Natural Search Blog

Inbound Deep Links Benefit Page Rank Distribution Sitewide

Ravi — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:20:52 +0000

Many a time, you would have come across sites (especially the large ones) where the deeper you dig into the site hierarchy, you can see the Pagerank toolbar grayed out or having a value 0. In general, the home page is the starting point for a website and it accrues the maximum Page rank.

The entire domain’s authority and trust is reflected by this page rank value. The home page then tends to distribute this page rank to the first level (categories), the second level (sub-categories) and the third level product pages which we often refer to as link juice. In general, the first level pages tend to derive the maximum link juice from the home page. But in a site with excessive number of sub-categories and product pages (money pages), the pagerank distribution is not proportional with some gaining link juice and a large majority not gaining any.

I am not delving into pagerank sculpting which was the rage of the SEO industry not long ago. This method was adopted to make certain areas of a site more powerful by flowing link juice from the home page preferentially to pages of interest (possible commercial intent). The internal linking architecture is altered from its natural form to highlight more important pages than the rest on the site.

In my opinion, internal linking with appropriate anchor text can be used to improve the ranking of pages within a site but this has its limitations. Integrating a blog with the main site so that it forms part of the global site template is vital. The different posts on the site blog can point to different pages of the site to flow some much needed link juice to prop select pages up and assist them in getting indexed by Google and ranked on the SERPs.

Eric Enge at Stone Temple Consulting has done some research in regards to distribution of domain authority and trust to pages on the lower level pages of a site. Let us assume you have a site selling products. You have the home page, many categories with respective sub-categories and product pages in that order. Let us consider an example where you sell Canon digital cameras as shown below.

The specific product page in question is listed on Page 4. You are not happy as this product page has not recorded any page rank. If it does not have the requisite page rank, there is a possibility that it will not gain entry into the Google index.

In this scenario, it is evident that the site despite a great PR of 6 is not able to flow link juice into this specific product page. Eric has found out in his experiments that an inbbound link to this deep page with appropriate anchor text (in this case EOS D7 Canon Digital Camera Review) from an external site is a huge help to get this product page into the index and help get it ranked. The link may not be of superior quality yet it helps a great deal.

As we all know, every inbound link is a vote to the site and the search engines recognise this as a strong signal. The search engines adjust their algorithm accordingly to flow more internal link juice into the page which has gained inbouind links. The more the merrier seems to be the case.

In our example, the Canon EOS D7 product page ends up gaining link juice thus helping it enter the Google index and get ranked over time. Deep inbound links help a site distribute more authority and trust to pages that receive such inbound links. This is a classic case of an inbound link triggering a tunnel of sorts to flow a site’s internal link juice to select pages at a lower hierarchy level.

In summary, you do not need masses of links to get your third level or product pages indexed and ranked on the SERPs. Just a few inbound links will facilitate better flow of the site’s domain authority and trust (read link juice) to the specific page recipient of the inbound links in question. You can read the post on impact of deep inbound links on a site’s lower level pages on Eric’s site.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine marketing company offering both seo and pay per click services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

New Tool to Annualize Google Keyword Data

Brian R. Brown — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:33:37 +0000

Do you use Google’s AdWord Keyword Tool for your keyword research? If not, you might be missing out. Like all keyword research tools, it may not be the end all be all, and it isn’t without its own little quirks, but it is still rich keyword data whether you use it on its own or in relation with the other keyword tools you are using.

Google has modified the tool over time, and one of the great additions was the ability to see the monthly demand via a small little bar chart. This can be very useful for factoring in seasonality or growing demand for certain phrases. Wrapping your head around the actual numerical data is a bit more challenging. The Local number is just for the most recent month while the Global number is a monthly average. This is further complicated in that the Global number includes the world essentially while the Local number may factor in your campaign settings and locality (based on your AdWords campaign configuration).

To help tighten up data and provide a little more insight into the Local numbers, I just released an Excel spreadsheet that can take your Google Keyword Tool’s export and annualize the Local demand numbers. In some cases, this may dramatically change the order of importance of keywords to target.

Best of all, this tool is free to use so give it a play. The link below will take you to the download page for the tool as well as more detail about how it works and an example.

Google Keyword Tool Annualizer

How To Breathe Life Into A Lacklustre PPC Campaign

Ravi — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:09:05 +0000

PPC or Pay Per Click campaigns are a sure fire way of attracting traffic to your website almost instantaneously without the rigors of an SEO campaign that is required to bring your site on top of the SERPs. The most important thing to be aware of when it comes to a PPC campaign is understanding the rules to play the Adwords game.

Google’s policy of serving relevant ads in response to user queries coupled with complex factors like quality score can make Adwords a minefield for a novice or intermediate level practitioner so much so that a lot of money is coughed up to elicit a poor ROI (Return on Investment) or not the best bang for your buck in layman terms.

If you are in a position where you have set up PPC campaigns and they are not doing well, then you could use the following guidelines to fine tune their performace to achieve optimum results. Let us get cracking.

1) Relooking at Opportunities:
There is a good chance that you would have done keyword research relevant to your industry before setting up your PPC campaigns. If you are finding that your campaigns are not doing well, then you will have to do a more indepth keyword research and dig deeper to find the “money keywords” - keywords that have decent amount of traffic (ideally 1000 searches per day or more) and less competition (50,000 and below).

If your site has been in existence for some time with Analytics installed, then your Analytics account will provide you a wealth of information. You can look at the keywords that are bringing in organic traffic and you can use these as the seed keywords for your keyword research and build on the opportunities presented in your domain of business.

2) Targeting and Relevancy:
These are the two mantras you have to keep in mind when setting up a new campaign or reorgainising an existing campaign. If you have a group of keywords that are well related to each other and can be grouped into a relevant ad group targeting an underlying theme, that is the first step of achieving relevancy.

The ad copy for that ad group must reflect the same idea as the keywords themselves. When writing the ad copy, make sure you include the representative keyword in the title and include it once in the two lines that make up the ad copy description.

Always your ad must show a clear benefit and it should have a clarion call to action. If you do not ask users to take action, they probably never would. Do not waste precious ad copy space by using words like Click here.

If you are stating in your ad that your blue widget would do something, then make sure that the landing page which that ad leads to dwells at length and explains clearly that benefit. Never mislead users by staing something in the ad and having a landing page that is totally different. If you get all the above correct, then you are well on your way to improving relevancy and targeting which plays a huge part in the optimisation of the quality score.

If your current PPC campaigns are not doing well, then you must ensure the relevancy of keywords in the ad group. For example, if you are a builder and you build both industrial and residential buildings, you must have two distinct ad groups, one each for Residential Buildings and Industrial Buildings. Though they are both buildings, they are distinct types of construction and you must differentiate between them.

Try reorganising your campaign at the granular level and accord each and every distinct keyword the respect and value it deserves. Avoid lumping unrelated keywords together. You can bet that these keywords will be rejuvenated and gain a fresh lease of life and start performing really well.

3) PPC Landing Page
You have improved the targeting and relevancy of your PPC campaigns. The next important criterion is the landing page for the ads that display triggered by the keywords in your campaigns that match the searches made by users on Google.

The landing page plays a very important role in determining the quality score, a mystery component that is evaluated by the Google algorithm. Human nature is such that when something is shrouded in secrecy, the human mind tries to analyse it to the maximum possible extent.

I like to keep things simple. In my opinion, I do not worry about the quality score excessively. All that you need to do is get the targeting and relevancy spot on and the landing page near perfect. The quality score takes care of itself.

Ensure that your landing page is in total sync with the keywords and the ads that lead a user to it. Your landing page must contain the representative keyword in its title tag, meta description and h1 tag to start with.

Your copy must also include variations of the representative keyword (in other words, the other keywords contained in your ad group targeting this specific landing page) when defining the benefits of your product or service.

Sell the benefits of your product/service and keep features to a minimum. If your product/service is solving a problem, then go ahead and lay it out for the whole world to see. Users are looking for solutions to problems. When a great solution is found, a user automatically ends up a buyer.

Have clear calls to action and embed them as anchor text on the landing page. By highlighting the call to action as a clickable link, you are getting the user to focus on the blue underlined text and at the same time, you are able to gain value in terms of improving quality score for your keyword phrase by making it part of the anchor text.

The common belief is to have a tight sales funnel. I myself do not like to divert a user’s attention much when she lands on a landing page. I tend to remove the global site template from landing pages. The reason is two fold. It is possible to accurately track the user’s path from the moment they land on the landing page. The second reason is to minimise the user distraction.

You are paying for every user that lands on your optimised landing page. You want to capture their focus and lead them on through the sales funnel and this is achieved by making them take action (in our case, click the link) and take them to buy your product or sign up for your newsletter or whatever it may be on the following goal page.

But for the purposes of quality score, you would be well advised to have links on the landing page. You can have links like Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy at the bottom of the page. At the top, you can have links to Resources and any other information laden areas of your main site. From the user perspective, this also gives the user the feeling that she is not hemmed in and led like cattle to the final desired goal.

Again, if you are getting a user to fill a form, please do not make the user sweat it out. Have a form with just 3 or 4 fields where you capture their name, email address, phone number and comments. Then call them or email them to prove you are a human operating a business and take your sales process to the next level.

If you sell products and have a shopping cart, please make it a simple and intuitive process for the user to go through the sales cycle. Have a clear call to action with a button saying Add to Cart or Buy Blue Widget. Do not make the user jump through too many hoops that would result in frustration and make her leave your site.

4) Analyzing Results:
Once you have reorganised your PPC campaign, it is vital to have an eye on the results as much as you can. If it is an existing campaign, you should get a clear sign of the trends in a week or so. If it is a brand new campaign, it will take atleast 3 months to get a clear picture.

Just as in real life, even your keywords are all not created the same. You will find a few keywords that are foot soldiers. They will bring in good load of visitors but not necessarily convert. You are going to have a few lynchpin keywords (royalty kind) which can convert like crazy. These are the superstars.
You will find dummies that just do not fire up.

If you find that certain keywords are not recording any clicks over 3 months, then there are two ways to look at it. Maybe they need to be checked for better targeting and relevancy. Else, there is no demand in the market for the product or service that the keywords in question represent.

Group them into a distinct ad group and see if they fire up. Wait for another couple of months. If nothing happens, pause them. Please do not delete them. You can read my earlier post titled Taking On An Existing PPC Campaign - Things To Be Aware Of explaining the PPC account history.

5) Cutting down Costs:
This is not directly connected to the optimization of a PPC campaign but it is handy if you are not loaded with money. Adwords is Google’s revenue generating flagship. Click costs are only going up everyday. There is no way the CPCs (cost per click) are going to tank in future like the stock market. The best thing you can do is run your campaigns on Adwords for atleast 3 months.

You can easily pick out the winners at the expense of paying a “good” price as CPC even after using the above techniques for optimizing your PPC campaigns. After 3 months, start advertising on Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter with the winning keywords. You are going to pay less than what you would pay on Adwords.

If you are happy with the response from these two big networks, you can either switch off the Adwords campaigns and concentrate on improving your site’s position on the organic SERPs. You can also have the luxury of paid traffic albeit at manageable budget levels.

Ravi Venkatesan (on Twitter) is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland pay per click marketing company offering both seo and pay per click services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

Good Practices SEO With A Tinge Of Creativity

Ravi — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 21:45:16 +0000

Search engine marketing is increasingly becoming popular with people from all walks of life and businesses of all hues adopting the web in a big way. The global recesssion has clearly thrust SEM into the spotlight as a great way to drive targeted traffic that is measurable and also making a huge difference to the bottomline of any company, the $ generated in revenue.

Search engine optimisation(SEO) and Pay per click (PPC) marketing are being accorded increasing importance as affordable means of tapping the market potential by reaching a targeted audience on the web compared to the traditional TV and/or newsprint advertising which are more expensive and the results are hard to measure. It is all the more imperative that SEO practitioners adopt more white hat creative methods to improve the visibility of their clients’ sites.

1) On page optimisation:
The search engine algorithms in place today are way more sophisticated than what it was a few years ago. This makes SEO such a dynamic field that SEO techniques which worked well no so long ago have lost their charm in the present.

With the incredible level of testing and research being done today by the likes of the amazing team at SEOmoz, the only on page factor worth its salt in terms of pure SEO value and ranking on the SERPs seems to be the title tag. The alt tag is making a comeback. The header tags have diminished in their SEO value and are now more useful to describe the information hierarchy on a page. Some of the other factors like well formed URLs and internal linking can help but to a certain extent.

All in all, in my opinion, I would conservatively attribute the impact of on page SEO factors to be between 30% and 35% when it comes to ranking well on the SERPs. The majority of the action clearly takes place outside the website and hence outside the sphere of influence of what a site webmaster can tweak on her site.

2) Top Quality Content:
Content is the currency of the web. The more unique it is and higher its value in disseminating valuable information, the more powerful it is and gets traded heavily on the web by being passed around.

Even top shelf companies who are a force to reckon with in their domain of business get so clouded in their vision of their industry that they either get too technical in their content delivery or just are not in tune with the demands of their market. Everything evolves in life and so do consumers as they search for products/services using search terms that are not technical or even colloquial.

All that needs to be done is to do a keyword research to find out what prospective customers are searching for. A look at Google Trends, Amazon and Twitter will also reveal what search terms are hot in a particular industry and pretty much the talk of the town at a given point of time.

The next thing to do would be to go to industry specific forums related to the keyword and read posts wherein users are asking questions related to the industry using these popular keywords. You must remember that not everyone who surfs the web is looking to buy a product/service. Everyone has some problem or the other and people are looking for solutions to solve their problems.

What starts off as a search for general information leads a user to looking for more specific information, then research and review of the products/services available and culminating in the purchase of the relevant product/service.

The content developer/webmaster can focus on topics that target these most searched keywords and develop content that provide solutions/advice to the pressing problems in that industry in sync with the targeted keywords.

Every piece of content written on the web does not have the propensity to go viral. Creating viral content is one of the most bandied terms on the web. It is not easy. You can get it right only after many attempts. So it is wise to dwell on topics that are popular in the present term (and relevant to your niche) and develop content towards that end.

You would be wise to avoid the curse of duplicate content within your site. This can arise due to two versions of the domain in existence, namely http://www.site.com and http://site.com You can also have the case of multiple distinct URLs leading to the same content. Canonicalization can help reduce this problem.

In the case of scrapers stealing your content and getting indexed first where they appear to be the original creator of content, I am sure Google would be able to find out over time as backlinks to your site’s content would be a strong signal for it to recognise the true owner.

If you post on your blog, the blog and ping feature should alert the bots straightaway. You would be well off tweeting the post/article on Twitter. Google scours the Twitter landscape for new content and is sure to pick up your tweet thus confirming the ownership of the content.

In my experience, I have found that personal experiences invoving trials and experiments in a particular niche that lead to well defined results seem to be quite popular and have a good chance of getting great link love. Readers on the web are discerning and can easily separate the chaff from the wheat. I have dwelt at length on unique content and its seo implications in a previous post.

3) Social Media:
Let us be honest about this. Social media is not suitable to all businesses selling products/services. It is very powerful tool to leverage in businesses like travel sites, music and video sites etc. Twitter is the darling of the cybermasses today and undoubtedly has captured the imagination of millions of users worldwide.

The general belief is that to sell products or services on Twitter, one must have lots of followers. This means the same person has to follow others in order to make the others follow her. She ends up with thousands of followers and in turn follows thousands. When she has a critical mass of followers, then she can promote her services/products. I totally disagree with this.

I bet you will agree with me that when you have thousands of followers, you will not have the time to read all the tweets and follow links. Your twitter screen will be utter pandemonium with messages trickling in every minute or so. If you are struggling to keep up with your tweets, imagine the plight of your followers. They are in the same boat as well. There is no focus and it is a virtual free for all. It is well nigh impossible to get any message through to your followers in this scenario.

Judicious use of social media involves building relationships. If you are in the field of manufacturing baby nappies, then there must be like minded people out there in the hundreds (and not millions) who will be interested in your product. You would be well off building a good laser focused community on Twitter or Facebook or any other popular social media platform to leverage your position as a domain leader in the baby nappies industry and then disseminate information and/or sell products/services to an interested community.

4) Backlink Profile:
At this point of time, links are a singular source of authoritative signals to the search engines. If your site has an impressive backlink profile as a result of hard work put in over the years by you, the website owner or due to outsourced link building efforts of an industrious SEO professional, it has a huge impact on your site’s ranking on the SERPs of all the major search engines as it is not easy for a site owner to manipulate this.

Again. all links created are not equal. This may sound cliche but it is very much true. The key today to a successful link building campaign is the the number of unique domains linking to your site. The higher the domain diversity, the more powerful is your site’s influence in the rankings on the SERPs.

It is equally important for a site to link to its other authoritative peer sites as this strengthens the notion of the site’s good neighborhood aspect. It is also natural to invite some spammy links in the process as a site owner does not have control over who links to her site.

Some of the other important factors to consider are:

Variation in anchor text of incoming links
Smattering of domains ranging from strong to weak provides for a natural linking landscape
Synergy in topicality of linking domains

In conclusion, the real time response of the web through social media and instantaneous response from users by way of blog comments etc gives anyone the opportunity to streamline the operations of their domain of buisness (niche) and helps them understand what their specific market is demanding which makes provision of what is required all the more easier.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine optimisation company that offers both natural search and paid search to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.

SEO Tools: Using Xenu and Excel - Blindfolded SEO Audit Part 2

Brian R. Brown — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:26:50 +0000

During Part 1 of the Blindfolded SEO Audit, we started learning how to use Xenu and Excel to begin our SEO audit and focused on the foundational element, URLs.

Now let’s move on to the most important signal a site’s pages can send to the search engines, the all powerful title tag. Like URL constructs, sites often have nearly as many constructs for title tags. Three things that a quick scan of our data will tell us:

General constructs and patterns used
Title tag duplication
General sense of optimization quality (potentially)

Branding (or lack of) always jumps out quickly, of which we have a number of different examples:

three quarter sleeve sweater | Coldwater Creek
Apparel at Coldwater Creek
Coldwater Creek misses clothing.
Coldwater Creek

What about duplication? I expect to find some levels, especially on an ecommerce site or any site that features a pagination system. Most CMS or ecommerce systems don’t provide a way, or at least an easy way, to modify the title tags (or headings and body copy) of individual paginated pages like GravityStream can. However, I also want to see beyond the pagination to identify duplication across URLs/pages that really should be unique. In this case, these pages are cannibalizing and missing an opportunity to target additional phrases.

Best way to do that in this case is to sort by the title, rather than the URL, and then filter out those with a “page=” in them to clear out all the pagination and make reviewing easier (the specific sorting will vary depending on a site’s constructs).

I quickly find some examples of title duplication.

Title: Clearance apparel at Coldwater Creek

Used on these URLs:

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/outlet-apparel.aspx
http://www.coldwatercreek.com/outlet-tops-and-tees.aspx
http://www.coldwatercreek.com/outlet-dresses.aspx

Title: Coldwater Creek

Used on these URLs:

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/blue-jeans-in-pink.aspx
http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Catalog/catalogRequest.aspx
http://www.coldwatercreek.com/cqo/cqo.aspx

Title: Coldwater Creek offers a great selection of women’s denim jeans.

Used on these URLs:

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/classic-waist-jeans.aspx
http://www.coldwatercreek.com/lower-waist-jeans.aspx
http://www.coldwatercreek.com/natural-waist-jeans.aspx
http://www.coldwatercreek.com/shop-by-fit.aspx

Not to mention the store locations, which appear to not have titles at all. Of course I would still want to verify this against the actual site, but Xenu has quickly jump started the audit process by pointing to areas of concern. It may not find the needle in the haystack, but it does move the hay from the field to the stack to begin, and sometimes cuts the stack down into manageable bales.

Some of the title tags above are okay and maybe are the most optimal … only keyword research combined with site analytics will reveal that. What we do know though is that duplicating the same title across different 4 pages means at least 3 of them are not optimal and we’ve created keyword cannibalization. Just based on the URLs, I can also tell that there are probably better, more targeted titles that could be used.

Whether a site’s title tags are manually or programmatically optimized doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that the title tag is the strongest and easiest signal that a site owner has control over. This is the juiciest, ripest, most important low hanging fruit opportunity that many sites continue to miss.

A couple more interesting bits of information we can get from Xenu that also probably go mostly unnoticed, are the Level, Links Out and Links In columns. Level may not be exact, but we can get a quick idea of how deep, based on click and crawl path, content is. While purely site related, the links information can give us a quick view as to internal linking strength, identifying which pages or sections may undervalued or serving as internal hubs.

Hopefully this proved an interesting exercise. While I wouldn’t recommend doing a real SEO site audit blindfolded, I definitely recommend reviewing your site in new and different ways and removing some of the visual cues (and clutter) to see how the bots view some of the site’s most important signals. Remember that Xenu doesn’t provide the answers, but at least helps to identify areas that may be problematic and helps to better make sense of the foundation of a site … especially if that site consists of hundreds of thousands or millions of URLs.

This is also a great training tool and a way to further hone your skill set. I’ll liken it to Luke Skywalker’s blindfolded lightsaber training … one must move beyond seeing to feeling. May the SEO be with you.

SEO Services: Blindfolded SEO Audit Part 1

Brian R. Brown — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:15:28 +0000

SEO consultants spend a lot of time looking at websites. Moreover, like web designers, SEOs definitely “see” websites very differently than the average web user. Some days, it feels a little like the Matrix, where instead of seeing the streaming code, you see the people, cars and buildings that the code signifies. After doing web design, this is heightened even more, although perhaps inverted … instead of seeing shoes, cookware, and dog collars, I see title tags, heading tags, URL constructs and CSS.

Like any skill though, it takes continual honing and refining, along with the education. This is part of the concept behind the 60-Second Website Audit and training the eye to quickly identify key SEO issues and potential issues.

I’ve joked that, after so many audits, SEO consultants could probably do them blindfolded. So, whip out the blindfold and let’s put that to a test.

Okay, so maybe not really blindfolded, but how about auditing a site without actually seeing the site? Hmm, that might be interesting. This is more than gimmick. In fact, though I might normally take a quick look around a site, ala 60-Second Audit, I generally start the deep dive of an audit exactly as I’m going to show you.

So how do I start auditing a site without looking at the actual site? Just like a search engine, I start at the crawl, which is what we are going to do today. SEO is about so much more than just keywords, and while the title tag is one of the most important signals a site can send to a search engine, a title tag that can’t be found is of little value.

Let’s Audit, Blindfolded

I needed a website I haven’t seen before for this experiment. To pick a site randomly that I haven’t seen, I started by picking a word and searching in Google for it. Being mid-October and feeling the quick approach of winter, the word “sweater” seemed aptly appropriate. I then jumped to the 5th page of results and selected the 2nd result, which was ColdWaterCreek.com. While I know of Cold Water Creek, I don’t recall ever seeing their site, so this is perfect.

Let me introduce you to Xenu. Xenu Link Sleuth™ is a free crawler program that you can download and use to crawl your own site (highly recommend) or other sites. Xenu is one of the most powerful (and perhaps underrated) tools an SEO can have. The amount of information from this tool is priceless, and in this case, will be how we’ll start to audit ColdWaterCreek.com “blindfolded.” That said, if you want to try this at home, I’d recommend doing so on your own site, rather than everyone running out and crawling Cold Water Creek’s site!

Since I prefer to work with the data within Excel, the first thing I do after running it is to export it out to a tab separated format that can be imported into Excel. The details of using Xenu are beyond the scope of this post, so if you are new to Xenu, I highly recommend spending a little time reading first.

After moving the external URLs/links, which in this case also includes the images to another tab, I’m left with 5,161 rows of data, or in other words, 5,161 URLs. When I do a site:www.coldwatercreek.com search in Google (appending &filter=0&start=990 to the URL), I see Google returns 820 results. Quite a difference … what’s the true number?

No idea, but most clients feel that the Google number is often far less than the number of URLs (pages) they have and Xenu seems like a lot more than they expect. I certainly don’t expect Google (or any other search engine) to index 100% of a site’s URLs, but seeing less than 16% indexed based on the Xenu number tells me there may be some issues. Remember though, I haven’t even looked at the site so I don’t really have any idea what those issues are yet.

More importantly, and I see this time after time, we don’t know whether the “true” number should be closer to the Google number or the Xenu number. Too often, people view indexation numbers as something that needs to be increased, that more is better. But more could just as well be indicative of problems.

Next, I note that the server is running Windows IIS as the server platform. I see this in part by the .aspx file extension, but confirmed by the “Server” column of the Xenu report, which lists the URLs as Microsoft-IIS/6.0. In a normal audit, this would clue me in on two things, the first being that I want to be aware of possible case issues. Since IIS doesn’t distinguish case differences, this means that we might see somewhat “sloppy” or inconsistent linking references, such as default.aspx vs. Default.aspx, or blue-jeans.aspx, Blue-Jeans.aspx, Blue-jeans.aspx or even blue-Jeans.aspx. While the server may gladly serve up the appropriate content for these variations, search engine spiders recognize that these could be different pages on other serves, such as Linux, which means that each of these URLs are unique.

Second, this also alerts us to proper redirection challenges. Setting up 301 permanent redirects vs. 302 redirects in IIS seems to trip up many IT departments. So now, we know that this may be a roadblock to any recommendations we make, or that we really need to double check that they have been done in the past and that they are done correctly going forward.

A quick scan is all that is needed to find examples of the case issue:

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/StoreLocator/Store_Details.aspx?StoreID=9126
http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Storelocator/Store_Details.aspx?StoreID=9126

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/StoreLocator/Store_Events.aspx?StoreID=146
http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Storelocator/Store_Events.aspx?StoreID=146

See the differences above? One version uses an upper case “L” while the other version uses a lower case “l” within StoreLocator. This means that there are likely duplicates of all of the stores for the details and events pages. Fortunately, the rest of the URLs are pretty clean and consistent, which isn’t always the case (no pun intended).

After sorting by URL, we quickly see some other common issues. Ironically, this issue is less about the content that is there and more about what isn’t there. Toward the top of the list, we find these URLs:

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/%2f404.htm
http://www.coldwatercreek.com/404.htm
http://www.coldwatercreek.com/404.htm?aspxerrorpath=/MyAccount/MyAccount/MyAcctLogin.aspx

First, the %2f is the encoding for the “/” which tells me that there is probably a malformed URL here. The real issue though is that all of these represent a 404 file not found page, yet all return a 200 ok header status. This means that these, and likely any malformed URLs or URLs that no longer exist, will continue to live on and bloat the index rather than drop out. It also means that the site isn’t sending the highest quality signal to search engines by appearing to return ok statuses for URLs that don’t exist. However, we can also see by the following example that some URLs are returning a proper 404 header status:

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/GiftCard/%2fGiftCard%2fEGiftCardATB.aspx%3fproductid%3d01GC006%26ensembleid%3d10756

Along with additional examples of possible encoding issues, this is a good reminder that we need to check for issues in different areas of the site and in different ways. This is especially true with complex sites that might appear seamless visually, but may be powered by a number of different scripts, such as a content management system, ecommerce cart, blog, forum and FAQ … all of which might be powered separately.

While we are on that note, my guess is that the following URL probably isn’t of much value either:

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Blank.htm

Other examples of possible duplication or diluted content may be seen in the following:

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/default.aspx (because I still haven’t viewed the site, I don’t know for certain, but experience and my gut tells me that this may be a duplication of the homepage URL, http://www.coldwatercreek.com/).

Another challenging area for duplication is in presentation, and my guess is that:

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/apparel/pants/longs.aspx

is probably being duplicated by:

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/apparel/pants/longs.aspx?ShowAllProducts=false

Which is prevalent for all products that have pagination, and to some extent, duplicated further by the counter URL variation:

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/apparel/pants/longs.aspx?ShowAllProducts=true

At this point, we don’t know if these are being dealt with in other ways, such as robots handling, nofollow link attributes or the canonical link element. Nor can we determine how these should be handled, but at least we have a better understanding of what is going on and what we need to dig into.

Related to that, we also have a quick view into the pagination URL construct:

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/apparel/pants/longs.aspx?page=1

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/apparel/pants/longs.aspx?page=2

In addition, some other URLs that are probably low value for search (as well as possible encoding issues again) that we’ll want to check to see whether they are being excluded from the bots:

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/GiftCard/%2fGiftCard%2fGiftCardATB.aspx%3fproductid%3d44130%26ensembleid%3d50183

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/GiftCard/EGiftCard.aspx?productid=01GC001&ensembleid=10756

While we are looking at URLs, we can quickly scan our Excel file and identify key URL constructs being used.

Such as parameter-based product detail pages, including perhaps low-value duplication:

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Products/Detail.aspx?productid=30144&ensembleid=34281

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Products/Detail.aspx?productid=30144&ensembleid=34281&Skn=outlet

Some lengthy, a little parameter heavy and generally ugly URLs that may be challenging to bots:

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Products/prodList.aspx?provider=productsearch&cmd=czcategory&cat=All+Products////Apparel////Dresses////UserSearch=Dept.Channel+ID=1&ShowAllProducts=false

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/Sale/default.aspx?provider=productsearch&cmd=czNewPage&path=All+Products////UserSearch=RedTag////UserSearch=Misses&page=18

Especially in comparison to the cleaner, keyword friendly category pages (though I’d still want to review these around the pagination construct mentioned earlier):

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/knit-dresses.aspx

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/misses.aspx

http://www.coldwatercreek.com/outlet-jackets.aspx

Seem like a lot of focus on URLs? You bet. URLs are at the foundation of a site’s SEO. Get these wrong and little else matters. Xenu is excellent at seeing the URLs that exist that may not ever make it into a search engine index … which may be quite telling. So remember that a “site:domain.com” advanced query only reveals what is “above water.”

The Cold Water Creek site is actually quite small with only a few variations of URLs. The real power and beauty of Xenu is when you find yourself reviewing 300,000+ URLs from highly complex sites with several URL constructs and variants.

In part 2 of the Blindfolded SEO Audit, we’ll start out by seeing what Xenu can show us about the most important search signal a site has.

SEO Followed By Website Optimization - Beat Your Competition

Ravi — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 21:08:25 +0000

As search marketers, most SEO professionals are focused on the optimization aspects (both on page and off page) that will help a site achieve top rankings in the SERPs of the major search engines. The complexity of achieving top rankings increases by the day with the algorithms focusing more and more on factors that cannot be manipulated by a site owner/webmaster.

In this scenario, it is imperative that a site owner with a fairly new site maximizes her chances of retaining as many visitors to her site as possible by giving them an opportunity to communicate with her site through a comment on her blog, leaving feedback or collecting the visitor’s email address.

This will allow her to sell products/services on the backend through email marketing. This is where website optimization techniques coupled with solid SEO strategy can pay huge dividends in the long run.

Website optimization basically deals with improving a visitor’s experience on your website and increasing the conversion of casual visitors into customers.

Internet marketers have long realised the power of squeeze pages through which they collect email addresses and then sell products/services through email marketing repeatedly. They also know the concept of “The money is in the list” as each email subscriber is a very valuable proposition.

Many a time, sites ranking well on the SERPs can be attributed to the diligent efforts of a search engine optimisation professional. But rankings are not an end in themselves. They are just the means to the end. Better visibility helps a site gain more visitors. But the crucial aspect lies in converting the visitors into customers. Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is an important aspect of SEO that is hogging the limelight in the present.

It would be worth the effort for SEO professionals to atleast propose to site owners the effectiveness of retaining visitors and/or upsell/downsell products and services once the site has attained good visibility on the SERPs. Let us consider a few techniques that can be employed in the light of what is being discussed.

1) Undiluted Focus:
If you are selling a product or service, you can be in a situation where you are selling many distinct products or services. This will result in specific money pages (inner pages) which highlight the particular product or service in question.

The page that describes the benefits of the product or service should focus completely on just that and should not diverge to talk about a related product or service.

Remember that prospective buyers will buy benefits and not features of a product or service. So it is important to highlight the benefits clearly on the money page.

2) Strident Call To Action:
With the singular focus described above, the visitor is subjected to a single call to action that specifically sells that particular product or service described.

As a site owner, it is your responsibility to ensure that the visitor is asked to take action. If you sell blue widgets, have a big bold button that says Buy this blue widget now. If there is no clear call to action, there is a good chance that visitors will not take action.

3) In the case of visitor trying to move out of the sales funnel:
In the above example where you sell blue widgets on your site, there are many reasons why a visitor is unable to buy a product. The price point can be a major factor as the visitor feels it is too expensive. You cannot predict this until you find out.

This is where the application of a popular internet marketing technique can help you gain a deep insight into the makeup of a typical customer in your niche. If the visitor clicks the Back button or tries to close the tab or tries to type in a new web address in the URL box, then she is definitely not interested in buying your blue widget.

If you use a script that can sense this action, it can popup a special one time offer for the same blue widget at a discounted price. As a business owner, you are cutting your profit by a margin that you can afford. This causes the visitor to rethink and induces her to buy the product at a discounted rate. You are gaining a sale where there was none in the first place.

An increased incidence of the one time offer sales indicates that your produt price is more expensive for most visitors. You have to bite the bullet and reduce the price to attract more sales.

4) Information seekers:
Not all visitors are in a buying frame of mind when they visit your site. There are many seeking information on the blue widget that you sell. For users in reasearch mode, you must have a Resources page on your site which explains all the features of your product.

You can have a review of your product and your competitor’s product and show the superior/useful features your product offers compared to that of your competitor. You can also compare the pricing models. If you have a truly superior product in your niche, then you can certainly justify its higher sale price.

5) Optimizing your site for buyers keywords:
I would like to insert here the idea of optimizing your site for buyers keywords. During keyword research, you are prone to come across keyword phrases that specifically are commercially action oriented in intent. Some examples in our case can be “buy blue widget” or “blue widget software download” (without the quotes).

These clearly show the number of searchers who have done their research and review of the product you sell and are ready to buy. It is ideal to have pages on your site optimized for such buyers.

6) Collecting visitor email address:
You can also incentivize your visitor to submit her name and email address by offering an ebook download that explains the nuances of what to look for when buying a blue widget. For information seekers who have no idea of your niche and/or product, this is a goldmine of information. They would certainly subscribe to your mailing list to get their hands on this great resource.

Now that you have their email address (you have to make it double opt-in subscription process), you have obtained customers for a lifetime (unless they decide to unsubscribe) to whom you can sell products/services in the backend. These offers can be tailor made for just your email subscribers and should not appear on your main website.

7) Collecting Feedback:
At every possible stage of the sales cycle, encourage your visitors to submit their feedback either through a feedback form on the site or through a blog comment if you have an active blog on your site.

The feedback can be about the quality of your product or service offered, shipping and handling concerns etc. It would be ideal to have a 6 to 12 hour turnaround time to respond to queries/complaints.

Feedback is valuable to a business owner to streamline her sales funnel and address issues that she may not have imagined existed in the first place.

8. Use of Website Optimizer:
I have described at length the process of using Google’s Website Optimizer. You can use this as a standalone tool or from within your Adwords account.

Please note that when you sign up for a Website Optimizer account, Google will automatically setup an Analytics account (if you already do not have one) for use with your experiments to collect your experimental data.

Laxity due to Free Traffic:
Though this is not part of the methods actually used to improve conversion rate on a site, many a time, even owners of websites well entrenched at the top of the Google SERPs can be lax as they are getting free traffic from the major search engines.

If a site owner is driving traffic to her site using PPC, she feels the pinch as she is paying for each visitor. This is also the case with CPA (Cost per acquisition) marketing where marketers pay for each visitor to visit their landing page on which they make an offer in the form of a signup to a service for example. They get paid only if the visitor signs up.

It is common for such marketers to employ these techniques mentioned above to gain the maximum ROI for the $ paid to get their visitors into their site.

It is important to realise the value of each visitor to your website. As a website owner, you have to endevour to improve the visitor experience in every possible way and get them to communicate to you their delightful and/or woeful experiences on your site. This will ensure the success of your online business and put you head and shoulders ahead of your competition.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search marketing consultancy that offers both organic search and ppc marketing to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.

Social Media Costs … More Than Just ROI Calculations

Brian R. Brown — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:26:38 +0000

Social media costs. Yes it does. One way or another, there is a cost that is (or should be) associated with social media efforts. Determining and measuring that cost isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but if you took the time to determine your Social Media Marketing Goals and established metrics for Social Media Measurement, then you are well on your way to understanding the financial (and resource) impact of social media.

Why are social media costs so challenging to measure? Social media is about more than just ROI. Unlike areas of a business that have very specific and direct cost and revenue associations, social media costs are a combination of your goals, metrics, direct costs and time; of which, many of these may actually be soft measurements.

Along with hard measurements, social media costs include many soft measurements. I think of hard measurements as those that are very defined and clearly measurable. Let’s say that it costs you $100 to have an article written, or maybe you write it yourself, in which case you can calculate the amount of time for research, writing, editing and eventual publishing, based on your salary. We might even be able to regiment that someone will spend exactly 3 hours a day, 5 days a week responding to blog comments. Again, we can associate some hard cost measurement to these activities.

However, social media is largely associated with soft measurements, and therefore, is as much about the value of the activity as it is some ROI to be gained. Unlike the examples above, time is often hard to directly measure because, unless you have dedicated staff where you can directly associate 100% of their time and salary, social media activities will often happen when they happen, often in small chunks or bits of time.

Even then, time can still be a soft measurement. Social media success is based on networking, relationships and conversations, which often have to happen long before they are “needed.” To get some great content pushed out into the social venues may take time invested to build up rapport and connections with leaders within the venue. To drive fans, followers or links to your content or website takes time invested in participating within the venue; just like blogging success requires commenting on other blogs as much as it does writing great blog posts.

Sure, you can measure the creation cost of content used for social media activities, but your metric for success may be in inbound links to the content or improved rankings within the search engines. How do you directly associate that value to sales, leads and revenue?

Social media often operates on a soft timeline. While some activities are done with a specific time goal, such as tweeting a sale that ends tomorrow, many of the activities done today may not have a specific timeframe and could pay off immediately, in a week, a month or even 6 months or more from now.

If all this sounds challenging, you’re right. If all this sounds like I’m saying you don’t need to measure impact, results or costs of social media, then you might want to go back and reread the previous blog posts.

In fact, I’m saying quite the opposite. Because of the soft measurements and the incredible time suck that can come from social media - admit it, we’ve all sat down to take 5 minutes to read a blog post, tweet something or interact in some way, only to see an hour or more fly by - establishing metrics and measuring your social media efforts is critical. Without measuring results and the costs associated, you have no way to determine whether a certain activity or venue is valuable. Just realize that ROI may not be the best way to qualify social media activities. Social media is about connecting with your audience and that’s a value measurement.

Looking for some more thoughts on measuring social media? Be sure check out these great posts by Don Bartholomew, Social Media ROI Part 1: Framework and Social Media ROI Part 2: Research Approaches.

Key Factors To Include In Competitive Analysis

Ravi — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 23:41:55 +0000

As a site owner, you would be analyzing the Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) frequently to see the sites ranking on Page 1 for terms that are of particular interest to your business or niche. Today it is vital to rank in the top 5 results on the first page to get the lion’s share of user clicks (approximately 70%).

Ranking below the fold on page 1 or on succeeding pages is not going to help your site’s cause in gaining better visibility and hence more traffic. The key factors you have to consider when doing a competitive analysis to dethrone a site ranking in the top 5 results and get your site listed in its place is what constitutes the meat of this post.

Broadly speaking, there are two sets of metrics to consider when doing competitive analysis namely the Domain and Page metrics. We will consider each of them in detail. For a change, I will try to make it as pictorial as possible (where applicable) and include my observations under Note (where applicable).

Also, some of the tools mentioned herein are proprietary and owned by SEOmoz. A PRO membership is necessary in most cases to see the values of metrics mentioned in this post. I will mention this where necessary. Screenshots showing link and domain figures are that of Natural search blog site.

A) Domain Metrics For Competitive Analysis:

1)Domain Size:

NOTE:
In general, the site: command shows the virtual real estate your site owns on the web. More specifically, it shows the number of pages from your site that have been included in the Google index. You can use the same command on Yahoo and Bing as well.

2) DmR or Domain moz Rank:

NOTE:
The DmR measure indicates how important your domain is in the entire search engine index amongst all the other domains. The values are logarithmic and increase from 0 to 10.

A value of 5+ or 6+ is relatively competitive to beat. A value of 7+ or 8+ indicates a very powerful domain. Lower values mean you can take them on and try to dislodge them from the top.

3) DmT or Domain moz Trust:

NOTE:
DmT or Domain moz Trust indicates the trustworthiness of a site and the number of links it has earned from other well trusted sites.

All search engines have a core group of trusted seed sites as a starting point. The trustworthiness of your site can be measured by the hops or distance it is away from the trusted seed site. For more information, refer to my earlier post titled Relationship between trust and link building

4) Number of links to a given domain:

Yahoo Site Explorer
Linkscape

NOTE:
This is a measure of inbound links to your entire site. You can use the above tools to get an idea of how many links your domain has garnered and compare it with your competitor.

5) Number of linking domains:

NOTE:
You can use Linkscape to identify the number of domains linking to your site.

The more diverse the domain set linking to your site, the more it will help your site reach the top. If you have 1000 links from 100 domains, this is a classic example of a sitewide link increasing the link count. If you have 500 links from 300 domains, your domain diversity measure is significant.

B) Page Metrics For Competitive Analysis:
Here we look at metrics that influence the specific page of a site.

1) Page Rank or PR:

NOTE:
The Page Rank in the Google Toolbar is a logarithmic value. A Page rank value encompasses a lot of things apart from just links going in and out of the site. It also includes several other factors that are domain and page specific.

The mR or mozRank is its equivalent in Linkscape. A Page rank of 5+ or 6+ is relatively competitive. A PR of 7+ or 8+ indicates a powerful site.

It is 10 times harder (in terms of time ($) and effort) to elevate the Pagerank value from one level to the next succeeding level.

2) Kewyord Targeting:

Basic on page factors like Keyword present in the title tag, URL and h# tags on the page and body copy

In my honest opinion, on page factors constitute 30 to 35% of efforrts in helping a certain page rank at the top of the SERPs.

If the niche your site is in is very special with not much competition, then on page factors will make the cut. Else, majority of the action lies external to your site.

3) mR or mozRank:
This is a Linkscape metric. This was discussed earlier as being similar to Page Rank.

A mR of 0 or unranked value should alert you to other issues like whether the link juice from your home page flows to the page in question. It raises questions about the location of the page in your site hierarchy.

Nowadays, each page of a site must have a certain pagerank threshold to retain their place in the Google index. Pages that do not have enough pagerank can be attributed to lack of content focus and quality of the page, lack of inbound links to the page etc.

Another problem is that Google updates its Page Rank toolbar once in a while and you cannot depend on it. Linkscape crawls the web atleast once a month and updates the mR value regularly.

Boosting your site pages through internal links alone will not help. It has to be reinforced by links from external unbiased sites to your site pages as well.

4) mT or moz Trust:

NOTE:
This is a measure of how trusted the page in question is in the eyes of Google. Links from other trustworthy sites to this particular page can certainly help increase its trust.

5) Number of links pointing to the page:
This is the number of links pointing to the page in question can be found out using tools like
Yahoo Site Explorer and
Linkscape

If links obtained are from a diverse set of domains, then it is valuable. So saying, it is agian unrealistic to expect only sites related to your industry to link to you. As a site owner, you have no control over who links to you.

Over the years, I have found that an inner page of a site that ranks well on the SERPs for a particular search phrase is more enduring and harder to dislodge from the top than a site whose home page ranks for the same term.

6) Number of linking domains:
Again, these are the links from various domains pointing to your site. A high domain diversity is a key factor to reach the search engine SERPs summit.

Links are powerful signals in the ranking process. It is not possible for a site owner to manipulate incoming links especially those from quality sites.

Domain diversity also cannot be manipulated easily. The number of inbound links from a diverse set of domains can help a site in even the most competitive industry break the ranking deadlock and burst into the top page of the SERPs.

7) Anchor Text of inbound links:

NOTE:
These examples show the anchor text of inbound links to the Natural Search Blog site. The anchor text is the text that forms the clickable part of the link.

The anchor text in links should reflect subtle variations of the subject discussed on the page of your site. If all links have the same anchor text, it is more than a coinicidence and the search engines will smell a rat.

There is a belief that if you get an inbound link from a good external site and if you are not happy with it, you can write to the other webmaster or site owner asking her to change the anchor text to suit. This is fine.

But in my opinion, if the other person linking to your site defines the focus of your site’s page in her own words, then that is the natural reinforcement your page gets. You would be well off checking the focus of the page on your site. If it exhibits mixed focus, this will naturally lead to different people interpreting it the way they read it sometimes giving rise to unexpected anchor text.

If you still want to have a more animated representation of this post, it would be worth watching Rand’s presentation on Key Factors in Competitive Analysis

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine optimisation company that offers both seo and pay per click services to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.

Social Media Measurement

Brian R. Brown — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:50:21 +0000

Measuring social media will help you better understand what works, which social media venues perform for you, and provides an important metric to factor into cost analysis. Once you have pulled together your social media marketing goals, you need to lay down how you are going to measure the impact of your social media marketing efforts.

Social media measurement presents some interesting challenges compared to the more typical site or page metrics. The most direct measures, such as traffic and conversion on your website, are only part of the picture. By the very nature though, much of your social media efforts will take place off your website. But let’s make it easy and start internally before we move to the more challenging external measurements.

Like site optimization, it is helpful to identify or create a landing page target on your website for your social media campaigns as well. Not all of the traffic and gains from social media will flow into your target page, but it will help your efforts to have a defined target to build your efforts around. This is especially true when focusing on link baiting efforts as an intersection of social media and SEO.

Some of your social media efforts will be indirect, just interacting with others and building your social media rapport and authority, and that is okay, even required. However without some focused targeting, you may find you’re spending a lot of energy on social media with no real purpose and fewer gains.

Target pages don’t have to be newly created or strictly for your campaigns, especially since they may generate inbound links over time as others (hopefully) link to them. What this will do though is to help sync and consolidate your social media efforts with all of your other SEO efforts. Then, as you mention target phrases in your social media campaigns, you’ll already know where it needs to link to, rather than having random linking to different pages. This is especially critical if you have a team working on your social media.

Global tracking, such as total traffic being sent to the site from each of the venues you are targeting, will provide a bigger picture view. Now with your target page, phrase and promotion combination, you can at least connect a page to your specific efforts. You’ll want to monitor your specific target pages for referring traffic from the venues you’ve targeted:

record the dates you promoted your target (begin a timeline as you may re-promote over time)
track referring traffic from each venue promoted in (also have benchmarks prior to promotion)
also track ranking positions and traffic for targeted phrases

As you can see, much of this internal tracking isn’t all that different than what you should already be doing. Of course, things like rankings and targeted phrase traffic won’t be exclusive to your social media efforts.

Social media marketing measurements should also extend beyond your site though, which is where the measurements get a little more challenging. Depending on the venue, you may only have minimal or no visibility of the types of metrics you rely on for your own site. If the site allows you to embed an image, such as an avatar that could be hosted on your own site, you can get a rough idea on page views by tracking how often the image is served up. However, like any kind of “hits” reporting, this can be highly skewed.

So rather than focusing on the more traditional site metrics, your off-site social media metrics will be more focused on popularity and activity measures. Fortunately, these types of measures are often reported in some way by the social media venues.

Whether they are called friends, fans or followers, one of the core metrics you’ll want to track is how many of those you have. This however, is only part of the picture. Social media is about conversation and interaction. These counts are purely quantitative, but what you want to strive for is qualitative measures. Sorry to say, but some portion of your fans will be inactive. You’ll want to try to understand what level of quality you have achieved by establishing metrics for:

how many fans actually interact with you
average number of comments, votes, etc. for your individual efforts (posts, videos, etc.)
mentions to your efforts
how many of your fans cross over into other venues (while this may seem to lower your total reach counts, it improves your quality counts as it means you are reaching a greater level of involvement)

Like any reputation management efforts, social media measurement wouldn’t be complete without social media monitoring. You will want to employ the same types of tracking you do for your general reputation management, but look for mentions, links, etc. back to your social media campaigns or profiles. The further you move from your own analytics on your own site, the more challenging and less precise these metrics get. But, without any metrics, you are completely in the dark.

If all this sounds a bit complex, well, it can be. Moreover, these are just a few of the basics to get you started. Understand that real value will come from tracking over time, monitoring the ebb and flow of the various metrics in relation to your activities. Social media marketing can be a huge win or a giant resource black hole. Investing time and resources into social media without some level of measurement is simply irresponsible mismanagement.