A nofollow link is a link that search engines will not follow and that doesn’t flow page rank. You can do this by using an attribute in the anchor text and that is “rel=nofollow”. When you place a comment on a website you have the ability to list your website address, your name, e-mail address (that usually is not published) and the comment itself.

By default the links posted in comments are nofollow links. My SEO tip for you is to leave it just like this. Changing those links in dofollow links could damage your website in terms of SEO. The reason is because search engines consider that you have total control of what’s being published on your website.

So any link pointing to low quality websites, or websites that are penalized by search engines will affect you as well. Usually when you enable dofollow links in comments many people will comment just for the sake of it. They will also put their keywords in their names with links to their websites.

Even if you moderate the comments and allow only websites that are from your niche and that are trust worthy your SEO will suffer because you’ll offer more relevancy to those domains by linking to their websites with their keywords. Maybe those keywords are exactly the ones you are targeting and now you offer all your work to another website.

What do you have to say about this? Do you have dofollow comments on your website? If you find this article useful please consider subscribing to my blog.

I’m always happy when people return to my website: it means they liked what they saw the first time and want some more similar stuff. Keeping your returning visitors happy it’s very important.

Here are two big reasons for being so interested in the happiness of your returning visitors:

1. A returning visitor means a potential client in the future: conversions don’t happen from the first visit.
2. These people already like your website so it’s more likely they’ll tell others about your website/product/service

So, what I did is I created a Custom Report in Google Analytics that show me what Returning Visitors are viewing and other metrics, that I’ll talk about in just a minute. If you know nothing about Custom Reports you can check out my introductory article for Custom Reports and I also have an article about how to track what pages were viewed because of a keyword, using Custom Reports.

Now let’s get back to the custom report from today. Log in into your Google Analytics account and click create new custom report. Give it a suggestive name like “Happy Returning Visitors”. The thing is that you don’t have a direct metric for returning visitors. So here is what metrics you’ll choose to display and then I’ll explain why.

Metrics to choose to view: Visits, %New Visits, New Visits, Avg. Time on Page, Pages/Visit and Bounce Rate. The first dimension to apply these metrics to is Page Title. As optional drill down dimensions chose Visitor Type and Source/Medium.

Here is how to look at this custom report: you’ll basically look at the pages that have the less percentage of New Visitors. Click on that link and from the new table choose Returning Visitors. Now you’ll see how the Returning Visitors chose to return to your website (the source and the medium), the bounce rate, how many pages they saw and what was the average time on page.

Of course that you can also check this information for New Visitors as well. This custom report shows you relevant metrics for each page New and Returning Visitors.

What do you think of all this? Share your ideas for custom reports and if you find this article useful please consider subscribing to my blog.

If you’re using Google Analytics to track how your website performs then Custom Reports is something that you should pay really close attention to. You can basically choose to see only what matters to you and most important you can also customize a single Custom Report to serve different purposes.

You can show different metrics about the same dimension depending on what each department needs. The Custom Report that I want to talk about today will show you what pages were viewed on your website because of a keyword.

So, when someone types a keyword in a search engine and that person clicks on your link, because of that search, what pages he/she saw on your website, what was the bounce rate, how many visits, how many new visits, what was the avg. time on page and so on.

The answer to all these small questions is a Custom Report. So, in case you know nothing about Custom Reports, I have an article about how to create custom reports in Google Analytics. In case you do know how to create one, log in into your Google Analytics account and hit create new custom report.

Here are the suggested metrics to place in your custom report (you can place what metrics you want): Bounce Rate, Page Views, Avg. Time on Page, Visits, New Visits, %New Visits. As dimension you’ll chose, of course, Keyword and as additional drill down dimension chose Page Title. Create the report and view it.

The first thing you’ll see is a table with a list of keywords and all the metrics you selected above. Click on one of those keywords (I like to start with those that have more Page Views) and now you’ll have a table showing you what pages from your website were viewed by a user that arrived on your website through that specific keyword.

While you are viewing this second table you have the option to display a secondary dimension. Chose Landing Page from the drop down menu and you’ll see on what page the reader entered your website.

Let me know what you think about custom reports and how you use it. Share your experience and if you find this article useful please consider subscribing to my blog.

You have a website and analytic software installed. I use Google Analytics but it’s up to you what solution to use. It really doesn’t matter because every analytic software should provide some basic reports. What I’m going to talk about in this article is how to use your top landing pages to improve your website functionality.

First thing that I consider important is this: any analytic software is meant to suggest some actions. Don’t just read your website reports: you have the answer to some of your problems right in front of you. Take action and then go back and measure it.

Top Landing Pages is a feature that shows you what pages, from your website, are used as entry gates. The tip that I have for you is to use these top landing pages to direct users deeper in your website.

There are two major cases of top landing pages:

1. The main page of your website
2. Particular pages/articles from your website

In the first case you have a lot more choices to direct people to other pages but when it comes to a particular page you have to be careful and direct readers to relevant content. When you want to improve the functionality of a particular page don’t place links to general pages (I mean don’t try to divert readers to your main page, for example).

The reason is that those people arrived on that page because they’re interested in that subject. A logical thing to do would be to direct them to more related subjects and from those subjects to other pages and so on.

So, your top landing pages could be the engine of your website if you know how to proper link it to the rest of your website.

What do you think of all this? Share your ideas and experience and if you find this article useful please consider subscribing to my blog.

Search engines are not the only thing out there, on the web. I see so many articles concentrating only to search engines and they miss the most important thing: all their content is actually for people. We tend to forget that all those statistics and all that we call traffic are people.

For a search engine a nofollow link is equal to zero but from a user perspective it could mean a lot, especially when you’re new on the market and your website doesn’t have too much authority. That is why is a good thing to go on the web, search for the authority websites and people on your market and comment on those websites.

If your comment is interesting enough then it’s a good chance other readers of that blog to click your link. It may not happen right from your first comment but this social-web is about persistency. So keep posting interesting comment and even thou your links will be nofollow you may receive some benefits out of it.

The most important thing is that those websites already managed to gather people interested in your market, so any click will have high value and may also lead to a conversion.

Now, I don’t want you to read this article and just run and place comments all over the web. Find a balance in everything you do and find its value. Just like in a brick and mortar business when you’re evaluating everything you do in terms of costs, you should try and do the same with a web based business.

What do you think of all this? Share your opinion with us and if you find this article interesting please consider subscribing to my blog!

I recently had to perform an SEO analysis on a website that had a high bounce rate and the main question of the owner was “why such a high bounce rate, if I have good quality content?”. I looked at the text content from the website and he was right: lots of good information but extremely high bounce rate.

How to look at it in Google Analytics Reports

When you’re checking the bounce rate you should also look at it together with time on site. Only when you’ll have a high bounce rate and almost zero seconds time on site you should think that your content is not relevant to what the reader was searching for. And only then you should try and find out the sources of traffic for that page and better understand the bounce rate.

But if you have high bounce rate and a couple of minutes time on site then this means the content was relevant to what the readers were looking but they didn’t had a good reason to navigate further. This is a common issue to blogs because many articles are created as standalone pages. This was the case of the website I analyzed: lots of good content with no natural links placed in text to point to other topic related articles.

Suggestions to improve bounce rate

When you plan your articles don’t just think of standalone articles: try and plan groups of articles. Start with the main one that speaks about a problem in general terms and from there go for more specific articles. Link between articles in a natural way and use descriptive anchor text. Don’t just place links on words like “here”.

If someone sees the link for the first time, without reading your article he should already have a general idea about what the next page would be.

Your turn

What do you think of this? Did you find this information on bounce rate useful? Share your experience and please consider subscribing to my blog.

Your presence on the Internet is a collection of bases and outposts: your business blog or business website is your home base, your Facebook page is an outpost, your YouTube channel is an outpost, your Twitter account is an outpost. All your actions in all your outposts are meant to direct readers to your home base, to the place where you can fully show them what you can do for their businesses.

Tracking how effective your actions are on these outposts require different approaches, depending on the social network. In this article I’ll present a quick and easy way to track your impact on YouTube. As you probably know by now, your own video channel on YouTube can be a powerful marketing tool and a great way to drive traffic to your website.

In this article I’ll concentrate on how you can measure the impact of your videos over your website. The most important thing you have to keep in mind is that you need a strategic approach. The requirement for tracking your results is to have some kind of analytic software installed on your website. I personally use Google Analytics.

The simplest thing you can do is to look at your referral traffic and check for YouTube. In order to get some results you’ll have to edit your video description on YouTube and place a link to your website. People will click it and they’ll show up in your Google Analytics reports.

The big disadvantage of this method is that you can’t measure how effective each video is. I think is very important to know how many of your viewers for a particular video clicked the link in the description and not the overall performance of the video channel.

The solution is a small strategic decision. Instead of creating content that you’ll place as standalone videos on YouTube you’ll create video content that will supplement your articles. Each video will be designed for a specific article. And when you’ll edit the description of the video, the first thing to do will be to place a link to that specific article.

You’ll not have all your videos pointing to your home page but each video points to a specific page, where you’ll probably also embed the video. By making this small adjustment you’ll be able to track the impact of each video. You’ll know what videos work and what not and you may also find out that high number of views does not necessary means lots of clicks.

With this setup you’ll be able to go to your Google Analytics account, go to Content > Content by Title, locate a page that has a YouTube video on it, select it and as a second view option you can check for Source. Now you’ll be able to see how people reached that page. Search for YouTube and see how many visits you receive, what was the bounce rate or how much time they stayed on that page.

You can now compare the number of views with the number of visits and you can make decisions on what types of videos to create in the future so that you’ll increase the click rate.

What do you think of all this? How do you track your impact on YouTube? If you find this article useful please consider subscribing to my blog.

You must have some kind of analytic software installed on your website: you have no other option. Not knowing the stats for your website is like walking in the dark and hoping for the best to happen. I personally use Google Analytics because it’s free, easy to use and offers great info.

Basically an analytic software will tell you how users come to discover your content and what they’re doing while on your website.

A very important aspect of the problem is this:

1. Where are my readers located?
2. How they find me?

Why is very important to correlate these two reports: it may give you the answer to the question “why am I not selling anything?”. If you want to rank well for a certain keyword that you believe it will bring you conversions and you see that you receive traffic from that keyword but no conversion, what do you do?

The first thing is to look at the landing page to see if your readers arrive where you want. But if this is ok then you’ll have to see from what country your readers are. If your company only sells products in UK and you get traffic from other countries then that traffic it’s irrelevant to you.

This is something that you’ll have to think about not only in the case of keywords: direct traffic, referral or e-mail correlated with location can help you solve many issues. If you are trying to market on a social network and you’re not getting traffic from the location you’re interested in then maybe you should change your message or the social network.

Location can also be responsible for high bounce rates or low bounce rates with no conversion. The implications of a location can be huge: different culture, difference expressions, a different way to look at your products/services, different prices and the list could continue.

What do you think of this? Share your experience and if you find this article useful please consider subscribing to my blog.

I wrote a recent article about what the long tail keywords are, their advantages and disadvantages, but now I would like to explain a little bit the process I use to find long tail keywords worth targeting. You’ll develop content that targets main keywords but the base of every website should be an enormous number of long tail keywords.

The Process of Finding Long Tail Keywords

Just like in the case of main keywords, long tail keywords have to offer a decent search volume/month and also be relevant. Once you decided that a main keyword is relevant to your website then almost all the long tail keywords that are derived from it should be relevant to your website.

Before I tell you the process of how to research for long tail keywords, here are the tools I’m using: Google Keyword External Tool (because it has information on any language or country), Google Sktool and two features from Google Search: Wonder Wheel and Related Searches.

And now, here are the 5 steps that I take in order to find long tail keywords:

1. I start with Google Keyword External. The first search is just using single words. For example for my market I start with words like: seo, keyword, keywords, content and so on. Is very important to let the tool suggest related terms that people are searching. These terms are really the starting point of my search. The same method can be applied using Google Sktool.  I choose one main keyword and then go to step 2.
2. I perform a search on Google for that main keyword. The things that I pay attention are the general competition and title competition. These numbers play an important role in deciding if a keyword is worth targeting or not. So write this down: you’ll have to compare it with the data for the long tail keywords.
3. I use the Wonder Wheel to see what other keywords people searched after the main keyword. Watch the competition and when you find something under 1 million or maximum 2 million you can go for it. Write it down.
4. I also use Related Searches to see what the search engine says that are the related keywords other people searched (these searches are not necessarily performed after searching for your keyword). Again look at the competition and make your own decision: is this keyword relevant and also have a decent competition.
5. I return to Google Keyword External Tool with the long tail keywords that I found. Keep in mind that these keywords were definitely searched by someone but this is not enough. So, you’re checking to see if the tool says it has Not Enough Data or shows you a number. Depending on your market you choose to target a long tail keyword or not. Sometimes a search volume of 100/month can be enough, other times you’ll need a few thousands. It’s relative and depends on the overall search volume trends from your market.

What Do You Think Of This?

Let me know if this info was useful to you and if you have questions. Or maybe you could share your experience. Also, please consider subscribing to this blog and receive my articles directly in your e-mail.

The concept of long tail keyword usually refers to keywords composed of more than 3 words. It can be something from 3 to 4, 5 or more words. Targeting this kind of keywords has its own advantages and in the case of many websites the long tail keywords deliver most of their traffic.

The downside of targeting long tail keywords is the fact that you really have to concentrate on large numbers of long tail keywords. The reason is because the number of monthly searches for a long tail keyword is usually much lower than the searches for a competitive keyword.

Here are some of the advantages of long tail keywords

1. The competition is much lower than in the case of main keywords. So it’s much easier to rank well and faster.
2. Higher conversion. The reason for higher conversion is because long tail keywords mean that people know exactly what are looking for.
3. Help with your rankings on main keywords. You usually use long tail keywords related to your main keywords. A good practice would be to use this additional content to link to your other articles. More articles on related themes will boost your ranking.

Major disadvantages

1. Low search volume. Because of the fact that a long tail keyword is so specific few people are searching for it and the more specific it gets the lower the search volume. So you’ll have to pay attention and decide what long tail keyword is worth the effort and what not
2. You need many. Because of the low search volume you’ll need to target many long tail keywords in order to see some benefits.

The Fact

You can’t do it without long tail keywords. Although it has their disadvantages you’ll have no other option. Why? How many main keywords do you think you can target? Not that many. Yes, it can deliver high volumes of traffic but to get that traffic you’ll need to rank well. And you can’t rank well with just one article.

So long tail keywords are not an option: it’s something you have to do. You already write 3 or 4 or maybe 7 times per week. Why not using long tail keywords in your articles?

What say you?

What is your opinion on this? How do you select your long tail keywords? Share your experience and don’t forget to subscribe to this blog and receive my articles in your e-mail.