In my last post, I talked about the importance of utilizing keyword, content and directory silos to help your pages rank higher. Today, I’d like to discuss the importance of optimizing Meta titles to help boost rankings. At Hanapin, we recently updated Meta titles for a client using a new strategy, and rankings increased significantly.

Meta Data Matters

When it comes to page rank, Meta titles are a factor, but descriptions are not. (However, descriptions are what help you gain user click-through from SERPs; they are the description of your page that encourages people to click, driving more traffic to your site, so we should still be writing compelling descriptions that incorporate keywords smartly.) As SEOs, one of our primary jobs is to help a site rank highly in the SERPs, and since Meta titles are a key factor in rankings, they should be optimized regularly. However, in the grand scheme of all that an SEO can do to optimize a site, it seems that Meta data tends to get neglected. For starters, writing Meta data for a site is time consuming. When I first started working at Hanapin, I spent hours writing new Meta data for one of our ecommerce clients and I remember thinking “Oh my gosh! I wonder how often this has to be done, because it takes for-ev-er!”

However, it seems that Meta data tends to be written once and then neglected. But the fact of the matter is, you can implement excellent keyword, content and directory silos, you can link build ‘til the cows come home, you can have the best link bait of any site around, but if you don’t optimize your Meta titles you’re neglecting a key factor in helping your pages rank highly in the SERPs. The case study below demonstrates the positive results we’ve seen in an account by implementing a new Meta title strategy.

Meta Titles: A New Strategy

Some of my colleagues were recently working on optimizing the Meta data for one of their accounts. They evaluated the current Meta data and determined that it was good – highly targeted and keyword centered – but they wanted to refresh it. They decided to employ a new Meta title strategy to see if they could generate even better results. The ‘old’ structure of the titles looked like this:

Adjective Keyword Product | Company

They decided to rearrange the order of the string, moving the keyword to the front. The new structure looks like this, with the adjective being optional:

Keyword Company | (Adjective) Product

Below is a granular breakdown of upward keyword movement over a one-month period with the new Meta titles implemented. When reading the chart, the ‘Current Position’ is where the keywords are currently ranking in Google, and the ‘Up From Previous Month’ is how many positions the keywords moved up from the previous month:

The pie chart below shows changes in positions of the account’s keywords during the same one-month period used above. The chart shows that 30% of the keywords the account is ranking for saw no change in position, 27% decreased, while 43% increased in position after the new Meta title strategy was implemented. It is also important to note that the majority of keywords that decreased only fell by one position, while the average increase in positions of those that moved up was 2.15.

A final important note is that during the one-month period for which the above data was gathered, there were no other on-page optimizations or link building efforts made. The only SEO change made to the account was the Meta title strategy, and, in addition to a large percentage of keywords increasing in rankings because of the new strategy, the account also saw an increase in traffic. In sum, the data speaks pretty loudly about the importance of Meta titles in page rank, and I hope your fire for Meta data has been rekindled!

Have you tried this Meta title strategy? What results have you seen? We’d love to hear from you in the comments section below!

Sticking with the farming theme from my last post, today I’d like to cover using silos in your SEO strategy. I think it’s been too long since anyone’s talked about silos, and I find it to be a crucial SEO best practice. Silos refer to the way in which you organize and group your site content. In other words, you want each page of your site to have ‘themed,’ keyword-relevant content. If you haven’t been using silos to organize your site’s keywords, content, and architecture – or you’re not familiar at all with this concept – here’s a rundown of why to use them:

In my opinion, that alone is reason enough to utilize silos when putting together content for your site. But, here are some more reasons if you’re on the fence:

• Keep it friendly: As an SEO, your job is to make a site friendly to both search engines and users. Using silos helps you do both! For search engines, silos basically allow you to help them understand the theme of each page, and this can even help you rank better for long-tail terms because the search engines will be better able to recognize your authority on a specific topic. For users, it’s simple: you need to quickly convince them that your site is where they want to be and you offer what they’re looking for. When each page of your site is easy to navigate and easy to understand, there’s a better chance they’ll stay on your site!
• Be the authority: When each page of your site is highly organized and has relevant content, the search engines will consider your site an authority on that product or topic. Keep in mind that search engines are looking for keywords on each page as well as how relevant your content is to keywords.
• Focus inbound links: If you organize your content into keyword-rich themes for each page, this will help you focus on and distribute your links to the page content that will get the most benefit.
• Increase your rankings: The result of all of these is better rankings on the SERPs! And who doesn’t want that??

So How Do You Create Silos?

At Hanapin Marketing, we consider siloing a best practice when creating a site structure (you can also check out a great post on SEOmoz about site architecture!). As you’ve read, there are too many benefits to having highly themed, keyword-rich pages to not use silos. Search engines will love you more, users will love you more, and clients will love you more for helping their site rank higher!

There are three types of silos (and we recommend that you use all three):

Ultimately, silos really are crucial to a great SEO strategy (…and they’re a little bit common sense, too). Utilizing silos will make your site more search engine and user friendly, you’ll be able to focus inbound links, and you can become an authority on your product/service – all while improving your page rank! When done right, silos will improve your site.

Yesterday, roughly one week later, I performed the test again wondering if Starbucks would still be the winner. I was once again surprised to see the results. Starbucks had fallen off, in fact it wasn’t even found on the first page of the results. This time it was Mashable but the second result remained consistent with CommonDreams.org.

I waited about 10 minutes and then searched again, just to see if it would change, as if this was a random fluke. While the top result remained consistent with Mashable, the second and third results swapped places as well as the fourth and fifth positions. The American Red Cross, was now in position five instead of four.

This little experiment really got me thinking about all the different factors that go into determining rankings and what does it all really mean. What makes Starbucks the “authority” on something as general as “about us” one week and then Mashable is the “authority” on it the next? How do these sites rank at the top for a term that is so general, that is found on almost every single website?

Out of curiosity, I ran a quick SEOmoz Linkscape Report just to see if there was something I was missing that could help tell me what the real difference between these two pages was. What I found was that Mashable has a ton of links (duh!) which is the key differentiator that impacted most of the metrics. But if that is the case, and overall Mashable comes out ahead on most metrics, why was Starbucks at the top last week?

We all know the factors that help determine if and where your page will rank:

• Use of keyword on page as well as in title tag and meta description
• Links in terms of both number as well as quality
• Content – is it quality, is it unique, is it relevant and are you adding new
• Trustworthiness of the domain
• Plus many, many others

But this experiment proves to me that while those things continue to be important, some of the other factors could be having a larger impact and they may not be top of mind.

• Social media – are people loving your site and sharing it with others? A presence on social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter, can only help spread the word further.
• PR, Buzz & Popularity – are you in the news recently, leading to a lot of people searching? The fact that the American Red Cross is now showing up in the top five, likely due to both the relief & fundraising efforts for Japan along with the fact that March is Red Cross month, tells me that this is even more important than ever before.
• Click-through rate – your site needs to show up, but also people need to click on it to show that is matching what they are looking for. If people aren’t clicking on your site even though it is in the #3 or #4 spot, that signifies that it may not be as relevant.

Bottom line – you need to put together a holistic approach to your SEO efforts. While the SEO fundamentals are important (such as keywords, content and link building), there is so much more that needs to be considered. By stepping back and developing an SEO strategy that includes things like a social media plan along with PR efforts, you can make sure that you are getting the most out of everything you do for your website. Who knows, maybe your site can be the next top result for “About Us.”

Sneaky!

A few years ago, I was checking out websites that ranked for keywords for a client. This one site kept ranking #1 – all the time, for every one of my keywords. It didn’t make sense. The site was some ambiguous blog on popular topics back before blogs were a buzzword. He was getting traffic and getting clout for the traffic. But how? It turned out there were hidden links in the source code to a very problematic link farm.

oo! Double Sneaky!

Add to that robot content, doorway pages, dynamic page generation and you get a slimy ball of snake oil soiling your mouse cursor.

Many changes have been made to the search engine algorithms to made these techniques worthless or punish the website for doing it. How does one punish a website? Well, how about removing it from the index altogether?

The other side of unethical SEO is the exploiting the customer.  Over-promising to rank you better, faster and stronger and yet under-delivering.
Here are some exploits I’ve seen:
Examination of a websites SEO worthiness – $83,000. Yeah. I saw that while checking out an
SEO guy’s cached page. I still get spam from him.

Optimized content chunks placed on each web page – $60,000. Wait What? Yes, a New York corporation paid this much for this company to write a chunk of readable text with the target keywords and pasted on every possible webpage they have.

I’m guessing that these two companies just wanted to land just one client and then move to another state. Oh wait! It could be the same person!

The real problem is the dissemination of outdated or bad SEO. We are all guilty of it because we can post a blog post from last year and the suddenly the rules change. It’s important to read the latest info available, check dates of postings. Outdated SEO: If you see anything from 2004, its probably best to move on and find something fresher. This is from 2008, but it at least serves as a way to shed off some old “methods.”

All this brings me to a real life instance of Ethical SEO practice. I am going to relate the conversation to you and I will ask you, readers, a question. I’d like to hear from you. I’ll go ahead and say their are no wrong answers.

Colleague: “Hey, do you still do some stuff on the side?”
Me: “Sometimes, I rarely have time anymore, what’s up?”
Colleague: “I have a friend that owns this Widget shop and he owns 10 different domains in different combinations of Widget-city.com and he needs someone to redirect them to a single web page. He doesn’t want a website or anything online. Just a page for his contact information. He wants them to call.”
Me: “uh … ok. He can’t find someone to do that?”
Colleague: “Oh yeah, he got one bid for $1200 and another guy will do it for $500. But the second guy is really busy and it’s been a month and he really wants to get this going.”
Me: “…”

Can anyone spot the problem(s) here?

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!

Over time, Internet users have learned how search should look, and more specifically, what information search engines will deliver.  A query is entered and a list of links to relevant pages is returned. Yet as the Web evolved from text based information to multimedia information, content became more than just Web links and transformed into audio, video, and image files.

Thus, a surge of user-generated multimedia content (video blogs, podcasts, photo albums, etc.) began to rule the Web and change the tradition of Internet information organization and distribution. Search got more crowded in the era of Web 2.0 as YouTube and Facebook popularized the concept of multimedia and social search.  Most major search engines evolved to include this content, but the general public’s concept of search engines has been slower to change. Furthermore, SEO rules and best practices have not kept up with the new sources of content.

Before I begin to explain how to optimize multimedia content, it is probably best to define what I mean by the terms multimedia and multimedia search. Multimedia search includes results for both audio and visual files (think YouTube & Google image search). Information is delivered in a way very similar to general linked search results and with any large search engine, multimedia results will be generated in addition to web page files. Overall, multimedia files are organized by keyword themes much like Web pages; however, with the rapid rise in social sharing of user generated content over the past half decade, organizing and distributing the information is an issue of significant importance.

Needless to say, a lot of mistakes have been made in labeling and optimizing this content for search engine crawlers. Fortunately for us, a great window of opportunity has been left for those savvy in SEO.  Today I’ll provide 8 tips on how to best rank for images.

1)   Surrounding Text – The most vital part of optimizing your images is providing fresh, relevant, and themed content around the image. Search engines will use the text surrounding your image to define, organize, and display your image. Thus, load your keywords in the places that count: the header tags above your image, the content describing your image, and the labels that caption your image.

2)   Alt Tags – Basically, an “alt tag” is a text description provided in the HTML to explain your image when it is unavailable or cannot load for any number of reasons. In the case of SEO, when a search engine bot crawls your site, it is unable to see the page as your visitors will see it. Thus, a search engine crawler will never be able to see any of your beautiful Golden State Bridge pictures.

An important step in the SEO process is to describe your image to the crawler using the alt tag. In addition to helping your overall image rank, this process also allows you to strengthen your Web page optimizations by utilizing target keywords. Although the alt tag has lost some of its influence in the search engine algorithm over the years, this is still an important step for both your users and your SEO needs.

As for some general rules to follow:

• Try to use short and complete sentences to describe the image
• Focus on more detailed, and longer tail keywords
• Always vary your alternate text, and never use the same alt tags for multiple photos.

3)   Above the Fold – I was once told about this thing called a “newspaper.” Apparently, the best way to appeal to your audience and to grab readers for a newspaper was too put the most intriguing and important information above the fold (or in other words, the part of the page that could be seen when a newspaper was folded in half and laying out on display).

Times haven’t changed too much since then and in Web design and layout the best images are still best served above the virtual fold (i.e. the top of the page where no scrolling is necessary to see content).  Search engines will give more value to content on the top half of the page, including images. Particularly, Google will reward you for this by displaying images next to your stories in the Google News and Blog feeds, which is a wonderful eye catcher to a potential reader.

4)   File Location – This tip refers to the actual place you store the original image file. Hopefully this will serve as an easy guide:

• Ok/odd: Separate domain – siteimages.com/
• Better: Subdomain – images.site.com
• Best: Subfolder – site.com/images/

5) Embed Links – Rather than directly linking to image sources, it is better to embed the source on your page from your own server. Mostly, this is a matter of having control over the content. If you direct link from another page, a number of things can go wrong that will be out of your control (for example, the image changes, the image is removed, or the server crashes).

6) Image Title & File Name – The image title and file name serve as two more places to utilize your target keywords and to inform crawlers of your page and image theme. Here are a few best practices to keep in mind:

• Keep the titles and filenames short
• Use more detailed and longer tail keywords, if possible
• For File Names – Use hyphens, rather than underscores to separate multiple words in the file name.
• For Image Titles – Make these informative as this content is displayed when users hover over images.

7)   Image Size – Once an issue of concern, image sizes matter much and much less these days. My only advice here: Keep it larger than 400X300

8)   The Bonus tip - Check out this fun and addicting game from Google and kill an hour of work… Tell your boss you are “brainstorming.” In fact, this game does provide great insight on how other people will label images and provide you information on how to narrow down your descriptions to provide the most relevant and concise information.

That’s it for me, but before I go, us here at SEO Boy would like to give a quick thank you to the SEOMoz Pro Conference for inspiring this series. That said, good luck with your image optimization this week and check back next week for Jessica’s tips on video optimization!

Let me preface by saying, this isn’t a beginners guide to SEO. I’m not going to tell you how to optimize your site. What I am going to do is give you the tools to protect yourself from investing in the wrong website. I’ll give you the knowledge to find the right people to accomplish your goals and make your first jump into the web a successful one from an SEO standpoint. First and foremost, this is going to cost you. I can’t say how much but it won’t be free. Developer prices vary as much as the quality of work does. You can get good work for low prices and bad work for high. What you want is to find great work that fits your budget – easy enough.

As I mentioned before, you’re have a real advantage in that you can get your site designed with the core elements of SEO right off the bad. The only downside is that site history is a component of search engine rankings and you currently have none. With that said, you’ve got to start somewhere and now is the time to do it.

The first thing you should be doing is research. You’ll want to know enough to talk with SEO pros in their language. There are a lot of developers that don’t know the first thing about SEO so even a basic understand can help weed those from your potential hiring pool. Anyone can be intimidated by technical jargon so get the lingo down and have a basic strategy in mind first. I’m not saying become a guru, but if you don’t understand what to ask for, it’s more difficult to get what you need. Content is king but link building, keywords, meta data, site structure, and internal linking should all be areas of initial research. You should be able to easily grasp these topics in a week by investing an hour or so every night. While researching, prepare some questions to ask potential developers.

Once you know the basics, the next step is to research your competitors websites. Think of the two or three main keywords or phrases you would use to describe what you do. Type those keywords or phrases into Google and study the top sites that pop up. Recognize the elements of SEO you learned while researching and see how the top sites in your industry implement them. Try to find areas on each of the sites that you like. Take notes to eventually show your developer but screenshots are better. If you notice something you like but aren’t sure if it’s SEO friendly, do additional research. For example, if you see a video that seemed to work, do some research on Video SEO.

One of the most important aspects of your build is implementing an SEO friendly Content management System (CMS). Understand what it is and why it’s important. With a good CMS in place, you’ll be able to handle the majority of your content additions going forward and won’t have to rely on a developer to make simple updates or changes. Even if you don’t have time to do these updates yourself, it’s easy enough for an employee to handle it on the occasions something comes up. That’s the beauty of CMS.

OK, so you’ve done your research and can talk the talk. You aren’t a pro but you aren’t scared of SEO either. What do you do now? The point of all of this is so you can scout the proper development team. Go find a developer that knows what they’re doing and has a strong background in SEO. Ask them about their SEO strategy and if it doesn’t match up with what you’ve learned in your initial research, move on. Remember, SEO is an ongoing process but you want to have the proper foundation to build upon. Make sure they are grounded in the basic principles you researched. Those aspects I highlighted need to be at the core of every website.

You’ll want to look into some of the sites they’ve built and see how they are ranking in the search engines. Ask them to show you their work and ask specific questions about the SEO strategies they used on these sites and where the sites rank for their keywords. If they have high ranking sites – meaning sites with several target keywords in the top 10 results – find out what was involved in putting them together. You want to find people who are able to work with minimal direction so they don’t take up all your time. If you find their sites rank well but they don’t do creative, keep in mind you’ll have to put a similar team together or go someplace else. Perhaps they can recommend the creative team that was involved in that site build that is ranking well? Either way, having to put a team together isn’t a bad thing but having the option to one stop shop has its advantage in saving you time and gaining their experience working with each other.

Regardless of if you’re team comes from the same shop or several, discussing creative is the next step. Talk through the areas that are involved in SEO, specifically on the content side of things. Look into their keyword strategy. If you sell shoes and they recommend ‘shoes’ as your main keyword, it’s probably not a good idea unless you’re Nike, and even Nike doesn’t show up on the top results page when searching ‘shoes’ (although their site isn’t the most SEO friendly). Sometimes the competitive environment is too strong to battle for broad keywords. Finding a good balance of search results and competition is what you’re looking for so find someone that understands the concept. You’ll want a strong keyword strategy from the onset so you don’t have to fix it later.

One last thing you should cover is the visual element of your site. You want your site to look pretty but it’s important to understand how images affect SEO. You could have the best looking site in the world but if people can’t find the site, what have you accomplished? The battle between creative and SEO is hard fought but there is a good medium and you want to find the person who understands it. If their work looks good and is highly ranked, it’s a fair assumption they know what they’re doing.

Once you find a developer and creative team you feel comfortable with, bring your notes from your competition research and collaborate towards a great site, which will allow you to stay on top of your SEO goals. It’s important to understand that building a site is just the first step but I’m a firm believer in doing things right the first time. If you find you don’t have time to keep up with your ongoing optimizations, you can always hire someone to do that as well. Unfortunately, that’s a whole other blog post.

We all understand that SEO isn’t performed in a vacuum.  In addition to the on-site optimizations you must continue refining and expanding throughout the life of a website, there are external linking opportunities, linkbait campaigns, social media integration, and all of the other relationship-building activities that help your site gain respect and popularity. You have to interact with other people and understand what they need from you in order to fully leverage the power of SEO. When it comes down to it, you’re probably doing SEO for a business reason. You want people to find your site so they can buy your stuff. But: unless you’ve been lucky enough to invent Awesome Item X and no one else sells it, there are probably a million other people who also want people to find their site and buy the same stuff.  So if you really want to take advantage of all of the opportunities available to you, you’ve gotta mind not only your own business but everyone else’s too. SEO: where it pays to be nosy.

The main drawback here is that being nosy can be a lot of work. You’re trying to write some copy and set up Website Optimizer tests and do all of the stuff you need to do on your own site, and it can feel a bit like being lazy when you stop to take a few minutes to browse other peoples’ websites. But it’s such an important part of SEO, as it can give you valuable insight into industry standard website features, competing special offers, keywords to target, and new industry players. The point of it all is: if you haven’t checked out what everyone else is doing lately, now is as good a time as any. Stop character counting your meta descriptions for an hour, grab a Mai Tai and a blank Excel workbook, and sit back and start snooping.

There are as many ways to approach competitive research as there are people doing it, but here are a few ideas, ranging from free and very high-level to paid and more detailed:

Look up your keywords in search engines. This is pretty easy. You have your target keyword list? Look all of them up! Click on the sites in the SERPs. For those site which are ranking more highly than your own, take notes on anything that they are doing differently. It wouldn’t hurt to keep track of which sites are appearing for each keyword, too, as there will likely be a significant pattern of overlap where the same sites show up for multiple target keywords, and tracking those sites which appear in high positions repeatedly can give you an idea of your biggest competitors.

If you know who your competition is, or only want a high-level analysis of opportunities available, there are free SEO tools like those which you can find at www.compete.com or SEOmoz such as Open Site Explorer that you can use to comparatively analyze various measures of rankability. Both also have reasonably priced paid versions of their tools, and really, I think it’s worth it to pay a bit for a group of tools that will vastly improve your ability to analyze your site for internal improvements and search for competitive advantages.

We’ve been using Advanced Web Ranking to track our own rankings and for competitive analysis for over a year, and it’s turned out to be a very useful tool that will do a lot of things for you at once, saving you time in gathering data so you can focus your energy on analyzing it! If you’re unfamiliar with the tool, it basically takes your specified keyword list and your domain and determines the rank of each of those keywords on any specified search engines you choose. It also, helpfully, will indicate exactly which page of your site is ranking for those keywords, as well as which other sites are ranking for each keyword and where they are in comparison to you. Additionally, it offers comparative metrics between any dates on which you ran a ranking analysis and data about keyword density in copy, meta elements, alt tags, titles, and links.

Here are a few of its most useful features, and how you can use this data to create a pretty excellent internal analysis and competitive profile for your site.

Current Rank:

This handy tab shows you your position, previous position, and URL on which your keywords rank in each search engine. You can see data for all keywords collectively for one or more websites for any two dates on which you pulled ranking information. This allows you to determine exactly which page is ranking for which keyword for each search engine- sometimes there are surprises and the page you intended to rank for Keyword A isn’t ranking for it at all, so this is a good SEO double-check to ensure that the pages that you hope are best-optimized for a particular term are in fact the best-ranking.

Search Engine Rank:

This tab will show you, on an individual keyword basis, your position, previous position, and URL for which you are ranking for all search engines simultaneously. They’re interestingly not always the same URLs in each search engine, so this report is especially useful for identifying areas where you have large ranking gaps between various search engines and can help you develop a plan to address them individually to the extent possible.

Top Sites:

Very useful! This is a lot of info, but super important and neat. For each search engine, and each keyword you identify, you can see the top 10 ranking URLs and their change from the previous run date. Much like running your own search on Google, but everything is done for you and all you have to do is download this report in Excel format and analyze. Also, you don’t have to remember to do it at any set time increment, and you won’t run out of minutes in the day to sit down with your Mai Tai and search, because you can schedule the updates to run in any increment of time you’d like and the data will just be waiting for you when you’re ready to analyze.

Keyword Analysis:

This report needs to be run separately from the ranking update, but it analyzes your site’s text, titles, meta elements, links, and alt tags for keyword density and prominence and then scores them. Similar tools are available through SEOmoz’s paid subscription, but if you’re buying AWR you may as well use this one too! It’s good for identifying pages on which you are missing image alt tags or meta descriptions, as it will report them, and also good for identifying possible “oops” keywords- if the keywords it identifies your site as being dense with are not those which you intend to rank for, you should reanalyze your on-site SEO strategy.

Overview Report:

Most of the reports that can be run in the AWR interface can also be saved as HTML files, PDFs, or Excel files, and this is one of the most useful for high-level comparison and client reporting as well. This report will list your keywords and their performance for your specified URL for a comparative date range. If you have an identified competitor, you can add their URL to your list of sites to pull keyword rankability for and generate the same report which will compare your performance. This report is also very useful in identifying trends that occur after significant algorithm changes in the search engines, such as Google Caffeine introduction or the Yahoo-Bing merger.

Using a paid tool to manage your competitive research is much more streamlined and convenient than manually searching out competitors, but no matter your strategy it’s an important exercise to complete at least occasionally to ensure that you’re not falling behind in features, offers, or usability and that your rankings are remaining comparable. Please let us know if you have any favorite competitive research tools or other rank-tracking methods!

From the Beginning: Adding a new site to Google WMT is incredibly easy. All you need to start is a Google Account, so if you already have a Gmail set up for the site, or an Adwords Account, you are all ready to go. From the WMT login page just login and follow the steps below:

• Click “Add Site” once logged in to Google WMT
• Verify your site using one of the options below the ‘add a meta tag’ option, or ‘Upload an HTML file’ option.
• Click ‘Verify Site’and Google WMT will check to see whether you have added the meta tag or the HTML file to your site.
• Start analyzing— it will take Google a bit to begin collecting data on your site, but soon you’ll be able to explore the three main tabs, Site Configuration, Account Diagnostics, and Your Site on the Web.

Site Configuration: This section of Webmaster Tools is what you will cover when you are first getting started. Under this section you can control general settings, like preferred domain, and crawl rate. You can also tell Google about any change of address to your site, while the other tabs in this section cover the basics of a site, including:

• Sitemaps: Once you create your site’s XML sitemap, this is where you will submit and update as needed. The tool will also tell you how many of your sitemap’s URLs are indexed by Google.
• Crawler Access: Once you create your sitemap, you will also want to generate a Robots.txt , which will help prevent the bots from crawling unnecessary sections of your site. This tab will help you test your Robots.txt, as well as generate it.
• Site Links: Here you find additional links to your site that Google will sometimes generate in order to help users navigate your site. Site links are automatically given to certain sites and while you cannot choose your links, you can opt to remove them, though this is not suggested.

Account Diagnostic: The diagnostics tab on the left provides some good information about your site that you do not want to overlook. If you are using Webmaster Tools to try and combat a poor performing site, this is one of the first tabs you will want to review. Under Diagnotstics, you will find the following information:

• Malware: Detects any malware on your website
• Crawl Errors: Identifies errors as the Googlebot crawls your site (404 errors, time out URLs, URL’s restricted by robots, no follows, http errors).
• Crawl Stats: Identifies the Googlebot activity on your site in the last 90 days including the number of pages crawled per day, the number of kilobytes downloaded per day, and the time spent downloading a page
• HTML Suggestions: Shows potential problems with site’s meta data, such as duplicate data, missing data, data that is too long or too short, or non-informative metadata. You can easily download the information for easy reference while you correct any of the problem areas.

Your Site on the Web: This tab is a great source for stats about your website and its relationship with not only searchers but other sites on the web.

• Search Queries: This section shows the percentage of searches for a particular keyword, the keyword itself and the position organically, in which the keyword is ranked via Google. It’s a great source for identifying that you’re receiving the traffic you want, while also providing insight about traffic that perhaps you don’t want.
• Links to Your Site & Internal Links: Here you can see all of the anchor text located within your site, as well lists of the links that point to your site including internal and external.
• Keywords: This section identifies the most common keywords Google found when crawling your site. This is a good indication as to whether or not you are successfully hitting the keywords you’re trying to target.
• Subscriber Stats: This WMT Report is only used for sites that have a feed that users can subscribe to, like a blog.

Labs: This section provides a couple of extra tools that can be particularly useful. The Fetch as Googlebot allows you to see what your site looks like to bot. This can help you make sure the bots can read your most important information and that it isn’t buried in the bottom of the page somewhere. The is also the Site Performance tool which provides some general statics for your site including load time which can play a big role in rankings.

While the stats and tips provided by Google Webmaster Tools are Google specific, the tool can help your site be more easily found on other search engines as well as many engines use similar performance indicators. To be sure that you’re covering all of your bases however, it is our recommendation that you also open an account with Bing Webmaster Center and Yahoo Site Explorer.

In 2010, Gatorade released a new commercial line called “Gatorade has Evolved.” The commercial features a catchy new song by the same title. The jingle even stirred a buzz and a little confusion. The confusion started to make me mad. I was running into what I confirmed where misconceptions about the song:

“It was written by Bo Diddley.”
“It’s an Otis Redding Song.”
“It’s not available for commercial release.”

I discovered the song was written by David Banner and was sung not by Otis Redding, (though I can hear why people thought that) but by Kermit Quinn. And, sure, sites like the AOL Radio Blog were right that the song wasn’t available for commercial release (yet), but what they didn’t point out that the MP3 was sitting on the Gatorade site.

I took my findings,  posted it on my poor, neglected site 11 days ago on a Sunday night at 6pm. By midnight I had close to 300 hits.

After that I was I was getting about 600 hits a day off that post. More importantly, I was hovering around the top 3 for “Gatorade Has Evolved,” and many other variations of the term. Especially any variation of the search term with “MP3,” “David Banner,” “Kermit Quinn,” and even “Otis Redding” in it.

Now people who pay more attention to their site have jumped in. Especially those with MP3 sites that are offering the song now. And they NBA playoffs have less games a night / week so the commercial airs less. My rankings have fallen in some spots and I dunno how much I want to fight to keep the rankings…or have the time.

But the most shocking to me was that Gatorade didn’t appear in the search terms for “Gatorade Has Evolved” or “Gatorade Evolve” until the last couple days. They can thank bloggers for linking to their page because their onsite SEO isn’t doing anything. Heavy flash, hidden content…

by the way, Gatorade, running the same lines of content between P tags and behind your Flash animation on every page of your site isn’t helpful. In fact, some might think it to be hidden text and, gasp, duplicate content. Oh yeah, UNIQUE META DATA per page wouldn’t hurt. And are you really trying to put the same Google verification tag on every page of the site? 2002 called. They’re glad you’re keeping the faith.

Unless you expect people to be able to type the easy-to-remember:

http://www.gatorade.com/default.aspx#program?s=g-evolve

The point is my poor, neglected blog shouldn’t be kicking an international brand’s a** on their own keywords. I know I’ve taken close to 4 thousand hits they should have had and I didn’t jump in til the second round of the NBA playoffs. I can’t imagine the 10s of thousands of visitors they could have had. And though, yes, I sent my fair share of traffic to them and played my part in their World Wide Rave, my point is their site should be right along with us collecting and converting that traffic from the moment that commercial first aired.

That traffic should lead to conversions. For an international brand site with Gatorade’s age, history, backlinks, and promotion machine, that’s leaving money on the table.

It’s almost inexcusable.

Are you letting these kinds of golden SEO opportunities slip through your fingers? Oh I hope not.

And Gatorade (PepsiCo), Thank You.

(photo credit: 1)  wynk and 2) me via Flickr)