301 2.0

If your redesign amounts to a platform change, such as moving from HTML to PHP, with your existing URLs all remaining intact but changing their file extensions, congratulations. Your redirection issues will be relatively minor and you can simply use a universal instruction to redirect/filename.oldextension to /filename.newextension. The 301 header code tells engines the new URL has replaced the site’s old URL, so the new URL should replace the old one in the engine’s index as well.

When you toss in a global revision of content and site structure, things get much more complicated. The conventional redirection advice, that you use a 301 (permanent) redirect from old URLs to new ones, is sound. I’ve recommended this many times and am always satisfied with the results. But it’s not an adequate answer to many subsequent questions.

Suppose your old site had a page devoted to reviews of Product X. In the new site, you decided to build out the content of the main Product X page and incorporate reviews on that same page. Because the Product X reviews page has no direct counterpart in the new architecture scheme, it’s reasonable to redirect the old Product X reviews page to the new main Product X page.

Engines are much faster at processing directives like this than ever before. Assuming your redirects are set up correctly, you’ll frequently see new URLs show up in SERPs within a couple days of your new site launch.

One thing to remember about 301 redirects is that while the index transfer from the old URL to the new one is permanent, the associated rankings may not be. Initially, after you implement a 301 redirect, the new URL will likely rank for the same things the old one did. But over time, the new URL’s content and incoming links must reflect similar or improved content to retain rankings.

XML Sitemap Feeds

With a large shift from one group of URLs to another, be zealous about finding ways to get them indexed as quickly as possible. During a redesign in which significant architectural changes occur and URL structure changes, it’s a good idea to populate your XML sitemap feed with both old and new URL lists for at least a month or two. Theoretically, you could keep your old URLs in the sitemap feed forever, but once you see the new URLs consistently showing up in all major engines for a few months, you’re better off pulling the old URLs out of the XML feed to save bandwidth and server resources, and to let the spiders spend their limited time more productively — on your actual pages.

Note that dual-listing URLs in your XML feed is a supplement to a solid 301 strategy, not a replacement for one. It simply provides robots with one more way to notice the redirects you’ve placed on old URLs as well as a direct route to the new URLs on your site.

Another caveat is this technique is likely invalid if you’re redirecting content from one subdomain to another. A given sitemap feed must include URLs only on that specific host. In other words, if you’re shifting new URLs from www.domain.com to www.newsub.domain.com, the sitemap file that sits on www.domain.com cannot contain URLs from www.newsub.domain.com. In that case, the best route is to quickly generate a new feed exclusively for www.newsub.domain.com.

Robots.txt

A way to bolster the effects of your XML sitemap feed is to be sure to place its location in your robots.txt file. It’s a very simple operation, and requires only one line of code: sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml. “Domain.com” is your own domain, and “sitemap.xml” is the correct name of your sitemap file. Remember, there’s no right or wrong location within the robots.txt file to place this line.

A final but important note about the role of robots.txt in a redesign: be sure to include both old and new exclusions during a rollover period. Suppose you want to exclude your site’s search results pages from being indexed. If your old search results pages would be excluded with this line: disallow: /search/, but your new search results pages reside in this line: /cgi/results/, then beginning at relaunch, you should have both of these lines in your robots.txt file.

Do this because during the transition time from one set of URLs to another, you must be sure both old and new URLs are excluded until the old ones no longer exist in the index.

The Bottom Line

Relaunching a site is a difficult practice often mired in tedious details. But each hour spent in preparation often saves a day or even a week in retrofitting or fixing errors. It’s true you should build sites primarily for users, not for engines. But during a redesign, you really need to think about the bots.

Reference material for this article: http://www.clickz.com/3626928

For any business ready to plunk down a sizable portion of its marketing budget for organic search marketing, these are legitimate questions. In fact, the questions apply to nearly any purchase. How many calories does this have? What are the odds that I’ll walk again after surgery? How long will this new roof last?

In a metric-crazed industry like SEM, it’s odd that most SEM firms throw up their hands and say, “We’re not really sure. It depends.”

A Common Industry Dilemma

In his “Oilman” blog, Range Online’s in-house SEO guru Todd Friesen recently wrote an interesting post about the difficulties of forecasting organic SEO results. It made me feel better knowing it’s a pretty common problem across the industry.

I use (and recommend) several keyword prediction programs, which share one shortcoming: an inability to predict monthly query volume based on a very narrow share of total online searches. Keyword tools are very good at showing two terms’ relative popularity, but I think it’s nearly impossible to predict how many people will search for a given term by extrapolating 0.0065 percent of all searches out to universal proportions.

Consequently, to echo Friesen, even if we could guarantee a number one ranking for a set of terms and even if we knew the percentage of clicks that went to rankings one through five, we still couldn’t assume we’d know the grand total of people searching for a unique term.

Progress Is Not Necessarily Linear

“We made three out of your four recommendations. Shouldn’t we see 75 percent of your projected improvement?”

Many clients don’t understand, often because it’s not fully explained by the SEM firm, that various site recommendations and their resulting benefits aren’t always independent or linear. In other words, if four recommendations (A, B, C, and D) to a site architecture constitute 100 percent of our recommendations, making three of the four does not mean the company will reap 75 percent of the ideal site improvement. They might be completely reliant on one another. If change A means breaking down a crawling obstacle to deep pages, but changes B, C, and D are enhancements to deep pages, then a site will see no meaningful improvement unless change A is made.

The Paradox of Experience

Making matters worse, there’s often an unfortunate paradox in the relationship between clients’ SEO/SEM awareness and an SEM firm’s ability to help them. Businesses ignorant of SEO principles often have the most to gain from a good program because their sites possess such poor architecture. Yet knowing so little about SEM, these clients are difficult to find and it’s sometimes hard to explain the potential benefits.

Similarly, SEO-savvy clients have likely done their homework, implemented some sound changes on their own, and may have only a few issues that must be ironed out.

What’s the Answer?

About the best we can do is use past performance of a variety of sites to determine a range of potential improvement. In other words, find sites whose baselines best match the current client’s initial circumstances, and show the various results of no, partial, or complete implementation of the SEM firm’s recommendations. In determining that magical “initial circumstance,” take into account factors such as:

• Percent of the site currently indexed versus total theoretical page count.
• Total number of issues found during a comprehensive site analysis (with issues weighted according to severity and difficulty/time spent in implementing).
• The site’s current list of referring keyword phrases compared to a list of potential short- and long-tail phrases for that industry.
• Percent of existing content that requires minimal changes made. This could be as simple as determining the percent of pages with identical page titles and meta descriptions or as complex as a full content audit.
• Amount of new content needed to rise to the level of minimal keyword demands for the site’s vertical market.
• An honest assessment from the client about its ability to get changes implemented, as well as a rough timeline. This can be difficult to obtain, because most clients are overly optimistic about their ability to get changes pushed through various layers of bureaucracy.

In graphing these values, present the resulting grid as a visual representation of potential improvement, not guaranteed improvement. An SEM firm’s recommendation document, no matter how brilliant, will never result in search gains until it’s fully and correctly implemented.

If you’re working in-house, don’t despair. Whereas SEM firms might have many campaigns under their belts to use for data, you can too. You can optimize smaller portions of your site and divide them into topical areas, 10-page groups, or whatever is convenient. Call each segment a “campaign” and use the same criteria above to gauge your success over time.

Reap What You Sow

Early in the sales stage, a cursory glance at a site will almost never reveal the full potential of improvements. If a firm promises a certain improvement in results without digging into a site, chances are they’re aiming purposefully low to hedge its bets. This isn’t necessarily bad or dishonest, but it’s important to recognize when evaluating potential vendors.

Reference Article: http://www.clickz.com/3627443

Optimization: Ad copy, landing page testing, keyword management. The best way to combat slipping conversion rates is to optimize the PPC campaign beyond bid management. Tactics like ad copy optimization and landing page optimization allow you to increase your average conversion rate; in some cases, even during steep budget increases. As a nice side benefit, your quality scores should improve and your average cost-per-click should decrease.

Careful scrutiny of your keyword list is also important. Manually managing the bids for your most important terms will ensure that youre not reducing your bids on important brand visibility terms (brand name and generic, but relevant, non-brand keywords that drive a lot of traffic). Another best practice is to look at your search query performance report in AdWords. You can generate useful keyword reports from your analytics software as well. Using this information, an analyst can extract any terms that are irrelevant and add them to the negative keywords list. You should also cross-reference the top converting terms from your organic and paid campaigns. Make sure to optimize for top-ranking paid keywords that have poor organic rankings and bid on top-converting organic keywords that arent currently being purchased. Beware though, because PPC can cannibalize your organic efforts.

Measurement: Latency, lift and cannibalization. Integrating the measurement of PPC, SEO, email and online advertising campaigns creates a holistic view of the traffic acquisition strategy. With this perspective, you can get a better outlook on the subtle (or not so subtle) interactions between the various traffic drivers. You can also attempt to estimate ROI and CPA for each channel. But unless youve invested in highly sophisticated analytics software, you wont be able to understand the latent effects that one channel has on another.

For instance, visitors to an electronics supply web site could take the following path to conversion. First, they click on a banner ad they see on a niche site. They do not convert. Later, they go to a portal site and see a behaviorally retargeted ad, but they do not click through. Next, they view/click your top paid listing in Google for a broad term like electronic supplies, but they still do not convert. There was too much noise in the first set of query results, so the searchers get more specific with their queries, searching for speaker wire suppliers. They see both your top ranked PPC ad and your top ranked organic listing. But they dont click on either. However, all of your branding starts to sink in and these people are eventually compelled to search on Google for a phrase like Acme Electronics Speaker Wire, which includes your brand name in combination with a specific product. This time, they see both your paid and organic listings, click on the paid listing, and eventually buy on your web site.

In this example, its obvious the impressions and clicks that didnt create conversions still had value in leading to a conversion. This example also highlights the fact that PPC listings can cannibalize highly-ranked organic listings. So the question is, how much lift or cannibalization does each campaign create and at what additional cost?

The best way to find out is through testing. Simple A/B testing would involve turning off each paid-traffic driver (PPC, email, display ads) one at a time, while keeping the other traffic drivers (online and offline) constant. This can be painful because you are likely to see some reduction in traffic, but the data these tests provide is invaluable. By measuring the lift and cannibalization, you can obtain a more accurate representation of ROI and CPA. With a better understanding of these metrics, you can determine the best budget allocation for each channel, and optimize the marketing mix.

John Faris is Senior Search Analyst at Red Door Interactive. He helps plan, implement, test, measure, and optimize traffic acquisition strategies and tactics for Red Doors clients. The Paid Search column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

Links Create Direct Traffic
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