Search Engine Optimisation – Improving Website Quality

If you want to improve your website rankings and increase the organic traffic from Google, then you must be aware of the recent Google’s Panda / Farmer update designed to weed out low quality websites. So, how do you make your website a high quality site?

Add Original, Useful and Substantial Content and do it Frequently!

Some guidelines include:

a.) At least 500 words per page or article. If your content does not explain the details of what you’re writing about, then your content is probably not good enough and this will reflect in the overall quality of your website.

b.) Content should be original and not copied. Content duplicated on other sites looks like you’re a spammer.

c.) Articles should be well written, clear, concise, and direct to the point. The English should be good. There is software that writes content for you but, as yet, it produces poorly written results. Make your content readable.

d.) Content should contain images or videos. Content with images or videos (make sure you’re allowed to use them!) reinforces learning, helps the reading process and keeps people on a page.

e.) If you are referencing someone else’s material, link to it (providing it’s a quality external resource) and provide editorial merit.

f.) Internal links to other content within your website. For example if your content is talking about “widgets” and you talk about building widgets in one paragraph, then link to your other page about “building widgets”. This helps improve the user experience and increases the retention time of your visitors on your site.

g.) Allow user-generated comments, where applicable. When you publish content make sure you allow comments to it. User comments are helpful to validate the accuracy and trust of the content.

h.) Allow users to share your content on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking websites through the like button or bookmarking widgets.

i.) Write regular content. You are more likely to get higher organic traffic due to the long tail keyword effect because of your content. Google also loves to rank big websites.

So, to repeat our message. How do you make your website a high quality site? Add Original, Useful and Substantial Content and do it Frequently!

Search Engine Optimisation  for Retailers following Google’s Panda Update

As many of you know, in February 2011 Google released it’s Panda algorithm update to try and reduce the impact of link farms and improve the quality of it’s search results. To a large extent this has worked but an unfortunate side effect is many small businesses who run e-commerce stores selling mainstream products lost rankings. This article is paraphrased from an article by Rob Snell who outlines some of the Panda pitfalls and what to do about them:

10 Common Mistakes Many Online Retailers Make

These are the main problems I’ve seen across many online retailers, and to protect themselves from major algorithm changes like Panda, they need to address these issues now.

1. Little Or No Original Product Text Content

Some larger retailers have tens of thousands of products with little or no detail on product pages. And when there is content, the text is verbatim from the data feed provided by the manufacturer or other vendors.

It’s only a problem when dozens if not hundreds of other stores sell the exact same product with the exact same content. Then hundreds if not thousands of shopping portals, affiliates, coupon sites, etc. promote the same products linking to the above retailers. If 75%+ of your products are word for word from a data feed, you now have a problem.

2. Little Or No Original Category / Section Page Content

It’s not just product pages. Many category pages on online stores are only a list of product links with thumbnails. Sometimes there will be a sentence or two of unique content on category pages, but that’s not enough.

On one retailers’ top 100 category pages, only 4% of the text was unique text. The rest was template boilerplate or lists of product links. Bad retailer, no back link for you!

3. Same Template. Page After Page After Page

Lots of stores use the same template on every page. Same header. Same footer. Same 100 text links in drop-downs on tens of thousands of pages. One of these stores had the exact same template on over 50,000 pages.

I prefer stores with multiple templates, and not just for SEO. Think in terms of departments within a bigger store. If a product category would have its own department in a real store, consider giving that category its own template.

4. Really, Really, Really Big Boilerplate Text

Sometimes I call this the “Ain’t No Meat On That Sandwich” problem. All template. No content.

An ecommerce site looks a lot more like lower-quality shopping engine sites or content farms when a page has a big template (lots of words), especially on pages that are light on content or have no unique content. If most of the pages on your site are like this, you’re toast.

Even when you write unique content, the value is diminished when the content is such a small percentage of the page’s total word count. Put that big boilerplate on a diet.

And write original content for your store on category pages. If a page is a top entry page, the unique content (by count of words) needs to be equal to the the template/boilerplate text. For example, if you have 400 words of boilerplate on every page, you owe yourself one hundred 400-word category descriptions.

5. Same Run Of Site Links On Every Single Page

When you have the same template with the same 100 text links to your top categories on every single page, there’s a point of diminishing returns. It’s not 2001 anymore when all you had to do was put you keyword in link text in your run of site navigation, and top rankings would be yours.

For example, say I’ve got 20,000 links with the anchor “hunting dog supplies,” I think at a certain point Googlebot says, “OK, Rob, I got it. That page is about hunting dog supplies.” And don’t have same exact same anchor text in links to a specific page. Have multiple anchor text for text links on your own store for internal link anchor diversity.

6. Writing Unique Content But Giving It Away

When retailers share all of their original content via feeds for shopping and/or affiliate folks, there’s the serious danger of Google seeing that content as “low quality,” probably because it’s on so many different sites.

Don’t share your best quality content with affiliates or shopping stores because the worst are just going to whore out your content, stick it on multiple doorway pages based around popular / valuable keyword phrases, and hurt your SEO efforts.

When you do write compelling content, keep it for yourself!

7. Great Unique Content Buried On Pages Not In The Index

Sometimes there are pages buried so deep in your site, Google will never find them. These pages just don’t have enough PageRank to get indexed regularly, much less to rank for more competitive phrases, so any unique content on these pages is wasted.

Put your unique content on pages that matter — the top 100-1000 entry pages from Google organic traffic. These pages are in the Google index, rank for somewhat competitive keywords, get clicks from real visitors, and drive revenue to your online store.

8. Unique Content Hidden From Spiders

One client had a lot of user-generated product reviews, but it was hidden from spiders because it was delivered via javascript. Google can’t give you points for content it can’t see.

Another had reviews stuck in an iframe from one of their subdomains. The result was that search engines can get to it, but don’t credit the main domain for the content. Since this subdomain had no authority, the reviews didn’t rank on their own, and the links back to the product pages didn’t even pass anchor text.

Display customer reviews on product pages using simple HTML that can be spidered and indexed by the search engines so you get credit for all your customers’ love.

9. Multiple Pages On The Same Domain With The Same Content

Maybe this is the old duplicate content problem. This retailer had the same unique content, but he placed it on multiple pages selling different products, resulting in multiple pages on the same site competing against one another for the same keywords. This couldn’t be solved with a simple 301 or canonical URL.

Another retailer had section pages that displayed full product descriptions on the category level, and these competed directly with the product pages.

I prefer to show snippets on category pages, just like a Google SERPS snippet. Give me a 90-character snippet of the text under thumbnails. For example, Yahoo! Stores have the ‘ABSTRACT’ field which works great for this.

Have one page with one URL for each piece of content.

10. Competing against yourself with multiple subdomains

Another store had their own static search engine results pages displaying the full product description but on their subdomain. Several companies selling custom store search products sell these pages as way to generate “search engine friendly pages,” but the reality is that you’re competing against yourself and devaluing your content.

If this seems overwhelming, don’t panic. Start by prioritizing your pages based upon revenue. Your Top 100 Google Entry Pages probably drive the most traffic and revenue your a site. Identify your top 100 best-selling products and apply the above techniques. You’ll see your rankings and your revenue improving.

What’s the most important page of your website? I’ve proven this time and time again. Look at your Google Analytics results and how often visitors look at your ‘About Us’ page. For most small businesses, even though one of the first pages a visitor goes to is usually the “About” page, unfortunately, this is one part of their website that is most likely to be neglected.

Updating it, or better still, humanizing it, is actually pretty easy. Just remember to tell a story. People don’t always go to the About page for information about the company, it’s often because they want a story and some reassurance about who you are. So, tell a story, (a true one!), one that resonates with your target market. They’ll be visiting the page for many reasons and to ask various questions, but your objective will be the same for all groups, to inform them why they are on the site or why they should be on the site.

DO NOT let your lawyers, PR or marketing specialists write it for you! Keep the About Us page free of jargon or anything that resembles a Sales and Marketing spiel.

Include some personal information so your audience can relate to you but keep the information to the point, don’t waffle and always answer the five customer ‘Ws’:

1. Who are you?
2. Where are you?
3. What do you do?
4. When did you start doing what you’re doing?
5. HoW do you accomplish what you claim to do/sell?

Remember, we want to buy from people, not computers, so make your website as human as possible…

You need to promote your products and services to increase sales. What’s the best way to do this? Does Online Advertising actually work? Current statistics show that people tend to conduct online searches for products after spotting an ad about it elsewhere. Recent studies on marketing and advertising-related topics show the following trend:

After Spotting an Advert for a Product or service, more than three-quarters of respondents (to Performics’ 2010 Search Engine Results Page Insights Study) reported conducting a search to learn more about that product or service. These searchers are also tenacious, the study found, if at first they don’t succeed, they did the following:

• they will modify their search and try again (89%),
• they will try a different search engine (89%),
• and, they will go through multiple search results pages if necessary (79%).

The conclusion? If you are going to advertise online, make sure you use a Marketing Hook (memorable word or phrase) that relates to your produce or service and comes up highly in the search results. To do this, make sure you have positive reviews and customer testimonials are all optimized for the search engines using your ‘Hook’. Otherwise, you’ve wasted your advertising $$$s and you’re actually just as likely to be promoting your competitors products and services than your own.