Complex Solutions to Simple Problems» SEO

Digital Frontier – the doors are open

Pål Heick — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:58:14 +0000

A couple of months ago I sat down with a group of former colleagues from the SEO company formerly known as Notabene.net. While bemoaning the fact that a lot of the interesting news we shared with each other at our desks didn’t go further than sporadic messenger conversations and emails, the idea of a blog collaboration project arose.
As we were all thoroughly brain washed to believe that the world revolves around SEO, SEM, and ROI, it was an easy task to pick the focus of our blog. But as we have now branched out in different directions, our information intake will probably be mirrored by our respective jobs and activities.
So without further ado, I invite you to come see us at the Digital Frontier – read, comment, share.
Be warned though, that we write in danish and only about really interesting stuff…

6 free traffic analysis tools

Pål Heick — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:25:32 +0000

Found an interesting blog-post on Techchrunch today. It seems that the market for free yet complex traffic analysis tools has a few new serious competitors. This probably means that we’ll see even more features from the free analysis tools in the future.
This prompted me to do a quick writeup on the different free traffic analysis tools out there:

Woopra is the latest player on the scene and in the words of Techcrunch is ‘Google Analytics or Nuconomy, but in real time…’ – sounds good to me…
(update: Woopra is currently invitation-only)

Google Analytics is probably one of the biggest players in the market. Analytics has a really nice flashy (flex?) interface, but has a 1 day delay on traffic data.

Nuconomy

is designed to consider the impact of widgets, Ajax, Flash, mobile, etc., which don’t generally show up in page view metrics. And they are also measuring everything on both a contributor level (think analytics by author in a blog) and user level (people on the site).

(Techcrunch) … also read a positive review on ReadWriteWeb

Clicky has a nice web2.0′ish interface, and data in real time. There is a basic free account with a limit of 3 sites to track and a pro account with bells and whistles.

Statcounter has a more traditionally looking interface, but data here is also real time.

GoStats has an nice and clean interface that looks like a blend of Clicky and statcounter.

Bonus info:
If you use Greasemonkey, Joost de Valk has a really nice greaseMonkey statistics detector that gives you an idea of how and when you are being tracked.

I’m on a mix of Analytics, Statcounter and Woopra.
What do you use?

Pushing WordPress design – Ford Global Auto Show

Pål Heick — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:07:32 +0000

If you are in need of an effective case demonstrating that WordPress can look all cool and glittery – head over to the Ford Global Auto Show. Very slick design, open comments and of course lots of all those little social bookmarking icons, invitations to use rss, netvibes, iGoogle and whatnot.

Only thing that bothers me a bit is their use of date-based permalinks. It may not mean much but I think these two urls speak for them selves:

Current permalink example:http://autoshows.ford.com/213/2008/02/06/factory-customized-2009-ford-edge/

Suggested permalink:

http://autoshows.ford.com/ford/factory-customized-2009-ford-edge/

What do you think?

Anyhows – Go have a look (yes the image is linked):

Sitelinks… Me too :-)

Pål Heick — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 08:35:38 +0000

Lars Bachmann showed off his brand new sitelinks some days ago. Yesterday I realized that this blog now also has sitelinks:

Go try : Pål Heick on Google

…ok so Lars has more sitelinks. But then again… he probably has more traffic, more incoming kinks, and more ‘popular pages’.

A little intra- and extrapolation then leads me to conclude that:

Sitelinks are not for the chosen few
…but sitelinks depend on a website where the actual query is very relevant.’
The number of sitelinks are affected by popular pages

And there is lots of polations to be found here: factors to generate sitelinks.

Any further polations?

Hooray for Clueray

Pål Heick — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 19:40:03 +0000

I made my first query on Clueray and waited for more than 20 seconds for the results – luckily I was warned that it might be slow – but it was a while worth waiting. Clueray challenges the way documents are served on the SERP by looking at the ‘document intent’:

One of the key insights leading to the development of Clueray’s unique intent-driven approach was to recognize that all of these different document types can be organized by intent: the intent to inform, the intent to facilitate a transaction, the intent to that serve as a “launching point” for exploring related topics, etc. Interestingly, these document intents map very nicely onto the types of searches people do which have been identified by researchers.

This means that you can filter your results according to your specific needs – and by the looks of the search results, the SERP has a range of additional features – one of which is a couple of new ways to display an the results.

Go play with the thing and tell me what you think
(In return I’ll omit a rant about Clueray totally screwing up their blog…)

…and if you are in a hurry – you can just take a look at Cluerays own break down of their SERP:

Agressive Affiliating Strategy with the SEO Book

Pål Heick — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 09:55:39 +0000

Here’s a rather interesting example of an extremely aggressive affiliating strategy from a SEO Book affiliate. I was about to purchase the SEO Book, and did a quick search just per habit. Being Danish and thus accustomed to somewhat prudent marketing strategies. We have several organs and government offices controlling and regulating marketing behaviour. On top of that – knowing that Google’s restrictions on the use of ‘trademark’ keywords I was surprised to see an ad in the results calling SEO Book a scam. The SEO Book is one of the most respected resources in this line of trade, and a couple of years gave me a lot of important information on SEO.

Of course I clicked through and found a salesletter that at the same time praises and scolds the contents in SEO Book, but also sports obvious SEO Book affiliate links along with efforts to sell of own SEO products…

So what does a clever man do? Well, being a lemming 2.0, I of course immediately signed up as an affiliate for use in this post… I’ll buy the SEO Book is the near future and as it is being incrementally updated, I actually hope to get my SEO knowledge refreshed.

Matt Says: Use Alt-text

Pål Heick — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 10:18:43 +0000

The Google Webmaster Central Blog features videos with Matt Cutts sharing some of his points on good webmaster behaviour. I told about Matt’s walkthroug of the SERP Anatomy, where controversial meta tags got the thmubs-up from Matt.
Now the Webmaster Central has Matt in a video, where he tells us to use alt-text smartly. In the example he uses, he puts in 7 keywords in the alt-text to describe the picture.

Now, the videos are trivial in the sense that there’s nothing new under the sky here. But the fact that Matt Cutts tells us to use alt-text and meta descriptions could be a reminder to webmasters that Google hasn’t stopped paying attention to these elements (again).

Still – if one is going tooptimiz – take them from the top down from this list on SEOmoz: Google Search Engine Ranking Factors

50 good SEO articles

Pål Heick — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 22:34:32 +0000

Compilations of content – top 10 this, 5 way to do so – has become one of the prime advices for writing linkable content. This list of 50 of the years best SEO articles is very linkable and has thus … Continue reading →

Google + Digg = Giggle?

Pål Heick — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 20:34:06 +0000

Several blogs have spotted that Google may be considering adding a social element to the search results. At Google experimental you can always play guinea pig with novel search technologies – and now it seems that a social approach to search results may be on the way:

This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made.

Read more here Giggle Search.
Of course this only allows for manipulating search results in your own searches – but it isn’t hard to see Google using this data to refine general search results.

Via Googlified: Google Digg-Style Experiment

SERP Anatomy by Matt Cutts

Pål Heick — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 08:06:44 +0000

My favourite Google person (Matt Cutts) seems to have been inspired by my favourite not-Google person (Rand Fishkin) and started a whiteboard-venture to tell a little something about Google.

The first session:

Matt talks about the anatomy of a search result, and gives some useful tips on how you can help improve how your site appears in our results pages. This talk covers everything you’ll see in a search result, including page title, page description, and sitelinks, and explains those other elements that can appear, such as stock quotes, cached pages links, and more.

I’ve always been a strong advokate for meta descriptions in order to get precise results in the SERP, but the meta description is often disregarded due to it’s shaded past as SEO-dumping ground. Well, next time this debate arises, I’ll have Matt’s words to back me up

…or watch the video: