Directory Submissions – Submission to relevant directories
• Press Releases – Press releases of your products and services
• Article Submissions – Writing relevant articles and submitting them to high quality article sites
• Guest Posts – Completing guest posts on related sites
• Contacts – Utilize your contacts to get some quality links
• Authority links – Links from magazines or high PR sites
• Blog comments – Commenting on relevant niche sites in your industry
• Competitions – Running a competition
• Link Bait – Create tools, write something controversial, this is great as link bait
• Social Media- Using social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to build up your links

There are of course many other methods of obtaining quality back links to your site. One of the most important factors when link building is to use your main services as the anchor text to your site. This can however lead to an unnatural link profile, resulting in loss of rankings and all your hard work lost.

To make your links appear more natural you should look at building links that appear more natural such as image links, brand links, using people names in links, and links simply to the domain name. This is especially important if you are link building to a new domain as it is likely the new domain would have very few natural links on the internet.

To test this theory I completed some tests on a domain name evaluating all the links, and deciding if they were one of the following:

• Brand links
• Service Links
• Image Links
• No anchor text
• Brand and service links

The test involved exporting all the links, and then breaking the links down into the different anchor text that was used. I then manually decided if the links equated to one of the above list. This showed the following:

Here we can see that the site in question was heavily service related, with very few links towards the other types. To me this link portfolio is a little unnatural. Google would expect to see more non service related links in the sites link profile.

Evaluation
After reviewing the above link profile of the above site I would evaluate that this site needs more non-service related links. This can come in the form of blog commenting or perhaps some brand linking using social media. I would also concentrate on creating some links that contained a brand and service, as this would relate the brand and their services more closely together in the search engines.

• Shopping Cart – Your shopping cart maybe on a sub-domain, and you may wish to track traffic from your site into your shopping cart in one report profile. You may also want to set up goal tracking and funnels all in one profile.
• Blog – You may have a blog on a sub-domain – You would want to track traffic to and from the blog in the same profile
• Your site may use sub domains for site content instead of sub folders, and you want to track the traffic in one easy to manage profile
• Many other reasons…

If you don’t set up cross domain tracking your sub-domain account will produce lots of referrals from your main site, meaning that the original referrer such as Google will be lost. This means that potentially you are losing out on important data as to where your traffic is coming from when a users skips between your domains.

In order to track visitors between your main domain and sub-domains you will need to edit the tracking code that appears on both domains.

Lets suppose you want to track traffic between the www.mystore.com and cart.mystore.com. The tracking code to achieve this is indicated below:

Asynchronous syntax

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_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-12345-1']);
  _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.mystore.com']);
  _gaq.push(['_setAllowHash', false]);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

Traditional (ga.js) syntax

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var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12345-1");
  pageTracker._setDomainName(".mystore.com");
  pageTracker._setAllowHash(false);
  pageTracker._trackPageview();

You will notice that there is a leading “.” before the domain name, this indicates that you want to track any sub-domain of this main domain. It is important that you add this tracking code to all pages on the main domain and sub-domain in order to track everything successfully.

I consider myself to be quite advanced in Google Analytics so therefore decided to take the Google Analytics test, where you have to get over 80% to pass. I went through all the tutorials on the Google Analytics Conversion University to familiarize myself with all the features before taking the exam.

I thought that taking the exam would be a great way of testing myself, ensuring that I know all about the many features of Google Analytics (and there are many)!

A few days ago I passed the exam, so I am now officially Google Analytics qualified. It’s good to know that I can prove I can use the platform at a professional level rather than just working on particular clients accounts.

I would suggest that anyone involved in Internet Marketing takes the test as its proof that you know what you are talking about.

To achieve this you have a choice of two different features in Google Analytics they are:

• Virtual Pageviews
• Event Tracking

Below I have detailed the different methods of capturing this data within Google Analytics

1. Virtual page views

The first method of tracking such events is using a virtual page view. Virtual page views are a way of faking a page view after a given event, say clicking on a video or an external link. This is achieved by adding the ._trackPageview function to the link. For example if you were to tag an external link to say www.google.co.uk you could use the following call.

pageTracker._trackPageview(’/outgoing/google.co.uk’);

When a users triggers a virtual page view the data is passed to Google Analytics and is recorded will all the other page views in the system, it is a good idea to use a strong naming convention to track your virtual page views, which is why in the above example I have used the subdirectory /outgoing/.
One problem with virtual page views is that it can greatly increase your overall page view figures, making it more difficult to analyse data.

The main reason you would use a virtual page view is so you can use the page view as a goal, and track conversions with it

2. Event tracking
Another way of tracking these events is to use event tracking, which is different to a page view. With event tracking you call the _trackevent() Javascript call within a link. This allows you to add the following attributes to a link

• Category – The name you supply for the group of objects you want to track.
• Action – A string that is uniquely paired with each category, and commonly used to define the type of user interaction for the web object.
• Label – An optional string to provide additional dimensions to the event data.
• Value – An integer that you can use to provide numerical data about the user event.

As event tracking allows you to define more variables you can track more information such as page load times, how long a video is played and what buttons a user clicks. For example the below link shows how you could track a video, when someone clicks play, and the video is called ‘gone with the wind’.

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<a href="#" onClick=_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos',
 'Play', 'Gone With the Wind']);">Play</a>

You should be careful to plan which metrics you want to record, this will ensure that the data sent to Google Analytics is actionable. The advantage of event tracking over page views is that event tracking won’t ruin your overall page view data, the only disadvantage is that event tracking cannot be added into a goal which is slightly annoying. The data that you can get from this however is great and provides a huge amount of data to act on.

• Banner Advertisting
• Email Campaigns
• PPC campaign

One problem many webmasters find is tracking the success of these campaigns. Recording any marketing campaigns success is a critical part of the optimisation process, you need to know which of your marketing campaigns is working well for you.

Luckily Google Analytics provides the ability to tag your URLs so that the traffic data is sent to your Google Analytics account. You should remember that if your Adwords and Google Analytics accounts are linked, your adwords data will automatically be tagged, meaning cost, campaign and click through data is automatically sent through to Google Analytics.

You will however still need to tag your other non search engine campaign, such as banner ads and promotional email. It is important to remember that you don’t need to tag any natural search clicks as Google Analytics automatically records these visits under natural search.

Within a tagged URL you can use the following variables:

• Campaign Source – The referrer such as Google, citysearch etc
• Campaign Medium – CPC, Banner etc
• Campaign Term – Keyword
• Campaign Content – Used to differentiate between different adverts
• Campaign Name – Used to indicate the campaign, for example xmas campaign

To help your tag your URLs Google has created a URL builder, this easy to use tool creates the tagged URL for you, you simply have to copy and paste the URL into your campaign links. The below link shows a tagged URL for a Google banner campaign, for a christmas campaign using the keyword xmas trees.

http://www.website.co.uk/?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=banner&utm_term=xmas%2Btrees&utm_campaign=christmas%2Bcampaign

Once you have completed your tagging you will be able to review the success of your campaign through Google Analytics, it is important however to remember that data can take hours to reach your Google Analytics account.

In Google Analytics go to Traffic Sources –> All Traffic Sources

You will then be able to look for medium and source of your campaign, such as Google banner advertising campaigns. It is important that you analyze and review the traffic from your tagged URLs to discover what form of advertising is working for you, and achieve the highest return on investment possible.

• Video
• Images
• News
• Blogs
• Forums
• And more…

Videos will always attract users as they are more appealing to view than traditional adverts. The search engines have quickly caught onto this allowing users to search a huge selections of videos on sites such as YouTube.

One of the main things to think about when deciding to use video as a form of marketing is where to host the video itself. Traditional it is more efficient to host content on your own site as this builds up your site, and provides more search terms for users to reach the site. Video however is generally hosted on third party websites such as Youtube, mainly due to the technical reasons of hosting video. Users also host videos on Youtube due to its popularity and reach, Youtube is now in fact the 2nd biggest search engine.

In more recent times however websites have become more powerful, making it easier to host the video on your site itself. Most people however will still host their video on Youtube as they will make more money per view than they would on their own site.

A good idea is to promote the video on your site and third party video websites, that way you get both of the benefits including links to your video on both Youtube and your site. One great way to get your video on as many third party sites as possible is to use a video syndication services such as Tubemogul which will sent your video to a selection of third party websites.

But what ranking factors are used for videos
Like natural search Youtube uses a selection of ranking factors including title, description, tags, views, ratings, how many times it has been embedded, comments, age, subscribers and inbound links

One way to get Google to index the video on your site is to use a Video Sitemap, video sites are like traditional XML sitemaps, it is a sitemap of the locations of your videos. The video sitemap protocol also allows you to specify a thumbnail image which can appear in the search results. Once you have completed the video sitemap you should upload it to Google Webmaster Tools as usual, you should also reference the sitemap in the robots.txt file

To help your video rank better in the search results it is still best practice to include some text description of the video next to it. Google’s algorithm still heavily relies on text, so including some relevant text can only help your chances of listing.

One great tool to discover new SEO keywords from your PPC account is the search based keyword tool. Firstly you should login to your Google Adwords account then open the search based keyword tool. You should then be able to pick your site from a drop down list and click on find keywords.

This tool will then provide you with a long list of keywords from your Adwords campaign. Each keyword comes with the following metrics of data:

• Monthly searches
• Competition
• Suggestion bid
• Ad/Search Share

The most important parts of data from this list are monthly searches and Ad/Search share, you can actually use this data to discover niche keywords for your SEO campaign, that you were not aware of before.

To discover these niche keywords you should export this keyword list to Excel and then filter the list by ‘monthly searches’ and ‘Search Share’. You should look to filter the search share by anything between 50-75, and search volumes over 200 a month.

This will provide you with a list of keywords that appear on the first page 50-75% of the time, and have high monthly searches in Google. This gives you a great starting point to push more long tail SEO keywords which are one the first page of Google, but can be pushed higher through SEO to improve your sites visibility in the search engines.

Doing this means you are actually using all the keyword research your PPC account manager has undertaken to help your SEO campaign. Not only this the data you are analysing is real data from your account and hence is more trusted than other methods of analysing websites.

This way of analysing keywords for SEO only works for clients who have both an SEO and PPC account. I will be reviewing other ways of analysing this data soon, so watch this space.

Our stand was in a great position and was busy for most of the day which was great. On day three of the event I presented a seminar on ‘SEO for ecommerce websites’ in the ecommerce theatre. The seminar was full, with many people having to watch from the outside of the theatre.

The presentation talked about SEO tips for ecommerce sites including structure, content, internal linking and technical recommendations for ecommerce sites amongst other things . For those of you that missed the presentation please see the slides below

This tool makes it easy to filter unwanted data from your content report. It achieves this by allowing you to filter any metric by one of the following methods:

• Containing – a value to include
• Excluding – a value to exclude
• Less than
• Greater than – greater than a value
• Less than or equal to
• Equal to
• Not equal to
• Greater than or equal to

For example I might wish to filter my results that contain the keyword ‘insurance’ and have a conversion rate of higher than 2%. This will give me all the insurance terms that are greater than 2% conversion rate.

This tool would also come in useful if you were trying to remove all brand terms from a content report. You could simply use the exclude parameter and us to OR operator. For example for Marks And Spencer you could enter the following ‘ M&S | Marks And Spencer’. This will allow you to see the traffic for non branded terms, allowing you to view the more keyword related terms you are after.

The filtering tool is very powerful and filters lots of data really quickly, allowing you to make quick decisions about your marketing.

• Adding dynamic meta data
• Removing duplicate content
• Addition of content, possibly a blog system
• Implementing canonical URLs
• Changing the navigation
• Plus much more…

SEO of course does not finish there, your site will be ever evolving especially if you have an ecommerce site selling products online. In order to ensure that your site’s SEO is still optimised as well as possible you should be also undertaking regular site checks they include:

Checking Pages can be Indexed
Search engines can often have trouble indexing the lower levels of your site, this can be due to navigation problems, your server is slow, or a possible penalisation reducing the amount of pages indexed by Google on your site. This can be monitored by adding many sites maps across your site and submitting them to Google using Google Webmaster Tools. For example you should create a different set of sitemaps for categories and sub categories of your ecommerce site. Google will then provide you with the following information:

• URLs in sitemap – How many URLs are in the sitemap
• Indexed URLs – How many URLs have been indexed

This will give you a good idea as to where any problems arrise, you can then work on the best ways of fixing the issues and getting all your pages indexed.

Canonicalisation
One method of increasing internal link strength and reduce duplicate content is to specify the canonical tag on your URLs. As your website is changing often you may find that your redirect rules have been removed, or the canonical tags have been removed. It is always worth checking canonical URLs in the site, perhaps the most common are URLs indexed with and without the trailing slash, upper and lower case duplication issues, and old unfriendly URLs which have not been properly 301 redirected to their new page.

Duplicate Meta Data
Perhaps one of the most easiest things to diagnose is duplicate meta data in the site. Simply go to your Google Webmaster Tools account then click on HTML suggestions. Google will supply you with a break down of any duplicate meta data (see image below)

Duplicate meta data general means that your dynamic page templates are missing a meta data section. Most of the time this can be resolved by adding meta data into the database and calling this within the of the pages. This exercise although quite simple to undertake can help increase your long tail traffic, especially for large ecommerce sites.

Site Speed
There have been many blogs and post recently talking about Google introducing site loading speed into its algorithm, to me these stories make sense, Google want to show the best possible result to a user, and a slow site is not the best result. To enforce how much Google would like you to speed up the web they added the ’site performance’ tool in Google Webmaster Tools. Going to labs > site performance will show you how well your site is performing. (see image below)

If you notice that your site is particular slow speak to your webmaster who should be able to optimise things to make them a little faster

Sites that link to you
An extremely important factor in SEO is the sites that link to you. A link to your site is like a vote of confidence in your service, so the more links from respected sources you can receive the better. You should regularly check your links using the ‘links to your site’ section under ‘your site on the web’.
You should check a selection of your links to ensure they are of a high quality, you may also find some hidden gems here, like a strong link from a site with high PR. You can then contact that webmaster to change the link to one of your keywords to improve your rankings on that term.