Search Engine Tigers

Yes! After all your work, that site has started to take off. It’s been trending up nicely, and suddenly it’s made a nice jump. What’s the first thing that you should do? Obviously it’s to go to your boss or client and show them the proof of the great job that you’ve been doing. Well, maybe not. The first thing you should do is to understand the reasons for the jump, and verify that you actually are the cause of it.

Indexing
Check your indexed page numbers, and see if you’ve had a jump there that may explain the increase If you’ve recently made optimization changes to your site, then you may be able to take the credit for the jump. Has new content recently been released to the site? Have pages moved from the supplemental index to the main index on Google? Check your link numbers, have they increased?

Rankings
Check your rankings, have they moved dramatically? If your main entry pages are now coming up even a few positions higher, that can be the difference.

Referrers
See where the traffic is coming from. Has your site been linked to by a major traffic site? Has something that you’ve done been written about, or just simply picked up a really nice link? Have you done any viral campaigns that may be pulling in the traffic?

Offline Marketing
Make sure that you’re aware of any offline marketing campaigns that may be running. If there’s a tv, radio, or print ad that’s running, that could very well be the source of the new traffic.

Just remember that if you take the credit for an increase in the traffic levels for a site, without truly understanding the reasons for it, and if the traffic drop back down to the previous levels, you’re going to have to be ready with an explanation and to take the blame…

Google Webmaster Tools were originally released as Google Sitemaps, and were the place to manage your XML sitemap. Since then, they’ve evolved to such a point that you no longer need have an XML sitemap on your site for you to take advantage of the tools available. So what does it give you?

• View any errors on your site (missing pages, pages excluded from indexing by your robots.txt, etc).
• Validate your robots.txt file (a file used to tell the spiders what not to index, as well as other special commands).
• Manage your site verification (so the webmater tools know to give you access to the data).
• View your crawl rate stats, and change the frequency that the engines spider your site (if the spiders crawl you so much that they bog your servers down, you can tell them to slow down the speed of their indexing).
• Set your canonicalization preference (do you want the site indexed with a www or not?).
• Authorize Google to label and display your images through Google Images.
• View the page rank of your pages (not the actual numbers, just high, medium, low or not ranked).
• See which page has the highest page rank (not always your home page).

• See what searches on Google one of your pages showed up for, and what position you ranked (handy for finding long tail searches that you may not have realized people were searching for – i.e. this site shows up 5th for the search term “different tigers and maps“).
• A list of the words that occur on your site (shows you what Google is seeing).
• A list of the anchor text that people are linking to your site with (handy for quickly seeing any negative or positive news about your company that you need to be aware of).
• A list of external links into your site, by each page on your site, with the ability to drill down by page, and see the actual URLs that point to each page, along with their Google Page Rank.
• A list of internal links on your site (helpful to validate that the internal site structure that you believe should work great, is actually seen to do so by the Google spider).
• Sitemaps, any XML sitemap that’s been created and validated for the site (a sitemap for your site created in a format specifically for the spiders to read and digest).

So this tool has evolved over time into a very useful tool for anyone with their own site. Simply log in and validate your site, then you can get in and play with all of the tools / data above, not bad for for a tool that you get for free…

So you want to put a website up for your business, or you already have one up, and you know enough to know that to make your website work for you, you have to do some Search Engine Marketing. But where do you start? Well, I’ve put together some links below to resources that will at least explain what you didn’t know you didn’t know, and get you moving in the right direction. These links are not the be-all and end all of information on these topics out there, but they’re good enough to get you thinking and point you in the right direction, too many links may make you feel overwhelmed.

Education

The first step is Education. Before you start running, you need to know how many legs you have. Attending a conference, reading a good book, and taking certification courses all help. The link here is a poll, which gives you an idea of how some of these courses and conferences rank, but it also gives you links to their websites.

Best Conferences and Certification Courses

Keyword Research

Keyword research is vital for your site. If you don’t do it correctly you have no idea as to whether your site is visible to as many potential customers as possible. The right keyword research can lower costs for pay per click, and just generally increase your sales. The article linked here has a full discussion on keyword research from Lisa (“The Lisa”) Barone at Bruce Clay.

The 5 steps of Keyword Research

Page Optimization

So now you know what to target, the next question is how to target. If you can incorporate them into your URL i.e. nashvillebuggywhips.com, then that’s great, but more likely than not you’ll want to go with your brand as the name. So what’s the first element on your website that you want to target? The title tag. This article describes everything you want to know about the title tag.

All about Title Tags

Next you want to work with your meta tags. Remembering that while these elements may not have the power they once had, they’re still worth looking at and getting right (especially the ROBOTS tag, which can impact indexing on your whole site).

The Meta Tag primer

Next, you want to make sure that you have good content on your site. The search engines love good, unique, relevant content. If you have plenty to say about your company and it’s products / services, do it. While you want to weave the keywords into your content, just remember that all of the text on the page will be indexed and so you may pick up searches for a long tail search such as “premier buggy whip supplier in nashville”. These searches don’t happen too often, but they’re much more likely to convert into a sale for your company. This next article talks about using your content to help your site

Content is King

Link Building
Now that you have your site up, the next step is to make sure that people know about it. Just building a site and optimizing it does not mean that it will rank well in the Search Engines. Their current algorithms are based largely on trust, and one of the ways that that trust is generated is through links to your site. The more high quality, relevant links that come to your site, the better. How do you get links? Well there are several ways. You can contact other site owners and get them to link to you (you may have to link back to them though), there are directories, both free and paid that accept links, there are paid linking services, and then there is linkbaiting, where you write an article / put out a video / do something different, that spreads virally, and results in them linking to the site. There are many companies out there now that specialize in linkbaiting services, especially to the relatively new phenomenon of Social Media sites such as Digg. The first link below is to a running section of SearchEngineLand that deals specifically with link building topics. The second is an example of a linkbaiting campaign from SEOmoz.

Link Week

The Super Digg

Analytics & Reporting
So you have a site, it has incoming links, the search engines have indexed it. How do you know how well it’s doing? You need to have an analytics solution in place. Are they expensive? Well, it depends on the level of analysis, and whether you need real time analysis, or you can afford to wait until the next day. The link below discusses six packages that can provide analytics data for your site without costing you a penny.

Analytics on the cheap – six free stats packages

Alternatives

What else might you want to look into? Well, there’s blogging, podcasting, and social media sites, the number of which seems to grow fairly regularly. Here are the final 2 links, the first addresses how you may want to use podcasting in promoting your business, and gives you a list of resources, the other describes using one off the social media sites – Flickr.

Podcasting for small businesses

Marketing on Flickr

So I was walking an IYP customer through their analytics tool when we decided to take a look at the most popular search phrases that people have entered to reach their site (for a major US city). For the month of January the most popular search phrase used was a url. I mentioned this to the client and he burst out laughing before asking if any women were on the call. He then informed us that it was the url of an escort company…

The curious thing was though that we ranked 3rd for that term on the SERP (Google), whereas the actual site with that url ranked 1st, I guess people like to shop around and research for all products and services…

Since it was the end of the month yesterday, I thought I should take a look at the statistics for the site and see how it’s going since I’ve been blogging more. I’ve had a nice steady rise in monthly readers, mostly thanks to those nice bloggers (Lee Odden, Matt McGee, Lisa Barone, et al) who’ve linked over here and sent me some traffic. Now, one of the fun features of Google Analytics is the map graphic that shows you where the traffic comes from (yes all analytics tools tell you this, but I’m a sucker for a pretty picture). Being from the sceptered isle, I wasn’t too shocked to see a chunk of traffic coming from over there. Then I did a double-take when I noticed where the majority of that UK traffic was coming from… Skipton, West Yorkshire?

Even more curiously the referrer for all of the Skipton traffic is the website for a furniture store… (well more accurately it’s on another port on their website which leads to a password protected area). Being an East Yorkshire lad, I don’t know anyone in Skipton, but it’s not that far from Ripon where a certain Dave Naylor resides…

Update: Well it looks like it’s not DaveN. this site has actually been set up as a home page by one of the furniture store guys. Which is actually pretty cool in and of itself.