What They Never Told You About Bounce Rate

March 27, 2013 By 13 Comments

First of all, what is bounce rate?

Bounce rate is defined as the percentage of visitors who land on a page of your site and then leave your site (not clicking on any other pages).

They only view a single page and then ‘bounce off’.

There’s even an official bounce rate equation.  I’ll spare you (and me) from that, but there are other similar terms too, for example…

What is exit rate compared to bounce rate?

Exit rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your site on a certain page compared to how many total visits that page gets. You might have a page that gets about 100 visits a month where 90 of those 100 visitors leave. If so, that page has a 90% exit rate.

The thing is everyone’s going to leave your site at some time or another. You can’t avoid it.

But at first glance you might think because a page has a high exit rate the page sucks.

On the flip side, if you’re running a lot of advertising (like Adsense) then you may have a page where a lot of people click off your site and onto one of your ads. In that case it might be a good thing.… Continue Reading >>

2013 Research Study: Google SEO Ranking Factors

March 6, 2013 By 70 Comments


Purpose

The point of the study was to analyze the characteristics of web pages at the top of the Google search engine results pages (SERPs).

What We Did

We randomly selected 100 keyphrases, typed them into Google and collected the URL’s of the first 5 results that showed up. The Firefox browser was used for all the searches. We were not logged into any Google products during the search phase.

The 100 keyphrases ranged from 2 word phrases up to 6 word phrases.  The first 5 results in the Google search results listings were chosen, giving us a total of 500 different web pages to collect data from.

We ignored all the Google Adwords ads. We also skipped image listings, shopping site sets, and news site sets.  We only analyzed actual web pages ranking #1 through #5 in the SERPs.

Here’s what we collected from each web page:

  • Full URL
  • Title tag
  • Headline
  • Number of subheadings
  • Body copy word count
  • Number of images in the body
  • Number of videos in the body
  • Number of referring domains to the web page (data from ahrefs.com)
  • Social signals; Tweets, Facebook like, and Facebook shares (data from ahrefs.com)

We also analyzed the keyphrase the web page ranked high for in comparison with many of the factors listed above.… Continue Reading >>

5 More Questions and Answers on Content Marketing

February 22, 2013 By 9 Comments

Last week I put together an article on the top 5 questions from the Content Marketing Survey Report along with my answers. These were all pressing questions marketers had about content marketing.  In this article I’d like to cover 5 more popular questions along with their answers for you.

6. What are the most effective content methods that are currently working?

The best strategy is to create useful content for an audience and learn how to optimize it for the search engines There’s really no reason not to and in my opinion it’s a wasted opportunity if you don’t. There are a lot of searches done everyday on Google alone, something like 1 billion so you want to at least try to get your fair share of that traffic.

Once you’ve got your content created and optimized for keyphrases people search for, promote it by letting other sites know about it. If you’re successful at this you’ll gain some links that bring in direct traffic and give your rankings a boost in the search engines.

Plus if your content is useful then your visitors will be more likely to share it (and that brings in more traffic for you). And visitors will be more likely to sign up for your newsletters and buy stuff from you once they see the value you provide.… Continue Reading >>

Top 5 Questions and Answers on Content Marketing Revealed

February 22, 2013 By 6 Comments

I asked my subscribers to take part in a Content Marketing Survey about a month ago and put together a full report on the results.  One of the things asked in the survey was “what were your top content marketing questions?”.

There were a ton of replies to that open-ended question and since so many people were nice enough to take part in the survey I’m offering up my answers to their questions.

I’ve been using content marketing successfully since 2001 so I have a lot of experience creating, publishing, and promoting content online. However, I’m sure other experienced marketers have opinions that differ from mine. If you’ve got any advice or further questions on content marketing just leave a comment at the end of the article so everyone can benefit from further discussion.

Here are the top 5 questions marketers had about content marketing along with detailed answers based on my experience.

1. How can I use content marketing to gain the most SEO benefit?

You really need to consider that the entire job of the search engines is to rank the best and most relevant content high. It doesn’t matter what someone with black hat tactics or loopholes tells you. What I just stated is a fact and if you want long-term traffic from search engines (namely Google since they’re currently running the show) you’re going to need to consider that.… Continue Reading >>

Why Magnetic Content is an Inevitable Part of Your Content Strategy

February 6, 2013 By 16 Comments

You already know content is at the heart of your SEO strategy.

In the past, due to many SEO loopholes, it was commonplace to optimize a page with very low quality, filler content and still manage to get it ranking high.

I think everyone will agree with me it’s harder to do that now.

Here are a few facts regarding SEO that are cause for concern:

1. Google owns a monopoly on search (some say as much as 90% of all searches are done through Google). So if you put all your eggs in the SEO basket, you’re basically putting ALL of them in the Google basket. One company controls all your traffic and that one company can take it away.

2. Google is aggressively penalizing sites for link building practices that manipulate their algorithm (which is most all link building just for the sake of building links). So if you manufacture the majority of the links coming to your site expect to see your rankings drop as they get more sophisticated at figuring this out.

Solutions

Here are another set of things to think about that will lead to a solution for BOTH these major issues:

Links on Highly Trafficked Sites Bring You Traffic

Make no mistake, there are plenty of sites online receiving an absolute ton of traffic.… Continue Reading >>

Google Manual Penalty Guide

January 6, 2013 By 7 Comments

Google definitely gives out manual penalties. This is not something new.

It sounds a little crazy with all the billions of sites on the internet that Google would ever manually look at any of them, but they do.

The thing is, they only do a manual review on the sites listed at the top of the search engines for fairly competitive keyphrases. So a site in one of the top 3 spots for ‘car insurance’ has a really good chance of getting manually reviewed. So this set of search engine results listings is probably manually reviewed:

A site at the top for ‘my favorite car insurance and why’ will probably never catch anyone’s attention.

And there’s all the stuff in between that may or may not ever be reviewed by someone on Google’s webspam team.

So there’s a limited number of sites that are ever manually reviewed.

Unless you’re actually good at SEO and go after phrases with some competition, you never need to worry about this (and may still not).

But, manual penalties are a real thing.

And there’s more to a manual penalty than just having your site de-indexed. You can have a manual penalty placed against your site where it’s still in the index, but it just doesn’t rank high for any keyphrases anymore.… Continue Reading >>

Link Building Tips

January 5, 2013 By 4 Comments

We’ve discussed on-site search engine optimization in great depth – including some of the different adjustments you can make to your webpages to make them more appealing to search engines – but these techniques are only half the battle.

Off-site optimization is just as important in getting your site ranked well in the search engines results. Off-site SEO techniques revolve around the links that point to your site from other webpages. These links back to your site are commonly called backlinks (or external links).

The thing is, if your site has no links pointing back to it from other sites, then it doesn’t look very popular.  Google wants the best sites ranking high. They believe very strongly that there’s a direct correlation between popularity and the best sites.

In fact, Google’s entire early algorithm was based on the idea of popularity (which was known as PageRank). Currently, PageRank is only one of many factors incorporated into their algorithm, but it’s still important.

You still need these external links.

Link building is hardly a precise art, as there are a number of factors that the search engines take into account when measuring the strength of the backlinks to your site. These include the number of links, the quality, the anchor text of the links, and all this in comparison with each other.… Continue Reading >>

On-Site Optimization Tips

January 5, 2013 By 2 Comments

As mentioned previously, on-site Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the actions you take on your website to make your site appeal to the search engines. These include actions like the words you choose to use in the navigation links, meta tags, and the words within your content.

Here’s a screenshot that shows a thoughtful use of the keyphrase dog training. It’s in the headline, the content (even used as a hyperlink) and over on the navigation menu. This site was ranking very high for the phrase ‘dog training’ (which is competitive). So that shows they’re doing something right.

Meta tags are snippets of code you can include on your website to give the search engines more information on what your site is about. Visitors to your webpage won’t be able to see this information, but the search engine crawlers that scour your site will appreciate the tip off. Here’s an example of what this meta code looks like:

Alternatively, you don’t want to frustrate the search engine crawlers by bogging down your site with loads of pictures and flash animations. Search engines rely on the words and phrases on your site to get a feel for what it’s about, so that they know when to pull your site up in response to user search terms.… Continue Reading >>

Keyword Research

January 5, 2013 By 3 Comments

As you explore the world of SEO, you’ll probably come across the phrases “keyword” or “keyword research” on more than one occasion. But what are keywords and why should you care about them?

Think about what happens when you go to a search engine like Google or Yahoo. If you’re looking for information on cruise deals for your next vacation, you might enter the word “cruises” into the search bar to find websites related to vacation deals. That word you entered is what’s referred to as a keyword. If you entered a string of words, say “best cruise deals”, you’ve entered a keyphrase into the search engine.

Searchers use keywords to find information on the internet.

The keyword or keyphrase tells the search engine what kind of results to bring back for you. Search engines scour the internet, recording the information they find on various sites around the web. When you enter the keyphrase “best cruise deals”, the search engines comb their databanks to find sites related to “best cruise deals”.

When you’re building a website, choosing the keywords and phrases to focus on is extremely important. You want to target the keywords people are actively searching for. But as you can imagine, some keywords are more competitive than others.… Continue Reading >>

Introduction to SEO

January 5, 2013 By Leave a Comment

SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, refers to the wide variety of strategies used to make your website more appealing to the search engines in the hopes of drawing free traffic to your site.

Getting free search engine traffic is often called organic traffic, or natural search traffic. You don’t pay for it, and if you have the right mindset, you can continue to get large volumes of natural search traffic for years to come.

Unfortunately, when you first launch a website, you probably won’t have thousands of visitors pounding down your door, eating up your bandwidth, just to get a look at your content. When it comes to getting visitors to your website, you’ve got a few choices – two main ones include either paying for your traffic through pay-per-click advertising programs like Google Adwords or banner ads, or waiting around for free, organic traffic to find you through the search engines.

However, if all you do is launch your site and then sit around waiting for visitors, it could take weeks or months before the major search engines figure out that you’re even there at all, let alone send you any free traffic.

This is where SEO comes in.… Continue Reading >>

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