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Top 10 SEO News and Advice Websites

At the end of the year we often try to summarize our experience and make conclusions and projections for the next year.

So, in this issue, we are offering you ratings of the best websites that we recommend to you as valuable sources of news, tips and tricks related to website promotion and SEO. We’ve tried to be objective and we’ve used traffic trends (according to Google and Compete) and social mentions on Twitter as signals. The results often did not agree with how our experts’ subjective opinions would have rated these sites. We have considered only the educational part of site content, although many of these sites also provide tools, training and services.

1. DigitalPoint Forums

These forums seem to be the absolute champion both in traffic and Twitter mentions. We recommend the forums for beginners – you will find quick answers there because of the large number of participants, but quantity does not always mean quality.

2. Search Engine Journal

For the past year, the SEJ has made a remarkable achievement in growing their community. Loud applause for Lauren Baker, the Search Engine Journal’s Editor in Chief.

3. Search Engine Land

Actually, we expected this site to be number one or two. Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman are legendary SEO experts and they and their great contributing editors provide important insights into industry news and trends.

4. SitePoint

You can find here a lot of online and downloadable tutorials, blogs and forums with a wealth of great information for any level of webmaster expertise.

5. WebProNews

If you like video information, WebProNews is your destination point to view all of the great interviews that Mike McDonald publishes.

6. Searchenginewatch.com & Clickz.com

Those two properties of Incisive Interactive, with Mike Grehan as the VP & Global Content Director, provide great articles covering web marketing and SEO news and events.

7. SEO Chat

SEO Chat is one of the most SEO-focused sites. You will find SEO news, articles and forums here. This is a great site for SEO beginners.

8. SEO Book

One of the highest trafficked SEO sites according to Google, with a great SEO community, forums and articles. The community leaders here are Aaron Wall and Peter da Vanzo.

9. SEOmoz

Yes, we also thought that Gillian Muessig and Rand Fishkin Team’s brainchild should have been placed higher up on the list. SEOmoz is a great community producing a lot of interesting and helpful content.

10. Sphinn

This site aggregates the best news and how-to articles related to SEO, social media promotion and Internet marketing in general.

Some great SEO sites escaped our top 10, but we’d like you to also consider WebmasterWorld.com, Webmaster-Talk.com, Search Engine Roundtable and MarketingVox as your ongoing channels for SEO and web marketing news and advice.

Happy New SEO Year! Let the fortitude, zeal and creativity be with you the whole next year!

The Web CEO Team

Web CEO Metrics

Are SEO companies as good as they claim to be on their sites? Will they return the efficiency they promise? Are their skills qualified? The only way to find it out is to check how they optimize and promote their own sites.

Here we share Top 10 SEO Companies according to their search visibility rate for November 2010.

Click here to see the complete rate.

Web CEO analysts use objective evidence to rate SEO firms according to their search engine visibility. SEO companies’ visibility rate is calculated using a special formula that considers the positions of SEO companies’ sites in search engines results pages for the keywords their potential clients use, popularity of these keywords and number of competitors.

Learn more about the formula.

Here you can see how Top 10 SEO companies’ visibility rate has changed from September till November 2010.

Top 10 SEO Companies

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Today’s article

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling.

(с) Sitemaps.org

How easy is it to create sitemaps and submit them today?

Google, Bing and Yahoo support the standard XML protocol for sitemaps that was agreed upon in November 2006. All the three search engines accept the following formats: XML sitemap (detailed metadata for web pages), RSS/Atom feeds as sitemaps (for blogs and media), and TXT sitemap (a text file containing a list of URLs).

Later on, the web site owners’ needs forced Google to implement specialized XML sitemaps – each for specific content type; however these are not fully supported by Yahoo! and Bing.

Let’s see which Sitemaps we can submit to each of the major search engines.

Google Sitemaps

In addition to standard XML Sitemaps, Google supports specialized Sitemap extensions:

• Video Sitemap.
• Images Sitemap.
• Sitemap for a website.
• News Sitemap
• Geographical (KML) information – created to help site owners provide more information about local websites. Read more about KML sitemaps at http://www.martijnbeijk.com/tutorial/using-kml-for-local-seo/

This year, Google has initiated support for a sitemap consisting of different content types. They wrote about it in their blog.

Bing Sitemaps

Bing supports all of the standard Sitemap files submitted as XML, RSS/Atom syndication feeds and it also recognizes the gzip format. As for content types, Bing suggests submitting mRSS Sitemaps for videos.

Yahoo Sitemaps

Yahoo! supports the Sitemaps format and protocol as documented on www.sitemaps.org – XML, RSS/Atom feeds, and recognizes the gzip format. They also support mobile sitemaps.

A few helpful tips

• For some sites, there is sense in creating several Sitemaps and combine them into one index Sitemap. This would be supported by all of the 3 major search engines.
• Common sitemap rules – 50,000 URLs maximum in one file and the limit of 10MB uncompressed file size – apply to all of the 3 major search engines.
• If your sitemaps are large, compress them into gzip format and submit it as a sitemap. Search engines will recognize it.
• You still can create HTML Sitemaps, they can be used by site visitors. There’s no need to submit such sitemaps to search engines. Matt Cutts talks on HTML sitemaps at YouTube.
• Search engines’ ping service. Using your browser’s address bar, you can directly submit your Sitemap to Google, Bing or Yahoo.
  
  Google
  http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap= www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
  
  Yahoo!
  http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=SitemapWriter&url=www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
  
  Bing
  http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
  
  
  The above having been stated, to be able to track indexed pages and sitemap status and any processing errors, it’s highly recommended that you submit Sitemaps from specialized Webmaster tools to every major search engine.
• Refer to Sitemap from Robot.txt file. Add a line to your robots.txt as follows:
  Sitemap:http://www.YourURL.com/sitemap.xml
• To generate sitemaps, you can use generators recommended by Google and WebCEO’s sitemap generator that you can find in the Editor function.

Web CEO Metrics

Here we are sharing the generalized numbers from our HitLens Web Analytics service. It covers 300,000+ websites from all over the world.

This November Google referred 82% of all visitors who used SEs. Yahoo referred 8% of visitors to sites, same as in November 2009. Bing’s share is rising: it referred 7% of all visitors in November 2010.

Global Search Engines (%)

You can see how visitors are being referred to websites.

Search engines gained 57% of visitor audience in November 2010 which is portrayed in the high-rise bars you see on the left of the chart. Bookmarking and linking shares are less popular than in November 2009 – they have referred 18% and 17%. The amount of people who clicked on paid advertising has increased to 5%.

Visitor Referrers (%)

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Today’s article

In earlier issues we discussed how to improve landing page design and usability and optimize landing pages for PPC. Today we’ll go on speaking about split testing for the improvement of website usability.

The split testing technique provides website owners with data that lets them increase web page usability and conversion rates. This data is obtained from experiments with page variations, when changes to any page components – texts, graphics, and layout – can be tested and compared.

Ways to test

A/B testing allows one to test a few static versions (A, B, C etc.) of a landing page (or any other page that should cause a targeted action, so conversion is expected) against each other in real-time.

Multivariate testing lets you test changes to specific sections of your page like headline or price, and then analyze how changes to each section have affected the conversion rates. To be able to define what has caused a boost in conversion, only one thing (variable) at a time should be tested – a headline, a screenshot, a color, a font, a price, an offer text or inclusion of a guarantee.

An A/B testing method lets you test 2-3 versions of a page, and multivariate method allows testing of combinations consisting of different variables simultaneously.

How to start

You can use a ready-made solution for split testing, however there are not very many of them on the market. They differ in their technology, in the ease of implementation, in reporting facilities and of course in price.

We recommend Google Website Optimizer as the most popular and easily accessible service.

How it works

Prepare several design options for your experiment, set up (a) test page(s) and (a) goal (conversion) page(s) – you’ll need to add the JavaScript codes Google has given to you. If you choose the multivariate testing, you’ll need to specify sections for each page to be tested. Ensure that everything has been set up correctly and launch the experiment.

Tips:

1. If your site gets low traffic, it is better to run A/B testing rather than multivariate. Fewer variations will help you get experiment results faster, because each variation can be shown to every new visitor only.
2. If you have enough traffic, you may test your pages only on some part of your site visitors. You can choose the exact percentage of all traffic to your site to be involved in the experiment.
3. GWO (Google Website Optimizer) lets you track only one conversion page at a time. If you feel you need to track several types of conversion separately, find more information in the GWO Tricks blog.

What elements should you test?

You should test the landing page elements that influence efficiency most of all.  Usually marketers advise to test the following parameters:

• Headlines
• Content Positioning
• Texts (web copy) – product reviews, testimonials, money-back guarantee, pictures of products
• Color Schemes
• Font sizes
• ‘Buy now’ button properties, order forms

You can get many testing ideas at this website www.marketingexperiments.com. Webmasters and site owners also share their thoughts and experiments at www.abtests.com .

On completion of the experiment, you’ll get the “winner” page which is the best performing page. Publish it at your website as a permanent page. But this is not the end of the story!  You should repeat the split testing from time to time, because customers may change their preferences over time. Split testing is an ongoing process, so keep planning more and more experiments to adjust your pages for better conversion rates.

Testing gives you the opportunity to maximize conversion rates, solve problems, and challenge assumptions.

From Marketing Experiments

Web CEO Metrics

Are SEO companies as good as they claim to be on their sites? Will they return the efficiency they promise? Are their skills qualified? The only way to find it out is to check how they optimize and promote their own sites.

Here we share Top 10 SEO Companies according to their search visibility rate for October 2010.

Click here to see the complete rate.

Web CEO analysts use objective evidence to rate SEO firms according to their search engine visibility. SEO companies’ visibility rate is calculated using a special formula that considers the positions of SEO companies’ sites in search engines results pages for the keywords their potential clients use, popularity of these keywords and number of competitors.

Learn more about the formula.

Here you can see how Top 10 SEO companies’ visibility rate has changed from August till October 2010.

Top 10 SEO Companies