Section 1: Web content and your business | How to optimize a page for search engines
Description tag
Many experts say that your description metatag (tag) won’t improve your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rankings as it’s not directly considered by search engines. Perhaps, but you should use it carefully because a good description metatag can increase clickthroughs to your site when it is seen on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Also, there is some evidence that an increased clickthrough rate (the % of viewers who click to visit your site) will in turn increase rankings.
Here’s a simple formula for your description tags:
And (if you’re really clever) add a call to action. The following is an example from ThinkingManagers.com:
“Business strategy & Business continuity strategy: Improve your business with advice and free newsletter from leading gurus Edward de Bono and Robert Heller ”
Headlines, sub-headlines and body text
Look again at the screen grab below from our example site and see how the headline, sub-headline and the body text include the target keywords.
Include your primary keywords in your headline, sub-heading and body text.
On the next page is a screenshot of the start of the example page’s main body text, with the primary target keyword highlighted:
Note we haven’t used the target keywords as much as we might have. Neither Google nor users will like it if you cram your keywords in and make your copy hard to read.
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Section 1: Web content and your business | How to optimize a page for search engines
Include keywords in your body text.
Internal and external links (use text)
The blue text in the above body copy links to other pages on the site. Notice how these links use the target keywords (and variations of them). It’s also good practice to link to other sites, preferably those that rank well for your target keywords.
That’s it. There are no secrets to optimizing pages for search engines and it shouldn’t slow you down. Also, the ideas you get from Wordtracker can both help you optimize your content and give you ideas to enhance it. After all …
… Wordtracker is only showing you what searchers are looking for – so why not give it to them?
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How to make
your articles sell
By adding irresistible marketing offers to
unmissable positions on (almost) every page, business management website ‘Thinking
Managers’ more than doubled its response rate.
This dramatic improvement was primarily achieved by placing marketing in the middle of the top of almost every page (beneath the main banner) and also high within body copy. Previously, there had been some marketing in its left-hand column and about 300 quality articles that finished with a marketing offer.
You can see the new marketing positions outlined in red
can act as marketing landing pages. That includes pages that weren’t written to directly promote your products, category pages you never get time to work on and even pages that might not contain much copy.
We’ll now have a quick look at why this works and how you can use similar techniques to increase your own site’s response rate.
in the screen grab below:
Put your marketing where it will be seen
For most of your visitors, you get just a few seconds to give a reason for them to stay on your site. And no matter what you do many will quickly leave, perhaps forever. Therefore, to maximize response you must put your marketing where it will be seen within the first few seconds of a visit.
This means your marketing must be visible without the need to scroll down the page (we call this being ‘above the fold’, an old newspaper phrase). But whereabouts
Place marketing in your customers’ eyeline.
With these and similar simple techniques, all your pages
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above the fold is crucial and you can decide where by first using the results of others tests and then starting your own.
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Section 1: Web content and your business | How to make your articles sell
Eye-tracking research shows us where our marketing will be seen
Research tracking site visitors’ eye movements and displaying the results as
‘heatmaps’ gives us our first clues about where to place marketing. Below are a three heat maps for different types of sites:
Source: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html
The above heatmaps are from an About Us page, a product page on an e-commerce site and a Google results page. We can see that users mostly look at the top of a page’s main body of text and its headlines; users are less interested in banners and separate left and right-hand columns.
Conclusion: place your marketing just above or below your main headline and within body text as high up the page as possible.
Always be testing
‘Always be Testing’ is a mantra that should quickly follow ‘Always be Marketing’. Once you have your new marketing positions in place you should never stop testing different marketing content and positions. The rewards can sometimes be astounding.
For example, Sports Injury Bulletin recently trebled – yep that’s a 300% increase – response by adding a marketing position below the page headline and offering free reports with a sign-up to a free newsletter.
You can try your own simple tests like this or get sophisticated and scientific with tools like Google’s Website Optimizer.
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Section 1: Web content and your business | How to make your articles sell
Also, if eye-tracking heatmaps are too expensive for you then with Crazy Egg and Click Heat you can create heatmaps that track users clicks for free.
Learning to place your marketing on the most looked-at positions on every page is the first step on the road to maximizing your website’s conversion. For a more advanced exploration of conversion, see Conversion Rate Experts and GrokDotCom .
What is your site for?
I regularly hear the objection that putting marketing where it will be seen will put readers off the article, the site or the product. If you’re thinking that, ask yourself who and what your site is for?
If your website exists to sell stuff then you are interested in what maximizes response, not what minimizes fuss. The whole point of your website is to give you a chance to present your marketing – so why back off from the obvious best way of doing it?
If your current response rate is 2% then that’s 2 out of every 100 visitors doing what you want them to do, appealing to just 2 more people (per 100) will double response. Is it a problem if, whilst doubling response, your new marketing does not appeal to those other 96 people?
If your marketing appeals to potential buyers by genuinely offering real benefits then the chances are that the only people that aren’t going to like it aren’t ever likely to be your customers. It was nice of them to drop by and make your visitor numbers look good but your website is not for them – it’s for potential buyers.
So convert all your pages to marketing pages by putting your marketing where it will be seen by the most visitors and don’t let the sensibilities of someone else’s customers stop you increasing yours.
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