Search Engine Optimization ( SEO )

Lots of articles cover the basics, again this is an article that acts as “SEO flypaper” and rounds out the rest of the articles. My recommended strategy is to write focused, more “serious” treatments of SEO data collection.

My current favorite tool is google analytics. The “top 20 keywords” is ironically its weakest point, but the site overlay is wonderful. I used it to do path analysis for the purpose of identifying poor site layout. What does that have to do with SEO? A lot. Many of the same factors that make good user navigation (placement of key links, the words you use for them, etc) appear to please the google gods too. The new Links tab is very cool – you finally know who’s linking you. I’ve noted that many of my site’s backlinks are from “favorite links” in blogs. It’s worth keeping your eye on them. In fact, I started a separate thread Blogger Favorites just to keep track of the really good ones (not all referring back to my site, oh well).

The diagnostics on google analytics are pretty good. They’ve found broken links post-migration in the forums that I missed. Sure, I know, they’re only internal links…

I tend to pay the most attention to the organic referrals by source. The percentages hold stable within a few points and getting them to budge even 2-3% consistently demonstrates real progress. If your site runs contests and such, it pay attention to the visitor patterns. For example, it’s best to start a contest on Sunday if your main traffic day is Monday. Not SEO stuff per se, but just smart webmastering.

The overall purpose of this article is to highlight a few tools and recommend practices for collecting data to demonstrate that your SEO efforts are working (or not).

As the fastest growing vertical in search, many people are now starting to recognize the value of local search engine optimization can have on their site traffic. Also known as regional search, it’s basically geo-targeting your audience when they search.

Local search works best for the service provider, or a retailer that has numerous locations. While the search volume won’t be as great as a non-regional phrase, the person who reaches your site will be a more targeted visit and most likely ready to convert.

Another happy accident in local search is that for sites that are well optimized may also pick up rankings in mobile search.

So, here’s what you need to do in order to rank for local seo:

* Be sure to have your location(s) full address
* If you have a regional number, list that as well since some people start with an area code
* Be sure to include driving directions to your location
* Use a mapping service to display your location
* Have pictures of your locations and name them with your street address
* Make sure your site appears in any regional directory that might be online
* If you can afford it, get listed in your local yellow pages
* Place the regions you want to rank for in your page titles
* Get text links that contain the regional phrase

Most of these techniques are are not only common sense, but also good web design. If you’re in business, you want people to be able to find you, right?

What is the KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index)?

The KEI compares the number of searches for a keyword with the number of search results to pinpoint which keywords are most effective for your campaign.

Suppose the number of searches for a keyword is 486 per month and Google displays 214,234 results for that keyword. Then the ratio between the popularity and competitiveness for that keyword is 486 divided by 214,234. In this case, the KEI 0.002.

The higher the KEI, the more popular your keywords are, and the less competition they have. That means that you might have a better chance of getting to the top.

Is this a good indicator for useful keywords?

According to the KEI definition, the best keywords are those that have many searches and that don’t have much competition in the search results.

However, the KEI makes no statement about the quality of the competition. While there might be only a few competitors in the search results, these competitors could be big players with big SEO teams and thousands of back links.

The number of search results cannot really tell you whether it is easy to get your web site listed in the top 10 results for that keyword or not. It’s much easier to move your web site from position 50,000 to position 32,000 than from position 210 to position 8.

In addition, the KEI factor is not a scientific number. The numbers on which it is based might not be comparable for all keywords. The keyword counts could be calculated differently for different keywords (some terms might be combined into one and other might not) and the search results sometimes change because a special word in the search term triggers a special filter.

If you are serious about your web site, you must be serious about your keyword choice. KEI can help you to choose keywords but you should not rely too much on it and it should be the last step when choosing keywords.

It is important that your keywords are targeted and popular and that they attract web surfers with the right motivation.

Once you have build a list of specific keywords that have many searches and that are used by web surfers with the right motivation, you could apply the KEI formula to them.

Use common sense. If the KEI for a keyword is high it might still be a good idea not to use the keyword if your top ranked competitors are very big players.

Finding the right keywords is a very important step in every search engine optimization campaign. Take some time to find the best keywords for your web site and then optimize your pages for these keywords so that you get high rankings on Google, Yahoo and other major search engines.

Here is an interesting new product on the block DIY SEO Live. Its a great tool to monitor your SEO strategies. You can use DIY SEO Live to generate SEO Analysis reports for all usability and credibility problems on a web site. It involves analysis of the site for several factors, such as:

* Clean and professional look
* Abandonment rate and bottlenecks in the conversion funnels
* Broken links, including missing images
* Incorrectly displayed graphics
* Slow pages
* Hard-to-reach pages
* Missing (or improperly formatted) META information – such a TITLE tag – that affects your search engine positioning.

It is quite affordable for small businesses and offers a good return on investment.

Their SEO Inbound Link Analysis reports will tell you if the backlinks that you have been building are in place with the backlinks text, number of links in both summary and detail level.
Such SEO reports can be very useful for analyzing your SEO strategies.

SEO Search Engine Ranking report is a big time saver. These SEO rankings report gives you an idea of your rankings in the major search engines across the world. Not only this, you can compare your current search engine rankings to the previous, first and best ranking results. You can keep track of changes in your web results, and have enough information to determine which of your search engine optimization strategies were most effective.

Currently DIY SEO Live is running a discount campaign and you can have over 40 reports for just $49.

Robots Exclusion Protocol

The Robots Exclusion Protocol is a method that allows Web site administrators to indicate to visiting robots which parts of their site should not be visited by the robot. When a Robot visits a web site, it first checks for the file robots.txt in the root directory; e.g. http://exapmle.com/robots.txt. If it can find this file, it will analyze its contents to see if it may retrieve further documents (files). You can customize the robots.txt file to apply only to specific robots, and to disallow access to specific directories or files. Note that there can only be a single “/robots.txt” on a site.

The Robots META tag
The Robots META tag allows HTML authors to indicate to visiting robots if a document may be indexed, or used to harvest more links. No server administrator action is required. Note that currently only a few robots implement this.


< META name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" >


Parameters that can be passed
ALL = INDEX, FOLLOW
NONE = NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW
INDEX Index this page.
FOLLOW Follow links from this page.
NOINDEX Don't index this page.
NOFOLLOW Don't follow links from this page.

The Robots META tag name and values are case-insensitive. Note: In early 1997 only a few robots implemented this, but this is expected to change as more public attention is given to controlling indexing robots.