Google’s Webmasters Tools
October 28, 2006
Google Webmasters Tools, formerly Google sitemaps, is slowly building up some really useful utilities.
You can now checkout GoogleBot activity stats:
The above stats are from one of my sites and you can see that on average GoogleBot looks at the site 23 times a day. There are also stats that show how many kilobytes are downloaded by GoogleBot and the time spent downloading each page in milliseconds. You can see in the third graph that there is a real blip where the time that GoogleBot spent downloading pages on a certain day went up by about ten fold. This is likely to be a problem with my hosting company. Useful stats!
MSN Forward & Backward Linking
October 21, 2006
MSN has recently enabled the ability to display what forward links a domain has. LinkFromDomain:semconsultancy.com demonstrates the links that this site links to. SEOBOOK points out an advanced linking feature whereby you can see domains pointing at country specific domains. Pretty nifty!!
MarketingFan has an interesting article, detailing 3 great uses for the link operator. This includes bad neighbourhood linkage analysis, authority analysis & reciprocal analysis. All quite handy, although I don’t think people will be using it heavily for reciprocal link building these days!
Website Optimzer
October 18, 2006
Google’s Website Optimizer is a cool landing page testing tool that is rapped into the ever growing Google Adwords. If you are interested in more conversions and have time to tweak headlines, promotional copy and images, then website optimizer could be just the ticket.
It’s a beta release and I have not received an invite to test it, but the outlook looks promising!!
Geo-Location Domain Strategy: One Domain, Two Domain, Three Domain, More?
October 13, 2006
Have you got a killer product or service and are thinking about going global with it? Careful consideration should be spent on choosing the right domain name and whether to go for multiple domains or just one.
Step 1 – Choose the right Domain name
To brand or not to brand – that is that is the question. You could go for a keyword rich domain like www.semconsultancy.com. This kinda has a ‘what it says on the tin’ attitude and it will also help slightly with your search engine rankings, but not significantly to justify it outright.
On the flip side, you could go for more of a brandable name, that is often unrelated to the industry you are in, like Google or Wanadoo. From a user’s perspective, less traditional names, are often easy to remember and are good for creating a buzz factor and viral marketing. Brandable domains generally work well for large companies and if your company is going global, it could be a good port of call.
Perhaps more importantly in your domain strategy should be in the retention of visitors. The cost of acquisition is almost always more for a new customer than for a returning one. Sticking to .com or the tld of your country, if it is widely used and available, is generally the best route to go with. Stuntdbl’s awesome article shares these views and I am also in agreement that it is wise to stay away from .net’s, dashed domains and typo’s if you want to maximise retention of customers and visitors.
Step 2 – Your going Global, one Domain or one for each Country?
The reason for having more than one domain is largely to do with search engines and generating natural search results for each country and also forward planning. Also, customers will scan through listings for relevance and if your website is domain country specific, then this can be perceived as RELEVANT!
Google UK will favour UK based sites by default, even if you don’t use the pages from the UK option. However, the effect if you don’t select pages from the UK in a search is not as noticeable than if you do .
“In short, a search across the entire web at Google UK is not equal to a search across the entire web at Google’s flagship Google.com site and is quite different for a country-specific search.” Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch.
Search engines are straying more and more into showing different results at the various country-specific versions they operate, even if country-specific results were not requested.
The main reason for this is due to Google associating a regional origin for the website. This is mostly due to where the website is hosted e.g. in the UK or USA. Other factors include the country origin of sites that link to you and also slightly to do with the tld of the domain e.g. .co.uk – but the tld has a lesser impact from a search engine perspective (for Google), but may have more of an impact when a user is scanning results to see the ones they perceive to be more relevant (localized).
Step 3 – Decision time and is it Worth it?
Decisions can be difficult at the best of times and this is quite a complicated issue - there isn’t one fit that will suite all. I don’t think there is case to argue in having multiple domains for each specific country in order to maximise natural search results.
As raised in a SeoMoz discussion, perhaps the more appropriate question should be - Is it worth it bearing in mind the costs and resources required for more than one?
From an SEO perspective, then yes it is. From a PPC perspective, no it is not. It really depends on how you plan to market your product and services online. There are heaps of other online marketing avenues you can explore like affiliate marketing, email marketing and viral marketing to name but a few – so it really depends on how much you value your natural search.
Issues
SearchEngineWatch provides an interesting article detailing problems with multiple domains and duplicate content. This can be a real issue and if not properly considered, it can create as many problems as you are adressing.
In the short term, the impact of having only one domain may not be that significant at first. But like any SEM practice, early planning and a clear strategy of where you want to be is essential and there is no a better place to start than with your domain strategy! Do it – Strategise it! - Don’t Duplicate it!
p.s. You may want to check where your website is hosted. Hosting companies are full of surprises!
links:
Should SEOs REdirect or Park for Geolocation?
Compare Google Results for Different Geolocations
Does Change of Domain Name Ownership Hurt Rankings?
Search Engine Rankings & Algorithms
October 9, 2006
Search Ranking Factors
Let’s have a quick look at a report by SeoMoz who have grouped together some of SEO’s finest brains to break down various on-page and off-page ranking factors.
The top ten ranking factors are as follows (rankings out of 5):
- Title Tag - 4.57
- Anchor Text of Links - 4.46
- Keyword Use in Document Text - 4.38
- Accessibility of Document - 4.3
- Links to Document from Site-Internal Pages - 4.15
- Primary Subject Matter of Site - 4.00
- External Links to Linking Pages - 3.92
- Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community - 3.77
- Global Link Popularity of Site - 3.69
- Keyword Spamming - 3.69
A thoroughly informative read and I really like the stats and evaluation. There are no surprises for the top 10 – although I am somewhat surprised that H1 tags were not considered of higher value.
Google’s Ranking Algoritm Explained
Secondly, courtesy of SeoMoz (again…) - Google’s ranking algorithm explained nice and simple in easy to grasp maths!
GoogScore = (KW Usage Score * 0.3) + (Domain Strength * 0.25) + (Inbound Link Score * 0.25) + (User Data * 0.1) + (Content Quality Score * 0.1) + (Manual Boosts) - (Automated & Manual Penalties)
Yes, this is a simple maths formula in comparison to traditional page rank algorithms articles.
Again I really like the stats and its simplicity. It ties in nicely with SeoMoz’s ranking factors and although not an exact science, if you understand all that and have found a place for it to sit in your brain, you won’t go far wrong 
!
October SEM Resource of the Month
October 3, 2006
E-Consultancy – has an annual individual subscription to all their SEM/SEO resources that will cost you £149. Ok, this may not be super cheap – but it really has some awesome reports. Personally I believe the 208 pages in the SEO Best Practice Guide justifies the price alone.
It really goes into great depth, although I wouldn’t advice reading any more than a chapter per sitting as it can get a bit intense. It’s not that complicated to comprehend, but it really will get you mind buzzing with ideas and how you can relate them in the promotion of your products or services.
There are loads of other best practice guides, buyer’s guides and various template files to keep you occupied too. I am really looking forward the Paid Search best practice guide which is due out soon. In fact, when I spoke to Chris, one of the editors from E-Consultancy at the ad-tech exhibition last month, he said it should be ready by the end of the month – fingers crossed, I can’t wait to get my geeky fingers on it!
Key topics to improve your results from SEO
- Techniques for advanced keyphrase analysis
- Developing an integrated search engine marketing strategy across paid and natural search
- Improve your page inclusion and reporting using Google Sitemaps
- Detailed coverage of on-page optimization factors including document meta data, copywriting and code structure explaining the factors which really matter.
- How to increase your click-through rate in the search engine results page
- 10 complementary SEO strategies for refining site architecture
- How to plan and execute a link-building campaign
- 10 key factors to improve landing page effectiveness
