On the back of Panda, Penguin and any other updates Google has stored in the Zoo, writing SEO content has become more and more about delivering a better user experience.

Gone are the days of keyword laden text that reads poorly and lacks substance. It has been laid to rest and will never return. We’re not mourning.

With ‘quality content’ the buzzwords on everyone’s lips, identifying areas in which you can deliver a better user experience whilst adhering to key SEO techniques is the overall goal.

Below are four aspects of on-page content that enable you to naturally combine interesting, marketable content with SEO copywriting techniques, resulting in a page that is not only likely to rank higher, but turn more visitors into customers.

[...]

Or do you find yourself feeling a bit like Gary Coleman…

He is talking about WordPress, yes?

If you’ve ever tried to optimize WordPress for SEO success you’ve probably said those exact words at some point… some crazy theme breaks something, or a plugin crashes the whole site, or in terms of SEO you get 971 duplicate pages back from your crawl report.

But I don’t think your troubles with WordPress are your fault entirely. I’ve been there too when I was first learning it! Gary Coleman has been there. But this post is an opportunity to move on from that…

Let’s Wipe That Gary Coleman Look Off Your Face!

There’s a lot of well meaning yet misguided info out there. After over two years of battling with (umm… using…) WordPress, I know it can be tricky and frustrating at times, and so I wanted to create a guide that might help clear some of this up.

I’m not here to get into every single little detail and variation, but rather to spend time on the core WordPress features and give special focus on SEO related WordPress issues.

Five Goals of This Post

1. Clear up some confusion about WordPress terminology
2. Explain that WordPress, being a dynamic CMS, is built on relationships (as in “relational database”) – and explain those relationships
3. Show you some hands on, practical tips for setting up your WordPress site with an SEO focus
4. Give you a few ways to cross check SEOmoz’s crawler diagnostics with other sources
5. Get rid of that ‘ol Gary Coleman look!

For This Post, Let’s Assume

• We’re running wordpress.org (the self hosted version)
• This is a single author site (to keep it simple, although not hard to extend the concepts to multi-author)
• We’re not doing any ecommerce, photo galleries, or anything else you’d find in a more custom application of WordPress.
• We’re using Yoast’s SEO for WordPress plugin.

Alright. Everyone ready? LET’S GO!! ….What Chu TALKIN’ Bout WordPress?!

Part 1 – WordPress Terminology

• Explanation of some of the most common terms

Regular Web “Page” vs. WordPress “Page”

Let’s get really basic here for a minute, hope you don’t mind. But I think a lot of people may confuse/interchange a WordPress page with a Web Page.

A web page is a single HTML document that exists at a unique URL. Even if the extension is .php or .asp. The underlying source code is still HTML. This is a WEB page. It does not matter HOW it was created – it loads in your browser as an HTML document and that’s all you need to know. And for the rest of this post, when I say “web page” I’m talking about any HTML document existing at a URL.

But a WordPress page is WordPress’s version of a “static” page. In fact, anytime you’re talking about a page in the context of WordPress, put the word “static” before “page” = “static page” and it will always make more sense.

Pages vs. Posts

This is the second thing people either usually confuse, or have a hard time grasping. To your credit, I think it’s confusing that they’re put side by side in documentation, as if they’re somehow similar. They’re not at all!

Note that pages and posts differ entirely in how they function.

• A post is dated and “time-sensitive” and a page is not.
• A post can belong to categories, tags, dates and authors and a page can not.
• You can access a post from multiple pages – its category, tag, date or author.
• A page is only accessible from where ever you link to it.

Some additional references about pages vs. posts:

• wordpress.com documentation (although not the self hosted version, still applies)
• wordpress codex about pages
• wordpress codex “the dynamic nature of pages”

Categories vs. Tags

Ah. Another sticky point for folks. Some may argue, but I think Yoast would agree. Categories are for your main 5-7 “buckets” of topics that your posts fall into. Tags are there to fine-tune categories, and are usually much more specific that categories.

• Also, you should NOT have a category that is the same as a tag or vice versa. Categories should all be unique from tags.
• And, categories can have hierarchy and tags have no hierarchy.

Author Archives

• Simple. Me like.

Dated Archives

• Easy. Good.

Pagination (Subpages)

Yeah… why is this confusing? The only thing that doesn’t paginate… are PAGES!!  ….WHAT CHU TALKIN’ BOUT??’

Part 2 – Relationships In WordPress

• This part will show you how the different elements within WordPress relate and interact with one another.

Pages – They’re Static

Not much to ‘splain here (I hope by now!).

• Pages are like regular, non-blog pages on a website.
• They can have a hierarchy.
• They will not go into the RSS feed.

Use Pages For The Following Types Of Content

• An “About Us” section
• If a dentist, say a page about “dental implants” describing your service.
• If a restaurant, your Menu Page.
• Directions page
• Fees page etc.

Posts->Categories

Think of “Many To Many” relationships in databases.

• You can put a post in many categories. And of course a category can hold many posts.

Posts->Tags

• You can put the same tag on many posts.

Date & Author Archives

• Dates are simple. If you view a date archive by month, all the posts from that month appear within that date archive.
• For our single author blog setup, since every single posts is by the same author, that’s what you’d get when viewing that archive (which is why we 301 redirect it to the blog homepage).

Accessing Posts

• This is showing you, you can arrive at the same post from multiple places.

• And this is showing you, for the most recent posts, or popular posts, sometimes there is a link in the sidebar – and of course the blog home IS a feed of the most recent posts.

Don’t Forget Pagination (Subpages)!

• All of these web pages can have subpages off of them.

Bonus – For the Truly Geeky

I found this awesome template of the hierarchy within WordPress and loading a page. Not necessary to know for what we’re doing here, and not 100% relevant either, but I found it really useful, especially if you like to know more about what’s going on behind the scenes.

Part 3 – Best Practice Configuration

Any Decisions I Need To Make Up Front?

This is sort of a “I wish I knew then” chart. Things that would be useful to know up front, such as;

• Decide your categories at the beginning.
• Decide what you want the homepage of your blog to be early on.
• When you create a user account, choose the username wisely, because this is the URL and can not be changed afterwards (don’t get stuck with “admin”!)

What Should Be Accessible To Users & Search Engines?

• This chart is showing you what page types should be accessible to the user and to the search engines.
• So unless otherwise noted, the page type can be indexed and followed.

What Links Go In What Menus?

This is the general rule of thumb I follow for deciding what links to put where. In general

• I put pages and categories in main menus
• I put categories, recent/popular posts, dated archives, and maybe tags in the sidebar/widget.

Where Do I Control URLs Titles & Descriptions?

URL control can be confusing, because some are set in odd places, or called “slugs”.

• Page and Posts URLs get set within the page/post editor
• Category and tag URLs get set in their respective menus under “slug”
• Author URLs are the “username”

If you’ve got everything set up correctly, it should be EASY to get your titles and descriptions in check.

• Title and description templates get set in Yoast
• Titles and descriptions at the individual page/post level are set in that page/post editor with Yoast.
• Need help writing a title? Use this post I did about writing titles.

Actual Setup

Themes

This is where things get tricky, because a lot of themes tend to break perfectly good WordPress install. Or they try to handle SEO stuff when they shouldn’t. Or, you get a theme, and a plugin and WordPress all handling title tags and it becomes a mess.

DO use themes for design elements;

• Colors
• Fonts,
• Page layout
• Headers
• Footers
• Basic social media button stuff

Do NOT use themes for SEO stuff, such as

• Indexation
• Analytics codes
• Titles and descriptions
• RSS feeds
• Menu structure (ideally this is done with WordPress Custom Menus)

Let the Yost SEO plugin handle this stuff! Shut off / do not use these types of SEO functions within the themes.

Plugins

There are two plugins I always install right away for pure SEO stuff;

• Yoast SEO for WordPress
• Yoast Google Analytics for WordPress

I often see other plugins that try to set SEO settings – so be sure you’re only managing SEO with one thing!

Configuring Yoast SEO

Titles & Descriptions

• Yoast SEO has the ability to assign a title and description template for every possible page, post and archive – so I advise using Yoast to manage all title and description templates.

As noted: Don’t forget to update your header.php file to include the correct title code;

A note about the ‘sitename’ variable – this is the site title under settings>general

Indexation

• This follows all of the best practice procedure from above. Tag, author, and date archives will all look too similar to other content. So it does not make sense to have them indexed.
• Please note: Want to reiterate – this is what I typically use for a standard WordPress setup – one author, standard blogging format, or a business website with a blog inside etc. You may find yourself in a different circumstance if you have multiple authors, ecommerce etc.
• Also – if your blog has already existed for some time, and you’ve been indexing tags all along for example, you shouldn’t just go deindexing them. Look in analytics, see how much traffic they might be bringing you, if that traffic is quality, and make a well thought out decision about if/how to move away from indexing tags.

• Since running a single author blog, disabling the author archives 301 redirects them back to the blog homepage. This is good for the engines AND the user since they look exactly the same.
• I like letting users browse posts in the dated archives
• Not best practice to add noodp/noydir to every page – but the plugin allows you to do it for individual pages/posts in the editor.

XML Sitemaps

• Make sure you don’t have any other plugins or your theme handling the sitemap.
• Check off what you don’t want included in the XML sitemap. (This is usually the same as what you are NOT indexing).

Permalinks

• One thing I LOVE about Yoast’s plugin – you can strip /category/ off the folder structure for categories. AWESOME! You should definitely do this. If the site has already been indexed with /category/ redirects are automatically created.
• You could redirect images to their parent post or page. I usually don’t but it won’t do any harm if you do.
• Unless you’re running something with https (secure pages) you can just leave canonical settings as default.

Part 4 – Diagnostics

This is THE most common question we get in Q&A. Duplicate content issues. Basically I want to give you guys some extra tools and resources for checking duplicate content issues re: WordPress and the Moz crawl report.

A lot of folks get concerned when they see “47 duplicate page titles found” etc, and with understanding!

If you’ve set everything up as above correctly, there isn’t a whole lot of room for error. But sometimes things happen and stuff breaks or we miss something.

And most times, no matter the issue, ensuring you have things setup as described above in the post, will fix things.

Step 1 – Check Google Webmaster Tools

Check webmaster tools. If they are not reporting duplicate page titles or descriptions, you probably have little to worry about. Moz might have picked up on pages that were crawlable but not being indexed. But definitely check back in with webmaster tools in a week or so (its healthy to check webmaster tools once a week anyway!)

Step 2 – Crawl With Screaming Frog

I honestly love the Moz crawl report. Its turned up some important things to fix for me at times. Yet I think its just smart with ANY tool to cross check, especially if it involves a big error like duplicate content.

Use the free version of Screaming Frog to crawl up to 500 pages (and the paid version is unlimited).

1. Crawl the site
2. Click on titles
3. Select Duplicates
4. You’ll see a report like this:

In this case we can clearly see subpages are causing a lot of the duplicate title issues.

Step 3 – Use Google Queries To See What’s Indexed

Just because a crawler like Screaming Frog or the SEOmoz crawler crawls pages, does not mean they are indexed. Check Google’s index to find out with these queries.

• site:mydomain.com/blog – check for blog indexation
• site:mydomain.com/category – check for category indexation (unless you’ve stripped from folder structure)
• site:mydomain.com/tag – check to see what tags are indexed
• site:mydomain.com/author – check to see if author archives are indexed
• site:mydomain.com/2012 – check to see what dated archives from 2012
• site:mydomain.com/ inurl:page – check for subpages being indexed (see example below)

Steps To Take If You Confirm Errors

If you also find errors in webmaster tools, screaming frog, or Google’s index:

1. Identify which page type it is (category, tag, dated archive, author archive, or subpages)
2. Determine if the page should be indexed to begin with.
3. If it should be indexed, make sure you have a setting in WordPress to generate unique titles/descriptions from the template.
4. If it should NOT be indexed, block it using Yoast and be sure you don’t have to do any 301 redirects

I know that’s a little overly simplistic – it’d be tough to cover every possible variation of errors within this post – but that general framework is what I would advise to follow.

Part 5 – Do The Gary Coleman Dance

No seriously. I know WordPress can be challenging – but I hope this guide has helped give you a better understanding of its different functions, and how to resolve some common issues on your own.

I will answer some questions…

Got questions? If you lead them with “What chu talkin’ bout!?” I’ll answer (within reason – only short 3-4 sentence answers possible here). NO specific site questions here please, just general concept questions.

Please take any detailed or site-specific questions on over to the Moz Q&A.

Or… ask me questions at MozCon! That’s right, I’ll be at MozCon, as an attendee, so if you’re there you can track me down and ask away!

Thhhannnnnks!

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The Star Wars saga continues to grow in popularity with the increasing May the Fourth be with You/Star Wars Appreciation Day. This unofficial day of recognition for anything Star Wars has grown from a meager recognition but has been given a ‘faster than the Millennium Falcon making the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs’ boost in popularity mainly due to SEO’s.

Search Engine Land has put together a great blog article about the role that SEOs have had in the rise in popularity of Star Wars Day. The growth in popularity of the internet meme that propagated the Star Wars Day phenomenon, speaks to the multitudes of youngling Padawans that grew up with the Star Wars movies (the original episodes 4,5,6…not episodes 1,2,3).

I take great personal pride that the first movie I watched in a theatre was Star Wars. I was immediately hooked. From the fly through opening text, to Chewbacca’s growl at the end of the award ceremony! Needless to say I dressed up as Luke Skywalker that year for Halloween. Buy why should we stop there? I think an internet community, we can encourage the spread of Star Wars Day phenomena and have people dress up for the May the Fourth date next year in appropriate star wars garb! Who’s with me? (pics to follow next year . Maybe a flash mob of stormtroopers and/or Jedi?

In very much the same way, Beanstalk SEO is akin to the Rebel Alliance. We are a last bastion of white-hat SEOs trying to work within the confines of the Google Empire while staving off a constant barrage from the black-hat forces of scum and villany seeking to bring ruin to our peaceful Alderaan of search results. (ok, the metaphor was a stretch, but just go with it…)

Remember: Don’t give into hate. Do not turn to the Dark Side as Vader did. Complete your training and become an effective SEO Jedi worthy of a seat on the White-Hat SEO Jedi Council. Many Bothans died to bring you this message….

Have fun with this soundboard from starwars.com

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Google’s actions against “overoptimised” sites have been intensified and it seems that the recent updates are able to detect various links-related overoptimisation violations that can result in short or long-term positional drops, with or without warnings. Even though Google announced the Penguin update on the 24th if April 2012, changes on Google’s link evaluation system have been noticeable several weeks before the public announcement.

It appears that in some cases Google has been overzealous, hitting (temporarily) even websites with rather natural link profiles. In other cases, Google admitted algorithmic classification mistakes, publishing apologetic messages like this one Matt Cutts posted on Google+.

According to Patrick Altoft (branded3) the sites that have received unnatural links notifications fall under five main categories, and they are not just the ones participating in link exchanges or other types of link networks. Rand made a Whiteboard Friday video about 6 changes every SEO should make before the overoptimisation penalty hits. Now that Google has rolled out the Penguin update against “black web spam,” making sure that your website’s backlink profile does not violate Google’s quality guidelines is quite essential, especially if your traffic has gone down.

This is a follow up to the post ‘How to Monitor Your Website For Link Equity Loss’, which can be used to identify backlinks from low quality or penalised/deindexed websites. However, this post intends to cover the following links related overoptimisation cases:

A) Excessive Link Acquisition

B) Site-wide links detection

C) Unnatural Anchor Text Distribution

D) Unnatural Spread of Links Authority

A. Excessive Link Acquisition Check

Acquiring a high number of links over a short period of time has never been a good practice and webmasters need to keep an eye on the levels of acquired links, especially these days that negative SEO seems to become more of an issue. Phrases like the following one from Dan Thies, seem to be heard more often lately:

“Both sites have received “unnatural links” messages in Webmaster Tools. Neither site has had a “link building” campaign ever. By using 3rd party tools (e.g. Majestic) I can see a lot of unnatural links pointing at both sites, but I didn’t put those links there”

There are two quick ways to check your site’s link acquisition velocity, using Ahrefs or Majestic SEO.

Extremely  High Link Acquisition Velocity (Ahrefs) 

Unnatural Link Acquisition Velocity (Majestic SEO historic index, cumulative view)

B. How To Check For Site-wide Links

A high number of blog-roll, header, footer or sidebar links can trigger Google’s “overoptimisation” wrath and keeping them to a minimum would be a rather reasonable thing to do. Certainly some site-wide links may have occurred naturally but the less “overoptimisation” signals you site sends out, the better. There are a few ways to quickly check your website against site-wide links with the quickest one being Webmaster Tools.

Under ‘Your site on the web’ -> Links to your site WMT list the domains that link the most to your site. The ones that link several times should be flagged as potential site-wide links and be manually checked.

Using Webmaster Tools to detect site-wide links is a rather easy and quick way. However, because WMT don’t report all backlinks Google actually see, for a more thorough investigation a third party link intelligence service should be used such as Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs etc. One thing to bear in mind using any 3d party service, is that their crawlers do not try to replicate Google’s behaviour, therefore in some cases the data can be significantly skewed. This is particularly the case for links from web sites that Google has removed from its index but the 3d party services will still report as normal links.

A section in the Ahrefs FAQ page reads: “Having the full information at hand you may decide on subjective estimates of links and figure out real situation with the given website or page”. In a similar manner a Majestic SEO rep commented that:

 ”Our index is independent of Google and will remain so. If Google has banned a site, it does not mean there are no longer links to that site. We map the link graph – not Google’s interpretation of it.”

C. How To Check For Unnatural Anchor Text Distribution

Overoptimised anchor text seems like a ticking bomb, especially after Google made public the following two messages:

“Tweaks to handling of anchor text. [launch codename "PC"] This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust.“

“Better interpretation and use of anchor text. We’ve improved systems we use to interpret and use anchor text, and determine how relevant a given anchor might be for a given query and website.”

This task is quite more complicated because, ideally, you need as much data as possible. Exporting anchor text data from as many different data sources as possible is strongly recommended e.g. Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer, Sistrix, Blekko.

Next you would need to filter the data removing the following:

• Dead links – These are sites that no longer link to your site but used to link in the past. Filtering out the dead links is absolutely necessary and some 3d party services offer such tools. Otherwise, proprietary link checkers can be used like the one we use at iCrossing UK - Alex Ovsianikov‘s creation. Counting dead links into a backlinks audit can result in wrong conclusions.
• Deindexed linking root domains – It’s rather pointless carrying out a backlinks audit for Google including links from sites that Google has deindexed. NetPeak Checker, makes this task quite easy as it is explained on this post.
• No follow links – These are unlikely to cause any overoptimisation issues and could be discounted
• Site-wide links – These should be counted once, otherwise the anchor text distribution will be greatly skewed. Different services treat site-wides differently; hence you need to pay extra attention at how each service treats them.

After having applied the above filters, the remaining backlinks data could be analysed for different anchor text types such as:

• Exact match targeted keywords e.g. hr software
• Broad match keywords e.g. online hr software system
• Brand terms e.g. BreatheHR, www.breatheHR.com
• Keyword + brand terms e.g. Breathe HR software system
• Image links
• Other e.g. ‘click here’, ‘this site’ and other natural anchor text that doesn’t fall under any of the above categories.

Having classified all different anchor text variations, it is now relatively easy to spot weaknesses – pay particular attention for spikes on exact match keywords as in the following graph:

D. How To Check For Unnatural Link Authority Spread

Don’t Let The Penguin Leave You In the Cold

About the author
Modesto Siotos (@macmodi) works as a Senior Natural Search Analyst for iCrossing UK, where he focuses on technical SEO issues, link tactics and content strategy. Modesto is happy to share his experiences with others and posts regularly on digital marketing blog Connect.

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From adding the +1 button in all Display Network Ads, to a new system that will help advertisers get more verified calls to their website.  I’ll walk you through and give you the basics on everything!

Dynamic Search Ads

Dynamic Search Ads is Googles new system to take advantage of all the traffic that isn’t being used while helping businesses to gain more customers. Google indexes your site frequently for changes, next it looks at all the keywords from your website and generates a highly dynamic search ad.  This dynamic search ad is based on different search queries that take place on Google. The ads will be served to people that search for terms and keywords that are found on your landing pages and website.

You can open Dynamic Search Ads up to your whole site or specific pages within your site.  This will help people to not have to manage every little part and find keywords and manage your campaign.  I would however make sure that Google is bidding on keywords that you should be bidding on.  Giving any system full control over your account without checking it could mean that you are losing a lot of money every month.  Make sure that you are only promoting the pages that you want to get traffic to and feel comfortable spending money on.

This system is in beta and you can apply for yourself or your clients here.

AdWords Express Available in UK and Germany

Adwords Express was released in late July as a way for local businesses to promote their business with a Google AdWords type system that’s easy to use.  The whole setup process from start to finish takes around 10 minutes.  You can tell Google how much you want to spend and you’re set to go. Google will take care of the rest for you.  Potential customers will see your ads in the section right above the organic listings but below Google Adwords.  Your ads will also show up on maps with a blue pin instead of a red pin like all the rest.  This will help your local business stand out but will cost you money in order to do it.

One very nice thing about AdWords Express is that your business will shown in two different places for each search that a person performs if you are optimizing your Google Places account.  When people see your business in two different places on the same page, they will naturally give your business more trust.  This will help your business get more customers. Google is trying to help local business with an easy to use system that takes 10 minutes to setup and you don’t have to do much after that.

Google +1 Button Now Displaying in Google Display Network Ads

Google has now started displaying the Google +1 button in the Display Ads Network ads.  Anyone that has +1′d your website or any of your ads will now show on both your ads and your website.  This is turning social recommendations and injecting them with steroids.  Now everyone can see what you’re doing and liking across the internet.

Now you can +1 a website and it will display in the ads for the website that you have recommended to people. If a million people +1 your website, it will show up that a million people have +1 your banner ad. At the same time, if a million people +1 on your banner ads, every single one of those will show up on your site as someone +1 your website.

Bid-Per-Call

Have you ever wanted to get more phone calls to your business?  Now you can with Google’s bid-per-call system.  With bid-per-call you bid for phone calls and determine how much money you’re going to pay per phone call.  Google will give you a personalized number that will track everything.  When you put up your ads, people will be able to call the phone number listed and it will all be tracked through your Adwords tracking account.

The more you bid, the better your ad is written, and the higher your quality score, the higher your ads will be placed.  When your ads are placed towards the top, it will get you more calls and more customers.  This is a very good system for businesses that are very phone oriented and good at selling their products over the phone.  It’s important to note that you will only have to pay for the call to the phone number that Google gives you.  Your ad will also be available to click.  Whichever the person does you will have to pay Google for.

At this time Google bid-per-call system is only available in the US and UK as long as you meet certain click call requirements.

Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal

 Quotes:  

1. “Search engines are not as smart as people yet.”
2. “Search engine optimization can be a valid way to help people find what they are looking for via search engines.”
3. “There are many many, many valid ways people can make the world better with SEO.”

WOW! Thanks Matt Cutts! Go conquer the world my fellow SEOs!

Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal

AdWords express helps searching customers to find your website or Google Places listing. You provide basic information to Google such as business information, ad text, monthly budget and you’re good to go.

Gathering rankings is one of the most annoying and time consuming tasks of an SEO consultant’s work. Because of search personalization, it can be near impossible to find accurate rankings for keywords to report to clients or to use to gauge our work’s effectiveness.

Michael King and I have found a way to get rankings for the keywords driving traffic to your site directly into your Analytics using Custom Variables. Not only that, but we can also get international rankings based off of the keywords and the location from where the person came. And finally, this may also be a step towards identifying the identity of the (not provided) keywords we are now seeing thanks to “privacy concerns”.

How Do I Get These Rankings Into My GA?

Different people have come up with different ways to get rankings directly into GA. One tactic is to create a custom profile using directions from this post by Chris Abernethy. This strategy works fairly well, but requires a lot of setup and requires you to be able to create another profile on your account. It also requires many steps and custom filters to clean the data.

Mike and I decided that a custom variable would be a better way to go. In order to make this strategy work, you need to be able to do the following (or know someone who can):

1) Insert the Javascript custom variable that I will provide you below into your section of your website below your normal GA code;

2) Insert a parameter into your <body> tag;

3) Be able to slice/dice your data in Analytics; and

4) Use some Excel wizardry to present the data.

The Code

Here’s the code that you need to use to send the data from your site into GA. Put this code in the section of your site, directly under your normal GA code:

Get the code here

Now you need to put this code into the <body> tag of your site. Yes, directly within the body tag. This code:

onLoad=”rankingsPush();

Your <body> tag will end up looking something like this:

<body onLoad=”rankingsPush();”>

Now sit back and let the data collect!

Where Do I Find This Data?

You find the data that is collecting under your Custom Variables tab in GA. I’ll show you some screenshots. Click on Visitors > Demographics > Custom Variables, like so:

Then you’ll see this screen:

Click through that and make your Secondary Dimension “Keywords”. Boom! You get rankings and keywords!

What Can We Do With This Data?

Now we’ve got the rankings of the keywords driving traffic (which is what we really care about, right?). Data is worthless without applications, so let’s come up with a few. Endless possibilities exist for slicing and dicing the data.

International Rankings

One cool thing that I did was match up the keywords and their positions with the country from which the visit came. You get the average ranking of the keyword driving traffic (which you also get in Webmaster Tools), but now you can break this down by country! Like so:

We could guess at what the (not provided) keywords are

We may also be able to guess at what the keywords coming up as (not provided) are now. As you can see in the screenshot below, I know that my visits from (not provided) are ranking #1 and #2. Based off of this, I can narrow it down to only my keywords ranking #1 and #2. If I do this for the data set I am working off of, I get these keywords:

Now that I’ve narrowed this down, I can take the landing pages for these rankings (set secondary dimension to “Landing Page”):

And I can see the landing page for my (not provided) keywords (Traffic > Sources > Search > Organic):

So, we can guess that most of the (not provided) keywords probably have something to with my name, since the majority went to my homepage where my name ranks #1 or #2.

*note* I am sure that someone with some mad Excel skills could automate this. If someone wants to take a crack at it, feel free and I’ll link to it.

*edit* I need to give a shout out to Mike Pantoliano’s post from last September where he details a very similar process. He also has some great applications in that post.

What other applications can you think of? How could we make this data sing even more?

I welcome your comments below!

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Every SEO eventually gets fixated on a tactic. Maybe you read 100 blog posts about how to build the “perfectly” optimized URL, and you keep tweaking and tweaking until you get it just right. Fast-forward 2 months – you’re sitting on 17 layers of 301-redirects, you haven’t done any link-building, you haven’t written any content, you’re eating taco shells with mayonnaise for lunch, and your cat is dead.

Ok, maybe that’s a bit extreme. I do see a lot of questions about the “ideal” URL structure in Q&A, though. Most of them boil down to going from pretty good URLs to slightly more pretty good URLs.

All Change Is Risky

I know it’s not what the motivational speakers want you to hear, but in the real world, change carries risk. Even a perfectly executed site-wide URL change – with pristine 301-redirects – is going to take time for Google to process. During that time, your rankings may bounce. You may get some errors. If your new URL scheme isn’t universally better than the old one, some pages may permanently lose ranking. There’s no good way to A/B test a site-wide SEO change.

More often, it’s just a case of diminishing returns. Going from pretty good to pretty gooder probably isn’t worth the time and effort, let alone the risk. So, when should you change your URLs? I’m going to dive into 5 specific scenarios to help you answer that question…

(1) Dynamic URLs

A dynamic URL creates content from code and data and carries parameters, like this:

It’s a common SEO misconception that Google can’t read these URLs or gets cut off after 2 or 3 parameters. In 2011, that’s just not true – although there are reasonable limits on URL length. The real problems with dynamic URLs are usually more complex:

• They don’t contain relevant keywords.
• They’re more prone to creating duplicate content.
• They tend to be less user-friendly (lower click-through).
• They tend to be longer.

So, when are your URLs too dynamic? The example above definitely needs help. It’s long, it has no relevant keywords, the color and size parameters are likely creating tons of near-duplicates, and the session ID is creating virtually unlimited true duplicates. If you don’t want to be mauled by Panda, it’s time for a change.

In other cases, though, it’s not so simple. What if you have a blog post URL like this?

It’s technically a “dynamic” URL, so should you change it to something like:

I doubt you’d see much SEO benefit, or that the rewards would outweigh the risks. In a perfect world, the second URL is better, and if I was starting a blog from scratch I’d choose that one, no question. On an established site with 1000s of pages, though, I’d probably sit tight.

(2) Unstructured URLs

Another common worry people have is that their URLs don’t match their site structure. For example, they have a URL like this one:

…and they think they should add folders to represent their site architecture, like:

There’s a false belief in play here – people often think that URL structure signals site structure. Just because your URL is 3 levels deep doesn’t mean the crawlers will treat the page as being 3 levels deep. If the first URL is 6 steps from the home-page and the second URL is 1 step away, the second URL is going to get a lot more internal link-juice (all else being equal).

You could argue that the second URL carries more meaning for visitors, but, unfortunately, it’s also longer, and the most unique keywords are pushed to the end. In most cases, I’d lean toward the first version.

Of course, the reverse also applies. Just because a URL structure is “flat” and every page is one level deep, that doesn’t mean that you’ve created a flat site architecture. Google still has to crawl your pages through the paths you’ve built. The flatter URL may have some minor advantages, but it’s not going to change the way that link-juice flows through your site.

Structural URLs can also create duplicate content problems. Let’s say that you allow visitors to reach the same page via 3 different paths:

Now, you’ve created 2 pieces of duplicate content – Google is going to see 3 pages that look exactly the same. This is more of a crawl issue than a URL issue, and there are ways to control how these URLs get indexed, but an overly structured URL can exacerbate these problems.

(3) Long URLs

How long of a URL is too long? Technically, a URL should be able to be as long as it needs to be. Some browsers and servers may have limits, but those limits are well beyond anything we’d consider sane by SEO or usability standards. For example, IE8 can support a URL of up to 2,083 characters.

Practically speaking, though, long URLs can run into trouble. Very long URLs:

• Dilute the ranking power of any given URL keyword
• May hurt usability and click-through rates
• May get cut off when people copy-and-paste
• May get cut off by social media applications
• Are a lot harder to remember

How long is too long is a bit more art than science. One of the key issues, in my mind, is redundancy. Good URLs are like good copy – if there’s something that adds no meaning, you should probably lose it. For example, here’s a URL with a lot of redundancy:

If you have a “/store” subfolder, do you also need a “/products” layer? If we know you’re in the store/products layer, does your category have to be tagged as “featured-products” (why not just “featured”)? Is the “featured” layer necessary at all? Does each product have to also be tagged with “product-“? Are the waffles so tasty you need to say it twice?

In reality, I’ve seen much longer and even more redundant URLs, but that example represents some of the most common problems. Again, you have to consider the trade-offs. Fixing a URL like that one will probably have SEO benefits. Stripping “/blog” out of all your blog post URLs might be a nice-to-have, but it isn’t going to make much practical difference.

(4) Keyword Stuffing

Scenarios (3)-(5) have a bit of overlap. Keyword-stuffed URLs also tend to be long and may cannibalize other pages. Typically, though a keyword-stuffed URL has either a lot of repetition or tries to tackle every variant of the target phrase. For example:

It’s pretty rare to see a penalty based solely on keyword-stuffed URLs, but usually, if your URLs are spammy, it’s a telltale sign that your title tags, <h1>’s, copy, etc. are spammy. Even if Google doesn’t slap you around a little, it’s just a matter of focus. If you target the same phrase 14 different ways, you may get more coverage, but each phrase will also get less attention. Prioritize and focus – not just with URLs, but all keyword targeting. If you throw everything at the wall to see what sticks, you usually just end up with a dirty wall.

(5) Keyword Cannibalization

This is probably the toughest problem to spot, as it happens over an entire site – you can’t spot it in a single URL (and, practically speaking, it’s not just a URL problem). Keyword cannibalization results when you try to target the same keywords with too many URLs.

There’s no one right answer to this problem, as any site with a strong focus is naturally going to have pages and URLs with overlapping keywords. That’s perfectly reasonable. Where you get into trouble is splitting off pages into a lot of sub-pages just to sweep up every long-tail variant. Once you carry that too far, without the unique content to support it, you’re going to start to dilute your index and make your site look “thin”.

The URLs here are almost always just a symptom of a broader disease. Ultimately, if you’ve gotten too ambitious with your scope, you’re going to need to consolidate those pages, not just change a few URLs. This is even more important post-Panda. It used to be that thin content would only impact that content – at worst, it might get ignored. Now, thin content can jeopardize the rankings of your entire site.

Proceed With Caution

If you do decide a sitewide URL change is worth the risk, plan and execute it carefully. How to implement a sitewide URL change is beyond the scope of this post, but keep in mind a couple of high-level points:

1. Use proper 301-redirects.
2. Redirect URL-to-URL, for every page you want to keep.
3. Update all on-page links.
4. Don’t chain redirects, if you can avoid it.
5. Add a new XML sitemap.
6. Leave the old sitemap up temporarily.

Point (3) bears repeating. More than once, I’ve seen someone make a sitewide technical SEO change, implement perfect 301 redirects, but then not update all of their navigation. Your crawl paths are still the most important signal to the spiders – make sure you’re 100% internally consistent with the new URLs.

That last point (6) is a bit counterintuitive, but I know a number of SEOs who insist on it. The problem is simple – if crawlers stop seeing the old URLs, they might not crawl them to process the 301-redirects. Eventually, they’ll discover the new URLs, but it might take longer. By leaving the old sitemap up temporarily, you encourage crawlers to process the redirects. If those 301-redirects are working, this won’t create duplicate content. Usually, you can remove the old sitemap after a few weeks.

Even done properly and for the right reasons, measure carefully and expect some rankings bounce over the first couple of weeks. Sometimes, Google just needs time to evaluate the new structure.

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