Marketing Effectiveness Score
When they look for information on the Internet, most people start with a search engine they’re familiar with. For a vast majority of people, this means Google. If you want people to find your website, one of the best (free) ways is by making sure that the search engines know about it, and know what it’s about. This process is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.
There’s a lot of information about SEO on the Internet, but many (too many) of the sites reviewed on this website ignore it completely, which results in dismal search engine rankings and less traffic. If your competitor appears on the first page of a Google search for ‘left handed wing nuts’, and your site is on page 37, who do you think is going to get the business?
My Marketing Effectiveness score is a way for me to compare the marketing effectiveness of websites. It’s based on a large number of variables, mostly to do with the on-page optimization of the site and the number of incoming links.
Some of the factors taken into account by the score are:
The Page Title – this is the text that appears in the blue bar at the very top of your screen. The Page Title is one of the most important elements for telling the search engine what your page is about. If it is related to the content on the page, it’ll improve your score. If it’s ‘Untitled Page’ or ‘Index’, you’ll lose points.
Meta Keywords and Meta Description – Having too many keywords is a Bad Thing. Not all of the search engines use the Meta Keywords, but it’s good to have the most important keywords listed here. The Meta Description is sometimes used by the search engines as part of the listing for your site, so it’s a good idea to make sure that it’s well-written.
Page Structure – I was quite surprised to find a couple of sites using frames. This technique appeared in Jakob Neilsen’s ‘Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design’ back in the prehistory of the Internet – 1996. Why do web designers insist on using frames? Who knows? Neilsen’s objections had to do with the user experience and the difficulty of bookmarking and printing framed pages. My biggest objection is that most of the search engines will not crawl framed pages. The Search Engine Optimization part of my Marketing Effectiveness score simply gives up with a score of 0% if it finds frames on a page.
Too much JavaScript - JavaScript is a scripting language which is useful for validating form data and creating dynamic menus. As with frames, search engines can’t read JavaScript. If you want them to find your web pages, you should make sure that JavaScript is kept to a minimum.
Text embedded in images – some of the sites we reviewed have text content burned into the images. The search engines can’t read this text, and this results in very low scores.
Incoming links: One of the very best ways to get a high search engine ranking and all the good things that come with it is by getting other websites to link to you. Back in the day, “reciprocal linking” was all the rage. This has become less effective now. But it’s not that difficult to get the coveted “one-way” links you need to dominate the search engines. One of the sites I reviewed has over 4,000 incoming links. Combined with well-optimized pages and good layout, and it’s not surprising that it scores highly.
If you don’t want to do this yourself, there are plenty of people who will do it for you. Of course, I recommend my service, IdealMedia.
