Once you’ve completed your Meta Title the next thing is to write your Meta Description; together, these are what you see when Google returns search results; the Title is the blue link and the Description is the words beneath it – and they are critical for your B2B marketing.

Why is the Meta Description Important?

The Meta Description is used to describe a webpage and Google always uses it if it accurately describes the page and is the right length.

Creating a Meta Description

The description should be specific to the page it is referring to and contain keywords/phrases that are found in the page Title and that are relevant to the page content.

The description must read well; SEO is a second priority to this. Put the most important keyword first, minimise irrelevancies and put the essentials near the beginning.

The description should have no more than 155 characters (including spaces) and, again, should include all the main keywords yet still make literal sense, even if it is a little ‘clunky’. For example one of the descriptions for Lead Creations is:

B2B Marketing strategists. We shorten your sales cycle by gathering, engaging, then selling.

The keywords that have been used are “B2B Marketing” and “shorten your sales cycle”. It’s better to optimise each page for one or two keywords at the most.

Exaggerating Text

This is done through using punctuation marks such as pipes (|), commas, exclamation marks and ellipses (….)

These all help separate content and encourage browsers to click on the link to your page. Using ellipses at the end is a subliminal suggestion encouraging them to click, as it suggests more…

Keywords Metadata: Dead

In a page’s Metadata, the Keywords field is where, in the past, you would list the Keywords and Keyword phrases relevant for the specific company/page.

However Google announced in late 2009 that it no longer considers Keywords entered into this field. The simple reason for this was Keyword spamming—webmasters were stuffing 50 or more Keywords in this field, as it was the only tag never visible to people.

Although other search engines may consider this field, in terms of marketing, Google is the only search engine that matters in the developed economies.

Final Tip: Use Keywords in Page URLs

A final tip is to use your Keywords in the URL, wherever possible…. and please, make the name consistent with what is on the page and in the Title.

Tricks to try and get visitors to think something else is on the page are very irritating and will never help to build trust or a closer relationship.

You can separate words with underscores or dashes as the URL does not need to read well—but be sure to state the main Keyword for that page. Avoid having more than 2-3 words in the URL after the / and no more than 65 characters.

Example of Folder/Directory Naming:

Worst: /index.php?=12679%20guide%20download.html

Bad: “/na/do/”

Better: “/content/seo-guide/”

Best: “/seo/free-seo-guide/”

Example of File Naming:

Bad: “final%20guide%20october.pdf”

Better: “final_guide_october.pdf”

Best: “free_seo_guide.pdf”

If you follow the above and combine it with well written Meat Titles there is absolutely no reason why you won’t see almost instant results for your Google rankings and lead generation.

First, a little background as to what filters spam

All email clients (Outlook, GMail etc.) have spam filters. You are also able to install a third party spam filter on top of your existing spam filters. So, you can install a spam filter into Outlook, or even into your mail exchange (where email is handled).

Now, why does your email get sent to junk?

There are a number of reasons for this. They are usually sent to junk because they appear to be junk (in the eyes of your spam filter):

1. The history on the domain (server host) is poor: When you send an email, it comes from a domain e.g. @leadcreation.com.au. If I forever send junk emails and people keep marking it as spam, then this information is fed into a global database where eventually, my domain is rated as a spammy domain.

This is why companies like MailChimp don’t allow you to send to third party lists. If you are sending spam from their servers, then eventually all emails from their servers will not get through to the recipients. You’re killing their business if you send spam.

2. The content of the email appears spammy: Some spam filters look for overly spammy headlines, too many images or too much text. You need to ensure that these high profile elements (headings, subject lines etc.) do not contain spammy words e.g. buy, cheap, viagra etc. The big killer is when an email has too many links.

If you have a combination of all of the above (lots of images, lots of links and spammy headlines and subjects) then it’s likely that the combination of these get sent to spam.

3. The end user has an aggressive spam filter: If you’re sending to government or large corporates, or if your list mostly consists of professionals such as doctors, accountants and bankers, then you’re going to find that a lot of your emails will go to junk automatically for most of these people due to the security of their spam filters.

All spam filters have a threshold and then give a ‘spam value’ to each element of your email. It will add up a cumulative amount up to that threshold before it sends it to junk. Let’s say, for example, my spam filter will filter anything with a spam value 4 or over, then I send an email with spammy elements:

• Headline spammy: 0.5
• Subject spammy: 1.2
• Too many links: 2.0
• Host doesn’t rate well: 2.0

Straight away you’re going to see that this email is going to add up to a value of 5.7, which is way over the threshold that my spam filter sets. It will get sent to junk.

People with overly agressive spam filters have a lower threshold.

The simple answer is marketing. Marketing to a bunch of people who are prospects, existing customers or other stakeholders.

Who typically controls the website in a company? IT. What does IT know about marketing? Nothing. Does IT need to control modern websites? No. Can sites now be edited and updated by non-IT people? Easily.

Does anyone need to control your site? Absolutely, it is your public window to the world and needs careful managing. Who should control it? The people responsible for marketing. Responsible for the messages you are putting out into the world.

It’s way past time that IT was pushed aside. And remove probably the biggest bottle neck in your marketing.

More on Website for Lead Generation here.

Inside an account you can place varying websites. These are called Properties. You can store websites, applications etc here.

For each property you can setup multiple Profiles. Profiles are ways of filtering user segments. For example, you can create a property that only shows mobile visitors, or a property that filters out your own IP address etc.

You can have individual users for an Account, or for a Profile, but not for a Property.

To set the users, go to your Analytics account and from the top right corner select Admin. When you click on the account or property, you will see the user tab available.

Users can be setup as Administrators or Users. Administrators have rights to alter and change things inside the account. Users simply have viewing rights.

The words in your Meta Title are the most important words on your website. That’s right – unless you get this right you are handicapping your lead generation efforts.

Why is the Meta Title so Important?

It is important both for SEO purposes and because it is the ‘doorway’ to your website that potential visitors will see; simply put, if it is not persuasive, you will lose a potential visitor to your web page.

It is the number one factor Google considers when trying to work out how relevant your page is to any search, and it can be considered the page’s ‘headline’.

Now, has that convinced you that you need to take the Meta Title seriously in your B2B marketing, for each and every page on your site?

Creating a Meta Title

The Title is 65 characters long, including spaces. As with all online text, the first word is more highly valued by the ‘algorithm’ than the second word, etc.

Try to use your main keyword first or at least early on in the title. The sentence should still make literal sense and must be persuasive. If your company name contains keywords, you can use it in the title. If not, put it in the description.

Your keywords are the foundation stones when it comes to editing your data. These keywords target the traffic that you want to obtain.

Put your keywords up on the wall or somewhere prominent and refer to them constantly for all the different pieces of online B2B marketing you do.

Make the Title Descriptive

“Welcome to the Website of Company X” is a total waste of SEO “juice.” The Title must describe the page and be persuasive if you want lead generation from it.

If you have used the same Title for every page, visitors will likely check your site and won’t find what they are looking for. They will ‘bounce’ off your site—and Google factors your ‘bounce rate’ in how highly they rank your site.

Remember you can also use abbreviations for non-Keywords and numbers in titles and this will help you keep to 65 characters or less. You might need to use ‘4’ instead of ‘for’ and ‘&’ instead of ‘and’ for example; pipes (|) are very helpful in keeping it short and creating a clear barrier between different concepts.

To give you an idea of how this works, here’s the Title of the copywriting page on the Lead Creation site and a breakdown of how it is made up:

B2B Marketing strategy|How copywriting shortens B2B Sales Cycle

(Keyword) + (‘|’ to save space) + (Keyword) + (description of page content) — 63 characters including spaces

Hopefully that all makes sense and you are ready to go away and rewrite all the titles of the pages on your site! But hold up a second – you might as well learn how to write good Descriptions too; that’s dealt with in a separate post.

Find out more about Lead Generation here.

Firstly, you need to understand that there are two ways of optimising websites—what you do on your own website (On Page) and what you do on other people’s websites to point to yours (Off Page).

The appropriate use of keywords is integral to both types of optimisation, if you are to generate leads from your VIPs.

If you were to spend a lot of money to employ an SEO “Guru” he should include many of the following tips and techniques for improving your on page SEO and search engine rankings.

• Use Keywords in your navigation menu links. This gives additional SEO significance to the pages to which the links refer.
• Use Keywords in your URL – Google loves it. One of our clients is a trainer of other trainers. We bought the URL www.trainingthetrainer.com.au for them and having this major keyword in their address gave their new website a huge boost. A bad URL example? Most law firms use partners names (even dead ones!) in their URL. This is a huge waste.
• Use Keywords in the name of an HTML page file – it has a major effect on your ranking.
• Create a site map of your website to allow search-engine ‘spiders’ easy access to your entire site.
• Use Keywords and descriptions in your ‘anchor text’ (the underlined text in the actual link). Those who know nothing about SEO write ‘Click Here’ as their link, which is a complete waste of this extremely valuable real estate.
• Use the Alt Tag attribute on images. This provides images with a text description that can be ‘seen’ by Google, because the website analysis programs cannot read images or graphics just by themselves.
• Use Keywords in your site’s metadata. The metadata provides information about your pages and consists of a title and description. As browsers and other programs read the metadata, it’s vital that you include key words to optimise your page. NB: you do not need to use the third metadata field called ‘Keywords’, as Google long ago stopped considering it when ranking your site.
• Keep your navigation menu or header simple. If it consists of graphic elements to make it more attractive, search engines may not be able to index the text of its links. Your navigation menu/header must be text based.
• Use Keywords in headings. Headings are text highlighted with larger and/or bolded fonts. You only need to highlight each Keyword once or twice on a page for it to have a positive effect on your ranking.

Just following these few guidelines will put your business streets ahead of the competition; most businesses are simply not doing this and leave their SEO in the hands of someone not well equipped to be looking after it. Taking your on page SEO more seriously will greatly improve traffic and lead generation.

It always amazed me how Google could return search results in a fraction of a second (even if you don’t have a high speed connection and a fast PC), and how it could search the entire Web returning relevant results, all ranked in order?

The secret? Google doesn’t search the Web.

They just search their own database.

Google’s Crawlers

Google’s web “crawlers” (“spiders”/”robots”) automatically copy the content of websites into their own (rather large!) database. They then analyse the content and determine how relevant each page is to the search terms (Keywords) that people type in.

So the Google crawlers copy all the latest content on your page and store it in their database. This content may be old, if you haven’t updated your site recently.

When Did Google Last Come to Your Town?

To find out when Google last visited your site, type your company name in and search; then, in the relevant result, click on the word ‘Cached’ after the URL appears. This shows the page Google currently stores and when they last visited you.

Your goal with SEO is to make them visit you more often. If your content never changes, they won’t have a reason to come back.

This is why, for any business looking for a sustainable B2B marketing strategy that maintains good rankings, you need to regularly add high quality content to your site.

Read more about Lead Generation here.

There are thousands of millions of web pages online with thousands created every hour. How do you achieve any lead generation from all this competition?  How will potential clients find your site in this rapidly-expanding sea of information?

Search Engine Optimization

The cold, hard truth is that if you don’t know anything about Search Engine Optimization, prospects searching for you won’t find you and you won’t get any leads from your brand new, great- looking, expensive website that you thought was going to be the answer.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process by which you deliberately optimize each page of your website.

Why? So that when your VIPs (Very Important Prospects) are searching for services like yours, they will find you before your competitors.

The Dominance of Google

Essentially, SEO is the process of making your website more relevant in the eyes of Google and therefore featuring higher in search results.

In most countries, for B2B marketing, Google is by far the most dominant search engine. The techniques to optimize for Google are very similar to those for the other engines and will work there as well.

If you want prospects to find you, you need to be towards the top of the first results page—in the top 10 results. The simple fact is that the higher up you are on the results page, the more people will click on your link.

A ranking on page one of Google will greatly increase the traffic to your site. People don’t and won’t sort through the thousands of entries that come up in their search. Most of us rarely even go to the second page.

So you need to aim for the top, that much is clear; watch out for our other posts on SEO, which help show you how you can get there.

Find out more about SEO with Lead Generation here.

The highest value terms to your business are those terms where someone types into Google exactly what it is you do – they therefore click, and call you because they have found what they’re looking for. We find that balance between High Value and Traffic.

Long tailed keywords (longer phrases) are more valuable to you; lower competition and more exact as to what you provide. Shorter phrases have higher traffic, but are more general.

Say that I have a Pizza & Pasta restaurant in Crows Nest, Sydney. Here are some alternative keywords and their traffic:

Now, although Pizza Restaurant has very high traffic, someone in Melbourne might be searching it, what is the value to you of ranking? Nothing.

Pizza Sydney is closer. But again, what is the likelihood that you’re ranking for something of use? If someone in Liverpool is searching it, it’s useless for you to rank.

The highest value keyword here is the middle one, because it is exactly what you do, who you are etc. and has some considerable traffic. Pizza Crows Nest has 720 searches per month.

So, you see, you shouldn’t automatically go for the very broad, high traffic keywords. Aim for the lower traffic more exact keywords that are going to transpire into business!