Search Marketing Insomniac…The Blog of Adam Henige

Image courtesy of: star5112 on Flickr

Nothing is worse for the budding online businessman than to see their traffic numbers plummet…particularly their search numbers because they are often the least understood form of traffic.  Often search traffic is oversimplified as, “Work hard in SEO and link building to get top positions and the traffic will magically appear.”

But like any business, it’s just not that simple.  I was working with a site earlier today and was a bit puzzled as to why their would be a pretty substantial drop in traffic over the last week after a rising tide of gains.  Knowing that my observant client would have questions, I dove in to see what the deal was.  Here was my approach.

1. Did our rankings take a dive?

This has to be your first thought in this situation.  A simple rank check can usually give you the answers to this one.  However, the site I was working with is a very new site that just recently got out of the sandbox and started climbing the ladder for competitive terms.  So with largely long tail traffic (and over 3,000) products, I had to be more creative.  Another extremely valuable tool here can be Google Webmaster Tools - which will allow you to see historical trends of your most visible terms week to week.

2. Did we get a penalty or lose site authority we had gained?

I went back a few weeks in analytics and grabbed several hundred random listings of long tail terms and ran those through rank checker.  The thought here was that even though I hadn’t been following the rankings for these terms, that most of them should maintain high rankings if we were getting clicks only a few weeks ago.  My sample showed that the vast majority of the terms still held solid first page rankings.  So this wasn’t the culprit either.

3. Is this a seasonal trend?

This was a new business for me and my client, so I had no historical data to work with myself, so it was time to start looking at competitors.  Quantcast can be great for this if you have competitors who have quantified sites and share their results.  You can get accurate traffic numbers and really look for trends.  Sure enough, after a pretty substantial search I started finding trends in quantified sites (as well as extremely high volume non-quantified sites) that seemed to tell me that this was most likely a seasonal issue.

While I will continue to keep my eye on the search traffic trends, I thought the thought process here would be a valuable thing to share with online business owners and small businesses investing time in SEO.  It’s easy to panic and start making changes to a strategy when it appears you’re not getting results.

Be sure to do your due diligence, as this example shows, the strategy might not always be the problem.

Image Courtesy of MagpieShooter

I am not a programmer.  Hell, I’m not even a designer.  With that in mind, please know that in a lot of instances, SEO friendly redirects are REALLY easy to perform and can be very beneficial for your SEO efforts.

What is a 301 redirect?

I won’t assume everyone knows what a 301 is, so let’s start here.  A 301 redirect is basically a signal telling browsers and crawlers that destination A has moved to destination B.  A good example situation of this would be when an online store stops carrying Brand X cat food, but begins carrying Brand Z instead.  Obviously you don’t want old customers going to a dead page once you remove it, so you can set up a 301 so when visitors type in the URL for Brand X it sends them instead to Brand Z.

More than people friendly

So while this is obviously good for human users, it’s also good for search engines.  Keep in mind that search engines are in the business of giving users high quality results.  If they find that you have dead pages, that’s probably not going to help your site’s rankings in general.  Secondarily, if people are linking to your dead pages, you’re effectively wasting all of that delicious link juice.  In the previous example, any links pointing to the now defunct Brand X page are completely wasted.  Once the search engine sees your redirect, it will credit the new page with the link juice and your Brand Z page will reap the rewards in the rankings.

Another valuable use of 301s is consistency.  What SEOs refer to as canonicalization - meaning that your site can be reached at both http://www.yoursite.com as well as http://yoursite.com.  While search engines seem pretty capable of dealing with this now (there’s always a concern that one of the pages could be seen as duplicate content which is not a good thing).  This can also come in handy if your site has a home page that’s available from multiple URLs - sometimes you’ll see this as a /index page or a /home page.  This is problematic for two reasons - 1)  It’s another possible duplicate content issue and 2) If other sites begin naturally linking to these pages, you’re not maximizing the links to your home page.  Instituting 301s can solve these problems.

Instituting a 301 redirect

So you’ve found a couple of dead pages on your site, what do you need to do?  First off, you’ll need to know what type of site you have.  Our site is done in .php so if we wanted to redirect a dead page to a new location, we would just add a page where the dead page was and insert this:

<?
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.wheremynewpageis.com” );
?>

That’s it!

Depending on your type of site, you can do a google search and find all kinds of resources, just try something like “how to create a 301 redirect in html“

If you want to redirect all of your pages to the www version, you’ll need to do a little more work (but not much).  You’ll want to get into your cpanel file manager or ftp and look at the root folder of your domain for a file called htaccess.  If one exists, just add the following text to the file (you can edit it in notepad - just replace “yoursite” with your domain).

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^yoursite.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

If you don’t have an htaccess file, just make one in notepad and save the file without the .txt extension and upload it to the root folder via ftp.

SEO isn’t always hard, and there’s lots of things that you can do to improve your site without a ton of SEO knowledge.  If you have a question on implementing any of this, just shoot me a question by filling out the contact form to your right.

Here are some other valuable redirect resources:

• http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php
• http://www.bruceclay.com/newsletter/0405/redirects.html

Even the casual SEO has historically kept an eye on their rankings.  Using an online service or a program like Web Position Gold to track the successes and failures of their activity.  At the same time, the wise SEO kept an eye out for their usual competitors, and stayed on the lookout for emerging competitors in the marketplace.  As Google continues to innovate, the landscape of the results have changed, and there is now an additional item for the SEO to worry about - Google itself.

Thank you Google.

Two years ago if you did a search for “grocery store” from your home computer you’d get a listing of the most relevant sites for the term grocery store - for the whole country.  You’ve probably noticed that similar searches have begun integrating local results, complete with Google map listings.  You’ll see the same thing when doing searches for product related terms, and for certain informational topics you’ll also see the integration of video results.  This is Google trying to anticipate user needs, which may not always be pleasant for the SEO.

Recently I was working with an online retailer that had achieved a #3 ranking for a popular product related term.  The only page outranking it was the manufacturer.  This led to a steady stream of traffic and consistent month to month sales.  Out of nowhere it seemed, that all stopped.

On a month to month basis we saw the drop in analytics.  I quickly looked back to the organic rankings report - there was no drop.  The next step was to look at the SERP.  That’s when we saw the problem.  Google had integrated both video and product listings.  We had gone from a cozy perch atop the rankings to below the fold and competing with images and videos for the user’s attention and eye share.  I wouldn’t have assumed the loss in traffic would be as drastic as it was (see below).

Can you guess when the SERP changed?

Even with the number one ranking within the Google Product feed listing (essentially maintaining our #3 ranking in terms of visible links) the additional competing items on the SERP wiped out our traffic.  The moral of the story here is that while your competition needs to be monitored, so does the medium itself.  Google will continue to adjust the SERPs to improve user experience, and as SEOs we will need to continue to adjust to the changing landscape.

Much has been made of Google’s move to personalized results.  Whether you’re logged in or not logged in, Google has been personalizing results based on your activities.  This is news to the innocent bystander, but certainly not to SEOs.  So I won’t go too far into that.  If you want to learn more about the technicalities and ramifications of personalized search, I would recommend that you try this: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-everyone.html

But let’s talk about something bigger here.  As an SEO you might be running some rank checking software and seeing that your site is pulling down some top rankings in Google for a certain keyword, but it doesn’t seem to be turning into traffic from an analytics standpoint.  Traditionally, you’d think that you should change your page title, or possibly adjust your description to give you a more attractive SERP.  That type of thinking was in line with the idea that results were universal (non-personalized results, which will STILL be the vast majority of searches in the near future) from sea to shining sea.  Turns out, there’s more customizations going on than you know.

Let’s take the case of Dave Kahle for example.  Dave Kahle is a sales training professional based in Comstock Park, Michigan.  Taking a look through some of the SERPs, I find that his site is currently ranked 3rd for the terms sales workshops and sales seminars.

I'm not making this stuff up.

So you’d naturally think that based on the Google keyword tool’s information, and AOL’s SERP data you would think that the site would be getting about 40 clicks for sales workshops and about 200 for sales seminars based on its third place standing.  I, however would wager it doesn’t quite reach that level.  Why?

Well, I’m searching in Lansing, Michigan and Google knows that.  Trying a little experiment using SEOMoz’s rank tracker tool I found last week that Dave Kahle’s site was ranking 6th and 9th for these terms.  Why would that be?  Well, SEOMoz’s tool displays a West Coast bias, as their physical location is in Seattle.  So their tool displays rankings as they would from that location.  Apparently Google has made a bit of a distinction between the relevance of these services to a West Coast audience.

So next time you start wondering why traffic doesn’t seem to be accompanying your rankings, here’s another tool in the toolbox to help explain why.  Try to find a surrogate rank checking tool based in a different geography to test the consistency of your rankings.

Update: I began writing this blog last week, but it appears the West Coast rankings have nearly caught up.  Good for Dave, but bad for my example.  Try this yourself and let me know what types of drastically different results you can find.

As I sit in my recliner with the Olympics glowing in the periphery, I can’t help but think how few people have the motivation to devote four years at a time for their shot at glory.  I’m fairly certain a lot of these athletes forgo making a decent living to pursue their passion.  As I mull over all of that dedication to hard work, I realize just how much I like being lazy.  So in this edition of SEO on a Nickel, I’ll offer up a quick and easy way to continuously build links - blog commenting.

Now, let me say this first.  I do not condone spamming blogs for links. If you read this blog and use its contents as ammunition to spam other blogs, there is a good chance you will be eaten by polar bears…but I digress.  Let’s get down to business.  Here’s the tools we’ll be using today:

1. Google Reader
2. Google Alerts

Short list, eh?  I said this was going to be a testament laziness, didn’t I?  Okay, so here’s the idea.  If you don’t have much time, a great way to find links is to set up a handful of relevant searches in Google Alerts and spend a few minutes each week looking for relevant blogs to post on in Google Reader.

The first thing you need to do is recognize what linkable assets you have on your site.  Is your home page a valuable asset?  Is it a site that has particular value for a product category or a niche interest?  Perhaps you have an article section with valuable information, or some tools on your site that make it easier to find the right product or calculate an important equation.  Regardless, most sites have some specific linkable assets, and if not, start by making some unique content that relevant sites in your industry would want to link to.

Secondly, do a couple of searches in Google blog search to identify some searches that provide a healthy amount of returns.  If you sell blue widgets, you may just want to do a search for “blue widgets” or if you want something more specific to blue widgets, you might want to search  intitle:”blue widgets” which will return only blog posts with the phrase blue widgets in the title.  Handy, eh?  If you want to take it a step further, you can add some additional elements to your search to find blogs that are more likely to be dofollow - or as some of the industry insiders call them, “footprints”.  An example of this would be blue widget “allowed html tags:” which is a footprint in the comment section used on many blogs that tend to allow dofollowed links within the comments.  The link query tool from Ontolo can be used to show you a whole bunch of ideas for this (use your keyword and then select conversation from the linkable opportunity type drop down).

With some queries in place, get into Google Alerts and set up your search:

Keep up on your blue widgets.

Once you create your alert, you can choose to edit your alerts where you can select the option to view in Google Reader.  Otherwise, I suppose you can have them sent to your inbox (but that’s sooooooooooo 2008).  Now, you can set up a time each week to find appropriate blog posts where your comment can add value through providing a link to your site.

Once again, I recommend that you don’t bombard every blog you come across.  Chances are you’ll find some blogs that are good communities to participate in aside from building links, so if you’re a good citizen, you can make some worthwhile connections that may lead to a bevy of other opportunities.  So keep that in mind before you start angering people…or the polar bears.

The SEO polar bear hates blog spammers! Image courtesy of www.freeimagedepot.com

And I would be remiss not to point out that I fleshed this post out from Navin Poeran’s suggestion on Search Engine Land a while back.  That post will open your eyes to the immense number of ways you can use search queries to identify linking opportunities.  Until next time, I wish you lazy but successful link building.