Archive for June, 2011
Track your Social Signals in Google Analytics and Webmaster tools
Thursday, June 30th, 2011 | SEO | No Comments
Its been a busy couple of weeks for Google, with the launch of their +1 and Google+ set to rival Facebook they are proving to have their finger on the pulse when it comes to becoming more social after appearing to be a little reluctant to jump on the social band wagon.
Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools have added new tools for tracking the impact of tweets, likes, +1s & more on your website’s traffic.
Google Webmaster Tools now allows you to report on the impact of the +1 Button and how this can affect your click through rate. You can also view the new “Activity Report” within Webmaster Tools which will help you see how many +1’s your site pages have received
A great new tool launched within Google Analytics is the Social Plugin Tracking tools. This not only tracks +1s but other Social Signals such as Twitter tweets, Facebook Likes and Facebook Sends.
Google recently admitted that Social Signals now do play a part in ranking success and this is backed up in a study by SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin for the new Ranking Factors for 2011 have been revealed with Social Signals play a significant part.
The Social Plugin Tracking allows you to create three reports: Social Engagement, Social Actions and Social Pages.
Social Engagement tracks behavior changes (time on site, pageviews, bounce rate, etc.) for visits from social plugins.
Social Actions tracks the number of social actions users take on your site,
Social Pages compares your pages on the number of social actions they are receiving.
These new tools offers a greater insight into Social Signals and the impact of such on your website. Especially how Social Signals are driving traffic to your website.
This is invaluable data and means web masters can better devise a social strategy to aid website rankings.
PageRank – what does it mean for linking strategies?
Tuesday, June 21st, 2011 | SEO | No Comments
For many search marketers PageRank is an important factor both on their own website and those they approach for backlinks – and rightly so, PageRank needs to be a key consideration when devising an effective strategy.
The PageRank is a numerical value assigned by Google that represents the importance of that page on the web.
A higher PageRank can be achieved by another relevant and highly PageRanked website linking to your site. This will act as a “vote” for your site from theirs and you inherit reputation for this.
However it is worth noting that PageRank is called PageRank as it applies to the page of a website only, not the whole website. For example, the PageRank (or PR) of a websites homepage can greatly differ from that same websites privacy policy page. This is mainly due to the fact that typically the homepage of a site will acquire the most backlinks and deeper pages, although maybe more relevant, tend to be harder to promote via backlinks from other websites.
Search marketers need to ensure this is taken into account when devising a linking strategy. If part of the strategy applies to directory submissions for example, it is worth noting the PageRank of the page within the directory’s category that the link will appear.
Just because a website has a homepage with a PageRank of 5 doesn’t mean that every page within the site will be attributed with this level of PR. If fact, generally speaking, the deeper the link the lower the PageRank.
However, if a website has a homepage rank of 5 it indicates this site is reputable and will be frequently crawled, giving your link a good chance of being picked up even if it appears deep within the directory.
Quality V Relevance
So is a backlink from a PageRank 5 page better than a website which shares common themes with yours and is therefore highly relevant to the keywords you want to rank for? This is the $64 million question.
Both play a part but lower PageRank sites can rank very well for keyword relevant to your website, same as websites with high PageRanks and limited content quality can rank highly and are seen as reputable thus contributing to your own PageRank should a backlink be granted.
So the question you need to ask yourself is are you more interested in link reputation and gaining a higher PR for your own website or are you looking for improving your ranking for specific keywords quickly?
The ideal solution is to use a blend of both strategies. It could be argued that a small sacrifice could be made in PageRank if the site is highly relevant as it is not always possible to achieve both.
HAPPY LINKING.
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