Archive for SEO

Lower Your Bounce Rate With One Line of Code

April 30th, 2010 • 3 comments Analytics, SEO
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While reading through the Google Analytics Event Tracking Guide, I came across this nugget:

In general, a “bounce” is described as a single-page visit to your site. In Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single GIF request, such as when a user comes to a single page on your website and then exits without causing any other request to the Analytics server for that session. However, if you implement Event Tracking for your site, you might notice a change in bounce rate metrics for those pages where Event Tracking is present. This is because Event Tracking, like page tracking is classified as an interaction request.

Of course having read through several SEO related posts identifying bounce rate as a ranking factor (or at a minimum a quality signal), I devised a way to game it. 

<div id="header" onMouseOver="pageTracker._trackEvent('bounce', 'bouncecheck', 'Look Ma No Bounce');">

I figure a mouseover on my header will probably be triggered enough to dramatically drop my bounce rate without looking too artificially manipulated. Plus I wonder if a body onLoad statement would be overkill, or trigger faster than the gif request. Anyway after implementing this for one day you can see the huge difference below.




Now while my method is obviously solely aimed at gaming the system, there are some legitimate uses. A few examples that come to mind where firing off an event make sense are video plays, if the end of a javascripted animation, newsletter signups, rss subscribes and there are probably a thousand more.

SEO Friendly Split Testing

February 26th, 2010 • SEO
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I’ve recently been spending most of my time split testing the designs across many of the sites I manage. The question is always raised – how will this effect my seo? Unfortunately website owners aren’t allowed to serve up different page versions to search engines than to regular visitors – without risking the wrath of Google. (That is unless you’re one of the big brands) This technique is commonly referred to as “cloaking” and is expressly in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Luckily we have a new tool at our disposal to set things straight with some level of reliability – the link canonical tag. According to Google:

If your site has identical or vastly similar content that’s accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.

Let’s assume three split test variant pages:

  • index.php
  • indexb.php
  • indexc.php

To properly point each page to the original you would simply place this tag in the HEAD statement of each page:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.domain.com/index.php">

What about other search engines you say? Well luckily Yahoo! and Bing announced support for the link canonical tag at the same time as Google. YMMV with these second-tier search engines – but at least they have stated their intent to honor it.

A second level of protection can be added by adding a meta tag to each page to prevent indexation. I would recommend a setting of NOINDEX, FOLLOW as seen below:

<meta name="robots" content="NOINDEX, FOLLOW" >

Obviously this method is ONLY going to work if you are split testing and not multivariate testing.

Firefox Keyword Research Addon

August 9th, 2009 • SEO, scripting
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If you are anything like me you probably use seobook’s keyword rankings tool enough to have it on speed dial. Luckily the script used to process results accepts a GET request. As a result I have made a simple firefox search engine addon to make it easier to get the keyword research you are looking for.

NOTE: I am not in any way affiliated with seobook or Aaron Wall. (Aaron if you’d like me to take this down send me a note – Ryan)

xml for search engine:

<OpenSearchDescription>
<ShortName>seobook keyword research</ShortName>
<Description>seobook keyword research
</Description>
<Image height="16" width="16" type="image/x-icon">http://seobook.com/favicon.ico</Image>
<Url type="text/html" method="get" template="http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/?Keyword={searchTerms}"/>
</OpenSearchDescription>

To install this script just click the down arrow on your search engine bar in firefox and select “seobook keyword research”. Big thanks to Aaron Wall for creating such a useful tool.

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