SEO Value Pyramid & Time Line

SEO Value Pyramid & Time Line

Doodling to explain the SEO Value Process to a new batch of SEO students, and we came up with the following SEO Pyramid. I thought of sharing this as it will be a useful “Guide” for SEO enthusiasts to better understand the SEO process, SEO value and SEO timelines.

SEO Expert Services - Week 1

1. Keyword Discovery and Analysis. This is the foundation of any successful SEO campaign, so it’s important to get the “winning” keywords for your business, services and products in the beginning itself. This process generally takes 4 to 5 days, and there are many useful free and paid tools to help you do that. Keep in mind; finding the right keywords is all about researching statistical, analytical and forecast data for keyword usage, history and competition over time, in specific geographies.
2. On-page Optimization. The KISS (Keep it Simple ……) concept works great here. Keep in mind that each well optimized page can be a source of traffic and conversions for your website. I would suggest focusing each page on 1 to 2 related keywords only, with modifiers like location, industry, long tails and mis-spellings, included in Meta tags and the content of that page. If you have a CMS driven site, then ensure your CMS allows facility of giving unique title, description and keyword tag for each page, and that your dynamic URL’s are short and SEO friendly.
3. Google local, Maps, and Yahoo local. This not only helps the search engine identify the location (for geo targeting) of your business, it also puts your business on the local map for anyone searching for products and services you could offer. Local listings are displayed on the top of the SERP (search engine result pages), and many people want to do business with someone who is close by (types of businesses where service and personal contact is crucial) can reach your website almost immediately.
4. Corporate Blog. This is going to become your most valuable asset to power up your keywords/ website and share valuable content with your visitors. You will be using the blog to post new articles, How To’s, testimonials, reviews, press releases, case studies, videos, photographs, PPT presentations and more. Both WordPress and Blogger offer free hosting platform - so get cracking.
5. Analytics and Webmaster Tools. These tools will help you monitor the visitors to your site, visitor trends and demographics, entry/ exit pages, traffic sources, track conversions, performance of keywords, submit site maps, check on links and broken/bad links and a lot more.

SEO Expert Services - Week 2

1. Web Directory Submissions. These are the easiest links you can acquire, and there are many relevant, regional and niche web directories where you could submit your listing. Avoid directories that are not relevant to your business, products and services, though global directories should be included in the category your business fits under. There are many paid directories as well (Yahoo Dir, Business.com etc) which are great links to have, but I would be selective not to use up the clients budget in this activity, as it can be well spent in other places.
2. Social Bookmarking. Great way to promote your content across user communities like Digg, Mixx, Stumble Upon etc . The trick is to get other users (or your network) to up vote, thumbs up, review or comment on your content. This makes the link you are building permanent, and leads to more traffic as users generally opt to check links (and vote up links) that already has many votes. They key to social enlightenment is participation!
3. Press Release. Getting back good links to your website from the press releases syndications, a journalist may chance upon you story and make a National release out of it. Though ensure you have a worthy story first!
4. Power up pages. This is an easy way to power up the existing pages of your website. Take each page link and post across relevant social bookmarking sites, and get a few users to up vote, thumbs up, review, or comment on your content. Don’t try and bookmark all your pages in one day, but rather just 3 to 4 links a week. You don’t want the social sites to blacklist you for spamming. Tip: Don’t use social bookmarking sites for just link building purposes. Get involved in the community, make friends, help them, and ask them to help you.

SEO Expert Services - Week 3

1. Weekly Content Strategy. Each week you can create unique and useful content focused around the keywords you are targeting for that month. The types of content can vary - like articles, how to’s, FAQ’s, case studies, pictures, videos, testimonials, PPT presentations, press releases etc. This content can be posted on your corporate blog. Both your visitors and search engines will love you for this effort.
2. Weekly Syndication & Promotion Strategy. Each week you take the content from the blog and syndicate to select article sites, and promote across select social bookmarking sites. Get other users to participate by voting your content. Each type of content can be syndicated and promoted across relevant syndication channels.A video can be syndicated to video submission sites. A How to article, can be syndicated to “How to” sites.
3. Social Media. Sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter etc. Keep in mind social networking is about building a network of contacts (potential business) and enhancing brand communication and recall.

SEO Expert Services - Week 4

1. Website Review. Getting links from relevant blog sites will go a long way in your SEO strategy. Of course you will have to figure out that no blogger will review and link to your site because they love you. An additional tip here is to power up the external blog review pages by promoting across select social bookmarking sites and getting vote ups. Powering important external pages that link to you will in turn power your keyword pages.
2. Links from Relevant Websites. Get links from sites that are relevant to your business, products and services back to your important keyword pages. These industry links are “relevant” links and are highly valued by search engines. Tips: Avoid reciprocal linking unless it’s with very few select partners and not just for the purposes of link building. Another option, three-way link building is often tedious and filled with rejection. I would focus on “value” based link building.
3. Blog Commenting & Forums Posting. Find a few blogs and forums related to your industry. Spend time each week posting useful comments on blogs, and post/ answer queries on forums. If you cannot create value to the discussion by blogger/ forums users, then its best to avoid this strategy. Also if you plan to place links in the comments and forum posts, then make sure those links add major value to what’s being discussed, otherwise your comments, posts will not be accepted.
4. Monthly Campaigns. Each month choose one social bookmarking site from the ones you are participating in, and choose one story/article from the previous articles you have bookmarked. The objective in the campaign strategy is to get 15 or more users to vote up your content. This accomplishes two things. A chance that your story gets “hot” and as the author of the content you gain popularity.
5. Monitoring, Tracking and Reporting. Prepare weekly/monthly reports to track the links you are building. Prepare a report from Analytics each month showing progression over various metrics of conversion.

Heading for an SEO Interview?A few Ideas to Help You Along…

Heading for an SEO Interview?A few Ideas to Help You Along…

 On the back of all these interviews, I thought what better chance to share a little empathy (considering how tough the interview process can be at times!) and a couple of observations that might help SEO folk prepare for the opportunity of their dreams!  So here goes; a few ideas to help get you SEO interview fit…

Prepare and plan ahead

An easy area to start the preparation process is by getting a few gazillion responses to typical SEO interview questions – firstly, to highlight academic understanding of the area, and secondly demonstrating technical and experiential understanding.  Constructing those thoughts/experiences and putting them in to some sort of order and shape can really help to answer questions comprehensively.
I think sometimes SEO’s learn and talk about SEO as if it was a dictionary of industry terminology to be recited at each and every opportunity.  Really, it’s about the application of technical and creative ideas.  This really shouldn’t be underplayed in my opinion as this is where the true value to your employer and/or clients is derived from.

Practice Articulating SEO

Developing the previous point further, try practising explaining previous work and complex areas of SEO. When you know something in your head, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can articulate it in layman’s terms to less knowledgeable – something that SEO’s have to do on occasions when speaking with clients.  Taking this further, can you then build on this layman’s explanation and then provide additional higher-level detail?  It’s certainly worth practising if you’re not used to doing this already.  Maybe even consider chatting those SEO interview questions through with a friend to see how well you can communicate some complex areas in an engaging way.
I consider myself fairly competent at talking about SEO, but recently I stumbled over the explanation of the process of tokenising a web page by search engines.  I could visualisation what it might look like and explain the process in detail but not summarise it at an entry-level SEO training session.  I was, however, kindly helped by a non-SEO colleague who reiterated my stumbling explanation with the anecdote that it could be that a search engine captures the key elements of the page / meaning of a page in the Times newspaper and condenses it down to a column or headline in the Sun newspaper…a clear, succinct explanation that people can relate to.
One of the things that we encourage across the SEO team at MEC is that all team members must regularly run training sessions for other members of the Interaction team.  This, we have found, has really helped their confidence in clearly communicating complex issues in SEO and search marketing in general.

Read the latest

There is nothing worse than someone saying that great SEO consulting requires keeping up-to-date with the latest SEO news and developments, and then not be able to demonstrate that they, the interviewee, do this themselves.  Nothing worse than shooting yourself in the foot now is there?!!
When reading though, don’t simply passively read – test and apply what you are reading – where are the opportunities?  Remember the 5 bums on rugby posts image (5 W’s sat on a big H) which stand for: what, why, when, who, where and how?
As a result, this should give you a much rounded and analysed opinion around these topics, provide you with a stronger view of what you are reading, who’s writing it, where it can be applied to your websites, etc, etc…

Company’s blog

When preparing for an SEO job interview, a little understanding of what’s big on the agenda for the company in question, and where you might fit in could be a great start.  Asking a few questions about the history of activity and upcoming marketing plans for the company or clients might be great area to cover off too.  That said, there are a whole lot of questions to ask to see whether the role would be suitable to you…

Show an interest: prepare some questions

I’d expect a whole lot of information to be shared by the interviewer themselves, but asking questions helps to show real interest in the role, and the potential for you to confirm that the role is indeed right for you.  As SEO activities by teams around the UK are likely to differ quite wildly, it’s certainly a great opportunity to learn about the team, how broad or clearly defined their roles are, and of course how you might fit to what currently exists.  
If asked a question on current SEO affairs, then to turn it around and ask the interview for their opinion too – this can be a great way to provide more of a two-way conversational format to the process, and get a feel for their thinking too. After all, you don’t want to be stuck in a new role thinking what ridiculous procedures and management are in place now do you?!

Every SEO is unique

People interviewing SEO’s in the UK are quite likely to meet a huge diversity of people with different experiences and stories to tell, so make sure you make clear where you can add your own areas of expertise.
So for instance, have you got experience in the sector that you’ll be working in?  Do you have your own blogs, affiliate sites, highly sociable online?  What can you bring to the role from a previous career (e.g. PR, offline marketing, IT, etc)?  Put all these areas to the top of your mind before meeting your interviewer, and make sure you show them all off!

Wild Card

One of my favourite questions that I like to ask candidates, which has given me some great answers previously, is asking whether there is anything that the candidate has prepared for the interview that they haven’t had a chance to cover off from the areas covered in the interview.
The idea behind this question is that SEO candidates aren’t like typical marketing role candidates or IT candidates.  The SEO industry has such a diverse range of entry points so that in itself means that people’s experiences and talents are going to be far more diverse.  As such, this should help to capture some of these extra little bits.

Different roles

Prepare appropriately to demonstrate the competencies that you can apply to the role!  Of course preparing for an SEO job interview can vary quite a lot if you are going for a graduate role, an SEO Exec role to a more managerial role.  Again they can differ depending on whether the role is more focused on analytics, link-building or account management?  Unsure about the role, give them a call in advance of the interview – a great way to show confidence and initiative in the role you are interested in.
Tips for SEO interviews, feel free to leave a comment!  :)

Link: Heading for an SEO Interview?A few Ideas to Help You Along…

6 Ways to Optimize Your Site for the iPad

6 Ways to Optimize Your Site for the iPad

The iPad is no Apple Newton. It truly is a revolutionary device. The whimsical blog of “Fake Steve Jobs” calls the iPad a “life-changing, mind-altering product”. Although that may be an overstatement, the iPad is certainly important — to the computing industry, to computer users, and to online marketers.

The launch of the iPad marks a significant step forward for mobile computing, and for computing in general: one’s productivity can finally be as high as when they are in front of their laptop or desktop computer. The iPad user can efficiently and effectively do their shopping, banking, email, YouTube video watching, and general web surfing. It is also surprisingly easy to use the iPad for more complex, input-intensive tasks, like writing term papers, building slide decks, and manipulating spreadsheets — particularly when also equipped with a Bluetooth keyboard. In fact, the iPad just may be versatile and powerful enough for the road warrior to travel with sans laptop. Conversely, smart phones and other handheld mobile devices, really only serve as a complement — rather than a practical replacement — for the user’s laptop or desktop machine.

Technically speaking, the iPad’s operating system is the iPhoneOS, but practically the OS is the Internet. Just upload your documents into “the cloud” (e.g. MobileMe, Dropbox, Xythos) and you are off and running. For the multitude of Google Docs users this is an unnecessary step, as the documents already live in the Cloud, not on any local hard drive. The iPad will undoubtedly speed adoption of this trend towards Internet-based file storage.

Overall, it looks like this launch is going to be a success and the iPad, like the iPod, iPhone, and the iMac before it, will gain significant distribution among consumers globally. And, since it includes a browser with a different set of specifications from either the standard mobile devices, the question for advertisers becomes a practical one – “will my web pages come up on this browser?”

With the iPad’s Safari browser, the Web generally looks and works like one would expect on any traditional laptop or desktop computer. However, there are important differences in the browsing experience and these differences could thwart your web visitors, stopping them in their tracks. As a site owner, you must compensate for these differences, or risk losing the conversion, and more importantly, the customer.

“Mobile-Friendly” Does Not Equal “iPad-Friendly”

If you created a mobile-friendly version of your website, you are probably seeing the fruits of your labor in customer adoption already. That mobile site, however, is not suitable for iPad user consumption. Mobile sites are designed for a teeny-tiny screen and translate to a deficient user experience on the iPad. Consequently, your mobile site should never be served up automatically to the iPad user. This can happen inadvertently when your web server’s “user-agent detection” is overly broad in its matching of mobile user agents (the user-agent strings for the iPhone and iPad are very similar; the iPad’s even includes the word “mobile”). This is the case for Walmart.com and Officedepot.com (screenshots photo-2 & photo-21). Thankfully this is easy to correct.

Avoiding the mobile-friendly version is one thing, serving up a site that offers an iPad-optimized user experience is quite another. It can involve overhauling page layout, recoding CSS, redesigning navigation, and adding alternative non-Flash elements.

Layout and Formatting

Your website design should lay out correctly whether the user is holding the iPad in landscape mode or portrait mode. Furthermore, when in landscape mode the primary call-to-action should still be visible without scrolling.

Even if the page renders properly on the Safari browser for the Mac or Windows, it will not necessarily render the same on the iPad. Case in point: Homedepot.com, with overlapping text where the breadcrumb navigation displays. This anomaly does not occur on Safari for the Mac. (screenshots photo-26 & screen shot 1)

Bear in mind that the browser window cannot be resized on the iPad. This means you cannot force elements to stay in a specific fixed position on the screen like you can for desktop browser users. Fixed positioning should not be used, if at all possible.

Retool Your Navigation

The multi-touch display provides an elegant and intuitive interface for users, but it also presents some unique challenges to web designers who are use to designing for the desktop. The biggest one is that iPad users cannot hover their cursor, potentially rendering any mouse-over navigation unusable. On the iPad, holding your finger down invokes the copy-and-paste function rather than creating a hover state.

On Officedepot.com, once you manage to get off of the mobile site, you will find that the sub-navigation items underneath the main navigation tabs are practically inaccessible. When you press on a tab (e.g. Furniture), the sub-navigation is displayed, but at the same time you are taken to the Furniture category page. So there is not enough time to select a sub-item (such as Modular Collections) before you are whisked away to the top-level category page (screenshot photo-18). The aforementioned sub-section (Modular Collections) is not accessible elsewhere on the page, like in the footer. It is not in the sub-navigation directly under Furniture on the mobile site either, curiously.

On Homedepot.com, pressing on a top navigation button caused its sub-items to display — without loading the top-level category page. Clicking on the top navigation item a second time takes you to the top-level category page. Unfortunately, you have to click twice on the sub-item before it will load the requested page. (e.g. to get to the Light Bulbs page from the navigation requires pressing on Electrical once then pressing on Light Bulbs twice (see screenshot photo-24). That was not at all intuitive.

The CDW.com top navigation and MacConnection.com’s left navigation both functioned beautifully on the iPad. Press on a category, and the sub-categories are visible and accessible with one click (screenshots photo-9 & photo-8). You are not whisked away to a top-level category page before you made your sub-navigation selection. On MacConnection.com you can go to the top-level category page by clicking that item again; on CDW.com you cannot, presumably, because there is no corresponding top-level category page for Products, Services, etc.

Lack of Flash Support

This is one of the main complaints with the iPad. No, this was not an oversight. The lack of Flash support was intentional. The company line at Apple is that Flash is prone to crash and is too resource-intensive. Just ask the helpful employees at the local Apple Store and that is what they will tell you. I do not buy it. If Flash really were that unstable, wouldn’t we notice it on our desktop machines? Speaking for myself, this is not something I experience regularly. Google’s Chrome browser, which I now use as my default, even calls it out when Flash crashes and displays an unhappy icon in the place of the Flash animation. Note that in Chrome, Flash does not crash the browser or even the tab/window. Surely Apple can follow Google’s lead and build this same capability into Safari? I feel this is more a political/competitive issue than anything else.

What are the implications of not having Flash? For one, you will find a content-less hole in many home pages across the Internet. Some sites will display a blank space where the Flash animation would have been (photo-20 and photo-5 screenshots). If on your website this represents a large amount of the screen real estate, that void could cost you a conversion. Other sites fill that void with a message urging the user to download and install the Flash player from Adobe’s website (photo-23 screenshot), thus sending the user on a wild goose chase that will ultimately end fruitless. Still other sites discretely display a warning that the lack of Flash makes their site inaccessible or somehow unusable. (photo-10 screenshot)

The workaround involves a mix of user-agent detection and HTML5. First, detect the iPad Safari browser, then selectively serve up a version that eliminates the dead space and compensates for the loss in content/functionality. If the Flash was navigation or a rotating carousel, this can be accomplished with HTML and CSS. If it was a video (the majority of video on the web is Flash-based), then develop an alternative HTML5-based player or utilize a solution like BrightCove’s (examples: eBags, onlineshoes.tv, screenshots photo-1 & photo-4). If your Live Chat function relies on Flash, then you have a very big and immediate problem. MacConnection’s customer service chat (screenshots photo-7, photo-6) is fully functional on the iPad. Is yours?

Expect Glitches

It’s still early days for the iPad. This is version 1, with many more revisions to come. There are still many kinks to be ironed out, including in the iPad Safari browser rendering engine. So do not be too surprised if Safari for the iPad mangles your website with browser rendering bugs and inconsistencies. For example, notice in the figure below (insert photo-11 screenshot) that the “New Account?” checkbox partially overlaps the input field, the combination of the two resembling a pull-down list. User confusion could result: if the user doesn’t recognize the checkbox, then they are liable to mistakenly expect the “New Account?” label to be a clickable link and find themselves unable to proceed to checkout.

Bottom line: expect to compensate for Apple’s bugs and glitches, and develop workarounds. The process starts with good old-fashioned QA. Without rigorous testing, you may never know that your site does not work on the iPad. Please do not rely on your users to tell you. Broken websites can happen to anyone. Even to Apple, ironically. Parts of Apple’s Safari Dev Center are un-navigable when accessed from an iPad, including their “Preparing Your Web Content for iPad” technical note in their Safari Reference Library, which does not scroll (screenshot photo-0).

A Simple Solution

If implementing an iPad-optimized version of your website quickly is not feasible or would be a struggle, there are a number of vendors that provide real-time site translations – one such solution is our own Mobile Site Optimizer. These solutions can be implemented quickly, cost-effectively, and with minimal IT involvement. See our product overview at http://www.covario.com/what-we-do/deployment-software/mobile-site-optimizer

SWOT ANALYSIS & SMART PLAN

SWOT ANALYSIS & SMART PLAN

There are many methodologies for business planning. One of the more well-known ones is the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) Analysis. There are also methodologies for ensuring that the plan objectives are the right type of objectives, such as the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-lined) Plan. Next we will take a look at both of these in the context of SEO.

SWOT ANALYSIS:

Sometimes you need to get back to the basics and carry out a simple overview strategy of where you are in the marketplace, and where you would like to be. A simple SWOT analysis is a great
starting point. It creates a grid from which to work and is very simple to execute.

As you can see from the SWOT chart in below, Strengths and Weaknesses usually stem from internal (on-site, business operational, business resource) sources, whereas Opportunities and Threats are from external sources.

Where does SEO fit in here? To explore this, it is helpful to use an example. Take Business X. It has a website that was built on WordPress, makes use of category tagging, adds at least one
page of content every two days, and has excellent knowledge of its industry. Its domain name isn't ideal -- Businessnameandkeyword.com -- but it is decent.

Business X does not get much traffic from search engines, but its rival, Business Y, does because Business Y has had its website up for a long period of time and received some great links along the way. Business Y doesn't have any SEO plan and relies on its main page to bring in all traffic.

This is because Business Y has a keyword-rich domain name and people have linked to the site using the domain name (giving it keyword-rich anchor text), and because of its longevity on the Web.

There aren't a lot of target search queries; in fact, there are fewer than 50,000 for the core set of keywords. Business X's site ranks on the second page of Google results, whereas Business Y
is ranked #3, with Wikipedia and About.com taking up the top two positions.

Neither of the businesses is spending money on PPC (paid search) traffic, and the niche doesn't have much room for other entrants (there may be 10 to 15 competitors). Both sites have similar link authority in terms of strengths and numbers. The businesses deal in impulse purchases -- the products evoke strong emotions.

The preceding analysis suggests quick wins for the Business X site, as well as where the priorities are. It also forms a great starting point for a long-term strategy and tactical maneuvers. This example is simplistic, but it illustrates how instructive a fleshed out SWOT can be. It does require you to have analyzed your site, the main competitor(s), the keywords, and the search
engine results pages (SERPs).

SMART PLAN

Every company is unique, so naturally their challenges are unique. Even a second SEO initiative within the same company is not the same as the first initiative. Your initial SEO efforts have changed things, creating new benchmarks, new expectations, and different objectives. These all make each SEO project a new endeavor.

One way to start a new project is to set SMART objectives. Let's look at how to go about doing that in the world of SEO.

• Specific objectives are important. It is easy to get caught up in details of the plan and lose sight of the broader site objectives. You may think you want to rank #1 for this phrase or that, but in reality you want more customers. Perhaps you don't even need more customers, but you want higher sales volume, so in fact having the same number of orders but with a higher average order value would meet your objectives better.


• Measurable objectives are essential if one is to manage the performance in meeting them -- you can't manage what you can't measure. SEO practitioners have to help their clients or
  organizations come to grips with analytics, and not just the analytics software, but the actual processes of how to gather the data, how to sort it, and most important, how to use it to make informed decisions.


• Achievable objectives are ones which can be accomplished with the available resources. You could decide to put a man on Mars next year, for example, but it is just too big an undertaking to be feasible. You can be ambitious, but it is important to pick goals that can be met. You cannot possibly sell to more people than exist in your market. There are limits to markets, and at a certain point the only growth can come from opening new markets, or developing new products for the existing market.
  
  Aside from basic business achievability, there are also limits to what can rank at #1 for a given search query. The search engines want the #1 result to be the one that offers the most value for users, and unless you are close to having the website that offers the most value to users, it may be unreasonable to expect to get to that position, or to maintain it if you succeed in getting there.


• Realistic objectives are about context and resources. It may be perfectly achievable to meet a certain objective, but only with greater resources than may be presently available. Even a top ranking on the most competitive terms around is achievable for a relevant product, but it is realistic only if the resources required for such an effort are available.


• Time-bound is the final part of a SMART objective. If there is no timeline, no project can ever fail, since it can't run out of time. SEO generally tends to take longer to implement and gather momentum than paid advertising. It is important that milestones and deadlines be set so that expectations can be managed and course corrections made.

"We want to rank at #1 for Bunk Beds" is not a SMART objective. It doesn't identify the specific reason why the company thinks a #1 ranking will help it. It doesn't have a timeline, so there is no way to fail. It doesn't state an engine on which to be #1, so there's a guaranteed argument if it means to rank on GOOGLE and you get the job done on Yahoo!.

"To increase Term Bunk Beds generated by natural search by 30% over six months" is a far better objective. There is a deadline, and the company can certainly gauge progress toward the specific objective. The company can look at its current market share and the resources committed to see whether this is achievable and realistic.

Source: Art of SEO

9 Tips For Ecommerce SEO's

9 Tips For Ecommerce SEO's

The below tips are especially for search engine optimizers (SEOs) actively working in the ecommerce field. Hopefully you can make use of these, and maybe even provide some tips of your own in the comments (or on your blog).

With that out of the way, let’s focus on these 9 Tasty Tips for Ecommerce SEOs, shall we?

1. Implement a recommendation engine

The king of upselling has always been Amazon.com (they don’t need any more links, so I won’t bother), a site that pretty much invented the idea of displaying recommendations during the browse and purchase processes. Recommendation engines can be extremely powerful. If you aren’t using them yet, make sure you put this on your radar for 2010 planning.

There are a few key things to remember for SEO with functionality like this, especially how the feature will be coded on the site. If it’s built on javascript, that could pose problems with search engines. While googlebot can crawl through javascript, it’s not guaranteed and certainly won’t provide the benefit of plain text links; Bing’s bot (still msnbot as far as I’m aware) and Yahoo! Slurp are also important to cater to and don’t follow javascript yet.

You’ll also want to ensure the recommendation engine is making use of definitive product URLs and not creating its own “variety” as the recommendations are generated. Depending on business requirements, you may want to build this in-house or look to a third-party solution. Either way, this is a large project requiring a lot of resources—but it’s worth it. Why? Just look at this:

A company we work with recently launched a recommendation engine and saw the following performance improvements after launch:

• Pages per visit (PPV): +20.1%
• Time on site: +2.8%
• Bounce rate: -5.9%
• Conversion rate: +4.8%

Pretty extraordinary results from adding recommendations to the site! This client is a large brand with an already healthy sales process, so your mileage may vary.

2. Add related links

With a lot of pages to work with, related linking can be huge for SEO. At the enterprise scale, SEO is really about leveraging large amounts of pages efficiently, and using that scale to advantage. Related linking accomplishes that very well, but can be an intensive feature to implement and manage (there are several third-party resources for this, including TextWise, SLI Systems, and others).

The king of related linking has always been Shopping.com, a site that was using this to advantage years before it caught on (thanks to their extremely sharp SEO at the time, Aaron Shear).

The idea behind related linking is to accomplish at least 3 major goals:

• Flatten the site, thereby making it easier for crawlers to access URLs from many different points. Think of this as opening more doors for spiders to traverse a site.
• Relate and categorize products and categories together, thereby making it easier for crawlers to understand how URLs can potentially be grouped together. Think of this as putting signs on the doors to other, possibly related, doors for spiders to follow.
• Provide human visitors with links to related products and categories, thereby aiding the navigation process.

Using related linking well can offer a huge advantage in areas beyond SEO, because users love them too! Related linking can be used alongside or separately from recommendations, and is highly recommended for ecommerce sites--especially large ones.

3. Correlate entry page to bounce rate

Here’s a great tip for SEOs working in analytics, with a hat tip to Brian Kalma who pointed me in this direction: generate search traffic reports to show you the search term alongside the corresponding entry page. You can then analyze the bounce rate of that term and page combination, and find where relevance needs to be improved.

The idea here is to ask, What organic traffic terms are bringing visitors to the wrong page? Knowing that, you can either optimize the page for relevancy, or figure out if a conversion issue is causing problems.

This is literally a gold mine of opportunity for the hard-working SEO! But it’s not something that you can accomplish over night. After you’ve created the ability for your analytics reports to generate the right data points (easier said than done), you’ll then need to analyze that data and finally begin to chip away at the large number of projects this analysis will create as outcomes.

4. Be a speed demon

Dealing with hundreds of millions (or billions) of pageviews a day is nothing out of the ordinary for enterprise sites. Ecommerce sites can get pounded with traffic, and require advanced content delivery network (CDN) solutions such as Akamai and Limelight. While these are important (actually, essential), what’s also important is ensuring your pages are loading lightning fast!

While Google in particular doesn’t use page load time as a factor in its ranking algorithms, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t impact SEO or isn’t important. Site latency can have ramifications in SEO in at least the following areas:

• Crawling efficiency. As a spider crawls the site and performs typical GET/RESPONSE requests, the content needs to be served without excessive delays and without any 5xx server errors. Slow-loading sites can hinder the crawl by serving pages too slowly, which can adversely influence indexing and ultimately even impact rankings.
• User response. A slow-loading page is as dead as a non-existent page. On the web, we want it fast and we want it now, and if we can’t get it now we hit the back button. Google certainly, and Bing probably, look to user satisfaction as a prime concern. A user who searches, clicks a result, then quickly returns to the search engine result page (SERP) and clicks on another result sends a strong signal about a page that is surely recorded. Think of this occurring many thousands of times and you can predict the outcome: the page will be pushed lower in the SERPs, or if it’s a serious error such as a 5xx, removed from the index altogether.

Have your development team look into techniques to speed up the site, and continually audit site load time.

5. Find and kill duplicate product URLs

Here’s some low fruit to pick: ecommerce sites are especially bad at having multiple versions of product pages. Normally we can find these with site: and inurl: search operators. Pay careful attention to the product level URLs, as this is usually the area duplicate content creeps in (through faceting and sorting of URLs, or through tracking or cookie information appended in the query string). It’s also an area that can cause major negative impact on search rankings. Each product page should have one single, authoritative URL.

Duplicate product pages cause the following issues (at least):

• Page dilution in the search indices. It’s not uncommon to find sites with dozens or even hundreds of product duplicates; with Google crawling and indexing a finite number of pages (domain dependent, of course), this is critical to resolve.
• PageRank split in the link profile. Duplicate pages can attract links on their own, too, and these need to be consolidated to maximize a product URLs external links.

To find duplicate product URLs, do some quick searches in Google like the following:

1. site:mydomain.com inurl:productID
2. site:mydomain.com intitle:"my product name"

You’ll have to click on the “repeat the search with the omitted results included” link to see all the duplicates (this adds filter=0 to the query string in the URL). After you find them, here are your options (in order of preference for SEO, and intensiveness to implement):

• Best but highly intensive: Re-structure your URLs so they don’t create duplicate content. This may mean a complete overhaul of the URL format and is not recommended in 99% of cases. However, in very serious situations this is the long-term goal, even if you have to get there via other short-term fixes.
• Second best and moderately intensive: 301 redirect duplicate versions to the authoritative version. This is always a good option, however it requires more resources and is sometimes not do-able on ecommerce sites sorting products by season, style or special promotion. Also, redirects cause latency on a site (a point often overlooked by SEOs).


• Third best and lightly intensive: Use the link canonical meta tag to relate duplicates with a single, authoritative version. Next, use Google and Yahoo! parameter removal tools in their web consoles to pull out parameters that aren’t needed. This is the least desirable option because it doesn’t really fix the underlying issue, it only places a band-aid on it. Still, it’s better than nothing, and it requires very few resources in comparison to the above methods.

6. Run your own scheduled crawls and audits

If you’re an in-house SEO, set a crawler loose on your pages regularly. Xenu can be a good option, however it doesn’t scale for large sites and won’t stand up at the enterprise level. web Link Validator is better in this department. However, there are unique advantages to either having a custom crawler created or to use the services of an outside agency. The idea here, and the benefit, is to continually monitor the site for changes and new content pushes to ensure nothing creeps in that will stab you in the back (like the creation of 25,000 302 redirects from out of stock items).

Google’s webmaster console is fantastic (I also recommend using Bing and Yahoo!’s tools, which are good but not as comprehensive). Google’s tool acts very much like a crawler you would use on your own, but in my experience only shows “indications” of issues, and therefore acts best as a pointer for further investigation with other tools

7. Brag about your successes

This may sound odd, but you need to hear it: brag! That’s right, brag. If you don’t tell anyone about your successes, do you just expect them to discover them on their own? You can’t quietly do your work expecting for everyone to notice how amazing you are. You have to stand up and say, “hey! check this out, we made the front page of Digg! We got some new rankings! We’re building links like crazy!” or whatever you can brag about.

You provide reporting and benchmarking, I’m sure, but be sure to share what you’ve done outside of those formal procedures. Brag to your managers and even the C-levels about link building successes, wins with rankings and social media, traffic increases, and even specific projects that you’ve recently undertaken or completed.

8. Leverage landing pages

Landing pages are like little hubs that tie entire categories (and even sections) of a site together. For large ecommerce sites, having custom and high-quality landing pages created enables web teams to:

• Create excellent user experiences


• Control the number and type of links on a page (not to mention their location)


• Control the ‘flow’ of a site from the category to product level


• Aggregate content such as custom-tailored copy, links, reviews, product shots, promotions, and navigation elements into a single page

9. Stay creative

I’ve saved the best one for last, because I really like the number 9. Top ecommerce sites do one thing very well: they cater to their customers. They innovate, they contribute value. Creative thinking is required in SEO, because SEO best practices can only get you so far.

Continually aim to keep new projects on your agenda. It’s not enough just to stay caught up with damage control. Keep an open mind. Stay away from “latest fad” type of SEO tips and other rubbish. Creative ideas can drive a lot of traffic and attention, regardless of SEO benefits. And always remember, as Bob Massa says, “Search engines follow users.”

Courtesy: Search Engine Land.

SEO Tips for Flash

SEO Tips for Flash

Creating accessible flash content for search engines is odd for you to preserve your online presence and drive traffic to your site. Follow these Flash Optimization Tips to get most out of the major search engines.

Adding SWF content to your HTML source

An iron-clad way to guarantee that a SWF’s content is picked up and ranked by search engines is to extract the content and place it into the page’s HTML source. Tools such as Dreamweaver use SWF Object to embed Flash. The code view in Dreamweaver displays comments where you should add your alternative HTML content.

Keep your URL unique

If your site is just one big lump of Flash in an HTML template, your page is never going to refresh. Consider having a different URL for each page of your site’s Flash content. Each page would have its own HTML source title, “H1″ and body copy containing the keyword you want to rank.

Use source content dumping

A one-page HTML rich internet application (RIA) will not be SEO enhanced simply by adding the content for each section of the Flash application into the HTML source for this page. Doing this doesn’t establish any prominence of content, as there are too many competing terms. Keep extracted Flash content relevant to the page it’s on.

Keep an eye on new initiatives

Adobe has been working with Google and Yahoo! to make the Flash file format (SWF) search engine friendly. This will enable the engines to see what’s inside a SWF’s content and index it. However, the use of Flash Player technology by search engines is still developing and so can’t be relied on as the only step towards optimizing your project for SEO.

Add text to your Flash applications

A simple Flash SEO enhancement is to use Flash-generated text in your creative when displaying or animating type. You can do this instead of using text that’s a flattened bitmap. Flash text can contain keyword-based messages, which help increase traffic. Include this text in the HTML source of the page as well.

Remember that search engine spiders hate pop-ups

We’ve all visited sites that urge us to click to launch Flash content into a new window. This removes any chance of the site’s content being picked up and indexed by search engines. In addition to search spiders not being able to see them, pop-ups suffer from being blocked by many browsers.

Get robotic help

Robots.txt is a plain text file found at the root of a server. This tells search bots which content needs to be allowed or disallowed when it visits their website. If your Flash text content is the same as your HTML version, you could set the Robots.txt file to ignore the SWF content and push only the HTML content to the search bots.

Embed Flash content with SWF Object

SWF Object is a search engine-friendly way to embed Flash content. Alternative (non-Flash) content is produced first, and then snippets of JavaScript are used to swap out the alternative content with the Flash movies. This ensures that the content is indexed by search engines. Users without Flash will still see a working HTML page.