I’m not going to go into monitoring the technical performance of your site in this post, but look at how you can find out how your site is performing in a search. This is a great tool and if you’re not using Google Webmaster Tools, then you need to do so!

When you log into your account, you need to navigate to the option, ‘your site on the web’, then ‘search queries’. This section will show you which search queries your site is ranking for, their average position in the rankings, whether the rankings have improved or decreased in the dates shown (default is last month to date), as well as which pages of your site are ranking for those terms. It also gives you an idea of impressions (when your site was shown in the results) as well as an idea of click throughs. You can see why this is useful.

The image below is a snapshot of this report for my Forty First website. You can see a list of terms the site is being found for in a search, their rough position and impressions (NB I’m no longer actively promoting this site, hence the low rankings!)

Google Webmaster Tools Search Query report

Clicking on each keyword on the left of the report (under ‘query’) will take you to information about the page(s) ranking for that particular keyword. This is very useful if you’re actively promoting your site in the search engines as you can find out which pages are ranking for a particular keyword and work out if some pages need improvement – perhaps you’re expecting certain pages to show up and they’re not. It can also help you to focus your keywords better too, you may find that a page is ranking for a keyword that isn’t very targeted and therefore need to refine the content and/or keywords used on the page.

Scrolling down to the bottom of your search query list allows you to download the data into a spreadsheet and also click through to your Google analytics keyword report where you can see which keywords resulted in traffic to your website.

Other tabs at the top of the report also show top pages performing in the search results (in this case it’s the home page of the site), and you can also filter results to show particular countries, and type of search e.g. web, mobile or image etc.

If you’re looking to make improvements to your website’s overall optimisation in the search engines, this report is a great place to start and more useful than relying on rankings reports or checking rankings manually yourself.

If you’d like to find out more about measuring and tracking the performance of your website, then check out our new Online Marketing Tracking & Measurement Guide.

Whenever we explain to newcomers to the internet how important, even vital, writing is

That isn’t what we had in mind.

Of course there are always exceptions. Like those business owners who launch into email marketing and/or blogging with gusto – sharing lots of promotions but unfortunately little substance to engage their readers. Wrong kind of impact.

If you’re unsure where or how to start writing to use the internet to promote your business, there are several related posts & great resources right here on this blog.

Impactful writing from the beginning

Keywords are what people type into their browser bar to look for information. To give your online writing a chance of being found you need to first establish and then include the right keywords, both in your heading and body text. (Sam explains it much better than I can in this post.)

Headline, Heading or Subject Line. Probably the most important part of any marketing material anywhere. And yet so often it’s treated as an after-thought and ends being lacklustre and uninspiring. If the heading lacks impact, the chances of your newsletter, webpage, blog post etc. being read are much reduced. A useful free tool used by many writers is the Headline Analyser at http://www.aminstitute.com.

Impact doesn’t mean being spammy

Steer clear of exaggeration and hype. From 1st March in the UK, the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) regulations include online advertising and marketing messages.

Deliver what you promise. On a related note, not only do you want to avoid being spammy or misleading, you need to make sure your article delivers what the headline promises. If you want people to continue to read your articles, blog posts and newsletters that is.

What impactful writing have you come across – for whatever reason? We’d love you to share.

Imagine you have a mixed pile of paperwork on your desk. There may be magazines, articles, correspondence, bank statements – all sorts.  In order to file everything away, you’d start by separating the big pile into several smaller piles according to what they were (subject or category).  In this way, you’d still have a chance of finding a particular piece of paper again at a later date.

Blog Categories work in just the same way. If you blog about photography for example, you might want Categories about cameras, lighting techniques, portraits, weddings and so on.  Here on this blog, we have a Category for each of the online marketing topics we specialise in.

After much trial and error, here are three ways I’ve found to use blog Categories effectively:

1.  Just as you wouldn’t set up a separate file for each piece of paper in your mixed pile of paperwork, don’t set up a new Category for your latest blog post, without searching through your existing Categories to see if you already have one that is appropriate.

2.  Try to keep the total number of Categories manageable, (somewhere between 12 and 20 as a rough guide).  Going back to our fictitious office, too many files can be overwhelming and take ages to search through.  On your blog, people may only be interested in one particular subject, so make it easy for them to find all related posts.

3.  Avoid putting a post into more than one Category wherever possible. It can make your blog a bit disorganised if you’re not careful – a bit like taking copies of a document and putting each copy into a different file.  It’s best to only do this if absolutely necessary.

So Categories are an important tool for organising your blog posts and other online material so that you (and your readers) can find what you’re looking for quickly and easily.

The other day I was having a browse around a site I vaguely remember joining and clicked to view my profile page……  Oh dear, not only had I not uploaded a photo, there were only the most basic details about me and my business.

Now, that particular network may not be one of my most frequently visited sites, but the same isn’t necessarily true of its other members – who could quite possibly be interested in finding out more about what I do …. except they’re put off by my incomplete profile page.  Do you see where I’m going with this?  Those lost opportunities could add up.

What I’ve decided to do is make up a template file with the most often asked questions and other requested information, together with my answers.  For example:

Keywords – somehow I seem to forget what they are when it comes to filling out online forms.
URLs of my other social network profile pages – I always mean to return and add these in, but rarely do.
Brief description of business – sometimes you only have a few words or even characters to play with so it helps to be prepared.
More detailed description of services – this is the section I’m most likely to rush and therefore not get the message absolutely right.

Hopefully having all this information pre-prepared will speed things up next time I’m tempted to sign up on a new social networking site.

How about you?  Do you have any tips to share that you use to help you fill in the blanks on all those forms?

So with all this spamming going on, it’s no surprise the search engines decided not to bother using it as part of the way they rank sites. But there is still a wide belief it is used by the search engines in the way they rank sites.

Well, the answer to this came last week from Matt Cutts, a Google Software Engineer (Head of their Web Spam team), so effectively, straight from the horse’s mouth. If you’re still confused about the meta keywords tag, then take a couple of minutes to read this post and watch the video which should clear up any questions you have.

By the way, if you’re not sure what the meta keyword tag is, it’s a tag that sits in the code of your web page that visitors to your site can’t see, but the search engines can read. It’s a place where you can list the keywords that relate to your website and looks something like this:

<meta name=”Keywords” content=”search engine marketing, search engine optimisation, online marketing, etc, etc,” />

Tags are basically keywords that you attach to your blog post, so for example, if your blog is about cooking and the subject of your blog post is ‘coq au vin’, then the tags you may want to attach would be as follows: coq au vin, chicken, French recipes, French food, etc

This will enable your post to be found if anyone searches within your blog. Most blogging platforms allow for tags (or keywords), which include Blogger, Typepad and WordPress.

To ensure your blog posts are correctly categorised, which allows further ways for visitors to your blog to find the posts they’re interested in, make sure each post is placed within a category. So, continuing with my example, your blog post all about ‘coq au vin’ may be placed within a category that could be ‘French Recipes’. Typepad and WordPress allow categories to be created, but not Blogger, so if your blog is hosted on Blogger, you need to make sure you tag each blog post.

Sometimes when you visit blogs, you may see groups of keywords together within the navigation of the blog, with some of these keywords displayed bigger than others. This is known as a ‘tag cloud’ (see above image) and gives the visitor a way of seeing which tags are the most popular. Clicking on one of these words within the tag cloud will lead you to a list of the blog posts containing those tags (or keywords).

For further reading on tag clouds, read ‘Tag Clouds Gallery: Examples and Good Practices’ on Smashing Magazine.