Some of the spam comes with the solicitation in SEO area

As any other company we receive piles of junk mail. There is nothing new about it except for one peculiar thing. Some of the spam comes with the solicitation in SEO area.

Our organization has great reputation as a seasoned web analytics and SEO company, yet the solicitations from different countries come for the same services that we provide. This just shows me that the spammers just are doing blast after blast from their compiled e-mail list and don't care who is getting the letter. The promises to build a company to the top range from simple search engine submission to link building campaigns, seo web design, on site optimization and the like. There is even one weird company that sends us weekly letters about monitoring our web servers.

There are also blog spammers, of course, who try to do the link and keyword stuffing into this working blog. I am really flattered but we don't need their "comments" either. Their IP addresses are visible and the abundance of information who they are can be resolved by any good systems analyst.

I am not really judging anybody. But the question still bugs me, though. Do they think that they will get any kind of work through their e-mail blasts? Is there any fool who would look at one of those letters and would want to sign with them risking to breach the security of his company, open his code and, possibly, get penalized by leading search engines? I wish we could have some stats on these issues.

Recently, I read a lot of online discussions on the lack of qualified people in our field. So it saddens me, that good beginnings and positive steps in SEO are being diluted by the spammers, who taint our efforts in this field. We would not want any business owner fall into this trap due to his trusting nature.

All additional advantages

I attach to this principle a lot of importance because unlike big corporations who hire in droves web analysts, copywriters, editors and the like, and spend humongous piles of money on pay per click campaigns, all responsibilities related to the ability to reach up the masses online, statistical calculations and web analytics itself fall into the lap of SEO specialist. Personally, I think, that this is the wrong name for this job, but, obviously nobody found any better title.

It is really tough to be the leading in-house SEO specialist because his ass is always on the line, thus the pressure never really goes away. This pressure increases even when the guy successfully pushes forward the business that he is working for, because the company feels that it needs to expand and assemble a team of people who would push up the productivity. Overall, I’ve never met an in-house online marketer who was not looking deadly tired or constantly overwhelmed.

Yet, in a year or so, this SEO professional becomes invaluable for the small business because he acquires so much powerful knowledge and expertise in the required industry, that he can complete some of the most challenging and daunting tasks with closed eyes. In this case, one of the main tasks of the small business owner becomes the necessity to create the most comfortable working conditions and highly rewarding pivotal position in the company’s future. This policy will pay off and is going to be smart investment, if the company plans to stay and grow in its online business.

I did not mention all additional advantages of hiring an in-house SEO specialist, because many of you can fill up the blanks yourselves without my help. Anyways, having somebody who can analyze and explain why things are happening on Internet and fix the problems directly presents more opportunities than turning to the outsourcing company for solutions. This still does not mean that outsourcing firms can not co-exist with an in-house online marketer but I will get into the subject deeper in my future blog entries.

The ability of deep thinking and analysis of situation

I am observing a lot of discussions in articles, online and even in the books dedicated to SEO and web analytics. It seems that small business owners are searching for some sort of a definite answer to the question that bothers them. And the question is the following: should they hire an in-house SEO specialist or find a hundred percent outsourcing solution to all their SEO problems.

To put it simply, there is no easy answer to this question. In my personal opinion, a small business company should hire an in-house specialist, especially if their business is completely Internet driven. Unfortunately for the small business owners, they can not find enough qualified people to hire. There is an extraordinary lack of search personnel.

This does not surprise me at all, because the SEO specialist in the company has to have deep knowledge in many disciplines, great intuition and a lot of other qualities that I will discuss in my future blog entries. And even when they find such a person, in most cases, employers want to work, according to the principle "if Charlie is here – Charilie is working".

I think, if you want to kill any spark of creativity in an SEO specialist, you will be treating as a 9-to-5 employee. The ability of deep thinking and analysis of situation usually does not thrive in a dusty old office or a cubicle. And the work for an online marketer does not end in the office, as you know it. It does not matter where your SEO professional is as long as your business gets the results. So the aforementioned business principle should change to the following one: "if Charlie is delivering the results – Charlie is working".

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Bounce Rate metric for your web analysis

Let's take a look at another drawback. If somebody arrives directly on your landing page from other website, sees a link to another external website that you recommend visiting and clicks on it before the session timeout - a bounce will also happen.

There are so many other cases when the bounce is registered that you can not even imagine. If you are a seasoned Internet power user or even a regular surfer and you leave the page by typing directly URL in your browser and leaving that page ... You guessed right - a bounce will definitely happen. Or if you closed the tab or shut down your browser while surfing - that site will get a bounce for sure. Many of us are still prone to using "Back" button on the browser, this also may cause a bounce as well.

All mentioned above still does not mean that you should not use Bounce Rate metric for your web analysis. All web traffic metrics have their drawbacks and shortcomings. I will try to tell about them in my future blog entries. It just means that you, as a web analyst or search engine marketer should be aware of the side effects and take them into consideration right from the start when you create SEO web design, during the development of the site, etc.

Evidently, the best way of dealing with side effect is to pro actively work on segmentation of your web traffic. Then you will understand better why potential clients came to your site but did not engage and left. If you value your web traffic, you will use segmentation in combination with bounce rate for everything: referring sites, pay per click campaigns and top pages.

There are many factors

In the previous two blog entries I was telling you how useful and invaluable Bounce Rate metric was and how you can utilize it for figuring out what kind of problems exist on your landing pages.

It is true, this metric is great but not everything is so peachy as it seems. There are some drawbacks as well. One of the reasons is that web analytics is not precise science and it is still at its infancy. There are many factors that can have impact on Bounce Rate metric. This still does not mean that you should not use it in your calculations, just keep in mind that this metric can have some "side effects".

The bounce usually occurs when the Internet visitor leaves the web page or a site before the session timeout takes place. Regularly the session timeout happens after thirty seconds, but we don’t really know the minimum or maximum time that the visitor spends on the page before this session timeout. Some web analytics specialists mention 10 seconds, other web analytics name 12 seconds, and the rest raises it up to 29 seconds.

This seems easy, isn't it? If an internet visitor left after some twelve seconds the bounce will occur. But what if you surfed to some certain web page, and then somebody called you and you left your browser open on that very page for, let's say a minute or so? This happens to many of us on daily basis. Well, the sad fact is that in this case the bounce will also be registered by Google Analytics or Urchin or any other similar software.

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Vulnerable spots on clients web sites

Overall, from what I am observing, Bounce Rate metric is extremely unappreciated and even unwelcome metric among my brethren web analysts and SEO professionals. To some certain degree this is understandable. I mentioned in the previous blog entry that many web site owners think of Bounce rate as synonym of Exit rate. This means that they are highly sensitive and may blame web analytics guy or an outsourcing company for changes within this metric.

Yet, Bounce Rate comes extremely useful when we try to measure current Internet visitor trends. It is also invaluable when we spent money and try to observe the results. It is great to quickly report to the owner that you reached a lot of conversions for online advertising company. But looking at the Bounce Rate you may find that the worst real results ever. Even if it hurts, don’t throw this metric away. Try to analyze why the campaign has failed.

I see very important correlation between Time on Site metric and Bounce Rate. These two evidently go hand in hand. The connection between these two metrics help me to discover vulnerable spots on clients web sites, suggest the ways to improve landing pages and provide site visitors with the content they were looking for.

Internal search engine requires a lot of testing

What I am trying to say here is that any internal search engine requires a lot of testing. And not only for keywords but also additional tests for speed. Has it ever happened to you, when you visit a website, type a keyword in the on-site search text field and then wait forever? If you are persistent, you would try to do this a couple more times and in the end get sign like "the search item was not found". Sometimes it gets even worse - you are presented with an error page or this "search" simply crashes your browser.

If you really feel that you need an internal search engine, it should have for the start the following characteristics. First of all, your search engine should be able to clearly visible on the site, understand all possible misspelings and produce results even if you typed them all in capital letters (in other words, no case sensitivity, please). Don’t go over 20 search results, if you think that this may slow down your web server.

The greatest turn-off for visitors is the sign "no results found", so your search engine should be capable of producing some suggestions, links to additional searches and the like. If the results are produced, they should not be cryptic, but clear as water with the closest results coming first.

I can go on with the suggestions forever, but mentioned above points are necessary for any basic on-site search engine. If you feel, that you can not provide these features for your visitors, maybe you will be better off without an internal search engine.

Internal search engine of the website

In the previous two parts of the abstract web usability report I was discussing the importance of website navigation, website content and design, top level pages. Yet, these are just the starting points of a decent website usability report.

This time I would like to talk about other aspects, like, for example, internal search engine of the website. It is a must to have it. As I already mentioned, as your website grows and you keep on adding these web pages, decent website navigation is important. But Internet visitors get easily confused on a big site. This is where comes useful your internal search engine that allows your potential clients to quickly find information or product that they are searching for.

One may think, that I am talking about trivial things that everybody already knows. Yet, six times out of ten I still encounter either weak on site search engines, or even non-working ones. Not so long ago when I was preparing another web usability report for a certain website, that looked great and was quite prominent, I decided to check site’s search engine out of sheer curiosity. And this engine was not able to pull out pages related to the main keywords that this site was advertising!

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A great support of users

What bothers me is that when I decided to contact Google and ask the question about this issue, I could not do easily through my Google Analytics. They kept re-directing me to various places on the Net and in the end I found myself on Google Analytics group with other dozens of web analysts asking the same question and not getting any answers. Some of them, who were obviously hanging in that group long enough, were complaining that Google Analytics team completely ignores that group.

He was obviously right because I did not find any monitoring administrator representing GA, who would try to help these guys, or even say hello, to say the least. I would not want to think that Google is just another mammoth corporation. If it is then the transformation was fast, because this was not how it all started. We have three leading search engines - one is falling down, another is, mostly irrelevant, and the third one is quickly forgetting that it came to power not only thanks to its great capabilities but also due to a great support of users who chose it and put on pedestal.