Nathan Jackson » Marketing

Character limits for your title & meta description tags

Nathan — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 12:14:48 +0000

Your page title & meta description are what the major search engines use on the SERPS to display each page, and optimising these tags can help clickthrough rates. People may say that the meta keywords tag is important too, but there really isn’t any point in wasting the bytes its written in.

So, try to keep your page title under 70 characters and having the meta description under 150 characters means that on the SERPS nothing will be cut short. Below is a tool that you can paste your titles & description in. Enjoy

Page title (70)		0
Meta description (150)		0

Google Adwords text advert character limits

Nathan — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 12:07:52 +0000

Here’s a quick javascript length validation for your Google AdWord’s adverts. The headline must be 25 characters in length, descriptions 1,2 & the display url are 35. Characters include spaces and punctuation!

But remember, even though your advert may be the right length, you still need to conform to advertising policies! Having excess punctuation, capitalisation, promotion of illegal or shady activities & repeated words can dissaprove your advert.

Enjoy

Google PPC Adverts
Headline (25)		0
Description 1 (35)		0
Description 2 (35)		0
Display URL (35)		0

Tracking events with Google Analytics

Nathan — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 13:51:56 +0000

So, we had some hyperlinked images on one of our websites, each leading to the same page, but with a different $_GET which identifies which button this was. As far as my knowledge goes, that would have made the page duplicate (in google robot’s eyes), which then would have a minor impact on the organic page rankings.

And because organic page ranking is quite important, I thought I’d do some digging regarding to tracking hyperlinks with Google Analytics. I found lots of information regarding to tracking form buttons, flash files and allsorts but most were crowded with extra information.

The line of code that tracks this event is quite simple, and all you need to do is add it into your or your

onClick=”pageTracker._trackEvent(category, action, optional_label, optional_value)”

Category in this case was the general name for the event which happened to be ‘Buttons’.
Action in this case was what they’d done, so I named it ‘Click’.
Optional_Label in this case wa a numerical indicator dependant on which button was clicked.
Optional Value I didn’t acually use, as I didn’t see any point in assigning the button a value, as each was equal as each other.

It should look something like this:
Link text here

Sorted! Just log into your Google Analytics account, go to the website report -> Content -> Event Tracking and within a few days you’ll see some numbers

Need a hand? Just post a comment!

The world of twitter!

Nathan — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 19:44:41 +0000

So, I joined twitter around Christmas after hearing bits about it for the past year or so. Basicly its a blogging tool, but the letter limit is 140 charecters long, so its really a ‘microblogging’ tool. You can imagine it as the Facebook ‘status’ text, but alot cooler

Basicly, you sign up and then enter your mobile phone number (if you want sms updates), then your ready to tweet to your hearts content! Its a very simple concept, but the best thing about twitter is that you don’t have to make a huge blogpost, you get straight to the point and its very quickly ‘out there’ to those who are following you, this means that theres alot of potential for information thats flying about.

You can do the following things with twitter:

You can follow other people and receive their ‘tweets’
People can follow you and receive your ‘tweets’
Receive SMS updates – Though this service doesn’t seem to be available for UK phone numbers
Reply to other ‘tweets’ and give your opinions
Search the tweets for a certain bit of text

Because of twitters simple API, there are alot of different ways to use twitter – whether thats tweeting or just reading other tweets. You can do the following to use twitter:

Access twitter.com from your PC
Access m.twitter.com from your mobile phone
Apps for your Iphone
- Twitterific
- Pocket Tweets
Google Gadgets
Twhirl – A Desktop application
Spaz – Another Desktop application
A Widget for your Opera Browser
WidSets for your mobile phone
TweetDeck – An Adobe Air application

Twitter is becoming more popular day by day, so why not sign up and see what all the fuss is about!

Some useful SEO / Marketing resources

Nathan — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 18:19:58 +0000

At work I find myself trying to find more and more information about SEO and online Marketing. I don’t consider myself to be awesome at SEO, so instead of preaching I’ll direct you to those who can / do There are many websites that aid me in the daily task of this, most of which that I’ve found by using Google Reader.

First off, Google Reader is one of the most useful tools I use in a day, instead of looking around on the various sites (some which may not have updates), I just subscribe to the various news feeds via Google Reader and every time there’s a new post, It picks up on this and give me a title and a short description of the new news story. If i deem the story interesting, i click the link and there I am…onto the page – awaiting the information overload!

Why search through loads of different sites when you can just get given the latest news from the ones you pick? You’d be silly not to.

So, what you should do is to sign up to Google Reader and subscribe to a few of the following sites: (In no paticular order

If you have anything to add, go ahead and reply in the comments! I look forward to hearing from people.