Archive for August, 2008
Target Pays $6 Million To Settle For No Alt Tags
Yesterday Target settled a lawsuit brought on by the NFB (National Federation of the Blind) for $6 million. At the heart of the case was that Target.com did not employ the use of alt tags on their images for blind users screen readers to render them. Alt tags are simple additions of a description to a photo that is displayed on your website. They are used in conjunction with a successful SEO strategy, but they are also helpful for those visitors who utilize screen readers or other accessibility based software.
Even if there were other factors at play $6 million for not doing something as simple as adding alt tags to your images is pretty hefty. Why Target didn’t have their webmaster or someone in marketing develop a script that automatically tags the images with ‘Picture’ or ‘Photo’ just to be simple is beyond my comprehension. It would have taken five minutes at most. Anyone have any additional insight into this case?
Importance of Search Engine Results Position
Whether you are relying upon SEO, SEM, or a combination of both to achieve targeted traffic from search engine results pages you probably know that achieving a position within the top three results is critical. All too often I hear, “I need to be #1 in Google for X term” without having any science associated with it, but as you can see in the image below from Enquiro Research which conducted eye tracking studies for visitors almost all visible eye movement is focused on the top five results.
You can clearly see that eye tracking is focused on the upper left hand corner of the search engine results page, with minimal eye movement down towards the bottom of the page. There is also very little eye movement in the lower right corner of the page, typically where position 5+ SEM ads are placed. Enquiro’s visual eye tracking study is solidified when you look at the CTR (click through rate) associated with results in major search engine results pages. Pete at Searchlight Digital provided the following SERP Click Through Rates recently:
Rank Clicks Click % Delta #n-1 Delta #1 1 8220278 42.30% n/a n/a 2 2316738 11.92% -71.82% -71.82% 3 1640751 8.44% -29.18% -80.04% 4 1171642 6.03% -28.59% -85.75% 5 943667 4.86% -19.46% -88.52% 6 774718 3.99% -17.90% -90.58% 7 655914 3.37% -15.34% -92.02% 8 579206 2.98% -11.69% -92.95% 9 549196 2.83% -5.18% -93.32% 10 577325 2.97% 5.12% -92.98% 11 127688 0.66% -77.88% -98.45% 12 108555 0.56% -14.98% -98.68% 13 101802 0.52% -6.22% -98.76% 14 94221 0.48% -7.45% -98.85% 15 91020 0.47% -3.40% -98.89% 16 75006 0.39% -17.59% -99.09% 17 70054 0.36% -6.60% -99.15% 18 65832 0.34% -6.03% -99.20% 19 62141 0.32% -5.61% -99.24% 20 58384 0.30% -6.05% -99.29% 21 55471 0.29% -4.99% -99.33% 31 23041 0.12% -58.46% -99.72% 41 14024 0.07% -39.13% -99.83
Pete followed up the data with the following analysis: “As you can see, the number one position receives just over 42% of all clicks. Where this gets really interesting though is when you look at what can happen if you own most of the real estate on a good SERP. The top four results put together account for over two thirds of all clicks that will happen (68.69% in total). The top ten taken as a whole will give nearly nine tenths! (Actual total figure - 89.69%).”
What this clearly shows is that eye tracking and CTR clearly favors being within the top five results. What this doesn’t necessarily show is that being #1 is always better than being #2 or #3. Sure, you need traffic, but that doesn’t always show a correlation. For those of you who are using Google Analytics in conjunction with Google Adwords you can see a Keyword Position report like the one shown below:
The default as you can see in the picture is to show ‘Visits’. Now while visits is important we already know that being in the top five positions will result in more traffic than being in position 26. What we’re concerned about is how this relates to the conversion rate and associated monetary gain on our website. For that we can still use the Keyword Positions report, but change the breakdown to focus on conversion metrics like the image below demonstrates:
What this image demonstrates is how through the Keyword Position report you can see from which position your conversions came from. Keep in mind that just because one has a 15% conversion rate and another has 5% doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re better off bidding for position A or B if you’re running SEM through Adwords. Ensure that your data is statistically significant by using a conversion confidence calcualatorand then you can feel confident that the correlations and sub relations that you’re making actually make sense. In theory the beauty of this is that you could potentially pay less to run in position three that converts at a higher rate than paying more to be in position one. Hopefully this helps with your position strategies. Does anyone have any related stories about correlations between position and conversion rate?
Rule #1: Figure Out Why You’re Doing Something
One thing that has amazed me for years is how projects get green-lit either from committees, management, or individuals without figuring out WHY they are doing a project and having clear goals associated with them. Being in the agency world we often receive RFPs that detail out what they WANT to happen, but not WHY this needs to occur. Consider the following WANT’s:
- I WANT a new website (WHY? To sell more products? To obtain more leads? To generate more traffic?)
- I WANT a new search tool (WHY? Do you want to lower repeat searches? Get better results?)
- I WANT to do SEM (WHY? To lower your CPA compared to display? To compliment words you can’t obtain through SEO right now?)
- I WANT to be #1 in Google for X Term (WHY? Is this term a ‘money’ term that you know through SEM? Have you done keyword research?)
Now, let me be clear and say that I am for one not against any WANT. I would simply recommend that you associate clear, and hopefully measurable goals associated with your project. You want to implement a new shopping cart? Sure, let’s implement it and put as a goal to reduce shopping cart abandonment from the current 75% to industry average for your vertical of say 50%. I will go out on a limb here and say that obtaining support from committees, management, or individuals will be substantially easier in the future if you can go back to them with the original target goal, and show how much quantifiable improvement was made.
The easy answer of doing something because: A. Someone else is doing it B. It just looks cool or C. I read about this and want to beat my competitor to it all sound like somewhat reasonable answers but remember to think clearly and logically when planning a project out. Google wasn’t the first search engine; looking ‘cool’ by itself doesn’t always have a calculated ROI; and just because someone else is doing it doesn’t mean that you should to. ‘Everyone’ used to have all Flash websites with catchy techno music playing and a Winamp style EQ display too, but it didn’t mean that it made business sense to do it either.
Be strategic in your thinking, clearly define WHY you WANT to accomplish this project, assign measurable goals to the project, and establish reporting before, during, and after the project to show the change that occurred by accomplishing the project.
Great Web Analytics Plugin For Firefox
Recently I made the full time switch over from Internet Explorer 7.0 to Firefox 3.0 as I transitioned from Windows Vista to Mac OS X and an Apple Macbook Pro. Along with that transition came the addition of plug ins for Firefox. One great plug in that everyone interested in web analytics should be using is WASP (Web Analytics Solution Profiler). This tool is available for anyone using Firefox 2 or Firefox 3, and is extremely valuable for both practitioners and marketers in the field of web analytics. To see some of the immediate uses of this plug in I took a screen shot of NBCOlympics.com, which is shown below:
What you can immediately see is the addition to the browser on the left. This is triggered by double clicking on the WASP logo in the bottom right corner of the browser. The bottom right corner displays both the WASP logo as well as information on what is currently tagged on the site that you are visiting. This works for most major web analytics vendors, as well as advertisers, leads, testing solutions and VOC vendors.
For NBCOlympics.com we can instantly see that NBC is utilizing Omniture Site Catalyst and Quantcast for web analytics and Doubleclick for advertising. Instead of manually looking at page code to see what competitors or others are using this information is readily available as soon as the page executes.
Additional features of this plug in include checking for correct tagging of web analytics implementations. Simply navigate to the page that you would like to check and right click on the WASP icon in the bottom right corner of the browser. The current version of the plug in checks up to 100 pages, and allows you to export a report after it is done scanning.
For a full list of feature sets you can visit WASP’s features which details out the current free version, and the upcoming paid version. If anyone has any similar web analytics plug ins that are helpful please feel free to post them in comments below.
Top 50 SEO Tips and Tricks for Beginners
About a year and a half ago I was helping a friend learn the fundamental basics of SEO as he was transitioning from Marketing to being a professional photographer. I created the following checklist of tips and tricks for beginners who are interested in SEO that I thought I would share once more. Please keep in mind that this has not been updated to include ‘newer’ ideas in SEO such as distributing internal linking to craft link flow, but it does serve as a starting point that will allow anyone new to SEO to at least get a head start when it comes to optimizing their sites for SEO.
This checklist is segmented into Keyword Research, Link Building, On Page Optimization, Off Page Optimization, and Miscellaneous factors that make up some of the core areas to focus on when it comes to SEO. In upcoming posts on this blog I’ll be posting an updated guide with some more advanced tips focusing around linking, both internal and external. If you have any questions related to these items please comment below or contact me.
Site Architecture
1. Utilize search engine friendly URL links which have hyphens instead of underscores, dynamic or session URLs which often confuse crawlers.
2. Rewrite dynamic URLs via htaccess into URL friendly ones.
3. Use robots to control access to which pages crawlers analyze and index. Restrict robots from “print” html pages for example to control duplicate content issues.
4. Put each domain on a separate IP address. Sharing IP addresses with other sites that could potentially be spamming or using black hat techniques isn’t smart, and at $3-5 a month for a unique IP it’s worth it.
5. If you’re running Linux as your web hosting server then read about creating an htaccess file to avoid canonicalization.
6. If you’re running Windows as your web hosting server then learn about how to do the equivalent of htaccess.
7. Invest in quality web hosting service. Most sites aren’t setup to handle the incoming traffic from hitting the top of Digg but you should be able to handle a steadily increasing amount of traffic from your SEO efforts. If your site goes down and the search engines try to index the site you will be penalized, and the results can be dramatic.
8. Validate your HTML to W3C standards. Although there is no evidence that this is required Google it provides a clean experience to visitors.
9. Keep the number of trailing slashes to less than four to avoid crawling and other issues. If you have a blog just the post name is optimal, the date and other information is unnecessary.
10. When considering launching a new site consider purchasing a domain name that has been registered for quite some time. This avoids any perils of the “Google Sandbox” as well as having the advantage of already having established back links, and other SEO benefits.
11. If no domain names are available that suit your company consider purchasing a domain name that has your specific keywords in it. Limit the hyphens to a maximum of two.
12. When creating pages ensure that no page is beyond two pages from the home page. This helps ensure that your pages will become indexed.
13. Check for dead/broken links in Google Webmaster tools, and then utilize a 301 redirect to the correct location or to the home page to clean up that aspect.
14. Register your domain name for the maximum amount of time. This instills trust among the search engines that you don’t have a one year hosting plan and then you’re done. This is a cheap solution, and lets them know that you plan to be around for a long time.
15. Ensure that outgoing links from your site are going to quality on topic sites Linking to poker/porn/Viagra, etc sites from a health site for example will hurt not help you.
Keyword Research
1. Determine the keywords that you would like to target by doing some research at Google Adwords or alternatives such as Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery.
2. Place your keywords in your body text. Don’t worry about keyword density as much as making it functional for both the user while targeting your specific keywords for the search engines.
3. Use keywords in the H1, H2, and H3 tags that are relevant to your site.
4. Place your targeted keywords in the page URL, separated by a dash between keywords.
5. Target keywords above and beyond just the ones with the most traffic. Misspellings, alternative words, and lower traffic keywords could potentially still are lucrative by driving targeted traffic to your site.
On Page Optimization
1. Add a unique title to each page that targets your specific keywords. Typically this occurs with having your targeted keywords followed by – company name. If your brand is strong enough you can switch this around and have your company first.
2. Add a unique Meta description to each page that again targets your specific keywords. This is limited to 160 characters in Google, 165 in Yahoo, and slightly over 200 for MSN. Make the description unique for each page so that you don’t fall into any duplicate content issues.
3. Add a unique Meta keyword tag for each page that only lists keywords that are relevant and appear on the page. Although Meta keyword is not used by Google it still may have limited importance for Yahoo.
4. Make sure that all images have alt tags associated with them to ensure that your site is accessible for everyone.
5. Develop content that is unique and different for all pages. Having similar content on multiple pages could throw up duplicate content filters and your pages could go supplemental.
Link Building
1. Download WebCEO and submit your site to the various search engines and directories through the automatic process.
2. Download DigiXMAS and semi-auto submit your site to several hundred directories.
3. Don’t worry about incoming directory links, and whether you are submitting too quickly. You will be denied from some, others will take months to approve you, and the resulting links will appear natural.
4. Submit your site to DMOZ. Although DMOZ has had problems recently it is still a highly trusted source, and is the premier free directory to submit your site to. It may take months or even years to get added but it is still worth the 10 minutes to submit to.
5. Pay to submit your site to Yahoo directory. Along with DMOZ Yahoo directory is one of the most trusted directories out there. The $299 fee is nominal and instills trust among Yahoo and the other search engines.
6. Create “link bait” content for submission to the social websites such as Digg, Reddit, etc. Getting an article to the top of a social website can result in thousands of additional back links almost overnight.
7. Manual link building is a highly effective way to increase your rankings in the SERPs. Use WebCEO to find link partners who are related to your respective field, and would be willing to link to you.
8. Often times the best links are the links that your competitors have. Go to Yahoo and type in “link:www.competitor.com” and look for links that they have that you should look into.
9. Edu and Gov links are typically more respected and trusted than Com links as they have built up thousands of back links, produce quality content, and are unlikely to engage in questionable techniques. If you can get these links get them.
10. If you want to buy links do so in a manner that is not obvious. Purchase links from relevant sites and don’t publish details in forums or other locations which could be seen.
11. When linking out or posting links surround the link with text so that it does not appear to be a generic links page, and instead flows nicely with relevant information.
12. Post your link in forums that you frequent with the anchor text that you are targeting.
13. Comment on blogs, again with the same anchor text and link that you’re targeting.
14. Although Wikipedia utilizes “NOFOLLOW” attributes on links adding your relevant links to Wikipedia can generate a significant amount of targeted traffic to your website.
15. Create a Squidoo lens to generate back links as well as hopefully generate traffic to your website.
Miscellaneous
1. Create a sitemap of your site using GSite Crawler or a free online sitemap tool like XML-Sitemaps
2. Submit your site Google Webmaster Tools, and then verify it.
3. Inside Google Webmaster Tools choose Preferred Domain and pick www.yoursite.com or yoursite.com to avoid canonicalization issues.
4. Submit your site to Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft Webmaster Tools, then verify them.
5. Download Firefox and then head over to SEOBook to download Aaron Wall’s SEO Tools for Firefox. This neat utility allows you to check back links, Edu links, Wikipedia entries, cache date, and other SEO info that is crucial for analyzing data.
6. Use page analysis to look at the anchor text of incoming links to your site to analyze what is working, how spread out your anchors are, and how to solidify under a few anchor texts if possible.
7. Develop articles that visitors may want to link to. Interviews with industry leaders and others are a quick way to develop links.
8. Submit your article to article submission services only after your article has been indexed by the search engines to avoid any duplicate filters.
9. Ignore Page Rank. Although it may be important to those who aren’t as familiar to the SEO process it does not determine your rankings, and is only updated visually every 3-4 months. Actual Page Rank is constantly being updated by Google on a daily basis.
10. Ignore Alexa data. Alexa is calculated by users who install their toolbar and is thus a very narrow segment of the population. Companies who browse their own sites with the toolbar thus rank unnaturally high in Alexa.
Why Google Isn’t Enterprise Level
As I was in a client’s portfolio today inside Google Analytics I was trying to export a dashboard as a PDF, but would consistently get the following error message upon either export or trying to send the dashboard via email:
After playing around with it I was able to export as XML. I suspect the problem may be due to the fact that this particular dashboard had Google Adwords data in it, as other reports and profiles exported just fine, but so far it is just a theory. After exhausting all of my troubleshooting methods (PC vs. Mac, Firefox vs. IE vs. Safari) I opened up a ticket with Google Analytics support. As Google Analytics is a free solution they only currently offer email support, although they do have Google Analytics Authorized Consultants as well as Google Analytics Groups if you have an issue, but in this case I believe it is with Google themselves and not something I’ve defined.
I go to open my ticket and it goes through without issue. Fast forward 15 minutes when I go to check my email in Entourage. It comes up with an error that it cannot connect and that there is an error with my account. Colleagues email is working fine so I give it some time. Fast forward again over 12 hours later and my work email is still down. Upon logging into Google Apps our IT administrator is greeted with a message that there are problems with Gmail and Google is actively working on fixing the issue. Upon logging in to web mail I’m greeted with the following:
So now I’m stuck in a situation where I emailed Google Analytics for support on an error message but I’m unable to see any communication because Google Apps and Gmail is not currently functioning either. Now not every company can afford to house a Blackberry Exchange Server or Microsoft Exchange 2007 which I understand, but I’m not the first, second, or even third to point out the pitfalls of relying upon Google to essentially manage day to day business operations. Similarly on the web analytics front there are plenty of free alternatives out there to Google Analytics, but not everyone has the need or can shoulder the expense of deploying Omniture Site Catalyst or Coremetrics.
My point being that while Google offers solutions that are geared towards the small and medium business market their products are simply not up to the caliber of being termed Enterprise level when you have over 12 hours of downtime to fix email, and when you’re unable to export a report in Google Analytics as a PDF for days without getting error messages. Has anyone else had similiar issues with other Google based apps?
What If Google Cut You Off?
Over the past few months I’ve been thinking about all of the products and services that I currently use with Google, and what can happen when you are so dependent upon a single vendor when stories like when Google owns you and web searches like Gmail account disabled appear online every few months. I have no idea if Mr. Saber justly or unjustly lost access to his Google based accounts to be fair. I’m just the type of person who utilizes weekly backups to an external hard drive as well as utilizes Mozy for remote online backups. To find out what Google based products I was currently using I headed over to My Account, which listed the following services:
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AdWords |
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Analytics |
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Audio Ads |
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Base |
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Blogger |
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Docs |
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Gmail |
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Groups |
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iGoogle |
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Local Business Center |
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Notebook |
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Reader |
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Sites |
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Talk |
|
Trends |
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Web History |
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Webmaster Tools |
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Website Optimizer |
I readily admit that Google has some of the best free services out there, such as Google Website Optimizer, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, Google Adwords, etc, etc. I also firmly believe Avinash and others when they list out all of the good things that Google offers. Matt also offers suggestions on how to export your data from Google into other formats. The one thing that this doesn’t take into consideration is if your account is disabled you don’t have the opportunity to go in to export your data. In future posts I’ll outline some steps that you can take to maximize your privacy settings, but my initial recommendation would be to utilize other services in conjunction with Google provided ones as a precaution as well as to verify Google data.
One thing you can do is if you use Google Analytics for your web analytics vendor also tag your pages with another solution. Auriq, Microsoft Analytics, Crazy Egg, Mint, IndexTools, StatCounter, and others all offer the ability to have your pages tagged while being free or low cost solutions. This has the added benefit of verifying Google Analytics if something looks weird or out of place within your data. An extra added benefit to having more than one JavaScript based web analytics solution implemented is you start to collect data as you cannot currently export your data from Google Analytics and upload it to a new vendor.
Other Google based products have alternatives as well. For the SEM based campaigns that I run Google Adwords normally always performs the best, but I always have Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter, and Ask Sponsored Listings campaigns ready to go. Most of these solutions offer you the opportunity to simply export your Adwords campaign as a CSV file and then upload them. Ask reps will even upload it for you gladly. There have been a few occassions where my ads were not displaying in Adwords and it took an Adwords rep a few hours to fix the problem. In situations where it could be longer I always want to be safe rather than sorry.
With the exception of a few tools that I use I’ve found that there are alternatives to simply having all of my eggs in a single basket when it comes to the products and services that I utilize online. If you have any other suggestions please free to post them in comments.
Consistency When Using Dynamic Keyword Insertion
One of the more popular options when running SEM (search engine marketing) campaigns in either Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter, or Ask is using a form of dynamic keyword insertion. There are several great guides written out there about the subject including this one from RedFly Marketing if you’re new to the subject.
Where I like to take it further is in the use of dynamic keyword insertion from start to finish. What I mean by this is that a user types in “Super Red Widget” in Google for example. Up pops an ad that has in the title exactly what I typed in, which is “Super Red Widget”. I think to myself, wow, that’s exactly what I was looking for. Note to readers: Dynamic keyword insertion is not the end all be all when it comes to text ads. There are several ads that I manage where traditional ads far outperform those which use dynamic keyword insertion, but this post centers around ads where it is effective.
After I see “Super Red Widgets” I as a user click on the ad which takes me to a landing page. Now traditionally this is where most SEM agencies and other marketers stop. Due to lack of control over the landing page or just not understanding what is possible with a decent web developer the use of dynamic keyword insertion is done. What I would suggest doing is talking with your development/technology group and asking them to try an experiment for you. Tell them you want to pass the keyword query from the search engine and insert it onto the landing page where you are driving the visitor. This can be in the form of a H1, H2, or H3 tag or it can be inserted as a Flash var if you have a Flash based website or header.
Sitting down with your developer and implementing some basic requirements is also helpful. If your keywords are particularly long you may want to put a keyword character length, similiar to what search engines do with default text in showing a standard keyword if the keyword exceeds that character length. Other requirements of capitalizing the first letter of each word and indicating a space are items you may want to take into consideration.
Don’t worry about fully understanding the implementation, but it shouldn’t take a developer more than a couple hours to implement and test this. In future posts I’ll get more into A/B and MVT solutions, but if you do have knowledge about these you can easily setup an A/B test provided that you only run this on ad groups that fully utilize dynamic keyword insertion. Send the traffic to the page without dynamic keyword insertion on the landing page and one group that has dynamic keyword insertion.
The end result is to test out the theory that having a consistent usage of the user’s keyword from start to finish results in a higher conversion rate than simply stopping at the SERP (search engine results page). You start with the user typing the keyword into Google, then seeing the keyword in your ad copy, clicking on it, and seeing it again on the landing page. In my experience this has resulted in a lift in conversion rate most of the time. There have been a few exceptions when it didn’t so my advise is to try it out, and monitor your results carefully. If it results in a lift you can expand into other ad groups and campaigns.
One tip with this is to ensure that you have all of your negative keywords properly attached so that you don’t have words associated to the landing page that you wouldn’t otherwise bid on. Chances are if you’re bidding on competitor keywords or other iffy terms you may not want to implement this strategy for the particular ad group or campaign. If anyone has implemented this or something similiar to it I would love to hear your results. Please feel free to post comments or to contact me with your results.
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