Only When the Words Outdo the Silence

You often hear people talk about the death of rankings, but looking at traffic alone can be misleading.  As with many things in life the answer lies in the middle, that boring gray core.

Let’s say you’ve segmented your SEO traffic into keyword and URL groups.  It’s the first of the month and you’re comparing both month-over-month and year-over-year traffic to see what’s improved and what’s declined.  You notice that URL A has declined by 35% in March 2011.  Uh oh.  Might be bad.  Might? Maybe.

You take a look at last years numbers and notice the MoM decline, from February 2011 to March 2011, follows a seasonal pattern and, actually, URL A is up YoY, March 2010 vs March 2011, by 10%.  Time to celebrate right?  Not yet.

That’s where the ranking issue comes in.

You’re fortunate enough to have historical ranking data for the number 1 keyword traffic driver to URL A and see that URL A improved from position 14 to 10, March 2010 vs March 2011.  Even though traffic to URL A increased by 10% YoY, there is still room for improvement. Assuming the URL falls within the 80/20 rule, dedicating resources to pushing it from 11 to say 6 could do wonders for traffic.

You can’t forget that the traffic you’re staring at on a daily/weekly/monthly/yearly basis is generally controlled by two levers in SEO – search volume and ranking.  Ranking is a great instigator of action and can make your teams work that much more tangible.

Written on June 19, 2009

Link: Best Practices for Product Search

Love: optimizing your universal search presence.  The natural search results aren’t the only results that deserve optimization attention.  Universal search requires a holistic approach to SEO where you need to also focus on optimizing for local, blogs, videos, images, and if you have an e-commerce website, product search which makes an appearance in the search results as shopping results.  Check out the Product Search for Webmasters video from Google on how you can go about optimizing for shopping results.  Also, you’ll need a Google Base account in order to get started with the optimization.

Link: Pagerank Sculpting

Love: focusing your efforts on more important things…I kid (only if you’re a small outfit.  If you work for an agency and have a full plate of clients, I think this is a massive waste of time as it’s not scalable and loses the opportunity cost match with other tasks like content creation or link building), the news from Google that Pagerank sculpting does not work as SEO’ers thought is important.  The Google man himself Matt Cutts explains it on his blog.  The basics:

• Your page has a Pagerank score of 8
• It has 4 outgoing links
• Left as is, each link passes along 2 points of Pagerank, 8 divided by 4
• Previously, if 2 of those links pointed at less important pages, “Contact Us” and “About Us” for example, some SEOs would nofollow those links
• In doing so, it was believed this allowed the other 2 links to pass along 4 points of Pagerank rather than 2
• Pagerank sculpted
• Now, nofollowing those important links does not pass Pagerank points in this simple way and requires Pagerank sculpting using a number of other techniques

Here is a SEOmoz post of the topic that also provides pros and cons from the SEO perspective.

Link: SocialMention

Love: simple and reliable tools that allow you to track your company and its keywords across multiple channels – blogs, microblogs (Twitter, FriendFeed), social bookmarks, comments (blog, forum or otherwise), news, video and more.  It’s extremely easy to get bogged down with tools just as it is with too much data.  Personally, I tend to stick with those that are simple, efficient and reliable and do not often switch unless the tools will allow me to provide even more actionable insight – Occam wins.  SocialMention is simple and reliable.  Not only are you provided with links to blogs, blog comments, Q&A sites, social bookmarks, and more, that mention your company or keywords, but SocialMention also provides data on sentiment (positive to negative mentions), reach (number of unique authors mentioning the entered keyword) and other metrics.

Link: 10 Ways to Make Your Site Accessible Using Web Standards

Love: making your website not only able to be found, but actually accessible to everyone. Think of the user.  Remain outwardly focused (just like phenomenal non-profits). Not everyone uses the same setup for surfing the internet, so you should ensure nearly all users are able to actually find information on your site once they’ve found you on the search engines.  There are a few pointers in this post that play a role in SEO:

• Supply proper meta tags – small piece of the pie, but a piece of the pie nonetheless
• Use accesible navigation – descriptive title and header tags provide keyword relevancy and help structure your site, which can help improve the ability of Google to provide Site InLinks
• Supply alternative content for images

Link: Bing Whitepaper for Webmasters and Publishers

Love: when you get information about search from the mouths of the leviathans.  This whiteapaper, distributed by Microsoft, details features of Bing, the layout of the search results page, the structure and details of the search results page and much more information.

BONUS Link Love Laughter Section: The Year The Media Died

Post written on October 13, 2008

leviathan

Okay, I’m sorry.  In this particular instance, what’s on the outside does count as well, let’s not fool ourselves.  Incoming links from the outside do matter; I’ll be the first to admit that while I’m on my weekly Sunday jaunt through BookPeople, certain covers catch my eye and I buy (like this one.  And, as it turns out, Snoop was a solid purchase).  Anyway, back to the inside.  We’re here to discuss the importance of link architecture and how it relates to usability (visitor interaction) and crawlability (search engine interaction).

Recently, Google kicked off a series of posts on their Webmaster Central Blog called Links Week. The second post in this series is entitled Importance of Link Architecture and it provides three guidelines for ensuring Google indexes your site’s pages and visitors are able to easily navigate your website:

• Keep important pages within several clicks from the homepage
• Use descriptive anchor text
• Verify that Googlebot finds your internal links

Let’s start with “keeping important pages close to homepage“.  Search boxes can be helpful, but search engines rarely, “type into search boxes or navigate via pulldown menus.”  Instead, step into character and attempt to find information on your website from the homepage.  Or better yet, bring in your kid, your grandma, your spouse or significant other and ask them to find information on Product A, contacting sales, etc., you get the point.  Why would they not be able to find the information you asked for?  How are search engines going to find your Product A page and provide this page within search results?

Maybe a visitor hits your gifts website on a random walk through the Internet.  He or she lands on a sub-category page four levels removed from the homepage and wants to get to the homepage.  Outside of making a Home link, another way to improve the link architecture of a website is to provide breadcrumbs.  If the visitor landed on the Purple and Green Father’s Day Gifts page, the breadcrumbs on that page might read:

Homepage > Gifts > Father’s Day Gifts > Colorful Father’s Day Gifts > Purple and Green Father’s Day Gifts.

Not only does this enhance the website’s effectiveness and usability, but these breadcrumbs help improve keyword relevancy to pages within your website – a perhaps minuscule piece of the pie, but a piece nonetheless.  Text links are easily navigated by both users and search engines alike.

Additionally, according to Coremetrics’ Benchmark Industry Report the average time a visitor spends per session (the entirety of the visit) is 479.87 seconds, that’s 8 minutes.  How many pages do visitors traverse during those 8 minutes?  11.  So, approximately how long does a visitor spend on each page?  How much time do you have to make sure your website is easily navigable, usable, effective? On average, 43.62 seconds.  Would you like some breadcrumbs on that internal link lasagna?  While you’re at it, create a sitemap that centralizes all the links of your website – users will appreciate its efficiency and search engines will reward its efficiency by crawling all of your pages.

How about descriptive anchor text? You don’t have to write Seamus Heaney descriptions when deciding on what the text of your internal links should be.  However, linking to the Purple and Green Father’s Day gifts page like this is less than optimal:

Check out our awesome Purple and Green Father’s Day Gifts <a href=”http://www.gifts.com”>here</a>.

Instead, make the text of your link the name of the product, <a href=”http://www.toys.com”>Purple and Green Father’s Day Gifts</a>.  This not only explicitly lets the user know that he or she will find the Purple and Green Father’s Day Gifts page, but search engines will crawl the link and associate Purple and Green Father’s Day Gifts with the page – “The more Google knows about your site—through your content, page titles, anchor text, etc.—the more relevant results we can return for users (and your potential search visitors).”

Finally, verify Googlebot finds your internal links. Google Webmaster Tools provide website owners with information regarding the internal links the search engine has crawled.  As Google mentions in the post, this tool is particularly useful for websites utilizing Javascript with navigation (Javascript isn’t always executed).

Thus, the Leviathan has spoken – optimize your internal links.  Provide a great user experience through effective link architecture and not only will users potentially extend their 43.62 second stay per page, but search engines will sing the Itsy Bitsy Spider as they crawl, crawl, crawl your website.