Posted on December 4, 2011 by Hans Riemer
For Google's eyes only!
One of the most important things a Web Analytics tool can tell you is the keywords people are typing to find your website on the search engines. Lately, however, Google has been blocking significant portions of that data, ostensibly for privacy reasons.
To see what we mean, here’s an example of keywords as a traffic source. You can do this yourself in your own Web Analytics account. These instructions are for the new user interface in Google Analytics but instructions for the old user interface are also provided in parentheses, if appropriate.
- Log in to your account (and then click View Report).
- Select Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic (Select Traffic Sources > Keywords and then select “non-paid” just below the graph).
- Scan down the list of keywords that brought non-paid traffic to your website. You may need to expand past the first 10 that are shown by default. You are looking for a keyword called “not provided” or “not set”.
In the actual example shown below, Organic Search brought 4,810 visits over a 30-day period. Of those 4,810 visits, the #1 keyword was “not provided” which brought 1,110 visits.
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Take a few minutes to increase visibility for your business!
Google Places is a significant and free way to advertise your local business. Unfortunately, many business owners are not taking advantage of this valuable tool. We want to help you set up a Google Places listing so you can make the most of this great opportunity!
We previously wrote a couple of articles entitled “Improve Google Places Ranking With These 5 Optimization Tips” and “What Are Google Tags and How Should You Use Them To Enhance Your Local Business Listing”. These were both intended for people who already had listings and just focused on a few of the features for Google Places.
Download our FREE step-by-step illustrated Google Places SEO guide intended for people who have never set up a local business listing or need additional explanation on some of the specific fields.
Learn more…
Posted on August 4, 2011 by Hans Riemer
Who wants the worst website award?
In our previous post about the Google Panda update, we mentioned that inbound links, while still very important, are not weighted as heavily as a ranking signal as they were previously. What has gained in importance is website quality and user experience. As far as inbound links are concerned, they are still extremely important as a ranking signal but Panda now enables Google to analyze links more carefully. Unnatural linking patterns are now more likely to harm your rankings than before Panda.
Let’s talk about website quality and user experience. Imagine that you’re Google and you want to present only the best sites at the top of the search results. But how do you rate website quality via software? Quality is really something best left to a human being, or many human beings, to gauge.
For several years, Google has provided the public with a dizzying array of “free” tools and applications. These include Google Search (a tool so ubiquitous that it has become a verb), Google Analytics, the Google Toolbar and lately a number of social apps including the Google +1 button.
Google doesn’t charge for these applications. However, we all know that the popularity of Google Search is what drives Google’s core revenue business, namely, keyword sponsorships via AdWords. If everyone switched to a different search engine overnight, Google would lose 2/3 of its AdWords revenue. (The other 1/3 is derived from AdWords clicks on non-search related websites, which Google calls the Display Network.)
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Posted on June 28, 2011 by Hans Riemer
Where did my website go?
Over the past couple of years, there’s been a sharp increase in complaints about poor quality websites showing up at the top of Google’s search results. In response, Google issued a software update, known as Panda, on February 23, 2011. The fundamental goal of the Panda Update was to downgrade the rank of websites that didn’t offer users unique, valuable information. One website that was mentioned in this regard was eHow.com, which offers many thousands of how-to guides, and has sometimes been referred to as an example of a “content farm.”
Panda had a powerful effect, banishing many formerly top-ranking sites to second-class status and elevating other, previously lesser known sites, to the top of the rankings. It didn’t have as significant an impact on eHow as Google wanted, so a subsequent release of Panda was made in April.
Panda is the latest escalation in the war between Google, which wants to rank websites by quality and usefulness, and people who want their website to appear at the top of Google’s search results for certain keywords whether they deserve to or not.
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Posted on June 14, 2011 by Hans Riemer
Personal Search Results
Last week, someone emailed me a link to a YouTube video that was recorded at a TED conference. In it, Eli Pariser makes a presentation about “Filter Bubbles” in which he demonstrates how our online behavior causes information providers to “filter” what we’re shown, with the result that we tend to see and hear only what they perceive we want to see and hear. He presents a compelling case and it’s worth the investment of nine minutes to watch. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s
Eli, you may recall, is the former executive director of MoveOn.org, which means that I probably don’t share most of his political views, though I do understand his concern about the rapid growth of personalized news search results. However, I’m not so worried about personalized advertising and search results.
Recently, Time Magazine started showing up in my mailbox each week, which was puzzling because I knew I hadn’t subscribed. Then came Rolling Stone. Nobody has claimed credit, although I’ve made some discreet inquiries to several acquaintances and friends to try to identify my anonymous benefactor.
My hypothesis is that someone who knows me is trying to burst a self-imposed Filter Bubble,
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Posted on April 15, 2011 by Cindy Wilson
301 redirects
Our previous article How Canonical URL Redirects (301 Redirects) Can Affect Your Search Rankings provided a brief overview of the effects a lack of canonical (301) redirects can have on your search rankings. Today we would like to tell you how to correct this issue on the major platforms.
A couple of notes to mention regarding the following instructions:
o For ASP platforms, you will need to create a script to be executed before the content on each page of the site.
- The Single Page redirects will only transfer one specified page to another individual page.
- For redirects on Apache servers:
o Create .htaccess file on root directory of site
o For sites hosted using Windows, you will need to contact your host provider
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Posted on April 2, 2011 by Cindy Wilson
How many home pages?
Have you noticed that when you type certain URLs, they are automatically redirected? For instance, whether you type market-vantage.com, market-vantage.com/index.php, www.market-vantage.com/index.php or www.market-vantage.com they all resolve to the same URL www.market-vantage.com/. This is called a “Canonical URL Redirect” or a “301 Redirect”. Now unfortunately, a lot of websites don’t have this redirect which can negatively affects their search rankings, though you probably don’t mind if they are your competition.
There are two reasons missing URL redirects is an issue: the page is seen as multiple pages and the “multiple pages” are seen as having duplicate content. Here is a brief look at both of these potential problems.
1. There are a number of different factors search engines look at to determine the page ranking of a website. For instance, Google uses about 200 signals in its algorithm. When Google looks at your home page, one of the elements it looks at is the number of page views your website has received. If your home page comes up as three different pages then, in essence, it may be competing against itself for rankings. So having them all redirect to one page is beneficial.
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Posted on March 4, 2011 by Hans Riemer
Google Search Results
Lately there has been a flurry of coverage in the mainstream media about Google’s efforts to improve the quality of its organic (non-paid) search results. In the past two weeks we’ve seen articles in the NY Times, Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, just to name a few. Never before has the practice of search engine optimization, or SEO, received such prominent publicity.
The reasons behind SEO’s sudden fame are not very flattering, though. The story begins with Google’s rise to prominence in the search engine wars by delivering higher quality results than its competitors. It was common knowledge that nobody could “buy” their way to the top of Google’s organic search results, and whenever people tried to game the system, Google’s smackdowns were relatively swift and harsh.
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Posted on December 16, 2010 by Hans Riemer
Are you trapped?
Recently we were called in to investigate a PPC account that had been migrated from Yahoo
Search Marketing to Microsoft adCenter. Since moving to adCenter, the account experienced a significant drop in ROI. They were still getting plenty of clicks but those clicks weren’t converting, which was badly hammering their cost-per-acquisition.
The company sells Christmas decorations from their website. They have an excellent web analytics tool that can track individual incoming visitors (which Google Analytics does not do) so it didn’t take us long to spot quite a number of paid clicks that spent almost no time on the site. We looked at the referring URLs to see where the ads were appearing that sent these visitors and discovered something very interesting about Microsoft adCenter PPC that’s potentially costing advertisers some real money.
In a moment, we’re going to explain what is occurring and tell you how to fix it if it is happening to you. This affects advertisers using adCenter as well as those who previously used Yahoo Search Marketing, because YSM is now managed through adCenter.
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Posted on October 21, 2010 by Cindy Wilson
There’s a lot of talk about making sure your website uses the “best” keywords so that it can be found on the search engines by as many potential customers as possible. But, how do you find and select the best keywords? Ideally, you can hire someone with professional experience do this for you. However, it’s always good to understand a certain amount of the process yourself. Below, we explain in understandable terms a few steps you can take to start researching keywords for your site.
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