Posts Tagged ‘SEO / SEM Research’

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I’m just now getting around to checking my stats after posting Link Building Secrets Revealed on our site early last month. I thought I’d share a few stats:

The main page linked above was viewed just over 7,500 times. That’s not bad traffic. But who’s secret was most popular?

Here’s the breakdown on page views for each contributor’s page:

1. Peter van der Graaf: 4,461
2. Maurizio Petrone: 2,536
3. Patrick Altoft: 1,828
4. Hamlet Batista: 1,782
5. Rand Fiskin: 1,566
6. Eric Ward: 1,419
7. Jim Boykin: 1,228
8. Michael Gray: 1,063
9. Debra Mastaler: 1,043
10. Bob Gladstein: 931
11. Peter da Vanzo: 801

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A site’s navigation structure is extremely important in providing a rich, friendly user experience. Well designed and implemented navigation assists in the process of helping visitors identify sections and pages of the website that interest them and then in moving them in that direction. If you’re able to implement a solidly developed navigation system on your site you’ll also be providing strong visual cues to the depth of content you have available. This alone can be an immediate first-impression indicator of trust.

When a site’s navigation is intelligent, focused and intuitive, visitors have to think less and are able to more immediately find what they are looking for with minimal guesswork or backtracking. This, in turn, will most often translate into better overall conversion rates.

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Yeah, you heard me… that was a slam on your mamma. But that hardly matters now, let’s talk about reciprocal links. They are not dead. I know it and you know it. But for just a second let’s pretend otherwise.

A while back there was quite a bit of scare mongering going around the SEO industry about how reciprocal links were dead. I had a potential client once tell me that so-and-so-big-name-in-the-SEO-industry told them that reciprocal links were dead. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it here again. There is nothing wrong with reciprocal links. It’s all about how you use/implement them that matters. No, reciprocal links are not dead and now I have the proof.

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Two years ago I put together a post about what I thought was the perfect SEO firm. I revisited that post this morning as I was looking at one of our white boards that had a list of positions that we have filled and positions that we want to fill in the coming months. My list of positions required for good SEO has not changed a whole lot in the last couple of years, although some minor modifications are needed.

Click here to continue reading at Search Engine Guide…

Over the past few days, I’ve discovered many relevant attributes about Google PageRank. Essentially, Google developed PageRank as a way to give sites a numerical ranking based on some key calculations. PageRank evaluates various criteria from sites to help determine the site’s importance.

One way PageRank develops its rankings is by evaluating the content of a site’s incoming links in relation to specific keywords. As we work with more clients, it has been more evident that adding links can at times be like pulling teeth. Finding reputable articles about keywords related to client sites can be a tricky search. In addition, finding links that have higher PageRank scores can be equally difficult.

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SEOMoz’s recent release of Search Engine Ranking Factors Version 2 has generated a lot of buzz within the SEO industry. More accurately it has received tremendous praise and is being hailed as the “final answer” to search optimization for Google. After carefully reviewing this hopeful work which is said to;

“…represent the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization”

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There is a great deal of talk within the search marketing world concerning the future introduction of personalization factors into search as a way to improve SERPS relevancy. Many regard this as the death of SEO. It is reasoned that if each user is getting a unique and personalized search experience; the SEO cannot deduce the unique personalized signals used by search engines to help sort the search results. Furthermore, that any SEO techniques employed to optimize a web page would probably boost rankings for only a handful of searchers.

I strongly disagree. In fact I see personalization as ushering in a new era of SEO, in which search optimizers are able to target specific audiences with great precision. This will be, as Stoney has so eloquently defined, the era of Destination Marketing.

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A few weeks ago I became the proud owner of a 1966 Dodge Charger. Its in good condition but it needs some engine work. Unfortunately, about the only thing I know how to fix in a car is, uh, well… hmmm… I guess I really don’t know how to fix anything in a car. Not a good place to be when you own one of these!

Jason clued me in on a few things and suggested I find a Chilton Manual. He said that it will help me learn how to “fix” things. So I immediately put my never-been-grease-stained fingers to work and went to Google to find such a manual.

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I feel compelled to begin with a little disclaimer: in no way was today’s blogging activity here at PPM orchestrated to be a pick on Rand day. We openly praise and discuss much of Rand’s work here at the office and we are very much fans of SEOMoz.

With that said…

Today I was reading an interesting post over at SEOMoz in which Rand put forth the idea that perhaps submitting a Google sitemap could be detrimental as it may cause pages to be indexed which are unworthy of inclusion in the index (Google SpamMaps?) . The main point that I got from the post was that non-inclusion served as a pass/fail metric to indicate the strength of a given page.

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Early last month I posted our company’s 12-month SEO schedule as it pertains to our client campaigns. This is the information that goes into our proposals so the client has an understanding of what to expect. Just recently we have updated that schedule in a way to make things a bit more immediate for our clients and allows for less downtime.

That previous post I offered quite a bit of information so I won’t repeat that here but I will add some notes as to what changed and why.

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