Here’s an article which backs up something I’d been fairly sure about for quite a while. According to Improve click-throughs with the right URL names on Industrial Search Engine Marketing, the actual URL (the web page address) in Google results (the bit in green) is becoming more important. I agree. If I type in “widget review” into Google, I know that 9 out of 10 results which come up are not going to be reviews of widgets, but shopping sites selling widgets which have managed to score well for the term “widget review” without having any decent reviews. I’m sure you’ve seen the same thing. So I then scan down the URLs to see the site names, and if one of them is “www.widget-world-magazine.com” or something similar, that’s the one I click.

This becomes a habit after a while, even when it’s not strictly necessary. So what do we take away from this? If your system allows you to give your web pages decent names, use that capability. If you’re reading this page on the web, look at the URL (or if you’re reading my email, click here). The URL is in the “address bar” at the top of your browser window. If you glanced at that in a set of Google results, it would be a lot more clickable than some long string of random numbers, wouldn’t it?

In WWW or Non-WWW, That is the Question on Industrial Search Engine Marketing, the question is asked: Is http://www.mysite.com better than http://mysite.com? - and there’s a good discussion which you might like to read.

But there’s a more fundamental question which everyone should ask, right now: does my own website work for the alternative way of typing in the address? For most of us, that means, if the “www.” is missed off, does it work? It ought to, because many, many people now just bash the last part of a website address into their browsers (e.g “bmon.co.uk“) without the “http://” or the “www.” and you don’t want them to think you’re no longer around. It’s a two-minute job to fix this and it shouldn’t cost you anything because any decent website manager should have had this working from the start.

Here’s a nice little article on the Industrial Search Engine Marketing blog which is worth going through. Quick Site Audit! Is Your Site Search Engine Friendly? gives a small selection of elementary things which your website should and shouldn’t have if it’s to be “search engine friendly”.

If you think you might not be conforming to the article’s suggestions, get the problem fixed and you’ll undoubtedly see more traffic from Google. Some of the points may seem quite technical, but throw this at your website designers if you’re unsure and get them to confirm all is in order. It doesn’t do any harm to keep them on their toes.

Today’s linked-to article is a fairly throwaway piece, but it allows me to bring up an important subject. In Keyword density: How many keywords are too much? on the Industrial Search Engine Marketing blog, the author ponders whether there’s a magic number for keyword density.

Hang on a moment, if you’re thinking “keyword what?”, this is for you too.

Keyword density is the percentage of the copy on the page taken up by “keywords”, or your targeted search terms (the ones you want to be found on Google for). To reinforce that your page is about “red widgets”, and to help your page score more highly in Google for “red widgets”, you should probably include the term more than once on the page. But how many times is too much? That’s something we need to consider carefully.

I bring this up because one or two people have expressed interest in our forthcoming Insider Programme training course and consultancy service, but have asked me if it’s worth it, as their website is controlled by a parent company, and there’s nothing they can do to modify the design. My answer is that even if your input to your own website is limited to providing news and copy, there’s still a lot you can do to improve things - such as considering the keyword density of the copy you provide. We’ll be investigating this a lot further in the Insider Programme.

The author of How to Use Keywords in your Navigation on the Industrial Search Engine Marketing blog and I tread very much on the same path. I can bore for Britain on the need to optimise the navigation on your web sites, and I almost certainly will do when we get our Insider Programme launched in the autumn. But not only should the navigation be focused on the important stuff on your site (we don’t really need links to legal disclaimers on every single page, thanks), the keywords for your site should be prominent in the navigation too. And while we’re at it, can we get rid of the graphical navigation buttons and the overcomplicated pop-out ones too?

We’re often quite blinkered when it comes to devising ways to attract more traffic to our web sites. Sure, you can’t beat being number one on Google for “blue widgets” (especially if that’s all you sell), but there are other ways - and many of them contribute to a better Google ranking. Now, you might think that in industrial marketing, we’re a lot more limited in what we can do, and to some extent that’s true. But don’t use that as an excuse to completely walk away from new ideas.

In Creative Ways to Drive New Traffic to Your Industrial Website on the Industrial Search Engine Marketing blog, five less commonly considered (but still proven) methods of getting your site noticed are listed. Make it a resolution to give one or more of them a try.