Enpiem Internet Marketing Blog

The challenge for all search engine marketers is to know or be able to accurately anticipate what keywords users will enter when performing a search on their chosen search engine. We have been working recently with a small personal training business that have a fixed geographic catchment area that they will travel within for home-based training or clients to their gym will realistically travel to for regular training sessions. Therefore keyword phrases such as ‘personal trainer’ and ‘personal training’ were far too broad and generic to deliver quality traffic (and unrealistically competitive given our clients marketing resources). It was vital during the keyword discovery phase to find out how a variety of clients referred to our client’s service as (e.g. training, fitness, working-out, health etc.) and also the geographic word usage employed during searches to find our client (county, city, region etc).

Following a detailed discussion with our client and analysis of their Google Analytics account, we had a good base from which to start looking at previously used keyword phrases by searchers. As you would expect, there are a number of resources online to assist with this task, some are free, some require registration and login and others require subscription purchase. The following are all free resources that provide instant results without any logging in, registration or payment:

• Google Adwords Keyword Tool – enter some base keywords and results are displayed matching your base keywords plus a wide selection of assumed matches that don’t directly match your phrase. The default information includes Adwords advertiser competition for that keyword phrase, local search volume for the previous calendar month and global monthly search average. By changing the ‘choose columns’ drop down option you can discover a variety of useful metrics such as the month when the highest search figures were recorded as well as the average cost-per-click if you were considering running a PPC campaign as well as organic search
• SEO Tools – again, enter the lead keyword phrase that you anticipate users will enter and a table of suggestions is presented. In addition to the keywords themselves, supporting information includes Google, Yahoo and MSN estimated daily searches for that keyword phrase as well as links to other research applications such as Google Trends, Google Insight (showing search volumes on a daily basis, useful to match to your own Analytics data)
• Webmaster Toolkit – enter the lead keyword phrase then select the search engine you wish to use as the research platform and then click on ‘research keywords’. The information is purely keyword driven with no supporting information on volume or seasonal variance
• Spacky – a simple to use tool returning a comprehensive list of keyword variations and suggestions. Keyword is listed on the left side of the results table with monthly search volumes relating to each word for Google, Yahoo/Overture and MSN results. You can reorder the list to any of those engines to assist with your keyword prioritising. There is also a single click feature to save all the keywords to a text file for import to applications such as Excel or directly into Adwords or other keyword tools

Client requirements differ in each case, but with clients such as our personal trainer, volume wasn’t the key to success and three word phrases with geographic references continue to provide the best targeted traffic and inbound enquiries leading to new business acquisition.

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide a full Search Engine Optimisation service including on-page and off-page optimisation, link building and copywriting. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

It is almost universally agreed that static frames aren’t used to present a website to users because of the issues with indexing and a lack of navigation if anything other than the correct frameset are presented. The iframe was seen as an evolutionary step from static frames by dynamically injecting content directly into a web page. The following is an example of iframe HTML code:

<iframe src=”http://www.yourdomain.com” height=”500″ width=”600″ frameborder=”0″> </iframe>

So are iframes all they’ve cracked up to be, and what is the effect on your search optimisation as a result of using them? iframes are used to insert a wide variety of content into web pages such as form data, display advertising and 3rd party text feeds. But how do search engines cope with the presence of an iframe and will it help or hinder your search optimisation?

It is widely believed that iframes serve no SEO benefit to a website because the content is not actually located on that page – the source code of that page includes an instruction to insert the content of a destination URL at that point on the page, but not the actual visible text so a search crawler doesn’t actually see and associate that content with the web page it is presented on.

There are three arguments against the use of iframes if you are considering their use:

• > Navigation difficulties – the iframe content, if text, will usually only contain the raw copy as opposed to a complete visitor-friendly web page. This means that if the content of that frame is indexed by the search engine, then any subsequent visitor will be presented with a page that contains no navigation by which to explore the rest of your site.
• > 3rd party control of content – if you are relying on a third party source to provide the content displayed in your iframe then you are trusting them to provide high quality content that you are effectively presenting as your own – from your brand. In extreme cases site owners have suddenly found undesirable content featured on their site because of the use of iframe content.
• > Security concerns – some users actively block iframe content because of the possible security problems when a website they have given a ‘trusted site’ status features iframes and then unknowingly serves malicious/damaging content into that trusted page

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide a full search engine optimisation service including on-page and off-page optimisation, link building and copywriting. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

Having spent a significant amount of time and effort on your search engine optimisation, redevelopment or re-structuring of your website can be a daunting prospect for the Internet marketer. This is especially true when URLs and even page name suffixes are changed (e.g. from .htm to .aspx). Those inbound links you cultivated with other websites can suddenly resolve to missing pages and ‘Error 404 - File not found’ messages. Your organic ranking can be severely disrupted if proper planning and preparation isn’t carried out.

Take time before the new site goes live to prepare for the relaunch and how you will preserve your search ranking and link integrity. At the heart of this planning is the implementation of redirection codes. There are a number of different redirect codes, the one we are interested in here is the 301 code. This is an instruction that the redirect is permanent (the code 307 denotes a temporary redirect).

Do not be tempted to use the META refresh command (meta http-equiv=”refresh”) as this is widely regarded as a technique used by spammers and therefore search engines frown upon its use. A 301 redirect is a much safer and more efficient way of redirecting users and search engines without compromising your hard work on SEO and link building. The same is true of custom error pages. Whilst this method resolves to an actual page on your website, it puts the burden on your visitor to try and navigate to the new page. Search engines will assume that the page no longer exist and you will lose your ranking.

So how can you ensure that this doesn’t happen? On Windows servers you can manage redirection through IIS. Right click on the domain name and selecting the properties option, then click to the home directory. Select the ‘A redirection to a URL’ radio button option, enter the redirect URL (new URL) and ensure that the ‘A permanent redirection for this resource’ box has been ticked. Then close IIS and test the website to ensure the redirection is working properly.

On an Apache server you manage 301 redirection through .htaccess. Where a file has changed, you can use the following statement (substituting your existing and new URLs for the example ones shown here):

Redirect 301 /sample-directory/pagename.htm http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/new-directory/newpagename.htm

In addition to redirecting from a specific page to another specific page, you can also redirect an entire site (where the directory and filenames remain the same) using the following statement (note that the ‘/’ represents the existing site top level and everything within in):

redirect 301 / http://www.yourdomain.com

Search engine crawlers will read the .htaccess file and over a period of time replace the legacy URL with the new one. This may take some time, but gradually your listings will be modified and hopefully your ranking preserved.

Enpiem Internet Marketing manage 301 redirection as a standard part of all website development projects. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

An important part of your SEO work is the creation and submission of an XML sitemap file. The XML sitemap is a webmaster resource that provides search engines with information to assist their indexing and crawling of your website. The file contains a list of URLs plus additional meta data such as frequency of change, importance of the page (within the site) and when it was last modified. The XML sitemap is especially important for sites that don’t have easily indexed navigation such as flash-heavy websites. The sitemap file follows a standard format with an entry looking like this:

<url>
  <loc>http://www.example.com/pagename.htm</loc>
  <priority>0.9</priority>
  <lastmod>2008-11-14T20:16:26+00:00</lastmod>
  <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>

The full path URL must be included and prefixed with http:// and the file should be placed in the root directory and follow the UTF-8 encoding method. The URLs in the XML sitemap must be on the same host as the XML sitemap file. It should be noted that provision of an XML is no guarantee of a page being indexed or where on the SERP it will appear, it simply provides assistance to the crawler when indexing. Page importance or priority is not determined by the order of URLs specified in the XML sitemap.

The XML sitemap file should be no larger than 10Mb and contain no more than 50,000 URLs. If your site contains more URLs than this then you need to create multiple sitemaps and create a sitemap index file. The sitemap XML file complements robots.txt.

Sitemaps can be generated manually in notepad or similar text editor, although there are sitemap generators online that do this automatically such as http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ which generates sitemaps for sites with up to 500 pages.

Enpiem Internet Marketing create XML sitemaps a standard part of all website development projects as used by major search engine webmaster tool applications. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

Despite your best efforts, as your site grows and your copy becomes more abundant, it soon becomes a challenge for users to find what they’re looking for. As with the source of a great deal of your website traffic, the search engine can continue to be of service to your visitors after they’ve arrived on your website and acts as a familiar tool to retrieve the information they’re looking for.

We were recently asked to add a site search facility to a client’s website and through researching the products on offer decided to implement a search facility to our own website at the same time.

It seems that products and services fall into three categories – enterprise-level site-based search engines, outsourced solutions that ‘mimic’ your website for results presentation and then a blended solution combining on-site query and results with offsite indexing and dynamic presentation of results. These solutions come in a variety of packages from free advert-heavy applications through to programming heavy advert-free solutions with complex advanced-search capabilities.

Our client was understandably keen to keep costs under control but also to maintain a professional feel to the SERP layout. Therefore, we dismissed the free solutions relatively quickly as our client had already specified no text or banner advertising in the results or to lose traffic to another website for results presentation (we certainly didn’t want this for our own site either). We looked at a number of site search products aimed at the SME market which matched both our business models. There are a number of packages that broadly fitted the bill including PicoSearch, Freefind and Google Custom Search.

In the end we chose Google’s ‘Custom Search Engine’. We selected the Google CSE for a number of reasons including: ease of implementation, integration with Google Analytics and scalability. The package we chose was for sites up to 5,000 pages (plenty of room for growth!) and 250,000 individual search interrogations annually.

We were particularly keen to see how the results integrated into Google Analytics and were pleased with what we found in our user-testing. Analytics provides a wealth of information such as the proportion of users that used your search function, search queries used, start and destination pages, day-trends as well as the quality of subsequent site usage metrics such as time-on-site, search-depth and further search refinement. It should be noted that Analytics is compatible with a number of site-based search services, we just kept it ‘in-the-family’.

Blended with general site usage metrics, site-based search is a powerful tool for the site manager but primarily a great resource for your visitors, hopefully improving their time-on-site and your conversion levels. It will also provide vital insight for future site development and content organisation and management.

For advice about adding site search to your website or full implementation of site-based search, contact us to discuss your requirements.