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Performing SEO for an already live site is much different from integrating SEO during a ground up site build.

Analogies are a simple tool that we can use to explain technical SEO concepts to our clients.  Here are a few that I’ve found myself using recently with a baseball analogy that have been well received and gotten the point across.

1. You may strike out…and that’s OK

Generally speaking, professional baseball players strike out two out of every three times they step up to the plate.  On average, if this was the only indicator of success, they are failures.

Despite striking out two out of every three times, runs are still scored and the game always ends with at least one team with one or more runs.  Each team gets a minimum of 27 times at bat.  Some strike outs are OK, and long as there are some hits in the mix.

Not every site tweak or change will get you ahead.  Due to the massive complexities and mystery surrounding the algorithms and data, some changes may even set you back.  You should never hinge an SEO project on a single change.  A multifaceted approach is key.  On the whole, you will still end up ahead.

2. Don’t always swing for the fences

Not every hit is a home run.  If fact, most hits only get you to first base.  It is entirely possible to win a baseball game one base hits alone.

In SEO, not all site changes will equate to homerun traffic increases.  Many small traffic improvements can add up.  In fact, I’ve more than tripled traffic for an established site without achieving a single high volume keyword ranking.

If you try for a base hit each time up at bat, you are more likely to succeed than if your strategy is to swing for a homerun every time.

If you target popular high volume keywords phrases to the exclusion of everything else, you may bite off more than you can chew and, in the end, have no traffic increase at all!

3. Base hits are investments in future potential runs

Runs are all that count in the game of baseball.  Nobody ever wins for getting players on base.

Search optimization is about getting runners on base and waiting for them to come home.  This is not a game of short feedback loops.  Although the timing of things is getting shorter, you may not see the results of specific optimization changes for days, weeks, or even months after a specific change is made.  If you sit around on your keister waiting for results before you make the next change, you’ll only ever take baby steps.

You must continue making changes based on the belief (based on experience) that the optimizations you are performing will pay traffic dividends down the road.  If you perform a single optimization then wait to see results before doing more, you will lose the game.  The feedback loop takes too long.

Web Analytics tools are nice to show you how many people are visiting your site, but their value can go well beyond that. Here is one simple way you can use your web analytics package to gain information you can immediately use to improve your site and generate more traffic.

There are two reports in most analytics packages that show how people found a specific page on search engines.

Keyword Phrase Report - This report show the entire phrases that searchers typed into the search box to find your site. “Blue Widgets”, “Red Widgets” would be an example.

Keywords Report - This report list the individual words searchers used to find your page. “Widgets”, “Blue”, “Red” would be an example.

I will explain on way to get information you can immediately act upon out of your Keywords Report.

On the surface, especially at the site level, this report may not tell you anything you don’t already know. If your site is about widgets, “Widgets” will of course be at the top of the list day after day, likely followed by the other primary keywords your site generally targets.

Filter the Keywords Report down to the single page level.

Pick a specific content page to target and improve, and filter the Keywords Report to only show keywords for that one page. Ideally, pick a page that gets decent long-tail traffic. If you can, open up the report in a window right beside the webpage itself so you can easily compare the two side by side.

Look at the words people are using the find the page. You will probably see a long tail trail off of a handful or two of words a lot of people use, trickling down to lots of words only a few people use.

Start by focusing on your top 5 words. Look at how you use them on the page. Check the title tag, headings, and links. Usually this won’t be too surprising. The top 5 words are likely prominent in these places.

Keep going down the list until you start seeing keywords that you don’t prominently use. What are they, and how do they relate to the page? This is where the opportunity is hiding.

Are groups of people finding the page using a word you didn’t expect or target?

Take Action!

1. Re-write your title, headings, links, and content to include some of these newly found keywords. However, don’t remove or de-emphasize the other more important words. If that doesn’t make sense for this page and these words, then:
2. Consider creating new pages to target these specific keywords.

Not every page will have these opportunities staring you in the face. Pick 10 pages to go through, and a bet you’ll find a couple good opportinities for improvement.

Don’t force these changes into any page where they don’t make sense. In my experience, the best page modifications not only include these keywords for search engine sake, but also make the page better for human visitors as well, after all, you’re now speaking their language.

It’s been said that Google takes over 100 different considerations into account when figuring out where to return your page in a search result. Even though that sounds like a lot, all those 100+ factors can be boiled down into two core concepts. To rank well, you need to maximize both.

Ranking = Strength + Relevance

Page Strength

I know a lot of SEO’s love to say PageRank is dead. I disagree, and see evidence of it every day. Sure, PageRank is certainly not as important as it used to be, but it’s certainly not dead.

PageRank is a measure of how important a page is on the Internet as a whole. Every page that links to your is essentially counted as a vote of confidence for the page. Links from important pages like the New York Times count more than links from lesser pages like your brother’s personal blog about his dog. To over-simplify things greatly, Google’s PageRank score is a sum of the value of all those votes in comparison to all the other pages on the web.

There are other factors adding to a page’s strength as well. Such as:

• Is the page new?
• Has the page and/or domain been around for many years?
• Is the domain registered for a long term between renewals, like 5 years?
• Is the domain or page penalized for not following the webmaster guidelines?
• Is the domain selling links?
• Is the page located in Wikipedia? (OK - maybe not that one)

I know I’m missing some factors, but you get the general idea about what might play into strength.

What’s clear though, is that your page is never going to rank well on strength alone.

Ranking well needs one additional key factor…relevance.

Query Relevance

If strength was all that was required, a site like www.google.com would rank #1 for all queries…it’s a PageRank ten out of ten. That obviously would not make sense.

Relevance is a measure of how related a page is to what the user has search for. Your brother Joe’s blog about his dog, even though not a strong site, may very well be the most relevant destination for people searching for “joe dog blog”.

Relevance factors include:

On-Page:

• Query Terms in the title?
• Query Terms in header tags?
• Query Terms in body text?
• Query Terms in outgoing link text?

Off-Page:

• Query Terms in incoming link text?
• Query Terms in “on page factors” of the pages linking in?

It’s possible for a page to rank well based on a strong relevance while having a low pagerank, which is why some people say pagerank is dead. (That doesn’t mean PageRank is dead, it just means there are other factors than can overcome a low pagerank.)

Burn the Candle on Both Ends

Strength and Relevancy are simple high level concepts that can be easily explained and understood by both technical and non-technical users alike.

Some tasks, like link building, will have an impact on both.

For a strong ranking, your strategy should be to maximize both strength and relevancy. Don’t give one the blind eye.

A couple months back, I decided to take a calculated risk with my most popular page; I cut off my head. It’s worked out for the better, and is an interesting case study. Let me explain…

A page on one of my sites was ranking a very solid #1 for a single head keyword. That’s great, right? Maybe.

Let’s say my site is about Widgets. This one head keyword, let’s call it WidgMaster was bringing in a decent amount of traffic.

While the page was certainly related to the WidgMaster variant of Widgets, it was also very relevant to learning about widgets in general. As evidence, the page currently ranks on page 3 of Google for the much more broad “widgets” term.

In terms of traffic, the page was successful, but unnecessarily pigeon-holed into a very small niche.

It’s worth noting that this page is linked to more heavily than any of the other internal pages on this site, having been on the front page of Slashdot once, and digg twice. It has more “link juice” than any other page on the site, and pulls in three times as much traffic as the homepage.

I wanted to see if I could make the page pull in a more general audience. I was looking for more “Widget” focused long tail traffic, as described very well recently in “Deep Links, Longtail Keywords, and Why you Should Love Them Both.

I performed a simple and minor, but crucial strategic change. I figured the chance of success was 50/50, and there was certainly potential for traffic loss.

I reordered the words in the page title.

Learn about WidgMaster Installation and Configuration - Widgets

Became…

Learn about Widget Installation and Configuration - WidgMaster

Almost immediately, I lost the #1 spot that I had held for WidgMaster, which had been solid #1 for over a year. The page now ranks around #6 on Google, high enough to still get a trickle of traffic, but less than 10% of what was previously coming in for that keyword.

Interesting, and supporting my initial hypothesis, the traffic levels stayed about the same.

I was hoping for an increase, but the resulting wash isn’t all bad.

The page now ranks much better for more general long term “Widget” phrases. The resulting visitors are less WidgMaster focus “one hit wonders”, and much more interested in sticking around my site after their initial landing.

While this strategy is not right for all situations and pages. Much more usable for “short head” terms than “tall head” terms, it’s certainly a strategy and method that you should consider experimenting with on a small scale, and having in your SEO Bag o’ Tricks.

When performing on site optimization, it’s important to keep your eye on the ball.

Here’s a hint; SEO is not really about code and content optimization.

Seriously, many of us can’t see the forest through the trees. Stop looking at the trees, and start enjoying the beauty of the forest.

What do I mean by that? Most of the SEO discussion and articles about on-page optimization are looking at it backwards.

It’s not about performing the optimizations that the search engines are looking for. You know the drill…

• Optimized and Unique Title Tag
• Proper use of header, strong, list tags, etc.
• Link to related content using keyword rich anchor text
• Build content silos around a tightly focus niche
• etc. etc.

While that may work, you’re going through the motions but missing the entire point.

Here’s the point you may be missing.

It’s NOT about performing optimizations.

Search engines don’t want to return highly optimized pages. They really don’t.

It’s IS about making quality sites.

Search want to return high quality pages that are relevant to search terms.

So, on a page by page basis, how to you make a high quality site?

• Optimized and Unique Title Tag
• Proper use of header, strong, list tags, etc.
• Link to related content using keyword rich anchor text
• Build content silos around a tightly focus niche
• etc. etc.

Yes. That’s the same list you already saw.

So what’s different? Your perspective, the process, and the end result.

If you look at it from the pure SEO side, it’s entirely possible to “check-off” all the items on your list without really increasing, and possibly even reducing, the quality of the page for actual users.

If you look at it from the page quality side, but with an eye on SEO guided principles, you end up with a highly optimized quality page, because that was your goal. The more I look at things from this perspective, the more I see how SEO and page quality go hand-in-hand.

Google and (some of) the other search engines know this. They don’t pick their on-page weighting factors at random. They choose and weight them because they are generally indicators of higher quality pages for their search results.

Once your mental paradigm makes the shift, you will find yourself think less and less about optimizing pages, and more and more about how to actually make your pages better for users.

It only makes logical sense that building high quality pages is a better long term strategy that just trying to optimize content for the sake of optimizing content.

Stop giving search engine spiders optimized pages. Take the next step and start giving them the high quality pages they are really looking for in the first place.

Microsoft has finally officially commented on the fake traffic they’ve been sending to websites recently.

Recently I commented about how Microsoft Live Search has been stuffing our log files with bot traffic pretending to be human.

Basically they say, “we’ve been doing bad stuff for the last EIGHT months that screws up your metrics and disregards internet respect standards, but it’s OK, because we are going to stop soon.”

If anything, their statements strengthens my mistrust.

At least now I know how far back I can’t trust any traffic from MSN. They offer no solutions for how to scrub our log files (which I’ve already spent time trying to do myself.)

Maybe the real problem is one of scale. Google and Yahoo probably do this too, but it’s different. Google and Yahoo (to a lesser extend) send real traffic volumes. Any stuff like this that Google and Yahoo do ends up being noise that is not noticed.

With MSN…these queries are more than just noise; it can end up being the bulk of MSN traffic coming in. In one case, the bogus queries continually use a keyword phrase that I am trying to optimize for and measure results around.

The only reason I even noticed this problem is I saw a large spike in traffic to that phrase, but could not figure out any ranking change driving the increase. The bogus Microsoft traffic was enough to cut through the Yahoo and Google traffic for that phrase, and lead me down the path to discovering this problem.

At least Microsoft has commented. They have not apologized or offered any solutions. In my mind they’ve only gone as far as saying they are playing dirty pool (but plan to stop soon!) The damage is done. I’ve said my piece. What are you thoughts on the matter?

On one of the large sites I SEO and monitor traffic for, we’ve seen a large bump in search.live.com traffic over the past few months. The keywords used don’t always make sense for the page being landed on, and the keyword phrase is always a single word.

I’ve assumed (shame on me?) that it was a bug somewhere related to search.live.com that is only allowing the first keyword through to our WebTrends Analytics tool. Andrew Urquhart has commented on his similar theory for the problem.

For yesterday’s stats, MSN had a significantly large volume of traffic that just didn’t seem to make any sense. If it’s wrong, it’s no longer statistically background noise, but rather seriously impactful data that puts the legitimacy of the log data into question.

Looking for answers, I directed my browser over to WebMasterWorld to check out the MSN forum. The Strange Referrer Activity post was right near the top. Among other things, this post on Sept. 5th 2007 was interesting, and a major cause for concern:

Thanks for all the feedback on this thread.

First, we appreciate the concerns and issues that have been raised and apologize for any incovenience this might have caused.

Second, we want to explain what this is all about. The traffic you are seeing is part of a quality check we run on selected pages. While we work on
addressing your conerns, we would request that you do not actively block the IP addreses used by this quality check; blocking these IP addresses could prevent your site from being included in the Live Search index.

Please keep the feedback and thoughts coming as we will use this to help improve this process and make sure that it impacts your sites as little as possible.

thanks
- msndude (msd)

That seems to confirm that at least some of this may be bogus traffic. How much is bogus? We have no easy way to know…

That should be very concerning to any webmaster who values the credibility of their log data. If nothing else, that puts thousand of historical search.live.com referrals for the past few months into question.

It concerns me that:

1. Microsoft seems to not seem to care about messing with the validity of log files for websites on a global scale.
2. Microsoft is making it look like websites are getting human traffic from search.live.com which in fact may be a Microsoft bot. I heard the phrase “fake it until you make it”, but that should not be a valid search engine market share tactic!
3. There is no obvious and/or official way to correctly cleans the corrupted log files of this bogus traffic. (Not to mention the time I need to spend to do it.)
4. Microsoft has mostly been silent on this issue.
5. The bot is ignoring the robot.txt rules, and does not identify itself as a bot.

I don’t follow MSN very much since they don’t send very much traffic, so I don’t really know where to look for these things, but I’ve found no official mention of this other than the WebmasterWorld post.

Frankly, this seems to be to be very unethical of Microsoft on a number of levels. For one thing, many website opperators probably think they actually ARE getting an increase in traffic from search.live.com.

If you run a Website, this should concern you greatly. We need answers and solutions. Please comment if you have either.

Matt Cutts opened up a whole new world of possibilities when he told Rand from SEOmoz that it’s acceptable for a site owner to use nofollow on internal links to control the flow of PageRank within a site.

There’s a whole can of worms that has been opened up by internal use of nofollow being considered white hat. Matt muddied the waters a bit in this comment, but still indicates internal use of nofollow is a white hat tool webmasters can use by saying “It’s available if you want to get into that much fine-grained control.”

So far the best information I’ve seen about this is the Third Level Push (modified Siloing) For Deeper Index Penetration. That’s an excellent post, tool, and process, but it’s not the whole story. It’s also a little hard to get your head around.

On most sites, especially smaller ones, I don’t think PageRank sculpting is generally required. It may actually cause more harm that good.  On larger sites, especially where SEO is not a primary concern, PageRank Sculpting could make a huge difference in how linkjuice flows through your site.

Here’s one example.

PR Sculpting using internal nofollow tags may be helpful for a site with extensive multiple layers of site navigation as part of the template for a site. (Think your entire sitemap on every page.)

The one example I’m thinking of right now has over 80 links in css based drops downs in the top navigation bar. Granted, there are over a thousand pages on the site, so it still only links to a small fraction of the overall pages.

If your site only has a handful of site wide navigation links, link sculpting isn’t for you. However, if you have multiple levels of CSS based dropdowns leading deep into your site, including to areas not very valuable in terms of search traffic, you may be a good candidate for internal use of nofollow.

Having a large quantity of deep links from every page on your site can only help, right? Well, maybe not. By linking to a large number of pages from your site template, you end up spreading your link juice very thin over your entire site, like peanut butter on bread. While that may be what’s best, sometimes that does more harm than good.

Instead of spreading your link juice thinly over a large portion of your site, you may be better off strategically directing a larger portion of your PageRank to certain pages by properly implementing nofollow on some internal links. We’ll get into that in future posts.

Is your site navigation like peanut butter on bread? Is it helping or hurting the PageRank flow within your sites?  This is like a sharp knife…sometimes it’s the best tool for the job, but if you’re not careful…it could hurt or kill your site.