Archive for the ‘Blogs By Camilla T.’ Category

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What Does ‘Not Provided’ Mean in my Analytics Keywords Reports?

Apr
30
2012

I’ve had a growing number of clients asking me this, wanting to know why there is a rising number of keyword searches being replaced with ‘not provided’ in their Google Analytics reports:

The answer, unfortunately, is that Google are specifically withholding these searches. Every ‘not provided’ was carried out by someone logged in to their Google or Gmail account, and since late last year Google has been (by default) logging people into a secure search page to make these searches private.

Not Provided keyword in Analytics

 

They will still supply details of these search keywords for Pay Per Click advertising clients, but not for Organic searches in your Analytics statistics.

Given the reason for this missing data, it makes sense that the amount of ‘not provided’ keywords will increase steadily, as more and more users log in to Google and stay logged in permanently. Already we are seeing clients with over 20% of their search keywords hidden.

For the moment, there isn’t so much you can do. You can set up filters to show you the landing page for these hidden keywords, which gives you some small insight into what kind of search many have led that visitor to your site. You also have the option of paying somewhere in the region of £70,000 per annum for Google Analytics Premium, but that is no doubt vastly out of the budget of most businesses.

It’s a disappointing move on Google’s part, and we will simply have to use the remaining visible keyword searches as a guide as to the overall pattern of organic searches on our websites – keyword performance tracking will just be a little more challenging in future!

About The Author: Camilla Todd manages Search Engine Optimisation, social media campaigns and brand awareness for WNW Design SEO clients. You can follow her on Twitter @camilla_wnw, email her at camilla@wnwdesign.co.uk or phone on 01395 542 569. You can also follow WNW Design on Facebook here.

Posted in Blogs By Camilla T., Keywords, Tools, WNW Staff Blogs | No Comments »

Our Office Daylight Tubes From CLS

Apr
11
2012

A quick plug for a local company (and client) that recommended, supplied and installed lighting in our new offices when we first moved in. They assisted with regular bulbs throughout the office, but in the main offer they recommended daylight tubes and we definitely appreciate it!

Daylight tubes

Daylight tubes recreate natural light, and they definitely lift the mood and atmosphere, especially on gloomy days (and let’s face it, we’re in England, there are a lot of gloomy days!). I’ve personally noticed a huge difference with the lighting in the main office, so wanted to give them a shout-out on our blog, say thanks and point people their way.

Their website is here: www.commercial-lamps.co.uk

Posted in Blogs By Camilla T., WNW Staff Blogs | No Comments »

Finding & Growing Your Blog Audience

Apr
11
2012

Nurturing a blog into a busy and regularly visited mine of information and discussion is not an easy task. You are not going to be able to post two blogs and then sit back and watch the visits pour in. Equally though, it’s not impossible, and if you do the right things and offer appealing and useful content, you can attract regular readers to your corner of the internet.

So how to go about this? For the purposes of this blog post, I’m skipping things such as good blog/website design, SEO, a good topic that you know you can deliver quality content around, and regular updates. All this can (and should) be in place and without reaching out and marketing your blog you will still find yourself typing into a vacuum.

Find Your Audience

Simple enough – your potential audience are all already out there, and the type most likely to be easily attracted to reading your blog are those already reading other related blogs. So the first step is to start searching online for as many excellent blogs you can find along the same subject as yours. If your area is baking, search on Google for ‘bakery blog’ and trawl through all the results, listing any that have a good amount of comments on each post (of quality, not just spam). If your blog topic is fashion, search for other fashion blogs, etc.

You may have to think abstractly if you are blogging about a service or obscure product that doesn’t already have a following online – put yourself in your customers shoes and work out where they will be and what they will be reading.

Comment & Link

Now you have your list of blogs, keep a keen eye on their updates and start commenting on their posts. Make sure you add something of value of course – a committed audience on a blog will soon spot someone who is just commenting for the sake of marketing, so make sure your comments are genuine. If you write in their field anyway, you should be able to find something interesting to say.
If possible, work hard at being one of the first commenters (purely because if a post has over 100 comments yours is more likely to be seen right at the top than it is on page five). Make sure that your blog name and link is in the comment name/link box (most blogs allow this).

This way, other commenters will be reading your comment and you’ll be getting lots of visibility on your site name and link – people will come through to see what you offer, especially when they haven’t seen your site name before.

As well as commenting on posts and engaging in conversation that way, start using your blog posts to ‘comment’. If someone posts a blog you strongly agree with, disagree with or have a completely different perspective on, post on your blog as a response and link to the original blog. If you offer an interesting response the original blogger may sometimes link to you, and you will gain a lot of traffic from their visitors.

Incidentally – make sure your Trackback monitoring is on in whatever blog software you use. This enables your blog to tell you when another site links to one of your posts, and vice versa.

So don’t just focus on writing lots of quality content (although that is your incredibly important foundation), you have to then also let your audience know that you are actually there – find them and then comment, engage in discussion and respond and you’ll be able to build a loyal following that will start bringing in new readers on your behalf.

About The Author: Camilla Todd manages Search Engine Optimisation, social media campaigns and brand awareness for WNW Design SEO clients. You can follow her on Twitter @camilla_wnw, email her at camilla@wnwdesign.co.uk or phone on 08456 588310. You can also follow WNW Design on Facebook here.

Posted in Blogging, Blogs By Camilla T., Internet Marketing, WNW Staff Blogs | No Comments »

SEO Basics: A Guide to Meta Tags

Apr
10
2012

Meta tags are small pieces of code in each page of a website, with various functions. The three we’re going to look at are the title, keyword and description tags, which are helpful for optimising your site for the Search Engines. Orginally, the keyword and description tags (the keyword tag particularly) was brought in to give Search Engines specific instructions on what the page should be listed for. Nowadays too many people are trying to manipulate the listings, and so the Search Engines don’t pay as much attention to the keywords tag anymore. It is still a solid basic part of SEO however, so let’s go through each tag separately.

Title Tags

These display in two visible places – at the top of your browser window or tab, and as the title of your listing in the Google results.

So both for visitors and for the Search Engines your title tag needs to be relevant and unique to the page.

As a rule of thumb, try not to go past 12 words. However, as long as the Title makes sense you should have a title of an appropriate length. You also need to consider that the title will be seen above your website in the Search Engine listings, so you will want to ensure that your title encourages people to click on your listing and brings in traffic.

Description Tags

This should be a short one or two sentence description of the specific page the description is on. The only place this may be displayed is in the Search Engine listings, underneath your title. So you need to write it for the Search Engines, and to attract potential customers too.

Ideally, it should include basic information, specific information and something of value. So for an online shop, the description for a specific product page would include a reference to the shop’s general range, the specific product on the page, and something such as free delivery or free returns or something to attract those seeing the listing in the Search Engine results.

Keyword Tags

This is a trickier one, as there are a few things to be aware of. Firstly, it’s bad practise to put a keyword or phrase into your keyword tag if it’s not already somewhere else on the page. So if the word or phrase is not in the content or either of the two other tags, you can’t put it in the keyword tag.

Essentially this tag is for highlighting your important text to the Search Engines. So for a web design company we’d be highlighting phrases like “web design” and “website build” and “search engine optimisation” as these are phrases specifically important for finding us and relevant to what we do.

Phrases and keywords are separated by commas, and as a rule of thumb try to perhaps include no more than 14. If you have done your keyword research and found the most efficient phrases for listing in the Search Engines and bringing in traffic, your keyword tags will be focused towards these.

On a very basic level, you need to write your tags to be unique for ever page – a succinct summary of the content, giving both people and Search Engines a good idea of what the page and site is about, and also encouraging peope to click through and read more.

About The Author: Camilla Todd manages Search Engine Optimisation, social media campaigns and brand awareness for WNW Design SEO clients. You can follow her on Twitter @camilla_wnw, email her at camilla@wnwdesign.co.uk or phone on 08456 588310. You can also follow WNW Design on Facebook here.

Posted in Blogs By Camilla T., General SEO, WNW Staff Blogs | No Comments »

Facebook Timeline for Business Pages Hits Today

Mar
30
2012

If you’ve logged in to your Facebook Business Page within the last month you will have seen the warning that the new Timeline layout will be brought in today, on March 30th.

There’s not a whole lot to be worried about in the new Timeline, and many of you will already have experience of it on your personal Facebook Profiles. There are two main things to be aware of though. One is the space for a banner that will appear at the top, and the resized userpic. The other is the new flexibility for adding posts in the past, so you can add important business milestones such as when you launched, photos of your first offices, new members of staff, etc.

Firstly, the new banner. There are some limitations along with the size requirements, so it’s well to check before you bung together a sales banner. The top banner needs to be 851 by 315 pixels. The userpic needs to be 180 by 180, and bear in mind it will be resized around the site to 32 by 32 pixels.

In terms of limitations, Facebook obviously want the banners to give an impression of brand and character rather than sales or marketing. They specify that banners can’t include reference to prices, contact info (including phone number, web address, etc), marketing promotions, calls to action (click this, phone us, fill this in) or any references to Facebook actions (such as ‘click like to follow us’).

With all that discounted, what are you left with? Well, you may choose to rely on just your logo. You could choose a striking image from your product range, or a ‘lifestyle’ photo. For a client who offers Land Rover parts and spares we will be using photos of their mascot vehicle in various stunning locations. For a packaging and floristry supplies company, we are currently using this bold image of some of their raffia:

         

If you need help or advice placing a banner or adding posts for the past in Facebook, give us a shout.

About The Author: Camilla Todd manages Search Engine Optimisation, social media campaigns and brand awareness for WNW Design SEO clients. You can follow her on Twitter @camilla_wnw, email her at camilla@wnwdesign.co.uk or phone on 08456 588310. You can also follow WNW Design on Facebook here.

Posted in Blogs By Camilla T., Facebook, WNW Staff Blogs | No Comments »

SEO Basics: Can The Search Engines See Your Site?

Jan
03
2012

Search Engine Optimisation is a detailed and ongoing process of building your site’s reputation in the Search Engine listings, and before your website has gone live you should have already been working on a lot of the aspects of your website that influence those listings. Things like linking structure, keyword-rich content, sitemap pages, image alt tags, etc. However, on the most basic level, when your website actually goes live none of this will matter if Google can’t see your site, and there are a few very important things to do, and some to avoid, in order to ensure this is the case.

Publicise Your URL

First off, you need to let Google (and all the other Search Engines) know that your website now exists. One of the best ways of doing this is getting a link from a website that already lists well – it will count as a good ‘vote’ for your new website, and plus a well-listed website will be checked quite often by Google so they will see the link quickly.

Alternatively (or as well) you can set up a Google account for your site and submit a sitemap in Google’s Webmaster Tools area. This allows you to give Google information on your new website and its content.

Bing also has a Webmaster Tools area, and AOL and some others allow you to actually ‘submit’ your site URL to them for indexing.

Check Your Robots.txt

The robots.txt is a file that can be placed on your site hosting space and that the Search Engines know to look for. It can hold instructions to Search Engine robots (hence the name) about what pages on the site to spider (look through) and which not, and also where the website’s XML sitemap is stored (a file listing all the pages, their importance and last update dates).

A robots.txt that states ‘Disallow’ and then has either a / or a folder or file after it, is asking the Search Engines (either a specific one mentioned in the line above, or all is an asterix is used) to not spider those areas. The / means the whole site. In order to allow the Search Engines to see and list the whole site your robots.txt needs to have either nothing after the ‘Disallow’ or to use ‘Allow’ and then a / after.

If you have an /admin/ area or /cgi-bin/ or other folders and files that you don’t want listed in Google, you can list them in here to be ignored.

Use Visible Coding

Once you’ve publicised your URL and made sure your robots.txt file isn’t impeding the Search Engines finding and spidering your site, you need to consider your site coding. A Flash site, for example, is next to invisible to Google – it can’t read the text and doesn’t see the content, so it has no idea what your website is about. At the very least a Flash site has to have an HTML version, but ideally you need to make your website without Flash (limit it to dynamic banners if you must).

If your website is built with HTML coding that the Search Engines can see, great, but you need to ensure it’s not bloated and over-complicated (they are only robots after all, and can get confused if you have piles and piles of code and links all over the place) and that it has an understandable page and link structure. This way you stand more chance of the Search Engines quickly seeing all your site content, it’s hierarchy, and therefore also when it is changed and expanded.

You also need to avoid building your site from frames, which is an out-dated method often used to build sites with framed navigation, but that disguises the true content of the page from the Search Engines and can harm your listings badly. No-one really uses this method anymore though, and with good reason.

Now Go Forth, And Optimise…!

Now you know the Search Engines see your site, don’t leave it there, work on getting excellent listings and bringing in the millions of searches made every minute on the internet! Do your keyword research, optimise your page content and text, show Google what your images are about with alt tags, keep your website fresh and updated, relevant and interesting, and get links in with networking and Social Media. With a visible site and clear, structured coding, you will be building on excellent Search Engine Optimisation foundations.

About The Author: Camilla Todd manages Search Engine Optimisation, social media campaigns and brand awareness for WNW Design SEO clients. You can follow her on Twitter @camilla_wnw, email her at camilla@wnwdesign.co.uk or phone on 08456 588310. You can also follow WNW Design on Facebook here.

Posted in Blogs By Camilla T., General SEO, SEO, WNW Staff Blogs | Comments Off

Making Blog Comments Work For Your SEO

Oct
28
2011

Blog commenting for SEOI’ve been reading and commenting on a few SEO-related blogs recently, and noticed something that is both frustrating for me and counter-productive for the sites I am commenting on. On almost every good-quality blog I have visited, my comments have gone into moderation rather then going live straight away. Obviously this is incredibly important if you get a high level of traffic and therefore lots of spam, and don’t want to subject your visitors to a barrage of useless comments when they visit. However, it can also present a barrier to sharing content, and there are ways of avoiding this.

In many cases I will link to a blog article because I find it useful or want to share, and that’s fine. But in some cases I want to link to a blog specifically because I have something to say in response to it, and I am linking with the intention that my blog/twitter/facebook followers read both the blog in question *and* my followup comment. Perhaps because I can’t respond in the space that something like Twitter offers me, but I still want people to see my stance on the matter being discussed.

In these cases, I want to post my comment and then share a link to the blog while I’m still looking at it. If my comments go into moderation I can’t share a link yet, as no-one will see my comment. And with a load of other things to do in a day I am unlikely to remember the blog later and go back to check if my comment is approved and then link.

There are two easy ways to fix this, and ensure that commenters link to your blog while they still remember about it. One is to turn off comment moderation. Make sure your blog has an excellent spam filtering system (something like Akismet for WordPress works excellently) and then check for spammy comments a few times a day. Unless you really get a vast quantity this may be perfectly adequate for ensuring the site appears full of quality comments and well-maintained.

The other way to get around this problem is to have comments go into moderation, but to set up an alert system to let commenters know when their comment is live. I’d happily tick a box for ‘Email me when my comment is moderated’ and the email can contain quick links to the blog, and for sharing on Social Media.

It takes a lot of work to build a site to the stage where you get regular comments and can really generate discussion on your blog posts, but it only takes a little bit of work to really make the most of that discussion – so sort out your comment moderation and let your blog commenters do some SEO work for you!

About The Author: Camilla Todd manages Search Engine Optimisation, social media campaigns and brand awareness for WNW Design SEO clients. You can follow her on Twitter @camilla_wnw, email her at camilla@wnwdesign.co.uk or phone on 08456 588310. You can also follow WNW Design on Facebook here.

Posted in Blogs By Camilla T., Linking, SEO, Social Media, WNW Staff Blogs | Comments Off

Drawing A Blank: 6 Ideas For What To Say On Your Business Social Media

Oct
03
2011

Blogging as your company can be somewhat daunting – you’ve got a brand new Social Media account with lots of white space, no followers and no idea what to say. It may seem at this stage that there is nothing interesting going on at your company to talk about – but there are plenty of interesting and relevant things to be said about any company and yours is no different.
Keep this list of content ideas handy and simply work through them one by one every time you want to update your account… you’re bound to find something that you can talk about.

1. Company Changes
Changes and achievements suchas new staff, work experience students, staff passing qualifications, new premises, annual meetings, company mergers.

2. Products & Services
This one is perhaps the most obvious – you should be using your Social Media accounts to alert customers to new services they may be interested in. So any new products or product ranges, services, any product reviews (on your site or others), special offers or discounts on products, price changes, delivery option changes, new stockists or partners.

3. Industry
You can post about industry events such as conferences or trade shows (and if you attend you can write more detail and post photos), industry body news, rules and regulation changes, technological advances, seasonal information. This one is quite specific to your industry, so try to put yourself in your customers shoes – what might they want to be kept informed on? If you sell horse-riding gear you may want to update fans on the latest competitions and races. If you operate a garage you may want to post advice on how customers can maintain their vehicles in the particular season and what checks to do, etc.

4. Website
Use your Social Media accounts to alert customers to new items on your website – feed them back to your pages where they can actually click ‘buy’ or phone you to convert into business. Let them know when there is a new blog to read, a newsletter has been sent out, new pages or sections have been added, or new functions added such as online purchasing, order history, new payment options, etc.

5. Publicity
Any references to your company or products in the media, magazine features or articles, appearances on TV or new adverts can be showcased to customers.

6. Plugging Others
This is the last item but it is by no means the least important – in fact it may be one of the most important types of update. Highlghting your customers, companies you work with or good causes can encourage them to do the same in return and you can gain valuable visibility for free.
So talking about and publicising any charities you support, local fundraising, plugging clients or customers that have bought something or passed courses, or had success with your services (best to get permission before mentioning companies), and giving out thanks to companies and individuals you have worked with.

I haven’t even yet mentioned ideas such as running small competitions for fans/followers to win vouchers or freebies in exchange for posting photos of your product/service, simply asking questions when you update such as ‘what do you want to see us post about?’, requesting feedback or asking people relevant questions about your business area. Research can be very helpful, so look around at a few other Social Media accounts belonging to your competitors and related businesses and see how they are doing it, and what works.

Essentially Social Media is all about conversation and give and take, and it may take a bit of practice but almost any small business has the potential to be able to generate a little community online that can turn into repeat sales and word of mouth publicity.

About The Author: Camilla Todd manages Search Engine Optimisation, social media campaigns and brand awareness for WNW Design SEO clients. You can follow her on Twitter @camilla_wnw, email her at camilla@wnwdesign.co.uk or phone on 08456 588310. You can also follow WNW Design on Facebook here.

Posted in Blogs By Camilla T., Facebook, LinkedIn, Social Media, Twitter, WNW Staff Blogs | Comments Off

New Google Product Fields in Mazurka eCommerce Admin

Sep
21
2011

Anyone with our Mazurka software operating an online shop (so, offering products you can ‘buy’ on their website) who also submit a Google Products feed will need to read this update.

Google Products have introduced some required fields (you can read my explanation and introduction to these changes here) and we’ve added these into the product and category details of Mazurka product management.

What does this mean for you? It means that you may need to add three fields:

Google Category

REQUIREMENTS/EXCEPTIONS: This field is required if your products fall into the Clothing & Accessories, Media or Software categories. If they do not, it is still recommended that you select a category but not required.

This is a field you need to specify for each product, but it can be specified at the category level.
In your admin area, go to your Products tab, and click the ‘Edit’ button next to a category. Then click ‘Additional Details’ at the top, and you will get this screen:

Use the ‘Select a Category’ drop-down to choose your top-level category for the products. It will place this choice in the ‘Google Product Category’ box. Then use the ‘Select a category’ dropdown again to choose a sub-category. When you run out of categories the screen will say ‘No more child categories’ and you can click ‘Submit Category Details’ to save your choice. Get as specific as you can, but don’t choose a subcategory if there isn’t one that suits, you can leave it on a top-level category if you wish.

If you have any sub-categories within a category, this will have to be done for each sub-category individually.

To assist you working out where your products fit, here is a page with a full breakdown of the Google categories.

If you have an SEO package with us we can make all these category changes for you – please me know at camilla@wnwdesign.co.uk (or on Twitter if you like) know if you require this. If you don’t have an SEO package we can still do this for you, contact us for a quote.

Brand

REQUIREMENTS/EXCEPTIONS: This field is not required if you are selling books, media or custom made goods. You can just leave it blank in these cases.

This is a product-specific field, and will need to be entered for every product. Click ‘Edit’ next to a product and you will see the field at the bottom of the screen:

If you submit your products via CSV and have this field in there, please contact us about automatically filling this field for you using your data.

If you have large quantities of items that have the same brand, contact us for entering them in bulk.

Barcode

REQUIREMENTS/EXCEPTIONS: This field is not required if you are selling clothing or custom made goods.

This is also a product-specific field, and will need to be entered individually for every product. For some shops you may find that this field is already filled, if you have been providing barcodes in your shop data.

You can find this field next to the ‘Brand’ field discussed above:

The barcode can be one of several trade numbers, including:

UPC: 12-digit number such as 001234567891
EAN: 13-digit number such as 1001234567891
JAN: 8 or 13-digit number such as 12345678 or 1234567890123
ISBN: 10 or 13-digit number such as 0451524233. If you have both, only include 13-digit number.

Again, if you have this in CVS or spreadsheet format and need help adding it to your products, contact us and we can import the data for you.

Ultimately, not entering these required fields may not stop your Products feed running straight away, Google will likely leave some time for people to catch up on these changes. However, they do officially take hold on September 22nd so I’d advise adding whatever data you need to around then. Even if the data is not required, if you can add it then it’s a good idea to do so, because your Products will both list and perform better with more information.

About The Author: Camilla Todd manages Search Engine Optimisation, social media campaigns and brand awareness for WNW Design SEO clients. You can follow her on Twitter @camilla_wnw, email her at camilla@wnwdesign.co.uk or phone on 08456 588310. You can also follow WNW Design on Facebook here.

Posted in Blogs By Camilla T., Google, SEO, WNW Staff Blogs | Comments Off

More Mandatory Fields in Google Product Search from Sept

Aug
03
2011

Google is introducing more mandatory categories for your Google Products feed from September, meaning you have to add these before then or your feed will stop working and your products will not appear.

If you’re not quite clear what I’m talking about, let me rewind… When searching for products on Google you have likely seen the small listings at the top with images and prices:

These results are pulled from the Google Shopping search area, which you can find here: www.google.co.uk/products

If you have an eCommerce shop and an SEO package with us, we are more than likely to be submitting your products to this area. If not, you would need to be doing this yourself, by setting up a website Google account, setting up Webmaster Tools and then adding a feed through the Google Merchant Centre.

From September, Google are requiring that all products have additional required fields of availability (in stock or out of stock), category, image link and size, colour, gender, age (in clothing only).

You can read their Blog post on the changes here.

So make sure you’re up to date with these changes come September, or give us a shout and we can help you set up Google Products for your eCommerce site. If you have SEO with us you don’t need to do anything, we’ll do all this for you.

About The Author: Camilla Todd manages Search Engine Optimisation, social media campaigns and brand awareness for WNW Design SEO clients. You can follow her on Twitter @camilla_wnw, email her at camilla@wnwdesign.co.uk or phone on 08456 588310. You can also follow WNW Design on Facebook here.

Posted in Blogs By Camilla T., Google, SEO, WNW Staff Blogs | Comments Off

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