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By Scott Frangos

This is the second in a series on using the popular and comprehensive “HeadSpace” plugin from Urban Giraffe, written by John Godley. In the first article, we looked at an overview of the software with some screenshots showing how to set it up. We’ll review tags and keyword stratagies and some strategic ways to use this great tool as you become a “TagMaster” in addition to a BlogMaster. Note that I use the HeadSpace plugin for clients in my private practice at WebFadds.com.

How do you deploy and reap the benefits of HeadSpace for your Blogs and CMS websites in WordPress? In this lesson, we’ll break down the answer into three areas — Greating Visitors, SEO Tactics, and Learning Visitor Behavior, and take a closer look at practical tactics for each.

First, an Overview:

1) Greeting visitors: Saying hello, with a call to action.

When you go into a retail store, the first thing you do is have a look around. If you like what you see, and get a good greeting, you might come back. And maybe… you will sign up for a mailing list. Now you can apply those tactics at your website using the HeadSpace plugin “First Time Visitor” module smartly.

Above, one of the “Site Modules” in HeadSpace allows you to great First Time Visitors (returning visitors won’t see it) with a message (use HTML too), in which you could ask them to sign up for your RSS feed.

By smartly, I mean consider carefully what you wish to say — and include a request that your visitor actually do something. That could be signing up for a RSS feed, a newsletter, or visiting an important page on your site, etc. Note that you can use HTML in the module so make it easy, and include a link. Consider making this module active for 2-3 visits, in case your new blog readers miss it the first time.

2) SEO Tactics: 4 ways to maximize your site for SEO using HeadSpace.

I. Nesting in HeadSpace

One key concept is that HeadSpace provides you a “nesting” order — a hierarchy set-up for your keywords/tags at your website. Study the illustration above, prepared by the plugin author. A good way to take advantage of this capability is to first determine what tags are most important for your site, and would apply to every page in your site.

For example, if you had an Astrology site, the words “Astrology”, “Horoscopes”, and “Zodiac,” would be entered in the Global settings in HeadSpace. Then for a post about a particular Horoscope, like “Pisces” you would enter “Pisces” in the post settings for Keywords, Descriptions (and in the Title too). But you would not have to enter the three keywords you already entered in the Global settings, since HeadSpace “nests” them in for you.

II. TagMaster Strategies using Google Keyword Tool

You thought you were just a BlogMaster? Now you need to become an SEO TagMaster. HeadSpace makes it easy to key in your tags — in a nested hierarchy, if you follow the first tactic. But you need to understand how to determine tags. The key is to generate a list of 5-12 keywords that are the most important ones for the stories and posts you write. These are the top keywords you expect people to search on to find your site — and the reason you are deploying HeadSpace.

Google’s “Keyword Tool” is one way to research what tags (keywords) you should assign to your posts:

Above, note that the Google Keyword Tool allows you to generate keywords in active use (they will appear below) based on either words you type in, or based on website content. Whose website content? I suggest you generate lists of keywords based on the content at least two of your closest competitors sites.

When you click “Get Keyword Ideas,” this Google tool returns a long list showing columns for “Advertiser Competition,” the search volume for the preceding month, and the “Average Search Volume” — and average over the last 12 months.

Important Keyword Tool Strategies…

• You can sort the list returned by Average Search Volume (averaged over 12 months), or for the preceeding months (columns two and three in last screenshot), by clicking on the column heading. This helps you find hot terms.
• Use the popdown menu at upper right to select “Broad” (returns related keywords), “Phrase” (your keyword in search phrases), or exact (shows results for exact matches) — learn more about these at Google
  
• You can download your list to open in Excel and then refine your searches more (you could add a “priority” column in your spreadsheet and search by that, for example)

Once you’ve discovered your best “tags” (keywords) include them in the list of tags for each post (in the field directory under the one where you write your posts).

III. Page Specific Titles

The first field is above is where you write the title of your post or article. The second Title field shown (bottom arrow) appears under posts after you install the HeadSpace plugin. Work your primary keyword/tag into both locations.

Your technique here is to know the primary keyword for each post you write. You should arrive at that using the previous techniques. Once you know it, get that keyword into your story “Title” (in the field above where you write your posts), and also into your page title (seen at top of Browser windows, and also read by search engines). Use the field provided by HeadSpace, below where you write your posts, to add a page title that is slightly different than your story title.

IV. Google Analytics

Above, the Site Module provided in your HeadSpace2 plugin is shown with the “who to track” pop-down menu open and “Subscriber” selected. This means that Google will just track what Subscribers, and lower (visitors) do on our site — not what your administration staff does. You get your Account ID from your Google Analytics account.

The tactic for this is simple: sign up for Google Analytics (free). Input your user ID into the correct module in HeadSpace (shown above). Then… start analyzing your data by logging into Google to see what’s going on at your site.

Above, though you get a lot of data using Google Analytics, two key stats to follow are Referring Sites (where you get your traffic), and Bounce Rate (how good is that traffic — does it visit more than one page on your site, or just bounce off it?).

Above is an important screen for TagMasters — you get there by clicking on “Referring Sites” shown in the previous ScreenShot. All items hilited in yellow are important to know. Your careful analysis is even more important. Why? In general you want to achieve a lower bounce rate because that means that your visitors continue on into your site to other pages (above see “Pages/Visit”) after hitting the first page to which they were referred. So… does that mean I should give up on the Urbangiraffe.com referrals (red arrows above) because it has relatively high bounce rate? No. It just means that I have to come up with other valuable content for those visitors and make it easy to find from the page to which they’re linking.

Ok. Maybe “easy” isn’t exactly the way to describe the process for coming up to speed on all the things Analytics reports for you. But when you key in on the two stats mentioned here (watch your “referring sites”, and your “bounce rate”), you’ll be ahead of the pack, and moving quickly toward the title of “TagMaster.” Then, you can read all the extensive documentation about the rest of the Analytics stats, provided by Google.

3) Visitor Behavior: Learning what visitors do (and make adjustments accordingly)

This tactic take advantage of one of those add-in modules mentioned at the top of the article. Make sure you use the module’s controls to set it to record only behavior for subscribers and visitors:

Above, the HeadSpace module for CrazyEgg (heat map tracking) is set to Subscriber, so it will just track Subscribers, and visitors — your blog readers, not the actions of people working on your site for different purposes.

Go ahead and sign-up for the independent heat mapping service, “CrazyEgg.com” What you learn about visitor behavior using this service will be very valuable to you. There is a free membership plan that is fine for most users.

Above, a “heatmap” generated by the CrazyEgg service shows this WordPress website client (AstroDaija.com) that visitors click from her home page directly to her “Scopes” page a lot.

Now we understand what people are clicking on most at our site, we can use the link name (in the example above, it was “scopes”) as a keyword throughout the HeadSpace plugin “tag” fields, and perhaps adjust the site a few more ways:

• Consider moving the link that gets the most “heat” further to the left in the navigation bar
• Make an “ad” graphic that links to that same page and place it in the sidebar (there is more than one plugin for WordPress that allows you to rotate ads, and you can use them to show “internal” ads that link to pages on your own site)
• Review and understand just why people click your hottest links. You can then place appropriate related offers, or link to related posts on those “hot” pages?
• What about your not so hot links? Can you change their name and get more interest? Or should you take them off the main navigation bar, and place them on a secondary bar? Test both options.

There you go — welcome your visitors and ask them to sign up for your RSS feed (or newsletter, etc.), make sure you maximize your HeadSpace SEO setup and study what your visitors do, then make site revisions accordingly. Now you have some homework to do, TagMasters. Just remember, a good website is a growing, maturing animal — not a static, old-school “brochure-ware” website. It takes work, but really pays off.

About the Author: Scott Frangos is a web developer, college instructor and graphic designer. He is Managing Partner at WebFadds.com, a web development firm specializing in WordPress Content Management Websites. He lives in Portland, Oregon with wife and partner, Pepper, and their three dogs: Wisdom, Spirit, & Steggman.