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Search Tools and Resources Category

Are you Measuring Your Online Marketing Campaigns Correctly?

Sep
14
2005
By

A recent study suggests that most SEO/Ms are not using the proper metrics for measuring their client’s online marketing campaigns.

[F]our out of 10 search marketers are being evaluated based on business goals, such as ROI or total sales generated. Instead, most marketers are being measured against intermediate metrics, like Web site traffic volume or top search engine ranking.

For years rankings and traffic have been the de facto measurement for online marketing campaigns, however that trend does seem to be changing. Obviously not quickly enough. While I think its impractical to get away from measuring rankings and/or traffic, those should not be the only measurements used to gage success.

Pole Position Marketing has an incredible client management system, which includes many of the typical measuring systems, however we also have a robust ROI Calculator which allows clients to measure everything from page views, unique visitors, to sales, conversion rates, cost per sale and quite a bit more.

Not to just toot our own horn here but the calculator also allows our clients to measure off-line marketing successes along with the online. Here is more from the study:

“Most people build a Web site to have an impact on the buying continuum. If someone converts off line, and you’re not linking it with your search marketing efforts, you’re not evaluating the full returns you’re generating, and you can’t make a full evaluation.”

While we still deal with many clients that look primarily at rankings and traffic, we are working to change that mindset. Those measurements are good, but what really matter is conversions and sales.

Thanks to Marketer Today for the tip.

Competition Analysis: Part 1

Aug
23
2005
By

This article by Dave Davies is the first part in a two-part lesson on analyzing the competition in terms of search engine rankings.

The first part explains onsite factors while the sencond part will explain offsite factors such as PageRank.

“Onsite factors of your website are the easiest to address as they are factors which are under your complete control. You have the power to change anything within your site from the content, internal linking structure, and even the design structure itself.”

“In analyzing the titles and meta tags essentially you are looking for the optimal keyword density of those tags. A KDA tool will let you know what percentage of your competitions tags are made up of the targeted keywords.”

Wordtracker's New Keyword Research Guide

Aug
23
2005
By

Wordtracker just released a keyword reasearch guide which is “a practical guide that features nine marketing experts as they advise a fictitious vegetarian dog food company.”

You can also download the whole report. It’s pretty interesting to read and there’s some tips on how to use Wordtracker and its advanced features. Check it out.

Linking Up and Feeding All

Aug
03
2005
By

Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts explains how links, RSS feeds, and blogs help in search optimization. This is really kind of basic stuff, but it just helps emphasize how important these things are for rankings.

“The major search engines — Google, in particular — seem to love blogs, which are the personal or professional diaries that number in the millions online.”

“By providing one or more feeds on your Web site, you can get syndicated onto other sites that wish to use your content to augment their own. This will result in deep links into your pages of late-breaking content.”

The Best Keywords

Aug
01
2005
By

Lil Waldner tells us “How To Test A Keyword For Success”. She explains the processes needed in order to find good quailty keywords that get traffic to your site. She also names some good, free tools you can use to find and test your keywords.

“You need to find out what people are looking for on your website. What are the relevant terms to search for the information or offers on a certain website?”

“You will create a list of keywords and you will need to test how popular and useful they are. You may use these keywords on your website, within the meta tags and in the description and keyword list of your submissions to directories and search engines. The internet offers some useful and free tools to test them. Testing keywords is recommendable.”

New SEO Tools!

Jul
28
2005
By

A new website called Optimization Central has just launched and is looking for SEM professionals to test their new optimization tools. TheHostingNews.com says that;

“The site was created by web application development firm Zafel to help SEO companies, Internet consultants, and web developers add cost-effective search engine optimization tools to their web site in a matter of minutes.”

I haven’t looked into it much, but it sounds pretty cool.

Smaller and Smaller Searching

Jul
27
2005
By

AOL is now planning on testing a new system for searching on cell phones that would bring up normal web pages that are reformatted for the small screen size. AOL isn’t the only one to get into the phone searching service and it certainly isn’t the first one either [Sorry, link no longer available.]

“The test of AOL Mobile Search Services is an attempt to move away from the computer, where its position as the dominant Internet provider is being undermined as users defect to cable operators and telephone companies offering high-speed Internet access.”

“AOL’s test comes amid a flurry of other major deals between phone manufacturers and wireless operators.”

“Up until recently, wireless service operators, like their online counterparts such as AOL, have attempted to maintain a lock on services to keep out interlopers.”

Brief Introduction to Clustering

Jul
05
2005
By

A core area of study in the Information Retrieval sciences involves the concept of clustering or cluster-based retrieval. At the foundation of cluster-based information retrieval is the Cluster Hypothesis:

Closely associated documents tend to be relevant for the same requests.

Clustering is a subject of great interest in the search engine technology field as this proven method can greatly enhance both relevancy and user experience.

In practice, clustering involves the implementation of an algorithm based upon pre-defined heuristics which determine similarity between all documents within a set. Generally this is done at query-time (live). The algorithm can be implemented across the entire corpus of documents or pre-screened candidate sets that are known to be related to the query. Documents that are related via similitude above a certain thresh-hold are grouped into a cluster. The clusters are given semantically meaningful titles and then presented with related clusters to the user. The presentation of the actual clusters is important, as they must be organized in a descending fashion beginning with the most query relevant cluster and ending with the cluster, which is related to the query, but least likely to provide relevant information to the user.
A sound clustering system can profoundly improve the user’s ability to locate the documents that are best suited for their needs. The best example of such a system that I have found to date is Microsoft’s Search Result Clustering (SRC) tool which is currently in Beta. SRC implements a variety of top level clustering methods to furnish intelligently clustered results. Methodologies include:

  • Query disambiguation
  • Sub-topics discovery
  • Fact finding
  • Relationship finding

Any of which are implemented automatically depending on the type of query entered. The system is definitely worth a test run by anyone who uses search engines for informational research. SRC also has a toolbar available which can be downloaded from the SRC Toolbar page.

Review: G-Metrics

Jun
14
2005
By

I recently stumbled across an interesting research tool called; G-Metrics .
This is a web based system that allows you to track changes in the number of search results returned by Google for a specified query. The service is powered by the Google API, which G-Metrics uses to poll Google daily for the number of results returned for each search term in its database. The service creates time-line based progression charts detailing these fluctuations. Another nice feature of this tool is that it is subscription based; all you do is sign up for a free account and you can store and track multiple search terms, which are updated daily with new information. G-Metrics presents an original and unique service to the world of search engine marketing. Definitely worth taking a look at.

Review: SEO Quiz

May
26
2005
By

SEOMoz has developed an online “SEO Quiz” for those in the industry to test their knowledge against. The quiz is composed of 32 multiple choice questions divided into 4 sections;

  1. On-Page Optimization
  2. Link Building
  3. The SEO Industry
  4. Search Technology

Top scores are posted on a Leader board along with user name info (At this time the top spots are held by Danny Sullivan and Dan Thies, each with a score of 30.).
After a thorough review of the questions I found the quiz to be entertaining and generally sound. The quiz does however have 3 main flaws that are apparent to me:

  • Confirmed answers simply are not available for some of the questions. For example, one question presents a hypothetical keyword and asks you to choose between 4 sample title tags, selecting the one that “will be most effective in ranking well for the term “Blue Widgets” at the major search engines?” To be fair it is certainly possible to assume that all other factors for each web page are perfectly equal, thereby giving you a better position from which to select an answer. However the question itself assumes a very linear ranking algorithm is in use by “major search engines” which is probably not the case. Lastly, most major search engines employ unique ranking algorithms and are therefore unlikely to value the same page elements in the same fashion. I would offer: “Which of the following title tags has the best topical strength for the keyword…” As a more appropriate question.

  • Some of the answer information furnished is overly simplistic. For example one question asks “What does PageRank technically measure?”. According to the quiz the correct answer is “The relative strength of the links pointing to a particular page”. Offering the following explanation “PageRank technically measures the global link popularity of a particular page as determined by the relative strength of its incoming links (from both internal and external sites). Although some believe that this takes into account the number of links to a given page, this is incorrect. A page with only 1 link could easily have a higher PageRank score than a page that is linked to by thousands of other pages.” While the last statement is true, it is not correct to state that the number of incoming links is not taken into account. From the paper PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web Larry Page offers the following: “…we give the following intuitive description of PageRank: a page has high rank if the sum of the ranks of its back links is high. This covers both the case when a page has many backlinks and when a page has a few highly ranked back links” This clearly contradicts the quiz information stating: “Although some believe that this takes into account the number of links to a given page, this is incorrect”.

  • The SEO Industry section is primarily focused on the life and times of various industry personalities.While it seems logical that questions in this section may touch on trends, growth, etc. Instead you are presented with questions like
    “What was Ian McAnerin’s (McAnerin of SEW, HighRankings & Others) previous occupation?”.

I want to make it clear that I am not trying to be overly critical of the SEO Quiz. All in all it is an interesting exam with excellent breadth and scope. Definately worth taking the time to check it out.

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