Karl Havard in the British Internet periodical "Econsultancy" uses a football ("soccer", to you NFL fans) metaphor to make a point about all of the other things, besides good solid SEO, that we Internet marketers need do to "score" success. A "goal hanger" is a player who waits just outside the box around a football goal, hoping to deflect the ball that others work so hard to advance. To Havard, we focus too much of our efforts (especially monetary ones) on SEO, while shorting, for example, the conversion elements on our site that make SEO pay off, just as football fans give too little credit to the players who worked so hard to get the ball to the "goal hangers". The algebra of success is Site Entries times Conversion Rate, and the return on conversion investment is often "misunderestimated", as former President Bush would say.

Labels: conversion rate improvement, seo, web analytics, web marketing

My colleague and co-blogger Avery Cohen is presenting "Analytically Speaking: Using Google Analytics to Improve your Web-based Marketing Efforts" to the Joomla Chicago user group on January 14th, at the offices of the Acquity Group, 500 Madison Street in Chicago (that's the tower over the Ogilvie Transportation Center), at 12:10 pm. The talk will include a brief recap of his well-received Search Engine Optimization talk last fall. RSVP for Avery Cohen on Google Analytics and Web Marketing here.

For those of you interested in the Joomla Content Management System, there is also a Joomla 101 in the same room at 11 AM on 1/14. I've just built my third Joomla 1.5 site, so I know I'll be there.

Labels: Avery Cohen, Chicago Web Analytics, Google Analytics, Joomla Chicago, search engine optimization, seo

SEO - Duplicate Content, when employees blog...

A recent email from a client asked about handling duplicate content:

I know that having duplicate copy is bad but I'm wondering if I can get away with two things:

1. One of our high-tech gurus wants to update his personal blog and have me copy or syndicate the post on our company blog. I have added links and for key words I change his spelling. Will Google ding us if I copy the content of his blog?

2. I would like to set up a wordpress blog and use the copy from our company blog to feed it. My thought is that a blog hosted outside of our website and linked extensively might help us. However, this might cause us problems if Google dings for repeat content issues.

Metrist response:

Suppose we look this question from Google's point of view? They don't want to end up with the same article showing up multiple times on a search engine results page.

By the same token, you will dilute the effectiveness of your linking strategy if you publish the same material in several places. If I'm a blogger and I want to link to your story, to whom should I link? You end up with your own pages being spoilers for building link strength.

While it may be a good idea to utilize the community benefits of publishing on WordPress (or Blogger, etc.), you can get the same effect by putting your corporate blog articles on an RSS Feed from Feedburner, with strong headlines and good relevant meta tags. We have a couple of clients using Feedburner and they were very satisfied with the results. Their content got blogged faster and more often than before.

The issue of your Guru's personal blog + corporate presence is potentially problematic. Ultimately, I'd recommend that it work like Matt Cutts, from Google. He's a Google Employee who blogs independently. Occasionally the Google webmaster blog will summarize a relevant posting from Cutts and point back to Cutts' blog. Essentially you would blog on the Corporate blog about what cool stuff Guru is blogging about, using your keywords to link back to his articles. This also lets you frame what he's talking about in terms of your keywords without having to fight with him about using your chosen language framework. And by "fight", I mean cajole, flatter, remind, and suggest.

Now, it turned out that Matt Cutts weighed in on duplicate content SEO the next day. Cutts responds to a question from a presentation at one of the SES conferences:

I often get questions from whitehat sites who are worried that they might receive duplicate content penalties because they have the same article in different formats ( e.g. a paginated version and a printer-ready version). While it’s helpful to try to pick one of those articles and exclude the other version from indexing, typically a whitehat site doesn’t neet to worry about 1-3 versions of an article on their own site. However, I would be mindful that taking all your articles and submitting them for syndication all over the place can make it more difficult to determine how much the site wrote its own content vs. just used syndicated content. My advice would be 1) to avoid over-syndicating the articles that you write, and 2) if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content. That will help ensure that the original content has more PageRank, which will aid in picking the best documents in our index.
We use additional heuristics of course, but I figured other people might want to hear that take.

Labels: duplicate content, seo

More Convergence

We have been seeing (and participating in) a convergence of Internet Marketing disciplines. Ken and I started out seven years ago focusing on Web Analytics and Conversion Optimization. We focused on Processes and Behavioral Segmentation. Now we see Email, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Web Analytics all as part a spectrum of Internet marketing tools.

Over the the past year we have been helping more of our clients with Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing. As SEO became more sophisticated and link farming and meta tagging didn't provide the edge, our team's skills in Web Analytics were needed.

Now, SEO expert Mark Jackson writes on Clickz that as Google's search engine becomes even more sophisticated and gives greater value to fresh content, Web Analytics is becoming more important to evaluating results of SEO efforts. Since Ranking changes daily, it's hard to provide good ranking reports. Jackson's solution: putting more focus on analytics than search engine rankings.

I wonder if search engine optimization firms should discontinue the practice of providing ranking reports for clients (at least for now with Google). No ranking reports would be hard for clients to swallow. A better solution? Web analytics.

Labels: internet marketing, seo, web analytics

The Mystery of the Missing Links: Why are web site Visits Down 30%?

Inbound links are the key to Search Engine Optimization. For publishers, a well-cited web site is a source of high page rank and more traffic from search engines. SEO experts often stress the importance of being linked by “high value” web sites for giving your web site a boost. But the search engines also know that thousands of diverse web sites are also less likely to be wrong.

A large on-line publisher recently contacted us with the following inquiry: “our web traffic dropped after our redesign six months ago, and traffic is still down.” Where their web traffic had been trending positive, we now saw that web traffic, measured in visits to the web site, had dropped 30%.

Comparing web traffic reports before and after the redesign didn’t reveal anything significantly different about the use patterns. The redesign was successful at improving navigation and pages per visit were up. But where were the missing visits? One big answer: Search Engine referrals, especially Google referrals, were down 50%.

Looking for clues, we turned to web usage reports. The web analytics tool this publisher used reports based on volume. And for the first five or more pages of the reports, there was little difference in activity. But when we downloaded the top several thousand web pages (they have a lot of articles), we saw that the number of visits to the lesser used pages dropped dramatically. The old version of the site had a longer tail of pages with few requests per month.

When they redesigned the site, this publisher set up redirects for many of their pages. Unfortunately they made two SEO errors: 1) they missed a lot of URL variations that had given users multiple ways to access the same material and 2) they used 302 redirect codes (temporary redirect) instead of 301 redirect codes (permanent redirect).

These two SEO mistakes lead to their losing page rank credit for thousands of links to their site. First, they lost “credit” for the links. Then they lost page rank credit for the redirected pages. Finally, the effect of their moving content from linked URLs was to “break” the linking web sites (from the perspective of the users and web masters of those sites). This lead to a loss of goodwill, and formerly modest linking sources no longer showed up at all in the long tail of the list of “top referring sites”. And these modest referrers had a big impact on this large publisher.

This left the publisher with three significant tasks: 1) create better programs to handle missing links (even at this point, six months down the road), 2) eliminate navigation "breadcrumbs" from the URLs so that each article text has a single endpoint URL, and 3) create a quiet “referrer relations” program to rebuild credibility among linking referrers.

If you are planning a web site redesign, or you are implementing a new Content Management System, remember this motto: “Make New Links, but Keep the Old.”

Labels: linking strategies, seo, web analytics