In Today's Issue
Search Engine Marketing
---> 5 Types of Links You May Not Have Thought of Tracking
High Rankings Happenings
---> Need Ongoing SEO Help?
---> Written SEO Website Review of YOUR Site
Twitter Question of the Week
---> How often do you view your web analytics?
Advanced SEO Forum Thread of the Week
---> Title Tags and H1 Tags: Same or different for best SEO?
Advisor Wrap-up
---> Congrats to Robbie! Introduction
Hey everyone!
Hope you are having a good week so far. Before we get started with this week's newsletter, I wanted to give you a head's up that there were a ton of interesting comments on the last newsletter's SEO myths article. You probably didn't see them unless you clicked through to the article from the newsletter. Don't forget to click through this week's links as well!
Okay, so let's get to straight to the good stuff! – Jill
Search Engine Marketing Issues
++5 Types of Links You May Not Have Thought of Tracking++
Think you're doing a good job of tracking and measuring the success of every link to your website that gets announced to the world in some fashion?
While most website marketers are tracking website referrals from search engines, as well as links from other websites and paid search advertising campaigns, a lot of visitors show up as "Direct Traffic." Do you ever wonder where they came from? I know that I do!
I've talked about campaign tracking via Google Analytics before, so I won't bore you with the mechanics of how to create these links so they don't look ugly. But do read that article if you need a refresher course. After you have a good system in place for adding campaign tracking codes to your URLs, the most important thing you can do is remember to use them on everything!
So here are 5 categories of links that you may not have thought about tracking, but should be:
- Email Signature Links. Most of you have at least one link to your website in your email signature that goes out in most every email you send. But how many of you are tracking whether anyone clicks on them or not? I know that I rarely click on other people's email signature links. With that in mind, I was curious whether mine ever get clicked, so I appended them with some campaign tracking codes. Turns out they don't get too many clicks (just 8 this past month), but keep in mind that I don't have any sort of call to action in my signature, as some do. It would be fun to experiment with different offers in the signature to see how those fare.
- Specific Words or Graphics Within Your Website. Do you have call-to-action buttons or text links on various pages of your website where you're trying to elicit a specific response from your site visitors? Are you measuring them? For instance, on our website we have an image prominently featured on every page. It rotates between a call-out to subscribe to the High Rankings Advisor newsletter and one that provides more info on our low-end SEO website review. Because I look at the site every day and am not part of our target audience, I'm basically blind to the images.
For a long time I assumed that most who visited our site would never click those images. Well, you know what they say about ASSuming things! After I added tracking codes to those images, I learned that people do indeed click them, and about 75% of those who click the newsletter image end up following through and subscribing. And more than 5% of those click to the SEO review page and fill out our contact form for more information. Hardly what I would call blind!
- Offline Marketing. You should of course have specific tracking URLs for any offline advertising you do in radio, TV, newspapers and magazines. But remember to add tracking codes to your links from other places where you're able to list your website URL, such as business cards, classified ads and telephone book ads. Does your business have a sign? How about a tracked URL there? Have a VW Beetle wrapped as a roving ad for your website? Use a tracking URL. Give your website address out on the phone a lot? Provide a tracking URL.
- Article Bio Links. You all know the power of writing content such as guest articles for other websites, blogs and newsletters in your niche, but are you tracking those links? While you can see the referring URL in your analytics when they come from a specific website, you can get more granular with your analysis when you have added tracking codes to the links back. For instance, with tracking codes in place, you can see which articles, in general, referred the most traffic to your site regardless of where they were posted.
- Social Media Status Updates. I covered this one in the aforementioned article, so I won't belabor it, but didn't want to leave it out because any links that you Tweet, add to Facebook, or leave in a LinkedIn update should have tracking codes. Clicks from social media often come without a referrer for many reasons, making campaign tracking your best bet for measuring their effectiveness. Remember to use tracking URLs in your profile link back to your site as well, so you can easily know which profiles bring actual site visitors and which don't.
Only with campaign tracking codes appended to any and all URLs can you quickly and easily know what media are bringing visitors to your site, as well as seeing what actions they take (or don't) once they get there!
Jill Whalen
CEO, High Rankings SEO Consulting
Share your comments and thoughts here.
P.S. If anyone would like to republish the above article, please email me your request and where it will reside, and I'll send you a short bio you can use with it for your site.
Read additional articles tagged as: Web Analytics.
Twitter Question of the WeekThis week I asked my Twitter followers:
++How often do you view your web analytics?++
Here's what they said:
nsandlin: We do weekly & monthly roundups with "of interest" notes for all staff, plus daily and as needed bitly.net (etc.) monitoring.
aomedia: I check all my clients' stats every weekend. Clients rarely look themselves.
ZachRoth: Not frequently enough...
MattMcGee: Every day. I get about 15 email reports from Google Analytics.
DKS_Systems: Once a day.
bradleyhunt: I check the pulse once a day, peek at AdWords performance 2x day, and spend a couple hours in depth every 2 weeks or so.
klagden: Daily. I look at analytics every morning. More if monitoring something specific.
LiquidWholeFood: I probably access analytics 2x/wk, but I probably do it poorly in that I'm not always sure I'm looking in the right places.
ann_donnelly: Not often enough, hardly ever; but do think it's important to see where leads are coming, or not coming, in.
I80equipment09: Weekly plus month end hard analysis and reporting.
JoshuaTitsworth: Once a day.
quinn_taylor: I check my analytics stats daily #nothingbettertodo
forestsoftware: Checked two or three times a week.
dizzySEO: So often all I have to type into my url bar of my browser is "Anal" and I get there – I'm anal like that.
Jill's comment: All I can say to that last one is that I'm sure glad that it's Google Analytics that shows up for dizzySEO!
Oh yeah, and I'd say that I'm probably in Google Analytics at least once a day, sometimes more for one reason or another. I tend to really dig deeply into our own stats on the weekends, however.
Want to participate in the Twitter Question of the Week?
Follow @jillwhalen on Twitter
Share your comments and thoughts here.
Advanced Forum Thread of the Week ++Title Tags and H1 Tags: Same or different for best SEO?++
Forum member "CompareNetworks" was wondering:
Are Title tags and H1 tags that have the same content, best for SEO?
See what other forum members said or share your own comments here.
Advisor Wrap-up
That's all for today!
We had a really good SEO class last week, but we're taking a break from these for a while. Please let me know if you're interested in a future class and I'll put you on a list to contact if and when we decide to teach another one. In the meantime, you can get up to speed by taking my Lynda.com online SEO course. (It's a super value!)
In other news, my daughter's boyfriend of many years is graduating from law school this weekend and we're finally going to meet the "in-laws." It's kind of funny that we haven't met them yet, especially since my parents and my sister met them last year when they were visiting Hawaii.
Looks like there are lots of other things going on this weekend as well. Let's hope for nice weather.
Catch you in 2 weeks! – Jill
 Today's issue is also available online in the newsletter archives. If you prefer RSS/XML please feel free to use our newsfeed here. Feel free to forward this email in its entirety to anyone you feel might be interested in it. Paid sponsor ads are clearly marked as advertisements and neither High Rankings nor Jill Whalen take any responsibility for the claims made within these ads, nor the websites they point to. Paid ads do not constitute an endorsement for the products, services or companies advertising in the newsletter. Please visit our sponsors and use your own due diligence for any purchases you make on the Internet.
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