How you gather, manage, and use information will determine whether you win or loose. Bill Gates, Business @ The Speed Of Thought.

For most people when they think of search engine optimization they think only of bringing visitors to their site and then hopefully getting a newsletter sign-up or a sale. But part of any SEO process involves taking the information gathered from your SEO campaign and applying it to future SEO efforts to constantly improve your search results.

Knowing what visitors are doing while on your website is crucial. Can you answer the following questions about your website:

• How many visitors came to your site yesterday?
• How long did they stay and what did they look at?
• Are any of your site’s pages under performing?
• Is your sales page actually bringing in the sales, if not why not?

If you cannot answer these simple questions about your website then your ability to respond to your visitors needs is severely diminished.  How much would you pay if you could know every fact about your website and could intelligently deal with the information & feedback that it provides in a timely and cost effective manner?

By far the most popular (and free) website analytics package available at the moment is Google Analytics. The setup process is straight forward, you need a Google Account which most people already have in the form of their Gmail Account. Once you have registered with Google Analytics you will be given a piece of HTML code called a Tracking Code. You need to paste this piece of code into every page of your site that you want to track. Once Google has verified that the code is in place you will start to receive information from your site within 24 hours. Using Google Analytics you can obtain the following information:

• Site Visitors
• Page Views
• Bounce Rate
• Average Time on Site
• % of New Visits
• Traffic Sources
• Content Overview

Within each of these sections you can further drill down through the information to get even more detailed results. One of my favorite features is the map overlay function which allows you to see where users are clicking on your website.

Obviously having the above information at your fingertips would allow you to make fast, informed decisions about your website, transforming it from a static brochure into a finely tuned sales tool.

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking”.
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users?”
• Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s rankings or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighbourhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate the Terms of Service of search engines. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

All of the topics covered in our latest series of post can be found in the Help Pages of Google but they can sometimes be a hard read if you are not familiar with the terminology. If you would like to read our previous post explaining Google SEO guidelines check out:

• SEO Basics
• SEO Design & Content Guidelines
• SEO Advanced

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• Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing your entire site in a text browser , then chances are that the search engine spiders may have trouble crawling/seeing your site as well.
• Allow search bots to crawl your site without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behaviour, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may or may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since it last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
• Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it’s current for your site so that you don’t accidentally block the search engine crawler. Go to http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site.
• Make sure that your content management system creates pages and links that search engines can crawl.
• Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages to other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.
• Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.

So far in this series of posts we’ve covered How Google Ranks Your Site, SEO Basics, and SEO Design & Content Guidelines.  This post gives you some more advanced SEO insights to consider during the design & development stage of your website. In the next post I’ll discuss SEO quality guidelines basic & advanced.

Design & Content Guidelines from Google

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesnt recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the “ALT” attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
• Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character). be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Google has several other guidelines related to site content and good SEO which we will be discussing over the next few days.

What is the first step of  basic SEO?

For most web site owners search engine optimization is an after thought when their website is built but as mentioned today by Brett Yount, the program manager at Bing Webmaster Center:

“Clean code can help quite a bit in indexing on all the Search Engines. If you are just starting out, I suggest finding a W3C compliant template.”

Basically what Brett is saying here is that even if you are following SEO best practices you’ll still be fighting an uphill battle if your website is not W3C compliant. So when you’re selecting a web design firm make sure you specify that your finished site must be W3C compliant.

Some clients come to us utterly frustrated with the lack of progress their site is making in the search engine rankings. So before you start to invest time in an SEO campaign that is built on poor foundations check to see if you have the basics right first!

The easiest way to check if your website is W3C compliant is to go to http://validator.w3.org/ enter your site name and see what result is returned. Ideally you should get something back like this, webscience W3C. If your site returns errors than this may be an answer as why your site hasn’t been performing as you expected.

The Google algorithm is one of the most closely guarded secrets in business and rightfully so! If your process was responsible for $21,796,000 annual turnover wouldn’t you want to keep it to yourself?

Recently SEOMOZ.org asked 72 Search Engine Optimization experts to rate more than 100 search ranking factors that they think make up the Google Algorithm. The gragh below gives you a quick overview of what industry experts believe are the factors Google considers when ranking a website. For the complete survey go to www.seomoz.org

The SEOMOZ survey is an excellent guide on where to focus your SEO efforts. If you’re currently performing search engine optimization for your or your clients site let us know what you think works when trying to climb the Google rankings?

Doing business on the web is no longer about having one web presence, it’s no longer enough to just get eyeballs to your site with little or no interaction. To do business on the web, be competitive and get your message out to as many people as possible you need to have several “homepages”, www.mybusiness.com – www.facebook.com/mybusiness – www.twitter.com/mybusiness. If there is one thing that is going to increase your site traffic, leads and sales it’s interaction. Obviously the more people that are interacting with your sites, leaving comments on your blog or replying to your Facebook updates the easier it will be to convert these interested users into customers in the future.

Although not as advanced as Google Analytics Facebook does provide you with some details about how your Fan Page is interacting with it’s audience.

Weekly interactions:

Fans who interact with your page:

Total fans:

Top countries/cities/languages:

The average person on Facebook has 120 friends and when you consider that almost everyone in your organization will certainly have a personal Facebook page with around 120 friends your Facebook business page can reach a lot of people in a very short space of time. Another excellent thing to remember about Facebook is that when someone receives one of your updates it’s because they have become a fan or a friend has forwarded it on to them, it’s word of mouth online and as such trusted.

Below are some Facebook Fan Pages that have helped their owners increase sales, brand awareness and site interactions.

• Decisions for Heros
• Dorans Seafood

Big Brands

• Guinness Ireland
• U2
• Coca-Cola
• Starbucks