Posted by Sam Niccolls The analytics ninja is not dead, but with Avinash talking more about SEO analytics and SEOs like Rand talking more about web analytics, 2010 has brought with it increased cross-pollination between analytics experts and SEOs. This blog post is for the analytics driven, SEO savvy, search samurai looking to implement tracking code best practices and take advantage of some useful Google Analytics plugins. The focus of this post is on Google Analytics, but many of the concepts are also applicable more generally, no matter what web analytics platform you're using. Tracking Code Basics Asynchronous Tracking Code - Even before the asynchronous tracking code was rolled out, I was a believer in putting the GA tracking code in the header, rather than before the closing body tag, which is where Google recommends placing the tracking code. With the announcement of asynchronous tracking code, which loads in conjunction with the page as opposed to sequentially, however, you can now have your cake and eat it too. You can get the benefit of your data not being compromised by slow page load times and also keep from getting push back from the developer that implements your tracking codes. <script type="text/javascript"> var _gaq = _gaq || ); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; ga.setAttribute('async', 'true'); document.documentElement.firstChild.appendChild(ga); })();</script> Expanding Goal Limitations - Without setting up goals, your GA account is a glorified hit counter. So it's imperative that you set up goal or eCommerce tracking (if not both). When setting up your GA goals in your analytics settings, you can either use the expanded goals, which allow you to track up to 20 different URLs or engagement metrics per profile. It's important to realize, however, that you can also set your goals up so you can track hundreds or even thousands of goals. All you have to do is set up a logical hierarchy where the root of your goal URLs trigger your goal events. For us at SEOmoz, this might mean we have a tool run goal event triggered with /goal/tool-run - yet we also have the added granularity down to the individual tool level should we ever want to see which tools are being run the most or to segment traffic based on visitors who ran a particular tool. eCommerce Tracking - Justin Cutroni did a great job with his series of blog posts that walk through how eCommerce tracking works, installing & setting up eCommerce tracking, explaining why everyone should use eCommerce tracking, & tracking lead gen forms. In addition to eCommerce tracking, not to be forgotten is using SetVar or a custom variable to segment repeat or premium buyers. For example, say your site gets 5 sales from keyword #1 and 5 sales from keyword #2. If sales for keyword #1 are each $800 and sales from keyword #2 are $10 each, you're going to want to segment that traffic and make on-page optimizations by looking at the on-site behavior of your premium buyers who converted on keyword #1, rather than from keyword #2.   Custom Variables for Registered & Non-Registered - One of the most powerful aspects of GA is the ability to set custom variable. Custom variables can be set at any of three levels (visitor, session, & page). The Google Analytics help documentation is particularly great, but EpikOne also has a worthwhile description on how custom variables work. The most powerful of these is the visitor level custom variable which allows you to cookie a visitor across multiple sessions. At SEOmoz, we use this to track three different member types: free members, PRO members, & canceled members. We also use custom variables to cookie at the session level.   Campaign Tagging & SetAllowAnchor - From widgets to newsletters to signature links in personal e-mails, campaign links should be tagged using the GA URL builder, which gives you tracking parameters that includes multiple, including required _utm values for source, medium, & campaign. In action this looks something like this: http://www.seomoz.org/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=march-6-2010 When tagging your campaigns be aware that by default GA will only recognize tracking parameters if the string is kicked off by a question mark, which from an SEO standpoint can lead to diffusion of link juice and duplicate content issues. To avoid these issues, we you can kick off campaign parameters with the hash tag and modify your GA tracking code using the SetAllowAnchor attribute, so GA recognizes the hash tag as way to kick off a campaign tracking URLs. To do this, add -- pageTracker._setAllowAnchor(true); -- to your main GA tracking code between the var pageTracker and pageTracker attributes. Or, for additional documentation, read LunaMetrics' blog post on using SetAllowAnchor, but the code should look something like this: <script type="text/javascript">   try {     var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-0000000-1");     pageTracker._setAllowAnchor(true);     pageTracker._trackPageview();   } catch(err) {} Tagging Email - One of the most important areas you can apply campaign tagging is e-mail. And though you can get fancy and create a filter that combines email sources you should not have to do this because your campaigns should be tagged to begin with. So definitely follow what the experts say about tagging email campaigns, but I am a huge fan of bucketing your reports by segment and grouping based on conversion goal. For example, at SEOmoz we're rolling out a number of e-mails ranging from a customer lifecycle welcome series to newsletters to follow up emails after PRO members cancel. Rather than doing one off tracking, our GA tracking is set up in a way that we can aggregate by visitor type. This allows management to quickly look at the all up numbers and see how e-mail is driving each goal area of the business: activation, retention, and re-activation. And if you use a logical naming convention with your email tagging, such as the one shown below, your marketing team will be able to splice and dice using regular expressions to get a much more granular view of performance for each email format, type, or version:

• Email Format:  Which types of emails are doing best (i.e. newsletters, promotional emails, system notifications, etc.)
• Performance by Email Type: Shows the breakdown of which email types have the greatest volume and/or the lowest click through rates. And thus, where you should place your testing and optimization energy. (i.e. emails sent 1 week after sign up, promos sent in December, etc.)
• Version Number: Allows you to test subject lines and e-mail variants to see which versions are driving the most conversions, engagement, or retention. (i.e. subject line #1, subject line #2, etc.)

Vanity URLs - If you're running an offline campaign, such as a magazine ad, a business card run or a billboard creative, you're not going to want to use the long URL builder parameter. As WebShare's Corey Koberg shows in the below graphic, long URL parameters don't work for offline. So you'll likely be much better off measuring offline efforts with a short, easy to remember vanity URL, which, in order to keep your metrics from being skewed as a result of page load times, you'll want to implement using a 301 redirect, rather than using meta refresh. Google Analytics Plugins Though not on the list of must haves for the search samurai, I'm a sucker for a great browser plugin. And as ROI Revolution blogged about, there are a handful of browser plugins for GA that you might find are worth installing. Three plugins I use with varying degrees of regularity are: Does a Page Have GA? If you're checking a lot of pages on your site to see if they have tracking code installed or if you want quick, at a glance reference as to whether or not a page on another site has GA tracking code, Twistermc's GA? Firefox plugin is a great way to see if GA is installed without having to view the source code. The way it works it works is simple. If a page has GA installed, the bar chart that appears in the lower right hand corner of your browser is illuminated. If the page does not have GA installed, the bar chart is not illuminated. Which Referring Sites & Keywords Have Changed? Similar in concept to a custom alerts, the Better GA plugin by Juice Analytics provides a useful way to drill into your referring sites or referring keyword reports and see which sites or keywords have fluctuated the most over the last few days or week. Better Google Analytics: Perhaps the most robust GA plugin of all is VKIs studios' greasemonkey script based plugin, which offers a number of bells an whistles, including page level social media data from sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Delicious (see below),as well as added functionality such as a direct entry field to access your top content report from any other report, direct links to export to Google Docs, and a half dozen or so others.   For more comprehensive information on Google Analytics, I encourage you to read through Google Analytics' help documentation or tapping into some of the great web analytics resources available such as Google Analytics' Official Blog, Webshare's Blog (their Google Analytics 101 posts are particularly good,) LunaMetrics, EpikOne, & Avinash's Occam's Razor - each of which are full of Analytics tips from top-notch experts. Also, special thanks to David Booth at WebShare for his help with SEOmoz's implementation of Google Analytics and also for sharing several of the insights included in this post. For more info on GA and GWO, WebShare's Google sponsored Seminars for Success, which I attended last year, and which the SEOmoz marketing team will be attending here in Seattle on May 12-14th, are among the most educational and best valued around.Do you like this post? Yes No Continue Reading »

Posted by Sam NiccollsThe New York Times, CNN, and Yahoo News each get more traffic than Google News, but in a given month Google News sends almost a billion clicks to publishers worldwide, which makes it an incredibly compelling syndication platform for sites with newsworthy content. But how do you get articles indexed and ranking in Google News? And how can you get your article snippets to appear in the SERPs for Google web search? In an attempt to answer some of the basic questions around getting started, this post builds off the information provided in the Google News publisher help center and in Maile Ohye's awesome video on Google News to provide publishers with a basic primer of factors to consider before submitting to Google News.   Google News SERPs One of the best parts of Google News is that news snippets are not just included among the news results on Google News. They also often appear amidst the organic search results for Google web search in the form of a Google News one box. Getting Articles Discovered Indexation: Google News' bot discovers content in one of two ways: through a discovery crawl where it sees new URLs and crawls them, or through a news sitemap. Discovery crawls are often broad and deep, but just as XML sitemaps are a great way to help Googlebot discover new website content, news sitemaps are a great way to ensure content gets crawled and to push meta information. To create a news Sitemap read the Google News' sitemap documentation. Or, if you run WordPress, you can run the Google News Sitemap Generator plugin. It's also important to note that as Vanessa Fox wrote about on Search Engine Land, Google News recently changed their news sitemap protocol. Re-Crawl: Typically the initial discovery process is fast and it takes just a few minutes for your content to be crawled. But it's important to note that if you make changes to your article, Google News will come back. Generally Googlebot-News re-crawls for new content within about 12 hours. Exclusion: For content you do not want indexed by Google News, you can employ the robots exclusion protocol, you can create either a robots.txt file or you can use META tags to identify the documents you want excluded from search results. As Google News' robots tips explains, either method is effective (however, at SEOmoz, we recommend against blocking with robots.txt whenever possible).   Categorizing Articles For any given article Google News tries to classify both topic and location in order to populate the most appropriate sections of the editions in the most appropriate country. This is done through recognition of words and word combinations. For example, if an article contained words such as "democratic," "political party," "congressman," and "voter" it would indicate that the article should be categorized under politics. Similarly, if the same article contained "Chicago," "Illinois," and "United States," this combination of words would indicate the article has greatest relevance in the US, and specifically in Chicago.   Keyword stuffing is definitely something you want to avoid. Two additional recommendations to help categorize your articles are - #1 put your articles into relevant categories or sub-folders on your own site and - #2 open the article with an explicit "city, state", the way the above article does. Each are great ways to help categorize without compromising user experience. You can also use the keywords field of your news sitemap. Ranking Factors Google News ranks stories in two distinct ways. An oversimplification of this process is that a story rank is first applied which identifies the story topics that are most talked about across the web. Then, once the most popular story topics are identified, each cluster is displayed in descending order based on relevance and interest in the topic. After cluster positions are set, Google News then tries to figure out which articles on each story topic should be included within each cluster. Story Ranking Determines which stories rank atop news results based on editorial interest and the amount of coverage the story is getting. Does the article have local interest that appeals only to a niche audience? Or is it a massively popular story with global interest, such as the death of Michael Jackson? Based on the amount of editorial interest, the top story topic will either appear at the top or bottom of the cluster. Article Ranking Once Google News has identified the top story clusters, they try to sift through the hundreds or thousands of stories on the topic and surface the most important articles to lead the cluster. Then, they prioritize the additional article links to display within the cluster. Some of the key factors that are looked at when ranking articles include:

• Freshness: Recent, important, and objective articles are what Google News is looking for. So no matter how great your comic strip, op-ed or press release is, it's not going to be lead a Google News cluster. 

• Citation Rank: For any given story topic, Google News will look at who is citing whom as the original source. For example, if the Seattle Times breaks a story about SEOmoz focusing on building awesome SEO software, then 10 other blogs reference that article, it's a good indicator that the Seattle Times' article is the original, most authoritative source on the topic.

• Local Relevance: For geo-targeted stories, greater authority is given to hyper-local publishers. So if there was an important local event such as a shooting in Spokane, Washington, a smaller publication with local trust like the Spokesman-Review might have greater relevance than a bigger publication in a different location.

• Trustworthiness: Click through data over time is something Google News uses as an indicator of trust. This is done less on an individual article basis or on a total click number basis (which would be fairly easy to game), but more on a by category and by country basis. In other words, if the same personal finance blog repeatedly got high click through rates within the business category or in France, it will develop high trust as being a high quality resource for the business category in that particular country.

Optimizing Multi-Media To maximize traffic from the SERPs in both news and web search, articles need to include images that adhere to Google News' desired specifications. Additionally, though less imperative, using video can also provide high click through rates and significant traffic. Images: Articles with images to do better than articles without images. To optimize your article's images you should:

• Save images as JPEGs - PNG, GIF, and other formats are less optimal.
• Use large images with good aspect ratio.
• Give images descriptive captions and keyword targeted alt text.
• Place good images at the top near the title to help associate the image with the subject matter.
• Put image inline and make it non-clickable.

Video: YouTube is a trusted video hosting platform for Google News. So for best results, setting up a YouTube channel and submitting it to Google News is likely going to be more effective than using other platforms. One thing to be aware of with video is that video can be hard to categorize. So to ensure correct categorization, textual descriptions and transcripts are each great ways to associate videos with subject matter. Additional Recommendations

• URLs: Create permanent unique URLs with at least 3 digits. Reason being, publishers have historically used article ID=number in their URL strings and this helps show it's an article and not just a static HTML page. Of course, we'd recommend against dynamic parameters in your URLs (you could rewrite these as static URLs like newssite.com/story/345). If your news publishing system does not have at least 3 digits, you can submit a news sitemap and identify which URLs you want included as news. In general though, you don't want your URLs to be too long, too short or non-permanent.

• Article Titles: There are a handful of best practices for news article titles, but titles are incredibly important, especially as a way to ensure good categorization. Ideal titles are ones that are keyword rich, indicative of story topics, yet still catchy and compelling to click on.

• Between Title & Body: Putting publication date between the title and body helps the date extractor identify the correct publication date and include it in the snippet. Similarly, you want to make sure there's no extra text between the article's title and body in your article's source. Doing so will make it difficult for Googlebot-News to extract the appropriate snippet to display in the SERPs.

• Article Body: There are a number of article text considerations, but among the most important is that you don't want to break up your article body. You want sequential paragraphs. This means you should not have elements such as user comments, advertisements, or links to related posts breaking up your content.  

• Inbound Links: Inbound links matter a great deal for web search, but news is fundamentally different in this respect. As Google News' Josh Cohen said in his interview with Eric Enge, "to be able to build up links over time is just something that isn’t really all that applicable on the news side of things."

Google News is not a platform for every website or blog, but you also don't have to be a mega-publisher churning out 10 articles a week to be Google News-worthy. It will help for rankings if you are, but it is not necessary for indexation. So your website or blog is probably more newsworthy than you think. For example, in the tech category you will find the big sites you might expect like TechCrunch, Huffington Post or ZDNet, but amidst the articles from these mega-publishers, you will also find articles from lesser known sites such as gadgetsteria or ithinkdiff, both of which are included in the news results even though you might not think of either as the "most newsworthy" technology sources. So if your blog is a good fit with one of Google News' categories, odds are submitting to Google News or submitting to Yahoo News would each be effective methods of distributing content and increasing traffic.Do you like this post? Yes No Continue Reading »

Posted by Sam Niccolls "Don't do viral marketing until your product doesn't suck. If you do, more people will find out your product sucks." This pearl of wisdom from serial entrepreneur Dave McClure applies well not only to product development, but also to conversion rate optimization. The extension would be "don't focus on getting more visitors until your site converts the visitors it already gets." This is a sentiment we've taken to heart here at SEOmoz. So in this post we will share how we grew traffic and conversions in 2009, as well as some of the valuable lessons we've learned in the process, which we're excited to execute on in 2010. Traffic Statistics from 2009 In the past, SEOmoz has shared data about the traffic we receive (see past years - 2006, 2007). In 2008, we somehow skipped out, but this year, we're bringing sexy back. Yes, it's probably helpful to our competitors, but it's also hugely valuable to our members (we hope) and part of our core value of transparency. So in the same vein of Rand's blog posts about the venture funding process, we're opening the kimono and sharing some analysis in hopes that others can benefit from our traffic and conversion rate learnings.  We'll start with an overview of visitor and broad traffic data:  The early part of the year featured a big growth, as the overall popularity of the site spiked, new traffic sources (like Twitter) started bringing in visitors and we had some big successes with email marketing. The latter part of the year saw relatively steady numbers, with a small, predictable fall in December for the holidays. Return visits show a fairly similar trend, with a slight drop in Q4 (though, as you'll see below, it was a massive growth from 2008). We've come a long way in 2009 - growing traffic to the site as a whole and to the blog. Revenue was also up over 250%, so it's not just additional visits or visitors - conversions have also been improving. All this raw data is interesting, but it's even more valuable to dig in deep and identify the opportunities for improvement. 11 Conversion Rate Optimization Lessons We Learned in 2009 If marketers are captains of leaking ships, finding ways to remove more water faster might work, but plugging the holes and improving conversion rates is much more efficient. At SEOmoz we're proud of the ship we're sailing, but there's also a laundry list of ways we can improve. So based on some of the things we learned in 2009, here are some of the holes we will look to plug to keep the Moz ship rising in 2010.   A note on #10 - there are several ways to implement form field tracking, including onclick events or using the track event in Google Analytics. Additionally, Clicktale, though not part of Google Analytics, is a really useful tool for tracking abandonment. For more information on the subject, Distilled's Duncan Morris has a detailed follow up post on using jquery and GA to track form abandonment. The takeaways from these slides shouldn't be - do exactly what we're doing on your pages - but rather, find a process at your company to identify where your traffic is going, where you are losing customers, and make small conversion rate improvements because, depending on how you monetize your site, making incremental conversion rate improvements could be the most efficient way to hit your revenue goals this year. For us at SEOmoz, 2009 was an outstanding traffic year. We're certainly proud of the fact that over 100,000 more visitors will visit the site this January than last January, but we are also well aware of the fact that more traffic does not equate to more revenue. So for this reason, we will continue to place our efforts on better converting the visitors we already have and better retaining our existing PRO members. In closing, please note that this post is not meant to bash SEO, PPC, social media marketing, or any other traffic building tactics. Getting traffic to websites is what we do. It's at the core of what we do at SEOmoz! Our goal is simply to be transparent about how we're working to improve our business. Admittedly, however, when Rand says conversion rate optimization will be a major trend in 2010, it's possible he's projecting just a little. :-)Do you like this post? Yes No Continue Reading »