There are certain concepts of search engine optimization that will likely always remain a ranking factor. Whether you are a new or seasoned SEO professional, it may be nice to revisit these subjects and ensure you are aware of new factors that may have come into play. We hope our short video answer web series will answer basic questions and keep you informed of changes, events, and tips in the industry. Watch for a post ever week or so highlighting the latest videos.

Coming up next week: answers to Schema.org and link building questions!

This week you will find answers to the following questions:

Why Do I Need SEO?

What is an XML Sitemap?

What is Analytics?

Do I Need Analytics?

What is a Meta Description?

What is a Search Engine Index?

What is the Rel=Canonical Tag?

For the most part, link building is pretty straight forward and simple. You can publish your articles, request some directory listings, bookmark links, guest blog posts, request links from other webmasters or even purchase links if you’re feeling particularly rebellious. But keep in mind if you don’t have a strategy behind it, you might fall face-first into a ditch filled with sorrow and regret.

Many times so many of us start a website in hopes that in 5-6 months we might start seeing some decent cash rolling in. Because you need link building to attain those rankings, you need to make sure the links you’re acquiring match the progress that your website is currently at. Let me explain.

Most experienced search engine optimization professionals understand that you need a healthy balance of links. Building links in moderation and keeping a proper anchor text to non-anchor text ratio is crucial. If your entire backlink portfolio consists of anchor text links, it isn’t going to look natural to the search engines. Same can be said if everything is a directory link, bookmark link and especially a comment link.

If you are submitting articles, make sure that you are using your anchor text but also make sure that some of those links back to your site are strictly the URL or business name. If your site is brand new, the number of anchor text to branded links should probably be a 50:50 ratio so your backlinks don’t look unnatural.

However, the same cannot be said about large, established websites. Odds are that if your site has 40,000 backlinks, submitting higher ratio of anchor text links aren’t going to hurt you or your rankings. For example, if you pointed 1000+ spammy, anchor text filled comment links to YouTube, do you think it’s going to make a difference? On the other hand, if you did the same to a brand new site with no reputation or authority, you’ll probably get a penalty very quickly.

I’d like to share a personal experience with this. On one of my personal websites I wasn’t following my own advice. I got in the habit of submitting content using my anchor text. There was variation of the anchor text but I never threw in my URL to make it appear more natural.

For a couple months all I saw was an increase, and for two of my main keywords I even attained first page rankings. I was very happy and hopeful that this website might actually bring in some money. Then, on one fateful day, Google dropped the hammer…

As expected, I was very perturbed to say the least. After looking through my backlinks I found that I clearly wasn’t following best practice. I wasn’t building enough natural looking, credible links. Instead I got caught up in my fantastic rankings and continued submitting content, directories, bookmarks and other links using only my anchor text.

Because I was a new site with a limited online existence, building these links worked for almost two months, but it caught up with me. If I was a site with some authority and a very healthy, natural looking backlink portfolio, this probably wouldn’t have happened.

Just remember that the links that you are pointing back to your website need to vary when it comes to your anchor text and method of link being built. I think the same analogy (for the most part) applies to life, “too much or too little of anything, is a bad thing. Keep everything in moderation.”

Eliminate everything on your website that doesn’t contribute to the primary objective.

Every website has one major objective. It could be a purchase, download, contact form submission, or any number of actions. It also has several other less important but necessary objectives; actions that only indirectly result in a sale. A successful website is one where every secondary objective is held accountable to the more important primary goal.

Water Fountains

Let’s say we have a website that sells water fountains. The first thing we would do is set up a goal in Google Analytics that tracks fountain sales. That’s our primary objective. But we also have a page on our site that offers advice on interior decorating with water features. We have another page on the art of water placement in Feng Shui. Finally, we have a page where people can sign up for our monthly newsletter. We have created these pages so people can learn more before they buy a fountain.

But just because the page is there doesn’t mean it’s doing its job.

What we need to do is set up additional goals in analytics that track what happens on these pages. Ideally, people will purchase fountains more often after browsing our informational resources. If lots of people are heading to the purchasing areas after reading, we may be doing a good job. We’d also like to see purchases increase as newsletter subscriptions increase. If that happens, our newsletter might be OK. In our analytics software, we want to see exactly where people go after they hit a given page. That data can be used to determine if our information and newsletter are doing a good job of enticing people to buy.

The important thing here is that secondary objectives can provide small wins on the way to the big win. They can also show losses and force us to change things around. We want to know how every part of our site is behaving so we can keep the good stuff and get rid of the bad. We’ll need to set up tests to determine winners. We want to embark on a journey where our site keeps getting better and better at driving people down the conversion funnel to the purchase.

Recap

To recap, tracking only one major goal (such as purchases) leaves us blind to everything else happening on our site. We have to be aware of how everything is performing so that we make our website an efficient sales or lead producing machine. The way to do that is by setting up goals in our analytics software and tracking how efficiently our pages are guiding people to the primary objective.

Engagement can be a fuzzy term in search marketing, but it’s exactly what we want. A user who converts in our secondary areas is engaged, and engaged users are more likely to buy.

Don’t Blindly Trust your Data

Too often, webmasters and even Internet marketers put too much trust into the data that their Google Analytics accounts are reporting; especially if they see traffic increasing.

For example, I recently ran across an account that looked like it just exploded with additional visits and revenue from organic sources.

From every angle I was looking at, it simply looked like everything was working the way it should. Organic traffic was up, PPC was up, even direct traffic and referral traffic was looking great.

However, it was just too good to let it go without investigation. It wasn’t until I looked at the PPC accounts that I noticed anything was wrong. The PPC account was turned on the very same day that the traffic started to spike. In fact, the traffic graphs were pretty much identical, showing a strong correlation between the PPC being turned on and the traffic we saw coming in.

It was clear that something was off. WAY off. But was it Google’s fault? Not really. Turns out their PPC wasn’t being associated with their account, effectively skewing the organic results.

Now we get to the fun part, where I fixed the problem. In order to make sure that the traffic was pure coming into Google analytics, I changed all of the URLs in their PPC account to tracking URLs, using Google’s URL builder. Let’s look at how we build these URL’s.

Google Analytics and Tracking URLs

The good news is that this is a really automatic process, and only requires a few bits of information (once you get the hang of it, you may not even need to use the builder). You’ll need to input the following information:

• Website URL – Input your desired landing page URL
• Campaign Source – Type in where your visits will be coming from. If it’s going to be Yahoo’s PPC, then type in Yahoo.
• Campaign Medium – Here you want to the medium that is sending the traffic to your site. If it’s a banner ad, then type in “banner”. If it’s cost per click advertising with Bing or Yahoo (or even Google), then type in “cpc”.
• Campaign Name – Type a name that will help you distinguish the traffic from other campaigns and stay organized.

The other two options, Campaign Term and Campaign Content will allow you to distinguish a keyword you want associated with the particular landing page and the content of the ad used.

Results

Once I fixed the URLs and inputted them into the PPC campaign, the Analytics data seemed to return to normal. Note how the traffic drastically changed once the change was made:

Other Applications

Sometimes, when I share this awesome URL builder with others, they think it’s just for PPC purposes. It’s actaully robust enough to handle just about any marketing effort. Here are some common uses:

• Banner Ads
• Newsletters
• Email Marketing
• PDF Files and Brochures
• Sponsored listings (not paid links!)
• Social Media campaigns (such as twitter tweets)

If you have any other ideas on how to use this nifty, sometimes underrated tool, leave a comment.

The sad thing is that a lot of the things we recommend should have been done during the Web development phase the first time around.

No matter how much the SEO world tries to get the information out there, a lot of Web developers don’t understand the basic concepts of SEO. This in turn leads to sites being developed that an SEO team will later have to tear apart and fix.

So whether you’re designing a new site in-house, using some kind of template site-building system, or hiring an outside firm, here are 18 things that you’ll want to make sure are in place before you launch your site. It will keep us SEO guys from giving your site an overhaul later. By following these guidelines you’ll have a much more search engine friendly web design from the beginning.

1- Perform Keyword Research Before Developing the Site

SEO starts with keywords. And if you’re planning to market your site in the search engines, you should know what keywords you want to rank for before you even start building the site. Make sure this is done FIRST.

Here are some other posts that talk about how to properly do keyword research:

• Keyword Research Gems from PubCon
• How to Create a Huge Keyword List
• Use All the Tails in Your Search Marketing Strategy

2- Put Non-www to www Redirects in Place

It amazes me how many sites load with and without the www in the URL. The problem with this is that it creates an automatic duplicate of your site, and can waste a lot of link value as people link to both versions. Decide which version of your URLs you want to use, then 301 redirect everything else to the preferred version.

3- Use a Static, Keyword Based URL Structure

Dynamic URLs can cause a lot of problems if not handled right. So rather than going through all of the headache that they cause us SEO-types, just set your site up with good URL rewrites so that you don’t have dynamic URLs in the first place.

More posts about URLs:

• Checklist for Changing Your URL Structure
• 3 Common URL Problems and How to Fix Them
• Absolute URLs – Better Safe Than Sorry?

4- Have Unique URLs for Each Product/Service

Even if a product or service can be found multiple ways on the site, make sure that there is only one unique URL for each product or service your company offers. This helps to eliminate unnecessary duplicate content problems.

5- Include Redirect Capabilities

You never know when you’re going to want to take a page down and redirect it to something else. The mistake a lot of sites make is that they just take a page down when they don’t need it any more. When this happens you lose the link value that page may have gained while it was live. So do yourself a favor: make sure you can 301 redirect that old page to a new page that can use the juice.

6- Create a Custom 404 Page

Having a custom 404 page makes it so that if someone lands on a 404 page, they at least know they’ve reached the right site. Without a custom 404 in place, they may just assume the site is down and move on to your competitor’s site.

Here is an example of a custom 404 page:

7- Include Keyword-Rich Alt Attributes

Alt attributes are very easy to overlook. But if you use them the right they can be another signal to the search engines to tell them what a page is about. One quick tip on this one: don’t abuse this attribute by using a keyword phrase on every single bullet point image or stuffing a bunch of keywords into the attribute.

8- Make Room for Sufficient Content

Sometimes designers and developers get carried away with the look and feel of the page and forget to include room for text-based content. That’s what the search engines read, so you have to make sure there is a logical place for that content. Ideally, plan on having at least 150-200 words of optimized content on any page you want to rank well.

You should also make sure that your content is structured right. Have one H1 tag at the top of the main content, and then break out other sub topics with H2-H6 tags as appropriate. Make sure to use your keywords in these headings and in the content, but once again don’t overdo it.

9- Set Up Internal Linking Structure

I think that internal linking is one of the most commonly overlooked things for most sites. In fact, Ken Lyons wrote a great post about it that goes into more detail than I can in this post: Want More Link Juice? Here’s an Easy Way to Get It

10- Decide on a Consistent Title Structure

A site should use the same title structure throughout the site. Pick your convention and stick with it. A good format to follow is to have a phrase that includes main keywords for the page and describes what the page is about, followed by a separator (- or | are common), and then your brand name. For example, “Professional SEO Services for Organic Website Optimization | SEO.com”. Keep these titles to under 65-70 characters so they don’t get truncated in the search results.

11- Include Meta Descriptions on Every Page

Since most of the search engines can choose to use your meta description as your snippet in the search results, you should have a unique one written for every page. Include the main keywords and a call to action to encourage clicks. DON’T just make this tag a list of keywords.

12- Allow Inclusion for Other Meta Tags (canonical, robots, etc.)

If you’re using any kind of tracking codes or other things on your site that create duplicate URLs, you’re going to want to be able to include a canonical tag on those pages. Also, depending on how your site is built you may need to include other meta tags like a robots tag and others. Make sure your site’s back end allows for this when necessary.

13- Incorporate Social Media Sharing Buttons

In case you missed it, social media is a pretty big thing right now. I’m not a big fan of the generic ShareThis button, but you need to have some kind of social media sharing buttons on your products and other important pages. Do some research to decide which social networks are best for your site and then stick with those.

More general information about social media:

• 4 Ways Any Business Can Benefit From Social Media
• So Your Industry Is Boring – Don’t Let That Keep You Out of Social Media

14- Install Analytics Tracking

If you don’t have any kind of analytics tracking installed, you have no way to tell where you traffic is coming from, what’s working, and lots of other crucial information. Pick a solution and get it installed. Popular ones include:

• Google Analytics
• Omniture
• Mint
• StatCounter
• And a lot more…

Make sure that the software you go with will allow you to block your office IP address, track conversions, ecommerce revenues generated through different online sources, and anything else that will help you to understand what is actually affecting your bottom line.

15- Set up and Verify Webmaster Tools Account

Through Google Webmaster Tools you can find out a lot about how Google sees your site, and can give them indications on how to handle certain parameters, submit your XML sitemap, and be notified of problems they find with your site. Bing’s Webmaster Center is coming along, so it’s worth it to go ahead and verify that one as well.

16- Follow Web Standards for HTML, CSS, and Database Programming

The more you follow standards, the easier it will be for someone else to come along later and make changes or modify the site. It’s a real problem when a site’s backend code or database is so complex that it has to be rebuilt later in order for it to be changed.

17- Generate an XML Sitemap

It only takes a few minutes to do it, but once the site is live make sure you create and XML sitemap and submit it to the major search engines through their webmaster tools accounts. It’s even better if you can set this up so that it automatically updates and pings the search engines whenever a change is made.

18- Create a Robots.txt File

When you create your robots.txt file make sure that you are disallowing any pages or directories that you don’t want the search engines crawling. Standard examples would be login pages, search results pages, and shopping cart pages. You should also include a link to your XML sitemap as well. Also, make sure you test this file in your Google Webmaster Tools account to make sure it is working correctly.

Here’s a great site that talks more in detail about how to create a robots.txt file: About /robots.txt

If you follow these 18 guidelines you’ll launch a site that is in great shape as far as SEO is concerned. If you’re an SEO, feel free to add anything else to this list in the comments.

Tom Critchlow from Distilled wrote an excellent post about this yesterday that you can read here: New Google Webmaster Tools Keyphrase Data Is 70% Useless

My take on this subject is as follows: This is a brand new tool released by Google a few days ago. There is obviously a discrepancy when the data is compared, but Google is not one to just sit around and take criticism. If they want this to be a valuable resource for webmasters, they will improve the tool so that analytic data and Webmaster Tools data matches. SEOs, including myself would really like this tool to provide a valuable metric that we can measure over time and use for further website optimization.

Let me discuss some of my favorite tools. Some of the tools are basic (and rather obvious) while others are more in depth. I’ll use Google’s analytic for this post, although much of the same functionality exists on other analytics programs.

One of the first things that I do when I log into analytics is to go to traffic sources, and then to keywords. In order to see how well I’m doing in getting traffic from organic search, I click on the “non-paid” link just below the graph of the page. This will display the keywords that are generating traffic from searches in the various search engines. By doing this, I’ve been able to get a better understanding of what my visitors are actually looking for and which keywords are working. From an SEO perspective, this information provides a huge benefit. If you run a PPC campaign or have another source of drawing visitors to the website, being able to segment your traffic in this way is essential.

Goal tracking is great feature in analytics software that too often seems to be neglected. Setting it up is easy:

• Click on analytics settings.
• Click on edit next to the site you wish to create goals for.
• There are four slots for goals in this settings page. Click on edit to create a goal in one of these slots.
• Once you’re at the goal settings page, all you have to do is put in a URL for the goal. This is a page that should appear after the visitor has completed some sort of goal, usually a “Thank you” page.
• Make sure that the “Active Goal” option is set to on, and then you are set!

If there are multiple steps to the goal (say it’s a shopping cart and they have to go through a couple pages to check out), you will want to put the URLs for all of the steps down below, on the same page. This allows you to see the progress of visitors throughout the goal process. For example, if a high number of customers are  leaving your site once they get to the shipping page that may indicate that your shipping costs are too high.

Monitoring your goals lets you know how successful your online marketing efforts really are. After all, having a lot of people come to your website won’t mean anything if they don’t buy anything.

For more information and resources on using Google Analytics, look at their learning center with tutorials on installing, setting up and using their software.

1. Peek inside the minds of searchers
Often we as marketers think we know a lot about how people search. The truth is, there are a lot of different ways to search and it varies by industry and from one individual to another. By analyzing the keywords and phrases that are driving traffic and sales to your website, you can find out how your customers search to find your site. What adjectives or other modifiers do potential customers search on? What order do they search

2. See which keywords are working for organic search
If your site is showing up on the first page for some of those keywords, how much traffic are you getting from those organic listings? More importantly, how many leads or sales are you getting from those keywords? You will sometimes be surprised at which keywords drive the most traffic. Often it’s not the keywords you think will be best, and that’s why you have to watch your keyword referral reports to see which keywords are working.

3. Determine which keywords are not driving traffic
If you’re on the first page of Google and you get zero clicks, it’s time to find some new keywords. Stick with the keywords that drive sales and ditch the keywords that don’t work. There is a huge difference in click through rates depending on the position your site is listed in, but if your site is anywhere on the first page of Google, you should expect some level of traffic, or you’re not targeting the right keyword.

4. Find keywords that work in PPC that can be used for SEO
The nice thing about PPC search advertising is that you can choose exactly which keywords your ad shows up for. The thing that sucks about PPC is that you have to pay for every click. So why not take what you’ve learned from your PPC campaign and make sure you’re focusing your SEO efforts on the right keywords? You’ll usually find that a first page organic listing for the same keyword will send a lot more traffic than a paid listing for the same phrase, and the price per click is way better

5. Find keywords that work for SEO that can be used for PPC campaigns
The same idea for taking PPC keywords into your SEO campaign works the other way, too. Organic search listings will bring people to your site for all kinds of different keywords–including tons of keyword combinations that you never would have thought to include in your PPC campaign. If you notice a particular phrase that drives a lot of sales from a unique organic search keyword, you should try it out in your PPC ads. You’ll usually see a similar conversion rate, or maybe even better conversion from PPC on the same keyword!

6. Identify keywords to add as negative matches
Negative matching with PPC campaigns is when you tell the search engines to not show your ad when certain words are included in the search query. This can come in handy when you’re doing broad matching on keywords that have multiple meanings or connotations. They can also help you eliminate keywords that are driving a lot of traffic without resulting in sales. By watching your conversion metrics on a keyword level, you can identify keywords that drive traffic without sales and add those keywords to your campaigns as negative matches. You can even save yourself some money by looking at irrelevant, under-performing keywords from your organic search that should be excluded from your PPC campaigns before you even spend a penny on PPC ads.

7. Get ideas for new content and products
You’ll start to notice that people find your site for all kinds of different, sometimes strange, keywords. Watch the keyword list for new ideas for topics you can write about on your blog or even a new product you can add to meet the needs of your customers. If you’re getting significant traffic on keywords that you don’t have content about, it’s a good indicator that traffic would flow to your site if you create content to match what people are looking for.

I find it very interesting to review the keyword referral data in website analytics reports. As you dig in you’ll find all kinds of hidden gems that you can apply to make your website better and more profitable!

Any other ideas of ways you’re using keyword analytics to grow your business?