Archive for October, 2008

Perhaps you have made some efforts to improve the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of your web site, but it isn’t working well and you still aren’t receiving much search traffic.

Here are a few potential reasons why your SEO isn’t working.

1. Outdated Methods - The effectiveness of different techniques changes from year to year, and some are no longer useful. You should consider researching newer methods of conducting SEO if your techniques include things like putting a hundred different words in the “keywords” META tag, purchasing links on pages that aren’t related to your site in any way, or commenting on blogs that now use the “nofollow” attribute. Certain outdated techniques, like putting a long list of keywords at the end of the page (typically in a very small font) or posting to FFA (Free For All) link pages, can actually worsen a site’s position in search results instead of improving it.

2. Not Enough Time -Even if your techniques are correct, another one of the reasons why your SEO campaign may not be working is because you don’t spend enough time on it. SEO shouldn’t be viewed as an afterthought; efforts to design and create content for a web site are wasted if it receives little or no traffic. There are numerous important tasks associated with SEO; optimizing URLs and META tags, obtaining inbound links, researching keywords, improving keyword density, submitting to directories, creating a site map, and so on. Many companies pay marketing firms to carry out SEO work, thus saving time and ensuring that effective techniques are applied.

3. Too Impatient - One of the reasons why your SEO efforts might seem not to be working is that you haven’t waited long enough to see an effect. Search engines need to index pages, find new links, update rankings, and so on - which doesn’t happen immediately. It typically takes longer (especially for new web sites) to see results from SEO on Google than MSN, Live.com, or GigaBlast. Submitting a new site to the major engines can help expedite the results a bit. If it is your goal to start receiving traffic immediately, consider using a different promotional method like PPC (Pay-Per-Click) or paid inclusion until your SEO campaign starts working effectively.

After identifying and responding to the reasons why your SEO isn’t working, you will have a better chance of achieving high rankings in search results and gaining more traffic to your web site.  If you would like a professional review of your website, check out our Website SEO Audit service.

Many people may not think of Firefox as an SEO tool, but in actuality, it’s a great one. It works well for SEO for many reasons. Among them are that it’s free, secure, works on Mac, Windows, and Linux with the same features and functionality and has a large developer network creating extension that are generally independent.

After you make the decision to use Firefox though, it can be overwhelming deciding which plugins you should use. To that end, here is a list of the 7 highly useful plugins and what you can use them for:

1. SEOQuake – This tool helps analyze search results and various parameters that may influence SEO such as Google PR (Google PageRank of current page), Google Index (Number of indexed pages. Google version), Google link (Number of links, pointed to the current page. Google version (Except links from concerned domain) as well as similar parameters for many other search engines (Yahoo, MNS, Yandex, Rambler, Baidu) and some other miscellaneous parameters.

2. SEOpen: Provides some basic tools to help with search engine optimization, including Google backlinks, yahoo backlinks, PageRank check, http header viewer, and more. All features are available by right-clicking on an open area of a web page, or by using the included toolbar. (Note: Not yet compatible with Firefox 3.0)

3. SEO Link Analysis: Adds display of PageRank, linktext and nofollow links to external links in Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft Webmaster Portal.

4. Mahalo Share: Share and recommend Web pages across many different services; recommend a link once and have it automatically posted to any of Twitter, del.icio.us, MySpace, Ma.gnolia, Jaiku, your Tumblr blog, Facebook, Pownce, StumbleUpon, Mahalo, Faves, or Google Bookmarks.

5. SearchStatus: Display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and more.

6. RankQuest SEO Toolbar: RankQuest SEO(Search Engine Optimization) Toolbar provides you quick access to more than 30 intuitive SEO tools. Alexa Rank and Page Rank provided by Alexa and Google respectively ensure the popularity of the site. Once you download and install the SEO Toolbar you are only one or two clicks away from carrying out most of your day to day SEO operations.

7. About This Site: One-click access to web site metadata - traffic, related and linked pages, and more - added to the Tools menu and context menu.

Google’s Insight for Search program is closely related to their Google Trends product. With Insights for Search you can compare and contrast search volume patterns across specified regions (like USA or Japan), categories (such as health or sports) and time ranges (last 30 days, for example).

No matter what business you’re in – small business owner, marketing/advertising agency or even a giant corporation – Google Insights for Search can help you determine the interest in different search terms. The reason is that Insight for Search shows you A/B comparison between keywords so that you can choose the best keywords for your needs. It also shows you the top related keywords as well as which keywords are on the rise in your market. Additionally, you can see which cites, states and even countries in which a keyword is popular.

A note of caution, Google Insights for Search works much like Google Trends in that it defaults to the broad matched version of a keyword. This means that a word like credit will show more volume than credit cards, event though credit cards gets more search volume. The reason is that the term credit card counts towards the search volume for the word credit. Also good to know, keywords are weighted so that their top volume day is anchored at 100 and other days represent a relative percentage of that search volume.

All in all, this is another powerful tool in Google’s toolbox that is well worth taking a look at to determine how it can fit into your marketing plan.

It’s no secret that companies around the world are competing for the top places in search engine results. It’s also no secret that the reasoning behind this is that the closer you are to the top, the more traffic your site will receive and, hopefully, the more revenue your company will generate.

Since most search engines only allow natural results, or non-paid results, at the top of their lists SEO companies are stepping in to help businesses reach those coveted spots. Through SEO techniques these SEO marketing companies can help their clients climb higher and higher in the results page, eventually landing on the first page of a search query.

While many of these companies will simply charge customers a flat rate for their services, RankPay has come up with a different plan. They don’t charge any upfront fees, but they do have an up-front pricing schedule. Their theory however, is if you don’t rank you don’t pay. Then, once you rank, the amount you pay is based upon the ranking that has been established. This amount is the up-front pricing schedule that was determined before the SEO process began.

RankPay can be used for any sized web site, but they will not optimize more than one web site per keyword. Additionally they don’t accept all sites and/or keywords so you’ll have to see if you qualify to use their services. Once your rankings have been achieved your business will be billed monthly. And you always have the option to deactivate terms from your keyword list at any time.

There are lots of different tools online that provide quick data regarding websites, two sites that we use are Quarkbase and Website Grader.  Here is a quick overview of Mortgage101.com using both tools along with some interpretation of the information found by the tools.

Google supports query words that have special meaning to Google. These are known as advanced operators and modify a search in some way or tell Google to do a different type of search. Quite a few of these operators use punctuation instead of words and quite a few of them are accessible from the Advanced Search page of Google. Here is a list of the more common types and what they do.

1. link: Using the query [link:www.webpage.com] will list web pages that have links to the web page you specify. Make sure you do not put a space between the “link:” and the web page URL.
2. related: The query [related:www.webpage.com] will list web sites that are similar to the web page you specified. Again, you cannot leave a space between the colon and the web site specified.
3. site: This query [site:www.webpage.com] allows Google to restrict the results to the web sites in the given domain.
4. allintitle: This query [allintitle:example search] restricts the search results to ones with all of the query words in the title.
5. intitle: [intitle:example search] restricts the results to documents containing the word you search for in the title.
6. allinurl: [allinurl:example search] limits the results to ones will all of the query words in the URL. This query works on words only and not URL components.
7. inurl: [inurl:example search] confines the search results to documents containing that word in the URL.

Keep in mind there can be no space between the colon and the first word in any of these queries. Using these advanced Google searches as well as the additional ones found on Google can help you with your search engine optimization

We use this keyword ranking tool (Download Rank Checker) at least a couple of times a day to check keyword rankings quickly.  In addition, we use the .CSV export to show the rankings to clients and potential clients.  The rankings are tracked for the Top 200 rankings in Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

Additional features include the ability to set a preset list that will let you re-check at a later date as well as the history of the keyword preset lists.  Once a preset list is setup, you can schedule the Firefox extension to run at a set time…be sure to set you search interval to between 4-7 seconds so you are being ‘friendly’ to search engines.

This product review of Wordtracker is by Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com
and covers some useful keyword research techniques.

Basically, keyword research should begin with looking at your current web logs or analytics reports since basically these keywords should have some type of ranking. The logic is that you can probably rank for similar keywords.

The key to using a keyword research tool is to start with general themes like ‘chocolate’ and then find other keywords like ‘white chocolate’ and ‘chocolate truffles’. Once you identify some of these, you should visit competition to see how they have ranked.

According to SEOQuake, the more keywords in a search results the better lower quality sites did in the results. This long tail strategy can be good for sites that don’t have the authority to rank for competitive keywords.

Quintera shows keyword phrases that people might be using by relating keywords from the top Google SERP results.  There are lots of keyword tools that can be used for ideas as part of the discovery process.  Be sure to review keywords volumes as part of the input, but don’t rely on the data from any of the tools.

Google’s keyword tool not only provides keyword variations but you can also plug in a url and Google will use the content of the home page to pull relevant keywords.  Compete also provides a traffic / ranking based keyword terms that allows you to ’spy’ on your competition.

Picking the right keywords can lead to traffic quickly if you the right modifers.  Only half of the search queries on Google are unique, so be sure to use modifiers that might include product names, brands, and action items like ‘buy’, ‘price’,'order’, ‘cheap’, etc.  For another example, clothes might have modifiers like ‘loose’ or ‘tight’.  Aaron Wall gives a lot of good ideas regarding the type of keyword modifiers that might be used and these items could potentially be used for on-page body copy.

Rand at SEOMoz does a good walk-through of the Keyword Research Process and how site hierarchy should be more important than just Keyword Demand. This is a common question that we come across as we try to interpret keyword volume research and overlay it into a website.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Implementing Keyword Research from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Once keyword research is complete, it is time to overlay the identified keywords into the meta data and on page body copy (a writing task) and modify the site architecture and link structure (a development task). While not specifically mentioned, this is an excellent time to evaluate Page Rank sculpting and attempting to silo content.

Rand is putting this all under a Keyword Research and Implementation, while we tend divide this overall process into several smaller steps:

• Keyword Research - Brainstorm, research, presentation and sign-off by client.
• Meta Data - Mapping of target keywords to the website pages.
• SEO Content Optimization - On page body copy improvements to support target keyword by page.

While we break this up into some small deliverable items, we do view the overall process as one complete exercise to improve the on-site factors that affect SEO.

We receive a lot of questions about reporting differences between Google Analytics and Google Paid Search, here are some of our thoughts regarding this:

1. Browser limitations: There are limitatiation in older browsers where the referring information isn’t passed correctly, this can lead to differences in the statistics.
1. Click Fraud - Yahoo & Google don’t count every click or visitor that comes through the system.  This leads to GA visitors and no reported clicks.
2. Counting Methods - Google Analytics sets a different cookie than counting a click-through.  If 5% of internet isn’t using cookies (or robots are following content ads) then GA will count the visitors higher than the clicks.  This could lead to multiple GA visitors and only one reported click.
4. Page Loads - If your page runs slow, a click is counted…but the JS script isn’t ran properly.  This will lead to one click and no visitor.
5. Shared IP address: Some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) assign the same IP address to multiple computers. Your AdWords account statistics will reflect multiple clicks that occur from the same IP address, while your third-party tracking software may not.

With all of these potential reporting differences, all your tracking mechanisms will tell you a different story.  Our advice is to use a 3rd party tool to act in combination with Google Adwords data….you can’t assume that Google Analytics and Google Adwords (even with Auto-Tagging turned on) will work with each other and report similar data.