Entries Tagged 'SEO' ↓

Research and Analysis is part and parcel of business. It’s an important aspect as it gives you vital information about your company, your potential clients via visitors to your website, sales, and profit. You need to analyze your company’s progress to ensure that it is heading where you want it to.

I came across an awesome tool to track and analyze your website’s progress.

*Drumroll*……………………….

Introducing Google Analytics

This fantastic tool allows you to view and analyze your webpage’s report. It allows you to do an analysis on:

• Site usage (visits, page views, pages/visit, bounce rate, average time on site, and new visits)
• Visitors
• Traffic Sources (Direct Traffic, Referring Sites, Search Engines)
• Content (Pageviews of Content)

You might want to look out for something called “Bouncing Rate”. Bounce rate is the percentage of single page visits (i.e, visits in which visitors leaves your site from the main page). It is a measure of your page quality therefore a high bounce rate is not a good indicator as your visitor (and potential clients) are not finding relevant information on your entrance page (landing page). To minimize this, you should improve on your landing site’s content and make it more relevant

Whilst it’s good to have a high percentage of new visits, it’s retainment that counts. The higher the percentage of returning visitors, the better (clients! clients! clients!)

These are few of the tools Google Analytics allows you to do to track the progress of your website. I must say that it’s pretty interesting! I can assure you that you’ll be motivated to find ways to improve your site when you see the graph decline.

I’ve seen many people asking about this, and I’ve seen even more people generally mystified by the way Google works. So most people don’t understand how and when Google crawls and are generally thinking it’s a secret.

It’s not really that big a secret, but it is a bit of a thing to predict when Google does come. Of course if you deal with this stuff as often as I do, you start to become used to the schedules. What is a bit confusing though is how this crawl schedule changes like hell depending on a million factors Google finds important.

We’ll start off with a bit of information from the Google Webmaster Center. As always they give us the follow the guidelines and it depends on many things crap, but a few factors come out as obvious in the process:

• PageRank
• links to a page
• crawling constraints (such as the number of parameters in a URL)

Ok, so we know what helps us. PR is the most important, then links, then the ability of your site to be crawled (that number of parameters refers to the fact that Google doesn’t like many php parameters - use mod_rewrite). So we have a starting point. But as always Google is cryptic and doesn’t really help… So we move on.

As early as 2002 people were asking about the Google crawl schedule, and some were guessing at it. However, results were strange and back them high PR sites were a lot more. However, many have seen Google full crawls at around 1st June, while another had it in May and still moving on in June. An interesting piece of info was that for large sites Googlebot came in at about every three minutes indexing about 2-10 pages a second, which I feel was a bit of a slurp but was made to keep a bit of the strain off the webserver. Their discussion goes offtopic then on, but for the purists, go read…

Our next source is a for dummies book excerpt, in which we get a bunch of terms related to the crawl. In doing research for this I was really surprised to see there’s very little info to be found. Then again, it’s not such a hot topic for SEO, but is somewhat important. They say the deep crawl occurs about every month and that fresh crawls occur randomly. Also, they consider the index as static between deep crawls, in a form called everflux in the strange update given by fresh crawls. My opinion later

There’s not much else on the web, except a mention of the Google Dance. I find all these names so amusing, since they don’t really explain the phenomenon and there’s no dancing involved. I guess they got bored of using crawl in everything. It’s basically the deep crawl, and we get the info that it usually begins at the end of the month, lasting 3-5 days, and usually updates PR. Also, for the people out there who know how to monitor server logs, deep crawl uses an IP range of 216.239.46.x whereas fresh crawl uses the 64.68.82.x range. Also at that link above you can find a so called Google Dance Tool, which could be useful to see what pages Google finds important and crawls, but you could just use webmaster tools for that.

Now for my take on the whole thing. I feel that there’s not two, but three kinds of crawls. Firstly, there’s an almost immediate crawl, from pings and links and basically whichever spider Google uses for Google alerts. That happens at once, and crawls the title and the post, but does not index it. It only notices it’s there. Then, in a few days to a week, the post becomes indexed completely, and starts showing up in Google results (on a quite high position at first, then gradually lower if no further activity on that post is detected, or no search activity for that keyword is detected). The next kind of crawl is a longer-term crawl, which usually includes the homepage, and is done every week, or two weeks, or even a month for less active sites. This updates the cache on your active pages, but doesn’t touch the others. And the last kind of crawl happens about three or four times a year, and reindexes everything. This usually happens in February or March, June, November, or in some cases any other month. Google tends to vary this stuff, presumably due to factors on and off the site. So be prepared for a couple of crawls this year in June (beginning) and mid-November or so, and see if it happens as I’ve predicted.

One more thing, an important factor to crawling is the kind of servers you are hosted on. Use GoDaddy or any other established host rather than hosting on your old machine, so Google can download the data properly. The crawl intensity depends a lot on that. Also, Google does not have the same schedule as Yahoo for example. Yahoo just performed a deep crawl for my site a few days ago, whereas Google didn’t.

Keywords are the in thing as far as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) goes these days. It’s important that to keep in mind when you create a fantastic write up about your company. Three to four key words should do the trick. The trick is to place those words strategically in the first paragraph when you write so the ‘crawlies’ (search engine spiders) will pick it up and chances of your website getting spotted on search engines goes up!

For example, if I were to do a write up about 2LevelsAbove, I would use three keywords – 2LevelsAbove, Search Engine Optimization and startup business. I will then write in a way that would place these words in the first few lines of the first paragraph….something like this:

2LevelsAbove is a company dedicated in helping startup businesses gain popularity in the virtual world using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies and creating a fantastic web site for our clients.

If you only have one of the top 10 spots in Google searches for important key words - here are some ways get more visibility there.

Here are three places that will let you (responsibly) publish information with links to your site. The new thing you write ranks well quickly because it is on existing sites that have great ranking.

1. answers.yahoo.com - Strategically creating good questions and answers will get ranked well on search engines and generate traffic to your website or blog. Use the tool and do not always promote something, or the same thing.
2. Squidoo.com - Publish your lens with resources and outbound links. Be sure to use the keywords you are targetting in your tags and titles.
3. HubPages.com - Freakishly fast and high ranking in Google after publishing on this. Build HubPages on your targeted topic and be sure to include a few links to what you are promoting.

In all three of these cases, you have to add value. If you just post blatant promotional items, it will get far fewer results (and possibly removed.). So be a little smart and post something intellectual

The Dallas Business Journal recently ran a story on , Wasp Barcode Technologies, describing how they went from spending enormous amounts of money on PPC to focusing more on traditional SEO and link building. The strategy paid off — Wasp spent less and got better results. These are the kind of results every small to medium sized business would like to enjoy.

Wasp cut its external spending by 13% and reinvested the funds into in-house personnel, who “re-architected” the site so users would find it easier to use and more relevant. Those steps meant optimizing the site for specific key words such as “asset tracking” and “inventory control” and continuing to add richer online content, including slide show presentations, Webinars and YouTube demos. This strategy also including increasing the link popularity of the site by both natural and aggressive means.

The efforts are paying off in a multitude of ways. In 2007, the company’s Web hits grew by 60%, topping 600,000 visits. “The added visibility makes the company appear large and established, and bodes well with resellers such as Fry’s and Staples who rely on brand awareness to sell Wasp’s products,” Wasp President Steve Coffman said. “It also helps Wasp reach small businesses, which often turn to the Web for technology guidance.”

While a PPC campaign can deliver traffic with relative ease, it can be very costly and has no real longevity — once you stop shelling out the cash, the traffic goes away. SEO and link building require a lot more creative effort but can have more sustainable results. It also allows a business to target a larger base of users as most studies reveal that 75 - 80% of searchers click on organic listings as opposed to paid listings.

Wasp learned this after spending considerable funds on Google AdWords and other PPC programs. That is not to say that they did not learn from the PPC experience. They most likely were able to gather intelligence on specific terms searchers were looking for related to their products. They also very likely learned how to improve conversions for each keyword search they attracted.

So the lesson to learn here is to lay your foundation with SEO, link building and maybe even some social media marketing. If you have additional budget, incorporate the PPC as well. However, don’t overlook the potential that a strategic SEO and link building campaign has to offer in your web marketing efforts.

“Building links are just like making friends in college or your hometown, you seek out those who have similar interests,” says Gardi, The senior vice president of Teoma.

Link popularity refers to the number and quality of the incoming links that are pointing to your site. No marketing tool can replace the effectiveness of word of mouth advertising. The same principle applies to website links. When a trusted site links to yours, people follow the recommendation. That is how linking works.

2 Levels Above is an experienced hand in the field of link building campaigns. 2 Levels Above assists you in making your link building and website promotion easier and faster. We perform the following functions:

1. Find websites to link with
2. Make link requests
3. Process, organize, and manage links
4. Ensure that the search engines find or “spider” your link partners
5. Check frequently to see if your links are still on your partner’s websites

We are avid about providing the best link marketing services to compliment your ongoing Search Engine Optimization programs.

Our linking building processes are broken down in to the following categories.

Reciprocal link building
Directory Submission
Buying Text Advertisements
Buying Sitewide Text Links
Buying Sitewide links across web journals / weblogs / blogs
Buying Links from Related sites
Article Reproduction
Press Releases
Pagerank Optimization / Pagerank Increase.

We all know good coding is always a boost in search engine rankings, If we have a clean HTML coding every search engine will love to index our site, JavaScript, Frames, .INC files, .LBI files are always a small barrier to search engines, I can see today’s search engines particularly google can understand any sort of Crap coding but still they don’t give the best PR to pages which it finds difficult to crawl, We all know how important Page Rank is to a site so it is important we give the best coding to the search engines.

Very important thing when designing a site is to make sure we make the site navigation as friendly as possible, we have to make the site with the best navigation for the crawlers to dip deep into the site, If your Web pages are not accessible to a spider, no amount of content optimisation, Website popularity or submitting to search engines will improve their performance — they simply won’t be added to the index.

Some the stuff search engines find difficult to crawl is flash, DHTML, Javascript etc, Make sure you use all these things to the minimum level on the site.

On Monday, Sunbelt Software’s security blog revealed that thousands of malware redirects were showing up in search engine results. Network bots designed to post relevant keywords and spam links in various online forms (think forum posts or blog comments) helped attackers claim high-ranking search engine positions for various obscure and seemingly innocuous search terms. According to Sunbelt, two of the thousands of terms were “infinity” and “hospice.” Yeah, that’s cool. Search for hospice information for a sick friend or family member, potentially get your system infected with nasty malware.

On Tuesday, Sunbelt revealed more information about the ill-effects clicking on these fake links could have on a vulnerable system (as a reminder - ALWAYS keep your browser and Internet security tools up to date). Best case scenario - you might end up with one of those annoying toolbars and pop-up ads for fake security software. Worst case? Your computer could be used to generate false-clicks for the attacker’s pay-per click programs (so they infect your system so that you can make them money), or worse still, that bot could load other malware/worms/trojans onto the unprotected system. Further investigation also revealed that these SEO-poisoning attacks were targeted at Google, although other search engines may have also been victim to the attacks.

Google has cleansed more than 40,000 of these hosting sites from their index, so for now - it looks like the biggest source of this sort of attack has been taken offline.OK - you might be thinking, spam search results show up everyday - why is this a big deal? It’s a big deal because the techniques used for these attacks was more clever and thought out than the typical SEO-poisoning. It’s also a big deal just based on the sheer scale of sites and domains dedicated to hosting these links and because of the malware involved.

It’s great the Google stepped up and cleansed the index so quickly after being made aware of the problem, but this should be a big (or continuing) wake-up call to users who don’t stay up to date with security updates or don’t have some sort of Internet security solution. And while Windows users are obviously the users who are most directly affected by these types of attacks, having these kinds of search results show up as relevant, even if the link can’t harm your system, is bad for the Internet community as a whole.

There’s lots of talk within the tech community, especially the blogosphere about using SEO and how it’s GOOD for bloggers and doesn’t negatively affect readers/searchers/regular users. This is a lie. Instead of Search Engine Optimization, SEO should really stand for Search Engine Opportunism, because that’s what it really is. Look, we certainly don’t object to gaining revenue from ads or page-views on a web site, that’s why we are able to do what we do; we do object to gaming the system and using loopholes to insert web sites into search queries that really have nothing to do with the content. Techniques to make sure your relevant content shows up in corresponding searches is one thing — inserting back-door code that is aimed at getting higher page ranks and more page views, regardless if the targets are actually correct, is another. To us, the type of SEO attacks revealed this week are only a few steps away from what tons of bloggers/websites do every day: purposely try to game search engines just so they can get more hits to their site, and by extension, maybe make a few extra dollars. Unless you are running a straight-up scam link-farm or very, very lucky — the highest search engine rank in the world is not going to have lasting benefits if the content is nonexistent.

For many people the beauty of content writing on the internet is the fact that everybody has their own idea about what works and what will see you in trouble with the search engines.  Too much spam will see you pushed further and further down the rankings with much of your content possibly discounted by Google, but too many keywords may well alarm the Googlebot and also land you in trouble for being too aggressive.  So do you really need keywords in your content or should you rely on the overall power of your site to attract traffic?

No matter what some people will have you believe, there is no doubt that the more keyword rich your content is (within reason) the higher you will rank for certain keywords and phrases, which in turn has the potential to pull in massive traffic for your site.  By giving the surfers what they want to see, they will be attracted to your site and if you keep adding quality content, slowly but surely your traffic will continue to rise.  It won’t happen over night, but it will happen.

So do I just place a few keywords in my content and hope for the best?

If only! Keyword rich content is an art form because adding keywords and still maintaining the flow of the article is a much specialised art.  There is no point in attracting readers by placing keywords in your articles only for them to look at your site, read the full article and see that it does not make sense – it was just designed to get them there, and is of no value what so ever to them.  In this instance they would not return to your site – one customer lost.

You need to take your time when producing content and ensure that as well as containing the relevant keywords it also reads well and is informative.  Many people prefer to use content writers such as ourselves who are aware of the levels of keyword density which the likes of Google will accept, can research niche markets for you, and produce something which you readers will enjoy.

Very Nice: Google Ranking factors