VijayWeb.com

URL means Uniform Resource Locator (URL) which specifies where an identified resource is available and the mechanism for retrieving it.

An URL structure generally includes a domain name, folders, files and extensions in it.  We are going to discuss the best practices in URL Structure for the benefit of SEO, Usability and Branding too.

A domain name has several levels to it.  In domain name “www.vijayweb.com ” -  “.com” is called as the Third Level or Top Level Domain, “vijayweb”is actual domain and it is also called as Second Level Domain, and finally “www” is just a sub-domain.  We use www as prefix or a subdomain more commonly as the interent has been branded in that way from the beginning. It is just a custom than a technical requirement.

Choosing a domain name was the most difficult part in the beginning of the DotCom story than it is now One had to really do a lot of research and brainstorming, even taking consultants assistance to really choose a right domain for new dotcom business.  The main factors that were used to rate “a domain name should be easy to remember, easy to recall, easy to pronounce, spell, write” are some of the main requirements to choose a domain. But, with Web2.0 they all have really not a big stand and any catchy word will work, for example, reddit.com, digg, del.icio.us, youtube, flickr etc.,    Earlier there was great option to depend on the domain name for branding the business or service, now with all the domain names are gone with cybersquatting, we are left with minimum options.  Now, we are left with chosing a catchy word and brand the domain name with the unique solutions we are offering.

Best Practice: Choose a Catchy Word, still keep in mind the basic rules (easy… that is usability).  Be particular about choosing a country specific TLDs (top level domain) if your target audience belong to specific countries.  Country specific TLDs are one of the factors that will win Search Engine Ranking Positions in your country specifc search engines while still play in the global search engines.  (I don’t really see it is important to choose a keyword rich domain  that doesn’t meet the above prequalifiers unless you are building the site specifically for the purpose of search engine rankings).

After Domain Name,  a url structure can have one or more levels  to it. And, this is where the most difficult and confusing part as there is a direct SEO benefit.  There is no one formula works for all when creating search engine friendly urls for SEO purposes as there are only 10 positions every other person want to rank in.

There are different SEO URL structures in practice:

1. Creating content theme by having all similar content into one folder or category.

2. Having all static and dynamic files originating from the root of the domain.

3. Use Keyword rich file name and folder name.

4. Not keeping more than 2 or 3 levels down in the url.

5. Having static pages with no query string parameters

6. Having underscores between the words

But, these are pretty old practices…with the social web in web2.0, SEO will also majorly depend on how users are liking the content and sharing on the web.

Best Practice: While keeping the above guidelines in mind, thinking about the user and how he behaves after he lands and what you want him/her to do on the site would give great inputs in how you can align this with the above SEO practices.  Providing seperate identification in the URL for important sections and features of the site would enable visitors to remember the urls and land directly to the pages. Provide short and easy to copy and share urls.

I found it is interesting that SmashingMagazine.com has only 2.5K pages but get about 3 Million daily unique visitors per month.  The below I compared with couple of sites which mainly were built to drive traffic from Search Engines…And there are a ton of them coming everyday to make quick ad $ (I must confess I did test this

No. of Pages Indexed by Google:

Smashingmagazine.com – 2530 web pages
SM has hand picked topics and well written content. Having high userbase every topic is discussed in comments and linked from high quality sites, and social bookmarking sites which is a direct SEO benefit.

Hotklix.com (A Times Group Venture) – 370,000 Pages
A web scrapping site from Times Group, the site gets updated with small snippets of the content from other news sites, blogs as and when they are posted.

Kosmix.com (a $50 Million funded startup) – 225,000 Pages
This is also a web scrapping site but received a big media attention as it is a well funded startup and good PR Campaigns. They came up with a concept which is very similar to universal search results page, but organized various components/data elements coming directly from API’s thru algorithmically.

And, most of the pages from Kosmix, Hotklix and similar site are dropped from search engines as they identify the duplicate content patterns.  These sites may ultimately be banned from search engines which will obviously result to lesser traffic to a zero traffic.

It is always advisable to focus on “Content Quality, Uniqueness and Popularity in Social Web” to get the same sustainable results with much less effort.

Role Based Web Analytics Reports – Know which report you should be looking at!

Unless you are a one-man army, you may not require every report that can be generated in your web analytics tool set.  I have seen people looking at all kinds of reports all the time and miss the metrics exactly that require their attention.  I believe no one role/person is required to monitor more than one or two metrics over a period of time. And, I wonder why we should be ending up creating hundreds of those colorful slides every year…which only misses the focus on the things that should be taken care.

You could be a Web Developer, Server Administrator, Usability Professional, Web Content Manager, Search Engine Optimizer,  Search Engine Marketer (Paid),  eMail Marketer, Online Store Manager…there is something that you can use from web analytics to optimize for better.  All  you need to do is define the metrics on what you do, and be aware on how it is contributing to or from others metrics.

Creating Role Based Web Analytics Reports in different Levels would help in increasing the focus on those specific defined metrics and also you know exactly on what you would need to concentrate to improve the metrics that you are responsible to.

Let me put this in a pyramid format for better understanding, I am calling it as “Web Metrics Pyramid” -

Let’s try to apply this Web Metrics Pyramid to one of the web business function or a role… with Search Engine Optimization.

Search Engine Optimization Metrics -  It is very important for the businesses and search engine optimizers to define their success metrics.  Like with any function, the reporting frame-work should be split to the Role…which we are calling as “Role based Web Analytics Reports”.

On a typical case, I am taking two roles for Search Engine Optimization – Business and Search Engine Optimizer.

Businesses may not be interested in how a specific URL is ranking in Google rather they would be very interested in how are they doing in Search Engine Optimization as a whole and what’s its contribution in the total traffic acquisition to the website and how is it compared to competition.  (As a sidenote: Make sure you only measure qualified traffic using the metrics like Committed Visits).  The metrics would be “Share of Traffic” or “Average Variance from the Competition”

Search Engine Optimizers on the other hand would pay attention to the site-level metrics for monitoring the trends and page-level metrics for re-optimization purposes.

On both the stakeholders above, it is important they define what is important to their business and objective of the SEO Program and determine the success metrics.  For example, for big brands it could be branding which is objective of the SEO program….so ranking is relatively important to actual visits from search engines as it gives free impressions for their listing in the search engines.  However, for a small biz owners it is $ more important.  He/She may not be interested to get traffic that doesn’t convert to $ at his/her website.  For them it could be “$ earned per Visit from Search Engine “would be a great metric.

Keeping both the stakeholders above in mind, I am creating the web metrics pyramid for SEO. In the above example, let’s assume business targets to generate US$10K a Month from the search engine traffic…so I put “Revenue as the success metric in the Level 1”

The above SEO Metrics Pyramid is created for illustrative purposes only the actual metrics vary based on the business requirements.

Search Engine Optimization – Driving Targeted Visitors to your Web Sites through Search Engines!

* Majority of visitor traffic is driven from Search Engines to web sites.
* Search is the second largest activity on web, after email.
* Paid Search contributes to 40% of internet advertising spend.
* Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and Live.com drive qualified traffic through their Organic Results.

The process of optimizing a web site with the purpose of getting the site listed on top 10 results for relevant search query is called Search Engine Optimization.

Optimizing for search improves the chances of site’s pages and content to be easily accessible by search engine spiders. This makes users to acquire relevant information via minimal search queries.

Successful Search Engine Optimization process allows website content to be compatible with search engines understanding on actual content based on search queries.

3 Simple Steps to Usability Centric Search Engine Optimization:

1. Keyword Research – what keywords are used for widgets.com website to appear in the search results? For example, business is trying to showcase “widgets solutions”, users are likely to search with keywords like “widget solution providers”, “buy widget” than just “widgets” or “how widgets work”.

Keyword research covers understanding of various keywords that are likely to be used to find the content offered on the website. A good starting point to keyword research is Google’s FREE Keyword Research Tool and WordTracker tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal; http://www.wordtracker.com

2. Usability:

a. Content Relevancy: Upon understanding of keywords usage, next step would be to identify what content users are expecting on the website by using these keywords. Content on website needs to be created with this correlation. For example, if the keyword used is “widgets support” and if your business doesn’t support widget problems, it would be recommended to drop this keyword from keyword research list. Writing content on user needs would dramatically increase the relevancy for search query usage.

b. Design Usability: Making the content immediately obvious on the webpage will increase the page stickiness.   If content is written on “Support on Widget Problems” and is not easily visible on the landing page, users would very likely exit and search on other websites.  In such cases, search engines would think that “your” content is not relevant to the query and rank them lower next time.

c. Website Accessibility: Quality of the website is determined by its accessibility. Simple way to improve accessibility of a website is by making it available 24/7 and compatible across all major internet browsers by following the w3c standards (http://www.w3.org/).

Creating a website which is more usable with unique content allows the users and search engines to rank the site in top 10 of search results.

3. Popularity: Making content pertinent on the web page would directly reflect on the rankings by appearing in the top 10 search results. This can be achieved through PR campaigns, have people write reviews on their sites, and boosting viral marketing strategies.

Driving Traffic from Search Engine’s Organic Results is the most cost effective and a only traffic driving channel for majority of the content websites and ecommerce portals. There are different SEO KPIs to look at different levels in the SEO process.

I got inspired from some ppt I viewed sometime back but don’t recall the name to give the credit.

Users “Search” to “Find” what they want. “Search” – What users are searching for? “Find” - What users are finding for what they are searching? Search starts with the Search Engines like Google but ends when they find the information they need on a document on web. The process of measuring how effective a SEO program at your company depends on these two important steps.

….pls. subscribe to the rss feed for updates to this post, will try to complete it by weekend

Search Engine Optimization…..Optimization??? then there is something web analysts can be helpful here?

Search Engine Optimization is a process of optimizing a website with an intention of (I think I should say “with a hoping of” : ) getting the site listed in the top 10 results for relevent search query for the business.  There is a reason why I said “hoping of” – if you are a search engine optimizer I am sure you would know, else you will know by end of the reading this blog post.

I think it is important that we should know where we started on this.  Before Google, there were search engines like altavista, lycos etc., were widely used eventhough there were only a few documents on the web.  As the web growing rapidly the importance of search engine has grown with the similar trend.   Now, let’s briefly understand how traditional search engines used to rank pages compared to the modern ones like Google, Yahoo, Live.com.

Internet Search Engines used to look at the meta data (data bout data) that is embedded in the html tags or meta tags to understand what a specific document is about.  One of  the  Meta Tags is Keyword tag, it stores “keywords” relevant to the page – it had utmost importance in such that the Search Engines were looking specifically in this area and  rank the pages if the user performs a search with these keywords.   Webmasters were realized that they get lot of traffic from search engines compared to any other channel and most people started misusing this meta-tags in such a way that their website gets lot of traffic.  And, SPAMERS became champions in this   Search Engines had to find new ways to understand the web document so that they can list it in the top 10 results for the searcher query.  Imagine you go to a search engine and do a search for “web analytics articles” and it gives totally irrelevant results because of the SPAMMY documents, would you take them as relevant to what you need?  and continue love that search engine.  So, it is important for the search engines to continue in the business they consistently need to provide the relevant results to the searchers needs.

Then, our beloved Google entered the industry with the refreshing look and feel web page, selling speed and relevance as the USP.  Google came up with a patented page-ranking technology which gives ranking score to each page in the website based on internal linking and external linking.  This kind of system was very much viable in the begenning since poeple post links to the other sites as they feel they are useful for others and absolutely for non-commerical benefits.  But, again most webmasters and marketers started misusing this by buying and sellings links, exchanging links and creating programs exclusively to get inbound links to their websites.

Imagine Google doesn’t have strong algorithms so that SEO’s and webmasters would easily get good ranks in Google….The users include ourselves would end up with frustration as we all are completely dependent on search engines like Google.

Google and other today’s search engines are also studying many other factors to understand what the document is all about.  They are studying the actual text on the web document, its font size, colors, backgrounds, images, alignment, theme of a section/site and much more.  Though most ethical SEO’s would optimize the sites in an ethical manner still there are people stuff the keywords here too to make search engines understand the document is relevant to something that actually it is not.

Marketers should realize more relevent traffic means more revenue but not just any traffic to the site.

The Approach I am proposing “A Data Driven Approach to Usability Centric Search Engine Optimization” would talk about using Web Analytics and Usability Principles to create an SEO strategy for your site.  Moving from the perception of “SEO is SPAM” to “SEO is Good Design”

Google announced that landing page loading time is soon to be incorporated into the quality factor that decides how much you pay to google for each click in the campaigns you are running on Google Adwords.  http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/03/landing-page-load-time-will-soon-be.html

I think this is going to be another factor that SEM landing pages have to compete with those of competition. We would need to compare the landing pages with the ones that are competing in each of the keyword category…well that’s again a reverse engineering and require a lot of resources. Instead, I would prefer to build light speed web pages…light speed web pages? again that is also going to be dependent on network speed.

Anything Google comes up is mainly to increase their revenue and their business continuity(TCE-Total Customer Experience which most established businesses measure and monitor to see any pitfalls that effects their business over-time) as a search engine. All these factors are closely inter-related that directly impact their top line.

For example, assume all other factors remains constant…Google has a potential of 100 adwords clicks a day for each of the keywords “discounted widgets” and “cheap widgets”

www.widgetstores.com would like to pay $3 each for the two keywords i.e. $3 * 100 clicks * 2 keywords = $600 in total

www.widgetshop.com would like to pay $2 for each of these two keywords i.e. $2 * 100 clicks * 2 keywords = $400 in total

Now Google has to send all these 200 clicks (100 clicks * 2 keywords) to www.widgetstore.com for optimium benefit.  So, Google has a potential of making $600 on these two keywords assuming it’s searchers would be 100% satisfied (TCE) with www.widgetstore.com which is important factor for their business continuity as a search engine.

Lets say there are users visited Google.com and peformed a search with the keyword “discounted widgets” and adwords results being…

Link 1 position: http://www.widgetstore.com ($3 per click)

Link 2 position: http://www.widgetshop.com ($2 per click)

If good no. of people click on www.widgetshop.com in the link 2 position that means..Google’s recommendation in Link 1 alarms that it has a negative impact on their TCE which will definitely influence their revenues over a period of time.  To avoid this google will make the following adjustment algorithmatically.

Link 1 position:  www.widgetshop.com ($2 per click)

Link 2 position: www.widgetstore.com ($3 per click)

Now www.widgetshop.com being in link 1 position, it has the higher potential to get all 200 clicks for $400…This is what Google calls it as Click Popularity.

After this…let’s imagine the searcher with “discounted widgets” clicked on www.widgetshop.com and visited the landing page and found that it is irrelevant to his search.  And he comes back to Google and does another search with “cheap widgets” and clicked on www.widgetstore.com.  Again their TCE is effected… And, there will be some revenue Google will be loosing as part of discountng multiple clicks for the advertisers.

That is the reason “Accessability, Usability and Relevancy” should be the high prioirty things for everyone in the web business. I am sure all your website design and development guidelines are sorrounded among these three.

Conclusion: Building faster loading pages would be an excellent thing but that alone doesn’t contribute for the success in Google.  For example, assume www.widgetstore.com has a homepage that loads in less than 2 seconds and www.widgetshop.com has a home page that loads in 50 seconds…so Google likes www.widgetstore.com here.

But, on a 2-second home page www.widgetstore.com can only provide a little text content that may not be targeted for everyone visting this page which will have an higher page abandonment…Here Google likes www.widgetshop.com.

Ultmately, We will have to help Google success in getting higher revenues and TCE for our success in terms of traffic drivng to www.widgetshop.com

Pls. note that the above is only an illustraton, the actuals may vary when putting together various other factors.

When we all go to Search Engines like Google and do a search – we obviously expect the relevant results.

What should Google deliver as the results in order to satisfy the searcher’s needs. How would Search Engines know exactly what the searcher is looking for with a mere keyword that you have provided in the search text box? Have you ever disappointed with the results that Search Engines deliver for you?

Imagine I went to Google and just typed a keyword phrase “web analytics” in the Google’s search text box and just hit the “Search” button – Google does know that I am looking for something related to web analytics which is evident from the search keyword I have just entered in the search text box and it can also know since I am doing this search geographically from India, it would know I may be looking something related to “Web Analytics in India”. But, how does it know exactly what I am looking for?

Am I looking for what is web analytics or what it means? Am I looking for how web analytics works? Or Am I looking for where in the world this web analytics stays Or Web Anlaytics Tools Or Web Analytics Vendors Or am I just looking for Web Analytics Blogs or Articles on Web. When we target a generic keyword phrase like “web analytics” there could be hundreds of intentions could be related even from Search Engne Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization, Web Reporting & Web Analysis, and many more online marketing functions.

How would Google going to satisfy my search intention by providing relevant results which it always says it would when I can relate my intention to many of the above mentioned web analytics topics. What do you think that Search Engines would give me as the top 10 results that would satisfy my search need? What happends if Google give me results about Web Analytics Companies but I am looking for Web Analytics Reporting Techniques, what happends if Google gives me results on Web Log Analysis Software but I am looking for Web Analytics Jobs in United States – so it never matches.

The answer is Search Engines provide relatively different results that means it would provde a mixture of all the topics that can be highly related and commonly searched. The sites that can answer most of the search intentions or provide links to the resources can get the advantage to be ranked in the top 10 results of the search query.

The Search Results page for the keyword “Web Analytics” would normally look like 1 or 2 results on what is “web analytics” and 1 or 2 results from web anlaytics tools or vendors or web analytics companies and 1 or 2 results that can provide links to most of the web analytics topics such as a wikipedia or a directory listing.

But, that may not be the right always for satisfying the searcher needs – the probablity of not satisfying the searcher’s intention would always be 50%, that is the reason Google gives related searches at the bottom of the results page as you see in the above screen shot. When we do more specific search we many not get the recommendations from Google on Related Search but how Google ranks the top 10 results would remains the same – “Relatively Different” and unique content that can answer many of search intentions or provide links to the similar resources would always have an advantage to be ranked in top 10 results.

Lot of times, I have seen SEO’s spending time in analyzing the competitors results and their keyword relevancy and proximity to guess what works for optimizing their web pages (Tools like Webposition Gold, WebCEO provide similar analysis and reports) but I personally say a big “NO” and it is recommended to provide unique but relative content on the web pages. If we try to provide the same content that is already ranked in the top 10 there is likely to be filtered from top 10 results for that search query unless we convince Google that you have better content than the competition on the same topic.

Click Here to read Formula for Search Engine Optimization

SEO = Relevancy + Usability + Accessibility + Popularity

RED ALERT: Don’t Optimize Your Web Site for Search Engines , But Optimize For Your Users ——Read On….

Ask These Questions Yourself:

1. Do You Know What Your Users Are Looking For?

2. Do You Know What Keyword Phrases They Are
Using To Find What They Want?

3. Are You Providing What They Want?

Answers to these three questions are the key foundation for Your Website Success !!!

That’s what I call it as “RELEVANCY“

The Next Important Step in SEO:
After you have the content ready that users are looking for,?the big challenge is providing this content to the user in a usable manner.
That’s where the Information Architecture plays a key role.

Let’s say you have developed the website with all relevant content that users are looking. When user visits your website, you have less than 1 second to tell the user that the content is there on your website what they need. How do you do that?

Place relevant titles at relevant places. Make the content look like what it is meant. And, there are many more..that’s all the job of an Information Architect.

What makes the content & website Usable:

1. Appropriate Titles
2. Indent and Bulleting
3. Font Size and Color
4. Page Breaks
5. Right Links at the right places,
6. Descriptive Link Text
7. Navigation and Site Architecture
8. Size of images and alt text
9. Design of your website and much much more….( Google says there are hundreds of factors…read here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/4.html?). Who knows all of them?

The more accessible it is to search engines, the more accurately they can predict what the site’s about.? The samething is true with users too.

To read more on USABILITY & ACCESSIBILITY, check the below link:
http://www-306.ibm.com/able/guidelines/web/accessweb.html

Hey, the last and important step in SEO is making your web site popular on Web. Don’t participate in link campaigns or submit to 1000’s of search engines and directories. Do it in an honest way…by passing on thru your friends, press releases, by providing free reports and do everything that makes people talk about your site on web.

Read more on what Google is talking about on SEO’s.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html