The Maine SEO Blog

There are hundreds of web marketing and SEO blogs out there and I subscribe to quite a few; but depending on my workload and – let’s face it – attention span, I only avidly read a handful. Here are my top 3 must-reads, as far as I’m concerned:

Copyblogger

If you ever have or ever will write – especially for the web – then you’re crazy not to read Copyblogger. Get insights, tips, and tricks from industry leaders on everything from blogging to SEO to email marketing. While you’re at it, make sure you also subscribe to their email newsletter; you’ll get some emails about whitepapers that you may or may not be interested in, but you’ll get super valuable articles, too!

SEOmoz Blog

The ever-brilliant team at SEOmoz brings both technical and interesting when they blog. You’ll learn why search engines do what they do from one of the industry’s best data-crunching team. These guys are figuring out why things happen, first-hand; and while the majority will be about SEO, you’ll also get some great overall web marketing advice, too!

Social Media Examiner

For the best on what’s happening web marketing-wise, look no further than the Social Media Examiner. Specialists on social, this blog will give you incredibly informative and content-rich posts on the topics that you should be familiar with. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that our own Rich Brooks is a club leader and regular expert contributor to the blog!

What are your favorite web marketing blogs to read?

Nicki Hicks
Blog Supporter

Recently, my friends and I have been hiking every weekend. It’s a great way to get some exercise in and it’s a fun activity to explore nature with friends. Not to mention it’s something that I can do with my dog on the weekend to give him a much needed energy release after being cooped up in the house all week. But, it wasn’t until I wrote a blog post for a client on Maine’s Waterfalls that I started to get really inspired.

Maine has a crazy amount of beauty and so many things to discover. But, the caveat to that is, in order to see a beautiful waterfall or awe inspiring mountain view, you first have to make the hike to do it. Hiking is NOT easy. In fact, many of the trails that are required to get to these Mountain Tops can cause you pain and exhaustion. However, once you hit that apex you get to stroll down and the endorphins kick in and it was all worth it.

But, the more you hike, the easier it gets. You develop your muscles, strengthen your heart and lungs and build endurance. In the end, it becomes more natural and more enjoyable.

SO, what does this have to do with web marketing success? EVERYTHING!

Social media doesn’t come naturally to everyone. I can’t count how many times we hear clients say that they didn’t know it was going to be so much work.  Blogging is work, creating content is work, posting updates takes time and imagination and it all has to be valuable and interesting information for your audience.

Waterfalls were my inspiration, what’s yours?  What is going to get you excited to put the work and effort in to get the web marketing and social media results that you want? You can look for inspiration for your posts in many places, did someone say something to you today that sparked an idea, did you hear something on the radio, did you read a blog or magazine article that got you thinking? Anything you hear, read or do can be used to spark an idea for a blog post or Twitter update.

Like with starting a workout or starting to hike, it takes time to adjust and adapt to your new activity until it becomes easier or a habit.  This also goes for web marketing.  Right now it may not seem like it fits in your schedule or it may not feel natural to you.  But, the more you do it the easier it becomes.  Create an editorial calendar for yourself and stick to it. Commit to posting one blog post a week or making 3 updates on Facebook a day. Do that until you master it and then add on the next phase of your web marketing plan.  Like with taking a hike, the first trail is the hardest and with every new trail (or marketing step you take) the easier it becomes.

Results! We all do this because we want the web marketing results.  With a hike it’s an amazing view, endorphins released from exercise, fresh air or a waterfall, with web marketing we want to get our message to the right people resulting in our end goal.  Whether that goal be more leads in the sales funnel, more people attending your event, more traffic to your website or better customer service web marketing and social media are just our tools to help us achieve those goals.

So, what are you waiting for? Find your inspiration, make the commitment, and take the first steps.

If you’d like help developing a social media plan for your business, or a personal trainer for your social media marketing to help you stay with it, flyte can help. Just contact us to get the ball rolling.

Joan Woodbrey Crocker
Hiking Web Everest

Dear Maine SEO,

We’re trying to decide whether we should set up a business blog or do pay-per-click advertising. Which will provide a better return on investment?

–Marketing in Maine

Dear Marketing,

We’ve never recommended putting all your eggs in one basket, be they proverbial or free range. Both blogs–which help with your organic search rankings–and pay-per-click (PPC) ads–which appear on page one–can help deliver qualified traffic to your website.

One way to look at this is the difference between cooking in an aluminum pan vs. a cast-iron pan. The aluminum pan heats up quicker, but it also cools off quicker.

PPC advertising is a lot like that aluminum pan. If you need to get page one results on Google or Bing, you just need to pay them and your ads will start running immediately. Same day results. That’s fantastic for sites that may not otherwise do well in the organic results, such as new sites or sites that rely heavily on Flash.

However, the moment you stop paying them–whether because you hit your daily budget or you’ve decided that PPC is no longer for you–that traffic stops just as quickly. You’ll get no more benefit out of the money and time you’ve invested.

Compare this to blogging: you may not enjoy much search engine visibility for the first few months of your blogging and you’ll be putting in a lot of work…we’d recommend 2 – 3 keyword-rich posts a week of 300 words or more. However, once you’ve established your blog and built up trust and inbound links, your blog stays hot like a cast-iron pan.

In reviewing the top ten traffic generating posts this month at our web marketing blog, five of the posts are at least a year or two old, the oldest one was written in 2006! Five years later and it’s still pulling in hundreds of new visitors each month…that’s a much better payoff than most PPC campaigns in our opinion.

So, if your budget allows it, we might recommend setting up a small budget for PPC, but develop develop a business blog for your long term success.

Rich Brooks
Now You’re Cooking with Gas

Photo credit: Jeremy Noble

This is a recap from a webinar SEOmoz did a while back, with Rand Fishkin. Follow Rand on Twitter here.

Goals of successful information Architecture

• Semantically logical structure (Zoo animals –> African Savannah –> Lions) – If your site architecture is logical, your users will spend more time on site, find what they want easier, and convert more often.
• Minimize click depth (not JUST for search engines!) – so that users and search engines can reach any point on the site in a minimum number of site. Usability and SEO best practices are nearly identical.
• Maximize usability of navigation

Tips for Semantically Useful Navigation

• Initially design without keyword research – so that you aren’t bias in the way you organize by the keywords you discover. Rand suggests first organizing your content the way it makes sense to you and then incorporate the keywords that make sense for search engines, where they make sense.
• Add  in keyword research based modifications to your draft IA
• Validate architecture/path with non-SEOs – make sure that your navigation still makes sense to non-SEOs and non-web users

Tips for Minimal Click-Depth

• Imitate the ideal navigation pyramid – in the first example, you’ll see you can get to 1 million pages with three clicks; in the second, you can only reach 150,000 pages with three clicks.

• Broad linking at top levels – at the top level, link to very broad categories; link to popular subcategories from the homepage. Rand uses Metacritic as an example.
• Editorial categorization > user-defined (hack: multi-level HTML sitemap – like this page at Rotten Tomatoes)

Tips for Usable Navigation

• Obvious navigation elements (like with MailChimp)
• Naming Conventions that Make Intent (not like Media Temple) – don’t use language no one outside your company won’t understand
• User & usability testing (using something like Silverback 2.0)

Avoiding Common “Big Site” Problems

• Duplicate content issues:
  • Rel Canonical tags (although sometimes it isn’t perfect) – you’ll lose a tiny bit of PR, but you’ll save yourself before bad things happen. Rand always suggests using the rel canonical for the absolute URL of pages for your article/blog/products section(s).
• Google Webmaster Tools – use to ignore duplicate content
• SEOmoz web app

Scraping and Re-Publishing

• Scrappers (good or bad) that take content can be shown instead of original content.
• Employ absolute URLs (as in <a href=”http://www.seomoz.org/blog”> anchor </a>) not relative (<a href=”…blog”> anchor </a>)
• Don’t go overboard with bot blocking

Incomplete Indexation

• Don’t look at the site: command and compare it day to day. (Read this post by Rand.) Use track referrals instead.
• Check page “types” that don’t receive traffic (see this post by Rand)
• XML sitemaps – helps search engines crawl large websites
• Content syndication (use the allintitle: command)
• RSS feeds
• Twitter for indexation

“Search Results” in the SERPs

• Create category “landing” pages
• Remove obvious traces of “search” on landing pages

Faceted navigation

• Rel canonical can help
• Use AJAX to reload pages
• Watch out for Google crawling Javascript
• Offer facets only to loggin-in/cookie users

Q&A

Sorry couldn’t stick around for the whole webinar, but here are two juicy tips:

Google Image search – less a new algorithm than a new interface. Text around image seems to be doing better than alt text.

Want a copy of Rand’s Firefox bookmarks? Here they are!

The following is a selection of takeaways from the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East. Find conversations around the conference on Twitter.

I apologize for those of you who kept up with my pseudo live blogging yammering last week. I’m taking some time to make some observations and actionable takeaways from the conference. If you want to skip ahead to something you’re especially interested in, the following are the topics covered:

• Real Time & Social Search
• Google’s Keyword Research Tools
• What’s new with local search?
• Location Services: The new local search?
• Facebook SEO
• Actionable Metrics and Diagnostics
• Demystifying Attribution
• SEO & Competitive Analysis
• Analytics for Social Media

(more…)

The following is a recap from a session at Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East. Follow the conference and this session on Twitter.

Social Media Analytics with Jack Bauer

Preparation is key. Start with a social media checklist.

Part 1: Discovery

Identify your business objectives

• Increase brand awareness
• Increase brand trust
• Increase interaction with customers
• Increase brand loyalty
• Sell more [your service/product]
• Better understanding of user behavoir

What characteristics do you want associated with your brand?

• Great customer service
• Convenience
• Low prices
• Refreshing

How much time and resources are you willing to invest?

A few stats

• 67% of Twitter users who follow a brand, are more like to buy that brand’s products
• 60% of Facebook users who like a brand are more likely to recommend a brand to a friend
• 74% of consumers are influence on buying decisions by fellow socializers

Part 2: Understanding your Audience

Listening – your parents were onto something

• How are your customers using social media
• Where are they participating?
• Are they currently interacting with companies via social media?
• What are they already saying about you?
• What is their activity level on each social network?

Part 3: Defining KPIs

• Define KPIs specific to each business objective
• Cool social media marketing analytics
• Use KPIs to measure, like:
  • Share of voice – Brand mentions/total mentions
  • Audience engagement – Comments + Shares + Trackbacks/Total Views
  • Conversation reach – Total people participating/Total audience views

Examples of Actionable KPIs

• Number of people in a specific location who follow us on Twitter
• Reduction in support costs
• Number of product improvement suggestions from Facebook fans
• Increase in product reviews & ratings
• Reduction in sales cycles

Other KPIs to consider

• Volume of consumer-created buzz
• Seasonality of buzz
• Rate of virality
• Embeds/installs
• Increases in searches
• Rankings improvemnts
• Demographics
• Interaction/engagement rates
• Number of interactions
• Store locator views
• Registrations by channel

KPI Evolution

• The key to successful social media measurement is asking questions

Part 4: Tools for Insight

• Scout Labs
• Radian 6

Configuration Tips

Setup separate searches for:

• Brand mentions
• Product mentions
• Events
• Promotions
• Competitors
• Product launches

Taylor Pratt, Raven Internet Marketing Tools

Social Media Metrics

Content-oriented social media

Consumption = branding and organic social media presence

Benefits

• Traffic
  • Unique visits/page visits
  • CPM revenue
• Visibility
  • Branding/buzz
  • Links
    • Long tail traffic
    • Search rankings (leads/sales)
• Stickiness
  • Newsletter/RSS subscribers
  • Return visitors

Quantitative Metrics (KPIs)

• Engagement
  • Comments (Not including spam, but do include negative comments)
  • Social votes/bookmarks
• Consumption – traffic count
• Micro-conversions
  • Subscribers
  • Fans/followers
• Virality
  • Social shares/mentions
  • Links

Granular Metrics: Links

• Volume of links for a number of pieces of content
• Amount of links based on number of visits
• Shift in link count over time
• Competitive link growth
• Links by category/topic
• Links by social channel

Micro-conversions/Engagement

• Bookmarks
• Downloads
• Favorites
• Feedback
• Forward to a friend
• Groups
• Install widget
• Invite/refer
• Uploads
• Wishlists

URL shorteners

• bit.ly
• Google URL shortener (Goo.gl)

Comment engagement

• Bring social comments into your blog with Disqus
• Conversion rate = # visitor comments/# pieces of content
• Compare to regular content vs. promoted content

Google Analytics

Google URL Builder

• Create trackable link (Google URL builder)
  • Campaign name
  • Promotion start date
  • Delivery method
  • Medium
  • Format
• Shorten your trackable link
• Add your shortened trackable link
• Track your URL in Google Analytics

Advanced Segments

• Segment social visits from regular visits through Advanced Segments
• Tie Advanced Segments to Goals

Other GA social analytics sources

• Content > Content by title > Entrance Source
• Click Map (content overlay)
• Infographic tracking through GA
• Google Social Analytics - GreaseMonkey for Firefox/Chrome
• Google Analytics for Facebook pages – FBML markup

Social Sharing Measurement

• Facebook Insights (through Facebook page)
• Facebook Page Tool
• WebTrends Facebook Analytics Tool
• (Official) Twitter analytics
• Twitter sharing – how many people are RT’ing you?
• Delicious bookmarks
  • View history to see how many times a URL was bookmarked
  • Use SEOQuake plugin to see how your site is bookmarked overall
• YouTube Insight
  • Views over time
  • Demographic/geogrpahic breakouts of views
  • How many imbed codes were shared
• Social sharing measurement - ShareThis
• Social Meter
• PostRank

Data Use

• Start with a baseline measurement
• Then do monthly audits

Takeaways

• Social media metrics vary with strategies, goals, sites, etc.
• Track anything possible for insight
• Social media is not just about numbers
• Measuring social media does not = ROI for social media

Jordan Kasteler, BlueGlass Interactive Inc.

The following is a recap from a session at Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East. Follow the conference and session on Twitter.

Why competitive analysis?

The value of competitive analysis in organic SEO:

• No lonely metrics
• Managing expectations
• Steal ideas & strategies
• Ammunition

No lonely metrics

What can context do for you?

• It can make more impact
• Benchmark where you stand against your competitors
• Makes you more persuasive (or sexy) – like using rich snippets

Competitive Analysis Tool Roundup

• Keyword research – what keywords are your competitors targeting?
  • SpyFu
  • iSpionage
  • KeywordSpy
  • SEMRush
  • Google Keyword Research Tool
• Keyword research – what’s actually sending traffic to your competition?
  • Compete.com
  • Alexa
  • Hitwise
  • ComScore
  • NetRatings
• Goals and benchmarking
  • Google allintitle:, allinurl:
  • SEOmoz keyword difficulty
  • siteopsus – for bulk allintitle search
  • SEO for Firefox
  • Google AdWords Tool for paid
• Ranks and traffic
  • Quantcast
  • Google Trends for Websites
  • Google Analytics Benchmarking
  • Advanced Web Ranking
  • SEMRush
• Link building
  • Majestic SEO
  • Open Site Exployrer
  • Wordtracker Link Builder
  • Advanced Link Manager
• Social media listening
  • Twitter
    • Follow on Twitter
    • Twazzup
    • Topsy
    • Tweetdeck
    • Tweetbeep alerts
    • The archivist
    • Trendrr
  • Facebook
    • Facebook’s own search
    • Facebakers.com
    • SocialSenseFB
    • Like their company page
• Reputation monitoring
  • iGoogle and Google Alerts
  • BrandsEye
  • radian6
  • socialmention
  • netvibes
  • Sprout Social

Gradiva Couzin, Gravity Search Marketing

Competitive Research

How much should I be spending on my SEO campaign?

• How much am I spending now?
• How large is my market share?
• How large do I want my market to be?

What kind of content do my competitors have?

• Training?
• Introductions?

What do I need to do?

• Blog mentions – check out Digg, GoogleGuide.com, Yahoo Site Explorer
• Social media widgets
• Press releases

Jeff MacGurn, Covario

Where can you compete now?

If you are more established: Decide where you can make progress

Tools for competition research

• Compete for traffic funnel
• SpyFu for keywords
• Google Insights for search

Natural search

• Open site explorer (has anchor text and page importance)
• Majestic SEO

Pay attention to

• Content analysis
• Add content
• Add alternative keywords and phrases to your pages to cast a wider net
• Internal links
• External links

Dave Cook, TheFind

SEO & Competitor Analysis: This is War

Identifying Targets

Identify broad and niche competitors:

• Broad competitor: competitor in your market
• Niche competitor: competitor for a segment of your market

How to identify competitors

• Take note of competitors routinely showing up for related searches
• Ask client for 10-20 competitors
• Survey customers
• Research industry associates, forums, and networks

Operation Search: Internal Structure

Keyword analysis

• What keywords do they believe are a priority?
• What keywords they are targeting that you should?
• How well are they ranking for their targeted keywords?
• How are they optimizing their title tag structure?

Content Analysis

• What keywords are they focusing headlines on?
• Are they focusing heavily on branding/optimization?
• Are they optimizing their internal link strucutre?
• How often are they creating new content?
• What types of content are they creating?

Technical Analysis

• How well is their site rendering in the search engines
• How well are they optimizing their navigation?
• What are their calls to action? (Are they obvious?)
• How well is their site being indexed in the SERPs?
• How clean is their HTML?
• How quickly is their site rendering?

Operation Anchor: External Structure

Backlink Profile

• Total number of backlinks (Majestic SEO)
• Date backlinks were created
• The pages receiving the most backlinks (Majestic SEO)
• Anchor text being used
• What percentage are images/nofollow?

Types of Links

• What forums are they participating in?
• What associations/organizations are they members of?
• What conferences are they sponsoring?
• What blogs are they guest posting on?
• Can you tell if they are buying links?

Acquisition

• What are they doing to acquire these links?
• What is their content creation strategy? (guest blogging, viral content, free tools, widgets, conducting interviews, holding contests?)
• Are people reviewing their products on their own site?
• Where are they getting mentions and what are the sentiment of those mentions?

Enemy Surveillance Program

• After initial competitor review, revisit every quarter
• Determine how their strategy is evolving:
  • Rankings increased/decreased?
  • Inbound links?
  • Site grown?
  • Link bait programs?
  • Successes? Failures?
• How does this compare to your site?
• Are there any new links, communities, keywords for you to target?

Taylor Pratt, Raven Internet Marketing Tools

The following is a recap from a session at Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East. Follow the conference and session on Twitter.

Cross Channel Attribution

• Unified Tracking: track interaction of the user with all media channels at one place.
• Attribute and Analyze
  • Model how different factors contribute to conversion
  • Model how factors interact with each other
• Optimize: Allocate media spend based on cross-channel models

Unified Tracking

• On average, there are 4-6 touchpoints across before conversion
• Conversion Data (over 10,000) for several clients
• Identify key variables influencing conversions
• The more time it takes to convert, the less likely a conversion will take place.
• Relative importance of conversions
  • 70% time to convert
  • 20% first touch source
  • 7% search engine
  • 3% brand term

What is the chief limitation of revenue attribution?

Conclusions

• First prerequisite: unified tracking program
• Attribution is a partial solution
• Attribution + Algorithmic Optimization is the solution for answering the media mix question

Siddharth Shah, Efficient Frontier

Improving ROI through Web Analytics

Success means different things to different people.

Test A/B pages with bounce rate, but be sure to check conversion rates down the funnel!

3 Tips for Better Attribution

1. Look at the whole picture
2. Use a fair measure of success
3. Know your limits

1. Look at the whole picture

• Window shopping
• Entering the store
• Asking questions
• Trying it on
• Buying it

Look at the whole sales cycle

• Awareness
• Interest
• Consideration
• Purchase
• Retention

Solution: create a weighted metric

Assigning value to behaviors for “assists”

Which is more valuable?

• Identify online behaviors that correlate with conversion
• Analyze trends to assign to corresponding value
  • Regression Analysis – built into MS Excel
• Optimize to align with weighted metric

When to use weighted metrics

• Long sales cycles
• Multiple “successes”
• Offline sales
• Efficient campaigns

2. Use a fair measure of success

The problem with “last click”

Tools that are starting to get the message

• Omniture Markeitng Channels
• Google Search Trends
• Google Analytics “first click” hack
• Interim solution: combine first + last click

3. Know your limits

• Correlation does not imply causation
• No crystal ball
• Review regularly

Always be testing!

David Sprinkle, ROI Labs

Demystifying Attribution: Two myths

Myth 1: We need to be perfect in order to do it

You don’t need to have a PhD in Math to get attribution right

The perfect is the enemy of the good. -Voltaire

Evolution of Attribution Management

• Last click
• Even
• Exclusions
• Rules based
• Algorithmic

Myth 2: Isn’t attribution just about moving money around?

Just because you have the same amount of money at the end of the month doesn’t mean you should attribute where it comes from so that next month you can optimize accordingly.

Adam Goldberg, ClearSaleing

Demystifying Attribution

Deep down:

• Consumers are constatntly moving around the purchase path
• Multiple touchpoints could all lead to a conversion

Early on looking at attribution:

• Lots of data, no clear takeaways
• Data would only show certain channels based on system redirects
• Or to get the whole picture, you were looking at a hefty price tag

First steps toward attribution:

• Attribution through an ad serving platform
• Able to track 2 channels and 10 touch points
• Found a 15% overlap in revenue attributed
• Proved the need for a deeper level of understanding

What they needed to make some impact:

• A solution built to track all digital activities
• Easy to implement with strong customer support
• Flexible in its attribution models and accommodated multiple views
• Ability to report back at an actual profit level

In action: affiliate valuation

• Ensure affiliates aren’t over inflating credit
• On last click model, affiliate was converting over 10%
• Affiliate was only ‘introducing’ the transaction 2% of the time
• Action: renegotiate pricing structure

In action: network valuation

• Better evaluate individual network performance (consumer path and strength of performance)
• Layer in segmentation (acquisition, LTV)
• Use data to make more targeted and efficient buys

Mixed Media Modeling

• Weight the incrementality of channel buys
• Assign credit in a conversion path against these findings
• Allows for real time ‘exclusion’ set
• Leads to more accurate judgement on each individual channel’s impact

Danielle Smith, Range Online Media

More coverage of this session

• Search Engine Roundtable

The following is a recap from a session at Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East. Follow the conference and session on Twitter.

Optimize the Google Store: SEO in 15 minutes

Steps

1. Sign up for Webmaster Tools email forwarding
2. Utilize search queries
3. Focus on one item

1. Webmaster Tools email forwarding: Receive site alerts from Google straight to your inbox

• Malware notification
• Alerts in crawl errors

2. Make the most of search queries

• Highlight/star the terms for which you want to rank
• Deprioritize queries that are unlikely to help your conversions

Focus on starred search queries within Webmaster Tools

Improve your query in search results:

• Check for appealing titles and snippets (descriptive and matches user’s intent)
• Learn tips from the other results

Sell like hot cakes!

3. Target your content to match your audience (Keywords)

• Write content that matches your query terms
• Webmaster Tools provides an overview of keywords

Check for duplicates in results

• May be possible to consolidate PageRank between duplicate/near duplicate pages
• Pages displayed should be diverse in content

Reduce duplicate content

• Check search queries
• Review HTML suggestions
• Select canonical
• Use 301 permanent redirects where possible
• Implement rel=”canonical”
• Utilize URL parameter handling

Improve crawl efficiency

• Recommend behavior to Googlebot through URL parameter handling
• Check for 404s
• Fix broken links: crawl error sources – bring users and linking properties to the right URLs
• Prioritize your content – internal links
• Help users and engines quickly find your important pages
• Verify you’re linking as expected
• Make text/links accessible
• Fetch as Googlebot
  • Links and text should be clearly visible
  • URL rewriting/redirect issues uncovered
• JS loaded text common issues with video, even Video Sitemaps

User happiness: site performance

• Site performance offers improvements for slow pages
• More information at code.google.com/speed

The recap

• Email forwarding
• Search queries
• Keywords to content
• Reduce duplicated in crawling and indexing
• Crawl errors to fix broken links
• Prioritize content: internal links
• Verify crawler access: Fetch as Googlebot
• Site performance review in Google Webmaster Tools

Maile Ohye, Google

18 Metrics to Answer Questions

1. How much SEO do I really have?

Filter out branded traffic

2. Is my site what I think it is about?

Google Webmaster Tools –> keywords (Does Google think my site is about what I do?)

3. Is my site authoritative?

• SEOmoz authority rank (part 1)
• How many indexed pages does Google have for you? (part 2)

4. How does my site’s authority stack up against competition’s

• How many domains link to your’s vs. your competitor’s
• How many links to your’s vs. your competitor’s
• (Data warning: link data is inconsistent)

5. Am I a good linkbuilder?

How many links do you have to your homepage? (Google Webmaster Tools links to site à links to homepage only)

6. Was that a valuable link? (A valuable link is one that gives you traffic)

Google Analytics – traffic from links

7. Have I lost some links?

Google Webmaster Tools – check 404 errors for pages that are losing links

8. How spammy is my link profile?

SEOmoz report (Domain mozTrust vs. mozRank – should be very similar)

9. Should I give up on this keyword?

SEOmoz report (backlinking report)

10.  Do I nail the long tail?

• Look at the number of keywords bringing traffic to your site (Google Analytics)
• Look at number of landing pages (Google Analytics)
• How many pages does Google have indexed in my site (site: command)

11.  Is my site a bunch of useless templates?

Crawl vs. Index ratio (just because it’s crawled, doesn’t mean it’s indexed)

12.  Does my site look fat in these jeans?

• Site performance (Google Webmaster Tools spped)
• Site speed (YSlow)

13.  Will prospective partners take my call?

Business often starts with PR review

14.  Does my site lack fresh content?

Review site logs to see what your most-crawled pages are

Conrad Saam, Avvo

More Metrics and Diagnostics

Check server log to see how often GoogleBot:

• Number of pages crawled
• Canonicalization
• 302s

Better than rankings reports (combo of Analytics and Webmaster Tools)

• Query clusters
• Traffic
• Search behavior
• Google impressions and clicks

Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land

Go from Interested to Informed

Social media metrics that count

• Hit the right target
• Social metrics for social intelligence
• Online metrics: bridging the gap
• Additional resources

Hit the right target

Goals ensure that metrics are aimed at the right targets

Answer these 4 questions before you track social media

1. What business questions are we trying to have answered?
2. What are we planning/willing to do with the findings?
3. What are our short-term goals for our social media program?
4. What are our long-term goals for our social media program?

Social media goals

• Increase brand awareness
• Decrease customer attrition
• Uncover valuable market insights and trends

Social metrics for social intelligence

• Brand awareness metrics:
  • Volumes of conversation around your brand
  • Volumes of conversation around your competitors
  • Affinity groups and influencers
  • Sites where your brand conversation happens
• Audience sentiment metrics:
  • Audience sentiment around your brand
  • Audience sentiment around your compeititor’s brand
  • Audience affinity groups and influencers
• Corporate engagement
• Outcomes and findings:
  • Causes in shifts and spikes in volume
  • Causes in shifts and spikes in sentiment
  • Insights and ongoing metrics that track back to your original goal

Vicki Blair, Visible Technologies

More coverage of this session

• Outspoken Media

The following is a recap from a session at Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East. Follow the conference and session on Twitter.

Facebook Organic SEO & Naughty Ranking Tips

It’s hard to get in the SERPs for Facebook

aimClear tested 5 account (4 mature accounts, 1 totally new)

Personalization effects

These elements affect personalization and the way results appear when you’re logged in:

• You like it
• Your friend likes it
• You’ve got 2^nd degree friends
• You’ve been invited
• You’ve visited it before
• You’ve listed it as an interest on profile

Inside the autocomplete box

• 2-8 results
• “I’m feeling lucky”
• Masking crappy SERPs
• Most important to rank

How to rank in autocomplete box

• Your name
• Evens you are invited to
• Friend with keyword in name
• 2^nd degree friend with keyword in name
• Questions with keyword in it and number of answers
• App you’ve used
• Internal/external page and interest you have on profile
• Page friend likes (in tandem w/ number of friends and total likes)
• Group you have joined

Facebook SERP Anatomy

About All results

• Previous de facto search hub
• Requires additional click to see results
• All FB content types battle it out!

How to rank in All Results

• People – Friends or 2^nd degree friends with keyword in name
• Page – with enough like can beat friends…sometimes
• Keyword in posts by friends
• Web results (fueled by Bing)

About People results

• Purely human search
• Pay attention to filters!

How to rank for People results

• Keyword in friend or 2^nd degree friends (Name)
• Keyword in friend or 2^nd degree friends (workplace, school aka network)
• Keyword in anyone’s name/city/workplace/school/network

About Pages results

• Confusing
• Lumped together – admistered pages, community pages, non FB pages
• Heavily affected by personalization

How to rank for Pages results

• Too messed up to rank logically
• General guidelines – keywords play a large role, keyword density
• Put keywords – name, description

About Group results

• Being a member
• Friends are a member
• Keywords in title
• Number of members

About Event results

• Not based on geo
• Not based on friends attending
• Not based on invited
• Not really keyword relevant
• (basically, it sucks)

How to rank for Event results

• Get people to RSVP as attending (not maybe)
• Get people to visit page at least once
• Put your high value keyword  first
• Don’t make event names too long

About Apps results

• You are already a fan/user
• Your friend is a fan/user

How to rank for Apps results

• Keyword in title, body
• Buy fans/users

Facebook questions

• Often outrank more valuable/verteran content

How to rank for Questions

• Keyword in title, answer, in URL
• Multi-user engagement
• Generate something of value to community

Naughty to the Naughtiest ranking trick (Don’t do this at home)

• Facebook PPC and personalization
• Create ads to FB properties (those can’t help but click ads)
• Internal page destination has keyword rich title
• Shows up in search box
• Keyword rich profiles
• Gain friends somehow
• Wait a bit to get FB indexed
• Promote on your wall
• Create an even with keyword in title and body
• Invite non-friends (with just email address)
• Invitee types keyword  – they don’t even have to RSVP!
• Dominate search box for any keyword

Marty Weintraub, President, aimClear

Facebook SEO

Facebook search is punctuation sensitive

Methods for ranking pages

• Use a relevant page name
• Build the number of fans (and number of fan friends)
• Engage in relevant current all searches
• Search results

Facebook Questions – Shows heavily in suggest box – not necessarily all search results

Facebook Events – Be aware of spam (because of messaging from events)

The Future? Page browser – see pages you’re a fan of and suggested pages

How to prepare for Facebook Page Browser? Ads – make sure you include likes and interests to drive traffic to page

Free Tricks to Boost Your Fans

• Charity – donate money to a charity to acquire fans
• Must be a fan to comment (or even see) wall; for every comment, we’ll give money
• Create exclusive content – “visible to connection” tag (If you want to see (coupons, % off, deal), then become a fan) Use it for: coupons, sales, etc.
• Typical method – “Find us on Facebook” = NOT GOOD; fix = use QR code instead, use for FB places too

Greg Finn, Cypress North

Facebook SEO

Optimizing your status updates in Facebook

• Status update doesn’t appear on public page, unless you plan ahead and do some research to have them show up
• Appears to be private/controlled page, search for the “open” page
• Include popular keywords
• Tag referenced pages to increase presence

Optimizing page code for Facebook

Use open graph code: opengraphprotocol.org (Yelp does a good job of this.)

Chris Silver Smith, KeyRelevance