The Math of Social Media
February 1st, 2010 by Greg
We have a lot of blogs, facebook pages, twitter accounts etc. across the company. One advantage of this is that I can to evaluate what works best. For social media tools, it is clear that engagement with your visitor is the number driver for increasing traffic. For Facebook, this means that your fans are commenting on your posts or ‘liking’ them. This causes your posts to be exposed to all of their friends along with their friends comments which builds fans. For Twitter, retweeting expands your exposure and for blogging, getting your posts referred to by other blogs is the key.
Facebook tracks your fan pages’ engagement with the Insights tool. From my limited sample of a dozen or so fan pages, it seems that the growth rate correlates nicely with the engagement ranking. Sites that have a 4 or 5 engagement are showing growth rates of around 1.25% per day, sites with a 3 to 4 have a rate of about .75% per day and sites with a 2 or 3 have a rate around .25% per day. Below that sites don’t seem to have a material growth rate. Of course this doesn’t include special efforts at growing fan base such as email campaigns etc., this is just the natural organic growth of fans. A compounded growth rate of 1.25% per day is over 45% per month. The numbers get pretty staggering after a year. These organic growth rates also show how valuable early efforts at growing fan bases can be over the long term.
It will be interesting to see how long these numbers hold up. So far, it has been pretty consistent for up to 6 months. Facebook was the easiest one to calculate these values. I’ll put the numbers together for blogs and Twitter in a later post.
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Top 10 SEO tasks that are often forgotten
December 31st, 2009 by Greg
One of the common problems I find with websites is that there are many very simple mistakes that could have been avoided by testing. None of these are difficult or not obvious, just often omitting when you are working on a many page site.
- Broken links
- Misspellings
- Formatting issues
- Forgetting to put in good unique title on each page
- A good meta description.
- Leaving an old copyright date
- Forgetting to add alt text to images
- Bad anchor text on the links
- Images not reduced in size for speed
- Clear headings that make sense to the reader
Much of SEO is just getting the basics right and doing so consistently.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Tags: meta tags, search engine optimization, SEO
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Linking – It’s just that important
December 17th, 2009 by admin
The single most important thing to do (after getting your basic SEO setup on your site done) is to work getting links to your site. There are lots of links you can get easily buy adding your site to free directories and other low page rank sites but for the most part, these don’t really help much.
The key is to get links from sites with a solid page rank that are in the same industry or area as your site is. This takes a little work. First you need to identify the candidates, look for industry leading blogs and other sites related to yours. For blogs, if you have some interesting content, then maybe they will write a post about it. So far, my favorite is to simply write a good post and add a link to them. Let them know you did it and often times, they will link to you in a future post. For websites, see if you can purchase an ad on their site or provide some content they would like for their customers.
You should try to control the anchor text of links coming to you as much as possible. Having your best keywords in the link anchor can be a huge help. Links from the body of a page are better than links from a side menu area and much better than links from a footer area.
All in all, getting good links takes effort but it is well worth it.
See also:
Understanding the Importance of Keywords
Tags: linking, page rank, SEO
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Get the SEO Basics Right
November 9th, 2009 by Greg
A lot of search engine optimization is just paying attention to the details and being consistent. It’s amazing how many sites out there miss out on the simple basic steps.
1. Do all of your page titles have the keywords you want for that particular page? Does the title describe the content accurately?
2. Does the description on each page reflect what you want the user to see on their search results? Does it have the keywords from the title included.
3. Does the body text of the page include the keywords from the title and description? Do you have enough content that a search engine could tell what the page is about?
4. Do you use alt tags in your images? Do the alt tags use your keywords?
5. Do you have good internal linking using keywords as anchor text within the body text?
If you make sure you have all of these steps well handled, you are far down the path of having a site that will rank well.
Tags: SEO
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Websites and Analytics
September 28th, 2009 by Greg
The statement “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” was popularized by Mark Twain at the turn of the last century. Some things never change… I spend some time every day going over analytics for several dozen websites. Over time you get used to the weekly and seasonal ebbs and flows of the traffic. Most every site has its own rhythm; some are slower on the weekends and others busier. Some during the day and others during the evening. Some overseas and some domestic.
It is interesting to watch over time as improvements occur. An increase in search rankings, an improvement in bounce rate or pages viewed or repeat visitors. Changes in search traffic, since that is primarily driven by how many people search for related terms, tend to be gradual especially with higher volume sites; although, you may get a short term spike to a related news event. Referrers can radically change the amount of traffic they drive since your placement is driven by other factors. My favorite is Stumbleupon.com. You can get thousands of visitors per day for a week or two if you happen to be in their selected groups but then have that traffic disappear just a quickly as they rotate others into those spots.
One of the most powerful features of Google Analytics is the advanced segments tool. With it, you can select (or deselect) traffic that meets a particular criteria and then analyze that particular segment. One site I have has a couple of pages on jobs that went up years ago but attracts a fairly large number of daily visitors. Most of these visitors don’t help this local business, so we separate those visitors out for a different review allowing us to focus on just the visitors they are targeting. Another usage is to separate out a group coming in on a particular search term and review and contrast their experience on the site with others. Sometimes it becomes painfully clear where your errors lie.
Without segments you could make some mistakes. For example, bounce rate is a very important metric, but in most places in analytics it is summarized at a page or source type level. You may find a page with a high bounce rate and then decide to make drastic changes to it. The root cause may have been that the page draws a high volume of traffic from one search term that isn’t really related and that term experiences almost a 100% bounce rate, but the correct terms could have a very low bounce rate. Just using the averaged number creates a bad result.
Another place to pay attention is geography. If your site attracts worldwide viewers but your target audience is solely domestic, then you should segment that group out. Overseas visitors often do not have the same types of bandwidth, browsers and screen resolutions that domestic visitors do. If you are using your stats to help drive your web design (and why wouldn’t you???), it could very like alter your requirements.
What can you change?
I’ve always thought one of the easiest things to improve on an individual landing page is the bounce rate for a given term. It is easy to determine this value and often easy to understand why you have a higher than average bounce rate for the term once you review the context of the page. Then, just test a few different modifications that you think would better connect with the users of that term and keep the best result.
Google Analytics is free, simple to use, powerful and constantly improving. There is no reason not to have it on your site. Knowing what you visitors are doing on your site and how they got there is a critical piece of information for running a successful website.
Tags: analytics
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The Search Engines, Social Search and Buzz
September 8th, 2009 by Greg
One way to think about the search engines is that it is their job to show you the sites that have the most activity around them (buzz) given your search terms (kind of like a buzz-o-meter). This is a very challenging task given the shear size of the Internet. Google, for example looks at all of the links coming to your site, the credibility of the site they are coming from and the anchor text used in the link to you (along with where on the page the link is etc.). By ranking and summing up all of these links, the search engine can score your web site relative to others based on these off-page factors. Search engines infer buzz (and indirectly trust) by using formulas to evaluate rank who mentions you and how often.
Social media based search is basically the same concept in that they are measuring the buzz, but rather than formulas, they add the more direct component of personal evaluation. Sites are ranked for search by how they were evaluated by people who visited them. If you can trust (or develop trust for) the people who ranked the sites, then you can be more comfortable that the site is appropriate for your search and that it is trustworthy itself.
It will be very interesting to see how these two models evolve over the next couple of years to address the challenges of real-time search, image and video search and geo-targeted search.
Tags: search engines, social search
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SES San Jose 2009
August 15th, 2009 by Greg
We just returned from the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose. This is our second year of taking the whole web marketing team out there. It probably is one of the best investments we make all year.
It is amazing just how rapidly this space is evolving. While social media was an important topic last year, this year it was everything. Last year, it seemed like the discussions were more about how Google would own everything and this year, in the very first panel discussion I went to, the moderator opened with ‘Is Google dead?’ It’s not and it won’t be but that really set the tone for many of the following presentations.
Along with the launch of Bing and its joining with Yahoo for search, the social media websites are starting to assert their presense. All of these present challenges to Google and the status quo. My feeling is that Google is staffed by a lot of very sharp people and like other successful companies will adapt and most likely succeed quite well.
It seemed that the Bing team was very excited about their future. I can only guess how they felt in years past where there product really wasn’t that competitive. They don’t feel that anymore. Bing is focusing on the entertainment, travel and shopping spaces initially. From the data we are seeing with our customers, it seems they are doing quite well in this area. We even have one customer where Bing is driving a higher number of visitors to a site. Last year, nobody but Google was really even on the radar for search referals.
I’ll put together a number of posts on this show. As a team, we attended over 35 presentations, panel discussions and lectures.
Tags: SEO, SES, Social Media
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Are websites obsolete?
July 30th, 2009 by Greg
In short, no, but its role is changing.
Prior to the explosion of social media, a company’s web strategy revolved around its core website. The key issues were mostly related to garnering traffic and the best means to convert that traffic. Now the core website is becoming just one component, albeit one with a central hub role, in a widening circle of a company’s web presence. Blogs, micro-sites, event based sites and most importantly social sites are taking on an increasingly important role in the overall web strategy.
The home page on Coca-cola.com directs their visitors to become fans of their Facebook site. They now have over 3.5 million fans. Links to Twitter and Myspace are prominent on most every large company website. Even railroads have Twitter accounts now. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Myspace and dozens of other social networking sites are commanding a significant and rapidly growing portion of the Internet traffic. Like in the early days of search, when companies that staked out a position and continued to expand it, reaped huge benefits as traffic increased, companies must get involved in the social networks in order to preserve their position in the social realm for the future.
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Tags: SEO, Social Media, web design
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Traffic is Not the Most Important Thing!
June 15th, 2009 by Greg
When we get a new marketing client, the first impulse is to dig in and put together an overall plan to fix all of the search engine optimization issues their website has and build a powerful social marketing plan. You could spend many hours reviewing a website and coming up with dozens of changes about what words should be used, titles, layout, navigation as well as blog, Facebook, video and Twitter strategies, etc. But, that often begs the real question of “Can the site be effective?” The simple and often overlooked question is, “If I had traffic, would I accomplish my goal?” If you can’t answer “yes” confidently, then some testing is in order.
I’ve worked with a number of sites over the years where the answer was no. Maybe their product was priced too high or nobody really wanted what they were selling or wanted it in the manner they were selling it. In my opinion, those issues really need to be addressed before spending a lot of time and money on a search engine optimization or web marketing plan that will bring in a lot of visitors that you won’t convert.
The days of “build it and they will come” have mostly gone away. Now, with few exceptions, there are a number of providers of most services and products on the web, and differentiation is more and more difficult and challenging and requires a much more skilled approach than in days past. Driving traffic to a site today requires a good understanding of the on-page rules such as titles and keywords as well as the off-page rules such as anchor text and link quality. It also requires a strong attention to detail since computers don’t usually understand what you meant to do.
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Tags: conversion, SEO
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Links and link quality
May 28th, 2009 by Greg
For a complete search engine optimization effort, you need a good link program. This program should focus on the quality of the links more than the quantity of the links. A single link from a web site that is credible (trustworthy) is worth more than dozens of links from junk sites.
How do you get links from high quality sites?
a. Look at your vendors and customers. Are there opportunities to get links from them. Maybe if you have a good case study about a customer, they would link to it. Vendors could advertise their relationship with your company.
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