Ken Shafer's Bloggity-Blog

New Discussion Group at MultifamilyInsders.com

As some of you know, I am the SEO Manager at Apartments.com. Among other things, I try to engage in conversations regarding SEO and the multifamily industry. To that end, I have created an SEO-specific forum on MultifamilyInsiders.com. It’s open to everyone. Join the group and let’s talk SEO!

http://www.multifamilyinsiders.com/home/apartment-groups?action=gj.core.groups.showgroup&groupid=81

See you there!

New iPhone Twitter App Results

This is the 2nd error message I got after trying to use the new Twitter App for the iPhone. The first error being a bad gateway. Awesome.

WordPress Dashboard’s All Messed Up

Anyone else out there have the problem where your WordPress Dashboard doesn’t appear to be using and CSS and it just plain looks funky? I did. I just fixed it today (thank goodness).

Here’s what I did.

1. Upgrade to the latest version of WordPress
2. Upgrade all of your Plugin that can be upgraded
3. I also found some weird “Hello Dolly” plugin that I deleted. (not sure that did anything but hey, stuff works now)
4. Also, if you’re using IE8I had to click “Compatibility View” to get the post-new.php page to render.

Hope that helps! Good luck all!

UPDATE: This has not resolved all the issues on all of my WP sites.  I’m still getting this error:

Webpage error details

User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; InfoPath.2)
Timestamp: Tue, 18 May 2010 21:26:51 UTC
Message: Invalid character
Line: 1
Char: 11
Code: 0
URI: http://websitename.com/wp-admin/load-scripts.php?c=1&load=jquery,utils&ver=d24248fe4b0cd62086633fd42ef1019b
Message: Invalid character
Line: 1
Char: 2
Code: 0
URI: http://websitename.com/wp-admin/load-scripts.php?c=1&load=hoverIntent,common,jquery-color,plugin-install,thickbox&ver=270b766b5bbb45d10ea674db3e4d0da3

The interesting thing is that I’m getting this error on admin panels that work and those that don’t so I can’t say for certain if this is actually the cause of the problem.

UPDATED AGAIN:

Ok. So now I’m deleting the wp-admin and wp-includes folders. I have downloaded a fresh version of WordPress and am in the process of re-uploading those folders. Fingers Crossed.

My First Piece of Google Buzz Spam

Suck it Bryan indeed.

I think I’m seeing a glimpse into the future of Google Buzz failure…

Le’ts think about this for a second, shall we?  So now anyone can go into anyone’s Google Profile and “Buzz Bomb” (I’m coining that here first, folks) them with spam? I think this illustrates a considerable flaw in the design of this Social Network.

At least Facebook has privacy settings that prevent these sorts of shenanigans. If Google Buzz is going to compete in this space, they need to give the users a little more control over who can post what to where.

Am I missing  some privacy setting here? Thoughts?

Impact of Rich Snippets on Traffic

On January 22nd, Google announced the inclusion of event-related information in their Rich Snippets. The protocol will be based off the hCalendar microformat and will look like this:

Now, let’s consider another post that covers Rich Snippets as well as something called “Answer Highlighting” which looks like this:

“Consider the example, [empire state height]. The first search result used to look like this:”

“With today’s improvements, the answer —1250 ft, or 381 m — is highlighted right in the search result:”

Let me start off by saying I’m not making a judgement here… I just want us to take a moment to consider what’s going on here. These improvements for the user can have a detrimental impact on your traffic numbers.

By offering more information to the searcher on the SERP itself, the developer is removing the need for the searcher to actually visit the website. In the above example, I no longer need to visit Wikipedia to see the height of the Empire State Building. As Google adopts more and more Microformat protocols, it seems logical that the number of visits siphoned off should increase.

What’s the motivation for developers to encourage proliferation of the protocols if your goal is to drive traffic to your website? Couldn’t this change your goals?

Let’s say you have a restaurant website with your phone number and address tagged with Microformats. Someone looking for your restaurant or a similar one, might find your Rich Snippet in the SERP and call your restaurant. Success right? Sounds like it. Now imagine how that looks to an Analyst when multiplied by 1000 times.  I’d see a steady decline in visits to the site from Google and need for a way to account for that.  The apparent success of the site would appear to be waning but the restaurant’s phone would still be ringing off the hook.

What’s next?

It’s not hard to imagine what else could be served up in a Rich Snippet. Why not figure out a way to display your actual lead or contact form right there? Imagine the havoc that would cause for conversion rates. If you think about it, it wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility, right?

I think there’s opportunity for further discussion on the impact of Rich Snippets and Answer Highlighting on our analytics in the future. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Stuff I Liked This Week

Here are the articles I “starred” in my Google readers lists.

January 20th
One Giant Leap for Link Data: Announcing Open Site Explorer + Page/Domain Authority Metrics – Awesome tool. Making me consider becoming a Pro Member, honestly.

January 19th
Keyword Targeting: How to Employ Multiple Keywords for SEO & Conversions – SEOMoz breaks down keyword research

January 18th
Browse American Eagle, Aerie Merchandise Directly From Your News Feed With New Widget – Finally an effective use of a Facebook widget

10 Professional Development Tips to Boost Your SEO Career – This sounded important so I starred it. I haven’t read it tho. Let me know how it is.

Link Building With Interviews: How Thought Leadership Builds Links & Leads – I really thought this was a neat idea and a good example of thinking out of the box. I’m definitely going to try to implement this with some of my projects.

That’s it for this week folks! If you’ve got something you think I should read, just lemme know.

Thanks!

Matt Cutts On Links From Facebook and Twitter

Interesting video post from Google’s Matt Cutts. Watch first and then let’s discuss.

Video source: How do you rate links from sites like Twitter and Facebook?
Original Article: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/01/answering-your-december-grab-bag.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+blogspot/amDG+(Official+Google+Webmaster+Central+Blog)

Points of interest:

1. Links aren’t any different if they come from .gov or .edu. “It’s not like a link from an .edu autmatically carries more weight.” (1:58)
2. Most links on Twitter are nofollow. (We knew this but it’s worth mentioning again.)

I noticed that he didn’t mention links from Facebook Fan Pages, but he makes it pretty clear that all links are treated equally from the outset, but then Page Rank is applied to determine the linking site’s “reputation.” Keep this bit in mind people. It’s not always the number of links you have, it’s the quality of those links. You dig?

(for the experts out there… you may already know all this. however, this is core information that bears repeating for others out there who are just getting their feet wet. thank you for your understanding.)

Mod_Rewrite for GoDaddy and WordPress

I didn't know what image to use for this post

Back in 2008 I posted an article about getting mod_rewrite working on a GoDaddy account. I thought it’d be a good time to update that information with another example. This time we’re going to be looking at making some changes on a GoDaddy account with a WordPress installation.

Options +FollowSymLinksOptions -MultiViewsRewriteEngine onRewriteRule ^attorneys/(.*)/(.*)/(.*) practice.php?geo=$2&pa=$3&state=$1
# BEGIN WordPress<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>RewriteEngine OnRewriteBase /RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-fRewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-dRewriteRule . /index.php [L]</IfModule>
# END WordPress
DirectoryIndex index.php

—————————————-

This implementation takes this: “domain.com/pagename.php?paramB=Y&paramC=ZparamA=X”
and turns it into “domain.com/DirectoryName/X/Y/Z ”

I like this set up since it fits in with my normal WordPress url structure. Just make sure that you pick a directory name that isn’t going to be used within WordPress.

Also, notice that the custom rules are inserted before the usual WordPress rules. This was the only way I was able to get it to work.

Hope this helps! Just let me know if you have any questions at all.

Digging For Buried Traffic

Use tools you already have to find ways to boost traffic.

Using a Site Analytics tool? Got a Rank Tracker or some free time to manually check some rankings? Here’s a way you can find and predict how much traffic you might be missing out on.

Aside from the fact that I just ended that sentence with a preposition which drives me nuts, let walk through the process, shall we? Super. Open up your analytics tool and your favorite spreadsheet app and let’s go.

Collect the keywords

Go into your analytics tool and find the report that tells you what keywords are driving organic traffic to your website.

Set your date report range for 30 days and make sure you can see how many visits each keyword/keyphrase drove to your site within that time frame. Get as many keywords as you can. I’m talking like 400-500 keywords if your report allows and if you have that much data.

Paste that data into a spreadsheet. One column for the keyphrase and one column for the number of visits. Good!

Get the rankings

Arguments about the veracity of rank-checking these days aside, paste that list of keywords into your favorite rank checking tool and fire it up. Or, you can always check them one-by-one if your list is manageable.

Plug in your findings into a third column on your spreadsheet. (I’m just checking Google here)

Forget about the #1 ranked items

Now, sort the spreadsheet and delete all the rows that have keywords that are currently ranking #1 for you. We’re only going to concern ourselves with anything not currently ranking #1 from here on out.

Now for some imperfect math

Let’s take a look at the chart here…

source: http://www.seo-scientist.com/google-ranking-ctr-click-distribution-over-serps.html

If we accept these numbers, you can start to calculate how much traffic you might be losing by ranking something other than #1. For example…

“red widgets” brought in 100 visits and you’re currently ranking #4. Based on our chart above, there’s a difference of  44.83% between #1 and #4. Let’s do the math: You could have had roughly 45 extra visits had you been #1. See where this is going?

You can use these numbers to help justify projects/man-hours geared toward trying to rank for all these other keywords. You can use them to give a ROUGH projection of potential traffic/lead increases. I can’t emphasize the term “rough” enough here. The math is not perfect all the time in all cases. You’re going to have two moving targets here:

1. The percentage of click-thru rates are not going to work out exactly for every market or set of search terms
2. The rankings you see might not be the rankings that everyone sees.

But overall, you can see how this can give you a rough estimate on traffic of which you could be taking advantage. You can also turn this into a monthly or quarterly exercise. I find it best to track the traffic I’ve gained by moving up the rankings on that initial list. I use the same spreadsheet we set up above and add columns by date that track the ranking improvements/setbacks. I then add a column after 30 days to see if the traffic to that keyword has improved.

Hope this helps! It’s an interesting report anyways. I gotta give a shout-out to Larry Cotter from ApartmentHomeLiving.com on this one.

Return to the Airwaves

Ever fallen prey to the “physician, heal thyself” rut where you seem to work on so many other projects that you can’t ever seem to find time to get your own stuff up and running?

Well, that was pretty much all of 2009 for me. I think the last real post was sometime in March of ’09 or something. Yeesh!

In an effort to change to change all that in 2010, I’ve completely wiped out my old site and and currently in the process of back-filling all my old blog posts into WordPress here.

It’s actually terribly interesting (to me) to go back and look how my thoughts and opinions have changed since I last started blogging regularly. I use the word “terribly” since I don’t necessarily agree with everything I thought a year ago. So much changes so quickly in this industry. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so hard on some people (I said “maybe”), for example.

Well, there it is. The Mea Culpa to myself for letting this go for so long. Please pardon the generic WordPress theme for now. I’ll be trying to personalize stuff as much as possible over the next few weeks.

Thanks for reading everyone!