Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

By now we know that beyond your site design and ease of navigation, the heart and soul of your site is the content that is provided there. Often times we ask our clients to figure out what content is working for them; what brings them traffic, what is being shared, what gets people to stay and convert? In some cases it might be obvious what content is popular but many times you have to do a little digging to really see which content are your real all stars.

Thanks to my pal, Google Analytics, the Content Report offers a variety of ways to look at the content on your site and will offer you a better understanding of what kinds of content to continue expanding on. Just by viewing your Content Dashboard you can see the top 10 most visited pages (organized by pageviews for that given time period) and then you can click “view full report” to see more data about those top visited pages. You can start to see which content is:

• Most popular – Organized by the number of pageviews. You can change the date range if you want to see what content was popular over a longer period of time or at a different time altogether.
• Stickiest – In Google Analytics you can click on the top of each column to reorganize the pages by different information (see image of columns below). By organizing the pages by average time on site, you can see which pages people spent the most time engaging with certain content.
• Best retainer – Find out which content keeps the visitor on the site. Organize your website by bounce rate to see which pages kept the user from leaving (the smaller number the better!).

Dig Deeper

After completing the exercise above you’ll start to see some content pages as all stars for your website. With some other content reports available you can dig a bit deeper to see why they might be performing so well.

• Keyword Traffic – One way to understand why certain pages are performing better than others is to determine if the subject matter is something that your audience is interested in. First off, you have to understand what keywords are bringing organic traffic to your site.  Then, in the top content section, you can click a content page and then select secondary dimensions to review for those pages; like traffic sources, visitors, technology, and content. Since I know that the blog, “What is a QR Code” was one of my most popular pieces of content, I want to look at what keywords (under “Traffic Sources”) people typed into search engines that then navigated them to this post. I can know that a large amount of organic traffic was driven by the keywords “smartphone scan box” and “scan box code”and that is verified when I look at the keywords that drive traffic to that particular blog post.
• Entrance Sources – Using secondary dimensions again, you can find out where the traffic that ended up on a certain page had been prior to coming to the website. It might be helpful to understand that your most popular or most engaging content pages came from visitors who were on Twitter. You can find that out by reviewing your entrance sources for certain content pages.
• Navigation Summary – Use the navigation summary to understand more about the how the traffic moves throughout the site while interacting with your known “all star content.” You can see where they had been before a particular page and where they went to after visiting that page. You can see how often a certain page was an entrance page as well as how often a certain page was the last page that a user was on before leaving the site. This just gives you some depth of knowledge about where your opportunities might be or areas of the site that might need to be improved

Big Opportunity

The whole point of understanding which content is making a splash is to continue producing more content around the topics that are more popular to help drive new traffic to your website. You should also take a look at the actual content page – what is your offer? Is it clear? Are you obtaining leads from that page? Understanding your content all stars reminds you that those pages are a good opportunity to get the engaged traffic to take action and convert.

Have you ever heard of “sitelinks?” Sitelinks are those extra list of links that you see below a main search result in the Google search engine. [See my example of sitelinks below where I searched for "maine popcorn"] Google’s secret algorithm determines whether sitelinks will appear under a particular search result or not. The idea behind sitelinks is to give the user an easier way to immediately navigate to interior pages of the site within that search result. Although they have been around for a while now they have changed, and continue to change announcing their most recent update this week.

Here’s what’s new with Google Sitelinks:

• Now, when you see sitelinks, you’ll notice that they are larger and resemble the main search result more.
• The maximum number of sitelinks possible to appear for a search result is now 12 (up from 8 previously).
• Sitelinks are being ranked now. Before, a site would be given a fixed set of sitelinks that would either appear in a search engine result or not show up at all. Now, the original query will influence the sitelinks that appear for a given result.

What does this mean and why should you care?

As a Google user– The goal of Google’s search engine is to make our lives easier by simplifying search results and saving us time. By delivering us the results with additional sitelinks that are relevant to our queries means we can find what we’re looking for quicker. Thanks Google, you rock!

As a marketer –  Google does a great job of making continuous updates to their products that will improve the relevancy of their search results to the user. Our job is to follow suit – make the content that we provide to our users as relevant to them, their needs, and challenges as we possibly can. By creating consistent, informative, helpful, and relevant content to our users will boost our chances of benefiting from those associated sitelinks in Google’s search results for our website. Plus, with additional space required for sitelinks, that’s more real estate that we could possibly own on the search engine results page. And who doesn’t want more real estate there?

How do I get sitelinks for my website’s search results?
Since Google’s algorithm is under strict lock and key, there isn’t a handbook on how to get sitelinks for your website. However, sitelinks are based on your site’s linking structure and there are a few things you can do to make sure that’s good to go:

• Ensure your site can be crawled successfully
• Use informative anchor text
• Optimize your website with various on-page SEO elements
• Create content for your site that proves your are an authority on your subject matter

Even though we don’t get a particular say in which pages actually show up as sitelinks, we can request that Google demote certain sitelinks that we don’t want to appear, but even that isn’t guaranteed.

With this update that Google has made, and many in the past, for me it is just a reminder on who the focus is on – the user. Site rankings, Twitter followers, and Facebook Likes don’t mean much if I’m not getting traffic to my site and converting that traffic when they are there.

This week I did a webinar all about Blog Comments. To take my own advice, I wanted to write a blog post about some of the main topics we talked about in our webinar.

We know that blogging is good for SEO, targetting long-tail search terms and having a blog helps establish you as an expert in your field. We also know blogs are a great hub for your social media activity and to quickly respond to news and events in your industry. But have you thought about how commenting on blogs can help you build relationships with influencers in your industry? Or how getting more comments on your own blog helps your marketing?

Here are the key points we discussed on Tuesday

On getting more blog comments…

1. For starters, know what is important for your business – There are lots of things you should be focusing on if you have a blog for your business. Getting more comments on your blog is just one of them. Make sure you are keeping track of the data points that are most important like inbound links, traffic, conversions and buying something. A blog comment does not move your bottom line, it is just one way to measure the success of your blogging efforts.
2. Not getting a lot of comments? Check your tone – A lot of blogs out there have a know-it-all tone of voice: ‘this is the best software for your industry’. So other than to agree or disagree (which are boring blog comments) what more is there for a blog reader to say? Some blogs are primarily for SEO or giving expert opinions. The blogs that get the most comments are the ones that read more human, the ones that admit they may not know everything and the ones that are asking for your input. Try leaving blog posts more open ended, or ask a question or advice – you will probably see a change on how many people comment.
3. Reward your readers who leave comments – Try a comment contest. Tell readers in your post that you will select one random comment and they will get a t-shirt, pen, free download of an ebook, etc. See if a campaign like that gets the comment mojo going.
4. Being controversial gets comments and feedback – Do I recommend that for most businesses? No. I do think you need to make a stand for the things that make your different from your competition. Boring, vanilla content doesn’t exactly inspire your readers to leave a comment.
5. Write blog posts about comments you have received – Let people know that comments are important to you. Highlight how smart your readers are. Take some of that great content and expand on it or give your opinions in a new post. Letting your readers know that their comments are that important to you only encourages more commenting.
6. Make it easy for people to leave comments – Oftentimes people want to leave a comment but when faced with a form with a dozen fields for them to fill out, they change their mind. Make leaving a comment on your blog as easy as possible. I would even recommend looking into services like DISQUS or Facebook Comments to see if that does anything to get your more comments on your posts.
7. Are social media sites stealing your blog comments? – Maybe. Before if you had a blog and people wanted to react to it, they had to leave a comment. Now they can tweet what they think, leave a comment or share it on Facebook or repost and comment on LinkedIn etc. Lots of bloggers who have been in the game awhile now noticed a significant drop in blog comments since the rise in popularity of social media. If how much interaction your posts are getting is important to you… you should make sure you are monitoring social media sites for comments as well.

On leaving better blog comments…

1. Expand on the conversation – If you are going to leave a comments be genuine, add value, be human and make sure you are expanding on the conversation. Use this opportunity to show the blog author and their readers how knowledgeable you are on this topic. Feel free to leave a link if it is to more information on that specific topic but don’t just add a link just to add a link. Your website will be linked from your name already (with most blog comment systems) so no need to add it again.
2. Promote your network – For even more blog comment points, leave your comment showing how knowledgeable you are on this topic but then link to someone in your network who is the perfect person for them to connect with. Promote not only your knowledge but your network as well. Good juju all around.
3. Post on social media sites that you left a comment – Give props to work well done AND to how smart you are by sending out a tweet or status update that says ‘Great post by Bob on Marketing over here www.thissite.com/blog/ I left a comment, what do you think?’.
4. What would you say in person? – Some people know they want to leave a blog comment but don’t exactly know what to say. I tell them to pretend the blog they just read was the keynote at a conference or event – what would you go say to the speaker afterwords? Lots of people say ‘nice job’, ‘thank you’, ‘I totally agree’ but the people speakers remember most say things like ‘I loved your speech. I actually have written a paper specifically about one of the points you just made and our organization found…’ Those are the people that make a new connection with a leader in their industry.
5. Make your blog comment stand out visually – My friend Marc A. Pitman wrote a blog post on formatting your name so it has your website. I thought that was a good idea. Also just like all web content, make sure you format your comment with spaces or lined items. Internet readers love to skim first and read second. Make your comment skim-able and find a way to break up long chunks of text.
6. Do your homework – Want to comment on a blog you have never been to before? Do your homework. You should always review the comments other people have left on that post. You don’t want to be the 40th person to say the same thing. You also should take a peek at other posts, see how this community communicates with eachother.
7. Your blog comments should be long enough – People ask me a lot how long their blog post should be. I think they should be longer than something you could just tweet but shorter than a blog post in itself. If you start writing a blog post and realize it’s length is getting out of hand, consider making your blog reaction a post in itself and linking back to the original source.
8. Be there early – Your post is going to get more attention from the blog author and their readers if you are there first. Some blogs leave the newest comment at the top while others do it the other way around. Either way, more eyeballs on your early comment are better. If you have a great comment but you are the 50th person to comment, again think about writing a reaction blog post instead.

Blog comments for marketing…

1. Build relationships with influencers – Leaving smart and helpful blog comments on influencers blogs is a great way to get some attention for you, your business and your knowledge. Take some time each week to leave comments on blogs that you respect. Let people know that you have a presence in that space too. Be kind but don’t always just agree with the author. Share some unique insight that you have that could make you stand out from the crowd.
2. Direct traffic to your own blog – We have talked about it a few times already but in between the link in your name or a link you leave in a post with more information – you are giving people who may not of heard of you a reason to go to your website. Look at your website Analytics and see if any of the posts you are leaving are generating traffic to your website.
3. Blog comments do NOT directly help your SEO – I hear this one a lot too. We know that inbound links to your site are good and helps you with your SEO. Most blog comments though are marked as ‘no follow’ links, which means they are not given the SEO juice you are looking for as a link to your website. What blog comments DOES is hopefully drives more traffic to your site, which is helpful. Also, the text words you leave are index-able by search engines. Someone could Google a term and find your blog comment as a search result. Also, someone could take your comment and update or write a new blog with their response and link to your website – now THAT is good for your SEO.

Phew! That was a lot of information. Thanks again to everyone who made it to the webinar! And as usual, I would LOVE to hear from you on what you think about leaving blog comments as a marketing strategy and how you are trying to get more blog comments. Let me know in the comments!

Photo credit: Family Oon

What does it mean to crawl a website?
A website crawler is a program that indexes all the pages of a website and generates an XML Sitemap of the site contents; just like the spiders that crawl the entire World Wide Web, only on a much smaller scale. Completing a Sitemap crawl uncovers broken links,  flags frequency of change for URLs and also allows the site manager to generate a snapshot of the most current version of the site pages which will later be used by search engines to index the content.

Why should your site be crawled?
Your site should be crawled regularly to uncover errors like broken links, duplicate content, etc. but more importantly to generate an XML Sitemap which would then let search engines know quickly where all your content is and, more importantly, how often that content is changed so that the search engines can then know when and if it should return to recrawl a site for indexing. Additionally, many site crawlers will list SEO elements like meta, title, description, and keyword tags which can then be reviewed for duplicate content and be modified or updated as needed by your site manager. These elements of your site are important for both user experience as well as organic search optimization.

How often should my website be crawled?
Depending on the size and frequency of updates on your website you should complete a site crawl each time significant content is added, removed, or edited then generate the XML Sitemap for submission to Webmaster Tools like Google, Bing or Yahoo. This could mean daily, weekly or  monthly depending on the amount of activity on a site.

In most cases the people or team that maintains your website will complete a site crawl and fix any errors. There are also Sitemap generators that you can download to complete your own site crawls.

Here are a list of downloadable Sitemap generators that Google has been so kind to compile:

• GSiteCrawler (Windows)
• GWebCrawler & Sitemap Creator (Windows)
• G-Mapper (Windows)
• Inspyder Sitemap Creator (Windows) $
• IntelliMapper (Windows) $
• Microsys A1 Sitemap Generator (Windows) $
• Rage Google Sitemap Automator $ (OS-X)
• Site Map Pro (Windows) $
• Sitemap Writer (Windows) $
• Sitemap Generator by DevIntelligence (Windows)
• Sorrowmans Sitemap Tools (Windows)
• TheSiteMapper (Windows) $
• Vigos Gsitemap (Windows)
• WebDesignPros Sitemap Generator (Java Webstart Application)
• Weblight (Windows/Mac) $
• WonderWebWare Sitemap Generator (Windows)

Remember, a regularly crawled site will increase usability and help build trust in potential leads. Scheduling regular website crawls and fixing errors allows you to proactively maintain your site; making a better experience for visitors and optimizing for organic searchability. When was the last time your site was crawled?