• Reach – create buzz, get new customers, create awareness
• Reputation and influence – become an authority/thought leader, improve sentiment
• Engagement – improve customer and brand loyalty

But how do you determine if your campaign is successful? First you need to determine your objective. If you have a new product launch, you probably want to build some buzz and create awareness (Reach). If you have added new features to your product, you will want to measure it’s effect on user engagement/loyalty. If your goal is to increase your influence and reputation, you can start aggregating content or create your own (via a corporate blog for instance).

This is a rapidly evolving field and the tools and metrics used to determine success are changing quickly. Don’t be afraid to throw away metrics, the most important thing is that you start tracking. Below I list some methods for objectively measuring your success.

Measuring Reach

• Visitors – The number of people visiting your site and the source of that traffic. This can be measured using standard web analytics tools like Google Analytics. If you want to benchmark against peers/competitors use tools like Compete/Alexa.
• Number of Friends/Followers/Fans (applies to Facebook, SlideShare, etc…) – I don’t believe Twitter followers is a good metric to measure since there is a lot of spam. Much more important is quality of visitors (i.e. one Oprah or Michael Arrington is much more valuable then 1000 followers). Measuring 2nd degree relationships (number of friends of friends), is much more valuable (albeit more difficult to measure).
• RSS Subscriptions – Feedburner
• Links – When sharing links, you can use tools like bit.ly to determine how many people have clicked on it. Just add a + to the end of any bit.ly link (check out my self-referential example: http://bit.ly/16GZ6x+).

Measuring Reputation and Influence

• Number of public mentions (Blogs, Twitter, Facebook) – To measure public mentions on blogs you can subscribe to an RSS feed for your company/product/brand/name on Google Blog Search. For public mentions on Twitter subscribe to an RSS feed from Twitter Search. For Facebook, use Lexicon (this is more interesting as a tool to compare against your competitors, though they are undoubtedly improving this tool and I’m sure will add a y-axis soon).
• Incoming links (SEO) – This is the primary way Google measures the authority of pages when ranking search results. Use tools like Google Webmaster Tools, Xinu Returns and Technorati to track these.
• Comments about you on other sites – Since Google doesn’t index comments on blogs (most often), you can find out using tools like BackType.
• Retweets – Twitter Search
• Unsolicited positive mentions – I love this metric, there’s not much you can do to actively improve this, but if you are tracking it and are open, transparent and engaging your users properly, people will speak positively about you.

Measuring Engagement
You can use standard web analytics tools (Google Analytics) to measure:

• Visitor Loyalty – The number of return visitors over 1 month
• Recency – The number of return visitors over 1 week
• Duration – The length of time spent on the site
• Actions – The number of actions taken on the site: downloading, posting, commenting, playing, etc…

The absolute numbers are not important. Track these numbers month over month and look for an upwards trends.

Off-site engagement metrics include:

• Facebook – You can use FB insights to measure the number of actions on your fan page: comments, likes, wall posts, etc…
• YouTube – Youtube has it’s own analytics for measuring video plays.
• Trendrr – Trendrr is an awesome tool which let’s you measure public mentions and music/video plays across a variety of sites.

In short there is no easy way to measure your success across social media. Sure there are short cuts like Twitalyzer, which is nice for at a glance metrics, but if you have the time coming up with your own set of metrics is far more valuable. This all assumes that your brand is small enough that you don’t get thousands of public mentions a day. If you do, you’ll have to call in one of the big boys like Visible Technologies or Sentiment Metrics.

Anything I missed? Anything else you track? Let me know on Twitter or in the comments…

Related posts:

1. Slides from Social Media Training Sessions
2. Comparison of Free Social Media Monitoring Tools
3. B2B Social Media Marketing

As part of my previous job, I used to manage development and operations for some pretty big entertainment and ecommerce sites.  While my company didn’t explicitly offer SEO services, we implemented recommendations from third party SEO consultancies.  Outside of work, I recently setup wordpress installations for my two friends (Ballgame’s points and Evan Cobb Jazz) as well as my own personal site.  My buddies keep asking me how to improve traffic to their sites, and now that I have my own, I figured I should put it out there to help and get feedback from the community.  My plan is to set reasonable goals, define tangible steps, and show (through Google Analytics/Webmaster screenshots), the results.

Goals (we’re talkin’ baby steps here)

Here’s my first two (modest) goals for the site:

• Unfortunately for me, there is another Amit Klein who is a well published expert in the field of Network Security.  In a google search for “amit klein” my site isn’t even in the first 10 pages (I stopped checking after that).  Goal #1: Get my site to show up within the first two pages when I search for my name.
• It’s great that some of my friends have seen the site, but I  want to create a real online presence and attract some visitors who are interested in the topics I’m writing about.  Let’s start small – Goal #2: Attract 50 visitors in one day without spamming everyone I know.

Let’s take a look at where I’m at right now…

Current State (miserable)

• I’ve had this domain name for about 2 years and have used on only as a test environment for some wordpress and drupal installations.  On Sept 22, I setup this wordpress installation at the top level.
• I’ve removed any old installations and setup permanent redirects for any pages in Google’s current index.
• Copied over my old posts from my company blog
• Setup a Google Analytics Account and included the tracking code in the footer file of my site.
• Setup a Google Webmaster Tools account and validated my site.
• Setup a Feedburner Account and link to the RSS feed in the footer of the site.
• Installed two wordpress plugins: All In One SEO Pack and Google Sitemap Generator
• Using the All In One SEO Pack I’ve defined a home page title, description and keywords.
• Using the Google Sitemap Generator, I automatically genereated a sitemap then told Google Webmaster Tools about it:

• On the sitemap tab above, It says that 1/22 of the pages in my sitemap are currently in Google’s Index.  The overview tab below says that Google’s spider last indexed my site on 9/18 (4 days before I setup this blog):

• On the first day of my blog’s launch I let some close friends know about the blog, since then I’ve also setup a twitter account where I’ve announced new blog posts.
• Looking at my Google Analytics traffic my numbers are pretty pathetic (some sites I’ve been managing for my site get multiple thousands unique visitors a day), my best day was the day I launched (with 30 visitors aka all my friends):

• Because I have such few visitors, I can identify exactly who they are (shout out to my readers: Kenny O in Germany, Evan in Nashville, Alyson and Steiner in Denver):

Since I’ve plateaued at about 4 visitors a day and my site isn’t even indexed by Google.  I have my work cut out for me on achieving my goals of getting my name to show up in a Google search and attracting 50 visitors in one day.  Here’s how I’m going to do it:

The Plan

In the short term I plan on implementing as many as I can of the SEO Best Practices including:

• Adding specific tags, meta descriptions and keywords for all my posts
• Create a static HTML sitemap with descriptions of posts and link to it in my footer
• Rewrite titles and title tags to include keywords
• Provide alt tags for all images
• Redirect traffic from amitklein.com to www.amitklein.com

In the long term I plan to:

• Start posting comments to articles I read in the 20 blogs I go through daily.  This is not a ploy to link to my site, I believe if I can make valid points about the post and join the community I can get people interested in me and what I have to say.  Only if it’s appropriate link back to articles I’ve written.
• Be more active on Twitter, get more friends/followers and engage people through microblogging.
• Join open directories like Yahoo Directory, and The Open Directory Project.
• See if I can write guest posts for blogs I read.
• Find ways to distribute my content through existing syndication channels.
• Explore ways to increase RSS subscription through Feedburner.

I’ll write again once Google indexes my site and share my progress and any other ideas I have.

Related posts:

1. SEO Best Practices
2. Measuring the Success of Social Media Campaigns
3. hello worldl

The purpose of this article is to describe SEO best practices. The list was put together based on recommendations from SEO consultants as well as individual research. This is not meant to serve as a definitive guide since this is a quickly changing field and with every new update to Google’s algorithm, some of these “rules” may no longer apply. Use with caution.

For those looking for introductory material check out how Google crawls, indexes and serves pages, as well as their introduction to SEO.

Introduction

The number one, most important thing to know is the best way to have your pages appear high in search ranking is by having unique, quality, relevant and updated content. All the optimized keywords in the world won’t help if your content isn’t original and fresh.

The sections in this article deal with:

• How to Structure and Optimize Pages
  • General
  • Title Tags
  • Links
  • Meta Keywords / Descriptions
  • URLs
  • Images
• Sitemaps
• Other Technical Improvements
• Additional Ways to Improve your Ranking
• Google Says you Should Avoid…
• Resources

How To Structure and Optimize Content on your Pages

General

• Make sure your HTML, CSS, RSS are valid: http://validator.w3.org/. This allows spiders to more easily index the content on your page. You can check out how a spider views your page by using a text browser like Lynx.
• Include a clear hierarchy and make sure every page is reachable via one static link.
• Make sure the most keyword-rich content is at the top of your page. In specific circumstances, this could mean using includes or unobtrusive javascript to minimize the amount of additional non-content related html is at the top of a page/template.
• H1 tags should define the theme and focus of each page. There should only be one H1 per page. Have H1 tags match the Title tag of the page as much as possible.

Title Tags

• Title tags are the most important on-page element in regards to SEO.
• Make sure to use readable page titles that include information on how people search for the topic (see keyword research below).
• Words at the beginning of title tags are given the most weight. Try to have them be unique. Move the name of the site to the end. (i.e Product – Genre – Department – Sitename)

Links and URLs

• Use descriptive text for links (i.e. Do NOT use “Click Here”). Make sure the anchor text for links are keyword focused.
• If there are multiple links to the same destination page use nofollow tags (i.e. on images, arrows, etc… where there is already a text link)
• Links within content on pages are extremely valuable to search engines. Make sure to link to other pages within your site that have relevant content. Surround links with keyword heavy content (context).
• Have less then 100 links on a page (otherwise Google thinks you are a link farm)
• If there is any navigation within flash, use text links behind the flash using <noscript> tags (so search engines can get to those pages).
• Make URLs as human readable as possible. Include keywords and datetime (where applicable).

Meta Keywords and Descriptions

• Meta descriptions should be one to two sentences summarizing the content of the page and using main keywords.
• Meta description should be listed just before meta keywords.
• Generally 4-8 keywords are enough, don’t repeat phrases, pluralize words when possible (spiders can determine singular versions), include common misspellings

Images

• You can use full sentences or phrases for alt text for images.
• Use the full name of people and any event information as a caption/alt text.
• Use phrases full of keywords surrounding a photo.

Sitemaps

There are two types of sitemaps HTML and XML. XML sitemaps are used directly by search engines. HTML sitemaps are useful for your users as well as by search engines.

Tips for building a good HTML sitemap:

• Link to the sitemap from the footer of every page on the site (including any splash/landing pages).
• Do not include more then 50 links per page (if there are more create individual sitemaps per section)
• The anchor text should be the main keyword being targeted.
• Provide a short description of the page being linked to.  Make sure the sitemap is still usable for real visitors who are searching for content on your site.

Other Techical Improvements

• Redirect all traffic from non-www url to www (i.e. http://amitklein.com should redirect to http://www.amitklein.com).
• Create and upload a robots.txt file for every single domain and subdomain. The robots.txt tells spiders what not to index (i.e. ajax layout files, data files, CMA, etc…).
• Serve a customized 404 error page

Additional Strategies for Improving your Ranking

• Use Google Webmaster Tools to upload sitemaps and robot.txt, specify preferred geographical location, check for crawling errors, see keywords related to your site, etc…
• Submit your site to directories and aggregators like Yahoo Directory, and The Open Directory Project.
• Use keyword tools to see if the way you describe a topic matches the way that people search for that topic. You can use the following tools to find the most common keywords describing particular topics:
  • Word Tracker
  • Keyword Discovery
  • Google Trends
  • Yahoo Buzz Index
• Get other sites to link to your pages (backlinks)

Google Says you Should Avoid…

Taken from Google Webmaster Guidelines:

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don’t send automated queries to Google.
• Don’t load pages with irrelevant words.
• Don’t create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.
• Tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.

References

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Google Webmaster Central Blog
• http://www.webconfs.com/15-minute-seo.php

Related posts:

1. Increasing WordPress Traffic (Part 1)
2. Measuring the Success of Social Media Campaigns