Archive for July, 2008

What if you have a client that has difficulty implementing changes you recommend? What if he/she is restricted (for whatever reason) from making any real meaningful changes to the source code?

Is it possible not to touch the code of a site and still optimize it?

The answer is yes. A good SEO Consultant knows that the search engines read “backlinks”. That’s one of the ways search engines figure out what your site is about. As a matter of fact, the thesis paper from the founders of Google is called Backrub because it measures on “backlinks”. This type of optimization is called Off-Site Optimization. Your goal is to appear as the subject matter expert in your topical neighborhood. And by using a Strategic Link Campaign, this is possible.

The link development factors to look for are many, and a time consuming discovery process. But a well crafted Strategic Link Campaign will be well-targeted research and meet the Criteria & Time Period for Link Effectiveness.

A well crafted Strategic Link Campaign can have the SEO power to boost a site to position #1 if the right link combinations & quantities are used.

Your goal is to appear as the subject matter expert in your topical neighborhood. The best sites to get links from are in your same topical neighborhood, and under Google’s “radar”.

Some websites neglect to focus on link building when optimizing their site. Instead, they allocate budget on hiring an SEO Consultant that can optimize their code, and get them “free” rankings. However, without link building many of these types of on-site optimizations just don’t produce the results that satisfy website owners.

I’ll use the analagy that onsite optimization is like planting the seeds, and link building is the nourishing rains that will produce the harvest.

Link building is an easy and affordable way to improve your website’s keyword rankings, and brand presence in your industry.

As the years roll by and I keep honing my SEO Consulting skills, my Keyword Analysis process and documentation has gone through several transformations.

The deliverable Keyword Analysis document is on an Excel spreadsheet with several tabs. The main contents of my keyword analysis are:

1) Keyword Volume/Discovery.
2) Keyword Ranking.
3) Keyword Demand.
4) Web Analytics.
5) Keyword Difficulty.
6) Next Steps.

Keyword Search Volume and Discovery:
I use Wordtracker and cross reference with other tools like KeywordDiscovery and the Google Keyword Tool. A separate tab is created for each keyword group. International SEO demands that the foreign language Google is checked. Eg: Google.no, google.de, google.co.uk. Once all the possible keyword combinations are generated, I look for the most relevant terms that are further down the Conversion Funnel for a better return on investment (ROI). Those are the terms that I use for the next step.

Keyword Ranking:
I take the identified terms from the Keyword Search Volume Discovery tab, and plug them into Web Position. Sometimes, I double check the keyword rankings manually against Web Position. This tab is used as the Baseline Keyword Ranking.

Keyword Demand:
Next, I plug those terms from the Keyword Ranking report into a Keyword Demand Matrix. This tab contains 5 Columns: Keyword Phrase, Monthly KW Demand, Actual search referrals, Share of Search traffic, Missed opportunities.

Web Analytics:
In this tab, copy and paste the Analytics report. Basic information I like to see is Visitors, by Keywords, by Search Engine, for the last 3 months. Each month can be it’s own tab. Of course if they have conversion data, that is included. Occasionally, we need to correctly configure the Analytics software.

Keyword Difficulty & Competitiveness
At this point, I’ve usually narrowed down the keyword(s) I want to optimize for the Target URL to a couple of terms. A few factors I measure are: Domain Link Portfolio, Age of Domain, .edu .gov links, Alexa Rank, PageRank, and the Internal link percent of the Target URL.

Next Steps:
In this tab, you want to call out 3 things: Campaign Objectives, Target Keywords and their Success Metrics and the rationale behind it. The actual next steps are a Technical SEO Analysis & Recommendation document to Optimize the entire site.

My objective is to optimize the entire site for an increase in overall visitor traffic, with an additional success metric for a few specific keywords mapped to their corresponding Target URL’s.

Guest post by Carmen Sutter. She’s on my team, and specializes in Web Analytics.

So you finally implemented web analytics. Now what? What metrics should you look at? What do those metrics mean? As always with questions like this the answer is: It depends. It depends on what type of site you are running. It depends on your goals for your site. It depends on the marketing around your site, if any.

Over the next couple of analytics posts we will help you explore some of the metrics you should know.

For any type of site, bounce rate is probably one of the more important metrics. The bounce rate tells you the percent of visits that only look at one page. Literally, how many people “bounce” right off your site. This is a metric you want to observe in aggregate for your entire site as well as on a page level.

There are a number of reasons for high bounce rates.

1) Maybe your content is not as fresh as it could be. Evaluate how often you update your content and see if you can improve on that and if that makes a difference in the bounce rate.

2) Maybe your site is not the site your visitors are looking for. Take a look at the search engine keywords that drive traffic to your site. Make those keyword sense for your site? Let’s say a large number of visitors come to your site via the keywords ” cookies history”. You could be a tech blog or a baking site - make sure your search listings are optimized to help potential visitors know what to expect when coming over to your site. And then evaluate if your bounce rate changed at all.

3) In sticking with the search keywords topic, the bounce rate is even more critical for your paid search campaigns. No matter if the goal for the PPC campaign is a purchase or lead generation, if your visitors don’t make it beyond one page and bounce right off your site, you are wasting money. Make a sure that your PPC campaign is targeted and brings in qualified traffic.

You’ll probably wonder what constitutes a good bounce rate and my answer, like for most metrics, is to benchmark against yourself. If you have a bounce rate of 80% today, aim for 75% next month. If you have a bounce rate of 10%, aim for 5%. We all have the tendency to want to compare against others, but there are so many factors affecting benchmark data. On the other hand, if you know what’s going on with your site, you can control the content and see how it impacts your own metrics over time.

In the next post we’ll take a look at important metrics for commerce sites.
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Carmen Sutter has extensive experience with Omniture, Google Analytics & Coremetrics. She is experienced in implementations, customizations, integration services, and Reporting & Benchmarking.

By streamlining reporting processes, performing in-depth analysis, and understanding customers’ level of engagement, Carmen helps measure and improve our search marketing campaigns.