It’s important to track the results of any campaign: Sales, Conversions, Email Signups, Customers Acquired, et cetera. But another key to long-term success it to build in additional tracking that will make you more successful in the future. ‘Search’ is fantastic for this: by simply capturing the right pieces of data & making sense of it, you are building yourself a free pot of information to feed your future success.
A human readable URL looks something like this:
http://www.yourwebsite.com/toys/green-fluffy-dogs
A non-readable URL looks more like this:
http://www.yourwebsite.com/cat39/prodid1347
Here are the 5 most important reasons you should always try to use Readable URLs:
In the UK, Google offers two different search options:
The second option is a subset of Google’s index, showing only pages that Google thinks are in the UK.
If you’re a UK company that doesn’t appear in the ‘pages from the UK’ index, you could be missing out on 30% or more of your potential traffic. This can be costly to your business, and can confuse both current & potential visitors, so knowing how to make sure Google thinks you’re in the UK can be quite important. Here are the three ways to make sure your page appear in ‘pages from the UK’:
Hosting your site on a .uk domain name is the simplest way to ensure you’ll be in the ‘pages from the UK’ index. There are currently 13 UK ’secondary level domains’ to choose from (.co.uk, .me.uk, .org.uk, .ltd.uk, .plc.uk, .net.uk, .sch.uk, .ac.uk, .gov.uk, .nhs.uk, .police.uk, .mod.uk, .mil.uk). Hosting your site on any of these (for example yoursite.co.uk) will work just fine. Of the domains available to the general public (ie. excluding .ac.uk, .gov.uk, etc) .co.uk is by far the most familiar to the UK’s population & is the defacto standard.
It’s worth noting that anyone can buy a .uk domain name whether they are a UK resident or not
Pros of using .uk domain names to appear in ‘pages from the UK’:
Cons:
Even if you have a non-UK-specific address (eg. yoursite.com) you can still appear in the ‘pages from the UK’ index by hosting your site on a UK IP address (ie. putting your site on a server within the United Kingdom).
Pros of hosting your site in the UK to appear in ‘pages from the UK’:
Cons:
Though I would never recommend ignoring the previous two options & relying solely on this, if you’re in a position where you are simply unable to either buy a .uk address or host in the UK, purchasing AdWords ads is a simple option to ensure you’re visible in the UK.
Pros of using AdWords ads to appear in ‘pages from the UK’:
Cons:
The title tag is one of the fundamental elements of any webpages. Using titles in the right way offers many benefits and no disadvantages, yet so many sites still misuse them & suffer as a result.
This article explains the basics of title tags & then shows you how paying some attention to your own titles can benefit you. It finishes by offering 6 simple best practices to follow when setting up your own title tags.
The title tag is (or should be) an element of every webpage. In HTML code it looks like this:
Take a look at the titlebar on any site & you can see the current page’s title tag. Here it is in Internet Explorer:
And here it is in Firefox:
The primary functions of a title tag are:
Title tags also have a few ’secondary’ functions. Search engines & other users will make use of your title tags. Understanding how/why they do this, & how this impacts search results, allows you to use them to your advantage.
Ensuring each of your titles is highly relevant to the page it appears on has three large search marketing benefits:
It’s worth noting that most search engines (including Google) will embolden terms matching the current search. (eg. the above example was a search for ‘OM Strategy’ & so each instance of those terms appears in bold)
While there are hundreds of ways to market yourself and your organisation online, search marketing is one of the most powerful. Understanding exactly why it is so powerful and the unique benefits it can offer you are two of the keys to success in search. Here’s a breakdown of three key benefits to make use of in your online marketing strategy.
To be successful in almost every marketing medium, you have to actively research, target & find your prospective customers. This can be a laborious, costly, hit and miss process. With search engines, this process is entirely the opposite: Your customer is working hard to find YOU. A nice metaphor for this is recruitment: In most marketing media, you have to go out & scour the job boards looking for work. You have to tailor your CV, put together a perfectly pitched covering letter & then hope. With search, it’s like receiving a headhunter’s call out of the blue. You are exactly the candidate they’re looking for & they’d like you to come over for an interview.
While most tactics have an impact on either your ability to gain new customers, or on your ability to keep existing customers, a clever search campaign can achieve both.
Search For Acquisition:
There’s no better way of acquiring a customer than to have a search engine they trust return the most relevant page on your site as the top result. If your site is good enough to follow that through, it immediately makes you appear to be the greatest authority & the logical choice.
Search For Retention:
Though it’s often overlooked, search can act as a fantastic tool for retaining customers. Many companies focus on email as their sole retention tactic: keeping customers warm & up to date with news, reinforcing share of mind & often gathering data on when the customer is next thinking about purchasing. If your site ranks closely to your customer’s search interests, with language relevant to them, your site can appear frequently in their search results. This keeps them warm to your brand, brings them back to your site without intervention & can put you at the top of their mind when they next need something you provide.
Passive Income is something every entrepreneur seeks: removing the direct tie between your effort & your reward; the ability to make money while you sleep. While email marketing, pay-per-click, affiliate, online advertising, blogging & most other online marketing tactics (as well as offline tactics) all require you to constantly supply a flow of money or effort, search marketing need not.
Set up a highly relevant, highly linkable site, set the ball rolling firmly, and you can achieve ongoing results without any ongoing effort. Whether your site is a photography portfolio, a religous forum, a multinational business, or indeed anything else, building this principle into your strategy can be used to your long-term advantage.
In the early days of the web, most URLs were handmade & totally readable. Files were created one by one & named by hand, for example:
http://www.mywebsite.com/welcome.htm
(it was usually .htm in those days, because windows didn’t like the extra character in .html).
After a couple of years, CGI came along (the common gateway interface), which let us put dynamic content onto the web, & people started pulling that content using ‘query string parameters’. A query string parameter looks a little like this:
http://www.mywebsite.com/index.pl?page_desc=welcome
Again, a couple of years after that, content management systems started springing up, and larger sites were all run by databases. Databases are fantastic for managing content, but the way they do it is by using unique (ie. not-human-friendly) identifiers for everything, so we started to see URLs looking a little like this:
https://www.mywebsite.com/index.php?cat=17&pg=17306&sort=asc
To the computer, that’s straightforward: go grab the content for category 17, page 17306 & put it into ascending order. To any human other than the web manager or database admin, it means nothing - and your average google user certainly isn’t likely to search for any of those terms when they’re looking for your content.
To overcome those problems, web managers started using an apache plugin called ‘mod_rewrite’ to convert those meaningless query strings into meaningful URLs. So, for example, ‘cat 17′ might translate to ‘fruit’, ‘pg 17306′ might convert to ‘pink lady apples’ and ’sort=asc’ might convert to ‘price-low-to-high’, resulting in a URL that looks something like this:
https://www.mywebsite.com/fruit/pink-lady-apples/price-low-to-high/
That makes everyone happy: the database manager can still put content wherever he likes on the server, the computer knows exactly where to find each piece of content, the web manager gets more search traffic & the end user knows exactly what they’re getting when they click your URL.
Go to Google & search for the phrase “click here” and you’ll see somewhere between 1.5 and 2 billion results. To put that in perspective, searching for the phrase “thank you” will return around 255 million results. Even “microsoft” only returns around a billion results. That puts “click here” well up in the top 10 most popular phrases on the web & possibly makes it one of the most (over) used phrases in the English language.
So if a couple of billion other pages are use “click here”, why shouldn’t you? Here are a few quick reasons:
Reason 1. Don’t Patronise Your Readers
People understand what a link does. If it’s underlined & it’s on a website, you don’t need to spell it out. When was the last time you saw a book with “Read Me” written in big bold type on the front cover?
Reason 2. Improve Your Site’s Scanability
Say you’re trying to get your visitors onto a page containing driving directions to your office. You could either explain that in plain copy & waste the highest-contrast element of the paragraph on a meaningless phrase, or, you could make sure the first thing their eye sees when scanning the paragraph tells them exactly what your link does. Glance at these two examples & see if you can figure out what the links do without reading word-for-word:
Example 1
Our facility is centrally located and can be reached simply by both road and rail networks. For directions click here. Free off-road parking is available nearby.
Example 2
Our facility is centrally located. Follow these directions to our office to reach us by either road or rail network. Free off-road parking is available nearby.
Even a passing glance tells you what’s behind the link in the second example.
Reason 3. Boost Your Search Rankings
If you’ve managed to build 100 links to one of your pages with the key phrase “silver necklaces”, you’re going to rank higher in the search engines for the phrase “silver necklaces”. Conversely, if all of those 100 links use the key phrase “click here”, those search engine algorithms are going to associate your page with the phrase “click here” and you’ll lose out on all those potential necklace sales.
A simple example of that concept in action is the phrase “leave”. Search any of the major search engines for the phrase “leave” and you’ll see the highest ranking pages will be Disney, Yahoo and Google themselves. Why is that? Well since child-protecting legislation came in, Adult and Gambling sites are compelled to include an “Are you of legal age?” entrance page. Many of those pages include a link for minors to leave the site, containing the phrase “leave now” or “exit now”. Obviously they need to send visitors leaving their sites somewhere. Disney, Yahoo and Google are obvious non-offensive choices and, as a result, they’ve each built a healthy ranking for the word “leave”.
Reason 4: Call Your Readers To Action
If you listen to radio ads, you’ll often hear them finish with something like “Call us today on XXX XXX for your free quote” or “Visit your nearest store today”. The reason you hear this kind of formula so often is that it gets results: tell your customer/reader/donor what you want them to do & they’re more likely to do it.
“Click here” was the original web-based call to action, but it’s so commonplace and implicit it does nothing. You’re no more likely to click that link than you are any of the other 2-billion. To improve your results, tell your customer what action they’re really going to take by clicking that link. A couple of examples:
Each of those stands out more as a link than “click here”, they tell the visitor exactly what’s behind the link without forcing them to read an entire paragraph, and they conjur up the image of the visitor taking that action.
Reason 5: It’s the Quickest, Cheapest Way to Improve Your Campaign Results
Unlike most methods of increasing results (buying traffic, tweaking layout, crafting a sales pitch, etc), changing your link anchor text takes next to no time, next to no money, and it can dramatically improve your results.
