By the way, Gyutae is managing our affiliate contest that is giving away more than $14,000 in prizes. Our goal is to register a good number of quality affiliates and of course, to increase the visibility of the RankSense product. Check it out and see if you want to join the conversation.

This blog is now 16 months old and you’ve probably noticed that I don’t run ads, push products or do any kind of affiliate promotions. Only recently did I timidly begin to promote my SEO software. Why? Well, until recently I didn’t feel like the quality experience I was hoping was there yet. Don’t get me wrong, I am very proud of the ideas, innovations and concepts that RankSense offers and also very proud of my development team–especially now that RankSense is finally at a place where I feel comfortable promoting the product.

I have to admit that in the early stages of the project, we made some critical design decisions (mistakes) that resulted in a very unstable code based and non-optimal user experience. Since then, we’ve made significant progress in removing bugs, speeding up the software and providing more valuable insights. Of course, there is still room for improvement and we are continuously working on identifying and addressing these.

When I first came up with the idea of developing a comprehensive SEO management suite that would simplify the technical aspects of SEO, I honestly had no clue just how much effort, money and time would be involved! It’s been four years since starting and I often wonder if all this time and effort would have taken me farther, had I decided to focus on something else.

So what went wrong… Perhaps I simply broke some of the rules I followed to achieve my initial success. For example, I had always tried a new project by creating something small, testing the response and then making it bigger if I was able to see results. No results, no further effort, time or money. With RankSense things were different. I wanted to pursue a dream and along the way ignored common business sense. This is why it is important to remove emotional considerations from your decision making process!

There is also a part of me that enjoys taking on new challenges. I used to be very proud of this personality trait. With this experience, I have to say I have grown a bit wiser. These days, I tend to think that as long as you accomplish your desired goals, there is no need to take the most difficult and challenging road just to prove a point. For me, those days are long gone!

Despite all this, I actually don’t regret having started the RankSense project. I have learned far too much to look back at my experiences with regret. Plus, I am a firm believer that things do happen for a reason. =)

Well, I needed to get that off my chest … now some positive news.

During the past few months, I have been working hard to sign on new web hosting partners interested in promoting the RankSense software suite. I think that a list of good partners will be instrumental in distributing the software at a much faster pace than I could myself. We are starting to see the results of that effort.

1. Superbhosting just added our software to their customer control panel and online marketing section.

2. 1&1 added information about Ranksense to their affiliate marketing site

3. Hostgator signed the partnership agreement and we are expecting them to start offering the software to their customers very soon

4. We have a couple of more hosting companies testing the software and considering it for promotion.

I honestly think that an SEO suite that focuses on simplicity and improvements from an SEO perspective has the opportunity to help give SEO the credibility that it has been sorely lacking. Regular people want search traffic but are primarily turning to PPC due to the instant gratification and perceived simplicity over SEO.

Our goal with RankSense is to remove the technical barriers and allow people to write content and promote it in ways that can improve their search presence. We do not claim to be the magic tool that will instantly push the site to the top of the rankings. Our belief is that by exploiting obvious “search opportunities” anyone can enjoy increased search traffic. There is no black magic, or rocket science in this approach.

What are your thoughts? Will RankSense help or hurt the SEO community by getting SEO into the hands of thousands of non-experienced website owners?

Apparently Adam Audette from AudetteMedia thinks so. Thanks for the recognition, Adam!

You have probably heard about the two most important metrics for the success of a website: traffic and conversions. No one will dispute that the more traffic you receive, and the better that traffic converts, the more sales/profits you are going to make. Entire professions are dedicated to driving traffic to your website and to improving your landing pages’ conversion rates. The general wisdom is that these two important fields need to be treated separately. But in this post I am going to explain why the two are more tightly related than they initially seem.

Going Back to the Source

Certainly you can do all sorts of things to your site to “improve” the likelihood that the visitor will stay around longer and perhaps take action eventually. But I think that too much effort and thought is put into driving traffic from as many sources and keywords as possible and in trying to optimize everything that can be optimized on a website. Yet little thought is put into something as obvious as trying to understand clearly what each visitor is expecting when they see your landing page.

Think about it. Visitors land on your website all the time, but the path of clicks they followed to get there, and their expectations once they arrive, are often completely different from visitor to visitor. One visitor may arrive after reading a favorable review of your services from a reputable blog site or online magazine. Another may arrive directly from your Google AdWords ad that promised a discount on purchases “today only.” This is what I call the visitor’s frame of mind. It is a very important concept for conversion: the source of your traffic preconditions your visitor to take (or not to take) action on your content.

Once you really understand how much the visitor frame of mind changes from one traffic source to another, you will place more emphasis and effort in the sources that provide the most valuable visitors. You will conclude, like I did, that the conversion from online advertising is abysmal compared with the quality traffic you get from editorial pieces. Incidentally, the editorial frame of mind is also why I’m a big fan of affiliate marketing: you have third-party sellers endorsing your product and services.

I consider search engine marketing the most powerful way to get clicks that are likely to take action. Remember, high-ranking organic search listings are also perceived as a form of editorial content and endorsement. If Google ranked your site as number 1, people believe it’s worth a try. Ads, on the other hand, are not seen as endorsements, but rather “try at your own risk” advice. Think about your own experience searching. Do you trust the PPC ads on the side of the screen, or do you jump to Google’s “recommendations” first?

Opening day madness

These days, the keywords that convert best are usually the most expensive or the hardest to rank for organically. Savvy advertisers have identified these keywords and start bidding wars that increase the overall cost of acquiring clicks. But you do not necessarily need to get the most expensive ones — you just need to get the cheap ones and lure people back to you a few more times. It’s similar to the way we shop for movies. Sometimes we’re willing to pay more money to see a movie on its opening day at the theater, while in many cases we prefer to pay less and wait for the film to come out on DVD so we can see it a few more times for less money.  You too can get cheap clicks if you are willing to wait for people who are not ready to buy right away.

How? In order to get the action you expect — a purchase, a signup, a download, etc. — the visitor needs to feel like your content presents the ultimate solution to his/her problem. If you solve specific problems affecting many users and gain the credibility and visibility to be a recommended resource, the traffic and the conversions will pour in. This is why I say that conversion rates are affected by the source of the traffic more than you might expect.

The stream of clicks that got the visitor to your site in the first place can tell you what that problem might be. If you select the right keywords to map the problems/needs your potential visitors are expressing, you can better serve them with the content that is going to address those particular needs when they land on the website. That will boost your conversion rate — and your profits.

Another important tactic is to build a relationship over time. Offer a free e-zine subscription, for example, and you can share useful tips with these visitors until you get the person into the right frame of mind. People are primarily looking for content/information, and you can provide that info while slowing building up their desire to purchase from you at a later date. The idea is to trade your time in creating valuable content, tips and advice in exchange for traffic and sales down the line. The visitors will come back to your site with the right frame of mind. This is the approach I’ve taken on this blog and it is working out very well.

Now, I just need to find more time to write/share more useful content! Please let me know what you think of this concept in the comments.

A couple of months ago I found a really clever and easy way to build thousands of links to any site (with your choice of anchor text). In the spirit of sharing I try to promote in this blog, here it is…

PAD your link-building regimen

There are thousands of software developers that provide their solution as a software download (RankSense is one of those), but getting visibility for your solution is an uphill battle due to the large number of competing products in any software niche. One of the easiest ways to get a lot of visibility is to offer a free version of your product and syndicate it through free software download directories.

Now, there are thousands of such directories and submitting your software to each one manually is definitely a pain. Fortunately, there is already a solution for that. All of the software distribution sites support a standard syndication format for content similar to RSS. It’s called PAD (Portable Application Description). Essentially, it is an XML format with all the details about your software, your company, and so on. And most important of all for us marketers, it includes a space to provide our company/product URL and description. In most cases, both result in a link with the anchor text you specify.

You are probably going to say that you don’t have a software download to distribute. Here are two very simple options for you:

1.      Hire a programmer on Elance or Guru and have him develop a very simple tool (like a calendar or to-do list) or enhance an existing open source one. If you search diligently, you can get lots of proposals for anywhere between $50 to $200 bucks. Most of the software directories—at least the ones that are most useful for link juice—review each submission, so if you want to increase your chances try to create something simple but original.

2.      Turn your blog’s content into an e-book in executable format using one of the popular e-book creators. This strategy is even easier and I guess most of you will go this route, but I need to warn you that you will have less success with the directories that carefully review submissions.

After you have your “free new software” you need to create the syndication file—the PAD file. There is a free tool that you can use for this called PadGen. Simply fill out the forms, which are self explanatory, and let the software generate the PAD file for you. Pay special attention to the fields for your link and company name. Those are the ones that control the link back to your site and the anchor text. Upload the file to your server, and submit the URL to the directories.

Anchors away

As a regular reader of this blog, you probably understand the importance of mixing your anchor text. Getting thousands of links back with the same anchor text is not a good idea. So here is a clever strategy you can use to control the anchor text:

Write a simple PHP script and map it to your PAD file URL using Apache’s ScriptAlias, or map the .xml extension (if you don’t have other files with the same extension) or do something similar. The idea is that the script must intercept the request and randomly or serially alter the anchor text in the XML with the values of a predetermined list of anchor text that you want to target. Performing basic keyword research will give you a suitable list. The goal is to have every submission use a different (but relevant) description for your company/product. To be on the safe side, I suggest you always leave the product name with the keyword-rich description. I also recommend that in some of the variations you use only the product name and not a keyword-rich description. This will make everything look much more natural.

This sounds like a lot of work, but really it isn’t. Syndicating software is not very different from syndicating content.

All that’s left is to find a big list of software directories to start submitting your PAD file to. A search in Google for “software downloads” returns more than 70 million results and all I see are software download sites, so the sky is the limit! I recommend you don’t include your personal e-mail in the PAD but create one that you can actively monitor because many of the sites will e-mail you additional steps. I’m sure spammers set up fake download sites to harvest e-mails so be careful with that, too.

There are software tools that can automate the submissions too; do a quick search in Google and you will find some really useful ones.

Happy link hunting!

Update: I’m glad to learn that SEO expert, Nick Wilsdon, has been using this technique for years! Check  out his really useful post for more useful tips

The problem is scammers who claim to be SEOs and who disrepute all of us with what they do. Wherever we draw the line between who is and who isn’t a “real SEO” is not important. There is no central authority or watchdog group that validates which SEO claims are true and which are false. But—and this is a big but—there is one way we can turn the tables. You guessed it: unlike scammers, we can guarantee our results.

A Knock at the Door

It’s well known that many people at the moment associate the term SEO consultant with snake oil salesmen. This is in large part thanks to people that don’t have a clue about SEO, but do know a lot about telemarketing and how much money can be made by proffering SEO services. Picture somebody coming to you and offering an irresistible service that will send mountains of customers right to your door; he’ll charge several thousand dollars for the service and you need to wait six months to see the results, which he doesn’t guarantee. Would you buy it?

Actually, a lot of people do buy into it…and that’s a problem for us. By offering our services with no guarantee at all, we are encouraging others to do the same. It has opened the door for scammers to prey upon innocent people. When a site owner comes into contact with an SEO, how can he tell the good ones from the bad ones? Most small business owners don’t attend search marketing conferences and don’t know who Danny Sullivan or who Aaron Wall is. They do know that their inbox is flooded and they get called maybe five times a week from different companies pitching SEO services.

You don’t need to know SEO to confirm whether a practitioner is providing a useful service or not. Just measure words against tangible results. How many extra visitors and/or sales/leads have resulted from the work of this SEO? Many will say that SEO has nothing to do with sales/leads/actions/conversions but, as I have laid out before, I strongly disagree. And I’m not talking about conversion optimization, which I consider a separate concern from SEO. If the consultant can show only rankings as proof, run away. Why? Because rankings alone are not useful unless they result in an increase in valuable traffic.

If you read my previous post, I think you’ll agree that rankings are not the best way to measure the success of an SEO campaign. There has to be a bottom-line benefit for the site owner, and that will depend on the specific goals of the campaign. Is it to increase awareness and trust of the brand, or to generate leads and sales? At the end of the day, the campaign is successful by reaching those predetermined set goals. This makes the SEO campaign valuable, both to the customer and the SEO providing the services.

A Line in the Sand

What I am trying to get across is that we can (and should) guarantee results—the right kind of results—because a well-executed SEO campaign will certainly drive more search traffic and affect conversions. This is true for at least a couple of reasons:

1.       With proper SEO you can pretty much define the right audience for a product or service. That is, if the consultant does a good job and selects the right keywords, those visitors should already express an immediate interest in whatever it is they are expecting on the landing page. Choose the wrong keywords and the results and conversions are going to be drastically the opposite.

2.       People tend to trust editorial pieces more than ads. That being said, when someone does a search in Google they see “editorial content” on the left (which is the result of SEO) and they see paid ads on the right (the result of PPC). Which content do you think they trust more? Which will result in higher conversions more often? Remember, most people trust Google, and that trust is conferred upon the search results. This is why Google is so protective of their users; every search result is perceived as an endorsement.

The larger point I’m trying to make is that we shouldn’t be fighting amongst ourselves about different hat colors. It doesn’t matter if you’re a white hat, black hat or gray hat if at the end of the day you’re providing results and the customer understands the risks of your methods. No matter what hat color we wear, we should be fighting together against the scammers that are infiltrating and destroying our industry. Our real concern are those people scamming our potential customers and not providing any value at all. We need to set a clear line in the sand that separates “us” from “them.” That is why I believe the smartest thing to do is guarantee our results—not top rankings—but measurable results.

If you get a customer and you don’t think you can provide measurable results, then don’t take the job. There will be plenty more knocking at your door because, when you deliver on what you say and exceed your customers’ expectations, they will come back to you for more and refer you to others.

Okay, I’ve said my piece. I’d appreciate your thoughts on this in the comments.

A better way to check search rankings

I definitely feel the pain of those that need to rely on tools that are constantly getting blocked by Google. But there is no need to get Google mad at you and block your IP. I learned early in life that there are always many different ways to achieve the same goals. You can get far more information about your rankings, for instance, directly from your traffic log files. You can determine all the keywords that you are ranking for, their relative positions, the number of visits each keyword is sending, and, with the IP address, you can also determine the physical locations where searchers are coming from. We’ve had this functionality built in to RankSense since we started developing it four years ago! Plus, you don’t need to query Google to get this information. (BTW, the new 2.0 version of RankSense is coming out, and the Discover Rankings tool can now detect conversions as well. That way, you’ll be ranking first for the keywords that actually bring in the money!)

The problem with fixation on ranking reports

But even if you can still check your rankings, this belies a notion that SEO is all about moving a site to the #1 spot in the search results. There is a camp that thinks ranking reports like this are important because customers are asking for them; the other camp argues that it is a waste of time because different people get different search results, and that the success of an SEO campaign must be measured in another way, like traffic and conversions.

There certainly are some fundamental problems with letting your customers get fixated on moving up in the rankings. Let me explain a few of them:

1.       A #1 ranking for a keyword means nothing if the traffic that derives from it does not give you the desired results: leads, sales, downloads, sign-ups, etc. Is the customer clear on his or her specific goals for the SEO campaign? How does he or she know a ranking for “blue widgets” will help achieve those goals? Has the keyword phrase been tested with PPC? Those are more important questions.

2.       Rankings can move up and down for a multitude of reasons, and fixation on those fluctuations can make any normal human being crazy. For example, Google delivers different results based on the physical location of the searcher, the language setting, the search history, and so on. That makes perfect sense because people living in different places and having different interests would consider relevant things that other people in other places do not.

3.       There are more important metrics of success for an SEO campaign. We should not let the client forget the main purpose of SEO, and ranking for “blue widgets” should not be the end goal in and of itself. As consultants, we need to be the ones telling clients which keywords are going to produce the best results, not rankings.

Does this means that trying to rank #1 is impossible or a bad idea?

I personally don’t think so. Fighting for #1 is like trying to be the best at what you do, and it is well known that #1 rankings bring with them a huge amount of benefits. They receive more than twice as many clicks as the second result (provided it doesn’t have a crappy snippet) and being #1 is a sign of trust to searchers. Users trust that if Google recommends the site as #1, it has to be good.

Also, while it is true that for many keywords the location in the search results might shift for different users, for a great many searches this is not the case. Consider navigational or brand searches. People doing brand searches are expecting the same thing and it doesn’t matter where in the world they are, their language or their search habits. A search for RankSense anywhere in the world should hopefully bring you to my RankSense software! For many searches, trying to be #1 (or on the first page) for queries that bring in money and don’t necessarily vary much from searcher to searcher is a very good idea, IMO.

My SEO Key Performance Indicators

As I said, rankings are not a measure of success unless they result in tangible goals such as traffic and conversions. That is why my favorite KPIs for measuring/tracking the success of my search campaigns are:

1.       Search traffic growth and corresponding conversions. I want to know week-to-week and month-to-month how my organic traffic is growing and, more importantly, how many conversions I’m getting from the overall search traffic.

2.       How many rankings I have on the first page vs the rest of the SERPs. As I said, I can derive this information from the traffic logs. Getting more visitors from the first page of results than from page two downwards means that I will be getting more traffic, so this indicator supports the first. In addition, I want to make sure my most profitable keywords are on the first page. That needs to be a priority because that will drastically improve my results.

3.       How many new incoming links I am getting every week/month etc. If I were the obsessive type, instead of fixating on rankings I’d fixate on how many new links I was getting. Getting links and increasing the visibility of the site will result in deeper index penetration (because the site is considered more important) and the ability to rank for more competitive terms that can potentially result in a lot more traffic. It could also help me adapt my content development strategy to focus on more competitive terms.

4.       How many pages I have in the search engine index vs. the total crawlable pages of the site. Last but not least, the easiest way to start getting search traffic from long-tail queries is to create lots of quality content and promote that content. Every page we manage to get into the search engine index is another source of search referrals, so making sure all or most of the pages are getting indexed is a winning strategy.

There are several other metrics I use to measure success, but for me the most critical/important ones are these four. Do you use any KPIs to measure the success of your SEO efforts? If you do, please share them in the comments.

This is a guest post by Paul Burani from Clicksharp Marketing, a very sharp search marketer I met in NY

In the search engine world, it’s easy to think in terms of black and white.  Some traffic you pay for, some you don’t.  There’s page one, and there’s everything else.  And of course we use the terms “black hat” and “white hat” SEO to differentiate the practices which push (or exceed) the limits of what is deemed acceptable by each search engine’s terms of service.

This view often creates a temptation to pursue Search Engine Optimization at all costs, when in fact it may be an ill-advised strategy.  What would lead a CEO, marketing manager, publisher or webmaster to make a dubious investment in SEO?  In many cases, this is based on the simplistic notion that clicks from Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising come at a significant price, whereas in organic search, they cost nothing.

The idea that SEO is free is patently false.

What you’re not paying in Cost Per Click (CPC), you’re paying in time: the time required to generate and/or syndicate content, format your markup properly, research competitors, and stay current on trends in search engine algorithms.  We all know that time is money.  And if you’re outsourcing any of the above, you’re paying money on top of that money.

So whereas in PPC you build your campaigns around a certain monthly ad budget, with SEO your budget is effectively measured in content and not dollars.  Writing more content and creating more pages increases the reach of your site.  It broadens the spectrum of keyword queries for which you can be reasonably competitive — from the high traffic core keywords to the “long tail” terms with comparatively low volumes but high upside (in the form of conversion potential).  This creates a very powerful virtuous cycle:

• Googlebot and other search engine crawlers have more content to crawl, and begin to view your domain more favorably.

• A growing number of unique users find your site through their own natural search behavior.

• A certain percentage of these users link to you in the process of generating their own content.

• Your steadily growing network of inbound links improves your authority in search engines, indirectly improving your crawl rate, your search engine visibility, and the overall stature of your website on the internet.

If you haven’t yet gained any key insights from your PPC campaigns, SEO may not be as valuable.

Another myth about SEO is that it’s a dark science, driven by a small handful of hyper-intelligent individuals who stand around a bubbling cauldron sipping nerve tonic, talking about how much smarter they are than Google.

That’s far from the case.  While it is true that an SEO campaign is driven by basic competencies in content generation, keyword and competitor research, server dynamics, usability and so on — ultimately SEO is about running a business.  The same way an offline business might invest in a billboard placement to pull in new customers, search engines are simply a newer medium for practicing all the same rules of business.  Thanks to all its campaign administration tools, and support from the major search engines, PPC tends to be more generally embraced as a business development tool.  For instance, measuring and enhancing Return On Investment (ROI) in PPC has evolved much more quickly than in SEO.  Maybe that’s why the industry doesn’t consider Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to be a part of the broad strategies of Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?

Making the transition from PPC to SEO, however, is easier than you think.

If a PPC campaign is well-designed to attract a wide variety of clientele, and has been running long enough to have statistically-significant volumes of impressions, clicks and conversions, the next step is to skim the cream off the top of the campaign and create the foundation for an SEO campaign.

Imagine you’re running your favorite analytics program, looking at a list of all your PPC keywords, sorted by conversion rate.  Once you’ve filtered out a few outliers with inadequate sample sizes (go back to your Statistics 101 textbook if need be), you find maybe a dozen keywords that are significantly outperforming the overall campaign.  (Note: in PPC/SEO-speak, both single words and multiple-word phrases are referred to as keywords.)

These keywords now become the bedrock of your campaign to migrate business potential from PPC to SEO — we’ll call them the Dynamic Dozen.  Your copywriters are instructed to create content which repeatedly brings the Dynamic Dozen to prominence.  Your developer or webmaster organizes supporting elements of the markup (e.g. title tags, alt tags, meta descriptions, etc) accordingly.  Your PR firm (or guerilla link builders) generate inbound links using the Dynamic Dozen as rotated anchor text.

You’re acting on a very simple premise: once upon a time, the people who searched for those core half-dozen terms found you and became customers — and other people would do the same, regardless of whether they found you in the sponsored results or the organic results.

Checking your rankings in the search engines for the Dynamic Dozen might seem like a worthy benchmark for success, but it’s important not to give too much credibility to this metric.  A better strategy is to become very friendly with your analytics program, and monitor your search engine traffic on a regular basis.  Trends in absolute numbers of unique visits will give you a very general idea of the SEO campaign’s progress, but for a more objective view, ask yourself questions such as:

• How much traffic is being generated specifically by the Dynamic Dozen (including phrases that contain any of the these terms)?

• The people who reach my site through these keywords, do they develop a better-than-average relationship with the site content?  Do I see a lower bounce rate, higher pageviews per visit, growth in repeat visits?

• Are the Dynamic Dozen converting at the same rate as they were in PPC?

• Here’s the million dollar question — for the amount of time and money I’ve invested in SEO, is my organic search traffic reaching the same rate overall ROI as it was in PPC?

How would I begin to estimate the cost of an SEO campaign?

Understanding the return on your SEO investment can be tricky, but as always, you have a lot of objective data to use to your advantage.

1. Costs.  Come up with a reasonable estimate of the value of one hour of time for each of the key people involved: copy writers, webmasters, link builders, etc.  There are a variety of very cheap (or free) time tracking tools which facilitate this kind of record-keeping.  Add to this any costs for submission and/or syndication.

2.Assign value to conversions.  These numbers can usually be input directly into your analytics program.  If you’re selling product directly, the value is measured in profits.  If a conversion is represented by something less concrete, such as a white paper download, use your own business data to calculate the rate how many white paper downloads it takes to generate one new customer — and how much that new customer is worth.

3. Competition.  You can set a reasonable benchmark for ROI by isolating a few key competitors and studying their SEO campaigns.  Count up all the inbound links pointing to an important page on their site (you might also apply a filter such as PageRank, to account for the varying levels of inbound link quality).  Using your own human resources as a model, estimate how much it would cost to create and promote that content, and divide by the number of inbound links.

Once you’ve accomplished this, an objective view of ROI is your reward, and you’re essentially left with one of two results.

1. The ROI is lower than what you’ve observed for your PPC (or lower than what management has required).  In this event, you’ll need to return to your analytics software, extract the laggard keywords, and adapt both existing and new content toward better performance for these terms.

2. The ROI is higher — and which case you’ve earned a pat on the back.  You now have a mandate to return to the C-level executives asking for more budget.  Or if they don’t want to invest in marketing, maybe they’d like to invest in a big bonus for their new marketing guru.

There are many compelling reasons to invest in SEO.  Though it is not as “free” as many people believe, much of the intelligence needed to manage your campaign already exists in the form of PPC data.  Transferring these assets to the organic search channel, and measuring their impact on the bottom line, are a viable marketing strategy for many businesses competing in the digital economy.

So when is this a good idea, and when is it not?  Consider these criteria:

• Are you prepared to spend human resources, as well as your marketing budget, on SEO?

• Can you come up with an ongoing list of themes to use for developing new content?

• Have you gained a clear understanding of which keywords are convert your website’s visitors into customers?

• Do you regularly use your analytics software to measure your marketing investments?

• Do you have a good sense of which competitors are doing the same thing?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, you may not yet be ready for the spoils of Search Engine Optimization. But if you believe your marketing agenda is prepared to meet these challenges head-on, the upside is yours for the taking.

[Editor's note: BTW, don't miss my interview at Meetinnovators :-)]

I’ve been spending a little bit of time lately out of the search marketing world and into the broader Internet marketing space. I signed up for every “guru’s” newsletter, accepted all the free offers and I even signed up for a few paid ones. There are a lot of scams out there, but there are also those genuinely interested in providing quality information.

What I’ve come away with, and I’ve certainly talked about this before, is that conversions depend a lot on the traffic source. This becomes especially true when we move our ads away from the search page and onto social media sites or other places where users are browsing, not searching. Most people will say that in order to increase conversion you need to tweak the landing page, change what you say, how you say it, update the artwork, the offer, or work on other countless variables. What they don’t tell you is that you can also improve your conversion rate without making any changes to your landing page at all. How? Well it all goes back to the traffic source, so keep reading…

Traffic is less than king

As search marketers we focus too much on traffic. This is especially true of those working with social media. The truth is that traffic alone is not enough—we need to get the traffic to convert into desired actions on our website (leads, sales, etc.). You may have a page that converts at 10%, but if you send that page untargeted traffic the conversion rate will quickly drop to zero. Targeted search engine traffic is more likely to convert than any other traffic source for two reasons:

1.       The searcher is actively looking for what you are offering.

2.       Most people trust popular search engines and assume that if you are listed (especially if you are number one) you must be good and will deliver on what you promise.

But what about other traffic sources? Social media sites, banners, blogs, etc.—those traffic sources are good too, but they require a different content strategy. They require us to understand the difference between browsing and searching. When I search, I am actively looking for something. The marketing and sales message can be very fast and direct. When I am browsing social sites and blogs, I click on an ad more out of curiosity than focused interest. The way we convert the browser into a buyer, then, is a whole different ballgame.

The slow sale

It’s well known that the browsing traffic you get from social sites and blogs is great for branding. Top link baiters understand this and leverage it to get large numbers of links. But browsing traffic is good for more than just links. We can leverage browsing traffic for leads and sales too, but we must do so as part of a more prolonged strategy, similar to the one employed by B2B companies. We must offer something valuable for free to the browser right now in order for them to click through. Social site and blog readers love things like free e-books, useful tools, reports, etc. The idea is to collect their contact information now and contact them later, persuading them slowly over time to finally take action. I’ve seen this used by several successful sites. The idea clearly works.

Here is my process to increase conversions on non-search channels (social sites, blogs, Google content network, etc.)

1.       Study your target source carefully. Try to understand what the audience likes and wants. For example, people visiting technical forums like free scripts or technical documents. People visiting “make money online” sites like free reports/e-books on how to make money.

2.       Prepare a compelling offer. Provide something that is going to be attractive to the target group. Digital content is easier to produce so it should be the first option, but free tools are generally well received.

3.       Create ads that call attention. Search ads are generally more passive, but when you are browsing you are not even looking for ads so they must call attention to themselves more aggressively. Something like “Get top widgets here…” may work for searchers, but “Free report: 10 secrets to world domination!” is more likely to get clicks on a social site.

4.       Collect the leads. Ask for an e-mail and a name at the very least. Then, set up auto-responder messages to move your targets slowly onto your persuasion scheme.

There’s no question that this is more work than selling directly to people actively searching for what you offer. But consider that at any one moment more than 80% of web surfers are not looking to buy anything. However, we know that eventually they will be. If you’ve already got your foot in the door, you’ll quickly tap into that huge market opportunity when the moment comes.

As always, let me know your own experiences or ideas in the comments.

I promised everybody that I’d be posting my presentation slides from my talk at the SMX Advanced Bot Herding panel, so here they are!

First, let me say that I was very excited to be speaking at a major search marketing conference, and I can say with confidence that all the traveling was definitely worth it. My only regret is that I did not get to finish my presentation. This is the first time I spoke publicly and as an inexperienced speaker I was not even looking at the timer. My apologies to all those in attendance. Frankly, I do think speakers should be allowed a little bit more time for SMX Advanced, as you really do need time to lay the groundwork before delving deeply into these sorts of topics.

For those that didn’t come, let me summarize the key takeaways from my speech and put it into context regarding Google’s recent post on Webmaster Central:

Cloaking: Serving different content to users than to Googlebot. This is a violation of our webmaster guidelines. If the file that Googlebot sees is not identical to the file that a typical user sees, then you’re in a high-risk category. A program such as md5sum or diff can compute a hash to verify that two different files are identical.

Basically, Google says that geolocation and IP delivery (when used for geolocation purposes) are fine as long as you present the same content to the Googlebot as you would present to the user coming from the same region. Altering the content the robot sees puts you in “a high-risk category.” Google is so strict that it suggests you need a checksum program to make sure you are delivering the same content. Obviously, it doesn’t matter if your intention is to improve the crawling and indexing of your site or not.

Why would you want to cloak anyway?

Let’s talk about the key scenarios I discussed in my speech:

• Content accessibility

-          Search unfriendly Content Management Systems. According to Google, if you are using a proprietary CMS that does not allow the flexibility of making the URLs search-engine friendly, or if it has cookie-based session IDs, or has unique titles and descriptions, you need to replace your CMS with a newer one. Using a reverse proxy that cloaks to fix those issues is a “bad idea.” Again: easy for Google, hard for the customer.

-          Rich media sites.  If you use Scalable Inman Replacement, SWFObject, JavaScript or CSS to render rich media content to the user and regular text to the search engine then you are fine, because the checksums will be the same.

-          Content behind forms. Google is experimenting with a bot that will try to pull content from basic forms using HTTP GET and providing values listed in the HTML.

• Membership sites

-          Free and paid content. Google recommends we register our premium content using Google News’ First click free. The idea is that you need to give searchers the first page of your content for free and they need to register for the rest. This is very practical for newspapers that have resorted to cloaking in the past. I do see a problem with this technique for sites like SEOmoz where some of the premium pages are guides that cost money. If SEOmoz signed up for this service, I would be able to pull all the guides by guessing search terms that would bring them up in the results.

• Site structure improvements

-          Alternative to PageRank sculpting via “no-follow.” I explained a clever technique where you can cloak a different link path to robots than you present to regular users. The link path for users should be focused on ease of navigation and the link path to regular users should be focused on ease of crawling and deeper index penetration. This is very practical but not really mandatory.

• Geolocation/IP delivery

-          According to the post we don’t need to worry about this. Some good news at last!

• Multivariate testing

-          This is a very interesting case and I would have liked them to explain this in the Webmaster Central post. Search engine robots don’t take part in these experiments because they don’t execute JavaScript, yet many users will see a different version of the page than the robot sees. JavaScript-based cloaking will provide the same checksum for the page the bot sees and the page the user sees. I’m sure some clever black hats are taking advantage of this to do “approved” cloaking.

Google = Romulans

Just like the Romulans from Star Trek, Google doesn’t want cloaking technology in the hands of everyone. I didn’t get to talk about this in my presentation, but let me speculate as to why Google is drawing such a hard line on cloaking: Simply put, it is the easiest, cheapest and most scalable solution for them.

1.       As a developer I can tell you that running checksums against the content presented to Googlebot vs. the content presented to the cloaking detection bots is the easiest and most scalable way for them to do it.

2.       Similar to the problem with paid links, it is easier to let us do all the work of labeling our sites so they can detect the bad guys without having to dedicate a huge amount of resources to solve such problems.

Enjoy the slides and feel free to ask any questions. If you were there at SMX Advanced and watched me present, please let me know your honest comments. Criticism can only help me improve. Let me know what you think of the slides, too. Originally, I had planned to use more graphics than text, but ultimately I thought that the advanced audience would appreciate the added information.

It’s perhaps the most frustrating thing that can happen to an SEO. But it’s also something you can often avoid completely with a little planning. In this post I’m going to talk about a technique I like for using pay-per-click first to test out my SEO game plan. This way the next time you make it to the top of the search rankings, the traffic and money will start pouring in!

Using the PPC guinea pigs

An important point before we start is to disable the Google “content network” and set up conversion tracking—that’s how we’ll ultimately identify the best keywords. Remember, the best keywords aren’t the ones with the highest number of searches or even the most clicks. They are the ones that bring in the most conversions at the lowest possible cost. Our PPC strategy is simple:

1. Start with a large list of relevant keywords using Google AdWords keyword tool.
2. Create very specific ad groups and landing pages you want to test.
3. Split test everything: ad copy, keyword matching options, and landing pages.

Spend money to make money

Start with a large list of as many relevant keywords as possible. Divide your keywords into small groups so that each can be sent to an appropriate landing page. Set a low budget per day in AdWords so that you don’t spend anymore than necessary. Even if it turns out to be an expensive campaign, you can run it for a limited amount of time just for testing purposes. I think in the vast majority of cases, the ultimate payoff is worth the small investment.

There are some other points worth noting as you go about your testing. Keep in mind that you are finding the best candidates in multiple categories: keywords, ad text, and landing pages. Ad variations will eventually help you title your SEO landing pages and offer meta descriptions that appear in the search results and cause searchers to click on your link. You have to think of an ad as an offer. The searcher is always in the “What’s in it for me?” frame of mind. Your ad text must offer a promise of something specific to the searcher. Your landing page will have to deliver on that promise; if it doesn’t, you’re not going to get a conversion. You can also test the efficacy of different landing pages with Google’s Website Optimizer

Another often-overlooked point is to test variations on the same keyword phrase. AdWords offers you flexibility in terms of a broad match, exact match or phrase match. These are explained here in Google’s documentation. AdWords also has an advanced matching option called embedded match that I can use to help make my split testing more effective. It’s just as important to test these keyword matching variations as it is to test different ads.

You’ve seen the future, now go after it

With Google Analytics, you’ll be able to do a detailed assessment of your campaign when it’s over. You’ll see clearly the exact words people typed into the search that led to conversions. This will allow you to hone your keyword list even more. Based on your PPC conversions, you’ll also be able to estimate how much revenue you can potentially earn and whether your SEO efforts are going to be worth it for these keywords.

Before I leave you, I want to mention that this post was inspired by an answer I read in the LinkedIn forums written by Laura Alter from notebookforums.com. I want to thank her for that, and I hope you’ll let me know what you think of this strategy in the comments.

PageRank sculpting with nofollow

The majority of the nofollow debate centers around external and paid links. But nofollow can be used with internal links as well in a concept often called “PageRank sculpting.” The idea is to use nofollow to help shape the relative importance of pages on your site. In the eyes of search engines, certain pages on your site are clearly more important than others. Google and Yahoo determine this automatically by how many incoming links a page has, and they include internal links in this calculation. Of course what the search engine believes is important may not necessarily agree with what you think. With a commercial site, for instance, the pages that make the most money are the important ones, but users around the Internet don’t naturally link to commercial content as much as to informational pages. It makes practical sense that you want these moneymaking pages listed in the search engine index, and you can use nofollow on internal links to lessen the importance of some pages and thereby increase (internally) the importance of others.

There are people in the SEO community who don’t encourage this. You can do similar things with information architecture, JavaScript or other methods after all, and nofollow is just another way. For a large e-commerce site like Amazon, for example, it might make some sense. Amazon has a good toolbar PageRank, but there are so many pages available that they will want the most PageRank on the most important pages. But for the vast majority of sites out there, I don’t think this is a problem. The focus should really be getting PageRank in the first place. Think about it this way: what’s going to benefit your site most, incremental tweaks of shifting PageRank in between pages, or getting more PageRank juice to start with? I think, for most of us, the latter is true.

A follower no more

That is one particular use for nofollow. Search engines, of course, are encouraging sites to use nofollow for paid links. As I’ve outlined before, I don’t think this is the best solution and search engines have other alternatives they should try. But some blogs and other sites nofollow everything with the hope that they can keep all of their internal PageRank for themselves. If you read my latest post on SEOmoz about how PageRank works, you understand that this idea really doesn’t hold water. You’re still going to share some amount because of the way the PageRank algorithm is designed. If everyone starts doing the same thing, it’s going to be harder to get links and I don’t think it’s a good idea to promote this behavior.

Until today my blog was a dofollow blog. I wanted to reward my readers for reading and commenting. As SEOs, I know that one of the hardest problems we face is getting links to our sites. So why did I reverse my decision and go from a dofollow to a nofollow blog? It’s because I simply don’t have the time anymore to moderate all the comments and filter out the spammy ones. I’m finding that some first-time readers feel like they need to write a comment on every single one of my posts, even ones that are several months old. It takes a lot of time to delete these things.

To me, all this is sad. I feel that I am sending out the wrong message because I am very much against the nofollow attribute. But I don’t want my blog to become a source of spam comments either.

If you want to contribute to the conversation, you’re as welcome as ever. Above all, I still want my readers to be active with this blog and be rewarded for it. With that in mind, I’m soon going to install another plug-in called Linky Love. The idea is that after several approved comments you can get dofollow link for your comments.

Let me know your opinions on the subject of nofollow. Your comments do matter here!

It’s been a while since I’ve had time to post here as I am extremely busy with RankSense. In selling an SEO software suite I answer a lot of technical questions, but, oddly enough, I feel I have become much better at explaining what SEO actually is. As SEO has become more mainstream, and more people are curious about what exactly it means, I think it’s important to find ways to explain SEO in simple terms. That’s exactly what I want to do in this post: simple SEO in terms of goals, strategies, and tactics.

Eyes on the prize

I’ve found that explaining SEO in terms of specific goals is the most successful way for me to get my point across when pitching my services or products to prospective clients. I like to think of SEO as anything and everything you can do to your website to improve the number of qualified visitors coming from search engines.

In order to get qualified visitors, you have to pursue 3 specific goals for the website. The first, and most important, is increasing the site’s visibility. For a user to find a website via a search engine, the search engine has to find the site first! Just as important, the search engine must also deem the site important: worthy of having a high place in the index. At the moment, search engines, including both Google and Yahoo, rely primarily on the links coming into a website. If many big sites link to your content, Google assumes your content is pretty useful. So the activities involved in increasing the visibility of a website in the eyes of Google and Yahoo primarily means that you are building links. In a future post I’ll talk about some research I’ve been doing that shows that search engines are trying to shift away from this methodology and have started working on incorporating usage data instead to determine importance. But the truth of the matter is that, for the moment, there is nothing as solid as link building to increase your site’s importance.

The second goal is targeting. If I want to get more qualified visitors to my site, I need to understand which specific keywords are bringing me the right visitors—visitors that are likely to take action on my site (download, subscribe to a newsletter, buy something, and so on). A lot of people new to SEO or the Web just want traffic. But traffic alone is not useful. You want traffic that takes action on your site. Targeting the right keywords is the best way to do that.

The third goal that you pursue when doing SEO is what I call the presence. You want to get as many pages of your site as possible indexed, but especially the ones that are most important. If your content isn’t getting listed then people aren’t going to be finding the most relevant content that you’ve created.

As I have tried to lay out with these goals, SEO is not simply about ranking #1 for a random keyword. Many people will tell you that, but they are missing the point. Rather, the purpose of SEO is getting as much traffic for qualified keywords—the goals of your site will determine the kinds of users you really need.

Strategies for successful SEO

When the right visitors are coming to your site and taking action on your content, then you know you’ve accomplished successful SEO. But how do you get to that point? Let’s talk about strategy and tactics. My strategy has 3 different steps:

1. Research – First, I try to understand where my site is right now. Am I targeting the right keywords? What’s my market? Am I missing any keyword opportunities? What are my competitors doing? Understanding what successful competitors are doing lets me learn and apply their strategies to my own site.
2. Create/Promote – My next step is to create an SEO plan that will get me where I need to be. This usually involves creating or reconfiguring content to attract the right type of user with qualified keywords. Just as important, I need to promote my content so that users can find it. There are a lot of tactics to do SEO properly, but here are some basics, many of which I’ve discussed in previous blog posts.

• Keyword research
• SEO copywriting
• Social media marketing
• Link building/baiting
• Blogging
• Creating XML sitemaps
• Fixing duplicate content issues
• URL rewriting/redirects
• Etc.

3. Track progress – The final step, and this is one that many people forget about, is tracking your progress. How far are you from your specific goals? Periodically checking in will help you understand where you are so that you know what worked and what didn’t, as well as the areas you still have to focus on.

So that’s how I’ve been explaining SEO to all the people who ask me. I’ll be posting on a more regular basis from now on, but I’m curious to know how you map out your SEO thought process. Sound off in the comments.

The Thrill of the Chase

Chasing links is the traditional way of building links. This includes things like submitting your site to directories, creating press releases, submitting articles and comments with your site link and anchor text, and other strategies. While it’s the most common way to acquire links, it’s also the most time-consuming, labor-intensive approach. But who is going to disparage a tried and true technique with results?

Step 1: Identifying link targets. First off it’s important to consider and research the links that are most valuable to your site. One way to do this is to scour through search engine results to see the top spots for your keywords, and attempting to acquire links from those sites. Another way is to look at your competitors and see what links they are getting (Yahoo Site Explorer is great for this). Personally, I like the latter method because you know that if your competitor obtained a link, surely you can too.

Step 2: Categorize your targets. There are different kinds of sites and each will require a unique approach, so you should look at where the most valuable links are coming from. Are they from blogs or news items? From link directories or review sites? Membership organizations you might want to join or already belong to? By understanding the kinds of links you’re after, you can hone your approach and employ specific strategies.

Step 3: Approaching the link target. As with any chase, approaching the target deftly and surely is of paramount importance. Press releases, for instance, have a particular format and style. Your success rate will be higher if you follow the guidelines and focus on a specific, newsworthy idea. Link directories also have their own rules and guidelines. Read them carefully and make certain you meet the qualifications before submitting. (Notice that I am assuming that the directory will review your site. That’s because a directory without an editorial board, one that lets every site in, probably isn’t worth your time as it will be demoted by search engines, either now or sometime soon.) Some blogs accept paid reviews, but probably the best ones won’t. Study what authority sites are already linking to so that you have the right idea of what to present them with. Always get the right contact information, an email address or phone number, and do things in an individual, personal, and personable manner. The chase of link building is a refined art!

Pros

Chasing after links allows you to be more selective and gives you greater control over your link structure and link text. It’s going to be naturally high quality and diverse. If you look at my previous post about link mass, you know that I encourage you to go after the hardest ones first because they usually give you the most link juice.

Cons

The obvious con is the time and labor required by you. Chasing after links isn’t something you want to be