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Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

Facebook SEO Now a Reality

Published June 27th, 2010 Industry, SEO, Social Media No Comments

When Facebook announced Open Graph and everything that came along with it I wrote about how I thought Open Graph integration would become part of almost everyone’s websites. I wasn’t explicit about the primary way in which I suspected this would happen, but these were the main questions I had at the time:

1. Would having Open Graph meta data in conjunction with Like buttons become as necessary for sites, from an SEO perspective, as having proper meta descriptions, title tags, and other on-site components of a solid SEO strategy.

2. Would SwellPath need to begin scoping this into our SEO engagements for clients?

In our opinion, the answer to both of these essentially became yes this week. Earlier this week, All Facebook reported on larger sites with Open Graph integration having pages returned in Facebook search results. It is now clear that Facebook will be indexing pages that have Open Graph integration and have been Liked. These are not “Facebook Pages” but actual pages from other domains.

Now when I bring this up to many people, the response is something along the lines of: “well, how many people are going to use Facebook to search the web anyway?” My response to that is pretty simple: how many people thought they would use Google for email in early 2004? Or how many people thought they would use Google for analytics in early 2006? How many people thought they would use Facebook for showing friends their pictures 4 years ago?

You see where I’m going with this: consumers will shift their behavior. I have no doubt that there is at least the potential for many Facebook users to suddenly find it far more convenient to just search from the page their on.

And what about Facebook’s partnership with Bing? Is it possible that Facebook will give Bing access to this data also? That Bing will begin incorporating the “social value” of pages into their results? I don’t see why Microsoft wouldn’t jump on this opportunity if it becomes available. Alternatively, we might see the relationship between Bing and Facebook sunset as Facebook takes on the search industry solo.

Some concerns here revolve around Facebook’s ability to crawl and index. Google, Bing, and Yahoo, have all been doing this for a long time, and have the technological components in place to crawl and index the web at amazing rates. Will Facebook be able to “catch up”? If they can’t, who will be left out? Likely the “little guys”, i.e. the long tail, which is a fundamentally valuable (the most valuable?) component of Google’s search results. My feeling is that technology can be bought for a high enough price; Facebook has been building the technological infrastructure to handle this, and they have been and will continue to hire the appropriate people to lead this initiative.

Bottom line: this will stick, and SEOs, publishers, retailers, and anyone else who wants their content to be delivered to Facebook users better begin implementing Open Graph functionality into their sites. If we’re wrong about this, that’s great; one less thing to worry about with SEO. I don’t think we will be though, and I don’t want us to be. Disruption is good for any industry, and search is no exception. I’d love to hear others thought’s on this, and how they think this will affect SEO.

Semantic SEO: 5 Keyword Research Techniques & Tools

Published June 7th, 2010 SEO, Social Media No Comments

Semantics in search is evolving quicker than ever with the inevitable convergence of search and social. Search engines have been using latent semantic structure for a while to classify pages and uncover the meaning of a user’s query. However, semantics is no more transparent than it is in social content and the relatively recent indexing and inclusion of social content unveils an evolved direction from the search engines.

With keyword research as the foundation of SEO; incorporating a more semantic approach is essential and also effective to find variations and relationships of keyword groups to drive optimization and IA. Extracting meaning from keywords and additionally identifying variations to drive your SEO strategy takes time and experience. Here are 5 semantic keyword research techniques and tools:

1) Social Media Monitoring

Most marketers use some social media monitoring app to track brand or competitive mentions. For keyword research though, it’s just as valuable. We use Jive’s Market Engagement, formerly Filtrbox (full disclosure, Jive Software is a client) for ongoing keyword research. Trackur and Radian6 are 2 other popular monitoring tools.

Tracking your keywords will help to build a conversation environment and emerge other uses and variations. Jive Market Engagement is great because it shows you the conversation cloud around your terms, or terms most likely to appear with your keywords.

2) Tags

Tags are a way of classifying information, but for keyword research it’s a focus group. As users tag their social bookmarks, they’re essentially telling you how they would classify and structure your website.

Let’s use Foursquare as an example. There are over 4,000 Fouraquare bookmarks on Delicious and probably 5 – 10x as many tags (multiple tags per URL). Spending a bit of time pursuing user tags can returns some interesting results:

Geolocation, community, game, hyperlocal, ridesharing, application, geo-locator, lbs, social media, social media location, blackberry, gps, tools…

Not only can you look at tags but users’ descriptions about the domain -

“…explore their environments using cell phones.”

“…no more location updates. Yay.”

“…and also a game.”

This might be straightforward to some but for a marketer trying to position their offering, this is gold. Rinse and repeat for other social bookmarking sites.

3) Trending

Keywords rise and fall with the advent of new spaces and products. Understanding when to optimize around a rising keyword/topic is key to positioning your page in front of the storm so to speak. Here are some tools we use for trending purposes.

TweetVolume – Compare trends and popularity of keywords on Twitter.

Ice Rocket - View how often a term has been mentioned in social media over time.

BlogPulse – Automated trend discovery system for blogs. It analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere.

Trendrr – Tracks the popularity and trends across a variety of inputs, ranging from social networks, to blog buzz and video views downloads.

4) Social Search

Sometimes, simple one-off searches can provide the most insight into semantic keyword variations and synonyms.

OpenBook – With Facebook’s new privacy settings, it’s all open. Search FB updates for keywords and connections.

Twitter Search – Search terms in Twitter mentions. Be sure to use their search operators to refine and target searches.

5) Cool Social Tools

Here are some other random tools we find useful to derive keywords from social media.

Addict-o-matic – Aggregate tool that searches sites for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images pertaining to a specific topic or keyword.

Backtweets – Search for tweets linking to any url, and setup email alerts with via the advanced search page.

MentionMap – Great visualization tool that pulls in hashtags as well as relationships between tweeps.

Flash SEO: A Presentation

Published January 27th, 2010 SEO No Comments

Flash Optimization (SEO)

View more presentations from SwellPath.

Mobile & Search Converge = Mobile SEO

Published December 4th, 2009 Mobile, SEO No Comments

mobile-seo The growth and evolution of mobile devices inevitably leads to convergence with other technologies and disciplines. One such being search. The convergence of mobile technology and search technology creates complications and considerations for the usability of website content.

A shift in user behavior and technology has led to the evolution of search. Mobile platforms create complications to web searches. Search engines have adjusted to this shift; offering mobile versions of their products that address some of the limitations of mobile technology.

However, to ensure website content can be found and usable, mobile SEO best practices should be utilized. First and foremost, heavy interactive websites (graphics and rich media) have historically created issues with mobile platforms. While Adobe’s Flash Player 10.1 release is looking to change that, it’s far from solved. As such, content needs to be mobile friendly which that means limiting rich media.

If you don’t have content that is supported, you have bigger fish to fry before considering mobile SEO.

Mobile Website Development

As with all SEO, the code is one of the most critical factors and major hurdles for optimizing a mobile website for search engines. One of the common and most used practices for mobile SEO is still building a mobile website counterpart for your standard website. This isn’t always necessary but still a best practice.

For most mobile websites, avoid WAP/WML (Wireless Markup Language) and make use of a more familiar markup language, XHTML. Most mobile browsers these days can handle XHTML. Additionally, common HTML elements are supported such as body, head, title, meta, H1, H2.

Mobile web development is a bigger topic than we’re tackling here, check out W3C’s Mobile Best Practices and the XHTML Mobile Phone tag list.

Mobile SEO Best Practices

As you would for your standard website, developed a list of keywords and map them throughout your site for targeting. Certain mobile tags and attributes should be used to create a mobile search-friendly website. Utilize keywords via the available SEO elements such as H1, H2, alt tags, etc.

The size of a web page is an important aspect to consider when designing mobile-friendly pages. Bandwidth is still an issue, thus keep it simple. Under 20KB is best practice.

W3C has a great tool for helping validate your mobile site – W3C Mobile OK Validator.

Mobile Website Accessibility

Similar to accessibility in standard web development, mobile sites need to be found, crawled and indexed. As such, a mobile sitemap should be developed to assist mobile search engine bots.

Mobile search engines crawl and index sites that are specifically developed for mobiles platforms. As such, they require a mobile XML Sitemap, which adheres to the Sitemaps Protocol with a specific <mobile:mobile> tag.

This is a unique XML sitemap from your standard website XML sitemap and requires a unique location. Anytime you have multiple XML sitemaps, including mobile, you need to have Sitemap Index file to support them.

Once you’ve created a mobile XML sitemap, submit it to Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo mobile site submission as you would a standard website.

Developing a stand alone mobile site isn’t always essential for your site content to be found on smartphones, however it is essential to consider mobile SEO best practices if you want your site content to be found and remain usable on mobile platforms.

Preparing your Search Campaign for the Holidays

Published October 12th, 2009 Paid Search, SEO No Comments

The leaves have changed and the hats and scarves are out. Ready or not it is time to shop for pumpkins, finalize your Halloween costume and perfect that Sunday chili recipe. Preparing for fall also means that winter and the holidays are just around the corner.

Everyone loves the holidays and it is true that it’s better to give than receive. Though with the turn of the economy, retailers are expecting a tough season. In a report from E-marketer, 57% of Internet users plan to spend less on gifts this holiday season, and 58% were more concerned about how they would pay for holiday spending this year than last year. Since dollars will be tight, stand out above your competitors and start your online marketing now to catch consumers in their research stage.

Google recently blogged that 44% of shoppers have already began shopping and researching online. With this, search interest in the term “christmas gift” has jumped in the last weeks, demonstrating this increased phase. Since consumers are there, make sure you are in the right place to reach your customers when they are ready to buy. Here are a few pointers on capturing these researchers with a targeted paid search campaign.

Campaign History

Look at your campaigns, keywords and conversions from last holiday season, especially your daily budgets, keyword bids and time period of increased impressions and conversions. Expect to pay higher bids during the two or three weeks before the holiday as well as on Black Friday.

Key up your Keywords

Fine tuning your keywords and adding event and holiday targeted copy will increase your ad’s click through rate. Be aware that special terms such as “Christmas Gift” are targeted, though will be competitive and expensive. To be creative and beat large budget advertisers, use product names or bid on long tailed keywords with modifiers such as “Affordable Christmas Gifts for Moms.”

Start a new campaign around holiday text and sales such as “In time for the holidays” Or “Christmas Special.” Targeted copy will make your ads stand out, though again, these terms will be expensive. Competitors will also be increasing bids, so make sure you calculate your keyword bids and know what you can spend.

Test, Test and Test Again

Christmas is a busy time and in order to keep up with your consumers and ahead of your competitors, test and refresh your ads and groups. Review successful headlines, ad text and keywords and introduce new products or sales. A/B, or split test to see which headlines or phrases resonate with searchers.

Look back at your sales and see if there are trends for certain products in specific locations. For example, if your company sells snorkeling gear, you may want to consider creating a geo-targeted campaign aimed only in southern California or in Mexico.

Control Where Potential Buyers Land

Landing pages give companies the chance to not only capture consumers in a customized place around a specific holiday product, but your quality score will be higher as a result of this specialized destination, viable ad copy, and keywords. If your quality score is sufficient your ads will show in a better position at a lower cost, which in the end will drive more clicks and maximize sales.

By making your paid search list and checking it twice you will be ready for this holidays season. Begin now and with a little research, creativity and organization you will be on your way.

Advanced SEO Services: 5 Key Methods

Published September 9th, 2009 SEO No Comments

SEO isn’t rocket science; best practices are easy to learn and implement with a little practice. However, SEO goes way beyond simple best practices to include strategies and techniques only realized and utilized through experience. Furthermore, advanced SEO (in my opinion) is the practice of successful and proven techniques coupled with methodologies that support larger business objectives.

These are in sense, less of specific tactics as they are an approach for providing advanced SEO services.

1) Integrate Analytics

triangle Data-driven decisions is our mantra. Whether it’s Google Analytics, Omniture or WebTrends, it doesn’t matter. Just as long as it’s configured or has the appropriate features/applications/components to provide SEO intelligence. Analytics should be used identify opportunities and weaknesses of a site.

Site search, apart from functionality is a feedback tool, providing insight into what user’s are searching for on a site. Analytics is the key to mining this data from your site’s users and incorporating it into an SEO keyword plan.

Additionally, sections of a site should be analyzed independently to determine their overall impact in terms of driving organic traffic; including a blog, categories and any deeper content. Understanding of historic data gives insight into where the site has been and where it’s capable of going.

2) Monitoring & Measurement

Most SEO specialists have some sort of measurement system in place for measuring impact; from ranking positions to organic traffic. However, monitoring and measurement should go beyond a simple aggregate of monthly organic traffic to measure campaigns from every angle; including segmentation of organic traffic and long tail impact.

All online marketers, especially SEO specialists should be well versed in the theory of the long-tail; whereas most traffic consists of infrequent and rather unique search queries. The majority of keyword traffic lies in the long tail, thus every SEO strategy should focus on tapping into long tail traffic. As such, that strategy also needs to be monitored and quantified.

Organic traffic should be segmented in the following buckets: branded, head keywords and long tail keywords. Additionally, a few filters, customer reports, and some reg ex can easily configure Google Analytics to track SEO efforts as this level; providing insight into the true impact of SEO.

3) SEO to Compliment Design

SEO often and regularly conflicts with design. This is most often the case with bigger brands where branding and style guidelines are integral and more often than not, required. Advanced SEO techniques offer alternatives to such heavy design (images & rich media) rather than the normal contradictory approach.

Simply suggesting removing Flash for instance, is no recommendation. Flash has it’s place even as SEO unfriendly as it may be. There is a balance between user experience/branding and SEO; advanced SEOers know when to offer the middle ground.

4) Business Analysis

Ok, this isn’t necessarily “seo”, but it is important that SEO specialists integrate a deep level of business understanding into their approach. Where does SEO fit into the overall marketing mix? What are the KPIs beyond just organic traffic? How does your sales cycle map to your SEO strategy?

It’s important to understand more than simply just rankings; you need to know if SEO is helping your business succeed. An advanced SEO approach will need to make recommendations regarding budgets and resources; prioritizing SEO against other mediums and needs.

5) On-site & Off-site Plan

This “catch all” method really just includes the other major components of advanced seo – content development, landing page optimization and link baiting. SEO is nothing without the off-site factors (external backlinks) and vice a versa with the on-site factors.

A thorough SEO strategy includes both an on-site and off-site strategy and most importantly how the two strategies overlap.

Of course, our jobs don’t stop once a user hits the site; it actually just begins. SEO and online marketing aren’t just about specific variables and tactics but rather a bigger picture of how resources, techniques and technology align with overarching business objectives.

Display v. Search – The Last Ad Model Bias

Published September 3rd, 2009 Paid Search, SEO No Comments

Now many would argue that it’s not display v. search but rather the synergies achieved when both mediums work together. Search marketing currently comprises more than one-half of all interactive dollars, and will remain the biggest format through 2014. Most ad networks don’t love that stat and for obvious reason. Their response has been that they receive little to no conversion credit and thus a diminishing media budget.

The issue with display ad ROI measurement is the inability to assign a quantifiable value, which some believe results in a disproportionate value being assigned to search, otherwise know as the last ad model.

“The current “last ad” model attributes 100% of the credit for a conversion to the last ad seen or clicked. This is the current standard the industry has relied on to justify their digital media spend. The problem with this approach is that it ignores the contributions of any previous ads that led the customer down the road to that conversion.”

Source: Atlas Institute

Of course, the Atlas Institute (Microsoft) has been pushing their Engagement Mapping approach or the ability to measure cross-channel impact, but details into their technology are still blurry. Regardless of the technical ability to measure (another post altogether), there has been little credit given the role of search throughout the entire conversion funnel or search’s ability to generate demand.

While clearly there is somewhat of a “halo effect” between display and search whereas users that have been exposed to display ads are more likely to click on a paid advertisement – note case study by iCrossing. However, many mediums (that can’t all be measured) can be attributed with creating greater upstream demand; mediums such as TV ads, radio, billboards and yes, display ads. However, no credit is given to search as vehicle to drive awareness and demand in the last ad model.

A common argument is that the majority of sponsored search clicks are simply navigational; assuming that sponsored search is not bringing in new prospects but simply delivering people to a URL they are seeking. I would argue that savvy search marketer understand the importance of branded traffic but focus the majority of SEM efforts on non-branded traffic and new segments to target – essentially on “research” type queries higher in the conversion funnel. As such, search is not only the “last step” in a purchase funnel, but one integral throughout.

An example given by Atlas is one that looks at users searching for basketball shoes. A user compiles their research for basketball shoes, decides to buy Nike, and returns to a search engine and searches “Nike basketball shoes”. They state that 100% of the credit is given to the “nike baseketball shoes” and search had little to do with the research but was simply navigational.

I would argue that a “basketball shoes” search query is a research query whereas a user is comparing brands, prices and reviews and users find this type of data more often than not, online and specifically via search engines. Now display ads can clearly support the brand but are not the main vehicle for research or driving demand. Additionally, there are numerous retailers selling Nike basketball shoes, thus a users’ intent is possibly to find where to buy and not necessarily navigate to Nike.com.

The point is that search is credited for capturing users towards the end of the sales cycle but is also ideal for conducting research and generating awareness, something display ads try to claim the majority of credit for. Other mediums certainly have an impact on demand and search and should be a part of the online marketing mix. However, mediums need to be evaluated based on the industry and data at hand; data that needs to be accurate and opaque.

Alternative Value in Paid Search Traffic

Published August 5th, 2009 Analytics, Ecommerce, Email Marketing, Paid Search, SEO, Social Media No Comments

When analyzing paid search traffic the central focus is obviously on conversions, the sale, lead gen form completion, or whatever the primary conversion event is. But this shouldn’t be the only focus, and you shouldn’t calculate the value of your paid search activity entirely by conversion rate or ROI. Here’s some other ways you may find value in paid search, and some ideas for calculating that value.

Usability & Conversion Improvement

What does paid search traffic have to do with usability? Look at it like this: paid search traffic is a random sampling of visitors that have strong purchase intent, or strong intent to learn about your offering. Those that don’t convert, as a group, provide insight into what is “not working” with your site. You should be able to ask and answer questions like these:

Are these visitors bouncing at high rates? If so, you need to start testing out some different landing pages, or take a good look at your offering.
If they aren’t bouncing, are you tracking specific events on your landing pages? Implement event tracking on any key potential actions on your page and see if visitors are engaging at all.
Beyond the landing page, are they navigating to other pages or areas of your site? Why are they not finding what they came for on the landing page? What are the common paths their taking, and where are they exiting?
Are they using your site search field, and if so, what keywords they searching for? Are they getting results? How do these terms and results relate to the original paid search keyword and landing page offering?

Answering these questions will initiate a process focused improving conversion. Use unconverted paid search visitors as a “focus group”, and look into your analytics data for their “responses” and “feedback”. You’ve paid for them to visit your site, get value out of their behavior and actions.

Email Sign-ups, Catalog Sign-ups, & Social Media Follows

Let’s suppose I’m shopping for vitamins. I’ve decided I need to start taking ginko biloba supplements again to combat the lack of sleep that seems to come with running an interactive marketing agency. Disclaimer: I have no idea if ginko would help with this, or of the actual health benefits of this product, it is just a good example. So, I normally buy my vitamins and supplements at VitaminShoppe.com or Trader Joe’s or some other grocery store. But I decide to price it out and buy it on the internet, so I search for “ginko biloba” on Google. I see a paid search ad for Vitamin World and I click through. After researching their products a bit, I decide I’m a little skittish about buying this new addition to my diet on the internet, so I’m just going to buy it at Trader Joe’s the next time I’m there. Failed PPC conversion for Vitamin World right? Maybe not, before I exit, I notice the two links highlighted in the image to the left: Email Specials and Request a FREE Catalog.

You know how the story ends: I sign up for a catalog, end up visiting a Vitamin World store in my local mall the next time I’m there, and become a lifetime customer worth hundreds and hundreds of dollars to the company. So, that’s best case scenario. But the gist of it is, Vitamin World is making an effort to keep the “conversation” going with me. While I’m not a big fan of the Email Specials link, I love the big call to action on the catalog request link. Beyond catalogs and email, you might also track if visitors are clicking through to your social media profiles. Track these actions specifically for y0ur paid search visitors and develop a value for them. This may be a more complicated equation if you have advanced analytics and direct marketing programs in place, where you can track multiple touch-points and segment customer types based on product categories; or something as simple as calculating the estimated value of an email recipient, then applying that to number of signup conversions you have in your PPC account. Now, obviously you can track these as conversions in your PPC account, but that can muddy up your PPC data. Using analytics to track the goal, and segmenting your PPC traffic out for analysis is usually a better option.

Keyword Testing & Strategy

I’ll tiptoe around this, because I’m definitely not the SEO specialist (or PPC for that matter) around here but the gist of thsi is that you can use your PPC account to test and refine your SEO strategy. If certain PPC keywords are limited in their conversions, but result in high-levels of engagement or some other key performance metric, you may decide to integrate them into your SEO strategy and target some pages for them. This is somewhat of an extension of the usability and conversion improvement section, but with an obvious focus on SEO and the value of certain keywords.

In conclusion, don’t write off your failed PPC conversions. You paid for those clicks – get some value out of them any way you can. This might mean putting in some sweat in the form of analysis, testing, or development, but those costs will likely be recouped over time, because you will never convert 100% of your search traffic.