SMarT Marketing

The Official Google Base Blog offered up a tip recently on how to track your Google Base listings in Google Analytics by creating a special landing page to identify that traffic as unique.  While this would work, it’s not exactly a elegant solution and quite frankly outdated. Google Analytics enables you to append tracking variables to URLs that you can place as links on various inbound traffic sources, including Google Base, that will feed in data about where specifically the traffic came from right into every aspect of your Google Analytics account. The same solution can be used to track email campaign performance, banner ads and PPCs, even offline marketing efforts like radio, TV and print. This shows the value of using a professional online marketing agency like SMT as they can sometimes have a more fuller understanding of how to implement the services offered by search companies like Google.

An XML sitemap file is a fairly recent standard adopting by the major search engines that can help with indexing. Yahoo recently announced that the big 3 search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN, have agreed on another standard that relates to how these sitemap feeds can be submitted. Previously they could only be submitted through some site management tools maintained by the search engines, but now your robots.txt file can be used to automate the process a little more. By adding a single line to your robots.txt file you can identify the URL location of your sitemap file for indexing. This is good news for sites with large amounts of pages as it makes it that much easier for the search engines to fully index a site.

Search engines such as Google and Yahoo recently began supporting a new value for your robots meta tag that would prevent them from forcing your DMOZ (Open Directory Project) title and description to be used in your search engine results. DMOZ is the source Google uses to populate it’s own browseable directory of websites and Yahoo as well will pull information from it for listings from time to time. The issues that would result from this often would be that an old outdated name or description of a site or company would appear in listings despite the site itself having newer more appropriate information. Since DMOZ is volunteer driven getting things submitted, much less updated, has progressively gotten more and more difficult if not altogether impossible. The support of a NOODP meta tag allowed your site’s current information to override and the problem was solved.

However, Yahoo has it’s own directory which has served as the core of their services for a long time, which means it often contains a lot of old outdated titles and descriptions. Getting those updated requires access to the Yahoo account that originally submitted the site for inclusion and for many people this can be information long gone as employees and email accounts change over time.  The same issue could be found in Yahoo search results where the directory listing overrides a site’s careful crafted title and descriptions from the actual site. The Yahoo directory titles and descriptions are sparse and cannot contain any sales driven copy, which means being able to present an attractive listing in the search results is difficult when your directory listing overpowers.  To combat this, Yahoo has announced support for a new robots meta tag value, NOYDIR, which works just like the NOODP tag. This is good news for sites locked into an outdated Yahoo directory listing!

A “title tag” is coded into each page of a site and is meant to define what a page’s content is about. It appears in the title area of a browser window and will be the default name when you go to bookmark a page. It’s defined in the underlying HTML coding of each page.

Title tags are a critical part of SEO. While not as important as the content of a page in gaining rankings in the search engines, it does get heavily factored by the search engines. However, arguably its greatest importance lies in getting people to click your listing in the search results in the first place. Your title tag is used by the search engines as the blue underlined link that people will see in the list of results, and therefore this wording needs to be both engineered to the benefit of the search engines as well as actual human visitors.

So how do you handle this careful balancing act? It takes a lot of experience and testing to perfect, but the general idea is to utilize keywords that are specific to the page’s content in an eye catching but meaningful way. Sounds easy right? Well now throw in that you have to do this in about 60-65 characters or risk important parts of your great phrase getting chopped off! Here’s a few bad examples:

::Awesome Widgets!!!::MyStore
Don’t waste time with pointless characters and fluff words, you’re strapped for space remember. Also, search engines have been known to penalize for trying to intentionally include characters to stand out more. Besides, when have you ever searched for “::”?

MyStore Offers Fast Free Shipping on A Wide Selection of Green Wid …
This title has an attractive offer but what for? The length pushed the most important info out of view.

Green Widgets
Good for rankings maybe, but what entices the visitor to click on this link as opposed to a competitor?

So what does a good title tag look like? For the examples above a good title tag might be:

Green Widgets, Woggles: Free Shipping from MyStore
This listing identifies what’s on the page right up front and provides an additional synonymous keyword that people might also use to describe that item. An attractive offer is presented and the branding wraps it all up.

Your website analytics can be used for far more than just tracking the performance of your search engine optimization efforts. Media buys these days almost always have a website address as one if not the only path for conversion. Think about how many television spots, radio reads, magazine ads, direct mail pieces, or billboards feature prominently a website address as the next step for an interested party to take. When the people making these media buys are not working with the ones tasked with tracking and analyzing your site’s traffic you are missing out on a bevy of useful performance data.

Many people have heard of or seen tracking URLs, addresses for a site with special codes attached to the end when clicking links between two online sources, such as site to site or email to site clicks. These tracking codes let you filter your web stats by specific sources or campaigns and learn about the regionality of respondents, their conversion rates, user behaviors and more. This technique can also be used for tracking the same information from offline sources by using a special domain and then redirecting people using it to your site with a tracking code applied. Instead of sending people in that direct mailing piece to MyCompany.com, send them to GreatDeal.com (which bounces them to Mycompany.com?ref=Mailing0107) and reap the benefits of merging traditional offline marketing with detailed site performance analytics! Our clients have been able to maximize and better understand their entire marketing efforts by utilizing this total team approach.