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How to Predict Traffic from Google

admin — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 13:43:34 +0000

Google gives you plenty of really good tools at the moment to predict the traffic to your website from Google rankings. In this post I will show you how you can make a guestimation of the %age of traffic that a particular rank will give you, this is something that I have been trying to figure out for a long time now, and with Google’s wealth of tools available we can use these to get quite fair estimations (Well I think so anyway.). So what do you need to do this: Google Adwords Keyword Tool Your Analytics Package Daily Rankings Reports Google Insights for Search Firstly some caveats, This is an estimation tool remember this and make no promises based on the results, Results can depend on many other factors other than just this such as how appealing your result looks to the searcher, Results do not take into consideration the number of sponsored listings on the page or local search results and the maps with them, real time search box and Shopping results. Collecting the

7 Overlooked Sources of Keyword Data

admin — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:22:50 +0000

Keyword Research is an obvious first step in researching a niche for yourself or for a client. Keywords, and their results, make up the terrain of search marketing – and knowing the terrain (and who else is playing in it) helps us navigate up the mountain (and determine when the mountain is maybe too crowded to climb). Google’s AdWords Keywords tool isn’t a bad place to start, but if you’re operating in a competitive niche there isn’t much of an advantage there – even my grandma uses it (not really, my grandma still has a rotary phone, but you get the idea). Your real advantage comes from looking in places where your competitors aren’t to identify “under the radar” keywords. Here are 10 sources of keyword data that are often overlooked in the course of everyday keyword research. 1) Misspelling

How to Aggregate Google Analytics Stats with SEJ Tools

admin — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:48:08 +0000

The best thing about the SEJ tools is that you can have all aspects of your website promotion campaign and performance tracking under one combined login. Using one tool you can create and publish content , track links , monitor and compare rankings , do on-page diagnostics and also view your traffic stats. Traffic monitoring is based on Google Analytics: SEJ toolset allows to import all your Google Analytics accounts into your SEJ tools account to view your stats. To activate Google Analytics, you should first login and authorize a specific Google Analytics account so the system can access the data. This process is secure , and you can revoke access at any time. So to start: Go to ANALYTICS tab and click the link saying “Authorize Google Analytics”. Then click “Grant access” link and select the Google Account profile you want to import; You will then be taken back to your SEJ tools account where you will be able to instantly see the imported stats. The software will fetch and display the following data: The Dashboard view:

How to Hire a University Student for Link Building

cgseo — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 18:41:30 +0000

As we all know, unless you are fortunate enough to have content on a client site go viral due to its sheer brilliance, link building is a time intense activity. Positioning yourself in a niche, building great content, approaching a webmaster for a link– these things don’t happen in the blink of an eye. But I’ve established an excellent way to work on link building campaigns that takes less time than it would to do all the work alone. The answer is simple – university students. These anxious young minds are jumping for work experience, and link building is a relatively simple task where their success can be easily measured as you give them a head start in the marketing industry. University students are Internet savvy, decent writers, and cheap in comparison to link-building companies and consultants. The saying “you get what you pay for” does spring to mind, but they aren’t hard to train – they’re used to learning new material. It’s important to note that especially in this economy, university students are having a harder time finding work experience – which can work to our link-building agenda’s advantage. Step 1: Find the Career Office of a Local University Universities are eager to reach out to local businesses in order to connect their student with opportunities. Take advantage of this! Most schools have intra-net job sites, where you can post your “Link Building Trainee” opening at no cost. Step 2: Explain Link Building to Your New Charge Once I’ve selected Link Builder, I email them link building resources and explain that links from reputable sources are a significant part of a search engine’s algorithm. The more they understand what an important part of SEO links are, the more empowered they’ll feel to do their job well. Step 3: Identify Linkable Content The student must understand what parts of the site make for strong content and to whom they appeal. Have them write a quick line or two about which target audiences are interested in the content they have identified and why. Step 4: Proposed Websites Depending on how much control you want to exercise, it may be a good idea to have your student draw up a list of websites they propose to contact BEFORE they do it. If the student has understood the target audiences, this step should be easier for them to get the hang of. Step 5: Email Template or Phone Script If you’re going straight for the kill and contacting webmasters directly, show your student examples of past emails you’ve sent when link building. Naturally, they should be to the point, personalized, and demonstrate your site’s involvement/relevancy enough to convince a webmaster. If your student is phoning the website, run over with them who they should speak to and how they should present the content – it’s worth writing a script to ensure there is no confusion. Step 6: A Log It is important your student keep a log of their communication with different bloggers and webmasters. Be sure this data is in YOUR control, so if the student leaves for summer holiday or gets ill, you know who they’ve conversed with. Before I end this, I must say a word about student salary. While cheap, be fair and compensate university students for their time; at the very least reimburse them for travel and lunch when they come into the office. That said, go find yourself an aspiring Link Builder – while freeing up your time to focus on more important tasks, your Builder will be gaining valuable employment experience. Chelsea Blacker is a London based search consultant currently working at Base One Search With a background in SEO & PPC cultivated at Promediacorp in NYC, Chelsea focuses on engaging B2B brands in social media and online PR. If you want to further procrastinate from getting on with your real work, check out her current Marketing Pilgrim post You Know You Work in Search When… or say hi to her on twitter @ChelseaBlacker Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . How to Hire a University Student for Link

2010 : A New Age For Search Marketers

admin — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:22:29 +0000

We are in the midst of the largest algorithmic changes to Google’s relevancy since the Florida Update of 2003, and perhaps even the largest change for how marketers approach search since Google and Inktomi revolutionized the concept of citation based rankings. The interesting part of this change is that it is not focused on one concept, but rather several, that mixed together change the face of search as we move into the new year. What makes this change so important is that the future of search, whether it be Search “2.0″ or Caffeine oriented, is based on much more than the relevancy factors of content, links, queries and relevant infrastructure. This new “ Search-o-morphis ” brings factors into play which include site usability, site mobility, the presence of the site socially and also more and more offpage factors which go beyond traditional linking. Personalized Search Changes Real Time Search Growth of Android and Personalized Mobile Search Social Search Bing Growing into legitimate option 2 These concepts individually have an effect, but combined they leave search relevancy heading in a direction that will leave SERPs looking far different than they did in 2009. Looking at the way these changes are making search as a whole move, SEOs are going to have to focus on two new concepts in their marketing plan in 2010: 1. Social Media 2. Mobile Search Why is social media so important? Well, since social media is such an all encompassing metric, let’s look at one aspect of social media : the sharing of information. In 1998, links were important in the Google Citation algorithm because links were the way that people shared information and gave recommendations online. In 1998, in order to link to something, you usually had to hardcode a link in the HTML of your website. Doing so could take minutes to code, and hours to FTP via dial up, and if someone put that much time into linking to a site … well, that site must be of value, wouldn’t it have? With blogging, things changed. Blogging came into the forefront in 2003 with Google’s acquisition of Blogger.com and ultimately Google’s launch of AdSense; which monetized blogs and led to a new economic culture of self publishing. With anyone having the ability to launch a blog with the click of a button, any novice now had the ability to link. Links are easier to achieve, easier to manipulate and much more valuable, since the link is no longer the voice of few, but the voice of many. Enter microblogging and socially networked sharing, with Twitter and more predominantly Facebook. If Twitter is to an HTML link what Facebook is to mass blog linking. This analogy means basically that in my opinion, Twitter will hit its early adopter plateau while almost anyone will join Facebook, connect with friends and share information with others. What’s our point? Our point is that if Google is to still work off of a citation based algorithm based on relevant conversations and suggestions of websites using keywords, then the engine is going to have to catch up to the world of social media. Because bloggers don’t just blog anymore, they share thoughts and relevant information on Twitter and Facebook. If Dave’s mom reads something interesting, he’ll share it on Facebook. If Loren’s wife runs across a great recipe, she may tweet it out. Hence, microblogging . If blogging has become microblogging, then linking should become micro-linking ( ie. URL Shorteners ). If Google fails to incorporate social media signals via Twitter & Facebook sharing, TinyURL’s and other conversations … then they would be ignoring the direction of the Internet. How will social media effect search directly? Well these new changes are sending signals beyond search. Traffic The signal of traffic will not come simply from SERP use. The engines will be looking for how users interact with pages beyond their search product. How do they find the site? How do they share it? This can all be monitored from the methods above. Social media sites spread a ton of traffic throughout the web every day. But traffic is not measured in terms of shear numbers, the relevance of traffic to a site can be measured via conversions (sales, sign ups, shares), bounce rate, time on site (all hail video!), diversity of traffic, whether the user revisits the site, and how the site is viewed amongst its peers and followers. Engagement The more users engage with a document, the more it will show up in their personalized results. Methods and systems for personalized network searching (Google Patent) An embodiment of the present invention may comprise features to facilitate community building. For example, in one embodiment, the uniform resource locator comprises a community bookmark. The bookmark may be shared by a set of users or may be transmitted by one user and received by another. The second user can then perform personalized queries that are based, at least in part, on the shared bookmark. In another embodiment, a cluster of users is identified based at least in part on the bookmarks and annotations that they have previously identified. If a user spends a great deal of time on a site, it is identified as a bookmark for later personalized searches. In other embodiments, the implicit measure may comprise at least one of the quantity of repeat visits to the site or the quantity of click-throughs on the site…Other implicit measures include printing the page, saving the page, and the amount of scrolling performed on the page. Upstream and Downstream

SpringNote: a Free Collaboration and Data Organization Tool

cgseo — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:26:56 +0000

I have always believed that the way you organize your work and information defines how successful you are. In SEO various tools that allow for data outlining and manipulating can be helpful in multiple tasks: (1) Keyword research (for better keyword organization and analysis). Remember how useful an outlining tool called “wikidPad” turned for keyword research ? (2) Reporting (for compiling detailed, yet easy-to-grasp reports your client will appreciate); (3) Collaboration (for easier distributing multiple tasks, organizing multiple writers and teams), etc. The tool I am going to share in this post can help in all the tasks listed above – SpringNote is a free online tool that can be used for collaboration and data organization. Best features: Data “ tree-like ” organization. Collaboration; Auto-saving; Search within a notebook. Organize Your Data in Multiple

Google Answers Privacy Questions with Call for More Data

cgseo — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 04:49:19 +0000

Last week Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s director of community development, put out a link on his personal blog and stated: Here’s how you can easily switch Firefox’s search from Google to Bing. It was a pretty shocking move by a member of a company that has seen most of its revenue come from Google . It was a move brought on by concerns over the search giants view on privacy. The comment was spurred by Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt comments on privacy: If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” Schmidt told CNBC. “If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities Why are they watching and storing what we do? Data. The more data they can collect, the more they can personalize search. How does Schmidt feel about personalized search ? From his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal: It’s the year 2015. The compact device in my hand delivers me the world, one news story at a time. I flip through my favorite papers and magazines, the images as crisp as in print, without a maddening wait for each page to load. Even better, the device knows who I am, what I like, and what I have already read. So while I get all the news and comment, I also see stories tailored for my interests. I zip through a health story in The Wall Street Journal and a piece about Iraq from Egypt’s Al Gomhuria, translated automatically from Arabic to English. I tap my finger on the screen, telling the computer brains underneath it got this suggestion right… Personalized search can only happen with data collection, this is a reality. How does Google collect data ? Gmail and Google Accounts Adsense Adwords Google Analytics Google Chrome (browser and OS) Google Toolbar Android On and on and on… Their new love? Real Time Search data. This data comes in the form of APIs from places such as Twitter in some cases, and can give the engines much of the information they need to fuel time based elements in the ranking algorithm such as Query Deserves Freshness (QDF). Real time data allows them to pull in trending information, links, and pages linked from conversation without a crawl. Why stop there? Enter Goo.gl, Google’s URL shortener. What kind of information can you pull from a URL shortner? 1. What information people care enough to share – will likely be a huge signal if you are logged in 2. What information people are clicking on 3. Referral sources for differing pages that do not include Google Analytics The really strange component of this addition to Google’s product set is that it goes against what initially made them THE search engine, the interlinking web’s use in ranking. 301 or no, that loss of anchor text and the credit from direct citation are something that seem to be against everything the engine was founded on. However, they are everything the engine is moving towards. Data driven results. Eventually this data will not only mean your results being shaped by what you like, but also your social web. Think about this, if I am logged into Google and share 30 pieces of content and you click on 25 out of the 30, do you think this will begin to shape your SERPs? More involuntary personalization. Less of the web delivered. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Google Answers Privacy Questions with Call for More

Why Real Time Search Should Interest SEOs

cgseo — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:46:59 +0000

When Google announced their real time search additions, many were probably left unimpressed. After all, they are jumping on a bandwagon created by the popularity of Twitter’s search platform. From an SEO perspective, however, the move excited me. It opens up a whole new world for savvy SEOs looking to compete in the always profitable business of trending search terms. There are several reasons I believe SEOs should be taking note of this addition: 1. QDF – The concept of query deserves freshness is not new, and search users are utilizing results that show up because of it everyday. However, in terms of rankings QDF can have huge impacts on the SERPs. The first thing that came to mind when I saw the real time search data pouring through was that Google is getting a massive amount of real time link data without the issue of a crawl. I am convinced they will be utilizing this data to help shape SERPs for terms that are trending or based on timeliness. 2. SPAM – Seriously, any new feature that Google rolls out is a playground for SPAM. My head is spinning thinking of all the cool/evil implications of the service. I am sure lots of people are going to be testing how Google is choosing the results coming in the box. Some people might ask the importance of coming up for a mere moment in that position, but the sheer amount of traffic generated for a trending term can make even a 30 second window profitable. Time will tell if this is actually a feature search users utilize. From the user perspective, I definetly see the benefit in terms of staying on top of breaking news. This could be a game changer in that respect, and was the one place Twitter search had really changed the face of social media. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Why Real Time Search Should Interest

How to Work with Google Services While Offline: Detailed Overview

cgseo — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:51:46 +0000

To access all (but one) Google services listed here while not online you will need to install Gears FireFox addon which lets web applications interact naturally with your desktop and stores web data locally in a fully-searchable database. Her’s a quick overview of which Google services are available in the offline mode and what exactly you’ll be able to do:

4 Tools for Advanced Google SERPs Analysis

admin — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:17:06 +0000

I have already looked at most important factors to take into account when analyzing search engine results page ; this week I am taking a bit more practical approach reviewing (and comparing) tools that will help you to analyze SERPs. They all work as FireFox addons (so you will hardly be abe to install all of them because we need to be very selective when it comes to browser plugins to allow our FireFox to work fast), so I suggest reading through the post to decide which one(s) of them you feel like trying: Tool Major features Most outstanding features Drawbacks / bugs SEOquake Lots of SEO-relevant information for each listing in Google search results Sort Google results by any of the parameters, export search results, create your own parameters May insert its own ads above the search results; got some problems with updating it SEO for FireFox Quick and easy to use, minimum bugs – Search Cloudlet Most frequently ranked domains within one search results page – SERPs Analyzer Estimated number of clicks and PPC revenue per month; Google PR, Yahoo backlinks. etc SERPs stats Beta mode (buggy, non-customizable) 1. SEOquake Inserts lots of data under each listing in Google SERPs: Google pagerank, Google index, Google cache date; Yahoo! index, Yahoo! linkdomain, Yahoo! link; Bing index; Dmoz listing; Webarchive age; Alexa rank; Delicious bookmarks; Technorati index; Digg index; Domain IP; Link to Robots.txt, Sitemap and Page source; SEMrush info (traffic, traffic value, rank); Compete Rank, More! Moreover, you can sort results by any of the parameters and export all the results along with the retrieved data. This is the most customizable addon I am aware of: not only it allows to hide any of the data item but it also enables you to create new parameters by using the following variables: 2. SEO for