How to Keep Visitors on Your Website - Part 5

As I've mentioned before, it's becoming increasingly important for you to make sure that any visitors to your website stay on your page for long enough to get to your call to actions, and see your website's message. Previous posts have details on certain techniques such as custom 404 pages, freephone telephone numbers, and your website or company "voice", but there are also a certain number of things on websites that can be an instant turn off.

Things like "empty cart" or "clear form" are things that always puzzle me. Why on earth would you have a "clear form" button on any kind of contact form? People know who they are and why they're completing a form, and even if they did make a small mistake with something it's easier to edit one particular field, rather than clear the whole form and start again.

Again, if you've been on a shopping site, and been collecting things in a basket, then why would you suddenly want to empty that? Surely the basket has things you have intentionally clicked on, perhaps through visiting various pages on a site, and might not necessarily be that easy to find again. I'm also puzzled when people add these buttons so close to the Call to Action buttons - like "Proceed to Checkout" "Buy Now" or "Send". Are you using any of these signals on your website? You may well be sending your clients away without knowing.

For more information about website optimisation in Barcelona and other e-marketing strategies, please contact me. We also offer Adwords managment Barcelona and other services.

You Tube Insights - Video Analysis

An often overlooked medium in today's search world is video. The rise of Vertical Search means the it's ever more likely for your SERPs to throw up a youtube video along with the local results, paid results and normal organic listings. That Google is the owner of youtube means that youtube is probably the main one to focus on from an SEO point of view, although such sites as vimeo, aol video, metacafe, etc. are all good exposure for your business and increase branding.

This is all great, but what about analysing the videos? How can you see if the videos are working? or if you need to target a particular region/sex/age group, etc. ? Well, youtube has Youtube Insights which helps along the way with your analysis.

This is great for tracking exactly where your visitors are coming from, and who is viewing your videos. The analysis can give excellent information as to sex and age groups, geographical location and of course how the viewer found your video (search, embedded video, etc. Whilst the information could be a lot better (maybe hotspots within videos, how much of the video has been viewed, click out or pause/stop, etc.) it's still a great tool to have for free from YouTube.



Are you taking advantage of all the mediums for your website? Barcelona SEO can help create your online presence and make it more visible. Contact me for more details, or if you'd like to find out more about Search, we also offer SEO Training in Barcelona on a one-to-one basis or in groups.

Internet Market Training in Barcelona

After recent demand, Barcelona SEO has teamed up with UK based Internet Strategy company ProMarketingOnline and will be hosting a number of SEO workshops in the beginning of 2010 in both Barcelona and the UK. The workshops will be covering three main areas of SEO:

·Internet Marketing Training in Barcelona
·Online Marketing Strategies in Barcelona
·AdWords and other PPC training and Management

The workshops will be pro-active and cover both beginners and advanced SEO techniques and e-marketing.

If you or your company may be interested in workshops or one-to-one SEO training in Barcelona pleae contact me at Barcelona SEO

Claiming Your Social Media Presence

Social Media is becoming more and more important as a current e-marketing strategy. More and more people are turning to social media for reviews, comments, and up to the second information regarding products and options for purchases. So it's important for your company to start creating that social media presence in those websites that might work. Have you created a Facebook page? Already Twittering? Got your photos on flickr?



There are literally hundreds of social media sites to choose from and depending on your website's audience, some may work better than others. So what happens when you go to one of these websites and your domain name has already been taken? This can happen, and is definitely something that can throw a spanner in the works with regards your branding. Sites such as Twitter are fairly good at helping reclaim a name if they think you deserve it, but it's a good idea to claim your name amongst as many sites as you can, even just to cover all possible options.

Knowem is a site which takes care of a lot of the legwork for you. The site checks your desired user name on 120 social media sites, and also offers a paid service to register those names for you (if you don't have the time). It's a fairly quick process for them to check all the sites (considering the time you would take on your own) and is also a great place to check out some new sites that maybe you didn't know before.

Interested in creating your social media presence online? Contact me at Barcelona SEO for more details. Or if you prefer to find out more about other link building techniques, I also offer SEO Training on a one to one basis or in groups.

Longer Snippets in SERPs - Possible Problems

In late March Google released information regarding 2 new improvements with regards to Search Engine Page Results. It's the second that I'm going to focus on here.

When a SERP presents the organic results, the small description below the title is called a snippet, and Google have decided to lengthen the snippet for longer-tiled keywords - i.e. giving you a little more to read before you click through to the pages.

This, for me, has 2 main implications. It's clear that this move has been taken by Google to improve the end user experience, to help the users find the right page faster. Google does not want a high bounce rate, or back click rate. If a Google user clicks on a result through the SERP, quickly sees that it's not what they're looking for and then clicks back to the Google SERP, this reflects bad not only on your site for the bounce rate, but also for Google as it's not providing the user with the correct result quickly enough.

So, this can work in a couple of ways. One is that it can improve your bounce rate - if people are clicking through from an extended snippet, it probably means that the page's content is sufficiently relevant for them to find what they're looking for.

Implication 2 is that you won't get clicked through at all. Obviously there will have bee steps taken so as to not be able to abuse the new extended snippet via keyword stuffing, etc. and Google will have taken care of that, but I think it just proves once again how much the content of your pages is so important as a global SEO/Internet Marketing strategy.

For more information about Website Optimisation in Barcelona or if you'd like some In-House SEO Training in Barcelonaplease contact me for more details.

Social Media for Search

Traditional search has changed dramatically over the last few years, and it looks to be on the brink of (or it's already happening) another shift, a quite important one.

After the introduction of Google's Universal Search SEOs needed to prepare for visibility in what was essentially going to become a Vertical Search for a product. However, it's well known that search results can be manipulated, and despite Google doing it's utmost to deliver the best results, it can still fall short - and that's because it's SERPs are dependent on Mathematical algorithms, not people (obviously that would be impossible!).


So here's where the shift is going. The rise of Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter mean that as long as you have a certain community established within those websites, you can get your answers a lot quicker. Let me give you an example. Let's say your printer breaks down on you. So you send a quick tweet on Twitter - which updates your facebook page - about how your printer just broke and you're on the lookout for a new one. No more than 90 Euros.



Within a couple of hours, you might have some replies from friends or colleagues, or hell, even PC City if they're SEOs are savvy enough to use things like backtweet. These can range from "wow, don't get an Epson" to "I'm sure XX store has got a special on this week" to "I'm selling mine, only 2 weeks old, cos I got it free with my new laptop" etc. etc.

Now if you compare that with a normal SERP, you would likely get a couple of review sites, some branded pages like HP, Epson, etc. but nothing "REAL TIME". It is this freshness of having real people to talk to which can make us think twice about rushing straight to Google, Yahoo! or MSN for something we need. User Generated Content (or UGC) is going to become huge and Content is always King.

Like what you're reading? Please feel free to leave a comment or if you have anything specific to share about your social search, I'd love to hear from you.

For more information about social search, contact me at Barcelona SEO or if you'd like some SEO Training in Barcelona I can come into your office or workplace and teach you.