Renegade Search

I tend to find that most Google Analytics users are primarily looking at how people reached their website and hoping that the traffic graphs get bigger over time. George wrote a great piece last month on setting up goals so that you can see what actions users performed once they reached your website - this is very important! This can show you the value of the traffic coming to your website and how well your marketing is working for your business. All the upward trending graphs and thousands of visitors don't mean much for reporting purposes if you don't know what actions those visitors took. Now the next step is figuring out how the users interacted with your website and one great way to understand both user action and user intent is through the Site Search reports.

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On par with their biennial report, earlier this year SEOmoz released their search engine ranking factors for 2011. The finished product is a collection of in depth ranking analysis, correlation-based data, and opinions from some of the most well respected SEOs in the community. And while many of the predominant factors that Google uses in their ranking algorithm have remained steady influencers, the sudden impact of social signals on ranking positions, while all things considered still relatively weak, cannot be overlooked. As we move in to 2012, it is evident that Google is honoring social relevance and user experience, and finding ways to incorporate those elements on a greater scale in to their algorithm to impact SERPs for the better.

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Google, Bing, and Yahoo recently announced the joint creation of schema.org. In their respective statements, the companies declared their support for a new set of standards for web documents. After years of discussion, this seems to be a major step in the direction of creating a true semantic web from the relative chaos that is today's web. Before going into more detail on what this actually means, I want to note that the last time I can remember Google's official blog even using the word 'bing', it was under far less pleasant circumstances, so the spirit of cooperation and friendship in these posts definitely caught my attention.

'Semantic web' is one of those buzzwords that has been around for many years and the subject of a ton of hype. While I wouldn't blame any business owner or site operator for being skeptical (let alone confused) about what this all means, I definitely feel that it's time to take a closer look at what's going on here.

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In order to effectively track the progress of your SEO campaign, it's important to look at the right metrics. For this post, I'm only going to cover the metrics pertaining to SEO and only the most important ones. Keep in mind that there are many different types of data you can track for different strategies, specific elements, analytics, and ongoing SEO fine tuning. For now, let's look at the main metrics for measuring your SEO effectiveness.

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I love recaps and summaries. That's why I love this time of the year, when search engines and social networks start compiling and sharing statistics about user behavior. Just today, Twitter put out their year in review, capping a year of 25 billion tweets - and while it's nothing groundbreaking from most business perspectives, it's still fun to view a year in total.

To better help users understand the significance of these number twitter did explain how trending is defined. However, I'm still not sure how their selected categories are defined. For example, Brett Favre's inclusions on the "Sports" list. Does his inclusion on the list this year really have anything to do with "sports" per se? Does his trending in "sports" preclude his inclusion (or Lebron's for that matter) in the general list for people?

Aside from better defining their categories, I'd also like to see Twitter expand their categories a little more to include some fun topics for marketers such as top 10 brands, top 10 products, top 10 URL shortening providers, or maybe top 10 websites linked to from Twitter. Another fun topic could be showing the quickest declining trends over the last year. By the time December rolls around, I'm sure I'm not the only one to find some amusement in a couple "oh yeah, I remember that Bieber kid" moments.

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