Search engine optimisation (or optimization if you insist) is the process of making sure that the search engines recognise, qualify and index the content of your website.

I recently attended a presentation on black hat SEO that I found interesting. The speaker clearly knew a lot about the darker side of SEO, but his polarised views were more than little disconcerting.

For example he considered so-called White hat SEOs to be “losers”, and frequently referred to Matt Cutts of Google disparagingly and with a surprising level of venom.

SEO is about helping the search engines understand the visitors that you want on your website.

Like any business relationship this can be anywhere on a scale from absolute honesty to complete deception. But no-one can dispute that black hat techniques carry a degree of risk.

A black hat SEO may argue that the rewards outweigh the risks, but if you’re contemplating following the dark side, you might want to think about what you’ll be gambling.

If SEO is about making sure the engines index your content, there should be no room for techniques that jeopardise that aim.

The dark side might be tempting, but the good guys usually win.

Note: The next issue of our Competitive Edge newsletter will be covering this issue and some of the finer details of practical and safe search engine optimisation.

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Last month Google announced dramatic changes that seem to have fallen below the radar for many businesses.

In a nutshell, they will no longer be reporting on the organic keywords used by anyone logged into their Google accounts.

So if, for example, you are logged into your Gmail account, carry out a search on Google and click one of the organic results, the keyword you searched for will not be reported in the website’s Analytics account. It will simply be classed as (not provided).

As Google put it:

“We hope that today’s move to increase the privacy and security of your web searches is only the next step in a broader industry effort to employ SSL encryption more widely and effectively.”

This raises a number of questions.

1 – Why does this only apply to organic search results? If Google are genuinely taking a stance on protecting privacy, why not apply the same rule to Google AdWords?

The cynic might assume that Google can’t afford to upset their paying advertisers, but have no qualms about doing so to their free Analytics users.

I might class myself as a cynic.

2 – This all stems from Google’s recent move to force logged-in users to the secure version of Google. So why not force all Google users to their secure server? SSL became the default setting in Gmail almost two years ago.

3 – The big question:  How big a problem is this?

The scale of the problem will depend on the people you’re trying to target. We’ve been looking at some of our client’s Analytics accounts, and have seen that the number of affected organic searches seem to average around 10-12%. Sometimes considerably higher.

The above screenshot shows a sample of data from our blog. Over 16% of the organic keywords used to find our content are not being reported.

If we’re lucky, the 16% will consist of a representative sample across the board.

If we’re unlucky, it might contain some incredibly useful data that is now beyond our reach.

By taking away such a large sample, our data has to all intents and purposes been polluted.

To see how much of your data you’re losing right now, go into your Analytics account and choose TRAFFIC SOURCES, Sources, Search, Organic.

You will then probably see (not provided) in the top ten keywords.

If not, you can count yourself lucky – for now at least.

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One of the recurring questions from last weekend’s European Software Conference was how to draw the line between legitimate and dangerous SEO.

Interestingly a common pattern tends to emerge.

Companies engaged in legitimate SEO are often concerned that their efforts may land them in trouble, resulting in possible bans or a dramatic drop in rankings and traffic.

Companies engaged in questionable, black-hat or downright illegal SEO tactics often seem to think that they’re immune from such penalties. They think that they’re smarter than Google and won’t be caught. At least until they watch their Google traffic dry up overnight.

As a rule of thumb, Google are usually reasonable.

I like to say that if you could sit in a room with a representative from Google and answer all of their questions with absolute honesty, and without the fear that they might spot that page or technique on your website, then chances are you’re not going to get in trouble with them.

If you could answer every variation of “…why did you setup that page in that way?” with an honest and reasonable answer, then you’re probably in the clear.

If, on the other hand, the honest answer would be that you were trying to boost your traffic from the search engines, then you may have a problem.

And if the only honest answer would be that you’re trying to trick Google, then your day of reckoning will most certainly occur at some point.

Good SEO is about making sure that people looking for what you sell find it. Without having to lie to Google.

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Why either/or?

Some food for thought:

- Good organic rankings won’t last forever. SEO is a moving target.

- If people click on your ads then they’re working. *

- PPC is more accountable. *

- PPC gets quicker results. *

- SEO is free. (Except it isn’t.)

* = assuming that you’re doing it right.

Some common misdecisions: (not a real word but it should be)

“Because more than 80% of our conversions come from the organic listings.”

“AdWords doesn’t work. It’s too expensive.”

“We can figure this out for ourselves. How hard can it be?”

“PPC is easier.”

“SEO is easier.”

Don’t weigh up whether to focus on AdWords or SEO.

Both work and both can produce great results.

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I’m not.

You’re not.

You and I wouldn’t think about using anything else but Google for our searches, right?

But you and I may not be representative of anything other than you and I.

What about them?

- TechCrunch recently reported that Bing and Bing-powered Yahoo account for over 30% of the market share.

- Bing’s year-on-year growth is said to be 41%, compared to Google’s 6.4%.

- Internet Explorer accounts for 72% of Bing search queries, yet is is currently estimated to account for just over 50% of browsers in use today.

This reinforces what we suspected from the outset: that Bing users aren’t the likes of you and I.

So the important question remains:

Who’s using Bing?

Your customers?

The reactive business might be forgiven for thinking that it doesn’t matter. That the days of optimising individual pages for different search engines are long gone, so we can sit back and watch what happens.

The proactive business might seek out the opportunities that Bing offer, with a view to tapping into a comparatively open market.

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Google have always maintained a strict separation between their paid ads and organic listings, yet I believe that this has now changed. At least in terms of strategy.

In the early days of AdWords, Google’s model wasn’t that different from that of GoTo. Essentially you paid for ad position: the higher the bid, the higher the placement.

But Google soon realised that this model was flawed, as it effectively diluted the quality of their search results with poorly-targeted ads. Some of their advertisers had different agendas, poor skills and/or larger budgets, but none were as committed to the quality of the results as Google.

And so along came Quality Score – the AdWords equivalent of PageRank: over-hyped, misunderstood and often mistakenly interpreted as either the holy grail or irrelevant.

Stage 3 in the evolution of AdWords saw Google placing a far greater importance on the landing page.

This was a critical turning point, as before this you could directly ramp-up the number of AdWords visitors by spending more, irrespective of the quality of your website.

The same principle still applies, but if Google deem landing pages to be low quality, advertisers soon realise that to have any impact on their position and clicks, they’re going to have to spend a great deal more. Increasing volume becomes exponentially more costly.

So let’s take a step back.

Effective SEO requires on-site optimisation, external optimisation and a hint of black magic.

Effective AdWords management now requires the need to optimise the website, a healthy budget and a pinch of voodoo.

Both require website optimisation. And dabbling in the occult helps.

Ads and organic listings are not only starting to look like each, the optimisation process is moving ever-closer too.

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One of the many inspired marketing strategies of Google is the idea of PageRank. Not just in the brilliance of the concept itself, but in the way the idea has experts and self-proclaimed-experts alike obsessing over one relatively minor aspect of SEO.

People still lose sleep over their PageRank to this day, and many still don’t understand how it actually works. Brilliant.

Google +1 (not to be confused with Google +) is simply a means of people endorsing a web page, and signifies a refocus for Google, where they acknowledge the importance of the user: the start of social SEO.

From Google:

“The +1 button is shorthand for “this is pretty cool” or “you should check this out”.

Click +1 to publicly give something your stamp of approval. Your +1′s can help friends, contacts, and others on the web find the best stuff when they search.”

From an SEO perspective, four words jump out:

“…others on the web…”

I personally don’t believe that +1 will make much of a difference in the short term. The feature is still experimental, and it’s still not possible for Google Apps users to even use it.

It’s also worth noting that Google have had a poor track record of jumping on the social wagon, notably with Buzz and Orkut.  But if the feature catches on, it could prove to be an important aspect of your SEO strategy.

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I often come across businesses who want to improve their performance in Google – often through organic search.

Most of them use Google Analytics, and all want more traffic from Google.

When we begin optimising a client’s website for the search engine/s, the process begins by getting a feel for how they’re doing so far.

Apologies for the screenshots using the ‘old’ interface of Analytics, but there are bugs in the new version that haven’t yet been resolved.

The first step is to isolate Google organic traffic using a simple segment:

Remember that from this point onwards you’re only looking at the organic traffic from Google.

It’s easy to confirm this by going to Traffic Sources, Search Engines.

From here you want to know which pages are working at bringing in traffic from Google. So go to Content, Top Landing Pages.

Note that you’re more interested in landing pages than top content, as these are the pages that are ranking in the search results and generating visitors.

It’s at this point that quality starts to come into play. Take a look at the Bounce Rate column. If some of the figures surprise you, then you might want to drill down into the page to see what keywords are sending you traffic.

Click on the page name link, then choose Keyword from the third drop-down along.

From there you’ll be able to see which keywords are responsible for the high bounce rates. You’ll either understand these, or identify opportunities for improvement.

If you want to see the bigger picture, go to Traffic Sources, Keywords to see how the website as a whole is doing.

You want to focus on two main areas:

1 – keywords that you should be getting traffic for but you’re not (or not enough of it)

2 – keywords that generate large proportions of visitors with high bounce rates

You can ignore any keywords that have nothing to do with what you sell. Unless there are high volumes, you can’t use these to your advantage, and it’s not worth trying to fix an essentially benign problem.

The key is quality through relevancy.

Getting high volumes of visitors who aren’t interested in what you sell is meaningless.

Ranking highly for phrases that no-one searches for is pointless.

Effective SEO begins with identifying relevant keywords, and selecting which to target based on the number of searches and levels of competition.

Only then does the task of optimising the website begin.

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Google has changed. At least when viewing results from the US, Finland, Greece, Romania and others:

It’s odd that in the UK, France, Hong Kong and other more civilised countries, we’re still seeing the old interface that suddenly looks a little dated:

What’s of particular interest is that the URLs are now being displayed above the page excerpts. The same applies to the AdWords ads.

Yesterday:

Tomorrow:

One other noteworthy change. At a higher resolution, you can see that there’s been a definite move to the left hand side of the browser.

Old and stale:

New and vibrant:

Prediction: people will either love it, hate it, not notice or not care!

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There are more myths of Search Engine Optimisation than any other field of online marketing. Too many companies follow bad advice, act on incorrect assumptions and miss out on an abundance of Google-originated targeted traffic.

Once the optimisation of the website is complete, mistakes often continue, with an astonishing number of businesses and individuals incorrectly measuring the results of their labours.

The following is a list of factors to consider when trying to gauge the results of your optimisation efforts.

Realistic expectations:

Time – don’t expect newly optimised pages to start ranking in first place a few days after uploading the changes. Even though new content may be indexed relatively quickly, it can take weeks, months or even longer for the full impact of the changes to take place.

Moving target - Google change their ranking factors on an ongoing basis, and both you and your competition are constantly adding new content, adjusting and reoptimising your websites. The result is a constantly changing environment. Never forget that rankings may rise or fall as a result of changes made by your competition. You can’t always take the blame or credit for the results.

Data depth – traffic from Google drying-up or exploding tomorrow means nothing. Short-term fluctuations are meaningless, as are small data samples. Looking at a trend over the last two weeks is as pointless as celebrating a 200% surge when you only get 4 visitors a day from Google.

Quantity vs. quality:

Quantity of traffic is meaningless. You may start getting an additional 200 visitors a day from Google, but if they’re looking for something that you’re not selling, then nothing has been achieved.

Ultimately the number of targeted visitors you get from Google is all that matters.

If most Google-originated visitors are leaving within a few seconds of arriving, then you’re either attracting the wrong people or the page they’re landing on isn’t working correctly.

Keep an eye on bounce rates, pages per visit and time on site to get a feel for what’s working and what isn’t. But be careful – see below.

Don’t blend your data:

Food blenders are great for making sauces, soups and smoothies, but blend everything and you end up with baby food.

The same applies to your SEO data.

When analysing organic keyword performance, you might notice a reasonable number of visitors for a targeted keyword that has a high bounce rate. With a little Analytics kung fu you should be able to isolate the page/s where this is occuring and then address the issue accordingly.

It’s important to remember that the data in your Analytics account is by default for the website as a whole. So if KEYWORD 1 has a 50% bounce rate, that might be spread across a number of pages, some of which are performing well, while others perform poorly.

Making decisions on keyword bounce rates has to be based on individual pages.

Get funky with Analytics:

Google Analytics allows you to quickly and easily segment your organic traffic from the search engines, and using Advanced Filters will identify which keywords are producing more than 50 visitors a day with bounce rates below 50%, for example.

Judicious use of these features will allow you to recognise two important data streams:

- traffic that should perform well but doesn’t – requiring optimisation of the relevant pages for conversion (aka the visitor experience)

- targeted, worthwhile visitors from Google – ultimately the true measure of success for your SEO efforts.

Don’t get distracted by…

- Rankings for specific keywords. These can change with alarming regularity, and never forget that results will vary according to location, search history, user settings and more. Ultimately the number of targeted visitors you get from Google is all that matters.

- The number of backlinks. Yes it’s a factor to take into consideration, but ultimately the number of targeted visitors you get from Google is all that matters.

- PageRank. If you’re still obsessing over this then there’s little I can do to help. Try to remember that it’s 2011. Ultimately the number of targeted visitors you get from Google is all that matters.

Notice a theme?

Ultimately the number of targeted visitors you get from Google is all that matters.

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