SEO Company Reveals Analytics Secrets
May 29, 2008 | Conversion, SEO, Web Marketing Advisor
Any good SEO company will tell you that analytics are the key. The first key performance indicator we look at is what position a website reaches in the search engine results page. I don’t care what any so called expert says, if you don’t get traffic, you can’t even begin to look at conversion! Then we start looking at internal website key indicators. These are usually;
New Visitor Percentage
The reason why we look at this is because if we are working on a search engine marketing campaign, we want to see if new visitors are coming to the site, or just old ones. It is always a concern if this number is low as it means no real promotion is happening.
Bounce Rate
This is the amount of people who come to a website, don’t click on any links and leave within a matter of seconds. This is a great indicator of traffic which is not targeted to the information you offer, or that quite simply, your website is poor!
Pages
These are the most popular pages on the site. It will give a good flavour of what people find interesting, and which pages are never visited
Keywords
These are the keywords people are typing into the search engines to find you. Most of the time this will probably be your company name, but we need to see this report showing the keywords we are optimising for.
Time on site
Again, a great benchmark of how engaging the site is. If people are staying less than a minute, the content they are reading might not be the content which is what they want.
Conversion
The final metric is how much conversion occurs. This can be carried out simply by the number of chosen actions divided by the number of visitors, or can be more sophisticatedly tracked using conversion tracking software. The key point is to decide what a conversion is and to make people take that action.
All of the above information can be discovered by using Google Analytics which a free to use.
Authority Sites and Anchor Text
May 28, 2008 | Link Building, SEO
Within the SEO Company world, there are two key terms which will come up a lot – Authority sites and anchor text. So what are they and what do they mean?
Anchor Text
Anchor text is the word or phrase which appears as the link. The anchor text you will probably have the most appreciation of is ‘click here.’ If you look at it from a search engines eyes, what this is saying is if you follow this link, the information on the page will be about click here. Search engines don’t really understand the relevance of click here and come to think of it, neither do people!
The anchor text provides context for the link. So when you create your next link, use one of your keywords as the link/anchor text and make sure the keyword is repeated in the actual page where the link goes to. This is also classed as ‘topical link vectoring’ but its far to early to be talking about that. One final point is to know that as well as the anchor text, the search engines also take into account the words around the link, so make sure they are relevant to your anchor text and landing linked page as well.
Authority Sites
An authority site is a website which ranks well in the search engines, is updated regularly, has lots of inbound links, may have an active community or forum attached to it and may have a high Pagerank. Really, you need to be generating links to your site from these sites.
There is far more to linking that generating authority site links, but it is a good place to start. The key piece of advice is to make your linking strategy to look as natural as possible, as the search engines are getting clever. A large influx of links in a very short period of time can look very suspect.
Go forth and linkbuild!
Geo Tagging – SEO Manchester
May 27, 2008 | SEO
Today we have been writing a proposal for a London based client who is looking to do some search engine optimisation.
As with all our clients, they want top listing for a tier 1 keyword, which would be something like SEO or Golf or Tennis. The business issue is that visitors who originate from these kind of searches never turn into business as they are far too broad. The other issue is that there is so much competition page wise, that it makes it a major job to get to the front page.
Geo tagging keywords does the trick, so SEO becomes SEO Manchester. That simple addition of a location changes the competition from 235,000,000 to 536,000. Now that’s where we like to play. SEO Manchester all day long. It’s much cheaper for the client and the truth is for many businesses its far more effective at delivering qualified traffic to the website, which ultimately means more profit per visitor.
And yes, if you read this post, you will see an example of keyword optimised copy – can you guess what the term is? SEO Manchester…purely used for an example of course.
Guy Levine, The IMG and Fashion eTail
May 23, 2008 | SEO, Web Marketing Advisor
Yesterday I spoke for the International Menswear Group who held their meeting at the Merrion hotel in Dublin (Bruce Springsteen was checking in as I was leaving!) . The meeting consists of a luxury/designer menswear store from each country worldwide. I met store owners from as far afield as Canada, Australia and the USA.
My remit was to talk about ecommerce and how it could be done better. It turns out there were a few key points that came out of the meeting.
The first point was that online, two areas work best – discounted designer brands where price shoppers could find good bargains and hard to find items. I think this marks the fact that online is a separate stream to retail. While this may not be true in all cases, in fashion it is at the moment.
The second that email marketing is still the best pound for pound marketing. Any methods used to capture customer details are worth implementing. It’s about being creative and adding value.
The third is that video rocks, and the more it is used, the more people buy. Combine video with adding value and there is a major recipe for success.
If you have any insight into eCommerce with designer brands, leave a comment!
Link Building SEO
May 23, 2008 | SEO
If you have been reading this blog for a while you will know my views on building links to your website as a key search engine optimisation strategy. The issue is that sometimes people get it wrong, very wrong!
Today I am going to share one of the reasons why people get it wrong, and it relates mainly to blogs and forums.
It used to be a really cool tactic to go and leave comments on peoples website, leaving a nice little link back to your website. Some people think it is still really cool and it is, but not in the search engines eyes. Most blogs now use something called a ‘nofollow’ tag. This piece of code when added to a link basically says to the search engines, ‘don’t follow this link as a 100% credible link because it might not have been me who put it there.’ (yes, seo’ers, I think that is the right way of describing it as opposed to just don’t follow!) Now, Google may well follow it, but you might not get any link credit for it. Often forums do the same thing.
Anyway – does this mean we should never leave comments any more. The answer is no. The tongue in cheek version is download a Firefox extension called Search Status - http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/ which will highlight all the ‘nofollow’ links on a page, you can then see if it’s worth leaving an SEO comment. The real answer is that good comments will drive traffic to your site, but you have to write good comments! It’s exactly the same with forum posts.
Good content always wins!
