French | Spanish | Portuguese | Italian | German | Japanese | Chinese | Korean | Russian | Arabic

Link-Building Activities

Most likely, you’ve already had some correspondence, possibly even several back-andforth e-mail communications, with potential linking sites and blogs. You may have also made directory submittals or explored linking opportunities in the Social Web. Today, review your e-mails and your Link Tracking Worksheet, and briefly summarize these activities. Here are some examples of this kind of commentary:

• I contacted 14 bloggers to alert them to our new line of Madras napkins, e-mailed five website owners seeking new inbound links, and requested updated URLs from four sites pointing to our old product page. Of these, our site received two link updates and one new link.

• On (date), I submitted our website to the Napkin Mania Directory in the category:…

• Surfing the Web, I found a long list of blogs and other sites that may wish to comment on or link to our website. Links will be requested after our new landing pages are complete.

• Three site owners stated that they would not link to us because… If you received useful feedback from any site owners, such as a rejection letter that stated specifically why you were turned down, consider quoting it in your report so that the idea doesn’t get lost in your e-mail inbox forever.

Google PageRank

Despite our misgivings about the usefulness of the Google PageRank value, we recommend that you track it for your landing pages. Why? It’s an easy way to gather at-aglance numbers that can help you see changes in your status over time.

You can see Google PageRank just by browsing to your landing pages and reviewing the Google Toolbar.

Google PageRank is good to know, but it’s not essential. If you’re short on time, you can skip this step.

Conversions and Traffic

Have you fallen in love with your web analytics program yet? We sure hope so. Today, you’ll look at some of the key measurements that can show the effects of Your SEO Plan and point you in the right direction for ongoing improvement.

Conversions

Conversions, especially if you’ve defined them properly so that they match the overall goals of your organization, are truly the bottom line of Your SEO Plan. During your Prep Month, you established a baseline on conversions to the best of your ability, and recorded it in your Quick Reference Report. Maybe you’ve got plenty of cold, hard facts and were able to document something like “One percent of site visitors, and 7 percent of search engine–based visitors, completed an online purchase transaction.” Or, perhaps you had to improvise a little: “According to the development department, very few of our catering customers have any awareness of the website’s existence, and there is no evidence that any wedding orders this year resulted from web visits.”

Take a look at your current conversion data as compared to the data you compiled for your Quick Reference Report. If there are differences, what caused them? Separating out all of the different factors that contribute to your bottom line SEO efforts, seasonal effects, even regular month-to-month fluctuations is almost impossible. Your mission in this report is to separate out the effects of your SEO campaign as well as you can. If there are any results that you can attribute directly to your SEO efforts today, make a note of them in your report. Here are some examples:

• Listing our site in the Home Décor Directory has resulted in a branding boost and 700 visits.

• Since we succeeded in getting the “Tea Time” page indexed in all of the major search engines, we have seen a 27 percent increase in lace doily sales.

• Four hundred click-throughs on our PPC campaign resulted in 16 sales of monogrammed napkin sets.

Traffic Stats

Your well-defined conversions are the most important measure of your SEO success, but they don’t tell the full story on their own. After all, knowing that conversions went up is nice, but it doesn’t give you insight into why they went up and what you can do to reinforce the trend. Here are some of the other measurements that we find useful:

• Search engine traffic as a percent of total traffic and as a percent of total new traffic. This is a good metric if you’re dealing with skeptical higher-ups, because some nice increases may help justify your SEO campaign.

• Overall average bounce rate compared to bounce rate by referrer, entry page, or referring keywords. For example, “The overall average bounce rate was 56 percent. Bounce rate from search engine visitors was only 25 percent, while bounce rate from our top referrer, ExpensiveDirectory.com, was 87 percent. Of our top landing pages, our new Napkin Holders page had the lowest bounce rate at 22 percent.” This information can tell you which audiences your website is serving best and which ones are disappointed by your offerings. It might provide ideas for new landing pages or keyword optimization choices.

• Top referring sites. This information helps you assess the value of your link building efforts.

• Keyword-by-keyword conversions and dollar values. This is a great way to assess your keyword choices, and determine whether you need to adjust your focus. For example: “‘Tea cozies’ had 16 conversions with a total value of $345. ‘Wholesale linens’ had 4 conversions with a total value of $6,500.”

• Conversion rate broken down by audience. For example, “Users who entered the site via pages in the Restaurant section had a 5 percent conversion rage, while users who entered via the Home section had only a 0.5 percent conversion rate.” You can segment your audience in any way that you find meaningful, as long as your analytics program will support it.

• Number of page views and/or time spent on site by keyword, landing page, referrer, or any other type of audience segmentation. Although a larger number of page views is not necessarily a plus (it could signal that people are having trouble finding what they need on your site!), for many sites it is a good indicator of audience engagement.

Your goal in this section is not just to document traffic it’s to come up with ideas for site improvement. If you discover a trend that you can’t explain, dig deeper until you have at least a hypothesis as to why it happened. Grab the most creative thinker on your team and brainstorm how you might test your guesses.

Internal Search Function

We mentioned that the internal search on your website can teach you about your site visitors, giving insights into who they are and what they need. If you already have an internal search engine on your website, don’t let its data go to waste! Data from your internal search engine can help you determine the following:

What are your site visitors searching for? If you sell shrimp deveiners and your internal search function is logging a lot of searches for “shrimp deveiners,” that might be a good thing…or it may not. It’s certainly nice that your visitors seem to want your product. But why do they need to search for it in the first place? Why can’t they find it by navigating your site? Finding a large number of searches for your top-priority keywords in your internal search means that you need to make this content easier to find.

What’s the (key)word on the street? When you were choosing keywords in the Prep Month, we advised you to try to get into the minds of your potential customers. The in-site search engine is a great tool for doing just that. Are they searching for “shrimp de-veiners,” “shrimp deveiners,” or something unexpected, like “shrimp cleaners”? Keep in mind, though, that this audience, having already decided to visit your site, may not behave the same as your general search engine audience.

Who’s coming to your site? If most of your site’s internal searches are related to finding a job in your organization or some other activity that has nothing to do with your intended conversion, it may be an indication that a substantial portion of your site visitors are not your target audience.

Are they getting where they need to go? Find the top 10 phrases entered by users of your internal search engine. Then, take each of them for a spin. What results came up? Were they your preferred landing pages or some crusty press releases? Depending on the technology behind your search function, you may be able to improve the results by taking advantage of the features provided by your internal search tool (you may be able to create specially formatted metadata or assign destination pages using an administrative interface).

For example, for your Clearance Products page, you can assign keywords like “discount” or “sale” even if these words don’t appear on the page and your internal search will then be able to show your Clearance Products page to anyone searching for those terms. Of course, you should never manipulate your internal search results to be irrelevant; you don’t want to display your Clearance page when someone is searching for “returns,” for example. But it’s your site, and assigning reasonable synonyms and related concepts to your search function’s metadata may be helpful to both your visitors and your conversion goals.

One of the easiest ways to find out all this data, and more, is by using the internal site search capabilities of Google Analytics. If you do this kind of extra-credit analysis, your internal search will be much more than a helpful feature for your visitors…it will also be a marketing tool for you!

Webmaster Tools

We talked about some of the benefits of Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer (MSN Live Search has a Webmaster Tool, too, currently in beta). These are the search engines’ own services, designed to assist website owners and marketers in other words, everyone reading this article with getting your site indexed and listed properly.

Here’s an up-front caveat: webmaster tools won’t directly help with ranks or indexing (there’s no “Rank me higher!” button). However, they are marvelous tools for troubleshooting indexing errors and communicating your preferences to the search engines. Here are the features that we think are the most important:

• Indexing and links

• Preferred URL

• XML Sitemaps

• Video Sitemaps

Indexing and Links

Using webmaster tools accounts, you can review basic data about your website, including when your pages were last indexed, what (if any) errors were found, and what feeds or Sitemaps you have submitted. Google’s tool is by far the richest; here you can even view PageRank summaries of your site’s pages and get your hands on some other cool tools: page analysis, robots.txt info, and a full list of inbound links.

Sign up for webmaster tools at these three URLs:

• Google: www.google.com/webmasters

• Yahoo!: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

• MSN Live Search: http://webmaster.live.com/

To access the full repertoire of options on Google, Yahoo!, or MSN, you’ll need to prove that you’re the site owner (you’ll need access to the server to upload a file or edit a home page meta tag). If you’re short on time, you can stick with Google, since it offers much more than the other two. Once you’re authenticated, here is some of the information about your site that you can find on Google Webmaster Tools:

Site indexing As SEOs, we follow a careful policy of being kind to search engine robots. Google Webmaster Tools will tell if you’ve done anything to offend the allimportant Googlebot. Just log into your Webmaster Tools account and click Diagnostics, then Web Crawl. You’ll see if there are any broken links, errors, timeouts, or unreachable URLs. Once you’ve got a handle on what’s wrong, task your team with making fixes.

Inbound links

One of the most common questions people ask us is, “Why won’t Google show all my inbound links when I perform a link: search?” We won’t speculate about Google’s motives, but we can tell you how to get Google’s full report of inbound links to your website. Log in at google.com/webmasters, then click on the Links tab. Voilà! We’ve seen Google Webmaster Tools report 10 times the inbound links you can see using the link: operator in the main search results.

What can you do with this information? Lots! You can spot-check the links for outdated mentions of your products or company. You can identify complaints or unflattering mentions that point to your website. You can find those friendly bloggers who are talking about you.

One thing you shouldn’t do, though, is assume that each of these links is transferring authority to your linked-to pages. Just because Google knows about the link and reports it back to you does not mean that the link has any worth in Google’s opinion. Preferred URL

You know about a common SEO handicap a canonical problem that happens when your site is accessible via more than one version of your domain. The most common canonical problem occurs when your site is available at both yoursite.com and yoursite.com (without the “www”).

If you have set up 301 server-side redirects from the alternate version(s) to your favorite version as we advised, it’s time to tell Google which URL you prefer. This is as simple as logging into your verified Google Webmaster Tools account, clicking Tools and then Set Preferred Domain, and selecting your favorite URL from Google’s list. Lest you think that this is a cure-all for your canonical problem, here’s the not-so-surprising truth: Google does not promise to abide by your preference.