Many business owners don’t realize that they can actually influence and control the way their listing looks on the search engines.  Changing a few things on your website can dramatically increase ranking, click-throughs and of course website traffic.  For purpose of example, I’m going to use a site that I built a while back: FloatMissouri.com (for those of you that don’t know what a float trip is, this site will enlighten you)

See What They See

The first step in modifying your listing is to check out just how the search engines list you now.  You can do that by going to Google.com and typing in info:www.domain.com – obviously changing the domain to your domain.

The resulting page will show you just how Google lists your site currently.

Changing the Title

The words in the picture above “Float Trips in Missouri” come from an HTML tag called the Title tag.  This is a tag that goes near the top of every page on your site.  The title tag should be unique, concise, and definitely needs a keyword or keyphrase that you want to rank for in it.  Oh – and every page should have it’s own unique title.

Depending on how you create your website, this tag may be something you change in your CMS or your web guy may have hard-coded it into the page.  Either way, this tag is a big factor in determining your overall ranking, so you need to know how to modify it.

Changing the Description

The description is another section of the listing that you can actually control.  If yours is just a bunch of junk, chances are you don’t have the meta description tag and you’ve forced the search engines to take a random snippet of text from your page.  No worries – we can fix it!

The meta description tag is sometimes a little more elusive.  In fact, many sites don’t have this tag at all – but they should!  While many say this tag has no SEO value, I believe it does.  While it may not affect your rankings, it definitely can be a make or break line for anyone who sees your listing on the search engines.  You need to make this line a compelling and descriptive sentence about the page you are modifying.  You have limited space here – around 150 characters – so make it something that a searcher would likely click on to find out more.

There you go – you’ve done it!  Modifying those two lines of code will change the way the search engines display your website to the world.

Hurry Up and Wait

Just like the military, nothing in the world of search engines is done quickly.  So don’t expect these changes to show up right away.  If you normally don’t change your page often, it may be a while before the spiders come back and discover your changes.  But that’s ok – you’ve got a lot to do.

Now Get to Work

Here’s the bad news – every page on your site really needs to have both of these tags, and they need to be unique for each of those pages.  Yeah, every page.

Didn’t think you’d have homework at the end of this post, did you?

This can kind of be a trick question.  Obviously, in the perfect scenario, you want your customers to search for you on Google, Yahoo!, whatever and find your call to action page right away.  But that’s not always the case.  What if they land on your home page?

Many businesses focus nearly all their efforts, especially link building efforts, on their home page.  So it’s very common for searchers to land on your home page when searching for one of your products.  But if you’ve got even just 100 products, you aren’t going to be able to list them all on your home page.  So how much time do you have before they decide to give up, hit the BACK button, and abandon your site?  You’ve got about 3 clicks.

One Click or Less

The perfect scenario is that the searcher lands on the product/service page for which they are searching.  If you’re selling  many types of widgets:

• You should have separate pages for each type of widget you sell
• These pages should be clearly labeled (meta description, title tag, H1 tags) as such
• Searchers will find these pages in Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc
• Searchers will click the BUY button. You’re happy.
• You ship the widget. They’re happy.

Unfortunately, what usually happens is the searchers end up on your home page.  Not the best possible scenario, but still ok.

Finding the Way

Most natural links point to a website’s home page.  These links, when accompanied with decent anchor text, can help your home page rank for multiple words.  There’s nothing wrong with that.

Over time your site may rank for widgets, blue widgets, and maybe widget problems for example.  Since the information on your blue widgets isn’t on your home page, a person landing on your home page is forced to find them.  This is where your site navigation becomes important.

Site structure is a completely separate blog post, too deep to go into here.  But it suffices to say that a good structure built up front will help you keep more customers on your site for a longer period of time.  The quicker they can find what they came for, the better.

Into the Funnel

And as I said before, the most they should have to click before finding the blue widgets page is three times.  If they have to click more than that, it’s very possible that they’ll end up heading back to the search engine and going to the next result.

Check out your website.  Pick out a few products, then start at your home page and see if you can get to a call to action button in three clicks or less.  Examples of a call to action would be:

• a Purchase/Buy button
• a contact form (“for more information”)
• a Click to Call button
• a Request Catalog button (not the best but at least it’s something)

If you pass that test for your products, then try this:  Go to a random page on your website.  Now try to get to those same products in three clicks or less.  Can you still get there?

Why do this?  Easy.  You have limited control over what pages the searchers are going to land on.  So you need to make sure your entire website is navigable within three clicks or less.  You’re going to need a lot of funnels.

Fixing It

If you do these tests, and have to click four or five (or more!) times before finding what you need, there’s a real good chance you need to rethink your site structure and navigation.  Before you go all gung-ho and start moving things around, you really need to be careful that you don’t do it wrong.  Moving pages without telling the search engines where the pages are moved to can just kill your rankings.  There are steps involved, plans to make, and redirects to build.  Contact a professional that can help you keep that Google juice flowing – like me!

Now, once they end up at the contact_us page and fill out a form, I want to email that original referer information to myself as a hidden input item.

How can I save a variable and keep it from changing as they bounce through the site?  I’m sure it has something to do with PHP sessions but I can’t get it to work no matter what I try.