In my last role, we had a number of internal tools that I’ve had to find replacements for or just stop using the equivalent of. As a result, it’s made me think closely about the tools that I needed to be bringing across, look for some more modern variants in some cases, as well as making sure I find some new ones to help with the day to day role.

Some of these are SEO specific, and others are more general useful tools to aid productivity, but I thought that this would be a decent topic to write my first blog for theMediaFlow on. I hope you find some of them useful, and be prepared for a fairly long list!

SEO/Search Marketing Tools:

Screaming Frog SEO Spider -

This tool has changed my working life immeasurably for the better. I first started talking to the Screaming Frog tool about this whilst it was in development well over a year ago now, as I was looking for a tool that could help me check with the implementation of the canonical tag across a website.

From an on-site audit perspective, nothing beats this for me. You can evaluate titles, descriptions, keywords, headings, canonical tags, internal link patterns. You can review specific inlinks and anchor texts to specific pages, review broken links and links passing through internal redirects. I’m sure that there are plenty of elements that I am still not getting the full benefits from still, but this is a tool I love and recommend incredibly strongly that you try it if you haven’t already.

Google Keyword Tool - I’ve used lots of keyword analysis tools over the years, and found most of them fatally flawed by the data sets supplying the information. Who knows, they may have got better over the years, but I have my doubts (let me know in the comments if there are any worth having a look at).

I don’t exactly trust the data that this tool gives as the potential traffic levels available on terms are rarely anything like what the exact match data suggests is possible. However, I do find that in terms of comparative volumes between phrases that this is a useful indicator of how a keyword might perform in terms of traffic potential.

Excel - I definitely need to get better with spreadsheets, as I’ve been known to tear my hair out at times, but where would I be without Excel? 2012 is the year where I am really going to get my head around better spreadsheet usage.

I know a large number of the SEOs are talking about learning to code this year, but for me, maximizing and improving my Excel usage is a considerably higher priority.

Already though, I wouldn’t be without it, and its an essential part of the Search Marketers tool kit.

Raven Tools - in particular this is replacing the internal tools that I have previously used.

I have a long way to go before I get to grips with everything that its possible to do with Raven – I’ve mostly thus far been using it for the rank checking & competitive intelligence elements for campaigns that I am working on a the moment, and am planning on spending a lot more time getting to grips with all the extra features over the coming weeks and months.

Header Status Checkers – I actually tend to vary my use between 2 tools, the HTTP Status Codes Checker and check your server result codes. I find it useful to double check the results from time to time, and I don’t always find they give precisely the same data.

GSiteCrawler - this has been mostly superseded for me now with the additional features being added to the Screaming Frog tool, but this is one that I’ve historically had a lot of use from. I used to use it to create XML sitemaps (now a task for the Screaming Frog Spider), spotting duplicate content issues (now a task for the Screaming Frog Spider) and… ok, maybe I don’t really need to be using this one anymore – if you don’t have a paid subscription for the SF SEO Spider, then it could be useful for creating fairly big XML sitemaps.

Google Analytics & Google Webmaster Tools - goes without saying really!

Google URL Builder - A handy tool for tagging links up for campaigns.

Google Analytics Configuration Tool - This is a newly released tool from the Raven Tools team to help configure Google Analytics in the way that you need for your website. It has options for helping you to setup Google Analytics accounts for websites with multiple subdomains, track multiple domains in one account as well as configuring site search and 404 tracking. It also helps you to setup Goals for the website, using event tracking methods, helps you to track Facebook page traffic and has a URL Builder.

I’ve actually not used this yet beyond a couple of tests, but can see plenty of uses for this in the future and can definitely see how simple this could make configuring some of these options.

Piwik - This is a new one to me, but I’ve been starting to have a look at this open source analytics package since starting at theMediaFlow. It seems to broadly collect the same sort of information as I am used to seeing in Google Analytics, without Google having access to that data specifically.

MajesticSEO - The link analysis tool that I am most familiar with, I regularly use this one. Useful for identifying potential problems in your backlink profiles, performing competitor intelligence and comparisons. So much data available to be looking at it can be a little daunting at first, but once you get your head around what’s on offer its a valuable resource.

OpenSiteExplorer - Since the demise of the Yahoo Site Explorer, this has been my go-to for quick link spot checks. It also does some good comparisons and visualisations of the data.

Link Research Tools - I’ve historically only really used free tools and MajesticSEO for backlink analysis and have enjoyed having access to these Link Research Tools to review that data from a slightly different source

Cognitive SEO Tools - this is a fairly new tool, and one that is certainly new to me. However, I’ve started to play around with the data that this is collecting for a few clients of late and have really liked the data visualisation that you can produce from it. I suspect that as I start to use this a bit more in the future that I will be finding plenty of additional uses for it, as it seems to have a lot of additional features beyond the link analysis elements that I’ve been using it for mostly so far.

Schema Creator - I actually only found this tool today, but I can see this being really useful for using Microdata as set out by schema.org to mark up People, Products, Events, Reviews and more. It gives you a preview and then the HTML to copy and paste where you want to use it.

Google Rich Snippet Testing Tool - Well, once you’ve implemented schema for your reviews (and recipes which I’ve used a fair bit too), you want to make sure that its possible for it to display with those 5 star reviews in the SERPs. Drop a URL into here and see how Google *might* display your rich snippets. It’s also useful to find any problems that you might have with your code to help you get these working properly. Rich snippets are everywhere in search results at the moment and seem to have fewer barriers for entry at the moment, so now is the time to get them on your site!

Google SERP Snippet Optimiser - I’ve loved the SEOmofo SERP snippet optimization tool since i first stumbled across it. It lets you put your title, description and URL in and generate a preview of how that snippet might look when its live on a Google search.

WHOIS Domain Tools - Always useful to do a bit of snooping. Find out details on the Whois record, registration details and some hosting information on websites you want to know more about.

First Link Checker - I’ve used this tool for a number of years now; it lets you look at the links outgoing on a page and flags to you when you link multiple times to the same URL. It can be useful to identify when you might be over-linking internally to a page on your site – I particularly use this a lot on website home pages or specific pages that I want to investigate further.

SEO Browser - Another old one, but I still find it useful to have a quick look at text only views of a page from time to time.

Hitwise Intelligence Dashboard - Whilst this isn’t a tool as such I tend to find myself checking this data a couple of times a month. I find its search engine share statistics particularly valuable to check in on (it always amuses me as well that Google has the top 2 slots here, with .co.uk and .com engines).

Assorted Productivity & “Other” Tools:

Percentage Calculator - I used to get a lot of stick for this one being in my bookmarks, and yes, I can calculate percentages in excel. But this has been in my bookmarks forever, and for a quick and easy percentage calculation that I don’t want to attempt in my head, I always visit here.

Skype - to keep in touch with those around that I need to be able to communicate with at all times (it’s mostly a smaller extension of my Twitter network).

ToodleDo - I resisted using this in my last place of work, but particularly now, where I am working in multiple locations, the importance of a to-do list that syncs everywhere I go has grown to be invaluable. Throw in the iphone and ipad app and I can access my to do list wherever I am in the world. Much better than the post it notes and scraps of paper that used to litter my desk space.

Evernote - Another app that I’ve started to use as a result of working more frequently in multiple locations (and the primary location that I have written this blog from), Evernote allows you to write notes and attach data to it, and have a central storage and access to that wherever you go, on all the devices that I own. In tandem with Dropbox and Toodledo, these are keeping me organised at the moment.

Dropbox - I’ve used dropbox every now and again over the years, but not really with any seriousness. However, since starting here, having an online storage space where I can access what I am working on everywhere that I am working has become more important. Again, using iphone and ipad apps has proved invaluable whilst out and about

Google Chrome Extensions:

I made the switch to Google Chrome about 18 months ago for the most part, although of course keep other browsers to test differences in SERPs and the like. I regularly make use of the following Chrome Extensions to help make SEO’ing that little bit easier!

SEO Site Tools - A fantastic extension for Chrome, my main browser based tool. Contains a ton of offsite and onsite data about a wealth of factors, it lets you have a quick snapshot of a pages primarily important on page items. A must have for Google Chrome using SEOs.

Pinterest Right Click - Not a search marketing tool at all I guess, but I have really enjoyed adding things to my Pinterest boards – particularly since I found this extension that allows you to right click on an image and pin it without any faff.

PageRank - Pretty simple extension – displays the PageRank of a page. Maybe I shouldn’t be looking at it with any credibility, but hey, I still like to know.

XML Tree - I didn’t like how Google Chrome displayed XML sitemaps when I looked at them, and this makes them more usable and readable

Number Search Engine Results - Does what it says on the tin, and numbers search results for you – simple!

Google Global - an extension to let you see Google results in different regions. I often forget that I have this extension, but it is handy for some quick research on how your results might appear in other locations when I do remember to use it!

Evernote Web Clipper - in conjunction with using Evernote I’ve been using this to clip articles to Evernote for later reading.

Honourable Mention: 

Spotify… ok, this isn’t a search marketing tool at all. But everyone needs some background noise to help the day on its path. I’ve also been enjoying starting to build some playlists for sharing, and will be tweeting about some more of these over the coming months. I am someone that isn’t a complete iTunes hater, and have previously run my music collection mostly through that, but similarly to some of the other things I’m using at the moment, the accessibility between multiple locations is growing in its importance for me these days.

Finishing Up: 
For things like Twitter & Facebook, unlike many search marketers, I actually just use the web interfaces. I find that I can dip in and out of the activities on these platforms much more simply as a result of closing down the browser windows, rather than receiving a barrage of notifications when there have been new updates and getting distracted all the time. For the same reason, I have notifications switched off for most things, particularly email.

Hopefully not all of these were completely the usual suspects for this sort of post, although I appreciate that a lot of these are popular tools and bookmarks. I’m always on the look out to develop this toolset further though, so I’d love to hear if there are some obvious tools and bookmarks that I should be adding – please let me know in the comments.

Panellists are;

Mikkel de Mib (our MC) – deMib

Richard Baxter - SEOGadget

Christine Church - KeyRelevance

Lasse Clarke Sorgaarde – MediaCom Denmark

Kevin Gibbons – SEOptimise

First up, Richard baxter…

Data is problematic in that it needs to be organised into actionable segments. How do we get from a data-set, to an information architecture?

Can we group keyword types together into an actionable “journey” as such?

Baxter demonstrates an example looking at “buy used audi s3 black london” and segments the token types e.g “buy” is an action, “new” is a condition (and so forth). However before we can get on to this segmentation principle we need to understand the demand curve. (Specific to product).

Using such data (typed) gives a richer understanding, providing we have the analytical tools to do so; which leads us to excel and a couple of recommended commands.

FIND()

ISERROR()

NOT()

Baxter shows a spreadsheet with segmented query tokens per column, e.g. Make, colour, action etc.

{=NOT(ISERROR(FIND([KEYWORD-TYPES],$A2)))}

This query checks an array for strings that can be found common to groups, which can then be charted to give insight into demand per token type.

Increase data sets – Improve your perspective

• Download all of your analytics data
• Use he suggest API
• Capture rankings
• Build sweet data models

Why is this awesome?

Such data reveals more about discover mechanics e.g. “how” do people search for my product.

Christine Churchill

Christine will be focusing on tools and is a huge proponent of the use of varied tools for a greater perspective, and varied data-sources.

Google KWT = Christine points out that in Sept 2010 GKWT dropped “partner sites” data at this time.

Christine gives an overview tool of some of her favourite tools, from Google tools to SEOMoz.

Lasse Clarke Sorgaarde

Preso is entitled “Searchenomics”, so hoping for some interesting data observations.

Setting the scene Lasse points out that first and fastest is not the winning technique in today’s market-place.

Using a supermarket shelf analogy Lasse compares the decision funnel to position on shelf. Essentially we need to funnel people to “eye level” goods. Purchase intent is a key principle to understand.

Understanding the relationship of term type to customer intent is key to driving ROI – which is really the most sensible objective.

Kevin Gibbons – SEOptimise

Kevins Preso “10 Steps to Target Long Tail Traffic”

How do we optimise for this traffic when Google themselves say 20 – 25% of queries have never been recorded before! How on earth do we understand/predict/optimise for them?

Kev shows us a case study for Audley Travel, for whom they increased longtail traffic by 181% – such traffic being good quiality with high propensity to convert.

1. Find common trends KW add-on – good example looking at GTrends “how, why, when, who, where”

2. Answer industry-specific FAQ’s

3. Pick out “themes” in GA

4. Use advanced segments in GA e.g. only visits from 4+ token keywords

5. Use PPC data (impression and SoV) – even if just for a month as a data collection exercise. (Broad and phrase to get best data-spread.)

6. Use multiple tools (Hitwise data is explicitly mentioned)

7. Estimate average CTR, as this varies wildly in the tail.

8. Use excel to predict traffic values

9. Filter KW into thematic groups

10. Don’t overthink it and go too long tail – work smarter.

Now for the Q&A

A question from the audience about PPC data tests – diffs with seasonality in short-terms tests. How can other data sources be used to normalise?

Kev agrees this is a problem, and recommends Hitwise for best data sample for normalising and also points out to exclude brand terms (inc. missplells).

Q – what about webmaster tools data? Does it include paid search?

Kev – no

Richard – avoid Google Keyword Tool for anything other than a yardstick measure.

Q How important is first to market on a new KW e.g. “2011 car insurance”?

Richard – there does seem to be some advantage to being first with content.

Christine – recommends to back up with other marketing techniques e.g. twitter etc.

Kevin – it’s important to get this is out as soon as possible. Citing an example of a Billy Connelly TV program, where they pushed out client content months in advance, beating ITV themselves when the show was aired.

I was aware of the Digital Surrey community, and on a recent trip to leading Surrey Online PR Agency, thebluedoor to deliver some advanced SEO training via SEO PR Training; was invited to attend the next event by the team there, who are instrumental in supporting and organising the Digital Surrey events.

The event on April 20th promises to be something extra special, as the format will consist of what is known as Pecha Kucha style, which restricts each speaker to a very strict 6:40 slot.

Although tickets for Digital Surrey April have already “sold” out (it’s free, but you know what I mean) you can register your interest should space become available!

http://digitalsurreyapril.eventbrite.com/

Search today, is not the user experience it first was. When searching Google, Bing or Yahoo! we often see richer results than the traditional ten blue links on a text heavy page. Now it is very common for a search query to trigger additional types of results too, particularly when searching Google you may see images, local listings (with a map) and of course video.

Whilst there are many statistics about video content being more likely to get to page one than standard text content; and whilst there is a great deal of truth in such statistics, there are conditions and dependencies. Just having video content on your site is not enough. Setting aside the content subject-matter and quality, your video needs to be optimised so that it can be effectively interpreted by search engines. Search engine crawlers cannot “see”, or “hear” video content, so we’re much more reliant on technical structure and on-page set-up, as information and relevancy signals here.

Technical/Structural

1. One video per page

Having one video per page allows you to explicity target data about that page, to the content of the video. As an example, having a keyword-rich URL, that speaks to the video content will provide an additional relevency signal.

2. Navigational and internal links

Ensure that your video(s) are well linked-to within the site, both by navigation and by internal linking. With internal links it is much easier and more natural to link with explicit anchor text, which will add additional meaning to what it is, that the video is about.

3. Video directory or sub-folder

House all collated video on the site, in to a specific folder or subdirectory i.e. http://mywebsite.com/video/

4. Video sitemap

Tell Google about your video content by creating a video sitemap and adding it to your Webmaster Tools account, for the site.

On the Page

1. Embed content

Ensure you embed your video content, as opposed to playing in a pop-up window.

2. File names

Give the video file a keyword-rich, descriptive name.

3. Meta data

Ensure the page meta-title and description are a good balance of keyword rich, meaninful data.

4. Transcribe where appropriate

Depending on the length of the video and additionally from an accessibility perspective it is considered best-practise to provide a transcript of the audio. Not only will this make the content accessible to hearing-impaired users, but having the content transcribed on the page will add additional meaning to search engines.

5. Allow for easy sharing

Certain types of video content may naturally have that share-appeal, however it pays to make this as easy as possible by ensuring your content is extremely easy for users to share. Consider providing an embed URL, and certainly ensure that you have social sharing icons to make it easy for users to share with their communities in a single click.

Aaron Wall of SEOBook, a leading SEO resource based in the US, first reported this change in early November for the US market. In his post, Wall posits that for the set of sites that rank well for a term, rather than rank the page that might “traditionally” be the strongest (which is normally any sites’ homepage), Google is then applying “internal site searches & back in other relevancy factors to look for other popular & relevant pages on those sites“.

Looking at our client site rankings, and conferring with industry peers, it seems that this change hit UK shores around December 20th.

Here’s an example:

Simon owns one of the UK’s most established and authoritative sites retailing car parts www.potn.co.uk. The site retails products such as brake discs, alloy wheels, exhausts, high-performance tyres etc. Pretty much anything one may require in order to “pimp one’s ride”. Previously the site homepage has ranked in the top five for almost any term (product) that they retail. Post the 20th December update, Google now return the specific subpage listing for the term in question.

Search “alloy wheels” returns the following result, which was previously the homepage.

Although the listing has slipped a couple of places, one may imagine that the click-through rate on this listing may increase, as the URL shown is descriptive and entirely relevent to the user query. Plus, given the landing page is now the explicit alloy wheels page (on which conversion activity occurs), the revenue effect may be neutral to positive.

What is Happening Here?

Google are taking a further step in the persuit of relevancy and a better user experience, by applying site search (and other relevancy signals) to identify an even more suitable page from within the site; than the naturally more-authoritative homepage.

Who Should this Benefit?

Provided a site is well built, and contains good quality original content, any site can benefit; though in particular this could be useful for ecommerce websites, such as the POTN example above. Ecommerce retailers with multiple products, may now find that the specific product page now ranks where the homepage did previously – which should be great for both user experience and conversions.

Who Are the Losers?

Sites with poor information architecture and little, (or poor quality) content will fail to capitalise on this change. Sites that have failed to invest in content and infrastructure, but have instead chosen to game the algorithm by agressive link-building tactics will also find their poor strategy may no longer pay.

What if Google Are Showing the “Wrong” Page?

In most cases, this change should be quite positive for most quality websites. In some cases however, you may find that a sites blog (by its’ very nature more dynamic and containing more written content than a homepage) usurps a sites’ homepage. We have a client site, with very little written content on the homepage where the blog has usurped the homepage result for the sites core term. In this case, this is not a desirable effect; however we suspect from experience, that the user interaction (as fed back in the search metrics), will prompt the listing to revert to the homepage soon. In the meantime we’re making a couple of on-page changes to the blog, to de-prioritise the site’ core terms.

Future Considerations

This latest change to the Google algorithm makes an even stronger case for the necessity of good quality original content. Site architecture is pushed higher up the agenda. Best-practise in site artchitecture being to establish a flat and wide structure; that is, where content is divided up into as many channels as possible (without comprimising on what makes sense), where each channel is as close as possible to the homepage. That said; if applying site search is indeed the method Google are using to qualify sub-pages, perhaps there is a risk we may see the re-emergence of “SEO landing pages” and low quality keyword-stuffed content again.

The job of an SEO is not getting easier, but they can handle it.

One thing I often proclaim is that people should start looking outside of their websites when trying top optimize for search engines. Branding and marketing are becoming more important on places where people exactly are and search is going to play a much bigger role in branding than it did until now. I’ve written about that several times and I’ve even talked about it many times.

One thing I always have to watch out for when I’m saying these things is that people think they can ignore all the on site elements except for linkbuilding and that life has just become a lot easier, because you don’t need SEO anymore.

Here is where my story hits a ‘dangerous’ area. Because I do not believe that you do not need SEO anymore. In fact, SEO is the basis for becoming successful in your marketing and branding efforts. So on site SEO should be step 1, off- site SEO step 2. And though opportunities are growing, it is definitely not becoming ‘easier’ to optimize. The job of an SEO just got a bit more difficult again. But the SEO professional can handle that…

The job of an SEO evolved more or less from the job of a programmer. What you can see is that many programmers caught the “SEO-bug” and started working on optimizing websites from a code-perspective. Trying to make sites rank better based on things they can change in the code. That slowly changed when the technical parts were not the only ranking factors anymore. In came the textual part. When search engines decided a page was going to be ranked based on the content, all of a sudden SEOs were forced to think about text. And that is not always easy for a technical person who sometimes rather “talks-in-code” than in text.

But the SEOs got the hang of it and now had two major things they were supposed to do: optimize a website based on text and optimize the code. Or wait, is there more? Yes there is. Remember the idea Larry Page once had,.. Pagerank? This algorithm meant that another huge ranking factor is links. Links from other websites. So the SEO needed to do three things: think about the content, optimize the technique and get links. They could get links
technically by simply building a lot of sites but they should also get in touch with other website owners to ask them for links. In a way they were ‘selling’ their own sites to get the links.

Maybe the fact that SEOs are not sales people has something to do with some of the crappy link-exchange requests we get daily?

At this time an SEO combined three jobs in one: a technical programmer, a content writer/ editor and a sales person. And don’t think that each of the jobs they have to do is simply following a list. With the ever changing search engines the way things work within all of these areas can change from one day to another, just look at all the local aspects. Must be hard to do that within 40 hours. But hey, the SEO did it!

So that was the job of an SEO. And in comes web 2.0. Social Media, websites like Slideshare, Scribd, video sites like YouTube. You can all use them to get your brand out there and make a name for yourself. For that you need to first find out which are the places you want to be. Then optimize for that specific place and then get it all back to the original place you were optimizing for: your website.

This last change, the one I keep on talking about to many people is a change which also is added to the job-description of the SEO. They now have a fourth job to combine: marketer. And you know what? They just do it.

I don’t think you’ll hear of many jobs who have four that different jobs hidden inside one job. With the latest change, the SEOs job just got a little bit more difficult. But the SEOs can handle that, trust me

Bio

Bas van den Beld is a Web/search strategist, international search specialist, trainer, and well-respected blogger. Bas keeps up to date about all facets of online marketing worldwide and especially Europe.

Bas is the owner of Stateofsearch.com. He is also the owner of NetTraject, a Dutch company that advises on international search matters and provides training in search engine marketing and project management.

Bas is also a regular speaker on different marketing and search events. He’s also host of several podcasts, including a weekly show on a WebmasterRadio.FM. Bas also publishes on his personal blog, www.basvandenbeld.com.

Although Bing is currently very much the also-ran, in terms of search engine market share; their partnership with Yahoo! (which will be in effect in the UK before year end) plus their increasing innovations in search technology, plus rather enormous marketing budget means that they will be a serious contender in 2011.

I firmly believe that Bing will start to erode some of Google market share and by the start of 2011 will have at least 10% share if not more. Now is the time to start planning and acting on improving rank on Bing.

What’s the News?

Bing have confirmed that CTR is a factor in their ranking algorithm. This information comes from Barry Schwartz, news editor of Search Engine Land and Schwartz has carefully detailed and personally checked the information with his source, Steve Tullis – Senior Program Manager Lead, Bing. You can read the full story here.

What is CTR?

CTR is the abbreviation for “click-thru rate”. It is a derivative metric determined by dividing the number of times your listing is clicked (clicks), by the total number of times your listing is shown (search impressions), to determine your listing CTR, which is expressed as a percentage.

Example: My site is in position 10 for the term “car insurance”, on Bing, which is searched for 10,000 times a day. I receive 300 clicks a day from Bing, on that listing.

300 /10,000 = 0.03 (expressed as percentage) 3% CTR

What Factors Determine CTR?

Setting aside comparative CTR to competing listings, and the variation afforded by position on-page; in my first-hand experience of working at a search engine, CTR increases or decreases according to assumed relevancy to query term. I.e. the more relevant the page (may be assumed to be by the user,) to the query term, as signified by the title, description and URL of the listing; then the more likely the user will click that listing. Bing generally display the page’ meta title and meta description, as the search result snippet.

What Does this Mean for Rank?

In the Search Engine Land piece, Steve Tullis of Bing is asked if they use CTR as a ranking factor, “yes, we do – but it is one of many factors.” So assuming all other factors determining the ranking order for the sites on a search results page are fairly equal, we might imagine that a listing with compelling, relevant title, description and URL gets a slightly better than average CTR (than might be considered network average,) for the position then this may contribute to that listing moving up the ranking somewhat.

Do I Need to Do Anything?

I’m not a great believer in deliberately optimising for any single known componant of a single search engine’ ranking- algorithm, however in this case we’re talking about click-thru rate; which ranking factors aside, should always be on the agenda for your search engine optimisation team.

I’ve written a rather more detailed piece on four ways to increase organic search CTR for Econsultancy in the past, which is a good place to start. Ultimately, you do need to consider the user journey – in that the query-term, search snippet (normally meta data) and subsequent landing page, all need to provide a relevant and consistent experience. After all; you can optimise the shizzle out of your search result snippet, but if your web page content doesn’t match, you’ve missed an opportunity to convert a potential customer.

I intend to follow up this post with a look at the type of behavioural data CTR as ranking factor provides, plus examine the merits and demerits of CTR as ranking factor.

It is good practise to have your own customised error page, which is in your own template look and feel, as this provides a consistent user experience and allows you to communicate a suitable message; whilst being in control of that message. Additionally if you don’t create a formal process for errors of this nature you may risk how well your site is perceived by search engines.

Most search engine optimisation and usability experts will recommend you have a customised error page that makes some apology to the user, explains in basic terms what has happened, and suggests some useful and popular content or pages to visit as an alternative. Tip: Don’t reference “404″ in the page content as it is meaningless to the user.

Here’s what we do, which seems to work for us :

Example of a customised error page

Whilst all of this is professional and does something to rescue a poor user experience; for a commercial website, this is a missed opportunity. Make the most of your error pages by turning what could have potentially been a poor user experience into a commercial opportunity by creating a commercial error page.

Tips for Creating a Commercial Error Page

1. Start by doing some simple analysis into your most popular products and pages with highest conversion rates.

2. Do your research first, and if your are a new site, wait a couple of months to get some statistically meaningful performance data.

3. Don’t just put your most expensive products on the page, as this may look hollow and may not convert at all. Wait until you have some interaction and conversion rate data beforehand.

4. Identify top 3 to 10 products and present them in the error page content.

5. Identify top converting pages and explain what these pages are, asking if they might be of interest to the user.

6. Put your search box on your error page.

7. Optimise your error page by testing performance of different products.

8. Analyse the visitor route to error and see if there is a pattern or commercial inference to be made.

Here’s the best commercialised error page I’ve ever seen.

Best Commercial Error Page We Have Seen

Note the friendly and apologetic intro, the huge search box in prominent position, and the placement of the trendy, popular and celebrity-fave footwear items. This brand is working hard to make me like them and to get my business.

It’s worth saying that I was surprised to find a huge number of giants in online retail with a lot of opportunity to increase commercial usability and user experience, by improving on their current solution. Such as ASOS and their automatic redirect to the homepage , Argos and their complete lack of customisation and possibly the biggest surprise of all was Amazon and their slightly formal and completely non-commercial message; which for a web retail giant like Amazon, could be a considerable bit of scooping up to be done. (As you have gathered, I didn’t need to look past ‘A’ to find a surprising amount of missed opportunity.)

Automatic re-direct to home

Er... Where Am I?

Mal Function

Kudos to Zappos for leading the field. Do please let me know if you come across any really good or really bad error pages in the comments!

If Immanuel Kant was alive today, I think he’d be an SEO on the side. I think the combination of knowledge fuelled by common results of repeated experimentation, combined with the all- too- common Cartesian doubt (did we really drop a place – or did they gain a place) would seriously appeal to him.

So, it is with some sense of compassion that I wanted to reference this hilarious Google result for the search term “Google Ireland”. Have a look at the top ranking results…

Notes on a small Ireland

How good is that?

Maybe someone did a misspell in the meta keywords, cos – like New Zealand is an Ireland, right? Of course the search engines don’t use meta-keywords to inform the ranking algorithm though.

Regardless. My point is that SEO is an inexact science, though we can use learned inferences and experimentation to support our hypotheses, but when all is said and done – even Google can fall foul of their own algorithm.

Diddums.

We can hopefully help you a little further as here we’ve taken the Top 5 Ranking Factors from the SEOmoz report, and explained what they refer to in layman terms.

1. Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links

Anchor text refers to the clickable text part of a hyperlink. Anchor text is thought to be weighted quite highly in search engine algorithms as the linked text is normally highly relevant to the landing page. Thus, the anchor text of a link is an indicator of what the linked page is about and can help search engine spiders understand the subject of the target webpage better.

It is best to try and use anchor text which is similar or identical to the keyword targets for your website. Whether the link is from from an internal or external source, even if you can’t use one of your keyword targets, never, ever use a generic phrase such as ‘click here’.

2. External Link Popularity

External link popularity is a measure of the quality and quantity of external links that point to your website. External link popularity is an off-page factor that is supposedly impartial. The theory is that the more links that point to your website, the more popular it is therefore the more useful the pages should be. Content-rich sites should attract lots of links easily; content-poor websites should find it difficult to attract websites.

However it isn’t just about the quantity of links – it’s also about the quality. Not all incoming links are equal; a link from a well-repsected site from a well-respected page (such as the BBC’s homepage) will be worth far, far more than 10 links from an obscure link directory. Naturally, the more respected the website is, the harder it is to get a backlink therefore the more weight the link will carry.

One-way links are thought to be the best kind of link to have (where Site A => Site B only). Reciprocal linking (where Site A => Site B, and Site B => Site A) is useful, particularly if both websites are well respected, however the link is not thought to carry as much weight as a one-way link. Three way links (Site A => Site B => Site C => Site A) are at attempt by some webmasters to create more ‘natural’ looking links. Three way linking can sometimes be better than normal reciprocal links as each link looks like a one-way link.

3. Diversity of Link Sources

Link diversity refers to the number of different root domains that link to your website. Although link quality and link quantity are important, the variety of links is also a critical factor in the search engine algorithms. Example www.themediaflow.com/about and www.themediaflow.com/contact are two different links but are not diverse as the root domain is the same ‘themediaflow’.

The more domains that link to you, the more trust and authority your site is likely to have. Links from a variety of sites are also likely to create new traffic opportunities as well as giving your site exposure to a larger audience. Linking repeatedly from the same domains also looks slightly artificial – a wider sphere of influence means your site will tend to look more authentic.

Having a wide source of links is also a good insurance policy – if you have links from just one or two websites, what if one of the sites loses all of it’s content? You’ve suddenly lost a whole bunch of links. Or what if the search engines adjust their search engine algorithm? You could be out in the cold.

As a final word on link building, when you are building links for your site, don’t just look for the followed links (when links are created, you can apply an HTML attribute called ‘nofollow’ to the link which tells the search engines that the hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the SERP. Many blogs, directories and bookmarking sites have ‘nofollow’ applied as standard to any link). OK, ‘nofollow’ links won’t pass your website pages any link juice however it is slightly suspicious to only have full-fat links pointing at your website – it will probably look more natural if you have diversity in your links. Also, link building is not just about the SERP – it’s about traffic. Some of the ‘nofollow’ links may actually drive good (free) traffic at your site – and having a diverse source of traffic is great insurance against search engine algorithm changes.

4. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag

There are two titles that are worthy of mention: the first is within the metadata and the second is within a link.

Metadata title tags should appear in every page on your website and every page on your site should have unique title tags created for it. Titles should always include the keyword targets for that particular page and it is also a useful place to put in alternate spellings in the hope of ranking well (e.g. customisation vs customization). Always front-load your titles with your keywords, but don’t put too many in as this will ‘water down’ the relevance.

Link titles serve two purposes: to help users predict what will happen if they follow a link and to give more relevance pointers to the search engine spiders. Link titles are usually seen by the user when their mouse pointer hovers over a link. The link title should be descriptive, however they should ideally be less than 60 characters and certainly no more than 80 characters long. The link title should be used for supplementary information and to backup the anchor text of a link.

5. Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains

The link distance refers to how many hops you are away from a ‘Trusted Domain’. The closer you are to a ‘Trusted Domain’ the more trust/authority you inherit from that link.

So what exactly is a ‘Trusted Domain’? Trusted Domains are domains which search engines believe they can trust. Unfortunately, there is no known public list of trusted domains although places such as brands are likely to be on the list. Once a site is classed as a trusted domain, it is believed that any link published within the site will get a little bit of extra link juice. Even if you can’t get a link directly from a trusted domain, by having a link from another domain which does have a link from the trusted domain, you will probably still see a little extra link juice.

I’d say we’re pretty much in agreement with the SEOmoz Top 5 Ranking factors, though there are a number of other factors that can have both a positive and negative effect on your ranking in the SERPs that are also not to be ignored. Finally; one thing that is worth stressing time and again, is that you need to have a fair amount of good- quality, original content that grows and updates frequently. When it comes to SEO you really can not polish a turd.