Despite this, there are still many who will treat or describe SEO as a purely on-page technical exercise. Essentially they’re saying that high amounts of traffic can be recieved simply by tweaking various tags and attributes and strategically using keywords on one’s website. Whilst this can certainly help, and, in the case of some very niche keywords, raise rankings, this is sort of activity will not enable a website to compete on phrases where large amounts of traffic are available.

This situation partly explains why it’s possibly to get 10 radically different solutions for an SEO strategy with equally radical price differentials – many of the very cheap solutions are only optimising the on-page technical factors, which, according to industry experts are only around 15% of the algoirthm.

The explanation for this is very simple – there’s simply too much competition on the web. To demonstrate my point I’ll show you exactly how much competition there is for a big phrase. Here is a search on Google for the phrase “Car Insurance” :

Yes, that’s right – 35 million web pages seemingly competing on that result . Ok, so you’re probably thinking that most of those pages aren’t relevant at all, and this is where the clever SEO comes in. Not so.

If we use Google commands to search for the same phrase with that phrase in both the title and page URL (a very strong indicator that the web page is actively optimising for that phrase) we see that there are still a staggering 439,000 web pages in Google’s index. It doesn’t matter how advanced your software is, or how technically adept somebody may be, there’s simply no way you can do anything on-page that puts you head and shoulders over half a million results, because there isn’t a logical way for Google to determine which is the most relevant.

It would be rather like trying to pick 10 people to hire from 439,000 applicants based purely on the contents of their CV – they can *say* whatever they want on their CV – but it ain’t necessarily so – you’d definitely want to meet them, collect references and so on before hiring, right?

There is the also argument that on-page is fine if you’re not targeting super competitive phrases, but even for some less competitive terms you’ll need to do a lot more than tweak a few elements on-page.

There are many people who prop up the ‘tweak it and they’ll come’ theory – these include designers of wordpress plugins; £199 website optimisation ‘tools’;  lazy SEOs and those who simply don’t know any better. The sad thing is that it not only does it not work, but it could cost the business owner thousands of pounds of lost sales.

So, if you’re in the market for some SEO consultancy make sure you take a long hard look at those proposals. Ideally the activity proposed should comprise of:

1. Technical & on-page
2. Content creation (NB you may be able to save yourself some pennies if you’re willing (and able) to create the content yourself)
3. Link building

Oh, and bear in mind that great old adage – “pay peanuts… get monkeys”.

Question based search is exactly what it says on the tin – a situation where a user types a question into Google, rather than the name of a product or service. The type of search often indicates the user is in the research phase rather than ready to buy/sign up, but this isn’t always the case (for instance, many users will search for something like “where can I find a ….”). Either way, if you are thinking long-term, you’ll gladly take the extra traffic (and potential leads) that ranking well for these particular terms can yield.

In order to succeed with a question search strategy, you need to break the process down into 4 steps :

1. Identify your customers questions
2. Decide which questions you’d like to answer
3. Answer the questions
4. ‘Convert’ the searcher into a lead

Identifying Questions

There are many places where you can look for questions that have already been asked – although you’ll be competing with other websites, you’ll have the benefit of knowing that those questions are definitely of interest to people. Some ideas for finding questions would be as follows :

1. Look at your analytics search phrases ; the chances are, you’re receiving the occasional visitor on question searches already. Another way to use your existing site data is to use your internal search data – which you can also track through many analytics packages.
2. Do a google search for a broad term, and then select ‘discussions’ from the options menu on the left
3. Search websites such as Yahoo Answers, as well as any industry specific forums individually

I did a search on Google for the word ‘accountant’, and clicked discussions – an encouraging 700,000+ results. Yahoo Answers alone had over 4,000 results.

Also, don’t forget about the questions that may never have been asked – you could raid documents, textbooks and even exam papers here – an accountant, for instance, might find that many of the questions in their tax textbook would be of great interest to small businesses.

Filtering questions
Given that finding enough questions to answer won’t be a problem for many businesses, selecting the best questions to try and answer is probably the key challenge. You’ll want to consider several factors in this,  but some of the more important questions you should ask yourself are as follows:

1. Can I actually answer the question? (be honest with yourself!)
2. How long will it take to provide a good answer? (again, be realistic)
3. Is there likely to be any value in attracting this type of visitor?
4. What competition am I up against?
5. How often do I think this question may be asked?

By filtering with the above 5 criteria, you should get a large number of questions that will be likely to offer a reasonable reward in respect to the effort expended in answering. You can then pass the list to your staff / content writers or perhaps even work down them yourself in an effort to create some genuinely useful content.

Answering the questions

Now, depending on available resources, this part could be the easiest or most difficult. Factual based questions are likely to be among the quickest to answer, while complex questions may need a good writer to explain. Either way, you’re going to need a section of your website where you can actually put these answers. Some of the places you could put this content are as follows:

1. FAQs section
2. A knowledge base system
3. Your blog
4. A traditional ‘articles’ section

If the system you choose has the flexibility to allow users to ask their own questions, you should try and take advantage of this, since you’ll be getting content ideas  for free via this route.

Getting a conversion

Probably most important of all – you’ll need to get these visitors to convert. Often providing different ways of converting will be your best bet here.

If you think you can convert your customers straight into leads, then by all means push a ‘get a free quote’ or similar message at the customer, but if this isn’t the case then you might want to consider pushing a softer conversion type. Newsletters, mailing lists, white paper downloads etc might not make you any money right now, but they all provide you with a means of building your customer database, and hopefully an opportunity to sell your services to these visitors in the future.

Bear in mind that Google doesn’t need to be too concerned about making mistakes when doing such a classification – as long as they penalise link sellers (by stopping them from passing value) they don’t risk excluding sites unfairly.

make sure your links don't look like this

Here’s just a few of the many signals we look at to determine if a site is selling links:

Look out for Blocks of Links

Some websites are less savvy about Google’s terms than others. Whilst it may be against Google T&C’s to sell links (unless using nofollow) many webmasters are unaware of this and don’t go to a great deal of effort to disguise the fact that they are selling links. They will therefore mark up the section ‘Sponsored Links’ or something equally blatant. This is extremely easy for either a manual reviewer or an algorithm to spot. If you are familiar with HTML, you can also check the source of any link blocks to look for clues in the markup if you see something like ‘div id=’ads”, then you have another clue

Another obvious signal is where you find a block of links, often in a dubious place on the website (e.g the footer), that all link to a set of seemingly unconnected but commercial websites. A key thing to differentiate here is a ‘Blogroll’ from a block of ad-links – a Blogroll will usually link out to useful resources which tend to be a mix of other blogs, commercial and non commercial links – a block of ads will link purely to commercial websites.

Check the Anchor Text

Another obvious signal is in the anchor text of links – i.e. the text you see on the screen for the link. If all the links say things like ‘Credit Cards’, ‘Car Insurance’ etc, then there’s a str0ng possibility somebody paid for the website to link with favourable text – this is especially likely to be the case if:

a) the site being linked to isn’t called ‘Credit Cards’ (i.e. doesn’t have the url www.creditcards.com)

b) the site being linked is obviously targeting ‘Credit Cards’ as a keyword

Who are they linking to?

Possibly my favourite test of all when looking at a website’s outbound links is to see exactly who they are linking to. Generally, you can identify the major link buyers in any industry – the types that have chunky five figure link building budgets that buy rich links from anywhere and everywhere. If the website you are looking at links out to these (especially with rich anchor text in a sidebar) then it’s almost certain they are in the business of selling links – Google knows who the major offenders of link buying are, and therefore by association has a good idea of who the sellers are too – don’t get yourself involved with this crowd because you’ll probably be wasting your time/money… or worse, you may see a your site penalised.

Who owns the website?

Although this might lead to an occasional false negative, the owner of the website can give you a good clue as to their intentions. There are two interesting things to look out for here:

1) Is the website owned by a publishing company? If so, you can almost certainly buy a link. Generally speaking links tends to be nofollowed and go through some sort of tracking url. However, some publishing companies have wised up to the potential income from followed links…

2) Is there a disconnect between the websites owner details and their audience? For example is the website targeting a UK audience but owned by an individual outside the UK who also owns 572 other domains. Why should this concern you? Because there are literally thousands if not millions of websites created every day,  purely to sell links to other countries. Although there will sometimes be a perfectly legitimate reason why the domain owner is overseas,  it’s just another indicator that the website was created with the intention of selling links which can be balanced against other signs and signals.

Use your common sense!

It might be difficult to see every link on a page, but given you can pretty much ignore internal links for this purpose, scan your mouse over all the main link blocks and pay attention to the external links – a simple sense check can often tell you whether or not the link deserves to be there. Put yourself in the users shoes – if there’s no logical reason you’d want to click on the outbound links, then chances are, the site’s selling links.

Image credit Tim Parkinson

If you can’t make it along to our Online Marketing for Profit knowledge session fear not – you can still view the presentation right here

Flash was released in 1996 by Macromedia as an animation tool for the web and was later bought out by Adobe. It was rebranded as an Adobe product in the CS3 generation of software updates. It retains the timeline structure of an animation program, but still uses its own programming language, Actionscript, to power dynamic and interactive content.

Traditional Flash animation sites like Weebls-Stuff.com use vectors which for a long time were the best way you could stream animation to people. That all changed when Adobe introduced the FLV video format. You could then stream high-quality video over the internet much faster that any vector based animation could. Flash FLV powers YouTube and almost every video sharing site on the internet.

Not everyone, however, is a fan of using Flash; even here at Gravytrain we are divided.  Apple has taken the bold move to deny users of any iPad or iPhone the use of Flash. Although iPhone and iPad users can’t see Flash; the devices still allow users to view YouTube videos using the YouTube app.

The main problem with Flash is; even though some of the text in .swf files can be indexed by search engines, not all of it is. Google indexes flash text, but gives preference to text that can be read without the use of Flash.

Most people who use Flash use it to display video, animate a button or show an image gallery.  Apart from video, there are javascript and ajax alternatives that will do those jobs just as well, and make the web page easier to view more in most browsers. Sites like Miniclip.com allow users to play games that are rich, interactive Flash-based experiences; that can’t be replicated any other way.

I personally love the range of rich interactive experiences that you can create in Flash; such as the growing genre of interactive film.  Survive the Outbreak is a typical example of how Flash can be used to give users an experience that they have control over. You watch a film from the perspective of the protagonist, and at the end of each scene you choose the direction the film takes. Through your choices the narrative takes different turns; leading many potential endings. This is a very engaging experience in comparison to the passive experience of watching a film.

I wholeheartedly suggest you consider looking for an alternative every-time you want to use Flash on a webpage. Can you use a gif animation instead of Flash? Can Java be used to make that image gallery? But, if there is an instance where Flash would give you the best choice; such as a killer opening animation, go ahead and use it!

Whether this proves to be significant will depend largely on whether Google takes the reports submitted seriously. If there is a strong indication that submitting such a report leads to your competitors rankings suffering, it’ll become too tempting for many SEO’s to ignore.

As it becomes increasingly easier to analyse your competitor’s backlinks, it also gets increasingly harder to hide what you are doing.

Such a scenario create a tricky dilemma – are the benefits of reporting your competitors more significant than the drawbacks? While the benefits might seem obvious (your competitor could drop in the SERPS, possibly below you), the drawbacks are probably more complex than you might first think.

Firstly , the new form isn’t anonymous, meaning that you need to submit from an actual Google account , and whilst I’ve no doubt that most would-be-reporters will use a fake/spare Google account for this purpose, it doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t be traced back to your website. If there is any way of Google knowing who’s behind the report, then you better be sure your website would stand up to similar scrutiny.

Then there’s the problem of shared links – even if you have used a disconnected account to report your competitors from, you might still lose out if you have shared links with your competitor. Should the algorithm be used to apply penalties to sellers (and it likely will be), you might find that Google discounts all links from websites linking to both of you. Imagine you gained a natural editorial link from a website – it wouldn’t be unforeseeable in competitive industries for your competitors to have approached the publisher and ended up paying for a link; in this scenario it’s quite possible that both the editorial and paid links were invalidated.

The ultimate question in both of the above cases would be your view of the playing field – given most websites will likely have some questionable backlinks (even if you haven’t bought links or spammed blogs, there’s previous SEO agencies to think about, ex-employees, competitors, or just being unlucky enough to have attracted links from websites that are usually spammy), your strategic call would depend on where you see your websites links compared with those of your competitors. If you are low in the SERPS but have a much cleaner link profile than your competitors, then you are probably well placed to submit reports.

Even if you do judge yourself of having more to gain though – it doesn’t mean you will actually want to do this. I’ve never personally reported a competitor, and I know many others who would say the same – it just feels wrong. Even if you do feel it’s the right thing to do, do you really have time? It’s kind of like playing a game of Darts – you can try and put off your opponent, but may just prefer to focus on your own game.

All things considered, savvier SEO’s may come to another conclusion altogether – whether or not you choose to report your competitors, future proofing your own links has to be the way forward.

Image credit Drew_

Google Analytics is pretty easy to set up – you simply need to insert a small snippet of code into every page of your website. However, there are certain instances whereupon URL structure can adversely affect the data which you get out of the package.

For example, if you want to monitor conversions through your website via Google Analytics, the easiest way is to set up goals and funnels.

Goals are very easy to set up – all you need to do is insert the URL which all users who complete the goal hit. For example – if you were looking to track purchases, you’d probably use the ‘thank you’ page URL which users hit once the goal is completed.

Funnels are simply the steps a user has to go through in order to complete a goal. So, again taking our purchase example; step one might be a page where the user completes their name and address; step two might be where they insert their payment details; step three might be the confirm purchase page; and step four might be the thank you for purchasing page.

All of this sounds simple enough; however, you are reliant on all users hitting the same pages. Which, if a site uses Session IDs can be a problem…

We came across one such example a couple of weeks ago. We won ourselves a lovely new insurance client. Like many they were using a white label quote engine. Not unusually, the quote engine utilised dynamically generated session IDs. Ordinarily this isn’t a problem as the URLs are typically configured as follows:

www.website.co.uk/quote-form/step-one.html?uniquesessionid

These types of session IDs are simply ignored by Google Analytics, and as such you can get aggregated data on all of the users who viewed www.website.co.uk/quote-form/step-one.html – this means you can track conversions by setting up goals and funnels as normal.

However on this particular site the URLs were configured as follows:

www.website.co.uk/quote-form/uniquesessionid/step-one.html

As such a new URL was being dynamically generated for each user. This was causing problems in Google Analytics, making it impossible to track conversions via goals and funnels in the usual way.

However, there’s a nice little work around – by using a filter you can solve the problem:

Let’s use this URL as an example:  www.website.co.uk/quote-form/uniquesessionid/step-one.html

1. Login to your analytics account, however rather than clicking on ‘view reports’ click on ‘edit’.
2. You’ll be taken to your profile setting page
3. Click on add filter
4. Give your new filter an appropriate name
5. Select ‘Custom filter’
6. Select ‘Search and Replace’
7. From the Filter Field drop down list, select Request URI
8. In the Search String box insert:       quote-form/.*/
9. In the Replace String box insert:     quote-form/
10. Select ‘No’ for Case Sensitive
11. Hit ‘Save Changes’

Effectively this will filter out all of the Session IDs from the URLs – so rather than reporting on individual user’s URLs you will be able to view the data in aggregate, and set up goals and funnels as usual. Smart, huh?

]]> http://www.gravytrain.co.uk/blog/2010/03/using-google-analytics-filters-to-remove-session-ids-from-urls/feed/ 0 http://www.gravytrain.co.uk/blog/2010/02/keyword-selection-for-seo/ http://www.gravytrain.co.uk/blog/2010/02/keyword-selection-for-seo/#comments Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:42:05 +0000 Matthew http://www.gravytrain.co.uk/blog/?p=878 The first step in any SEO project is to establish which keywords/phrases we should pursue rankings for. For some clients, the question is an easy enough one to answer - I sell blue widgets, so I want to rank for ‘blue widgets’, ‘buy blue widgets’, cheap blue widgets’ and so on; but in most cases it’s somewhat more complex.

A typical ‘old school’ SEO keyword research technique would be to simply divide the volume of searches for the keyword by the amount of websites ‘competing’ for the search query, and find the keyword with the most favourable popularity/competition ratio. Whilst volume and competition should of course form part of the keyword research process,  this approach can be a little too simplistic.

As such, we typically consider the following factors when selecting keywords for our clients:

Relevance (and what converts!)

Before we even start looking at search volumes and competing websites we need to fully understand what kind of keywords would be relevant to our client – typically this involves looking at all the products/services offered and working out what a searcher might use to find the service/product in question.

The temptation here is to go too broad with keywords,  if you sell golf lessons, you’re probably likely to find that your best converting traffic comes from keywords like ’golf lessons’, or ‘golf lessons in <location>’. You might *want* to rank for ‘golf’  but unless you’ve a huge budget and have little or no concerns about seeing ROI from your activity, this probably isn’t the best choice of keyword.

If you’ve run PPC campaigns before, you should already have a goldmine of information to give you a good idea of which phrases are most relevant, and convert. If you’ve no such data, and poor rankings currently, it may be worth running a PPC campaign to test which keywords/phrases convert.

Commercial Value

This ultimately relies on having a clear understanding of the client’s business model – many businesses  either sell multiple products, or have multiple propositions for various  customer subsets e.g. for a site selling blue widgets – the keyword ‘luxury blue widgets’ might bring in higher margin business whereas ‘cheap blue widgets’ will deliver volume.

Volume

Once you’ve got an idea of what keywords might be feasible to target, the next thing you’ll want to consider is how many people are searching on the different variations – obviously more searches mean the potential for traffic is higher. Different variations can have surprisingly different search volumes even when the meaning is the same. For example, if you compare “caravan insurance” to “insurance for caravan” – 2 phrases which broadly mean the same thing – the search volumes are radically different.

Trends

Don’t overlook trends either – Google Trends is the most obvious source for information here, it’s not necessarily about only targeting keywords which are increasing in popularity but targeting a keyword in the descendance might not be the best use of time and resource.

Competition

Perhaps one of the most important considerations  – we basically consider this from 2 points of view:

1. What can be achieved for the budget available
2. What niches are being under-served

The budget , if known, will determine the absolute ceiling, while the keywords with low competition (yet reasonable volume and relevance) may represent easy wins. Assessing keyword competition can be tricky rather than relying on a purely arithmetic approach here we tend to look at several factors:

1. Strength of top sites (mozrank & domain mozrank of top websites)
2. What type of pages are ranking (homepage, powerful subpages or weak subpages)
3. Competing pages (allintitle search for the phrase in question)
4. Strength of sites at bottom of page one

There are more things that can be done (especially if the decision might require a high investment with a long payback), such as looking at whether the websites ranking have optimised anchor text or not, but it’s not always feasible to do this for every keyword.

Putting it all together

Good keyword research isn’t easy, it requires detailed thought and attention to get right, and when you have hundreds of potential keywords and many factors to consider it’s advisable to get the data into a format where you can make sense of it. There are many approaches but a balanced scorecard is probably the most obvious. An example might be as follows:

Your weightings will obviously depend on your clients priorities, and the data here is purely fictional, but hopefully it should give you an idea; in this case ‘Luxury Blue Widgets’ and ‘Dark Blue Widgets’ both look attractive, but given the competition differences it may be a wise strategy to target both ‘Blue Widgets’ and ‘Luxury Blue Widgets’ on the same page.

Even after you’ve done all of this work, it’s often just the start – combining primary keywords for pages (and secondary keywords you are able to pickup) will often follow this stage, as well as working out how to pickup mid/long tail variations of the keyword.

The one thing for sure though, is that if you spend the time to get this right from the start, you will be far more likely to see your efforts pay off….

We’ve recently won some lovely new SEO & PPC clients – as such we’re recruiting a PPC/SEO Exec (your time will be split roughly 50/50 on PPC and SEO), who’ll be based in our offices in Hampton Hill, TW12 1ND.

A full job spec is detailed below; to apply please email a CV and covering letter to hannah@gravytrain.co.uk or to discuss the opportunity further call 020 8941 2364.

Reporting to:

SEM Team Manager

Duties & Responsibilities

1. Assist in the management of our client’s PPC campaigns.
2. Assist in the planning, development and implementation of strategy to improve ranking, traffic and the conversion rates of our SEO clients
3. Identify and analyse key metrics and assess the performance of campaigns, providing clients with written monthly reports
4. Day to day client liaison via phone / email / face to face
5. Keep up with industry news and developments
6. Represent the company at industry events / conferences
7. Create new business pitch documentation and attend pitches

Person Specification

Personality

A self-starter you will be driven, positive and focused on delivering high quality results for our clients.

Skills / Experience:

Essential:

1. A minimum of one year’s hands on PPC experience gained either client or agency-side
2. Excellent written and verbal communication skills
3. Strong analytical skills
4. A genuine passion for the web, online marketing and social media

Desirable:

1. University graduate
2. Be active within the online marketing community
3. Previous experience of SEO / social media / online reputation management / email marketing

Working Hours

Monday – Friday 9am – 5.30pm.

Salary

Up to  £26k per annum depending on experience

Benefits

Private health care and subsidised gym membership.

SEO

Rand Fishkin explains how search engines judge the value of a link - essential reading.

Social Media

Over at 10e20 Rebecca Kelley teaches Social Media - McHammer style, 2 legit 2 quit - marvellous.

PPC

Chelsea Blacker shares an adwords tip – including your keywords in display URL subdomains - definitely worth a test, methinks. 

Usability

Tom Critchlow has penned an excellent post on improving conversion rates, and deserves a link for the title alone

Aaannnd Finally, Friday’s Saturday’s Funny

Courtesy of xkcd:

Image credit Flawka