Renegade Search

On October 18th, Google announced that they have decided to make the default method for searches encrypted. In layman's terms, this means that, when a user is logged in to a Google account, through Gmail, Google+, or any other of their services, site owners will no longer be able to see exactly how a user found their site. While this change will rouse annoyance from quite a few site owners, it actually presents a great opportunity for attentive SEOs who do high-quality work, and might even put a dent in the prominence of so-called 'content farms'.

Before this change, site owners using Google Analytics, Adobe Omniture, or any other decent web analytics package, could track the actual search term that a user entered into Google to get to their site. On our own site, for example, we could track how many of our visitors had searched for 'chicago search marketing' before coming to our home page. Beyond that, we could track their behavior once they landed on our site; Analytics would let us know if those visitors were likely to click around to various pages of our site, and how they differed from users who entered something like 'chicago internet marketing'.

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In the past week, Google has announced two new major changes to their Analytics software: the first is a very high-end (ie, expensive) premium service, and the second is the inclusion of real-time data into all Analytics products. And unless your annual Analytics software budget is six figures, neither should really hold your attention.

I don't mean to dismiss the value of Google Analytics Premium. For the enterprise market, Google Analytics could be a game-changer, seriously challenging Adobe's Omniture as the market leader for very-high end Analytics solutions. The downloadable data, expanded processing power, and other features will be a massive boon to the largest sites out there. And if Google can do a better job with customer service for those clients than it does in... well, every other area of its business, they might really be on to something here.

But Google Analytics Premium will cost $150,000 a year, so it is unlikely to ever even cross the minds of a vast majority of Analytics users. So that leaves us with the second announcement - Real Time Data. To be blunt about it, this feature offers almost nothing of value for most Analytics users, and will almost always serve as little more than fluff. But as a silver lining, it does offer a good excuse to talk about the true value of Google Analytics--and web analytics more generally.

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This week Google rolled out a feature in the new version of Google Analytics that will have most SEOs feeling thankful as we head in to the upcoming weekend. It allows those that have synced their Webmaster Tools account to their Google Analytics profile to access Search Engine Optimization reports. These reports will allow SEOs the opportunity to assess site performance through an entirely new lens in Analytics. Considering the lack of ability to test and receive real time feedback by running an organic search campaign (as you would for example have the ability of doing with a paid search campaign), these reports may also reduce the amount of time it takes to identify what keyphrases are truly most valuable to rank for, and what pages of a site are performing the best in the SERPs.

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Link building is my favorite part of SEO. For some it can be a source of contention, confusion and consternation, but in actuality it's really pretty simple - it's about connecting with other people. Basically, you find a site you want to get a link from, contact the site and then make your case as persuasively as possible to get a link. SEOs do this all day long and it has a lot in common with cold calling. However, as a business owner you could be sitting on a mountain of hot link leads and not even know it.

If you are a small business owner, I am willing to bet you have a lot of professional relationships that you could use to snag a targeted anchor text link or two. Chances are that you have networked with other small business owners at professional events, use them as vendors or have them as clients - these are all great connections to ask for a link. Here are 3 easy ways to get links from business you know and work with.

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Thank you for your relentless passion to make technology "easier to use".  RIP Steve Jobs.

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