by Vinny on April 16, 2010
Yes Your Title Tags Suck
Yesterday Google changed the game for webmasters, and I think it was a great change that will improve a lot of websites. Of course there will also be webmasters screaming but such is life on the web.
Yesterday Google let webmasters know what pages get impressions and more important the amount of clicks on those pages. You may be saying what’s the big deal about this. Well lets do a little digging, say you have a page on blue widget that is showing 5000 impressions a day (I know most people would love that) but the end user only clicks on the results 5 times. A very low percentage that I don’t even feel like doing the math for. This tells me that the user either wasn’t looking for your type of widget or your title tags and meta descriptions suck.
Odds are your page title says blue widgets and nothing else. Your meta description tag is probably non existant and search engines are grabbing any content from your page and it looks jumbled and uninviting to the end user. Sorry but odds are this is the cold hard truth.
Now lets see, what do you think is gonna happen to this page that only gets 5 clicks out of 5000 impressions. I would bet that page gets a lower spot in organic search results since users are not finding that page as relevant over and over again.
I admit I only spent a hour looking at one of my sites that rank well and I was amazed at what I was looking at. I found about 25 things that I could change ASAP and make my site much better for the end user. Although the search engine guru’s may tell you meta tags are dead I will be using and have been using them on my sites. It only takes a few seconds to include them so why not include them.
Now this is also good news for people not creating spammy pages. Those spammy pages and sites will naturally disapear as webmasters improve their websites based on info found in the new Google webmasters tool section. I will be interested on reading up on this more. Do yourself a favor and log in to webmaster tools and look at your best site and then your worst site you will see why your worst site is ranking badly.
Come back and let me know what you found.
by Vinny on November 17, 2009
I bet you can find at least five things that your website should be doing or doing better. Odds are you have built a site and you are getting some traffic but things are not exactly how you thought they would go. Well lets take a look at five things that may help you get better results. Some are so simple it may surprise you that you haven’t thought of them on your own.
1) Does your site help the user solve a problem? This is either a yes or no. In this day and age the consumer is looking for an answer for their problem, if your product does that then explain it any way you can. This may be a video or a white paper or something of the sort. Give away the information so that the user remembers how helpful you were, they will end up telling people through word of mouth.
2) Do you know what your visitors are doing on your site? Odds are you think you do but you could be wrong. You need to get some sort of analytics set up and see how a user is navigating through your site. You may not even know what your most popular pages are,or even what your worst pages are. You may be focusing on the wrong things and wasting time.You also need to know how people are finding your site. Get a neighbor to sit down in front of a computer and put them on your site and see how they navigate it, it will not be what you thought. get a pen and paper and tell them to give you the honest truth.
3) Do you have an email newsletter? Getting traffic is hard enough so once you get a customer you should try and make them a returning customer. This saves you the worry of trying to rank in search engines and also decreases your advertising cost as you already have that customer. A lifetime customer is the best investment you can make for your site.
4) Do you have a FAQ page? Whenever you get an email asking questions about your site or product make that question into a line on your FAQ page as it will be looked for again on your site. Your answer will help others find you and use your services. It will also end up being keyword rich content that will attract the search engines and get you good long tail keywords.
5) Do you have trust pages? Every website needs to develop trust with the potential customer. Your site needs a page for privacy policy, contact us, terms of use, disclaimer, and let the customer know what you are doing with their information and what they can expect from your site.
I bet if you are not doing these things your site is not doing what you want it to do.
