Having gone through a series of SEO evaluations those last few weeks, I was shocked to come across so many cases of websites with bad internal linking structure.   I now think it's essential to stress on good internal linking since I have the impression that web designers often overlook the importance of having a well structured site in terms of internal linking.  The current situation is very sad since a lot of websites are not benefitting of the power of internal linking.  I therefore compiled a short list of factors that one should consider while building the website structure.

Good Navigation - The most important issue here is to make sure that the site navigation is correctly spidered by the search engines.  We can ensure this by either use of anchor text and text based navigation, or an image-based navigation type with significant 'alt attributes' attached to every image link in the navigation.  Avoid Javascript and Flash navigations because they are still not well crawlable and spidered by the search engines.  If you still want to keep your 'flashy' navigation then I'll suggest you include an alternative navigation that would be spidered by major search engines. For example, you could have a text based navigation at the bottom of your page, this will help you inner pages be more spiderable.  

XML Sitemap - I cannot stress enough on having a good XML sitemap on your website.  Sitemaps provide an overview of the site at a single glance but at the same time they help search engines crawl the website.  Submitting a XML sitemap to Google Webmaster Tool for example can be very useful since it gives the search engines a concise format that provides spiders with a super-fast blueprint for indexing a website. Furthermore, sitemaps also improve web usability as they are an alternative form of a site specific search, which brings users to the information they need quicker.  

Breadcrumbs - I believe breadcrumbs are excellent internal linking tools. Being 'links' by nature, they aid with internal linking and consequently increase the search engine visibility. In addition to anchor text differentiation, breadcrumbs are very useful since they increase the general usability of the website by allowing users to know exactly where they are on the website.  

Links in Content - I had the chance to analyse different kind of websites in different industries but it was quite common to see a lack of links in their copy.  It's essential to have in-content links, since not only they are more likely to have higher click through rates (increased confidence path), but they are also capable to add more significance to a link because of the neighbouring text.  Therefore, the rule of thumb here is to have links with anchor text with targeted keywords in the copy of the website.  

Links to Important Pages - It's essential to always ensure that all important pages are well linked to other pages on the website.  I sometimes found it amazing how some of the most important pages of a website are not properly linked to other pages.  It is better to link them directly to the homepage so that they can benefit from the power of link juice passing from the homepage.  But time and again I see websites with important pages buried too deep and ending up with no page-rank at all.  And it's not uncommon to find those pages not indexed by the search engines.  

Cross-check Robot.txt - This may look stupid, but I came across cases where I found important pages of a website not being crawled and spidered because they were found in a section where the robot.txt was preventing spiders to crawl.  This mainly happen by mistake or when new pages are added to the website.  Sometimes webmasters tend to forget to go back to their robot.txt and check whether all crawlable/non-crawlable sections are up-to-date.  In brief, your important pages need to be findable, if not there's no way they'll get crawled and indexed.  

Linking Policy - It is very important to be extremely consistent in your linking behaviour. What I mean is that while linking pages we need to be meticulous about how we are building the links.  I once had to re-build the links of a whole website since links to the homepage were very inconsistent.  Some links were pointing to the .com page whereas others were pointing to the .com/index.php page.  The website also had some major canonicalisation issues where several links were pointing to identical pages but with different URLs.  Cases like this actually decrease all the power of internal linking since the link juice is diluted around the site instead of being intelligently focused on the essential pages.  In brief a link policy should be setup so that everyone building links knows exactly how and where to link them.  

Just to remind, good internal linking ensures that all pages on your website get properly spidered and indexed on search engines.  It increases the relevancy of a page to the targeted keyword phrase.  Allows proper link juice passing to internal pages hence increasing their page-rank. That's it, hope that this helps tuning and enhancing your internal link structure.  

At first I found it amazing how plenty of twitter applications are flooding over the web everyday, but looking at this phenomenon closer may be it's not so surprising.  According to ComScore there has been an increase of Twitter traffic of up to 700 percent since last year and number of twitter users are growing everyday. Therefore it's not surprising to see so many twitter tools emerging everyday, and sometimes it can be difficult to find yourself in this tsunami of twitter applications. 


I was mostly concerned about tools on tracking twitter traffic.  For sure, there are a lot of 'cool' tools out there allowing us to track number of hits, geolocalisation and even do real-time traffic analysis but it was not always convenient to have data separated from my main web analytics software.  My approach to web analytics is to have a consistent, reliable and integrated view of the traffic thus ensuring a clear vision on what is going on in my campaigns.  Furthermore, after testing several twitter analytics applications I didn't find the statistics from the different tools meaningful enough.  So I revert back tracking my tweets on Google Analytics (GA).  It is much more powerful in my opinion when  considering all the functions that we have on GA.  It would be wiser to use them to track our twitter campaigns.  For example, we can track and analyse goals and conversion rates knowing very well how conversion rate analysis is imperative today.

Google analytics by default shows traffic coming from twitter but wait.. it shows traffic coming from Twitter.com only and today most of the people using Twitter never even visit twitter.com! For that reason, I prefer to manually add some utm codes on my URLs and this allows me to track my tweets wherever they are, even if someone forward my tweets by email.

As you know, tweets that include a URL use some type of URL shortening service, like http://bit.ly or http://cli.gs, but we will be using the classic Tinyurl.com which shortens a URL by creating a redirect that is hosted on www.tinyurl.com.  The trick is to add GA's campaign tracking parameters to our Tiny URL, thus encoding campaign info into the URL we use in our tweets:

?utm_campaign=blogpost&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=micro-blog

Of course you can change the utm_campaign and utm_medium names to anything you like but be sure they makes sense since you will be using them in your analyses later.

Example:
http://www.itjoblog.co.uk/?utm_campaign=itjoblogpost&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=micro-blog

After adding this code to the URL, we shorten it using TinyURL and finally use the 'shortened' URL in our tweets which will be traceable by GA.

Below is a picture on how the data appear in 'All Traffic Sources' report in GA:


This is very cool, but it's even nicer to use all the power of Google Analytics in your web analyses, for example you could use Advanced Segments feature to subdivide your visitors based on operating systems they used to reach your tweets (Windows, Mac, Iphone, etc). Or if you like you could create your own segment that makes sense to your campaign.
 
As said by Gail Ennis, senior vice-president of marketing at Omniture: "Online marketers recognise the importance of brand reputation management in the social media environment," and I believe that accurate twitter tracking is fundamental and can help a lot in social media campaign analysis.

Some time ago Avinash Kaushik the web analytics Guru said: "Analyzing data in aggregate is a crime against humanity". No we're not talking about the last episode of Dexter but about the visitors to your website.  Segmentation has become one of the most important thing you should do to understand traffic to your website and hence your business.


So why is visitor segmentation so important?

It is simply the breaking of your site visitors into groups and examining traffic and conversion data for those specific groups.  Actually, in Google Analytics, you can perform advanced visitor segmentation and see the number of visits, the average number of pages viewed per visit, and conversion rates for different groups of visitors (example analysis of visitors from different locations).

Google Analytics provides a number of default segments like New, Returning, Paid and Non-Paid Visitors, Search, Direct and Referral Traffic.  But you can also create your own custom segments. For example you could find yourself segmenting branded search vs non-branded search terms for organic and paid traffic.  Why segmenting all these? Because looking at 'all' your figures that in average does not mean a lot. Figures like 'Average Time on Site' does not mean a lot since it is too broad. To find the real actionable insights we need to break our analytics data and split the various sources, behaviour, goals and outcomes.  In brief we need to focus on the details as far as possible.  Because trying to make strategic decision based on global data can simply lead our business to failure.


Ok, let's now really ask why we should segment our visitors and customers and think about the 'real' reasons for these.

In today's, highly competitive world successful companies realise that the nurturing of high-value, faithful, recurring, pleased and lucrative customers is the key solution for having long lasting profits and help the business stay afloat.  In fact, I totally believe that it is imperative for organisations to properly identify their customers. No company can afford to offer the premier level of service to all its customers without really knowing who they are. 

Therefore calculating the visitors' and customers' value to the company enable us to know better the different types of customers we have and therefore put us in a better position to allocate valuable resources to different types of visitors/customers.   After discovery of those different customer classes we can approach different type of customers differently, like proposing appropriate products at appropriate prices for a particular segment.

For exemple: Advanced segmentation could let you see what are the web pages that are most visited by visitors who came on your site by typing brand keywords. And also what are the products that they bought?

Another common term 'Customer Differentiation' is in fact the segmentation of the high-value and high-potential customers but also the identification and separation of the least cost-effective customers. This process is important to know who the company want to serve, it involves the effort to understand what the customer really wants, what are the customers worth or potential.  After discovering valuable information about customers we are is in a better position to give priority to the most profitable ones. We can also decide what to do with the least cost-effective customers.

For exemple: It is useful to discover who are the customers that purchased more than one items on your website, and/or who are the ones that purchased again.  Then based on these figures we could deploy more effort to a particular 'segment' of our customers.

One way of differentiating customers is by establishing a baseline for the servicing cost of all customers.  The segmentation of all customers should then be done to represent them in figures. After that we evaluate actual and strategic value of all the different types of customers (segments) and finally compare the customer value figures to the baseline established before and consequently make appropriate strategic decisions accordingly.  The following graph shows an example of how customer segmentation, customer value and the servicing cost baseline can be represented for decision-making purposes.

Customers in the 'Tier 1' are actually the most valued customers with the highest actual and strategic value, they can be considered as the company's very important customers (VIP) and all effort must be made not to lose them.

Whereas the last group (tier 5) is well below the customer service cost baseline and has also a very low strategic value, appropriate decisions can then be made by managers concerning those customers classified under this group.  For example: keep them with expectations that they can be more lucrative later or simply fire them?

As said by Brett Crosby,  the Manager of  Google Analytics : "Segmentation can help you perform better through an economic downturn and go with what works, find new ways to drive revenue, find the right segments, working for them and invest there to increase their conversions."

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.
 

To all you web surfers out there... did you hear that Google released a browser?  Seems that this is the big news in the nerdy world!  Hum, we know pretty well the dramatic browser wars  that occurred a few years ago, witnessing the fall of Netscape and the dominance of Internet explorer as the main browser and can also see how it is now struggling against Firefox.  But as my granny likes to say 'War does not determine who is right, war determines who is left!' and i think in this case this is true.  If we look at the actual browser market we still see Internet Explorer as the dominant force (all versions inclusive) but just behind it lies 'Firefox'!  Other modern browsers like Safari or Opera are far behind with only about 5% of the market compared to IE (all versions) 50% and Firefox 44% of the browser market!

I have a rant that I have wanted to get off my chest for a while now,  it's like an itch that has been just out of reach, one that I have not been able to scratch until now...

One of the most often overlooked SEO issues that can have an explicit impact on your organic search engine rankings is URL structure. This is one of the most commonly overlooked aspects of SEO.   I have witnessed countless times the mess left by poorly optimised and down right messy URLs. It is a crime and if asked I am willing to point those accused out in police line-ups.  Not paying attention to your websites URL structure can make it difficult for the search engine spiders to index your site, let alone rank well! Too often we see website developers not planning carefully their site's architecture and finally ending-up looking for corrective measures after launch. 

It's a bit like constructing a huge tower on poor bases...



Here're some issues we consider important when constructing the URL structure of a website.

Few folders - When creating a directory structure, we have to be careful not to create too many sub-categories under too many categories.  At the most, we should keep the depth of the directory structure to two levels.  Most search engines don't go beyond one or two levels of directory structure, therefore keeping it to 2 levels is good from a SEO perspective but it is also good for the user experience.  This is because shorter URLs are better than longer ones for usability (easier to remember)

Descriptive keywords in URLs - Avoid using numbers (usually from dynamically generated URLs) as opposed to using descriptive and targeted keywords in the URL.  The URL structure should be as straightforward as possible and constructed logically as well as being comprehensible to users.  That is using clear words rather than long ID numbers.
 
Keyword rich URLs - It is also important to have keyword rich URLs. Highly relevant keywords should appear in the domain name or the page URL. This became clear in a recent study on how the top three search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN, rank websites. The statistics showed that top ten ranking websites on the major search engines have keywords either in the URL or in the domain.
 
At the same time we can use words in the URL to promote the theme or content of a website, as far as possible we must try to ensure that our URLs accurately reflect the page content.  According to Matt Cutts  (Head of Google's Webspam team) we should keep from three to five words in our URL, having more than that can look a little 'abnormal'.

Static URLs vs Dynamic URLs - A dynamic URL is a page address that results from the search of a database-driven web site.  The dynamic page is basically only a template in which to display the results of the database query using a script.  Whereas static URLs are page addresses, in which the contents of the web page stay the same unless the changes are hard-coded into the HTML.
 
Now, static URLs typically rank better in search engine results pages than dynamic pages and they are indexed more quickly.  This is because a search engine normally wants to only list pages that are unique. Some Search engines decide to combat this issue by cutting off the URLs after a specific number of variable strings (e.g.: ? & =).
 
Example: The 3 pages may look all the same for a Search Engine


This can happen if the search engine purges the information after the first offending character, the question mark (?), now all three pages can look the same:
 
Whenever possible, we must try to shorten URLs by trimming unnecessary parameters. To be brief, static URLs tend to be shorter and more successful than dynamic URLs.  Search engines have been pretty straightforward about that, they have a preference for static URLs...

Use of robot.txt - If we think we can have problematic URLs in our website then we can consider using a robots.txt file to block crawlers access to those particular URLs. Usually we prevent crawlers to have access to dynamic URLs, such as those that generate search results.  We can also use the robot.txt file very effectively by using 'regular expressions' thus allowing us to easily block large numbers of URLs.

Good Navigation - We have to make sure that our visitors can easily jump from one category to another, without having to click the 'Back' buttons multiple times. This is why it is important that we list all the top category links significantly on every page.  We can also use 'Breadcrumbs' to help in navigation, using breadcrumbs are good as they are navigational techniques displaying all visited pages leading from the homepage of a website to the currently viewed page.
 
Conclusion
Even if a website might be having great content, information must be logically organised for both search engines and visitors to access it.  It's somewhat pointless to put effort in optimising a Web page without giving search engines simple access to that page's content.  Badly constructed navigation schemes and URL structures can constantly act as a stop sign to search engine indexing.

Ok, let me get straight to the point, lets skip the captivating introduction, pass through the drawn out middle and land at the grand finale, what puts bums on seats, it is all about conversions... this applies to all aspects of life. Let me explain, we all want our website to attract visitors but once they are there we want to convert them into customers. What I mean is that even if we have really good rankings, it does not mean anything if our conversion rate is low.

Being dumped recently and coincidently having a lot more time on my hands I was talking to another friend (dumped too) we came to realise that perhaps there is not much difference between a first date and converting users on a website! May be the same rules apply...



RIGHT KEYWORDS - As with dates, we have to stimulate the interest of people even before they come to our website / agree to a date. We need to tweak their curiosity and make sure they click with us and not our rivals. How? Words, words & more words... No technical trick here! Our Title tags and meta-description tags are our main weapons here.

SEOMOZ a respected and valuable resource for Search Marketers place 'Keywords used in title-tags' first in the list of factors positively affecting the search rankings of a website. In brief, while a good title tag can boost rankings, a bad title tag can totally ruin your page, exactly like a few misplaced words can ruin a date. I still can't believe that my friend, whom I won't tell the name managed to say something like this on his first date "I never said you need a nose job. I just said it wouldn't hurt to consider it?"

GOOD FEELING AND CONTENT - Having a clear theme on our website ensures visitors understand and feel positive about the business right at the start. Normally we have only a few seconds before a visitor decides to stay on our site or leave. Our dialogue with the visitor (date), clean design (clean shaven and fresh clothes) are key elements that can make visitors stay (and not escape out the toilet window), thus increasing our chance of conversions. We also need some interesting and unique content on our website because we don't want our date (visitors) to get bored, do we? Talking about your lousy day at work or your ex (worst) will bore your date so much that you can possibly never see her again. The same rule applies on your website, we must ensure that our content is interesting enough to make visitors stay and hopefully provide us with a return visit (2nd date!)

Also we should never optimise for keywords that are not related to our business since this will cause our website to attract the wrong audience. In brief, we should always talk to our target audience (your date) in a way that makes you attractive...

CONSISTENT NAVIGATION - Ok, now that things are going well enough, we don't want that to end on the first night... do we? We'd like the long lasting romance. So the same applies to visitors to our site. Visitors are more likely to get what they want from a website if they are familiar with its navigation scheme. Most of the time visitors hesitate to purchase products on a website where the global navigation scheme is not consistent, they get confused, they don't know if the product they're looking for is on the same site or not and finally find themselves asking "Maybe this website (guy) isn't trustworthy and not right for me"

Therefore, we have to make sure we have a clear, consistent and well-labelled navigation that will make our visitors (our date) time on our site a pleasure...

APPEALING CALL-TO-ACTIONS - It's like making our proposal. Our goal on our site should be clear, direct and express why people should click, you don't want to mumble words and stare at your feet whilst proposing a date as the likelihood of success is slim. Whether we want our visitors to buy something, sign up for something or else (Uh hum...like spending the night together after diner).

The call to action should be clear enough and sharp to make them 'click' and convert. Therefore, when planning site architecture, part of the process is to clearly determine individual pages primary and secondary calls-to-action (depending on the type of website).

We must also think about what messages we are communicating to our visitors and the search engine spiders. If keywords, navigation and calls-to-actions are all obvious to targeted users including the search engines... then we have better chance that our visitors convert.

KEEP THEM INTERESTED - Our first conversion, hold that 'feel good' sensation. The story does not end there as within SEO we are not concerned about one night stands but the long lasting romance! So we will have to keep our dates (visitors) interested! How? We have to 'feed' them with nice and exciting offers always! Keep our content up to 'date' and interesting and also offer 'gifts' from time to time... it's all part of the game.