Coaching For Success
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Analysing Key Performance Indicators Is Essential To Web Site Health
Mar 25th
As an internet business owner, it’s important you know whether or not the effort you’re putting into your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategies is paying off.
In order to do that, you need to look at certain key performance indicators (KPI), but the question then is, “Which ones do you look at?”. Good question – here are some of the more important KPIs you should monitor.
What’s The Goal When Looking At KPIs?
It’s important to recognise that the main goal when looking at KPIs is to find out what’s working on your site and in which areas there is room for improvement. Through analysing KPIs, you’ll discover useful data as your site improves and moves closer to the desired finished product. This data should then be shared throughout your organisation to help improve communication and decision-making at all levels.
The good news is you don’t need to be an expert in analytics to be able to understand and take full advantage of these KPIs. Even though it would be helpful to understand analytics, reports are generally available that will provide most, if not all, of the information needed.
A Look At Essential KPIs
The analytics used may vary by organisation, so it’s possible different KPIs will be used to measure how well different web sites are performing and all the following may not be applicable, so that should be borne in mind.
1. Average Number and Type of Keywords per Page
This KPI can help you discover whether or not you’re taking full advantage of “long tail” keywords. It’s also essential to explore further to find what your users’ interests are and what they are searching for, along with the conversion rates of the top-ranking keywords.
2. New Visitors / User Loyalty
You can learn about the organic traffic coming to your site and its characteristics, including the percentage or rate of new visitors, visitor type by keyword, etc.
3. Average Length Of Visit And Visit Duration
These are both excellent metrics when examining the natural/organic traffic coming to a web site. Knowing which pages of your site get the shortest length of stay will show you SEO opportunities for improvement.
4. Page And Traffic Totals
These are the simplest and most obvious indicators, as well as some of the most revealing. The health of a web site in SEO terms can be determined by the number of pages ranked by and being found in search engines, indicating the overall exposure of a web site.
5. Bounce Rate per Search Engine By Keyword
Knowing the bounce rate for the various keywords on your site can show how effective keyword analysis had been and also provide insight into the demographics of your visitors.
6. Length of Keyword Queries
If you know the number of keywords used in users’ queries, you can tailor your site to take advantage of that type of long-tail search. Also, if you see a trend towards longer keyword searches resulting in more traffic, that indicates a tendency towards more long-tail queries, so it’s safe to assume your site’s performing well for those types of queries.
7. Pages And Categories That Receive Most Traffic
This is a vital metric for SEO success, since knowing which sections of your web site receive the most traffic and which receive the least shows you what’s working and what’s not as far as SEO is concerned. If an area is receiving little or no traffic, that’s an indication that more work needs to be done to ensure users find that area; if an area is doing well as far as traffic goes, you should look at ways to expand that particular area.
These are important KPIs to analyse, but there are many others that may also be appropriate for your internet business, depending on the type of business you run.
It’s important to track how well your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts are going, and a UK internet marketing consultant can provide you the analytical skills you need to use these metrics to maximum effect.
Advanced Link Development Strategies To Improve Your Search Engine Rankings
Mar 23rd
We’ve already discussed the importance of building external links to your internet business‘s web site, and we can’t emphasise that enough when it comes to improving your search engine optimisation (SEO) results.
Having discussed some basic steps to take to get started with the new process known as link development, it’s time to look at some more advanced strategies to move your link building efforts into high gear.
Just to recap the reason for this new approach. The search engines, and Google in particular, are now looking for more natural, organic links that are of high quality rather than just any links to any sites. It’s now about deep link building rather than just link building, so let’s look at more advanced ways of doing so.
Powerful Techniques For Developing Links
The tactics discussed here may take more effort, but are the best way to develop high value links that will reward the effort extended now and for a long time in the future.
1. Build A Widget
This technique is extremely powerful as building a widget is fairly simple, but getting that widget adopted on a large scale is the tricky part. Your widget must offer a strong value proposition such that thousands of web site owners decide to add your widget to their web sites, but this is complicated by the fact that you’re competing for advertising space and web site real estate with such powerful players as Google Adsense.
2. Information Graphics, Or Infographics
An infographic is a visual representation of data or knowledge or information that is used to explain a complex issue in more simple visual terms. In other words, it needs to be useful as well as informative and/or entertaining in such a way that it has the potential to go viral and be widely adopted by your peers.
Tracking Your Link Development Efforts
Once you embark on your link development campaign, it’s important to keep track of how your efforts are going so you can see what’s working and what’s not and double your efforts in the areas that are working and abandon, or, at least, reduce those that aren’t.
Let’s look at some ways to track your efforts:
1. Google Webmaster
The tools offered within Google Webmaster have grown and improved in proportion with Google itself. Practically all SEO efforts can be tracked, including internal and external links, click-through data, visits and keyword ranking. Some of the most important features include:
- Site performance evaluation
- Monitoring external links
- Sitemap submission
- Tracking crawl errors
- Monitoring internal links
- Tracking duplicate Title and Meta Tags
- Traffic and revenue projections based on search query analysis
2. Open Site Explorer
This tool provides information on how your link portfolio is shaping up (your link graph), your site’s trust ranking and your anchor text distribution.
a) Anchor Text Distribution
This can provide you with a benchmark of how your site compares to other sites when it comes to keyword-specific anchor text links pointing back to your site as compared to your competitors.
b) Link Graph
The tool will show you updates to your external followed links, which you can then use to plot your own link graph, showing you graphically how your external link efforts are working.
It should be obvious by now that link building has changed and will no doubt continue to change as search engines look to optimize their users’ experience. But, one thing that hasn’t changed (and shows no sign of doing so) is the importance of high-quality external links to your internet business, so take the above link development steps and watch your rankings start to improve.
Check with a UK internet marketing consultant for all the help you need to formulate and execute a successful link development campaign.
Reap The Benefits Of Twitter’s New Advertising Platform
Mar 14th
Promoting your internet business on the various social media networks is regarded as a major component of any search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy today.
Some of the social networks, such as Facebook, also offer excellent opportunities for paid advertising, and it appears that Twitter is about to leap headlong into that market also.
Watch For Promoted Tweets Coming Soon
Advertisers’ messages on Twitter are known as Promoted Tweets, and users should start seeing them in their timelines any day now, if they haven’t already.
This is part of a major push by Twitter to sell advertising space to small-sized and medium-sized businesses in the form of either Promoted Tweets or Promoted Accounts, which is Twitter’s pay-per-follower advertising system.
Choose The Right Type Of Advertising
The question then is, Which type of advertising is right for your business? That all depends on the amount of money involved and also what the goals of your business are.
If the aim is to promote a single product or a single piece of content, your best bet may be to use a Promoted Tweet, but that depends on how popular what you’re offering is with the Twitter users and how relevant it is, not to mention the quality of the copy in the tweet.
If you’re looking to gain more followers, then the Promoted Account may be right for your business, but the expense can only really be justified if you intend to maintain your business’s presence on Twitter over the long haul.
The optimum option may actually be a combination of the two, particularly if most of your user base comes courtesy of Twitter.
Is Advertising On Twitter A Good Bet?
While it’s estimated there are over 200 million accounts on Twitter, only about 20 million are “active”, i.e. access their accounts at least once per month. So, this begs the question, “How effective can advertising on Twitter be?”.
That remains to be seen, but Twitter is determined to become a major player in the advertising stakes and is putting plenty of its not insubstantial weight behind a push to match, and, eventually, overtake Google and Facebook when it comes to revenue from online advertising.
Its sales force is playing a leading role in the push, but even more important is its upcoming platform for self-service ad buying, similar to Google’s AdWords, making ad buying much more accessible and affordable on Twitter.
More and more internet business owners are advertising on social media platforms to great effect, and adding Twitter to your advertising portfolio may be a great move, provided your budget can handle the expense.
For more information and help advertising on Twitter, check with a UK internet marketing consultant, who will help you determine the best strategy for your business going forward.
Google Putting Greater Emphasis On Social Search Recommendations
Mar 4th
OK, so nobody can say we haven’t talked about this and that we haven’t tried to emphasise its importance to you and your internet business, but now the proof of how much effort you’ve been putting into the social networking area of your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts will soon be evident.
Google’s Really Going Social
That’s because Google is putting more emphasis on social search results (it may be more accurate to refer to them as social recommendations), bringing them more to the forefront by actually listing them in their search results pages.
These results will be mixed in with the rest of the search results based on their relevance to the query submitted by the user and also taking into consideration the content from the user’s social graph. Results will also be dependent on which accounts the user has connected to their public profile on Google.
This represents a major change in Google’s philosophy, since social search results were previously only listed at the bottom of the page. Now they can appear anywhere in the results and a notation will appear alongside the results showing their origin, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Twitter Firehose Makes Results More Comprehensive
In 2010 Google paid a lot of money for access to Twitter’s database of tweets (also known as the firehose) and is finally using that data to produce more comprehensive socially based results, meaning that links shared on Twitter may now be displayed as part of the search results.
Overall, it’s highly possible that, if someone is connected to you and your business publicly and decides to share a link, that may well appear in Google’s search results.
The More Connections The Better
The obvious takeaway from this (at least, we hope it’s obvious!) is that, if you haven’t done so already, you should be out there in social network land building a fan base and a following for your business. The more social connections that can be established between your business and social media networks the more search results may be displayed with references to your internet business.
We can’t emphasise enough the importance of establishing a presence for your internet business on the social media platforms from a search engine optimisation (SEO) standpoint, and, with Google’s latest initiative, that fact has become doubly important.
Check with a UK internet marketing consultant for help getting your business established on the social media networks to take full advantage of Google’s latest search initiatives.
How Is Google Categorise Your Internet Business Website?
Mar 2nd
In the fast moving world of internet business marketing we all know why we need to be visible to prospective clients, you know what it is your offering them and how your product or service can help them, but have you ever stopped to wonder how search engines like Google view your site? How it is being categorised?
You know how you would look at your site and categorises it but what if search engines do not see it the way you are categorising it. Lets face it if you think your site is about one thing and search engines think it is about something else the end result is that you will not get traffic or the right type of traffic, you could be ranked incorrectly or not at all – sobering thought isn’t it but how many internet business owners really check to see how they are being categorised.
This potential issue is not difficult to sort out as using tools and certain search operators you can find out easily and fix any potential problems. For example if you use the search operator “similar” you can check how Google views your site. To do this simple go to Google search and type in related:www.domain.co.uk/~domain.co.uk Replace www.domain.co.uk with your own internet business domain name. Make sure there is no space after the colon. You will then get results pages, which will show other sites Google thinks are related to your site.
This is very useful to see how Google is looking at your site, if they are related (similar) then that is good your on the right track and the search engine understands what your site is all about, however if they are unrelated then you have issues you need to fix as soon as possible even if it is partially related i.e some of it is similar and the rest is not you still need to work on harmonising your site so search engines categorise your site properly.
Some simple tweaking to your Internet business site can allow for clarity and show Google without a doubt what the topic/category of your site really is. Search engines like Google determine what your site is about by looking at your content on the site and the search engine optimisation (SEO) you have used for the site along with the type of links coming into your site to categorise your site.
If you have lots of links coming into your site from totally unrelated external sites then this will not help with clarifying your position or reinforcing the ideas you have about your site and the category it falls into. If you are in this position then you need to look at your links again and ensure they come from related sites that compliment your own. Any anchor text you are using should be one of your keywords this will help your search engine optimisation (SEO) as well.
Ensuring that your Internet business website’s search engine optimisation (SEO) matches your content is important to ensuring that search engines categorise your site properly to effectively maximise your potential to generate useful traffic and gain potential customers.
