IT Service Corporation
Website Solutions and Services
Low Cost SEO
Published October 29, 2010 | 
If you’re considering getting some SEO work done, but working to a tight budget, here’s a look at the key issues, and trouble-spots to look out for.
Buying Professional SEO Services
If you’re short on time, or SEO skills, or inclination, then you may be looking at getting an eternal supplier to undertake SEO work. Like anything in life, you get what you pay for, and SEO is no exception. There is also a danger you could get a whole lot less, of course.
Like any profession, there are many great operators, and many poor ones.
Set Clear Business Goals
Start by writing down the goals you want to achieve. What business problem are you trying to solve? Do you need more conversions? More traffic? Higher rankings? Only one of those requirements is likely to make you any money.
Traffic and higher rankings can make you money, but can just as likely make no difference to your business, whatsoever, unless they are tied into your website strategy. For example, you may receive more traffic after engaging an SEO, but if this traffic isn’t interested in what you offer, they will click back. Likewise, you could gain high rankings for keywords that no one searches on. This will result in no traffic increase, and no new business.
Devise your own metrics for success. Some SEOs will devise metrics for success that are easy for them to achieve, but make no real difference to your business.
Watch Out For Hidden Costs
If you have an existing site, you may need to make changes to your design and layout. Depending on how your site has been built, these changes may be minor or significant in terms of cost to rectify.
The Problem With Cheap
Whilst high cost alone will not guarantee you good results, there’s a high probability that low cost will almost guarantee poor results.
SEO is labour intensive and requires skill and knowledge. As a rough ballpark, a small site, that doesn’t have design issues, that has had no previous SEO work, could take, at very least, five days of full-time SEO work. This work involves link building, adding keywords and content to the site, and other external promotional activities. Get the SEO to breakdown the work into hours and tasks, and see if the amount charged equates to the work required.
If the SEO is pricing significantly under their competitors, there may be a legitimate reason. They may use cheaper labour, often located in emerging economies. This is fine, however make sure any firm you do use has a good knowledge of the country and culture in which you operate. Marketing, SEO or otherwise, requires an intimate knowledge of language use, culture and location, so ask to see previous work, and check references.
On the other hand, there are agencies that will charge like a wounded bull for essentially the same tasks as everyone else. Obtain a few quotes and compare, as pricing can be all over the place. The industry is not standardized.
Do It Yourself
Anyone can do SEO. However, that doesn’t mean that everyone should.
What does SEO involve? It can involve restructuring a site, coding, content creation, marking up content, market research, strategy, link building, and public relations. Do you have the time, or the inclination to do this? The learning curve, for the beginner, is steep. It’s also time consuming. How much is your time worth?
However, there are many aspects you can do yourself. Start with a good, solid SEO course 
Join forums where other SEOs hang out. Look for content management software that is reasonably SEO friendly, out of the box, such as WordPress (free). Using SEO friendly software means you’ll avoid a lot of technical problems that can be expensive to rectify if you use software the search engines find difficult to crawl.
Search engines like content. Generally speaking, the more pages you publish, the more chances you’ll have to be seen. If appropriate, adopt a strategy similar to that of magazine publishing. Publish often.
Once your business case and site content are established, you need to build links. A site without links is pretty much invisible. Here are a few link building strategies. In summary, submit your site to directories, get your partners to link to you, issue press releases featuring links back to your site, put links in your online signature. You can never have too many links, so long as they accurately represent the content is on your site, and they appear in places your audience hangs out.
Hybrid Approach
You can go a long way by buying in some help, and doing the rest yourself.
Pay for a few hours of consulting where an SEO evaluates your site and your market niche. It’s well worth paying top dollar, for someone good, for this part – as it most likely only takes a few hours. Setting off on the right course can pay high dividends, whilst heading down the wrong path can be difficult, and costly, to recover from. Engage them in an advisory-only role, and ask them to provide you with a strategy. Some SEOs will do this, some won’t.
The most important thing is to ensure they establish your site has no technical issues that will prevent it being crawled, and that your content is structured correctly. Once these problems are ironed out, SEO becomes a lot less troublesome.
Only you know your skills, but the following areas are reasonably straightforward for those with a little web knowledge. Keyword research is easy enough to do yourself, using readily available keyword tools, as is content generation.
Simply write on topic and sprinkle keywords through your content and headings, or have your copywriter do so.
You may also wish to undertake link building yourself. This involves requesting links, submitting your site to directories, and building effective partnerships. It can be a good idea to get consultancy as to where you should focus your link building energies. Some links are worth a lot more than others, and there is a strategy to it.
Like any complex professional service, you’ll still need to monitor and measure, even if you do opt for expensive, comprehensive outsourced options. There’s no sitting back with marketing, and that includes SEO.
Whatever path you choose, make sure the SEO work is aligned with your business goals.
Exact Match Domains
Published October 29, 2010 | Are exact match domains “too” powerful?
Not in my humble opinion. 
Sure across the entire web exact match domains can rank for a wide variety of keywords, but there are a couple things to think about when stating that…
- those rankings are spread across many different domains
- the bonus any domain gets is only relevant to their 1 exact match phrase
- Many domains are seen as exact match, but the keyword is popular precisely because the keyword is a brand (like eBay, Amazon.com, Monster.com, Google, Yahoo!, or Bing).
- Many brand owners (especially small & local ones, where there are few signals of quality) are not heavily engaged in SEO. If Google doesn’t show the official site on a brand search they look bad (in 2005 there was a brief period of time when Paypal.com wasn’t ranking for “Paypal” due to botched aggressive Google link anchor text filters), whereas if they rank an exact match domain where it is relevant it doesn’t really significantly detract from the searcher’s experience.
At SES San Jose 2009, Nick Fox stated that Google has about 30 million words in the AdWords advertiser database. In spite of their database being that large, they keep trying to push advertisers toward broad match (and searchers down a well worn path with Google Instant) because roughly 25% of searches are unique.
Adam Lewis highlighted how advertisers can get a glimpse into the endless sea of words searchers use & how impractical it is to presume they can know everything in advance:
One of the most impactful new features lies within the keywords tab and is called “see search terms”. This option allows advertisers to choose one or more keywords and see the search term users typed in to trigger that keyword. It also shows which ones are being clicked most often and which are not being clicked.
Often the exact keyword it not what users are actually typing in. Guessing all the possible variations that a user might enter to find your product is essentially impossible. “See search terms” gives you the most popular user queries that triggered your ads. Not only does it help people learn about their user, but it can also potentially save money on SEM by exposing highly specific keywords with less competition and better quality scores.
Note the sentence that I bolded…guessing everything that is searched for that is relevant is roughly impossible. In SEO there are a variety of implications associated with that, but one of the most important ones is this: when you pick an exact match domain it is mainly only helping you with that 1 main keyword that you chose.
Yes there are implications in terms of perceived credibility and such, but those impacts can be created through brand building. With an EMD you pay thousands of Dollars (sometimes 10′s or 100′s of thousands) to target that one keyword. If a person were to buy MyKeywordStore.com (or similar) for $8 & spend that $10,000 on marketing, then in many cases that $10,000 would generally / typically more than make up for any advantage MyKeyword.com gets.
Much like often overstated type-in traffic, when you look beyond brands, there are not many individual keywords that represent a huge market by themselves.
We have built a database of 10 million + keywords & few of them (less than 10,000 of them) have a combined CPC * estimated search volume of $1,000 or more per month (presuming you captured 100% of the search traffic for that keyword & monetized it as well as Google does).
However, those numbers overstate the market …
- many of those valuable keywords *are* brands (seo book wasn’t much of a keyword until *after* it was a brand, which is why the domain name was available to me for $8)
- brands that are created on keywords can be forced to change due to market conditions (FreeCreditReport.com —> FreeCreditScore.com, legislation whacked the student loan consolidation market, Google Instant promotes some keywords at the expense of others, the US government has launched names like Cars.gov, StudentLoans.gov, Change.gov, etc. … who wants to compete directly against the government when they control legislation, can create an EMD on the fly, and can cross-link new sites in their network … allowing them to outrank you in a couple weeks)
- If you are not a brand & rank #1 in the organic search results (with 3 AdWords ads above you) then you might only get about 25% to 40% of the search traffic. Worse yet, in some of the largest markets Google puts a 4th “Google comparison” ad above the organic search results, further driving down the organic search results.
- Google’s search volume data & suggested bid prices have typically overstated the market (because they want to create bidding wars on core keywords & drive bids upward)
- Almost nobody monetizes as well as Google does. In many cases when their number shows $100,000+ per month the actual publisher earnings for that keyword might only be a few thousand Dollars.
There are at most a few hundred exceptionally potent keywords where the single word will build a business for a generalist webmaster. That number would be higher if you combined them with professional training in an area and significant industry knowledge, but if you know your industry well and have access to capital and are investing into a premium domain name then odds are good you are investing heavily elsewhere and doing quality work elsewhere. The idea that there are tons of lucrative exact match domains on the market which anyone can use to build thriving businesses on and are available at a discount is somewhat (perhaps completely?) inaccurate.
Exact match only gives you that bonus on exact match. Not a collection of keywords – just that 1 word. And tying your business to 1 keyword can be risky. Just ask anyone who is on a singular version of a domain name where Google Instant promotes the plural version of that keyword. Some of those folks likely had chunks of cinder block falling out their pants the day that launched.
Whereas brand allows you to keep spreading … but it can take a lot of work to turn a generic keyword into a brand. And by the time you do, your business model and/or the market may have already moved elsewhere. An exact match domain name can sorta box you in and make your business less flexible. SEO Book is a bit of a weird fit for a private SEO community & training website, and Oakland Pizza will *never* become Dominoes or Pizza Hut.
And (when compared against generic keywords) brands are not only more flexible, but they are more memorable, make it easier for you to differentiate, allow to engage at a deeper emotional level & charge more for your products or services.
I don’t regret choosing SeoBook.com in 2003 (it certainly worked out awesome in the short run), however if I had more foresight I would have shifted to a different domain in the 2004 to 2005 timeframe. So often when people join our community they are amazed by the depth and breadth of discussion outside of SEO, but a rebrand at this point would be brutal.
Owning SearchEngine.com doesn’t really do much for you when there is a Google or a Bing in your market. Owning Auction.com (or maybe Auctions.com) doesn’t do much against eBay. Owning Portal.com (or maybe WebPortal.com) isn’t going to compete against Yahoo!. Microblogging.com is no Twitter, SocialNetwork.com is no Facebook, VideoHosting.com is no YouTube.
It is basically a choice of short-term vs long-term goals:
- do you want to pick a specific keyword & try to sell something relevant today (with less flexibility going forward)
- do you have the assets available to build a brand that will remain flexible under changing market conditions
While exact match domains can box you in, it is a sign of relevancy for that specific keyword: as you have tied your business to it!
Either you got to the market early, or you shelled out thousands of Dollars. OnlineKredit.org just went for $36,400! Whoever bought it is not probably going to be signing guestbooks / comment spamming / auto-generating content /etc. And the guy who paid $1 million for Poker.org wouldn’t have paid that unless he planned on building something sustainable there.
Even Matt Cutts recommends buying relevant domain names as gifts
The one area of exact match domains where I think Google has been (and will continue to) tighten up is some of the longtail cybersquatting, but…
- tightening up can be tricky because the same word can have different meanings in different markets (perhaps continued efforts into localizing results will solve some of these issues)
- earlier this year Google did whack some longtail EMDs that had few other signals of quality
- more recently, Google has been showing far more results from 1 domain on navigational queries, and has been ranking official sites for related queries even if they didn’t have some of the keywords in their content or link anchor text
- even for generic search queries (like “cameras”) Google sometimes lists suggested related brand navigation in the search results
- trademarks protect usage & legislation is moving in the direction of making it easier / cheaper / faster for brand owners to whack cybersquatting
Ho Ho Ho, Go Google Go
Published October 29, 2010 | Some sites have seen pretty drastic drops in Google search traffic recently, related to indexing issues. Google maintains that it is a glitch:
Just to be clear, the issues from this thread, which I have reviewed in detail, are not due to changes in our policies or changes in our algorithms; they is due to a technical issue on our side that will be visibly resolved as soon as possible (it may take up to a few days to be visible for all sites though). You do not need to change anything on your side and we will continue to crawl and index your content (perhaps not as quickly at the moment, but we hope that will be resolved for all sites soon). I would not recommend changing anything significantly at this moment (unless you spot obvious problems on your side), as these may result in other issues once this problem is resolved on our side.
An example of one site’s search traffic that was butchered by this glitch, see the below images. Note that in the before, Google traffic is ~ 10x what Yahoo! or Bing drive, and after the bug the traffic is ~ even.
Not that long ago I saw another site with over 500 unique linking domains which simply disappeared from the index for a few days, then came right back 3 days later. Google’s push to become faster and more comprehensive has perhaps made them less stable, as digging into social media highlights a lot of false signals & often promotes a copy over the original. Add in any sort of indexing issues and things get really ugly really fast.
Now this may just be a glitch, but as Tedster points out, many such “glitches” often precede or coincide with major index updates. Ever since I have been in the SEO field I think Google has done a major algorithmic change just before the holidays every year except last year.
I think the reasons they do it are likely 3 or 4 fold
- they want to make SEO unpredictable & unreliable (which ultimately means less resources are spent on SEO & the results are overall less manipulated)
- they want to force businesses (who just stocked up on inventory) to enter the AdWords game in a big way
- by making changes to the core relevancy algorithms (and having the market discuss those) they can slide in more self promotion via their vertical search services without it drawing much anti-trust scrutiny
- the holidays are when conversion rates are the highest, so if they want to make changes to seek additional yield it is the best time to do it, and the holidays give them an excuse to offer specials or beta tests of various sorts
As an SEO with clients, the unpredictability is a bad thing, because it makes it harder to manage expectations. Sharp drops in rankings from Google “glitches” erode customer trust in the SEO provider. Sometimes Google will admit to major issues happening, and other times they won’t until well *after* the fact. Being proven right after the fact still doesn’t take back 100% of the uncertainty unleashed into the marketplace weeks later.
Even if half your clients double their business while 1/3 lose half their search traffic, as an SEO business you typically don’t generally get to capture much of the additional upside…whereas you certainly capture the complaints from those who just fell behind. Ultimately this is one of the reasons why I think being a diversified web publisher is better than being an SEO consultant… if something takes off & something else drops then you can just pour additional resources into whatever is taking well and capture the lift from those changes.
If you haven’t been tracking rankings now would be a great time to get on it. It is worth tracking a variety of keywords (at various levels of competition) daily while there is major flux going on, because that gives you another lens through which to view the relevancy algorithms, and where they might be headed.
What Is SEO, Really?
Published October 29, 2010 | 
Lisa Barone wrote an interesting piece entitled “Are SEOs Responsible For Rankings Or Money?“. At a recent SMX conference, Matt McGee posed the SEO myth “SEO is about rankings”. Lisa was relieved when the panel concluded that SEO was really all about the money.
I agree, but then all business activity is ultimately about money. We could say car racing is all about money, but it’s also about engineering. It’s about skill, excitement, and winning the game.
So what is SEO these days, anyway?
A Very Brief History Of SEO
Back when SEO started, SEO wasn’t called SEO. It was probably best described by those who did it as a form of hacking.
The first search engines weren’t particularly clever, so it was relatively easy to figure out their sorting algorithms. There was a time when Infoseek’s algorithm was almost entirely based on keyword density and keyword position.
Whilst this hacking was still ultimately about money, it was as much a game as anything else. I’m sure many old school SEOs remember those days with a sense of nostalgia. It was more of a pure technical pursuit back then.
As search engines got more sophisticated, and more money flowed online, the nature of the game changed. SEO moved beyond technical hacking to an exercise in making connections.
In Googles early days, you could buy a few high PR links – or beg for them – and that was enough to get you ranking top ten in most keyword areas. Buy a few more if you really wanted to go hard. Saturate the long tail with auto-gen, just like your competitors were doing, and it was game on. Some may say we haven’t completely left this phase, but the sun is setting on this approach.
These days, a more holistic approach is required. The search engines, Google in particular, have become more and more oblique, which means systematic technical approaches are less effective than they once were. This begs the question – what is a client hiring an SEO to do, exactly?
BTW: For those who want to read deeper on a history of SEO, check out this excellent Danny Sullivan interview. He knows more than most about the history of SEO.
Explaining SEO
Ever had trouble explaining to people what you do?
I’ve worked out a succinct answer that is easy for non-technical people to understand. When people ask me what I do, I tell them “I’m a drug dealer”.
It isn’t true, of course, but I just figure it’s easier for people to grasp. If pushed, I’ll launch into a detailed explanation of SEO, internet advertising and web publishing models – an explanation which is universally guaranteed to be met with the response “huh”?.
Often, they’ll conclude: “so you rank web sites in Google, then?”.
To which my reply is “well, that’s part of it”. As I explain further, I’m still not sure I’m making any headway, so figure it’s time everyone had another drink and talk about something else.
The SMX panel is right. SEO is not about just about ranking websites, it’s about so much more. Some SEOs, myself included, use SEO as part of a business strategy, a strategy that is just as much about publishing, domain names, brand building, marketing and traffic acquisition. It involves metrics, tracking, conversions, split/run testing, adwords, adsense, writing, researching, managing and changing the light-bulb in the office when it blows. The commonality is that it is oriented around the search ecosystem. Except for the light-bulb.
Some SEOs focus on very specific areas. It is their job to take a site from nowhere in the search engines to achieving desirable rankings. Their job ends there. I suspect such a role is becoming less common as search companies like Google extend their tentacles into every corner of the web, and search consultants invariably follow.
Ask ten different SEOs what they do, and you’ll probably get ten different answers. None of which the lay person will likely understand, unfortunately.
Learning SEO Today
If you’re starting out in SEO now, I don’t envy your challenge. If you’re reading this, and you’re an SEO veteran, please feel free to add your comments below. What is your advice to those starting out?
It helps to understand the big picture first. The reason people engage in SEO is ultimately about making money. Even a non-profit may make money from SEO by saving money they would have spent on some other marketing channel.
They want people to find their web site. They want people to connect with them, rather than their competitors. They want people to do this so they can convert these people to buyers, of their goods, their services, or their ideas. If a site were only to rank – say, on keyword terms no-one searched for, or that weren’t directly applicable to the objectives of the business, then the SEO work is largely useless. It matters not if a site appears in Google’s index. If no one visits via a search in Google, then all that’s happened is the bandwidth costs have increased i.e. Google’s spider visits and digests pages, and the ROI for the SEO spend looks dire.
So SEO isn’t about rankings.
The rankings must translate to something tangible. In most cases, this means gaining qualified visitor traffic. To get this traffic, a site must do more than rank, a site must appeal to visitors. A visitor who clicks back isn’t really a visitor. To appeal to visitors, the SEO must first understand them. What do they want? What problem do they have?
Once the SEO understands visitor intent – and they can do this by getting clues from the search query itself, and testing pages against alternatives – they then direct that visitor around the site in order to turn the visitor into something else i.e. a buyer, a subscriber, a reader. Some might say this goes beyond the job description of an SEO, however whether an SEO works on this part or not, they do need to understand it. If the client doesn’t see a positive benefit from an SEOs work, they are unlikely to keep paying for the services.
So, yes, SEO is about money. But it is also about the long process by which money is made.
Scary SEO Mishaps – Whiteboard Friday
Published October 29, 2010 | Posted by Aaron Wheeler
Happy Halloween mozzerati! Oh, Roger wants me to tell you: "Trick or treat!" Actually, this week we’ve got a lot more treats than tricks for you. Our treats will even help you overcome some of the nasty trixes of the SEO world! Jen Lopez, our Community Manager at SEOmoz, is here to tell you about some of the scary SEO mishaps that could happen to you if you’re not careful. You’re going to want to watch this one all the way through; I hear there’s a wiked Halloween mozzter mash at the end! Roger may even go trick or treating after the credits…
Embed video
<object width="640" height="360" id="wistia_211900" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"><param name="movie" value="http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/flash/embed_player_v1.1.swf"/><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"/><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/><param name="wmode" value="opaque"/><param name="flashvars" value="videoUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/2e5532ab39eefbb07f0ffffa1a8d4c8fed9c588b.bin&stillUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/85ea8e76bc2ced693ee9b09e5294bcf89cdabd8a.bin&unbufferedSeek=false&controlsVisibleOnLoad=false&autoPlay=false&endVideoBehavior=default&playButtonVisible=true&embedServiceURL=http://distillery.wistia.com/x&accountKey=wistia-production_3161&mediaID=wistia-production_211900&mediaDuration=528.46"/><embed src="http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/flash/embed_player_v1.1.swf" width="640" height="360" name="wistia_211900" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" wmode="opaque" flashvars="videoUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/2e5532ab39eefbb07f0ffffa1a8d4c8fed9c588b.bin&stillUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/85ea8e76bc2ced693ee9b09e5294bcf89cdabd8a.bin&unbufferedSeek=false&controlsVisibleOnLoad=false&autoPlay=false&endVideoBehavior=default&playButtonVisible=true&embedServiceURL=http://distillery.wistia.com/x&accountKey=wistia-production_3161&mediaID=wistia-production_211900&mediaDuration=528.46"></embed></object><script src="http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/embeds/v.js" charset="ISO-8859-1"></script><script>if(!navigator.mimeTypes['application/x-shockwave-flash'])Wistia.VideoEmbed(‘wistia_211900′,640,360,{videoUrl:’http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/2e5532ab39eefbb07f0ffffa1a8d4c8fed9c588b.bin’,stillUrl:’http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/85ea8e76bc2ced693ee9b09e5294bcf89cdabd8a.bin’,distilleryUrl:’http://distillery.wistia.com/x’,accountKey:’wistia-production_3161′,mediaId:’wistia-production_211900′,mediaDuration:528.46})</script> <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/">SEOmoz – SEO Software</a>
Video Transcription
Hi, everyone. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. As you can tell, both Rand and Danny are out of town and they have left me, Jen Lopez, the Community Manager here at SEOmoz, with the reins. [sinister laugh]
Today we’re going to do something a little fun. We’re going to talk about making sure to not let these scary SEO mishaps happen to you. Some of you may have noticed I actually sent a Tweet out last night asking for everyone to let me know some of the scariest things that have happened to their site. These are really the top three things that people talked about and things that I have personally seen both here at SEOmoz and at previous jobs.
The first one is to fear the agony of sitewide de-indexing. [eerie wail in background] This can happen a number of different ways. A rogue developer or a developer that doesn’t understand what a major impact something can make. It could be a host. It could be a number of different things, but there are various ways to do this.
The first one is robots in the robots.txt disallowing all. I’ve also seen this where we did major rewrites of a ton of URLs, a bunch of redirects, and the developer thought, "Oh, well, since we’re redirecting these URLs, we should disallow all of these thousands and thousands of pages from the robots.txt because we don’t want them crawled anymore.’ It essentially completely killed weeks and weeks’ worth of 301 redirects because all those pages were poof, no longer being served in the index.
The next one is canonicalize all pages to the home page. Last week, Dr. Pete did a great post, a very scary post, about how he added the rel=canonical tag to every page on his home page and it always redirected them all back to the home page. I’ll let you take a look, but it was essentially catastrophic. He was lucky enough to get some of the pages back, and he wrote a very funny reinclusion request. But I don’t think most people would have gotten the same results. So, don’t do that.
The next thing is adding the no index tag to every page. I’ve seen this happen. Sometimes a developer goes in and they want to set it up so that the no index tag shows up on certain pages, paginated pages for example. But the code that they wrote isn’t quite right, and actually the no index tag is showing up on every page. I specifically had this happen. It took about two weeks for all of the pages to be de-indexed and for the hair to start coming out, people are freaking out, running around, where are all of my pages, to find out that one simple little tag at the top of the page on every page removed all the pages from the index.
So just be sure to watch those three things. Sometimes it is not always you who is updating it. Like I said, it’s a developer, it’s a development team, it’s something else. Just be sure to watch it. Make sure that you are going through and checking those out now and then.
The next one is, don’t let your CMS kill your rankings. [sinister laugh in background] That’s scary. There are a number of things that your CMS (content management system) can do to your site that will actually kill your rankings. We’ve seen this several times. I worked on a site once where it was builtin.net and we used something called DotNetNuke, maybe many of you have used this before, and it created tons of duplicate content. Every single page on the site had at least three URLs that you could get to. You had to use plug-ins and various things in order to do redirects and that sort of thing. It was very, very difficult to set up.
The other one are theme or design issues. Michelle Robbins actually sent me a message today and said, "Okay, I have a doozy here. It’s much more than 140 characters." She sent me a message about a friend of hers who went through a site redesign. They set her up in WordPress. They picked a great theme and did some modifications to it, redesigned it and all this stuff. The site goes up, and two or three weeks later they are wondering, "Why aren’t any of our pages indexed? I don’t even rank for the actual site name. What in the heck is going on?" They realized that the theme that they had chosen didn’t allow title tags on the page. She also had a number of widgets and various things so the internal linking was broken. Essentially, it was the theme that killed her website. She had to go in and do a bunch of modifications. So just make sure that when you pick that amazing theme for your website that it is not hurting your ranking.
Another big issue is, oftentimes, if you have a big huge CMS sometimes maybe a homegrown one that’s five, six, ten years old, it doesn’t allow for 301 redirects or even easily set up the canonical tag. Just be sure, be aware of some of those things when you’re setting up your CMS, you’re changing to a new one, whatever the case may be.
The third one, the third one is really horrible. Beware of those gruesome backlinks. [eerie roar in background] Yikes, that one gave me shivers. Watch out. These are some black cat, really scary tactics. But I actually had several people come to me and say that they’ve seen this happen, which for the life of me I can’t imagine doing, but, you know, there are people out there. So watch out for competitors, revengeful employees, bad agencies, whatever the case may be. They can go out and whether it’s hijack your backlinks, they buy a bunch of spammy backlinks from bad neighborhoods and whatnot, and all of a sudden your pages are getting de- indexed. You’re noticing you have a penalty, you have no idea why. You think everything is happy and chipper. And then you go to Open Site explorer, put in your site, and you see all these ridiculous links. Another tactic people can take is to sort of brand-jack you, right. Okay, that sounded really bad. But I think you know what I mean. They go in and they start ranking for your name in those tops SERPs.
I know that is a completely separate topic but it is rather scary. It’s just something that when you are, we all obsess over rankings, so every day you’re checking your analytics, you’re checking to see if your rankings are still in place, you’re checking on all these things, but don’t forget these three things. Don’t forget that these can happen and don’t forget to double check. Maybe it is a weekly or a monthly process of going in and having a checklist of, "Let’s make sure that these nasty things aren’t happening to me." You’ll be on your merry way.
I hope everyone has a great Halloween. As you can see, Roger over here is going trick-or-treating. Here at the SEOmoz office, we are having a big Halloween party today. I hope you guys have an absolutely great weekend. Next week, I promise, Rand or Danny, the really cool guys, they’ll be back. See you next week. Bye.
[Awesome dance party]
[Roger Trick-or-Treating]
Boo!
Video transcription by SpeechPad.com
Follow SEOmoz on Twitter! I’d love it if you’d follow me too: Aaron Wheeler.
If you have any tricks or treats that you’ve learned along the way, we’d love to hear about it in the comments below. Post your comment and be heard! Happy Halloween!
2 Actionable SEO Metrics You’re Probably Missing
Published October 29, 2010 | Posted by Aaron Wheeler
Everyone loves metrics! Even more so, everyone loves taking action! After all, that’s why we have Action Man, international man of…. well, action. This week, Rand helps you become an action man or woman yourself – that’s right, we’re talking about you! In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses two metrics that you may not be using in your current campaign; if you’re not, then you’ve got a lot of action to catch up on!
Embed video
<object width="640" height="360" id="wistia_206779" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"><param name="movie" value="http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/flash/embed_player_v1.1.swf"/><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"/><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/><param name="wmode" value="opaque"/><param name="flashvars" value="videoUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/54ead7b07821aefa4911f4ea102a5460542ed607.bin&stillUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/d3ea81eac2163232162f7a26673bef5787ac4d0e.bin&unbufferedSeek=false&controlsVisibleOnLoad=false&autoPlay=false&endVideoBehavior=default&playButtonVisible=true&embedServiceURL=http://distillery.wistia.com/x&accountKey=wistia-production_3161&mediaID=wistia-production_206779&mediaDuration=480.88"/><embed src="http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/flash/embed_player_v1.1.swf" width="640" height="360" name="wistia_206779" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" wmode="opaque" flashvars="videoUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/54ead7b07821aefa4911f4ea102a5460542ed607.bin&stillUrl=http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/d3ea81eac2163232162f7a26673bef5787ac4d0e.bin&unbufferedSeek=false&controlsVisibleOnLoad=false&autoPlay=false&endVideoBehavior=default&playButtonVisible=true&embedServiceURL=http://distillery.wistia.com/x&accountKey=wistia-production_3161&mediaID=wistia-production_206779&mediaDuration=480.88"></embed></object><script src="http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/embeds/v.js" charset="ISO-8859-1"></script><script>if(!navigator.mimeTypes['application/x-shockwave-flash'])Wistia.VideoEmbed(‘wistia_206779′,640,360,{videoUrl:’http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/54ead7b07821aefa4911f4ea102a5460542ed607.bin’,stillUrl:’http://seomoz-cdn.wistia.com/deliveries/d3ea81eac2163232162f7a26673bef5787ac4d0e.bin’,distilleryUrl:’http://distillery.wistia.com/x’,accountKey:’wistia-production_3161′,mediaId:’wistia-production_206779′,mediaDuration:480.88})</script> <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/">SEOmoz – SEO Software</a>
Video Transcription
Howdy, SEOmoz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we are covering some analytics tips for SEO.
So, one of the things that I’ve seen recently is a lot of sites who have seen either precipitous drops in their traffic or they’ve seen rises in their traffic, and they’re not always sure how to attribute those to know where the gains and losses are coming from. It is because the partitioning of the data that they are looking at isn’t as ideal as it could be. That’s exactly why I’m presenting these two sort of very actionable SEO metrics that you should be tracking and keeping track of for your site. Hopefully, not even necessarily just for your site, but on sort of a folder by folder or different content by different content level basis. So, I might want to track these things not just for SEOmoz as a whole but for the blog, the tools section, the Q&A section, all the individual sections. I would urge you to do the same thing.
When you see something like, oh, my search traffic has gone up, that can come from a number of things. It could be, number one, your existing pages are rising in the rankings. There’s not more keyword demand. You haven’t done anything to gain or lose new pages in the search engine’s index. It’s just that pages that were in there have risen. Maybe you’ve gotten links to them. Maybe competitors have fallen. Maybe Google has rejiggered how they rank pages and you’ve benefited from that. And then there’s also changes like you’ve gotten more pages into the index and now those pages are performing whereas before they didn’t. And so, you’ve got new traffic opportunities, new keywords that are sending you traffic. But if you are not measuring these two things, you’re not going to be able to see them. So, let me walk you through exactly what they are, how to get them, and how you can apply this now.
First off, the number of pages receiving at least one, right, at least one visit from search engines. What this means is that it’s an individual page on my site, and the search engine, you know, Google, Bing, Yahoo, or whatever it is, has sent a visitor — look at that nice friendly visitor — over to my page. It doesn’t have to be more than one. If they send you one visit to that page, you know that it at least is in the search engine’s index and is earning some form of traffic. So you’re just looking for that raw count of pages. You can get this directly from Google Analytics just by looking at Google and seeing the count of the quantity of URLs that have generated a Google search visit from organic traffic.
Now, when you’re tracking this over time, I’m going to recommend doing a week-by-week analysis, but I think you should also do a month-by-month and possibly a quarter-by-quarter, because breaking these out into longer views will mean that pages that are rarely receiving search traffic but are in the index and do sometimes get a visit will appear in there. It could be that you have an extremely long tail targeted page and it doesn’t get visits every week, but it does get them at least once a month or at least once a quarter. Once a quarter is rarer. I think once a month is probably the limit.
In any case, if you are tracking these you can see things like, huh, if the number of pages on my website is increasing, I’m adding new content, and this is not increasing, then I know something’s going wrong. Essentially, maybe Google is losing traffic at those pages or I am having pages that are falling out of the index because maybe they no longer exist on my site. Have they 404′d? Am I redirecting old things? Is Google not crawling as deeply anymore? What’s going on with those? Actionable item to let you investigate and figure out what’s happened with that traffic drop. The problem is if you are not monitoring this, you might see your traffic rise and think everything is just fine when, in fact, you’re losing existing opportunity that could be easily captured.
All right. So if I see that this rises dramatically, and I know that I haven’t done anything specific, then I can assume that Google is now crawling deeper on my site. Maybe links have existed, links now exist to subcategory pages or deep in my site or my XML sitemap is finally being respected or, you know, some of those kinds of things. And as you do these things, as you submit an XML sitemap or you optimize that feed or as you are creating an HTML sitemap or you’re changing your navigation structure, you should be monitoring these so you know whether you are having a positive impact there. Since search numbers can fluctuate so much, search demand fluctuates, rankings fluctuate, keywords fluctuate, this can give you a good sense of how those pages, whether I am actually getting all those pages into the engine and those are helping me bring at least some traffic back. If this is going down, I know I, generally speaking, have indexation or site crawl problems.
The second one is the number of keywords sending at least one visit from search engines. And you need to monitor these independently. I marked on here that this needs to be Google and down here it’s going to be Bing. I would want to monitor this for all of the engines that I care about because indexation and search traffic is going to be independent on those different engines. The number of keywords sending more than one visit tells me, aha, I ranked somewhere for that keyword. I was in the top maybe 10, maybe 20, maybe 30, if people are digging all around way down into the 30s and 40s for some of these keywords. If those numbers are rising and falling in relation to your number of pages, there should be sort of an appropriate correlation between those two numbers. If there is not, you know something weird is going on.
For example, if the number of pages that are sending you traffic is shrinking but your number of keywords sending you traffic stays the same or even rises, you might presume that, oh, maybe that page fell out of the index but some other one that I had gained those rankings back or is now ranking in its stead. This is really good information to have because it can help tell you want the cause for and what the action should be when traffic falls or doesn’t rise as much as you expect. If you’ve been adding pages, you know, sort of long tail content pages and they’ve been generally generating, you know, we added ten pages, we have ten more pages that earned us traffic this month. But wait a minute, last time we got seven keywords that sent us traffic, and this time we only got three new keywords that sent us traffic. Maybe those pages, that content wasn’t as keyword rich. Maybe it didn’t have the types of content that people are looking for as much. So, we can chose writers and content and editorial subject matter to cover that is going to be the most helpful in earning us traffic. We can rate ourselves and know the right things to do.
Along with the classic thing that you are measuring, which is sort of, you know, just visits over time, which is a key metric that obviously you should be reporting, this gives you that one level deeper into things that you should be grabbing. Both of these are available in standard analytics packages like Google Analytics.
In fact, I’m sort of excited to preannounce, you’ll be able to get these in our web app, in the SEOmoz web app, as well. These numbers will be in there on a week-by-week basis along with your crawl and rankings data if and when you integrate with Google Analytics. That feature should be coming, oh, in the next few weeks let’s say. So, we’re excited about that.
But by all means, do be monitoring this stuff. Do measure it. Tell us how it goes. I look forward to the comments. Take care everyone.
Video transcription by SpeechPad.com
You should follow SEOmoz on Twitter! I’d be thrilled if you’d follow me too: Aaron Wheeler.
If you have any tips or tricks that you’ve learned along the way, we’d love to hear about it in the comments below. Post your comment and be heard!
Connect With Us!
IT Service Corporation: Your "One Stop" for IT and Web Solutions