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miercuri, 10 august 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

An Experiment in Boosting Google Rankings w/ Search Volume

Posted: 09 Aug 2011 04:39 PM PDT

To say I was bowled over when Martin MacDonald of OMD showed the results of his testing on query volume influencing rankings (not just auto-suggest, but actual positions) would be an understatement. Anyone who saw me listening to him at Mozcon knows I was flabbergasted. But, as is typical in the SEO world, I wanted to test it for myself.

Caveat: This is one test, performed not particularly scientifically and without a control group, formal methodology, etc. All that said, I think you'll still find the results fascinating and, hopefully, it will inspire others to run tests of their own.

My goal was to see if I could move the rankings for a particular site through search volume and clicks. I started with my wife's travel blog, Everywhereist, since she refuses to do SEO and generally sees very little fluctuation in terms of search engine rankings (in fact, non-branded search is less than 10% of her traffic). I also picked it because I could look at the analytics and publicly share all the findings.

The results are in the slide presentation below (which I thought would be a better format than scrolling through dozens of images and screenshots).

Google Search Volume Experiment

View more presentations from Rand Fishkin

My general takeaway from this process is that the query volume seemed not to have any impact on the broad query "travel blog" (which, granted, is hyper-competitive), but it's plausible that clickthrough rate or maybe search volume influenced the rankings of the site itself in the "travel blog everywhereist" results.

I was, however, really shocked to see the engagement and clickthrough from Google+. Given that I have, currently, 12,570 followers on Google+ and 39,969 on Twitter, and given that Twitter is a much more popular service (I thought) from a login/participation perspective, I'm amazed that Google+ drove just over 50% of the clicks as Twitter over the same timespan. Note that I shared the URL in two posts/updates on each service, nearly simultaneous to one another. This was an unexpected, but fascintating result for me and I hope to dig in more in the future. Perhaps Google's really onto something :-)

Looking forward to seeing your perceptions, analyses and experiments on this front, too!

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How Often Should You Update Your Website Graywolf's SEO Blog

How Often Should You Update Your Website

Posted: 10 Aug 2011 10:30 AM PDT

When I talk with small business owners or look at their websites, one of the frequently-asked questions (or subject that I notice requires attention) is how often should you update your website, and how many websites are filled with outdated information.

To be clear, when I talk about updating a website I’m talking about the text, information, or pictures. I’m not talking about layout or design. Unless your design is completely outdated or in some way broken, I’m not a huge fan of massive design changes every few years. I much prefer small incremental changes based on testing and user data. But that’s a subject for another post. In this post, I want to talk about the content and and actual words on your website.

…you need to develop a plan to keep adding new content on a regular basis…

So how often should you update your content? Ideally, as often as possible, but especially whenever you have something new worth talking about. At this stage, most websites really should be running some sort of CMS, WordPress, joomala, drupal, pixelsilk or something else that is somewhat SEO friendly out of the box or with a little customization. The downsides to using a CMS include things like maintenance and updates, which in some cases come so frequently they can become burdensome (look squarely in the direction of WordPress and Matt Mullenwegg). But the ability to edit, change, add, and remove pages without needing a webmaster who charges billable hours to do it is key for keeping your website fresh and up to date.

The first thing I always recommend is a content audit . Look at what pages you have, which pages are driving traffic, and which pages aren’t. Look for pages that are outdated. Do they have value as part of your archive library, or do they just need to be reviewed and tightened up? If you will be updating an existing page, I strongly suggest using a living URL approach.

Once that’s done, you need to develop a plan to keep adding new content on a regular basis. How often you should add new content depends on your situation and particular business. Some businesses have a lot to talk about, some have less. You should add new information when you have something worth saying or sharing.

Many times I’ll get resistance along the lines of “we don’t know what to write about.” I’ll share a bit of advice I got from Joe Larato of Tandem Interactive: start a work diary. Make notes and write about the different projects you work on (make sure you aren’t violating any client confidentiality agreements of course). As a real world example, I did some work for a wedding photographer last year. Every week they wrote about a wedding that one of their photographers shot the week before. They emphasized writing about new locations they hadn’t already written about. They also talked about weddings that were shot with different styles, photojournalistic wedding photos, artistic wedding photos, and classic wedding photos. This created a nice wide set of keywords that included locations and photography styles for the search engines to index and return when people were typing in those terms.

Ok, ok. You’ve read all the way through this article and I still haven’t given you a real answer about how often you should update your website. To be honest, I don’t want to give a hard number answer because it means you’re like the kid in class who who always asked “Will this be on the test?” It shows you’re more concerned with passing the test than actually learning. But I’ll try to be a little more helpful. If you can add one or two pages a week, you will be in really good shape. If that’s too ambitious, shoot for one or two a month. Anything less than one new page a month, and it’s pretty likely Google will see your website as stale. I also recommend dripping out new content at regular intervals, not in clumps. One article per week for four weeks in a row is much better than four articles one week followed bythree weeks of inactivity. If it’s easier/cheaper to produce your content in batch, by all means do so, just schedule the actual publishing over time.

Lastly, let’s talk about making the content accessible to humans and search engines. If you are engaging in outbound marketing like an email newsletter, absolutely include links to your new content in the email messages. There is no substitute for clicks tracked through Gmail or toolbar/user data generated by real users. Depending on your architecture, your new pages may reside several layers deep and several clicks away from the homepage. You need to shorten that distance. Put links to your newest content on your homepage. This guarantees that the search engines will find it as soon as possible. I would recommend investing in some programming that automatically adds links to new content to your homepage and removes the “oldest” new content. Make sure you also update your HTML and XML site maps and ping the appropriate services. Adding plugins or programming to do this for you automatically is worth investing time/money in.

What are the takeaways from this post

If possible, migrate away from flat file or include files and use a CMS that makes it easy to add new content.
Do an audit of your existing content. Look for old, low quality, or under-performing content. Make the decision to remove or update it. Try to use a living URL strategy to preserve existing link equity.
Determine a realistic and sustainable plan to add/update new content on a regular basis.
Try to add content that is useful and has terms that searchers are using. Avoid industry jargon if it’s being used as a search term.
Talk about the work you are doing or projects you are working on if you can.
Add new content at regular intervals. Avoid dumping new content out in clumps if possible.
The more new content you can add, the better. One to two new pages a week is ideal. One to two a month is ok,. Less frequently than once a month makes your website look stale and dated.
Add links to new content to your homepage, email marketing, Twitter, or Facebook accounts. The more places a search engine sees the links and users click on them, the better.
Update your HTML and XML site maps and ping the appropriate services. Making this process automatic can save time and drudgery from the process.

photo credit: Photospin

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

How Often Should You Update Your Website

Photo of the Day: President Obama Honors Fallen Troops at Dover Air Force Base

Your Daily Snapshot for
Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Photo of the Day: President Obama Honors Fallen Troops at Dover Air Force Base

President Barack Obama, in the process of saluting, participates in a ceremony at Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Del., Aug. 9, 2011, for the dignified transfer of U.S. and Afghan personnel who died in Afghanistan on Aug. 6. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

SEOptimise

Significant Traffic Sources You Probably Miss Unless You Blog

Posted: 09 Aug 2011 06:25 AM PDT

Other SEO blogs linking to us

While perusing the SEOptimise Google Analytics reports for last month, I noticed a few traffic spikes where I did not necessarily expect them. Upon taking a closer look, I discovered that many major traffic sources only show up as such on blogs, or rather blogs that are popular on social media.

I write for and contribute to several blogs so that I can compare the stats of other top blogs as well. I think it’s worth noting that these significant traffic sources are not very commonly targeted by businesses, especially businesses that don’t blog. In the past I often argued that

without business blogging your company barely exists on the Web today

as a static website and sheer social media marketing do not suffice to catch and retain the attention of the volatile social media crowd. Today I want to show the positive outcome of a long term social media strategy based on business blogging.

Below are the traffic sources not so commonly found in web statistics unless you blog successfully.

Google News

SEOptimise has been on Google News for years and from time to time I noticed a few dozens visitors from there. Sometimes there may have been even more, but the numbers weren’t awe inspiring until recently. Several Google News sites – the US, UK and Indian ones – sent us considerable traffic.

Feedburner

I’ve watched Feedburner traffic grow over the years to become one of the most significant traffic sources on the SEOptimise blog. The numbers are pretty fuzzy as you can’t track them directly, you can only attach a “utm_source” parameter to the URL. Feedburner does this by default and Google Analytics counts it as Feedburner as well, but the parameters don’t only show up when you click right from the feed.

If somebody bookmarks a Feedburner tagged link, the “utm_source” is used when the bookmark is clicked. Add social bookmarking on Delicious to the equation and you see that the data is far from accurate. Still, you can determine that it’s many or not so many, and it is many indeed.

Google+

I was surprised to see that my post on Google Profiles got nearly 100 visitors from Google+. I didn’t expect significant traffic from there yet, but it seems that the fast-rising user numbers can be seen in the website statistics already. In a very short period of time, Google+ has become the third largest traffic source when it comes to social networks behind Twitter and Facebook.

Twitter

Some people argue that Twitter.com only accounts for roughly 20% of all visitors from Twitter. I can’t prove this, but it is certainly just a part of it. People arrive from Twitter using Web apps or mobile phones that do not send referrers. Some other referers like t.co or Hootsuite can also be considered Twitter traffic. So you can at least take those and multiply the sum with two to get a more accurate estimate of Twitter traffic.

You will notice that it’s quite considerable, at least if you have a large Twitter following like we do. The number of followers by itself is of course not sufficient; you must entice your followers to click and share. Nonetheless, once you have an engaged audience on Twitter you can count on it. By the way, take note of how my SEO 2.0 visitors click on the embedded Twitter links.

Other Blogs

While some leading blogs, such as Search Engine Land, are not surprisingly a good traffic source, you might have the impression that most other blogs aren’t. A few clicks here and there but not real numbers. Well in July just the blogs that have the term “blog” in their name have been impressive traffic sources. The same applies to industry blogs or the blogs containing “seo” in its name (see on top for screen shot).

Is traffic the best way to measure website success? Of course not. But you have to know where your visitors come from to target them better. Casual visitors who arrive through Google News probably don’t even know what SEO is, and need something different from your devoted subscribers. Likewise, early adopters from Google+, Twitter users and readers from other blogs are different audiences with a special approach.

Please also take note of how three of the five traffic sources I have reviewed above are Google properties (Feedburner is owned by Google as well). Google traffic can mean a lot of things these days; it might be returning visitors, social media participants or search users.

Seth's Blog : R&D in public

R&D in public

Companies do research and development, particularly large ones. This is an investment, one that fails often but is essential to future growth.

The web is R&D in public. So are apps. Not just for tech companies. For any company that is trying to figure out how its customers think and what they want.

We shouldn't be so quick to excoriate those companies that launch interactive tools that fail. In fact, we should be critical of those that don't.

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miercuri, 10 august 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

How Often Should You Update Your Website Graywolf's SEO Blog

How Often Should You Update Your Website Graywolf's SEO Blog

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