Related posts:

1. Attention Interest Desire Action in Keyword Choices
2. The power of keyword domains – Still almost nothing, sometimes
3. Descriptions for SEO – 10 quick keyword ideas

Global SEO

What is it worth?

Optimising your website for global customers is a specific task that is worth isolating from general SEO activities. This activity is of specific benefit to exporters, but it is also of benefit to businesses that are targeting customers all over the globe. You can clearly increase your customer base by adding pages on your site that specifically target the US, Europe or Asia.

What can you do?

If your site has a generic top-level domain, such as .com or .org, and targets users in a particular geographic location, you can provide Google with information using the Google Webmaster tools. This will also improve your website in Google’s search results for geographic queries. Setting a geographic target won’t impact your appearance in search results unless a user limits the scope of the search to a certain country.

If an international domain (.com, .org, .eu, etc) has been used, Google relies on several other signals, including IP address, location information on the page, links to the page, and any relevant information from Google Places.

Matt Cutts has also said that server location is taken into account for local search results, although the level this is the case is debatable. Google does try to find context from server IP and top level domain location. However, if your site has a geographic TLD/ccTLD (like .co.nz) then Google states they will not use the location of the server as well. Obviously there could be a clash between server IP and your TLD, (for instance hosting your site in the US and having a .co.nz domain). Doing that would be a bit confusing, and Google can’t really “average” between New Zealand and the USA.  So, the ccTLD is generally a much stronger signal than the server’s location could ever be.

The optimisation also counts on the keywords that a user chooses. Not only is search location, search preferences and search history taken into account, but also if they are using words that are geotargeted. This means there is a language factor that needs to be taken into account. There are specific foreign language search engines, Baidu for Chinese or Yandex for Russian. These search engines take into account the language of the site, and the page that is produced.

So what specific SEO steps can you take?

1. Build GEO specific pages with local content and location information
2. Build GEO specific pages that attract local links
3. Purchase the GEO specific domain and point either at your website or at the pages or build a second mirror site (this will depend on the competitiveness of your market).

Related posts:

1. The Importance of Keyword Targeted Domains in SEO; Almost Zero

How to Get Google Plus Badge On Websites?

Creating a Google plus badge on websites and blogs is very easy. First we need to create a Google plus page with relevant text, images and videos. The page can be linked to your website by adding some codes to the header of the website template. Here are the steps in detail.

1. Create a Google plus page and note the long string of numbers in the address bar.

2. Go to Google plus page badge customization page and choose the type of badge you want.

3. Copy the code found below the page and paste it on your website.

5. The page button will be there just like the buttons for Facebook and Twitter.

How Google Plus is Going to Affect SEO?

The new Google plus one button will allow people to recommend websites and blogs to friends, family and colleagues. If the website gets more plus ones, the website will get more authority in the eyes of Google. As the page gets more authority than the competitors, naturally its ranking may go higher in the search results.

Some SEO experts still believe that Google plus is not going to make drastic changes in search results. The reason is that several other social networking components are already working much before and hence Google’s recent entity cannot make a substantial impact at present. The Facebook and Twitter are well established and their presence cannot be ignored very soon. Therefore an early prediction on the effect of Google plus on SEO is not possible now.

Related posts:

1. The most shared page on the internet
2. The most shared post on the internet
3. 1 Week Google PageRank Jump

1. Vital - A special rating category
2. Useful – A page that is very helpful for most users.
3. Relevant  - A page that is helpful for many or some users.
4. Slightly Relevant - A page that is not very helpful for most users, but is somewhat related to the query. Some or few users would find this page helpful.
5. Off-Topic or Useless - A page that is helpful for very few or no users.
6. Unratable  A page that cannot be evaluated.
7. The following flags may also apply: Not Spam, Maybe Spam, Spam, Porn, and Malicious.

Vital Web Pages

The Vital rating is used for these very special situations: 1) The dominant interpretation of the query is navigation, and the landing page is the target of the navigation query. 2) The dominant interpretation of the query is an entity (such as a person, place, business, restaurant, product, company, organization, etc.), and the landing page is the official webpage associated with that entity. You can imagine the pages that would be classed as vital, such as Facebook.com for “facebook log in” type queries, and people pages for queries about a person. In most cases, as an SEO Consultant, you can either deliver on this or not.

Useful Pages

This would be the most interesting, or important, category for SEO consultants. If you can create pages that an indipendant reviewer would class as “Useful” then you a) are not likely to be classed as spam and b) might actually be providing your users with interesting content. Google classes this as pages that are very helpful for most users. They rate these pages as highly satisfying, authoritative, entertaining, and/or recent (such as breaking news on a topic). If someone is searching for “buy tickets for foo fighters concert sydney” then the results would have to show ways to purchase these tickets.

Relevant Pages

Google assigns a rating of Relevant to pages that are helpful for many or some users. Relevant pages have fewer valuable attributes than were listed for Useful pages. Relevant pages are helpful for users, in addition to being on-topic. The examples of this sort of page would be travel guides for cities, or wikipedia pages for people. The information might not be 100% on topic, but it would be interesting or useful.

Slightly Relevant Pages

A rating of Slightly Relevant is assigned to pages that are not very helpful for most users, but are somewhat related to the query. Slightly Relevant pages may be low quality and/or contain less helpful information. Slightly Relevant pages may serve a minor interpretation, have outdated information, be too specific, too broad, etc. to receive a higher rating.

Off Topic or Useless

A rating of Off-Topic or Uselessis assigned to pages that are helpful for very few or no users and have no relation to the search query. These pages usually warrant the Spam flag. Some other key points from the guidelines that are worth noting;

• Search engine results pages should be rated just like other landing pages
• The query location is an important consideration, as are queries that include locations
• A page is Spam if it is created using deceptive techniques
• Google will not penalize a message board because someone has put spam posts up
• If the page has copied content but is legitimate (lyrics, poetry, etc), this is not spam.
• If the page has copied content but exists only to make money, then it is spam.

Related posts:

1. Google Panda October – Google results lower in quality
2. Increase Quality Score – How to Cut Your Adwords Costs
3. SEO: How Do Search Engines Choose Page-One Sites?

1. Panda update. This update was aimed at reducing the effectiveness of content farming, and reduce the prominance of so called “low quality” websites. A lot of speculation about the algorithm update was that Google was looking to promote websites with original content, and where a user would trust the content more. The update took down a lot of websites, including good ones. Some of the changes were for the better (the punishment of eHow etc).
2. Google Fresh. This update increased prominance of pages that have been recently posted. The aim is to increase the value of websites that keep up to date with the latest information on topics, especially ones that are time sensitive like sporting results.
3. (not provided). Google Analytics started showing this for keywords. The response from Google is that SSL users will not have their keyword search show up in the website’s analytics.

Increased integration of Google+ sharing and Google results

There has already been a lot of integration with Google+ and seeing results from users inside your circles. I think this will increase in prominence, first as there are more users of Google+ and second as Google starts to look for other signals for the quality of a page. What also might start to happen is, Google+ users in a high number of other people’s circles will be able to influence the ranking of pages by sharing them.

Complete integration of webmaster tools and analytics.

Most of the data is already there, but it makes sense to no longer have separation of data that basically does a lot of the same tasks. If Google moves to make all searches via SSL, and Analytics no longer shows the keywords users use, then the only way this data will come into the system would be through the queries in webmaster tools.

Expansion of Google Merchant.

Google Merchant is only a relatively new thing to Australia. However more businesses are using this to output their ecommerce data. Over the next year I think product specific queries will start to have Google merchant searches.

Increased use of Rich Snippets.

Some authors have already started to see their profile appear next to pages they have written. There is a whole raft of other rich snippet information webmasters can build into their sites, including locations, reviews, events etc. How exactly these will be integrated is not clear, but there is certainly room to add them.

Refinement of Google Places.

Right now, even though it is meant to be the least easy to rig, Google Places has a big problem with spam in highly competitive markets. As Google Places are often the top result for local searches, there is a big incentive to try to game the system. You only have to look at some of the top results for plumbers or SEO companies to see a number of these results with 100% glowing reviews of 5 stars from users that rate nothing but those companies. Also a lot of these companies set up post office boxes at places around big cities, so they can claim their address in that area. Whether Google are bothered by all this is another matter all together, however if they do want to take it seriously they need to remove the benefit from reviews and operate on a system that is more like their current ranking, that is places appear according to search quality and location.

Promotion of SEO into the mainstream marketing process

SEO spend compared to PPC is very low. A large number of businesses who build a website would rather pay for traffic than actually optimise their website. This has to change. Over the next year we think larger business will increase their focus on optimisation as competition hots up in medium sized markets.

Serious changes to Google

Every year we predict that Google will change a lot about how their ranking works, basically because it is so easy for low quality websites to rank (still). There is still a big incentive to use article marketing, blog spamming and other poor link building techniques. This has to change.

Related posts:

1. SEO Trends for 2011
2. Marketing Trends for 2010
3. Twitter Trends – How to track what is happening right now!

1. Location keywords
2. Product names
3. Product specifications
4. Service/Product benefits
5. Time constraints (delivery in 24hours, open now)
6. Payment options (cash, visa)
7. Service delivery options (30 day trial, 7 day returns, lease to buy)
8. Your contact details (telephone, email)
9. Pricing
10. Guarantees

Related posts:

1. Attention Interest Desire Action in Keyword Choices
2. How to Find Great Business Ideas
3. The Importance of Keyword Targeted Domains in SEO; Almost Zero

URL normalization (or URL canonicalization) is the process by which URLs are modified and standardized in a consistent manner. There are some standards that search engines look for to determine if the URL has been created “well”. They also use these points to determine if a URL has been crawled before, and which parts of the website are the most important.

1. URLs are case sensitive. Most normalizers will convert them to lowercase. Example:HTTP://www.Example.com/ ? http://www.example.com/
2. There are two ways to present special characters in URLS. The first is through the encoding itself and the second is with the special character. Most systems do not allow special characters in the database, but these are required by search engines. This is called decoding percent-encoded octets of unreserved characters. For consistency, percent-encoded octets in the ranges of ALPHA (%41–%5A and %61–%7A), DIGIT (%30–%39), hyphen (%2D), period (%2E), underscore (%5F), or tilde (%7E) should not be created by URI producers and, when found in a URI, should be decoded to their corresponding unreserved characters by URI normalizers. Example:http://www.example.com/%7Eusername/ ? http://www.example.com/~username/
3. Adding trailing / Directories are indicated with a trailing slash and should be included in URLs. Example: http://www.example.com ? http://www.example.com/
4. Applying the following normalizations result in a semantically different URL although it may refer to the same resource: Removing directory index. Default directory indexes are generally not needed in URLs. Examples: http://www.example.com/default.asp ? http://www.example.com/
   http://www.example.com/a/index.html ? http://www.example.com/a/
5. Removing the fragment. The fragment component of a URL is usually removed. Example:http://www.example.com/bar.html#section1 ? http://www.example.com/bar.html
6. Sorting the variables of active pages. Some active web pages have more than one variable in the URL. A normalizer can remove all the variables with their data, sort them into alphabetical order (by variable name), and reassemble the URL. Example:http://www.example.com/display?lang=en&article=fred ? http://www.example.com/display?article=fred&lang=en
7. Some normalization rules may be developed for specific websites by examining URL lists obtained from previous crawls or web server logs. For example, if the URL

   http://foo.org/story?id=xyz

   appears in a crawl log several times along with

   http://foo.org/story_xyz

No related posts.

For the Creative’s Value figure, we have collected as much information about each directory as possible, and then used that compared to the price of getting a standard link in that directory. This method is not perfect, but it is not a bad idea. The full data is here.

Related posts:

1. Paid Directories – Which Ones Are Worth It?
2. List of blog submission sites by pagerank
3. ultimate link directory search engine

Which websites have worked for you, and why?

The standard ones are;

BOTW – $149 – Domain rank 5.9, 9 million links in
Yahoo – $299 – No idea on the stats
What U Seek – $24 – Domain rank 5.5, 500K links in
Canny Link – $19 – Domain rank 4.6, 900K links in
ProLink – $19 – Domain Rank 5.1, 116K links in
Pegasus – $69 – Domain Rank 5.9, 172k links in

Thoughts?

Related posts:

1. Paid Directory List – Which ones have value?
2. Which directories should I submit my website to?
3. Lessons from Article Directories – Panda Proof Content

Modern marketing methods allow you to track your ROI at every step of a campaign. Long story short, if you are not optimising your campaign for ROI, then you are probably throwing money down the drain. Google Analytics, and a range of other tools, allow you to calculate where you are making your money and what caused that to happen. There are three things you need to do first before you can really start looking at your ROI on SEO.

1. Understand what the value of a sale is. If you are an ecommerce store, then that should be easy. If  you are a service provider, that might be a little harder to quantify, but you should know what your average sale value is.
2. Calculate what your profit margin is on an average sale
3. Set up Google Analytics Goals or Ecommerce tracking (if you can) and give your goal value your average sale value.

This now allows you to carry out a wide range of analysis using Google Analytics. Generally there are three key ways to improve your ROI on SEO;

1. Target keywords that generate more revenue
2. Reduce your targeting on keywords that generate low revenue or a high exit/bounce rate
3. Improve your landing pages and product offerings to encourage more people to buy

1. ROI on Keywords

The number one ranking for a keyword might not get you the most number of sales. 10k queries for a product you never sell is almost a waste of time and money. This metric will allow you to track the value of the keywords that you are getting searched. Setting it up is straight foward. In Google Analytics follow these steps;

1. Custom reporting
2. New custom report
3. Name: ROI on Keywords
4. Metric Group: Revenue or Goal Completions
5. Dimension Drilldown: Keyword
6. Save

This should leave you with a view something like the information at the very top of this page.

One thing to remember about this is that as Google is now moving users to secure browsing, you will not get a complete set of results for the keyword metric, as this is not carried across with SSL.
This will then allow you to see which keywords are generating the goal completions or the ecommerce conversions for you. Whilst we do not recommend focussing ONLY on these keywords (as other un-ranked words might also generate sales for you), this is a good start to calculating your ROI.

2. Landing Page ROI

1. Metric Group: Revenue or Goal Completions, and Pageviews
2. Dimension Drilldown: Landing Page

This will tell you which of the pages your customers have landed on before they completed a goal. This is probably the second most important metric after the keyword ROI. It will tell you if a page is ranking for you, generating pageviews, but not generating revenue. This then gives you three great options;

1. Fix/change pages that are not generating any revenue for you
2. Focus your SEO on pages that are generating revenue for you
3. Change the keywords you are optimising for poorly performing pages

Your best performing page will probably be your front page. After that you should be able to see your top performing internal pages by revenue and pageviews. On the image to the right we have sorted by pageviews, and you can see there are three poorly performing pages there with a good number of views.

3. Keyword Bounce Rate

Related posts:

1. Skip Hire SEO – 9 Ways to improve your position in Google
2. 10 ways restaurants can improve their direct marketing
3. 10 ways plumbers can improve their direct mail flyers