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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

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Today’s article

In the process of creating a PPC campaign, search engine marketers have to point their ads to pages that give more detailed information related to the ad. The simplest solution is using the existing pages of a site. This idea is often far from ideal because it doesn’t guarantee two things: great visitor experience (and the landing page efficiency that results from it) and high Google AdWords quality score.  So, there are a few reasons why creating special landing pages for PPC campaigns should be considered seriously.

• A specially created page is much easier to optimize for a higher Google AdWords quality score.
• The A/B split testing of a landing page is easier if you are free from your site’s template.
• You can get rid of all elements that might reduce the landing page’s efficiency.
• You can go on testing until you find a successful combination of text and page layout that converts visitors into buyers best of all.

The result of your marketing and design endeavor should be a landing page with the following characteristics.

1. The landing page is very relevant to the ad and it gives valuable and unique information to visitors.A word-by-word reproduction of your ad on the landing page would seem redundant to visitors and its not really necessary from the AdWords quality score perspective. At the same time, repeating the ad’s main keyword is a good idea, because it connects the ad and the landing page in the mind of a visitor.Keeping your landing page up to high-quality website standards is important for your visitors and for obtaining a high quality score. Google recommends that “advertisers bear in mind the three main components of a high-quality website: relevant and original content, transparency, and navigability”, which is equally true for landing page quality.
2. The copy is brief, clear, scannable, and includes a prominent call to action, i.e. all of the information necessary for a visitor to complete your targeted action.Use straightforward and keyword-rich headings so that a visitor can quickly understand your proposition; minimize descriptions to give just the most important and convincing facts and details. Find a good balance between “meat” and brevity in your copy, and make the targeted visitor’s exit from the page the most logical step for her while being the most desirable step for you.Additionally, in accordance with Google’s “navigability” criterion, you should point the visitor to the page where she can receive enough information to make a decision if your landing page has not been persuasive enough. However, providing a number of navigation options may result in a lower conversion rate.
3. The page is credible and contains details that will make your potential buyers feel safe to buy.According to the “transparency” principle, your visitors should easily find information helping them to clearly understand the consequences of their transactions with your company. Details that identify you as a reliable vendor are smart elements of your landing page.
4. The landing page loads fast and complies with other Google AdWords Criteria for a high quality landing page.To define if your landing page is slow, Google compares it to the threshold. The threshold is calculated by adding three seconds to the “regional average”, i.e. the average download time in a specific region or country.The load time is based only on HTML downloading; neither images, nor video content are included. The quality score may be penalized if the load time of your landing page goes above the threshold. Read Google’s recommendations on how to improve the load time.

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 October Google gained even more of a visitor audience – 83%. Yahoo referred 7% of visitors to sites against 9% in October 2009. Bing’s searcher number has increased to 7% of all global searchers as opposed to 6% in October of last year.

Global Search Engines (%)

You can see how visitors are being referred to websites.

In October 2010 visitors queried search engines in 52% of all searches (up 4% compared to October 2009!). Bookmarking and linking shares fluctuate – they have referred 19 and 21% of all visitors correspondingly. The amount of people who clicked on paid advertising has decreased – 6%.

Visitor Referrers (%)

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Today’s article

With time, nearly every site owner feels that his or her website has lost some of its greatness. In case you too are not satisfied with your website outlook and layout, get ready for redesign. You’ll have many questions about the redesign process, so we’ve prepared some tips to make it easier for you.

There are 3 redesign steps to perform: set goals, plan the site changes, and launch an updated site.

1. Goals. First of all, you should have a clear understanding of why you want to redesign your site. Ask yourself: Why do I need to do this? What problems should I solve?

The main task is to define, what exactly is missing on your site. Our advice at this point is: you should only be guided by your site audience’s needs.

If you consider that the main drawback is that your site looks old-fashioned, you may try to add some trendy accents. For example, you can change colors, menus, or add social buttons. A complete site redesign is a time-consuming process; it may be unnecessary for you in terms of visitor benefit and site conversions. But if your site visitor navigation analysis and visitors’ feedback indicate your site has poor usability, then yes, prepare for your site’s redesign (or realign).

2. Plan Changes

It’s important to consider changes that you want to see at your new website. Based on your goals, describe the preferred website layout, information structure, changes in site content and SEO-improvements. As a result, other people involved in the upcoming redesign will have a chance to do their job correctly and efficiently to your and their satisfaction.

Graphic Design

• Decide on the style that would perfectly match what your site is all about. Style and quantity of graphic elements, content layout, background and font colors, and font styles – all of these may vary depending on the niche of your project.
• Consider a technical factor. Flash looks great and allows a lot of interaction, but it takes much more time to load a Flash page than an HTML one. Java Script menus make a website look convenient and pretty, but the content generated by scripts cannot be effectively read by search engines’ bots, which is bad for SEO.
• Cross-browser rendering – if you have web analytics activated for your site, check browser statistics for your visitors, watch the overall global trends in browser usage, and define what browsers your site really needs to be compatible with.

Site usability and structure

After you have analyzed visitor statistics and gotten an idea of what pages and content sections of the site require your attention, you can easily plan changes. We’ve got some tips on how to improve the site theme and structure. You can also find a good checklist on usability corrections here. These corrections will help you make your site accessible and easy-to-use.

Textual information and communication

Redesign is a great chance to review your website content and check if it is up-to-date and if anything is missing.

• If there’s a lack of information – add it. If your visitors cannot find important information on your website, make that more reachable and prominent.

• If your site texts naturally encourage communication, add social elements to your website – add comment and poll voting plugins, organize contests, add Twitter and Facebook buttons and add an RSS subscription button. Make people talk to each other! This way they will visit your site more often.
• If you sell goods and experience a lack of conversions, it’s high time to redesign the landing page.
• Review images and their ALT tags throughout the website. Update screenshots and photographs, people love fresh stuff.

SEO

Since you’re going to remake the site, it’s a good chance to check how your site is optimized for search engines.

• Look through the keywords your pages are optimized for. Use keyword research tools to find out what keywords are most highly queried.
• Include the keywords in page names to make the page URLs search engine-friendly.
• If you change your site structure, make sure to correctly redirect old pages to the new ones.
• Update the Sitemap and robots.txt files.
• Update the Title and META tags (at least the description tag) for each page. Make them unique for each optimized page.
• All the images should be optimized with keywords in the ‘alternative text’ (ALT) tag.
• If you use a visitor tracking system, make sure to move the visitor tracking codes to all pages of the redesigned site.
• If you used webmaster tools (Google or Bing), check that your site ownership is still verified (check to see that the specified tag, file, record, or code is present on your site).

3. Before you launch …

Before you upload the redesigned site directly to the host, check it thoroughly. Broken links, orphaned pages, missing images, ALTs and META tags – all these should be fixed.  There are plenty of services for a site audit nowadays; choose a good one, like Web CEO Site Auditor.

Further site testing deserves more advice, and that’s exactly what we are going to give you next.

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 September 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 July till September 2010.

Top 10 SEO Companies

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Today’s article

The more people go online without “Web” training, the more tools Web professionals offer them so they can create content or sell things without knowing much about webpage coding.

Nearly all of the newer generation websites are built using one of the data-base driven site building techniques that organize content such as products, news, articles, etc.

Optimizing such sites is a formidable challenge from the SEO standpoint.

Dynamic vs. static

What’s a dynamic page and how is it different from static? Unlike a static .HTML/.HTM page, a dynamic page does not exist as such until the information for the page is requested and pulled from a data base with the help of a server-side program, and as a result such a page is built on the fly. Search engines have difficulties with crawling dynamic sites basically because their requests may result in an infinite number of URLS, especially if URLs contain session IDs.

Search engines don’t want to store multiple copies of the same page in their indexes (if the same page can be built with the help of different request syntax elements that results in different URLs or also, if parameters are used to produce unique URLs, but do not change the page content).

You – as a webmaster – should help a search engine to solve these problems.

What approaches can be applied to dynamic site optimization?

First, webmasters should focus their efforts and follow webmaster guidelines for Google and Bing. Google is the top referrer among search engines (as of August 2010, more than 71% of US searches according to HitWise and 83% worldwide according to HitLens), and Bing is its main rival since Yahoo! has been losing ground on the SE battlefield (as of August 2010, Bing+Yahoo! have more than 24% of US searches according to HitWise and 13% worldwide according to HitLens). Moreover, Google’s Chairman has named Bing as Google’s primary competitor.

Second, one should consider rewriting URLs for all search engines to crawl more effectively.

As Apache servers and Microsoft servers are most often used (56% and 17% share respectively of active servers across all domains), we’ll mention how to optimize URLs of sites hosted on Apache and IIS servers.

What Google recommends

Basically, Google recommends three things:

1. Use of the rel=”canonical” tag in the head section of the dynamic pages to specify a preferred URL of a page that Google will store in its index:

   <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/dresses/greendress.html">

2. Creating and submitting a sitemap that lists your canonical (preferred) URLs for the dynamic pages.
3. Specifying URL parameters for Google to ignore in your Google Webmaster Tools account. In this way, you can make Google omit all kinds of IDs, “sessionid”, “source” and a multitude of other parameters making a URL unique but not really creating a unique page.

Note that Google gives no guarantee that it will take into account all the information that you gave to help it better index your site.

What Bing recommends

1. Bing does support the rel=”canonical” tag (together with Google and Yahoo!), so you may follow the above Google advice for better indexing of your dynamic content by Bing. Read this article for more information.
2. A sitemap will also help you have Bing index all of your important site pages.
3. Although MSNBot (Bing’s crawler) claims to be able to read and follow URLs using more than 30 variables, Bing recommends minimizing usage of parameters. Unlike Google Webmaster Tools, there is no possibility for webmasters to tell Bing directly which URL parameters it should ignore.

Server-side rewrite engines

These programs are used as a part of server software to replace pieces of URL syntax in a query string (question marks and parameters) with static-looking slashes and directory names so that the URLs could look as plain HTML. The replacement rules based on usage of regular expressions or more simple replacement techniques are entered into the configuration file (for instance, .htaccess for an Apache server).

For example, with the URL rewriting rules in place, the below URL

http://www.some.site.com/agent/answer/256

corresponds to the following GET request:

http://www.some.site.com/index.php?person=agent&command=answer&id=256

If your site is hosted on an Apache server…

You may use the favorite technique of many SEOs – use of the “mod_rewrite” module. More information and step-by-step instructions can be obtained on Apache Module mod_rewrite page.

If your site is hosted on a Microsoft IIS server…

A similar regular expression-based technique can be used to rewrite dynamic URLs on IIS servers. Refer to Rewriting URLs for detailed description.

If you have a WordPress-powered blog…

Use the All in One SEO Pack,  a WordPress plugin that optimizes your blog in many ways, including support for advanced canonical URLs.

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 September the world searched Google more than they did in September 2009: Google referred 83% of all visitors. Yahoo referred 7% of visitors to sites against 10% in September 2009. Bing is stable: it referred 6% of all visitors in September 2010 as well as in the same period of 2009.

Global Search Engines (%)

You can see how visitors are being referred to websites.

In September 2010 visitors used search engines in 47% of all searches (down 2 percent compared to September 2009). Bookmarking and linking are more popular – 2 and 1 percent up correspondingly. The amount of people who used paid advertising has decreased – 6%.

Visitor Referrers (%)

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Today’s article

All fledgling site operators wish to know every small detail about their visitors. As time goes, they come to understanding that cherishing every single IP address is not as important as building sales funnels and improving ROI.

Competent statistics services such as Google Analytics (GA) or Web CEO’s HitLens real-time visitor analytics offer the most useful information about visitors’ steps across your website. With such knowledge you can get the most honest answers to the vital questions concerning the efficiency of your web-based business.

1. Where do my visitors come from?
   Reports from the ‘Referrers’ group in HitLens or ‘Traffic Sources’ in Google Analytics will tell you what sources bring more visitors to your site – search engines, bookmarks, linking pages, or paid advertising – so you can promptly correct your marketing and advertising strategy.

   To know what pages of your site are found in organic results on certain targeted keywords, you can view the ‘Pages found on keywords’ report in HitLens. Based on this information, you can decide if corrections should be applied to your site’s semantic core, or if the found pages need more optimization for better search engine positioning.

2. Who are my visitors?New, motivated, returning – all your visitors are potential customers. Compare the numbers from these reports (’Visitors’ group in both HitLens and Google Analytics services) to know how many people your website attracts and to measure their interest.

   A large number of new visitors may show the result of well-targeted advertising, however your success lies in garnering a fair amount of returning visitors who are more likely to order your product (the ‘New visitors’ and ‘Returning visitors’ reports in HitLens, and the ‘New vs. Returning’ report in GA). Motivated visitors are those who look through many pages within one visit – this category of visitors are most interested in your services or goods (see ‘Motivated visits’ in HitLens and ‘Depth of visit’ in GA).

3. When are my visitors most active?Activity reporting (the ‘Activity’ group in HitLens) shows when exactly your visitors are most and least active. If you often update your site with news, this will let you know which topics make people come to your site.If you run paid advertising campaigns, you can adjust your campaigns’ time wherever possible so that your newsletters or other ad types reach your targeted visitors in the right time.
4. What are visitors doing on my website? How soon do they find what they look for?The amount of time (‘Site stickiness’ in HitLens, ‘Time on site’ in GA) that people spend on your website is an indicator of the site’s attractiveness or uselessness. If this number is too small, you should think about how to keep visitors’ interest and have them stay longer on your website. If you offer files for download, track these downloads using the special tracking code inserted to the download link. HitLens offers the ‘Downloads’ group for this purpose.Look through the navigation reports (‘Navigation’ group in HitLens or ‘Content’ group in GA).

   The exit pages (last page viewed) require most attention, because they make people leave (‘Exit pages’ in HitLens). If you don’t expect people to simply leave from a page, but they do it often – examine the page carefully to see what prevents visitors from moving to your targeted action.

   The single pages (the only ones visited) are the saddest cases – the visitor didn’t even look through a few pages of your site and left at once (‘Single pages’ in HitLens, ‘Bounce rate’ report in GA). The reasons for this behavior can be different: you get quite untargeted traffic, so people are uninterested, visitors are interested in the subject, but the first page visited hasn’t met their expectations, there are technical problems on the page, and others. Make sure all your pages offer comfortable navigation to all segments and topics of the site, and they are optimized for proper keywords to be relevant. We wrote about site structure recently; refer to issue 39 of SEO MixTour for more information.

   Popular and unpopular pages show your visitors’ interests. Unpopular pages may contain a lack of information, so consider adding more valuable content there.If your site has many similar pages, combine them into content groups – this way you will get reasonable statistics for a site’s sections in order to define which of them are most interesting for your visitors (this feature is offered in HitLens).

5. And the main question: is my business profitable?Everyone who invests her time and money in link building, PPC and paid advertising wants to find out which ad positions are worth investing in and which are not. The ‘Campaigns’ reports in HitLens help you do this – you’ll need to insert a special parameter into the ad link and track this ad campaign.If you use the order form on your site, you can track all completed transactions and revenue for any period of time (‘eCommerce’ group in HitLens, ‘Goals’ in GA).

   You can also count how many visits had been made before the first transaction was completed (‘Visits before first transaction’ report in HitLens) – this will let you know if your website is convincing enough to incite a visitor to complete a transaction.The ROI (return on investment) number is the key indicator to evaluate the efficiency of your promotion efforts. The ROI is calculated as the net profit to costs ratio. Analysis of this information (ROI report in HitLens) can help you see if you use your budget efficiently to generate profit so you can adjust your marketing budget accordingly.

   You can get more information about Google Analytics at their website and from experts. To get more information about HitLens, visit our website and read the FAQ. Go ahead – you can easily improve your online business by converting more visitors into customers.

SEO Companies’ Visibility Rate

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 August 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 June till August 2010.

Top 10 SEO Companies

SEO Cartoon

Today’s article

It’s no secret that search engines are very much concerned about improving their methods of analyzing website content. They don’t want to serve searchers with irrelevant pages. Their sophisticated algorithms take into account not only the content of a page where a keyword is found, but also a complex of interrelations between this page and other pages of the site, and also other sites linking to that page.

This means that it is not enough just to have a website but to present information in an organized and structured manner. As a rule, when SEOs are talking about establishing and supporting a website theme, they discuss optimization of a website’s directory structure and page cross-linking or siloing. We’d like to add a few simple concepts that are often skipped by SEO professionals because they are so obvious.  We suggest that a newbie keep in mind the following three main aspects of site structure optimization as a theme factor:

1. Optimize every page as a document with a definite (quite rigid) structure that search engines expect to findns
2. Optimize your website’s directory structure based on the principles that search engines (and the SEO community) recommend, and
3. Optimize cross-links to emphasize keywords and themes that your important pages are optimized for.

A good page is a well-structured document

So logically, its elements have higher or lower importance. A page title is the most important and concise information about your page. Page headings are also important, but not as important as the page title, and texts in the paragraphs are less important than headings. This means you should care about having a keyword-rich page title, headings and texts – every page that you consider important and devoted to some specific aspect of your business should be well-focused on a certain keyword and be also supported by various words that determine a more general theme.

A good site is a well-structured book

If your book is a short story, there is little reason to break it down into many chapters. Regarding a site, a complicated multi-level structure makes little sense if your site consists of 10-15 pages being subordinate in theme only to the index page. However, if you create a large site, grouping similar content into directories is a good solution, because you can set a specific theme in such a way.

Take enough time to consider your site navigation menu – it must be concise and include keywords that help you maintain theme accentuation.

As the major search engines continue to introduce different content into their search results (blended or universal search), the idea of directory siloing becomes even more attractive. It’s not only quite natural and convenient, but also good from the SEO point of view to group your movies into a /video/ folder, blog posts into a /blog/ folder and news into a /news/ folder.

Cross-linking as a theme supporting factor

Any landing page that is optimized for certain keywords will need a kind of credit – links from other pages that will corroborate the keyword and emphasize the theme. That is why you should create back-links on other supporting pages with keywords in the anchored text.

To summarize, what page elements should you optimize for a better theme support? Here they are:

• Page titles. Page visible text, especially, headings. Image alt texts, image titles. Surrounding text to support images, videos, maps.
• Page file names, directory names.
• Link anchor texts, link title attributes.

Its not a big surprise that you will find here nearly all page elements that require keyword optimization.

To understand what idea a search engine (in this case Google) might have about your site keywords and theme, enter Google Webmaster Tools and load the ‘Keywords’ report under ‘Your site on the web’. Does the Google analysis on your keyword significance match your desired pattern?

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.

We’ve noticed a rise of Google in August 2010 compared to the year 2009 – it’s the leading SE referring 83% of all visitors. Yahoo is still losing visitors (it referred 7% of visitors to sites) and Bing is not in its best form (it refers only 6% of visitors). In light of the recent news about Yahoo and Bing combining, it will be interesting to see what will happen in the next few months.

Global Search Engines (%)

You can see how visitors are being referred to websites.

Visitor referrer shares have slightly changed compared to last year. Search engines referred 50% of all visitors in August 2010, which is 2% more than in August 2009. Bookmarking and Linking shares are equal – they have been reduced 1% each and now total 20%. The amount of people who use paid advertising has not changed – 6%.

Visitor Referrers (%)

SEO Cartoon

Today’s article

At least once in a lifetime everyone wonders how to earn some cash with a modicum of effort. A Web-based business seems an easy answer. It is true to some extent: the Internet gives you a great opportunity to generate intermediary money without producing anything material. And affiliate marketing is the easiest way to start making money with no significant initial cost – just join a successful affiliate program – and you are there. Completing a few steps to start earning with affiliate programs is as easy as ABC: a) sign up for an affiliate program, b) drive targeted traffic to a merchant via your affiliate link, and c) make maximum referrals perform the targeted action. But the question is:

How to achieve this?

1. Be helpful

   Provide your affiliate link as an additional source of valuable content. It should be relevant to your post’s theme and useful for your readers. Nobody will click on an affiliate link if there is no incentive for a visitor to do that, i.e. unless it is a useful tip, bright description, or hot news. Otherwise you may lose your readers’ trust throwing affiliate links indiscriminately. A helpful review that mentions a product’s pros and cons always attracts visitors and converts well.

2. Use different media

   Your aim is to show your affiliate link to the maximum number of prospects. That is why you shouldn’t be limited only to your website, take part in relevant forums, social networks, comment on blogs, use Squidoo Lens, and create videos. Pay attention to the fact that different products convert better if you use different ways of promotion.

3. Talk the way you’ll be heard

   Start with your reader in mind rather than the product. Use the language your readers understand. If you know your visitors’ interests, you may find a formula for a highly targeted message for them.

4. Talk when you’ll be heard

   Pay attention to how your sales level depends on the day of the week and the time of day. It may differ because of your prospects’ geographic location and the products you sell. If the product you promote is interesting to the people surfing the Internet at night then you should be active at this time too. And do not forget that during public holidays internet activity is minimal.

5. Recommend

   Your own success story is the best advertisement. Share your own experience of using the product you promote with your readers. Give tips and advice, write reviews, share useful information and how-to’s. Be objective and avoid marketing hype. You will achieve the best results if you give an open and honest review of the product, including both its strengths and weaknesses.

   This is absolutely true for the Web CEO affiliate program – our affiliates who recommend Web CEO, and not sell it, increase their commissions several times over.

6. Use multiple promotion channels for the same product

   A certain percentage of your readers will surely notice your blog post promoting the affiliate product and will buy it, but you may increase the percentage of the buyers with follow-up messages. You may use the following idea: a Blog Post #1 announces a new product, tells about its benefits – a few days later, a Blog Post #2 gives some tips on using the product – in a few days a Newsletter notifies your subscribers about the two previous posts – then a few Tweets about the blog posts during the week follow up.

   Remember that your aim is not to load up your readers, but to find ways to draw attention to the promoted product in an ethical way.

7. Use contextual links instead of banners

   Most Internet users ignore banner ads as white noise or even use ad-blocking plugins. Use multiple text affiliate links throughout the post about the promoted product or in other relevant posts. This will work much better than any beautiful banner.

8. Give bonuses

   Do you like discounts and sales? Your visitors feel the same way. If your merchant can afford a discount on the price of the product you promote, ask for this. This way you will attract more buyers.

   Most merchants give seasonal discounts on their products. BTW, until September 3 you may purchase the Web CEO Unleashed Editions for a fraction of their regular price and even get a cash bonus.

9. Do not forget about SEO

   People should find your website somehow. That is where SEO comes into play. Organic traffic is still the main source of visitors for most websites, so be serious about your website optimization for targeted keywords.

10. Track results

    Keep track of your affiliate links’ performance: see what messages work better, which products sell better, what day of the week is better for posting and emailing, etc. and use this information to improve your future affiliate strategies.

Web CEO Affiliate Program

The Web CEO Affiliate Program has been one of the most popular affiliate programs on the SEO market for more than 6 years. Join our successful affiliates and get the following benefits:

-         High commissions

-         Two-tier system

-         Monthly payouts

-         Real-time tracking and reporting

-         Incentives for top performers

-         A must-have popular product with a good reputation in the SEO world

Sign up for Web CEO Affiliate Program Now

SEO Companies’ Visibility Rate

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 July 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 May till July 2010.

Top 10 SEO Companies

SEO Cartoon

Today’s article

Have you ever met someone who doesn’t love free stuff? This feature of human nature is inherent in every individual: everybody wants to get more by doing less. Why not use this knowledge to your benefit?

People naturally love freebies, whether they are products, services, or consultations. When a visitor comes to your site, and finds something free that she can use or download (downloading is especially important, because the file will get to her own PC – visitor’s private territory), it definitely makes her happy.

As a result, the visitor gets tied to a powerful psychological anchor – ‘this site is good, it makes me feel better’. In most cases, this visitor will come back – either to get a new freebie, or to find out what else is there on your website. Being grateful, she may decide to ‘StumbleUpon’ (or whatever bookmarking service she uses) the site or tell friends about it. Both are good for you since this way you get new visitors.

Before you offer something free, you should be sure your visitors really need it. How can you be sure? – Research your audience. Make a poll: ask your visitors what they are interested in most of all, what they would like to see at your website. Next, create a freebie. What can it be?

1. Useful how-to instructions that are close to the site theme:  guides, books, articles (printable PDFs are handy in such cases), videos, etc.

   Visitors should be interested in downloading your files. Include some additional information about products you offer at your site into the guides, describe their usage in real life – add showcases – to make it interesting.

2. Entertaining freebies: coloring pictures (for children), games, puzzles, featured music files in mp3, magazines, clipart, icon sets, whatever fits your site’s theme and goal.

   Depending on your site, choose something that may be interesting to your visitors. If your blog is about web-design, offer free icon sets and clipart. If you sell icons, make some of them available for free.

3. Valuable information: web sources lists, newsletters

   By offering site lists, you save your visitors’ time – they don’t need to search for important information through the entire web. Make it easy for them to subscribe to the list with their favorite feed-reader or save the list to their bookmarks or desktop.

4. Corporate attributes: cups, t-shirts, caps, pens, hand-mirrors (anything people might need for their daily use)

   If you sell products under your own brand, offer a free t-shirt or cup containing the corporate logo along with the order. This way the buyer will feel her proximity to something successful (such as your brand).

5. A perfect way to make your visitors feel they save money is to offer free shipping for their order. In this case you aren’t giving them something, but you will make them feel satisfied because they are saving on the delivery costs.

6. Run a contest and give a small present to each participant – every bit counts.

7. If you sell software, it’s always good to offer a free version or a full-featured trial – let people understand what it is and what she can get by paying money. Some thoughts on free software by Mac Slocum.

Right after your visitors get what they want, you, in your turn, may ask for some small favor in return. Most site owners ask for a subscription to their newsletter or account registration (of course, this should be also free). This is a good way of getting targeted and interested subscribers.

Make your visitors happy with your care, and they will make you happy too!

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.

As compared to June 2009, Google has referred 82% of all visitors to websites. Yahoo’s position lowered from 10% to 7% and Bing referred the same amount of visitors.

Global Search Engines (%)

In July 2010 search engines referred 47% of all visitors, while in 2009 this number totaled 50%. The share of bookmarking increased to 22%, and the share of linking sites decreased to 20%. The number of search marketers who used paid advertising was 6% of all visitors, which is 1% higher than in July 2009.

Visitor Referrers (%)