Blog Disclaimer

The posts published in this blog are collected from different blogs or websites written by various famous bloggers/writers. I have just collected these posts only. These posts are not written by me. All collected posts are the great stuffs.

Blog Disclaimer

All content provided/collected on this blog is for informational purposes only, it is not used for any commercial purpose. At the end of any post, the visitor can find the link of the original source.

Blog Disclaimer

At the end of any post, the visitor can find the link of the original source. These posts are only for further reference to review/study latter. It’s a request to all visitors; please go through the original post by clicking on the source given below/above of every post.

July 26, 2011

Microsoft Word Hints - Symbols Not on the Keyboard

Microsoft Word Hints - Symbols Not on the Keyboard

If you ever want to create a character in a word document there are a couple of ways you can do that.  In some MS Word programs if you type dash –, colon, left parenses)  it will automatically “correct”  to make a  simple smiley face
  • (r)  = ®
  • (c) = ©
  • 1/2  will automatically create ½
  • 1/4  will automatically create ¼ 
Here is a miscellaneous list of other basic characters and symbols:Type the number while holding down the Alt key.
  • Alt + 0153..... ™... trademark symbol
  • Alt +  0169.... ©.... copyright symbol
  • Alt + 0174..... ®... .registered trademark symbol
  • Alt + 0176 ...°....... .degree symbol
  • Alt + 0177 ...± ... .plus-or-minus sign
  • Alt + 0182 ...¶....... paragraph mark
  • Alt + 0190 ...¾...... fraction, three-fourths
  • Alt + 0215 .... ×..... multiplication sign
  • Alt + 0162... ¢...... the cent sign
  • Alt + 0161..... ¡...... upside down exclamation point
  • Alt + 0191..... ¿..... upside down question mark
  • Alt + 1.......... ☺... smiley  fsce
  • Alt + 2 ......... ☻... black smiley face
  • Alt + 15........ ☼... sun
  • Alt + 12........ ♀.... female sign
  • Alt +  11....... ♂.... male sign
  • Alt +  6......... ♠..... spade sign
  • Alt + 5.......... ♣.... Club symbol
  • Alt + 3.......... ♥.... Heart
  • Alt + 4.......... ♦..... Diamond
  • Alt + 13........ ♪..... eighth note
  • Alt + 14........ ♫.... beamed eighth note
  • Alt +  8721.... ∑.... N-ary summation (auto sum)
  • Alt + 251...... √..... square root check mark 
  • Alt + 8236..... ∞.... infinity
  • Alt + 24........ ↑..... up arrow
  • Alt + 25........ ↓..... down arrow
  • Alt + 26........ →... right pointing arrow
  • Alt + 27........ ←... left arrow
  • Alt + 18........ ↕..... up/down arrow
  • Alt + 29........ ↔... left right arrow        
  • Alt + 0167 ...§...... .section symbol
  • Alt + 0163 ...£...... .the British pound
  • Alt + 0128 ...€....... .the euro of the European Union
  • Alt + 0165…¥....... the Japanese yen
  • Alt + 0156... Å“...... lowercase Å“ diphthong (ligature)
  • Alt + 0224 ...Ă ....... .lowercase a with grave accent
  • Alt + 0225.. ...Ă¡..... .lowercase a with acute accent
  • Alt + 0226.. ...Ă¢..... .lowercase a with circumflex
  • Alt + 0227... Ă£....... lowercase a with tilde
  • Alt + 0228... ä....... lowercase a with umlaut
  • Alt + 0229... Ă¥....... lowercase ae diphthong (ligature)
  • Alt + 0231... ç....... lowercase c with cedilla
  • Alt + 0232 ...è....... lowercase e with grave accent
  • Alt + 0233.. ...Ă©..... .lowercase e with acute accent
  • Alt + 0234 ...Ăª....... .lowercase e with circumflex
  • Alt + 0235 ...Ă«....... .lowercase e with umlaut
  • ]Alt + 0236 ...ì........ lowercase i with grave accent
  • Alt + 0237 ...Ă­........ lowercase i with acute accent
  • Alt + 0238 ...Ă®........ lowercase i with circumflex
  • Alt + 0239..... Ă¯...... lowercase i with umlaut
  • Alt + 0241..... ñ ... .lowercase n with tilde
  • Alt + 0242..... Ă².... lowercase o with grave accent
  • Alt + 0243.. ...Ă³..... .lowercase o with acute accent
  • Alt + 0244 ...Ă´....... .lowercase o with circumflex
  • Alt + 0245.. ...õ..... .lowercase o with tilde
  • Alt + 0246 ...ö....... .lowercase 0 with umlaut
  • Alt + 0249 ...Ă¹. ...... lowercase u with grave accent
  • Alt + 0250 ...Ăº ... .lowercase u with acute accent
  • Alt + 0252….Ă¼…..lowercase u with circum flex
  • Alt +  0253…Ă½…..lowercase u with umlaut  
Source : JoyceBetz's blog

July 25, 2011

List of free social media tools

List of free social media tools

Check back often – we find and share new free social media tools all the time!
Analytics
Facebook Insights – Track analytics for a Facebook page or a website
Google Analytics – Web analytics tool to track website traffic from marketing efforts
Management
Hootsuite – Social network management tool that allows team collaboration, multiple networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, MySpace, Ping, WordPress, mixi) tab organization and more
CoTweet – Social network management tool that allows team collaboration and multiple Twitter networks, owned by ExactTarget
TweetDeck – Social network management tool with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn integration that allows organization by column/group
Message Boards/Forums
BoardReader – Forum and message board search engine
BoardTracker – Forum and message board search engine
Monitoring/Measuring
Addictomatic – Create a custom dashboard page on any topic
Backtype – Track social engagement with a website
Google Alerts – Free email updates on a keyword or topic
NetVibes – Online dashboard creator and publisher
Social Mention – Social media search and analysis platform, aggregates user generated content into a single stream
Spy – Find social media conversations on a topic
TouchGraph – Explore connections between related website or keywords
Username Check – Tool to check username availability on various social networks, can also be used to find client or competitor presence on various networks.
Webbed-o-Meter – measure your social media presence, from Webbed Marketing
Wildfire – Compete for Twitter and Facebook. Compare Facebook and Twitter pages fans and followers.
RSS
Feedburner – RSS feed optimization and tracking tool, owned by Google
Page2RSS – Allows you to create an RSS feed from any static webpage
PonyFish – Allows you to create an RSS feed from any static webpage
Yahoo Pipes – Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web
Search
BlogPulse – Blog search tool
IceRocket – A search engine for searching blogs, web, new, twitter, MySpace and images
Technorati – Blog search engine and directory with more than 1 million blogs indexed
Trends
Alltop – Collection of headlines of the latest stories from the top sites and blogs, organized by topic
Google Trends – Shows top searches/hot topics and how often a particular search term is entered into Google Search
Twitter
BackTweets – Find URL mentions on Twitter
Klout – Twitter influence measurement
Listorious – Twitter list directory and search tool
MyTweeple – Manage twitter followers and friends
The Archivist – Save and analyze tweets around a certain topic or hashtag
Tlists – Twitter list directory and search tool
Trendsmap – Trendsmap.com is a real-time mapping of Twitter trends across the world
Tweetake – Export Twitter posts, followers, friends
TweetStats – Twitter stats tool
Twellow – Twitter directory and people search tool that allows an extended biography and linking to other networks
Twellowhood – Tool within Twellow, find twitter users by location
Twitalyzer – Provides Twitter analytics and reach statistics
TwitterCounter – Twitter stats tracking tool
Twitter People Search – Search for new people to follow on Twitter
Twitter Search – Formerly known as Summize, this is the official Twitter search tool
Twittersheep – Create word clouds from words in followers bios
WeFollow – Twitter directory and people search tool
Tweet Sentiments – Analyze Twitter user or topic sentiment
Miscellaneous
Wordle – Wordle is a tool for generating fun word clouds from text


Source : Webbed Marketing

July 18, 2011

Get Traffic and Index Your Backlinks with RSS Feeds

In case you’re not familiar, RSS stands for Really-Simple-Syndication. Basically, it is a way for people to share and connect with content very quickly to stay up-to-date with the newest headlines of their favorite blogs and web 2.0 sites. RSS feeds are a great way for people to stay updated with your site and also share your content. We often get very concentrated on getting a lot of traffic ONCE – RSS feeds help you get returning visitors which is the key to big numbers in your site stats and bank account. I’m sure you probably already have an RSS feed, but you may not know what to do with it. Here’s a few ways you can use your RSS feed and RSS feeds in general to get more traffic and backlinks.
You may have heard about getting backlinks from RSS feeds, these links come from RSS aggregators and directories. You submit your blog or RSS feed and it is published with its own page there, producing a link to your site. The only problem with these links is that they are pretty weak. You won’t rank well simply with RSS backlinks. However, they are still good for getting traffic, and recurring traffic at that. Submitting to RSS directories is easy and it’s worthwhile to put your blog in all the blog directories you can. However, for SEO purposes, the biggest strength perhaps in RSS is its use for indexing backlinks. RSS feeds in aggregators and directories get crawled very well. You can tap into this crawling action by getting your backlinks into RSS feeds. Here’s how you do it:
1) Gather up a list of 20-30 backlinks (can be more, but these numbers are for best effects).
2) Go to html2rss.com. At this site, you can create an RSS feed even for sites that don’t already have one. More importantly, you can create an RSS feed entirely out of URLs of any sort.
3) Create an RSS feed with your backlinks
4) Submit your RSS feed to the directories/aggregators
Your RSS feed will get crawled and with it, all of the backlinks it is composed of. Now this is already a solid strategy, but you can take things one step further. You can increase the chances and thoroughness of the crawling for your RSS feeds themselves as well. Here’s what you do:
1) Gather a list of your submitted RSS feeds
2) Go to html2rss.com and create a new RSS feed that is entirely made up of URLs to your other RSS feeds
3) Submit this RSS feed to the directories/aggregators
This creates a tiered RSS submission and a great level of indexation for your backlinks.
[Master RSS Feed] -> [RSS Feeds] -> [Backlinks] -> [Your Site]
Here’s a list of 10 popular RSS feed directories you can use to submit to:
RSS feeds don’t provide powerful backlinks, so they won’t get you the top rankings you’re looking for. However, when you use them in the right way, they can be an excellent source of recurring traffic and means for indexing your other backlinks.

Source : Daily SEO Tip

July 15, 2011

Details About Sitemaps XML Format

The Sitemap protocol format consists of XML tags. All data values in a Sitemap must be entity-escaped. The file itself must be UTF-8 encoded.
The Sitemap must:
  • Begin with an opening <urlset> tag and end with a closing tag.
  • Specify the namespace (protocol standard) within the tag.
  • Include a <url> entry for each URL, as a parent XML tag.
  • Include a <loc> child entry for each parent tag.
All other tags are optional. Support for these optional tags may vary among search engines. Refer to each search engine's documentation for details.
Also, all URLs in a Sitemap must be from a single host, such as www.example.com or store.example.com. For further details, refer the Sitemap file location

Sample XML Sitemap

The following example shows a Sitemap that contains just one URL and uses all optional tags. The optional tags are in italics.
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

<url>

<loc>http://www.example.com/

<lastmod>2005-01-01

<changefreq>monthly

<priority>0.8



Source : sitemaps.org

Your SEO Toolbox

The SEO tool space is a pretty crowded one (and growing one!). Tools are helpful, there is no doubt about that. However, tools are generally only as good as the person using them. We'd love to know what tools you use and why, so please let us know in the comments after the post :)
I am not "house" handy by any means, I can barely hang a picture frame straight. So if you gave me the best construction tools in the world I'd still make extra holes and screw something up.
Even if I managed to get the picture hung correctly, it certainly would not look professional.
You can buy as many guides, tools, and accessories as you like but in the end it is your skill that determines the success or failure of a project (building a deck or building a website). Skills can be harnessed, but tools do not overcome a lack of skill.

SEO Tool Fatigue


SEO tool fatigue is a real issue for some folks. Some people spend a good chunk of their productivity on testing or trying out new tools, or even using so many tools that their implementation and interpretation of data suffers a great deal. One tool says this, another says that, and yet another says 1 or the other or both or neither :) .
The first thing to realize is that most of the data from tools (excluding analytics and such) are basically estimates of estimated data, or are directly from Google's various estimation-type tools (Keyword Tool, Trends, Insights, and so on), or driven off what the tool builder thinks are important or reliable metrics to build your research off of (there tends to be some swings and misses with that type of approach).
You are not going to fail miserably if you decide not to do days and days and days of keyword research with multiple tools and then spending more days comparing different datasets. Research is important, but there is a limit.

Picking a Core Set of Tools

From a cost and time standpoint I've found it really helpful to pick a core set of tools and stick with them rather than bouncing around to get an extra feature or two.
It's good to peek around from time to time but using mostly similar tools can lead to a "needle in the haystack" approach; where you spend most of your time digging a time-suck hole rather than building websites and adjusting strategies based on analytics and/or AdWords data.
Again, research is important but there is a sweet spot and it's a good idea to get some kind of system down so you can focus on doing "enough" research without doing harm to the time it takes you to get sites up and running.

Evaluating Tools

I'm going to highlight some of the tools I've used below, most of which are considered to be market leaders. I'll point out why I use certain tools, why I don't use others (yet) and I encourage anyone who's dealing with tool overload to do the same for the tools you use.
The areas I'll be focusing on are:
  • Keyword Research
  • On Page Criteria
  • Rank Checkers
  • Competitive Link Research Tools
  • Link Monitoring

Keyword Research


There are many keyword research tools that pull data from the sources listed below (like our free keyword research tool, which pulls from Wordtracker).
These tools use their own databases (although in Wordtracker you can ping Google's tool as well).
I use all the Google tools as well as Ad Intelligence and Wordtracker as well as the SeoBook Keyword Tool. Sometimes I use Wordtracker just via our keyword research tool and sometimes I use Wordtracker's web interface (I like being able to store stuff in there).
Our keyword tool also links in to most of the sources listed above. A big reason why I like our keyword research tool is that it's super easy to hit the major data points I want to hit on a particular keyword from one location.
Ad Intelligence is solid as (Microsoft claims) they incorporate actual search data into their results, rather than estimating like Google does.
I should also note that I mainly use Trends and Insights for comparing similar keywords and looking at locality (in addition to the history of keywords). Sometimes you run across really similar keywords (car, auto) and it can help to know which one is most relevant to your campaign.

On-Page Optimization


For the on page stuff I'm mainly concerned with large scale, high level overviews.
I use our toolbar for specific on-page stuff but when I'm looking to diagnose internal linking problems (not maximizing internal link flow, broken links, http status codes, and so on) or issues with title tags and meta descriptions either missing, being too short, or too long, or duplication then I use a couple different tools.
Since I'm on a Mac and I don't care to run Windows for anything other than testing, I use the three listed which work on Mac (though I don't use them in every situation).
I use Screaming Frog's SEO Spider pretty frequently as well as Peacock's Integrity. Integrity is a broken link checker while SEO Spider incorporates other SEO related features (title tags, H1/H2's, anchor text, and a ton of other important elements).
WebSite Auditor offers most, if not all, of what SEO Spider does but also incorporates white-label reporting, Google Page Rank, Yahoo! & Google Link popularity, cache dates, and so on.
For some of those features in Website Auditor you might want to either outsource the Captcha inputting or use their Anti-Captcha service so you don't have to sit there for hours entering in captcha's.
In my regular workflow, SEO Spider and Integrity get used a lot and Website Auditor comes in to play for some of those other metrics and for white label reporting.

Rank Checking


Here's a crowded space! So I think the right choice here really depends on your needs. Are you a solo SEO who runs multiple sites, or maybe you run your own sites and client sites, or maybe you are a client-only shop.
Here are some of the main players in this space:
Even if you have reporting needs, you can still do a lot for free with our free rank checking tool (scheduled reports, stored reports, multiple search engines, and so on) and Excel or another spreadsheet program like OpenOffice.Org or Google Docs. Some good tips on creating ranking charts with Excel can be found here.
There are a couple differences with the software players, Advanced Web Ranking and Link Assistant's Rank Tracker (both have multiple levels so it's wise to check the features of both to see if you need the higher end version or if the lower priced versions will work for you). Some of the key differences are:
  • Rank Tracker integrates with Google Analytics
  • Advanced Web Ranking has a variety of ways to track local rankings, including maps and a local preview engine
  • Advanced Web Ranking has more, easier to customize reporting options
  • I find that the interface with Rank Tracker is much easier to work with
  • If all you are looking for is rank checking, then Link Assistant is a bit cheaper overall (comparing enterprise versions of both). While noting, AWR has more local options at their higher price point. You can see AWR's pricing here and Link Assistant's here. Note, it's worthwhile to check out maintenance pricing as well (Link Assistant and AWR)
  • AWR let's you assign a proxy per project, which can be really helpful if you have clients all over the map.
  • AWR automatically pulls in the top ten sites for a keyword, and their last position compared to current, and let's you add that site to your tracking (at any point) with all the historical data saved and updated within your account.
One tip with software tools is to run them on a different machine, perhaps even behind an IP off of a private VPN service like WiTopia, and think about utilizing multiple proxies from a service like Trusted Proxies and/or using an anti-captcha service with Link Assistant's tools.
The idea is to not get your IP banned and to let you continue to work as normal on your main machine while another machine is handling the automated queries. If you don't want to fuss with that, you might want to try a cloud app.

The Cloud and Scalability

The 3 main services, that I've used anyway, come from Raven, SeoMoz, and Authority Labs. Authority Labs now powers Raven's SERP tracker too. My biggest concern with cloud-based rank checkers is that the keyword volume can be (understandably) limited. Now, Authority Labs has unlimited checking at 450/month but the other two have limits.
Let's just look at the highest plans for a second, Moz allows 30 campaigns and a total of 3,500 keywords. Raven's highest plan allows for unlimited domains and 2,500 keywords total (and 200 competitors).
If scalability is a concern for you then you might be better off with software solutions. Once you start running multiple sites or are responsible for reporting on multiple sites (and you are working the long tail and your analytics) then you can see how restrictive this could become.
Of course, comparing just the rank checking options of a tool set like Raven and Moz (which both have other useful tools, Raven more so for full on campaign management) doesn't do the pricing justice. So what you could do is still use the many other tools available from each company and use a software solution once your rank checking scales beyond what they offer.
Both Moz and Raven integrate with Google Analytics, and Raven's campaign integration with GA is quite nice too (beyond just rankings).

Link Research


Free tools like Yahoo!'s Site Explorer, search query tools like Solo SEO's link search tool and Blekko's link data are nice but at some point in your SEO career you'll might have to get on board with a more advanced link research tool or tools to get the data you need to compete in competitive SERPS.
A good chunk of software-based solutions pull link data from search engines but if you want a more, way more, comprehensive view of a competing site's link profile (and link history) you do have a few options.
Majestic was originally known for having a much deeper database, with the caveat that they keep a lot of decayed links, and their UI wasn't overly impressive. Well, as noted in a recent blog post (which includes 20% off coupons) on Majestic's new tools, most of that isn't the case anymore. Though, I still feel Open Site Explorer has a better and smoother UI.
Advanced Link Manager's strength lies in their ongoing link management and reporting but they also have some decent link research tools built in and they can connect to SeoMoz's API to gather link data, so that kind of sets them apart from those other software-based solutions.
Again, Moz offers other tools as well so it's hard to really compare price points. What I like about OSE is that you can get a really solid, quick overview of the anchor text profile of a competing site. Also, you get unlimited look ups and up to 10k links per query on their pro plan (in addition to other Moz tools). You can get a 30 day free trial of all the Moz tools as of this writing.

Majestic's New Tools

Majestic, now with their new site explorer and fresh index, rival OSE's UI and freshness a bit but there still are limits on usage. You can check out Majestic's pricing here and don't forget about the 20% off coupon mentioned here.
Typically I like to use both Majestic and OSE. I like the new tools Majestic has come out with and their historical data is solid. OSE, for me, is great for getting some of a site's top metrics quickly (anchor text, top pages, etc).
If I had to pick one, I'd go with Majestic mostly because Moz gives a decent amount of data away for free (being a registered user) and because Majestic has really good historical + deeper data.

Link Management


Building links, especially if you have a team, can be a cumbersome process unless you have collaborative tools to work with. Even if you operate mostly on your own, you might want to track links you've earned or built directly.
Every once and awhile i like to download a report from Majestic SEO and add any links that are not yet in my tracking program into the program. Some people like to just track paid or exchanged links and let the natural ones sort of come and go naturally.
There are a couple of tools out there that I've used, and one I haven't but I've heard good things about it from reputable sources so I'll include it here.
Raven's Link Manager is probably their flagship tool. It has received really high praise from experienced SEO's and is easy to use. You can easily add links, assign them to employees, and let Raven worry about the automatic checking and reporting in case something changes with a link.
Advanced Link Manager has many features built in but you can use it just for tracking links you want to track by uploading the links into the program. It's software based and you can set it to run whenever you'd like, automatically.
I personally haven't used Buzzstream, but reputable people have told me it is a solid program, and they have a free 14 day trial here. It's a dedicated link building and management tool (and also has a PR and social media tool) so chances are if you are looking for a specific tool to fill that need, this one might be worth a shot.
If you don't have a ton of links to manage or a team to manage, you might be just fine with an Excel spreadsheet or a Google Doc. To me, it's just one more thing to think about and Raven and Buzzstream have low priced plans if you don't need enterprise-level storage.

Source : SEO Book.com

4 Ideas To Improve IIS & .NET For Technical SEO

In June 2011, I spoke at SMX Advanced about SEO issues that I commonly run in to during technical SEO site evaluations. The part of my presentation that dealt with Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS) generated a lot of comments and questions afterward, so this column addresses some of those questions about how to improve techncial SEO on the Microsoft stack.
First, a caveat: The majority of my experience has been with Linux- and BSD-based operating systems, starting with SunOS way back at Berkeley, so I’m definitely not an expert on deploying servers on Windows and/or .NET.
I’ve asked Microsoft-stack expert Colin Cochrane to correct anything Windows-related that I have stated incorrectly. (Thank you, Colin. Your link is in the mail.) Any remaining errors in this article are definitely mine, and not his.
After completing technical SEO assessments on numerous sites running on IIS and .NET, I believe that it is a very scalable and production-worthy platform, but I have found that its default settings are far from optimal from a technical SEO point of view.
This article describes the most common issues I’ve seen. Several of these issues cause canonicalization problems, as described in more detail in this article about Google’s parameter handling feature.
Oh, and here is a second caveat: Please be sure to test any changes on a staging server before rolling them out to production. I would hate for something to happen to your website because I made a typo or worded something unclearly.

1. Default Pages (Default.aspx)

The problem
Directory pages are available at two URLs, one with and one without the default page. For example, these two URLs would lead to the same page:
  • http://www.site.com/directory/
  • http://www.site.com/directory/Default.aspx
In this example, the default page is Default.aspx, though it could be configured to be a different name.
Why it is bad
  • Link diffusion. Inbound links to the page could point at either of these two URLs. It would be much better to focus the inbound links on only one URL.
  • Crawl inefficiency. Crawlers have to crawl two URLs to get one page for each directory on the site.
The usual way to deal with duplicate URLs like these is to permanently (with a 301) redirect one URL to the other. However, in this case, it will result in an infinite redirect loop.
The culprit
The reason that redirecting one URL to the other leads to a redirect loop is because both of these URLs look exactly the same to the .NET application. For directory URLs, the default page is always appended to it so the application can’t tell whether it should redirect the URL or not.
Fixing it
The easiest way to fix this is to put a link rel=canonical tag on these pages and point to whichever URL you want to be the canonical. It’s not as good as a permanent redirect, but it will work in a pinch if you don’t want to mess around with your server configuration.
A more permanent fix is to use a 3rd party URL rewriter, which will redirect the URL before it gets to the .NET application. Some URL rewriters I have seen used successfully on sites are URLRewrite (for IIS7 only), URLRewriter, and ISAPI Rewrite 2.

2. Case Insensitive URLs

The problem
The path part of the URLs served by IIS is case-insensitive. So any of these URLs will usually lead to the same page:
  • http://www.site.com/directory/default.aspx
  • http://www.site.com/Directory/Default.ASPX
  • http://www.site.com/DIRECTORY/DeFaUlT.aSpX
Why it is bad
  • Crawl inefficiency. Google and Bing will crawl all of the different case variations that it sees in links, even though they all lead to the same page.
  • Link diffusion. Inbound links could go to any of the variations of the same URL. I’ve even seen different capitalizations of URLs used in internal links within a website.
  • Robots.txt problems. Because the robots.txt file is case-sensitive, if your URLs aren’t crawlers may be accessing URLs that you thought were blocked.
The culprit
My guess is that it has something to do with the Windows path handling in general, which is also case-insensitive.
Some ideas for fixing it
Similar to the first issue, the easiest way to resolve this is to use a link rel=canonical tag that points to the URL with the correct capitalization.
The URL rewriters listed above are the best option for normalizing the case. They can be configured to permanently redirect a URL to the right capitaliziation. If you pick an easy method for canonicalizing URLs, like converting everything to lower case, it can be implemented with one general rule.
Here is an example rule that rewrites a URL to all lower case that will work with URLRewrite:
If you implement something like this keep in mind that some URLs may require upper case, such as the Bing authorization file BingSiteAuth.xml. URLs like these need to be added to the rule as exceptions.
Here is a post containing 10 very useful rewriting rules, one of which converts URLs to lowercase.

3. Handling Page Not Found Errors & Internal Server Errors

The problem
In its default configuration, ASP.NET handles errors (like page not found or internal server problems) by redirecting with a 302 temporary redirect to an error page, which usually returns a 200 response.
Why it’s bad
  • Crawl inefficiency. Because a 302 redirect is a temporary redirect, search engines will continue to check that URL often in hopes of one day getting a page at that URL instead of a redirect. And if the target page returns a 200 response, then the search engines will index the initial URL, which means your site might start ranking with URLs that lead searchers to error pages.
This means that pages that are removed from the site or pages that throw an error will get continue to be crawled as if they were regular pages. This means that the crawler is spending time on these URLs instead of on actual pages with useful content.
And because the page not found page gets so much traffic and has so many URLs pointing to it, they tend to get crawled pretty frequently, which further reduces crawl efficiency.
  • “Non-graceful” site failure. If your site starts returning an error — due to a temporary database problem, for example — large portions of your site could get de-duplicated out of the index because they are suddenly redirecting to the same URL.
The culprit
This is the default behavior in ASP.NET.
Some ideas for fixing it
Fortunately, this issue has a fix that is pretty straight forward and requires a minor change to the web.config file.
Here is part of an example web.config file that prevents these redirects:
The attribute redirectMode needs to be set to ResponseRewrite instead of its default value of ResponseRedirect.
redirectMode is not available in all versions of .NET, so you may need to update first. More detail can be found in this article.

4. Browser-dependent code

The problem
.NET has some hooks that makes it pretty easy to write code that changes a page depending on the user agent requesting it.
Why it’s bad
  • Cloaking. Pages that change based on the user agent (i.e. Googlebot or Firefox) is dangerous for a lot of reasons, but from an SEO perspective it is dangerous because it could lead to unintentional cloaking of content, which can result in having a severe penalty put on your site.
By default, there is nothing user agent-dependent about the code that is served by IIS/.NET. But because the functionality is there, it is possible that browser-dependent code exists in your site.
The culprit
I believe this functionality dates back to the late 1990′s/early 2000′s when browsers had widely different support for web standards. If you are feeling nostalgic for those days, here is an old browser compatability chart that you can look at until the feeling goes away.
Some ideas for fixing it
Chances are there is nothing to fix, but if you want to look at your source code for potential browser-dependent logic, here is an article with sample code that should give you an idea of what to look for.

Conclusion

I hope this article helps you make your IIS installation more search engine-friendly. I have spoken with some very smart Windows developers who initially swore to me that there was no fix for some of the issues in this list, so there is a pretty good chance that your development team isn’t aware of all of these issues or even that these fixes exist.
Of course, these are only a few of the issues that I see with IIS on a regular basis. Others include cacheability of the site, character encoding issues, and URL redirects.
The easiest way to pinpoint these types of issues is by looking at your server logs.

Search Engine Land

July 14, 2011

Analyze Your PPC Ad Positions

How is it Calculated?

The metric displayed in AdWords is an average of your ad positions weighted by impressions. What this means is that it is effectively showing you your mean position on the page based on where you mostly appeared.
Sounds obvious right? But is this really what your brain expects when you see that figure?
When averages are displayed, they are usually mean averages (e.g., the sum of the measurements divided by the number of measurements taken). But the natural interpretation of “average position” is “the position I was mostly in.”

Mean can be Misleading

Most people’s brains are wired to think of a median more naturally when they look at an average. A median average means “what position was I most commonly in?” The difference can be stark.
Picture the following scenario: Acme Inc. has the keyword [widget] in their campaign in exact match. When looking at the average position from the previous day they see an average of position 3.
It’s tempting to interpret this data as meaning that they were generally in or around position 3 for most of the day. But if instead they gained 50 percent of their impressions in the morning in position 4, then after lunch two competitors ran out of budget and their position rose to 2. They didn’t spend any of the day in position 3 but the stats will clearly show that as the average.
Now picture a more extreme scenario where 50 percent of impressions were in position 5 and 50 percent in position 1. Suddenly position 3 is a very misleading statistic about how your campaign performed.
You may make bid adjustments to deliberately drop out of the banner, but you’d find that your proportion of time in the banner hasn’t changed at all. Instead you’re now fluctuating between positions 6 and 2.

Any Other Problems?

Granted these are extreme examples. Not that many advertisers will see half their impressions in one position and half in another. Much more common (and subtly difficult to notice) is when most of your impressions come in one position, but that’s not representative of where you spent your time measured in hours.
This is a complex concept to explain, so bear with me. The table below shows an advertiser’s impressions through the course of a typical business day.
Advertiser Impressions Typical Day
You’ll notice that the ads slipped down the page dramatically at lunchtime, the busy period. The total number of impressions was 7,964 and the average position was 5.5. But actually the ads were in positions 2-3 for most of the day. What the advertiser needs in this situation is either ad scheduling or bid management that can cope with dramatic intra-day changes.
But now we come to the worst issue. Your impressions are directly correlated with your ad position. If you move into a higher position your impression share will increase and you will get more daily impressions. This will weight those times of day or days of the week much more strongly. So your average position will be dominated by the periods in which you were higher on the page, deliberately or not.
If you find that you’re in high positions at the end of the day but the rest of the day is really low, you’ll wind up with high average positions even though you generally weren’t high enough on the page to show.

What’s Our Recourse?

Now that we’ve established that average positions are lying to us, we need to remove the averaging as much as possible. Break our numbers down into the smallest possible chunks so that we see as close as possible to the true figures.
The Dimensions tab is your friend.
AdWords Dimensions Tab
Select an ad group of interest and navigate to the Dimensions tab. If you don’t see it, click the drop-down arrow at the end of your tabs list and tick the box to enable that tab.
From the drop down box in the tab select the “Hour of Day” dimension. Set your date range to a single day, and voilĂ . The smallest unit of measurement that you can see from AdWords.
This is where you’ll really get an idea where your ads are appearing and how many impressions you’re getting in each of those positions. What you’re really looking for is signs that you are spending some parts of the day in low positions (with low associated impressions) and some parts of the day in high positions (with high associated impressions). These are your opportunities to start making decisions to restrict the high areas or push more aggressively in the low areas.
AdWords View Hour of day

Impression Share

The impression share is a great addition to this kind of analysis. It will give us an idea of exactly how much traffic we were sacrificing being in a particular position. Navigate into the “columns” button to enable the impression share view.
AdWords Competitive Metrics
Remember that your impression share is affected by more than just your position on the page, but also your available budget and other factors. But assuming other things being equal (and your campaign isn’t limited by budget and running on standard delivery) you should be able to get an idea how much the low position at a certain time of day is costing your campaign.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics would seem at first glance to be the ideal tool to dive deeper and get the true data. It lets us break down statistics by the ad slot we appeared in on the page. However despite claiming that viewing impressions by ad slot is a valid combination, all your data will come back as zero.
As of the time of writing, Google Analytics simply won’t give you any data about clicks or impressions on your ads broken down by position on the page, despite being willing to give us visits or on-site metrics broken down that way.

How Will We Use This?

It’s great that now we understand that average position is lying to us, and we have an option for getting better quality data. But it’s not necessarily as simple to act upon as we thought.
We have a good idea what position we’re appearing in for each part of the day. It’s now up to you to think about the following:
  • What is my conversion rate like at that time of day? Should I be pushing further up to page to get more good quality traffic?
  • Do I think my target audience is likely to be searching at particular times? Am I adequately targeting people at the times they’re going to be looking for me?
  • Why am I in each position at each time? Are there particularly competitors whose actions are influencing me?
If you can answer these questions you’ll be in a good position to start making adjustments to your bids or ad scheduling based on better knowledge of your search landscape. You should see returns from your top keywords improve, and hopefully start getting somewhere with keywords that you think should be doing better than they are.

Written By
Source : Search Engine Watch

July 12, 2011

Important Google Plus Tips

At least if you got in recently via a Google Plus invite. At this point I’ve spent a decent amount of time with it and have concluded that Google has finally made a positive mark in social networking. It’s still early, but there is a lot of excitement around Google+ by those who have jumped on early, and for good reason. Google has launched a social network with several features designed to leapfrog its competition. What’s evident, as more and more people start using Google’s social network, is the need for help for newer users. In this post you’ll learn how to quickly add friends to your network, what circles are, how I’m using circles to be more productive, how photos are displayed, what your profile page is and why it’s important, security, some advanced tips, browser plugins, and more. May it serve as a good first step to help you and others make the most of the social network.

40 Google Plus Tips for Newbies

*A word about updates to this post. From time to time this post will be updated to reflect current information either on the Google+ features and as the user interface evolves. If you find something out dated or missing, feel free to give a nudge on Twitter or Facebook. Now for those tips…

» Making the Most of this Post

  • Bookmark it so you have it for the future (or use share buttons on this page).
  • Open a second browser window with Google+ loaded so you can toggle back and forth easily.
  • Don’t try and do all these in one shot.
  • Read (Scan) through once to pick out the tips you want to start out with.
  • If post was useful, use the social sharing buttons on this page and share with others.

Friends

First thing you’ll likely want to do is add some friends right? There are several ways to do that.

Creating new circle when mousing over contacts.
Tip #1: Adding Friends from Suggestions. On the right hand side, there’s a Suggestions area highlighting friends you can easily add
Tip #2: Adding Friends from Yahoo Mail. This option is available when clicking the circles icon on the toolbar. If you are a Yahoo! Mail user, go for it.
Tip #3: Adding Friends from Hotmail. In the same “Circles” view, next to the Yahoo! option. Bring all those Hotmail users in to your designated circles, more on that in a moment.
Tip #4: Blocking Friends. The folks at Google could be more creative in naming this. If they are friends, why block them, right? Maybe Enemies, Not a Friend? Block People? Picky I know.

Circles

When adding friend you’ll be able to specify a circle to put them in. When doing so there is also an option to create a new circle when adding a friend. Circles are used to organize friends. Many ways to think of these circles. Based on affinity, like work, church, family, and extended family. Or you could go a little more military as De Niro and Stiller’s in “Meet the Parents”. Either way, circles make it pretty easy to put friends in order fast in Google Plus.
Creating circles allows you to quantify who see’s what you publish in your stream updates.

Tip #5: When you add someone to your circle, you are saying, “I wanna see your stream updates.”
Tip #6: When someone adds you (more on notifications later), they are saying, “I want to see your extended circle and public updates.”
Tip #7: By creating circles allows you to quantify who see’s what you publish in your stream updates.
Tip #8: Creating Circles. You can see how to create a new circle above, when responding to suggestions, or mousing over a plus user.

Drag and Drop Convenience of Circles
Tip #9: Managing Circles. The drag and drop interface makes it really simple to populate circles. Click the circles icon, start dragging and dropping into your newly created circles. Don’t have a circle created yet for a contact? Drop your new friend on the “Drop here to create a new circle” circle. Name it, you are done.
Tip #10: How I’m managing circles. A the moment I have about 12 circles. The circles fall in the following classifications.
  • Personal contacts: Friends, family, people at church, etc.
  • Professional contacts: These are people I know in my industry, other industries, politicians, and celebrities.
  • Utility circles: more on this in the ‘somewhat’ advanced tips section below.
Considering relevancy. I’m particular about these circles, goes back to my Sage ACT! certified consultant days. I chose to organize contacts in circles with two things in mind.
Tip #11: How can I easily share my stream updates with those I think have the most interest in what it is I’m saying? If I post a question about recent email marketing delivery rates, I want to select a circle of those who are most interested in that stuff, professional contacts. If I have a personal update about something one of my children did, I want to share it with the appropriate personal contacts.
Tip #12: How can I get up to speed with what is going on with specific people? With circles setup, I can quickly click a given circle under the “Stream” on the left hand side of the home page, to get up to speed on members of that circle.

Photos in Google Plus

Tip #13: See photos of those in your circles. Click on a picture and you are brought to a screen that looks like this one.

Viewing Photos of those in your Google Plus Circle
Tip #14: A useful feature is the ability to see the photo while commenting or reviewing comments. At this time, there is no circle-based filter available like the main comment stream. I can see the need to see photos from members of a specific circle.
Tip #15: Have a friend in the photo? Tag them by using the Actions option just below the photo.
Mobile photos: Not a whole lot to say here. My Android phone, while cleaner than ever and germ free, has not yet recovered from going through the washer, nor has it been replaced (soon).
Tip #16: Once you have Google+ installed on it, uploading to your Google+ Photos account is instant. My understanding from Android users, uploaded photos can optionally include Geo data of the photo (disabled by default). More on that in the a word about photo security section of this post.

Your Google Plus Profile Page

Tip #17: This is important. Fill it out as completely as possible. Not only is it your brochure to the masses about who you are, it is also something that shows up in the SERPs, specifically:
  • The Title comes from your Google Plus Profile name.
  • The Description is from the introduction field on your profile page.
Tip #18: Find out more details from Dana Lookadoo’s excellent post on Google Profiles in the SERPs.

Security in Google Plus

Securing Sections of Your Google Plus Profile

You can specify security settings on your Google profile page, one section at a time.
Tip #19: Many sections of your Google profile can be secured quickly and precisely.

» Click to see sections

  • Send an Email
  • Who is in Circles
  • Introduction
  • Bragging Rights
  • Occupation
  • Employment
  • Education
  • Places I’ve Lived
  • Home Number
  • Work Number
  • Relationship Status
  • Looking for
  • Birthday
  • Gender
  • Other Names
  • Links
  • Photos (next to About, see note below)
To get there, view your profile, and then choose to Edit Profile. This takes you to the about page of your profile with the ability to select and edit security settings per section. The sections you specify can be visible in any way you like, public to the web, specific circles, extended circles, or not at all.

A Word About Photo Security in Google Plus

Tip #20: Photo security in Google plus is handled differently. As per the screenshot below, at this time, users can specify whether to include photos on your profile, photo tag approval settings (when you are tagged in a photo), and whether to display geo settings (where the photo was taken, if available) for newly uploaded photos and albums.

Tip #21: Geotagging is powerful allowing you to share your journey’s with friends, however for the security conscious, having the ability to disable these functions is a must. For more about Geotagging in photos go here.
Configuring circles and settings for Google chatTip #22: Google chat security settings. Below the stream section on the left hand side, there is a Google chat area. Click the small arrow next to “Chat” (credit to friend Linda Lawrey for sharing this nearly hidden option). Selecting Circles takes you to a box to select the circles you wish and enabling chat for Google+. The notice there states:
People in these circles who also enable chat will be able to see when you’re online and chat with you.
Tip #23: Hardware settings in Google chat. Selecting settings allows you to configure and verify your microphone and webcam are working to your liking.

Security Concerns? Test Your Profile by Viewing as Another Google Plus User

Tip #24: Test your profile from another users perspective.
  • Click on your name in the Google bar at the top.
  • Choose View Profile.
  • In the category bar across the top on the right there is a “View profile as…” box.
  • In that box, type a user for whom like to view your profile as. Presto! you are now viewing as that user!

Using the Google+ Notifications Window

Google+ notifications lets you comment right within the notifications dropdown window.
Tip #25: This jumped out at me as one of the early winning features of Google Plus. The notifications window works similar to the ones found in other social networks. It’s different as it let’s you comment on status updates right within the notifications dropdown. Small detail, but when you are in a hurry this means you don’t have to click, load another page, and then comment. You can read the whole comment stream, and inject a reply if you wish.
Tip #26: The notifications window allows you to scroll through notifications newer or older than the one you are viewing.
< Newer | Older >
Tip #27: Getting to noisy? You can select to mute a given post, from the notifications window as well. Handy for those chattier posts you may have commented on, but don’t care to be updated with every new comment.

Advanced Tips

Google Plus Settings

Tip #28: Be sure to checkout these settings (screenshot below), they primarily deal with your notification preferences. Receive a notice when someone mentions you in a post, or adds you to a circle, tags you in a photo, etc. There are currently 11 notification options available. Which brings us to SMS notification.

Setting Up SMS Notifications In Google Plus

Tip #29: Sometimes sending notifications to your phone via text is a good thing. I do this on Twitter for certain people I follow, and it’s handy to get these notices when you are remote. Google+ offers this functionality too. Just plugin a phone number, respond to the verification, and you are in.

How to Format Text in Google Plus Stream Updates and Comments

Tip #30: Bold. Italics. strikethrough, or any combination thereof. Doable in Google Plus. Simply use an astericks (*) on either side of a word or sentence you’d like bolded. Use an underscore (_) on either side for italics. Lastly use a dash (-) on either side to strikethrough. Any combination of the three can be used as well.


Controlling Updates and Comments in Google Plus

Tip #31: Edit/Deleting comments on others posts. Mistakes happen. So do misspellings. When this happens, all those who have commented before you are notified of your comment… potentially embarrassing. Fortunately, you can do something about it. Once a post is published, you can edit or delete the comment.

Modifying stream comments in Google+
Tip #32: Controlling your stream updates. More than just correcting post mistakes or deleting them altogether, you can also disable comments on a post, as well as disable your post from being reshared in Google plus. Click the arrow for those options.

Modifying stream updates is pretty easy.

Using Shortcuts in the Google bar for Quick Google+ Status Updates

It is available while logged into your Google account, and using nearly any Google services.
One of the changes Google has made for the user experience is the addition of the Google bar. Here’s a screenshot of mine.
It is available while logged into your Google account, and using nearly any Google services. Play around with yours to get familiar, but there are two handy features worth pointing out. See Chrome extensions later in this post for a toolbar based notifications.
Tip #33: Google bar share button: Click this and the status Google plus stream update box pops up. Handy and useful to have such functionality without being “in” Google plus.
Tip #34: Your Name on the Google bar: Gives a dropdown with links to take you directly to your profile page, circles page, account settings and privacy.

Utility Circles

Tip #35: Using circles to save stuff. This is where the use One problem I had early on, was there were so many great Google+ Tips coming through my stream I wasn’t sure what to do with them. One of the sharp people in my circle, Linda Lawrey had another great suggestion I’d like to pass on to you.
  • Create a new circle for what you’d like to save (I called mine Google+ Tips).
  • Using an alternate email you have, add a new person to this circle.
  • When you find something worth saving, share the content with just that circle.
  • When wanting to reference these “saved” items, simply select that circle on the left hand side of Google+ under “Stream“.

Adding Google Plus Functionality with Chrome Extensions

Chrome extensions are a great way to add functionality and productivity to your web experience.
Haven’t had a ton of time with extensions, but have worked with a few. May do a more detailed post on Chrome extensions for Google+ at some point. Here are a few Chrome browser extensions that stood out to me.
Tip #36: Facebook Stream in Browser. Useful tool from the folks at Crossrider, get it here. First alerted to this from Mari Smith.

What Facebook looks like in Google+ with "Google+ Facebook"
Tip #37: Extended Share for Google Plus. Simple way to share Google+ content on Facebook or Twitter. It’s here.
The following extensions were first brought to my attention by Ryan IT Guy.
Tip #38: Helper for Google Plus. Can share/send posts to Twitter, offers post translation as well. Find it here.
Tip #39: Surplus. It’s the notification bar from the browser toolbar, so you can leverage the notification bar regardless of what site you are on. Also has desktop notifications. Get it here.
Tip # 40: +Photo Zoom. Magnifies photos to full size when hovering. Get it here.

Author  : Travis Campbell
Source : MarketingProfessor.com

Don't Run These PPC Test

PPC has always been a fast-moving channel. The search engines (and lately, social channels) are continually innovating, adding great new products and features for PPC advertisers to try. In the past month alone, there have been Search Engine Watch columns about inventory feeds, interest category targeting, sitelinks, and remarketing.
And this is just Google. Microsoft adCenter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and second-tier PPC engines are adding features all the time, too.
The really great thing about PPC is that nearly everything can be tested. In addition to testing ad copy and keywords, you can test all of the features listed above, and more. Landing pages, ad formats (for display), ad extensions – all of these, and more, can be tested to learn what drives the best results for advertisers.
Testing is great. I love PPC testing. I’ve even called out “not testing” as a common campaign mistake. But there’s one PPC test you should never run.

Testing Too Many Things at Once

Even experienced PPC managers can be tempted to immediately try all the latest and greatest new features. It’s like a dessert table of PPC full of delectable choices – you can’t decide, so you just grab one of each.
In a way, this makes sense. You never know what can end up being the game-changer for your PPC campaign – that’s why we test, after all. But if you’re testing too many things at once, you’ll never know which thing (or things) really changed the game for you.

Combining Search & Display Campaigns

One common mistake novice PPC managers make is to combine search and display campaigns. These networks rarely perform the same way, and require different optimization strategies.
Furthermore, at least at a high level, campaign stats are muddied when both search and display are factored in. One may assume their campaign’s click-through rate (CTR) has tanked, when really, low CTRs are normal for display campaigns – and this data is skewing the averages. An ad group that does well in search may not do well at all in display, and vice versa.
Don’t combine the two – you won’t know what’s working!

Sitelinks & Ad Copy Changes

While most seasoned PPC managers know better than to mix search and display, there are other more subtle ways that combining too many tests can backfire.
Let’s say that you started some new ad copy tests on the first of the month, and then on the 7th of the month you added sitelinks to your campaign. On the 15th, you look at your ad test data – and it’s all over the place.
Your CTR is way up, but conversion rates are down. Why? Is it because your new ad copy sucks? Or is it because sitelinks don’t convert?
And sure, you can tag your sitelinks and track them separately – but it’s nearly impossible to drill down into the effect of sitelinks on individual ad variations. Testing ad copy on top of sitelinks is a test you don’t want to run!
google-sitelinks-younkers
Google Tests
Even Google’s own testing can mess up your tests. When Google started testing long headlines in the top ad spots, many of us saw our performance stats start to go all over the place. While ultimately the long headlines appear to have a positive impact, ad tests run during Google’s test of this feature were, again, all over the place.
So if you’re running a test to figure out which ad gets the best CTR, and Google starts playing around with ad display formats in the middle of your test, your results are going to be wonky and possibly even invalid.
google-adwords-pure-michigan-long-headline
While you can’t control Google’s testing, you absolutely can control your own. Make sure to use a systematic approach to PPC testing: don’t test too many things at once, and measure, measure, measure! Don’t get impatient – as they say, patience is a virtue – especially in ad testing.
Written By

Source : Search Engine Watch (#SEW)

July 10, 2011

Top SEOs And Data Correlations

Whilst many SEOs haved focused mainly on links, it can come at the expense of content or the engagement of your audience and ignore future trends. Top search positions are meaningless unless you can convert that traffic into something meaningful to your business.
Withour descent positions in search results your less likely to get found so you need to understand, or at least know that the people you’re working with actually understand what impacts your site and its pages search positions.
Here’s some interesting data from a number of SEOMoz surveys that looked at ranking factors from 70 of the top SEO strategists worldwide and correlated that with data from hundreds of search results.conducted during 2009.

How SEO Is Affected By The Components In Google’s Ranking Algorithm

According to the experts link popularity as well as domain trust and authority were amongst the highest factors that affect SEO closely followed by anchor text and on-page keyword use.
seo ranking algorithms opinion
Search results data shows that links, as they pertain to both the domain and the individual page, are vastly superior in importance to the page’s content.
seo ranking algorithms data
Overall there appears to be a strong correlation between data and the experience of SEO’s that shows that links are a major contributing factor to a pages rank.

The Effects Of Keyword Usage On SEO

According to the SEO experts the use of keywords in title tags and domain names had a strong impact on SEO.
seo keywords opinionseo keywords opinion2
The correlating data shows that keywords in the URL followed by title tags were the most significant factors.
seo keywords data
From the data on keyword usage within various parts of the URL yahoo and bing were most affected by keywords in the primary domain, path and query. However google was affected more by keywords within subdomains..
seo keywords url
The data produced from measuring the position of keywords in title tags showed that keywords closer to the beginning of a title had more bearing on the titles implied meaning.
seo keywords title
Whilst there was agreement that keywords in the URL and title tags had a significant impact, there was some considerable disagreement. For example;
  • H1 title tags showed a low correlation with rankings.
  • Alt text showed a higher Correlation with rankings.
  • Keywords in URL (Very High Correlation).
  • Keyword Location (Data Says Closer is Much Better).

Non-Linking SEO Factors

SEO experts were pretty unanimous that unique and substantive content made the biggest difference to SEO results closely followed by the freshness of new content in the non-link based factors.
seo non link opinionseo non link opinion2
There are more detailed factors covering link metrics, sub and root domains, geographic ranking factors.

Future SEO Factors

SEO is ever changing as search engines try and filter out the less meaningful content and serve more relevant and timely content to users.
As a result most of the top SEO experts believe that links will decline in importance as newer signals rise from usage data, social graph data and other sources to replace them.
SEO will require a multi-disciplinary as well as multi-webchannel approach to be successful and integrated marketing strategies and technologies will play a big part in making it possible for companies to generate results.
The SEO link basher will fade away in favour of the integrated SEO ninja.

Author: Nic Windley
Source : Business 2 Community

July 9, 2011

An Introduction to Website Split Testing

It’s a fact of life that when people hire a web designer, they don’t just want a website, they want a website that does something! There can be a world of difference between these two things. The "action" they need the website to take for them can be one of several common things: selling products for their business (an e-commerce site), generating sales leads, and/or providing free information in the hope that the visitor will make a purchase from the company at a later date.

These aims differ slightly for some sites, like non-profits, blogs and communities; however business sites in general aim to generate revenue by one of the above methods.
Sometimes the client will split up these functions between two separate businesses – the website development will be taken care of by "Best Ever Web Designers Incorporated", while the marketing is done by "Your Ad Here Pty Ltd". However, if the push towards action (marketing) is created at the web design level, rather than externally, it is much more effective. The more effective your client’s website, the happier they will be; and the happier your clients, the better your web design business thrives!
More than that, you can create an additional ongoing revenue stream that requires a little effort each month at your end but can provide a significant benefit to your client in the form of increased sales or sales leads for their business.
Here we look at how to determine which aspects of your web design work is most effective to help the client’s website achieve its aims, by a process known as split testing.

What is Split Testing?

In website split testing (also known as A/B testing), a software application splits the traffic between two or more variants of the same web page, measuring whether there is a difference in the effectiveness of that page in achieving the website’s goals. Every time a visitor takes the desired action on a website, such as making a purchase or submitting a form, it is called a conversion.
Web designers might check whether:
  • A landing page with a graphic of a person encourages better conversion rates than one with a graphic of the product
  • A different positioning of the shopping cart button encourages more people to click it
  • A form with fewer elements, or different elements, encourages more people to finish filling it out.
Just about every aspect of a website can be split-tested.
Split testing involves a single element of a page being changed at one time. A different type of split testing is sometimes used to achieve faster improvements with a shorter number of tests; multivariate testing. In this type of testing, multiple variables are changed within a single web page. So, rather than having multiple versions of the same page, multivariate testing rotates different elements on the same page, for example, the headline, the call-to-action, the image and the opening paragraph.
The advantage with multivariate testing is that you can find the optimum combination of website elements in a shorter space of time and achieve significant improvements in the website’s performance; the disadvantage is that it takes a considerable amount of traffic to get accurate results.
For most websites, A/B split testing will be the optimum method of improving a website’s conversion rate over time.

Why Bother With Split Testing?

Split testing is what separates elite web designers from the rest because it provides them with the knowledge of which combination of website elements will produce the optimum results for the client and they can demand a higher rate as a result. Split testing can help:
  • Get visitors to stay longer on the website
  • Get visitors to interact more with the site
  • Get more visitors to request a consultation or join a newsletter
  • Get more visitors to buy from the site
It can also achieve these aims (depending on what the site is set up for) at a lower cost per action (CPA) than competing sites in the same niche. In some ultra-competitive online markets (home loans, insurance, accommodation, SEO, online dating, etc) split testing is the only way to guarantee that you will be heard above the noise of the competition.
Split testing also helps ensure that when it comes to advertising, you are maximising each and every dollar. If your website doubles its conversion rate from 1% to 2% using split testing techniques, you have just doubled your revenue using the same marketing budget. You will be able to spend more on advertising your site and earn a better return on investment (ROI) from each dollar you spend. Sounds like you’d be crazy not to, doesn’t it?
It becomes even more exciting when you start to examine the numbers. Many untested websites have conversion rates that run around 0.25%. This means that it takes 400 visitors to get one sale. With split testing, you don’t need to increase the number of visitors, just the rate at which they convert. Many success stories tell of conversion rates upwards of 10%. That would be the equivalent of a 40-fold increase in visitors, all of a sudden giving you 40 sales or sales leads out of 400 visitors, instead of 1.

Who Should Be Split Testing?

Ideally, the web designer should start split-testing as soon as the site launches, as they are the ones who have designed the site and have all of the source files on hand. Even if the owner feels that the website is performing well enough, the benchmark for "good" performance could be moved even higher through using split testing. Just keep in mind that split testing does require an established traffic flow because you need to people visiting your site to be able to split-test web pages.
Why is it ideal that the designer does it at the launch stage? Because it is much easier to keep the site as a work in progress after launch, not only visually and structurally, but in terms of its goals. It is infinitely harder for a third party to come along later and change things around, and in many cases, you wouldn’t want them to. That site’s your creation!
Doing the split testing yourself, as a designer, also gives you a real-world feel for what elements will work and what ones won’t. It adds an extra dimension to your sense of aesthetics, removing the guesswork that you necessarily engage in during the design phase. You are no longer doing what you think will create conversions, but implementing what you know produces measurable results. And this knowledge alone will increase the value you bring to your future projects.

Setting Up a Split Test with Google Website Optimizer


Google Website Optimizer is an A/B split testing and multivariate testing platform that allows you to easily see the effects that making changes to page elements has on your website conversion rate. It’s a free platform, and is robust and user friendly. One of the major advantages, though, is that you can use the Google Website Optimizer with existing web page URLs (e.g. yourdomain.com); some other split testing applications require you to use a custom URL (e.g. yourdomain.com/tracking.php) which makes it very difficult to split test non-paid website traffic, such as SEO traffic, referral traffic or direct traffic.
Google Website Optimizer serves different pages to different users, with hundreds of variations possible. In our experience, using the website optimizer tool does not affect your rankings and does not cause duplicate content issues. Here is the process for setting up an A/B test with Google Website Optimizer:
Identify the page or pages you want to test (usually the home page or pages that receive a lot of traffic).
Define which element you want to test. In A/B testing, you’ll only test element one at a time. Commonly tested elements are the headline, sub-headline, opening paragraph, image, call to action, and the submit button (look and/or placement).
Add tags to the original page, the variation page and the conversion pages to allow tracking.
Enter the website URLs you are testing into the Google Website Optimizer.
Preview how the pages will look before sending them live.
Google Website Optimizer will rotate the page that is displayed for every visitor, so that the first person sees version 1, the second person sees version 2, the third person sees version 1 and so on.
You can access the results and reports of various statistics within Google Website Optimizer to see which variant is the most effective.

What Should You Test with Google Optimizer?

These are the most commonly tested elements of a web page:
  • Headings
  • Sub-headings
  • Opening paragraph
  • Images
  • Call to action
  • Offers
  • Hyperlinks
  • Submit button
  • The location of different elements
  • Colors
The first six elements are the ones which generally have the most impact on conversion rates, and the ones you should test first. Google once tested 41 different shades of blue for their pages. They have the luxury of doing this because they get more traffic than any other website, and they have the drive to do this because performance is their life. They thrive on it! You don’t need to go to this extent but if Google places so much value on it, shouldn’t you?

Knowing When a Split Test is Finished

The number of conversions needed to garner a reliable indication of future traffic varies incredibly with different types of sites. If the business you are designing for is a high-customer volume, low-value spend store, you should test until you have 70 or so conversions for one variant. If it is a low-customer volume, high-value spend store, aim for 20 conversions.
If the set conversion is further from becoming an actual "profit" for the store (i.e. a conversion creates a lead from a visitor, rather than a sale from a lead), you may want to be more certain that one variant is working better than the other. You may also want to test more different variants of the same element, or do multivariate testing … within the limitations of your traffic volume.

Determining statistical significance at the conclusion of a test

For you to have a high confidence level that the test results aren’t just a fluke, you can apply a simple formula to determine whether the difference in results is statistically significant. This rule is:
The numerical difference between the two results must be greater than the square root of the sum of the two results.
Or
Y-X>√X+Y, where Y>X
Sounds like a nightmare from before your high school maths exam, doesn’t it? It is easier to understand with an example:
  • If the result of page A was 20 conversions, and the result of page B was 30 conversions, then the difference between the two is 10.
  • The sum of the two results is 50
  • The square root of that sum is 7 (rounded down)
  • The difference (10) is greater than the square root of the sum (7), so the result is statistically significant.

If the two results had been 22 and 28:

  • The difference between the two is 6
  • The sum of the two results is 50
  • The square root of that sum is 7 (rounded down)
  • The difference (6) is less than the square root of the sum (7) – the result is not statistically significant.
If the results of your split test are not statistically significant, you can either:
  • Keep testing and see if a more definite pattern emerges
  • Decide that the element doesn’t make a difference to conversion in this case, and test something else.

Tips for Ongoing Split Testing

Either you, as the designer, or the website owner, should be implementing split testing constantly, on all your high traffic web pages. It takes time to get test results, and in the meanwhile customer preferences and market sensibilities are changing, along with the season and your stock.
It is important to note that not all split tests will be successful. In fact, if you have a 20% success rate where one in five split tests improve the overall conversion rate of the site then you are doing well. The key point to remember with split-testing is that every success forms a new baseline, with considerable website performance improvements achieved after a number of different split tests.
The easiest way to manage all of the split tests is to set one day per month when you review results and then set up tests for the coming month based on those results. Every month you should track your results in a spreadsheet to avoid accidentally re-testing the same elements over and over again. This also provides a point of reference for when you are starting new projects – you can see which placements and copy types are most effective in which industries.
If your website grows to the point where you have upwards of 1 million visitors per month, you can use multivariate testing.
And don’t forget to check what competing sites in the same niche are doing, and test the same elements on your site!
Once you start split testing you’ll find that what you thought would perform better doesn’t and you’ll be very surprised with some of the results. The best part about split-testing is that the confidence you will gain from split testing will help you with your future web development projects because you will have an increased knowledge of what produces results and what doesn’t. Consumer behavior is a specialized field and web designers can get on a steep but exhilarating learning curve for it by engaging in split testing on their own and their clients’ websites.

Source : Six Revisions

Share

Twitter Delicious Facebook Digg Stumbleupon Favorites More