Referral Traffic

Based upon traffic figures from the previous month, the website was averaging around 55k referral traffic per month – with the majority of this traffic hitting the homepage (the website isn’t based upon article creation). For testing purposes, we obtained an extra 30k traffic over the course of two days from a reputable website, with an extremely high authority (click the image for a clearer picture):

This traffic from this source had:

• a lower bounce rate than the website average (so pretty low)
• users spending longer on the website than the average (over twenty minutes)
• users click more pages than on average (over ten pages)

The results

The following chart highlights the position improvement for a number of keyword terms (highly competitive terms as well) over a two day period, following the influx of referral traffic:

Conclusion & Findings

The purpose of this blog is not to state the obvious. “Getting an extra 30k referral traffic is good for your website” is not something that is very helpful. You get these blogs and web videos that give you ‘advice’ like “just keep building great content”, which of course is as useful as an inflatable dartboard. Its quite clear that adding over 30k referrals to your web traffic is extremely difficult to achieve, however these results highlight the importance of concentrating on obtaining links from webpages that can convert traffic (rather than looking at the outdated metric of PageRank for example).

Yes, anchor text is still key and also the placement of the link on the page. This link was positioned second out of five external links and just had the homepage URL within the anchor tags. Also, the link was setup using a ‘rel=nofollow’, highlighting the importance of traffic to the actual homepage, independent of other metrics. This position improvement was also reflected by another website (the one that featured above our domain) over the same period of time. This pattern has not be replicated within this industry since the time period tracked.

So what is your take on this? Does referral traffic, from ‘nofollow’ links, help influence keyword rankings within Google? If the website continued to obtain 30k extra referral traffic, would the positions have been maintained?

Google’s new social product Google+ has enjoyed a positive initial market response. Users have praised the design, usability and approach to group networking with Circles.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at the popularity of what may be the fastest ever growing site as Google has an existing visitor base of more than 1 billion to work with. Although access to Google+ is by invitation only by current members in much the same fashion that Google launched Gmail by invitation years ago, there is clearly huge potential to convert a high number of users to its new social tool.

Google Plus Visitors by Country June 29, 2011 – July 19, 2011

Already, there are over 400 million local searches every month and growing.

70% of these are searches looking for local products or services. This significant change in local search is underpinned by the fact that 67% of people search online instead of looking in Yellow Pages.

Local search is Yellow Pages on steroids.

If people need a local plumber, gardener, or electrician the benefits of viewing these services on a website far outstrip an earpiece ad or just a telephone number to help customers evaluate who to call.

Much is made of the increase in online purchasing of products and services. As yet, the majority of people still enjoy visiting a store. They visit the website and evaluate the quality, colour, style, and price of competing products but many still want to see the real thing, touch it, check out its craftsmanship, and general functionality and ease of use. They also still enjoy the social aspect of shopping.

Whether consumers search and then buy online or search and buy off-line, the starting point increasingly is local search. For the retailer, online and off-line work together as the yin and yang of shopping, providing balance and reflecting the continuous change inherent in product retailing.

There are three tools of search: pay-per-click, where businesses pay to have a listing on the top right hand of the page; organic which has the majority of listings on the left and centre of the page; and map directory listings which locates your business when people are searching on Google. These three complement each other for the local business. However, organic has the better ROI than pay-per-click for businesses, being responsible for over 90% of searches on the page. Over 85% of searches stop on page one.
This makes ensuring a local businesses website gets onto page one crucially important.  The best way to do this is through organic search engine optimisation.

The single biggest change that cloud computing and the ability to provide local mobile search will bring, is today we have one page one for any search term. Soon we will have thousands of page ones because search will be local.

If a person searches for a plumber you will only get plumbers in your local town. If you are having a night out and want to find an Indian restaurant and search on your mobile phone or I-Pad, you will get displayed three or more within your immediate vicinity. You can enter their websites, look at the menus, make a choice and ‘phone to book a table. Or you may be so close that you just walk in.

For local and global businesses local search will be both a opportunity and a challenge. You can be emailed by a store with a local promotion as you walk along the road towards it. This immediacy will be a new tool in the marketing armoury of both international conglomerates and local small to medium sized businesses.

At Intelligent Positioning we have anticipated this some time ago and are well prepared for this dynamic development.

Garry Titterton
CEO
Intelligent Positioning Limited

Search engines love text

So if you write a document with some special formatting, that doesn’t fit well into a web page or contains some graphics that must be preserved, you can publish over the web converting it to a PDF file, and let it accessible to the entire world.

Search engines are smart enough to crawl your web pages and index (normally) all the link and documents contained. Google started to index PDF documents later in 2001 so they are not completely new to this kind of stuff, but recently they enhanced the quality and the user experience introducing the “Quick View” PDFs feature.

The reason why Google developed “Quick View” was due to poor quality of the “View as HTML” feature, originally developed to “translate” a file into a document readable directly into the browser (unless searchers weren’t interested in opening it into different applications after downloading it).

Unfortunately the “View as HTML” feature isn’t perfect and often the layout proposed doesn’t respect the original one. These kind of problems no longer exist thanks to Quick View which has changed its approach to opening PDF files, opening the documents directly into the browser whilst keeping the formatting intact.

But, well formatted or not, a PDF document – as any other web page – should be optimized before being shown in the SERP.

How can I optimize my PDF file for ranking?

Having looked into research papers, that contained possible indicators on how to properly optimize a PDF document, I was unable to find anything really useful. Since I’m aware (are you?) Google is particularly interested in details and quality, I decided to spend some time to create a test case to evaluate many different combinations of the same PDF document to understand which factors really influences the PDF ranking.

The test has been published on a recently registered domain, so I can entirely appreciate the results that I will collect from this test.

To stay updated about this test, or to simply have a look at it, point your web browser to my “PDF ranking and indexing test”.

The process of indexing flash is more challenging than for web pages for two reasons. With its clearly defined structure, XHTML provides a rich description of content – it identifies headings, paragraphs, and lists and provides a way to assign metadata such as title and description – it is by definition a markup language. Flash is not: flash is a multimedia platform focussed on interaction and experience and providing fewer semantic cues to search engine robots. In addition, Flash supports storing entire applications within a single file, allowing multiple pages of content to share a single URL and thus presenting as a single indexable resource.

According to a Google announcement last year..

“We’ve developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed.”

Unsurprisingly, the details of this algorithm are not public, although Google suggest that it is based on Adobe’s Searchable SWF library. While Adobe says that content developers do not need to do anything in order to benefit from the improved indexing of swf files, they do provide a utility called the Search Engine SDK which was originally designed by Macromedia to “provide search engines with the means to search and index Macromedia Flash movies”.

The tool is available for free, but it’s quite hidden on the Adobe website and you do need to sign up to the Adobe Player Licensing Program. The best way to get it is via this link: https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=search_sdk. Follow the prompts to sign up and verify your email and you’ll receive a download link.

For anyone not familiar with command-line applications, here’s how to use the tool on windows:

1. Extract the flash_search_sdk.zip file somewhere on your computer.
2. Open the extracted folder and copy the swf2html.exe file from the ‘windows’ directory to a new directory such as C:\swf
3. Copy the swf file you want to convert into the same directory.
4. Fire up a terminal window (in Vista, click the start button, type ‘cmd’ in the search field and press enter)
5. Switch to the directory containing the tool

   cd c:\swf

6. enter the following (where myswf is the name of your flash file):

   swf2html myswf.swf

This will output the html to the screen, but if you’d like to save the html to a file (for viewing in your browser) then simply redirect the output as follows:

swf2html myswf.swf > myhtml.html

While the tool won’t show you exactly what will appear in search engines, a quick look at the output should give you some idea whether all of the important content is visible as text, and conversely whether unimportant text could be hidden (for example, by converting it to images within the Flash).

Image of London in Google maps

Google Maps was the starting point for Google’s navigation based platform, allowing users to user either a map or satellite view of the terrain to explore areas, find locations, and locate businesses and more. As time went on the Maps platform expanded, offering more dynamic views of the earth, with interactive views, 3d imaging and terrain exploration.

Google’s next step was to allow webmasters to integrate Google maps with their websites, allowing the plotting of coordinates and customization of the maps.

The current step has now brought Google to creating the Street View platform which offers an incredibly detailed 3d view of streets using high quality imaging. You can explore in any way you wish, choose what road to go down, what junctions to take, zoom in on shops, even take a look at the people that have been captured leaving pubs, shops and much more.

It’s amazing to think that Google have managed to create the idea and put it into existence considering the sheer volume of places throughout the USA and the UK. The amount of storage needed for this huge volume of images would near an exobyte in size.

So what kinds of views are on offer?

Take a look at some of the famous UK landmarks with Google Street View, below is Big Ben

Big Ben in Google Street view

Here is a snapshot taken from Google Street View, this is one of the most famous landmarks in the UK and is found in central London.

When you are done exploring Big Ben, why not take a trip to Regent Street, London

Regents Street in Google Street view