And Then Google Said “Let There Be Penguin”

It seems that Google created the Penguin update to address several practices in search engine optimization. From doorway pages, to unnatural linking patterns, to a whole slew of other “gray hat” SEO tactics, Google has made it clear that this is about control. It is about forcing companies to give up control of off-site practices while holding hostage their search rankings. So, fellow SEO control freaks – follow Google’s quality guidelines, stop trying to work the system and don’t implement a one-sided marketing strategy that fully relies upon search optimization or even digital marketing. Perhaps that last point is the most important.

I’m going to break this down to one aspect of control, consistency, and then I’ll provide a Penguin hypothesis using the example of footer links. I’m not presenting anything here as fact – just observation.

Let’s Talk About Anchor Text

At The Net Impact, we continuously research footer format because we design websites and we take advantage of footers for marketing and branding. Below is the two-part hypothesis that I will try to support through our findings.

Hypothesis A: Google Penguin encourages consistency for outbound links from your website to other websites.

For example, Google doesn’t seem to mind footer links in your website’s footer that lead to your location page, interior page or outside pages.However, as a web design company we also include a lot of links from our client websites to our website.

Hypothesis B: Google wants to see variation for inbound links from other websites to your website.

To clarify, if Google notices that every single back link to a website follows a rigid structure and a consistent format with unnatural anchor text, they will assume that the owner of that website has some kind of unnatural control over their linking environment.

The Net Impact’s web marketing team looked at nearly 100 websites that rank highly for web service related keywords and here is what we discovered. There is no clear right or wrong way to alter your footer links for Google Penguin, but some ways seem better than others. So we created a continuum to illustrate our very unscientific findings. Keep in mind, this is an effort to balance branding efforts with linking compliance.

Some different footer link and tagging options from best options to worst options. Based on a review of over 100 websites and their ranking.

Another option is to implement a rel=”nofollow” tag for links pointing to your website or simply remove links while keeping images and copy. Unfortunately this algorithm change puts web design and development companies in a unique position.  Many companies do not control their inbound links…unless that company is a web development company that inserts a standard footer with their client’s permission.

Learn more about tracking goals with Google Analytics.  Please leave thoughts, suggestions, comments below. Thanks!

It is not common for Google to release any information on their upcoming algorithm changes before they go live; in fact Matt Cutts did just that during his SXSW panel in March.  Cutts explained that Google will update their algorithm to target websites over doing their SEO and penalize their search engine rankings.  This will not come as a surprise to many in the industry, especially to those who use the proper SEO techniques against competitors who abuse SEO practices.

Many might ask what does Google consider “over optimization” or what makes a website “overly SEO’d”?  According to Cutts, they will be looking at websites which have “too many keywords on the page or exchange way too many links or go beyond what you normally expect.”

The “too many keywords on the page” penalty refers to the page content and the frequency of keyword mentions also referred to as keyword stuffing.  Google has always stressed the importance of well written and relevant content.   This change further strengthens Google’s algorithms to detect good content versus poor content written to improve keyword rankings.  Webmasters should continue to perform keyword research and optimize their content with highly relevant terms with the primary goal being to develop engaging content for the user.

Linking was also mentioned as a contributing indicator of overly SEO’d sites.  For years, search engine ranking algorithms placed an importance on linking, and in turn, linking strategies were developed to improve the authority of websites. However the rules of the game have changed throughout the years.  Initially, every external link was a good link; then, Google began to recognize bad links or irrelevant links and ignore them.  The latest change that Cutts refers to says that Google will no longer ignore bad links but, rather, penalize a website with bad links.

One might wonder how a webmaster can control all of their external links and regulate who might link to their site.  In reality, Google recognizes that not all external links are controlled by the webmaster and will not penalize a website if it has one or two bad links.  This change will, however, apply to websites which only have two way links, links from link farms, or websites which employ other non organic link building strategies.

Overall, the “over optimization” algorithm change is not a new concept for Google; the only difference is the fact that previously Google ignored these SEO tactics, and now it will penalize websites for utilizing them.  Cutts hinted that the release date would be in the next couple of weeks or month.  So stay alert, and monitor your website performance.

Google Analytics is a free tool that can help website owners track traffic and goals to determine the effectiveness of the website.  According to Google Analytics, “Goal conversions are the primary metric for measuring how well your site fulfills business objectives.”   Google has made setting up goals in Analytics simple and straightforward and a feature all websites should take advantage of to track conversions.

When you think of website goals, the ability to track purchases on e-commerce sites may come to mind first. However, Google Analytics tracking isn’t just limited to monetary goals.   A few examples of goals that Google Analytics allows users to track are:

• Purchases
• Leads (such as filling out a contact form)
• PDF downloads
• Printing or emailing pages
• Sharing content through social media buttons
• Video interactions
• Page visits
• Time on site

Depending on the nature of your site, the goals you choose to measure will vary.  Google Analytics explains that, “A goal conversion is registered once a visitor completes a desired action on your site, such as a registration or a download.”   It is important to create a specific goal completion page if your site does not already have one; an example of this would be a thank you page after a purchase or contact form submission.  When this page is displayed, it notifies Google that a goal conversion has been completed.  If you are tracking interactions, events will need to be setup and some may require additional tracking code. (http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/eventTrackerGuide.html)

Once you have established which goals to track in Google Analytics, created the appropriate landing pages and event tracking in place, it is time to interpret your data.  Goal tracking allows you to find out if visitors are navigating your site the way you had intended and if they are not, to determine how they are converting.   A few areas to consider:

• Which traffic sources lead to the most goal conversions?  By evaluating which keywords searchers are using to find your site, you can optimize pages based on relevant high traffic keywords.
• Which landing pages are leading to conversions?  Successful landing pages can be assessed and used as models to create new pages and improve upon existing content.
• Which campaigns are leading to goal conversions?  Looking at which campaigns are successfully converting visitors will help you determine whether your email, social media, or PPC campaigns are effective.  Successful campaigns can be used as models for future promotions.
• Which countries, regions, and cities lead to the most goal conversions?   If certain areas are converting more than others, it would be worth experimenting with geo-targeting through PPC, Facebook, or email campaigns.

Whether you are creating a brand new website, or revamping an existing one, it is important to have your goals in mind.  Tracking your goals and adjusting strategies is a great way to ensure that your website is performing at its best.  Setting up and monitoring your goals in Google Analytics are a great place to start.

Analytics Experts and Web Marketing Strategists packed the room at The Net Impact

Watch for “Pogo-Sticking”

Users who bounce back and forth from the search engine results page and multiple sites quickly are pogo-sticking. These users can potentially hurt your search rankings. Make sure the page for which you are ranking is relevant to users searching for that specific keyword.

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It’s All About Engagement

Google is no longer just looking at quantity of web traffic and links in its ranking algorithm. With the  Panda algorithm update, Google is attempting to measure a quality user experience with metrics like Bounce Rate, Pages per Visit, and Time on Site; keep an eye on these metrics. The best way to improve these metrics is to engage visitors with quality content, clear calls-to-action, and an intuitive UX Design.

Quality Snippets are a Must

Landing page click-through rate (CTR), available through Google Webmaster Tools, is an important element to analyze. If the “snippet” under the link is not enticing enough to users the CTR may be low despite the link’s high position on the search results page. This snippet is a combination of your meta-description of the page and relevant content Google finds on the page.

Use Google Analytics Goals to Track Conversions

Set and Track Conversion Goals.

Specific conversion goal tracking is one of the most powerful tools integrated with Google Analytics. These goals can include purchases, contact forms, downloads, or clicking a link. Fully implementing a site into Google Analytics Goals provides administrators a simple way to measure and compare the value and success of each conversion goal.

Watch Page Load Speed.

Another way Google measures the quality of the user experience is through page load time. Additional quarter-seconds of load time can drastically affect user enjoyment, bounce rates, and search engine rankings. Google Webmaster Tools help to track your page load speeds and compare them to average load times of other sites.

Don’t miss our next TXCHANGE Happy Hour Event! Stay up to date with The Net Impact events, announcements and insights with The Impact Update.

Let’s start this post with a minor clarification.  The relevance attribute or “rel” tag basically defines the relationship between the current document and a linked document.  For example, say I have two html pages, cookies.html and milk.html.  I decide to link the cookies.html page to the milk.html page, hence fulfilling the current document and linked document requirement.  When linking the cookies page to the milk page the code on the cookies page will traditionally look something like this in standard html:

<a href=/milk.html>Milk</a>

Milk is the word that displays to the web user.  Just as “href” is an attribute the same is true for the “rel” attribute.  Href tells “Milk” where to go when the user clicks on the link and Rel describes the relationship between milk and cookies, which we can all agree is pretty darn good.  With a “rel” tag, the same link may look like this:

<a rel=”friend” href=/milk.html>Milk</a>

This makes the assumption that Cookies and Milk are friends.  Why include a “rel” tag?  For one, it’s great for classifying content and styling links.  Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! will refer to rel tags to get more information about a link for search engine optimization or SEO.  Browsers support rel tags but do not use the attribute in any way.

Below is a list of different relevance tag values and what they do.  Each can impact SEO in its own way.

Almost twenty additional rel tag options exist, but the rel tags listed above will make the biggest impact on search engine optimization or SEO.

If you have more questions about relevance tags or search engine optimization, visit us at www.thenetimpact.com.

“Currently, Google Analytics does a great job analyzing past performance. Today we’re very excited to bring real time data to Google Analytics with the launch of Google Analytics Real-Time: a set of new reports that show what’s happening on your site as it happens,” says  John Jersin.  Google Analytics Blog

Let’s take a deeper look into the Real-Time tool.

Right Now

Right Now allows users to see the number of active visitors on site.  If there is more than one active user at a time, you can click on any of the active visitors to follow them.  At any time you can click out of following only that one visitor and view all visitors.  Right now also gives the user a closer look at who is a new visitor and who is a returning one.

Top Referrals

Top Referrals gives the user the opportunity to see where the visitor was browsing before they got to your page. Real-Time also enables user to click on the specific link to see the actual site.

Page Views

Real-Time allows the users to see the average time per minute and per second each visitor is on each page of the website.  This tool is a way to indicate whether a specific page has the information a visitor is looking for.  For example, if a visitor is on a page for a few seconds the page might not have appropriate content for that visitor but if the visitor is on a page for a few minutes then that would indicate it had the correct information they were looking to find.

Top Active Pages

Top active pages enables users to see what pages the active visitor is looking at, allowing the Real-Time user to follow the path they take throughout the website.  This can come in handy if the user wants to navigate the visitor to specific pages on the website.

Top Locations

Top Locations is an easy way to see where the visitors of the website are geographically located.

Google is not the first company to offer such data.  Woopra, Chartbeat and numerous other tools offer Real-Time but Google allows you to use it for free.

Real-Time is able to track the immediate impact to site traffic, making this great for social media.  For example, if a user posts a picture on their website and then tweets about it, Google Analytics Real-Time is able to track when traffic from the tweet stops driving visitors. The new version of Google Analytics was turned on for only a small number of people before to test it out in September of 2011. According to the Google Analytics blog, the full version of Google Analytics will be full force sometime January 2012.

Google Analytics provides tracking for anyone with a web presence, whether the user is an executive, marketing professional, content or a web developer.   It’s important for any person who has a website and wants it to succeed in the crazy world of the internet.  Google Analytics is a way to take control of your website and turn page views into profits.

Interested in Google Analytics? Contact The Net Impact.

Information architecture is not something that you can do quickly. This post recaps Omni Marketing’s presentation from Shari Thurow.

Information architecture and SEO
Challenge:
First, consider organization and labeling. It must be easy to use and your information must be easier to find.  If people cannot find what they want to find, they will leave your website and you will lose customers. Only an average of 12% of web visitors will return to a website that was unhelpful before.

Solutions:
Wireframes helps reduce lost customers, reduce development costs, increase crawlability, increase indexation, increase rankings and build brand value.  Tech teams often don’t think like your customer.  A technique to try is to take a website screenshot and remove design and content and individually quiz people about what page they are viewing.

Content MUST contain words and phrases that people type into search engines. Reduce  number of ”WTF” moments.

You do not want the technical model of your tech team. Accommodate navigational, informational, and question search types.

Understanding information architecture
Challenge:
Return to the idea of organization and labeling think about categorization, hierarchical taxonomy. Avoid practices like siloing and page rank sculpting.

Solution:
To have successful blogs and social media networks, use categorization. If you have different types of visitors or industries, versioning pages to include relevant keywords in the content is important.  Give multimedia a separate area in addition to their native locations. To test, make sure you’re observing the user target that you want to reach.  Pages should be unique, distinguishable and well-labeled. Think in terms of navigation labels over keywords.  Yup, SEO and information architecture are related.

For blogs, titles and headings SHOULD contain keywords. Use embedded text links to other previously written blogs and…categorize, categorize, categorize. This helps your articles and posts maintain traffic as they age.

A few resources:
Taxonomy Warehouse provides taxonomy structures by industry.
Use a tilde ”~” search to find keyword synonyms.

Check out The Huffington Post for a great author page structure.

Navigation Labels:
Only children and programmers “minesweep”, don’t require users to search for links. Make them obvious.

Spell out abbreviations.

Give people choices, but not too many. Drop downs give too many choices, one button makes people feel they’re being forced into a sales funnel.

Review Tips for Getting Valuable User Generated Content
Challenge:
How do you get good website, product and service reviews?

Solution:
Monitor and reward good reviews.

That’s it! Great presentation!

Daily Analysis. On August 9th, we took a look at Twitter’s trending topics for Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, South Africa, Australia and the Worldwide buzz. Put simply, this simple 5-minute check gives us insight into topics affecting the globe and topics localized to specific countries.

Take a look at the table below to see this breakdown of global and localized national trending topics. Notice that the London Riots have become a major area of concern for the entire world, occupying a large portion of the trending twitter topics, not just worldwide, but in specific countries too. And according to a recent Mashable article, Twitter users not only shared footage of riots on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, but now social media is a key mechanism for the organization of riot cleanup.

The United States’ State Department recognizes 195 independent countries worldwide. Although, many think of Twitter as highly global (and it is in respect to other companies), Twitter trends represent trended tweets from only 31 of the world’s 195 countries. Major countries not represented by Twitter Trends include Russia, China, and more surprisingly, South Korea.

1. Your brand is not a logo, advertising, your mission statement, etc. Your brand is a gut feeling (as articulated by Robert Brunner, Ammunition Group). Or you could say, a brand is the intangible sum of your assets (Tom Schmittdiel, PSG Marketing).

2. It is important to identify every touchpoint of your brand and then deliver on the brand promise that you’ve made AT EACH touchpoint.

3. You cannot tell people what to believe about your brand, but you can be consistent with your branding efforts. Words create a challenge you must live up to, actions give you the opportunity deliver on that challenge.

4. Communicate your brand consistently online through your navigation, social media, search engine optimization (SEO) and beyond.

5. For EVERYTHING you do, ask yourself, “Does this follow the brand that I’ve created?” If this brand were a person, would it do that? Here? In this way?

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At The Net Impact, we conducted a short study pitting the SEO efforts of our local St. Louis non-profits against national powerhouse non-profits.  In other words, we graded their websites using HubSpot’s Website Grader tool. 

HOW WE DID IT

Through a Google search, we selected 10 recognizable St. Louis based non-profits for our St. Louis SEO sample.  Then we selected the top ten non-profits from a 2005 Forbes list of the Top 200 national charities (we verified that all 20 organizations in our sample still exist and have websites).

Using HubSpot’s Website Grader tool, we analyzed all 20 non-profit URLs.  Then we averaged all the statistics to compare St. Louis SEO to national SEO.  Here are the results:

WHAT WE MEASURED

Average Website Grade.  This is a HubSpot scale from 0 to 100 (100 being the best).  Hundreds of thousands of websites make the top 5% (scoring 95-100). An average score of 77.1 means there is a huge opportunity for St. Louis non-profits to improve their overall SEO efforts.

Average Indexed Pages.  This metric is the average number of pages that Google indexes from each website.  Google indexed as many 37,000 pages for the top indexing St. Louis non-profit in our sample and as low as 58 pages for the lowest indexing St. Louis non-profit in our sample.  Interestingly enough Google indexed only 32,000 pages for the top indexing national non-profit.  And the average page index of 5,742.2 pages nationally versus 4,552.1 pages here in St. Louis, is fairly comparable. 

Average Linking Domains.  Perhaps the largest gap in performance is the number of inbound links to St. Louis non-profit websites versus the average number of inbound links to national non-profit websites.  St. Louis SEO fell short with an average of 1,063 inbound links compared to the national average of 15,256.2 inbound links.

Best Traffic Rank.  Traffic rank is a statistic that defines a website’s overall rank in terms of site visitors compared to all indexed websites.  The top ranked website of our entire 20 website sample hailed from St. Louis as the 1,422^nd most visited website (which is actually pretty darn good).  The top national traffic rank was 8,547 (hint: it was the Red Cross). 

% Sites With Blogs.  Only 4 websites in our sample contained blogs that Google recognizes.  One non-profit in our St. Louis SEO sample had a recognized blog.  Three national non-profits hosted a recognized blog.  So on this metric, everybody gets a big fat…Eh….

MozRank.  Yet another linking measure.  The Moz Rank weights inbound links not only by quantity but by the popularity of the referring website.  For example, one referred link from CNN.com might be worth as much as many referred links from a small blog. 

Overall, St. Louis SEO is growing among local non-profits, but we can do better and we’re well on our way to competing with huge national non-profits.  If your non-profit is looking for an SEO solution or any other type of interactive marketing solution, check us out at http://www.thenetimpact.com/.