Get More Clicks to Your Website - 5 Tips for Effective Page Titles and Descriptions

Want more clicks to your website?

But don't want to pay for them?

Statistics say that the number 1 listed website on Google for any given search term gets up to 50% of the clicks for that search term. And as you go down the list each listing gets fewer clicks.

And, once you get to the bottom of Page 2 most websites get very few free clicks from Google.

It is possible however to increase the number of free clicks that you are getting by using your Page Title and Meta Description effectively to entice searchers to click on your listing as opposed to the other listings on the page.

As you probably know the Page Title and Meta Description are the parts of your website that appear in the search engine results. Your Page Title is what people will click on, and the meta description gives them some more information about your business to convince them to click on your website.

Here are some rules for creating Page Titles and Meta Descriptions that will get you more clicks.

1. Each webpage on your site must have a unique Title and Description.

2. Google will only show the first 70 characters in your Page Title and 160 characters of your meta description so put your most relevant information at the start of each.

3. The Page Title and Meta Description should contain the most relevant keyword phrases that relate to that page on your website.

4. Sell Benefits not Features. You have a small space to convince a searcher that they should click on your listing.

What can your product do for them?

What will it create for them?

What problem can you solve for them?

These are the questions that you should be trying to answer in your Page Title and Meta Description.

5. Include a Call To Action

Most of us are used to following instructions and when left to make our own decisions, sometimes the decision that people make is no decision at all. Help them to make a decision. The decision to click on your website.

A Call To Action might be a FREE Report or a Special Offer that they will receive when they visit your website. Including this in your meta description will increase your click through rates.


Go and have a look at your page titles and meta descriptions for your website. Grab a pen and paper (yes they still exist)!! Write down the URL for each page on your website. Next to each URL write down the main keyword phrase that you are targeting on the page of your website. Then write down the current Page Title and Meta Description for the page.

Then, answer these questions.

Are my titles and descriptions unique?

Do they include my keyword phrase?

What benefit am I trying to sell?

Is there a strong call to action?

It can take some time and practice to get used to writing effective page titles and meta descriptions in only a very short space.


PS If you want more information about keyword research for your website check out my post on Effective Keyword Research for Business Websites

Get More Clicks to Your Website - 5 Tips for Effective Page Titles and Descriptions

Know Your Website Numbers - What you Don't Measure you Can't Improve

As a business owner we all know the importance of 'keeping your finger on the pulse' of your business. It is vital that you know how the various areas of your business are performaing against industry benchmarks or your own budgets and targets.

And your website is no different.

What statistics do you review about your website on a regular basis. What numbers do you need to keep track of? What is relevant and what is not relevant?

In terms of what statistical package do you use there are many options. The main one that I use is Google Analytics, because it gives you good information about your website and it is free.

It is not the most detailed package on the market. If you are a stats guru then maybe you should look at something like Overture which does provide an extra level of detail which you don't get with free packages.

For the average business owner Google Analytics will do just fine.

Please Please Please be very wary of the stats packages provided by web hosts. I am yet to find one that gives you any kind of accurate meaningful information. If you know of one please let me know.

So what things do you look at with Google Analytics.

1. Bounce Rate

Under the Content Tab in Analytics click on the 'Top Content' section. This will show you a list of the pages on your website, and among other things it will show you the 'bounce rate' for each page.

The 'bounce rate' represents people that clicked on this page of your website and then left your website or 'bounced'.

What you want to look for is a page that has a higher bounce rate than other pages on your website. If you find a page with a higher bounce rate have a close look at this page. Is there something about the layout or the content that is unattractive to people. Improving this page could make a significant difference to the overall performance of your website.

If your website has a high overall bounce rate then you need to look closely at the quality of your website traffic and where it is coming from. Maybe you are attracting people to your website that are not looking for what you are offering.

Also, related to this are the 'Top Exit Pages' which is also under the content tab. Have a look at your top exit pages to see where people are leaving your website from. Can these pages be improved?

2. Pages/Visit

Pages/Visit represents how engaged your visitors are by your website. If they find useful content on your site and it is easy to navigate they will look at more pages on your website.

I watch the trend of this number with the aim for it to be trending up.

If this number is too low you need to look at your content and navigation to make them more useful and user friendly.

3. Traffic Sources

The third number that I look at is the percentage of traffic coming from direct traffic, search engines, and referring websites. I like to see a spread of traffic across each of these sources so that you are not relying solely on one source of traffic for your website.

What if that source disappeared tomorrow? So would all your website traffic.

For each of the top traffic sources you can click on the link that is in the list and see the bounce rate and pages/view for each traffic source. I use this to determine the quality of the traffic source. I then invest my time in developing traffic from the sources that give me the lowest bounce rate and highest pages/visit.

Benchmarking

If you want to get a better idea of how your website is performing against similar sites you can also use the benchmarking feature. You will find this under the 'Visitors' tab. This will compare the main stats for your website against similar websites to see how you are performing. This will also help to give you a list of areas to work on improving your website.

Know Your Website Numbers - What you Don't Measure you Can't Improve

The Key to Online Business Success - Position Yourself as an Expert

If you want to be successful online (or offline for that matter) it is essential that you are able to give your customers the most current information about the current information and trends in your industry as they happen.

That means being aware of information as it happens. That could involve a lot of time and effort scouring the internet finding information about your industry on news websites, your competitors websites, blogs, forums, and social media pages.

The challenge as a business owner is to be able to keep track of a large amount of information in the shortest period of time to position yourself as an expert in your industry.

There are a couple of ways that I do this.

1. Google Alerts - You can set up a number of alerts so that Google will track new information as it becomes available and then send you an email telling you where to find this information. I set up 8 to 10 alerts covering the main search terms for my industry and then Google sends me an email whenever new content becomes available on the internet.

I always use comprehensive alerts for this purpose. This monitors websites, blogs, vide, news and group websites. I set the frequency to daily.

I then set aside 15 minutes each day to monitor the alerts and review this information, and make relevant notes that I can refer to when I need to.

2. Feeddemon - Feeddemon is a fantastic tool for being able to quickly review new content on the blogs that are of interest to you in your industry. I have about half a dozen blogs that I follow closely and about another half a dozen that I follow not so closely. About half of these blogs relate directly to web design and seo, and about half of them relate to business ownership. This allows me to quickly stay up to date with the relevant information in my industry. I also post comments which give me links back to my website.

Feeddemon allows you to monitor your blogs all from one application. You are also able to search for blogs that you might be interested in following using your key search terms.

I set aside about 10-15 minutes per day to review these blogs and make comments where I feel that I can contribute to the discussion.


These 2 tools allow me to stay up to date with my industry for about 20 to 30 minutes per day. In this time I also do some link building via the blogs as well. I find this a very efficient use of my time as I am getting ideas for new content, staying up to date with my industry and link building all in about half an hour per day.

The Key to Online Business Success - Position Yourself as an Expert

Looking for Links - Don't miss This.

OK, so this week I have been looking at Google Trends.

One of the most powerful uses I have found for Google Trends is finding links for my websites.

Having done lots of website reviews for clients, one of the major reasons that most business websites don't feature highly in the search engines is not enough links.

(PS Don't forget that if you would like a FREE website review I am running a competition at the moment for you to win a free review).

Is not enough links holdingg back your website?

In my experience the issue is actually finding the websites to link to that is the problem for most business owners.

One of the tools that I use to find websites to link to is Google Trends.

Here is how I go about it.

1. Find a blog that is relevant to your industry. In Google you would search for "your industry" blog or just search Google Blogs or maybe you are following some already.

2. Put the address of this blog into Google Trends

3. Have a look at the websites that people that visited this website also visited.

4. Check out these websites and see if you can get a link back to your website on them.

5. Check out the search terms that people also searched for and put these into Google and see what websites you get. Put the first few into Google Trends and see if you can get other websites that might give you a link.

6. Look for a forum that relates to your industry. Google search for 'your industry' forum. See what the rules are for posting links on the forums.

7. Put the address of the forum into Google Trends and see what other websites you get. See if you can get a link from these websites.

8. Look at the search terms that people used and check out these search terms.

WARNING - Link building can be a somewhat tedious task. But it is vital to the success of your website in terms of how much organic (Free) traffic you will get to your website.

This is one way that I use to build links for my websites. Stay tuned over the next couple of weeks and I will share with you some other ways that I build links for my websites.


7.

Looking for Links - Don't miss This.

Out of The Box Keyword Research Strategy - Keep this one to Yourself

Yesterday I gave you an insight into how to use Google Trends to get better results in a shorter time.

Now I want to dig deeper into how I use this for my websites, and how you can use it for yours as well.

We all know the importance of great keyword research so I am always looking for an edge over my competition for my websites and my clients' websites.

Untapped keywords are like Texas Tea. (Anyone remember the Beverley Hillbillies??) They made a lot of money from Texas Tea (oil - for those of you that don't know the Hillbillies). Showing my age I know!!

So, what if you take the info you get from Google Trends and combine it with the info you can put into the Google Keyword Tool.

OK, I'm not a Google freak but when they give you free tools to use that more than do the job, why not use them.

Here is what I do.

1. Type your main search term into Google.

2. Take the number 1 website and put that address into Google Trends.

3. Take the number 1 website and put it into the Google Keyword Tool. Make sure you select 'website content as your means to generate keywords and then hit generate keywords and go through the list and add all keywords that are relevant to your website.

4. Go back to Google Trends and look at the number 1 website. Look at the websites that people also visited.

5. In turn, put each of these websites into the Google Keyword Tool and add all relevant keywords.

Now you have a long list of keywords. Have a good look for the ones with reasonable traffic and reduced competition. These are the nuggets. Here is your Texas Tea.

Out of The Box Keyword Research Strategy - Keep this one to Yourself

Did you find a Gold Nugget? Don't stop looking. There will be more than one.

Last week I wrote about 10 Essential Tools for your online business.

Today I am going to dig deeper into another great tool that I use for my online business - Google Trends.

I treat finding a great website like finding a gold nugget. Don't stop looking when you find one, because there might be a cluster of them.

So, how do you find them quickly and easily.

Google Trends

You can use Google trends for a number of things like seeing what search terms are hot on the web.

But, a lesser used section of Google trends is the websites section. You can see different stats about people that visited a certain website.

Lets say that we look at a website like ezinearticles.com

If you put this into the website section of Google Trends you get some info about visitors to the website.

You can see the volume of traffic and the trend in the traffic.

But, more importantly you get a list of the top 10 websites that people that visited ezinearticles also searched for. Here are the nuggets. Some of these websites you may already know about, but there are some nuggets here that maybe you didn't know about.

You can also see a list of other search terms that they searched for as well.

If you want to dig a bit deeper you can then repeat the propcess for any of those top 10 websites to find other websites.

So, rather than using the search engine and typing in something like 'article directory' and then sifting through the search results, you have a list of the top 10 websites that people visited.

Imagine the possibility in terms of keyword research and linking. Stay tuned, over the next couple of days I am going to take you through using these tools to find great websites to link to and ways to find new keywords.

Did you find a Gold Nugget? Don't stop looking. There will be more than one.

Are you tired of people stealing your stuff?

Have you ever had your house broken into and some of your stuff stolen?

Really sucks doesn't it.

Last time it happened to me they made a huge mess in our house as well.

I was pretty p....d off.

Well, it happens on the internet as well. You might have even experienced it already. It usually happens a bit like this, you start creating some great content for your website, and you post it to some article directories.

And then one day, you come across what looks a lot like the article you wrote. It might be on another website, or a different article directory, or on a blog somewhere. But the only thing is that someone else has taken credit for your article and they are sending links to a different website.

Not happy, right.

I guess the good news is that on the internet it is easier to find the culprits than it can be in real life. Don't get me worng here - I want people to take my articles and repost them on their websites or blogs. I just want them to acknowledge me as the author and leave my links intact.

Here is what I do to protect my content.

1. I create a Google Alert.

When I do this I usually use a keyphrase from the article or the headline of the article. I make it a comprehensive alert, and I request a daily email whenever Google finds the phrase or headline.

I use a specific term for these alerts as I am just looking for copies of my articles. These are different to the alerts that I use to monitor what is going on in my industry on the web.

2. I use Copyscape.

Copyscape have a free version and a paid version. Once you have a few articles out there the paid version is great value for money. Once a week they send me an email with copies they have found for my articles.

And that is about it.

When I find that someone has copied one of my articles without leaving my links I contact the website owner and advise them. Most often they are posted on obscure article directories.

I give them the web address of my original article and the address of the article on their website and request that the copy be removed.

If they are posted on third party websites I follow the same procedure.

Very rarely are they published on the website of the person copying the article because they are looking for backlinks. I usually find that it is difficult to establish the ownership of the sites that the links are directed to but I do use Whois to do this.

Best case scenario for me is that I get the copied article removed from the website and I then repost the original article with my links intact.

Are you tired of people stealing your stuff?