Click Through Rate Increased 38 Percent With Rel Author

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Posted on February 19, 2012 by Russell Jensen

One week after implementing Google authorship markup my bodybuilding blog’s click-through rate increased 38 percent!

The Rel=Author tag was placed on all my blog posts but not all of them got the rich snippet next to their Google SERPs. Illustrated on the right is a single article on the first page of Google for an undisclosed keyword.

Now for all of you analytical SEO’s and Marketing Managers. You’re not going to take my word that this rich snippet increased my click-through rate; I bet you want to see the numbers… Here’s the breakdown:

Click Through Rate Increases

Blue line – Week of authorship markup

Orange line - 7 weeks before authorship markup

Week1
Week2
Week3
Week4
Week5
Week6

Week7

Before Rel=Author

Average of 39.14 unique visitors/week for 7 weeks.

After Rel=Author

63 unique visitors or an increase of 38 percent.

Author Stats in Google Webmaster Reports

Google webmaster tools has a two day lag in reporting compared to live time, so it’s not in sync with the rest of my report.
The stats mentioned above only represent the traffic increase of one keyword. While the two graphs below represent a variety of keywords and key phrases. These two graphs just give additional fortification that rich snippets increase click-through rates.

Implementing the rel=author tag on your website

After implementing the rel=author tag I can’t grantee your blog or website will get better search rankings. But I can grantee you will steal some clicks away from your competitors. In my case I am fortunate enough not to have any rich snippet competition, as illustration above. Either way I would say Google authorship markup is worth your time.

AJ Kohn, the author of Blind Five Year Old, wrote a great tutorial about implementing Google authorship markup here: How To Implement Google Authorship Markup

Rich Snippet Testing Tool

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

This is a tool by Google where you can test your authorship markup and other rich snippet markup as well. After verifying you coded everything right, there is no saying how long it will take Google to recognize your markup. Sometimes it’s instant, and others it takes weeks. You will just have to pray to the Google gods that everything works out.

Additional rel=author notes

Authorship markup was recognized on February 12, 2012.
The article was written several weeks before authorship markup was recognized. So there was a consistent, non-fluctuating, flow of traffic.

Increase ROI with Internal Linking Strategies

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Russell Jensen

I was inspired by Dennis Goedegebuure to do an internal linking experiment. He said: “Strong sites can rank based on internal linking! Move PageRank around until you have optimized it the way you want it.” He demonstrated how he used internal linking strategies on Ebay.com to direct traffic where he wanted it to go.

Conversion and Traffic

Any large eCommerce, lead generation or other business related website has several pages with high conversion rates and several more pages that don’t convert at all. For some reason or another your readers come to a select few pages on your site, read the content, and decide to purchase whatever it is you are selling. Unfortunately, those high ROI pages don’t always generate high volumes of traffic, like you would prefer.

There is a way to harness the power of those low ROI pages and redirect that power, via PageRank (explained below), into your higher converting pages using an internal linking strategy.

The two images below demonstrate two different pages I used for my internal linking experiment and the resulting traffic:

Internal Linking Increase ROI with Internal Linking Strategies After building some internal links to each page it took a few days before I saw traffic increases to the linked pages. Internal Linking 2 Increase ROI with Internal Linking Strategies

My Internal Linking Strategy:

Identify one of your highest converting pages. You may or may not be able to identify which pages convert better than other depending on your companies tracking capabilities. This process will be different for everyone.
Identify 5 pages with high search rankings and traffic but low conversion rates, blog posts fit this profile nicely. Usually a page with high rankings in the search engines also has a high PageRank.
Identify the keyword(s) that your high ROI page ranks for.
Link your 5 low ROI pages to your 1 highly converting page using the keyword(s) you identified in step 3 as the anchor text.

PageRank Explained

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.

–Google

Notes From: SLCSEM April 18, 2012 with Dennis G

Posted on April 19, 2012 by Russell Jensen

This post is my notes from SLCSEM. THESE ARE NOTES NOT AN ORGANIZED BLOG POST!

SLCSEM speaker is Dennis G originally from Holland and currently living in San Francisco. He spoke on SEO Theory to Practice.

Rob pulled a lot of his natural search ideas from placing his desk next to the paid search team and listening to them. That way you have a data driven campaign.

Working on big sites like ebay doesn’t require building links. Links are litterally thrown at them naturally.

Target keywords that. You rank on the second page for. 2nd page poaching.

Keywords don’t rank, pages rank.

Strong sites can rank based on internal linking! Move page rank around until you have optimized it the way you want it.

Adobe

Use data to set goals

Internal links can be very powerful. Don’t link out to non relevent pages or you could be in trouble!

Keep The CEO Informed, In-House SEO Tips

Posted on April 17, 2012 by Russell Jensen

If you are an In-House SEO for a small company your biggest job is not always doing SEO but keeping the CEO informed of what your doing. If the CEO doesn’t see value in SEO then your out of a job. I try to send periodic emails to keep him informed of where his website traffic is coming from.

Take Credit For You SEO

If you don’t take credit for spikes in traffic then the CEO will assume he is just an awesome business guy and that all of his traffic comes from “word-of-mouth”. When it comes to marketing “word-of-mouth” is a dirty word, don’t let it steal your glory as an SEO.

Here is an example of an email I recently sent out to the CEO of a company I do SEO for:

Mr. CEO,

This is the traffic pattern for your website just over 2 years. This graph represents ONLY the traffic that is not related to your brand. Meaning, users typed something that doesn’t have your brand name in the Google, Yahoo, or Bing search bar.

The big spike in 2012 is when we started our SEO content marketing campaign.

This graph (below) represents ONLY brand-related traffic, meaning they typed in keywords directly related to your product(s). As you can tell it’s a more gradual increase. They only way to make this graph jump up is to do a magazine ad, television spot, or other form of media, other than SEO. You can’t do a lot of SEO for your brand because we already rank #1 for the term. But we can do SEO for every other term.

Twitter And Title Tags For Linkbuilding

Posted on April 9, 2012 by Russell Jensen

Recently, while I was browsing inbound links in webmaster tools, I discovered a link from the Huffingtonpost.com to one of my websites. For any SEO this is a very delightful surprise! Before I got too excited I decided to see if it was just another comment link that I forgotten about.

Writing For Robots Builds Links

I found this list of links at the bottom of the Huffingtonpost.com article. I not only believe tweeting my article got this link, but also writing a proper title tag for the bots to find it.

I wanted the exact match keyword “workout reviews” to be in my title because it had a high search volume. You can see my tricky use of the pipe symbol to make this work for human readers and bots. I believe this list of links in this article were auto generated based off of what a bot found when it searched for “workout reviews” in Twitter.

I would be flattered if the author actually found me on Twitter and manually placed the link because my website is a great resource, but that is unlikely. Remember when writing title tags that you not only need to appease to the reader but you also have to be visible to search algorithms or bots.

How To Get Search Engine Rankings From The NYTimes

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Russell Jensen

A controversial article by Jacques Steinberg, a writer for NYTimes.com, may have caused short-term damage to the reputation of a large lead generation website, Classesandcareers.com; but yielded, unintentional, long-term revenue for their company. In an attempt to vilify them the NYTimes.com called out Classesandcareers.com for using President Barack Obama’s image in an online advertisement.

In Jacques Steinberg’s attempt to paint the website in a bad light, she/he also provided a valuable link to Classesandcareers.com. If you have a mind for online marketing, or are a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), you already know a link from NYTimes.com is valuable.

Link Juice

The NYTime.com is one of the most popular websites on the Internet; this is largely due to the numerous reputable links pointing towards it. In SEO terms we like to call this “link juice”.

There is so much link juice flowing into the NYtimes.com that webmasters around the globe have targeted it as a place to get their website mentioned and linked to. Inadvertently, Classesandcareers.com has successfully done this.

How Do Inbound Links Effect Marketing and Conversion Rates?

Google uses a scale of popularity called “Domain Authority” for every website or “domain” on the Internet, ranging from 0-100. A brand new site with no links and no content would have a domain authority of (0) while sites like Google.com and NYTimes.com would have a domain authority of 100.

This and many other factors play into where a page on your website will show up in Google’s search engine rankings.

Domain Authority

If a website like Classesandcareers.com has a domain authority of, lets say 68, then a link from NYTimes.com could bump them up to a domain authority of 69. Each point of domain authority is exponentially harder to gain the higher up the scale your website goes. So it would take many more links for a site to move from a domain authority of 68-69 as it would for as it would for a site to move from 67-68.

Converting Search Keywords Into Money

When the NYTimes.com linked to Classesandcareers.com they did so with the words “online” and “classes” (illustrated below) passing valuable link juice to Classesandcareers.com. People who search the key phrase “online classes” in the Google search box are very likely to sign up for a class with an online university.

In an attempt to paint Classesandcareers.com in a negative light NYTimes.com inadvertently helped them gain their number one spot in Google for the highly competitive key phrase “online classes”.

SEObodybuilder Online Marketing

Link Juicin, SEO Geekin and Google Ranking Addict