The Olympics have inspired me!

The most common question I get asked is:

How quickly can I rank for [insert your favourite keyword here]?

A sense of instantness surrounds SEO and with the arrival of social networking the rumor is that you can be and become what everyone is talking about overnight, the top of everyone’s list even Google’s. If you could just think of that hook/idea/tactic that can propel you, your company, your website into the spotlight.

Of course it’s possible but not very sustainable; one month later it’s likely your site will be on page 100 of Google, and more people have been to the moon than there.

Sustainable SEO involves mostly repetitive tasks done regularly, over time, and to a consistent standard. This will usually involve the introduction of processes that change the way you maintain your site, may involve a new hire like a web content writer, a redevelopment, or just a methodical optimisation of your page titles and descriptions (if you have 3000 pages that’s going to take a bit of time).  All this takes time and, you know, Google likes continuous improvement, big bang changes make it nervous and when that happens Google becomes punitive.

So sustainable SEO involves a sound, long-term strategy consisting of great content combined with long-term SEO – the winning combination.

How to prepare for your marathon:

1. Identify some measureable SEO goals, 3 is plenty
2. Write down the steps you are going to take to move towards these goals
3. Identify what meeting these goals looks like and how you are going to measure progress

Measure progress at least monthly and don’t give up, it can take 3-6 months before you see the start of progress. Remember sustainable SEO is a marathon and not a sprint.

The keyphrases visitors use when they search your site are gold.

They:
• let you know what visitors are looking for
• indicate what visitors may be looking for and cannot find easily
• identify possible problems with navigation labeling or content

Knowing what visitors are looking for can also give you ideas for SEO optimised content, if you have a lot of searches for a keyphrase then this is obviously something your visitors are interested in. If this content already exists on your site a high search volume could indicate that people cannot find it and that you need to raise its profile on the site.

Ok, some of you may have access to search reporting depending on the search engine you use on you site but I long ago forgot how to access these and anyway I wanted to view them in my Google Analytics (GA) account because, I want all my web stats intelligence in the one place – it’s just easier, isn’t it?

So…this is how you link your web search to your GA account:
1. Login into your account and click ‘edit’
2. You should now be in your ‘profile settings’, click on ‘edit’ in the top right-hand corner
3. Scroll down to ‘Site Search’
4. Make sure ‘Do Track Site Search’ is selected
5. Open up your website, enter any search term in the search box and press return
6. Enter your ‘Query Parameter’ in the field provided. Please enter only the word or words that designate an internal query parameter such as “term,search,query”. Sometimes the word is just a letter, such as “s” or “q”. You may provide up to five parameters, separated by a comma
7. Select whether or not you want Google Analytics to strip out the query parameter from your URL. Please note that this will only strip out the parameters you provided, and not any other parameters in the same URL.

Google Analytics (GA) is simply the tool that collects the data for analysis, it can provide you with very useful answers but here’s the catch… first YOU must identify what you want to know – if you don’t you will spend a lot of time roaming aimlessly looking at pretty graphs.

Believe me, and i’ve rolled this out for a lot of people and watched them use it, GA has the ooh ah factor; nice interface, offers a lot of information, you can slice and dice this info in lots of ways and pull off reports in txt, excel and pdf – my goodness. GA impresses people so much that they seem to forget that its a tool to help them analyse their visitor activity. Time and time again i’ve watched people spend hours wondering around it aimlessly ooh ahing without extracting anything useful. When they go back for a second visit they’ve also forgotten how they found what was useful the last time.

Key to using GA is knowing what you want from it and knowing how to use what it
provides.

To help get the most from using GA, and before you login, write down answers to these 3 questions:

1. I want web stats for…
Today – Last 7 days – Last month – Year to date – A defined timeframe?
2. I want to know…
3. I want to know this because…

Answering these 3 questions will keep you on track and help you get value from GA.

Also, if you find something you know is useful when using Google Analytics keep a note of what it is, why it’s useful, how to find it again (believe me you’ll be happy you did this when you visit next time).

Reputations online can tumble like a pack of cards.

While doing some research for a client I came across Rate My Agency; a rating forum for IT contractors which allows them to rate the recruitment agencies they use. Mostly Wellington recruiters but a few based in Auckland.

Boy it was interesting…mostly uncomplimentary with similar gripes from IT contractors regarding poor communication i.e. emails and phone call not replied to, advertising jobs that don’t exist, cv phishing, big promises no follow through, etc. You cannot please all of the people all of the time but the comments on this forum were overwhelming negative.

I wouldn’t trust them, nor rate them. Avoid at all costs!

Rung the recruiter 4 times over 3 days, left messages each time yet he never rung me back.

I wondered did the recuritment agencies know about the rating forum and I wonder what they thought of it. Without a doubt when your industry is being critiqued by your clients you want to:

1. Know about it as soon as possible
2. Make someone responsible for monitoring and managing your online reputation
3. Have a plan in place to deal with client feedback and communication

From a reputation management perspective dealing with client/consumer generated content can be a challenge, no one likes to be criticized, especially publicly – it’s just bad public relations.

However, there are substantial benefits to positively addressing client/consumer dissatisfaction expressed online and there are great risks if you don’t. After all you want to attract the best IT contractors (and other types of employees) and they might be influenced by your ratings. You also want to attract employers – do you think they will be influenced by other peoples experiences of your services? Of course they will.

Online rating fora are a fact of life and people love, trust and put value on them. How is your business dealing with them today?

Google Analytics (GA) is a free web software programme that generates detailed metrics about how visitors find and interact with a website.

It’s as easy as going to Google Analytics, signing up for a free account, entering your website details, copying the code they supply and pasting it in to the correct place on every page you want to track user activity. I put the code on all my pages, but it’s up to you. GA will track what you want it to. And, it’s free! Big bonus.

Also known as web stats, Google Analytics at a basic level provides information on number of site visits, unique visitors, geographic origin, keywords used by visitors accessing your site via search engine, bounce rates etc. At a more sophisticated level, it provides the ability for you to view some user activity visually with Site Overlay and allows you to setup Goals so that you can track visitor progression and cnversion rate though a task you define.

Google Analytics is easy to implement, it’s flexible, and yes I already mentioned it’s free. If you can dedicate the time it provides some valuable intelligence about your visitors, how they found your site and what they do when they visit. All this data is invaluable for effective SEO.

I’ll be talking about applying this intelligence to improve your website in latter posts.