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June 20, 2008
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How does Usability affect your Search Engine Rankings?
June 20, 2008
Traditionally Usability and SEO have been considered two separate disciplines. With the popularity of Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns however, Search Engine Marketers (SEM) marketers spent a lot of time working on the usability and conversion of their landing pages to ensure positive ROI metrics.
Can’t blame them, can you 
? On PPC campaigns you are paying per click, so if your website doesn’t convert visitors into revenue you are simply losing money.
However, this is not exactly the overlap between SEO and Usability I am talking about today. I am talking about how the way a user behaves on your page has a direct impact on your website’s chances of ranking in the engines.
Let’s look at the following example: your visitor arrives to your site, she spends 2 minutes at the home page, then she clicks through to one of the website sections, she spends 1.5 minute, then she clicks though to another section and spends another 3 minutes, then she subscribes to your RSS feed.
Conclusion: your visitor was definitely interested in your website. She considered it relevant and useful. If 7 out of 10 visitors follow a similar path, it means that this is a quality, resourceful and useful website
Now let’s see another example: your visitor arrives to our website. She spends 30 seconds at the home page and clicks the back button of the browser.
Conclusion: she obviously considered it useless. If 7 out of 10 visitors follow this path… it’s just not speaking too well about your website, is it?
How can the search engines find out what occurs during a visitor’s session in your website, you may be asking? Let’s think for a second all the tunnels that Google alone has access to, if they want to “watch” (let’s not say spy, it’s not PR) internet users’ behaviour:
· Google toolbar (comes as default on many IE installations)
· Feedburner (a popular RSS subscription management tool very popular among bloggers owned by Google)
· Gmail and Google Accounts (which allow users to personalize their search settings)
· Google Analytics (free statistics script very popular among webmasters)
· YouTube and Google Video embeds (the option that webmasters have of embedding videos in their websites)
Am I saying that Google is using all of these channels to track browser behaviours? I can’t say that because I (as any other SEO) don’t have access to Google’s algorithms, but what I can say is that it would make perfect sense for Google to move into this direction. After all, in the very competitive market that they operate on, they need to keep ahead of their competition and ensure they keep providing the very best results to their users, so why would they not use this information if it’s available to them?
Besides what our common sense dictates, there is a lot of evidence that suggests that variables such as high bounce rates and low RSS subscriptions have a negative effect on rankings.
All of this information suggests that there should be a close interrelation between your usability team and your SEO campaigns.
Trustrank: the less talked about SEO factor
June 20, 2008
Even though Keywords On Page and Links Off Page are the two most important variables that play out in SEO, there are other factors that the search engines take into account to decide on the rankings.
Some of them are only being figured out by professional SEOs.
The words “Trust” and “Trustrank” have been used a lot in SEO forums and blogs. The common consensus among SEO practitioners is that the accumulated trust on any given domain defines the ability that such domain has to rank on the search engines.
Conversely, the lack of trust means that the domain will have a tough time ranking for anything, even with the correct optimization in all other areas of SEO.
The million dollar question is then, how does a domain accumulate “trust”? These are some of the factors that seem to accumulate trust in a domain:
· The age of the domain
· The age of the links pointing to the domain
· The consistency and stability on the content growth pace
· The consistency and stability on the link equity growth pace
· The trust of the domains containing the links
The implications of the trustrank factor are huge for SEO. Among other things, it has pushed many SEOs into the art of Linkbait SEO, which is something we are going to talk in detail in future posts.
It also means that you can’t simply be as aggressive as you want to be on your SEO campaigns because there is a limiting factor, which is the trust accumulated on the domain that you are optimizing for.
Once reached the threshold, if you are still dissatisfied with the results there’s no much you can (on that specific domain) besides waiting patiently while you keep on accumulating quality content and quality links.
Links, get lots of them, get good ones
June 20, 2008
Links pointing to your site are probably the most important variable affecting your website’s ability to rank in the search engines.
Let’s say you are a Google engineer and you collected data about 25,000,000 websites that seem to be relevant to the keywords “fast car”. 25 Million websites is a lot, how are you going to decide which of those you are going to display first?
This is what you do: you use all the data you gathered to find out how many links there are out there pointing to each one of the 25,000,000 websites. The algorithm considers a link as a vote of popularity. The more links (votes) one website has, the more perceived quality that website has.
So, from all those 25M websites, the one that has more links pointing to it will rank, number 1 on the search engines. Is it that simple? Of course not, but I purposefully simplified it to illustrate the point and help you understand the way the algorithm operates.
Now that you understand this, let’s add a few things to it:
· It’s not just the amount of links pointing to a website, but also the relevancy to the topic on the websites containing those links
· It’s not just the amount of links pointing to a website, but also the popularity of the websites on the links containing those links
· It’s not simply the quality of a link, but also the code behind the link tag
· It’s not just the amount of links one website acquires but also the pace at which those links were accumulated
All these factors are computed into an algorithm that provides each domain with certain value of Link Equity.
The highest the link equity of any given domain, the more chances it has to rank high in the search engines.
Of course you’ll also need to take into account the trustrank and usability factor.
Keywords: the Bread and Butter of Search Engines
June 20, 2008
Let’s talk about one of the very basic aspects of SEO: keywords.
You need to figure out what keywords your target audience is using to find what you are selling online. What are they typing into Google to find products/services related to your industry?
Even though there are very sophisticated keyword research methods, in most cases you can jot down an intuitive list of keywords and keyword phrases.
Once you have this list of words, you’ll need to add them to your page copy and to the code behind your pages.
When you add specific keywords to your pages copy, you need to make sure you don’t compromise the flow and the readability of your text. If during this process you lower the quality of your text, you are only ruining your users experience and damaging your site’s reputation, which will ironically have a negative effect in your SEO (more on that later.)
Adding keywords to the code behind the pages is a lot easier. You don’t need a copywriter to do this. Anyone with HTML knowledge is capable of doing this. In most cases, these are the HTML tags you’ll need to include your keywords in:
Title
Keywords
Description
Alt
This is what techies mean when they talk about meta tags.
Having the right keywords in your pages and in the code behind your pages is the first step to a successful SEO campaign, but it’s not enough to rank in the search engines.
The other variables that need to be taken into account when planning a complete SEO campaign you can read:
Links
The Trust factor
Usability
Are you a CEO who needs to understand SEO?
June 20, 2008
The purpose of this article is to help CEOs understand what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about. If you run a business or are responsible for the Online Marketing activities of your organization, this article will help you level out with the SEOs you need to hire and to understand what the are talking about (and what you are spending your money in.)
Why are you spending money on SEO?
For most websites, between 75% and 80% of traffic comes through the search engines. Additionally, most people don’t even look beyond the first 2 pages of search engine results.
This means that if you don’t SEO your website to display in the first 20 positions of the search engines you are missing out on 80% of the traffic that you could be getting.
Before we go into detail let’s clarify a common misconception. When we talk about ranking in the search engines, we don’t mean you should rank for your brand or company name. Of course you also need that, but more important is to rank for what your audience is searching when looking online for a product or service you can offer.
Now, let’s look at this from a search engine point of view. The search engines send thousands of web spiders every day to crawl and gather data of thousands/millions of websites around. Why? What are they looking for?
Actually, they have a very clear purpose in mind: to find the best possible results on each keyword, so they can provide useful results to their users. If they do that, their users will keep using their services and they’ll make more money. Simple as that.
Back to us. Now that we know what they want, let’s see how we can give it to them. This is where SEO comes in. SEO is the art of creating websites that have high chances of ranking high in the search engines.
In other words, SEO ensures that websites are created in a way that the search engines will consider them useful to their users.
Understanding the following aspects of SEO is essential to understand the process and to be able to make a better decision when hiring a professional SEO to implement an online marketing campaign for your business.
Keywords
Links
The Trust factor
Usability
Why Search Marketing?
June 19, 2008
Why SEO and Search Marketing is such a great way to promote your business?
I’m not going to throw numbers at you. If you are reading this blog you probably already know that people are using the web every day to look for what they need.
Potential customers are googling every day for the best deal. If what you are selling can’t be sold online, you can still use the web as point of contact with your customers, so there’s really no excuse for any business not to be actively pursuing strategic listings in Google.
Search Marketing is great because you do not look for your customers; they look for you. You strategically pick the keywords you want to be found for, and they find you while searching these keywords.
From a customer’s point of view SEO and Search Marketing is non intrusive and relevant.
From a business point of view it’s efficient and inexpensive.
Non Intrusive and Relevant
It’s non intrusive because you are not spamming junk mail in their home addresses or annoying them at home with unexpected phone calls. You are not forcing them to watch your spot on a TV commercial when they would rather keep watching their favourite TV show.
It’s relevant because you only display your marketing when they are looking for it. You are actually helping them to find what they need, and this makes you relevant, and useful. It helps build a healthy, long term relationship with your target audience.
Efficient and Inexpensive
It’s efficient because there is no waste. Only your target audience gets the message. This doesn’t happen in all other areas of off line advertising, where the possibilities of segmenting your audience are a lot more limited.
TV spots, street signs, even radio ads and print ads, they are all seen by a lot of people who are not interested in your products or services. Big business can afford them and that’s all well and good for them, but what about start-ups and small businesses that need to target their audiences with a laser beam? With Online Advertising you only send the message to your audience, and no one else.
Let’s talk about how inexpensive it is. Some people claim that organic SEO is free, and this is obviously a fallacy. It’s true that Google doesn’t charge a fee for listing your website at the tops of its listings, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually free. You need to earn that position with an organic SEO campaign, which naturally costs time and money.
On the other hand there’s PPC (Pay Per Click), which allows businesses to buy traffic paying per click or per ad impression. In these cases the results come a lot faster than with organic SEO campaigns, and it is incredibly important to optimize conversion metrics in the landing page to avoid negative ROI equations.
Regardless you go the organic SEO or the PPC way, these campaigns are very inexpensive compared to off line advertising or traditional PR, which is one of the reasons more and more businesses are using the online space as the main promotional channel.
In future posts we will look at how to organize successful Search Marketing campaigns.
