Archive for the ‘SEO and Marketing’ Category

Search Engine Blind Test

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

I love trying new things out on the net which is probably one of the reasons I am fascinated by web analytics and search. Naturally, I have been checking out Bing since it’s launch just to see what it’s all about. I have to say, so far I like it; that doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned Google…especially for SEO. Now that Microsoft and Yahoo have finally struck a deal which will give Bing close to a 30% market share once implemented got me thinking about what search engine would someone use if they had to pick based on blind search results. Put another way, if you saw the search results side by side for each search engine but didn’t know which search engine delivered each set of results would you pick a different search engine?

The premise of the idea is to determine which search engine delivers more “relevant” results when there is no search engine branding influencing your perception. My analytical side took over and I actually found a cool little tool that is actually running a blind search engine test.

Just for fun, try searching for something and see which results you like better. I recommend searching on something you don’t search for everyday. Mainly because you will likely recognize the “normal” results you see every day. Here is my test using, Zeus:

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Forget About SEO Content, Create Videos

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

Everyone says content is king in the SEO world and most people think this is strictly text content. Amazingly though videos with very little text content (a title and description) can be your most powerful content for optimizing search rankings and potentially your conversion rate. Considering 77% of people online watched a video on the internet in November 2008 and since this online community are making e-commerce purchases; you want to be in front of this growing crowd.

In April 2009, YouTube received 3.2 billion searches beating both Yahoo and Microsoft in volume of searches. Also, YouTube saw a 9% increase in searches performed from March to April which is larger than the increase by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft sites. Given that YouTube is growing the fastest and getting a large number of searches each month you probably should make videos a top priority of your marketing plan. The numbers for YouTube are only getting bigger which means if you are not showing up in video results then the potential revenue you are losing is getting bigger each month too.

Google also embeds video results into standard search results enticing potential customers to view your competitors’ videos if you don’t have any showing up. So the 9.8 billion searches in Google for April 2009 inevitably led some people to videos too.

Ok, so enough with the big numbers behind YouTube and online videos. Lets get into how videos can help you with your SEO campaign coupled with some tips to get the most out of your videos once you create them.

One thing I have noticed over the past year is videos have a huge amount of weight in the search engines and don’t get knocked for duplicate content as easily (if at all). I have personally observed this phenomenon becoming more prevalent over the past 18 months so don’t expect it to go away. Another dirty little secret about online videos is they are great for getting one way links to your site. For example, a video on a particular product is a great way to build deep links to your product pages to get them ranked better.

Here are three quick tips to get the most SEO benefit out of your videos and you might even raise your conversion rate along the way.

Video Title & Description

Whenever you upload a video to YouTube or some other video sharing site you will be prompted for at least a title, description and either tags or keywords. Each of these fields has tremendous SEO value when utilized properly. Use the keyword phrase you want to rank for in the search engines in all three sections: title, description and tags or keywords. You may want to include your domain name in the description if space permits but this does not get counted as a link.

Your video title will ultimately determine how many people watch your video. A great potential viral video can be made or broken by the title. In the search results and on the video sharing sites, the video title is the most prominent and often only text available. Given this, your title needs to entice people to watch and include your keyword if possible. Sometimes it is worth having a great title without your keywords if you truly believe the video will spark a huge amount of interest in the internet community. In this case, save the keyword phrase for the video description and tags.

Multiple Video Sites

Use a service such as Tube Mogul to upload your videos to multiple sites since this will give you multiple links from unique domains. You must signup at each video site you want to use at Tube Mogul which can be time consuming but you only need to register once. I recommend keeping a spreadsheet of the sites and logins you create; you may even consider using Roboform or similar password software. It is worth briefly mentioning three other strategies; hosting videos on your own site, putting your videos exclusively on one video site or putting your videos on multiple video sites with an unique title and description of the video for each video sharing site.

Share Your Videos

Submit bookmarks to your best videos at places like Digg, Reddit, Stumble Upon. Then encourage your visitors to vote for the video by placing share links on the page of your site that has the embedded video. If you see another blog or website comments about your video or syndicates the video then leave a comment and share their blog post on Digg or similar site.

You can get a bigger list of sites to share videos or blog posts at socialmarker.com. Note I do not endorse using the Socialmarker service since it could be considered spam if used in a bad way; however, the listing of sites is great. Another site worth checking out in the social media / web 2.0 world is http://www.go2web20.net/. I love the way their classic layout works but it can be a little slow.

So can you really completely forget about text content and focus on just video? No. You still have text titles and descriptions so there is still some text content creation. Also you will be creating a script for the video in most cases. In some cases you will want a transcript of the video so you have the video content on the page for the search engine spiders as well. However, the great thing about video is the content you create can be reused multiple times on multiple sites in multiple ways making it worth the investment.

One tangent on online video behavior, people who watch videos on Hulu.com spend almost 12 minutes on average watching a video much higher than the industry average of 3 minutes so I recommend putting your videos on at least YouTube and Hulu; especially if they are longer than 3 minutes.

Do you have any video promotion tips to share? Leave a comment below so everyone can learn more.

Sources:

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/5/comScore_Releases_April_2009_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/1/US_Online_Video_Viewing

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Google Addresses Duplicate Content

Saturday, April 11th, 2009

Google Addresses Duplicate Content

February 17, 2009

Countless hours have been spent by developers, consultants, webmasters and many others trying to figure out how to make sure search engines (Google) only see one copy of your website. If you are not quite sure what dictates duplicate content then you may want to review a previous post by Google on duplicate content.

Google really picked up the slack and now supports a way for you to tell them the preferred URL. Every site owner should be excited about this because you no longer have to worry about a product being in multiple categories or affiliate links negatively impacting your SEO efforts.

I am not going to get too deep into the inevitable Q&A or debates about using the canonical URL attribute on a page but instead focus on how to implement in an existing Miva Merchant store.

First off, the most common instances of two URLs for the same page in Miva Merchant is the storefront page. The second most common is likely the addition of a Session ID appended to the URL.

Normally a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file is utilized to eliminate multiple URLs for the same page such as:

www.example.com
www.example.com/mm5/merchant.mvc
example.com
example.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?

Without the redirect all of the above URLs are considered different pages by the search engines. Another example is when a Session ID is appended resulting in a URL similar to:

www.example.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Session_ID=49d8db48b1283df25e43e99201ba974b

The Session ID issue cannot be addressed with a 301 redirect though. Both scenarios can now be covered by adding one line to the header of your storefront

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Online Store Optimization Tips (from Miva Merchant Blog)

Monday, September 15th, 2008

Building an online store is just the beginning in an ecommerce business that is destined to grow and become more profitable each year.  Once you have your site up to approximately 100 visitors a day or 3,000 visitors a month it is time to start figuring out where you can make improvements.  The first step is to use an analytics tool such as Google Analytics, ClickTracks or WebTrends.  Google Analytics is very powerful and best of all you will love the price, free!

Analytics software allows you to know how many visitors come to your online store which is the equivalent of counting the people who come through the door of a retail store.  If you do not know this information then you should immediately install Google Analytics or find some one to do it for you; whoever maintains your website should be able to complete this task.  The easiest way to install in a Miva Merchant store is to add the Google Analytics code to the global footer.  The basic installation is easy but I would highly recommend setting up ecommerce tracking, conversion tracking and site search tracking.  Each of these requires setup within the Google Analytics interface along with some additional Google Analytics code added to your online store.

When you first start off with analytics most likely you will be impressed to now know how people are finding your online store, what page of your site they started on, how long people are staying, what pages people are visiting and what page they are leaving your site from.  You can also find out what percentage of people make a purchase, what part of the checkout process people are leaving and what people are searching for once at your online store.  All of this data is great but doesn’t really mean anything unless you are making changes to the site and using the data to decide if the change made a positive or negative affect on purchases (conversion rate).

Analytics software contains a wealth of data but knowing what to focus on is not always readily obvious. Here are three important metrics also called key performance indicators (KPIs) that are essential to an ecommerce business’s success.

Conversion Rate – Conversion rate is the percentage of people who purchase from your online store out of the total people who visited the site.  It is calculated as Orders/Visits and indicates the ratio of window shoppers to buyers.  Most ecommerce sites have a conversion rate between 1 – 2 percent.

Bounce Rate – Bounce rate is the percentage of people who only see one page of your online store before leaving.  The best way to think of this is someone who walks into a retail store and leaves after looking at the first display.  It is calculated by taking the number of people who visited just one page and dividing by total people who visited the online store.

Pages/Visit – Pages per visit measures the average number of pages each person sees on your site.  This is important because if the number is lower than the minimum pages to place an order then people are not even seeing enough of your online store to become a customer.  You should determine the number of pages required to place an order from the home page along with other entry pages such as landing pages, product pages or category pages.  Use these numbers as a benchmark to measure against pages/visit; the idea is to make changes that get pages/visit close to the benchmark or above.   Note it is much more important to see a lift in conversion rate than pages/visit.

How To Optimize Online Stores

You can use analytics to test every part of your website from color combinations, different images, fonts, page layout and even content wording.  The key is to start by making one change and compare the metrics for the change to an equal time period before the change.  A more accurate approach would be to send a certain percentage of visitors to a test page with changes while the majority of visitors see the original page.  This is known as A/B testing and can be a great way to measure changes quickly.  If you do not know what sample size to use for A/B testing run an A/B test where page A and page B are exactly the same.  Once traffic to both pages yields very similar conversion rates, bounce rates and pages/visit you will have a solid idea of the relevant sample size for your online store.

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Should You Add SEO To Your Marketing Efforts?

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

Should You Add SEO To Your Marketing Efforts?
Balance pay-per-click advertising with search engine optimization
By: Boris Mordkovich

Pay-per-click advertising is, no doubt, one of the most effective ways of getting new leads and prospects to come to your website. Within a period of 24 hours, any business—large or small—can appear at the top positions for any keyword that’s applicable to their business.

However, it does have its downfalls. Primarily, at the point when you stop paying for the clicks, your ads disappear from the search results. In other words—no money, no honey.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a different animal. It is accomplished by optimizing your website to make it more search-engine friendly and increasing your link popularity by purchasing or exchanging links, so that it will rank higher in the natural results.

SEO is quite difficult, and nobody has the right, sure-fire way of doing it. It takes months to get up to the first pages of results for specific keywords and, even then, there are no guarantees you will stay there.

Also, while you don’t have to pay for individual clicks, you may wind up either paying a professional to work on your website to optimize it or spending a lot of time learning to do it yourself.

In any case, over the long term, well-done search-engine optimization can yield terrific results and even surpass pay-per-click in terms of effectiveness. If you manage to get your website high up in the rankings for popular keywords relating to your business, you will have a steady stream of new customers without paying anything for each one. This is especially true because most searchers tend to click on the “natural” listings before they click on the “sponsored” ones.

So, ultimately—is one method better than the other? Not necessarily. If you have the opportunity, you should approach both techniques to get the most out of search marketing. PPC should be used as the short-term (although it will work quite well in the long term, as well) way of acquiring traffic from the search engines, while SEO should be planned for the long term (six months and more). Together, they will produce the most results for your business.

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