Quick update: I have verified the shop, added Worldpay, loads of new pages and new services and items. I am currently working on links.

Meantime, my clinic business was taking a nosedive so I am concentrating on patients for now. Bear with me. In the words of Arnie: “I’ll be back!”

Here is what I said last time, 3 days in, and what the data says now:

44 visitors, now 266

75% of whom are new to the site, now 61% are new visits, which suggests that some people are returning regularly and the initially high figure was people looking after I launched the site.

who have viewed an average of 3.5 pages per visit, now viewing an average of 4.36, which is good news as they are looking around more.

with a total viewed of 154 pages, total now viewed 1,161!

spent an average of just over 5 minutes on the site, which is the same now – 5.27 minutes. Hang on there, though, does that suggest that they are looking at more pages but not spending more time on the site?

and 36% have left after only viewing one page (the so-called Bounce rate). Bounce rate still around the same at 35%, which is good apparently. I read somewhere that under 50% is great, so I am very pleased at 35%.

I also know that all my visitors came from the UK and US (this is still the same although I have had a few visitors from Phillipines, Canada, Oman and all over Europe now too), 47% of them looked for my site direct by putting the www.purehealthclinic.co.uk address into their browser (now 26%) , 35% came via another site (referred visitors) (now 44% which is great news) and 19% found me via a search engine, now 29%, even better news.

It will be fascinating to see if these figures change now I have started to optimise the site. Will the organic visitors (those who come via a search engine) go up and will the pages I have optimised become more popular. Ooh…fun!

By the way, I’m not going to go into how you add the tags because that will depend on what system/software/template you are using so I will leave you to check with your own contacts. Suffice to say in 1&1, you can do it in Settings (although you can only add 1 title page for the whole site, which, of course, I have complained about andthey say they are looking into changing! You can add description tags for each page and meta tags, though.)

As far as I understand it, there are several places and these seem to be in a sort of priority order as follows:

• Title tag of all pages, especially the home one.
• Description tag of all pages.
• Headings (and sub-headings)
• In links: internal, external pointing out and pointing to you.
• In your text.
• Alt tags for images.

Years ago, search engines also used Meta Tags to get info from, but from what I read they stopped this a few years ago. Despite this, many people see them as the be-all-and-end-all of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). You might as well put them in those tags too as you have nothing to lose, but they do seem to be right at the bottom of the pile SEO-wise nowadays.

Let’s take that list one at a time.

Title tags come up at the top of the browser and are what the search engine (SE) will often use to see if the site matches what a person has searched for, say, in Google. You will often see the title tag words displayed on the search page under the headline or name of the company. Make the title tag make sense and be useful to a person coming across your site – be clear who you are and what they will find on your site. Use your primary keyword at the beginning of the sentence if you can – the sooner it is is there, the more it is likely to be picked up. Use other keywords too, if you can and they make sense.

Description tags are like the title tag but often longer so you can give a bit more – truthful – explanation of what you offer. Again, use your primary keyword asap and give others in context. This may also be used as text when someone searches for you so make it count.

Headings. SEs will pick up sometimes the description tag, but sometimes grab info from the first text it comes across on your page. Say, for example, someone searches for tests and my tests page comes up, it is likely to use whatever I’ve put in the description tag but also whatever comes first on my page. If I have made sure the first text is a bolded header containing a keyword, and even better, followed by a bullet-pointed list containing several other relevant test keywords, I’m laughing.

If that text is attention-grabbing and persuades the searcher to visit the page, even better. You see, you have to do two jobs here and get the balance right. It’s no good stuffing loads of keywords in to get the SEs to pick you up, you have to appeal to the human person first. Relevant copy is your aim, and if you can get an appropriate keyword in there too, all the better.

Links. These seem to be very important in search rankings. SEs like to see links going to somewhere else from the page and also links coming into it from within your site and, importantly, from outside your site. Basically, without going overboard, use links to navigate people around and make sure the page you link to is relevant as the SE will look at that page too and you want it to trust you, if that’s the right way of saying it. A machine with feelings, whatever next!

Here’s an example of linking from my site:

Bloating and wind are often caused by lack of digestive enzymes, poor bowel environment or too much of the wrong foods. Check out more on this in the IBS factsheet.

 Indigestion and heartburn are most often caused ironically by lack of stomach acid even though the symptoms seem to suggest overacidity. Check out the low stomach acid page.

And when they get to the IBS factsheet, page, there is more linking:

For More Help

See the full Gut Ebook (coming soon) or contact me.

For details of the IBS-100 programme, visit: http://www.ibsregister.com/content/ibsap100

FoodsMatter site has a great list of organisations and groups. Go to http://www.foodsmatter.com/links_non_food/campaigning.html

This brings up external linking. It is very important for the credibility of your site that you link to well-known or well-respected sites which also have a lot of links pointing to them. It’s all about the relationships, you see, between sites. If you can get them to link back to you, that’s even better – an example of a link pointing IN which is worth loads in SEO terms. For example, I have Foodsmatter.com linking to me lots of times from different pages because I write for them. They are a credible site as the leading allergy resource in the UK.

Of course, what I should be doing instead of writing these posts (!) is making sure I find keywords to use in those links and headings. I’m sure I could do better than IBS factsheet, for example.

In Body Copy/Text. Remember, the aim is to create a useful site and not get side-tracked by keywords. But, if you can drop a keyword or two into whatever you’re writing about, you’re more likely to get it noticed.

For example, yesterday I was writing a post about blueberries reducing blood pressure. To test Wordtracker out, I looked for a keyword and found the phrase ‘alternative blood pressure medicine’. So, even though I don’t want to give the impression  that someone can control their bp with berries alone, I used it as my heading and in the text. You can read it here: (a link, see..!) Blueberries – An Alternative High Blood Pressure Medicine?

You will also note that I have used the keyword phrase as the link and tagged it (hover over it and you’ll see the tag come up), which brings me on to the last placement target:

Alt tags. These are where you can add a tag, including a keyword of course, to images or links etc like I just did. This is good practice because if the person on your site is using a voicing system, perhaps because of eyesight problems, they can still ‘see’ around your site. But, SEs use them too and it is another opportunity for you to get the keyword in.

Phew. There’s a lot of work there to do.

Summary: I have verified and indexed my site, added the title tag and optimised my home page – take a look to see how I have changed it if you saw it before.  Admittedly, it’s having to strike a balance between prettyness and SEO, but in a few days hopefully, I should see the text I want to appear come up when someone finds me on a search via Google or Yahoo etc.

Now, I plan to take it a page at a time, optimising as I go along.

Ah, but before I do that, I’d better take a record of my Google Analytics stats now so that I can measure any difference. Blow me, it never ends!

Now I can see why everyone says that this is the start of the hard work and building your site is the easy bit!

I have been at it for days now and am seriously boggle-eyed, but I will try to explain in simple terms what has taken me days to work out so you can have it easier. I hope.

Here is a step by step plan for you. I, of course, came via a more circuitous route ie. wandering all over the place, but I can see Now the way I should have come.

1. Check Google Analytics to see what keywords people are using to find you already. These are already successful for you so write them at the top of your ‘Keywords List’.

2. Search for your own site on the various search engines and see what comes up. What title comes up, what words are underneath the heading, who else comes up, do you not come up at all? Write those down. You will need to compare later what you want to come up with what currently already does and you will want to see who your competitors are.

3. Search using your successful keywords so far (see 1) and see what and who comes up. Write those down too.

4. Buy yourself a copy of Search Engine Optimisation for Dummies, 3rd edition and read up to the start of chapter 8. Believe me, this will save you eons of time. Make notes and a huge list of everything you will need to do at some time, but for now, learn about keywords and what search engines like and don’t like. My list is currently at aorund 103 points. This is not for the faint-hearted.

5. Go to wordtracker.com and get yourself a week’s trial. I had already had one so I bought a month, but I can already see it is worth having an annual subscription as part of your expenses. (Keep reading. In reality, don’t do this until No 10.) 

6. Tear your hair out trying to see how it works.

7. Bang your head on the table and wish you had never started this “”***!!!! project.

8. Go and have a huge glass of wine/beer/tipple and take a day off.

9. Calmly, despite the thinner hair and bruised head, do two things. Make a list of all the words you can think of that other people might think of when typing in a search related to your organisation. Think about words THEY would use, not jargon or specialist terms. Think in terms of phrases rather than single words – the long-tail (you should know what I mean by that if you have read the book so far!).

9A. Go back to the list of your competitors and go to each of their sites. Click View in your browser on their home page and Source. This will show you the HTML code their site is made from. In it, you should be able to see their title, description and meta tag keywords. Write any down you think are appropriate for you too. By now, you should be getting a good list of what are termed Seed words. The ones you will use to find goldmine keywords.

10. NOW you can get your trial of Wordtracker set up.

11. Learn a bit, watch the videos (see my previous post for how to get all the training videos in one go – search wordtracker on this blog.) You need to know what long tail keywords are, cos that’s what you’ll be looking for.

12. Choose your top few seed keywords from your list. Put the first one into the orange keyword tool (left hand side) which acts a bit like a thesaurus and will come up with loads of related terms.

13. Go down that list and click Search next to each term you like the look of, (not search and save) . This will bring up a list in the blue tool (on the right of the orange list) and show you how many searches there are. Make sure you have clicked the buttons Wordtracker rather than google, plurals and mis-spellings, and click search.  

Note – Google searches will come up with a lot higher search numbers than Wordtracker. This is apparently because Google will estimate and extrapolate from its data, whereas Wordtracker gives ACTUAL searches within the life of the database (about 1449 days as I type). Wordtracker uses data from metacrawlers like dogpile.com (don’t ask) and gives much more accurate data. This really makes a difference. When I compared two searches for nutritionist, I wish it was the Google number, but Wordtracker showed there were actually very few searches for it. Harrumph.

14. If there are some words in the list with searches above, say, 75, click Additional Metrics at the top. Don’t get Google count, you don’t need it, and it depressed me. This will bring up more detail about these words. (I say 75 because under that is a low number of searches and do you really want to target those..?)

15. Click KEI so that the KEI numbers start highest at the top. KEI means Keyword Effectiveness Index and gives an idea about how popular that particular term is. Note down the highest ones that are relevant to you.

16. Click KEI3 so the highest are at the top. This is an even better indicator because it gives you an idea of how popular a term is but how much competition there is for it. The higher the KEI3 number, the less competition there is for the term which means you have a shot at beating the compeition on this term.

In other words, you need the high KEIs and the high KEI3s. It is, of course, a lot more complicated than that, but that is what you really need to know, unless you want to read much more – which you can in the Wordtracker academy.

17. Deselect all the terms in your list and then click on all the high ones you fancy. Remember, some might be keywords/terms you can use now, but others might give you an idea for some content you could write later with that target keyword in mind. Then save those selected to a list of  ‘Best Target Keywords’.

18. Repeat using all the search terms you have identified and fancy, ad infinitum, or until you can’t take any more.

You should now have a long list of target keywords. I got to 419.

19. Go through your list now and select all the ones you think you could use for later content and move them to a ‘Later Content’ list. You could also split off others into different categories if you like.

And that’s all there is to it!

Next, you need to know what to do with them. That’ll come in the next post. For now, I’m off to bed. Phew.

Caveat: Of course, I could have this all totally wrong. So please tell me someone if I have. Gently. And with a tissue ready.

I spent the few days since the last post trying hard to sort out the verification on my 1&1 eshop. If you recall, I managed at long last to get my main site verified with all three main search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) and added the Google analytics code. Yay! More on that in a bit as I said I was going to leave it 2 weeks and then report back. That time is up….

But, back to verification of the eshop. This was really hard to work out and I was going back and forth to 1&1 and, frankly, getting nowhere. They swore they had added the verification files from the search engines that I sent them as I can’t add them myself. I kept trying to confirm the verification with the search engines and it kept failing. I checked in Source view of the site (see previous posts on this) and could see no verification codes there at all, even though I had added the verification meta tags myself (in Designer, Content and using the Placeholder icon, far right of all the icons at the top.)

VERY ANNOYING!!!!!

Then I had a brainwave.

I searched on the google forums and sent a question in, not really expecting it to be answered. Lo and behold an hour later, a very helpful chap somewhere in the ether had looked at my site and came back to tell me it was framed. The codes had been added to the site but my purehealthshop domain was forwarded to it. 1&1 HAD been adding the codes and files, as I had, but to the bottom layer of the site, if you see what I mean.

I immediately wrote to 1&1 and asked them how I could stop this being a framed site and they said I had to assign my domain name to the actual space where the site had been built. I thought I had done that from the start. Probably my fault, but surely they should have picked that up a bit sooner!

A few days later, I had worked out how to transfer the domain from one package to another and assigned it so my eshop is no longer framed. Hoorah!!! The way to tell, by the way, as I have said before, is to see if the URL in the browser bar changes. If the URL stays the same no matter what page you’re on, it’s framed. It should change with each page.

‘Great,’ I thought. I sent them the files to add again onto the proper site and tried to confirm the verification files again. No go. I added the meta tags and google analytics myself using the placeholder as they instructed. No go.

***!!!”"”>**^

Suffice to say I was not happy.

To be honest, I got so fed up with it, I have decided to leave it for a bit and concentrate on getting my main site right as people can get to my eshop via that anyway. I have got the purehealthclinic.co.uk site and mickirose.wordpress.com verified and analysed, so that will have to do for now. I hold my hands up. I had to let it go as the laptop was about to be thrown out of the window.

Calm. Calm. Calmer.Phew.

Onward.

For now, though, a large glass of wine is called for I reckon!

I finally managed to get google analytics onto the home page of my main clinic site. (I am still going back and forth with 1&1 to get it onto the eshop – driving me mad!).  Analytics is a free Google service where you can get a tracking code and add it into the header section of your site. It will then literally track all manner of activity on your site, which is good for you, but also good for Google as it gives them tons of so-called ‘trending’ information ie. what people are up to on the web.

The reason for putting analytics on now is that I want to wait for a couple of weeks and see what keywords people are using to find me and then optimise those before working out a load of new ones. If you remember, stage 2 in my optimisation plan is to add keywords and meta tags to my site so I can be found more effectively. If people are already finding me without me doing anything, then those keywords must really work for me, so I will use them thanks very much. I shall wait and see.

Meantime, I have taken the opportunity to start learning how to read and interpret the data on analytics, of which there is much!

First off, you get the main Dashboard page up. This tells me loads. In the 3 days since I added the code (and there is a 24 hour delay so this is up to this time yesterday), I have had:

44 visitors

75% of whom are new to the site

who have viewed an average of 3.5 pages per visit

with a total viewed of 154 pages

spent an average of just over 5 minutes on the site

and 36% have left after only viewing one page (the so-called Bounce rate).

Haven’t a clue if this is a rubbish or good start!? 

I also know that all my visitors came from the UK and US, 47% of them looked for my site direct by putting the www.purehealthclinic.co.uk address into their browser, 35% came via another site (referred visitors) and 19% found me via a search engine. I can tell too which are the top 5 pages visited.

Wahay, not bad!

If I ‘drill down’ (such jargon!) a lot further, there is a ton more info. I can find out, for example, how many people came from the US or UK, what search engines were used, what pages they entered the site on and left on, what the bounce rate is for each page, how long people spend on each page and which sites they were referred from etc.

What I REALLY want to know is how many people click on an action such as signing up to the newsletter, downloading a factsheet, going to a recommended site or to the eshop. But I haven’t worked that one out yet.

There is a site overlay thingy which shows you where on each page people click and a percentage of visitors who click each bit, which I’m sure will give me some of that info, but at the moment, I presume because the analytics aren’t on the eshop yet, or (dreading this) because it is a framed site, it’s not counting those clicks yet.

So, first thing I wanna know about is bouncing. It sounds fun. But I have a feeling a lot of ‘bounce’ is going to turn out not to be a good thing!

After all that to-ing and fro-ing asking 1&1 how to add verification and tracking codes to my site, them telling me I could add it in the header, me saying I couldn’t work out how, them saying actually they had to do it, me sending the meta tags, them saying they wanted verification files, me sending them, they saying they wanted meta tags after all, me sending them and asking them to confirm when they’d done it, them saying you can add them yourself in the header section (are you still with me in this viscious circle??!!), I FINALLY worked out how you can add it yourself!!!

In the MyBusiness site, open the site to edit, go to the settings button, edit header and simply paste them there. To check you have done it right, open your live site, click View in the browser bar and click Source. This shows you all the HTML code of your site and you should be able to see the tags you uploaded there.

Then, go back to the search engine verification sites (try typing in Google webmaster/Yahoo webmaster/Bing webmaster), confirm you have added the codes to your site, verify them and sit back whilst they gather data.

Blimey. Easy after all that hoo-ha! Now I just have to work out how to read, interpret and use the data.

Wish I could do that too with the eshop but different system so I am dependent on them there. Fingers crossed!

I followed the same process of asking 1&1 to add verification code for the 3 top search engines to my home page. This took flippin’ ages and I’m still not sure they’ve done it.

In their marketing bit of the eshop manual, they also recommended you add your shop feed to a variety of shop search engines including Google Merchant Center, Pangora and Kelkoo.

Of course, I had no idea what they were so had to spend a time looking at them. Basically, you sign up to the various services and set up a feed that is automatically sent to them so your products show up in their searches. You generally pay a fee per click. Kelkoo costs £50 plus fees to set up, Google Merchant seems free plus fees and Pangora is £100 plus fees.

I decided with my small offering thus far, it wasn’t really worth it for me. I have signed up for the Google one, though, just to see. Which meant asking 1&1 again to add some code to my eshop site. Ha, they will be fed up with me!

The other marketing suggestion they make is to set up an ebay account and you can automatically list your products on ebay, which is pretty cool.

I set up an account (a personal one , wasn’t sure whether I needed a business one but you can change later if need be) and plan to set up at least an About Me page where you can give a bit of blurb and link to the shop. Or you can go the whole hog and set up an ebay shop.

Ebay don’t allow you to sell ebook downloads and I felt that health tests weren’t quite right for ebay so I have put that on hold until I add more stuff later on.

I did add Google SiteMaps to my eshop though and listed that, so I did actually do SOMETHING!!

Oh, and I downloaded and read a good ebook about keyword research. Didn’t really undertsand a lot of it so I shall re-read it a few times and let you know how I get on.

Phew, is it knocking-off time yet? Mentally exhausted after all that learning.