When undertaking an SEO campaign, most people look at their content first. While this is valuable, you also need to consider the first thing that a person will see before going to one of your web pages: the link. It’s important to analyze your SEO page titles in order to make sure that you are maximizing their effectiveness and power to boost your SEO rankings. Here are a few things you need to look at with your URLs:

Work to Create Shorter and Easier to Read URLs: Making the URL of your pages or blog posts easy to understand means that readers seeing the link will have a better sense of what to expect when they click. This also makes the links more attractive to search engines. Including keywords that you want to rank for as part of your URL is still an effective way to increase your rankings. You still want to avoid overstuffing your URLs with keywords — which, like other content, can make it look “spammy” in the eyes of search engines.

Along with easier to read URLs, you also want to keep your URLs as short as possible. This issue isn’t with search engines but with your readers. It’s been proven that people don’t like to read, copy or share longer URLs (over 100 characters).

Single Domains and Subdomains Are the Best: We’ve repeatedly seen the results — when someone fixes their website architecture so all of their content is in a subfolder instead of a subdomain, their SEO results improve. You should also avoid URLs that have multiple folders, since this can create lengthy URLs that appear to have many levels.

Canonicalize Similar URLs: Another way to improve your search engine rankings is to review if you have instances of multiple URLs with similar content. If you do, use a rel=canonical tag to canonicalize the similar URLs.

Avoid Tracking Parameters: Having tracking IDs at the end of the URLs is not as common — or necessary — as it used to be. You may need them in some cases to help track clicks for specific campaigns, however, so use your judgement to determine if the benefits outweigh having lengthy URLs.

Match Your Titles and URLs As Closely As Possible: People want to know the content of their stories before they read them. Keeping your URLs as closely related to the title of your page or blog post as possible will make sure readers know exactly what it’s about just from the link. However, you typically don’t need to worry about using connecting words from your title such as “and,” “or” or “but.”

Watch Out for Awkward Punctuation Characters in URLs: Many characters that are used in titles can create link breaks in URLs or have trouble being recognized by browsers. This can include empty spaces or characters such as “&” or “#.” Try to avoid using special characters in URLs and stick to basic letters and numerals. As noted, avoid spaces in URLs if possible and use dashes or underscores instead.

Keep Redirections to a Minimum: Most users won’t have a problem if a link they click on redirects to a different site. Things start to get dicey when a URL redirects two or more times before getting to its final page. Search spiders might get confused and readers might see this as being “spammy.”

Don’t Use Hashtags to Create Separate Content: There are exceptions to this rule, but generally it’s cleaner to have a fresh URL than to use a hashtag so that someone can jump to a specific point within a page.

Be Careful of Inconsistent Case Sensitivity: This is especially true for Linux/UNIX servers, which can interpret separate cases as separate URLs. Take steps to redirect or canonicalize URLs that use an incorrect case to the right one.

There is perhaps no piece of meta data on a web page that is more important that a title tag. This is the short description that tells both users and search engines what a web page’s content is about. One bit of evidence highlighting the importance of title tags comes from Kristine Schachinger of Search Engine World, who wrote that title tags are “like the title of the chapter of a book” and “the most important single tag on your page.”

It’s impossible to do effective search engine optimization without paying close attention to your title tags. This is particularly true with Google’s recent modifications to its results page layout, which places additional emphasis on title tags. With this in mind, what are some of the ways that you can leverage title tags to your advantage? Here are 10 of the hottest tips:

Grab Attention With Your Title Tag From the Beginning: Much like with a headline, you want to grab people’s attention from the start of your title tag. Use a strong, declarative statement to catch the eye of a reader.

Make Title Tags Long Enough to Explain the Page: Even if the description is too long to fully display on the search engine results page (SERP), Google may still be using all of it to determine the topic of your page.

Short Title Tags Are Wasted Opportunities: When you have a short title tag, you lose the chance to fully explain your page. You also run the risk of Google “filling in the blank” with extra content.

Be Bold: Having part of your title tag in bold will catch the reader’s eye. You can do this by including phrases that customers are likely to search for in your tag. Google will automatically bold the phrase that is searched for in the result.

Leverage Thematic Search Results: Google now can tell what you are searching for and delivers results based on this — not necessarily just based on your keywords. Using this information can help you to craft a broad title tag that can return many Google results.

Include a Call to Action in Your Title Tag: Just asking people to “click here” isn’t enough; you need to let people know what they expect to get out of clicking on your link. Tell them what the end result of their click will be ahead of time.

Do What Your Competitors Aren’t: In order to stand out from the competition, sometimes you need to take an approach that stands out from them. Review your competition’s title tags and try to approach yours from a different angle.

Give Specific, Real-Time Data in Your Title Tag: You can program title tags to include dynamic content related to searches. This might include information on how much of a certain product is available in a local area.

Don’t Forget About Your Brand: Even when you are posting links to products, it’s important to include your brand name. This helps to ensure that you rank for your brand and that you avoid possible SEO headaches.

This All Might Not Matter: Google will give results based on what it thinks that users are looking for, which can mean that it will give your homepage title tag over your individual page’s title tag in the SERP for any number of reasons. You’ll need to experiment to see which strategies avoid this happening to your pages.

Title tags are just one of the many ways you can improve your search engine rankings through meta content. Find out more about how eVisible integrates meta content into our SEO services for clients by viewing our approach to SEO success. Have more questions about best SEO practices? Find out answers by reading our FAQ on SEO.

Few aspects of being a webmaster or owner of a website are more terrifying than the prospect of moving your site – either to a new URL or to a new server while keeping the same URL. In both cases, there’s great potential for problems to occur which can limit your ability to be crawled and indexed correctly and seriously damage your search engine optimization campaign.

In an effort to help webmasters who are undertaking a site move, Google has recently published an in-depth guide to moving a website. Whether you are moving your site without or with a URL change, Google has identified four key steps that are critical to successfully migrating your site.

Site Moves Without a URL Change

1. Set Up the New Site’s Hosting Infrastructure. Copy your current site to your new site and then do rigorous testing to ensure that it behaves correctly. This includes creating a private testing environment for the new site (complete with IP-restricted access), public testing on a beta site or live testing on a limited capacity. You’ll also need to check that Googlebot can access your new infrastructure using the Fetch as Google function in Webmaster Tools, review the Time to Live setting for your DNS and review the Webmaster Tools verification.
2. Move the Site. Get rid of any disallows in your robots.txt file and update your DNS settings to your new web hosting provider.
3. Monitor Traffic. Check the server logs on both your old and new site for any unusual activity. Use DNS checking tools and monitor crawl stats and errors.
4. Shut Down Your Old Site. You can do this after your traffic there reaches zero.

Site Moves With a URL Change

1. Set Up the New Site’s Hosting Infrastructure. Move your site to a new CMS and transfer over any images and files you currently host. Create your robots.txt file and create 404 or 410 error pages for any pages that will be deleted on the new site. Make sure that everything is ready to go with Google Webmaster Tools on your new site.
2. Perform URL mapping. You need to make sure that all the links on your current site are linked to URLs on your new site. Determine your current URLs, create a map of how they will link to your new URLs and then update the URL details. This update can include annotation, internal links and sitemaps. You’ll also need to do 301 redirects.
3. Move the Site. Google recommends moving everything on your site at once instead of in pieces. Remove all robots.txt directives from your old site and make sure the robots.txt file allows for full crawling. Go to Webmaster Tools and submit a change of address. Redirect users from the old site to the new site and include the old and new sitemaps on the new site – this signals redirects to crawlers.
4. Monitor Traffic. Use Google Webmaster Tools and other tools to review traffic and see if the new URLs are being indexed, crawled and search for by bots and users.

These are just some of the step necessary to properly migrate a website. eVisible’s Webmaster Services can help you avoid costly mistakes when moving your site, no matter how complex the move. Contact us today for a consultation.

Search marketing is about more than just achieving the highest page ranks for your web pages. Getting ranked on the first page of a Google search isn’t useful if a customer isn’t given a compelling reason to click on your link. This is one of the main reasons that doing semantic markups on your website is important even though they are not a ranking factor with Google.

A semantic markup is the adding of HTML markups to your web pages that give Google clues about the context of its content. In many cases, this takes on the form of rich snippets of text, photos and other information designed to give readers more information about what is on a particular web page and who is responsible for it. While it won’t result in a higher search engine results page (SERP) listing, it can play major dividends for your click-through rate (CTR). The reported increase in click-throughs for results with rich snippets is an average of 15 percent.

For this reason, adding semantic markups to your web is one of the steps that eVisible recommends for our clients. Our website development and consulting services go beyond just achieving better search results and focus on improving your ability to connect with new clients. Semantic markups are a great way to increase your visibility with little extra effort required.

If you are not doing semantic markups on your site, you need to start. Here are four of the most basic types of semantic markups that you should consider implementing right away:

Breadcrumbs

Think of breadcrumbs as a way to let web users quickly navigate your website. Instead of just your home page coming back in a result, end users can see links to very specific landing pages. This can direct them to the areas on your site you are most interested in showing off and cut down the amount of clicks between them and a sale.

Facebook Open Graph

An Open Graph markup allows you to connect your web pages to Facebook’s social graph. This means that you can control how your web page is displayed when a link to it is used on Facebook or other social media sites. You can create a headline specially designed for social media sites and choose which images will be used when your links are shared.

Rating and Review Information

Give potential customers an idea of what other people think about your business by including ratings and review information in the search results. The rich snippet information can also include the number of reviews – a higher number gives people more confidence – price levels and other product-specific information.

VideoObject Schema

People want to know more about videos that you create before they click on a search result to view them. Including a screenshot and some basic information (description, length, etc.) about a video in the search results can enhance CTRs.

In the modern online world, all businesses are global. Customers from around the world can visit your site, browse your goods and services and contact you for more information or place an order. When you construct your website and create an SEO strategy, it’s important to consider international factors, especially if you plan on doing a significant amount of business with customers from outside of the United States.

Considering the international reach of your site allows you to accomplish two things: you can avoid issues that might harm your site’s SEO in other countries and you can take advantage of opportunities presented by the international reach of your site. Businesses of all sizes can benefit from taking a worldly approach to their SEO audit and considering global elements. Here are some of the things you need to check when evaluating your global website from an SEO standpoint:

Targeting Languages vs. Countries

The world is increasingly becoming a melting pot, and this extends to languages. Many countries have more than one official language. Other countries – such as the US – don’t have an official language but might have many different languages spoken within its borders. Depending on your business goals, you will want your sub-directories, sub-domains and ccTLDs to either be targeted toward specific countries or specific languages, and you’ll want to have a consistent and simple way of doing this throughout your website structure.

In addition, you’ll want to make sure that you remain consistent through on-screen and meta content if you are structuring your pages by country or by language. For example, if you are targeting for languages, you don’t want to have country flags be the icon for making a selection.

Optimizing Structure for International Sites

Each international version of a website needs to have its structure analyzed thoroughly. Website owners need to make sure that it isn’t overly complex or have unnecessary directories while also making sure that the URL names are clear and in the right language for the target audience.

Alignment, Indexing and Crawling Issues for International Web Versions

To further ensure that your structure is correct on the International version of your website, you need to make sure they are crawled and indexed correctly by search engines such as Google – along with local search engines popular in the regions you are targeting. Make sure that you aren’t block language or country versions through your robots.txt or that you are redirecting all crawlers to one version of your site.

Hreflang Annotations

Incorrect Hreflang annotations can directly impact your international search traffic. You need to make sure that you are using the correct language and country code and that you are correctly cross-referencing similar pages on your site with content for other languages or countries.

Webmaster Tools Geolocation Settings

If you are using sub-directories or sub-domains instead of ccTLDs, use the Geographic Tools in Google Webmaster Tools to make sure that you are targeting the correct countries.

Cross-Checking Content

It’s surprisingly easy to have your localized website content be different than what you expect. Make sure that you check each country- or language-specific website version to make sure that the right content is being displayed.

Avoid Cross Linking

Remember that cross-linking pages on various versions of your site can lead to penalties from Google. Avoid doing this as much as possible.

No matter what size your business, if you need to reach an international audience, eVisible can help. Our Internet marketing firm works with companies of all sizes to find online marketing solutions to expand their reach and attract new customers.

With so much information out there about SEO, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. In fact, sometimes a little bit of knowledge can be dangerous, as people can wind up falling prey to some common misconceptions about SEO. eVisible would like to clear up some of the myths that we see many website owners have that can cause major problems with their online marketing strategies:

Myth: Link Building is Dead. Many people have become confused because Google has recently penalized websites that attempt to buy their way to a high volume of links. This is different than organic link building, which is what happens when links come to a site in a “natural” matter. This type of link building is still very valid and can have a very positive impact on your SEO. There’s a great value in working with a company such as eVisible that can create an organic link building campaign that stays within Google’s parameters.

Myth: Social Media Has Replaced Link Building. With the exception of Google+, the opposite is true. Because social networks such as Facebook and Twitter don’t share information with Google, Google doesn’t factor social links into their SERP.

Myth: Search Result Positions Don’t Matter. It’s true that it’s harder than ever to determine a true search engine “ranking” because factors such as geolocation and personalization mean that people’s search results are different. But there’s still a major difference between being first on a page or tenth. And there’s a huge gap between being on the first page of results or not.

Myth: Google Is Spying On You. Google isn’t the government. While they use Google Analytics to determine if you are doing something against their “rules” (such as creating multiple domains for links), they don’t use Analytics as part of their site rankings.

Myth: All You Need for a High Ranking Site Is Content. The message that “content is king” has been twisted by some people who now believe that you don’t need to do SEO work in order to rank highly. The reality is that without the proper SEO features, your great content will just sit there unread.

So what are the things that you need to pay attention to in order for your SEO campaign to work today? In many ways, some of the same things that have always worked:

Authorship: Make sure that your blog posts, articles and other content are linked to your Google+ profile. You also want to make sure that your business information is featured every time you post content.

Content: Don’t post thin content or content that strays from specific topics. Anything that comes off as too “salesy” might get punished by Google.

Alt Tags: Use alt tags for your images and other places in your content.

Robots.txt: If your robots.txt file is blocking Google from crawling your site, you simply won’t rank.

Page Speed: Faster page speeds matter to Google and to your customers, especially if they are viewing your site on a mobile device.

URLs: Having site URLs be relative in your code doesn’t help you. Instead, make them absolute along with being short and free of multiple query parameters.

Penalties: If you are penalized by Google, you need professional help to determine the problems and the solutions to get you out of “Google jail.”

Creating a powerful headline is important — maybe even more important than you think. According to recent research, 80 percent of people will read a headline on a website, but only 20 percent of these people will actually read the article. The quality of the headline can make a big difference between the articles that are read versus the ones that aren’t.

So what makes a compelling headline? The team behind eVisible content writing services knows that there’s no “magic bullet” to assure that headlines will grab your readers’ attention. You’ll need quite a bit of trial and error to discover the type of headlines that will resonate with your target audience but doing it properly can pay significant dividends.

Don’t Be Afraid to Get Creative: A boring headline — even if factually accurate — isn’t going to drive people to your content. Any fears about using clever or “cute” headlines to draw in readers have been proven to be outdated with the rise of viral sites that get huge click-through and page view numbers with creative and witty headlines.

Consider Your Target Audience: It’s important to think about who you want to read your stories and what you want them to do when crafting a headline. If you are looking at closing sales, you need a headline that calls the reader to action. If you are simply looking to increase page views, you need to focus on grabbing their attention with the promise of something unique in the story text.

The Medium Matters as Well: You need to consider who your readers will engage with the headline when creating it. Sites such as Facebook allow you to use an image and, possibly, some additional “teaser” text as a sub-headline to attract a potential reader’s attention. Make sure you take advantage of these opportunities when you can.

Remember That People Are Curious By Nature: There are several types of headlines that have become popular in recent years:

• Lists
• Questions
• How-Tos
• Directly Addressing the Reader

But one of the most popular recent trends has been in headlines that use shocking language, over-the-top statements or emotional responses to get readers hooked. This is particularly true of viral news sites, which often use headlines such as “This Picture Shows Why Our Education System is Doomed” or “You Won’t Believe Why This Woman Was Sent to Prison for 20 Years.” They present bits of information that connect with people’s emotions and lead them on to want — and almost need — to click through to find out more. It’s powerful, effective and is a method that can make your articles go viral.

One of the easiest ways to make more money from your online business is to improve the flow of your eCommerce checkout system. You need to make it as easy as possible for people who are browsing for products on your site to make a purchase. There are many ways to improve this flow rate, but even a slight improvement in conversion rate optimization can lead to a significant increase in profits.

The specifics of how to improve your conversion rate will be unique to your website. You’ll need to do conversion testing and reporting to fully understand what it means for your site. But what motivates a person to decide to make a purchase from a website is universal. Roughly stated, a person makes a purchase because they are motivated to buy a product, have the immediate ability to make a purchase and have been “triggered” to buy.

Getting people motivated and triggered to make a purchase can be as simple as sending out an email and having them click through to your product page. But it takes professional website development in order to give a customer the easiest path to purchase. One secret is to make sure that a customer gets an item into their shopping cart as quickly as possible. This gets them out of the mindset of “just browsing” since they are now officially “shopping.”

It’s important to make it as easy as possible for a person to add something to their shopping cart. The purchase button should be as big and obvious as possible. Once a person adds something to the shopping cart, it should be clear that they have something in the cart. And you need to make sure that the customer can see how to go to the shopping cart to enter in their payment information and complete the purchase at any time.

From a web design standpoint, you also need to consider what happens when a customer gets ready to make a purchase. One consideration is whether or not you require customers to register before buying anything. As a general rule, forcing customers to register creates a barrier that could very easily lead to them not making a purchase. You’ll also want to make sure that you don’t ask for credit card information until the last step in the process. Get all of the shipping and personal information first so that the credit card information is easy to get.

These are just a few of the things that you’ll want to do when you think about your eCommerce set-up. eVisible can help you design an eCommerce system that is right for your industry and business.