Trending Upward » search

Why You Need a Meta Description

Shelby Thayer — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 01:57:16 +0000

This weekend I was checking out some organic search results for higher education sites. I was astonished by the number of higher ed sites that do not use a meta description.

Why the meta description is still important. The meta description won’t help your ranking in the top search engines, but it’s still very important.

It describes your page. According to an old SEOmoz post, the meta description is used:

To describe the content of the page accurately and succinctly

To serve as a short, text “advertisement” to click on your results in the search results

To display targeted keywords, not for ranking purposes, but to indicate the content to searchers

The meta description is usually listed beneath the linked title in most search engine results. Key for click-throughs. The keywords users search for in the top search engines are also bolded in the search result (the meta description and title tag). Again, key for click-throughs.

Quick example. If I’m a user searching for liberal arts colleges in Wisconsin and I happen upon the below search listing, I have a nice little blurb that tells me what the page is all about. Since this is the homepage, it tells me what the school is all about. I know nothing about this college, but taking 1 or 2 seconds (and that’s what users take) to read the description helps me decide if I should click through or not.

Search Result #1:

Compare that to the listing directly below it. I’m deleting the school and names.

A Great College
A Great College work pref 414.555.1212 work 1.800.555.1212 4400 South 1st street … A Great College named one of the nation’s 10 leading schools for …

Or the one directly below that:

A Great University Home
Smith joined the physics department in 2006 as part of the Great University Fellows in the Liberal Arts and Sciences program ..

Do you have any idea what “A Great College” and “A Great University” are all about? We know the phone number of one and the recent hire of another, but we still have no idea about the homepage or the school. Don’t be fooled into thinking users will click through to find out, either.

Of course we’re talking about the homepage here, but most secondary pages should have a meta description – a *different* meta description that describes those pages as well.

First impressions count. For many schools, users searching may have never heard of the school. If they happen upon the school in a search listing, that title and description is the first impression – make it relevant.

Leaving the meta description blank so the search engine can scrape your page and use what *they* think might be relevant doesn’t make much sense. Writing a good meta description is not easy, but it’s worth it. Take the time and write it!

Kyle James just wrote a great SEO post on .eduguru last week about optimizing higher education websites for search engines. This is an area that higher education sites really need to focus on and, as a whole, we haven’t.

SEO is so important to get users to your website and the meta description is important as well – just not for page ranking. It’s one thing to rank high. It’s another thing to entice the user to click through to your website.

Obviously the higher the rank, the more users will click through, but if your school is listed on a page with 6 other schools (or 6 lead generation sites who spend way more time on SEO than you do!), the meta description plays a key role in that click through.

Directory Listing Descriptions. If your website is listed in the Open Directory or Yahoo Directory, Google and Yahoo both can grab your directly listing from DMOZ or from Yahoo Directories and use it as your “description” in the search engine results.

To get them to use your meta description tag, simply use the following snippets in your header ():

This tag tells Google, Yahoo, and MSN to use your meta description instead of the directory listing description.

Of course, once you get users to your website, it’s your job to *keep* them on your site. That’s another post for another day, though.

Google Changes Mean Major Implications for Analytics Tools

Shelby Thayer — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 02:41:10 +0000

Google has started testing using Ajax to power their search. This may not seem like a big deal, but it is for those who care about web analytics. Why? It completely breaks the way web analytics tools tracks keywords from Google.

How?

If someone searched for this blog on Google in the past, the search string would look like this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=trending+upward&btnG=Search

Today, it looks like this:

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=trending+upward&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=trending+upward&fp=3WTwdsC3GPc

Notice the difference? The second one uses a hashtag (#) instead of the more familiar “search?.” The problem lies in the fact that nothing after the hashtag is passed through to the analytics tool, so your referrals look like they’re from http://www.google.com instead of the actual search string. This also means that there are no search keywords associated with it. Not good. How do we know how users are searching on Google to find us?

From what I’ve read, this is just a test, but who knows how long it will go on?

According to today’s post on the Clicky blog, this isn’t happening across the board yet. Go to Google right now and search on a keyword. See if it’s happened on your end yet.

What does this mean for us, though? A lot, unfortunately. Since almost 75% of our natural search traffic is from Google, this will be a big deal.

Here’s a quick screen shot from this search traffic this morning. It’s already affected our results:

Not only that, through the Clicky blog, I read this post on Smackdown and it spelled out other implications. According to Smackdown:

… this would affect Firefox plugins that existed (definitely some existing ones would stop working), break some of the rank checking tools out there (they would have to be re-written I’m sure), and even some people asking if it would thwart serps scrapers from using serps for auto page generation (not for long, no).

While those things would definitely be affected in at least the short term, there is a much greater impact from Google switching to AJAX.

All of the issues mentioned involve a very small subset of the webmastering community. What actually breaks if Google makes this switchover, and is in fact broken during any testing they are doing, is much more widespread. Every single analytics package that currently exists, at least as far as being able to track what keywords were searched on to find your site in Google, would no longer function correctly.

I’m hoping that either Avinash Kaushik or Brian Clifton post about this soon. I’m really interested in getting their take as they are both close to Google.

Update: Chatter on Twitter and blogs asks if javascript can be used for a workaround. According to yesterday’s post at SearchEngineLand, Sean from Clicky states:

Yes, Javascript can be used to track the #hashmarks at the end of the URL. This isn’t the problem though. Javascript has a variable called “document.referrer” that contains the URL of the referrer for the page you are currently looking at. Web browsers don’t store the hash in this variable, so there is no way for us to get it.

So, the issue is with browser not passing through the variable (because they don’t store it), not with the analytics software not being able to capture it.

Update 2: Google finally responds. It states that this is a test, but it doesn’t state how long the test will run for nor do they address the implications for web analytics tools.

The ironic part for me is that they mention the change is going to improve the user experience, which is great. In doing so, however, Google may be hindering other websites from improving their user experience. Referring keywords is one big way to help improve the relevance of your own website (thus improving the user experience on your site).

Measuring the Success of the Online Course Catalog

Shelby Thayer — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 04:58:19 +0000

The online course catalog is the place where prospects and students go to not only see what courses are offered, but what the prerequisites are, who the instructor is, how many seats are left and more.

The bottom line is the online course catalog is essential for higher education websites. Creating and maintaining a *usable* course catalog is as important. So how do you know if the catalog is usable?

Before going on, I’ll mention that it’s important to not only track the form page, the *results list* page, and the details page, but it’s also a good idea to track what users are entering into the search form.

Another point I’ll mention quickly is that the search engine for our course catalog is independent of the search engine for the rest of our website. For this reason, in our analytics tool, although they are within the same report, we use a pipe (|) delimiter to denote course catalog search results (the pipe separates each input field) while the overall site search results have no pipe delimiter so we can quickly and easily separate out the two results. This technique is probably not the best, but it works well for the time being.

Hard decisions about the course catalog. A little more than a year ago, we decided that something needed to be done about our online course catalog. How did we come to this decision? We not only looked at the analytics, but we also listened to the customer. We found that:

We had a low “search conversion rate.”
Our search form was confusing and thus users were abandoning it.
Students and prospects were calling in with questions that could have been answered using the course catalog.

Low search conversion rate. What do we mean by that? We’ve talked before about conversions not being only for e-commerce sites. In this case, we wanted to figure out what percentage of the time users viewed the search form, searched and got to the results list page, and then clicked through to the course “detail” page?

For example:

catalog-search-form.asp –> catalog-results-list.asp –> course-detail-page.asp

We were finding that the conversion rate was quite low and, further, the conversion rate between the form and the list results (the first step) was low. This means that a high number of users were taking a look at the search form and never actually searching for anything.

Because our search form was quite complex, our assumption was that users were getting confused when confronted with the search form.

Failed search results. Looking at failed search results is more complex. We’ve tagged our search form such that we knew the specific criteria users were inputting into the form to search. At the time, our search form had many input fields:

It was basically an advanced search, but it was our default course catalog search. Our analytics tracked not only what users entered into each field, but how many results came back. What we found was that users were entering too many criteria, thus narrowing their searches so far that no results came up.

Voice of the customer. We were also experiencing a high number of calls that were what we’d call *simple* calls. Questions that the caller could easily help themselves to on our course catalog (if they knew how to find the information).

Time for some user testing. Next, we decided to do some user testing to see if we were, in fact, correct in our assumptions taken from our analytics. If possible, it’s important to user test and not just *assume* user behavior is one way for a reason. This is another reason voice of customer is so important. Basic web analytics can tell you the what, but they cannot tell you the why. That’s where voice of customer (surveys, feedback forms, etc.) and user testing come in. We had our assumptions about what we *thought* was the reason for the poor performing course catalog, but we couldn’t be sure until we saw users struggle with our own eyes.

After testing 8 users, our assumptions were confirmed:

When users were faced with the search form, it took them all quite a long time to search for a course – meaning, they had to think about how to do it. They had to think hard. Obviously we didn’t get the abandonment rate that we saw in our analytics because we were forcing these users to find a certain course so they couldn’t abandon the form.
When users typed in criteria to search for a course, more often than not, they entered too much more criteria than was necessary (guessing at some of the criteria). Because of this, they were getting no results when, in fact, the course they were searching for was actually there.

A facelift and more analysis. After a redesign of the catalog (the form, the results list page, and the detail page), we were careful to analyize the data to see if things improved.

Before the redesign, we found from the analytics that the most used fields were the keyword search, the semester pulldown, and course abbreviation pulldown. We decreased the number of fields on the search to 4 fields (including the top 3 most popular from our analysis as well as a field for schedule number since that’s is how our current students are used to searching for courses.

We did include an *advanced search* so if users were looking for something more specific, the functionality was there for a very focused search.

The course catalog redesign worked. We saw signifant increase in conversion from the search to the results list to the details page. We found that the amount of criteria users are inputing has decreased dramatically and thus, users are getting results to choose from. Further, we found that users were not only getting search results, they were also clicking through to the detail page.

All-in-all it had all the elements of a successful redesign – evaluation and analysis, user testing, redesign, more evaluation and analysis, design tweaking.

When redesigning or updating your websites significantly, it’s important to not stop there, but to continue to analyize the data to make sure the new content and/or design is working.

If not, tweak and repeat.

Must Subscribe Blogs – December 2008

Shelby Thayer — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 22:41:53 +0000

For this month, I’ve subscribed to 3 great blogs (well, 2, I’ll explain below) that I hope you find useful and entertaining. It’s worth noting that I was introduced to all these blogs via the people I follow on Twitter. Yet another reason why Twitter is invaluable to me.

Website Development & Website Marketing tips and Strategies – Thomson Chemmanoor has been a successful online marketing expert since 1997. With his blog, Chemmanoor offers the reader practical lists of tips and tricks for online marketers and website owners. Note: unfortunately the RSS feed for this blog is not working right now. I wrote the author and hopefully it will be working soon. In the meantime, bookmark it.

10 Firefox Extensions for Web Analytics – I don’t know about you, but I’ve all but abandoned other other browsers (except for cross-browser comparison testing) just because of the breadth of extensions available for Firefox. In this post, you’ll be introduced to ten essential extensions for the web analytics freak in all of us (come on, I know there’s one in you!). Although we all probably have WASP and Greasemonkey installed, there were others in the list I hadn’t even heard of and installed immediately.
16 Useful .htaccess Tricks and Hacks For Web Developers – There are some great tips here. I especially like the custom error page creation and the SEO friendly 301 redirect. Another one i found very useful was the linking protection (#6).

Stuntdubl Business Search Marketing Consulting – Stuntdubl is an SEO expert site with a twist of humor thrown in. Thanks to @glenngabe for tweeting a link to this blog and introducing me to Todd Malicoat and his fantastic site. If you’re serious about SEO, you need to subscribe to Stuntdubl.

9 Reasons You Need Social Media Marketing in 2009 – This is a great post which states that social media is the new search engine optimization. Straight from the post: You’re banned from using the company email and internet until you read the Cluetrain, and can name at least 10 social media sites, and which 3 are likely to drive the most traffic. If you’re in a corporation that won’t listen, or change anything because of what lawyers say – you deserve your miserable cubicle dwelling existence for not standing up and pitching things better.

You’re banned from using the company email and internet until you read the Cluetrain, and can name at least 10 social media sites, and which 3 are likely to drive the most traffic. If you’re in a corporation that won’t listen, or change anything because of what lawyers say – you deserve your miserable cubicle dwelling existence for not standing up and pitching things better.

Indexed – This has got to be one of my all time favorite blogs. It’s very simple and not about any particular topic. Each post is an amusing chart, hand-written (or hand-written font written!). Take a look, subscribe to Indexed. You won’t be disappointed. Thanks to @avinashkaushik for the link from a tweet.

Real World Example – Search Engine Traffic

Shelby Thayer — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:54:20 +0000

Let’s get back to talking analytics with a real-world example.

Last week a colleague of mine came to me with a problem. He was optimizing his program website for a few keyword phrases (via organic and paid SEO) that pertain to a specific program he was promoting to prospective students. Although those keyword phrases were getting a *ton* of traffic to his site, he was getting a lot of click-throughs, but nothing else. Why?

Before looking at any analytics, our immediate thought was that the keywords he was targeting might be misleading. Our assumption was that users were typing those keywords into a search engine, seeing our website link, clicking through, but not liking what they saw once they got to our site. Now, the question was, is this segment of our users not finding what they’re looking for on our site or is this segment of our users *not* the right segment we want to target? Are these users getting to our website basically by mistake?

How can we try to get to the truth without actually asking those users? Well, let’s roll our sleeves up.

Digging in. What we found was interesting. We were targeting 4 *suspect* keyword phrases and what we found with one, was basically true for all 4.

For a two month period, we had 3,107 visits from the keyword phrase.

87% of those visits ended their session immediately.
94% of those visits left after viewing only 1 or 2 pages.
Not one visitor took an action on the website (filled out an application, requested more information).
98% of those visitors did not come back to the website.

Hmmm … not very good, huh?

So, what can we infer from these stats? The website might be broken or down or buggy. That wasn’t the case, though. The website could just be terrible and not be user-friendly at all. That’s probably not the case, though, since this specific program is one of our most popular and users are *taking action* on it every hour, every day.

This is where our research got exciting! Our next step was to look to see if any of those visitors searched for something on *our* site. Remember that onsite search can be like a mini usability test. Users type what they are looking for in their own words! Perfect! Well, that was it! Every single internal keyword search where the visit was referred from those *suspect* keywords was for something that was completely unrelated to our website … and *every* one of those searches brought back zero results (obviously).

*Our* context of the keyword was obviously not the *users* context of the keyword.

Instantly Actionable – Internal Site Search

Shelby Thayer — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 04:17:19 +0000

Internal site search can give you so many great insights. Remember, this is how your users are searching your site. I can see you reading this saying, “Duh. Thank you, miss obvious!” Think about it, though. What does that tell you? What does it scream?

Pay attention! That’s what it tells you. Internal site search is like a mini usability test. Instead of formally asking users what they are looking for on your website, they’re telling you … in their own words … without you asking them!

Let me expand.

Take a look at the top internal keyword phrases your users are searching for on your website. What type of terminology do your users use? Is that same terminology used on your website? Now take a look at how many of those keyword phrases bring back *zero* results? Why are they bringing back zero results? Are your users searching for something that isn’t on your site? Are you using the word “cost” when your users are searching for the word “tuition?” Looking at this specific report can give you so many instant insights.

Looking at it from another angle. Let’s say your top internal keyword search term/phrase is “tuition.” Look further. What pages are your users on when they search for “tuition?” Hmmm … is tuition located on that page anywhere? Should it be? Is it buried four paragraphs deep and users are missing it? Looking deeper into your internal keyword reports can give you key insights into not only the terminology of your users but also *where* within your site your users are searching for certain topics. Where do your users *think* these terms should logically be found within your site?

When users search for phrases using your internal search engine, pay attention to where they go after they land on your results page. Do they leave your site? Do they go back to the site search?

Your internal search engine reports tells you exactly *what* your users are searching for and *how* they are searching. Instant insights. Instantly actionable.