Internet Marketing Blog

Today we have launched our new site!

After 6 months of research, designing, writing and photo-taking (you will see what we mean on our ‘Who we are’ page) we are there!

Our new site has been designed to reflect our company and where we are going in the next few years. We’ve been expanding and have a whole host of new clients and internet marketing solutions on offer to you and your business.

Why not let us know what you think of it?

We’ve just launched the latest O’Neill event website for “The Mission”

It is an invitational freesurf ‘no judges, no rules’ contest of 9 Surfers from around the world.

The contest is held on the Atlantic coast of France. It is a mobile event with the surfers travelling and living in motorhomes and accessing the beach with Safari buses. Unlimited freesurf sessions - just as much and as long as the surfers want.

Every wave of every surfer will be filmed, with each surfer selecting their favourite waves to be edited into a video and judged at the end.

Then it is all about surfers judging surfers, with the overall winner walking away with US$25,000. Total prize money: US$ 50.000

Website: www.oneilleurope.com/themission

What is bounce rate? It’s the percentage of people who enter your site and leave straight away. You can save thousands of pounds by looking at your Pay per Click bounce rates and pausing the under-performing keywords that have a high bounce rate.

If your Pay per Click ads are driving highly relevant traffic to your site you should have an average bounce rate of around 25%, if your bounce rate is higher than 40% you are driving the wrong traffic to your website and wasting your money and marketing budget.

Checking your bounce rate is very easy; your site will need Google Analytics in place with your Pay per Clicks tracked. It would be good to have goals setup with Google Analytics too to double check conversion rates with borderline performing keywords. Hopefully you will have been running Google Analytics for a few months so you can take a large date range to view a full set of results, which will give you the stats that you need to make a more informed decision.

Go to Google Analytics > Traffic Sources > Search Engines > Google > Paid (the Paid filter is in the main content area, just under the main traffic graph).

You will now see all the search terms listed by most visited. Take a look at the end column “Bounce Rate”; now sort the data by bounce rate, and there you have it - a list of keywords with high bounce rates. You can export this data into an excel spreadsheet and play around with it, removing all the low bounce rate term. You will soon be left with a detailed report on underperforming pay per click keywords with a high bounce rate.

Example of a bad bounce rate

We have taken a screenshot from Google Analytics of a Pay per Click campaign with a few bad performing keywords in. The 3 keywords highlighted shows that over 1,200 clicks have been paid for (that’s £600 at 50p a click). These keywords have a much higher bounce rate than the rest of the campaign; the highest being 72.32%. In addition the average page visits and time on site is much lower than the other keywords.

These 3 keywords are obviously worth pausing and looking into. There could be a combination of factors that are causing it; such as poorly targeted keyword, badly worded adverts or poor landing pages.

The average bounce rate of the campaign is 39.35%, page views per visit is 4.98, with the highest being 7.73 and time on site is 2.03 minutes. If we remove the 3 bad keywords it would have a positive impact on the campaign.

Example of a good bounce rate

Here is an example of a well tuned Pay per Click Campaign. The average bounce rate is 23.71%, page view per visit is 7.13 and time on site is 4.03 minutes. There are no underperforming keywords;

We’d recommend you pause all the high bounce rate keywords from your Pay per Click campaigns straight away, especially if they are driving a lot of traffic with few conversions. You can do a quick calculation on how much money you will save by multiplying the monthly visits by the average cost per click. If you stop 2,000 high bounce rate clicks per month at 50p each this will equate to a saving of £12,000 a year.

We are finding an increasing number of new clients have had their sites penalised by Google from bad search engine optimisation techniques used on their sites in the past.

In most cases they are unaware that their site has been unethically optimised for search engines. There are several levels of penalties that Google use, from a full blown ban or simply losing your ranking for pages that used to rank well.

If you break the Google Webmaster Guidelines in anyway you are likely to get a penalty. Here are a few of the most common causes of a Google Penalty:

Linking to other banned sites

If you link out to other banned sites or bad neighbourhoods, you will be tarred with the same brush as them. If you download the Google Toolbar it will display the Page Rank of sites you visit. If the sites you are linking to have a greyed out Page Rank on the Google Toolbar it is more than likely they have been banned and you will be penalised for linking to them.

Over optimisation of link text

If you have been building text links from other sites and they all point to your home page and have the same text in the link, this can trigger a filter and lower your ranking. We suggest you make sure that you have a variety of different link text linking to different pages on your site.

Reciprocal links

Similar to above, too many reciprocal links may trigger a Google penalty especially if they use the same search term in them and if the link comes from unrelated sites with little relevance to your website. Linking to low quality sites or unrelated sites can also cause a sudden drop in ranking.

So be very carefully who you link to.

Hidden text and links

If your site has hidden text or links, Google will ban you. This can be text the same colour as the page background or having blocks of content that are set to invisible in your style sheets. In most cases the hidden text is simply loaded with keywords and phrases.

The text links are normally to doorway pages you want the search engines to see but not your visitors. Common tricks are to make links with 1 pixel high words or images which can’t been seen.

Website cross linking

If you run several websites and have extensive cross linking between them, particularly if they are run off the same server with the same C Class IP address this can be viewed as “link schemes” by Google which breaks their Webmaster code of conduct. It’s also very easy to spot by Google.

The risks are even higher where site A site wide links (links that appear on every page) to site B and site B wide links back to site A.

Another common error is registering several domains and have them all linking to one site, this will ring alarms at Google HQ.

Link buying or selling

If you buy or sell links to gain Page Rank and increase your search results you will be penalised.

Keyword stuffing

Stuffing keywords into content which bloats the density of your keywords within the page. This again is a bad search engine optimisation technique and can lead to penalties. Your content should be semantically correct and readable!!

Duplicate content

If you have copied content from another site, Google can work out that it is a copy and will lower its importance. A big mistake usually made with ecommerce site is copying and pasting product information from manufactures brochures. If every sites selling the same product has the same manufactures information there is little chance the page will rank. Your content needs to be unique.

Cloaking

Cloaking is when you display different content to a search engine than a user. Cloaked content is normally stuffed with keywords and has links to doorway pages etc.

Doorway pages

Several years ago it was common practice to have a series for interlinked pages specially developed to target different keywords. These sort of pages normally will have a dubious link structure and will not be available if you navigate through your site in the normal manner. These links are hidden or buried away somewhere on your site. This is a big no no.

Automated page redirects

Automated browser re-directs in any of your pages using Meta Refresh and JavaScript can often result in Google penalties as the pages using them are often seen as doorway pages which you don’t want the user to read. Again very easy to detect.

Automatic rank checking software

It is against Google guidelines to use a piece of software that uses Google’s API to check your sites ranking. This is automatically picked up on, particularly if it’s from the same IP address of your website and will lead to a ban.

Google Penalty Recovery Service

It can take many months to recover from a penalty. Most of the penalties are applied automatically by triggering filters in Google’s Algorithm, and will automatically be removed once you have taken away the offending elements.

If you have removed every offending element that could trigger the penalty, but your site still isn’t ranking you can then apply for a re-inclusion request, this can take months too.

If your site has been penalised and you’d like some expert help to get it back in the rankings then give us a call on 0845 838 7435 and we will be happy to help you out.

When your site is listed in the search results, you can improve the click through rate of your site dramatically by making sure the snippet of information shown in the results is enticing and relevant to the search.

If you look at the example below, for the search of “Pension Release”, our client’s site is listed 1st in the results : ) and the snippet is highly relevant telling the user exactly what the site is about.

Your site might get great ranking, but by nature people will skim read the results and click on the site they think is the most relevant. They take no prisons; this is your only chance in grabbing their attention and making them click on your search result listing.

By optimising your snippet, you can make your search result an enticing mini advert for your website, which is just as effective a Pay per Click Ad.

The first line in the results is taken for the browser title of the page that is ranked. Google limit the amount of characters displayed to 66. So you can develop quite a catchy little title.

The next snippet of information is taken from the meta descriptions tag within the code of the page. If you don’t have a meta description tag with relevant information then Google will cut out a piece of content from the page which has the keywords in. By adding a relevant descriptive meta description tag to your page you can take control of what is listed in the results and improve your traffic.

It is good practice to develop a unique title and meta description tag of every page on your site.

Some search result snippets will display your entry from your listing in the DMOZ Directory. You can turn this off by using the tag <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”> within the page code.

Flybubble are a Paragliding School based on the South Downs. We have relaunched their site with a new design and added functionality.

The site has a bespoke content management system to administer the content. Features include galleries, user galleries, customer feedback, event calendars, courses, trips, news and articles. Don’t take our word for it - drop by for a look around!