Effective search engine optimization (SEO) can improve query rankings, but companies also need to give consumers easy-to-use Web sites to boost conversion rates and close the sale. More visitors to the site is great, but if the price of average orders drop, marketers should rethink strategies, according to panelists on a Webinar Tuesday.

Search Engine Land Executive Editor Chris Sherman moderated the Search Marketing Now Webinar, “SEO and Conversion Rates: Hand-in-hand,” sponsored by Range Online Media. Herndon Hasty, senior SEO evangelist, Range; and Chris Knoch, principal search engine marketing (SEM) consultant at Omniture, presented and fielded questions. [READ MORE]

· Are your pages indexed by the large search engines? Ours are submitted and indexed every day

· Do you have back links pointing to your pages? We have an enormous number deployed

· Do you rank well for query term that you care about? We test and adjust to maximize this all the time

· Does your site make money? In our world that means do your marketing dollars make your phone ring….our testing indicates a resounding yes to this metric.

You should ask the same question about your website, enjoy..

March 17, 2009 · by Jill Kocher

Measuring success in search engine optimization can typically be done in four ways. “Indexation” measurements will determine if a search engine has properly identified all of your site’s pages. “Backlink” measurements will show the number of internal and external links that point to your site as a whole. “Rankings” measurements will show where in the natural search results your site appears for given search words or phrases. And “traffic and revenue” measurements will show the keywords used to find your site, revenue generated per keyword, the percentage of visitors that purchased products and so forth. This article will explore each of the measurements, which we refer to here as “metrics.”

Indexation Metrics

Indexation is the first critical step to natural search performance. Pages that aren’t indexed have zero chance of ranking in the search engines. However, more indexation isn’t necessarily better because that could indicate that identical pages in your site are duplicated in a search engine’s index, which will decrease a site’s ability to rank because the pages are, essentially, competing against themselves.

What is the “right” indexation number? Most ecommerce sites can only guesstimate based on the number of products they offer. For example, if a site offers 50,000 products but only has 5,000 pages indexed, there’s likely a barrier preventing a search engine from fully “crawling” a site. Conversely, if that same site has 500,000 pages indexed, there’s likely a duplication issue. The site will then have issues with self-competition and split-link popularity, both of which hinder a site’s ability to rank strongly.

Indexation is measured by performing a “site:” query in the major engines. For example, type [site:www.yourdomain.com] into the Google and MSN Live search boxes, without the [brackets]. For Yahoo!, just enter the URL into Yahoo! Site Explorer. These site queries measure how many URLs are indexed in each engine. Compare that number to the number of pages that should exist to determine actions required and progress made.

A complete list of the queries available in Google, some of which are also available on Yahoo! and MSN Live, can be found at http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html.

Backlink Metrics

Measuring “backlinks” will show the number of links pointing to various pages across a site. Generally, the more external links that point to your site, the higher your site will rank in natural search results. However, measuring backlinks varies among the search engines.

For Google, enter a “link:” query such as [link:www.yourdomain.com] in the search box. This is a measure of how many backlinks are coming into the entire domain. However, Google only gives the true measure of backlinks in its Webmaster Tools, which anyone can access once they have a Google account.

For Yahoo!, enter the domain into Yahoo! Site Explorer. Click on the “InLinks” tab and filter the results to show four different data sets: (1) all backlinks (internal & external), (2) only external backlinks, (3) only to the home page and (4) to the whole site.

For MSN, the “link:” query is currently disabled in MSN Live, so backlinks cannot be measured there.

How many backlinks should a site have? There is no way to estimate in the way we can for indexation, and the engines aren’t known for giving accurate, specific or detailed backlink data, unfortunately. The best advice for measuring backlinks is to watch the trend rather than be concerned about individual numbers. And more high quality links are always better.

Advanced Link Manager is a tool for scanning and reporting on backlink trends, including number and diversity of domains linking in, anchor text diversity, and a number of other reports.

Ranking Metrics

Rankings are a tricky metric to report on. Rankings (i.e. where your site appears in natural search listings) vary greatly between singular and plural versions of the same term. Moreover, personalized and blended search affect individual rankings so that no two people are likely to get the same ranking result. However, I suggest a couple of ways to attack this issue.

· Targeted. Choose a select set of keyword terms that you’ll target based on keyword research. These will probably include the trophy terms for which management aspires to rank. Use a subscription rank checker such as WebCEO or a free tool such as the Rank Checker plug in for Firefox to check the rankings for the terms you’re targeting. These tools will give you only the rankings for the terms you specify, for the domains you specify.

· Aggregate. Subscription tools like Enquisite offer the ability to track the page on which a term ranks for every keyword that drives natural search to your site. So, say that [widgets] drove 10 visits to mydomain.com. Enquisite would report which URLs on my site drove those 10 visits, and what page in the search results the rankings were on. The information can be sliced and sorted by keyword, URL, IP, date, engine, and more.

Traffic and Revenue Metrics

Natural search-referred traffic is a common measurement in most analytics programs. The “holy grail” for measuring SEO effectiveness is frequently a report combining URL, keyword, traffic, orders, and revenue. Such a report tells you which URLs are effective, and by omission, which are not. It tells you which keywords and keyword phrases drive traffic, and by omission which don’t. And it tells you which URLs and terms drive sales through natural search and which don’t.

Consider which pages were optimized and how, for which keywords. Those pages and keywords are the ones where you should expect to see growth. Only by performing large-scale programmatic optimizations, like title tags across the entire site, would you expect to see a site-wide increase in traffic. Most optimization efforts will improve performance for individual pages and keywords. Knowing which pages and keywords are most valuable to your business will guide those optimization efforts.

You can see the full article here

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1014-Measuring-SEO-Performance

In this article we are going to touch on something a bit less tangible but no less important, actually it is probably the most important element in establishing a successful development team. Communication is, in my opinion, the most foundational piece of a strong development team.

Where skill, and resources may come up short, if strong communication is in place a team can overcome prepare in advance, and address some of these shortcomings more readily, setting them on the road to success.

With many teams built of diverse parties setting up solid lines of communication is key. Developers, project managers, marketing, front end designers, and quality assurance personnel are just a few of the many parties that make up a solid dev team for products and projects. With so many different people, perspectives, and skill sets touching the project it can become very easy for details to slip through the cracks that end up slowing down the workflow, hindering progress, delaying deadlines, and contributing to headaches and frustrations on all ends.

Those of us who work in this team environment have experienced this in one form or another, and more than likely something will slip through regardless. With this in mind I have compiled a few simple practices, along with a couple of applications that can help open up the lines of communication.

Learn to Dabble in Disciplines.

One great way to increase the value of your contribution to the development/project team is to gain an understanding of the other team members disciplines. This doesn’t mean that we have to become experts in their fields but gaining an understanding of their roles and responsibilities will help us to provide the right information in the right format to make their job that much easier (not to mention score some brownie points with them).

In our team I have found it helpful when preparing front end designs to ask alot of questions of our engineers, so as to avoid providing files, designs that simply aren’t practical from a development perspective. I am still a pretty big noob when it comes to .net but since that is the framework we develop in I have made an effort to understand their world, and what would make life easier for them. I would suggest even going beyond frameworks and code, and find out how to prep designs, and deliver files in a way that makes life easier for them.

By expanding our horizons to understand each of the team’s disciplines we make life a bit easier for everyone, and learn to communicate more effectively in ways that help others be more efficient, and well equipped in their roles within the team environment. Besides the initial benefits we also expand our skill set which opens up new avenues within our current jobs, as well as in our future endeavors. We should never stop learning.

Go get your Intel

This is a very critical point. We can only be responsible for ourselves, and I would strongly encourage all of us to be proactive in getting info about projects/products. If you are unsure about something, ask, and then ask again until you feel comfortable with your understanding of the scope, and your role in the project.

This brings the focus to the most important aspect of communication… Listening, don’t just hear what is being said, listen, ask questions and make sure that you understand, repeat what is being said back to the team, that way there is little room for misunderstanding, and mis-communication, it will also validate your team members, showing them that you value their input and efforts in the project. Some of this may sound pretty rigid, but if we can take these extra steps it will really help us in the communication process.

Tools of the Trade

In some circumstances team members may work remotely or off-shore this can also make communication a bit tough at times. Using tools/apps can help bridge the gaps, and keep everyone on the same page.

For project collaboration, task management, file sharing, time tracking, and version tracking we use Basecamp by 37signals. I am sure there are other project management software/apps out there but this one has proven itself to be a very valuable tool, and is very affordable.

For more immediate communication we also use Skype as this allows for instant access when questions, and issues may arise.

There are other resources out there, and if your team isn’t using something I would encourage you to be proactive, find something that will fit best with your team.

Wrapping Up

By no means is this a call to arms, my hope is that we can be encouraged in our efforts to better our development team. This effort starts with us, team development is an investment in our projects and fellow team members. Listening, learning other skills, and being proactive in communication are just a couple of foundational ideas for better team communication, as projects come and go many different situations will arise, and they will provide new challenges, as long as we are communicating openly the challenges can be faced, overcome, and turned in to successful solutions.

Next up in the series “There is no “I” in Team, and no “U” in Win” dealing with conflict, and disagreements in development.

For many of us single line css, our own routines, choice of naming conventions and personal approach to writing and organizing code is a way of life, and we are very comfortable in it. When working as a part of a development team a lot of these comfort-zones can be challenged, but the ability to be flexible not only saves frustration, but also says a lot to those we work for about our ability to be a productive part of a team, which goes along way in the work place. Here are some things that I have learned, tried, and found to be very helpful. I will provide reference links so you can do more research if so inclined.

1) Link / Import your stylesheets, and scripts.

This may seem like simple beginner css/html, but we must remember that everyone on our team my not be well versed in our areas of expertise. The cleaner and more organized our html (and css) files are the easier it is for others to pick them up navigate through the code and execute their project responsibilities.

One of the ways to do this is to keep all styles out of the html in an external style sheet that you link or import to the html file. The same goes for scripts wether we are using jquery, mootools, or some other scripting we should do our best to keep it out of the main html document (there are exceptions… google scripts, flash, and browser detection to name a few).

The main idea is to keep our code very clean, readable, and easy for others to use. When we compartmentalize our different code elements it makes it easier for others to know what to expect, where to find it, and keeps a solid framework for team development from initial development to revisions. For more on this check out Jina bolton’s presentations on Sexy Stylesheets there are some great insights.

2) The Name Game – Responsible Convention Naming

When creating our html and css files it can be easy (for times sake) to cut some corners and name our div id’s and classes very general terms. Initially I can understand this thought process, but I think we do out team members a disservice by taking this simple approach.

If someone were to pick up our work and need to edit it would our naming conventions help them get to the section they need to edit quickly, or would they have to search through our files filtering through general terms to try to find it?

As you can see this isn’t very efficient, I am sure that many of you are thinking “that sounds great in principal, but it just isn’t practical.” I agree there are times and environments that don’t lend to this idea, but as much as we can we should make our best effort to help our team by clearly defining “id’s” and “classes”, so that when someone else picks up one of our files to edit, they can easily find the section where the edits need to take place.

Using terms like main, left, right may seem easy and even familiar to us, but can lead to frustration when digging though files looking for content to edit/update. We should try to give our id’s and classes names that describe their purpose and placement on the page.

Andy Clarke put it well when he said.

“ That is why I think that establishing a set of naming conventions makes sense, not because I’m some kind of Maoist revolutionary who thinks that we should all wear the same grey boiler suits, but because it can make life easier for us and our end-users. “

Our team members and end-users should be the driving force behind setting up good practices. I encourage you if you haven’t to check out his site, and especially his writings I have found them very informative, and helpful.

Again for those of us who use css/html on a more advanced scale some of these concepts may seem simple, but we must remember that the focus of this series is to work towards bettering our development team.

3) Use Comments

If we take into consideration the above ideas and build upon them further by implementing a comment system we all but serve up great mark up on a silver platter for our dev teammates.

Working with Mike A (@miacevedo) we implemented commenting for easy browsing through code, as well as version tracking to help keep track of when revisions happened and who executed them. This allows us to both work on the same style sheet, or html pretty seamlessly, and will without a doubt increase efficiency of our front end development efforts.

This is something that I also picked up from Jina Bolton’s “Creating Sexy Stylesheets” presentation.

 As you can see a them the idea is to communicate well by the code we write. At times this will cause us to have to take some extra steps, and go beyond what is asked of us, but in the end it will lend to a better end result, not to mention earn the respect of our teammates, which will go a long way. The only way we can see improvement in our development team is if we start with our contribution.

Wrapping Up

These are just a few simple tips that I have picked up along the way. A lot of the concepts and inspiration comes from talks that I have heard and blogs that I have read. There is a wealth of knowledge out there just waiting to be soaked up.

If you have any input, or tips that you have used, please feel free to share them.

So this is the start of a new series on designing/developing in a team environment and how to take steps to ensure that you and your team are working towards success. Wether you are a team lead/manager or one of the cog’s in a bigger mechanism each role is important and if we can learn what we can contribute to the team we can help insure the success of the products/web sites that we are a part of creating.

The series will be split into four parts:

1) Coding in a team environment.

2) Effective Dev Team Communication.

3) There is no I in team… and no U in win.

4) Wrapping things up.

Hopefully as we look at these (an possibly a couple extra) points we will be able develop a focused pursuit of development team bliss, granted it may not be as easy as it sounds, but developing a solid dev team that works together to accomplish a common goal is instrumental to the success of any design firm, start up, and or top secret missions.