Posts from ‘SEO’
Common Analytics Mistakes
The complexity and sheer level of data presented by analytics packages can often cause confusion and lead to mistakes. These mistakes are usually the result of misinterpretations and a lack clear goals. Before beginning any SEO campaigns it is important to set out some clear goals or KPI’s and have a defined plan of action. You need to know what you are measuring and what you are trying to achieve. Without this knowledge you will often get little from your analytics data.
Of course there are a couple of packages out there to track your websites performance, with Google analytics being the most popular. Yahoo’s offering has also started to get some attention while some higher end packages such as Omniture exist.
Some of the most common analytics mistakes can be found below:
No SEO campaign would be complete without extensive testing and the guys over at ABtests.com have been highlighting some great examples of split testing. I wanted to use this post to highlight some of the things they have been doing and show how essential testing has become.
It is easy in life and especially SEO to make assumptions. Assumptions can be costly in SEO as tactics that have worked in one place won’t necessarily work in another. This is because target audiences in different markets expect very different things and have completely different mind sets. A good SEO will understand these mind sets and test different alternatives on a site.
I find this one of the most interesting aspects of SEO because you often find things that you wouldn’t expect. A simple change in the positioning of text or an image can dramatically improve conversions for example. There was also a great example on abtests.com recently for a site called 5ftShelf.
Link building is a big part of SEO and having the right link building tools can help improve both the effectiveness and speed of the process. There are many tools out there which provide different functionality and serve different purposes. I find there isn’t one tool out there that does everything and it is therefore important to use a selection of tools. The best tools are often paid but well worth the investment.
Of course the list of tools could be endless for this post however i am going to list the ones i use regularly and find most useful.
SEO SpyGlass
SEO SpyGlass is a desktop tool that lets you analyse the backlinks of your competitors. I tend to use this tool at the beginning of a project and look for patterns between top ranking competitors. The great thing about this tool is that you can get it to list a range of key attributes next to each link. For example what type of link it is, what page rank it has and the exact anchor text used.
Once i have run SEO Spyglass i like to add the key links from the research into a spreadsheet. I don’t think its worth getting all the links the competition has as you need to differentiate yourself in some way but helps you identify and target the authority links. SEO SpyGlass is a paid tool and it might be worth purchasing their entire suite. The rank tracking software in the suite is very good.
Site search is a feature in Google Analytics that allows webmasters to track the terms people search for using their sites search boxes. Most sites these days have these boxes and as analytics features go its one of my favourites. The data gained from this tracking is pretty extensive and can help you identify which products or pages are the most requested on your site.
You can also do a lot more with your site search feature than you think. For example if you know a particular product is popular then why not get it show up first in the search results listings. Look at relevance. After all this is what Google does. There are also numerous companies that specialise entirely in site search functionality. I have seen some really good demos but never heard anyone extensively recommend one or another.
It’s something i have been waiting for for a while now and this morning i noticed that Stumble Upon has finally added an SEO category to their site. It doesn’t sound like a major development but i got a bit tired of my submissions being given the thumbs down by users in the ‘internet’ category. Before this recent update it was one of the only relevant categories for many of my stories.
It will be nice to see what effect it will have on my submissions and as a big fan of Stumble its an extremely welcomed addition.
image: clubfemina
Monitoring exact link acquisition numbers is not something that i have had to look into with to much detail before but i was recently asked by one of my clients to report on the exact number of links we had each month. Although for many reasons this is not strictly valuable data (because you really want to know what links you have, the quality of them and of course the anchor text) i decided to do a bit of research.
I often find that Yahoo Site Explorer fluctuates the numbers pretty heavily so decided this was not an ideal solution. I then started looking in to a few options and asking people in forums. Two big suggestions came from it. The first being Linkscape which is of course SeoMoz’s high end link and site evaluation tool. I love this tool for many reasons and the metrics are extremely powerful but i found with out paying the huge custom reporting fee’s it didn’t output data in a friendly manner. This was important as the client is not particularly technical.
I then, one day while reading ‘the google cache‘ blog came across a post about a tool or i should say i Firefox extension which integrates with webmaster tools. This seemed ideal as Google although doesn’t list all the links to a site (like Yahoo) delivers reliable data. In delving into the extension further i found it deliver one crucial thing. That was an easy to understand interface. It shows a nice graph, which of course all clients can appreciate, especially if its heading in an upwards direction. Having a graph and the links in a table below make it a joy to use.
In essence the tool is pretty basic but if you want to share those basic numbers with clients this could be the one you were looking for. Being embedded in webmaster tools means it can also easily be used by your clients. I have been using the basic version but a more in depth pro version is available.
