As the Internet encroaches more on our lives than ever before, many people are finding themselves uncomfortable with the ability of online media to peek into our every little move. The fact that what we do online is probably personal as often as it is commercial, if not more, creates a situation where there is good reason for people to worry. Privacy concerns are a very real part of the growing internet phenomenon, and Google seems to be addressing those concerns, particularly with one recent move that is of great interest to internet marketers.

Google recently announced that they will be giving users the option to be ignored by Google Analytics, which means that data will not be gathered and stored when searching. The opt-out feature will come in the form a browser plug-in, and will be released within the next couple weeks. As soon as Google’s engineers put the finishing touches on the plug-in, it should be hitting the scene.

For many marketers, this may be cause for alarm because analytics provide a very important tool to SEO experts. In fact, when online marketers pitch their services to brick and mortar businesses, one of the biggest selling points is the ease and accuracy of online tracking as compared to traditional advertising mediums. These offline marketing tactics are often referred to as “spray n’ pray” marketing because that is essentially what people who pay the outrageous fees for some print media ads are doing if they haven’t taken the right moves to monitor ads.

This new turn of events certainly does have the potential to put a huge dent in analytics data and the ability to tailor marketing efforts to individualized Google search. The thing is that if you look at many recent actions Google has taken, you will see that before this they seemed to be heading in the direction of putting more emphasis on individualized Google search.

In other words, Google has recently been heading towards less privacy rather than more. So what gives? Why the sudden contradiction in Google’s direction?

Well, the obvious answer is that Google faces heavy opposition among privacy supporters, and even as a marketer myself, I believe these people have good reason to be concerned. That said, in my opinion, Google’s recent development is not as telling as it might seem.

This is nothing more than an “insurance” move put in place to silence the opposition. Google knows what I myself have seen about the online world—a very small percentage of people will bother with privacy measures no matter how easy you make it for them.

Consider for just a moment how willing the general population has been to give private information for everyone to see on social networking platforms. Even people who 10 years ago would have held on to their social security number for dear life have no qualms making home addresses public information or handing over private details to corporations for the smallest incentives.

And by giving that option to protect your privacy, Google minimizes the voice of the opposition without really affecting the data gather. The citizens don’t seem to care too much anymore. In my honest opinion, marketers have nothing to worry about as far as the value of their data; the percentage of those who skirt around Google Analytics will be next to insignificant. If the trend of privacy becoming a thing of the past worries you, however, you have plenty of reason to be concerned…

Google Analytics Plug-in Provides Enhanced Privacy Control is a post from: SEO Blog | SEO Marketing World

Think of all the ways that friends come to visit you at your home; chances are that many of them come through the front door. Sure, there may be a few friends that know the “secret” to going to the backdoor or coming in through the garage door, but most people come in through the front door – so naturally most homeowners spend a lot of time making their entry ways look well decorated and inviting.

Now think about your website, or perhaps a site that you are engaged in SEO with. I’m willing to bet that the site has incoming links from other sites pointing all over the place. Sure, some may hit the home page, but your visitors are coming in through every virtual nook and cranny they can find!

As an SEO professional you should know that one of the biggest problems out there when it comes to understanding bounce rate (why people don’t complete a purchase process, or don’t complete navigation to a specific page) is because the landing pages they hit (the first page they see when they visit your site through a link) don’t engage visitors enough to turn them into customers. It is your job to understand what landing pages most visitors come in through and to take that information and work on designing landing pages that help visitors convert into customers. It’s something that very few people actually do, yet the impact of these changes alone can often times pay many times over for the cost of doing SEO work.

First, homepages are great but today almost every page on your site has the potential of being a landing page. One of the first things you should always do is setup funnels and conversion goals on your sites. You need to understand the process visitors take to get to the final page you want them to see, and you need to know how many people actually achieve that goal. The good news is tools such as Google Analytics can easily tell you all this information and more for zero cost.

Once you know your top landing pages then its time for you to work some search engine optimization strategies. Here are 5 things that every SEO professional should keep in mind when thinking and designing landing pages:

• Offer your customers a way to “sign up” for more information or to join the community. In this Web 2.0 world customers are looking for ways to connect – don’t make it difficult for them to do so. Make sure your landing pages let people join the community and get involved.
• Keep the credit card forms away – the last thing a potential customer wants to see the moment they hit your site is a form asking for their credit card information. Visitors don’t like to be solicited the moment they walk in the virtual door, especially by a site they may have never visited before.
• If you got it, show it! Landing pages are a great place to put customer comments and show off a few testimonials. Don’t be afraid to toot your own horn – just look at how Amazon features their reviewers on every product page.
• Reassure visitors that they are “safe”. Landing pages are great places to put links to privacy policies, data retention policies and customer service functions.
• Get rid of the “ad” pages before the content. Nobody likes to visit a site and the first thing they see is a huge ad. Chances are people are just going to close their browser window and move on. These big “interrupting” ads that appear before content may seem cool, but how many visitors are you scaring away?

With a little bit of work you can apply these techniques and ideas to your top landing pages and see the results through metrics such as bounce rate and conversion goals. The good news is that once you’ve tackled the big fish, the little fish (the smaller, less hit landing pages) become easy to do. Before you know it your conversion rates will show the results – and your bounce rate will be something a little more manageable!

Improving Your Bounce Rate Through Better Landing Pages is a post from: SEO Blog | SEO Marketing World

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.

When Links Go Bad – Determining Quality Links is a post from: SEO Blog | SEO Marketing World

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?

There is More to SEO Than Tracking Rankings is a post from: SEO Blog | SEO Marketing World

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.

Advanced Google Analytics: Interesting Tricks is a post from: SEO Blog | SEO Marketing World

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”.

So how do we fix this? How can SEO work on the content presentation and make it user friendly and easy on the reader to not only find, but to read and hopefully take action? It all starts with great content, no doubt, but the following tips are ways to take that great content and help give it small, but measurable, boosts in the rankings.

First, look at your fonts. Some of us have a habit of using text that is just fine for younger eyes (since most of us tend to be younger), but which is impossible for older readers to see easily. If you are marketing products toward the over-40 crowd you have to design with them in mind. 

I recommend sticking with a font such as Verdana with at least a 10pt font. Verdana has good spacing between the letters, is a little big larger than Arial, and the characters themselves are distinguishable. You should always stick to black lettering on a white background for maximum contrast and readability unless you have a darn good reason not to. Just think to yourself about all the potential customers that skip your site because they can’t see the text, or the contrast is impossible to read clearly.

Next, focus on the length. Notice how we write in short, succinct paragraphs? You should do the same. Nobody wants to read paragraphs that stretch on and on and on. Keep it simple and to the point for maximum reader digestibility. Studies show people comprehend and remember small pieces better. Keep the run-on sentences and 20-sentence paragraphs reserved for college papers!

Another practice you should be following when you do SEO is to make use of CSS. Not only does it help maintain consistency, but it also helps to make changes site-wide with a few keystrokes. At one time content length used to be an issue for search rankings, but thanks to widespread high speed access this is no longer a concern.

Now let’s talk about quality – I know you might think we talk about this too much, but quality content is the #1 thing you can do to get better rankings. Here is a list of things that I believe are cruicial:

• Keep it unique. Don’t re-use content and make sure anything you add can pass a service such as CopyScape. If your content isn’t unique you are going to suffer in the rankings.
• Unique page design. Don’t re-use the same HTML layout for site after site. The search engines are watching and take this into consideration.
• Unique titles and meta descriptions. Every page should have these. Your titles should be specific, but concise. Aim for 5 words.
• If you are re-publishing content you must add value to it.  Don’t simple re-publish a review from Amazon and think the world will come running to your site. You must add value to it, otherwise why bother visiting your site when they can just visit Amazon?

Keep in mind that as I stated in the beginning, these ideas alone won’t help you much without first focusing in on your content. These ideas are like ingredients in a recipe – alone they don’t make much of anything, but put together they can make one heck of a delicious meal and well ranked site!

SEO Content Optimization – Designing Your Layout is a post from: SEO Blog | SEO Marketing World

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!

Many SEO companies are a “one solution” company. They offer the client one solution to a problem, and don’t even mention the fact that there are several others that may produce better results. If you are lucky, in 6 to 12 months you’d have a chance to revisit the recommendations – but let’s be honest, how many times do we actually do that? Once we make a recommendation most of us stick with it and never look back.

To be fair, it wasn’t until recently that we had tools to help us make better decisions and to test our changes. The introduction of detailed web analytics (such as Google Analytics) has made the idea of SEO testing achievable. Search engines and crawlers also now index more frequently, and thanks to features such as XML sitemaps we can even control how often most of our content gets checked and crawled. We no longer have to wait 3 months until Google crawls us again, we can (almost) control it ourselves. All of this comes together to let us see what changes worked, and which ones didn’t, faster than ever.

So now that we know we have the tools available for testing, what type of testing should we do? What questions do we have to ask ourselves to make effective use of SEO? Some of the better questions I’ve come up with are these:

• Does alt-text on images matter? Should I stuff keywords in there?
• Are footer links effective? Should I have one, two, two hundred?
• How many links should I have from the homepage? Should I just link to main topics or products or should I try to link to a wide assortment of pages?
• Long or short title tags? Brand before or after the keywords?

These are just a few questions (and there are probably hundreds of other questions), but the answers to these questions are going to vary from site to site and demonstrate how testing can help point you to the correct answer.

There are also questions which won’t be as easy to determine, but still need to be addressed: Should I buy links? Should I cloak content based on user agent? Questions like these are difficult to test, but you should still be asking and trying to answer these questions as well.

Once you get your testing methodology down for SEO you now need to start monitoring the results. One of the best ways of doing this is through split testing. This is where you use different techniques on different parts of the site and see which one brings about the best results. For some sites you may also wish to look into A/B testing where you design the same page two (or more) different ways and then send a percentage of people who visit a particular page to the different versions. This works best when you are selling something as the results are more obvious through the sales figures.

Testing should be an integral part of any SEO process. If you aren’t doing it now you should start investigating how to do it and start rolling it into your projects. You will find that by investing the time up front to setup testing methodologies your final deliverables to your clients will deliver the results that keep them coming back year after year for your services.

SEO Testing – What Works and What Does not is a post from: SEO Blog | SEO Marketing World

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.

As an SEO company you owe it to yourself and your customers to be able to measure their site before and after – to provide the numbers that identify where their traffic is today, what is attracting most visitors, where are the links coming from, etc.  By taking the time to measure websites before you tackle them, both you and the customer will learn a lot more about the traffic to the site and what SEO methods will give the best results.

The first thing to look at is what data is being collected right now?  Do they have any existing tracking programs or log files you can access?  Is there any historical data about site traffic available?  Often many sites are using no analytical tools at all – or they may be using simple web log analyzers that aren’t providing critical data needed to make good SEO decisions.  As an SEO service provider it is your job to make sure that if they aren’t monitoring, they start, and a baseline is taken for comparison when the project is done.

Next, it’s time to categorize the site.  It’s not unusual for a handful of pages to be driving the majority of the traffic.  It may be that the pages that are drawing in the least amount of traffic are actually bringing in the most value – again, this is where a good analytics program comes into play.  Segment out your site by section or pages and see what is driving the traffic and which sections are performing and which sections are languishing.  You may be surprised to find that the most obscure areas of a site turn out to be the most popular.

Next, determine what is bringing in the traffic.  Let’s say you have two sections (or categories) on the site.  In order to determine how to get the maximum SEO value you need to find out how many visits per page you are getting.  If section 1 is made up of 5,000 blog posts and is bringing in 25,000 visits per month while section 2 is made up of 500 article pages and is bringing in 10,000 visits per month then you can quickly see that the article pages are getting more “views per page”.  However, this is not enough data to make any judgment calls on just yet.  If you have 5 articles that are bringing in the majority of those 10,000 visits then the numbers start to mean something.

This is a clear cut example of where a good analytics tool will benefit any SEO provider.  You have to be able to measure visits, views, the how and the why – plus a thousand other questions.  The more you know about why people come to a site the better you can focus your SEO skills at making it better.

Don’t just look at today either; make sure you are looking at historical data when it is available.  You want to know things such as the quantity of content over time, what page are receiving search traffic, what is the rate of link growth and how much has traffic to the site gone up (or down) over time?  This may not be easy to find out if the client doesn’t have analytics already in place.  Sometimes web access logs are the best method to get this data from if it doesn’t already exist.

Once you get this data it’s time to analyze it – to find out what is making the site perform (or not).  The more data you about a site the better you can use your SEO toolkit to help improve the site and make your job a lot easier.

It is All in the Numbers – Using Metrics for Better SEO is a post from: SEO Blog | SEO Marketing World