Your SEO & Web Analytics Questions Answered (#7mktgsins)

Posted By Hollis Thomases on Feb 3rd, 2011

Last week, Hollis Thomases gave an encore presentation of her popular webinar The Seven Deadly Sins of Online Marketing for the Cornell Entrepreneur Network. The 45 minute session was packed with tons of real examples, practical advice and “what NOT to do” takeaways spanning the topics of SEO, PPC, online media, social media, web analytics, and more. We’d like to give a HUGE “thank you” to the over 200 professionals who attended, and to everyone else who followed along on Twitter (#7mktgsins)!

Because there were so many attendees and only 15 minutes allotted to Q&A time, a lot of additional questions poured in afterward, and Hollis has taken the time to respond to each one individually. We’ve grouped the questions into topical batches, and we’ll be sharing the answers here in addition to the follow-up emails attendees will be receiving.

Today’s Topic: SEO & Web Analytics

1. Can you talk more about the content management systems and why they are not good for search engines?

The best elaboration I can give you resides in this blog post we did last year: Why Your CMS Isn’t SEO-Friendly: 9 Things Your Developer Didn’t Tell You.

2. Do you approve of any of the content management systems out there? Are any of them SEO friendly?

There are a lot of SEO-friendly content management systems out there, but be cautious because there are a lot of no-so-great ones, too. We’re leery of any custom-developed CMSs that don’t provide the end user with a lot of control over basic SEO elements, like title tags, meta tags, header tags, and so on. If your website is on a PHP (Linux-based) server, there are a few great open-source solutions available like Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress—all free. On the .NET (Microsoft-based) side, your choices are much more limited, but one that works well is ADXStudio.

3. You mentioned that you don’t think flash on a website is effective. The Visit Baltimore site has a series of photos that rotate on the home page. What is your point of view on the Visit Baltimore approach?

It’s not that Flash isn’t effective on a website — it can be quite effective — but that Flash is not a search engine-friendly addition to a website. Therefore, if you want a search engine-friendly site, what you don’t want to do is have an entire Flash-based site or have Flash dominate your home page without a balance of other SEO-friendly elements. For example, if you scroll down the home page of Baltimore.org, you’ll see that they have static HTML text and that this text contains keyword-rich anchor links. This helps to balance out the Flash component above. [Full disclosure: Baltimore.org is our client and we’ve been providing them with SEO services for the past seven years.]

4. Who typically performs the web analytics roles - IS dept? Marketing dept?

I wouldn’t say there’s anything “typical” in this area, though I would say that it’s common for IT/IS to install and maintain the web analytics software code on the website. Data analysis is part science, part skill, and it’s not necessarily even within the capabilities of an IT or marketing person. Raw data can certainly be pulled by anyone and that data can even be further manipulated by anyone who’s given a guide as to how to present this data, but the ability to read into and extrapolate information or “the story” from data isn’t something everyone can do. Larger companies often have dedicated personnel who specialize in data (or competitive) analysis.

If your company isn’t large enough to support such a position, I would advise that you try to identify someone within the organization who’s good with data and then task them with helping you review your web analytics. You might also want this person to learn how to use the Web-based analytics dashboard. Remember, you’re looking for trends over time and what goes missing as much as what appears anew. Web Ad.vantage does provide training in Web Analytics Analysis to in-house staff if that becomes your next question.

5. What does optimization of robots.txt files mean and does that help optimization? Are sitemaps also helpful?

Robots.txt is a simple text file that resides in the root of your website; for example, http://www.example.com/robots.txt. It is used to give instructions to search engine robots (also called “spiders” or “crawlers”) that control how they index your website. For example, you can use the robots.txt file to tell spiders to ignore entire directories of your website, rendering them “invisible” to search engines, which in turn is very useful for hiding certain content that you don’t want to appear in search engines. More information about robots.txt and can be found here: http://www.robotstxt.org.

Like robots.txt, the sitemap.xml file is also used for the benefit of search engine spiders, and resides in your website’s root directory. It contains a list of all the individual pages/URLs that comprise your website, along with additional information about each URL for spiders, including when it was last updated and how important it is relative to the other URLs in the list. Larger, more complex sites may use multiple sitemap files to better organize the massive list of URLs. It should also be noted that there is a big difference between a sitemap.xml file a sitemap “page.” A sitemap page is meant for human visitors, while a sitemap.xml is meant for search engines. More information about the sitemap.xml standard can be found here: http://sitemaps.org/.

6. During your response to the first question of the question/answer session, I believe you said to make sure your best keywords were in your meta tags. Please see the following posting.

As you know, Google — though the largest — is not the only search engine out there. Though Google doesn’t (or at least says it doesn’t) pay attention to keywords in meta tag data, the other search engines still do and when we perform SEO, we aren’t ignoring the other search engines just because one does something one way and the others do it a different way. There’s pretty much no harm in using keywords in meta tags either so having them there properly (not stuffed) is still seen by most SEOrs as a good practice.

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