| LED Digest 2572: Bounce Rates & Rankings |
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| Written by Administrator | |
| Thursday, 17 January 2008 | |
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The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom www.WillMaster.com/Master : the LED's Key Sponsor Master Series Software - Get Connected with Your WebSite www.SEOToolSet.com/training/ : the LED's Premier Sponsor Bruce Clay's Search Engine Optimization Training & Certification ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. January 18, 2007 Issue no. 2572 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ===== NEW ======================= --== Social Media Crash Course ==-- ~ Nancy Cardinali "I'll admit my eyes glaze over when I try to figure out a social site." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== 2008 Marketing Predictions ==-- ~ Dirk Johnson "The newness and overall intrigue of SEO has worn off for most paying clients..." --== Bounce Rates as Ranking Factors ==-- ~ Michael Linehan "For anyone asking a question, I have a request..." ~ Nathan Holley "I think you're on to something here Bill." --== The Paid Links Scam ==-- ~ Big Bill "...what does publishing [Pagerank] give [Google] that's of so much value...?" ~ Al Toman "Google is about...ADD CENTS into their bank account." ========= NEW ===================================== From: Nancy Cardinali Subject: Social Media Crash Course? Hi All, We are hearing tons about social bookmarking and how wonderful it is; how it will help with the almighty SEO. This is an excerpt from EntireWeb Newsletter Issue # 406: ---------------- "Use social bookmarks to generate inbound links. By bookmarking your website or webpage on popular social bookmarking sites, such as Reddit, Digg, or Del.icio.us, web browsers are pointed to your website and valuable links are created. This strategy is essential for making users aware of your content and generating interest. Many sites will provide links to valuable content." Source: http://www.entireweb.com/newsletter/archive/2008/ISSUE406.html ---------------- Can anyone explain how to SIMPLY bookmark a website on, say, Delicious? How many hoops must one jump through? I'll admit my eyes glaze over when I try to figure out a social site. I keep wondering, "Why do people do this?" I just don't get it. However, if it will help expose my clients web sites, I'll learn it. Is there a crash course for this social bookmarking thing? Any help appreciated! Nancy Cardinali www.CardinaliDesigns.com ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Dirk Johnson Subject: Predictions Hi Adam, I don't know about predictions, but I do try to watch trends here. We do a lot of small business work, especially with real estate agents and brokers, and e-commerce site owners. I get to talk to a lot of prospective clients. Here's what I currently see as trends, based on those conversations: 1) The recession atmosphere will not support overpriced and obfuscated SEO services much longer, at least among the tens of thousands of small-to-medium sized businesses that have been willing to pay whatever it took to hire a name-brand SEO firm in the past. As business owners get wise to the real costs and work tasks associated with basic SEO services, they are pulling it in-house, or shopping for specialists at certain tasks that charge rates that are commensurate with the work performed. This development should actually add to the workload of the people in this industry who have always charged honest rates for honest output. But it will mean lean days ahead for some. Those will be the higher-profile outfits who do not have enough deep-pocket, cost-no-object clients to sustain the overhead that is required for them to maintain that high profile. A lot of SEO clients have been paying most of their money for the "brick and mortar" and the marketing efforts and of their SEO firms, and not really for delivered SEO services. That works in a boomtown atmosphere, but a recessionary environment will not sustain that kind of disconnect. The newness and overall intrigue of SEO has worn off for most paying clients, and this work is becoming a commodity. Contrary to popular belief or posturing on the part of some in this business, this industry is not the equivalent of the legal, medical or accounting industry. Not even close. Anyone with a computer can call themselves an SEO consultant, and work from home. The truly good ones can do it as good or better than anyone else, even for large clients. 2) At least in the real estate SEO market, we are finally starting to see the acknowledgement that good rankings are a worthwhile goal, and not an afterthought. The recession is already full blown in real estate, and the agents with well-ranking sites seem to be weathering the storm much better than the ones relying on traditional marketing methods. Word gets around, eventually. The boom years clouded this condition at the street level. 3) We are seeing business owners reject a lot of the more arcane and "bleeding edge" concepts that used to trip all the triggers in SEO circles, in favor of just covering the basics. I think that there is a "chasing new SEO theories" hangover coming on. People are no longer fascinated with the latest guru pronouncements. The wolves have cried wolf too many times. This mostly has to do with link development, where a lot of high-end strategies are also very high cost, often benefiting the SEO firm more than the client. Site owners are rejecting the widely-held belief among the gurus that reciprocation (done properly) does not work. They simply look to their competitors or colleague sites, which often rank well using very basic link building techniques. Again, in a recession, people will do what works best, for the least cost, first. This is not a condemnation of social networking and viral marketing concepts. Those can be quite powerful, when properly executed. Finding an executioner worth the cost is the real challenge, and that is not in the budget of most small business owners. SEO is an industry that has had a lot of Wild West aspects to it. Bombast, self-promotion and schmoozing made a lot reputations, some warranted and many wholly unwarranted. It made a lot of people wealthy. The people who have been footing the bill are now realizing that what works is not all that complicated or mysterious. Going forward, SEO work will be a lot more mundane. Frankly, I welcome that development. Best regards, Dirk Johnson DomainDrivers LLC www.domaindrivers.com ========= Begin Sponsor Message ========= 50 Things You Can Do With Master Form V4 Get the visual ebook. Discover why people say Master Form V4 is the best form-handler on the 'net! Click to download: http://flowto.us/LED/download.html ========== End Sponsor Message ========== -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Michael Linehan Subject: Bounce rates > How does one go about reducing bounce rate > etc.? - Bill Lund, LED Digest 2571 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1986/190/ For anyone asking a question, I have a request, if the question is about a particular site... One type of question is at the principle level. E.g. "Is it a good idea to buy links?" Reference to any particular website or page is not needed to comment on that. But if one is asking about bounce rate, or how to form a headline, or effective navigation, or use of color, an answer that is much more focussed and useful to you can be given, if you show us the page/ website that the question is about. I may be able to make some comments about reducing bounce rate. But I don't want to answer your question Bill, when my comments may be completely irrelevant to your situation. A waste of my time to write it. A waste of your time to read it. Thanks. Michael Linehan, Marketing Alchemy www.marketing-alchemy.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Nathan Holley Subject: Bounce rates The subject of bounce rates and anything to do with analytics interests me, thanks for bringing this up. There's much good information to find about this topic from some of the blogs available, and books. So if you like to read blogs (or like me love to read blogs) and books you'll be in good shape. Here's a good one to start with, expand from it: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/ Speaking on ranking criteria, Bill Lund writes -- > I would use criteria such as the bounce > rate, average time spent on the site, > number of pages visited, number of return > visits, etc. While Google can't take their analytics data from Google Analytics and apply it to ranking criteria, they certainly factor in some of these metrics in ranking sites. For instance bounce rates. Clicks in natural SERPs that result in a quick visit back are calculated and can impact rankings negatively, no doubt about it. (The following is conjecture - empirical conjecture - but conjecture all the same. Consider that I haven't done any tests on this while reading.) I've had a page rank extremely high for a company's brand name. The page wasn't optimized for the phrase, but has it sprinkled throughout the page copy. I've never worked on building links into the page, but they have come naturally (and not many). Anyway, I've noticed favorable rankings with excellent traffic from people targeting this company name in searches. Rankings have continually improved with no SEO efforts. The company has been frantically working on reputation management to push my page down the results, to no avail. It's still there high in the SERPs and I'm sure a big factor is the excellent time on site and very low bounce rate it enjoys. I think you're on to something here Bill. Nathan Holley -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Big Bill Subject: Paid links > Most of Google's "problems" with paid links > and link gaming would evaporate if they > simply stopped publishing that hideous > PageRank value. - Dirk Johnson, 2572 Yup, agree absolutely and I've said so myself on occasion. Difficult to think they can't agree also, so; what does publishing it give them that's of so much value that despite those problems they continue to do it? They must have their reasons, so; if everyone stopped visibly chasing that little green rainbow, what even worse problems would Google have then? BB ========= Begin Sponsor Message ========= One Way Links to your Site, by the Hundreds? Yes! Get Traffic and Link Popularity to Your Site from Legitimate, General Interest Web Directories. DomainDrivers Makes It Hassle-Free. Details Here: http://www.domaindrivers.com/directory-submissions.html ========== End Sponsor Message ========== -------- new post - same topic -------- From: al toman Subject: Paid links I might as well come out and get right to the point. Shari Thurow LED Digest #2571. Kudos. This is the Shari Thurow that I'm used to reading since 2005. It's a 132% post. Remember, Google is a "public" business, "to make money with the intent to profit" (IRS). What and where in that statement do you see anything about "search engines"? Google is about solar panels, widgets and whackettes of all kinds, Earth and maps, and ADD CENTS into their bank account. And, we ALL fell for it to one degree or another. (That's exactly what whackettes do.) Scholars had developed the world's most valued search engine decades prior to my birth non the less the birth of Google. It's called the library. Imagine, Google indexes ALL content without ranking. Indexing meaning, this web site belongs in 300 section, this web site belongs in the 900 section, and so on. Then, marketers would have spent all their time marketing and not SEOing. Off topic, the library has been W2.0 eons before "W2.0" appeared on the billboard. The library is multi-media. Imagine that! Off topic, who but scholars (physicists) were the original "Internet" participants? I've taken plenty of courses in technical writing including studying German and there are plenty of courses in social writing. The W3C standards is similar to these courses. This is how you compose a sentence. This is the definition of words. This is how you write a paragraph. The problem with Google creating a scholarly search engine is, is that it would, by natural selection, limit the number of participants. Not all 6-7 billion of us on Earth at any one given time, kin rite in reed sen tances. Therefore, it is to Google's benefit as a business model to NOT concentrate on search (at the moment) and concentrate on getting as many of the 6-7 billion of us to participate. The more participants, the more "Cha-Ching" (for Google). Google's board meeting does NOT discuss PR, keywords, search, SEO. Google's board meeting discusses, "this number is supposed to be bigger then that number. Now, how can we make it way more bigger? Let's build a whackette!" That's ALL Google is about. If you've a business web site, then, it should be considered as a tool, of sorts, a small part of your business. As business people, we'd save a heck of a lot of time and money not screwing with SEO, PR, keywords, linking, and whatever else you're screwing with. Imagine, you'd be spending your time and money on marketing and promoting your business, not your web site. You too, then, would be discussing more of what Google discusses in their board meetings. Then I wake up from my scholarly dream. 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