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June 3, 2008
Check Your SERPs!
Guest Post By Mark Speener
If you had paid for an advertisement in a local newspaper, you would check your ad for accuracy because it’s the first impression given a potential customer. You should also be checking your SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for the same reason.
You can’t decide what goes there, but, you can see what the search engines have chosen then you can try to manipulate what they are showing your potential customers.
One thing you’re going to need is an analytics package like Google Analytics or Awstats installed on your site so you can capture the keywords people use to find your site.
Let take a look at one of my sites: NASDrives.net.
We can see what keywords give me my most of my visitors. Let’s take a look at nas drive on Yahoo! where it’s currently 5th.
NAS Drives - Get A Cheap NAS Drive
Get A Cheap NAS Drive! Find news, reviews, articles and a buyers guide at NASDrives.net! … Printing - Surfers Paradise Hotels Copyright © 2008 NAS Drives …
www.nasdrives.net - Cached
It looks fine until you get to the footer area and you see Surfers Paradise Hotels. Why is that there? I’m part of a link trading program and I don’t have much control over what goes there. I think I’ll try moving that out of the footer and put it somewhere else now that I know how it shows up in the SERPs.
This is my first impression to a visitor and they may not click due to something irrelevant in my search result. I thought “Hey, no one will look at the footer”. Now I see that everyone is.
Let look at one more site: Lladro Figurines.
Now our Live Search results for lladro collectibles:
The unusual thing there is the lack of the word collectibles anywhere in my site’s search result. Notice that the one above me has it in the URL and the one below has it in the title. If I changed my title to Lladro Collectible Figurines and Lladro Porcelain @ BuyThatFrom.Us then maybe I could take the top spot.
Not only does your search result matter, your competitions result matters too. Even if your at #30 it doesn’t hurt to look at the Top 10 and see why they are ranking.
If you’ve been putting time and effort into keyword research and targeting, make sure you take that next step and examine your search results to see how your site gets presented by the search engines. You won’t regret it.
Mark Speener is a professional network administrator and an Internet marketer. He runs the BuyThatFrom.Us network of BANS stores.
9 Responses to “Check Your SERPs!”
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Interesting post Mark! I hadn’t even thought about making changes based on the search engine results, but obviously it makes a lot of sence to do so. I just made a couple changes on my site to see if the search engine will use the same area of text with the changes I’ve made. I only made minor changes that I think will actually make a big difference to customers, so hopefully the search engines don’t decide to pick up text from different parts of the page!
Thanks,
Gene
Is it easy to install Awstats I use godaddy for hosting and thier tracking sucks…but I like their service.
Desmond
Very good post Mark S. Love the template for that NAS site. I look forward to the day I can develop a site as good as that one.
Mark,
Great article and one that I need to re-read a few times and study - thanks.
Looked at the NASDrives.net site and spotted a couple of things that I’d love to be able to implement and was - cheekily I admit - wondering if you’d give me some pointers…
..Firstly, how do you manage to not display the ‘right now on ebay’ logo? The site looks so much more professional without it.
Secondly, you have a great Search / Advanced Search at the top of the site, how can I do the same?
Hope you don’t mind me asking, but as the adage goes, ‘if you don’t ask you don’t get’.
Regards,
G.
The template is a modified BANS layout-1-left that I made a bit wider and changed the color scheme. That search box is part of that basic theme. I think I made it wider. That was my first experience with CSS and I spent days getting it the way I wanted it.
The logo came from Cooltext.com.
That was my very first BANS store.
Mark, thanks for the reply. Have checked out Cooltext.com and used it for my latest BANS site.
Can you explain how you can set a BANS template to not display the ‘right now on ebay’ logo? please.
Hi Mark,
I really enjoyed your post about the SERP’s.
I was wondering on your NAS site what you use for your “feed”
for your news page?
Thanks,
Randy
G: I think there’s a checkbox in the setup of BANS 3.0 to turn of the ebay logo.
Randy: I think I’m using Yahoo Pipes to meld a lot of tech RSS feeds together and then sorting out the posts that are about NAS Drives.
Mark,
Thanks - can’t believe I asked such a dumb question!
G.