Step-by-Step Optimization for Search Landing Pages

When you craft titles for your pages, do not just copy what Snap did. Snap knows that it has a well-known brand name and that many of its highest-converting keywords contain its company name (Snap) and its brand name (SnapShot). Your business might not have that kind of name recognition, so you might be better advised to lead with the generic product name (digital cameras). Tailor your titles to what searchers are looking for and you will improve your rankings.

So what creates high-ranking effectiveness? You already know the answer. Keywords. High keyword density and prominence. If you want to optimize for multiple keywords ( especially several multiple-word keywords), however, you run out of space very quickly.

What to leave out of a title soon becomes just as important as what you put in. Obviously, words that are neither keywords nor strong calls to action must go. Delete home page in fact, page by itself is also useless. Wipe out welcome, online, menu you get the idea. These flabby words do not drive rankings or clickthrough. Every "waste" word you remove leaves more room for words that matter and improves your keyword density.

Combine keywords wherever possible. When Snap writes "SnapShot Digital Cameras," a double dip takes effect: The page is optimized for the query snapshot digital cameras but for the digital cameras query, too. Repeat keywords if you can get away with it. It hurts readability if overdone, but if you can do it naturally, go for it. Try to use one singular and one plural form to ensure the page is found no matter which form the searcher uses.

To improve referral effectiveness, cram as many trigger words into the title as you can, making sure it is readable. Happily, for many situations, the keywords and the trigger words are the same Snap Electronics and SnapShot are the kinds of well-known brand names that spur clicks. Other trigger words include local place names, low prices, prized features, and time-sensitive offers. But do not get the searcher off trackyou need to reinforce the searcher's query first and foremost. If you can reinforce the searcher's query and still have room to add brand image terms or a strong call to action, do so.

Sometimes the title is not enough to cause a searcher to click. Fortunately, the searcher will see your snippet, tooyou need to influence what text shows up there.

Influence Your Snippet

You've seen the "pitch" on the outside of an envelope of a direct marketing piecea strong pitch causes more people to open the envelope and read the content inside. A snippet is the pitch on the outside of your search marketing "envelope." Your snippet is shown below your page's title on the search results page and can make the difference between a searcher clicking your page or passing you by.

Snippets are excerpts from your page's text that contain the searcher's keyword. Because you cannot predict every possible variation of search query that searchers will use to find your page, there is no way to control what displays in every case. However, you might find it to your advantage to massage your writing to influence snippets for the targeted keywords. To do that, you need to understand a little bit about how search engines choose their snippets.

Each search engine uses different rules for composing its snippets. Google, for example, rarely uses the description tag for its snippets, whereas Yahoo! frequently does. Search enginesfrequently take excerpts from text in the body of the page, normally choosing a section of text where all or most of the keyword terms are found together, or in close proximity. The first occurrence of the terms in proximity is frequently the excerpt chosen.

Just as with ranking algorithms, the rules search engines use to compose snippets change over time, so it is not usually worth the effort to chase the snippet algorithm. But you can benefit from a few tips as you write your page.

To influence the Yahoo! snippet, place your important keywords together at the start of the description. For example, Snap changed its description to begin "SnapShot digital cameras from Snap Electronics have been named 'Best Digital Camera 2005' by Camera Views magazine." A similar approach within your body text can influence Google.

For any search engine, ensuring that the first occurrences of your major keywords come together is a good thing. So, Snap should not allow the first occurrence of digital cameras to appear without its brand name. Make sure that your brand name (such as SnapShot digital cameras ) is the first occurrence, so that searchers for digital cameras will see your brand name in the title and in the snippet.

Yahoo! appears to favor 150- to 200-character snippets, but sometimes shows longer ones. Google's snippets are generally shorter, around 100 to 150 characters. If you decide to craft a few snippet-worthy excerpts for a few high-priority keywords, remember the snippet length restrictions as you write.

This is a completely legitimate technique, because you are providing an accurate synopsis of what is on the page. The search engines are happy for you to take the care to consider what the snippet will say for popular queries, although they might change their snippet algorithms at any time. Remember, there is no reason to induce clickthrough for searchers who will not ultimately convert, so you want your snippets to be a factual representation of your page.

Snap Electronics rewrote their landing page to influence their snippets for digital cameras . The original copy was loaded with model names and features but did not mention digital cameras prominently. The first line of text in the body was changed to say, "SnapShot Digital Cameras feature a wide range of models ranging from the award-winning X5 to the top-of-the-line SLR X900..." This opening was considered a good compromise between what the marketing department wanted and what was required for strong search rankings.

The marketing department asked for its copy to be used for the description, but it was changed a bit to ensure it delivered a strong snippet. The new description begins "SnapShot Digital Cameras, named 'Best Digital Camera' by Camera Views magazine, features world-famous ease of use based on the OneTouch..."

By tweaking its body text and description, Snap raised its odds of placing action-oriented text into its snippet that reinforced the brand image Snap wants to convey . For your high-priority keywords, similar attention might raise your search referrals.

Tune Your Description

Time was, description metatags were extremely important in search marketing, but they grow less important each year. In the old days of Web search, the search results page showed the description text under the page title for each result, but the emergence of snippets changed all that.

Because descriptions do not display as part of your viewable page in the browser, they have no impact on persuading a customer to convert. What little impact your description has is limited to rankings and referrals.

For some search engines, such as Google, descriptions have no impact on search rankings. Google typically ignores the description when deciding both whether your page appears in the search results and how high it ranks. Yahoo! seems to give text found in descriptions some weight, but far less than for text found in the body.

As discussed previously, snippets are very important in driving referrals to your page. Yahoo! frequently excerpts description occurrences of keywords for its snippets. Google has used descriptions in its snippets at times in the past, but seems to do so infrequently at the moment. Snippet algorithms change regularly, so you might want to check sources found in Chapter 16 for the most current information.

So what's a search marketer to do? Our advice is to spend a little time ensuring that your search landing pages have good descriptions. It does not take very long, and you never know when it might help. Use the tips presented in this chapter to optimize your description text in case it is selected as a snippet. There is no restriction to how long a description can be, but search engine snippets are about 100 to 200 characters, so there is no point making descriptions too long. You can knock yourself out crafting multiple sentences to influence your snippet for several keywords, but that is probably worth your time only for your most critical landing pages and keywords.

Fix Your Body Text

Before you became a search marketing expert, you might not have realized that there was any more to a Web page besides what you saw in your browser. All of the text and the images the browser displays on the screen are contained in the body of the Web page, signified by the <body> tag in your Web page's HTML.

Except for whatever is excerpted for your snippet, the body has no effect on search referrals, but it is very important for organic search rankings and the most important part of your landing page for Web conversions (for paid and organic search). In addition, paid placement vendors are increasingly inspecting paid search landing pages to make sure that the page is relevant to the keywords purchased for that page, so paying attention to your keyword prominence and density still makes sense.

As you saw, the most prominent placement for your targeted keyword is in the title, but to get strong rankings, you need keywords present in the body, too. Search engines look at the body as a single area when determining keyword density and prominence, but not all words in the body are treated equally for ranking purposes:

• Headings . Within the body, keywords found within headings are given higher weight than elsewhere. Because visitors treat headings as more important than other text, the search engines do, too. Although all headings carry more clout than surrounding text, an <h1> tag is more powerful than lesser headings. Keywords found in heading tags are among the most prominent placements on the page.

• Opening text . Keywords that occur at the top of the page have more impact than text that occurs later. Because most pages summarize their central concept in the first few words, search engines give these words much more authority when determining relevance. The most prominent body placement of a keyword is inside a heading tag within the opening text of the page.

• Emphasized text . Bold and italicized keywords stand out to a visitor, so search engines give them somewhat more consideration, too.

• Links . This is the oddball of this group , because although the anchor text in a link tag is very important, its importance is credited to the page being linked to, not the page the link appears on. As discussed in Chapter 13, some of the most important text for your page is the text that other pages use when they link to your page. Links from other sites are considered far more credible than links within your own site, but it can be helpful for you to carefully choose your anchor text to reflect keywords even for intra-site links, because they do carry some weight.

• Everything else . Keywords found anywhere on the page have some value, but not as much as if they were in placements listed above. This content includes paragraph tags and many others, but the search engine does not evaluate any of them with higher import than the others.

Although different body elements count more than others, good writing is not assembled piecemealdropping a bold word here and a heading there. If you write naturally, you are likely to use the right number of keywords without making it sound like a keyword-stuffed mess. Some writers like to read their copy out loud so that they can listen to it as well as see it. They say that if it sounds stupid, it is.

Poorly optimized body copy can sometimes lean to the other extreme. Sometimes the targeted keyword is not mentioned even once in the body copy. (We saw that Snap had a meager one occurrence.) Here are some tips for crafting your body text for top rankings and high conversions:

• Keep it short . Search engines will index as many as 100,000 characters on your page, but it is virtually impossible to maintain strong keyword density over a very long pagethe best pages are usually less than 1,000 words. Short pages aid conversion, too. Web visitors do not read your pages the way they read a book. They scan for what they are looking forlong pages are much harder to scan.

• Write with variety . Using variations of your keywords in your copy helps both rankings and conversions. Because searchers do not use the exact same keywords each time they search, peppering your text with both singular and plural forms, varying verb tenses, and using different word orders help your page be found no matter what searchers type. Moreover, writing with variety overcomes tendencies toward the stultifying, repetitive prose that marks amateurish search optimization. Because your writing is easier to read, you will attract more links to your site and higher conversions.

• Think location . Search engines are increasingly taking searchers' locations into account. If you are a local business, make sure that all the variations of your place names are woven into your content so that search engines know where you are located. Search engines increasingly attempt to match local searchers with local organizations.

• Think local . For global marketers, translating pages to local languages can endanger your search marketing. Don't settle for a correct translationyou must do your keyword research over again for each country and language and get the "just right" keywords. The difference between a correct word and the best keyword could cost you a lot of conversions. And insist on translators paying attention to the same prominence, density, and other writing techniques listed here.

• Think like a newspaper reporter . Start out with the most important information up front. Continue to emphasize important concepts throughout, and wind up with a strong conclusion.

• Think like a direct marketer . How do direct marketers get you to open the envelope? To read the copy? To respond? You must think about your title and your snippet and your body text as your direct marketing copy. Study how direct marketers use language to hook you and offer strong calls to action with a sense of urgency. Don't settle for "click here" links. And don't forget to analyze all the pages between your landing page and your conversion pagevisitors can abandon your site as easily as they dump a direct-mail piece that misses the mark. Raise your conversions with compelling and action-oriented direct marketing copy throughout your site.

• Avoid tricks . Do not go overboard as a direct marketer. Avoid the dark side full of tricks and hypethey work even less well on the Web than they do in direct marketing. Stay accurate and factual. Eschew overblown hype-laden prose and, of course, stay away from stupid content tricks that spam the search engines.

The challenge of writing good copy with these tips in mind underscores how difficult it is to optimize for multiple keywords. You will find that aiming for good keyword prominence and density limits the number of keywords you targetthey cannot all be the first words on the page. Even worse , the more subjects you write about, the harder it is to achieve proper density for any of them. Recalling our work on Table 12-1 on meaning elements, you can pepper partial keyword phrases into your writing to aid readability. Rather than constantly referring to "SnapShot digital cameras," you might use "SnapShot" and "digital cameras" separately sometimes. Examining your meaning elements will guide the best separations. As we learned in Chapter 2, search engines look for multiple-word keyword elements in proximity to each other, so it is not necessary for you to use the entire set of words together every time.

In addition to well-written copy, you want your page to be well designed. Technical folks like to speak about "clean" codeHTML that is so well structured and organized that it is easy to understand and maintain. That clean code is good for your extended team as they maintain the page, but it's a pleasure for spiders, too. And the easiest way to maintain clean code is with a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS for short).

Pages that use CSS files can be remarkably smaller than other pages because all the formatting instructions are in the CSS file, not on the page. It is common for half of a traditional HTML file to be formatting instructions, with the other half the text to display. The less formatting instructions, the easier it is for the spider, and the more of your pages can be crawled in less time.

CSS files also enable you to use more modern page-layout techniques rather than tables or (please, no!) frames . Tables are fine for information laid out in rows and columns , but too many Web pages are designed as one big table with the left navigation as a long column, for example. Although this produces the desired result onscreen, the tortured markup is very difficult to correctly maintain and for spiders to interpret. Sites coded without tables sometimes rank higher. CSS files enable you to use <div> tags and other techniques to place your text anywhere on the page, so you can put your most important content nearer the top of the page where the spider wants to see it.

As with all tools, you must be careful how you use style sheets. It is possible for you to define your own set of tags with names of your choosing, but make sure you keep the basic ones intact. Heading (<h1> through <h6>) tags, especially, should be used with their traditional names so that spiders know to treat that text with increased importance. You can define any appearance for these tags that you want, so being limited in the use of the name will not crimp your style.

Clearly, the body element of your Web page drives both your search rankings and Web conversions. We have seen many tips to improve the writing and the coding of your body textit might seem a bit complicated to you. Don't worry. It gets easier from here as we look at some simple rules for managing the parts of your page that are not text.

Handle Nontext Elements Properly

As you know, spiders cannot understand images. They do not interpret JavaScript. So these parts of the page don't matter, right? Wrong. Carefully craft your nontext page elements to avoid these common problems:

• Embedded scripts and style sheets . Throughout this book, we have cautioned you on misuse of JavaScript, and to a lesser extent, style sheets. Used wisely, however, both JavaScript and style sheets improve your site's appearance and usability. But don't embed large scripts or style sheets within your Web pages. It is okay for a few lines to be embedded here or there, but anything longer should be "offloaded" (as the techies say) to an external file that is called by the page. You saw in Chapter 10 how bloated pages impede crawling. It is also true that these elements can push the real content further down into the file, harming keyword prominence.

• Overemphasis on images . There is no harm in having many images on your landing page, so long as they are not crowding out your text. If your page becomes so image-laden that there is precious little text left, you can cause a few problems. First, if you have fewer than two dozen words, the search engine might not correctly identify the language of your page, putting it at risk of being erroneously excluded from queries using language filters. That same lack of text can make it quite challenging to provide enough keyword occurrences to attain high rankings, and you might also hurt your page's conversion rate if the images are not as persuasive as some well-written text would be.

• Text hidden in images . Frequently, page headings are bold and bigand invisible to the spider. All because they are coded as images rather than as heading (<h1> through <h6>) tags. Heading tags are prominent placements of your keywordsdon't hide the keywords from the spider.

• Poor alt text . Too often, descriptive text for images is either hurriedly constructed or missing completely. The HTML <img> tag is designed to help visually impaired visitors (and those who use text-only browsers) determine what the images contain, by allowing you to specify some alternative (alt) text. This text is shown (or spoken if you are visually impaired) when visitors mouse over an image. In addition, spiders will index this text, so make sure it is an accurate description of the picture. Use keywords in the alt text if appropriate, but don't "stuff" keywords unrelated to the picturethat's spam.

Painstaking attention to nontext page elements can improve your search rankings. If ignored or handled sloppily, nontext elements can undermine your best efforts on your text. So make proper coding of nontext elements one of your priorities.

Optimize Dynamic Content

We've served up a bevy of tips on optimizing your contenteverything from working over your titles to coding alternate text for your images. All of those tips are important, and they apply to every Web page. If you are working on a static landing pageone that is stored in an HTML file on your serveryou can skip this section. However, you have a few more things to learn if you need to optimize a dynamic page.

You recall that dynamic pages are generated on-the-fly by a software program whenever a visitor (or a spider) requests the URL. You know that dynamic sites can pose a number of problems for spiders, as discussed in Chapter 10. Now let's look at how dynamic sites generate their pages and how you can ensure they are optimized for search marketing.

Dynamic pages are created by software programs that use two different kinds of information:

• Templates . For each type of dynamic page, the software program fills in a shell with dynamic content (content that can be different every time the program displays the page). Figure 12-10 shows a dynamic page with the content in the template overlaid in gray. The content in the template is the same on every page that uses that template. In this case, all books sold by Prentice Hall have a page driven by a template, and the template causes them to have a common look and feel.

  Figure 12-10. Dynamic pages use templates. The shaded areas contain text generated by a template, with the rest of the text coming from a database.

  

  
  

• Database information . The dynamic content that makes each page different is drawn from some kind of database. It could be a content management system or an e-Commerce catalog or any kind of database at all. Prentice Hall maintains a database that has a record for each book that it publishes and the software that generates the page fills in the title, the author, the ISBN number, the price, the excerpt, and other information on the page.

The figure can show you how the template looks on the screen, but more is going on behind the scenes than that. The template actually contains all the HTML coding that formats the pagethe database contains only the information to be filled into the template.

By now, you might be thinking, "That's all very interesting, but what does it mean to me?" Search marketers need to understand this split between template and content to optimize dynamic pages, because the template is controlled by different people than the content is.

Your Web developers usually control the template. In some cases, it is a separate file that is easily updatedmost content management systems work that way. At other times, the HTML is stored inside the software program itself, which means that the programmers must modify the software to change the HTML.

The content, on the other hand, is managed by the operations people who maintain the database. Sometimes these folks are writers, because the content contains long prose fields that require the same care in writing as static HTML pages. For some kinds of pages, however, the content is a long list of features and specifications reminiscent of a printed catalogif the content requires no writing ability, it might be maintained by data entry operators who key in the data and make sure it is correct.

So, every piece of text on the screen comes from either the template or the database. And every HTML tag comes from the template. That's important to understand when you want changes made to the dynamic page.

All the tips in this chapter apply to dynamic pages. Dynamic pages have titles, and you want them to drive rankings and referrals. Dynamic pages have descriptions. They have body text. To the spider, the HTML of a dynamic page looks the same as for a static page. Both kinds of pages are ranked against each other in the same ways.

If there is no static HTML file, however, how do you optimize a dynamic page? There is no single answer to that questionevery situation differs slightly. Here are a few scenarios that will give you the idea of what you will be up against:

• There are no title tags on my pages . That's obviously not a good thing for search marketing. Without titles, your pages are unlikely to be highly ranked in the search results and will get low clickthrough. It turns out that the developer left the title tag out of the template for the product catalog. One template change later, your catalog pages have titles.

• Yeah, but all the titles are the same . Okay, that's still not great. It turns out that the developer just plugged some boilerplate text into the template, when it should have been taken from the database. Now the developer has changed the program so that the titles are being generated from the product name field in the database.

• Um, but the titles are wrong . Yeah, about thatthe data entry folks said that the product name field has never been checked all that carefully because it was never used for anything before. Now that they know how important it is, they can fix the data in the next couple of weeks so the names are right.

• Okay, but I noticed the descriptions have the same text on every page . Well, that is a problem. We do not have a field in the database for description text for every product. We can add the field, but it will take a couple of months to change the database design and the template, and then wait for the operations team to write descriptions for every product in the catalog.

All right, it is not always as frustrating as that, but changing a dynamic page usually takes more persuasive powers and more time than getting a static page changed. That's the bad news. The good news is that when you persuade your extended team to change one dynamic page, they usually change them all. With static pages, when you have changed one, you have changed, uh, one. So it is harder to change one dynamic page than one static page, but it is easier to change them all.

Dynamic content has other benefits, too. It is perfect for trusted feed programs. If you want to participate in shopping search engines or any other paid inclusion program, having your content stored in databases makes it far simpler to do.

Another advantage of dynamic content is quality control. Static pages are usually created with HTML editing tools that cannot check the content of the page, except to validate the HTML. Because dynamic page content is drawn from databases, you can ensure that the database update process checks the content itself. For example, if your company's model numbers always start with two letters followed by five numbers, your update process can check for that when data is entered.

Let's explore a scenario for optimizing dynamic content. The page that Snap Electronics wants to optimize for its digital cameras keyword is a dynamic page. That means that no one can change its title directly, because no static page contains that title tag. That title tag is generated, along with the rest of the page, by a program that uses a template in conjunction with content stored in a databasein this case, Snap's e-Commerce catalog database.

An inspection of the template shows how the current "Snap Electronics digital cameras for you" title is generated. The template record that generates the title (text: "<title>Snap Electronics" field: PRODCAT text: "for you</title>") produces the title tag followed by the company name, grabs the product category field from the catalog database ("digital cameras" for this page), and finally adds the "for you" text and the title end tag.

The marketing team at Snap prefers the new title to be "Snap Digital Cameras Save on a SnapShot digital camera," but it might take some thinking to pull it off. The Web developers proposed a new template record (text: "<title>Snap" field: PRODCAT text: "Save on" field: PRODCAT text: "</title>"), which would produce a title of "Snap digital camerasSave on digital cameras"not exactly what the marketing folks had in mind.

The marketing folks asked the developers why they could not add the word SnapShot to the template, to come closer to the original idea, but the developers explained that the template is used for all product catalog hub pages, and they cannot use the SnapShot brands name on pages for VCRs and TVs. (They have their own brand names.) As it was, every product catalog hub page would now have the "Save on" call to action in its title, but the marketing folks thought that was okay. The impasse was averted when the developers agreed to change the product category name to "SnapShot digital cameras" in the database. Using the same template record, the title now reads "Snap digital camerasSave on SnapShot digital cameras"not exactly what marketing wanted, but acceptable for now. The developers agreed that they could eventually add a title field to the database allowing the data entry folks to enter any title they wanted for each product in the catalog, but that will take a couple of months to pull off.

Dynamic content is the most efficient way to power large sites with many similar pages. With the right attention to detail, you can optimize your dynamic site for search as easily as a static site.