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SEO Strategy: Are your links rich with diversity?

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

Like a healthy ecosystem needs many different habitats in order to thrive, your online business website needs a diverse array of links to maintain healthy organic search and Internet ranking results.

Although link building may seem like a vast and endless ocean of blogs, directories, social media, forums and more, there is no shortcut to finding the online platforms and places that will benefit your website business. In other words, your search engine marketing person’s online business strategy in this case is to sit down and do some actual research. Fortunately, instead of making a huge list of every website business or organization that pings on your SEO analytics, then working your way down that humongous list, the better search engine marketing strategy is to use a virtual watering hose approach, instead of a watering can.

What we mean is, when it comes to diverse link building, you don’t have to get every single person on your list, but, like Noah’s Ark, you should try to get at least one or two of every type of link relationship that would benefit your online business’ marketing strategy. This benefits your organic search results too, because search engines can find you in more places if you’ve stretched your social network out to them.

For best practice SEO results, try and accomplish 15 to 20 link building activities in a month. This can mean anything from picking a few relevant blogs and commenting on them, participating in a few forums, submitting articles to a few publications. The trick is to cultivate a few favorite of each type and take the time to participate in each of them. The diversity doesn’t just help your online business’ organic ranking, but it keeps you from getting incredibly bored while you increase your website’s good online reputation.

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SEM Strategy: Customizing segments in Google Analytics

Wednesday, April 6th, 2011

As a small business owner, or the SEM for a small online business, you have a responsibility to keep costs low until the website business is, at the very least, breaking even. If you are just starting out with a website for your business, you might not have the financial capability of affording a search engine marketing or web solutions company.

Luckily, Google Analytics is free for online businesses interested in optimizing their websites. While you chose to use GA, you should get the absolute most out of it, which means using some of the advanced and customized reporting features to improve your insight of your online business’ behavior.

One of GA’s interesting SEO/SEM features is called “Custom visitor segments.” While Google already offers various segments like Geographic Location, SEMs can set up this custom feature to improve search engine marketing insight with deeper reports about their visitors’ behavior in the website.

The “How to” guide exists on GA’s help section, and involves adding code to your website so tracking cookies will be put in place to monitor the metrics you specify in your custom visitor segment. Once you’ve added the necessary code, you need to create the custom report in GA so you can begin to monitor this particular funnel you’ve created for your users.

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SEM Strategy: Bounce rates (Part 3- How to deal with high bounce rates.)

Thursday, March 31st, 2011

Continuing from our last post, is what an online business’ search engine marketing person should do with bounce rates. One of the first things we recommend is double checking the numbers. One simple way you can do is is to check on your exit pages.

As a quick test, visit the Content section of Google Analytics and check the “Top Entry” and “Top Exit Pages.” At first glance you should make sure your top entry, exit and landing page (your main page, for example) are the same one. Next, you should check and see your “entry ratio” and “exit ratio,” by comparing the entry and exit numbers to the total number of visits, just like you would with bounce rates. These new ratios might give you a better indication of how your users behave on that particular landing page.

Now what? Our recommendation would be to drill further down into your research and look into the Entrance Paths and Entrance Keywords (both found on the main dashboard of reports). With these two reports you can see where your users are coming from, and see what keywords they are using in the search engines to find your website business. If the landing page your users are coming to does not match up with the keywords they’re using, then there’s a good possibility your bounce rates are being caused by that, in part. Optimize your titles, content, description and meta tags to reflect what you actually have, or include the content your users are looking for on your landing page, and see if that helps.

Up next, two simple ways to improve bounce rates, and two simpler ways to track your numbers.

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SEM Strategy: Don’t “like” it? +1 it, instead

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

In the social media branch of search engine marketing is one of the most popular of social networking sites; Facebook. One of Facebook’s most easily-recognized features is the “like” button. This happy little thumb’s up allows people to show their support of a website, link or online business without having to post any comments.

In response, Google rolled out the “+1″ (pronounced “plus one”) for its entire search engine website. What does this mean for search engine marketing people? Why, another chance to rack up some organic search and Internet ranking points, of course. The +1 is another way for Google to help its users streamline their searches, which means you have a better chance of reaching your target audience if your SEO is flawless.

When you +1 an online business, your “+1 network” (yes, another social media network built on Google) will see these results. The more recommendations a website gets, the more a person’s social network is likely to see this as a positive review. Even if you do not participate in Google’s social network of +1-ing, chances are you will be contributing to the search engine’s understanding of users like you and improving their searching experiences by adding your site as a recommended link in the sidebar or as one of the top searches.

While the +1 isn’t available in all markets just yet, you can go to the Google labs and test drive this new app. As to its popularity…that remains to be seen, but in this particular matter, search engine marketing professionals can relax and watch this update do its work.

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SEM Strategy: Beating your competition (Part 2- The metrics process)

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

Continuing yesterday’s post about the search engine marketing strategy involved in beating your competition. After you’ve gauged your website’s strengths and patched up any cracks in your SEO, then you can really figure out your competition and how to rise in Internet rankings against them.

So, what metrics do you need? At first, you want to track the number of visitors to your website, preferably on a weekly basis. This part is the foundation for any further metrics or SEO analytics you will need. After that your most important metrics are the time spent on site and your bounce rate. You might want to keep an eye on new visitors too, but pay closer attention to those top three, because they are the snapshot of your website’s health. Once you’ve gathered a few month’s worth of data, you can plug in a formula to Excel and try and make some predictions.

Another good metric to track are your top keyword searches. These will give you an idea of whether your bank of optimized keywords is actually working, or if you need to re-draft your search engine optimization strategy for keywords.

As far as definitive tracking of your users goes, this is something you would need advanced SEO/SEM software for, and it would require installing a cookie tracker pixel on your website. If you can’t afford it just yet, don’t sweat it—focus on the other important metrics and on making your organic searches work.

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