CrawlTrack: Tips and Techniques for Webmasters
March 10, 2010
If you re looking for a web analytics program but don t want to use Google Analytics you might want to give CrawlTrack a look. This web application goes beyond simple analytics to help secure your website. Let s take a closer look….
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SEO vs. PPC Debate — Which Do You Prefer?
March 10, 2010
There’s a growing divide between online marketers who enjoy organic search and those who prefer paid search. What do your preferences say about you? …
Twitter Starts Looking for Scam
March 10, 2010
Twitter just announced that it will start looking for malicious links in Direct Messages to help protect users from phishing and other deceitful attacks. Twitter will do this by routing all links to Twitter’s link shortner (twt.tl).
“By routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread [...]
Get All Your Media News in One Place
March 10, 2010
There is quite a bit of media news to keep up with these days, what with the constant threat of local newspapers become a thing of the 20th century, new pay models being introduced by major online news sites like the Wall Street Journal, just to keep afloat, online video becoming the new “television”…the list goes on.
Targeting Multiple Keywords vs. Singular Keyword Focus
March 10, 2010
Posted by randfish
Despite being a seemingly simple topic, this one seems to stymie even experienced SEOs. There’s a natural conflict that creates the issue - the more keywords you target on a single page, the less you need to link build and optimize (for both search engines and user experience/conversion rate) on many pages.
To answer this question in a logical and truly optimal fashion, you need to start with the answer to two other important questions:
- How many of these keywords carry the same visitor intent?
- How competitive are the targeted terms/phrases?
When you answer the first question, you’ll be able to break up lists of keyword terms into buckets of "intent." Searches are almost always intended to discover information or take action. If there are too many pieces of information/actions you need to provide on a single page, your conversion will drop. Remember that a 10% conversion rate for position #10 is better than a 0.5% conversion rate for position #1 (assuming the avgs. from the leaked AOL data cited below).
NOTE: This data is from averages via AOL’s data release in 2007. New numbers have not been forthcoming from any of the engines or third-party studies.
For the second question, you need to know something about the competition levels. In a scenario where every shred of keyword usage matters a great deal, from the anchor text focus to the keyword being employed at the very start of the title tag, breaking up keyword targeting to multiple pages can make a great deal of sense. If you’re deep into research on this topic, you can do something like the image below, where I’ve taken stats and metrics for all of the top 25 ranking pages for the query "broadway tickets" on Google.com and run analysis:
NOTE: data in this graph via Open Site Explorer’s Backlink Analysis
If a keyword is highly competitive, I suggest single page targeting. This is not only because you can maximize on-page optimization, but also because it means that internal and external links that point to the page can focus more directly on the target term/phrase. It’s also likely that you’ll be competing against pages that are more highly targeted on that keyword phrase and could lose out if you don’t have that singular, pinpoint focus.
I wrote another post on a similar topic highlighting how to format titles, meta descriptions and keyword usage on pages that aim for multi-keyword targeting that may also be of help.
Look forward to your thoughts on the topic.
Google`s Living Stories: the Final Nail in the Coffin for Paper Media?
March 9, 2010
Google has earned the wrath of publishers before. You d be upset at Google too if it looked like the search giant was going to put you out of business — or at least force you to seriously rethink your business model. Living Stories one of Google s more recent endeavors presents news in a whole new way…with repercussions likely to be felt at every big newspaper….
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Don’t Over Optimize Your Site
March 9, 2010
SEO is a best practices game. Understanding how not to over optimize is an important part of the mix. …
Search Marketing Success Stories
March 9, 2010
Posted by RobOusbey
Search Engine Optimization covers a huge range of tactics - all of which can bring direct benefit to a website. In this post, I’ve shared examples of different tactics used at different websites, and the effects that have been seen. If you’re considering an SEO campaign for your site, or are trying to persuade someone else to invest in internet marketing, I hope this post will help demonstrate the potential of internet marketing.
The post includes real screen shots from Google Analytics (click any of them to enlarge) but the sites and data have been anonymized.
Target Your Target Terms
Remember that post about building a page with perfect keyword targeting? SEOmoz wasn’t kidding around.
A website that sells homewares had issues with site structure and on-page targeting. Their category level pages were at subdomains such as
- http://kitchenequipment.sitename.com
or
- http://livingrooms.sitename.com
whilst each sub-category was back on the main subdomain at:
- www.sitename.com/find_product2.asp?url1=living+room&url2=rugs+and+carpets
Category and sub-category pages had a distinct lack of semantic HTML or term targeting.
Getting appropriate H1 tags onto each page was a quick job, improving title tag structure took a bit longer, clean & friendly URLs and internal links with appropriate anchor text were also added.
The site saw ranking improvements across the board, which brought new traffic through head, mid and long tail terms. Can you guess when the changes were made? 
Getting sorted in Google Local
Before getting into the nitty-gritty of ranking factors for Local Search, dead simple tactics, etc, it’s important to get the basics right. A large chain of restaurants created a ‘bulk upload’ file with the correct data for each one of their locations. After uploading the file, they applied for it to be reviewed and ‘whitelisted’. Local data that’s been uploaded by the business owner and whitelisted is treated as authoritatively as locations that have been manually verified by postcard.
Despite various issues (Google’s best practice guidelines still aren’t quite the best solution in some cases) the traffic generated by visibility in Local Search has been significant and valuable. (The uploads were verified in late November when the traffic begins its steady rise.)
Architecture of Change
A current affairs magazine wanted to get more from their website. Because of falling advertising revenue, the publication was at risk of being closed down. They’d seen some growth from SEO already, but wanted to prove that the website had greater value.
Although the site had a good brand and some great content, it suffered from similar problems to many news-type websites, including badly archived content, duplicate issues and a CMS that hampered keyword targeting or promoting individual articles. Recommendations were made to improve the site’s architecture and migrate to the new structure.
The effect of the changes was immediate growth which took the organic traffic to 257% in three months. A month later, the magazine’s owner explained that the falling revenue from print advertising meant that they couldn’t continue to lose money publishing the mag, and closed it down.
Hook, Line, Sinker
An office cleaning company wanted to improve the profile of their site through SEO. Amongst other tactics, a member of staff spent a day writing a ‘linkbait’ post to publish on their blog. This generated huge amounts of traffic from social media sites (dwarfing their regular daily visitors) and was subsequently linked to from dozens of sites. This post, along with other content published on the site to attract links, helped the site grow in strength and authority, and it now ranks position 3 for ‘office cleaning’ in their country.
Paid In Full
This is SEOmoz, but I’d like to share a graph from a PPC colleague working on a site that sells scooters. They were initially bidding on very broad terms (scooter, scooters, buy a scooter, etc) but the campaign was adjusted to target more long tail terms, including descriptions, specifications, etc.
Over a period of around six weeks, the cost per click was reduced by 30% and the more targeted traffic converted increasingly well - this allowed the site owners to increase their ad budget and generated more sales than their paid search campaign ever had before.
If you’re new to SEOmoz and this post has inspired you to get involved in search marketing for your site, do browse the site for the PRO & free SEO guides and the SEO blog. If you’re a regular, do share any stories you’re particularly proud of in the comments.
Winning the Multi-Agency Game: Can’t We All Just Get Along?
March 8, 2010
Some survival tips for when you’re asked to work with your clients’ other agencies. …
Google Buys DocVerse for $25 Million
March 6, 2010
Google has agreed to buy DocVerse, a startup that enable real-time sharing and editing of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel files.
“What impresses us the most about the Google team is that they all share the same philosophy—giving people the tools to work the way they want.” founders Shan and Alex said in a statement.
DocVerse allows [...]
