Alexa , a free and well-known website information tool, recently released a paid service. For $199 per site Alexa will audit your site (up to 10,000 pages) and return a variety of different on-page reports relating to your SEO efforts. It has a few off-page data points but it focuses mostly on your on-page optimization. You can access Alexa’s Site Audit Report here: http://www.alexa.com/siteaudit Report Sections Alexa’s Site Audit Report breaks the information down into 6 different sections (some which have additional sub-sections as well) Overview Crawl Coverage Reputation Page Optimization Keywords Stats The sections break down as follows: So we ran Seobook.com through the tool to test it out Generally these reports take about a day or two, ours had some type of processing error so it took about a week. Overview The first section you’ll see is the number of pages crawled, followed by 3 “critical” aspects of the site (Crawl Coverage, Reputation, and Page Optimization). All three have their own report sections as well. Looks like we got an 88. Excuse me, but shouldn’t that be a B+? So it looks like we did just fine on Crawl Coverage and Reputation, but have some work to do with Page Optimization. The next section on the overview page is 5 recommendations on how to improve your site, with links to those specific report sections as well. At the bottom you can scroll to the next page or use the side navigation. We’ll investigate these report sections individually but I think the overview page is helpful in getting a high-level overview of what’s going on with the site. Crawl Coverage This measures the “crawl-ability” of the site, internal links, your robots.txt file, as well as any redirects or server errors. Reachability The Reachability report shows you a break down of what HTML pages were easy to reach versus which ones were not so easy to each. Essentially for our site, the break down is: Easy to find - 4 or less links a crawler must follow to get to a page Hard to find - more than 4 links a crawler must follow to get to a page The calculation is based on the following method used by Alexa in determining the path length specific to your site: Our calculation of the optimal path length is based on the total number of pages on your site and a consideration of the number of clicks required to reach each page. Because optimally available sites tend to have a fan-out factor of at least ten unique links per page, our calculation is based on that model. When your site falls short of that minimum fan-out factor, crawlers will be less likely to index all of the pages on your site. A neat feature in this report is the ability to download your URL’s + the number of links the crawler had to follow to find the page in a .CSV format. This is a useful feature for mid-large scale sites. You can get a decent handle on some internal linking issues you may have which could be affecting how relevant a search engine feels a particular page might be. Also, this report can spot some weaknesses in your site’s linking architecture from a usability standpoint. On-Site Links While getting external links from unique domains is typically a stronger component to ranking a site it is important to have a strong internal linking plan as well. Internal links are important in a few ways: The only links where you can 100% control the anchor text (outside of your own sites of course, or sites owned by your friends) They can help you flow link equity to pages on your site that need an extra bit of juice to rank Users will appreciate a logical, clear internal navigation structure and you can use internal linking to get them to where you want them to go Alexa will show you your top linked to (from internal links) pages: You can also click the link to the right to expand and see the top ten pages that link to that page: So if you are having problems trying to rank some sub-pages for core keywords or long-tail keywords, you can check the internal link counts (and see the top 10 linked from pages) and see if something is amiss with respect to your internal linking structure for a particular page. Robots.txt Here you’ll see if you’ve restricted access to these search engine crawlers: ia_archiver (Alexa) googlebot (Google) teoma (Ask) msnbot (Bing slurp (Yahoo) baiduspider (Baidu) If you block out registration areas or other areas that are normally restricted, then the report will say that you are not blocking major crawlers but will show you the URL’s you are blocking under that part of the report. There is not much that is groundbreaking with Robots.Txt checks but it’s another part of a site that you should check when doing an SEO review so it is a helpful piece of information. Redirects We all know what happens when redirects go bad on a mid-large sized site This report will show you what percentage of your crawled pages are being redirected to other pages with temporary redirects. The thing with temporary redirects, like 302’s, is that unlike 301’s they do not pass any link juice so you should pay attention to this part of the report and see if any key pages are being redirected improperly. Server Errors This section of the report will show you any pages which have server errors. Making sure your server is handling errors correctly (such as a 404) is certainly worthy of your attention. Reputation The only part of this module is external links from authoritative sites and where your site ranks in conjunction with “similar sites” with respect to the number of sites linking to your sites and similar sites. Links from Top Sites The analysis is given based on the aforementioned forumla: Then you are shown a chart which correlates to your site and related sites (according to Alexa) plus the total links pointing at each site which places the sites in a specific percentile based on links and Alexa Rank. Since Alexa is heavily biased towards webmaster type sites based on their user base, these Alexa Rank’s are probably higher than they should be but it’s all relative since all sites are being judged on this measure. The Related Sites area is located below the chart: Followed by the Top Ranked sites linking to your site: I do not find this incredibly useful as a standalone measure of reputation. As mentioned, Alexa Rank can be off and I’d rather know where competing sites (and my site or sites) are ranking in terms of co-occurring keywords, unique domains linking, strength of the overall link profile, and so on as a measure of true relevance. It is, however, another data point you can use in conjunction with other tools and methods to get a broader idea of your site and related sites compare. Page Optimization Checking the on-page aspects of a mid-large sized site can be pretty time consuming. Our Website Health Check Tool covers some of the major components (like duplicate/missing title tags, duplicate/missing meta descriptions, canonical issues, error handling responses, and multiple index page issues) but this module does some other things too. Link Text The Link Text report shows a break down of your internal anchor text: Click on the pages link and see the top pages using that anchor text to link to a page (shows the page the text is on as well as the page it links too): The report is based on the pages it crawled so if you have a very large site or lots and lots of blog posts you might find this report lacking a bit in terms of breadth of coverage on your internal anchor text counts. Broken Links Checks broken links (internal and external) and groups them by page, which is an expandable option similar to the other reports: Xenu is more comprehensive as a standalone tool for this kind of report (and for some of their other link reports as well). Duplicate Content The Duplicate Content report groups all the pages that have the same content together and gives you some recommendations on things you can do to help with duplicate content like: Working with robots.txt How to use canonical tags Using HTTP headers to thwart duplicate content issues Here is how they group items together: Anything that can give you some decent insight into potential duplicate content issues (especially if you use a CMS) is a useful tool. Duplicate Meta Descriptions No duplicate meta descriptions here! Fairly self-explanatory and while a meta description isn’t incredibly powerful as standalone metric it does pay to make sure you have unique ones for your pages as every little bit helps! Duplicate Title Tags You’ll want to make sure you are using your title tags properly and not attacking the same keyword or keywords in multiple title tags on separate pages. Much like the other reports here, Alexa will group the duplicates together: They do not currently offer a missing title tag or missing meta description report which is unfortunate because those are worthwhile metrics to report on. Low Word Count Having a good amount of text on a page is good way to work in your core keywords as well as to help in ranking for longer tail keywords (which tend to drive lots of traffic to most sites). This report kicks out pages which have (in looking at the stats) less than 150 words or so on the page: There’s no real magic bullet for the amount of words you “should” have on a page. You want to have the right balance of word counts, images, and overall presentation components to make your site: Linkable Textually relevant for your core and related keywords Readable for humans Image Descriptions Continuing on with the “every little bit helps” mantra, you can see pages that have images with missing ALT attributes: Alexa groups the images on per page, so just click the link to the right to expand the list: Like meta descriptions, this is not a mega-important item as a standalone metric but it helps a bit and helps with image search. Session IDs This report will show you any issues your site is having due to the use of session id’s. If you have issues with session id’s and/or other URL parameters here you should take a look at using canonical tags or Google’s parameter handling (mostly to increase the efficiency of your site’s crawl by Googlebot, as Google will typically skip the crawling of pages based on your parameter list) Heading Recommendations Usually I cringe when I see automated SEO solutions. The headings section contains “recommended” headings for your pages. You can download the entire list in CSV format: The second one listed, “interface seo”, is on a page which talks about Google adding breadcrumbs to the search results. I do not think that is a good heading tag for this blog post. I suspect most of the automated tags are going to be average to less than average. Keywords Alexa’s Keyword module offers recommended keywords to pursue as well as on site recommendations in the following sub-categories: Search Engine Marketing (keywords) Link Recommendations (on-site link recommendations Search Engine Marketing Based on your site’s content Alexa offers up some keyword recommendations: The metrics are defined as: Query - the proposed keyword Opportunity - (scales up to 1.0) based on expected search traffic to your site from keywords which have a low CPC. A higher value here typically means a higher query popularity and a low QCI. Essentially, the higher the number the better the relationship is between search volume, low CPC, and low ad competition. Query Popularity (scales up to 100) based on the frequency of searches for that keyword QCI - (scales up to 100) based on how many ads are showing across major search engines for the keyword For me, it’s another keyword source. The custom metrics are ok to look at but what disappoints me about this report is that they do not align the keywords to relevant pages. It would be nice to see “XYZ keywords might be good plays for page ABC based on ABC’s content”. Link Recommendations This is kind of an interesting report. You’ve got 3 sets of data here. The first is the “source page” and this is a listing of pages that, according to Alexa’s crawl, are pages that appear to be important to search engines as well as pages that are easily crawled by crawlers: These are pages Alexa feels should be pages you link from. The next 2 data sets are in the same table. They are “target pages” and keywords: Some of the pages are similar but the attempt is to match up pages and predict the anchor text that should be used from the source page to the target page. It’s a good idea but there’s a bit of page overlap which detracts from the overall usefulness of the report IMO. Stats The Stats section offers 3 different reports: Report Stats - an overview of crawled pages Crawler Errors - errors Alexa encountered in crawling your site Unique Hosts Crawled - number of unique hosts (your domain and internal/external domains and sub-domains) Alexa encountered in crawling your site Report Stats An overview of crawl statistics: Crawler Errors This is where Alexa would show what errors, if any, they encountered when crawling the site Unique Hosts Crawled A report showing which sites you are linking to (as well as your own domain/subdomains) Is it Worth $199? Some of the report functionality is handled by free (in some cases) tools that are available to you. Xenu does a lot of what Alexa’s link modules do and if you are a member here the Website Health Check Tool does some of the on-page stuff as well. I would also like to see more export functionality especially in lieu of white label reporting. The crawling features are kind of interesting and the price point is fairly affordable as one time fee. The Alexa Site Audit Report does offer some benefit IMO and the price point isn’t overly cost-prohibitive but I wasn’t really wowed by the report. If you are ok with spending $199 to get a broad overview of things then I think it’s an ok investment. For larger sites sometimes finding (and fixing) only 1 or 2 major issues can be worth thousands in additional traffic. It left me wanting a bit more though, so I might prefer to spend that $199 on links since most of the tool’s functionality is available to me without dropping down the fee. Further, the new SEOmoz app also covers a lot of these features & is available at a monthly $99 price-point, while allowing you to run reports on up to 5 sites at a time. The other big thing for improving the value of the Alexa application would be if they allowed you to run a before and after report as part of their package. That way in-house SEOs can not only show their boss what was wrong, but can also use that same 3rd party tool as verification that it has been fixed.

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Alexa Site Audit Review

by Stoney deGeyter Note: Recently I’ve gotten some ribbing from friends and colleagues about my exceedingly numerous multi-part posts. In order to wean myself off my favorite form of not-having-to-think-about-what-I’m-going-to-write-about-next, I’ve combined all 12 parts of this series into a single post. Enjoy! Part 1: Guilty of Crimes No One Committed A lot of people subscribe to the “Guilt by Association” theory in online marketing. This theory suggests that you are who you associate with. I agree there is some definite truth to this mindset, but, like a lot of things, it can also be taken to a paranoid extreme. This fear leads some people into a paralysis that ultimately hinders their online marketing efforts rather than helping them. “Guilt by Association” extremists work hard to keep themselves squeaky clean. They tread extra carefully with who they associate with in an effort to ensure that they are never found guilty of crimes they haven’t committed. In order to stay “pure”, they avoid having online relationships with some who they believe may have broken some rule at some point that, likely, nobody even cares about. Part 2: Google’s Guidelines Don’t Rule the Web With Google controlling so much market share, many business owners and online marketers are scared of doing anything that might seemingly violate Google’s Guidelines. We know Google looks at both positive and negative attributes, including your associations, when developing your overall trust profile. But we often do ourselves a disservice when we let Google’s Guidelines dictate everything we do on the web - even in areas that don’t have any specific connection to Google. There is nothing wrong with keeping a clean profile and ensuring you don’t do anything that violates the search engine guidelines. There is also nothing wrong with making sure you associate your online profile with people you know will help you and not hurt you. But there comes a point where it borders on paranoia, at best, and counter-productive, at worst. Part 3: You Have No Control Over Who Associates with You One of the problems with worrying too much over your online profile is that you have little to no control over who associates themselves with you. Anybody can link to you, anybody can scrape your content, anybody can share your post with their friends, and anybody can retweet you. If you’re unhappy about who’s doing any of these things, your sole recourse is to contact them, ask them to stop, and then cross your fingers. Google (and the other search engines) know this. They knew it back when they made links a part of their algorithms. They knew it when people started scraping and duplicating your content. And they know it now in an age of RTs, Likes, Mixxes, Stumbles, and whatever else we do with content we like. Google will not hold you responsible if someone promotes you and then goes off and violates Google’s Guidelines. Part 4: You are Responsible for Who You Associate With If there is one constant in the world of online promotion, social media profiles, and search engine rankings, it is that you do have some responsibility for who you choose to associate with. In the real world, it is often said that you can tell a lot about a person by the friends they have. If you’re associating with thieves, liars, spammers, and cheats, you don’t have to be a thief, liar, spammer, or a cheat to get the reputation of one (or as an enabler of one). Either way, your associations affect you. Part 5: You Are Not Responsible for the Entire History of Who You Associate With There is some truth, both in real life and on the web, that you can learn a lot about a person by who they associate with. But it is also true that you cannot not be held accountable for the actions of every person you’ve shaken hands with. In the social sphere of the web, retweeting or liking someone’s single message is not an endorsement of every tweet, post, thought, or blog they ever published. Even the worst offenders do something right! Making note of the positive doesn’t suddenly hang all their negative around your neck as if you’ve endorsed it all. Parts 6-10: yada yada yada Part 11: Everyone’s Got Some (Negative) History No matter how squeaky clean you want to keep your social media profile, the only way to stay squeaky clean is to not associate yourself with anyone . The only person who does not have something negative in their profile is likely the person who has no profile whatsoever. Or you can check the complete historical profile of every person before you RT, Stumble, Like, or whatever. Of course, even with those who pass the test, what guarantees do you have that they won’t do something shady in the future? Not only do you have to check the historical profile before you connect with them, you have to keep checking back to make sure you still want to be connected with them. Part 12: We Are All Violators Sooner or later, whether you like it or not, you’re going to violate some guidelines somewhere, including Google’s. It’s inevitable. Which is why we can’t live and breathe by every guideline that Google puts out. Keep in mind, those who try hard to stay violation-free are often those that violate guidelines the most. They just hide it better. And the search engines likely know this too. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Guilt by Association: Do You Really Know Who You Are Linking To, Parts 1-12

by Stoney deGeyter No matter where you go in life, you’re sure to find people who seem to make it their life’s joy to make you angry. They probably don’t even realize what they are doing… it just comes naturally. Two conflicting personalities at work. I find it fun to think of people who you can’t stand the most, then think of their spouses, friends, or children who love and support them, and probably don’t have the faintest clue that you think they are an ass. I remember the first time I met my ex-wife, she found me rude and annoying. I was teaching a card game to a group of kids after church and she came up to talk to one of the girls, the daughter of her best friend. Here I was trying to herd cats, so to speak, and I finally got everybody to listen to the rules when she interrupts not once, but twice . So I stopped talking and (politely) waited for her to finish her conversation before resuming my discourse of the rules of “idiot”. According to her, however, I was the idiot. She interpreted my silence as a glare that said “how dare you interrupt me!” She stayed well clear of me for some time after that. But, it wasn’t long until she was around me enough to see the charm and wit hidden underneath the “rude” behavior demeanor I portrayed. For a while at least. There is no doubt that I could have reacted differently during that interaction. The same is likely true of most people that we find irritating. Most of the time it’s minor personality flaws that just don’t allow us to see eye to eye. Life dishes these people out to us through business, related friendships, social events, on the beach, and even church. In your personal life you have some control over who you interact with. Not so much in business. In his book High Maintenance Relationships , Les Parrot discusses several types of people that have personalities that tend to get under our skin: Critics who constantly complain or give unwanted advice. Martyrs who are forever the victim and wracked with self-pity. Wet blankets who are pessimistic and habitually negative. Steamrollers who are blindly insensitive to others. Gossips who spread rumors and leak secrets. Control freaks who are unable to let go and let things be. Back-stabbers who are two-faced. Green-eyed monsters who seethe with envy. Volcanoes who build steam and are always ready to erupt. Sponges who are always needy and never give anything back. Competitors who always keep track of tit-for-tat. Many books have been written about how to deal with or prevent hostile work environments. The book, The No Asshole Rule talks about having a completely asshole-free work environment. It talks about how to deal with these people, and the solution generally comes down to firing them. But what this and other books often overlook is how not to be one of these 11 types of people. We can learn how to be better managers, better communicators, better leaders, better workers and whatever else. We can read books on how to create a more productive work environment, how to reward your employees or make your co-workers feel special. But often the best advice for any manager boils down to one thing: Don’t be that guy! I can see myself in any number of these personality types, and I’m sure many of my friends and colleagues do to. So, what can I do? Recognize which tendencies I have, and make a deliberate effort to act contrary to my nature. This is crucial for anyone looking to get ahead in business, whether you’re an employee, manager, or business owner. Continuing with any of these 11 personality traits simply makes people not want to work with or for you. The more you temper your personality to be the type of person that people want to be around, the better success you’ll have in your relationships and life and business in general. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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11 People that Will Piss You Off

In information retrieval some words are powerful / potent. They are really descriptive and get right to the point of what someone is looking for. Other words have little to no value. The reason the concept of stop words came about is that you really couldn’t tell much about a document by it including words like a, an, the, and, are, etc. The flip side of stop words are words which have a high discrimination value. Recently I was searching to see if there was a FedEx office in the town where my mom lives, and in spite of there not being one, Google still returned multiple pages (the home page and the store locator page) from the FedEx.com website in the search results. That was a great search result, and Google was smart to place more weight on the core concept word in the search (FedEx) while placing less weight on the location. Words which have a low discrimination value may have a higher discrimination value when combined with neighboring words. Hot and dog might have a different meaning when they are next to each other. As explained in this Wired article : Take, for instance, the way Google’s engine learns which words are synonyms. “We discovered a nifty thing very early on,” Singhal says. “People change words in their queries. So someone would say, ‘pictures of dogs,’ and then they’d say, ‘pictures of puppies.’ So that told us that maybe ‘dogs’ and ‘puppies’ were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it’s hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance.” But there were obstacles. Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological.” The concept of discrimination value also has value outside of search. If you get feedback from an anonymous person on a third party site it gets so much weight (maybe none). If you get feedback from someone who is not anonymous it gets more weight. If you get feedback from a paying customer it gets much more weight. One of the most powerful levels of discrimination is indeed payment. If a person pays you the (typically) you know who they are & they have expressed significant interest beyond what most people will do. I think online business models which require payment from the typical user are not hyped and are not considered sexy because those sorts of models are often slow growth due to the penny gap and the requirement of greater trust to convert. Whereas a programming marketer can hear of a new network (say Pippers) and create 40,000 bogus accounts in an hour. The owners of Pippers can then talk about their explosive growth rate in the media, which earns them media coverage. In turn this increases their ability to raise capital and continue their “growth.” But many of the social networks end up being a bag of smoke that will fade because they aim to bucket people as beings in a database and are so broad as to have little discrimination value. I have been reading You Are Not a Gadget and he compared the depersonalization on the broad social networks to the beauty of an oud forum he is a member of. Much like charging for admission, obscurity is a filter which improves the level of discourse. Compare the comments on *any* niche topic site to what you find on Youtube. If you can show me a site which is consistently worse than Youtube (outside of site like 4Chan which specialize in creating campaigns to try to make epileptic people have a seizure) I will buy you a beer then next time we meet. My wife deleted her FaceBook account because she was annoyed at some people’s behavior on it. Part of the problem with the social networks is that they are so broad and so frictionless that your activities on them really don’t matter. As a marketer there are a couple ways to play such networks largely ignore them be friends with everyone use bots As a marketer the first of those options means you are saving your time for higher paying areas, and the second of those options means more people seeing more distribution of whatever content you create. But many of the helpful aids are at best dubious short term opportunistic ploys . The third option means you are one of the people who is going out of their way to make the web worse, but many will. Generally any given month I haven’t been on Facebook for more than 5 minutes outside of writing & targeting ads, or approving a few real “friends” and hundreds to thousands of other people who claim to be my friend. But if you message me on FaceBook there is a precisely 0% chance of getting a reply. When FaceBook launched Beacon a few years ago they wanted to sell peer pressure as an ad unit. If brands can show that your friends did something then maybe that can help lead to a cumulative advantage sort of environment which has you follow along. Beacon was such a flagrant violation of user privacy that it was quickly shot down by the market. But with the new FaceBook like button, they are trying to use like button clicks to put your name on ads : “Marketers have always known that the best way to sell something is to get your friends to sell it,” says Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. “That is what people do all day on Facebook. We enable effective word-of-mouth advertising at scale for the first time.” In the short run it may work, but in the longrun I don’t like the concept. The reasons are many. You can agree with one particular thing a person says and like it while being nearly diametrically opposed to their general philosophy on life. For example, when we launched that “How Google Works” infographic last week one of the reporters who wrote about it also mentioned how sleazy and nefarious the SEO industry is, and yet he was willing to promote the efforts of an SEO because it was published on a blog with a sister acronym in the domain name. … Of the 3,000+ people who voted for us likely less than half of them know anything about me, or even my association with the site. You can like one product from a company, but not like their other products. I have worked with GoDaddy as a registrar for years. And I have had no complaints on that front. But they also sell some search engine submission service that I would cringe to see my name promoting. You click the like button once on one page. Years later the business you liked is trading in another area…they moved from remnant inventory to spyware, and you recommend them. An individual can have multiple lines of work. You might like Thom Yorke’s role in Radiohead, but you might not like his political views or his solo work. Imagine when someone buys a car that you passively recommended which has a manufacturer defect. One of their loved ones gets killed and you eat the blame. Just like businesses, people change over time. This is especially true in the area of business, where a former partner or friend goes out of their way to betray your trust and screw you. How do likes work with 301 redirects? How do they work when the content of the page shifts from genuinely useful to hawking trash with a hyped up sales letter? A like doesn’t have much discrimination value. And it shouldn’t last very long. Why did you like something? When did you like it? Who knows. Did you like Toyota right up until the brakes didn’t work? After you get out of the hospital, how do you feel when your friend asks you why you are still promoting their products? Did you work for a digital sharecropper overlord like Jason Calacanas who required you to push their junk elsewhere? How did you feel when your friend asks you why you are promoting his trash after he canned you with 1 week notice while boasting how they are nearing break-even and have over 8 years of cash in the bank? Once people experience that will they become jaded and stop recommending things? And if there isn’t a backlash against the like button then given enough time one of your friends will like almost anything. It doesn’t matter the product/service/offer … if your pool of “friends” is wide enough then one of them is receiving an affiliate commission for pushing something, one of them owed a favor to the merchant, and one of them liked the merchant because they picked up a tab in the bar last month. A wave of 100 million blond hair 18 year old girls who are lonely have joined FaceBook friending up with the desperate and then promoting scammy wares to them via automated clicks of the like button. And then of course there will be services like SpikeTheVote. Sure a fad might work in the short run , but given enough time and there will be friend recommendations for almost anything. Once the novelty wears of does any of it matter? In time any database record can be an ad targeting mechanism. Will I be promoting some of the products my thousands of “friends” create or endorse by a click of the mouse which changes purpose after the fact? At first online petitions were powerful because they seemed to have mobilized swaths of people. But then people realized that a vote represented nothing more than an automated form submission and clicking send. 2 clicks of the mouse. Not much discrimination value.

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I Like it, I Love it, I Want Some More of It

by Manoj Jasra Facebook pages are popping up as quickly as websites and blogs, in fact I am often seeing organizations push users to their Facebook page due to the built-in social interactivity of Facebook pages. With the majority of our online experiences still starting with search, whether it be on Google, Bing or Facebook, there are many factors that will help boost a given Facebook page to the top of the results. Below are some of my speculations: � Total Number of Followers : You can consider this the same as back links, the more ‘votes’ your page receives, the more authority it gains. Content Posted : The fresher the content, with regards to wall posts/pictures/comments, the greater likelihood of search spiders continuously crawling the content. Relevancy of Content : Does all the content that is posted within the page help improve its overall theme? Big Brands : Large organizations will receive a bump just because they are top of mind to users and therefore they receive precedence in search results URL : Does your Facebook page’s URL contain relevant keywords related to search queries? Number of ‘Shares’ : Is the Facebook Page so compelling that people absolutely have to pass it along to their friends? Age of Page : This one is pure speculation, but could there be benefits of having an older Facebook Page vs. a brand new one? Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Top Rankings for Facebook Pages

Anyone who has been an SEO consultant knows that SEO is often bolted-on as an after-thought. Which is, of course, the worst way of doing SEO. Part of the problem is that SEO is often thought of, by clients, as a fix. It is a fix applied to solve the unforeseen problem of not showing up in search engine result pages. Whilst some businesses get it, we know most never will. But this fact is to your considerable advantage if you build and run your own sites Relevant Traffic Is Everything We know that a site without traffic is like a billboard in the desert. If no one sees it, it doesn’t matter how pretty it is, it is useless. A site without relevant traffic is a cost, not a benefit. Traffic that “just passes through” presents a major opportunity cost. What did that traffic really want to see, and why aren’t I providing it? Someone else will be. We know that search is the ultimate internet marketing research tool. Search is marketing nirvana. Visitors tell us what they want, using a keyword query, and all we need to do is match that query up with our site. Most people, outside search, still do not get this. But we do. Integrating SEO At Every Step One thing some SEOs may not get is that SEO needs is an integral part of business strategy. SEO is not just about positioning a site in the search rankings, it’s about positioning a site in the market. For example, it is pointless getting a #1 ranking for “cheap t-shirts” if a site sells designer t-shirts. Whilst this may result in a few rouge purchases, the site will constantly lose out to sites that offer cheap t-shirts. Because the visitors will reformulate their search queries until they find the service that is most relevant to them. From a business point of view, it may be better to run two sites - one offering cheap t-shirts, and one offering designer shirts. That’s what being relevant really means. Being relevant to a target market. An SEO strategy should look like this: Identify the target market Conduct a competitive analysis Create a business plan that shows how you will compete in that market Research keywords Create a brand identity related to those keyword terms Create a search-friendly site Get links SEO flows naturally out of the demands of the target market. The visitors tell us what they want. We look to see if anyone else is providing it. If they are, could we do better ? We create a basic plan showing how we will supply the need, and how much money we’ll make, after costs, if we succeed. We develop a strategy, as opposed to tactics . We investigate the many ways people phrase queries . We create a “language” for our site copy, and brand, that includes those queries, and addresses the intent behind them. We build a crawlable, well-ordered site and then we tell the world about it. We hope the world will talk about it, the send some attention our way . SEO Is Ongoing Just as business strategy is something we must do each day, so too is SEO. Integrate SEO into all you do. Even sending out a bill is an opportunity to ask someone to engage with your site. And hopefully link to it. Ask your friends, associates, suppliers and customers to link to you. Do the same for them. Create a personal link network of like-minded people and grow that network wider and wider. Think of it as a circle of trust. Your keyword referral stats are pure gold. Find the keyword terms people have used to find you. Use them as ideas for new page topics. Integrate their language into your copy. Repeat. Grow organically based on the demands of visitors. It’s just a case of “listening” to them. And responding with new pages. Join related clubs, forums and organisations. Find out the top sites in your niche that accept advertising, and advertise on them. Write articles for them. Contribute to discussions. Go to wherever your potential visitors are. Every page should link to another page on your site in a strategic, meaningful way. Think of any page you write as the start of a funnel that leads to other areas of your site. You want to subtly direct people to the page or action where they’ll engage with you. For this to work, you need to have a clear business directive in mind. What is it you want people to do? Every page is a step leading to that point. Be newsworthy. And remarkable. What do you do that’s really interesting? Social media thrives on, and rewards, the different - the thing that is new. Same-ness - not so much. Position for both business and rankings

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SEO Flows Through Everything

During the Super Bowl, we ran a 60 second ad made simply with a few Google searches and a little music. We were humbled by how much some people liked it . And we’ve even seen a few parodies that have left us in stitches. Making videos out of Google searches isn’t exactly elaborate Hollywood film-making, but to help everyone get in on the fun, we’ve made a really simple video creation tool , which you can try today. All you need to do is type in your Google searches, pick some music and — presto! — you’ve got your very own Search Story to share with your friends or showcase on our YouTube channel. And who knows, if people really like your Search Story, it may end up in a place you never dreamed. Posted by Robert Wong, Google Creative Lab

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Make your own Search Story video in minutes

During the Super Bowl, we ran a 60 second ad made simply with a few Google searches and a little music. We were humbled by how much some people liked it . And we’ve even seen a few parodies that have left us in stitches. Making videos out of Google searches isn’t exactly elaborate Hollywood film-making, but to help everyone get in on the fun, we’ve made a really simple video creation tool , which you can try today. All you need to do is type in your Google searches, pick some music and — presto! — you’ve got your very own Search Story to share with your friends or showcase on our YouTube channel. And who knows, if people really like your Search Story, it may end up in a place you never dreamed. Posted by Robert Wong, Google Creative Lab

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Make your own Search Story video in minutes

Earlier this month we added stars in search so that you can easily mark and rediscover your favorite websites. Today we’re debuting lists in Google Bookmarks, an experimental new feature that helps you easily share those sites with friends. Bookmarks are a great way to keep track of your favorite content across the web and we want to help you share them with your friends. To use lists, visit Google Bookmarks at google.com/bookmarks or by clicking “Manage all” in your Google Toolbar. From there, select the links you want to share and click “Copy to list.” Lists are private by default, but once you’ve created one you can share it with specific friends or even publish it to the web. For example, if a friend of yours is visiting Seattle for the first time and you have some local attractions bookmarked, you might want to create a new list for “Seattle attractions” and share it with your friend. Sharing lists can help you collaborate with your friends on common interests or activities. Let’s say you’re planning a group trip to Paris. With a list, everyone can contribute useful links and resources, such as packing lists, hotel links, flight information and attractions. You could also create lists for your favorite hobbies, and then share them with friends who share your interests. Lists dynamically generate previews for many pages so you can get a sense of the site before clicking. Lists also help you discover new web content. For example, once you’ve created your list of favorite Seattle attractions, Google will algorithmically analyze your list to identify other potentially relevant links, such as the Seattle Aquarium. Similarly, when we detect that a list is relevant to a specific region, we provide a map of those places and relevant info for each place, such as addresses, hours and reviews. We’re launching lists as an experimental feature so that we can quickly test it out and get feedback. Visit Google Bookmarks on google.com in English to try it out and let us know what you think. You can also learn more about lists in our Help Center . Posted by Christina Chen, Product Manager

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Collaborative bookmarking with lists

I use Google Reader a lot — not only to stay on top of the news, but also to find interesting blog posts and articles . I’m always telling my friends about Google Reader, and while some of them love it, others don’t want to take the time to set it up. For those of you who fall into this second category, we’re announcing Google Reader Play , a new product that makes the best stuff in Reader more accessible for everyone. Reader Play is a new way to browse interesting stuff on the web, customized to the topics you’re interested in, with no setup required. Items in Reader Play are presented one at a time, and images and videos are automatically enlarged to maximize the viewing experience. We use the technology behind Recommended Items in Reader to populate Reader Play with the most interesting content on the web. While you don’t need a Google account to use Reader Play, your experience will be personalized if you sign in. As you browse, you can let us know which items you enjoy by clicking the “like” button, and we’ll use that info to show you other content we think you’ll enjoy. We think Reader Play is a fun way to browse interesting items online that you wouldn’t find otherwise. We designed it especially for people who don’t want to spend time curating their own set of feeds — but folks who already use Reader can easily use it to read their feeds as well. Just click the feed settings menu on any feed in Reader and select “View in Reader Play.” We’re launching Reader Play as an experiment in Google Labs so that we can test it out, get feedback from you and then improve it as quickly as possible. Visit google.com/reader/play to give it a try, and let us know what you think! Posted by Garrett Wu, Software Engineer

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Finding awesome stuff online with Google Reader Play