Backlinks vs. Page Content
So which is better SEO for your website; getting more backlinks, or improving your page content? This is an issue I’ve been dealing with for some time now, and I think the evidence clearly shows that it is your page content that is most important. Google is increasingly downgrading the worth of backlinks, and I recently had another example that proves it.
Specifically, I moved a large website (with over 500 web pages) into a content management system. I moved all the actual page content over from the old site to the new one – with the one big exception being that the number of pages was drastically reduced, down to about 125 web pages. There was a new marketing director who thought if we made fewer pages, the site might be easier to navigate for the user – which is a valid point.
But how did this effect the website’s SEO values? Why, for many of the keywords they dropped drastically, of course. Some of the main product pages remain strong, but many of the long tail keywords have fallen off the map. Without losing a single backlink to the site!
So this story reinforces my belief that it is your page content that needs to be addressed first when working on your site SEO. Because unless your site is optimized for a set of keywords – how can a search engine ever rank it well?
And no, I’m not saying backlinks are worthless – I’m just saying you need to ignore the whole backlink mantra until you get your house in order.
Dashes vs. Underscores
Posted by Joe in Maintenance, SEO on November 3rd, 2011
I still see lots of URLs having underscores, so thought I’d discuss that a little. Who cares, right? Well, Google cares, for one. If you use an underscore in your URL like this: www.mysite.com/my_best_post.html – then what Google will do is join the words together when it gets indexed “mybestpost”. On the other hand when you use dashes: www.mysite.com/my-best-post.html – then Google will consider the words separate and index them that way.
Both ways will work, as proven by so many old sites still using the underscores. But the dashes are definitely better for your SEO health, and every little bit helps.
Periodic Table of SEO
Here’s a slick presentation of the different SEO factors, presented in a ‘periodic table’ format, making it an easy read. Explaining SEO can be hard to the uninitiated sometimes, so this should help. I especially like they way the show the negative SEO values colored red and yellow at the bottom.
Panda Update
Posted by Joe in Maintenance, SEO on July 12th, 2011
I’ve said for years now that the goal of Google is to put SEO people out of business, and that may have been a little harsh. What might be more accurate is to say Google is redefining what it means to SEO a website. As SEO tactics were adopted, Google would implement counter-measures to negate them. From loading up a site with keywords, to getting lots of bogus backlinks – each SEO tactic was incorporated into the Google algorithm and new tactics would be searched for.
So now Google has come out with the Panda update, and with it comes a need for SEO people to ‘reset’ their best-practices again. The panda update focuses more than ever on the site quality, which makes sense if you remember site quality is what Google wants to have in their search results. What does this mean for you? Here is what Search Engine Land has to say about it:
The SEO model has changed with Panda in that, rather than getting as many URLs as you can indexed, you now want only your highest-quality, most important URLs indexed. Consistent signals should be sent as to which pages are most important:
- Decide which URLs are canonical and create strong signals (rel canonical, robot exclusion, internal link profile, XML sitemaps)
- Decide which URLs are your most valuable and ensure they are indexed and well optimized
- Remove any extraneous, overhead, duplicate, low value and unnecessary URLs from the index
- Build internal links to canonical, high-value URLs from authority pages (strong mozRank, unique referring domains, total links, are example metrics)
- Build high-quality external links via social media efforts
SEOmoz also has some good info, if you are interested in the subject.
The Importance of Your Site Navigation
You can use your site navigation to “help” Google assign SEO values to your pages. The concept is an old one, but I don’t think is understood by many people. So let me break this down a little as to how it works.
Obviously the first purpose of the site navigation is to make it easy for your site visitors to move around you site and find what they need. But the other purpose often neglected is its importance to your SEO value. This is especially true for large websites having many pages to it. Google evaluates your site structure and how it is linked together to help decide which pages are important, which ones are not.
To visualize how to organize your website navigation, think of a triangle. At the top of the triangle is your homepage – the most important page on your site. Then arranged across the bottom of the triangle is all your main category pages; for instance for a animal website it might be Dogs, Cats, and Birds, etc. All of these lesser pages are linked back to the top homepage giving it the top spot in importance – and so far I’m probably explaining stuff you have already figured out but stick with me here.
The important part is the next levels you set up, for instance the one for your Dogs page. It too is within its own triangle, where that page is at the top and across the bottom is all the different Dog pages you have. All of the individual Dog pages must link back up to the main Dog page, thus forming a triangle, telling Google that it is the main Dog page. The way you do this is via a second level of navigation. So at the top of your page you have your main navigation, but then you also have a lower level of navigation on the inner pages as well, maybe in the margin of the page. So this second navigation will have at its head “Dogs”, and under that list all the different Dog categories. All of these second level pages will have this second navigation on it.
Then you follow the same idea for your other pages, only on those pages you have a different set of links on it relevant to Cats. And so on, and so on. Your top three levels may be on your main navigation, with the ‘Product 1′ being in a drop down menu. Important points to remember:
- For SEO value you want to name lower pages for the main keywords, so Google will find them. So for instance, name the page Labradors under the Hunting Dogs category, and have the navigation link to the page also called ‘Labradors’.
- You don’t want every page of your website linking to every other page (for sites having more than 15 or 20 pages). The top main navigation links to the main category pages, then the second level of navigation links the others.
- You don’t want any page of the site to be more than three clicks away – better if it is only two. The first click gets the person to the “Hunting Dogs” page, then the sub menu on that page gets them to the Labrador page.
- By focusing the lower pages to the one above it, you concentrate the SEO value to that particular page. Google then understands the site hierarchy and will assign SEO values appropriately, and you can have some control over how it is done.
Reciprocal Linking
Is reciprocal linking bad? This is the practice where you place a link on your site, in exchange for someone else doing the same back to you from theirs. I think the answer to this question depends on your site, how well known it is already. Because if you have a new website with few or no backlinks coming to it, then getting reciprocal links can help you to get started, to help you create your ‘web presence’.
On the other hand if you have an older established website that is already decently ranked by the search engines, then reciprocal linking can be bad. By linking to other sites, you lend your good credibility to them and can thus dilute what you have. So as your site moves up the ranking ladder, you don’t want to be linking to sites of lesser or questionable value.
And if you do create a link page on your site, here are a few rules to follow:
- Give it a good name like “Partners” or “Sites We Recommend”. Don’t call it your backlink page.
- Place links on the page that really will be helpful to your website visitors.
- The links should be helpful to your customers, relevant to your industry, and be quality sites
- Include not only sites that are linking to you – also link to sites that don’t. Magazine sites about your industry, trade groups, and any other sites people might consider ‘helpful’ to them.
Having nothing but a bunch of links to bogus sites is bad, it identifies your site as nothing but a spammer site engaged in a linking scheme. Google says this about it:
“some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites… and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results”
Do you really need backlinks?
I’ve worked SEO for some years now, and remember fondly (not) how I would put my websites into various directories, lists, blogs and phone books. Spent quite a bit of time doing it, and today find that it means next to nothing.
So I saw the image below recently on Wikipedia, under Page Rank, which clearly shows that 1 good backlink will trump a hundred lesser backlinks every time, (the orange website C). Even though website B (red) has lots more backlinks, website C is almost as high with just the single link coming into its site from a highly ranked site.
So the point I would make here is this: stop wasting your time on getting lots of poor back links. Instead concentrate on getting authority backlinks – backlinks that are from “quality” websites relevant to your own. I’ll write a another post on this, because it is important enough to deserve its own space.
And to be clear on one point. For a new website just starting out, the lesser known backlinks can and do help to get your site discovered around the web.
Website Analytics
So which website statistics are most important to look at when evaluating the performance of your website? The easy answer is to say the traffic levels – and you would be dead wrong. A high traffic website can still fail if it is not converting the traffic into sales or leads.
So for someone like me who gets hired to improve the performance of a website, the website analytics are crucial to the cause. Knowing which statistics to look at, understanding what they mean, as well as making them understandable to the client is what it is all about. The first order of business is to get a good snapshot of how the site is performing right now, then second is to figure out how to make things better.
If you are selling stuff, or gathering leads from the site – a good performer is usually pretty easy to spot. With a good performer you don’t need to look at the statistics to know – you look in the cash register (smile). But wait a second, even with a so-called good performing website – don’t you want to improve it even more, make even more money? Of course you do!
And you don’t want to just look at the current statistics for the site – what is important is to know the trends. You put the statistics into a spreadsheet if you have to each week, and that way you can tell if you are improving or not. You can take an action on the site and then watch and see if it results in the desired way.
When I first work on a site, I can usually get some significant improvements made because the site is usually missing some fundamental stuff – this is the low hanging fruit. But as you continue, it gets harder and harder to improve things, and at that point you have to look for incremental improvements over time – which is only identified by using trend data.
Anyways, sorry for being so long-winded with this. But with that in mind, here is a breakdown of some stats I tend to watch close. The most important ones are #1 – #3, the others are helpful indicators for your site.
- Traffic level breakdown – knowing who it is coming into your site, broken down into 4 main areas.
- SEO traffic. Your ‘seo traffic’ is coming in from the search engines, and can be improved by implementing some SEO tactics and strategies. This traffic is highly valued because it is free, and typically represents the level of new customers you are attracting.
- Referral traffic. This is traffic coming to you from other websites. Also helps with your SEO efforts because these are the holy backlinks everyone talks about.
- Direct traffic. This is the traffic coming from bookmarks, or otherwise from people who already know you.
- SEM traffic. This is your paid traffic like PPC, banner ads, or what have you. A larger company probably has this broken down further by source.
- Keyword ranking is important because you will want to increase your SEO traffic into the site. Find a tool that will check the ranking of your desired keywords, and measure them each week.
- Goals achieved tells you if the website visitor is doing what you want, buying something, submitting a lead, funneling to certain information, etc.
- Bounce rate will show you if people are actually viewing your site, or coming to it by accident.
- Pages per visit will show how interested people are in your site and what you are offering.
- Unique visitors will tell you how many new visitors are coming into the site, instead of returning visitors.
- Top content will give a list of pages that are most visited on your site.
- Site navigation will tell you the most often traveled paths thru your site.
I’m Number One!
I shake my head over some of the promises being made to website owners regarding SEO. I get lots of spam emails myself , where some SEO company based out of India is promising to make me “number 1 in the search engines!” So let me address this a little bit, put it into perspective.
First off, the point is not just to be “number 1″ – the point is to be “number 1″ for the keyword that you want. Huge difference. Anyone can get number 1 rankings for the keyword phrase “doohickey 123″ by simply placing that prominently on their website. Since no one else is competing for that phrase – give it about 2 weeks and you will be number 1 in google for that term. That is the scam – they take advantage of the fact that people don’t really understand what SEO is about.
If you make yourself a website and have high hopes for it’s success, an important area to look at is who your competitors are, and what are they optimizing for. Obviously they will be optimized for the keywords people are using the most – so a good tactic for new website owners is to use keywords that are more “niche” than what your competition is doing. So instead of optimizing for “idaho plumber” you optimize instead for “boise plumber” – you make the keyphrase less broad. To make that even more effective, you make lots of pages optimized for lots of niche keywords.
Another thing to watch out for with some SEO companies are the ones using what is called “black hat” techniques in your name. If you hire someone to get you better SEO, and they are using techniques forbidden by Google, then Google can ban your website – and it will take you awhile to recover from that.
I’ve had some good success doing SEO for my customers, and you want to know my secret? I do what Google says I should do – and I do it very well. I admit that doesn’t sound as attractive as promising you the “number 1 position” or “10,000 backlinks” – what it is though is effective. I’m just saying.
Which Test Won?
I do a lot of testing of webpages – pitting two versions of a page against each other in the attempt at raising its conversion rate (CR). The idea is to find the winner, and then do the test again having a newer version of the page to increase the CR even more.
Anyways, there is a website called Which Test Won that shows actual tests people have run, and for fun lets you try and guess which version of the test won. Pretty interesting, and a good place to look for ideas on how to improve your own site.