MacDonald on Marketing

Archive for June, 2008

Reviewing and analyzing the volume and behavior of the visitors to your site can help you identify opportunities to save money and increase sales. The best stats tracking service I’ve found is actually free!

Google Analytics is a fantastic service that will give you detailed statistics about your website visitors. Analytics’ incredibly detailed reports will tell you just about anything you can imagine about your visitors:

• How many visitors your site is getting (and you can generate reports by date range for all statistics)
• How many page views your website receives
• Where your site visitors are geographically located
• How your visitors find your site (e.g. search engines, links from other sites)
• The bounce rate — in other words, how many visitors are viewing only the first page and then leaving your site
• The keyword phrases your visitors are using to find you in search engines
• Your visitors’ browser versions and connection speeds
• How often your visitors return, and how recently
• How deeply into your site your visitors click
• How long they spend on your site
• The typical paths users take on your site

Google Analytics can track your conversions for sales, newsletter signups and other goals of your online marketing — even providing breakdowns for different traffic sources. In other words, you can directly compare your return on investment for purchased clicks from many sources.

Using such detailed statistics can help you invest wisely in marketing. You can end ineffective campaigns and increase spending on campaigns that are giving you good ROI. You can save money by test marketing before starting larger marketing or advertising campaigns.

Google Analytics is quite easy to integrate into your website. Go to Google Analytics and either create a Google account or sign in with your existing account. Then set up a website profile for your website. You’ll receive a code snippet. This snippet should go on every page of your website right above the close body tag. Install the code, or ask your web developer to do so (at Simply Brilliant Solutions, our content management system websites have Google Analytics integration so that you can just copy the code into a box in the administrative control panel). Then, go back to the Analytics site and check to make sure that Analytics is receiving data.

Do you have experience with or comments about Google Analytics? Please chime in below!

Welcome to SEO Tuesdays. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of creating a website that enjoys good search engine rankings for the search queries your potential customers are likely to use when searching for products or services your business provides.

Last week I talked about keyword research and showed you how to come up with a list of about a dozen keyword phrases to target. The idea is that when somebody goes to Google or some other search engine and performs a search, these are the phrases for which you want your site to be ranked well. Now you may be asking, “Okay, what do I do with the keyword phrases to make that happen?”

Search engine optimization efforts can be roughly divided into two separate categories:

• Onsite optimization, the changes you make to your actual website to improve its ranking; and,

• Offsite optimization, everything else you do to help improve your search engine ranking (most of this work involves developing inbound links to your site from other sites).

Today we’re talking about onsite search engine optimization. Both onsite optmization and offsite optimization are critical in search engine optimization. Think of onsite optimization in terms of the foundation of a house. A foundation is not a whole house, and similarly, onsite optimization by itself will not make you achieve your search engine optimization goals. However, without properly optimizing the coding of your website, all offsite optimization in the world will not give you high search engine rankings.

Onsite search engine optimization is a complex subject, and many businesses opt to hire a search engine optimization professional to make the decisions about onsite search engine optimization and implement the coding changes. However, if you are starting from zero and do not have the budget for outside help, here are the basics to help get you started.

First, make a list of all your site’s pages. For each page, choose two or three of your keyword phrases that most closely match the theme of the text content. Repeats are okay. We’ll call these your target keyword phrases.

Even if you are not comfortable editing your site’s HTML code, the information below will serve as a guide so that you know what to look for and how to instruct your web developer to change your site. For each page, here are the elements that should contain one or more of your target keyword phrases:

URL: The URL is the address of each page of your site (starts with http://). Ideally, each page of your site should have it’s most relevant target keyword phrases as part of its URL (e.g. www.thisisyoursite.com/target-keyword-phrase.html). If your site has already been online for more than a few months you should consult a search engine professional before changing the URLs of any of your pages to avoid losing the search engine benefits that you may have already developed.

Title tag: The title tag is the piece of code that determines the title of your page. You can see the title of any page at the very top of your browser screen, above all your toolbars. Your title tag will also be the title Google uses when displaying your site in search results. The title should be summary of the content of the page and it must contain one or two of your target keyword phrases. Keep the title length to one reasonably short sentence.

Meta description tag: The meta description tag will not be visible on the page itself, but Google and other search engines may display it as the description of your site in the search results. Therefore, this is a good opportunity to persuade searchers that your site has what they are looking for. Write a short paragraph, one or two sentences, that ideally contain your target keyword phrases and make a well-written summary of your page.

Header tags: Header tags go around the headings in your page’s content. Search engines treat headers as an important indication of your site’s content. Make sure your headers include your target keywords.

Text content: As mentioned above, your target keywords should be related to the content of the page itself. Therefore, it should not be difficult for you to make sure that the target keywords appear naturally in the text of the content of your page. Make sure you have at least three to four paragraphs of content on each page.

Image ALT tags: The image ALT tag is meant to contain a description of the image to which it relates. If you are using the Internet Explorer browser, you’ll see the ALT tag pop up when you mouse over an image on a web page. Starting with your target keyword phrases for the page, work in ALT tags for each image that are accurate and also contain your keyword phrases. Once you have used up your two target keyword phrases for the page, move on to other keyword phrases in your list of 12 in order to create the other ALT tags for images on the page.

There are some other important things to know about onsite search engine optimization:

Site navigation: It’s very important that some of the navigation elements on your site are hyperlinked text rather than images. If your main navigation uses images in order to look nice, make sure you at least have a text footer menu. If you can use a target phrase in the navigation links pointing to your pages, even better. If your site has more than 10 pages, a site map would be good idea.

A word of caution: Keyword stuffing is the name for packing too many keyword phrases into your URL, title tag and other page elements. More is not always better and keyword stuffing frequently results in lower, not higher, rankings. Don’t keyword stuff — stick to one or two keyword phrases for each element of your page. About a decade ago meta keyword tags were important to search engine rankings, but because of rampant keyword stuffing and spam almost all the search engines now disregard meta keyword tags. If a service provider tries to convince you that he can get you to the top of the rankings just by manipulating your site’s keyword tags, run — you are being scammed.

Next week we will talk about some of the ways to start building your offsite optimization strategies. Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed in your reader or sign up for free email updates at the upper right of this page.

Do you have any onsite search engine optimization strategies to share? Please comment!

You spend a lot of time and money to get visitors to your website, and then the majority of them will leave again without contacting you or making a purchase, never to return.  Turn some of those “not today” visitors into future customers by persuading them to join your email list.

Here are the five steps to building a healthy opt-in email marketing list for your small business:

1. Use a third-party email marketing service provider.  I prefer Aweber.com — other providers include ConstantContact.com and GetResponse.com.  Why should you pay for a third-party service?  Your website host or ISP is not really geared to handle your email newsletter needs; if you don’t use a third-party provider, you’ll find that many or even most of your subscribers do not receive your emails.  Packages start at $20 a month and it is well worth the investment.
2. Put an email collection box (the little form your visitors fill out with their name and email address) on the front page of your site, and ideally on every page.  Make it easy for your visitors to sign up to your list.
3. Make an irresistable offer to induce your visitors to subscribe.  Offer free information, a discount coupon, insider deals:  anything that will appeal to your audience.
4. Tell your visitors exactly what they are going to send them in their email.  A weekly newsletter?  Special discounts?  Recipes?  And then stick to your promise.  Give them what you promised them, and not a bunch of other stuff.
5. Send marketing emails on Wednesday.  Statistics show that emails sent between Tuesday and Thursday stand the best chance of actually being opened.

Need help getting your email list and website collection boxes set up?  Contact me at catherine@macdonaldonmarketing.com