Web Analytics Wednesday Ahmedabad

Finaly Team of Internet Marketing Journal brings Web Analytics Wednesday Day to Ahmedabad. Internet Marketing Journal (IMJ) was founded by Jaydip Parikh, Kaushal Shah and Dipali Thakkar. They really work hard and now we are going to enjoy Web Analytics Wednesday to our own Ahmedabad.

Lead Speaker

Ravi Pathak,

Founder & Business Head, Tatvic (Bangalore)

Tatvic is official Google Analytics Authorized Consultant in India and having clients like Make My Trip, Cardekho and other leading portal and some prestigious International clients too.

Venue – Date & Time

14th. April, 2010, 7.00 PM Onwards

Gloria Banquet Hall

1st. Floor, Regency Tower,

Nr. Rahul Tower,

Anand Nagar – Prahlad Nagar 100 ft. Road,

Satellite,  Ahmadabad.

Sponsors for this Event

Lead Sponsor :

YASH Infotech  (Business Partner TATA Communications Ltd.)

Diamond Partners :

InvestPlus : InvestPlus is Personal Finance Software specially Design for Individuals needs.

Datatech Media : Web Development, Design & Internet Marketing Solutions Provider

Byte Technosys Pvt. Ltd. : RIMS, On Site Support, Microsoft Solutions, Web Solutions Provider

Merchandiser Partner :

Infibeam.com : Infibeam.com is a premier online shopping portal of India portal carrying 50 Lac products including Books, DVDs, Cars, Bikes, Mobiles, Cameras, Gifts and many more

Global Supporter : Eric Peterson Founder of webanalyticsdemystified.com

 

Different Types Of ‘HATS’ In ‘SEO’

The other day in the office we were joking around about the different “hat colors” for SEOs (search engine optimizers)–you know, black hat, white hat and so on, for the efforts people make to get pages to rank highly on Google and other engines. I mentioned it to my buddy Arch Carey, who is a talented iPhone sketch artist. (He’s the guy behind OM-NOM-NOMNITURE.)

We got to thinking, what would the various SEO hats actually look like? Here’s what we came up with, thanks to great suggestions from the rest of The Daily Green team:

Black Hat SEO

The dark ninjas of the net, black hat SEOs try to trick search engines into ranking their sites higher by any means necessary. They often hawk scams and dubious products, and engage in such Google-banned practices as link farming, page hijacking, cloaking, keyword stuffing, link buying, spamming and other evil arts that clog up the Intertubes and give legit SEOs a bad name.

White Hat SEO

White hats worship at the altar of Google, and follow the TOCs (terms of service) of search engines to the letter. Unconcerned with “gaming” rankings, instead they focus on trying to lay out everything as clearly and transparently as possible.

Gray Hat SEO

Gray Hats avoid the activities that are expressly banned by search engines and by the Internet community. But they aren’t above trying to aggressively outrank the competition through link building, use of social media, smart use of RSS and building partnerships with other sites.

Pirate Hat SEO

Those “bloggers” who engage in egregious linkjacking, or who Shangai other people’s content in other ways. And those who post anything on Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Top Hat SEO

Those who achieve the coveted first place ranking in search engines.

Bacon Hat SEO

Net denizens who are obsessed with bacon, burgers as big as Volkswagens and Turducken, and building sites around these clickbait themes. Example: The Bacon Queen

Cat Hat SEO

Not to be confused with Dr. Seuss, cat hats are all about exploiting the Internet’s obsession with keyboard-playing cats, sneezing pandas and maybe even skateboarding dogs. Don’t let the cuddly cuteness fool you, they’re pure evil incarnate.

Beret Hat SEO

Les optimization de chercher.

Hipster Hat SEO

Wearing a trucker hat or fedora, these guys move slowly because they’ve got no place to go, man. And they’re unhappy.

Newsboy Hat SEO

No such thing. Newspapers don’t know how to do SEO. (Well, except maybe Colonel Tribune.)

Dunce Hat SEO

What’s SEO?

Brain Hat SEO

Watch out, zombies!!!

Source : www.thedailygreen.com

 

SEO and Branding: Which Is More Important?

It’s not often you’ll hear SEO experts admit that search engine optimisation is of less than central importance to a site. Partly this comes from the tendency for businesses to completely ignore their SEO. Partly it comes from the intense focus the SEO industry has. It is true, however, that SEO shouldn’t be the first and last thing you consider for your site.

In truth, search engine optimisation can both be assisted by and assist other aspects of your site’s marketing. If done well, search engine optimisation should have a positive effect on your site well beyond the search engines. To have this affect, though, optimisation has to look beyond the basic optimisation techniques. A good SEO company won’t just stick keywords all over your pages and consider the job done. Good SEO involves tactics that improve the site overall. You can talk to us about this at SEO Consult. One of the things that should be considered is your business branding.

The origins of brands

Branding has been the traditional realm of the marketer, and the move online hasn’t changed anything. Businesses still go to their marketing departments for their brand ideas, and approach SEO experts only when the marketing side has been sorted out. Some separation between SEO and regular marketing is only natural, but SEO shouldn’t be left out of the loop entirely. The choices you make for your brand have a big affect on your SEO and, more importantly, your SEO could have a big effect on your brand.

Find the balance

Just as your site and SEO cannot operate in isolation from each other, it’s not wise for your brand and your SEO to be completely separate. It’s a mistake to allow your brand to be the central guiding factor of your SEO, but it’s a mistake to go in the opposite extreme as well. If incorporated properly, your SEO and your existing brand presence can work together to promote each other. In areas where your brand is already known, tying it to your SEO can boost site rankings. In areas where off-page SEO is being used to promote inbound links, your brand can also be mentioned.

Brands in the future

Branding may well take on greater importance in coming years. In late 2008, Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned the publishing industry that without proper efforts in branding at that stage, their news services could take dive-bomb in future rankings. The reason, Schmidt said, was that the internet is increasingly starting to resemble a ‘cesspit’ of information. Branding may well be the only way to identify reliable information in the future, if only because it automatically attributes a source for the information which can be tracked down.

Brands already play an important part in modern culture. Market studies have consistently shown that people will pay more for a brand, and in the case of information, will pay for a brand when they can get the generic version for free. Basically, a well-established brand can sell itself. Allow your SEO to help your brand.

Source : seoconsult.co.uk

 

Web Analytics Event – “Web Analytics Wednesday” Ahmedabad (WAW)

Hello Friends,

As you all know, I am here to share with you all my research and new facts that I come across related to SEO, Web Analytics, SEO Tips And Techniques, Internet Marketing Industry Updates and such others. So, in this post I would like to draw your attention towards a Grand Event that is going to be organized especially for Web Analytics Lovers. Many of you might be knowing that, there is an International Event called WAW (Web Analytics Wednesday) which has been started by a very well known Web Analytcis Practitioner “Eric T. Peterson”. Normally, these kind of events used to be held at US, UK & Canada, but since last 2 years, We were fortunate enough to get this Event at India. Last year, the same kind of events were organized at Banglore, Chennai & Hyderabad.

And, NOW, With Lot Of Cheers, I am happy to announce that, We got got an opportunity to get this event to our own “Ahmedabad”. This event is hosted and managed by IMJ-Internet Marketing Journal which is usually maintained and handled by the combined efforts of industry experts. Credit goes to my industry friends (Dipali, Kaushal & Jaydip). It will be for the first time in North-West India where such kind of events are going to be held. The agenda of this event is to share and discussion about the Role of Web Analytics Insights in the Business.

Yup, WAW- Ahmedabad sounds so good isn’t it…

I would like to invite all of you people to attend this event. We will have a great presentations during this event (Might be few speakers who have presented their knowledge in Google India seminars last year will going to speak in this event)

Please visit the below URL to send your RSVP

http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/wednesday/list.asp?event_city=Ahmedabad

Event : Web Analytics Wednesday – Ahmedabad

Date : 14th April, 2010

Time : 7.00 pm onwards

Venue : Gloria Restaurant, Anand Nagar Cross Road, Satellite, Ahmedabad Gujarat

Agenda : To share and discuss about the role of web analytics & data based decision driven process.

If you have any queries Or concerns, Plz feel free to ask.

Feel free to get updates of WAW-Ahmedabad event on LinkedIn & Facebook.

Hoping to meet you all at WAW – Ahmedabad

 

Funny SEO Cartoons

1. The changed Algorithm

2.  Link Baits

Via

3. Send them a candy

Via

4.  The most searched keyword

Via

5.  More uses of the Nofollow tag

6.  Socialitis

Via

7.  The Date

Via

8. The SEO Birthday Card

Via

9. What is SEO ?

10.  Hold it – Ranks !

Via

 

Quick 12 SEO Tips For Your Blog

Here are some helpful SEO tips for your blog. These tips definitely useful for your blog and your blog will get more traffic for the search engines if your follow the following tips :

* If you have a domain and want to install wordpress blog, don’t put your blog at the root of your domain. Rename the directory with “blog” instead of “wordpress”.
* Always use dashes or hyphens in the url. These are best. You can also use underscore in the url. Spaces and no spaces are useless.
* Put target keyword in the title tag and the heading of blog post.
* Include the main keyword in the first paragraph in every post.
* Use alt tags on images. Its good seo strategy.
* Install title and meta description plugins. And make all the titles unique with the help of title plugin. These worpdress plugins are available free.
* Always ping your blog in google and other autoping resources when updated.
* When changing your host, use a permanent redirect (301).
* Check your blog in all the popular web browers and cell phone.
* Verify your blog using google webmaster tool and submit xml sitemap in all the three major search engines like google, yahoo and msn.
* Don’t mix non-www with www.
* If you are earning from google adsense, use section targeting. Google will display relevant ads on your blog.

Source

Quick 12 SEO Tips For Your Blog

 

e-commerce sites : 5 Common SEO Mistakes

Parts of the search engine optimisation work e-commerce sites undertake require a certain level of technical understanding which is where SEO consultants can shine. Other parts need some common sense and an eye for detail.

Here are five SEO mistakes e-commerce sites make, so that you don’t have to make them…

Avoiding the ‘copy and paste’ trap

1. Using identical vendor descriptions.

Most e-commerce sites will get a product description from the vendor and copy paste it word for word. Superficially, this looks OK because each product page has a full product description which includes key features, overview etc, but it isn’t that easy.

There is a fair chance that other e-commerce sites have used the identical vendor description which makes your content a type of duplication. You should make your content unique and valuable by adding your own notes under an editor review or by encouraging customer reviews.

2. Duplicating that unique and valuable description.

Many e-commerce sites will copy paste their new unique content onto 3rd party sites like eBay, Amazon and co’ thereby creating a type of content duplication. Sure, the description first appeared on your site and the search engines should recognize this, but why take the risk.

The engines do get things wrong and the last thing you’d want is to compete on the SEO front with more sites. Remember that identical vendor description from before? Well, here you can use it freely.

Creating unwanted competition

3. Not paying attention to the affiliate channel.

E-commerce sites often profit from a good affiliate programme and for many of my clients, this channel has the lowest CPA which makes me a huge fan! Nevertheless, it’s important to set terms and communicate them to your affiliates as to what they can and cannot do. It is also important to take into account your weaknesses when recruiting new affiliates.

For example, if the search engine results for your brand terms are weak and you have recruited many promotional code affiliates, don’t be too surprised if within a short space of time you’ve created unwanted competition for yourself on the organic front. You might be paying for sales, which would have otherwise come directly to you.

4. Revealing way too much.

There is always a fine line between revealing too much information and finding ways to convert more users by sharing internal stats. e-commerce sites will often reveal best sellers lists to try and generate more sales, and while this is all well and good, there’s a fine line here. Some e-commerce sites will even go a step further and will list best sellers on a category level together with revealing the product availability (XY in stock).

When doing competitive analysis, eagle eyed people might pick up on that and will very quickly estimate the number of products you sell. If the conditions are right, you might encourage others to complete against you as they can tell how many you sell.
Fixing what’s not broken

5. Making site wide changes.

For established e-commerce sites in particular, making site wide changes over night can easily backfire. It’s common for site owners to pick up on the latest SEO trends and implement them across the site although it isn’t clear what they are trying to fix. From time to time we come across misuse of the robots.txt which wrongly blocks important parts of the site and lately misuse of the rel=canonical tag is becoming a real issue. The trick is to identify the area you’re looking to improve, measure the outcome on a group of pages and only then implement it site wide.

Have you come across any common sense mistakes recently?

Source

e-commerce sites : 5 Common SEO Mistakes

 

Diagnosing SEO Technical Critical Issues

I always pick the technical panels because I think you guys will find them most interesting… but I forget that I am not a technical SEO so trying to decipher the slides is often like performing brain surgery… on a rock.

A very sick Vanessa Fox is moderating speakers Adam Audette, Patrick Bennett, Gabe Gayhart, and Brian Ussery.  I spent ten minutes chatting with Vanessa and I can already feel the germs congregating in the back of my throat to ruin my day.  I’ll be starting the #blamevanessa hashtag tomorrow when I wake up sick and unable to move. Things to look forward to!

Okay, we’re starting. Let’s go. Vanessa really sounds like death.  She needs a stretcher. Or a hot towel. Or to maybe stop traveling so damn much.  [yeah, Vanessa, I said it.]

First up is Adam Audette.

Site audits and diagnosing technical stuff is a never ending process. Our sites are never perfect. It’s a continual process of going through the site, looking at it and fixing things.  He approaches SEO audits by looking for patterns, using his experience, and being a good problem solver. The basics can be easily taught but it does take time to perfect.  Collaboration helps.

Technical SEO is:

Part Art: Follow your nose. It takes diligence to dive in and find out what the problems are. It requires trust. The company has to trust you to find their issues.

Part Science: It’s very calculated in the processes. They’re always looking at a set number of factors and we’re documenting everything.  Project management of diagnosing SEO audits is really important. He uses Basecamp. It requires documentation and collaboration.

A Framework for SEO Audits

* On-Page
* Domains
* Navigations
* Sections & Categories
* Pages Media

Off-Page

* Backlinks
* Social Media Signals
* Cache Dates, crawl frequency, indexed pages
* Toolbar PageRank

The Big 4 Factors

* URLs
* Site Architecture & Navigation
* Deep pages (PageRank Dispersion)
* Site Latency – speed of your site. This has gotten a lot of play lately.

Some Cool Tools

* SEM Rush: look at a site and find the natural keywords that the site is already ranking for.
* Use Google Searches: site: + inurl: /intitle:
* Lynxlet/SEO-Browser.com
* Charles/YSlow
* Various Toolbars: Web Developer’s Toolbar, Wave Toolbar, SEOBook Toolbar

Using the command line is a great way to diagnose problems.  He mentions using Wget and there’s lots of code on the screen that I don’t understand.  My brain is suddenly yelling at me.  Adam also mentions that he uses SEOmoz’s Page Analysis Tool and LinkScape.  Because he’s super rad he wrote a post offering a free log file parsing script, that you may want to check out.

Next up is Gage Gayhart.

He starts off talking about his team structure but flips through the slides quicker than a person blinks. I barely saw them, let alone blogged them.

Crawling:

* Full Crawl: Perform a full crawl of a site to ID each page on the site.
* SE Simulation: Run consecutive crawls to simulate each engine.
* Browser Crawl: View how a site is being rendered in the browser.

Goals:

* ID indexation gaps and issues.
* ID crawler behavior.
* ID opportunities to trim the fat.

Infrastructure Issues

* Template Coding: If templates aren’t bot friendly or flexible for change.
* Directory Structure: Everything from parameters being added to dynamic URLs or nonexistent structure.
* File Naming Conventions: Granted this isn’t the end all/be all but it’s yet another opportunity to establish theme.
* Code Base: Some CMS’ generate a bunch of unnecessary code.

Performance Issues

* Images, Flash, AJAX
* Flash Alternatives
* Semantic HTML
* Frames
* Image Maps
* Tables
* Page file size – he calls this the ‘big 2010 thing’ people will start to worry about, again it’s tied to load time.

Redirect issues:

* Expiring products or content. This would include expired special offer pages or season promotions.
* Internal 302 redirects or multiple redirects.
* Internal JavaScript/page-based redirects

When prioritizing what to do, you have to consider impact. How will this recommendation impact our client’s business? What about ease? How easy can a client implement it? Readiness – how quickly can they implement it?  If you have an inhouse SEO team, you probably have a better sense of what types of resources you’ll need and how to allocate them.

He ties in a case study for Ford Motor Company. They had a very Flash-heavy site. They had to do a site migration and deal with CMS troubles. They went in and collaborated with content strategy teams. They rolled out additional content and created a content migration plan.  They made sure the Flash was crawlable. Once all those things occurred they were able to up visitors by 66 percent.

Common Issues

* Duplicate Content from canonical issues, mirror sites, staging sites, load balancing, pagination, non-localized international content, session IS.
* Navigation Components: Maintaining the user experience. Robots.txt, XML Site maps, HTML Site maps.
* Rich media & Content Accessibility

Brian Ussery is next.

Technical SEO: Images

* Use detailed file names
* Use keyword-relevant anchor text
* Use Alt Text: Used to determine relevancy, by screen readers, people on cell phones, etc.
* Place images near relevant text
* Don’t place text in images
* Provide info about images without spamming
* Don’t block images
* Use a license via CC
* Use quality photos – bigger the better
* Use direct names that describe your photos
* Place images above the fold.
* Specify width and height.

Provide as much meta data as you can about your images. Use tags, labeling, location info, etc.

Image Speed

Use the appropriate optimized image format

* JPEG photos
* Crush PNG for graphics
* Optimized gifs for small and animated images
* Don’t scale images in (X)HTML
* Specify dimensions
* Use a favicon with expiration to avoid 404s

It’s very difficult for the engines to extract images from Flash. Adobe doesn’t even rank top for [adobe logo] in Google Image Search. From Twitter: Use Flash like you would use cilantro – sparingly and for a single high-impact effect. Nobody wants to eat a whole bowl of cilantro. Heh.

Next up is Patrick Bennett.

He loves that on the Internet you can make up your own words. He’s using Crawlability and Indexability today and isn’t sure if they’re real. Eh, who cares.  At least they have vowels.

Developers are SEOs.  You have a responsibility in avoiding issues so don’t be afraid to speak up. Be forward-thinking with new marketing initiatives and an asset to your marketing team. Hurrah!

Crawlability Intro

Spiders have limited resources. You control how easy your site is to spider. How important is crawl-rate for your Web business? TechCrunch and Mashable are crawled by the second.  Once they published an article it already ranks.  If you didn’t hear, Mashable is the new Wikipedia. Think users first, spiders second. Spiders love to crash parties. They’ll come back as much as you want them to.

Are all of your pages created equal? You control which pages are indexed.

Crawlability/Indexabilty Checklist

1. Convince spiders to visit often: Create static URLs that are updated frequently with the latest content and point links to them. Show the latest products that have been added. Do the same with your category pages.   Add a blog that is updated DAILY.
2. Show spiders where to go: Use consistent navigation that points your users and spiders to most important areas. Use breadcrumbs. ID pages that change frequently and link them directly from your top landing pages. Follow Web standards. Think of getting the user to various spots with a couple of clicks.
3. Block Spiders from less important content: Use Google Webmaster tools to create your robots.txt file. Don’t allow spiders to use their resources on pages that don’t need to rank.
4. Give the spider a map to your site: XML and user sitemaps provide a list of all URLs on your site. Just another way to help the spider around.
5. Feed the spider as quickly as possible: Implement server-side caching to reduce real-time database calls. Use a CDN server to increase the amount of parallel requests. GZIP the output of all text files. Limit the amount of code surrounding the content by leveraging external CSS and JS files. MINIFY the output of VSS and JS files. Use CSS sprites wherever possible.  You can use YSlow or Page Speed to see how well you’re doing.
6. Don’t make the spider think too hard: Since the spider is only going to allocate a certain number of resources on your site, don’t create any bottlenecks. Some common pitfalls: broken links resulting in 404s, long URLs w/ multiple parameters or session IDs, duplicate content, duplicate title/Meta tags, excessive code surround the important content, base use of Title, Meta and H1 tags.

Source
Diagnosing SEO Technical Critical Issues

 

Top 20 SEO requirements for eCommerce platform

Having spent the last 6 years Client side as Head of eCommerce and agency side managing digital marketing teams, one constant has been confusion in new platform builds over what a “search engine friendly” website actually is.

eCommerce solution providers advertise optimised platforms and Clients demand search engine friendly sites; do both mean the same thing? Rarely. Client side eCommerce managers can confuse technical and content optimisation, leading to miss-matches between expectation and delivery. A technically optimised web platform does not necessarily mean that keyword planning and meta content optimisation have been carried out.

This blog provides a tick list of the core elements that you should specify in any RFP or ITT when scoping a new eCommerce platform. They act as a starting point for SEO dialogue, enabling you to push vendors on specific areas of optimisation expertise. Please note the list is not in any order of priority.

1. 301 redirects to preserve search engine rankings

2. Avoiding duplicate content and use of the canonical tag where relevant

3. Dynamically generate search engine friendly URLs for product and content pages e.g.

www.yoursite.com/category-name/product-name instead of www.yoursite.com/productdetails.aspx?pid=037012&cid=144&language=en-GB

4. Ability to specify / edit URLs for individual pages via CMS – important for campaign landing pages and microsites

5. Support for linking of product pages and content pages to improve internal linking – should be delivered via the Catalogue Management tool or CMS

6. CSS absolute positioning for text links on product list pages to ensure the first link for each product is keyword rich

7. Dynamic XML sitemap that is submitted on a regular basis

8. HTML sitemap that is auto generated based on your catalogue and site structure

9. Support for rich snippets within platform – encoding of data in RDF format e.g. customer ratings & reviews

10. Custom 404 error page and automated report to flag error pages so your internal team can take action (you can achieve this through a separate monitoring tool such as Indiabook)

11. Robots.txt file is provided and you can access and edit when required

12. Core provision for meta content (title, description, keywords) that is auto generated when you load new products and content pages and can also be edited easily from within the CMS

13. Text links in navigation not images; if coders are using sIFR (flash replacements) push them for clarification on how this is being done to ensure it complies with accessibility standards

14. Keyword optimised H tags within html for headings – structure for use of H1 to H6 to provide a relevant hierarchy of content

15. Ensuring flash objects are search engine friendly

16. Ensuring pdf content is readable e.g. captions for images, document meta data

17. Graceful degradation – when elements like JavaScript are disabled in the browser, key content is still visible to search engine spiders/bots as well as to visitors

18. RSS feeds to support product and news announcements e.g. deal of the day

19. Page load time to meet agreed threshold but make sure you define how load speed is measured e.g. after all page elements have loaded – this factor will be included in Google’s algorithm in 2010

20. Social media content such as blogs are hosted on your primary website domain using an SEO friendly blog engine (e.g. WordPress is better than Blogger) – blogs usually sit on a sub-domain such as blog.yoursite.com to ensure you benefit from the search engine juice.

It is essential that your site specific SEO requirements are accurately documented during your project scoping phase to ensure you evaluate the relative optimisation strengths of potential vendors.

Please note that this checklist does not attempt to tackle bespoke areas of website optimisation that relate to business specific commercial goals. You may have more detailed needs for elements such as Google Sitemap (e.g. separate news sitemap) that will need thorough mapping. My recommendation is to make sure you have the essentials covered and then work with an SEO specialist (in-house or outsourced) to overlay the detail.

Source : econsultancy.com

 

5 SEO Wins & Sins Questions With Joe Laratro

Effective search engine optimization is equal parts art, science, and EXPERIENCE, so I sat down with industry veteran Joe Laratro to get the dish on what matters most in SEO. Joe is a recognized and leading expert in the Search Engine Marketing industry, and regularly speaks at industry events like Webmaster World, SMX, and Search Engine Strategies. He sits on the advisory board and is the lead moderator and speaker for PubCon.

1. What are the most common mistakes newbie SEOs make?

Search Engine Optimization has changed over the years. I would say there are three distinct generations of SEOers: the meta taggers, the link builders, and the social media marketers. I have seen newbie SEOs try to choose one path for optimization. For long term success all areas and disciplines of Search Engine Optimization need to be addressed and made part of the ongoing strategy.

Another newbie mistake involves trying old and dated spam tactics. I do quite a bit of teaching for the Industry. I am always surprised when someone hints at cloaking, or using white on white text. When I think about it, where is the history book on SEO? Newbie’s need a resource of what not to do and how to learn from the mistakes of Webmasters / Marketers / SEOers of the past.

2. On the flipside, are there common mistakes that experienced SEOs still make?

I think to some extent experienced SEOs can make the same mistakes as my first point in question one. We cannot pigeonhole ourselves into only doing one type of SEO. Site architecture, optimized growing content, and natural link building are essential for success. I have seen SEOs that just focus on one area. If we look at link building, it is possible to rank for keywords without ever optimizing the main site. But will that cover the hundreds if not thousands of keyword variations that might drive traffic to that Web site? No.

Benchmarking, analytics, and tracking SEO changes are more common problems. Clients come back and ask what SEO accomplished for the Web site? The numbers should be easy to prove – increasing search referrals and increased number of keywords driving those referrals. This has become even more important since Google’s announcement in December of 2009 of full time personalized search results.

The last mistake that is fairly common does not happen because of the SEO professional. This problem lies in communication and tracking between marketing departments and technical departments. Unfortunately SEO work gets overwritten without anyone’s knowledge. It can be days, weeks, or even months until the issues are identified. Each department claims the other speaks Greek. Finger pointing flies, but the real loser is the Web site. SEO’s have to monitor their implementations.

3. What are 3 things marketers can do RIGHT now to improve their organic rankings?

• Have a solid technical infrastructure that is search friendly
• Have an ongoing content development plan to add new and useful content to the Web site
• Have a link building plan in place: target directories, social media sites, and related Web sites

4. What are the 5 most important elements of an effective search optimization practice?

• Write great subject based content – optimize the basics: title, meta description, alt tags, H tags, and links (anchor text)
• Make a link building plan, stick to it, and monitor it’s growth (hint – social media sites should be a large part of this strategy)
• Consider the value of internal linking when it comes to keywords and anchor text (navigation and in content links)
• Make sure the Web site is registered with Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Bing Webmaster Central. Regularly review for issues and new insights.
• Monitor Analytics for keyword performance and trends

5. After implementing an effective search optimization practice, how soon can marketers expect to see changes in the SERPs?

Search Engines have become very adept at listing fresh content. The Search Engine Marketing community used to say wait 90 days to see the results. Some changes can occur much more quickly now. Personalized search also throws a large monkey wrench into seeing changes in the SERPs. I suggest monitoring Analytics for natural search growth and occasionally spot checking positions.

Source : searchenginejournal.com