18th June 2007

The page title and meta description

By : Nidhi Gupta

It’s tempting sometimes to pay a great deal of attention to the sales text or content on a web page, and then just scribble off the page title and meta description. Or maybe you don’t write them at all. Maybe someone in IT adds the title and description for you. Its a big mistake.

Every page title and meta description on your site is enormously important, from the point of view of both the search engines and your readers.

Writing for your readers

When someone does a search on Google, MSN or wherever else, they’ll scan through the page titles and descriptions. While search engines will not always display the description you wrote for the meta description, they often will… particularly if the search term being used can be found exactly in the meta description you wrote.

So let’s consider the times when both your page title and meta description are used by the search engines. Because you’re in control of writing them, you can quickly signal to your readers that your page is directly relevant to their search.

In other words, your title and description should be descriptive and useful. You have just a few words with which to wave your hand and persuade readers to click on your listing first.

Let readers know exactly what they can expect from the page and, wherever possible, include a promise. If your page is going to deliver something useful, say a few words about how the reader will benefit.

And yes, a great page title and description can result in someone clicking on your listing in third place, rather than on a poorly described listing in the number one spot.

Writing for the search engines

Like people, and deliberately so, the major search engines will try to figure out what your page is about. Hopefully you have confined the page to a single topic. That will make it easier for you to write a great page title and meta description, and it will make it easier for the search engines to identify your key phrases.

Search engines are just like people in this regard - they’re looking for clues to identify the topic of the page. Keep that in mind as you write the title and description.

And no, there’s no conflict between what the search engines are looking for and what people are looking for - they’re both looking for clarity. The only difference with search engines is that they have no feelings and are looking for words and phrases to guide them.

However, people do have feelings, which is why you also need to include that sense of promise and success.

Pay as much attention as you would when writing an ad

It’s curious - people will often pay experts, test headlines and body text and generally invest a huge amount of attention in their PPC ads. But when it comes to their organic listings on the same page of search results, they scribble down the title and description as if they were of no importance. Never forget just how important they actually are…

Get More Details At : webcredible.co.uk

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posted in SEO/Search Engine News | 0 Comments

18th June 2007

The Visitors You Never Knew You Had

By : Nidhi Gupta

When monitoring your traffic, especially with a large site, you will naturally look at the traffic received related to the keywords you have targeted. But is every visitor likely to be there for the exact same reason? If you take a moment or two to analyze your traffic statistics, you’ll be surprised at how many visitors you get from odd places or strange search terms.

If you are working actively with targeting specific keywords within your niche, you are no doubt getting your fair share of visitors from the search engines. But, on top of those visitors, you will get search engine traffic from phrases you are not actively targeting. Many of these visitors are most likely derived from searches related to your niche. More often than not however, a web page will have many specific phrases, certain to attract the occasional visitor from Google.

If your site is large enough, or if you are running multiple sites, you are probably getting quite a few hits like this every day. The problem with this kind of traffic is the lack of information, you haven’t actively tried to attract these people, yet they arrive. But you need to figure out from where they are coming, and most importantly, what page(s) they are landing on.

The easiest way is to look at your statistics, most information will be found there. First of all, look at the search terms that have resulted in visitors. Try to find phrases or words NOT specific for your niche, but instead of a more general nature. Or better yet; a phrase that, taken out of context, will be related to something completely different. If you can find enough, similar or related, search terms, odds are you can use these to improve your revenue.

When you have figured out what search terms generate the most traffic, its time to see where they are landing. Do a few searches on ALL major search engines to see the most likely entry pages for each particular query. If you can find one or a few pages often occurring on various queries, you have an excellent opportunity to figure out what these visitors are looking for. If you can, it’s almost too easy to present them with right on target ads. This way, some of the people will click your ads rather than the back button, thus making you some money.

Sometimes the terms giving you the extra visitors will be easy to translate, hence making it clear what the visitors are really looking for. In these cases, all you need to do is sign up for an affiliate program offering products of interest. In other cases, the terms are of a very general nature, making it less obvious what they are looking for. It is, however, possible to experiment with a few text ads, analyzing what ads attract the most clicks. Most free website statistics software don’t enable you to track visitor-behavior, but if you sign up for Google statistics you’ll be able to see how many times each link is clicked, making it easy to find an affiliate program matching the visitors you never knew you had.

If you have numerous pages attracting odd visitors, you can easily repeat the above for each page getting enough search engine traffic to make it worth your while.

Get More Details At: Ezinearticles.biz

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posted in SEO/Search Engine News | 0 Comments

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