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This is part 2 (of 3) of a quick overview of what’s new in the SEO arena, along with links to full articles so you can find out more for yourself.
Has someone at Google has reviewed your website and decided it deserves to be penalised in Google’s search results? Google’s now reporting such cases nearly 100% of the time. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team has stated that… “…[Google have] actually started to send messages for pretty much every manual action that we do that will directly impact the ranking of your site. If there’s some manual action taken by the manual web spam team that means your website is going to rank directly lower in the search results, we’re telling webmasters about pretty much about all of those situations.” Now is a good time to review the two types of actions that Google has: manual and algorithmic. Find out more at Search Engine Land.
News from Google: 5 new SEO rules Google uses to rank websites
Everyone is looking for answers and guidance about search engine optimisation. SEO Master WordPress have presented five new posting rules to bear in mind and follow.
Posting rule 1: Mix up the copy in your anchor text. Instead of ‘Click here’ try ‘Find out more’ or Buy here’.
Posting rule 2: The deeper your users go into your website the less links should appear. Your links should be weighted at the home page or high traffic pages.
Posting rule 3: Try and get back links from a variety of domains i.e. most from .com, then .net, country based etc.
Posting rule 4: You should be writing for humans - the average character number of every word should be 5.5 characters.
Posting rule 5: Google counts the time each user leaves the SERP to visit a website. The counting starts from the moment the user leaves the SERP until the moment he/she returns to the SERP to pick another website. This is something like bounce rate but now Google can count that time even if you are now using Google analytics.
To find out more out the new posting rules, visit Kreouzis’ blog on SEO Master WordPress
Top 10 web analytics segmentation tips
With so much raw data out there, many web analysts look to social media, analytics experts and peer discussion to determine what data can be compiled into meaningful information.
Here are the top 10 tips segmentation tips from Search Engine Watch that can transform data into information.
- Filter first, group second, then segment
- Determine visitor type segments
- Segment by traffic source type
- Scrutinise ‘direct' traffic by using query string parameters
- Categorise content by intention
- Segment by product type engagement using a meaningful taxonomy
- Integrate data sources across platforms
- Get closer to the customer
- Set targets with reasoning for each & test your predictions
- Align segments & metrics with business drivers
Garry Pryzyklenk explains more here.
How to make web analytics data more insightful
Retrieving the information from web analytics software should be less than 10% of the work, which means that 90% of time should be dedicated to determining what all this data means. Search Engine Watch has given us some insights into making sense and use of web analytics data.
Compare trends, not just differences - current web analytics software makes it extremely easy to compare equal periods of adjacent data, but other comparisons such as average weekday or current day versus the same day last week are much more difficult to configure. Unfortunately, the best way is crunching these numbers manually. You can then add layers of additional analysis such as calculating the long term mean, variance, and standard deviation.
Analyse the significance of your data before drawing conclusions - calculating standard deviation is an easy way to determine whether the change you see in absolute numbers is statistically significant, if your data falls outside of two standard deviations of the mean. Q1 and Q4 are of significance.
Dig deeper with segmentation - sometimes the driving force behind observed changes can be obvious, but other times a change can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. By segmenting your analytics data you can quickly find commonly-shared behavioural traits that are influencing the changes in trends observed.
Correlate reported trends with business impact - this is when we should be asking ‘so what?’ As a simple rule of thumb, try to attribute fair assumptions in revenue generation, cost savings, or visitor satisfaction back to the trends you observe.
Make insights actionable - the easiest way to make insights actionable is to develop ideas for a complementary optimisation program. The goal for a web analytics reports is to include insights that can actually be completed within a short amount of time and have a significant impact.
Garry Pryzyklenk explains more here.
Brands use Instagram for visual marketing
Instagram is a free photo-sharing program and social network that was launched in October 2010. The service enables users to take a photo, apply a digital filter to it, and then share it with other Instagram users they are connected to on the social network as well as on a variety of social networking services. The popular photo-sharing platform snaps up 7.3 million daily users in the U.S. and last month zoomed by Twitter in daily mobile traffic.
With 80 million+ registered users and 5 million+ photos per day, Instagram is reshaping the way people communicate in pictures. Brands can’t afford not to take notice and join the visual party. After all, sharing a photo is easier than writing a tweet. Find out how you can use Instagram for your business on Search Engine Watch.
Keep a lookout for part 3 coming soon!
