1. Do not rely on SEO to market your product

It sounds contradictory, but its true. There are two main scenarios for new startups, the first is that it’s a completely new product or proposition, for example – balaclavas for pets. The second is that it’s a slant on an existing product, such as a service that allows other people to lend small amounts of money to others at a more reasonable rate.

The problem with scenario 1 is that, because it’s a new idea, people won’t know about it and so they simply wont be searching for it. You can check search volumes for particular keywords using Google’s AdWords keyword tool – but take the data with a pinch of salt, as it’s not always entirely accurate.

For scenario 2, because it’s an existing product, the competition is likely to be far too strong (at first) to get those rankings. Even though the person-to-person micro-lending example above is a relatively newish idea (the example is actually stolen from Zopa, who have been around for a few years now) – the new site would still be aiming to rank for terms like “small loans” and “payday loans”, which are remarkably competitive and could take a huge amount of time and effort to rank for.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t be thinking about SEO when you prepare for launch, however. Launching your startup is one of the biggest opportunities you have to gain links into your site – links that, later down the line, could prove to be invaluable in allowing you to rank above your competitors, or rank for particularly high traffic driving phrases. While there are a huge number of intricacies with search engine optimisation, the basics are to find the right key phrases to target, to include those terms on the page naturally and within the page title and, of absolutely massive importance, to get other sites to link to you.

When launching your startup, even with just your minimum viable product, there are a large number of chances to pick up links – potentially some of the strongest links you could hope for.

2. Think about links during your initial launch coverage

Try to ensure that, when other sites cover your launch (potentially sites similar to Killer Startups), they include a link back to your site. While those initial links will be very useful in sending traffic your way in the early stage, they can be massive useful later by allowing search engines to find your site and gain authority and link value. Traindom has an excellent list of places to submit your startup to, and the comments of this Hacker News page are also very useful.

3. Tie link building into your initial promotion

If you’re going to promote your new product, see if you can incorporate a way to build links at the same time. A year or so ago, I noticed a marketing campaign by a company that involved offering bloggers a “plant a tree” widget for their site – if you placed the banner on your site, they’d plant a tree. If anyone were to copy your embed code and put it on their site, your score would go up – the higher your score, the more trees they would have planted for you. It meant free advertising for the company, it made them look good, it was an interesting enough idea that they might have potentially picked up natural links anyway and each widget included a link back to the “download this widget” page on their site. (I can’t find any traces of the competition now, so I’m not sure it’s still running – but if you find it, please give me a shout). Make sure you don’t overcook this idea though, or you could cause Google to review what you’re doing – make sure you read this post first so you know where the line is.

4. Build in a reason for people to link to you

Similar to the example above, try to find a reason for people to link to you – and think about ways you could tie it in to promoting your product. Think about approaching relevant bloggers and offering them exclusive early access to your product, or free 1 month/2 month/lifetime membership, in exchange for a review on their blog.

5. Ask your customers to link to you

If you have any new customers, it’s worth mentioning in the confirmation email that you’d be grateful if they shared word of your new site, and would be especially thankful if they linked to you.

6. Provide something to actually link to

If you’re launching a minimum viable product, you can still try to include something on the signup site for people to link to. When news sites are covering your startup, they may not be too inclined to link to you if all you have on your site is a signup form. If, however, you have a promo video explaining your product, a more in-depth description or an easy to understand illustration of your service (for an example, check out Appointment Reminder) then you’ll have a much better chance of gaining links during any blog or press coverage.

Getting other sites to link to you may not be hugely important in the short term, except for sending traffic your way, but in the long term the links that you can pick up when you launch can prove to be some of the most valuable links your new site may get.

7. Find the search terms your customers are using

What you would type into Google to find your product may be significantly different from what your customers (or potential customers) would search for. You can check which search terms have the highest number of searches by using Google’s AdWords keyword tool. But again – take that data with a pinch of salt, it’s impossible to say how accurate it is. Also, when you check keyword search volumes, it’s best to make sure you check “Exact match” instead of “Broad match” (the default).

8. Protect your new brand name

You’ll absolutely, without doubt, want to rank for your brand name – but if your startup is a success then you’ll want to make sure that other people aren’t easily able to outrank you. Knowem provides a really useful service that lets you easily check a large chunk of the popular social network sites to see if your brand name is available to register. If you have the time, it lets you register them one by one, or they’ll register it for you for a small fee.

And now for the experts

This post was originally going to be much shorter, but then I thought it could be significantly more useful for bootstrapped startups if it included advice from some extremely experienced SEOs. For everyone that helped – thanks very much!

Aaron Wall, SEO Book

Add a free feature which is accessible, useful, and spreads virally. It can create a stream of links and mentions that quickly replaces an ad budget.

Decide in advance who you want to be compared against and offer the points upon which you should be compared. Blekko recently used health search as an example of where they beat Google, offering specific queries where they were better. Make it so that the companies you are comparing yourself against can’t change to fix “the issue” you are creating without drastically altering their business strategy.

When preparing your launch, ensure you have at least a few stats you can talk about, as these can help make reporting feel more firm / less soft when journalists write about you.

Solicit feedback from socially connected folks & give them early access. Blekko’s “closed” beta had 8,000 people in the test.

Tom Critchlow, Distilled

Rank for your name

If you’re launching a startup with a funky name like strtpsitesRawsm.com then make sure you rank for the full query “startup sites are awesome” as this is what people will search for when they want to find you and those branded searches are incredibly valuable. To rank for these queries – try and make sure you put the full words on the site somewhere in the text. This is especially relevant for me as I’m about to launch www.7bks.com which is pronounced “7 books” but clearly might not rank for that term unless I mention it on the site in text.

Don’t do SEO

Wow. Ok, so let me explain this one. There are two things that make SEO tick: 1) links, 2) links. Unfortunately you’re going to struggle to get links initially so don’t obsess over SEO as a major factor. What you SHOULD do is make sure that your other activities are SEO-friendly. So don’t actively do SEO, but do do things that will bring you SEO benefit like outreach to relevant communities, viral blog posts, embeddable content etc. All of these activities are solid marketing tactics in their own right but in the long run will help your SEO.

Wiep Knol, Wiep.net

In my opinion, there are three elements that are important for the success of a marketing campaign: Brains, Balls and Big bucks. It’s not a problem if you miss one of these three elements -like startups usually miss the Big bucks-, but it does mean that you have to focus a bit extra on the other two elements.

The most important part is that you’ll have to be creative (Brain) with your marketing, and link marketing is just a part of that. Send out press releases for example, but with a different angle than most of the regurgitated stuff you can find on most press release and news websites. Make yours stand out from the crowd to increase the chances of getting picked up by large websites and blogs. Also, make sure to start networking with important players in your industry (journalists, bloggers, etc.) well before you launch. Help them wherever you can, so they have the feeling that they owe you something by the time that you’re ready to go.

Also, don’t be afraid to fall flat on your nose every now and then (Balls), if you don’t try you’ll never succeed. For example, you could email the top guys in your industry and ask them to participate in some research, contribute to a massive article, or to answer a few questions for an interview series. Some probably won’t even reply to your request, but others may be willing to help you out and even to help you promote the content piece. Ego is a *very* effective link hook (see this post on the most influential UK SEOs for example), so make sure to use that when contacting your most important targets.

Rishi Lakhani

Get Your Keyword Association From Day 1 – when I see startups, many have really good ideas, and really cool funky names. Nothing wrong with creating a brand name out of thin air, in fact it’s advisable. However, from an SEO point of view, these “made up” names don’t mean much when trying to rank for generic keywords. My advice would be to include your keywords and service message, all in one, by the use of a well targeted tagline.

Consider Geekosauros – a name I made up to represent a new startup that aims to be a Thesaurus specifically for the scientific community. The name is pretty cool, and brand able, but has none of the keyword targets in the logo or name:

So what would I do? Well the top keyphrase the site wants to try and aim for is “Scientific Thesaurus”. I would use a tagline in the logo and on the site “Thesaurus for the Scientific Minded”:

See what I did there? I included the words from the phrase in the logo, such that over time the strapline becomes synonymous with the brand identity. There are multiple effects of doing this:

1. Gives you a nice title and strong identity in SERPs if you use it in the home page title, which ensures that the keyphrase is covered:

2. When blogs, newspapers, etc write about the site, they will be tempted to lift YOUR definition of the business, instead of creating their own. This means that the Press and PR you get isn’t working in silo but working to push your generic keywords as well.

The result of that? Well, they may either:

a. Link to your site using the full definition, hence including the tagline as anchor text
b. Or link to your domain with your keywords in close proximity, which is also considered a “signal” for search engines to rank sites for generic keywords.

Rae Hoffman-Dolan, Sugarrae.com & Outspoken Media

I think the main piece of advice I would offer is to figure out who your brand is before telling the world who it is. And sometimes, this means spending some time prior to launch writing content nobody will ever read, especially if you plan to have a company blog. With brands of mine such as Outspoken Media and Sugarrae, obviously, we knew who we were (us!) pre launch, so we didn’t need to write “pre-content” to figure it out. But with brands I’ve built like BlackBerry Geeks and Android Geeks, etc we spent a few months writing content while developing the site (both sites launched with several months of content in place) to get a feel for who we were and who we wanted to be in the space and to consumers. It allowed us to find our point of difference, which in my opinion, is absolutely essential to Internet success, whether you’re “simply” an affiliate website or a traditional company/brand.

Richard Baxter, SEOgadget

(As a quick note from Rich, he’s writing this from the perspective of having started his own company SEOgadget).

On a tight budget, you’ve got to look at what you can do cheaply, and sort those activities by the highest potential return. I genuinely believe the single biggest reason why we have a company at all is because of our blog. Starting a blog on WordPress costs nothing, and good WordPress hosting can be very inexpensive, too. Your effort is rewarded by traffic and (hopefully) credibility in your niche. If I could start SEOgadget over again, I would still run the site from WordPress, and write about topics I care about.

Of course, networking with peers and people you generally hold respect for can make a great deal of difference. I have so many great friends that have, often many times over, tweeted, sphunn, linked to, recommended or in some way contributed to my work. Those people know who they are, and I’m very grateful they exist. If, as a startup, you have material to promote – build great relationships and network online. It works. Networking, and a good blog or some kind of emerging industry presence can open up opportunities to speak or attend events. Most industries have some kind of conference these days – what are the criteria you need to satisfy to be invited to speak?

For a low budget start up, I often think – if you build a great product, they will come. I know that’s pretty standard advice these days, but it’s true. More than just building a great product, it’s about who knows about the product at launch. Have you researched a PR / launch strategy? Do you have a few technology bloggers or influencers in your field who have advanced knowledge of your startup?

I would check out Rand’s post on having a launch plan.

It’s quite important to build a site platform that is scalable. Don’t worry about big keyword research and large site architecture on day one – but do make sure that what you’re building will scale easily. Baking in search engine friendly URLs, internal navigation and page templates is pretty simple stuff these days, but I still see startups with horribly polluted session ID based URLs and shocking duplicate content problems before they’re even a month old!

If you have the capability – bake in an embeddable content theme into your product from day one. Does your product produce data, charting, pricing, jobs, salary data, images, videos etc? There’s little excuse for a product that doesn’t have an embeddable content strategy at some point in the development cycle. With the right embedded strategy, you could save a lot of time and effort in building links. All you need to understand is what would make someone share your product? What would their reward be?

If you’re keen to make your product embeddable, consider making it sharable, too. Check out Spreadable.com – developed by the good folks behind Chargify, you can reward the people who share your products through social media channels by thanking them with a discount code after they’ve shared your product. Pure brilliance.

David Naylor, Bronco

Get a blog on the site and use the URLs that will later become landing pages.

So www.startup.com/ is the new site that will take 6 months to get to market, while it’s in the incubate status we collect the keywords we are wanting to rank for and plan the URL structure, we install WordPress in the root and start adding blog content to the SEO url structure:

www.startup.com/blog

www.startup.com/Keyword-Cat

www.startup.com/Keyword-article links www.startup.com/Keyword-Cat
www.startup.com/Keyword-article1 links www.startup.com/Keyword-Cat
www.startup.com/Keyword-article2 links www.startup.com/Keyword-Cat

We use the www.startup.com/Keyword-articles for social attraction. People link better to non commercial

But we know full well that on launch day the www.startup.com/blog will 301 to blog.startup.com, but we don’t 301 the articles they become the landing pages of the sites keeping the backlink equity they have built up

Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz

1. Leverage your network of contacts at launch to help draw attention, links and traffic to the site. If you’re a heavy user of social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter, beef up your participation and connections prior to launch and announce your new site at an optimal time. If you have reporters/press/bloggers in your network, asking them for help/coverage/links is smart, too.

2. Plan a bit of post-launch viral content. If you can put together remarkable video content, write an amazing blog post, do cool data analysis or infographics, all of these are worth a shot to spur on marketing and awareness. Just make sure not to get disheartened – you may need to build 5-10 pieces like this before one actually “goes viral” and earns you the kind of traffic, attention and links you want.

For more information on SEO for bootstrapped startups, a number of people have recommended checking out these useful posts from Rand:

SEO for Startups: Top 7 Lessons
I’m getting pretty tired of startup advice that doesn’t include any mention of SEO
Advice for Startup CEOs

Did I miss any useful SEO for startups blog posts? If so – please give me a shout in the comments.

Flickr image from Snelvis.

You should follow me on Twitter here.

SEO Advice for Bootstrapped Startups is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

I’ve been using Raven tools (aff) for about 6 months now and it’s fair to say that I love it. It’s probably best known for it’s link manager, and that’s understandable – I think for agencies or in-house SEO’s, it’s an incredibly useful way of storing site owner contacts and potential link targets. In truth, if you’re an SEO company that builds links, or if you manage a team of link builders, and you still use Excel spreadsheets to record all of the details – I’d suggest giving Raven a go, it’ll save you time. And if you are using Excel spreadsheets, Raven lets you easily import all of that data.

It’s Firefox toolbar is incredibly useful for teams of link builders, allowing them to add link data (contacts, prices, notes etc) in a way that can be easily shared between everyone, and can prevent link builders from chasing sites that have already turned them down, or that are being contacted by another member of the team. It’s much more efficient than using loads of spreadsheets – but if you want, you can still easily export all of that data into Excel, if that’s your thing.

Rather than talking through it’s link manager though (which Sugarrae does a much better job of than I could), I thought I’d instead give a run through of a few things that I love about Raven, and that I find useful or interesting or that save me time and effort.

Majestic Data

Raven’s backlink explorer now brings in data from Majestic SEO, which means that you can get some access to it’s huge database of link data, and can sort things by Majestic’s AC Rank. While it’s not the same as having full-blown access to Majestic, it’s definitely a pretty awesome addition to an already useful tool. This link data is also exportable, which means you can also play around with it in Excel, and pivot your heart out. It’s another tool to support Linkscape or Yahoo’s backlink data, and it’s inclusion in Raven is incredibly useful.

Competitor Tracking

Raven has a built-in Competitor Manager – it lets you add a whole load of competing sites and it’ll automatically fetch and store things like PageRank, number of indexed pages in Google and Yahoo and the number of inbound links they have according to Yahoo. You can also dig deeper into each site listed by clicking the “Research” link. This shows you a bit more data about the site, including things like a sample set of keywords the site ranks for, the estimated traffic they get based on where they rank for those terms, which keywords they bid on using AdWords and the estimated CPC and associated traffic for those terms – all of this is data that comes out of SEMRush and, while interesting, I suggest taking it with a pinch of salt simply because I can’t verify how accurate it is.

For some of the sites that I run, the data is fairly close but for others it can be way off. Obviously, while it’s a useful little tool – it’s definitely not a replacement for digging much further into competitor’s backlink profiles, but it is a nice, handy starting place.

Raven’s Site Finder

Raven lets you quickly find sites that you’d benefit from a link from, based on a topic. If you search for the word “laptops”, for example, it looks at the top 10 site that’s rank for that keyword and then runs through all of the sites that link to them. It then shows you the best of those links, and let’s you sort by mozRank, Majestic’s AC Rank or, interestingly, by “connections”, which is Raven’s term for the number of sites in the top 10 that site links to. So if one site links to Dell, HP and Apple, it’ll have a connection of 3.

I really like the idea of displaying connections like that so easily – if you’re a brand like (for example) Sony, and you find a site that links to Dell and Apple, but not you – there’s a good chance that you can find a reason for that site to also link to you. It’s possible to get that information out of Yahoo with specific queries, or from SEOmoz’s OpenSiteExplorer – but I find it quicker with Raven. You can also add each link to Raven’s built-in Link Manager.

There’s a slight downside to the site finder though – it’s a bit optimistic with the site’s it shows at first. It’ll obviously show you the absolute strongest, relevant sites out there to get a link from, so a competitive term like “laptops” is going to bring back powerhouses like the BBC and Wikipedia, which you may almost certainly never be able to get a link from unless it’s naturally given. The site finder is best used by choosing to add the sites that you think you may be able to chase down a link from into the link manager.

My tip for the Site Finder is to try it using a search term that’s related to your niche, but is much more longtail. Wireless hard drives, hot air balloon rides, semi-acoustic guitar amps – whatever it is your site is about, try and find a longer tail term and see what results you can get from the site finder. Quite often you can dig out some absolute gems that you may not have found otherwise.

Clever Ranking & Analytics Tracking

Raven tools integrates really easily with Google Analytics and I love how simply it mashes up visitor and ranking data. It’s something that’s kind of obvious but isn’t ever really done. Raven makes it simple.

If you’re monitoring a keyword and have connected Raven to the site’s Google Analytics account, it can show you the ranking of that keyword over time and can overlay it on top of a graph of visitor data. It’s a nice and simple way of seeing how much extra traffic that specific ranking improvement is getting you. You can get to it from the SERP tracker by clicking on the keyword you’re tracking, and then selecting the “Google visits” checkbox, or you can export it as a client-friendly PDF.

But there’s another awesome feature of the SERP tracker – every time Raven checks the search results for your keyword, it caches those results. You can access the historical rankings by following the same process as above, but then clicking on the ranking position for the date you want to check out. As I’ve set it to check Google.co.uk, the tool has usefully accessed Google from a European data centre.

For search agencies and in-house SEOs, I’d guess that the most useful feature of Raven is it’s link manager, which tends to overshadow some of the other awesome features that the tool has. Raven saves me a huge amount of time, and it gives me very easy and incredibly quick access to some pretty awesome data too.

Free Raven Coupons

Jon was also kind enough to offer some coupons for Shark SEO readers, too. What an awesome guy.

The first 50 people to use the invitational code SharkSEO (or by clicking here) will get 3 months free access to Raven.

If you miss the boat on the coupon code, they still have a free 30 day trial which you can take advantage of. Bear in mind though, the trial version of Raven has a much lower limit on the number of keywords you can track or sites you can monitor.

Note: I’ve chosen to use affiliate links in this post, but if you’d prefer to use a non-affiliate link (and because I want to give the guys a clean, dofollow link) you can use this link (although I’d prefer it if you didn’t): Raven SEO Tools.

Raven SEO Review, Features and Tips is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

According to w3.org, 303s basically mean “see other”. The redirecting URL shouldn’t be cached and it generally indicates that the content is held elsewhere. Importantly though, it says this:

“Many pre-HTTP/1.1 user agents do not understand the 303 status”.

SEOs generally know to use a 301 for the vast majority of redirects, but if you ever get a web dev or a design team that wants to use a 303, there’s now a good example of why it should be avoided here:







A search for “Wimbledon” in Google currently shows a blank .com also ranking, just as a 302 often would. This implies that a 303 redirect won’t pass on link value to the main site, like a 301 would, and can cause the redirecting URL to also be listed in the SERPs.

For some reason, the Wimbledon.com URL 301 redirects most users to the correct Wimbledon.org domain, but will show search engines a 303. You can switch your user agent to Googlebot and check.

Yahoo and Bing treat 303s the same way:

Yahoo also doesn’t appear to see the .com redirect properly. And neither does Bing:

So, in summary – 303 redirects don’t appear to work properly to search engines. If you want your permanent redirects to be counted by the search engines, avoid them and use 301 redirect instead.

303 Redirects & SEO is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

There’s two main kinds of duplicate content, and it can affect sites in different ways. On-site duplicate content occurs when pages are repeated across one domain. Off-site duplicate content happens when a site’s content is repeated across other domains – ITN.co.uk frequently has their content distributed across orange.co.uk, msn.co.uk and yahoo.co.uk for example.

On-Site Duplicate Content

Firstly, there’s on-site duplicate content – where you have the exact same page repeated across two or more URLs. An example might be having an article on your main (real) URL, and then having the same article on a printer friendly page. It happens very easily, if you display the full post on the homepage in WordPress, for example, then you run the risk of having that page appear in full on the homepage, on the tag pages, in the category pages and finally on the (real) post page itself. This doesn’t tend to cause major problems unless one of the duplicate pages starts getting all of the links – so if the printer friendly version of the page was the one that was heavily linked to, you may find that ranking in the search results instead of your real article. The unseen downside is that if that printer friendly page gets a few links, but not enough to rank in place of your real article, those links to the duplicate page will still be less likely to help your real article rank.

You can reclaim those lost links, and ensure that your real article is the one that ranks, by using either 301 redirects to redirect duplicate pages to the real version or by using canonical tags (which are slightly more useful in the case of printer friendly pages).

Off-Site Duplicate Content

It’s less common to have content that’s duplicated across a number of different sites, but it still happens. Sites that syndicate out their content, article directory sites and press release sites all have this issue – the exact same article may appear on PRWeb.com and a whole load of other sites that have chosen to pick up that press release.

In either case, you’re not going to get a penalty – it happens naturally.

If you have an article on your site – the same article that appears on a number of other different sites, and somebody searches for it, then Google is only going to try and display one result that leads to that article. If you wrote that article, then you should be the one to get that traffic – but it doesn’t always work that way. Google usually tries to display the site that first wrote the content, but sometimes just displays whichever site is most authoritative.

Google works out the originator of the article by looking at who links back. If Site A writes the content and it gets picked up by Sites B, C and D – if B, C and D are all linking back to A then it’s a clear signal to Google that they should rank site A, and that the remaining sites should be filtered out. A massive problem arises, though, when the remaining sites don’t link back to that article page – especially if the sites that pick up that article have more authority than the originator.

Where does ITN fit in?

ITN.co.uk often create articles and then syndicate them out to other large sites at the same time as publishing them themselves. Because the large sites often don’t link back properly, Google has a hard time working out who the content really belongs to. This article on astronauts carrying out a space walk was originally written by ITN, but was syndicated out to a load of different sites too, including to Yahoo. Even though ITN wrote the story, because they launched at the same time as Yahoo (and a number of other sites including MSN) then Google isn’t always sure which site is the originator. As a result, it’s easy for Google to filter out the wrong site – currently a search on a snippet of text from that article for me shows that ITN is filtered out, while Yahoo ranks.

How can ITN get their search traffic back?

If I was ITN, I’d look at getting an agreement in place with Yahoo, MSN and the like so that all of the articles syndicated out included a link at the bottom that included the article headline linking back to the source, e.g. “Astronauts carry out space walk is an article from ITN News“. While this doesn’t guarantee they won’t be filtered out for duplicate content, it should strongly help their chances – Google will usually look at who everyone links to to determine which site originally produced the content. If they wanted to take it a step further (and this may not even be possible with a topic as sensitive as news), they could launch their content, send out a ping to help the article get indexed, and then a few minutes later release the article to Yahoo, MSN and the other big news sites.

ITN’s best chance of getting their search traffic back is to make sure that they include links back to the article when they syndicate out the content. It’s not guaranteed to work, nothing in SEO is, but the worst case scenario is that they pick up a lot of massively authoritative links.

ITN & The Problem With Duplicate Content is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

Tracking Site Searches

Google Analytics by default doesn’t automatically track what people are searching for using the search function of your own site (if you have your own search box). Being able to track the search terms people use is massively helpful for blogs (you get to see what content people were hoping to get) and for e-commerce sites (you get to see what products are in high demand).

To enable it, click “Edit” on the main dashboard screen to look at the profile’s settings. Click “Edit” again in the top-right hand corner – under the Site Search section, select “Do Track Site Search” and enter “s” (without the quotes) if you’re using WordPress. If you’re not – you’ll have to enter the URL parameter that your site’s search uses (for example, if your search URL is http://domain.com/?search=hello then you’ll need to enter “search” without the quotes).

Once Google Analytics has tracked site searches you should be able to find what your visitors are searching for under “Content” and “Site Search”.

Creating Custom Reports

The regular Google Analytics dashboards give you standard metrics out of the box, for example under the “Visitors” tab you’re shown Visits, Absolute Unique Visitors, Pageviews, Average Pageviews, Time on Site, Bounce Rate and Percentage of New Visits as the default – all good metrics if that’s what you’re after. Using custom reports, you can create your own tailor made reports that give you access to a whole load more.

Click “Custom Reporting” and then “Manage Custom Reports”. Click “create new custom report” in the top right and then you can drag and drop your metrics and dimensions. As an example, a report that I like for quite a few of my sites includes Visits, % New Visits, Bounce Rate and Goal Conversion Rate (more on this later) as my four main metrics and uses Keyword as the dimension.

Give it a name and click “Save Report”. Once you’ve created the report it’s also quite interesting to play around with it – click “edit” and play around with the metrics and dimensions on the left hand side.

Creating Goals

You don’t just have to be an e-commerce site to be able to have specified goals or conversions. There’s loads of goals that you may want out of a blog and you can set Google Analytics up to report on these. My main goals could be in the form of browsers, readers and RSS signups so I have three main conversions set up for this site.

To set up goals, first go to the Overview section (the page you see as soon as you log in). Click “Edit” next to your site, then click “Add Goal” in the Goals section.

To track my RSS Subscribers, I’ve gone a bit basic and only actually tracked people that have landed on my RSS feed page (although Feedburner will show me the real number of subscribers). Name the goal (I’ve used “RSS Subscribers”), use “URL Destination” as the Goal Type. Under Goal Details select Head Match for match type, and /feeds as the Goal URL (although you should use your appropriate RSS feeds page – you should subscribe to mine here).

To track readers (the people that actually read my blog posts, instead of just arrive, skim read a bit, get bored with me rambling and leave) I’ve used time on site as a goal metric. In this case I’m looking for people that have spent at least 4 minutes on my site. Follow the same steps as the RSS Subscribers goal, but then use “Time on Site” as the Goal Type and under Goal Details use Condition “Greater Than” and change the time to 4 minutes. You can also give it a goal value, if that’s the sort of thing that floats your boat.

You could be a bit more strict and up that 4 minute count to 5 or 6 (or if you tend to write particularly lengthy blog posts) but I wouldn’t really recommend it. The last goal I use is “browsers”, which I’m tracking as people that look at more than 3 pages when they visit. To track it, use Pages/Visit as the Goal Type. Under Goal Details, change Pages Visited to greater than 3.

Using Advanced Segments

The ability to create advanced segments is easily one of the most useful features of Google Analytics as it lets you segment and then track the behaviour of loads of different groups and traffic sources. It’s an unbelievably awesome feature and it’s amazing how much you can find out about your visitors in such a short space of time.

To set them up, click on “Advanced Segments”, click “Create new custom segment” and then you can add your dimensions and metrics. As a useful example, if you want to track the behaviour of branded versus non-branded organic search traffic, search for Medium and use that as the dimension – set the condition to Matches Exactly and select Organic.

Add an “And” statement, search for “Keyword” and use that as the dimension – change the condition to “Contains” and add your brand name in the “Value” section (for example, I’d use “Shark”). Name the segment as Branded Organic and click save.

You can find loads more help on advanced segments at Avinash Kaushik’s blog (his blog is definitely worth reading and his latest book worth buying – not an affiliate link).

There are loads of segments that you might be interested in creating – organic visits that include your brand term, visits that include the word “guide” or “help” or “tips”, visits that include the word “buy” or “rent” or “order”, visits from Digg, Facebook or Reddit for example. You can segment pretty much anything you can think of, and with enough traffic you can usually get some pretty interesting insights out of them. I particularly like the idea of segmenting visits from social sites to see how conversions, time on site, bounce rates and other metrics like that compare against organic or paid search traffic, or display traffic. Very useful stuff.

Once you’ve created your segment you can click “test segment” to see some nice, instant data. It’s always nice to play around with advanced segments so if you’ve got a spare half-hour, it’s worth segmenting your traffic as much as you’d like and looking at the results.

Comparing Segments

Finally, if you want to easily compare segments against others piranha biscuit, on one of your main graphs (like your traffic graph), click the “advanced segments” option in the top right-hand corner and select the advanced segments that you’d like to compare.

You’ll instantly get some site usage data underneath the graph too which can compare metrics like bounce rate and average time on site. In the example I’ve used here (which is for a different site of mine), I’m able to dig deeper into the data to find out interesting things – organic traffic has a much lower bounce rate and has a higher browser rate, with organic traffic looking at twice the number of pages per visit than referral traffic. Playing around with your own segments, and working out which segments have lower bounce rates and higher conversion rates is interesting and can give you some new and unexpected insights into how different people interact with your site.

Getting More From Google Analytics is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

Malcolm Coles recently brought this point home in his excellent Econsultancy post about the Mirror’s 3am site making a bit of a hash of their SEO. Malcolm also mentioned an earlier article from paidcontent.co.uk which had an interesting quote from one of the developers on the 3am site:

“We want this site to perform well over a period of time. Not live or die by how many times we can write Britney Spears or Michael Jackson into the metadata”.

And that’s a problem – if that’s genuinely what a lot of web developers think us SEOs do, then it doesn’t look good on us. If they think that our jobs involve shoving the keywords into the meta data and then hoping it works then it’s no wonder that there’s an “SEO sucks” drama post every other week.

And in truth, part of this problem is because of the sheer amount of misinformation out there (check out some of the biggest SEO myths as proof). Have a look at this terrible, terrible SEO article from About.com. Some of the bad advice it gives is “don’t make small changes to your content”, “duplicate content is for spammers and could get you banned” and my personal favourite “don’t link to and from the same site repeatedly – this is known as link spamming”. (Sorry Malcolm).

SEO isn’t about stuffing your pages with keywords and it’s not about worrying about linking to the same sites often or deliberately not making changes to your content. We know this – it comes naturally to us as SEOs, but it’s surprising to see that other people do believe it.

SEO mainly comes down to 3 things – making your site accessible to search engines as well as users, making sure the content is relevant and then making your site as popular as it can be. Most non-SEOs don’t know about the importance of that last point.

Flickr image from Phillustration

What SEO Isn’t is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

Check out a search for bigmouthmedia – for me, the second result is Superbreak.com. Bigmouthmedia isn’t mentioned anywhere on Superbreak.com. Digging a bit deeper, I found out that Superbreak is (or was) a client of bigmouth. Ordinarily I wouldn’t announce who is a client for who, but I don’t think bigmouth or Superbreak will mind because bigmouth announced it themselves with press releases (apparantly they’re doing a very good job).

Interestingly though, if you search for other SEO companies you can start to, sometimes, find sites that may well be their clients.

I’ve not examined this too much, but it’s definitely interesting how Bing works. It’s possible that it’s got a very, very strong reliance on backlink anchor text (so if you’ve got just the one backlink with “bigmouthmedia” as the anchor text, you can rank even if the term doesn’t appear anywhere on your site).

Another interesting possibility is that Bing might look at sites that are often both linked to at the same time, and may use this to determine if they’re related. If that’s what they’re doing then, with a bit more polish, that may just work.

(Flickr image from Brajeshwar)

Does Bing Rely Too Heavily On Backlinks? is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

Flagfox – Puts a tiny flag in the browser address bar to show which country the site is hosted in.

Live HTTP Headers – Runs through the headers that are sent to your browser.

Firebug – I love Firebug so very much. Once it’s installed, hit F12 and it’ll bring up the Firebug menu. Then you can hit “inspect”, select any element on the page and adjust it. I think it’s mostly useful for coding, but it’s got loads of uses.

SEO For Firefox – Comes with loads of awesome features like adjusting the search results to show more information about sites that are ranked, but I use it mainly because it highlights NoFollows.

User Agent Switcher – Lets you see pages as if Googlebot was your user agent, as well as loads of other user agents. If you want to add Googlebot as a possible user agent, open up the User Agent Switcher options menu, go to User Agents and select “Add”. Put the title as Googlebot, and then put the user agent as: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html).

Web Developer Toolbar – Lets you disable JavaScript, CSS, images and meta redirects. Does loads of other stuff too, like displaying ALT text on images.

SEO Quake – Shows Page Rank toolbar data, instant access to Yahoo linkdomain data and Google site: command data. If you’re going to use this in an office full of SEOs, all of them using SEO Quake, try not to have it auto-load data whenever you query Google, it tends to get your office IP captcha’d for a few days. I speak from experience.

SEOMoz Toolbar – Display Moz Rank & Moz Trust from their Linkscape tool, as well as Page Rank. You need to be an SEOMoz member and you need to be logged in to use it.

(Flickr image from flod)

Firefox SEO Plugins That Make Your Life Easier is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?