Learning from the Experts: SEO Performance Metrics

Sangeeta Kumar
Sangeeta reporting from #SMX #11B It's back to my first love,SEO; so today I will be attending all SEO seminars. Two back-to-back sessions on SEO Performance Metrics that matter that was PACKED with information. It was divided into two sessions: General and Technical. The general session focused on why rankings don't make much difference and why other factors matter. Vanessa Fox and Ryan from Sapient were two of the speakers. According to Vanessa, results take a long time to happen. Moreover, personalization, localization and search history ensures that results are never the same, even on the same computer. As Ryan mentioned, for an attorney it may take up to two years. So some of the parameters of a successful campaign would be:
  • Traffic
  • Leads
  • Conversion rate
  • Qualified leads
  • Cases
  • Wins
  • Company growth
The technical session speakers Dixon Jones of Majestic SEO and David Burgess of Ayima were terrific, and they laid it bare which is pretty unusual in these seminars. As per Dixon Jones of Majestic SEO:Google help is 500 pages. Read it. It gets updated regularly. Crawler issues are important for SEO: Is Google seeing your content fast enough?
  1. Avoid shared hosting.
  2. Check the IP of other websites on the same server. They will be stealing your share of GB attention.
  3. Minimize the number of URLs that Google bot can see.
  4. Check log files.
  5. Google bot backs off if it sees 500 errors.
  6. Track 404s (soft). They create a lot of duplicate content, and Google does not like it.
  7. Set up email notification in WMT.
  8. Track % of pages dropped at speed.
  9. Most webpages have duplicate titles.
  10. Unique content!
David Burgess of Ayima Early Warning signs in SEO:
  • Has the website code been changed?
  • Has the hosting been changed?
  • Have normal indexations been changed?
  • Have you gained /lost links?
  • Are there spikes in brand citations?
  • Hardcore technical skills
  • 301 redirects increase
  • Robot.txt monitoring opens the entire site to crawl
  • If your site has authority, Google will look to discover new URLS
  • Includes concatenating fragments of URLs found on page
The next session that I will attend is Penguins and Pandas: Surviving the Google Beast.
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Sangeeta Kumar

Sangeeta Kumar is the Vice President of Web Marketing for GMR Web Team, a global online marketing, strategy, development and maintenance agency. Sangeeta is a jack-of-all-trades kinda person in the world of Internet marketing, excelling in market research to come up with a strategy based on the latest trends to get a website on page 1. She knows her stuff and enjoys a good discussion on SEO anywhere, anytime.

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