Whew! Just got back from a whirlwind wedding, honeymoon and road trip combo – and of course, being the web junkie that I am, I couldn’t help but think about work. (Bad Tara, bad!) Here are some lessons from the road on how to address your online audience!

5. If they want X, they’ll probably want Y. One thing that really impressed me about our honeymoon cruise to Ensenada was how well our cruise liner had thought of everything we could possibly want to do (or spend money on). For example, they plan on doing a formal night on the cruise, which is great for fools like me who like to make anything romantic. Then, as you make your way to your formal dinner, feeling dressed to the nines, there’s a staff of professional photographers waiting to take your portrait. I couldn’t turn them down! Even with the $20/print pricetag.

You can take this lesson and apply it to your website by really thinking about which services or products your clients will want in addition to what they’re offering on the page. For example, a cosmetic surgeon’s page on liposuction might be a great place to put a Call-to-Action for brachioplasty (arm lift) or buttock augmentation. This helps your bounce rate, time on site and helps convert visitors to patients.

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There are many of us who see the BBB sticker posted on trucks and business buildings around town, and the meaning of it kind of surpasses those of us who are less savvy with internet marketing. Yes, the Better Business Bureau has some awesome implications for your business in the physical world, if anyone knows what it is or what it stands for. But the real power of the BBB can be seen in your web presence. Being a member of the BBB and having a listing on BBB.org can be one of the strongest things you can do for your online presence. The most important “person” to see your online influence with the BBB is Google, and other search engines. Here’s seven reasons why your BBB listing will improve your search engine results!

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I may be a total girl when it comes to actually using most of the tools in anyone’s garage, but I absolutely love them. I love the magic that happens when a painstaking task becomes effortless thanks to a brilliantly engineered device. Since I like to nerd-out about my favorite things while talking about SEO, let’s see if I can draw some parallels between my three favorite actual tools, and their theoretical SEO counterparts!

The “mini power tool” (shown in the photo) that was developed and used by NASA for the last repair of the Hubble Space Telescope combined with the fastener capture plate developed for many uses on the same mission is an awesomely specific and effective combination. The mini power tool was developed specifically to allow astronauts to remove tiny screws from one panel of the Hubble telescope. It had to be made smaller than previous power tools in order to gently remove the small screws, and a light was installed in the front of it so astronauts could clearly see them. The fastener capture plate allows for the screws to be removed cleanly, capturing all the screws as they are removed so they don’t drift off into space… or worse, inside the telescope.

This tool reminds me a lot of Yahoo! Site Explorer. It is an invaluable tool to SEOs for either evaluating your own backlinks or looking at the backlinks of a competitor. There’s really no better tool for the job. SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer is a close replacement, and certainly offers some nice metrics in addition to links, but we’ve found that it doesn’t give as complete or accurate a list as YSE. We are devastated with the thought that it might go away. Both of these tools are great examples of tools engineered to a very specific purpose. However, they also both share a ginourmous fault – being a one-trick pony. Yahoo! Site Explorer only shows us backlinks – why not also show local citations and reviews? Why not allow an option to see social media citations? Yahoo could also take a page out of SEOmoz’s book and show some trust rankings. My next favorite is a much, much more versatile tool…

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As the competition for first page listings, web traffic and business leads keeps getting tougher, optimizers are always looking for new ways to get inbound links and authority and credibility for their clients’ sites.

The fact that results from search queries now increasingly include real time search results , it’s becoming imperative for us to craft strategies above and beyond the traditional link-building methods.

While making sure that the fundamentals like custom Title tags, compelling descriptions, high quality content and user friendly interfaces remain the cornerstone of our work, we can successfully use some strategies to boost the presence of our sites.

• Publishing targeted blog posts, interacting with the viewers and syndicating blog via feeds.
• Making sure Google Maps and Bing Local listings are verified and updated with the latest media rich information about the site.
• Finding Local directories to add sites and create a presence within a smaller, more focussed geographic area.
• Using Twitter and Facebook to build a brand following for your site, thus proving the popularity of your site to the search engines.
• Using e-PRs , articles and press releases to target specific key phrases through latest updates.
• Using Video especially YouTube to build a strong presence for your site.

These strategies will bring definite advantages to our sites, helping us get an edge over competition in the search engine rankings and potentially bring in high quality web traffic and business leads for our clients.

Whether it’s on blogs or articles or any Internet Marketing related news, the message seems to be that CRO or conversion rate optimization is the  new SEO. SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin recently declared that conversion optimization is the most underused and highest ROI activity in the marketing department.

So what is CRO?  Is this within the realm of SEO or does this fall more in the  design and web development area? How do we as optimizers conquer this new mountain and get success for our clients.

CRO In broad terms, conversion optimization is the implementation of techniques on a website that enhance a vistor’s experience when they visit the website, so they can  quickly find what they’re looking for,  move without delay through the site and get to the point where they  get converted into potential clients.

Optimizing for Conversion

The first step in improving conversion rates is to define the site’s objective – Is it to sell products or services,  provide information or generate click-throughs ?

Once the  site’s objective is defined, the next step is to develop metrics and carry out regular tests  to identify problems and trends.

Once the data has beeen gathered, immediate action needs to be taken to address problems and enhance the overall site usability.

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Did you know that you can use web analytics to track different SEO and internet marketing practices? You bet your sweet giraffe you can! Here are five really great ways to track your efforts as an optimizer.

5. Event Tracking. This is a method you can use where, by adding a small snippet of code to select areas of your site, you can very specifically track visitor clicks on certain areas of your site. This is especially handy with things like Calls-To-Action that go to your social media pages (buttons to your Twitter profile, for example). This is also handy in doing things like experimenting with the location of certain links or buttons on a page, to see if they get more clicks. Although you should definitely read Google Code’s guide on Event Tracking, implementing the Event Tracking code is not as difficult as they make it sound.  Simply add this code:

onClick="pageTracker._trackEvent('Category', 'Action', 'Label');"

Within the code of whatever you want to track. For images, this is within the <img> tag, for links this is within the <a> tag. Swap out the “Category, Action, Label” tags with your own custom tags. One example might be, “Twitter” for Category, “Follow” for Action, and “SideNav” for Label. You will start to see hits on these spots in the “Content” section of Google Analytics, under the “Event Tracking” report!

4. Custom URLs. Custom URLs using Google’s URL Builder are a great way to track external content, or content that you send off into the world with a link back to your client’s site. This can be anything from a Press Release, to a Linkbait Article, to a banner ad on an external website.

It won’t track how many views a page gets, but it will track how many times the URL that you create is clicked, and it will add specific labels so that you know where the clicks came from. Our Account Managers wrote a great blog post outlining how to use the Google URL Builder to this purpose.

Once the URL has been set up, you will start to see hits come in the “Traffic Sources” section of Google Analytics, in the “Campaigns” report.

3. Search Engines Report. The value of this report to an optimizer is so self-explanatory that I won’t even bother explaining it. It is also found in the “Traffic Sources” section. Check it out.

2. Referring Sites Report. This is a really simple report, found in the “Traffic Sources” section of Google Analytics, but it can have a treasure trove of information on your link building efforts! This report will show you all the non-search engine websites that send traffic to your site. If one of your link building sites is sending a lot of traffic, then you know it is a valuable resource. Conversely, if you’re spending money on a link resource that never sends you traffic, you might want to reconsider investing in that website…

1. Keywords Report. One use of the keywords report that you might not have considered is that if a keyword has a lot of visits but a really high bounce rate (the % of people who visit your site then leave without viewing any other pages) then it may be that you don’t have a good page for that keyword, or that the page isn’t well optimized. This can be extremely valuable for making sure that your website’s pages are really well targeted towards your chosen keywords. I usually like to complement the Keywords report with Google Insights for Search, to compare keyword popularity across all of Google.

For more information on analyzing data in Google Analytics, you can check out my other recent blog entry, “Quickly and Visually Interpret Data in Google Analytics.”

How do you use Google Analytics to measure your SEO practices? We’d love to hear it! Please feel free to share your knowledge in our comments.