and your SEO as it clearly shows what the content of a page will cover.

You can use keywords in your H1 tags but don’t make them too spammy – using tags that seem unnatural in the circumstances can make the page look spammy.

Each page of your site should have just one H1 tag and it should be relevant to the content on the page; for example, on a blog post, the H1 tag should be the title of the piece.

Title tags

The title tag of a page is an important element of your optimisation and it can influence your SEO.

Here are some simple tips for making the most out of your title tags:

• Make sure every title tag on your site is unique
• Make sure title tags are relevant to the content on those pages
• Don’t stuff them with keywords
• Make them look natural – and not like a list of keywords
• Don’t make them more than 70 characters long as they’ll be cut short by the search engines otherwise

Sometimes Google will change the title tag it shows in search results if it feels that there is something else on the page which is more relevant to the user’s search.

You can make sure there are no duplicate title tags on your site by monitoring the HTML Recommendations report in Google Webmaster Tools, which will show you if there are any pages that have missing, short or duplicate title tags.

Meta descriptions

Meta descriptions show up in the search engine results under the title of your page.  The text in this description can be used to encourage people to click on your page from the results, and consequently draw them into your website.

Make sure that all your meta descriptions are unique and that the text is relevant to the content on your website.

When you are up and running you can monitor your meta descriptions using the HTML Recommendations report in Google Webmaster Tools, which helps to identify those pages that are displaying duplicate meta descriptions.

Canonical tags

A canonical tag can help you to resolve duplicate content issues; for example, if your homepage is available at two URLs. It’s always best to try to resolve these kind of duplicate content issues by actually removing the duplicate content, but the canonical tag is a nice support method for reinforcing this after removal, or if you are unable to remove due to your content management system.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps are important to help with the crawling and discovery of the content on your website.  An HTML sitemap, linked to from your footer, should contain links to the major sections of your website, but not individual blog posts, thousands of products or every industry news page you have created.

Including a short piece of text for each link in the sitemap is also a good idea, as it helps users discover what each page is about – and thus helps them make better choices. This extra content on the page also allows the search engines to see the relevance of each page you have listed.

An XML sitemap is also needed; it provides search engines with relevant information for when they crawl and index your site.  You can upload your sitemap.xml to Google and Bing Webmaster Tools.

If you have industry news, videos or lots of images on your website, then you can create a special sitemap.xml file for each of these file types too.

Robots.txt

A robots.txt file tells the search engines what sections of your website you don’t want them to index; for example if your website has an online admin panel that can be found at /admin, you can block this in the robots.txt file.

Careful use of this file can help to resolve duplicate content issues and stop Google from seeing – and listing – pages that you don’t want people to find in search results.

You can also reference your sitemap.xml files in your robots.txt file.

Although this guide doesn’t cover everything to do with on-page optimisation, it gives you a brief intro to the things which you will need to consider when working on your website.  Paying attention to these core factors can help ensure that your website does not have issues when you are trying to get rankings in the search engines.

Guide to on-page optimisation originally appeared on Search Marketing Guides on April 17, 2013.

It is almost always impossible to create universal guides for SEO strategy as the needs of every company differ so greatly. What may be perfect for one company, may be entirely wrong for the next.

Rather than draw a line in the sand and tell you when your company should consider outsourcing its SEO, this guide aims to ensure that you are fulfilling your in-house responsibilities, before looking for help. Adhering to best practices will ensure that your site visitors, and consequently search engines, have the best possible experience and opinion of your site.

Once you have covered the basics, you can then look further afield for your SEO needs. Whether you choose to bring people into your company to do that or outsource, will depend largely on the size and structure of your organisation. More on that later…

SEO is an all-encompassing term for an ever increasing number of techniques to ensure your site is viewed in the best possible light by the major search engines and your target audience. At the core of these techniques are a collection of best practices that all webmasters, business owners, administrators and content creators should be familiar with. These golden rules are essential, require very little effort and no money. However, SEO is such a rapidly changing area that it may be safer to outsource either some or all of your optimisation needs. Using an external company can allow you to better utilise your internal resources.

Below are some of the core practices you that you can either implement yourself, or if you feel more comfortable, outsource to an SEO company.

Site structure

Think of Google’s spiders like inquisitive three-year-olds. They want to click on everything, turn things upside down, put it in their mouth and move on – but they have a painfully short attention span, so unless you help them open the doors, they will just give up and find something else to keep themselves entertained.

The first rule then, is to make sure your site behaves the way that it is meant to. Take time to go through your site and make sure that your structure flows in a way that both users and search engines will understand. Generally speaking, your structure will drill down from your root page to a broad topic and then to a specific topic or page. Have a structure and stick to it. Tagging pages on here and there ultimately causes grief as your business grows.

Next, make sure none of your internal links are broken. Google Webmaster Tools is your best friend and it’s especially useful when it comes to hunting out broken links.

It is also important to make sure you have an up-to-date sitemap. In fact, you should have two versions of your sitemap – one for customers and one for search engines. For your customers, create an HTML page with hyperlinks to the most important part of the site. This doesn’t have to be extensive, it is merely a map for users to follow should they want to find a specific part of the site.

For the search engines, create an XML Sitemap and submit it through Google Webmaster Tools. There are many guides available on how to do this and there is plenty of advice out there on how to make sure that you get the most from your sitemap.

Redirects

It is very important to wrap your head around redirects and when to use them. It is not as complicated as many SEOers would have you believe, but using the wrong type of redirect could land you in trouble. In almost all instances, webmasters should be using a 301 redirect. This is a permanent redirect and is important because it transfers authority with it. What this means is that if you change domains, for example, all of the natural link building, ageing and SEO that goes into your old domain, won’t be lost. In fact, you will retain around 90-95 per cent of the link benefits from the original site.

Your 301s may be need to be served from an .htaccess file, which an SEO company can help you setup.

302 redirects should only be used when a move is temporary, if for example, the site is taken down for maintenance.

If you move a page, change its name or delete it altogether, you should use a 301 redirect again. Having links which do not go anywhere can cause issues with indexing, which will have a negative impact on your SEO. Not redirecting properly can also lead to a direct loss of sales as a customer may have bookmarked pages which are no longer in use. Once you have implemented your redirects, it is also important to update your internal links with new URLs, rather than rely on the redirect to do the hard work for you. Depending on the extent of the changes, this might be time consuming – but is well worth it.

Furthermore, it is a good idea to make sure that your broken links ‘handling page’ is serving the correct 404 header status. A well designed 404 page can keep visitors on your site, even if they do find a broken link.

It is easy for redirects to get out of hand. If your company has experienced a lot of growth or you have implemented site-wide changes, an SEO company can help with the process of making sure redirects go to the right place and eliminate errors.

Building links

Link building is one of the most contested, deliberated and debated issues in SEO. Here are the facts, if you are active in online communities via social media and through forums and comments, you will slowly build natural links back to your site and this will only ever help your presence and rankings. Building links by providing a meaningful contribution to online communities will never harm your site!

So go out and build relationships with people online – bolster your social presence. This should be at the heart of your SEO best practices, However, if you try to cheat the system, the search engines will eventually catch you out.

Things to avoid

Just as important (if not more) as following best practices is not following worst ones. Once a company begins to see results from practising basic SEO, it is all too easy to turn to the dark side. Backlinks are good, so why not pay someone to build hundreds of thousands? Please read these words – ‘do not do it’. A good agency will never offer to buy you thousands of links, but instead will look to build you high-quality, natural links from a diverse range of authoritative sources.

Link schemes, automated submission programs and the rest are the very reason that legitimate SEO has become such a complex arena to operate in. Over the years, Google has taken very dramatic and very effective steps to ensure that these ‘blackhat’ methods are not rewarded. You may see a spike in results in the short-term but if you fall foul of Google’s Penguin update, your site will eventually suffer - perhaps irreparably. Worst-case scenario, your site is deindexed by Google and you are never seen again.

If your website has been hit with an unnatural links warning or you think that your link building has resulted in a drop in rankings, you may have to bring in an external company to help you clean up your backlinks to help you recover from the penalisation.

SEO Plateau

Without investment, your SEO results will eventually plateau. With over three trillion URLs indexed by Google, all websites are very small fish in a very big pond and in the words of Steven King, ‘If you wanna play, you gotta pay’. It is an unfortunate fact that unless your product or service is so niche that there is virtually zero competition, SEO is more than a full-time job.

For many companies, bringing in enough SEO professionals to fulfil the business’ optimisation needs is financially impossible. Unless you have the means to ensure that you can build your SEO team in keeping with business needs, outsourcing is usually the best option. There are also other risks involved with building an in house SEO team, not least of which is creating an information vacuum – because the industry is changing at such a rapid rate, it can be difficult to keep abreast of change if your team is inhouse.

The good news is that outsourcing SEO has become a viable and effective solution. By outsourcing, not only do you free up internal resources to focus on overall strategy, but you bring on board a team of professionals who live, eat and breathe SEO; which is exactly what you need. When you outsource to the right company, you not only gain from their knowledge, but you gain from the experience they have had with all their previous clients. A core part of SEO is making sure that your business does not fall fowl to any changes implemented by Google and that if you do, there is a robust strategy in place to recover rankings quickly.

If you reach the point where you feel like you need to outsource your SEO, check out our ‘Questions to ask an SEO company’ guide to make sure you pick someone who will best suit your needs.

When should you outsource SEO? originally appeared on Search Marketing Guides on April 2, 2013.

If you identify that there are links pointing to your website which might be causing some issues with your SEO, then the Google Disavow Tool is invaluable for ensuring your recovery.

As part of our SEO services we offer assistance for people whose website has been hit by a penalty. This includes attempting to remove bad links and utilising the Disavow Tool to repair the profile of your site in Google’s eyes.

Reviewing your links

If your website has had a penalty which appears to be related to your backlink profile the first thing we will do is review these backlinks.

Once we have identified the links coming into your website we can review which of these might be doing harm to your rankings and which are not hurting you.

Our review of this data includes looking at the number of unique websites which are pointing to your domain, the number of different anchor texts which are being used and the quality of the sites that are linking to you. We will review each linking site in detail to decide if there is any harm being done to your site.

Removal Requests

The first step in the clean-up process is to manually contact each of the sites which might be harming you and request removal of their link to your site.

As we are performing this process we will keep notes based on what we’ve done and the outcome of this. This data will be useful once we come to work on your Disavow request for Google.

Using the Disavow Tool

We use the Disavow tool once all possible steps have been taken to contact the site, remove and move on from harmful backlinks. All the data we have recorded from the link clean-up will be used to create and upload a disavow report for your site in Google Webmaster Tools.

Depending on the severity of the issue for your website we can then contact Google on your request, and demonstrating all the work which has been done on your behalf, request re-inclusion of your site in the search results.

If you think your website might have been hit by a link based penalty contact us today for a free review of your site and advice about how we can help recover your rankings.

The Google Disavow Tool and the link clean-up process originally appeared on Search Marketing Guides on March 15, 2013.

This guide will tell you what video content marketing is, how to integrate it into a current marketing strategy and how to measure the effectiveness of video content.

Understand video content marketing

One of the biggest benefits of including video content in your marketing strategy is that it’s highly shareable. If you host it on your own site, you can ensure that every time the video is shared, it’s linked back to you by controlling the embed code. Hosting your video on another platform – like YouTube for example – may not immediately increase your rankings, but it does still give the option to attract links.

There are various types of video you can use, some are more effective than others and that largely depends on the nature of your business. If you work for an ecommerce business, product videos are a great format that you should be embracing. Asos is a great example of how to integrate product videos well and statistics show this format reduces the number of returns and increases conversions. Ice.com reported a rise of 400 per cent in conversion rates and a reduction in returns from 12 per cent to just nine per cent on products the jewellery company included videos for.

Sponsored videos that feature celebrities and clickable videos are also effective formats to look into. Fosters managed to get Steve Coogan and Armando Iannucci to create mini episodes of an Alan Partridge show, generating over four million views for the lager brand. French Connection launched its own YouTique, allowing viewers to buy items by clicking on clothes featured in the video. As the first British brand to do this, it’s proved to be an effective way to drive engagement with viewers.

Integrate video content marketing into a current marketing strategy

Before you start posting videos, you need to establish exactly what you want to gain from using video as part of your content marketing strategy. Are you looking for a viral hit or for longer-term lead nurturing? Figure out what it is you are trying to achieve from integrating video before deciding on the format of your content.

You need to look closely at your budget when trying to fit video into your overall marketing strategy. Be savvy with your cash to get the most effective results. YouTube may seem like an ideal host given that it’s free but there are downsides to consider. It will remain the primary host so there is little benefit to you and your site directly. Investing some money into a video hosting service like Vzaar and Vimeo Pro can give you more options that will actually give you referrals each time the content is shared.

Good-quality content is going to have a far better chance of being shared. If you rush to get something up and running, the end result could actually have a negative impact on the brand you’ve worked hard to generate. Take the time to produce something high-quality and meaningful. The more share-friendly the video content is, the better it will be for your brand.

Measuring the return on investment and refining the strategy accordingly

You need to understand what you’re measuring before you can start making any tweaks to the strategy. Depending on the company, you may be looking at increased brand awareness or it could be the amount of conversions gained. You also need to define what your conversions actually are which, again, is largely dependent on the type of site you have. Ecommerce sites will primarily be looking for sales, but businesses offering a service may be more interested in gaining sign-ups. You need to gather some results before you can start setting targets and work on a more complex strategy.

Analytical software can track the amount of views your video is getting but it can also tell you what viewers are doing after watching. For example, you can find out if they go on to look for more content on the site or if they click away. You can also analyse how long viewers watch the video for. If they are leaving half-way through, it’s a good sign that the content either isn’t up to scratch to maintain their interest or it’s simply too long. Being able to track these things gives you the opportunity to develop and adapt your content to ensure it meets the needs of the viewer.

Gaining a good understanding of the benefits of adding video to your content marketing strategy is a good place to start. Once you are confident in how it can benefit your business, you can address the type of video that is going to be the most effective for your site. Establishing a budget and a detailed strategy beforehand will save you time later on. A good analysis of the results gives you the opportunity to refine your content marketing strategy to ensure your video content is as effective as it can possibly be. Tweaking the content to gain the maximum ROI will be constant as trends and viewer preferences change and develop.

How to implement video in your content marketing originally appeared on Search Marketing Guides on March 7, 2013.

Using Google Analytics (GA) correctly, you can not only track the number of people coming through to your website via your marketing activities, but also which products sell best and which pages convert well. You can even improve the processes of your checkout to reduce lost sales.

Setting up your tracking code

The first step is to install the GA tracking code on your website.  This should be the asynchronous version of the code and should be installed in the <head> section of the templates on your site.

When setting up the tracking code for your site, the first thing you need to work out is what you are actually tracking. If your checkout and payment processes happen on your main website (e.g. www.yourdomain.co.uk), then you can use the same code across the site. This is the easiest way to install it.

If your checkout process happens on a sub-domain of your website (e.g. checkout.yourdomain.co.uk), then you will need to use sub-domain tracking code to ensure that both your main website and the sub-domain are tracked. You’ll also need to do this in order to attribute the sales you have made to the source from whence the visitor came.

The last option is that your checkout process happens on another completely different domain name because you use a third-party payment service like SagePay. If this is the case, you will need to use a slightly different set of tracking codes and also make sure that you can install tracking code on the pages of the third-party service.

Importantly, if you are linking from your main website to a sub-domain or third-party domain name for your checkout process, you have to ensure that this code is configured correctly and that all links which move a visitor from one website to another keep the cookie alive. You must also use GA code in all of the links to ensure that you are telling Google that the visitor which GA can see is the same person.

If you don’t set these up correctly, you will find that your sales from SEO or PPC are not correlated properly; instead you will see that the website was the source of the sales.  This means you won’t be able to track the ROI of your marketing activities correctly.

For the full technical guide on how to use cross domain tracking, read our blog here.

Using ecommerce tracking

Once your tracking code is configured, you need to install the ecommerce tracking code for your site to ensure you can see what products have sold and how much revenue you have achieved.

To install the ecommerce tracking code, you will need to edit the final receipt page of your checkout process.   This final receipt page should already have the tracking code on it following the above steps. You can now edit this code to include the calls to GA which send the order details into the system.

One you have the ecommerce tracking code in place on the site, you will be able to see the number of sales, revenue, and product names from sales; showing you what has sold best and from what marketing activity these sales were generated.

Read our full ecommerce tracking code blog here.

Using goals and funnels to improve your conversion rate

In addition to ecommerce tracking code, you can use GA goals to track your checkout process. A goal won’t show you the revenue your website has made, but it does allow you to monitor the steps of your checkout process using a goal funnel.

The final goal page on the site is the final receipt page which you added the ecommerce tracking code to, as above. Your funnel is configured to contain all the steps within the checkout process. For example, if your checkout process includes a basket page, customer details page, payment details page and the final receipt page, then your goal funnel would be configured with 3 pages in the process.

When you view your goal funnel in GA, then you will be able to see how many people moved from each step to the next. This information is vital for helping you to work out if there are steps in your checkout process which are stopping people from making purchases.  Using this information, you can review and improve the checkout process; ultimately helping you pull in more sales.

Read our full goal funnels blog here.

Setting up ecommerce tracking correctly can offer some fantastic insights into the performance of your website and online marketing activities. Hopefully this guide has helped you to avoid some of the common pitfalls which stop this data from being recorded correctly.

Google Analytics for Ecommerce Websites originally appeared on Search Marketing Guides on February 14, 2013.

Choosing keywords

Choosing keywords for your website is the first step in your SEO campaign.  If you run a PPC campaign, then you should already have some ideas of the types of keywords you might want to use.

It’s important to look at the main themes and messages of your website when looking at keywords. You shouldn’t use keywords which don’t cover products that you sell or services you offer. At the same time, you don’t want to target things which are so broad that they are unlikely to convert. For example, ‘sales’ is a really broad term and doesn’t actually say what you are selling or what services you offer.

Your keywords should not be too granular. The exact name of a product is probably too specific as a keyword and won’t help you to drive traffic to the site, particularly if you only sell one of them. We call this the long tail. Long tail can help drive traffic to your website, but these very specific keywords shouldn’t form the main focus of your website. Generally it’s better to use themed keywords which aren’t specifically about just one or two products but instead a product category or grouping.

Generally it’s a good idea to look at covering four or five keyword silos (or topics) when looking at your website; enabling you to focus your SEO efforts.

New websites

One thing to remember when choosing keywords for a brand new website is that it will take time to create rankings when your site has no history and authority.

When choosing which keywords to optimise for on a new website, it’s important to look at the short term as well as the long term. Although ultimately your SEO target is the shortest, most competitive term in your industry, it is unlikely that you will rank for this in the short term.  In the short term, going for longer-tail keywords which are more likely to rank and create traffic for your site will ensure that you receive sales whilst the authority of your website is growing.

Read our blog on choosing keywords for a new website here.

Keywords for ecommerce

Choosing keywords for a website with an ecommerce focus is slightly different again, as you need to take into account the different steps in the buying cycle when selecting which terms to use on the site.  Look at the structure of your website and the intent of your potential customers before choosing keywords.

Read our keywords for ecommerce guide here

Using keywords

Once you have a list of keywords for your website, you need to begin working with them on your site.  It’s important to make sure that you have title tags and H1 tags which are relevant to the keywords you are targeting. You also need to make sure that you mention the keywords you are targeting so that Google can find relevant content on the site.

When writing your content, don’t focus on the keywords too much; even a subconscious focus on a keyword can lead to you over-using a keyword in the text. So, when writing content read the wording out loud to make sure you aren’t over-using a term. If you find that you are mentioning a keyword 3 or 4 times in each paragraph, that’s too much.

When looking at optimisation of your website, keywords will form part of the work you are doing, including influence over title tags and H1 tags on the site.

Keywords form an important part of your online marketing, so making sure you have selected and used the best terms on your site is the first step towards achieving on-page optimisation and improving your website traffic – as well as conversions. Hopefully this guide has helped you start the process of selecting terms for your SEO.

A Guide to Keywords for SEO originally appeared on Search Marketing Guides on February 14, 2013.

Account – Your account is the holding place for your GA profiles. An account can have multiple profiles underneath it allowing you to track more than one website or create different views of the data of one website. In the GA tracking code, the longest number represents your account number – as shown in bold here: UA-XXXXXX-1

Advanced segments – These can be applied to the reports and provide a quick way of saving/accessing queried data, before applying this to many reports within GA.  For example, you could set up an advanced segment for non-brand organic visitors, which would allow you to view any report (including landing pages, goals and browsers).

Bounce – A bounce is recorded in GA when a visitor to your website only visits one page on the site and does not undertake another trackable action – such as downloading a PDF file.

Campaign Tracking –This allows you to track the visitors coming into your website from other sources – for example, via banner adverts or from your email marketing.  The Campaign Tracking code is added to the end of the URL you use to link to your website from these banners or emails and can be customised using the URL builder within GA.

Cookies – GA uses first-party cookies to monitor visitors into a website.  There are 5 cookies used, which range in lifespan from 30 minutes to 18 months.  These cookies do not allow individually identifiable information to be tracked.

Cross-domain tracking – Cross-domain tracking creates a link to the GA tracking code, which allows you to monitor the visitors to your website in GA even if your website is split across multiple domain names – for example, if it uses a sub-domain or third-party payment gateway.

Custom Reports – Allow you to set up a filtered report which you can easily access on multiple occasions without having to set up again.

Dimension – Data which is descriptive rather than numeric is a dimension. Dimensions include Landing Pages, Keywords and Browsers.

Goal – A specific action completed on your website – such as the completion of a form, spending a certain amount of time on the site, or an event, like a PDF download or a video view. You can also set up a goal on the ecommerce checkout process on your website, but this does not negate the need for you to set up ecommerce tracking code.

Goal Funnel – When tracking a form or ecommerce checkout process, you can create a goal funnel which will allow you to see the percentage of people who completed the conversion process and the percentage of those who dropped out part-way through. Using goal funnels correctly can help you to improve your website’s conversion rate.

Ecommerce tracking – Ecommerce tracking code is added to the receipt page of your checkout process and sends information to GA about the sales your website has made; including product details, prices and total order value. Ecommerce tracking can help you identify which of your marketing activities contributed to the sales your website made and helps you monitor your ROI.

Event Tracking – If you have actions on your website such as PDF downloads or videos which cannot have the GA tracking code added to them, then you can use Event Tracking to monitor these actions. Event tracking code is added into the code for a link or video to create an event to be monitored.  Events can be tracked as goals.

Filter – A filter is a set of rules used to change or limit the information which is shown in a profile.  For example, you can add a filter to exclude traffic from a specific IP address or you could add a filter to a profile so you can only see traffic to a specific URL. This allows you to track all your websites in one profile, but also split out visitors in sub-profiles.

Metric – A metric in GA is a numerical figure which can be plotted on a graph.  Examples include visit numbers, pageview numbers, conversion rates, revenue figures and bounce rate

Profile – A profile is the actual area of GA which records what traffic your site has received.  A profile is a sub-set of data within a GA property.  Profiles can be used to add a filter and segment data.

Property – The property is the website which is being monitored. The property ID is the last part of the GA code, as shown in bold here: UA-XXXXX-1. A property can be used in multiple profiles.

Shortcuts – When you have set up a filter on a report and drilled own to the specific information you need, you can save this as a shortcut which allows you to quickly access this data again.

Unique Visitor – A unique visitor is recorded the first time a person enters the site in a given time period. Repeat visits by the same person/browser are counted as repeat visits and not unique visitors.

Virtual Pageview – Similar to event tracking, a Virtual Pageview is used in the code on a website to create a page viewable in GA when actually there is no page available.  For example, if you have a form which doesn’t have a thank you page you can create a /thanks.html page when someone clicks submit on the form.

Visitor – A visitor is a computer which visits a website and has a cookie stored in its browser.  If you visit a website from two different browsers or two different computers you are seen as two visitors; whereas if one computer and browser if used by two people to visit a site, this is recorded as one visitor.  Once you have visited the site once and the cookie is stored on your browser, every time you return to that site from that computer, you are seen as the same visitor.

Visits – A visit or session is a single period of time a visitor is on a site. Generally a visit lasts as long as someone is on your site, until 30 minutes of inactivity builds or when a browser is closed.

Google Analytics Glossary originally appeared on Search Marketing Guides on February 14, 2013.

200 Header Status

A 200 header status is a message sent to a browser or search engine when a page is loaded and is working fine.  Ideally all working pages on your website should show a 200 header status code.  The short version of 200 is “OK” Speaks for itself really.

301 header Status

301 is another header status and this is sent out when a page has moved and a redirect has been set up from the old location to the new location to help people find the content they are looking for. A 301 is the correct way to redirect content which has been moved forever and won’t return to it’s old location. The short version of 301 is “moved permanently”

302 header status

302 is similar to 302 which redirects and old page to a new page – however this redirect instead of being permanent is temporary, so could be used if a page is likely to redirect to its old location at a later date. An example of when you might use this is when you have a special offer page which is only available at certain times of the year. The rest of the time you might want to redirect this page to your product page. The short version of 302 is “Found”

404 header status

404 is another header status and this one means broken link. The official message is “not found”. When there’s a broken link on your site this 404 message is what you would want to be served so that the search engines know that the page is broken and that you

503 header status

A 503 header status is served when a website is down for maintenance or is being moved to another server.  This error message means that the site is temporarily down and tells Google and the other search engines to return later when the website will be back up and running.

Header statuses originally appeared on Search Marketing Guides on November 27, 2012.

Algorithm

Algorithms are used by the search engines to work out what pages should be ranked where in their search results.  The algorithms give each page and website they find a score and it’s these scores which determine rankings.  As websites change regularly and the search engines try to keep on top of new technologies neither rankings nor their algorithms themselves stay in one place

Authority

Authority is a word used to describe the power of websites to rank in the search engines – the more authority a website has the higher it will rank

Back links

Back Links are the links from another website to your website.

Back link profile

Your back link profile is the mix of links from other websites which come to your website. A good back link profile will be made up of high quality site, blog posts, lower quality sites, and directory listings.

Canonical Issues

Canonical issues on a website are caused when there are two versions of a page available due to the way the page or website have been configured. An example of this is having a homepage available with and without the www. at the beginning and having a homepage which is available as /index.html as well as on the root domain. These issues can cause duplicate content problems on your site which can affect rankings.

Canonical Tag

The Canonical tag was designed to help resolve some of the canonical issues mentioned above. This tag is placed on pages of the site and tells the search engines which URL to index.  If you have two URLs for your homepage (such as www.mysite.co.uk and www.mysite.co.uk/index.html) then placing the below canonical tag

Crawler

Crawler is a name for used the robots which the search engines send out to find and review the pages on your website. Other terms for “crawler” include “spider” or “bot”.  There are also tools which can be used from peoples computers which simulate a crawler such as Screaming Frog Crawler or Xenu.

H1 Tag

The H1 tag is the coded heading on a page – the H1 tag on this page is “The Vertical Leap SEO Dictionary” which tells people what the page is about.

Header Statuses

Header statuses are messages sent from a page on your website to a browser or a search engine crawler. There are a number of different messages which mean different things from pages which are broken to pages which are no longer there.  Read our guide to header statuses here

Inlinks

Another name for back links

Keywords

A word of phrase used to find a website in Google. A Keyword or Phrase can be one or more words long.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is something SEOs used to talk about a lot.  The keyword density of a page is the % of the content which is made up of a particular word.  Years ago there was a sweet spot for getting the correct “density” of a page to create rankings. However. times have changes and this is not something which works now.  One warning: when writing content on a page don’t overuse a keyword so it doesn’t look natural

Link Building

Link building is the process of creating a link profile for the website which helps with the authority of the site. Link building should not look forced or create a link profile which is very focussed on just one keyword or just one kind of link.

Long Tail

Long Tail keywords are longer versions of search terms which a term normally used on SEO campaigns as they have lower search volumes. However these keywords quite often convert better as people are more

Meta Description

The Meta Description of a page appears in the <head> tag and is used by the search engines to describe the site in the SERPs. This tag is often used by social media sites to act as the default description of a page which you are liking too.

Meta Keywords

Meta keywords is a tag which was used in the <head> of a website. However as this was heavily spammed years ago this tag no longer holds that much value and Google have said that they don’t use this tag.

Page Rank

Visible Toolbar PageRank (which you can see on your browser using Google Toolbar or other plugin) used to be an important factor for people who ran websites as an indication of authority.  Mainly used as a gauge of whether a site should be linked from in Link Building, Page Rank is no longer regularly updated and is generally ignored in the SEO industry.

There is a PageRank which forms part of the Google Algorithm, however this is not visible to anyone and so can’t be used as a measure of authority.

Panda

Google released an overlay to its algorithm which focussed on the quality of websites in the index.  This was designed to remove sites which farmed out duplicate and low quality content such as article marketing sites.  Panda is reapplied with new updates roughly once a month or so.

Penguin

Google release an overlay to its algorithm which focussed on what they called “Over Optimisation”

Robots.txt file

A robots.txt file is a file which sites in the root of your website (www.yoursite.co.uk/robots.txt) and tells the search engines which parts of the site they can’t look at.

SERP

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page and this is the page where your results will appear in Google.

Sitelinks

When your site is listed in the SERPs by Google you may sometimes get extra pages listed

Sitemap

A sitemap is a page which allows for the pages on a website to be easily found.

There are two kinds of sitemap, an on page sitemap which is a page on your website.  This page should be designed to help visitors of your website find pages on the site. The other is an XML sitemap which is used by the search engines to help with indexing content. If you have news content, videos or images it’s an idea to set up an XML sitemap for each of these types of content as well as a generic one for your main pages.

Spider Trap

A spider trap is created when an infinite number of URLs can be created on your website creating a loop. For example a self referencing URL which creates a new folder each time it’s click

Teleporting

Teleporting is when a person searches in Google for the name of a company and then just clicks on that company website – for example searching for “Vertical Leap” and clicking on the first result which is our website. This is more common than you’d think.

Thin Content

Thin content is a term Google uses to describe content which is very short, and doesn’t have any depth to it.  Following the Panda update from Google this kind of thin content is frowned upon.  Not only should your content offer value to customers but every page of your site should contain at least 300 words of content.

The Vertical Leap SEO Dictionary originally appeared on Search Marketing Guides on November 27, 2012.

As trends show marketers are opting for lower cost online strategies over higher cost traditional marketing, your business’s website/s is set to become the lynchpin of all online communications as well as the fulfilment of many off line marketing activities, like never before.

Looking to improve the performance and deliverables of your website? Then you need to be considering working with a search marketing specialist to ensure you are using your website to create more, quality customer acquisition opportunities.

Why Choose Search Engine Marketing?

There are four ways to help consumers find your website online; luck, paid for advertising (PPC, banner advertising), social media and search engine optimisation (SEO).

Search Marketing for Customer Engagement Model:

Working in conjunction with paid for online advertising such as PPC and social media, SEO forms the backbone of your search engine marketing (SEM) strategy.

SEO promotes the natural ranking of your business on the major search engines such as Google, through the technical improvement of your website and through the creation of web authority, on which search engines assess your website against your peers and competitors.

As the model above illustrates, Search Engine Marketing operates, impacts and is influenced through its collaboration with Social Media Marketing, Public Relations and Reputation Management to affect customer engagement.

Need advice on benchmarking SEO vendors? Check out our ‘Questions for your SEO Company’ guide

Vertical Leap’s Top Tips to Improve your Website through SEO:

1. Ensure that your site is accessible.

Make sure that your website is accessible to search engines and that all your content can be found. Having a library of useful hints and tips on your website is only useful to you if the search engines can access this information.  Make sure that your menu structure is easy to navigate and your folder structures make sense for both users and search engines.

Make your products easy to find and easy to buy, with clear calls to action, so that visitors to your website know what you are expecting them to do.

Consider the information your visitors would expect to see at each stage of your website and try to create pages which meet these needs.

2. Ensure all pages have unique title tags and meta descriptions

Make sure the search engines are able to find all individual pages to help them discern the scope of your website and the products and services you offer. Particularly relevant for ecommerce websites or online catalogues, having 100’s of products on offer will not make any difference to your ability to be found online if all your title tags and meta descriptions read the same way.

3. Content Strategy

Content is still king. As most marketers already know, keeping your website relevant through the introduction of fresh content is the key to creating repeat traffic, establishing brand loyalty and helping to convert web traffic to new customer.

Commit to a blog by creating a pool of resources within your business that contribute on a regular basis.

Commit to creating news content too, allowing you to update your website regularly with fresh content which is of interest to your target market.

Make sure that your site does not contain lots of pages with duplicated content or pages which contain very little information or value.

Don’t be afraid of adding different kinds of content such as infographics or videos to your website as these types of content will encourage people to link to you.

4. Use content to drive social media  

Once you have a content marketing strategy use this content to drive your social media activities and begin the process of engaging with people online. Social media is now an important part of SEO and ensuring you are utilising Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest will ensure that your website performs well in the search engines and attracts new visitors.

Reach out to people on social outlets and don’t be afraid to start discussions, do something a bit quirky and don’t forget to use social sites to help resolve customer questions.

Improving your Website – A Guide to SEO originally appeared on Search Marketing Guides on November 16, 2012.