Almost everyone is aware that mobile usage has been on the upswing for the past few years, and more and more search activities are being conducted via smartphones. Since consumers are going to handheld devices to find products and services, it behooves companies to target the mobile market and focus on the unique opportunities to be found there.

Enter Pure Oxygen, a real pioneer in the field of mobile ad optimization. The firm provides consumer brands and marketers independent analysis, tools, and strategy to improve results across mobile web, search, social, sms, apps, and more.

They have created a tool for checking out webpages on mobile devices, the Mobile Site Analyzer, currently in beta, which checks content for optimal delivery on multiple platforms including iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.

Pure Oxygen also provides consultation services for more sophisticated analysis of mobile friendliness, and they help increase conversion rates and ROI derived from mobile channels.

There’s a surprising number of companies which are ignoring mobile optimization and ad targeting — apparently expecting their regular internet marketing via SEO and PPC advertising to automatically distribute their marketing message via mobile as well. This is a very poor assumption, since traditional internet media does not automatically translate onto mobile platforms, and there’s a plethora of mobile-specific channels which would fail to be exploited under this lack of strategy. For instance, mobile apps can be a terrific source of referrals and promotion, but they must be properly engineered and could be offered through iPhone app store, Android/Verizon app store, and Amazon’s appstore.

I recently pointed out how Google is treating mobile-friendly sites differently than sites without mobile optimization, and this has significant implications for websites’ performance as mobile usage continues to grow. For many local companies desiring to appear and rank in local search results, the need for mobile optimization borders upon necessity — it could well be, ahem, “oxygen” to them!

Anyway, congrats to Brian on the launch of Pure Oxygen Mobile! I think this new venture is targeting a great niche, and will provide just what many companies need.

The rating service and talk about it reminded me that I actually did a sort of rating via a blog post here back in 2007 entitled “Some Top In-House SEOs“. In that post I sought to list out the cream-of-the-crop of search engine optimization experts working within major companies.

The main difficulty of attempting to rate SEOs is that it’s quite hard to know precisely what they’ve recommended or done to optimize a company’s websites. For instance, you could be an absolute genius at SEO, but if the company is lethargic or incompetent programmers oversee their sites, none of the SEO expert’s talent might be reflected in the actual site. That’s an extreme example, and in most cases some degree of the expert’s recommendations will be properly implemented. But the point is that site configuration may not really be used to reflect an expert’s actual ability, particularly if compared with other colleagues.

Back when I wrote “Some Top In-House SEOs”, I wasn’t really prepared for the large amount of attention it received. I was immediately pressured by a lot of people who wanted to be added to the list, but didn’t meet the criteria I was using. Quite a few people asked me to update the list over time as well, and I quickly saw that it would be necessary if this was done ongoing to be open about the rating criteria I was using — else people would question why so-and-so was listed while so-and-so was not.

The criteria I used back then was very basic. I wanted to list only people who were employees of top companies that performed organic search optimization of one sort or another for those company’s websites. I wanted companies which were readily-identifiable by a majority of people in the U.S., so they had to be MAJOR brand names: top-50 websites, Fortune 500 companies, and Internet Retailer 500 companies. Finally, I had to be able to find/identify the SEOs who worked for those companies, which usually meant that they’d have to self-disclose what they did (many SEOs operated somewhat anonymously behind corporate walls). So, the SEO needed to blog or speak at conferences, and disclose who they worked for. In one or two cases, I discovered individual’s names through news interviews or press releases. I also mined the list of top-linked SEOs from LinkedIn (apparently no longer in operation? formerly: http://www.linkedseo.com/).

I made a number of mistakes, of course. I didn’t feel I had time to write to and receive confirmation from each person. In some cases I just “outed” people from behind the corporate curtain for the first time!

For the most part, people loved the attention and recognition! I felt a bit stressed from those who clamored to get in, and I pretty much stated that I wouldn’t add any until I updated a year down the road. In quite a lot of cases, I think that headhunters mined the list in order to lure people away to other companies, so many benefited from the exposure.

Here it is, about three years after the fact, and I thought it’d be interesting to see where are they all now? So, here’s the list once again, with individual’s former companies listed from back then, and who they work for now. Nothing scientific – I merely base this on what their LinkedIn resume or website states. It’s been neat for me to revisit this list! So many of these folks became friends and close acquaintances since I wrote this up! It’s also fascinating to see how many of them have moved on to advanced titles and to owning their own companies.

Some Top In-House SEOs – Where They Are Now:

Amr Awadallah:
Then: Director Product/Business Intelligence at Yahoo! Inc.
Now: Founder, CTO, VP Engineering. at Cloudera, Inc.

Aidan Beanland:
Then: Regional SEO Manager at Yahoo
Now: Regional SEO Manager at Yahoo

Jennifer Blamy:
Then: SEO Manager at LendingTree.com
Now: VP – Digital Marketing at Bank of America

Jessica Bowman:
Then: Director of SEO for Business.com
Now: Principal at SEMinhouse.com SEO Consulting

Michael Brito:
Then: Search Marketing Manager at HP
Now: Vice President at Edelman Digital

David Carberry:
Then: Director of Search Marketing for Advertising.com
Now: Director of Digital Sales Baltimore-Washington at Radio One, Co-Founder at Local Roll Call

Steve Carrod:
Then: Search Marketing Manager (EMEA) at Hewlett-Packard
Now: Website Marketing Manager at Snapfish

Gene Chan:
Then: Search Marketing Manager at Imaging & Printing Group – HP
Now: Senior Account Executive at MySpace

Michael Cheung:
Then: Search Marketing Lead at Marchex
Now: AVP of Business Development at PT Kreatip Komunikacitra

Kathleen Coughlan:
Then: Strategic Alliances & Search Marketing at Lexis Nexis
Now: Director, Global Brand Marketing at LexisNexis

Terry Cox:
Then: SEO/SEM Manager for Walt Disney Parks & Resorts Online
Now: Search Engine Marketing Director at Walt Disney Parks & Resorts Online

Christopher Curtis:
Then: Associate Manager, Search Engine Marketing at Shopzilla.com
Now: Senior Director, Traffic Operations at Shopzilla.com

Darren Dalasta:
Then: Search Marketing Manager at WhitePages.com
Now: Search Engine Marketing Manager at WhitePages.com

Rudy DeDominicis:
Then: Search Marketing Specialist at Time Inc Interactive
Now: Associate Director Audience Development- Search Marketing Specialist @ Time Inc

John Ellis :
Then: Online Marketing Manager, Search for ResortQuest / Gaylord Entertainment
Now: Independent Search Engine Marketing Consultant (SEO & PPC)

Matt Evans:
Then: SEO Manager at Monster.com
Now: SEO Manager at Monster.com

Duane Forrester:
Then: Manager, Search Marketing at Sports Direct Inc.
Now: Senior Program Manager of SEO at Microsoft

Derek Fulford:
Then: Search Marketing Manager at The Weather Channel Interactive
Now: Search Marketing Manager at The Weather Channel Interactive

Jason Hall:
Then: Director, Search Engine Marketing at Shopzilla.com
Now: Search expert w/ international experience, currently exploring Brazilian Internet market

Seth Hammac:
Then: Search Engine Marketing Media Manager at CNET Networks
Now: Sales Engineer at Microsoft

Julie Handleman-Baerwald:
Then: SEO/SEM Manager at Citysearch
Now: SEO & SEM Director, Citysearch

Liz Keller:
Then: Manager of SEO Strategy at iVillage, Inc.
Now: Head of Search Engine Optimisation (UK) at Razorfish

Mia Kemp:
Then: SEO and Sr. Project Manger – Marketing at Kaplan University
Now: Manager, Marketing Analytics & Strategy at Sapient

Imran Khan:
Then: Chief Marketing Officer at E-Loan
Now: VP, Worldwide eCommerce Marketing at Symantec

Vic Kuzmovich:
Then: Director Online Marketing at Expert Realty
Now: VP Search Marketing at BodyLogicMD

Rob Lenderman:
Then: SEO Architect at LendingTree.com
Now: AVP Interactive Product Development at Interval International – IAC

Jeff Leong:
Then: Sr. Online Marketing Specialist at Symantec Corporation.
Now: Web Consultant

Laura Lippay:
Then: SEO for Yahoo!
Now: Online Visibility (Social Media & Search/SEO) Consultant

Paul Low:
Then: Search Marketing Manager at JCPenney.com
Now: Account Director at Camelot Communications

Bill Macaitis:
Then: VP of Traffic Generation and SEM / SEO for Fox Interactive Medi
Now: VP of Online Marketing at Salesforce.com

Philip Maher:
Then: Director of SEO at LocalLaunch
Now: Founder at Intuitive Investments

Matt McGee:
Then: SEO for Marchex
Now: Self-employed Marketing Consultant

Sean McGinnis:
Then: Manager, Search Engine Marketing at Findlaw
Now: Director, Online Bar Review at Micromash

Andy Mihalop:
Then: Head of Search Marketing at Reed Business Information
Now: Search & Performance Media Director – Global Clients at Aegis Media

Melanie Mitchell:
Then: Director, SEO/SEM at AOL
Now: SVP, Search Marketing Strategy at Digitas

Mike Moran:
Then: Distinguished Engineer / Product Manager of IBM’s OmniFind Search Product
Now: Chief Strategist at Converseon

Iestyn Mullins:
Then: SEM Manager at SHOP.COM
Now: Director Managed Services at Logic361.com

Michael Nguyen:
Then: SEO Strategist at Shopzilla
Now: SEO Strategist at Shopzilla

Paul O’Brien:
Then: SEO for HP
Now: VP Marketing at Outright

Giovanna O’Grady:
Then: SEM/SEO Manager at Intuit
Now: Consultant, Customer Acquisition & Retention at AboutAirportParking.com

Paul Pedersen:
Then: Manager Search Engine Marketing at E W Scripps
Now: Manager Search Engine Marketing at E W Scripps

Dan Perry:
Then: SEO Producer, Cars.com
Now: SEO Director at Turner Broadcasting

David Perez:
Then: SEO/PPC Manager for eHarmony
Now: Cofounder at Convertro

Robert Pettee:
Then: Search Marketing Manager at LendingTree, LLC
Now: Director, Search Marketing at LendingTree, LLC

Amy Pickwick:
Then: Web Communications Manager at USinternetworking, an AT&T company
Now: Senior Project Manager, Go Forward Media

Antonella Pisani Vernier:
Then: Director of Search Engine Marketing & Optimization at ProFlowers
Now: VP, Acquisition Marketing at Provide Commerce (ProFlowers / RedEnvelope)

Roni Raulwing:
Then: International Program Manager – Mobile & Devices at Adobe, Inc.
Now: Web Project and Globalization Manager & Int’l SEO/SEM at a Silicon Valley Company

Greg Reitman:
Then: Manager, Search Marketing at Barnes & Noble .com
Now: Director of Marketing at [x+1]

Jennifer Wood (Rodriguez):
Then: Online Marketing Manager at The Seattle Times
Now: Online Marketing Manager at The Seattle Times

Thomas Shaffer:
Then: Sr. Search Media Analyst at Microsoft
Now: Product Manager – Analytic Services at Microsoft

Aaron Shear:
Then: Global Director of SEO for Shopping.com
Now: Partner at Boost Search Marketing

Marshall D. Simmonds:
Then: Chief Search Strategist for New York Times
Now: Chief Search Strategist for New York Times

Scott Skurnick:
Then: Director SEO (Search Engine Optimization) at Edmunds.com
Now: Executive Director of Search Engine Optimization & User Insight at Edmunds.com

Chris Silver Smith: (Huh! I listed myself in this list! Narcissistic much?!?)
Then: Head of the Technology & Development Department, Idearc Superpages.com
Now: Director of Optimization Strategies, KeyRelevance

Jenn Mathews:
Then: SEO Manager at Classmates.com
Now: VP of Interactive Marketing at Obvio.us

Julie Sun:
Then: Senior Manager, SEO at MTV Networks
Now: Director, Digital Marketing at MTV Networks

David Temple:
Then: Search Marketing Consultant at FindLaw
Now: Regional Digital Director at OgilvyOne Worldwide/Soho Square

Patrick Terrell:
Then: Affiliate and Search Marketing Manager at PETCO
Now: Director, Marketing at SurfStitch

Mike Banks Valentine:
Then: Senior SEO Manager at Fox Interactive Media
Now: Director of SEO at Demand Media

Julie Kosbab:
Then: Team Lead, Search Marketing at FindLaw
Now: Online Marketing/Strategy at Plaudit Design

Tanya Vaughan:
Then: Search Engine Marketing & Optimization, Web Marketing Hewlett-Packard (HP)
Now: VP Internet Marketing at Bodybuilding.com

Alfonso Veggetti:
Then: Senior Marketing Analyst at Washington Mutual
Now: Senior Marketing Analyst – Washington Mutual

Meg Walker:
Then: Online Marketing Manager at Network Solutions
Now: Online Marketing – PRWeb at Vocus

Frank Watson:
Then: SEM Manager at FXCM (Forex Capital Markets)
Now: CEO Kangamurra Media

Anthony Ziehmke:
Then: Search Marketing Strategist at Microsoft
Now: Manager – ASG Search at Microsoft

Sandra Zoratti:
Then: Director, Marketing and Strategy at IBM
Now: Vice President, Global Solutions Marketing at Ricoh IBM InfoPrint Solutions

If I’ve made some error as of the date of this blog post, or if you don’t wish me to list your name, feel free to contact me.

* See also my commentary about this post and rating methods at my personal blog: “Top In-House SEOs Reprised“.

The new features might also reveal some secrets of Google Maps ranking factors. It’s definitely a space that’s well worth watching for local search marketing experts.

Naturally, I got my t-shirt sporting the SEO Superman-esque logo! I don’t wear t-shirts a whole lot, but this is one I’ll definitely wear sometimes.

It felt odd not to see Stephan Spencer, VP at Covario, at the SMX conference, since he’s been such a search marketing juggernaut over the past few years and his book, The Art of SEO, just came out. But, I understand that he may be hitting some other conferences, and these speaking gigs can sap the energy out of one really quickly.

There’s not a lot of companies that could pair themselves up with an SEO superhero promotion and still be taken seriously, but I think Covario can do it. I know from formerly working with Netconcepts that their automated SEO solution, GravityStream, is an awesome service, and pairing it up with Covario’s analytics makes for a very strong combination. As a technologist, I certainly think it’s best to simply program a site to have excellent optimization for search rankings, but I’ve seen time and again when large companies are unable to get past bureaucratic IT development processes to roll something out in a timely fashion. For those companies, GravityStream is a really good solution.

For all of you who also attended the SMX West conference, did you get your SEO superhero t-shirts? How often will you wear them?

Today, when a new web site is launched, it will take a while before its pages get crawled and indexed in Google. With the increasing strain on hardware and resources due to the rapid growth of new sites, Google has become very strict in its policy of admitting sites and retaining web pages of sites in its index. It is a case of survival of the fittest in cyberspace.

Some of the basic facts to be borne in mind when looking at the issue in its entirety are:

• The Page rank is proportional to the total number of pages in Google’s index
• The page rank gained by a site depends on the number of inbound and outbound links to that site
• To increase its page rank, a site must build more pages and increase its virtual real estate

When a new site is launched, the number of backlinks to that site is negligible unless the business is well known and has a credible following offline and is launching its brand online. The average site owner has to set about building an external link profile by submitting to directories, guest blogging on well established industry relevant blogs, providing a platform for user generated content on her site, promoting site badges etc etc.

All this takes time and effort and it is a slow and steady natural growth. There are several link building software programs that promise instant deliverance by helping you build multitude of links in no time. The problem with this approach is that an average human cannot acquire 100 links in a day (read 8 hours of work time). Google also knows this and it is an easy recipe for raising a red flag.

Coming to the crux of the issue, creating and growing the number of pages on your site is relatively easy as you, the site owner, have full control over it. If you are passionate about your industry with good working knowledge, you can build lots of content over a short span of time. But this alone will not make the cut in today’s circumstances for making it into the Google index and being retained and ranked over time.

The most powerful links that can be obtained today are editorial links. When another site owner regards your site content as one of high quality and decides to link to from her blog or site, it is clearly a double thumbs up for your content and Google will also consider it seriously. A great linkbait program can help your site gain lots of natural inbound links from the linkerati.

If you have votes from other sites in the form of backlinks to the various pages of your site, this is crucial in Google retaining those pages in its index. Again, you cannot produce top quality content across all pages of your site as the subject being discussed can be limited in scope or not very popular in the eyes of users.

I have been noticing of late that even powerful domains with several product pages with wafer thin content and footer heavy links do not pass muster to be admitted/retained in the index. It is becoming increasingly clear that each individual page must attain a certain pagerank threshold to be retained in the index. This clearly proves that things cannot be taken for granted. Also, well established sites cannot afford to rest on their laurels any more.

To achieve a minimum pagerank threshold, internal linking can help to an extent and you as the site owner can do your bit to this end. But it is very vital to get a link from external unbiased sources to derive some link juice that can boost the pagerank of the page in question.

If the momentum on “natural” external link building profile of your website is maintained at a steady level from the inception of your website to its current state, you can expect Google to maintain a decent indexation level of your site and update its index regularly with the fresh content and growing number of pages offered by your site.

Rand in his Whiteboard presentation on Link Growth Patterns explains the relationship between link growth patterns and indexation levels.

Eric Enge in his post on The Disproportionate Value of Deep Links talks about improving the pagerank flow to hitherto areas of the site where there was no link juice flowing before.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland seo firm offering both search engine optimisation and ppc services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

The entire domain’s authority and trust is reflected by this page rank value. The home page then tends to distribute this page rank to the first level (categories), the second level (sub-categories) and the third level product pages which we often refer to as link juice. In general, the first level pages tend to derive the maximum link juice from the home page. But in a site with excessive number of sub-categories and product pages (money pages), the pagerank distribution is not proportional with some gaining link juice and a large majority not gaining any.

I am not delving into pagerank sculpting which was the rage of the SEO industry not long ago. This method was adopted to make certain areas of a site more powerful by flowing link juice from the home page preferentially to pages of interest (possible commercial intent). The internal linking architecture is altered from its natural form to highlight more important pages than the rest on the site.

In my opinion, internal linking with appropriate anchor text can be used to improve the ranking of pages within a site but this has its limitations. Integrating a blog with the main site so that it forms part of the global site template is vital. The different posts on the site blog can point to different pages of the site to flow some much needed link juice to prop select pages up and assist them in getting indexed by Google and ranked on the SERPs.

Eric Enge at Stone Temple Consulting has done some research in regards to distribution of domain authority and trust to pages on the lower level pages of a site. Let us assume you have a site selling products. You have the home page, many categories with respective sub-categories and product pages in that order. Let us consider an example where you sell Canon digital cameras as shown below.

The specific product page in question is listed on Page 4. You are not happy as this product page has not recorded any page rank. If it does not have the requisite page rank, there is a possibility that it will not gain entry into the Google index.

In this scenario, it is evident that the site despite a great PR of 6 is not able to flow link juice into this specific product page. Eric has found out in his experiments that an inbbound link to this deep page with appropriate anchor text (in this case EOS D7 Canon Digital Camera Review) from an external site is a huge help to get this product page into the index and help get it ranked. The link may not be of superior quality yet it helps a great deal.

As we all know, every inbound link is a vote to the site and the search engines recognise this as a strong signal. The search engines adjust their algorithm accordingly to flow more internal link juice into the page which has gained inbouind links. The more the merrier seems to be the case.

In our example, the Canon EOS D7 product page ends up gaining link juice thus helping it enter the Google index and get ranked over time. Deep inbound links help a site distribute more authority and trust to pages that receive such inbound links. This is a classic case of an inbound link triggering a tunnel of sorts to flow a site’s internal link juice to select pages at a lower hierarchy level.

In summary, you do not need masses of links to get your third level or product pages indexed and ranked on the SERPs. Just a few inbound links will facilitate better flow of the site’s domain authority and trust (read link juice) to the specific page recipient of the inbound links in question. You can read the post on impact of deep inbound links on a site’s lower level pages on Eric’s site.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine marketing company offering both seo and pay per click services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

In this scenario, it is imperative that a site owner with a fairly new site maximizes her chances of retaining as many visitors to her site as possible by giving them an opportunity to communicate with her site through a comment on her blog, leaving feedback or collecting the visitor’s email address.

This will allow her to sell products/services on the backend through email marketing. This is where website optimization techniques coupled with solid SEO strategy can pay huge dividends in the long run.

Website optimization basically deals with improving a visitor’s experience on your website and increasing the conversion of casual visitors into customers.

Internet marketers have long realised the power of squeeze pages through which they collect email addresses and then sell products/services through email marketing repeatedly. They also know the concept of “The money is in the list” as each email subscriber is a very valuable proposition.

Many a time, sites ranking well on the SERPs can be attributed to the diligent efforts of a search engine optimisation professional. But rankings are not an end in themselves. They are just the means to the end. Better visibility helps a site gain more visitors. But the crucial aspect lies in converting the visitors into customers. Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is an important aspect of SEO that is hogging the limelight in the present.

It would be worth the effort for SEO professionals to atleast propose to site owners the effectiveness of retaining visitors and/or upsell/downsell products and services once the site has attained good visibility on the SERPs. Let us consider a few techniques that can be employed in the light of what is being discussed.

1) Undiluted Focus:
If you are selling a product or service, you can be in a situation where you are selling many distinct products or services. This will result in specific money pages (inner pages) which highlight the particular product or service in question.

The page that describes the benefits of the product or service should focus completely on just that and should not diverge to talk about a related product or service.

Remember that prospective buyers will buy benefits and not features of a product or service. So it is important to highlight the benefits clearly on the money page.

2) Strident Call To Action:
With the singular focus described above, the visitor is subjected to a single call to action that specifically sells that particular product or service described.

As a site owner, it is your responsibility to ensure that the visitor is asked to take action. If you sell blue widgets, have a big bold button that says Buy this blue widget now. If there is no clear call to action, there is a good chance that visitors will not take action.

3) In the case of visitor trying to move out of the sales funnel:
In the above example where you sell blue widgets on your site, there are many reasons why a visitor is unable to buy a product. The price point can be a major factor as the visitor feels it is too expensive. You cannot predict this until you find out.

This is where the application of a popular internet marketing technique can help you gain a deep insight into the makeup of a typical customer in your niche. If the visitor clicks the Back button or tries to close the tab or tries to type in a new web address in the URL box, then she is definitely not interested in buying your blue widget.

If you use a script that can sense this action, it can popup a special one time offer for the same blue widget at a discounted price. As a business owner, you are cutting your profit by a margin that you can afford. This causes the visitor to rethink and induces her to buy the product at a discounted rate. You are gaining a sale where there was none in the first place.

An increased incidence of the one time offer sales indicates that your produt price is more expensive for most visitors. You have to bite the bullet and reduce the price to attract more sales.

4) Information seekers:
Not all visitors are in a buying frame of mind when they visit your site. There are many seeking information on the blue widget that you sell. For users in reasearch mode, you must have a Resources page on your site which explains all the features of your product.

You can have a review of your product and your competitor’s product and show the superior/useful features your product offers compared to that of your competitor. You can also compare the pricing models. If you have a truly superior product in your niche, then you can certainly justify its higher sale price.

5) Optimizing your site for buyers keywords:
I would like to insert here the idea of optimizing your site for buyers keywords. During keyword research, you are prone to come across keyword phrases that specifically are commercially action oriented in intent. Some examples in our case can be “buy blue widget” or “blue widget software download” (without the quotes).

These clearly show the number of searchers who have done their research and review of the product you sell and are ready to buy. It is ideal to have pages on your site optimized for such buyers.

6) Collecting visitor email address:
You can also incentivize your visitor to submit her name and email address by offering an ebook download that explains the nuances of what to look for when buying a blue widget. For information seekers who have no idea of your niche and/or product, this is a goldmine of information. They would certainly subscribe to your mailing list to get their hands on this great resource.

Now that you have their email address (you have to make it double opt-in subscription process), you have obtained customers for a lifetime (unless they decide to unsubscribe) to whom you can sell products/services in the backend. These offers can be tailor made for just your email subscribers and should not appear on your main website.

7) Collecting Feedback:
At every possible stage of the sales cycle, encourage your visitors to submit their feedback either through a feedback form on the site or through a blog comment if you have an active blog on your site.

The feedback can be about the quality of your product or service offered, shipping and handling concerns etc. It would be ideal to have a 6 to 12 hour turnaround time to respond to queries/complaints.

Feedback is valuable to a business owner to streamline her sales funnel and address issues that she may not have imagined existed in the first place.

8. Use of Website Optimizer:
I have described at length the process of using Google’s Website Optimizer. You can use this as a standalone tool or from within your Adwords account.

Please note that when you sign up for a Website Optimizer account, Google will automatically setup an Analytics account (if you already do not have one) for use with your experiments to collect your experimental data.

Laxity due to Free Traffic:
Though this is not part of the methods actually used to improve conversion rate on a site, many a time, even owners of websites well entrenched at the top of the Google SERPs can be lax as they are getting free traffic from the major search engines.

If a site owner is driving traffic to her site using PPC, she feels the pinch as she is paying for each visitor. This is also the case with CPA (Cost per acquisition) marketing where marketers pay for each visitor to visit their landing page on which they make an offer in the form of a signup to a service for example. They get paid only if the visitor signs up.

It is common for such marketers to employ these techniques mentioned above to gain the maximum ROI for the $ paid to get their visitors into their site.

It is important to realise the value of each visitor to your website. As a website owner, you have to endevour to improve the visitor experience in every possible way and get them to communicate to you their delightful and/or woeful experiences on your site. This will ensure the success of your online business and put you head and shoulders ahead of your competition.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search marketing consultancy that offers both organic search and ppc marketing to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.

Ranking below the fold on page 1 or on succeeding pages is not going to help your site’s cause in gaining better visibility and hence more traffic. The key factors you have to consider when doing a competitive analysis to dethrone a site ranking in the top 5 results and get your site listed in its place is what constitutes the meat of this post.

Broadly speaking, there are two sets of metrics to consider when doing competitive analysis namely the Domain and Page metrics. We will consider each of them in detail. For a change, I will try to make it as pictorial as possible (where applicable) and include my observations under Note (where applicable).

Also, some of the tools mentioned herein are proprietary and owned by SEOmoz. A PRO membership is necessary in most cases to see the values of metrics mentioned in this post. I will mention this where necessary. Screenshots showing link and domain figures are that of Natural search blog site.

A) Domain Metrics For Competitive Analysis:

1)Domain Size:

NOTE:
In general, the site: command shows the virtual real estate your site owns on the web. More specifically, it shows the number of pages from your site that have been included in the Google index. You can use the same command on Yahoo and Bing as well.

2) DmR or Domain moz Rank:

NOTE:
The DmR measure indicates how important your domain is in the entire search engine index amongst all the other domains. The values are logarithmic and increase from 0 to 10.

A value of 5+ or 6+ is relatively competitive to beat. A value of 7+ or 8+ indicates a very powerful domain. Lower values mean you can take them on and try to dislodge them from the top.

3) DmT or Domain moz Trust:

NOTE:
DmT or Domain moz Trust indicates the trustworthiness of a site and the number of links it has earned from other well trusted sites.

All search engines have a core group of trusted seed sites as a starting point. The trustworthiness of your site can be measured by the hops or distance it is away from the trusted seed site. For more information, refer to my earlier post titled Relationship between trust and link building

4) Number of links to a given domain:

Yahoo Site Explorer
Linkscape

NOTE:
This is a measure of inbound links to your entire site. You can use the above tools to get an idea of how many links your domain has garnered and compare it with your competitor.

5) Number of linking domains:

NOTE:
You can use Linkscape to identify the number of domains linking to your site.

The more diverse the domain set linking to your site, the more it will help your site reach the top. If you have 1000 links from 100 domains, this is a classic example of a sitewide link increasing the link count. If you have 500 links from 300 domains, your domain diversity measure is significant.

B) Page Metrics For Competitive Analysis:
Here we look at metrics that influence the specific page of a site.

1) Page Rank or PR:

NOTE:
The Page Rank in the Google Toolbar is a logarithmic value. A Page rank value encompasses a lot of things apart from just links going in and out of the site. It also includes several other factors that are domain and page specific.

The mR or mozRank is its equivalent in Linkscape. A Page rank of 5+ or 6+ is relatively competitive. A PR of 7+ or 8+ indicates a powerful site.

It is 10 times harder (in terms of time ($) and effort) to elevate the Pagerank value from one level to the next succeeding level.

2) Kewyord Targeting:

Basic on page factors like Keyword present in the title tag, URL and h# tags on the page and body copy

In my honest opinion, on page factors constitute 30 to 35% of efforrts in helping a certain page rank at the top of the SERPs.

If the niche your site is in is very special with not much competition, then on page factors will make the cut. Else, majority of the action lies external to your site.

3) mR or mozRank:
This is a Linkscape metric. This was discussed earlier as being similar to Page Rank.

A mR of 0 or unranked value should alert you to other issues like whether the link juice from your home page flows to the page in question. It raises questions about the location of the page in your site hierarchy.

Nowadays, each page of a site must have a certain pagerank threshold to retain their place in the Google index. Pages that do not have enough pagerank can be attributed to lack of content focus and quality of the page, lack of inbound links to the page etc.

Another problem is that Google updates its Page Rank toolbar once in a while and you cannot depend on it. Linkscape crawls the web atleast once a month and updates the mR value regularly.

Boosting your site pages through internal links alone will not help. It has to be reinforced by links from external unbiased sites to your site pages as well.

4) mT or moz Trust:

NOTE:
This is a measure of how trusted the page in question is in the eyes of Google. Links from other trustworthy sites to this particular page can certainly help increase its trust.

5) Number of links pointing to the page:
This is the number of links pointing to the page in question can be found out using tools like
Yahoo Site Explorer and
Linkscape

If links obtained are from a diverse set of domains, then it is valuable. So saying, it is agian unrealistic to expect only sites related to your industry to link to you. As a site owner, you have no control over who links to you.

Over the years, I have found that an inner page of a site that ranks well on the SERPs for a particular search phrase is more enduring and harder to dislodge from the top than a site whose home page ranks for the same term.

6) Number of linking domains:
Again, these are the links from various domains pointing to your site. A high domain diversity is a key factor to reach the search engine SERPs summit.

Links are powerful signals in the ranking process. It is not possible for a site owner to manipulate incoming links especially those from quality sites.

Domain diversity also cannot be manipulated easily. The number of inbound links from a diverse set of domains can help a site in even the most competitive industry break the ranking deadlock and burst into the top page of the SERPs.

7) Anchor Text of inbound links:

NOTE:
These examples show the anchor text of inbound links to the Natural Search Blog site. The anchor text is the text that forms the clickable part of the link.

The anchor text in links should reflect subtle variations of the subject discussed on the page of your site. If all links have the same anchor text, it is more than a coinicidence and the search engines will smell a rat.

There is a belief that if you get an inbound link from a good external site and if you are not happy with it, you can write to the other webmaster or site owner asking her to change the anchor text to suit. This is fine.

But in my opinion, if the other person linking to your site defines the focus of your site’s page in her own words, then that is the natural reinforcement your page gets. You would be well off checking the focus of the page on your site. If it exhibits mixed focus, this will naturally lead to different people interpreting it the way they read it sometimes giving rise to unexpected anchor text.

If you still want to have a more animated representation of this post, it would be worth watching Rand’s presentation on Key Factors in Competitive Analysis

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine optimisation company that offers both seo and pay per click services to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.

Some business directories and data aggregators contain huge percentages of bad listings including gone-out-of-business companies and duplicated listings. Pankaj Mathur of InfoUSA recently estimated that some sources such as Dunn & Bradstreet, Acxiom, Localeze and Google Maps might contain 17-to-18-million records, or up to 4 million more records than actual, live businesses! That’s as much as a 28.6% error rate!

I know from experience that some percentage of a business directory’s bloat can be caused by inability to figure out if a business has closed up for good or not (most data sources are not set up to verify each individual business, although InfoUSA remains an example of the gold standard, relying on a practice of phoning each and every business to verify it’s viability at least once per year, and also using a number of other signals of possible closure). These old, dead business listings clog up a great many online directories and can result in poor usability when consumers attempt to drive to their doorsteps for products or services.

However, another source of bloat is in the form of duplicate listings, and as a search engine marketer, it’s these duplicate listings that my clients sometimes have which concern me highly. Just as with duplicate webpages in regular SEO, duplicate listings in business directories and within Google Maps can potentially dilute down a company’s possible ranking score, resulting in lower overall rankings and poorer online performance.

Back in February, Google and other search engines jointly announced support of a canonical tag for webpages, enabling webmasters to specify which page URL should be treated as the main/authoritative one for search engine indexing in cases where multiple URL variations could occur.

If such a protocol makes sense for the general web search engines, why not a protocol to assist in reducing dupes in local search, too?

Google Maps help suggests that users can help them identify cases of duplicate listings, but the problem is that dupes may be constantly coming in through all of Google’s various data partners.

At the recent Kelsey Conference, local directory industry experts predict that Cost-Per-Call is increasingly going to become a dominant pricing model and this will mainly happen through individual directories displaying different tracking phone numbers for the same businesses – and all these different channels with separate phones feed into Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, Bing Maps, and other local search engines. So, potential issues from many various phone numbers could be increasing.

Tracking phone numbers are not the only potential problem – sometimes a company’s alternate phone numbers and fax numbers will get parsed off into separate business listings, causing further instances of duplication.

So, how could this “Canonical Phone Tag” effectively be accomplished? hCard Microformat already provides a framework for doing something like this. A canonical phone tag could be formed like this:

<abbr class=”tel” title=”000.867.5309″>000.123.4567</abbr>

In this example, webpage users could see the “000.123.4567″ tracking phone number when they view the webpage, and the machines could instead glean the authoritative, canonical phone number for the business, “000.867.5309″, and ignore the tracking number.

So, is this a solution in search of a problem?

How many of you have encountered instances where a tracking phone number has gotten indexed in a separate listing alongside a business’s primary phone number/listing? If so, this solution may be worthwhile to consider in keeping all of a business’s ranking weight combined in one listing as opposed to distributed across many.

There is a crying need for unique quality content nowadays. Copywriters are in demand and I have come across cases where journalists in leading dailies and magazines have kicked their full time jobs and taken to writing content for the web. But the uniqueness of the content has come under the scrutiny of the major search engines.

What exactly is unique content?
In one of his Whiteboard Fridays, Rand talks about uniqueness of content and the way content can be categorised into 3 major types. He cites the example of a search in the travel industry which throws up very similar results on the top results in the SERPs.

Most of the content is from the same source of User Generated Content (UGC). From the user experience perspective, the content on the sites are almost the same leading to a stalemate. This is where fresh updated unique content can surcharge the user’s energies and rev up her interest in the product or service she is looking for.

By unique content, it is not just laying out content in correct grammatical form in a unique style to escape the content duplication filter of major search engines. It is the inherent value of the content itself and the ideas portrayed therein that makes the content unique.

If you are an expert in a certain industry and you have worked in the trenches and have a lot of knowledge of the inner workings of the industry, then the ideas expressed and the tone and quality of your content will show that you are indeed a domain expert.

This is most importantly recognised by other users who can clearly decipher you are indeed an expert. This is reflected by a spike in the visitors to your blog to read your posts and the increase in subscribers to your blog feed.

If you state clearly in your article or post that the content is free to be circulated provided there is a credit at the bottom through a link back to your site, the merit of your content will ensure that it gets circulated well and truly over the cybersphere.

It is common to find, especially in the field of affiliate marketing, site owners who have no clue of the specific niche the product is in, getting content creation outsourced to create an ebook or articles with its variations which in turn are used for promotion to gain inbound links and ultimately sales. The lower the costs of outsourcing, the more fluff that gets dished around the web.

Search engine algorithms today are superior in analysing the uniqueness of a given piece of content. They look at the navbar, the sidebar and footer links and the content itself to analyse its uniqueness. Gone are the days when a customised introduction and conclusion to an article made it unique. It is a lot harder now.

You can create all the content that you want but it is the search engines that determine its uniqueness and include it in their main index or banish it for lack of quality and the poor amount of inbound links it garners to have a low Pagerank threshold that prevents it from getting retained in the main index.

What kind of content should you adopt for your site?
When you have an idea for a website, that is when you have to determine the type of content that will suit your site. You cannot change horses midstream. Rand talks about the three widely prevalent types of content on the web today.

1) Editorial Content:
This refers to the content that is built by a human with a clear idea as the basis, then logic and reasoning that is initiated by a good introduction and great body copy that expresses the idea in lucid fashion and a healthy conclusion. The style and expression is unique to each writer. Good examples are a site owner blogging on her site coming up with unique content on a regular basis that keeps readers engaged and also garners great inbound editorial links from her industry peers and the linkerati in general. This type of content is ideal for smaller sites.

2) Machine Built Content:
If you have a burning ambition to domionate your niche or industry, then machine built content can be handy in satiating your desire. This involves collecting data from reliable sources and pushing them into a fixed well formatted content structure by way of an xml file and stored in databases. Content pages are generated on the fly in response to user clicks on the site.

The biggest problem here is the pattern that is obviously common to most machine built content sites. The on page factors like page titles and h# tags are unique on each page. But the content follows a fixed pattern with subtle changes in data as in case of statistical information. Most major travel sites employ this technique.

It is a scalable and saves time and money. But it does not make the cut when it comes to the search engines analysing it for its , you guessed it right, uniqueness. A content duplication filter can definitely prevent such a page from getting indexed.

From an SEO perspective, if the domain on which such content resides is a trusted mature domain with good standing, then it would not be a major issue. For newer sites (typically less than a year old) trying to establish themselves rapidly, it could be a major stumbling block.

3) User Generated Content (UGC):
This is the most valuable type of content any site owner could have on her site. But it does not come easy. It takes a lot of time and effort to build a bustling community and incentivize the contributors to make the content creation happen. Some of the popular examples are Wikipedia, Reddit and Digg.

This is a powerful and scalable technique but it is not easy to get a network of dedicated users scaling it up to the higher levels of content creation.

You can consider using content from each of the above mentioned categories or a nice blend of them to create unique content that can satisfy visitors to your site and keep them engrossed longer on your site pages. The amount of time spent by users on your site is certainly a factor the search engines could consider to determine the quality of your site content.

Most times, I hear site owners clamouring for links and/or aspiring for higher positions on the SERPs. One of the major factors that can propel a site to the top of the search engine summit is unique quality content. This arises from personal experiences of the blogger and the successful practice and implementation of the actual content that is being preached by her in her day to day blogging activities.

Once justice has been done to this crucial part, then it is only a matter of time before users identify the good quality advice offered on your site and the twittering and digging of your posts akin to the Web’s word of mouth propels your site into the limelight which is top rankings on the SERPs.

The number of inbound links from a variety of domains of different hues (domain diversity) and the naturally worded anchor text in the inbound links to your site are proof enough of the confirmation aspect of your post’s nature from unbiased external sources in the most natural form erasing any doubt about the duplication of content in the eyes of the search engines.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland seo consultancy offering both organic seo and paid search marketing services to their clients in both New Zealand and Australia.