Archive for the ‘Site Architecture’ Category

Where Does Site Traffic Come From?

Monday, January 11th, 2010

Of all the online marketing channels – organic search/SEO, referrals and PPC – where does the majority of traffic to a site originate from?

Does someone do a search on Google using keyword phrases to search for the products and/or services you offer online?

Or, are they referred to your site from an online directory like YellowPages or Google Maps? Or, do they see your PPC or social network ad?

Data recently compiled at HubSpot definitively proves that organic search is the primary driver of traffic to websites – which underscores the importance of them being search engine friendly. From the survey of 2,100 of its customers, the company shows that site traffic coming from online searches is 67.2% greater than from referral sites and 156% greater than PPC.

They further break the data down by industry – traffic from search engines is much higher in manufacturing, medicine/health services and retail. Referrals play a more important role in other industries like technology, software and online marketing but still does not exceed online search as a primary source of traffic.

So from this data, it really depends on your industry in determining what you allocate to each of these online marketing areas.

In terms of organic search and SEO, Google is by far the most popular search engine still, handling 71% of online searches this past November according to Hitwise. The two closest were Yahoo! at 15% and Bing at 9%.

It’s clear though – having a website optimized for the search engines is key to driving traffic.

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Posted in Online Marketing, SEO Technology, Site Architecture | 3 Comments »

Benefits of Installing Site Search on your Website

Friday, January 8th, 2010

As the Internet has evolved over the years, websites have grown more complex. You don’t need me to tell you that many websites contain a wealth of information on their respective niches.

And with the advent of social networking and other means of finding and disseminating information, web users are growing ever pickier about the websites they visit. That’s why installing site search on your site is an important step in building search engine rankings and boosting conversion rates.

There’s many reasons why more site visitors are immediately going to a site search to find information on a website. These include confusing navigation, cluttered design and even pure impatience. In fact, studies suggest that a person will leave a site if the search function is poor or not there around 80% of the time.

But site search has even more benefits for webmasters and SEO professionals. With the proper analytical tools, site owners can get a lot of information about their site visitors and how they navigate around their site. You can transform your site into a “customer centric” from a static “one size fits all” approach.

Take a look at our newest article in the search engine optimization knowledge center regarding the benefits of site search and stay tuned to the SEO-e blog for recommendations on good site search tools you can easily purchase for your website.

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Posted in Online Marketing, SEO Technology, Site Architecture | 2 Comments »

Use Caution with Session IDs and Dynamic URLs

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

In order for a spider to crawl your website and index it in the search engines effectively, the web address or URL for your webpages should be as simple as possible.

As we’ve discussed in the past, sites with static URLs that are simple are crawled and indexed much more efficiently than those containing dynamic characters and session Identifiers.

Session IDs are most common in ecommerce sites and are embedded in a URL so the website can track their customers from page to page and they are used keep track of items in a customer’s shopping cart. But these IDs cause problems for search engine spiders because they create a large number of links for the spider to crawl. This can create a situation where the search engine indexes essentially the same page over and over. Search engines like Google refer to it as a ‘spider trap’.

Below are a couple of examples of how session IDs can give the appearance of an endless number of pages within a single site. A spider coming to your website may find a page with the following URL:

http://www.yoursite/shop.cgi?id=dkom2354kle03i

This page gets indexed but when the spider returns later to look for new content, it finds the following:

http://www.yoursite/shop.cgi?id=hj545jkf93jf4k

This is actually the same page as before, just with a different special session ID but the spider sees it as a brand new URL. Because of this confusion, search engine spiders are programmed to avoid pages containing these session IDs.

While Google and others are trying to improve their ability to crawl URLs with session IDs, it’s best to avoid them whenever possible. It’s best to avoid them until you absolutely must track what a customer is doing, like when they start adding items to their shopping cart.

It’s also possible to store session IDs in cookies rather than URLs. Changing this may require the expertise of a web programmer though.

The gist of the story is this – the more dynamic variables in a URL, the more difficult it will be for search engines to index your pages. To maximize your position in the search engines, use simple URLs that are easy to locate, crawl and index.

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Posted in Site Architecture, Tip of the Day | No Comments »

What Extension Should I Choose for My Domain?

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

Choosing a domain name for your new website is the first step to developing your online brand and building rankings in the search engines.

But in addition to the domain name, you need to choose the domain extension as well – the .com, .net, .org, .biz or .info at the tail end of a web address.

In terms of ranking high in the search engines, .net or .org extensions are given equal weight. Plus, you are likely to find more domain names available with these extensions which can be purchased from their owners for a cheaper price than .com extension domain names.

.com extensions hold some advantages, mainly because of most web users’ familiarity with that domain extension. Not controlling the .com version of your domain means you could perhaps lose out on what’s called type-in traffic, or traffic that comes when a searcher types their query directly in their browser’s address bar.

Also, if someone else owns the .com version of your domain name, they can possibly bleed traffic from your site if people type in your domain with the .com extension. This is okay if your main goal is to rank high in the search engines but if you think this diversion of traffic will be a problem, be sure you can at least control the .com version of your name or choose another name altogether.

If you’re based or your target market is outside the United States, you can also consider country-specific domains like .co.uk (United Kingdom) or .co.in (India) for example. You will certainly garner an advantage in the search engines for people in the respective country performing search queries.

.info extensions are generally very cheap and abused by spammers, which is why they’re not recommended for building rankings in the search engines. The other domain extensions you’ve probably seen, .gov and .edu, are reserved exclusively for recognized educational institutions and agencies of the U.S. government.

Links from these sites though are extremely valuable.

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Posted in SEO Technology, Site Architecture, Tip of the Day | No Comments »

Importance of Good Information Architecture

Monday, December 7th, 2009

Having a successful content and information oriented website means it has to be organized in a way that’s easy for users to navigate. This not only improves your conversion rate but your site’s rankings in the search engines as well.

It’s all too common for sites to have a lot of content – articles, blogs, video clips, photos, etc. – that’s totally disorganized and cluttered with noises, ads. Suffice it to say this would not lead to a good experience for any user. Without good user experience, no amount of optimization will help your site’s rankings.

So how can I be sure my site’s information architecture is the best it can be to lure in the most visitors and make the most conversions?

Understanding how people search online is the first step to developing good information architecture. When searching online, we want content that’s fast and simple and in small chunks…we like to stay on task.  Google knows this so to have high rankings, create sites using keywords you know people respond well to.  You can integrate head and long tail keywords to tap into the main terms people use when looking for what you’re offering.

Having too many links to off-site pages especially messes with a site’s information architecture. Having too much scattered and loosely connected information causes the site/page to lose its core message.

Accommodating your users is the number 1 goal of your website’s content. For it to work to your maximum advantage, it has to be setup in a way that doesn’t inhibit user friendliness or the search engine’s ability to crawl it.

Search engines look closely at user-friendliness when ranking websites. And especially since Google may begin factoring site speed into their ranking algorithm, flashy sites undoubtedly will suffer in terms of their ranking and conversion.

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Posted in Site Architecture, Writing for search engines | No Comments »

Pros and Cons of Canned vs. Custom Shopping Cart Optimization

Friday, November 20th, 2009

Since the holiday season is upon us, now is the time to think about your shopping cart…anytime is good for that matter.

It’s relatively easy to optimize a shopping cart – the buyer has already been persuaded as they are well into in the buying stage. You don’t need pages of persuasive content to get them to convert. Shopping carts are often where the low hanging fruit is so a small investment can pay off big.

Shopping cart optimization solutions span a wide-range from really simple to really custom and complex – this post is only intended to outline the pros and cons of 3rd party and custom shopping carts

3rd party shopping carts

Also known as “canned” shopping carts, pros of a third party shopping cart are lower cost, quicker marketing time and the convenience you get from having a shopping cart that comes with all the bells and whistles like payment gateway, fraud protection, SSL encryption and so on.

On the flip side of this, the cons include a lack of control over the look and feel, the user experience, and difficulty in testing and analyzing user data.

Custom shopping carts

They are just that, custom. So one of the pros of course is how a custom shopping cart can more easily integrate with the rest of your site. Also, you can analyze user data more easily, make changes much easier and integrate it with testing tool like Google Website Optimizer much easier than canned shopping carts.

But they do cost more, carry more operational overhead and it’s slower to market custom shopping carts than canned ones.

Which route you choose mainly depends on the financial and IT resources you have at your disposal. Even if you’re currently using one the most restrictive 3rd party shopping cart, you can optimize it and see a worthy return on your investment. Many who initially optimize their 3rd party carts move on to build a custom one in the future to tap into more opportunities.

The moral of this story – don’t think just because you’ve got a generic 3rd party canned shopping cart you can’t optimize it. Especially with the Christmas season fast approaching, the time to optimize is now.

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Proper Anatomy of a URL – An SEO Cheat Sheet

Friday, October 16th, 2009

One topic that comes up often when optimizing a website for the search engines involves URLs. How should they be constructed, optimized and what do each of the pieces mean are common questions.

As we explain in an SEO knowledge center article from a few months ago, a URL should be as simple as possible so the search engines can easily crawl and index it. If you’re trying to achieve high search engine rankings in the shortest amount of time, URLs need to be short and contain different keywords for efficient crawling.

Dynamic URLs like you see on many ecommerce sites can overtax a search engine spider computer program trying to crawl and index your site. A site with short, static URLs will be crawled and indexed more efficiently and ranked higher.

But what are the different parts to a URL and thus how would I know if mine is setup correctly?

Well, Dr. Pete at SEOMoz just released a wonderful cheat sheet that outlines the different parts of a URL, including parts where Google looks for keyword phrases and other tips to optimize your URL for the search engines.

It’s an interesting chart where I was able to learn a couple things myself about URLs.

This all reminds me of an old saying – “the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know”.

It’s true, you never can stop learning. So take a look, download and keep this little URL cheat sheet handy for future reference.

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Posted in SEO Technology, Site Architecture | No Comments »

HTML Sitemap or XML Sitemap – Which is more valuable?

Friday, October 9th, 2009

Google software engineer Matt Cutts answers a question from a SEO in India about whether it’s better to build a HTML sitemap or XML sitemap.

An HTML sitemap is basically a good old fashioned landing page that contains links to all the pages on your website. It’s very useful for users trying to locate specific information. Larger sites may require several HTML sitemap pages but for smaller sites, they are a perfect resource for visitors trying to figure out what’s on your site.

Check out SEO Advantage’s HTML sitemap here…as you can see, all of our important pages are linked from this page. A visitor looking for SEO services can go here and easily find what they’re looking for.

An XML sitemap can have several files but is only visible to search engine spiders.

So when asked which one to prioritize, Cutts says an HTML sitemap since it’s viewable by both site visitors and search engine spiders.

Remember, Cutts is a software engineer not a SEO professional but he is correct in his assessment of the workability of each type of sitemap.

Creating an XML sitemap is very easy once you create an HTML sitemap according to Rusty Brick at S.E. Roundtable. Therefore, he suggests making both so you can be sure all of your pages are properly indexed.

Watch the quick video to learn more.

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Posted in SEO Technology, Site Architecture, Tip of the Day | 1 Comment »

Customize your Site’s Appearance in Google

Monday, October 5th, 2009

Of all the talk here about web site customization and organic search engine rankings, one point we haven’t mentioned is customizing how your site appears in Google’s search engine results page.

That’s right, you can now easily customize how your listing appears in Google…before you were limited to just titles and descriptions but now you can include star ratings, product images, prices, business addresses and more.

Look at this example…you can see a star rating system, number of reviews and a price range.

Google’s Rich Snippets feature displays this information, pulling it from special tags imbedded in the page’s HTML code. Those special tags come in two forms: microformats or RDFa.

While they sound complicated, each of these formats are pretty easy to master. Developers have yet to settle on a standard but Google accepts both. To denote data to be displayed on your Google listing, you simply wrap it with descriptive class attributes in one of these two tags.

Here’s what the code would look like for Café Cakes:

<div class=”hreview”>

<span class=”name”>Café Cakes</span>

<span class=”rating”>4</span>out of 5.

<span class=”count”>28</span>reviews.

<span class=”pricerange”>$</span>

</div>

The “hreview” tag tells Google that it’s a review…the other information is added using the name, rating, count and pricerange span classes.

For now, Google only has Rich Snippet Listings for marketing restaurants online. They are working to add more categories but currently, business directory sites and others based on user reviews and categorizing businesses stand to gain the most. But Google is rapidly expanding this program so Rich Snippets is likely to become more relevant to many other types of websites in the future as well.

Search Engine News says “…listings that are enhanced with Rich Snippets can expect to increase their click through rate – so we highly recommend them.”

Google has some great examples and tutorials on the following Rich Snippets: Reviews, People, Products and Businesses and organizations. And learn much more about Google’s Rich Snippets in general here.

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Google Software Engineer Says Google Does Not Use Meta Keyword Tag in Determining Rankings

Friday, September 25th, 2009

Recently, Google’s Webmaster Blog has received a number of questions regarding the search engine’s use of meta keyword tags, specifically how they use them for ranking websites.

To my surprise, Google totally disregards meta keyword tags in ranking websites for the search engine!

So why do they not use these identifying features we put into our web pages?

In the late ‘90’s, Google and other search engines looked at only content and weren’t so concerned with the number of links pointing to a page like they do now. It didn’t take long for keyword meta tags to become a place where dishonest webmasters would stuff irrelevant keywords the public would never see to accelerate their rankings.

Since this abuse was becoming a problem, Google quit looking at keyword meta tags.

But meta description tags are useful and shouldn’t be disregarded in your web pages…search engines like Google sometimes use them in the page descriptions you see right under the link to your page in the search results.

But as far as your rankings are concerned, Google doesn’t use the meta description tag at all and it’s unlikely this information will be used in the future.

Read more about this on Google’s Webmaster Blog and watch the short video of Matt Cutts explaining how they use meta keyword description tags.

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Target Web page Indexing with your Robots.txt File

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

This strange sounding name isn’t some alternate website personality.

A robots.txt file is a simple text file placed in the root directory of a website that is used to provide instructions to a search engine spider that crawls and indexes your website.

Specifically, the file tells search engine spiders, which are actually computer programs, which pages NOT to index.

So why would you not want some of your pages crawled and indexed?

Well these computer programs have limited time and resources. You want them to spend their time indexing the high value pages on your site – ones with important content, product listings and sales pages.

Pages containing a shopping cart checkout for example are not that important so you do not want the spider to waste valuable resources and time indexing that. Anything in your cgi-bin folder and directories containing images or sensitive company info shouldn’t be indexed either.

That’s another important function of a robots.txt file – it helps protect your site from hackers. Search engine spiders will crawl and index just about anything it can get its hands on, including sensitive places like password files.

One more very important thing about your robots.txt file – adding the following two items (User-agent: * and Disallow: /) to your file can prevent all search engines from ever indexing any of your site. The asterisk is a generic symbol for all and the forward slash in the disallow command indicates the root directory, meaning everything you have.

To prevent only certain places on your site from being crawled and indexed, spell them out in the “disallow” line (i.e. Disallow: /cgi-bin/)

Of course, if you want every webpage in your site crawled and indexed, there is no need for a robots.txt file.

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