This morning I did an interesting and funny discovery when searching for Google on Yahoo.com.

Yahoo is telling people to "please stay with us - pretty please - we can do better - don't go!". When searching for Google or MSN this comes up. Have a look for yourself below. Not very Christmassy of Yahoo.

The "You could go to Google or..." message only come up when using Yahoo US and both Google and MSN are targeted.



Merry Christmas everyone!!

I am not going to patronise anyone in this post by saying it is obvious that you need both quality content and links in order to survive the search engines....... The debate here at Base One is between me and a co-worker over what is MORE important as we realise the significance of both for ranking purposes.


The Background

The co-worker  is a link building machine - he could be considered an Arnold Schwarzenegger of the link building world, except his phrase is not "I will be back", it is more like "I am not going anywhere"....

Me?  Well my strengths lie more in on- page optimisation. This major difference is perhaps where this year- long debate has stemmed from...........




 The Arguments

For Content: Whilst acknowledging the co-worker's argument, and the importance of links towards any search marketing effort, I remain in favour of quality, keyword rich content as the more significant element. I am debating for the user whilst the co worker is debating for the search engines. In my opinion, the ultimate objective for any website is to gain user intrigue, navigate throughout the site and hopefully get them to convert.

A website can have a million quality links but, if it has poor or limited content, that is not relevant to the search, it is likely that any user will instantly bounce off the website. What will gain conversions, links or content? And if this is, after all, the objective, should there not then be more importance placed on quality content rather than links? Without great content, link building can prove difficult.....particularly when approaching high authority websites. People are more likely to link to strong, well optimised content with relevance to their own website. Be it a product or a service, quality and interesting content more often than not will have people blogging about it or linking their own websites naturally to yours.

For Links: Without links there is little or no chance of ranking on the first page for any competitive terms. They are vital to off-page optimisation in allowing a website to be found and potentially gain a high volume of traffic. If using logos as links on relevant websites then this also increases online brand awareness, as users will start to recognise the brand. Referring traffic or even direct traffic can increase with this type of link building.

Closing Statement

I put this question to you......User or search engine? Good content MORE important than links? I ask you this: can you, the user, live in a world where websites are revolved around the number of links they have and the importance that Google has placed on these sites, or do you want to create a society where the content is interesting and relevant to your search?

"Let us not despair...

And so, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream, that one day content will reign over the link weight in the Google algorithm, that content will be able to walk the worldwide web with heads held high.... "

VOTE CONTENT!!!!!

When 'Base One Search' launches SEO campaigns we usually configure Google Analytics (GA) accounts in order to provide more detailed reports, and for client to be able to view the information themselves.  However, as user-friendly as Google Analytics seems to us, some of our clients feel overwhelmed by the vast amount of information and reports it generates. Getting started with GA can be somewhat knotty.  In this first article, we uncover some of the most useful functionalities of GA.

The Dashboard

Once logged-in with your ID and password you'll see the dashboard which contains snapshots of several reports generated by Google Analytics (GA).



The Site Usage contains the following:

• Visits: The number of visits to our site during a given time period and this is the most basic parameter for any website owner.  Note this number includes new visitors and returning visitors.  So, a site that receives 20 visits in a day may be from four people, who each go to the website 5 times that day.  

By default Google shows the last 30 days of activity (number of visits), however this default setting is customable and allow us to view figures for a specific period and even compare two different date ranges.

• Unique Visitors: This represents the number of un-duplicated visitors that have visited the website for a given period. This means that visitors were counted only once, even if they may have visited the website several times in a given period.

• Pageviews: is the total number of pages all visitors viewed on the site for a given period.

• Unique Pageviews: can be seen in the Top Content report. It is the aggregation of pageviews that are generated by the same user during the same session.  A unique pageview represents the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times.

• Pages/Visit: The average number of pages viewed by each visitor.  A high Average Pageviews number may suggest that visitors interacted lengthily on the website, this can be the result of appropriate targeted traffic or good content (of high interest) on the website. However, this is not always a good thing because it may also mean visitors could not easily locate the information they wanted to find.  It is important to ensure that web pages are designed with good web-usability principles. 
  

• Bounce Rate: is the percent of traffic that viewed the landing page without visiting any other pages on the website.  A High bounce rate is a double edged sword because it may be caused by poor website usability, poor call-to-actions on the landing page or simply because users are landing on your page and not finding what they were looking for.  But it may also be a result of a high quality landing page, that provides exactly what the user is looking for, hence the user doesn't need to cruse on to other pages.

 

• Average Time on Site: This one is pretty self explanatory.  It is believed that if visitors spend a long time visiting your site, they may be interacting more extensively with it. However, this theory can be misleading because visitors often leave browser windows open while they may not be actually visiting the website.

• Percentage of New Visits: the percentage of how many computers went to the website for the first time, which Google tracks by IP address.  A high percentage of new visitors can indicate that the website is doing well at driving fresh traffic while a high percentage of returning visitors suggests that the content of the website is appealing enough to keep visitors coming back.

Traffic Sources
Understanding where your visitors come from is essential. GA shows us figures of where our traffic comes from together with a pie chart.

                          Traffic Sources in Google Analytics

• Referring Sites - shows the number of other websites that have links that brought visitors to the site.

• Direct Traffic - The number of visitors who directly accessed your site by typing the URL directly in their browsers or via bookmarks.

• Search Engines - the amount of traffic coming from user search queries on search engines, includes both organic clicks and PPC clicks.

There are several factors that affect those figures, it can depend on the nature of your website, the power of your brand and how much effort you put into optimising your site. For example, a newly launched website normally have a higher number of direct traffic or referring sites, but over time as the page contents are indexed by the search engines and with more SEO effort, traffic will shift more to search engines.

• Top Traffic Sources: This is an excellent tool to analyse where exactly most of your traffic comes from.  The report provides a deeper insight into the traffic sources of your website. It separates 'Organic traffic' to 'Paid traffic' (PPC) as well as details on exact referring sites.  By default GA shows top five results but you can see the full report anytime by clicking "view full report".

• Top Keywords: Give a list of the most popular keywords together with their number of visits.  The report grows with more and more results and figures when you have more and more web-pages that are indexed by the search-engine.  Sometimes you don't see your targeted keywords in the table, this is quite normal when a website is new, in this case you are most likely to see long-tail (mainly descriptive) keywords.  It can take a while to rank for targeted keywords, however with consistent SEO effort you'll soon see your targeted keywords ranking well.

• Map Overlay:The Map Overlay in Google Analytics allows you to have a geographical view of where your visitors are accessing your website.  Geotargeting is helpful in a lot of industries, including travel websites when we want to know where our target audiences are coming from.  It also helps us spread out PPC budgets across relevant nations, and tell us what other languages may bring in more traffic.

By default GA gives you a view of the world map with varying shades of green. The darker the green, the greater number of visitors from that particular section or place.
 

At SMX London a few weeks back I was interviewed by the lovely Bas van den Beld from the relatively new blog called Search Cowboys. This blog was only launched 3 weeks ago but is already producing fantastic blog content as well as video interviews and more. Well, you wouldn't really expect anything less with the likes of geniuses like Joost de Valk on board.

It was a really fun interview, Bas is a great interviewer and it was easy talking to him. In fact it was so easy to talk to him that the interview lasted for nearly 20 minutes. Yes that's right, nothing can really shut me up when it comes to Search.

It is a bit on the long side, which is totally my fault. Even when Bas asked me to "sum up something in 2 sentences" I kept on blabbering on.

Anyway, here it is! Thanks Bas and SearchCowboys for listening to my ramblings, I enjoyed the chat!


SEO Roadshow interview: Lisa Ditlefsen from NetTraject on Vimeo.

We have finally got around to making the sequel to our brilliant/ridiculous series of SEO Wars.   This episode is called "SEO Wars - Planet Link Space" and is about the discovery of an amazing new planet called "Link Space". From this newly discovered planet you can see the link paths that both SEO jedis and the "evil" SEOiths have taken.

Rand LinkWalker and Princess Jane are admiring their discovery of this planet when Darth Cloakmaster suddenly appears, not being best pleased about his link paths being seen by others....what will happen?

In this episode Base One had the pleasure of a guest star; Jane (Copland). As Jane was staying with me over the period of SMX London we managed to force....ehm I mean convince Jane to join us in the filming. And since Jane is such a cool SEO Chick she agreed. We had so much fun filming this, hope you enjoy the randomness, if not, at least it made us laugh =)

Rand LinkWalker = Rand Fishkin (if you didn't guess)
Princess Jane = Jane Copland (oh and actually Jane's voice, in fact it was her idea that Princess Jane strips...hmmmm...)
Darth Cloakmaster = Dave Naylor (and fear not, we got Dave's permission although I'm not sure he agreed to the ridiculous Yorkshire accent Beccy puts on!)

SEO Wars - Planet Link Space




Disclaimer: This production is made by the Base One Search team and not Base One designers which means the quality of the sound, picture etc is not super. But we kind of like this proper home made movie feel. It must also be warned that this movie is VERY random, if you are likely to be offended by randomness don't watch this!

I am afraid I have an announcement; sadly I am temporarily leaving the Base One search team. I am not sad because I am only temporarily leaving, just sad to be leaving obviously.

Cue: Trumpets and Fireworks plus hire extras to look sad and tearful.

I am set to travel the world and visit such wonderful places like Thailand, Laos, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Chile, Peru, Mexico and Las Vegas! As you can see it was a very difficult choice but a choice had to be made and I am fairly happy with it.

But not to fear I will be back, not like Arnie, just back.

But in the meantime and in my absence I am commencing a silent auction on my work properties.

I have a wonderful, loyal servant named Bic the pen. He has travelled with me to meetings and has never let me down. I shall start the bidding at a reasonable 50 pence.

Do I hear 60?

Alright folks, my first blog post. Be nice please. I thought I would write a simple guide on how you can find available domain names to register containing keywords people search for on Google. This is a really simple guide how to register keyword rich domain names getting organic traffic. Find and register keyword rich domain names to use for landing pages, link building or 301 redirects.

There are two tools we will use here; the Google AdWords keyword tool and a bulk whois checker. Google AdWords keyword tool is a great tool in many ways. We will use it here for finding domain names with keywords people search for. This is how you do it.

•    Go to Google AdWords keyword tool, https://AdWords.google.com/selec/KeywordToolExternal
•    Pick the keyword or keywords which you are interested in. I will pick the keyword "laptops". This keyword is quite competitive and probably isn't the best example but I am pretty sure Google will provide us with a couple of domain name ideas containing the keyword "Laptops".
•    Make sure that the "use synonyms" box is ticked. We want Google to give us synonyms on our keyword(s). Then hit "Get keyword ideas".
•    Filter the results on Exact matches (Broad is fine too but exact is.... Exact)

•    Scroll down and click on "download all keywords" and choose text format as the output. Or you can manually add each and every keyword. But I prefer to go with the bulk approach.
•    Copy and paste the keyword list into a blank word or notepad document. Then use the find and replace function to remove the [ & ] characters.

•    Now you got your list of keywords, keywords containing "laptop" and keywords people search for on Google.
•    Next step is to go to a bulk whois tool, the whois will tell us which domain names are available and which domain names are already registered and who owns them.
•    Moniker bulk whois is one of the best ones, lets you search for 500 domain names at once (however nowadays it requires you to register but registering is an easy thing). Head over to http://www.moniker.com/domains/batch_reg.jsp. There are other bulk whois tools as well, http://www.domaintools.com/bulk-check is another ok one.

•    Copy the list of up to 500 keywords (now without the [ & ] characters) and don't worry about adding a .com, .co.uk extension into the search box and hit search. Before you hit Search you can filter on preferred domain name extension, if you only want .com and or co.uk etc. Hit Search.
•    Whois will tell you which domain names are available to register. Our keyword "laptops" don't give us that many available domain names to choose from. But there are a few available ones (at the moment of writing that is).



•    Of the available domain names we found, mostpopularlaptop.com "most powerful laptop" gets 1000 exact searches on Google every month and bestbudgetlaptop.com "best budget laptop" gets 590 exact searches on Google every month.



•    That's it really. Play around with your keywords and when you find your gem(s) then head over to your preferred domain name registry and register your new domain name!

Base One Search has extended it's Search Team family with another talented Search "geek", welcome to Mathias Ahlgren!

Mathias is originally from Sweden (can you belive it? The Norwegian has hired a Swede, it's Eurovision all over again!), has lived in Australia for 3 1/2 years and came to the UK in August this year with his lovely Australian wife (yeah sorry girls he's taken). Mathias has a strong background in online marketing and developed a keen interest for search engine marketing through his big passion for domaining (parking/selling and buying domains). He is also super positive and excited about Search, which is a must in this industry.

Mathias Ahlgren - The SEO Swede



Although Mathias has only been with Base One for a week and a half, he is already contributing to the team and not only learning but also sharing his knowledge. In fact, you will see his first blogpost on B Search blog here very very soon!! (in about 10 min once I have posted this lol)

Again a very welcome to Mathias (pronounced mateeas), let's rock the SERPs!

The Exact Keyword Tracking Tool by the folks at ROI Revolution allows paid search advertisers to view the exact search queries of their visitors.  Broad-match is one of three Adwords keyword setting that results in ads running based on general keyword terms and what Google believes to be relevant variations; even if these terms aren't in a campaign's keyword lists.  With the Exact Keyword Tracking Tool, the exact phrases that triggered the broad-match ad to be issued can be retrieved, instead of only allowing adwords users to view which keyword terms they've bid on drove traffic to their site.

Typically, broad-match phrases are more expensive to bid on than their counterpart's exact-match and phrase-match, due to their higher traffic volumes (and more competition).  Utilizing this tool, Adwords managers can discover trends in long tail keyword phrases that would not otherwise be revealed in typical analytics data.  With this knowledge, managers can bid on their new-found phrases, probably at lower costs due to the lower volume, detailed orientation of long-tail keywords.

The script for Google Analytics can be found here (note there are two versions: ga.js and urchin.js).

Once the script has been implemented, where will you find this data in Analytics?

1) Traffic Sources > AdWords > AdWords Campaigns report and use the Dimension User Defined dropdown.

2) Using the Visitors > User Defined report.

Tip:  Let the new code run a couple of days so you can see results