Optimizing SEO Resources - Whiteboard Friday

Hello everybody! My name is Aaron Wheeler and I do customer service here at SEOmoz; if you call us or email us, there's a 50% chance you'll end up talking to me. Oh well! Your loss is my gain. =) Anyways, one of my new tasks in the office will be video production so you may end up seeing my gob around the blog every once in a while. I'll be the main one posting these Whiteboard Fridays in the future as well as some of the other glorious cinema we create to vitalize your ears and eyes. It'll be fun! If you have any feedback or ideas, I'd love to hear them; you can reach me by email or twitter at my contact page: Aaron Wheeler. Nice to meet you!

This week, our very own Danny Dover discusses some important and scalable ways to optimize your SEO resources. We all know that pickins' can be slim when it comes to many companies' budgets for SEO, so why not make the best of what you've got? Danny has some ways that you can make the most bang for your (and your boss's) buck.

Hello, everybody.  My name is Danny Dover.  I do SEO here at SEOmoz.  Today we have something a little bit special.  We've bought all new equipment and new microphones.  We heard your comments in the blog posts that our sound quality was a little bit "meh."  So, we're trying to make it a lot less "meh."  So, please give us your continued feedback in the comments below.

For today's Whiteboard Friday, we're going to be talking about optimizing your SEO resources.  So, according to my research, this is the most meta SEO Whiteboard Friday we've ever done.  We have optimizing and then, of course, the O in SEO stands for optimization.  So, if there is some kind of time warp or something that goes on, just expect it.  It is kind of the things, part of the downside of this job is that sometimes you disrupt the universe.  Oh, well.

So, I've broken this down into three categories that I recommend.

1. Define Goals

The first one is define goals.  Just like self-help books, goals are very important, right?  That analogy didn't work per se.  Maybe I need to read more self-help books.  That would be a good idea.  Define goals, right.  I have broken that down into three subcategories.

Find your highest ROI customer.  This is a little bit counterintuitive but it makes a lot of sense.  I recommend doing this first.  If you have an established website and you're trying to optimize your SEO resources, you're already going to have some data on who your customers are.  Let's say you are a newspaper website.  I'm sorry, first of all.  Hard times for you, but good luck.  So, if you're a newspaper website, you've got to figure out if it is your politics readers who are going to make you more money or if it is going to be your sports reader that are going to make money.  Then based on this information, you get this from your analytics and some Excel stuff, figure out what you can do to target those customers specifically.  So, really maximize the money you are already getting.  So you have these resources in place.  Make sure that you are getting the most out of them.  That is kind of the key to optimization.

Identify your budget.  They say the creativity is limited by, or creativity is dictated by limitation.  The Google homepage is always the example I hear about this.  Although, if Google is watching, you're kind of getting overboard lately.  The one where the balls went flying everywhere annoyed the heck out of me.  Please don't do that again.  Identify what your budget is.  This is going to dictate everything that you are able to do.  Are you going to be able to hire on a whole team of content writers?  Are you going to be able to get SEO consultants onboard with you?  How are you going to do all of your web development stuff?  It's all dictated by budget.  So, know what that is going forward.  Get it on paper.  Make sure you know what this is.  Make as elaborate a budget as you can upfront so that you know what you are going to be able to do going forward.

Develop a Content Strategy. this is the one where I see mistakes made the most times, myself included.  I mess this up all the time.  Develop your content strategy.  The key to SEO -- and you have heard lots of talking heads like myself talk about this in SEO spaces  -- is that content is the key for SEO.  That's because when people go to search engines, be it Google, Bing, Yahoo, or whatever it may be, they're going there to find content, right?  That's the purpose.  They want some kind of question answered.  The key to SEO is content, building that thing that Google is going to want to index and provide in their search results.  You need to figure out how it is going to happen.  Who is going to be writing these contents?  If it is a blog post, is it going to be Jamie from marketing, is he going to be the one who is going to write it every week?  Is it going to be every week?  Is it going to be every day?  Do you have a signed contract from Jamie saying he's going to do this?  What happens if he is out on vacation or something?  How are you going to get the content produced every week?  Who's going to write it?  Who's going to edit it?  How is it going to get published?  You need to figure out these details early, as quickly as you can.  Get them ironed out on paper.

2. Calculate Impact vs. Effort

Calculate impact versus effort.  This one is kind of core to optimization.  Figure out what are your lowest hanging fruits, this is the first one.  I found the best way to do this is using, this is super self-promotional here, using OpenSiteExporer.org, which is a SEOmoz product.  It's free.  You don't even have to sign up to use the basic version.  But with OSE, with Open Site Explorer, you go in there, put in your URL or your competitor's URL if you are really clever.  Click on the tab that says top pages, and it will show you all of the top pages by links, so which page has the most links to it.  It will show you the status codes.  So, if it is like a 404 error, it means you have links going to that page, but you are not getting any SEO value from it.  The same thing with a 302 redirect.  If it is not a 301 redirect, it is not going to help you from an SEO perspective if it is a 302.  These are links that you already have.  You've already done the effort to make these work, but you aren't getting any benefit from them.  They're the low hanging fruit.  Again, that is OpenSiteExploreer.org.

Meet with stakeholders.  I would say it is about three months ago now, we did this at SEOmoz.  We brought in all the heads of the departments here and then a couple other important influencers for the company.  We put them all in one room.  We were like, "Okay, what are everyone's top priorities?"  What do they want to see happen in the year to come at SEOmoz?  We wrote our suggestions on sticky notes, put them up on the board.  It was not surprising that they varied by department.  I am in the marketing department here and mine happened to be marketing goals, whereas the developers wanted some more back end things to happen.  The bus dev people wanted more, like, "We should make more money. That'd be a great idea, right?" That's why they're the bus dev people.  Then we had operations who were doing other things like that as well.  We put all of these on a whiteboard, discussed them all, and then voted on them as a team.  Based on this, based on how much effort it is going to take from the marketing department, how much benefit are we going to get globally for the entire company as a whole?  We found that this exercise provided a lot of value for us.  It is actually the roadmap that we are using today.

3. Document Repeatable Processes

Document repeatable processes.  This is kind of self-explanatory.  In SEO, there are lots of tedious projects you have to do.  Let's say it is link building. You're going to go do the keyword research, figure out what anchor text you want to target, then you are going to go through and find out what the relative link sources are for that.  You're going to contact the right people and ask them if you have a template probably.  Or you're going to do some kind of, build some content so it can attract the links naturally.  That's the way I like to do it, just as a side note.

With these, whatever your process is, whatever you find works for you and your organization, document the processes.  Write down every single step.  I do this for two reasons.  The first one is so that I know I am not missing a step when I go through this.  A lot of times when I have done a process for the umpteenth million time, I skip a step just because I am human, I get bored of it, and I stop paying attention.  But if I have a checklist in front of me, I can go through and make sure I don't do it.  The other reason is for scalability.  If you can take this process and hand it off to more people to do the same process as you while you are doing it, then it is going to scale, right?  You're going to get more throughputs on this process.  I have found this to be extremely successful here and especially when I was doing SEO work with clients in the past.  If I push this off to other people who are working for the company who are doing similar things, we can maximize the amount of impact we get with minimal effort from the people involved.  So, it's fantastic.

That's all the time I've got today.  I look forward to hearing all your comments below.  Thank you.  I'll see you next week.  Bye.

If you have any tips or advice that you've learned along the way, we'd love to hear it in the comments below. Post your comment and be heard!

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Portrait of an SEO

The following is a guest post by Kpaul. :)

A long time ago, on an Internet far, far away (when I wrote for fun - and for free), I did a piece called Portrait of a Blogger. The year was 2002 and blogging was just beginning to really hit the mainstream hard. If you’re not familiar with the audience at Kuro5hin.org, they’re a snooty version of slashdot readers if you can imagine such a thing. (Mentioning both of these websites is outing my age, I think. I better not mention Compuserve.) The story was published on K5 and is still available today. I was told once that it drew a lot of traffic, although Mr. Foster never would share the exact numbers with me. (I imagine he’s laughing somewhere on his yacht these days.) It’s interesting to see how many of the links are still active in that article.

In any case, I thought about that story the other day when I was lamenting the fact that I didn’t start publishing my own content on my own sites earlier. (I spent the bubble years working for corporate media on the Death Star.) I let the idea of the piece gel in my mind for a while. I knew I couldn’t do another portrait of a blogger piece. I mean, I could, but I don’t think it would do as well as the previous one did. Also floating around in my mind was an okay from the esteemed Aaron Wall to submit a guest post for SEO Book. Eventually, these two ideas crossed paths, exchanged emails, and set-up a plan to combine the old Portrait of a Blogger piece with something relevant for Aaron’s audience.

So, without further ado, I give you a portrait of an SEO circa 2010

Favorite software: SENuke
Favorite website: webmasterworld.com
Favorite drink: Jolt (cause that’s the stereotype and it was in Hackers the movie)
Favorite viral video: Numa Numa
Favorite rapper: 50 cent

A friend of their friend’s sister’s little brother makes money online, so it’s totally going to be possible. The SEO newbie looks forward to a life of an hour of work every week for untold riches. While more and more people are trying to make money online, many of them just don’t have what it takes to work for themselves online. While chasing the magic button - also known as the golden tip, the super duper affiliate secret, or even the extra double tip for making money online - the SEO newbie tends to get distracted from the one obvious thing that equals sucess - i.e. work. Once most SEO newbies find out making money online takes work (more and more of it as time passes and competition increases), they drop out of the game and go back to whatever it was they were doing. Before that, they’re usually found on Webmaster World gabbing about the latest “Google Dance.”

Favorite software: WordPress MU
Favorite website: Any with an RSS Feed
Favorite drink: Watered Down McDonald’s Pop (mass produced sugar water that sorta resembles soda)
Favorite viral video: Lazy Sunday (something everyone copied)
Favorite rapper: Black Eyed Peas

If one page in the SERPs is good, and ten pages in the SERPs is great and so on and so forth, what about 1 billion pages? That would be best, right? But how to write a billion pages worth of content? Enter the auto-blog. This spray and pray method of SEO is still tried by many new to the industry, but it is becoming more and more difficult to keep a site like this going for more than a few months. That’s not to say that it doesn’t exist, but there are few low level auto-bloggers who don’t end up getting burned. And yet auto-bloggers make up a large slice of the SEO landscape. This will undoubtedly change in the years ahead.

The mainstream media also plays this game :D

Favorite software: Yahoo! Site Explorer or any Online Link Tool
Favorite website: Any that will buy or sell a link
Favorite drink: Absynth (not legal anymore)
Favorite viral video: Star Wars Kid
Favorite rapper: Tupac

These people live and dream about links. From the value of links to anchor text to placement to link wheels, their world revolves around the power of the link. Since link selling and buying has gone into a shady black market type atmosphere over the last few years, some of these characters can be shady. A common technique is to peddle “text advertisements” for a low monthly rate to unknowing webmasters. While there are some websites and email accounts still operating in the open, there are also black hat link merchants in some very bad neighborhoods. While I probably shouldn’t mention it, there are some who see short term success using these methods. The thing is, online you want to play the long game. And for that, buying and selling links is out.

Favorite software: The autoresponder
Favorite website: forums.digitalpoint.com
Favorite drink: Acai Juice
Favorite viral video: That annoying frog techno thing!
Favorite rapper: Vanilla Ice

The schemes and scams are plentiful in the world of the phony guru. Yes, you too can make money by showing others how to make money. A lot of these so called gurus don’t even make money on the Internet other than peddling their ebooks and membership sites. The problem with these people is that after a person is burned by so many, they run the danger of not spending ANY money online. This can be just as bad as wasting money on worthless, phony gurus. For example, an SEO Book membership is a wise investment that will pay off in the long run. Don’t be afraid to invest money wisely after being burned by phony SEO gurus.

Favorite software: The latest WSO!
Favorite website: warriorforum.com
Favorite drink: Budweiser (or something domestic and bland)
Favorite viral video: Anything their neighbor liked
Favorite rapper: Eminem

Usually found huddling around the phony gurus (which grow in numbers every month it seems as more and more people try to monetize the web), tail chasers are those people who try to copy current successful marketing methods online. If you study the whole rebill period of Internet marketing, there were a few people who started off strong (and somewhat legit), but as more and more people got into the game, the boundaries were pushed more and more. The highlight for me, I think, was seeing an elderly lady talking on a YouTube video about posting links to Google to make money. While some tail chasers may be able to make small (or even moderately large) amounts of money in a short time, they lack the skills (and vision) to replicate the success on a continual basis.

We interrupt this guest blog post for a shameless plug. On one of my blogs, I’ve started using D&D character alignments instead of ‘colored hats’ to tag various methods for SEO and marketing online. Okay, it’s not really unique and I doubt it catches on, but it gives more opportunities to categorize Internet marketers. We now return to our regularly scheduled guest blog post. Thanks, Aaron!

Favorite software: Vanilla Internet Explorer
Favorite website: mattcutts.com/blog/
Favorite drink: Water (good for you)
Favorite viral video: Anything LOL cats
Favorite rapper: DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince

When not wearing their “I Heart Matt Cutts” t-shirt or coming up with ways to make their website more unique and useful for visitors, these individuals like to volunteer at local homeless shelters and nursing homes. But seriously, these people make an effort to do things above board online. Many are still able to make a good living while doing this. Many don’t have the patience for white hat SEO, which is a shame, because it’s one of the better long term methods of success online. Think of your visitor after they get to your site more than trying to trick Google into ranking you high in the SERPs and you’re on your way to becoming a high level white hat SEO, which comes with many special abilities and powers.

Favorite software: xRumer
Favorite website: Any that will take a link - willingly or not
Favorite drink: Whiskey (wine is fine but liquor is quicker)
Favorite viral video: Anything from 4chan
Favorite rapper: NWA

There are some who fall between the tail chasers and the SEO grandmasters (of all persuasions) who have the ability to recognize an opportunity and jump on it, making a bit of money along the way. The problem is that most methods used with Black Hat SEO are short term. They may have a huge payout, but the model is not sustainable unless you can stay somewhat ahead of the crowd when it comes to new things to exploit online. While some are fine with this, most at this level have the ability to come up with unique ideas on their own. When you consider that there’s about the same amount of work involved and the non-black hat techniques last longer, it makes sense to try to get beyond this stage in your SEO evolution.

Favorite software: A little of this and a little of that
Favorite website: wickedfire.com
Favorite drink: Coffee (some mornings with a dash of rum)
Favorite viral video: Boom Goes the Dynamite
Favorite rapper: Drake

If you mix black and white, you get grey, of course. The grey hat SEO uses both white and black hat techniques. While they’re more open than those who wear a black hat most times, they are generally more cautious than people into white hat SEO. For the most part the mix of both (good and bad) vary at any one time with grey hat SEO. Over the years, this label has morphed somewhat into a blue hat SEO, with a few key differences. Grey hat SEO, to me, means more about techniques while blue hat SEO concentrates on a mixing of web properties with different values.

Favorite software: A little of this and a little of that
Favorite website: wickedfire.com
Favorite drink: Coffee (some mornings with a dash of rum)
Favorite viral video: Charlie the Unicorn
Favorite rapper: Ice Cube

I’m pretty sure I know who came up with this phrase, although I’m not exactly sure of their definition of the term. To me, it follows the ‘SEO Empire’ line of thinking that was created by Eli at Blue Hat SEO. So, it would be a mix of pure white and somewhat grey (or downright black) websites in a network online. So, garbage sites at the bottom of the pyramid point up toward the money sites at the top of the pyramid. How this differs from straight grey hat SEO, I’m not sure, but it’s used by quite a few people these days. For the most part, Blue Hat SEO peoeple are well versed in the way the Internet works. And if they don’t have skills, they have someone in their network who does. There are quite a few high level blue hat SEOs currently operating online.

Favorite software: Google Docs
Favorite website: ezinearticles.com
Favorite drink: Green Tea (proven weight loss, act now!)
Favorite viral video: None (text based viral only)
Favorite rapper: Mos Def (very lyrical)

When they’re not actually banging out articles for their own or other sites, they’re thinking up ideas and topics for their next round of articles. They know the value of content online. This group is split like most others into various levels of quality ranging from garbage to modern literature and everything in between. You will notice if you look closely that the more successful article marketers have higher quality content. This is no coincidence. Of course, good content is only one small piece of the puzzle, but you may want to consider outsourcing your content needs to an article marketer.

Favorite software: Anything related to email
Favorite website: digg.com
Favorite drink: Tang (it’s orange, it’s different)
Favorite viral video: lonelygirl15
Favorite rapper: Kanye West (marketing magic man - good or bad)

When it comes to linkbait and causing ripples in the blogosphere, there’s nothing like the skills of a high level viral ninja. Part Charlie the Unicorn, part Star Wars Kid, and with a dash or two of LOL cats and one very, very, extremely tiny bit of 4chan, the viral ninja can mix media to send a message, get a laugh, or compel people to tell their friends about the content. As more and more people come online and try to be viral, it’s becoming more and more difficult to be unique and stand out from the millions of other people online who are vying for attention. The viral ninja understands this and is already working on three or four projects that will drown the numbers for the “Please don’t taze me” video.

Favorite software: LAMP
Favorite website: SEOBook.com
Favorite drink: Vitamin Water (expensive, but worth it)
Favorite viral video: Dancing baby (old school...)
Favorite rapper: Grandmaster Flash

You don’t hear from these people too much on the forums or at conferences. They don’t typically have a very active blog. They do, however, spend their time making money online - most times quite a bit of it. They apply their SEO knowledge quietly in the background, slowly building their empire piece by piece. They understand marketing and business principles and employ them. These people learned early on that wasting time online - especially at forums chasing the magic button - is not a good thing. They learned how to buckle down and apply the knowledge that everyone who’s anyone has. They know it’s all about applying the information rather than just knowing about it. While you don’t hear much from these people publicly, when they do talk quite a few people tend to listen.

Favorite software: Firefox browser + extensions
Favorite website: Any that they own or are involved with
Favorite drink: Orange Pineapple Juice (sweet, sour, but good for you)
Favorite viral video: All Your Base Are Belong To Us (cause they do)
Favorite rapper: Jay-Z (making piles of money)

What are the lyrics from Ghetto Boys about real gangsters not talking much? Go Google it. (Sorry, Matt, it’s a verb now. You know there are secret Google parties celebrating the fact. Smile.) But yeah, real gurus aren’t all talk and no action. Real gurus of the industry don’t pitch anything and everything just to make a buck. The real gurus are few and far between, but they do exist. If you run into one, be nice to them. Unlike the SEO grandmasters, they’re more public and don’t mind interacting with the public. That said, they tend to value their time, so don’t waste it. This path has the most opportunities for people who are into SEO. (In gaming terms, it has the highest level cap.) It’s a long road, and it’s not a quest that can be undertaken alone, but if you’re serious about SEO, this is the route you want to take.

If you’ve been around for any length of time, you know that the Internet is still constantly changing. Some of the changes are for the better and some aren’t as good, but they all are something that everyone who works online has to deal with. The SEO of last week - or even today - isn’t the same SEO that is going to be in operation over the next decade. Personally, I see the word organic being more important.

By organic SEO, I mean not mass produced, not a trick, not a scam, not a scheme, but an actual relationship between publishers and website visitors. The sites that are able to build communities around themselves are going to be the ones that survive, I think. And there is no method of SEO known to man that can create a community - a real one - out of thin air. That said, SEO can be useful to help draw people to a website that is worthy of a community forming around it.

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The above was a guest post from K. Paul Mallasch, who runs kpaul media, which publishes local news communities like Anderson Free Press as well as many niche websites. You can contact him at kpaul.mallasch@gmail.com

A disclaimer from Aaron: I thought it was fun, but I loath rap music (especially that from asshats like Kanye West), and I realize that being a publisher in the SEO space is way more profitable than being labeled as an SEO guru. I also didn't put the last picture in because he used me...and I felt that would have been a wee bit egotistical for me to publish a guest post highlighting me like that. ;)

But the post is still a lot of fun & I am sure you can associate with at least 1 or more of the above profiles. If not then you haven't been in the SEO space very long yet! ;)

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So You Call Yourself an Analyst? Part 1: Asking the Right Questions

Today I am going to talk about something that plagues companies and consultants everywhere--half baked analysis. It's something we've all done at some point, and something a lot of us still do on a regular basis. It's unfortunate because as online marketers we all understand the power of good data mining, but time and time again we revert to generic inquiry, at best, and default report templates.

Disclaimer: Origionally I attempted to write about the five steps I follow for solid data analysis in one post, but as I approached my 6th page of content, I realized it may be best to break up into a series.

Alas, this will be the first of three posts, tackling a five-step process toward good data analysis. The three topics are:

Asking the Right QuestionsIdentifying What is Going WrongTurning Data Into Action

Yup that's right...cancel that afternoon meeting because you my friend are going to be stoked about data analysis in 3...2..1...

Rethinking the Questions

A few weeks ago at our SEOmoz PRO Seminar I spoke on "Analyzing What Matters & Ignoring the Rest" and I challenged the attendees to rethink the questions that guide their data research. Too often we get caught up in asking questions that simply put-- don't really matter. Let me explain. It will always be important to know things like "How much has traffic increased" and "What referrers are performing better this month," but this sort of inquiry does not qualify as marketing analysis.

Sure it's valuable to report that to your clients or boss, but as an analyst you are tasked with much more. You are tasked with finding things others can't. You are expected to dive into the data head first and find issues before they become huge problems. You are also responsible for finding opportunities a.k.a. the "game changer" for your company...that is your job. If you don't like the way that sounds, please stop calling yourself an analyst. You are stressing me out.

So what questions should you be asking? Bigger ones to start.

I know they sound uber-top level, but don't roll your eyes just yet. I challenge each of you to write these out and really think about the answers. I think you'll be surprised with what you come (or can't come) up with.  I'm going to apply this to SEOmoz as an example.

An outsider would look at our site and say we are -

Trying to sell PRO membershipsAn increase or decrease in completed goals would show us if we are being successfulLosing traffic to our sign-up page, and a lower traffic count would be detrimental to our success

Well that is great, but honestly SEOmoz can't succeed solely on increasing PRO memberships. The truth is, there is a lot more to it than that. We have a recognized brand with expectations on it, and a community of over 200,000 people that come to us for the latest SEO information on the web. We can't afford to lose ground on either of those two. These are defining qualities of SEOmoz, and strong advantages over our competitors. So my three questions would leave me more complex answers, something like this:

Increase organic traffic on "Learn SEO" type queries, increase branded term searches, increase YOUmoz member engagement, and increase signupsMore referrals from links to our resources, more traffic from people researching SEO, more YOUmoz submissions, more comments, improved engagement metrics on site, higher sign up attempts, higher signup completions, etc.Decline in branded term searches, decline in organic traffic to resource pages, decline in time on site for YOUmoz members, etc.

So now what? You are left with a handful of metrics to investigate. Those metrics should be the base of your analysis efforts. I urge all of you to revisit the reasons why you analyze what you analyze, you'll be surprised to learn that you don't really have a good reason most of the time. After you have your new questions nailed down and you know what metrics you want to analyze,  it's time to jump in the data.

Start Macro and Go Micro

This is when I highly suggest you fill your coffee cup, or grab another Red Bull. I also support locking your office door, or putting up a "Do Not Disturb, I am Data Mining You Silly Non-Analyst" sign up on your cubicle. Okay anyway...so the main roadmap to solid analysis includes five steps and they are:

*Please note that Analyze, Value, and Action will be covered in upcoming posts in this series.

What Do We Mean by Macro Analysis?

Macro analysis means you have a solid understanding of the different sections of your site, the different user types that navigate it, and the top-level metrics. You should know these like the back of your hand. In addition to knowing these actual numbers you should know their rate of change (how often does that data point change), the depth of change (how extreme are those changes--big jumps? small steps?), and the way they interact (is there a consistent relationship between two metrics--one goes up/down, the other will too). If this sounds like a lot to continuously track, you are right. Good analysis is a lot of work. Thankfully SEOmoz pays me in cupcakes, and Champagne Wednesdays, I highly suggest negotiating for these perks ;)

At SEOmoz we track our top sections by week, so we can easily identify shifts in the data, and it looks something like this:

(A portion of our weekly analysis for full site stats)

You can see we aren't just looking at our homepage, we are looking at our subdomains, our highest trafficked sections. We also are going beyond visitors, we are pulling top-level stats like pages/visit, time on site, bounce rates, etc. This graph goes around to the entire company once a week. This macro level view helps all of us understand the momentum of our site's growth. It helps us easily isolate problem areas so we can address them before they grow into huge "Oh sh*t" moments. Trust me when I say, if you aren't tracking your data at this macro level, you should start today.

What Do We Mean by Micro Analysis?
This part of the puzzle is the one that most people skip over. Micro analysis means you don't just have a sense how your blog's traffic is doing you know how many comments you get on it, how long they spend on it, how deep they go into your site after reading a post, and how many of your blog visitors end up converting for you. In short, micro analysis means you look at all those secondary data points that you can actually manipulate.

While it's great to go into work on a Monday and say I want to increase traffic to my blog by 20%, it is a big feat to accomplish. Not only will it take a lot of time conceptualizing, writing and sharing that content, it will also, most likely, be less lucrative than if you took the existing traffic and increased its conversion rate by 5%. That sort of move is done by honing in on data at a micro analysis level.

Specifically this is where things like event tracking in Google Analytics and deeper dives into your preferred analytics package come in handy. Everyone has their own approach for micro analysis, but I think a good place to start is see where successful events (downloads, subscriptions, sign-ups, conversions, etc.) are taking place and see if you can come up with common demoninators. If you see that successful pages all have one or more thing in common, you can start testing these on other sections to increase conversions across your whole site. Here is an example of what we pull for SEOmoz:

(A portion of our micro tool usage analysis report)

We can see which tools are performing the best, and analyze those pages to see if we can isolate out page tweaks to roll out across all tool pages. It seems simple, but way too often analysts look into analytics to see how they are doing, and fail to put in the time required to uncover what they could be doing for increased success. You should know, for every single section and user type on your site, what makes it "successful." You need to be tracking these "successes" as closely as you would your visitor count.

Well this post got a little long, but I really wanted to give you guys some real examples on how I approach data analysis both at the macro and micro level. Hopefully, you can take some of this and apply it right away. I know we all have our own unique approach to analysis, and I'd love to hear yours in the comments below!

Next post I will be talking about the "analyze" step of a solid analysis strategy. That post will hone in on quick ways to figure out what is going wrong. I will talk about some GA features that you can use to make your analysis more effective and less time consuming. So stay tuned!

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3 Creative Ways To Drive More Traffic To Old Blog Posts

In many ways it makes as much sense to promote existing content on your blog as it does to create new content. Every site needs its share of new content to be successful, but it’s important to recognize many opportunities available to get more visitors to old content.

Here are some of my favorites:

Optimization For Relevant Keywords Already Driving Traffic.

Look at a page-by-page breakdown of which keywords are bringing traffic to your site. With those keywords, you can determine where you already rank in the search results, and what the overall keyword volumes are for the terms. You can then improve the optimization of your content for these keywords by (1) improving on-page optimization with exact match usage of the keywords in the content and/or page title, (2) use internal links on your site to point to the page with the corresponding anchor text links for the keywords, (3) consider building backlinks to the page if search volumes or relevancy justify it.

Freshen Up Content By Removing Aging Signs

When content is old, it shows. But old doesn’t necessarily mean outdated. You can prepare old content for new waves of popularity by modifying or removing many of the post attributes that say “old.” Doing so is likely to increase exposure and lifespan.

Post dates: Many great posts I run across have publication dates removed both from the post as well as the URL. This may seem odd to a visitor at first glance, but this gives the content a greater opportunity to shine without the “recency bias.”Comments/Trackbacks: You may consider removing old comments and trackbacks completely if they allude to the age of the post.Dated references: (remove and update): You may have dated your content without realizing it just by what you’ve written. If it’s summer and you refer to the snow; or if you refer to a recent holiday or other event that dates the post, you may consider removing those references. You should also consider updating some references to refer to more current events.Make Your Old Post Titles More Boring (Functional))

I always face the dilemma of creativity vs. functionality when I write post titles. Somehow, I often end up more on the creative side. This usually means that the post ends up attracting readers that never would have come to the site otherwise. The dark side of this is that many of these posts will never be found organically.

Consider changing old post titles to include terms or phrases that people might logically search. Having looked at a lot of client blog analytics, I can tell you that the posts most frequently found by organic search have instructional titles because people are often searching for instructions, how-to’s, etc.

For example, a Search Engine Journal post titled “When Do You Pull The Plug On A Keyword?” is a great, creative title, but the title isn’t likely to correspond to what someone actually searches for. After an initial “newness” phase, I might consider changing the title to something boring, but more search-functional. After some quick keyword research, you might change the title to “How To Identify The Wrong SEO Keywords (So You Can Choose The Right Ones).” We’re not shooting for literary eloquence here. After all, isn’t it better to get your content read than let it go unfound?

But I Love My Old Content

Don’t be deterred by the prospect of changing things, even drastically, on old content. If you love your old content, you’ll stop treating it like scripture and start treating it like the business tool it was meant to be.

Scott Cowley is an SEO Manager at SEO.com, a search engine marketing company. He also writes about 21st century marketing at Scottergories.com.

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