We’ve been tracking quite a few domains and keywords on Live for sometime now. I was curious to see if Microsoft made an effort to improve the actual results within their new search engine Bing, and not just dress up Live.com results. It looks like they definitely made a few changes to how they rank sites. This isn’t the case for every keyword across the board, but a good amount of the keywords we’re tracking significantly changed positions on the 13th of last month.  Here are some examples …

‘Social media’ is the new craze because of how large sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are getting. The web has been social since it’s existence, it’s all about communication and getting information from one place to another. Forums were around way before MySpace. These concepts aren’t new they’ve just been implemented in a way that makes it easier for people to connect.

In real life, the more social someone is the more friends they have. The more connected and active you are in your community the more popular you are.

When thinking about search and how to get traffic to your site, the answer is simple … just be more social. Find people who share your interests on Twitter, reply to them and start a conversation. Find blogs that discuss some of the same things you do and comment on them, linking to your blog (with your name, not keywords). Post interesting and relevant content, often. Be active inside forums targeted at your subject of choice. Link to other bloggers from your site, trust me they’ll notice.

Search was originally strictly about content. Google changed that up and realized backlinks are a better indication of what a site is about and not the actual content contained within the site. But lets think about what exactly Goolge has in it’s database … EVERYTHING. They have link data, on-page site data, RSS feed data, email data, browsing history (via their toolbar and web history) and the list goes on and on. One of things we know Google takes into account when ranking content is freshness. It looks for when content on a page was last updated, and the newer, more active pages get ranked better than less active ones (considering everything else is equal). So, it’s not that far of a stretch to think that the more active a website is everywhere on the Internet, the better it will rank considering those places it’s active are relevant to the content it’s targeting, links or no links.

I guess what I’m trying to say is just get out there! Be social in a relevant context (in a way Google can index it) and a nice side effect will be improved rankings and more traffic.

There’s a long standing debate about ranking reports as an KPI (key performance indicator) for the success of an organic SEO campaign. Obviosly, we like ranking reports

This post will go into a few reasons why they are necessary, and valuable data to have. Lots of people have weighed in on the topic …

SEO KPI’s – Use the Right Search Engine Optimization Key Performance Indicators

Will Personal Search Turn SEO On Its Ear?

Are Search Engine Rankings Dead

We’ll be the first to admit, with the advent of WikiSearch, localization and personalized search it’s getting more complicated to measure performance within organic search results, but that doesn’t mean organic ranking data are useless.

Success of any campaign should be measured by conversions. Conversions though, are at the end of the funnel. The journey to a sale begins far before anyone even visits a website, and it often (on the web) begins at search. There are lots of pieces to the puzzle, having those pieces is the first step to success.

Some people say you need to use analytics to measure success.  This is one piece of the puzzle and if you have a very large website, with lots of content, organic traffic is often the easiest initial KPI to measure. If you can make sweaping changes to the site that benefit the way search engines view and spider content then this kind of indicator is great.

The majority of sites out there aren’t large. The issue with organic traffic as an indicator for small websites, is that they’re small. New or small sites don’t get a lot of traffic from search, if any. So, how do you know if the changes you’re making to your site are working or not? How do you know if the topics you’re blogging about are being seen as authoritative to search engines? There’s no way to tell unless you monitor rankings.

Rankings as an indicator are especially important if you’re trying to learn SEO. Optimization is about feedback, and getting feedback as quickly as possible. With search, feedback can be painfully slow. The first thing that your efforts are going to change, however, are rankings. Using this information to adjust some of the things you’re doing will improve rankings and therefore improve everything else as well, provided you’re targeting relevant keywords.

This post on the Bruce Clay blog has some amazing information on other organic SEO performance indicators (page was removed). But, if you aren’t fortunate enough to have the traffic, data, or the time to get into these quite yet, rankings are a perfect place to start. In fact, search is most likely going to be the first place potential customers encounter your brand.

Since the launch we’ve been signing up accounts left and right.  A lot of people have been asking … “Ok, so now I have this ranking info, now what?”

I’ve explained the way AuthorityLabs can provide serious value when used in combination with a good analytics system and keyword research tool a few times, so I thought it would make a good blog post.

First, if you have a website already and you don’t have analytics installed DO IT, right now! Google Analytics is easy to install, easy to use and best of all it’s free. Analytics information is invaluable these days. If you have a contact info form, or you’re actually selling something set up goals so you know what your conversion rate is. Use the Google Analytics Help Center to learn how to set up goals. Once you do this, wait a month so you have some decent data and then find out how much traffic you’re getting from search and which keywords people are using to get there.

Search referrals are telling you how people are finding your site through search. This is basically telling you what Google thinks your site is about. You’ll have some shorter phrases that are probably sending you some traffic, some branded keywords (keywords surrounding your brand name), and a lot of long-tail keywords as well.  Your long-tail keywords are probably making up a good deal of traffic. Go through these keywords and find the ones that are generating the most traffic for you, then export these in a .csv file.

Once you know which keywords are sending you traffic, add those to your AuthorityLabs account. In a day you’ll know where you rank for all those. Here’s where you can find some serious opportunity. For a lot of your keywords you might be near the first spot on Google. For most though, you’re probably not. You’re probably ranking on the 3rd or 4th page for a lot of your keywords. If you’re getting 50 visits a month (for example) and you’re on the 4th page, imagine how much traffic you can get if you’re on the 1st? Finding the keywords that are generating traffic, but where you’re not ranking that well is the first step of the optimization process.

You don’t want to optimize for terms that you don’t have a chance of ranking for, and you don’t want to waste your time on keywords that won’t drive any traffic.

Now that you know what’s going to be worth your time to target get into your favorite keyword research tool. I like Keyword Discovery, but WordTracker is a great one as well. You want to find keywords that support your targeted keyterms.  Keyword research tools will try and give you an idea of search volume. They’ll also give you an indication of how difficult those keywords will be to rank for. Don’t be concerned with this as much. These are meant to be keywords which support your content and linking strategy going forward.

Now it’s time to get cranking. Content is perhaps the single most important element to your search strategy. The more content on your site, the more search engines have in their index, and the greater your chance of ranking for something. If this content is themed correctly, linking correctly and targeting keywords correctly you’ll do even better.

What do you think? What tools are you using? Have you found another way to leverage ranking or traffic information? Let me know.