SEO 101: How Your Website’s Structure Affects its SEO

When it comes to SEO training, most of the resources out there are quick to extol the benefits of both on-site optimization (typically, including your target keywords in key areas across your website) and off-site SEO (as in the case of external link building activities).

Site construction – courtesy © Maxim_Kazmin – Fotolia.com

However, many of these introductory guides gloss over a subject that’s just as important to your website’s natural search success—its underlying structure. In fact, there are a number of different ways your website’s structure can influence its overall SEO authority, so be sure to brush up on the following site structure elements to make your website is as search-friendly as possible.

Element #1: Site Navigation

At first glance, website navigation might seem like one of those things that happens organically. That is, you don’t plan out where you’ll place every page on your website; categories and hierarchies simply start to form on their own as the size and breadth of your website grows.

When it comes to SEO, though, this is a huge mistake! The structure of your website plays a tremendous role in its overall SEO authority, and the specific navigation elements you put into place deserve plenty of attention in this process.

Your first site navigation consideration should be to avoid using navigation types that make it difficult for the search engines to crawl through your pages. Particularly, steer clear of navigation structures that are built entirely in Flash or JavaScript. While these formats might look flashy to your visitors, they’re nearly impossible for the search engine spiders to parse and crawl.

Instead, stick with navigation schemes based in XHTML and CSS (or, if you must, images that use appropriate keywords in their ALT tags). These navigation structures are more easily read by the search engine spiders, making it more likely that your pages will be crawled, indexed, and displayed in the SERPs, where appropriate.

But beyond the initial setup of your website’s navigation structure, you’ll also want to pay attention to your website’s depth.

When it comes to websites, “depth” refers to the number of clicks needed to reach any page on your site from your home page. From an SEO perspective, a shallow website (that is, one that requires three or fewer clicks to reach every page) is far more preferable than a deep website (which requires lengthy strings of clicks to see every page on your site).

As an added bonus, don’t forget that shallow navigation structures improve your website’s usability, making it far less likely that visitors will give up trying to find the content they were looking for in your buried pages. This decreases your website’s bounce rate and may improve your overall average time on site, both of which are factors that are suspected to play a further role in SEO rankings.

Element #2: Internal Linking

Of course, if your website is large, controlling the depth of your website through your site’s navigation structure alone isn’t entirely feasible. If you have 100 total pages, for example, you’d need more than 30 separate categories to make all of your pages accessible within three clicks using navigation structures alone, which would almost certainly bog down your site’s appearance and functionality.

So, while structuring your navigation paths correctly from the start can help to improve your website’s SEO performance, you can also decrease your site’s depth through the use of internal linking.

In the world of SEO, there are two types of backlinks:

• External backlinks, which are links that point to your website from an entirely separate site, and
• Internal backlinks, which consist of connections between individual pages within your website.

Creating internal links between the pages on your website offers a number of different SEO advantages:

• As mentioned above, internal links decrease the number of clicks required to access each page on your website, allowing the search engines to use their crawl budgets more effectively.
• Internal links offer opportunities to use keyword-rich anchor texts throughout your pages (though you should be careful to only create internal links to relevant, useful pages, instead of using this as an opportunity to create keyword-stuffed links).
• Internal links improve the user experience on your website by providing readers with additional materials that may pique their interests. As a result, both average time on site and average pages per visit go up, leading to potential SEO and conversion rate benefits.

Fortunately, unlike plotting out your website’s entire navigation structure, getting started with an internal linking plan is easy. Whenever you add a new page, article, or blog post to your website, take a second to see if the readers who are accessing this new content might be interested in other topics you’ve covered elsewhere on your site.

If you do find opportunities to recommend related pieces, create internal links within your new content that point to these other website pages.

Again, keep in mind that, though there is some benefit to creating internal links that utilize keyword-optimized anchor text, this shouldn’t be your primary pursuit. Keep the focus on serving up interesting content to your readers, and don’t be afraid to skip internal linking on new content pieces altogether if you’d have to stretch to make other articles seem relevant.

Element #3: URL Structure

One final website structure element to consider is how your individual page URLs are built. As you might expect, there’s a potential SEO benefit to be had from integrating your company’s target keywords into this vital navigation area.

The specific steps you’ll need to take to set up an SEO-friendly URL structure depend on whether your site runs on HTML or a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla or Magento.

HTML websites

If you run an HTML-oriented website, your page URLs will be built according to the file names of every new HTML file you create and upload to your site.

For example, if you use a desktop website editing program like Dreamweaver to create a new article and save your file as “my-new-article.html,” the full URL of your article once uploaded to the root domain of your website will be “http://www.mydomain.com/my-new-article.html.”

Now, in this example, odds are you aren’t trying to get your website ranked for the keyword phrase “my new article.” So, instead of using generic file names, take the time to label each file with a descriptive name that includes your target keyword.

Be sure to separate multiple words with dashes, rather than underscores, as the search engine spiders may interpret words separated by underscores as a single word (as in, the file name “apple_pie” might be read as “applepie” to the search engines in some cases).

CMS websites

Typically, most CMS websites make it easy to create search-optimized page URLs, though you may need to tweak a few settings to get the greatest SEO benefit possible.

For example, in the case of WordPress, you’ll need to first navigate to the “Permalinks” section of the “Settings” area within your dashboard and select a link structure option that includes your post title within the full URL assigned to each post. If you don’t take this action, your URLs will—by default—include the numbers and codes created for each new post by WordPress’s standard settings.

According to the default WordPress settings, a new post URL structure could look like this:

http://www.mydomain.com/?p=144

By selecting the “Post name” option within the “Permalinks” panel, this URL would be transformed to:

http://www.mydomain.com/post-title.html

This second variation is both more appealing to readers (leading to higher rates of engagement on your website) and confers the SEO advantage of being able to include your target keywords in your URLs.

If you’re using a CMS other than WordPress, consult the Help section of your chosen platform for complete instructions on how to set up SEO-friendly URLs on your website.

Even if you’ve already built your website without these elements in mind, it’s still very possible to go back and make the changes needed to ensure that your website qualifies for full consideration by the search engines and their automated spider programs.

Try correcting one element, or even one element on one single page, at a time. With consistent effort, you’ll see substantial SEO benefits as the result of your site structure changes.

Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/website-structure-and-seo/54156/

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Attract your visitors through Attraction Marketing.

Why You Shouldn't Ignore Long-Tail Clients (Small Business Owners)

Hopefully most of you have already read the news, but in case you haven’t, I am very excited to be a full-time member of the SEOmoz staff! The announcement came out as I was en route from Blueglass X in Tampa toBIA Kelsey’s ILM West show in Los Angeles. In fact, and I’m still trying to catch up on thanking everyone inmy Twitter stream and on the original blog post.

Both conferences were excellent, but if you’ve never attended a BIA Kelsey show, it’s a completely different animal from conferences and seminars in the search industry. The conference contains very few “actionable tips that you can implement on Monday morning,” but that’s not the reason you attend. BIA Kelsey recruits executives from the major digital marketing technology and service providers to small businesses for extended 1:1 or 1:2 discussions with their analysts. By and large, these executives are surprisingly open about challenges they face, and although some sessions turn into sales pitches, the best ones give you real insight into the online marketing pain points and opportunities for small businesses across the country.

So, keeping that background in mind, I want to focus my first SEOmoz post on my #1 and #1a takeaways from the BIA Kelsey show. (There will be plenty of posts from me coming up over the next several months, and Rand’s excellent Whiteboard Friday last week will hopefully satiate you guys on local for the time being.)

Small businesses vs. Search marketing 

I have lived, breathed, eaten, slept, celebrated, and advocated small business internet marketing for the last eight years. But not even I realized until recently:

1) How large the disconnect between the search marketing industry and the small business community is.
1a) The size of the market opportunity for the consultants and agencies who can bridge this disconnect.

One of BIA Kelsey’s forecasts really crystallized this disconnect for me: their annual survey gauging the marketing mindset of the average small business owner. This survey breaks respondents into two categories: “core SMBs” and “plus spenders.” What is incredibly revealing for most people in our industry is the average annual marketing spend of these two groups: $3,000 and $82,600.

Note: these numbers are TOTAL marketing spend. Annually, not monthly. Even the “plus spenders” would have a hard time finding anyone on this list willing to take them on for less than a $5,000/month budget, assuming they were looking for an end-to-end, search-and-social-media monthly arrangement. The level to which this segment is being served by the broader search industry is substantial, but economics dictate that more established agencies tend to go after bigger fish.

On the other side of the spectrum, BIA Kelsey is one of the few companies out there who even considers the plight of the $250/month small business. And if you think $250 sounds like a small monthly budget, wait 'til you hear that these businesses actually spend closer to $100/month on their website and web presence (see slide 8)! This is the reality of operating a small business, though. Advertising costs for small businesses do not come from a corporate marketing budget; they come from family vacation budgets or college savings funds.

Why do I think the market opportunity is so large, then, for agencies who can serve these average businesses? Surely there is no margin in a stable of $250/month clients?

#1 You have virtually no competition for these clients

Jim Moroney of the Dallas Morning News candidly admitted that his newspaper had effectively “priced out” most small business advertisers years ago. His newspaper has a 600,000 subscriber distribution, and for the mom-and-pop dry cleaner or local restaurant serving one small neighborhood in Dallas-Fort Worth, those types of ads do not pencil out economically.

The analogy holds true today even in the digital era. Most small businesses in this $250/month segment are priced out of online advertising. Most of the major Internet yellow pages companies are thinking either of Adwords, display ads (whether they be CPM or CPC), or a combination of the two. There were very few presentations at the show focused on acquiring new customers via inbound marketing. Yet in many categories, $250 will only buy a handful of clicks per month, especially once you consider the Cost-of-Goods-Sold that third-party vendors need to build into their pricing.

The bottom line is that inbound marketing, i.e. “free” traffic, is the only sustainable marketing technique for this large segment of small businesses. No other option has enough margin to sustain a business on the sales side, so traditional advertising companies are simply not targeting this enormous potential customer base. The CEO of YP.com roughly admitted as much -- that his company was simply too big and too slow-moving to be able to compete effectively with a 2-3 person agency -- and I don’t think he’s alone in this admission.

#2 By default, all of your leads for this business segment are going to be high-quality, inbound leads

At $250/month, only companies at the very largest scale (basically, Google, Facebook, and Apple) can sustain a business with a sales force. There is just not enough margin to support feet-on-the-street at this price point. So, at least among the BIA Kelsey audience, everyone is targeting the “plus spenders.” And even if those companies are able to bring on a business at this price point, they usually end up underserving them. Almost every company that has tried serving this segment at scale bemoans the tremendous “churn” rate when these clients cancel their contracts as a result of poor service.

No one is targeting these businesses from a sales perspective, so they’re literally forced to do their own research. Business owners making the effort to seek you out are going to be more engaged in the marketing process, more responsive, and more likely to implement changes or give you buy-in on your recommended tactics.

#3 The upside for these businesses could be huge

Chances are, you are starting from scratch with this segment. If they have a website, it’s probably completely un-optimized, and a few Title Tag and H1 changes will dramatically increase the amount of business they get from the Internet. Maybe only a few have claimed local search listings, or maybe the business only has one inbound link from a local college or community organization.

Unlike more competitive categories in organic search (like e-commerce or travel), success can still be achieved relatively quickly in most local categories. You're going to see a "wow" factor associated with even moderately effective white-hat tactics. And while small business owners have a reputation for “churn” in this industry, as I mentioned above, most of them are incredibly loyal to companies who actually provide value with their services.

So, what can you do to serve business owners at this lower end of the market?

Here are just a few basic tasks that rookie or junior search professionals can perform without requiring any time investment by a senior employee:

• Improve Title Tags and H1 tags
• Submit citations (whether in-house or outsourced)
• Set up Google Alerts
• Set up a WordPress blog
• Provide editorial advice for weekly blog post topics and Facebook posts
• Control blog commenting on the business owner’s behalf
• Draft review solicitation emails on the business owner’s behalf
• Track the success of review solicitation campaigns via a spreadsheet
• Reach out to business and community organizations for locally-relevant links
• Create hyper-targeted Facebook ad campaigns under $50/month in total spend*
  *In my opinion, Adwords has effectively killed its own small business market opportunity with the increasing number of "not enough search volume" long-tail keywords and ever-higher minimum bid levels.

Let’s assume your agency wants 100% markup on your employees’ or contractors’ time. Let’s also say that a decent hourly rate for a recent liberal arts college graduate is about $17/hour (this works out to a $36,000/year annual salary). This means your agency can afford roughly seven hours per month of marketing on behalf of an average small business owner. Let’s be even more conservative and say that a more senior employee at $100/hour will need to review each account for 30 minutes per month. This still leaves five hours per month, per business for the college grad. Think of the number of tasks in the list above that could be completed in that amount of time!

Helping business owners at the lower end of the marketing spectrum has been a cause for me since I started in the search industry. Beyond the near-moral imperative that I’ve felt personally, I also see incredible economic potential from serving these long-tail customers.

OK, that’s enough out of me for today. I’d love to hear from you guys: how many of you serve clients anywhere near this $250/month price point? What kinds of services do you provide them? What has your experience been like? How many have served them in the past but moved onto clients with bigger budgets? Looking forward to the discussion with you in the comments.

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-you-shouldnt-ignore-longtail-clients

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New topic: What is Attraction Marketing?

Is P.C.P the New SEO?

For years, optimizing a website was quite a simple affair. Through the course of search engines indexing sites, there were various algorithm updates too, but till Panda and its good friend Penguin came along, things like link building were quite easy to achieve. Article sites, blog comments, forum posts etc. and etc., these and other elements were great for bulking out a link profile and gaining some high PR. Exact match domains enabled many affiliate and Adsense based sites to ride high in the SERPs.

Fast forward to today, and if it is not crystal clear to internet marketers that things post Panda and Penguin are very, very , different, the it really should be. Proper Company Promotion, or P.C.P, is now the only safe and effective way to gain web traffic and also improve rankings.

Proper Company Promotion – courtesy © alphaspirit – Fotolia.com

Is SEO Dead?

Seo hasn’t “died”, but it has certainly changed dramatically. For one instance, back links now need to be earned, rather than created. That is one of the main rules now, covering the links that come back to the websites you are promoting. Links that carried a lot of value, for example article links, are now only really useful for adding a little bit of diversity to your link profile, the same with generic press releases that do not offer anything more than 400 words of empty writing.

For a long time the SEO world (in many, rather than in all cases) lazily adding masses of links to clients sites, many of which were empty and built just for the fact they would be a back link, was THE strategy. Finally in 2012 Google played the swan song for sites optimized so (or was it a Penguin song?). Sites disappeared from page 1 of Google quicker than a bowling ball dropped in the backyard swimming pool. Tears were shed, cries of unfairness echoed around the online marketing world. Much as I may have sympathy, I can’t help feeling that we should all have seen this coming. It is not as if the search engine gods at Google hadn’t explained to us all year after year, what they expected from those practicing SEO, and how to keep on the right side of search relevance, when promoting theirs or their clients sites.

P.C.P

Proper Company Promotion means exactly what it suggests. Rolling up your sleeves and actually earning the links and traffic that you have been trying to gain from various link building services, and short term blasts from this or that software link creator. PCP doesn’t have to be very expensive, though it is more time consuming, it’s all about value really. What is the true cost of improper SEO, after all? Sure, those paying you may have to pay more to get the job done properly and have some “future proofing”, but in the long run the proof will be in the pudding. Here are some examples of what can be done to create “real” links and also enhance company brands and exposure with  their target clientele.

• Sponsor an event, the size of which will always depend on your budget. You may supply the awards, or the cost of a kids’ football league with their equipment, for instance. Get local newspapers involved, release a press release that explains what you are doing and how it is benefiting the recipients. Make sure that any website that is involved with anyone benefiting from the sponsored event contains content about your business/website, and is linking back to your site. The press release will also generate real links that will also pass traffic, Google loves links that pass on traffic to a site. The buzz generated will help to enhance the company brand and the exposure will help generate more traffic to your website.
• Guest post on blogs that are relevant  to the niche your business is in. Most blog owners are always looking for high quality and information rich content. Blog posts still carry weight at the moment, this may change as the marketing spammers out there try to abuse its ability to help sites rank. Writing between 500 – 1500 words that are useful and informative to those reading within your industry  will help gain you traffic through any links that are placed within the content you have written, and enhance the authority of your company within your business or customer community. Poor quality content is not accepted by most “authority” blogs so the content needs to be useful and therefore highly readable.
• Advertising is still a great way to get traffic back to your website, and visibility for your business and/or product or service. You can place banner adverts on forums and blogs that are relevant to your business niche. You may well ask to add a blog post to the same sites you are advertising on as they will view you as a customer and be interested in keeping you happy, (hopefully). Make any advert links no follow so that Google doesn’t think you are merely buying a link. If you gain a blog post from the site(s) that you are advertising on you can benefit from a link and an advert from the same site. This is a perfectly legitimate thing to do in the eyes of Google, and will gain you a great deal of traffic and brand authority.

There are many other strategies that can help gain you proper, earned back links, as well as enhance the authority of your brand and get you very valuable exposure within your market place. No one tactic should be used on its own. Successful search engine optimisation entails a mixture of different strategies and making sure that company branding and information reach as many people, on as many different platforms, as possible. Making sure that you are also looking after your onsite affairs is obviously a must. There is no point driving traffic to a site that cannot give your potential clients and customers what they are looking for. Social media platforms also need to be used as much as possible, promoting offers, blog posts and any information that is seen as useful for the business community that you are in.

Lets all think about how we can earn a back link, rather than how we can create one. The long term benefits of any online marketing campaign should always trump the short term gains, and P.C.P is a long term thought process.

Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/is-p-c-p-the-new-seo/56627/

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New topic: Saving time by using Gmail Filters!

How to Come Up with Share-Worthy Content Ideas for Any Niche

A common and convenient excuse for people who aren’t getting the traction they want with content marketing and SEO is that their industry is too boring and too specific, and as a result they can’t create interesting content. This is something that’s been talked about frequently by marketing blogs, and there are a lot of great resources available for coming up withshareable content ideas for boring niches. That said, it’s still definitely a pain point and something many people point to as a barrier to entry for content creation, so I want to share one specific tactic you can use to start to come up with content ideas that folks will share and link to.

Content creation – courtesy © alphaspirit – Fotolia.com

Model Ideas After Content That’s Already Been Shared

It sounds pretty simple but one of the best ways to create content people will share is to look at other content that they’ve already shared, and model your topics and the content of your blog posts, articles, infographics, and free tools after that content. If you had an online marketing software company this would be pretty easy: you’d look at popular publishing sites like Search Engine Journal, communities like SEO Book or Inbound.org, and see what online marketing related stories made it into larger publications and start to develop some ideas with a new slant but similar “hooks” to what’s already being shared around what tends to do well.

But what if you’re in a niche where there aren’t obvious central, “community” oriented sites to mine for topic ideas?

One tactic that tends to work well is to look at what some of the savvier communities on the Web are sharing, and create something similar for your niche.

Developers and people in the “tech space” are typically folks who spend a significant amount of time on social networks and are subsequently plugged into memes and frequently a few steps ahead of other parts of the Web in finding interesting content with share-worthy hooks and angles. One advantage to working in what’s considered a “boring” niche is that the niches that are more boring tend to also be behind the curve on content marketing ideas and different memes, so something that’s already become somewhat trite to an audience of software engineers and online marketers can be a brand new, totally unqiue angle when applied to a different niche.

Your niche may be more or less boring than these, but if we look at a single tech aggregator we can start to see some ideas for content that we know folks are interested in reading about and sharing:

So obviously a lot of the things that get shared will just be “news” items, which is likely not something your manufacturing or call center company has the resources to crank out consistently. We also see some fairly obvious ideas you may have already thought of, like product reviews, but if we look closer we see some pretty interesting content ideas that we could apply to any of the industries above:

• Making Cents – This article goes into why bands are getting a raw deal on royalties from streaming music services, which is obviously a very interesting topic. What if you took that same topic and applied it to your niche? Let’s say you sell investment castings. An in-depth article on the real economics of manufacturing which looked at who is getting a relatively raw deal in the manufacturing business and even expanded to talk about topics like how manufacturing has changed over time, how the health of the manufacturing industry impacts larger economic trends, what factors lead to a healthy or not-so-healthy manufacturing ecosystem? This could be a pretty intriguing content piece that would give you an asset on your otherwise boring investment castings site that a number of blogs and Websites might be interested in linking to, sharing and visiting.
• As Boom Lures App Creators, Tough Part is Making a Living – This post looks at a specific couple who lost a significant amount of money trying to develop mobile apps. Let’s imagine you’re trying to see what content ideas you can get from this for your farm equipment site. What if you did one (or a series) of really in-depth portraits of folks within your industry who had hit rough times? Maybe for your tractor and farm equipment site you could go out and find some family farmers having a rough time of it and profile them. Maybe you’d also focus the articles on a specific issue that you see as problematic and would like to see changed (a specific policy or trend). This would give you something that other folks who are going through similarly difficult times would empathize with and likely share, and by addressing a specific issue you’ll also have the support of people who feel the same way you do, and the attention of people on both sides of the issue.
• When the Nerds Go Marching In – This article looks at the role technology had in Obama’s presidential campaign victory. Let’s say we run a call center service and are looking for content marketing ideas. What if we created an infographic or in-depth article on the role that call centers play in political campaigns? Maybe we could highlight specific popular issues and/or movements that were propelled to victory with the help of really strong outbound calling strategies, and really detail how those strategies worked. Then we’d have a piece of broad interest that could also serve to humanize what many people consider a net negative in society.

Now that’s just three examples from this page – but now imagine if we do this process every day or every few days and keep a running list of all of the ideas we come up with. Then imagine if in addition to TechMeme we look at other aggregators like Hacker News, the Launch Ticker, or even broader sites like Reddit to find great content ideas and save anything that seems like something we could apply to our niche? We’ll have a nice, long list of ideas that we can consistently refresh over time.

And there are a lot of areas outside of tech aggregators that you can apply this methodology to: in going outside your niche and identifying the really remarkable, most-often shared content in other niches you’ll almost always come back with some awesome ideas for content, regardless of how “boring” your topic may be.

Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/share-worthy-content-ideas/56514/

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An interesting topic about - Finding a Job.

Forget Rankings: Here Are 6 SEO Metrics That Matter

It would be an understatement to say that the SEO landscape has changed a lot through the years. In just the last two years the changes have been dramatic.

Panda and Penguin top the list as the most visible game-changers, but there is another one that occurred somewhat under the radar – but has been equally dramatic in its impact on SEO.

That change is Search Plus Your World. In a nutshell, Search+ personalizes your search results. Google evaluates your location, brand mentions, your friend’s search history, who is in your social media sphere and even your search history.

Think custom-tailored results.

What that means is you and I could both search for “swine flu” or “tablet” and come up with different results. Each of our respective result pages will be tailored toward those factors I mentioned above.

When the number of searches for those terms multiply into the thousands – now you, as an SEO practitioner, have a problem. A typical client is looking for consistent rankings in the top three spots on a number of key terms. That’s what he’s been trained to expect. He or she is thinking old-school search, and will be sorely disappointed in your results.

What you need to get him to think about are the new-school SEO reports, because Search+ killed normal rankings. What exactly are those new reports? Here are the six you need to pull from Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools.

1. Average Rankings

Obviously Google knew what they were thinking when they developed Search+ from both sides of the equation. They are trying to give the end users the best possible results out there, while giving SEO practitioners, who are on the other side of the equation, the tools they need to stay on top of the game.

This is where the Average Rankings report comes in. Here’s how Google explained it:

Average Ranking gives you the ability to gauge how many links in Google are being seen across the board. In other words, it’s a weighted measure of all impressions.

Start with this metric because the client, no matter what you tell them, will still want to see ranking reports. You probably won’t be able to break him of that. So, generate an average ranking report and show them how their pages and website is performing overall.

2. Impressions

An impression report used to be the redheaded stepchild of SEO. Who cared about how many times your search query listing appeared? Who cared about eyeballs? What you want is action – people clicking through to the site.

So in the old days of Internet marketing you’d use impression against click-through rate to develop a conversion ratio. That was something you could visibly improve upon.

Well, now that we're in the world of Search+ it’s again important to know how many eyeballs there are on a comparative search term. You can’t work the white hat tactics anymore and nab number one, so now you need to know who is seeing what, where and how often.

What you really want to know is if your page is even showing up for your keywords. And where.

But impressions probably don’t mean what you think it means. And this is critical if you want precise tracking. See, Google looks at two things when it comes to impressions.

For example, if you do a non-personalized search on Google with “Search Engine Watch,” this is what you will get:

Google displays seven possible URLs you could click on. But don’t count that as seven separate impressions. What you see above is one impression.

Here’s where it gets tricky: a hit on one of the sitelinks equals a hit to the top level domain. When people are clicking through to a page from a search query listing you might see an inflation of your top-level domain hits. So, if you want to deliver accurate reports, make the necessary adjustments.

However, if on the same page you have two different listings (your root and an interior page), then these listings will count as two separate impressions.

3. Visitor Growth

The next report you need to train your client to love is the visitor growth report in Google Analytics. It’s a baseline growth metric. What I like about this report is its simplicity: the trend shoud be going up. If it’s doing that, then you're succeeding. If it is flat-lined or going down, you're failing.

The other thing about this report your client might like is that you can calculate expected qualified leads from traffic – or your reach.

It’s necessary to report accurately by separating the new visitors and the repeat because that will impact your reports. For example, pulling in repeat visitors is a good sign that your content is compelling. If the ratio is skewed to new visitors, however, you might be delivering good headlines, but not substantial content.

4. Conversions

A conversion is what happens when somebody successfully completes a goal you’ve created in Google Analytics. These goals include things like buying or subscribing on a landing page.

This report will help your client see how those impressions that lead to visitors are actually turning into profit. This is also how to evaluate ads, copy and keywords. Are they working together? Can you isolate the weak link? Where are people leaving your site in your sales cycle? Conversion goals will help you decide.

This report is all about conversion, and that is decided on two measurements:

• One-per-click: A one-click conversion means you're measuring a single action like signing up for a newsletter or downloading a report. A conversion equals someone successfully performing your goal. Your ratio is simple: impressions versus conversions.
• Many-per-click: Sometimes you have goals that don’t end with a single action – like when you're trying to measure the path an agent takes through your purchase path. This will demand you use a many-per-click measurement.

5. Exact Match

If you take a peek at the Google Analytics exact match you’ll notice that it looks a lot like the PPC exact match: you're targeting a specific URL, and will only get reports delivered on that particular URL.

Who should care about this? Established businesses that are going through a rebrand (you’ll want to avoid domains with keywords and focus on your brand name, which is what people will search for). Or even new businesses where local search (establishing the city name in the URL) is a key part of your SEO strategy.

This is important because you can narrow your efforts to one very precise URL – and eliminating any confusion that might come up from similar URLs. Say you're targeting /purchase-chickens. Google Analytics will ignore all variables that might fall under that variable (/purchase-chickens.html for example. If you want to measure that URL, then create a separate goal).

6. Regular Expressions Match

I like to view regular expressions match as an extension of exact match because it allows you to bring under one umbrella similar goals. Using our example from above, inside Google Analytics identify your regular expression match by typing in “^/purchase-chickens”. In essence, you're telling Google Analytics to hunt down metrics on any page within that family of URLs: /purchase-chickens.html, /purchase-chickens/blog and so on.

What you won’t see are URLs with those keywords, but flopped: blog/purchase-chicken or subscribe/purchase-chicken (you can find that data, however, by using the $ symbol instead of the ^ symbol).

Conclusion

Being a metrics rock star is definitely a requirement in this new world of SEO rules where the landscape is changing daily and c-level executives are demanding more and more accountability when it comes to your SEO endeavors.

In other words, you have to validate your work.

But that’s always been the case, really. Yet, now, validating your work is getting easier when you know the right metrics to share – and how to explain them to your client or boss.

Armed with these new tools you can explain how high rankings alone are not enough (or even the most important factor) when it comes to search. You can tell them that conversion is what counts. And you know how to increase their conversion.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2231719/Forget-Rankings-Here-Are-6-SEO-Metrics-That-Matter

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Please do read this blog: Finding and Snagging a Part Time Job

Building a Video SEO Strategy

The core tactics of technical Video SEO are pretty easy to pick up. You can read through the bulk of what there is to know about getting rich snippets, optimizing for YouTube, and driving links back to your site within a couple of hours. While advice on these tactics will adjust and evolve as new technologies and iterations of the algorithm are released, there is an evergreen side to video marketing; one that both SEOs and creative marketers consistently fail to comprehend. And that is... 

Defining and implementing a goal-driven strategy.

Creative agencies often fail at this, simply because they don’t know how SEO works. Most creatives don’t understand the full consequence of embeds or pointing to YouTube and Vimeo rather than to a company’s site. Typically they don't understand how to get rich snippets, and so typically fail to get companies the SEO benefit due to them for the content they invest in.

SEOs fail because most have no say in the creative process for video, and are typically invited to do “video optimization” after the video has been shot, cut, and edited. Such a process ends up looking a little like this:

1. Take a look at the existing content.
2. Work out what goal best suits that content.
3. Implement the appropriate technical optimization.

And this is the consequence...

Thus follows the often observed, awkward disconnect of marketers attempting to make promotional product videos “go viral.”

As with copywriting, content creation, and development, success in the video space looks like "integrating  the creative and the technical aspects of SEO."

For video, this means taking a goal driven strategy from inception to launch:

1. Define the business goals.
2. Define the appropriate audience, hosting, and promotional strategy for the goal.
3. Create content that matches the business goals and the audience demographic.

In this post, I want to take a step back and outline the core goals I believe video can provide for SEO, the kind of content required for each goal, and the common mistakes made by companies both big and small in this field.

Consider this post a prequel to my last SEOmoz post which has more explicit tactical details on how to match the creative ideas to the technical implementation required.

Possible Goals for Video SEO

Rich Snippets

Video rich snippets have a higher click through rate than normal organic results, and so are an incredibly valuable asset for the kind of pages you want to drive a lot of search traffic to, directly from the search results. In the vast majority of instances, these pages are typically “product” or “category” pages in some form.

In the simplest terms, you can get rich snippets by self hosting your videos and submitting a video sitemap. Google is currently unable to read the “quality” of content outside of YouTube, so it actually doesn’t matter what kind of content you have if you’re trying to get a rich snippet. Indeed, for the more grey-hat minded...it's even possible to get rich snippets for images that are just encapsulated in a video container format.

Common objection: can I not get Rich Snippets for YouTube videos?.

It’s not impossible to get a rich snippet back to your own site with a YouTube video. Yoast’s Video SEO Wordpress plugin (which is excellent, by the way) offers a method of doing it. However, this and other methods only work with a hack and when the video isn't performing particularly well on YouTube, making it strategically redundant. If a video is not returning many views or generating engagement on YouTube, then it’s doing nothing except devalue the overall quality of a channel and restrict the ability of that channel to rank. Especially when you can get secure hosting for free, there is no reason to do that.

Conversions

Video can be a fantastic way to improve conversion rate, again, particularly for commercial landing pages.Appliances Online have created videos that are a fantastic example of undertaking this goal driven strategy with immense success.

A user who watches an Appliances Online video is twice as likely to convert and spends 9.1% more money on average. When considering the average price of white goods, it’s not difficult to work out how quickly those videos will pay for themselves.

These videos work because they carefully take into account the context of their target audience, which is “on the cusp of buying a washing machine.” The videos bridge the gap between interest and conversion, by engaging on a personal level with the likely questions and concerns of the interested party. Conversion videos should be informational, rather than promotional; more “shopping channel” than “TV ad.” However, these videos do not need to be "product" focussed, and can just as easily be created for service sector businesses. 

Earlier this year, Kurtz and Blum, a Law firm in Raleigh, North Carolina - created 53 videos for $4000 ($75 per video) - each of which describes, on a very personal level, a specific service that they offer their clients in need of legal advice. Through this work alone, Kurtz and Blum saw a 14% month on month increase in traffic.

Videos for conversion should also almost always be self-hosted or hosted with a secure third-party solution, rather than put on YouTube. Why? Because these videos should invariably also be used to get rich snippets and drive additional traffic to the "money pages" of a website. 

Common objection: can I put this “conversion focussed” content on YouTube as well as securely hosting?

Usually not, for the following reasons:

1. It’s very difficult to target specific, product focused videos to a different keyword

If you put content on YouTube as well as self hosting and embedding the content on your site, one of the ways of ensuring YouTube doesn’t outrank you for your site is to target this version to a different keyword. However, as with the Appliances Online example, if you have a video about the "Bosch Classixx Washing Machine," it’s very difficult to find more than a couple of variations of relevant keywords.

2. Potential cannibalization of shares and links

If potential customers/influencers share your YouTube video rather than your product page, you miss out on the link equity. This can also affect sales and word of mouth marketing, as product videos invariably make little sense outside of the context of the supporting page. Especially if you want to retarget visitors with PPC ads, driving customers to your site has to be the goal; and duplicating content on YouTube can hinder this.  

3. Devaluing your YouTube channel for SEO through lowering the average quality of content

From some tests I’ve run at Distilled, I think there’s reasonable grounds to believe that YouTube algorithmically rate channels based on the cumulative and average “quality” of the content uploaded. Practically speaking, if your videos have all been very popular, your channel and new uploads will tend to rank very well. Conversely, if your channel has lots and lots of videos on it, few of which get much traction, then the SEO consequence is negative. Therefore, adding a whole bank of product videos (most of which probably won't do very well) can serve to dramatically devalue your channel. It’s possible to mitigate against this by creating a new channel for your product videos (as Zappos have done), but you run the risk of setting this channel up for failure to a greater or lesser extent.

4. Generating negative brand awareness.

YouTube is a community platform, as much a social network as a search engine. For users discovering your brand, you want the first touch to be a positive demonstration of your identity and quality, which video can both help and hinder. Attempting to sell users a product before they’ve visited your site often isn’t going to work very well and you can turn off those who would otherwise have been positively disposed to your presence on YouTube. Product videos aren’t created with the intention of building brand awareness and as such, and they normally do a pretty bad job of it.

Brand Awareness

Video is a fantastic form factor to improve brand awareness, as it's an easy way to display the ‘faces” of a company, either through actually filming the people who work there or by explaining the “character” of the company through the integration of story, imagery, and sound.

There are fundamentally two different methods of improving brand awareness through video: you can either pay for it, or generate it organically.

In both instances, the best place to host such video is on YouTube, the world’s second biggest search engine and absolutely best place to put video that you want to be “seen.” (You should also put branding video on other platforms too, such as Vimeo).

To generate that awareness organically, you need to create “a creative story, attached to your brand.”

If you’re willing to pay for the awareness, either through YouTube/Google Display Network Advertising or viral seeding services (I recommend Unruly Media), then you can alternatively create content in the traditional, promotional “Tv Ad” model. However, to get the most bang for your buck from CPV advertising, you should make sure any video you plan to seed is under 30 seconds in length.

Common objection: I don’t have the money to build anything that good, but want to have a YouTube presence. Why can’t I put my product videos up there?

While YouTube channels featuring a large number of product videos can be ROI positive, especially when combined with a paid video advertising campaign, my experience is that they are far less ROI positive than seeding a targeting ad campaign through YouTube advertising and having rich snippets point back to the product videos on the business’s own domain.

As well as creative stories, tutorials are also a great way to build up your brand identity as experts in a specific field. These can be extremely simple, easy to make either through filming physical products and providing advice...

...or for software/services businesses, this can be done very simply using screencasts or by recording lectures/conferences e.g. SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday.

Links and Social Shares

Typically, the best way to get links back to your site with video is to create valuable and useful video content that simply does not make sense in isolation from a wider mixed-media page type. A perfect example of this technique is the Simply Business guide to WordPress that currently has 137 linking root domains according to Open Site Explorer.

Alternatively, another way to build links and shares back to your site is to take the kind of video you should create for organic brand awareness, but securely host the content on your own site, rather than putting it on YouTube and Vimeo.

Under this model, you'll also need to ensure you provide an embed code that features a text link at the bottom back to your site. I've built a tool to help you do this quickly, which can be found here.

Summary of Goals and Content Type

Common objection: can I target more than one goal with the same bit of content?

Yes. But, you probably shouldn't. That’s not to say you can’t use the same piece of content for two different goals, but when you do, you typically dilute the return you’re going to get, either because your content will not be particularly well suited for the goal, or because the technical implementation will cause compromise.

In most instances, it’s much more effective to directly and exclusively target one of the goals, rather than attempt to do everything with one piece of content. However, do remember that conversions and rich snippets should always be treated as conjunctive goals; as essentially two facets of the same strategic approach.

So what does a fully comprehensive Video SEO strategy look like?

With some variance dependent on vertical and business model, companies looking to achieve all of the above should look into creating four different kinds of content: one to target each marketing specific goal and audience demographic :

1. Video created to improve conversions (with video sitemap submitted to get rich snippets)
2. Video created to increase brand awareness through inbound channels
3. Video created to increase brand awareness through paid advertising
4. Video created to drive links and social shares back to the company’s site

I hope you found this post a useful resource. If you're interested to read more about the ideas and approaches suggested, then I've written a very large  (but pretty comprehensive!) guide to online video marketing which can be found here.

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy

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Interesting topic: How to save your time by using Gmail Filters?