You can segment your email list by what page(s) they visited.

That means you can use your email marketing for “retargeting” aka “remarketing.”

Retargeting is an increasingly popular marketing tactic that targets prospects based on their having already visited your site (or a specific page, depending what pages include your retargeting-cookie-dropping code).

You know from the person’s previous visit that they’re interested in your product, so you use retargeting  to get a second chance at converting them.

Typically, retargeting is done via display ads. And this still is worthwhile for people who visited your site but aren’t on your email list.

The point of this blog post is to say that you don’t need to use display ads. You can just segment your email list by people who visited your site before. That way you don’t need to pay per click, and get more out of your existing email marketing dollars.

If you’re an Aweber email marketing customer (you can try it for $1 / 30 days) , this is super easy.

To set up a retargeting segment:

1. Browse to your Subscibers > Search area, then select Web Page viewed and enter the URL.

2. Click search.

3. Then enter a name for the segment and save it!

Some particular cases where email retargeting can be handy:

1. Need to liquidate your inventory?

Segment the list by people who visited the relevant pages on your site, and use your newfound remarketing savvy to let them know it’s now up to 50% off!

2. Over-deliver to customers who saw the thankyou page.

Did someone just donate to your charity? Buy your product? Don’t just say thanks – send them an email offering a free hat or sweater if they’ll give you their offline address. (Then you can use this for direct mail.)

3. Combine with local segmentation to set up meetings next time you’re in town.

Ex.: Did someone on your list see your enterprise B2B product but not convert? Let them know when your sales staff are in town next and offer to take ‘em out for lunch!

4. Download the segment and follow up personally via phone or social media.

Use this to understand the prospects’ objections and refine your persuasion process!

If you liked this post, you might also like my post Why Ecommerce SEO Is A NON-Profit Activity, which discusses using SEO for customer acquisition with minimal profit, and email for generating profit. Or try Aweber email service for $1.

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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Here’s how to increase your adwords CTR and drop CPCs in 30 seconds, by finding more negative keywords. Sort by impressions.

The reason this boosts CTR is because your CTR is determined by clicks across ALL keyword phrases people use – not just those you intended.

Use negative match to block your ads from showing up for irrelevant keywords, even those that are close misses. If you sell Ford F-150s but not their tires, phrase-matching “Ford F-150″ will get you tire-buyers viewing your dealership’s ads.

So you want to pay attention not just to know budget wasters like broad match, but even phrase match keywords.

Unfortunately, it’s sometimes a hassle to sort through the “actual search phrases” report in AdWords. That’s because the default sort is by spend, and that’s not optimal for showing underperforming keywords.

Step 1: View your campaign or adgroup’s actual search phrases.
Step 2: Sort the report by impressions.
Step 3: Look for the close-misses and irrelevant traffic that are causing your ads to appear most frequently but have low CTRs.

Voila – that’s how to find the bulk of your negative keyword list.

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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Google is cutting the ROI on ecommerce SEO and has been for 8+ years. If ecommerce merchants don’t understand the changes below, they’re going to lose market share to savvier competitors.

Read on for what you need to do to survive and thrive.

Google has reduced the traffic and ROI available to SEO-ed sites by:

• - Publishing sites’ content directly in search results as stock quotes, movie times, flight times, sports scores etc.
• - Creating “universal” search results that make sites compete with Youtube, Google News, Product search etc
• - Taking away keyword data for up to 30% of sites’ SEO traffic

And that’s just the more obvious things. But don’t take my word for it, Google proudly say so in this video:

Smart SEOs are already transitioning out of relying on SEO traffic for profit. They’re using it to acquire customers, period.

Everyone knows that repeat customers are easier to sell to and buy more. So make an initial low-profit sale to search visitors, so that you can add them to your email list and make more sales and profit later.

In fact, in my previous email to people who got a free advanced SEO book chapter, I went so far as to advocate selling at cost -i.e. at 0% profit – to maximize your conversion rate on SEO traffic.

Then wouldn’t you price everything – since you want search traffic on all your products – at 0% profit?

How will you ever be profitable then?

There are two parts to making long-term profit off of search visitors.

Part 1 – Dividing products between customer-generation and profit-generation
Part 2 – Segmenting traffic on the fly to personalize the products you show

Part 1 – Divide products between customer-generation and profit-generation

The reason for cutting into margins is that SEO traffic is decreasing, and price-comparisons are a click away.

The thing is … what if there wasn’t search traffic in the first place?

Challenge the assumption that all your products want/depend on search traffic!

Surprisingly, that’s the case for many products. For example, any new product doesn’t have existing search demand. (See sidebar.)

1) Acquisition products. These low-margin products are meant to draw visitors into the store, to be either immediately converted and/or upsold on products with higher margins.

In offline retail this is known as a “loss-leader” – a product that is sold at little, no- or even negative-margin.

It leads visitors into the sale that is then made profitable with crosssels and upsells.

2) Profit products. These are higher margin products that allow the business to grow and thrive.

Popular examples:

• - Candy-and-magazine display at the checkout counter
• - Accessories for your electronics, such as cases, memory cards, insurance
• - “House” brands – if you manufacture the product, customers can’t get it from competitors, eliminating price-competition

So how do you make sure that your existing customers will see profit-generating products when they return to your site?

Part 2 – Segment the traffic and personalize

Have you visited Youtube while logged in to your Google account? Notice that it recommends videos specifically for you?

Or notice how Amazon welcomes you by name and shows you recently-browsed products? (Retargeting of a sort.)

You can use a free tool like BTBuckets (hattip Daniel Waisberg at SMX Israel) to show these visitors custom content. It’s called behavioral targeting (BT).

Why not just send existing customers to targeted landing pages? Why resort to fancy technology?

It’s not an either-or choice. You can do both.

Most products aren’t sold on the immediate first visit, though. So it’s useful to have this segmentation in place for when users return, potentially on a different URL than your targeted landing page.

They might visit your homepage instead – but fortunately you’ve got them cookied and IP-logged so you know to show them the profitable merchandise, not the acquisition merchandise.

To conclude:

Show SEO traffic your cheapest products – but don’t keep showing them flat-margin products once they’re customers.

Create your own products.

Differentiate them.

Bundle products.

Scrape Amazon’s “customers who bought X also bought Y” recommendations.

Show products that require a higher-degree of trust. Ask for Facebook-connect logins to gain demographic data so you can buy Facebook ads to keep increasing your email list.

Increase that average order value and those profits!

If you liked this post, you might also like:

How to Find Competitors’ Keywords
Brand Building Online – It’s Not Just Colors
Remote usability testing beginner’s guide
How Inhouse Ecommerce SEOs can add value
4 Advanced Ecommerce SEO Tactics

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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Steve recently got a warning from Google that a number of pages were returning soft 404s, and the next week, his traffic dropped 10%.

The following week, another 30% was gone. What are these dramatically harsh “soft” 404 errors? How do you fix them?

What is a soft 404? It’s when your content is no longer what was there but you return an http status code other than 404 or 410 (i.e. you don’t return an error code). For instance, you might return a 200 code. As Google says in describing such errors, you can label a giraffe a dog, but it’s still a giraffe.

If Google detects such errors, you can expect them to index less of your pages and to eliminate the rankings those pages might once have had. In Steve’s case, this was probably partly to blame, but an additional server crash certainly did not help. So don’t worry about as drastic drops as Steve experienced, but be aware that you can see traffic drops due to soft 404s.

The difficulty this client experienced is that contrary to the more common soft 404 situation where 200 status codes are being served, we had established 301 redirects.

Here’s my analysis of the problem affecting this client’s site, all of which essentially stemmed from a recent redesign.

With the redesign, the client also implemented search-engine-friendly URLs. Great!
The trick of course is how do you maintain the rankings? Standard SEO best practice is to 301 redirect the old URLs to new URLs. Great!

What about when some of the pages on the old site won’t exist on the new site? This client has a dynamic classifieds site, so products are constantly being sold and delisted by the merchant who advertised it.

During the transition from old to new site, a number of product detail pages became useless because that merchant sold out his/her inventory.

We couldn’t leave the pages in place and just label them as sold, with links to other merchants’ identical-product listings. While good for users and Googlebot, it would burden the server heavily given the size and volume of this site.

Instead, we had to redirect these expiring classified listings. The priority list for 301 permanent redirects was as follows:

1. Exact-Product overview page that links to listings from several merchants. So an expired Nike Air Jordan 1991 Red Men’s Shoe product listing would send visitors to the Nike Air Jordan 1991 Red Men’s product overview page.

2. If such a page didn’t exist, a redirect to the deepest subcategory (i.e. from breadcrumb navigation) would be shown.

3. In the absence of a subcategory, a category page would be the redirect’s target.

4. In the absence of a relevant category, the general “Pick A Category” page would be shown.

Google showed us three URLs that it said were soft 404s, and indeed they were right with regards to two.

Those two redirected to the Pick A Category page. While that used to be acceptable and even widely advised SEO practice for the sake of maintaining traffic, Google’s realized it’s not an ideal user experience.

So Google tells you that such redirects (in their example, to one’s home page) are no good.

Fair enough, we’ll change that to 410 errors and hopefully make up the lost traffic on any specific rankings with increased indexing and longtail traffic to other product detail pages.

But the third page was perplexing – it redirected from a product detail page to a page that listed classified ads for exactly the same product. It wasn’t clear why Google thought this was a soft 404? A false positive from Google, clearly.

This lead me to write the following analysis for the client:

Hi Steve,

I looked around, checked out SEOmoz Pro and Google help and used my noggin. Here’s my analysis:

1) Generally, soft 404 is when there’s a 200 response even though the content isn’t there.
2) Google’s help pages also talk about redirecting to the home page as being a soft 404 – so we know that it’s not just 200 responses but also 301 that can cause soft 404s.
3) How does Google detect that there’s a soft 404? It checks if the content of the page says that the file is not found or otherwise says that an error took place.

ALSO – It seems it can look for content that is too different – as in 2). So probably it’s looking at title tags, headers, images, and content similarity.

If you look at the first soft 404 page (— edited to protect the innocent—), it’s more surprising because that category/search result shows exactly the products someone is searching for.

However, if you look at the html code, neither the title nor the headers (h1 h2 etc) reflect the product searched for. So for a robot, it’s not clear that the page it gets redirected to is about the same topic as the page it tried to fetch.

Therefore, the solution I propose to fix the soft 404 errors is:

—–Part 1—–

For products that are gone and redirect to perfectly accurate subcategories or model pages, to edit pages of that type (is it search results? something else? product-overview page?) and include the keywords in the important areas for SEO: title, h1 and let the on page content take care of the rest.

On a related note to the above, I suggest changing the css/coding around so that on category pages, not just product pages, the product name is in a large-font size h1. Currently they’re not in h1s at all. And other things that are not really important (e.g. non-category-specific sidebar headings) should not be h2.

Ex.: “Brand” “Color” etc should not be in h2, because that tells Google the wrong message about the page’s topic. They can still be in a larger font via css, but preferably not
h2.

Another benefit of making the category keyword a prominent h1 heading visible on the page is that this should hopefully help reduce bounce
rate.

—-Part 2—–

For product pages that are currently redirecting to the pick a category page, or a regular category page, let’s eliminate the 301 and just do a 410 gone .

In any case, Google is not treating them like 301s, so we may as well try and do what Google’s asking and show 410. On the 410 page, we can still show links to the relevant category page as well as the pick a category page.

For product pages that are currently redirecting to product-overview pages, let’s make sure the model pages have h1s set up right.

For product pages that are redirecting to subcategories, can we prioritize the same exact same product to show up first?

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In writing a report for an illuminea client, Traffix Diameter Systems , I wrote the following about the new Modified Phrase Match and Exact Match:

“The low-volume keywords (ex.: misspellings and 4-word phrases) have been paused to allow them to be targeted by other keywords set on phrase match targeting.”*

*Phrase match did not previously target misspellings (or accents or abbreviations), so it was necessary to add misspellings as separate keywords, which resulted in low quality scores since the landing pages did not also misspell the keywords.

Alternately you could target these keywords using modified broad match and broad match targeting, but this meant lower CTRs since the same ads would have to target a wide, diverse audience.

Google has, starting May 1, changed the default nature of phrase and exact match keywords to include these variants: misspellings, singular/plural, stemmings (swiming will also match swim), accents and abbreviations.

So you can achieve high keyword quality scores on phrase-matched keywords without worrying about writing ads that both appeal to your regular audience and your misspellings demographic with modified-broad-match ad writing.

Cesar Barba has a useful post that explains how to see if the change is profitable, and Steve has a nicely illustrated, colorful explanation of the change.

P.s. Anyone who doesn’t want this can opt-out via the Campaign settings selections page.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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If you’re using both an autoresponder series of emails as well as “broadcast” messages that go out with no regard to sequence, you run the risk of annoying people with too-frequent emails.

For example, if you have an autoresponder series that sends emails every 3 days, then broadcast on top of that, someone could literally have just gotten an autoresponder when they get your broadcast. I just found that out the hard way with someone who got my free chapter telling me that they unsubscribed because the email prior to my broadcast today was sent 90 minutes earlier!

The solution is to segment your email list. In Aweber, you go to Subscribers > Search Subscribers. Then look for subscribers with whom the last followup date was 2+ days ago.

Aweber allows you powerful segmentation including by the date you last sent a follow-up email.

The problem with this kind of segmenting is that it always needs updating, because Aweber makes you pick a specific date. You can’t set the “Last Followup” field to “2+ days ago,” you need to set it to “On or Before” “April 20, 2012,” for example (I’m writing this April 23, 2012).

The result is that in the future, subscribers who have been recently added will be excluded by this segment – EVEN IF they have gotten the whole series of autoresponders over a month ago! Imagine we’re in June, and someone got all the autoresponder emails by May 15th. I can email them again without being annoying, but my above-saved segment would exclude them.

So the conclusion is that you need to save the segment with a name that tells you exactly how it’s set: “Last followup on or before {insert precise date}.” That way, next time you need to broadcast, you’ll be reminded to update the segment before sending to it.

Kudos to Joel Chudleigh from DeepFootprints.co.uk for forcing me to improve , and to Aweber for generally making great software despite my occasional quibbles.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

[Edit: I try to post original stuff but I realize here that I'm adapting "second page poaching." It only occurred to me after writing my post, but when you're done reading this, check out Virante's posts on second page poaching, relevant data collection and an API. ]

While working on a huge site with 1000s of pages and keywords, I realized that I needed to prioritize what keywords to build links for.

The situation was different from a brand new site, because for a new site, all keywords are equally hard to rank for (except perhaps those in the domain), in that you’re not in the top 100 for anything. In such a case, you typically prioritize keywords by absolute search volume, then keyword difficulty.

Unlike a brand new site, this site already has pages in the top 100 – and especially the top 20 – for dozens of terms. I sawthis when setting up the rank tracking (for reporting purposes) in Raven Tools. (Normally I prefer Authority Labs for rank tracking for their great historical graphs. These let you see what links boosted you, assuming the links are published on sites crawled regularly.)

 Check page 2 rankings with equivalent keyword search volume for their relative keyword difficulty, using SEOmoz‘s keyword difficulty tool.

Accessible to SEOmoz Pro members only as of this writing.  

Anyways, Stephan Spencer and the boys at Virante shared a tip that you should look for pages ranking in positions 11-20, e.g. on the second page, since they’re easiest to rank.

The site already has loads of authority links from across the web, having been around since the 90s. So what’s needed at this point is deep links with a mix of anchor text. You’re only a few links away from page 1 and traffic in that case.

And as the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day. A site doing 1 million visits/month didn’t get there from trying to rank for “insurance” straight away, but from getting 50 visits a month here and 230 visits a month there. It adds up and snowballs, because as more people get to know you and find you in search results, more people link to you.

(Mike Grehan described this phenomenon years ago as the [SEO] Rich Get Richer, in a piece called Filthy Linking Rich.)

What do you do when you have a few dozen pages on page 2? With similar keyword search volumes? Look at the keyword difficulty. 

So unless there’s a tool that gives me keyword difficulty scores in bulk, I’m going to go through the terms 5 at a time with SEOmoz’s keyword difficulty tool and see what ranks in positions 2-20 and is worth building links for to top up traffic.

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I launched some Facebook ad campaigns in the past few days and saw traffic skyrocket in Google Analytics.

Problem is, the traffic was garbage – not the traffic I was paying for, which converted decently. It was Facebook’s ad reviewers, tasked with checking the 1000+ ads I uploaded, visiting my site once/ad. 

You’d think they could just do CTRL+F, see the destination URLs are all the same and visit once?

I used Google Analytics’ campaign URL builder, which helped me find the problem, because it was quite obvious what URLs were generating this spike in traffic relative to this site’s otherwise low traffic, not to mention you can view goals by UTM URL variables etc specifically.

Also, checking where most of the traffic was, Google Analytics showed North Carolina.

Guess what? I wasn’t targeting ads to the US. I think we’ve found Facebook’s East Coast ad review center, lol .

Conclusion: Use filters to look at your Google Analytics data minus North Carolina if you’re uploading ads and are in a time zone ahead of North America.

I just published a guest post from Lior Levin on Advanced Segments in Google Analytics with explanations on doing that, if you need help.

I’m on time zone GMT +2 in Israel. That’s presumably why I got an East Coast review instead of waiting extra hours for the West Coast team. Speaking of which – big kudos to Facebook for setting that up so I could get my ads live some hours sooner! Thanks folks!

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
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Suppose you’re using Google’s URL building format to mass tag URLs with UTM_campaign, UTM_Keyword, UTM_content and other UTM settings – where do you see the data afterwards?

Google Analytics used to provide UTM-tagged URL performance data under the Advertising tab/navigation item. Now, it’s moved.

You can find the info in

Traffic Sources > Sources > Campaigns .

Once that’s open, scroll to the top and click Goal Set 1 (or 2, 3 etc according to what you want to see).

This provides extremely actionable info if you’ve properly tagged your campaigns.

Here’s some sample info from a client, for example.

We used

- one UTM variable for age and

- one UTM variable to insert country targeting data:

When the data presents this clear, it makes taking action so easy a trained monkey could do it.

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Directory.Google.com is dead. All the links going to it and its associated URLs are broken.

Follow the process of broken link building and you could find yourself with some massively juicy links.

Step 1: Find links to relevant pages on directory.google.com in your favourite link research tool.
Step 2: Publish a directory page with links to relevant sites/pages, in replacement of Google’s equivalent page. Try archive.org to see if what was on Google’s directory is still around.
Step 3: Solicit the webmasters linking to the dead pages.

The catch? Most of the pages with links have under 10 links … so you could do a fair amount of work for little reward. This is especially true when you consider the low response rates for manual outreach.

Of course, experienced link builders know that link building tactics don’t die, they just get recycled with new twists/modifications. This is a whitehat variant on cloning dead sites, a grayhat tactic I spun off of a blackhat tactic, and shared a few years ago.

(I realize I’m a bit late finding out about the death of Google’s directory, but hey – when was the last time you visited a directory for purposes besides SEO?…)

How badly do you want quality links?

p.s. Google directory was a scrape of DMOZ… so you can also look at DMOZ”s links, and tell them how out-of-date, broken down etc the directory is and why not link to you instead?…

If you liked this post – I`d love a link to it ;D.

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Does your competitor have some sweet old links you wish they didn’t have?

Well, here are two sneaky ways – one’s even sly and nasty – to get your competition’s links dropped.

1) Run their site through your favourite backlink research tools.
2) Use something like Xenu Link Sleuth or your favourite link checker to look for 404 pages on your competitor’s site that have links.
3) Contact the webmasters linking to said 404s and use broken link building to get the link for yourself instead.

If the link is on a hub page that links to many pages in the field, you don’t even need the competitor’s page to 404.
1) Run the hub page through a broken link checker.
2) Write an email to the hub page’s webmaster with a large list of the broken links – but don’t send yet.
3) Add your competitor’s link into the list near the end.

Q: Why would the webmaster remove your competitor’s link if it’s not broken?
A: Laziness and trust – if the first dozen links were all broken, the next dozen are probably broken, too. Why keep checking all of them?

While I think it’s fine for you to do the first to competitors, the second approach isn’t ethical. It’s an approach to be aware of though, so if you have a link management software like Buzzstream , follow up with the appropriate webmaster if a link dissappears. And of course, monitor your 404 errors in Webmaster Tools and server logs.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Recently a client came to me with a question about where to prioritize their content-writing efforts for the site redesign, and I offered her an answer based on Google Analytics‘ keyword data.

The problem is that if you just export your top keywords, you’re going to see brand search terms near the top.

What can you do with branded keywords? They’re not actionable, because you rank for your brand terms and will continue to rank in the future.

You want to find out what are your top keywords to prioritize where you spend your time writing copy.

So how do you exclude brand search keywords from your Google Analytics traffic sources report?

1. Click the “advanced” link that is near the search-filter box.

You’ll see a screen like the following one:

2. Click on the Include drop-down and switch it to exclude. Then type in your core brand term. So if your company is called John’s Crazy Shoes, type “John” or “Crazy”. Finally, click apply, and voila – you’re done!

What about if your brand name has lots of alternative spellings and misspellings? Or what if one site has multiple brands, due to a rebranding or multiple child companies sharing a single site with the parent company?

In such a case, you can use regular expressions, or regex, to exclude all of the brands .

All you need to do is switch the matching parameter to be “Matching RegExp” and type each of the various spellings into the text field.

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(Related post: How To Build Your Company’s Brand Online)

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• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Content Marketing Cannon is a new WordPress SEO plugin.

It consolidates many ordinary posts on topic X into the authority article on X, increasing longtail traffic possibilities, PageRank per post, and linkworthiness of your content.

Other benefits include easier browsing of archives (due to less pagination), time savings, and innumerable supermodels chasing after you.

To download this plugin, you can (i) “pay” with a tweet or Fb-share or (ii) get my latest posts in your RSS reader or email, free. (You need to wait for the weekly email to if you choose the email option.)

FYI: You can edit the tweet/Fb share or cancel before it appears in Twitter/Fb.

The problems CMC solves: pagination, PageRank dilution, content division

Blogs can only include so many posts on a category page before you need to paginate. And if you paginate, posts on page 2 etc won’t get as much link juice. Sure, you can set posts to appear that to 100 posts, but then the category page will take a while to load which isn’t ideal either.

I offered a few solutions to this problem in my advanced SEO book, one of which was:

Consolidate posts on a specific topic into a single authority article.

1) You get an in-depth authority article that is more likely to attract links than smaller bits of info.
2) The link juice from those articles consolidates onto 1 page, making it more competitive (e.g. use 301 permanent redirects).
3) There are more possible longtail combinations to hit.
4) You reduce the number of posts and thus have more PageRank flowing from the categories into posts . Also, you reduce the need for pagination.

An example scenario: Roof repair blog

In one post you talk about wooden roof frames rotting and in another about wooden roof frames warping shape and a few others on wooden frame issues.

You consolidate your wooden roof posts into the authoritative article on wooden roof damage. You 301 the subarticles (e.g. the ordinary posts now part of the authority post), and remove the 301 posts from the homepage, category pages, tag pages, search pages and sitemaps.

Thus your authority article has more PageRank than any of the subarticle ones did – and it stands a better chance to rank. Meanwhile, all the site’s remaining articles have a greater share of your PageRank, too.

Plus you now get longtail traffic you couldn’t get before because the two articles were on separate pages, like “wood roof rotting because frame warped.”

You can see a case study of the plugin at work from SEO consultant Kieran Flanagan’s SearchBrat blog. He beta tested the plugin. Here’s a screencap of what the results look like:

The problem is this demands a fair bit of manual work…

Unless you automate it.

Oh wait! That’s what Content Marketing Cannon does:

- Include any post in another with a simple shortcode that refers to the subarticle’s post ID: writing [ spid=123 ] in the article will include the post with ID #123. 123′s title will become an h2 in the authority article. (Don’t use spaces between the “[" and "]” .)

- Adds a column to the “edit all posts” page, which column displays posts’ IDs.

- Add a table of contents for the post Wikipedia style with another shortcode [ toc align=left ] or [ toc align=right ] (Don’t use spaces between the “[" and "]” .)

- Adds a box to the post editor page, below the main post area, which allows you to redirect the post to any article on your site. Delete the text and save again to undo. The plugin doesn’t assume you’ll redirect because sometimes, as on Wikipedia, content is included in more than one post. So you might want to use it differently.

- Removes redirected articles from the homepage, category archives and sitemaps.

- Adds a subarticles page to the WP Dashboard so you can find all redirected articles in one convenient spot.

- Adds a settings page for CMC where you can request tech support, new features etc. There will be more settings added to it with planned features.

So how do you get the plugin?

Either pay with a tweet, Fb-share, or get my latest posts sent to your email or RSS reader.

FYI: You can edit the tweet/Fb share or cancel before it appears in Twitter/Fb.

Sponsors we’d encourage you to patronize:

Sponsors of the plugin helped develop the current set of features. They’re also helping us add an auto-redirect feature for the next version, which will automate the process even more!

Get professional SEO services from SlingshotSEO.com.

Get VPS Hosting from Prohoster.gr.

Get search engine optimization from Stepforth.com .

Get local SEO from PoweredBySearch.com .

Get link building from CanadianSEO.com.

Use a analytics URL builder from WebStrategy360.com.

Use link tools and other goodies from SEOTools.net .

Get online PR and social media marketing services based in Ireland from Simply Zesty.

Get WordPress themes built for direct marketing performance from Progo.com.

Image of Gisele Bundchen via BobBekian.com, creative commons license.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant for a company that provides a to do list application and, who also consults for a company that offers psd to html 5 service.

Google Analytics is great at collecting lots of data for your clients, but once you create a graph or a spreadsheet showing traffic and keyword trends, many customers will ask, “What’s next?” There is no shortage of website data available, but the hard part is figuring out how to create a useful SEO report that will help clients improve their return on investment and keep them happy.

Reports are an easy element of SEO marketing to overlook. While creating a report by itself does not magically lead to more hits on a client’s website, creating an actionable report is an essential tool that will make you more effective and help you retain clients.

How to Present an SEO Report

SEO reports force you to sit down with your clients and discuss the goals of their SEO strategy, measure their progress, and plan for future growth and effectiveness. As you look at the various reporting tools available, you’ll need to think of various ways to present data to different clients and different groups within larger organizations.

SEO expert Max Thomas suggests that a report to a marketing team should include more data and metrics as well as analysis that makes it easier for them to report to their superiors, while a report to a boss or board will need to be stripped of search jargon and focus on analysis that summarizes your findings in a way that shows your SEO work is contributing to brand awareness and the bottom line.

Sam Crocker of OMD UK, writes on the SEOMoz blog, “there is no question that you will prepare a report differently for the Board than you will do for the developers or an in-house SEO. Make sure you know who will be reading the report and create different reports where necessary.” Different actions will be required by each segment of a company, and therefore be sure your reports target the specializations of each department—such as return on investment for the boss or keyword competition analysis for the marketing team.

Workbooks CRM

One of the most attractive tools for generating an SEO report is Workbooks CRM because of its price tag (free) and its powerful ability to track the conversions generated from keyword traffic.

Daniel Bianchini of SEOptimise writes in Search Engine Journal, “Workbooks is able to track from first touch all the way through to conversion from the site, and then on to completion of the buying cycle. With all this information you are then able to produce incredibly insightful reports and calculate ROI down to keyword level, allowing better analysis of SEO and PPC campaign effectiveness and improved efficiency in the allocation of budgets.”

Besides SEO effectiveness, you need to be able to present why the current ROI justifies maintaining the current strategy, adjusting it, or giving it a complete overhaul. In other words, the profitability of your marketing business and your clients rests on presenting a clear, easy-to-follow report tied to the ways your strategy is paying off.

Analytics Canvas

For a larger company’s SEO campaign, Analytics Canvas provides clear and simple SEO reports along with the added functionality of integrating data from the Google Analytics accounts for multiple websites. If you’ve ever been frustrated with managing multiple reports from a company’s various sites, this powerful tool will streamline your data into one report that allows you to capitalize on all of the data from your clients’ sites in order to create a complete picture of their market share and SEO success.

Analystics Canvas does not provide any unique data on its own. You’ll only be working with the data Google provides for queries, landing pages, and geography. It’s up to you to figure out how your brand is performing, but Analytics Canvas will allow you to integrate large data groups into charts that are easy to create so that you can present extremely broad trends and new opportunities to marketing teams and executives.

Recognized by Google as one of its top API developers, Analytics Canvas is not a free tool like Workbooks CRM. However, it should pay for itself with all of the time that it saves. If Analytics Canvas is a little too pricey for your budget, check out ShufflePoint.

Google Analytics Reports

As of October 2011, Google Analytics integrated Webmaster Tools data into reports, which SEO strategists had been clamoring for, but the data remains incomplete in the eyes of some reviewers.

SEO consultant Cyrus Shepherd writes, “The Landing Pages report shows how many times your top landing pages were shown in search results, again along with average position and CTR. Average position isn’t as useful in this report, as you don’t know the exact search query.”

In addition, the query report on the top 1000 terms presents the average position based on a metric that averages a page’s rank rather than simply presenting its highest position. While Google Analytics is easy to use and accessible, some of its tools will need refining before it receives a firm endorsement from many SEOs. Workbooks CRM provides a far more valuable insight into keyword tracking since it can tell you the exact return on investment for your keyword strategies rather than mere rankings. While Google Analytics provides helpful data for a marketing team, it still falls short of what you’d need for a report to a CEO or board.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Ever needed to send a link request but lacked anything better than “webmaster@site.com” as a contact address? I’ve been back to basics with a client recently, and of course this classic situation has come up. Here are a few tools/tricks I’m using to get more information to personalize the email/phone call and increase the success rate:

1) Whois data: For those who don’t know, “whois” refers to the registrant information and associated contacts for domain names. Often a person is listed in the whois data even though the site itself doesn’t give any names of people to contact.

2) Sometimes, Whois only lists a company name. In such a case, I’ll look up the company on both Bing/Google and LinkedIn. Maybe the company behind my link-target-site has a brochure site about themselves with contact info. Better yet, maybe they’re on LinkedIn and I can contact them there!

3) At times, you’ll find a site for the holding company via Google but because of server or other issues, the site’s not accessible. And that’s where search engines’ cache and preview can be really handy! In particular, try a site:example.com inurl:contact search to find a contact page on your target domain, then use cache or preview to see if there’s an email or phone number publicly visible.

4) Another valuable resource I just discovered is searching for a company by name – often yellow pages type directories come up in the results with valuable data.

Liked this post on link building? Get my latest posts by RSS or email!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

2011 was a beautiful year for guest posts on SEO ROI as more and more of the web’s top SEOs shared advanced ideas and original material, right here on this blog. I don’t publish rehash, and it shows in the unique tactics, case studies and tools reviewed.

If you want to guest post, read the guest posting guidelines then contact me. Benefits include links, the attention of 2600+ RSS subs, 1600+ emails subs and social love…

Guest Article Case Studies & Research

What Do CTRs Look Like By Position In 2011? – This excellent research piece by Phil Golobish (T: @saintphilip) of Slingshot SEO was a preview of their massive research piece featuring data from 170,000 visitors to their client websites.

Not to be outdone, a glorious case study on mobile web analytics and conversion optimization came to us from the skillful Stephan Croome, who sells ipads, talks about hair styles and dreams up marketing ideas like www.startupbeanbags.com.

Longtime contributor Everett Sizemore taught us about affiliate marketing, and specifically how an affiliate got merchants to promote him! Everett blogs about e-commerce SEO on his website www.esizemore.com. You can follow him on Twitter and connect on Linked-In.

Ben Jackson wrote me a clever link request email that turned into a case study on his approach. As a result, Ben published his experience with broken-link link building (broken link building for short), where you look for dead pages or sites and go after the people who linked to them… Ben writes at SEO Discovery, an SEO blog with link building strategies, amonst other goodies.

We got another two case studies in a single article by Liz Krause, on how to reverse negative reviews. Liz writes for EtherSpeak, a company specializing in Unified Communications for internet phone service. They are a Microsoft SIP provider and also offer internet encryption for business class VOIP.

Guest Posts on Tactics:

Post-Panda, Here’s How To Beat Scrapers Outranking You With Stolen Content was a guest post from Everett Sizemore, who is an eCommerce SEO consultant operating off his 38 acre farm in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia. He enjoys gardening, collecting eggs and tackling tough SEO problems.

How To Recover From A Wild Panda Attack: 3 Cheap Tools
This post was written by guest Brian Patterson, a partner at SEO consulting firm MangoCo.

4 Advanced Ecommerce Tactics

This guest article was by James Agate, the SEO director at Skyrocket SEO, a leader in eCommerce SEO & Conversion Optimisation for small and medium sized online retailers.

Can you rank on page 1 for one-word keywords? Find out the inside details how in another great guest post by Brian S Patterson, partner at a Virginia SEO firm known as MangoCo. You can also follow Brian on Twitter!

How do you produce professional video for your blog? We learned all about angles, lighting, editing and more in a guest article by Andy Havard, a Marketing Executive at Skeleton Productions, a UK based Internet video production company that also does corporate vids.

Guest Posts About Tools:
… Or Tools for Guest Posts: How to Use Scrapebox to Find Guest Blogging Opportunities/

This guest post came from Andrew Breen of Outshine Online Marketing who offers SEO, PPC management, and CRO services.

6 WordPress Plugins That Automate Your SEO was an experienced based guide by Pedro Cardoso who runs a site teaching folks to fix their slow @#!*% computers, as well as his blog, slices of life.

Found the content here interesting? You can be featured here in 2012! Read the guest post guidelines then contact me with your idea. Preference is obviously given to case studies, tactics and anything original you can share!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Want to learn usability testing? I promise that any complete beginner who applies the lessons in this guide thoroughly will see a higher conversion rate in 30 days, guaranteed!

Q: What is usability testing? What is remote usability testing?

A: Usability testing is the process of having people interact with a website and provide feedback on it. The purpose of this testing is to find out why users are using the site as they are.

The value in understanding why users behave a certain way is that you get actionable insight, which raw data on what users are doing doesn’t tell you. You can see what’s tripping up users and fix it!

Note: Usability testing is also used offline for testing products, but for our purposes we’ll stick to website usability testing.

Remote usability testing is a method of usability testing where the users testing the website are in a different location than the person giving the test. The test giver, known as the moderator, sets up the test and provides instructions on what to do.

For now, let’s see how usability testing works. Later we’ll address specific issues like remote vs in-person usability testing, moderated vs unmoderated testing, and what tools to use for specific tasks.

How Usability Testing Works

Photo credit sxc

There are 5 steps to running a usability test.

1. First, you decides on tasks you want people to do on your website, such as search for a product and add to cart.

2. You recruit users, ideally ones representative of the site’s audience for the test. Typically, 3-5 testers are used in each round of testing, after which changes are made and another round of testing begins.

(If you can’t recruit users, there are companies who do that and usability testing tools with panels of users you can recruit.)

3. Users attempt to do the tasks set by the site owner.

In the most popular and effective form of usability testing, test-takers record their screen and voice, while sharing their thoughts out loud as they use the site. In other types of usability testing, feedback may only be written afterwards.

A short questionnaire typically follows screen-and-audio-recording type tests. Questions focus on problems encountered using the site, possible solutions, and how the tester would have behaved had it not been a test.

4. You review the user feedback to understand what the users were trying to do and why. Make note of the most common difficulties.

5. The site owner makes changes to the website to solve the problems discovered from the recordings.

Note: For ease of reference, I’m going to use “the moderator,” “site owner” and “you” interchangeably, but the roles can be shared between team members as you see fit.

Let’s see each step of the testing process in more depth.

Step 1: Deciding On And Writing Tasks For Users

The first step is figuring out and writing what you want your users to try to do. You need to describe outcomes for users to achieve, and avoid (to the extent possible) being too explicit in how to do a task, avoid mentioning the names of particular links to click (e.g. the task reads “learn pricing,” when the site has a “Pricing” link).

A good task description is, “Get in touch with us,” not “Click ‘contact’ and fill out the form.”

Photo credit sxc

Start by asking, what is the purpose of the site? Then work backwards and ask yourself what steps are needed to get a visitor to accomplish those steps.

The following example illustrates how this works at a coarse level, but you can go more granular and test sub-elements within each step.

Ecommerce example: Let’s imagine we’re usability testing a running shoe retailer.

6 – Purpose of the site: The site’s purpose is to sell running shoes.

5- Previous step: To sell merchandise, users need to checkout.

4 – Previous step: To checkout, they need to have added something to cart.

3 – Previous step: To have added something to cart, they need to have found a product that adequately meets their needs.

2 – Previous step: To find that product, the users must sort through the site’s products easily.

1 – First step: Before sorting, visitors need to be convinced not to bounce with a credible appearance that’s relevant to their intent in visiting.

For step 1, since users are coming to your site to do the test, they won’t bounce on their own. To find out if your site is credible and relevant, use a five second test task description:

Ask people to look at the page for five seconds, look away, then share what they remember. Does “what people remember” match the landing page’s traffic sources, such as search keywords and ad copy? Is the design credible or does it make people flee?

For steps 2-6, a regular usability test with screen and voice recording would work fine.

Task description

Good: “Find a pair of Reebok running shoes and buy them. Find answers to any questions that come to mind.” This leaves discretion to users to browse for Reebok running shoes the way they naturally would. This allows them the choice to browse with search or clicks, refine their options as usual… in sum, to be themselves, which is what we want to see.

Bad: “Click the Reebok running shoes button in the lower left sidebar, click on a pair of shoes, add them to cart, and fill out the checkout forms.”

Step 2: Recruiting Users

(image credit Vintage Military Ads)

This is where most web pros aspiring to run usability tests give up. Frankly, recruiting testers is hard.

First, it’s not always obvious who your audience is. Who are these “representative users” anyways?

To answer that, build personas (easier), and seek keyword-level demographics (harder). If you’ve never worked in the field, you can always email the owners of existing sites and ask them; if they’re competitors, look at
people offering the service in a different city or language.

Second, how do you go about soliciting people to test the site? Why would they care or bother? Where do you find them? How do you approach them?

Commonly, usability testing will pay testers for their time. With remote usability testing, paypal payments or online gift certificates (ex.: Amazon.com) are common. Others are interested in helping just to be helpful or because they’re friends.

Once you know who your representative users are, you need to find them. To do that, first try the free way and solicit amongst family, friends and contacts by email and phone.

After exhausting this pool or if your contacts just are too different from representative users (you’re starting a hispanic dating site without knowing anyone hispanic), you can run demographically or professionally targeted ads. Places to advertise include Facebook, PlentyOfFish, LinkedIn, MyAds (demographics powered by MySpace) and supposedly the Google Display Network (formerly the Content Network).

Another option that recruits directly from your users is Bolt|Peters‘ Ethnio recruiting service.

Originally, Ethnio was offered at a rate of a few hundred dollars per person because it was an offline, labour-intensive recruiting process. Today Ethnio is a software tool with a free trial that just requires you to copy-paste some code to get started. It intercepts visitors as they come to the site, asking them to participate in your test. The downside is that the test needs to consist of a survey or Usabilla click test, which helps but isn’t as useful as getting them to record their screen and voice.

Another easy way out of recruiting is buy a remote usability testing service with a panel of users.

Tools in this category that will have users record their screen and spoken thoughts include TryMyUI , UserFeel -whose panel includes testers in the UK and Greece- and UserTesting.com. (UI means User Interface, such as the part of the website customers interact with by clicking and typing.)

On a lower-tech level there is Feedback Army, which surveys visitors after they try using your site. While it doesn’t record audio or video, it’s also only $15 for 10 users to provide their feedback.

Note that these panels are only appropriate for sites geared towards a general audience. Sites requiring knowledge of particular jargon (e.g. SEO) won’t find representative users here, since user selection criteria are limited to demographics and tech-savvy (“technographics”), and don’t break down by vertical.

A word on “representative users”

Finally, while it’s ideal to get representative users, it’s also fine to get users who are less representative and grade on a curve, proportionately to how closely they match your audience. (Hattip Steve Krug)

Step 3: Running the Test

Once recruited, it’s up to users to follow instructions and do the test. This either happens at agreed-upon times (moderated testing), or at the user’s discretion (unmoderated usability testing).

Test Preparation

With moderated testing, the moderator either sets up a computer with screen and audio recording software before the test, or instructs users to use browser-based software to record their screens and voices.

With unmoderated testing, the user is responsible for ensuring the audio and video recording software is on and recording, at the right level.

Note: Both of these comments assume a regular usability test, as opposed to a limited or partial test aimed at discovering how users interact with particular aspects of the site. This includes mouse-movement tracking and click measurement tests, for example, as well as visual analysis tools like FiveSecondTest or predictive gazeplot-and-eye-tracking tool Feng-Gui.

A gazeplot generated on Amazon’s mobile homepage by Feng-Gui.

Tip: It’s important to make sure that both video and audio are recording at the start, and that the sound levels are high enough, to avoid wasting time and money.

What Your Instructions  Need To Cover

Once the audio and video are on and at the right level, there are three things your instructions must cover:

a. Asking the user to say what hes doing and why out loud, constantly. To quote TryMyUI:

“Clearly say exactly what you are thinking as you are thinking it. We are interested in your impressions, expectations, and the motivations for your actions. Don’t edit your thoughts as you navigate the website! Simply say exactly what you are thinking at each step.”

Steve Krug’s excellent book on usability testing, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, emphasizes that you should make clear it’s the website being tested, not the user. They can’t make mistakes here!

This serves the highly important purpose of preventing self-censorship, as alluded to in TryMyUI’s instructions.

b. Providing a starting URL for the user. With in-person testing, you’ll have this pre-loaded.

c. Provide a written list of tasks. Don’t just provide it orally, because you want to ensure the same phrasing each time.

If users get distracted and go off to do their own thing, the moderator gently encourages them back to the task at hand.

Step 4: Reviewing The Feedback

Once the tests have been run, what’s left is data – not actionable insight. To turn that information into actionable recommendations, the moderator needs to review the collected feedback.

His purpose is to look for patterns in what gave users difficulty.

By focusing on problems common to more than one user, you ensure that you get the most bang for your buck in making changes and fixing the site. This is also why running a test with one user is insufficient.

Conversely, to save time and money, you shouldn’t test with more than 5 users per round of testing. By the fourth or fifth user you’ll already know the main issues the site has and having the same problems highlighted another half dozen times isn’t productive.

The problems the moderator will discover can usually be categorized by WiderFunnel’s classic LIFT model of conversion optimization:

• Value Proposition: What’s in it for the user. This is the core which the other factors act upon.
• Anxiety: How design -security reassurances, layout- and content -answering questions, social proof- affect trustworthiness. Reduce anxiety to lift the conversion plane.

• Distraction: The page features too many eye-catching elements. Focus is drawn away from the page’s main purpose. Reduce distraction for more lift.

• Relevance: The degree to which the page matches users’ expectations before arriving. Increase relevance for more lift.

• Clarity: Do the design and content work in synergy to explain the value proposition?

• Urgency: Do users have a reason to act now?

To return to our earlier example of the online running shoe retailer, here are some things you would look for in your analysis.

First, as mentioned earlier, is the landing page’s credibility and relevance to traffic sources. Is the site secure? Is the graphic design professional? For relevance, you can show the traffic source (ad, link or search listing) briefly before taking users to the landing page. Within the five second test, you can ask if the landing page matches the expectations the traffic source created.  – Relevance, Anxiety, Clarity -

Visitors need to drill down and find a product that suits their needs. Can they browse and search their way through your categories to find an adequate fit? How effective are your refinement options? When clicking through to a subcategory or product detail page, does the content there match expectations? – Relevance, Clarity -

Third, visitors need to get sufficient information from the product detail page. Does the information answer visitors’ questions? Does it convey benefits? How scannable is the information – bullet points or paragraphs? Where’s the refunds policy? Are the shoes in stock? How much is shipping? – Value Proposition, Urgency, Anxiety-

Users also need to be able to add to cart easily, and then modify the contents of the cart. Is the add to cart button noticeable and clearly a button? Are the cart buttons clearly labelled and laid out in a hierarchy reflecting their importance? Does the site need all this information the checkout requests? – Clarity, Distraction, Urgency, Anxiety -

Step 5: Implement The Changes

Again, follow Steve Krug’s excellent advice: Change the least possible to solve the problems.

For example, instead of redesigning a page’s graphics to reduce distraction, comment out some of the graphics. Test again and see if that solves things. To save time on such visual makeovers, you can just use a visual testing tool like Feng-Gui or Five Second Test, mentioned earlier.

And don’t wait for the “upcoming redesign”… 99% of the time it’ll go live months after promised. In the meantime, you’ve wasted loads of traffic.

Miscellaneous Testing Tips and FAQ

How do I test…

… information architecture (aka the organization of content on a site into logical groups)? Use card sorting. Do users look for content where you expected? Do they click the right links to drill down to the content you want them to find? (Image credit Revium.)

… where people would click next? Look at click based tools like CrazyEgg or Usabilla.

… how people make their way through a model of the site? Try wireframe creation software that (i) lets you interact with the wireframe by clicking the navigation and going to the wireframes for the relevant pages and (ii) allows you to share your wireframes online, so testers can access them. Some wireframe tools are designed to only be used in a desktop environment, so read carefully to avoid that.

See

Remote Testing vs In-Person Testing Pros and Cons

Remote testing is

- Cheaper: Don’t need to pay for travel, premises, computer equipment, food
- Less work to organize
- Easier to recruit for because there’s no geographic restriction
- Commonly paid for via Paypal or gift certificates

In-Person testing is

- More personal, you can get body language
- A more compelling opportunity for the whole team to witness the testing simultaneously and debrief, which can get things moving faster
- Commonly paid for in cash
- Instantaneous feedback; you view the data as it comes in, instead of waiting until later

“Moderated Testing” vs “Unmoderated Testing” Pros and Cons

Moderated testing:

- Is significantly less likely to encounter errors requiring retakes, such as setup issues with hardware or software, or testers veering off topic
- Yields richer, more useful data
- Tends to have representative users

Unmoderated testing:

- Sometimes yields obnoxious or useless responses, like FiveSecondTest and Feedback Army testers more interested in accumulating credits or micropayments than being helpful.
- Costs less on an individual test basis, because there is no moderator, or because it typically involves testing narrow interaction aspects such as click tests or visual feedback
- Is commonly associated with narrow aspects of interaction
- Tests of particular aspects may or may not have representative users
- Can save time when run through a service with a panel of testers, such that recruitment effort is negligible. This advantage makes it an easy entry-point/stepping stone for beginners to enter the world of usability testing.

Additional testing tools references:

There are many tools available for usability testing specific aspects of a website, or the whole shebang.

Kyle Soucy of Usable Interface put together a helpful, comprehensive overview of these varied tools.

Concluding Tip: Start as early in the web design process as possible

- Talk about the idea with friends and family and see what are the most common questions/objections raised, so you can answer them.

- Create user interface mockups in Photoshop and do the 5 second test (with or without the site): namely, ask people to look for a few seconds, then look away and ask what they recall.

- Put early design mockups through Feng-GUI as a sanity check – are there too many visually ‘loud’ areas?

- Imperfect testing is better than none. As the French say, “the best is the enemy of the good [enough].”

Further reading:

Review of testing service UserTesting.com
Sensible – Steve Krug’s site
Usability Post
RemoteUsability.com/tools

http://okcancel.com/archives/article/2006/07/guide-to-remote-usability-testing.html

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/remote_online_usability_testing_why_how_and_when_to_use_it

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

When it comes to the often-overlooked art of internal website optimization, too many people stick with the standard methods such as being mindful of keyword use within content and relevant tags.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with those techniques; they certainly won’t hurt unless you overdo them. However, there are yet other ways to improve your website’s internal optimization that take nearly no maintenance or additional thought, and which can provide a nice boost to your SERP rankings over a couple of weeks.

With that in mind, this article will showcase six optimizations to your website that you can achieve easily using free WP plugins. Take an hour today to make these changes to your website, and you may soon realize it was one of the most time-efficient efforts you did as part of your website promotion endeavors.

1) Show Most Popular Posts in Sidebar

Not only is this a great way to show off your most successful posts, but it’s also an effective
way to improve optimization of such posts. When you activate a sidebar list showing the most
popular posts, you’re automatically creating side-wide links to those posts. This will strengthen
the internal optimization of said posts, and likely improve their rankings.

How it’s done: There are several plugins that can be used to this effect, such as “Popularity
Contest” and “WP-views”.

2) Floating Social Share-bar

In this day and age, most webmasters already realize they should install a plugin that makes it easier for users to share content across their favorite social media channel.

What not all webmasters have realized yet is that a floating share-bar that follows users as they scroll down the page will indeed get more clicks. Each time someone bookmarks your content, you’re getting additional links, so this is actually a way to indirectly have users build links on your behalf!

How it’s done: The most popular WP plugin to add a floating share bar is called “ShareBar”; if
for some reason this plugin does not work for you, try using “Share Rail”.

3) List SEO Search Terms After Post

Links inside your website will go a long way towards effective search engine optimization, and the same guidelines apply as with off-site optimization: you want those links to be relevant to the content, and you want to use related long-term keywords as anchor text. This is why adding a list of incoming search terms to your posts linking to the actual posts, will usually help
improve your website’s ranking for those keywords.

Make sure to cap the list to the 10 most popular search terms, because too many internal links in a single page may trigger the link spam flags and actually hurt your rankings (based on experience).

In a future post, we’ll publish a case study that explains exactly how this plugin improves your SEO; make sure to subscribe to this blog, if you look forward to that!

How it’s done: If you’d like to add this feature to your blog, the most popular plugin is called “SEO SearchTerms 2”.

4) WP Minify Code

Code Minifying is a process that involves stripping off redundant code and annotations (which are often interspersed in your website’s backend) before they’re sent to a visitor’s browser. Doing so will often reduce the size of your pages quite a bit, which in turn will make your website load faster and improve the user experience.

5) Gzip Compression

Did you know that most modern browsers support Gzip compression, meaning that you can broadcast a compressed file with all the resources necessary to display your page, as opposed to sending the bloated individual files one at a time? This technique can reduce the total size of your website quite drastically (as much as 80%), which in turn will cause a noticeable boost in its loading times.

6) Server Side Cache

If you have a moderately busy website which relies on plenty of plugins and sophisticated features, you simply can’t do without a cache plugin. What it does is keeping a file with your website in static .html format which is served to your visitors directly (as opposed to rendering the website from all its dynamic code and plugins), thus significantly cutting down on the
strain to your server.

This approach will make your website load much faster to visitors, especially if thousands of them happen to access your website simultaneously.

How it’s done: There are separate plugins you can use to implement WP minify, Gzip compression and cache in your website, but the problem is that some of these plugins can conflict with one another. Luckily, there’s also a free 3-in-1 solution that you can rely on, and it’s called “W3 Total Cache”. Look it up, install it, and you’ll be amazed with how faster your website gets.

This post was brought to you by Pedro Cardoso who runs a site to help fix slow computers. Come see us if you could use some tricks and advice to make your computer faster, so that your hardware does not bottleneck your workflow.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

This guest post is by Andy Havard, a Marketing Executive at Skeleton Productions, a UK based Internet video production company that also does corporate vids.

You’ve no doubt seen the slick, professional video blogs Google and its representatives have churned out lately. Videos shot with pristine white backgrounds, inviting speakers and a whole lot of views. They’re impressive video blogs right? Well the following article explores how you can make the same professional looking corporate video blogs from the comfort of your own home.

Why Create A Video Blog

A video blog is a great way to showcase your brand or business as an approachable and engaging organisation. Corporate video productions allow organisations to connect with potential clients and show a human side to their brand or business. A prospective client will always feel more comfortable using an organisation if they feel they know the people behind it.

Sales pitches, adverts and marketing strategies can’t connect with an audience like a personal one-on-one video can. This is why so many organisations of all niches and sizes are starting to create video content to engage with their future customers.

Where Should I Film My Video Blog?

You don’t actually need to step foot outside your house or flat to find a great filming location. A garage, spare room or simply just a room that has a bit of free space to set up your equipment could work perfectly as a makeshift studio.

What Equipment Do I Need?

What Background Should I Use?

The infamous Google white background can make any video look powerful and professional. It’s a background technique used by many corporates in their video blogs and it works like a charm. Surprisingly it doesn’t actually cost an awful lot to create this effect. If you’ve got a bit of a budget then perhaps you can afford a film standard white screen, but you can create the same effect with some white sheets or even just by painting a wall in a glossy white shade.

What Camera Should I Film With?

Depending on the style of your video, whether you want to appear sat down for a desk-side chat or standing up for a more animated performance you may need some different equipment. If you’re sat down you could use anything from a standard Webcam to a high end film camera depending on your budget. If you’re presenting a standing presentation you’ll need either a Flip cam or a standard camcorder and you’ll definitely require a tripod to position it. If you’re shooting at desk height you may find you can rest your camera on an object nearby to save you purchasing a tripod. The quality of your images will depend on the quality of your camera, but even the most poor quality visuals can be boosted in post production.

What Lighting Should I Buy?

Your lighting is what makes both you and your background look slick. You can use anything from household standing lamps (around £40) to industry standard florescent lighting (around £100+ per light). The brightness of your image can also be boosted in post-production so don’t fret if the lighting isn’t as bright as you’d hoped.

You’ll need to position your lighting as follows; one light to the right of your background, one light to the left and one left next to your camera positioned at a 30 degree angle to the subject you’re filming (perhaps yourself). This three-point lighting will help to give you the best quality lighting for your video production.

Here’s a quick sketch of what I mean:

What Microphone Should I Use?

If you’re using a Webcam or any type of video camera you may find you have a built in microphone that works rather well. Whether you opt to buy an external microphone will depend on your cameras positioning and whether it can efficiently pick up your voice from your presenting position. If you have to get an external microphone choose a lapel/lav mic. These mics capture great quality audio and are very easy to hide during filming.

What Do I Do When I’ve Finished Recording?

When you’ve wrapped finishing your video blog it’s time to get editing and work on the post production side of your corporate video. You can get a variety of free editing software if you’re a Mac or Windows user (iMovie/Windows Movie Maker), but it might be worth paying for a more extensive piece of software (Adobe Premier), which will offer some extra tools in post production.

When you edit your video try and keep it as short as possible; short and snappy is always a winner.

The post production stage will allow you to:

• Increase the brightness on your video if your lighting wasn’t bright enough during filming,
• Alter any colour aspect of your image you wish to enhance whether you want to give your video a warm orange hue, a black and white finish or a neutral white hue to make the image seem more crisp
• Get rid of any shadows that are being cast during filming or reduce any light glares or reflections spoiling your shot.

Using such tools will help make your videos look as professional and polished as possible.

In Sum…

Follow these tips to create effective corporate video blogs that present your brand or business as a powerful and approachable organisation.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

The following is a guest post from James Agate, the SEO director at Skyrocket SEO, a leader in eCommerce SEO & Conversion Optimisation for small and medium sized online retailers.

eCommerce SEO is a unique beast. There are technical issues to consider, scalability challenges to think about and countless other opportunities and drawbacks that need to be taken into account. We work a great deal in the eCommerce space; here are some of the ways I know will take your or your client’s business to the next level.

Put an End to Ranking Cannibalism

The problem

eCommerce websites are notorious for having multiple versions of very similar pages which can cause serious SEO headaches. This is because there might be multiple URLs as a result of sort/search parameters or category labels.

In an ideal world, you will have one page that ‘champions’ each keyword so you can concentrate resources and measure progress.

I’m not talking heavy anchor text linkbuilding here e.g. all links pointing at your page for ‘picnic blankets’ need to be for ‘picnic blankets’. I mean a general awareness across your organisation that you are trying to get ‘yoursite.com/picnic-blankets’ to rank for ‘picnic blankets’.

There’s nothing wrong with getting multiple listings for a term –if you can. But if a client isn’t visible for a term because they have split links and social signals between 2 or even more pages, get a first listing ranking, then you can worry about a second listing.

The solution: How to eliminate page overlap in ecommerce SEO

1. Generate a crawl report using SEOmoz’s Crawl Test Tool (or comparable software).

2. Run a Google Analytics Top Content report.

3. Go through the sitemap (and the site itself) to identify content that overlaps and go through the crawl report to identify pages with duplicate content.

4. You should now have a list of pages that need some attention from you.

5. Using the data from both the crawl report and the top content report, you can now run through each page and analyse the best resolution – this might be redirecting or canonicalising one page to another, building out the content on a page to make it sufficiently different or useful, or perhaps consolidating content from multiple pages into one hub and redirecting all link juice into one place.

If you are unfamiliar with the term canonicalising, then I am simply referring to the use of the rel=canonical tag. This indicates to Google and other search engines which version of a page you want to rank.

The rel=canonical tag is easily implemented by adding the following tag to the of a page that is not your keyword champion, but has similar content.

< link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/example/product12345.html" >

Manual implementation of rel=canonical across a site could take a great deal of time but there are numerous plugins for a variety of platforms which can make the process a lot less painful. Also, many of the leading eCommerce software platforms have started to incorporate automatic rel=canonical tags into their system to make the process very straightforward indeed. Check with your eCommerce provider or web developer to see what the situation is for you.

Caveat: Social shares don’t appear to redirect in the same way link juice does so take this into account when deciding what to do with a page.

If you are an SEO practitioner then I think you will be amazed at the impact you can have on a client site just by doing this kind of housekeeping. As Warren Buffett would say “I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.”

Optimise Detail Pages’ Content with Structured Markup

There’s more to on-page optimization in today’s richer web than titles and keyword use, and with stronger competition, the need to go that extra step is increasingly important to gain an edge.

On-page optimisation for eCommerce websites is an extremely diverse subject but one area I would concentrate on initially would be on-page markup since it is apparent that Google will be focusing more and more on this in future. In particular, I would be looking at adopting the Schema.org principles.

Schema.org is a set of html tags for structured data that is supported by all the leading search engines. It allows you to add rich context to your website’s pages, by telling search engines what parts of the content refer to commonly sought information such as price, average review score, number of reviews, colour etc.

In turn, the search engines use this to make your search listing that extra bit jazzy. They create rich snippets in the search results displaying things like price, rating, availability, brand, condition, model number and much more besides.

The main benefit is an increased clickthrough rate. Over time, it could also actually improve your rankings because Google is working user feedback metrics like clickthrough rate into its algorithm.

Schema-Creator.org is a fantastic free tool which allows you to easily add the required markup to your pages. You can enter all the details about a product for example and it generates the markup code which you can then copy and paste into the page on your site.

Afterwards, you can use Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool to make sure you have implemented everything properly.

Scale is currently an issue when it comes to implementing Schema.org but as this area advances, readily available tools to automate and scale this will almost certainly follow. There is already a WordPress plugin (I haven’t tested this yet though).

I would also suggest that many of the leading eCommerce software companies out there will create of add-ons or plugin because the future of SEO is all about a richer web.

If you have an able web developer then chances are they will be able to advise you as to the best way to implement structured markup in your particular situation. Planning a redesign or a restructure – now is the time to look at ways Schema.org can be incorporated into your code.

Finally, also in the context of richer markup, you might also consider implementing rel=author for any content, blog posts or guides you have on your site. Rel=author is an html attribute for the link tag (like the alt attribute for images) indicating who has created the content, and allows authors to carry their authority around the web with them, regardless of what site they write on.

This will ensure you or your client, any authors on the site and the website itself will all start to build a reputation within your chosen industry. At some point in the future when Google really starts to take into account the Google Authorship Markup (rel-author) you will be ahead of the curve and likely gain an edge over the competition.

Don’t Set and Forget Keywords

Very few organisations review their keywords’ performance regularly, if at all. That’s a big mistake.

To many, keyword research, is a set and forget exercise, believing it is possible to make your keyword selections and then just plug away building links and content for months or even years, regardless of whether that particular keyword is still performing well in a business context.

The first step we take with clients is to understand and analyse their keyword portfolio, in particular the performance of individual keywords and categories of keywords.

How you decide to structure your audit depends on the goals of your client, but we mainly analyse looking at metrics like current ranking, current traffic, current conversion rate, revenue contribution, future potential and time to conversion.

Time to conversion is a particularly interesting metric because it helps you to identify what stage in the consumer decision making process a keyword might fit into. This helps you tailor content that targets this keyword to be as relevant as possible to the user.

For example, a keyword might have an average time to conversion of 35 days, a relatively long period of time.

Such a keyword is likely at the problem recognition or information seeking stages of the consumer decision process. You would do well to encourage users who arrive via this keyword to download a product brochure perhaps, get a product tour or even a demo.

In contrast, if you identify a keyword with a short average time to conversion – say a few minutes to a few days – this would suggest the consumer is much further along in the decision making process. So you should be encouraging ‘add to basket’ type actions as visitors are clearly on the verge of handing over their money – offering up a product guide or a product tour is inappropriate this late in the process.

Point #6 in my recent SEOmoz post talked more about performing keyword audits.

Auditing keywords is no easy task. There is quite a bit of data to trawl through but it will be worth it because it can help you to shape an overall SEO strategy that delivers a far higher return on investment, over a strategy that relies upon throwing links at the wall to see what sticks.

• Look specifically for keywords that contribute a high-level of revenue or have a particularly high conversion rate – identify ways you could increase traffic on these keywords. Are you ranking as high as you could be?

• Look for keywords that have strong traffic but a poor conversion rate – this could be an indicator that something is going wrong and is a good place to start when it comes to fixing and optimising the performance of a site.

• Look for ways to branch out around high-conversion keywords. Identify common themes amongst your top performing keywords and see if there are associated terms that you could be targeting.

Essentially a keyword performance audit is about identifying opportunities and looking at ways to capitalise on them.

Build a Community

SEO and social are now inextricably linked – we are hurtling towards life after link trust so your website and your business need to be ready.

Building a community serves multiple purposes both now and later down the line:

• Build a loyal base of customers – brand loyalty, less churn, increased profitability.

• Helps with SEO – user generated content can help scale your SEO.

• Future-proofs your website – if Google switches to more of a social trust algorithm, you’re not going to end up out in the cold.

First and foremost, your community should be respected – don’t be ‘that company’ that fakes a community or sells them out to turn a fast buck. Building a community can be a long term strategy that is beneficial for both business and individual alike.

You can leverage the power of your community in the following ways:

• For content – encourage community members to add comments, submit reviews and generally contribute to your website. All of this is long-tail content that enriches your pages and helps improve visibility AND you haven’t had to write it yourself or pay someone else to.

• For linkbuilding – As Patrick Altoft from Branded3 points out: “Commercial sites struggle to attract natural links.” This is because the person you are requesting the link from knows that in some way you are going to (over time) benefit financially from the link, in the form of direct traffic and increased search engine visibility. Leveraging a community for links can mean running competitions and prize giveaways to generate social shares and actual links. Rewarding users for linking back to you, or even giving them an identity (and a widget/badge) to show their commitment to your community.

• Grow your revenue – encourage advocates/ambassadors by offering rewards and incentives for helping you as a business achieve your goals. Referral bonuses or community points that can be exchanged for goods or cold hard cash are great ways to kickstart a community growth explosion.

Use Punchtab – a great engagement app that helps you easily reward your community when they perform a particular action e.g. like you on Facebook, makes a comment, submits a review and so on.

For further reading, you should try Motivating a Community and Gamify your Community; both provide valuable insights and tactics for encouraging and building a community even in a commercial context.

More posts on ecommerce and ecommerce SEO:

Don’t Leave Shipping Rates To The Cart
5 Surprising Sources of Competitive Intelligence
Ecommerce Widgets and more – video
How Inhouse SEOs can Add Value Beyond Search
Google’s Conspiracy To Monopolize Shopping

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.