Beyond SEO, getting the right traffic for your product

Also see,
Introduction to Search Engine Optimisation
Beyond SEO – The right traffic to your site
An Introduction to Google Webmaster Tools
Introduction to Google Analytics and other website analytical tools
Introduction to Pay Per Click Campaigns
PPC Pay Per Click Marketing and purchase process
Integrating online video into your digital marketing strategy

You may often wonder why you might get such a high bounce rate on your websites pages and how you can improve this. For those who religiously follow their web analytics and spend time and money on ppc accounts, understanding your organic traffic can also help improve the quality of your traffic. When I first started to look into search engine optimisation I presumed it was all about achieving perfect accessibility, perfect code and checking in an seo browser to make sure your title, meta, and content achieved 100%. I later moved into the world of ecommerce and realised that it’s all very well being optimised, but it was as important,  if not more so to be achieving high positions for the right search terms and following this up with content. A real life example I  thought about recently, came about when walking past a little arcade that contained a computer shop / repairer. In the window he had placed a remote controlled helicopter. I went in and asked if he had any more helicopters to which he replied, ‘no… I just put that in the window to get people through the door’. My point is that the likilyhood of someone in the market for a helicopter is unlikely to just pop in and want their computer fixed or to buy a stick of ram. So, this is where it gets even more time consuming and complicated, whilst you think about all the points made in the introduction to search engine optimisation, you must also be thinking about the copy on the page and the words you use. For this reason, it always baffles me when companies offer to come in and optimise your site, unless they completely know your product and industries, they will optimise your site but you will attract all the helicopter buyers!

So, you will develop your own technique to get the balance right, you will often have no choice on the content of your page if you are running somebody else’s site, but you must insist on the freedom to rewrite the content. Use google adwords keyword tool to assess the key words you have used and use the traffic estimator to best drive traffic. Once you have your content choose the highest traffic drivers (keywords) to build into your h1 tags, follow this up with a similar technique for the page title, then for now copy this page title into your meta description. Based on your choice of keywords for the page content, copy 5 to 10 of the most used AND most relevant to your site into the meta keywords. Don’t make the mistake of listing as many possible keywords as you can think of into the meta keywords this will have the opposite effect and google will see it as spamming. Give it a few days and check the site in domain tools to see how each individual element we have just talked about scores. Once you start tweaking things, monitoring is extremely important, record your figures and make one change at a time, if you see an improvement then implement it site wide. If you see things get worse you know what had this effect and you can change it straight back.

Intoduction to Search Engine Optimisation – SEO Learn at lunch