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Writers and editors have to adopt a very different mindset when they set out to write headlines and titles that will attract search engine visits rather than catch the eye of a passerby at the newsstand or the book store. While clever headlines might sell newspapers, they won’t do much to attract the search engine user. That’s because search engines are very good at giving the user results that are related to their specific search query. A user interested in finding a job at Goldman Sachs is likely to type into a search box “Goldman Sachs jobs” or “Careers at Goldman Sachs.”
A professional writer or editor, on the other hand, has been trained to think of a clever, non cliched turn of phrase rather than the ultra prosaic “Jobs at Goldman Sach.” He or she might title an article about the rebound at Goldman Sachs like “Goldman Sachs Gold Rush is Back!” or something much more clever. The problem is is that the more clever the headline or title, the less likely it is that anyone might be searching on that specific phrase. After all, it’s clever because it’s unique, not because it’s obvious.
The search engines give great weight to the “title tag” when trying to figure out what the content of the page is about. The title tag is the content in the html source that appears between the <title>this is the title</title> in the <head> section at the top of the page. Although the title tag is invisible to users on the page, it appears in the blue horizontal row at the top of the browser. A good compromise for clever writers and editors is provide a <title> that matches what a user interested in the subject might type in a search engine. He or she can save that very clever turn of phrase for the title that actually appears on the page itself, usually in the form of a <h1> tag.
My advice to writers and editors who want to have their copy read by large numbers of internet users and who want to help their companies sell more advertising, is work closely with your webmaster or search marketing staff to find out what keywords or phrases that have been identified as important to building traffic to the site. Often, there will a relatively small list of, perhaps 50 or fewer words and phrases, that are highly relevant to the website but which are most frequently entered into search engines. These are the works and phrases that you want to see included in the title tags and even the <h> tags as well.
Google announced an API for Google Analytics on April 21, 2009. An API or “applications programming interface” is important because it opens a window between the consumer of analytics data and the data itself, which resides Google servers. Agencies like Resolute Digital are continually involved in creating and sharing reports with their clients on the progress of digital marketing campaigns. With the API, it’s now possible to automate much of that reporting, to build custom reports, to make information available in near real time, and to share data with clients in a transparent fashion.
It also opens the possibility for a variety of widgets and mobile apps and, in fact, there are several Google Analytics applications now offered on the iPhone so that Google Analytics users can stay in touch with their websites while away from their computers. While it might seem like data overload to need to stay in monitor website data that closely, it’s not unusual for search marketing campaigns to to testing new bid levels and keywords. It’s often hard to predict how quickly budgets might be consumed and using budget caps is a rather crude way to manage the campaign. You don’t want to be away from your computer when a new campaign kicks in and the spend rises to $5,000 per hour.
The API itself is extremely easy to use for anyone with a programming background. There is a ample documentation and Google provides sample code to jump start the process. And naming conventions are quite intuitive. To read more about the API itself, check out Google Analytics Documentation.
Resolute Digital has created a benchmark report that compares traffic and traffic sources for four different time periods: a “baseline” period which serves as a benchmark, “last month,” “month to date”, and “last 7 days.” The main traffic sources that we follow are: organic (unpaid search engines), paid search engines, referral urls, direct, and email. For our paid search clients, we typically report cost per visit (as opposed to cost per click), cost per page view, and cost per action (goal). “Green” change numbers report progress against the benchmark while “red” number show movement in a negative direction. Resolute Digital’s modest web traffic is reported here: Resolute Digital Reporting. In order to view the report, login with the username “rd” and password “rd”.
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Webmasters need to understand, on a daily basis if their site’s content changes frequently, how the search engines view their site. Google provides this feedback mechanism through its Webmaster Tools, a free service that is quick and easy to set up. In order to get data on the website, Google requires the webmaster to validate their rights to see statistics on the site by demonstrating their ability to get a file or a meta content item added to the root directory or home page of the site, respectively. If you have access to the servers (or can get your developer to respond quickly), this can be done in a few minutes.
Google Webmaster Tools should be checked daily, especially if there are many changes occurring on the site. The single most important stat is crawl stats which is found under the “Diagnostics” heading. This is, in essence, your SEO heart rate. The first two indicators (“pages crawled per day” and “kilobytes downloaded per day” indicate the attention Googlebot is paying to the site. In this case of both of these indicators, more is better; less is worse. In the case of the third indicator, “Time spent download a page,” less is more. Googlebot considers the time that it takes when assessing the site’s overall quality (in the case of AdWords, a slow loading page will actually reduce the quality score and increase the cost of buying traffic). We like to see pages in the 100-300 milliseconds range. There are a number of causes of slow loading pages, but typically is a fault of poor software design or lack of bandwidth to the servers.
You can check the download time of your pages as well as the page elements contributing to the download times by adding the “Firebug” add-on to your web browser.
Slow loading pages threatens Googlebot’s willingness to visit the site and index pages.
Once crawl stats has been examined and the developers have been notified if there is a problem, it’s important to look at “crawl errors” which will point out issues that Googlebot might be having indexing the site. Stats are reported for web search, Web Mobile CHTML, and Mobile WML/XHTML. We are primarily focused on web search since that is where most of the traffic volume is. We see the following kinds of errors:
Possible errors include:
* Not found
* URLs not followed
* URLs restricted by robots.txt
* URLs timed out
* HTTP errors
* URL unreachable
Google describes the source of each of these problems as follows:
Not found
Google encountered an error when attempting to view the URL. See RFC 2616 for more information about HTTP error codes. Google encountered an HTTP error when attempting to view the URL. In general:
* Ensure that the file exists at the specified location.
* If we attempted to crawl the URL from your Sitemap, make sure that your Sitemap lists the URL correctly.
* If we attempted to crawl the URL from a link on your site, make sure that the link is correct.
* If another site lists a broken link to your site, we may list that URL but you may not be able to fix the error.
* If the file exists, your server may have returned an error when we tried to access the file.
The following table lists some errors you might see:
404 not found The webserver returned a 404 error (page not found). This page likely does not exist.
HTTP errors/ 401/407 authentication error The page requires authentication. It’s likely that you do not intend this page to be indexed. If this page is listed in your Sitemap, you can remove it. However, if you leave it in your Sitemap, we won’t crawl or index it (although the page will continue to be listed here with this error).
HTTP errors /4xx error See RFC 2616 for a complete list of these status codes. Likely reasons for this error are that the webserver didn’t understand or couldn’t process the request, the request was forbidden, or the request timed out. If the page has moved and requests for it return a status code of 410, you might consider changing the response to return a status code of 301 and permanently redirect the request.
HTTP errors /Domain name not found The DNS may not have been properly resolving. We could communicate with the DNS server, but couldn’t find the domain name.
HTTP errors /Couldn’t parse HTTP response When we tried to access your page, we couldn’t parse the response we received from the webserver.
HTTP errors /IP in excluded range The IP address is in a private address space, reserved for local use (for instance 127.0.0.1). See RFC 1918 for information on private IP ranges.
No Title - Google encountered a general HTTP error Google encountered a general HTTP error when trying to access this page. Note potential reasons for this error could include any of the HTTP errors listed on this page
Google encountered an error when attempting to view the URL. See RFC 2616 for more information about HTTP error codes. Google encountered an HTTP error when attempting to view the URL. In general:
* Ensure that the file exists at the specified location.
* If we attempted to crawl the URL from your Sitemap, make sure that your Sitemap lists the URL correctly.
* If we attempted to crawl the URL from a link on your site, make sure that the link is correct.
* If another site lists a broken link to your site, we may list that URL but you may not be able to fix the error.
* If the file exists, your server may have returned an error when we tried to access the file.
URLs not followed errors
This category lists URLs that we were unable to completely follow, along with some information as to why. In general, keep in the mind the following to ensure Google’s spiders can follow links in your site:
* Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, since many search engines see your site much as Lynx would. If features such as Javascript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
* Don’t use &ID= as a parameter in your URLs.
* If you use dynamic pages (for instance, the URL contains a ? character), be aware that not all search engine spiders crawl dynamic and static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
* If you are permanently redirecting from one page to another, make sure you’re returning the right HTTP status code (301 Moved Permanently).
* Where possible, use absolute rather than relative links. (For instance, when linking to another page in your site, link to www.example.com/mypage.html rather than simply mypage.html).
URLs restricted by robots.txt errors
Google was unable to crawl the URL due to a robots.txt restriction. This can happen for a number of reasons. For instance, your robots.txt file might prohibit the Googlebot entirely; it might prohibit access to the directory in which this URL is located; or it might prohibit access to the URL specifically. Often, this is not an error. You may have specifically set up a robots.txt file to prevent us from crawling this URL. If that is the case, there’s no need to fix this; we will continue to respect robots.txt for this file.
If a URL redirects to a URL that is blocked by a robots.txt file, the first URL will be reported as being blocked by robots.txt (even if the URL is listed as Allowed in the robots.txt analysis tool).
URLs timed out errors
We received a timeout when we tried to access the page. Make sure the page is accessible. Some errors you may see are:
DNS lookup timeout We received a timeout on DNS lookup.
URL timeout We received a timeout when connecting to your webserver or during the request.
robots.txt timeout The server timed out when we were trying to access your robots.txt file. Before we crawled the pages of your site, we tried to check your robots.txt file to ensure we didn’t crawl any pages that you had roboted out. However, we received a timeout when we tried to access your robots.txt file. To make sure we didn’t crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. When this happens, we return to your site later and crawl it once we can reach your robots.txt file. Note that this is different from a 404 response when looking for a robots.txt file. If we receive a 404, we assume that a robots.txt file does not exist and we continue the crawl.\
URL unreachable errors
Google encountered an error when trying to access this URL. We may have encountered a DNS error or timeout, for instance. Your server may have been down or busy when we tried to access the page. Possible URL unreachable errors include:
5xx error See RFC 2616 for a complete list of these status codes. Likely reasons for this error are an internalserver error or a server busy error. If the server is busy, it may have returned an overloaded status to ask the Googlebot to crawl the site more slowly. In this case, we’ll return again later to crawl additional pages.
DNS issue We couldn’t communicate with the DNS server when we tried to access the page. This could be because your server is down, or there is an issue with the DNS routing to your domain. Make sure that your domain is resolving correctly and try again.
robots.txt file unreachable Before we crawled the pages of your site, we tried to check your robots.txt file to ensure we didn’t crawl any pages that you had roboted out. However, your robots.txt file was unreachable. To make sure we didn’t crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. When this happens, we return to your site later and crawl it once we can reach your robots.txt file. Note that this is different from a 404 response when looking for a robots.txt file. If we receive a 404, we assume that a robots.txt file does not exist and we continue the crawl.
Network unreachable We encountered a network error when we tried to access the page.
This can happen when Googlebot encounters a time-out or other network related issue when requesting a file from your site, and thus is forced to abandon the request. This can be caused by one or more of the following:
* Excessive page load times due to dynamic pages taking too long to respond
* Excessive page load times due to a site’s hosting server being down, overloaded, or misconfigured
* The hosting server is blocking Google’s web crawler
* A DNS configuration issue.
Failed to connect A connection could not be established.
No response The server closed the connection before we could receive a response.
Truncated response The server closed the connection before we could receive a full response, and the body of the response appears to be truncated.
Connection refused The server refused the connection.
Truncated headers The server closed the connection before full headers were sent.
Googlebot also reports problems that it is detecting with the content of the pages it is indexing where content refers to title tags and meta descriptions in the HTML content section. Usually duplicate titles and meta descriptions means that Google is seeing pages that look identical to it and it implies that it will eliminate such duplicate pages as time goes on. These issues are usually incurred when pages and urls have been redesigned but the old pages page not been eliminated through 301 redirects.
Google states “When Googlebot crawled your site, it found some issues with your content. These issues won’t prevent your site from appearing in Google search results, but addressing them may help your site’s user experience and performance.”
It’s important to use 301 redirects to let Google know that old pages should be eliminated from the index in favor of the new urls for those pages. The section should be monitored over time with the goal that duplicate content will be eliminated over time.
The “sitemaps” section will report any difficulties that Googlebot is having handling the sitemap.xml files (or sitemap_index.xml file in the case of multiple sitemaps) that were set up to help Googlebot explore the site.
While there is lots of useful information contained in Webmaster Tools that can provide webmasters with a better understanding of how their site is being indexed, the above are the principal error messages that should be monitored on a daily basis to make sure that the site is being properly indexed by Google.
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