So you’ve made it to page one for your keywords – excellent!  In order to have done that, then chances are that you already have an idea of how you can use keywords in the head elements of your website for maximum search engine placement.  But have you ever thought of the human factor?  Have you put much thought into how the placement location of your keywords in your title and Meta descriptions will play a factor in the amount of times a user clicks your results?  In this article, Andrew Hallinan will cover how your keywords will be most effective for the human element.

Reader, I want you to think about something for a second.  When you search for something on Google, Yahoo!, or Bing, what do you look at first?  What grabs your attention first?  Do you ever really think about this?

Google has thought about it!  Google’s User Experience Research team has discovered a way to actually track a person’s eye movements and focus when they are looking at a search results page.  Watch this video for an example:

Based on the research that Google has performed, we’ve learned that people mostly read the search results page in the order that the search results have been listed – top to bottom.  Searchers will generally start top down and scan the results until they find something that they feel will be useful – and then BAM!  They click the link and make a decision to check out that website.  (Sometimes the searcher will decide to revise their search terms, but that’s information for another blog post at a later date.)

After 34 different users were evaluated Google had a pretty good idea of what they were looking for when evaluating the search results page.  Check out this heat map image below – a great image which helps show where people looked at the longest.

Google Heatmap Study

What can we learn from this?

1. Searchers will scan the results top down

Duh!  Most people already knew this – the best place to be for your search terms is on page 1, in position 1!  This study certainly verified what we already knew.  But there are some other conclusions that we can come to that will greatly effect how our website will perform once displayed on the search engines.

2. Searchers will notice the first few words in your title and snippet first

Ah, now we’re getting somewhere!  Look at the site map again – where did users spend the most time?  Searchers spend the most time looking at the left side of the page reading the first few words in your title and the first few words in the snippet.  This is important!  If you want to maximize the human response to your search engine results, it’s utterly important to have your most important keywords in the title – FIRST!  It’s equally as important to have your most important keywords in your Meta description tags – FIRST!

If the user spends more time looking to the left of your results, then it’s important to meet them where they are.  Considering that Google will bold the keywords that match exactly the search terms, if you give them what they are searching for in the first few words of your title and description, you’ll have a much better chance of succeeding and getting their click.

1. Why, Google, WHY?!

First of all, Google is on a kick to make the internet faster – which I think is great!  With ISPs providing faster download and upload speeds, computers becoming faster and more powerful, and searchers becoming more impatient – who really wants to have a website that is slow and bulky?  No one.

The bottom line here is that speed has been shown and proven to increase conversions.  Shopzilla and Firefox have both spent resources in testing the increases in speeds and nothing else – not a single content change.  Shopzilla saw a 7-14% increase in conversions, and Firefox saw a 15.4% increase in downloads – just from changing their site speed!  This what just from making tweaks in their speed.

The second issue is that if you have a faster site, your users will be happier.  You’ll increase your user’s satisfaction.  Microsoft and Google teamed up and did an experiment in which they gave some users delayed results.  They found that the more the delay, the more unhappy a client was.

The third issue is that slower website speeds produce long term negative results for the end user.  Again, Microsoft and Google teamed up and gave users a half a second delay.  They found that the users who received these results showed a decrease in query volume.  At 7 weeks, they reset these users, and the query volume went up, but not to the same levels.

Although speed is a factor, content and relevance are still the primary ranking factors.

2. Steps to improve your website’s speed

First of all, it’s important to know that 80-90% of the end user response time is spent on the front end.  Images, Flash, and other objects that will be displayed are going to take immense amounts of time to download.  When you decide to start optimizing for speed, start on the front end!  There is a greater potential for improvement, it’s simpler to do, and it has been proven to work.  Although one would think that optimizing your database or scaling your architecture would help more, it doesn’t.

Second, a question arises – how the heck do you know if your website is slow or not?  I think the first place to start is to head over to http://www.webpagetest.org where they have an absolutely excellent speed test.  It’s very in depth and will even give you ideas on how to optimize your website for speed!  It’s amazing how much time it took to download my simple blog – over 7 seconds!

Now, Webmaster Tools has a section called “Site Performance” which will give you a pretty good idea of how your website is doing.  It will not only tell you what your website page load time is and it will compare it to other websites throughout the web.

There is also a Firefox plugin called “Page Speed” that you can run on ANY URL.  It will give you very specific recommendations and ideas to help your website have an decrease in page load times.

Your customers are searching for different things every day.  For all advertising that your corporation kicks off, it’s absolutely essential that your organic search strategy is part of the planning process.  What are the particular taglines and products that you will be promoting?  How will your advertising efforts cause people to search for your product or service?

Here’s a great example.  Lately, I’ve been searching around local shops for a fly fishing rod and reel – but the problem is that fly fishing isn’t a huge sport here in Florida, and so no shops carry them.  I drove an hour away to the nearest Dicks Sporting Goods only to find that they too did not carry such a great item.

I was driving in my car the other day, and I heard a radio ad for a local sporting goods store having a special – “Buy a fly rod and get a free fly fishing reel!”  I was excited and made a mental note of the company name and website.

Throughout the day, life happened, and all I could remember was the promotion – not the name of the business, the location, or the website.  Not even a hint!  I tried to search for their promotion, but alas, I could not find them.  They certainly lost my business for having a poor search strategy.

Your offline advertising is searching for searchers.  Your offline advertising is attracting the same people as your online advertising.  It’s all connected!  If you share data between departments, you’ll be surprised at how much better you’ll understand your customers.  You will be able to provide a better, more intimate marketing message to your customers.

Here are some times when canonicalization is an issue:

1. When you have not redirected www and non-www versions of the website and they both resolve

These versions will be the same – but ideally, you need a 301 or permanent re-direct from one to the other in order to deliver the best possible results.  Without this simple server redirect in place, you basically have two websites that will be indexed by the search engines – which spells bad news for your results.

2. You’ve changed your URL structure so that your information and content still exists on both the new and old versions

Obviously, you don’t want to lose traffic that is linking to or visiting the new content.  In this situation, a 301 redirect is important to use and is usually the best possible way to redirect your traffic – especially since both the search engines and web browsers can follow a 301 redirect.  (A 302 redirect can only be followed by a web browser and not a spider)

3. Your URL structure generates infinite URLs

If you have a dynamically generated URL structure that could generate an infinite amount of URLs, you’ll be in trouble!  This generally happens in large e-commerce websites that have tons of product listings that can be sorted by price, size, closest to you, color, etc.  If the website generates a different URL for each of these results, you could spell trouble.  Most often, the reason that this is set up this way is so that your marketing department can add a tracking code to the URL to keep track of the campaigns.

Here’s an example – let’s say you have a new shoe campaign and your marketing department is sending out direct mail pieces, has an email marketing campaign, a blogger relationship database, and just search engine traffic.  If the email url is “www.example.com/email”, direct mail is “www.example.com/dmail”, etc. then you can have a bunch of URLs for the same content.

If a spider suspects that the page can load with infinite URL variations, it can fall into a “spider trap” and stop indexing your website.  Since there is limited resources for the spiders to crawl your website, important content may be left uncrawled.  When this happens, it’s a great idea to use a canonical meta tag or Google Webmaster Tools parameter handling tool.

4. Your pages are blocked by the robots exclusion tag

As you probably know, the robots.txt exclusion helps you block out search engines from indexing the information on your website that you don’t want it to index.  While it’s a good practice to use this tag on occasion, it’s very easy to accidentally block the spiders from indexing pages that are relevant and helpful.  If your website isn’t being properly indexed – this is the first place I’d look.

Remember the “good to great” methodology.

Most programmers and developers may not have the same personality traits as your management team or customer service teams.  Keeping that in mind, some programmers and developers may be a bit resistant to training, advice, or direction from someone who is not a programmer or developer.  This can cause conflict between the two parties and be detrimental for the overall goals of your SEO campaign.

Over the past few years, I’ve managed to gain excellent skills in handling these situations.  The first thing to do when speaking to a programmer (or group of developers) is to clearly establish that these developers have more training, experience, and programming experience than you do (even if you think that they don’t!)  Acknowledge that they have done a good job with SEO up until that date, and that you’ve been brought in to bring them from good to great – NOT from bad to good.

Communicate best practices clearly and often.

Although I may not directly understand the relationship between variable functions in PHP programming versus ASP direct subsequent variations, I do understand SEO and how it relates to programming.  Web programmers and developers need to understand the principles of searchability and absolutely need to build these techniques into their programming.  Web programmers also need to have a set of standards and best practices for editing and modifying the website architecture – and to address any relevant problems that the website may have.

For example, there’s been a lot of buzz going around about Google’s new site speed factor in rankings.  This has created quite a bit of panic in some of the major websites that have speed issues.  Understandably, it’s very important that a website can compete and stay on top of the game with fast load times and crawl rates.  Addressing these concerns with a firm but gentle approach with your developers is best – instead of, “Our site loads extremely slowly, you need to fix it,” try using a different approach.  Explain the situation, explain why speed is now a factor in search results, and encourage the developers in their work.  Try saying something along the lines of, “Google has just announced that speed is a major factor in our website rankings.  Our website isn’t as slow as some of our competition, but this is an area where we can really get to the top of the game and steal some great momentum to beat out the competition.  We need to really focus on site speed and using our best practices in this area – look out for a company memo to be distributed later on these subjects.”

a. What are the company goals for this page?

b. What are we trying to get the person to when they get to this page?

c. Why would a visitor find this page from the search engines?  What would they be looking to get or do?

d. Why would this visitor want to become a conversion?

1. Server response times

The search engines, with Google leading the pack, are trying now more than ever to increase the speed of the internet as a whole.  If your server is slower than your competition’s, and your website responds to requests too slowly, the search engine spiders may slow their crawls of your website down to make sure that they are not overloading the server.

2. Page load times

It’s simple, really – the faster your individual pages load, the more pages of your website the spiders can crawl!  If you have a 100,000 page website and the crawler takes a second per page, that’s way too long.  You can actually monitor your own page load times in your Google Webmaster Tools accounts.

3. Your content

You content MUST be unique.  Autoblogs, automatic RSS feeds, and other forms of using dynamically distributed content are great – but if they are the only way your website gets traffic, you’ll never dominate the search engines.  You must have unique content that is relevant for the searcher and search phrase.  If there is too much duplicate content, or you have too many pages with thin content, the search engines won’t be crawling your website too often.

4. URLs, redirects, and missing pages

For whatever reason, there can be issues with the crawler crawling your website.  It can get stuck in a redirect loop or have any other number of problems with crawling your website.  You can view your crawl report and diagnose/troubleshoot problems from your Google Webmaster Tools account.  Chances are pretty good that if Google has had problems crawling your website, Yahoo! and Bing will have problems crawling as well.

5. Server efficiency

You can lessen your server’s resources that the spiders are allowed to use by creating compressed files and if-modified-since methods on the server.  This is a great way to reduce your bandwidth.  This isn’t a problem for small websites, but when it comes to a website with 100,000 pages or unique products, the bandwidth can be very costly.  If you use the if-modified-since portion of your server, it will return a 304 (not modified) response to the bot when it’s requesting a web page that has not been modified since the last time it’s contents were indexed.  You can find out much more about this by visiting http://janeandrobot.com/library/managing-robots-access-to-your-website

6. Bot efficiency

You can adjust the crawl times of both Bing and Yahoo!’s bots by using a crawl-delay setting in your robots.txt file.  If either of these seem too slow, see if an entry in this file exists.  Another good way of being able to tell if the other bots are indexing too slowly is by checking on Google’s own crawl speed – it may be a good indicator as well.

The key to great support comes from the top down.  If your upper management creates an environment which is central to having search strategies a priority, then it can then be a goal shared by the entire corporation.  Upper management absolutely needs to provide the necessary resources for search integration and to make sure that all departments are motivated to create great upward momentum to the search marketing strategy.

Here are some tips to great content architecture across your organization.

1. Make sure that your website has the most useful and functional information architecture possible

Make sure that multiple pages don’t have similar or thin content.  Will your website’s visitors be confused at all?  Is the page they access relevant to the information they’re looking for?  Don’t ever confuse your visitors, and don’t ever show them something they aren’t looking for.  Keep it simple!

2. Make sure that the copy on your website speaks to your customer

Keyword research is a huge part of this.  You must make absolutely certain that anyone writing web copy has access to (and understands) your keyword research.  Make sure they use this research in the writing and development of web copy – if your core demographic is high school children, don’t write using the vocabulary of someone with a PHD.

3. Although your meta keywords tag is not helpful in search engine optimization, it can be helpful in collaboration.

Often, a company will spend countless dollars and time on research about how to speak to their customer, how to create the best marketing calls, marketing segments, and then a copywriter will change the message without realizing all of the energy that was put into the message.  To help avoid this, make sure the copywriter has coordinated site wide, and make sure they incorporate the correct keywords into the content.  Don’t focus too much on keyword density, but rather on providing valuable content.

4. Remember that every page of your site is a possible entry point.

Every page of your website is a possible entry point for your customer and should be developed using this mentality.  Make sure that each page clearly states the primary subject, provides contextual navigation and momentum about the rest of the website, helps the visitor complete a task/find what they were looking for, and to motivate the visitor into your sales funnel.  Pages often don’t have a strong call to action and conversions may suffer greatly.

Your corporation should create a checklist for each page to ensure all of these actions get met.

5. Make sure that your website has a great internal linking structure.

This is absolutely crucial to make sure that you have an easily crawlable website. At least one internal link should be in place to each page of your website.  A page that does not have an internal link to it is called an “orphan page” and will never be seen by the search engines.

6. Think about what you’re going to link to from the home page.

Your website’s home page is the page that most visitors will see – so it’s important that you link to your most important pages.  Search engines also recognize this, and they use your home page link architecture as a sign of what your most important pages are.

1. Dynamically created meta and title tag problems.

When optimizing a large website for SEO, chances are pretty good that you won’t be hiring someone to optimize 100,000 title tags and meta tags on each of these pages.  Title and meta tags are not the be-all-end-all of SEO, but they can certainly provide some value to the search engines, and even more value to people who are searching for your website’s products or services.

All large websites will generally be dynamically created.  With that in mind, a normal header that will hurt your rankings will be:

<title><?php echo $pageTitle; ?> – Your Constant Content Here</title>

<META name=”description” content=”<?php echo $metaDescription; ?>” />

<META name=”keywords” content=”<?php echo $metaTags; ?>” />

Then, here is a sample of PHP that you’ll add to your typical index.php code:

<?php

$pageTitle = “My page title”;

$metaDescription = “This is your meta page description.”;

$metaTags = “Meta tags are pretty much outdated, but it can help you remember which keywords your page will become optimized for”;

include(“header.php”);

?>

The above is an OK example of dynamic meta data for a website, but the results will be the same off every page.  When you have the same title tags and meta information on every page, it becomes a nightmare for the search engines to try to sort out different genres and information based on the relevant keywords.  Don’t expect to get in the top placement with code similar to the above code.

2.  Thin content problems

When you are attempting to search engine optimize large websites, another issue that can come from dynamically generated pages is thin or sparse unique content on each page.  These pages can have heavy programming, images, and other attributes that don’t necessarily produce excellent value for the user.  Google and other search engines are generally going to reduce the importance of websites that try to increase their value for their users by using scraped or other auto generation features to their websites.

To avoid thin content penalties, make sure that each and every page of your website contains unique and relevant content that truly adds value to your users.

3. Affiliate site problems & doorway page problems

Sometimes, affiliate websites will be cookie cutter websites with no uniquely generated content.  Doorway pages which are created specifically for search engines can have sparse unique and no real relevant content to bring value to the user.  Seeing as how doorway pages were created specifically for the search engines, they can actually have the opposite effect.