Don’t overload your home page

Lots of website owners want to avoid having too much copy on their home page. And while it’s true that a home page with an intimidating amount of copy can scare some people away, you don’t want to go overboard with the sparse copy principle.

At a minimum your home page needs to indicate clearly and concisely what you do or what you sell. You have about three seconds to convince visitors that they’re in the right place. If they have to search to find if you’re really the website they’re looking for — or worse yet, if they have to click to an internal page to find that out — you’ve lost them.

As the copywriting experts at Market It Write put it, there are five things you need to know before you pare down the copy on your home page. Then go ahead and make your home page punchy yet still informative enough so your potential customers know it’s worth their while to stick around and read more of what you have to say.

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It’s important to understand the use of synonyms

Over the past several months, Google has made many changes to how it treats “synonyms”, and that has affected how we recommend on-page optimization to our clients. Google’s greatly improved recognition of synonyms and near synonyms is reducing or eliminating the need to use exact keyword phrases in your web pages.

How can you tell what words Google treats as synonyms? Simply do a Google search for one version and note what words are bold in Google’s results. The bold words are synonyms.

“Car repair” and “auto repair” are synonyms.

No longer must you use the phrase “divorce lawyer” a certain number of times on the page and then use the phrase “divorce attorney” a certain number of times. Google now recognizes them as the same, so if you pick one and use it consistently, people searching for either version of that phrase will find you.

Moreover, you don’t need to use the verbatim phrase multiple times on your page at all. If the natural flow of your copy includes the word “divorce” on the page (how could it not?)  as well as the word “lawyer” or “attorney” or even “law firm” or “attorney at law” or “law offices”, Google will recognize all of them as being roughly equivalent for rankings purposes when someone searches for a divorce lawyer or a divorce attorney, or any other versions of these equivalencies. That applies across virtually all keyword phrases for any business.

Out of date keyword placement can hurt you

The better Google gets at understanding how searchers use language to find what they want, the more it moves away from dependence on keyword phrases. In fact, the Penguin algorithm change last spring reduces rankings on websites that may be “over-optimized” by repeating verbatim keyword phrases artificially.

The good news

This is great news for the readability of your web pages, and that translates into visitors reading more of your copy and, in turn, a better conversion rate turning visitors into paying customers or clients.

WebProNews has a good article that goes into this subject in greater depth.

If you have concerns about over-use of keyword phrases on your web pages, Rank Magic can help.

We don’t expect this to impact many (if any) of our clients, but a new Panda update always hurts at least some websites. This one is expected to impact about 1% of websites.

This advice from Google itself is good to review:

Our advice for publishers continues to be to focus on delivering the best possible user experience on your websites and not to focus too much on what they think are Google’s current ranking algorithms or signals. Some publishers have fixated on our prior Panda algorithm change, but Panda was just one of roughly 500 search improvements we expect to roll out to search this year. In fact, since we launched Panda, we’ve rolled out over a dozen additional tweaks to our ranking algorithms, and some sites have incorrectly assumed that changes in their rankings were related to Panda. Search is a complicated and evolving art and science, so rather than focusing on specific algorithmic tweaks, we encourage you to focus on delivering the best possible experience for users.

Google lists about two dozen questions to ask yourself about your website to see if it’s the kind of site Google considers a high quality site. In addition:

One other specific piece of guidance we’ve offered is that low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content.

If you do get impacted by this algorithm change, Rank Magic can help.

Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting recently had a conversation with Google’s Matt Cutts about what makes a quality website. One of the essential points they drive home is that having a page that’s simply non-duplicative of other pages isn’t enough to gain good rankings.

Inadvertent non-duplicate content

Many car repair websites, for example, have a page about brake jobs for people looking for brake service and/or information about brake maintenance.  Typically they all say pretty much the same thing. In fact, sometimes when creating their web page they look at other car repair websites to get ideas about what to talk about. Usually they put everything in their own words and feel good that they don’t have duplicate content.

But that doesn’t mean that they don’t still have duplicate information.

And quite frankly, search engines don’t do consumers of information any service if they display lots of web pages for a query that all just say basically the same thing.

The trick is to make sure your web pages provide an additional value not found on other similar pages. You have to figure out what makes you special, and then create pages that highlight that.

Mat Cutts also talks about a number of other things that reflect on a website’s quality, including their inbound link structure. It’s a thoughtful conversation and I recommend it to you.

Once upon a time

Years ago you had to include specific keyword phrases multiple times on a page  — verbatim  — to rank highly for them. Since then, Google has gotten much better at recognizing synonyms and even near-synonyms. More recently, Google has gotten better at piecing together a sense for keyword phrases even when the words in the phrase aren’t adjacent to one another.

Much better now

Today, if you want to optimize your copy for people searching for plugin hybrid SUVs, you no longer have to pepper that 3-word phrase throughout your copy and in your code. If your page is about SUVs and mentions the word hybrid and includes the term plugin, Google can tell that it’s relevant for the phrase plugin hybrid SUVs.

That’s much easier on the patience of your readers and allows you to optimize for the phrase naturally, without keyword stuffing. It may even positively impact your conversion rate because your copy will read so much more naturally.

In fact …

Google’s Penguin update last spring addresses this very thing. Google may now consider as “over-optimized” websites that repeat the same verbatim phrase too many times. What may have been necessary for rankings ten years ago can actually earn you a penalty today.

Karon Thackston wrote in High Rankings Advisor a couple of months ago about a conversation she had with Google’s Matt Cutts on this very subject. I recommend her article and her presentation of that conversation.

If your website was optimized years ago and involved sprinkling verbatim keyword phrases throughout your pages, you may be seeing some loss of rankings. If so, we can help.

Very few of our clients have been smacked with a loss of rankings from the recent Google Penguin algorithm update, but across the web many web sites have suffered. If you’ve been penalized under Penguin, it can be a frustrating job uncovering the reason for your loss of rankings and fixing it.

You may be able to benefit from the experience of Nick LeRoy, an SEO in Minneapolis who has recovered one website from a 75% loss of visitors and revenue. He writes about it in an article he entitled How I Smacked Google Penguin In Its Ugly Little Beak.

If you think you’ve suffered as a result of Penguin, Rank Magic can help.

How readable is your copy?

You’re probably not a professional writer, so you may be excused for not realizing if your website copy isn’t “readable”. After all, it’s in plain English, right? But readability is more than that. AJ Kohn points out the importance of readability on your website:

Readability is about making your content accessible and comfortable. Never make it a chore. If you make your content difficult to read the value of that content goes down. Lack of readability frustrates comprehension and reduces sharing. This, in turn, limits the social echo of your content and lowers the chances of it obtaining organic links.

Here’s your clue

If poor readability is driving away visitors on your website, the clue will be a high bounce rate  — the percentage of visitors who leave immediately after arriving on a page without looking at anything else on your site. If you have that problem, you may have a readability problem.

AJ provides a valuable guide to producing readable content. Here are the bullet points, but you’ll need to read his article tor the background and explanations.

• People Don’t Read, They Scan
• Use A Font Hierarchy
• Subheads Are Your Friends
• Legibility Matters
• Get Line Height Just Right
• Color Contrast
• Highlight The Important Stuff
• Use Short Paragraphs
• Crush Pronouns
• Use Images
• Reduce Clutter
• Link Your Paragraphs
• Reading Difficulty

Need help with copy readability or a high bounce rate? If we can’t help, we can refer you to someone who can. Call us.

The Gong Show

Dierdre Rienzo at MarketItWrite asks:

Do you remember “The Gong Show”?

Brave contestants would go on stage and display their talents (or lack thereof) in front of three judges. If the contestants made a mistake, or just didn’t impress… GONG. Game over.

The world of online business has a gong equivalent. It’s called your bounce rate, and it tracks how often prospects click away without bothering to learn more.

When prospects click away, it means your time is up. It means you won’t get any more chances to win them over with your products or services.

Your bounce rate is available from your site analytics (like Google Analytics) and if it’s too high, you’re losing business. As a benchmark, most of our clients have a bounce rate between 39% and 69%. Don’t get discouraged if you’re a bit high because typical bounce rates vary depending on the kind of business/website you own. If yo’d like to reduce your bounce rate, though, take a look at your web page content.

As a copywriter, Dierdre is particularly sensitive to copywriting errors that raise your bounce rate. In her article, she explains six online writing mistakes that you should avoid. Use her explanations to look at your web copy with a new perspective. How many of the errors she discusses have you made in the copy on your site? Go ahead and fix them now. It’s never too late. Why not do it now?

Once that’s done, if you’d like some professional help with your on-page keyword optimization, please get in touch with us.

Did your rankings drop around the end of April?

The recent Google Penguin update is focused on web sites that are over-optimized and have been getting better rankings than they really deserve as a result. Some of what Google is looking for relates to unnatural link structure. But a lot of what they are penalizing sites for is copy that’s been over-optimized. If you saw a significant drop in your Google rankings around the end of April of this year, that may be a signal that your website has come to the attention of the Penguin algorithm change. Asking yourself three important questions can reveal whether or not you stepped over the line and need to make some changes to your copy.

Three Over-Optimization Questions

1. How does your website sound when you read it out loud?
   If it sounds awkward or if it feels like you are tripping over one or another of your keyword phrases too often, then you may have crossed the line. Look for places in your copy where the keyword phrase isn’t needed, and drop it.
2. Did you try to achieve a certain keyword density?
   Keyword density is a persistent myth, with many believers struggling to achieve a certain percentage of the words on the page being keyword phrases. This is a major item that Google’s latest update is focusing on. If you’ve been trying to achieve a certain density of keywords, you may have stepped over the line. Remove or paraphrase some of your keyword phrases in copy and read it out loud to yourself again.
3. Does your copy suffer from logorrhea?
   If you wrote a lot more words that needed just so that you could work more keyword phrases into your copy, chances are that’s hurting you. When we pad our copy in order to work in keyword phrases, we typically don’t actually add more valuable information to the page. We restate things and we paraphrase thoughts, sentences, and even whole paragraphs  — and all that allows us to work our keyword phrases onto the page more times. That’s a mistake. If you have more words than you need to make your point it hurts you two ways. First it may trigger the over-optimization flag at Google, and second it may be driving visitors away from your page. If there’s too much text on your page visitors find it intimidating and either don’t read all of it or leave the page without reading any of it. The trick is to write as much as necessary about the topic and no more. Blaise Pascal once wrote “I would have written a shorter letter but didn’t have time.” On your website, take the time.

Have questions? We welcome comments and try to respond promptly.

Do your rankings need improvement? Rank Magic can help.

Penguin Penalizes Keyword Stuffing

Google’s latest significant algorithm change, Penguin, was released in late April of this year.  It’s designed to reward high quality websites and penalize what Google calls webspam. One of the kinds of webspam Penguin is focusing on is on-page keyword stuffing.

In the past it was felt that a certain number of iterations of a verbatim keyword phrase was needed in order to score highly enough in relevance and achieve a high ranking in the search engines. Search engines have since gotten much better at understanding matching pages for a query without requiring such verbatim keyword density measures. But many web pages have nevertheless gotten better rankings than they might otherwise deserve due to overly aggressive on-page keyword placement.

Penguin is designed to put those web pages in their place. According to Google:

In the pursuit of higher rankings or traffic, a few sites use techniques that don’t benefit users, where the intent is to look for shortcuts or loopholes that would rank pages higher than they deserve to be ranked. We see all sorts of webspam techniques every day, from keyword stuffing to link schemes that attempt to propel sites higher in rankings.

Have you inadvertently done some keyword stuffing?

Assuming you haven’t engaged in link spam, it would serve you well to examine your on-page optimization. Now a certain presence of important keywords is essential for a page to rank well, so how do you know if you’ve gone overboard? Respected SEO guru Dan Thies has studied a large number of websites and come up with a test you can do yourself with a printout of your web pages. He calls it The Red Pen test and it should give you a good idea of whether you’ve stepped over the line and are in danger of a Penguin slap-down.

We recommend his keyword stuffing test to you  — you’ll find it here.