Section 4 - Squeezing Search
Once you are on page one for a given keyword, the chances are you will want more traffic. If you are going to do this, the first thing you will need is a decent analytics program. An analytics program will monitor traffic on your web site and tell you lots of information about that traffic. Such as how they found your site, if they found it through a search engine what keyword(s) did they use, what country they are from and so on. A good analytics program will also give you a lot of other very useful information, such as how long people spend on your page and what pages they are leaving on. The best analytics program out there is probably Google Analytics. The problem is with the free version of Google Analytics is it can't measure all of the traffic on your website because it relies on JavaScript (which some people turn off) and some people will block it with a firewall. You can also get Google Analytics for installation on your server, but you will need root access and a few notes for the software and installation. If you are with a half-decent web host you should have some sort of statistical program available in your control panel.
Adding More Keywords
Once your site has been up and running for a while, check your analytics to see what keywords people are using to find your site. So long as you are getting good traffic, you will probably find you are getting found for keywords that you did not optimise your site for. You may even find that you come up on page one for a whole host of terms you didn't know about. What you are looking for is searches that you can maximise on. If you are at the bottom of page one for a search term you want to maximise, you should be able to increase your ranking just by changing the text on your web site. If the search volume for the search term is large, your best option would be to add the term to the title of your document. Otherwise, just add the term somewhere into a header tag of paragraph text without being spammy. Wait until your search engines of choice indexes your site and see if you have moved up the rankings. If you haven't moved up the rankings or wish to move further up you will need to build incoming links to your site with the keywords in the link text.
For very competitive search terms changing the text on your site may not change your rankings at all, particularly in Google. Your only option here is to get incoming links with the keyword(s) in the link text. If you can't think of a way to do this yourself try hiring a link builder or buy some links from a link broker or bloggers.
There is only so much you can optimise a page for by changing the page's content, but so long as you can get incoming links and control the link text you are able to rank for whatever you want.
Also be careful of modifying the text on your site too much. If you take away the personal touch and make it sound like a list you will not impress your visitors.
Bounce Reduction
If you have a good analytics program, it will tell you on what pages you are losing your visitors. The pages you should take most notice of are your sales oriented pages and your home page. If you have a website that has a phone number on the page(s) and the aim of your site is to get them to call you remember that someone leaving your site after viewing just one page maybe a successful sale. If you have a lot of pages with bounce rates of 50% + your site could probably do with being evaluated from a marketing angle and then redesigned. If your bounce rate is below 30% on your sales page and your home page your website should be considered affective. More to come on bounce reduction in a future article.
Keyword Tracking
I've never actually seen or heard of anyone else doing what I term 'keyword tracking'. This is only applicable for websites that provide an online ordering facility or a form which they use for sales enquires. Using this method you can track where all orders/enquires came from and if they came from a search engine, what they searched for to find your site.
This is achieved by creating a session every time someone visits your site that holds the referring site and the keywords they searched for if applicable. If someone comes direct to your site (they type in your URL) a default value is assigned. This allows you to monitor what keywords are giving you the best results. Using this method you will get a very good idea of your market. With the information you gather, you can optimise your copy to perfection, because you know what your customers are looking for. It also lets you know what keywords (if any) aren't working for you. This is particularly useful if you are renting links or paying for PPC.