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If you’re participating in social media, you’re going to want to know how it’s working. But before you even begin to measure your success, you need to know what you’re measuring it against. Define concrete goals for your efforts. Those might be to increase your web-site traffic by a certain amount each month, to increase conversion values, or some other goal. Whatever those goals are, use them as a guide as you’re planning your social-media marketing efforts.

Once you’ve decided what you want from social-media optimization, you can measure the results that you’re gaining from your efforts. The most obvious indicator is web-site traffic. If your traffic begins to climb, it’s a pretty good bet that your social-media efforts are working.

But if you don’t want to rely solely on site traffic as in indication of your success, there are several other elements you can look to in the effort to determine how successful your social-media efforts are.

There are many good web analytics packages that will track what the most popular content on your site is. I think that Google Analytics is one of the best analytics solutions out there, and as its free, its well worth a look at. With this software you can see where your site visitors are coming from and how long they’re spending on your page. This information will help you determine which of your content is most successful and who is sending the most traffic to your blog, so that you can capitalize on that.

Next, you can monitor the number of visitors who are actually interacting with your content by checking your guest book, forums, or comment capabilities. Guest books aren’t nearly as popular as they once were, but if you’re participating in a social network and you don’t have forums or comment capabilities on your blog, you’re missing a large part of the value of social media.

Also pay attention to how often you’re added to social booking sites. Sites like del.icio.us and StumbledUpon are a couple of the social bookmarking sites that can help boost your site traffic. The easiest way to monitor your site in social bookmarking networks is to create an account with them and then use the account to search for your URLs. In other words, who is actually adding your site/article/blog posts to sites.

Measure how many readers are actually subscribing to your RSS feeds. The number of subscribers you have on your RSS feeds will be a good indicator of how well you’re doing in your SMO efforts. The more subscribers you have, the more popular your site is.

Another way to measure your success with social bookmarking is to watch who is linking to you. If you have a good analytics program, it will probably provide you with a report that shows where incoming links originated. If your analytics program doesn’t provide this information, you can figure out who’s linking to you using that old standby, a web search. To find out who is linking to your site use the following search string, replacing your website with the actual URL of the pages you want to
track: link:http://www.yourwebsite.com.

One last way to monitor your success in the social-media space is to monitor how many people are connected to you. In MySpace and FaceBook, that might mean how many friends you have. In LinkedIn, it would be how many colleagues you are connected to, and on Digg the measurement you’re looking for is the number of times your content is tagged.

All of these are indications that you’re being followed by someone. And the more people with whom you can build a relationship, obviously the better your success will be. And that’s probably the most important rule of all to remember about social-media networking and social-media optimization: build the relationship first and the rest falls into place.

Guest post by Andy MacDonald, author of The SEO & Marketing Tips for Webmasters Blog.

Tags: social media, Web 2.0

Deep links are an important strategy in SEO. Ratios, such as the number of deep links to non optimized links are a fundamental mathematical equations that determine the percentage of inbound links from other sites to pages other than your homepage.

Using deep links both internally to link to relevant content from a topical page and externally by link building or controlling inbound link anchor text in the proper context is important to define or produce relevance for your website.Everything in nature leaves a trail and similarly each form and function can be reduced to its mathematical equation. But how does this apply to SEO?

Traffic is based on two things, “links from other sites and links from other sites”. Sounds pretty straight forward right? An advertisement whether it is pay per click, a press release or an image banner is a link, a search result is a link, we navigate from page to page or site to site with links, the underlying conclusion denotes that by mastering the context of frequency, consistency, structure, site architecture and the prevalence of continuity, we can send a clear signal to search engines and humans alike about the content of our pages.

One way to do this is through building multiple links to pages other than your home page (known as deep linking or deep links). Through using deep links, you are passing on vital ranking potential to the site, which eventually transcends where the link is directed and flows link weight back to the home page.

This is why it is increasingly important to only have links that are targeted to share this vital link juice from the homepage with other areas that are an oasis for pages you wish to make pivotal in your site architectures framework.

Now for the exercise, the deep link / internal link audit.

1) determine which pages have the most link weight
2) determine which of your pages are optimized (with the appropriate anchor text)
3) consolidate internal links that are congruent with page theme
4) use deep links to give them traction in search engines for a higher relevance score

Deep links send a clear message to humans and search engines, that each page of your site is important, when harnessed properly, deep links are one of the most effective off page factors aside from anchor text relevance.

So, how do you determine what Google deems as the most relevant page for your keywords in your site when building links? Not sure, just ask with a simple link command.

site:sitedomain.com keyword or key phrase (just replace the sitedomain with your own and the keywords with the keywords you want to emphasize).

The page at the top of this search result represents the most worthy page to build links to strategically to emphasize that page as a potential landing page.

To take it one step further, you could log in to your Google Webmaster Tools account, look at the internal links tab and assess the link distribution framework of your site architecture and determine if you need to salvage some pages from starvation (orphaned pages) or use your power house link magnets (the pages with massive quantities of internal links) in a more optimized and refined manner. Personally with strong internal links right under your nose, the first thing you should do is perform a link audit.

For example, if I have a sub folder or sub page that has 1000 internal links referencing it from other parts of the site and less fortunate pages only have 7 internal links (and that is a page I want to rank in search engines) then I need to map out the flow of link weight to be more conducive to accomplish this.

The other point is, with only 7 internal links linking to an internal page, it may rank for an “exact match” phrase, but only for something on the bottom of the barrel compared to any potential keyword combination enter in a boolean search query.

To rank for a competitive term or key phrase you need two things (1) strong internal links focused on quality and relevance from related pages (think Wikipedia who has an extremely high deep link ratio) and (2) enough external links (using those same keywords) from relevant sources.

Internally (to increase relevance) just find your strongest pages or determine which pages are linking to that page, by cutting and pasting the full URL in Yahoo Site Explorer for example. Select the only from this URL drop down menu and look at the pages that link to it.

After taking note, go through those pages and determine the positioning and relevance of the outbound link and determine if you are effectively employing the most appropriate anchor text (for every link on that page).

Once you edit or audit the page (by use the main root phrase of the target page as anchor text) then go through all of the pages from the list and tidy up your internal links.

Something as simple as this can increase your internal links distribution of link weight and relevance and have multiples pages making their debut in search engines to drive even more relevant traffic to your pages.

Now you can consider that stage one in honing internal link weight, but in order to “flip the switch”, you will need to do the same using external links from other pages. However that is another topic in its entirety.

On page factors are often overlooked for their ability to impact just how visible your site is or how it impacts your hang time for competitive phrases. Through leveraging deep links (both internally and externally) you elevate your content, the pages and the site to another level, which will become painfully obvious to your competition over time.

In closing, finding the appropriate deep link ratio for your pages, ensuring that the informational structure of your content has a blueprint and that you are not simply partaking in random practices that diffuse continuity are the foundation of advanced SEO.

Reducing complex algorithms to their root functions to reverse engineer relevance falls into this category, but sometimes all you need is common sense, directive and a penchant for research to shed light on why your #20 instead of #1 for a competitive phrase.

Deep links most definitely hold a key to unlocking your websites latent ranking potential and when coupled with basic LSI (latent semantic indexing) and word stemming, it is possible to optimize a site for an entire market segment, not just a few high vertical keywords.

Just remember it’s not about who has the biggest link, it is about who distributes the link juice better than the competition. It is a competitive marketplace out there, and there is a reason there are only 10 spots at the top for the creme of the crop. Optimizing ones internal link structure and mapping the appropriate balance of external link ratios is one area of search engine optimization that any website can benefit from.

Jeffrey Smith is an active internet marketing optimization strategist, consultant and the founder of Seo Design Solutions Seo Company http://www.seodesignsolutions.com. He has actively been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a wealth of collective experiences and fresh marketing strategies to individuals involved in online business.

Tags: Deep Links and Anchor Text, Optimized Site Architecture, Structured Internal Linking, The Power of Deep Links

In today’s online world search engine rankings can make your business succeed, and while rankings in Yahoo and MSN are very valuable, their combined market value is still less than that of Google. This makes achieving top rankings in Google that much more important.

In this three-part series on How to Optimize for Google we will touch on a number of important aspects for top Google rankings including website optimization, links, Google Webmaster tools, and a number of other considerations.

The focus of Part 1 will be with on page website optimization.

THE RIGHT KEYWORDS
This article is not about keyword research so I will not spend too much time on this topic, however, I felt it was important to at least brush on this slightly. If you are interested in reading more please see Keyword Research for Organic SEO.

Make sure that your targets are achievable. If you select the wrong keywords it can make your entire optimization experience essentially a waste. Choose keywords that are attainable but yet still offer a reasonable search frequency for your industry. Your phrase selection should also be targeted to bring qualified traffic to your site.

Using the hotel industry as an example, targeting the word “hotel” would make very little sense but by narrowing it down to “Victoria BC hotel” you now have less competition, and a more qualified audience. Keep your targets in perspective and go after the obtainable rankings.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Google, optimize