The basis of ALL search engine rankings is keywords.
Keywords are words and phrases you place in your website’s page titles, headings, meta data, body content, and URLs of your pages so when users enter them in the Search Engines, they find the information they need, from you. It is EXTREMELY important that you optimize your site for such target keywords as they will be what potential customers search for to subsequently find your site.
Here’s how to choose and implement the right target keywords:
- You’ll want to consider your target audience, and what the primary focus of your website will be.
- Jot down a list of words and phrases that you think people might type into search engines when looking for your site. Don’t worry about being perfect: just be creative. For example, if you sell books, use specific keyword combinations like “educational children’s books, adult romance novels, celebrity auto-biographies”, etc. If you’re having a hard time coming up with different keyword iterations, try using Google Adwords Keyword Tool.
- Each page on your site should have one to three related keyword phrases that are site-specific. For example, say you have a page all about tea kettles. Good phrases to target on this page would be tea kettles, stainless steel tea kettles, or unique tea kettles. See what I mean? They’re all related, and they’re all pointing at the same general content on the page.
- Your keywords should be used throughout your site copy – where they make sense – as well as in your title tags and various meta tags. Don’t go nuts and start inserting keywords every other word, because this is considered bad form aka “black hat SEO”.
- It takes a while to get the hang of finding the right keywords that work, but that’s what BoostSuite will help you with!
Do you have any other good tips for choosing keywords? Drop us a comment below!
An anchor link is a link on a page that brings you to a specific place on that page. Anchor links can be helpful when you want to bring a website visitor to a specific spot on a page. Try it out…
Click here! This is an anchor link to the bottom of the page.
Adding anchor links to a page is very simple.
1. Start by writing out your copy and putting it on your website, either as a new page or on an existing page.
2. Determine where on the page you want the link (the anchor link) and where you want it to go (the anchor destination).
3. Next you will need to add HTML code, using the <a> tag to create the link and to create the destination.
- The anchor link will use this format: <a href=“#anchor1” >Anchor Link Text</a>
- The anchor destination will use this format: <a name=“anchor1”>Anchor Destination Text</a>
4. Be sure that the “a href” and “a name” are identical except for a “#” symbol with “a href”
5. You’re done.
One last comment about anchor links. Use them sparingly. As this blog post shows, if you overuse them, or have the links jump all over the page like we did here, it can be a real turnoff to a visitor. Used with care, they can be a great navigational tool for your website.
Now Click here! This is an anchor link back to the rest of the article.
Please give a warm BoostSuite welcome to Abdul Khan, the newest member of the BoostSuite team!
Abdul is currently working on getting his Masters of Engineering Management degree at Duke University. We met him at Duke’s Just-In-Time career fair back in April and were impressed with his experience and knowledge of online marketing and start-ups. We’re excited to have him.
Abdul will be helping us this summer by being our “Jack of all trades.” He will be interacting with BoostSuite beta users to gather feedback and provide it back to our development team, building our Knowledgebase with frequently asked questions and answers, and assisting with sales and support so expect to hear from him at some point!
When he’s not working, Abdul likes to play soccer and is a huge fan of Liverpool Football Club. He also listens to a lot of progressive rock and metal, with Porcupine Tree, Dream Theater and Rush being some of his favorite bands.
Do you have any words of advice for Abdul? If so, please leave them in the comments below!
Small businesses who want to optimize their websites need to understand the key elements of every web page. One of these elements is the page title. A page title, or title tag, is the main text that describes a web page. It is the second-most important on-page SEO element (behind your main body content), is the easiest SEO element to edit and appears in three key places.
1. Browser:
The title tag show up in both the top of a browser’s window as well as the applicable tabs.
2. Search Results Pages:
Title tags also show up in the search engine results as the links that potential visitors will click on after conducting a search.
3. External Website:
Oftentimes external websites (especially social media sites) will use the title of a web page as its link anchor text.
Page Title Best Practice
The page title element of a web page is meant to be an accurate and concise description of a page’s content. This element creates value in three specific areas and is crucial to both user experience and search engine optimization (SEO).
1. Search Engine Relevancy
Creating a descriptive, keyword-rich title tag is important for increasing rankings in search engines. Keyword usage in the title tag is one of the most important places to use keywords to achieve high rankings.
As title tags are such an important part of search engine optimization, implementing BoostSuite’s suggestions regarding them is paramount. It’s a very easy task to complete, yet carries its weight in gold.
There are a couple things to be conscious of when building your page titles:
- Make sure they are not too long or too short. 70 characters is the maximum amount of characters that will display in the search results. The search engines will truncate the title and add an ellipsis – “…” to indicate that a title tag has been cut off.
- Place important keywords close to the front of the title tag. The closer to the beginning of the title tag a keyword is, the more helpful it will be for ranking and the more likely a user will be to click them in the search results.
- Place your brand name at the end of the title tag. You may see that some companies include their brand name at the beginning of their page titles. This is mostly reserved for companies with good brand recognition. If you’re a small business using BoostSuite, we suggest adding your brand name at the end of the title tag.
- Consider readability and emotional impact. Creating a compelling title tag will pull in more visitors from the search engines. Thus, it’s important to not only think about optimization and keyword usage, but the entire user experience. The title tag is a new visitors’s first interaction with your brand when they find it in a search result and should convey the most positive impression possible.
2. Search Engine Result Page
Using keywords in title tags means that search engines will bold, or highlight, those terms in the search results when a user has performed a query that matches those terms. This helps give greater visibility and a higher click-through rate.
3. Browser
The title tag of any page appears at the top of the browser you’re using. While this is important for user experience, this location has been noted to receive a relatively small amount of attention from users.
Optimal Format for Small Businesses
Here’s an easy format you can follow to properly structure your page titles for optimal optimization. However, this is not a rule. You should follow the suggestions above to determine the proper formatting for your unique business.
Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
Check out our 5 Tips For Creating Perfect Page Titles.
Would you like to be given free suggestions on which keywords to add to your page titles to improve your SERP ranking? Sign up for BoostSuite today.
I started my last company iContact.com in 2002, and for years as we grew the company we added customers and employees to help us scale. At around 150 employees something new happened, we began hiring lots of people called “analysts.” I’d never really seen anything like it before, we had hired programmers, we had hired salespeople, we had hired marketing people, but now we were hiring people whose entire job was to explain our own data to us. I learned quickly how much hidden meaning an average looking set of data holds.
How did we find data analysts to hire at iContact? Well, we recruited students graduating with degrees in advanced mathematics, statistics, operations research, and the like. Where didn’t we look to hire data analysts?… the local bakery. And why is that? It’s pretty much because your average hometown baker doesn’t have the skill set required to analyze complex sets of data. Let’s be honest, I have a four year degree in Computer Science and I don’t have the skill set required to analyze complex sets of data. This is a very specialized skill.
I make this point to make a bit of a jab at Yahoo’s newly launched SMB Marketing Dashboard, as reported by TechCrunch earlier this week. If you’re not familiar with the term, SMB means Small and Mid-Size Business. These are businesses much like your local baker, or your neighborhood locksmith, or your cousin who does home inspections. The point is, they’re not very large businesses. They’re specifically not the type of company that has a data analyst on their payroll.
And yet, from the Yahoo SMB Marketing Dashboard press release: “As [Yahoo] explains, the new tool allows small businesses to analyze website metrics…”
Why do all of these companies who sell products to small businesses think that small businesses want to spend their time analyzing data? Small business people go into business because they’re absolutely and incredibly talented at something, usually something pretty specific, like baking. For the most part, in order to grow and succeed, they need to focus their time on what they do best and outsource everything else at the lowest price possible.
As a company that works with small businesses here at BoostSuite, we’re absolutely obsessed with helping our users entirely avoid the things that they aren’t awesome at or simply don’t like doing. We think this is the best way to help small businesses grow and succeed. BoostSuite does web marketing data analysis for small business people so they can spend less time pulling their hair out and more time making the simple improvements that will help them take their businesses to the next level.
We hope that you’ll join us on this mission, and maybe let BoostSuite find the best opportunities in your marketing data too. And as a personal favor to me, the next time you hear someone telling small business people to “analyze” their data will you please comment here so that I can call them out too. Thanks.
Your friend in fighting boring data,
Aaron
CEO, BoostSuite
Tomorrow is Star Wars Day, which was named after a popular mis-interpretation of the famous movie line, “May The Force Be With You”. In Star Wars, you have a classic fight of good versus evil, of the status quo versus a new idea and of big against small.
Like Star Wars, the upcoming launch of BoostSuite will change the way the world looks at website optimization for small businesses. Let’s look at this in more detail.
Good Versus Evil – The Galactic Empire is the big bad guy in Star Wars. Emperor Palpatine rules with an iron fist and uses Darth Vader to carry out The Empire’s bidding throughout the universe. Up until today, traditional web analytics tools have been The Empire. They tell you there is only one way to make your website work, with expensive analytical suites and overpriced consultants. BoostSuite is the Rebel Alliance, refusing to be part of the analytical-focused approach and leveling the field for small businesses in the universe.
Status Quo – In Star Wars, there is fear of the Empire and its rule. Citizens of countless planets quiver in fear of The Death Star. Up until today, your website was forced to play by the same archaic rules that The Empire has put in place. You have had to consume large amounts of data and spend countless hours analyzing what that data means. If you are not a marketing expert, good luck! With BoostSuite, we take care of the analysis for you. We flip the status quo on its head and help you get to your real goal, more traffic and leads through your website. BoostSuite offers agile tools to improve your site, just like the highly-maneuverable X-Wing Fighter helped to defeat the much larger, cumbersome, powerful Death Star.
Big against Small - The Rebel Alliance is a small group of soldiers and patriots who decided to bring the fight against all that is wrong. They refuse to admit that their hodge-podge of ships is outmatched and that they have no chance of winning. BoostSuite believes that your small business’s website is no different. Just because you do not have the budget and resources of a Fortune 500 company doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have the tools to level the playing field. Using BoostSuite will give your site the competitive advantage and find the weaknesses in the Empire’s defenses to take down even the largest competitor.
Unfortunately, the Internet can be a far more complex place than the clear lines of Good and Evil brought on by The Force. Use BoostSuite to sift through your emotions and to make your website be all it can be for your business. With BoostSuite your small business can proudly proclaim – “Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you?”
May The Force Be With You!!!
Sign up for a free BoostSuite account at www.boostsuite.com
Have you ever had this situation? You need to get a co-worker a file or a number of files and they are just too big for email? Or, you need to work on a presentation or a spreadsheet with a co-worker, but they are in another office or working from home? Or you have a bunch of large photos you want to send to some friends?
This happens all the time for me and I know it happens quite often for other small businesses. As a startup, I have to be flexible in my work environment and be able to work from everywhere. There are numerous times I need to work with my business partner, my designers or my support staff on marketing copy, a new design or an idea for a new feature in BoostSuite. This is why I was so excited with the release last week of Google Drive. Google Drive is a product, similar to Dropbox and Sharefile that allows you to share files with anyone you want, all without the need to email or worry about the size of the files. This is a concept called cloud storage. Google’s entry into this market is exciting because this product offers much more flexibility than other existing products. Primarily, it syncs with Google’s Docs product, so you can open and collaborate with your co-workers from right inside of Google Drive.
Say for example, you have a Microsoft Word document you want to share and work on with a co-worker. Simply upload that file by dragging it into the Google Drive folder on your computer (this looks just like any other folder on your computer).
Then you can share the file with your co-worker from within the Google Drive interface. Then, both of you can open that file at the same time and see your edits in real-time. At any time either of you can download that file or share that file with others as necessary. There is a full revision history so you can see every change and who made the change. In addition, with Google Drive, you can now access that file from any platform/device you wish such as your iPhone, Android Phone and iPad. This is a big evolution from Dropbox, where you could merely store and view files. With Google Drive, not only can you edit and collaborate, you can even create a new file from scratch and share with your co-workers.
Some other features of Google Drive include:
- 5gb of free storage (compared with only 2gb from Dropbox) – this is enough for thousands of files
- download to mobile
- version tracking
- file and folder collaboration
- a public API
- public file sharing (anyone with the URL of the file can access)
Google Drive allows you to upload almost any file type and in addition, lets you view over 16 file types directly in the interface, with no need to download. These include:
- Microsoft Word (.DOC and .DOCX)
- Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)
- Microsoft PowerPoint (.PPT and .PPTX)
- Adobe Portable Document Format (.PDF)
- Apple Pages (.PAGES)
- Adobe Illustrator (.AI)
- Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)
- Tagged Image File Format (.TIFF)
- Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)
- Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)
- PostScript (.EPS, .PS)
- TrueType (.TTF)
- XML Paper Specification (.XPS)
- Archive file types (.ZIP and .RAR)
- Text files (.TXT)
- Markup/Code (.CSS, .HTML, .PHP, .C, .CPP, .H, .HPP, .JS)
Finally, one of my favorite features is the ability to bring a file you receive in your Gmail account right into Google Drive by clicking the “View” link next to the attachment. It couldn’t be any simpler.
Google Drive is my favorite small business productivity tool right now. It helps a small business to be more productive and increase the bottom line.
BoostSuite is the “Google Drive” for your small business website. It allows you to be the most productive online marketer you can be. With BoostSuite you spend your valuable time implementing changes that bring you more customers to your site and not wasting your time trying to analyze why your website is not working. Sign up for our beta today at www.boostsuite.com
Let’s face it. As marketers, brand image and perception matter. First impressions are key to building trust and most of first impressions are built visually on the web. We want to make sure we’re clean, consistent and uniform. With the BoostSuite beta launch looming on the horizon, our team of designers and developers have been working at a feverish pace to redesign all of the current Eden user interfaces and implement them into their new home in BoostSuite. All of the new interfaces have been designed with simplicity, ergonomics and ease-of-use in mind.
Our goal is to provide all existing Eden customers with the same publishing functionality they’ve become accustomed to, but revamp the look and feel to match the BoostSuite brand. The core functionality remains constant throughout, but we’ve fixed some items that were brought to our attention by our customers, like not being able to see certain fields and/or buttons.
Here’s a first-hand look at 3 of the new publishing interfaces compared to their Eden predecessors.
There are only a few weeks left to build your site using the Eden Platform, so if you’ve been on the fence about trying it, now’s the time. Sign-up for a free 15 day trial here – preation.com/freetrial
A website conversion is the most important factor to the success of your online marketing strategy and goals. It means getting your visitors to do what you want them to do, whether that is to buy your product, sign up for your newsletter, register for a webinar, download a whitepaper, or fill out a lead/contact form. Having a marketing website is a moot point if it doesn’t present the opportunity to close sales or generate leads.
So what is a good website conversion rate?
The answer to this question can differ depending on your industry, but here are some good general numbers. Visitor-to-lead conversion rates for Business-To-Consumer websites for necessary items that we all need tend to exceed 15%, while for non-necessary items tend to be around 1-4.5%. Business-To-Business services companies can expect visitor-to-lead conversion rates between 5-8%. This is significant because it is very common for online marketing companies to brag about much higher visitor-to-lead conversion rates, but upon further investigation, we find out they are calling every phone call or web contact a “lead”. The problem with this is that a large percentage of these contacts are often solicitors and spam.
How do I measure my web site’s conversion rate?
First, you’ll need to determine the conversion point; leads, sales, etc. Second, you’ll gather data from your website analytics program like Google Analytics regarding leads and traffic. Finally, you’ll follow the formula of number of (leads collected/total traffic to the web site) x 100 = Conversion rate. Alternatively, you can use BoostSuite. BoostSuite will have you define your conversion points and then it will do the rest of the computations for you.
Many of these analytics tools actually tell you your conversion rate, but you must first set up your conversion points by adding tracking code to the pages that result post-conversion so they can register.
Tips for improving your website’s conversion rates
1. Make your calls-to-action obvious
It should be obvious what you want people to do once on your website. If you want people to call you, you shouldn’t have your phone number in 8pt font at the bottom of the page. Out of sight, out of mind. Keep things simple. You might consider a three-tiered approach – tell visitors what you’d really like them to do (call us!), give them a secondary option (email us!) and then give them an ‘out’ option (signup for our email newsletter).
2. Follow the mud-tracks and adjust your site accordingly
According to the folks over at Conversion Rate Experts, visitors to NY’s Central Park were taking shortcuts across grassy areas and in doing so, they created lots of little dirt paths in the grassy (aka mud tracks). Many cities, in an effort to discourage this type of behavior, put up fencing, tape, walls, etc. This isn’t what NY’s planners did. They actually encouraged people to take shortcuts and then they paved them!
You should do the exact same thing with your website! Instead of fighting visitor behavior, rearrange your content in a way that aligns with how visitors interact with your site. Of course, you need the right website tracking tools in place in order to see these patterns.
3. Ask your visitors what they want
Instead of guessing what people want, ask them directly! Feedback and survey tools like those offered by Kampyle and KissInsights make it cheap and easy to find out what your website visitors are looking for and what would make it easier for them to find it. Also, many younger users of the web are already very comfortable with feedback tools like these so look for an explosion in their usage rates.
Final conversion rate considerations
Some local business websites have so little traffic (less than 500 visits per month) that it can be difficult to even determine what their website’s visitor-to-lead conversion rate is. If this is the situation you’re in, you should probably make sure there are no obvious conversion rate obstacles on your website (like the phone number at the very bottom of the page when one of the most important things you want people to do is call you) and then invest in traffic, traffic, traffic. If you put the right tracking tools in place, you’ll be able to monitor (and improve) your website’s conversion rates over time and take actions to improve them.
If, on the other hand, you’re getting decent traffic to your site each month – say 1,500 visitors or more for a services company – you should probably review the conversion rate numbers above and if your website doesn’t exceed them, fix it first! Sending (more) traffic to a site that can’t close is an incredibly common situation, but it shouldn’t be.
If you are tired of using traditional analytics tools to measure conversions/conversion rate, or don’t know how to use them at all, you should sign-up for a free BoostSuite account. No more confusing charts and graphs, just results.
Facebook Timeline for Business has been in the news a lot lately as the experience for your customers on the world’s largest social media site has changed dramatically. You can read about some of the most significant changes in this blog post: Facebook Timeline For Businesses.
One interesting discussion that has arisen around these recent changes is whether they create more traffic for your social content. I have picked out two excellent blog posts that show both sides of the argument. The first article shows that Timeline increases traffic all things being equal. The second article shows that Timeline could be helpful to large businesses that post directly to Facebook, but is negatively affecting traffic for companies that mostly post through third-party software like HootSuite.
Take a look at my summary of each post below and let us know know how Timeline is affecting your Business.
Facebook timeline fuels 102 percent growth in app traffic
In this Tech Journal article, 500 companies with an average following of approximately 19,000 people were studied to see the affect on traffic. At first glance, the results were very encouraging. 59.8% increase in overall traffic and an astounding 102.1% increase in App traffic. However, the study failed to look at how these companies post to Facebook (directly versus third-party) which can have a much greater affect on whether the content is ever even seen by their followers.
Facebook Content Published Via Third-Party Tools Suffers 67% Fewer Likes [New Data]
In this HubSpot blog post, the authors show how the introduction of Timeline has introduced a different treatment of posts made directly to Facebook and those made with third-party applications such as HootSuite or HubSpot’s social media publishing tool. The results show that with Timeline, those posting directly do see an increase in traffic, however those that use these third-party tools actually see a decrease in traffic, a very different result than seen in the Tech Journal article.
A basic conclusion that you can draw from this is that those companies with the time and budget to monitor and post directly to their Facebook accounts can see tremendous benefit from the introduction of Timeline, while smaller companies that rely on third-party tools may actually see a decline in visitors as a result of Timeline.
What has your experience been with Timeline for your business? Has your traffic increased, decreased or stayed the same since the switch? Do you post directly to Facebook or use other tools? Let us know!
The leading website content management and marketing system for small businesses
Share with a friend
You should follow us on twitter
