Archive for May, 2007
published by Dan in SEO
SEO Contests are everywhere. Lots of people are drawn to these contests because of the usually big prizes associated with it. Serious SEO folks though have their eyes on more than the pot. What they are after are the bragging rights and the clients that come flocking after the winner. But what are these SEO contests really and how can you win one?
An SEO contest is usually created by some organisers who come up with an obscure (or even non-existent) word or phrase that participants need to use in their websites. The website that comes out on the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) for that certain keyword wins the contest.
The premise is very simple but the actual SEO work to be able to win SEO contests is far from simple. SEO contests will show whether you are really any good at it. It requires a lot of optimisation and gathering of inbound links in a relatively short span of time. Because of the difficulty some contestants resort to black hat methods although these are usually banned. Of course those who do sometimes get caught and are disqualified from the contest.
To even out the playing field organisers usually require contestants to start out with a fresh or new domain so that everyone starts out with the same age, page rank, and virtually a “reputationless” site. This means that to win SEO contests it all boils down to whoever can optimise a website the best as well as come up with great ideas on how to get their page noticed and gather inbound links.
Popularity: 11% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Tools
As promised here are the last of the 27 features blogged about by Adam Ostrow.
Visitor Loyalty - The greater the number of loyal readers you have the better.
Visitor Type Contribution - Pie chart showing the contribution to your traffic
that your returning (loyal) visitors compared to the new ones. You can compare here the number of pageviews, time spent on the site, and their bounce rates.
Search Engine Traffic - Show the amount of traffic different search engines send your way. This will help you determine in which search engines your SEO campaign is having the greatest impact.
Top Content - Shows which pages are most popular in terms of the number of visits. It also shows the average time spent by visitors in those pages and whether they click on another page after visiting that page or exit your website.
“About This Report” Link - Found on the left under Help Resources this link will help you understand more about each report you are looking at and help you learn how to use it to your advantage.
Top Exit Pages - Shows which pages your visitors are usually at before exiting your website.
Network Location - Usually not really important (in my opinion). But in case you’re curious this will show the ISPs that your visitors use.
Report Finder - For old user of Google Analytics. Since the new Analytics format is different this will help those who want to dig into their old reports.
Export to PDF - Self explanatory. Allows you to export your report and convert it into PDF format.
To try out the features yourself head on to Google Analytics. No harm done if you don’t like it since it’s FREE.
THE END
Popularity: 12% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Tools
This series on Google Analytics turned out to be longer than I anticipated so I have decided to cut it a bit short and make this the second to the last one. Hence discussion of some features might be pretty abrupt while some will just be mentioned without even being discussed at all. Having said that, here’s more features of Google Analytics explained…
Keyword Source - This feature shows you the keywords typed in by people who got to your site via search engines. The results can be fun and really surprising. Very useful for those who want to optimize their AdWords campaign.
Referring Sites - List of sites that send you traffic. It also shows the amount and quality of traffic the referring sites give you.
Browser Capabilities - Shows the type of browsers your visitors are using. Very important for websites who don’t support ALL kinds of browsers. If you see that you are starting to get visitors that use a certain type of browser you don’t support you’d better start making the necessary changes so that future visitors won’t be discouraged from returning.
Connection Speeds Data - Shows the type of internet connection you visitors have. If you have plenty of visitors with slow connections you’d better make sure to have an optimized website or to have a version with lower resolution or with less fancy features.
Languages - Shows the preferred language of your visitors. This information comes from the language setting of the computer used by your visitor. You might want to support another language if you have enough visitors that prefer a certain language.
Exclude Internal Traffic - Allows you to exclude traffic from specified (by you) IP addresses so that your data won’t be skewed from traffic from your very own PC.
To be continued yet again…
Popularity: 11% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Tools
More on the features of Google Analytics explained…
Site Overlay - Perfect for those who need or simply like visualizations to be able to really understand what the data is all about. Using the data gathered and analyzed by Analytics you can view your website and see the the data for each part when you hover your mouse over it.
Email Reports - You can opt to simply view reports sent to you by Analytics instead of having to log into your Analytics account. You can customize the frequency of reports and what will be included or excluded in the reports. Email reports can be sent to multiple email addresses making it perfect for those who work in teams or those who need to send reports to their bosses or clients.
Access Privileges - You can give other people access to your Analytics page and can set limit their privileges. Peers can be invited as co-administrators allowing them to do as much tweaking as you. You can also invite people and only allow them viewing or read-only privileges.
Bounce Rate - This one shook me a bit until I understood what it stood for since I was getting a pretty high bounce rate in my blog. It actually simply stands for the percentage of people who land on your page and don’t click on any further links before exiting the page. It stands to reason that my bounce rate will be high since I don’t really have any other pages to visit in my personal unless you feel like commenting or reading back posts. For business websites though you would like people to explore other parts of your site so that pages with high bounce rates should either be improved or removed.
To be continued yet again…
Popularity: 11% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Tools
More on the features of Google Analytics…
Local Conversion Data - For those who have set conversion goals, Google Analytics makes it easy to track whether you really are making any conversions by simply viewing the local conversion data. This will of course show you how effective your methods are and can then adjust your methods accordingly.
Funnel Visualisation - This feature is very important since it reveals exactly which part of your registration or subscription process turns off most of your customers. Some times you will be surprised at what it can reveal. Of course it does not reveal exactly WHY the people get turned of at that part but once you identify which needs improvement you can study whether you can remove that step entirely or simply present it in a different way. You might be surprised at how big the increase in subscriptions and sales a little tweaking can do.
Navigation Summary - This simply shows the way your visitors navigate or move through your site. The summary contains data from the visitor’s entry to your homepage up to the time they exit. You will see how the traffic flow goes and in case you want to highlight certain portions of your website you can rearrange the placement of some things or even just the colors or font size so as to draw people to the links you want them to go to and to encourage them to navigate through your site the way you want them to.
AdWords Integration - Those who advertise using AdWords will find the extra benefit of being able to organise and track their website’s data as well as their AdWords campaign all at once by simply using Google Analytics. It provide information about each AdWord campaign, group, and keyword as well as computes your margin for you.
Customisable Dashboard - The customisable dashboard allows you to place any reports you want to see on the dashboard by simply dragging and dropping.
To be continued…
Popularity: 11% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Tools
Google Analytics is the next generation web analytics tool from Google that shows you how people find your site, how they navigate through it, and how they they become customers.
Google Analytics has always been a very good analytics program not only because it is free (though that is of course one of the best things about it for people without any real budget) but also because of its features. The new Google Analytics is even better. It has more features and a simpler more comprehensible look making the reports very easy to understand. According to Adam Ostrow’s Blog the New Google Analytics has 27 Essential Features that make it the top analytics program. The 27 Features are:
Flexibility of what you can do to meet the goals you set. With Google Analytics whatever your goals may be, whether it is to improve sales, to get subscribers, or to simply get more traffic/readers you can do many things with it and get the data you need to help you achieve it.
Ability to compare data ranges. You can take data from two different time spans and compare the data by make a chart. This makes it easy for you to see improvements over different periods or the effect of whatever changes you might have done to make comparing the data from the two periods important.
Exhaustive Geographic Data. This part does not only give you data on users per country but even by state. You can view this data through clickable maps or through a chart. You will be able to see not only the number of visitors you get per locale but also the average amount of time spent by the visitors per locale allowing you to compare how well your site is attracting visitors per area.
To be continued…
Popularity: 13% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Tools
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is meant to help your website get higher page ranks and get a good position in search engine result pages (SERPs). It is pretty easy to rate your SEO campaign as successful if you see your website promoted from page nothing to the first page of SERPs. However, this doesn’t happen overnight and people who do not quantify the success of the SEO campaign either get discouraged since they don’t see any noticeable results or get over confident thinking that the campaign is helping then when it fact it might not be that effective. This is why it is very important to get your website’s statistics and analyze the trends so as to be able to actually quantify your SEO campaign’s effects.
If you plan on using an SEO firm to do SEO for you then you won’t really need to learn about how they came up with all the data they give you. Website analysis should come with the package. However, if you are interested in heading your own SEO campaign then learning how website analysis is essential. Even if you won’t be doing SEO it is still very interesting and useful to know your website statistics.
Quantify your SEO efforts in terms of website statistics is actually pretty easy since there are plenty of analytics programs out there. Some are paid services while some, like Google Analytics, are completely free. Using one is also very easy and most reports are automatically generated. I will discuss some good analytics programs and what they can do for you in my next posts. For now though you can try playing around with Google Analytics and you’ll be surprised that it is usually more than enough for your needs.
Popularity: 13% [?]
published by Dan in SEO Strategy
Inbound links are great. In fact the last entry was about effective ways to increase your inbound links. However, some people get a bit too enthusiastic about link building and commit some serious mistakes that DO result in more inbound links but at the same time do not really do anything for the website in terms of SEO, or even worse, actually result in getting their website penalized by search engines.
Reciprocal links - Reciprocal links aren’t really bad. You can use reciprocal links and share link love but don’t expect your page rank to soar because of this. You want lots of inbound links from other websites and not just a small close circle of sites. Reciprocal links do not really work.
Link Farms and FFA (Free for All) Sites - This is the worst mistake one can commit when trying to get more inbound links. Joining an FFA site or a link farm is one of the fastest ways to get “bad quality” inbound links. This is because such sites do not really filter their member sites so that they get a lot of websites with unsavory reputations as well as simply poor quality sites. By joining such a community your website will automatically be linked to them and this is one thing you do not want. In fact some search engines automatically “penalize” websites that belong to some link farms and DO NOT index their members.
If you are thinking of some other method to increase your links my advice it to research its implications before implementing your new method. If it borders on unethical just stick to slower but surer means.
Popularity: 14% [?]
published by Gary in SEO Strategy
Inbound links are very important for higher search engine rankings but you cannot just get inbound links from any website. You need an effective link building strategy operational in order to get inbound links from websites that are really respected by the search engines.
Listed below are a few steps you can pursue to get high-value inbound links to your website:
Lots of relevant content
Fill your website with content that people are really looking for. Make your content unique in presentation and information so that it can only be found on your website. Make it so compelling that people find it irresistible. But what makes your content compelling and irresistible?
- Your content solves a difficult problem. People are always looking for solutions, for answers, for ways to do things, or do things the better way. So give them that. Even if you cannot think of something unique, there are always better, quicker ways of doing old things.
- Your content is topical. Write about the current topics doing the round on the Internet, pertaining to your niche. Current topics are always the hot favorites and lots of searches are conducted on them. When people write about a topic, they prefer to link to other points of views too, and they’ll link to you if your put across your view convincingly.
- Your content is interesting. Well, it can be funny, it can be controversial, it can be contradictory or it can be anything that catches the fancy of your readers and the perspective linkers.
Just keep in mind that your content add values to the websites desiring to link to you.
Use titles that grab attention
This matters a lot on all those social media websites like Digg and Netvibes. Your compelling title makes the readers click on your link because when they read an interesting title, they want to know what it is about.
Link to people
They’ll most probably link to you if you link to them. People often use things like blog-rolls or link-exchange pages to link to other websites and blogs but I suggest you link to them through your content because that’s more effective: both in terms attributing appropriate importance to the links and convincing the search engines that you link to informative resources on the Internet.
Interact on the Internet
There are numerous online forums, message boards and blogs where you can constructively interact with other publishers and readers and consequently share your links with them. Regular interaction also builds your recognition as people begin to know you and once they get familiar with they find you convincing enough to link to you.
Link building is a slow but rewarding process. You have to formulate a clearly defined, goal-oriented strategy to glean valuable inbound links.
Popularity: 11% [?]
published by Dan in Keyword Research
Keywords are a very important aspect of SEO. It is the keywords that will determine how searchable your content and thus, your website, will be.
Users of search engines ALWAYS find the information they need by typing in some keywords and key phrases into the search box and simply choosing from the results given to them. Now if you do not choose the proper keywords and phrases your website will definitely not be found among the results even if your website does have the information the user needs. Because of this some people make sure their website contains all the possible keywords and phrases the user is likely to enter and resort to keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing simply means cramming in all the keywords you can in your content and repeating the same words and phrases needlessly. Quite obviously, keyword stuffing isn’t the way to go. It not only makes your content look and sound ugly but also puts you in danger of being penalized by search engines.
The key to finding the balance when using keywords is to spend time in keyword analysis to find out which words and phrases you should be using. Though some advise content writers to use highly specific keywords to target their niche market and to eliminate the trouble of having to compete for in-demand keywords I believe that you should use a mixture of both keywords. It simply doesn’t make sense to turn a blind eye on popular search terms. In the end the balance is found when you use relevant keywords in moderate amounts. In the end, though you might need keywords, your content should always be understandable, informative, and well-written. It should be written for your readers and not just the search engines. If you do that and yet remember to insert some keywords here and there, then you will find that your keywords will start working in your favor.
Popularity: 11% [?]
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