21 October, 2013

SEO Review of your website - DIY guide

When asked to undertake a brief review of a new website from an SEO viewpoint, we usually just examine just the home page in any great depth, with a quick glance at two or three of the other pages. Here is a guide to a doing a brief review of your own website.

Ensure that your content complies with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Looking at the presented page, it should be easy to distinguish colours and there should be a reference to cookies, if applicable. (Link to Legal Compliance post)

  • Determine your keywords per page and include them in the content
  • You should have at least 300 words of well-written text on the page

Keywords are search phrases that describe the product or service that is detailed on the page. They should occur naturally within the page content, as over-stuffing the text will have a detrimental effect. The home page should give an overview of your products or services and provide keyword links, within the content, to other pages with additional information.

Most browsers have the facility to let you see the code behind the page, usually by using right-click and choosing 'view source code' whilst on the website page.
Each page should have:

  • a unique <title> approx 56 characters, with keyword(s)
  • a unique meta-description, up to 160 characters, which is displayed in search engine results
  • one <h1> header per page, with main keyword(s) for the page
  • at least one <h2> sub-header with keyword(s) for the ensuing content
  • possibly some <h3> sub-headers of lower importance than <h2>
  • one relevant keyword link from within the content to each of the major secondary pages

You need to optimise images, too.

Each website would benefit from having a sitemap.xml file uploaded. You can check its existence by going to yourwebsite.suffix/sitemap.xml (replacing the example with your real url, of course). If you need to create one, you can find free software on-line or, if you are using a CMS system, it may be included in the package.

Google Analytics is a good way to track information so, even if you don't think you need it now, it is still a good idea to include it. To check if it is already there, look for UA- in the source code. It should be near the top, before the </head> command.

We hope you found this useful. Contact us if you have any questions.

10 October, 2013

Where To Find Google Analytics Traffic Sources Data

If you have upgraded – or, indeed, have been upgraded – to the New Google Analytics, you may be thinking how hard Google is working to enhance your Google experience.

Alternatively, you may have spent a couple of frustrating hours trying to find out what happened to the information relating to your website’s traffic sources. Maybe there was some clue somewhere but I missed it.

Searching Google Analytics Help and searching the internet brought no joy. If you stumble across this, I hope it will be of some use so that you can breathe a sigh of relief and treat yourself to a cappuccino.

WHERE TO FIND GOOGLE ANALYTICS TRAFFIC SOURCES (October 2013)

  1. In the left column, go to Acquisition and All Traffic.
  2. Set the Primary Dimension to Medium if you want to group traffic as organic, cost per click, referral and none (direct?)
  3. Then, if you want to see referrals in detail, click on Referral from the list then set the Secondary dimension to Source.

Once you have done this, you will begin to understand all the other options available to you.

Example: