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What are Bounce Rates?

January 27, 2009 @ 9:49 pm · Filed under Google Analytics, PPC (Pay-Per-Click), SEO basics, Tutorials

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Bounce Rates in Search Engine Optimization

I have just spent the last few hours looking at posts from the past few years about bounce rates in Google Analytics and I think that there is a lot of information out there that Google must laugh at.  In this post about bounce rates, he talks about how someone else says it better than he does and he passes on the torch to another useless post about bounce rates.  At least one truth from both of the posts is that a low % is a better %, however breaking them down into what they are for and what they can tell you is completely off kilt.

  • Low bounce rate is telling you that people come to your site and at some point and time during their visit, go to another page. Meaning that a low percentage of the people that visit your site only visit the first page.  This doesn’t mean your home page necessarily, it could be a product page if you are an commerce site, or another post within your huge blog.
  • High bounce rate means they came, they saw, they left.  No clicks to anywhere else in your site, just viewed the landing page and left.
  • There is no time limit on how long a person can stay on the page before clicking to another page, if they click in and click out 2 hours later, it’s a bounce.

If your bounce rate is high, evaluate the type of site that you have, if its a blog, expect people to hit it and forget it.  That is really what a blog is for, to provide available information quick and easy.  That’s why you need to make sure that the content within the pages of your site are right to the point, don’t have too little or too much information.  You don’t want to misinform or bore your site visitors.

Bounce Rates in Pay-Per-Click

There are a few things to think about when you are looking at the bounce rates of your ppc campaign, you have to look at the possibility that your price is too high, product wasn’t really what the searcher wanted, or your page itself doesn’t have enough stickiness to keep them on the page.  When someone is shopping they are more likely to leave the site entirely to “shop around” rather than shop around the site that didn’t provide them with the content they were looking for.  Make sure that your landing page supports the words you are paying for, because even if they click on your site and bounce off, it still costs YOU money! Knowing what to expect before hand does make it easier to swallow, it still doesn’t take away the costs you are going to incur.  Good luck and happy bouncing.

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How do you track the success of your SEO/ campaign?

January 27, 2009 @ 8:51 pm · Filed under Bing.com, Google, Google AdSense, Google Adwords, Google Analytics, PPC (Pay-Per-Click), Search Engine Optimization, SEO basics, Yahoo

Alright you have your site, you performed your SEO plan to the best of your ability, how do you track the success?  Reading earlier you may have learned how to use Google Webmaster Tools and installed them on your site.  Now you may want to get more into the meat and potatoes of tracking SEO success.  Google Analytics is the easiest and most affordable way to track your results (its free!).

All you need is FTP (File Transfer Protocol) access and you can install a simple code and let the tracking begin.  Install the code between the <body> and <body/> tags in your site.  If you have no clue what you are doing you may want to contact your hosting provider to give them the code that google analytics provides to you after you sign up your site.  Just send them an email that you want them to add it to all the pages of your active site, 24 hours later you will have some data and going forward you will be able to track each visitor to your site.  You can track, IP, city, network, browser type and more!  You can even track when a searcher lands on your site and proceeds to a checkout or maybe even a contact form.  You can track your month to month results to show where you were last month and where you are today.  See how many visits you got today, yesterday, last week or last month.  Look to see what is your most popular page, what page gets the most hits, or how many pages the avg. site visitor views before leaving the site.

You can use Analytics to really gauge how well your SEO campaign is doing, or your PPC program.  Bounce rate is a very important statistic of your site.  This tells you how effective the web pages in your site are for what they are being found under.  Meaning if someone was to search for blue widgets, and found your green widgets page, chances are they are going to leave the page to find a blue widget, giving you a bounce. More to come with bounce rates and how to use Google Analytics.

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Major Search Engine site Submission vs. Directory Submission.

January 26, 2009 @ 5:06 pm · Filed under PPC (Pay-Per-Click), Search Engine Submission, SEO basics, Tutorials

Did you know that search engines provide search results for other search engines and those search results contain directories, or databases of websites like superpages.com or thomasnet.com?  These databases or directories,  that is a site with drop downs or drill downs to the specific area that you service.  People do use these directories because they are human derived, meaning they  go through approval by an admin before they are put into the directory.  You do have to submit your site, it doesn’t just automatically appear in their search results.  Being listed in a directory for traffic is not an effective way to draw traffic.  Use this as an opportunity to build some sort of link trust within the search engine industry.  If that directory has 50,000 monthly visitors, that’s 50,000 visitors to the site, not your specific industry.  Say if 10%, 5000 visitors per month were potential site visitors  to your industry, where there are over 100 other sites competing for those potential visitors.  10% is a very hopeful number and realistically would be great but isn’t the truth.

Your best bet overall is to have your site in the major search engines and play the SEO game of trying to increase your site rankings for keywords you choose based on the content of your site.  Direct traffic from the major search engines may not wield the kind of conversion rates that the second tier or third tier search engines may have.  However these 2nd and 3rd tier search engines may not have the same amount of traffic that the may have either.  Use both of the options, but just don’t pay for higher position in the lesser engines.  This is just going to cause you to spend a lot of unnecessary money, save it for Google Adwords or Yahoo! PPC.

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Submitting your site to Directories.

January 18, 2009 @ 7:35 pm · Filed under Search Engine Optimization, SEO basics

A search directory is usually associated with Search Engines as a place to query searches.  When its a database of websites that are associated strictly by categories.  Categories range from Autos to Zoos.  With a lot of other categories that may be minor categories within the major ones.

When you submit your site to the directories you have to make sure that you:

What User Based Directories may use to evaluate your site that you are attempting to list.

  1. Pick the proper category that your site will fit into.
  2. That you choose descriptive Titles and Descriptions for your listing.
  3. Title and Description are relevant to the content within your site and links you point them to.
  4. Make sure that your domain names match the site title to avoid your site from being listed. They are user based databases.
  5. Make sure your site is secured for online purchases, use Paypal if you don’t have proper online ordering capabilities.
  6. Proper contact information within the site, usually 1 click away or on the home page.
  7. If you are associated with any certs that you have a link on your home page to show security.
  8. Make sure that all the content on the site will show properly on all computers that may use a search engine or directory.
  9. Make sure all code is free of errors including all JavaScript.
  10. Make sure all internal links that are pointing to any internal pages work properly and have reasonable load times.

Here are some directories that you can use for free to get your site going:

Search Directories are a great starting ground for 2 things, links and possible searchers looking for more links or for a particular product or service.

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Using Webmaster Tools From Google.

January 17, 2009 @ 6:05 pm · Filed under Search Engine Optimization, SEO basics

wrenchAre you really looking to see what is happening with your site on a global level?  Using tracking within you site can do this.  You can see how many sites are linked to you and how many links you have to other sites. Google Webmaster Tools provides alot of information that can keep you informed on what you need to know for decent SEO.  If you have a commerce site with a lot of dynamic pages you may not know which of your pages that are cached in search engines that are dead links 404 pages so that you may be able to remove them from the search results to avoid affecting your search engine rankings.

You would need FTP (File Transfer Protocol) access in order to verify that you are the owner of the site.  Normally on a global include file which is templated to go over all pages that are and are already created.  This will let you see the good bad and the ugly within your site so that you may see what you can do to fix the problem and move on.

With the links, you see who is linking to what, which can let you figure out why.  Not to mention that you see if the sites you link to do exist and to make sure they are relevant to the content you are trying to provide in the first place.  Make sure that your internal links aren’t broken as well.  This can give you a better view of your link structure, which determines two things, that search engine spiders can find your pages easier, since they are scanning the content. Even the people that are reading the pages, they can get more info as they read the content.

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What are Meta-Keywords and how do they affect my SEO?

January 15, 2009 @ 3:37 pm · Filed under Keywords, Meta Tags, Search Engine Optimization, SEO basics

As soon as someone mentions the word “keywords” everyone associates them with their websites.  Which is great, because that is where you would use them, not to mention in advertising campaigns as a whole.  Your SEO campaigns start with keyword research and what people are using to get to your site, basically what they put into the search engine as a search query to get results generated for them.
After you get the keywords generated, you then should be starting to incorporate them within your site, in the Title, Content, anchor-text, you then can put them in your meta tags, aka meta-keywords.  This is the back end source code of your site that pretty much labels your site on how search engines should categorize it.  A very crucial part of the business but you have to keep in mind, putting down every single word in your content in the keywords is not going to get you found that way.  Careful choosing and experience will get you picking the correct terms, and remember even if you are listed at #1 you still may not be receiving traffic.

You can use the Google Keyword Tool, Keyword Discovery Tool or WordTracker for information on keywords if you cant decide what works.  Although this is half the battle, it is still a chunk of what needs to be done for the site, wash the keywords or take out duplicates and any other terms that may not work for the particular content of the site and than redo the process until you have about 7 unique keywords per page.  Yes per page, otherwise you will be competing with your own pages and cause a bit of an issue when attempting to rank all your pages.

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What is anchor-text and what does it do for my SEO?

January 14, 2009 @ 4:19 pm · Filed under SEO basics

How many times have you sat down in front of your mac/pc, went to Google Yahoo, or MSN, searched for something, found your results and went to a site? While you were on the site, how many times have you found yourself reading, click on the clickable link and start reading more information on another link, or another page of the same website? You just used anchor text to get to the other page. Anchor-text is no different than one of the nav buttons you use to get to a different page, it’s just used within the text content of the page itself as more navigation. But for whom, Search engines like more navigation and searchers aka you and I, do to, to an extent. We don’t want to get bounced around because we may feel a sense of mistrust and misdirection, thinking that for some reason we got scammed. The webmaster knows that’s not true and so do the search engines, but who are we kidding, without the searchers, there would be no search engines. Think of if there were no televisions in the world, would there be need for a commercial? Cause there would be no networks to broadcast there is no need to advertise.

Search engines wish to see coherent links within the site, supporting or promoting another site shows trust. Anchor text to link to other pages within your site will also allow spiders to crawl through your site more efficiently. Keeping that in mind, don’t obviously go put every word on the site a text link that’s just going to confuse the searchers and mislead the search engine spiders into thinking you are a link farm.

Also consider using all your keywords that you are targeting as anchor text as much as possible, but not exactly making 4 words out of a 7 word sentence your keywords. You really need to match the content, with the title, description and keywords to show signs of usefulness to be ranking where you should be.

Obviously there is the unwritten book of the algorithm of Google, so it’s judgment, statistics and gut with this part of the SEO process, but if done correctly can be extremely beneficial for you search engine rankings.

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What is your Meta-Description?

January 12, 2009 @ 6:53 pm · Filed under Meta Tags, Search Engine Optimization, SEO basics

What is that line of text within your source of your web page that says  <meta name=“description” ? Very simply put, it is a brief summary of the content on the particular page.  Each page has it’s own meta-description, but most sites that have a meta-description already installed keep the same description for most to all pages of the site.  It makes life easy to just copy and paste something that works for a whole theme for your site, however having a unique meta-description for each page of your site will allow each page to compete evenly with each other.  When you have the same description for each page you are actually outranking yourself and pushing other pages of your site down the rankings of search results.

Take time and effort with this process because this is also what shows up in the search results, giving the searcher a little information about you page and will be in sync with the page <title> itself.

Meta-Description results from Source Code <meta content="description

Meta-Description results from Source Code on Google.com

If you don’t choose to put in anything in your meta-description, Google will extract a brief summary of the page and post that on search results until you put something in the description itself.  Then you have to wait until the search engines come back to the site and re-index the pages to update the meta’s if applicable.

Using keywords where ever possible is always a plus, but do not use this area to stuff more of your keywords, you are only going to harm your rankings and/or get banned from the results.

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What is your Page Title and what does it do for SEO?

January 12, 2009 @ 1:39 pm · Filed under Meta Tags, Search Engine Optimization, SEO basics

Page title these days is a big decider on search engines ranking your site.  If you have phrases or words in your title that are not spread through the content within that page, chances are your rankings are going to suffer.

Page Title

Page Title

An example of a page title shown above through a search results page on Google.  Most everyone makes their decision on whether or not to go to the page based on the information provided in that first line, your search usually has at least one of your search terms in the title, which is highlighted in bold giving you something to catch your attention.  Having a good keyword phrase will enhance the look of the search and increase the chances of someone clicking through to your site. You really want to keep it to about 50-70 characters in order to have all of the characters to appear in the result. You don’t want the important terms cut off from the results if those are the terms you want people to use to find you, keep them to the front of the title increasing the chances of someone landing on your page.

Your page title should be the most important keywords from that page’s content, ensuring that when someone searches on a search engine that those keywords will appear in the blue line letting potential surfers know that you are what they are looking for.  Just make sure you have content on the site to support the commitment to those keywords, or your efforts will be useless.

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Microsoft strikes deal with Dell and Verizon. Whats that mean?

January 8, 2009 @ 4:02 pm · Filed under PPC (Pay-Per-Click)

Today Microsoft announced that they are in agreements with Dell Computers as the primary search engine that would show up automatically on the desktop screens of most new Dell consumer PCs beginning in February.  Their agreement with Verizon will allow them to be the primary search engine for handsets for the next five years.

This move was something that needed to be done in order to keep Google in check with their constant stride to be the only online search engine.  60% of search queries originate from Google, where as Yahoo comes in a steady second with 20% and Microsoft/Live comes in third with 8%.  Even though Internet Explorer comes as the default web browser for all Microsoft OS’s, people still have the opportunity to change their Internet properties default home page to support any search engine they desire, but the people they are targeting are the consumers that don’t necessarily use search engines on a day to day basis.  These are the ever so often search for a pizzeria or restaurant in the area they are in allowing them to provide more opportunities for their paying advertising customers.  Verizon cell phone users will now be faced with MSN/Live search results on their cell phones, which would give MSN customers the opportunity to place ads in front of the potential customer providing them exclusive opportunities to Verizon Wireless customers.

As of right now there is no competition between the search engines, and I do not anticipate this to change anything in the long run.  Since they will have exclusive rights to both Dell and Verizon, they are also going to have to skim some of the advertising costs with the 2 making their profit levels lower, and increasing the cost to advertise on the search engine itself.  Today’s market is at a steady decline with unemployment increasing and job opportunities decreasing giving big business’s less profit and making their companies downsize to keep their doors open.

The Verizon/Alltel merger expected to happen sometime in late 2009 early 2010, was expected to downsize some Alltel locations, which this merger may bring some extra income and extra work for worrisome Alltel employees and maybe even kick start the merger faster than anticipated.  Hopefully this will make life easier for SEO specialists by giving them 3 targets rather than just 2 to focus their SEO efforts.  This would allow more room for trial and error with other markets and search algorithms   and possibly bring unity to how search engines rank their sites.  Ultimately search engines want the searcher to find what they are looking for fairly quickly within a few clicks after their search.

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Search engine Spiders and Crawlers

January 6, 2009 @ 5:57 pm · Filed under Meta Tags, Search Engine Optimization, SEO basics

Search engine spiders and crawlers are little workers that search engines send out to your site in order to see what you have on your site.  Content is usually scanned about 200-300 words deep depending on the size of your page.  Pictures and videos may not be scanned right away on the first visit.  Depending on how many pages your site has, the search engine may not get to all your pages on the first glance.  Having a lot of data or content on your site gives the search engine spiders and crawlers a lot of data and links to scan, and there are trillions of sites out there other than yours.  Don’t be worried that your site will never be fully scanned, it may be scanned throughout on the first pass, or it may not, but either way you need to focus on the SEO for each page one step at a time.  In fact if people are linking to the internal pages within your site, chances are when the search engine crawls the site linking in, they will make it to your site.  So be sure to link to relevant sites to what you do/provide this way the search engine spiders will find relevance to the content on your site and give you a better ranking than what you would get if it was an irrelevant site.  Don’t get me wrong you can still link to sites that are irrelevant, however if your site is filled with sites that have nothing to do with what you do, search engines may consider it “link farming” or a way to cheat the system in order to gain higher rankings.

A search engine spider and a crawler are really the same thing.  They both go out looking for new websites in order to provide the best search results for any given query at any given time.  You could even use code on your site’s source to set rates at which the crawler comes back to your site.  However this could backfire if you don’t change your content or your links on your site from time to time.  And not necessarily change the actual content, but if you were to add a page, or maybe post some news about the company.  Don’t allow the content on your site to get stale and outdated, unless what you are doing is never gonna change, you will be finding yourself lower and lower if you don’t give yourself some prominice over all the other sites that are out there.

So in short, give the search engine crawlers and spiders something to talk about when they come to your site, give them something they are looking for which is good, clean, informative content that allows their searchers to find what they are looking for when they want to find it causing the search engines to give you high rankings, only cause they are looking for the searchers best interest all the time, not the SEO specialist nor the website owner.

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Social Media’s Importance on SEO

January 4, 2009 @ 12:36 pm · Filed under Search Engine Optimization, SEO basics

Have you been hesitant to start up a facebook or a myspace page?  Linkedin is the “professional” social media website.  It’s really a way to stay connected with co-workers, industry leaders, business contacts and maybe even a long lost high school friend. 

These sites are also a free starting ground for getting your website name out there with your own name.  Just from people seeing your site as they visit your “homepage” might bring up some conversation, inquiries or ultimately, a useful incoming link to your site.  Word of mouth is still a very effective often overlooked source of free advertising.  Think of these sites as an online business card that you may use to point people at your hobby or even a specific skill set you may have.  Don’t go gungho and have your entire social site as an advertising portal for your new business or your new site, but more or less, “this is what I do, and how I do it”.

See more about website user tools, or widgets to build value to your site,  even something totally off topic of what your site is actually trying to accomplish.  Helpful tools, videos and instructions are a way to get people coming back to your site or to get them there in the first place.

So do what you normally should be doing about your site using these social media sites, make friends, and find people to come back to your site, link to your site or better yet, purchase your products or services.

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Search today Rank Tomorrow

January 2, 2009 @ 6:01 pm · Filed under SEO basics

Welcome to SearchandRank.com!  The site where you learn how people search for sites and how search engines rank sites.  Many new webmasters buy a domain, host the domain, build a site and let it go.  We have been playing with our own sites, our customers sites and companies we have worked for, so we have tried and failed and tried and failed and tried and succeeded.  We are trying to pass on our knowledge to help small business’s compete with big brother and the rest of the powerhouse conglomerates that are out there.

First thing first in order to understand SEO (search engine optimization) you have to know what doing it is going to provide you with.  Every cause has an effect and every action has a reaction, very much the same with SEO.

Each page within your site has it’s own “unique” url,  so each page should be unique.  It’s own title, it’s own content, it’s own pictures and videos.  This way when search engines visit the site’s page, there is another category for it to list the page under.  You don’t want to compete with your own site! You should really keep each page to about 200 words of  “text content” or more.  Search engines tend to only read the first 200 words of a page in order to conserve time to get to the trillions of sites that are out there.

After your content is laid out here is the time to pick out “keywords” that you think “searchers” would use in order to “land” on your page and browse your content.  Think of how you search for something, chances are you don’t put in “one word” you put in a “keyword phrase”, this phrase is a money phrase that you want to concentrate on in order to “theme” the page and create  monetization.

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