The Best Seo Blogs

Archive for the ‘BlogStorm’ Category

There has been a lot of talk recently about how TopSEOs.com might not be the “Independent Authority on Search Vendors” they claim to be. I’ve not followed all the blog posts about it but today I decided to see just how much it would cost to get Branded3 listed on TopSEOs for all the services we offer.

As you can see from the screenshot below, the $500 monthly fee for each category adds up to a nice $15,000 per month fee for being listed. TopSEOs state that this fee is for “research and time is spent on reviewing your organization and talking to your clients” and in the next paragraph state that “unfortunately, some firms do not make their way to the final list. In such a case you will be reimbursed.”

Not getting the rankings you want? Hire us for Search engine optimisation

TopSEOs.com $15,000 per month listing fees

Go to Source

Google is increasingly starting to personalise search results for users and they even have a feature called Starred Results which allows users to make a note of their favourite sites for a particular search result.

We assume that when you “favourite” a site by clicking on the star it gives that site a boost in your personalised results but what isn’t clear is whether it gives the site a boost for every search user.

I would like to do an experiment and need your help in doing this so if you could follow the steps below that would be fantastic.

• Make sure you are logged in to your Google account
• Search for “search engine optimisation” on Google.co.uk
• Click the star on the right hand site of the result for Blogstorm (shown in the screenshot below)

I will report back on the results in a week or so.

Thanks for your help.

Not getting the rankings you want? Hire us for Search engine optimisation

Please help my experiment to see if Google Starred Results affect rankings

Go to Source

The single most useful way to find high value keywords has always been to look at the exact search keywords driving sales via AdWords and copy them. Looking at the keywords you are bidding on is useless, looking at the keywords that people are actually searching for is very important.

This month Google is finally going to add a report to Analytics which shows the exact search keywords for AdWords campaigns in your reports, previously this was only available via AdWords (great if you have access, not so great otherwise) and by a filter which was quite hard to implement.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be making a new set of AdWords reports available in Google Analytics. These reports expand significantly on the AdWords reports you currently see in your account. For example, you can break out your AdWords traffic by actual search query, match type, distribution network, and many other AdWords attributes. We’ve added reports for day parting, placements, and destination URLs.

You can see a video of the new reports below:

Interestingly the asynchronous tracking tag is now out of beta and will be the default option for new users.

Not getting the rankings you want? Hire us for Search engine optimisation

AdWords exact search keywords coming to Analytics in May

Go to Source

We’re down at Internet World this week and I’ve just done a seminar on Off Site SEO for Ecommerce Websites, if you want to get the slides click here for a PDF.

The sites I mentioned in the presentation are the excellent SEOmoz and their Open Site Explorer tool.

Come and see us on our stand for some free SEO advice.

Not getting the rankings you want? Hire us for Search engine optimisation

My Internet World Presentation on Link Building for Ecommerce Sites

Go to Source

This week Google released a very exciting new feature in Webmaster Tools – the ability to see impression data and click through data for your most popular keywords. On the face of it this is excellent information however the implications of what Google is actually telling us are pretty unprecedented in terms of how the SEO industry reports on results.

Let’s look at the actual data to start with, the report tells me the top keywords along with data for the number of impressions that my search listings have received and the number of people who actually click through to my page. A number of people have pointed out that the figures don’t match Google Analytics but I think we just have to accept that any two systems using different tracking methods are going to give different results.

The interesting thing for me is that Google is reporting rankings across a range of results, typically 1,2,3,4,5, 6-10 and 2nd page. With the advent of personalised search most people in the industry have understood that rankings won’t be the same for everybody but there was never a way of tracking the impact of this – until now.

Rankings are not real numbers

What Google is saying with this report is that your site no longer has a particular ranking for a keyword – instead you have a range of rankings determined by loads of different personalisation or perhaps time of day factors even. While in the past an agency or in-house SEO might have reported on a a 3rd place ranking for a big keyword we can now see that the ranking is actually something like this:

• 1st 4%
• 2nd 6%
• 3rd 63%
• 4th 9%
• 5th 3%
• 6-10 8%
• 2nd page 7%

From this data it seems that the goal of an SEO campaign isn’t to deliver a particular ranking, it’s to give a site a higher probability of ranking in a certain position. If we can change the probability that a site will rank first from 10% to 30% then we might be seeing the same actual ranking ourselves but we have still increased the overall traffic for that keyword.

As an industry we need to accept that results are going to bounce around every minute of every day and focus on improving the percentage of time we are in the top 3, rather than just looking at the ranking at a given time on a given day. If we can provide a report showing a client then had top 3 rankings 60% of the time in April then that’s a lot more valuable than just saying they rank 2nd when we last ran a ranking report.

Google has always told us to stop focussing on rankings and to focus on traffic instead, with this data they seem to be showing us that a ranking is just a probability rather than an exact number.

Not getting the rankings you want? Hire us for Search engine optimisation

Google Click Through Data & The End of Rankings

Go to Source

In a couple of weeks time I’m doing a half hour seminar on Off-site SEO Strategies for eCommerce Websites at the Internet World event at Earls Court, London.

Internet World always has an excellent seminar programme with case studies and insights from big brands being the highlight of the show. My talk is going to be 100% non-salesy so if you want to learn about the link building strategies we use on a daily basis for ecommerce clients then this is the talk for you. It’s at 1.50pm on Tuesday 27th April in the eCommerce theatre.

If you’ve not been to an event such as Internet World before then I really recommend you give it a try. The event is free and you get access to over 180 seminars across 7 different topic areas. There are hundreds of exhibitors all under one roof and most are more than happy to give free tips and advice to people who visit their stand.

With keynote speakers including Ciao, Google, Discovery Channel, Stella Artois, Unilever & LinkedIn there are some big names to attract attention too.

We won’t be taking any sales people to the event so if you come to our stand you will get to meet and chat to the people who actually do the work at Branded3, whether it’s design, development or SEO.

If you can make it to the event please come and say hello, we’re on stand E5050.

Not getting the rankings you want? Hire us for Search engine optimisation

Link Building Seminar at Internet World 2010

Go to Source

We’ve suspected for some time now that site speed was a factor in the Google algorithm and today Google has sort of confirmed it. The only strange thing is that they have confirmed it is currently only live on Google.com.

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.

This is interesting because a lot of the rumours are that this algorithm is live in the UK already but it seems the rumours might be wrong if you believe the wording of the post above.

Not getting the rankings you want? Hire us for Search engine optimisation

Site speed not a factor in the UK, yet

Go to Source

Analysing the link profile of your website and comparing it to your competitors is a fundamental part of any link-building strategy. The normal method is to download all of your competitors links and try to replicate them but sometimes you need to take things further and do some data analysis before you start work.

A link profile is the single biggest SEO asset that a site can have and yet not many people stop to think about what their current profile looks like before trying to improve it.

Building links is time consuming and trying to replicate your competitors 10,000 links will probably take years. The key to success is to figure out where they are beating you in terms of authority and fix that first. If a competitor has a few trusted links then you won’t beat them by going after a load of links from low quality sites.

I’m a big fan of Open Site Explorer and we use this (and the other SEOmoz tools) a lot in our link analysis but only as a source of data, the actual analysis part is done in Excel using the power of the pivot table.

One of my favourite ways to visualise a link profile is to create a pivot chart showing the quality distribution of links across whatever metric you choose. The chart above uses Domain Authority from SEOmoz (a scale of 0 to 100 with the most authoritative sites having a domain authority of 100) to compare the link profiles of Blogstorm, SEO Book and SEOmoz.

The same analysis can be performed with metrics such as PageRank, mozRank, mozTrust. One thing to remember is that Domain Authority has a slight flaw (which hopefully will be fixed soon) because it treats .uk.com sites as sub-domains of www.uk.com and also treats blogs on WordPress.com & Blogspot.com sub-domains the same authority as the root domain.

Comparing your link profile against the top 10 competitors in your industry on metrics such as mozTrust and mozRank shows you where your site is performing badly – perhaps you have loads of trusted links but very few anchor text links from low trust type sites. Perhaps you loads of low trust links but no links from really top domains.

Once you have interpreted the data you can start to put things right.

Instructions

The first step is to download all the links from the domains you want to analyse. Open Site Explorer is good for this but you can use another tool if you prefer as long as you can populate a column with the metric you want to analyse.

Import all the links into the same sheet and add a final column called “Domain” which is the name of your site and your competitors sites so that you can identify the links to each.

Next you need to highlight the entire sheet and create a Pivot Table with the following fields:

Finally highlight the data and click on the Pivot Chart button in the options menu and you’re done.

Update: The chart above is a stacked area chart which is perhaps slightly misleading unless you are used to them, below is a non-stacked area chart which shows that the link distributions are quite similar.

Not getting the rankings you want? Hire us for Search engine optimisation

Using Pivot Charts to visually analyse competitor link profiles

Go to Source

One of the easy wins in improving search traffic to a large site is to improve indexation. Indexation isn’t about the raw number of pages indexed, it’s about increasing the percentage of real, high value pages, that are indexed.

Forcing Google to index useless pages that won’t get any traffic isn’t going to help things.

Indexation is quite a straightforward issue, every site has an indexation cap based on a number of factors including:

• PageRank
• Trust
• Site / server speed
• Duplicate content

The last one is hard to explain but basically if Google sees loads of pages that are the same then it probably won’t bother to do as deep a crawl of the site as if it found a lot of high value unique pages.

Monitoring indexing using the site: command every month is good and looking at the number of pages that receive at least one visitor each month is better but both of these methods just look at the site as a whole. What we need is a method of breaking the numbers down so we can see which pages are not indexed and figure out how to improve things.

Multiple sitemaps

This is where using multiple sitemaps comes in – rather than just using one giant sitemap what we like to do is use a sitemap for each type of page on the site.

That way we can look at the number of pages indexed for each page type and immediately see that 76% of product pages are indexed but only 43% of the lower level paginated category pages are indexed for example.

Once you can diagnose exactly the type of pages that Google doesn’t want to index you can fix the issue by improving PageRank flow to those pages and adding more unique content.

Some ideas for the type of pages you might like to look at separately:

• New products this month
• Top selling products
• Pages in French/English/German etc
• Products that have not been selling
• Blog posts from a particular month/year
• Product pages
• Category pages
• Paginated category pages (page 2 of 10 etc)
• Products in a certain category

Not getting the rankings you want? Hire us for Search engine optimisation

Using multiple sitemaps to analyse indexation on large sites

Go to Source

Google AdWords just got a lot more complicated thanks to a new feature called Search Funnels.

Currently, conversions in AdWords are attributed to the last ad someone clicks before making a conversion, masking the fact that many customers perform multiple searches before finally converting. AdWords Search Funnels help you see the full picture by giving you insight into the ads your customers interact with during their shopping process.

The process of tracking only takes into account AdWords ads so it’s far from an ideal solution (ideally this would be done in Analytics, not AdWords) however it’s certainly a big step forwards. Basically when somebody clicks on an advert Google monitors the other searches they perform for 30 days and, in the even that they end up converting on your site, all their searches and clicks where they either saw your advert or clicked on the advert will be reported to you.

Full details here & a good overview here.

Not getting the rankings you want? Hire us for Search engine optimisation

AdWords launches Search Funnels to show all keywords in conversion funnel

Go to Source