Off-page SEO factors affecting rankings

Last week I discussed on-page SEO factors affecting rankings. I reviewed the top 5 websites competing for “calgary web design” and their on-page SEO elements. Then I summarized the key findings from this short study. This week I’d like to talk about off-page SEO factors affecting website rankings as these tend to be more important.

This time I’ll keep looking at the top 5 websites competing for the same key phrase “calgary web design”. Let’s first look at how the websites stack up against each other using Open Site Explorer (OSE) tool by SEOmoz.

Off-page SEO: Page authority by SEOmoz

Page authority is an overall score for a homepage in the case. Based on the OSE tool Wedge IM is in the lead. If you recall, this website has had #1 position in Google for the term “calgary web design”. The Wedge IM lead in this table tells us that Google does rank this website according to its Page Authority score. Three out of 4 other websites are following close behind with the exception of MediumRare, which ranks significantly lower on Page Authority by SEOmoz. The next logical question is: What are the key factors that contributed to a high PA score?

Off-page SEO: PA score and key factors

As you can see in the image above, there are 3 factors that has put Wedge IM in the lead here:

• Followed linking root domains: The number of root domains that have at least one followed link to a page or domain. In other words, this is the count of all followed links from unique websites / domains that lead to Wedge IM homepage.
• Total linking root domains: The number of root domains that link to a page or domain. Just like above but including the no-follow links too.
• Linking C Blocks: A number of linking C blocks indicates link diversity. A significantly lower than “total linking root domains” number tells us that links are coming from same servers, and therefore indicating that links inventory is not diverse. In this case 579 is NOT significantly lower than 747.

Before we go further, here’s more on C blocks from itrogers.

It is not necessarily the case that the two are owned by the same company, but are related. Google uses these C blocks to determine likelihood of relationships if any.  Google would tend to assume that these two sites are related, since they are on IPs right next to each other. It would be even more so if they were on the same IP.

Links from the same C block aren’t necessarily bad. Just make sure ALL of your links aren’t from the same C block. If you own several sites it’s natural to link to your others. Google just lowers the value of these links so that people who own several domains don’t have an automatic advantage over others due to excessive linking. Basically, the more C blocks the better. 100 links from 10 C blocks probably won’t rank as well as a site with 100 links from 35 C blocks. I hope this helps!

You will notice the three measures above are significantly higher than those of the other four competitors. On the table above you will also see that there are other link measures on which competition outperforms Wedge IM in but apparently those are of less value according to SEOmoz algorithms.

Off-page SEO: Quick takeaways

So, what did we learn and what do we need to do to outperform our competition on off-page SEO factors. Here’s two important takeaways.

1. Links from different websites is better than many links from the same website. If you regularly comment on 2-3 blogs / forums, consider adding more blogs / forums to your network.
2. Having a large total links inventory is good (the more votes the better), however make sure that at least half of those links are followed links (no rel=”nofollow” specified). One of the best ways to get Followed links is guest posting on other blogs.

There’s definitely more off-page SEO factors that play a role in website rankings, but it is worth simplifying to: the more quality links you have, the better you rank. I’ll go into ways to gain those quality links in the future posts.

On-page + off-page SEO results summary

Now that we’ve gone through key on-page and off-page SEO factors affecting rankings, let’s summarize the points to see if WooRank and OSE tool by SEOmoz combined score gives us any relevant results we can compare with Google Rank.

You can see that #1 and #4 are matching what Google ranks and this website review of top 5 sites competing for “calgary web design”. Variations, although insignificant, do exist with results 2, 3, and 5.

Again, I do realize that this is a very simplified picture of off-page SEO factors affecting rankings, but keeping it simple helps keep sane when it comes to SEO. I hope you find it useful. Feel free to drop a comment here and let me know if you have questions.

Can I assist you with link building?

On-page SEO factors affecting rankings (Part 3)

Now that we’ve gone through all 5 on-page SEO contenders and their on-page SEO factors, let’s do a summary of findings and things to keep in mind when thinking about on-page SEO for your website.

On-page SEO – The Summary table

Here’s a summary table that combines WooRank score and a number of other key on-page SEO elements we talked about. Please note, That WooRank score is out of 100. Scores for other elements are out of 10 and are very arbitrary (but I hope more or less accurate). At the bottom of the table I’m putting my numbers in based on how I would rank the sites :) Well, I’m not Google, but I am a person and websites should be built for people, not search engines.

Now, let’s look at some more general lessons from this series of articles about on-page SEO.

On-page SEO – The Verdict

So, what did we just find out that will help identify key elements of on-page SEO?

1. There are many on-page SEO factors that contribute to web page relevancy. There’s a few key SEO factors that affect your rankings more than other factors. Titles, headings, link anchors, image alts, etc. are among the most important ones.
2. Always remember that your website experience starts from a search listing. Landing on your site in step 2 or even 3. So, make sure you use unique and descriptive titles and promising descriptions on your pages.
3. Build your websites for people first, then for search engines. Make sure your landing page (the page that results in clicking on your Google listing) is clean and actually representative of your business. If you claim you’re a design shop, show it.
4. Although all 5 websites have relatively high WooRank score, there are things to improve on. Also, looking at score variation between the 5 sites, we see that there’s something else at play besides on-page SEO.

The fact that some of the most critical on-page SEO elements like canonical tagging, headings, image alts, etc. are being missed by top performers in “calgary web design” competition, suggests that either these are not as important to Google OR the rest of the sites perform even worse.

Next week I will do a similar exercise with off-page SEO and external factors affecting website rankings. In the meantime, feel free to follow me on Twitter where I share SEO things I find on the internet.

On-page SEO factors affecting rankings (Part 2)

Yesterday I started looking at on-page SEO factors affecting rankings for top 5 performers on Google.ca for “calgary web design”. Today we’ll look at the contenders and their on-page SEO elements in more details.

On-page SEO review for top 5 listings

#1: Calgary Web Design | SEO | Web Designer

Now let’s look at on-page SEO for WedgeIM in more details:

• WooRank score: 54.2, http://www.woorank.com/en/www/wedgeim.com
• Descriptive meta title: This “Calgary Web Design | SEO | Web Designer” title contains high traffic keywords that the company targets. It does describe what company does though. This title raises a question: is this a company or a freelancer. There’s nothing wrong with either but I prefer to be clear on that from the beginning.
• Promise in meta description: This description offers a promise of no-hassle answers, clean design and easy-to-navigate sites, as well as asks the user to give them a call. I’d include a phone number in this description. There’s enough space left for it too.
• Site links: This is the only website that has site links in Google listing. Site links are granted by Google to show a list of most popular pages on the website. This shows that the site is well trafficked. According to WooRank it gets over 1000 visits per month. It’s not a lot but considering the key phrase “Calgary web design”, it’s enough to get site links from Google.
• Landing page: This is where we land after clicking on the search listing. Are we in the right place? Based on latest website design showcase, we are in the right place. Good! Does this page look like a web design shop? At first it looks like a modern Web 2.0 web design with an image scroller and bold calls to action. However, looking at more details, it appears that the website is based on a Joomla website template with a few things unfinished.
• Headings: H1 tag is one of the most important elements on a webpage. It appears that H1 is missing here. According to WooRank the page has 5 H2′s and 8 H3′s, which is not so bad, but all H2′s are the same “Making beautiful websites since 2004…”. Not the best way to do it.
• Image alts: Also, according to WooRank, the page has 26 images and 18 of them are missing alt tags. Adding unique alt tags to those 18 images might help the company to solidify its #1 position :)
• Address / email  / phone number: The page has contact details of the company spelled out in text on the page. This is exactly what you would want to do to be considered more credible according to Google, especially if you’re running a local business.
• Canonical issue: This page is missing canonical tag (has a www. vs. non-www issue). As a result Google views the URL with www. and without as two separate websites with exactly the same content. This raises a duplicate-content issue, which is bad. The fact that the website still ranks #1 interesting.

#2: Web Design Calgary & iPhone Apps by Mediumrare Inc.

And on-page SEO for Mediumrare in more details:

• WooRank score: 51.2, http://www.woorank.com/en/www/mrare.ca
• Descriptive title: The page title “Web Design Calgary & iPhone Apps by Mediumrare Inc.” sounds pretty descriptive to me. It identifies the keyword, the service and the company. Best one so far.
• Promise in description: This description is a humble (can compete…) overview of services the company offers. It invites the user to make the next step and check the portfolio. No promise made, but clean and within the character constraints.
• Landing page: This page is about creativity. It can be seen the headline and the graphics. To me this one looks as a very clean and unique website design showing that the company is in fact a web design agency.
• Headings: This page has 1 H1 and 8 H2′s. That’s what I like to see. However, H1′s text is “mediumrare” and like embedded into  the logo on the page. Ideally, I’d like to see H1 showcasing a target key phrase for the page (i.e. Calgary web design by Mediumrare Inc.” or something like that.
• Image alts: 2 out of 2 image alts are missing. Adding those in and planing a key phrase in there should help the company make this page more relevant to its target search term.
• Canonical issue: No canonical issue here. All great! Google views the www. version and no-www version as one page.
• Contact info spelled out: This one also has the contact details spelled out in text. Google like to see things like that!

#3: Calgary web design – Apis Design

Here’s on-page SEO for Apis Design in more details:

• WooRank score: 61.8, http://www.woorank.com/en/www/apis.ca. That’s the top scored site according to WooRank. Let’s see what we have here.
• Descriptive title: The title is descriptive, includes the key phrase and the company name. I’m not sure if adding “inc.” at the end would make any difference though.
• Promise in description: Describes the service being offered, has the keyword phrase mentioned and promises “we build websites that work”. Adding a recommendation for next step could make this description more actionable. Like, “get a free quote today” or “call us today (and list a number)”.
• Landing page: The page showcases a visual scroller of featured website projects as well as shows strong calls-to-action such as “improve communication” and “reach the masses”. This website is custom-built, no templates involved, a good sign of a true web design agency. Their websites might be more expensive, but they will be unique, professional and, according to the promise, they will work.
• Headings: The page has no H1, 3 H2′s and 7 H4′s. Not the best case. As mentioned above, I like to see at least 1 H1 per page containing a target key phrase. In addition, H2′s do not contain any text. In this case, they’re just images. I’d highly recommend adding the text to these H2. It won’t be a big deal if it’s left as is, but there might be a good opportunity in adding text.
• Image alts: out of 7 images, 1 is missing alt attribute. Not a big deal, but for the sake of consistency I’d recommend specifying an alt attribute here.
• Canonical issue: no issues here. We’re great!

#4: Calgary Web Design – Web Design Calgary – Calgary Web Design

Now on-page SEO for Calgary Web Design Network in more details:

• WooRank score: 50.2, http://www.woorank.com/en/www/calgarywebdesign.ca
• Descriptive title: Although it contains the keyword and appears relevant this title looks like plain keyword stuffing. It does not identify the company.
• Promise in description: The description identifies the company as well as the key phrase, which is actually the same in a lot of cases. Its description is a bit too long to fit into the Google snippet so the user only sees the initial portion of it. It outlines the service, but does not more to the next step. I’d recommend shortening the description and adding a call-to-action.
• Landing page: The page does not really look visually relevant to the query “calgary web design”. Although it displays various computer related images, there’s nothing that says “a web design agency”.
• Headings: According to WooRank all major headings are missing. Adding headings to the page will likely increase its relevance for focus key terms.
• Image alts: 6 out of 38 images on the page are missing alt attributes.
• Canonical issue: Just like WedgeIM this site may have duplicate content issues and, as a results, may be devalued in rankings.

#5: Calgary Web Design, SEO, E-Commerce, Graphic Designers & More | Web Candy – Calgary Web Design and Web Development

Let’s look at on-page SEO for Web Candy in more details:

• WooRank score: 53.7, http://www.woorank.com/en/www/webcandy.ca
• Descriptive title: This title is descriptive and includes the company name. However, it also looks a bit keyword-stuffed. There are many opinions on the length limit for meta-titles. My personal take is that 70 characters (including spaces) is enough space to tell your audience about the focus of your company and mention your company’s name. Also, with so many different things in the title, the value of each key phrase is diffused.
• Promise in description: With the length of over 150 characters this description does describe the business, but puts it a bit more for search engines than for people. There’s a clear promise “Your best source for Calgary Web Designers” but it gets truncated due to character limitation and the potential customer does not see it.
• Landing page: This landing page is relevant to the search query and actually very useful. It’s got a functional display area that tells you about the company’s services. It’s got a sitemap-like menu of things the company does, which allows users to see all in one place, and very well-organized.
• Headings: The page is missing H1, it’s got one H2 and one H3, which appears very weird. Adding at least a H1 to this page and ensuring it contains target terms will likely help the company be more relevant for their target search queries.
• Image alts: no image alt attributes are missing. That’s great!
• Canonical issue: no problem here either!

Key elements of SEO analytics

A good friend of mine has recently asked me about key website analytics areas he should pay attention to. My head started spinning as the question was tooooo general. My response was that it depends on what you want to track and what your goals are. When we narrowed it down to SEO purposes, I briefly explained the key areas. I’m not saying that these are the only areas. After all, it all depends on your goals. Here’s what my answer was…

What you track on regular campaign basis depends on what your goals are. Generally speaking, there are three main areas of SEO analytics I look at on campaign basis: change in rankings, change in organic search traffic and change in conversions this month.

Change in rankings

At the onset of a campaign we choose a number of keywords we will work with in the following weeks and months. We need to able to track how we process on each key phrase from month to month. There’s a number of products available to track your SEO rankings including: SEScout, SEO rank monitor, Authority Labs and of course good old Google Analytics (GA). Here’s a good article going in details of how to track SEO rankings with Google Analytics by Yoast. I personally prefer having things in one place so I use GA.

Change in organic search traffic

There are three types of traffic you get to your website: direct, referrer, and traffic from search engines. Further, traffic from search engines can be segmented by different search engines and divided into paid and organic. For SEO purposes we’re concerned with organic traffic. The question here should be “Did we increase organic traffic to the website comparing to last month?”. This can be easily tracked by checking Google Analytics > Traffic Sources > Keywords. If you’re running PPC campaigns, then you’d want to segment the organic search traffic out.

Change in conversions

The ultimate goal of most SEO campaigns should be to increases conversions resulting from organic traffic, not the rankings or even traffic itself. So, I recommend creating conversion goals at the onset of the campaign. Once this is done, then it’s easy to track the change in number of conversions. Depending on your product or services your conversion can be “quote requested”, “product ordered” or “user path completed”. Usually a conversion results in some kind of “form submitted” on your website. Here, the question is “How did we do on conversions comparing to last month?”.

Whatever tools you choose to track your SEO analytics and the progress of your campaigns, make sure you go for positive change in the number of conversions, not change in rankings. Let me know if you feel that there are other important areas of SEO analytics.

Google algorithm change, January 2011

Earlier today I wrote a post about changes in my rankings with a few first thoughts on why this may have happened. In that post I said I will do more research and will be back with more actionable items. Also, shortly after posting it a good friend of mine Serge Nekipelov commented on Facebook with a very generic recommendation for improvement. I though I take Serge’s comment one step further and explain it a bit.

A week ago Google posted that they’re planning to implement algorithm change targeted at fighting sites with copied content. Yesterday, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s spam team confirmed the focus on fighting “content farms” and added a couple of details. Later yesterday Chris Crum of WebProNews, questioned the content far focus of the update. Here’s a few other good sources on the matter:

• Google algorithm change squashes code geek ‘webspam’
• Google PageRank & Algorithm Updates

So what are my my thoughts after going through some research?

• Write original content, don’t copy content from other sites (even with a link back to the original). Quotes with a backlink should be fine.
• Stay away from “keyword density” state of mind. It used to be that the more keywords you have on a page, the more relevant your site is in Google’s eyes. No longer the case. Now Google may treat repetitive phrases as spam attempt. Just write naturally and don’t bother about keyword frequency on a page. This point is further clarified here.

Other than that, it’s business as usual:

• expand your site consistently by writing original content (blog posts, white papers, press releases),
• get links from sites with similar orientation (industry), which will show that your site is a valuable resource in that industry,
• pay attention to anchor text in links pointing to your site, make it relevant where possible (where you can control it).

Please feel free to share your experiences on recent algorithm changes in the comments to this post.

Search rankings update, Jan 29, 2011

Just checked my rankings for “online marketing Calgary” and noticed a change – got down to #5 from being #2 a couple of weeks ago. Here’s a few first thoughts about what changed:

• The term online marketing Calgary is no longer in my title. Also, this terms is not part of first 3 words of the title. This is likely one of the most important things affecting my ranking.
• My description tag does not work properly for some reason. Looks like Google picks up random text from my homepage, not what I have in the meta description tag. Will look into it right away. My competitors’ descriptions are proper and under the length limit of 150 characters.
• I slowed down on link building recently. My guess is that everybody else have speeded up on it :) or just remained the same.
• I’ve been recently trying to maintain a frequency of new content (once every two days on average). I’m not saying it didn’t contribute to my higher rankings. In fact, I do think that consistent content development contributes to rankings. I’ll have to look more into it and wait.
• It’s worth noting that traffic from Google organic results remained the same as last month and bounce rate dropped significantly.

I’ll keep looking at numbers and will be updating your shortly. Feel free to ask specific questions in comments to this article. Ta-ta!

Review of “online marketing Calgary” rankings

Just wanted to take another snapshot of my search rankings for the term “online marketing Calgary”. This time I got to #2 bypassing Vovia. Please note that the results are “depersonalized” and are based on Google.com. So, what was done to create this change in rankings?

• regular blogging activity, I’ve recently created a number of resource pages as well as a few relevant posts
• link building campaign focusing on terms “online marketing Calgary” and similar terms
• change in site architecture (please see the main navigation)
• online community participation, answering questions, commenting on relevant blogs, found through StumbleUpon.

One last thing I wanted to note is that prior to focusing on the term “online marketing Calgary” I wanted to rank well for “digital marketing Calgary“. Over time I’ve reached #1 on Google.com. Then, I changed focus to Online Marketing related terms and for the first few months I was still dominating. However, today I noticed that I’m #4. Morale: if you don’t do the work to rank  high for a particular terms, others do, and over time you loose positions.