Gaining an Edge With Web Analytics

Web analytics software is the eyes and ears to your web site visitors. Understanding the behavior of potential customers from the time they find your site, when they're surfing it, to when they leave, is essential for a number of reasons. Web development issues, cross platform compatibility, landing page success, and search engine visibility are just some of the areas analytics can shed much-needed light on.

In the mid 1990's, it created a splash when big businesses announced they were simply launching a web site. Today, many companies' web sites can function as the sole method of generating income. With the advent of blogs, discussion forums, podcasts, online stock info and more, people keep referring to web content daily, hourly, and even by the minute.

In my industry of search engine optimization, there are specific habits I need to know in order to make my web site function more efficiently. Useful information for me is:

- what search engines are referring visitors the most
- what keywords did my visitors search for
- what page are they visiting first (entry pages)
- what page are they visiting last (exit pages)
- what link is followed the most from my home page
- what's the ratio of total visitors to visitors who contact me

Advanced statistics and analytics software can tell me if say, visitors from Google are more likely to contact me than visitors from Yahoo's search engine. If this is the case, then I know by optimizing my site more for Google, I'm increasing the changes of contacts made.

Visitor information is especially useful when doing PPC campaigns. If you pay for every click on your ad, you're paying for every visit. You need to know how your site's structure works for your visitors. Are they getting confused on the entry page and leaving? If you created the PPC ad for the sole purpose of selling product A, are visitors from that ad more likely to visit sections of your site for product B for some reason?

Being able to react to your visitors' needs can have a profound effect on profit made from your web site.

Those who operate a web site blindly, that is to say those who don't know their visitors' habits, are at a disadvantage.

For more information, visit the Web Analytics Association.
To get to know your visitors better, sign up free for Google Analytics.

Buying Links for SEO

There is a debate raging over paid links as part of an SEO plan. Should it be done? Does it fall within White Hat SEO techniques? What do the search engines say about this? Is there a risk involved with buying incoming links? There are so many questions brought up with this issue, but let's cover a few of the big ones:

First off, search engines don't like the fact that webmasters can indirectly buy rankings, since obtaining good quality, relevant links theoretically helps your rankings rise. It also lowers the quality of links on the web when webmasters start linking for SEO instead of for visitors and quality. Matt Cutts has a good blog on this topic here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/

So right off the bat we know that link buying is a Black Hat SEO method because Google has said it does not condone it. Paid directory listings are different because human eyes validate these links upon submission as being relevant and useful to their core audience. Business directory listings will always have a place in the heart of search engines, but buying thousands of site-wide links strictly for SEO do not.

The risk part is definitely true. As with any Black Hat SEO method, there may be benefits in the short term, but as your methods age they will likely get picked up by new search engine algorithm updates. For example, take hidden text. Many webmasters years ago would make text the same color as the background of a page in order to stuff the page's content with repetitions of popular keywords, hoping to get a high ranking. Occassionally I will come across a site that's still using this method, but over time, the search engines weed these bad folks out.

But fear not. For those who want to throw some money at a web site and have it ranked well (and quickly), take the PPC route. Pay-per-click advertising reaches just as many people if not more (with Google content ads) than organic search engine listings. Hire a capable PPC campaign manager and you will probably see a good return on your monthly budget. Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing are the most popular services for PPC advertising.

And if you still want to buy links, do what Google says and use the 'nofollow' tag. Set up a link for direct click-throughs from potential customers, not to increase your link popularity.

Article Submissions: The SEO Fallacy

Everyone loves to submit articles for SEO purposes. It's such a great, and easy, way of getting incoming links for your web site, provided you can write something intelligently about your product or field. And even if you can't write worth a lick, many article reprint sites will do you the gracious benefit of accepting your submission.

But as one would assume, this clutters up the web quite a bit. Duplicate content, 'scraped' content, not to mention content written for the sole purpose of increasing link popularity instead of human eyes, amounts to a problem for search engines trying to present their users with useful content. So what are search engines doing about this? Easy: they're discrediting the value of your articles.

Your articles are now being relegated to Google's dreaded "Supplemental Index." If you're not familiar with that term, it's basically a database within Google's larger database where it keeps all the web pages and files it collects on the Internet. The Supplemental Index is where old, irrelevant pages go to die. Rather than banish them completely from their index, Google keeps them on hand in case a user's search query doesn't bring up enough in the regular index.

Search engines also like fresh content. A lot. Why do you think blogs, forums, RSS, and social bookmarking are so popular these days? The active participation between users and web sites, whether it's RSS feeds, blog comments, or 'diggs', just having something happen with your content weeks, months and years after creating it is one way of letting the search engines know that it's a good resource.

Articles submitted through reprint sites with suspect names like ArticleMegaBlaster sit buried deep in web sites on pages with low PageRank values. Their content never changes and search engine spiders rarely crawl them. So you have a link on that page to your web site. Big deal. It's the same thing as getting linked to from a link exchange page that's 3 categories deep and isn't indexed by Google. It's worthless. And what's worse is that this does more harm than you might expect. Search engines have a memory; a very long memory. Just as it's difficult to get re-listed by a search engine once your site has been banned, it is difficult to tell a search engine than your content is in fact very valuable once it's been copied on hundreds of poor quality web sites.

Think of article submissions the same as a news story by the Associated Press. The day it's published it's a popular read, as many places like CNN and MSN pick it up. After that for a couple weeks people may search and want to reference some information contained in that news story. But as time goes on, the news gets stale and is buried deep in the archives of web sites that reprint AP news. Any searches for that topic a year from now will result in newer stories about it, not the old article. Chances are it isn't relevant anymore, unless the story covers a major event and presents unique information about it. The same goes for your article. It will only stay relevant if others continue to link to it or feature it on their site.

If you really have something of value to write about, consider submitting it as a press release. If you have a popular blog, just print it up there and wait for people to find it. If it's worth their time, they'll use it (hopefully along with a link to your site) and do the distribution for you. If you don't have a blog of your own but think your article is interesting, ask some popular bloggers in your field to feature it on their blogs. Another option is to find out if web resources or publications in your industry accept submissions. Some web sites look for guest authors to write on a weekly or monthly basis. While most won't pay you anything, they will feature your writing and give you free exposure.

If the purpose of submitting your articles is ultimately for SEO purposes, then you must realize that SEO is an ongoing task. Continue to write about your products or services and look for ways of getting temporary exposure from each article.

8 Link Popularity Methods Ranked for SEO

If you haven't read my new article, there is a link to it here:

8 Link Popularity Methods Ranked for SEO in 2007.