The Maine SEO Blog

Happy 2009!  My how the year flies by!!

As a present for entering the New Year, the great Google guru Matt Cutts has confirmed it: Google’s Toolbar PageRank has officially been updated for the first time since September.

The Maine SEO blog has gone from a PR 2 to a PR 4!

Toolbar PageRank is basically inaccurate after a few days, as it’s updated only about every 3 months.  So if yours is up, enjoy and Happy New Year!

Nicki Hicks
What’s your New Year’s PR?

I’m a huge advocate for measuring success and using geeky measurement tools to do it.  As a compliment to Google Analytics, there is Webmaster Tools.  While there is some overlap between the two, together, they give you a pretty good picture of how your site is doing.  And while some think Google knows too much about our websites (yes, they see same data as you do), the trade off is that it’s free.

1. Installation is easy. Choose to either plop a meta-tag into your code or upload an HTML file.
2. Quickly check for web crawl errors. Have any 404 errors?  Any nofollows or robots.txt you didn’t know about?
3. Can your site be accessed via smart phone? No need to check manually…Webmaster Tools will tell you!
4. Specific help for SEO. In the Diagnostics > Content Analysis section, check out any meta-description, title tag, or non-indexable content issues your site may have.
5. Top Search Queries. More of a fun fact than anything.  What top 20 keywords do you rank for?  What percentage of people that search for that term click on your site?  More importantly, ask yourself…are these the terms you optimized your site for?
6. “What Googlebot sees.” Very powerful information.  You can see exactly what anchor text people are using when linking to your site.
7. Pages with external links. Which are your most linked-to (read:popular) pages?  Webmaster Tools will show you most, if not all, of your incoming links.  Plus, you can view your backlinks in graph form with Glync.
8. Remove a URL. This tool can be incredibly useful if you have duplicate content or have removed a page for some reason.  This tool goes hand-in-hand with the web crawl errors page: after you find an error, you can then remove the page from Google’s index (it usually takes only a few days to complete the process).
9. Various other perks of having Webmaster Tools: crawl stats (how often Google crawls your site), subscriber stats (if you have a blog or email newsletter: how many subscribers do you have?), view your sitemap(s), generate and view your robots.txt file, enhance your 404 error pages (if you don’t already have a template matching your own design), and many more!

Nicki Hicks
If I add any more tools to my toolbox, where the heck am I gonna put my hammer?

You may have noticed this tiny green bar on your Google toolbar that changes with every site you visit.  In its simplest terms, PageRank is one of Google’s ways to assign weight and rank to websites.

Google bases this particular algorithm off of millions of variables; the major factor being the number of (quality) incoming links.  While no one knows their true PR, the toolbar will at least give you an idea of where you’re at: with a number from 1-10, 1 being low PR and 10 high PR.  (Similarly, you will never know exactly how many incoming links your site has, but Yahoo’s Site Explorer will give you a fairly close number).  Google updates toolbar PageRank approximately every 3 months.

Being somewhat inquisitive, I decided to investigate a little further.  I took a look at 10 sites - with toolbar PR of 1-10.

I also included age because I’ve seen PageRank increase over time, simply from gaining trust from traffic rather than backlinks.  I wanted to test whether or not it had much impact on PR.  However, from this small sample, it seems too difficult to infer that age has anything to do with PR.  Perhaps with a larger sample, I could decide differently.

However, it is easy to see the direct relation between PR and backlinks.  Due to the drastic change in the number of backlinks, I had to split the charts: PR 10-6, then PR 5-1 following in order to see the similarities.

What I learned and confirmed

1. Don’t rely on your toolbar PR; use it instead as a relative guide.
2. Get as many quality, incoming links as you can.
3. Since blogs generally acquire more backlinks than regular sites, a young blog can have a better PageRank than an older site.
4. The only other website with a PR 10 (as far as anyone can tell) than Google, USA.gov, has just over 11 million backlinks - millions less than any examples I provided above a PR 7  - proving the power of a .gov (.edu’s are powerful too!).

Nicki Hicks
Watch your back(links)

Conversions are more important than rankings - they are the goal.  Sure, good rankings should lead to higher conversions; but being #1 should not be your first priority.  Using Google Analytics, you have the opportunity to set up a total of four goals for each website (should you have multiple sites) to track your conversions.

Click the edit button on the Dashboard page in your Analytics.  There, you’ll find all of the settings for your account.  What we’re interested in are the Conversion Goals and Funnels.

Again, you see you have four goals to choose from.  Pick “edit” for one of the goals.

1. Turn the goal “on”.
2. Choose Match Type. Exact Match requires the URL you enter to be exactly the one your users will land on - good for things like a Thank You page for email subscriptions.  Head Match is best for URLs with unique values - checkout pages, for example, where the content is dynamically generated.  Regular Expression Match is best for pages where the stem and/or URL is dynamic.  Google uses this example: “page=1 will match http://sports.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&id=002 as well as http://fishing.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&language=fr&id=119.”
3. Goal URL/Goal Name/Case Sensitivity.  All fairly self explanatory.  Insert the URL - or landing page - where your customer will complete the goal.  A thank you page for an email sign up or filling out a contact form.  For E-commerce sites, a checkout page for continuing to checkout or a receipt of payment for the actual sale.  The goal name should be specific - something other than “Goal 1″.  Case sensitivity is explained above.
4. Goal value is the dollar amount of what a single completed goal will mean to you.  For example, if you know that for every 10 people who fill out a contact form, 1 will do business with you; and the average person will spend $10,000 with you, then your goal is worth $1,000.  (NOTE: Be sure to leave the amount without $ sign; as in 1000, NOT $1000.)
5. If you would like to track your conversions through the steps your customers take to get there, use funnels.

Once GA starts collecting data, you can view it in the Goals section of your account.

Nicki Hicks
Happy Converting!

Lately, I’ve been writing a lot about Google - attempting to keep up with their never-ending additions to the search world.  Most recently, they’ve launched SearchWiki (as a default setting to their SERP) and a new search-based keyword tool.

SearchWiki

Rich posted a great article yesterday on the flyte blog about SearchWiki.  To summarize, if you’re logged into your Google account, you can literally change your results page - either by removing results entirely or pushing them to the first position(s).  You can also write comments about a result, and see what other people have written.

Currently, SearchWiki does not affect search results; but with millions of people “voting” on websites, I think it’s only a matter of time before Google adds it to their algorithm.  Only problem being…it is incredibly easy to spam.

Search-based keyword tool

This new tool is reminiscent of Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool.  The comparison is not unlike the similarity between Google Trends and Google Insights.  The data comes from generally the same place, with a few differences in presentation.

The new keyword tool uses your website or blog as a base to search for keywords, in addition to the ones you tell it to search for.  Like the AdWords tool, you see the same categories, plus the suggested bid price for AdWords.  You can save and export your keywords with both tools.

Here are the top ten keywords from Google’s new search-based keyword tool for this blog’s domain, along with the terms “seo” and “search engine optimization”:

You can see the differences in the top ten keywords between the two tools.  The Adwords Keyword Tool pulls this data for the same search query:

All of these tools are great - and can be used in conjunction with one another in order to find the best keyword opportunities.  But, good grief, what will Google come out with next?!?

Nicki Hicks
Does ‘Googlers Anonymous’ already exist?