Holistic Internet Marketing Optimization
As an update to our post of yesterday about Web Analytics, Google recently announced that on their Google Analytics blog that open access is now available to all. For many months now users have had to apply and wait for weeks or even months to get a Google Analytics account.
So this is good news for those of you who have been waiting to get in. Head on over to the Google Analytics site and get started!
Today, I took a look at a post by Andy Hagans and Aaron Wall, titled: 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006. The list is packed with good and interesting suggestions. Which ones are best for you? Well, it depends on your site and the resources available to you.
Of course, some of these you need to ponder carefully, e.g. “Sue Google”. Yes that will get you links, but … well they had to have some fun with the list. One I would propose to add to the list: Make a link to your site a standard term in all your contracts with partners of any kind. If you use distributors, agencies, VARs, resellers, or any such companies, make them give you some link love.
Equally interesting, and more amusing, are the list of suggestions of bad ways to build links (and that “Sue Google” was not in this section!). There are oldies, but baddies, such as sending out link exchange emails mentioning Page Rank. And then there is the creative idea of wearing a T-Shirt with your URL on it and then being rude to people.
The only serious recommendations on this list that I disagree with in principle are 57 and 58. The renting, or buying, of links is too risky a practice in our opinion. Other than that, check out their article. It’s packed with good stuff.
I read this morning two recent posts about problems with Analytics on other SEO blogs. Reading these posts has caused me to add my own thoughts to the fray. One of these two posts was done by Michael Martinez at SEOMoz, and it titled How Reliable is Google Analytics.
In it Michael presents some puzzling data about traffic levels reported by Google Analytics (GA) and what he sees in his log files. Google Analytics, it seems, is significantly under-reporting traffic. In addition, GA is seeing dramatic changes in traffic levels that do not correspond in any ways to changes seen in the log files.
It’s fascinating to see that there is such a large disconnect in the data. GA is Javascript based. This means that it should, in principle, be able to provide a very active measurement of the behavior of visitors to the site. Michael mentions one possible source of error as being the robot filtering. Of course, another form of error is that some people have Javascript disabled in their browsers. However, we don’t think that this should be a substantial source of error.
Lisa Barone over at BruceClay.com offers an excellent post about web analytics titled: Five Problems Facing Web Analytics. In this post, Lisa takes a somewhat broader look at the problem of web analytics. You can summarize some of her post be saying that it’s really hard work (there is no free lunch).
Lisa based her post off a report by Jim Sterne for DM News’ Special Report on Web Analytics. You can read the whole series of articles in the report and get a better idea as to how Web Analytics fits into your overall strategy.
Making analytics work for you requires a strong analyst, an analytics strategy, and an ongoing investment to measure, tweak, measure again, etc. Lisa also makes the point that any tool you use will make errors. There are many possible sources for these errors. There is the Javascript problem I mentioned above.
Likewise, log file analysis based tools are also prone to errors – for one thing, they don’t count traffic where the page served to the end user is delivered from some third party cache (such as an ISP cache). The most well known source of errors in analytics software relates to the use of cookies by these programs. Many users have cookies disabled on their machines (last I heard it was 2 or 3%). Also, another small source of error can be the time zone orientation of the tool (when does its day start and end).
One way we have tested analytics tools with our clients is to implement multiple tools so that they can cross check one another. We have done some tests with 3 tools at once at times. When 2 of the tools agree (more or less), and the 3rd is off by a large amount, chances are the other 2 tools are accurate. As Lisa said, this is hard work.
But the tools can provide solid (not perfect) data. Putting GA aside (perhaps you really do get what you pay for), we have had great experiences with this type of data analysis. You can use analytics to improve the conversion of your site. Instead of using the feeling in your gut to design your web pages, analytics allow you to start with your gut, and then experiment.
For example, we had one experience, using GA by the way, where we learned that users were not clicking on the links where we expected. It was on a page with an 8 paragraph long informational article. We offered users links that led to our conversion pages near the top of the page, to the left of the menu.
But no one was clicking there. The majority of our visitors read the entire article. They clicked on things near the bottom of the article as a follow up – our links to conversion pages had scrolled out of sight. The article had generated interest so people were looking for more information from us, but we had hidden it on them. It was a quick fix – we offered a link to our conversion pages at the bottom of the page, and all was well.
Sounds simple, and in actuality, it was. But we had put in the effort to setup the tracking we needed, and we worked hard at it to get it right. We think that this type of investment is well worth the time for most sites.
So I put up a post earlier today. And I made a stupid mistake. Since I have optimized my blogs to make sure my posts show up under the right tags on Technorati, you would think I would know better. I forgot to put a title on the post. So its get listed in Technorati, but no title shows. Ugh. You could file that one under “stupid blog tricks”.
So that spawns this brief post. Make sure you have a checklist before uploading a blog post. Here is one for starters:
You can do these things in preview mode in your blog software package. Well OK, I know you can do it with WordPress, and I assume that the other major blog software packages offer something similar.
Follow these guidelines more strictly than I did this morning, and you will be doing yourself a favor! You can get other tips on Blogging for traffic here.
In reviewing Matt Cutts Qualities of a good site video, one of the questions that came up was the use of <b> v.s. <strong> and <i> v.s. <em> tags. It’s one of those esoteric details that make up the world of SEO. For those of you who don’t know, my attempt at the technical definition of these tags is as follows:
There is a pretty good forum posting about bold vs strong and italic vs emphasis tags here. Note that the W3C recommends that we all use <strong> and <em>.
So now, onto SEO. In one of Matt’s Qualities of a good site video he reported that Google had a slight preference for bold <b> tags over <strong> tags. I imagine that this caused a grand rush for thousands of web site owners to tweak their sites.
But you can stop the presses! Matt later recanted on this comment in his Lightning Round. One of Google’s engineers evidently showed Matt the specific code that addresses this issue. Google treats the <b> v.s. <strong> exactly the same, Google treats the <i> v.s. <em> tags exactly the same.
So what does this mean? If you are into the finer details of the semantics of markup, use <strong> and <em> tags. If you are into minimizing typing time, use <b> and <i>. We personally prefer to use <strong> and <em>, as we are simply in the habit of maximizing compliance with standards and recommendations, whenever it does not interfere with business results (which is most, but not all of the time).
One of the things that I have not been paying enough attention to is the upcoming release of Internet Explorer 7. This is one of the good things about SES. It helps me get a broader picture of things than I tend to get in my day to day work. While there, I got a better understanding of one of the key features of this upcoming browser update from Microsoft. You can get the feature review of IE 7 here.
That is, RSS auto-discovery. RSS has been historically the domain of advanced users for a variety of reasons. For one, most users have no idea what it is. Two, they don’t know where to look for it. And three, when they open an RSS file and see XML, they assume that they are looking at a broken page. That’s a lot of big obstacles to adoption.
IE 7 includes improvements that address these problems. For one, RSS feed links are going to made much more obvious to users, so they do not need to know what RSS is. And when a user looks at an RSS file, they will no longer see XML, they will see a rendered page. This does appear to attack many of these problems head on.
This was discussed in detail in the SEM Via Communities, Wikipedia & Tagging session at SES. This session had Rick Klau of FeedBurner, Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts, LLC, and Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit.
The panel seemed to feel that IE 7 could cause a big leap in RSS consumption. I agree with them, and think that it will in fact cause a significant step up in usage. However, I also think it will be a while before the average user fully appreciates the advantages of subscribing to content.
The premise of subscribing to content is an excellent one, and I for one am in to it. The idea is that there is way too much stuff available on the web to try and read everything out there. So you want to pick off the sources you trust most, and you want to be notified when those sources have new stuff for you to read.
Much like the newspaper being delivered to your doorstep, RSS allows the content you have selected to be delivered to your browser, with all your trusted sources of content aggregated together. Unlike newspapers, you get to select the sources of information you trust most. Very cool. As a side note, even though very few people have picked up on it, this is what the subscribed links portion of the Google Co-Op program is all about.
But I suspect that the concept of subscribing to content will take some time to become mass market. There are a lot of users who do not yet have 10 sites they like to check on every day. For those of us in the business, it is real, and it’s compelling. And it wil become a part of nearly everyone’s daily routine in time, but this could still be 10 years down the road.
For the record, we advise our clients to get on board with RSS now. Locking in long term relationships with your customers who are into the model sure seems like a good idea.
Order The Art of SEO by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin, and Jessie Stricchiola.
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You can also get more info on the book here or The Art of SEO Book web site.
Eric Enge was Voted the #27 most influential marketer by readers of the Invesp blog.
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