A UK SEO

Enhanced WP-ContactForm is a popular Wordpress plugin which adds a neat contact form to your WordPress blog. This can be completed with two small changes to you contact page.

1. Add the tracking code to the form.

On line 185 of wp-contactform.php

$results = '<div style="font-weight: bold;">' . $success_msg . '</div>';

change to

$results = '<div style="font-weight: bold;">' . $success_msg . '</div><script type="text/javascript">pageTracker._trackPageview("/contact-sent/")</script>';

All you are doing is adding the track page view which throws a page view into Analytics after the success message is displayed.

2. Move the tracking code

The original Google Analytics tracking code needs to be placed before the line you just added to the contact form. In WordPress I have placed the tracking code on the footer so I just copy & past the footer and header into the page template. The move the code from the footer into the header. If you use a WordPress plug in to manage your tracking you might need to use a plugin that places the tracking code in the head of your template or have a little play around.

All done sent a test contact and in Google Analytics this will appear as a page view.

Now just add that page as a goal and then Google Analytics will start to track conversion rates.

If you want you can add similar tracking when the contact form fails, this will track if the user enters an invalid field. This is useful to track if you think people may be having problems filling out the form. Although the above method applies to Enhanced WP-ContactForm the same concept should be applied to forms that just refresh the page, add the page view just after the confirmation statement and move the tracking to the top of the page.

I search the internet a lot during the day and I do come across dodgy sites but this afternoon this one has rather annoyed me. A search on Google for LPG Conversions and down on page 60 will show you the start of a network of sites targeting the key phrase “LPG Conversions + Area”.

In total they are around 19 of these sites and they are ranking well in Google for a range of searches. Once you dig down into the site they don’t link back to one site which is strange but the phone numbers go to “Rochdale Auto Rescue” who don’t have a site so you wouldn’t really call them up about a LPG Conversion.

It just seems all very pointless that this network of sites takes up places on the SERP’s where legitimate companies could be.

It looks like Google Webmaster Tools is having a few issues at the moment with listing a 404 error on /index.html from external links pointing at that URL, but when you look at the external links they all point to the root of your site e.g. http://www.domain.com. I’ve seen such an instance this morning on a client’s site.

This has been noticed by Fizzarotti who posted on YouMoz.

The fix implemented by Fizzarotti decided to 301 /index.html back to the root. This can be done by rule in the htaccess file if your an an apache server.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.domain.com/ [R=301,L]

This screenshot from Google Webmaster Tools shows the 404 error for /index.php with 100 links pointing to the page. (click to see larger image).

A second screenshot lists the pages where that link to /index.html. Check over them all point to the root of the site and not /index.html (click to see larger image).

In this example the rankings of the site haven’t been poor in recent weeks, Fizzarotti’s case on SEOmoz the site had dropped several rankings. I’m guessing there is another problem with Fizzarotti’s website and this ‘issue’ in Google Webmaster Tools is a reporting problem.

If you’ve seen the same problem add a comment below.

Tracking conversions on a site is essential, most of the time you track on the completion of forms on the “thank you” page. Some sites have mailto links which open up blank e-mails, so how do you track clicks on such links?

Well take your standard link

<a href="mailto:info@domain.com">E-mail John</a>

Then add in the JavaScript tracking and ?subject=E-mail John to set a subject for the message (not essential but see later on).

<a href="mailto:info@domain.com?subject=E-mail John" onClick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview("/mailto/john");">E-mail John</a>

That page view “mailto/john” will start to appear as a page view on the top content section on Google Analytics

Next add that into a goal.

So at the end of the month you’ll be able to get a total of times the link has been clicked. Then check your inbox / ask the client how many e-mails they have received with the subject specified in the mailto link, in the example “E-mail John”. You then have the data work out of the conversion of clicks to e-mails received. E.g. 100 clicks 60 e-mails = 60% conversion.

If the conversion is low then you might want to change the link to go to a contact form, often people are more likely to fill out forms and some users won’t have their e-mail set up on Outlook which opens on the click of mailto links.

Recently I’ve been advising about best practice in the layout and design of Ecommerce Websites. SEO goes hand in hand with layout and design. A good design should result in easy and good SEO.

Here are four layouts in my opinion that make for a good layout for ecommerce sites. The structure works best for site with not too many products around 50-400 products.

Home Page / Static Pages

Category

Product Lists

Product Page

For a more detailed look see this pdf.

Search Engine Rankings move, they move a lot and there’s pretty much nothing you can do about it but keep on the track of building content and links which should reduce the movement.

How much can they move? Well in the matter of 12 hours my Blackpool FC blog move from 3 to 9 on the first page for the key phrase “blackpool fc“.

So happy happy, joy joy with a number three ranking, the official club site takes up number 1 and 2 spot so no room for improvement. That was about 11 last night.

This morning at 11, whammy all the way down to 9 on the bottom of the first page. I’m signed out of my Google account which can skew the results.

It’s great to see in the past two weeks channel four have updated their catch up service from using windows DRM to using flash. Which means it now works on my mac which is great. Channel four being the nice fellows that they are even have a intro video saying sorry for the on demand service being delayed for mac users.

All I need now is Chrome, this year maybe?

I’ve been looking for a way to import a csv into pages on Wordpress. So far all I’ve found is plugins to import csv’s into posts. In the past I’ve ran mySQL inserts created from spreadsheets, which do work but are time consuming to create.

I’ve found one import scrip which with a simple change will upload csv files into pages. You can download the plugin (well it’t not technically a plug in but an import script which goes in /wp-admin/import) from Zack Preble’s blog.

All you need to do is change line 292 from

= "post";

To

= "page";

That sets the new entry as a page rather than a post. Get your csv ready and upload. This is great for building new sites or transferring sites in to Wordpress as you can get the client to prepare all the data in excel first. The other useful tip is for affiliates …… product feeds……

It seems more and more tv commercials are now using the “Search for……” rather than giving out websites address. The latest is the 3D movie from Dreamwork’s Monsters Vs Aliens, I went to see the movie yesterday and have to say it was really good, especially with the 3D glasses.

Anyway, the TV advert this afternoon promoting the movie this afternoon ask the viewer to search for “MVA” which is quite precise. It’s working according to the stats from Google insight with a recent surge in traffic.

Amazingly this is the SERP you see searching for MVA.

So you get one PPC advert about the Monsters Vs Alien’s movie and the top organic spot is taken by www.mvaconsultancy.com. Nothing in the top ten is related to the movie. This type of campaign must be costing a fair amount of money for Dreamworks and maybe bringing a fair amount of traffic to www.mvaconsultancy.com.

There seems to be a little page rank update going on this weekend. As we know Page Rank doesn’t directly relate to how much traffic a site receives, sales or success but many people are hung up on what the little Green Bar says.

The last update was on News Year Eve, if you’ve gone down in Page Rank this time you’ve either lost links, links have changed to nofollow, or the sites that link to you have lost links thus not passing on the page rank they once did.

Another reason for a drop in score is Google shifting the boundaries, Google will shift the page rank boundaries up to make sure we all don’t end up with page ranks of 10.