Google last week announced the launch of 2 new social engagement reporting tools that have been included in Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics. This comes shortly after the launch of “Me on the Web”, Google +1 and Google+ which have been great motivators of getting more and more people to sign up to a Google account, effectively giving Google access to a lot of the information necessary for enabling social engagement tracking in Webmaster Tools and Google analytics.

Let’s take a brief look at the latest reporting tools introduced by Google:

1. Google +1 Metrics in Webmaster Tools

Google has introduced what they’ve called the “+1 Metrics” section to Webmaster Tools. This section essentially gives webmasters the ability to see how Google +1 is affecting the traffic coming into their site from Google’s SERPs. The +1 Metrics are split into 3 sections:

Welcome to my very own guide to becoming an SEO “Expert”. This “guide” is based entirely on my own experience and is to be used or abused as you wish. For the record, I am not an SEO expert just YET, but I now know what it’s going to take to become one, and I thought I should share this with anyone interested in taking on SEO as a career choice.

I’ve been involved in online marketing for about 3 years now, having started out touching on SEO at a price comparison website. After that I moved on to become a project manager at an online marketing company and was bitten by the SEO bug. I moved to MediaVision to leave the complicated world of project management and get started with pure SEO work.

What a great decision! A year on and I have four of my own clients who are flourishing thanks to the knowledge I’ve gained in SEO, conversion analysis and effective copywriting. Here’s how I got to where I am now as an SEO specialist…

As an online professional who browses the web day in and day out, I’m not a massive fan of completing pop-up surveys. However; but if I’m approached in a non-evasive way such is the case with 4Q survey software, I tend to not mind doing it for certain websites. I recently managed to get one of my clients to implement a 4Q survey on their website and the results have been extremely insightful and have resulted in some large scale changes by the client.

The 4Q survey revolves around the four most important questions that should be addressed to all visitors of a website:

1. What are my visitors at my website to do?
2. Are they completing what they set out to do?
3. If not, why not?
4. How satisfied are my visitors?

Having an opportunity to thoroughly review some keyword data for one of my proposals while traveling on a train up to Sheffield, I came to realise that as much as we talk about regularly reviewing keyword data we just don’t actually do it enough! We all know that every month something like 20% of all searches are unique and have not been seen by Google in the last 90 days.  

Image by Danard Vincente via Flickr

This can however be a double edged sword – lessons learnt in the past have also taught me that it is possibly even more important to pick a route and stick to it. It is all too tempting to see the vast variety of (search phrase) opportunities open to a website and to want to grab all of them. It very quickly leads to a scattergun approach, with just not enough weight behind any of it. Result: dilution, mixed messages, a multitude of pages with similar content, confusion on the site, and ultimately poor performance!

New Google Analytics filters and methods pop up all the time from various sources. Sometimes the simplest of filters or tweaks within your analytics that are all that is needed to help you track your SEM more effectively and streamline your process. So, you have setup a large SEO campaign, traffic increases can be seen and all seems to be well, but are you refining your strategy effectively over time to ultimately show that much needed ROI figure?

Organic Search

Ranking reports are good and well, however, we all know that the SERPS change daily, even hourly and running ranking reports every day is simply a waste of time. If you are using Google Analytics, you are able to track your search phrase rankings (positions) in analytics that result in clicks and the traffic your site receives. This information will help you decide which search phrases and “pages” require additional work as well as fine tune your optimised pages for your “money” phrases.

So, online ad spend finally overtook TV ad spend this year, but is the shift in spend gaining momentum or slowing down? Ecommerce growth estimates are forecast to slow (Forrester as quoted on business week) but that growth is still stealing market share from traditional ad spend.

At the beginning of this year, growth and spend for 2009 was predicted to fall somewhat as we all battened down for the long hard winter of recession.

I had a much gloomier picture in mind than what the actual figures to date reveal as quoted by e-marketer. Looking at this growth curve would hardly have me believe that we were in recession this year!

It looks like we are almost back to the days of the Iframe – with a difference. Google is showing your entire page without sending you the traffic, and as @graywolf correctly pointed out – they have the balls to host Adwords down the side with a big fat arrow pointing at them (flip to next page) and should you miss the arrow – well then you click the conveniently positioned ad!

http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/view?q=view:popular#V5LKvYsCtI-iIM

Already there has been a lot of talk about this arrangement contravening adsense guidelines. I couldn’t specifically find the paragraph that says you may not draw attention to the ads – perhaps someone who knows the guidelines inside out can enlighten us, but what worries me more is the fact that visitors are no longer coming to your web page to read your content. So your analytics will suffer in terms of home page pageviews. At present fastflip has pre-defined categories and sites for well known news sites such as “The Washington Post” and “BBC News”, so there is no danger of the average web site falling prey to this.

Many of us in the search industry already know that rankings are not the be all and end all, yet there are still so many people out there who are fixated on keyword rankings or that trophy phrase. I’m sure we have all seen the occasional article or blog post along these lines in the past; however, this topic gained renewed vigor last week after a presentation by Bruce Clay in which he stated “ranking is dead”.

Many people disagree with Bruce Clay’s statement, however, he possibly just used the wrong words at the time. I am in full agreement with what I believe was the true meaning/intention behind what he said. Most of us know that rankings fluctuate on a daily basis; different data centres produce different results, local queries differ from country to country and finally there are all the advances in personalised search.