SEO, Social Media and General Web Designs Stuffs
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!
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.
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.
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!
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:
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.)
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:
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.
Basically, all the search engines will let you suggest the preferred URL you’d like them to focus all the SEO juice on:
To use Google’s example, all you put in the head tag is something like this:
link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish”
That’s all there is to it, folks.
Here are the links to the new canonical goodness!
For once, the search engines unite to make and SEO’s life a little easier.
WOO HOO!!!
A co-worker just sent me this link. I read through the article and it’s pretty interesting if you place a lot of value on Page Rank.
“The Google PageRank Algorithm”
It pretty interesting since he also includes a PageRank Calculator.
Check it out folks!
Thanks to habitaquo.net for tweeting this story.
Backlinks.com, as site that lets you buy and sell links (I’m sure Google loves these guys) let their security policies ride the fail boat and leaked a truckload of customer data to Google (ironically).
Check out this link: http://www.google.es/search?hl=es&q=site%3Abacklinks.com%2Fadmin
While you can’t click on the links, you can view the cached versions of the pages. Usernames and passwords for everyone! Thanks Backlinks.com!
once again…thanks habitaquo.net for the scoop!
So I was doing a search for a response I posted on this blog to a Search Engine Watch article.
When I was logged in to my Google account in Chrome, my article was #1. When I was not logged in and using Firefox, I was #8.
Just another example of how using SERP ranking as a success metric is becoming more and more wishy-washy.