When it Comes to SEO, Links are Supreme
July 1st, 2010 by admin
The goal of search engine optimization is to show the search engines that your website is important. Link building is the process of getting your website’s link on other sites to generate increased traffic to your website.
Link popularity is the number of links pointing to your site from other sites on the Internet. The search engines consider your site more important and rank it higher depending on the number of your sites incoming links. Building quality and relevant links helps you gain visitors from the linking site and you also boost your page rank with the search engines.
Every link that you do manage to gain, whether it’s from a directory, blog or website, will help build your site’s core strength. Here are just a few of the benefits of link building:
• Links are viewed as a ‘vote’ for your site
• Inbound links offer a route to your site from other sites
• Links to and from relevant sites help search engines assess what your website’s overall theme is
• A higher link profile can boost your site’s credibility and trust
• More links means more avenues for website traffic to find you
• Improved rankings for your targeted keywords
• Improved search engine robot crawl rate
If you have numerous links to your web pages from spam sites and other low quality websites irrelevant to your business industry, this is not going to reflect positively upon your company. Find web sites that have some relevance to your site, business or products. A Page Rank of 5, and a high traffic rank, receiving a link from an unpopular website, with no Page Rank, and scarce traffic will not help your search engine results rankings. Links can be directories, social networking sites, blogs, even writing articles and optimized press releases. Directories are one of the most comprehensive ways to generate incoming links. They are designed to promote links and are sometimes ask for fees. Social networks and blogs have become a great way to generate incoming links to your web site.
As in most areas of SEO, some are more effective than others though. The relevance of the link and the strength of the site that has provided will often determine just how much strength you gain. Whilst quantity is extremely important, so too is the quality and diversity of a linking structure. In the process of link building, quality is more important than quantity. If you want to increase search engine rank of your website and also generate flow of traffic at your site then quality link building is the best profitable investment.
If you have numerous links to your web pages from spam sites and low quality websites irrelevant to your business industry, this is not going to reflect positively. If you have a selection of high quality links from respectable and trustworthy websites this is going to portray your business in a positive light and attract interest and attention. Find web sites that have some relevance to your site, business or products. A Page Rank of 5, and a high traffic rank, receiving a link from an unpopular website, with no Page Rank, and scarce traffic will not help your search engine results rankings.
A complete link building program involves generating links to your website from a variety of sources. Having a good mix of quality and quantity in your inbound links will greatly increase your search engine results rankings and thus, drive more traffic toward your website.
Tags: link building, SEO
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Study Finds Ecommerce Experts Believe SEO is Crucial
May 14th, 2010 by admin
Using effective SEO practices on your ecommerce business website can ensure a steady, reliable flow of targeted traffic that should give you a good conversion rate and a healthy bottom line, and according to a recent survey from the online trade publication Practical eCommerce, search engine optimization has become a top priority for digital marketing professionals.
The Magazine conducted the study in April 2010 and concluded 95 percent of respondents said SEO was important to their business, with 3.1 percent said they didn’t know, and only 1 respondent replied that it was not important. The survey found that 82.8 percent of respondents indicated their website is search engine optimized, while 11 percent said it wasn’t and 6.3 percent professed they did not know. In addition, the survey found that 40.6 percent of respondents “completely” understand SEO, while 54.7 percent understand it “somewhat” and 4.7 percent said they don’t understand it at all.
This news comes after a recent survey conducted by Genius found that many B2B organizations are missing out on opportunities to use SEO. Of the respondents, 32 percent of B2B companies didn’t use SEO tools, reported Genius. Similarly, many didn’t use social platforms, like blog software or social media, either.
A report recently released by Conductor reported that among the top 500 ecommerce companies based in the United States, the average grade it awarded for their use of SEO was a D. While most seem to understand its importance, many organizations have not implemented it as well as they could to enjoy optimum benefits. Without SEO, eCommerce organizations will struggle to draw both impulse online shoppers and those who use search engines to find the best prices for planned online purchases.
When it comes to search engine marketing, it seems natural search has emerged as the most effective. A recent study from Internet Retailer found that 51 percent of retail marketers said a quarter or more of their website traffic comes from natural search, compared to 28 percent who said so for paid search.
Tags: ecommerce Marketing, ecommerce seo, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, SEO
Posted in SEO, web design | Comments (0)
Facebook Revises Promotional Guidelines
March 16th, 2010 by admin
Read the full set of promotional guidelines
Tags: Facebook Advertising, Facebook for Business, search engine optimization, Social Media
Posted in Social Media | Comments (0)
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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