Archive for January, 2009

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Whiteboard Friday - When to Track Rankings

Posted by great scott!
January 30, 2009

Posted by great scott!

Okay, so any of us in the online marketing world have been guilty of obsessing over rankings at one time or another. Well, in this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand makes the case that Rank Tracking may not be the end all be all of SEO metrics, at least not by itself.

Take a look and see what else you need to be monitoring in order to make rank tracking truly worthwhile to your sites and those of your clients.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - When to Track Rankings from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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Some freebies

Posted by k
January 30, 2009

You have two days to register .es (spanish tld) domains at $1 each (pay with dollars) on Gandi.net, no strings attached. Don’t forget it’s also valid for idn.es domains.
You can get a free domain on Register using this link. Not sure about the strings attached on this one.
And now comes the Black Hat part: how [...]

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Advanced Google Analytics - Zero Visits and Search Page Referrer

Posted by willcritchlow
January 30, 2009

Posted by willcritchlow

About a month ago - back before Christmas and before my brilliant trip to New Zealand - I wrote a post over at Distilled about how to track referrals from the second page of Google using Google analytics. It was one of my more popular posts - and since I discovered the trick, I’ve found it quite handy on our own site, never mind client sites. It relies on using a filter to separate traffic based on the "start" parameter passed in the referring URL from deeper Google pages. It looks a bit scary to set up, but I tried to include screenshots so you just step through the process bit by bit.

If you are interested in advanced uses of Google Analytics, you may also be interested in:

Although I think knowledge of these methods is useful, my main point today is to share some insight that arose in the comments of my post. John raised a question:

I got it working, and created segments for 2nd, 3rd, and 4th page. I’m a little confused though - When I apply this segment to keywords, why do some keywords (usually longtail) show up, but have zero visits? If there were zero visits from that keyword, why would it show up in Analytics in the first place?

Political Reputation Management - zero visits

An example from Distilled analytics showing 0 visits for political reputation management over a short timescale

I wasn’t sure on the answer to this, but I had seen the same thing so I dropped Avinash Kaushik a line to find out (he’s the analytics evangelist for Google and everyone here should be reading Avinash’s blog and following him on twitter - one of the smartest guys I know in the field). Sure enough, Avinash came through with the answer and I thought it was useful enough to share with everyone here. There are two likely scenarios when you may see a keyword appearing in a report and showing zero visits:

  1. If someone makes more than one visit to a site within the same "session" (i.e. within 29 minutes without clearing cookies) and each visit comes from a search but on different keywords, then both keywords will be included in the keywords report - the first with 0 visits and the second with 1 visit. This is done, apparently, in the interests of balancing between on the one hand, avoiding discarding data (the fact that the first keyword sent you a visitor) with the need to make the total number of "visitors" reconcile. It’s a tough call, but this seems a pretty sensible way of handling things - but as users, it’s important for us to understand what these decisions and trade-offs are
  2. If you have analytics connected to an AdWords account, then cost and impression data is pulled into analytics from your advertising campaigns. In this scenario, you can see keywords that have had impressions but no clicks which will show up as keywords in a report with 0 clicks.

Sorry that this post has been a bit of a collection of interesting things found elsewhere rather than any new insight. I hope you’ve found it useful - my understanding and use of Google Analytics has improved in leaps and bounds recently so I wanted to share some of the tips with you. I’ll leave you with one more - from Joost again - a fantastic tip on tracking traffic you get from Twitter.

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Has Yahoo! Search Marketing Lost Their Minds?

Posted by Aaron Wall
January 29, 2009

Imagine selling web traffic as a commodity in a blind auction, while touting its value based on the traffic being targeted, relevant, precise, and trackable. Then imagine taking away the default keyword tool on the internet that has been written about in thousands of marketing books, ebooks, and web pages - and replacing it with nothing. Then imagine signing up some seedy publishing partners that run clickbots against your highest value keywords, and giving them the lion’s share of the click “value” on those keywords. Then imagine not making it easy for advertisers to opt out of that “traffic.” Then imagine editing your advertisers accounts without their permission to alter ad text and keywords, and only informing some of them about the changes sometime after they take place…with 1 in 5 rejecting the changes!

So inefficient and sloppy. They can call that account optimization, but only in an Orwellian sense. Why not give advertisers the tools to do optimization themselves?

Google offers about a half-dozen public keyword tools, makes it easy to filter out bad traffic, has way more volume, offers enterprise level analytics for free, and does not edit your keywords and ad copy against your permission. Is it any wonder Yahoo! managed to lose hundreds of millions of dollars last quarter, while Google keeps exceeding market expectations - even during a recession?

I just hope that when Yahoo! gets bought out by Microsoft that they keep Site Explorer around for us SEOs, and don’t do us as poorly as they did their advertisers. ;)

[update: Danny Sullivan also covered this issue.]

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The SEO Process Chart

Posted by Aaron Wall
January 29, 2009

It is no secret to readers here that SEO is an ongoing process, but I was playing with SmartDraw and created an SEO process circle.

One of the problems many people have with SEO is that they think that they will use SEO to get their site in front of thousands of relevant people, but that model only works if they are…

Amongst the hundreds or thousands of participants in your market, some of them enjoy an older site, more social relationships, more links, a more well known brand, a larger traffic stream due to their site already being trusted, and other traffic streams like RSS readers and email list members, etc.

All of those advantages for existing webmasters act as headwinds for a new webmaster (at least until you get established). You typically have to create some number of social interactions to leave the trail of signals of quality to make Google want to trust a site enough to put it in front of a large traffic stream, especially if you are starting a brand new site and are trying to operate within Google’s guidelines. As Bob Massa says “search engines follow people.”

If you like the above entry, you might also like the SEO Flowchart. :)

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Root Domains, Subdomains vs. Subfolders and The Microsite Debate

Posted by randfish
January 29, 2009

Posted by randfish

Last week, I did a Whiteboard Friday, The Microsite Mistake, in which I called out a practice I see as potentially detimental to SEO - using a separate domain to accumulate links for your content site. I was not arguing against all microsite strategies or all domain separations or even all subdomains, just pointing out that this particular usage wasn’t a very logical one. Then came the comments…

Don’t get me wrong - I absolutely love the vibrancy and passion and level of engagement from all our readers and commenters, particularly those that disagree. Honestly, I believe that it is when we disagree and confront one another in positive, constructive ways that we learn the most so please, keep it up! In this instance, though, the comments weren’t a particularly good place for me to address all the many thoughts that arose - that takes a post, and here it is.

Root domains vs. Subdomains vs. Subfolders

Search engines have metrics that they apply to pages, such as PageRank, and metrics they apply to subdomains and root domains (including things like TrustRank, various quality scores, domain level link metrics like Domain mozRank, etc.). Through years of experience, observation and testing, SEOs have observed some very steady patterns of behavior:

For these reasons, if you’re seeking to maximize your ranking ability for a given piece of content, it’s my personal belief that you should, most of the time, keep it on 1 subdomain under 1 root domain (but feel free to use subfolders as it makes sense). Starting a blog? I almost always recommend yoursite.com/blog over blog.yoursite.com. Want to launch a new section of content? Use yoursite.com/newstuff rather than newstuff.yoursite.com.

However, there are exceptions…

When to Use a Subdomain

Subdomains can sometimes make sense when:

There are other situations, some of them more technical in nature, where it can make sense, but the best practice is to use one subdomain on a root domain for all your content. In my experience, unless you’ve got some serious SEO savvy and know exactly what you’re doing and why, this should be the default.

When it Pays to Use Microsites

Like subdomains, microsites, too have their place:

There are probably several other good uses for microsites and times when it pays to apply them, but they tend to fit with some of the above principles. The big trouble with microsites is that they inherit none of the trust, authority, ranking power, consideration, etc. that search engines give to established, well-linked properties. Mistaking a link between two domains as a signal that the engines can interpret to mean "oh, these two sites are owned by the same company, and since I trust that one, I’ll trust this one" can make for very unhappy execs when it comes time to see the new project’s metrics.

As always, I’m looking forward to your opinions and experiences on this topic.

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Who Do You Recommend for Web Design?

Posted by Aaron Wall
January 28, 2009

Good design makes quality content look and feel better. Design can help improve conversion rate, makes a site more linkable, and sometimes a site generates additional links and mentions just for having a great aesthetic design.

I frequently get asked how we can run a wide array of websites with only a few high-quality part time employees. One of our secrets is staying away from the stuff we are no good at - like web design. I could show you my attempts at design, but you would think less of me if I did. ;)

Rather than going the DIY route, I have been getting quality custom website designs from Wildfire Marketing Group for many of our newer sites, and they look great. I liked their services enough to work a deal with them to get SEO Book training subscribers $100 off their designs, which start out at $765 for a basic design and $975 for a design + a Wordpress theme. Their services page is here, and the coupon code is here.

A couple other people I would also recommend for design work without hesitation are Sophie Wegat and Chris Pearson. Though Chris Pearson is working on Thesis and no longer is available for hire. Luckily we have a 20% off Thesis coupon too.

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Should You Have Multiple Websites?

Posted by PeterD
January 28, 2009

Or just one?

Let’s take look at a web strategy that has a number of SEO and benefits: the hub and spoke strategy. A hub and spoke strategy is when you create one authoritative domain (the hub), and then hang various related websites off that domain (the spokes).

If you don’t yet have an authority site, it’s probably best to focus on that one site. However, once you’ve built an authority hub, it can be a good idea to specialize in a number of niches using multiple, smaller sites.

Let’s look at a few reasons why, in the context of dominating a niche.

Economics

Economic theory holds that division of labor increases profitability.

During the early days of the web, it was easy to make money by being a generalist. However, as the web got deeper and richer, it became difficult to maintain a generalist position unless you had significant resources.

Specialization, by way of niches, allows for greater targeting, and this targeting can increase value. Leads and advertising become more valuable, because the target audience can be reached more efficiently.

The hub and spoke approach is this theory in microcosm. The hub is the generalist authority, whilst the spokes allow for niche specialization.

We’ll see how this dove-tails with SEO shortly.

Domain Knowledge

If you were to create a series of sites on different topics, it might take a significant period of time to know each area well. However, if you create niche topics within your own area of expertise, you should be able to create new sites very quickly.

Why would you create new sites? Why not just stick with one?

Let’s say your main site is fairly broad in it’s appeal. However, you’ve discovered some lucrative niche keyword areas within that broad topic area. By creating spoke sites, you can focus on these keyword areas, and dig deeper, without compromising the general appeal of your main site.

An example might be a hub site that is aimed at community education, whilst spoke sites might cover private tuition, corporate learning materials, and education facility hire.

This segmentation can be done in a number of ways. You could aggressively target one search engines algorithm and/or audience (MSN) with one spoke, whilst targeting another search engine on another spoke. One site might be aimed at do-it-yourself people, whilst another site is aimed at a person looking to hire a professional. Both sites cover the same topic, but require a different approach in terms of language, structure, offer and tone.

Likewise, you may use spoke sites for brand reasons. When Google bought YouTube they wisely kept the YouTube name, as the brand appealed to users. Google Video - not so much. There is a general perception that YouTube does video, and Google is a search company, and never the twain shall meet.

Google knew better than to force the issue.

Legitimate Links

A hub site on education that links out to pharmaceutical affiliates could easily get hit by Google. The relationship between the two areas is questionable. However, if you link out to your spoke sites, that cover related niches, your link pattern will be much more acceptable.

From an SEO standpoint, it can be difficult to get links to purely commercial sites. If you have a hub site that already has link authority - or is created specifically to attract links - then you can pass this authority to your more specialized spokes. Once the spokes become more popular, you can either pass that authority along to yet more specialized sites (one way), or even promote your hub site (reciprocal). Either way, the link graph makes sense.

Each site doesn’t need to be directly profitable. You can use one site to attract links, and pass this authority on to your monetarized domains. One can subsidize the production of the other.

Fame

If you’ve already built up name recognition in your niche, you’ll find it easier to get links and press attention for your new projects.

Status is important because if no one knows who you are, they probably don’t care about the content so much. Let’s say Danny Sullivan or Matt Cutts writes something, it will instantly get attention because of who they are and the trust relationship they have with their audience. If you’re new to the SEO space, no matter how profound your content is, it could easily get over-looked.

This is why it can be more difficult building multiple areas across unrelated niches. You may need to establish yourself in each new area, which can be a lot more difficult than leveraging your name recognition in your existing niche, then going granular.

Enhanced Monetarization Opportunities

We’ve looked at how you can target the most profitable areas aggressively using a hub and spoke strategy, without affecting the main brand.

Other advantages include economies of scale. As your network grows, you have more ad inventory to sell people. The inventory can be segmented, as opposed to the advertiser having to accept a one-size-fits-all approach of a generalist site. Similarly, you may be able to demand higher affiliate payouts, because you can precisely target offers.

Aaron covers this toipic in greater depth in the video “Why You Should Dominate A Niche“.

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Google’s .edu Domain Love: Department of Economics ? Mortgage, or Does It?

Posted by Aaron Wall
January 28, 2009

Some recent Google shifts have caused a lot of .edu websites to rank for competitive keywords like mortgage and credit card. Here is a screenshot of the top 100 search results for “mortgage” with 57 .edu results and 15 .gov results. And here is a similar credit card screenshot.

Note that few of these pages have any relevant on-page content. Is this a case of Google-bombing? Or did Google dial up the .edu bonus too far?

Does Google want to return all the irrelevant pages? Or does it not matter if they are deep enough in the result set? Will having mystery meat results on pages 2 through 100 hurt Google’s brand? Or does everyone just click on the first page?

We discussed this a bit more in the forums: new Google results

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Where Do New SEOs Go Wrong When They Set Learning Priorities?

Posted by PeterD
January 28, 2009

Another question we received recently from the SEOBook.com community was:

What qualities are common in Aaron Wall, DaveN, Bob Massa, Jason Duke, SugarRae, et al, that new SEOs can adopt, to come closer to people like these in expertise. Where do most new SEOs go wrong when they set learning priorities?

I’ve asked these people to provide their views, which I’ll get to shortly.

It’s a great question, because the avalanche of SEO information that confronts the beginner can be overwhelming. How do you know what information is important? What aspects do you really need to spend you time on, and what information do you need to reject? What are the qualities that make for a good SEO?

Let’s take a look…

Learning SEO

Most people stumble into being an SEO.

An awareness of SEO usually comes about when a person launches a site, only to find that the site doesn’t magically appear #1.

Soon after, the webmaster will likely find themselves knee deep in SEO forums and blogs, where everyone has a viewpoint, and often those viewpoints contradict each other. Contradiction is rife in SEO. To understand why, we need to understand the history of search engines.

The first step in setting learning priorities for SEO is to…..

1. Understand The History & Context Of SEO

My own foray into SEO began with Infoseek.

Infoseek was one of the early search engines. Infoseek introduced a feature around 1996 , whereby they would crawl a site and update their index immediately. This feature made it easy for webmasters to game the algorithm.

I had just launched a small, commercial site. I thought all I had to do was publish a site, and the search engine would do it’s job, and put me at number one! Unsurprisingly, that didn’t happen.

So, I tried to figure out why Infoseek didn’t think my site was great. I could see that there were sites ranking above mine, so there was clearly something about those sites that Infoseek did like. I looked at the code of the high ranking sites. Did that have something to do with it? To test that idea, I cut and pasted it their code into my own code and republished my site. Viola, I was at number 2!

So far, so good.

But why wasn’t I number one? The sites that were ranking highly tended to have long pages on the same topic, so I added more text to my pages. Soon enough, with a little trial and error, I was number one. Predictably, Infoseek soon pulled this feature when they saw what was happening.

I was clearly not alone in my underhanded trickery.

At the time, I thought my cut n paste trick was an amusing hack, but I wasn’t earning my bread and butter from the internet. I was working in the computer industry, and unaware of “SEO”. I soon forgot about it.

A few years later, a whole cottage industry had sprung up around SEO. The search technology had become a lot more sophisticated. My dubious copy n’ paste hack no longer worked, and the search engines were locked in a war against webmasters who were trying to game their ranking criteria.

There is an inherent conflict between the business model of the search engine, and that of the SEO. The SEO wants their site to rank, the search engine wants to rank a page a searcher will find useful.

That isn’t necessarily the same thing.

Therefore, the search engines are notoriously secret about their ranking formulas. SEOs try and reverse engineer the formulas, or just guess the factors involved, which is why you’ll see so many contradictory viewpoints.

So who do you listen to? What information is relevant?

2. Technical Know-How

Dave Naylor had this to say about doing too much at once:

Common qualities that’s simple we notice the little things and understand the larger impact that they will have in long term,

And where do you most new SEOs go wrong when they set learning priorities?

From the new SEO’s on the block that I chat too, they seem to run at a million miles an hour trying 100 different things at once, they need to slow get a decent data set of information and slowly pick though it and test small things at a time, and work out thing like why is it when I search for The FT in Google it returns Grand Theft Auto ?

Most people new to SEO place a lot of emphasis on the technical aspects. It’s natural to seek out the secret recipe of high rankings. Whilst most forums obsess over these issues, much of what you’ll read is irrelevant fluff. These days, SEO is more about a holistic process, rather than an end unto itself.

Start with a solid, credible source - like SEOBook’s course for example ;) The cost of a well researched course is nothing compared to the time you may spend heading in the wrong direction.

Most people will benefit by applying the 80/20 rule. To rank in Google, you need to be on-topic, you need to be crawlable, and you need to have inbound links.

You could spend a lifetime trying to figure out the other 20%. Unfortunately, the formula is in Google’s hands, and even then, only known to a few. It is reasonable to assume Google tweaks the dials often, especially once a common exploit makes the rounds. Take Dave’s advice and take it one step at a time. Focus on the key aspects first - relevance, crawlability and linking - then methodically test and evaluate in order to expand your knowledge.

Bob Massa on not sweating the small stuff:

I honestly think the only way anyone can go wrong, new to online promotion or a seasoned veteran, is to not look too hard for tricks and magic beans from those who make their names posting those so-called tricks, in forums.

I believe anyone can be successful at online marketing or even traffic generation and search engine placement specifically, if they just stop looking for ways to trick machines and instead look for ways to connect with humans.

search engines are just computer programs and algorithms written by humans. The engine is only a tool intended to aide humans do things faster and easier that are important to their lives. I think machines can help with connecting humans BUT the humans are the target, the goal, the end that machines can provide the means to.

I think one thing that is common among the list of people you mentioned is that they all realize, understand and accept that concept.

3. Strategy & Goals

The opportunity in SEO lies in the fact that Google must have content, around which it places advertising. If you rank high, you get “free” clicks.

Of course, nothing in this world is free, and SEO is no exception. There is significant time cost involved in getting lucrative rankings. And that cost comes with a reasonable degree of risk. Google has no obligation to show you at position x, and your competitors will always try and eat your lunch.

Strategy is the most important aspect, and one you should spend a lot of your time on. Why are you trying to rank? Are there better things you could be doing i.e. building up a community? Do you have an on-going publishing model? How is your brochure-web site ever going to attract links? Are you building enough link juice to ensure your entire 500K page affiliate site gets indexed?

Check out my post on strategy and goal setting. The key is to take a holistic approach.

I think some of the general principals that apply to most of them are that they are: smart, curious, hard working, blunt, honest, and sharing. They also view SEO as a tool to help them achieve other goals, rather than having SEO be the end goal.

Where a lot of people go wrong with SEO is that they try to think in concrete numbers based on a limited perspective built off a limited set of data. Some things may happen sometimes, but there are very few universal truths to the shifting field of SEO beyond preparing for change. And the certain lasting truths do not provide much competitive advantage…that is built through curiosity, testing, hard work, and creativity - Aaron Wall.

4. Measurement

It’s surprising how little time is spent talking about measurement, because without it, SEOs are flying blind.

One common metric is rank. It’s not a very good metric, because it doesn’t tell you very much, other than you’ve won the ranking game.

But so what?

What if that rank doesn’t help you achieve your goals? What if every person who clicks on your link ends up buying from the guy who is advertising on Adwords instead?

This is why measurement, aligned with your goals, is important. If you track SEO efforts through to a goal, and most of those goals tend to involve making money, then you’ll be head and shoulders above most of the forum hacks and pretenders. It doesn’t matter what tracking software you use. Become an expert and tracking and metrics.

Summary

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