When taking a look at your website statistics, or Google Analytics, you may wonder what Bounce Rate actually means?

Bounce Rate refers to the amount of times visitors have arrived at a page (landing page) on your website, and then left on that same page.  It is a good way to measure “visitor quality”.  If your results show a high bounce rate then your page is probably not relevant to the visitors.  Think about different keywords and search terms and use them in the text of your page.  This way you will bring the right visitor on to your pages, and turn them into customers.

Kelly Drewett

Kaydee Web Design

www.kaydee.net

t. 01865 522621

e. design@kaydee.net

fb. www.facebook.com/kaydeeweb

t. www.twitter.com/kaydeeweb

linkedin. uk.linkedin.com/in/kellydrewett

google+. www.gplusid.com/kaydeeweb

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An algorithm is basically an instruction to something (a computer) or someone that helps to solve a specific task.  An algorithm is the process by which you solve a problem.

Googles “freshness” update

The Google search algorithm is the way in which Google takes your search and produces the results, on a search page.   These days Google delivers more up-to-date and relevant search results.    The Google method can now analyse the web in small portions and will update it’s search index on a continuous basis.

What is so clever about the new Google algorithm is that it realises that different types of searches will have different “freshness” needs, and therefore will list them differently. Take a search for “a good Cotswold walk” which was posted a few years ago – it might still be popular enough to be ranked highly, but searches for a breaking news story should list the newest content first, followed up by the older results.

When searching on Google, even if you don’t use keywords that indicate you’re interested in the most recent event, Google takes over and will list the newest for you.  Some are up to only a minute old.   We used to have to wait what felt like FOREVER for Google to update it’s search results.

How does this effect your small business on Google?

Your website and your blog need FRESH content and need to be updated regularly, more so now than ever before.  Old content will drop down the search pages.  A blog will enable you to update content yourself and push people over to your website.  Or just ask me to review your latest newsletter and pop it onto your site.

By now you must realise that by posting  a lot of copied text you will not get good rankings from Google.   If you are struggling, there are freelance writers out there who can help you in this respect, but you also need to research some good keywords that will help you get the right readers.

Kelly Drewett
Kaydee Web Design

www.kaydee.net
t. 08448 709 621
e. design@kaydee.net

fb. www.facebook.com/kaydeeweb
t. www.twitter.com/kaydeeweb
blog. www.kaydee.net/blog
linkedin. uk.linkedin.com/in/kellydrewett
google+. www.gplus.to/kellydrewett

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Every time I meet a client I make them aware that I cannot control Google.  Just because I launch the website that day, or that week, and it is sat pretty on it new domain doesn’t mean that Google has picked it up yet.  To see your website at this stage you will have to type in the website address provided into the address bar.

Type your website address into the address bar

Once your site is complete and uploaded (or launched), I will submit your URL to Google, along with the millions of other websites submitted by others everyday.  Google bot (Google’s crawler) has to get round to crawling your web pages and will then start to show you in it’s ‘organic listing‘.

It can take 4 days to 4 months for your website to appear on the Google Search Results page.  Once ranked you may appear under your chosen keywords, or under your company name only.  It depends on all sorts, like how competitive your market is.   I will have done the basics on your web pages, but you do need to work at it to get good results.

I will create a post soon about working at your Search Engine results.

Is there anything I can do to speed up the process?

Yes.   There are a few other things we can do that are not included in the price of your website.  These are things I can do for you if you ask, or you could have a go yourself.  Please read on below.

Links from other websites

Links from related/topical/relevant sites can help you get indexed, but it is not necessary to go over the top.     These links should be from reliable sites.    The more popular the site that is linking to you, the better.  This does include sites like facebook, twitter or even your own blog.  If you want to do well on the Internet you have to work at it.

Verify your site

Sign up for a Google Webmaster Tools account (or ask me to put you onto mine).     This is not the same as Submitting a URL.     This MAY NOT improve the chances of getting crawled/indexed.

Provide an XML Sitemap

Sitemaps are a way of telling Google what is included in your site, and what you want it to crawl, especially if there is content within your site Google bot may not be able to crawl.  It is basically a list of all your web pages, and within it you can let Google know how often the pages are updated.  Sitemaps will not guarantee getting Crawled/Indexed, but will help Google to crawl your site.

Do drop me an email if you need more information on any of the above.

Organic listings refer to the ‘natural’ or ‘unpaid’ listing.  This is the section in the centre of a search result page.

Organic, Natural or Unpaid Listing from Google

Ultimately, this is where you want your website to be listed if you want it to work for itself, without pushing money at it.  But there are a lot of factors to take into account like how competitive your market is, how big your website is, if you are regularly updating it, how long you’ve been on the internet, if you have links from other sites.

I’ve had many clients come to me with a full website, pleasing on the eye, but it is no where to be seen on Google, one of the major search engines.  I am not claiming to be a Google expert, but I know what pleases Google when designing and structuring a website.  This doesn’t mean I guarantee to get you to the top of Google like some companies would, but if the website is designed in the correct manor you are half way there.

A site designed by me will always have the basic meta-tags including keywords and descriptions, I will include alt tags on the images and title tags on the links.   Below I cover most of the basics.

See my post I’ve got a website, now what?  Getting better search engine results.

Guidelines for a website

• Each web page should be reachable from at least one static link.  Some have all their site navigation done in Javascript, Java or Flash, which means the links are hidden from the bots, meaning they can’t follow them.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.
• A website should be useful, and information-rich.  Users may not read it, but search engines crawl it.
• Write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content, your service or product.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.  See my page on writing content for your website.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links.   For example the headers.  The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images. If  images are used for textual content, use the “ALT” attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
• Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• Be cautious of dynamic pages – those on a database system (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character).  Be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages.
• A site map can be helpful to users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map has an extremely large number of links, you may want to break the site map into multiple pages.

Some of the above may not make sense to you.  Ask me to check your website.

Using images on a website

Things to be avoided

Hidden text or hidden links

Hiding text or links in your web page content may mean that Google perceives your site as untrustworthy, as you could present false information in this way.   Both text and links can be hidden in the following ways;

• Using same colour text on a coloured background (eg. white on white, black on black)
• Text behind an image
• Setting the font size to ZERO

Google may completely remove you from it’s index if your site is found to be deceptive.

Loading pages with dud keywords

Keyword Stuffing

Do be aware that you can over fill pages with keywords, known as keyword stuffing.  This sort of behaviour can also be seen as spamming, and Google will only return a negative result on your site.  It can harm your ranking, or you can be taken off the results page all together.

Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses good keywords which are in context.

View your website in a text browser such as Lynx – this is how the Search Engines would see your website.

Googles quality guidelines – basic principles

Taken directly from Google

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
• Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.