Alas, the fourth and final installment of the Analytics test series: the regular expression portion. While the Google Analytics test might seem daunting, with a little studying, it really isn’t bad at all. Yesterday, Jessica covered event tracking.  Previously Erin covered types of Google Analytics cookies and how they are each used to track activity.  In this post, we’ll cover the  different functions of each regular expression character, along with examples.

Regex can be a lot to take in but when it’s broken out in simplified form, it’s not half as bad as its reputation would lead you to believe.  (I hope you’ll agree!) The regex portion of the series will serve to help you through the questions on the test centered around regular expression.  Regex was a fairly small portion of the Analytics test, with maybe 3-4 questions, but is a pretty handy knowledge set to maintain, even if you aren’t worried about taking the test.

Regex can be used for several things within Google Analytics, such as:

1. Setting up goals funnels
2. Tracking equivalent pages
3. Filtering data within reports
4. Profile filters

Finally, without further adieu:

Regex Character Guide

Regex Wildcards

. is a wildcard for any single character.

• Act . matches Act 1, Act 2, Act 3, etc. but does not match Act 10
• Act .. matches Act 10, Act 11, Act, 12, etc.

Note:  If you want to use a period as an actual period, not as a wild card you’ll need to use a backslash before the period, as a qualifier.  You would want to do this if excluding an I.P. address in Analytics.   The same rules apply for question marks, which can also be used in regular expressions, as we’ll discuss later.

• U\.S\. matches U.S.
• 163\.212\.171\.123

? matches 0 or 1 of a previous item (Use / as discussed above, if using a question mark in the literal sense).

• 51? matches  5 or 51
• AB? matches A or AB

+ matches 1 or more of a previous character.

• 51+ matches 51, 511, 5111, 51111, etc.
• AB+ matches AB, ABB, ABBB, ABBBB, etc.

* matches 0 or more of previous item.

• 51* matches 5, 51, 511, 5111, 51111, etc.
• AB* matches A, AB, ABB, ABBB, ABBBB, etc.

{} quantifies the number of the previous item.

• 51{2} matches only 511 (the 2 means that there are two of the previous item, which was a 1)
• 51{1,3} matches 51, 511, 5111 but does not match 51 or 51111

Match Set

[] matches one item in a character set.

• [uU]\.[sS]\. matches u.s. and U.S.
• [1-9] matches any number between 1 and 9

^ negates the set.

• ^[uU] will not match u or U
• ^[1-9] will not match any number between 1 and 9

() allows you to group contents as an item, using | to separate grouped items.

• (U\.S\.|US| u\.s\.|us) matches U.S., US, u.s., or us

Regex Anchor String

Match a string of characters using ^ to start the series and $ to mark the end of a string

• ^US matches ‘US Holiday’ but does not match ‘Monday is a US Holiday’ because it does not start with ‘US’.
• Holiday$ matches ‘US Holiday’ but does not match ‘US Holiday Dates’ because it does not end in ‘Holiday’.
• ^US Holiday$ only matches US Holiday

Regex Shorthand:

\d matches any number just like [0-9]

\s matches any white space

\w matches any number, letter, or underscore like [A-Za-z0-9_]

Now let’s try something a little more comprehensive.

What does \d{1-5}\s\w* match?

1. 1234 Johnson
2. Johnson
3. 132344 Johnson
4. 123

If you guessed ‘a’ or ‘d’ then you are correct.  Here’s why:

\d means that there is a string of numbers, which knocks out choice b, and {1-5} means that it can only have from one to five characters long, which knocks out choice c.  These are the kinds of questions that you will need to prepare for. \s represents the space and \w represents the word ‘Johnson’, however, as we know * means there could be an infinite number of  \w, which matches any character, or it can mean that the last character may not be present, so choice ‘d’ works also.

Although it isn’t an extensive part of the test, be prepared to answer a couple questions on regex when you’re taking the Analytics test.  Much like this last question, you will need to be able to identify what a sequence of characters and numbers will match.  As I said earlier, it is helpful to have a guide so that when you are setting up profiles, filters, goals, etc. you can be sure to do it correctly, without accidentally skewing your data.

For more tips on regular expression, check out the Analytics help section.

I’d love to hear any tips, tricks, or questions!

This post will walk you through an account I work with that was hit by the Panda Algorithm Update and the steps we took to begin recovery.

The Situation

At the beginning of this month I got a frantic email from a PPC client wondering why revenue had dropped so drastically from last March, historically one of their most profitable months. After looking at the account in analytics we found PPC revenue had remained steady but revenue from non-paid search traffic had dropped 27%. Visits had also dropped 27% from last March, but it wasn’t until we looked at each search engine individually that we began uncover the issue.

So visits and revenue only decreased in Google, but was Panda really to blame?

How To Tell If You’ve Been Hit By The Panda

To see if you’ve been hit by the Panda, log into your Google Analytics account and follow these steps:

1. From the advanced segments drop down list uncheck “All Visitors” and check “Non-paid Search Traffic.” This will show only data from organic search results.
2. Since Panda was released on the 24^th, we set the Date Range from February 1^st – March 31^st to see trends in visits before and after that date.
3. Go to Traffic Sources and select Search Engines to just view organic traffic from search engines. (Click to enlarge)
4. Click on the source “google” at the bottom to view site visits from Google’s organic traffic:

For the client, visits dropped by 700 from February 23^rd to the 24^th and have never recovered. That’s how you know you’ve been hit (or kung fued) by the Panda.

Panda Update Recovery

So what do you do if you have a legitimate site that’s been hit? This is Google’s answer: “If you believe your site is high-quality and has been impacted by this change, we encourage you to evaluate the different aspects of your site extensively.” That doesn’t provide much direction, but since it’s Google’s algorithm I decided to look at what Google says is wrong with my site.

To look at site diagnostics, log into your Google Webmaster Tools Account. Click on Diagnostics in the left hand column and you’ll get a drop down of options. Select HTML suggestions to view content issues Google found.

Google found a total of 294 pages with three content issues: duplicate meta descriptions, short meta descriptions, and duplicate titles. You can click on any one of the issues to view the specific pages where Google has identified an issue. You can also export all of this information by clicking “Download this table” at the bottom of the page. If Google has flagged this content as having an issue, than fixing the issue should help boost your ranking.

You should also look at your sites performance in Webmaster Tools. Click Labs and select Site Performance.

We found that our site’s load time was slower than 59% of sites. With Panda’s focus on providing users with high quality sites, a slow load time could cause a decrease in rank. You can also view load time for each page on your site to determine if this is a site wide issue or just a problem for particular pages. Since this site is a retailer with lots of product photos, we had the website developer decrease image size.

Google’s Webmaster Tools is a helpful in figuring out where to begin making changes to your site. You should spend time clicking through all the tabs in Webmaster Tools and begin resolving any issues Google has found. If Google says it’s a problem, it’s safe to assume fixing those problems will make Google, and the Panda, happy.

Unfortunately, there isn’t an instant fix for Panda recovery. Making sure you are following SEO best practices seems to be the best, although not very specific, answer.  Have any of you been hit by the Google’s Panda Algorithm Update and if so what steps have you taken to recover?

**Although Google won’t manually go in and change site rank, if you think you have “a high quality site that has been negatively affected by this change” you can let Google know about it here.

To start, for those of you who don’t know, Quora at it’s simplest is a question and answer social network. Comparisons to Yahoo! Answers and Answerbag are of course warranted, but Quora is much more. To start, it was co-founded by Adam D’Angelo, who was Facebook’s former CTO (yeah, that Facebook), so it has a very competent managing team. Another huge difference (and factor into Quora’s success) is that there is no anonymity as is much the case with the other often maligned answer networks. So, as a result of this transparency, you tend to see much more insightful and helpful answers (without the wild card factor of anonymity). Also, with Quora, there is an intricate ranking system that gives you a result to your question (or keywords/topics searched).  This ranking system is based on upvotes or downvotes, which are given by users much like Digg. The more votes the answer gets, the more prominently it will be displayed. But, unlike Digg, votes carry different weight depending on the user. Voters who have given good answers previously will have much more influence based on their up/downvote than other users, or users who have had issues with the site. So much like Google’s quality score, user history plays a role. And also, Quora does not allow for solicitation for votes, and any user reported doing this will be banned.

To move past the operating procedures of Quora, there is also the dynamic way in which Quora sorts it’s answers and information. When you sign up as a user, you can have Quora as part of your RSS feed, depending on topics of your choosing. Quora users bookmark certain issues (i.e. religion, Iraq War, 2012 elections, etc.) and sort questions/answers into these topics, and can alert you of new questions and answers. Or, you can simply search questions, topics, or people in the easy to user Quora interface. A good analogy would be a scaled-down, more human version of Google, a mini-Google. And the more upvotes a question/answer gets, the more likely it will be relevant to the keyword/topic you search.

And finally, the sheer amount of people who are “reputable” on Quora is amazing. Quora’s community consists of constant contributors from the Silicon Valley (and other tech luminaries) such as Marc Andreessen, Dustin Moskovitz, and Steve Case. Virtually all PPC/SEO bloggers or authorities have a Quora account as well, making this a valuable and reputable source of information pertinent to the industry of internet marketing. All this being said, it is safe to say that the upside of Quora is very large, but how do you use this for SEO?

In an attempt to keep from commercializing Quora, the administrators have blocked corporations from making accounts and have limited it to individuals with email accounts, as well as prohibited advertising of any type on the site. But, there are definite ways around this to garner more traffic, be it directly or indirectly. Directly speaking, Quora has been added to Google Social. So, having a presence on Quora and having a large amount of followers could lead to your posts being more prominent in search results. The more people who feel your web presence, the more that will listen to your answers or questions.  And because of this, slipping a name in one of your posts or promoting a company blog could lead to a traffic spike, or at least more name recognition. In addition, if you make it clear that you are affiliated with either a client or company, if you are in good standing with many users of Quora, you could see some traffic from those mentions as well.

Indirectly speaking, Quora is a good way to get your name out to a reputable pool of contributors. For instance, based on the niche of your industry (or the industry that you are advertising for a client), you can find what is being asked or what is a hot topic. The more you contribute to this topic type, be it through questions or answers, the more you will get your name out there as an authority on the topic. And the more you capitalize by posting on what is trending or being discussed, not only will you be kept up to date on the issues, but you will have valuable insight into the industry you are advertising for.

Quora is a free question and answer service that is worth a look. It may not be as high in traffic as Yahoo! Answers, but for what it lacks in traffic it gains in reputation and sheer upside. And, being integrated into Google Social is a huge step forward in terms of affecting you or your clients SEO. Take into account the strategies above, and you could see an upswing in either traffic, search rank, or both for free. And be sure to check back with SEO Boy as we keep you up to date on Quora and everything else SEO.

For those that don’t know, Google Places gives the user information about local businesses that are related to the keyword or keywords that the user searched for.  For businesses, you can have your business listed for free as long as you have a physical address and fill out the required information. Basically, as a business, you have to give information about yourself. Mainly this information pertains to business category (like keywords about the features/products of your company), photos or videos, or other additional categories. Basically, the more you fill out, the better you will look in terms of your Places profile. In addition to this basic profile, you can update and write short statuses, and much like a Facebook update, you can post about discounts or giveaways to your Places profile.  Basically, this profile can make it easier for users to find you in local organic searches, and if you don’t rank well for general industry keywords, you can see your traffic skyrocket if you optimize for local SEO terms and fill out a Places profile.

One of the most important aspects of Places are the reviews that customers can submit about your business.  Getting reviews is key to legitimizing your Places page—more reviews, the more relevant and busy you will look to prospective customers, and in turn the higher you will rank on the Places results. It goes without saying that bad reviews will hurt you, so try to limit those with positive customer experiences.

In addition to these features, Places also allows you to “tag” your location for twenty –five dollars a month. Basically, this will place a small yellow tag next to your places location on the Google map, adding some emphasis to your Places profile. These tags can announce promotions, discounts, coupons, or really any pertinent information you want to get across. And, you can track the performance of this “tag” as well as all other analytical data for your account from the easy to use Places dashboard.

Hotpot is the next step for Places, as it takes all of the features of Places and adds a social element. Unlike Places, Hotpot is designed primarily for the consumer, as opposed to both the business and the consumer. It has a much easier to use interface, and focuses more on the customer side of the business interaction. Hotpot data doesn’t supersede the pre-existing data of Places—it still keeps all of the business information the same. It simply eliminates some details from the profile for quick and easy viewing, such as destination URL and phone number. But these are still accessible should the user decide to research more into your business profile.

Each Hotpot user is required to choose a nickname that is different from their Google account. Then they can either start searching for businesses and reviewing them based on their experiences, or they can check what their “friends” (added in much the same way as Facebook or any other social utility) have reviewed. Based on these positive or negative reviews, Google collects data on the user’s preferences (as well as all user preferences on businesses and locations), and then offers suggestions on different businesses based on these preferences. Also, the preferences of the user’s friends will be taken into account, especially if the several users have similar reviews. So the more people who review your business, especially in a positive manner, the more information that Google will have from users. In the case of positive reviews, this will drive many more customers your way. This will all result in Google being able to more accurately recommend you to potential customers.

In terms of best-practices in order to rank highly in Place and Hotpot Searches, it is important to properly categorize your business. This is much like page optimization for SEO—if you don’t categorize your business accurately and thoroughly, you could be missing out on traffic. Also, be sure to recommend to your customers that they review your business. As of now, it seems that quantity of reviews is more important than quality in terms of Places page rank, but in terms of Hotspot its best to be positively ranked. Both factors need to be taken into account. A good way to ensure more reviews is to offer free Wi-Fi at your business, then remind customers to review you. And finally, make sure that like in standard SEO, that the citations (similar to links from sites in SEO) you are receiving are legitimate and from sites with good authority, according to Google.

The wider implications of Hotspot is that Google may be looking to compile the data that users input as their personal preferences to start to flesh out local listings for smaller population centers. Because most small towns don’t have many Places entries for businesses, this data that is entered by users living in these areas may help to expand the reach of Google. In essence, Hotspot users could be used as human crawlers for small towns. So, be sure to stay up to date with Hotspot and Google Places, as not only can they be utilized for cheap advertising, but you can have limitless people referred to your company by their trusted friends and Google in the local area as well!

First consider this:

This year, 46% of retail sales will be influenced by the web – but more than 90% of total retail transactions will occur in-store, from small neighborhood boutiques to national chains.

-       Mobile Marketing from In-Store: A Potential Game Changer, eMarketer, June 2010

When you couple that with the fact that 20% of Google’s search volume is Local (April, 2010), you can see that optimizing for local search should be a vital part of any online marketing strategy. Keep in mind that a traditional SEO is different from local SEO, because instead of optimizing websites you are optimizing locations.

Have brick and mortar stores? Get that information on the web!
This really is the most important step in making sure your store locations are seen. Knowing that more and more consumers will locate your store not only online this year, it’s well worth the short time it takes to make sure you have an updated and accurate information in a variety of local listing platforms.

1. Be consistent. Be sure your name, address and phone number are the exact same in every listing.
2. Claim your listing. Make sure another company hasn’t taken your location, and make sure you clean up duplicate listings.
3. Be there. You MUST have a physical location in the city being searched if you are going to show up.
4. Optimize your store pages. Include the address in the HTML of your store page, and if possible, create a page for each individual location.
5. Get Listed. Make sure you have a verified listing with all the big players like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, etc.

Google Places
Google Places is where you need to start to get your business listed on Google. If you have a physical address – sign up! Start by answering all of the company questions, and getting your business verified. From there you can start to add extras like videos and images.

You can also take advantage of the offers tab where you can add promotions to your map listings, and customers can print them off and bring them in. You still have time to get this information uploaded before this weekend, so take advantage of it, and try to get a leg up on the competition.

Set up a Google Merchant Center.
You have to have a Google account (like Gmail) to create a Google Merchant Center. Once you have created a Merchant Center you will be able to upload a data feed of your products, view performance reports about your products on the dashboard, and add additional information to assist your customers like tax and shipping rates.

Before uploading your data feed, you need to be aware of the strict policies:

1. All of your links must go to active pages that are actually about your items. No pop ups or redirects allowed!
2. You must be able to purchase all products being shown. If they aren’t in stock, don’t put them in your data feed. In the end you want to remember that your customers will be looking for the best deals, especially over the holidays, so why make them mad by showing a product you won’t be able to sell them?
3. You get one listing per product, and content must be unique for each item. Your descriptions must be void of promotional text, and should be kept to a concise description of the product you are selling.
4. Upload only products with fixed prices. If you require a membership or are a paid club, you unfortunately can’t upload your products. Bulk products are allowed, but you need to show the total price and the minimum order amount.

Visit the official page of policies for the Google Product Search for more information.

So once you have verified that you will be able to comply with the policies, you can submit your data feed. For the record, Google defines a data feed as:

A data feed is a file made up from a grouping of attributes that define each one of your products in a unique way that allows customers to search and find your items.

Your data feed will need to include the six required attributes, and can also include any number of the recommended attributes that Google allows. The feed can be uploaded in either an XML or a text file.

Sign up for Local Product Availability.
Local product availability is the newest feature from Google that was released last week that allows shoppers to not only see product information, but also find store locations that have that item in stock.

So I admit – I’m not the biggest shopper, and I’ve never once woken up early on black Friday to take advantage of the hottest deals. However, this year I’ve got my sights set on a stand mixer, and I have to confess that if I were to find the right price, I would scoop it up, even if that means racing to a store before dawn. So once I saw that stores were ramping up their sales even earlier this year, I started doing a little research:

As you can see I’m being shown results with images AND links for nearby stores. Though I’m a fan of the red one, I decided that the price of the mixer on the right was better, so I clicked on the nearby stores link, and was taken to a map that shows me 10 locations that carry this item, as well as their inventory levels:

I’m sure you can see by now why I’m confident that local product availability will be so important to retailers, especially during the upcoming shopping season.

So if you aren’t one of the 70 retailers that were included in the initial roll out, how can you join in? It’s simple. Just fill out this form and give Google some information about your store(s). You must also apply for a second Merchant Center account that will be used specifically for your local availability. Your site will be reviewed, and after it has been qualified you will be given a new Merchant Center account within three business days.

A few things to note: local availability is only viewable on desktops right now, and is currently only available in the US.

I hope that this has motivated you to get all of your brick and mortar stores on the web and working for you. Good luck this holiday season – I’m off to find my stand mixer!

Those setting up sites should be conscientious of the effects their URLs are capable of having in terms of search engine rank.  It is infinitely easier to do this the right way from the get-go, as opposed to going back and changing the URLs later in the game.  HOWEVER, if you have a pre-existing site, read on; you can change your URLs to optimize your site, it’s just a little more work.  It’s important to keep your URL structure consistent throughout the entire site, so you will need to change your whole site not just a few pages.

Without further ado, let’s start with the basics of URL optimization:

Keep it Short and Sweet:

Google’s crawlers put less weight on terms to the far right of the domain.  In other words, the closer the keyword is to the domain, the higher the value it is given.  It’s recommended that keywords are no further than the third to fifth term to the right.  Also, according to a study, shorter URL’s are clicked more often than their longer counterparts.

All Keywords Are Not Created Equal

Sure, having keywords in the URL are more beneficial than no keywords at all.  Keywords in spot 5 or before, are better than keywords after term 5.  Also, keywords in the filename position are better than keywords in the subdirectory or subdirectory name.

Your  Personality Should be Dynamic, Your  URLs Should Not

Search engines prefer static URLs over dynamic URLs, meaning your URLs should not contain ampersands, equal  signs, or question marks.   However, if you must have dynamic URLs , cut it down to what you really need.  This goes back to bullet one, keep it short and sweet.

Keyword Separation

Keywords should be separated by hyphens.  This makes it easier to read for people and for search engines to understand your URL structure as well as where each keyword ends and another begins.  Hyphens are best practice over underscores, although that may change in the future.  Try, if possible, not to use hyphens in the domain.

Sometimes Less is More

As we all know, search engines do not like to be fooled.  That being said, there are serious consequences for keyword stuffing.  Although, you most likely won’t get penalized too hard for keyword stuffing your URLs, it’s still bad practice.  Pick the best 2-5 keywords and try to utilize those in the URL as well as throughout the content and metadata.  Anymore than that starts to look spammy.

Change is Bad

Your URLs should remain unchanged so that search engines are able to find the pages that they had previously indexed.  If you would like to change the structure, you should redirect your old URL to the new URL. This will ensure that Google and other search engines are able to transfer your link juice and PageRank without hurting your site.

Don’t Save The Best For Last

Some search engines discount pages with a large directory depth.  A directory depth works like this:

www.Domain.com has a directory depth of 0.

www.Domain.com/directory has a directory depth of 1.

www.Domain.com/directory/subdirectory has a directory depth of 2.  (Notice, there are two backslashes)

There aren’t usually indexing issues because of directory depth but the weight can be discounted for pages that are multiple levels down in the directory structure because some search engines considering the pages nearest the domain to be the most important pages on the site.  Generally you should keep your content up to 2 or 3 subfolders deep in URLs and separate multiple keywords with dashes.

On that same note, directory names should be created for the search engines and for users.  As previously discussed, directory names should contain keywords so that search engines and humans can identify what the page is about.

To ‘www’ Or Not to ‘www’? That is The Question.

It’s common practice for people to create multiple URLs for one web page. I.E. you might want domain,com and www.domain.com, to make sure you are catching all traffic but beware, search engines treat each URL as a unique site and, thus, view this as duplicate content.

So you pick one URL, then what happens to the rest of the traffic?  The best practice to combat this issue, Is to create a permanent 301 redirect to forward your home page URL to a preferred domain.  You can use Google Webmaster Tools to set up the preferences for the www or non-www version.

Ditch the I.D.

Each time the spider comes to a URL with a session I.D., it find a different URL.  As we just discussed, the spiders view each URL as a unique page so a URL with a unique session I.D. appears to be a duplicate page, and Google assigns zero importance.  Then, when the Googlebot tries to crawl the original page, it receives an error.  Plus, everyone linking to your page will be linking to a different URL, which means every inbound link will be directed to different URLs and will not improve your page rank.

If you follow all of these tips, you should have a well optimized foundation for your site.  Next, I’d suggest creating metadata and writing content for each page, remembering to use the keywords that you had chosen for your URLs.  Since the keyword research is out of the way, you’ve paved the way for a speedy optimization process!

In October 2009, Google announced “Google Social Search,” an innovative idea that collects a Google users public digital data to form personal social circles that influence search results. In the Google model, Google users opt-in by connecting their online social profiles (Twitter, Picasa, Blogger) to their Google account. Then, Google uses this information (along with Gmail contacts and Google Reader subscriptions) to return search results that are personalized, relevant, and most useful to the searcher.

In October 2010, one year after Google’s experimental search feature, Microsoft Bing made the full leap into social search. Not to be outdone by their longtime adversary, Microsoft played a $240 million trump card by the name of Facebook. Facebook, home to over 500 million users and a plethora of personalized user information, partnered with Microsoft Bing to provide search engine results based on the “likes” of Facebook friends.

Cue social search. Begin thinking about it, begin saying it, and be prepared for your clients and co-workers to begin asking about it. The fight hasn’t quite started, but both of the proverbial heavyweights are in the ring and the bell is about to ring.

SEO & Social Search

With each advancement in search engine technology, SEO detractors start to predict the imminent decline, or even worse, death of SEO. In 2010 alone, both Google Caffeine and Google Instant caused heated discourse about the future of the search engine optimization industry. Social search is no different and while some see it as a sign of SEO’s demise, most see it as the next logical step in search modernization.

However, while I believe we are by no means seeing the end of SEO, we are quickly approaching a time where SEO experts need to vastly expand their digital expertise and online reach. To elaborate, for SEO professionals to keep up with this model of real-time, personalized search results, the role of the search engine consultant must evolve, adapt, and ultimately, delve into more intricate realms of digital content creation and distribution.

At Hanapin Marketing, we are challenging traditional expectations of SEO agencies and leading the way in integrated social media and SEO campaign strategies.  The following steps will help prepare you for the future of social search, especially in light of the most recent Microsoft and Facebook partnership.

1. Build a Community Around Your Brand

Traditional search optimization practices are not going anywhere anytime soon, but the presence of social search trends will increasingly emerge as social media outlets control more and more of the Internet market share. Therefore, it is essential that brands play an active role within social communities.

Most brands (not all) should be persistently extending their social graph, encouraging digital participation and collaboration from potential consumers. Whether you represent a B2B or B2C company, incorporating social components into marketing campaigns will provide a distinct advantage over competitors as social search becomes more expansive.

Additionally, with a thorough and well-developed social strategy, integrating social media communications into small business marketing and branding plans can be completed with few financial resources. On the other hand, time does need to be set out to develop a solid social media action plan and to keep accounts up-to-date from day to day.

2. Accumulate a fan base (likes, followers, subscribers)

In any social media action plan, there should be three primary goals:

1. Like – The first call to action for a potential fan is to simply “like” or “follow” your brand on the social network. Having a fan socially connect to your brand is a key step to being exposed to the consumer’s social graph.
2. Participate – After the initial “like” call to action, it is important to entice more participation from users. Daily questions, giveaways, and customer care and support are fantastic ways to keep the community fresh and interesting.
3. Share – The final action for a social media fan to take is to share (retweet, link, etc) the content distributed from your page. Thus, the text, images, and video need to be rich, entertaining, and informative for the respective audience. In other words, the content should deviate from traditional marketing efforts. In regards to SEO, think of social content as link bait 2.0.

3. Social Link Building

The most important component of an effective social SEO campaign is to obtain links outside of the social media realm (ideally, non-no follow links). One area that provides ample opportunity for legitimate link building as well as larger social development is blogger outreach. Links from authoritative blogs and news sources can have a significant impact on organic search listings. At the same time, bloggers are often very willing to promote coupons and discounts that will resonate well with their readers. Make sure to do your research and be informed, gracious, and professional when approaching bloggers. If you are reaching out to the right types of bloggers, they probably see a lot of promotional pitches during the course of the month.

Occasionally, consider hosting a promotional campaign from a social media platform like Facebook or Twitter. Directing blog readers to a branded social profile, rather than a corporate website, has the potential to provide a longer and more beneficial relationship.

Case Study In-Brief: Sweet Peaches Bedding, Making it Attractive

Sweet Peaches Bedding, an online baby and children’s bedding distributor, recently launched the “Share the Warmth” initiative, a promotion designed to give baby blankets to children in need while also increasing Sweet Peaches social reach. The passionate campaign is a great example of how small business can best prepare for social search trends. The “Share the Warmth” campaign blends SEO best practices with an actionable social media strategy. Below is a brief strategy summary:

a)    Social SEO Link Building – Niche Mom and Dad bloggers were contacted to spread the word for the campaign. The blogger outreach program encouraged links back to the Sweet Peaches website as well as to the Sweet Peaches Facebook page.

b)   Holiday Giving (Social Good) – Utilizing the giving spirits of the holiday season, the Sweet Peaches Social SEO campaign delivers one blanket to a charitable organization for every 12 likes on their Facebook page. The initiative encourages the cooperation and collective action from the online Sweet Peaches community to help give blankets to children in need this holiday season.

c)    Simple Call to Action – As an introductory social media campaign, the call to action for Sweet peaches is nothing more than liking the page.

d)   Additional Incentive – To sweeten the deal, each person who likes the Sweet Peaches fan page is also given a 10% off coupon to use on any item in the Sweet Peaches online store.

Ultimately, to succeed in the future of search engine optimization, digital brand managers (a future title for today’s search engine consultants) must be well versed in search engine optimization fundamentals, social media engagement and monitoring, and dynamic content distribution. Social search is a great area for innovative exploration, so let me know what your plans are for social search this next year!

The other day, one of my more hands-on clients forwarded me this article about monitoring rankings using advanced filters. After reading it I knew that I would be able to use this for all of my clients, and I started telling my colleagues about how helpful it would be for everyone to use. However, I forgot one important detail. Not all of us know about filters, let alone advanced filters. I also realized that we haven’t really implemented very many “User Defined” segments, so all in all, we’d have to start with those steps first before we truly appreciated the “golden nugget” that had been uncovered.

What are Google Analytics filters & how are they used?

There are two types of filters, predefined and advanced. Google describes them as:

• Predefined Filters: Predefined filters are a quick and easy way to accomplish some of the most common filtering tasks.
• Custom Filters: Custom filters allow more advanced manipulation of data.

So what does this mean for you, and how are they set up?

Note: When working within an account it is a good idea to always have one profile without filters. It’s important to keep a “clean” profile, and create additional profiles that contain segmented data. This will help ensure the integrity of your data in case a profile is deleted or a filter is set up incorrectly. Just imagine if you only tested on your main profile – you’d have no way of knowing what data was accurate, and if you deleted the profile, you’d have no way of getting historical data back.

Creating Predefined Filters

There are a few choices when creating a predefined filter, so you first have to decide what you want to exclude or include in your profile data. After you know what you want to track, log into your account, and choose the profile you will be working with (or create a new one). Once you are in the profile you can add/edit filters from there.

1. Exclude all traffic from a domain. Use this filter to block all traffic from a certain domain. Google help explains that Google Analytics uses reverse IP lookup to find the domain of your users, so this can come in handy for larger companies that have their IP addresses mapped to the domain instead of their ISPs.
2. Exclude all traffic from an IP address. We use this one all the time to block traffic from our IP address. This helps ensure that the testing I do for clients, and the visits I make to their site doesn’t skew the data. I know the level of traffic I generate isn’t all that much, but by excluding our IP the data is just that much cleaner, and who doesn’t like that?
3. Include only traffic to a subdirectory. This helps you track only the traffic that goes to a subdirectory of your site. This is particularly handy when you have a blog that you want to monitor traffic on. You would simply enter ^/blog/ if you want to track www.mysite.com/blog.

Creating Custom Filters

There are a variety of custom filters that you can create, each one giving you a deeper dive into the data that is captured in your Analytics account. When creating a custom filter, you first have to choose one of the following:

• Exclude
• Include
• Lowercase
• Uppercase
• Search and Replace
• Advanced

From there you will make a selection in the filter field that will help further segment your filter. There are a variety of choices ranging from Request URI, data from your campaigns (like keywords), eCommerce data, and visitor information. When paired with the choices above, you can see how quickly you will be able to create an immense number of filters to help you really hone in on certain parts of data.

User Defined Segments

If you checked out the article I referenced above, you’ll know that the other feature mentioned and used in the advanced filters they created were user defined segments. You may have seen these when viewing reports in Analytics, either on the top under advanced segments, or on the left hand side under Visitors. Either way, it’s important to understand that they are just one more powerful tool that we can use to get a better idea about who is visiting a website, and how one segment’s behavior may be different than another’s.

Still wondering why you should care? User-defined segments allow you to label your visitors based on the actions they take while on your site, such as sign up for your newsletter, fill out a contact form, or make a purchase. And considering the fact that all of these actions would lead us to believe they are probably more engaged than the average Joe, it would be really great if only we could see how they interact differently when it comes to other important metrics like time on site or pageviews, or even bounce rate.

Setting up User Defined Labels

Now don’t leave when I say this, but user-defined labels require a bit of extra code. But it’s not that bad, I promise! Firs you have to decide the name for your segment, such as “customer”, and you add a little snippet of code that helps identify that label when they reach the confirmation page. Check out this help section for specific details on adding the user-defined code. (Be sure to scroll down to the “technical notes” to make sure you understand all aspects before diving in.)

So now that you understand filters and user-defined labels, you can start to do some of the experimenting that Patrick discusses in the article above, and start gathering some pretty amazing data that will help you better optimize your accounts.

A friendly tip:When dealing with keyword reports or filters, you are bound to notice that there are visitors coming in through (not set), and it might be a fairly large number. This is because not all visitors come in from a keyword; some come in directly either by typing in your URL, or through a bookmark. You can verify that your filter is correct by calculating the percent of visitors that came in through (not set), and compare that to the percent of Direct visitors in the Traffic Sources report. They won’t be identical, but they should be fairly close.

There is a lot of information out there on link building and one of the more common ways to build links is to simply ask for them. This is basically like cold calling someone, where you actually email a blog or site, tell them a little bit about your site and ask for a link. This can be incredibly time consuming and if done right, it is a lot of work. In order to get any of those blogs to respond, you need to research their site, find a reason their readers would be interested in your product, and present a well thought out and personalized argument for why they should link to you. Carrie explains the right way to send a link request in her post, How Not To Request A Link.

Today, I’d like to focus on techniques for link building that generally see a higher return on investment and links that are, for the most part, naturally non reciprocal.  These are all strategies for building links that we use for many of our SEO clients. But, before we get started, if you don’t already have it installed, take a few minutes and download the Free mozBar from SEO Moz. This tool will come in handy when analyzing a site for its link value as it provides a quick glance of a site’s SEO metrics in addition to easy highlighting of no followed links. Do you have it downloaded? Okay, good! Let’s start with the first strategy, directories…

Directories
There are thousands of directories online that categorize and list different sites. Some directories include all products and services, while others, like Market Mommies, focus on one type of industry (in this case it is Mommy bloggers and business owners). The nice thing about these directories is that so many of them are free. Generally, they ask for a description of your product or service, a link, an image, etc., so it’s fairly easy to mass-produce the information that you can then copy and paste into each directory. The downside is that some of the more valuable directories do cost money. Many require only a one-time fee, while others require a yearly fee at a lower price. Yahoo! Directory, Business.com, Best of the Web, and Joeant.com, are a few of the directories that require a fee, but are generally worth the return. In his SEO Boy post, Five Free Directories that Can Provide Quality Links, Joe reviews his favorite free directories that are worth checking out. While all of these are general topic directories, don’t forget about those niche areas like Market Mommies. This is where you can really find a targeted audience for your site!

PR Directories
Writing and distributing a press release is another fairly quick and easy way to gain links. The nice thing about a press release is that once you write one, you can repurpose the same thing or nearly the same thing to multiple PR Directories. Don’t make the information too cookie-cutter though. The more interesting the information is, the more likely someone is going to ‘pick it up’ and spread the news. A few free press release sites to get you started include: Free Press Release, 1888 Press Release, PR Log, and Click Press.

Article or Blog Submissions
Useful articles are not only a great way to attract readers to your site, but they’re also a great way to gain a new audience but sharing your information through article or blog submission sites. Squidoo and Buzzle are two example sites and just like the directories, some of these sites focus on niche areas so you’ll know your hitting your target audience. Don’t worry! You don’t have to maintain a blog to write interesting and relevant articles. You can simply have a section on your site for Articles & Resource and then repurpose the information on other sites. Again, don’t completely copy, as this can lead to issues of duplicate content but why not reuse the information you’ve already written for your site?

Local Newspapers
I am sure that this title sounds silly. But, the idea comes from a SEOMoz Pro Seminar session on local SEO. If you are a smaller company and you feel like a tiny fish online, don’t forget about your local community. Your story may be similar to thousands of other online startups, but to your local community, you may have something interesting to say. Getting in the local or regional newspaper can be a form of link building. How? Well, most newspapers have an online version and if you’re covered in print, you’re likely to be covered online. Whether or not the article or press release will guarantee a link, I cannot say, but it’s worth a shot at getting one!

The same is true for government and educational sites. Do you have a university in your town? Find ways to partner with them. Sponsor an event or even guest lecture a business course. If you can get your URL linked from a .gov or a .edu, the link value is even greater.

Niche Relationship Building
This is a little more time consuming, but it isn’t as ‘telemarketer-ish’ as cold-emailing blogs to ask for a link. Building a relationship with other companies or bloggers that fit within your niche can be an incredibly rewarding form of link building. Maybe you sell a product that pairs nicely but doesn’t compete with another site. Build a relationship that could lead to future links from your new friend. Or maybe you sell a product that all runners would be interested in. Find forums related to running and join their conversations. Finn’s post on Link Building By Making Friends talks more about this.

Those are some of my golden nuggets on link building. Do you have any others to add?

Why Video SEO?

Because! For many topic areas/keyword phrases, it’s much easier to appear on the search engine results page with a video result than with page of your website. Additionally, videos frequently have a higher click-through rate than normal organic listings.

In addition to multimedia search results being included in major search engine SERPs, the usefulness of actual video hosting-site search functions should not be underestimated. YouTube is technically the second most-used search engine behind Google, and the audience who understands that they can use YouTube to find how-to information and tutorials rather than solely entertainment is constantly expanding. If you can offer a video that teaches something both industry-related and useful, the impact in terms of branding can be much larger from an engaging video than via text ads or organic results. Additionally, competition for search results listings for the same terms are frequently much lower for video than for other organic listings: there just aren’t as many videos yet competing for a certain niche keyword as there are web pages.

Now that we understand that the creation and optimization of videos might be a viable branding and traffic-development strategy for your website, the next steps are important. How do you “do video right” in order to maximize your chances of being discovered and making the big time? There are a few important things to keep in mind:

1. Choose an interesting, unique, relevant topic- Ah, that’s always the rub, isn’t it? Make it entertaining and differentiate yourself, but hey you’ve still gotta provide something useful to watchers. In most cases you won’t get to make random unique videos on just any topic. In order to make a video make sense for your business, you have to keep it industry-relevant or related But that doesn’t mean you can’t get creative and deliver a message in a different way, so keep in mind that unique and different DO count in terms of “shareability” and in terms of the time people will dedicate to watching your videos.
2. Use a descriptive title- Funny titles are…funny, but they usually don’t give Google or searchers any help in understanding the content of your video. Especially because a video search result won’t contain any snippet of text like the meta data associated with a web page search result, you need to make sure the title describes what someone will find there. Use whatever keywords you’d like people to find the video with. You can target keywords in your video’s title in the same way that you can target them on your website, so either keep in mind that you should keep them consistent with the keywords on the page on which the video is embedded, or do a little research to determine the video-specific competitive landscape for a keyword before you title the video. Using YouTube’s keyword tool will allow you to determine dedicated video-only search volume for keywords, and then you can use the number of competing videos which appear for your terms on Google Video or YouTube to determine the relative competition for each term. If you are hosting your video at a site like YouTube, tag your video accurately and take advantage of the video description and captioning capabilities YouTube offers to expand upon its content.
3. Embed your video- It’s better to embed your videos on your pages than link to them. Links get broken, locations get changed- and it will be sad when your excellent video inclusion no longer can be played because it was relocated or removed.
4. Create a thumbnail- If you create a useful, descriptive thumbnail image for your video rather than letting the thumbnail be a random image from the video, it will be more likely to catch a searcher’s eye and interest.
5. Add a video sitemap- You can either add video information to your sitemap, or create a separate video sitemap to direct search engines to the video content you’d like indexed. If you don’t know how, you can read Google’s video sitemap advice. Don’t forget to submit (or resubmit) your sitemap once video is integrated.
6. Leverage video analytics- If you really want to understand how people are interacting with your videos, you need to have some sort of analytics to give you that visibility. Unfortunately this issue can become complicated by several factors, including where you host your video. If you host your own video on your site (an option which gives you the most control but isn’t financially feasible for many, particularly if you have a large number of videos or high video traffic), you can track user interaction with the video and your site using Google Analytics’ Event Tracking. You can find out when people stop watching, their actions before and after watching the video, and how they got to your website in the first place.  If you customize the video player on your site for an embedded video hosted elsewhere you can still gain Analytics data, but this is a bit more complicated and you’d better have a competent programmer on staff to implement. For videos hosted on YouTube, you can use YouTube Insight to gain some understanding of who is watching your videos and where they’re coming from, but if you use Google Analytics to track other site use metrics, you’ll probably be a bit disappointed by the feature set currently available, as it won’t give you as much data as you’d like to fully understand visitor actions before or after they interact with the video, and no metrics regarding how engaged they are with the video itself. If you have videos hosted elsewhere, or on multiple sites, using an analytics package such as that offered by TubeMogul can help you gain a greater understanding of your traffic quality by video and by platform.  Overall, the best choice for you will depend on your video requirements, visitor volume, and budget, but no matter what, to get the most usefulness from your video SEO efforts, you need to make sure you can track whatever you do.

In summary- if you have videos, fix them up and start leveraging them! If you don’t have any videos, consider what areas of your business might be translated to the format and step into the arena. Interactive, engaging multimedia search is part of the future of SEO, and you need to be there with it. Once again many thanks to Rand and the SEOMoz team for their great image and video SEO tips at their Pro Conference- for more fabulous ideas for creating an overall online video strategy, check out these tips from SEOMoz team member Kate Matsudaira!