If a user is signed in into his or her Google account, their searches will now become encrypted by default through a secure connection.Google states this change will only occur when searching on Google.com and being signed in.

Why the Need for SSL (Secure Socket Layer) Encryption?

Google has mentioned that search has become personal and customised, further evolving into a more exclusive experience, the need to protect personalised search results has become further apparent.

By the time you are reading this, the Google.com search engine would have already changed to SSL and be fully released to anyone searching using Google.com and logged into their Google accounts. You will know if your search is encrypted when you see the same little lock symbol on the bottom of your web browser you see when you’re shopping online.

What Do SSL Encrypted Search Results Really Mean?

No one except Google and the web browser can see what searches are currently being conducted. Referral data is now out of bounds to anyone, including third-party tracking software and Google Analytics!

Webmasters will begin to lose valuable data they have become dependant on – understanding which keywords their visitors have found their websites with. However, referral search engine data will still be available to third-party tracking software and Google Analytics.

What is the Percentage of Users Logged into Google and Searching?

As mentioned in the first paragraph, the new Google SSL search will only be implemented on Google.com and only for those who are signed into their Google accounts. Head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts suggests the impact can be measured as a single digit percentage of all Google searchers on Google.com

How Will AdSense and other Ad Networks Display the Correct Ads?

SSL will not interfere with referrer blocking when it comes to ads. Google will continue to allow this as Google feels there is a need to provide this data to advertisers so they can continue to monitor, examine and tweak their advertising campaigns to deliver what is best and most appropriate to users.

It would be silly if AdWords or AdSense ads were displaying irrelevant or off-topic ads and not basing them on the keywords a user is searching Google for.

However, the Future is not so Bleak

Google Webmaster Tools reports the top 1000 search terms people are using to reach websites over a 30 day period. Thankfully, Google has stated this will remain, and I’m sure many webmasters are rejoicing. Unfortunately, conversion tracking is out the door, only the search queries used to find your site using Google will be available.

Referrer data is gradually leaving the search engines, but according to Google, the lack of referrer data being passed onto web analytical software is only going to impact a very small number of Google.com searches. Anyone not signed into their Google account will still pass along their referrer data (including search terms) to all forms of web analytics programs out there. This will still leave plenty of data out there for SEOs and CROs to play with and obtain the best possible optimisation results.

If a user is signed in into his or her Google account, their searches will now become encrypted by default through a secure connection. Google states  this change will only occur when searching on Google.com and being signed in.

Why the Need for SSL (Secure Socket Layer) Encryption?

Google has mentioned  that search has become personal and customised, further evolving into a more exclusive experience, the need to protect personalised search results has become further apparent.

By the time you are reading this, the Google.com search engine would have already changed to SSL and be fully released to anyone searching using Google.com and logged into their Google accounts. You will know if your search is encrypted when you see the same little lock symbol on the bottom of your web browser you see when you’re shopping online.

What Do SSL Encrypted Search Results Really Mean?

No one except Google and the web browser can see what searches are currently being conducted. Referral data is now out of bounds to anyone, including third-party tracking software and Google Analytics!

Webmasters will begin to lose valuable data they have become dependant on – understanding which keywords their visitors have found their websites with. However, referral search engine data will still be available to third-party tracking software and Google Analytics.

What is the Percentage of Users Logged into Google and Searching?

As mentioned in the first paragraph, the new Google SSL search will only be implemented on Google.com and only for those who are signed into their Google accounts. Head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts suggests the impact can be measured as a single digit percentage of all Google searchers on Google.com

How Will AdSense and other Ad Networks Display the Correct Ads?

SSL will not interfere with referrer blocking when it comes to ads. Google will continue to allow this as Google feels there is a need to provide this data to advertisers so they can continue to monitor, examine and tweak their advertising campaigns to deliver what is best and most appropriate to users.

It would be silly if AdWords or AdSense ads were displaying irrelevant or off-topic ads and not basing them on the keywords a user is searching Google for.

However, the Future is not so Bleak

Google Webmaster Tools reports the top 1000 search terms people are using to reach websites over a 30 day period. Thankfully, Google has stated this will remain, and I’m sure many webmasters are rejoicing. Unfortunately, conversion tracking is out the door, only the search queries used to find your site using Google will be available.

Referrer data is gradually leaving the search engines, but according to Google, the lack of referrer data being passed onto web analytical software is only going to impact a very small number of Google.com searches. Anyone not signed into their Google account will still pass along their referrer data (including search terms) to all forms of web analytics programs out there. This will still leave plenty of data out there for SEOs and CROs to play with and obtain the best possible optimisation results.

Although rankings are important for SEO, once you have them, persuading more visitors to click through to the website is the next step towards the ultimate end goal of increased sales/conversions.

One of the ways that you can improve the click through rate from the search engine results pages (SERPs) is to attract attention and stand out from other results. Eye catching Meta title and description tags are a good starting point, but you can take this even further by utilising rich snippets.

The rel=”author” attribute has recently been introduced by Google to generate rich snippet displays that are very inviting.  If implemented correctly, you may see that an image of the article author appears next to the description of the search result, as below:

So the question begs: How can I replicate this and make my search results stand out with a picture of a handsome blogger?

There are three ways in which you can implement the rel=”author” attribute to attempt to trigger the photo display in the SERPs.

Method #1: Single author site

This is the simplest way. All you have to do is place a link on your post, anywhere on the page and point it towards your own Google Profile, with a rel=”author” attribute attached.

After that, ensure that you also link back to your site, from your Google Profile (Go to About> Links section).

Method #2: Multi-author site with no bio pages

This is the simpler of the two methods for multi-author sites. What you can do on every post, is link from each page to the various authors’ Google Profiles. This can be done by creating a contextual link with the author’s name on the post.

Do not forget to have the authors link back to the site from their Google Profile.

Method #3: Multi-author site with bio pages

Some sites actually link from the author’s name in the post to a bio or an author profile on the site.

The technique to get this happening on such a site is to firstly add a rel=”author” attribute to the link pointing to the author bio on the website and then link from the bio, with a rel=”me” attribute, to the relevant Google Profile.

Again, do not forget to have the authors link back to the site from their Google Profile.

For those who are more visually inclined, I’ve created a diagram to show you how it all works:

I hope that you now have a clearer idea of how you can get a handsome photo of yourself (or your authors) into the search results. It is a new feature, so there is no guarantee that if the above methods are implemented that the images will appear in the SERPS.

To check what authorship data Google can extract, use the Rich Snippets Testing tool:

For more information on how to implement rel=author, you can also check out their YouTube video.

The new version of analytics (v5) became available to all users from April 2011. Other than its new look, it has many new features for helping provide better analysis and SEO reports. The analytics team is still working to give us more surprises over the next few months. I will be covering the most useful features that were missing in the old version of analytics.

Simplified Custom Reports

The Custom Reports section of the new analytics has become more advanced and manageable compared to the older version. Now users can create new categories that group the related Custom Reports simply by clicking a few buttons. There is also an option to migrate all custom reports from the old version of analytics.

Another improvement is the ability to quickly re-order metrics and dimensions using drag and drop feature. All these simple features help to create reports the way we want in short amount of time. To learn how to create custom reports in the new Google Analytics, visit the custom reports article in the Google Analytics Blog.

The new Map Overlay reports

In the new version of analytics, we can now see region level maps of over 170 countries. The previous version had the map overlay feature within the visitors > demographics report but now it is available in other sections of report. This feature can help provide a broader view for analysing geographical data.

New map overlay feature (Source: Google Analytics Blog)

To try this feature, simply login to Analytics, select the new version if you have not already done so. Go to the Map Overlay report that is under Visitors > Mobile > Devices and then click on any country. To see cities, simply click on the City and in this view, you might be able to see a magnifying glass that appears when cities are clustered closely together just like in the image above.

New metrics and dimensions

The new metrics are always better because we get to do deeper analysis of our website using many choices. The analytics team added 45 new metrics and dimensions in the custom reports. The custom reports now can also be explored without making changes to the actual report just by selecting secondary dimensions in the explorer tab.

Categorised metrics and dimensions (Source: Google Analytics Blog)

The new metrics and dimensions cover more variety of areas such as social, e-commerce, mobile and advertising. To make it easier to use, all the dimensions and metrics are now categorised.

New categories

Another new feature of Google Analytics v5 is the new categories that can be found in the left navigation. The most useful including:

• Social reports: Once you have implemented the tracking code on your website, you will be able to measure the impact of social interactions on your websites. The social engagement report shows behaviour of your site for visits that include clicks on sharing buttons like Follow, Like and +1.The Social actions report shows the amount of social media activity on the site (Tweets,+1’s, Facebook Likes etc).Social pages report shows the pages on the site that drives the most social actions.

• Site Speed: Site speed has become an important factor in SEO, and the new version of analytics now reports on the site speed. This report can be useful to answer questions like: Which landing pages are the slowest? Or how does page load speed vary across geographies?

To setup the site speed report, you have to enable it in the analytics and update your tracking code. The detailed instruction on configuring and using site speed can be found here.

I hope these new features will help you do better analytics and create good reports. Stay tuned to Bruce Clay Australia’s blog for more Internet Marketing news

Doing SEO on your mobile phone? We decided to analyse every SEO iPhone App we could get our hands on from the App Store and this is what we found.

The native SEO iPhone applications currently available definitely don’t provide the full capability of desktop or hosted SEO tool solutions; however that is not necessarily the point.

SEO related iPhone apps should provide the data you need whilst away from your office and although the current offerings might not meet all of the typical SEO needs, the future looks promising. The most significant surprise was the sophistication of the analytical apps available from Omniture SiteCatalyst and Thomas Blackburn’s Analytics Pro.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, we feel that native SEO apps on any type of mobile device may be short lived, as hosted SEO tools providers (like the Bruce Clay ToolSet and Raven Tools) begin to provide suitable applications for mobile devices, allowing you to access the fully hosted feature set, including historical data and reports on any platform, as long as you have a browser and a secure connection to the Internet.

Introduction:

Let’s face it SEOs love tools that make their life easier, enabling them to skip the data gathering and churn, and start to provide analysis and insight.

A native SEO application for a mobile device will never compete with a fully-fledged desktop application, which likewise, cannot compete with a hosted solution that automatically gathers and analyses on-site and off-site data. Nevertheless, everything has its place, so we decided to see if the SEO apps available in fact had a practical place for the busy SEO practitioner and were of any use, to us anyway.

We found just over forty free and paid SEO Apps for the iPhone and iPad, paid our $60 to buy them, claimed that as an expense and downloaded them.

We then got input from the team as to what key features they believed a mobile SEO app should have and extracted the key features from the various desktop SEO toolsets we are familiar with. We then ranked each one across each of the eight categories.

The eight key categories we identified included:

1. Price: We recorded the price but did not factor this into the overall average ranking analysis.
2. Useability of App: We compared the interface speed, ease of reading, intuitiveness of the application, if the app allowed multiple domains, if the app could save reports for later retrieval and if the app enabled a user to compare different domains.
3. Accuracy & Reliability of App: Points were lost if the app could not retrieve data, data was inconsistent or the app crashed during the test.
4. External Ranking Factor Analysis: Features included external link reporting, link and anchor text analysis, PageRank and analysis of links from key websites or domains.
5. SERP Ranking Reports: Features included the ability to check rankings from more than one Search Engine and from more than one geographic location.
6. Content Analysis: Features included the ability to check titles, meta data, headings, alt attributes and body content and analyse these at any level.
7. Code Analysis: Features included the ability to check page load times, code size, robots Meta tags, W3C validation, source code and the identification of Google Analytics tracking code.
8. Domain & Server Analysis: Features included the ability to check the indexation of the domain, robot.txt, XML Sitemaps, WhoIs lookups, domain age and server location

On the first cut, we found our expectations may have been set a tad high and that none of the apps reviewed actually rated in any of the key categories. Clearly, we had the wrong factors or our expectations were wrong. An app should not be compared against a desktop tool; it is for use at a different time and place and thus needs different criteria.

The second attempt at reviewing these apps resulted in us starting from the app up, as opposed to a bunch of features down. We listed each feature of each app in a list. We found around 50 features across all apps, and used that as our baseline for comparison, which then gave a better picture of each apps functionality, capability and gaps against the other apps on offer.

SEO App Results

Although we analysed over 40 SEO apps we only included the most useful apps in the final comparison table. Many of the excluded applications provided only one feature, for example: XML Sitemap checking, URL submission or PageRank checking and it would not be fair to compare these against the other tools with multiple features.

The Full SEO IPhone App Comparison Chart

The best performing apps are summarised below, however you can download the full SEO iPhone app comparison here.

The SEO iPhone Application Comparison Chart

Staff Pick – Best Overall

Staff Pick – Easy to Use

We had a tie between the two top ranking apps in the useability category. Both SEM Tab SEO Pro and SEO Pro provided a great and intuitive user experience.

In addition to a number of SEO applications reviewed, we also downloaded and tested some related applications. If analytics applications were included in this SEO app comparison, Analytics Pro by Thomas Blackburn would be a strong contender for the most usable interface.

Staff Pick – Best for External Ranking Factor Analysis

Staff Pick – Best for Ranking Analysis

Staff Pick – Best for Content Analysis

Staff Pick – Best for Code Analysis

Staff Pick – Best for Domain & Server Analysis

Dishonourable Mention

The dishonourable mention goes to SEO Submit Pro by Ned Kubica for charging $9.99 for a tool that submits your URL to Google (among others, however, let’s face it, Google is usually the first port of call). Google provide this service freely.

A couple of months back I wrote a post on how to use Microsoft Excel when calculating search engine visibility percentage (SEV%). This is useful for visualising how you rank for your keywords compared to your competitors. The problem with this method of presenting data is that, while it may make perfect sense to SEO practitioners, it doesn’t translate well into stakeholder/manager speak. It’s possible to end up with dozens of line charts that don’t really communicate what good rankings mean for a website. In addition, a basic SEV% chart does not take the search volume associated with different keywords into account. For example, two clients could have the same SEV% however, one could rank for extremely competitive, high search volume keywords and the other may rank for less competitive, low search volume keywords.

Wouldn’t it be nice to see how often your competitors are getting seen for each of the keywords you monitor? That sort of information would surely be useful in convincing the stakeholders that optimising their website, or areas of their website, is a worthwhile undertaking that can result in traffic increases. Well, unfortunately we don’t all have access to our competitors’ analytics accounts, so we’re stuck with calculating estimates, and one method for doing that is using search volume, current rankings and eye tracking data for the Google Search Engine Results pages to calculate Impressions.

Things you’ll need to calculate the estimated number of impressions for a given keyword set:

• Microsoft Excel (or equivalent)
• Google Traffic Estimator
• Google SERP eye tracking data (What is the eye tracking visibility based on ranking position in the search results)

Before we move on, a small disclaimer, if I may…

We are not about to calculate click through rates and potential traffic increases here. You can use these calculations as a basis for estimating ROI of SEO projects. There are some assumptions that I have made that you may not care for, but you can adjust the numbers to suit your needs. OK, so let’s dive in.

Step 1: Estimate Eye tracking Visibility Based on Ranking Position

This is the table I use most often for general impression calculations. It assumes that if you do not rank for a keyword, you get seen zero percent of the time. If you’re ranking in position 1, 2 or 3 for a keyword you get seen 100% of the time as you’re above the fold. If you’re factoring in mobile devices with smaller screens, adjust the visibility data accordingly. Then, as you can see, the lower your ranking, the smaller the percentage of times you might be seen in the SERPs.

While this may not be the most accurate eye tracking data ever, we will be applying the same percentages to the competitor rankings, so it’s relative. Adjust them as you see fit.

Step 2: Keyword traffic data

Head over to the Google Traffic Estimator to get your traffic data. I prefer to use this tool as opposed to the External Keyword Tool because you get traffic volumes of much more keywords.

Now check yours and your competitors’ rankings for the keywords, I’ve used some pretty competitive keywords for this example, so the numbers will be large. I’ve backdated with 3 months of data so it’s easier to work with and create charts from:

Now we need to add the traffic estimator data and eye tracking estimates to the mix, I’ve left some room for reach to be added in between (click to enlarge):

Step 3: Use vlookup to calculate

OK, the next step is the hardest part of the task, we need to combine a couple of vlookups to do this:

a) Find the ranking for the keyword

b) Find the estimated impression percentage for that ranking

c) Then we multiply a) by b)

The formula will look like this:

=VLOOKUP($B3,$I:$K,3,FALSE)*VLOOKUP($C3,$L:$M,2,FALSE)

And in this example, it would be placed in cell F3.

What’s happening here step by step is this:

• Identifying the contents of cell B3 – “game”

Looking at the columns I, J and K, finding the word “game” in column I and then looking for the value in column K. 3 is the column index number: I is column 1, J column 2 and K column 3. The value we get here is 90,500.

• Multiply by:
• The second vlookup finds the ranking in C3 – “10”
• Looks in columns L and M to find what percentage is allocated to a ranking of 10, which is “20%” or 0.2

• Now combine both parts and the calculation looks like this: 90,500 * 0.2

Number of Impressions for that particular keyword is 18,100. So for a ranking of 10 for the keyword “game” you’d expect to get around 18,100 impressions per month (Note: This is just the number of impressions or times that we estimate that your website’s results with be viewed in the search results it does not factor in click through rate – CTR).

Now we can drag down the formula to apply it to all keywords and sum by month to get total reach. Repeat the process for the competitors. I’ve added a workbook below to save you the trouble though. Once you have sums per month (pro-tip: use a pivot table to do this, it’ll save you tons of time), you can chart it up.

While these numbers are somewhat limited by the size of the keyword set that you are analysing, they do provide a more insightful comparison of a client’s SEO performance against the ranking and business competitors.

Impressions Calculator (xls version spreadsheet)

Please leave any questions you have in the comments.

Picture source, CC by Dey via Flickr

Last month, we saw how to experiment a web page using A/B testing. In this post, I will discuss another way to experiment with web pages, that is, Multivariate testing.

What is Multivariate testing?

Multivariate testing is one of the various methods for experiments in Google Website Optimiser (GWO) that lets you test different permutations of layouts and functionalities on your page. For an example, if you had two possible variations for your hero banner and newsletter sign-up forms and you could not decide which combination will work the most, you could use the multivariate testing experiment in which –your visitors would be shown the combination of a randomly selected hero banner and newsletter sing-up form.

You could then analyse the results and figure out which of the combinations brought you the most conversion.

Implementing your first multivariate experiment

The first step is to choose your test pages. Try choosing pages that receive high volumes of traffic so that you can see meaningful results in short periods of time – for an example, your landing pages. The test pages you choose need to offer key converting actions for your visitors such as e-commerce pages, view basket pages, checkout pages, newsletter or member sign-up pages, or even e-Book download pages, depending on what “conversion” means to your business.

The second step is to choose your conversion page. Choosing the conversion page is easy; it’s the page that represents the result. In the above examples, your conversion page would be the thank you pages that visitors see when they perform the different converting actions above.

You will be given an option to choose whether you want to put the HTML code into the page or want your webmaster to do the job for you. If you choose to do the job yourself, you will be provided with different types of codes to be implemented on your web page that is discussed below in the third step. If your webmaster is doing the job for you then you just have to wait and view the results.

The third step is to add tags to the experiment pages. You will need to be familiar with HTML and with the structure of your webpage to perform this step correctly. To add tags, you will have to add four different types of scripts on the test page and conversion page:

a.    Add the Control script on your test page at the beginning of the <head> tag

b.    Add the Tracking script on your test page at the end of the <head> tag

c.    Add the Page sections in the script on your test page. For each element you wish to make variations, you will need to name the page sections in the script

d.   Add the Conversion script to your conversion page at the end of the <head> tag.

Once you have added all your scripts, validate them through the Google website optimiser tool to continue to the next step. You can always save the progress of your work as you go or click “Continue”.

The final step is to create variations and start your experiment.

To add new variation for your sections, you will have to follow the following steps in the GWO:

a.    Click on “Add new variation”

b.    Enter a name for your variation and edit the content where the original content is displayed to create a new variation

c.    Save your work and repeat the process to create more variations.

Checkout Google Website Optimiser user guide to get more information on the implementation of the experiment.

Viewing the results

The difficult part is over! Once the experiment process is completed successfully, the conversions/impressions will be recorded and can be viewed from the “View Reports” link under the experiment list in the GWO.

Hope you will engage yourself in an experiment soon and start increasing your conversions! Visit Google Website Optimiser support page to get more information and keep visiting Bruce Clay’s blog for more SEO.

One of the most frustrating things that I have come across is a CMS (Content Management System) that has poor support for SEO. Basic tools such as generating a sitemap, searching for broken links or checking markup are often unavailable. This blog will focus on SEO tools available for websites built on Microsoft IIS and how effective they are in covering a website assessment.

At Bruce Clay we group core SEO requirements in 3 broad categories: Technical, Expertness/Linking and Copywriting. These are broken into sub areas of which some are shown below

Core SEO elements:

Tools such as the MS IIS Search Engine Optimisation Toolkit, and Expression Web SEO Checker help to optimise or support the technical aspects of your website. These include sitemaps, robot exclusions, HTML and structure.

The IIS SEO Toolkit helps web developers and server administrators to improve their Website’s relevance in search results.

It has a fully featured crawler engine and reporting which helps understand the route search engines reach your content. This is important since the preliminary step for Search Engines is to index your content. What do you want indexed? Are there parts of your site you do not want a robot having access? And are there any errors in your URLs that are preventing a spider from crawling?

In addition this toolkit has Robot Exclusion Features and the ability to generate Sitemaps based on the architecture of your site. A robots.txt and a sitemap are mandatory files when setting up a website on GWT ( Google Webmaster Tools). GWT helps webmasters see how Google is crawling and indexing their site and also provides data for ranking and traffic reports for SEO specialists.

Microsoft Expression Web is an HTML editor and general web design product by Microsoft. It supports XHTML, XML, CSS, W3C accessibility standards and also integrates with Visual Studio. It was released at the end of 2006 and has had positive reviews. Last year Expression Web 4 provided a new reporting tool, the SEO Checker.

The SEO Checker analyses page structure and content based on 50 rules that the Expression Web team have researched. What does the SEO checker do? It focuses on HTML markup and relevant content. This covers the sub categories of HTML and structure in BCA core technical requirements mentioned above.

The SEO checker’s rules provide guidance in the following categories mentioned in MSDN blog, Using the Expression Web SEO Checker.

Content is not where search engines expect to find it

e.g. a missing title tag, empty H1, or missing ALT attributes

Relevance: Title tags are used to identify what your page is about and hold important keywords. This is what appears in SERP (Search Engine Results Page). H1 is an important element of page structure and is a must have element in grouping content in headings. Alt attributes label images and are needed for accessibility requirements as well as appearing in Google Images.

Content or markup follows patterns that may be associated with deceptive practices

Relevance: This a test to see if you are inadvertently stuffing keywords or have excessive content in your page, metadata and ALT attributes or using redirection inappropriately which can penalise your position in search engine rankings.

Content or markup interferes with the ability of search engines to analyze a page

Relevance: This is similar to running your page to in W3C HTML Validator. It will look for missing tags and see if HTML elements are nested correctly. It checks to see if the page is well formed and parsed correctly.

Content or markup reduces the appeal of a page in search-engine results.

Relevance: This analyses how optimum your title and metadata schema is. Are elements missing and are they too short in length. This is the information that is displayed in SERP (Search Engine Ranking Results Page)

Content causes search engines to consider two or more pages to be relevant to the same search term.

Relevance: This analyses your site for duplicate content. Is your title and description unique? This information can also be obtained in HTML suggestions in Google Webmaster tools. It also checks malformed URLs that can result in duplicate URLs such as session IDs, uppercase characters and redundant forward slashes.

Content or markup blocks search engines from analysing your site.

Relevance: This checks to see if content is being blocked from search engines. Are there any errors that are preventing your site being crawled properly? This covers hyperlinks with the nofollow attribute, hyperlinks with too many parameters or invalid chars attributes in the <meta name=”robots”>

The above tools are great for webmasters and server administrators who maintain a MS IIS site. It’s particularly helpful if they are using a CMS that lacks SEO support. Note that these tools do not analyse Expertness/Linking or Copywriting as described in the BCA core SEO elements above. For link profiling a good set of tools would be Majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer. For copywriting the Bruce Clay SEO Toolset can come in handy for optimising content on webpages.