StyleWired

The Best Way to Write a Meta Description Tag

Chris — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 20:35:35 +0000

Think of your meta description tag as Google Adwords ad text. The purpose of this description is to entice searchers to click the link. But you can also use it to gain leads and sales directly by adding a phone number for example. As with Adwords ad text, you have a limited amount of space. Use keywords to help make the connection between the most likely used search phrases and your link, as these will be bolded if they match the search query. But most of all, use the description to entice searches into clicking your link.

Keeping bounce rates down

To keep your landing page bounce rate as low as possible make sure your meta description accurately describes your landing page content. The content on your landing page should follow on from your meta description nicely. You need a strong headline that connects with the searches keywords and ultimately should aim to answer their search query.

How to start writing your meta description

You should already have a good idea what keywords people will be searching for when your page comes up — your page should be based on keywords you have researched in order to keep your landing page content in line with your customers’ (and potential customers’) language. Speaking your customers’ language is important if you want to connect with them.

When you search your desired keywords in Google, look at the Google Adwords ads that appear. Get some ideas from these ads for your meta description. If there aren’t any ads displaying, search something else to get some good ideas for ad text that works. If you’re experienced at writing ad text for PPC ads you already know what to do — write your description based on ad text that achieves the highest conversion rates.

The best way to write a meta description tag

Before starting your SEO campaign, run a PPC campaign for the same keywords. Research the keywords and track your conversion rates. Determine the keywords that achieve the highest ROI and base your SEO landing pages on these keywords. Now, split test ad text variations until you find the ad text that achieves the highest click through rate or ROI. Use this description in your meta description tag.

Bottom line

Think of your title element and meta description tag as a Google Adwords ad.

How to establish the best time to send an email campaign

Chris — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 16:36:37 +0000

Establish top conversion time of day using analytics

Go into your analytics programme. Go into goals or eCommerce if you have an eCommerce website. Select total conversions and graph by day. Find the day with the highest number of conversions.

Now go into Graph by hour and establish the time of day that has the highest number of conversions. Do the same for conversion rates. Now you know what time(s) people are most likely to buy from your site. It’s worth experiementing to see if you get more success from an email sent at your highest conversion rate time of day or time of day with the highest number of conversions. These two figures will usually correlate anyway.

Experimentation

You should test sending your email at your peak time of week as it is is likely that your customers are most likely to buy your products at this time. However this might not correllate with the time of day and week that your customers are most likely to open an email. So you will need to experiment with this to achieve the best of both worlds.

How to create a ‘flash mimic’ animated rollover link using just HTML and CSS

Chris — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:28:21 +0000

This is an extremely simple and lightweight way of created a link that animates on hover. All you have to do is create your link in the normal way using HTML. For example:

 class="animated-rollover"> href="#">Link text

Now style this code so that you have a background image for ‘p.animated-rollover a’ and a different background image for ‘p.animated-rollover a:hover’. The hover state background image is going to be an animated gif. This is how you get the animation on hover.

p.animated-rollover { width: 150px; height: 40px; background: url(images/animated_rollover_a_hover.gif); text-align: center; line-height: 40px; }
 
p.animated-rollover a { width: 150px; height: 40px; background: url(images/animated_rollover_a.gif); display: block; }
 
p.animated-rollover a:hover { background: url(images/animated_rollover_a_hover.gif); }

I’ve left out any text styling in this example. You could use ‘text-indent: -5000px; overflow: hidden’ and use the background image for the text if you like.