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It can be frustrating to check out your competition’s website, or a website that has a complementary product or service to yours, and find they are ranking high while you are barely showing up on the search engine radar. It’s even more frustrating when you apply SEO techniques to your website and still are being outranked by other sites that hit on some of the same keywords that you aim for. So why are they ranking high and you are still struggling? The answer may be because of your links. Not all links to your site are created equal, and if you don’t have enough high quality links your site can really take a hit in the search engine rankings no matter how good your other SEO techniques are.
So let’s start at the bottom and work our way up. First, what makes the worst type of incoming link – ones that the search engines are sure to label as spam and penalize you for? The answer is easy – if you know its spam and it links to you then the search engines know as well. You never want to have links to your site showing up in comment spam on blogs, guestbooks (what quality site nowadays uses a guestbook anyway?) that are known spam holes and link farms. If it’s considered spam stay away from it – plain and simple!
The next type, and unfortunately the one where so many of us have most of our links coming from, is low quality sites. This includes other sites you own (don’t fool yourself, the search engines know what domains you own), reciprocal links (you might fool the search engines for a while, but they will eventually catch on to this one), message board signatures (by all means, mention your site in forums you participate in, but if a majority of your links are coming from forum signatures then you are missing your SEO mark), and junk directories – you know the kind that anyone and their brother can get listed in. Again, it’s not bad to have links in a few of these categories – such as the forums – but if the majority of your links are coming from this category you are going to suffer in the rankings.
Before we move onto the moderate category let’s talk a minute about social media sites. Social media is growing by leaps and bounds; it is the next generation of marketing. So what about links to your site from social media users and profiles? It really depends – it can be a moderate value link or a low quality link. A lot of the major search engines are still trying to nail down an algorithm for handling social media sites, but the general rule is if people are talking about and linking to your site naturally that is a good thing.
Moderate quality links are where most of us would like to get to for the majority of our links. These provide the best value in proportion to the effort it takes to get. Links coming from trusted directories (Yahoo Directory and the Open Source Directory are two good ones), blogrolls and partner sites all fit into this category.
Of course, in an ideal world, you want your links coming from the highest quality sites available out there. Sites such as news sites and trusted editorial sites fall into this category. Just think about it – if a site such as MSNBC or CNN links to you that says a lot about your site, and search engines treat it accordingly. Badges and widgets also fall into this category – which is why it is so important to make them available for your readers; if people are willing to re-syndicate your content through a widget that also says a lot about the site.
So remember that the quality your links plays a critical role in how your site ranks. SEO techniques alone can’t carry you to the top of the listings without investing time and a little bit of legwork into making sure your incoming links are based on quality and not just quantity.
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Think about two department stores located in the middle of town. One is brand new, glitzy and has the “designer” name. The other has been around for years, has a modest appearance and locally owned – and perhaps not everyone has even heard of them. Yet, the modest department store is drawing in more customers and creating more sales despite the fact it isn’t the “#1 retailer”. How can this be? It’s for the same reason that being #1 in the search engine rankings doesn’t necessary spell success – you have to look at more than just where you rank, but how your traffic and segments are doing in comparison to various factors to determine how well your site is (or isn’t) doing.
So why is worrying about rank alone a wasteful exercise? Let’s start out by saying that yes, it is important to be on that first page and hopefully near the top – but let’s face it, not all of us can be #1 all the time. Here are so many factors that can affect where you rank at any given moment of the day. There may be a big news story of the day that is taking up screen real estate and affecting rankings for the keyword you are targeting. It could be a geographical problem – you are #1 in St. Louis, but #3 from Quebec. Search results vary by location as the engines try to deliver the most relevant results for the keywords and location of their customers.
It could even be the data center that is returning the results, or the new code that Google is testing out for their engine. Things that you have no control over and as a result have no consistent method to address as an issue.
A more accurate measure of how well you are doing in the rankings is to look at how much traffic your site is getting. Sure, you may be ranked 3rd but if you are getting a large volume of traffic (and hopefully converting the traffic into revenue-generating activities) then you could very well be doing better than the #1 and #2 results. This is why it is so important to implement segmenting on your website through tools such as Google Analytics so you can analyze how certain segments of your website – such as revenue generating activities – are doing. It helps eliminate the noise from the dollars!
Once you get a handle on search engine traffic and conversions, then you can start looking at merging that data with ranking data to look for correlations. Suppose you have a spike in traffic – was there a noticeable change in rank? Or was it due to non-organic methods? Correlating the two data sources help you know where the traffic is coming from and what type of traffic it is.
As you continue to develop your SEO skills and manage your web properties and clients it is important that you (and your customers) understand the difference between rankings and traffic. You can help your clients better understand how to interpret the data when you start by knowing how to analyze the data effectively.
Just remember Avis (the rental car company) and their slogan – “No. 2. So we try harder”. Then ask yourself if you need to work harder on your site, or is #2 producing the traffic and revenue that you and your clients desire?
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SEO and Google Analytics go hand in hand – it’s without a doubt one of the best tools out there for really understanding how your website is performing in terms of search and inbound links. Using Google Analytics you can see how SEO techniques affect your web properties in about as close to real time as you can get. In this article I want to walk you through a few of the interesting tricks and caveats I’ve discovered when using some of the more advanced Analytics features.
First, let’s talk about segmenting. If you’ve worked with SEO long enough you know that there are times when you want to segment out visitors or pages from your site to take a closer look at what is driving the content, or where they are coming from. For example, many sites put their sales process into a separate segmentation so they can analyze how people make purchase decisions more closely. It’s not unusual to see different page depths broken into segments to see how far down people will drill into content. The general rule is the farther down people drill in content, the more “hooked” they are on the content and the site in general.
When applying these segments to keywords in Google Analytics you will often see keywords that show “0” visits, which is misleading. Google is actually starting the counter at 0 for the first visitor. This is because of Google’s attempt to make sure the total number of visitors reconcile with other Analytics data. This situation only occurs when the same user comes to your site within a 30 minute time frame using different search terms. So, for example, if a user searches for “SEO optimization” and hits your site through search and then goes back to their search engine and types in “Apple pie” and hits your site again, the keywords will show 0 visits even though you have had one visit for “Apple pie”.
It’s confusing, but worth noting so you don’t scratch your head wondering why Google is showing zero visits for a particular keyword.
The next tidbit is for those of you who have your Adwords account tied into your Analytics account. In this case you will see keywords that have displayed text ads on Google, but haven’t had any click-through, show up as 0 clicks in the keyword report. Another head scratcher for some until you realize that Analytics is simply pulling through impression and click-through data from Adwords.
Analytics is a powerful tool, and I’d love to hear from you the tricks, caveats and pitfalls you’ve discovered when using it for SEO and keeping track of search and click campaigns.
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I’m sure you know of someone, or seen pictures of people, who live in absolutely beautiful houses on the inside. We’re talking about marble floors, well-decorated rooms and spacious appointments throughout the house. Then you walk outside and it looks like a train wreck. Overgrown grass, lack of landscaping and paint on the house that is 20 years old. The type of house you’d drive right past without giving a second thought if you didn’t know much better. How many of you are aware that content layout follows this same type of behavior? You can have the best content in the world, but it doesn’t matter if you make it impossible to find and hard to read. People will just “drive right by”.
Continue Reading: SEO Content Optimization – Designing Your LayoutRelated Posts:
How many times have you worked on a client’s site and thought to yourself, “I hope these changes work!” For many people in the SEO field testing is not a part of their toolkit. They make changes based on what has worked in the past and hoped it would work now. Only time would tell if the changes actually helped or hurt the site – and by the time you knew the results, so did the client!
Continue Reading: SEO Testing – What Works and What Does notRelated Posts:
I remember a teacher telling me one time that if we never knew where we had been then we’d never know where we are going. She was so right. That same advice also holds true for website optimization and measuring SEO results. How many times have you walked onto a project and been told, “Just make it better”. What does “better” mean? How do we know when we’ve reached “better”? Without metrics about a websites performance you could end up spending 75% of your time on the part of the site that only gets 5% of the visits.
Continue Reading: It is All in the Numbers – Using Metrics for Better SEO