As it relates to SEO, not really much insight that is derived from the tool.  Potentially, a user can identify sites that were #1 then and #1 now to really get a glimpse of true authority sites.  But my thinking is that situations such as that are going to be few and far between.

Anyways, Google time machine is worth checking out….for fun at least.

Check out some of these site to see how you can leverage the “authority” of these social media sites to your domain for SEO purposes by creating great content and other forms of media.

Fall Wedding Decorations

Wedding ideas for the fall

Flowers used in fall weddings

Wedding invitation ideas

Wedding locations in Autumn

Notice these pages target a seasonal theme (”fall weddings”) for maximum relevancy.  Start creating these types of sites for your market niche.  Use Squidoo, Google Knol, HubPages, Google Notebook, and Zimbio to get started!

The reasoning of these fluctuations are algorithm “shifts” that correlate to your current inbound links. When changes are conducted within Google’s engineering team, and the ramifications of those changes gets absorbed across different Google datacenters, your rankings will seem completely unreliable as multiple times a day they may change. It is not uncommon to see as a domain fluctuate within 2-4 SERP’s (Search Engine Rank Position) in one given day.

To some extent, this is inevitable. To expect a ranking to stay in a specific spot, especially within a high competition category, is foolish, and complacency will usually result in a loss in rankings.

To reduce this risk, your online marketing unit must stay proactive in link building and continue to build links to your domain from relevant topical content.

This last sentence is the one you want to remember from this post. Links from relevant topical content is what Google likes and rewards webmasters on!

By having websites that are tightly knit on topical areas, it is easier for the search giant to provide a more relevant experience to what the visitor is looking for, as they can more easily present content within inter-related websites.

So you know you need topical links, but you also know that just buying them is not a good practice. Where do you begin?

A great place to start is within the social media marketplace and by constructing a network of independent “social sharing” sites that interlink to each other and your domain.

Lets take for example you are trying to rank numerous products within the Baby products category. Your goal is to rank on a plethora of terms that include the phrase “baby” as well as many standalone terms that are going to be very competitive such as “stroller”.

After conducting your keyword research, you should have a targeted list of about 30-45 primary phrases that are on the short list of SEO targets. At this point you start creating webpages within social sharing sites, on the topics for which you are targeting.

What is a social sharing site? It is a new type of web property that is driven from user generated content. Sites like Squidoo.com, Hub Pages, and others that allow users to visit and create media rich webpages embedded with html content, video, rss feeds, and other tools.

As long as these pages are of high quality, and can be utilized as a trusted source of information for Google, these pages will provide value in outbound links. Here is an example of a example page that is targeting the PediPaws product.

http://www.squidoo.com/pedi-paws-trims-pets-nails

Notice the video, content and integrated posts from external sources. Also notice the one or two outbound links with targeted anchor text? These links were strategically included and provide great value to the targeted domain.

These links will also increase outbound value (i.e. pagerank) over time, as age and future content updates will help dramatically.

By creating a network of these types of sites, within a certain keyword theme, and interlinking these sites together, a business will have a powerful asset for search engine optimization.  These links will improve over time and leverage the authority of the core domain for which the page was published.

Of course this is going to take alot of fresh content, re-purposing content would be a waste of time.  By executing this strategy,  your online marketing metrics, in terms of incremental visits, will go up within the category.

Learn more about this tactic and Trinity’s SEO Services at our website.

]]> http://www.trinityinsight.com/wp/wordpress-2.1.3/wordpress/�/seo/creating-a-network-of-content-within-your-seo-campaign/�/feed http://www.trinityinsight.com/wp/wordpress-2.1.3/wordpress/�/web-analytics/yahoo-and-index-tools/� http://www.trinityinsight.com/wp/wordpress-2.1.3/wordpress/�/web-analytics/yahoo-and-index-tools/�#comments Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:12:18 +0000 admin http://www.trinityinsight.com/wp/wordpress-2.1.3/wordpress/?p=33 For those who are not aware, Yahoo! recently purchased a company called Index Tools.  Index Tools was a not well known, but very viable provider, or web analytic and bid management solutions.  The acquisition though has been extremely quiet as the businesses have not issued any type of release that outlines next steps in terms of a public rollout.

Being that web analytics consulting is  one of our most prominent offerings within Trinity, this is a decision that we are anxiously awaiting.  Index Tools is a great platform and provides some key differences versus Google Analytics.

First, I love the drag and drop interface for customizing reports.  This is a intuitive time saver.  Second, unlike google analytics, you can apply filters dynamically within the report you are viewing (similar to Omniture) and do not have to set them up at a central location.

Next, their overlay tool is superior to GA.  You can actually take a section of a webpage that you want to assess and drill down into the datapoints within that section.  Also, there are many more metrics to segment by within the overlay data.

Lastly, Index Tools allows for the integration of multiple segments at once.  And again, similar to the segmentation features, this is all done in a drag and drop interface.

Hopefully, Yahoo releases this product for free.  If so, Google Analytics is going to be playing catch up immediately.  More realistic in my mind though, is a scenario in which you have to meet a certain spend level within Yahoo search marketing to get it for free and if not, a user would pay a monthly or annual fee.

If you havent checked out Index Tools, I highly recommend it.

The key behind GA is the simplified user interface and speed for which reports render.  The system is built in flash, and is a great example of a new technology driving better insights within Internet Marketing.

Well it seems that Google’s efforts, as well as the macro-trends that associate with analytics usage, have led to a run of competitors in the free or low cost analytics/web information space.  After taking a closer look at some of these offerings, I thought it would be helpful for our readers to get awareness into what I see as the winners.  Most of these companies are using new technologies like flex and ajax to make these apps more slick and fast.

Here are the top three finishers…

Bronze Medal:

Clicky

Clicky is a analytics tool that is built within AJAX and unlike Google Analytics, the web data is presented in real time.   This is a great way to help protect versus site outages, versus seeing it 8 hours later with GA.

Clicky also provides much more detailed metrics relating to user behavior as it happens.  The system shows what visitors are in your site, from what country, and how they found you, but in an individual presentation.  This type of information is similar to what a business can extract within certain live chat offerings.

The report offerings are much less sophisticated than Google Analytics, but for a CEO type, the offering is easier to navigate with the simplistic links at the top of a browser.   Last but certainly not least is the fact that the API vault is open with Clicky and companies can create their own cool applications with this data.

Silver Medal:

Enquisite

If you are in Search then this is something you should check out.  One of the hardest things to do within SEO is properly evaluate current positioning across multiple keyword themes and be able to FORECAST where a theme is headed.

Similar to the stock market, where trend analysis using moving averages is vital to assessments, Enquisite offers toolsets to gain moving averages within SEO targets.   You can export your search data and do this is in Excel, but hey who really has the time for that?

Also cool within Enquisite is the PPC Assurance offering that allows paid search advertisers to assess fraud and other errors within PPC.  Any experienced paid search marketer will tell you that if you go to a search engine with a legitimate complaint about click fraud or mis-calculations, and can back it up with data, then you have a great shot at getting a refund on those clicks.  Use this software to do this for you.

Gold Medal Winner:

Crazy Egg

Very innovative.  Essentially Crazy Egg provides free heat map type tools to understand click distribution for usability questions.

Varied heat maps exist in the analytics space.  GA’s “overlay” leaves some things to be desired and Omniture’s plug-in based model that integrates with Site Catalyst has not always been the most effective as well.

Crazy Egg provides a solution to run in parallel with either Omniture or Google Analytics.  Offering a free and paid versions, Crazy Egg provides click data in overlay, list, heatmap, and confetti (?) form.

Ok, I’m with you that the sword election of confetti might be a weird choice by the Crazy Egg management team, but you need to see how this interactive application works!  Essentially all clicks show up on the analyzed page in the way of colors, and these colors map to an incoming traffic parameter (ex. Direct or Google).  This can be clicked on or off by an analyst.

This provides great insight into how varied channels are performing as it relates to individual page click tendencies.  This type of information is critical for your landing page tests in PPC and Email.

Hope everyone is having a great summer.   Football season is right around the corner!

First it was Yahoo’s purchase of Index Tools, a good mid-market analytics application.  Index Tools could potentially be more robust that the current Urchin platform that is used by Google Analytics, because of the already established bid management tools.  Rumor has it however that Yahoo is not going to go down the same route as Google did by making the software free.  This I feel is a tremendous mistake. 

If the goal for Yahoo is to either gain more data on advertisers, or educate advertisers into site & marketing performance so that they  spend more, then the focus should be mass integration (i.e. getting as many users as possible).  To get businesses to integrate the Yahoo analytical tags on their site, Yahoo has to position their data as an alternative to Google, but they can not lose fact of the fact that Google Analytics is and always be free, and even a low cost paid alternative will likely have very slow adoption.

Microsoft on the other hand is trying to get a slice of the market for which Google’s webmaster tools owns.  For those who may not know what webmaster tools is, in a nutshell it helps websites understand the way a web crawler sees them.  Webmaster Tools allow a user to see crawl rates, broken links, create sitemaps, and gain visibility to the overall “health” of the website.

Because Google likes clean code, and has put out so much information to the SEO community about the importance of the indicators in the toolset, it has to be a vital part of site maintenance and management.  

Microsoft’s alternative is much less robust and has a ways to go to catch up with Google’s offering.  It seems the real goal of the effort is to attempt and get businesses to provide their Geo-location data so MSN Live can provide the type of local search results that Google provides today.  If I was Google, I wouldn’t be too concerned about this latest challenger as well.

Even in a standard installation, with no customization from a technology perspective, I was blown away at the level of functionality that is provided. Here are some snapshots of what this software can provide.

• Catalog Promotional Pricing by percentage or fixed amount with ability to restrict to stores, categories, products
• Free Shipping Option
• Multi-Tier Pricing for quantity discounts
• Customer Group-specific pricing and group-specific tier pricing
• Landing Page Tool for Campaigns
• Search Engine Friendly URL’s
• URL Rewrites
• Recently Viewed Products
• Recently Compared Items
• New Items Promotional Tool
• Up-sells in Shopping Cart
• Cross-sells on product pages
• Send to a Friend for all visitors, or registered users only
• Send Wishlist to a Friend by Email or RSS
• RSS Feeds for New Products, New Specials and New Tags

Wow. I know many enterprise level platforms that do not have this type of functionality. Most impressive to me was the ajax based cart page that allows a user to progress through a transaction without having a page load as well as the guided navigation functionality that is allowed to be customized through the back end by aligning attributes to the taxonomy.

What is a bit of a challenge at this stage is finding developers for the software. Being that is so new to the marketplace, you have to hunt to find someone with experience.

I highly recommend loading the software on a domain and having some fun with the customization capabilities. If you want to see it in action, and view the homepage UI with an integrated multivariate testing solution (google optimizer), check out Skateboarding Direct

So every day, or almost every day, a person arrives at our office looking for the county courthouse that resides in the same building.  And typically, we let the person know that they missed the sign for the courthouse and it was located on the first floor.

Now this physical sign is very visible.  Its just missed by 1 out of every 35 people or so.  But it proves the point that instructions and persuasion has to be clear and VISIBLE.  Make sure to clearly tell your users the pathways to the tasks that they are trying to achieve.

First, lets look back in history.  Affiliate links (ie links from other sites to yours within a advertising network) did not typically help natural search rankings.  Typical affiliate links would go straight to a link network (ex. http://cj.com/t_a.php?id=00292282) and get re-directed to your site.  Because of the tracking parameters within the URL string, as well as the fact that the incoming visit was based from a re-direct, affiliate programs did nada in helping out merchants in organic search efforts.

One company has changed that however.  A company called Link Connector has created a technology that allows affiliate programs to be executed by code that is installed on the server of a merchant.  No longer, does the re-direct need to take place from the affiliate network.

Their technology is called “naked link technology” and essentially allows a web publisher to use a query free outbound link (ex. www.trinityinsight.com). Code on the merchant side when the page loads, communicates affiliate details with Link Connector and drops the cookie on the user.

What does this have to do with SEO?  Well for starters, your affiliate campaign is going to assist in link building.  A website can dramatically improve the speed for which a link campaign is being conducted by using Link Connector.  Link Connector has signed some high profile companies lately such as American Greetings, Gunther, and Wordtracker.  Their publisher network is likely far behind CJ and LinkShare, but their technology makes it worth it to engage.

If you are considering a affiliate program for your marketing efforts, consider Link Connector.  You will be literally killing two birds with one stone… Well ok, maybe not “killing” your link building efforts - but it will be a great supplement to traditional efforts.

This year has been an interesting one to say the least with Google.  The BIG change was dropped in May, when many sites were given a “N/A” for pagerank.  Much different than the “google sandbox” (ie where your site sometimes sits when it is new to the index), the sites that were discounted included sites that allowed “manufactured” links within their webpages.  Also discounted to a higher degree was that of reciprocal linking.  Often a staple of online marketing and link building, the value that the reciprocal linking practice provides has been reduced greatly from the past.

So where does a SEO go to get results?  Glad you asked…Here are what we see is teh emerging trends today in SEO - but by tommorow, they may have changed so research is key.

1. Daily content

It seems like a no-brainer but you would be shocked to know how many sites sit without being updated for months.  At Trinity, we have seen first hand how powerful this is.  In our SEO engagements, a large portion of our work is centered around content development.  We syndicate the content on the web, bookmark it in social sites, and then re-formulate the content (so its unique!) for publishing purposes on our client sites.  No matter what you sell or offer on your site - write about it daily!  Include RSS feeds to help with content integration from the blogosphere.  Create a blog and use the “tag and ping” tactic to inform technorati and other news sites of your content.  Following these processes is a must for high rankings.

2. Widget development

Ok, you may have to outsource the development of this one, but by creating a widget and marketing it online, you can literally have thousands of links coming to your site.  Think through what type of widget may make sense for your business from a marketing perspective.  Get creative!  Is it a functional tool?  Daily content updated via xml?  Joke of the day?  It really doesent matter.  All that matters is that it is unique, catchy, and marketable - both on your website and via viral marketing on the web.

3. Back to basics - Keyword selection and HTML

Lets not forget SEO 101.  Make every page unique.  Make every page’s meta data unique.  Target terms that have less competition but a high volume.  Use phrases within your title tags segmented by “|”. Looking for a great tool to help you in identifying the best terms to target?  Download the SEO for firefox tool and see what wonders it does for your keyword research. Get it at http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html

There’s so much more, but this is enough to hopefully get you down the right path with SEO.  Drop me a line if you would like to learn more or just talk shop..

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