Did they come for the sessions?  The networking with others in the industry?  The  constantly changing array of warming trays and platters containing tempting culinary experiences?  If only they had installed Google Analytics on SphinnCon Israel 2010, we might be able to find out.

Analytics was the topic of one of the sessions, which covered the range of the search engine profession from SEO to SEM to Social Media.  The following are some of the actionable takeaways from the sessions I attended:

A/B Split Testing for Adwords from Dan Perach of PPCPROZ (a very professional, well-presented and practical presentation):

• while A/B testing can help your performance tremendously, if you don’t have time to be on top of an A/B test – don’t  (simple, seemingly obvious, but overlooked – and definitely applicable to other areas of life as well).
• when you’re starting a new test in the Search Network, make sure you pause your old ad, clone it and start a new test – or the past history will skew the results.
• be on top of your tests to know as soon as possible after a test is really over (with a winner or a dead heat) – otherwise you’ll end up losing money to losing ads.  If you have many ads being tested, use a tool to manage the tests and tell you algorithmically when the test is over.
• matrix the competition – use a competitive research tool like Keyword Spy to look at the top ads for each keyword or adgroup.  Make a chart with the unique feature or benefit each one gives, the call to action, the tone – and then see how you can differentiate your ads from the competition.

Content Network Tips from Naomi Sela of Compucall:

• optimize by predefining: themes and site lists where you think your ad will succeed.
• optimize by refining: exclude sites, categories and page types if you see they aren’t bringing you the traffic you want; exclude demographic segments or bid more for a particular age or gender.
• use a placement performance report to identify your highest converting sites, and then create specific ad copy for those sites.
• target users who visit sites out of their country (for example, target sites in English, Russian and Arabic – but for visitors with an Israeli IP).

SEO Indexing Tips from Vanessa Fox (no, not the name of a session, but a few tips from a site clinic that she directed):

• the most accurate way to see how many pages of your site have been indexed by Google is by uploading an XML sitemap to Webmaster Tools – and letting them tell you there how many pages they’ve indexed.  Using the “site:” command is relatively inaccurate (as anyone who has paged to the end knows), and wildly inaccurate for numbers over 1000.
• if you have a directory site and some of the categories may not have listings, you should programmatically create a single page that will show for any request for which there is no content, otherwise Google may end up indexing lots of pages with different URLs that all say “0 results found” and eventually decide that your site has little worthwhile content. You may not be too happy with the results of that decision.

Thanks to all the presenters and organizers!

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Any type of semantic markup needs to have a vocabulary defined somewhere on the internet – so people can learn what the terms are, and sometimes as an essential part of a computer figuring out what the terms are.

Google officially supports microformats and RDFa:

Microformats

Microformats are a set of vocabularies developed and hosted on microformats.org.  Any interested party can contribute to the development of new and existing vocabularies.  Some of the vocabularies are stable and established and some are drafts and are liable to change.  (Interestingly enough, Google supports the hCard vocabulary for defining People and Organization, which is an established vocabulary, and the hReview vocabulary for defining reviews, which is listed as a draft.  I guess Google assumes it won’t change too much in the future.)

When you use a microformats vocabulary on your webpages, you first define which vocabulary you are using by <div class=”insert vocabulary here“>.  Then you define the term you are using from that vocabulary by <span class=”insert property here“>.

Example: <div class=”hreview”>

Then: <span class=”rating”>

(*note – “div” and “span” are not absolutes – use whatever tag fits with your formatting)

RDFa

RDFa is a practical way of using RDF – Resource Description Framework, which is a description format using “triples” of subject – property – value of the property (or, in their technical terminology, subject – predicate – object).  For example, using our brownie example from last post:

1 cup brown sugar

This statement is about the subject of brown sugar.  It contains an inherent property, which is the amount of brown sugar, and the value of the property which is 1 cup.

There are a number of RDFa vocabularies on the internet – just like microformats, the potential number is infinite.  If you want to write an RDFa vocabulary, go right ahead.  The difference between microformats and RDFa is that while microformat vocabularies are all hosted and edited on the microformats.org website, anyone can write an RDFa vocabulary and host it wherever he wants.

But if the framework is so open, how in the world (wide web – does a computer reading your webpage’s code know what you’re referring to?

When you use an RDFa vocabulary on your webpages, you first define the “name space” – the place on the internet where the list of terms and definitions is located.  You do this by writing: <div xmlns:abbreviation for your vocabulary=”URL where your vocabulary is located“  After that, for every property you want to mark up, you write: <span property=”abbreviation for your vocabulary:property>

Example: <div xmlns:dc=”http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"

Then: <span property=”dc:title”>

Huh?  Does that sound confusing to you?  It did to me… and it still does.  Let’s take it slowly.

xmlns is short for “XML name space”, meaning the XML document where your vocabulary is defined.

dc in our example was the abbreviation that the creators chose to stand for the URL where their vocabulary is located (it stands for Dublin Core).

http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/ is the URL itself.

Now the computer reading the RDFa knows that when it sees dc in the future, it is going to refer to a term contained within that URL, thus eliminating the need to rewrite the URL of the vocabulary source every single time you define a property.  When you add span property=”dc:title”, you are effectively telling the computer to go to the URL above and find the “title” section to understand what the property means.  The above URL actually redirects to http://dublincore.org/2008/01/14/dcelements.rdf#, making “dc:title” roughly equivalent to http://dublincore.org/2008/01/14/dcelements.rdf#title.

So now you’re about to go create your own RDFa vocabulary so you can mark up your website about your collection of Madagascar hissing cockroaches, with properties like: name, length, favorite food, best trick, decibel level of hiss…

Not so fast.  If you look at Google’s instructions for marking up your website with RDFa, you see that you are instructed to write <div xmlns:v=http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org/#”.  This is Google’s name space, where it defines the properties it supports in RDFa.  Currently Google only supports properties relating to people, reviews, products and organizations, and only information relating to people and reviews is actually used for display purposes.  In their latest update on Rich Snippets, Google announced that they will recognize FOAF (the Friend of a Friend vocabulary) and vCard terms that are equivalent to the terms they support.  vCard is one of the earlier published web standards for defining properties of people and organizations – microformats’ hCard and Google’s RDFa definitions are based on this standard.

Which vocabulary to use?

So with your newfound awareness of semantic markup, you now want to go and mark up all your pages using a vocabulary that Google recognizes (your Madagascar hissing cockroaches will have to wait – probably for quite a long time).

But… which vocabulary should you use?  The following is a bit of conjecture, without any definitive conclusions, but may provide food for thought as you make your decision.

Popularity

Microformats have historically (as historical as you can call relatively recent technology advances) been the more popular of the two.  A search on Google Trends shows that “microformats” were searched for a significant enough way to register starting from 2006, whereas “RDFa” only appeared on the significant search scene starting in 2009 – and it’s had its ups and downs.

Google Trends for Microformats and RDFa - since 2006

A closer look at 2009:

Google Trends for Microformats and RDFa - 2009 only

On the other hand, the quantity of “microformats” search seems to be declining since 2006 – slowly, to be sure, but steadily.

Ease of Use

Microformats seem a little bit simpler to use: take a look at Google’s example for the difference in marking up information about a person in microformats and in RDFa (you have to scroll down a bit on the page for the examples).

On the other hand, do or will CMSs (content management systems) offer built-in support for one or the other?  In the comments to the last blog post on this topic, Amir Simantov mentioned that Drupal has some built-in RDFa capabilities.

If you don’t use a CMS that has those capabilities, can your site programmer build either one more easily into your templates?  (For a client of ours who is building a new e-commerce website, we’re recommending that the programmer look into building these semantic mark-up capabilities into the product pages.)

I posed a question to the SEOmoz staff about preference in which vocabulary to use, but they also hadn’t come to any conclusions.  They did confirm my hesitation about mixing and matching vocabularies – so once you pick one, stick with it.

Are there any other points you think are relevant to deciding which one to use?  Have you had experience with either microformats or RDFa and can share some advice with us?  The comments are waiting for you.

(Okay – how many of you actually clicked on the Madagascar hissing cockroaches site?  Admit it – in the comments.  )

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We decided to put our latest SEO blog post on SEOmoz’s user generated SEO blog – so check it out over there!

Just to give a brief summary – recently Google announced that YouTube videos (and other videos from Google’s video partners) will be able to have automatic captioning.  Admittedly this is a big step for deaf accessibility, but some SEOs voiced the opinion that having all this new topic-rich text on the page would be of benefit to SEO as well.  When we investigated, however, we saw that in fact the text doesn’t seem to appear anywhere and doesn’t seem to help…

For more details, check out the full blog post (complete with lots of images!) on SEomoz.  Enjoy!

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The different search engines have different maximum lengths for the titles and descriptions that they will show in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Google will show up to 69 characters (including spaces) for the title and up to 156 (including spaces) for the description.

While many content management systems that enable you to add title and description tags to your pages will show you the number of characters, it’s quite frustrating to spend precious time writing the tags only to find out when you copy them into your system that they’re too long. And not all systems have this feature for all the tags. Our Wordpress-based system tells us only the number of characters in the description (not the title). Using Excel’s length count and conditional formatting features lets you see length issues at a glance. Here’s how:

Create columns for the page URL, current title, new title, current description and new description. Add in a “length” column after your new title and description.

Put the formula len=(cell) into the first cell of the length column, using the cell just to its left in the formula. Copy and paste for the entire column.

You will now see the number of characters (including spaces) contained in your new titles and descriptions.

In order to see which titles and descriptions fit the prescribed number of characters, use conditional formatting in the length column. Here’s how:

1. Select the entire New Title length column, and go to Format>>Conditional Formatting.
2. In the resulting pop-up box, Condition 1 should be: “Cell Value Is”.
3. In the next menu, choose “less than or equal to”.
4. Enter the maximum number of characters allowed (for Google, 69).
5. Press the “Format” button and then the “Patterns” tab to choose what color you would like the cell to be if your title is the correct length (green is a pretty intuitive choice).
6. Press “Add” to add a new condition.
7. For Condition 2, select “Cell Value Is” from the first menu.
8. In the next menu, choose “greater than”.
9. Enter the maximum number of characters allowed (for Google, 69).
10. Press the “Format” button and then the “Patterns” tab to choose what color you would like the cell to be if your title is longer than the correct length (red is the intuitive choice here, but it always seems too harsh to me – I prefer rose).
11. Press “OK.”
12. Repeat process for New Description Length column.

And there you have it: you can easily and colorfully tell which tags are fine and which need some pruning. I guess we have to fix that “Fans” description. Yes, fans – what did you think a company like “Coolness Is Us” would do? 

Any Excel tips of your own? Please enlighten us all!

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How do Rich Snippets work?

In order to produce a Rich Snippet, Google looks at semantic markup (programming code that explains meanings) that webmasters have added to their pages, marking data that humans understand naturally so that machines can understand it also. Basic HTML has plenty of semantic markup that explains data structure, for example, the <h1> tag to denote a heading or the <p> tag to denote a paragraph.

To see a simple explanation of how more complex semantic markup works, take a look at the following:

You know that what you are looking at is a recipe. (Looks pretty good, no? If you are so tempted that you end up making the recipe, tell us in the comments whether it’s worth it.) You know that the text contains (among other things) the title of the recipe and a list of ingredients consisting of the types of ingredient and how much of each you will need.

If basic HTML is used, all a computer knows is that it is looking at a title and a list that contains numbers. It could be a recipe; it could be the inventory of a store; it could be the list of final grades for Geology 101.

More advanced semantic markup tags different parts of the page with code that “explains” to the computer what the data is referring to, and the relationship between different parts of the data. In the above example, the semantic markup would effectively tell the computer something like this:

<recipe title> Chocolate Chip Cheesecake Brownies

<list of ingredients>

<amount of ingredient>1 <measure of amount>cup <type of ingredient>shortening

<amount of ingredient>1 <measure of amount>cup <type of ingredient>brown sugar

<amount of ingredient>1/2 <measure of amount>cup <type of ingredient>white sugar

<amount of ingredient>1 <measure of amount>teaspoon <type of ingredient>vanilla extract

There are a number of existing vocabulary systems for semantic markup, enabling you to let machines understand and make connections about information on people, organizations, products, locations, events, media, and jobs, among other things (there’s even a vocabulary for recipes!). If all information was tagged, a search engine would ostensibly be able to return “all brownie recipes with no oil that are written by people who live in Oklahoma and are friends of my friends on Facebook.”

We’re not there yet. Google only visibly uses this information for its Rich Snippets, and only for reviews and for social/people profile sites, although they say that they do use the information from other markups. The two systems that Google supports are microformats and RDFa. As you may have noticed, the above mouth-watering brownie recipe does have ratings, but they do not appear in the search result snippet for that page:

as they are using a system other than microformats and RDFa.

More Rich Snippet support will be added in the future for markup that is helpful to searchers and that gains wide use among webmasters. E-Commerce sites, in particular, may be likely to benefit.

Which system should you use and how should you use it? Stay tuned for the next blog post on semantic markup and Rich Snippets! In the meantime, if you have your own opinions on the use of semantic markup, let us know in the comments below.

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How do you know whether your site will be compatible with them all?

One useful service for checking how any particular URL will display on different browsers is BrowerShots. They offer the ability (free!) to check how your URL will display on numerous different browsers, with the options to choose the screen size and color depth, as well as whether you want Java, Javascript and/or Flash enabled or disabled.

Although highly useful (especially if you don’t have all these browsers installed on your computer), oftentimes BrowserShots would time out before loading all of the screenshots I wanted to view.

In these cases, or if you want to check multiple URLs on a single domain quickly, the following are directions on how to disable Javascript and Flash in common browsers. The version in parentheses is the version that I tested the instructions on; they may well work in earlier/later versions as well – but you’ll have to try that yourself. If you have any comments or tips about other versions and/or browsers, please enlighten us all in the comments below!

Internet Explorer (8.0)

Disabling Javascript:

1. Go to the Tools menu.
2. Click on Internet Options (all the way at the bottom).
3. Click on the Security tab.
4. Click the “Custom Level” button.
5. Scroll down to where it says “Active Scripting” and click “Disable”.
6. Click OK.
7. Click Yes.
8. Click OK.

Disabling Flash:

The Toggle Flash add-on disables and re-enables any Flash banner by clicking the Toggle Flash button in your toolbar. To install and use Toggle Flash:

1. Download Toggle Flash. In order to use Toggle Flash, you must have Microsoft .NET 2.0 Framework or one of the later service packs installed.
2. Close Internet Explorer and install Toggle Flash.
3. Re-open Internet Explorer. The Toggle Flash button (a red circle with the Flash “f” symbol in the middle and a line through it) should be present in your command bar (the toolbar with the homepage button, printer button, etc.).
4. If you don’t see it, you may need to resize your command bar. Right-click on an empty space in the command bar and uncheck “Lock the Toolbars” in the pop-up menu.
5. Put your mouse over the line that appears and the cursor will change to a bi-directional arrow. Drag the line to expand the toolbar until the Toggle Flash icon appears. You can then re-lock the toolbars.
6. Click the Toggle Flash button to turn Flash off. The button will not show a depression, making it hard to know whether it really worked or not, but if you visit a site with Flash, the Flash will not display and you may receive a message telling you that you need to download the latest Flash player or a similar message.
7. In order to show the Flash, click the Toggle Flash button again and reload the page.

Mozilla Firefox (3.0.13)

Disabling Javascript:

1. Go to the Tools menu.
2. Click on Options (towards the bottom).
3. Uncheck the “Enable Javascript” box.
4. Click OK.

Disabling Flash:

The Flashblock add-on automatically disables any Flash banner, indicating its presence as a grey button that fluctuates between the Flash “f” symbol and a “play” arrow. If you click on the button, it will display the Flash. This add-on is incredibly convenient, not only for testing browser compatibility, but also for eliminating annoying Flash ads from displaying during your regular surfing of the internet.

Google Chrome (4.0.206.1 – dev version; should work on latest stable version as well)

Disabling Javascript:

1. Right-click on the Google Chrome icon found on your desktop.
2. Click on Properties.
3. Click on the Shortcuts tab.
4. In the “Target” field, where it says something to the effect of “C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe”, add a space and then “-disable-javascript” (without the quotes)
5. Restart Chrome.

Disabling Flash

Okay, this Flashblock works the same way as the Firefox one, but the installation is a tad more complicated than clicking “Install”. Hold on tight…

1. Go to the page containing the Flashblock user script. Copy the script into a Notepad file and save it as a text document as “Flashblock.user.js” (the name “Flashblock” is not crucial; the “.user.js” suffix is).
2. Find your Default user data folder for Chrome.

· In Windows XP, the pathway is: \Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default

· In Windows Vista the pathway is: \Users\username\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default

* If you are using Explorer to find the folder, you may need to tell it to display hidden folders by going to the Tools menu, clicking “Folder Options”, clicking the “View” tab and selecting “Show hidden files and folders” (towards the bottom of the list of options).

3. Create a new folder within the Default folder entitled User Scripts.

4. Copy your Flashblock.user.js file into the User Scripts folder.

5. Right-click on the Google Chrome icon found on your desktop.

1. Click on Properties.
2. Click on the Shortcuts tab.
3. In the “Target” field, where it says something to the effect of “C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe”, add a space and then “–enable-user-scripts” (without the quotes – and make sure the first hyphen is doubled)
4. Restart Chrome.

Note: In order to display Flash permanently for any site, press Alt+F.

Yet another note: On Chrome, you cannot block Flash and Javascript at the same time. Putting “-disable-javascript” into the target field will disable your userscript that runs Flashblock. *sigh*

Happy browsing!

References:

www.mistered.us/tips/javascript/browsers.shtml

http://www.simplehelp.net/2008/04/07/how-to-temporarily-disable-flash-in-internet-explorer-7/

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=5e291648113cc731&hl=en

http://www.chromeplugins.org/google/chrome-plugins/block-flash-disable-most-visited-sites-7491.html

http://www.chromeplugins.org/google/chrome-talk/userscripts-chrome-7483.html

http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel

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When we search for your keyword
Your site does view
Way down on the list
Rank three hundred and two

Your homepage has five versions
.html, .php
/index, /default
And the original, you see

Your links are all Java
Your navigation’s in Flash
Google has just one page of yours
Stored in its cache

Your title and description tags
Are all the same
The only keyword that refers surfers
Is your name

URLs are dynamic
Lots of errors in your code
Your homepage takes
Two minutes to load

Half your site content
Is password protected
Including “Terms of Use” –
Plagiarism, you suspected?

Your PageRank is zero
Backlinks twenty-one
But eleven from link farms
Ten from the blog of your son

Bumping your site up
Won’t be easy
And rapid acceleration
Can make one queasy

But hold on tight
And we’ll give it a go
Search Engine Overhaul
That’s SEO

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One of the most helpful ways to conduct research for these “lower search volume” keywords is to use Google Adwords. Not just the Adwords Keyword Tool – which may or may not be helpful in your case – but an actual Google Adwords campaign. By seeing how often your ads appear for the keywords you indicate, you can get a more accurate idea of how many people are searching for those keywords.

In general, when you set up an Adwords campaign, you want your ad to appear as high as possible in the search results, as long as you don’t have to pay too much. When you run a research campaign, however, you want to set your bid high enough that the ad appears, but low enough that the ad appears towards the low end of the search results (i.e. positions 7-10). This way you reduce the chances that people will click on your ad, reducing the amount of money you need to spend. You can get an idea of how high to set your maximum bid by using Adwords Traffic Estimator.

Start out by putting your keywords into the entry field, as seen above, using quotation marks if you want exact match (which you will probably choose if your keyword research is to determine which of several similar phrases people search for more). Do not choose a Max CPC, but do indicate your currency, language and country of interest.

Results:

Note that the bid amounts that are returned are enough to place the ad in positions 1-3 – not what we want for our research. Continue entering lower and lower amounts into the “Maximum CPC” field and clicking “Get New Estimates” until the Estimated Ad Positions show 7-10. See what the minimum amount is that you can enter and have it stay 7-10 (any lower will take you off the first page and severely minimize your chances of the ad showing at all, even if people do enter your keywords).

With prices like these, even if a few people do click on your ad, it won’t cost you so much – a bargain for effective keyword research. (Why Google estimates your daily expenses as $1 if they estimate 0 clicks at 6 cents apiece is a bit of a mystery… so you won’t be upset at them if you actually have to pay something?) Make sure to have a real landing page for your ad – if someone does click, you might gain a customer in addition to the information.

You now have the information you need to set up your research campaign, but these numbers are only an approximation. After your campaign is up and running, check frequently to make sure that your ads are showing, and showing in the position you want. You may need to adjust your bid up or down. Make sure – as mentioned above – that you indicate exact match for your keywords in order to get accurate information if you want to compare frequency of similar keywords (which would have a chance of appearing for each other if broad match was chosen), unless you are using Analytics filters that enable you to see exact keywords which sent visitors to your landing page.

After you have let the ads run for a significant period of time (still monitoring frequently to ensure that your campaign is running effectively), gather and analyze your data to see which keywords received the most impressions.

Happy campaigning!

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In addition, it is the title of your web page that appears as an entry in the search engine result pages, together with the description, which is the one or two line snippet that normally appears under that title in the entry.

Apropos the description, Google has recently been using longer snippets in the search results, excerpted from different places on the page where the search terms appear, for searches of 3 or more words. Page excerpts had often been used when there was no description tag or one that was irrelevant to the search terms, but now even when there is a description tag that has most of the search terms (but not all of them), it may be ignored. It has been theorized that this may reduce the importance of the description tag and place the emphasis for achieving good snippets on on-page optimization.

There is also a keywords tag that the user never sees – it is for search engine use only. The keyword tag has declined in importance for Google in recent years (it used to be that you just inserted whatever keywords you wanted to rank for and – poof! There you were! But no longer…), leaving the focus on the title and description tags.

Many content management systems give you an easy way to add and edit these tags, eliminating the need for you to know the HTML code to insert them manually. In case your system does not provide you with that convenience, the following is the coding that should be inserted into the HEAD of the web page in question.

Title tag: <title> insert title </title>

Description tag: <meta name=“description” content=”insert description”>

Keywords tag: <meta name=“keywords” content=”insert keywords separated by commas”>

What should these tags say? How can you use them to your advantage?

1) Make sure they exist

A surprising number of web pages have no title whatsoever, or have wholly unoriginal titles such as “Home” or “Blog”, or have the same title for every page on their website. The Search Engine Roundtable’s Blog commented recently on the problems this can cause, as Google might pick a title for you, and it may not be the title that you would choose. We saw this recently when the (untitled) homepage of one of our clients appeared in search results with the title “-name of company- logo”. Apparently Google decided that their logo was the most relevant thing on the page, but I doubt many searchers would agree. Additionally, if all the titles and descriptions are the same, Google might decide that the pages must not be unique and fail to index part of them.

2) Make sure they use the words searchers will use

The tags should contain your keyword(s), both for the searcher to see and to give Google a reason to put your page in the search results, so put on a thinking cap when you write them, but not your thinking cap – the thinking cap of your potential searcher. If your web page deals with koalas, don’t use “All You Ever Wanted to Know about Phascolarctos Cinereus” as your title, unless you want to attract zoologists only.

3) Make sure they sound attractive

Although you may think it’s “just semantics,” your choice of words can mean the difference between a searcher clicking on your site or moving on to the next. As my husband pointed out about our baby’s burpcloth: “It’s really just a nice way of saying ‘vomit rag’.” But we humans appreciate when things sound as sweet or as suave as possible – even when it’s a piece of fabric meant to catch regurgitated matter.

4) Make sure they sound attracting

Engage the searchers – compel them to click on your site. This especially applies to the description, where you have more text space at your disposal. Ask a question – invite the searcher to find out more. Which attracts you more? “LOW LOW Prices on Electronics on Joe’s Electronics website” or “Where can you find a digital camera for $20? An iPod for $30? Joe’s Electronics invites you to explore our website for the electronics you need”.   (See the first screenshot above for a good example.)

Two heads are better than one, and three are better than two, and four are better than… Test your titles and descriptions on others before you use them. Ask people who fit the profile of your potential searchers: what words would you search for? Which title sounds more appealing? Which description makes you want to click more? Use their feedback to create tags that will say: “You’re IT!”

Do you have a home page with an uninspiring title or description? Or with none at all? Post the website domain name in the comments, and we’ll give you a suggestion!

Thanks to you all for having been so patient, and for sticking around till we got back to writing here again. Looking forward to seeing you on our next post  (if you sign up for our RSS feed, of course!)

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• What are the goals of your business?
• What do you want your website to achieve – quantifiably?

This information should be at the tip of the tongue for anyone running a business – especially someone who is actively looking for a professional to improve the achievements of their business – but it is surprising how many people just… don’t know.

“I’m not sure…”

“I have to think about that…”

“Good questions…”

When you get a degree in education and they teach you how to write a lesson plan, one of the most important elements (in the professor’s opinion) and the most annoying (in the education student’s opinion) is the definition of goals. What should your student be able to do at the end of your lesson?

• The student will recite the times tables backwards.
• The student will identify all the nature metaphors in an unfamiliar poem.
• The student will design an experiment to test the pH of chicken soup.

“Why do I have to define goals? Why can’t I just write the lesson? Why can’t I just teach?” complains the typical education student. Some solve their discomfort and frustration by writing the lesson first and then formulating the goals. Much less annoying, and as this former education student found, much less effective.

Having a goal – a specific goal – focuses you. Knowing exactly what you want to accomplish – quantifiably – increases the accuracy of your foresight and your hindsight. You can plan more effectively before you act and analyze whether your actions were effective after the fact.

The critical connection between goal setting and achievement holds true in any area of life – from the most public to the most personal.

If I have to deliver a speech before the United States Congress, what exactly do I want them to do after I leave the room?

• The Congress will pass a resolution banning the sale of plush pink stuffed elephants.
• When approached individually, the members of Congress will be patient with termite-right-to-life lobbyists.

If I want to improve my marriage, how exactly do I want the improvement to manifest?

• My spouse and I will be able to discuss inviting so-and-so to the family get-together for ten minutes without raising our voices.
• My spouse and I will share our feelings about daily experiences at least twice a week.

Pursuing an elusive “achievement” or “improvement” without a specific goal is like going to the grocery store without a shopping list and vaguely expecting to come back and be able to prepare a gourmet meal. You may surprise yourself and succeed… or you may end up hungry. Either way, you will probably end up more satisfied in less time if you define quantifiable goals.

So don’t be the corner-cutting education student and jump into the water before you’ve charted a course. Before you start your business, before you expand your business, before you call us – or any other consultant – to improve your business, make sure you can give yourself answers:

What exactly do I want to see?

What specifically am I trying to achieve?

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