Web Analytics - Terra Incognita

In eight out of ten cases every Internet marketing company that provides SEO services hears the same nagging question posed by a client: “Do I need to redesign my website?”. In fact, customers like to ask this or similar questions when they ask a web analyst or or a web analytics specialist  provides them with an appropriate SEO quote.

Yes or No replies won’t work here. Subject aside,  Web is full of ugly and utterly despicable “commerical” websites that serve no purpose and will never have any decent SEO results no matter what master optimization expert works on them.  Some sites just need to be erased and created from scratch. However, this is not an answer that clients  wants to hear. It would be fair to analyze and pinpoint  some factors on and about his website.

Web Usability Test - 10 Minutes

Instead of complicating things any further, web analysts should conduct a simple website usability test.  A web analyst should check first the load times of a customer’s website.  Multiple researches show that longer load times may lead to a huge decrease in sales and less visitors whose attention span does not go over 11 seconds.

Another basic “pro” web redesign factor occurs often when a website has been created by the amateur web designer or the owner himself.  All kinds of legibility issues,  mismatching fonts, wild unwelcome colors,  empty spaceholders for images vouch for redesign. And, naturally,  the most important of all the problems are  faulty navigation and broken links.

An experienced web analyst should also watch for “apples” vs “oranges” factor.  It occurs when images don’t support the textual content.  Or when each page is so eclectic that a visitor gets lost and confused due to information overload.

At all times browser compatibility check should be conducted.  Not that Internet Explorer is not the only name in the game anymore, it makes sense to check all webpages in Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.  It would not hurt to add to this list Safari and the look and feel of the website on smartphones.

The last factor any SEO contractor should check is whether the whole website has a professional and modern look and feel.  Many web hosting services offer a free website creation tools that mildly putting are not up to the task.  Utilizing them often makes an SEO-unfriendly website, especially when a client chooses worst templates out of the list.  One page Flash websites and sites with default splash page are a big no-no too.

After your complete your webiste analysis and web usability  tests and don’t forget to  attach a supplemental web analytics report that supports the indispensible emergency  of a website redesign.  Hopefully, these steps will persuade the customer to take necessary steps. But this is another story…

Tags: internet marketing company, optimization expert, seo quote, seo results, web analyst, web analysts, web analytics specialist, Web Usability, web usability test

I often encounter online articles where SEO contractors lament that they have to conduct their marketing campaign while the client’s website looks ugly and despicable. Web analysts and search engine optimization specialists compare that kind of work to great advertising poster  on the wall of a cockroach-ridden restaurant.  But what if the website is in good shape and your internet marketing campaign was a complete success but the client is still not happy? Here is just one simple example why this may happen.

One of the main reasons  - is the lame sales process that occurs internally. We were recently auditing a great client with an outstanding website.  All processes undergone a very strict website analysis. Some of his organic keywords are extremely lucrative and beat a lot of competitors who have to pay high AdWords fees for paid search.  That website was getting web traffic and leads. Every week a a couple of dozen people would sign for a mailing list. So, everything was in place, however our client was complaining that the level of sales was very low.

We found that nobody was properly processing leads,  customers questions were not answered in a timely and orderly fashion.  Promised newsletters were never received and the blog has not been updated for several months, etc.

So, even when the web business optimization and best website analytics work guarantee great results    small web business still would fail if  is not dynamically and constantly work at least on the following issues

• Customer Service
• Customer Retention Process
• Conversion of Leads into Prospects
• Constant communication with past and present clients
• Timely updates and a consistent Lifeline with clients
• Competitive Prices
• User Satisfaction

Let’s be honest: customers like website not because it knows how to manipulate keywords on Google - they simply do not know or do not care about it. Customers like certain websites because they can add the word “great” to any component mentioned above. And if every component is in place then the positive result is obvious. Website visitors get satisfied and want to learn more about services and products offered by the site. They  learn  something with each visit and wholeheartedly  refer  the site to people that they  know. This is the best referral possible.

When sales and other internal business processes are down, website owner gets completely opposite results.  As for me, that kind of business would  remind of a neat and nice store in real life where everything is in place but nothing is happening. If somebody visits such a store for a month and nothing is happening there - what will be the outcome? A potential customer  will start losing interest. And why would he bother if in this cool place there are no sales, no promotions and no communications?  Visitors  will still like that store, even drop in there occasionally. But after a while knowing that no other pleasant surprises will expect them, the stream will get dry, for sure.

Tags: adwords paid search, internet marketing campaign, organic keywords, paid search, search engine optimization speacialists, search engine optimized websites, website analysis, website analytics

There is no absolute definition that describes the quality of inbound links. Normally, more is better. However, there are guidelines and observations by search engine marketers. For example, a popular site that links to you prominently that itself has many inbound links is likely to mean more than a link from a random page from an unimportant web site with few links.

1. IMPORTANT: No more than 25 links per week to be added !
2. 100% of websites should be in English
3.Bids to submit to Web/Links Directories or article sites will be ignored.
4. No link farms, link-exchange programs, forums, web directories, Blogs or articles submission, strictly no FFA’s, gambling, pharmacy, illegal, porn, violent, or hate-based, guestbook’s, classifieds, dynamic links, spam sites, or generally black hat links.
5. All links must be indexed by robots, not blacklisted by Google.
6. Links must be from different Class-C IP addresses.
7. The linking page has to have no more than 30 outbound links.
8. All links must be static, plain, standard a href type links (no cgi etc…) and direct using provided anchor text
9. All links must be indexable by googlebot. no rel=”nofollow”, robots.txt blocking and the like
10. Link page must have a recent Google cache; no less then 30 days old.
11. No hidden links. All links must be visible and readable.
12. No sites using dynamically generated links, MouseOvers or other PageRank-hoarding tricks.
13. Non-reciprocal links only.
14. Staggered deployment of the links to avoid any penalties (over 3 months)
15. Links should not be from framed pages or cloaked links.
16. Links should not be through a javascript.
17. Links should be through a redirect script.
18. Links should not be on Flash sites or pages.
19. All links should be free and not paid links.
20. All links shouldn’t appear in a paid links slot such as: “sponsored” links, advertisers, links, ads or any other slot links that will show the search engines that it is a paid link.
21. All Links have to be on sites which are NOT penalized or banned by Google.
22. All links have to be new, links from websites that already link to my site will not be counted.
23. Page containing link must be listed in Google’s Cache.
24. No use of Automated software (Zeus, Arelis or others)
25. Links must be permanent and remain active.
26. All links will point to one domain.
27. The anchor text (or title, description) will be different, and will have several options.

Relevance of Inbound Links

A search engine is likely to view a link from semantically related web page or site as more valuable than a link from a random unrelated one. Usually, a series of links with very similar anchor text from unrelated sources is an indicator of an artificial link scheme, and they may be devalued. Too many links from irrelevant sources may result in a penalty. For additional information, click here

Link Churn

Links that appear and disappear on pages are likely to be a part of a linking scheme. The rate at which these links appear and disappear is termed “link churn”. If this happens frequently, it may be regarded as spam. Those links will either be devalued, or at worst your website will be regarded as spam and penalized.

Number of Links on a Page

A link on a page with a few outbound links is generally worth more than a link on a page with many outbound links. this concept is also implied by the formula for Google’s Page Rank.

Tags: link building, link building campaign

I Built a Website - Now What? (Part One)

So you hired an SEO contractor and got top rankings for the keywords that you wanted. You say to yourself: “Now my site does not just have the great design, it is also visible on all leading search engines. Where are all the Internet crowds that I expected and why am I not getting any return on investments?” Of course, there is another scenario when you see a lot of visitors but they are mostly coming for information without any regard to your products and/or services. Well, I can give an answer that not everybody will like: you, man skipped web analytics and relied too much on basic SEO.

I can predict a lot of objections of the type “How come? I installed Google Analytics and get reports weekly/daily/monthly!” Yeah, you are getting reports, but do you think you can really process and analyze them? For the last several years I saw so many SEO guys who  claim they understand web analytics. But after a couple of questions and 5-10 minutes of conversations, I realize that these people can generate reports but don’t have ability to drill down and get to the bottom of the problem that worries their clients.

At the opposite side we meet many SMB  clients who started their online business, thinking that money spent on a website development will be the major key to success and profitability.  Some even think that they are Internet pros because they surfed there a lot, some don’t even have a clear business concept of actionable web strategy.   After the months of idle waiting, they find some dubious SEO “boys and girls” who can talk but not deliver serious  business results.  These “SEO specialists” assure them that as soon as some certain keywords reach the first page on Google/Yahoo/MSN all business problems will be solved.  Sometimes it takes up to one year for an SMB client to realize that his website is mostly at the same place where it was before.

Before or after his unsuccessful marketing campaign, some business clients turn to Pay Per Click solutions and pay dearly for each click, especially if their business  offers products or services in a highly competitive field.  Without the help of a savvy PPC administrator who needs to constantly adjust the campaigns ,  cost per click for some single keyword in AdWords may easily reach $10 or higher.  If the Quality Score is low, the campaign may turn into a money-draining, painful experience.

The majority of proactive companies begin to wake up from this nightmare and start asking themselves the right questions. What went wrong?  What are the right online solutions?  If they do pose these questions, they may find that the best answer will be: “I should not have neglected web analytics”.

by Allen Gabriel

Tags: modern web analyst, pay per click solutions, ppc administrator, return on investments, seo contractor, seo guys, web analyst, web statistician, web stats

Internet is swarming with all kinds of web directories that promise to provide website owners with useful paid links. Matt Cutts from Google explains the guidelines of the world leading search engine towards defining which paid links can do a good job for you and which are just poison.

Tags: web directories, web directory

A couple of months ago Google announced its new AdWords feature called Automatic Matching. It is still in beta format but many advertisers and SEO consultants already received the message from our dominant search engine company about this “exicting feature”.  In fact, Google claims that Automatic Matching is purely optional and it “helps your ads reach targeted traffic missed by your keyword”.  It will show ads for keywords that are not already in an advertiser’s keyword list by using its algorithm.  For example, if your daily budget is 300 and your keywords brought you $200 traffic, Automatic Matching may bring you another $100 of traffic draining your daily budget.

I am amazed at the audacity of this step.  First of all, Automatic Matching will only use broad match. This means that the keywords Google adds may not be as relevant as it claims them to be.  As a result, multiple imprecisely matched keywords can cause your campaign a lot of harm. Including low click thru rates and more expensive cost per click.Second, it means that your daily budget will be reached more often than you even want to, thus increasing your ad spendings.

Currently, Automatic Matching feature is already active for certain accounts with billing addresses in the US, Canada, Australia, UK, Italy, Germany and Spain.  There is a possibility to opt out from this feature by going to the Campaign Settings and manually unchecking the box.

Overall, I think any business that has a PPC administrator or in-house SEO consultants on board and/or other personnel which is actively involved in PPC campaign management should opt out immediately. However, I am open to possibility that this feature may be advantegous to small businesses  with limited number of keywords, ads and campaigns.

Tags: automatic matching, keyword research, ppc administrator, ppc manager, search engine company, seo consultant, seo consultants

Part of our marketing efforts in our web analytics company  is concentrated on generating interest about our clients websites on social media networks. Viral marketing through social media can be extremely time-consuming and draining, especially if client offers products and services that are not really ideal for generating the buzz.  However, the masses of SMN online visitors help increase web traffic and search engine rankings which are crucial for our customers. 

As you may well know, social media represent a wide variety of not marketing but personal communication tools.  All these online networks appeared for the needs of social communications not for advancing the agenda of the marketing companies.  However, some of our clients try to get from us some kind of traditional “measurements” that will allow them to calculate retun on investments in this case.

Naturally, it is completely natural to understand the result from campaigns conducted through natural marketing channels. It is relatively easy to put numeric quantities, report the results, count conversions e.t.c.  Unfortunately, it is not possible to create viable metrics on conversations and other human interactions, which is what the social media is about.  

Social media was not invented for marketers, millions of Internet visitors use it to communicate and interact, exchange opinions.  Internet marketing companies hope to stream some of those visitors to the clients websites, in other words to take advantage of the existing online SMN subscribers.

I would say that the better criteria for measurements from viral marketing will be the number of positive interactions of clients websites with the masses, web traffic increase, and, possibly, the number of positive exchanges between the websites in question and Internet visitors coming from SMN.

Tags: analytics company, communication tools, marketing channels, marketing tools, social media network, viral marketing, web analytics company

Before the advent of Quality Score, the situation with Google advertising was as bad as it could be.  Rich corporations and businessmen  with big pockets slowly but surely were taking over the sponsored results. They set up huge Internet advertising budgets and were pushing small business with limited resources out of the game. In the early 2007 this situation had changed when Google announced the policy of Quality Score. This meant that most relevant Pay per click campaigns would rank highest in listings sponsored by Google.

Quality Score policy did tremendously improve the relevance of the sponsored ads.  If any company wanted to build a successful PPC campaign it had to hire an experienced SEO contractor who would be capable of  tuning up landing pages and working on keyword performance.  He would also have to provide solid PPC campaign management, according to the new Internet trends.

Surprisingly, even now, when the year 2009 is swiftly approaching,  many businesses still don’t follow Google guidelines and Quality Score policy.  They think that by not hiring an SEO professional they save money. But quite the opposite happens. They keep bidding on keywords that are nowhere to be found on landing pages. In turn, Google, in absence of other words, fines them by raising sky high the minimum of CPC.  The minimum can keep on on going up to the extent, that makes any profitability impossible.

Personally, I like Google approach with Quality Score. It moved organic results and ppc sponsored results closer to each other.  If you are a web analyst or an SEO consultant, you know that there will be no organic results if you try to sell shoes on the web page that has content about oranges.

Tags: experienced seo contractor, Google advertising, Internet advertising, pay per click campaigns, ppc campaign management, ppc campaign manager, quality score, seo consultant, seo consultants, seo contractor, seo contractors, seo professional, seo professionals, web analyst

In the early days of WWW any give web page did not contain a lot of objects. Today we have gigantic objects overhead in web pages that leads to the delays that are happening on many web sites.  Many websites owners don’t realize the cause of the delay. Our web analytics company has to do a lot of explaining because many don’t want to sacrifice their favorite objects even if it means that this step will have a drastically positive effect and faster response time of the landing pages.

In its turn, faster response time of landing page increases profits, as recent SEO researches show.  One of our web analysts told me about another research. It turns out that when the home page of a Google Maps was downsized to 70-80 KB, its traffic went up 10% in the first week and an additional 25% in the following three weeks.  Another research completed for a giant online store revealed that every 100 ms increase in load time of a landing page decreased sales by 1%, which is a lot if the company in questions makes billions of dollars from its website.

If the landing page is optimized properly and is attractive enough for the visitors, its speed becomes the decisive factor. There are multiple solutions that will allow to increase response time. The obvious ones are; image and multimedia optimization. Other measures may include conversion of JavaScript behavior to CSS and the HTML table layout to CSS layout.

If a small business owner wants to get the viable results from his landing pages, he needs to do the utmost to minimize the initial display time and HTTP requests.  Honestly as a web analyst and SEO professional I am still surprised when a lot of website owners show lack of interest towards  conversion rate optimization (CRO) and landing page optimization, even if this costs them a lot of money.

Tags: conversion rate optimization, cro, free seo tip, landing page, landing page optimization, landing pages, seo professional, web analyst, web analysts, web analytics company, website owner

Conversion rates optimization is an art. I can name right out lots of SEO contractors and companies,  recall many professional web analysts and PPC administrators. Yet, I can count on my fingers the number of true CRO experts. Many companies will approach website owners with a promise to improve the conversion rates of their landing pages, but can they really deliver?

There are all kinds of secondary solutions that may help to improve conversion rates optimization. By combining advanced SEO and proactive PPC campaigns, it is possible to make the website more visible and direct more quality traffic to landing pages.  Unfortunately, this is not good enough. The wave of visitors that an SEO or web analytics company deliver to the landing pages very often crashes and dissipates leaving just a trickle of those who has taken the desired type of action.

There are not really many truly successful landing pages, where the results beat all expectations. Unless, the website is a leader of some niche market, or offer a product that everybody wants, one needs to do a lot of song and dance to persuade website visitors act the way you want on your landing pages.

There are several approaches to conversion optimization and various schools of thought that preach that certain steps need to be taken before even the construction of a landing page. In this short entry I am not going to go deep into analysis of each CRO strategy. After all, a pile of books has been created on this subject. I just want to add after all that’s said and done, the best CRO experts are also guided by their gut feelings.  One can conduct the best keyword research, make landing pages look as credible as they can be, write a brilliant copy, waste a lot of money on pay per click campaigns and the like, and still get pretty pathetic conversion results.

CRO experts don’t stop with all these, they “read” the visitors, understand their behavioral tendencies and psychological motivational factors. They are like Internet psychics, in the good meaning of this expression.  I observed the results when CRO guys would achieve multiple goals at once. They would raise the conversion optimization to unbelievable heights while at the same time tremendously lowering down costs of the bids and getting magnificent points in Google Quality Scores as well.

I believe that conversion analytics companies are gonna, eventually,  gain more significant role in the Internet growth.  Sooner or later CRO experts are destined to achieve some kind of celebrity status and will be hunted by paparazzi the same way as Hollywood or baseball stars. Right now, they keep pretty quiet and operate mostly behind the curtains.

Tags: , conversion, conversion analytics, conversion analytics company, Conversion Optimization, conversion rate, conversion rates, conversion rates optmization, cro expert, cro experts, cro strategies, cro strategy, landing page, landing page optimization, landing pages, ppc campaign, ppc campaign administrator, ppc campaigns, quality scores achievement, seo contractor, seo contractors, web analyst, web analysts, web analytics web analytics company