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Free Search Information and Tracking Tools

I recently tried Searchmetrics for SEO tracking and keyword analysis.

At around £60 per month their paid for accounts are not for small businesses or single websites but aimed more at SEO companies and larger businesses who need to track multiple sites, including competitors.

However for us smaller businesses and sole traders there is a free option that allows an in depth analysis of a single domain.

According to Searchmetrics: you can look up the SEO Visibility and Social Visibility of one domain at a time plus limited views of KPIs such as organic, paid and universal keyword results and competitors.

What I found handy was to have these all in one place, rather than using different tools from around the web

The free account is probably all a sole trader really needs to start off: Searchmetrics Essentials – try for free!

Multiple Pages and Website Optimiser in ZenCart Part1

Having braved google analytics, the bounce rate of an ez-page is high and I want to change it. But what to?

Well, by looking at how and why people visit a page and, from the overlay, where they click I can make assumptions at why there are there and now i want to meet their expectations.

But hold on. How will I know my new content will be an improvement? Why not offer multiple variations of the same ZenCart page and see which one is more successful?

Once you have a Google analytics account you can go directly to Google Website Optimiser and set up testing. I am using a simple A/B page to begin with.

One page is made in EZ pages and consists of the normal, but revamped, page. The other is again an ez-page but one that google will redirect to rather than publicly linked and clickable.

Having created two pages and selected a ‘results’ page (i used adding an item to the shopping cart as a result to measure page performance http://allgiftsdirect.co.uk/index.php?main_page=shopping_cart) it is time to add the tracking code. That stage is a little more tricky so I’ll cover it in part 2.

Get Serious About SEO: 3 Meta Descriptions in ZenCart

Previously I briefly covered the basics of meta descriptions. Here I focus specifically on Zen Cart and how it can help you.

I haven’t manually assigned meta descriptions and keywords for each product, that is too time consuming, but I have for product categories. Google picked up those changes very quickly so it it absolutely worth doing.

In your categories menu you will see, on the right hand side, something like this:

The orange symbol shows the tag has been manually configured, the black shows it is on automatic. Doing it manually is so much better and from the example above there is one category to configure so lets do that now.

There are 3 boxes to complete: the first is a customised title for the page which should reflect its content. The second is for keywords which should reflect the products within that category (or subcategories if you use them). The third box is for the meta description.

This is what could be displayed when people search for a particular key word. If your keywords and content match up to a users search term then the meta description may be shown in the search engine results, otherwise only the page title will show.

Maximum characters displayed (by Google) in a meta description is 150 so don’t go over this.

My previous post offers ideas on what makes a good meta description.

It is too important to leave to Zencart to auto display. Ensure for each category and sub category you manually configure your (meta) title, keywords and description. It is so worthwhile.

Update: Don’t forget /includes/languages/english/YOUR TEMPLATE/meta_tags.php

and then add a line for each of your EZ-pages

  • define(‘META_TAG_DESCRIPTION_EZPAGE_2′,’your description here’);
  • define(‘META_TAG_DESCRIPTION_EZPAGE_3′,’your description here’);

and so forth for the title, description and keywords for each EZ-page you are using. Google loves it.

NB: When editing meta titles, descriptions and keywords for your categories or pages all 3 fields must be filled in otherwise the meta fields are not complete and will be ignored.

Get Serious About SEO: 2 Word Length and Relevancy

Again it is basic but have you checked the length of your descriptions, meta descriptions, key words and their relevancy to your content?

Try this meta tag analyser and have a look at your own website.

In my own example, before working on it, word length is fine but word relevancy needs some work.

Get serious about SEO and do it.

In the next article I will talk meta descriptions in Zen Cart. I changed mine manually and Google noticed the improvement.

Get Serious About SEO: 1 The Meta Description

Its time to get serious about SEO.

This is basic but has been on hold for too long so lets get down to it.

  • Set up your meta description

While of only little use to search engine placement or result, the meta description appears beneath your web site title on the results page.

Image shows google result with meta description (before work begins)

It can therefore be used to:

  1. explain in a nutshell what your site is about
  2. persuade potential visitors to click through to you
  3. give potential customers confidence about your business
  4. stand out from competitors
  5. build a brand

Check out this article for  more in-depth examples of branding using the meta description.

Meta Tag Analyser Tool for SEO

Meta tags are important for SEO and page ranking.

If you need to analyse the tags for your own website this is a good tool.

The usual meta tags for description, title, author and so on are included plus a lot more information too. A very useful tool and free to use.

Meta Tag Analyzer

Check your meta tags!

example: http://www.host.com.


URL

(optional)


User Agent * (optional)

Please enter the access code as displayed above.


Access code



Online Meta Tag Analyzer
provide by SEOCentro.

The Simple and Best SEO Tip in the World

You need to be top of the search engine result and you understand about on-page optimization and have done the basics.

Now what? How do you take your site from the middle of the pile and push and pull it slowly to the promised land of the top 5 positions?

And slowly here is the key. I’m talking about long term investment into the future of your website and business.

I’m also not talking about ranking number 1 in Google for your business name or a 10 word phrase that absolutely no-one else would want to rank for. If you haven’t done that yet, you need get some very basic SEO grounding.

What I want to discuss is out-performing your competitors on the absolutely top-notch make-you-a-fortune keywords that bring laser-targeted traffic. In other words, the ones you’re only dreaming about ranking for!

How do we do it?

Simple, really – we stand on the shoulders of giants. In other words, we look at what successful websites do and have done – and we use that information. No, we’re not going to re-invent the wheel and copy others’ business models, we’re going to take the cream from their hard work and pour it onto our sites!

Ranking in Google is about two things – it’s about relevance and it’s about popularity. We’ll assume that our sites are relevant to the traffic we’re seeking – no point attracting shoe shoppers if we’re selling ice cream! So it’s about popularity. And in Google’s case, that means backlinks. Put simply, the better the links to your site, the more they’ll see you as being popular, and the more they’ll pull your site to the top of the results.

Notice I said ‘better’, not ‘more’. In this case, quality is far more important than quantity. I can give you examples of sites with 300,000 inbound links that are far outranked by sites with 2000.

SEO experts talk about ranking number 1 in Google rather than Yahoo or MSN simply because Google is the search engine that most searchers use. Ironically, though, we need to use Yahoo to get to number one in Google. This is because Google is really bad at showing inbound links.

Yahoo Site Explorer (siteexplorer dot search dot yahoo dot com) is far better at this. YSE will show you which sites link to your competitors. And better still, they’ll rank them in terms of importance, so all the hard work’s done for you!

You just need to type in the URL of the site into the SEARCH box at the top of the screen, click on ‘Explore URL’, then click on ‘Inlinks’ and select ‘Except from this domain’ in the drop-down box. Lo-and-behold – a list of your competitor’s most important links. Not bad, eh?

So here’s your strategy:

  • draw up your list of must-have, top-drawer keywords and keyword phrases.
  • search Google for them and take a note of the top 10 websites for each.
  • examine each of the top 10 in YSE and see where the important links are coming from.
  • filter these links into three categories: 1, the sites you won’t get links from; 2, the sites you’ll get links from with some hard work; 3, the sites you can get links from straight away (these can include blogs that allow comments, directories, article sites etc.
  • get to work on acquiring links from the third category, then move on to the second.

This takes time, obviously, but not as much time as randomly searching for links that you’ll ultimately discover have no importance whatsoever.

If you follow this procedure diligently and methodically, you’ll soon begin to see your sites slowly but surely marching up to the top of the rankings. I’m going to start straight away.

Resources you must read when re-designing a web page.

I admit I have neglected my websites look recently and decided it was time for a spring clean. A fresh new look and some SEO love.

There are thousands of web pages dedicated to web design and SEO, here are some worth looking at:

For choosing colour palates I use this scheme chooser and colour scheme generator. They make it easy to select complementing colours.

You can also check your colour scheme used in CSS with this free and easy to use colour contrast tool.

iWebtool have a page dedicated to free on-line tools to analyse your website.

CopyBlogger offer some useful tips on copy writing for SEO success.

If you are unfamiliar with the jargon of web page components there is a a good basic guide to SEO web essentials at webconfs.com

My favourite page is Web Pages That Suck. It’s a humorous and attention grabbing title yet packed with loads of information. By showing you how NOT to design a website you can learn how to do things the right way. It was this site that provoked me to get rid of my red and green theme. They offer a detailed check list to apply to your own web-site design and then suggestions for further action.

And finally if you need some new buttons for your Zen or OS Commerce cart then Advance Software have a free on-line tool where you can create and download an entire button set with correct labels for simple uploading to your site.