Archive for the ‘SEO Experiment’ Category

What’s the Best Test for SEO?

Tests. The word doesn’t carry many good connotations. Perhaps it’s the remnant memories of hours of torture in a classroom, or the awareness that tests often take up more business time than they are worth. Testing isn’t a stage that many companies relish, but sometimes it’s necessary.

If you’ve invested a lot of time and money in your search engine optimisation, it’s possible you’ll want to test your options. For most businesses, the testing stage of SEO is quite brief and fairly informal, superseded by the analytical stages before and after optimisation. You can discuss SEO  testing and analysis with us at SEO Consult. Your options for testing range from the very simple to the complicated, but the first thing you need to decide is whether your tests should be casual and on-the-run, or thorough and rigorous.

If you decide on rigorous testing

Your SEO company may be able to assist you if you wish to embark on a testing period before implementing SEO. You can also test proposed changes yourself, although it is wise to get a good web programmer on board.

There are many types of rigorous tests that have been devised over the years, and you might already have a favourite testing method used when your site was in development. There are two main types of testing used for SEO. The A/B split method, or the multi-variable test. Both have areas of simplicity and complication. Your decision between the two will largely depend on what you want to test, with the amount of time you can spend on testing coming a close second.

How to choose your test

Two factors work together when you need to decide on a test method. If you have narrowed down your options, things are fairly simple and a basic A/B test should get you sufficient results. Just test out one variation for a set period, then testing the other for a similar period, repeat and compare the results, and you’re done. If you have a number of options and a number of things you wish to test, things get a little more complicated.

With an A/B switch test, you’re able to test one distinct element at a time. For example, if you’re unsure whether containing an offer in your main title works better than using a humourous title, you place both titles over the same copy and test. The main benefit of A/B testing is that it gives you more definitive results. The drawback is that it takes a long time to test all your variants.

Testing many variables at once takes less time, but is less accurate. You might decide to change several elements of your page at once, perhaps altering the title but also including a call to action button and adding an image. This method is better when you have a fairly good idea of what you want, but want confirmation.

Testing is not an easy process, and needs good planning. If you undergo testing, it can be a good idea to get professional assistance.

Top 25 Linking Strategy Tips

One of the factors search engines use to rank a site is the number of links pointing to it. The assumption is, the more people reference a site, the more authoritative it is, and the more likely it will have the relevant information a searcher is looking for. Here are some of the best tips to start you off with your SEO linking strategy.

  1. Submit your links to social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, reddit, or digg.
  2. Put bookmark links on your page to allow users to easily submit your sites to reddit or twitter.
  3. Politely ask other bloggers if you can exchange links on each others’ blogroll.
  4. You can also ask them if you can write at their blogs as a guest. Don’t forget to link back to your own site.
  5. Use social media (twitter, FaceBook) to jump start linking.
  6. Use Flickr; generate interesting images and illustrations that link back to your site.
  7. You can also start blogs and link back to your site.
  8. Ask if your employees, family or friends maintain their own sites. Ask them if they can link to your site too.
  9. Get your own host so you can access information only found in web server logs (these are not usually available with free blog hosts, for example).
  10. Look out for 404s – this usually means a user stumbled on your site from an outside link but didn’t get what he wanted. A filename may have changed.
  11. It is a lot better if links going into your site come from unique domain names.
  12. Use forum signatures to link back to your site.
  13. Comment intelligently on other blogs. Although comments generally use a no-follow attribute, you can still get other people interested and they might link to your site from their own.
  14. See which sites link to your competitors and find out if you can convince them to link to your site as well.
  15. Have patience. Search engines will not immediately index your site overnight.
  16. Use adwords or similar ad networks and bid on your own keywords.
  17. When you see that a site directs a lot of traffic to your site, ditch the middleman altogether and contact the site directly for an advertising gig.
  18. Nor will your page rank increase within a day of your campaign. Give the results a month or so to sink in then measure it.
  19. Start a contest or a survey that gives out real prizes (an ebook is a real prize). Other people will link to your site quickly.
  20. As much as possible, use text links.
  21. Put links at both your headers and footers.
  22. Use a Sitemap. That way you can be sure that all your pages are reachable and therefore indexable.
  23. You can also use breadcrumbs. Not only do they make life easier for your readers to find out where they are in relation to your site structure, it is a great way to reference your own site links.
  24. If you’re using a blog, add a widget that will display post archives.
  25. And lastly, quality content naturally attracts other people to read, and ultimately link back to it.