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Meta Keywords and Google

On September 28, 2009, in Stuff we've learned, Web/Tech, by Philip Boyle

We often get asked about our experiences with SEO, usually about what worked for us and what didn’t. Keywords are a topic that come up again and again. The video above comes from Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, and it neatly summarises the fact that when it comes to Google’s main search product, meta keywords are completely ignored.

That should be the end of that then. But it isn’t.

A lot of people seem to get mixed up between keywords and meta keywords, thinking they are exactly the same thing, so the video above might be taken by some people to mean that ALL keywords are ignored by Google. That just isn’t the case.

The word “keywords” can mean many things interchangeably, but for the purposes of this blog post, let’s  refer to a set of keywords as the most important words, phrases or acronyms that your potential visitors will use to find a particular page of content on your site.

For these potential visitors to find your page, the keywords they use, or their synonyms or related keywords will have to appear on or pointing to the page somewhere. These keywords can  appear in:

  • the body text of your page
  • the URL of the page, including the domain name
  • the page title of the page
  • the meta description of the page
  • the H1 tag on the page
  • the alt text of images on the page
  • the links to the page

And that’s just off the top of my head. They can also still appear in your meta keywords, even if Google currently chooses to ignore them THERE.

You should still be doing your keyword research for each page (or set of pages) and using those keywords you identify as being the most important in the page elements listed in the paragraph above. Google even offer some good free tools to help you find out what keywords to use. I’d recommend Google’s Search Insights, Google Analytics, their free AdWords Keyword Tool, and even Google Trends. Add your own favourite keyword research tools in the comments below.

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Philip Boyle

Philip is the marketing manager at WhatClinic.com.

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Video of Caelen at BizCamp 2009

On September 22, 2009, in Conferences, by Philip Boyle

Here’s the first ten minutes of Caelen’s talk at BizCamp 2009 in the Guinness Storehouse last weekend, covering the 4 main points you need to think about when starting a web business:

  1. Who will pay?
  2. How much will they pay?
  3. How will they pay?
  4. Can you reconcile revenue to costs?

Elsewhere on the blog you can find the full set of slides for Caelen’s web revenue models presentation. He has also written up the first half of his presentation.

Personally, it was great to hear a lot of people feeling very positive about their businesses, from the brand new start-ups like Cloudsplit (Real time analytics for the cloud) to the better established companies like Realex Payments, and it was good to meet up with some friendly networking faces again – hi to @LeoFogarty, @CareersCoachEU, @UnaColeman, and @redoaktaxrefund.

Big thanks to the whole team of volunteers for organising the day in the first place and hopefully you all got as much value out of it as myself and Caelen did.

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Philip Boyle

Philip is the marketing manager at WhatClinic.com.

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Using Wikipedia Content to Combat Duplicate Content

On September 21, 2009, in Stuff we've learned, Web/Tech, by Marta Sawicka

We publish a lot of web pages on RevaHealth.com, tens of millions of them in fact. One of the SEO problems we run into because of this is that a lot of them are very similar to other pages on the site. For example our page for cosmetic surgeons in London is extremely similar to our page for cosmetic surgeons in the EC district of London. This results in the search engines sometimes thinking that we are publishing duplicate pages, even though the pages are perfectly valid and are distinct pages from a newly landed user’s perspective.

The SEO problem with duplicate pages is that Google doesn’t want to clog up its index with a whole bunch of duplicate content, so it tries to cull the duplicate content from its index. In our case it only includes cosmetic surgeons in London in its search results.

In the past we included machine generated text on each page, in an effort to describe on the page in a way people could easily understand what the content was without having to write tens of millions of descriptions by hand. However, because this particular block of text was quite similar from page to page, it hindered us rather than helped us in relation to duplicate content. So we set about trying to find a way to increase the originality of each page.

On a side note, it is possible for you to take control over your own duplicate content and to tell the search engines which page is the original or most important version of a page rather than letting them make that decision for you. You can use either canonical URLs or 301 redirects, something we’ll discuss in another blog post. For now, this is something that we do already, but as the pages are actually valid, non-duplicate pages for our visitors, we think that this shouldn’t be necessary.

So, going back to looking at how to increase the originality of the content on our pages, we took our search results for Dentists in Mexico as our test bed. For 50% of the locations in Mexico we added 2-3 paragraphs of location descriptions taken from Wikipedia. Wikipedia has relevant content that can be re-used on other sites thanks to the GNU Free Documentation License. The link to the original source of the text was included underneath.

We were hoping that syndicating content from Wikipedia could alleviate the duplicate content issue along with giving our visitors a better experience. We let the test run for three months.

The Results

Although our results shouldn’t be regarded as complete, we found that the inclusion of Wikipedia content on our search results pages had no effect on whether the page was included in the main Google index.

However, we also found that all pages with Wikipedia content that were already in the search results dropped by around 3 positions, while all control pages gained on average 2 positions!

Search engines want and reward original content. It is known that Google uses document similarity techniques to keep searchers from finding redundant content in search results. Our experiment left no doubt about it. I only wonder how will Google solve the problem in the current large scale web syndication era if it is possible to find 5 exactly the same articles on the top 5 sites in the results for many of Google searches, e.g.

http://www.google.com/#q=Get+Motivated+to+Create+New+AdSense+Content

About the author

Marta Sawicka

Marta is a product manager and an SEO expert at WhatClinic.com.

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Business & Revenue Model Presentation for Bizcamp Dublin

On September 18, 2009, in Conferences, Start ups, by Caelen King

You can also check out this video of Caelen at BizCamp Dublin and his write up of the first half of his presentation on online business and revenue models.

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Caelen King

Caelen King is CEO and founder of WhatClinic.com, the medical search engine that helps people find clinics anywhere.

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Performance Improvements by Caching Fewer Pages

On September 10, 2009, in Web/Tech, by Caelen King

The time it takes to render a landing page dramatically affects bounce rate. If it takes more than around 4 seconds for a visitor to start seeing your page they get bored and hit the back button.  We continually invest in engineering improvements to improve our page load times and constantly monitor key metrics, however as traffic patterns and server loads change, so do the rules of the game.

We have implemented nearly every performance enhancement possible and by far the most effective one for dynamic pages is page caching. What caching  does is store a copy of every page in the web server’s cache for a period of time. If someone requests the page during that period of time then the web server can serve it up immediately without having to make a request to the actual application.

For us this cuts a full second off of our page load time.  However, recently our page caching started becoming less effective and a greater percentage of landing pages where not in the cache, resulting in increased page load times and increased bounce rate.

The problem was that over the last six months the number of landing pages that the search engines were sending traffic to increased exponentially.  Every month Google sends visitors to over 100,000 different landing pages out of the 250,000 pages that it has indexed.

Caching 100,000 pages in itself is not problematic, however because we dynamically convert pricing on each landing page to the local currency of the visitor it meant we were in effect trying to cache a multiple of this number. At times this was as high as 60 different copies.

This caused our front cache to constantly flush the older pages resulting in decreased coverage of the landing pages.

We examined two possible solutions. The first one was adding more hardware.  This wasn’t a good idea because our problem was an exponential problem as both our landing page and countries that visitors were arriving from were increasing. We came to the realization that we had to stop caching a different page for each source country.

The problem was that we still wanted to have the performance improvements of page caching and to be able to localize into each visitor’s currency.

Our solution was to only cache a single master page for each landing page with the price in Euro. We then store the visitor’s currency and conversion rate in a cookie that we place in their browser. We use JavaScript in the browser to calculate and  display the currency.

This has allowed us to work with the boundaries of our existing hardware and implement a scaling strategy that has near linear requirements on hardware.

About the author

Caelen King

Caelen King is CEO and founder of WhatClinic.com, the medical search engine that helps people find clinics anywhere.

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Changes To Our Search Results To Improve Visitor Engagement

On September 4, 2009, in Web/Tech, by Caelen King
The old search page

The old search results

We deployed an updated version of the RevaHealth.com website last night that focused upon the usability of our main search pages. The goal of these changes is to make it easier for users to refine their search results and increase their engagement with the site.

We are closely monitoring the performance of this change and are expecting to see a noticeable increase in the number of pages viewed by the average visitor. We also expect to see a drop in our bounce rate, however we expect this to be slight. If the test succeeds the next goal will be to convert the increased engagement with the site into delivering value to both the visitor and the clinics featured on the site.

  1. We reduced the prominence of the search functionality. While the search boxes are still visible and constantly available we have discovered that the vast majority of our visitors are either interested in further refining their search or broadening it. It is rare that they want to jump into different categories or locations. Eye tracking analysis tells us that putting the search box on the right hand side of the page means that most visitors simply won’t notice it. This works as long as the page is relevant to the visitor, however some users will always land on the wrong page and having the search function available is still important.

  2. The new search results

    The new search results

    We logically grouped all of the search functionality into one cohesive unit by putting a white background behind it. Previously the search functionality comprised of three separate items that needed to be tied together into one function by the visitor. Now by strongly visually linking them we hope to have simplified this.

  3. We changed the filtering mechanism from tick boxes and radio buttons, replacing them with drop down lists. While we don’t feel the new interface is as elegant or visually appealing as the previous filtering, it is more standard and occupies less real estate. We expect that by adopting the more common practice of drop downs and not forcing our users into learning a relatively unique UI that we will increase the use of this feature. This will give the visitor better and more relevant search results.

  4. We increased the size of the title on the page and spaced it out more so that visitors who land on page for the first time can instantly see what the page is about.

  5. We added the number of clinics that are returned by a search. So instead of saying ‘All Dentists in XXXX’ we now say ‘All 212 Dentists in XXXX’

  6. We have added breadcrumbs into the header of the page for visitors that want to broaden their search criteria. We are not 100% sure about this feature and we expect to do further tests on their placement on the page.
About the author

Caelen King

Caelen King is CEO and founder of WhatClinic.com, the medical search engine that helps people find clinics anywhere.

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Why Do You Need an Online Enquiry Form?

On September 3, 2009, in Stuff we've learned, by Caelen King

Lots of clinics don’t have an online enquiry form on their website. After all why do you need an enquiry form when you can just put your phone number on your website? If someone wants more information they can just call you, can’t they? Unfortunately, this assumption is wrong.

In our guide to sales funnels for health clinics we include the online enquiry (form) as a distinct stage. It is a part of the process that brings consumers into the sales funnel proper, so it is not a step that you should consider trying to skip by leaving the form off your website. Here’s why:

  1. 24/7. Customers look at your website all the time; on the weekends and in the middle of the night. Will they get a good consumer experience by ringing you at this time? If all you have is an answering machine then the answer is no.  Most won’t bother to leave you a message, and you are relying on them to remember to call you again the next day, which they probably won’t. An online enquiry form is available 24/7, and it is easy to set up to meet your customers’ expectations (see moving prospective customers through the sales funnel).
  2. Phone calls can interrupt your normal daily business. An online enquiry form empowers you to use your staff resources as they are needed, and then to have them deal with the online enquiries when they are not so busy.
  3. The form allows you to weed out the time wasters. Many people who call the clinic aren’t really a potential patient at all. It might be that they can’t afford your services, or that they aren’t in your catchment area.  By using an online enquiry form you can weed these time wasters out and reply with a polite standard email rather than tying up your staff with another phone call.
  4. Be prepared. An online enquiry form gives you the time to prepare information for the specific query so that when you do actually talk to the patient you can meet their expectations by being able to talk directly to their concerns. A phone call does not give you this opportunity, and you can be forced to terminate the call in order to get further information. This does not give the consumer a good experience.
  5. Capture the patient’s information reliably. Everyone has had the experience of talking to a potential patient and taking down their contact information incorrectly, or maybe your computer is booting up and you write it on a scrap of paper only for the cleaner to put it in the bin. Now the patient expects you to call back and you never do – how likely do you think it is that they will call back? If they do, what sort of impression have you given of your clinic? Online enquiry forms can solve this problem.
  6. Some people don’t want to talk. Many potential patients who are early in the buying cycle are not prepared to talk on the phone and would rather remain at arm’s length for the time being. If you don’t have an online enquiry form then you are excluding them.

Hopefully you can now see some of the benefits in having a dedicated online enquiry form.

I’ll finish with one final piece of advice – even though we recommend strongly that you use an online enquiry form on your site, our own survey of consumers tells us that your phone number is also in the top five pieces of information that they are looking for on your site. Don’t forget to make it easy to find, in the header or footer of the page, and include it on your enquiry form too.

About the author

Caelen King

Caelen King is CEO and founder of WhatClinic.com, the medical search engine that helps people find clinics anywhere.

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