Paul Sizemore

Paul Sizemore  //  

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Oct 26 / 2:21pm

SEO is not cured, it's managed!

Once the initial campaign has achieved it's goals, you can't rest on your laurels. SEO is like maintaining a budget, you have to stay on top of it or it will get out of control. Plan on that from the beginning. 

Position Monitoring  /  If you do nothing else, monitor the position of key pages. You can use a program to do it, but don't monitor too much. Using page monitoring software is a violation of the term of service for most search engines, and can get you banned. It's a lot like the speed limit, as long as you don't over do it, you'll be fine. 

Analytics Monitoring  /  Monitoring your analytics will help you see if your users change, and they will. They might change slowly over time, but they will change. That means that your SEO efforts will also need to change with them. It also helps a lot to set up a funnel report for your site's conversions. This will be a key metric that will indicate a change that needs to be addressed. 

Content so Fresh  /  All sites need to be living, growing sites. So, it's good to monitor this, so that it can be paced so that the bots and users can expect fresh content on a regular basis. Don't forget images; new images can breath new life into sites. 

A well thought out, and written monitoring plan can help ensure continued SEO success. Continued monitoring of the right metrics is essential, and it will help your SEO efforts become part of the business process. 
Filed under  //  SEO  

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Oct 26 / 1:54pm

What has your site done for you lately? / Conversions

A lot of people in interactive believe traffic is king; not true, conversions are king. Every web site has a goal, or should have. Every site has a way to measure value. Conversions are the measure of value on a web site. The higher your conversions, the higher the value of your site. 

Sales or leads are evident as conversions, but what if you don't sell anything on your site? If your site is in place to build a brand, or communicate a message, then when a user lands on that page, they are a conversion. Your goal has been reached. 

Conversions are more clear cut in a sales or a lead generation site. Every conversion has steps the user follows to make it to the conversion point. This is often represented as a funnel, and it's great to look at a funnel report in your analytics package. Once set up, it can help you identify places in the sales cycle that users fail to make it to the next step. For example, if you have a large number of visitors delivered from organic search results, and those users are failing to convert, that might indicate a problem with the user's expectations based on the search terms. 

You can test several designs and funnels using A/B testing or multivariate testing. Your analytics package might be able to help you implement this, and it's best tracked in your analytics package. The concept is you test, for example, two versions of a page and then collect data on the one that leads to the most users doing what you want them to do. 
Filed under  //  Analytics   Internet Marketing   SEO  

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Oct 26 / 1:28pm

Looking at your Competitors - a first step

A strong competitive analysis can take your SEO efforts a long way toward success. If you are chasing a goal that is in-part determined by your competitors, then you have to measure their success also. In the case that sucsess is partially determined by standings of competitors, then at least a brief SEO competitive analysis is essential before any resources are allocated to any SEO activities. Even before you initiate on page SEO driven changes, you have to know if what you are doing is needed or a waste of resources based on the goals you've defined. 

The best solution is ongoing analysis; make it part of the business process. The SEO landscape is constantly changing because search engines change the way the rank and competitors change their efforts. Plan to spend at least a couple hours a week at analysis. It gives you a good way to gauge your efforts, and to let you know if you have achieved your goals. Best of all, a good competitive analysis report can help set expectations by making the process a bit more transparent in your organization.

When you do your analysis, make sure that you look at the right metrics:
    • Site ranking on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
    • How many pages are indexed?
    • Measure the page titles on a scoring index, or individual metrics (keyword, character count)
    • Measure the meta data for relevance
    • Look at the information architecture, and rank that metric
    • How effective does your competition use the robots.txt file or a sitemap.xml fie
    • How do you rate their content
    • What does their link structure look like? 

Once you have a template set up based on the SEO goals, you can use that as an effective communications tool. Your stakeholders will come to expect the report, and become a part of the process.
Filed under  //  SEO  

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Oct 26 / 12:42pm

Succeeding in SEO

Since the SEO environment is in a constant flux, it is imperative to maintain your SEO efforts consistently over time. Measurement is essential. There are many different ways to measure SEO success, and the way you decide will be determined by your overall goals of your SEO campaign. 

The fluctuation of success can be caused by the search algorithms, changes to the site or efforts of your competitors to gain rankings. Therefore, rankings and traffic are best measured long-term. 

Set and Reset Expectations

Setting realistic expectations can help your campaign maintain forward movement, keep pressure low, ensure success. Expectations drive the stakeholders actions and decisions. 

Remember, when you are defining expectations, be SMART -  Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound.

People expect immediate results. Be sure to set these expectations first. Also, it helps to have a few low hanging SEO fruit that you can implement. If needed, you can pull that card out and play it. SEO can take months to see results, be sure to pass that along to the stakeholders.

Touch Points
It's also essential that you maintain touch points within the organization to be able to reset the expectations anytime it looks like the campaign starts lagging, but most important, it allows you to know what's going on in the organization. Be an evangelist, that will ensure people understand the process better, and know what to expect. 

Metric: Web Analytics 
Google Analytics is a good solid choice for baseline stats, but will not provide your analytics with very strong of a competitive advantage. It's free, and everyone uses it. The most important thing is to collect baseline stats, those are stats taken before any SEO changes are made. The more historical analytics you can collect the better. If you haven't set up Google Analytics or another script based package to collect the historical data, it might be a good idea to assess you server logs. Log based analytic packages can be loaded with historical logs, so if they are on your server, they can be loaded and analyzed. 

Metric: Referring Web Sites
Looking at the referring sites will let you know if you are getting inbound links, and if the number is increasing or decreasing. In addition, this metric will help you identify new partners. 

Metric: Referring keywords
Keyword tracking will let you know the search terms people are using to find your site. This report is invaluable. It will help you further refine your keyword research. 

Metric: Visit Duration & Depth
This report will let you know how targeted your pages are for the searchers. 

It's important to measure and report SEO results, once you are doing this, you can manage expectations and succeed in SEO. 
Filed under  //  Analytics   SEO  

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Oct 25 / 9:15pm

Programming Languages and their effect on SEO

All sites are built on programming languages. It's the language of web creation. Good site SEO starts in the design phase, and the programming language selection is part of that phase. 

JavaScript  /  Not very search engine friendly. It's a best practice to include external JavaScripts at the bottom of the page, in order to ensure the search engine 'reads' the important parts of the page. Also, search engines don't index content in JavaScript optimally, so if you have any links in the JavaScript, they will not be indexed as well. 

Flash  /  A SEO nightmare. There have been a few strides in being able to index content in Flash files, but in general, make sure the content is in HTML code also. 
Adobe has launched a SEO Tech Center at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/seo/. It includes quite a few current resources for Flash and SEO. Right now only Google and Yahoo is indexing the optimized Flash files. 

ASP and PHP /  Could be good to go!  These are programming languages to build applications, and depending on the architecture, they can be very SEO friendly. The most important thing is to remember each page of content needs to have a seperate URL. 
Filed under  //  SEO  

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