JM Spate Web Analytics

As we’ve discussed before, the algorithms used by search engines change constantly. While SEO and analytics professionals are rarely told much about the exact nature of the changes, we can infer, experiment, and keep a close eye on the official Google blog. Mike King and Joshua Giardino even made some very interesting points based on the patents being taken out by search engines as an indicator of what they’re capable of, or will soon be capable of.

Their research (and that of a good many others) shows that Googblebot is no longer a simple text reader. Its ability to interact intelligently with Java has been well established for a while now, and official sources announced new capabilities for dealing with AJAX POST requests last month. There is no doubt that search crawlers can capture more than ever before.

So, what does a smarter Googlebot (and smarter crawlers more generally) mean for SEO? Search professionals are going to be a little more careful about the way they do some things, but the main take-home message is this: usability and design considerations aren’t just about user experience any more. They’re going to have an impact on organic search too.

The brand new South Wales Parks and Gardens website is now live. More content will be added over the next few weeks as more of the favourite parks and garden attractions around Cardiff, Swansea, and Newport come on board. We’ll be working hard on making this new site as visible as possible.

It might be getting pretty close to winter out there but that’s no reason to abandon healthy outdoor fun for the rest of the year. The number, diversity, and quality of things to do around South Wales never fails to amaze us, so go and check it out!

Potpiegirl.com is current hosting a very interesting document. The leaked handbook contains a wealth on information on the way good makes quality ratings- although it has to be said that human raters are only one small cog in the search engine ranking machine, before anyone gets too excited.

Much of the manual content was pretty much as the SEO community had long suspected but there were a few interesting points. Probably the most interesting is about the way Google assumes intent on the part of a searcher. It’s not just a question of guessing that you’d be more likely to be after local shops and services but a deeper assumption that in order to be relevant to a keyword, you should be relevant to their idea of a dominant interpretation of that keyword, if there is one.

The other biggie is that duplicate content doesn’t necessarily bring up a red flag. There is a more subtle discrination going on. This tallies well with a few things I’ve seen over the last few months and there are probably other analysts who feel the same.

Most people won’t be making major adjustments to their SEO strategy after reading the 125 document (or any of the commentary that’s popping up all over the search community). It might, however, be really useful to anyone who has suffered a big drop in organic traffic and can’t figure out exactly what went wrong.

If you’ve looked at Google Analytics search keywords lately, you might have seen something unexpected. (not provided) will be showing up here a lot more frequently from now on. Google has decided to encrypt search information relating to signed-in users. Supposedly that will only mean information disappears for a small percentage of users on the average site, but some are already reporting considerable swings. And if more people start browsing and searching while signed-in, as Google no doubt intends, the impact of this decision is only going to get heavier.

Why did they do this? Well, the official statement cited privacy concerns but people some have other ideas. In fact, quite a lot of people have other ideas and most of them don’t like new scheme one little bit.

Of course, this isn’t the only change they’ve made lately. The new toys provided in Google Analytics/Webmaster tools are intended to help with SEO, but at first glance there doesn’t seem to be much data in there that couldn’t be obtained elsewhere in a neater, rather more informative package. It seems they’ve taken away more than they’ve given.

The change to search keyword reporting is more likely to irritate the analytics community than it is to cause huge uncertaintly for individual websites, but as always, being aware of changes to algorithms and reporting platforms is the best way to make sure that a new pattern isn’t mistakenly attributed. If you see (not provided) popping up, it’s nothing to do with a change in your traffic, just a change in what Google is willing to tell you about it.

While we do work with sites across the UK (and sometimes in the US and Canada as well) it’s always nice to find new clients right here in South Wales. This month has been a very busy one so far, particularly in terms of SEO for Cardiff companies. Here are a couple of new sites we’re going to be helping:

Surveys Gwalia offer a full range of topographical and land surveying services, and are particularly well known for underground mapping. Like us, they work in South Wales and further from home too.

SciEnts is the place to go to find the best in science shows, science workshops, school presentations and scientifically-themed after dinner speakers. Every listing is hand picked for quality of entertainment as well as education.

At first glance, web analytics (the practice of finding out about what visitors do on your site) should be easy. All you have to do is track each one, find out which pages they visit and how long they spend on them. However, even a total number of visitors per day or per week can be very hard to pin down with any accuracy.

Most people treat the figures that come from Google Analytics or another reporting suite as gospel, so it often comes as a shock when two sets of figures are compared. If the visitor numbers that come out of Google Analytics are plotted against the visitor numbers obtained by statistical analysis of the server logs, the GA figures will almost always be significantly lower.

It’s actually pretty hard to count visitors. First of all, you have to decide who should be counted- there is a world of difference between a real person looking at your site and an automated search crawler indexing the pages. Server logs count both search bots and human browsers, and while tools like AWStats and Webalizer do try and filter out the crawlers it can be quite hard to catch them all, so real visitor numbers might be a little inflated.

Google Analytics uses another approach. Users loading a page trigger a piece of Javascript. This code snippet is not tripped by robot crawlers, so the only people who register as visitors are real people. The downside is that a significant percentage of users browse the internet with Java disabled so they aren’t counted either. Therefore Google Analytics tends to underestimate visitor numbers.

There is also the issue of what counts as a session. If a user closes their browser window and then immediately reopens it on one of your pages, does that count as a separate visit? If they are inactive for an hour, then resume browsing, should that count as the same session? Different analytics packages have different ways of counting sessions and this will also affect total visit counts.

Then there are sampling issues. If your site sees millions of visits, some software packages will sample the dataset rather than examine each individual element. This can provide a good statistical picture of what’s going on, but it inevitably introduces some degree of error.

So, with all those accuracy problems, how can web analysts hope to generate useful insights? Consistency is the key. If Google Analytics always underestimates visitor numbers by 12% because 12% of the target market disables Java, the exact figures may be off but the trends are still sound. A 30% rise in visitor numbers is still a 30% rise in visitor numbers, even if the exact numbers aren’t known precisely.

Usually, problems only arise when measurement methods change. If you’re moving from one analytics package to another, it’s good practice to run the two side by side for at least a month. That way you’ll be able to see how the two sets of figures relate to one another. Don’t worry if they don’t match up exactly, because they almost certainly won’t!

No business wants to waste time (and therefore money) on activities that don’t deliver a good return, and it’s true that some people still consider Twitter a social tool rather than a commercial one, but there are plenty of reasons to get involved with it. Twitter can be used to establish yourself as a knowledgeable expert in your field, or it can be used to find new clients directly.

In terms of the raw number of searches performed each month, Twitter sees more than Bing and Yahoo together. The figure is a little misleading (the percentage of automated searches is much higher on Twitter) but it does demonstrate the massive power and influence of social media. Twitter is now being used as a source of news as well as entertainment.

Social searching is also growing fast. 20 years ago, you might have picked up the telephone directory when to find a local plumber. 10 years ago, searching through Google would have been just as likely. Now, rather than relying on a search engine’s rankings to find the best plumber in your area, you may well put out a call on Facebook or Tweet something like ‘Anyone know a good plumber in Philadelphia?’

People who use Twitter in this way are looking for trusted recommendations from real people, but smart businesses who monitor Twitter for terms like “plumber” + “Philadelphia” can also reply, and if they appear helpful they’ve got a good chance of picking up a new client.

Twitter monitoring isn’t difficult and it doesn’t have to take up time. Tools like Monitter (monitter.com) trawl through Twitter traffic in real time, collecting relevant posts within a set geographical area. Others, like Tweetbeep  can send email updates whenever your chosen set of search terms comes up. If you use Google Alerts to monitor new websites, Tweetbeep can extend your watch to include Twitter traffic. Twazzup  searches through recent news items and Tweets for the terms of your choice. There are also numerous mobile apps for sending, reading, and monitorring tweets.

If you’re serious about Twitter monitoring Monitter can be left running in the background as you work. Once set up, Tweetbeep won’t bother you unless something relevant comes up, and whenever you happen to have a spare five minutes, you can check Twazzup or a mobile app like Echofon. Twitter monitoring doesn’t have to take long and it doesn’t have to be complex. Anyone can do it, and enjoy the benefits.

Following on from last month’s post on keeping changelogs, we were asked if there is a public record of major Google algorithm changes over the past few years. If your site traffic goes up or down dramatically, it could be something you did or it could be the ranking algorithm that’s changed.

Happily, there is a handy record of algorithm updates over at SEOMoz. It only covers the bigger changes but it’s very useful nonetheless.

While web analytics has precise definitions for what constitutes a hit, a site visit, and a pageview, the wider web community is not always on the same page. In particular, those who claim that there site has ’12675 hits per month’ are sometimes a little confused (or being confusing). Let’s start by laying out exactly what analysts mean when they use these words:

Visits: When an individual loads any page on a website or more than one page, one after the other, it counts as a visit. If they leave and then return soon after or stay on the same page for a long time the waters get muddier (see the discussion on the way Google Analytics counts sessions for more on this) but right now it suffices to say that when a user arrives on site and looks around it counts as a single visit.

Views, or Pageviews: When a user opens a new page, they add to the view count. A single visit can contain many pageviews (and ideally, it usually should). If they happen to click onto another page than come back, that counts as two pageviews. There is another measure called ‘Unique pageviews’ that doesn’t count more than one view of a particular page in a single session.

Hits: A single pageview can generate several hits. Essentially, a hit is a request to the server, and it’s one hit per page element, not per page. A busy page with lots of images with have a higher hit count than a plain and unadorned piece of HTML.

So a person that claims 12675 hits per month could be talking about the total number of hits, of which a single visit can generate dozens or hundreds, or they could be talking about visits or pageviews. If they’re being underhanded they may be giving an honest hit count and hoping people will mistake it for a visit count.

Either way, it pays to be clear, especially when you’re trying to establish what a site should be charging for advertising. If in doubt, ask for a visit count and take care to distinguish between overall figures and those that relate to individual pages.

Efficient SEO is all about experimentation. Knowing that your campaign is working is great, but it’s a long way from the full picture.

A friendly, helpful log

No two websites are the same and operate in exactly the same enviroment, so it’s only natural that their rankings and traffic patterns will respond in different ways. The trick is to know what works for your site, and how to get the maximum SEO value out of the minimum amount of effort.

The first step towards finding out what works and what doesn’t is to keep a log of changes. Adding some new text content to a particular section? Note it down. Rearranging some categories? Note that too. Even if all you do is update some graphics or add a few new products, make sure the change log gets updated.

When experimenting, keep in mind that the full effect of your changes can take a while to filter through. The user experience might change immediately but unless Google and the other search engines scrape your site quite frequently, rankings probably won’t leap up or down overnight. As a rule of thumb, the less frequently you make changes, the longer it will be before Google notices new alterations.

Matching up a few months of changelog with a few months of monitoring or analytics data is often extremely informative. Of course there will be external influences affecting traffic levels and behaviour, but the timelines almost always have a few interesting tidbits to share.