Advanced SEO Requires Good Analytics Information

Good quality analytics (such as Google Analytics or another paid analytics software packages) provides good and very useful information. If you pay attention to it you could very quickly increase the overall efficiency of your website. You just have to look at the numbers and list to what they tell you. The proof is in the pudding as they say and if you ignore your analytics information you could be missing out on a great deal of potential business and traffic.

Here are some basic areas for you to review in order to find any holes in your website and to help you decipher data that you learn from your analytics:

Conversions: In case you don’t know, a conversion is a completed action on your website, such as lead, sign up, sale, etc. The most important factor (I think) to learn from your analytics software is the conversion data. Understanding and learning about how and where you conversions come from can help you make much more educated and better SEO, PPC and Social Media marketing decisions. I can’t tell you how many people I still speak to think that the best goal for an SEO campaign is rankings or positioning. Sorry to break it to you, but it is not. Increasing conversions (and visitor growth) should be the starting goal(s) of your SEO and search marketing efforts. I won’t get too deep into that as that is not the main point of this post J

Bounce Rate: Whether you are looking at this overall or down to a single page if your bounce rate is really high try to figure out what is turning people off from that web page. It could be a variety of things depending on your business so take a deep look at your page. Is it too much info? Or a lack of info? Do you have too many ads on that specific page? It could also be a combination of all these items. It might just be that your page needs to have a serious over haul. Bounce rates vary for each client and industry but understanding what yours is and try to improve your bounce rate is very important.

Visitors: When you start to really get into advanced SEO techniques you will need to understand even more so where all of your visitors are coming from. Visitor quality is just as important as visitor growth. You never want to rely on just one stream of traffic because if that stream dries up so does your business. You have to understand where your traffic is coming from because often times it might be from an area that you least expected it to come from. Analytics information allows you to find new locations along with locations of where you might be able to place yourself to find new traffic.

Keywords: Analytics information will tell you what keywords your website traffic is using to find your website. This is a potential to really open things up for you as you grow your business online. As new keywords develop you can capitalize by finding new variations on those specific keywords and using them throughout your website. You have to look at your analytics information very closely otherwise you won’t find those windows of opportunity to help improve your SEO and overall search marketing efforts.

Analytics keeps your approach to marketing your website efficient and smooth. It is all about finding opportunities that could already exist right in front of you. Data and information that you can get from your analytics allows you to find those areas where you can really maximize your efforts in the online world.

Author:

Nick Stamoulis | SEJ

SEO: To Outsource Or Develop In-House Resources?

Online marketing is complex, and it seems that the number of factors you need to consider to make sure you have the optimal strategy is only increasing. Therefore, it might be tempting to conclude that SEO, or more broadly, online marketing, is something that needs to be outsourced. There is certainly a strong case to be made for hiring external expertise, but outsourcing your SEO strategy completely does have some disadvantages. On the other hand, bringing people in-house has some advantages, but requires in-house people to stay current with developments in the industry. Today’s column will investigate the pros and cons of each approach, and the case for doing a bit of both.

The outsourcing option

Whether outsourcing is best for you depends on your situation. Here are some of the pros and cons of taking this route:

Pros:

• Expertise. It can be easier (sometimes much easier) to find someone who has the expertise you need now.
• Leverage industry exposure. SEO consulting firms have visibility into many different projects across many different types of sites. This breadth of experience is very difficult to recreate in-house.
• Persuasive power of an external authority. In my last two columns I discussed how important it is to sell management on the benefits of investing in SEO. Management may simply by more willing to believe the advice of a recognized industry authority over their in-house people.

Cons:

• Lack of understanding of the internal company environment. Any external organization, no matter how skilled, is simply not going to understand your company as well as someone who lives and breathes your company culture every day.
• Less committed. SEO consulting firms are likely to have many clients. Losing one client is not desirable, but it is not a disaster either.

The in-house option

Here is a brief look at the pros and cons of hiring your own internal SEO talent:

Pros:

• Internal expertise. Consulting relationships are often designed to be temporary, and once a consultant is gone, so is a lot of the knowledge gained around a search marketing campaign. Of course, employee relationships come to an end too, but usually not as often, or as quickly, so the knowledge is retained by the organization for a longer period of time. If you have more than one internal SEO resources this risk is reduced even further.
• Better positioned to sell internally. Somewhat paradoxically, external authority can be helpful in selling the benefits of SEO, but an employee is in a better position to sell to many different stakeholders within an organization. There are many groups that are impacted by SEO, and they all need to be sold on the process.

Cons:

• Potentially more expensive. You can hire a consultant and engage only a portion of their time, but an employee generally requires full time work and benefits.
• Scarcity of top talent. You may need to train your in-house talent, because many of the top SEO consultants are making a lot of money, and bringing them in-house to work for you could cost you more than you might be willing to pay.
• Learning on the job. A corollary to the prior point is that to keep costs down you may need someone to learn the necessary skills on the job.

The argument for doing both

While there are compelling arguments for both outsourcing and hiring in-house talent, there are also some strong arguments for doing a bit of both. Given the challenges of staying current with developments in SEO and online marketing, consulting with a firm or individual who makes a living doing just that can be a big advantage. The consultant’s ability to work on different sites and with clients who have a wide range of needs can be a pretty compelling advantage.

On the other hand, hiring an in-house SEO position has advantages as well. As outlined above retaining knowledge and expertise, and the ability to sell across multiple departments in the company can be a huge benefit.

Of course, the needs of every organization are different, but SEO and online marketing are must-haves for your organization. For many, the best choice will be to decide on what expertise is essential to have in-house, and make a plan to build it or buy it. Then, supplement that with external expertise to make sure your in-house team can leverage all of the expertise of external SEO professionals.

SEO: To Outsource Or Develop In-House Resources?

Online marketing is complex, and it seems that the number of factors you need to consider to make sure you have the optimal strategy is only increasing. Therefore, it might be tempting to conclude that SEO, or more broadly, online marketing, is something that needs to be outsourced. There is certainly a strong case to be made for hiring external expertise, but outsourcing your SEO strategy completely does have some disadvantages. On the other hand, bringing people in-house has some advantages, but requires in-house people to stay current with developments in the industry. Today’s column will investigate the pros and cons of each approach, and the case for doing a bit of both.

The outsourcing option

Whether outsourcing is best for you depends on your situation. Here are some of the pros and cons of taking this route:

Pros:

• Expertise. It can be easier (sometimes much easier) to find someone who has the expertise you need now.
• Leverage industry exposure. SEO consulting firms have visibility into many different projects across many different types of sites. This breadth of experience is very difficult to recreate in-house.
• Persuasive power of an external authority. In my last two columns I discussed how important it is to sell management on the benefits of investing in SEO. Management may simply by more willing to believe the advice of a recognized industry authority over their in-house people.

Cons:

• Lack of understanding of the internal company environment. Any external organization, no matter how skilled, is simply not going to understand your company as well as someone who lives and breathes your company culture every day.
• Less committed. SEO consulting firms are likely to have many clients. Losing one client is not desirable, but it is not a disaster either.

The in-house option

Here is a brief look at the pros and cons of hiring your own internal SEO talent:

Pros:

• Internal expertise. Consulting relationships are often designed to be temporary, and once a consultant is gone, so is a lot of the knowledge gained around a search marketing campaign. Of course, employee relationships come to an end too, but usually not as often, or as quickly, so the knowledge is retained by the organization for a longer period of time. If you have more than one internal SEO resources this risk is reduced even further.
• Better positioned to sell internally. Somewhat paradoxically, external authority can be helpful in selling the benefits of SEO, but an employee is in a better position to sell to many different stakeholders within an organization. There are many groups that are impacted by SEO, and they all need to be sold on the process.

Cons:

• Potentially more expensive. You can hire a consultant and engage only a portion of their time, but an employee generally requires full time work and benefits.
• Scarcity of top talent. You may need to train your in-house talent, because many of the top SEO consultants are making a lot of money, and bringing them in-house to work for you could cost you more than you might be willing to pay.
• Learning on the job. A corollary to the prior point is that to keep costs down you may need someone to learn the necessary skills on the job.

The argument for doing both

While there are compelling arguments for both outsourcing and hiring in-house talent, there are also some strong arguments for doing a bit of both. Given the challenges of staying current with developments in SEO and online marketing, consulting with a firm or individual who makes a living doing just that can be a big advantage. The consultant’s ability to work on different sites and with clients who have a wide range of needs can be a pretty compelling advantage.

On the other hand, hiring an in-house SEO position has advantages as well. As outlined above retaining knowledge and expertise, and the ability to sell across multiple departments in the company can be a huge benefit.

Of course, the needs of every organization are different, but SEO and online marketing are must-haves for your organization. For many, the best choice will be to decide on what expertise is essential to have in-house, and make a plan to build it or buy it. Then, supplement that with external expertise to make sure your in-house team can leverage all of the expertise of external SEO professionals.

A New Feature-Rich SEO FireFox Addon: SEO Doctor

SEO Doctor is a newly launched FireFox addon that has tons of useful SEO features; I am looking at only a few of them below (to see the more detailed overview, check out Vladimir’s post).

Status Bar Stats

One of the first features you’ll notice on installation is some cool SEO-relevant stats that loads (on request) in the browser status bar while you are browsing the pages. The numbers displayed stand for:

• SEO Score represents the result of on-site optimization analysis of the currently viewed page (the flag icon will give you an idea of how well you are doing)
• Flow shows how much of the Page Rank has been preserved on the site.
• Links shows number of external links/total links on the page.
• Visits show estimated number of daily visitors for the site (requires Compete API);
• Nofollow icon allows you to instantly highlight all nofollow links on the page.

Now Research Everything in Detail

Inspect Page Links:

Clicking on the status bar stats will reveal a panel containing all the page links. The good thing is that if you have the panel open all the time, it will display links for each new page you land on:

Each link displayed has its count and percentage of total number.You can also export the data to a CSV file.

Evaluate On-Page SEO:

The STATS tab in the same panel allows you to diagnose the page. It evaluates the following criteria:

• Image ALT tags;
• Meta tags;
• Heading tags;
• Number of links;
• “Indexability” of the page (absense / presence of any meta tags preventing proper indexing);
• URL structure;
• Page Rank flow:

Each sections expands with the details:

Take advantage of Menu options:

Right-clicking on the status bar numbers allows to quickly access quite a few useful tools and resources:

• Domain registration details
• Google indexed pages
• Yahoo backlinks
• Alexa ranking
• Compete visitors
• Quantcast visitors
• Google website trends
• Link diagnosis
• SEMRush analysis
• IP neighbors
• Open Site Explorer
• Back Tweets

Configure the Options

The tool also allows to set a few smart options that include:

• Ignore www. prefix on domains instructs SEO Doctor to treat www and non-www versions of the domain as a same site for purposes of calculating external links
• Show stats on document ready will attempt to show the stats even before the document is fully loaded (for the impatient ones)
• Ignore links containing keywords is for filtering out links in calculations, for example those that appear on the page only for logged in users etc.
• Compete API key will allow you to retrieve daily visitors metrics.

Looks like an awesome tool, doesn’t it?

Google Caffeine Unofficially Live on 80% of Google Data Centers?

An updated WebmasterWorld thread has many convince webmasters and SEOs saying Caffeine is live in the majority of Google's data centers. Senior member, whitenight said:

For the UNOFFICIAL record, I'm calling Caffeine UNOFFICIALLY launched.

Why?

** It's on 80% of all DCs.
The remaining 20% have been getting Caff datasets flickering for the past 24-48 hours.
The "old" SERPs and Algo are now the minority.

** At the time, I couldn't be bothered to post and then argue with the masses,
but the INFRASTRUCTURE (NOT datasets) has been fully live and operational for ALL DCs for about a week and half now.

since testing the INFRASTRUCTURE is far more complicated than observing datasets, you'll forgive me if i don't give any practical examples... other than pointing out i've given past examples of how ANYONE can do this on their own in the earliest Caff threads.

Got all that? But another senior member, walkman, said that although it may be on 80% of the data centers, maybe the 20% of those data centers that it is not on get's more traffic? I don't think it works that way... But he said:

I agree that it's on almost all but strangely I have checked on google.com, www2 and www3 with several googledance tools and in my own area and I don't see it there. Maybe those 20% of DCs without the caffeine are getting more traffic?

It has been a really long time since Google or Matt did a post on Matt's blog or Google's blog about the status. Maybe it is a good time to just check in and say, here is where we are and where we see we are going in the next 3 to 6 months? Or maybe SEOs and webmasters should stop obsessing over it?

Google’s Facts & Stats

Pingdom, the Internet monitoring company, has shared a timeline of events & acquisitions, facts, figures that display almost everything big that Google has done, over the years. They have covered Google’s Indexes, Search stats, Google’s Revenues from advertising and other products,etc… and everything is displayed in the image below :

Complete On-Page Seo in 12 steps

Though many Search Engine Optimizers may disagree, On-page SEO is very much important. The need for extra on-page optimization is surely a debatable topic. Considering the search volume provided by the other search engines like Yahoo,Bing and ASK and their priority towards on-page factors, i’d say on-page optimization is a must. SEO For Google mainly consists of relevant off-page optimization mainly consisting of link-building but this is not the case with its competitors.

Relevancy according to Yahoo mainly includes Authority, trustrank and ofcourse on-page content.following are the tips and techniques to be considered while optimizing your pages so as to rank better for the respective keywords :

1) Keyword In URL :

Having your keyword in the URL can have the best influence for ranking for that particular keyword.

2) Keyword in Title :

The

3) First Priority :

Search engines read a page from the top left to the bottom right, place the Keyword within a

tag to the top left such that it will be the First words that the spider would read.

4) Last Priority :

So also place the Keyword in the bottom right corner.e.g. in the copy right text,i.e.© All rights reserved ‘Keyword’.

5) Html Tags :

Search Engines also give priority to text with the ,, tags. You may place your keyword within these, but be very sure not to overdo it. Having it once in each is more than enough.

6) Inclusion Of Images :

You ’should’ include images in your content,though search engines are not too smart with them’ images can be used for your benefit. They are even included in the ‘Google Images’ index thus driving you traffic from another source. Make sure the name of the image file is your Keyword,e.g. ‘Keyword’jpg. Also include the ‘alt’ attribute within the tag which will contain your Keyword i.e alt=”Keyword”.

7) Keyword Density :

Maintain a moderate level of keyword density, there is no prescribed amount that is deemed best but make sure you don’t overdo it. Many people say keyword density doesn’t matter but actually it does. Google Webmaster Tools itself gives significance to keywords based on their density.

8′) Keyword Proximity :

Place your keywords intelligently. Don’t keep a keyword 5 times in the first 50 words and 2 times in the next 500 words, that would be really stupid, its best to evenly place them across the content.

9) Internal Linking :

Linking to other pages within your domain wrapped within relevant keywords is a good practice for healthy on-page Seo. These inner links are known as deep links and internal linking has many benefits, i.e. (a)Reduces the bounce rate (b)Directs search crawlers to your inner pages thus helping some pages get indexed. (c) Acts as a low priority backlink highlighting the keyword wrapped.

10) Titles For Links :

How the ‘alt’ attribute is used for images, similarly the ‘title’ attribute is used for links within the tag. It provides some kind of hypothetical authority to these links and strengthens the keyword significance for the link if the keyword is placed within the ‘title’ attribute.

11) Meta Description :

Who says this isn’t important? The meta description is the description of the page mentioned in the SERPs(Search Engine Results Page). Keep the word count below 160 characters and place the keyword not more than 3 times. As per Matt Cutt’s last notice, Meta Description has no influence on SEO whatsoever. Make this description look genuine and not spammy as this is what will convince the users to click on the link leading to your site from the search engines.

12) NO Spam :

The last and the most important point. Your content is made for humans and not bots, don’t make it look even a bit spammy. You can compromise Seo but never compromise quality.

The best on-page Seo is the one that would not at all be visible to th normal visitor but would easily grab the attention of the search crawler. These are all the points I can get as of now, if there are any you would like to share you are welcomed to place them in your comments.