Minutes after running the YSlow Firefox/Firebug add-on, I noticed some low hanging fruit. No HTTP compression on their server. 

I told them, ‘Just do it.’ They had to ask why. 

First, it will save you bandwidth, and bandwidth is money, right? Here’s a nice case study from IBM that details the bandwidth impacts server compression has on overall bandwidth. 

Second, and more important, because engines only index pages to a certain volume, the rest of the page is lost. Implementing it is a change that not only reduces the bottom line, but provides growth into new areas of SEO. 

According to Sitepoint the engines stop points are:

That means most pages with a footprint more than 210 kb in download size will not be indexed completely by yahoo, and that’s something that could be tragic. 

Links: 

Stakeholders often look for immediate results in rankings, and that they will maintain a steady curve increase. This isn’t the case, report on the incoming traffic, and not the rankings. SEO will increase the organic inbound traffic, and stakeholders can understand this if it’s communicated to them. 

Stakeholders also often feel that since the research was done on a keyword, the site should rank on that keyword. Certain keywords are more difficult to rank on than others, and the process of the search engine crawling the site varies. There are also a lot of other variables that factor in, and it’s not a 100% process. No business process is 100%. 

When stakeholders see numbers it sets an unrealistic expectation. The numbers, the rankings and the analytics often set a false sense that the entire process is as sharp, defined and quantitative as the numbers. This isn’t the case. I like to relate it to the stock market, it’s up and down, but there is a trend. This analogy resonates with a lot of stakeholders.

It appears that the engines have indexed the pages from the old domains, but they are not reindexing those pages. Right now, they are are ’301ing’ requests for the old domain to a new domain, and most of the pages that were indexed were in the lower levels of Google’s Index. The pages are in the Supplemental or Secondary index. The ’301′ response to the search bot would take care of it, but the engines aren’t indexing the site. So, the engines don’t know that the pages have changed. 

The engines need to reindex the site. This will return the ’301′ redirects that will update the index. 

Since they still owned the domain, they could still establish a webmaster account for the domain with the engine’s webmaster tools, and then verify the domain by uploading the validation HTML template. 

That can be done at the following URLs: 

    Bing Webmaster Tools – http://www.bing.com/webmaster/

    Google Webmaster Tools – https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

    Yahoo SiteExplorer Tools – https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ 

Once the validation is done, create a new ‘sitemap.xml’ file, and submit the sitemap to the search engines. One of my favorite tools to create sitemaps is : http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ Point the sitemap starting URL to one of the validation HTML files, and the sitemap will only have one entry. 

Once the sitemap is submitted, this will cause the engine to reindex the old domain, thus removing all the older pages in the cache. 

SEO in the enterprise is best accomplished by SEO governance, accountability and education. Many departments in organizations feel that since they are not in the trenches of SEO, they don’t have to be concerned about it, but a solid reporting and education program can help alleviate that feeling.  

The discipline of SEO in the enterprise needs to liaison not only between IT and Marketing, but between the product side, sales and design. 

Creating a business process to implement SEO is the only way to ensure long-term commitment to SEO in a corporate environment. That process needs to be based on best practices, and incorporated into the business workflow. 

Position Monitoring  /  If you do nothing else, monitor the position of key pages. You can use a program to do it, but don’t monitor too much. Using page monitoring software is a violation of the term of service for most search engines, and can get you banned. It’s a lot like the speed limit, as long as you don’t over do it, you’ll be fine. 

Analytics Monitoring  /  Monitoring your analytics will help you see if your users change, and they will. They might change slowly over time, but they will change. That means that your SEO efforts will also need to change with them. It also helps a lot to set up a funnel report for your site’s conversions. This will be a key metric that will indicate a change that needs to be addressed. 

Content so Fresh  /  All sites need to be living, growing sites. So, it’s good to monitor this, so that it can be paced so that the bots and users can expect fresh content on a regular basis. Don’t forget images; new images can breath new life into sites. 

A well thought out, and written monitoring plan can help ensure continued SEO success. Continued monitoring of the right metrics is essential, and it will help your SEO efforts become part of the business process. 

Sales or leads are evident as conversions, but what if you don’t sell anything on your site? If your site is in place to build a brand, or communicate a message, then when a user lands on that page, they are a conversion. Your goal has been reached. 

Conversions are more clear cut in a sales or a lead generation site. Every conversion has steps the user follows to make it to the conversion point. This is often represented as a funnel, and it’s great to look at a funnel report in your analytics package. Once set up, it can help you identify places in the sales cycle that users fail to make it to the next step. For example, if you have a large number of visitors delivered from organic search results, and those users are failing to convert, that might indicate a problem with the user’s expectations based on the search terms. 

You can test several designs and funnels using A/B testing or multivariate testing. Your analytics package might be able to help you implement this, and it’s best tracked in your analytics package. The concept is you test, for example, two versions of a page and then collect data on the one that leads to the most users doing what you want them to do. 

The best solution is ongoing analysis; make it part of the business process. The SEO landscape is constantly changing because search engines change the way the rank and competitors change their efforts. Plan to spend at least a couple hours a week at analysis. It gives you a good way to gauge your efforts, and to let you know if you have achieved your goals. Best of all, a good competitive analysis report can help set expectations by making the process a bit more transparent in your organization.

When you do your analysis, make sure that you look at the right metrics:

    • Site ranking on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

    • How many pages are indexed?

    • Measure the page titles on a scoring index, or individual metrics (keyword, character count)

    • Measure the meta data for relevance

    • Look at the information architecture, and rank that metric

    • How effective does your competition use the robots.txt file or a sitemap.xml fie

    • How do you rate their content

    • What does their link structure look like? 

Once you have a template set up based on the SEO goals, you can use that as an effective communications tool. Your stakeholders will come to expect the report, and become a part of the process.

The fluctuation of success can be caused by the search algorithms, changes to the site or efforts of your competitors to gain rankings. Therefore, rankings and traffic are best measured long-term. 

Setting realistic expectations can help your campaign maintain forward movement, keep pressure low, ensure success. Expectations drive the stakeholders actions and decisions. 

Remember, when you are defining expectations, be SMART -  Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound.

People expect immediate results. Be sure to set these expectations first. Also, it helps to have a few low hanging SEO fruit that you can implement. If needed, you can pull that card out and play it. SEO can take months to see results, be sure to pass that along to the stakeholders.

It’s also essential that you maintain touch points within the organization to be able to reset the expectations anytime it looks like the campaign starts lagging, but most important, it allows you to know what’s going on in the organization. Be an evangelist, that will ensure people understand the process better, and know what to expect. 

Google Analytics is a good solid choice for baseline stats, but will not provide your analytics with very strong of a competitive advantage. It’s free, and everyone uses it. The most important thing is to collect baseline stats, those are stats taken before any SEO changes are made. The more historical analytics you can collect the better. If you haven’t set up Google Analytics or another script based package to collect the historical data, it might be a good idea to assess you server logs. Log based analytic packages can be loaded with historical logs, so if they are on your server, they can be loaded and analyzed. 

Looking at the referring sites will let you know if you are getting inbound links, and if the number is increasing or decreasing. In addition, this metric will help you identify new partners. 

Keyword tracking will let you know the search terms people are using to find your site. This report is invaluable. It will help you further refine your keyword research. 

This report will let you know how targeted your pages are for the searchers.