Search Engine Optimization Miniseries: Rich Website, Poor Website - A Website Visibility Battle of Epic Proportions

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1 Search Engine Optimization Miniseries: Rich Website, Poor Website - A Website Visibility Battle of Epic Proportions Part Two: Tracking Website Performance July 1, 2007 By Bill Schwartz EBIZ Machine 1115 Grant Street #G-3 Denver, CO

2 3 Rich Website, Poor Website A Website Visibility Battle of Epic Proportions 1 Part Two: Tracking Website Performance About the Rich Website, Poor Website Case Study For those of you who missed my first installment that described SEO case study "Rich Website, Poor Website", I created a strange reenactment of the classic TV miniseries "Rich Man, Poor Man" in which I offer to track and compare the performance of two competing, sibling websites WITHseo.com and WITHOUTseo.com. The two websites WITHseo.com ( the Rich Website ) and WITHOUTseo.com (the Poor Website ) look similar but they are treated quite differently. My premise is that in today s competitive online world, the disciplined and focused miniseries character Rudy Jordache would have designed and maintained his website, WITHseo.com, taking into account its usability and relevance in order to ensure that his products and services were visible to the online community. No doubt his bad boy brother Tom would exercise poor judgment and lack the attention to detail and patience needed to give his website, WITHOUTseo.com, a fighting chance. I apply popular web page optimization techniques during the design, development and maintenance of WITHseo.com but WITHOUTseo.com, was simply developed, deployed and ignored. In general, these techniques take into account recommendations made by major search engines and they are designed to both improve a visitor's online experience and enhance website visibility. In part one of this series I asked in today s Internet battlefield, which site is destined to prevail? 2 I predicted that the web page optimization applied to WITHseo.com would result in better performance. In other words, I expect the Rich Website to outperform the Poor Website. But, what the heck does outperform mean? As a website owner, how do you accurately determine whether your website and Internet marketing activities produce the desired results? In this topic Tracking Website Performance, I will discuss the use of performance metrics or key performance indicators to track the effectiveness of a website strategy. 1 Please keep in mind that this content is provided for educational purposes in order demonstrate search engine optimization concepts. There are many factors that influence search engine results and page rank I cannot promise that the techniques described in this article work in all cases. Thank you! Bill Schwartz, EBIZ Machine 2 To obtain a copy of part one of Rich Website, Poor Website A Website Visibility Battle of Epic Proportions - Part One: About This SEO Case Study, Download Topic One

3 4 I will emphasize that good web traffic alone is NOT ENOUGH! We must make sure to focus on analytics that quantify our performance relative to the strategic goals of the business. In his article Optimizing the Online Business Channel with Analytics, Christopher McFadden encourages us to align metrics with business goals. 3 Before we present the results of this Rich Website, Poor Website study, we ll need to clearly identify the business goals and analytics we will rely upon to judge the relative success of our demo websites. As I did in Topic One, I note here that this study is by no means intended to be a controlled scientific experiment. There are simply too many factors affecting web site visibility that are beyond my control! I do hope you find the contrasting techniques employed by these two sites interesting and educational, and I hope that WITHseo.com outperforms WITHOUTseo.com or I will have some splainin to do! Business Goals As website owners and administrators, our goal is to identify key performance indicators (KPI s) that help us define and measure progress toward important organizational goals. In order to identify relevant KPI s for this case study, we need to capture the business purposes and strategic goals for the two websites. What then are the goals of the WITHseo.com and WITHOUTseo.com websites? Example online objectives could include improved revenue, lead generation, improved customer service, brand loyalty, etc. But this case study is somewhat atypical. The goal here is simply traffic. Primarily, we hope to direct traffic to WITHseo.com that significantly exceeds the traffic that WITHOUTseo.com experiences. A secondary goal is lead generation for Bill Schwartz and EBIZ Machine, the creator of this case study. There are a number of links and references to EBIZMachine.com and a click to the EBIZ Machine website in order to review its services would certainly be a desired result. In some instances, the depth of the visit is relevant. Online users who fail to navigate past the home page of your site may have stumbled onto your site for the wrong reasons. Alternatively your site may fail to provide a compelling reason to take action and investigate your products and services deeper. In this case, I ll consider the WITHseo.com design and optimization a success if online visitors navigate either to the About this Case Study page or the Study Results page. In both cases, the online visitor is intrigued enough by the premise of the study to want to learn more. 3 Optimizing the Online Business Channel with Analytics, Christopher McFadden, May 2005, Web Analytics Association,

4 5 Target Audience We typically identify a group or groups of online users who are vital to the success of our site. Examples could include small business owners, women, Denver residents, teens, medical professionals, etc. Again, our case is atypical in that any visit to WITHseo.com is a good visit. Web Analytics Web Analytics refers to the collection and reporting of statistics that shed light on the manner in which online visitors utilize your website. We use these analytics to better understand the effectiveness of our online initiatives relative to the underlying goals of our businesses. Note that the software tools we use to analyze web metrics typically work in one of two ways. Traffic log analyzers process raw website traffic data and provide bar charts, graphs and tables that describe how your website was accessed. Logfile analysis to some extent suffers from extensive use of web page caching. In some cases, if a person revisits a page, the second request will often be retrieved from the browser's memory, and the second request will not be properly reflected in the log files. As an alternative, newer techniques called page tagging require you to add embedded code to your web pages that pass along information about the page request and the visitor to 3 rd party applications that process and report traffic data. Google Analytics, discussed later, is a good example. Embedded code solutions are typically thought to be more sophisticated and allow for greater control and customization than log file analysis. By now you ve no doubt heard about and perhaps analyzed analytics like site visitors and page views. Here are definitions of few essential metrics terms you may have already encountered: HIT: A file request. A web page request most likely contains multiple hits as multiple images, videos, text files, CSS/JavaScript files etc. are downloaded from a web server. For this reason, do not assume hits alone are a good indicator of web page popularity! PAGE: A document provided by a website server. A page is an HTML file, script file, or text file but embedded images, sound files, video files, etc. are typically not considered pages. PAGE VIEW: A request to load a single web page of a website. This can be a request for an HTML file like a home page, index.html, or a script like products.php. VISIT: An interaction a unique visitor has with your website. It can entail a series of page requests by the visitor until the session expires because the visitor either leaves your site or fails to interact with your site for a specified period of time. A visit is may contain multiple hits and page views.

5 6 VISITOR or UNIQUE VISITOR: A uniquely identifiable individual or computer that requests a page from your website. REPEAT VISITOR: A visitor that has made at least one prior visit to your website. NEW VISITOR: A visitor that has not previously visited your site. A good understanding of web analytics terminology is essential to your analysis of your website metrics. Rich Website, Poor Website Key Performance Indicators To recap, my primary goal is to generate online traffic to WITHseo.com. You ll recall that I speculated that the SEO techniques applied to WITHseo.com will result in better search engine performance compared to WITHOUTseo. There can be no doubt that better search engine performance translates to better traffic. For that reason, I ll analyze the extent to which the two sites are properly indexed in the search engines along with metrics related to site traffic. Our secondary goals include sticky visits as evidenced by navigation to the interior pages of WITHseo.com as well as lead generation as evidenced by navigation to the EBIZ Machine web site. In this regard, I will to review performance indicators related to conversion. Here conversion is the occurrence of an important action taken by online visitors: navigation to a WITHseo.com interior page or to the EBIZ Machine website. The KPI s then include the following analytics: 1. Visits and Page Views - WITHseo.com vs. WITHOUTseo.com 2. Internal Page Views - WITHseo.com case study details and results 3. Pages indexed in the Google search engine and Yahoo! Directory - WITHseo.com vs. WITHOUTseo.com 4. Google Analytics Conversion Rates - WITHseo.com In addition to log file analytics made available to me by my website hosting company, I will utilize Google Analytics ( to review metrics developed through page tagging. In general, Google Analytics is a free service designed to provide information related to where online visitors came from, how long they stay on the website and their geographical location. Note that Google Analytics integrates with Google Adwords such that online advertisers can see Google ad group and keyword performance as part of their reports. Conclusion As mentioned, my plan is to focus on web analytics that quantify the performance of the sibling websites relative to each other AND relative to the strategic goals of the case study. I will analyze both log file metrics and Google Analytics reports in order to determine if the traffic and conversions play out as expected.

6 7 In the next article I will publish and discuss the results of this study after enough time has passed to allow the SEO techniques employed to run their course. I ll call it Part 3 of this Rich Website, Poor Website mini-series. So, stay tuned! Bill Schwartz, BSEE / JD / MBA, owns and operates EBIZ Machine of Denver, Colorado (on the web at He supports his clients' E-Commmerce initiatives through web site design, web-based application development, ecommerce platform integration, search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click internet marketing program development. He may be reached at or bill@ebizmachine.com.

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