Welcome to the latest installment in our SEO 101 series, where we attempt to weed out all the conjecture and give you a very basic understanding of the part of online marketing that we’re most comfortable with…mine being links. Lucky, lucky me. Now, the reason for my choice of paid vs. non-paid links as a subject for 101 is because I think that there’s a huge amount of misinformation about paid links out there, and, being public service-minded (not really), I view it as my goal to explain just what the fuss is all about. After all, if you’re starting to build links, you’re going to soon get into the whole paid vs non-paid debate, right?

Note: We’ve written several good posts about links (how to make irrelevant links relevant, what exactly constitutes a paid link, etc.) and I encourage you to read those, despite any nasty formatting errors.

What IS A Paid Link?

This isn’t as clear-cut as you think. Technically, a paid link is one that has been purchased. However, what about links that are given for some other non-monetary reason that’s really no different? The exchange of goods, for example, is one that’s bandied about as people argue whether that constitutes an actual violation of Google’s guidelines. The FTC has recently cracked down on bloggers who blog about a product without releasing the info that they have, indeed, been paid for it, but currently, that same issue isn’t affecting the buying and selling of actual links themselves.


Who Says Paid Links Are Bad?

What this all boils down to is, once again, Google. As you may or may not know, Google has decided that buying links is not a great idea, and it’s a violation of their webmaster guidelines. Thus, to remain happily in their index, you should not buy links, according to them. You’ll read link builders going on and on about how bad paid links are, but I’d honestly love to know how they’d feel if it didn’t constitute a violation that could get a site thrown out of an index.

How Are Paid Links Detected?

Some of them are just so glaringly obvious that it’s laughable. Some of them are so well-done, there’s honestly no way someone would know that the link was purchased. There are the give-away keywords like “Sponsored Links” or “Advertise Here!” There is my favorite, the link that is so obviously out of place, it’s just stupid. There are footprints, where you can find the same exact text surrounding a link, on 15 sites. Some site owners enjoy hiding paid links in text that matches the color of the background. Clever!! Very, very clever. OK it’s not. It’s not at all clever. If I see a link that’s hidden in that manner, I am immediately suspicious when, many times, I wouldn’t have been before.

Why Would You Buy Links?

If you’re working in an ultra-competitive niche, you honestly may not be able to rank well without buying links. All the competitors are doing it, and even though the “everyone else is doing it” argument isn’t usually one that I enjoy making, in this case…it’s true. As I’ve said before, if anyone IS ranking in the top 3 spots for ultra-competitive terms without buying any links, I’d love to hear about it. If you encounter a lovely site owner who wants to give you a great free link on a high-traffic site, I’d also like to know.

What Are The Alternatives?

Building content that attracts links on its own, using social media, and simply asking for a link in a very, very nice way. While these methods definitely work for the right niche, including some very competitive ones, nothing really seems to convince people better than cash. That’s kind of a sad social commentary all on its own, but hey, we live in a capitalist society don’t we?

What’s a NoFollow?

Nofollow is an HTML attribute that basically tells a search engine not to influence the link target’s Page Rank from that link. Thus, if you nofollow a link, you’re telling the engines that you don’t want that link to pass any link juice. Some people will only give you a nofollowed link, but if your aim is traffic and the link is in a nice spot, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Personally, I have become much less interested in nofollow over the past few months, as we’ve seen that nofollowed links are part of a natural link profile. Technically speaking, if you’re buying a link somewhere and it’s really, really obvious that you’re buying, you may want to ask for a nofollow so that you aren’t violating any engine’s guidelines. Since nofollow could really take all day to discuss, just go search and read about it.

Are Paid Links Right for Everyone?

Absolutely not. They may work for everyone, but that doesn’t mean that you should always buy links. A backlink profile for a non-profit that is full of nothing but crappy sitewide fashion blogroll links is just a waste of time and money and a damn good shot at getting a handreview that knocks you out of Google. Good luck cleaning THAT mess up…

Just as I think that there definitely are some sites that will never move up in the rankings without buying links, I’ve definitely seem enough sites where I think it simply isn’t a good idea for one reason or another. Basically, even though I pretend to be all anti-establishment, when it comes to certain niche industries, buying links is just stupid. This site, for example, has never bought a link and we’ve been able to generate a decent amount of backlinks for our troubles. We may not rank in the top 3 for massively competitive phrases all the time, but we’re doing ok. It just depends on what you want to get out of it, I imagine. We want qualified readers, not loads of people who hit the site and immediately leave.

Are There Some Cases Where You Should Never Buy Links?

Absolutely. In fact, if you would lose your shirt if your site got banned, you might want to steer clear of link buying. However, I’ll tell you that I have worked with clients who would indeed be up the creek without a paddle if they got thrown out of Google for buying links, yet they continue to do so in spite of the risk because their ROI happens to make them skip hand in hand with their bankers down the yellow brick road. That’s also an ethical dilemma for you as a link builder. My theory is that if people are aware of risk and still wish to do something, in this case, I’m ok with it. I don’t equate buying links to butchering babies or committing genocide, so I do tend to save my energy for getting angry at meaningful things, like the cashiers at Marshall’s who only open up another lane once I’ve waited 45 minutes and am next up, the bitches.

What Happens If You Get Caught?

If you get caught, which means that you’re turned in by some nasty horrible troll of a person, you’re hand-reviewed by Google, or something else, then you’ll be tossed out of Google’s index and you have to “clean up” your site before you can be reincluded. That’s a massive pain in the arse. It won’t affect you in the other engines, but if you’re dependent upon Google for the majority of your traffic, you’re fairly well screwed. I’ve spoken to people in this situation and it can take full months to clean things up. This isn’t like the days of cloaked sites where you could say hey Google, I’ve removed those redirects and then you’re back in. This involves going to other people who have linked to you with paid links, and either nofollowing them or removing them altogether.

So there you have it, on a very basic level. Paid links are all about risk versus reward (or just not getting caught) so proceed with caution.

This is the third of the SEO Chicks 101 series that Lisa introduced a couple of weeks ago with her delve into canonicalisation issues. The second post in the series was Nicholas look at data analysis

This post was inspired by Lesley Cutts, owner of one of my favourite sites www.Goodnessdirect.co.uk who posted what I thought was an interesting response to a statement I made on twitter. Now not to make you think I’m disorganised, but I had lost some notes I had made on a keyword strategy for a client (I found them in the end & all was well), and Lesley commented that she wouldn’t know where to begin writing down a keyword strategy, as it seemed like quite an intangible thing.

This got me thinking, as there is a lot of information about how to do keyword research out there, and lots of information on conducting on page optimisation, but really I find there is very little about the middle step, deciding what to do with your keywords once you have them, so I convinced Lesley to be guinea pig case study for this post. Armed with a keyword list for Goodness direct, I’m going to show you how I use that to define how I apply the on page optimisation.

Getting organised

looking at the Goodness Direct site you’ll see that there are lots of categories, which means hundreds of keywords. This can seem quite unmanageable when it comes to optimisation, and deciding what goes where. For me the first step in creating a strategy, is always to create some order. The reason for this is two fold, firstly, it makes the job a hell of a lot less daunting, and secondly, it makes life a lot easier when it comes it grouping for internal optimisation.

To anyone who has ever done large scale PPC campaigns the way to organise keywords will be obvious, you manage your keywords in themed groups. so looking at just one section of the site, supplements, there are categories that we can place the keywords into, just as we catagorise the products

• vitamins
• minerals
• herbal

Those are our categories
form there we group our keywords into groups

• vitamins
  • vitamin c
  • vitamin A
  • Vitamin B
  • etc
• Minerals
  • Iron
  • calcium
  • zinc
  • etc
• Herbal
  • Garlic
  • Ginger
  • Ginko Biloba
  • etc

And in each group we assign the relevant keywords

• vitamins
  • vitamin c
    • daily vitamin c
    • vitamin c supplement
    • vitamin c benefits
    • vitamin c powder
    • pure vitamin c

So now we have a way of managing the huge number of keywords we have for the site, it becomes much easier to determine the strategy of what we are going to do with them.

So where does the strategising start?

The next step is to look at which pages we are going to i for individual keywords, and which pages are going to be the focus. Every product in the range qualifies as a vitamin C supplement, so which page should be optimised for it, do we try and use the term on every page? No. It’s much easier to focus optimisation on key pages, especially when it comes to key terms. For some things there will be a need to optimise one page above all others, for instance product x is a best seller with a huge profit margin, it makes sense that that would be the page you want to optimise for the highest volume term, but if that page is terrible, and another product page has a higher chance of getting positions, you may want to optimise the best page instead, get the quick win that that will afford and look at optimising the high profit product longer term.

Before I start looking at the financial benefits of individual pages or products though, I want to know what Google thinks. So I check which pages already have positions for the keywords (I generally go 3 pages in on a manual search) if the site isn’t ranking for the term, I then use the site operator to look at which pages Google is picking up for the term, for example; site :www.goodnessdirect.co.uk daily vitamin c

These are the results I got;

From the table & links above a few things become clear. First is that Goodness direct is missing out on some very easy wins, simply from having more keywords rich page titles. In the one instance where the keywords are in the title they’re ranking very highly indeed, so adding keywords to their page titles is likely to have a big impact. We have also identified the most relevant pages to do this to for daily vitamin C & vitamin C supplement. However the page identified for vitamin C supplement is the Vitamin C home page, which may not be the page we want to rank for that term long term (although it is likely to be the quickest win).

You’ve probably also noticed that I have highlighted two of the results, this is because the most relevant pages to these terms, and in fact the top 10 most relevant results on site returned by Google, aren’t vitamin C related pages. This highlights the need for additional content to be added to the site to cater to these search terms.
I know at this point you’re thinking “bloody hell Sarah that’s a lot of work to go through just to decide where keywords go” and for some sites it is, but if it can mean the difference between seeing results in a couple of months, and chasing your own tail for years. I do this a lot, and so the information I have provided above took about 10 minutes to produce. Doing this throughout a site will take a few hours, but it will let you identify the quick wins & the long term goals. So bare with me, because there is just a couple more paragraphs and another table before I’m done.

Build your road-map

You now have all of the information you need to actually build your strategy. This can be seen in the table below, which outlines the strategy for the vitamin C pages of Goodness direct. In Excel I can sort this by tasks, position, and a number of other factors to look at how the site is doing at any time, this is also arranged into campaigns & adgroups, to allow me to focus on higher value product groups or specific site areas at any given time.

For me this is a road map to the entire optimisation process. When I’m looking for links, I’m thinking about what page is relevant based on the information here. When I’m thinking about content creation, I’m looking at what gaps there are that my strategy tells me need filling. I use it to look at whether the pages that are ranking are the most effective for that term, or whether I need to start trying to outrank myself with a more relevant page. As with all journeys in life a road map might not be necessary, but setting out without one can cost you dearly both in time & money,  sometimes an extra few hours planning can make all the difference.

This is the second in our new SEO 101 series. A series intended to be of most use to those new to the search industry, or perhaps a useful refresher on some of the more fundamental elements of our day-to-day work and the services we provide to clients. In this post I wanted to look at a fundamental skill for any search professional, and that is good data analysis. In future posts we will be looking at more task-specific analysis, such as keyword research; however this post outlines a handful of principles you can extrapolate to any situation.

Firstly; (and to a certain extent this is personal preference), I would strongly urge that you do not rely on a single analytics package for your research and analysis. I’m not saying that you should invest in a bespoke tracking solution and compare that data against another; more that each web analytics provider has its own set of variables and ways of presenting data to you. When data is presented to us in a certain way, it is quite natural to allow that to steer us; however try not let your research and interpretation be limited by the functional interface. Personally, (though I love Google Analytics) if I’m doing a detailed piece of analysis, I prefer to export every single line of data available to me and collate into the same Excel spreadsheet and create a pivot table, so I can analyse any variable against any other.

Here are some tips, considerations and good-practises in data analysis for search.

1. Agree Your Data Variables and Performance Objectives with your Client

You’ve been engaged to provide a service or set of services to a client and maybe they have been extremely succinct and defined in their expectations of you. If not I would strongly recommend that you agree a set of reasonable expectations, and make it clear to your client the ways you will measure and report your performance against these objectives. I’m sure many established agencies have bespoke tools and resources to do this, but if not this is a really good exercise in proving your worth. We all know the fruits of our day to day efforts can take a long time to show up in the SERPS, and some actions can be quite intangible. Your client may not know that much of the growth in ‘referral traffic’ is a result of your link building for example. Make sure at the outset that your client is aware of how you will measure performance in what you are being paid for and how you will report that to them.

2. Never Present a Single Line of Data

Something I learned from Gianluca Carrera, a former commercial VP at Yahoo! now VP New Media at Truvo (and the person with the best analytical skills I have ever worked with,) is that a single line of data on a graph is an absolute waste of time. I know Analytics likes to present us with a single line graph and that is fine for a snap-shot; however presenting that data, or trying to interpret that data without comparator is not just meaningless, it’s impossible.

I know that Google do allow you to ‘compare to past’, which can be a useful illustration of (hopefully) growth, or seasonality, however some growth is outside our sphere of influence and some performance shifts cannot be understood simply by comparison to previous behaviour.

Additionally, it is important to note that a lot of our performance criteria in search, are not measurements in their own right, but often derivative variables of two or more original metrics. As an example if I am presenting Adwords CTR (click-through rate), which is a derivative normally expressed as a percentage, of ad impressions and number of clicks, I really need to present absolute impressions or absolute clicks (or both) against this data, to understand the interplay between the two original metrics.

So What, Compared to Nothing

3. Don’t Self-Censor

I’m a big believer in trusting your gut. I think that ‘gut-feel’ or instinct (call it what you will) isn’t some sort of magic premonition, but rather a predisposition towards a particular theory, which is based on past experience. Now having said that, when it comes to data analysis, don’t let your gut-feel take you in the wrong direction. This is extremely pertinent when performing reactionary analysis, like when a performance issue occurs. I made a school-boy error myself quite recently when analysing the same performance issue on two sites belonging to the same client. I suspected the error on the second site was the same as the error on the first site. I exported the data, analysed the metrics and duly found the same indicators as before; however things didn’t improve…  In a late-night lightning bolt moment, I realised that I’d ignored the golden rule. I’d self-censored by only exporting the data surrounding the issue I suspected. I immediately exported all of the site data and ‘lo and behold’ discovered that there was another instance of this particular issue further down the goal path.

Always start with a complete data pool, and though it makes sense to go first where your gut takes you, don’t self-censor.

4. Learn to Weight

Weighted algorithms are of course the stuff of our very existence. Knowing how to perform a weighted calculation is not just useful for testing our thoughts on ranking factor variables, but there are many practical applications on a much smaller scale. As this is a ‘101’ post I’m going to show a simple example of a weighted formula that can be used to get a deeper understanding of traffic performance.

In search we tend to be of an analytical mind-set and I’m sure by just a few days or weeks into a new client relationship, you will be able to recall the key stats regarding the site volume and conversion drivers. Another initial exercise I would recommend that you do as a matter of course is to establish a value understanding of each source of traffic by working out the weighted contribution of this source of traffic to two or more primary goals.

A common set of goals are to increase traffic, and drive sales. As an example, if 50% of traffic is from non-paid search and this traffic contributes 30% of conversions/completed goals; but then Facebook referral traffic at 20% of overall traffic drives 50% of conversions,  this traffic is more than pulling its weight. It is in fact more valuable.

How Do I Define the ‘Value’?

i) Decide on your period of analysis and required data points.

As an example I’m going to imagine my client cares only about sales and volume, so I want a snap-shot picture of the value of each source of traffic where sales and volume are my metrics; for a single month.

ii) Identify your data.

In my example you need each source of traffic, and its percentage contribution to total traffic and percentage contribution to total completed goals. In Analytics you will need to create a Custom Report to get this data together easily. If you haven’t explored Custom Reports, it is really straight-forward if a bit clumsy on the left-hand drag and drop.

iii) Export Your Data

Depending on how flexible your web analytics package you might need to do more than one export and copy/paste the data together. In my example we’d be aiming for something like this…

Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead is Purely Coincidental

iv) Assign a ‘Weight’

In speaking and consulting with your client, they may tell you that they have a dual objective for both volume and sales growth, in which case both elements of the calculation could count for 50% of the calculation. In my example, I’m going to imagine that my client prioritises total sales a bit more than volume growth, so I’m going to say that volume contribution of each traffic source counts for 40% of my calculation and contribution to sales counts for 60%

Arbitrary Weight Assigned

v) Insert Your Formula

Unfortunately there is no Function for a weighted average, but you can enter the formula as follows…

=SUMPRODUCT(VALUES,WEIGHTS)/SUM(WEIGHTS)

In my sheet this would look like this…

Formula 1

(The ‘$’ symbol before the row number tells excel to fix the reference to that particular cell, so that when I ‘fill-forward’, other rows update, but the reference to the cells containing the weight stay fixed. I bet you already know this, but no harm in over-stating in a ’101′ I hope.)

What we have here is a weighted average calculation, used as a representation of the value of each source of traffic, expressed as a percentage. What such an exercise will tell us is that, though focusing on volume may be a natural way to prioritise, we may find that it could be more valuable to start elsewhere, or move a particular activity higher up the agenda. In my example it would make a lot of sense to focus on link-building with sources akin to “That Forum” and upping activity levels on Twitter and Facebook.

Of course, a formula is a formula and once you are comfortable using this, you can extrapolate these principles to any situation, according to the relevent priorities. If you have any questions about data analysis on any level just @NicholaStott and I’ll be  happy to see if I can help. If I can’t, I do know someone who can!

This will be the first blogpost in our new “SEO 101 Series” where the SEO-Chicks will be going through some basic, and some more advanced search engine optimisation principles. I have decided to start with an area within technical SEO; “Canonicalisation”.

One of the reasons I chose this subject is that for some reason this area always seems to be one of those areas of SEO that somehow gets forgotten, even when a company are doing SEO. It amazes me! In the last 9 months, since I’ve set up Verve Search, I have been doing more SEO evaluations than you can shake a stick at. And the most occurring problem I evaluate for a website is canonicalisation issues, and it can have such a massive impact on your SEO efforts. Let’s start from scratch.

First of all I find it very amusing that the term “canonicalisation” isn’t actually the appropriate description or term for the actual problem. In fact “canonicalisation” is the term for the solution to the problem rather than the name for the problem itself. But in SEO we have taken to referring to both the problem and solution when using the term “canonicalisation”. How the heck that happened I don’t know. In fact I recon we should take it upon ourselves to come up with a term that explains the problem. Clients particularly have a epileptic fit when you mention a word like “canonicalisation”, took me years just to pronounce it for petes sake.

The word Canonicalisation derives from mathematics and simply put means; the process of choosing one where there are several choices. Canonical = preferred! So in SEO terms it is referring to choosing one preferred URL where there several URLs loading the same page (content).

So how do you get several URL versions of the same page? Short answer, a dozen ways. The most common, and also in my opinion the most unnecessary and unforgiving example of canonicalisation issues are these:

www.samplesite.com

http://samplesite.com

www.samplesite.com/index.php (or .htm .asp or whichever)

http://samplesite.com/index.php

99% of the time your website will have a www version and a non www version of each page. The site is also likely to have a /index version or sometimes even a /home version.

Now, what happens when the search engine spider arrives on your site is this:

The spider will only chose ONE of these versions for its index, if you have no canonical “signs” it will chose as it pleases (although yes most of the time the spider will chose the www.vervesearch.com version). So what’s the problem with this? Let’s say for argument sake that the search engine spider chose the non www version but as you can see per below illustration this version of the homepage actually has the LEAST amount of links!

Because all of these URLs load the homepage, people can link to any of these versions. Most likely people will link to the www version, but quite often you will find that if someone has gone further in to your site then hit the home button this will load the /index versions. And sometimes people don’t use www before the domain name when they type it straight into the browser. So what is happening here? You are DILUTING YOUR LINKS! If the spider indexed the above version in the example it would mean the likelihood of ranking highly (for whatever keyword you have optimised for) will be significantly less than if the spider ranked the www version! Thus the biggest problem with “canonicalisation issues” is dilution of your “link juice”/link equity! There are also a dozen other examples of even worse instances of “canonicalisation issues”, if you have an ecommerce site for example it’s probably 99% chance you have canonicaliation issues. Usually a website with loads of products will have different routes of getting to the same end product; i.e one product will be in several categories thus creating duplicate URLs with the same content!

To fix it we need to make sure the search engines know which URL is the preferred URL and also take precautions to carry over the link juice from the “duplicate URLs”, so to speak, to the preferred/canonical URL.

You essentially have two options for carrying over the link juice. Either by using a ‘301 redirect’ or use of the (relatively new) ‘canonical link tag’. Or even both. In fact for the above example of Verve Search I used a 301 redirect for the non www version and a canonical tag on the /index version.

Using a 301 redirect
In my opinion using a 301 redirect is still the “safest” way to make sure the link equity gets carried over. In addition using 301 redirects can be used across domains, whilst the canonical link tag can only be used within a domain. I would say the only downside with 301 redirects is that this will need to be carried out on a server level so if you are not a programmer or at least very familiar with how this is done it can easily be done wrong. I would recommend this is left to a programmer or technical SEO (I have seen instances where 301 redirects implemented wrong has created infinite loops and all sorts!)

Setting up 301 redirects and how it is done very much depends on your server. If your site is on a UNIX or Apache server it’s relatively simple.

Here’s how to do use a 301 redirect using the .htaccess file:
1. Locate the .htaccess file on your server. If you don’t have one, just create one using a textfile (notepad) and name it .htaccess (if you already have a .htaccess file make sure you start the new redirect instructions scroll down to the end of the previous instructions)

2. Put in your redirect information, which would be something like this
redirect 301 /directory/file.html http://www.domainame.com/directory/file.html

NB! The first part “/directory/file.html” is the location of the file being moved and the second part “http://www.domainame.com/directory/file.html” is where the file is being moved.

3. Upload the file to your server.

On the other hand, If your site is on IIS Server (eeek) the procedure for implementing 301 redirects is totally different.

For 301 redirects on IIS do the following:

1. Click on the file or folder you want to redirect within the internet services manager.
2. Select “a redirection to a URL”.
3. Enter the URL that you want to redirect to
4. Make sure you check “The exact url entered above” and the “A permanent redirection for this resource”.
5. Click Apply

I would also like to point out this very usefully article by Steven Hargrave for specifics on doing 301 redirects for pretty much any script, including Perl, Ruby, Java and 301 redirect with mod rewrite.

Using a Canonical Tag
In theory the canonical meta tag should be just as effective as a 301 redirect. But as it’s still relatively new I’m finding it hard to trust it yet (I would love to get your feedback on your experiences using this tag though.) Here’s in essence how the tag works: the “canonical tag” lets you specify in the HTML header that the URL in question should be treated as a “copy” and names the canonical URL that all link authority and content metrics should flow back to.

The canonical link tag is very easy to implement, and you don’t need access to the server. Here’s how:

Within the HTML Header (Meta information) of the pages you want to “redirect” the link juice from, implement the following tag:

The canonical tag should be implemented on every URL you have that is loading the same page. For more information on the canonical link tag, check out this article on the subject by Matt Cutts.

The canonical link tag is ideal for large products and ecommerce sites, I also usually use the canonical link tag on all /index version of pages as I’m a bit worried about 301 redirecting /index versions as these are essentially the physical version of the actual page.

In allot of cases sorting out your canonicalisation issues will have a BIG impact on your SEO efforts, in fact I would say that when starting out the SEO process on a website, fixing the canonicalisation issues should be the first port of call. Doing SEO on a site that is “bleeding” link authority due to canonicalisation, is a bit like building a sandcastle using a sieve!!!